Free Internet Press Newsletter - Sunday October 21 2007 - (813)

Sunday October 21 2007 edition
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Energy Traders Avoid Scrutiny - Making Manipulation Of Energy Prices Difficult To Detect 2007-10-21 03:33:21 Commodity trading is exploding in complexity and popularity with almost no oversight, as federal regulators struggle to keep up. One year ago, a 32-year-old trader at a giant hedge fund named Amaranth held huge sway over the price the country paid for natural gas. Trading on unregulated commodity exchanges, he made risky bets that led to the fund's collapse - and, according to a congressional investigation, higher gas bills for homeowners. Still, as another winter approaches, lawmakers and federal regulators have yet to set up a system to prevent another big fund from cornering a vital commodity market. Called by some insiders the Wild West of Wall Street, commodity trading is a world where many goods that are key to national security or public consumption, such as oil, pork bellies or uranium, are traded with almost no oversight. Part of the problem is that the regulator, the federal Commodity Futures Trading Commission, has had a hard time keeping up with the sector it oversees. Commodity trading has exploded in complexity and popularity, growing six-fold in trading volume since 2000 - the year that a handful of giant energy companies, including Enron, successfully lobbied to get Congress to exempt energy markets from government regulation. Read The Full Story Tighter Border Delays Re-entry By U.S. Citizens 2007-10-21 03:32:53 United States border agents have stepped up scrutiny of Americans returning home from Mexico, slowing commerce and creating delays at border crossings not seen since the months after the Sept. 11 attacks. The increased enforcement is in part a dress rehearsal for new rules, scheduled to take effect in January, that will require Americans to show a passport or other proof of citizenship to enter the United States. The requirements were approved by Congress as part of antiterrorism legislation in 2004. Border officials said agents along the southern border were asking more returning United States citizens to show a photo identity document. At the same time, agents are increasing the frequency of what they call queries, where they check a traveler’s information against law enforcement, immigration and antiterror databases. The new policy is a big shift after decades when Americans arrived at land crossings, declared they were citizens and were waved through. Since the authorities began ramping up enforcement in August, wait times at border stations in Texas have often stretched to two hours or more, discouraging visitors and shoppers and upsetting business. Read The Full Story 3 More UAW Locals Reject Contract With Chrysler 2007-10-21 03:32:16 Workers at three more local unions of the United Auto Workers (UAW) have rejected a tentative contract agreement between the UAW and Chrysler, even as union leaders from Detroit, Michigan,spent the latter part of the week lobbying for yes votes. The contract was rebuffed Saturday at Local 110 in Fenton, Missouri, one of Chrysler's largest, with 2,781 hourly workers at the South Assembly Plant. A recording at the Local 110 union hall said Saturday that 66 percent of skilled-trades workers voted against the contract, while 79 percent of non-skilled workers opposed it. It did not mention the number of workers who voted. Local unions in Newark, Delaware, and Twinsburg, Ohio, also voted no, in both cases by smaller margins than in Missouri.  Read The Full Story China's Vice President Steps Down 2007-10-21 03:31:47 China's politically powerful vice president stepped down Sunday amid a reshuffling of the Communist Party leadership, removing from office a potential challenger to President Hu Jintao's unrivaled authority. Closing out a week-long party congress, delegates selected a new Central Committee, a body that approves leadership positions and sets broad policy goals. Vice President Zeng Qinghong not among those selected, the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported. Zeng's absence means he cannot be in the Politburo or its Standing Committee, the powerful grouping that runs China, whose members will be approved by the Central Committee on Monday. Aside from Zeng, Xinhua said two other Standing Committee members, the defense minister and two vice premiers were among the more senior officials stepping aside. No reasons were given but all were either over or near the party's preferred, but not mandatory, retirement age. Read The Full Story 15 Bodies Recovered In Mexico Shipwreck 2007-10-21 03:29:57 Authorities have recovered the bodies of 15 Central American migrants whose boat capsized in the Pacific Ocean, the Mexican navy said on Saturday. The vessel was believed to be carrying more than 20 migrants. Survivor Noemi Martinez, 29, of El Salvador, said the boat departed from Guatemala and capsized Tuesday with more than 20 people aboard, according to Moises Hernandez, regional commander for ministerial police in Oaxaca. State authorities identified the only other known survivor as Salvadoran Walter Alan, 23. Search efforts were suspended on Saturday because of heavy rain that flooded rivers and creeks. Earlier, a military helicopter searched the sea while state authorities combed the beach near the towns of San Francisco Ixhuatan and San Francisco del Mar, about 200 miles from the Guatemalan border. Read The Full Story News Analysis: In Pakistan Quandry, Bush Administration Reviews Stance 2007-10-20 17:25:48 A political meltdown in Pakistan, where al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and nuclear weapons are all in play, could be a disaster for the Bush administration. The scenes of carnage in Pakistan this week conjured what one senior administration official on Friday called “the nightmare scenario” for President Bush’s last 15 months in office: Political meltdown in the one country where al-Qaeda, the Taliban and nuclear weapons are all in play. White House officials insisted in interviews that they had confidence that their longtime ally, Gen. Pervez Musharraf,  Pakistan’s president, would maintain enough control to keep the country stable as he edged toward a power-sharing agreement with his main rival, Benazir Bhutto.  Yet other current and former officials cautioned that six years after the United States forced General Musharraf to choose sides in the days after the Sept. 11 attacks, American leverage over Pakistan is now limited. Though General Musharraf seems likely to survive a multifront challenge to his authority, he is weakened. His effort at conciliation in Pakistan’s tribal areas, where al-Qaeda and the Taliban are, proved a failure, and his efforts to take them on militarily have so far proved ineffective and politically costly. Almost every major terror attack since 9/11 has been traced back to Pakistani territory, leading many who work in intelligence to believe that Pakistan, not Iraq, is the place Bush should consider the “central front” in the battle against terrorism. It was also the source of the greatest leakage of nuclear arms technology in modern times. Read The Full Story Satellites Show Unexpected Activity In Andes Volcanoes 2007-10-20 17:25:13 The central part of the Andes situated between southern Peru and Chile bears 50 active or potentially active volcanoes, spread along a 1500 kilometer-long arc. These volcanic structures mostly rise to between 4,000 and 7,000 meters, are very remote with abrupt slopes and are often cloaked in snow. Few studies have been made on them as such conditions make field surveying extremely difficult. A team of IRD researchers working in partnership with the University of Chile (Santiago) and the Observatoire de Physique du Globe of Clermont-Ferrand focused special attention on the Lastarria-Cordon del Azufre volcanic complex. With a surface area of 1,600 square kilometers, it is situated in the central Andes Cordillera at the border between Argentina and Chile near Antofagasta. Research projects on deformations of the earth crust, conducted in this region between 1992 and 2000 by a North American team, had led to the detection of a long wavelength signal over the area's topography, extracted from analysis of data collected by the European Space Agency (ESA) satellite ERS-1. This deformation would correspond to crustal inflation affecting the whole Lastarria-Cordon del Azufre complex. Although this volcano is not considered as active, as the last eruption dates back 9,000 years, such inflation could express an underlying activity related to the dynamics of a functioning magma chamber. IRD geophysicists continued such investigations on the deformations at work in the Lastarria-Cordon del Azufre complex in 2003, by using radar interferometry. This measurement method is based on the superimposition of two satellite radar images of the same geographical area taken at different times. The resulting differential signal between the images, termed the interferogram, provides a way of detecting possible deformation of the earth crust. Read The Full Story Georgia Governor Declares State Of Emergency Over Drought 2007-10-20 17:24:36 With water supplies rapidly shrinking during a drought of historic proportions, Gov. Sonny Perdue declared a state of emergency Saturday for the northern third of Georgia and asked President Bush to declare it a major disaster area. Georgia officials warn that Lake Lanier, a 38,000-acre reservoir that supplies more than 3 million residents with water, is less than three months from depletion. Smaller reservoirs are dropping even lower. Perdue asked the president to exempt Georgia from complying with federal regulations that dictate the amount of water released from Georgia's reservoirs to protect federally protected mussel species downstream. "We need to cut through the tangle of unnecessary bureaucracy to manage our resources prudently - so that in the long term, all species may have access to life-sustaining water," he said. Read The Full Story In Memoir, Valerie Plame Tells Her Side Of CIA Leak Case 2007-10-20 17:22:51 In a new memoir, former CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson recounts her shock as she watched then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, appearing before the United Nations on the eve of war, deliver what she knew to be a flawed portrait of the intelligence on Iraq.  "It was a powerful presentation," she wrote, "but I knew key parts of it were wrong." At the time, Wilson served in an elite branch of the CIA charged with investigating Iraq's suspected weapons programs. In July 2003, four months after the invasion, her name and covert status were disclosed by the Bush administration to members of the media, setting off a leak inquiry that reached inside the White House and ended at the vice president's office. The disclosures were part of a White House effort to rebut criticism of the Iraq war by her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV.No one was charged with the leak of her name, but Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, was convicted of lying to investigators and obstructing the investigation. In her book, Wilson said that she had neither supported nor opposed the Iraq invasion but that over time, as U.S. casualties mounted, she came to regret it. Read The Full Story	Global Economic Slowdown Fears As Oil Prices Soar 2007-10-21 03:33:05 OPEC under fire as U.S. crude nears $100 a barrel. Finance ministers from the G7 nations issued a blunt warning this weekend that rising energy costs and the American housing crisis will put the brakes on the global economy over the next 12 months, as oil prices surged towards $100 a barrel. Crude prices have smashed a series of records in recent weeks, as the producers' cartel, OPEC, gambles that oil-consuming countries can withstand a fresh jump in costs. U.S. crude for November delivery touched $90 a barrel on Friday. At the same time, equity prices on both sides of the Atlantic plunged and the dollar hit new lows against global currencies amid pessimism that the fallout from the U.S. sub-prime crisis will spread well beyond the housing sector. Gathering in Washington, D.C., on the fringes of the International Monetary Fund's annual meeting, G7 finance ministers issued a statement saying that the fundamentals of the world economy remain strong, but the U.S. housing downturn and high oil prices will hit growth. Read The Full Story Bhutto Defiant As Bomb Suspects Held 2007-10-21 03:32:32 The terror outrage could strengthen ties between Benazir Bhutto and Gen. Pervez Musharraf. Even her supporters call it "blind faith". In a Karachi mortuary last week it was a faith articulated by Rustam, a poor Sindhi farmer, who choked back tears as he searched for the body of his slain brother. "If we have to, I will sacrifice 10 more brothers," he said. Last week the growing political cult of Benazir Bhutto was cemented in the most terrible way, amid bomb blasts and bloodshed, during a rapturous return to Pakistan, the country from which she was exiled. Suddenly a persecution which seemed soft and unshaped during her years of exile has been given a hard edge by events. "What I really need to ask myself," Bhutto told the BBC in the wake of the explosion which killed 138 of her supporters, "is, do I give up, do I let the militants determine the agenda?" She has decided to fight the parliamentary elections due in mid-January. Read The Full Story Obama Calls For Ouster Of Justice Dept. Official After Remark 2007-10-21 03:32:03 U.S. Senator Barack Obama said the leader of the civil rights division of the Justice Department should step down after suggesting that minority voters were not widely disenfranchised by laws requiring photo identification because many members of minorities died before reaching old age. “This administration has shown very little interest in making sure that all people have equal access to the ballot box,” Obama said in a telephone interview. “It’s important for all of us to embrace the basic notion that we should try to make voting easier, not harder.” Obama, an Illinois Democrat who is seeking his party’s presidential nomination, was responding to a remark made by John Tanner, the chief of the Justice Department’s civil rights division. In a speech to a Latino group earlier this month in Los Angeles, Tanner said that a disproportionate share of elderly minority voters did not have identification, but added that it was not a widespread problem because of their life expectancy. “Creating problems for elderly persons just is not good under any circumstance,” Tanner told the National Latino Congreso, according to a video posted on YouTube. “Of course, that also ties into the racial aspect because our society is such that minorities don’t become elderly the way white people do. They die first.” Read The Full Story Israel Shaken By Troops' Tales Of Brutality Against Palestinians 2007-10-21 03:31:20 A psychologist blames assaults on civilians in the 1990s on soldiers' bad training, boredom and poor supervision. A study by an Israeli psychologist into the violent behavior of the country's soldiers is provoking bitter controversy and has awakened urgent questions about the way the army conducts itself in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. Nufar Yishai-Karin, a clinical psychologist at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, interviewed 21 Israeli soldiers and heard confessions of frequent brutal assaults against Palestinians, aggravated by poor training and discipline. In her recently published report, co-authored by Professor Yoel Elizur, Yishai-Karin details a series of violent incidents, including the beating of a four-year-old boy by an officer. The report, although dealing with the experience of soldiers in the 1990s, has triggered an impassioned debate in Israel, where it was published in an abbreviated form in the newspaper Haaretz last month. According to Yishai Karin: "At one point or another of their service, the majority of the interviewees enjoyed violence. They enjoyed the violence because it broke the routine and they liked the destruction and the chaos. They also enjoyed the feeling of power in the violence and the sense of danger." Read The Full Story Former Lead Prosecutor At Guantanamo Alleges Pentagon Plays Politics 2007-10-20 17:26:04 Pressure for "sexy" Guantanamo hearings. Politically motivated officials at the Pentagon have pushed for convictions of high-profile detainees ahead of the 2008 elections, the former lead prosecutor for terrorism trials at Guantanamo Bay said Friday night, adding that the pressure played a part in his decision to resign earlier this month. Senior defense officials discussed in a September 2006 meeting the "strategic political value" of putting some prominent detainees on trial, said Air Force Col. Morris Davis. He said that he felt pressure to pursue cases that were deemed "sexy" over those that prosecutors believed were the most solid or were ready to go. Davis said his resignation was also prompted by newly appointed senior officials seeking to use classified evidence in what would be closed sessions of court, and by almost all elements of the military commissions process being put under the Defense Department general counsel's command, something he believes could present serious conflicts of interest. "There was a big concern that the election of 2008 is coming up," said Davis. "People wanted to get the cases going. There was a rush to get high-interest cases into court at the expense of openness." Read The Full Story Iran's Nuclear Envoy Resigns, Talks In Doubt 2007-10-20 17:25:31 The chief negotiator’s resignation signaled that Iran may have closed the door to a possible negotiated settlement. Iran's chief nuclear negotiator, viewed by the West as a moderating influence in Tehran, resigned before crucial talks with Europe this week over Iran’s nuclear program, signaling that officials here may have closed the door to any possible negotiated settlement in its standoff with the West. The negotiator, Ali Larijani, was among a small group of officials who, while supportive of Iran’s nuclear ambitions, have tried to press back against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his more radical approach, which has left Iran increasingly isolated. With Larijani’s resignation, it appears that the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the final say in all matters of state, has fallen in squarely behind the president. Ahmadinejad represents the most radical face of the leadership, which has defied the United Nations Security Council twice and sped up the process of uranium enrichment. Larijani had been appointed by and reported to the supreme leader. Now, with oil prices high enough to help Iran mitigate the effects of any new sanctions, and with Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, having made a historic trip to Tehran last week, it appears that the top leadership has settled on a single, radical track. Read The Full Story Winnipeg UFO Sightings Almost Triple Average 2007-10-20 17:24:57 The night skies over Manitoba, Canada, were apparently busier than usual last month. Nearly triple the average number of UFO sightings were reported, according to Chris Rutkowski, research coordinator for Ufology Research of Manitoba, a Winnipeg-based independent center that investigates and researches Canadian UFO sightings. "It's significantly above what we normally get," said Rutkowski, adding 11 sightings in Manitoba were submitted in September. The monthly average is about three or four, he said. Read The Full Story Right Whales Remain At Risk 2007-10-20 17:24:13 Proposal to slow ship speeds in effort to save endangered sea mammals stalled in agency fight. Sixteen months ago, a federal agency proposed slowing ships in certain East Coast waters to 10 knots or less during parts of the year to save the North Atlantic right whale, one of the world's most endangered marine mammals, from extinction. Nine months later, officials at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said the situation was so dire that the loss of one more pregnant female might be the death knell for the species, whose surviving population numbers fewer than 400. Today, however, the rule remains the subject of intense debate among senior White House officials, and the toll keeps rising: Since NOAA published the proposed rule, researchers have found three of the whales dead from ship strikes, and another two suffering from propeller wounds. The question of how best to protect right whales - which got their name as the "right whale" to kill in the heyday of whaling because they floated after being harpooned - has proved vexing to regulators, since attempts to protect them have economic consequences for powerful political constituencies, including international shipping interests and Maine lobstermen. Read The Full Story
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