Free Internet Press Newsletter - Saturday March 3 2007 - (813)

Saturday March 3 2007 edition
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U.S. Secretary Of The Army Resigns Amid Walter Reed Controversy 2007-03-02 18:39:33 The Secretary of the Army, Francis J. Harvey, resigned Friday amid the fallout over revelations of shabby conditions at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, once considered the very symbol of fine medical care for military men and women. A grim-faced Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates announced Harvey’s resignation at the Pentagon this afternoon, only hours after President Bush ordered a top-to-bottom investigation into the medical care available to returning veterans. The White House move came a day after the firing of the two-star general in charge of Walter Reed. Gates said he was “disappointed that some in the Army have not adequately appreciated the seriousness of the situation pertaining to outpatient care at Walter Reed.” Then he said he was reversing a move announced just a day earlier by Harvey, and that by late Friday Walter Reed would have a new permanent commander. “This flagship institution must have its new leadership in place as quickly as possible,” said Gates. Read The Full Story U.S. Markets End Week On A Down Note 2007-03-02 18:38:45 Stocks extended their slump Friday, finishing their worst week since January 2003. Share prices on the New York Stock Exchange opened modestly lower and continued to decline during the day. At the close, the Dow Jones industrial average was down 120.24 points, or 1 percent, to 12,114.10. The broader Standard and Poor’s 500-stock index fell 16 points, or 1.1 percent, to 1,387.17, and the Nasdaq composite index dropped 36.21 points, or 1.5 percent, to 2,368. So what is bothering investors this week? No one thing in particular and yet everything. From a slowing American economy to a faltering mortgage market and the tightening of historically easy credit, a caldron of concerns has been bubbling up over the last year and appears to have set off the wave of selling that rocked world financial markets this week. Read The Full Story UPUDATE: Tornadoes Kill At Least 17 In Southeast U.S. 2007-03-02 03:51:07 Six more tornado-related deaths were reported in Georgia early Friday, bringing to 17 the number of fatalities blamed on a storm system that blasted the central and southeastern United States. The storms killed nine people in Georgia, seven in Alabama and one in Missouri. Details of the six newly reported fatalities in Georgia early Friday were not immediately available. In southeastern Alabama, a tornado Thursday afternoon killed seven people, five of them at Enterprise High School, said spokeswoman Tasamie Richardson. Read The Full Story Is Chinese Firm Interested In Chrysler? 2007-03-02 03:49:40 When Chery Automobile cars first appeared outside of China in 2001, they were ridiculed as a cheap attempt to trick purchasers into thinking they were buying Chevy vehicles instead of Chinese knockoffs. These days, however, when industry watchers talk about the future of the auto industry, Chery's name and its lines of cute, gas-efficient cars elicit excited talk. The company has done so well - it is now the No. 1 independent automaker and auto exporter in China, with business in 30 countries - that when DaimlerChrysler announced this month that it may be interested in selling off its flailing Chrysler unit, many analysts mentioned Chery as a potential suitor. Chery spokesman Wang Wei denied any such deal was in the works, and many industry analysts in China were skeptical about a merger, citing Chery's small size and potential political hurdles. Read The Full Story Stephen Hawking Gets Ready For The Ride Of His Life 2007-03-02 03:48:55 Stephen Hawking, the British cosmologist, Cambridge professor and best-selling author who has spent his career pondering the nature of gravity from a wheelchair, says he intends to get away from it all for a little while. On April 26, Dr. Hawking, surrounded by a medical entourage, is to take a zero-gravity ride out of Cape Canaveral on a so-called vomit comet, a padded aircraft that flies a roller-coaster trajectory to produce periods of weightlessness. He is getting his lift gratis, from the Zero Gravity Corporation, which has been flying thrill seekers on a special Boeing 727-200 since 2004 at $3,500 a trip. Peter H. Diamandis, chief executive of Zero G, said that “the idea of giving the world’s expert on gravity the opportunity to experience zero gravity” was irresistible. Read The Full Story	At Least Six Dead In Team Bus Crash 2007-03-02 18:38:59 A bus carrying a college baseball team plunged nearly 30 feet off an overpass in Atlanta early Friday morning, killing at least six people and injuring three more critically, said emergency officials. The chartered bus was carrying baseball players from Bluffton University in Bluffton, Ohio, a small town south of Toledo, to an upcoming series of games in Florida. A. J. Ramthun, 18, a freshman second baseman from Springfield, Ohio, told reporters at a press conference that most of the players were asleep in their seats when the bus ploughed through a guard rail and landed on its side across the southbound lanes of Interstate 75, a major through route. He said the sound of the crash woke him up. “I looked out and saw the ground coming up after me,” said Ramthun. The window next to his seat shattered in the crash, spraying his face with glass, he said. Read The Full Story Widespread Storm Causes Death In 3 States 2007-03-02 18:38:28 A violent storm system that stretched nearly 1,000 miles from the Midwest to the Southeast has killed at least 20 people in three states, including 8 who died when what appeared to be a tornado caused the roof to collapse at a high school in Enterprise, Alabama on Thursday, state emergency management officials said. At least 31 tornados have been reported over the last two days in Missouri, Illinois, Alabama, Georgia and Florida, the National Weather Servicereported. The storm system has been blamed for nine deaths in Alabama, two in Georgia and one in Missouri. A tornado apparently touched down early today near the Sumter Regional Hospital in Americus, 117 miles south of Atlanta. The storm blew out the hospital’s windows, tossed cars into trees and killed at least two people, but the extent of the damage remained unclear. Read The Full Story How The President Saw The Light And Changed Foreign Policy 2007-03-02 03:50:45 It is being called George Bush's Come to Jesus moment. As in the midlife realisation that led Mr Bush to give up alcohol and embrace Christianity, the president in his sixth year in the White House has undergone another radical conversion, abandoning an ideological foreign policy for a more pragmatic approach, foreign policy experts say. Within the space of two weeks, the Bush administration has made dramatic steps towards diplomatic engagement of two countries once shunned as part of the Axis of Evil - agreeing to contacts with Iran and opening the door to recognition of North Korea. In Washington, the shift was seen Thursday as a belated acknowledgement that the administration's approach to the world - on Iraq, nuclear weapons proliferation, and Middle East peace - was not just ineffective, but dangerous. "The main thing was that there was a sense that American foreign policy was spinning out of control. The administration was looking at one series of failures after another and these were really beginning to damage national security," said James Steinberg, who served as a deputy national security adviser in the Clinton administration and now heads the Lyndon Johnson school of public affairs in Texas. Read The Full Story U.S. Paper Mills Want To Limit Chinese Imports 2007-03-02 03:49:21 For years the residents of this economically distressed hollow in the Appalachians have watched textile mills, glass factories and tire makers close down one after the other. Now its lone remaining big factory - “the last man standing,” as the production manager at the paper mill here put it - is threatened by imports of cheaper paper made in China. “We’re still the economic engine for this whole area,” said Scott Graham, the production manager, referring to the river valley and forested hills surrounding the mill. “But our operations cannot compete with these below-cost imports.” It is a familiar story in the struggle of the American industrial base to cope with globalization, but this one may have a different ending. The problems of paper mills here and elsewhere around the country have become a test case for a possible new confrontation between the United States and China, which many industry officials and members of Congress hope could lead to new tariffs on imports not only of Chinese-made paper but also of steel, furniture, textiles and plastics. Read The Full Story
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