Free Internet Press Newsletter - Tuesday October 17 2006 - (813)

Tuesday October 17 2006 edition
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Homes Raided In U.S. Rep. Weldon Influence Probe 2006-10-17 00:46:57 Federal agents raided the homes of U.S. Rep. Curt Weldon's daughter and one of his closest political supporters Monday as part of an investigation into whether the veteran Republican congressman used his influence to benefit himself and his daughter's lobbying firm, according to sources familiar with the investigation. The investigation focuses on actions the Pennsylvania congressman took that may have aided clients of the business created by his daughter, Karen Weldon, and longtime Pennsylvania political ally Charles Sexton, according to three of the sources. A grand jury, impaneled in Washington, D.C., in May, has obtained evidence gathered over at least four months through wiretaps of Washington area cellphone numbers and has scrutinized whether Weldon received anything of value, according to the sources. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the investigation. The investigation focuses on Weldon's support of the Russian-managed Itera International Energy Corp., one of the world's largest oil and gas firms, while that company paid fees to Solutions North America, the company that Karen Weldon and Sexton operate. Read The Full Story Families Flee Iraqi Towns As Sectarian Violence Claims 100 Victims A Day 2006-10-17 00:45:54 Families fled in search of safety Monday as open warfare raged for a fourth day between Shiite militias and armed Sunni men in Tigris River towns north of Baghdad. Militias allied with Iraq's Shiite-led government held sway in Balad city, forcing out Sunni families and leaving the bodies of slain Sunni men to rot in the streets, according to police, residents and hospital officials. The Iraqi government deployed still more reinforcements to try to calm the embattled towns and hold open the main roads, Interior Ministry spokesman Abdul Kareem al-Kinani said in the capital. But local police officers accused Shiite-dominated government police forces of working alongside Shiite militias in executing Sunnis and appealed for more help. The escalating violence in the Tigris River towns in many ways serves as a microcosm of the daily violence roiling Iraq. Sectarian attacks have increased more than tenfold since the start of the year and now claim more than 100 victims a day, according to the Iraqi government. Read The Full Story Losing Faith In The President 2006-10-17 00:44:31 White House officials realized they had a problem, former staffer David Kuo writes in his new book, "Tempting Faith," when they saw how a panel rated the first applications for grants under the "faith-based initiative," President Bush's vaunted effort to help religious charities. On a scale of 1 to 100, respected national organizations such as Big Brothers Big Sisters of America scored in the mid-70s to mid-80s, "while something called Jesus and Friends Ministry from California, a group with little more than a post office box," scored 89 and Pat Robertson's overseas aid organization, Operation Blessing, scored 95, according to Kuo. "It was obvious that the ratings were a farce," he writes, adding that he and other White House aides feared that if the list became public, "it would show once and for all that the initiative was purely about paying off political friends for their support." Read The Full Story Saddam Hussein Calls On Iraqis To Unite And Oust Invaders 2006-10-16 18:09:10 Saddam Hussein, who is on trial for mass murder and genocide, has issued an extraordinary message from his prison cell, urging warring Iraqis to set aside their differences, drive the multinational forces from Iraq, and then forgive those "who shed the blood of your sons and brothers". In a three-page open letter dictated to his lawyers on Saturday and made public Sunday, the former Iraqi dictator said resistance against the U.S.-led occupation forces was "a right and a duty" and that "victory is certain". But he said: "Do not forget that your goal is to liberate your country from the invaders and their followers and is not a settling of accounts outside this goal." Since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, tens of thousands of Iraqis have lost their lives as a result of attacks by multinational forces and growing insurgent and sectarian violence, which is pushing the country towards all-out civil war. In his message, Saddam wrote: "I urge the brothers in the noble resistance and the great Iraqi people to be just and fair," adding that they should "keep the door of forgiveness open until the last minute that precedes the hour of liberation". Read The Full Story News Blog: British Soldiers Stand Up For Their General 2006-10-16 18:08:22 Intellpuke: The following news blog was written by Guardian correspondent Mark Oliver. It deals with the reaction of British military troops to comments made last week by British army chief Gen. Richard Dannatt that U.K. troops should be pulled out of Iraq "soon".  Mr. Oliver's news blog follows: A poll on a website popular with former and serving British military personnel shows that 79% of its users think Sir Richard Dannatt was "absolutely right" to call for a withdrawal from Iraq "sometime soon". The remarks last week by Sir Richard, the head of the army, are continuing to make waves today with the former Lib Dem [Liberal Democrat] leader, Lord Ashdown, adding his voice to criticism of the general from unnamed ministers. The users of the British Army Rumour Service -  arrse.co.uk - have expressed strong support for Sir Richard and they were today attacking his critics. Lord Ashdown and others railed against Sir Richard, alleging his remarks amounted to a "clear constitutional breach" - an argument which is not going down well on the site's message boards. Read The Full Story 2 Die As Severe Thunderstorms Bring Flooding To Southeast Texas 2006-10-16 11:58:57 Severe thunderstorms with torrential rains and a possible tornado hit Southeast Texas overnight, killing two people, flooding roads and shutting down numerous schools Monday. As much as 10 inches of rain fell in the Houston-Galveston area. More rain was expected across Texas on Monday, with the possibility of damaging winds and flooding, the National Weather Service said. Two women were found dead in a sport utility vehicle on a heavily flooded roadway in Houston Monday morning. A police spokesman didn't know the extent of the flooding, but broadcast reports said the SUV was in 8 feet of water. South of Houston, as many as 20 homes were damaged when a suspected tornado roared through Magnolia Beach before daybreak Monday, Calhoun County Sheriff B.B. Browning said. The only injury reported in the small community 75 miles northeast of Corpus Christi was a cut thumb a man suffered from flying glass, he said. Read The Full Story Vehicle Of Slain Florida Family Found In West Palm Beach 2006-10-16 11:58:08 Authorities on Monday found the vehicle that belonged to a family of four before they were shot to death last week along Florida's Turnpike, said the St. Lucie County sheriff. The 1998 four-door black Jeep Cherokee was discovered at about 8:45 a.m. in an industrial section of West Palm Beach, about 70 miles south of where the shootings occurred, said Sheriff Ken J. Mascara. The vehicle was being towed to the sheriff's office in Fort Pierce to be processed for evidence. The bodies of the husband, wife and two boys ages 3 and 4 were found Friday along the turnpike in Port St. Lucie. Investigators believe their Jeep had pulled to the side of the highway before someone else in the vehicle shot them and drove away sometime between 1:30 a.m. and 3 a.m. Read The Full Story Concerns Over U.S. Plan To Let Coast Guard Fire Guns On Great Lakes 2006-10-16 11:56:49 Even in autumn, the cold, silent expanse of Lake Michigan defines this town, where pleasure boats glide into harbor, fishermen wait patiently for salmon and tourists peer up at the lighthouse. But the United States Coast Guard has a new mission for the waters off of these quiet shores. For the first time, Coast Guard officials want to mount machine guns routinely on their cutters and small boats here and around all five of the Great Lakes as part of a program addressing the threats of terrorism after Sept. 11. For the first time in memory, Coast Guard members plan to use a stretch of water at least five miles off this Michigan shore - and 33 other offshore spots near cities like Cleveland; Rochester; Milwaukee; Duluth, Minn.; and Gary, Ind. - as permanent, live fire shooting zones for training on their new 7.62 mm weapons, which can blast as many as 650 rounds a minute with a range of more than 4,000 yards. Read The Full Story British Universities Urged To Spy On Muslim, Asian-Looking Students 2006-10-16 00:35:00 Lecturers and university staff across Britain are to be asked to spy on "Asian-looking" and Muslim students they suspect of involvement in Islamic extremism and supporting terrorist violence, the Guardian has learned. They will be told to inform on students to special branch because the government believes campuses have become "fertile recruiting grounds" for extremists. Britain's Department for Education has drawn up a series of proposals which are to be sent to universities and other centers of higher education before the end of the year. The 18-page document acknowledges that universities will be anxious about passing information to special branch, for fear it amounts to "collaborating with the 'secret police'". It says there will be "concerns about police targeting certain sections of the student population (e.g.  Muslims)". The proposals are likely to cause anxiety among academics, and provoke anger from British Muslim groups at a time when ministers are at the focus of rows over issues such as the wearing of the veil and forcing Islamic schools to accept pupils from other faiths. Read The Full Story 2 More Deaths Bring Canadian Deaths In Afghanistan To 42 2006-10-16 00:33:46 Two Canadian soldiers in the NATO force were killed and three were wounded in an ambush in southern Afghanistan on Saturday afternoon, and an Afghan provincial council member was assassinated Sunday on his way to work, said officials. In other violence, an Italian photojournalist was reported to have been kidnapped by gunmen in southern Afghanistan. Two policemen were killed in a raid on Afghanistan's eastern border with Pakistan, and two civilians died in a roadside bomb explosion that was apparently intended for a Westerner's vehicle that was passing by, news agencies reported. The Canadians were killed when their convoy came under fire by rocket-propelled grenades and gunfire in Kandahar Province, forcing their unit to call in airstrikes, according to a NATO news release. Forty-two Canadian soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan this year. Read The Full Story Bill Clinton Rallies Iowa Democrats 2006-10-16 00:31:55 Former president Bill Clinton entered the Hy-Vee Hall in Des Moines, Iowa, on Saturday night like an aging rock star, striding up a red carpet, wearing a big smile, his arms outstretched to touch the hands of Democratic admirers lined up along his walkway to the stage. Clinton came to rally Democrats three weeks before critical midterm elections. But his visit may have served another purpose as well. Alone among prospective Democratic presidential candidates for 2008, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (New York) has not set foot in the state all year, and the futures market in Clinton political stock here has been suffering. Early polls by the Des Moines Register have shown former North Carolina senator John Edwards, the Democrats' 2004 vice presidential nominee, to be more popular among Democratic activists than the New York senator. A more recent survey of Iowans showed her running weaker than Edwards, Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Massachusetts) and Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack (a Democrat) in a series of hypothetical general election matchups against prospective Republican candidates. Read The Full Story	Allies Criticize Guantanamo, But Block Return Of Prisoners 2006-10-17 00:46:31 British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett last week issued the latest European demand to close down the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The existence of the prison is "unacceptable" and fuels Islamic radicalism around the world, she said, echoing a recent chorus of complaints from Europe about U.S. counterterrorism policy. Behind the scenes, however, the British government has repeatedly blocked efforts to let some prisoners leave Guantanamo and return home. According to documents made public this month in London, officials there recently rejected a U.S. offer to transfer 10 former British residents from Guantanamo to the United Kingdom, arguing that it would be too expensive to keep them under surveillance. Britain has also staved off a legal challenge by the relatives of some prisoners who sued to require the British government to seek their release. Read The Full Story Former F.D.A. Chief Is Charged With Conflict Of Interest, Lying 2006-10-17 00:45:19 Lester M. Crawford, former chief of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, was charged Monday with conflict of interest and lying about stock he and his wife owned in companies the agency regulates. Dr. Crawford, who resigned abruptly in September 2005, just two months after his nomination had been approved by the Senate, is expected to plead guilty in federal court in Washington, D.C., Tuesday, said his lawyer, Barbara Van Gelder. Each of the two charges filed against Dr. Crawford, 68, is a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail, but Van Gelder said she expected him to be fined and placed on probation. "It's his responsibility," she said, "and he accepts it." Read The Full Story Scientists Announce Creation Of Heaviest Atomic Element Yet 2006-10-17 00:43:44 Scientists in California and Russia announced Monday that they have created the heaviest atomic element ever made, adding a new item to the universal menu of matter known as the periodic table and revealing fresh secrets about the nature of atoms, the fundamental units of physical stuff. The new, radioactive element, which has not yet been formally named but is being referred to variously as ununoctium (Latin for "one-one-eight"), eka-radon (beneath radon on the periodic table) or simply element 118, did not linger long. Indeed, as with most "super-heavy" elements - which are not known to exist in nature but have been synthesized by slamming smaller atoms together - the three atoms of ununoctium created in the latest experiments came and went in a literal flash. But during their brief tenures of about nine ten-thousandths of a second each in a laboratory on Russia's Volga River, those three atoms revealed much about the laws that govern the behavior of matter, said scientists. Read The Full Story British Terror Suspect On The Run 2006-10-16 18:08:50 A suspected terrorist has escaped the authorities after being placed on a control order, in the latest embarrassment to hit the Home Office. It was understood the man, who has not been named, escaped from a mental health unit and has been on the run for two weeks. The British citizen was believed to have climbed through a window to evade staff at the London unit. Control orders act as a loose form of house arrest, usually placing suspects under a curfew and requiring them to report regularly to police. The man now on the run will have been suspected of playing a role in international terrorism, possibly linked to al-Qaeda groups. Read The Full Story Report: Cheaper To Act On Global Warming Now Than To Wait 2006-10-16 18:07:51 Weaning the world off fossil fuels sounds like an expensive fantasy, but a major [British] government-backed report will reveal later this month that slashing greenhouse gas emissions will be far cheaper than dealing with the devastation if global warming continues unchecked. Nick Stern, a former chief economist at the World Bank and the Treasury, has spent more than a year combing through the science and economics of climate change and his final report is keenly awaited by campaigners. Some environmentalists are skeptical about reducing global warming to a financial calculation. "How do you put a price on the melting of the Greenland ice shelf?" says Doug Parr, chief scientist at Greenpeace. But Whitehall insiders say Brown and Blair hope Stern's report will "change the terms of the debate" on climate change, giving them the clout to persuade other countries to adopt ambitious solutions, just as the Africa Commission in early 2005 was used as the intellectual ballast for negotiations on debt relief and aid. Read The Full Story Hawaii Governor Declares Disaster After 6.7 Earthquake 2006-10-16 11:58:39 Hawaii Gov. Linda Lingle, who was in a hotel near the epicenter, issued a disaster declaration for the state, and the state Civil Defense had several reports of minor injuries as aftershocks continued to shake the island chain. Officials began inspecting bridges and roads across Hawaii early Monday following the strongest earthquake to rattle the islands in more than two decades, a 6.7-magnitude quake that caused blackouts and landslides but no reported fatalities. At least one stretch of road leading to a bridge near the earthquake's epicenter on the Big Island collapsed, Civil Defense Agency spokesman Dave Curtis said Monday. Several other roads on the Big Island were closed by mudslides, debris and boulders, but most were still passable, he said. The power was back on across most of the islands Monday morning. About a dozen schools were closed for inspection, but no major injuries or deaths had been reported. Read The Full Story Negroponte: Analysis Of Particle Confirms N. Korea Nuke Test 2006-10-16 11:57:22 U.S. intelligence confirmed Monday that North Korea conducted a nuclear test on Oct. 9, saying that "radioactive debris" was detected in air samples from a relatively small atomic blast. North Korea publicly claimed to have carried out its first test of a nuclear weapon shortly after the explosion, which was recorded by the U.S. Geological Survey as a 4.2 magnitude "seismic event" about 240 miles northeast of the North Korean capital, Pyongyang. The United States and other members of the U.N. Security Council generally accepted the Stalinist state's claim and voted to impose sanctions on North Korea Saturday. But U.S. officials said the claimed test needed to be confirmed by scientific data. That confirmation came today in the form of a two-sentence statement posted on the Website of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the post held by John D. Negroponte. Read The Full Story Iraq Cancels Peace Talks After Scores More Die 2006-10-16 00:35:24 The unremitting wave of sectarian violence that has greeted the Muslim holy month of Ramadan claimed scores more Iraqi lives over the weekend, as authorities in Baghdad announced the indefinite postponement of a conference of political leaders seen as crucial to quickly diminishing hopes for national reconciliation. In a terse statement from the ministry for national dialogue, the government said the reconciliation conference, which had been scheduled for this Saturday in Baghdad, would be delayed until further notice for "emergency reasons". The cancellation is a further blow to the credibility of the national unity government of Nuri al-Maliki. The embattled prime minister has come under intense pressure from the U.S. and Britain, as well as ordinary Iraqis, to halt the communal violence and the activities of armed militias and death squads. In the weekend's most vicious act of score-settling between the Shia and Sunni Arabs, at least 63 people were killed in the town of Balad, 50 miles north of Baghdad. Read The Full Story Israeli Police Say President Should Be Charged With Rape 2006-10-16 00:34:30 Police in Israel said Sunday night that the country's president should be charged with raping and sexually assaulting several women who worked for him. In the most serious allegations faced by an Israeli head of state, Moshe Katsav was also suspected of bugging his staff's telephones and of fraud, said police. The case, which has dragged on for months, will now pass to the attorney general, who is expected to take several weeks to decide whether or not to bring charges. "There is prima facie evidence of a number of incidents in which several women who worked under his authority were involved, that the president carried out sex crimes of rape, sexual molestation by force and without consent," the Israeli justice ministry and the police said in a joint statement. Read The Full Story Questions Over Effectiveness Of U.N. Curbs On N. Korea 2006-10-16 00:32:38 Questions over the effectiveness of the Security Council's punitive sanctions on North Korea for its claimed nuclear test grew Sunday, as both South Korea and China - the North's two most important trading partners - indicated that business and economic relations would be largely unaffected. A day after the Council unanimously passed the resolution, following nearly a week of intensive diplomatic negotiations, the South Korean government said it would still pursue economic projects with North Korea, including an industrial zone and tourist resort in the North. Those projects are not explicitly covered by the Security Council resolution, but they are an important source of hard currency for the North. China, which shares a 870-mile porous border with North Korea and is perhaps its most critical economic gateway to the outside world, said Saturday that it had no intention of stopping and inspecting cross-border shipments, as called for, but not specifically required, in the resolution. The Chinese government said nothing on Sunday about how it intended to carry out the sanctions, and American officials said they would be focused on whether the normal trade flow across the border was slowed. Read The Full Story
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