Free Internet Press Newsletter - Sunday August 12 2007 - (813)

Sunday August 12 2007 edition
Free Internet Press is operated on your donations. Donate Today
Tight Credit Could Stall U.S. Buyout Boom 2007-08-12 03:00:33 The severe turmoil in the credit markets last week has raised serious questions about the future of the buyout craze that gave rise to the biggest deals in U.S. corporate history. For the past few years, a group of elite Wall Street players have been buying up major American icons and taking them private. These massive acquisitions have depended on access to cheap credit, which is supplied by a complex relationship between investment banks and hedge funds. But with credit markets tightening, the pace of these deals, at least in the short run, is expected to dramatically slow. Already-announced multibillion-dollar buyouts, like Tribune Co., Sallie Mae and Hilton Hotels, are likely to be far more complicated to close, said analysts. If one or two of these big deals were to collapse, it might not send the economy into a downturn. But it would profoundly shake investors' confidence in a financial system already under siege from billions of dollars in losses from home mortgage defaults. That could make it even more difficult for companies and home buyers to get loans. Read The Full Story Back Home, More Frustration 2007-08-12 02:59:51 The woman stood waiting amid the lunch counter clatter at the Grand City Variety Store to confront Olympia J. Snowe. "We need to get out," Stephanie Slocum told Snowe, one of Congress's most conflicted members over the war in Iraq. It was the Maine Republican's first week of her summer break, and Slocum was among the first of many constituents who would tell her the time to act is now. The self-described "proud mother of an Army cavalry scout," Slocum is taking Iraq personally. She told Snowe in a matter-of-fact voice about her 27-year-old son, who is now home but shouts angrily at her, whose body trembles, who at times feels he is still in Iraq and who, if Congress does not begin to redeploy troops by September, will be sent back. She spoke of her son's leave that never came, the goggles to protect him that she had to buy herself and the mental health treatment he has just given up. Because, he told his mom, "what's the sense" if he has to go back. "Outrageous," Snowe said of the problems. "I would encourage him to continue to get his care." "I do, but you know how it is," said Slocum. "In the Army ... if you get the therapy, it's shame on you." Read The Full Story In U.K. Fears That U.S. Mortgage Crisis Will Hit Home 2007-08-12 02:59:10 Investors are expected to suffer this week as fears grow that the global financial crisis, sparked by Americans defaulting on their mortgages, could have serious repercussions in Britain. Shares went into freefall round the world on Friday and experts are concerned the meltdown could soon be felt by British householders in the form of depressed house prices and lower income from investments. Pension funds which had been boosted by the strong performance of the stock market by this year's gains have been wiped out, sending some schemes back into the red. All eyes are now trained on how the Asian markets react when they open for business tomorrow to see how confidence has been shaken in global markets. "When confidence is hit and markets start to wobble there is the danger of contagion from one to another," said Dr. Gerard Lyons, chief economist at Standard Chartered. But he says people shouldn't panic: "The market is reacting to the prospect of a slowdown in America and higher interest rates. What happens in the City (London) eventually has an impact on the high street but the housing market isn't about to crash." Read The Full Story Hurricane Flossie Upgraded To Category 4 2007-08-12 02:57:42 Hurricane Flossie strengthened to a Category 4 storm Saturday as it spun more than 1,000 miles south of Hawaii. The hurricane could pass by Hawaii late Tuesday or early Wednesday, said forecasters, but by then cooler waters should weaken Flossie considerably to a tropical storm. At 5 p.m. EDT, Flossie had intensified with maximum sustained winds near 135 mph about 1,035 miles southeast of Hilo, Hawaii. "Flossie continues to be an impressive system," the Central Pacific Hurricane Center said in a statement. Read The Full Story Analysts See 'Simply Incredible' Shrinking Of Floating Ice In The Arctic 2007-08-11 14:13:28 The area of floating ice in the Arctic has shrunk more this summer than in any other summer since satellite tracking began in 1979, and it has reached that record point a month before the annual ice pullback typically peaks, experts said Thursday. The cause is probably a mix of natural fluctuations, like unusually sunny conditions in June and July, and long-term warming from heat-trapping greenhouse gases and sooty particles accumulating in the air, according to several scientists. William L. Chapman, who monitors the region at the University of Illiniois Urbana-Champaign and posted a Web report on the ice retreat Thursday, said that only an abrupt change in conditions could prevent far more melting before the 24-hour sun of the boreal summer set in September. “The melting rate during June and July this year was simply incredible,” said Chapman. “And then you’ve got this exposed black ocean soaking up sunlight and you wonder what, if anything, could cause it to reverse course.” Read The Full Story How The 'Good War' In Afghanistan Went Bad 2007-08-11 14:12:47 A year after the Taliban fell to an American-led coalition, a group of NATO ambassadors landed in Kabul, Afghanistan, to survey what appeared to be a triumph - a fresh start for a country ripped apart by years of war with the Soviets and brutal repression by religious extremists. With a senior American diplomat, R. Nicholas Burns, leading the way, they thundered around the country in Black Hawk helicopters, with little fear for their safety. They strolled quiet streets in Kandahar and sipped tea with tribal leaders. At a briefing from the United States Central Command, they were told that the Taliban were now a “spent force”. “Some of us were saying, ‘Not so fast’,” Burns, now the under secretary of state for political affairs, recalled. “A number of us assumed that the Taliban was too enmeshed in Afghan society to just disappear as a political and military force.” Yet that skepticism never took hold in Washington. Assessments by the Central Intelligence Agency circulating at the same time reported that the Taliban were so decimated they no longer posed a threat, according to two senior intelligence officials who reviewed the reports. The American sense of victory was so robust that the top C.I.A. specialists and elite Special Forces units who had helped liberate Afghanistan were packing their guns and preparing for the next war, in Iraq. Read The Full Story Diggers In Afghanistan Battling Desperate Attacks By Suicide Troops 2007-08-11 14:11:55 Australian troops in Afghanistan faced a terrifying new threat from suicidal Taliban forces as they fought off a fresh attack Saturday. Fighting across the country left 45 dead, including a British soldier, as new tactics by the Taliban show they are prepared to sacrifice themselves in desperate attacks. They are launching major frontal attacks on coalition forces, including storming coalition forts with wave after wave of suicidal fighters prepared to die in the attack. Australians fought with extremists for 90 minutes about midday on Friday after they were ambushed in an alley. Read The Full Story Canada Steps Up Fight For The Arctic 2007-08-11 14:11:18 Another volley has been launched in the battle for the Arctic, with Canada announcing Friday that two new military facilities will be built in the Arctic in a bid to boost its sovereign claim to the fabled Northwest Passage. The frigid hamlet of Resolute Bay, Nunavut - barely 600 kilometres from the magnetic North Pole and one of the coldest human settlements on Earth - will house a new army training centre for cold-weather fighting. A new deep-sea port will also be built for navy and civilian use on the north end of Baffin Island, in the abandoned zinc-mining village of Nanisivik. The two projects will cement Canada's claim to each end of the fabled Northwest Passage, coveted for centuries as a possible trade route to Asia. Read The Full Story Editorial: The Need To Know 2007-08-11 01:42:18 Intellpuke: The following editorial appears in the New York Times edition for Saturday, August 11, 2007. Like many in this country who were angered when Congress rushed to rubber-stamp a bill giving President Bush even more power to spy on Americans, we took some hope from the vow by Congressional Democrats to rewrite the new law after summer vacation. The chance of undoing the damage is slim, unless the White House stops stonewalling and gives lawmakers and the public the information they need to understand this vital issue. Just before rushing off to their vacations, and campaign fund-raising, both houses tried to fix an anachronism in the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires the government to get a warrant to eavesdrop on conversations and e-mail messages if one of the people communicating is inside the United States. The court that enforces the law concluded recently that warrants also are required to intercept messages if the people are outside the United States, but their communications are routed through data exchanges here. The House and Senate had sensible bills trying to fix that Internet-age problem, which did not exist in 1978. But that wasn’t enough for Mr. Bush and his aides, who whipped up their usual brew of fear to kill off those bills. Then they cowed the Democrats into passing a bill giving Mr. Bush powers that go beyond even the illegal wiretapping he has been doing since the 9/11 attacks. Read The Full Story	Fatigue Cripples U.S. Army In Iraq 2007-08-12 03:00:18 Exhaustion and combat stress are besieging US troops in Iraq as they battle with a new type of warfare. Some even rely on Red Bull to get through the day. As desertions and absences increase, the military is struggling to cope with the crisis. Lieutenant Clay Hanna looks sick and white. Like his colleagues he does not seem to sleep. Hanna says he catches up by napping on a cot between operations in the command center, amid the noise of radio. He is up at 6 a.m. and tries to go to sleep by 2 a.m. or 3 a.m., but there are operations to go on, planning to be done and after-action reports that need to be written. And war interposes its own deadly agenda that requires his attention and wakes him up. When he emerges from his naps there is something old and paper-thin about his skin, something sketchy about his movements as the days go by. The Americans he commands, like the other men at Sullivan - a combat outpost in Zafraniya, southeast Baghdad - hit their cots when they get in from operations. But even when they wake up there is something tired and groggy about them. They are on duty for five days at a time and off for two days. When they get back to the forward operating base, they do their laundry and sleep and count the days until they will get home. It is an exhaustion that accumulates over the patrols and the rotations, over the multiple deployments, until it all joins up, wiping out any memory of leave or time at home. Until life is nothing but Iraq. Hanna and his men are not alone in being tired most of the time. A whole army is exhausted and worn out. You see the young soldiers washed up like driftwood at Baghdad's international airport, waiting to go on leave or returning to their units, sleeping on their body armor on floors and in the dust. Read The Full Story Iraq Security Cost Overruns Soar 2007-08-12 02:59:37 U.S. pays millions in cost overruns for security in Iraq. The U.S. military has paid $548 million over the past three years to two British security firms that protect the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on reconstruction projects, more than $200 million over the original budget, according to previously undisclosed data that show how the cost of private security in Iraqhas mushroomed. The two companies, Aegis Defence Services and Erinys Iraq, signed their original Defense Department contracts in May 2004. By July of this year, the contracts supported a private force that had grown to about 2,000 employees serving the Corps of Engineers. The force is about the size of three military battalions. U.S. officials and company representatives attributed the overruns to the cost of protecting a largely civilian workforce amid an escalating insurgency, as Corps of Engineers commanders demanded more manpower and increasingly expensive armor to guard their field staff. Read The Full Story British Firm Under Scrutiny For Export Of Bosnian Guns To Iraq 2007-08-12 02:58:44 Parliament members and Amnesty International demand to know if a Nottingham-based company has breached the United Nations arms embargo. The British government was facing awkward questions Saturday night over an arms deal involving a British company licensed by the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) to import weapons but which was also selling machine guns to an Iraqi official later implicated in an alleged $1.1 billion (£545 million) corruption scandal. A committee of MPs (members of Parliament) and Amnesty International have both demanded to know whether the deal breaches either the United Nations arms embargo on Iraq or British government export laws. They want to know who was involved in the deal and what safeguards are in place to ensure arms exports negotiated by British companies through foreign intermediaries reach their intended destination. Documents obtained by The Observer show Procurement Management Services (PMS) had a contract to provide assault rifles to Ziad Cattan, the former head of military procurement at the Iraq Defense Ministry. PMS was licensed by the DTI, now known as the Department for Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR), to import at least 40,000 assault rifles and AK-47s to Britain from the former Yugoslavia. Read The Full Story Immigration Rules May Hurt Economy 2007-08-11 14:13:41 Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff predicted painful economic fallout from the array of immigration enforcement measures the administration unveiled Friday in an attempt to choke off the jobs "magnet" that draws illegal immigrants. The changes, which would stiffen work-site enforcement, add border agents and increase penalties for rogue employers, could cause havoc in immigrant-dependent industries like agriculture, hospitality and healthcare, Chertoff acknowledged. "There will be some unhappy consequences for the economy out of doing this," he said in an interview with The Times. Chertoff said he had little sympathy for businesses that hire illegal workers, saying they should have seen the crackdown coming after the Senate failed to pass immigration reform. "We have been crystal clear about what the consequences would be," he said. Read The Full Story Mortgage Meltdown - The Personal Effect 2007-08-11 14:13:13 As foreclosures and default warnings pile up across Southern California, thousands of people are losing their homes because they can't pay their mortgages. Thousands more are losing their jobs or seeing their incomes shrink. Realtors, plumbers, loan officers, truck drivers - the effects of the stumbling housing market are widespread and, by many accounts, growing. The following series of reports reveal the personal impacts the troubled housing markets are causing. Housing Woes Afflict Many The sub-prime mortgage pain convulsing financial markets is nothing new to people who make their livings in real estate and the housing construction industry. For months, the deteriorating market has been taking money out of millions of workers' pockets. Real estate agents are selling fewer homes. Appraisers and construction workers are scrambling for assignments. Mortgage loan company employees are being laid off by the thousands. During the peak of the housing boom in California - from 2003 to 2005 - the construction and real estate industry accounted for nearly a third of all new jobs created in the state, said Ryan Ratcliff, an economist for the UCLA Anderson Forecast. Today, he said, they account for about 10%. The number of people thrown out of work by the housing slump is hard to calculate. The state doesn't precisely track several of the housing industry's occupations, including commissioned real estate agents, mortgage brokers, day laborers and self-employed professionals. Read The Full Story Taliban: Two Sick Korean Female Hostages To Be Freed 2007-08-11 14:12:07 A Taliban spokesman said Saturday that two sick, female South Korean hostages would be released “soon” for the sake of good relations between the Taliban and South Korea. Neither the international Red Cross or the Afghan government could immediately confirm the claim. The spokesman, Qari Yousef Ahmadi, said the two women would be freed because they are sick. He said the decision had been made by the Taliban's high commanders, but he said it had not yet been decided when the women would be freed. Two Taliban leaders and four South Korean officials met Saturday for the second day of face-to-face talks over the fate of 21 South Korean hostages being held since July 19 by the militants. The two said earlier Saturday that the Koreans would “definitely” be released and possibly as soon as “today or tomorrow.” Read The Full Story Bombing In Southern Iraq Kills Governor, Police Chief 2007-08-11 14:11:38 A powerful roadside bomb on Saturday killed the governor and police chief of a southern province that has seen fierce internal fighting between Shiite factions, said officials. The bomb struck a convoy carrying the Khalil Jalil Hamza, the governor of the Qadisiyah province, and the provincial police chief home from a funeral service for a tribal sheik at about 5 p.m., said army Brig. Gen. Othman al-Farood. Hamza and the police chief, Maj. Gen. Khalid Hassan, were killed, along with their driver and a body guard who were in the same SUV, according to al-Farood, the commander of the Iraqi army division in charge of the area. The attack occurred in the town of Aajaf, as the convoy was headed back to the provincial capital of Diwaniyah, 80 miles south of Baghdad. Read The Full Story Gouge On Endeavour's Heat Shield Caused By Debris - Worries NASA 2007-08-11 01:42:34 A piece of debris hit the underside of the space shuttle Endeavour during liftoff on Wednesday and gouged a small but potentially worrisome divot in a heat shield tile, NASA officials said Friday. The gouge, spotted via images taken by the crew of the International Space Station as the Endeavour approached docking Friday afternoon, is small, about three inches wide. Still, there were some visual indications that it might be deep. “What does this mean?” John Shannon, chairman of the mission management team, said at a news conference Friday. “I don’t know at this point.” Astronauts will conduct a closer examination on Sunday, using a laser tool attached to the shuttle’s robotic arm to measure its exact shape. Based upon that information, NASA engineers will analyze how much heat might reach the Endeavour’s underlying structure when the spacecraft re-enters Earth’s atmosphere. Read The Full Story Commentary: Oh well. At Least Losing All Those AK-47s Builds A Market 2007-08-11 01:42:03 Intellpuke: The following commentary was written by Marina Hyde and appears in the Guardian edition for Saturday, August 11, 2007. At times it seems that no statistic to emerge from Iraq cannot be looked at in a glass-half-full kind of way. Last year, when the civilian death toll was having one of its moments in the spotlight, Iowan Republican Senator Steve King claimed: "My wife's at far greater risk being a civilian in Washington, D.C., than an average civilian in Iraq." He explained that there were 45 violent deaths per 100,000 people in Washington in 2003 and 27.51 per 100,000 in Iraq as a whole. As it turned out, the source of his Iraq statistic was unclear, while his Washington figures were out of date ... but let's not dignify him any further. The vignette merely illustrates that no matter how obviously dire a situation, there is usually some idiot on hand, someone who is bewilderingly able to "put a new perspective" on horrifyingly high civilian death tolls, or suggest that one can't make a big democracy omelette without breaking a few hundred thousand eggs (I paraphrase slightly). Yet occasionally a statistic comes along that seems indefensibly absurd. And so it was with this week's news that the United States has lost 190,000 weapons issued to the Iraqi security forces since the 2003 invasion - a statistic on which Mr. King has unsurprisingly yet to break his silence. According to the U.S. government accountability department - I know! the what? - 135,000 pieces of body armor are also missing, and even the most frothingly diehard supporters of the whole Iraq adventure are being forced to concede that the figures "raise questions". Read The Full Story
Original materials on this site © Free Internet Press. Any mirrored or quoted materials © their respective authors, publications, or outlets, as shown on their publication, indicated by the link in the news story. Original Free Internet Press materials may be copied and/or republished without modification, provided a link to http://FreeInternetPress.com is given in the story, or proper credit is given. Newsletter options may be changed in your preferences on http://freeinternetpress.com Please email editor@freeinternetpress.com there are any questions. XML/RSS/RDF Newsfeed Syndication: http://freeinternetpress.com/rss.php