Morning Shinbun Friday October 29

Bill Clinton Urged Florida Democrat to Quit Senate Bid



By MICHAEL D. SHEAR and JEFF ZELENY

Published: October 28, 2010

WASHINGTON – Former President Bill Clinton last week almost succeeded in persuading Kendrick B. Meek, the Democratic nominee for the Senate in Florida, to drop out of the three-way race – but Mr. Meek changed his mind at the last minute, a spokesman for Mr. Clinton said Thursday evening.  

Matt McKenna, Mr. Clinton’s spokesman, said the former president had concluded that Mr. Meek’s candidacy was struggling and was urging him to drop out and endorse Charlie Crist, the state’s Republican governor, who is running for the Senate as an independent.

Jon Stewart’s ‘Daily Show’ has exploded beyond its humble late-night comedy roots



By Dan Zak

Washington Post Staff Writer

Friday, October 29, 2010

Springsteen detonates from above. Red and blue lights somersault. The drumbeats and guitar riffs of “Born to Run” flood the theater. The audience quakes while Jon Stewart leans over his desk for a last-minute powwow with a trio of writer-producers on Tuesday.

“Tell them to keep the pace up,” Stewart says, his voice inaudible over the roar in the theater but carried clearly through his microphone to the giant white production truck on Sixth Street NW. Inside the truck, in front of a flickering wall of switchboards and video feeds that looks like a mini NORAD, the crew gets the message. This is a 22-minute song-and-dance. Nothing more, nothing less.

USA

Yes we can, Obama said. But can he?

US gets ready for a new kind of presidency

By Rupert Cornwell in Washington Friday, 29 October 2010

For barack Obama, the past is mere prologue. From January 2011, the President will be part of an entirely new political play in Washington. Unless every poll in these last days of the mid-term election campaign is wrong, next week’s vote will force him to deal with a world in which Republicans have a majority in the House and near-parity in the Senate – and in which his plans for the presidency will have to take quite a different tack. For Mr Obama’s first term, at least, the time of sweeping political change is at an end.

And yet, just possibly, a Republican takeover of the House of Representatives in the midterm elections could be the makingof the President.

Tests showed unstable cement in gulf oil well before explosion



By Steven Mufson

Washington Post Staff Writer

Friday, October 29, 2010; 12:01 AM

A cement mixture intended to temporarily seal BP’s Macondo exploration well repeatedly failed lab tests before the April 20 blowout, a presidential commission investigating the oil spill said Thursday.  As early as February, oil-field service giant Halliburton was getting poor results in lab tests of the recipe for the cement it was planning to use, according to evidence collected by the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling.

Three separate tests suggested that the mixture would be “unstable,” according to a commission staff letter released Thursday.

Europe

Angela Merkel struggles to win support for EU bailout rules at Brussels summit

Eleven countries speak out against vote sanction as Cameron fails in effort to freeze £107bn budget

Nicholas Watt and Ian Traynor in Brussels The Guardian, Friday 29 October 2010  

Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, was struggling last night to win widespread support across Europe for a major revision of EU law to underpin the multibillion pound bailout of Greece.

A series of countries spoke out at last night’s EU summit in Brussels against Merkel’s demand for voting rights to be withdrawn from member states that fail to meet strict eurozone fiscal rules.

The opposition, which came as David Cameron abandoned a campaign for a freeze in the EU’s £107bn budget for next year, means that Merkel is expected to win only a small revision of EU law.

Russia’s hungry bears dig up graves



October 29, 2010

Famished bears in northern Russia have resorted to digging up graves in cemeteries – and reportedly eating at least one body – after a scorching summer destroyed their natural food sources of forest berries and mushrooms, officials say.

The brown bears’ grisly habit is forcing locals in the Arctic Circle region of Komi to mount 24-hour patrols, protecting their families and livestock out of concern that the bears might get a taste for fresher human flesh, said Pyotr Lobanov, a regional spokesman for the Emergencies Ministry.

Middle East

Iran will be back in the frame

 

By Victor Kotsev  

TEL AVIV – As of late last month, the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks have practically been on life support, in a vegetative state. United States President Barack Obama tried to keep them going, but was stonewalled and opted instead for a delay in pronouncing them dead – until after the mid-term elections on November 2. Then, the predominant narrative goes, he could put more pressure on Israel [1]. Rising tensions with Iran and its allies, however, could interfere with this projection.

While, as many analysts have argued, for the duration of the mid-term-elections campaign Obama needed badly some semblance of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in order to shore up his foreign policy record and to help his fellow Democrats get re-elected to the United States Congress, it is not entirely clear what will happen after the elections.

Hezbollah urges Hariri case boycott

Hassan Nasrallah warns against Lebanese co-operation with investigation into 2005 assassination of Rafiq Hariri.

Last Modified: 28 Oct 2010 23:12 GMT  

Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the Hezbollah movement, has urged all Lebanese to boycott a UN-backed investigation into the murder of Rafiq Hariri, Lebanon’s former prime minister.

In a televised address on Thursday, he warned that the country had reached “a very dangerous point”.

“I call on all Lebanese, citizens and politicians alike, to boycott this tribunal and end all co-operation with its investigators.

“Any further co-operation with the tribunal is equal to an attack on the resistance,” Nasrallah said, referring to his predominatly Shia Muslim movement.

Asia

Hopes fade for Indonesian tsunami survivors

Hopes are fading for more than 300 people still registered missing after Monday’s tsunami in Indonesia, as the death toll climbs to 394.

The BBC 29 October 2010  

Disaster official Ade Edward says the 3m (10ft) surge is likely to have carried many of the missing out to sea, or buried them in the sand.

The first major aid ships reached the worst-hit Mentawai Islands on Thursday.

The government has pledged millions of dollars for the relief effort, but relief workers say more is needed.

Aid agencies said people on the islands still urgently needed food and shelter, three days after a 7.7-magnitude undersea earthquake triggered the tsunami.

Afghan warlord’s private army trained in Australia

EXCLUSIVE

Rafael Epstein

October 29, 2010

SENIOR militia fighters loyal to a notorious Afghan warlord have been flown to Australia to train with elite special forces as part of a covert strategy to strengthen military operations against the Taliban.

The six fighters are allied to Matiullah Khan, a powerful Oruzgan warlord with whom Dutch forces refused to work because of his alleged connections to murder and extortion.

Advertisement: Story continues below The government did not reveal that the men were in Australia, even though their trip coincided with the parliamentary debate last week on the Afghan war.

Africa

Hero of ‘Hotel Rwanda’ is declared enemy of the state

Man who saved Tutsis during the genocide says ‘the government is coming after me’  

By Daniel Howden, Africa Correspondent Friday, 29 October 2010

The man made famous by the film Hotel Rwanda and credited with saving more than 1,200 Tutsis during the 1994 genocide said yesterday that he fears for his life after the country’s President made him “an enemy of the state”.

Paul Rusesabagina, a former hotel manager currently living in Brussels where he says his home has been repeatedly ransacked, will be charged in Rwanda with links to a terrorist group.

Rwanda’s chief prosecutor said this week that Mr Rusesabagina has been financing commanders in the FDLR, a rebel army across the border in the Democratic Republic of Congo made up from ethnic Hutus responsible for the 1994 genocide.

Somalia’s Shebab executes two girls for ‘spying’  



By Sapa-AFP

A firing squad shot the pair in front of hundreds of local residents Wednesday afternoon, in the first known instance of such an execution over spying charges against women.

“These women were spying for the enemy and were arrested by mujahideen (holy warriors)” last week, Sheikh Yusuf Ali Ugas, the insurgent group’s regional commander, told the crowd after the execution.

“After a long investigation, they confessed to their crimes,” he added.

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