Free Internet Press Newsletter - Sunday December 17 2006 - (813)

Sunday December 17 2006 edition
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Lawmakers' Inaction Puts Some Federal Programs In Peril 2006-12-17 03:37:01 The Republican-controlled Congress's decision to adjourn a week ago before completing many of the spending bills that finance the federal government will reverberate in ways large and small, such as understaffed U.S. attorney's offices, delayed renovations at the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut and a scuttled global nuclear energy exchange. Republican leaders left behind just enough spending authority to keep the government operating through mid-February, less than halfway through the 2007 fiscal year that began Oct. 1. Democrats have signaled that when they take control of Congress in January they will extend that funding authority for the remainder of the year based largely on the previous year's spending levels, which will result in many cuts in programs. The Democrats also will do something that is certain to anger many lawmakers but cheer critics of excessive government spending: They will wipe out thousands of lawmakers' pet projects, or earmarks, that have been a source of great controversy on Capitol Hill. In the past, lawmakers have peppered individual spending bills with earmarks benefiting special interests. But the funding resolution the Democrats intend to pass in lieu of spending bills will be devoid of earmarks. Read The Full Story High-Dose Fertility Drugs Put Mothers And Babies At Risk 2006-12-17 03:36:26 Thousands of infertile women who undergo IVF treatment are risking themselves and their embryos because they are receiving too many strong hormonal drugs, new research reveals. More than 10,000 children - around 1.5 per cent of all live births - are born in the U.K. each year using the treatments. For years, clinics have chosen to place several embryos in the womb to give the best possible chance of a pregnancy, often leading to multiple pregnancies that are dangerous in themselves because they can lead to premature delivery. Now two studies discussed at a conference in London last week show that women who receive high doses of drugs to stimulate their ovaries into producing lots of eggs - so that the best possible ones can be picked once the egg has been fertilised by sperm in the laboratory - are more likely to produce embryos with genetic defects and suffer harmful changes to their womb lining. Read The Full Story Northern Hemisphere Warming Twice As Fast As South 2006-12-16 18:00:39 The northern hemisphere has been warming twice as fast as the southern hemisphere in recent years, the United Nation's weather agency said Thursday. In its annual report on the state of the global climate, the World Meteorological Agency said that in the period 1997-2006 the average temperature in the north was 0.53 degrees Celsius (0.95 Fahrenheit) warmer than the average for 1961-1990. In the south, average temperatures rose by 0.27 degrees Celsius (0.49 Fahrenheit) in the same period, according to the report. Read The Full Story Lebanon's Premier Says Arab League Mediation Will Continue 2006-12-16 17:59:56 Lebanese Premier Fouad Siniora on Friday denied media reports that the Arab League had failed to end the political crisis in Lebanon, as he met with Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss possible mediation with Syria. "Efforts to solve the crisis are ongoing and the mediation by Arab League chief Amr Moussa will continue," said Siniora, who met with a series of top Russian officials. "Moussa is working on developing his efforts and we have to have faith in the necessity to unite all Lebanese against external dangers," added the premier. Media reports on Thursday quoted a source close to Moussa as saying that the initiative conducted by the Arab diplomat "had failed." The premier's visit to Moscow precedes a scheduled trip to the Kremlin by Syrian President Bashar Assad on Tuesday, December 19. Read The Full Story Kyrgyz Parliament Wants U.S. Soldiers' Immunity Revoked 2006-12-16 17:59:05 The Kyrgyz parliament demanded Friday that terms for keeping a U.S. military bases in Manas airport should be reconsidered, and that U.S. servicemen should be deprived of the legal immunity granted when the U.S. was allowed to use the airport for its base. Members of the Kyrgyzstan parliament cited the Dec. 6 murder of Kyrgyz citizen Alexander Ivanov, allegedly committed by a U.S. Air Force sergeant, as the reason for the resolution; but officials in the Kyrgyz capital, Bishkek, said that Moscow was pushing Kyrgyz authorities to approve a resolution with strong language regarding the U.S. base. “The event [the murder] caused the negative perception of U.S. image with Kyrgyz people. Our nation is strongly against not just the fact of incidents around the aviation base, but against the fact that the U.S. prefers procrastination, and sometimes ignores Kyrgyzstan’s demands altogether,” reads the resolution prepared by the country’s authorities. Read The Full Story Commentary: Negotiation Is Bush's Only Way Out Of Iraq 2006-12-16 16:31:46 Intellpuke: The following column is written by John Conason, a writer for The New York Observer. In his column, which I found posted at alternet.org's website, Mr. Conason argues that more attention needs to be focused on the finding and recommendation of the Iraq Study Group that there is no way for the Bush admnistration to achieve a military victory in Iraq, and the only way out is through negotiation. Mr. Conason's column follows: Before the publication of the Iraq Study Group report, predictions abounded that the committee, chaired by James Baker III and Lee Hamilton, would offer little new and nothing radical. Bipartisan mush in soft covers seemed the most likely product of any Washington group whose first imperative was unanimity. Yet the former secretary of state, the retired Indiana congressman and their colleagues exceeded those expectations. Bland as their language is, they assessed the overall failure of the Bush administration's foreign policy in the Middle East, from the president's abandonment of the Arab-Israeli peace process to his distraction from securing Afghanistan. And they urged him, in the strongest terms, to adopt a new policy of engagement with adversaries in Syria and Iran. That emphasis on diplomacy became the focus of media coverage - along with the report's rejection of both immediate redeployment of American troops and indefinite commitment to their presence in Iraq. What deserved far greater attention, however, was the most important of the Baker-Hamilton committee's conclusions: namely, that there is no military solution to the American dilemma in Iraq, and that the only way out is negotiation. In the report, most references to this reality appear under the euphemistic category known as "national reconciliation." Read The Full Story Opinion: Bush Has Created A Comprehensive Catastrophe Across The Middle East 2006-12-16 03:12:53 Intellpuke: The following opinion column is written by Timorthy Garton Ash and appeared in Britain's Guardain newspaper on Thursday, December 14, 2006. In his column, Mr. Ash contends that U.S. President George W. Bush's policies have, in every vital Middle East area from Afghanistan to Egypt, made the situation worse than it was before. Mr. Ash's column begins here: What an amazing bloody catastrophe. The Bush administration's policy towards the Middle East over the five years since 9/11 is culminating in a multiple train crash. Never in the field of human conflict was so little achieved by so great a country at such vast expense. In every vital area of the wider Middle East, American policy over the last five years has taken a bad situation and made it worse. If the consequences were not so serious, one would have to laugh at a failure of such heroic proportions - rather in the spirit of Zorba the Greek who, contemplating the splintered ruins of his great project, memorably exclaimed: "Did you ever see a more splendiferous crash?" But the reckless incompetence of Zorba the Bush has resulted in the death, maiming, uprooting or impoverishment of hundreds of thousands of men, women and children - mainly Muslim Arabs but also Christian Lebanese, Israelis and American and British soldiers. By contributing to a broader alienation of Muslims it has also helped to make a world in which, as we walk the streets of London, Madrid, Jerusalem, New York or Sydney, we are all, each and every one of us, less safe. Laugh if you dare. In the beginning, there were the 9/11 attacks. It's important to stress that no one can fairly blame George Bush for them. The invasion of Afghanistan was a justified response to those attacks, which were initiated by al-Qaida from its bases in a rogue state under the tyranny of the Taliban. But if Afghanistan had to be done, it had to be done properly. It wasn't. Creating a half-way civilised order in one of the most rugged, inhospitable and tribally recalcitrant places on the planet was always going to be a huge challenge. If the available resources of the world's democracies, including those of a new, enlarged Nato, had been dedicated to that task over the last five years, we might at least have one partial success to report today. Read The Full Story Defense Science Board Seeks Consensus On U.S. Nuclear Weapons Arsenal 2006-12-16 03:11:26 A prestigious Defense Department advisory panel has determined there is no national agreement on what the nation needs in the way of nuclear weapons in the post-Cold War period. In a recently released declassified version of a report on U.S. nuclear capabilities completed earlier this year, the Defense Science Board reported that its task force on the subject concluded "there is a need for a national consensus on the nature and role of nuclear weapons, as well as a new approach to sustaining a reliable, safe, secure and credible nuclear stockpile". The task force found "most Americans agree that as long as actual or potential adversaries possess or actively seek nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction, the United States must maintain a deterrent to counter possible threats and support the nation's role as a global power and security partner". Beyond that, however, it found "sharp differences". Read The Full Story Florida, California Suspend Lethal Injections In Death Penalty Cases 2006-12-16 03:10:03 Executions by lethal injection were suspended in Florida and ordered revamped in California on Friday, as the chemical method once billed as a more humane way of killing the condemned came under mounting scrutiny over the pain it may cause. Gov. Jeb Bush (R) ordered the suspension in Florida after a botched execution in which it took 34 minutes and a second injection to kill convicted murderer Angel Nieves Diaz. A state medical examiner said that needles used to carry the poison had passed through the prisoner's veins and delivered the three-chemical mix into the tissues of his arm. In California, a federal judge ruled that the state must overhaul its lethal-injection procedures, calling its current protocol unconstitutional because it may inflict unacceptable levels of pain. Read The Full Story	Abbas Threatens To Dismiss Hamas-Led Government 2006-12-17 03:36:43 The increasingly violent power struggle in the Occupied Territories edged closer to civil war Saturday as Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas announced he would call fresh presidential and legislative elections and insisted he had the right to fire the Hamas-led government. After days of fighting between Abbas's Fatah faction and Hamas in Gaza and in the West Bank city of Ramallah, Abbas's aides said a date for new elections could be set within a week and the vote take place within three and six months. The latest escalation came ahead of the arrival of Tony Blair in Israel today as part of a tour of Turkey and the Middle East which the Prime Minister hopes can help breathe fresh life into a moribund peace process. Saturday Blair visited Cairo, Egypt, for talks with President Hosni Mubarak. His arrival in Egypt drew no red carpet, no high-ranking reception committee, and a three-strong honour guard. Read The Full Story Iraq Opens Army To Hussein Loyalists Who 'Aren't Tainted With Blood' 2006-12-17 03:36:03 Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki and his Shiite-dominated government reached out to former members of Saddam Hussein's regime Saturday, inviting them to claim government pensions and rejoin the army in a gesture meant to calm the country's sectarian passions. "The Iraqi army opens its doors to officers and soldiers from the former army who wish to serve the country," Maliki said at a national reconciliation conference of politicians and sectarian leaders in Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone. Maliki has been under increasing U.S. pressure to improve security forces. But, exposing fissures that have plagued his struggling government as the country descended into civil war, several Shiite and Sunni Arab groups rejected the proposal, saying it would reward insurgents and stalwarts of Hussein's regime. Read The Full Story Litvinenko's Widow Says He Feared Kremlin's Long Reach 2006-12-16 18:00:17 Marina Litvinenko, the widow of the former K.G.B. agent who died of radiation poisoning in London, said Friday that he began to worry about the safety of Russian exiles like himself in July, when the Parliament in Moscow, with little overseas fanfare, approved a law legalizing strikes beyond Russia's borders against those the Kremlin considered to be extremists or terrorists. But she said her husband, Alexander V. Litvinenko, still felt protected by asylum in Britain. After the new law was passed in July, "Sasha said: 'They are going to kill us'," Mrs. Litvinenko said, using his Russian nickname. His apprehension deepened in October, when an associate, the investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya, was shot dead in Moscow. "He was devastated," said Mrs. Litvinenko. "But he could not say he felt he was going to be next: that would have been unbelievable. He was concerned about other people who have political asylum here. But he said: It can't happen in England." Read The Full Story Editorial: Temporary Face-Saving Is No Substitute For Statemanship 2006-12-16 17:59:34 Intellpuke: The following editorial appears in Beirut, Lebanon-based Daily Star edition for Saturday, Dec. 16, 2006. The editorial begins here: No objective observer who has watched the current crisis in Beirut since its inception can accuse either side of having engineered it with malice aforethought. As has frequently been the case throughout the tragic history of Lebanon, the real problem is that while malice is an ever-present component of the Lebanese political climate, there appears in this case to have been no forethought at all. It is especially important to accept this fact as the finishing touches are applied to a package of compromises that, hopefully, will allow all sides to save face. Anyone who cares about the welfare of this country has to be pleased at anything that keeps its squabbling political parties from committing yet another catastrophic miscalculation - but the breathing space it provides must be used for something other than either idle waiting or active preparation for the next confrontation. There is no need to further complicate the current negotiations by attaching consideration of additional issues. What is required is a collective resolve to get serious about preventing another crisis in the spring or the summer. Unless concerted and genuine efforts are made now, disagreements over a new law to govern the next round of parliamentary elections will bring Lebanon back to the brink of collapse. Read The Full Story Abbas Calls For Early Palestinian Elections 2006-12-16 16:32:01 Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas announced Saturday that he has decided to call early elections, including for his own office, to end a political crisis in the territories that has brought a surge in deadly factional violence over the past week. "We shall not continue this vicious circle," Abbas told a friendly crowd of about 500 legislators, religious leaders, and supporters gathered at the Moqata government compound in Ramallah, West Bank, for a national address. "Let us go back to the people and let them have their say." Abbas' decision drew a defiant response from Hamas officials, who said the party would not accept a new election less than halfway into its four-year parliamentary term and challenged the president's right to call one. The dispute comes amid growing concerns among Palestinian leaders over the spate of partisan reprisal killings in the territories, which officials recently warned resemble the start of civil war. Read The Full Story Federal Panel Urges Limits, Warnings For Antibiotic Ketek 2006-12-16 03:13:17 The risks of the controversial antibiotic Ketek outweigh its benefits for minor illnesses and it should not be sold to patients with sinusitis or bronchitis, a federal advisory panel concluded Friday. The panel stopped short of taking Ketek off the market, voting 16 to 3 that it could still be used for mild to moderate pneumonia, the most serious of the three conditions for which it is prescribed. Even for that illness, the drug should be a secondary alternative to other medicines, said the panel. A majority of the 19-member panel also recommended that Ketek should carry a so-called black box warning about its rare but potentially serious side effects, which include liver failure, visual disturbances, loss of consciousness and serious aggravation of myasthenia gravis, a neuromuscular condition. The warning is the strongest that the F.D.A. can require drug makers to include on a drug’s label. Read The Full Story Testimony Helps Detail CIA's Post-9/11 Reach 2006-12-16 03:12:29 A few days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the CIA station chief in Rome paid a visit to the head of Italy's military intelligence agency, Adm. Gianfranco Battelli, to float a proposal: Would the Italian secret services help the CIA kidnap terrorism suspects and fly them out of the country? The CIA man did not identify which targets he had in mind but was "expressly referring to the possibility of picking up a suspected terrorist in Italy, bringing him to an airport and sending him from there to a foreign country," Battelli, now retired, recalled in a deposition. This initial secret contact and others that followed, disclosed in newly released documents, show the speed and breadth with which the CIA applied in post-9/11 Europe a tactic it had long reserved for the Third World - "extraordinary rendition," the extrajudicial abduction of Islamic radicals overseas for interrogation in friendly countries. Read The Full Story 'Tis This Season To Be Really Jolly - If You're A Wall Street Executive 2006-12-16 03:10:48 The heads of Wall Street’s most profitable banks are in line for record bonuses after their most successful year ever, led by Goldman Sach’s Lloyd Blankfein who is in line for a $50 million (£25.3 million paycheck.) James Cayne, Bearn Stearns’ chief executive, Richard Fuld, of Lehman Brothers, and Merrill Lynch’s Stan O’Neal are also expected to rake in between $40 million and $50 million in salary and bonuses this year after their banks followed Goldman Sachs’ lead and reported record profits for 2006 last week. The world’s biggest securities firm posted a 93 per cent rise in net income to $3.15 billion for the fourth quarter. Fulds has received $10.9 million in stock this year, and is expected to receive an additional cash bonus. These compensation packages are taken from some of the heftiest bonus pools ever amassed on Wall Street. Read The Full Story New Mechanical Heart Has No Pulse 2006-12-16 01:16:27 A 65-year-old Quebec man who received a new long-term mechanical heart last month is being described as the only living Canadian without a pulse. Dr. Renzo Cecere implanted the “Heartmate II” mechanical heart into Gerard Langevin in an three-hour operation Nov. 23. Officials at the McGill University Health Centre say the device, which is about the size of a flashlight battery, could last up to 10 years. Read The Full Story
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