Free Internet Press Newsletter - Thursday October 5 2006 - (813)

Thursday October 5 2006 edition
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Ex-Aide To Foley Warned Hastert Office In 2003 2006-10-05 00:12:16 A longtime chief of staff to disgraced former representative Mark Foley (R-Florida) approached House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert's office three years ago, repeatedly imploring senior Republicans to help stop Foley's advances toward teenage male pages, the staff member said Wednesday. The account by Kirk Fordham, who resigned Wednesday from his job with another senior lawmaker, pushed back to 2003 or earlier the time when Hastert's staff reportedly became aware of Foley's questionable behavior concerning teenagers working on Capitol Hill. It raised new questions about Hastert's assertions that senior GOP leaders were aware only of "over-friendly" e-mails from 2005 that they say did not raise alarm bells when they came to light this year. Read The Full Story Court Allows Warrantless Wiretapping During Appeal 2006-10-05 00:10:59 The Bush administration can continue its warrantless surveillance program while it appeals a judge's ruling that the program is unconstitutional, a federal appeals court panel ruled Wednesday. The president has said the program is needed to fight terrorism. Opponents argue that it oversteps constitutional boundaries on free speech, privacy and executive powers. The unanimous ruling from a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit gave little explanation for the decision. In the three-paragraph ruling, judges said that they balanced the likelihood an appeal would succeed, the potential damage to both sides, and the public interest. Read The Full Story Bush Comment Stirs Up Debate On Iraq War 2006-10-05 00:09:22 When the president speaks, every word can be subject to scrutiny. Even the punctuation marks. As he heads out on the campaign trail, haunted by an unpopular war, President Bush has begun reassuring audiences that this traumatic period in Iraq will be seen as "just a comma" in the history books. By that, aides say, he means to reinforce his message of resolve in the long struggle for Iraqi democracy. But opponents of the war have seized on the formulation, seeing it as evidence that Bush is indifferent to suffering. To them, it sounds as if the president is dismissing more than 2,700 U.S. troop deaths as "just a comma." And a lively Internet debate has broken out about the origins of the phrase, with some speculating that Bush means it as a coded message to religious supporters, evoking the aphorism "Never put a period where God has put a comma." Read The Full Story Iraqi Police Unit Linked To Militias 2006-10-04 11:52:34 Iraqi authorities have taken a brigade of up to 700 policemen out of service and put members under investigation for "possible complicity" with death squads following a mass kidnapping earlier this week, the U.S. military said Wednesday. Meanwhile, a series of bombs went off in rapid succession in a shopping district in a mainly Christian neighborhood of Baghdad, killing 12 people and wounding 87, said police. The dead were among 28 people killed in attacks across Iraq. The U.S. military also announced the death of two soldiers - the latest in what has been one of the bloodiest stretches of days for American troops this year. At least 17 troops have been killed in combat since Saturday, including eight U.S. soldiers who died in gunbattles and bomb blasts Monday in Baghdad - the most killed in a single day in the capital since July 2005. The Iraqi police officers were decommissioned following a kidnapping Sunday when gunmen stormed a frozen food plant in the Amil district, abducted 24 workers and shot two others. The bodies of seven of the workers were found hours later but the fate of the others remains unknown. Read The Full Story Ex-Hewlett-Packard Head, Others, To Face Charges 2006-10-04 11:50:14 Patricia C. Dunn, the former chairwoman of Hewlett-Packard, and four other people will be named in indictments expected to be filed by California's attorney general today in the spying case at the company, according to lawyers involved in the case. In addition to Dunn, Attorney General Bill Lockyer intends to indict Kevin T. Hunsaker, a former senior lawyer at H.P.; Ronald L. DeLia, a Boston-area private detective; Joseph DePante, owner of Action Research Group, a Melbourne, Florida, information broker; and Bryan Wagner, a Littleton, Colorado, man who is said to have obtained private phone records while working for DePante. All of those named face four charges: using of false or fraudulent pretenses to obtain confidential information from a public utility, unauthorized access to computer data, identity theft, and conspiracy to commit each of those crimes. All of the charges are felonies. Read The Full Story Some Pages Warned On Foley As Early 1995 2006-10-04 00:38:50 In 1995, male House pages were warned to steer clear of a freshman Republican from Florida, who was already learning the names of the teenagers, dashing off notes, letters and e-mails to them, and asking them to join him for ice cream, according to a former page. Mark Beck-Heyman, now a graduate student in clinical psychology at George Washington University, and more than a dozen other former House pages said in interviews and via e-mail that Rep. Mark Foley was known to be extraordinarily friendly in a way that made some of them uncomfortable. Beck-Heyman, who was a Republican page and is now a Democrat, said the attention was "weird," and he provided a handwritten letter that Foley sent him after the page left Washington, D.C., to return home to California. The note suggested that they get together during the Republican National Convention in San Diego in 1996. Read The Full Story In Legislation Fine Print, $20 Million To Celebrate Victory In Iraq 2006-10-04 00:37:37 Even as the Bush administration urges Americans to stay the course in Iraq, Republicans in Congress have put down a quiet marker in the apparent hope that V-I Day might be only months away. Tucked away in fine print in the military spending bill for this past year was a lump sum of $20 million to pay for a celebration in the nation's capital "for commemoration of success" in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Not surprisingly, the money was not spent. Now Congressional Republicans are saying, in effect, maybe next year. A paragraph written into spending legislation and approved by the Senate and House allows the $20 million to be rolled over into 2007. Read The Full Story Fatah Gunmen Threaten Hamas Leaders 2006-10-04 00:36:34 Fatah gunmen threatened on Tuesday to kill leaders of the governing Hamas group, escalating a power struggle marked by the worst internal Palestinian violence since the Palestinian Authority was created in 1994. Twelve Palestinians have been killed and more than 100 wounded in two days of fighting between rival forces from President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah faction and Hamas in the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank. Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed wing of Fatah, said it held Hamas' Damascus-based political chief Khaled Meshaal, Interior Minister Saeed Seyam and senior Interior Ministry official Youssef al-Zahar responsible for the deaths. "We in al-Aqsa announce, with all might and frankness, the ruling of the people in the homeland and in the diaspora, to execute the head of the sedition, Khaled Meshaal, Saeed Seyam and Youssef al-Zahar, and we will execute this ruling so those filthy people can be made an example," said a statement. Read The Full Story	Al-Qaeda Has A New, Far-Reaching Partner 2006-10-05 00:11:47 In a video released last month on the Internet, al-Qaeda's deputy leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, declared that he had "great news." Al-Qaeda, he reported, had joined forces with an obscure Algerian underground network and would work in tandem with the group to "crush the pillars of the crusader alliance". The Algerian partner, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, had fought the Algerian government in a barbaric civil war for almost a decade, but Zawahiri said the new alliance had different targets in mind. "Our brothers," he said, "will be a thorn in the necks of the American and French crusaders and their allies, and a dagger in the hearts of the French traitors and apostates." Zawahiri's statement was the latest sign of how, with al-Qaeda's help, the Algerian network has rapidly transformed itself from a local group devoted solely to seizing power at home into a global threat with cells and operations far from North Africa. Read The Full Story Iraq Universities And Schools Near Collapse 2006-10-05 00:10:25 Iraq's school and university system is in danger of collapse in large areas of the country as pupils and teachers take flight in the face of threats of violence. Professors and parents have told the Guardian they no longer feel safe to attend their educational institutions. In some schools and colleges, up to half the staff have fled abroad, resigned or applied to go on prolonged vacation, and class sizes have also dropped by up to half in the areas that are the worst affected. Professionals in higher education, particularly those teaching the sciences and in health, have been targeted for assassination. Universities from Basra in the south to Kirkuk and Mosul in the north have been infiltrated by militia organisations, while the same militias from Islamic organisations regularly intimidate female students at the school and university gates for failing to wear the hijab. Read The Full Story FCC Opens Media Ownership Hearings 2006-10-05 00:08:50 The concentration of media ownership by a few large corporations came under attack Tuesday as the Federal Communications Commission opened a series of hearings on the issue. "Without diversity in ownership and participation, our democracy is in danger," Rep. Maxine Waters said at the initial hearing held at the University of Southern California. Waters, a Los Angeles Democrat, and others criticized ownership of the Los Angeles Times and KTLA-TV by Chicago-based Tribune Co. Speakers said the situation stifled competition and diversity of local opinion. Read The Full Story Bernanke: Baby Boomers Will Strain Social Security, Medicare 2006-10-04 11:52:04 Unless Social Security and Medicare are revamped, the massive burden from retiring baby boomers will place major strains on the nation's budget and the economy, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said Wednesday. "Reform of our unsustainable entitlement programs" should be a priority, he said in prepared remarks to the Economics Club of Washington. "The imperative to undertake reform earlier rather than later is great," Bernanke added. It marked the Fed chief's most extensive comments to date on the challenges facing the United States with the looming retirement of 78 million baby boomers. In his remarks, Bernanke did not offer Congress and the Bush administration recommendations on how the massive entitlement programs should be changed. Efforts by the administration to overhaul the Social Security program -  once a centerpiece of President Bush's second-term agenda - sputtered last year, meeting resistance from Republicans and Democrats alike. Read The Full Story It Runs In The Family, Kornberg Wins Nobel For Chemistry 2006-10-04 11:49:47 American Roger D. Kornberg, whose father won a Nobel Prize a half-century ago, was awarded the prize in chemistry Wednesday for his studies of how cells take information from genes to produce proteins. The work is important for medicine, because disturbances in that process are involved in illnesses like cancer, heart disease and various kinds of inflammation. And learning more about the process is key to using stem cells to treat disease. Kornberg, 59, a professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine, said medical benefits from his research have taken root. "There are ... already many therapies, many drugs that are in development in trials or already available and there will be many more," he said. "Significant benefits to human health are already forthcoming. I think there will be many many more." Read The Full Story More Foley Fallout 2006-10-04 00:38:11 As Congress continued to feel the fallout from Rep. Mark Foley's resignation over a scandal with male pages, Foley's lawyer announced Tuesday that the Florida Republican had been molested by a clergyman as a teenager and that he was under the influence of alcohol when he sent lurid messages to congressional pages. Foley had represented the West Palm Beach district for 12 years and was seeking re-election until his sudden resignation last week after the disclosure of salacious e-mails he sent to teenage congressional pages. "This is part of his recovery," attorney David Roth said of his disclosures about Foley. He declined to identify the clergyman or the church Foley attended, but said the abuse happened between the ages of 13 and 15. Foley is a Roman Catholic and attended Sacred Heart School in Lake Worth, Florida. Read The Full Story 11 U.S. Troops, 52 Iraqis Killed 2006-10-04 00:37:10 A suicide bomber unleashed a blast in a Baghdad fish market Tuesday and two Shiite families were found slain north of the capital as violence across Iraq claimed at least 52 lives. The U.S. military, meanwhile, announced the deaths of nine soldiers and two Marines in what has been a deadly period for American forces in Iraq. The announcement brought to at least 15 the number of service members killed in fighting since Saturday. Four of the soldiers were killed in Baghdad on Monday in separate small-arms attacks, the military said. Another four were killed the same day in a roadside bomb attack on their patrol northwest of Baghdad. The ninth died Sunday when his vehicle was struck by a roadside bomb west of the capital. Read The Full Story
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