Free Internet Press Newsletter - Wednesday January 3 2007 - (813)

Wednesday January 3 2007 edition
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FBI Employees Saw Prisoner Abuse At Guantanamo 2007-01-02 21:44:21 The FBI on Tuesday released documents showing at least 26 FBI employees witnessed aggressive mistreatment and harsh interrogation techniques of prisoners by other government agencies or outside contractors at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. "On several occasions witnesses saw detainees in interrogation rooms chained hand and foot in fetal position to floor with no chair/food/water; most urinated or defecated on selves and were left there 18, 24 hours or more," according to one FBI account made public. One FBI witness saw a detainee "shaking with cold," while another noted a detainee in a sweltering unventilated room was "almost unconscious on a floor with a pile of hair next to him (he had apparently been pulling it out through the night)." Another witness saw a detainee "with a full beard whose head was wrapped in duct tape." One FBI statement said that an interrogator squatted over the Quran and that a German shepherd dog was ordered to "growl, bark and show his teeth to the prisoner." Another detainee was draped in an Israeli flag. Read The Full Story UFOs In the News 2007-01-02 21:10:46 Several readers have let us know about a report on MSNBC that France's space agency has announced plans to publish its archive of UFO sightings in a month or so. The archive includes some 6,000 reports relating to around 1,600 incidents over 30 years. In a separate development, many readers have sent in word of the reported UFO that at least six United Airlines workers saw over Chicago's O'Hare International Airport last November. National Public Radio picked up the story with an interview with the Chicago Trib reporter who wrote about it yesterday. United is, strangely, denying that any such incident was ever brought up. The FAA admits there was an incident but is not investigating it. Read The Full Story Central Banks Moving Away From Dollar To Stronger Currencies 2007-01-02 19:27:53 Countries with large holdings of dollars in their foreign-exchange reserves are showing a new willingness to dump the dollar in favor of the rising euro. The latest to make a major move is the United Arab Emirates, which joined Russia, Switzerland, Venezuela and others late last month when it shifted a chunk of its reserves into euros. There have also been ambiguous signals from China about a possible pullback from the dollar, and recent word from Iran, the world's fourth largest oil producer, that it would prefer to be paid in euros rather than the usual dollars for its oil shipments. Still, currency experts say these moves are not likely to do any long-term damage to the dollar, for a number of reasons. Read The Full Story Iraq Plans Inquiry Into Hussein's Execution 2007-01-02 19:27:17 With angry demonstrations spreading across Iraq's Sunni Arab heartland, the country's Shiite-led government said Tuesday that it had ordered an investigation into the disorderly scenes at the execution of Saddam Hussein, who was mocked and taunted by Shiite witnesses and guards as he stood on the gallows. Iraqi officials said a three-member committee of the Interior Ministry would investigate scenes that have raised outrage among Hussein's Sunni Arab loyalists and widespread consternation elsewhere as video recordings of the execution have been broadcast around the world. The officials said the government wanted to know how some of those present at the hanging had been allowed to use cellphone cameras to record grainy images of Hussein as he endured the mockery from a group standing in front of the gallows. The investigation will also ask why the hanging had been allowed to descend into scenes that some Sunni critics have described as a sectarian lynching, said the officials. Read The Full Story Analysts: Housing Slump Will Continue To Hurt U.S. Economy In 2007 2007-01-02 16:29:41 The slowdown that hit the U.S. economy will persist into 2007 as the once red-hot housing market continues to suffer through a serious correction, analysts say. As the new year begins, many private analysts are forecasting the economy will perform at the slowest pace in five years, a full percentage-point lower than growth in 2006. One such analyst is Nariman Behravesh, chief economist at Global Insight, a forecasting firm. "The recession in the housing market does not seem to have had much of an impact on the consumer," he said. "The bad news on housing has been offset by good news on wages, jobs and the stock market." While the slowdown will cause the unemployment rate to rise, economists remain hopeful that the economy will remain on track to achieve the Federal Reserve's hoped-for "soft landing". That is described as a scenario in which growth slows enough to dampen inflation but not trigger a recession. Read The Full Story Airline Workers Say They Saw UFO Over O'Hare Airport 2007-01-02 16:29:11 Federal officials say it was probably just some weird weather phenomenon, but a group of United Airlines employees swear they saw a mysterious, saucer-shaped craft hovering over O'Hare Airport last fall. The workers, some of them pilots, said the object didn't have lights and hovered over an airport terminal before shooting up through the clouds, according to a report in Monday's Chicago Tribune. The Federal Aviation Administration acknowledged that a United supervisor had called the control tower at O'Hare, asking if anyone had spotted a spinning disc-shaped object, but the controllers didn't see anything, and a preliminary check of radar found nothing out of the ordinary, said FAA spokeswoman Elizabeth Isham Cory. Read The Full Story As Troops' Lives Are Changed Forever By Iraq, Much Of U.S. Remains Unaffected 2007-01-02 03:39:03 "Grenade!" Manning a .50-caliber machine gun in the turret of a Humvee, Pfc. Ross McGinnis could see the insurgent on a rooftop fling a hand grenade at his vehicle. He shouted and tried to deflect it, but it fell inside. Four of his buddies were down there. What followed was a stunning act of self-sacrifice. McGinnis, a 19-year-old from rural Pennsylvania and the youngest soldier in his unit, threw himself backward onto the grenade, absorbing the blast with his body. He was killed instantly. The others escaped serious injury. With the death toll for U.S. service members in Iraq past the 3,000 mark, McGinnis's heroism, on Dec. 4, stands as one extreme in the vast spectrum of how Americans are experiencing the Iraq war. Like an emotional manifestation of the laws of physics, the casualties have rippled across the American psyche - those close to the events have been profoundly moved, while those at some distance, the majority of Americans, have been largely unaffected. Concentric circles of loss spread outward, starting with grieving parents, spouses and children - many so young they will not remember the father or mother who was killed in war. Families of the severely wounded face a future they never planned for and financial hardships they never imagined. In small towns, which supply much of the nation's fighting force, one death can send an entire community into mourning. Tens of thousands of U.S. troops continue to brave the war zone, while their friends, families and sweethearts worry at home. Read The Full Story Iraq's Shiites Fear Betrayal By U.S. 2007-01-02 03:37:51 As a dull winter sun nibbled away at the chilly morning, Hussein Lefta stood beside the Rahman Mosque. Before him, Shiite Muslim worshipers passed through an emerald green gate and shuffled across a stone-covered field. Behind him the giant gray shrine rose above Mansour, a mainly Sunni Arab neighborhood that was once home to the elite of the late Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. Built to proclaim Hussein's glory, the mosque is one of the most visible symbols of his fall. Thousands of oppressed Shiites took control of the unfinished building following the U.S.-led invasion. On that day in April 2003, Shiites say, their history was reshaped, their politics reborn and their faith reinvigorated . Lefta, 42, was among the many Shiites who thanked the Americans for their freedom. He dreamed that his community, Iraq's majority, would exert the political influence the Sunnis had long denied it. Today, the mosque is still incomplete, as are Lefta's dreams. "The Americans are afraid the Shia will take over Iraq," he explained. Read The Full Story Concerns Raised As More U.S. Police Departments Empower Private Police To Protect Public 2007-01-02 03:36:37 Kevin Watt crouched down to search the rusted Cadillac he had stopped for cruising the parking lot of a Raleigh apartment complex with a broken light. He pulled out two open Bud Light cans, an empty Corona bottle, rolling papers, a knife, a hammer, a stereo speaker, and a car radio with wires sprouting out. "Who's this belong to, man?" Watt asked the six young Latino men he had frisked and lined up behind the car. Five were too young to drink. None had a driver's license. One had under his hooded sweat shirt the tattoo of a Hispanic gang across his back. A gang initiation, Watt thought. With the sleeve patch on his black shirt, the 9mm gun on his hip and the blue light on his patrol car, he looked like an ordinary police officer as he stopped the car on a Friday night last month. Watt works, though, for a business called Capitol Special Police. It is one of dozens of private security companies given police powers by the state of North Carolina - and part of a pattern across the United States in which public safety is shifting into private hands. Read The Full Story	5 Charged In Airport Luggage Thefts 2007-01-02 21:23:50 Five employees of a baggage-handling contractor have been charged in the thefts of 158 pieces of luggage from George Bush Intercontinental Airport, police said Tuesday. Sixty-eight pieces of luggage were discovered in a Houston pet store's trash bin on Dec. 26. Police said the luggage appeared to have been picked over, with any valuables stolen. Another 90 pieces of stolen luggage were found at two undisclosed locations over the weekend, Houston Police Capt. Rick Bownds said. Read The Full Story NASA Considers Ad Campaign To Persuade People to Care About NASA 2007-01-02 20:07:35   Young Americans have high levels of apathy about NASA's new vision of sending astronauts back to the moon by 2017 and eventually on to Mars, recent surveys show.   Concerned about this lack of interest, NASA's image-makers are taking a hard look at how to win over the young generation -- media-saturated teens and 20-somethings growing up on YouTube and Google and largely indifferent to manned space flight.   "If you're going to do a space exploration program that lasts 40 years, if you just do the math, those are the guys that are going to carry the tax burden," said Mary Lynne Dittmar, president of a Houston company that surveyed young people about the space program. Read The Full Story Hay Airlift Aims To Save Snowbound Cattle In Great Plains 2007-01-02 19:27:38 National Guard helicopters dropped emergency food bundles and bales of hay for people and livestock trapped by snowdrifts as high as rooftops Tuesday after back-to-back blizzards paralyzed the Plains. At least a dozen deaths were blamed on a weekend storm that knocked out electricity to tens of thousands of people in Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska and Oklahoma and left herds of cattle without food or water. The blizzard spread a blanket of snow on top of the icy layer left by a storm that hit just before Christmas. Because of rising temperatures, many highways were clear, but many rural roads remained impassable, and National Guardsmen used Humvees and snowmobiles to reach people trapped in their homes and take them to shelters. Colorado also launched a hay lift in hopes of saving thousands of cattle immobilized by drifts as high as 10 feet. In 1997, a similar storm killed 30,000 in the state. Read The Full Story Ethiopia Plans To Pull Troops From Somalia, Cites Lack Of Funds 2007-01-02 19:26:52 Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, said Tuesday that his country, one of the poorest in the world, could not afford to keep its troops in neighboring Somalia much longer, and that Somalia's stability depended on the quick injection of foreign peacekeepers. In a speech to parliament, in which his tone alternated between humble and triumphant, Meles said that Ethiopia had accomplished its mission to wipe out Somalia's Islamist forces, which just two weeks ago controlled a large chunk of the country and were regarded as a regional menace. "We will now leave as soon as possible - it could be weeks, it could be months," he said. "We don't have the money to take this burden individually." Read The Full Story Study: Louisiana Slowly Sliding Into Gulf 2007-01-02 16:29:26 A new report by scientists studying Louisiana's sinking coast says the land here is not just sinking, it is sliding ever so slowly into the Gulf of Mexico. The new findings may add a kink to plans being drawn up to build bigger and better levees to protect this historic city and Cajun bayou culture. If the land is shifting - even slightly - engineers may need to take that into consideration as they build new levees and draw lines across the coast to identify areas that should and shouldn't be protected. The report, which appeared in December's Geophysical Research Letters, a peer-reviewed journal published by the American Geophysical Union, says the bedrock under heavily populated southeast Louisiana is breaking away at a glacial speed - at the pace fingernails grow. Read The Full Story Indonesian Crash Update - Wreckage NOT Found - No Survivors Found Yet 2007-01-02 14:07:53 Previous aviation and police statements that the wreckage of a missing passenger jetliner had been located proved false, Indonesia's transportation minister said Tuesday. It had been reported early Tuesday that an aerial photograph had identified that the crash site was west of the island of Sulawesi and that bodies and survivors had been found. According to AFP, Major General Arif Bundi Sampurno told MetroTV, "News from the village head reporting 12 survivors was also not true; the village head said that he never made that report." "The local commander, the police chief and the governor went to the location and they found nothing, so earlier reports about the location, number of survivors are all untrue. We don't know where that information originates from," AFP quotes Sampurno as saying. Read The Full Story Commentary: Betrayal Of The Big Easy 2007-01-02 03:38:31 Intellpuke: The following commentary is written by Dr. Giles Fraser and is posted at the Guardian Unlimited's website for Tuesday, January 2, 2007. In his column, Dr. Fraser writes that Hurricane Katrina forced out New Orleans poor residents and now developers don't want them back. Dr. Fraser is the vicar of Putney, in Britain, and a lecturer in philosophy at Wadham College, Oxford. His column follows: It's well over a year since the levees collapsed and billions of gallons of water flooded into New Orleans, trashing the city and displacing several thousand residents, most of them black and poor. Many may not return. For Hurricane Katrina produced acres of empty real estate that are being eyed up as a promising opportunity for corporate developers. Mayor Ray Nagin wants the new New Orleans to be "market driven". The Episcopalian Bishop of Louisiana thinks differently. Once a conservative, he was rebaptized with dirty water. He now speaks for many in condemning the mayor's words as "a blow against the poor and needy", and says developers threaten "the soul of the city". Last August two-thirds of New Orleans was under water. In low-lying areas - such as the lower ninth ward, where many of the city's musicians originate - almost no reconstruction work is being done. Insurance companies won't cover new buildings unless the levees are reinforced to withstand another big storm, and the government won't cough up the $30 billion-plus the work is expected to cost. So the powers that be are effectively abandoning the lower-lying areas, offering precious little hope of return to the Katrina diaspora spread over the south. A city that had a population of nearly half a million has been reduced by 300,000. Some are whispering that this is a way of rebalancing the city's ethnic mix, which has been majority black for some time. Read The Full Story Only 12 Of 102 Survive Indonesian Jet Liner Crash 2007-01-02 03:37:15 This story has been updated HERE Rescuers on Tuesday found the smoldering wreckage of an Indonesian jetliner that disappeared during a storm. Officials said 90 people were killed, while the remaining 12 aboard survived. "The plane is destroyed, and many bodies are around there," said the local police chief, Col. Genot Hariyanto. Air force Rear Cmdr. Eddy Suyanto told el-Shinta radio that the plane, operated by local carrier Adam Air, had crashed in a mountainous region of Polewali in western Sulawesi island. Adam Air spokesman Hartono, who goes by one name, said 90 people were killed and 12 survived in Monday's crash of the Boeing 737-400. The survivors' conditions were not immediately known. Read The Full Story
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