Docudharma Times Saturday January 9

China’s lobbying efforts yield new influence, openness on Capitol Hill

THE OTHER SUPERPOWER

By John Pomfret

Saturday, January 9, 2010

Ten years ago, U.S. lawmakers publicly accused the China Ocean Shipping Co. of being a front for espionage and blocked plans to expand its Long Beach, Calif., port terminal over fears that Chinese spies would use it to snoop on the United States.

By last year, Congress was seeing the state-owned Chinese behemoth in a far kinder light. Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) authored a resolution applauding the company for employing thousands of Americans and helping keep the waters of Alaska clean. Rep. Stephen F. Lynch (D-Mass.) hailed the firm on the House floor, calling its chief executive “a people’s ambassador” to the United States after it rescued Boston’s port — and thousands of jobs — when a European shipping line moved out.

Ted Turner and Native Americans in row over fate of Yellowstone Bison

A herd of 74 rare bison could be slaughtered if a dispute involving conservationists, Indian tribes and media mogul Ted Turner is not resolved.

By Nick Allen in Los Angeles

Published: 10:45PM GMT 08 Jan 2010

The wild bison, which live in Yellowstone National Park, are currently in quarantine to stop them being part of a regular cull carried out to stop the spread of the disease brucellosis to cattle.

The quarantined animals are part of a plan to see if a brucellosis-free herd can be created to help repopulate America’s West with bison. The iconic species used to number in the millions before it was driven close to extinction.

Turner, who owns an estimated 50,000 bison, has offered to take the animals on his nearby ranch at the request of Brian Schweitzer, the Democratic governor of the state of Montana.As compensation, he would keep 90 per cent of the animals’ offspring, meaning he could gain as many as 190 bison frmo a herd prized for its genetic purity.

USA

Courts Whittle Spending Limits in Election Law



By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

Published: January 8, 2010

WASHINGTON – Even before a landmark Supreme Court ruling on campaign finance law expected within days, a series of other court decisions is reshaping the political battlefield by freeing corporations, unions and other interest groups from many of the restrictions on their advertising about issues and candidates.

Legal experts and political operatives say the cases roll back campaign spending rules to the years before Watergate. The end of decades-old restrictions could unleash a torrent of negative advertisements, help cash-poor Republicans in a pivotal year and push President Obama to bring in more money for his party.

If the Supreme Court, as widely expected, rules against core elements of the existing limits, Democrats say they will try to enact new laws to reinstate the restrictions in time for the midterm elections in November.

Wrongly imprisoned, Donald Gates adjusts to freedom after 28 years

 

By Keith L. Alexander

Washington Post Staff Writer

Saturday, January 9, 2010

KNOX COUNTY, TENN. — It’s a little after 3 a.m., and Donald Gates bolts upright from what he had hoped would be a normal night’s sleep on his brother-in-law’s sofa.

But the anxious thoughts racing through his mind won’t allow him much rest. Don’t sleep for long, he tells himself, or you’ll wake up back in prison.

“It’s like, man, that cage is still there,” he says. “Just waiting.”

It has been nearly a month since a D.C. Superior Court judge’s legal assistant faxed a notice to a Tucson, Ariz., prison warden that vacated Gates’s sentence and allowed him to walk free after 28 years behind bars. DNA tests on a tiny sample of evidence found at the District’s medical examiner’s office confirmed what Gates had been saying all along: He’s innocent.

Middle East

Fault line that allows al-Qa’ida to flourish in Yemen

Two decades of unification have failed to heal a regional rivalry that has hindered the country’s efforts to root out the extremists. Donald Macintyre reports from Aden

Saturday, 9 January 2010

The devout and grave-faced men pouring out of prayers yesterday at the al Rihaab Mosque in Aden were at once keen to speak about their government, seven hours’ drive to the north, and guarded in their choice of words.

But most left little doubt about the deep vein of discontent that runs through the port city the British left over 42 years ago. Yes, there was corruption, said Sami Samir, a 24-year-old support teacher. He added carefully that President Ali Abdullah Saleh is himself “good” but: “Under him the government is playing with the country. We need a government that is more democratic and keeps by the law.”

Iran opposition leader Mehdi Karoubi escapes mob bullets after mourning victims

From The Times

January 8, 2010

Martin Fletcher

Iran’s most outspoken opposition leader has had a narrow escape after his car was hit by bullets as he fled from a mob of government supporters.

Mehdi Karroubi’s armoured car was hit at least twice as it pulled away from the angry crowd, breaking the front and back windows. Mr Karroubi was unhurt.

The shooting was an ominous development in the seven months of internal strife that have engulfed Iran since the hotly disputed presidential election in June that handed victory to President Ahmadinejad.

Europe

Paris licks its candy columns back into shape

After years of neglect, controversial sculpture is given a £3.6m facelift

By John Lichfield in Paris Saturday, 9 January 2010

One of the least-loved monuments in Paris will re-open today after a €4m (£3.6m) facelift. A truncated forest of black-and-white, candy-striped columns which has graced, or disgraced, the Palais Royal since 1986 has been restored by the French state.

Two years ago the 260 columns, resembling a kind of liquorice allsort Stonehenge, were so dilapidated that their creator threatened to have them destroyed. Daniel Buren, 71, an internationally acclaimed monumental sculptor, accused successive French governments of “vandalising” his most celebrated, and controversial, work “by neglect”.

Iceland says ‘Can’t pay, won’t pay’ – and it is right

From The Times

January 9, 2010

Bronwen Maddox: World Briefing

Iceland is right. Britain (and the Netherlands) should give way on the demand that it should pay them back in full for losses in the collapsed Icesave online bank. They will probably have to do so – but before they give way their stubbornness may drive Iceland, now within sight of joining the European Union, to the level of international basket case.

President Grímsson’s decision to block a Bill that would repay Britain and the Netherlands the £3.6 billion their savers lost has triggered a storm of abuse. But the tiny nation of 320,000 people has a good case for saying it won’t pay back all the debt on the dates set out. It has an even better case for saying it can’t.

When Landsbankii, the parent of Icesave, collapsed in 2008, Iceland questioned whether it was obliged to compensate foreign savers.

Asia

Reds ready to rumble in Thailand



By Nelson Rand and Chandler Vandergrift



UDON THANI and BANGKOK – Thailand’s United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD) red-shirted protest movement is poised to launch a renewed campaign to topple Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva’s wobbly coalition government. The protests promise new rounds of instability after a period of relative political calm and threaten to derail the country’s still tentative economic recovery.

The new push will commence on Monday with a planned rally of 10,000 protesters around a royal privy councilor’s allegedly ill-gotten land in a provincial forest reserve and eventuate in what UDD leaders contend will be a “decisive” mass rally in Bangkok later in the month. The UDD’s symbolic leader, exiled former

premier Thaksin Shinawatra, wrote in a Twitter message to his supporters on Friday that soothsayers he had consulted foresaw violence on the horizon in 2010.

Afghanistan parliament mulls Karzai cabinet nominees

 Afghan President Hamid Karzai has presented parliament with a new list of nominees for cabinet posts.

The BBC   Saturday, 9 January 2010

The proposals come a week after 17 of his initial 24 nominees were rejected, dealing him a major blow.

The second round of nominees includes the post of foreign minister, which was left unfilled on the last vote.

Mr Karzai is hoping to finalise his cabinet before an international conference on Afghanistan in London later this month.

The more than 200 members of parliament will question each of the nominees, a process which is expected to take several days, before voting in a secret ballot.

The vote is one of the few occasions when parliamentarians have genuine power to hold the executive to account, analysts say.

Africa

Jailed but not forgotten: Birtukan Mideksa, Ethiopia’s most famous prisoner

Life sentence for Unity for Democracy and Justice leader casts shadow over May elections

Xan Rice in Addis Ababa

guardian.co.uk, Saturday 9 January 2010

At noon every Sunday an old Toyota sedan donated by supporters of Ethiopia’s most famous prisoner pulls up near a jail on the outskirts of the capital. A 74-year-old woman in a white shawl and her four-year-old granddaughter – the only outsiders the prisoner is allowed to see – step out for a 30-minute visit.

Most inmates at Kaliti prison want their relatives to buy them food. But Birtukan Mideksa, the 35-year-old leader of the country’s main opposition party, always asks her mother and daughter to bring books: an anthology titled The Power of Non-Violence, Bertrand Russell’s Best, and the memoirs of Gandhi, Barack Obama, and Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese political prisoner to whom she has been compared.

Emanuel Adebayor on Togo football team bus ambushed by Angola gunmen

Gunmen spray automatic fire at bus carrying players to African Cup of Nations tournament

David Smith and agencies

The Guardian, Saturday 9 January 2010

African football was in shock last night after gunmen attacked Togo’s national squad, including the English Premier League player Emmanuel Adebayor, five months before the continent hosts its first World Cup.

The Togolese football team told how they crouched under their bus seats for 30 minutes as they were ambushed and “machine-gunned like dogs” by a gang in Angola. The attackers killed the driver and wounded nine others, including two players, as well as dealing a blow to Angola as it prepares to host its first African Nations Cup.

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