Gina Keating & Carol Bishopric | Los Angeles | November 20

Reuters - A Florida jury on Thursday ordered cigarette maker Philip Morris USA to pay $300 million in damages to a 61-year-old ex-smoker named Cindy Naugle who is wheelchair-bound by emphysema.

The Broward Circuit Court jury assessed $56.6 million in past and future medical expenses against the company, part of Altria Group Inc, as well as $244 million in punitive damages.

The verdict is the largest of the so-called Engle progeny cases that have been tried so far, both sides said.

Michael Smallberg | Nov 20

POGO - The House Financial Services Committee voted 43-26 yesterday afternoon in favor of an amendment introduced by Reps. Ron Paul (R-TX) and Alan Grayson (D-FL) that would remove restrictions preventing the GAO from auditing the Federal Reserve. The amendment was modeled after Rep. Paul’s long-standing bill to audit the Fed, which was co-sponsored by over 300 Members in the House and supported by POGO and many other groups.

The vote on the final passage of the financial regulatory package to which the Paul-Grayson amendment is attached has been delayed until after Thanksgiving. Nonetheless, yesterday’s vote signals a defeat for Rep. Mel Watt (D-NC), who had introduced an alternative amendment that would have limited the scope of the GAO’s audits.

Kudos to FDL: FDL Statement on the Committee Passage of H.R. 1207, the Paul-Grayson Bill to Audit the Fed

Julian Borger | Halifax | Nov 20

The Guardian - The Canadian government was fending off calls for a public inquiry on torture today after allegations from one of its senior diplomats that Canada was complicit in the torture of Afghan detainees.

Richard Colvin, who was second in command at Canada's Kabul embassy in 2006 and 2007, said that Afghans swept up in security sweeps by Canadian troops during that time were routinely handed over to the Afghan intelligence services.

"According to our information, the likelihood is that all the Afghans we handed over were tortured," Colvin told Canada's parliament. "For interrogators in Kandahar, it was standard operating procedure.

"In other words, we detained, and handed over for severe torture, a lot of innocent people."

Colvin said his frequent memos about the abuse were ignored and that senior officials attempted to cover up Canada's complicity until prisoner transfer procedures were changed in 2007, partly as a result of his complaints.

Hugh Bronstein | Bogota | Nov 20

Reuters - Colombia will not be provoked into armed conflict with Venezuela despite the neighboring country's aggressive rhetoric and its dynamiting of two cross-border pedestrian bridges, Colombia's defense minister said on Friday.

"We will not be provoked. The insults bounce off us," Gabriel Silva told local radio a day after Venezuelan troops dynamited the two suspended wooden plank pathways connecting the countries.

Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez this month ordered his army to prepare for war after Colombia signed a military cooperation pact with Washington allowing U.S. troops increased access to its territory to run anti-narcotics surveillance flights.

Chavez says the agreement could set the stage for a U.S. invasion of oil-rich Venezuela, a claim that Washington and Bogota dismiss. He calls Colombian President Alvaro Uribe "a traitor" to the region for signing the deal.

Venezuela says the narrow bridges were illegally built and used by smugglers. But Colombia's Foreign Ministry issued a statement calling the destruction of the bridges "an aggression against the civilian population and the frontier communities."

Warren Richey | Washington | November 19

CSM - Judge David Hamilton is elevated to the US appeals court, after GOP effort to stall a vote failed. Republican resistance signals more political fights are likely over Obama's nominees to the federal bench.

The US Senate voted 59 to 39 on Thursday to elevate Judge David Hamilton from his current job as chief judge at the federal courthouse in Indianapolis to a seat on the Seventh US Circuit Court of Appeals.

The vote comes eight months after Judge Hamilton was nominated to the Chicago-based appeals court.

Singapore | November 12

World Bank - World Bank President Robert Zoellick has said in 15 years the Chinese yuan can become an alternative to US dollar as a global reserve currency, with China's fast economic growth and efforts to internationalise the currency.

Scott Lanman | Washington | November 19

Bloomberg - A U.S. House committee advanced a proposal to remove a three-decade ban on congressional audits of Federal Reserve interest-rate decisions, a measure backed by a lawmaker who has called for the abolition of the central bank.

The House Financial Services Committee today, in a 43-26 vote and a second voice vote, attached the amendment for a broad audit of the Fed to legislation creating a council of regulators to monitor systemic risk. The proposal was offered by Representative Ron Paul, a Republican from Texas, and based on a bill with more than 300 co-sponsors.

Johann Hari | Nov 20

The Independent - Before you can appeal to America's voters you have to appeal to the corporations

Almost a year after Barack Obama ascended to the White House, many of his supporters are bemused. His healthcare bill is a hefty improvement but it still won't provide coverage for all Americans, and may not provide a public alternative to the over-charging insurance companies - if it passes at all. His environmental team is vandalising the vital Copenhagen conference by saying the US – the single biggest emitter of warming gases – will not sign up to any legally binding restrictions there. He has placed the deregulation-fanatics who caused the New Depression, like Lawrence Summers, in charge of the recovery. Despite the real improvements on Bush – such as the end of torture, the resumption of stem-cell research, and opposition to the coup in Honduras – many people are asking: why he is delivering so little, so slowly?

A pair of seemingly small stories about the forces warping American politics can help us to answer this question. At first glance, they will seem like preposterous caricatures, but the facts are plain. The institutions that are blocking progress on all these issues – Republicans in the Senate, and the mighty corporate lobbying machine that bankrolls both parties – have rallied over the past few months to defend two causes with very little popular support in the United States: rape and slavery. No, really. If we begin to explain how this came to pass, then we might see why the American political system is malfunctioning so badly, even after a landslide victory for change.

Sean O'Grady | Nov 20

The Independent - When the masters of the universe came crashing down to earth last year, the reverberations were felt far beyond Wall Street and the City. Sean O'Grady surveys the best of the books that explode the myth that greed is good

One of the few welcome consequences of the global recession has been a modest upsurge in economic literacy, or at least interest. That's not to be exaggerated; most people still don't know their asset-backed securities from the elbows, but at least we're making some attempt to redress that deficit of understanding.

No previous economic crisis has brought forth such a crop of words – over 3,000 new books, a few more reprints, trillions of column inches of newspaper, magazine and web pieces, official reports, not to mention a Facebook page devoted to "Recession Survivors" and those Twittering and blogging their way to an understanding of seismic changes. OK, it isn't much to throw into the balance when you have mass unemployment, the derangement of national finances and the destruction of the world's banking system on the other side, but at least we are creeping towards some acknowledgement of what went wrong, and why. That's something.

So, what to read? A bit like the bewildering complexity of "exotic derivatives" that helped to get us into this mess (and which the bankers themselves never understood), the choice seems endless. It really boils down to which of the three prevalent treatments of the crisis you prefer: the anecdotal, the analytical or the apoplectic.

Steve Connor | Nov 20

The Independent -

Revolutionary treatment using human embryos for patients with incurable blindness

People suffering from a form of incurable blindness could soon become the first patients in the world to benefit from a new and controversial transplant operation using stem cells derived from spare human embryos left over from IVF treatment.

Scientists working for an American biotechnology company yesterday applied for a licence to carry out a clinical trial on patients in the US suffering from a type of macular degeneration, which causes gradual loss of vision. They expect the transplant operations to begin early in the new year.

The development is highly controversial because many "pro-life" groups are opposed to using human embryos in any kind of medical research but scientists believe that the benefits could revolutionise the treatment of many incurable disorders ranging from Parkinson's to heart disease.

The company has applied for a licence from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and is confident of its application being granted.

Moscow | November 19

BBC - Russia's ban on the death penalty will remain when a current legal suspension expires on 1 January, the country's Constitutional Court has ruled.

It said the use of the death penalty was now impossible because Russia had signed international deals banning it.

Montréal, Québec | November 19

CBC - China's terracotta warriors are coming to Montreal in 2011.

The Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal will receive rare visit of 14 of the warriors — life-sized replicas of soldiers of the Qin dynasty — it announced on Thursday.

David Brown | November 19

WaPo - If a biologist had to pick one living thing as the textbook of how genes work, what would it be?

Corn seems to be a good answer.

Now the scientific world has at hand the complete genome sequence of corn, announced by researchers who have collaborated over the past four years and published their results Thursday. A package of 14 research papers in Science and PLoS Genetics accompanying the genome release suggests corn still has some useful secrets to reveal.

Nicholas Wade | Madison, WI | November 19

NYT - Whenever modern humans reached a new continent in the expansion from their African homeland 50,000 years ago, whether Australia, Europe or the Americas, all the large fauna quickly disappeared.

This circumstantial evidence from the fossil record suggests that people’s first accomplishment upon reaching new territory was to hunt all its all large animals to death. But apologists for the human species have invoked all manner of alternative agents, like climate change and asteroid impacts.

A careful analysis of lake deposits in New York and Wisconsin has brought new data to bear on this heated debate. A team led by Jacquelyn Gill, a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, has uncovered a critical sequence of events that rules out some explanations for the extinction of the large animals and severely constrains others.

Stephen Castle & Steven Erlanger | Brussels | November 19

NYT - Leaders of the 27 countries of the European Union on Thursday night chose Herman van Rompuy [wikipedia], the Belgian prime minister, as the European Union’s first president, and Catherine Ashton [wikipedia] of Britain, currently the group’s trade commissioner, as its high representative for foreign policy. The vote was unanimous.

Both are highly respected but little known outside their own countries. After an eight-year battle to rewrite its internal rules and to pass the Lisbon Treaty that created these two new jobs, the choice of such unknown figures seemed to highlight Europe’s problems instead of its readiness to take a more united and forceful place in world affairs.

James Halpin | Anchorage | Nov 18

adn.com - Two Anchorage men who told investigators they were horsing around with a "redneck flamethrower" set a 5-year-old boy's head on fire and have been charged with felony assault and reckless endangerment, according to police and court records.

Jonathon Michael Miller, 29, and Stephen Ray Dilley II, 32, were jailed Tuesday after inflicting second-degree burns to the boy's head and singing his hair with an aerosol sprayer and lighter, according to Alaska State Troopers. The child, who was injured Friday, did not receive medical treatment until arriving at school near his home in Anchor Point on Monday.

"It was described to the troopers as an accident," troopers spokeswoman Megan Peters said. "I mean a child, two guys, can of Quick Start, Bic lighter: How could this not go wrong?"

According to a troopers' affidavit filed in court, Miller told investigators he's been trying to toughen the boy up and the best way to do it is to "scare the s--t out of them when they don't see it coming."

Asked why the child had not gotten treatment, Miller told investigators, "Why go make bills for yourself over little things," according to the affidavit.

Jim Lobe | Washington | Nov 19

IPS - While Cuban President Raul Castro has implemented some economic and administrative reforms, his three-year-old government has continued to isolate and persecute political dissidents, according to a major new report released here Wednesday by Human Rights Watch (HRW).

"In his three years in power, Raul Castro has been just as brutal as his brother (Fidel)," said Jose Miguel Vivanco, HRW's veteran Americas director. "Cubans who dare to criticise the government live in perpetual fear, knowing they could wind up in prison for merely expressing their views."

The 123-page report, "New Castro, Same Cuba"(PDF), comes on the eve of an unprecedented hearing by the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Representatives on legislation that would end the nearly 50-year ban on travel by U.S. citizens to Cuba. The legislation currently has 180 co-sponsors, and many observers believe the House could approve it some time early next year.

While the new report is expected to be used as ammunition by anti-Castro lawmakers led by Florida Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen to argue against any moves that would relax the U.S. embargo, Vivanco stressed that HRW favours lifting both the travel ban and the embargo as part of a strategy designed to enlist Europe and Latin America in a concerted effort to press Havana to grant its citizens more freedoms.

"The embargo has failed and must be changed," he said.

"Rather than isolating Cuba, the policy has isolated the United States, enabling the Castro government to garner sympathy abroad while simultaneously alienating Washington's potential allies," the report noted.

Yara Bayoumy and Peter Graff | Kabul | Nov 19

Reuters - Veteran Afghan leader Hamid Karzai was sworn in as president on Thursday, pledging to fight graft and take control of his country's security before his five-year term ends, after a fraud-marred election left his image in ruins.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari were among dignitaries attending the ceremony in an ornate hall in Karzai's sprawling Kabul palace.

Outside, the capital was all but a ghost town, with police shutting down all streets and ordering citizens to stay home.

In the south, where the Taliban-led insurgency is at its deadliest since the war began eight years ago, a suicide bomber wearing a vest packed with explosives killed 10 civilians in a crowded market and a car bomb killed two U.S. soldiers.

Karzai, 51, called for reconciliation with enemies and proposed a "loya jirga", a traditional grand assembly, which under Afghanistan's constitution can take precedence over all government institutions, including the presidency itself.

"We welcome those who are not affiliated with any terrorist organisations and whose hands are not red with Afghans' blood," he said. He described corruption as a menace to the state, and promised measures to fight it.

hmmm, what about greedy relatives, crony's and druglords? ahhh the administration two-step

Brad Knickerbocker | Washington | November 18

CSM - Though the congressional debate and legislative sausage-making are far from over, the Senate took a major step Wednesday in putting forth a $849 billion healthcare reform bill.

The bill, launched by Senate majority leader Harry Reid – and vigorously opposed by Republicans – aims to provide health insurance for 94 percent of all Americans, including 31 million people now uninsured.

Nov 19

Jerusalem Post - The US is too bogged down in Afghanistan to engage Iran militarily over its nuclear program, an ex-CIA South Asia expert and current adviser to US President Barack Obama said in Tel Aviv on Tuesday.

Bruce Riedel, a senior Brookings Institute and Saban Center fellow for political transitions in the Middle East and South Asia, addressed scholars and journalists at Tel Aviv University's Institute for National Security Studies.

He warned that the US was fighting a losing battle against Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan, and that Washington would soon have to make difficult choices on beefing up troop levels there.

"Israelis need to understand that there's going to be a huge drain on resources, attention and capital, and that will have implications," Riedel told The Jerusalem Post before his talk.

He acknowledged that those implications would primarily affect the Iran question.

During his address, Riedel referred to the US's commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan, and said, "We've got two wars. You've got to be bold to say, let's start a war against a third party, particularly when the third party can hit you in the first two fronts."
The US has learned that it "can't fight two medium-sized wars simultaneously," he said (h/t Bernhard)

Nov 19

AFP - UN experts will visit a controversial uranium enrichment plant south of Tehran on Thursday, as US President Barack Obama warned of "consequences" after Iran dismissed a UN-brokered nuclear fuel deal.

The visit by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) team to the plant, which is being built inside a mountain near the Shiite holy city of Qom, was announced on Wednesday by Iran's envoy to the IAEA, Ali Asghar Soltanieh.

"It is a routine visit," a source close to Iran's nuclear body told AFP about the inspection, which is the second by the IAEA in less than a month.

Four inspectors first visited the plant on October 25 after its disclosure by Iran to the agency triggered intense outrage in the West.

"This site will, from now on, be under the IAEA. And for your information there will be tomorrow another inspection of this site in order to make sure that we are fully cooperating," Soltanieh told reporters in Vienna on Wednesday.

Dhaka | Nov 19

DPA - Bangladesh's Supreme Court on Thursday rejected the appeals of five men convicted in the assassination of the country's founder Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, upholding a previous death verdict against 12 former soldiers convicted for the murder.

A five-judge panel headed by Justice Tafazzul Islam delivered the verdict Thursday, after 29 days of hearings, in a crowded court amid heightened security, state attorney Anisul Haq said.

Five of those convicted are on death row in Dhaka Central Jail while the rest have absconded abroad.

Mujibur, one of Bangladesh's independence heroes, was killed along with most of his family on August 15, 1975 by a group of disgruntled army officers in a military putsch which overthrew the South Asian country's elected government.

The verdict of death by hanging will be carried out in a month unless the convicts file a review petition to the court and seek presidential pardon for their convictions, Haq said.

Kristen mack | Chicago | Nov 19

LA Times - Studs Terkel, the American storyteller, author, radio host, actor and activist, sought a job at the FBI, according to recently released documents.

Terkel, who died last year at 96, applied for a job in the FBI's fingerprints division in the 1930s. "It's a non-agent position," FBI spokesman Bill Carter said. "You would have to go through a background investigation, the same as you would for an agent, but you don't have arrest powers."

Instead of hiring Terkel, the agency ended up amassing a file on him. The FBI spent 45 years tracking him as a suspected communist, according to the 147 pages released from his 269-page dossier. The file was obtained by the New York City News Service under an act that requires the FBI to release certain documents to the public after an individual has died.

Terkel's paper trail started in 1945. It references Terkel speaking at a Paul Robeson rally in Chicago and quotes a source who questioned Terkel's "loyalty to the United States" because he worked with the BBC on a piece about the "sordid side of life in Chicago."

His file ends in 1990, when agents cut and pasted a Wall Street Journal article quoting his reaction to financier Michael Milken's junk-bond scandal.

"We live in a corrupt, amoral moment," Terkel said. "There are a million Milkens. He's reflective of our society at this time. People have lost their sense of outrage."

Richard Fausset | Atlanta | Nov 19

LA Times - A federal judge says the agency showed 'gross negligence' in the years before Katrina. The ruling could leave the government open to billions in claims.

In a ruling that could leave the government open to billions of dollars in claims from Hurricane Katrina victims, a federal judge said late Wednesday that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had displayed "gross negligence" in failing to maintain a navigation channel -- resulting in levee breaches that flooded large swaths of greater New Orleans.

U.S. District Judge Stanwood R. Duval peppered his 156-page decision, issued in New Orleans, with harsh criticism of the Army corps, at one point citing its "insouciance, myopia and shortsightedness" in failing to maintain the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet, known locally as MRGO.

For more than 40 years, the judge said, the corps had known that a crucial levee protecting suburban St. Bernard Parish and the Lower 9th Ward neighborhood would be compromised by the deterioration of the channel. The corps had "myriad" ways to address the problem, he wrote, but failed to do so.

Duval awarded a total of $719,000 to a small group of flood victims that sued the government in April 2006.

But according to Pierce O'Donnell, the lead plaintiff's counsel, roughly 100,000 New Orleans-area residents and businesses who have filed flood-damage claims with the Army corps were now potentially eligible for payment.

"The judge agreed with us that Katrina was not a natural disaster," O'Donnell said. "Katrina was a man-made disaster caused by the Army Corps of Engineers."

Andrew Buncombe | Nov 19

The Independent - The magician who mesmerised the world has been reduced to performing in a fast-food joint as his country embraces the ways of the West

20 of 50 Greatest Magic Tricks - Indian Rope Trick (Amazing)

Download @ Punjabi Lok Virsa Media Center
By any standard, Ishamuddin Khan is a man of remarkable talents. Back in 1995, this traditional Indian magician or madari, completed the first successful outdoor performance of a trick that had been whispered about for centuries but that no one before had mastered. When, before an amazed audience on the southern edge of Delhi, Ishamuddin managed a convincing rendition of the legendary Indian rope trick, it made headlines around the world that ought to have secured his place in the history of magic and won him lasting recognition at home.

Yet that has not happened. Almost 15 years after he performed a trick that many experts believed to be impossible – in 1934 the Magic Circle in London offered a prize of 500 guineas to anyone who could do it – Ishamuddin is struggling, not only for recognition but simply to get by. While he has toured Britain, Europe and Japan to display his mesmerising skills, he says that India is increasingly turning its back on traditional performers such as himself in its race to become all things modern. To supplement his job devising magic tricks to encourage school children to learn science, he sometimes works as a conjurer at McDonald's.

"Every capital city around the world that I have been in has an area for street performers," said the 42-year-old, who lives in a crowded cluster of tiny homes in west Delhi known as the Kathputli – or puppeteers' – colony: an area rich with the skills of performers, musicians and craftsmen but sorely lacking in facilities. "But rich people in India are offended if you talk about street performing. They are only interested in computers or software. I am poor but I am suffering not so much from poverty as I am from the attitude of the Indian government. I am happy in my poverty but I would like people to respect me as I am. I would like recognition."

For centuries, stories have been told in India and beyond about a magic trick in which an ordinary rope is made to rise upwards before a young boy climbs up and disappears into the sky. The spellbinding story may have been partly inspired by the fairy tales of King Bhoja, who throws a thread into the sky and then ascends. Ibn Battuta, a 14th-century Moroccan explorer and scholar, also wrote of seeing such a trick performed in China, while mention of the deed in India was made by the 17th-century Indian emperor Jahangir, whose memoirs were first translated in 1829.