Fighting rages as Karzai urges restraint
Marines, Afghan soldiers exchange fire with Taliban insurgents in Marjah
Associated Press
MARJAH, Afghanistan – U.S. Marines and Afghan soldiers advanced through poppy fields of Marjah on Saturday under withering gunfire from Taliban fighters shooting from mudbrick homes and compounds where families huddled in terror.President Hamid Karzai urged NATO to do more to protect civilians during combat operations to secure Marjah, a southern Taliban stronghold and scene of the biggest allied ground assault of the eight-year war.
NATO forces have repeatedly said they want to prevent civilian casualties but acknowledged that it is not always possible.
Elián González and the Cuban crisis: fallout from a big row over a little boy
Ten years after six-year-old Elián González sparked an international crisis between the US and Cuba, Ed Vulliamy returns to Little Havana to chart the incredible story of a family tug of war that changed the course of history.
Ed Vulliamy
The Observer, Sunday 21 February 2010
In the back room of a bungalow in Little Havana, Miami, at number 2319 Northwest 2nd Street, hangs a tyre of the kind on which thousands of rafters have landed ashore in the United States in flight from Cuba, and aboard which many others have perished in the Straits of Florida. Beneath it, on the floor, is a blow-up of the famous picture of the moment when US federal marshals seized six-year-old Elián González, a Cuban boy who had crossed the straits to Miami. Elián’s young mother, Elizabeth Brotons, drowned at sea along with her lover, who was to have become Elián’s stepfather.The little boy was found floating on a tyre in the raging waters off Florida by two cousins taking a fishing trip on Thanksgiving day 1999. The boy then spent five months in this house – both haven and fortress – as his Miami relatives fought to prevent him being taken back to his father in Cuba.
USA
Justice Department decision on terror memos sparks legal debate
By Carrie Johnson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 21, 2010
A Justice Department decision to reject sanctions against Bush-era lawyers who approved harsh treatment of terrorism suspects provoked a heated exchange among legal experts Saturday over whether the lawyers’ actions had constituted unethical conduct or violated professional standards.Analysts divided bitterly on that question, but the torrent of commentary, unleashed by a senior department official’s decision to discard the recommendations of ethics investigators in the case of John C. Yoo and Jay S. Bybee, underscored the murkiness of disciplining lawyers.
A cautionary tale in healthcare reform
Two decades ago, New York passed a law requiring insurers to accept all applicants, even those with preexisting conditions. Now, premiums in the state are the highest in the nation by some estimates.
By Noam N. Levey
February 21, 2010
Reporting from Washington – Spurred by heart-wrenching stories of sick people denied health coverage, the state of New York did what many of President Obama’s critics say he should do now — it passed a relatively simple law requiring insurers to accept all applicants.Other states have taken similar steps, making narrowly targeted changes instead of trying to overhaul their whole healthcare systems.
But two decades later, New York’s experience offers a cautionary tale: Making isolated changes to the complex medical insurance system can have unwelcome consequences.
Europe
Basque separatists call on Eta to end terror campaign
Leaders of political wing say 40-year conflict must stop before peace talks can begin
Giles Tremlett in Madrid
The Observer, Sunday 21 February 2010
The political wing of Eta, the Basque separatist group, will today make a historic call for the organisation to lay down its arms after 40 years, so that peace negotiators can get to work.The call is a further sign of a growing rift between Eta and those who have traditionally spoken for the terrorist group, as it slides towards insignificance. It is seen as the first time Eta’s frontmen in the nationalist Batasuna party have dared to issue directions to the group.
In an interview to be published today by Berria, a Basque-language newspaper, Rufino Etxeberria, a separatist leader, said that attempts by himself and others close to Eta to bring separatism back to the centre of Basque politics included a peace process that would require the group to stop its attacks.
Floods and mudslides in Madeira leave 32 dead
More than 60 people are injured and hundreds more are left homeless as rainstorms and high winds batter Portuguese holiday island
By Sadie Gray Sunday, 21 February 2010
Floods and mudslides have killed at least 32 people and left hundreds of others homeless on the Portuguese holiday island of Madeira.An unusually violent rainstorm, which battered the island for several hours yesterday, accompanied by winds exceeding 100 kilometres an hour, triggered flash flooding.
The island is popular with British tourists seeking winter sun. The Foreign Office said last night that it had received no reports of any Britons caught up in the devastation, but was monitoring the situation closely.
Middle East
In Turmoil, Sunni Party in Iraq Calls for Vote Boycott
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
Published: February 20, 2010
BAGHDAD – The Sunni political party whose two most prominent leaders were disqualified from next month’s parliamentary elections in Iraq because of supposed ties to Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party called Saturday for a boycott of the vote, raising fears of worsening sectarian tensions in an already volatile campaign.It remains to be seen how deeply the call for a boycott will resonate in Iraq’s Sunni heartland. Sunnis largely boycotted the country’s last election in 2005 and as a result were disproportionately underrepresented in Parliament.
Mossad: Inside the spying game
Accusations of assassination are hardly unusual Israel’s security service over its 60 years of covert operations
By Donald Macintyre Sunday, 21 February 2010
If the Dubai police are right – not only in asserting that last month’s lethal hit on the Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was the work of Mossad, but also that it was run from Austria – a template is on hand to help us imagine the atmosphere among those controlling the assassination before it happened.“Their operations room… was a hastily rented ground-floor office in the Walker and French Investment Company GmbH, one of dozens that Gavron’s secretariat kept permanently registered. Their communications equipment had more or less the appearance of commercial software; in addition, they had three ordinary telephones, courtesy of Alexis, and one of them, the least official, was the… hotline to Kurtz.
Asia
Street riots greet Kashmir peace talks
India and Pakistan are holding their first high-level talks since the Mumbai terrorist attacks in 2008
Jason Burke in Srinagar
The Observer, Sunday 21 February 2010
At one o’clock, he is behind the dusty shelves of the small shop he runs with his father. A few phone calls and an hour later, he is walking through the streets of Srinagar’s Nowhatta district, two friends in tow. Fashionable but scuffed shoes, turned-up dirty jeans, a ring on each finger and a chequered Arab-style scarf, Mehraan, 22 and already a veteran, knows where he is going: to the police checkpoint on the Gojwara Road.“It’s going to be big. We’re under a lot of pressure, but it’s going to be big,” he says as he strides through narrow lanes, past food stalls, rubbish-strewn wasteland, and open drains full of human and animal waste.
Chinese censors tormented by mythical animal
From Times Online
February 21, 2010
Jane Macartney in Beijing
A new mythical animal is on the prowl on the Chinese internet.The Yake lizard is the latest creation of China’s nimble and imaginative netizens as a way to poke fun at the authorities and their bid to corral online debate and to block access to sites the censors deem inappropriate.
Internet satirists were inspired by the language used by a Uighur artist performing on the Spring Festival Gala show, the annual Chinese New Year’s Eve jamboree created and broadcast by China Central Television to entertain viewers gathered at home for the most important festival of the year. Watched by the largest television audience on Earth, it is an opportunity for wholesome family entertainment peppered with propaganda.
Africa
Sudan, JEM to sign Darfur peace deal within three weeks – official
Sunday 21 February 2010
(KHARTOUM)
Sudanese Presidential adviser in charge of Darfur dossier said today they agreed with the rebel Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) on March 15 as deadline for the signing of final peace agreement to end Darfur conflict in Doha.
Ghazi Salah Al-Deen Attabani and Khalil Ibrahim, JEM leader, signed a preliminary framework agreement in Ndjamena including a temporary ceasefire, considered by Khartoum as most important issue in the deal. The framework agreement which should be developed in Doha outlined issues related to the power and wealth sharing and displaced and refugees.
Anti-retrovirals could halt Aids spread in five years
Anti-retroviral treatments (ARVs) and universal testing could stop the spread of Aids in South Africa within five years, a top scientist says.
The BBC Sunday, 21 February 2010
Dr Brian Williams says the cost of giving the drugs to all HIV-positive patients would be $2-3bn per year.
He said the scale of the problem in South Africa was “enormous” – almost six million people carry the virus and only about 30% getting the treatment.
The drugs reduce the amount of virus patients have in their body fluids.
Dr Williams called for this approach at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in San Diego.
Dr Williams, a leading figure in the field of HIV research, is based at the South African Centre for Epidemiological Modelling and Analysis (Sacema) in Stellenbosch.
Latin America
The 10p cocaine byproduct turning Argentina’s slum children into the living dead
A generation of parents in Buenos Aires can only watch in despair as their sons and daughters are consumed by paco, a lethally cheap drug
Annie Kelly
The Observer, Sunday 21 February 2010
Nina Chamorro runs her finger across the montage of photos of neighbourhood children tacked to the wall of her community soup kitchen in Villa Itatí, a sprawling urban slum on the outskirts of Buenos Aires.“He is dead now. And him. And him,” says the 75-year-old grandmother, her eyes drifting sadly over grinning faces. She points to another photograph. “He was shot by the police last month. That girl disappeared. We have lost so many of our beautiful children. We knew them since they were born. They had their whole lives to live.”
Villa Itatí is only a few minutes’ drive from the more upmarket parts of Buenos Aires. Ask most people here to explain the cause of the grisly gallery in Chamorro’s kitchen and the answer will be a single word: “paco”.