Free Internet Press Newsletter - Thursday February 8 2007 - (813)

Thursday February 8 2007 edition
Free Internet Press is operated on your donations. Donate Today
As Railroads Face Tighter Safety Regulations, They Hire Lawmakers' Lobbyist Relatives 2007-02-08 02:48:06 The railroad industry is hiring relatives of Capitol Hill lawmakers and staff members as it faces tighter federal safety legislation, employing a tactic untouched by the Democrats' new ethics proposals: lobbying by congressional family members. The new Democratic Congress is working on the first overhaul of railroad-safety laws in 13 years. Long attuned to Republican control, railroad companies are now working to keep their GOP allies but also hiring Democratic lobbyists. Days after Jennifer Esposito became majority staff director of the House transportation panel's subcommittee on railroads, her father, Sante Esposito, and brother Michael Esposito signed up as railway lobbyists. Rep. Daniel Lipinski (D-Illinois) has just taken a seat on the subcommittee, and in the coming weeks, the railroad industry trade association said, his father and predecessor in Congress, William O. Lipinski (D-Illinois), will register as a railroad lobbyist, too. The new lobbyists join Bud Shuster (R-Pennsylvania), a former congressman and chairman of the transportation committee who lobbies for railroads and whose son, Rep. Bill Shuster (R-Pennsylvania), also has just joined the railroads subcommittee. Read The Full Story Veterans Group Speaks Out Bluntly On Iraq War 2007-02-08 02:47:38 When Iraq war veteran Jon Soltz accused Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) of "aiding the enemy," the Democratic senators gathered around him Wednesday did not wince. Nor did Democrats object when Soltz, the chairman of a group called VoteVets.org, called President Bush and Vice President Cheney "draft dodgers". In the United States Congress, where decorum usually holds sway, Soltz and his small band of veterans are saying things many Democrats would like to express but can't. And as the politics heat up over the Iraq war, Democratic leaders increasingly are being drawn to Soltz and his angry soldiers. VoteVets.org appears to be the most active group trying to influence the debate about the president's plan to send 21,500 more troops to Iraq. Last month, it dispatched veterans to the home states of Republican senators waffling over resolutions on the war. Next, it ran a stark television ad on Super Bowl Sunday that drew national attention. And this week, group members crisscrossed Capitol Hill, trying to persuade lawmakers and their staffs to oppose the troop increase. Their efforts are supported by a coalition of liberal groups that blocked the president's 2005 plan to privatize Social Security, but this new campaign could prove more difficult. Read The Full Story Few Veteran Diplomats Accept Mission To Iraq 2007-02-08 02:46:52 While the diplomats and Foreign Service employees of the State Department have always been expected to staff “hardship” postings, those jobs have not usually required that they wear flak jackets with their pinstriped suits. In the last five years, the Foreign Service landscape has shifted. Now, thanks to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the White House is calling for more American civilians to head not only to those countries, but also to some of their most hostile regions - including Iraq’s volatile Anbar Province - to try to establish democratic institutions and help in reconstruction. That plan is provoking unease and apprehension at the State Department and at other federal agencies. Read The Full Story Heaviest Snowfall In Years Threatens To Paralyze Britain 2007-02-08 02:46:12 The heaviest snow for years will have fallen on much of England and Wales Thursday morning causing misery and chaos for commuters on roads, trains and at airports. Drivers were told only to venture out Thursday if their journeys were absolutely essential as the hazardous wintry conditions transformed roads into skating rinks and iced up train tracks. Snow, which is expected to fall for several hours in many areas, could be up to 15 centimeters (6 inches) deep in hilly areas of Wales and the Midlands and between 2 centimeters and 5 centimeters deep in London and the southeast, the Met Office warned. Rain was more likely close to southern coasts and across most of Devon and Cornwall. In parts of Wales, the wind chill temperature could fall to as low as -15 degrees Celsius (5 degrees above zero Fahrenheit). Conditions in the Brecon Beacons were expected to be particularly poor for motorists. People working outdoors for prolonged periods were warned to wear sufficient clothing or run the risk of frostbite. Overnight temperatures could have plunged to as low as -7C in places and Thursday's daytime temperatures are likely to remain only a couple of degrees above freezing. Read The Full Story NBC's Tim Russert Rebuts Libby Testimony In Leak Case 2007-02-07 20:26:22 Tim Russert, the Washington bureau chief for NBC News, this afternoon swiftly but firmly rejected I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's assertion that the journalist revealed the identity of undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame to him. Testifying as the final, and perhaps most critical, prosecution witness in Libby's perjury trial, Russert recounted a telephone call he received from Libby during the second week in July. He said that Vice President Cheney's then-chief of staff sounded "very agitated" and complained about broadcasts on one of NBC's cable stations, MSNBC. Under questioning by Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald that lasted just 12 minutes, Russert said he never told Libby about Plame. "That would be impossible," Russert told the jury solemnly in his familiar deep voice, "because I didn't know who that person was until several days later." Asked whether Russert told Cheney's aide that "all the reporters know that," as Libby contends, Russert replied: "No. I wouldn't do that." Read The Full Story 3 U.S. Army Reserve Officers, 2 Civilians Indicted In Iraq Kickback Scheme 2007-02-07 20:25:46 A grand jury indicted three Army Reserve officers and two civilians Wednesday on charges they steered more than $8.6 million in Iraqi reconstruction funds to a contractor in exchange for kickbacks that included vehicles, jewelry and real estate. The 25-count indictment, which includes conspiracy, bribery and money-laundering charges, is the latest development in a wave of criminal charges stemming from the alleged fraudulent use of U.S. funds in Iraq. "This indictment alleges that the defendants flagrantly enriched themselves at the expense of the Iraqi people - the very people they were there to help," U.S. Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty said in a news release. Read The Full Story U.S. Officer's Court Martial Ends In Mistrial 2007-02-07 20:25:18 A judge declared a mistrial Wednesday in the court-martial of an Army lieutenant who refused to deploy to Iraq, saying the soldier did not fully understand a document he signed admitting to elements of the charges. Prosecutors said 1st Lt. Ehren Watada admitted in the document that he had a duty to go to Iraq with his fellow soldiers. Watada, however, said he admitted only that he did not go to Iraq with his unit, not that he had a duty to go. Military judge Lt. Col. John Head granted prosecutors' request for a mistrial, which Watada's lawyer opposed. He set a March 12 date for a new trial and dismissed the jurors. Watada, 28, of Honolulu, had been expected to testify in his own defense Wednesday until Head and attorneys met in a closed meeting for much of the morning. Read The Full Story Legacy Of Radiation Illness Raises Objections To New Nevada Bomb Test 2007-02-07 02:41:14 When the baby boomers of St. George, Utah, were children, radioactive ash from nuclear test explosions in Nevada regularly drifted toward the red bluffs of their town and fell like snow. They played in it and wrote their names in it on car windows. The federal government reassured the townspeople they were in no danger as it detonated 952 bombs in Nevada over four decades. Yet thousands of people who lived downwind of the test site got radiation-related cancer, and the town of 50,000 has its own cancer-treatment center today. So when word got out recently that the government wants to test a huge conventional bomb in Nevada, sending a mushroom cloud thousands of feet in the air, people in St. George felt an unwelcome blast from the past. At a series of emotional meetings last month in Las Vegas, Nevada, St. George and Salt Lake City, Utah, and the Idaho capital of Boise, people who live downwind of the Nevada Test Site expressed fear that if the government goes ahead with its code-named "Divine Strake" test, radioactive dust from previous tests will blow their way. Read The Full Story U.S. Declines To Join Accord On Secret Detentions, 57 Nations Sign It 2007-02-07 02:39:06 Representatives from 57 countries on Tuesday signed a long-negotiated treaty prohibiting governments from holding people in secret detention. The United States declined to endorse the document, saying its text did not meet U.S. expectations. Louise Arbour, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, said the treaty was "a message to all modern-day authorities committed to the fight against terrorism" that some practices are "not acceptable". In Washington, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack declined to comment, except to say that the United States helped draft the treaty but that the final wording "did not meet our expectations" Read The Full Story Bremer Spars With Democrats Over Iraq Spending 2007-02-07 02:37:24 House Democrats criticized former Iraq occupation administrator L. Paul Bremer Tuesday for disbursing nearly $9 billion in Iraqi oil revenue without instituting accounting systems to track more carefully how Iraqi officials were using that money. In a five-hour hearing, Democratic members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee probed whether the money, which was provided to Iraqi government agencies to pay salaries and fund other operations in 2003 and 2004, was spent properly. The Democrats cited an audit conducted two years ago by the special inspector general for Iraq's reconstruction that found that Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) engaged in "less than adequate" managerial and financial control of the money. The funds were provided to the Iraqis in cash, often in shrink-wrapped packages of $100 bills. The committee's chairman, Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-California), said the U.S. government flew nearly $12 billion in cash into Baghdad on military cargo planes from May 2003 to June 2004. "Who in their right mind would send 363 tons of cash into a war zone? But that's exactly what our government did," said Waxman. Because of the way the CPA kept track of the payments, said Waxman, "we have no way of knowing whether the cash shipped into the Green Zone ended up in enemy hands." Read The Full Story	Editorial: Mr. Bush's Improbable Budget 2007-02-08 02:47:51 Intellpuke: The following editorial appears in the New York Times edition for Thursday, February 8, 2007. The editorial, which calls Mr. Bush's budget a sham, follows: President Bush claims that his new $2.9 trillion budget request is a tough-minded plan for balancing the books by 2012. In reality, it’s a smokescreen for making Mr. Bush’s tax cuts permanent - and either hollowing out the government in the process or digging the country deeper into debt. The budget is based on a series of improbable, if not dishonest, assumptions. To make it appear as if the tax cuts are affordable in the near term, it assumes that the Pentagon will not spend a single penny on Iraq or Afghanistan after 2009. It also assumes there will be no costs for fixing the alternative minimum tax after this year, even though Mr. Bush and virtually every politician in America is committed to such relief. The new budget would also slash key entitlement programs and punish many of the country’s most vulnerable citizens. Sharp reductions are envisioned for Medicare, with cuts of $66 billion over five years, and Medicaid, down approximately $11 billion. Some of the Medicare proposals could serve as useful starting points for a debate on controlling costs through such steps as raising premiums for high-income beneficiaries. But the Medicaid cuts would be largely counterproductive. At a time when the number of uninsured children is rising, the cuts would force many states to reduce their Medicaid rolls. Read The Full Story 7 GOP Senators Back War Debate 2007-02-08 02:47:23 Senate Republicans who earlier this week helped block deliberations on a resolution opposing President Bush's new troop deployments in Iraq changed course Wednesday and vowed to use every tactic at their disposal to ensure a full and open debate. In a letter distributed yesterday evening to Senate leaders, John W. Warner (Virginia), Chuck Hagel (Nebraska) and five other GOP supporters of the resolution threatened to attach their measure to any bill sent to the floor in the coming weeks. Noting that the war is the "most pressing issue of our time," the senators declared: "We will explore all of our options under the Senate procedures and practices to ensure a full and open debate." The letter sent to Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nevada) and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) was not more specific about the Republican senators' strategy for reviving the war debate. Under the Senate's rules, senators have wide latitude in slowing the progress of legislation and in offering amendments, regardless of whether they have anything to do with the bill. Read The Full Story Rice: Military Must Fill Civilian Jobs In Iraq 2007-02-08 02:46:40 Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told Congress Wednesday that more than 40 percent of nearly 300 State Department positions to be added in Iraq as part of President Bush's new strategy will have to be filled by military personnel. "Frankly, the agencies of the U.S. government cannot fill that many posts" as quickly as necessary, Rice said at a hearing of the House Foreign Relations Committee Wednesday morning. "And so our agreement with the Department of Defense was that for a period of time ... we would actually use reservists to fill those positions." The State Department has asked the Pentagon for 129 people to fill slots in "business development, agribusiness, medicine, city management" and other areas for 10 new provincial reconstruction teams (PRTs), according to David Satterfield, Rice's coordinator for Iraq, who spoke to reporters in an afternoon briefing. Read The Full Story 7 Killed As U.S. Military Helicopter Crashes In Iraq 2007-02-07 20:26:39 Seven people were killed Wednesday when a Marine transport helicopter crashed into an insurgent-heavy region northwest of Baghdad. It was the fifth American military helicopter to crash or be shot down since mid-January. Military officials are growing increasingly concerned that Iraqi insurgents are successfully adapting their tactics to be more effective against American aircraft. Some Iraqis who saw the helicopter crash said it appeared to have been shot down but, according to news reports, military officials suggested that the crash was probably caused by a mechanical failure. The aircraft was a CH-46 Sea Knight, a large transport helicopter that is easily distinguished by its twin rotors, one mounted near the cockpit and one on a tall structure at the tail. It can carry more than two dozen passengers and crew. The military said that seven people were aboard the helicopter that went down Wednesday and that all seven were killed, but did not identify the victims or say how many were American service members. Read The Full Story Major International Child Pornography Ring Uncovered In Austria 2007-02-07 20:26:03 Austrian authorities said Wednesday they have uncovered a major international child pornography ring involving more than 2,360 suspects from 77 countries, including hundreds in the United States, who paid to view videos of young children being sexually abused. The children were under the age of 14 and screams could be heard, said Harald Gremel, an Austrian police expert on Internet crime who headed the investigation. Interior Minister Guenther Platter said the FBI was investigating about 600 of the suspects in the United States. German authorities were following leads on another 400 people, France was looking into about 100 others, and at least 23 suspects were Austrians, he said. Platter said videos downloaded from the Internet and seized by Austria's Federal Criminal Investigations Bureau included images that showed "the worst kind of child sexual abuse". Gremel said "girls could be seen being raped, and you could also hear screams". Although officials initially said the children ranged in ages from "0 to 14," Gremel later said no infants were seen in the videos. Read The Full Story Kansas City Chemical Plant Explodes 2007-02-07 20:25:32 Several explosions engulfed a chemical plant in flames Wednesday, forcing a broad evacuation as the fire spewed a sticky substance that residents were warned not to touch. There were no immediate reports of injuries, but Kansas City police were busy driving up and down nearby streets warning that more explosions were expected at the Chemcentral Corp. facility, which stores and distributes various chemicals and solvents. Fire Chief Richard Dyer said officials were evacuating people within a one-mile radius, including about 500 residents, and were going door-to-door to get people out. Read The Full Story Grand Jury Tapes Bolster Case Against Libby, Describe Cheney As 'Upset' With Wilson 2007-02-07 02:41:30 Vice President Cheney and other senior White House officials regarded a former ambassador's accusations that President Bush misled the nation in going to war in Iraq as an unparalleled political assault and, early in the summer of 2003, held daily discussions about how to debunk them, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby told a federal grand jury. In grand jury audiotapes played Tuesday during Libby's perjury trial, the vice president's then-chief of staff said Cheney had been "upset" and "disturbed" by criticisms from former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV that Bush had twisted intelligence to justify the war. And Libby said that Karl Rove had been "animated" by a conversation with Robert D. Novak, in which the conservative columnist told Rove he "had a bad taste in his mouth" about Wilson and was writing a column about him. Libby is charged with lying to the grand jury as it investigated a leak by administration officials of the identity of Wilson's wife, an undercover CIA officer named Valerie Plame. The sound of Libby's clear, measured voice in the tapes - filling a courtroom in U.S. District Court here for six hours over the past two days - buttresses the prosecution's case in two significant ways. Libby's portrayal of the zeal to discredit Wilson's claims, reaching to the White House's highest echelons, reinforces Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald's assertion that the criticism of war provoked such a political crisis among Bush's top aides that it is unlikely the defendant simply forgot his role in the leak, as defense attorneys contend. Read The Full Story Military Wants More Civilians To Help In Iraq 2007-02-07 02:40:57 Senior military officers, including members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have told President Bush and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates that the new Iraq strategy could fail unless more civilian agencies step forward quickly to carry out plans for reconstruction and political development. The complaints reflect fresh tensions between the Pentagon and the State Department over personnel demands that have fallen most heavily on the military. They also draw on a deeper reservoir of concerns among officers who have warned that a military buildup alone cannot solve Iraq’s problems, and who now fear that the military will bear a disproportionate burden if Bush’s strategy falls short. Among particular complaints, the officers cited a request from the office of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice  that military personnel temporarily fill more than one-third of 350 new State Department jobs in Iraq that are to be created under the new strategy. At a Senate hearing on Tuesday, Gates made clear that he shared the officers’ concerns, telling senators, “If you were troubled by the memo, that was mild compared to my reaction when I saw it.” Read The Full Story Detained Saudis Described As Democracy Activists 2007-02-07 02:37:58 Saudi police have arrested 10 men and accused them of collecting donations to fund terrorist acts outside the kingdom, said the Interior Ministry, but a lawyer and a prominent dissident said that at least seven of the men are Saudi democracy activists whose arrest was a government attempt to abort their civic rights work. Matrouk al-Faleh, who was jailed in 2004 for calling for more democracy in the kingdom, said the seven men, most of them lawyers and professors, had been waiting for government approval to set up a civic rights group. They also had planned to present authorities this week with a list of more than 40 prisoners without legal representation whom they intended to defend. "The terrorist allegation is a coverup," said Faleh. "It was used against me as well when I was arrested. ... This is an attempt to abort the civic rights work they were planning." 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