Free Internet Press Newsletter - Saturday August 4 2007 - (813)

Saturday August 4 2007 edition
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Sentate Votes To Expand Warrantless Surveillance - Temporarily 2007-08-04 02:58:02 The U.S. Senate bowed to White House pressure last night and passed a Republican plan for overhauling the federal government's terrorist surveillance laws, approving changes that would temporarily give U.S. spy agencies expanded power to eavesdrop on foreign suspects without a court order. The 60 to 28 vote, which was quickly denounced by civil rights and privacy advocates, came after Democrats in the House failed to win support for more modest changes that would have required closer court supervision of government surveillance. Earlier in the day, President Bush threatened to hold Congress in session into its scheduled summer recess if it failed to approve the changes he wanted. The legislation, which is expected to go before the House Saturday, would expand the government's authority to intercept without a court order the phone calls and e-mails of people in the United States who are communicating with people overseas. Read The Full Story U.S. Military In Iraq Forms Perilous Alliances With Former Enemies 2007-08-04 02:57:32 Inside a brightly lit room, the walls adorned with memorials to 23 dead American soldiers, Lt. Col. Robert Balcavage stared at the three Sunni tribal leaders he wanted to recruit. Their fighters had battled U.S. troops. Balcavage suspected they might have attacked some of his own men. The trio accused another sheik of having links to the Sunni insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq. That sheik, four days earlier, had promised the U.S. military to fight al-Qaeda in Iraq and protect a strategic road. "Who do you trust? Who do you not trust?" said Balcavage, commander of the 1st Battalion, 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 82nd Airborne Division, his voice dipping out of earshot. An hour later, he signed up some of America's newest allies. Read The Full Story House Forms Special Panel Over Alleged Stolen Vote 2007-08-04 02:56:48 The U.S. House last night unanimously agreed to create a special select committee, with subpoena powers, to investigate Republican allegations that Democratic leaders had stolen a victory from the House Republicans on a parliamentary vote late Thursday night. The move capped a remarkable day that started with Republicans marching out of the House in protest near midnight Thursday, was punctuated by partisan bickering, and ended with Democratic hopes for a final legislative rush fading. Even a temporary blackout of the House chamber's vote tally board led to suspicions and accusations of skullduggery. While Democratic leaders hoped to leave for their August recess on a wave of legislative successes, the House instead slowed to an acrimonious crawl that threatened to stretch the legislative session into next week. Read The Full Story Beseiged By Crises, Afghan President Karzai Prepares To Meet With Bush 2007-08-04 02:56:09 As Afghan President Hamid Karzai prepares for a two-day meeting with President Bush at Camp David starting Sunday, his government is confronting contradictory pressures at home and abroad over how to secure the release of 21 surviving South Korean hostages, combat the aggressive Taliban insurgency and rein in Afghanistan's flourishing opium poppy trade. Bush administration officials have described the meeting as a private "strategy session" between partners and a chance to reiterate unwavering U.S. support for Karzai's beleaguered government; but here, analysts and politicians say that in return for providing $10 billion in aid and more than 20,000 troops, U.S. officials may be pushing Karzai to take or accept harsh actions that many Afghans adamantly oppose. The most urgent issue is what to do about the Taliban, the once-defeated radical Islamic militia that has roared back to life as a power-hungry, media-savvy guerrilla force. It is taking ever more audacious actions - such as kidnapping 23 Korean church volunteers on a bus July 19 - while moving ever closer to this tense capital in its campaign to drive out foreign troops and restore strict Islamic rule. Read The Full Story After Pakistan's Chief Justice Returns, Supreme Court Releases Musharraf Critic 2007-08-04 02:55:40 Pakistan’s Supreme Court on Friday ruled to free one of the country’s main opposition leaders, Javed Hashmi, who had been serving a sentence for treason and inciting mutiny in the armed forces. The case provided the first significant ruling since the reinstatement of Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry,  and had been closely watched to see what direction Chaudhry would take the court in after his own successful battle against a dismissal attempt by Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf.  Opposition political parties hailed the decision as a victory against military rule, and a lawyer for Hashmi said the ruling was “an expression of absolute independence of the judiciary.” “There are no political overtones,” said Muhammad Akram Sheik, the senior lawyer for Hashmi. “It is not a result of judicial activism.” Read The Full Story Libya Signs $400 Million Arms Deal With France 2007-08-03 20:37:23 The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, is facing an outcry over a major arms deal with Libya signed a week after he secured the release of six imprisoned health workers held in the country. Sarkozy has repeatedly denied promising the weapons to Tripoli as part of a secret trade-off for the prisoners' freedom. He faces fresh controversy after the European defense and aerospace giant EADS announced it had signed a $400 million (€296 million or £200 million) military deal with Libya. News that the weapons sale had been "finalized" came just two days after Saif ul-Islam, the son of the Libyan leader, Muammar Gadafy, suggested Tripoli had been promised arms. Read The Full Story Commentary: Good News From Baghdad At Last: The Oil Law Has Stalled 2007-08-03 20:36:54 Intellpuke: The following commentary is written by Jonathan Steele and appears in the Guardian edition for Friday, August 3, 2007. Glad tidings from Baghdad at last. The Iraqi parliament has gone into summer recess without passing the oil law that Washington was pressing it to adopt. For the Bush administration this is irritating, since passage of the law was billed as a "benchmark" in its battle to get Congress not to set a timetable for U.S. troop withdrawals. The political hoops through which the government of Nouri al-Maliki has been asked to jump were meant to be a companion piece to the U.S. "surge". Just as General David Petraeus, the current U.S. commander, is due to give his report on military progress next month, George Bush is supposed to tell Congress in mid-September how the Maliki government is moving forward on reform. The signs are that, on both fronts, the administration will carry on playing for time. Bush and his officials are already suggesting they will maintain the surge for another year, and that Petraeus' report will merely be an interim score card. It will not use the fateful Vietnam-era language of light at the end of the tunnel, but it will say progress is under way and therefore more congressional patience is needed. Similarly, Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador in Baghdad, is playing down the urgency of the benchmarks. He has reminded the U.S. media that Congress can take years to make reforms on complex issues such as immigration and healthcare. He argues it is unfair to expect the Iraqi parliament to do everything as fast as outsiders might wish. Read The Full Story 1,800 Chinese Officials Admit To Corruption 2007-08-03 20:36:02 Nearly 1,800 Chinese officials confessed to their involvement in hundreds of acts of "misconduct", after a month-long nationwide "discipline" campaign, a senior Communist party official told reporters Friday. The campaign, launched in May, uncovered around 77.9 million yuan ($10 million or £5 million) in illicit payments and funds, said Gan Yisheng of the party's central commission for discipline and inspection (CCDI). A special team of inspectors was sent across the country to question local party bureaus, state-owned enterprises and banks. As well as conspicuous acts of corruption, the team also looked at the buying and selling of government positions, several dubious promotions and other acts of malfeasance. Apart from rooting out economic crimes, it also gave officials a chance to "rectify" their mistakes, said Gan. Read The Full Story Federal Appeals Court Rules FBI Violated Constitution In Raid On Rep. Jefferson's Office 2007-08-03 14:58:38 A federal appeals court today ruled that the FBI violated the Constitution during a search of U.S. Rep. William J. Jefferson's Capitol Hill office last year and ordered the agency to return all privileged materials. The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia did not say that a raid in itself was unconstitutional, but it ruled that FBI agents skirted the law when they viewed paper documents during the May raid before giving the Louisiana Democrat an opportunity to challenge whether the papers were protected under the Constitution's "speech or debate" clause. The court, however, stopped short of ordering the return of all seized documents: "Although the search of Congressman's Jefferson's paper files violated the Speech or Debate Clause, his argument does not support granting the relief that he seeks, namely the return of all seized documents ... whether privileged or not." Read The Full Story Federal Crackdown On Illegal Immigrants Looms, So Does Chaos 2007-08-03 02:58:09 With the failure of immigration legislation in Congress this year, federal officials are planning a new crackdown on illegal immigrants that would force businesses to fire them or face stiff penalties. But the effort also could cause serious headaches for millions of U.S. citizens. In the coming days, the Department of Homeland Security is expected to issue a rule outlining how businesses must respond when they receive notice that there are discrepancies in a worker's tax records. Many businesses simply ignore such notices now. Under the new rules, employees would have a limited time to contact the Social Security Administration to correct the information, or face termination. Read The Full Story NASA's New Mars Probe To Go Off In Search Of Water - And Life? 2007-08-03 02:57:34 The search for life on other worlds can be boiled down to a simple maxim: Follow the water. Life, at least the carbonaceous form we are familiar with, loves water. Now, for the first time, NASA is about to land a spacecraft in a place on another planet where scientists are confident water exists. The Mars Phoenix lander is set to blast off from Cape Canaveral early Saturday morning for a journey to near the Martian north pole. Once there, it will extend a 7-foot-long robotic arm to dig down to a layer of ice thought to lie just beneath the surface. If the ice is as hard as some scientists suspect - think concrete - Phoenix will use a tungsten carbide drill to bore into it. The soil and ice will be analyzed by the most sophisticated suite of scientific instruments ever sent to the surface of another world. The instruments will scan, magnify and cook the compounds, finally sending them through a mass spectrometer to identify their parts. Read The Full Story Iraq Prime Minister Maliki's Impact Blunted By His Own Party's Fears 2007-08-03 02:56:33 As the U.S. military attempts to pacify Iraq so its leaders can pursue political reconciliation, Iraqi and Western observers say Prime Minister Nouri al-Malikiand his inner circle appear increasingly unable to pull the government out of its paralysis. At times consumed by conspiracy theories, Maliki and his Dawa party elite operate much as they did when they plotted to overthrow Saddam Hussein -- covertly and concerned more about their community's survival than with building consensus among Iraq's warring groups, say Iraqi politicians and analysts and Western diplomats. In recent weeks, those suspicions have deepened as U.S. military commanders have begun to work with Sunni insurgents, longtime foes of the Shiite-led government, who have agreed to battle the group al-Qaeda in Iraq.  "The level of mutual trust is so low that you really have to not just rebuild trust, you have to build trust in the first place, and that is still very much a work in progress right now," said Ashraf Jehangir Qazi, the top U.N. envoy to Iraq. Read The Full Story	Housing Worries Pummel Stock Market - Dow Down 281 On Job, Credit Fears 2007-08-04 02:57:48 Slowing job growth and increasing credit worries about a Wall Street firm hit by losses in mortgage investments sent stocks tumbling Friday, capping a tumultuous week of trading during which jumpy investors tried to assess just how much more damage the housing downturn would unleash. A rapid sell-off in the final hour of trading erased gains made in the two previous days. The losses were led by shares of financial companies, which have been hit particularly hard by lingering weakness in housing and related lending markets. "No one really knows how pervasive this is ... and the uncertainty is what's killing the market," said Jim Herrick, director of equity trading at Robert W. Baird. Most major market measures shed more than 2 percent of their value on one of the year's worst days for stocks. The Dow Jones industrial average fell 281.42 points, or 2.1 percent, to 13,181.91. The Standard & Poor's 500-stock index fell 39.14, or 2.7 percent, to 1433.06. The tech-heavy Nasdaq fell 64.73, or 2.5 percent, to 2511.25. Despite posting losses for three consecutive weeks, the Dow is up 5.8 percent for the year. The broader S&P 500 is now up just 1 percent for the year, however, and the Russell 2000 index of smaller-company stocks is down 4 percent. Read The Full Story Bush Invites World Powers To Discuss Climate Change 2007-08-04 02:57:02 President Bush Friday formally invited top officials from the world's leading economic powers to take part in a climate change summit aimed at establishing voluntary goals for lowering greenhouse gas emissions while sustaining growth. The meeting follows a May pledge by Bush to convene the world's leading economies - and most prolific polluters - to find a solution to the problem of climate change that would both promote energy efficiency and encourage prosperity. "Science has deepened our understanding of climate change and opened new possibilities for confronting it," Bush said in the letter of invitation. Long wary of the effectiveness of global environmental agreements, Bush tried to seize the initiative on global warming with his pledge to initiate a series of meetings to set flexible, long-term goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. He said his approach would allow countries to find their own best paths to reducing pollution. The proposal marked a clear shift for Bush, who had come under international criticism for his opposition to participating in the Kyoto Protocol, a United Nations-led environmental agreement that will expire in 2012. Read The Full Story Drug Violence Invades Monterrey, Mexico - Once Latin America's Safest City 2007-08-04 02:56:29 Biti Rodriguez could have gone anywhere for her 10-year-old's birthday party, but Incredible Pizza, a mammoth restaurant and fun house tucked into the corner of a strip mall here, offered her something that suddenly has become a consuming obsession: safety. She herded her daughter, Alejandra, and a dozen other giggling girls through two metal detectors one recent afternoon at this pizza parlor that promises "incredible security for your children," then dumped bags of presents on a table to be probed by a guard. It took a while to actually get inside, but Rodriguez didn't care. She thinks all the extra security is "super bien" - super good. Not so long ago, metal detectors at a pizza place would have been unimaginable in Monterrey, Mexico's  third-largest metropolitan area, with more than 3.6 million residents. The city once seemed as if it could do no wrong -- two years ago it was named the safest city in Latin America by an international consulting group, it boasted the region's wealthiest residential neighborhood, and it was a strong competitor for the Major League Baseball  franchise that became the Washington Nationals. Read The Full Story Afghans: At Least 18 Civilians Wounded In U.S. Airstrike On 2 Taliban Commanders 2007-08-04 02:55:55 The United States military said Friday that it had carried out an airstrike on two Taliban commanders during “a sizable meeting” of insurgents in a remote region of Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan, but that it could not be sure the men had been killed. Local officials said that at least 18 Afghans were wounded in the attack. A large number of the Taliban had gathered for a public execution near a shrine in the Baghran district and that members of the public were also present at the time of the bombing, 4 p.m. on Thursday, they said. “The people say there were many people there,” the provincial police chief, Muhammad Hussain Andiwal, said in a telephone interview. “The Taliban were also in great numbers; some 16 to 17 vehicles belonging to the Taliban were present at the scene. There must be heavy casualties to the Taliban.” Read The Full Story Foot And Mouth Disease Found On Farm In Britain 2007-08-04 02:55:29 Foot and mouth disease has been found in cattle on a British farm, the government said on Friday as it banned livestock movements to prevent a repeat of a 2001 outbreak that blighted farming and rural tourism. Infected livestock were found on a farm near Guildford, close to London, and all cattle on the farm were being culled, said Britain's Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA). Officials immediately halted movements of pigs and ruminant animals such as cows and sheep across the United Kingdom to stop the spread of the disease and set up a 10-kilometer (six-mile) surveillance zone around the farm. The disease causes high fevers and blisters in cloven-hoofed animals and can often lead to death. It can be contracted by cattle, pigs, sheep and goats, but very rarely by people. Read The Full Story More Than 1,100 Dead, 19 Million People Displaced By South Asia Floods 2007-08-03 20:37:11 Monsoon rains whipped the Indian subcontinent Friday, flooding a wide swathe south of the Himalayas and bringing the death toll over recent weeks to more than 1,100, with 19 million people displaced. Hundreds of kilometers of land from the Gangetic plains to the Bangladeshi delta are under water as rivers burst their banks, although most of the deaths have happened in central India. Parts of the Indian states of Assam, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh have seen almost three weeks of rain, swelling rivers and flooding fields. The country's financial capital, Mumbai, saw water levels rise to knee level in the streets, forcing train services to be closed down and flights to be cancelled. Read The Full Story After Tornado, Kansas Town's Comeback Is Uncertain 2007-08-03 20:36:33 Most of the debris is gone, the supermarket is moving back and students plan to start school this month in trailers set up as classrooms. Three months after a tornado killed 10 people and flattened this prairie farming town, locals are slowly rebuilding and planners say they are optimistic about Greensburg's future. Federal and local officials are even preparing a long-term, environmentally friendly recovery plan, drawing the attention of Leonardo DiCaprio, who plans a 13-part reality series called "Eco-Town". But many residents remain uncertain about their town's long-term prospects in the wake of destruction so severe that experts warn it could be a half decade or more before the community fully returns. Marion Marrs plans to stay, but he knows others are making a different choice. His wife of five years has lived in Greensburg for nearly 60 years and "she wants to stay here," he said as he mowed one of his four lots in town. "But all her friends are moving out, most of 'em," said Marrs. Read The Full Story Lawmakers Clash On House Floor 2007-08-03 14:58:52 The House was in disarray Friday morning after angry Republicans marched off the floor late last night over manuvering by Democratic leaders that cost them a parlimentary victory on legislation involving agricultural spending. GOP lawmakers marched out about 11 p.m. Thursday night and have not returned since, throwing into uncertainty an agenda that today was to include important votes on a massive energy bill, a defense spending bill and terrorist surveillance legislation before Congress leaves on its summer recess tomorrow. It was unclear by midday when, or if, Republicans would return. Rep. Patrick McHenry (North Carolina), a Republican insurgent, Friday morning called Democrats "cheaters," prompting a new eruption. Read The Full Story 5 Confirmed Dead From Bridge Collapse, But Toll Expected To Rise 2007-08-03 14:58:24 Four bodies have been recovered so far from the site of a highway bridge collapse, and a fifth victim died Wednesday night at the hospital, officials said Friday, but the death toll is expected to rise as crews search the twisted concrete wreckage and the debris-filled waters of the Mississippi River. Information about how many people may be trapped remains extremely sketchy. Authorities initially estimated that 20 to 30 were missing, based on the number of cars believed to have been on the bridge when it fell. Friday, some officials said they could confirm only eight people missing, but a spokeswoman for the Hennepin County sheriff's office, which is overseeing the recovery effort, said later that authorities still had no firm knowledge of how many bodies there might be. "We're not confirming any numbers at this point," said spokeswoman Tracy Martin. "There's been too much confusion. Everything that was given out was just belief." Search crews are working slowly and under extremely dangerous conditions, and officials have said they may not know for sure how many people were killed for several days. Read The Full Story Wall Street's Lucrative Tax Break Is Under Fire 2007-08-03 02:57:55 The most controversial tax break on Wall Street, known simply as the Carry, is not authorized by any law and was never approved by Congress. Instead, it grew quietly over several decades, hinted at but never directly addressed in obscure court cases and arcane regulations issued by the Internal Revenue Service. Unchallenged by lawmakers, it swelled into a benefit that, by one back-of-the-envelope estimate, spares a small band of the country's richest and most powerful financiers $6 billion a year in personal income taxes. The astonishing cost of this tax break to the federal government has riveted attention on Wall Street's titans of the moment, the extraordinarily wealthy managers of private-equity firms and hedge funds. Until now, they have gone largely unexamined by Washington but, at a time of rising income inequality and with Congress engaged in a desperate hunt for cash to expand aid to a disgruntled middle class, the Wall Street money men have become an appealing target for Democratic lawmakers and presidential candidates, who say the financiers are woefully undertaxed. Read The Full Story Judge's Ruling Limited Spying Efforts 2007-08-03 02:56:56 A federal intelligence court judge earlier this year secretly declared a key element of the Bush administration's wiretapping efforts illegal, according to a lawmaker and government sources, providing a previously unstated rationale for fevered efforts by congressional lawmakers this week to expand the president's spying powers. House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) disclosed elements of the court's decision in remarks Tuesday to Fox News as he was promoting the administration-backed wiretapping legislation. Boehner has denied revealing classified information, but two government officials privy to the details confirmed that his remarks concerned classified information. The judge, whose name could not be learned, concluded early this year that the government had overstepped its authority in attempting to broadly surveil communications between two locations overseas that are passed through routing stations in the United States, according to two other government sources familiar with the decision. Read The Full Story Federal Appeals Court Rules Against Katrina Victims, For Insurance Companies 2007-08-03 02:56:13 Hurricane Katrina victims whose homes and businesses were destroyed after floodwaters breached levees in the 2005 storm cannot recover money from their insurance companies for the damage, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday. The case could affect thousands of residents and business owners in Louisiana who are attempting to rebuild. Robert P. Hartwig, chief economist at the industry-funded Insurance Information Institute in New York,said in June that a ruling against the industry could have cost insurers $1 billion. "This event was excluded from coverage under the plaintiffs' insurance policies, and under Louisiana law, we are bound to enforce the unambiguous terms of their insurance contracts as written," Judge Carolyn D. King wrote for a three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans. Read The Full Story
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