Free Internet Press Newsletter - Thursday March 22 2007 - (813)

Thursday March 22 2007 edition
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Prosecutor Says Bush Officials Interfered With Tobacco Case 2007-03-22 01:27:49 The leader of the Justice Department team that prosecuted a landmark lawsuit against tobacco companies said Wednesday that Bush administration political appointees repeatedly ordered her to take steps that weakened the government's racketeering case. Sharon Y. Eubanks said Bush loyalists in Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales's office began micromanaging the team's strategy in the final weeks of the 2005 trial, to the detriment of the government's claim that the industry had conspired to lie to U.S. smokers. She said a supervisor demanded that she and her trial team drop recommendations that tobacco executives be removed from their corporate positions as a possible penalty. He and two others instructed her to tell key witnesses to change their testimony. And they ordered Eubanks to read verbatim a closing argument they had rewritten for her, she said. "The political people were pushing the buttons and ordering us to say what we said," Eubanks said. "And because of that, we failed to zealously represent the interests of the American public." Read The Full Story Substandard Conditions At V.A. Centers Noted 2007-03-22 01:27:09 A review by the Department of Veterans Affairs of 1,400 hospitals and other veterans care facilities released yesterday has turned up more than 1,000 reports of substandard conditions - from leaky roofs and peeling paint to bug and bat infestations - as well as a smaller number of potential threats to patient safety, such as suicide risks in psychiatric wards. The investigation, ordered March 7 by V.A. Secretary Jim Nicholson, found problems such as rugs loaded with bacteria from patient "accidents," ceiling and floor tiles with asbestos that needs to be removed, as well as exposed pipes and other fixtures from which mental patients could hang themselves. "We are committed to being upfront in identifying issues, and we are managing to correct them," said Louise Van Diepen, chief of staff of V.A.'s Veterans Health Administration. "I am pleased that we are managing it aggressively, and most represented wear-and-tear issues, as opposed to the Walter Reed situation," Van Diepen said, referring to the squalid conditions at an outpatient-care building at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, which prompted the V.A. review. Read The Full Story NASA Grounds Its Ideas Factory For Lack Of Funds 2007-03-22 01:26:35 In almost 20 years of research, it has been the home of some of the most daring ideas to aid exploration: space elevators, crops that could grow on Mars and a shield to protect our planet from global warming. But now NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) has fallen victim to a very down-to-earth problem - a lack of money. The U.S. space agency is set to close its futuristic ideas factory as part of a cost-cutting exercise which it hopes will help pay for ambitious plans to explore the moon and Mars. Bobby Mitchell, who works at NIAC's headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, told the Guardian: "From what I understand, NASA are out of money. We haven't got an official notice yet but we have heard from NASA that they are going to discontinue funding." Former NASA scientist Keith Cowing said the decision to close NIAC was "just plain stupid". Writing on his NASA Watch website, he directed comments to NASA's administrator, Mike Griffin: "Advanced spacesuits .. will open the surface of the moon - and then Mars - to meaningful and productive human exploration. Where are you going to get all of the things you need to put on those Ares rockets so as to allow their crews to carry out their missions, Mike? Or do you 'just need a good map'? Explorers without the right tools die - or turn around - and head back home. Wrong answer, Mike." Read The Full Story Charts Found In Bookshop Cast Doubt On Britain's Claim To Discovering Australia 2007-03-22 01:25:48 When James Cook thought he had discovered Australia and claimed it for the crown in the 18th century, he was late to the party. Another English explorer had been decades ahead in sighting the great southern land, while Dutch explorers had been charting the continent even earlier. New evidence has emerged to suggest that neither the English nor Dutch were the first Europeans to reach the continent during the great era of epic sea adventure and global circumnavigation. A set of maps unearthed in Australia appear to show that Captain Cook was predated by a little known Portuguese explorer, Cristovao Mendonca, who charted parts of the coastline 250 years earlier. Drawn in the early 16th century, the charts bear a close resemblance to Australia's coastline, and this coastline is marked with locations given names in Portuguese. An Australian journalist, Peter Trickett, claims he stumbled on the hand-crafted documents while browsing in a Canberra bookshop eight years ago, and says they are an accurate depiction of headlands and bays along the east coast, thus proving that Mendonca navigated the area in the 1520s. Read The Full Story Justice Department Threatened Retaliation Against Fired U.S. Attorneys If They Speak Out 2007-03-21 16:12:20 A Justice Department official threatened to take the "gloves off" and "retaliate" against the eight United States attorneys who were abruptly removed from their posts if they continued to speak publicly about the circumstances behind their dismissals, according to an email released late Monday sent to the fired prosecutors by one of their colleagues. The email, a portion of which had been discussed during a Senate judiciary hearing two weeks ago, was written by H.E. "Bud" Cummins on February 20 and sent to U.S. Attorneys Dan Bogden, John McKay, Carol Lam, David Iglesias and Paul Charlton immediately after Cummins had a somewhat heated exchange with Mike Elston, a top aide to Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, about comments Cummins had made that were published in the Washington Post on February 18. According to the Post story, Cummins had taken issue with statements made by Justice Department officials that the reasons behind his termination, and those of his colleagues, was the result of poor job performance. Cummins, the former U.S. attorney in Little Rock, Arkansas, was replaced by an aide to White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove. Read The Full Story Gore To Congress: Global Warming 'True Planetary Emergency' 2007-03-21 15:20:34 Weeks after he wowed moviegoers and Hollywood elites with his Oscar-winning documentary on global warming, Al Gore returned to Congress this morning and urged lawmakers to take drastic measures to address what he called "a true planetary emergency". He faced a far tougher audience, however, than he had at the Academy Awards. "Global warming science is uneven and evolving," said Rep. Joe L. Barton (R-Texas), the ranking minority member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Barton questioned evidence presented in Gore's hit film, "An Inconvenient Truth," and said measures Gore was recommending to curb carbon emissions "fail the common sense test - they provide little benefit at a huge cost." The former congressman, senator, vice president and 2000 Democratic presidential nominee argued that the scientific community has overwhelmingly agreed that climate change is a genuine threat. "The planet has a fever," Gore said, sounding incredulous at Barton's skepticism. "If your baby has a fever, you go to the doctor. If the doctor says, 'You have to intervene here,' you don't say, 'Well, I read a science fiction novel that says this isn't important'." Read The Full Story Charges Readied Against Reagan Aide Stockman 2007-03-21 15:19:46 Federal prosecutors are preparing to unveil criminal charges against former budget director David A. Stockman for incomplete disclosures and improper accounting practices he allegedly endorsed while at the helm of a Michigan auto parts company, according to sources familiar with the two-year investigation. Stockman, 60, famously led the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan, who once took him "to the woodshed" for privately expressing doubts about huge deficits at the same time he was selling the administration's budget to the public and federal lawmakers. A grand jury indictment sought by the office of U.S. Attorney Michael J. Garcia in Manhattan, New York, and officials at the U.S. Postal Inspection Service could be revealed as early as Monday, according to the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation continues. The sources would not confirm whether an indictment had already been returned. Read The Full Story Doctors' Ties To Drug Makers Are Put On View 2007-03-21 02:12:38 Dr. Allan Collins may be the most influential kidney specialist in the country. He is president of the National Kidney Foundation and director of a government-financed research center on kidney disease. In 2004, the year he was chosen as president-elect of the kidney foundation, the pharmaceutical company Amgen, which makes the most expensive drugs used in the treatment of kidney disease, underwrote more than $1.9 million worth of research and education programs led by Dr. Collins, according to records examined by the New York Times. In 2005, Amgen paid Dr. Collins at least $25,800, mostly in consulting and speaking fees, the records show. The payments to Dr. Collins and the research center appear in an unusual set of records. They come from Minnesota, the first of a handful of states to pass a law requiring drug makers to disclose payments to doctors. The Minnesota records are a window on the widespread financial ties between pharmaceutical companies and the doctors who prescribe and recommend their products. Patient advocacy groups and many doctors themselves have long complained that drug companies exert undue influence on doctors, but the extent of such payments has been hard to quantify. Read The Full Story E-Mails Reveal Tumult In U.S. Attorney Firings 2007-03-21 02:12:01 On the morning of Feb. 7, the day after a combative Senate hearing over the firings of eight U.S. attorneys, Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty was looking on the bright side. "Paul reports this morning that he's hearing good reports from the Committee," a senior Justice official reported in an e-mail. "In particular, Sen. Schumer's counsel told him that the issue has basically run its course." Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, traveling 5,000 miles away in Buenos Aires, did not agree. "The Attorney General is extremely upset with the stories on the US Attys this morning," a press aide wrote. "He also thought some of the DAG's statements were inaccurate." The e-mail exchange - part of about 3,000 pages of internal documents turned over to Congress this week - show a confused and divided Justice Department under siege in a political crisis largely of its own making. The crisis now threatens Gonzales's tenure as the nation's chief law enforcement official. Read The Full Story Ex-Captive In Guantanamo Runs For Office In Australia 2007-03-21 02:09:44 Mamdouh Habib cannot drink cold water. He vomits when he tries to, he said. He knows he must drink water, so he engages in vigorous exercise in order to force some lukewarm water down. He says his doctor has told him his stomach has been damaged. Habib thinks it is from having gas forced into it through some kind of tubes inserted into his rectum when he was detained and, he says, tortured in Egypt. “It made you feel like you were flying,” he said. Habib, an unemployed 51-year-old father of four, was an early case of rendition. He was seized in Pakistan in October 2001, where he has alleged that he was tortured, then bound up by tough English-speaking men in black and secretly flown to Egypt, where he was held and, by his accounts, tortured for several months, before being shipped to the American detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in April 2002. He was released from Guantanamo and returned to Australia in February 2005 without any charges filed against him, because the Bush administration did not want the torture allegations aired in court, Australian and American officials have said. Now, he is fighting back. He is running in elections on March 24 for a seat in the parliament of the state of New South Wales, whose capital is Sydney. Read The Full Story	Inspector General Details Failures Of Iraq Reconstruction 2007-03-22 01:27:32 The U.S. government was unprepared for the extensive nation-building required after it invaded Iraq, and at each juncture where it could have adjusted its efforts, it failed even to understand the problems it faced, according to the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction. In a stinging, wide-ranging assessment of U.S. reconstruction efforts, Stuart W. Bowen, Jr., said that in the days after the invasion, the Defense Department had no strategy for restoring either government institutions or infrastructure. And in the years since, other agencies joined the effort without an overall plan and without a structure in place to organize and execute a task of such magnitude. Lines of authority remained unclear in the reconstruction effort. With a demand for speed and a shortage of government personnel, much of the oversight was turned over to the contractors doing the work. There was little coordination among the various agencies. The result was a series of missed opportunities to address the unraveling situation, said Bowen. Read The Full Story Tamiflu Warning In Japan After Child Suicides And Injuries 2007-03-22 01:26:55 Concerns about the anti-flu drug Tamiflu deepened Wednesday after doctors in Japan were warned against prescribing it to teenagers because of several cases in which young patients committed suicide or harmed themselves. Japan's health ministry decided to act after a boy and a girl, both 14, fell to their deaths in suspected suicides last month and two 12-year-old boys suffered minor injuries after falling from buildings. The move is likely to fuel anxieties about Tamiflu, which is being stockpiled around the world as the best available drug to combat a bird flu epidemic. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration studied the evidence on deaths linked to the drug last November. Despite concluding that the drug should continue to be used, the U.S. and Canada have asked its manufacturer, the Swiss pharmaceutical company Roche, to warn in its labelling that Tamiflu may cause abnormal behavior. The possible side effects came to light in 2005, when 12 children died and 32 exhibited abnormal behavior, including running on to the road and falling from buildings. Read The Full Story Alaska Offers Wolf-Kill Cash 2007-03-22 01:26:15 The state is offering cash for people to kill wolves in an effort to boost a predator control program that has not met expected numbers, officials said. The incentives include offering 180 volunteer pilots and aerial gunners $150 for turning in legs of freshly killed wolves, Gov. Sarah Palin's office announced Tuesday. The state will use the left forelegs of wolves as biological specimens, said Denby Lloyd, commissioner for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, in a statement. The program, now in its fourth year and operating in five areas of the state, is designed to increase moose and caribou numbers by reducing the number of predators. Previously, the only reward was a wolf pelt that could sell for $200 to $300, a wildlife official told the Anchorage Daily News. Read The Full Story Think The Nation's Debt Doesn't Affect You? Think Again 2007-03-21 16:15:06 In addition to borrowing from the world's poorest countries, Bush & Co. are secretly confiscating your hard-earned dollars to support their out-of-control spending habits. Sometime in the next year, Congress will start going through their periodic rituals and related public relations charades in an effort to absolve themselves of any blame for raising of the federal government's debt ceiling. With Bush and cronies having added over $3 trillion dollars to the national debt, the country's credit card tab now stands at $8.8 trillion. This represents an astounding increase of over 45 percent since Bush came into office in January of 2001. And all this fiscal profligacy took place during the years when the CBO originally forecasted record surpluses of approximately $2.5 trillion. And there is no end in sight to the deficits. More alarmingly we now rely on foreigners to finance over 40 percent of this debt with the lion's share coming from the Asian central banks. In FY 2006 the current account trade deficit is on track to set yet another record, on the order of $700 billion. To put this in perspective, billionaire investor Warren Buffet points out that, "15 years ago, the U.S. had no trade deficit with China. Now, it's 200 billion dollars." He says if the country does not change course, the rest of the world could end up owning 15 trillion-dollars worth of the United States. That's equal to the value of all American stock. Read The Full Story House OKs Subpeonas For Top Bush Aides 2007-03-21 15:20:51 A House subcommittee Wednesday authorized the issuance of subpoenas for top presidential adviser Karl Rove and other White House and Justice Department aides as it investigates the firing of eight U.S. attorneys, potentially setting up a constitutional confrontation with President Bush. The House Judiciary Committee's subcommittee on commercial and administrative law passed by voice vote a motion giving the committee chairman, Rep. John Conyers, Jr., (D-Michigan), the power to issue subpoenas for five current and former officials, as well as for "unredacted documents" from the White House and Justice Department. Among the five are Rove, the deputy White House chief of staff, and Harriet E. Miers, the former White House counsel. In authorizing the subpoena power over the objections of Republican members, the subcommittee implicitly spurned an offer by Bush Tuesday to allow the officials to testify under strict conditions. The White House is demanding limits on the kinds of questions they would answer, opposes having them testify under oath and does not want their testimony to be recorded or transcribed. Read The Full Story The CBS Report That Helped 'Silent Spring' Be Heard 2007-03-21 15:20:02 Before global warming was hot and Al Gore was cool, there was Rachel Carson, the maverick marine biologist from Silver Spring, Maryland, who sounded an environmental-awareness alarm. Memories of her work return periodically to remind us how far we have come in making the world a safer place, and how far we have to go. Her 1962 manifesto "Silent Spring" - in which she envisioned a planet imperiled by pesticides - is still taught in schools and universities around the world. Each Earth Day her name is invoked as a godmother of the green movement. And now comes a screening of a 1963 "CBS Reports" episode, "The Silent Spring of Rachel Carson." There is, in the hour-long, black-and-white warning, a sort of retrospectral sense, an I-told-you-so from beyond the grave. Up against a smooth-talking scientist and befuddled bureaucrats, Carson cuts through the hazmat haze and warns that widespread use of biocidal chemicals will silence birds, still fishes and destroy innocent plant life. Read The Full Story Will Not Disclose ... or ... 2007-03-21 09:05:30 This was provided by a coworker.  The following text shows on his AMSCOT receipt. AMSCOT - You're OK with us! AMSCOT PRIVACY POLICY: WE DO NOT DISCLOSE ANY INFORMATION ABOUT OUR CUSTOMERS TO ANYONE, EXCEPT AS PERMITTED BY LAW. Read The Full Story Commentary: Why I Was Fired 2007-03-21 02:12:13 Intellpuke: The following commentary was written by David C. Iglesias, the former U.S. Attorney in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and one of the U.S. Attorney's recently fired by the Justice Department. In his commentary, which appears in the New York Times edition of Wednesday, March 21, 2007, Mr. Iglesias shares his view on why he was fired. His commentary follows: With this week’s release of more than 3,000 Justice Department e-mail messages about the dismissal of eight federal prosecutors, it seems clear that politics played a role in the ousters. Of course, as one of the eight, I’ve felt this way for some time. But now that the record is out there in black and white for the rest of the country to see, the argument that we were fired for “performance related” reasons (in the words of Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty) is starting to look more than a little wobbly. United States attorneys have a long history of being insulated from politics. Although we receive our appointments through the political process (I am a Republican who was recommended by Senator Pete Domenici), we are expected to be apolitical once we are in office. I will never forget John Ashcroft, then the attorney general, telling me during the summer of 2001 that politics should play no role during my tenure. I took that message to heart. Little did I know that I could be fired for not being political. Read The Full Story Clash Over Judge Challenges Musharraf's Rule 2007-03-21 02:11:15 When the police broke into the offices of some of Lahore's best-known lawyers in Pakistan last week, they didn't hold back. They smashed through doors and windows, tossed computers, ransacked files and beat anyone standing in their way with iron-tipped batons. "We couldn't even see them because of the tear gas, but we could hear the cries of our lawyers," said Khurram Latif Khosa, a counselor who was in the courtyard below. To Khosa, the raid was a clear message from Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf: Don't cross me. But Khosa, like lawyers across this country, is failing to heed it. In a controversy that has gripped Pakistan and poses perhaps the most serious challenge yet to Musharraf's leadership, the nation's executive and judiciary are clashing over the president's decision nearly two weeks ago to suspend the Supreme Court chief justice. Lawyers in black suits have staged almost daily protests since, as the president's political opponents joined in. The police have responded with several raids, including one on the nation's most popular television station. A major protest is expected Wednesday in the capital, Islamabad, with organizers calling for a nationwide strike. Read The Full Story Iraq Bombers Blow Up 2 Children Used As Decoys 2007-03-21 02:09:17 Insurgents detonated a bomb in a car with two children in it after using the children as decoys to get through a military checkpoint in Baghdad, an American general said Tuesday. Speaking at a news briefing at the Pentagon, Maj. Gen. Michael Barbaro, deputy director for regional operations at the Joint Staff, said American soldiers had stopped the car at the checkpoint but had allowed it to pass after seeing the two children in the back seat. “Children in the back seat lower suspicion,” he said, according to a transcript. “We let it move through. They parked the vehicle. The adults run out and detonate it with the children in back.” General Barbaro offered no further details. Read The Full Story
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