Free Internet Press Newsletter - Tuesday December 5 2006 - (813)

Tuesday December 5 2006 edition
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Bolton Bites The Bullet, Resigns As U.N. Envoy 2006-12-04 15:53:17 President Bush today accepted the resignation of John R. Bolton as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, expressing deep disappointment that "a handful" of senators had blocked his confirmation last year. Bolton, 58, submitted a resignation letter Friday after it became clear that he was unlikely to win a new confirmation battle in the Senate, where Democrats won a narrow majority in the Nov. 7 midterm elections. Bolton's nomination had been blocked by a Democratic filibuster threat last year, prompting Bush to place him in the U.N. post through a recess appointment in August 2005. That appointment expires when the current Congress adjourns. Formal adjournment could come as soon as the end of this week, but no later than the beginning of January. Read The Full Story Four U.S. Troops Killed In Helicopter Crash In Iraq 2006-12-04 15:52:15 Four American troops were killed when a military helicopter broke down as it flew over a lake in Anbar Province in western Iraq and made an emergency landing on the shore of the lake, American military officials said Monday. The military said the craft, a Marine Corps CH-46 troop transport helicopter with 16 people and equipment aboard, was flying over Lake Qadisiya on Sunday when it began to experience "mechanical difficulties". The pilots brought the helicopter down in a controlled maneuver over the water and guided it to shore, according to Lt. Col. Josslyn L. Aberle, a military spokeswoman in Baghdad. The mechanical failures were not caused by an enemy attack, officials said; they did not give further details. Read The Full Story U.S. Marine Convicted Of Rape In Philippines, Gets 40 Years 2006-12-04 15:51:03 A U.S. Marine was convicted Monday of raping a Filipino woman and sentenced to 40 years in prison, ending an emotional trial that has strained U.S.-Philippine ties and tested a joint military pact. Three other Marines and their Filipino driver were acquitted of complicity. Lance Cpl. Daniel Smith, 21, from St. Louis, Missouri, was the first American soldier convicted of wrongdoing in the Philippines since the country shut down U.S. bases here the early 1990s. His lawyer, Ricardo Diaz, said he would appeal. Staff Sgt. Chad Carpentier, Lance Cpl. Keith Silkwood and Lance Cpl. Dominic Duplantis, who had been accused of cheering Smith on, were freed. Read The Full Story Analysis: Amid Hints Bush Will Change Policy, Clues That He Won't 2006-12-04 03:54:40 The debate that will engulf Washington and much of the country this week centers on a question that lurks at the intersection of war strategy and the personality of the commander in chief: after three and a half years, is President Bush ready to abandon his declaration that American forces cannot begin to leave Iraq until the Iraqis demonstrate that they are capable of defending themselves? As administration officials tried to prepare the ground over the weekend for the release of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group's long-awaited report on Wednesday, the president's national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, repeatedly sidestepped questions about how the administration would react to the panel’s recommendations. On three television news programs on Sunday, he offered assurances that Bush would look at all the new ideas landing on his desk to develop what Hadley referred to - 12 times - as a "new way forward," one that the president would announce to the nation in "weeks, not months". Hadley knows that one of the commission's core conclusions is that the White House should announce a plan for American forces to begin pulling back, whether the Iraqis are ready or not. Read The Full Story Bush Mulls Resumed Natural Gas Drilling Off Southwest Alaska 2006-12-04 03:53:15 President Bush is considering whether to lift the 17-year-old moratorium on energy drilling in the waters off southwestern Alaska, a White House spokeswoman said Sunday, which would allow oil and gas companies to try to tap into more than five trillion cubic feet of natural gas that lies beneath rich fishing grounds. The push to market oil and gas leases in these waters, which oil and gas companies favor, is part of a larger national effort to expand domestic supplies of fossil fuel by opening up areas of the outer continental shelf, long off-limits to energy development. Last summer the Interior Department recommended reopening several areas of the outer continental shelf, including the southern part of Bristol Bay, which lies just north of where the Aleutian Islands meet the Alaskan mainland, to energy exploration. The report said that 14 oil and gas companies had supported the idea. The department has estimated that such a move could create up to 11,500 jobs, part of what it describes as "net benefits" of $7.7 billion. Read The Full Story Episcopal Churches To Vote On Separating From U.S. Body 2006-12-04 03:51:51 Two of the country's largest and most historic Episcopal congregations - both in Fairfax County, Virginia - will vote next week on whether to leave the U.S. church on ideological grounds and affiliate instead with a controversial Nigerian archbishop. The decision could lead to a bitter court battle and the loss of $25 million in property. Many members of The Falls Church and Truro Church, as well as some conservative leaders around the country, hope a split will establish a legal structure that would make it easier for dozens more like-minded congregations to also depart the national denomination. Some conservatives in the Episcopal Church, the U.S. wing of the worldwide Anglican Communion, believe the church abandoned Scripture by installing a gay bishop in New Hampshire in 2003, among other things. Those feelings of alienation were strengthened when Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori - who supports the New Hampshire bishop - was elected this summer to lead the national church. Read The Full Story	U.S. Supreme Court Weighs Race In Public Schools 2006-12-04 15:52:42 Several hundred demonstrators, many of them college or high school students, gathered on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court early this morning to proclaim support for using skin color as a factor in admissions in order to maintain racially diverse public schools. The court is hearing arguments today in two high-stakes school desegreation cases - the first test on the issue Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., and Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., since they were appointed to the court last term. Both justices in the past have been skeptical about the use of racial classifications. Some in the crowd that gathered before dawn wore t-shirts bearing a photo of Thurgood Marshall, the late Supreme Court justice who as a civil rights attorney famously argued the 195 Brown vs. Board of Education case that led to the desegregation of the nation's schools. Read The Full Story New Jersey Taco Bell Stays Shut After E. Coli Outbreak 2006-12-04 15:51:44 Nineteen people in New Jersey have been sickened, two of them seriously, by E. coli infections, and a Taco Bell fast food restaurant in South Plainfield, New Jersey, remained closed today as health investigators sought the source of their illness. Stephanie Brown, an epidemiologist for Middlesex County, where most of the victims live, told the Associated Press today that 5 of the 19 people known to have contracted E. coli infections were in the hospital, and 2 of the 5 had developed hemolytic uremic syndrome, which can be fatal or cause permanent damage to the kidneys. Calls to the county's public health department today seeking further information were not immediately returned; neither were calls to Taco Bell's corporate headquarters in Irvine, California. The health department scheduled a mid-afternoon news conference to report on the status of the outbreak. Read The Full Story Censorship Fears Rise As Iran Blocks Top Websites 2006-12-04 03:55:10 Iran Sunday shut down access to some of the world's most popular websites. Users were unable to open popular sites including Amazon.com and YouTube following instructions to service providers to filter them. Similar edicts have been issued against Wikipedia, the internet encyclopaedia, IMDB.com, an online film database, and the New York Times site. Attempts to open the sites are met with a page reading: "The requested page is forbidden." The clampdown was ordered by senior judiciary officials in the latest phase of a campaign that has seen high-speed broadband facilities banned in an attempt to impede "corrupting" foreign films and music. It is in line with a campaign by Iran's Islamist president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to purge the country of western cultural influences. Read The Full Story Chavez Wins Decisive Victory In Venezuela Election 2006-12-04 03:53:49 By an overwhelming margin, Venezuelans reelected President Hugo Chavez on Sunday, further extending a presidency that began when the former paratrooper was swept into power eight years ago, intent on overturning Venezuela's old social order. Chavez will receive another six years in office to broaden his leftist revolution and contest American initiatives across Latin America. "Today is a new era," the fiery populist leader told screaming supporters. "Venezuela is red, very red." With 78 percent of the votes counted by 10 p.m., electoral authorities announced that Chavez, 52, had secured 61.3 percent of the vote to 38.4 percent for Manuel Rosales, whose candidacy united a fractured opposition that included former guerrillas, industrialists and right-wing radicals, but had only four months to gather momentum. Minutes after the National Electoral Council announced that Chavez had garnered 5.9 million votes to 3.7 million for Rosales, the president appeared at the balcony of the presidential palace. Read The Full Story A CIA Rendition Foiled In Oslo, Norway 2006-12-04 03:52:38 Two months after he helped kidnap a Muslim cleric in Italy, records show, an undercover CIA officer boarded a flight to Norway on another secret mission. Two other U.S. spies followed a few weeks later and checked into the same hotel. Shortly after the agents arrived in the spring of 2003, an Islamic militant living in Oslo known as Mullah Krekar received a warning from an anonymous Norwegian official, according to Krekar's lawyer. The message: Krekar, then head of a Kurdish insurgent group, was a CIA target and should watch his back. The spies left Norway by the end of the summer, according to records of their travels compiled by European investigators. If the CIA was planning to abduct Krekar, like other Islamic radicals it had secretly apprehended in Europe after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, those plans were quietly abandoned. Read The Full Story 2 Firefighters Killed, 9 Injured In U.K. Fireworks Depot Blaze And Explosion 2006-12-04 03:51:17 Two firefighters were killed and 12 people were injured, one critically, when an explosion ripped through a fireworks factory Sunday, shooting rockets and burning debris high into the sky, and creating a mushroom cloud of black smoke visible for miles around. The two fatalities were members of an emergency team sent to fight a fire at the Festival Fireworks factory on an industrial estate in Ringmer, near Lewes in East Sussex. One was a 63-year-old retired officer who occasionally helped the service out in major incidents. The other was a 49-year-old control room staff member. They were thought to be the first fire service personnel to die on duty in England and Wales this year. Nine other firefighters, one police officer and two members of the public were also hurt. Read The Full Story
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