Sunday Morning News

Obama's NSC Will Get New Power
Directive Expands Makeup and Role Of Security Body
By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 8, 2009; Page A01
President Obama plans to order a sweeping overhaul of the National Security Council, expanding its membership and increasing its authority to set strategy across a wide spectrum of international and domestic issues.

The result will be a "dramatically different" NSC from that of the Bush administration or any of its predecessors since the forum was established after World War II to advise the president on diplomatic and military matters, according to national security adviser James L. Jones, who described the changes in an interview. "The world that we live in has changed so dramatically in this decade that organizations that were created to meet a certain set of criteria no longer are terribly useful," he said.

No crisis yet, but Obama finding world won't wait for him

By Warren P. Strobel | McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON - In the midst of the presidential campaign last October, Barack Obama's running mate, Joe Biden, warned that within six months of Obama's election, "We're gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy."

The prediction hasn't come true yet, but unfriendly nations and international competitors already are stepping up their efforts to challenge the young new president or at the very least get his attention.

USA

The next president of America?
He's a non-drinking, non-smoking vegetarian, who went from a Rhodes scholarship at Oxford to being the charismatic mayor of the "worst city in America". Here, Gaby Wood talks to Cory Booker about chasing robbers, saving Newark and turning down Obama
Gaby Wood
The Observer, Sunday 8 February 2009
Martin Luther King weekend, 2009. In a beautiful 19th-century church in Newark, New Jersey a young jazz musician has just performed a dizzying solo. Two days from now, the first African American president of the United States will take over the White House, and Newark - a city that has been predominantly black since the 1960s - is celebrating. Dr King's dream has, the church service programme declares, "become reality". As the applause mounts, a figure familiar to the assembled citizens hops into the pulpit.

"Oh!" he shouts in praise of the pianist, closing his eyes to emphasise the collective ecstasy. The congregation cheers. "Ohhhhh!" he repeats. More noise from the pews. "Can I get a witness!" he calls out, using the motivational cadences of a preacher to ride the natural rhythms of the crowd.

In search of the flesh-and-blood Abraham Lincoln
Henry Louis Gates' documentary examines the 16th president from many angles.
By Reed Johnson
February 8, 2009

For Henry Louis Gates Jr., the challenge of making a documentary about Abraham Lincoln was daunting but ultimately too good to pass up.

The only question was, which Abraham Lincoln?

"I got this reading list, and every book I read had a different Lincoln in it," says the Harvard University history professor by phone from Washington, D.C.
There was Lincoln the Great Emancipator, Lincoln the White Supremacist, Lincoln the Martyr, Lincoln the Tyrant/War Criminal, Lincoln the Romantic Lover, the Melancholic, the Atheist, the Orator, the Opportunist, the Gay, the Hero of Fidel Castro. . . . "And ultimately Lincoln the Unknown," Gates summarizes. "I thought it could be fun, without even using the word, to do a postmodern Lincoln.

Europe

War's Lingering Scars Slow Bosnia's Economic Growth

By DAN BILEFSKY
Published: February 7, 2009
SARAJEVO, Bosnia and Herzegovina - During the three-and-a-half-year siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s, Brano Vujicic provided Internet access to thousands in Bosnia, braving Serbian grenades thrown under his window and countering the constant electricity cuts by hacking into the Bosnian president's power supply.
"Doing business was an act of defiance and escape," said Mr. Vujicic, who managed to send e-mail messages to friends and clients twice a day during the height of the siege. "We needed a way out of Sarajevo and a way to communicate with the world."

British film tipped to take Berlin Film Festival by storm

By Jonathan Romney in Berlin Sunday, 8 February 2009
Jude Law in drag and Dame Judi Dench as a cynical fashionista are among the stars of a new British film tipped to be the talking point of the Berlin Film Festival. With a cast including Eddie Izzard, Steve Buscemi and model Lily Cole, Rage, by London-based writer-director Sally Potter, plays in competition on Sunday and promises a pithy critique of the fashion industry in the age of globalisation.

A low-budget feature set in the New York fashion world, Rage takes the form of a series of to-camera interviews as a murder investigation unfolds. The film features 14 actors, and despite its mixed cast of big names and relative unknowns, says Potter, "each worked for just a couple of days on a completely equal pro rata basis" The film's execution belies its glamorous background. The shooting took place with only three people present at any time: the actor, a sound recordist and Potter, operating the camera herself.

Middle East

Israeli Arabs fear a Gaza backlash as far right prepares for power role
 The elections have been overshadowed by Gaza - and the man most likely to gain takes the hardest line on the conflict
Peter Beaumont in Umm Al-Fahm
The Observer, Sunday 8 February 2009
Fadi Mustafa is a successful young PR executive. He has an office in Tel Aviv and another in the northern Israeli Arab town of Umm al-Fahm, where his family home is. He encourages other young Israeli Arabs to break through the glass ceiling of discrimination. He was what Israeli Arabs call a "straight back", in contrast to a previous generation - the "bent backs" who were bowed down by the experience of the creation of the Israeli state and the wars that followed.

He will look any Israeli in the eye as an equal, he insists, and shows me a painting that was given to him by the Israeli artist Menashe Kadishman.

But right now Fadi is an angry man, enraged by the rise of Avigdor Lieberman and his Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel Our Homeland) Party.

Israeli elections: Be afraid. Be very afraid
Donald Macintyre reports from Jerusalem on an election campaign that is still too close to call, but one with ominous portents
Sunday, 8 February 2009
Israel's Foreign Minister, Tzipi Livni, last night launched a concerted final effort to become her nation's first woman leader since Golda Meir, despite the rightwards shift in public opinion that has threatened to propel Benjamin Netanyahu back into the premiership.

The leader of the centrist Kadima party, who began the closing stages of her campaign with a rally for Druze Arab voters in Galilee last night, issued a direct personal challenge to Mr Netanyahu to agree to the television debate which he has consistently refused.

As polls showing the lead of Mr Netanyahu's right-wing Likud party has narrowed to only two seats ahead of Kadima, Ms Livni's campaign team believes she can overtake her rival by the time Israel goes to the polls on Tuesday.

Asia?

Australia ablaze as bushfires kill 66, destroy 700 homes
From Times Online
February 8, 2009
Sophie Tedmanson in Sydney
Bushfires that raged across southern Australia this weekend killing 66 people, destroying 700 homes and decimating whole towns, have been described as "hell on earth" and are threatening to become the worst fire disaster in the country's history. Victoria is ablaze with 26 fires which continued to burn today amid record-breaking temperatures after leaving a trail of death and devastation across the state on Saturday.

The Australian Army has been called into assist the thousands of weary firefighters who have been battling the blazes over the past 24 hours, and the government has announced a $10 million (£4.5 million) emergency relief fund to help the thousands of Victorians now left homeless.

The Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd toured the worst-affected areas, offering support to people who had lost everything, and was even a shoulder to cry on for one devastated man

Sri Lanka military: 10,000 civilians flee war zone

By BHARATHA MALLAWARACHI, Associated Press Write
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka - More than 10,000 civilians have fled Sri Lanka's northern war zone over the last two days, an official said Sunday as government forces appear poised to crush the separatist Tamil Tigers.
The military's relentless offensive in recent months has almost routed the rebels, virtually ending their 25-year war for a separate Tamil nation in the Sinhalese-majority country.
The United Nations and aid agencies have expressed concern for the estimated 250,000 civilians trapped in the shrinking sliver of land still controlled by the Tigers.
On Sunday, military spokesman Brig. Udaya Nanayakkara said 5,000 civilians fled the war zone for government territory Friday while another 5,600 crossed over Saturday.

Africa

The slum, the refuge and a woman they call mama
Lucy Kayiwa is on a mission: to rescue abandoned children in Kenya's biggest shanty town
John Carlin
The Observer, Sunday 8 February 2009
On the walls of the refuge that Mama Lucy runs for abandoned children in Kibera, a slum on the fringes of Nairobi, hang drawings depicting scenes of extreme mob violence. In the middle, a man on all fours is being beaten by men with sticks; to the right, a man on his knees pleads for his life as he is about to be stabbed; tucked away on the bottom lefthand corner, a man runs from a crowd brandishing machetes; all around, buildings on fire. There are captions that read: "Burn him!" and "Is that a human?" and "Kill him, he is a Kikuyu!"

The author is a thin, quiet boy of 15 called Denver whose parents both died of Aids, and who is HIV positive himself. His pictures are his vision of the ethnic violence that erupted in Kibera in January last year after the electoral victory by the party of Kenya's dominant Kikuyu tribe.

Tainted teething syrup kills 84 babies in Nigeria
'My Child' medicine found to contain anti-freeze

By Daniel Howden, Africa correspondent
At least 84 babies have died in Nigeria after being fed a tainted teething syrup containing chemicals used in anti-freeze and brake fluid, the Health Ministry in Abuja has revealed.

The contaminated drug called My Pikin, Nigerian pidgin for "my child", brought on fever, convulsions, diarrhoea and vomiting, and left the victims unable to urinate. Of the 111 babies known to have received the poisonous batch, three-quarters have died. The scale of the fatalities and the horrendous nature of the babies' deaths has sparked outrage in the West African nation, where the government is accused of failing to warn families of the danger. "The death of any Nigerian child is a great loss to the nation," said Nigeria's Health Minister Babatunde Oshotimehin. "The Ministry of Health sincerely regrets this painful incidence and sympathises with the nation and the families directly affected."

Latin America

New Bolivia constitution in force
Bolivia's President Evo Morales has enacted a new constitution that aims to empower the country's indigenous majority and allows for land reform.
The BBC
Mr Morales said he had accomplished his mission to re-found Bolivia.
The new constitution was approved in a referendum last month by 61% of voters, but was rejected in the lowland regions where Bolivia's wealth is concentrated.
The constitution also scraps the single term limit for the president, allowing Mr Morales to seek re-election.
Mr Morales is Bolivia's first indigenous president.
Speaking to thousands of supporters in the town of El Alto, near the administrative capital of La Paz, Mr Morales said his opponents had "tried ceaselessly" to kill him.
"Now I want to tell you that they can drag me from the palace. They can kill me. Mission accomplished for the re-founding of the new united Bolivia."