Free Internet Press Newsletter - Friday October 20 2006 - (813)

Friday October 20 2006 edition
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FBI Investigating Possible Theft Of Voting Software In Maryland 2006-10-20 00:45:36 The FBI is investigating the possible theft of software developed by the nation's leading maker of electronic voting equipment, said a former Maryland legislator who, this week, received three computer disks that apparently contain key portions of programs created by Diebold Election Systems. Cheryl C. Kagan, a former Democratic delegate who has long questioned the security of electronic voting systems, said the disks were delivered anonymously to her office in Olney on Tuesday and that the FBI contacted her Thursday. The package contained an unsigned letter critical of Maryland State Board of Elections Administrator Linda H. Lamone that said the disks were "right from SBE" and had been "accidentally picked up". Lamone's deputy, Ross Goldstein, said "they were not our disks," but he acknowledged that the software was used in Maryland in the 2004 elections. Diebold said in a statement last night that it had never created or received the disks. Read The Full Story Britain To Defy U.S., Russia On U.N. Arms Trade Resolution 2006-10-20 00:44:28 The U.K. is next week expected to push through the United Nations a resolution to open the way for a landmark arms trade treaty, in spite of opposition from the U.S., Russia and China. Campaigners have been pressing for years for such a treaty. An attempt at the U.N. three years ago had to be abandoned because of the level of hostility and failure to win sufficient backing. But a British government source said, as of Thursday, it had secured the support of 93 of the 192 countries in the general assembly: only 97 votes are needed for the resolution to be adopted. One of the campaign groups said a further four countries had since signed up and the final number is expected to be more than 100. Read The Full Story Major Change Expected In Iraq War Strategy 2006-10-20 00:43:22 The growing doubts among GOP lawmakers about the administration's Iraq strategy, coupled with the prospect of Democratic wins in next month's midterm elections, will soon force the Bush administration to abandon its open-ended commitment to the war, according to lawmakers in both parties, foreign policy experts and others involved in policymaking. Senior figures in both parties are coming to the conclusion that the Bush administration will be unable to achieve its goal of a stable, democratic Iraq within a politically feasible time frame. Agitation is growing in Congress for alternatives to the administration's strategy of keeping Iraq in one piece and getting its security forces up and running while 140,000 U.S. troops try to keep a lid on rapidly spreading sectarian violence. On the campaign trail, Democratic candidates are hammering Republican candidates for backing a failed Iraq policy, and GOP defense of the war is growing muted. A new NBC-Wall Street Journal poll released this week showed that voters are more confident in Democrats' ability to handle the Iraq war than the Republicans' - a reversal from the last election. Read The Full Story Rep. Boehner, Ex-Clerk Of House Testify In Foley Case 2006-10-20 00:41:49 Two key congressional figures testified before a House ethics panel yesterday about their roles in the Mark Foley scandal, reportedly sticking to accounts indicating that Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Illinois) or his top aides had been alerted to concerns about the disgraced Florida Republican's behavior toward teenage pages before it became public. The committee spent more than four hours questioning Jeff Trandahl, a central figure who has remained publicly silent about the affair. As House clerk from 1999 through last year, Trandahl oversaw the page program and dealt with several complaints about the actions of Foley, who abruptly resigned his House seat Sept. 29 as ABC News was reporting on sexually graphic electronic messages he had exchanged with former pages. Trandahl joined Rep. John M. Shimkus (R-Illinois), the chairman of the House Page Board, in quietly confronting Foley last fall about e-mails that the lawmaker had sent to a Louisiana boy, which the youth and his parents found troubling. Those e-mails were not nearly as explicit as the messages that emerged later from other sources. Read The Full Story British Parliament Member Says Support For Cancer Group Was Naive 2006-10-20 00:40:19 A Labor Party member of Parliament who chairs the all-party parliamentary group on cancer said Thursday night that he had been "naive" to get involved with Cancer United, a pan-European campaign mired in controversy over drug company sponsorship. Dr. Ian Gibson, a former chair of the science and technology select committee, was invited to be filmed for the launch of the campaign during the Labor conference in Manchester, England. "They had taken rooms in a hotel," he said. "They invited people to come and say some positive things about the issue on camera. I said who had they got and they said they had other celebrities, like Alastair Campbell." Read The Full Story Doctors Assail Eli Lilly Study Of Sepsis Drug 2006-10-19 13:42:39 Three doctors at the National Institutes of Health have sharply criticized Eli Lilly for its efforts to promote the use of Xigris, an expensive treatment for patients with sepsis, an often deadly blood infection. In an article published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, the doctors wrote that Lilly - the nation's sixth-largest drug maker - had manipulated treatment guidelines for sepsis patients to promote Xigris at the expense of older, cheaper and equally effective treatments. Sales of Xigris have fallen far short of expectations since it was approved in 2001. In the first six months of this year, Lilly sold just $98 million of Xigris worldwide, a drop of 16 percent from the same period last year. Fewer than 150 patients a day receive Xigris in the United States. The journal article says that Lilly, in financing a task force called "Values, Ethics and Rationing in Critical Care," had implicitly criticized doctors for "rationing" Xigris because of its expense. But in fact, the article says, evidence from clinical trials provides little support for using Xigris under any circumstances. Read The Full Story Priest Admits Intimate Contact With Foley But Denies Sexual Intercourse 2006-10-19 13:40:57 A retired priest from Malta acknowledged today that he had intimate contact with a youthful Mark Foley that involved nudity and - on at least one occasion - "light touching," but denied that he and Foley had "sexual intercourse." The Rev. Anthony Mercieca, in a telephone interview with the Washington Post from the Maltese island of Gozo, said he was surprised that his long-ago interaction with Foley had become linked to the scandal that erupted last month and cost the former congressman his job. Foley, who served as an altar boy at the Sacred Heart Catholic church in Lake Worth, Florida, when Mercieca was assigned there in the mid-1960s, resigned from Congress after reports about sexually intimate electronic messages he had sent to Congressional pages. Following his resignation, Foley entered alcohol rehabilitation, said he was gay, and alleged that he had been sexually abused by a member of the clergy as a youth. Read The Full Story FBI Questioning Young Man In Milwaulkee About Online NFL Threats 2006-10-19 13:39:55 The FBI interviewed a Milwaukee resident Thursday who officials believe was involved in posting Internet threats about dirty bomb attacks on NFL football stadiums this weekend. The threats appeared to be phony. The person, described as a 20-year-old man, did not appear to have any ties to terrorist groups, according to an FBI official in Washington, D.C., who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation was ongoing. ''From the information we have, we believe he was involved to some extent, but we don't know at what level,'' said FBI special agent Douglas E. Porrini in Milwaukee. Read The Full Story Russia Suspends Foreign Advocacy Groups 2006-10-19 13:38:51 Russia has suspended the activities of Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the International Republican Institute and more than 90 other foreign non-governmental organizations (NGOs) on grounds they failed to meet the registration requirements of a controversial new law designed to bring foreign activists here under much closer government scrutiny. The measure, signed into law by President Vladimir Putin at the start of the year, was criticized as an attempt to rein in one of the last areas of independent civic life in Russia. But Russian officials called it necessary to prevent foreign states interfering in Russia's political process. On Thursday, they defended the suspensions as simply due to the failure of private groups to meet the law's requirements, not a political decision on the part of the state. Read The Full Story Exploit Found 24 Hours After MSIE 7 Release 2006-10-19 10:04:47 Not 24 hours after the release of IE7, Secunia reports Internet Explorer Arbitrary Content Disclosure Vulnerability. So much for the "you wanted it easier and more secure" slogan found on Microsoft's IE Website. Read The Full Story Editorial: A Dangerous New Order 2006-10-19 00:30:45 Intellpuke: The following editorial appears in The New York Times for Thursday, Oct. 19, 2006. It deals with the new law on military tribunals approved by the Republican majority in the U.S. Congress and signed into law by President Bush. The editorial follows: Once President Bush signed the new law on military tribunals, administration officials and Republican leaders in Congress wasted no time giving Americans a taste of the new order created by this unconstitutional act. Within hours, Justice Department lawyers notified the federal courts that they no longer had the authority to hear pending lawsuits filed by attorneys on behalf of inmates of the penal camp at Guantánamo Bay. They cited passages in the bill that suspend the fundamental principle of habeas corpus, making Mr. Bush the first president since the Civil War to take that undemocratic step. Read The Full Story Judge: 9/11 Emergency Workers Lawsuit Can Move Forward 2006-10-19 00:29:20 New York City and its contractors are not immune from lawsuits brought by emergency workers sickened after toiling amid toxic dust at ground zero, a judge ruled, clearing the way for what he said should be the speedy resolution of thousands of claims. In his decision Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein said the city, its roughly 150 private contractors, and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey were only partially immune from lawsuits, with the precise scope and extent of the immunity varying according to date, place and activity. "If even a minority of the plaintiffs suffered serious injuries to their respiratory tracts arising from the acrid air of September 11, their claims deserve to be heard when a recovery could make a difference in their lives," the judge wrote, adding that the defendants are entitled to resolution at the earliest possible point. Read The Full Story Blair: British Troops May Quit Iraq In 10 - 16 Months 2006-10-19 00:27:37 British Prime Minister Tony Blair Wednesday shifted ground on the continuing presence of British troops in Iraq by saying it was government policy to leave the country within 10 to 16 months - so long as the security situation allowed. The prime minister also agreed with the chief of the general staff, General Sir Richard Dannatt, that the presence of British forces could become a provocation, but disagreed with Gen. Dannatt by insisting it was still the government's aim to secure a liberal democracy in Iraq. Blair's comments at prime minister's questions [in the House of Commons] appear to be an attempt to pacify the restive mood of the British army, as well as to reflect the developing view in Washington, D.C., that some radical policy change is imminent after the U.S. mid- term elections. Read The Full Story U.S. Government Doubts Threats On NFL Stadiums 2006-10-19 00:26:03 The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has notified the NFL and law enforcement agencies of an Internet threat to detonate radiological "dirty" bombs outside seven stadiums hosting games Sunday, but immediately dismissed the threat as non-credible. "We view this with the strongest of skepticism, and we strongly encourage the American public to go about their daily lives and to attend large gatherings, and to go to football games," said DHS spokesman Russ Knocke. The department issued the notice "out of an abundance of caution," and routinely shares 1,200 reports a year with state, local and private sector officials, said Knocke. "In this case there is no credibility," he said. Read The Full Story	Brazil To Call For Global Fund To Save Rainforests 2006-10-20 00:44:57 Plans for a global fund to help contain rainforest destruction and slash carbon emissions will be unveiled next month by the Brazilian government. The project, by which rich nations would offer financial incentives to developing countries that combat deforestation, will be announced at a November convention on climate change in Nairobi, Kenya. Championed by Marina Silva, Brazil's environment minister, officials claim the fund would help protect tropical forests while giving a much-needed economic impetus to the developing world. Read The Full Story California Battles Big Oil 2006-10-20 00:43:58 Call it the battle of Big Oil vs. Silicon Valley with a whole lot of Hollywood funding thrown in. Oil companies are squaring off against venture capitalists in a fight over a California proposition that would tax oil production in the state to fund alternative energy. To date, $107 million has been raised in the fight. If it is all spent, it will make Proposition 87 the most expensive proposition in the nation's history, dwarfing the $93 million epic, also in California, to legalize Las Vegas-style casinos on Indian reservations in 1998. Oil companies, including Chevron; Aera Energy, a partnership of Shell Oil and Exxon Mobil; and Occidental Petroleum have given more than $60 million to oppose the measure. On the other side is a coalition of environmentalists and venture capitalists led by John Doerr, a partner at the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and former partners Vinod Khosla and William Randolph Hearst III. The 800-pound gorilla in that camp is Hollywood mogul Stephen Bing, who has donated $40 million. Read The Full Story Republican Woes Leads To Feuding Conservatives 2006-10-20 00:42:34 Tax-cutters are calling evangelicals bullies. Christian conservatives say Republicans in Congress have let them down. Hawks say President Bush is bungling the war in Iraq. And many conservatives blame Representative Mark Foley'ssexual messages to teenage pages. With polls showing Republican control of Congress in jeopardy, conservative leaders are pointing fingers at one other in an increasingly testy circle of blame for potential Republican losses this fall. "It is one of those rare defeats that will have many fathers," said David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, expressing the gloomy view of many conservatives about the outcome on Election Day. "And they will all be somebody else." Read The Full Story U.S.: Battle For Baghdad Disheartening 2006-10-20 00:41:01 A day after George Bush conceded for the first time that America may have reached the equivalent of a Tet offensive in Iraq, the Pentagon Thursday admitted defeat in its strategy of securing Baghdad. The admission from President Bush that the U.S. may have arrived at a turning point in this war - the Tet offensive led to a massive loss of confidence in the American presence in Vietnam - comes during one of the deadliest months for U.S. forces since the invasion. Thursday the number of U.S. troops killed since October 1 rose to 73, deepening the sense that America is trapped in an unwinnable situation and further damaging Republican chances in midterm elections that are less than three weeks away. Read The Full Story Romulans Beware, Earth Scientists Create Cloak of Invisibility 2006-10-19 13:43:04 Scientists are boldly going where only fiction has gone before - to develop a Cloak of Invisibility. It isn't quite ready to hide a Romulan space ship from Capt. Kirk or to disguise Harry Potter, but it is a significant start and could show the way to more sophisticated designs. In this first successful experiment, researchers from the United States and England were able to cloak a copper cylinder. It's like a mirage, where heat causes the bending of light rays and cloaks the road ahead behind an image of the sky. ''We have built an artificial mirage that can hide something from would-be observers in any direction,'' said cloak designer David Schurig, a research associate in Duke University's electrical and computer engineering department. Read The Full Story NBC To Cut 700 Jobs In Overhaul 2006-10-19 13:42:02 NBC Universal said Thursday it would cut 700 jobs and streamline its news operations as part an overhaul aimed at exploiting new forms of electronic distribution. NBC, a unit of General Electric Co., said it expects the revamp to save $750 million in operating expenses by 2008. The job cuts would represent about 5 percent of its work force. As part of the changes, NBC's long-struggling 24-hour cable news channel MSNBC will move its operations to NBC's headquarters in Manhattan's Rockefeller Center and also to another NBC facility in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. The changes don't represent a diminishing commitment to news, but just reflect how the industry is changing, Jeff Zucker, chief executive of NBC Universal's television group, told the Associated Press. Read The Full Story Nissan Recalls 130,000 SUVs, Cars 2006-10-19 13:40:20 Nissan Motor Co. has begun recalling more than 130,000 vehicles globally - including 80,000 in North America -  because of an ignition key defect, a company official said Thursday. There have been no reports of injuries related to the defect, said Japan's Transport Ministry. Nissan is recalling in Japan of 50,962 X-Trail and Murano sport utility vehicles produced from August 2004 to July 2006, Nissan spokeswoman Madoka Soma said. Read The Full Story Baghdad Violence Up 22 Percent In Two Weeks 2006-10-19 13:39:17 A two-month U.S.-Iraqi military operation aimed at stemming sectarian bloodshed and insurgent attacks in Baghdad has failed to reduce the violence, which has surged 22 percent in the capital in the last two weeks, much of it in areas where the military has focused its efforts, a senior U.S. military spokesman said Thursday. The assessment by Army Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV comes as attacks on U.S. and Iraqi forces in the capital have spiked 43 percent since midsummer and have pushed U.S. military fatalities to their highest rates in more than a year. At least 73 U.S. military personnel have been killed so far this month in Iraq. Attacks on police and military units continued in many parts of Iraq Thursday. Coordinated suicide car and truck bombs and mortar attacks on several police facilities and two U.S. patrols in the northern city Mosul killed at least 12 Iraqis and wounded 30, local police and hospital officials said. There were no reports of U.S. casualties. Read The Full Story General: U.S. Plan To Reduce Violence In Baghdad Failed, Now Under Review 2006-10-19 13:38:22 The American military's stepped-up campaign to staunch unrelenting bloodshed in the capital under an ambitious new security plan that was unveiled in August has failed to reduce the violence, a military spokesman said  Thursday. Instead, attacks have actually jumped more than 20 percent over the first three weeks of the holy month of Ramadan, compared to the previous three weeks, said Gen. William Caldwell, the military's chief spokesman in Iraq. In an unusually gloomy assessment, General Caldwell called the spike in attacks "disheartening" and added that the American military was "working closely with the government of Iraq to determine how to best refocus our efforts". Read The Full Story NBC/WSJ Poll: Public Down On GOP, Bush 2006-10-19 00:31:17 Just 20 days until Election Day, the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll finds approval of the GOP-held Congress is at its lowest mark in 14 years, the Republican Party's favorability rating is at an all-time low and President George W. Bush's approval rating remains mired in the 30s - all ominous signs for a party trying to maintain control of Congress. In fact, according to the poll, Republicans are in worse shape on some key measures than Democrats were in 1994, when they lost their congressional majorities. "There is not a single number in here that would suggest the Democrats will not have their best showing in a decade - and maybe two decades," says Democratic pollster Peter D. Hart, who conducted this survey with Republican Bill McInturff. Read The Full Story Commentary: Beginning Of The End Of America 2006-10-19 00:30:04 Intellpuke: The following commentary is by Keith Olbermann, anchor of MSNBC's "Countdown" program. In his commentary on Wednesday, Mr. Olbermann took a serious look at the Military Commissions Act recently passed by the U.S. Congress and signed into law by President Bush. Mr. Olbermann's views on this issue are as much a warning as a commentary. A warning that the rights guaranteed to American citizens are being eroded away by the Bush Administration. Are these, indeed, "the times that try men's souls", as American patriot Thomas Paine once wrote at the time of the American Revolution? Each of us will have to decide that for ourselves. Mr. Olbermann's commentary follows: We have lived as if in a trance. We have lived as people in fear. And now - our rights and our freedoms in peril - we slowly awake to learn that we have been afraid of the wrong thing. Therefore tonight have we truly become the inheritors of our American legacy. For, on this first full day that the Military Commissions Act is in force, we now face what our ancestors faced, at other times of exaggerated crisis and melodramatic fear-mongering: A government more dangerous to our liberty, than is the enemy it claims to protect us from. Read The Full Story Poll: Montana Democrat Leads In U.S. Senate Race 2006-10-19 00:28:46 Democrat Jon Tester widened his lead against Republican Sen. Conrad Burns in a poll released Wednesday. Tester led 46 percent to Burns' 35 percent, with a majority of respondents saying the incumbent's ties to convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff were an issue in the campaign. Only 14 percent of poll respondents said they didn't think the Abramoff scandal was an issue. The poll, conducted by the Montana State University-Billings political science department, sampled 409 registered voters by telephone Oct. 10-12 and Oct. 14-15. It has a margin of error of 5 percentage points. Read The Full Story U.K. Anti-Terror Chiefs: Britain Now No. 1 Target For Al-Qaeda 2006-10-19 00:26:52 Britain has become the main target for a resurgent al-Qaeda, which has successfully regrouped and now presents a greater threat than ever before, according to U.K. counter-terrorist officials. They have revised their views about the strength of the network abroad, and the methods terrorists are able to use in the U.K. Intelligence chiefs with access to the most comprehensive and up to date information have told the Guardian that al-Qaeda has substantially recovered its organization in Pakistan, despite a four-year military campaign to seek out and kill its leaders. In that time, the organization has become much more coherent, with a strong core and a regular supply of volunteers. More worrying, officials say, is evidence of new techniques that would-be terrorists within the U.K. have adopted. The structure of individual al-Qaeda-inspired groups is much more like the old Provisional IRA cells, with self-contained units comprising a lead organizer/planner, a quartermaster in charge of weapons and explosives acquisition and training, and several volunteers. Read The Full Story U.S. Stops Venezuela Planes Deal With Spain 2006-10-19 00:25:38 The U.S. has stopped Spain selling 12 military aircraft to Venezuela by refusing to allow American military technology to be used in the planes. Venezuela planned to buy the aircraft from the Spanish company Eads-Casa but U.S. determination to prevent Hugo Chávez building up his armed forces wrecked the deal, according to the deputy president, José Vicente Rangel. George Bush's administration claims President Chávez, an ally of Fidel Castro, is a destabilizing force in Latin America. The U.S. imposed an arms ban on Venezuela in May. Read The Full Story
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