Free Internet Press Newsletter - Saturday July 28 2007 - (813)

Saturday July 28 2007 edition
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"Oh geez!" - 4 dead in new helicopter collision 2007-07-28 00:11:36 Editor:  Journalists aren't suppose to be the news.  It's very unfortunate when accidents happen.  Our deepest sympathy goes out to their families. Four men were killed in a mid-air helicopter crash in central Phoenix.   KNXV-TV Channel 15 reported that one of the choppers belonged to its station. The other chopper was from KTVK Channel 3 in Phoenix.  The news helicopters were covering a police pursuit in central Phoenix Friday afternoon. Police were pursuing someone suspected of stealing a city truck, then jumping into at least one other vehicle during the afternoon chase, a police spokesman told reporters. In the moments before the crash, the pilot from KNXV-TV (Channel 15), Craig Smith, was on the radio with the pilot from KTVK-TV (Channel 3).  According to a report from the Arizona Republic website, pilot Craig Smith is heard asking his photographer and talking to the pilot of Channel 3. “Where's 3?” “How far?” -  “3, I'm right over you. 15 on top of you.” - “I'm over the top of you.” Just before the picture broke up, Smith said, "Oh geez!" Read The Full Story 'Sabotaged' NASA Computer Came From Texas Company 2007-07-27 21:44:11 A Houston-area company supplied NASA with a computer that had been deliberately damaged, a company official said Friday. The computer is slated to fly to the international space station next month aboard space shuttle Endeavour. The space agency announced Thursday that wires inside the computer had been cut. The manufacturer, Invocon Inc., an electronics research and development firm based in Conroe, Texas, has not yet identified any suspects or motives, said Invocon program director Kevin Champaigne. "We don't know if it was just one person or if it was more than one," he said. Invocon made the unit for Boeing Co., NASA's main contractor for the space station, he said. Read The Full Story Britain's Worst Hit Flood Areas Brace For More Rain 2007-07-27 21:43:44 Flood-damaged regions of central and southern England were on alert again Saturday, as more heavy rain was forecast to move in from the Atlantic Saturday afternoon. Up to nine hours of persistent rain will bring a risk of further flooding in saturated areas of the Severn and upper Thames Valley, said Britain's Environment Agency. Damage to communications could hamper efforts to restore water to 350,000 homes in Gloucestershire, where engineers are working round the clock on the polluted Mythe pumping station. Severn Trent Water and the army said that bottled supplies of water, and those brought in by tanker, now amounted to over 6 million liters a day and were running well, with reports of vandalism stemming from a handful of "stupid" but minor incidents. The scale of the damage was inspected by Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall, who visited the recently flooded town of Upton-upon-Severn in Worcestershire. The prince chatted to flood victims over a Guinness at the Ye Olde Anchor Inn, which was awash earlier this week. Read The Full Story 1 Dead, 1 Injured In Crash At Wisconsin Air Show 2007-07-27 21:43:01 Two single-engine war planes at an experimental airshow collided while landing Friday, killing one of the pilots and injuring the other, said officials. The Federal Aviation Administration said the collision with the two P-51 Mustangs happened at 3:17 p.m. after the planes finished a performance at the Experimental Aircraft Association's annual AirVenture show. P-51 Mustangs are single-seat fighters that were used in World War II. FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board investigators were on the scene on Friday. Read The Full Story Bush Administration's Nuclear Deal With India Goes Beyond What Congress Approved 2007-07-27 13:46:27 Three years after President Bush urged global rules to stop additional nations from making nuclear fuel, the U.S. State Department Friday announced that the administration is carving out an exception for India, in a last-ditch effort to seal a civilian nuclear deal between the countries. “The United States and India have reached a historic milestone in their strategic partnership by completing negotiations on the bilateral agreement for peaceful nuclear cooperation,” the department said in a statement. The announcement follows more than a year of negotiations intended to keep an unusual arrangement between the countries from being defeated in New Delhi. Under the deal, which was described on Thursday by senior American officials, Bush has agreed to go beyond the terms of the deal that Congress approved, promising to help India build a nuclear fuel repository and find alternative sources of nuclear fuel in the event of an American cutoff, skirting some of the provisions of the law. Read The Full Story Editorial: Bush Asserts A King's Perogative 2007-07-27 13:46:01 Intellpuke: The following editorial was written by Jay Bookman for the editorial board of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. It appeared in the Journal-Constitution's edition for Wednesday, July 25, 2007. In theory, President Bush is sworn to faithfully execute the laws of the United States. In reality, he has treated federal law as a menu from which he picks and chooses those laws he likes, while ignoring those that do not suit his taste. That royalist attitude may soon inspire a constitutional confrontation unrivaled in U.S. history. At the moment, the president's penchant for ignoring laws he finds inconvenient is best displayed in the standoff with Congress over subpoenas. Congress has demanded the sworn testimony of White House officials as part of an investigation into the Justice Department; the White House is refusing to allow that testimony, citing executive privilege. In itself, that conflict is hardly unusual; it continues a traditional contest of wills between presidents and Congress that goes back to the earliest days of the Republic. The conflict is so standard that federal law lays out a clear process for resolving it. If witnesses refuse to honor congressional subpoenas and are found in contempt, the matter is referred to the U.S. attorney from Washington, D.C., "whose duty it shall be to bring the matter before the grand jury for its action." The wording of that law doesn't give the U.S. attorney any leeway. It doesn't say that he or she "can" or "may" bring it before the grand jury. It says he or she "shall" bring the matter to the grand jury, so the courts can resolve the conflict between the other two branches of government. Read The Full Story Stocks Trading Lower Following Thursday's Plunge 2007-07-27 13:45:17 Stocks are trading lower on Wall Street Friday, a day after a sharp sell-off caused by worries about slowing economic growth and tighter borrowing conditions. The three major stock indexes - the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index, the Dow Jones industrial average and the Nasdaq composite - each headed down about 1 percent in midday trading. The losses were less severe than yesterday, the worst day on Wall Street in five months, but the general trend was down. Trading was light and at times unbalanced, as stock prices jostled up and down in the morning session. Energy stocks were the biggest drag on the S.&P. 500, with Exxon Mobil, Chevron and Royal Dutch Shell all dropping more than 2 percent. European markets were essentially flat today, after the plunge in the United States Thursday, but stock markets across Asia suffered one of the worst days of the year. Read The Full Story From Coast To Coast Federal Lawmakers Are Under Investigation 2007-07-27 02:33:23 The way U.S. Representative John T. Doolittle has been talking about it back home in California, his indictment on federal corruption charges is only a matter of time. Doolittle acknowledges that the Justice Department pressed him this spring to accept a plea bargain and confess to criminal charges involving his relationship with the corrupt lobbyist Jack Abramoff, he says he refused the deal. His public relations situation has become so desperate that he and his wife, Julie, went on a local talk-radio show in Sacramento several weeks ago to describe, in detail, the four-hour F.B.I.raid that was carried out in April on their Virginia home. Doolittle, a former member of the House Republican leadership, said the raid was an effort to coerce him to “admit to a crime that I did not commit.” Among members of Congress, Doolittle is far from alone in feeling heat from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Justice Department. More than a dozen current and former lawmakers are under scrutiny in cases involving their work on Capitol Hill. Read The Full Story At Least 25 Killed By Car Bomb In Long-Secure Baghdad Neighborhood 2007-07-27 02:32:54 A car bomb tore through a crowded market in central Baghdad on Thursday evening, killing at least 25 people and injuring 110, said police. A cloud of black smoke rose over much of the city after the explosion, which set a three-story apartment building on fire. Police said many of the victims were women shopping for food or clothing. The explosion was the latest in a string of car bombs in Karrada, a largely Shiite district long considered one of Baghdad's safest neighborhoods. More than 50 people have been killed in seven car bomb attacks in the neighborhood this month. There was no significant violence in Karrada in June, police records show. Read The Full Story	U.S. House, Senate Agree On Lobbying Bill Changes 2007-07-27 21:44:22 U.S. House and Senate negotiators agreed Friday on a bill to tighten lobbying restrictions, including a requirement that lawmakers disclose those lobbyists who collect large sums of campaign money for them, said participants. Democratic leaders hope to pass the measure in the House and Senate next week, allowing them to fulfill a 2006 campaign promise before Congress recesses for most of August. The two chambers had passed similar lobbying legislation months ago, but efforts to reconcile their differences had bogged down. The proposed legislation would require lawmakers to disclose lobbyists who raise $15,000 or more for them, within a six-month period, through a popular practice known as bundling. Bundlers solicit campaign checks from numerous people, but their efforts often go undetected under existing campaign finance disclosure laws. Earlier versions of the bill would have required lobbyists-bundlers to disclose their efforts, but many lawmakers preferred to have the obligation fall on them, fearful that a lobbyist might deliberately or inadvertently make a mistaken but embarrassing claim of large donations to a member shortly before his or her re-election. Read The Full Story Commentary: Bush Now Must Lay Out The Least Worst Options For Iraq 2007-07-27 21:43:59 Intellpuke: The following commentary was written by Martin Kettle and appears in Britain's Guardian newspaper edtion for Saturday, July 28, 2007. Mr. Kettle writes for the Guardian on British, European and American politics, as well as the media, law, music and many other subjects. He has worked on the Guardian since 1984 in several capacities, including as a columnist, classical music critic, political leader writer, Guardian Europe editor and U.S.  bureau chief 1997-2001. He was chief leader writer 2001-6. He was appointed an assistant editor of the paper in 1994. Before joining the Guardian he was political correspondent of the Sunday Times and before that home affairs correspondent of New Society magazine. Mr. Kettle's commentary follows: The surge is not working, yet full-scale withdrawal would be protracted and bloody. The search is on for a compromise. In the pre-Iraq years, attitudes to war on both sides of the Atlantic were commonly framed by one of two radically opposed mythic experiences. A supportable war was the sort embodied in Britain's defiance of Hitler in 1940, whose lesson was that the right people would win if they stood firm against evil. An unsupportable war was encapsulated in America's rout in Saigon in 1975, whose lesson was that conflicts were more complicated in practice. When George Bush decided to invade Iraq, he offered Americans a rerun of a 1940-style war, with himself in the role of Winston Churchill and Tony Blair as his transatlantic cheerleader. Today, as Bush's surge strategy - the deployment six months ago of a further five combat brigades - struggles to produce the promised dividends, Iraq has flipped into the alternative frame. It is widely assumed that the conflict is heading inexorably to a 1975-style nemesis. But is this really true? Do these potent precedents illuminate the only possible alternatives? At the very least, such questions must be examined. The U.S. is better at doing this than Britain, since our role is in any case reduced and detailed public discussion of Iraq options rare. One problem is that much of the discussion in 2007 is a continuation of the argument about what ought to have been done in 2003. Defenders of the surge may no longer talk about creating a democratic Iraq that will transform the region; but they still talk about staying the course and doing what it takes to achieve some vaguer benign goal. Opponents go to the other end of the spectrum, however, and say that the best thing is for the U.S. and its allies to get out of Iraq as quickly as possible, frequently without regard to the practicalities or wider consequences. Read The Full Story Rainfall In Britain Worst In 200 Years 2007-07-27 21:43:32 Torrential downpours which hit last week and left swathes of England and Wales under water were officially the worst in more than 200 years of record keeping, according to figures released by the Met Office Thursday. Rainfall was more than double the seasonal average, with the early summer months of May to July witnessing 382.4 millimeters (15.06 inches) of rainwater, topping the previous record of 349.1 millimeters in 1789, said officials. Deluges in 32 counties, covering the thousands of square miles stretching from Devon to Yorkshire, broke records dating back to 1914 by more than 25 millimeters, the meteorologists added. Forecasters predict the weather to remain unsettled until early August, with satellite images for the weekend suggesting a further 20 millimeters of rain are possible across parts of the southwest. Read The Full Story Shell Oil Makes $3 Million An Hour 2007-07-27 21:42:44 Royal Dutch Shell has produced a stunning financial performance over the second quarter of the year with profits soaring by 20% to $7.6 billion (£3.7 billion) on the back of very high refining margins and despite a fall in production. The record results - amounting to some $3 million (£1.5 million) an hour - underlined Shell's current supremacy over arch-rival BP which barely lifted its profits when measured on the same basis. They also outpaced U.S. oil giant Exxon Mobil, which caught Wall Street on the hop Thursday afternoon with a fall in its quarterly profits instead of the expected rise. At $10.3 billion, Exxon's profits remain comfortably ahead of Shell's, however. The Anglo-Dutch group raised its dividend 14% to $0.36 per share and gave an upbeat assessment of future prospects. Read The Full Story Travelers Face Greater Distribution And Use Of Their Personal Data 2007-07-27 13:46:15 The United States and the European Union have agreed to expand a security program that shares personal data about millions of U.S.-bound airline passengers a year, potentially including information about a person's race, ethnicity, religion and health. Under the agreement, airlines flying from Europe to the United States are required to provide data related to these matters to U.S. authorities if it exists in their reservation systems. The deal allows Washington to retain and use it only "where the life of a data subject or of others could be imperiled or seriously impaired," such as in a counterterrorism investigation. According to the deal, the information that can be used in such exceptional circumstances includes "racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, trade union membership" and data about an individual's health, traveling partners and sexual orientation. Airlines do not usually gather such data, but officials say it could wind up in passenger files as a result of requests for special services such as wheelchairs, or through routine questioning by airline personnel and travel agents about contacts, lodging, next of kin and traveling companions. Even a request for a king-size bed at a hotel could be noted in the database. Read The Full Story Commentary: Dark Powers, The Sequel 2007-07-27 13:45:42 Intellpuke: The following commentary was written by Rosa Brooks and appears in the Los Angeles Times' edition for Friday, July 27, 2007. "We ... have to work the dark side, if you will," Vice President Dick Cheney told NBC's Tim Russert, five days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. "We've got to spend time in the shadows using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies. That's the world [terrorists] operate in, and so it's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal." It was an odd thing to say. Throughout our history - from John Winthrop's 1630 "City Upon a Hill" sermon to President Clinton's foreign policy speeches - our leaders have been quick to assure us of the opposite premise: We will prevail against our enemies because (and only if) we're on the side of light, rather than the side of darkness. We will prevail not through spending "time in the shadows" but through our commitment to freedom, democracy, justice and the rule of law. Granted, previous rhetorical commitments to the side of light were at times accompanied by some pretty dark episodes. But if we didn't always manage to live up to the values we publicly embraced, our public commitments at least gave us a yardstick for measuring ourselves - and declared to the world our willingness to be held to account when we fell short. Read The Full Story Violence Erupts As Pakistan's Red Mosque Is Re-Opened, 13 Killed In Nearby Bombing 2007-07-27 13:44:58 A suspected suicide bomber killed 13 people at a hotel near Islamabad's Red Mosque Friday as the government reopened the religious complex for the first time since a bloody army raid ousted Islamic militants from the site. Hundreds of students clashed with security forces outside the mosque and occupied it for several hours before being dispersed. They denounced President Gen. Pervez Musharraf and demanded the return of a pro-Taliban cleric who was detained during the siege earlier this month. The bomb struck the Muzaffar Hotel, in a downtown market area about a quarter-mile from the mosque. Local television showed victims - many of them bleeding or badly burned, with their clothing in tatters - being carried from the wreckage to waiting ambulances. Amir Mehmood, a witness, said he saw blood, body parts, and shreds of a Punjab police uniform inside the hotel. Read The Full Story Commentary: Bed Time For Gonzo 2007-07-27 02:33:09 Intellpuke: The following commentary was written by Eugene Robinson, an op-ed columnist for the Washington Post. It deals with the Alberto Gonzalez mess in Washington and appears in the Post's edition for Friday, July 27, 2007. It's way past bedtime for Gonzo. At this point, every day Alberto Gonzales continues as attorney general means more dishonor for the office and the nation - and higher blood pressure for Senate Judiciary Committe members trying desperately to get a straight answer out of the man. Gonzo has managed to do something no one else in Washington has managed in years: create a spirit of true bipartisanship. After his pathetic act in front of the committee Tuesday, it's no surprise that Democrats are threatening to investigate him for perjury. But it was Sen. Arlen Specter, a Republican, who looked Gonzo in the face and told him, "I do not find your testimony credible, candidly." Specter seems ready to pop a gasket. "The hearing two days ago was devastating" for Gonzo, Specter said yesterday. "But so was the hearing before that, and so was the hearing before that." Read The Full Story New Details On Tillman's Death 2007-07-27 02:32:18 Army medical examiners were suspicious about the close proximity of the three bullet holes in Pat Tillman's forehead and tried without success to get authorities to investigate whether the former NFL player's death amounted to a crime, according to documents obtained by the Associated Press. "The medical evidence did not match up with the, with the scenario as described," a doctor who examined Tillman's body after he was killed on the battlefield in Afghanistan in 2004 told investigators. The doctors - whose names were blacked out - said that the bullet holes were so close together that it appeared the Army Ranger was cut down by an M-16 fired from a mere 10 yards or so away. Ultimately, the Pentagon did conduct a criminal investigation, and asked Tillman's comrades whether he was disliked by his men and whether they had any reason to believe he was deliberately killed. The Pentagon eventually ruled that Tillman's death at the hands of his comrades was a friendly-fire accident. Read The Full Story
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