Free Internet Press Newsletter - Monday January 15 2007 - (813)

Monday January 15 2007 edition
Free Internet Press is operated on your donations. Donate Today
21 Dead As Ice Storm Lashes Much Of U.S. 2007-01-15 02:39:17 The ice storms that have been blamed for at least 21 deaths continued to lash much of the nation Sunday, as crews tried to restore power to hundreds of thousands and slick roads spawned accidents. Waves of freezing rain, sleet and snow since Friday have caused at least 12 deaths in Oklahoma, six in Missouri, two in Texas and one in New York. Seven adults were killed early Sunday near Elk City, Oklahoma, when the minivan they were in hit a slick spot on Interstate 40, crossed the median and hit a tractor-trailer, the Oklahoma Highway Patrol reported. Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt said about 300,000 households there remained without power on Sunday. About 350 National Guardsmen were going door to door checking on residents in the hardest-hit areas and were helping to clear slick roads of tree limbs and power lines. Read The Full Story Saddam's Half-Brother, Former Head Of Iraq Court, Both Hanged 2007-01-15 02:02:04 Saddam Hussein's half brother and the former head of Iraq's Revolutionary Court were both hanged before dawn Monday, said Prosecutor Munqith al-Faroon, two weeks and two days after the former Iraqi dictator was executed in a chaotic scene that has drawn worldwide criticism. Barzan Ibrahim, Saddam's half brother and former intelligence chief, and Awad Hamed al-Bandar head of Iraq's Revolutionary Court, had been found guilty along with Saddam in the killing of 148 Shiite Muslims after a 1982 assassination attempt on the former leader in the town of Dujail north of Baghdad. "They (the government) called us before dawn and told us to send someone. I sent a judge to witness the execution and it happened," said al-Faroon. Two aides to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki confirmed that the executions had taken place. They spoke on condition of anonymity because the government had not yet released the information. Read The Full Story Bush Admits Past Mistakes As Confrontation With Iran Grows Over Arrests Of 'Diplomats' 2007-01-15 02:01:04 The confrontation between the U.S. and Iran over Iraq sharpened Sunday, as Tehran demanded the release of five "diplomats" captured in northern Iraq, while the Bush administration insisted the detainees were elite revolutionary guards fomenting the insurgency and warned that America was going to "deal with" Iranian activity in Iraq. President Bush Sunday acknowledged that his administration's decisions had contributed to instability in Iraq, telling a CBS interviewer: "I think history is going to look back and see a lot of ways we could have done things better. No question about it." He also admitted that the execution of Saddam Hussein had been mishandled, describing the event as "discouraging", according to excerpts of the TV show 60 Minutes. He said he had only watched part of the execution on the internet, because he had not wanted to watch Saddam fall through the trap door. However, he stood by his decision to invade Iraq and topple the dictatorship, and his aides have defended his move last week to intensify U.S. action against Iranian agents in Iraq. Read The Full Story Tony Blair Launches New Drive To Let Officials Share Data On British Citizens 2007-01-15 02:00:02 British Prime Minister Tony Blair Monday will spearhead a fresh government initiative to persuade voters they have nothing to fear from consenting to a relaxation of "over-zealous" rules which stop Whitehall departments sharing information about individual citizens. The exercise was denounced by opposition members of Parliament as a further lurch towards a "Big Brother"  state even before the prime minister announced the formation of five citizen panels, each with 100 members, to examine the merits of such a change. Officials were keen to emphasise that talk of a "single massive database" is misconceived. What is at issue is allowing individual departmental systems to talk to each other. Read The Full Story Pentagon Expanding Intelligence Role Inside The U.S. 2007-01-14 16:26:33 The Pentagon has been using a little-known power to obtain banking and credit records of hundreds of Americans and others suspected of terrorism or espionage inside the United States, part of an aggressive expansion by the military into domestic intelligence gathering. The C.I.A. has also been issuing what are known as national security letters to gain access to financial records from American companies, though it has done so only rarely, intelligence officials say. Banks, credit card companies and other financial institutions receiving the letters usually have turned over documents voluntarily, allowing investigators to examine the financial assets and transactions of American military personnel and civilians, officials say. The F.B.I., the lead agency on domestic counterterrorism and espionage, has issued thousands of national security letters since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, provoking criticism and court challenges from civil liberties advocates who see them as unjustified intrusions into Americans’ private lives. Read The Full Story Spain's Prime Minister Takes Heat After Airport Attack By Basque Group 2007-01-14 16:26:01 At his year-end news conference on Dec. 29, Prime Minister Jose Louis Rodriquez Zapatero proclaimed that the peace initiative he had started with the Basque separatist movement ETA months before was making progress. “Are we better off now with a permanent cease-fire, or when we had bombs, car bombs and explosions?” he asked. “This time next year, we will be better off than we are today.” The next morning, a bomb ETA had planted in a Renault van exploded in the five-story parking garage of Madrid’s new air terminal, killing two people and causing tens of millions of dollars of damage to Spain’s glittery showpiece of modernity. Instead of bringing the political establishment of Spain together, the attack ripped it apart. It has left Zapatero more isolated than at any time in his nearly three years in power and sent the country’s politicians into a frenzy of finger-pointing and backbiting. Read The Full Story Analysis: After Bush's 'Surge' In Iraq, What's Next? ... Iran? 2007-01-14 01:30:05 Baghdad's Residency Office, a bustling maze of corridors and smoky rooms, is a place of Kafkaesque bureaucracy. Controlled by a Shia political party, it means foreigners who do not want to pay a bribe shuffle from desk to desk to get the signatures, stamps and counter signatures, and then more stamps, required to leave the country. Only one group is rushed through without a cursory glance: agents who breeze through with arms laden with stacks of passports. All of them from Iran. Some are pilgrims to Shia holy sites whom you see streaming across the Shatt al-Arab waterway in the heavily laden ferries at festival time and plying the motorways in packed minibuses. Others are returning exiles, many of whose families hold only Iranian passports. Others are diplomats and businessmen. Yet in the past few months, George W. Bush, has signed a presidential order targeting another group that his administration alleges is in Iraq: Iranians - Revolutionary Guards and intelligence officers. Iran, the Shia state, is destabilizing Iraqi politics and co-ordinating attacks on U.S. forces by Shia insurgents, claim the Americans. Read The Full Story Is Bush Set For A U-Turn On Global Warming? 2007-01-14 01:29:27 George Bush is preparing to make a historic shift in his position on global warming when he makes his State of the Union speech later this month, say senior Downing Street officials of British Prime Minister Tony Blair's administration. Blair hopes that the new stance by the United States will lead to a breakthrough in international talks on climate change and that the outlines of a successor treaty to the Kyoto agreement, the deal to curb emissions of greenhouse gases which expires in 2012, could now be thrashed out at the G8 summit in June. The timetable may explain why Blair is so keen to remain in office until after the summit, with a deal on protecting the planet offering an appealing legacy with which to bow out of Number 10. Bush and Blair held private talks on climate change before Christmas, and there is a feeling that the U.S. President will now agree to a cap on emissions in the U.S., meaning that, for the first time, American industry and consumers would be expected to start conserving energy and curbing pollution. Read The Full Story Deletions In Army Manual Raise Wiretapping Without Warrants Concerns 2007-01-14 01:27:27 Deep into an updated Army manual, the deletion of 10 words has left some national security experts wondering whether government lawyers are again asserting the executive branch's right to wiretap Americans without a court warrant. The manual, described by the Army as a "major revision" to intelligence-gathering guidelines, addresses policies and procedures for wiretapping Americans, among other issues. The original guidelines, from 1984, said the Army could seek to wiretap people inside the United States on an emergency basis by going to the secret court set up by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA, or by obtaining certification from the attorney general "issued under the authority of section 102(a) of the Act." That last phrase is missing from the latest manual, which says simply that the Army can seek emergency wiretapping authority pursuant to an order issued by the FISA court "or upon attorney general authorization". It makes no mention of the attorney general doing so under FISA. Read The Full Story	U.S., Iraqi Government Officials Wrangling Over War Plans 2007-01-15 02:39:02 Just days after President Bush unveiled a new war plan calling for more than 20,000 additional American troops in Iraq, the heart of the effort - a major push to secure the capital - faces some of its fiercest resistance from the very people it depends on for success: Iraqi government officials. American military officials have spent days huddled in meetings with Iraqi officers in a race to turn blueprints drawn up in Washington into a plan that will work on the ground in Baghdad. With the first American and Iraqi units dedicated to the plan due to be in place within weeks, time is short for setting details of what American officers view as the decisive battle of the war. The signs so far have unnerved some Americans working on the plan, who have described a web of problems -  ranging from a contested chain of command to how to protect American troops deployed in some of Baghdad's most dangerous districts - that some fear could hobble the effort before it begins. Read The Full Story Commentary: Next Stop For Bush Is Tehran 2007-01-15 02:01:34 Intellpuke: The following column by Dan Plesch appears on the Guardian Unlimited's website edition for Monday, January 15, 2007. In it, Mr. Plesch, a research associate at the Center for International Studies and Diplomacy's  School of Oriental and African Studies, writes that all the signs are that Bush is planning for a neo-con inspired military assault on Iran. Mr. Plesch's column follows: The evidence is building up that President Bush plans to add war on Iran to his triumphs in Iraq and Afghanistan - and there is every sign, to judge by his extraordinary warmongering speech in Plymouth on Friday, that Tony Blair would be keen to join him if he were still in a position to commit British forces to the field. "There's a strong sense in the upper echelons of the White House that Iran is going to surface relatively quickly as a major issue - in the country and the world - in a very acute way," said NBC TV's Tim Russert after meeting the president. This is borne out by the fact that Bush has sent forces to the Gulf that are irrelevant to fighting the Iraqi insurgents. These include Patriot anti-missile missiles, an aircraft carrier, and cruise-missile-firing ships. Many military analysts see these deployments as signals of impending war with Iran. The Patriot missiles are intended to shoot down Iranian missiles. The naval forces, including British ships, train to pre-empt Iranian interference with oil shipments through the straits of Hormuz. Read The Full Story Iraq's Foreign Minister Seeks Release Of Iranians 2007-01-15 02:00:29 Iraqi foreign minister Hoshyar Zebari called Sunday for the release of five Iranians detained by U.S. forces in what he said was a legitimate diplomatic mission in northern Iraq, but he stressed that foreign intervention to help insurgents would not be tolerated. Meanwhile, Saddam Hussein's half brother and the former head of Iraq's Revolutionary Court were hanged before dawn Monday, said Prosecutor Munqith al-Faroon. It was just over two weeks ago that the former Iraqi dictator was executed in a chaotic scene that has drawn worldwide criticism. (Editor: You can read the full article on the executions elsewhere on Free Internet Press' mainpage today.) Barzan Ibrahim, Saddam's half brother and former intelligence chief, and Awad Hamed al-Bandar, head of Iraq's Revolutionary Court, had been found guilty along with Saddam of in the killing of 148 Shiite Muslims after a 1982 assassination attempt on the former leader in the town of Dujail north of Baghdad. Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari's statement highlighted the delicate balance facing the Iraqi government as it tries to secure Baghdad with the help of American forces while maintaining ties with its neighbors, including U.S. rivals Iran and Syria. Read The Full Story Study: Low Cholesterol Levels Linked To Parkinson's Disease 2007-01-15 01:59:42 Scientists are to investigate why people with low cholesterol levels appear to be more likely to develop Parkinson's disease, following concerns that statins - given to control cholesterol - could cause an increase in the numbers of people with the illness. About 2.3 million adults in the U.K. take statins to help control their cholesterol levels; the American scientists have found that those with lower levels of cholesterol are more likely to develop the degenerative neurological disorder of Parkinson's disease. The link between statins and Parkinson's is not yet understood, and health charities last night urged caution. But the scientists behind the research warn that if they get confirmation of the finding, in their follow-up study of 16,000 people, there could be a surge in Parkinson's diagnoses in the next five years as the effects of the drug set in. The initial study compared 124 people diagnosed with Parkinson's with a control group of 112. They found that the people with low levels of "bad" LDL cholesterol were in excess of three times more likely to be in the Parkinson's group than those with high cholesterol. Read The Full Story Abbas Rejects Provisional Palestinian State In Meeting With Rice 2007-01-14 16:26:17 Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, pledging deeper engagement in the Middle East peace process, met today with the Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who rejected suggestions for establishing a temporary state within provisional borders and pledged that any American money to bolster his security forces would not be misused. “I have heard loud and clear the call for deeper American engagement in these processes,” Rice said after two and a half hours of talks with Abbas. “The United States is absolutely committed to helping to find a solution where Israelis and Palestinians can live in security, in which they can live in peace and in which they can live in democracy,” she said, adding, “You will have my commitment to do precisely that.” Rice’s visit to the Palestinian government headquarters was clearly an effort to bolster Abbas in his struggle to regain the political advantage over Hamas, which took control of the parliament in recent elections. Read The Full Story U.S. Midsection Hit By Ice Storms 2007-01-14 01:30:23 A crippling winter storm lashed the central part of the U.S. with another blast of freezing rain, sleet and snow Saturday, causing widespread power outages and tying up highways and airports. The storm was expected to continue through the weekend, laying down a coat of ice and snow from Texas to Illinois, where an ice storm warning is in effect through Monday morning. "We're in the middle of this storm," said Joe Pedigo, meteorologist for the National Weather Service in St. Louis, Missouri. "Friday was the first of three waves." Farther west, frigid arctic air reached as far south as southern and central California, where plunging temperatures prompted worry about the homeless and crops. Read The Full Story U.S. Senate Wants No Pension For Convicted Lawmakers 2007-01-14 01:29:46 With disgraced ex-California Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham eligible to collect a congressional pension from behind bars, the U.S. Senate on Friday voted to deny taxpayer-funded retirement benefits to lawmakers convicted in the future of serious ethics offenses. The action came as the Senate moved toward overhauling its ethics rules, including stricter guidelines to end the secrecy around earmarking, a controversial practice that contributed to congressional scandals involving Cunningham and lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Critics have denounced the practice, in which lawmakers secretly slip pet projects into spending bills, often without public notice and at the request of lobbyists who contribute to their campaigns, and they had accused the Senate's new Democratic leadership of writing a loophole-riddled bill that would have failed to publicly identify the sponsors of most earmarks. Read The Full Story Officials: Defense Department Probed Finances Of U.S. Citizens 2007-01-14 01:27:55 The Defense Department has used a long-standing authority to acquire the personal financial records of American citizens in military-related criminal and other investigations as part of an expansion of the Pentagon's gathering of counterterrorism intelligence at home, officials said Saturday. "There are certainly types of information and transactions that are valuable to the department when conducting counterintelligence and counterespionage investigations," said Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman. Whitman emphasized that although the FBI can compel banks, credit card companies and other private institutions to produce such records by issuing a National Security Letter, the military is authorized only to request that the institutions turn them over. Read The Full Story General: Kurd Brigade Will Go To Baghdad 2007-01-14 01:26:23 A Kurdish army brigade from northern Iraq is undergoing intensive urban combat training for deployment to Baghdad, where it expects to take on the Mahdi Army Shiite militia, its commander said Saturday. Meanwhile, three Iraqi generals told the Associated Press that the Iraqi commander who will lead the Baghdad security mission was the government's second choice and only got the job after the U.S. military objected to the first officer named to the post by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Underscoring the difficulties in taming Iraq's surging violence, at least 48 people were killed or found dead nationwide on Saturday, including a Sunni cleric who was shot to death near his home in Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad. In the northern city of Irbil, Brig. Gen. Nazir Assem Korran, commander of the 1st Infantry Brigade, 2nd Division of the Iraqi army, said "we will head to Baghdad soon. We have 3,000 soldiers who are currently undergoing intensive training especially in urban combat and how the army should act inside a city." Read The Full Story
Original materials on this site © Free Internet Press. Any mirrored or quoted materials © their respective authors, publications, or outlets, as shown on their publication, indicated by the link in the news story. Original Free Internet Press materials may be copied and/or republished without modification, provided a link to http://FreeInternetPress.com is given in the story, or proper credit is given. Newsletter options may be changed in your preferences on http://freeinternetpress.com Please email editor@freeinternetpress.com there are any questions. XML/RSS/RDF Newsfeed Syndication: http://freeinternetpress.com/rss.php