Free Internet Press Newsletter - Tuesday November 21 2006 - (813)

Tuesday November 21 2006 edition
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Bush: No Decision Yet On Iraq Troop Levels 2006-11-20 23:57:32 President Bush said Monday that he had made no decisions about altering the number of U.S. troops in Iraq,  noting that there are "a lot of suggestions" still being evaluated. "I haven't made any decisions about troop increases or troop decreases, and won't until I hear from a variety of sources, including our own United States military," said Bush. "They will be bringing forth the suggestions and recommendations to me here as quickly as possible." Bush made his remarks during a news conference in Bogor, Indonesia, following a meeting with Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, near the end of an Asian trip that included a stop at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Vietnam. Read The Full Story No U.S. Models On List Of Safest Vehicles 2006-11-20 23:56:10 Imported models took all 13 spots on the U.S. insurance industry’s list of safest vehicles this year, due mainly to a new requirement that all cars and sport utilities on the list have systems to keep them stable in an emergency. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety isn’t bashful about its reasons for pushing electronic stability control, saying that its studies show up to 10,000 fatal crashes per year could be prevented if every vehicle had the safety feature. “The research is so compelling that electronic stability control could help prevent many crashes from happening in the first place,” said institute spokesman Russ Rader. Read The Full Story Anti-Terrorism Unit Takes Over Investigation Of Poisoned Spy 2006-11-20 23:54:32 Counter-terrorism officers from Scotland Yard took charge Monday night of the investigation into the suspected deliberate poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko as the first pictures were published of the former spy’s dramatically changed appearance. Officers said that Litvinenko, a strong critic of President Putin, had been placed under police guard as he continued fighting for life in a London hospital. The effects of the poison were graphically illustrated by the pictures of the ravaged physical appearance of the former KGB agent in his hospital bed. The announcement of the involvement of Scotland Yard's Counter-Terrorism Command Monday underlined the seriousness with which the attempted murder of Litvinenko, 41, is being treated, and the possible diplomatic implications if a Kremlin connection is uncovered. Read The Full Story British Government Urged To Rethink Bird Flu Drug Plans 2006-11-20 23:52:46 The British government's strategy to prevent a flu pandemic is inadequate because the H5N1 virus can develop resistance to the only drug being stockpiled in the U.K., scientists warned Monday. A report by the Royal Society and the Academy of Medical Sciences said that in order to properly combat a pandemic, the U.K. should stockpile not only Tamiflu but also Relenza, another antiviral drug. The report - called "Pandemic influenza: science to policy" - says two patients being treated with Tamiflu in Vietnam died after the H5N1 bird flu virus in their bloodstream rapidly developed resistance to the drug. It also questions whether the government has stockpiled enough Tamiflu to deal with a pandemic. As of September, there were 14.6 million courses of the drug, enough for a quarter of the population. Read The Full Story 3 Students Die, 7 In Critical Condition In Alabama School Bus Crash 2006-11-20 14:42:35 A school bus carrying high school students plummeted 30 feet off an interstate overpass Monday, killing three teenage girls and injuring at least 30 other people, several critically, authorities said. The bus ended up below the overpass, its front end crushed. Two teenage girls died at the scene, and a third died of injuries at a hospital, said police. "It looks like the bus plunged headfirst" said police spokesman Wendell Johnson. Police Chief Rex Reynolds said officers were looking for a small car that apparently came close to or struck the bus, causing it to plow through the guardrail on the elevated section of I-565. More than 30 students and the driver were taken to hospitals, he said. Read The Full Story Space Junk Problem Rising To New Heights 2006-11-20 14:41:51 This week, a spacewalking cosmonaut will tee up a golf ball just outside the international space station and let loose with a publicity-generating drive - a shot that has already generated a debate over the dangers posed by orbital debris. But if you think one foam-rubber “golf ball” is a cause for concern, how about a concert grand piano? That’s roughly the size and weight of the piece of equipment NASA plans to throw over the space station’s side next spring - if they can figure out which way it’ll go once it’s cast away. The 1,430-pound (650-kilogram) unit is called the EAS, or Early Ammonia Servicer. It was installed in mid-2001 as an emergency reserve for the station’s coolant system. Once the mature thermal control system is activated next month during Discovery's STS-116 mission to the space station, the EAS becomes surplus space hardware. Read The Full Story School Bus Crashes Off Overpass In Huntsville, Alabama 2006-11-20 10:47:34 A school bus carrying about 20 high school students crashed off an interstate Monday and overturned, injuring an undetermined number of people, said authorities. The bus ended up below the I-565 overpass. Some of the students were taken to a hospital, said Keith Ward, a city schools spokesman. ``We know there were approximately, and this is an approximate number now, 20 students that were on a bus that were high school students that were en route from the Huntsville Center for Technology,'' Ward told WAAY-TV. ``We know that there was an incident and overturned bus and we've got a very serious situation.'' Read The Full Story Astronomers: Black Holes Exhibit Spin Control 2006-11-20 10:46:46 X-ray vision has brought astronomers closer than ever to completely characterizing a black hole, a place where strange things happen. Astronomers measured the spinning speed of three black holes, finding that one rotates at a breakneck 950 times per second, nearing its theoretical rotation limit of 1,150 spins a second. The black hole lies within the constellation Aquila, about 35,000 light-years from Earth. The finding represents an important step toward understanding these invisible objects. When any mass, such as a star, becomes more compact than a certain limit, its own gravity becomes so strong that the object collapses to a singular point, a black hole.The spin of a star is thought to translate into spin of a black hole that forms from the star's collapse. With its mass much more compact, the spin rate ought to be phenomenal, much like a skater pulls in his arms to increase speed when performing a pirouette. Read The Full Story Ohio GOP Fundraiser Sentenced To 18 Years In Prison 2006-11-20 10:45:40 A former GOP fundraiser at the center of a scandal-plagued state investment in rare coins that helped Democrats seize power in the midterm elections was sentenced Monday to 18 years in prison. Tom Noe, a prominent coin dealer accused of taking at least $2 million, was convicted last week of theft, corrupt activity, money laundering, forgery and tampering with records. Lucas County Common Pleas Judge Thomas Osowik, who described the crime as an "elaborate scheme of theft on a large scale," also fined Noe $120,000. "You continued to spend the bureau's money at what I thought was a shockingly, alarmingly large rate, and done for one purpose: to present some type of a facade that you had a bottomless cup of wealth and luxury at your disposal, when in fact it was at the state's expense," said Judge Osowik. Read The Full Story Zahra Kamalfar Trapped At Sheremetyevo Airport For 73 Days? 2006-11-20 10:27:04   The video about Zahra Kamalfar has been submitted to us several times.    The video looks like a spoof of 'The Terminal', the drama loosely based on Merhan Kerimi Nasseri's experience at the  Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris.      Since this was reported to be in Moscow, we asked our contact there to see what he could find.  This sounds like a hoax to us, but we were remaining open minded. Read The Full Story Drug Puts Wounded U.S! . Troops At Risk For Blood Clots, Strokes, Heart Attacks 2006-11-20 00:25:11 A blood-coagulating drug designed to treat rare forms of hemophilia is being used on critically wounded U.S. troops in Iraq despite evidence it can cause clots that lead to strokes, heart attacks and death in other patients, The (Baltimore) Sun reported for Sunday’s editions. Recombinant Activated Factor VII, which is made by Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk, is approved in the United States for treating forms of hemophilia that affect fewer than 3,000 Americans. It costs $6,000 a dose. The Food and Drug Administration said in a warning last December that giving Factor VII to patients who don’t have the blood disorder could cause strokes and heart attacks. Its researchers published a study in January blaming 43 deaths on clots that developed after injections of Factor VII. Read The Full Story In The Beginning: Scientists Get Ready To Hunt For 'God Particle' 2006-11-20 00:23:50 At security posts dotted around the fields between the Jura mountains and Lake Geneva scientists are installing hi-tech retina scans above shafts descending 80 meters down - and leading to the largest scientific instrument ever built. The machine is being bolted together inside a tunnel 17 miles (27 kilometers) long, and when the power is thrown on next year it will recreate conditions unknown for 14 billion years since the extraordinary fireball that marked the beginning of the universe - the big bang which blasted time and space into existence. In the coming months engineers using cranes will lower sections of detectors weighing several thousand tons into caverns carved within the tunnel. They will wire in some of the world's largest magnets and test run the machine's computer, built to handle a torrent of data equivalent to 150 times the content of the world wide web each year. Read The Full Story Rapid Growth In Solar, Wind And Biofuel Energy Shows Promise 2006-11-20 00:22:43 The top of a large steel vat gently swings open, and a slab of silicon, cut into pieces the size of large bricks, is lifted onto a conveyor belt. On a mezzanine above the warehouse-style floor of the factory in Frederick, Bill Good is monitoring the six-foot furnaces that melt the silicon that goes into bricks, which are later sliced into wafers and turned into solar panels in a building next door. Good, 53, used to work in a landscaping business, but like many people around the country he has found work in the alternative-energy industry. After two years, he said, "I could retire here." That's the sort of job certainty many workers would envy. Growth in the solar, wind power and biofuel sectors has been fast and promises to be enduring. Last Thursday, BP PLC's solar division announced a $70 million plan to double the capacity of the Frederick factory and hire 70 more people. Read The Full Story	Private Corporate Takeovers May Risk Financial Bust 2006-11-20 23:56:55 Elite private investors are buying up major companies at a record pace, a deal wave that is raining riches on Wall Street but also may be raising the risk of a financial bust to follow. On Monday, investors led by Blackstone Group announced the biggest takeover ever by a so-called private equity fund, a $36-billion deal to buy Equity Office Properties Trust, the largest U.S. owner of office buildings. The purchase follows buyouts announced in recent months that will put firms including radio giant Clear Channel Communications Inc., casino titan Harrah's Entertainment Inc. and food-services company Aramark Corp. in private hands, taking their shares off the stock market. Read The Full Story Israeli Map Says West Bank Settlements Sit On Arab Land 2006-11-20 23:55:18 An Israeli advocacy group, using maps and figures leaked from inside the government, says that 39 percent of the land held by Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank is privately owned by Palestinians. Israel has long asserted that it fully respects Palestinian private property in the West Bank and only takes land there legally or, for security reasons, temporarily. If big sections of those settlements are indeed privately held Palestinian land, that is bound to create embarrassment for Israel and further complicate the already distant prospect of a negotiated peace. The data indicate that 40 percent of the land that Israel plans to keep in any future deal with the Palestinians is private. Read The Full Story British Reject New Nasdaq Offer 2006-11-20 23:53:44 The Nasdaq Stock Market has intensified a trans-Atlantic battle for the London Stock Exchange in an effort to overtake the rival the New York Stock Exchange as the world’s leading equity marketplace. The London exchange, the largest in Europe, quickly rejected Nasdaq's $5.1 billion cash offer on Monday and said it would not meet with Nasdaq executives. Nasdaq officials said that, while they still hoped to reach a friendly deal, they planned to go ahead with their offer. The London market is attractive to Nasdaq because it has benefited from a flood of new money from Asia and the Middle East. It has lured new listings because its regulatory regimen is seen as less onerous than the oversight of stock exchanges in the United States. Read The Full Story UPDATE: Impact Threw Alabama Students 'All Over School Bus' 2006-11-20 14:54:57 A bus carrying high school students smashed through a guardrail along an overpass Monday and crashed nose-first 30 feet below, killing three teenage girls and injuring at least 30 other people, several critically, authorities said. Students on the school bus, which had no seat belts, were screaming when rescue workers arrived. "They were thrown all over the bus," said Huntsville Fire Chief Dusty Underwood. Some had to be pulled from the crushed front of the bus. Two teenage girls died at the scene, and a third died at a hospital, said police said. Police Chief Rex Reynolds said officers were looking for a small car that apparently came close to or struck the bus, causing it to veer off the elevated section of Interstate 565. More than 30 students and the driver were taken to the hospital, he said. Frantic parents went to the scene, where some students sat dazed or lay draped in white sheets, and went to the hospital to find their children. Read The Full Story California Supreme Court Says Bloggers Can't Be Sued 2006-11-20 14:42:12 The California Supreme Court ruled Monday that bloggers and participants in Internet bulletin board groups cannot be sued for posting defamatory statements made by others. In deciding a case closely watched by free speech groups, the court said a federal law gives immunity from libel suits not only to Internet service providers, like AOL, but also to bloggers and other users of their services. "Subjecting Internet service providers and users to defamation liability would tend to chill online speech," said today's unanimous ruling. Read The Full Story Iran Urges Summit With Iraq And Syria 2006-11-20 10:48:01 Iran has invited the Iraqi and Syrian presidents to Tehran for a weekend summit with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to hash out ways to cooperate in curbing the runaway violence that has taken Iraq to the verge of civil war and threatens to spread through the region, four key lawmakers told the Associated Press on Monday. Iraqi President Jalal Talabani has accepted the invitation and will fly to the Iranian capital Saturday, said a close parliamentary associate. The Iranian diplomatic gambit appeared designed to upstage expected moves from Washington to include Syria and Iran in a wider regional effort to clamp off violence in Iraq, where more civilians have been killed in the first 20 days of November than in any other month since the AP began tallying the figures in April 2005. Read The Full Story Former Student Shoots 5 At German High School 2006-11-20 10:47:08 An armed and masked 18-year-old stormed his former high school in northwestern Germany Monday, shooting five people and setting off smoke bombs before he was found dead, his body still rigged with explosives, said police. Witnesses said the masked gunman parked nearby and opened fire as soon as he entered the schoolyard, wounding several people and sending students running in all directions. The first patrol car arrived at the Geschwister Scholl school in Emsdetten, near the Dutch border, six minutes after a distress call from a school secretary, prompting the attacker to set off several smoke bombs and withdraw to the second floor, said Hans Volkmann, a senior police officer. Police searched the building room by room, evacuating terrified students. They found the assailant, identified as Sebastian Bosse by witnesses and German television, dead in a smoke-filled room. Read The Full Story Italy Replaces Military Intelligence Chief 2006-11-20 10:46:11 The Italian government Monday replaced the head of Italy's military intelligence agency, who is under investigation in the alleged CIA abduction of an Egyptian cleric in Milan in 2003, according to government officials. SISMI director Nicolo Pollari was replaced after a special Cabinet meeting, along with the heads of the civilian intelligence agency and the agency that coordinates the country's intelligence services. The government said the replacements were part of a broader overhaul of the intelligence services. The heads of the two non-military services are not under investigation in the alleged abduction. Read The Full Story Black American Stars Make Audio Bible A Best Seller 2006-11-20 10:45:11 PlayStation 3 may be the holy grail of American consumerism this Christmas but another item is causing an unexpected stir in the aisles - a dramatized audio Bible. The 21-hour Bible Experience, based on "Today's New International Version of the Bible", is read exclusively by black actors with Denzel Washington as Solomon and Samuel L Jackson in the role of God. It is a surprise fixture at the top of the U.S. audio books best-sellers lists - largely due to so many well-known voices among the 250 African-American artists, says the Michigan publisher, Zondervan. Read The Full Story Chilly Reception Precedes Bush's Indonesia Visit 2006-11-20 00:25:38 President Bush paid tribute to new symbols of capitalism in this struggling communist country Monday and offered encouragement for Vietnam’s battle against bird flu and other public health challenges. The president quickly toured this city, once known as Saigon, before flying to Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country, where thousands angrily protested America’s policy in the Middle East and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The White House said it was confident about security precautions for Bush’s visit despite police warnings of an increased threat of attack by al-Qaeda-linked groups. Read The Full Story Pentagon Review Sees Three Options In Iraq 2006-11-20 00:24:39 The Pentagon's closely guarded review of how to improve the situation in Iraq has outlined three basic options: Send in more troops, shrink the force but stay longer, or pull out, according to senior defense officials. Insiders have dubbed the options "Go Big," "Go Long" and "Go Home". The group conducting the review is likely to recommend a combination of a small, short-term increase in U.S. troops and a long-term commitment to stepped-up training and advising of Iraqi forces, said the officials. The military's study, commissioned by Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Peter Pace, comes at a time when escalating violence is causing Iraq policy to be reconsidered by both the White House and the congressionally chartered, bipartisan Iraq Study Group. Pace's effort will feed into the White House review, but military officials have made it clear they are operating independently. Read The Full Story Hezbollah Threatens Protests To Topple Lebanese Government 2006-11-20 00:23:19 In a deepening crisis that has paralyzed Lebanese politics, the leader of Hezbollah urged his well-organized followers to prepare for mass protests aimed at toppling the U.S.-backed government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora. The order by Hasan Nasrallah, given in a speech Saturday that was broadcast Sunday, was the latest in a test of wills between Hezbollah and a government that Nasrallah dismissed as more representative of the U.S. ambassador than Siniora. More than a simple political standoff in an always fractious country, many see the escalating struggle as perhaps the most decisive in Lebanon in a generation. It may determine which forces guide the country for years ahead: the coalition around Siniora that draws its strength from the country's Sunni Muslims, Druze and some Christians and has aligned itself with the United States and Europe, or Hezbollah's Shiite Muslim constituency, backed by Iran  and Syria, and its Christian allies represented by a former Lebanese general. Read The Full Story British Saudi Arms Deal Investigation Closes In On Secret Papers 2006-11-20 00:22:03 Britain's Serious Fraud Office (SFO) is on the brink of obtaining information from Swiss banks which may implicate the Saudi royal family in secret arms-deal commissions of more than £100 million (about $195 million), sources close to the attorney general's office confirmed Sunday. The SFO has been inquiring for three years, in some secrecy, into allegations of systematic corruption in international deals arranged by Britain's biggest arms company, BAE Systems. It was only this autumn that the Saudis, along with BAE executives and officials of the Ministry of Defense's (MoD) arms sales department, DESO, became aware of how much progress the SFO has made. Sources close to the Swiss say the authorities there notified two middlemen that access to their bank accounts is being sought. Read The Full Story
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