Free Internet Press Newsletter - Monday October 9 2006 - (813)

Monday October 9 2006 edition
Free Internet Press is operated on your donations. Donate Today
GOP Lawmaker Saw Foley Messages In 2000 2006-10-09 00:44:18 A Republican congressman knew of disgraced former representative Mark Foley's inappropriate Internet exchanges as far back as 2000 and personally confronted Foley about his communications. A spokeswoman for Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-Arizona) confirmed Sunday that a former page showed the congressman Internet messages that had made the youth feel uncomfortable with the direction Foley (R-Florida) was taking their e-mail relationship. Last week, when the Foley matter erupted, a Kolbe staff member suggested to the former page that he take the matter to the clerk of the House, Karen Haas, said Kolbe's press secretary, Korenna Cline. The revelation pushes back by at least five years the date when a member of Congress has acknowledged learning of Foley's behavior with former pages. A timeline issued by House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Illinois) suggested that the first lawmakers to know, Rep. John M. Shimkus (R-Illinois), the chairman of the House Page Board, and Rep. Rodney Alexander (R-Louisiana), became aware of "over-friendly" e-mails only last fall. It also expands the universe of players in the drama beyond members, either in leadership or on the page board. Read The Full Story E. Coli Concerns Lead To California Lettuce Recall 2006-10-09 00:43:20 Less than a week after the Food and Drug Administration lifted its warning on fresh spinach grown in California's Salinas Valley, a popular brand of lettuce grown there has been recalled over concerns about E. coli contamination. The lettuce does not appear to have caused any illnesses, said the president of Salinas-based Nunes Co. The lettuce scare follows other federal warnings that some brands of spinach, bottled carrot juice and recent shipments of beef could cause grave health risks - including paralysis, respiratory failure and death. Executives ordered the recall after learning that irrigation water may have been contaminated with E. coli, said Tom Nunes, Jr., president of the company. Read The Full Story Study: World Moves Into Ecological Overdraft Today 2006-10-09 00:42:19 Humanity slides into the red today and begins racking up an ecological overdraft driven by unsustainable exploitation of the world's resources, according to a report by the sustainable development organisation Global Footprint Network. In little more than nine months, humans have used up all that nature can replenish in one year, and for the rest of 2006 are destined to eat into the planet's ecological capital, the study claims. The network calculated the day the global economy started to operate with an ecological deficit by comparing world demand for resources with the rate at which ecosystems can replenish them. The study draws on surveys from bodies such as the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization. Read The Full Story DHS Looking For Threats In The News 2006-10-08 20:33:13 A consortium of major universities, using Homeland Security Department money, is developing software that would let the government monitor negative opinions of the United States or its leaders in newspapers and other publications overseas. Such a "sentiment analysis" is intended to identify potential threats to the nation, security officials said. Read The Full Story Anger Drives Property Rights Measures 2006-10-08 13:48:47 Cheeks chapped, patience thinned, Katie Breckenridge had no trouble making up her mind about an Idaho ballot measure that would make the government pay property owners if zoning rules reduce the value of their land. "Do I think this is almost swinging the pendulum back too far in the other direction? I do," said Ms. Breckenridge, 61, a rancher just in from tending to cattle and quarter horses. "But do I think we've got to do something to bring the balance back to property rights? I do, and I'm going to vote for it." More than a year after Suzette Kelo and several of her neighbors in New London, Connecticut, lost their battle against eminent domain in the United States Supreme Court, the backlash against the ruling has made property rights one of the most closely watched ballot issues nationwide. Read The Full Story Hundreds Rally In Moscow For Slain Journalist 2006-10-08 13:47:37 As hundreds of Russians attended a rally Sunday in downtown Moscow in commemoration of Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist who was slain Saturday in an apparent contract killing, the country's top law enforcement official said he was taking personal charge of the investigation because of its "particular importance and its wide resonance within society". "The investigation will focus on possible links between the killing and Politkovskaya's work," said Marina Gridneva, a spokeswoman for the prosecutor general, Yuri Chaika, who is now heading the probe into the journalist's death. The killing of Politkovskaya, a fierce critic of the Kremlin and its local proxies in the conflict in Chechnya, was the second assassination of a crusading figure in Moscow in less than a month. In September, Andrei Kozlov, a central banker who targeted corrupt banks, was gunned down as he left a soccer match in the city. That case remains unsolved. Read The Full Story	U.S., Iraqi Forces Clash With Sadr Militia 2006-10-09 00:43:50 U.S. troops engaged in ferocious clashes with militiamen loyal to anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr in southern Iraq on Sunday, ratcheting up tensions between two of the most powerful forces in the country. The pre-dawn battles in the city of Diwaniyah, where the U.S. military said American and Iraqi forces killed 30 fighters, come amid growing concern by senior U.S. officials that the Iraqi government lacks the political will to tackle the militias and death squads threatening to plunge the country into civil war. The Mahdi Army, Sadr's well-armed militia, accused the U.S. military of trying to provoke an all-out war between the two forces and said that only one of its members had been killed and perhaps two wounded. Read The Full Story As Sea Levels Rise, Britain Is Losing Battle With Erosion 2006-10-09 00:42:56 Intellpuke: Britain's coastline has remained more or less intact since the end of the last ice age. But as sea levels rise, erosion is accelerating and more than a million homes are now under threat. Is the only solution for us to abandon the shore? Some of you may be thinking, "This is in Britain, why should I care?" Because water seeks its own level and if the sea around the U.K. is rising, it will also be rising on the U.S. Atlantic coast. Guardian correspondent Adam Nicolson's report on this follows: If you had been alive 18,000 years ago, you could have walked in a straight line from Cork to Stockholm. The floor of the North Sea was land. Objects have been found from that strange, drowned world. A carefully sharpened flint scraper has been retrieved by Norwegians drilling for oil in 450 feet of water 100 miles east of Shetland. Spearheads and mammal and rhinoceros teeth have been dragged up by trawlermen on the Dogger Bank. Sometimes in their trawls fishermen find lumps of peat from forgotten moors. It is an unsettling fact that tens of thousands of people once knew the floor of the North Sea as well as any of us might know the Yorkshire Dales or the Sussex Downs. When this periglacial world began to warm up about 20,000 years ago, the ice sheets melted and sea-level rose, on average, at about a centimeter a year. By 5,000 B.C. it was some 130 meters (430 feet) higher than it had been at glacial maximum and Britain had become an island. But then the warming slowed. Since 2,000 B.C., the sea level has remained extraordinarily constant, varying no more than a meter in 4,000 years. This period of sea-level stability has also seen the rise of urban and commercial civilization. We have built our cities on a constant shore. That long constancy has allowed us to forget that we have been living in a privileged world. But that privilege is now over. The physical conditions of the world are changing for the first time since humanity started to build. For thousands of years we have shaped the world. Now, for the first time, the world is going to shape us. Read The Full Story Welcome North Korea To The Nuclear Arms Race 2006-10-08 20:51:57 North Korea said Monday it has performed its first-ever nuclear weapons test. The country's official Korean Central News Agency said the test was performed successfully and there was no radioactive leakage from the site.  "The nuclear test is a historic event that brought happiness to the our military and people," KCNA said. South Korea's Yonhap news agency said the test was conducted at 10:36 a.m. (9:36 p.m. EDT Sunday) in Hwaderi near Kilju city, citing defense officials.  Read The Full Story Foley Issue Consuming GOP As Elections Approach 2006-10-08 13:49:13 Rep. E. Clay Shaw, Jr., (R-Florida) was trying to talk about security Friday at bustling Port Everglades, but with planes roaring overhead and containers slamming onto trucks, nobody could hear him. That's a common problem for Shaw and Republican candidates around the country these days - trying urgently 30 days before Election Day to frame a winning message but finding their efforts drowned out by the furor over former representative Mark Foley (R-Florida). "It's sucking all the air out of the room," Shaw said in an interview after his news conference at the port. "It's a tough time; there's just total saturation right now." Back in Washington, D.C., Republican strategists acknowledge privately that, even under their best-case scenario, Foley's sexually charged messages and allegations that House leaders were too passive in responding to them will remain an all-consuming distraction for GOP campaigns for the next week. Read The Full Story U.S. Sen. Allen Failed To Disclose Stock Options 2006-10-08 13:48:22 For the past five years, U.S. Sen. George Allen has failed to tell Congress about stock options he got for his work as a director of a high-tech company. The Virginia Republican also asked the Army to help another business that gave him similar options. Congressional rules require senators to disclose to the Senate all deferred compensation, such as stock options. The rules also urge senators to avoid taking any official action that could benefit them financially or appear to do so. Those requirements exist so the public can police lawmakers for possible conflicts of interest, especially involving companies with government business that lawmakers can influence. Allen's stock options date to the period from January 1998 to January 2001 when Allen was between political jobs and had plunged into the corporate world. Read The Full Story Does Fidel Castro Have Terminal Cancer? 2006-10-08 13:47:12 U.S. intelligence officials believe that Cuban President Fidel Castro has terminal cancer and will not return to power, despite statements by that country's government that he will return to his post once he recovers from the abdominal surgery he had in July, according to a report in Time magazine. "Certainly we have heard this, that this guy has terminal cancer," said one U.S. official. Castro on July 31 released a statement saying the surgery to stop intestinal bleeding "obliges me to spend several weeks in repose, away from my responsibilities as leader." Yet the fact that Castro's brother, Raúl, 75, is still serving as acting president has some intelligence officials convinced that the Cuban government wanted Fidel Castro, 79, off the public stage before his death to gauge public reaction to his absence. Read The Full Story
Original materials on this site © Free Internet Press. Any mirrored or quoted materials © their respective authors, publications, or outlets, as shown on their publication, indicated by the link in the news story. Original Free Internet Press materials may be copied and/or republished without modification, provided a link to http://FreeInternetPress.com is given in the story, or proper credit is given. Newsletter options may be changed in your preferences on http://freeinternetpress.com Please email editor@freeinternetpress.com there are any questions. XML/RSS/RDF Newsfeed Syndication: http://freeinternetpress.com/rss.php