Docudharma Times Monday October 6

Sarah Palin

Wouldn’t Know The Truth Or A Fact

Even It They Walked Up And Handed Them To Her  

In D.C., few evade blame for financial crisis

Congress had a big hand in oversight failures and deregulation, in part through a philosophy of reducing government’s role. Rep. Waxman begins hearings today.

By Tom Hamburger, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

October 6, 2008  

WASHINGTON — When Congress voted last week to bail out Wall Street banks and investment houses, members were also indirectly voting to repair damage lawmakers themselves had caused during a decades-long era of deregulation.

As the blame game moves into high gear in Washington, there seem to be few winners. Already under scrutiny are lawmakers from both political parties, Presidents George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and their predecessors, and record amounts of money funneled to Congress from Wall Street and the two government-backed mortgage giants, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Asian markets plunge on fears crisis is spreading

 

By ALEX KENNEDY, Associated Press Writer  

SINGAPORE – Asian stock markets plunged Monday as government bank bailouts in the U.S. and Europe failed to alleviate fears of a global financial crisis that would depress world economic growth.

As the financial turmoil deepened in Europe, Germany on Sunday announced a bailout package totaling 50 billion euros ($69 billion) for Hypo Real Estate, the country’s second-biggest commercial property lender, after a rescue plan by private lenders fell apart. The move was part of a scramble by European governments to save failing banks.

USA

Registration Gains Favor Democrats

Voter Rolls Swelling in Key States

By Alec MacGillis and Alice Crites

Washington Post Staff Writers

Monday, October 6, 2008; Page A01  

As the deadline for voter registration arrives today in many states, Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign is poised to benefit from a wave of newcomers to the rolls in key states in numbers that far outweigh any gains made by Republicans.

In the past year, the rolls have expanded by about 4 million voters in a dozen key states — 11 Obama targets that were carried by George W. Bush in 2004 (Ohio, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Indiana, Missouri, Colorado, Iowa, Nevada and New Mexico) plus Pennsylvania, the largest state carried by Sen. John F. Kerry that Sen. John McCain is targeting.

Full of Doubts, U.S. Shoppers Cut Spending

?This article is by Louis Uchitelle, Andrew Martin and Stephanie Rosenbloom.

 By LOUIS UCHITELLE, ANDREW MARTIN and STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM

Published: October 5, 2008  

Cowed by the financial crisis, American consumers are pulling back on their spending, all but guaranteeing that the economic situation will get worse before it gets better.

In response to the falling value of their homes and high gasoline prices, Americans have become more frugal all year. But in recent weeks, as the financial crisis reverberated from Wall Street to Washington, consumers appear to have cut back sharply.

Europe

EU leaders tear up rules of eurozone



By John Lichfield in Paris

Monday, 6 October 2008  

Public spending curbs and rules against state subsidies will be thrown – temporarily – out of the window to rescue European banks from the abyss of the global financial crisis, EU leaders agreed at the weekend. Leaders of the four largest European Union economies – Britain, France, Germany and Italy – came up with no EU-wide magic formula, or rescue package, to defend the buckling European financial system.

They did agree, however, that national governments should be at liberty to take drastic action to shore up their own financial institutions, busting EU limits on national budgets and flouting European rules against public subsidies if necessary.

Dutch city kept warm by hot-water mines

 

From The Times

October 6, 2008  

David Charter, Europe Correspondent

In an age of rapidly rising fuel bills the discovery of vast supplies of free hot water sounds too good to be true. But that is exactly what one Dutch city has found to run the radiators of hundreds of homes, shops and offices.

Heerlen, in the southern province of Limburg, has created the first geothermal power station in the world using water heated naturally in the deep shafts of old coalmines – which once provided the southern Netherlands with thousands of jobs but have been dormant since the 1970s.

Asia

Ethnic violence in India leaves 33 people dead

 

By Biswajyoti Das

Monday, 6 October 2008  

At least 33 people have been killed and thousands left homeless in violence over the weekend between tribal people and Bangladeshi settlers in northeast India, police and hospital authorities said.

Violence between Bodo tribespeople and immigrant Muslims broke out on Friday in Rowta in Assam state’s Udalguri district, about 60 miles north of Dispur, the state capital. It has since spread to neighbouring districts.

Critics slam Thailand’s activist judges

Judges increasingly are calling the shots in a tumultuous political situation. Are they playing fair?

By Simon Montlake  | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

from the October 6, 2008 edition

Bangkok, Thailand –  Sworn in last month as Thailand’s fourth prime minister in two years of turmoil, Somchai Wongsawat hasn’t enjoyed much of a honeymoon on the job.

For one thing, he can’t even enter his office, as a royalist protest group stormed the compound in August and refuses to leave. Instead, his cabinet meets at an unused VIP airport terminal that has been converted into offices.

Then there’s the niggling matter of a lawsuit filed by a senator last week that alleges a conflict of interest in Mr. Somchai’s stock portfolio. A similar complaint led to the removal last month of his predecessor Samak Sundaravej over his TV cooking show. Somchai’s political party is expected to face the same court in the next few months in a campaign fraud case that could lead to its breakup, a fate handed down to a forerunner party.

Africa

Robert Mugabe’s marauders seize their last chance to grab white farms    



From The Times

October 6, 2008

Jan Raath in Beatrice

It was only days after Zimbabwe’s leaders signed the power-sharing deal intended to restore the rule of law when Kevin Cooke was called to the gate of the electrified security fence around his farmstead.

Waiting for him were a menacing group of government officials and a policeman. Holding up an eviction notice – which referred to the wrong owner, the wrong farm and carried no official stamp – they told him that he was illegally occupying his 765 hectare (1,890 acre) tobacco farm 38 miles (60km) south of Harare and that it now belonged to a Mr Kundeya.

The man claiming to be Mr Kundeya said that he was a clerk in the British Embassy in Harare.

Crime, flight mark post-apartheid South Africa >

 

Barry Bearak, New York Times

Monday, October 6, 2008

A dusty maze of concrete, sheet metal and scrap wood, Diepsloot is like so many of the enormous settlements around Johannesburg, mile after mile of feebly assembled shacks, the impromptu patchwork of the poor, the extremely poor and the hopelessly poor.

Monica Xangathi, 40, lives here in a shanty she shares with her brother’s family. “This is not the way I thought my life would turn out,” she said.

Her disappointment is not only with herself; she is heartsick about her country.

Middle East

Innkeeper’s log chronicles ebb and flow of Iraq war

Baghdad’s Johara Hotel, which was once a meeting place for foreign journalists and aid workers, is now filled to capacity with Iraqis who still can’t go home.

By Tom A. Peter  | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the October 6, 2008 edition

Baghdad –  The Johara Hotel was a backpacker’s delight. Rooms were just $12 at the tiny, 10-room inn that was part youth hostel and part rooming house. European, Asian, and American tourists stayed there, even as embargoes tightened on Iraq ahead of the invasion.

When war came, the Johara was the unofficial residence for freelance reporters, aid workers, and activists. But eventually they checked out – or left Iraq altogether – as Baghdad grew more dangerous.

Osama Johara has been forced to close his hotel twice during the war. Today, however, he has a full roster of guests. All of them are Iraqis, however, who for one reason or another have been driven from their homes and are still unable to return.

Emirates flexes its financial muscle



While Western economies lurch, sovereign funds in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, flush with oil gains, are snapping up property, companies and even English soccer teams.

By Borzou Daragahi, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

October 6, 2008  

ABU DHABI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES — No, no, no, he assured one of the businessmen buying the ailing Manchester City soccer club. The price tag for the British team wasn’t $4 billion, but a mere $400 million.

Anil Bhoyrul, editorial director of Arabian Business magazine and a confidant to some of the Persian Gulf’s super-rich and powerful, thought the Abu Dhabi investor would be pleasantly surprised.

He was wrong.

Even as the United States and much of the world reels from a succession of financial crises that are squelching access to credit and hampering economic growth in what a quarter of Americans are calling a depression, the oil-rich royal families of the Persian Gulf are bursting with cash they’re not afraid to spend.

Latin America

Drug cartel bloodbath on Mexican border claims 50 lives

 

Jo Tuckman in Mexico City

The Guardian,

Monday October 6 2008

Two headless corpses wrapped in blankets, five beaten and bound men asphyxiated in a car, and the mayor of a sizeable town riddled with bullets. Mexico’s spiral of drugs-related violence swept on through the weekend, defying the government’s biggest ever effort to rein in the cartels.

Much of the latest bloodbath occurred in Tijuana, across the frontier from California, where nearly 50 people – including 12 found next to a primary school – were killed in the past week.

The violence is being blamed on a battle between two factions of the Arrellano Felix cartel, one of which has allied with the Sinaloa cartel led by Mexico’s most notorious trafficker, Joaquín Guzmán Loera (known as el Chapo, or Shorty).