Docudharma Times Tuesday August 26

Darth Vader The Shot Gun Master

Goes On A Peace Mission

The Irony In This Is Just To Much

U.N. troops offer lessons in peace in Lebanon

Yoga, French poetry, pizza making — the international forces stationed there give war-weary residents a respite from their cares.

By Borzou Daragahi, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

August 26, 2008  

EBEL AL SAQI, LEBANON — The yoga instructor chuckles, and the three dozen or so women follow along, giggling nervously before bursting through some invisible layer of restraint or sorrow and laughing with abandon. Grins widen into smiles, tentative squeals bloom into full-bore howls.

The yoga instructor is teaching inner peace, but he’s also trying to keep the peace: He’s Warrant Officer Mal Singh of the Indian army, part of a 30-year-old United Nations force stationed in southern Lebanon.

The laughs peter out, some of the women wiping tears from their eyes as they gather up their handbags and head home.

“If we feel peace inside ourselves, maybe we will have peace,” says Hoda Munzer, a 35-year-old owner of a nearby clothing shop, who has taken a break from work to attend the class with her 9-year-old daughter, Sueen, in this hilltop community near the Israeli border.

Cheney To Visit Georgia Next Week

Ukraine, Azerbaijan Also on Itinerary?

By Dan Eggen

Washington Post Staff Writer

Tuesday, August 26, 2008; Page A03  

Vice President Cheney will travel next week to war-ravaged Georgia as part of a swing through several former Soviet republics, making him the highest-level U.S. emissary to visit the country since hostilities between Russia and Georgia broke out this month, officials said yesterday.

The trip will put the Bush administration’s most prominent hawk in a war zone still occupied by lingering Russian troops, and is likely to irritate leaders in Moscow, who have condemned the United States for siding with Georgia in the conflict.

USA

Obama’s Family Night Out

After Kennedy Electrifies Crowd, the Would-Be First Lady Calls on Democrats to ‘Stop Doubting’ and ‘Start Dreaming’

By Jonathan Weisman

Washington Post Staff Writer

Tuesday, August 26, 2008; Page A01

DENVER Aug. 25 — After an emotional speech by an ailing Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, the face of the Democratic Party shifted on Monday night to a new generation of leaders, as Michelle Obama opened the Democratic National Convention with a tribute to her husband and a call to the country to listen “to our hopes instead of our fears,” and “to stop doubting and to start dreaming.”

Seeking to ground Sen. Barack Obama in the experience of America’s working class while recapturing the lofty ideals that propelled him toward his party’s presidential nomination, Michelle Obama’s family-themed speech was the climax of a dramatic opening day for a political party confident of its chances of capturing the White House but still struggling to lay aside its own divisions.

McCain uses POW ordeal to fight housing gaffe

Candidate who miscounted his homes reflects on 5 1/2 years in captivity ?

Reuters

Aug. 26, 2008

BURBANK, Calif. – John McCain, who often invokes his ordeal as a Vietnam war prisoner to show his devotion to his country as he runs for U.S. president, drew on the experience again on Monday — this time to deflect sniping over the number of houses he owns.

McCain’s Democratic rival Barack Obama last week accused the Republican senator of being out of touch with ordinary people after he was unable to say in an interview how many houses were owned by him and his wife Cindy, a wealthy heiress to a beer distributorship.

Middle East

Dazed Iraqi teen suicide bomber says she didn’t want to die



By Leila Fadel | McClatchy Newspapers

BAQOUBA, Iraq – The 15-year-old girl had the chubby cheeks of a child who hadn’t lost her baby fat when she was arrested Sunday by an alert policeman. Around her chest was a vest packed with explosives. The policeman chained her to the bars of a window, stripped off her dress, found the vest and deactivated the bomb. Had he not intervened, Rania would have been this year’s 31st suicide bomber in Iraq.

A day later, Rania seemed in a daze as she spoke about the people who put her up to it: the relatives who forced her to don the vest and apparently drugged her, her husband, whom police accuse of being a member of the group al Qaida in Iraq, and her mother, who seemed to play a central role in turning Rania into a human bomb but whom she looked to as a rescuer.

Facing up to violence in Iran

The nuclear stand-off must not distract us from responding to a wave of repression that has seen activists executed

Alan Johnson

guardian.co.uk,

Tuesday August 26 2008 08:00 BST

The genius of the Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi was, as Norman Geras observed, to use “common experience to illuminate the experience of the Nazi universe of death, and vice versa.”

Take the experience of shame. In If This is a Man Levi recounted the hanging of a prisoner who had been involved in the blowing up of the crematoriums at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Everyone is forced into the roll-call square for the “ruthless ceremony” but the “thick barrier of inertia and submission” is broken by the cry of the doomed man: “Comrades, I am the last one!”

Asia

Thousands evacuated after blasts hit Chinese chemical plant



Tania Branigan in Beijing

guardian.co.uk,

Tuesday August 26 2008 08:57 BST

Officials in south-west China have evacuated 10,000 people from their homes after explosions killed at least four people at a chemical plant, official media reports say.

The blasts, which happened at Yizhou city, in Guangxi province, have injured at least 44 people. Another 17 are missing, Xinhua reported.

After the first explosion took place, rescuers who rushed to the scene heard several more as thick smoke enveloped the factory.

According to Xinhua, the plant is owned by the Guangxi Guangwei Chemical company and mainly produces chemicals for adhesives and paints.

Residents were quickly evacuated from around the city’s development zone amid fears of further explosions and chemical leaks, the state news agency added.

Pakistan bans Taliban after suicide bombings

 

 By John Matthew Hall and AP

Monday, 25 August 2008

Pakistan has banned a Taliban group after they claimed responsibility for one of the country’s worst-ever terrorist attacks, toughening its stance a week after US ally Pervez Musharraf was ousted from power.

The Interior Ministry announced the decision 24 hours after rejecting a Taliban cease-fire offer in Bajur, a rumored hiding place for Osama bin Laden where an army offensive has reportedly killed hundreds in recent weeks. Another 200,000 people have fled their homes.

Europe

Berlusconi uses his summer break to make Christmas CD

  By Peter Popham in Rome

Tuesday, 26 August 2008

Silvio Berlusconi has once again put his summer holiday in Sardinia to good use, slamming the door temporarily on Italy’s teeming problems to collaborate on another collection of Neapolitan love songs with his favourite singer and guitarist, Mariano Apicella.

Apicella, 44, who has been the Italian Prime Minister’s regular and faithful summer accompanist since the two met in 2001, said that the CD contains 14 songs, with words by Mr Berlusconi and music by himself. He hopes it will be released in time for Christmas – “but the Prime Minister has many other commitments, so that may not be possible”. Its title has yet to be made public.

Russian threat to Nato supply route in Afghanistan >



From The Times

August 26, 2008

Jeremy Page in Kabul

Russia played a trump card in its strategic poker game with the West yesterday by threatening to suspend an agreement allowing Nato to take supplies and equipment to Afghanistan through Russia and Central Asia.

The agreement was struck at a Nato summit in April to provide an alternative supply route to the road between the Afghan capital and the Pakistani border, which has come under attack from militants on both sides of the frontier this year.

Zamir Kabulov, the Russian Ambassador to Afghanistan, told The Times in an interview that he believed the deal was no longer valid because Russia suspended military cooperation with Nato last week over its support for Georgia.

Africa

Township youths tackle South Africa’s ‘white sport’: rugby

In the black Johannesburg township of Diepsloot, one volunteer coach is teaching children the basics of rugby.

By Scott Baldauf  | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the August 26, 2008 edition

Diepsloot, South Africa –  The coach’s whistle bleats, and the two young players, both 8 years old, square off and run full speed toward each other. One boy carries the oblong ball, juking to the left to avoid the inevitable crunch of a rugby tackle. When the defender brings down his man, a field of young enthusiasts cheer.

It’s a scene replicated in nearly every town in South Africa, where rugby – a sport akin to football but without pads, forward passes, or TV time-outs – holds the same revered space as cricket holds in India and football in Texas. In nearly every town, that is, except for the black townships such as Diepsloot, where rugby is seen as a “white sport.”

“I’m doing this because I’m tired of hearing that rugby is a white sport,” says Bafana Thawuzeni, a Johannesburg fitness trainer and volunteer coach in Diepsloot.

Zimbabwe: Blow for Mugabe as opposition candidate is elected speaker



Xan Rice

The Guardian,

Tuesday August 26 2008  

Zimbabwe’s main opposition party struck a blow against President Robert Mugabe yesterday when its candidate was elected as the parliamentary speaker.

Lovemore Moyo of Morgan Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) won the ballot by 110 votes to 98, marking the first time that the opposition has held the powerful speaker position since independence in 1980.

The ruling Zanu-PF party did not put up a candidate, choosing instead to back Paul Themba Nyathi of the breakaway MDC faction headed by Arthur Mutambara.

The significance of the result is revealed in the numbers. Zanu-PF holds 99 seats in parliament, while the MDC splinter group has 10. During the now-stalled power-sharing talks it had been assumed that Mugabe and Mutambara had reached an agreement to work together.

Latin America

Environment: Fate of Amazon tribes on trial as Brazil awaits reservation ruling

· Supreme court to decide if non-aborigines can stay

· Opening up reserve would ‘devastate’ native peoples

Tom Phillips in Rio de Janeiro

The Guardian,

Tuesday August 26 2008

Brazil is bracing for an imminent ruling on the future of one of its largest indigenous reservations – a decision that campaigners claim could spell disaster for indigenous communities across the country.

The supreme court is expected to announce its verdict tomorrow in a case brought by a group of farmers, businessmen and politicians who claim the 2005 creation of the Raposa Serra do Sol reservation was “unconstitutional” and are demanding the right to remain.

Located in the isolated Amazonian state of Roraima, the sprawling 1.7m-hectare (4.2m-acre) reserve was ordered by Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio da Silva, and is home to more than 18,000 aborigines from five different ethnic groups.