Free Internet Press Newsletter - Thursday May 31 2007 - (813)

Thursday May 31 2007 edition
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Rice, Russian Foreign Minister Clash Over Kosovo Plan, Defense Missile Shield 2007-05-31 01:48:21 Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Wednesday tangled fiercely over U.S. proposals to grant Kosovo independence and build a missile defense shield. Lavrov accused the United States of starting a new arms race with its plan to install a radar system in the Czech Republic and 10 interceptor missiles in Poland. On Kosovo, Lavrov all but threatened a veto if Western nations attempted to pass a U.N. National Security Council resolution backing a plan for Kosovo's independence, saying he hoped such a response would not be necessary. "This is an issue on which our positions are diametrically opposed," he said. "At the moment I don't see any chance of the positions moving towards each other." The disputes, laid bare at a news conference following a meeting of the Group of Eight foreign ministers, signaled that rising U.S.-Russia tensions could dominate next week's G-8 summit on the Baltic Coast. Read The Full Story Iran Warns Academics: Talk To Foreigners, We Will View As A Spy 2007-05-31 01:47:49 Iran's powerful intelligence ministry has stepped up its war of nerves with the west by telling the country's academics they will be suspected of spying if they maintain contact with foreign institutions or travel abroad to international conferences. The blunt warning has been issued by the ministry's counter-espionage director in an atmosphere of rising suspicion and paranoia as Iran claims to have cracked a CIA-backed spy ring and has charged three American citizens with spying. In a briefing with Iranian journalists, the official - whose identity was not disclosed - accused western intelligence agencies of using academic contacts to lure scholars into an espionage network against Iran. He said seminars inside and outside the country were used. Read The Full Story Student Loan Scandal Deepens 2007-05-31 01:45:12 A former financial aid director at Johns Hopkins University who cultivated a national reputation as a stickler for ethics accepted more than $130,000 from eight lending industry companies during her tenure, twice as much money as previously disclosed, according to documents and interviews. In 18 years at Johns Hopkins, Ellen Frishberg advised the federal government on rules for officials dealing with the student loan industry and lectured peers on the need to avoid perceived conflicts of interest. "Appearance of impropriety is as important as impropriety itself," she said in a 2000 presentation to California aid administrators. This month, Frishberg resigned after the university concluded that she failed to comply with ethics policies by accepting $65,000 from a lending company she had urged students to use. But her financial ties to the industry were more extensive than Hopkins or Frishberg have publicly said, amounting to at least $133,695, according to hundreds of pages of financial records, contracts and e-mails the Washington Post obtained from Senate investigators. Read The Full Story Thompson Says He'll Run For U.S. President 2007-05-31 01:43:38 Hollywood actor Fred Thompson said in an interview that he plans to run for U.S. president in 2008, joining a crowded field of Republican candidates. "I can't remember exactly the point I said, 'I'm going to do this,"' Thompson said of his planned presidential run in Thursday's edition of USA Today. "But when I did, the thing that occurred to me: 'I'm going to tell people that I am thinking about it and see what kind of reaction I get to it."' Thompson, a 64-year-old social conservative, said he was planning a campaign that will use blogs, video posts and other Internet innovations to reach voters turned off by "politics-as-usual" in both parties, USA Today said. Read The Full Story GOP Fears Fallout From New Ethics Probes 2007-05-30 19:19:04 A half dozen federal investigations into the activities of Republican lawmakers are raising new worries for GOP leaders who hope to regain the House majority they lost last fall. In recent weeks, two veteran Republicans surrendered prominent committee seats after FBI agents raided the offices of family businesses. Others have long-running investigations hanging over them. Some conservative activists are criticizing the party's handling of the matters. Democrats say at least six GOP House members are under some degree of Justice Department scrutiny, although Republicans question whether all the inquiries are active. Read The Full Story Bush Names Land Management Chief 2007-05-30 19:18:25 President Bush said Wednesday he is nominating James Caswell, a public land official in Idaho, to head the Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management. The appointment requires Senate approval. Caswell, who now runs Idaho's Office of Species Conservation, would succeed Kathleen Clarke, who resigned in February. Jim Hughes has served as acting director since then. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, a former Idaho governor and senator, praised Caswell. Read The Full Story Cheney's Lawyer Had Visitor Logs Eliminated 2007-05-30 12:07:07 A lawyer for Vice President Dick Cheney told the Secret Service in September to eliminate data on who visited Cheney at his official residence, a newly disclosed letter states. The Sept. 13, 2006, letter from Cheney's lawyer says logs for Cheney's residence on the grounds of the Naval Observatory are subject to the Presidential Records Act. Such a designation prevents the public from learning who visited the vice president. The Justice Department filed the letter Friday in a lawsuit by a private group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, seeking the identities of conservative religious leaders who visited Cheney at his official residence. Read The Full Story Bush Chides GOP Critics Of Immigration Bill 2007-05-30 12:06:31 President Bush lashed out at critics within his own party Tuesday, accusing Republican opponents of distorting the immigration deal he negotiated with leading congressional Democrats and playing on the politics of fear to undermine public support. In stern tones normally reserved for the liberal opposition, Bush said conservatives fighting the immigration proposal "haven't read the bill" and oppose it in some cases because "it might make somebody else look good." Their "empty political rhetoric," he said, threatens to thwart what he called the last, best chance to fix an immigration system that all sides agree is broken. "If you want to kill the bill, if you don't want to do what's right for America, you can pick out one little aspect out of it," he told thousands of trainees at a federal center here that prepares Border Patrol officers. "You can use it to frighten people. Or you can show leadership and solve this problem once and for all, so the people who wear the uniform in this crowd can do the job we expect them to do." Read The Full Story 28 Russians Die In Heatwave Drunk Drownings 2007-05-30 12:05:54 Twenty-eight people, many of them drunk, have drowned in the Russian capital this month as Muscovites cool off from a record heatwave in ponds, fountains and canals, rescue services said on Wednesday. "The main reason for the deaths is that people bathe in places were they are not supposed to ... but at the same time 75 percent of them are not sober," said Vladimir Plyasunov, the head of Moscow's lifeguards. "Because of the unusually high temperatures all our lifeguards have been put on high alert," Plyasunov told the Vesti-24 news channel. Moscow has been sweltering this week in temperatures above 30 degrees Celsius (86 Fahrenheit). Meteorologists said Monday was the hottest May day in the city since records began. Read The Full Story Al-Qaeda Video Threatens Attacks On U.S. 2007-05-30 02:30:36 An American member of al-Qaeda warned President Bush on Tuesday to end U.S. involvement in all Muslim lands or face an attack worse than the Sept. 11 suicide assault, according to a new videotape. Wearing a white robe and a turban, Adam Yehiye Gadahn, who also goes by the name Azzam al-Amriki, said al-Qaeda would not negotiate on its demands. "Your failure to heed our demands ... means that you and your people will ... experience things which will make you forget all about the horrors of September 11th, Afghanistan and Iraq and Virginia Tech,'' he said in the seven-minute video. Read The Full Story Pfizer Faces Charges In Nigeria 2007-05-30 02:29:57 Nigerian officials have brought criminal charges against pharmaceutical giant Pfizer for the company's alleged role in the deaths of children who received an unapproved drug during a meningitis epidemic. Authorities in Kano, the country's largest state, filed eight charges this month related to the 1996 clinical trial, including counts of criminal conspiracy and voluntarily causing grievous harm. They also filed a civil lawsuit seeking more than $2 billion in damages and restitution from Pfizer, the world's largest drug company. The move represents a rare - perhaps unprecedented - instance in which the developing world's anger at multinational drug companies has boiled over into criminal charges. It also represents the latest in a string of public-relations blows stemming from the decade-old clinical trial, in which Pfizer says it acted ethically. Read The Full Story Hamas Leader: Attacks On Israel Will Continue 2007-05-30 02:29:26 Khaled Mashal, the influential political leader of the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, insists attacks on Israel will continue despite overwhelming Israeli retaliation that has cost scores of lives in the Gaza Strip in the past two weeks. Speaking in Damascus Tuesday he asserted it was the right of the Palestinians to resist "Zionist aggression" regardless of whether their actions were effective. The continuing siege of the Palestinians would lead to an explosion that would affect the entire Middle East, he predicted. "Under occupation people don't ask whether their means are effective in hurting the enemy," he told the Guardian in a rare interview at his heavily guarded offices, plastered with images of Jerusalem and "martyrs" killed by the Israelis. Read The Full Story	Baghdad Lockdown As Troops Look For Kidnapped Britons 2007-05-31 01:48:08 Areas of Baghdad were under lockdown Wednesday as American and Iraqi troops searched for the five British men who were kidnapped in the city on Tuesday. There was speculation that the four security guards and the financial consultant they were protecting were taken hostage as an act of revenge for the British army's help in the killing of a Mahdi army militia leader. Iraq's foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, said Shia militia groups had taken the men, but a leading cleric with experience in hostage negotiation said he did not believe the Mahdi army was responsible. Sheikh Abdel al-Sattar al-Bahadli told the BBC Arab Service that Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi militia were not involved, and wanted to peacefully build a new Iraq. The four security guards, employed by GardaWorld, and their client, who works for the U.S. company BearingPoint, were abducted from inside the finance ministry building in Baghdad just before noon on Tuesday. They were driven away by men in police uniforms in the direction of Sadr City, the Shia district to the northeast. Read The Full Story Editorial: Injustice 5, Justice 4 2007-05-31 01:45:25 Intellpuke: The following editorial appears in the New York Times edition for Thursday, May 31, 2007. The Supreme Court struck a blow for discrimination this week by stripping a key civil rights law of much of its potency. The majority opinion, by Justice Samuel Alito, forced an unreasonable reading on the law, and tossed aside longstanding precedents to rule in favor of an Alabama employer that had underpaid a female employee for years. The ruling is the latest indication that a court that once proudly stood up for the disadvantaged is increasingly protective of the powerful. Lilly Ledbetter, a supervisor at the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company in Gadsden, Alabama, sued her employer for paying her less than its male supervisors. At first, her salary was in line with the men’s, but she got smaller raises, which created a significant pay gap. Late in her career, Ms. Ledbetter filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. A jury found that Goodyear violated her rights under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Goodyear argued that she filed her complaint too late and, by a 5-4 margin, the Supreme Court agreed. Title VII requires employees to file within 180 days of “the alleged unlawful employment practice.” The court calculated the deadline from the day Ms. Ledbetter received her last discriminatory raise. Bizarrely, the majority insisted it did not matter that Goodyear was still paying her far less than her male counterparts when she filed her complaint. Read The Full Story Ohio Company Used Melamine In Feed 2007-05-31 01:44:52 An Ohio company - Tembec BTLSR of Toledo - has long been adding the industrial toxin melamine to animal feed ingredients, and those feeds have been eaten by livestock and fish meant for human consumption, officials with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced Wednesday. The company used the chemical as a binding agent to hold feed granules in pellet form, in contrast to the recent pet food scandal, which involved imported ingredients that were spiked with melamine to provide a false measure of protein content, said officials. As with the pet food scandal, they said, the levels of melamine involved appear to be too low to harm humans who may have eaten animals that consumed the tainted feed. Read The Full Story U.S. Chopper Shot Down In Afghanistan, 5 GIs Killed 2007-05-30 19:19:16 Five U.S. soldiers were killed when their Chinook helicopter was apparently shot down in southern Afghanistan on Wednesday, said a U.S. military official. The Taliban claimed responsibility. Initial reports suggested the helicopter was hit with a rocket-propelled grenade, said the U.S. military official, who requested anonymity because details of the crash had not yet been released. It wasn't clear if there were any survivors, said the official. A purported Taliban spokesman, Qari Yousef Ahmadi, claimed in a phone call to the Associated Press that militants had shot the helicopter down in the volatile province of Helmand, the world's largest poppy-growing region and the scene of heavy fighting in recent months. That claim could not be immediately verified. Read The Full Story U.S. Judge: Release Jailed Immigrant 2007-05-30 19:18:48 A Middle Eastern man jailed for nearly four years must be released by June 8 because the government, which wants to deport him, has taken too long to find a country that will take him, a federal judge has ruled. U.S. District Court Judge Jerome B. Friedman said in his order issued Friday that the government violated Majed Talat Hajbeh's constitutional rights and that he must be released within 14 days of the order. "The court finds it difficult to conceive how his continued confinement remains reasonable," the judge wrote. "There is no significant likelihood of removal in the reasonably foreseeable future." Hajbeh was arrested and detained in 2003 in a sweep of suspected immigration violators. An immigration judge ordered him deported, reasoning that Hajbeh entered incorrect information on papers when he entered the United States in 1993. Hajbeh said he made a mistake when he checked "single" instead of "married". The judge did not take into account that Hajbeh was acquitted in federal court of a criminal charge of falsifying the document. Read The Full Story Experts: U.S. Interrogation Methods Outmoded, Amateurish And Unreliable 2007-05-30 12:07:21 As the Bush administration completes secret new rules governing interrogations, a group of experts advising the intelligence agencies are arguing that the harsh techniques used since the 2001 terrorist attacks are outmoded, amateurish and unreliable. The psychologists and other specialists, commissioned by the Intelligence Science Board, make the case that more than five years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration has yet to create an elite corps of interrogators trained to glean secrets from terrorism suspects. While billions are spent each year to upgrade satellites and other high-tech spy machinery, the experts say, interrogation methods - possibly the most important source of information on groups like al-Qaeda - are a hodgepodge that date from the 1950s, or are modeled on old Soviet practices. Read The Full Story Turkey Sends Troops To Iraq Border 2007-05-30 12:06:49 Turkey has sent large contingents of soldiers, tanks, guns and armored personnel carriers to reinforce its border with Iraq - amid heated debate over whether to stage a cross-border offensive to hit Kurdish rebel bases. The military has said the border reinforcement is routine in summer, to prevent guerrillas of the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, from infiltrating from bases in northern Iraq. For weeks, television stations have broadcast images of military trucks rumbling along the remote border with Iraq's Kurdish zone, and trains transferring tanks and guns to reinforce an already formidable force in the area. Read The Full Story Journalists Receive Bullet Threats 2007-05-30 12:06:07 Three Pakistani journalists employed by foreign news agencies each found an envelope stuffed with a single bullet waiting for them when they returned to their cars in the southern port city of Karachi, a local press official told CNN. There were no reports that an individual or group claimed responsibility, but a spokesman with the Pakistan Federation of Union Journalists said the move was an attempt to intimidate and threaten working journalists. A police official told CNN an investigation into the case has been launched. Tuesday's incident comes in the wake of widespread political turmoil caused by President Pervez Musharraf's suspension of the country's chief justice, Iftikhar Chaudhry, nearly three months ago. Read The Full Story Editorial: The Coal Trap 2007-05-30 02:30:47 Intellpuke: The following editorial appears in the New York Times edition for Thursday, May 30, 2007. There is a rule for judging solutions to the twin problems of energy dependence and global warming: A policy designed to solve one problem should not make the other worse. But that is a likely outcome of the many “energy independence” bills circulating in Congress that aim to build a whole new generation of coal-to-liquid plants to convert coal into automotive fuel. These bills have already acquired an enthusiastic constituency and will be offered as amendments to what is now a relatively simple and sound energy bill designed to increase the fuel efficiency of cars and light trucks, encourage the production of biofuels and provide research and development money for the capture and storage of carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. There are, of course, ways to make this bill better. Senator Jeff Bingaman will offer a useful amendment to require utilities to generate a percentage of their electricity from renewable sources like wind. But there are also ways to make the bill a lot worse. One of them is to require the expenditure of billions of dollars in loans, tax incentives and price guarantees to lock in a technology that could end up doing more harm than good. Read The Full Story Chavez Attacks Another Private TV Channel 2007-05-30 02:30:18 President Hugo Chavez condemned Venezuela's last remaining opposition-aligned TV station Tuesday, two days after pulling the plug on another critical broadcaster. The president called cable news channel Globovision an enemy of the state, and accused it of fomenting violence and attempts to assassinate him. "Enemies of the homeland, particularly those behind the scenes, I will give you a name: Globovision. Greetings gentlemen of Globovision. You should watch where you are going," he said, in a speech all stations were obliged to air. He accused it of distorting reaction to the closure of RCTV, a network which closed on Sunday after the government refused to renew its license. "I recommend they take a tranquilizer, that they slow down, because if not, I'm going to slow them down." Tens of thousands of mostly youthful protesters have marched through the capital, Caracas, and other cities for four days chanting slogans accusing the government of drifting towards Cuba-style authoritarianism. Clashes with police have left dozens injured. Read The Full Story Rice Cautions Israel On Syria 2007-05-30 02:29:38 Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Tuesday cautioned against a growing sentiment in Israel to pursue peace with Syria instead of with warring Palestinian factions, saying there is "no substitute" for creating a Palestinian state. Rice, who will discuss the stalled peace process with diplomats here Wednesday, has worked for months to lay the groundwork for Palestinians and Israelis to begin discussing what she calls a "political horizon" - the parameters of a possible Palestinian state. But with violence erupting between Palestinian factions - and with Israel under constant attack from rockets launched from the Gaza Strip - Rice has faced criticism from some outside experts for spending so much time on a diplomatic long shot, rather than seeking to quickly end the violence. Read The Full Story
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