Free Internet Press Newsletter - Saturday May 19 2007 - (813)

Saturday May 19 2007 edition
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'Welcome To Tehran' - How Iran Took Control Of Basra 2007-05-18 23:21:37 On a recent overcast afternoon in Basra, two new police SUVs drove onto a dusty, rubbish-strewn football pitch where a group of children were playing. The game stopped and the kids looked on. Three men in white dishdashas got out of one of the cars. One, holding a Kalashnikov, stood guard as the other two removed some metal tubes and cables from the back of a vehicle. As the two men fiddled with the wires, the man with the gun waved it at a teenager who wanted to film with his mobile phone. Then, amid cries of "Moqtada, Moqtada" and "Allahu Akbar", there were two thunderous explosions and a pair of Katyusha rockets streaked up into the sky. Their target would be the British base in Saddam Hussein's former palace compound. Their landing place could be anywhere in Basra, and was most likely to be a civilian home. The men got back in their cars and drove away, and the children resumed their match. "Since the British started deploying the anti-rocket magnetic fields our rockets are falling on civilians," Abu Mujtaba, the commander of the group of Mahdi army men told me later. The "magnetic fields" are the latest rumor doing the rounds of Basra's militias; another is that the British are shelling civilians to damage the reputation of the Mahdi army. Read The Full Story Report: Commerce Inspector General Broke Whistleblower Law 2007-05-18 23:21:09 The Commerce Department's inspector general, who is supposed to look into complaints of wrongdoing by government officials, committed "egregious violations" of the federal law that protects whistleblowers by retaliating against two subordinates, a government investigation has concluded. The U.S. Office of Special Counsel found that Inspector General Johnnie E. Frazier wrongly demoted the two employees during an investigation of his spending, according to a copy of the report obtained by The Washington Post. It concluded that Frazier's actions violated the Whistleblower Protection Act. The report recommended that President Bush discipline Frazier and suggested that dismissal may be appropriate. "Because Mr. Frazier as an I.G. is charged with ensuring compliance with laws and regulations governing the executive branch, his flouting of such standards in taking this retaliatory action is particularly egregious, as should be his punishment," the report said. Read The Full Story Putin Riles West By Banning Opposition Protesters 2007-05-18 23:20:32 Russia sent a signal of open defiance to the west Friday by arresting several leading opposition figures and detaining western journalists as they attempted to fly to a critical European Union-Russia summit. Police detained Garry Kasparov - the former world chess champion and a vocal critic of Vladimir Putin - as he tried to board a flight from Moscow to the southern city of Samara. Kasparov was due to lead a demonstration by a coalition of anti-Kremlin groups, The Other Russia. They were protesting on the margins of Friday's summit, hosted by Putin, and attended by Angela Merkel and other E.U.  leaders. Read The Full Story Wolfowitz Replacement Sought 2007-05-18 23:17:17 The departure of Paul D. Wolfowitz as World Bank president is prompting calls around the world to revoke the traditional right of the United States to select the institution's leader. As the White House asserted its claim on picking Wolfowitz's successor, aid groups and former bank officials demanded that the next president be selected not in deference to the Bush administration, but on professional merits. Advocacy groups and development experts took aim at an unwritten rule that has for six decades governed the financial institutions created in the aftermath of World War II: The U.S. president picks the World Bank chief, and Europe selects the head of its affiliate institution, the International Monetary Fund. Read The Full Story U.S. Millionaire Robbed And Injected With 'Blue Poison' 2007-05-18 23:16:06 Police in Connecticut are investigating a robbery in Litchfield county in which the attackers raided the home of a multi-millionaire society figure, injected her with a blue liquid that they said was poison, and said they would only give her the antidote if she handed over $8 million (£4 million). The victim was Anne Bass, the former wife of Sid Bass, an investor and member of a billionaire Texan oil family. The break-in happened last month when three armed robbers wearing masks captured Mrs. Bass and her live-in partner, artist Julian Lethbridge. They were both bound and had hoods placed over their heads before they were injected with the liquid. Read The Full Story Shipwreck Yields $500 Million Haul 2007-05-18 13:33:21 Deep-sea explorers said Friday they have mined what could be the richest shipwreck treasure in history, bringing home 17 tons of colonial-era silver and gold coins from an undisclosed site in the Atlantic Ocean. Estimated value: $500 million. A jet chartered by Tampa-based Odyssey Marine Exploration landed in the United States recently with hundreds of plastic containers brimming with coins raised from the ocean floor, Odyssey co-chairman Greg Stemm said. The more than 500,000 pieces are expected to fetch an average of $1,000 each from collectors and investors. ''For this colonial era, I think (the find) is unprecedented,'' said rare coin expert Nick Bruyer, who examined a batch of coins from the wreck. ''I don't know of anything equal or comparable to it.'' Read The Full Story 13 Die In Explosion, Clashes In India 2007-05-18 13:33:02 A bomb ripped through a historic mosque Friday in south India, and 13 people were killed - 11 in the blast and two in subsequent clashes between angry Muslim worshippers and security forces, police said. Minutes after the blast at the 17th century Mecca Masjid, worshippers who were angered by what they said was a lack of police protection began chanting ''God is great!'' Some hurled stones at police, who dispersed them with baton charges and tear gas. While the situation at the mosque was quickly brought under control, Muslims later clashed with security forces in at least three parts of Hyderabad, said Mohammed Abdul Basit, police chief of Andhra Pradesh state, where Hyderabad is located. Police fired live ammunition and tear gas to quell the riots, killing two people, he said. Read The Full Story Sarkozy Names New French Cabinet 2007-05-18 13:32:14 French President Nicolas Sarkozy named his first Cabinet on Friday, radically revamping the government, with nearly as many women as men and humanitarian crusader Bernard Kouchner as France's new foreign minister. Other appointments included former Prime Minister Alain Juppe, in charge of the environment - an area Sarkozy says is a priority - and Jean-Louis Borloo as minister for the economy. The Cabinet, trimmed to 15 ministers, offered both youth and experience, and near-equal distribution among the sexes. Former Defense Minister Michele Alliot-Marie was named as interior minister, and Sarkozy campaign adviser Rachita Dati will head the Justice Ministry. Read The Full Story	5 U.S. Troops, 2 Journalists Die In Iraq 2007-05-18 23:21:21 Five U.S. soldiers were killed and nine wounded in separate attacks in Baghdad and the restive province of Diyala  northeast of the capital, the U.S. military said Friday, and ABC News reported that two Iraqi journalists working for the network's Baghdad bureau were killed by gunmen while on their way home from work Thursday night. A statement by ABC News President David Westin identified the journalists as cameraman Alaa Uldeen Aziz, 33, and soundman Saif Laith Yousuf, 26. ABC Baghdad correspondent Terry McCarthy said on "Good Morning America" that the pair were driving home Thursday when two cars of unknown gunmen forced their vehicle to stop, ordered them out and shot them. He said the men were reported missing Thursday night, and their deaths were confirmed Friday morning. Read The Full Story Editorial: Caller ID - What Did Bush Know, And When? 2007-05-18 23:20:52 Intellpuke: The following editorial appears in the Washington Post edition of Friday, May 18, 2007. It doesn't much matter whether President Bush was the one who phoned Attorney General John D. Ashcroft's hospital room before the Wednesday Night Ambush in 2004. It matters enormously, however, whether the president was willing to have his White House aides try to strong-arm the gravely ill attorney general into overruling the Justice Department's legal views. It matters enormously whether the president, once that mission failed, was willing nonetheless to proceed with a program whose legality had been called into question by the Justice Department. That is why Mr. Bush's response to questions about the program yesterday was so inadequate. "I'm not going to talk about it," Mr. Bush told reporters at a news conference with departing British Prime Minister Tony Blair. "It's a very sensitive program. I will tell you that, one, the program is necessary to protect the American people, and it's still necessary because there's still an enemy that wants to do us harm." No one is asking Mr. Bush to talk about classified information, and no one is discounting the terrorist threat. But there is a serious question here about how far Mr. Bush went to pressure his lawyers to implement his view of the law. There is an even more serious question about the president's willingness, that effort having failed, to go beyond the bounds of what his own Justice Department found permissible. Read The Full Story Musharraf Bars Return Of Opponents To Pakistan 2007-05-18 23:20:15 Embattled Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf said in a television interview broadcast Friday that he would not allow his two primary political opponents to come back to Pakistanbefore elections slated for this year. Musharraf, who has faced the worst political crisis of his presidency since he suspended the nation's chief judge in March, said that neither of his two immediate predecessors leading the country, Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto, would be allowed to return from exile. "No, they will not be returning before elections," Musharraf said in an interview with the private Aaj Television network. Musharraf exiled Sharif when he took power in a bloodless coup almost eight years ago; if Bhutto returns, she could face corruption charges stemming from her tenure as prime minister in the 1990s. Read The Full Story Producer: U.S. Government Trying To Seize New Michael Moore Film 2007-05-18 23:16:39 Cannes, France, is smacking its lips in anticipation of filmmaker and provocateur Michael Moore's latest jeremiad against the U.S. administration, which receives its premiere at the film festival Saturday. "Sicko", a documentary tackling the state of American healthcare, focuses on the pharmaceutical giants, and particularly on health insurers. The film has already caused Moore - who won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2004 with Fahrenheit 911 - to clash with the American authorities. Now, according to movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, whose Weinstein Company is behind the film, the U.S. government is attempting to impound the negative. According to Weinstein, the U.S. Treasury's moves meant "we had to fly the movie to another country"- he would not say to where. "Let the secret service find that out - though this is the same country that thought there were weapons of mass destruction, so they'll never find it." He added that he feared that if the film were impounded, there might be attempts to cut some footage, in particular the last 20 minutes, which related to a trip to Cuba. This, said Weinstein, "would not be good." Read The Full Story Microsoft To Buy Online Ad Company For $6 Billion 2007-05-18 13:33:32 Microsoft said Friday that it would buy the online advertising company aQuantive for $66.50, a share, or approximately $6 billion. It is Microsoft’s largest acquisition ever, and the latest in a flurry of deals for online advertising firms by big Internet and media companies. The all-cash acquisition represents an 85 percent premium over aQuantive’s closing prince of $35.87 Thursday, underscoring just how critical Microsoft believes the deal is to its troubled efforts to become a major force in the fast-growing online advertising business. “Today’s announcement represents the next step in the evolution of our ad network from our initial investment in MSN, to the broader Microsoft network including Xbox Live, Windows Live and Office Live, and now to the full capacity of the Internet,” Microsoft’s chief executive, Steven A. Ballmer, said in a statement. Read The Full Story Lawyer: Iran Denying Rights To Detained Scholar 2007-05-18 13:33:12 Shirin Ebadi, the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize winner and the lead attorney for imprisoned American scholar Haleh Esfandiari, charged Thursday that the Iranian government has turned down her request to represent the Potomac resident, refused information on the charges against Esfandiari and denied a legal team access to its client. After Iran announced Thursday that Iranian and U.S. diplomats are to hold talks on the future of Iraq on May 28, Ebadi said the arrest of people such as Esfandiari is "not a very good starting point for negotiations between the two countries." Esfandiari, the director of Middle East programs for the Smithsonian's Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, was imprisoned in Tehran on May 8 after more than four months under virtual house arrest. Iran's judiciary said this week that Esfandiari is being investigated for "crimes against national security" - including fomenting revolution in Iran and spying for the United States and Israel. Read The Full Story China To Allow Its Currency To Fluctuate More 2007-05-18 13:32:46 China’s central bank announced late Friday that it would begin allowing the country’s currency to fluctuate more during each day’s foreign exchange trading but again rebuffed demands from the United States and Europe for a sustained rise in the currency’s value. The central bank also raised interest rates and demanded that commercial banks set aside more of their assets as reserves that cannot be lent. The two moves are aimed at tightening credit and reducing the risk of overheating in an economy that is growing at more than 11 percent annually and in domestic stock markets, which have more than tripled since the beginning of last year. The currency announcement came as top American and Chinese economic policy makers prepare to meet next week in Washington in an effort to head off growing pressures from Congress to address the widening American trade deficit. But the policy shifts announced tonight, which will take effect on Saturday, are unlikely to have any practical effect on China’s soaring exports, economists said. Read The Full Story
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