Docudharma Times Saturday November 1

John McCain Approves This Message

One So Confused That Only Confusion Could Understand It

Specter of Deflation Lurks as Global Demand Drops



By PETER S. GOODMAN

Published: October 31, 2008

As dozens of countries slip deeper into financial distress, a new threat may be gathering force within the American economy – the prospect that goods will pile up waiting for buyers and prices will fall, suffocating fresh investment and worsening joblessness for months or even years.The word for this is deflation, or declining prices, a term that gives economists chills.

Deflation accompanied the Depression of the 1930s. Persistently falling prices also were at the heart of Japan’s so-called lost decade after the catastrophic collapse of its real estate bubble at the end of the 1980s – a period in which some experts now find parallels to the American predicament.

“That certainly is the snapshot of the risk I see,” said Robert J. Barbera, chief economist at the research and trading firm ITG. “It is the crisis we face.”

Is this troubled nation ready for change?

 US correspondent Rupert Cornwell examines the mood of America and asks if the young pretender can really defeat the combative McCain

Saturday, 1 November 2008

Who, back then, could have imagined what would follow? On the glacially cold morning of 10 February 2007, I stood shivering in the crowd outside the Old State House in Springfield, Illinois, as Barack Obama formally declared himself a candidate to be the 44th President of the United States.

The very thought that, for the first time, an African-American and a relative political newcomer to boot, had a small but realistic chance of entering the Oval Office made the moment fascinating enough. There was also a small personal conceit. Back in October 1991, I had travelled to Little Rock to watch a young governor of Arkansas make a similar announcement. Bill Clinton went all the way. So, would lightning strike twice – might I have stumbled on another winner?

USA

New Model Is Forged In Bank’s Wreckage

U.S. Reworking IndyMac Mortgages By the Thousands

By Renae Merle

Washington Post Staff Writer

Saturday, November 1, 2008; Page A01

PASADENA, Calif. — Inside the stone-and-glass headquarters of IndyMac Federal Bank, regulators are carrying out an experiment that could change the course of the financial crisis by tackling the home foreclosures that are at its root.

With the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. at the helm of IndyMac, which was seized in July after it became one of the country’s largest bank failures, regulators are attempting to create a model for reworking mortgages and rescuing homeowners.

A few major banks are also trying to tackle the home foreclosure problem, a major impediment to the nation’s economic recovery.

High black voter turnout could tip Georgia to Democrats

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By Matt Barnwell | McClatchy Newspapers

MACON, Ga. – Phillis Malone had never gotten involved in voter registration drives before.

But this summer, when the Macon chapter of the NAACP asked her to help sign up new voters through Habersham Music, the Pio Nono record store she owns, Malone couldn’t say no.

“I just wanted to do it because there needs to be a change in this country,” she said. “The only way you can change things is to vote.”

Malone said she helped add about 100 voters to the Georgia rolls in a little less than two months. A few were white. Some were Hispanic. But most of them, she said, were black

Africa

Miliband flies to Goma as rebels advance

• Britain and France press for end to bloody conflict

• UN mission untenable and compromised, experts say

Chris McGreal in Goma and Julian Borger, diplomatic editor

The Guardian, Saturday November 1 2008

David Miliband, the foreign secretary, flew to the Democratic Republic of the Congo last night, as Britain joined a mounting diplomatic effort to end the interminable conflict in the east amid questions about the effectiveness of the UN peacekeeping mission there.

Miliband will fly this morning from the capital, Kinshasa, to the stricken eastern town of Goma, as concerns grow about the plight of tens of thousands of people displaced by the latest bout of the conflict.

He will proceed, with French counterpart Bernard Kouchner, to Rwanda as part of a mission to press as much as possible the Congolese and Rwandan governments to find a political solution to more than a decade of conflict that has claimed about 5 million lives, mostly from disease, and left more than one million as refugees.

Thabo Mbeki attack on ANC ‘corruption’ shows tacit backing for party split



From The Times

November 1, 2008

Jonathan Clayton in Johannesburg

The African National Congress (ANC) is riddled with nepotism, tribalism and corruption, charged former South African President Thabo Mbeki in a scathing attack on the ruling party and former liberation movement that he has served all his life.

Mr Mbeki, who became the second black president of South Africa in 1999 after Nelson Mandela retired and who was ousted in September, gave warning that he would not campaign for the ANC at the elections next year.

In a stinging attack he went on to accuse Jacob Zuma, his rival and the current ANC leader, of creating a “noxious” cult of personality more in keeping with Kim Il Sung, the late North Korean leader, than the democratic traditions of the oldest African liberation movement.

Middle East

Saudis build world’s biggest women-only university

 • King endorses single-sex campus for 40,000

• Gender-based barrier to study and jobs challenged

Riazat Butt, religious affairs correspondent

The Guardian, Saturday November 1 2008

The world’s largest women-only university is being built in Saudi Arabia; with a campus that will cover 8m square metres and accommodate 40,000 students.

Due to open in 2010, the Princess Noura bint Abdulrahman University, on the outskirts of Riyadh, will offer courses in subjects that Saudi women find difficult to study at universities where gender segregation is enforced.

It will have a library, conference centres, 15 academic faculties, laboratories and a 700-bed hospital. There will be facilities for research into nanotechnology, bio-sciences and information technology.

Avraham Burg: Israel’s new prophet

Avraham Burg was a pillar of the Israeli establishment but his new book is causing a sensation. It argues that his country is an “abused child” which has become a “violent parent”. And his solutions are radical, as he explains to Donald Macintyre

Saturday, 1 November 2008

In shorts, T-shirt and cotton kippa, Avraham Burg is sitting in his sukka, the temporary booth that every observant Jewish family in Israel builds outside their home for the joyous religious holiday of Sukkot, and talking with some disdain about the holocaust “industry”.

The sunlight is filtered through the roof of palm leaves, the decorative strings of apples, coloured balls and paper streamers almost motionless on this still October morning. Nearby the autumn desert flowers are blooming and a ladder up against a tree indicates that someone has recently been picking olives.

Europe

The killing fields of the First World War

It ended 90 years ago, but the First World War hasn’t faded from our minds. Far from it – more British people visit the battlefields now than ever before.

?By John Lichfield

Saturday, 1 November 2008

The First World War does not grow old, as other wars grow old. Age does not weary our memories, even if the years condemn. Here is a great conundrum. Ninety years ago this month, the guns fell silent in the war that failed to end all wars. The last poilu – the last of 8,410,000 Frenchmen to be mobilised – died in March. Astoundingly, there are six British and British Empire veterans, still living. Their ages range from 107 to 112 – the last patrol of an immense host of 8,904,467 soldiers, sailors and airmen.

The First World War is passing over the horizon of living memory. With next week’s 90th anniversary of the armistice of 11 November 1918, it is right, surely, to bury the Great War.

Exclusive: SAS chief quits over ‘negligence that killed his troops’>

The commander of Britain’s SAS troops in Afghanistan has resigned in disgust, accusing the Government of “gross negligence” over the deaths of four of his soldiers.

By Thomas Harding, Defence Correspondent

Last Updated: 7:42AM GMT 01 Nov 2008

Major Sebastian Morley claims that Whitehall officials and military commanders repeatedly ignored his warnings that people would be killed if they continued to allow troops to be transported in the vulnerable Snatch Land Rovers.

As a result, he says Cpl Sarah Bryant – the first female soldier to die in Afghanistan – and three male colleagues, the SAS soldiers, Cpl Sean Reeve, L/Cpl Richard Larkin and Paul Stout were killed needlessly.

All four died when their lightly armoured Snatch Land Rover split apart after hitting a landmine in Helmand province in June.

In his resignation letter, Major Morley, the commander of D Squadron, 23 SAS, said “chronic underinvestment” in equipment by the Ministry of Defence was to blame for their deaths.

Asia

China to tighten control of feed industry: state media

 

BEIJING (AFP)

China has pledged to tighten supervision of the animal feed industry, state media said Saturday, amid signs a toxic chemical found in milk and eggs was being mixed into livestock feed.

“The ministry will tighten its supervision of the feed industry and crack down on producers who add melamine to their products,” the China Daily quoted Wang Zhicai, head of the Agriculture Ministry’s livestock division as saying.

Melamine, an industrial chemical normally used to make plastic, was first found to have been added to milk in China, leading to the death of four infants and sickening at least 53,000 other people.

The chemical — which can lead to severe kidney problems if ingested in large amounts — was then discovered in Chinese eggs, leading to concerns the chemical was much more prevalent in China’s food chain than initially believed.

A Warning, a Blast, a Fight to Save an Afghan Life



By C. J. CHIVERS

Published: October 31, 2008

COMBAT OUTPOST LOWELL, Afghanistan – Jamaludin, an aging Afghan cook, twisted and writhed on the green stretcher. Blood ran from his mouth and nose. Medics had cut away his clothes, revealing puncture holes where shrapnel from a Taliban mortar round had struck him minutes before.Capt. Norberto A. Rodriguez, an American Army doctor, listened through a stethoscope as two Army medics and a Navy corpsman inventoried Jamaludin’s wounds. There were holes on his back, neck, buttocks, left leg and beside his right eye.

Jamaludin, who like many Afghans has only one name, had been made wild by fear and pain. But for some reason he could not speak