Free Internet Press Newsletter - Wednesday April 18 2007 - (813)

Wednesday April 18 2007 edition
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Virginia Tech Student Wrote About Death And Spoke In Whispers 2007-04-18 02:31:50 They met across the professor's desk. One on one. The chairman of the English department and the silent, brooding student who never took his sunglasses off. He had so upset other instructors that Virginia Tech officials asked whether the professor wanted protection. Lucinda Roy declined. She thought Cho Seung Hui exuded loneliness, and she volunteered to teach him by herself, to spare her colleagues. The subject of the class was poetry. Roy, other officials, investigators, acquaintances and neighbors helped fill in a dark portrait Tuesday of the bespectacled young South Korean citizen who had sought bizarre expression in literature and then massacred 32 fellow students and teachers here Monday in the worst shooting rampage in U.S. history. As police closed in, he shot himself and was found on the floor of a classroom building with his weapons nearby. Cho, of Centreville, Virginia, the son of immigrants who run a dry cleaning business and the brother of a State Department contractor who graduated from Princeton, was described by those who encountered him over the years as at times angry, menacing, disturbed and so depressed that he seemed near tears. Read The Full Story Saudi Arabia To Write Of 80 Percent Of Iraq's $15 Billion Debt 2007-04-18 02:30:20 Saudi Arabia has agreed to forgive 80 percent of the more than $15 billion that Iraq owes the kingdom, Iraqi and Saudi officials said Tuesday, a major step given Saudi reluctance to provide financial assistance to the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad. Iraqi Finance Minister Bayan Jabr said in an interview that Russia was holding out on debt forgiveness until talks begin on concessions that Russian oil and gas companies had under Saddam Hussein. Russian Embassy officials in Washington, D.C., declined to comment late Tuesday. The Bush administration has been working for months to persuade other governments to follow the U.S. lead and write off all of their shares of Iraq's debts, which Jabr said total $140 billion. Most of those loans date to Iraq's war with Iran from 1980 to 1988, when the United States, Saudi Arabia and other governments saw Iraq as a buffer against Iran. Iraq also owes $199 billion in compensation for the Persian Gulf War that followed Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, said analysts. Read The Full Story U.S. Supreme Court Rejects State Rules On National Banks 2007-04-17 17:50:30 The federal government is the sole regulator of national bank subsidiaries, the Supreme Court said Tuesday, ruling against state financial regulators. The 5-3 decision involving a mortgage subsidiary in Michigan is a victory for the 1,600 national banks, which say they should not have to face a dual system of federal-state regulation in a growing area of their business. States and many private groups including the AARP, representing retirees, say a regulatory framework that includes the 50 states as well as federal bank examiners can better protect millions of consumers. Read The Full Story Virginia Tech Shooter Identified As Student 2007-04-17 13:06:31 A 23-year-old English major from Centreville was the gunman who killed 32 people and then himself on the Virginia Tech campus yesterday - the deadliest shooting rampage in U.S. history, said university and law enforcement officials. Cho Seung Hui was a South Korean native who immigrated to this country as a child, officials said. His lifeless body was found in Norris Hall, a classroom building, among those of several other slain students, said Virginia state police superintendent Col. Steve Flaherty. Cho, a senior, had apparently taken his own life. Victims were also found in three other classrooms and a stairwell in Norris Hall, said Flaherty, who called the building "a horrific crime scene". Investigators worked through the night gathering and removing evidence from Norris Hall, including a 9mm handgun and a .22 caliber handgun, officials said. A total of 31 people, including Cho, were fatally wounded in the building. Read The Full Story Editorial: Virginia Tech's Tragedy Is America's Tragedy Too 2007-04-17 13:05:49 Intellpuke: The following editorial appears in the Washington Post edition for Tuesday, April 17, 2007. Even in a nation numb to violence and inured to recurrent school shootings, the scale of the human tragedy at Virginia Tech yesterday was heartbreaking. The nation watched, transfixed and horrified, as grainy cellphone images and video footage from Blacksburg conveyed a sense of the carnage and mayhem at a university seized in the blink of an eye by terror. And the nation grieved, once again, as young lives brimming with promise and possibility were cut short by that now familiar campus scourge: an aggrieved gunman, or gunmen, on a rampage. Students and commentators dubbed it "the college Columbine," recalling two teenagers' killing of 12 students at Colorado's Columbine High School in 1999. In fact, the toll at Virginia Tech yesterday was statistically worse -- at least 33 dead and more than 30 injured, the deadliest mass shooting of civilians in American history. And the details, as they emerged in early, unconfirmed reports, were unspeakable: students lined up and shot in a classroom; students leaping from the windows of buildings to save themselves; a gunman unidentified for hours because his head wounds were so severe. The atrocity at Virginia Tech sparked instant and fierce debates, online and elsewhere, even as survivors were fighting for their lives. Under what circumstances, and where, did the gunman obtain his weapons? Would the university have suffered the same tragedy if Virginia law did not prohibit the carrying of guns on campus? Should metal detectors be ubiquitous in American classrooms and dormitories? And why are gunmen so apt to carry out their lethal rampages at American schools? Read The Full Story Virginia Tech: Drumbeat Of Shots, Broken By Pauses To Reload 2007-04-17 00:43:31 The gunshots were so slow and steady that some students thought they came from a nearby construction site, until they saw the police officers with rifles pointed at Norris Hall, the engineering building at Virginia Tech. Bang. Bang. Bang. They went on and on, for what seemed like 10 or 15 or 20 minutes, an eternity with punctuation. Bang. Bang. On the third floor of Norris Hall, Scott L. Hendricks, a professor, looked out the window of his office and saw students crawling away from the building. Bang. Tiffany Otey’s accounting class crammed into an office and locked themselves in, crying in fright. Every so often, the shots paused for a minute or so. That was the gunman, who was in the midst of the worst shooting rampage in American history, stopping to reload. When it was over, 33 people, including the gunman, were dead and at least 15 more were injured. Read The Full Story Poll: Democrats More Trusted To Set Iraq Policy Than Bush 2007-04-17 00:42:36 Congress and the White House will move this week toward a final showdown over a contested war funding bill, with most Americans trusting Democrats over President Bush to set Iraq policy but with sentiment deeply divided over Congress's push to set a deadline for withdrawing U.S. forces. Democratic leaders will formally convene House and Senate negotiators Wednesday to hammer out a final version of the bill, hoping to have the compromise on Bush's desk by the end of next week. The president and Democratic leaders again exchanged verbal fire Monday. Bush used a backdrop of military families to declare: "We should not legislate defeat in this vital war." Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nevada), flanked by retired Army generals, fired back, "The president and the vice president continue to desperately cling to their failed escalation strategy and attack those who disagree with them." Democrats appear to be standing on firm political ground, as they work toward a final bill. A Washington Post-ABC News poll of 1,141 adults, conducted April 12-15, found that 58 percent trusted the Democrats in Congress to do a better job handling the situation in Iraq, compared with 33 percent who trusted Bush. Read The Full Story U.S. Senate Delays Gonzales Testimony On Attorney Firings 2007-04-17 00:41:54 The Senate Judiciary Committee canceled testimony scheduled for Tuesday from Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales after concluding that the hearing would be inappropriate in the wake of Monday's mass slaying at Virginia Tech. Committee Chairman Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vermont) said he postponed the hearing, which will focus on the dismissal of eight U.S. attorneys, until Thursday after conferring with Gonzales and the committee's ranking Republican, Sen. Arlen Specter (Pennsylvania). "I'm sure that he will want to be dealing with the matters of the shooting," Leahy said of Gonzales. Read The Full Story Russian Prosecutor Tells U.K. To Hand Over Beresovsky 2007-04-17 00:40:44 The Russian prosecutor general today asked Britain to hand over Boris Berezovsky for prosecution. The move came after the London-based oligarch admitted planning a revolution to overthrow the Russian government. In comments screened on Russian state-run television, prosecutor general Yury Chaika said: "Berezovsky has created a criminal group with the aim of overthrowing by force the lawful powers of the Russian Federation. In any country, that is a criminal deed." Chaika said he had sent an international legal request to Britain's Home Office to request that Berezovsky be stripped of his asylum and extradited to Moscow. Read The Full Story U.S. Failure To Help British Inquest 'Inexcusable' 2007-04-17 00:40:06 The Oxfordshire assistant deputy coroner Monday launched a fresh attack on the "inexcusable" U.S. failure to cooperate with an inquest into the deaths of British soldiers in Iraq. Andrew Walker hit out as he reopened an inquest into the deaths of eight servicemen who became the first British casualties of the Iraq war when the U.S. helicopter they were travelling in crashed on March 21 2003. Walker said he had asked for permission to use U.S. evidence that would help his inquiry, but had not received it. He said a tape taken by the air mission command aircraft, which he believed held radio transmissions before and after the crash, had not been made available. Footage filmed by an embedded crew from the Fox News TV station was also being withheld, he said. Read The Full Story	U.K. Nuclear Plants Kept Body Parts Of Dead Workers 2007-04-18 02:30:58 The government will announce an independent inquiry today into claims that body parts of workers who died in suspicious circumstances at Sellafield and other nuclear plants were secretly taken for medical examination without their families' consent for more than 30 years. It was not immediately clear whether skin samples only or limbs and tissues were taken for laboratory examination from the 1960s until the practice was stopped in the early 90s but there are suggestions that almost 70 bodies may have been affected. Mindful of Liverpool's Alder Hey hospital scandal and other cases involving children's body parts being retained without consent for research, the government moved quickly to investigate the claims. Alistair Darling, the trade and industry secretary, will make a House of Commons statement Wednesday promising to appoint a leading Queen's Counsel to establish the facts and issue a report. "The prime concern is the feelings of the families. There are clearly a number of matters that need investigating dating back to the 1960s," said the Department for Trade and Industry. Read The Full Story Virginia Tech Community Mourns At Convocation 2007-04-17 17:50:44 A day after a lone gunman killed at least 32 people in a campus rampage, Virginia Tech students, faculty and family members gathered Tuesday to receive condolences from President Bush, Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine and other officials, who urged them to preserve their sense of community amid overwhelming grief. Students, many of them wearing Virginia Tech sweatshirts or T-shirts, wept openly at times, and one student sitting behind Bush had to be helped up and escorted out of the building after he was overcome by his emotions. By the end of the convocation - after Virginia Tech English professor and poet Nikki Giovanni roused the gathering by declaring, "We are the Hokies! We will prevail!" - students were on their feet chanting "Let's go Hokies!" to rhythmic applause. Read The Full Story Egypt Accuses Nuclear Employee Of Spying 2007-04-17 17:50:09 An engineer from the Egypt's nuclear agency stole documents and gave them to the Israel's Mossad intelligence service in exchange for $17,000, a prosecutor said Tuesday, announcing the man's arrest on espionage charges. The engineer's family denied the accusations. State security prosecutor Hisham Badawi announced that two foreigners, one Japanese and one Irish, were also wanted in the case. Badawi identified the Egyptian engineer as Mohammed Sayed Saber. He said Saber was arrested Feb. 18 after he returned to Egypt from Hong Kong, but authorities withheld news of his detention during the investigation. Read The Full Story Virginia Tech Shooting Victims Remembered 2007-04-17 13:06:13 Among the first victims of the shooting rampage was Emily Hilscher, 19, of Rappahannock County, Virginia. She and another student were killed in the first shooting at the West Ambler Johnston Hall dormitory, according to Rappahannock County administrator John W. McCarthy. Hilscher had no known connection to the gunman, said McCarthy, who said the Rappahannock sheriff's office was briefed by law enforcement authorities in Blacksburg. "None at all that we're aware of," he said. As for the reason she was targeted, he said, "As far as we can tell: wrong place, wrong time." Hilscher, who graduated last year from Rappahannock County High School, was a freshman at Virginia Tech. She was studying to be a veterinarian and had worked at a local veterinary office during the summer, McCarthy said. She was an animal lover and was fond of horse riding. "She was a beautiful, smart, great kid," he said. With only about 7,000 people in the close-knit county, practically everyone knows everyone else, he said. "And Emily was certainly well known and loved." Read The Full Story UPDATE: Virginia Tech Shootings Deadliest In American History 2007-04-17 00:43:55 An outburst of gunfire at a Virginia Tech dormitory, followed two hours later by a ruthless string of attacks at a classroom building, killed 32 students, faculty and staff and left about 30 others injured Monday in the deadliest shooting rampage in the nation's history. The shooter, whose name was not released Monday night, wore bluejeans, a blue jacket and a vest holding ammunition, said witnesses. He carried a 9mm semiautomatic and a .22-caliber handgun, both with the serial numbers obliterated, said federal law enforcement officials. Witnesses described the shooter as a young man of Asian descent - a silent killer who was calm and showed no expression as he pursued and shot his victims. He killed himself as police closed in. He had left two dead at the dormitory and 30 more at a science and engineering building, where he executed people taking and teaching classes after chaining some doors shut behind him. At one point, he shot at a custodian who was helping a victim. Witnesses described scenes of chaos and grief, with students jumping from second-story windows to escape gunfire and others blocking their classroom doors to keep the gunman away. Even before anyone knew who the gunman was or why he did what he did, the campus community in Southwest Virginia began questioning whether most of the deaths could have been prevented. They wondered why the campus was not shut down after the first shooting. Read The Full Story Virginia Tech Tragedy: A Friend, A 'Good Listener' And A Victim 2007-04-17 00:43:00 Ryan Clark was known as Stack here on the rolling campus of Virginia Tech, an amiable senior memorable for his ready smile and thoughtful ways. He was also among the first victims of the deadliest school rampage in the nation’s history. A student resident adviser at West Ambler Johnston Hall, Mr. Clark was apparently rushing over to investigate what was going on when he came upon the gunman, according to a student who lives on the fourth floor, where the first shootings took place. In the end, as the people here struggled to come to grip with the tragedy, it fell to Vernon W. Collins, the coroner in Mr. Clark’s hometown in Columbia County, Georgia, to deliver the news of his death to his mother. “She was in shock,” said Collins. “It started out in disbelief. She was praying what I was telling her was wrong, and I felt the same way. I wished I didn’t have to tell her that.” Read The Full Story Fierce Nor'easter Leaves A Toll Of Flooding And Hardship 2007-04-17 00:42:17 The storm destined for the books as the northeaster of ’07 continued its assault on the New York region and the Northeast Monday, forcing the evacuation of thousands from flooded homes, disrupting travel, closing schools and trailing a wake of rising rivers, gouged beaches, power failures and widespread damage. The awesome storm, which swamped New York City and other locales on Sunday with record rains, punishing winds and heavy snows that recast northern landscapes, stalled over the Northeast Monday, but forecasters said it had lost its punch and would churn to oblivion over the Atlantic Tuesday. At least nine deaths in five states were attributed to the storm. There were no immediate estimates of its damage, which seemed likely to run into the hundreds of millions of dollars. And it is not over. While coastal flooding was receding in most areas, rivers were still rising, swollen by the runoff of record rains. Public officials warned of continuing and widespread power problems and commuting headaches. Read The Full Story Security Guards Go On Strike At U.S. Nuclear Weapons Plant 2007-04-17 00:41:22 More than 500 security guards at the United States' only nuclear weapons assembly plant walked off the job just after midnight Monday to protest what they said is a steep deterioration in job and retirement security since the government changed fitness standards for weapons-plant guards in response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The contractor at the plant, BWXT Pantex in Carson County, Texas, replaced the striking guards with a contingency force that it says will secure the plant's weapons, nuclear materials and explosives as long as necessary. The issue is not confined to Pantex because guard union leaders at other weapons plants also are raising concerns about the new security requirements, which they say will force many older guards out of their jobs. Congressional Democrats criticized the Energy Department for not acting to resolve the guards' concerns in time to avert a strike. "This employment instability not only raises the potential for significant costs to the American taxpayer, but also raises serious nuclear security concerns," said U.S. Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Michigan), who chairs the oversight subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Read The Full Story Britain To Raise Climate Talks As A U.N. Security Council Issue 2007-04-17 00:40:24 The British government will make a concerted effort this week to push climate change up the global agenda when it raises the subject for the first time within the U.N. Security Council. Tuesday's security council debate has been achieved by the U.K. despite opposition from the U.S., Russia and China, which made clear they did not see climate change as an appropriate subject for the Security Council, though they have stopped short of killing the debate via a veto. The British position is getting an important boost from unexpected quarters: the U.S. military. Eleven former generals are issuing a 63-page report Monday calling on the Bush administration to do more to counter climate change, warning that otherwise there could be "significant national security challenges" to the U.S. The generals include Anthony Zinni, retired chief of Central Command and a critic of the Bush administration's handling of the Iraq war, and Gordon Sullivan, formerly the U.S. Army's most senior general. Read The Full Story
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