Free Internet Press Newsletter - Sunday August 26 2007 - (813)

Sunday August 26 2007 edition
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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 G.I.s' Morale Dips As Iraq War Drags On 2007-08-25 16:12:58 With tours extended, multiple deploymnets and new tactics that put them in bare posts in greater danger, they feel leaders are out of touch with reality. In the dining hall of a U.S. Army post south of Baghdad, President Bush was on the wide-screen TV, giving a speech about the war in Iraq. The soldiers didn't look up from their chicken and mashed potatoes. As military and political leaders prepare to deliver a progress report on the conflict to Congress next month, many soldiers are increasingly disdainful of the happy talk that they say commanders on the ground and White House officials are using in their discussions about the war. And they're becoming vocal about their frustration over longer deployments and a taxing mission that keeps many living in dangerous and uncomfortably austere conditions. Some say two wars are being fought here: the one the enlisted men see, and the one that senior officers and politicians want the world to see. "I don't see any progress. Just us getting killed," said Spc. Yvenson Tertulien, one of those in the dining hall in Yousifiya, 10 miles south of Baghdad, as Bush's speech aired last month. "I don't want to be here anymore." Read The Full Story At Least 46 Killed As Forest Fires Sweep Southern Greece 2007-08-25 16:12:18 Officials suspect arson in some of the 170 fires. Forest fires sweeping uncontrolled across southern Greece have killed 46 people, some found Saturday in the charred homes of mountain villages reached too late by rescuers hampered by wind-driven flames. New blazes erupted across the country, including a fire on the fringes of Athens. Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis said arson was suspected in some of the 170 fires that have broken out since Friday morning. He declared a nationwide state of emergency and vowed to pursue the perpetrators. A 65-year-old man was arrested and charged with arson and multiple counts of homicide in a fire that killed six people in Areopolis, a town in the southern Peloponnese, said fire department spokesman Nikos Diamandis. "So many fires breaking out simultaneously in so many parts of the country cannot be a coincidence," said Karamanlis in a nationally televised address. "The state will do everything it can to find those responsible and punish them." Read The Full Story U.S. General Differ On The Timing Of Troop Cuts In Iraq 2007-08-25 03:13:59 As the Bush administration mulls options for withdrawing forces in Iraq, fault lines are beginning to emerge in a debate between commanders in the field who favor slow reductions and senior generals at the Pentagon who favor cutting the number of combat troops more deeply. Among others, Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. George W. Casey, Jr., the Army chief of staff, are said to be leaning toward a recommendation that steep reductions by the end of 2008, perhaps to half of the 20 combat brigades now in Iraq, should be the administration’s goal. Such a drawdown would be deeper and faster than Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top commander in Iraq, is expected to recommend next month, said administration officials. “If you’re out in Baghdad you might have a different priority for where you want the troops,” an administration official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the White House has not authorized public remarks on the options being considered. Read The Full Story Troops Confront Waste In Iraq Reconstruction 2007-08-25 03:13:26 Inexperience and lack of training hobble oversight, accountability. Maj. Craig Whiteside's anger grew as he walked through the sprawling school where U.S. military commanders had invested money and hope. Portions of the workshop's ceiling were cracked or curved. The cafeteria floor had a gaping hole and concrete chunks. The auditorium was unfinished, with cracked floors and poorly painted walls peppered with holes. Whiteside blamed the school director for not monitoring the renovation. The director retorted that the military should have had better oversight. The contract shows the Iraqi contractor was paid $679,000. The story of the Vo-Tech Iskandariyah Industrial School illustrates the challenges of rebuilding Iraq. It also raises questions about how the military is managing hundreds of millions of dollars to fund such reconstruction, part of the effort to stabilize the country. 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 California Governor, Legislature At Odds Over Health Care 2007-08-25 16:13:13 Changes could set tone for rest of nation. California did not start the current wave of efforts to overhaul the American health-care system, but what happens in Sacramento over the next few weeks could have a big impact on whether the drive gains momentum - or peters out. With three weeks remaining in the state's legislative session, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) still has nothing to show for the grand proposal he made in January to create a system that would guarantee health insurance for all Californians. With the resolution of a nearly two-month-long state budget impasse last week, the focus is turning back to health care, with hard-to-predict results. The adoption of a comprehensive plan to overhaul health care in a big, politically influential state would likely spur similar efforts around the country and increase pressure on presidential candidates to tackle the issue. It could also have an impact in Congress, where a battle will resume next month over whether to expand the State Children's Health Insurance Program that provides Medicaid coverage for uninsured children in low-income working families. Smaller states took the first steps. Massachusetts last year passed a law requiring all citizens to buy health insurance, and in recent years Vermont and Maine approved legislation intended to dramatically expand coverage to the uninsured, and Illinois made a priority of covering more kids. In 1974, Hawaii became the first (and still only) state to require that employers provide health insurance to their workers. Read The Full Story Twin Bombings Kill At Least 30 In Southern India 2007-08-25 16:12:32 A pair of bombings tore through crowded public areas in the southern city of Hyderabad on Saturday night, killing at least 30 people and wounding about 50 people, said officials. Security forces were put on alert across the city, which has long been plagued by Hindu-Muslim tensions and occasional violence between the two communities. "This is a terrorist act," Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy, the chief minister for Andhra Pradesh state, told reporters. The blasts - one in a park during a laser show, and the other in a crowded restaurant - went off minutes apart, said  officials. Read The Full Story Two-thirds Of Astronaut Love Triangle In Court 2007-08-25 16:11:27 Hypotenuse does not appear in court. The former romantic rivals don't speak, but Lisa Nowak issues a statement apologizing to Colleen Shipman. It had been almost seven months since Lisa Nowak and Colleen Shipman came face to face in a dark parking lot at Orlando International Airport. Friday they met again, this time before a television audience that tuned in to watch the latest developments in their courtroom drama. Amid a throng of national media, Nowak - whose arrest ended her career as a NASA astronaut - apologized to Shipman, her former romantic rival and the woman she is accused of terrorizing. "The past six months have been very difficult for me, my family and others close to me," Nowak said after a five-hour hearing at the Orange County Courthouse. "I know that it must've also been very hard for Colleen Shipman, and I would like her to know how very sorry I am about having frightened her in any way and the subsequent public harassment that has besieged all of us." Read The Full Story U.S. Terror Suspect List Produces Few Arrests 2007-08-25 03:13:44 Raises questions about Americans' privacy. The government's terrorist screening database flagged Americans and foreigners as suspected terrorists almost 20,000 times last year, but only a small fraction of those questioned were arrested or denied entry into the United States, raising concerns among critics about privacy and the list's effectiveness. A range of state, local and federal agencies as well as U.S. embassies overseas rely on the database to pinpoint terrorism suspects, who can be identified at borders or even during routine traffic stops. The database consolidates a dozen government watch lists, as well as a growing amount of information from various sources, including airline passenger data. The government said it was planning to expand the data-sharing to private-sector groups with a "substantial bearing on homeland security," though officials would not be more specific. Few specifics are known about how the system operates, how many people are detained or turned back from borders, or the criteria used to identify suspects. The government will not discuss cases, nor will it confirm whether an individual's name is on its list. Slightly more than half of the 20,000 encounters last year were logged by Customs and Border Protection officers, who turned back or handed over to authorities 550 people, most of them foreigners, said Customs officials. FBI and other officials said that they could not provide data on the number of people arrested or denied entry for the other half of the database hits. FBI officials indicated that the number of arrests was small. Read The Full Story Wife Of Chinese Activist Detained At Beijing Airport 2007-08-25 03:13:03 Authorities forcibly return her to home village. The wife of a blind, imprisoned legal activist was detained at the Beijing airport Friday by authorities, apparently on orders to prevent her from flying to the Philippinesto receive an award on behalf of her husband, whose case has sparked international outrage and condemnation. Yuan Weijing, 30, was forcibly returned to her home village near Linyi city in Shandong province. She had been staying in Beijing since sneaking out from under police surveillance last month to come here and work on the case to free her husband. "I was taken to the basement of the Beijing airport after I was stopped by the airport official at the security check," Yuan said in a telephone interview. "I saw 16 to 17 strong men in the basement, some of whom were from my town. We stayed in the basement for several minutes, and then left for Linyi." Read The Full Story
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