Docudharma Times Sunday September 27

Diverse sources fund Afghanistan’s insurgency

Foreign donations, opium bolstered by criminal rackets, U.S. officials say

By Craig Whitlock

KABUL, Afghanistan – The Taliban-led insurgency has built a fundraising juggernaut that generates cash from such an array of criminal rackets, donations, taxes, shakedowns and other schemes that U.S. and Afghan officials say it may be impossible to choke off the movement’s money supply.

Obama administration officials say the single largest source of cash for the Taliban, once thought to rely mostly on Afghanistan’s booming opium trade to finance its operations, is not drugs but foreign donations. The CIA recently estimated that Taliban leaders and their allies received $106 million in the past year from donors outside Afghanistan.

A Burst of Technology, Helping the Blind to See



By PAM BELLUCK

Published: September 26, 2009

Blindness first began creeping up on Barbara Campbell when she was a teenager, and by her late 30s, her eye disease had stolen what was left of her sight.

Reliant on a talking computer for reading and a cane for navigating New York City, where she lives and works, Ms. Campbell, now 56, would have been thrilled to see something. Anything.

Now, as part of a striking experiment, she can. So far, she can detect burners on her stove when making a grilled cheese, her mirror frame, and whether her computer monitor is on.

She is beginning an intensive three-year research project involving electrodes surgically implanted in her eye, a camera on the bridge of her nose and a video processor strapped to her waist.

USA

U.S. Job Seekers Exceed Openings by Record Ratio



By PETER S. GOODMAN

Published: September 26, 2009

Despite signs that the economy has resumed growing, unemployed Americans now confront a job market that is bleaker than ever in the current recession, and employment prospects are still getting worse.

Job seekers now outnumber openings six to one, the worst ratio since the government began tracking open positions in 2000. According to the Labor Department’s latest numbers, from July, only 2.4 million full-time permanent jobs were open, with 14.5 million people officially unemployed.

And even though the pace of layoffs is slowing, many companies remain anxious about growth prospects in the months ahead, making them reluctant to add to their payrolls.

On a Street in Gaithersburg, Health-Care Anxiety Abounds



By Brigid Schulte

Washington Post Staff Writer

Sunday, September 27, 2009

Chuck at 115 Linden Hall Lane worries about losing the monthly $9,000 infusions of a drug that keeps his lungs from collapsing. Martha, who lives at 113 and is expecting her second child, has had trouble finding a midwife. Thelma, residing at 109, fears being forced into a nursing home because insurance won’t cover a home health aide. And Sarah, at 114, out thousands of dollars every year to pay for special services for her autistic son that her insurer won’t cover, now faces the heart-stopping proposition of losing that coverage altogether.

Europe

One for the road? Film forces France to admit its drinking problem

One for the Road, the real-life story of a journalist’s battle with alcohol, sparks debate over the country’s self-image as a nation of moderate wine-lovers

Jason Burke in Paris

The Observer, Sunday 27 September 2009

The posters, on hoardings across France, show a slightly dishevelled media executive in his 50s, on a jetty, a bag in his hand, a Swiss lake behind, staring with vacant, battered, tired eyes into the middle distance.

He is an unlikely hero, but Hervé Chabalier, author of the book One for the Road (Le dernier pour la route), was being lauded by French journalists last week after a film based on his battle with alcoholism came out to critical acclaim. “Truthful, clear and sober,” said the Nouvel Observateur weekly magazine. A story that is “profoundly human”, said the mass-circulation daily Ouest-France.

But the film, in which Chabalier is played by François Cluzet, has gone beyond simple entertainment, provoking an unprecedented debate on alcoholism, long a taboo subject in France.

Merkel fluffs her lines as election rivals close in

As Germany goes to the polls today, Mary Dejevsky looks at the campaign and asks if the Chancellor has blown her lead

Sunday, 27 September 2009

The German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, rallied her party faithful for one last push on the eve of today’s election, arguing that only the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) would keep the country on a stable course, re-energise the economy and safeguard the interests of working people. The election is expected to be close, perhaps very close, with the last polls showing the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) continuing to close the gap on the centre-right CDU-CSU alliance.

Ms Merkel, who hopes to serve a second term at the head of a new, less constrained, coalition, with the free-market FDP rather than SPD, had returned from the G20 summit in Pittsburgh only hours before.

Middle East

Iran and United States on collision course over nuclear plant

Tension grows ahead of Geneva talks after secret uranium plant is revealed and Obama considers tougher sanctions

Julian Borger New York

The Observer, Sunday 27 September 2009

The US and Iran raised the stakes yesterday ahead of this week’s nuclear showdown in Geneva, with threats of global strife if no resolution is found.

The sharpened rhetoric followed Friday’s revelation that Iran had been building a secret uranium enrichment plant under a mountain near Qom, and it points towards a new wave of sanctions that go far beyond the targeted financial measures imposed on Iran so far.

Speaking at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh, Barack Obama declared: “Iran is on notice that when we meet with them on 1 October they are going to have to come clean, and they will have to make a choice.” The alternative to sticking to international rules on Iran’s nuclear development, he said, would be “a path that is going to lead to confrontation”.

The perils of an Israeli airstrike on Iran



From The Sunday Times

September 27, 2009

Tony Allen-Mills in New York

American and Israeli military planners have been examining options for an attack on Iran for almost three decades. There is no shortage of possible targets: Iran has dozens of nuclear-related sites that are known to western officials.

Yet military experts in Washington and Tel Aviv acknowledge that a surprise airstrike would be likely to succeed only in delaying Iran’s development of nuclear weapons. It would also present daunting logistical and political challenges with no guarantee that even a sustained assault on known facilities would eradicate Tehran’s nuclear threat.

Asia

China reaches out on 60th anniversary

From The Sunday Times

September 27, 2009

 Michael Sheridan

IT is designed to be a military spectacle to awe the Chinese people on the 60th anniversary of the People’s Republic and to show the world a well equipped, modern force that is a far cry from the peasant army that swept the Communist party to power.

Nothing has been left to chance for the grandest martial parade in the history of modern China, which is due to roll across central Beijing on Thursday.

Chinese military websites say the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) will unveil six weapons systems, including new generation Jian-10 fighters and JL-2 ballistic missiles. Some 200,000 soldiers will march in 56 formations, one for each of the officially recognised ethnic “nationalities” in China.

Koreans separated for decades by war and politics join in tearful reunion

The last time Kim Ki-sung saw his son and daughter, his homeland was being torn apart by the Korean War.

By Nick Meo

In the turmoil, the family became separated and Mr Kim, then 24, fled south with troops retreating from the communist onslaught.

His young children were trapped in the North – and as cold war descended when the fighting stopped, all contact between them was cut.

On Saturday, 58 years later, they were finally reunited in a North Korean holiday resort, and Mr Kim was able to apologise at last. “I am sorry for not taking you when I fled,” he told the children he last saw a lifetime ago.

They were strangers to the 82-year-old South Korean. His son, Kim Jung-hyun, brought five medals he received from North Korean leader Kim Jong Il – awarded, said his sister, “because he worked hard since he grew up without a father.”

Africa

Wave of Labor Unrest Grips Egypt at Crucial Juncture

 

By Sudarsan Raghavan

Washington Post Foreign Service

Sunday, September 27, 2009

TANTA, Egypt — The warehouses of the Tanta Flax and Oil Co. are quiet, the machines covered with dust. In the silence, Hisham Abu Zaid has found a power unlike anything he has experienced in his life.

For four months, the lanky, low-key father of three and his co-workers have staged a sit-in to demand higher salaries. They have blocked a main highway for hours and demonstrated in front of the prime minister’s office. Outside the shuttered factory’s rusting gate, government security officers keep close watch.

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