2008 Year in Review

Highlights:

• Early January our new Ambassador, Eric John, arrived.  Ambassador John served primarily in East Asia with three tours in Seoul Korea his latest as Minister Counselor for Political Affairs.   I continued to have visitors from CGFS/Charleston and Management Counselors/FMOs on consultations in route to embassies.  Chris Flaggs, the former Deputy Comptroller, became Comptroller and visited us along with Jim Millette and Alan Evans, Director Financial  Management Systems the end of February.  During the visit a Town Hall was held with Systems Development and Maintenance staff.  My OIG colleague and mentor, Alan Berenson, stopped by for consultations on his way to Tokyo.  

• I attended an Offsite conference at CGFS/CHS representing CGFS/Bangkok from January 14-18.

• Continued training with the Voucher Examiner class February 4-8.  

• Jim Basso, who covered for me last year when I was absent for three months due to surgery and recovery, departed post in February. 

• Renewed weekly conference calls with Charleston 8:00 a.m. Tuesday in Bangkok but 9:00 p.m. Monday night in the U.S.

• Attended FMO conference in Washington D.C. May 5-8.  Perfect timing to attend Jeffrey's graduation.

• Sharon Yang would replace Steve Carignan as USDO in June.

• Butch Davisson arrived June 15 for consultations with different offices.  Butch was able to join us at the J.W. Marriott for a going away dinner hosted by Bobby Raja my tailor.  An old friend, Vince Abramo, from Peace Corps days, was able to join us.  Vince was working with OBO as a construction safety manager.  Vince and I go way back to the early 70's when I was in Liberia.  

• We departed Bangkok July 16th.

• After officially retiring and attending the Job Search program I came on board with Department of State Office of Inspector General (OIG) as a Retired Annuitant (REA) and began my job as a Management Inspector.  

• My first assignment was inspecting our embassies in Banjul, The Gambia See Post: Edit (blogger.com); Luanda, Angola See Post: Edit (blogger.com)  and Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso; See Faso Post: Edit (blogger.com)  The three inspections took six weeks. 

• For fall cycle inspections we are guaranteed to return home by Thanksgiving.  As part pf the OIG "no surprises" policy each inspector on the team would clear their findings and recommendations with the respective head of each section.  A draft report was reviewed with the Ambassador and often the Country Team before we departed post so everyone was on board.    

Favorite Memories:

• Brother Chris and my Meehan cousins from Norwich, U.K. Liz and John Froud visited Thailand  end of January.  Sadly, John and Liz passed away in early 2021 within days of each other.

                   

• Raine and Dick visit Bangkok in February and we made our way up to Chang Rai and from there took a boat ride on the Mekong river through the "Golden Triangle" where the borders of Thailand, Laos and Myanmar meet and is infamous for trafficking of opium and heroin shipped across the border to Northern Thailand and down to Bangkok.    

 

March 4th we took our visitors to the Baan Klang Nam 2 seafood restaurant.

Doris and David Visit Viet Nam end of March

• Visit to Phenom Penh and Ankor Wat with David April 11-13

For more photos and narrative see:  Doris and Bill Travel Adventures Blog: Angkor Wat Cambodia 

• Jeffrey graduates from Virginia Tech on May 9th.

• Hoda Kotb, of the NBC Today Show, a 1986 graduate, was the commencement speaker

                                                  

• Tennis at JUSMAG compound; Tournaments with Thai Police

• Visit to Phuket May 17-19

 

For more photos see:  Doris and Bill Travel Adventures Blog Phuket

• Farewell dinner at J.W. Marriott by Bobby Raja.  Butch Davisson from CGFS/Charleston and my old friend from Peace Corps days, Vince Abramo were also able to attend.

• We had an excellent American dentist on the JUSMAG compound by the name of Dr. Dick Graham.  After serving as a dentist with the US Army in Viet Nam Dick was reassigned to Thailand to work alongside 30 doctors and nine dentists at the US Army’s Fifth Field Hospital, known today as the Sukhumvit Hospital in Bangkok.  In June 1974, he left the military but remained at the hospital as a civilian dentist. Two years later, America’s military presence in Thailand was winding down and it looked as though Dick would be heading back home but, instead stayed on to serve the American Embassy community.  

10 K charity walk to celebrate the 175th Anniversary of U.S. - Thai relations.  Doris is standing next to Ambassador John.  Doris came in first for her age group.   The ambassador lost his 17 year old daughter, Nicole, who fell to her death from a window ledge in NYC.  

Good friends at our favorite Italian restaurant La Buca.  Steve, Fran, Bert and Mary.

  Bert worked for Deloitte Touche. 

• Departed Bangkok July 16, 2008 and stopped in San Francisco for a few days to see Mom, my brothers and relatives.  

• Our house was under construction when we returned so we had to move into my town house on DI drive, which was rented the whole time we were in Bangkok.  We ended up not moving into our new custom built home until March 2009.

                                                      

                     

  

From August 8-11 we took Josh and Brielle up to Washington D.C. for a long weekend and toured all over on the Hop-On-Hop-Off bus stopping at all the historical sites and monuments.  We even got a pass to visit the White House gardens since President Bush was not in residence and were given some plant seedlings.  

• Also, on August 16 we attended the Bruce Springsteen concert at the North Charleston Coliseum.

Magic Tour  With Clarence Clemmons
and Danny Federici

  

• OIG Inspection of Banjul, The Gambia; Luanda, Angola;  and Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso via Madrid October/November.  My first inspection following retirement. 

      The trip from hell.  Our flight was delayed out of Banjul so we missed our connection to the TAP
      airlines flight to Lisbon.  There were only a limited number of flights from Lisbon to Luanda each
      week so we had to spend two extra days in Madrid before we could catch another flight to
      Lisbon.  Our reward was a complimentary stay at a hotel and two days of sightseeing in Madrid. 
      I did catch the election results in Ouagadougou.   Mom passed away on November 8th while I was          finishing up in Ouagadougou.  I ended up having to take a flight back to San Francisco via Dakar          and Paris and remember completing my portion of the inspection report at the Paris Charles                     De Gaulle airport waiting for my flight to SFO.

     For more photos see Bill Booth Travels Blog - Banjul; Bill Booth Travels Blog - Madrid;    Bill Booth  Travels Blog - Luanda;   Bill Booth Travels Blog - Ouagadougou

• December 15-18 went up to D.C. to particpate in the "hot wash" for the inspection reports for Banjul, Luanda and Ougadougou.

• Christmas 2008 (12/22-28) was spent in San Francisco.  We had time to start to sort out and dispose household effects from Mom's house with brother Mike.  

  

Top U.S.  News Stories Of The Year

Nov. 4: Democratic senator Barack Obama wins the presidential election against Sen. John McCain, taking 338 electoral votes to McCain's 161. Obama becomes the first African American to be elected president of the United States. Also in the election, Democrats increase their majority in the House and pick up five seats in the Senate.

June 12: The U.S. Supreme Court rules, 5 to 4, that prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, have a right to challenge their detention in federal court.

Oct. 10: Connecticut's Supreme Court rules that a state law that limits marriage to heterosexual couples and a civil union law that protects gay couples violate equal protection rights.

Oct. 27: A jury finds Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) guilty of seven felony charges for lying on financial disclosure forms and failing to report more than $250,000 in gifts from the VECO Corporation.

Feb. 5: Arizona senator John McCain emerges as the clear front runner among Republicans in the Super Tuesday primary races. On the Democratic side, New York senator Hillary Clinton wins big states such as California and Massachusetts, but Illinois senator Barack Obama takes more states.

March 8: President George W. Bush, saying intelligence officials must have "all the tools they need to stop the terrorists," vetoes legislation that would have outlawed all methods of interrogation that are banned in the Army Field Manual, which prohibits waterboarding and other harsh techniques that have been used by the CIA.

May 15: California's Supreme Court rules, 4 to 3 that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry.

May 20: Senator Edward Kennedy, a Democrat from Massachusetts who's been in office since 1963, is diagnosed with malignant glioma, a brain tumor.

Dec. 19: President George W. Bush announces plans to lend General Motors and Chrysler $17.4 billion to survive the next three months.

June 26: The U.S. Supreme Court rules, 5 to 4, that the Constitution protects an individual's right to possess a gun, but insists that the ruling "is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose."

Sep. 4: Sen. John McCain accepts the Republican presidential nomination.

Sep. 29: An internal inquiry by the U.S. Justice Department's inspector general and its Office of Professional Responsibility reports "significant evidence that political partisan considerations were an important factor in the removal of several of the U.S. attorneys." (Nine federal prosecutors were fired in 2006.)

Oct. 1: The U.S. Senate ratifies an agreement that allows India to buy nuclear fuel on the world market for its reactors as long as it uses the fuel for civilian purposes only.

March 11: The government begins to intervene in the U.S. financial system to avoid a crisis. The Federal Reserve outlines a $200 billion loan program that lets the country's biggest banks borrow Treasury securities at discounted rates and post mortgage-backed securities as collateral. March 16: The Federal Reserve approves a $30 billion loan to JPMorgan Chase so it can take over Bear Stearns, which is on the verge of collapse.

Top World  News Stories Of The Year: 

Sep. 20: A truck bomb explodes outside the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, Pakistan, killing more than 50 people and wounding hundreds. A previously unknown group, Fedayeen Islam, takes responsibility for the attack.

Dec. 28: Days after a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas expired, Hamas begins launching rocket attacks into Israel, which retaliates with airstrikes that kill about 300 people. Israel targets Hamas bases, training camps, and missile storage facilities.

Sep. 21: Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, who is under investigation for corruption, resigns.
Jan. 6: President of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, is reelected, taking 52% of the vote. He had called for early elections in November 2007, after massive protests prompted by accusations that he abused power.

July 14: Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, formally charges Sudan's president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, with genocide on main ethnic tribes.

Feb. 17: Kosovo's prime minister Hashim Thaci declares independence from Serbia. United States, France, Germany, and Britain indicate that they plan to recognize Kosovo as the world's 195th country.

Feb. 19: Cuban president Fidel Castro, who temporarily handed power to his brother Raúl in July 2006 when he fell ill, permanently steps down after 49 years in power.

July 2: After being held for nearly six years by Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) rebels in Colombia, 15 hostages, including three U.S. military contractors and French-Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt, are freed by commandos who infiltrated FARC's leadership.

March 2: Dmitri A. Medvedev, a former aide to Russian president Vladimir Putin, wins the presidential election in a landslide. Putin will remain in a position of power, serving as Medvedev's prime minister.

Oct. 1: The Iraqi government takes command of 54,000 mainly Sunni fighters from the U.S., which had been paying the fighters for their support. The fighters, members of awakening councils, turned against al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia in 2007 and began siding with the U.S.

Dec. 2: Thailand's Constitutional Court ruling that the governing People Power engaged in fraud during the 2007 elections forces Prime Minister Somchai Wongsawat from power and bans party members from politics for five years. Dec. 15: Parliament elects Abhisit Vejjajiva, the head of the Democrat Party, as prime minister.

Dec. 14: At a news conference in Baghdad, a reporter for Al Baghdadia, a Cairo-based satellite television network, hurls his shoes at President Bush and calls him a "dog." The shoes narrowly miss Bush's head.

April 11: In Nepal millions of voters turn out to elect a 601-seat Constituent Assembly that will write a new constitution. Maoist rebels win 120 out of 240 directly elected seats.

June 19: Egypt brokers a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, the militant group that controls the Gaza Strip. The agreement is intended to stem the violence in the region.

Nov. 16: Iraq's cabinet passes by a large margin a status of forces agreement that will govern the U.S. presence in Iraq through 2011. The pact calls for the withdrawal of all U.S. combat troops by Dec. 31, 2011, and the removal of U.S. troops from Iraqi cities by the summer of 2009.

June 22: Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe wins runoff election with about 85% of the vote.

July 21: Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb president during the war in Bosnia in the 1990s, is arrested outside Belgrade and charged with genocide, persecution, deportation, and other crimes against non-Serb civilians. Karadzic orchestrated the massacre of almost 8,000 Muslim men and boys in 1995 in Srebrenica.

Sep. 6: Asif Ali Zardari, leader of the Pakistan Peoples Party and the widower of former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto, wins 481 out of 702 votes in the two houses of Parliament to become president.

March 10: Some 400 Buddhist monks participate in a protest march in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, to commemorate 1959's failed uprising against China's invasion and occupation of Tibet. Violence breaks out, with ethnic Tibetans clashing with Chinese citizens. Chinese police suppress the demonstrations, and Tibetan leaders say that more than 100 Tibetans are killed.

Nov. 26: More than 170 people are killed and about 300 are wounded in a series of attacks on several landmarks and commercial hubs in Mumbai, India. Indian officials say ten gunmen carried out the attack. It took Indian forces three days to end the siege.

Aug. 7: Pakistan's governing coalition, led by Asif Ali Zardari, of the Pakistan Peoples Party, and Nawaz Sharif, leader of the Pakistan Muslim League-N, begins impeachment proceedings against President Pervez Musharraf on charges of violating the constitution and misconduct. Aug. 18: Musharraf resigns as president.

Aug. 22: As many as 90 Afghan civilians, 60 of them children, die in an airstrike by coalition troops in the western village of Azizabad. It is one of the deadliest airstrikes since the war began in 2001, and the deadliest for civilians. The U.S. military refutes the figures, which were confirmed by the UN.

May 28: Nepal's newly elected Constituent Assembly votes to dissolve the 239-year-old monarchy and form a republic. King Gyanendra is told he must step down within 15 days.

Sep. 17:  Thailand parliament elects Somchai Wongsawater prime minister.

Aug. 7: Fighting breaks out after Georgian soldiers attack South Ossetia, a breakaway enclave in Georgia that won de facto independence in the early 1990s. Russia and Georgia sever diplomatic ties from each other. It is the first time Russia has cut off formal relations with one of its former republics, which gained independence in 1991.

Movies:

"No Country for Old Men" won the Oscar for best picture at the 80th Academy Awards. 
Daniel Day Lewis won lead actor award for "There will be Blood," and the lead actress Oscar went to Marion Cotillard "La Vie en Rose".  Tilda Swinton, "Michael Clayton"  and Javier Bardem, "No Country for Old Men" won for supporting actress and supporting actor.

Super Bowl

Super Bowl XLII (42) was between the New York Giants and the New England Patriots to decide the National Football League champion for the 007 season. The Giants defeated the Patriots by the score of 17–14.  After a scoreless third quarter, the fourth quarter saw a Super Bowl record three lead changes, including New England wide receiver Randy Moss making a 6-yard touchdown reception with 2:42 left to play before New York's game-winning drive. Giants quarterback Eli Manning, who completed 19 of 34 passes for 255 yards and two touchdowns, with one interception,
                                                      was named Super Bowl MVP. 

World Series

 Philadelphia Phillies Beat the Tampa Bay Rays, 4-3, to Win World Series.   from losingest team to longest game, the Philadelphia Phillies are World   Series champions. Brad Lidge and the Phillies finished off the Tampa Bay   Rays 4-3 in a three-inning sprint Wednesday night to win a suspended   Game 5 nearly 50 hours after it started.

Recap of 2008 Grand Slam Tennis Tournament Winners

·                Australian Open Men's Singles. Winner –  Novak Djokovic defeated Jo-Wilfried Tsonga

·         French Open Men's Singles. Winner– Rafael Nadal defeated Roger Federer

·         Wimbledon Men's Singles. Winner –  Rafael Nadal defeated Roger Federer

·         US Open Men's Singles. Winner –  Roger Federer defeated Andy Murray

          Australian Open Ladies Singles. Winner – Maria Sharapova defeated Ana Ivanovic 

          French Open Ladies Singles. Winner– Ana Ivanovic defeated Dinara Safina 

·        Wimbledon Ladies Singles. Winner – Venus Williams defeated Serena Williams 

·        US Open Ladies Singles. Winner – Serena Williams defeated Jelena Jankovic