Six In The Morning

U.S. May Scrap Costly Efforts to Train Iraqi Police

　

By TIM ARANGO

Published: May 13, 2012

BAGHDAD – In the face of spiraling costs and Iraqi officials who say they never wanted it in the first place, the State Department has slashed – and may jettison entirely by the end of the year – a multibillion-dollar police training program that was to have been the centerpiece of a hugely expanded civilian mission here.

What was originally envisioned as a training cadre of about 350 American law enforcement officers was quickly scaled back to 190 and then to 100. The latest restructuring calls for 50 advisers, but most experts and even some State Department officials say even they may be withdrawn by the end of this year.

The training effort, which began in October and has already cost $500 million, was conceived of as the largest component of a mission billed as the most ambitious American aid effort since the Marshall Plan.

 Peru’s coffee growers turn carbon traders to save their farms from climate change

Global warming threatens the future of Peru’s poorest coffee farmers, but one brand thinks it has found an answer on the financial markets

    Lucy Siegle, Sierra Piura

The Observer, Sunday 13 May 2012

In the foothills of the Andes, in the Sierra Piura region of Peru, the problems faced by coffee farmers are clear. Up to 6,600 farmers produce here for the Central Piurana de Cafetaleros co-operative (Cepicafe), growing 4,000 tonnes a year of the finest Peruvian coffee on family plots scattered across the mountainside. Together, year in, year out, they bring in this special harvest, the arabica coffee cherries, which are painstakingly picked by hand, processed and dried in the sun.

However, thanks to “weather change”, a continual topic of conversation in the area, the harvest is unpredictable. Last year, there was too little rain in the region. This year there has been a deluge: in some areas an increase of 500% on the “norm”.

 Greece: A nation on the brink

 As the President makes a last-ditch effort to forge a unity government, Michael Pooler and David Connett report on what will happen if the country has to go back to the polls

Sunday 13 May 2012

President Karolos Papoulias will today become the fourth senior politician in Greece to attempt to form a new government for the debt-stricken country. President Papoulias last night called Greece’s political leaders to a meeting in a last-ditch attempt to forge a unity government.

The President will meet the leaders of all parties in parliament and try one last time to persuade them to create a government or, if they cannot, to call a new election, expected next month. The presidential move followed his meeting with the socialist Pasok party leader, Evangelos Venizelos, at which Mr Venizelos surrendered his mandate to form a government. Mr Venizelos gave up the mandate after failing to persuade Alexis Tsipras, leader of the hardline leftist Syriza coalition, to form a unity government.

Mugabe to act on factions with new politburo

 President Robert Mugabe is expected to appoint new members to Zanu-PF’s decision-making politburo in an attempt to rejuvenate

 JAMA MAJOLA | 13 May, 2012 00:12

Senior Zanu-PF officials say they have been informed Mugabe was set to appoint a new team to lead the party to the next elections which will almost certainly be the last in his political career of 52 years.

“I have it on good authority that the president will soon appoint 55 new politburo members. He was supposed to do so at the Zanu-PF Bulawayo conference in December, but it was postponed,” a senior party official said. “Later we were told he was going to do that after his annual holiday in January.”

Nepal’s mystery language on the verge of extinction

Gyani Maiya Sen, a 75-year-old woman from western Nepal, can perhaps be forgiven for feeling that the weight of the world rests on her shoulders.

By Bimal Gautam BBC News, Nepal  

She is the only person still alive in Nepal who fluently speaks the Kusunda language. The unknown origins and mysterious sentence structures of Kusunda have long baffled linguists.

As such, she has become a star attraction for campaigners eager to preserve her dying tongue.

Madhav Prasad Pokharel, a professor of linguistics at Nepal’s Tribhuwan University, has spent a decade researching the vanishing Kusunda tribe.

Professor Pokharel describes Kusunda as a “language isolate”, not related to any common language of the world.

Brazil, Venezuela, and Mexico: three ways to nationalize oil

 Argentina’s renationalization of its biggest oil company, YPF, recently caused an outcry. But the cases of oil nationalization in Brazil, Mexico, and Venezuela show that outcomes can vary widely.

By Sara Miller Llana, Staff writer, Whitney Eulich, Staff writer

“Nationalization is an old story in Latin America,” says Larry Birns, director of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs. “Almost as old as oil itself.” When countries choose to nationalize natural resources there are usually dire predictions that investors will flee and economies will crumble. These three cases of oil nationalization illustrate that investor panic can be shortlived and that a country’s approach matters. But nationalization can hamper innovation and constrain a country’s potential for investment.