Free Internet Press Newsletter - Thursday December 7 2006 - (813)

Thursday December 7 2006 edition
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Green Onions Identified As Source Of 99 E. Coli Cases 2006-12-07 03:29:40 After Taco Bell traced a growing E. coli outbreak to green onions at its restaurants Wednesday morning, government investigators began an intensive search to identify the source of the contamination. The total number of cases in three Northeastern states swelled to 99, implicating several additional restaurants and a second food distributor, who said the onions came from a California farm. Taco Bell officials said early Wednesday that their preliminary tests had traced the E. coli to three samples of green onions, which the restaurant chain sprinkles on many of its menu items. In what the company president, Greg Creed, called "an abundance of caution," Taco Bell removed green onions from its 5,800 outlets across the United States. A Suffolk County laboratory later confirmed E. coli in three of four green onions taken from a previously unopened package at one of the restaurants, "suggesting that it was already contaminated before it arrived," said Suffolk's acting health commissioner, Dr. David G. Graham. County officials retrieved the green onions from a Taco Bell in Deer Park after the franchise identified them as the probable cause of the outbreak. Read The Full Story Audit: FEMA Wasting Millions In Katrina Aid 2006-12-07 03:28:10 The government is squandering tens of millions of dollars in Hurricane Katrina disaster help, in some cases doling out housing payments to people living rent-free, investigators said Wednesday. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has recouped less than 1 percent of the $1 billion that investigators contend it wasted on fraudulent assistance, according to the Government Accountability Office. The report illustrates the disaster relief agency's struggles, more than one year after the deadly storm, to rush aid to those in need while also preventing abuse. Last week, a federal judge in Washington ordered the Bush administration to resume housing payments for thousands of people displaced by Katrina. The ruling, which FEMA is appealing, cited a convoluted process for applying for help. Read The Full Story Former U.K. Army Chief Says Government Failing Soldiers In Time Of War 2006-12-07 03:26:51 General Sir Mike Jackson, a former head of the U.K. army, delivered a blistering attack on the Blair government Wednesday night, accusing it of failing to meet the most basic needs of the country's soldiers who were risking their lives fighting unpopular wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In his first public speech since retiring as chief of the general staff this summer, he said the government was failing to give the armed forces the resources they craved, and warned that the army was in danger of becoming a political football. "I am confident that the nation trusts the army to do that which it is directed to do, and in which it succeeds," he said. Then he added: "That trust must be reciprocated - the nation, represented by the duly elected government of the day, must provide all the tools that the job requires." Read The Full Story Iraq: Study Group Report May Fail To Grasp Country's Complex Issues 2006-12-07 03:25:27 The Iraq Study Group's prescriptions hinge on a fragile Iraqi government's ability to achieve national reconciliation and security at a time when the country is fractured along sectarian lines, its security forces are ineffective and competing visions threaten to collapse the state, Iraqi politicians and analysts said Wednesday. They said the report is a recipe, backed by threats and disincentives, that neither addresses nor understands the complex forces that fuel Iraq's woes. They described it as a strategy largely to help U.S. troops return home and resurrect America's frayed influence in the Middle East. Iraqis also expressed fear that the report's recommendations, if implemented, could weaken an already besieged government in a country teetering on the edge of civil war. "It is a report to solve American problems, and not to solve Iraq's problems," said Ayad al-Sammarai, an influential Sunni Muslim politician. Read The Full Story Scotland Yard: Ex-Spy Litvinenko Was Murdered 2006-12-06 15:03:32 Scotland Yard said Wednesday it is treating the death of former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko as murder. The announcement came nearly two weeks after Litvinenko died in a London hospital; the rare radioactive substance polonium-210 was found in his body. Scotland Yard detectives are in Moscow as part of the widening investigation into his death. ''Detectives ... have reached the stage where it is felt appropriate to treat it as an allegation of murder,'' said the Metropolitan Police. ''It is important to stress that we have reached no conclusions as to the means employed, the motive or the identity of those who might be responsible for Mr. Litvinenko's death.'' Read The Full Story Thousands Of Taco Bells Toss Green Onions Over E. Coli 2006-12-06 15:02:43 Taco Bell Corporation today removed green onions from its 5,800 restaurants nationwide saying they may have been the source of the E. coli poisoning that has sickened 65 people in New Jersey, Long Island and Pennsylvania. The company said the action was taken as a precaution, based on preliminary testing. “While tests are preliminary and not yet conclusive, three samples of green onions were found to be presumptive positive” for the E. coli strain responsible for the outbreak of sickness, the company said in a statement today. It said the tests were conducted by an independent laboratory hired by the company. Read The Full Story Bush Declares ECO-Whistleblower Law Void For EPA Employees 2006-12-06 15:01:45 The Bush administration has declared itself immune from whistleblower protections for federal workers under the Clean Water Act, according to legal documents released Monday by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). As a result of an opinion issued by a unit within the Office of the Attorney General, federal workers will have little protection from official retaliation for reporting water pollution enforcement breakdowns, manipulations of science or cleanup failures. Citing an "unpublished opinion of the [Attorney General's] Office of Legal Counsel," the Secretary of Labor's Administrative Review Board has ruled federal employees may no longer pursue whistleblower claims under the Clean Water Act. The opinion invoked the ancient doctrine of sovereign immunity which is based on the old English legal maxim that "The King Can Do No Wrong". It is an absolute defense to any legal action unless the "sovereign" consents to be sued. The opinion and the ruling reverse nearly two decades of precedent. Approximately 170,000 federal employees working within environmental agencies are affected by the loss of whistleblower rights. Read The Full Story Analysis: Iraq Study Group Report Reshapes Debate On War 2006-12-06 13:46:38 The Iraq Study Group's report promises to reshape the national debate about a war that even President Bush's nominee for defense secretary says the United States is not winning, but its implementation would require the president to abandon many of the goals that have been the foundation of his second-term national security policy. Bush offered a tentative reaction this morning to the harsh findings of the bipartisan commission headed by former secretary of state James A. Baker III and former Indiana representative Lee Hamilton. He described the report as offering "a very tough assessment" of conditions in Iraq and "some really very interesting proposals" for changing course. But he stopped well short of endorsing any of the recommendations. The report marks the second repudiation of Bush's Iraq policy in a matter of weeks. Last month, the public delivered a vote of no-confidence in the president's Iraq strategy, turning the House and Senate over to the Democrats in a midterm election that was in large measure a referendum on a war that has divided the country like nothing since Vietnam. Read The Full Story New Artery Stents Raise Safety Concerns 2006-12-06 03:13:59 A flurry of recent research has raised alarm about the safety of a new generation of stents that have quickly become the most commonly used devices for treating clogged arteries, creating widespread concern about how to care for millions of heart-disease patients. The stents, tiny drug-secreting mesh tubes used to prop coronary arteries open, appear to carry a small but significantly increased risk of causing blood clots, compared with older "bare metal" versions. That may boost the patients' chances of suffering a heart attack or dying, according to the studies, including one released Tuesday. The accumulating evidence prompted the Food and Drug Administration to convene an urgent two-day meeting of a panel of outside experts Thursday to assess the devices, known as drug-eluting stents, including whether their risks outweigh their benefits. Read The Full Story Richest Tenth Own 85 Percent Of World's Assets 2006-12-06 03:12:40 The richest 2 per cent of adults own more than half the world’s wealth, according to the most comprehensive study of personal assets. Among the largest economies, Britain boasted the third-highest average wealth of $126,382 (£64,172) per adult, after the United States and Japan, a United Nations development research institute found. Those with assets of $500,000 could consider themselves to be among the richest 1 per cent in the world. Those with net assets of $2,200 per adult were in the top half of the wealth distribution. Although global income was distributed unequally, the spread of wealth is more skewed, according to the study by the World Institute for Development Economics Research of the U.N. University. Read The Full Story	Report Says Oil Royalties To Government Go Unpaid 2006-12-07 03:28:55 An eight-month investigation by the Interior Department's chief watchdog has found pervasive problems in the government's program for ensuring that companies pay the royalties they owe on billions of dollars of oil and gas pumped on federal land and in coastal waters. In a scathing report to Congress, the Interior Department's inspector general says the agency's data are often inaccurate, that its officials rely too heavily on statements by oil companies rather than actual records and that only about 9 percent of all oil and gas leases are being reviewed. The report undermines claims by top Interior officials that the department is aggressively pursuing underpayments and outright cheating by companies that drill on property owned by the American public. Read The Full Story Commentary: Arms And The Middlemen 2006-12-07 03:27:41 Intellpuke: The following commentary is written by David Leigh about the arms deal between the U.K. and Saudi Arabia that is now under investigation over bribes and kickbacks to members of the Saudi Royal family. I found Mr. Leigh's column to be intelligent and cogent and felt it should be shared because what he has to say could apply equally well to the U.S. Mr. Leigh's column, which appears in the Guardian edition for Thursday, Dec. 7, 2006, follows: All the Chicken Lickens in Britain's business press have been running about for the past fortnight shouting: "The sky is falling! The sky is falling!" The cause of this hysteria, adroitly stoked up by our biggest arms firm, BAE Systems, is that the economy is allegedly in danger because the Saudi royal family may take away a warplane contract worth £10 billion ($20 billion). But a senior British diplomat, Stephen Day, said publicly this week what many sensible people have been thinking for some time. He told the Financial Times that Britain might be better off if it ended its corrupt liaison with Saudi Arabia. The former ambassador to Qatar said there were no political or strategic grounds for continuing with these monster arms deals: "The U.K. now risks fuelling the perception that the British are shoring up a corrupt regime without sound military reasons ... Britain really has to sit back and think from first principles how it can help the Middle East .. Selling arms to Saudi Arabia is not the way." These words are heresy to the arms industry, and no doubt to the entourage of political actors on its payroll, which has included: Lord Powell, the brother of the prime minister's chief of staff; Michael Portillo, the former Tory defense secretary; and Sir Kevin Tebbit, the recently retired permanent secretary at the MoD (Ministry of Defense), now on the board of Smiths Group, a major BAE subcontractor. Read The Full Story Saudi Arabia Fires Security Consultant For Iraq Remarks 2006-12-07 03:26:08 Saudi Arabia said Wednesday it had fired a security adviser who wrote in the Washington Post that the world's top oil exporter would intervene in Iraq once the United States withdrew troops. Saudi Arabia's government said last weekend that there was no truth in Nawaf Obaid's Nov. 29 op-ed column, which suggested that the kingdom would back Iraq's Sunni Muslims in the event of a wider sectarian conflict. Obaid stressed in the column that the views were his own and not those of the Saudi government. "We felt that we could add more credibility to his claims as an independent contractor by terminating our consultancy agreement with him," Prince Turki al-Faisal, Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States, told the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia. Read The Full Story U.S. Senate Confirms Gates As Defense Secretary 2006-12-07 03:24:42 The Senate overwhelmingly approved Robert M. Gates Wednesday as the new defense secretary to replace Donald H. Rumsfeld, sealing a swift confirmation with a vote of 95 to 2 that reflected bipartisan confidence in his willingness to overhaul U.S. strategy in Iraq. Senate Democrats and Republicans lauded Gates's frankness after a day of testimony Tuesday in which he acknowledged that the United States is not winning in Iraq, and said that historians would have to judge whether the decision to invade Iraq in March 2003 was correct. He also pledged to take a fresh approach to Iraq in which "all options are on the table". Two Republican senators - Jim Bunning (Kentucky) and Rick Santorum (Pennsylvania) - voted against Gates, with Bunning saying that Gates's criticism of "our efforts in Iraq" sends the wrong message to U.S. troops and allies. Read The Full Story Mars Global Surveyor Finds Evidence Of Recent Water Flow 2006-12-06 15:03:06 Images taken by NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft suggest the presence of liquid water on the Martian surface, a tantalizing find for scientists wondering if the Red Planet ever has harbored life. The orbiting U.S. spacecraft allowed scientists to detect changes in the walls of two Martian craters that may have been caused by the recent flow of water, a team of researchers said in a paper appearing on Wednesday in the journal Science. Scientists previously had established that two forms of water - ice at the poles and water vapor - exist on Mars, but liquid water is crucial to nurture life. The scientists compared images of the Martian surface taken seven years apart and found the existence of 20 newly formed craters caused by impact from space debris as well as the evidence suggesting liquid water trickling down crater walls. Read The Full Story Milwaukee Factory Blast Kills 1, Injures 25 2006-12-06 15:02:14 An explosion that may have started in a large propane tank rocked an industrial complex near downtown Milwaukee Wednesday morning, killing one person and injuring at least 25 more. One person is missing. The explosion at 8:15 a.m. ignited a fire at a Falk Corp. warehouse near the Potawatomi casino about a half mile from Miller Park, where the Milwaukee Brewers baseball team plays, said fire Chief William Wendtland. The blast flipped cars, spewed debris into the air and prompted the evacuation of dozens of workers at the plant where large industrial gears and couplings are made. Fire spread through rubble covering several blocks. Read The Full Story Iraq Panel Report Calls Situation 'Grave And Deteriorating' 2006-12-06 13:47:15 Conditions in Iraq are "grave and deteriorating," with the prospect that a "slide toward chaos" could topple the U.S.-backed government and trigger a regional war unless the United States changes course and seeks a broader diplomatic and political solution involving all of Iraq's neighbors, according to a bipartisan panel that gave its recommendations to President Bush and Congress today. In what amounts to the most extensive independent assessment of the nearly four-year-old conflict that has claimed the lives of more than 2,800 Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis, the Iraq Study Group bluntly warns that "current U.S. policy is not working." Citing rising violence and the Iraqi government's failure to advance national reconciliation, the panel paints a grim picture of a nation that Bush has repeatedly vowed to transform into a beacon of freedom and democracy in the Middle East. Despite a list of 79 recommendations meant to encourage regional diplomacy and lead to a reduction of U.S. forces over the next year, the panel acknowledges that stability in Iraq may be impossible to achieve any time soon. Read The Full Story In Lebanon, Hezbollah Gambles In Quest For Political Dominance 2006-12-06 03:14:29 Hezbollah has entered territory uncharted in its 24-year history as armed militia, social welfare group and nascent political party, effectively seeking an unprecedented, decisive say in Lebanese politics to protect what it sees as its interests from foes at home and abroad. The month-long political crisis that has roiled Lebanon, hurtling it dangerously close to the precipice of civil war, marks a revealing shift for the Shiite Muslim movement that for years, at least rhetorically, tried to stay above politics, entering the cabinet for the first time in 2005. Now, by mobilizing its rank and file and pouring them into downtown Beirut to topple the government, the movement has framed that pursuit for political power in the same martial language of this summer's war with Israel. Read The Full Story Internet Spam Doubles, Finding New Ways To Deliver Itself 2006-12-06 03:13:26 Hearing from a lot of new friends lately? You know, the ones that write “It’s me, Esmeralda,” and tip you off to an obscure stock that is “poised to explode” or a great deal on prescription drugs. You’re not the only one. Spam is back - in e-mail in-boxes and on everyone’s minds. In the last six months, the problem has gotten measurably worse. Worldwide spam volumes have doubled from last year, according to Ironport, a spam filtering firm, and unsolicited junk mail now accounts for more than 9 of every 10 e-mail messages sent over the Internet. Much of that flood is made up of a nettlesome new breed of junk e-mail called image spam, in which the words of the advertisement are part of a picture, often fooling traditional spam detectors that look for telltale phrases. Image spam increased fourfold from last year and now represents 25 to 45 percent of all junk e-mail, depending on the day, Ironport says. Read The Full Story New York City Bans Most Trans Fats In Restaurants 2006-12-06 03:11:54 The New York City Board of Health voted Tuesday to adopt the nation's first major municipal ban on the use of all but tiny amounts of artificial trans fats in restaurant cooking, a move that would radically transform the way food is prepared in thousands of restaurants, from McDonald's to fashionable bistros to Chinese take-outs. Some experts said the measure, which is widely opposed by the restaurant industry, would be a model for other cities. Chicago is considering a similar prohibition that would affect restaurants with more than $20 million in annual sales. "New York City has set a national standard," said Harold Goldstein, executive director of the California Center for Public Health Advocacy, who predicted that other communities would follow suit. Read The Full Story
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