Free Internet Press Newsletter - Monday September 3 2007 - (813)

Monday September 3 2007 edition
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British Troops Withdraw From Basra Palace Base In Iraq 2007-09-03 02:23:38 British troops began pulling out of Basra Palace Sunday night and expect to hand control of the base to Iraqi forces within days, amid new Anglo-American recriminations about the aftermath of the Iraq war. The U.K. battlegroup in Saddam Hussein's former compound comprises about 500 troops and their redeployment to the city's airbase is the penultimate stage of Britain's presence in the country. Their withdrawal will be followed by the handover of the city itself to the Iraqi authorities in the autumn, said Britain's  Ministry of Defense (MoD). The MoD statement released last night said: "Handing over Basra Palace to the Iraqi authorities has long been our intention, as we have stated publicly on numerous occasions. We expect the handover to occur in the next few days. Read The Full Story Mexico's President Calderon Blasts U.S. Immigration Policies 2007-09-02 22:52:57 President Felipe Calderon blasted U.S. immigration policies on Sunday and promised to fight harder to protect the rights of Mexicans in the U.S., saying "Mexico does not end at its borders." The criticism earned Calderon a standing ovation during his first state-of-the nation address. "We strongly protest the unilateral measures taken by the U.S. Congress and government that have only persecuted and exacerbated the mistreatment of Mexican undocumented workers," he said. "The insensitivity toward those who support the U.S. economy and society has only served as an impetus to reinforce the battle ... for their rights." He also reached out to the millions of Mexicans living in the United States, many illegally, saying: "Where there is a Mexican, there is Mexico." Read The Full Story Chaos In Darfur On Rise As Arabs Fight Arabs 2007-09-02 22:52:07 Some of the same Arab tribes accused of massacring civilians in the Darfur region of Sudan are now unleashing their considerable firepower against one another in a battle over the spoils of war that is killing hundreds of people and displacing tens of thousands. In the past several months, the Terjem and the Mahria, heavily armed Arab tribes that United Nations officials said raped and pillaged together as part of the region’s notorious janjaweed militias, have squared off in South Darfur, fighting from pickup trucks and the backs of camels. They are raiding each other’s villages, according to aid workers and the fighters themselves, and scattering Arab tribesmen into the same kinds of displacement camps that still house some of their earlier victims. United Nations officials said that thousands of gunmen from each side, including some from hundreds of miles away, were pouring into a strategic river valley called Bulbul, while clashes between two other Arab tribes, the Habanniya and the Salamat, were intensifying farther south. Darfur’s violence has often been characterized as government-backed Arab tribes slaughtering non-Arab tribes, but this new Arab-versus-Arab dimension seems to be a sign of the evolving complexity of the crisis. What started out four years ago in western Sudan as a rebellion and brutal counterinsurgency has cracked wide open into a fluid, chaotic, confusing free-for-all with dozens of armed groups, a spike in banditry and chronic attacks on aid workers. Read The Full Story Japan's Farm Minister Resigns, Move Seen As Blow To Prime Minister Abe 2007-09-02 22:51:24 Japan's farm minister resigned on Monday over illegal dealings at a farmers' group he headed, dealing a fresh blow to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe just a week after he revamped his cabinet. Abe's first cabinet was plagued by scandals and gaffes and the 52-year-old conservative leader named a new line-up last Monday to try to revive public support after the ruling coalition suffered a defeat in a July 29 election that gave the opposition a majority in parliament's upper house. Agriculture Minister Takehiko Endo admitted on Saturday that a farmers' aid group he headed had illegally taken 1.15 million yen ($9,900) from the state and that he had failed to disclose this to the prime minister before his appointment. The 68-year-old Endo, who had been reluctant to take over the ill-fated post, confirmed his resignation at a news conference on Monday after meeting Abe at his official residence. Read The Full Story Can The Mortgage Crisis Swallow A Town? 2007-09-02 13:57:52 Tammi and Charles Eggleston never took out a risky mortgage, never borrowed more than they could afford and never missed a monthly payment on their neat, three-bedroom colonial in the Cleveland suburbs. But that hasn’t prevented them from getting caught in the undertow of the subprime mortgage mess now submerging this town. Over the last 18 months, the Egglestons have watched one house after another on their street, Gardenview Drive, end up foreclosed and vacant. Although lawns are still tidy and empty homes are not boarded up and stripped as they are in inner-city Cleveland, Ohio, the Egglestons say Maple Heights no longer feels safe after dark. Nor do they have the confidence they had when they moved in a decade ago that this is the ideal place to raise their 6-year-old twin girls, Sydney and Shelby. So, in May 2006, they put their home on the market in order to move closer to Mrs. Eggleston’s parents in another middle-class Cleveland suburb, Richmond Heights. They have had no takers. Although they lowered the asking price to $99,000 from $109,000, no one has even come to look at it in more than six weeks. “My heart panics every time I drive down the street and I see another for-sale sign,” says Mrs. Eggleston, pointing past the placards in front of her porch to others that dot surrounding yards like lawn furniture. “Some people on the street couldn’t pay, so they just left. The competition to sell is just ridiculous.” It is a scene being repeated in cities and towns across America as loans that were made to borrowers with little or no credit history, many of whom could not even afford a down payment, fail in ever-growing numbers. It is also a story of how local economic trends are intersecting with national politics, with local foreclosures drawing the attention of Democratic presidential candidates, including John Edwards and Representative Dennis J. Kucinich, of Ohio. Read The Full Story Civilian Death Toll Falls In Baghdad But Rises Across Iraq 2007-09-02 13:57:13 Newly released statistics for Iraqi civilian deaths in August reflect the strikingly mixed security picture that has emerged from a gradual six-month increase in American troop strength here: the number of deaths across the country rose by about 20 percent since July, but in the capital itself, the number dropped sharply. The figures, provided by Iraqi Interior Ministry officials on Saturday, mirrored the geographic pattern of the troop increase, which is focused on Baghdad. The national rise in mortality is partly a result of the enormous death toll, more than 500, in a truck bomb attack that struck a Yazidi community in August north of the capital, outside the areas directly affected by the additional troops. As Ryan C. Crocker, the American ambassador to Iraq, and Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top commander of military forces here, prepare to brief Congress on the progress of the troop increase, Iraqi politicians, clearly recognizing what is at stake, view the new figures through the lens of how their parties hope that Congress will assess the situation in Iraq. “We were hoping the figures would go down, but what happened was expected,” said Haidar al-Ebadi, who sits in Parliament as a senior member of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki's Dawa Party. The troop increase made it harder for insurgent groups to operate in Baghdad, he said, so they pushed outward to easier targets. Read The Full Story A Carbon Offset - Can You Buy A Greener Conscience? 2007-09-02 03:33:28 You can pay to erase your carbon footprint. It hasn't helped the Earth but you'll feel better. A budding industry sells "offsets" of carbon emissions, investing in environmental projects - but there are doubts about whether it works. The Oscar-winning film "An Inconvenient Truth" touted itself as the world's first carbon-neutral documentary. The producers said that every ounce of carbon emitted during production - from jet travel, electricity for filming and gasoline for cars and trucks - was counterbalanced by reducing emissions somewhere else in the world. It only made sense that a film about the perils of global warming wouldn't contribute to the problem. Co-producer Lesley Chilcott used an online calculator to estimate that shooting the film used 41.4 tons of carbon dioxide and paid a middleman, a company called Native Energy, $12 a ton, or $496.80, to broker a deal to cut greenhouse gases elsewhere. The film's distributors later made a similar payment to neutralize carbon dioxide from the marketing of the movie. It was a ridiculously good deal with one problem: So far, it has not led to any additional emissions reductions. Read The Full Story Commentary: The Great Iraq Swindle 2007-09-02 03:32:24 Intellpuke: The following commentary was written by Matt Taibbi and was posted on the Rolling Stone's web site  August 23, 2007. Mr. Taibbi uses some expletives (i.e. swear words, including the F-word) in his commentary and Free Internet Press has not edited them out. Mr. Taibbi's commentary follows: How Bush Allowed An Army Of For-Profit Contractors To Invade The U.S. Treasury. How is it done? How do you screw the taxpayer for millions, get away with it and then ride off into the sunset with one middle finger extended, the other wrapped around a chilled martini? Ask Earnest O. Robbins - he knows all about being a successful contractor in Iraq. You start off as a well-connected bureaucrat: in this case, as an Air Force civil engineer, a post from which Robbins was responsible for overseeing 70,000 servicemen and contractors, with an annual budget of $8 billion. You serve with distinction for thirty-four years, becoming such a military all-star that the Air Force frequently sends you to the Hill to testify before Congress - until one day in the summer of 2003, when you retire to take a job as an executive for Parsons, a private construction company looking to do work in Iraq. Now you can finally move out of your dull government housing on Bolling Air Force Base and get your wife that dream home you've been promising her all these years. The place on Park Street in Dunn Loring, Virginia, looks pretty good - four bedrooms, fireplace, garage, 2,900 square feet, a nice starter home in a high-end neighborhood full of spooks, think-tankers and ex-apparatchiks moved on to the nest-egg phase of their faceless careers. On October 20th, 2003, you close the deal for $775,000 and start living that private-sector good life. A few months later, in March 2004, your company magically wins a contract from the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq to design and build the Baghdad Police College, a facility that's supposed to house and train at least 4,000 police recruits. But two years and $72 million later, you deliver not a functioning police academy but one of the great engineering clusterfucks of all time, a practically useless pile of rubble so badly constructed that its walls and ceilings are literally caked in shit and piss, a result of subpar plumbing in the upper floors. Read The Full Story Bush, Congress Will Renew Battle Over Iraq 2007-09-02 03:30:51 The White House hopes Petraeus' report will change opinions, but many believe the war strategy must change. President Bush and the Democratic-led Congress are heading for another collision over the war in Iraq this month, framed by a flurry of conflicting assessments of military and political progress, and culminating in an impassioned debate over how soon U.S. forces should be withdrawn. Even before the debate has formally begun, officials on both sides are forecasting its likely course: The general who commands U.S. forces in Iraq will report that the current increase in troops has improved security, and will ask that it continue. Democrats will try again to impose a timetable for a withdrawal but acknowledge they don't have the votes in the Senate. Bush will continue to resist pressure for a major change in strategy but will weigh what aides call "adjustments". On one level, the battle may merely look like a rerun of the fiery but abortive one that Congress staged only two months ago, when Senate Democrats failed to pass measures that would have forced Bush to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq. Read The Full Story	UPDATE: Felix Grows To Category 5 Hurricane 2007-09-02 22:53:13 Hurricane Felix strengthened into a dangerous Category 5 storm Sunday and churned its way into the open waters of the Caribbean Sea after toppling trees and flooding some homes on a cluster of Dutch islands. The National Hurricane Center in Miami said Felix was packing maximum sustained winds of 165 mph as it plowed westward toward Central America, where it was expected to skirt Honduras' coastline Tuesday before slamming into Belize on Wednesday as a hurricane capable of massive destruction. On Sunday, Felix lashed Aruba, Curacao and Bonaire with rains and winds, causing scattered power outages and forcing thousands of tourists to take refuge in hotels. But residents expressed relief it did far less damage than feared as the storm's outer bands just grazed the tiny islands. "Thankfully we didn't get a very bad storm. My dog slept peacefully through the night," said Bonaire medical administrator Siomara Albertus, who waited out the storm in her home. Read The Full Story Iran Defiant On Two Fronts, One Of Them Nuclear 2007-09-02 22:52:35 Iran’s leaders issued dual, defiant statements on Sunday, with the president announcing that the nation had 3,000 active centrifuges to enrich uranium and the top ayatollah appointing a new Islamic Revolutionary Guards commander who once advocated military force against students. The pairing of the messages, just days after the United Nations' top nuclear official said Iran was striking conciliatory poses, appeared intended to reaffirm the country’s refusal to back down to pressure from the United States over its nuclear program and its role in Iraq, political analysts in Iran said. And it came as the Bush administration was celebrating progress in its talks with North Korea to shut down that country’s nuclear programs. Indeed, the timing and tone of Iran’s declarations may be more politically significant than their content, particularly in the case of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's announcement that Iran had finally reached its stated goal of developing 3,000 centrifuges. Many technical experts have expressed skepticism over Iran’s periodic claims of enrichment breakthroughs, saying the assertions often turn out to be exaggerated. Read The Full Story Lebanese Army Drives Militants From Refugee Camp 2007-09-02 22:51:46 The Lebanese Army wrested a Palestinian refugee camp from the control of Islamic militants on Sunday, ending three months of fierce fighting that took more than 300 lives and transfixed Lebanon. The surprise end to the camp standoff came when about 70 militants tried to escape at dawn Sunday. As they neared army positions, soldiers fired on them, killing at least 31, including the group’s leader, Shakir al-Abssi, and capturing 32, the army said. Five soldiers were killed in the gunfire. The camp, Nahr al Bared, had been home to 30,000 people, most of whom fled when the conflict started at the end of May. On Sunday, the state-run National News Agency reported that soldiers patrolled the empty camp, much of which had been leveled by army bombs, as helicopters searched for any remaining militants. It was unclear why the group, Fatah al Islam, made up of radical Sunnis inspired by al-Qaeda, chose Sunday to attempt its breakout, but the army had tightened its grip on the camp recently and ratcheted up its bombings over the past week, after family members of the fighters were permitted to leave. The remaining fighters were thought to be running out of ammunition and food. Read The Full Story U.S. Consumer Safety Agency Faces Scrutiny Amid Changes 2007-09-02 13:58:22 In March 2005, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission called together the nation’s top safety experts to confront an alarming statistic: 44,000 children riding all terrain vehicles were injured the previous year, nearly 150 of them fatally. National associations of pediatricians, consumer advocates and emergency room doctors were urging the commission to ban sales of adult-size A.T.V.’s for use by children under 16 because the machines were too big and fast for young drivers to control but, when it came time to consider such a step, a staff member whose name did not appear on the meeting agenda unexpectedly weighed in. “My own view is the situation is not necessarily deteriorating,” said John Gibson Mullan, the agency’s director of compliance and a former lawyer for the A.T.V. industry, according to a recording. The current system of warning labels and other voluntary safety standards was working, he said. “We would need to be very careful about making any changes.” Robin L. Ingle, then the agency’s hazard statistician and A.T.V. injury expert, was dumbfounded. Her months of research did not support Mullan’s analysis. Yet she would not get to offer a rebuttal. “He had hijacked the presentation,” Ms. Ingle said in an interview. “He was distorting the numbers in order to benefit industry and defeat the petition. It was almost like he still worked for them, not us.” Read The Full Story Felix Strengthens To Category 2 Hurricane 2007-09-02 13:57:29 Hurricane Felix strengthened to a Category 2 storm and shifted away from Curacao on Sunday, taking an unpredictable path that left Caribbean islands over a stretch of hundreds of miles fearful of the winds and rain to come. Felix was upgraded from a tropical storm to a Category 1 hurricane Saturday evening, becoming the second Atlantic hurricane of the season. By early Sunday, it had sustained maximum winds of about 105 mph and threatened to become a major hurricane as the day went on, said the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami, Florida. The storm was forecast to pass just north of the Dutch Caribbean island of Aruba, where heavy rain was falling on the island of 100,000 people as the center passed north. The island's airport was closed. Read The Full Story Afghan Police Are Set Back As Taliban Adapt 2007-09-02 13:56:46 Over the past six weeks, the Taliban have driven government forces out of roughly half of a strategic area in southern Afghanistan that American and NATO officials declared a success story last fall in their campaign to clear out insurgents and make way for development programs, say Afghan officials. A year after Canadian and American forces drove hundreds of Taliban fighters from the area, the Panjwai and Zhare districts southwest of Kandahar, the rebels are back and have adopted new tactics. Carrying out guerrilla attacks after NATO troops partly withdrew in July, they overran isolated police posts and are now operating in areas where they can mount attacks on Kandahar, the south’s largest city. The setback is part of a bloody stalemate that has occurred between NATO troops and Taliban fighters across southern Afghanistan this summer. NATO and Afghan Army soldiers can push the Taliban out of rural areas, but the Afghan police are too weak to hold the territory after they withdraw. At the same time, the Taliban are unable to take large towns and have generally mounted fewer suicide bomb attacks in southern cities than they did last summer. The Panjwai and Zhare districts, in particular, highlight the changing nature of the fight in the south. The military operation there in September 2006 was the largest conventional battle in the country since 2002, but, this year, the Taliban are avoiding set battles with NATO and instead are attacking the police and stepping up their use of roadside bombs, known as improvised explosive devices or I.E.D.s. Read The Full Story Reaping Global Warming's Bitter Fruits 2007-09-02 03:32:55 In France and throughout the wine-producing world, climate change forces early harvests, threatens survival of centuries-old vineyards. On a cobweb-encrusted rafter above his giant steel grape pressers, Rene Mure is charting one of the world's most tangible barometers of global warming. The evidence, scrawled in black ink, is the first day of the annual grape harvest for the past three decades. In 1978, it was Oct. 16. In 1998, the date was Sept. 14. This year, harvesting started Aug. 24 - the earliest ever recorded, not only in Mure's vineyards, but also in the entire Alsace wine district of northeastern France. "I noticed the harvest was getting earlier before anybody had a name for it," said 59-year-old Mure, the 11th generation of his family to produce wine from the clay and limestone slopes of the Vosges Mountains near the German border. "When I was young, we were harvesting in October with snow on the mountaintops. Today we're harvesting in August." Throughout the wine-producing world, from France to South Africa to California, vintners are in the vanguard of confronting the impact of climate change. Rising temperatures are forcing unprecedented early harvests, changing the tastes of the best-known varieties of wine and threatening the survival of centuries-old wine-growing regions. Read The Full Story Iraq Far From Meeting U.S. Goals For Energy - $50 Billion Needed To Meet Demand 2007-09-02 03:31:43 Iraq's crucial oil and electricity sectors still need roughly $50 billion to meet demand, analysts and officials say, even after the United States has poured more than $6 billion into them over more than four years. Since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Bush administration has focused much of its $44.5 billion reconstruction plan on oil and electricity. Now, with the U.S.-led reconstruction phase nearing its close, Iraq will need to spend $27 billion more for its electrical system and $20 billion to $30 billion for oil infrastructure, according to estimates the Government Accountability Office collected from Iraqi and U.S. officials. Even with the funding, the GAO notes that it could take until 2015 for Iraq to produce 6 million barrels of oil a day and have enough electricity to meet demand. A commanding general of the Army Corps of Engineers says it could have enough electricity sooner - 2010 to 2013. "The U.S. money was intended to get those industries started on recovery," said Stuart W. Bowen, Jr., the U.S. special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, who is charged with finding waste, fraud and abuse in the multibillion-dollar effort. "We were working with a dilapidated, run-down system. It still has a long, long way to go." Read The Full Story 6.9 Earthquake Prompts Tsunami Warning In South Pacific 2007-09-02 03:29:28 A 6.9 magnitude earthquake centered about 22 miles (35 kilometers) undersea near the Santa Cruz Islands in the south Pacific erupted at 12:05 p.m. (3:05 a.m. GMT) Sunday, prompting a tsunami bulletin for the region, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The earthquake's center was locate about 60 miles (95 kilometers) south of Lata, Santa Cruz Islands, which are part of the Solomon Islands group,  275 miles (440 kilometers) east-southeast of Kira Kira, San Cristobal, Solomon Islands and 1,370 miles (2,200 kilometers) northeast of Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, said the USGS. There was not immediate information about damage. Read The Full Story
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