Docudharma Times Friday March 19

Toyota used ‘game plan’ to escape early recall

Federal agency faces criticism for failing to wield its enforcement power

By Peter Whoriskey

As congressional investigators learned last month, Toyota Motor lobbyists claimed last year to have saved the company $100 million by fending off a 2007 federal investigation into unintended acceleration.

Toyota and agency officials dismissed the claim as an idle boast.

But a closer look at the 2007 investigation, revealed in agency records and internal Toyota e-mails, shows that after federal investigators at the time diagnosed a number of potential dangers in Toyota cars and trucks, the automaker resisted the findings and in the end escaped a broad recall that could have costmillions of dollars.

Bolivia creates a new opportunity for climate talks that failed at Copenhagen

Bolivia will host an international meeting on climate change next month because it is not prepared to ‘betray its people’

Pablo Solón Romero

guardian.co.uk, Friday 19 March 2010 07.00 GMT

In the aftermath of the Copenhagen climate conference, those who defended the widely condemned outcome tended to talk about it as a “step in the right direction”. This was always a tendentious argument, given that tackling climate change can not be addressed by half measures. We can’t make compromises with nature.

Bolivia, however, believed that Copenhagen marked a backwards step, undoing the work built on since the climate talks in Kyoto. That is why, against strong pressure from industrialised countries, we and other developing nations refused to sign the Copenhagen accord and why we are hosting an international meeting on climate change next month. In the words of the Tuvalu negotiator, we were not prepared to “betray our people for 30 pieces of silver”.

USA

School Suspensions Lead to Legal Challenge



By ERIK ECKHOLM

Published: March 18, 2010

CHOCOWINITY, N.C. – As school let out one day in January 2008, students from rival towns faced off. Two girls flailed away for several seconds and clusters of boys pummeled each other until teachers pulled them apart.The fistfights at Southside High School involved no weapons and no serious injuries, and in some ways seemed as old-fashioned as the country roads here in eastern North Carolina. But the punishment was strictly up-to-date: Sheriff’s deputies handcuffed and briefly arrested a dozen students. The school suspended seven of them for a short period and six others from the melee, including the two girls, for the entire semester.

House leaders announce $940 billion health-care compromise bi  



By Lori Montgomery and Paul Kane

Washington Post Staff Writer

Friday, March 19, 2010

Pushing toward a Sunday vote that could transform the nation’s health-insurance system, House leaders announced a $940 billion compromise Thursday that would extend coverage to the vast majority of Americans, cut billions of dollars from Medicare, and impose new taxes on the wealthy and the well-insured.

The proposal, a rewrite of a slightly narrower health-care bill the Senate passed on Christmas Eve, would also significantly expand the federal student loan program, offering President Obama the prospect of victory on two of his most important domestic initiatives after a year of legislative stalemate.

Europe

Johann Hari: The Pope, the Prophet, and the religious support for evil

This enforced ‘respect’ is a creeping vine: it soon extends from ideas to institutions

Friday, 19 March 2010  

What can make tens of millions of people – who are in their daily lives peaceful and compassionate and caring – suddenly want to physically dismember a man for drawing a cartoon, or make excuses for an international criminal conspiracy to protect child-rapists? Not reason. Not evidence. No. But it can happen when people choose their polar opposite – religion. In the past week we have seen two examples of how people can begin to behave in bizarre ways when they decide it is a good thing to abandon any commitment to fact and instead act on faith.

Adolf Hitler ‘wanted to use cricket to train troops for war’, new book claims

Adolf Hitler wanted to use cricket to train troops for war after he was trained in the game’s rules by British troops, a new book has disclosed.

By Andrew Hough

Published: 8:00AM GMT 19 Mar 2010

The future leader of Nazi Germany was taught the basics of the game by First World War POWs, BBC broadcaster John Simpson found.

But according to his new book about 20th century reporting, the corporation’s World Affairs Editor discovered the Fuhrer later became frustrated with the game’s complex rules and tried to rewrite the game’s laws.

He had “advocated the withdrawal of the use of pads” because the “artificial bolsters” were “unmanly and un-German”.

His claims are based on a report in the Daily Mirror newspaper that appeared in 1930, during the Nazis’ rise to power and written by Oliver Locker-Lampson, a British right-wing MP and Nazi sympathiser.

Middle East

Iran’s atomic ambitions cause impasse at disarmament talks

From The Times

March 19, 2010  

Tony Halpin, Moscow  

The US and Russia fell out over Iran’s nuclear programme last night as the two sides offered little sign of a deal to slash their own atomic arsenals.

Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, said that it was premature for Russia to open Iran’s first nuclear power station until Tehran allayed suspicions that it is secretly building an atomic bomb.

“We have said that Iran is entitled to civil nuclear power. It is a nuclear weapons programme that it is not entitled to,” she said. “If it reassures the world or if its behaviour has changed, then it can pursue peaceful nuclear power. In the absence of these reassurances, we think it would be premature to go forward with any project at this time.”

Iran protests: Is Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei winning?

With Iran protests largely shut down, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has declared “victory.” But as Iranians evaluate the past year during Norouz celebrations this weekend, he knows he’s lost legitimacy, say close observers.

By Scott Peterson, Staff writer / March 18, 2010  

Istanbul, Turkey

Iran celebrates the start of the Persian New Year – or Norouz – this weekend, a time of joyful spring renewal that will also be used by Iran’s supreme religious leader Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei to take stock of the damage done to the Islamic regime by post-election Iran protests and a determined opposition movement.

The Green Movement has been forced off the streets by police and security forces, and senior hard-line officials have declared “victory.”

But does Iran’s most powerful man – whose official title is God’s Deputy on Earth, infallible to his ardent followers – think he is winning?

Ayatollah Khamenei keeps a very tight circle, so divining the machinations of his mind can be akin to Soviet-era Kremlinology.

Asia

The mysterious case of the Grey Lady of Bagram

How does a neuroscientist and mother of three end up in jail as an al-Qa’ida agent?

Robert Fisk Friday, 19 March 2010

Dr Shams Hassan Faruqi sits amid his rocks and geological records, shakes his bearded head and stares at me. “I strongly doubt if the children are alive,” he says. “Probably, they have expired.” He says this in a strange way, mournful but resigned, yet somehow he seems oddly unmoved. As a witness, supposedly, to the mysterious 2008 re-appearance of Aafia Siddiqui – the “most wanted woman in the world”, according to former US attorney general John Ashcroft – I guess this 73-year-old Pakistani geologist is used to the limelight. But the children, I ask him again. What happened to the children?

Success of secret two-child policy could force Chinese rethink on family planning

From The Times

March 19, 2010

Jane Macartney

A secret experiment allowing families in a rural Chinese county to have two children could herald the beginning of a social revolution after years of the notorious one-child-only rule.

It has emerged that, 25 years ago, Beijing secretly authorised a pilot project in Yicheng county, 560 miles (900km) southwest of the capital, in which families would be allowed to have a maximum of two children if they adhered to certain conditions.

Details of the experiment were reported for the first time in the Southern Weekend newspaper in Guangzhou – and the results are sure to call into question the viability of the official family planning policy.

Latin America

Colombia rejects U.S. extradition request

Daniel Rendon Herrera, an ex-paramilitary leader and suspected drug trafficker, has been indicted by the U.S. The Colombian high court bars his extradition, citing his cooperation in domestic cases.

By Chris Kraul

March 19, 2010  

Reporting from Bogota, Colombia

Colombia’s Supreme Court has blocked the extradition to the United States of a notorious former paramilitary leader and alleged drug trafficker arrested last year, citing the importance of his testimony in bringing justice to victims of decades of violence in the South American country.

Daniel Rendon Herrera, known as Don Mario, has been indicted in the Southern District of New York federal court on charges of smuggling 100 tons of cocaine. But Rendon, 44, is cooperating with authorities in Colombia investigating mass killings and forced displacements of thousands of poor farmers, a factor cited by the court Wednesday in barring extradition.

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