Free Internet Press Newsletter - Thursday January 4 2007 - (813)

Thursday January 4 2007 edition
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U.S. Democrats Hope To Take From Oil, Give To Green Energy 2007-01-04 03:04:24 U.S. House Democrats are crafting an energy package that would roll back billions of dollars worth of oil drilling incentives, raise billions more by boosting federal royalties paid by oil and gas companies for offshore production, and plow the money into new tax breaks for renewable energy sources, congressional sources said yesterday. Eager to paint themselves as different from the Bush administration and the past Republican majority, Democratic leaders are targeting a manufacturing tax cut in 2004 that they say gave unneeded incentives to the oil industry, Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer, of Maryland, said in a briefing Wednesday. Hoyer said Democrats are also planning to force oil companies to pay royalties on deepwater Gulf of Mexico tracts leased in 1998 and 1999; the Interior Department has said that the leases inadvertently failed to include provisions for royalty payments once oil prices rose above certain thresholds. The repeal of the 2004 tax cuts for the oil and gas industry would generate nearly $5 billion, said Democratic lawmakers, quoting estimates by the Joint Committee on Taxation. The royalty payments would yield between $9 billion and $11 billion, said Hoyer. Read The Full Story Saturn's Biggest Moon, Titan, Has Lakes - Of Liquid Methane 2007-01-04 03:03:49 As scientists have predicted but have had a hard time proving, the surface of Titan, Saturn's largest moon, appears to be dotted with lakes of liquid methane. The lakes are more intriguing evidence of the active phenomena at play on the only moon in the solar system with a dense atmosphere. The discovery, reported Wednesday by an international team of researchers, was made by a radar survey of Titan's high northern latitudes by the Cassini spacecraft, which has been orbiting Saturn and its retinue of satellites since July 2004. One of the mission's major objectives is the investigation of Titan's environment, thought to be a frigid version of conditions on the primordial Earth. The radar imaging system detected more than 75 dark patches in the landscape near Titan's northern polar region, the scientists said in a detailed description of the find published Thursday in the journal Nature. Read The Full Story Bush Adopts Democrats' Goal To Balance Budget 2007-01-04 03:02:55 President Bush promised Wednesday to produce a plan to balance the federal budget in five years and challenged lawmakers to slash their special pet projects in half next year, embracing priorities of the new Democratic leadership that will assume control of Congress Thursday. Appearing in the Rose Garden with his Cabinet, Bush said he has been encouraged by meetings with Democrats and thinks they can reach common ground on spending issues that have bitterly divided them for six years. He said that the budget proposal he will make Feb. 5 will erase the deficit by 2012, and he called on Congress "to end the dead-of-the-night" process in which earmarks are slipped into spending bills. The president's announcements were greeted by Democrats as "me-tooism," as one senior leadership aide put it, that closely tracked goals outlined by the new majority. The incoming House and Senate budget committee chairmen have set 2012 as a target for balancing the budget, and the incoming House and Senate appropriations chairmen have decided to freeze earmarks this year and introduce further restrictions on such spending items, which are often called pork. In trying to adopt such ambitions as his own, Bush hopes to regain the initiative after his party lost Congress in November and to counter his reputation as a president who took a budget surplus and turned it into record deficits, said analysts. Bush has never proposed a balanced budget since it went into deficit, never vetoed a spending bill when Republicans controlled Congress and offered little sustained objection to earmarks until the issue gained political traction last year. Read The Full Story Update: Student Arrested In Tacoma High School Shooting 2007-01-04 03:01:28 A teenager was shot to death in a high school hallway Wednesday as classes resumed after the winter break. Police arrested a fellow student wandering around a neighborhood a few blocks away, authorities said. Police were trying to determine what prompted the shooting. Witnesses said the gunman, who was not identified, fired three shots at point-blank range, splattering blood on lockers at Foss High School and setting off panic. He appeared to be aiming only at the victim, they said. The victim "got shot - bang - and he just fell," sophomore Malcolm Clark said. "He just froze, and he fell backwards into the lockers." Read The Full Story Official: Saddam's Co-Defendants To Be Hanged Thursday 2007-01-03 13:19:41 An Iraqi government official told the Associated Press on Wednesday that preparations are under way to hang two of Saddam Hussein's co-defendants on Thursday. Al-Arabiya satellite television and Al-Furat TV, run by Iraq's major Shiite Muslim political organization, both also reported that Saddam's half brother Barzan Ibrahim, a former intelligence chief, and Awad Hamed al-Bandar, the former chief justice of the Revolutionary Court, would be put to death Thursday. The government official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information, said the exact place and time of the hangings had not been set. The two co-defendants were originally scheduled to hang last Saturday along with Saddam. Read The Full Story 'Perfect Storm' Brews Over Western Australia 2007-01-03 13:19:14 Tropical Cyclone Isobel crossed the northwest Australian coast on Wednesday, causing little damage, but weather forecasters warned it may now link up with a deep depression inland to create a destructive "perfect storm". "It's one of the few occasions as a forecaster that you really do hope your forecast is wrong," Australia's Bureau of Meteorology forecaster Grant Elliott told local radio. "But, unfortunately, indications are that it's going to be a very significant, perhaps a once-in-a-generation storm for this time of year," said Elliott. Read The Full Story Man Held Over Saddam Execution Video 2007-01-03 10:54:00 A spokesman for Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Maliki confirmed today that "an official who supervised the hanging" of Saddam Hussein was being held over a graphic execution video, shot on a mobile phone and later released onto the internet. The film has caused a bit of a rumpus, with the UK's deputy prime minister John Prescott slamming it as "deplorable". The two-and-a-half minute clip shows Hussein being taunted by witnesses, with one onlooker shouting "go to hell". Read The Full Story	Rhode Island School Shut After Encephalitis Outbreak Kills Pupil 2007-01-04 03:04:07 State and federal health officials are investigating an extremely rare outbreak of encephalitis in Warwick, Rhode Island, that killed a second grader last month and led officials to close his elementary school this week. Health officials said the cases of encephalitis, which is usually brought on by a virus and causes the brain to swell, are unusual because they appear to be caused by a common bacteria, mycoplasma pneumoniae, or walking pneumonia. "It's very rare for someone to be hospitalized with mycoplasma, and it's even more rare to see such a severe complication as encephalitis," said Cynthia Whitney, acting branch chief for the respiratory diseases branch of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "What makes this so unusual is that more than one case has been linked to this outbreak of mycoplasma." The second grader, Dylan Gleavey of Warwick, died of encephalitis on Dec. 21. A classmate of Dylan's at Greenwood Elementary School became ill with meningitis that progressed to a mild form of encephalitis, said Dr. David R. Gifford, Rhode Island's director of health. Read The Full Story Contractors Cited By FBI In Abuse At Guantanamo Bay 2007-01-04 03:03:17 New allegations of detainee abuse at Guantanamo Bay released by the FBI on Tuesday put private contractors at the center of interrogation operations, raising questions once again about where they fit in the military's chain of command. The FBI's disclosures, which are based on eyewitness reports, refer several times to contractors directing the Army's interrogation efforts at the military detention center in Cuba. In at least one case, FBI agents were told that detainees may have been mistreated on orders from a contractor. Taken together, the documents suggest a greater role for contractors than was previously known, and contracting experts said they indicate a further blurring of the limits on how much responsibility the private sector can carry in doing the public's work. "These are incredibly sensitive and important government jobs. That's why you're supposed to have a very clear and public chain of command," said Brookings Institution scholar Peter W. Singer. "But now there's a confusion about proper roles." Read The Full Story Citing Quality-Control Failures, U.S. Bars Lab From Testing Electronic Voting Machines 2007-01-04 03:01:49 A laboratory that has tested most of the nation's electronic voting systems has been temporarily barred from approving new machines after federal officials found that it was not following its quality-control procedures and could not document that it was conducting all the required tests. The company, Ciber Inc. of Greenwood Village, Colorado, has also come under fire from analysts hired by New York State over its plans to test new voting machines for the state. New York could eventually spend $200 million to replace its aging lever devices. Experts on voting systems say the Ciber problems underscore longstanding worries about lax inspections in the secretive world of voting-machine testing. The action by the federal Election Assistance Commission seems certain to fan growing concerns about the reliability and security of the devices. The commission acted last summer, but the problem was not disclosed then. Officials at the commission and Ciber confirmed the action in recent interviews. Read The Full Story U.S. Intelligence 'Czar' Will Leave Post To Be State Dept. Deputy 2007-01-04 03:00:56 Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has persuaded John D. Negroponte to leave his post as director of national intelligence and come to the State Department as her deputy, government officials said last night. Negroponte's move would fill a crucial hole on Rice's team. She has been without a deputy since Robert B. Zoellick left in July for a Wall Street firm. It also comes as President Bush plans to announce a new Iraq strategy; as former Iraq envoy, Negroponte would be expected to play a major role in implementing that plan in his new role. Negroponte's decision to step down as the nation's top spy for a sub-Cabinet position marks a sudden reversal. Rice had earlier sought to recruit Negroponte - as well as other high-profile figures - for the job, but last month he insisted he was staying at his post. "In my own mind at least, I visualize staying ... through the end of this administration, and then I think probably that'll be about the right time to pack it in," he told C-SPAN in an interview broadcast Dec. 3. "I've pulled together a very good team, and they've stayed with me for the past 18 months," he said, "and I hope they'll stay with me as long as I'm in the job." Read The Full Story Nardelli, Home Depot's Embattled C.E.O., Resigns 2007-01-03 13:19:28 Robert L. Nardelli, the chief executive of Home Depot, who came under heavy criticism for his pay package and failure to lift the chain’s stagnant stock price, has abruptly resigned, the company said Wednesday. In its statement, Home Depot said that Nardelli and the company’s board “mutually agreed that Nardelli would leave his position.” He will receive about $210 million in compensation from the company, including the current value of retirement and other benefits he was already entitled to, said the statement. Frank Blake, the company’s vice chairman, succeeds Nardelli immediately as chief executive, said the company. Read The Full Story BREAKING NEWS: Student Shot, Killed At High School In Tacoma, Washington 2007-01-03 12:44:23 A student was shot and killed Wednesday morning at a Tacoma, Washington, high school, and police were searching for a gunman, said a police district spokeswoman. Tacoma school district spokeswoman Patty Holmgren said a male student was killed in the shooting at Foss High School. She said police know who the suspect is and believe he ran from campus. "Two young people involved. Assuming one young person brought a weapon to school and wounded another,"  Holmgren told CNN. Read The Full Story
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