Tag: Docudharma Times

John McCain Parties Like Its

September 10, 2001

With A Mind To Match

Deals With Iraq Are Set to Bring Oil Giants Back

By ANDREW E. KRAMER

Published: June 19, 2008

BAGHDAD – Four Western oil companies are in the final stages of negotiations this month on contracts that will return them to Iraq, 36 years after losing their oil concession to nationalization as Saddam Hussein rose to power.

Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP – the original partners in the Iraq Petroleum Company – along with Chevron and a number of smaller oil companies, are in talks with Iraq’s Oil Ministry for no-bid contracts to service Iraq’s largest fields, according to ministry officials, oil company officials and an American diplomat.

Retired teacher detained in China after decrying shoddy construction

Chinese authorities have detained a retired teacher who criticized the shoddy school construction that led to the deaths of thousands of…

By Ching-Ching Ni

Los Angeles Times

BEIJING – Chinese authorities have detained a retired teacher who criticized the shoddy school construction that led to the deaths of thousands of children in May’s devastating earthquake, a Hong Kong human-rights group said Wednesday.

The Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy said Zeng Hongling, who wrote about official corruption in school construction and post-quake relief efforts, was detained June 9 in Chengdu on charges of “inciting state subversion.”

One of the essays Zeng wrote for the U.S.-based Chinese-language Web site www.observechina.com was titled “Earthquake relief efforts fully reveal the true face of party officials.”

USA

Paulson To Urge New Fed Powers

Bank Would Help Police Wall Street

 By Neil Irwin

Washington Post Staff Writer

Thursday, June 19, 2008; Page D01  

Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. plans to call today for the Federal Reserve to be given new, explicit powers to intervene in the workings of Wall Street firms to protect the financial system, adapting his vision of how the financial world should be regulated to reflect the lessons of the collapse of Bear Stearns.

“Our nation has come to expect the Federal Reserve to step in to avert events that pose unacceptable systemic risk,” Paulson plans to say in a speech today, according to prepared remarks obtained by The Washington Post. But the central bank “has neither the clear statutory authority nor the mandate to anticipate and deal with risks across our entire financial system.”

666 The Number of The Beast

668 The Neighbor of The Beast

Booming, China Faults U.S. Policy on the Economy

By EDWARD WONG

Published: June 17, 2008

BEIJING – Not long ago, Chinese officials sat across conference tables from American officials and got an earful.

The Americans scolded the Chinese on mismanaging their economy, from state subsidies to foreign investment regulations to the valuation of their currency. Your economic system, the Americans strongly implied, should look a lot more like ours.

But in recent weeks, the fingers have been wagging in the other direction. Senior Chinese officials are publicly and loudly rebuking the Americans on their handling of the economy and defending their own more assertive style of regulation.

USA

Report Questions Pentagon Accounts

Officials Looked Into Interrogation Methods Early On

By Joby Warrick

Washington Post Staff Writer

Tuesday, June 17, 2008; Page A01  

A Senate investigation has concluded that top Pentagon officials began assembling lists of harsh interrogation techniques in the summer of 2002 for use on detainees at Guantanamo Bay and that those officials later cited memos from field commanders to suggest that the proposals originated far down the chain of command, according to congressional sources briefed on the findings.

The sources said that memos and other evidence obtained during the inquiry show that officials in the office of then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld started to research the use of waterboarding, stress positions, sensory deprivation and other practices in July 2002, months before memos from commanders at the detention facility in Cuba requested permission to use those measures on suspected terrorists.

Detainees recruited for jihad

Third of five parts GARDEZ, Afghanistan – Mohammed Naim Farouq was a thug in the lawless Zormat district of eastern Afghanistan. He ran a kidnapping.

By Tom Lasseter

McClatchy Newspapers

Third of five parts

GARDEZ, Afghanistan – Mohammed Naim Farouq was a thug in the lawless Zormat district of eastern Afghanistan. He ran a kidnapping and extortion racket, and he controlled his turf with a band of gunmen who rode around in trucks with AK-47 rifles.

U.S. troops detained him in 2002, although he had no clear ties to the Taliban or al-Qaida. By the time Farouq was released from Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the next year, however – after more than 12 months of what he described as abuse and humiliation at the hands of U.S. soldiers – he’d made connections to high-level militants.

Just What’s Needed

More Monopolies

Bring Back The Robber Barons

Saudi King: ‘We will pump more oil’

 By Anne Penketh in Jeddah

Monday, 16 June 2008

Saudi Arabia will raise oil production to record levels within weeks in an attempt to avert an escalation of social and political unrest around the world. King Abdullah signalled the commitment to the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, at the weekend after the impact of skyrocketing oil prices on food sparked protests and riots from Spain to South Korea.

Next month, the Saudis will be pumping an extra half-a-million barrels of oil a day compared to last month, bringing total Saudi production to 9.7 million barrels a day, their highest ever level. But the world’s biggest oil exporters are coupling the increase with an appeal to western Europe to cut fuel taxes to lower the price of petrol to consumers.

Abuse plagued Afghan camps, too

By Tom Lasseter

McClatchy Newspapers

Second of five parts

KABUL, Afghanistan – U.S. soldiers herded the detainees into holding pens of razor-sharp concertina wire, used to corral livestock.

The guards kicked, kneed and punched many of the men until they collapsed in pain. U.S. troops shackled and dragged other detainees to small isolation rooms and hung them by their wrists from chains dangling from the wire mesh ceiling.

Former guards and detainees McClatchy interviewed said Bagram Air Base was a center of systematic brutality for at least 20 months, starting in late 2001. Yet the soldiers responsible have escaped serious punishment.

USA

In Midwest Floods, a Broad Threat to Crops

By SUSAN SAULNY

Published: June 16, 2008  

NEWHALL, Iowa – Here, in some of the best soil in the world, the stunted stalks of Dave Timmerman’s newly planted corn are wilting in what sometimes look more like rice paddies than the plains, the sunshine glinting off of pools of collected water. Although time is running out, he has yet to plant all of his soybean crop because the waterlogged soil cannot support his footsteps, much less heavy machinery.

Mr. Timmerman’s small farm has been flooded four times in the past month by the Wildcat Creek, a tributary of the Cedar River which overflowed its banks at a record 31 feet last week, causing catastrophic damage in nearby Cedar Rapids and other eastern Iowa towns and farmsteads

FCC Chair To Support XM-Sirius Merger

By Cecilia Kang

Washington Post Staff Writer

Monday, June 16, 2008; Page A01

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin J. Martin said yesterday that he will support a merger between the nation’s sole satellite radio operators, XM and Sirius, a decision that could remove the last regulatory hurdle in the lengthy and heavily criticized move to make the companies one.

Martin came to the decision after the companies agreed last week to several commitments intended to prevent the monopoly from raising programming prices and from stifling competition among radio makers, aides to the chairman said in an interview yesterday. Critics have argued that a merger of District-based XM and Sirius of New York would hurt consumers, who would have fewer choices of programming and radio transmitters and who would be charged higher prices because of a lack of rivals.

As Good As That Morning Cup Of Coffee

OK, Probably Not Just Pretend

That It Is

Nuclear Ring Reportedly Had Advanced Design

By DAVID E. SANGER

Published: June 15, 2008

WASHINGTON – American and international investigators say that they have found the electronic blueprints for an advanced nuclear weapon on computers that belonged to the nuclear smuggling network run by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the rogue Pakistani nuclear scientist, but that they have not been able to determine whether they were sold to Iran or the smuggling ring’s other customers.

The plans appear to closely resemble a nuclear weapon that was built by Pakistan and first tested exactly a decade ago. But when confronted with the design by officials of the International Atomic Energy Agency last year, Pakistani officials insisted that Dr. Khan, who has been lobbying in recent months to be released from the loose house arrest that he has been under since 2004, did not have access to Pakistan’s weapons designs.

USA

The Bubble

How homeowners, speculators and Wall Street dealmakers rode a wave of easy money with crippling consequences.

By Alec Klein and Zachary A. Goldfarb

The Washington Post

Sunday, June 15, 2008; Page A01

The black-tie party at Washington’s swank Mayflower Hotel seemed a fitting celebration of the biggest American housing boom since the 1950s: filet mignon and lobster, a champagne room and hundreds of mortgage brokers, real estate agents and their customers gyrating to a Latin band. On that winter night in 2005, the company hosting the gala honored itself with an ice sculpture of its logo. Pinnacle Financial had grown from a single office to a national behemoth generating $6.5 billion in mortgages that year. The $100,000-plus party celebrated the booming division that made loans largely to Hispanic immigrants with little savings. The company even booked rooms for those who imbibed too much.

“Dick! The Supreme

Court Says Those Evil

Doers At Guantanamo

Have The Right To

Habeas Corpus!”

“…Whatever

Hay-Bee-Ass

Korp-Iss Is.”  

Key Iraqi Leaders Deliver Setbacks to U.S.

Premier Rejects Terms of Proposed Pacts; Cleric Reactivates Militia

By Amit R. Paley and Karen DeYoung

Washington Post Foreign Service

Saturday, June 14, 2008; Page A01

BAGHDAD, June 13 — The Bush administration’s Iraq policy suffered two major setbacks Friday when Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki publicly rejected key U.S. terms for an ongoing military presence and anti-American Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr called for a new militia offensive against U.S. forces.

During a visit to Jordan, Maliki said negotiations over initial U.S. proposals for bilateral political and military agreements had “reached a dead end.” While he said talks would continue, his comments fueled doubts that the pacts could be reached this year, before the Dec. 31 expiration of a United Nations mandate sanctioning the U.S. role in Iraq.

USA

In Midwest, Rising Waters and Fears of Worse

By SUSAN SAULNY and MONICA DAVEY

Published: June 14, 2008

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa – All around the Midwest, the water just kept rising.Even as this city was nearly shuttered on Friday, its sandbagged downtown submerged in the biggest flood ever recorded here, people in Des Moines began evacuating and other Iowa towns thought about it. In Wisconsin, stretches of major roads were closed and tornadoes struck. Some in Michigan had no power. Elsewhere, there was no train service, no drinking water, no end in sight.

Friday The 13th

Do You Feel Lucky?

In Myanmar, a Times reporter worked in secret to cover the story

From a Times Staff Writer

June 13, 2008

KONG TAN PAAK, MYANMAR — From the far side of a murky brown river, the only moving thing visible on the ravaged landscape was a tattered maroon cloth, fluttering listlessly atop a tree stripped of its branches.

Two Buddhist monks had torn it from the only material they had, one of their own coarse robes. Its message was just as plain: “Alive! Please help.”

Tropical Cyclone Nargis killed 300 people in this village, wiping away almost every trace of the people, their homes and a monastery. Surviving monks went to a relief camp, but after nearly three weeks, they figured that what they had fled couldn’t be much worse.

So they took some of the meager rice rations they received from the military, came back and made themselves a tent by stretching tarps over a frame of fallen trees.

In the two days they had been living in it, our riverboat was the first to stop. My interpreter went ashore first.

News Analysis

Detention Camp Remains, but Not Its Legal Rationale

By WILLIAM GLABERSON

Published: June 13, 2008

The Guantánamo Bay detention center will not close today or any day soon.

But the Supreme Court’s decision Thursday stripped away the legal premise for the remote prison camp that officials opened six years ago in the belief that American law would not reach across the Caribbean to a United

States naval station in Cuba.

“To the extent that Guantánamo exists to hold detainees beyond the reach of U.S. courts, this blows a hole in its reason for being,” said Matthew Waxman, a former detainee affairs official at the Defense Department.

And without that, much will change.

USA

Earmark Spending Makes a Comeback

Congress Pledged Curbs in 2007

By Robert O’Harrow Jr.

Washington Post Staff Writer

Friday, June 13, 2008; Page A01

More than a year after Congress pledged to curb pork barrel funding known as earmarks, lawmakers are gearing up for another spending binge, directing billions toward organizations and companies in their home districts.  

Earmark spending in the House’s defense authorization bill alone soared 29 percent last month, from $7.7 billion last year to $9.9 billion now, according to data compiled by Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan watchdog group in the District. The Senate bill has not been approved, but the proposal includes an increased number of earmarks, although for a slightly lesser total cost.

Vetters Must Be Vetted

By Those Who Should Be Vetted

Robert Mugabe’s militia burn opponent’s wife alive

From The Times

June 12, 2008

Jan Raath in Mhondoro

The men who pulled up in three white pickup trucks were looking for Patson Chipiro, head of the Zimbabwean opposition party in Mhondoro district. His wife, Dadirai, told them he was in Harare but would be back later in the day, and the men departed.

An hour later they were back. They grabbed Mrs Chipiro and chopped off one of her hands and both her feet. Then they threw her into her hut, locked the door and threw a petrol bomb through the window.

The killing last Friday – one of the most grotesque atrocities committed by Robert Mugabe’s regime since independence in 1980 – was carried out on a wave of worsening brutality before the run-off presidential elections in just over two weeks.

USA

4 killed as tornado hits Iowa Boy Scout camp

Officials say about 40 injured as storm slams camp for leadership training

MSNBC News Services

 BLENCOE, Iowa – A tornado tore through a Boy Scout camp in the remote hills of western Iowa on Wednesday, killing at least four people and injuring 40, and setting off a frantic search to reach others in the piles of debris and downed trees.

Most of the injured had been on a hike when the tornado struck, authorities said, leaving them without protection from the deadly winds. A search and rescue team deployed after the 7 p.m. twister had to cut their way through branches during a lightning storm to reach the camp where the 93 boys, ages 13 to 18, and 25 staff members were attending a weeklong leadership training camp.

What We All Want

The 14-year-old Afghan suicide bomber

As three soldiers are blown up, teenager caught on a lethal mission reveals how he was groomed to kill British troops

By Kim Sengupta in Kabul

Tuesday, 10 June 2008  

The surroundings were grim and forbidding, a notorious jail run by Afghanistan’s feared security service for those taken prisoner in the bloody war with the Taliban.

Among the inmates: Shakirullah Yasin Ali; a small, frail boy, just 14 years old, arrested as he prepared to carry out a suicide bombing against British and American targets. “If I had succeeded, I would be dead now, I realise that,” he said in a soft, nervous voice.

USA

How HUD Mortgage Policy Fed The Crisis

Subprime Loans Labeled ‘Affordable’

By Carol D. Leonnig

Washington Post Staff Writer

Tuesday, June 10, 2008; Page A01

In 2004, as regulators warned that subprime lenders were saddling borrowers with mortgages they could not afford, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development helped fuel more of that risky lending.

Eager to put more low-income and minority families into their own homes, the agency required that two government-chartered mortgage finance firms purchase far more “affordable” loans made to these borrowers. HUD stuck with an outdated policy that allowed Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae to count billions of dollars they invested in subprime loans as a public good that would foster affordable housing.

We Always Know What We Knew

Young Pakistani girls traded as settlement in tribal feud

By Saeed Shah | McClatchy Newspapers

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan – It began with an errant dog,. It’s culminated with the forced betrothal of 15 little girls, some of them as young as three, as compensation in a case of tribal feuding in a remote part of Pakistan.

It’s thought that around 20 people have died in the bitter quarrel, and the marriage offer of the girls is meant to end the bloodletting.

Under a brutal custom, called Vani, the girls are being traded as settlement of a long-running dispute between two tribes. This case occurred on the border between the southern provinces of Sindh and Baluchistan, but the practice, known as Swara in some areas, isn’t uncommon in rural parts of Pakistan

USA

Rural U.S. Takes Worst Hit as Gas Tops $4 Average

By CLIFFORD KRAUSS

Published: June 9, 2008

TCHULA, Miss. – Gasoline prices reached a national average of $4 a gallon for the first time over the weekend, adding more strain to motorists across the country.

But the pain is not being felt uniformly. Across broad swaths of the South, Southwest and the upper Great Plains, the combination of low incomes, high gas prices and heavy dependence on pickup trucks and vans is putting an even tighter squeeze on family budgets.

Here in the Mississippi Delta, some farm workers are borrowing money from their bosses so they can fill their tanks and get to work. Some are switching jobs for shorter commutes.

Pentagon ‘urged notes destroyed’

BBC

Guantanamo Bay interrogators were told to destroy handwritten notes in case they were called to testify on detainee treatment, a military lawyer alleges.

The lawyer, Lt-Cmdr William Kuebler, said the instructions were contained in a Pentagon operations manual.

He said this apparent destruction of evidence at the prison camp stopped him from challenging alleged confessions in the case of his client, Omar Khadr.

It’s Over

And There Was No Singing  

Oil consumers ask for boost in output

Associated Press

AOMORI, Japan – Leading energy-consuming nations urged oil producers Saturday to boost their output to counter soaring prices threatening the world economy, while they pledged to develop clean energy technologies and improve efficiency.

The five nations – the United States, China, Japan, India and South Korea – differed, however, on how urgently oil subsidies should be phased out, with Washington backing bold movement while India and China warned of political and economic instability.

USA

Each Party Is Set to Hunt The Other’s Usual Ground

By Dan Balz

Washington Post Staff Writer

Sunday, June 8, 2008; Page A01

The 2008 general election will pit the best-organized nomination campaign in the history of modern Democratic politics against the battle-tested machinery of the Republican Party, with both Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) determined to shake up an electoral map that has been virtually static over the past two elections.

Democrats enjoy a highly favorable electoral climate at this start of the general election, created by gloomy attitudes about the state of the country and economy, President Bush’s low approval ratings and negative perceptions of the GOP.

I Will I Won’t

I Will I Won’t

What Was I Supposed To Do Today?

Saturday’s Headlines:   Holdouts at FEMA Trailer Park Test Limitations of Aid   German city bans waste from Italy     Negotiating a black hole   Leading clerics urge Muslims to learn about other faiths in drive to promote harmony   Israel cuts off Palestinian tax funds as relations hit new low     Vote Mugabe or starve – the latest ploy from a regime clinging on to power    Four accused of Tutsi genocide should be returned to Rwanda   After quake, Chinese open wallets, a few of them under pressure   Tighter Australia-China ties worry Asian neighbors    Guevara children denounce Che branding    Tijuana’s elite flee to San Diego County to escape kidnappings and violence in Mexico

Water drains from swollen Chinese ‘quake lake’

MSNBC News Services

TAOHUA MOUNTAIN, China – Water began flowing into a spillway Saturday from a swollen lake formed by a landslide in China’s devastating earthquake, easing the immediate threat of a flood that had led to the evacuation of more than 250,000 people.

Engineers were monitoring bridges and river banks downstream to see if they would hold under the rush of water, and work crews were trying to dig a secondary channel to improve the flow, China Central Television and the Xinhua News Agency reported.

USA

Record Oil Spike, High Jobless Rate Sink Stock Market

By Steven Mufson and Neil Irwin

Washington Post Staff Writers

Saturday, June 7, 2008; Page A01

A soaring jobless rate, an unprecedented jump in oil prices and a sliding dollar sent tremors through financial markets yesterday and cast fresh doubt on how soon the U.S. economy would be able to break out of a pattern of feeble growth and financial instability.

The nation’s unemployment rate shot skyward last month to 5.5 percent, the biggest leap in more than two decades, and crude oil prices rocketed up $10.75 a barrel, sending U.S. stock markets tumbling and shaking the economic and political landscape just as the general election season begins.

John McCain To Star In:

The Spies I Love Please Spy On Me

Coming Soon To Your Multi-Plex

Friday’s Headlines:   Investors’ Growing Appetite for Oil Evades Market Limits   Mugabe suspends foreign aid agencies’ work in Zimbabwe  New face of power in Zimbabwe  Germans aghast at ‘Holy Disneyland’ plan   EU treaty in peril as Irish ‘No’ camp takes the lead  Palestinian girl, 6, killed as Israel retaliates for fatal kibbutz attack   Food crisis: A daily quest for bread in Cairo    Quake aid: Neither landslides nor Chinese troops stop this volunteer     Pakistani cops seize 2,200 pounds of explosives  Leftist thinking left off the syllabus

The final battle: remembering D-Day’s veterans

Help us make one last journey to the D-Day beaches in honour of the fallen, plead veterans

By John Lichfield in Colleville-Montgomery, Normandy

Friday, 6 June 2008

A small group of old men will gather on the beaches of Normandy today – a handful of the 3,000 survivors of Britain’s own “Band of Brothers”. Many hundreds of other veterans, such as Bert Bowden in Bristol, will spend the 64th anniversary of D-Day at home, unable to join the men, living and dead, who they still regard as their “own family.”

As the Government faced new questions yesterday about how it pays soldiers who are serving in today’s war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan, in this corner of France on the D-Day anniversary, questions were being asked about how much Britain as a nation values its veterans of six decades ago.

Bert Bowden, 89, came ashore on Gold Beach on 6 June, 1944 and fought until he reached the German Baltic coast 11 months later. He is still physically and mentally strong. Like many of his surviving comrades, he is no longer able to afford a trip to Normandy. Like many others, he is unwilling to leave an ailing wife without a constant carer.

USA

Adviser Says McCain Backs Bush Wiretaps

By CHARLIE SAVAGE

Published: June 6, 2008

WASHINGTON – A top adviser to Senator John McCain says Mr. McCain believes that President Bush’s program of wiretapping without warrants was lawful, a position that appears to bring him into closer alignment with the sweeping theories of executive authority pushed by the Bush administration legal team.

In a letter posted online by National Review this week, the adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, said Mr. McCain believed that the Constitution gave Mr. Bush the power to authorize the National Security Agency to monitor Americans’ international phone calls and e-mail without warrants, despite a 1978 federal statute that required court oversight of surveillance.