Free Internet Press Newsletter - Monday August 27 2007 - (813)

Monday August 27 2007 edition
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Drop Foreseen In The Median Price Of U.S. Homes 2007-08-26 21:16:50 Many government officials and housing industry executives said that a nationwide decline would never happen. The median price of American homes is expected to fall this year for the first time since federal housing agencies began keeping statistics in 1950. Economists say the decline, which could be foreshadowed in a widely followed government price index to be released this week, will probably be modest - from 1 percent to 2 percent - but could continue in 2008 and 2009. Rather than being limited to the once-booming Northeast and California, price declines are also occurring in cities like Chicago, Illinois, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Houston, Texas, where the increases of the last decade were modest by comparison. The reversal is particularly striking because many government officials and housing-industry executives had said that a nationwide decline would never happen, even though prices had fallen in some coastal areas as recently as the early 1990s. While the housing slump has already rattled financial markets, it has so far had only a modest effect on consumer spending and economic growth. But forecasters now believe that its impact will lead to a slowdown over the next year or two. Read The Full Story Home Depot Is Said To Cut Purchase Price Of Wholesale Unit By $1.8 Billion 2007-08-26 21:16:17 In one of the most closely watched deals on Wall Street, Home Depot reached a tentative new agreement Sunday to sell its wholesale unit to a consortium of private equity firms for a reduced price of $8.5 billion, according to people involved in the transaction. The new price is almost $1.8 billion less than the $10.3 billion announced in June. In what could prove a turning point amid the crisis in the credit markets, Home Depot was forced back to the negotiating table after the investment banks financing the deal threatened to back out. It marked an unusual showdown between the retailing giant’s investment banks and their biggest clients, private equity firms. Home Depot’s board, led by its chairman, Kenneth G. Langone, approved the deal in principle during a meeting this afternoon, these people said. Home Depot’s board is planning to reconvene early Monday morning to complete the details of the agreement, which is tentative and could still collapse. Read The Full Story Iraq's Maliki Lashes Out At U.S. Detractors 2007-08-26 21:15:36 Iraq's embattled prime minister lashed out at American critics Sunday, saying Sen. Hillary Clinton and other Democrats who have called for his ouster should "come to their senses" and stop treating Iraq like "one of their villages." Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki also lambasted the U.S. military for raids in Shiite neighborhoods of Baghdad, adding new strains ahead of next month's showdown in Washington, D.C., over the future of the U.S. mission. The grim combination of ongoing violence and political deadlock have increased frustration in both Washington and Baghdad, with American lawmakers increasingly critical of al-Maliki's performance and Iraqi leaders growing weary of what they consider unfair U.S. criticism. Read The Full Story Ford And GM Say Factories In U.S. Face Axe 2007-08-26 03:03:26 Ailing car giants push unions to agree to pay cuts. Ford and General Motors have threatened to leave Detroit, Michigan, and take their car manufacturing operations overseas if unions do not agree to a massive pay cut for hourly paid workers. The threat to quit the city they call Motown because of its rich automotive heritage would be a crippling blow to Detroit, which is suffering amid a prolonged economic downturn and has been hit by the sub-prime mortgage crisis. Ford and GM are in the thick of negotiations with the United Auto Workers union, the most powerful labor group in the industry. The car makers maintain they must dramatically reduce manufacturing costs if they are to survive in today's global economy. Their biggest burden is the current labor cost per vehicle - an estimated $71 (around £35) per man hour. Workers earn about $27 an hour with the remainder made up of overheads such as pensions and healthcare costs for the thousands of retirees on their books. Read The Full Story As China Roars, Pollution Reaches Deadly Extremes 2007-08-26 03:02:54 No country in history has emerged as a major industrial power without creating a legacy of environmental damage that can take decades and big dollops of public wealth to undo. Yet just as the speed and scale of China’s rise as an economic power have no clear parallel in history, so its pollution problem has shattered all precedents. Environmental degradation is now so severe, with such stark domestic and international repercussions, that pollution poses not only a major long-term burden on the Chinese public but also an acute political challenge to the ruling Communist Party. And it is not clear that China can rein in its own economic juggernaut. Public health is reeling. Pollution has made cancer China’s leading cause of death, the Ministry of Health says. Ambient air pollution alone is blamed for hundreds of thousands of deaths each year. Nearly 500 million people lack access to safe drinking water. Chinese cities often seem wrapped in a toxic gray shroud. Only 1 percent of the country’s 560 million city dwellers breathe air considered safe by the European Union. Beijing is frantically searching for a magic formula, a meteorological deus ex machina, to clear its skies for the 2008 Olympics. Read The Full Story Dissent Threatens U.S.-India Nuclear Cooperation Deal 2007-08-26 03:01:58 Delhi parties say pact limits sovreignty. After two years of painstaking negotiations, a historic nuclear cooperation agreement between the United States and India appears to be unraveling as a broad spectrum of political parties calls on the government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singhto scrap the deal, saying it limits the country's sovereignty in energy and foreign policy matters. The landmark accord that just weeks ago looked like a major foreign policy triumph for this energy-starved subcontinent has become a political liability for India's fragile ruling coalition. The brouhaha over the deal has surprised some nuclear analysts in Washington, D.C., partly because the Bush administration was widely perceived as having caved in to key Indian demands. The administration had assured the government here that it could receive uninterrupted nuclear supplies from the United States and maintain the right to reprocess spent nuclear fuel - a potentially dangerous prospect because reprocessing technology can also be used to make weapons-grade plutonium. To many Western observers, India already had the upper hand in the deal, a testament to its growing international influence. Read The Full Story After Iraq Trip, Grim Resolve 2007-08-26 03:00:16 Antiwar Democrat returns from Baghdad shocked by U.S. military's time frame for withdrawal. When Rep. Jan Schakowsky made her first trip to Iraq this month, the outspoken antiwar liberal resolved to keep her opinions to herself. "I would listen and learn," she decided. At times that proved a challenge, as when Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih told her congressional delegation, "There's not going to be political reconciliation by this September; there's not going to be political reconciliation by next September." Schakowsky gulped - wasn't that the whole idea of President Bush's troop increase, to buy time for that political progress? But the real test came over a lunch with Gen. David H. Petraeus, who used charts and a laser pointer to show how security conditions were gradually improving - evidence, he argued, that the troop increase is doing some good. Still, the U.S. commander cautioned, it could take another decade before real stability is at hand. Schakowsky gasped. "I come from an environment where people talk nine to 10 months," she said, referring to the time frame for withdrawal that many Democrats are advocating. "And there he was, talking nine to 10 years." Read The Full Story Iraq Body Count Running At Double Pace 2007-08-26 02:59:02 This year's U.S. troop buildup has succeeded in bringing violence in Baghdad down from peak levels, but the death toll from sectarian attacks around the country is running nearly double the pace from a year ago. Some of the recent bloodshed appears the result of militant fighters drifting into parts of northern Iraq, where they have fled after U.S.-led offensives. Baghdad, however, still accounts for slightly more than half of all war-related killings - the same percentage as a year ago, according to figures compiled by the Associated Press. The tallies and trends offer a sobering snapshot after an additional 30,000 U.S. troops began campaigns in February to regain control of the Baghdad area. It also highlights one of the major themes expected in next month's Iraq progress report to Congress: some military headway, but extremist factions are far from broken. In street-level terms, it means life for average Iraqis appears to be even more perilous and unpredictable. Read The Full Story DNC Strips Florida Of 2008 Delegates 2007-08-26 02:57:48 No convention slots unless later primary is set. The Democratic National Committee sought to seize control of its unraveling nominating process Saturday, rejecting pleas from state party leaders and cracking down on Florida for scheduling a Jan. 29 Democratic presidential primary. The DNC's rules and bylaws committee, which enforces party rules, voted Saturday morning to strip Florida of all its delegates to the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver, Colorado --the harshest penalty at its disposal. The penalty will not take effect for 30 days, and rules committee members urged officials from the nation's fourth-most-populous state to use the time to schedule a later statewide caucus and thus regain its delegates. By making an object lesson of Florida, Democrats hope to squelch other states' efforts to move their voting earlier, which have created chaos in the primary structure that the national party has established; but the decision to sanction such a pivotal, vote-rich state has risks. Read The Full Story	Total Lunar Eclipse Will Occur Early Tuesday 2007-08-26 21:16:28 The Earth's shadow will creep across the moon's surface early Tuesday, slowly eclipsing it and turning it to shades of orange and red. The total lunar eclipse, the second this year, will be visible in North and South America, especially in the West. People in the Pacific islands, eastern Asia, Australia and New Zealand also will be able to view it if skies are clear. People in Europe, Africa or the Middle East, who had the best view of the last total lunar eclipse in March, won't see this one because the moon will have set when the partial eclipse begins at 4:51 a.m. EDT. The full eclipse will begin an hour later at 5:52 a.m. EDT. An eclipse occurs when Earth passes between the sun and the moon, blocking the sun's light. It's rare because the moon is usually either above or below the plane of Earth's orbit. Read The Full Story Another 12 People Killed As Raging Fires Sweep Through Greece 2007-08-26 21:15:59 At least 12 more people were reported dead on Sunday in fierce forest fires in Greece, as walls of flame, though slowed in somewhat calmer winds, continued to consume homes and to advance on the ruins where the Olympic games were first played. Scores of villages were evacuated, in fires that turned the earth to white ash and the air to a soupy ochre, but not everyone obeyed: In the hilltop town of Karnasi here on the hard-hit Peloponnesian Peninsula, Vassiliki Panagapoulou, 56, doused her tan dress with water, put a rag to her mouth and took a garden hose to the worst fires in Greece, by some accounts, since 1871. “It’s very scary but I have no other option,” she said, after she and her son stopped flames ripping down a slope that threatened her 9 white goats, her 14 roosters and her home of 40 years. “There is no other woman trying to protect her home? I can’t believe that.” Though the death toll was lower than that on Saturday - 46 people, most here on the Peloponnesian Peninsula - the government warned that little progress was made Sunday in putting out the 44 separate fires. They continued to rage, even as firefighters and water-bearing planes began arriving from other European nations. Read The Full Story Commentary: How easy is "Going Green"? 2007-08-26 19:55:00   This afternoon, I found that my hot water heater decided to turn my garage into a small lake.  This is something that happens to homeowners around the world at least a few times in their lives.    I believe strongly in "Going Green".  If I can reduce my dependence on public utilities and save the environment, I see it as a good thing.   In the area I'm in, there is no public service for gas utilities.  Unless you have a private company deliver propane to your residence, you don't use gas appliances.    After going through the normal diagnostic paces, trying to see if I could repair my water heater, I went on a quest for a new water heater.  It was Sunday morning.  All the hardware stores I checked with were open.    I decided that I want to use a solar water heater.  I'm in a prime part of the United States to use solar power, as we receive strong sunlight during the da! y, even in the winter. Read The Full Story Editorial: Stiff-Arming Children's Health 2007-08-26 03:03:09 Intellpuke: The following editorial appears in the New York Times edition for Sunday, August 26, 2007. The Bush administration has imposed new requirements on a valuable children’s health insurance program that look so draconian as to be unattainable. Late on a recent Friday while Congress was in recess, a time fit for hiding dark deeds, the administration sent a letter to state health officials spelling out new hurdles they would have to clear before they could insure children from middle-income families unable to find affordable health coverage. Some 19 states may be forced to pull back programs they have started or proposed. There is a legitimate argument to be had over how far up the income scale the federal-state partnership known as the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, or S-chip, should climb. When it was created, the program focused on children whose family incomes were no higher than twice the poverty level, or about $41,000 today for a family of four. The goal was to cover the near-poor, who earned too much to qualify for Medicaid but not enough to afford private health insurance. Over the years, the Clinton administration and especially the Bush administration allowed states to extend coverage to higher income levels. Today, New Jersey caps it at 350 percent of the poverty level and New York proposes to go to 400 percent. In reaching out this way, virtually all states have scooped up lots of children who were actually poor enough to qualify for Medicaid but had never been enrolled. The combined result has been a heartwarming drop in the number of uninsured children. Read The Full Story Analysis: America Divided Over Iraq Surge 2007-08-26 03:02:25 Clinton and Obama say that new tactics are showing signs of working. Top Democrats have thrown American politics into turmoil just weeks ahead of a make-or-break report into the Iraq war by praising the military 'surge' in Baghdad as producing concrete results. The move is a sign of the deep faultlines springing up in the party in the face of some military advances in Iraq. Though the Democratic party has grown more stridently anti-war since winning mid-term elections last November a raft of top figures, including presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, have now said the surge is showing signs of working. Though Democrats are still pushing for a faster withdrawal, Clinton told veterans in Kansas City: "We've begun to change tactics in Iraq and in some areas ... it's working." Obama said that the surge had succeeded in quelling some violence in and around Baghdad. "I don't think there's ever been any doubt that," he said. Read The Full Story Commentary: To Invoke Vietnam Was A Blunder Too Far For Bush 2007-08-26 03:01:31 Intellpuke: The following commentary was written by Christopher Hitchens and appears in The Observer edition for Sunday, August 26, 2007. Mr. Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair magazine and the author of "God Is Not Great" and "Thomas Paine's Rights Of Man".  In his commentary, Mr. Hitchens writes that the president's crass comparison between Iraq and war in southeast Asia was the most ludicrous misreading of history. His commentary follows: How do I dislike President George Bush? Let me count the ways. Most of them have to do with his contented assumption that "faith" is, in and of itself, a virtue. This self-satisfied mentality helps explain almost everything, from the smug expression on his face to the way in which, as governor of Texas, he signed all those death warrants without losing a second's composure. It explains the way in which he embraced ex-KGB goon Vladimir Putin, citing as the basis of a beautiful relationship the fact that Putin was wearing a crucifix. (Has Putin been seen wearing that crucifix before or since? Did his advisers tell him that the President of the United States was that easy a pushover?) It also explains the unforgivable intervention that Bush made into the private life of the Schiavo family: leaving his Texas ranch to try and keep "alive" a woman whose autopsy showed that her brain had melted to below flatline a long time before. Here is a man who believes the "jury" is still "out" on whether we evolved as a species, who regards stem cell research as something profane, who affects the odd belief that Islam is "a religion of peace". Read The Full Story British Scientists' Plea To Use Hybrid Animal-Human Embryos 2007-08-26 02:59:47 Britain's leading scientists have made a final plea for the right to create the first animal-human embryos for medical research using eggs taken from dead cows. The Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority will announce its decision next week on whether to give permission to U.K. laboratories to create the hybrid embryos to advance the understanding of genetic diseases. The issue is controversial because it involves scientists taking an animal egg, removing its genetic material and putting DNA from a human cell into it. This can be used to create lines of stem cells which can then be made part of studies into incurable genetic diseases such as motor neurone disease. However, it has caused controversy as some campaigners and religious groups argue that it is unethical to mix human and animal cells in this way. Read The Full Story 2 U.K. Soldiers Killed By U.S. 'Friendly Fire' Were On First Tour Of Duty 2007-08-26 02:58:24 Two of the British soldiers killed by an apparent "friendly fire" air attack in Afghanistan on Thursday were 19-year-olds on their first tour of combat duty, Britain's Ministry of Defense said Saturday. Privates Aaron James McClure, Robert Graham Foster and 21-year-old John Thrumble - all from the 1st Battalion, the Royal Anglian Regiment - died after U.S. air support was called in during a fierce firefight with the Taliban, said a British Ministry of Defense statement said. It was accompanied by moving tributes from the men's friends, comrades and family and by an expression of "profound sadness" from U.K. Defense Secretary Des Browne. The deaths triggered a sharp political row in the U.K. as the Conservatives attacked Prime Minister Gordon Brown for having demanded cuts in defense spending when he was Chancellor. In a strongly worded attack, shadow defense secretary Liam Fox said: "As Chancellor, Gordon Brown never gave defense much priority and now the skies are black with chickens coming home to roost. Read The Full Story
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