Free Internet Press Newsletter - Sunday January 28 2007 - (813)

Sunday January 28 2007 edition
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U.S. Army Probes War Contractor Fraud 2007-01-28 00:43:40 From high-dollar fraud to conspiracy to bribery and bid rigging, Army investigators have opened up to 50 criminal probes involving battlefield contractors in the war in Iraq and the U.S. fight against terrorism, the Associated Press has learned. Senior contracting officials, government employees, residents of other countries and, in some cases, U.S. military personnel have been implicated in millions of dollars of fraud allegations. "All of these involve operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kuwait," Chris Grey, a spokesman for the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command, confirmed Saturday to the A.P. "CID agents will pursue leads and the truth wherever it may take us," said Grey. "We take this very seriously." Read The Full Story Crowds On Both Coasts Protest Iraq War 2007-01-28 00:43:01 Convinced this is their moment, tens of thousands marched Saturday in an anti-war demonstration linking military families, ordinary people and an icon of the Vietnam protest movement in a spirited call to get out of Iraq. Celebrities, a half-dozen lawmakers and protesters from distant states rallied in the capital under a sunny sky, seizing an opportunity to press their cause with a Congress restive on the war and a country that has turned against the conflict. Marching with them was Jane Fonda, in what she said was her first anti-war demonstration in 34 years. "Silence is no longer an option," Fonda said to cheers from the stage on the National Mall. The actress once derided as "Hanoi Jane" by conservatives for her stance on Vietnam said she had held back from activism so as not to be a distraction for the Iraq anti-war movement, but needed to speak out now. Read The Full Story Playwright Tom Stoppard Has 'Oprah-Effect' For Book About Russian Thinkers 2007-01-28 00:39:37 We know all about Oprah Winfrey and Richard and Judy and their ability to send sales of a book spiralling into the stratosphere simply by mentioning the title. But Tom Stoppard? The playwright appears to have acquired Oprah-like powers, at least in Manhattan. The book in question is Isaiah Berlin's "Russian Thinkers", a collection of essays in Berlin's classic prose that surveys the terrain of Russian intellectuals in the 19th century and contains his most famous essay, "The Hedgehog and the Fox". In recent years sales of the book have been, shall we say, steady. Its publisher Penguin says it averaged 36 sales a month across the whole of the United States. Since November, however, booksellers in New York have noticed a strange phenomenon: customers have been requesting the title in growing numbers and there are now 2,000 orders for it that cannot be supplied. Behind the surge lay the opening last November at the Lincoln Centre of Stoppard's epic trilogy "The Coast of Utopia", and an innocent entry at the back of the play's program notes that list seven books, with Berlin's right at the top. Read The Full Story Experts See Peril In Bush Health Plan 2007-01-27 17:13:47 With his proposal to uproot a tax break that has been in place for more than 60 years, President Bush has touched off an impassioned debate over the future of the employer-based system that provides health insurance to more than half of all Americans. “Changing the tax code is a vital and necessary step to making health care affordable for more Americans,” Bush said in his State of the Union address this week. Bush said his proposal would eliminate a bias in the tax code that strongly favored insurance provided by employers over coverage bought by individuals and families outside the workplace. Paul Fronstin, director of health research at the Employee Benefit Research Institute, a nonpartisan organization, said: “The president’s proposal would mean the end of employer-based benefits as we know them. It gives employers a way out of providing the benefits because their employees could get the same tax break on their own.” Read The Full Story Abu Ghraib Officer Faces Court Martial 2007-01-27 17:13:16 The only U.S. military officer charged with a crime in the Abu Ghraib scandal will be court-martialed on eight charges, including cruelty and maltreatment of prisoners, the Army said Friday. Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan, a 50-year-old reservist from Virginia who ran the interrogation center at the Iraqi prison, was accused of failing to exert his authority as the place descended into chaos, with prisoners stripped naked, photographed in humiliating poses and intimidated by snarling dogs. He was also charged with lying to investigators. Jordan has not been accused of personally torturing or humiliating prisoners and was not pictured in any of the photos that embarrassed the Pentagon and shocked the world. Read The Full Story Washington Finally Recognizes Global Warming 2007-01-27 13:43:42 Maybe it's the weird winter weather, or the newly Democratic Congress. Maybe it's the news reports about starving polar bears, or the Oscar nomination for Al Gore's global warming cri de coeur, "An Inconvenient Truth." Whatever the reason, years of resistance to the reality of climate change are suddenly melting away like the soon-to-be-history snows of Kilimanjaro. Now even George W. Bush says it's a problem. For years, the president and his supporters argued that not enough was known about global warming to do anything about it. But during last week's State of the Union address Bush finally referred to global warming as an established fact. "These technologies will help us be better stewards of the environment, and they will help us to confront the serious challenge of global climate change," Bush said in proposing a series of measures to reduce gasoline consumption by 20 percent in 10 years. Environmentalists and scientists who study the problem say the nostrums Bush proposed Tuesday night will do little to prevent the serious environmental effects that the globe faces in coming decades. Read The Full Story As Temperatures Rise, So Do Illness And Death 2007-01-27 13:23:21 As global climate change pushes average temperatures higher, heat waves will likely become more frequent and more intense, which could mean tens of thousands of heat-related deaths each year in the United States at a cost of billions of dollars. Then there are indirect health impacts, such as a rise in West Nile virus and other diseases carried by heat-loving mosquitoes. Ironically, California's enviably mild, Mediterranean-style climate could make its population more vulnerable. Compared with those in hotter parts of the country, far fewer California homes, schools and other buildings have air conditioning. "We don't need heat waves or extreme ambient temperatures or high humidity levels" to cause heat-related health problems and deaths, said epidemiologist Rupa Basu of the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment. Read The Full Story IAEA: Iran To Start Assembling Centrifuges To Enrich Uranium 2007-01-27 03:08:24 Iran plans to begin work next month on an underground uranium enrichment facility, as part of a plan to create a network of tens of thousands of machines turning out material that could be used to make nuclear arms, United Nations officials said Friday. "I understand that they are going to announce that they are going to build up their 3,000-centrifuge facility ... sometime next month," Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), told reporters at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. "If Iran takes this step, it is going to confront universal international opposition," warned U.S. Undersecretary of State R. Nicholas Burns. "If they think they can get away with 3,000 centrifuges without another Security Council resolution and additional international pressure, then they are very badly mistaken." Read The Full Story Intel: Chips Will Run Faster, Use Less Power 2007-01-27 03:08:01 Intel, the world’s largest chip maker, has overhauled the basic building block of the information age, paving the way for a new generation of faster and more energy-efficient processors. Company researchers said the advance represented the most significant change in the materials used to manufacture silicon chips since Intel pioneered the modern integrated-circuit transistor more than four decades ago. The microprocessor chips, which Intel plans to begin making in the second half of this year, are designed for computers but they could also have applications in consumer devices. Their combination of processing power and energy efficiency could make it possible, for example, for cellphones to play video at length - a demanding digital task - with less battery drain. Read The Full Story Mexico Grapples With Soaring Prices For Corn, Tortillas 2007-01-27 03:06:53 Thick, doughy tortillas roll hot off the conveyor belt all day at Aurora Rosales's little shop in the congested city of Nezahualcoyotl, built on a dry lake bed east of Mexico City. Using cooking techniques that date to the Mayan empire, Rosales has never altered her recipe. Nor did her father, grandfather or great-grandfather. On good days, the neighbors line up for her tortillas. But these are not good days, and sometimes hours pass without any customers. Read The Full Story 11 Girls Dead, More Than A Dozen Injured In India School Collapse 2007-01-27 03:04:55 Rescue teams on Saturday ended their search through the rubble of a school residence in the western Indian state of Gujarat, which collapsed killing 11 girls and injuring over a dozen, said officials. Parts of a three-story hostel belonging to the Adarsh Nivas school in Tichakpura village, 300 kilometers (185 miles) south of the state's main city, Ahmedabad, came down on Friday, burying many students under mounds of rubble. The residence was home to about 150 girls, mainly members of India's disadvantaged tribal communities, and 20 teachers. Read The Full Story North Korea Denies Cooperating With Iran 2007-01-27 03:03:03 North Korea dismissed allegations Saturday that the communist regime is cooperating with Iran in nuclear development, accusing Western media of spreading the rumor to mislead public opinion. The "assertion is nothing but a sheer lie and fabrication intended to tarnish the image of (North Korea) by charging it with nuclear proliferation," the North's Foreign Ministry said in a statement carried by the North's official Korean Central News Agency. North Korea, which quit the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in early 2003, conducted its first-ever nuclear test in October, raising concerns about possible nuclear proliferation. North Korea and Iran - both labeled by President Bush as part of an "axis of evil" along with prewar Iraq - are under growing international pressure to give up their pursuit of nuclear programs. Read The Full Story	Experts Divided Over Climate Change Impact On Antarctic 2007-01-28 00:43:28 Serious disagreement has broken out among scientists over a United Nations climate report's contention that the world's greatest wilderness - Antarctica - will be largely unaffected by rising world temperatures. The report, to be published on Friday, will be one of the most comprehensive on climate change to date, and will paint a grim picture of future changes to the planet's weather patterns. Details of the report were first revealed by The Observer last weekend. However, many researchers believe it does not go far enough. In particular, they say it fails to stress that climate change is already having a severe impact on the continent and will continue to do so for the rest of century. At least a quarter of the sea ice around Antarctica will disappear in that time, say the critics, though this forecast is not mentioned in the study. One expert denounced the report - by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC - as "misleading". Another accused the panel of "failing to give the right impression" about the impact that rising levels of carbon dioxide will have on Antarctica. Read The Full Story Iran's Nuclear Plans In Chaos, But It's Propaganda Could Provoke Israeli Attacks 2007-01-28 00:42:31 Iran's efforts to produce highly enriched uranium, the material used to make nuclear bombs, are in chaos and the country is still years from mastering the required technology. Iran's uranium enrichment program has been plagued by constant technical problems, lack of access to outside technology and knowhow, and a failure to master the complex production-engineering processes involved. The country denies developing weapons, saying its pursuit of uranium enrichment is for energy purposes. Despite Iran being presented as an urgent threat to nuclear non-proliferation and regional and world peace - in particular by an increasingly bellicose Israel and its closest ally, the U.S. - a number of Western diplomats and technical experts close to the Iranian program have told The Observer it is archaic, prone to breakdown and lacks the materials for industrial-scale production. Read The Full Story Dutch Extradite Man Allegedly Linked To Attacks On U.S. Troops 2007-01-28 00:39:02 The Netherlands' government has extradited a naturalized Dutch citizen charged with involvement in terror attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq, the Justice Ministry said Saturday. Iraqi-born Wesam al Delaema, 32, was on a plane headed for an undisclosed location in the U.S., said Justice Ministry spokesman Ivo Hommes. In December, Dutch courts ruled that al Delaema could be extradited for his alleged role in attacks on U.S. forces in 2003. Al Delaema will become the first suspect tried in a U.S. court for alleged terrorism in Iraq's bloody insurgency. He is charged in the U.S. with possession of explosives and conspiracy to use them in an attack. If convicted, he faces a maximum sentence of life in prison. Read The Full Story Pakistan Bombing Near Mosque Kills 11, Including Police Chief, Wounds 35 2007-01-27 17:13:29 A suspected suicide attacker exploded a bomb near a Shiite Muslim mosque in the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar late Saturday, killing at least 11 people, including the city police chief, and wounding 35, said police. Most of the victims were police and municipal officials who were clearing the route for a procession of Shiites in a crowded old quarter of Peshawar, said police officer Aziz Khan. The procession had yet to begin. This weekend marks the start of the festival of Ashoura, when Shiites mourn the 7th century death of the prophet Muhammad's grandson, Imam Hussein. In the past the festival has been a target for sectarian attacks. The blast went off in a bazaar area about 200 yards from the mosque that was the starting point for the Shiite procession. It caused a power outage that left the city center in darkness, complicating rescue efforts. Read The Full Story Bush Is Left Isolated As America Turns Green 2007-01-27 15:45:44 For years, the most powerful voice in the US Senate on the environment was a conservative Republican from Oklahoma, James Inhofe, who famously declared "global warming is a hoax", and compared warnings about climate change to Nazi propaganda. This month, he was replaced by Barbara Boxer, a Democratic senator from California who considers global warming "a potential crisis of a magnitude we have never seen". George Bush may have two years to run on his presidency, and remains personally opposed to mandatory caps on carbon gases, but the change in the Senate illustrates how the rest of America has moved on. Congress, big business, state governments such as California, and mayors have embarked on a course that could bring America into step with the international community on climate change. In Congress, Democrats and Republicans have introduced five new bills on climate change so far this month, which would seek to reduce emissions by 60-80% below 1990 levels by the middle of the century. Other legislation that would set a higher standard for fuel efficiency in cars is also in the works. Read The Full Story Tens Of Thousands In D.C. Protest War 2007-01-27 13:43:29 Protesters energized by fresh congressional skepticism about the Iraq war demanded a withdrawal of U.S. troops in a demonstration Saturday that drew tens of thousands and brought Jane Fonda back to the streets. A sampling of celebrities, a half dozen members of Congress and busloads of demonstrators from distant states joined in a spirited rally under a sunny sky, seeing opportunity to press their cause in a country that has turned against the war. Read The Full Story Senator Surprised By Bush Administration Plan To Use FPS Forces In Iraq 2007-01-27 03:08:36 Army Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus, the new top U.S. commander in Iraq, told Congress that he might supplement efforts to secure Baghdad using the Iraqi Facilities Protection Service, a 150,000-man force that guards Iraqi government agencies. Yet that service is widely considered unreliable, and elements were described in July by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki as "more dangerous than the militias," according to Sen. Jack Reed (D-Rhode Island). "The prime minister said he wanted to get rid of the FPS as fast as possible," Reed said this week, recalling his meeting with Maliki in Baghdad last summer. There are "bad elements" in FPS units that "are carrying out murders and kidnappings ... [and] attacking the infrastructure that they are supposedly protecting," said Reed in his trip report about what Maliki had told him. "Because of the FPS," Reed wrote, Maliki said that "some governmental ministries' guards are more dangerous than the militias". The FPS was formed in 2003 by order of L. Paul Bremer, then administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority, to protect the 27 Iraqi ministries and their facilities throughout Iraq. Each minister, who generally represents one of Iraq's political parties, has his or her own FPS unit, whose armed members wear military uniforms. Read The Full Story Editorial: The Bait-And-Switch White House 2007-01-27 03:08:11 Intellpuke: The following editorial appears in the New York Times' edition for Saturday, January 27, 2007. We often wonder whether there is a limit to the Bush administration’s obsession with secrecy, its assault on the rule of law, its disdain for the powers of Congress, its willingness to con the public and its refusal to heed expert advice or recognize facts on the ground. Events of the past week suggest the answer is no. In his State of the Union speech, Mr. Bush stuck to his ill-conceived plans for Iraq, but at least admitted the situation was dire. He said he wanted to work with Congress and announced a bipartisan council on national security. That lasted a day. By Wednesday evening, Vice President Dick Cheney was on CNN contradicting most of what Mr. Bush had said. We were left asking, once again, Who exactly is running this White House? Read The Full Story In Presidential Hunt, Sen. Clinton Has To Gain Ground In Iowa 2007-01-27 03:07:19 When New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton arrives in Des Moines, Iowa, for her first presidential campaign events this weekend, she will encounter unfamiliar terrain - a landscape where she is not the perceived front-runner for the Democratic nomination. Although Clinton appears formidable at the national level, she has not built up a lead in Iowa, home of the first caucuses of the 2008 campaign next January. Most recent polls of Iowa Democrats have shown former senator John Edwards of North Carolina in the lead, with Clinton in a pack that includes Illinois Sen. Barack Obama and former Iowa governor Tom Vilsack. "This is anyone's race to win, including obviously Governor Vilsack, who is very familiar with the landscape here," said newly elected Iowa Gov. Chet Culver (D), who met with Clinton shortly after she arrived Friday afternoon but who is remaining neutral. "That's the wonderful thing about the caucus process. The winner will have to earn it." That puts Clinton in the unusual position of having to prove herself against other Democrats, and having to build up a political infrastructure in Iowa at a time when many rivals already have a head start. Her appearances here - her first in more than three years - are certain to start a media frenzy, potentially intruding on the direct access to candidates that caucus-goers have come to expect. Read The Full Story At Least 13 Killed In Palestinian Factional Violence 2007-01-27 03:06:11 Hamas gunmen stormed the home of a fighter from the rival Fatah movement Friday, witnesses said, sparking a deadly gun battle. The clash capped a day of factional violence across the Gaza Strip that killed at least 13 people, including a 2-year-old boy. The fighting, among the deadliest in nearly two months, marred the anniversary of Hamas's upset victory in Palestinian parliamentary elections. After nightfall, gunfire continued to echo through Gaza City. The heaviest shooting was concentrated around the residence of Mansour Shaleil, a Fatah leader in the Jabalya refugee camp just north of Gaza City. Hamas gunmen surrounded the house early Friday to detain Shaleil, accusing him of involvement in a shooting in which two Hamas supporters were killed. After an hours-long standoff, dozens of gunmen stormed the house and exchanged fire with Shaleil and a supporter, according to witnesses and ambulance drivers. Read The Full Story Dow Ends Down 15.54 On Economic Reports 2007-01-27 03:04:39 Wall Street closed out a volatile week with a mixed performance Friday after a pair of economic reports dashed hopes for an interest rate cut anytime soon. The major indexes were down for the week. The Dow Jones industrial average fell 15.54, or 0.12 percent, to 12,487.02. Stocks found some late-day strength as investors sought bargains after a two-day pullback that erased most of its 2007 gains. The market had its worst performance so far this year, despite optimism about earnings earlier in the week that lifted the Dow Jones industrials to its fourth record high of the year. Strong results from Microsoft Corp. helped lift technology stocks, while heavy machinery maker Caterpillar Inc.  lent some support to the Dow Jones industrials. However, those gains were offset by economic reports that raised concerns about interest rates. Read The Full Story
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