Free Internet Press Newsletter - Monday February 19 2007 - (813)

Monday February 19 2007 edition
Free Internet Press is operated on your donations. Donate Today
Global Warming: Scientists Warn It May Be Too Late To Save The Ice Caps 2007-02-19 03:01:06 A critical meltdown of ice sheets and severe sea level rise could be inevitable because of global warming, the world's scientists are preparing to warn their governments. New studies of Greenland and Antarctica have forced a United Nations expert panel to conclude there is a 50% chance that widespread ice sheet loss "may no longer be avoided" because of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Such melting would raise sea levels by four to six meters (12 to 18 feet), the scientists say. It would cause "major changes in coastline and inundation of low-lying areas" and require "costly and challenging" efforts to move millions of people and infrastructure from vulnerable areas. The previous official line, issued in 2001, was that the chance of such an event was "not well known, but probably very low". The melting process could take centuries, but increased warming caused by a failure to cut emissions would accelerate the ice sheets' demise, and give nations less time to adapt to the consequences. Areas such as the Maldives would be swamped and low-lying countries such as the Netherlands and Bangladesh, as well as coastal cities including London, New York and Tokyo, would face critical flooding. The warning appears in a report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which assesses the likely impacts of global warming and will be published in April. A final draft of the report's summary-for-policymakers chapter, obtained by the Guardian, says: "Very large sea level rises that would result from widespread deglaciation of Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets imply major changes in coastlines and inundation of low-lying areas, with greatest effects in river deltas. Read The Full Story Al-Qaeda Chiefs Are Seen To Regain Power 2007-02-19 03:00:34 Senior leaders of al-Qaeda operating from Pakistan have re-established significant control over their once-battered worldwide terror network and over the past year have set up a band of training camps in the tribal regions near the Afghan border, according to American intelligence and counterterrorism officials. American officials said there is mounting evidence that Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, had been steadily building an operations hub in the mountainous Pakistani tribal area of North Waziristan. Until recently, the Bush administration had described bin Laden and Zawahri as detached from their followers and cut off from operational control of al-Qaeda. The United States has also identified several new al-Qaeda compounds in North Waziristan, including one that officials said might be training operatives for strikes against targets beyond Afghanistan. Read The Full Story 65 Die In Fire On India-Pakistan Train 2007-02-19 02:59:48 An explosion on a train headed for Pakistan set off a fire that swept through two cars and killed at least 65 people in an attack that a government minister said was aimed at undermining the peace process between India and Pakistan. Authorities said two suitcases packed with unexploded crude bombs and bottles of gasoline were found in cars not hit in the attack, leading them to suspect the fire was set off by an identical explosive device. "It appears to be a case of sabotage," said the general manager of the Northern Railway, V.N. Mathur. India's junior home Minster, Sriprakash Jaiswal, said the homemade bombs were not powerful, and were simply intended to start a fire on the train, one day before Pakistani Foreign Minister Khursheed Kasuri was to arrive in New Delhi for talks on the ongoing peace process. Read The Full Story Deadly Bird Flu Strain In Moscow 2007-02-18 16:20:44 Russian officials traced dead domestic poultry in several suburban Moscow districts to a single market Sunday as experts reported new outbreaks and tightened quarantines following confirmation of the presence of the H5N1 bird flu strain. The presence of H5N1, confirmed by tests late Saturday, was the first such outbreak to be recorded so close to the Russian capital. Four separate incidences of domestic poultry dying involved birds that were purchased at a market located just outside the Moscow city limits, federal agricultural oversight agency Rosselkhoznadzor spokesman Alexei Alexeyenko told the Associated Press. The market was closed Saturday and experts were trying to determine the original source for the birds on sale there, he said. Read The Full Story 8 U.S. Troops Die In Afghanistan Copter Crash 2007-02-18 16:20:09 Eight coalition members were killed and 14 others wounded when their helicopter had a "sudden, unexplained loss of power and control" and crashed in southeastern Afghanistan on Sunday, said military officials. All eight were U.S. personnel, according to news wire reports. The CH-47 Chinook was transporting 22 people, including crew, at the time of the crash. Rescuers found the 14 injured passengers after launching a search operation and transported them to the hospital. Read The Full Story At Least 28 Bombs Explode In Thailand 2007-02-18 16:19:37 At least 28 bombs exploded Sunday in apparently coordinated attacks in parts of southern Thailand plagued by a Muslim insurgency, killing three people and wounding more than 50, said the military. The bombings targeted hotels, karaoke bars, power grids and commercial sites in the country's southernmost provinces, the only parts of predominantly Buddhist Thailand with Muslim majorities. Two public schools were torched. Police said three Thais of Chinese descent were also gunned down in Pattani province in what was believed to be the act of insurgents. The killings occurred as the country's Chinese community was celebrating the Lunar New Year Sunday. Violence in the south has been escalating in recent months despite a major policy shift by the military-imposed government, which is trying to replace an earlier, iron-fisted approach in dealing with the rebels with a ''hearts and minds'' campaign. Read The Full Story 2 Antarctic Studies Give Clues On Global Warming 2007-02-18 01:26:13 When researchers think about the effects of global warming, and especially about how much ocean levels will rise along with temperatures, they inevitably turn their attention to Antarctica. Almost 90 percent of the planet's ice is frozen in the glaciers and ice sheets of the continent, so conditions there will in large part determine whether sea level rise will be manageable - or catastrophic. Unfortunately, Antarctica's climate has proven very difficult to understand or predict, and it has given off seemingly contradictory signals. Both temperatures and snowfall have remained relatively constant for the continent as a whole over the past 50 years, but the Antarctic Peninsula - which reaches northward toward South America - has been losing ice rapidly and is among the most quickly warming places on Earth. Now, two new research efforts have tackled the subject - producing new insights into the systems that control and change Antarctica, as well into the worrisome limits to our knowledge about the suddenly crucial continent. The first project revealed that a previously unknown system of seemingly connected lakes lies under the massive streams of ice that move Antarctica's frozen water from the center of the continent to its coasts. It is a system that might work to moderate climate change, the researchers said, or alternatively might speed it up if a tipping point is reached. Read The Full Story Planning Seen In Iraqi Attacks On U.S. Copters 2007-02-18 01:25:13 Documents captured from Iraqi insurgents indicate that some of the recent fatal attacks against American helicopters are a result of a carefully planned strategy to focus on downing coalition aircraft, one that American officials say has been carried out by mounting coordinated assaults with machine guns, rockets and surface-to-air missiles. The documents, said to have been drafted by al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, show that the militants were preparing to “concentrate on the air force.” The contents of the documents are described in an American intelligence report that was reviewed by the New York Times. Seized near Baghdad, the documents reflect the insurgents’ military preparations from late last year, including plans for attacking aircraft using a variety of weapons. Officials say they are a fresh indication that the United States is facing an array of “adaptive” adversaries in Iraq,  enemies who are likely to step up their attacks as American forces expand their efforts to secure Baghdad, the Iraqi capital. Read The Full Story	Commentary: Once George Bush Has Got Hold Of A Bad Idea He Just Can't Let Go 2007-02-19 03:00:50 Intellpuke: The following commentary was written by Guardian correspondent Gary Younge and appears on the Guardian Unlimited's website edition for Monday, February 19, 2007. Mr. Younge's column follows: On December 20 1954, a woman known as Marion Keech gathered her followers in her garden in Lake City, Illinois, and waited for midnight, when flying saucers were supposed to land and save them from huge floods about to engulf the planet. Keech had received news of the impending deluge from Sananda, a being from the planet Clarion, whose messages she passed on to a small group of believers. Unbeknown to her, the group had been infiltrated by a University of Minnesota researcher, the social psychologist Leon Festinger. As dawn rose on December 21 with no flying saucer in sight, Keech had another revelation. Sananda told her that the group's advanced state of enlightenment had saved the entire planet. They rejoiced and called a press conference. "A man with a conviction is a hard man to change," wrote Festinger in his book on the cult, When Prophecy Fails. "Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts and figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point." George Bush is a man of conviction and clearly a hard man to change. When reality confronts his plans he does not alter them but instead alters his understanding of reality. Like Keech and her crew, he stands with a tight band of followers, both deluded and determined, understanding each setback not as a sign to change course but as further proof that they must redouble their efforts to the original goal. Read The Full Story Commentary: U.S. Freedom Of The Press Needs Shield Law 2007-02-19 03:00:16 Intellpuke: You can read this commentary by Seattle Post Intelligencer staff writer Amy Goodman. Ms. Goodman's column first appeared in the Intelligencer edition for Thursday, February 15, 2007. Ms. Goodman is the host of "Democracy Now", a daily international TV/Radio news hour. Her column follows: Josh Wolf, videographer and blogger, is now the journalist imprisoned longest in U.S. history for refusing to comply with a subpoena. He has been locked up in federal prison for close to six months. In July 2005, Wolf was covering a San Francisco protest against the G-8 Summit in Scotland (G-8 stands for the Group of Eight industrialized nations: Britain, France, Russia, Germany, the U.S., Japan, Italy and Canada). He posted video to the Web and sold some video to a local broadcast-news outlet. The authorities wanted him to turn over the original tapes and to testify. He refused. In a recent court filing, U.S. Attorney Kevin Ryan says it's only in Wolf's "imagination that he is a journalist." The Society of Professional Journalists must be equally imaginative. Their Northern California chapter named Josh Wolf Journalist of the Year for 2006, and in March will give him the James Madison Freedom of Information Award. "Josh's commitment to a free and unfettered press deserves profound respect," SPJ National President Christine Tatum said. Read The Full Story Iraqi Sunni Lands Show Oil And Gas Promise 2007-02-19 02:58:33 In a remote patch of the Anbar desert just 20 miles from the Syrian border, a single blue pillar of flanges and valves sits atop an enormous deposit of oil and natural gas that would be routine in this petroleum-rich country except for one fact: this is Sunni territory. Huge petroleum deposits have long been known in Iraq’s Kurdish north and Shiite south. But now, Iraq has substantially increased its estimates of the amount of oil and natural gas in deposits on Sunni lands after quietly paying foreign oil companies tens of millions of dollars over the past two years to re-examine old seismic data across the country and retrain Iraqi petroleum engineers. The development is likely to have significant political effects: the lack of natural resources in the central and western regions where Sunnis hold sway has fed their disenchantment with the nation they once ruled. And it has driven their insistence on a strong central government, one that would collect oil revenues and spread them equitably among the country’s factions, rather than any division of the country along sectarian regional boundaries. Read The Full Story At Least 55 Killed, 127 Wounded In Bagdad Bomb Attacks 2007-02-18 16:20:31 Two suicide bombers detonated explosives in a busy market in central Baghdad Sunday, killing more than 55 people and undermining Iraqi officials' claim that the Baghdad security plan is off to a "fabulous" start. The bomb exploded in quick succession at approximately 3:30 p.m. in a busy commercial area in the New Baghdad neighborhood, sending a thick plume of smoke that darkened an otherwise splendid day in the capital. It is the first large bombing since the security plan was launched on Wednesday. American and Iraqi soldiers dashed to the scene and cordoned it off as dozens of injured people were taken to hospitals. The Associated Press reported that at least 56 were killed and 127 injured, and attributed the information to police and other emergency response personnel. Iraqi security officials could not immediately be reached for comment. Read The Full Story Top Israeli Police Officials Resigns In Scandal 2007-02-18 16:19:54 Irael's police commissioner resigned Sunday evening after an investigative committee severely criticized his actions in a 1999 case involving an Israeli crime family. The commissioner, Moshe Karadi, whose term would have expired in August, said he was resigning immediately to “set a personal example” and spare the police the harm of a scandal. He insisted that the accusations against him were untrue. Avi Dichter, the minister for public security, said he had accepted the resignation and would appoint Yaakov Ganot, the current director of the Prison Service, as the new commissioner. Dichter said he would also remove the deputy commissioner, Benny Kaniak, even though he was not mentioned in the report, and offer him the prison job. “The police must and can become better,” said Dichter. Read The Full Story 6 Of 7 Dismissed U.S. Attorneys Had Positive Job Evaluations 2007-02-18 01:26:31 All but one of the U.S. attorneys recently fired by the Justice Department had positive job reviews before they were dismissed, but many ran into political trouble with Washington over issues ranging from immigration to the death penalty, according to prosecutors, congressional aides and others familiar with the cases. Two months after the firings first began to make waves on Capitol Hill, it has also become clear that most of the prosecutors were overseeing significant public-corruption investigations at the time they were asked to leave. Four of the probes target Republican politicians or their supporters, said prosecutors and other officials. The emerging details stand in contrast to repeated statements from the Justice Department that six of the Republican-appointed prosecutors were dismissed because of poor performance. In one of the most prominent examples, agency officials pointed to widely known management and morale problems surrounding then-U.S. Attorney Kevin Ryan in San Francisco, California. The assertions enraged the rest of the group, some of whom feel betrayed after staying silent about the way they have been shoved from office. Read The Full Story Soldiers Face Neglect, Frustration At Army's Top Medical Facility 2007-02-18 01:25:49 Behind the door of Army Spec. Jeremy Duncan's room, part of the wall is torn and hangs in the air, weighted down with black mold. When the wounded combat engineer stands in his shower and looks up, he can see the bathtub on the floor above through a rotted hole. The entire building, constructed between the world wars, often smells like greasy carry-out. Signs of neglect are everywhere: mouse droppings, belly-up cockroaches, stained carpets, cheap mattresses. This is the world of Building 18, not the kind of place where Duncan expected to recover when he was evacuated to Walter Reed Army Medical Center from Iraq last February with a broken neck and a shredded left ear, nearly dead from blood loss. But the old lodge, just outside the gates of the hospital and five miles up the road from the White House, has housed hundreds of maimed soldiers recuperating from injuries suffered in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The common perception of Walter Reed is of a surgical hospital that shines as the crown jewel of military medicine. But 5 1/2 years of sustained combat have transformed the venerable 113-acre institution into something else entirely - a holding ground for physically and psychologically damaged outpatients. Almost 700 of them - the majority soldiers, with some Marines - have been released from hospital beds but still need treatment or are awaiting bureaucratic decisions before being discharged or returned to active duty. Read The Full Story Pentagon Accused Of Blocking Investigation Into Accident Involving 3 British Troops 2007-02-18 01:24:44 The Pentagon has been accused of obstructing an investigation into how three British soldiers almost died when an American tank transporter rammed them off a road in Iraq. Lawyers for the U.K. troops claim that the U.S. authorities tried to "dump" their inquiry in a move to block a compensation claim. The American military also said it had no record of the incident, but it has emerged that the collision was officially recorded at the time. The allegations risk creating fresh tensions between the U.K. and U.S. coalition forces and arrive amid the ongoing inquest into the death of Lance Corporal Matty Hull, who was killed by American pilots after they mistakenly fired on his convoy. U.S. army officials are due in London this week to interview Corporal Jane McLaughlan, Staff Sergeant James Rogerson, Corporal Stephen Smith and their interpreter, Khalid Allahou, almost four years after all were seriously injured when their Land Rover was struck twice from behind by the U.S. transporter. McLaughlan, who was driving, was unable to keep control and the Land Rover crashed off the road. All four passengers were thrown from the vehicle. Read The Full Story
Original materials on this site © Free Internet Press. Any mirrored or quoted materials © their respective authors, publications, or outlets, as shown on their publication, indicated by the link in the news story. Original Free Internet Press materials may be copied and/or republished without modification, provided a link to http://FreeInternetPress.com is given in the story, or proper credit is given. Newsletter options may be changed in your preferences on http://freeinternetpress.com Please email editor@freeinternetpress.com there are any questions. XML/RSS/RDF Newsfeed Syndication: http://freeinternetpress.com/rss.php