Free Internet Press Newsletter - Thursday June 21 2007 - (813)

Thursday June 21 2007 edition
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Bush Vetoes Stem Cell Research Bill 2007-06-20 23:02:13 President Bush Wednesday vetoed legislation to expand federally funded embryonic stem cell research, saying that scientific advances now allow researchers to pursue the potentially lifesaving work without destroying human embryos. Bush followed his veto - his third since becoming president - with an executive order aimed at encouraging federal agencies to support research that offers the promise of creating medically useful stem cells without destroying human embryos. In his veto message to Congress, Bush said the legislation crossed an ethical line. "The Congress has sent me legislation that would compel American taxpayers, for the first time in our history, to support the deliberate destruction of human embryos," said Bush. The veto came under attack from those who say the president is withholding critical support for the most promising forms of stem cell research to appease conservative Christians and other supporters who equate human embryos with human lives. Read The Full Story U.S. Delays Passport Rules For At Least Six Months 2007-06-20 23:01:49 The Bush administration Wednesday postponed for at least six months a new security rule that Americans show a passport when crossing U.S. borders by land or by sea, requiring instead that citizens present an identity card and proof of citizenship upon entry for the first time beginning Jan. 31. Under the change, travelers returning from Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean would no longer be able to make a verbal declaration of U.S. citizenship, but would have to present a government-issued photo identification, such as a driver's license or certain "trusted traveler" cards, and a birth certificate. Children under 16 years of age could present certified copies of birth certificates. The Homeland Security and State Departments said they expect to require passports or similar documents no sooner than summer 2008. The House and a Senate committee passed legislation last week to delay the requirement at land and sea crossings until June 2009. Read The Full Story Third Crack Found In Hawaii's Kilauea Volcano 2007-06-20 23:01:01 A third large crack has formed on Kilauea, one of the world's most active volcanoes, park officials said Wednesday. A forest area that is home to rare plants and species could be in danger. The fissure, spotted in an area a few miles southeast of Kilauea's summit, is near two others discovered since hundreds of small earthquakes were recorded in the area Sunday, suggesting magma, or underground lava, was shifting beneath the surface. The fissure was spewing steam, but was not oozing lava like the others did. Heat from the fissures could spark a fire, said scientists. ''There's just smoldering, there's no open flames or anything like that,'' Jim Gale, a spokesman for the Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, said of the most recent fissure found. ''We're very fortunate because we just had a series of rains so the area is relatively wet.'' Read The Full Story U.S. Hints At Blair Middle East Role 2007-06-20 23:00:04 Tony Blair and George Bush have discussed the possibility of the outgoing Prime Minister taking up a peace envoy role in the Middle East, the White House has signalled. The intervention came amid reports that U.S. officials have been in London in the last 48 hours to hold talks over the appointment. The Prime Minister's official spokesman declined to comment on Blair's post-Downing Street plans. He steps down next Wednesday, but the White House indicated that an announcement could be imminent. Spokeswoman Dana Perino said: "Obviously Prime Minister Blair has been very active and deeply involved in Middle East peace issues throughout his prime ministership." She added that Blair and the U.S. President spoke often. Read The Full Story Justice Department's McNulty To Counter Claims On U.S. Attorney Firings 2007-06-20 22:59:29 U.S. Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty will defend his past statements about the firings of U.S. attorneys Thursday, rebutting allegations from other Bush administration officials that he misled Congress by suggesting there was no substantial White House role in the dismissals, according to prepared remarks released Wednesday. McNulty, who is leaving the Justice Department this summer, also will tell a House Judiciary subcommittee that he does not believe that other senior officials, including former Justice aide Monica M. Goodling, purposely hid the extent of the White House's role in the firings. The prepared remarks indicate that McNulty, 49, will attempt to hold a middle ground as he responds to sharp congressional questions, by defending his statements without leveling accusations at the administration officials who have accused him of giving inaccurate testimony. "When I testified in February before the Senate Judiciary Committee, I testified truthfully, providing the committee with the facts as I knew them at that time," McNulty says in his remarks. Read The Full Story 6 Gaza Militants Killed In Clashes With Israel 2007-06-20 11:17:47 In a sudden escalation of Israeli-Palestinian violence today, at least six Palestinian militants were killed in clashes with Israeli soldiers in Gaza and the West Bank, according to army officials and Palestinian news reports, and the Israeli air force attacked two rocket launchers in northern Gaza after they had fired two rockets into Israel. This was the first time the Israeli military has responded to rocket fire or clashed with Palestinians in Gaza since Hamas seized power there last week. Amid the violence, Israel continued Wednesday to bring sick and wounded Palestinians out of Gaza to hospitals in Israel. Three were evacuated and a fourth, a 17-year-old leukemia patient, was on the way out, army officials said. Read The Full Story Texans Fear Border Fence Will Sever Routine 2007-06-20 00:24:43 Antonio N. Zavaleta, a vice president and professor of anthropology at the University of Texas branch in Brownsville, saw a slight problem in the route of a border fence that federal officials displayed at a community meeting earlier this month. “Part of our university,” said Dr. Zavaleta, “would be on the Mexican side of the fence.” What about traffic between classes, he wondered. “Would the students need to show a passport?” He was not the only one who was startled. Local leaders throughout South Texas have been voicing puzzlement and alarm at the implications of the barrier, which Congress has authorized the Department of Homeland Security  to construct along 370 miles of the United States-Mexico border, including 153 miles in Texas, by December 2008. Read The Full Story Israel Lets Food And Medicine Enter Gaza To Avoid Crisis 2007-06-20 00:24:18 Israel allowed 12 trucks of food and medical supplies to enter the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, Israeli officials and international aid representatives said, in an effort to avert a looming humanitarian crisis now that Hamas is in control. In addition, Israeli ambulances evacuated at least two wounded Palestinians from the Gaza side of the Erez border crossing and took them to a hospital in Ashkelon, on the coast of Israel. The two were wounded Monday in Israeli-Palestinian cross-fire, after Palestinian gunmen allied with Hamas attacked the border terminal. The wounded men had been trapped in a no man’s land between Gaza and Israel, with hundreds of other Palestinians seeking to leave the strip. A Palestinian man was killed in the attack. Read The Full Story	Commentary: The West Has Created Fertile Ground For Al-Qaeda's Growth 2007-06-20 23:02:02 Intellpuke: The following commentary, by Soumaya Ghannoushi, appears in the Guardian edition for Thursday, June 21, 2007. Ghannoushi is director of research at IslamExpo. His commentary follows: It seems that al-Qaeda's dream is on its way to turning into reality. At last it has found a foothold on the Palestinian scene. Witness the kidnapping of BBC reporter Alan Johnston in Gaza by the al-Qaeda affiliated Jaish al-Islam 100 days ago Wednesday, and the heated battles in Nahr al-Barid refugee camp between the Lebanese army and al-Qaeda sympathisers Fatah al-Islam over the past month. And with Gaza and the West Bank sliding further into anarchy, with Hamas and Fatah turning on each other after a year of crushing siege, this new presence can only grow stronger. Since declaring jihad in 1998, al-Qaeda has aspired to acquire the legitimacy of representing the Palestinian cause, well aware of its rich symbolism within the Arab and Islamic collective conscience. Ever since the eruption of the Arab-Israeli conflict in 1948, Palestine has offered vital legitimacy to a great many political movements and regimes, from nationalist Nassirites and Ba'athists to liberals and Islamists. It is this moral authority that gave the late Yasser Arafat the status he enjoyed not only among Palestinians, but across the Arab world and beyond. Palestine is the mirror in which the Arab political scene is reflected. Fatah was an expression of the rise of the left and nationalism; Hamas of the shift towards political Islam. And that is precisely why events in Gaza and Lebanon's Palestinian refugee camps today should not be taken lightly. They are ominous harbingers of what could lie ahead. When Osama bin Laden and his lieutenant Ayman al-Zawahiri issued their "Jihad against Jews and Crusaders" statement on February 28, 1998, responses to their declaration varied from apathy to amusement. They were an obscure group lost in the faraway emirate of the Taliban, a pathetic remnant of the fight against the USSR during the cold war. Their role looked historically defunct and their discourse archaic. Read The Full Story Germany Collides With Britain Over E.U. Human, Civil Rights Issues 2007-06-20 23:01:28 Germany threw down the gauntlet to Britain Wednesday over one of the issues that will dominate a crucial European Union summit starting Thursday in Brussels, Belgium. Addressing one of Tony Blair's "red line" subjects, the Germans made clear they want the so-called charter of fundamental rights to be legally enforceable as part of a new deal on how Europe is run. The charter is a comprehensive catalogue of human, civil and social rights agreed by the E.U. in 2000 but never enforced. Though it will not be at the heart of any new treaty, the German government, chairing the summit, said it should still be referred to as "legally binding". Both Blair and his "heir apparent" Gordon Brown are flatly opposed to the charter becoming European law, and thus enforceable by the European court of justice. Read The Full Story A Hamas Leader Warns Of West Bank Peril For Fatah 2007-06-20 23:00:43 Mahmoud Zahar, perhaps the most influential Hamas leader in Gaza, warned Wednesday that Fatah's effort to repress Hamas in the West Bank could lead to Fatah’s downfall there as well. In an interview here, Zahar, the former Palestinian foreign minister, said Hamas would not sit idle if its political rival, Fatah, dominant in the occupied West Bank and backed by the United States and Israel, continued to attack Hamas institutions and politicians. “If they continue to dismantle the local elections in the West Bank and punish Hamas there, the United States and Israel will face another surprise there,” said Zahar. Asked how, he said, “The way we defend ourselves against Israel and this occupation.” Pressed if that meant attacks and suicide bombings, he smiled and replied: “You said that.” Then he added: “We are ending the reign of the spies and collaborators in Fatah.” Read The Full Story Army Corps Of Engineers' Data Show A Continuing Threat To New Orleans 2007-06-20 22:59:45 After nearly two years of work, the Army Corps of Engineers revealed Wednesday which New Orleans neighborhoods and blocks were the most vulnerable to flooding, and which were the best protected. The report shows that despite considerable improvement, large swaths of the city are still likely to be flooded in a major storm. If a big hurricane were to hit today - producing flooding with a 1-in-100 chance of occurring in any year - parts of the Gentilly and Lakeview neighborhoods, in the northern half of the city, would probably still take on at least eight feet of water. Hundreds of flooded homes in those neighborhoods are being rebuilt by owners struggling to return. But the report shows that the vulnerable areas within those neighborhoods are much smaller than they were before Hurricane Katrina - considered a 1-in-400 storm - thanks to the corps’ substantial improvements to the 350-mile levee system, the floodwalls, pumps and gates. Read The Full Story Bomb Kills 3 Canadian Soldiers; 21 Taliban Killed In Other Clashes 2007-06-20 11:17:58 A roadside bomb killed three Canadian soldiers Wednesday in a southern Afghan province where separate clashes left 21 suspected Taliban militants dead, officials said. Also in Kandahar province, police lost control of the remote Ghorak district to the militants hours after retaking a neighboring district, said Esmatullah Alizai, the provincial police chief. Kandahar borders mountainous Uruzgan province, where fierce fighting between Taliban militants and Afghan and NATO forces has killed more than 100 people since Saturday, including dozens of civilians, according to at least two Afghan officials. Read The Full Story Inca Skull Rewrites History Of Spanish Conquest 2007-06-20 11:17:36 The 500-year-old skull, found in a long-forgotten Inca cemetery outside Lima, Peru, had two round holes just across from each other. Nearby was a plug of bone, recovered intact, that carried the distinct markings of an old musket ball. Archaeologists sensed they had unearthed an important find, but it wasn't until months later that a powerful electron microscope scan confirmed it by finding traces of lead in the skull. The victim, who was between 18 and 22 years old when he died, had been shot by a Spanish conquistador. Given the age of the remains, as well as the age of other remains buried nearby, the archaeologists came to the conclusion that they had identified the earliest victim of a gunshot wound ever found in the Americas. "There may have been Incas and other native people killed by Europeans before him, but this is our oldest example so far," said Peruvian archaeologist Guillermo Cock, who has excavated in the area for more than 20 years. "This happened at the beginning of a long and difficult history." Read The Full Story Colorado Wildfires Force Evacuations Of 90 Homes 2007-06-20 00:24:31 White and yellow smoke billowed into the western Colorado sky Tuesday as firefighters battled three wildfires likely sparked by lightning that have burned at least 2,000 acres and forced evacuations of 90 homes. One fire was burning in steep terrain dotted with rural subdivisions between New Castle and Glenwood Springs, about 160 miles west of Denver. The blaze had grown to 1,000 acres, or about 1.5 square miles. No structures had burned, but one firefighter suffered a hand injury, said Suzanne Silverthorn, a spokeswoman for fire commanders. Residents of 110 more houses were advised to leave. It was not immediately known how many people had left their homes. Three people had checking to a school being used as an emergency shelter in New Castle. Read The Full Story
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