Free Internet Press Newsletter - Wednesday June 13 2007 - (813)

Wednesday June 13 2007 edition
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BREAKING NEWS: Insurgent Blast Damages Two Minarets Of Golden Mosque In Samarra 2007-06-13 02:40:45 A series of loud explosions have destroyed two minarets at an already damaged Shia shrine in the northern Iraqi town of Samarra.   The explosions were heard in the vicinity of the Askiriya shrine, also known as the Golden Mosque, at about 9 a.m. (0500 GMT) on Wednesday. "The explosion targeted the two golden minarets. They have been damaged ... This is a criminal act which aims at creating sectarian strife," Saleh al-Haidari, the head of the Shia endowment in Iraq, said.   The two minarets toppled on Wednesday even as security forces were guarding the holy site. Read The Full Story GOP Senators Push Bush On Borders 2007-06-12 23:10:01 In a rare visit to Capitol Hill, President Bush pressed Republican senators Tuesday to resurrect the compromise overhaul of the nation's immigration laws, but many of the senators instead demanded that his administration first show a more determined commitment to border security. The visit was the first time in five years that Bush had come to the Capitol for the Republican senators' weekly policy luncheon. He and senior administration officials painted the meeting - coming five days after the collapse on the Senate floor of the tenuous compromise on immigration - as a rescue session. Bush made an impassioned plea for the legislation, saying "the status quo is unacceptable." "Now is the time to move a comprehensive bill that enforces our borders and has good workplace enforcement, that doesn't grant automatic citizenship, that addresses this problem in a comprehensive way," he said after the lunch. Read The Full Story Palestinian Battles Raise Fear Of Coup, Civil War 2007-06-12 23:09:11 Gunmen loyal to the two main Palestinian parties fought street battles in the Gaza Strip Tuesday that increasingly bore the hallmarks of civil war, as Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, a Fatah leader, warned that the rival Hamas movement is attempting a coup. At least two dozen Palestinian fighters and three civilians were killed in the third consecutive day of clashes, the largest one-day total in 18 months of periodic factional conflict. The attacks brought the three-day death toll in Gaza to at least 42 people and to more than 90 so far this year. The two parties have different visions of a future Palestinian state, with Fatah favoring peace with Israel and Hamas advocating its eradication, but they are battling now over the control of various Palestinian security forces and the resulting opportunities for patronage. The conflict is complicated by U.S. and Israeli efforts to help Fatah contain Hamas, which is supported by Iran. Read The Full Story British Defense Secretary Stonewalls On Prince Bandar's $2 Billion 2007-06-12 23:08:08 British Defense Secretary Des Browne Tuesday refused point-blank to say whether his department's £1 billion ($2 billion) backdoor payments to Saudia Arabia's Prince Bandar for arms deals are still continuing. Visibly uneasy and irritated at a lunch with defense journalists, he claimed "national security" was the reason for his silence. He also refused to say whether he or his predecessors were aware of the payments allegedly processed by the Ministry of Defense (MoD) officials and wired to an American bank via the arms firm BAE as an integral part of Britain's biggest arms deal. "I am not going to discuss the detail of these confidential contracts for the very reason it would generate the consequences we do not want to generate," he said. The Liberal Democrats' leader, Menzies Campbell, last night criticized Browne's silence. "We need a full investigation to determine whether the Ministry of Defense has been directly involved in processing payments to Prince Bandar. The department's failure to clarify this issue is unacceptable. We need to know whether any payments took place after 2002 and whether they breached anti-corruption legislation. If it appears the law has been broken then it would be a matter for the police." Read The Full Story What The...? U.S. Air Force Looked At Spray To Turn Enemy Gay 2007-06-12 23:04:39 Make love not war may be the enduring slogan of anti-war campaigners but, in 1994, the U.S. Air Force produced its own variation on the philosophy. What if it could release a chemical that would make an opposing army's soldiers think more about the physical attributes of their comrades in arms than the threat posed by the enemy? And thus the "gay bomb" was born. Far from being the product of conspiracy theorists, documents released to a biological weapons watchdog in Austin, Texas, confirm that the U.S. military did investigate the idea. It was included in a CD-Rom produced by the U.S.  military in 2000 and submitted to the National Academy of Sciences in 2002. The documents show that $7.5 million was requested to develop the weapon. The documents released to the Sunshine Project under a freedom of information request titled "Harassing, Annoying and Bad Guy Identifying Chemicals" includes several proposals for the military use of chemicals that could be sprayed on to enemy positions. "One distasteful but non-lethal example would be strong aphrodisiacs, especially if the chemical also caused homosexual behavior," says the proposal from the Air Force's Wright Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio. Read The Full Story Blair: Journalism Standards 'Unraveling" 2007-06-12 13:39:39 Prime Minister Tony Blair on Tuesday said the news media, driven by increasing competition and pressure from fast-changing technology, has largely abandoned impartial reporting in favor of sensation, shock and controversy, which he said demoralizes public servants and badly serves the public. "The fear of missing out means today's media, more than ever before, hunts in a pack," Blair said in a speech two weeks before he steps down after a decade in office. "In these modes it is like a feral beast, just tearing people and reputations to bits. But no one dares miss out." In a speech hosted by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Blair said the media has become fragmented with the proliferation of blogs and other Internet-based sources of information and 24-hour television news programming. As newspapers "fight for a share of a shrinking market," he said, they face pressure to publish news on their Web sites today rather than in their newspapers tomorrow. Read The Full Story Iran: Fate Of Detained Americans To Be Decided Within Days 2007-06-12 13:38:53 Iran will complete its investigation of the Americans imprisoned or detained in Tehran this week and decide whether to try them for "crimes against national security" or free them, the spokesman for Iran's judiciary said today. Alireza Jamshidi told a news conference that Iran's prosecutor for security affairs expects to issue "judicial orders" in the cases of Washington scholar Haleh Esfandiari, New York social scientist Kian Tajbakhsh and California businessman Ali Shakeri in the next two or three days. All three have been held in solitary confinement in Tehran's Evin Prison since early May. A fourth American facing similar charges, Parnaz Azima of U.S.-funded Radio Farda, is out on bond. All are dual U.S.-Iranian citizens. Read The Full Story U.S. Warns Iraq That Progress Is Needed - Soon 2007-06-12 01:01:07 The top American military commander for the Middle East has warned Iraq's prime minister in a closed-door conversation that the Iraqi government needs to make tangible political progress by next month to counter the growing tide of opposition to the war in Congress. In a Sunday afternoon discussion that mixed gentle coaxing with a sober appraisal of politics in Baghdad and Washington, the commander, Adm. William J. Fallon, told Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki that the Iraqi government should aim to complete a law on the division of oil proceeds by next month. Iraq’s Shiite dominated-government, Admiral Fallon added in the meeting, has consolidated power and should have the confidence to reach out to its opponents. “You have the power,” said Admiral Fallon. “You should take the initiative.” Read The Full Story Air Force Jets Collide In Mid-Air Over Alaska, Pilots Safe 2007-06-12 01:00:35 An F-15 fighter jet crashed Monday after colliding in mid-air with another military jet during a training exercise, Air Force officials said. The other jet landed safely, and neither pilot was injured. The pilot of the F-15C ejected before the crash, said Airman Jennifer Anton, a spokeswoman at Eielson Air Force Base near Fairbanks. The other jet, an F-16C, was damaged but landed safely, said Airman Justin Weaver, a base spokesman. It was not immediately clear what caused the collision shortly after 11 a.m. local time during a training exercise about 90 miles east of Fairbanks in Alaska's interior, said officials. A board of Air Force officers will investigate. Read The Full Story	Federal Grant Winds Up As 2 Ships Gone Awry 2007-06-13 02:40:31 In theory, it was simple: Congress gave two decommissioned Coast Guard cutters to a faith-based group in California, directing that the ships be used only to provide medical services to islands in the South Pacific. Coast Guard records show that the ships have been providing those services in the South Pacific since the medical mission took possession of them in 1999. In reality, the ships never got any closer to the South Pacific islands than the San Francisco Bay. The mission group quickly sold one to a maritime equipment company, which sold it for substantially more to a pig farmer who uses it as a commercial ferry off Nicaragua. The group sold the other ship to a Bay Area couple who rent it for eco-tours and marine research. The gift of the two cutters was one of almost 900 grants Congress has made to faith-based organizations since 1987 through the use of provisions, called earmarks, that are tucked into bills to bypass normal government review and bidding procedures. Read The Full Story Secret U.N. Report Condemns U.S. For Middle East Failures 2007-06-12 23:09:36 The highest ranking United Nations official in Israel has warned that American pressure has "pummelled into submission" the U.N.'s role as an impartial Middle East negotiator in a damning confidential report. The 53-page "End of Mission Report" by Alvaro de Soto, the U.N.'s Middle East envoy, obtained by the Guardian, presents a devastating account of failed diplomacy and condemns the sweeping boycott of the Palestinian government. It is dated May 5 this year, just before de Soto stepped down. The revelations from inside the U.N. come after another day of escalating violence in Gaza, when at least 26 Palestinians were killed after Hamas fighters launched a major assault. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, head of the rival Fatah group, warned he is facing an attempted coup. Mr. de Soto condemns Israel for setting unachievable preconditions for talks and the Palestinians for their violence. Western-led peace negotiations have become largely irrelevant, he says. Read The Full Story Yemeni Languishes At Guatanamo Bay Long After U.S. OK'd His Release 2007-06-12 23:08:27 The word came in May 2006: Ali Mohammed Nasser Mohammed, a slight, 24-year-old Yemeni with curly black hair and a wispy beard, would be freed from Guantanamo after more than four years. He got a checkup. His photo was taken, as were his fingerprints. He was measured for clothes and shoes, then offered a meeting with the Red Cross. As the Pentagon tersely put it later in an e-mail to his attorneys: "Your client has been approved to leave Guantanamo." "He never went home," said Martha Rayner, one of the lawyers. In the legal netherworld that the U.S. military detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has represented since it was opened in 2002, Mohammed, once a cook for the Taliban in Afghanistan, remains stuck in a limbo of mistaken identities, bureaucratic inertia and official neglect. In the eyes of his lawyers, the young Yemeni's case is an indictment of a system, still cloaked in the strictest secrecy and largely beyond accountability, in which a man who faces no charge and no sentence remains deprived of the freedom he was granted more than a year ago. Read The Full Story Czech Villagers Reject U.S. 'Star Wars' Facility Planned For Their 'Backyard' 2007-06-12 23:06:59 When empires come to the Czechs, their armies invariably come to Brdy. The sprawling closed military area of 266 hectares (660 acres) in the rolling hills of western Bohemia is used to unwelcome visitors. Hitler pronounced this stretch of central Europe a Nazi "protectorate", and the Wehrmacht used the Brdy training ranges as a playground, expelling many local people. The Red Army invaded what was then Czechoslovakia in 1968, setting up camp deep in the forests of Brdy. And when the cold war turned warmer in the Euro-missiles crisis of the 1980s, the Kremlin trundled its SS-20 nuclear-tipped rockets around Brdy while it mulled over which western European cities to aim for, for a spot of mutually assured destruction. For the past decade Brdy has been slumped in depression, with the bases closed down and the military lifeline cut. But now in the villages there is a buzz of expectation and a ripple of anger. For, in all likelihood, the Yanks are coming. Read The Full Story U.S. Joint Chiefs Nominee Concerned Of Strain On Military 2007-06-12 13:39:51 Adm. Michael G. Mullen, the Bush administration's choice to become the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is deeply concerned that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are straining the U.S. military and he probably would seek political solutions to those conflicts, according to longtime military associates. "He's concerned the Army has been carrying the heavy load for some time," said retired Army Gen. William "Buck" Kernan, the former supreme allied commander, Atlantic, under whom Mullen served in 2000. "He recognizes you can only stretch the rubber band so far." If confirmed by the Senate, Mullen, 60, would become the first Navy admiral to serve as the nation's top military officer since the late 1980s. His selection comes as the Navy takes charge in several key U.S. commands covering the Middle East, Asia and South America, as well as U.S. Special Operations Forces. Read The Full Story Mueller Often Uses FBI Jet Bought For Antiterrorism 2007-06-12 13:39:10 When the FBI asked Congress this spring to provide $3.6 million in the war spending bill for its Gulfstream V jet, it said the money was needed to ensure that the aircraft, packed with state-of-the-art security and communications gear, could continue to fly counterterrorism agents on "crucial missions" into Iraq. Since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the bureau has made similar annual requests to maintain and fuel the $40 million jet on grounds that it had a "tremendous impact" on combating terrorism by rapidly deploying FBI agents to "fast-moving investigations and crisis situations" in places such as Afghanistan. But the jet that the FBI originally sold to lawmakers in the late 1990s as an essential tool for battling terrorism is now routinely used to ferry FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III to speeches, public appearances and field office visits. Read The Full Story U.S. Troops Mistakenly Kills 7 Afghan Policemen 2007-06-12 13:38:32 Afghan police mistook U.S. troops on a nighttime mission for Taliban fighters and opened fire on them early Tuesday, prompting U.S. forces to return fire and call in attack aircraft. Seven Afghan police were killed. Gunmen on motorbikes, meanwhile, killed two schoolgirls Tuesday in central Afghanistan, as U.S.-led coalition and Afghan troops killed more than 24 suspected Taliban fighters during a battle in the south on Monday, said officials. President Hamid Karzai's spokesman said the deaths of the Afghan police were "a tragic incident" caused by a lack of communication. Read The Full Story NASA: Shuttle Mission Extended For Repair Of Thermal Blanket 2007-06-12 01:00:52 Astronauts will try to fix a thermal blanket that peeled back during the launch of the space shuttle Atlantis, extending the spacecraft's mission from 11 to 13 days, NASA managers said Monday. No decision had been made on whether the loosened blanket, covering a 4-by-6-inch area over a pod for engines, will be repaired during a previously planned third spacewalk or an additional one, said the managers. The loosened blanket was discovered Saturday during an inspection. Engineers think the blanket was loosened by aerodynamic forces during the launch, not by being hit by debris during liftoff. The rest of the vehicle appeared to be in fine shape, said NASA. Read The Full Story 17 Killed In Palestinian Infighting 2007-06-12 01:00:17 Hamas officials reported that a rocket-propelled grenade was fired at the house of Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, causing damage but no injuries. That attack came just hours after Monday's brutal infighting that killed 17 Palestinians. Haniyeh and his family were present during the attack on the house in the Shati refugee camp on the outskirts of Gaza City, said Hamas security officials. A day earlier, Haniyeh's house had also come under fire. Meanwhile, rival gunmen exchanged fire at two Gaza hospitals and Cabinet ministers fled their weekly meeting after the government headquarters was caught in the crossfire. Read The Full Story
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