Free Internet Press Newsletter - Friday June 22 2007 - (813)

Friday June 22 2007 edition
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Egypt To Host Talks With Mideast Leaders 2007-06-21 20:20:44 Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas will meet Monday for the first time since the armed Islamic movement Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip, holding talks with two moderate Arab leaders who have a large stake in resolving the Palestinian political crisis. The meeting will be hosted by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and attended by Jordan's King Abdullah II in the Sinai resort city of Sharm el-Sheikh, Israeli and Palestinian officials said Thursday. Hamas leaders will be excluded from the four-way meeting designed to show Arab and Israeli support for Abbas, a leader of the secular Fatah party, and other moderate Palestinians now running a government in the West Bank that has no apparent authority in Gaza. Those territories have been envisioned as the cornerstones of a future Palestinian state, but remain separated politically and physically after Hamas' brutal victory over Fatah forces in the strip last week. Abbas called Hamas "murderous terrorists" in a speech this week and vowed that he would not negotiate with the party he appointed to head a power-sharing government just four months ago. Read The Full Story Bush Plan To Cut Federal Security Unit Decried 2007-06-21 20:20:21 The Bush administration wants to overhaul the troubled agency in charge of security at most federal buildings, cutting personnel and giving a bigger role to local police. Lawmakers are fighting the plan, saying that it could leave government employees more vulnerable to crime or attacks by terrorists. The police agency, the Federal Protective Service, employs about 15,000 contract security guards at government buildings nationwide. It has been under fire for its performance in the Washington region, where a report last year found that 30 percent of the service's guards analyzed had expired certifications. In addition, security guards threatened to walk off their jobs at some D.C. area government facilities this month after they hadn't been paid by their contractor. The Protective Service had hired the contractor without realizing that it was run by a felon and his wife, according to interviews. The incident was the subject of a hearing on Capitol Hill Thursday. Read The Full Story Scientists Puzzled By Disappearance Of 100-Foot Deep Chilean Lake 2007-06-21 19:32:11 A glacial lake on the southern tip of Chile has vanished, leaving behind a dry crater and a scientific mystery. Park rangers in Magallanes province, a remote wilderness 1,200 miles south of Santiago, were stunned to discover that the lake no longer existed. When last seen three months ago it had a surface area of 101,200 square meters (332,000 square feet) and was filled with icy water 30 meters (100 feet) deep. "In March we patrolled the area and everything was normal. We went again in May and to our surprise we found the lake had completely disappeared," Juan Jose Romero, regional director of Chile's National Forestry Corporation, said this week. "The only things left were chunks of ice on the dry lake-bed and an enormous fissure. We are not talking about a small lake, it's quite big. No one knows what happened." A 40-meter-wide(125 feet) river that flowed from the lake to the Pacific Ocean five miles away has been reduced to a trickle and can now be walked over. Read The Full Story Ashcroft: Officials Fought Over Bush's Plan To Eavesdrop On Americans 2007-06-21 13:02:53 Former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft confirmed the Bush administration was sharply divided over the legality of President Bush's most controversial eavesdropping work, the chairman of a congressional panel said Thursday. "It is very apparent to us that there was robust and enormous debate within the administration about the legal basis for the president's surveillance program," House Intelligence Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, told reporters after a closed-door meeting with Ashcroft. The point is critical to two matters being considered in the Democratic-controlled Congress: one is the House and Senate Intelligence committees' ongoing review of 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which includes an extensive examination of the president's warrantless eavesdropping program. Read The Full Story Commentary: The Middle East Doesn't Need Tony Blair 2007-06-21 13:02:31 Intellpuke: The following commentary by Ian Williams appears in the Guardian's edition for Thursday, July 21, 2007. Mr. Williams has written for newspapers and magazines around the world, ranging from the Australian, to The Independent, from the New York Observer and the Village Voice to the Nation and the New Statesman and Newsday, to the Financial Times and the Guardian. His byline has been in the Baptist Times, Penthouse, and Hustler. His commentary follows: In response to a news story, Tony Snow, Bush's spokesman, denied that Tony Blair was being considered for a position of special representative for the Middle East quartet. So, based on Snow's record for obscuring issues, it must be true. It would be the final epitaph for a quartet that has already proven to be a quadruple diplomatic paraplegic. To be fair, Blair does realize the primacy of the Israel-Palestinian issue for peace in the region. It is indeed the blockage in the regional U-bend that needs clearing before any other issues there can be seriously addressed. But knowing what the problem is, does not translate into knowing the solution, let alone being the solution. He has tried to tell George W. Bush this repeatedly - but with clearly limited success. Blair has consistently done whatever Bush wanted him to do. When he took British forces into Iraq, it was with clear knowledge of the ineptitude of the White House but he nursed the fond illusion that his support would give him a hand on the steering wheel - and then he found that runaway trains do not have steering capacity, and no working brakes either. Read The Full Story EPA Announces Proposal For Stricter Ozone Standards 2007-06-21 13:00:53 The Environmental Protection Agency today proposed reducing allowable ozone air pollution by as much as 20 percent in coming decades, setting up a battle with business and industry groups who feel current standards are adequate. EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson announced the proposed new ozone rules this morning, saying that existing federal standards do not adequately protect the public. "Based on the current science, the standard today is not sufficient to protect the public health, and so I am proposing to toughen the standard," said Johnson. The administrator also said, however, that the agency will formally take comments from business and industry groups, who strongly believe current standards should not be changed. Read The Full Story	Defense Secretary Gates Vows To Fix V.A. Mental Health System 2007-06-21 20:20:33 Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates vowed Thursday to improve mental health care for service members, focusing the Pentagon's attention on a system described as deficient in dealing with such issues as psychological trauma and severe brain injuries resulting from the war in Iraq. In a Pentagon news conference, Gates and Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, promised that the military would move quickly to ensure that service members, including those currently in combat, get the mental health care they need. Gates also told the news conference that extending deployments in Iraq beyond 15 months was a "worst-case scenario" that he did not expect to materialize, and he said he hoped to trim the deployments back "at some point" to their original limit of 12 months. Read The Full Story IAEA Chief Warns Agency May Not Cope In Atomic Crisis 2007-06-21 19:32:23 The head of the world's nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, has warned that the organization is so under-funded that it would have difficulty responding to a nuclear accident. In an unusual and angry appeal, Mohamed ElBaradei also claimed that the IAEA no longer had reliable equipment to detect covert nuclear activity, nor did it have consistent funding for its efforts to combat nuclear smuggling. Dr. ElBaradei made his remarks to the IAEA's board of governors, delegates from national governments, on June 15 but the comments were only made public Thursday. "If an accident were to happen tomorrow, we would be hard pressed to carry out core functions. This is a reality," he said. Read The Full Story U.S. Predicts Zimbabwe Regime Changes As Hyper-inflation Destroys Economy 2007-06-21 19:32:01 Zimbabwe's inflation will rocket to 1.5 million percent before the end of the year, the U.S. ambassador to Harare predicted Thursday, forecasting massive disruption and instability that will drive President Robert Mugabe from office. In a telephone interview with the Guardian, Christopher Dell said prices were going up twice a day, sapping popular confidence in a government which is now "committing regime change on itself". "I believe inflation will hit 1.5 million percent by the end of 2007, if not before," said Dell. "I know that sounds stratospheric but, looking at the way things are going, I believe it is a modest forecast." Zimbabwe's official inflation is 4,500% but independent economists and retailers say it is really above 11,000% and picking up speed. The black market rate for the Zimbabwean dollar has slumped, from Z$160,000 to the pound last week to more than Z$400,000. It collapsed further Thursday, tumbling to more than Z$300,000 to the dollar. The official rate is fixed at just Z$250. Mugabe insists that the Zimbabwe currency must not be devalued. Read The Full Story Senate Judiciary Committee Probes Political Hiring In Justice Dept.'s Civil Rights Division 2007-06-21 13:02:43 Karen Stevens, Tovah Calderon and Teresa Kwong had a lot in common. They had good performance ratings as career lawyers in the Justice Department's civil rights division. And they were minority women transferred out of their jobs two years ago - over the objections of their immediate supervisors - by Bradley Schlozman, then the acting assistant attorney general for civil rights. Schlozman ordered supervisors to tell the women that they had performance problems or that the office was overstaffed. But one lawyer, Conor Dugan, told colleagues that the recent Bush appointee had confided that his real motive was to "make room for some good Americans" in that high-impact office, according to four lawyers who said they heard the account from Dugan. In another politically tinged conversation recounted by former colleagues, Schlozman asked a supervisor if a career lawyer who had voted for Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona), a onetime political rival of President Bush, could still be trusted. Read The Full Story Study Finds 1.8 Million U.S. Veterans Are Uninsured 2007-06-21 13:01:05 As the nation struggles to improve medical and mental health care for military personnel returning from Afghanistan and Iraq, about 1.8 million U.S. veterans under age 65 lack even basic health insurance or access to care at Veterans Affairs hospitals, a new study has found. The ranks of uninsured veterans have increased by 290,000 since 2000, said Stephanie J. Woolhandler, the Harvard Medical School professor who presented her findings yesterday before the House Committee on Veterans Affairs. About 12.7 percent of non-elderly veterans - or one in eight - lacked health coverage in 2004, the most recent year for which figures are available, she said, up from 9.9 percent in 2000. Veterans 65 and older are eligible for Medicare. About 45 million Americans, or 15 percent of the population, were uninsured in 2005, the Census Bureau reports. "The data is showing that many veterans have no coverage and they're sick and need care and can't get it," said Woolhandler. Read The Full Story At Least 14 U.S. Soldiers, 6 Iraqi Civilians Die In Attacks In Iraq 2007-06-21 13:00:38 Fourteen U.S. soldiers have died in scattered attacks in Iraq over the last two days, including five killed Thursday by a roadside bomb in a northeastern Baghdad neighborhood, the military said in a series of statements. With a major U.S. effort to oust insurgents underway in Diyala province north of the Iraqi capital, a series of five attacks elsewhere claimed the lives of American soldiers on patrol in Baghdad, in the restive Al Anbar province, and southwest of the capital. Few details were released, but the military said that the deadliest attack involved a unit working with the Iraqi Security Force to "clear and control" a section of northeastern Baghdad. Along with the five U.S. soldiers who were killed, three Iraqi civilians and one Iraqi interpreter died, and one other soldier and two Iraqi civilians were injured. Read The Full Story
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