Free Internet Press Newsletter - Sunday March 25 2007 - (813)

Sunday March 25 2007 edition
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7.1 Earthquake Hits Japan, 1 Dead, 110 Injured 2007-03-25 01:33:00 A powerful, deadly earthquake struck Japan early Sunday, killing at least one person and injuring 110 others as it violently shook buildings and triggered a small tsunami that hit the coast, said officials and media reports. The magnitude-7.1 quake struck at 9:42 a.m. local time off the north coast of Ishikawa prefecture (state), Japan's Meteorological Agency said, about 225 miles northwest of Tokyo. The agency issued a tsunami warning urging people near the sea to move to higher land. A small tsunami measuring 6 inches hit shore about 40 minutes after the quake, said the agency. The warning was lifted about an hour later. At least one person was killed and 110 others injured along the country's Sea of Japan coast, media reports said. Read The Full Story Seized British Sailors Face Prosecution After Iran Claims 'Confession' 2007-03-25 01:32:37 Iran defiantly rebuffed international demands Saturday for the release of 15 seized British naval personnel, claiming that the sailors and Royal Marines had confessed to entering its waters in an illegal act of aggression, and were now to be prosecuted in the Iranian capital. Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesman, Mohammad Ali Hosseini, claimed in a statement that the Britons were engaged "in illegal and suspicious" activities, suggesting that Iran might claim they were spying. Iran, the U.S. and the U.K. have been involved in a tit-for-tat round of accusations. Washington and London accuse Iran of widespread interference in Iraq, including the supply of weapons that have resulted in the deaths of soldiers serving in the multinational forces there. Read The Full Story We Failed, Says Pro-War Iraqi 2007-03-25 01:32:09 Kanan Makiya, an Iraqi exile under Saddam and a key intellectual inspiration for the U.S. policy of "regime change" in Iraq, has admitted he failed to foresee the consequences for his country of the invasion four years ago. In an interview in Saturday's New York Times, Makiya, author of "Republic of Fear", the book that brought the brutality of Saddam Hussein's regime to international attention, concedes he allowed his own "activism" to sway his judgment and launched a scathing denunciation of U.S. policy after the fall of Baghdad, and of Iraq's new leadership. In the week of the invasion's fourth anniversary, the voice that cried loudest for the toppling of Saddam described the day of Saddam's execution "as one of the worst" of his life. "It was a disaster, an unmitigated disaster," said Makiya. "I was just so upset, even on the verge of tears. It was the antithesis of everything I had been working for. Just like everything about the war, it was an opportunity wasted." He catalogued the errors - including his own - that led to the present bloodbath. It is all a remarkable change of tone for the man who was once a friend of Ahmed Chalabi, has been praised in public by Vice President Dick Cheney and is highly regarded by anti-Saddam Iraqi democrats. Read The Full Story U.N. Back Tighter Sanctions On Iran 2007-03-25 01:30:31 The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously Saturday to approve a resolution that bans all Iranian arms exports and freezes some of the financial assets of 28 Iranian individuals and entities linked to Iran's military and nuclear agencies. The 15 to 0 vote came one day after President Mahmoud Admadinejad canceled plans to travel to New York to confront the Security Council, leaving his foreign minister to speak in his place. It unfolded as 15 British sailors and marines seized by Iranian naval forces were transferred to Tehran, escalating diplomatic tensions between the two countries. The 15-nation panel imposed the latest sanctions in response to Iran's refusal to abide by repeated U.N. demands to stop its most sensitive nuclear activities, including the enrichment of uranium and the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel. The council also threatened to impose new penalties on Tehran after 60 days if it fails to stop its nuclear activities and provide verifiable assurance that it is not secretly pursuing a nuclear weapon. Read The Full Story Several Injured As 15 Tornadoes Hit New Mexico, Northern Texas 2007-03-24 15:00:28 At least 15 tornadoes swept along the New Mexico-Texas state line, destroying homes and other buildings and injuring several people, two of them critically, authorities said. The worst damage from Friday's storms was in the towns of Logan and Clovis, which are about 80 miles apart, said police. Clovis had a narrow path of damage about 3 miles long, where several motor homes were destroyed, three schools were damaged and businesses had lost windows, police Lt. James Schoeffel said Saturday. "There's lots of destruction," he said. "It's quite an expensive strip of damage." Read The Full Story Egypt Rebuffs U.N. Chief On Darfur 2007-03-24 15:00:02 Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak rebuffed a request today from United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to influence Sudan's president to drop his objections to U.N. peacekeepers in Darfur. At a morning meeting with the Egyptian president in Cairo, Ban said he had asked for help in changing the mind of the Sudanese leader, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who has been defying United Nations requests to put troops into Darfur to help the overwhelmed African Union mission there. Government and rebel violence in Darfur has left 200,000 people dead and 2.5 million displaced. Read The Full Story Gonzales Met With Top Aides On Firings 2007-03-24 01:31:30 Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales met with senior aides on Nov. 27 to review a plan to fire a group of U.S. attorneys, according to documents released last night, a disclosure that contradicts Gonzales' previous statement that he was not involved in "any discussions" about the dismissals. Justice Department officials also announced last night that the department's inspector general and its Office of Professional Responsibility have launched a joint investigation into the firings, including an examination of whether any of the removals were improper and whether any Justice officials misled Congress about them. The hour-long November meeting in the attorney general's conference room included Gonzales, Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty and four other senior Justice officials, including the Gonzales aide who coordinated the firings, then-Chief of Staff D. Kyle Sampson, records show. Documents detailing the previously undisclosed meeting appear to conflict with remarks by Gonzales at a March 13 news conference in which he portrayed himself as a CEO who had delegated to Sampson responsibility for the particulars of firing eight U.S. attorneys. Read The Full Story Judge Rules Agains Vonage On Patents 2007-03-24 01:30:59 A federal judge Friday dealt a potentially fatal blow to Vonage Holdings, the Internet-phone service that offers one of the few alternatives to traditional carriers, by ordering it to stop using a technology that connects its network to the public telephone system. U.S. District Judge Claude Hilton approved the request by Verizon Communications for a permanent injunction two weeks after a jury in Alexandria, Virginia, found that three of its patents had been infringed by Vonage, including one for the technology allowing the Internet company's 2.2 million customers to call regular phones. Hilton said the ban would not take effect before he holds another hearing in two weeks on Vonage's request for reprieve through a stay. The company said customers will not be affected by the court's decision, although analysts are skeptical the company will be able to sustain service if the ruling is not overturned. Read The Full Story Russia Supreme Court Bans Liberal Party, Eliminating Opposition To Putin 2007-03-24 01:30:06 Russia's next parliament is likely to have no genuine opposition after a court in Moscow Friday banned a leading liberal party from standing in elections. Russia's supreme court announced that it had liquidated the small Republican party, claiming that it had violated electoral law by having too few members. The party is one of very few left in Russia that criticizes President Vladimir Putin. The move against Russia's opposition came as pro-democracy activists prepared for the latest in a series of anti-government rallies that have infuriated Russia's hardline authorities. Hundreds of demonstrators are expected to gather Saturday in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia's fourth biggest city. The protesters from The Other Russia, a coalition of opposition groups, are expected to march despite attempts by pro-Kremlin officials to prevent them from demonstrating. Read The Full Story	7.2 and 6.0 Quakes Shake Vanuatu In South Pacific 2007-03-25 01:32:50 Two strong earthquakes struck the South Pacific island nation of Vanuatu on Sunday and a tsunami warning was issued for some of its southern islands, said police. There were no immediate reports of injuries or damage in the capital, Port Vila. Australia's Emergency Management Office warned the powerful quakes could generate a tsunami, said police spokesman Capt. Arnold Giro. "We are moving (coastal) communities to higher ground" on the southern islands, he said. "We have advised the islands to be alert for a possible tsunami." Read The Full Story More Records And Questions About Gonzales' Role In Prosecutor Firings 2007-03-25 01:32:22 An accumulating body of evidence is at odds with the statements of U.S. Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales  that he played little role in the deliberations over the dismissal of eight United States attorneys.  Gonzales has said he did not take part in any discussions of the dismissal effort, and left the planning and execution of the removals up to D. Kyle Sampson, his former chief of staff. But e-mail messages and other documents released by the Justice Department in recent days suggest that  Gonzales was told of the dismissal plan on at least two occasions, in 2005 when the plan was devised and again in late 2006 shortly before the firings were carried out. The conflicts between the documentary record and Gonzales’ version of events have contributed to an erosion of support for him in Congress, where lawmakers from both parties have called for him to step down. They have also fed suspicions by some Democrats that the ousters, from the start, may have been orchestrated by the White House, and most particularly, by Karl Rove, the White House political adviser. Read The Full Story U.S. Database On Terror Evokes Secrecy, Error And Privacy Fears 2007-03-25 01:30:51 Each day, thousands of pieces of intelligence information from around the world - field reports, captured documents, news from foreign allies and sometimes idle gossip - arrive in a computer-filled office in McLean, Virginia, where analysts feed them into the nation's central list of terrorists and terrorism suspects. Called TIDE, for Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, the list is a storehouse for data about individuals that the intelligence community believes might harm the United States. It is the wellspring for watch lists distributed to airlines, law enforcement, border posts and U.S. consulates, created to close one of the key intelligence gaps revealed after Sept. 11, 2001: the failure of federal agencies to share what they knew about al-Qaeda operatives. In addressing one problem, TIDE has spawned others. Ballooning from fewer than 100,000 files in 2003 to about 435,000, the growing database threatens to overwhelm the people who manage it. "The single biggest worry that I have is long-term quality control," said Russ Travers, in charge of TIDE at the National Counterterrorism Center in McLean. "Where am I going to be, where is my successor going to be, five years down the road?" Read The Full Story New Mexico Towns Clean Up After 16 Tornadoes 2007-03-25 01:29:58 When she awoke Saturday, Andrea McLaren found that a stretch of the eastern New Mexico city she calls home had been obliterated by a tornado that flattened houses, snapped telephone poles and even heaved a trailer through a bowling alley. The tornado was one of 16 that moved through communities along the New Mexico-Texas border late Friday and early Saturday, leaving two people critically injured. Residents said Saturday that the cleanup effort could take months. "Pretty much everything was pushed together like toy cars," McLaren said by telephone from Clovis, New Mexico.  "We've been picking up debris the whole day. ... Clean up and assess the damage, that's all we can do." The worst damage was reported in Clovis and the village of Logan about 80 miles to the north, said state officials. Read The Full Story 47 Killed In Iraq Bombings, 20 In Baghdad 2007-03-24 15:00:18 A suicide bomber driving a truck carrying explosives hidden under construction materials on Saturday was waved through a checkpoint at a heavily fortified police compound in southern Baghdad, where he detonated his payload, killing at least 20 people, said an Interior Ministry official. The attack was the deadliest of a wave of suicide bombings around Iraq on Saturday that killed at least 47 people, many of them policemen, said the authorities. Despite the infusion of American and Iraqi troops to Baghdad this year, suicide bombings, a hallmark of the Sunni Arab-led insurgency, have been rising. Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, the top spokesman for the United States military in Iraq, said last week that the number of car bombs in Baghdad reached a record high of 44 in February, out of 77 nationwide. Read The Full Story Britain To Iran: Free Our Sailors 2007-03-24 01:31:39 Britain Friday demanded the return of 15 sailors and marines seized by the Iranian navy in a channel separating Iraq and Iran. Iran's ambassador to London, Rasoul Movahedian, was summoned to the Foreign Office and asked for an explanation of the incident, in which a British patrol conducting a routine search of traffic in the Shatt al-Arab waterway was surrounded by Iranian vessels and detained. Margaret Beckett, the foreign secretary, said the British patrol had been inside Iraqi waters "in support of the government of Iraq to stop smuggling" and that the Iranian envoy "was left in no doubt that we want them back". Read The Full Story 9 Die As Assassins' Blasts Wound Iraq's Deputy Premier 2007-03-24 01:31:14 An assassination attempt on one of Iraq's deputy prime ministers, a Sunni in the Shiite-dominated government, left nine people dead Friday and was another in the mounting number of cases of Sunni-on-Sunni violence. The deputy prime minister, Salam al-Zubaie, received chest wounds from shrapnel when one of his Sunni guards blew himself up as Zubaie led midday prayers in a prayer room attached to his house. Within minutes, a car bomb blew up outside Zubaie’s house, apparently part of a twofold attempt on his life, according to an account by Interior Ministry officials and members of the Iraqi Islamic Party, a leading Sunni political group. Read The Full Story Detectives On Woolmer Murder Case Investigate Match-Fixing Theory 2007-03-24 01:30:38 Detectives investigating the murder of Pakistan's cricket coach, Bob Woolmer, say they are actively pursuing the possibility that match-fixing of one or more of the World Cup games may have provided the motive for his killing. They confirmed last night that they are collaborating with a senior official from the International Cricket Council's anti-corruption unit to investigate speculation that Woolmer may have been intending to expose foul play. They are also investigating rumors that the coach was involved in a dispute with some of his players on their return from Saturday's Ireland game and said they would be interviewing security personnel who had been on the team bus. Read The Full Story
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