Free Internet Press Newsletter - Wednesday November 1 2006 - (813)

Wednesday November 1 2006 edition
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Senators Tell Exxon To Stop Denying Global Warming Exists 2006-11-01 00:41:34 ExxonMobil should stop funding groups that have spread the idea that global warming is a myth and that try to influence policymakers to adopt that view, two senators said today in a letter to the oil company. In their letter to ExxonMobil chairman and CEO Rex Tillerson, Sens. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, and Jay Rockefeller, D-West Virginia, appealed to Exxon's sense of corporate responsibility, asking the company to "come clean about its past denial activities." The two senators called on ExxonMobil to "end any further financial assistance" to groups "whose public advocacy has contributed to the small but unfortunately effective climate change denial myth". Read The Full Story Iraqi Prime Minister Demands Removal Of U.S. Baghdad Checkpoints 2006-11-01 00:40:30 Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki demanded the removal of American checkpoints from the streets of Baghdad on Tuesday, in what appeared to be his latest and boldest gambit in an increasingly tense struggle for more independence from his American protectors. Maliki’s public declaration seemed at first to catch American commanders off guard. But by nightfall, American troops had abandoned all the positions in eastern and central Baghdad that they had set up last week with Iraqi forces as part of a search for a missing American soldier. The checkpoints had snarled traffic and disrupted daily life and commerce throughout the eastern part of the city. The language of the declaration, which implied that Maliki had the power to command American forces, seemed to overstep his authority and to be aimed at placating his Shiite constituency. Read The Full Story Pfizer Heart Medication Dealt Blow In Testing 2006-11-01 00:38:53 Pfizer said Tuesday that clinical trials of torcetrapib - a heart medication that is the most important drug in the company’s pipeline - confirmed that it raises blood pressure, a potentially serious side effect. Any problems with torcetrapib would be a serious setback for Pfizer, the world’s largest drug company. Pfizer has been counting on the new medicine to eventually replace the $13 billion in annual sales from the cholesterol-lowering drug Lipitor, which loses patent protection in 2010. Cardiologists and Wall Street analysts alike have been closely watching the clinical trials of torcetrapib, a medicine intended to raise so-called good cholesterol. Read The Full Story Pakistanis Protest Attack By Own Army On School 2006-11-01 00:37:18 More than 15,000 Pakistani tribesmen, many of them carrying rifles and ammunition, protested Tuesday over a Pakistani army helicopter attack on an al-Qaeda-linked religious school near Khar, Pakistan, that killed about 80 suspected radicals. Chants of "Down with America" and "Down with Musharraf," referring to Pakistan's president, rang out as the tribesmen protested in Khar, main town in the Bajaur tribal region close to the Afghan border. "Our jihad will continue and, God willing, people will go to Afghanistan to oust American and British forces," Maulana Faqir Mohammad, a pro-Taliban cleric, told the crowd of turbaned tribal members. Some of them shouldered rocket launchers. Read The Full Story Gaff By Kerry Throws Bush A Lifeline In Election Battle 2006-10-31 19:23:35 A gaffe by the former Democratic presidential candidate, John Kerry, put his party on the defensive last night when it was seized on by George Bush as evidence of lack of patriotism over the Iraq war, a week before congressional elections. Senator Kerry told an audience of college students in California that if they did not study hard they could "get stuck in Iraq", a comment quickly denounced by Bush as implying that U.S. troops were uneducated. Senator Kerry, who lost to Bush in the 2004 election, later said the line had been a "botched joke" aimed at the president; an aide explained that it had been intended to mean that Bush's intellectual laziness had led the country into war but had been "mangled in delivery". Read The Full Story North Korea To Resume Talks On Nuclear Disarmament 2006-10-31 12:42:26 North Korea has agreed to return to nuclear disarmament talks for the first time in almost a year in the biggest diplomatic breakthrough since Pyongyang's atomic weapons test. After informal meetings in Beijing, U.S. and Chinese officials said the six-nation negotiations could resume in the coming weeks. "We took a step today toward getting this process back on track," said U.S. assistant secretary of state  Christopher Hill. "This process has suffered a lot in recent weeks by the actions that [North Korea] has made." Amid international sanctions, warnings of "catastrophe" from North Korea, and rumors of a second nuclear test, the promise of dialogue raises hopes that the stand-off on the peninsula is at least temporarily easing. Read The Full Story Hubble Telescope Gets New Lease On Life 2006-10-31 12:41:20 The Hubble space telescope has been reprieved after NASA Tuesday announced that it will send a shuttle crew to repair the 16-year-old telescope. The mission is likely to launch in 2008 and would keep Hubble working until 2013. The announcement from NASA administrator Michael Griffin was greeted with eager support by astronomers, who feared the shuttle would be condemned to early retirement by the end of the decade when its batteries and gyroscopes gave out. Named after the astronomer Edwin Hubble, the telescope's stunning pictures of the cosmos have been credited with transforming scientists' understanding of the universe. Read The Full Story 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	Italian Arms Contractor And U.S. Congressman Share Close Ties 2006-11-01 00:41:03 In November at the five-star Hotel Splendido overlooking the harbor in Portofino, a playground of the Italian rich, Representative Curt Weldon was the center of attention. The second-ranking Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, Weldon was a main speaker at a conference sponsored in part by the Italian military giant Finmeccanica. At the gathering of Italian, British and American political leaders, Weldon, of Pennsylvania, spoke on behalf of Italian arms makers who were seeking a bigger share of Pentagon contracts. Taxpayers paid for Weldon's stay. He received a $1,153 daily expense allowance from the federal government and flew over on a military jet. Read The Full Story Student Uleashes Uproar With Bogus Airline Boarding Passes 2006-11-01 00:39:50 Christopher Soghoian said he was simply trying to highlight a flaw in the nation's airline security procedures when he put a tool on his Web site letting anyone create fake boarding passes, but federal authorities didn't see it that way. FBI agents visited the 24-year-old doctoral candidate's home in Bloomington, Indiana, Friday and returned on Saturday to cart off his computers and other equipment. While Soghoian has not been charged with a crime, the incident has stirred a national tempest and renewed concerns about passenger screening procedures. Soghoian, a Virginia native and student at Indiana University's School of Informatics, declined to comment Tuesday on the advice of his attorney. But he has been writing about the incident on his Web site. "I came back today, to find the glass on the front door smashed," Soghoian wrote on Saturday. "Inside, is a rather ransacked home, a search warrant taped to my kitchen table, a total absence of computers - and various other important things." Read The Full Story Man Arrested For California Fires; 5th Firefighter Dies 2006-11-01 00:38:14 Authorities arrested a man Tuesday who is suspected of intentionally starting two wildfires this summer and is considered a person of interest in a blaze started last week that killed five firefighters. Raymond Lee Oyler, 37, of Beaumont, California, was arrested on two counts of arson related to wildfires in June, the Riverside County Sheriff's Department said in a statement. Oyler was not named as a suspect in the wildfire that started last week and roared across more than 60 square miles. Four U.S. Forest Service firefighters died shortly after the blaze began Thursday when flames overran them as they tried to protect homes in the area. A fifth firefighter died Tuesday evening. Read The Full Story On October 31, 1938, Orson Welles Scared The Bejeezus Out Of America 2006-10-31 19:24:06 Intellpuke: On October 31, 1938, as part of a special radio program for Halloween, actor and director Orson Welles aired a radio drama based on the "War of the Worlds", a science fiction novel by British writer H.G. Wells. The program caused a panic in many parts of America, as thousands of radio listeners thought the Earth was being invaded by Martians. Following is the actual news story on that event published by Britain's  Manchester Guardian on Nov. 1, 1938: A wireless dramatization of Mr. H. G. Wells's fantasy, "The War of the Worlds" - written at the end of last century - caused a remarkable wave of panic in the United States during and immediately after its broadcast last night at eight o'clock. Listeners throughout the country believed that it was an account of an actual invasion of the earth by warriors from Mars. The play, presented by Mr. Orson Welles, a successful theatrical producer and actor, gave a vivid account of the Martian invasion just as the wireless would if Mr. Wells' dream came true. The program began with music which was interrupted suddenly by a Columbia news announcer who reported that violent flashes on Mars had been observed by Princeton University astronomers. The music was resumed, but was soon interrupted again for a report that a meteor had struck New Jersey. Then there was an account of how the meteor opened and Martian warriors emerged, and began killing local citizens with mysterious death-rays. Martians were also observed moving towards New York with the intention of destroying the city. Read The Full Story Rumsfeld OKs Increase In Iraqi Forces 2006-10-31 19:23:08 Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Tuesday endorsed a proposal to spend at least $1 billion to expand the size and accelerate the training and equipping of Iraqi security forces. "I'm very comfortable with the increases they've proposed and the accelerations in achievement of some of their targets," Rumsfeld told reporters at the Pentagon, noting that the Iraqi government and Gen. George Casey, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, both recommended expanding Iraqi forces. "Now it's simply a matter of our pressing forward and getting our portion of the funding from the Congress and working to see that it's executed," said Rumsfeld. He did not say how much extra U.S. money would be required. Read The Full Story News Blog: Blogging In The Free Speech World 2006-10-31 12:42:00 Should bloggers be subject to a code of practice, like journalists? This was one of the questions debated this morning by the first Internet Governance Forum (IGF), a talking shop organized by the U.N. in Athens. The Greek hosts have scored a spectacular own goal with the reported arrest of Antonis Tsipropoulos, whose alleged "crime" was linking to blog posts hosted in the U.S. that satirize a Greek businessman. Tsipropoulos is the administrator for a Greek blog search engine, blogme.gr. The incident highlights again concerns raised by Irrepressible.info, a joint Amnesty International and Observer campaign promoting freedom of speech online. In today's session on "openness", Theodoros Roussopoulos, the Greek minister of state, denied knowledge of the case but said: "We have a problem with bloggers who spread lies through television ... we have bloggers who create false news ... So yes, perhaps a code of behavior is an idea." Read The Full Story Coroner: Glaring Errors Caused U.S. To Kill RAF Crew At Start Of Iraq War 2006-10-31 12:40:47 A British coroner Tuesday condemned the "glaring failures" that led to the killing of two British airmen when a U.S. missile battery confused an RAF Tornado for an enemy attack. An inquest into the deaths of the Tornado pilot, Flight Lieutenant Kevin Main, 35, and the navigator, Flight Lieutenant Dave Williams, 37, heard they were shot down by an American Patriot missile battery defending a coalition air base in Kuwait. The tactical control officer in the battery gave the order to fire on their Tornado GR4 on March 22 2003 because her radar had wrongly identified it as an anti-radiation missile (ARM), a weapon that could destroy the Patriot battery by homing in on the radiation it emitted. 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
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