Free Internet Press Newsletter - Sunday April 8 2007 - (813)

Sunday April 8 2007 edition
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Alien Invasion: The Killer Fungus That Came To Canada 2007-04-07 23:45:04 The mystery emerged slowly, its clues maddeningly diverse. Sally Lester, an animal pathologist at a British Columbia laboratory, slipped a slide under her microscope - a tissue from a dog on Vancouver Island. Her lens focused on a tiny cell that looked like a boiled egg. It was late 1999. She had started seeing a lot of those. On the eastern side of the island, several dead porpoises washed ashore early the next year. Scientist Craig Stephen, who runs a research center on the island, slit one open. He found its lungs seized by pneumonia and its other organs swollen by strange, flowerlike tumors. At work at the family trucking firm in Victoria, on the southern tip of the island, Esther Young, a lively 45-year-old mother, was feeling lousy in the fall of 2001. She had headaches and night sweats and was tired, said her family. The doctor told her she was pre-menopausal and it would pass. All would become pieces of a medical mystery centered on a tropical disease apparently brought to North America by a warming climate. An alien fungus took root on Vancouver Island eight years ago and has since killed eight people and infected at least 163 others, as well as many animals. Read The Full Story Politics Collide With Iraq Realities 2007-04-07 23:43:53 There are two Iraq wars being waged, according to military officers on the ground and defense experts: the one fought in the streets of Baghdad, and the war as it is perceived in Washington, D.C. Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, who took over as the top U.S. commander in Iraq in February, cited the disparity last week. "The Washington clock is moving more rapidly than the Baghdad clock," he said in a television interview. "So we're obviously trying to speed up the Baghdad clock a bit and to produce some progress on the ground that can, perhaps ... put a little more time on the Washington clock." While Washington appears headed toward a political endgame on Iraq, with the White House and Congress sparring over benchmarks and pullout dates, the war on the ground is at an ebb tide. All sides - including U.S. military strategists and Iraqi sectarian leaders and insurgents, as well as regional players such as Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Turkey - are waiting to see whether the new U.S. approach to make the Iraqi capital safer will work. Soldiers on the ground tend to see the Washington debate as irrelevant, and the perspective of many politicians in Washington is that the military schedule is simply too slow. "The time scale to succeed is years," said John J. Hamre, a former deputy defense secretary, while "the time scale for tolerance here is 12 months for Democrats and 18 months for Republicans." Read The Full Story Anger As British Marines, Sailors Sell Their Stories 2007-04-07 23:41:39 The 15 British military hostages released by Iran were accused Saturday night of cashing in on the ordeal by selling their stories in a string of lucrative media deals. The sailors, who spent 13 days in captivity and at times feared for their lives, have been given permission by Britain's Ministry of Defense to give exclusive interviews. The MoD justified lifting the ban on military personnel selling their stories while in service because of the "exceptional circumstances" involved. The former captives are expected to make around £250,000 ($500,000) between them. Faye Turney, the 26-year-old seawoman, is likely to get the most profitable deal. She is said to have sold her story for £150,000 ($300,000) in a joint contract with a newspaper and ITV. The development was criticized by politicians and relatives of victims killed in the Iraq war. Liam Fox, the shadow Defense Secretary, said: "One of the great things about our armed forces is their professionalism and dignity. Many people who shared the anxiety of the hostages' abduction will feel that selling their stories is somewhat undignified and falls below the very high standards we have come to expect from our service men and women." Read The Full Story U.S., China Got Climate Warnings Toned Down In IPCC Report 2007-04-07 15:22:12 Some sections of a grim scientific assessment of the impact of global warming on human, animal and plant life issued in Brussels, Belgium, Friday were softened at the insistence of officials from China and the United States, said participants in the negotiations. In particular, U.S. negotiators managed to eliminate language in one section that called for cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, said Patricia Romero Lankao, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, who was one of the report's lead authors. In the course of negotiations over the report by the second working group of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), U.S. officials challenged the wording of a section suggesting that policymakers need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions because countries will not be able to respond to climate change simply by using adaptive measures such as levees and dikes. Read The Full Story States Being To Feel Housing Slump Where It Hurts - Their Budgets 2007-04-07 15:21:32 State tax revenues around the country are growing far more slowly this year and in some cases falling below projections, a result of the housing market slowdown that has curbed voracious spending on real estate, building materials, furniture and other items. Nowhere is the downturn more apparent than in Florida, where tax revenue is projected to drop this year for the first time since the energy crisis of the 1970s. But other states, especially those where housing prices soared in recent years, are also seeing their collections slow, especially in the sales and real estate transfer tax categories. While the economy remains generally strong and it is too early to predict whether the housing slump will have long-term effects, some states will have to adjust their wish lists. For example, New Jersey could face a $2.5 billion shortfall by mid-2008, Gov. Jon S. Corzine has said, and may lease its turnpike or its lottery to a private company to raise money. In California, where income tax receipts in January were $1 billion less than forecast, a nonpartisan legislative analyst has urged budget cuts and warned that the state could have about $2 billion less in revenue this year and next than Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has projected. Read The Full Story North Korea Arms Ethiopia As U.S. Assents, But Does It Violate Sanctions? 2007-04-07 15:20:37 Three months after the United States successfully pressed the United Nations to impose strict sanctions on North Korea because of the country’s nuclear test, Bush administration officials allowed Ethiopiato complete a secret arms purchase from the North, in what appears to be a violation of the restrictions, according to senior American officials. The United States allowed the arms delivery to go through in January in part because Ethiopia was in the midst of a military offensive against Islamic militias inside Somalia, a campaign that aided the American policy of combating religious extremists in the Horn of Africa. American officials said that they were still encouraging Ethiopia to wean itself from its longstanding reliance on North Korea for cheap Soviet-era military equipment to supply its armed forces and that Ethiopian officials appeared receptive. But the arms deal is an example of the compromises that result from the clash of two foreign policy absolutes: the Bush administration’s commitment to fighting Islamic radicalism and its effort to starve the North Korean government of money it could use to build up its nuclear weapons program. Read The Full Story FDA Orders Drug Companies To Stop Making Anti-Nausea Suppository 2007-04-07 15:19:46 The U.S. Food and Drug Administration Friday ordered drug companies to stop making and selling anti-nausea suppositories containing a drug that the agency said did not work when used in that form. The move was part of a campaign by the agency to re-evaluate drugs approved before 1962, the year drug makers had to start proving that their products worked. Before 1962, they had to prove only that they did no harm. The suppositories, sold by prescription under the names Tigan, Tebamide, T-Gen, Trimazide and Trimethobenz, all contain the active ingredient trimethobenzamide. About two million such suppositories are sold each year, said Dr. Jason Woo, an official in the agency’s compliance office. Read The Full Story	Delayed Benefits Frustrate Veterans 2007-04-07 23:44:47 In his last years, World War II veteran Seymour D. Lewis would stand at the door of his home in Savannah, Ga., waiting for a letter that never arrived. The family of the former Army private, who lost the hearing in his right ear to a grenade explosion in basic training in 1944, spent years wrestling with the federal bureaucracy for his disability benefits, at one point waiting more than a year just to be told to fill out more forms. In 2001, the Department of Veterans Affairs started sending Lewis a monthly check for $200, an amount he appealed as too little and too late for the lasting physical sacrifice he made for his country, said his family. The appeal was still pending when Lewis died last year at age 80. "Every time I would call, they would send me a new form to fill out, with exactly the same information that they already had," said his son Frank A. Lewis, 61, a Navy veteran. "They run you around. They keep you dangling ...  My father was elderly. He would wait at the front door for the mailman, waiting for something from the V.A. When he would get a letter, he would anxiously open it, and when it said nothing, the depression he would go into was unreal. I have a feeling they were just waiting for my father to drop dead so they wouldn't have to pay any money. It's been one big nightmare." Read The Full Story Stocks Took A Surprising Dive, And More Jolts May Be Coming 2007-04-07 23:42:04 Buckle up, investors: Turbulence is back in the stock market, and analysts say it's going to stick around for a while. The ongoing turmoil arrived abruptly in late February, when a sell-off in the Chinese stock market jolted investors around the world, triggering the biggest one-day drop in the Down Jones industrial average in four years and ending several months of steady gains. Since then, stocks have seesawed sharply, as investors sift through mixed signals on the economy. Mortgage industry problems, a sputtering housing market and uncertainty about the direction of interest rates are all fueling market jitters. However, while economic growth has slowed considerably, unemployment remains low and corporate dealmaking continues at a record pace. "If you're really just looking to make a call on the macro-economic factors, your visibility is pretty poor right now," said Brian Angerame, a portfolio manager at ClearBridge Advisors, which is owned by Legg Mason. He noted that other wildcards are lurking, such as the recent rise in oil prices and ongoing geopolitical tensions in the Middle East. Read The Full Story Britain Delivers Damning Verdict On Blair's 10 Years 2007-04-07 23:41:15 A remarkable picture of the way Tony Blair has lost the faith of British voters over his 10 years in power is revealed in the U.K. Sunday by a comprehensive study of public attitudes towards the Prime Minister. As Blair prepares to leave office, the poll of more than 2,000 adults shows that people believe the country is a more dangerous, less happy, less pleasant place to live. There was a negative response to nearly all of more than 40 questions the public was asked about trust in politics, how they felt about their own lives and whether public services had got better. Despite some independent evidence that services have improved and the economy has performed well compared with other industrialised nations, the poll shows how damning the public's verdict is on Blair and his government. The poll, carried out for The Observer for a special supplement on his decade in power, will increase concerns among the Labor Party's high command that the party is facing electoral defeat in the crucial national elections in Scotland and Wales and the local elections in England next month. It could also mean that Gordon Brown, if he wins the subsequent leadership election, will be handed an almost impossible political legacy to deal with. Read The Full Story Soldier Recounts Sexual Abuse At Walter Reed 2007-04-07 15:21:58 Two months before Mario Alberto Echeverri administered a sleep disorder test to an Army corporal at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, the medical technician had been arrested for fondling the groin of a U.S. Park Police officer. Seventeen months before, Echeverri had been observed touching a Walter Reed patient inappropriately and was warned against such behavior. Two years before, he had been accused of improperly touching a patient at a private sleep center in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Cpl. Matthew Burgess knew none of this when he went to the Army hospital the evening of April 21, 2004. Echeverri gave the soldier sleep medication, asked him strip to his shorts, connected him by wire to monitoring equipment and had him lie down. The test was part of a study of whether Burgess's headaches, fatigue and diarrhea were connected to the anthrax vaccine he received when he was deployed to Iraq in 2003. While the machine monitored Burgess, a surveillance camera captured Echeverri fondling the drugged soldier while he was helpless to respond, court records reflect. Tapes show the technician engaging in similar conduct with two other male patients, one an active-duty soldier and the other a 16-year-old boy, according to records and interviews. Read The Full Story 22 Brands Of Dog Biscuits Added To Pet Food Recall List 2007-04-07 15:21:05 A recall of pet food tainted with melamine, a chemical used to make plastic products, has been widened to include 22 types of dog biscuits, the Food and Drug Administration said Friday. The biscuits, made by Sunshine Mills Inc., contain wheat gluten imported from China that contained melamine, said Stephen F. Sundlof, director of the Center for Veterinary Medicine at the F.D.A. Sunshine Mills, of Red Bay, Alabama, manufactures branded and private label dry pet food and biscuits. The recalled biscuits include Nurture Chicken and Rice Biscuit, Ol’ Roy Peanut Butter Biscuit and Pet Life Large Biscuit. Conrad Pitts, a lawyer for Sunshine Mills, said 80 percent of the tainted biscuits were sold by Wal-Mart, under the Ol’ Roy brand. Pitts said the company had produced about 24 truckloads of biscuits with the contaminated gluten, and that the majority of the product was large biscuits. He said wheat gluten accounted for less than 1 percent of the total weight of the biscuits. Read The Full Story UPDATE: Captain And 5 Crew Charged In Greek Cruise Ship Sinking 2007-04-07 15:20:01 A Greek prosecutor on Saturday charged the captain and five other crew of a cruise ship which ran aground near the Aegean island of Santorini, as the search continued for two French passengers missing since the shipwreck. The 22,412-ton Sea Diamond, run by Louis Cruise Lines, hit a reef on Thursday close to the shore of the picturesque island, one of Greece's most popular tourist destinations. It listed and was evacuated within hours. A 45-year-old Frenchman and his 16-year-old daughter remain unaccounted for. His wife and son were among 1,156 passengers and 391 crew safely evacuated from the Greek-registered ship. Louis Cruise Lines said there had been 730 Americans, 112 Spaniards, 100 French and many other foreigners on board, including Germans, Britons and Australians. Many have flown home and others are in hotels in the Greek capital. Read The Full Story
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