Tag: Docudharma Times

“We’ve got a lot of rebuilding

to do … The good news is – and it’s hard for some

to see it now – that out of this chaos

is going to come a fantastic Gulf Coast,

like it was before. Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott’s house

– he’s lost his entire house –

there’s going to be a fantastic house.

And I’m looking forward to sitting on the porch.

” (Laughter) -President Bush, touring hurricane damage,

Mobile, Ala., Sept. 2, 2005

Iran Election In Dispute as 2 Candidates Claim Victory

Ahmadinejad Official Leader, But Mousavi Alleges Fraud

By Thomas Erdbrink

Washington Post Foreign Service

Saturday, June 13, 2009

TEHRAN, June 13 — A pivotal presidential election in Iran ended in confusion and confrontation early Saturday as both sides claimed victory and plainclothes officers fired tear gas to disperse a cheering crowd outside the campaign headquarters of opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi.

With votes still being counted in many cities, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was leading by a 2-1 ratio in early returns, according to Iranian Interior Ministry officials. But Mousavi’s supporters dismissed those numbers, saying the ministry was effectively under Ahmadinejad’s control.

North Korea says it will ‘weaponize’ its plutonium



Associated Press

11:55 PM PDT, June 12, 2009

SEOUL, South Korea – North Korea vowed on Saturday to embark on a uranium enrichment program and “weaponize” all the plutonium in its possession as it rejected the new U.N. sanctions meant to punish the communist nation for its recent nuclear test.

North Korea also said it would not abandon its nuclear programs, saying it was an inevitable decision to defend itself from what it says is a hostile U.S. policy and its nuclear threat against the North.

The North will take “resolute military action” if the United States or its allies try to impose any “blockade” on it, the ministry said in a statement carried by the North’s official Korean Central News Agency.

The ministry did not elaborate if the blockade refers to an attempt to stop its ships or impose sanctions.

North Korea describes its nuclear program as a deterrent against possible U.S. attacks. Washington says it has no intention of attacking and has expressed fear that North Korea is trying to sell its nuclear technology to other nations.

USA

Permanence Eludes Some Katrina Victims

Many Still Live in Trailers, Rentals

By Spencer S. Hsu

Washington Post Staff Writer

Saturday, June 13, 2009

GULFPORT, Miss. — James Johnson can look across a grassy field here and see acres of empty pastel “Mississippi cottages,” each house an architect’s vision of how government can provide safe, low-cost and permanent housing to families made homeless by Hurricane Katrina nearly four years ago.

At 74, Johnson would like nothing better than to move one of the nearly 700 vacant cottages onto his land, where he now lives in a temporary trailer provided by the government. The cottages — with picturesque white fences and wide front porches — are designed to be set on a permanent foundation and can withstand winds of 150 mph.

Johnson’s daughter helped him apply for a cottage, but the request to the state has gone nowhere.

“if Mr. Obama signs into law

a ‘public option,’ government-run insurance program

as part of health-care reform

we won’t be able to undo the damage.”

Karl “Super Genius” Rove Ha Ha Ha

As Iran Votes, Talk of a Sea Change

NEWS ANALYSIS

By ROBERT F. WORTH

Published: June 12, 2009

TEHRAN – Iranians went to the polls Friday to elect a new president after an unusually intense campaign which saw the hard-line incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, seemingly thrown onto the defensive. Opposition leaders said they expected a huge turnout, with many reformists who sat out the last vote in 2005 saying they will take part this time.

Mr. Ahmadinejad’s main opponent is Mir Hussein Moussavi, a moderate who has mobilized huge crowds of his backers in Tehran and other large cities.

The official IRNA news agency reported long lines outside polling stations before they opened at 8 a.m. local time. State-run television showed Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, casting his vote under the gaze of local and foreign media.

Kim Jong who? Japanese TV station has egg on its moon face

TV Asahi claimed to have an exclusive photo of Kim Jong Il’s youngest son and heir apparent. Turned out to be a construction worker in South Korea.

By John M. Glionna and Ju-min Park

June 12, 2009

Reporting from Seoul — The photograph was considered a journalistic coup, a recent image of the elusive 26-year-old son of North Korean strongman Kim Jong Il, who has reportedly been named the next leader of the secretive state.

The Internet snapshot released by a Tokyo television station purportedly showed an adult Kim Jong Un — whose last known photo was taken at age 12 — as a spitting image of his notorious father, right down to the moon face, coiffed hair and oversize sunglasses.

Trouble was, it wasn’t the younger Kim at all, but a pudgy 40-year-old South Korean construction worker who also operates a website for fortunetellers. He says he is baffled as to how the Japanese got hold of his Internet image.

USA

Obama Bows on Settling Detainees

Administration Gives Up on Bringing Cleared Inmates to U.S., Officials Say

By Peter Finn and Sandhya Somashekhar

Washington Post Staff Writers

Friday, June 12, 2009

The Obama administration has all but abandoned plans to allow Guantanamo Bay detainees who have been cleared for release to live in the United States, administration officials said yesterday, a decision that reflects bipartisan congressional opposition to admitting such prisoners but complicates efforts to persuade European allies to accept them.

Four Uighur detainees, Chinese Muslims who were incarcerated at the U.S. military prison in Cuba for more than seven years, arrived early yesterday in Bermuda, where they will become foreign guest workers.

In Memoriaum

Stephen T. Johns  

In Iran Race, Ex-Leader Works to Oust President



By ROBERT F. WORTH

Published: June 10, 2009

TEHRAN – In a makeshift campaign war room in north Tehran, two dozen young women clad in head scarves and black chadors are logging election data into desktop computers 24 hours a day, while men rush around them carrying voter surveys and district maps.

This nerve center in the campaign to unseat Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s hard-line president, is not run by any of the three candidates who are challenging him in a hotly contested election on Friday.

Instead, it is part of a bitter behind-the-scenes rivalry that has helped define the campaign, pitting Mr. Ahmadinejad against the man he beat in the last election, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a two-term former president and one of Iran’s richest and most powerful men.

Swine flu ‘pandemic’ announcement imminent

The World Health Organisation prepares to hold an emergency meeting on the current state of swine flu outbreaks across the world

Associated Press

guardian.co.uk, Thursday 11 June 2009 06.30 BST

The World Health Organisation is gearing up to declare a swine flu pandemic, a move that could trigger both the large-scale production of vaccines and questions about why the step was delayed for weeks as the virus continued to spread.

WHO chief Dr Margaret Chan quizzed eight countries with large swine flu outbreaks yesterday to see if a pandemic, or global epidemic, should be declared. The agency then announced that an emergency meeting with its flu experts would be held at 10am today.

Since swine flu first emerged in Mexico and the United States in April, it has spread to 74 countries around the globe. On Wednesday, WHO reported 27,737 cases including 141 deaths. Most cases are mild and require no treatment.

The world is in phase 5 of WHO’s pandemic alert scale, meaning a global outbreak is imminent. Moving to phase 6, the highest level, means a pandemic has begun. If that declaration is made, it will push drugmakers to fast-track production of a swine flu vaccine.

USA

At a Monument of Sorrow, A Burst of Deadly Violence

Guard Killed, Suspect Injured Amid Scene Of Fear, Chaos

By Michael E. Ruane, Paul Duggan and Clarence Williams

Washington Post Staff Writers

Thursday, June 11, 2009

At 12:40 p.m. yesterday a man stepped through the doors of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. He took two paces, lowered his rifle at a security guard and, before anyone could react, opened fire in a popular national landmark.

The guard, who did not have time to draw his gun, fell bleeding and fatally wounded to the polished floor. Other guards fired back, cutting down the assailant. Terrified patrons, many of them children, dived for safety. And what moments before had been a bright weekday in June became a tableau of violence.

As described by bystanders and authorities, the attack inside the famed Holocaust museum turned the crowded building and Washington’s nearby tourist-thronged Mall into a scene of fear and chaos, with black-clad SWAT teams, hovering helicopters and racing emergency vehicles.

 But instead, Boumediene said he endured harsh

treatment for more than seven years.

He said he was kept awake for 16 days straight,

and physically abused repeatedly….

Boumediene described being pulled up from under his arms

while sitting in a chair with his legs shackled, stretching him.

He said that he was forced to run with the camp’s guards

and if he could not keep up, he was dragged, bloody and bruised….

Formerly of the Red Cresent

CIA Urges Judge To Keep Bush-Era Documents Sealed

Al-Qaeda Could Use Contents, Agency Says

By R. Jeffrey Smith

Washington Post Staff Writer

Tuesday, June 9, 2009

The Obama administration objected yesterday to the release of certain Bush-era documents that detail the videotaped interrogations of CIA detainees at secret prisons, arguing to a federal judge that doing so would endanger national security and benefit al-Qaeda’s recruitment efforts.

In an affidavit, CIA Director Leon E. Panetta defended the classification of records describing the contents of the 92 videotapes, their destruction by the CIA in 2005 and what he called “sensitive operational information” about the interrogations.

The forced disclosure of such material to the American Civil Liberties Union “could be expected to result in exceptionally grave damage to the national security by informing our enemies of what we knew about them, and when, and in some instances, how we obtained the intelligence we possessed,” Panetta argued.

In Lebanese Vote, Hopeful Signs for U.S.

NEWS ANALYSIS

By MICHAEL SLACKMAN

Published: June 8, 2009

BEIRUT, Lebanon – There were many domestic reasons voters handed an American-backed coalition a victory in Lebanese parliamentary elections on Sunday – but political analysts also attribute it in part to President Obama’s campaign of outreach to the Arab and Muslim world.

Most analysts had predicted that the Hezbollah-led coalition, already a crucial power broker in the Lebanese government because of its support from Shiites who make up a large part of Lebanon’s population, would win handily. In the end, though, the American-aligned coalition won 71 seats, while the Syria-Iranian aligned opposition, which includes Hezbollah, took only 57.

It is hard to draw firm conclusions from one election. But for the first time in a long time, being aligned with the United States did not lead to defeat in the Middle East. And since Lebanon has always been a critical testing ground, that could mark a possibly significant shift in regional dynamics with another major election, in Iran, on Friday.

USA

Supreme Court Delays Sale of Chrysler to Fiat



By MICHAEL J. de la MERCED

Published: June 8, 2009

The Obama administration’s effort to hurry Chrysler through bankruptcy court ran into an unexpected last-minute delay on Monday, when the Supreme Court said it could consider whether to hear the objections of three Indiana state funds and consumer groups.

The implications of the court’s move – Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg issued a one-sentence order that amounted to a holding action – are unclear.

The delay could be resolved by Tuesday, freeing Chrysler to join forces with Fiat. But if the court decides to hear an appeal that lasts weeks or months, it could put Chrysler at risk of going out of business. Fiat, the only company to show an interest in acquiring most of the assets of Chrysler, can walk away from the deal if it is not concluded by June 15.

  Media attempts to contact

MIC to establish why it was taking

an apparently defiant stance were rebuffed,

but the Guardian managed to grill MIC’s marketing

president, John McNelis.

“I would think [Burger King] would run from any form of controversy

kinda like cockroaches when the lights get turned on,”

said Mr McNelis. “I’m not aware of any direction

that they gave the franchisee and

I don’t think they have the authority to do it.”    

U.S. Weighs Intercepting North Korean Shipments



By DAVID E. SANGER

Published: June 7, 2009

WASHINGTON – The Obama administration signaled Sunday that it was seeking a way to interdict, possibly with China’s help, North Korean sea and air shipments suspected of carrying weapons or nuclear technology.The administration also said it was examining whether there was a legal basis to reverse former President George W. Bush’s decision last year to remove the North from a list of states that sponsor terrorism.

The reference to interdictions – preferably at ports or airfields in countries like China, but possibly involving riskier confrontations on the high seas – was made by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

N. Korea sentences U.S. journalists to 12 years

Country’s top court convicts Laura Ling and Euna Lee of ‘grave crime’

Associated Press

SEOUL, South Korea – North Korea said its top court convicted two U.S. journalists and sentenced them to 12 years in labor prison Monday, intensifying the reclusive nation’s confrontation with the United States.

The North’s Central Court tried American TV reporters Laura Ling and Euna Lee during proceedings running from last Thursday to Monday and found them guilty of a “grave crime” against the nation, and of illegally crossing into North Korea, the country’s state-run Korean Central News Agency said.

It said the court “sentenced each of them to 12 years of reform through labor.” The KCNA report gave no other details.

USA

U.S. Will Let Some Banks Repay Aid

Move Doesn’t Signal Economic Recovery, Officials Caution

By Binyamin Appelbaum and David Cho

Washington Post Staff Writers

Monday, June 8, 2009

The Obama administration plans to announce as soon as today that some of the nation’s largest banks can repay billions in federal aid, but some officials caution that the show of progress is being underwritten by multiple layers of less visible government support.

Through cheap loans, debt guarantees and a promise that big banks will not be allowed to fail, these officials say the government has created an artificial environment in which profits and stock prices have rebounded, helping banks in recent weeks to raise about $50 billion from private investors.

Lawyers At The

Justice Department Against

Torture Go Along With It

No Backbone No Conscious      

Obama to Forge a Greater Role on Health Care



By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

Published: June 6, 2009

WASHINGTON – After months of insisting he would leave the details to Congress, President Obama has concluded that he must exert greater control over the health care debate and is preparing an intense push for legislation that will include speeches, town-hall-style meetings and much deeper engagement with lawmakers, senior White House officials say.

Mindful of the failures of former President Bill Clinton, whose intricate proposal for universal care collapsed on Capitol Hill 15 years ago, Mr. Obama until now had charted a different course, setting forth broad principles and concentrating on bringing disparate factions – doctors, insurers, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, labor unions – to the negotiating table.

Tunnel fraud leaves Gazans on verge of financial ruin

For years, a network of underground smugglers’ routes from Egypt to the Gaza Strip has supplied a besieged population with everything from cement to cattle. But now a series of major scams has destroyed the dreams of desperate investors who saw the tunnels as a path out of poverty



Peter Bradshaw in Gaza City

The Observer, Sunday 7 June 2009

Jawad Tawfiq, a 52-year-old Gazan actor and director, was dubious at first, but his nephew insisted. If they could scrape together enough money, the nephew said, large profits could be made from investing in the tunnels that snake beneath the Egyptian border.

“They were liars,” Tawfiq said bitterly last week. “They took my money to put in their own pockets. And we are being offered a fraction of what we gave them.”

At first the tunnels emerged as smuggling routes; then they became the vital lifeline for a Gaza under economic siege by Israel. But many people who invested in the tunnels now see them quite differently – as a source of ruination.

The tunnel schemes were advertised as opportunities for doubling and trebling money by unscrupulous figures linked to powerful businessmen in Gaza and, allegedly, to senior officials in Hamas, but have instead led to huge losses for ordinary residents of the Strip.

USA

A Slow Burn Becomes a Raging Fire

Disdain for U.S. Policies May Have Led to Alleged Spying for Cuba

By Mary Beth Sheridan and Del Quentin Wilber

Washington Post Staff Writers

Sunday, June 7, 2009



He was a courtly State Department intelligence analyst from a prominent family who loved to sail and peruse the London Review of Books. Occasionally, he would voice frustration with U.S. policies, but to his liberal neighbors in Northwest D.C. it was nothing out of the ordinary. “We were all appalled by the Bush years,” one said.

What Walter Kendall Myers kept hidden, according to documents unsealed in court Friday, was a deep and long-standing anger toward his country, an anger that allegedly made him willing to spy for Cuba for three decades.”I have become so bitter these past few months. Watching the evening news is a radicalizing experience,” he wrote in his diary in 1978, referring to what he described as greedy U.S. oil companies, inadequate health care and “the utter complacency of the oppressed” in America. On a trip to Cuba, federal law enforcement officials said in legal filings, Myers found a new inspiration: the communist revolution.

D-Day      

State Dept. Retiree Accused of Spying

Official, Wife Passed Secrets to Cuba For Decades, Federal Prosecutors Say

By Del Quentin Wilber and Mary Beth Sheridan

Washington Post Staff Writers

Saturday, June 6, 2009

A former State Department official with top-secret security clearance and his wife have been charged with spying for Cuba over the past three decades, passing information by shortwave radio and correspondence exchanged in local grocery stores, federal prosecutors said.

State Department officials said last night they were still assessing the potential damage to the government’s security and intelligence operations and declined to comment further.

Within hours of the couple’s appearance yesterday at U.S. District Court in the District, a novel-worthy tale began to emerge from court documents and law enforcement sources, depicting an elderly couple of famed lineage, living in a Northwest Washington neighborhood and traveling abroad under code names, motivated by ideology to pass information to Cuban agents.

Plying the Pacific, Subs Surface as Key Tool of Drug Cartels



By William Booth and Juan Forero

Washington Post Foreign Service

Saturday, June 6, 2009

MEXICO CITY — When anti-narcotics agents first heard that drug cartels were building an armada of submarines to transport cocaine, they thought it was a joke.

Now U.S. law enforcement officials say that more than a third of the cocaine smuggled into the United States from Colombia travels in submersibles.

An experimental oddity just two years ago, these strange semi-submarines are the cutting edge of drug trafficking today. They ferry hundreds of tons of cocaine for powerful Mexican cartels that are taking over the Pacific Ocean route for most northbound shipments, according to the Colombian navy.

The sub-builders are even trying to develop a remote-controlled model, officials say.

USA

U.S. May Permit 9/11 Guilty Pleas in Capital Cases



By WILLIAM GLABERSON

Published: June 5, 2009

The Obama administration is considering a change in the law for the military commissions at the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, that would clear the way for detainees facing the death penalty to plead guilty without a full trial.

The provision could permit military prosecutors to avoid airing the details of brutal interrogation techniques. It could also allow the five detainees who have been charged with the Sept. 11 attacks to achieve their stated goal of pleading guilty to gain what they have called martyrdom.

The proposal, in a draft of legislation that would be submitted to Congress, has not been publicly disclosed. It was circulated to officials under restrictions requiring secrecy. People who have read or been briefed on it said it had been presented to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates by an administration task force on detention.

Rush Limbaugh Falls

Further Down The Abyss

Of Hate    

Ailing, Banks Still Field Strong Lobby at Capitol

BACK TO BUSINESS

By STEPHEN LABATON

Published: June 4, 2009

WASHINGTON – As he often does, President Obama took the opportunity in a bill-signing ceremony last month to remind Congress “to do what we were actually sent here to do – and that is to stand up to the special interests, and stand up for the American people.”

But Mr. Obama did not mention that the measure he was signing, the Helping Families Save Their Homes Act, was missing its centerpiece: a change in bankruptcy law he once championed that would have given judges the power to lower the amount owed on a home loan.

It had been stripped out three weeks earlier in a showdown between Senate Democrats and the nation’s banks, including many that are getting big government bailouts.

Sri Lanka doctors ‘to be tried’

A group of doctors who worked in Sri Lanka’s rebel-held war zone are being held on suspicion of collaborating with Tamil rebels, the government says.

The doctors could be in detention for a year or more before being tried.

With journalists banned from the conflict zone, they became an important source of news about the fighting during the final bloody months of war.

There has been no word from the doctors, whose work was praised by the US and UN, since they were detained.

Last month the Sri Lankan government defeated Tamil Tiger rebels fighting for a separate homeland.

Government infuriated

During the final phase of the war, the group of doctors treated wounded and ill patients admitted to the makeshift health posts in the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE)-held zone encircled by government forces.

Two of them were senior local health directors and the United States has said they “helped save many lives” while the UN called them “heroic”.

USA

Using New Language, President Shows Understanding for Both Sides in Middle East

ANALYSIS

By Glenn Kessler and Jacqueline L. Salmon

Washington Post Staff Writers

Friday, June 5, 2009

There was no mention of “terrorists” or “terrorism,” just “violent extremists.” There was the suggestion that Israeli settlements are illegitimate and the assertion that the Palestinians “have suffered in pursuit of a homeland.” There were frequent references to the “Holy Koran” and echoes of Muslim phrases.

President Obama, who aides say spent many hours “holed up” in the past week revising his Cairo speech, clearly believes in the power of his oratory to win people to his point of view. In many ways, he used his address to promote American values, but his efforts to use new language to recast old grievances have already prompted debate and consternation in some quarters.

At the same time, he avoided specific complaints about the lack of freedoms in the Muslim world. Instead, he spoke of the need to obtain concrete political goals, such as the fair administration of justice. He made no mention of his host, President Hosni Mubarak, a snub surely noticed by Egypt’s autocratic ruler of nearly three decades.

Perhaps The Right

Should Take A Hard

Look At Its Self

When It Comes To

Promoting Hate, Fear And Violence  

Confidence in U.S. Economy Builds Even as Recovery Still Seems Distant



By Neil Irwin

Washington Post Staff Writer

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Economists, senior government officials and ordinary consumers are all showing greater confidence in the outlook for the economy.

But three months after signs of hope emerged, the evidence of improvement still exists only in the form of glimmers. A slew of recent economic data and other news, including yesterday’s bankruptcy filing by General Motors, make clear that the nation is still muddling through a deep recession.

“A few months ago, the U.S. was in the throes of the most severe recession since the 1930s,” said Paul Ashworth, a senior economist at Capital Economics. “We’ve had some improvement, but . . . we’re still nowhere near a meaningful recovery or even a slight recovery.”

Kim Jong Il formally names youngest son as successor

From Times Online

June 2, 2009

Richard Lloyd Parry, Yeonpyeong Island

Kim Jong Un, the 25-year old youngest son of the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Il, has been formally declared as his successor, the South Korean media reported yesterday, in the latest sign of dramatic change in the isolated totalitarian state.

North Korea’s Worker’s Party, the country’s token parliament and cabinet were notified of the succession soon after the country’s second nuclear test, according to sources quoted by the Yonhap news agency and two Seoul newspapers. There were conflicting reports over whether foreign embassies had also been notified.

The news seems to confirm what has become increasingly clear for the past few months – that, after a serious illness last summer, 67-year old Kim Jong Il is preparing for his family’s continued rule of North Korea’s 25 million people, after he is gone.

USA

Now a G.M. Owner, U.A.W. Faces Delicate Balancing Act



By STEVEN GREENHOUSE

Published: June 1, 2009

For decades, the United Automobile Workers had a simple strategy for getting what it wanted from the carmakers – it would go on strike. The tactic proved so successful that the mere threat of a walkout often won better wages, benefits and job security.

Now, with General Motors and Chrysler in bankruptcy and the union a major shareholder in both through its retiree health fund, life has become a lot more complicated for the U.A.W.

The union, which was born of labor strife, has pledged not to go on strike against the two companies before 2015, as part of the rescue plan hammered out by the Obama administration. Whether this brokered peace helps end the antagonistic relationship between union and management could determine the future not only of G.M. and Chrysler, but also of the U.A.W. itself.

Why Is It That

Business Reporters

Report Layoff’s Of

Ten’s Of Thousands

With Such Glee  

NYT: The fall of an American giant

GM, once the symbol of U.S. innovation, is filing for bankruptcy

By Micheline Maynard

DETROIT – It is a company that helped lift hundreds of thousands of American workers into the middle class. It transformed Detroit into the Silicon Valley of its day, a symbol of America’s talent for innovation. It built celebrated cars, like Cadillacs, that became synonymous with luxury.

And now it is filing for bankruptcy, something that would have been unfathomable even a few years ago, much less decades ago, when it was a dominant force in the American economy.

Rarely has a company fallen so far and so fast as General Motors . And while its bankruptcy appeared increasingly likely in recent weeks, the arrival of the moment is still a staggering blow, particularly for anyone with ties to the company.

Dying for democracy: Tiananmen Square, remembered

Twenty years ago, a peaceful student protest in China’s capital sparked a massacre that was broadcast across the globe. But did it really change anything? Eyewitness Mary Dejevsky looks back

Monday, 1 June 2009

The Western world had been on “death watch” for weeks, preparing for the demise of Ayatollah Khomeini, inspiration of Iran’s Islamic revolution. But history has a way of frustrating even the best laid plans. And when Iran’s supreme leader eventually breathed his last, the news was utterly, and brutally, eclipsed: the Chinese army had mounted an all-out assault on the ceremonial heart of Beijing, ruthlessly evicting student protesters from Tiananmen Square, and reimposing communist rule in a ferocious exercise of force.

It was the night of 3 June, 1989. It was only an hour after night descended that the first tanks rolled down Chang’an avenue, the first bullets began to fly and the first bloodied casualties were delivered on wooden carts to the city’s hospitals.

USA

Gitmo case highlights challenge facing Obama

War crimes court begins amid uncertainty over facility’s future

Associated Press

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba – A session of the Guantanamo war crimes court that began Sunday will likely show the difficulties President Barack Obama faces in changing the system and closing the prison by January.

The case in question, of a Canadian charged with killing an American soldier, is stalled by infighting among lawyers.

Other defendants have even more complex legal issues, and officials say the U.S. may have to choose between delaying Guantanamo’s closure or quickly finding somewhere else to hold the trials.

“I don’t think they’ll get a single trial done by January,” said Michael Berrigan, the deputy chief defense counsel for the Guantanamo tribunals. “I don’t think there’s any way.”

Another Week And

The Media Just

Plays Along With

The Republican Racists  

Bias Case Looms Large for Nominee

Ruling on Firefighters’ Lawsuit Raises Questions About Sotomayor’s Philosophy

By Robert Barnes and Eli Saslow

Washington Post Staff Writers

Sunday, May 31, 2009

Judge Sonia Sotomayor has heard thousands of cases and has issued as many rulings in her nearly two decades on the federal bench, but the early debate over her judicial philosophy in her Supreme Court confirmation battle comes down to one paragraph.

It is the 134-word summary order in Ricci v. DeStefano, which upheld the decision of New Haven, Conn., to throw out the promotion test it had given city firefighters when no African Americans and two Hispanics qualified for advancement.

The case is under review by the Supreme Court that Sotomayor would join. If the decision is reversed — which, from the tone of oral arguments in April, seems a distinct possibility — the high court’s ruling will probably come at the end of June, just as the Senate and the nation begin to consider Sotomayor’s qualifications.

Kidnappers swoop on China’s girls

The state’s one-baby policy has led to a shortage of females that gangs are ruthlessly exploiting

Michael Sheridan in Kunming, CHINA From The Sunday Times

May 31, 2009

WHEN Li Xiang Xiang, aged 2½, went out of her family’s home on April 1 to the shop around the corner, as she did every day, her mother expected to see her back in minutes with a big smile and a bag of sweets.

Instead, Xiang Xiang – whose rhyming name means “thoughtful” – vanished and her heartbroken mother and father joined the ranks of Chinese parents who fear they have lost their little girls to child kidnappers.

Small boys have long been abducted for sale in China, but in recent years the country’s strict birth control policy, which has led to abortions of girls in families intent on having a boy, has left the countryside short of female babies.

According to a recent report in the British Medical Journal, 124 boys are born for every 100 girls in the country as a whole, and in one province the figure has risen to 192.

USA

Contractors Vie for Plum Work, Hacking for the United States

CYBERWAR

By CHRISTOPHER DREW and JOHN MARKOFF

Published: May 30, 2009

MELBOURNE, Fla. – The government’s urgent push into cyberwarfare has set off a rush among the biggest military companies for billions of dollars in new defense contracts.

The exotic nature of the work, coupled with the deep recession, is enabling the companies to attract top young talent that once would have gone to Silicon Valley. And the race to develop weapons that defend against, or initiate, computer attacks has given rise to thousands of “hacker soldiers” within the Pentagon who can blend the new capabilities into the nation’s war planning.

Nearly all of the largest military companies – including Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon – have major cyber contracts with the military and intelligence agencies.

Lies Damn Lies

The GOP’s New Mantra

Gates draws the line on North Korea’s nuclear program: No proliferation

The Defense chief says the Obama administration does not consider the nuclear program a direct threat, but he forcefully warns the regime against transferring nuclear material abroad.

By Julian E. Barnes

May 30, 2009

Reporting from Singapore — U.S. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates promised today to hold North Korea accountable for selling or transferring nuclear material outside its borders, providing the first clear expression of the Obama administration’s thinking on a vexing foreign policy challenge.

A succession of U.S. presidents have tried to persuade the reclusive government to give up its nuclear arms, and Gates made it clear that President Obama was open to using diplomacy to end the threat.But he also drew a distinction between the danger posed by a North Korea that possessed nuclear weapons and one that sold them to other countries or groups. Spreading its nuclear technology would invite the swiftest and most forceful U.S. response, he said.

North Korea’s nuclear test puts China in a tight spot

Decades after border town Dandong was rocked by the Korean war, Beijing is witnessing rising tensions with its troubled neighbour

Tania Branigan

guardian.co.uk, Friday 29 May 2009 22.09 BST

Grandfather Li sat by the Yalu river, feeding ice-cream to the little girl on his lap and gazing across to the desolate factories of Sinuiju, North Korea.

“The first day the planes came over we were so scared,” he recalled. He was 10 when the US bombed the nearby bridge to halt Chinese support for its neighbour in the Korean war; a few spans still stand as evidence of the raids.

“When the war ended [in 1953], we were very happy, a bit proud for helping them – and relieved.”

It has been decades since American bombs rocked Dandong, the main crossing on the 800-mile Chinese-North Korean border. But this week another explosion shook China and the new threat is from its old ally. North Korea’s nuclear test has raised tensions throughout the region – and increased pressure on China to rein in its neighbour.

USA

Congress’s Afterthought, Wall Street’s Trillion Dollars

Fed’s Bailout Authority Sat Unused Since 1991

By Binyamin Appelbaum and Neil Irwin

Washington Post Staff Writers

Saturday, May 30, 2009

On the day before Thanksgiving in 1991, the U.S. Senate voted to vastly expand the emergency powers of the Federal Reserve.

Almost no one noticed.

The critical language was contained in a single, somewhat inscrutable sentence, and the only public explanation was offered during a final debate that began with a reminder that senators had airplanes to catch. Yet, in removing a long-standing prohibition on loans that supported financial speculation, the provision effectively allowed the Fed for the first time to lend money to Wall Street during a crisis.

That authority, which sat unused for more than 16 years, now provides the legal basis for the Fed’s unprecedented efforts to rescue the financial system.