Morning Shinbun Monday November 29

Cables shine light into secret diplomatic channels

The confidential material was obtained by WikiLeaks and released despite requests by the U.S. government not to do so

By Scott Shane and Andrew W. Lehren

WASHINGTON  – A cache of a quarter-million confidential American diplomatic cables, most of them from the past three years, provides an unprecedented look at backroom bargaining by embassies around the world, brutally candid views of foreign leaders and frank assessments of nuclear and terrorist threats.

Some of the cables, made available to The New York Times and several other news organizations, were written as recently as late February, revealing the Obama administration’s exchanges over crises and conflicts. The material was originally obtained by WikiLeaks, an organization devoted to revealing secret documents. WikiLeaks intends to make the archive public on its Web site in batches, beginning Sunday.

The anticipated disclosure of the cables is already sending shudders through the diplomatic establishment, and could conceivably strain relations with some countries, influencing international affairs in ways that are impossible to predict.

Climate change scientists warn of 4C global temperature rise

Team of experts say such an increase would cause severe droughts and see millions of migrants seeking refuge

Damian Carrington The Guardian, Monday 29 November 2010  

The hellish vision of a world warmed by 4C within a lifetime has been set out by an international team of scientists, who say the glacial progress of the global climate change talks that restart in Mexico today makes the so-called safe limit of 2C impossible to keep. A 4C rise in the planet’s temperature would see severe droughts across the world and millions of migrants seeking refuge as their food supplies collapse.

“There is now little to no chance of maintaining the rise in global surface temperature at below 2C, despite repeated high-level statements to the contrary,” said Kevin Anderson, at the University of Manchester, who with colleague Alice Bows contributed research to a special collection of Royal Society journal papers published tomorrowtoday. “Moreover, the impacts associated with 2C have been revised upwards so that 2C now represents the threshold [of] extremely dangerous climate change.”

USA

Intolerance and the Law in Oklahoma



Editorial

For a few days this month, it was illegal in Oklahoma for a state judge to base a court decision on Islamic religious law or consider any form of international law. It was a manufactured problem; the issue has never come up in the state’s courts. But more than 70 percent of voters in Oklahoma still approved a state constitutional amendment to that effect, apparently persuaded by anti-Islamic activists, and a few cynical politicians, that Oklahoma was about to be brought under Islam’s heel.

American exceptionalism: an old idea and a new political battle



By Karen Tumulty Washington Post Staff Writer  

Is this a great country or what?

“American exceptionalism” is a phrase that, until recently, was rarely heard outside the confines of think tanks, opinion journals and university history departments.

But with Republicans and tea party activists accusing President Obama and the Democrats of turning the country toward socialism, the idea that the United States is inherently superior to the world’s other nations has become the battle cry from a new front in the ongoing culture wars. Lately, it seems to be on the lips of just about every Republican who is giving any thought to running for president in 2012.

Europe

Beer giant accused of tax evasion in India and Africa by ActionAid

UK-listed drinks firm denies claims it diverted up to £20m through havens

Felicity Lawrence The Guardian, Monday 29 November 2010  

The world’s second-largest beer company, SABMiller, is avoiding millions of pounds of tax in India and the African countries where it makes and sells beer by routing profits through a web of tax-haven subsidiaries, according to a report published by ActionAid today.

The company, whose brands include Grolsch, Peroni and Miller, and African beers Castle and Stone Lager, is accused by the development charity of siphoning profits out of developing countries and parking them offshore.

Basque party will repudiate all violence  

The Irish Times – Monday, November 29, 2010

PADDY WOODWORTH

BASQUE PRO-INDEPENDENCE radicals formerly associated with the banned Batasuna party announced at the weekend that they were forming a new party, still to be named, whose constitution would explicitly reject political violence in all circumstances.

Batasuna was made illegal under Spain’s controversial Political Parties’ Law in 2001, which was upheld by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg in 2009, and which provides for the banning of groups that do not condemn terrorist acts.

This is the latest in a series of steps that distances the radicals from the Basque terrorist group Eta, which called a cessation of “offensive operations” on September 5th. It puts the group under greatly increased pressure to dissolve itself altogether, since it now appears it no longer has any significant political allies in the Basque country.

Middle East

Egypt’s election magic turns the opposition almost invisible

Mubarak’s campaign workers hand out meat and beatings, reports Robert Fisk

Monday, 29 November 2010  

Sobhi Salah Moussa looked pretty crushed as he stood in the hospital courtyard in this scruffy little town, as well he might. Despite the town being top-heavy with plainclothes cops and squads of riot police – the normal theatrical backcloth for all Egyptian elections – poor old Sobhi of the Muslim Brotherhood, a lawyer and still (up until yesterday’s elections, at least) a sitting member of parliament, had just been duffed up by President Hosni Mubarak’s National Democratic Party thugs.

In fact, the NDP’s lads had helped to padlock the hospital gates to prevent the white-haired and much-bruised Sobhi Moussa from leaving.

Saudi women sue male guardians who stop marriage  

No woman can travel, gain admittance to a public hospital or live independently without a guardian  

By MAGGIE MICHAEL  

CAIRO – Year after year, the 42-year-old Saudi surgeon remains single, against her will. Her father keeps turning down marriage proposals, and her hefty salary keeps going directly to his bank account.

The surgeon in the holy city of Medina knows her father, also her male guardian, is violating Islamic law by forcibly keeping her single, a practice known as “adhl.” So she has sued him in court, with questionable success.

Adhl cases reflect the many challenges facing single women in Saudi Arabia.

Asia

War games start in Korea under menacing shadow of the North

 

By Donald Kirk in Seoul Monday, 29 November 2010

A powerful flotilla of a dozen American and South Korean warships, led by the US aircraft carrier George Washington, wrapped up its first day of war games in the Yellow Sea yesterday, against a background of menacing moves by North Korea and efforts by China to tamp down the tensions.

While the flotilla churned the waters well south of the scene of North Korea’s attack last week on a small South Korean island, satellite imagery revealed that North Korean forces had rocket systems ready for firing and surface-to-air missiles on launch pads near the North Korean shoreline.

Japan spreads the satoyama message



By Matthew Knight for CNN

November 29, 2010

It is a country that provides the world with much of its modern technology, but Japan is now adding some old-fashioned rural wisdom to its exports list in an effort to stem nature loss around the world.

The Satoyama Initiative has been set up by Japan’s Ministry of the Environment and the United Nations University Institute of Advanced Studies (UNU-IAS) in an attempt to promote traditional Japanese land conservation around the world.

While its widely recognized that conservation of unspoilt wildernesses is vital to preserve eco-systems, the fight to preserve and promote biodiversity in human-influenced habitats is equally urgent.

Africa

Wanted president at summit  

Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, wanted on war crimes charges, will attend an African-European summit in Libya this week, former President Thabo Mbeki said.

Nov 29, 2010 12:31 AM | By Reuters



The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Bashir, alleging he masterminded genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity during the country’s seven-year conflict in the Darfur region.

Libya, which is hosting the Africa-European Union summit today and tomorrow, is not a member of the Hague-based court and is under no obligation to arrest Bashir once he enters its territory.

However, his attendance would cause a diplomatic dilemma for representatives of the EU, all of whose members have signed the court’s charter and are bound to co-operate with it and enforce its arrest warrants

How ethnicity colors the Ivory Coast election

Third-place candidate Henri Konan Bédié threw his support behind Alassane Ouattara in Sunday’s Ivory Coast election, but how many from Mr. Bédié’s Baoulé ethnic group actually voted for a Muslim northerner?

By Marco Chown Oved, Contributor  

Yamoussoukro and Abidjan, Ivory Coast

Voting along ethnic lines is still a reality in the fledgling democracies of West Africa.

A glance at the results of the recent election in Guinea shows that the phenomenon is alive and strong. There, Alpha Condé, who received a mere 18 percent in the first round of voting, was able to pick up the “anyone but a Peul” vote, and rode a wave of discontent against the country’s majority ethnicity into the presidency earlier this month.

In neighboring Ivory Coast, sitting president Laurent Gbagbo says he’s putting an end to this kind of thinking.

Latin America

Haiti candidates denounce election  

Nearly all the major candidates in presidential poll call for election to be cancelled over fraud and violence.

Aljazeera

Nearly all of the major candidates in Haiti’s presidential election have called for the country’s election to be scrapped amid allegations of fraud and reports that large numbers of voters were turned away from polling stations throughout the nation.

Twelve of the 18 candidates endorsed a joint statement denouncing Sunday’s voting as fraudulent and called on their supporters to show their anger with demonstrations against the government and the country’s Provisional Electoral Council (CEP).

The statement included all of the major contenders except Jude Celestin, who is backed by the Unity party of Rene Preval, the outgoing president.

“It is clear that Preval and the CEP was not prepared for elections,” said candidate Anne Marie Josette Bijou, who read the statement to a cheering crowd that sang the national anthem and chanted “arrest Preval”.

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