Free Internet Press Newsletter - Friday September 7 2007 - (813)

Friday September 7 2007 edition
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Britain's Environmental Groups Withdraw From Nuclear Power Talks 2007-09-07 03:27:38 Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and World Wildlife Fund describe government consultation as a sham. Britain's leading environmental groups are poised to formally withdraw from a British government consultation Friday that will determine whether government ministers will be able to push ahead with plans to build a new generation of nuclear power stations. The coalition which was asked to provide evidence to inform the debate believes the government has failed to fairly reflect the arguments for presentations that will be given to more than 1,100 members of the public that are due to start Saturday. The process was forced upon the government by the the U.K.'s high court, which ruled in February that a previous consultation was "seriously flawed" and "manifestly inadequate and unfair". At least six groups, including Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, WWF and Green Alliance, claim the government is distorting the evidence and say they are considering whether to take the case to court again. The accusations are damaging because the government is bound by its own guidelines to keep an open mind on new nuclear power stations until after the "fullest public consultation". If the government is forced into a third consultation it could delay major energy decisions being made for at least a year. Read The Full Story Study Indicates Virus May Be Cause Of Collapse In Honeybee Colonies 2007-09-07 03:27:09 Scientists Thursday identified a virus as one of the likely causes of the recent wave of honeybee colony collapses across the country. The study, co-authored by researchers at Pennsylvania State University, Columbia University, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and several other institutions, suggests that the Israeli acute paralysis virus (IAPV) helps trigger the mysterious condition known as colony collapse disorder, which destroyed about 23 percent of U.S. beehives last winter. The paper is being published Friday in the journal Science. Beekeepers, scientists and public officials have been searching for the cause of the disorder, which surfaced in 2004 and was formally recognized last year. Unlike other diseases that strike hives, the collapse disorder leaves a colony without most of its worker bees despite the presence of plentiful food, a queen and other adult bees. It has devastated an industry that produces honey and pollinates lucrative crops such as almonds, oranges and apples. The scientists who authored the paper emphasized that they have begun to solve the puzzle but have yet to determine exactly what causes a colony's abrupt decline. Read The Full Story Petraeus Open To Pullout Of 1 Brigade 2007-09-07 03:25:34 Top general in Iraq said to favor caution. Army Gen. David H. Petreaus has indicated a willingness to consider a drawdown of one brigade of between 3,500 and 4,500 U.S. troops from Iraq early next year, with more to follow over the next months based on conditions on the ground, according to a senior U.S. official. The pullouts would be contingent on the ability of U.S. and Iraqi forces to sustain what the administration heralds as recent gains in security and to make further gains in stabilizing Iraq. President Bush signaled the possibility of drawdowns after visiting Anbar province earlier this week. After meeting with Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker, Bush said he was told that "if the kind of success we are now seeing continues, it will be possible to maintain the same level of security with fewer American forces." Administration officials say the president will make the final decision about the overall strategy in Iraq, but they suggested that Bush is unlikely to depart significantly from recommendations made by top military officials but, on the eve of Petraeus's testimony before Congress early next week, there is still a diversity of opinion among top U.S. military officials on the eventual size and length of U.S. deployments. Petraeus's recommendations could fall on the conservative side of preferences among U.S. military planners, with the Joint Chiefs and Adm. William J. Fallon,  head of the U.S. Central Command, concerned about the drain on U.S. forces and the heavy focus on Iraq, U.S. officials say. Read The Full Story Islamist Website Claims Bin Laden Will Release Video Message To Mark 6th Anniversary Of 9/11 2007-09-07 03:23:55 Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader, will release a video addressing the American people on the sixth anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks, an Islamist website reported Thursday night. The announcement appeared on a website where al-Qaeda's media arm, as-Sahab, frequently posts messages. It was illustrated with a still photo from the video, showing bin Laden addressing the camera, his beard apparently dyed black The tape is expected to be released in the next 72 hours. A banner for the forthcoming address read: "Soon, God willing, a videotape from the lion sheikh Osama bin Laden, God preserve him." If genuine, the tape will be the first time Bin Laden has appeared in a video broadcast since October 2004 when a tape was obtained by al-Jazeera shortly before the U.S. presidential elections. In that address Bin Laden said America could avoid another 9/11 style attack if it stopped threatening Muslims. Read The Full Story Federal Judge Strikes Down Parts Of Patriot Act 2007-09-06 14:12:27 A federal judge struck down parts of the revised USA Patriot Act on Thursday, saying investigators must have a court's approval before they can order Internet providers to turn over records without telling customers. U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero said the government orders must be subject to meaningful judicial review and that the recently rewritten Patriot Act ''offends the fundamental constitutional principles of checks and balances and separation of powers.'' The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) had challenged the law, complaining that it allowed the FBI to demand records without the kind of court order required for other government searches. The ACLU said it was improper to issue so-called national security letters, or NSLs - investigative tools used by the FBI to compel businesses to turn over customer information - without a judge's order or grand jury subpoena. Examples of such businesses include Internet service providers, telephone companies and public libraries. Read The Full Story Human Rights Watch Says 'Indiscriminate' Israeli Attacks Caused Most Civilian Deaths In Hezbollah War 2007-09-06 14:11:43 In its harshest condemnation of Israel since last year’s war, Human Rights Watch charged that most of the Lebanese civilian casualties came from “indiscriminate Israeli air strikes,” according to a report released today. In a statement issued before the report’s release, Human Rights Watch said there was no basis to the Israeli claim that civilian casualties resulted from Hezbollah guerrillas using civilians as shields. Israel has said it attacked civilian areas because Hezbollah set up rocket launchers in villages and towns. More than 1,000 Lebanese were killed in the 34-day conflict last summer, which began after Hezbollah staged a cross-border raid, killing three Israeli soldiers and capturing two others. They are still being held. Israeli warplanes targeted Lebanese infrastructure, including bridges and the international airport at Beirut, and heavily damaged a neighborhood in Beirut known as a Hezbollah stronghold, as well as attacking Hezbollah centers in villages near the border. Hezbollah fired nearly 4,000 rockets at northern Israel, killing 119 soldiers. Forty Israeli civilians were killed in the fighting. Read The Full Story New U.S. Mortgage Foreclosures Set Record 2007-09-06 14:11:08 The percentage of mortgages entering foreclosure rose to a record level during the three months that ended June 30, according to a survey released Thursday. The defaults left homeowners struggling to hold onto their houses and threatened to put added pressure on already weakening home prices. However, the pain was far from evenly distributed. If not for increases in foreclosure starts in California, Florida, Nevada and Arizona, the nationwide rate of foreclosure filings would have dropped during the second quarter, according to the quarterly survey by the Mortgage Bankers Association. Among other states, 34 experienced declining foreclosure filings and others showed modest increases, said the industry group. Read The Full Story OECD Warns U.S. Could Go Into Recession 2007-09-06 02:25:29 West's leading economic thinktank urges Federal Reserve to cut interest rates as housing market crisis deepens. The west's leading economic thinktank Wednesday urged America's central bank to insure against the prospect of recession with an immediate cut in interest rates as it emerged that the crash in the U.S. housing market had left real-estate activity at its weakest since the economy was brought to a halt by the terrorist attacks on 9/11. Updating its half-yearly forecasts for the global economy, the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) added to growing pressure on the Federal Reserve to ease the pressure on U.S.  borrowers when it meets later this month. The OECD expressed concerns about the ripple impact on the world economy from the credit crunch triggered by the losses sustained by financial institutions as a result of defaults on home loans to Americans with poor borrowing records and said it could not rule out a recession if an imminent slowdown in the world's biggest economy turned out to be worse than expected. "Downside risks have become more ominous," the OECD's chief economist, Jean-Philippe Cotis, said in a statement. Read The Full Story Italian Tenor Luciano Pavarotti Is Dead At 71 2007-09-06 02:24:51 Luciano Pavarotti, whose vibrant high C's and ebullient showmanship made him one of the world's most beloved tenors, died Thursday, his manager told the Associated Press. He was 71. His manager, Terri Robson, told the A.P. in an e-mailed statement that Pavarotti died at his home in Modena, Italy, at 5 a.m. local time. Pavarotti had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer last year and underwent further treatment in August. "The Maestro fought a long, tough battle against the pancreatic cancer which eventually took his life. In fitting with the approach that characterized his life and work, he remained positive until finally succumbing to the last stages of his illness," said the statement. For serious fans, the unforced beauty and thrilling urgency of Pavarotti's voice made him the ideal interpreter of the Italian lyric repertory, especially in the 1960s and '70s when he first achieved stardom. For millions more, his charismatic performances of standards like "Nessun dorma" from Puccini's "Turandot" came to represent what opera is all about. Read The Full Story Hurricane Felix Kills 18 In Nicaragua 2007-09-06 02:23:58 Hurricane Felix killed at least 18 people and damaged thousands of homes as it passed through the remote Atlantic coast of Nicaragua, but the storm failed to produce the massive flooding many had feared in neighboring Honduras, officials said Wednesday. Little more than a day after it came ashore as a powerful Category 5 hurricane, Felix was downgraded to a tropical depression. In the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa, where 300,000 people were evacuated from low-lying areas, the rain stopped and life returned to normal. On Mexico's Baja California peninsula, where a second hurricane struck land less than nine hours after Felix, officials were breathing a sigh of relief. Henriette made landfall as a Category 1 hurricane just six miles from the center of San Jose del Cabo, but damage to the region's tourist industry was minimal, said officials. Read The Full Story	Bandwidth Hogs Shut Down 2007-09-07 03:27:22 Comcast Cuts Internet Service To Big Downloaders The rapid growth of online videos, music and games has created a new Internet sin: using it too much. Comcast has punished some transgressors by cutting off their Internet service, arguing that excessive downloaders hog Internet capacity and slow down the network for other customers. The company declines to reveal its download limits. "You have no way of knowing how much is too much," said Sandra Spalletta, of Rockville, Maryland, whose Internet service was suspended in March after Comcast sent her a letter warning that she and her teenage son were using too much bandwidth. They cut back on downloads but were still disconnected. She said the company would not tell her how to monitor their bandwidth use in order to comply with the limits. "You want to think you can rely on your home Internet service and not wake up one morning to find it turned off," said Spalletta, who filed a complaint with the Montgomery County Office of Cable and Communication Services. "I thought it was unlimited service." Read The Full Story Commentary: A Police State? Crying Wolf Won't Protect Civil Liberties 2007-09-07 03:26:33 Intellpuke: The following commentary was written by Conor Gearty and appears in the Guardian edition for Friday, September 7, 2007. Conor Gearty is professor of human rights law and director of the Center for the Study of Human Rights at the London School of Economics; his latest book, "Civil Liberties", will be published next week. In his commentary, Prof. Gearty writes that if the left rejects every challenge to individual freedom, it will miss its chance to regain the influence lost under Tony Blair. His commentary follows: The argument for compulsory DNA testing of the entire population and all visitors to the U.K., so eloquently put by Lord Justice Stephen Sedley, has provoked another bout of anxious navel gazing by civil libertarians. Sedley is no reactionary but rather one of Britain's most progressive judges, a man with an impeccable record of legal activism. If even this kind of person is now joining the Reids, Howards and the rest on the authoritarian side, does this mean Britain's much-battered freedom has at last lurched into terminal decline? Is the police state that so many have warned about for so long finally on its way? Fortunately the position is rather more complicated than this. Just as the right is given to moral panics (teddy boys, hippies, hoodies) so the left regularly succumbs to freedom frenzies. Earlier this summer it was concern about police use of CCTV material. In days gone by it was extending police powers of search. Long before that it was the prosecution of journalists and civil servants under the Official Secrets Act. Each generation of committed civil libertarians has been convinced it is sure to be the last. Every home secretary is always the worst ever - until the next one comes along. No wonder the community as a whole treats civil libertarians much as the villagers did the boy assigned to look after sheep in Aesop's fable. But what words do we have left if the wolf does finally and truly arrive? A fresh, more cautious approach is called for. We can start by being more careful about language. The term civil liberties is confusing in that it includes both a commitment to the liberty of the individual and to political freedom, but these are not the same. The first is a liberal idea, rooted in that old English notion of the individual being above and beyond the state and with a natural right not to be interfered with by it. Supporters of this idea are the people who break CCTV cameras and are affronted by being asked to stop smoking in public places. This kind of libertarianism is often quite reactionary and in its absolute form it is always being overridden - and rightly overridden - by government in the name of the public good. Read The Full Story Britain's RAF Scrambles To Confront Russian Bombers As Putin Flexes Air Power 2007-09-07 03:25:06 Encounter reminiscent of Cold War incidents. Shifting alliances raise tension with Moscow. Vladimir Putin's new-found determination to project Russia's military power internationally led Thursday to an aerial encounter with the RAF over the North Sea as British fighter jets, backed by an early warning aircraft, intercepted eight long-range Russian planes in the North Atlantic. In the latest of a series of aerial incidents reminiscent of the cold war, four Tornado F3s from RAF Leeming, North Yorkshire, and RAF Waddington, Lincolnshire, were scrambled early Thursday followed by an E3 early warning radar aircraft and a refueling tanker to shadow eight Russian Tupolev Tu-95 "Bears". The Tu-95s were designed as bombers but are now frequently used for maritime reconnaissance. The aircraft, originally shadowed by Norwegian F-16s, were "approaching but not in British airspace", said Britain's Ministry of Defense (MoD), which played down the interception as "routine NATO procedure". The Russians were "upgrading and exercising their capabilities", said a defense official, adding, "It is not the start of a new cold war." Read The Full Story Contrary to U.S. Military, Experts Doubt Claims Of Drop In Iraq Violence 2007-09-06 14:12:41 Military statistics called into question. The U.S. Military's claim that violence has decreased sharply in Iraq in recent months has come under scrutiny from many experts within and outside the government, who contend that some of the underlying statistics are questionable and selectively ignore negative trends. Reductions in violence form the centerpiece of the Bush administration's claim that its war strategy is working. In congressional testimony Monday, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, is expected to cite a 75 percent decrease in sectarian attacks. According to senior U.S. military officials in Baghdad, overall attacks in Iraq were down to 960 a week in August, compared with 1,700 a week in June, and civilian casualties had fallen 17 percent between December 2006 and last month. Unofficial Iraqi figures show a similar decrease. Others who have looked at the full range of U.S. government statistics on violence, however, accuse the military of cherry-picking positive indicators and caution that the numbers - most of which are classified - are often confusing and contradictory. "Let's just say that there are several different sources within the administration on violence, and those sources do not agree," Comptroller General David Walker told Congress on Tuesday in releasing a new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report on Iraq. Read The Full Story German Authorities Search For As Many As 10 Additional Bomb Plot Suspects 2007-09-06 14:11:58 German authorities said Thursday they are pursuing as many as 10 additional suspects in connection with a plot to bomb American interests in the country, a day after announcing the arrest of three men believed to have trained at militant camps in Pakistan. Deputy Interior Minister August Hanning, a former chief of Germany's foreign spy service, said the men being sought included Germans, Turks and other nationalities - all believed to be part of a support group helping with plans for a massive bombing to kill Americans. Among them, he added, were several Muslim converts. Two of the suspects arrested Tuesday were Germans who had embraced Islam in recent years. "This is the network we are aware of at the moment," Hanning told the public television network ARD. He said authorities do not believe the cell was planning other attacks or that it still posed a security risk since the initial arrests. ARD reported that two of the remaining suspects are thought to be abroad and that authorities only know their aliases. Read The Full Story New Jersey Supreme Court Sides With Merck Over Vioxx Suits 2007-09-06 14:11:25 New Jersey's Supreme Court on Thursday rejected a class-action lawsuit against Merck & Co. over its withdrawn painkiller Vioxx. The ruling is a huge legal victory for the drug maker, which faces nearly 27,000 individual lawsuits from people claiming Vioxx harmed them. The state's highest court, reversing two lower-court decisions, ruled that a nationwide class was not appropriate for the lawsuit. The suit had been brought by a union health plan on behalf of all insurance plans that paid for Vioxx prescriptions. A lawyer for the New Jersey union had said the case could have cost Merck $15 billion to $18 billion. Read The Full Story Syria Says It Repelled Israeli War Planes 2007-09-06 14:10:38 Syria's air defenses repulsed Israeli warplanes that violated Syrian airspace early Thursday, according to the official Syrian News Agency, SANA. Other news reports cited officials in Damascus saying that the Israeli planes had dropped munitions on the ground. SANA said there had been no casualties or damage. Israeli military officials would not confirm or deny the reports, saying only that they “do not comment on reports of that nature”. Israel Radio cited an official Syrian spokesman as saying the aircraft had infiltrated Syrian airspace over the northern border, coming from the direction of the Mediterranean, before flying east. The Syrian official added that Syria “warns the government of Israel over its aggressive act and reserves the right to respond however it sees fit,” said Israel Radio. Israeli and Syrian officials have been exchanging calming messages through third parties in recent weeks, against the background of growing tensions between their countries. Israel has said it does not intend to start a war with Syria, but military officials here have warned of the dangers of a miscalculation because of the heightened state of alert on both sides of the Israel-Syria border. Read The Full Story GAO Criticizes Homeland Security's Efforts To Fulfill Its Mission 2007-09-06 02:25:11 Hobbled by inadequate funding, unclear priorities, continuing reorganizations and the absence of an overarching strategy, the Department of Homeland Security is failing to achieve its mission of preventing and responding to terrorist attacks or natural disasters, according to a comprehensive report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO).  The highly critical report disputes recent upbeat assessments by the Bush administration by concluding that the DHS has failed to make even moderate progress toward eight of 14 internal government benchmarks more than four years after its creation. The report is to be released to lawmakers today, as the Democratic Congress, Republican White House and presidential candidates from both parties are beginning to debate the administration's record of accomplishments since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, whose sixth anniversary will be on Tuesday. It echoes a sober report card issued by the former Sept. 11 commission in December 2005, which awarded mostly failing and mediocre grades to the administration's efforts to prevent another terrorist attack. Read The Full Story ConAgra Says It Will Drop Popcorn Chemical Linked To Lung Ailment 2007-09-06 02:24:33 At least one man who ate several bags of butter-flavored microwave popcorn each day has developed a life-threatening lung disease possibly caused by an additive in the popcorn, his doctor says, and U.S. regulators have launched an investigation. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said Wednesday that it had received a report from a Denver, Colorado, doctor saying that the man's lung disease was similar to an illness affecting workers in plants where microwave popcorn is made, said FDA spokesman Michael Herndon. "We are currently evaluating the recent information on the association of inhalation of the food additive diacetyl with lung disease, and are carefully considering the safety and regulatory issues it raises," said Herndon. Read The Full Story Fred Thompson Makes A Late Night Late Entry For GOP Presidential Nomination 2007-09-06 02:23:05 After months of testing the waters, former senator Fred Thompson (Tennessee) jumped into the race for the Republican presidential nomination on late-night television Wednesday, as his eight rivals clashed here in a debate that featured sharp exchanges over Iraq and immigration. Thompson used an appearance on NBC's "Tonight Show With Jay Leno" to kick off his campaign. "I'm running for president of the United States," Thompson told Leno during the show's taping early Wednesday evening. He prepared to follow that up at midnight with a longer video on his campaign Web site outlining his reasons for running, citing threats to national security and the economy and the need to change Washington. "I know that reform is possible in Washington because I have seen it done," he said. "I do not accept it as a fact of life beyond our power to change that the federal government must go on expanding more, taxing more, and spending more forever." Read The Full Story
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