Morning Shinbun Friday October 15

Tea Party set to win enough races for wide influence

Nominees have performed better than expected in many cases

By KATE ZERNIKE

Enough Tea Party-supported candidates are running strongly in competitive and Republican-leaning Congressional races that the movement stands a good chance of establishing a sizeable caucus to push its agenda in the House and the Senate, according to a New York Times analysis.

With a little more than two weeks till Election Day, 33 Tea Party-backed candidates are in tossup races or running in House districts that are solidly or leaning Republican, and 8 stand a good or better chance of winning Senate seats.

How US Nightclubs Revolutionized West German Music

G.I. Disco Revival

By Josie Le Blond

Berlin DJs Daniel Best and Kalle Kuts are reviving the spirit of 1980s West Germany with their compilation of “the Cold War’s hottest music.”The project hopes to shed light on the almost forgotten but massively influential GI clubs where US soldiers went to get a taste of life back home.

Around 500 party-goers, among them many Americans, were in the West Berlin nightclub La Belle when a terrorist bomb exploded just after midnight on Saturday, April 5, 1986. Two US servicemen and a Turkish woman were killed in the blast.

Aside from shocking the world and provoking a US attack on Libya 10 days later, the tragedy briefly drew global attention to the existence of the so-called “Ami-Club” scene associated with American troops stationed in the former West Germany.

USA

In many congressional swing districts, seniority is falling by wayside

 

By Philip Rucker

Washington Post Staff Writer

Friday, October 15, 2010; 12:25 AM

TRACY, CALIF. — For 14 years, Richard W. Pombo was the congressman for the San Joaquin Valley district here. In that time, he built a cowboy persona – George W. Bush dubbed him “The Marlboro Man” – and amassed power, rising to chairman of the House Resources Committee.

From that perch, he was able to steer a disproportionate slice of federal money to this sprawling agricultural and suburban district and become a fierce protector of property rights.

Countrywide’s Angelo R. Mozilo in talks to settle SEC charges, sources say

The co-founder of the mortgage lender is accused of civil fraud and insider trading. His trial is set to begin Tuesday.

 By E. Scott Reckard and Stuart Pfeifer, Los Angeles Times

October 15, 2010

Just days before his trial was to begin, Countrywide Financial Corp. co-founder Angelo R. Mozilo was in serious negotiations late Thursday to settle the government’s civil fraud and insider trading case against him, according to people familiar with the situation.

Mozilo, 71, the best-known and perhaps most vilified figure involved in the mortgage industry’s boom and collapse, faced trial on the Securities and Exchange Commission accusations starting Tuesday.

Europe

Portugal’s budget to trigger crisis for government

The Irish Times – Friday, October 15, 2010

JANE WALKER in Madrid  

WHEN PORTUGAL’S socialist prime minister José Sócrates presents his budget for 2011 today, he will open the floodgates for a political crisis which could bring down his already unpopular minority government.

Like so many other euro zone economies such as Ireland, Spain or Greece, Portugal’s is deeply troubled. The budget deficit is 9.3 per cent, its public deficit is more than 82 per cent and unemployment is at a 20-year high of 10 per cent. All of which are forcing the government to take painful measures.

“We have known for months that our economy was in trouble and our debt was among the worst in Europe. The Sócrates government has delayed too long in confronting our problems because they knew they would be unpopular and could unseat them,” said one Lisbon banker yesterday.

Budapest Experiences A New Wave of Hate

Europe’s Capital of Anti-Semitism  

By Erich Follath  

The city was always good for drama — for intrigues about life and death, for eternal love and murderous betrayal, for torture, political heroism and sexual escapades. Founded by the Romans, improved by the Mongols and oppressed by the Ottoman Turks, Budapest has reinvented itself time and again, flexible in the flux of time. It has also served as a laboratory of sorts for varying political ideologies, from National Socialism to fascism to communism.

The United Nations has named four spots in the city UNESCO world heritage sites: the panorama on the Danube River embankment, the Buda castle district, the Millennium underground railway and Andrássy Avenue.

Middle East

Robert Fisk: Israel comes face to face with the man who would wipe it off the map

Lebanon’s southern border, so often a battleground, hosted the latest leg of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s provocative tour yesterday

Friday, 15 October 2010

He looks like a shepherd, but he might have been the Shah. And there he was last night, the President of Iran, one of the triple pillars of the “Axis of evil”, scarcely two miles from the border of that holy of holies which every American president must support – the State of Israel, or the “Jewish State of Israel”, as its government claims it to be. The Shia Muslim crowds loved Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. They adored him. For weeks, they had been told he was coming. Shah-like was his welcome.

For it was in Bint Jbeil – his last stop last night – that the Shia Hizbollah destroyed at least 10 of Israel’s tanks in the 2006 war, and the message was perfectly clear.

Arab League still struggles for credibility



By Sami Moubayed  

DAMASCUS – When Arab leaders established the League of Arab States during the final years of World War II, several creative ideas were placed on the table by founding fathers Mustapha al-Nahhas Pasha of Egypt, Jamil Mardam Bey of Syria and Riad al-Solh of Lebanon.

If the LAS, also called the Arab League, was ever going to get anywhere, they argued, it had to learn from the mistakes of the League of Nations, which was on its way towards extinction, having failed to prevent the catastrophic outbreak of World War II in 1939.

Asia

The ‘untouchable’ Indians with an unenviable job

On discovering that his parents cleaned latrines for a living, Bezwada Wilson began a campaign to end this degrading profession. Andrew Buncombe hears his story

Friday, 15 October 2010

There is an infectious, impassioned enthusiasm about Bezwada Wilson that is hard to ignore. He laughs, he smiles. He frowns too, but soon he is smiling again. And yet things might have been very different. When he was aged 18, he came very close to taking his own life. The thing that led him to the very edge was the discovery of what his parents really did to scrape together a living.

Growing up in a gold mining area of southern India, they had told him as a child that they mined for ore. The evening they revealed to him that they were actually “dry latrine” cleaners who spent their days covered in the filth of others, he was so horrified, so disgusted, that he came close to committing suicide at a secluded water tower.

Kim’s heir linked to plot against eldest son  



Peter Foster October 15, 2010

BEIJING: Aides loyal to North Korea’s heir apparent, Kim Jong-un, planned to attack his exiled half-brother in retaliation for his comments last year about the need for reform in the North.

The attack on Kim Jong-nam, 39, was foiled after China warned the North Koreans not to attack him on its soil, a South Korean official has said.

Kim Jong-un’s aides tried ”to do something to Kim Jong-nam, who has a loose tongue abroad”, the official said, but the plot had been firmly scotched by China.

The plan to move against Kim Jong-nam, who lives in self-imposed exile in China, was allegedly fuelled by rumours he might be used as a Chinese puppet ruler in the event of a regime collapse in North Korea.

Africa

UN could police parts of north-south Sudan border





LOUIS CHARBONNEAU | UNITED NATIONS

Their remarks came in response to a request by south Sudan President Salva Kiir during a UN Security Council trip to Sudan last week for peacekeepers to be deployed along north-south border.

“Nobody thinks it’s realistic to put Unmis [UN peacekeepers], even if we had masses more troops, along the north-south border in a country that large,” one council diplomat, who did not want to be identified, told reporters.

“But I think one thing we can and should consider … is looking at augmenting Unmis in certain hot spots along the border where a buffer presence could be established.”

More white South Africans struggle in post-apartheid economy

White South Africans are increasingly living below the poverty line as the country’s job market adjusts to a post-apartheid era, which lacks the government support for whites that it once had.

By Ian Evans, Correspondent / October 14, 2010    

Cape Town, South Africa

It was an improbable sight even 10 years ago in South Africa: white people in shacks – poor, desperate, and surviving off handouts.

But with the fall of apartheid and the transformation of the job market in favor of the majority black population, increasing numbers of white people are without work and living below the poverty line.

Recent statistics from the Bureau for Market Research show that there are 650,000 whites ages 16 or over without work, with estimates saying that total is growing by 15 percent a year.

In the National Assembly, the leader of the mainly white Freedom Front Plus party, Pieter Mulder, has questioned the government’s commitment to confronting white poverty, claiming the startling rise was being ignored.

Latin America

‘Blood pact’ suggests what went on undergound will stay there

The Irish Times – Friday, October 15, 2010  

RORY CARROLL in Copiapo and JONATHAN FRANKLIN at San Jose mine

SPEAKING FROM a hospital bed at the San Jose mine, shift foreman Luis Urzua – the man who kept the Chilean miners alive for two months – said his secret for keeping the men bonded and focused on survival was majority decision-making.

“You just have to speak the truth and believe in democracy,” said Urzua, his eyes hidden behind black glasses.

As nurses, doctors and psychologists rushed around him in a chaotic scene, the world’s most famous foreman sat in bed, his arms folded across a thick chest, and spoke about making tough decisions 700 metres below ground when all hope seemed lost.

“Everything was voted on . . . We were 33 men, so 16 plus onewas a majority.”

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