Free Internet Press Newsletter - Tuesday October 31 2006 - (813)

Tuesday October 31 2006 edition
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Split Loyalities Of Baghdad Police Could Delay Handover Of Control For Years 2006-10-31 00:32:10 The signs of the militias are everywhere at the Sholeh police station. Posters celebrating Moqtada al-Sadr, head of the Mahdi Army militia, dot the building's walls. The police chief sometimes remarks that Shiite militias should wipe out all Sunnis. Visitors to this violent neighborhood in the Iraqi capital whisper that nearly all the police officers have split loyalties. And then one rainy night this month, the Sholeh police set up an ambush and killed Army Cpl. Kenny F. Stanton,  Jr., a 20-year-old budding journalist, said his unit. At the time, Stanton and other members of the unit had been trailing a group of Sholeh police escorting known Mahdi Army members. "How can we expect ordinary Iraqis to trust the police when we don't even trust them not to kill our own men?" asked Capt. Alexander Shaw, head of the police transition team of the 372nd Military Police Battalion, a Washington-based unit charged with overseeing training of all Iraqi police in western Baghdad. "To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure we're ever going to have police here that are free of the militia influence." Read The Full Story U.S. Drops Bid Over Royalties From Chevron 2006-10-31 00:31:02 The U.S. Interior Department has dropped claims that the Cheveron Corporation systematically underpaid the government for natural gas produced in the Gulf of Mexico, a decision that could allow energy companies to avoid paying hundreds of millions of dollars in royalties. The agency had ordered Chevron to pay $6 million in additional royalties but could have sought tens of millions more had it prevailed. The decision also sets a precedent that could make it easier for oil and gas companies to lower the value of what they pump each year from federal property and thus their payments to the government. Interior officials said on Friday that they had no choice but to drop their order to Chevron because a department appeals board had ruled against auditors in a separate case. But state governments and private landowners have challenged the company over essentially the same practices and reached settlements in which the company has paid $70 million in additional royalties. Read The Full Story Bush And Blair: Two Leaders Searching For A Way Out Of Iraq, And Finding None 2006-10-31 00:29:40 Their faces alone said everything. At his press conference on Wednesday, in the sumptuous setting of the White House East Room, George Bush was grim, bemused and aged. In the House of Commons 3,000 miles away, Tony Blair stood rooted to the same political spot he has occupied for more than three years. Two leaders, mesmerised and transfixed by the enormity of the crisis they face, searching for an exit and finding none. In the bleak recent history of Iraq, this last week may have been the most despairing for them, when the converging disasters set in motion by their misconceived invasion of March 2003 became impossible to deny and the gap between their aspirations for Iraq and the reality on the ground there became a chasm. Events have now acquired a terrible momentum of their own. This month alone the insurgency has claimed more than 1,000 lives, to add to the tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of lives already lost. Another 1.3 million Iraqis are now refugees. The American and British armies are stretched to breaking point. The cost of the war, for America alone, now tops $300 billion (£158 billion). The moral authority of both countries has been grievously damaged. Never in modern history has the solution to one problem resulted in the creation of so many larger problems, especially since the initial "problem", Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, turned out to be non-existent. Read The Full Story Fears Over Huge Growth In Iraq Unregulated Private Armies 2006-10-31 00:27:06 A huge increase in the number of unregulated private military and security companies operating in Iraq and Afghanistan is driving concern about the lack of regulation and constraints on their activities. There are three British private security guards to every British soldier in Iraq, the charity War on Want said Monday. At least 181 private military and security companies are operating in the country, employing almost 21,000 British private security guards, nearly half of the total number - an estimated 48,000. Foreign contracts by British private security firms are now worth about £1 billion (about $1.9 billion) a year, according to the companies. Read The Full Story Biggest competitor to Vista kept in check by Microsoft 2006-10-30 12:35:22 Ordinarily this headline would no longer come as any surprise, after all everyone is pretty much used to Microsoft keeping the competition at bay using whatever methods it can. However, this is no ordinary headline because what IO left out is the name of that competitor: Windows XP. Read The Full Story Blair: We Must Pay Now To Avoid Climate Disaster Later 2006-10-30 12:15:55 Tony Blair today said that the world was facing "nothing more serious, more urgent, or more demanding of leadership" than climate change and that Britons must be prepared to pay now to avoid future disaster. Speaking at the launch of Sir Nicholas Stern's review on tackling global warming, the prime minister said there was "overwhelming scientific evidence" that climate change was taking place and that the consequences of failing to act would be "disastrous". "This disaster is not set to happen in some science fiction future many years ahead, but in our lifetime. Unless we act now ... these consequences, disastrous as they are, will be irreversible," he said. "There is nothing more serious, more urgent, more demanding of leadership - here, of course, but most importantly in the global community." Read The Full Story A Crooked Alliance In The War On Terror? 2006-10-30 12:14:14 An FBI report obtained by NBC News suggests that the ruling family of the remote and mountainous Central Asian nation of Kyrgyzstan oversaw a vast international criminal network that stretched all the way to a series of shell companies in the United States. Still, it was Kyrgyz then-President Askar Akaev's alliance with the U.S. government, and his role in the war on terror, that may raise the most disturbing questions. Akaev, who was deposed in a revolution last year, agreed to let the Pentagon open an air base in his country for operations in Afghanistan. After that agreement, the U.S. military steered more than $100 million in sub-contracts to the Akaev family's fuel monopoly, according to U.S. contractors who oversaw the payments and transactions. That windfall to the Akaev family businesses equaled about 5 percent of Kyrgyzstan's annual gross national product, according to the contractors. Read The Full Story 80 Killed In Pakistani Raid On Purported Militant School 2006-10-30 12:12:51 Pakistani troops backed by missile-firing helicopters on Monday struck a religious school purportedly being used as an al-Qaeda training center, killing 80 people in what appeared to be the country's deadliest-ever attack against suspected militants. The country's top Islamic political leader said American planes were used in the pre-dawn strike against the school - known as a madrassa - and called for nationwide protests Tuesday, claiming all those killed were innocent students and teachers. Both Pakistani and the U.S. military officials denied any American involvement in the attack in northwestern Pakistan, less than two miles from the Afghan border. An al-Qaeda-linked militant who apparently was a primary target of the strike had left the building a half hour beforehand, said a Pakistani official. Read The Full Story Peeping Toms Utilize High-Tech Gadgetry 2006-10-30 11:36:14 The stereotypical Peeping Tom has evolved, investigators say, from predators drilling holes in walls or lurking outside windows with binoculars, to infrared cameras hidden in the tip of a shoe. That evolution was demonstrated in December, when 28-year-old Edward Wainwright was arrested in Omaha after police say he videotaped an undressed 16-year-old girl in a tanning booth. Read The Full Story	Commentary: Halliburton Motto - Its Cost Plus, Baby! 2006-10-31 00:31:36 Intellpuke: This commentary is written by Evelyn Pringle and was posted Monday, Oct. 30, 2006, on the TruthOut website. Ms. Pringle is a columnist for YubaNet.com and an investigative journalist focused on exposing corruption in government and corporate America. Her column follows: Halliburton's contracts for work in Iraq are what's known as cost plus contracts, meaning that after all the costs for labor, materials and other expenses are added together, the company makes its profit based on a percentage of that total. It certainly does not take a financial genius to figure out that under the terms of such a contract, a company has every motive in the world to increase the costs of every project to increase profits. Since the minute Dick Cheney authorized the no-bid contracts for Halliburton, the granddaddy of war profiteering has been ripping off American tax payers left, right, and center through the use of these cost plus contracts, and another clear-cut profiteering scheme was recently revealed in testimony at a Senate Democratic Policy Committee hearing. On September 18, 2006, Julie McBride, a former Halliburton employee with the company's Morale, Welfare & Recreation Department (MWR) in Iraq, testified that "the mantra at Halliburton camps goes, 'It's cost plus, baby'." Read The Full Story Britain To Push For Global Climate Agreement By 2008 2006-10-31 00:30:14 The U.K. is to use the warnings of irreversible climate change and the biggest economic slump since the 1930s, outlined in Monday's Stern review, to press for a new global deal to curb carbon emissions. The government is urgently pushing ahead on the issue because the existing Kyoto protocol runs out in 2012, and there is no binding agreement to extend it. Downing Street is seeking the outline of a package with the G8 industrial nations and five leading developing countries by next year, or 2008 at the latest. Tony Blair will lobby the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, to put the need for international cooperation on climate change at the heart of Germany's G8 presidency when it begins in January. Read The Full Story Roman Soldiers March On The M6, Most Haunted Road In Britain 2006-10-31 00:28:50 For the first time since ghost-hunting became an organized science, Britain's spooks and apparitions have made a motorway their favorite road to haunt. After years of weird goings-on in lonely lanes or moorland crossings, the M6 has recorded more alleged sightings and spine-tingling feelings than any other route in the country. Roman soldiers, a distraught woman hitchhiker and a phantom lorry going the wrong way have all appeared on the six busy lanes - or out of their users' imaginations. "We assumed Britain's spookiest road would turn out to be a dark lane near an ancient battlefield," said Tony Simmons, sightings coordinator for the survey. "But, when you think about it, these findings make sense. The M6 is one of Britain's longest roads and it travels through many counties - and therefore an immense amount of history." The eerie encounters have been recorded by a hospital consultant, lorry (van) drivers and the hauntings expert Paul Devereux, who used a Geiger counter to test radiation levels at sites of repeated reports. Spooks, or conditions which lead 45% of all drivers to think they have seen them, occur throughout the route's 230 miles from Carlisle to Rugby. Read The Full Story CDC Probing Salmonella Outbreak In 18 States, Investigating Link To Produce 2006-10-30 20:19:39 A salmonella outbreak potentially linked to produce has sickened at least 172 people in 18 states, health officials said Monday. Health officials think the bacteria may have spread through some form of produce; the list of suspects includes lettuce and tomatoes. But the illnesses have not been tied to any specific product, chain, restaurants or supermarkets. Read The Full Story U.S. Military Monitors Soldiers Blogs, Web Sites 2006-10-30 12:16:23 >From the front lines of Iraq and Afghanistan to here at home, soldiers blogging about military life are under the watchful eye of some of their own. A Virginia-based operation, the Army Web Risk Assessment Cell, monitors official and unofficial blogs and other Web sites for anything that may compromise security. The team scans for official documents, personal contact information and pictures of weapons or entrances to camps. In some cases, that information can be detrimental, said Lt. Col. Stephen Warnock, team leader and battalion commander of a Manassas-based Virginia National Guard unit working on the operation. Read The Full Story As Blast Kills 33 In Sadr City, U.S. October Death Toll In Iraq Tops 100 2006-10-30 12:15:03 The American death toll for October climbed past 100, a grim milestone reached as a top White House envoy turned up unexpectedly in Baghdad on Monday to smooth over a rough patch in U.S.-Iraqi ties. At least 80 people were killed across Iraq, 33 in a Sadr City bombing targeting workers. A member of the 89th Military Police Brigade was killed in east Baghdad Monday, and a Marine died in fighting in insurgent infested Anbar province the day before, raising to 101 the number of U.S. service members killed in a bloody October, the fourth deadliest month of the war. At least 2,814 American forces have died since the war began. Upon arriving on an unannounced visit, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley went straight into meetings with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his security chief, Mouwafak al-Rubaie, telling them he "wanted to reinforce some of the things you have heard from our president". Read The Full Story Goodyear To Cut 1,100 Jobs, Close Plant In Tyler, Texas 2006-10-30 12:13:31 Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. said on Monday that it plans to close a plant in Tyler, Texas, three weeks after workers at the plant and 15 others went on strike in part because of the tire maker's plan to shut down the factory. The move will eliminate about 1,100 jobs and is part of Goodyear's strategy to end some of its private label tire business. The plant, which opened in 1962, has produced approximately 25,000 passenger and light truck tires per day. Read The Full Story Milan Court Orders Berlusconi Tried On Corruption Charges 2006-10-30 12:12:04 A Milan court on Monday ordered former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and a British lawyer to stand trial on charges of corruption. Berlusconi is accused of ordering the payment in 1997 of at least $600,000 to David Mills in exchange for the lawyer's false testimony in two trials against Berlusconi. Both men deny the allegations. Milan Judge Fabio Paparella issued the ruling after refusing a defense motion to remove him from the case. Read The Full Story
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