Free Internet Press Newsletter - Wednesday October 11 2006 - (813)

Wednesday October 11 2006 edition
Free Internet Press is operated on your donations. Donate Today
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 Critics Doubt Border Fence Will Stem Migrant Tide 2006-10-10 12:41:41 Legislation passed by Congress mandating the fencing of 700 miles of the U.S. border with Mexico has sparked opposition from an array of land managers, businesspeople, law enforcement officials, environmentalists and U.S. Border Patrol agents as a one-size-fits-all policy response to the nettlesome task of securing the nation's borders. Critics said the fence does not take into account the extraordinarily varied geography of the 2,000-mile-long border, which cuts through Mexican and U.S. cities separated by a sidewalk, vast scrubland and deserts, rivers, irrigation canals and miles of mountainous terrain. They also say it seems to ignore advances in border security that don't involve construction of a 15-foot-high double fence and to play down what are expected to be significant costs to maintain the new barrier. And, they say, the estimated $2 billion price tag and the mandate that it be completed by 2008 overlook 10 years of legal and logistical difficulties the federal government has faced to finish a comparatively tiny fence of 14 miles dividing San Diego and Tijuana. Read The Full Story WWF: Toxic Paint Is Endangering Marine Life, Food Chain 2006-10-10 12:40:35 Wildlife campaigners warned today that a chemical used in paint on boats and ships is spreading pollution from the Arctic to the Antarctic. The World Wildife Fund (WWF) said member countries of the International Maritime Organization (IMO), including the U.K., are allowing the toxin tributyltin (TBT) to contaminate wildlife and enter the food chain. The environmental group is calling on member countries to ratify their own five-year-old legislation to bring an end to the pollution. TBT was widely used in anti-fouling paints to prevent marine organisms sticking to the hulls of boats and ships. The WWF is to submit a paper Wednesday to a meeting of the IMO on the problem of TBT pollution. Read The Full Story Security Alert At Heathrow Airport In London 2006-10-10 12:39:59 Travellers were told to expect disruption today after a security alert forced the temporary closure of part of London's Heathrow Airport. The British Airports Authority said "the majority" of Terminal Two had been evacuated as a precaution because of a suspect package in the check-in area. Scotland Yard confirmed that officers were dealing with the incident. Passengers due to travel are urged to contact their airline or visit heathrowairport.com for up-to-date information. Responding to a report that a man had run up to a desk, dropped off a package and run off, a Metropolitan Police spokeswoman said: "That is certainly a line of inquiry and CCTV [closed-circuit television] is being checked." Read The Full Story Surprise, NOT! Dissension On Responding To N. Korea 2006-10-10 10:52:14 After a unanimous condemnation of North Korea's apparent nuclear test, signs of disagreement appeared among its neighbors today, as Japanese officials pushed for tough sanctions and raised the possibility of military action, which China called unthinkable. In Tokyo today, Finance Minister Koji Omi said that Japan would consider imposing more financial sanctions on North Korea, while two other cabinet members said Japan might consider imposing a trade embargo. Japan's chief cabinet secretary, Yasuhisa Shiozaki, declared today that his government was considering "all possibilities," while officials in China and South Korea were saying that they would oppose any use of force. A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, Liu Jianchao, said at a briefing today that "taking military action against North Korea would be unimaginable." 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 Hezbollah: Unless Israel Leaves Shebaa Area We Will Drive Them Out 2006-10-10 12:40:56 Hezbollah will resume its military campaign against Israel unless it withdraws from the disputed Shebaa farms area and other pockets of territory occupied during this summer's 34-day war, Nabih Berri, speaker of the Lebanese parliament, has warned. "If Israel does not pull out we will have to drive them out," said Berri, who acted as a link to the militant organization during this summer's war with Israel, in an interview with the Guardian. Hezbollah will remain armed and fully operational in south Lebanon, despite the newly-deployed U.N. forces, until Israel withdraws from all Lebanese territory and ceases its ongoing air, sea and land violations, added Berri. "The UNIFIL presence will not hinder Hezbollah's defensive operations. The resistance doesn't need to fly its flags high to operate, it's a guerrilla movement; it operates among the people," he said. Read The Full Story River Crests At Near-Record Level In Virginia 2006-10-10 12:40:20 Swollen by torrential weekend rainfall, the Blackwater River crested Tuesday at nearly a record level, causing flood damage to about 65 businesses and 10 to 15 homes in this southeastern Virginia city. Downtown Franklin had been closed since Monday because of flooding, and the city was to send inspectors out as early as Tuesday night to assess the damage, said Capt. Tim Dunn of the fire and rescue department. They were hampered by a potentially flammable spill at a local fuel distributor that was caused by the flooding. The high water also may have caused the derailment early Tuesday of four empty CSX train cars on tracks over the river, Dunn said. No one was injured. Read The Full Story At Least 75 Bodies Found In Iraq Since Monday Morning 2006-10-10 10:52:35 At least 75 corpses have been found in the Baghdad area since Monday morning, authorities said today, most of them bound, riddled with bullets, and showing signs of torture. The grim discoveries reflected a familiar pattern of death-squad killings and sectarian violence in the Iraqi capital. A Ministry of Interior spokesman said today that 60 of the bodies were found in Baghdad in the 24-hour period ending this morning, while 15 more were discovered during the day today. In addition, at least five bombs exploded in the capital area, killing at least 14 civilians and 6 policemen, and injuring 23 people, said the ministry and the police sources. Read The Full Story Hastert Will Fire Any Of His Staff Who Withheld Page Info 2006-10-10 10:51:33 House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert said Tuesday he'll dismiss anyone on his staff found to have covered up concerns about ex-Rep. Mark Foley's approaches to former pages. Hastert said he huddled with his staff members last week and he believes they acted appropriately in handling information on Foley's conduct, but he also issued them a stern warning: ''If they did cover something up, then they should not continue to have their jobs.'' The FBI is conducting a criminal investigation and the House ethics committee is investigating any potential violations of standards of conduct. Read The Full Story
Original materials on this site © Free Internet Press. Any mirrored or quoted materials © their respective authors, publications, or outlets, as shown on their publication, indicated by the link in the news story. Original Free Internet Press materials may be copied and/or republished without modification, provided a link to http://FreeInternetPress.com is given in the story, or proper credit is given. Newsletter options may be changed in your preferences on http://freeinternetpress.com Please email editor@freeinternetpress.com there are any questions. XML/RSS/RDF Newsfeed Syndication: http://freeinternetpress.com/rss.php