Free Internet Press Newsletter - Sunday December 3 2006 - (813)

Sunday December 3 2006 edition
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Georgia State Legislator's Wife Fights Deportation 2006-12-03 03:42:15 The wife of a Georgia legislator known for his strong support of immigrants'  rights is in hiding after federal agents came to their home on Tuesday with an order to deport her to her native Colombia, said her lawyer. In a written statement issued on Wednesday, State Senator Curt Thompson, 37, a Democrat, said his wife, Sascha Herrera, 28, missed an immigration-related court hearing in February 2005. Thompson said notices about an asylum application that had been mistakenly filed on her behalf had been sent to the wrong address, causing her to miss the hearing. Because Ms. Herrera did not appear in court, a federal judge issued a deportation order in February 2005, Charles H. Kuck, Ms. Herrera's immigration lawyer, said on Friday. Kuck said Mr. Thompson told him that his wife was not at the couple's home when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrived on Tuesday to take her into custody. Kuck would say only that Ms. Herrera was in a safe place. Read The Full Story U.S. Adivsers Step In As Iraq Army Mission Falters 2006-12-03 03:40:29 The bullets flew from every direction - from rooftops, windows, alleys and doorways. Soldiers from the Iraqi army's 9th Division were pinned against a wall. They were under a covered sidewalk. According to accounts from U.S. forces who were with them on Friday, a suspected insurgent with an AK-47 assault rifle aimed at them from a doorway. Pieces of concrete fell as the insurgent's fire ripped into the wall above the Iraqi soldiers. That's when they froze. U.S. Army Sgt. 1st Class Kent McQueen, 37, arrived to help. As he tried to get them out, he was hit. The night-vision goggles perched on his helmet fell down his face. They were dented. He had been shot in the head. "God was definitely on my side," McQueen said Saturday. Read The Full Story In Lebanon, Fault Lines And Blame 2006-12-03 03:39:01 In a city of frontiers, Beirut built another border Saturday. On one side of coiled barbed wire and metal barricades were armored personnel carriers manned by soldiers in red berets toting U.S.-made M-16 rifles and guarding the colonnaded, stone government headquarters where Prime Minister Fouad Siniora and other ministers have taken up residence. On the other were the fervent young men of Hezbollah and its allies, who have turned a downtown tailored for the rich into the site of an open-ended protest to force the government's fall. "This is the point of confrontation between us and them," said Khodr Hassan, who walked 12 hours from his southern village to the protest with 30 other youths. He pointed at his friends at the barricade, some surging forward, others lolling about. "This is the line of separation," said one of them, Ali Aitawi. Read The Full Story Litvinenko Lived And Died In A World Of Violence And Betrayal 2006-12-02 16:59:22 The tangled tale of Alexander V. Litvinenko, the maverick Russian K.G.B. agent turned dissident who died of radiation poisoning last week, has seized the headlines recently, but its roots can be traced to a summer's evening in Moscow in 1994. At just after 5 p.m. on June 7, Boris A. Berezovsky, one of Russia's most powerful oligarchs, was leaving the offices of his car dealership in a chauffeured Mercedes 600. According to Russian news accounts at the time, he and his bodyguard were sitting in the rear seat behind the driver. As the car drove by another parked vehicle, a remote-controlled bomb detonated, decapitating the driver but somehow leaving Berezovsky unscathed. As a high-ranking officer in the organized crime unit of the F.S.B., the successor to the K.G.B., Litvinenko "was the investigating officer of the assassination attempt," said Alex Goldfarb, a Berezovsky associate and a spokesman for the Litvinenko family, in an interview conducted, fittingly, in the rear seat of a parked Mercedes in central London with a heavyset driver at the wheel. "They became friends." It was a friendship that was to shape Litvinenko's career, which began in the roller-coaster politics and self-enrichment of post-Soviet Russia, spanned his desperate flight from Russia through Turkey and then on to Britain to seek asylum. It ended spectacularly and mysteriously, with the British police saying the only thing they knew for sure was that he was dead, poisoned after ingesting an obscure radioactive isotope called polonium 210. Read The Full Story At Least 43 Dead, 91 Wounded As 3 Car Bombs Explode In Baghdad Market 2006-12-02 16:57:54 Three parked car bombs exploded in central Baghdad on Saturday near a predominantly Shiite area packed with vendors, killing at least 43 people and wounding dozens, officials said. The bombs were about 100 yards apart in the busy al-Sadriyah shopping district and exploded nearly simultaneously, according to police Lt. Ali Muhsin. At least 10 other parked vehicles were destroyed in the area, where vendors sell fruit, vegetables and other items such as soap. Muhsin and hospital officials said 43 people were killed and 91 were wounded. The blast, which sent huge clouds of black smoke rising into the sky, was in a popular area with narrow alleys that made it difficult for rescue vehicles to reach the scene. AP Television News footage showed a pickup truck carrying bodies to the hospital. 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	Blowing The Whistle On Big Oil 2006-12-03 03:41:15 During a 22-year career, Bobby L. Maxwell routinely won accolades and awards as one of the Interior Department's best auditors in the nation's oil patch, snaring promotions that eventually had him supervising a staff of 120 people. He and his team scrutinized the books of major oil producers that collectively pumped billions of dollars worth of oil and gas every year from land and coastal waters owned by the public. Along the way, the auditors recovered hundreds of millions of dollars from companies that shortchanged the government on royalties. "Mr. Maxwell's career has been characterized by exceptional performance and significant contributions," wrote Gale A. Norton, then the secretary of the interior, in a 2003 citation. Norton praised Maxwell's "perseverance and leadership" while cataloguing his "many outstanding achievements". Less than two years later, the Interior Department eliminated his job in what it called a "reorganization". That came exactly one week after a federal judge in Denver unsealed a lawsuit in which Maxwell contended that a major oil company had spent years cheating on royalty payments. Read The Full Story Pfizer Ends Experimental Testing On Heart Disease Drug 2006-12-03 03:39:32 Pfizer announced last night that it had discontinued research on its most important experimental drug, a treatment for heart disease.The decision is a stunning development that is likely to seriously damage the company's prospects through the next decades. Preliminary research found that the drug, torcetrapib, appeared to be linked with deaths and heart problems in the patients who were taking it. For people with heart disease, Pfizer's decision to stop the trial represents the failure of a drug that many cardiologists had viewed as a potentially major advance in efforts to reduce heart attacks and strokes. Read The Full Story Classified Rumsfeld Memo Proposed 'Major Adjustment' In Iraq 2006-12-02 17:00:08 Two days before he resigned as defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld submitted a classified memo to the White House that acknowledged that the Bush administration's strategy in Iraqwas not working and called for a major course correction. "In my view it is time for a major adjustment," wrote Rumsfeld, who has been a symbol of a dogged stay-the-course policy. "Clearly, what U.S. forces are currently doing in Iraq is not working well enough or fast enough." Nor did Rumsfeld seem confident that the administration would readily develop an effective alternative. To limit the political fallout from shifting course he suggested the administration consider a campaign to lower public expectations. "Announce that whatever new approach the U.S. decides on, the U.S. is doing so on a trial basis," he wrote. "This will give us the ability to readjust and move to another course, if necessary, and therefore not 'lose'." Read The Full Story Scaramella Shows No Signs Of Radiation Toxicity 2006-12-02 16:58:28 Mario Scaramella, the associate of Alexander Litvinenko, who was admitted to hospital yesterday with "potentially fatal" levels of polonium, is said to be "doing well" and has shown no signs of radiation poisoning. The Italian academic, who met the ex-KGB man on the day he was allegedly poisoned, tested positive yesterday for a "significant quantity" of the radioactive substance, polonium-210, which is believed to have killed Litvinenko. Doctors at London's University College Hospital said Saturday that preliminary test results carried out on him showed no sign of radiation toxicity. A spokesman said: "He is well. Preliminary tests so far show no evidence of radiation toxicity." Read The Full Story 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
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