Free Internet Press Newsletter - Sunday January 14 2007 - (813)

Sunday January 14 2007 edition
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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 'The Most Dangerous Foreign Policy Blunder Since Vietnam' 2007-01-13 15:28:44 George W. Bush's last attempt to win the war in Iraq is meeting with strong resistance. His own party is criticizing him with brutal openness, calling his new ideas for Iraq a disaster. Bush is almost completely isolated - like Richard Nixon during his final days in office. Chuck Hagel, the Republican senator from Nebraska, has ambitions to move into the White House. And since the race for electoral victory in 2008 has already begun, Hagel has no more time for losers - even if one of those losers happens to be George W. Bush, his own president. That became brutally clear on Thursday in the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, which invited Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice to explain President Bush's newest approach to Iraq. Despite being at pains to perform well, the conscientious emissary didn't get very far - especially since five designated presidential candidates are sitting on the committee. Read The Full Story Chinese Court Upholds Conviction Of Peasants' Advocate 2007-01-13 15:28:02 A Chinese court on Friday upheld the conviction of, and lengthy jail sentence for, a leading advocate for peasants’ rights despite widespread criticism that he was unjustly made a target by corrupt local officials. The ruling, by the Linyi Intermediate Court in Shandong Province, rejected the final appeal of Chen Guangcheng, known in legal circles as China’s “barefoot lawyer”. Chen, blind since a childhood illness, led a campaign to stop the authorities in the city of Linyi from forcing peasants to have abortions to meet population-control quotas. Local officials put him under house arrest for 10 months, then charged him on criminal counts of destroying property and organizing a mob to disrupt traffic. Read The Full Story Tsunami Fears Subside After Strong Earthquake 2007-01-13 03:45:34 Tsunami alerts that were issued for British Columbia, Alaska and Hawaii after a major underwater earthquake in the Pacific Ocean have been lifted, according to two warning centers. A tsunami warning had been issued for Japan and a broad area surrounding the Pacific Ocean after the quake, with a preliminary magnitude of 8.2, hit east of the Kuril Islands. Hours after the quake was detected, instruments in four locations along Japan's northeastern coast measured a rise in tidal levels of about 10-centimeters (4 inches), according to the Japan Meteorological Agency. No damage was reported. A 1-foot (30-centimeter) wave was measured in Shemya, Alaska, part of the Aleutian Island chain, said the West Coast and Alaska Tsunami Warning Center. Read The Full Story Breaking News: Japan Issues Tsunami Warning As 8.3 Earthquake Hits Near Kuril Islands 2007-01-13 00:35:38 Japan's Meteorological Agency issued a tsunami warning as an 8.3 earthquake hit 310 miles south-southeast of the Kuril Island chain.. The U.S. Geological survey gave a preliminary 7.7 magnitude to the quake which struck at 11:23 p.m. Friday EST (4:23 p.m. Saturday UTC and 2:23 p.m. Saturday in Japan).  The U.S.G.S. put the quake's epicenter at 46.344°N, 154.427°E and 6.2 miles beneath surface of the sea bottom near the Kuril Islands. The epicenter is located about 1,000 miles (1,710 kilometers) northeast of Tokyo, Japan. Read The Full Story 'The Jihad Now Is Against The Shias, Not The Americans' 2007-01-13 00:15:06 Intellpuke: As 20,000 more U.S. troops head for Iraq, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, the only correspondent reporting regularly from behind the country's sectarian battle lines, reveals how the Sunni insurgency has changed in this article for the Guardian's edition of Saturday, January 13, 2007: One morning a few weeks ago I sat in a car talking to Rami, a thick-necked former Republican Guard commando who now procures arms for his fellow Sunni insurgents. Rami was explaining how the insurgency had changed since the first heady days after the U.S. invasion. "I used to attack the Americans when that was the jihad. Now there is no jihad. Go around and see in Adhamiya [the notorious Sunni insurgent area] - all the commanders are sitting sipping coffee; it's only the young kids that are fighting now, and they are not fighting Americans any more, they are just killing Shia. There are kids carrying two guns each and they roam the streets looking for their prey. They will kill for anything, for a gun, for a car and all can be dressed up as jihad." Rami was no longer involved in fighting, he said, but made a tidy profit selling weapons and ammunition to men in his north Baghdad neighborhood. Until the last few months, the insurgency got by with weapons and ammunition looted from former Iraqi army depots. But now that Sunnis were besieged in their neighborhoods and fighting daily clashes with the better-equipped Shia ministry of interior forces, they needed new sources of weapons and money. Read The Full Story Best-Selling Author John Grisham Now Client In Court Case 2007-01-13 00:14:05 He's a lawyer. He's a best-selling author. Now he's The Client. The Virginia Supreme Court ruled Friday that John Grisham must face a jury for his actions in a real-life whodunit. Grisham, author of "The Pelican Brief," "The Firm" and "The Runaway Jury," among other bestsellers, lives outside Charlottesville, Virginia. His son attended the private St. Anne's-Belfield School, where he played baseball for Alan Swanson, the head coach. Grisham and Swanson became friends, according to court papers, and Grisham is on the school's board of trustees. In 1996, Swanson's wife, Donna Swanson, began receiving harassing anonymous letters, which included allegations that her husband was cheating on her, according to the ruling. Grisham also received an anonymous letter. Read The Full Story Two Missing Boys Found Alive In Missouri Home 2007-01-13 00:13:12 A 13-year-old boy who vanished from the gravel road near his home five days ago was found alive about 60 miles away in a suburban St. Louis, Missouri, home, along with a 15-year-old boy missing since 2002, authorities said Friday. The boys were found in a Kirkwood home belonging to Michael Devlin, 41, who has been charged with one count of first-degree kidnapping, said Sheriff Gary Toelke. The sheriff said both boys appeared unharmed. William Ownby, who goes by Ben, appeared somewhat dazed as he walked inside the sheriff's department, where he was reunited with his family Friday night. Read The Full Story Pakistan Angry At U.S. Intelligence Chief's Terror Claim 2007-01-13 00:12:15 The Pakistani government protested Friday a claim by the head of U.S. intelligence, John Negroponte, that al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders were hiding inside Pakistan. Since December 2001, when Osama Bin Laden escaped a U.S.-led siege of his Afghan mountain lair at Tora Bora, western intelligence agencies have presumed the al-Qaeda leader and his top Taliban allies were hiding in the highland tribal areas along the Afghan-Pakistan border. However, in written evidence to a Senate committee, Negroponte, director of national intelligence, singled out Pakistan as the location of the jihadist leaders' hideout, arguing that al-Qaeda and the Taliban were rebuilding a network there. Negroponte said Pakistan remained a "major source of Islamic extremism". 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 Doomsday Clock to Move Closer to Nuclear Armageddon 2007-01-13 21:34:38 The world is inching closer to nuclear Armageddon, a group of prominent scientists and security experts said. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has kept a Doomsday clock since 1947 as a reminder of the dangers of nuclear proliferation. The clock will be moved forward Wednesday at simultaneous events in Washington and London whose speakers will include physicist Stephen Hawking, the Chicago-based periodical said in a statement.   The Bulletin warned that the world had entered a “Second Nuclear Age marked by grave threats.” Read The Full Story Pentagon Official Attacks Top Law Firms For Representing Detainees 2007-01-13 15:28:23 The senior Pentagon official in charge of military detainees suspected of terrorism said in an interview this week that he was dismayed that lawyers at many of the nation's top firms were representing prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and that the firms’ corporate clients should consider ending their business ties. The comments by Charles D. Stimson, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, produced an instant torrent of anger from lawyers, legal ethics specialists and bar association officials, who said Friday that his comments were repellent and displayed an ignorance of the duties of lawyers to represent people in legal trouble. "This is prejudicial to the administration of justice," said Stephen Gillers, a law professor at New York University  and an authority on legal ethics. "t's possible that lawyers willing to undertake what has been long viewed as an admirable chore will decline to do so for fear of antagonizing important clients. "We have a senior government official suggesting that representing these people somehow compromises American interests, and he even names the firms, giving a target to corporate America." Read The Full Story Southeast Asian Nations Agree To Free-Trade Zone 2007-01-13 15:27:44 ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, made progress toward its goal of economic and political integration at a summit meeting here on Saturday, but it was sidetracked by tensions over how to deal with Myanmar, which has come under fire for its poor human rights record. Leaders of the 10 members of the organization agreed to establish a free-trade zone by 2015, intensify their fight against terrorism, protect the region’s migrant workers and improve their campaign against H.I.V./AIDS. They also agreed to draft a new charter with broad enforcement powers - a break from the 40-year-old group’s tradition of consensus and noninterference. “We want to advance the sense of community in our shared interest to look after each other in terms of justice, economic development and common security,” Philippines President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo said during her speech at the opening of the meeting. Arroyo emphasized ASEAN’s drive to expand trade, “to create one of the world’s greatest trading blocs.” Read The Full Story UPDATE: Japan Issues Tsunami Warning As 8.4 Earthquake Hits Near Kuril Islands 2007-01-13 01:12:15 A tsunami warning was issued Saturday for Japan and a broad area surrounding the Pacific Ocean, including Alaska, after a major undersea earthquake east of the Kuril Islands, according to the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center and the West Coast & Alaska Tsunami Warning Center. Tsunami waves between one and two meters (3 to 6 feet) were possible at about 2 p.m. local time near Hokkaido, Japan and other areas of Japan's northern island, according to another warning from the Japan Meteorology Agency. Half-meter waves were possible along Japan's coast south of Hokkaido, said the agency. The earthquake was measured at a massive 8.4 magnitude at 11:23 p.m. ET, said the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center bulletin. Read The Full Story Rice: Bush Authorized Iranians' Arrests In Iraq 2007-01-13 00:15:25 A recent series of American raids against Iranians in Iraq was authorized under an order that President Bush decided to issue several months ago to undertake a broad military offensive against Iranian operatives in the country, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Friday. “There has been a decision to go after these networks,” Rice said in an interview with the New York Times in her office on Friday afternoon, before leaving on a trip to the Middle East. Rice said Bush had acted “after a period of time in which we saw increasing activity” among Iranians in Iraq, “and increasing lethality in what they were producing”. She was referring to what American military officials say is evidence that many of the most sophisticated improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.’s, being used against American troops were made in Iran. Read The Full Story Somali Islamists Held Meeting In Britain To Raise Funds 2007-01-13 00:14:41 Somalia's Islamist movement, whose leadership is accused by the U.S. of sheltering some of al-Qaeda's most wanted operatives, sent a delegation on a fundraising trip to Britain last year, the Guardian has learned. Led by an Islamist minister, the Union of Islamic Courts delegation received pledges of funding from members of Britain's Somali diaspora at a meeting at a north London school in November. According to one community leader, the Somali delegation also met sympathisers at the Finsbury Park mosque, which became notorious as a recruiting ground for radical Islam under its former imam Abu Hamza. Abdiwali Mohamud, a Somali community worker in Camden, said: "They were trying to influence people in a Muslim way, saying are you with us or with the unbelievers?" Although they were not officially recognized by Britain, the Islamists also held talks with Foreign Office officials, who urged them to negotiate with Somalia's government. Read The Full Story Skull Supports Theory Of Human Migration 2007-01-13 00:13:44 From a new analysis of a human skull discovered in South Africa more than 50 years ago, scientists say they have obtained the first fossil evidence establishing the relatively recent time for the dispersal of modern Homo sapiens out of Africa. The migrants appeared to have arrived at their new homes in Asia and Europe with the distinct and unmodified heads of Africans. An international team of researchers reported Thursday that the age of the South African skull, which they dated at about 36,000 years old, coincided with the age of the skulls of humans then living in Europe and the far eastern parts of Asia, even Australia. The skull also closely resembled skulls of those humans. The timing, the scientists and other experts said, introduced independent evidence supporting archaeological finds and recent genetic studies showing that modern humans left sub-Saharan Africa for Eurasia between 65,000 and 25,000 years ago; probably closer to 45,000 to 35,000 years ago for Europe. Read The Full Story 17 Injured As School Bus Hits Students In Pennsylvania 2007-01-13 00:12:54 A school bus driver lost control and struck several students as they left a high school Friday, then crashed into a retaining wall, sending 17 children to hospitals, said officials. The driver said the bus developed some sort of mechanical problem that left it "somewhat steerable but out of control,"  said Pennsbury High School Principal William Katz. Fourteen students on foot and the three on the bus were taken to hospitals, officials said. A 17-year-old girl in critical condition was being transferred to a hospital in Philadelphia, said a hospital spokeswoman. One boy dived under the bus as it veered toward him, suffering only scrapes and bruises. "The bus drove over him while he was laying flat on his back looking up," said Lower Bucks County Hospital spokesman Bob Harris. "Thank goodness the buses are high." Read The Full Story Isabel Peron Arrested In Spain Over Alleged Human Rights Abuses 2007-01-13 00:11:51 Isabel Peron, the former Argentinian president and widow of the caudillo Juan Peron, was arrested at her home in Madrid, Spain, last night after a judge in her home country launched an investigation into alleged human rights abuses during her tumultuous rule in the 1970s. Police acted on an international arrest warrant issued by the judge, Raul Acosta. Ms. Peron was driven to court last night and bailed pending an extradition request expected to follow by the end of February. Judge Acosta wants her extradited to Argentina to face questions about dissident killings during her 20-month rule. Ms. Peron, who is believed to be 75, is accused of having links to rightwing death squads which abducted and murdered leftwing activists during her 1974-76 rule, a chaotic period ending with a coup which ousted her and ushered in a dictatorship. Read The Full Story
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