Free Internet Press Newsletter - Tuesday November 28 2006 - (813)

Tuesday November 28 2006 edition
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More Radioactive Traces Found In London 2006-11-27 20:46:40 Traces of radiation linked to the poisoning death of a former KGB agent turned up Monday at two more sites in London, and three people who showed symptoms of contamination were being tested for the deadly toxin. The government has ordered a formal inquest into the death. Alexander Litvinenko, 43, died of heart failure Thursday after falling ill from what doctors said was polonium-210 poisoning. The substance is deadly if ingested or inhaled. Six sites showed traces of radiation linked to the poisoning, including a bar in London’s Millennium Hotel, a branch of Itsu Sushi near Piccadilly Circus, Litvinenko’s house in North London and a section of the hospital where he was treated when he fell ill on Nov. 1. Two other sites - an office block in London’s west end and an address in the posh neighborhood of Mayfair - also showed traces of radiation, according to residents. All the locations except Litvinenko’s home are in west London, separated by about a mile. Read The Full Story Stocks Fall Sharply On Weak Dollar, Economic Slowdown Concerns 2006-11-27 20:45:42 Stocks suffered their biggest drop in four months Monday, as concerns about a weak holiday shopping season fed into broader anxiety about the slowing economy. It was a day with little for investors to cheer, with the dollar continuing its slide against the euro and the price of a barrel of oil rising. The decline on Wall Street spoiled what had been a steady run-up in stock prices in recent weeks. In the past month and a half, the Dow Jones industrial average broke through 12,000 for the first time, while the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index rose to its highest point in six years. Read The Full Story N.Y. Mayor Bloomberg Says Police Shooting 'Excessive', 'Unacceptable' 2006-11-27 20:44:35 New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg convened an extraordinary summit meeting of black religious leaders and elected officials at City Hall today to calm frayed tempers over the fatal police shooting of an unarmed black man in Queens, a killing he called “inexplicable” and “unacceptable”. “It sounds to me like excessive force was used,” the mayor said of the conduct of the officers, who fired 50 shots outside a Queens nightclub early Saturday, killing Sean Bell, 23, hours before he was to be wed and injuring two others. “I can tell you that it is to me unacceptable or inexplicable how you can have 50-odd shots fired.” Bloomberg made the remarks after meeting with some of the city’s most influential black politicians and community leaders, including U.S. Representative Charles B. Rangel, the Rev. Al Sharpton and dozens of others. The mayor’s decision to meet with Sharpton and other black leaders was a stark turnabout from the days of  Bloomberg’s predecessor, Rudolph W. Giuliani, who did not reach out to black leaders in the immediate aftermath of the fatal 1999 shooting of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed African immigrant who died in a hail of 41 police bullets. Read The Full Story Lincoln Memorial Reopens After Security Scare 2006-11-27 20:43:05 Authorities briefly closed the Lincoln Memorial Monday after receiving a report of a suspicious liquid and a threatening note on the grounds, officials said. The liquid was found to be harmless. D.C. firefighters received a call at about 12:40 p.m. about a Gatorade bottle containing liquid found in the ladies' room in the basement of the memorial, according to officials at the Washington, D.C., fire department and the Department of Homeland Security. While the hazardous-materials unit was en route, police also found a letter in the main chamber of the memorial, near the Lincoln statue, saying "Do you know what anthrax is?" and "Do you know what a bomb is?" said officials. Police also discovered a thermos on the steps to the memorial that was considered suspicious, said the officials. Read The Full Story Iraq President Talabani In Iran For Talks 2006-11-27 15:49:26 Iraqi President Jalal Talabani arrived in Tehran on Monday to meet with his Iranian counterpart amid increasing calls for Washington to enlist Iran's help in calming the escalating violence in neighboring Iraq. "Talabani arrived in Tehran minutes ago as the head of a high-level delegation," Iran's state-run television reported. Iran has been trying to organize a summit joining President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Talabani and Syrian President Bashar Assad in a bid to assert its role as the top regional powerbroker. Read The Full Story U.S. Air Force F-16CG Crashes In Iraq 2006-11-27 15:47:24 A U.S. Air Force jet carrying one pilot crashed in Iraq on Monday, the military said. The F-16CG was supporting coalition ground forces when it went down at about 1:35 p.m., about 20 miles northwest of Baghdad in Anbar province, the military said in a brief statement that contained no information about the cause of the crash or the fate of the pilot. Mohammed Al-Obeidi, an Iraqi who lives in the nearby town of Karmah, said he saw the jet flying up and down erratically before it nose-dived and exploded in a farm field. Read The Full Story Mahdi Army Provides Aid To Iraqi Victims 2006-11-27 14:32:54 In the chaos, Ayad al-Fartoosi thrived. Against a backdrop of death and panic in Sadr City last Thursday, he strode confidently through streets littered with burning cars and charred bodies. At one moment, he was guiding an ambulance carrying bomb victims through traffic. At another, he was searching cars at a checkpoint. By evening, he had helped to seize a would-be car bomber and to retrieve corpses. By nightfall, he was patrolling the streets of his neighborhood. Since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, Fartoosi has been a militiaman with the Shiite Muslim Mahdi Army of firebrand cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. Last week, he also served as a relief worker, a policeman, a traffic controller and a guard. So did thousands of his militia comrades who mobilized to assist victims of the deadliest attack on Iraqis since the invasion, highlighting the power associated with the Mahdi Army's less-publicized roles in Iraqi society. Read The Full Story New York On Edge As Police Kill Unarmed Man On His Wedding Day 2006-11-27 14:31:02 The New York authorities were scrambling to contain an angry backlash Sunday after police shot a group of three unarmed black men, killing one of them on his wedding day. The shooting took place after a stag party at a strip club in Queens, a few hours before Sean Bell, 23, was due to marry the mother of his two small daughters. He was struck in the neck and arm and was dead on arrival at hospital. One of his friends, Joseph Guzman, was in a critical condition after being hit 11 times, and another, Trent Benefield, was in a stable condition with wounds to his leg and buttocks. Outrage at the shooting was compounded when it emerged that Mr Guzman and Mr Benefield had been shackled to their beds. New Yorkers have also been startled at the apparent wildness of the fusillade. The police claim to have overheard one of three men mention a gun, but no weapon was found. Read The Full Story	Ford Motor Co. Mortgages Assets To Pay For Overhaul 2006-11-27 20:46:14 For the first time in its 103-year history, the Ford Motor Company is mortgaging its assets, including factories, equipment, office buildings, patents and trademarks, and stakes in subsidiaries like Volvo, in order to raise $18 billion to overhaul itself. The amount Ford is borrowing exceeds the total market value of all its outstanding stock by more than $2 billion. Although other auto companies have put up manufacturing equipment and other types of collateral over the years to secure loan, Ford has never done so before. For many decades, its credit was so good that it could easily borrow without pledging assets. Read The Full Story At Least 10 Killed In 'Suspicious' Fire At Missouri Home For The Disabled 2006-11-27 20:45:12 An early morning fire broke out in an Anderson, Missouri, group home for the elderly and mentally ill Monday, killing 10 people and injuring two dozen others in a blaze that the governor said was being treated as a crime. The blaze reduced the privately run Anderson Guest House to a skeleton of cinder blocks and stunned this rural community of about 1,800 people tucked in the Ozark hills about 35 miles south of Joplin. Gov. Matt Blunt said investigators were treating the fire as suspicious. Read The Full Story U.S. Supreme Court Rules Against N.Y. Times In Leak Case 2006-11-27 20:43:50 The Supreme Court ruled against the New York Times on Monday, refusing to block the government from reviewing telephone records of two Times reporters in a leak investigation concerning a terrorism-funding probe. The one-sentence order came in a First Amendment battle that involves stories written in 2001 by Times reporters Judith Miller and Philip Shenon. The stories revealed the government’s plans to freeze the assets of two Islamic charities, the Holy Land Foundation and the Global Relief Foundation. U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald is trying to track down the reporters’ confidential sources for the stories. Fitzgerald’s spokesman, Randall Samborn, declined to comment on the Supreme Court’s order. Read The Full Story Bush To Meet With NATO Leaders On Afghanistan For First Time In Two Years 2006-11-27 15:49:55 President Bush will seek fresh troops and equipment for the fight in Afghanistan and fewer restrictions on how they can be used when he sits down this week with NATO allies to review the state of the dangerous mission there, according to senior U.S. officials. Bush was flying Monday to this scenic capital of Estonia, on his way to a summit of NATO's leaders in Riga, Latvia, beginning Tuesday. U.S. officials are hoping for a re-commitment to the long-term success of the mission in Afghanistan, where a stepped-up insurgency from the Taliban militia is posing stiff new challenges for some 33,000 NATO troops seeking to pacify the country. Following the summit Bush will fly from Riga to Amman, Jordan, Wednesday for meetings with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki about how to arrest the deteriorating conditions in the other country in which the United States made a dramatic post-9/11 intervention. Read The Full Story At least Three People Tested For Radiation Exposure In Spy Death Case 2006-11-27 15:48:21 The British government "should be able to expect cooperation" from the Russian authorities over the death of the former Russian spy, Alexander Litvinenko, Britain's home secretary said Monday. Three people have been tested so far for exposure to polonium 210, the radioactive substance that killed  Litvinenko. The Russian ambassador was "called in" to the Foreign Office last Friday over the incident, John Reid revealed, as the government made its first official statement on the mystery death. Read The Full Story U.S. Supreme Court Sides With Philip Morris - OK For Company To Lie 2006-11-27 15:46:41 The Supreme Court on Monday sided with Philip Morris USA, refusing to disturb a court ruling that threw out a $10.1 billion verdict over the company's "light" cigarettes. The court issued its order without comment. Last year, the Illinois Supreme Court threw out the massive fraud judgment against Philip Morris, a unit of the Altria Group Inc., in a class-action lawsuit involving "light" cigarettes. Because the Federal Trade Commission allowed companies to characterize their cigarettes as "light" and "low tar," Philip Morris could not be held liable under state law even if the terms it used could be found false or misleading, said the state court. Read The Full Story Rift Over Afghan Mission Looms For NATO 2006-11-27 14:31:52 NATO is bigger than ever, and it is reaching further than ever before, by taking the lead in the war in Afghanistan,  but the Afghan mission threatens a rift within the Atlantic alliance between those nations willing and able to participate fully in combat operations in Afghanistan and those nations that are not. The challenge represents a third generational test for the allies - one fraught with argument and angst like the others were. The first test was how best to face off against the Soviet threat, a challenge that gave birth to NATO in 1949. The second was whether to move beyond the boundaries of NATO’s members in the 1990s to halt ethnic bloodshed in the Balkans. NATO’s 26 members and 11 non-alliance partners have committed 32,000 troops to Afghanistan, with 12,000 Americans assigned to the NATO portion of the mission. (Another 8,000 American troops are in Afghanistan carrying out counterterrorism missions solely under American command.) Read The Full Story
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