Tag: Docudharma Times

U.S. mulling private security in Afghanistan

More American troops means more protection needed on bases, convoys

Associated Press

WASHINGTON – U.S. military authorities in Afghanistan may hire a private contractor to provide around-the-clock security at dozens of bases and protect vehicle convoys moving throughout the country.

The possibility of awarding a security contract comes as the Obama administration is sending thousands of more troops into Afghanistan to quell rising violence fueled by a resurgent Taliban. As the number of American forces grow over the next several months, so too does the demand to guard their outposts.

The last of the noblest generation

Harry Patch died yesterday aged 111. He was the nation’s final living link to the horrors of the Western Front. David Randall, the last journalist to meet Private Patch, reports

Sunday, 26 July 2009

Harry Patch, the last survivor of the Western Front, and the man who reminded the modern world of its filthy slaughter, died yesterday at the age of 111.

His life ended on a fine summer’s morning in his native Somerset, many miles and 92 years from the Passchendaele mud where so many of his comrades fell, and where he, but for the aim of a German artillery officer, so nearly joined them. For decades he kept the sights and sounds of that butcher’s yard to himself. But then, beginning at the age of 100, he began to talk of them. In so doing, he became the very voice of history: the last Tommy, still fighting. But now, his campaign is over.

As the news of Harry’s death filtered out from his residential home in Wells, the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, paid tribute, not only to Harry, but to all the men who fought beside him. “The noblest of all generations has left us,” he said. “But they will never be forgotten. We say today with still greater force, ‘We will remember them’.”

Liberal and Conservative Democrats Feud Over Bill



By Perry Bacon Jr., Paul Kane and Ben Pershing

Washington Post Staff Writers

Saturday, July 25, 2009

House Democrats feuded openly over health care Friday before shaking hands on a deal that guaranteed only that they would keep negotiating, wrapping up a week in which consensus on a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s health-care system seemed to diminish by the day.

White House aides announced a week ago that President Obama was ready to “take the baton” for his biggest domestic campaign initiative, and indeed Obama campaigned for his proposals nearly nonstop this week, including taking an hour to make his case directly to the American public on prime-time television.

A Modest English Club Prepares Off the Beaten Path



By BILLY WITZ

Published: July 24, 2009

VENTURA, Calif. – More than 80,000 fans, among them Charlize Theron, Kevin Garnett and Will Ferrell, filled the Rose Bowl on Tuesday night, drawn by the star-studded lineups and the lion-like coaches of Chelsea and Inter Milan. It was one way to prepare for the coming European soccer season.

Another took place an hour’s drive west.

The Burnley Football Club readied itself for its first season in the English Premier League by playing a fourth-division American club on an artificial turf field covered by the lines for the Buena High School football team. The crowd was announced at 3,300. No celebrities were discernable, although Burnley’s manager, Owen Coyle, does bear a resemblance to George Clooney.

In a little more than a month, Burnley and Chelsea will play each other in London, and on Tuesday night they were separated by 67 miles. In reality, they exist in separate universes. They may, on occasion, share the same space but not the same air.

A $4 Billion Push for Better Schools

Obama Hopes Funding Will Be Powerful Incentive in ‘Race to the Top’

By Michael D. Shear and Nick Anderson

Washington Post Staff Writers

Friday, July 24, 2009

President Obama is leaning hard on the nation’s schools, using the promise of more than $4 billion in federal aid — and the threat of withholding it — to strong-arm the education establishment to accept more charter schools and performance pay for teachers.

The pressure campaign has been underway for months as Education Secretary Arne Duncan travels the country delivering a blunt message to state officials who have resisted change for decades: Embrace reform or risk being shut out.

“What we’re saying here is, if you can’t decide to change these practices, we’re not going to use precious dollars that we want to see creating better results; we’re not going to send those dollars there,” Obama said in an Oval Office interview Wednesday. “And we’re counting on the fact that, ultimately, this is an incentive, this is a challenge for people who do want to change.”

 IMF lends $2.5bn to Sri Lanka despite concerns for Tamil refugees

From The Times

July 24, 2009

 

Rhys Blakely in Mumbai

The International Monetary Fund is expected to approve a controversial $2.5 billion (£1.5 billion) loan to Sri Lanka today, despite concerns over the treatment of the Tamil minority.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the managing director of the IMF, said this week that the organisation had agreed the terms of the deal with the Sri Lankan Government after four months of talks.

The move comes two months after the army crushed the Tamil Tiger rebels, ending a 26-year civil war that had weighed heavily on the nation’s economy and claimed at least 70,000 lives.

The loan – desperately needed by Sri Lanka to stave off a looming balance of payments crisis – was delayed initially by Britain and the US in an attempt to force a ceasefire, which would have allowed hundreds of thousands of civilians to escape the battle zone during the brutal climax of the conflict in May.

 Obama’s Toughest Sales Pitch Is Also His Most Critical

Analysis

 By Michael A. Fletcher

Washington Post Staff Writer

Thursday, July 23, 2009



Since taking office, President Obama has preached the urgency of implementing the big items on his long list of policy priorities. And he has been largely successful at bending public opinion, and Congress, to his will — on the stimulus package, financial bailouts and his budget, with unprecedented new investments in education and renewable energy.But six months into his presidency, as Obama stood in the East Room of the White House on Wednesday night, he faced what is shaping up as his toughest and most critical sales pitch yet: explaining to an increasingly reluctant public that health-care reform is in its best interest.

Obama used his fourth prime-time news conference to directly address the anxiety many Americans feel about emerging plans to revamp health care, plans that are reaching a critical juncture in Congress.

Wind power plan blown off course

 Closure of turbine factory undermines Government’s green pledges

By Michael McCarthy and Nigel Morris

 Thursday, 23 July 2009

The Government was facing a growing credibility gap over green jobs last night as environmental campaigners and trade unionists united to fight the closure of Britain’s sole major wind turbine plant.

Only last week, ministers proclaimed a green employment future for the UK involving 400,000 jobs in environmental industries such as renewable energy – yet this week they are declining to intervene over the forthcoming closure of the Vestas Wind Systems plant on the Isle of Wight, with nearly 600 redundancies.

Workers at the Newport factory, which makes wind turbine blades, were last night staging their third night of occupation of the plant in an attempt to prevent the closure which is scheduled for 31 July. In an alliance not seen before, they were being helped by climate-change campaigners who have set up an ad hoc camp outside the factory and yesterday helped to get food to the occupiers.

Reports on U.S. Detention Policy Will Be Delayed



 By Peter Finn

Washington Post Staff Writer

Tuesday, July 21, 2009

The Obama administration is delaying completion of reports examining U.S. detention and interrogation policy, officials said Monday, in a sign of the formidable issues it faces in grappling with how to handle terrorism suspects as it prepares to close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay.

The work of a Justice Department-led task force, which had been scheduled to send a report on detention policy to President Obama on Tuesday, will be extended for six months, according to senior administration officials. A second task force examining interrogation policy will get a two-month extension to complete its work, which had also been due Tuesday.

Han Chinese revenge attackers should be punished, says Beijing official  

 Uighur assaults in Xinjiang were covered extensively in the press but witnesses report attacks on Uighurs days later

Tania Branigan in Beijing  guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 21 July 2009 08.54 BST  

Han Chinese who took part in violent riots in China’s north western region of Xinjiang should be punished, a senior official in Beijing said today.

While state media have extensively covered the events of 5 July, when Uighurs launched indiscriminate assaults on Han, they did not report Han revenge attacks on Uighurs two days later.

In all, at least 197 people died in the inter-ethnic conflict – including 137 Han and 46 Uighurs – and 1,700 were injured.

“After the 5 July incident, some people in Urumqi, out of indignation over the crimes committed by rioters or sorrow for the loss of their families, did take to the streets,” acknowledged Wu Shimin, vice minister in charge of the state ethnic affairs commission, when asked about the events of 7 July at a press conference in Beijing.

Pentagon Seeks Prison Overhaul in Afghanistan  



  By ERIC SCHMITT

Published: July 19, 2009

BAGRAM AIR BASE, Afghanistan – A sweeping United States military review calls for overhauling the troubled American-run prison here as well as the entire Afghan jail and judicial systems, a reaction to worries that abuses and militant recruiting within the prisons are helping to strengthen the Taliban.

In a further sign of high-level concern over detention practices, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sent a confidential message last week to all of the military service chiefs and senior field commanders asking them to redouble their efforts to alert troops to the importance of treating detainees properly.

The prison at this air base north of Kabul has become an ominous symbol for Afghans – a place where harsh interrogation methods and sleep deprivation were used routinely in its early years, and where two Afghan detainees died in 2002 after being beaten by American soldiers and hung by their arms from the ceiling of isolation cells.

Frank McCourt, ‘Angela’s Ashes’ Author, Dies at 78

 

 By WILLIAM GRIMES

Published: July 19, 2009

Frank McCourt, a former New York City schoolteacher who turned his miserable childhood in Limerick, Ireland, into a phenomenally popular, Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, “Angela’s Ashes,” died in Manhattan on Sunday. He was 78 and lived in Manhattan and Roxbury, Conn.

The cause was metastatic melanoma, said Mr. McCourt’s brother, the writer Malachy McCourt.

Mr. McCourt, who taught in the city’s school system for nearly 30 years, had always told his writing students that they were their own best material. In his mid-60s, he decided to take his own advice, sitting down to commit his childhood memories to paper and producing what he described as “a modest book, modestly written.”

Internal Rifts on Road to Torment

Interviews Offer More Nuanced Look At Roles of CIA Contractors, Concerns Of Officials During Interrogations

 By Joby Warrick and Peter Finn

Washington Post Staff Writers

Sunday, July 19, 2009

In April 2002, as the terrorism suspect known as Abu Zubaida lay in a Bangkok hospital bed, top U.S. counterterrorism officials gathered at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., for a series of meetings on an urgent problem: how to get him to talk.

Put him in a cell filled with cadavers, was one suggestion, according to a former U.S. official with knowledge of the brainstorming sessions. Surround him with naked women, was another. Jolt him with electric shocks to the teeth, was a third.

Child labour used in cosmetics industry

From The Sunday Times

July 19, 2009

Nicola Smith  

Deep in the jungle of Jharkhand state in eastern India, at the end of a rutted track passable only by motorbike, a six-year-old girl named Sonia sat in the scorching midday sun, sifting jagged stones in an open-cast mine in the hope of earning enough money for a meal.

Sonia was halfway through her working day and she was already exhausted and dishevelled. Her hair was matted and her pretty flower-patterned dress spoilt by dust.

She barely had enough energy to glance at her eight-year-old cousin Guri, toiling intently beside her as they searched the stones for pieces of mica, a shiny material whose many uses include putting the sparkle into make-up.

America’s Iconic TV News Anchor Shaped the Medium and the Nation

WALTER CRONKITE 1916-2009

By Bart Barnes and Joe Holley

Washington Post Staff Writers

Saturday, July 18, 2009  

Walter Cronkite, America’s preeminent television journalist of the 1960s and 1970s who as anchor and managing editor of “CBS Evening News” played a primary role in establishing television as the dominant national news medium of that era, died last night at age 92.

CBS Vice President Linda Mason said Cronkite died at 7:42 p.m. with his family by his side at his home in New York after a long illness. He had been suffering from cerebrovascular disease, his family said recently.

In Pakistan, Skardu is suffering backlash of Taliban violence

Residents of the beautiful town of Skardu say the violence roiling other parts of Pakistan is keeping foreigners away. Climbing expeditions are down by half in the area that’s home to K2.

By Mark Magnier

July 18, 2009

Reporting from Skardu, Pakistan — Psst — don’t tell anyone, but there’s still another part of Pakistan, an oasis of striking beauty all but free of the turmoil, Taliban militancy, suicide bombers and security fears that have gripped much of the rest of the country.

Clocks here in Skardu in northern Pakistan, an hour’s flight from Islamabad, may display the same time as their counterparts in the capital, or in Lahore and Karachi. But the slow pace, tranquillity and welcoming of outsiders are more befitting of a long-gone age when traders on horseback plied the nearby Karakoram Highway.

“Someday maybe all of Pakistan will be as peaceful as this,” said Abdul Munim, 29, a businessman from Islamabad who has spent much of the last year building cellphone towers in the isolated region more than 7,000 feet above sea level. “There’s no fear, no danger of going outside, nothing but quiet.”

CIA was a long way from Jason Bourne

The agency tried to assemble a team of anti-terrorist assassins. But officials could not solve logistical problems, including how to get close to targets while keeping U.S. involvement secret.

 By Greg Miller

July 16, 2009

Reporting from Washington — In movies, the CIA has so many prolifically lethal assassins roaming the world that the main problem often seems to be reining them in.

But details that spilled out this week about a real CIA assassination program indicate that when the plotting is being done by spies instead of screenwriters, the obstacles are not so easy to surmount.

According to current and former U.S. intelligence officials, the CIA spent seven years trying to assemble teams capable of killing the world’s most wanted terrorists but could never find a formula that worked.

The struggles came during a period in which the agency had been given unprecedented authority and resources, and a cause — responding to the Sept. 11 attacks — with broad public support.

High-Born Prussians Who Defied Their Origin

ABROAD

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

Published: July 15, 2009

BERLIN – Monday is the anniversary of the July 20, 1944, plot to kill Hitler, and services will be held here, as they are every year, where the conspirators were executed. Among those remembered, Count Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg may not ring many bells these days outside Germany, or even inside it. Others came to be famously associated with the plot. But as the German historian Hans Mommsen wrote, “Schulenburg was the inner driving force of the conspiracy.”

Schulenburg’s sister, Countess Elisabeth von der Schulenburg – Tisa, as she was called – was an artist. They constituted an extraordinary pairing.

The Schulenburgs were a very old, very high Prussian clan, staunchly Nazi, and as such a reminder of the complexity of families, not least German ones, aristocratic or otherwise. Their story is a cautionary tale about judging history, or a people, any people, in black and white.

Note Docudharma Times will not appear tomorrow as I “must” attend an Enkai

Britain halts some arms exports to Israel in response to Gaza conflict

From The Times

July 14, 2009



Sheera Frenkel in Jerusalem

In a move that threatens to strain diplomatic ties, Britain has blocked the sale of spare parts for Israel’s fleet of missile gunships because they were used in the recent campaign in Gaza.

The first country to revoke an arms licence in response to the war in Gaza six months ago, Britain told the Israeli Embassy in London that five of the export requests for parts for the Sa’ar 4.5 gunships had been rejected because the vessels had fired on Gaza during Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s controversial 23-day campaign against the militant group Hamas. The spare parts were intended for the ships’ guns.

An Israeli defence official said that Britain’s decision to revoke five of the 182 licences reviewed by the Government would not impair the navy’s operational abilities – but admitted that there was concern within the military that other countries might follow suit.

Afghan victims of abuse find refuge

The nation’s six shelters provide a place to stay and legal help to women and girls fleeing abuse, forced marriage or slavery. Some obtain divorces, others reconcile with their families.

By David Zucchino

July 14, 2009

Reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan — Her father is dead and her brother is just a boy. For Shabana, a radiant young woman of 17 with dark eyes and flowing hair, the absence of a strong male protector has cost her dearly.

One day last fall as she was walking home from school, Shabana was kidnapped by a young man from her neighborhood. He forced her into marriage, then beat and imprisoned her in his home over the next seven months. Her mother did not intervene.

“He knew I had no one to protect me, and he took advantage,” Shabana said of her kidnapper.

But in late May, Shabana managed to escape to a women’s shelter on a quiet side street in another part of Kabul, the Afghan capital. And into her life came Esther Hyneman, 70, an American who speaks virtually no Dari but has brought a New Yorker’s sharp tongue and aggressive attitude to the cause of Afghan women’s rights.

Hearings Not Just About Sotomayor

Judicial Confirmation Process Could Be a Partisan Platform and a Barometer

By Michael D. Shear

Washington Post Staff Writer

Monday, July 13, 2009

When Sonia Sotomayor takes her seat today in front of the 19 members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, she will finally add her own voice to those that have been arguing publicly for confirmation of the first Latina Supreme Court justice.

How she answers the questions of Republican panel members — both the substance of her comments and how she handles herself in the spotlight — will help determine whether charges from her critics persist about her ability to apply the law fairly, without a bias toward any group.

Philippine bombings: No one is a suspect and everyone is to blame

A series of blasts on Mindanao has left 12 dead and 100 injured. No one has taken responsibility, but most every group on the troubled archipelago is being blamed. Some even suspect President Arroyo.

By John M. Glionna

July 13, 2009

Reporting from Manila — The first bombs exploded outside two Catholic cathedrals on the restive southern Philippine island of Mindanao. They were followed by a series of blasts two days later that raised the toll to 12 dead and 100 injured.

The wave of violence last week in this religiously divided and politically troubled archipelago has made residents skittish even in Manila, the capital some 500 miles to the north, where a bomb damaged a government office in June and several others were found.

President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo has beefed up an anti-terrorist command center and troops have been placed on high alert. Bomb-sniffing dogs patrol the airport and weapons checkpoints have sprung up throughout the metropolitan area of 12 million residents.

So far, no group has taken responsibility for the attacks — fueling speculation in the press, on the streets and among opposing government factions.

Everyone seems to agree on this: Most every group is suspect.

Probe of Alleged Torture Weighed

White House Has Resisted Inquiry

By Carrie Johnson

Washington Post Staff Writer

Sunday, July 12, 2009

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is leaning toward appointing a criminal prosecutor to investigate whether CIA personnel tortured terrorism suspects after Sept. 11, 2001, setting the stage for a conflict with administration officials who would prefer the issues remain in the past, according to three sources familiar with his thinking.

Naming a prosecutor to probe alleged abuses during the darkest period in the Bush era would run counter to President Obama’s oft-repeated desire to be “looking forward and not backwards.” Top political aides have expressed concern that such an investigation might spawn partisan debates that could overtake Obama’s ambitious legislative agenda.

The planet’s future: Climate change ‘will cause civilisation to collapse’

Authoritative new study sets out a grim vision of shortages and violence – but amid all the gloom, there is some hope too

By Jonathan Owen

Sunday, 12 July 2009

An effort on the scale of the Apollo mission that sent men to the Moon is needed if humanity is to have a fighting chance of surviving the ravages of climate change. The stakes are high, as, without sustainable growth, “billions of people will be condemned to poverty and much of civilisation will collapse”.

This is the stark warning from the biggest single report to look at the future of the planet – obtained by The Independent on Sunday ahead of its official publication next month. Backed by a diverse range of leading organisations such as Unesco, the World Bank, the US army and the Rockefeller Foundation, the 2009 State of the Future report runs to 6,700 pages and draws on contributions from 2,700 experts around the globe. Its findings are described by Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the UN, as providing “invaluable insights into the future for the United Nations, its member states, and civil society”.