Free Internet Press Newsletter - Sunday April 1 2007 - (813)

Sunday April 1 2007 edition
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Prosecutor Posts Go To Bush Insiders 2007-04-01 01:04:56 About one-third of the nearly four dozen U.S. attorney's jobs that have changed hands since President Bush began his second term have been filled by the White House and the Justice Department with trusted administration insiders. The people chosen as chief federal prosecutors on a temporary or permanent basis since early 2005 include 10 senior aides to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, according to an analysis of government records. Several came from the White House or other government agencies. Some lacked experience as prosecutors or had no connection to the districts in which they were sent to work, the records and biographical information show. The new U.S. attorneys filled vacancies created through natural turnover in addition to the firings of eight prosecutors last year that have prompted a political uproar and congressional investigations. No other administration in contemporary times has had such a clear pattern of filling chief prosecutors' jobs with its own staff members, said experts on U.S. attorney's offices. Those experts said the emphasis in appointments traditionally has been on local roots and deference to home-state senators, whose support has been crucial to win confirmation of the nominees. Read The Full Story IPCC Climate Draft Charts Extinctions 2007-04-01 01:03:55 A key element of the second major report on climate change being released next Friday in Belgium is a chart that maps out the effects of global warming, most of them bad, with every degree of temperature rise. There's one bright spot: A minimal heat rise means more food production in northern regions of the world. However, the number of species going extinct rises with the heat, as does the number of people who may starve, or face water shortages, or floods, according to the projections in the draft report obtained by the Associated Press Some scientists are calling this degree-by-degree projection a "highway to extinction". Read The Full Story Saudi King Told Ahmadinejad Not To Underestimate U.S. Military 2007-04-01 01:02:53 Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah told Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad during their talks in Riyadh on March 4 that he should not underestimate the U.S. military threat to Iran, according to Newsweek. The magazine quoted Foreign Minister Saud Al-Faisal as saying in an interview that the king said Tehran should take the threat of a possible U.S. military strike on Iran over its nuclear enrichment program seriously. In the interview, Prince Saud quoted the king as saying: “Why do you want to take a chance on that and harm your country? What is the rush? Why do you have to do it (enrich uranium) this year and not next year or the year after? Or five years from now? What is the real rush in it?” The king “speaks to everybody frankly,” said Saud, adding that Abdullah told Ahmadinejad: “You’re interfering in Arab affairs,” a reference to Iran’s alleged interference in the affairs of other Middle East countries. Read The Full Story Ex-Aide Details Loss Of Faith In Bush 2007-03-31 22:30:00 In 1999, Matthew Dowd became a symbol of George W. Bush's early success at positioning himself as a Republican with with Democratic appeal. A top strategist for the Texas Democrats who was disappointed by the Bill Clinton years, Dowd was impressed by the pledge of Bush, then governor of Texas, to bring a spirit of cooperation to Washington. He switched parties, joined Bush’s political brain trust and dedicated the next six years to getting him to the Oval Office and keeping him there. In 2004, he was appointed the president’s chief campaign strategist. Looking back, Dowd now says his faith in Bush was misplaced. In a wide-ranging interview in Austin, Texas, Dowd called for a withdrawal from Iraq and expressed his disappointment in Bush’s leadership. Read The Full Story FDA Asks Swiss Pharmaceutical Company To Stop Selling Constipation Drug 2007-03-31 22:29:30 The Swiss pharmaceutical maker Novartis AG will stop selling a drug designed to relieve constipation after it was linked to a higher risk of heart attack, stroke and worsening chest pain that can become a heart attack, federal health officials said Friday. Novartis agreed to withdraw Zelnorm at the FDA's request, said the agency. Zelnorm, also called tegaserod maleate, is a prescription medication approved for the short-term treatment of women with irritable bowel syndrome, as well as of men and women younger than 65 with chronic constipation, said the FDA. Read The Full Story Israel Warns Of Hamas Military Buildup 2007-03-31 13:02:25 Hamas, the dominant faction in the Palestinian government, is building its military capacity in the Gaza Strip, constructing tunnels and underground bunkers and smuggling in ground-to-air missiles and military-grade explosives, say senior Israeli officials. The officials, including a top military commander who spoke in an interview on Friday, said that Hamas had learned tactics from Hezbollah,the Lebanese militant group, which brought in and stored thousands of rockets in bunkers near the northern Israeli border before its war with Israel last summer. In Gaza, said the Israeli commander, Hamas has now recruited 10,000 fighters to its so-called Executive Force, a parallel police force intended to counter the control its rival Fatah exercises over the Palestinian Authority's  security forces. The Executive Force is now divided into five “so-called brigades, with battalion leaders” and is receiving more military training and sharing a common headquarters, he said, with the Qassam brigades, Hamas’  military wing. Read The Full Story Sydney In Climate Change Blackout 2007-03-31 13:01:52 Australia's largest city dimmed on Saturday night as businesses and homeowners switched off the lights to draw attention to global warming. The normally gleaming white sails of the Sydney Opera House darkened, and so did the iconic harbor bridge and chunks of the city skyline. Security and street lights, as well as those at commercial port operations, stayed on. Throughout the city of about 4 million people, residents turned off the lights for one hour in an event organized by environmentalists and supported by Sydney city officials, the New South Wales state government and thousands of businesses. Restaurants throughout the city announced candlelight-only specials, and families gathered in parks and other public places to take part in a countdown to lights out, sending up a cheer when the switch was flicked at 7:30 p.m. local time. Read The Full Story Home Foreclosures Hit Record Numbers In Michigan 2007-03-31 02:16:30 Janet Laitis leaned on a chain-link fence in her front yard, dragged on a cigarette and pointed to the homes on her block that lenders have seized in just the past two weeks. "There. There. There," said Laitis, 70, pointing across the street, down the street and then to the modest ranch house next door. "This neighborhood is deteriorating before my eyes." Within a square mile of Laitis' house in this bedroom community outside Detroit, more than half the 96 homes on the market are foreclosed properties. The situation is not uncommon in pockets of the industrial Midwest, where a record number of people are missing their mortgage payments and losing their homes. While lax lending policies have been blamed for the unfolding home-mortgage crisis across the country, the distress in the Midwest has been exacerbated by fundamental problems with the economy. The region has been devastated by a severe drop in manufacturing jobs as the U.S. automobile industry shrinks. Read The Full Story Bush Apologizes To Soldiers At Walter Reed 2007-03-31 02:15:57 President Bush Friday paid his first visit to Walter Reed Army Medical Center since the uproar over shoddy conditions at the facility and emerged after a two-hour tour to publicly apologize for the physical and bureaucratic ordeals inflicted upon soldiers recovering from injuries on faraway battlefields. The president inspected new accommodations for patients who had been living in squalid quarters and visited a physical therapy room to talk with soldiers who lost arms or legs in Iraq only to find themselves lost in a broken system back home. The stories they told him about their frustrations at Walter Reed, he said later, left him troubled and reinforced his commitment to resolve their grievances. "I was disturbed by their accounts of what went wrong," he said in a speech to hospital staff members after the tour. "It is not right to have someone volunteer to wear our uniform and not get the best possible care. I apologize for what they went through, and we're going to fix the problem." Read The Full Story Australian Hicks To Serve 9 Months In Terrorism Case 2007-03-31 02:14:14 David Hicks, the Australian high-school dropout whose detention became an international issue, will serve nine more months in custody, most of it in Australia, under the terms of a plea deal unsealed at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Friday. The sentence came at the end of a long day in Guantanamo’s military commission courtroom and followed the deliberations of an eight-member panel of military officers. Having deliberated for two hours, the panel returned at 8 p.m. with a sentence of seven years, the maximum it was permitted to impose under the deal in which Hicks pleaded guilty on Monday. But the deal also provided that he actually serve the lesser of nine months or whatever sentence the panel arrived at. The balance of the seven years that could have been imposed is considered suspended. The agreement for just nine additional months of imprisonment was remarkable for a detainee who, before the plea negotiations, had faced a potential life term and had become an international symbol of many of the 385 detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Read The Full Story	Bush: Iran Must Release British Hostages 2007-04-01 01:04:41 President Bush on Saturday condemned Iran's seizure of 15 British sailors and marines as "inexcusable behavior" and demanded that the "hostages" be released, weighing in for the first time as the situation escalates into a sustained confrontation with Tehran. Bush said the sailors had been operating legally in Iraqi territorial waters in the Persian Gulf, as the British have insisted, and not in Iranian waters, and he offered support for British Prime Minister Tony Blair's efforts "to resolve this peacefully." He rejected any "quid pro quo" trade of Iranians held by U.S. forces in Iraq and ducked a question about whether military force would be justified to free the captured sailors. "The Iranians must give back the hostages," the president told reporters at a brief question-and-answer session at Camp David after a meeting with the visiting Brazilian president. "They're innocent, they were doing nothing, and they were summarily plucked out of the water. As I say, it's inexcusable behavior." Read The Full Story U.N. Panel: Global Warming Will Make Some Species Extinct 2007-04-01 01:03:43 From the micro to the macro, from plankton in the oceans to polar bears in the far north and seals in the far south, global warming has begun changing life on Earth, international scientists will report next Friday. "Changes in climate are now affecting physical and biological systems on every continent," says a draft obtained by the Associated Press of a report on warming's impacts, to be issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the authoritative U.N. network of 2,000 scientists and more than 100 governments. In February the panel declared it "very likely" most global warming has been caused by manmade emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Animal and plant life in the Arctic and Antarctic is undergoing substantial change, scientists say. Rising sea levels elsewhere are damaging coastal wetlands. Warmer waters are bleaching and killing coral reefs, pushing marine species toward the poles, reducing fish populations in African lakes, research finds. Read The Full Story Federal Judge Rules Bush Administration Illegally Rewrote Forest, Grasslands Regulations 2007-03-31 22:30:14 A federal district judge ruled Friday that the Bush administration illegally rewrote the rules for managing 192 million acres of federally owned forests and grasslands in 2005 and must consider the environmental impact of its plan before offering another policy blueprint. The ruling by Judge Phyllis J. Hamilton of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California suspends the forest rules the administration adopted on Jan. 5, 2005. Hamilton said the government did not adequately assess the policy's impact on wildlife and the environment and did not give sufficient public notice of the "paradigm shift" that the rule put in place. The judge ordered the Forest Service to suspend its 2005 rule and subject it to a new round of analysis, taking into account the environmental protections and public participation requirements in the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act and the Administrative Procedures Act. Read The Full Story U.S. Death Toll In March Is Twice That Of Iraqi Forces 2007-03-31 22:29:42 The U.S. military death toll in March, the first full month of the security crackdown, was nearly twice that of the Iraqi army, which American and Iraqi officials say is taking the leading role in the latest attempt to curb violence in the capital, surrounding cities and Anbar province, according to figures compiled on Saturday. The Associated Press count of U.S. military deaths for the month was 81, including a soldier who died from non-combat causes Friday. Figures compiled from officials in the Iraqi ministries of Defense, Health and Interior showed the Iraqi military toll was 44. The Iraqi figures showed that 165 Iraqi police were killed in March. Many of the police serve in paramilitary units. According to the A.P. count 3,246 U.S. service members have died in Iraq since the war began in March 2003. At least 83 American forces died in January and 80 in February 2007, according to the A.P. tabulation. Read The Full Story Republican Congressman Urges Gonzales To Resign 2007-03-31 13:02:37 A Republican congressman on Saturday urged Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to resign, citing what he said were Gonzales' contradictory statements about his role in the firing of eight federal prosecutors. ''I trusted him before, but I can't now,'' said five-term Rep. Lee Terry, whose district includes metropolitan Omaha, Nebraska. Gonzales' credibility took a blow this past week during testimony by his former chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Sampson, who resigned March 12, said the attorney general was regularly briefed about plans to fire the prosecutors and was involved with discussions about ''this process of asking certain U.S. attorneys to resign.'' Read The Full Story As World Warms, Poor Nations To Bear Brunt 2007-03-31 13:02:09 The world’s richest countries, which have contributed by far the most to the atmospheric changes linked to global warming, are already spending billions of dollars to limit their own risks from its worst consequences, like drought and rising seas. Despite longstanding treaty commitments to help poor countries deal with warming, these industrial powers are spending just tens of millions of dollars on ways to limit climate and coastal hazards in the world’s most vulnerable regions - most of them close to the equator and overwhelmingly poor. Next Friday, a new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a United Nations body that since 1990 has been assessing global warming, will underline this growing climate divide, according to scientists involved in writing it - with wealthy nations far from the equator not only experiencing fewer effects but better able to withstand them. Read The Full Story 2 Judges And Attorney Convicted Of Bribery 2007-03-31 13:01:33 A prominent Mississippi attorney and two former judges he was accused of lavishing gifts and money on in exchange for favorable rulings were convicted of bribery. Paul Minor, who amassed a fortune from asbestos, tobacco, medical malpractice and car safety litigation, was found guilty of all 11 counts against him, which ranged from racketeering to bribery. He faces up to 95 years in prison. The jury found former Circuit Judge John Whitfield and former Chancellor Wes Teel guilty of bribery and mail fraud. Whitfield could get a 50-year jail term and Teel could get 25 years. Sentencing for all three was set for June 14. Read The Full Story Ex-Partner Of Giuliani May Face Charges 2007-03-31 02:16:15 Federal prosecutors have told Bernard B. Kerik, whose nomination as homeland security secretary in 2004 ended in scandal, that he is likely to be charged with several felonies, including tax evasion and conspiracy to commit wiretapping. Kerik's indictment could set the stage for a courtroom battle that would draw attention to Kerik's extensive business and political dealings with former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who personally recommended him to President Bush for the Cabinet. Giuliani, the front-runner for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination according to most polls, later called the recommendation a mistake. Kerik rose from being a warden and police detective to become Giuliani's campaign security adviser, corrections chief, police commissioner and eventual partner in Giuliani-Kerik, a security arm of Giuliani Partners, which Giuliani established after leaving office in 2001. Kerik resigned his positions in Giuliani's firm after he was nominated to the homeland security job. The former mayor is not in any legal jeopardy, according to legal sources directly familiar with the investigation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the inquiry is ongoing. He and his consulting firm have cooperated in the FBI's long-running investigation of Kerik. Read The Full Story Detainee Alleges Abuse In CIA Prison 2007-03-31 02:15:43 A high-level al-Qaeda suspect who was in CIA custody for more than four years has alleged that his American captors tortured him into making false confessions about terrorist attacks in the Middle East, according to newly released Pentagon transcripts of a March 14 military tribunal hearing here. Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who U.S. officials believe was involved in the bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998 and who allegedly organized the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000, told a panel of military officers that he was repeatedly tortured during his imprisonment and that he admitted taking part in numerous terrorism plots because of the mistreatment. "The detainee states that he was tortured into confession and once he made a confession his captors were happy and they stopped torturing him," Nashiri's representative read to the tribunal, according to the transcript. "Also, the detainee states that he made up stories during the torture in order to get it to stop." Read The Full Story Conflict-Of-Interest Inquiry at National Institute of Health May Be Reopened 2007-03-31 02:13:56 Federal investigators are reviewing the activities of 103 scientists who may have had improper links to pharmaceutical companies while they were employed at the National Institutes of Health, apparently resurrecting a conflict-of-interest inquiry that many in the agency thought was closed. In a letter sent to several members of Congress on March 23 and made public Friday, Daniel R. Levinson, inspector general for the Department of Health and Human Services, said his office is looking into the cases "to determine whether investigation is warranted." Levinson also wrote that his office is reviewing whether NIH is adequately monitoring potential conflicts of interest among its thousands of grant recipients - typically university researchers. Members of Congress and watchdog groups have long called for such a review, noting that conflict-of-interest policies at universities are generally more lenient than those at NIH. The concern, critics say, is that federal grant money not go to scientists who may be predisposed to get results that favor their drug company sponsors. Read The Full Story
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