Free Internet Press Newsletter - Monday November 19 2007 - (813)

Monday November 19 2007 edition
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U.S. Envoy To Musharraf Returns Home With Nothing 2007-11-19 02:47:36 A special U.S. mission to the embattled Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf ended in failure Sunday, and the Bush administration is increasingly alarmed about the possible collapse of the government. There are also fears that its nuclear weapons could end up in the hands of Islamist extremists. John Negroponte, the U.S. Deputy Secretary of State, flew out of Islamabad after Musharraf, a close ally of the U.S., rejected his call to end emergency rule, to free political prisoners, resign from his post as army commander and hold free and fair elections in January. Article continues Negroponte, at a press conference in Islamabad Sunday morning, issued a warning that the U.S. will not recognize elections held under emergency rule. He refused to answer directly a question about whether the U.S. will cut off aid if emergency rule is not lifted. The U.S.  has provided Pakistan with $10 billion (£5 billion) in aid since 9/11, mainly to help in the fight against the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Read The Full Story Commentary: Our Science Fiction Fate 2007-11-19 02:46:37 Intellpuke: The following commentary was written by author Brian Aldiss and appears in the Guardian edition for Monday, November 19, 2007. Mr. Aldiss' writes: "The planet's dire state makes the imaginative leaps of dystopian science fiction writers redundant." His commentary follows: If only we had called it "climate climax". Climate climax sounds like something worth worrying about when Ban Ki-moon and the U.N.'s latest report call for urgent action. Alas, global warming sounds all too soothing, especially for those living in Skegness. We have been slow to take up the challenge presented by global warming. This country has its problems: turkeys looking forward to Christmas have been prematurely slaughtered. But there's a wonderful crop of apples, some still on the trees, nestling among the leaves in November. As a nation, the British have always had a problem with how to get agitated. It was one reason for inventing cricket. Imagine if a game of football lasted for five days. Science fiction writers find difficulty in dealing with the global threat, never mind recycling. There has always been a journalistic flavor to science fiction. If an SF catastrophe happens, it happens right now, and L.A. goes promptly up in smoke. If aliens from Alpha Centauri invade us five centuries from today - well, that's philosophy, isn't it? They will come to teach us to behave or maybe to wipe us out entirely. To serve us right. We have been so self-indulgent, so foolish, we of the self-promoting homo sapiens species. We have multiplied beyond our means, just as SF always said. No one took much notice. Except, that is, for Gaia. As James Lovelock has said, Gaia stands for Earth with its rocks, seas and atmosphere, together with all living things: Mother Earth. And mothers won't stand for too much abuse. Mothers can get nasty. Read The Full Story Spanish King's Outburst At Chavez Generates $2 Million Worth Of Ring-tones 2007-11-19 02:45:57 When the Spanish king Juan Carlos turned to Venezuela President Hugo Chavez and said to him, a touch irritably, "Why don't you shut up?", little did he know that his breach of diplomatic protocol would become a smash hit across the country. Were the king to claim image rights over his less-than-diplomatic outburst, he could find himself a nice little earner, as those five famous words have become a multi-million euro business, selling ringtones, mugs, T-shirts and websites. According to David Bravo, a lawyer specializing in I.T. law and intellectual property, "the use of the sentence 'why don't you shut up?' in ringtones ... is a violation of his image rights". An estimated 500,000 people have already downloaded the ringtone, generating around €1.5 million (£1 million or $2 million), but many companies have circumvented any potential problems over rights by using an actor's voice instead of the king's. Read The Full Story Commentary - Is It Too Late To Fix Global Warming? 2007-11-19 01:24:04   We ran yet another warming story today.  Very few people are disputing the legitimacy of global warming, finally.  Now, it's no longer a matter of if it even exists, but will we survive?   I'm not a tree hugging, survivalist, who is planning on doing green things.  Recycling your junk mail and water bottles isn't going to do it.  A few people driving your "green" cars isn't go to save us.   Please click "Read More" to read this full commentary. Read The Full Story China's E-Waste Nightmare Worsening 2007-11-18 19:43:25 The air smells acrid from the squat gas burners that sit outside homes, melting wires to recover copper and cooking computer motherboards to release gold. Migrant workers in filthy clothes smash picture tubes by hand to recover glass and electronic parts, releasing as much as 6.5 pounds of lead dust. For five years, environmentalists and the media have highlighted the danger to Chinese workers who dismantle much of the world's junked electronics. Yet a visit to this southeastern Chinese town regarded as the heartland of "e-waste" disposal shows little has improved. In fact, the problem is growing worse because of China's own contribution. China now produces more than 1 million tons of e-waste each year, said Jamie Choi, a toxics campaigner with Greenpeace China in Beijing. That adds up to roughly 5 million television sets, 4 million fridges, 5 million washing machines, 10 million mobile phones and 5 million personal computers, according to Choi. "Most e-waste in China comes from overseas, but the amount of domestic e-waste is on the rise," he said. Read The Full Story Deepening China-Iran Ties Weaken Bid To Isolate Iran 2007-11-18 02:52:18 Tehran increasingly important in Beijing's energy quest. The rapidly growing relationship between Iran and China has begun to undermine international efforts to ensure that Iran cannot convert a peaceful energy program to develop a nuclear arsenal, U.S. and European officials say. The Bush administration and its allies said last week that they plan to seek new United Nations sanctions against Iran, after the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said Iranian officials had given inadequate answers to questions about the country's past nuclear activities. U.S. and European officials now worry more about a Chinese veto than about opposition from Russia, which has previously assisted and defended the Iranian nuclear energy program. U.S. and European officials charged Friday that Beijing is deliberately stalling to protect its economic interests. "China needs to play a more responsible role on Iran, needs to recognize that China is going to be very dependent in the decades ahead on Middle East oil, and, therefore, China, for its own development and its own purposes, is going to need a stable Middle East, and that an Iran armed with nuclear weapons is not a prescription for stability in the Middle East," national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley told reporters Friday. Read The Full Story Commentary: We Must Not Tolerate This Putsch Against Our Freedoms 2007-11-18 02:51:49 Intellpuke: The following commentary was written by Henry Porter and appears in The Observer edition for Sunday, November 18, 2007. Mr. Porter writes: "A few journalists and Parliament members are prepared to fight the [British] government's sinister anti-libertarianism. More people should join them." His commentary follows: Welcome to Fortress Britain, a fortress that will keep people in as well as out. Welcome to a state that requires you to answer 53 questions before you're allowed to take a day trip to Calais. Welcome to a country where you will be stopped, scanned and searched at any of 250 railways stations, filmed at every turn, barked at by a police force whose behavior has given rise to a doubling in complaints concerning abuse and assaults. Three years ago, this would have seemed hysterical and Home Office ministers would have been writing letters of complaint. But it is a measure of how fast and how far things have gone that it does nothing more than describe the facts as announced last week. We now accept with apparent equanimity that the state has the right to demand to know, among other things, how your ticket has been paid for, the billing address of any card used, your travel itinerary and route, your email address, details of whether your travel arrangements are flexible, the history of changes to your travel plans plus any biographical information the state deems to be of interest or anything the ticket agent considers to be of interest. There is no end to Whitehall's information binge. The krill of personal data is being scooped up in ever-increasing quantities by a state that harbors a truly bewildering fear of the free, private and self-determined individual, who may want to take himself off to Paris without someone at home knowing his movements or his credit card number. Read The Full Story Goldman Sachs Staff To Share $18 Billion Pot 2007-11-18 02:51:07 Goldman Sachs bankers and traders are in line for record bonuses, despite the turmoil in the credit markets. The bank, dubbed "Goldmine Sachs" by rivals, has escaped most of the multi-billion-dollar write-downs and losses that have hit other investment banks such as UBS, Citigroup and Deutsche. City remuneration experts point out that staff at Goldman are already eligible for $16.9 billion (£8.4 billion) set aside in the first nine months of this year; this compares with $16.4 billion paid out by the bank for the whole of 2006. By the end of 2007, the pot should be worth at least $18 billion. (Intellpuke: When Britons refer to "City" with a capitol "C", they are referring to London's financial district, much as Americans refer to Wall Street.) Goldman pays up to half its net profits to employees, with the largest sums going to senior directors such as chief executive Lloyd Blankfein and Michael Sherwood, its co-chief exec in Europe, as well as top deal makers such as Yoel Zaoui. Before the credit crisis, Goldman had been offloading sub-prime debt, so it escaped relatively unscathed. American markets are braced for another week of turmoil as analysts fear that more bad news from the housing sector will slam the brakes on stock and bond markets to create a credit crunch as bad as the one in August. Read The Full Story U.N. Chief Seeks More Climate Change Leadership 2007-11-18 02:49:23 United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, describing climate change as “the defining challenge of our age,” released the final report of a United Nations panel on climate change in Valencia, Spain, on Saturday and called on the United States and China to play “a more constructive role”. His challenge to the world’s two greatest greenhouse gas emitters came just two weeks before the world’s energy ministers meet in Bali, Indonesia, to begin talks on creating a global climate treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. The United States and China are signatories to Kyoto, but Washington has not ratified the treaty, and China, along with other developing countries, is not bound by its mandatory emissions caps. “Today the world’s scientists have spoken, clearly and in one voice,” Ban said of the report, the Synthesis Report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). “In Bali, I expect the world’s policymakers to do the same.” Read The Full Story	Climate Change Threatens Farms 2007-11-19 02:47:20 Analyses conclude that global warming will affect agriculture disproportionately in lower latitudes. Climate change may be global in its sweep, but not all of the globe's citizens will share equally in its woes. And nowhere is that truth more evident, or more worrisome, than in its projected effects on agriculture. Several recent analyses have concluded that the higher temperatures expected in coming years - along with salt seepage into groundwater as sea levels rise and anticipated increases in flooding and droughts - will disproportionately affect agriculture in the planet's lower latitudes, where most of the world's poor live. India, on track to be the world's most populous country, could see a 40 percent decline in agricultural productivity by the 2080s as record heat waves bake its wheat-growing region, placing hundreds of millions of people at the brink of chronic hunger. Africa - where four out of five people make their living directly from the land - could see agricultural downturns of 30 percent, forcing farmers to abandon traditional crops in favor of more heat-resistant and flood-tolerant ones such as rice. Worse, some African countries, including Senegal and war-torn Sudan, are on track to suffer what amounts to complete agricultural collapse, with productivity declines of more than 50 percent. Read The Full Story Chavez, Ahmadinejad Assail Weak Dollar At OPEC Event 2007-11-19 02:46:21 A rare meeting of the heads of state of the OPEC countries ended in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Sunday on a political note, with two leaders - Venezuela President Hugo Chavez  and Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - blaming the weakness of the United States dollar for high oil prices. Despite the best efforts of the host country, Saudi Arabia, to steer the meeting away from politics and promote OPEC’s environmental concerns, the leaders of Venezuela and Iran let loose some show-stealing statements. “The dollar is in free fall, everyone should be worried about it,” Chavez told reporters here. “The fall of the dollar is not the fall of the dollar - it’s the fall of the American empire.” During a news conference after the meeting, Ahmadinejad added: “The U.S. dollar has no economic value.” Ahmadinejad said that oil, which was hovering last week at close to $100 a barrel, was being sold currently for a “paltry sum.” And Chavez predicted that prices would rise to $200 a barrel if the United States were “crazy enough” to strike at Iran, or even at his own country. Read The Full Story Bangladesh Storm Deaths Hit 3,000 - Fears For Thousands More Dead In Remote Areas 2007-11-19 02:45:42 Worst cyclone in a decade leaves vast trail of havoc. The death toll from the cyclone that obliterated parts of coastal Bangladesh soared above 3,000 late Sunday, amid warnings from relief workers that the body count could ultimately rise to more than 10,000 once remote regions have been accessed. The government rapidly deployed naval and military helicopters as rescue workers made their way to outlying areas where entire villages are believed to have been flattened in the worst cyclone to have hit the country in a decade. Article continues The ministry of food and disaster management confirmed Sunday that more than 3,000 people had died since the storm struck last Thursday. However, a government "early warning program" saved a vast number of lives, said the United Nations resident coordinator Renata Dessallien. About 1.5 million people on the coast were able to flee to shelters. The U.N. said it is making available $7 million from its central emergency fund, and the World Food Program is rushing in aid. Britain announced a £2.5 million ($5 million) relief package Sunday night, while Washington, D.C., said two ships would deliver 35 tons of non-food aid. During his Sunday blessing from the Vatican, Pope Benedict XVI called for "every possible effort to help our brothers who have been so sorely tested". Read The Full Story The Readers Will Have The Final Word 2007-11-18 19:59:46 Two examples today further drive home the lesson that the journalism media no longer provides the final word on the day's news, thanks to the Internet. Example #1 There's a stunning story out of the St. Louis area, involving a crowdsourced online effort to get around a newspaper's editorial decision in covering the suicide of a local teen. Gawker Media's Jezebel blog appears to have amplified the controversy, which was brought to the attention of the national journalism community via a letter to Jim Romenesko's blog on Poynter.org yesterday. Steve Pokin of the St. Charles Journal broke the story of Megan Meier, a 13-year-old who had some trouble (like many teens) but was reportedly turning her life around, in part due to the friendship of a boy she'd met on MySpace. But when the buy turned on her, insulting her, Megan was devastated, then took her life, Pokin wrote. The twist? The boy didn't exist. 'He' was the creation of the mother of one of the girl's former friends. But the Journal didn't name the woman, citing concerns for *her* teen daughter. Jezebel and other bloggers went nuts, and soon, they'd uncovered the woman's name, her address, phone number and business registration records and plastered them all over the Web. The lessons for journalists? First, we can't restrict access to information anymore. The crowd will work together to find whatever we withhold. ... Read The Full Story Hundreds Convicted Using Faulty FBI Tool 2007-11-18 02:52:34 Bureau scrapped 40-year-old forensic test, but failed to alert affected defendants or the courts, a joint project by the Washington Post and "60 Minutes" shows. Hundreds of defendants sitting in prisons nationwide have been convicted with the help of an FBI forensic tool that was discarded more than two years ago, but the FBI lab has yet to take steps to alert the affected defendants or courts, even as the window for appealing convictions is closing, a joint investigation by the Washington Post and "60 Minutes" has found. The science, known as comparative bullet-lead analysis, was first used after President John F. Kennedy's assassination in 1963. The technique used chemistry to link crime-scene bullets to ones possessed by suspects on the theory that each batch of lead had a unique elemental makeup. In 2004, however, the nation's most prestigious scientific body concluded that variations in the manufacturing process rendered the FBI's testimony about the science "unreliable and potentially misleading". Specifically, the National Academy of Sciences said that decades of FBI statements to jurors linking a particular bullet to those found in a suspect's gun or cartridge box were so overstated that such testimony should be considered "misleading under federal rules of evidence". A year later, the bureau abandoned the analysis. Read The Full Story Commentary: Learn To Swim 2007-11-18 02:52:03 Intellpuke: The following commentary was written by Tim Watkin and appeared in The Guardain edition for Friday, November 16, 2007. In his commentary, Mr. Watkin writes: "Climate change skeptics can no longer argue with the evidence that the planet is warming. Instead they say we'll just have to adapt." His commentary follows: It's remarkable what some people will do to maintain the purity of their ideology. Speaking to an influential business lobby group in New Zealand this week, former chancellor of the exchequer Nigel Lawson argued that we should simply learn to adapt to climate change rather than attempt to combat it, as adaptation is cheaper and can preserve the free market. He said humanity had dealt with crises before without resorting to government intervention and could do so again. The adaptation argument has become the retreat position in recent months for climate change skeptics who now find climate data and evidence from the poles mounting against them. No longer able to argue that there's no need to act because the climate isn't changing, they now argue against action because it's too expensive, requires too much government leadership (they say intervention) and because, what the heck, it may be too late anyway. They see the climate as they do the market - there will be winners and losers, but, so long as they're among the winners, it's best to let the forces at play work themselves out. The economics alone are questionable. The massive and detailed Stern report last year concluded that the negative impact of climate change could cost the world economy 20 times more than acting to prevent the damage in the first place. Lawson's concern is that nothing interferes with globalization, but he ignores the fact that climate change could destroy more demand-and-supply chains around the world than new government policies ever could. Read The Full Story Commentary: Private Equity Is On The Move 2007-11-18 02:51:28 Intellpuke: The following commentary was written by Ignacio Ramonet and appears in Le Monde Diplomatique's November 2007 edition. While critics of the economic horrors of globalization argue, a new and even more brutal form of capitalism is in action. The new vultures are private equity companies, predatory investment funds with vast amounts of capital at their disposal and an enormous appetite for more. Their names, among them the Carlyle Group, KKR, the Blackstone Group, Colony Capital, Apollo Management, Cerberus Partners, Starwood Capital, Texas Pacific Group, Wendel, Euraze, are still not widely known. And while still a secret they are getting their hands on the global economy. Between 2002 and 2006 the capital raised by these funds from banks, insurance companies, pension funds and the assets of the super-rich rose from $135 billion to $515 billion. Their financial power is phenomenal, more than $1,600 billion (or $1.6 trillion), and they cannot be stopped. In the United States, the principal private equity firms invested some $417 billion in takeovers last year and more than $317 billion in the first quarter of 2007, acquiring control of 8,000 companies. One American in four and almost one Frenchman or woman in every 12 now works for them. France is now their prime target, after the United Kingdom and the U.S. Private equity firms, mainly American or British, acquired 400 companies in France last year for $14 billion. They now manage more than 1,600 French companies, including such famous names as Picard Surgeles, Dim, the Quick restaurant chain, Buffalo Grill, Pages Jaunes (the French Yellow Pages), Allocine and Afflelou, and they are looking at other big names on the French stock market index, the CAC 40. Predatory funds are not new. They first appeared about 15 years ago but have recently reached alarming proportions, encouraged by cheap credit facilities and sophisticated financial instruments. The basic principle is simple: a group of wealthy investors buys up companies and manages them privately, without reference to the stock exchange and its restrictive rules and without having to answer to shareholders. The idea is to get round the fundamental principles of capitalist morality and back to the law of the jungle. Read The Full Story Death Toll From Third Superbug Soars In U.K. 2007-11-18 02:50:15 Pseudomonas is resistant to hospital cleaning - antibiotics are proving ineffective. Britain's health workers are struggling to control a surge in an "untreatable" hospital-acquired infection that is estimated to be killing hundreds of patients a year. The number of cases of Pseudomonas rose by 41 per cent from 2,605 in 2002 to 3,663 last year, according to U.K. Health Protection Agency figures. Cleaning agents that hospitals rely on to kill bacteria are proving inadequate, while most antibiotics that usually help patients repel infections are ineffective. It often contaminates water and moisture, so is a particular problem in breathing equipment, intravenous lines and catheters. One child cancer patient caught it when his lips were sprinkled with holy water at a Leeds hospital. The bug is similar to the potentially fatal MRSA and C difficile infections. MRSA was cited as a cause of death in 1,629 people in England and Wales in 2005, up from 734 in 2001. C difficile was given as the reason for the death of 3,807 people in 2005, compared with 1,214 people in 2001. There are no official statistics on the number of deaths from Pseudomonas, but Professor Mark Enright, an expert on healthcare-acquired infections at Imperial College London, estimates that it kills "at least hundreds a year", especially those who get blood poisoning as a result. Previous studies have shown that those who develop septicaemia related to Pseudomonas have only a 20 per cent chance of survival. Read The Full Story Saudis Object To Chavez's OPEC Stance 2007-11-18 02:49:02 To the annals of peculiar diplomatic and cultural moments, add Saturday's ceremony opening the summit of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).  The meeting was held in an ornate royal conference center, with Corinthian columns and carved archways worthy of ancient Rome or the Venetian doges. The OPEC leaders were led to a room with 11 giant crystal chandeliers, marble floors, 20-foot doors of inlaid wood and gold trim, cavernous ceilings with carved patterns painted powder blue, eggshell white and pink, and enough cushy seats for 2,000 people. After the chanting of an opening prayer from the Koran about God's "sublime light that reflects on mankind," Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez took the stage, crossed himself, invoked Jesus and launched into a 24-minute rallying cry to re-energize what he called OPEC's "revolutionary" battle against "exploitation" and to do more to alleviate poverty. After Chavez spoke, Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah said that "oil is a tool for construction and prosperity ... and it should not be a means for disputes or serving whims." Read The Full Story
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