Tag: Docudharma Times

AIG Should Be Given To

Fox News, Jim Cramer Of CNBC Or

George W. Bush  

Anger Over Firm Depletes Obama’s Political Capital

AN IMPERILED AGENDA

By Michael D. Shear and Paul Kane

Washington Post Staff Writers

Tuesday, March 17, 2009; Page A01

President Obama’s apparent inability to block executive bonuses at insurance giant AIG has dealt a sharp blow to his young administration and is threatening to derail both public and congressional support for his ambitious political agenda.

Politicians in both parties flocked to express outrage over $165 million in bonuses paid out to executives at the company, demanding answers from the president and swamping yesterday’s rollout of his efforts to spark lending to small businesses.

The populist anger at the executives who ran their firms into the ground is increasingly blowing back on Obama, whom aides yesterday described as having little recourse in the face of legal contracts that guaranteed those bonuses.

Sent back by Britain. Executed in Darfur

A failed asylum-seeker who returned to Darfur under a government repatriation scheme has been murdered by Sudanese security officers after they followed him home from the airport in Khartoum, The Independent has learnt.

Failed asylum-seeker followed home from airport and shot by Sudan security officials

By Robert Verkaik, Law Editor

Tuesday, 17 March 2009

Adam Osman Mohammed, 32, was gunned down in his home in front of his wife and four-year-old son just days after arriving in his village in south Darfur.

The case is to be used by asylum campaigners to counter Home Office attempts to lift the ban on the removal and deportation to Sudan of failed asylum-seekers. Next month, government lawyers are expected to go to court to argue that it is safe to return as many as 3,000 people to Khartoum.

But lawyers for the campaigners will tell the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal that people who are returned to Sudan face imprisonment, torture and death. Mr Mohammed, a non-Arab Darfuri, came to Britain in 2005 seeking sanctuary from persecution in Sudan, where he said his life was in danger. The village where he was a farmer had been raided twice by the Janjaweed, the ethnic Arab militia, forcing him and his wife and child to flee their home.

His family in Britain told The Independent that Mr Mohammed witnessed many villagers being killed and became separated from his wife during a second attack on the village a few weeks later. He escaped to Chad before making his way to the UK in 2005.

But last year his appeal for asylum was finally turned down and he was told that he faced deportation. In August last year he was flown to Khartoum under the Home Office’s assisted voluntary return programme, in which refugees are paid to go back to their country of origin. He stayed in Khartoum for a few months and then, when he believed it was safe, he travelled to Darfur to be reunited with his family

USA

In Seattle, the World Still Turns, a Beacon in Memory of a Lost Newspaper



By DAN BARRY

Published: March 16, 2009

SEATTLE – A visitor passing through Seattle last week made an impertinent request. He called someone at The Post-Intelligencer to ask whether he could, if at all possible, visit the 30-foot neon globe that sits atop the newspaper’s waterfront building. He couldn’t really explain the need.

The request might have seemed especially rude, given that those employed by The Post-Intelligencer were living hour to hour, waiting for a call from the Hearst Corporation, its owner in New York, about what day would be its last as a printed entity. That call came Monday: A daily Seattle tradition that began in 1863 will end Tuesday, March 17, 2009.

But back last week, back when the newspaper could at least revel in another day passed, another edition published, the good people at The Post-Intelligencer understood the well-intentioned desire behind the request.

I’m Not Sure We

Can Fathom The

Horrors Wrought By

The Bush Administration  

Red Cross Described ‘Torture’ at CIA Jails

Secret Report Implies That U.S. Violated International Law

By Joby Warrick, Peter Finn and Julie Tate

Washington Post Staff Writers

Monday, March 16, 2009; Page A01

The International Committee of the Red Cross concluded in a secret report that the Bush administration’s treatment of al-Qaeda captives “constituted torture,” a finding that strongly implied that CIA interrogation methods violated international law, according to newly published excerpts from the long-concealed 2007 document.

The report, an account alleging physical and psychological brutality inside CIA “black site” prisons, also states that some U.S. practices amounted to “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.” Such maltreatment of detainees is expressly prohibited by the Geneva Conventions.

Claims of British collusion in torture spread to Egypt

• Briton claims UK colluded in his torture in Egypt

• Detainee says he was hooded and beaten over five days

Ian Cobain

The Guardian, Monday 16 March 2009

Allegations of British collusion in torture have widened to Egypt, where a young British man says he suffered appalling mistreatment during a week of illegal detention while being interrogated on the basis of information that he says can only have come from the UK.

The development comes after the Conservative leader, David Cameron, said there needed to be a full inquiry, not just to discover whether crimes had been committed by British officials but to establish whether the government’s “moral authority” has been maintained.

Azhar Khan, a 26-year-old who has seen a number of friends jailed for terrorist offences, says Egyptian intelligence officers who detained him when he flew into the country last July forced him to stand on the same spot for five days, with little rest, while beating him and subjecting him to electric shocks. Throughout this time, he says, he was asked detailed questions about his friends and associates in the UK.

USA

In Iraq withdrawal, equipment poses a key logistical challenge

U.S. commanders are deciding what to take, and what to leave behind. Some of the materiel will go to replenish military warehouses in the Persian Gulf region, and some to Afghanistan.

By Julian E. Barnes

March 16, 2009

Reporting from Washington — The American withdrawal from Iraq marks the beginning of one of the largest relocations of military hardware and manpower in recent years. But much of the equipment will not be returning to the United States.

Instead, some will remain with the Iraqi security forces and some will be shipped to Afghanistan. But as important, millions of tons of armor and weaponry will be used to restock huge U.S.-run warehouses across the Middle East — in case it is needed in the future.

The plans follow a pattern set by the military for the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and again for the troop buildup in 2007, when the Defense Department drew on equipment stored around the Persian Gulf region, including in massive facilities in Kuwait and Qatar.

Equipment removed from Iraq will be sent to those warehouses, officials said, to ensure that the military is able to respond to a variety of contingencies, including possible Iranian aggression or renewed violence in Iraq.

Republican Logic Is Undeniable

Hooray For Stupidity  

Troops Face New Tests in Afghanistan

Battalion’s Experience Outlines Issues in South

By Rajiv Chandrasekaran

Washington Post Staff Writer

Sunday, March 15, 2009; Page A01

MAYWAND, Afghanistan — Lt. Col. Daniel Hurlbut rolled into this dusty Taliban stronghold in September with a battalion of U.S. Army infantrymen and a detailed, year-long plan to combat the Taliban.

The first quarter was to be devoted to reconnaissance. The next three months would involve military operations to root out insurgents. By now, his unit should have been focusing on reconstruction and building up the local government.

But the battalion’s efforts to pry information about the Taliban from the local population — by conducting foot patrols, doling out money for mosques to buy new prayer rugs and offering agricultural assistance to subsistence farmers — have been met with indifference, if not downright hostility.

“Nobody wants to tell us anything,” Hurlbut said, sighing.

Israelis ‘firing live rounds’ at West Bank protesters



Peter Beaumont

The Observer, Sunday 15 March 2009 00.01 GMT

Israeli armed forces and border police used the cover of the war against Hamas in Gaza to reintroduce the firing of .22 rifle bullets – as well as the extensive use of a new model of tear-gas canister – against unarmed demonstrators in the Occupied West Bank protesting at the building of Israel’s “separation wall”.

The tactics were highlighted on Friday, when a US protester, Tristan Anderson, 38, was hit in the head by one of the new extended-range gas canisters in the village of Ni’ilin, suffering an open wound in his skull and substantial brain damage. Anderson’s friend, Gabrielle Silverman, claims he was struck by a canister fired from a high-velocity rifle. The Israeli military says stone-throwing “poses a threat to troops”, and several officers have been injured by rocks.

It said troops used the permitted means of riot dispersal in Friday’s incident, including tear gas, rubber-coated steel pellets and stun grenades.

USA

A.I.G. Planning Huge Bonuses After $170 Billion Bailout



By EDMUND L. ANDREWS and PETER BAKER

Published: March 14, 2009

WASHINGTON – The American International Group, which has received more than $170 billion in taxpayer bailout money from the Treasury and Federal Reserve, plans to pay about $165 million in bonuses by Sunday to executives in the same business unit that brought the company to the brink of collapse last year.

Word of the bonuses last week stirred such deep consternation inside the Obama administration that Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner told the firm they were unacceptable and demanded they be renegotiated, a senior administration official said. But the bonuses will go forward because lawyers said the firm was contractually obligated to pay them.

The payments to A.I.G.’s financial products unit are in addition to $121 million in previously scheduled bonuses for the company’s senior executives and 6,400 employees across the sprawling corporation. Mr. Geithner last week pressured A.I.G. to cut the $9.6 million going to the top 50 executives in half and tie the rest to performance.

Gov. Mark Sanford (Scrooge) South Carolina

Decides That Helping The People

Of South Carolina Is Wrong  

Then Compares U.S. To Zimbabwe

Obama’s New Tack: Blaming Bush

President Points to ‘Inherited’ Economy

By Scott Wilson

Washington Post Staff Writer

Saturday, March 14, 2009; Page A0

In his inaugural address, President Obama proclaimed “an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics.”

It hasn’t taken long for the recriminations to return — or for the Obama administration to begin talking about the unwelcome “inheritance” of its predecessor.

Over the past month, Obama has reminded the public at every turn that he is facing problems “inherited” from the Bush administration, using increasingly bracing language to describe the challenges his administration is up against. The “deepening economic crisis” that the president described six days after taking office became “a big mess” in remarks this month to graduating police cadets in Columbus, Ohio.

Robert Fisk’s World: The West should feel shame over its collusion with torturers

I want to know why those complicit in Almalki’s ordeal are not tried in court

Saturday, 14 March 2009

I invited Abdullah Almalki to breakfast in Ottawa but he only took coffee. And while I wolfed down my all-English breakfast in the Chateau Laurier Hotel (beloved of Churchill and Karsh of Ottawa fame), he sipped gingerly at his cup with much on his mind. Snooped on by the Canadian secret service and then tortured in Syria while the Canadian authorities did nothing for him – save supplying his perverted torturers with questions – he had much to think about. A carbon copy of Binyam Mohamed, the British resident who had his penis cut up while the Brits sent questions to his perverted Moroccan torturers.

In Abdullah Almalki’s case, he wasn’t renditioned. He simply flew into Damascus to see his Syrian family, got banged up in the city’s secret police headquarters and was then beaten into submission, not much different from an even more famous case – that of Maher Arar, who was a Canadian citizen and got renditioned to Damascus by the Americans while the US authorities sent questions to his perverted Syrian torturers. Arar has received apologies from US senators – though not from the war hero George Bush (battle honours: the skies over Texas during the Vietnam conflict) — and compensation from the Canadian government.

USA

Plan to cut mortgage interest deduction stirs opposition

Obama’s proposed budget would reduce the tax break for households earning more than $250,000. Some see the plan as targeting real-estate rich states like California and New York.

By Peter Y. Hong

March 14, 2009

The Obama administration’s budget threatens to cut a benefit many Americans view as practically a right — the mortgage interest tax deduction — and powerful real estate interests are fighting back.

The move would affect only households earning $250,000 or more, but opponents say it could prolong the housing crisis by slowing already torpid home sales and deal another blow to home values ravaged by the market crash.

“Even though the intended impact is on the top 2% of households, the unintended consequence will be a reduction in home values for homeowners across the country,” said Lawrence Yun, chief economist for the National Assn. of Realtors.

The Realtors group contends that the loss of the tax break will lead high-income home-buyers to spend less on homes, which would eventually drive down prices at the high end. And if mansions cost less, modest bungalows will ultimately see their values fall as well, Yun contends.

Jim Cramer Handed His Hat

Among Other Things

Investors See a Glimmer and Shares Soar Worldwide



By STEVE LOHR and JACK HEALY

Published: March 13, 2009

A few clues that the economy’s downward spiral might be slowing galvanized Wall Street on Thursday and sent world stock markets soaring for the second time this week.

Investors searching for relief from a relentless march of bad economic news found wisps of hope in developments that, not many months ago, would have been regarded as alarming. The news, by and large, was bad – just not quite as bad as feared.

General Electric, the blue-chip corporation, was stripped of its triple-A credit rating, an emblem of business prowess it proudly held since 1956. But its rating fell just one notch, less than some analysts predicted. Shares of G.E. soared 13 percent.

Secret emails show Iraq dossier was ‘sexed up’

Intelligence chiefs criticised ‘iffy drafting’ of key document

By Nigel Morris, Deputy Political Editor Friday, 13 March 2009

Secret Whitehall emails released yesterday provide damning new evidence that the notorious dossier making the case for invading Iraq was “sexed up”.

They disclose that the intelligence services were sceptical over the “iffy drafting” of government claims that Saddam Hussein could mount a missile strike on his neighbours within 45 minutes of ordering an attack.

Officials privately mocked assertions that the Iraqi president was covertly trying to develop a nuclear capability and wisecracked that perhaps he had recruited “Dr Frankenstein” to his supposed crack team of nuclear scientists.

The release of a series of confidential memos and emails, following a protracted Freedom of Information battle, reignited the controversy over accusations that Tony Blair’s government “spun” Britain into war.

Last night both the Tories and the Liberal Democrats renewed their demands for a full public inquiry into the decision to join the US-led invasion of Iraq.

USA

A stem cell battle along state lines

Conservatives who oppose the use of embryonic cells will lobby at the national level too.

By Dahleen Glanton

March 13, 2009

Reporting from Atlanta — Faced with a new federal policy that opens the door for more embryonic stem cell research, conservatives have geared up for a political battle at the national and state levels that goes to the core of their beliefs about the sanctity of human life.

Since President Obama lifted the eight-year ban on nearly all federal funding for stem cell research this week, conservative leaders have stepped up efforts to lobby Congress to preserve some restrictions, they said. They plan to launch a far-reaching campaign to educate the public about their point of view — as well as research alternatives that are not as controversial.

“This executive order is just the beginning of the process. Our concern is how broad this will be interpreted, and will there be limitations,” said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council. “With limited tax dollars available, we should not use those funds for research that is at best morally questionable.”

Obama Gets Blamed

For Not Fulling A

McCain Campaign Promise

Even Though Republicans Added

More Than 300 Items Of Pork

Financial Fraud Is Focus of Attack by Prosecutors



By DAVID SEGAL

Published: March 11, 2009

Spurred by rising public anger, federal and state investigators are preparing for a surge of prosecutions of financial fraud.

Across the country, attorneys general have already begun indicting dozens of loan processors, mortgage brokers and bank officers. Last week alone, there were guilty pleas in Minnesota, Delaware, North Carolina and Connecticut and sentences in Florida and Vermont – all stemming from home loan scams.

With the Obama administration focused on stabilizing the banks and restoring confidence in the stock market, it has said little about federal civil or criminal charges. But its proposed budget contains hints that it will add to this weight of litigation, including money for more F.B.I. agents to investigate mortgage fraud and white-collar crime, and a 13 percent raise for the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Native American death rates soar as most people are living longer

Babies die at a rate 44% higher than decade ago

By VANESSA HO

P-I REPORTER

On the Okanogan plains in northeast Washington, the Colville tribes recently buried a man who died after facing a bleak decision: spend his money on trips into town for dialysis, or buy food for his family.It was a variant of a fate that has doomed many people on the stark, remote reservation, causing the timber-dependent tribes to increasingly spend their money on burials.

“It’s a choice between feeding your family and living,” said Andy Joseph Jr., a Colville Confederated Tribes council member. “Our people can’t afford to pay for their funeral services.”

From isolated reservations across the state to urban pockets around Seattle, Native Americans are dying at higher rates than a decade ago, at a time when most people in Washington are living longer, healthier lives.

A recent state Department of Health report showed that the march against cancer, heart disease and infant mortality has largely bypassed Native Americans.

USA

Intelligence Pick Blames ‘Israel Lobby’ For Withdrawal



By Walter Pincus

Washington Post Staff Writer

Thursday, March 12, 2009; Page A01

The withdrawal of a senior intelligence adviser after an online campaign to prevent him from taking office has ignited a debate over whether powerful pro-Israel lobbying interests are exercising outsize influence over who serves in the Obama administration.

When Charles W. Freeman Jr. stepped away Tuesday from an appointment to chair the National Intelligence Council — which oversees the production of reports that represent the view of the nation’s 16 intelligence agencies — he decried in an e-mail “the barrage of libelous distortions of my record [that] would not cease upon my entry into office,” and he was blunt about whom he considers responsible.

US Supreme Court holds to narrow interpretation of the Voting Rights Act

Critics say the ruling on ‘crossover’ districts could reduce the political clout of minorities.

By Warren Richey | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the March 10, 2009 edition

The federal Voting Rights Act does not authorize vote dilution lawsuits in voting districts in which a particular racial or ethnic group comprises less than 50 percent of the voting age population.

In a 5 to 4 decision announced on Monday, the US Supreme Court rejected a claim that so-called minority crossover districts qualify for protection under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA). Instead, the court’s conservative wing embraced a narrow view of the law.

Crossover districts are those in which a cohesive minority voting population can elect candidates of its choice by forming a coalition with cross-over votes from whites or other non-minority voters.

The case is important because it establishes ground rules that will apply nationwide during the redrawing of voting districts following the 2010 census. It could result in a reduction of minority districts by encouraging district drafters to pack traditional minority districts with more than 50 percent minority voters, rather than aiming for widespread distribution across several voting districts.

UN report condemns Britain over torture cases

UK hid illegal acts and breached basic human rights of detainees in US rendition programme, report finds

Richard Norton-Taylor

guardian.co.uk, Monday 9 March 2009 19.24 GMT

Britain is condemned today in a highly critical UN report for breaching basic human rights and “trying to conceal illegal acts” in the fight against terrorism.

The report is sharply critical of British co-operation in the transfer of detainees to places where they are likely to be tortured as part of the US rendition programme. It accuses British intelligence officers of interviewing detainees held incommunicado in Pakistan in “so-called safe houses where they were being tortured”.

It adds that Britain, and a number of other countries, sent interrogators to Guantánamo Bay in a further example of what “can be reasonably understood as implicitly condoning” torture and ill-treatment. It said the US was able to create its system for moving terror suspects around foreign jails only with the support of its allies.

USA

Obama’s Budget Faces Test Among Party Barons



By JACKIE CALMES and CARL HULSE

Published: March 9, 2009

WASHINGTON – What the Democratic barons of Congress liked best about President Obama’s audacious budget was his invitation to fill in the details. They have started by erasing some of his.

The apparent first casualty is a big one: a proposal to limit tax deductions for the wealthiest 1.2 percent of taxpayers. Mr. Obama says the plan would produce $318 billion over the next decade as a down payment for overhauling health care.

But the chairmen of the House and Senate tax-writing committees, Senator Max Baucus of Montana and Representative Charles B. Rangel of New York, have objected to the proposal, citing a potential drop in tax-deductible gifts to charities.

North Korea Throws A

Tantrum About Something  

A Rising Dollar Lifts the U.S. but Adds to the Crisis Abroad



By PETER S. GOODMAN

Published: March 8, 2009

As the world is seized with anxiety in the face of a spreading financial crisis, the one place having a considerably easier time attracting money is, perversely enough, the same place that started much of the trouble: the United States.

American investors are ditching foreign ventures and bringing their dollars home, entrusting them to the supposed bedrock safety of United States government bonds. And China continues to buy staggering quantities of American debt.

These actions are lifting the value of the dollar and providing the Obama administration with a crucial infusion of financing as it directs trillions of dollars toward rescuing banks and stimulating the economy, enabling the government to pay for these efforts without lifting interest rates.

Carbon cuts ‘only give 50/50 chance of saving planet’

As states negotiate Kyoto’s successor, simulations show catastrophe just years away

By Michael McCarthy, Environment Editor

Monday, 9 March 2009

The world’s best efforts at combating climate change are likely to offer no more than a 50-50 chance of keeping temperature rises below the threshold of disaster, according to research from the UK Met Office.

The key aim of holding the expected increase to 2C, beyond which damage to the natural world and to human society is likely to be catastrophic, is far from assured, the research suggests, even if all countries engage forthwith in a radical and enormous crash programme to slash greenhouse gas emissions – something which itself is by no means guaranteed.

The chilling forecast from the supercomputer climate model of the Met Office’s Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research will provide a sobering wake-up call for governments around the world, who will begin formally negotiating three weeks today the new international treaty on tackling global warming, which is due to be signed in Copenhagen in December.

USA

U.S. to pull 12,000 troops from Iraq as withdrawal begins

The initial phase in Obama’s plan to end combat operations will take place over the next 6 months, military officials say. Just before the announcement, a suicide bomber kills 33 police recruits in Baghdad.

By Greg Miller and Usama Redha

March 9, 2009

Reporting from Baghdad and Washington — The U.S. will reduce its military presence in Iraq by 12,000 troops over the next six months as part of the first major drawdown since President Obama announced his plan to end combat operations in the country next year, U.S. military officials in Baghdad said Sunday.

The announcement came just hours after a suicide bomber on a motorcycle struck a crowd of police recruits outside an Interior Ministry compound in Baghdad, killing at least 33 people and wounding 61.

Despite that grim reminder of the lingering danger, U.S. officials said the drawdown reflects growing confidence in the security gains in Iraq over the last two years. It also reflects a major shift in priorities for the U.S. military, which is increasingly focused on efforts to arrest the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan.

Republicans Know How

To Look Backwards. They’re Professionals  

Welcome to Libby, Montana, the town that was poisoned

After an epidemic of asbestos-related deaths, one woman is fighting for justice in the Rocky Mountains

Joanna Walters in Libby, Montana

The Observer, Sunday 8 March 2009

Dean Herreid’s lungs are gradually being destroyed. When he coughs, as he frequently does, his long, wheezing splutter sounds so painful it makes you wince. Herreid lives in Libby, a tiny Rocky Mountain town in Montana that is isolated, beautiful and toxic. Scores of men in this rough-edged, blue collar town have been killed off, poisoned with deadly asbestos from the local mine.

But Herreid is not elderly and he was never a miner. He simply played baseball as a child on a field near the mine and, years later, has developed a lung disease that is destroying the life of this 44-year-old father of two young boys. There are many others like him.

Horrifying stories are emerging at a criminal trial where the corporate giant WR Grace, which owned the mine, is accused of knowingly allowing not only its miners but the entire town to breathe deadly asbestos dust. The US government calls it “the worst case of industrial poisoning of a whole community in American history”.

Big plans in China for revolution’s 60th anniversary

The Oct. 1 festivities promise some of the dazzle of the Olympics shows. But critics fault plans for a huge military display and bring up other dates, such as the Tibet revolt and Tiananmen protests.

By Barbara Demick

9:32 PM PST, March 7, 2009

Reporting from Beijing — The Chinese Communist Party loves its anniversaries, so it comes as no surprise that the bosses in Beijing are planning a blowout to commemorate the 60th year since the nation’s founding.

President Hu Jintao has commissioned an extra-stretch limousine, 19 feet long, for the October festivities. A year before the occasion, the Beijing municipality put out advertisements for women between the ages of 17 and 25 (height between 5 feet 3 and 5 feet 7) to perform in a parade; rehearsals began in December.

“This is the tradition in communist culture. They use these grand occasions to justify their existence,” said Li Datong, former editor of a supplement of the China Youth Daily and now a pro-democracy activist.

USA

Honey Pot For Spending, Pet Projects and Slamming  Podiums Republican Anger Over The

Stimulus Bill

So The Top Republican

Whinier John Cornyn Is

The “Ear Mark King” In The

Current Spending Bill  

Job Losses Could Drown Stimulus

Unemployment Soars to 1983 Level, Testing U.S. Response

By Neil Irwin and Annys Shin

Washington Post Staff Writers

Saturday, March 7, 2009; Page A01

The nation is losing jobs so quickly that the government, racing to deal with the crisis, is having trouble keeping up.

The U.S. unemployment rate last month leapt half a percentage point, to 8.1 percent, the highest level since 1983, according to data released yesterday. The stunning pace of job losses raises the possibility that, perhaps as early as this summer, one in 10 Americans will be out of a job even though they are actively looking for work. It also means that the government faces even more pressure to take further action to stabilize the economy and the financial system.

The lost world beneath the Antarctic ice

British scientists search for life forms hidden more than 400,000 years ago beneath Antarctic ice

By Steve Connor, Science editor

Saturday, 7 March 2009

British scientists are about to mount one of the boldest-ever missions, to search for life forms that have survived for possibly millions of years in a frozen “lost world” beneath an ancient ice sheet.

This week, a team of Antarctic scientists has been given the go-ahead to drill through a two-mile-thick sheet of ice that has sealed a sub-glacial lake from the rest of the biosphere for at least as long as Homo sapiens has walked the Earth.

They hope to find species that have survived below the ice sheet since it formed between 400,000 and two million years ago. Finding life in such an extreme environment would be one of the most important discoveries of the century, raising the prospect of searching for extra-terrestrial life on Europa, a moon of Jupiter where life is thought to exist beneath a frozen ocean. The scientists plan to use sophisticated ice-drilling technology developed in the UK to penetrate the ice cap and enter the liquid-water world of Lake Ellsworth in West Antarctica, one of about 150 sub-glacial lakes scientists have recently mapped with ice-penetrating radar.

USA

Worst recession since World War II? Shaping up that way



By Kevin G. Hall | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON – The government’s report Friday of an 8.1 percent unemployment rate equals the jobless number that the Obama administration has projected for the entire year. Few economists think that optimistic projection will hold, and many think that more big job losses are likely, with grim implications for the housing and banking crises.

Employers shed another 651,000 jobs in February, the Labor Department said Friday, pushing the nation’s unemployment rate up from 7.6 percent to 8.1 percent. That’s the highest jobless rate in a quarter-century and a clear sign that the deep U.S. economic recession isn’t abating.

The monthly Employment Situation Summary also revised the jobs numbers for December and January downward, for a combined 161,000 more lost jobs than had been reported earlier. This pointed to a steeper economic contraction early this year than all but the gloomiest forecasters had projected.

House Republican Leader John Boehner  

And His “Alien” Economy

Must Be From Mars

Quiet Layoffs Sting Workers Without Notice



By STEVE LOHR

Published: March 5, 2009

With the economy weakening, chief executives want Wall Street to see them as tough cost-cutters who are not afraid to lay off workers. But plenty of job cuts are not trumpeted in news releases.

Big companies also routinely carry out scattered layoffs that are small enough to stay under the radar, contributing to an unemployment rate that keeps climbing, as Friday’s monthly jobs report is likely to show.

I.B.M. is one such company. It reported surprisingly strong quarterly profits in January, and in an e-mail message to employees, Samuel J. Palmisano, the chief executive, said that while other companies were cutting back, his would not. “Most importantly, we will invest in our people,” he wrote.

At the Heart of North Korea’s Troubles, an Intractable Hunger Crisis



By Blaine Harden

Washington Post Foreign Service

Friday, March 6, 2009; Page A01

SEOUL — Behind the long-range missile it is preparing to launch and the stockpile of plutonium it claims to have “weaponized,” North Korea has an embarrassing and insoluble weakness.

Under the leadership of Kim Jong Il, the country cannot feed its people. Perennially dependent on food aid, North Korea has become a truculent ward of the wealthy countries it threatens. It is the world’s first nuclear-armed, missile-wielding beggar — a particularly intricate challenge for the Obama administration as it begins to formulate a foreign policy.

The “eating problem,” as it is often called in North Korea, has eroded Kim’s authority, damaged a decade of improved relations between the two Koreas and stunted the bodies and minds of millions of North Koreans.

USA

Loudly and colorfully, opposing sides debate Proposition 8

Attorneys argue, demonstrators shout and entrepreneurs hawk as the debate over same-sex marriage fills the San Francisco Civic Center Plaza.

By Maria L. LaGanga

March 6, 2009

Reporting from San Francisco — God was in the eye of the beholder Thursday morning at the San Francisco Civic Center Plaza, where hundreds of spectators gathered to watch the California Supreme Court on a massive outdoor TV screen and wrangle over the sanctity of marriage.

The occasion: Attorneys from both sides of the gay-marriage debate were arguing the merits — or demerits — of Proposition 8, the November ballot measure that banned same-sex marriage in California. The dress code: dreadlocks, nose rings, rabbit costumes, clerical collars, wedding veils, hair colors not found in nature (and some that were), rainbow stripes, American flags, suits. The demeanor: loud.

“You’re bigger, God, much bigger than the small religious boxes that we put you in,” Bishop Yvette Flunder of San Francisco’s City of Refuge United Church of Christ declared at an al fresco, pre-hearing interfaith service. “We ask you for the freedom today . . . to have our relationships boldly without fear of reprisal.”

Across the broad, rain-damp plaza, Los Angeles contractor Ruben Israel held in his right hand a sign that declared “Homo-sex” a “threat to national security.” In his left hand was a bullhorn.

Rush Limbaugh

Leader of The World

His Own Wrong Little World  

China Outlines Ambitious Plan for Stimulus



By MICHAEL WINES

Published: March 4, 2009

BEIJING – Warning that China faces “unprecedented difficulties and challenges,” Prime Minister Wen Jiabao outlined a barrage of construction, increased subsidies and economic measures on Thursday aimed at continuing his nation’s modernization despite a world financial crisis.He also indicated that China’s leaders would seek to begin a fundamental shift in their economic strategy by encouraging citizens to spend and consume more goods, as in most Western economies. China’s startling growth has been driven so far by exports and abundant spending on roads, dams and other infrastructure projects, a trend that experts say cannot be sustained in the long term.

But in a long speech to the National People’s Congress, China’s legislature, he did not explicitly announce any new spending to combat the financial crisis beyond the $585 billion China committed to spend in November.

After the attack, west’s nuclear ally fears implosion

Militant assault on cricket tourists puts sharp focus on fragile democracy at risk of disintegration and international isolation

Saeed Shah in Lahore

The Guardian, Thursday 5 March 2009

Whole provinces beyond the writ of the state, Islamist insurgents uniting for a broader fight, terror attacks conceived, plotted and exported: Pakistan was in serious danger of implosion before the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team on Tuesday brought the parlous security situation in the country to a wider international audience.

But security is not the only problem of a country which the United States now considers a greater threat than neighbouring Afghanistan. With the economy teetering, political tumult building and social conditions ripe for extremists, nuclear-armed Pakistan faces six critical threats to the rule of law and governance of the state.

Security

The current violence started in summer 2007, when security forces routed armed militants at the Red Mosque in Islamabad. That event turned militant groups which were focused on India or Afghanistan inwards, to Pakistan itself.

USA

U.S. Launches Wide-Ranging Plan to Steady Housing Market

$75 Billion Plan Would Help Borrowers Avoid Foreclosure

By Renae Merle and Dina ElBoghdady

Washington Post Staff Writers

Thursday, March 5, 2009; Page A01

The Obama administration yesterday sketched in the details of its most ambitious attempt to reduce foreclosures and stabilize the beleaguered housing market at the root of the economic meltdown.

The program has two key elements: a refinancing program for borrowers with little equity in their homes but current on their loans, and a $75 billion program to help reduce mortgage payments for struggling borrowers.

Several large lenders praised the program, including Bank of America and Wells Fargo. There were also converts among those outside the industry. “I was skeptical at first, but I think these guidelines are helpful in a lot of ways,” said John Taylor, president of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, a nonprofit group that has been critical of industry efforts to modify mortgages.