Free Internet Press Newsletter - Sunday January 7 2007 - (813)

Sunday January 7 2007 edition
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Israel Plans Tactical Nuclear Strike On Iran 2007-01-07 03:43:20 Israel has drawn up secret plans to destroy Iran's uranium enrichment facilities with tactical nuclear weapons. Two Israeli air force squadrons are training to blow up an Iranian facility using low-yield nuclear "bunker-busters", according to several Israeli military sources. The attack would be the first with nuclear weapons since 1945, when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Israeli weapons wold have a force equivalent to one-fifteenth of the Hiroshima bomb. Under the plans, conventional laser-guided bombs would open "tunnels" into the targets. "Mini-nukes" would then immediately be fired into a plant at Natanz, exploding deep underground to reduce the risk of radioactive fallout. Read The Full Story Litvinenko's Radiation Poisoning Sets Off Alarm Bells 2007-01-07 03:42:38 Ninety-seven percent of the legal production of one of the world's rarest industrial products - the intensely radioactive isotope polonium-210 - takes place at a closely guarded nuclear reactor near the Volga River 450 miles southeast of Moscow. In an average year, about three ounces of the substance is made at the Avangard facility, a former nuclear weapons plant, then sold under strict controls to Russian and foreign companies that prize it for its abilities to reduce static electricity. This fall, a microscopic quantity of polonium-210, from somewhere, found its way into the body of Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian internal security agent living in London. He died an agonizing death in a hospital 22 days later. Now an international investigation is trying to track that dose back to its source. Detectives from Scotland Yard have said nothing about where the trail of evidence may be leading; Russian officials have been more willing to talk, saying that Avangard is tightly audited and that illicit production of polonium-210 is technically possible at many of the world's reactors. Read The Full Story Colorado Avalanche Buries Highway, Vehicles 2007-01-07 03:41:39 An avalanche roared across a mountain highway on the Continental Divide on Saturday morning, sweeping two cars off the road near Berthoud Pass, Colorado, onto a steep downward slope but causing only one serious injury. People from nearby cars dug frantically into the instant mound of snow and debris on the road to free the eight passengers in the two cars that were hit, said police. The cascade of snow, rocks and trees that came rushing down the side of Stanley Mountain about 10:30 a.m. covered all three lanes of U.S. 40. That was just after the normal Saturday "rush hour" on the road, a key thoroughfare linking Denver and Interstate 70 with the ski resorts of Winter Park and Steamboat Springs. "We have recovered two vehicles that were driven over the edge of the highway," said Colorado State Patrol spokesman Eric Wynn. The state patrol said eight people were taken to hospitals, but the worst injury incurred was apparently a broken leg. Read The Full Story Critics Say Troops 'Surge' More Of The Same 2007-01-07 03:40:38 President Bush is putting the final touches on his new Iraq policy amid growing skepticism inside and outside the administration that the emerging package of extra troops, economic assistance and political benchmarks for the Baghdad government will make any more than a marginal difference in stabilizing the country. Washington's debate over Iraq will intensify this week as Bush lays out his plans, probably on Wednesday or Thursday, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other administration officials face tough questions from Democrats in congressional hearings. Although officials said the president has yet to settle on an exact figure of new troops, senior military leaders and commanders are deeply worried that a "surge" of as many as five brigades, or 20,000 troops, in Iraq and Kuwait would tax U.S. ground forces already stretched to the breaking point - and may still prove inadequate to quell sectarian violence and the Sunni insurgency. Some senior U.S. officials think it could even backfire. "There is a lot of concern that this won't work," said one military official not authorized to speak publicly about the debate at the Pentagon. Read The Full Story Abbas Wants Hamas Military Police Disbanded 2007-01-07 03:40:00 After two days of intense fighting between Hamas and his Fatah faction, the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, demanded Saturday that Hamas-run paramilitary police be integrated into Fatah-dominated security forces. Hamas warned Abbas that he was making a mistake and that it would resist any effort to disband the group, known as the Executive Force. The Hamas Interior Ministry immediately announced that it had plans to double the size of the Executive Force to 12,000 men and called on Palestinians to join it. Abbas made his demand after the deaths of many Fatah men in clashes with the Executive Force over the last two days. In his statement on Saturday, Abbas called the force illegal and said it "will be treated as such if it is not immediately integrated into legal security services as stipulated by basic law." It is not clear whether Abbas' statement is simply declaratory or whether he would order his security forces to take action against the paramilitary group if Hamas did not meet his demands. Read The Full Story Congress' Failure To Pass New Budget Stymies Scientific Research 2007-01-06 19:08:49 The failure of Congress to pass new budgets for the current fiscal year has produced a crisis in science financing that threatens to close major facilities, delay new projects and leave thousands of government scientists out of work, say federal and private officials. “The consequences for American science will be disastrous,” said Michael S. Lubell, a senior official of the American Physical Society, the world’s largest group of physicists. “The message to young scientists and industry leaders, alike, will be, ‘Look outside the U.S. if you want to succeed’.” Last year, Congress passed just 2 of 11 spending bills - for the military and domestic security - and froze all other federal spending at 2006 levels. Factoring in inflation, the budgets translate into reductions of about 3 percent to 4 percent for most fields of science and engineering. Read The Full Story Attack Of The Zombie Computers Is Growing Threat 2007-01-06 13:40:52 In their persistent quest to breach the Internet’s defenses, the bad guys are honing their weapons and increasing their firepower. With growing sophistication, they are taking advantage of programs that secretly install themselves on thousands or even millions of personal computers, band these computers together into an unwitting army of zombies, and use the collective power of the dragooned network to commit Internet crimes. These systems, called botnets, are being blamed for the huge spike in spam that bedeviled the Internet in recent months, as well as fraud and data theft. Security researchers have been concerned about botnets for some time because they automate and amplify the effects of viruses and other malicious programs. Read The Full Story Mercury Contamination 'Hot Spots' Indentified In U.S., Canada 2007-01-06 03:18:00 Two newly published scientific reports suggest that mercury contamination has created at least five "hot spots" in New England and Canada, places where the neurotoxin has accumulated in fish and wildlife to such an extent that it could harm human health and local ecosystems. The 11 scientists, who work at institutions including Syracuse University and Vermont's Department of Environmental Conservation, analyzed how mercury has accumulated in two indicator species in the northern United States and southern Canada. In both cases, they were able to identify several regions where mercury in yellow perch and common loons is above acceptable levels. David C. Evans, who heads a Maine-based nonprofit group called the BioDiversity Research Institute and is one of the papers' lead authors, said the study shows that some areas of the country are more susceptible to mercury pollution than others. Read The Full Story Louisiana's Mayor's Death Sparks Controversy 2007-01-06 03:17:02 In the hours before his death on the evening of Dec. 30, the first black mayor of this overwhelmingly white town started learning his new job. About noon, he set City Hall's alarm system for the first time. He got instructions on how to raise and lower the U.S. flag. He had already ordered a new mayoral letterhead with his name on it and a button-down shirt embroidered "Gerald Washington, Mayor." A few hours later he indulged in a hobby, placing a $4 bet at a nearby horse racing track. By 10 p.m. Gerald "Wash" Washington was dead in the deserted parking lot of a former high school, a bullet wound in his chest. His gun was found by the body. Read The Full Story New Details Emerge In Haditha Deaths Report 2007-01-06 03:16:00 U.S. Marines gunned down five unarmed Iraqis who stumbled onto the scene of a 2005 roadside bombing in Haditha, Iraq, according to eyewitness accounts that are part of a lengthy investigative report obtained by the Washington Post. Staff Sgt. Frank D. Wuterich, the squad's leader, shot the men one by one after Marines ordered them out of a white taxi in the moments following the explosion, which killed one Marine and injured two others, witnesses told investigators. Another Marine fired rounds into their bodies as they lay on the ground. "The taxi's five occupants exited the vehicle and according to U.S. and Iraqi witnesses, were shot by Wuterich as they stood, unarmed, next to the vehicle approximately ten feet in front of him," said a report by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service on the incident that runs thousands of pages. Read The Full Story	Bird Flu Drug Carries A Lethal Threat 2007-01-07 03:43:00 Britain faces an ecological catastrophe that could wreak havoc on wildlife populations when the first outbreak of Asian flu hits the country. Scientists say they fear that tons of the anti-viral agent Tamiflu - taken by Britons trying to combat the disease - would be flushed down sewers into rivers and lakes. Natural populations of microbes would be killed off by a deluge of water polluted with concentrated amounts of the anti-viral drug. As a result, birds, fish and other creatures that rely on these bacteria and viruses for their survival could be devastated. In addition, waters containing Tamiflu would provide ideal conditions for the evolution of drug-resistant strains of bird flu virus. These strains would then infect wildfowl and ultimately human beings, triggering a second outbreak of the disease - although this time Tamiflu would provide no protection against the virus. Read The Full Story Starving Afghanis Selling Their Daughters - As Young As 8 - As Brides 2007-01-07 03:42:07 Afghani villagers whose crops have failed after a second devastating drought are giving their young daughters in marriage to raise money for food, according to the relief organization Christian Aid. Azizgul is 10 years old, from the village of Houscha in western Afghanistan. This year the wheat crop failed again following a devastating drought. Her family was hungry. So, a little before Christmas, Azizgul's mother "sold" her to be married to a 13-year-old boy. "I need to sell my daughters because of the drought," said her mother Sahatgul, 30. "We don't have enough food and the bride price will enable us to buy food. Three months ago my 15-year-old daughter married. "We were not so desperate before. Now I have to marry them younger. And all five of them will have to get married if the drought becomes worse. The bride price is 200,000 afghanis [£2,000 or $4,000]. His father came to our house to arrange it. The boy pays in instalments. First he paid us 5,000 afghanis, which I used to buy food." Read The Full Story Britons To Be Scanned For FBI Data Base 2007-01-07 03:41:15 Millions of Britons who visit the United States are to have their fingerprints stored on the FBI database alongside those of criminals, in a move that has outraged civil rights groups. The Observer has established that under new plans to combat terrorism, the U.S. government will demand that visitors have all 10 fingers scanned when they enter the country. The information will be shared with intelligence agencies, including the FBI, with no restrictions on their international use. U.S. airport scanners now take only two fingerprints from travellers. The move to 10 allows the information to be compatible with the FBI database. "We are going to start testing at several airports," a Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman confirmed. "It will begin some time this summer." Read The Full Story 30 Dead In Baghdad Clash; Bodies Hanged On Lampposts 2007-01-07 03:40:19 A fierce clash left at least 30 people dead in central Baghdad late Saturday night as Iraqi Army forces fought with gunmen in an area where several residents had been killed and their bodies hanged from street lampposts, said the Iraqi military. The fighting took place in the neighborhood around Haifa Street, a mostly Sunni Arab enclave with a small Shiite population. A spokesman for the Defense Ministry, Muhammad al-Askari, said that an Iraqi Army unit had gone into the area after receiving reports that Sunni fighters had set up a fake security checkpoint and were taking Shiites aside and shooting them. The bodies of many of those killed at the roadblock were then hanged from the lampposts, said Askari. Read The Full Story U.S. Dollar Could Slip Some More In 2007 2007-01-07 03:39:36 The dollar fell more than 11 percent last year compared with the euro and rose slightly against the yen. A lower dollar helps boost U.S. exports, by making them relatively cheaper in overseas markets, and attracts more foreign tourists to the United States. Many economists think the dollar will slip a bit lower this year for the same reasons it slid last year: the huge U.S. trade deficit, slower U.S. economic growth and robust growth abroad. Many analysts think the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates by midyear, while other governments are raising borrowing costs, which tends to diminish the demand for dollars. Read The Full Story U.S. Selecting Risky Hybrid Design For Nuclear Warheads 2007-01-06 19:08:32 The Bush administration is expected to announce next week a major step forward in the building of the country’s first new nuclear warhead in nearly two decades. It will propose elements of competing designs from two weapons laboratories in an approach that some experts argue is untested and risky. The announcement, to be made by the interagency Nuclear Weapons Council, avoids making a choice between two competing designs for a new weapon, called the Reliable Replacement Warhead, which at first would be mounted on submarine-launched missiles. The effort, if approved by President Bush and financed by Congress, would require a huge refurbishment of the nation’s complex for nuclear design and manufacturing, with the overall bill estimated at more than $100 billion. The council’s decision to seek a hybrid design, combining well-tested elements from an older design with new safety and security elements from a more novel approach, could delay the production of the weapon. It also raises the question of whether the United States will ultimately be forced to end its moratorium on underground nuclear testing to make sure the new design works. Read The Full Story Meningitis Death Spurs Search For 80 Contacts 2007-01-06 03:18:20 More than 80 people in three states may be at risk for meningitis after coming into contact with a University of New Hampshire student who died of the illness this week, said health officials. The warning came amid another meningitis scare that shut down schools Thursday and Friday in three towns in Rhode Island. The student, Danielle Thompson, 21, had been in her home state of Maine, as well as in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, in the 10 days before she was admitted to a Dover, New Hampshire., hospital. She died Wednesday of bacterial meningitis. Health and Human Services Commissioner John A. Stephen said the state has identified 29 people in New Hampshire and 55 in Maine who should receive antibiotics. Officials were tracking down how many people Thompson visited in Massachusetts. Read The Full Story Third Snowstorm Blows Into Colorado Plains 2007-01-06 03:17:36 The third snowstorm in as many weeks barreled into Colorado on Friday, blanketing the Denver area with up to 8 inches of new snow and further hampering efforts to rescue thousands of cattle stranded by last week's blizzard. Crews worked around the clock to clear roads so residents could get to stores for food and medicine. Several school districts canceled classes because winds gusts up to 30 mph had reduced visibility. In Kansas, an estimated 60,000 people were still without power after more than a week, and the new storm was headed their way after dumping nearly a foot of snow in the foothills west of Denver. An estimated 6,000 to 10,000 utility customers were without power Friday night in Nebraska, said the utility company. Read The Full Story Nuclear Energy Resurgent - For The Moment 2007-01-06 03:16:27 Sixty miles outside Buenos Aires, construction crews soon will be swarming over a partially built concrete dome abandoned 12 years ago, resuming work on Argentina's long-delayed Atucha II nuclear power plant. They will be in the vanguard of surging interest in nuclear power worldwide. Faced with evidence that coal- and oil-fired electric plants are overheating the planet, and alarmed by soaring demand for electricity, governments from South America to Asia are turning once again to a power source mostly shunned for two decades as too dangerous and too costly. Globally, 29 nuclear power plants are being built. Well over 100 more have been written into the development plans of governments for the next three decades. India and China each are rushing to build dozens of reactors. The United States and the countries of Western Europe, led by new nuclear champions, are reconsidering their cooled romance with atomic power. International agencies have come on board; even the Persian Gulf oil states have announced plans for nuclear generators. Read The Full Story
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