Free Internet Press Newsletter - Saturday September 22 2007 - (813)

Saturday September 22 2007 edition
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Homeland Security Dept. Keeping Records On Millions Of American Travelers 2007-09-22 02:08:12 The U.S. government is collecting electronic records on the travel habits of millions of Americans who fly, drive or take cruises abroad, retaining data on the persons with whom they travel or plan to stay, the personal items they carry during their journeys, and even the books that travelers have carried, according to documents obtained by a group of civil liberties advocates and statements by government officials. The personal travel records are meant to be stored for as long as 15 years, as part of the Department of Homeland Security's effort to assess the security threat posed by all travelers entering the country. Officials say the records, which are analyzed by the department's Automated Targeting System (ATS), help border officials distinguish potential terrorists from innocent people entering the country. New details about the information being retained suggest that the government is monitoring the personal habits of travelers more closely than it has previously acknowledged. The details were learned when a group of activists requested copies of official records on their own travel. Those records included a description of a book on marijuana that one of them carried and small flashlights bearing the symbol of a marijuana leaf. The Automated Targeting System has been used to screen passengers since the mid-1990s, but the collection of data for it has been greatly expanded and automated since 2002, according to former DHS officials. Read The Full Story Federal Prosecutors Investigating Blackwater In Weapons Probe 2007-09-22 02:07:32 Federal prosecutors are investigating whether employees of the private security firm Blackwater USA illegally smuggled into Iraq weapons that may have been sold on the black market and ended up in the hands of a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, officials said Friday. The U.S. Attorney's Office in Raleigh, North Carolina, is handling the investigation with help from Pentagon and State Department auditors, who have concluded there is enough evidence to file charges, the officials told the Associated Press. Blackwater is based in Moyock, North Carolina. A spokeswoman for Blackwater did not return calls seeking comment Friday. The U.S. attorney for the eastern district of North Carolina, George Holding, declined to comment, as did Pentagon and State Department spokesmen. Officials with knowledge of the case said it is active, although at an early stage. They spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter, which has heightened since 11 Iraqis were killed Sunday in a shooting involving Blackwater contractors protecting a U.S. diplomatic convoy in Baghdad. Read The Full Story White House To Seek Another $195 Billion For Iraq War 2007-09-22 02:06:52 After smothering efforts by war critics in Congress to drastically cut U.S. troop levels in Iraq, President Bush plans to ask lawmakers next week to approve another massive spending measure - totaling nearly $200 billion - to fund the war through next year, said Pentagon officials. If Bush's spending request is approved, 2008 will be the most expensive year of the Iraq war. U.S. war costs have continued to grow because of the additional combat forces sent to Iraq this year and because of efforts to quickly ramp up production of new technology, including mine resistant trucks designed to protect troops from roadside bombs. The new trucks can cost three to six times as much as an armored Humvee. The Bush administration said earlier this year that it probably would need $147.5 billion for 2008, but Pentagon officials now say that and $47 billion more would be required. Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates and other officials will formally present the full request at a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing Wednesday. Read The Full Story Judge Denies Request To Free Jena Teen 2007-09-22 02:05:31 A judge on Friday denied a request to release a teenager whose arrest in the beating of a white classmate sparked this week's civil rights protest in Louisiana. Mychal Bell's request to be freed while an appeal is being reviewed was rejected at a juvenile court hearing, effectively denying him any chance at immediate bail, a person familiar with the case told the Associated Press. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because juvenile court proceedings are closed. Earlier, Bell's mother emerged from the hearing in tears, refusing to comment. Bell, 17, was convicted of aggravated second-degree battery, which could have led to 15 years in prison, but his conviction was thrown out by a state appeals court that said he could not be tried on the charge as an adult because he was 16 at the time of the beating. "This is why we did not cancel the march," said the Rev. Al Sharpton, an organizer of Thursday's rally along with the Rev. Jesse Jackson and the NAACP. "When they overturned Mychal's conviction, everyone said we won." Read The Full Story Pakistan's Musharraf Names Loyalist As New Intelligence Chief 2007-09-22 02:04:17 With his retirement from the army looming, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf on Friday named a known loyalist to head the nation's hugely influential military-led intelligence service. Musharraf also cleared the way for the intelligence chief he replaced to possibly take over as army commander. The announcements came just days after Musharraf's attorney announced that the general would step down from the army if he is elected to a new term as president. The national and provincial assemblies are set to vote Oct. 6. Opponents argue that Musharraf's army job disqualifies him from running, and the Supreme Court is hearing a challenge to his eligibility. But if the court rules that he can run, he is believed to have the votes he needs to win. Musharraf's appointments are being watched closely in Pakistan, where the military has ruled for more than half the nation's 60-year history. Read The Full Story Editorial: The High Costs Of Ethanol 2007-09-21 14:39:33 Intellpuke: The following editorial appeared in the New York Times edition for Wednesday, September 19, 2007. I felt it made some interesting points about the rush to biofuels by many of the world's nations and I didn't want to let it slip through the cracks. The editorial follows: Backed by the White House, corn-state governors and solid blocks on both sides of Congress’ partisan divide, the politics of biofuels could hardly look sunnier. The economics of the American drive to increase ethanol in the energy supply are more discouraging. American corn-based ethanol is expensive. While it can help cut oil imports and provide modest reductions in greenhouse gases compared to conventional gasoline, corn ethanol also carries considerable risks. Even now as Europe and China join the United States in ramping up production, world food prices are rising, threatening misery for the poorest countries. The European Union has announced that it wants to replace 10 percent of its transport fuel with biofuels by 2020. China is aiming for a 15 percent share. The United States is already on track to exceed Congress’ 2005 goal of doubling the amount of ethanol used in motor fuels to 7.5 billion gallons by 2012. In his State of the Union speech in January, President Bush set a new goal of 35 billion gallons of biofuels by 2017. In June, the Senate raised it to 36 billion gallons by 2022. Of that, Congress said that 15 billion gallons should come from corn and 21 billion from advanced biofuels that are nowhere near commercial production. The distortions in agricultural production are startling. Corn prices are up about 50 percent from last year, while soybean prices are projected to rise up to 30 percent in the coming year, as farmers have replaced soy with corn in their fields. The increasing cost of animal feed is raising the prices of dairy and poultry products. Read The Full Story 1 Million Chinese-Made Baby Cribs Recalled 2007-09-21 14:38:55 At least two infant deaths linked to cribs. Simplicity Inc., a supplier of baby furniture to Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and other big retailers, is recalling about 1 million Chinese-made baby cribs which have been linked to at least two infant deaths, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) said Friday. The drop-side can detach from the crib, which can create a dangerous gap that leads to an infant being trapped and suffocated, the safety agency said in a statement. It urged parents to check all Simplicity-made cribs to ensure the drop-side is installed correctly. The cribs, priced between $100 and $300, were sold by U.S. retailers and chains including Target Corp., Big Lots Inc, and family-owned Meijer Inc. "The drop-side failures result from both the hardware and crib design, which allow consumers to unintentionally install the drop-side upside down," the safety commission said. "This, in turn, can weaken the hardware and cause the drop-side to detach from the crib. When the drop-side detaches, it creates a gap in which infants can become entrapped." Read The Full Story Israel Blocks Thousands Of Muslim Worshippers From Jerusalem 2007-09-21 14:37:48 Israel stopped thousands of Palestinians from entering Jerusalem for Ramadan prayers at the al-Aqsa mosque on Friday and tightened border security as Jews prepared for the solemn annual rite of Yom Kippur. Israeli police and soldiers at checkpoints near the West Bank cities of Ramallah and Bethlehem turned away several thousand Palestinians who tried to enter Jerusalem for the second weekly prayers of the holy month of Ramadan. Many of those held up at the checkpoints separating the occupied West Bank from Jerusalem knelt in prayer under the glaring sun. The Israeli army said that no Palestinians from the West Bank, other than exceptional humanitarian cases, would be allowed into the city due to a "high terror threat" until Saturday evening, when the Yom Kippur fasting day ends. Read The Full Story Blackwater's Shots Not Provoked, Concludes Iraq Interior Ministry 2007-09-21 02:05:26 Iraq's Ministry of the Interior is proposing radical reshaping of the way American diplomats in Iraq are protected. Iraq's Ministry of Interior has concluded that employees of a private American security firm fired an unprovoked barrage in the shooting last Sunday in which at least eight Iraqis were killed and is proposing a radical reshaping of the way American diplomats and contractors here are protected. In the first comprehensive account of the day’s events, the ministry said that security guards for Blackwater USA, a company that guards all senior American diplomats here, fired on Iraqis in their cars in midday traffic. The document concludes that the dozens of foreign security companies here should be replaced by Iraqi companies, and that a law that has given the companies immunity for years be scrapped. Four days after the shooting, American officials said they were still preparing their own forensic analysis of what happened in Nisour Square. They have repeatedly declined to give any details before their work is finished. Read The Full Story FBI Secretly Taped U.S. Sen. Stevens' Calls 2007-09-21 02:04:51 Recorded conversations between Stevens, businessman are part of public corruption probe. An Alaska oil contractor cooperated with the FBI by tape-recording phone calls with U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) as part of a public corruption investigation, a source familiar with the probe said Thursday night. The recordings done by former Veco Corp. chief executive Bill Allen mean that Stevens, who is the longest-serving Republican in the Senate, was under scrutiny by the FBI much earlier than June, when the senator first acknowledged publicly that he was a subject of FBI inquiries. Details about the recorded conversations between Allen and Stevens are unclear, including how many calls were taped, when they occurred and what information was gleaned from them. The recordings were first reported by the Associated Press, which cited two people close to the case who spoke on the condition of anonymity. A source familiar with the investigation who confirmed the AP report last night also declined to be identified because the investigation is continuing. Read The Full Story Dubai To Acquire 20% Stake In Nasdaq Market 2007-09-21 02:04:03 Three Mideast nations seek major stakes in the West. Middle Eastern governments announced a series of billion-dollar deals Thursday that would give them stakes in financial institutions at the heart of Western capitalism, raising concerns in Washington, D.C., about sensitive foreign investments. Under a complex three-way deal, the stock exchange owned by the government of Dubai would acquire a 19.9 percent stake in the Nasdaq Stock Market, becoming the first government in the Middle East to own a substantial interest in a U.S. exchange. Separately, Carlyle Group of the Washington, D.C., said it was selling a 7.5 percent share of its general ownership to an investment group owned by the government of Abu Dhabi, which like Dubai is part of the oil-rich United Arab Emirates. The Qatar Investment Authority, a government investment fund, said it bought a 20 percent stake in the London Stock Exchange. The transactions are the latest examples of governments of emerging economies, rich in natural resources and with healthy foreign-exchange reserves, buying shares of some of the biggest names in business. In May, as the private-equity firm Blackstone Group took itself public, the Chinese government paid $3 billion to buy a 9.7 percent stake in the IPO (initial prospectus offering). Read The Full Story Israel, U.S. Shared Data On Suspected Syrian Nuclear Site 2007-09-21 02:01:50 Sources: Bush was told of North Korean presence in Syria. Israel's decision to attack Syria on Sept. 6, bombing a suspected nuclear site set up in apparent collaboration with North Korea, came after Israel shared intelligence with President Bush this summer indicating that North Korean nuclear personnel were in Syria, said U.S. government sources. The Bush administration has not commented on the Israeli raid or the underlying intelligence. Although the administration was deeply troubled by Israel's assertion that North Korea was assisting the nuclear ambitions of a country closely linked with Iran, said sources, the White House opted against an immediate response because of concerns it would undermine long-running negotiations aimed at persuading North Korea to abandon its nuclear program. Ultimately, however, the United States is believed to have provided Israel with some corroboration of the original intelligence before Israel proceeded with the raid, which hit the Syrian facility in the dead of night to minimize possible casualties, the sources said. The target of Israel's attack was said to be in northern Syria, near the Turkish border. A Middle East expert who interviewed one of the pilots involved said they operated under such strict operational security that the airmen flying air cover for the attack aircraft did not know the details of the mission. The pilots who conducted the attack were briefed only after they were in the air, he said. Syrian authorities said there were no casualties. Read The Full Story	Britain Plans To Annex South Atlantic Ocean Floor 2007-09-22 02:07:45 The new British Empire? U.K. hopes to annex lucrative gas, mineral and oil fields. Britain is preparing territorial claims on tens of thousands of square miles of the Atlantic Ocean floor around the Falklands, Ascension Island and Rockall in the hope of annexing potentially lucrative gas, mineral and oil fields, the Guardian newspaper has learned. The U.K. claims, to be lodged at the United Nations Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf (UNCLCS), exploit a novel legal approach that is transforming the international politics of underwater prospecting. Britain is accelerating its process of submitting applications to the U.N. - which is fraught with diplomatic sensitivities, not least with Argentina - before an international deadline for registering interests. Relying on detailed geological and geophysical surveys by scientists and hydrographers, any state can delineate a new "continental shelf outer limit" that can extend up to 350 miles from its shoreline. Data has been collected for most of Britain's submissions and Chris Carleton, head of the law of the sea division at the U.K. Hydrographic Office and an international expert on the process, said preliminary talks on Rockall are being held in Reykjavik, Iceland, next week. Read The Full Story Iraq Expands Investigation Of Blackwater 2007-09-22 02:07:17 Recent deadly shooting by U.S. contractor casts light on Blackwater's other violent episodes. Iraq's probe into a deadly shooting by Blackwater USA in Baghdad last weekend has expanded to include allegations about the security firm's involvement in six other violent episodes this year that left at least 10 Iraqis dead. The incidents include the killing of three guards at a state-run media complex and the shooting death of an Iraqi journalist outside the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said Brig. Gen. Abdul-Karim Khalaf, chief spokesman for the Interior Ministry. Iraqi officials say these violent encounters have made them increasingly frustrated with Blackwater's conduct in Iraq, but the government backed away Friday from its attempt to expel the company. Blackwater has said its guards acted appropriately in the weekend incident, but it did not respond to requests for comment Friday on the other episodes cited by Khalaf. Read The Full Story U.S., Europeans Planning Their Own Sanctions Against Iran 2007-09-22 02:06:09 The United States and its European allies are preparing to impose their own broad military and economic sanctions against Iran if Russia and China balk at voting for a tough new resolution at the United Nations, according to U.S. and European officials. The breakaway diplomacy would impose a kind of "sanctions of the willing" on Iran, said a Western diplomat, playing off the "coalition of the willing" that was mobilized after diplomacy at the United Nations did not produce support for military action in Iraq. The U.S. State Department Friday hosted all-day talks with the four other permanent members of the U.N. Security Council - Britain, China, France and Russia - and Germany, to try to hash out the parameters of a new resolution on the eve of the U.N. General Assembly meetings in New York City. In talks the State Department described as "serious and constructive," the six agreed to proceed, after months of delays, with a third U.N. resolution punishing Iran; but deep differences remain on both substance and timing, with the United States and the Europeans on one side and Russia and China on the other, said officials from several delegations. Read The Full Story British Wachdog Under Fire Over Mortgage Lender's Collapse 2007-09-22 02:04:47 Embattled Financial Services Authority promises "root and branch" review of Northern Rock crisis. Britain's embattled Financial Services Authority Friday night promised a "root and branch" review into its handling of the Northern Rock crisis as it emerged that the Bank of England had provided a £3 billion ($6 billion) emergency line of credit to help the Newcastle-based bank over the past week. The chief City regulator said there were many lessons to be learned from the first run on a British high street bank in 150 years and promised to cooperate fully with an increasingly wide-ranging House of Commons investigation into the affair. It emerged Friday night that the FSA official responsible for regulating Northern Rock was replaced just weeks before it announced that its problems required emergency help from the Bank of England. The FSA drafted in its former wholesale insurance supervisor Julian Adams to oversee the bank. A spokesman for the regulator refused to identify Adams' predecessor or comment on his appointment. It also emerged Friday that members of Northern Rock's board received more than £30 million ($60 million) in salaries, bonuses and incentives in the past five years. Adam Applegarth, the bank's embattled chief executive, received almost £10 million ($20 million). Read The Full Story Iraq Wants To End Security Contractors' Immunity From Law 2007-09-21 14:39:50 Iraq wants to tighten control over security contractors after a deadly shooting incident involving the U.S. firm Blackwater, ending their long immunity from Iraqi prosecution, the Interior Ministry said on Friday. Spokesman Major-General Abdul-Kareem Khalaf said the ministry had drafted legislation giving it wider powers over the contractors and calling for "severe punishment for those who fail to adhere to the ... guidelines on how they should operate". Iraq has said it would review the status of all security firms after what it called a flagrant assault by Blackwater contractors in which 11 people were killed while the firm was escorting a U.S. embassy convoy through Baghdad on Sunday. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki suggested the U.S. embassy should stop using Blackwater and said he would not allow Iraqis to be killed "in cold blood". Read The Full Story 2 Students Shot, 1 Seriously Wounded, At Delaware State University 2007-09-21 14:39:18 The campus of Delaware State University was locked down Friday as police searched for a gunman who shot and wounded two students, one seriously, near a campus gymnasium at 1 a.m., said university officials. The shooting, on a normally quiet campus 95 miles east of Washington in Dover, Delaware, triggered a fast and extensive response by campus officials, who said they trained for such a scenario following the shooting rampage last spring at Virginia Tech. Classes were canceled for the day, non-essential staff and commuter students were told to stay away and students living on campus were instructed to remain in their dormitories, said school officials. At the university's main entrance, swing-arm gates were down to prevent people from driving onto campus, reported  the Associated Press. Read The Full Story What The ...? Mattel Apologizes To China Over Recalls 2007-09-21 14:38:36 A Mattel toy executive apologized to China today, saying design flaws, not manufacturing practices, were responsible for many of the recent problems with toys and that the company had unnecessarily recalled some toys containing lead. The conversation, which took place during a meeting in Beijing today between Thomas A. Debrowski, Mattel's executive vice president for worldwide operations, and Chinese product safety chief Li Changjiang, was reported by the official Xinhua news agency. In the eight-paragraph report, China said Mattel "admitted" that its recalls were "overly inclusive" and that it "admitted" that the "vast majority" of toys that were recalled were due to design flaws rather than problems with Chinese manufacturing practices. "Mattel takes full responsibility for these recalls and apologizes personally to you, the Chinese people, and all of our customers who received the toys," Debrowski said to Li, head of China's General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine. Read The Full Story Viacom Head's Remarks About Spielberg Create A Tempest In A Big Teapot Called Hollywood 2007-09-21 14:37:12 Viacom chief executive Philippe P. Dauman told an investment conference on Tuesday that his company and its Paramount Pictures and DreamWorks units would do just fine, even if DreamWorks lost the services of Steven Spielberg. On Wednesday, Spielberg’s longtime ally and partner Jeffrey Katzenberg fired back during another session of the same conference in New York, defending the film director as a “national treasure”. And by Thursday, the relationship of the corporate parent and DreamWorks - founded by Katzenberg and  Spielberg along with David Geffen, then sold to Viacom in 2005 for $1.6 billion - was once again on the rocks, despite stellar success at the movie box office with pictures like “Norbit” and “Transformers” and a confounding lack of substantive disputes among the principals. The exchange, featured in back-to-back articles on the front page of the trade paper Daily Variety, intensified already rampant speculation that Spielberg and Geffen would leave Paramount when their contracts expire at the end of next year. Read The Full Story Scientists Report Severe Retreat Of Arctic Ice 2007-09-21 02:05:01 The cap of floating sea ice on the Arctic Ocean, which retreats under summer’s warmth, this year shrank more than one million square miles - or six Californias - below the average minimum area reached in recent decades, scientists reported Thursday. The minimum ice area for this year, 1.59 million square miles, appeared to be reached Sunday. The ice is now spreading again under the influence of the deep Arctic chill that settles in as the sun drops below the horizon at the North Pole for six months, starting Friday. The findings were reported by the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, and posted online at www.nsidc.org. While satellite tracking of polar sea ice has been done only since 1979, several ice experts who have studied Russian and Alaskan records going back many decades said the ice retreat this year was probably unmatched in the 20th century, including during a warm period in the 1930s. “I do not think that there was anything like we observe today” in the 1930s or 1940s, said Igor Polyakov, an ice expert at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Read The Full Story Commentary: Lost At Sea 2007-09-21 02:04:23 Intellpuke: The following commentary was written by Robert D. Kaplan, and appears in the New York Times edition for Friday, September 21, 2007. In his commentary, Mr. Kaplan writes that, while the American government has been occupied in Mesopotamia, Asian militaries have been quietly modernizing and enlarging. Mr. Kaplan is a correspondent for The Atlantic magazine and a visiting professor at the United States Naval Academy. He is the author of "Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts: The American Military in the Air, at Sea and on the Ground." His commentary follows: The ultimate strategic effect of the Iraq war has been to hasten the arrival of the Asian Century. While the American government has been occupied in Mesopotamia, and our European allies continue to starve their defense programs, Asian militaries - in particular those of China, India, Japan and South Korea - have been quietly modernizing and in some cases enlarging. Asian dynamism is now military as well as economic. The military trend that is hiding in plain sight is the loss of the Pacific Ocean as an American lake after 60 years of near-total dominance. A few years down the road, according to the security analysts at the private policy group Strategic Forecasting, Americans will not to the same extent be the prime deliverers of disaster relief in a place like the Indonesian archipelago, as we were in 2005. Our ships will share the waters (and the prestige) with new “big decks” from Australia, Japan and South Korea. Then there is China, whose production and acquisition of submarines is now five times that of America’s. Many military analysts feel it is mounting a quantitative advantage in naval technology that could erode our qualitative one. Yet the Chinese have been buying smart rather than across the board. Read The Full Story Pentagon Probes $6 Billion Worth Of Contracts For Equipment, Services In Iraq 2007-09-21 02:02:38 Federal investigators are examining allegations of criminal misconduct related to $6 billion worth of contracts for equipment and services needed in Iraq and Afghanistan, a senior Pentagon official said Thursday. The financial scope of the inquiries was provided during a congressional hearing at which Defense Department representatives were criticized for moving too slowly to deal with a growing number of cases of contract fraud and abuse. Following the testimony from Thomas Gimble, the Pentagon's deputy inspector general, members of the House Armed Services Committee questioned whether a "culture of corruption" had consumed the military's system for buying the gear the troops need to fight. No, said the witnesses. In addition to Gimble, they included Lt. Gen. N. Ross Thompson, a top Army acquisition official, and Shay Assad, director of defense procurement. Read The Full Story Veto Threat On Children's Health Bill Angers Republicans 2007-09-21 02:00:44 Some on Capitol Hill disagree with Bush on child health care. Republicans reacted angrily yesterday to President Bush's promise to veto a bill that would renew and expand the popular State Children's Health Insurance Program, raising the likelihood of significant GOP defections when the package comes to a vote next week. "I'm disappointed by the president's comments," said Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), who urged Bush, in an early-morning telephone conversation Thursday, to support the emerging bipartisan compromise. "Drawing lines in the sand at this stage isn't constructive. ... I wish he would engage Congress in a bill that he could sign instead of threatening a veto." "I'm very, very disappointed," said Sen. Gordon Smith (R-Oregon). "I'm going to be voting for it." With the program about to expire on Sept. 30, Bush said in a news conference that he will reject the $35 billion funding expansion being cobbled together by House and Senate negotiators. He said the bill would inappropriately extend coverage to children in families with incomes of as much as $83,000 a year, prompting many parents to drop private insurance. He urged Congress to pass, instead, a temporary extension of the program until a more lasting compromise can be worked out. Read The Full Story
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