. . .Headlines . . .

Iran Concerned West Will Benefit From Arab Uprisings . . .

Libyans Mark Eid with Optimism, Sadness . . .

Vazquez Mota strengthens as Mexican 2012 candidate . . .

Hurricane Cost Seen as Ranking Among Top Ten . . .

. . .Today's Story . . .

• Current Events About Iranian Leadership
  Iran Concerned West Will Benefit From Arab Uprisings (NY Times) Iran’s supreme leader admonished the West and Israel on Wednesday not to seek advantage from the antigovernment uprisings convulsing the Arab Muslim world, delivering the warning in a nationally broadcast speech that appeared to reflect new unease in Tehran over the course of events among its strategic neighbors, particularly Syria.
  
  The speech by the leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, given at Tehran University to commemorate Id al-Fitr, the Muslim holiday, was officially described in Iran’s state-run press as a respectful tribute to the revolutionary movements that have reawakened Muslim populations to “their genuine Islamic identity.”
  
  But the speech included a cautionary caveat that suggested Iranian leaders are worried about the possibility of outcomes that diminish their influence as these movements progress.
  
  “The events taking place in Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, Libya, Bahrain and certain other countries today are decisive and destiny making for the Muslim nations,” the ayatollah said. However, he said, “if the imperialist and hegemonic powers and Zionism, including the U.S. tyrannical and despotic regime, manage to use the ongoing conditions in their own favor, the world of Islam will definitely face big problems for tens of years.”
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• Current Events About Libyans And Eid
  Libyans Mark Eid with Optimism, Sadness (VOA News) Libyans began their celebration of Eid al Fitr Wednesday with conflicting feelings about the holiday marking the end of Ramadan.
  
  Libyan Wahabi Mohamed Yemeni won't be celebrating this Eid el Fitr holiday with the joy the end of Ramadan usually brings. "Our family, we [celebrate] can't, because we're sad," said Yemeni. "No one [is] dead from our family. But our family, the same [Libyan] family, have dead people. Libya [is] one family."
  
  During the battle for Tripoli, as rebels entered the capital, Yemeni's neighborhood came under fire from forces loyal to Moammar Gadhafi. "Saturday we had many snipers here, here and here," explained Yemeni.
  
  While none in his immediate circle were killed, some were wounded. His neighbor took a bullet through the hip.
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• Current Events About India And Its Economy
  India Measures Itself Against a China That Doesn’t Notice (NY Times) MUMBAI, India — It seems to be a national obsession in India: measuring the country’s economic development against China’s yardstick.
  
  At a recent panel discussion to commemorate the 20th anniversary of India’s dismantling parts of its socialist economy, a government minister told business leaders to keep their eye on the big prize: growing faster than China.
  
  “That’s not impossible,” said the minister, Palaniappan Chidambaram, who oversees national security and previously was finance minister. “People are beginning to talk about outpacing China.”
  
  Indians, in fact, seem to talk endlessly about all things China, a neighbor with whom they have long had a prickly relationship, but which is also one of the few other economies that has had 8 percent or more annual growth in recent years.
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• Current Events About South Africa's New Land Policy
  South Africa Expert Urges Full Support for New Land Policy (VOA News) The chairman of the Walter Sisulu University Council is urging South Africa’s government to step up its efforts to publicize its newly announced land policy.
  
  It aims to restrict foreign and privately owned property, and lease out public and state land. It would also increase the amount of land redistributed from white farmers to black farmers.
  
  Somadoda Fikeni, who is also a policy expert, said the new plan needs to be well monitored and executed to achieve its objectives. He said the previous land policy did not go as well as the administration originally planned.
  
  It had established goals for redistributing commercial land, mostly owned by whites to landless blacks.
  
  “They will be happy to learn that the government has admitted the failure of the land reform program, which had only yielded three percent of the targeted 15 percent [land distribution],” said Fikeni.
  
  
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• Current Events About America And The Cost Of Hurricane Irene
  Hurricane Cost Seen as Ranking Among Top Ten (NY Times) Hurricane Irene will most likely prove to be one of the 10 costliest catastrophes in the nation’s history, and analysts said that much of the damage might not be covered by insurance because it was caused not by winds but by flooding, which is excluded from many standard policies.
  
  Industry estimates put the cost of the storm at $7 billion to $10 billion, largely because the hurricane pummeled an unusually wide area of the East Coast. Beyond deadly flooding that caused havoc in upstate New York and Vermont, the hurricane flooded cotton and tobacco crops in North Carolina, temporarily halted shellfish harvesting in Chesapeake Bay, sapped power and kept commuters from their jobs in the New York metropolitan area and pushed tourists off Atlantic beaches in the peak of summer.
  
  While insurers have typically covered about half of the total losses in past storms, they might end up covering less than 40 percent of the costs associated with Hurricane Irene, according to an analysis by the Kinetic Analysis Corporation. That is partly because so much damage was caused by flooding, and it is unclear how many damaged homes have flood insurance, and partly because deductibles have risen steeply in coastal areas in recent years, requiring some homeowners to cover $4,000 worth of damages or more before insurers pick up the loss.
  
  This could make it harder for many stricken homeowners to rebuild, and could dampen any short-term boost to the construction industry that typically accompanies major storms, Jan Vermeiren, the chief executive of Kinetic Analysis, said in an interview.
  
  
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• Current Events About Myanmar And "Free Speech"
  In Myanmar, Freedom Means Taunting the Ref (NY Times)The hardships and oppression of living in this authoritarian country all but vanish at the gates of its soccer stadiums. Or so say the fans, who swarm into the grandstands for a carnival of drunken revelry that would never be tolerated outside the stadium walls.
  
  “I don’t come here to support any particular team,” said Kyaw Lin, a 15-year-old high school student standing in an especially rowdy section of bleachers during a recent match. “I come for the freedom to yell anything I want.”
  
  Sports is an escape from the tedium of life everywhere. But in Myanmar, with its layers of secret police and prison sentences of as much as 100 years for those who speak out against the government, a soccer match seems something more: an island of raucous merriment in a sea of grinding poverty and fear.
  
  It is 90 minutes of seemingly unfettered liberty. Truckloads of riot police officers surround stadiums during matches, but these sour-faced legions stay mostly near the exits.
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• Current Events About Mexican Politics
  Vazquez Mota strengthens as Mexican 2012 candidate (Reuters) - The woman who wants to become Mexico's first female president is solidifying her standing as the grass-roots favorite to represent the country's ruling party in the 2012 election, according to opinion polls on Wednesday.
  
  Lawmaker Josefina Vazquez Mota still has only a slim chance of becoming president given that increasing unrest about drug war violence is hurting support for President Felipe Calderon's National Action Party (PAN).
  
  Security had replaced the economy as voters' top concern even before suspected drug gang hitmen torched a casino in the business hub of Monterrey last week, killing 52 people and shaking the PAN's support in a key stronghold.
  
  Opinion polls show none of the potential PAN candidates could win the 2012 poll if elections were held now, although Vazquez Mota has a better chance than other contenders -- including Finance Minister Ernesto Cordero.
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The Friendly Universe - Law of Attraction in Action 

. . .Headlines . . .

World Bank to Contribute Millions to Help Kenya Withstand Drought . . .

Survey of US Muslim Attitudes Finds Little Support for Extremism . . .

Germany Dims Nuclear Plants, but Hopes to Keep Lights On . . .

From a Few Iraqis, a Word to Libyans on Liberation . . .

. . .Today's Story . . .

• Current Events About The Famine In Africa
  World Bank to Contribute Millions to Help Kenya Withstand Drought (VOA News) In response to the ongoing crisis in the Horn of Africa, the World Bank is planning to provide Kenya with tens of millions of dollars to improve the country's defenses against future droughts.
  
  The drought and famine currently rippling through east Africa has shown no signs of slowing. With governments, businesses and people around the world ramping up relief efforts, the World Bank has also decided to intervene.
  
  A team of technical experts on emergency disaster recovery recently wrapped up a mission to assess the needs of the people and governments of East Africa. The team reviewed the humanitarian situation, the efforts to alleviate the situation, and the various drought prevention mechanisms already in place.
  
  After concluding the mission, the World Bank has announced it will contribute $39 million to help fill gaps it found in the various drought and famine response efforts. Johannes Zutt is the World Bank Country Director for Kenya and Somalia.
  
  
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• Current Events About The Effects Of Hurricane Irene In America
  Floodwaters From Storm Isolate 11 Vermont Towns (NY Times) Eleven small towns in Vermont remained cut off on Tuesday due to flooded roads and bridges, and emergency workers here and in upstate New York readied for another day of rescue and recovery in the wake of Hurricane Irene’s torrential rains.
  
  A convoy of trucks from the Federal Emergency Management Agency was to arrive in Vermont shortly after daybreak, bringing food, water and other supplies for at least seven hard-hit towns. The agency planned to use helicopters to deliver the supplies to cut-off residents, according to Vermont Emergency Management.
  
  More than 250 roads and 30 state bridges in Vermont remained fully or partly closed from the flooding, which could start again in some spots as larger rivers, like the Connecticut, continued to rise.
  
  In some communities of the Catskills and other rural areas of New York, electrical workers, limited on Monday by floodwaters that were still rising, hoped to gain access for the first time to downed power lines and other damaged infrastructure. A long stretch of the New York State Thruway remained closed for the morning commute due to flooding.
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• Current Events About Social Problems In Brazil
  As Prosperity Rises in Brazil’s Northeast, So Does Drug Violence (NY Times) The geography of violence in Brazil has been turned on its head the past few years. In the southeast, home to Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and many of the country’s most enduring stereotypes of shootouts and kidnappings, the murder rate actually dropped by 47 percent between 1999 and 2009, according to a study by José Maria Nóbrega, a political science professor at the Federal University of Campina Grande.
  
  But here in the northeast, a poor region that benefited most from the wealth-transfer programs that former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva championed during his eight years in office, the murder rate nearly doubled in the same 10-year period, turning this area into the nation’s most violent, Dr. Nóbrega found.
  
  Salvador, the region’s largest city, is one of Brazil’s biggest tourist draws, the gateway to some of the country’s most spectacular beaches. And like Rio, it is preparing to co-host the 2014 World Cup. So the authorities here are taking a page from Rio’s playbook, trying to grapple with the surge in violent crime by establishing permanent police units in violent areas frequented by drug traffickers.
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• Current Events About Migrants In China
  China Takes Aim at Rural Influx (NY Times) Xie Zhenqing spent 12 years transforming a collection of ramshackle houses into Red Star, a privately run, low-cost school for 1,400 children of migrants from poor rural areas. It took just a few hours this month for a government-dispatched demolition crew to turn the place into a jagged pile of bricks.
  
  “What the government did to us is unconscionable,” Ms. Xie, Red Star’s principal, said angrily as parents of her students scrambled to find other arrangements before the start of the new school year on Thursday. “I’ll never work for a migrant school again.”
  
  Red Star is one of 30 technically illegal private schools in Beijing that have been torn down or closed in recent weeks in an official campaign billed as a war against unsafe and unhygienic school buildings. In all, more than 30,000 students have lost their classrooms this summer. Advocates for the migrants warn that many of the capital’s 130 other unlicensed schools could be next.
  
  Some observers see other motives behind the campaign, including the municipal government’s unceasing pursuit of land sales to fill its coffers. The site where Red Star once stood is already surrounded by a crop of expensive high-rise apartment towers and a new subway station.
  
  But school administrators, parents and many Beijingers view the bulldozing as nothing more than a roughshod exercise in population control. According to the Beijing Bureau of Statistics, more than one-third of the capital’s 19.6 million residents are migrants from China’s rural hinterland, a figure that has grown by about 6 million just since 2000.
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• Current Events About Energy Sources In Germany
  Germany Dims Nuclear Plants, but Hopes to Keep Lights On (NY Times) Nuclear plants have long generated nearly a quarter of Germany’s electricity. But after the tsunami and earthquake that sent radiation spewing from Fukushima, half a world away, the government disconnected the 8 oldest of Germany’s 17 reactors — including the two in this drab factory town — within days. Three months later, with a new plan to power the country without nuclear energy and a growing reliance on renewable energy, Parliament voted to close them permanently. There are plans to retire the remaining nine reactors by 2022.
  
  As a result, electricity producers are scrambling to ensure an adequate supply. Customers and companies are nervous about whether their lights and assembly lines will stay up and running this winter. Economists and politicians argue over how much prices will rise.
  
  “It’s easy to say, ‘Let’s just go for renewables,’ and I’m quite sure we can someday do without nuclear, but this is too abrupt,” said Joachim Knebel, chief scientist at Germany’s prestigious Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. He characterized the government’s shutdown decision as “emotional” and pointed out that on most days, Germany has survived this experiment only by importing electricity from neighboring France and the Czech Republic, which generate much of their power with nuclear reactors.
  
  
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• A Story About Iraqi And Libyan "Liberation"
  From a Few Iraqis, a Word to Libyans on Liberation (NY Times) What emerged in Iraq after the fall of Mr. Hussein’s government was a society of everyone for themselves, individually and in small groups, grabbing for what they could get — literally, through looting, and eventually through the political process. This has made many Iraqis weary of the chaos of Iraqi-style democracy. Increasingly, they want a strong hand — elected by the people — to wield power.
  
  From the cafe here, where other men were playing dominoes and backgammon, smoking hookahs and drinking tea, these veterans of national turmoil provided armchair advice for the Libyans. Their insights, not exactly brimming with appreciation for democracy, were illustrative of the problems that still plague Iraq and, they suspect, will await Libya if its people do not act quickly.
  
  Among their advice: Do not trust expatriates who rush back to stake a claim in the new government. Avoid a parliamentary system. And do not ostracize members of the former regime, as happened in Iraq under the so-called de-Baathification policy.
  
  “People came from the outside to run Iraq, and they didn’t understand the suffering we had lived through,” said Firas Abdul Hadi, 28, an engineer in the office of the mayor of Baghdad, referring to how Iraqis who fled the country under Mr. Hussein’s rule tried to claim power when they returned.
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• Current Events About Muslims In America
  Survey of US Muslim Attitudes Finds Little Support for Extremism (VOA News) Since the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, many Americans have worried about the potential for home grown militancy among Muslims living in the United States. A new survey of American Muslims suggests that a decade after the attacks, there is very little support for extremism.
  
  The survey by The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life was released just ahead of the 10th anniversary of the September 11 attacks and on the Eid al-Fitr holiday marking the end of Ramadan.
  
  According to the survey of more than 1,000 American Muslims, only one percent said suicide bombings and other forms of violence against civilians are often justified to defend Islam from its enemies.
  
  Pew researcher Gregory Smith says that the findings show very little support for extremism among Muslims in the United States.
  
  "The overwhelming number say things like suicide bombings can never be justified," said Smith. "They say they have very unfavorable views of al-Qaida. We also find that Muslims in the United States are very satisfied with their lives. They're satisfied with their communities. They're satisfied with the direction of the country."
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The Friendly Universe - Law of Attraction in Action