Free Internet Press Newsletter - Saturday December 2 2006 - (813)

Saturday December 2 2006 edition
Free Internet Press is operated on your donations. Donate Today
Supreme Court To Decide If Citizens Can Challenge White House's Religion-Based Initiative 2006-12-02 03:19:07 The Supreme Court agreed Friday to decide whether private citizens are entitled to go to court to challenge activities of the White House office in charge of the Bush administration’s religion-based initiative. A lower court had blocked a lawsuit challenging conferences the White House office holds for the purpose of teaching religious organizations how to apply and compete for federal grants. That constitutional challenge, by a group advocating the strict separation of church and state, was reinstated by an appeals court; the administration in turn appealed to the Supreme Court. The case is one of three appeals the justices added to their calendar for argument in February. A question in one of the other cases is whether a public school principal in Juneau, Alaska, violated a student’s free-speech rights by suspending him from school for displaying, at a public off-campus event, a banner promoting drug use. Together with a third new case, on whether federal land-management officials can be sued under the racketeering statute for actions they take against private landowners, the additions to the court’s docket raised the metabolism of what had begun to look like an unusually quiet term. It had been just short of a month since the justices accepted any new cases. Read The Full Story A Dream Blown Away: Climate Change Affects Where Americans Can Build Homes 2006-12-02 03:07:34 A place near the water has been an American dream for a very long time. Fifty-four percent of Americans live within 50 miles of a coast. This is the year, however, in which the big boys in global finance got religion about climate change. As a result, this American dream - as far north as the Washington area, and even New York and New England - is under attack. Follow the money. Insurance doesn't sound like a world-changer. It seems so banal and prosaic, like reliable electricity or clean water. Yet without it - you want a place to live? You cannot get a mortgage without insurance. Read The Full Story Investors Question Fed's 'Mild Slowdown', See Sharper, Prolonged Slump 2006-12-02 03:05:59 Many investors aren't buying the Federal Reserve's forecast for a mild economic slowdown, worrying that a series of recently released figures might signal the onset of a sharper, more prolonged slump. Stock prices fell Friday and the dollar extended its recent decline after reports showing that construction spending fell in October at the steepest rate in five years, while the nation's factories produced less in November - the first monthly drop in manufacturing activity in more than three years. Those reports followed others last week showing the holiday shopping season got off to a tepid start and that new orders for big-ticket durable goods like airplanes and automobiles fell sharply in October. Read The Full Story Winter Storm Snarls U.S. Airports From Dallas To Chicago 2006-12-02 03:04:30 A surprisingly early winter storm rolled across the central United States, stranding airline passengers, shutting schools and leaving hundreds of thousands of households in darkness because of ice and wet snow. Authorities in football-loving Oklahoma even postponed the high school playoffs for the first time in 14 years. Dallas, Texas, encountered rare sleet. Snowfall in Amarillo, Texas, reached seven inches, topping the totals in downtown Chicago, Illinois, though the Windy City's northwestern suburbs registered more than a foot of snow. Read The Full Story U.S. GSA Chief Seeks To Cut Budget For Contract Audits 2006-12-01 22:54:53 The new chief of the U.S. General Services Administration is trying to limit the ability of the agency's inspector general to audit contracts for fraud or waste and has said oversight efforts are intimidating the workforce, according to government documents and interviews. GSA Administrator Lurita Alexis Doan, a Bush political appointee and former government contractor, has proposed cutting $5 million in spending on audits and shifting some responsibility for contract reviews to small, private audit contractors. Doan also has chided Inspector General Brian D. Miller for not going along with her attempts to streamline the agency's contracting efforts. In a private staff meeting Aug. 18, Doan said Miller's effort to examine contracts had "gone too far and is eroding the health of the organization," according to notes of the meeting written by an unidentified participant from the Office of Inspector General (OIG). The GSA is responsible for managing about $56 billion worth of contracts each year for the departments of Defense and Homeland Security and other agencies. Read The Full Story Pelosi Taps Rep. Reyes To Chair House Intelligence Committee 2006-12-01 14:40:05 U.S. House Speaker-to-be Nancy Pelosi picked a Texas congressman Friday to head the powerful House Intelligence Committee, a compromise candidate that ended weeks of debate and jockeying among House Democrats. Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-Texas), a Purple Heart winner known as "Silver" to friends, will take over the chairmanship of the committee when Democrats take control of the House and Senate in January. Reyes, a former longtime Texas Border Patrol agent, will lead the key panel, one of the few committee assignments that was still up for grabs after the midterm elections last month, at a time when there is increasing pressure for congressional intelligence committees not only to oversee the nation's intelligence agencies but also to shape the country's intelligence policy. Read The Full Story World AIDS Day Marked By Warnings, Worship 2006-12-01 14:39:00 World AIDS Day was marked around the globe Friday by somber religious services, boisterous demonstrations and warnings that far more needs to be done to treat and prevent the disease in order to avert millions of additional deaths. Ukraine's President Viktor Yushchenko conceded his country is losing ground in the race to curb one of Europe's fastest growing epidemics, saying 100,000 people have been officially registered as HIV-positive. Every day, 40 citizens of the former Soviet nation are diagnosed with HIV, and eight die from AIDS, said Yushchenko. "Such figures are shocking," Yushchenko said in a published address timed to coincide with World AIDS Day. "We can't be indifferent to them." UNICEF officials are warning of a public health catastrophe in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, where 270,000 people are infected, some 90 percent of them through intravenous drug use. Read The Full Story Calderon Sworn In Quickly As Mexico's President 2006-12-01 14:37:40 It was not pretty, but Felipe Calderon, the new president of Mexico, managed to take the oath of office in congress Friday, while leftist lawmakers whistled and catcalled and the losing leftist candidate staged a huge protest march down the central avenue of the capital. Calderon and members of his conservative National Action Party defeated attempts by the leftist Democratic Revolution Party to block the entries to the congress. With his own partisans crowding the dais, the new president and his predecessor, Vicente Fox, were spirited in by bodyguards through a door near the front of the chamber at 9:50 a.m. Calderon quickly took the oath of office, and Fox handed over the traditional presidential sash and left the chamber. The entire ceremony lasted four minutes. All the while, opposition politicians blew whistles and held up banners suggesting Calderon is "a traitor to democracy". Read The Full Story Russia Energy Giant Gazprom Seeks U.S. Markets 2006-12-01 03:32:18 For a company that has a market capitalization about the size of Microsoft or Citigroup and natural gas reserves that would make most OPEC members blush, Gazprom still finds itself with a lot of explaining to do. The Russian state-controlled natural gas monopoly has openly proclaimed its goal of becoming the world's dominant oil and gas company, and in the process it has raised hackles everywhere, from neighboring Ukraine to the boardrooms of major international oil companies and the capitals of Europe and the United States. It has jacked up gas prices to once-subsidized neighboring countries, pressured U.S. and European companies for stakes in overseas projects and pipelines, blocked access to its pipeline network in order to leverage its way into existing exploration deals and shelved a prized gas project because it wasn't satisfied with foreign bids. Now the company is seeking to polish its image in the United States, where it has a small office in Houston looking for investment opportunities. Moreover, among the biggest Gazprom shareholders are U.S.-based emerging-market mutual funds. Read The Full Story Typhoon Durian Kills At Least 109 In Philippines 2006-12-01 03:31:05 Typhoon Durian tore through the eastern Philippines on Thursday with winds of up to 139 mph, killing at least 109 people and cutting off power to thousands of homes, said officials. Dozens of people were missing, and 200 body bags were being shipped to the disaster zone at the request of provincial officials. With power and phone lines downed by powerful winds, helicopters were carrying out aerial surveillance of cut off areas. "Our rescue teams are overstretched rescuing people on rooftops," said Glen Rabonza, head of the national Office of Civil Defense. Read The Full Story	Corruption In Reconstruction Contracts Costing Iraq $4 Billion A Year 2006-12-02 03:08:06 The Iraqi government is in danger of being brought down by the wholesale smuggling of the nation's oil and other forms of corruption that together represent a "second insurgency", according to a senior U.S. official. Stuart Bowen, who has been in charge of auditing Iraq's faltering reconstruction since 2004, said corruption had reached such levels that it threatened the survival of the state. "There is a huge smuggling problem. It is the No. 1 issue," Bowen told the Guardian. The pipelines that are meant to take the oil north have been blown up, so the only way to export it is by road. "That leaves it vulnerable to smuggling," he said, as truckers sell their cargoes on the black market. Bowen, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (Sigir), cites Iraqi figures showing that the "virtual pandemic" of corruption costs the country $4 billion (£2.02 billion) a year, and some of that money goes straight to the Iraqi government's enemies. A U.S. government report has concluded that oil smuggling abetted by corrupt Iraqi officials is netting insurgents $100 million a year, helping to make them financially self-sustaining. Read The Full Story Lebanese Billionaire Drawn Into British-Saudi Arms Deal As Middleman For Saudis 2006-12-02 03:06:46 Another billionaire Saudi middleman was named last night in Britain's Serious Fraud Office's (SFO) controversial Saudi arms deal investigation, according to potential witnesses. The SFO is seeking information about any Swiss bank accounts belonging to Mohammad Safadi, a Lebanese politician who has acted for relatives of Prince Sultan, crown prince of Saudi Arabia. Safadi would not comment last night at his office in Beirut, Lebanon, where he holds the office of public works minister and also controls the Safadi Group. His property firms have received contracts from the British arms company BAE and have interests in office blocks in London worth £120 million ($240 million). This fresh development in the international investigation follows disclosures that access is being sought to Swiss accounts linked to wealthy British-based arms broker Wafic Said, who has acted for Prince Sultan's sons, Bandar and Khalid. Read The Full Story Nepal's Farmers On The Front Line Of Global Warming 2006-12-02 03:05:22 Schoolteacher Sherbahadur Tamang walks through the southern Nepalese village of Khetbari and describes what happened on September 9: "During the night there was light rain but when we woke, its intensity increased. In an hour or so, the rain became so heavy that we could not see more than a foot or two in front of us. It was like a wall of water and it sounded like 10,000 lorries. It went on like that until midday. Then all the land started moving like a river." Article continues When it stopped raining Tamang and the village barely recognized their valley in the Chitwan hills. In just six hours the Jugedi river, which normally flows for only a few months of the year and is at most about 50 meters wide in Khetbari, had scoured a 300 meter-wide path down the valley, leaving a three meter-deep rockscape of giant boulders, trees and rubble in its path. Hundreds of fields and terraces had been swept away. The irrigation systems built by generations of farmers had gone and houses were demolished or were now uninhabitable.  Tamang's house was left on a newly formed island. Khetbari expects a small flood every decade or so, but what shocked the village was that the two largest have taken place in the last three years. According to Tamang, a pattern is emerging. "The floods are coming more severely more frequently. Not only is the rainfall far heavier these days than anyone has ever experienced, it is also coming at different times of the year." Nepal is on the front line of climate change and variations on Khetbari's experience are now being recorded in communities from the freezing Himalayas of the north to the hot lowland plains of the south. For some people the changes are catastrophic. Read The Full Story Massive Terror Screening Of U.S. International Travelers Draws Outrage 2006-12-01 22:56:04 A leader of the new Democratic Congress, business travelers and privacy advocates expressed outrage Friday over the unannounced assignment of terrorism risk assessments to American international travelers by a computerized system managed from an unmarked, two-story brick building in Northern Virginia. Incoming Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy, of Vermont, pledged greater scrutiny of such government database-mining projects after reading that during the past four years millions of Americans have been evaluated without their knowledge to assess the risks that they are terrorists or criminals. "Data banks like this are overdue for oversight," said Leahy, who will take over Judiciary in January. "That is going to change in the new Congress." The Associated Press reported Thursday that Americans and foreigners crossing U.S. borders since 2002 have been assessed by the Homeland Security Department's computerized Automated Targeting System, or ATS. Read The Full Story Bill Gates For - You'd Better Sit Down For This - President 2006-12-01 18:00:40 Intellpuke: The following newsdesk weblog appears in The Times (of London) edition for Friday, Dec. 1, 2006. It discusses the possibility - remote though it may be - that Bill Gates should run for President of the U.S.  Here's the weblog: President Gates of the United States. Do you like the way that sounds? Because you are not alone. A cause doing the rounds of the internet this week - admittedly where you would expect to find his base - is for Bill Gates to run for President in 2008, or any time he wants to. It took us a moment to get used to the idea, but then we wondered why we hadn't thought of it before. The Microsoft man has done computers; he's done capitalism; he's doing as much as anyone to get on top of HIV / Aids and Malaria; so why not the White House? And at least a few American bloggers seem to think the same way. Take today, for instance, it's World AIDS Day - a cause to which the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has given hundreds of millions of dollars - and Mr. Gates has found time to give a spare $10 million to the UN refugee agency to allow it to carry on with its work in southern Sudan. To date, the Foundation has given away $11 billion. Read The Full Story Litvinenko Contact Tests Positive For Radiation 2006-12-01 14:39:32 An Italian terrorism expert who met the Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko on the day he was allegedly poisoned has also tested positive for the radioactive isotope polonium 210, it emerged Friday. Mario Scaramella, who has been in hiding since Litvinenko died, met the former spy in a London sushi restaurant just hours before he fell ill. Experts believe the fact that the academic, a contact of Litvinenko, has also tested positive for polonium 210,  indicates that the poison was delivered at the restaurant. Scaramella has since been taken to a hospital for further tests. Italian doctors said he had tested positive for a "significant" amount of the poison. Read The Full Story Hezbollah Protesters Call On Lebanon Prime Minister To Resign 2006-12-01 14:38:23 The Lebanese prime minister was under intense pressure Friday after tens of thousands of protesters descended on central Beirut in a mass rally orchestrated by Hezbollah in an attempt to force his resignation. The U.S.-backed premier, Fouad Siniora, whose position has grown increasingly precarious since the Israeli invasion this summer, stayed in his compound, ringed by police and troops. Hezbollah said the fight was against "American tutelage" and vowed the protests would continue until the government fell. The protest was to be followed by a sit-in near the government offices. Read The Full Story U.S. May Abandon Reconciliation Efforts With Sunnis 2006-12-01 03:32:59 The Bush administration is deliberating whether to abandon U.S. reconciliation efforts with Sunni insurgents and instead give priority to Shiites and Kurds, who won elections and now dominate the government, according to U.S. officials. The proposal, put forward by the State Department as part of a crash White House review of Iraq policy, follows an assessment that the ambitious U.S. outreach to Sunni dissidents has failed. U.S. officials are increasingly concerned that their reconciliation efforts may even have backfired, alienating the Shiite majority and leaving the United States vulnerable to having no allies in Iraq, according to sources familiar with the State Department proposal. Some insiders call the proposal the "80 percent" solution, a term that makes other parties to the White House policy review cringe. Sunni Arabs make up about 20 percent of Iraq's 26 million people. Read The Full Story Electronic Voting Condemned, 'Cannot Be Made Secure' 2006-12-01 03:31:40 Paperless electronic voting machines used throughout the Washington region and much of the country "cannot be made secure," according to draft recommendations issued this week by a federal agency that advises the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. The assessment by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), one of the government's premier research centers, is the most sweeping condemnation of such voting systems by a federal agency. In a report hailed by critics of electronic voting, NIST said that voting systems should allow election officials to recount ballots independently from a voting machine's software. The recommendations endorse "optical-scan" systems in which voters mark paper ballots that are read by a computer and electronic systems that print a paper summary of each ballot, which voters review and elections officials save for recounts. Read The Full Story Abbas Says Palestinian Unity Talks Are At An Impasse 2006-12-01 03:30:34 Talks to form a Palestinian unity government are at a dead end, the Palestinian Authority's president, Mahmoud Abbas, said Thursday, ensuring that the Bush administration’s plan to start pushing hard for a Middle East peace initiative will stay in a deep freeze for now. Abbas gave his grim assessment about the state of talks between his Fatah faction and Hamas, the militant faction that controls the Palestinian government, after a one-hour meeting with Secretary of State Condoleezza Ricein Jericho, in the West Bank. And while this is the second time Abbas has declared the unity talks dead - he did so in October, and talks resumed this month - there was a sense of defeat at the press briefing, which Abbas conducted with Rice. “We wanted a cabinet capable of easing the suffering of our people,” said Abbas. “This is very painful for us because we know how badly the people have been suffering over the last nine months.” 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