Free Internet Press Newsletter - Thursday October 12 2006 - (813)

Thursday October 12 2006 edition
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Japan Bans All Trade With North Korea 2006-10-12 00:27:04 Japan unilaterally imposed fresh sanctions on North Korea Wednesday, including a ban on shipping, as Pyongyang warned it would consider U.S. pressure "a declaration of war". Three days after North Korea claimed it had conducted its first nuclear test, there was no sign of tension subsiding. Japan's prime minister, Shinzo Abe, unwilling to wait for the United Nations Security Council, announced a total trade ban on North Korea. All its ships will be denied entry to Japanese ports. As he spoke, about two dozen North Korean ships lay idle in Japanese ports Wednesday with no dockers to unload them. Other measures include a ban on the entry of North Koreans, other than those with residential status. Tokyo imposed limited sanctions in July after Pyongyang test-fired missiles over the Sea of Japan. Read The Full Story Economists: Minimum Wage Hike Would Help U.S. Economy 2006-10-12 00:26:04 More than 650 economists, including five winners of the Nobel Prize for economics, called Wednesday for an increase in the minimum wage, saying the value of the last increase, in 1997, has been "fully eroded". Economists including Nobel prize winners Kenneth Arrow of Stanford University, Lawrence Klein of the University of Pennsylvania, Robert Solow of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Joseph Stiglitz at Columbia University and Clive Granger of the University of California, San Diego said in a statement released Wednesday that the real value of today's federal minimum wage is less than it has been at any time since 1951. Federal minimum wage is $5.15 an hour. Twenty-two states and the District of Columbia have set their minimum wages above the federal level. Read The Full Story Gaza Sliding Into Civil War 2006-10-12 00:24:55 When they buried Rafiq Siam, the traffic stopped and hundreds of armed men, some firing into the air, gathered at the Gaza mosque. Eight men wearing red berets and black combat uniforms lifted his body wrapped in a white shroud and Palestinian flag and carried it inside with as much ceremony as the pressing crowd would allow. Siam, 40, a father of seven, was the victim of a single bullet to the base of his skull. He died on Sunday a week after he was shot, the latest victim in the worst outbreak of factional violence in Gaza for more than 10 years. Years of rivalry between the Islamic Hamas movement, which now dominates the government, and the more secular Fatah, which was ousted from power in January elections, is spilling over into a struggle for power. Protests A few hours after the funeral, Siam's father sat with a dozen mourners outside the family home. His son, he explained, had worked at the office of the Palestinian president and Fatah leader, Mahmoud Abbas. The morning he was shot, armed men from a new Hamas unit, the Executive Force, clashed with Fatah protesters who were demonstrating about unpaid government salaries. "He was hit by a bullet on the back of his head," said his father, Yusuf, 74. At least 15 people were killed in the clashes last week. "This is no small thing that is happening. There is no nationalism here. It's just a competition between two forces. I'm sick of both sides because they can't control the situation. We are the victims. The victims are my son and the sons of others." Read The Full Story U.S. Population Poised To Hit 300 Million 2006-10-12 00:23:20 Clicking upward at a rate of one person every 11 seconds, the U.S. population will officially surpass 300 million in the next week or so. The milestone is a reminder that the United States remains a remarkable demographic specimen, 230 years old (since the Declaration of Independence) and still in a growth spurt. Behind only China and India, it is the planet's third most populous nation. For a rich, highly developed country, it is anomalously fertile, with a population that is increasing briskly, in sharp contrast to anemic growth or decline in Western Europe and Japan. Some demographers say this continued growth is essential to support an aging population in retirement and a sign of the continued allure of the United States even at a time when its image around the world has been sullied by the war in Iraq. Read The Full Story Fed Reserve Minutes Show Concerns About Inflation 2006-10-11 15:38:36 Uncertainty was the theme as the Federal Reserve's policy-setting committee debated last month whether to hold interest rates steady: Uncertainty over inflation. Uncertainty over the housing market. Uncertainty over economic growth. The minutes of the committee's most recent meeting on Sept. 20, which were released today, indicate that, of the two issues it monitors most closely - inflation and a slowing economy - the available evidence suggested to the Fed that slower growth should take precedence. In deciding to leave its benchmark overnight lending rate unchanged at 5.25 percent at that meeting, the Fed's policymakers bet that falling energy prices and a two-year run of past interest-rate increases would act to hold inflation down. Read The Full Story N.Y. Yankees Pitcher Dies In Plane Crash 2006-10-11 15:24:09 Cory Lidle, a pitcher for the New York Yankees, was killed today when his small private plane crashed into a residential high-rise building on New York City's Upper East Side, igniting several apartments before pieces of the aircraft crashed to the ground, a high ranking city official confirmed late this afternoon. Police said two bodies were found on the ground shortly after the crash, one of them that of Lidle, who was a licensed pilot. The plane was registered to Lidle. The aircraft struck at about the 40th or 41st floors of the the building, at 524 E. 72nd St., near York Avenue, known as the Belaire. That building and one next door were evacuated, said police. Flames shot out of the building and smoke streamed up into the sky, visible for miles. By 4 p.m., fire officials said the fire was brought under control. The plane was flying under visual flight rules and was not in contact with air traffic controllers, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. Read The Full Story UPDATE: At Least 2 Dead As Small Aircraft Hits Building In Manhattan 2006-10-11 13:12:23 An aircraft crashed into a residential high-rise building on New York City's Upper East Side this afternoon, igniting several apartments before pieces of the aircraft crashed to the ground, said the police and witnesses. Police officials said two bodies were found on the ground, possibly passengers or crewmembers from the aircraft, but the authorities are just beginning their investigations. There are no reports of any injuries yet. A Fire Department spokeswoman, Emily Rahimi, told the Associated Press that the aircraft struck the 20th floor of the building, 524 E. 72nd St., near York Avenue. However, television reports and witnessed said the aircraft hit closer to the 40th floor. That building and one next door were evacuated, police said. The authorities have not said whether the aircraft was a small airplane or a helicopter. Read The Full Story U.S. Army: Troops To Stay In Iraq Until 2010 2006-10-11 12:19:26 The U.S. Army has plans to keep the current level of soldiers in Iraq through 2010, the top Army officer said Wednesday, a later date than Bush administration or Pentagon officials have mentioned thus far. The Army chief of staff, Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, cautioned against reading too much into the planning, saying troops levels could be adjusted to actual conditions in Iraq. He said it is easier to hold back forces scheduled to go there than to prepare and deploy units at the last minute. ''This is not a prediction that things are going poorly or better,'' Schoomaker told reporters. ''It's just that I have to have enough ammo in the magazine that I can continue to shoot as long as they want us to shoot.'' Even so, his comments were the latest acknowledgment by Pentagon officials that a significant withdrawal of troops from Iraq is not likely in the immediate future. Read The Full Story Ex-ATF Director Made Questionable Expenditures 2006-10-11 11:42:43 The former director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives authorized hundreds of thousands of dollars of questionable expenditures on a new ATF headquarters, personal security and other items, and he violated ethics rules by ordering 20 employees to help his nephew prepare a high school video project, according to an exhaustive report released today. Carl J. Truscott, who previously served as head of President Bush's security detail at the Secret Service, also took several questionable trips with excessive numbers of accompanying ATF agents, including a $37,000 journey to London in September 2005 accompanied by eight other ATF employees, according to the report. Truscott also ordered two female administrative staffers to prepare meals for visiting guests and required one of the employees to announce, "Lunch is served". These and other findings by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine follow Truscott's abrupt resignation in August amid growing questions about his conduct. Read The Full Story Iraqi Parliament OKs Bill Allowing Autonomous Regions 2006-10-11 11:41:56 The Shiite-dominated parliament Wednesday passed a law allowing the formation of federal regions in Iraq, despite opposition from Sunni lawmakers and some Shiites who say it will dismember the country and fuel sectarian violence. The Sunni coalition in parliament and two Shiite parties tried to prevent a vote on a bill by boycotting Wednesday's session to keep the 275-seat body from reaching the necessary 50 percent quorum. The quorum was reached with 140 lawmakers, who voted on each of the bill's some 200 articles individually, passing them all unanimously. The law includes a provision that regions cannot be formed for another 18 months, a concession to Sunni concerns. Read The Full Story Water For Millions At Risk As Glaciers Melt Away 2006-10-11 00:20:32 The world's glaciers and ice caps are now in terminal decline because of global warming, scientists have discovered. A survey has revealed that the rate of melting across the world has sharply accelerated in recent years, placing even previously stable glaciers in jeopardy. The loss of glaciers in South America and Asia will threaten the water supplies of millions of people within a few decades, the experts warn. Georg Kaser, a glaciologist at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, who led the research, said: "The glaciers are going to melt and melt until they are all gone. There are not any glaciers getting bigger any more." Loss of land-based ice is one of the clearest signals of global temperature rise, and the state of glaciers has become a key argument in the debate over climate change. Last year, New Scientist magazine published a letter from the television botanist David Bellamy, a renowned climate sceptic, which claimed that 555 of 625 glaciers measured by the World Glacier Monitoring Service have been growing since 1980. His claim was quickly discredited, but the perception that glaciers are both growing and shrinking remains. Dr. Kaser said that "99.99% of all glaciers" are now shrinking. Increased winter snowfall meant that a few, most notably in New Zealand and Norway, got bigger during the 1990s, he said, but a succession of very warm summers since then had reversed the trend. His team combined different sets of measurements which used stakes and holes drilled into the ice to record the change in mass of more than 300 glaciers since the 1940s. They extrapolated these results to cover thousands of smaller and remote glaciers not directly surveyed. Read The Full Story Worries On Islam Spread To Centrists Across Europe 2006-10-11 00:19:41 Europe appears to be crossing an invisible line regarding its Muslim minorities: more people in the political mainstream are arguing that Islam cannot be reconciled with European values. "You saw what happened with the pope," said Patrick Gonman, 43, the owner of Raga, a funky wine bar in downtown Antwerp, 25 miles from here. "He said Islam is an aggressive religion. And the next day they kill a nun somewhere and make his point. "Rationality is gone." Gonman is hardly an extremist. In fact, he organized a protest last week in which 20 bars and restaurants closed on the night when a far-right party with an anti-Muslim message held a rally nearby. Read The Full Story American Secret? India Becomes The Gasoline Gusher 2006-10-11 00:18:28 Sitting on the edge of the water in the Gulf of Kutch on India's western shore is one of America's dirty secrets. A mass of steel pipes and concrete boxes stretches across 13 square miles (33 square kilometers) - a third of the area of Manhattan - which will eventually become the world's largest petrochemical refinery. The products from the Jamnagar complex are for foreign consumption. When complete, the facility will be able to refine 1.24 million barrels of crude a day. Two-fifths of this gasoline will be sent 9,000 miles (15,000 kilometers) by sea to America. India's biggest private company, Reliance Industries, with a market capitalization of $33 billion (£17.8 billion), runs the plant. Controlled by billionaire Mukesh Ambani, whose father Dhirubhai founded the company, Reliance towers over its industry rivals, contributing 8% of India's exports. Read The Full Story	New Book By White House Insider Says Bush Just Using Christians 2006-10-12 00:26:37 More than five years after President Bush created the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, the former second-in-command of that office is going public with an insider's tell-all account that portrays an office used almost exclusively to win political points with both evangelical Christians and traditionally Democratic minorities. The office's primary mission, providing financial support to charities that serve the poor, never got the presidential support it needed to succeed, according to the book. Entitled "Tempting Faith," the book is not scheduled for release until Oct. 16, but MSNBC's "Countdown with Keith Olbermann" has obtained a copy. "Tempting Faith's" author is David Kuo, who served as special assistant to the president from 2001 to 2003. A self-described conservative Christian, Kuo's previous experience includes work for prominent conservatives including former Education Secretary and federal drug czar Bill Bennett and former Attorney General John Ashcroft. Read The Full Story Hastert Aides Interest Ethics Panel Foley Probe 2006-10-12 00:25:32 With House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert denying personal knowledge of former representative Mark Foley's  activities, investigators for the House ethics committee are bearing down on three senior members of Hastert's staff to determine when they learned of Foley's actions and whether they passed on their knowledge to the speaker. The three - chief of staff Scott Palmer, deputy chief of staff Mike Stokke and counsel Ted Van Der Meid - have formed a palace guard around Hastert (R-Illinois) for years, attaining great degrees of power and unusual autonomy to deal with matters of politics, policy and House operations. They are also remarkably close. Palmer and Stokke have been with Hastert for decades. They live together in a Capitol Hill townhouse and commute back to Illinois on weekends. It is that relationship that has made investigators so interested in their knowledge of Foley's contacts with teenage male congressional pages, especially allegations that his chief of staff personally appealed to Palmer in 2003 to confront the Florida Republican. Foley resigned Sept. 29 when news reports indicated he had sent electronic messages to a former page. Read The Full Story DOH! Gen. Casey: Tough Time In Iraq To Continue 2006-10-12 00:24:10 Violence in the Baghdad region has peaked with a flare-up of sectarian attacks in the past few weeks, leaving U.S. commanders and the Iraqi government "not comfortable" with the current situation there, Gen. George W. Casey, the top U.S. general in Iraq, said Wednesday. Casey, in Washington for regular meetings with top U.S. officials, said at a Pentagon news conference that Iraq is a "tough situation" and that he expects it to continue to be difficult through Ramadan and in coming months, as Sunni and Shiite extremists vie for control of that nation's capital. "I think it's no surprise to anyone that the situation in Iraq remains difficult and complex," said Casey. Read The Full Story Katrina Insurers Get An Earful From Sen. Lott 2006-10-12 00:22:42 Sometimes, political connections come in handy. Ask Senator Trent Lott, of Mississippi. Lott, a Republican and former majority leader, is one of thousands of homeowners on the Gulf Coast who have been fighting with their insurers over payments for damage in Hurricane Katrina. In an interview Wednesday, he said he was angry about the insurers' "insensitivity and outright meanness" in rejecting many homeowners' claims. He said he inserted a provision into legislation, signed by President Bush last week, directing the Department of Homeland Security to investigate potential fraud by the insurance industry. Lott said he was also drafting legislation to challenge the industry's exemptions from antitrust laws and had asked his staff to investigate the industry's tax rates. "I am outraged," he said. "I'm concerned there are lots of abuses in the aftermath of the hurricane." Read The Full Story Fundraiser For Illinois Governor Is Indicted On Kickback Charges 2006-10-11 15:38:17 A top adviser and fundraiser for Gov. Rod Blagojevich was charged in an indictment unsealed Wednesday with scheming to collect millions of dollars in kickbacks from companies seeking to do business with the state. Businessman Antoin ''Tony'' Rezko was charged in the federal indictment with operating a fraud scheme in which he, millionaire political contributor Stuart Levine and other insiders used Levine's position as a member of two state boards to pressure companies to pay kickbacks in exchange for state business. Levine is among those previously charged in the case. U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald said federal investigations interrupted the plan, and Rezko and Levine only collected $250,000 despite seeking much more. He said Levine plans to plead guilty and is cooperating with the investigation. Read The Full Story Cory Lidle's Plane Crashes Into New York High-Rise 2006-10-11 14:26:07 A Cirrus SR-20 registered to New York Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle crashed into a 50-story residential building on Manhattan's East Side on Wednesday, killing at least two people, the New York City Fire Department and New York City Police Department said. Flames were shooting out from several windows midway up the luxury high-rise in a residential neighborhood. Paramedics and rescue workers are treating people on the ground. The Federal Aviation Administration described the plane as a "general aviation" fixed-wing aircraft flying under visual flight rules, meaning a pilot was flying by visual landmarks. First responders to the New York plane crash say an emergency call was made from the plane indicating a possible fuel problem. The plane hit the Belaire Condominiums at 524 E. 72nd Street! near the East River. More than 150 firefighters are on scene of a four-alarm fire in the building. Read The Full Story Breaking News: Small Aircraft Hits N.Y. Apartment Building 2006-10-11 12:27:57 Police say an aircraft has crashed into a building on Manhattan's Upper East Side at 72nd Street and York Avenue. It is near Rockefeller Center. There was no word on casualties. Video from the scene shows at least three apartments in the high rise fully engulfed in flames. It's unclear if it was a small plane or a helicopter. Read The Full Story OPEC OKs 1 Million Barrels Of Oil A Day Production Cut 2006-10-11 12:19:06 The president of OPEC, Edmund Daukoru, said Wednesday that the 11 members of the oil cartel have agreed to trim production by 1 million barrels a day but, after a week of talks, they are still negotiating over how the cut will be divided among them. Daukoru, who is also Nigeria's oil minister, said today from the Nigerian capital that the cartel's members were "nearing consensus" about how to share the cuts. At the same time, Qatar's oil minister said that OPEC was still debating the level from which to make the production cuts. Oil prices rose slightly on the news. At midmorning the benchmark contract for light, low-sulfur crude to be delivered next month was trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange for $58.68 a barrel, a gain of 16 cents. Read The Full Story McAfee, CNET Execs Leave Over Stock Options Probes 2006-10-11 11:42:20 Top executives at two technology companies quit or were fired today as the repercussions of a broad government investigation into stock option awards continued to expand. Computer security firm McAfee Inc. announced that chairman and chief executive George Samenuk had retired and that president Kevin Weiss had been terminated following an internal investigation of company stock option awards. Internet publisher CNET Networks Inc., meanwhile, announced the resignations of three top executives, including chairman and chief executive Shelby Bonnie, who co-founded the company. Read The Full Story Study: Iraq Death Toll 655,000 Since U.S.-Led Invasion 2006-10-11 00:20:53 A team of American and Iraqi epidemiologists estimates that 655,000 more people have died in Iraq since coalition forces arrived in March 2003 than would have died if the invasion had not occurred. The estimate, produced by interviewing residents during a random sampling of households throughout the country, is far higher than ones produced by other groups, including Iraq's government. It is more than 20 times the estimate of 30,000 civilian deaths that President Bush gave in a speech in December. It is more than 10 times the estimate of roughly 50,000 civilian deaths made by the British-based Iraq Body Count research group. The surveyors said they found a steady increase in mortality since the invasion, with a steeper rise in the last year that appears to reflect a worsening of violence as reported by the U.S. military, the news media and civilian groups. In the year ending in June, the team calculated Iraq's mortality rate to be roughly four times what it was the year before the war. Read The Full Story FBI Agents Lack Arabic Skills In Post-9/11 World 2006-10-11 00:20:13 Five years after Arab terrorists attacked the United States, only 33 FBI agents have even a limited proficiency in Arabic, and none of them work in the sections of the bureau that coordinate investigations of international terrorism, according to new FBI statistics. Counting agents who know only a handful of Arabic words - including those who scored zero on a standard proficiency test - just 1 percent of the FBI's 12,000 agents have any familiarity with the language, the statistics show. The numbers reflect the FBI's continued struggle to attract employees who speak Arabic, Urdu, Farsi and other languages of the Middle East and South Asia, even as the bureau leads a fight against terrorist groups primarily centered in those parts of the world. The same challenge is facing the CIA and other agencies as the government competes with the private sector for a limited number of applicants with foreign-language proficiency, according to U.S. officials and experts. Read The Full Story Bush Paints A Rosy Budget Picture - But Is It? 2006-10-11 00:19:03 The federal budget deficit shrank from $318 billion to less than $260 billion in the fiscal year that concluded in September, officials disclosed yesterday. It marks the second year in a row that the deficit has declined after ballooning in the early years of the Bush administration. White House officials hailed the improving short-term budget picture as a vindication of President Bush's tax-cutting agenda, though the long-term prospects are considerably bleaker, given the escalating costs of health-care and retirement programs and, in the view of many economists, the red ink produced by tax cuts. Bush pointed to the declining budget deficit in remarks Tuesday evening at a fundraiser in Georgia, where he once again sought to frame next month's midterm elections in part as a referendum on tax cuts that he says have stimulated revenue. The nation "has got this choice to make," Bush told donors here. "Do we keep taxes low so we can keep this economy growing, or do we let the Democrats in Washington raise taxes and hurt the economic vitality of this country?" Read The Full Story
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