Free Internet Press Newsletter - Sunday December 10 2006 - (813)

Sunday December 10 2006 edition
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Prices Of Black Market Weapons Surge In Iraq Chaos 2006-12-10 01:21:34 The Kurdish security contractor placed the black plastic box on the table. Inside was a new Glock 19, one of the 9-millimeter pistols that the United States issued by the tens of thousands to the Iraqi Army and police. This pistol was no longer in the custody of the Iraqi Army or police. It had been stolen or sold, and it found its way to an open-air grocery stand that does a lively black-market business in police and infantry arms. The contractor bought it there. He displayed other purchases, including a short-barreled Kalashnikov assault rifle with a collapsible stock that makes it easy to conceal under a coat or fire from a car. "I bought this for $450 last year," he said of the rifle. "Now it costs $650. The prices keep going up." The market for this American-issued pistol and the ubiquitous assault rifle illustrated how fear, mismanagement and malfeasance are shaping the small-arms market in Iraq. Read The Full Story Religion For A Captive Audience, Paid For With Tax Money 2006-12-10 01:20:02 Life was different in Unit E at the state prison outside Newton, Iowa. The toilets and sinks - white porcelain ones, like at home - were in a separate bathroom with partitions for privacy. In many Iowa prisons, metal toilet-and-sink combinations squat beside the bunks, to be used without privacy, a few feet from cellmates. The cells in Unit E had real wooden doors and doorknobs, with locks. More books and computers were available, and inmates were kept busy with classes, chores, music practice and discussions. There were occasional movies and events with live bands and real-world food, like pizza or sandwiches from Subway. Best of all, there were opportunities to see loved ones in an environment quieter and more intimate than the typical visiting days. The only way an inmate could qualify for this kinder mutation of prison life was to enter an intensely religious rehabilitation program and satisfy the evangelical Christians running it that he was making acceptable spiritual progress. The program - which grew from a project started in 1997 at a Texas prison with the support of George W. Bush, who was governor at the time - says on its Web site that it seeks "to 'cure' prisoners by identifying sin as the root of their problems" and showing inmates "how God can heal them permanently, if they turn from their sinful past". Read The Full Story Top Air Force Lawyer Had Been Disbarred In 1984 2006-12-10 01:17:28 A top Air Force lawyer who served at the White House and in a senior position in Iraq turns out to have been practicing law for 23 years without a license. Col. Michael D. Murphy was most recently commander of the Air Force Legal Operations Agency at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington, D.C.. He was the general counsel for the White House Military Office from December 2001 to January 2003, and from August 2003 to January 2005. In between those tours, he was the legal adviser to the reconstruction effort in Iraq, said an Air Force spokesman. Read The Full Story Discovery Launches On 12-Day Mission To ISS 2006-12-10 01:16:21 Night became day at 8:47 Saturday evening as the shuttle Discovery muscled its way off of the launching pad with a staccato roar on a mission to rewire the International Space Station. With a blinding streak of yellow flame that left a mark on the retina and a lump in the throat, the shuttle and its crew of seven astronauts lifted off in the program's first nightime launching in more than four years. It was the second launching attempt for the Discovery. Weather concerns forced mission managers to scrub on Thursday, and the space agency decided to forgo an attempt on Friday, when the weather predictions were even worse. The rules include restrictions on wind speed, cloud cover and other factors, both at the Kennedy Space Center here and at emergency landing sites in Spain and France; the concerns early Saturday were largely focused on high crosswinds at the Kennedy landing strip, but the winds died and the weather continued to improve as the evening progressed, and the mission management team ultimately gave approval for launching. Read The Full Story Congress OKs Offshore Drilling, Business And Family Tax Breaks, Vietnam Trade 2006-12-09 14:41:16 The Senate sent legislation to President Bush early this morning that expands offshore oil drilling, preserves a variety of popular tax breaks for families and businesses and gives permanent normal trading status to Vietnam. The package was approved after a marathon session in the departing Republican-controlled Congress, which didn't shut its doors until after 4:30 this morning. The House had voted overwhelmingly for the package Friday but the Senate held out as some lawmakers expressed anger over the bill's $50 billion cost and some of its trade provisions. The Senate approved the bill by a 79-9 vote shortly before 2 this morning. Read The Full Story Iran Expands Uranium Enrichment Program ... Again 2006-12-09 14:40:13 Iran has begun installing 3,000 centrifuges in an expansion of its uranium enrichment program that brings the Islamic nation significantly closer to large-scale production of nuclear fuel, the president said Saturday. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad also claimed that the international community was caving in to Tehran's demands to continue its nuclear program. "Resistance of the Iranian nation in the past year forced them to retreat tens of steps over the Iran's nuclear issue," the semi-official Fars agency quoted Ahmadinejad as saying. Fars is considered to be close to Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards. Read The Full Story Democrats Plan Oil Royalties Inquiry 2006-12-09 03:31:59 House Democratic leaders vowed Friday to pursue a broad overhaul of tax breaks and other subsidies to oil companies in January, saying that their first target would be an investigation of how the government collects billions of dollars in royalties on oil and gas produced on federal property. "The Interior Department has a background of mismanagement, to put it mildly, in the collection of these royalties," said Representative Nick J. Rahall II, of West Virginia, a Democrat who will become chairman of the House Resources Committee next year. Rahall said he planned a sweeping investigation of the Interior Department's enforcement of royalty payments as well as the possible repeal of a 10-year-old law that allows energy companies drilling in deep coastal waters to avoid billions of dollars in payments. Read The Full Story Traveler Data Mining Program Violates Congressional Ban 2006-12-09 03:30:58 The Department of Homeland Security violated a congressional funding ban when it continued to develop a computerized program that creates risk assessments of travelers entering and leaving the United States, according to lawmakers and privacy advocates. Although congressional testimony shows that department officials apparently disclosed some important elements of the controversial Automated Targeting System program to lawmakers in recent months, several key members of Congress said that they were in the dark about the program and that it violated their intentions. "Clearly the law prohibits testing or development" of such computer programs, said Rep. Martin O. Sabo (D. Minnesota), who wrote the three-year-old prohibition into homeland security funding legislation. "And if they are saying that they just took some system, used it and therefore did not test or develop it, they clearly were not upfront about saying it." Read The Full Story Berezovsky's Bitter Feud With Putin A Plot Line In Litvinenko Poisoning 2006-12-09 03:26:51 No ordinary billionaire, Boris Berezovsky is a onetime mathematician who travels around London with a posse of bodyguards. He openly taunts Russian President Vladimir Putin and once wore a rubber cartoonish mask of his face. Accustomed to drama, he is now a central figure in the fatal poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, the most sensational case of international intrigue since the Cold War. Police found traces of the poison, radioactive polonium-210, in Berezovsky's office in elegant Mayfair in central London. He said Litvinenko came there Nov. 1, the day he began feeling ill. Berezovsky, 60, had credited Litvinenko with saving him from assassination in the 1990s, and the billionaire helped Litvinenko financially after he fled Russia in 2000 and settled in London. Berezovsky visited the sickened man at the hospital shortly before he died last month and attended his burial Thursday. Read The Full Story Bush Administration Gropes For New Iraq Strategy 2006-12-09 03:25:06 As pressure mounts for a change of course in Iraq, the Bush administration is groping for a viable new strategy for the president to unveil by Christmas, with deliberations now focused on three main options to redefine the U.S. military and political engagement, according to officials familiar with the debate. The major alternatives include a short-term surge of 15,000 to 30,000 additional U.S. troops to secure Baghdad and accelerate the training of Iraqi forces. Another strategy would redirect the U.S. military away from the internal strife to focus mainly on hunting terrorists affiliated with al-Qaeda. And the third would concentrate political attention on supporting the majority Shiites and abandon U.S. efforts to reach out to Sunni insurgents. As President Bush and his advisers rush to complete their crash review and craft a new formula in the next two weeks, some close to the process said the major goal seems to be to stake out alternatives to the plan presented this week by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group. The White House denied trying to brush off the study group's report and said those recommendations are being considered alongside internal reviews. Read The Full Story	U.S. , Foreign Regulators Consider Tightening Controls On Deadly Polonium-210 2006-12-10 01:20:47 Nuclear regulators in Washington, D.C., and abroad are studying whether to tighten security on polonium 210 in case terrorists seek the deadly material for so-called dirty bombs that spew radioactivity, officials and diplomats said in recent interviews. The evaluation is based on longstanding fears about the possible terrorist threat as well as the polonium 210 poisoning that on Nov. 23 killed a former Russian spy living in exile in Britain and stirred public unease. British authorities traced the risk of radioactive contamination to a dozen sites around London and commercial jets carrying more than 33,000 people. The poisoning was an apparent first that caught the authorities by surprise. Groups considering tighter controls include the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in the United States and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna, Austria, which sets global standards for radiation safety. "There are no sirens wailing," said a senior European diplomat familiar with the agency's polonium 210 reassessment. "But there's a sense that we need to rethink how it is categorized," and thus controlled. Read The Full Story 5 Years Of Drought Leave Australia's Outback Parched, Towns On Verge Of Ruin 2006-12-10 01:19:10 Drought has plunged one of Australia's most famous outback towns to the brink of social and economic collapse. Bourke - heralded as the "Real Gateway to the Outback" - faces oblivion. Five years of drought has left Bourke facing its worst crisis. Little wonder Australians are calling this prolonged barren spell the "Big Dry". The earth in this isolated corner of New South Wales, 500 miles northwest of Sydney, crunches underfoot. Every step stirs a tiny swirl of fine dust. The land is slowly dying of thirst. Some farms are the size of a small country, yet still they can't produce enough grazing for their livestock. Farmer Ben Mannix is determined to stay until the drought passes, but life is a struggle. "You fight it," he said. "You work through and you pick up your pieces and on you go because breaking down or giving up isn't going to achieve anything." The ground is cracked. Without decent rain, it has been at the mercy of temperatures that have exceeded 50 Celsius (122 Fahrenheit). Read The Full Story Saddam's Nephew Escapes From Prison 2006-12-10 01:16:57 A nephew of Saddam Hussein serving a life sentence in a northern Iraqi prison escaped Saturday in what authorities believe might have been an inside job. Ayman Sabawi, the son of Hussein's half-brother, was detained last year during a raid in Tikrit, Hussein's hometown. He later was convicted of possessing illegal weapons and manufacturing explosives for Sunni insurgents. Police said Sabawi managed to leave Badoosh Prison, about 45 miles west of the northern city of Mosul, Saturday afternoon, got into a waiting car and fled. Authorities are investigating whether night-shift prison guards helped him escape, said police. Read The Full Story Secret American Talks With Insurgents Broke Down 2006-12-10 01:14:46 Secret talks in which senior American officials came face-to-face with some of their most bitter enemies in the Iraqi insurgency broke down after two months of meetings, rebel commanders have disclosed. The meetings, hosted by Iyad Allawi, Iraq's former prime minister, brought insurgent commanders and Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, together for the first time. After months of delicate negotiations Allawi, a former Ba'athist and a secular Shi'ite, persuaded three rebel leaders to travel to his villa in Amman, the Jordanian capital, to see Khalilzad in January. Read The Full Story Congress Expands Sale Of Nuclear Technology To India 2006-12-09 14:40:47 Congress Saturday reversed decades of U.S. policy aimed at preventing the spread of nuclear weapons, voting to allow expanded sales of civilian nuclear technology to India. The House approved the measure by a 330 to 59 vote last night. The Senate followed suit early this morning and sent the measure to President Bush. "I look forward to signing this bill into law soon," said Bush in a statement this morning. The legislation, pushed hard by the Bush administration, is part of a strategy to accelerate India's rise as a counterweight to China in Asia. Republican and Democratic supporters argued that the measure would solidify India as an ally while providing millions of dollars in sales for the U.S. energy industry. Read The Full Story Taliban Gunmen Kill 2 Teachers, Family Members 2006-12-09 14:39:44 Following up on a death threat, Taliban militants broke into a house and fatally shot two teachers and three other family members, bringing to 20 the number of educators slain in attacks this year, officials and a relative said Saturday. A NATO spokesman, meanwhile, said an investigation had begun into allegations that British troops fired at civilians, killing one and wounding six, after a suicide bombing attack on their convoy last weekend. The Taliban attack on two teachers, who were sisters living in the same house, happened overnight in a village in the Narang district of eastern Kunar province. Read The Full Story Bush Administration Says U.S. Officials Can't Be Held Liable For Torture 2006-12-09 03:31:30 The Bush administration asserted in federal court Friday that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and three former military officials cannot be held liable for the alleged torture of nine Afghans and Iraqis in U.S. military detention camps because the detainees have no standing to sue in U.S. courts. Deputy Assistant Attorney General C. Frederick Beckner III also argued that a decision by the court to let a trial proceed would amount to an infringement by the judiciary on the president's power to wage war and would open the door to new litigation in U.S. courts by foreign nationals who feel aggrieved by U.S. government policies. "Foreign aliens abroad enjoy no constitutional rights," Beckner told Chief U.S. District Judge Thomas F. Hogan at a hearing on a government motion to dismiss a lawsuit filed on behalf of the defendants by the American Civil Liberties Union and human rights groups. Read The Full Story Stents Increase Risk Of Blood Clots, Heart Attacks, Death 2006-12-09 03:27:41 New drug-oozing stents widely used to prop open clogged arteries are associated with an increased risk of blood clots, heart attacks and death for the majority of patients receiving the devices, an expert panel concluded Friday. Based on the finding, the special 21-member Food and Drug Administration panel recommended that the agency issue new warnings to doctors and patients that the devices' safety has not been established except for relatively low-risk patients, for whom the stents were originally tested and approved. "If you use the device outside that indication, you're going to have a higher incidence of complications," said William H. Maisel, of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts, who chaired the panel. Read The Full Story Hot Job In Iraq: Being Saddam Hussein's Executioner 2006-12-09 03:25:56 One of the most coveted jobs in Iraq does not yet exist: the executioner of Saddam Hussein. The death sentence against Hussein is still under review by an appeals court, but hundreds of people have already started lobbying the prime minister's office for the position. They have sent messages through cabinet officials and their assistants, and by way of government guards and clerical workers. One candidate, an Iraqi Shiite living in London whose brother was killed by Hussein, telephoned an aide to the prime minister to say he was prepared to drop everything and fly to Baghdad to execute the former ruler. "One of the hardest tasks will be to determine who gets to be the hangman because so many people want revenge for the loss of their loved ones," said Basam Ridha, an adviser to Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. Read The Full Story
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