Free Internet Press Newsletter - Wednesday October 4 2006 - (813)

Wednesday October 4 2006 edition
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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 Hastert Refuses To Step Down As U.S. House Speaker 2006-10-03 12:45:50 U.S. House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert said Tuesday that he would not step down, even as questions intensified about why Republican leaders in the House did not act more aggressively when they learned months ago that Representative Mark Foley was sending e-mails to a teenage page that disturbed the youth and his parents. With critical midterm elections five weeks away, some Republicans and conservative advocates fear that the Foley scandal will discourage Republican voters from going to the polls as they learn more about the sexually explicit messages Foley sent to teenage pages. And an increasing number of them are laying the blame at the feet of  Hastert, who has said he could not recall learning of the messages before news of them broke last week, even though some of his Republican colleagues said they told him of e-mails. Today, Hastert's spokesman, Ron Bonjean, issued a statement that said the speaker "has and will lead the Republican conference to another majority in the 110th Congress." His statement came after the House majority leader, John A. Boehner, of Ohio, said in a radio interview this morning that he was sure he had told Hastert about some of the e-mails last year. Read The Full Story U.S.: North Korea Nuke Test Unacceptable 2006-10-03 12:44:54 A nuclear test by North Korea would pose an "unacceptable threat" to peace and stability in the world and would further isolate the country, the U.S. State Department said Tuesday. "A North Korea test would severely undermine our confidence in the North Koreans' commitment to six party talks and would pose an unacceptable threat to peace and stability in Asia and the world," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said in a statement released in Cairo, where U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is meeting Arab officials. A statement from the North Korean Foreign Ministry released earlier said Pyongyang would conduct its first-ever nuclear test, blaming a U.S. "threat of nuclear war and sanctions" for forcing its hand. "A provocative action of this nature would only further isolate the North Korean regime and deny the people of the North the benefits they so rightly deserve," McCormack said. "The U.S. will continue to work with its allies and partners to discourage such a reckless action and will respond appropriately." Read The Full Story Big Bang Study Nets Nobel For American Physicists 2006-10-03 12:43:50 Americans John Mather and George Smoot won the 2006 Nobel Prize for physics on Tuesday for research into cosmic radiation that helped pinpoint the age of the universe and supported the Big Bang theory of its birth. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awarded the $1.37 million prize, said the two men were instrumental to the success of the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite program launched by NASA in 1989. Their work with the COBE satellite took Big Bang theory, which contends that the universe began billions of years ago as a tiny dot that exploded into today's huge system of stars and planets, out of the realm of mathematical equations and into the world of precise science. When their research was published in 1992, famed cosmologist Stephen Hawking called it the "greatest discovery of the century, if not of all time." "The COBE results provided increased support for the Big Bang scenario for the origin of the universe, as this is the only scenario that predicts the kind of microwave background radiation measured by COBE," the Academy said. Read The Full Story Report: U.S. Job Cuts Soar In September 2006-10-03 12:42:50 Job cuts soared last month, topping the 100,000 mark for the first time since last January. Outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas says it's the second straight month of increased job cuts, topping the August tally by 54 percent and the level of a year ago by 40 percent. The increase was led by the auto industry, which announced nearly 34,000 cuts. That was dominated by suppliers who are starting to feel the effects of the production cutbacks at Ford, General Motors and DaimlerChrysler. There were also sizable increases in the telecommunications and housing industries. So far this year employers have announced more than 639,000 job cuts, a drop of 18 percent from a year ago. Read The Full Story Kip Hawley Is An Idiot 2006-10-03 11:39:39 I was detained for about 25 minutes today after passing though the TSA checkpoint at MKE terminal E. I thought about posting this in the other treads devoted to their experience today under the new new liquids-are-okay-in-a-quart bag rule, but I decided it needed its own thread. Yesterday, while discussing the new rules a fellow Flyertalker suggested we write "Kip Hawley is an Idiot" on the outside of our clear plastic quart bags. At the checkpoint I placed my laptop in one bin, and my shoes, cell phone and quart bag in a second bin. The TSA guy who was pushing bags and bins into the X-ray machine took a good hard look, and then as the bag when though the X-ray I think he told the X-ray operator to call for a bag check/explosive swab on my roller bag to slow me down. He went strait to the TSA Supervisor on duty and boy did he come marching over to the checkpoint with fire in his eyes! Read The Full Story Organizations Pour Record Amounts Of Money Into Campaigns 2006-10-03 00:38:32 As the race for control of Congress turns toward its final sprint to Election Day, independent organizations with ideological or commercial stakes in the outcome are pouring record amounts of money into the closest contests -- in some cases eclipsing the spending of the candidates themselves. In Ohio, Rep. Deborah Pryce, the fourth-ranking Republican in the House, was attacked by nearly $1 million in negative commercials this summer. But her Democratic opponent, Franklin County Commissioner Mary Jo Kilroy, did not pay for any of them. They were bankrolled instead by trial lawyers, labor unions and the liberal group MoveOn.org. In fact, outside groups appear to have spent more in that period than Pryce and Kilroy combined, a pattern that is being duplicated in some of the most competitive campaigns across the country. Politically active groups on both the left and the right are shelling out dollars faster than in any previous midterm election and focusing them intensely on the races that are up for grabs. Even with five weeks to go in the campaign, the $34 million in "independent expenditures" so far is nearly double the amount spent in the entire 2002 midterm election, according to PoliticalMoneyLine.com. Read The Full Story Tenet Recalled Warning Rice Of Imminent Al-Qaeda Threat 2006-10-03 00:37:36 Former CIA director George Tenet told the 9/11 Commission that he had warned of an imminent threat from al-Qaeda in a July 2001 meeting with Condoleezza Rice, adding that he believed Rice took the warning seriously, according to a transcript of the interview and the recollection of a commissioner who was there. Tenet's statements to the commission in January 2004 confirm the outlines of an event in a new book by Washington Post Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward that has been disputed by some Bush administration officials. But the testimony also is at odds with Woodward's depiction of Tenet and former CIA counterterrorism chief J. Cofer Black as being frustrated that "they were not getting through to Rice" after the July 10, 2001, meeting. Rice angrily rejected those assertions yesterday, saying that it was "incomprehensible" that she would have ignored such explicit intelligence from senior CIA officials and that she received no warning at the meeting of an attack within the United States. Rice acknowledged that the White House was receiving a "steady stream of quite alarmist reports of potential attacks" during that period, but said the targets were assumed to be in the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Israel and Jordan. Read The Full Story Foley Scandal Puts Pressure On Republicans 2006-10-03 00:36:36 Republican strategists said yesterday that public revulsion over the sexually graphic online conversations between Rep. Mark Foley (R-Florida) and former House pages could compound the party's problems enough to tip the House to the Democrats in November - and could jeopardize the party's hold on the Senate as well. As House GOP leaders defended their role in handling revelations that forced Foley on Friday to give up his House seat, party strategists said the scandal threatens to depress turnout among Christian conservatives and could hamper efforts to convince undecided and swing voters that Republicans deserve to remain in the majority. There was intense anger among social conservative activists in Washington, D.C. Monday, and some called for House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert(R-Illinois) to resign. Republican operatives closely following the battle for the House and Senate said that they are virtually ready to concede nearly a third of the 15 seats the Democrats need to recapture control of the House, and that they will spend the next five weeks trying to shelter other vulnerable incumbents from the fallout of the Foley scandal in hopes of salvaging a slender majority. 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 Police: School Shooter Admitted Past Molesting 2006-10-03 12:46:22 A man who laid siege to a one-room Amish schoolhouse told his wife he had molested young children decades ago and left a note saying he had "dreams of molesting again," state police Commissioner Jeffrey B. Miller said Tuesday. Police said they could not confirm the claim by Charles Carl Roberts IV and that family members knew nothing of the alleged molestation. Authorities say a heavily armed Roberts, 32, took hostages at a one-room schoolhouse and opened fire on several girls before taking his own life in a bucolic area of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Roberts shot himself as police stormed the schoolhouse, which sat on a patch of grass amid pastures and farm fields, authorities said. Two more girls died from gunshot wounds overnight, raising the number of victims to five. Five other children remained hospitalized after Monday's school shooting, the country's third in less than a week. Read The Full Story Editorial: The Foley Matter 2006-10-03 12:45:25 Intellpuke: The following editorial on the Foley affair appears in Tuesday's New York Times. The editorial begins here: History suggests that once a political party achieves sweeping power, it will only be a matter of time before the power becomes the entire point. Policy, ideology, ethics all gradually fall away, replaced by a political machine that exists to win elections and dispense the goodies that come as a result. The only surprise in Washington now is that the Congressional Republicans managed to reach that point of decayed purpose so thoroughly, so fast. That House leaders knew Representative Mark Foley had been sending inappropriate e-mail to Capitol pages and did little about it is terrible. It is also the latest in a long, depressing pattern: When there is a choice between the right thing to do and the easiest route to perpetuation of power, top Republicans always pick wrong. The news about Foley should have set off alarm bells instantly, even if the messages the leaders saw were of the "inappropriate" variety rather than the flat-out salacious versions that surfaced last week. But there was certainly no sense of urgency in their response, which seemed directed at sweeping the matter under the rug rather than finding out precisely what was going on. Read The Full Story 14 Dead As Dengue Fever Overwhelms New Delhi Hospitals 2006-10-03 12:44:13 The Indian government called an emergency meeting of health officials Tuesday to try to control an outbreak of dengue fever that has infected about 500 people in northern India, overwhelming Delhi's hospitals and exposing serious flaws in the public health system. Delhi authorities were spraying high-risk areas with insecticide to kill the mosquitoes that carry the disease, but as the death toll rose to 14, doctors' associations criticized the government for a belated and ineffective response. There was chaos at Delhi's leading public hospital, the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences, where doctors were forced to turn away suspected dengue cases because of a scarcity of beds and blood. People were being treated in corridors and in tents erected outside the building, and television reporters filming undercover within the building said the shortage of doctors on the dengue wards was so acute that patients were helping administer intravenous saline drips to each other. The hospital was itself struggling to contain an outbreak of the disease, attributed to mosquitoes breeding in stagnant pools of water on the surrounding campus. One doctor died last week from the fever, and 19 medical students and staff members have fallen ill. Read The Full Story Turks Hijack Airline To Protest Pope 2006-10-03 12:43:13 Two Turks protesting Pope Benedict XVI's planned trip to Turkey next month hijacked a Turkish Airlines jet carrying 113 people from Albania to Istanbul on Tuesday, and it landed safely in this southern Italian coastal city, officials said. The hijackers, who were unarmed, began releasing passengers from the Boeing 737-400, which was parked on the tarmac in the darkness. A fire truck carrying Brindisi airport's chief of security had pulled up near the jet. The hijackers told authorities they were prepared to surrender, said Candan Karlitekin, chairman of Turkish Airlines' board of directors. He said no one aboard the Boeing 737-400 was injured. Istanbul Deputy Gov. Vedat Muftuoglu also said the hijackers had agreed to give themselves up. Read The Full Story Lawyers For Detainees Challenge Bush Plan In Federal Court 2006-10-03 12:42:23 Attorneys for 25 men being held in Afghanistan have launched the first legal challenge of President Bush's plan for prosecuting and interrogating terrorism suspects. Documents filed Monday in federal district court here demand that the men be released or be charged and allowed to meet with attorneys. Such a filing, known as a habeas corpus petition, is prohibited under the legislation approved by Congress last week. That bill says the military may detain enemy combatants indefinitely and, if officials choose to bring charges, the cases will be heard before a military commission, not a civilian judge. Read The Full Story FIP Blogger Experiment 2006-10-03 09:17:54   We've been toying with a new feature, that some of you may enjoy.   Our nightly newsletter, which thousands of you read, is now being posted online at freeinternetpress.blogspot.com .  This is to help join us with the Blogger readers, and make the newsletter available to anyone who isn't currently subscribed.   If you would like to receive the nightly newsletter in your own email box, simply sign up for a free account on the left (click "New User").   Let us know what you think.  Post a comment here (at FreeInternetPress.com) or email us at editor@freeinternetpress.com Read The Full Story 4th Girl Dies From Shooting In Amish School 2006-10-03 00:38:08 A dairy truck driver, apparently nursing a 20-year-old grudge, walked into a one-room Amish schoolhouse here Monday morning and systematically tried to execute the girls there, killing four and wounding seven before killing himself, said the police. The heavily armed gunman first ordered the 15 boys in the room to leave, along with several adults, and demanded that the 11 girls line up facing the blackboard. As the gunman lashed the students' legs together with wire and plastic ties, the teacher dashed from the room and called the police around 10:35 a.m. The gunman, identified as Charles C. Roberts, 32, killed himself as the police stormed the West Nickel Mines Amish School, which is set back in a cornfield on a street of stone houses, barns and silos in Lancaster County, about 50 miles west of Philadelphia. Several of the wounded were in critical condition in area hospitals. Read The Full Story Experts: Border Fence Is Impractical 2006-10-03 00:36:57 Building a fence in an attempt to secure the U.S. border with Mexico is impractical and would simply lead illegal immigrants to cross elsewhere, according to former U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents and other experts. The Mexican government agreed in a diplomatic note sent Monday to the U.S. government, warning that the fence would damage relations between the two countries. The Senate voted Friday to build about 700 miles of double-layered fence with access roads, lighting, cameras and sensors, to try to block five heavily used crossing points along the 2,000-mile border. Read The Full Story
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