Free Internet Press Newsletter - Monday March 31 2008 - (813)

Monday March 31 2008 edition
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Clinton, Obama Supporters Wrangle Over Delegates 2008-03-30 16:57:45 Less than a month ago, Texas Democrats turned out in huge numbers for the presidential nominating contest between Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, confident that, no matter who won, the party would have a popular, well-financed candidate. But that exuberance is gone now. Across the state this weekend, tense confrontations - even shoving matches - erupted as partisans for Clinton and Obama battled over how to interpret the March 4 election results and how to choose delegates to the Texas Democratic convention. At one particularly raucous session Saturday at Texas Southern University, a leading Clinton backer, U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee, was booed by hundreds of Obama supporters, and police were called later to break up heated exchanges that left some in tears. "It's bedlam," said Houston lawyer Daniel J. Shea, a Clinton backer. Read The Full Story Editorial: My Way Or The Highway 2008-03-30 16:56:51 Intellpuke: This editorial appeared in the New York Times edition for Sunday, March 30, 2008. President Bush likes to talk about not being swayed by public opinion, especially the views of Democrats. At a news conference last December, he said the most important criterion for picking a president is “whether or not somebody’s got a sound set of principles from which they will not deviate as they make decisions.” Unhappily for the country, we have learned that Mr. Bush has no idea when standing on principle becomes blind stubbornness and then destructive obsession. So it goes with his choice to run the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, Steven Bradbury. In a lower job in that office, Mr. Bradbury signed off on two secret legal memos authorizing torture in American detention camps. The first approved waterboarding, among other things. When Congress outlawed waterboarding, the other memo assured Mr. Bush that he could ignore the law. Mr. Bradbury is widely viewed on both sides of the aisle as such a toxic choice that he will never be confirmed. The Senate has already refused to do so twice. Still, Mr. Bush clings to this lost cause, snarling the confirmation process for hundreds of nominees and crippling parts of the federal regulatory apparatus. Read The Full Story Muqtada Sadr Orders Followers To End Fighting 2008-03-30 16:56:20 The Shiite Muslim cleric disavows armed members who attack Iraqi government institutions and party officers. He calls for the government to end what he calls random raids and to release all prisoners. Radical Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada Sadr ordered his followers Sunday to end six days of fighting, which has killed more than 300 people and threaten to reverse recent security gains across Iraq. In a statement issued by Sadr's headquarters in the Shiite holy city of Najaf, the cleric disavowed any armed members who attack government institutions and party offices. "Based on the responsibility imposed by Islamic law and to save precious Iraqi blood ... we have decided the following: to end the armed manifestation in Basra and all over the governorates," said Sadr. Read The Full Story Europe-wide Radio Network Could Pick Up Alien Broadcast 2008-03-30 03:31:31 Scientists are finalizing plans to link radio wave detectors in five countries and create a device sensitive enough to pick up signals from worlds the other side of the galaxy. By connecting banks of detectors in fields across Britain, France, Holland, Sweden and Germany, astronomers aim to create a radio telescope that will have the accuracy of a machine the size of Europe. They believe it could solve some of the universe's most important secrets - including the discovery of radio broadcasts from intelligent extraterrestrials. "This system works by collecting radio waves over a range of frequencies," said cosmologist Robert Nichol, of Portsmouth University. "These can then be analyzed using arrays of computers which can identify patterns from the data streaming from our detectors. "Some of these signals will reveal information about the early universe, for example. However, broadcasts by alien intelligences would also be revealed by our computers because we will, primarily, be collecting radio signals. Signals that have regular patterns will give themselves away as the possible handiwork of extraterrestrials. Such work is a bonus, however. The main work of the system is basic research," added Nichol. Read The Full Story Environment: Times Runs Out For Islanders On Global Warming's Front Line 2008-03-30 03:30:16 Rising sea levels threaten to flood many of the islands in the fertile Ganges Delta, leading to an environmental disaster and a refugee crisis for India and Bangladesh. Dependra Das stretches out his arms to show his flaky skin, covered in raw saltwater sores. His fingers submerged in soft black clay for up to six hours a day, he spends his time frantically shoring up a crude sea dyke surrounding his remote island home in the Sundarbans, the world's largest delta. Alongside him, across the beach in long lines, the villagers of Ghoramara island, the women dressed in purple, orange and green saris, do the same, trying to hold back the tide. For the islanders, each day begins and ends the same way. As dusk descends, the people file back to their thatched huts. By morning the dyke will be breached and work will begin again. Here in the vast, low-lying Sundarbans, the largest mangrove wilderness on the planet, Das, 70, is preparing to lose his third home to the sea in as many years; here global warming is a reality, not a prediction. Over the course of a three-day boat trip through the Sundarbans, The Observer found Das' plight to be far from unique. Across the delta, homes have been swept away, fields ravaged by worsening monsoons, livelihoods destroyed. It confirms what experts are already warning: that the effects of global warming will be most severe on those who did the least to contribute to it but can least afford measures to adapt or save themselves. For these islanders, building clay walls is their only option. Read The Full Story British Army Joins Battle To Control Basra 2008-03-30 03:28:44 British troops became involved in the intense fighting in Basra Saturday night as clashes continued between Iraqi government forces and Shia militia. The army launched artillery shells at a mortar position of the Shia Mahdi Army, led by the radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, in the al-Klalaf area in the north of the city that had been firing on Iraqi troops. Military sources admitted that the militia had consolidated a number of "criminal strongpoints" in the city. The involvement of the British is the first time U.K. forces have engaged militias since the Iraqi army operation, personally supervised by the Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, began in the city last Tuesday morning. British army spokesman in Basra, Major Tom Holloway, told the BBC the engagement had been successful: "This is something we were always prepared to do. There are still a number of militia criminal strongpoints in the city, and we know where they are. Elsewhere they are consolidating their positions and gains." British aircraft have been patrolling above the city during the course of the operation, but have not so far been used to attack militia positions. Read The Full Story	Medical Journal Issues Warning On 2 Cholesterol Drugs 2008-03-30 16:57:31 Two widely prescribed cholesterol-lowering drugs, Vytorin and Zetia, may not work and should be used only as a last resort, the New England Journal of Medicine said in an editorial published on Sunday. The journal’s conclusion came as doctors at a major cardiology conference in Chicago, Illinois, saw for the first time the full results of a two-year clinical trial that showed that the drugs failed to slow, and might have even sped up, the growth of fatty plaques in the arteries. Growth of those plaques is closely correlated with heart attacks and strokes. Merck and Schering-Plough, the companies that make Vytorin and Zetia, said on Sunday that despite the results of the trial, they would continue to promote their medicines as first-line treatments for high cholesterol. The medicines are among the top-selling drugs in the world, with total sales of about $5 billion last year. About four million Americans take them. Some scientists, including many of the same doctors who criticized Merck over the arthritis drug Vioxx and were eventually proved correct about Vioxx’s risks, say the companies are overstating the evidence of the drugs’ effectiveness and that doctors should not prescribe the drugs. Read The Full Story A $10,000 Lesson In Airline Policies And Missed Connections 2008-03-30 16:56:39 This is a story about two retirees who bought $753 round-trip tickets to Europe and wound up paying nearly $10,000. It's also a story about self-serving airline policies, regulatory indifference and the perils of booking separate tickets for connecting flights. If it doesn't make your blood boil, consult a cardiologist. Anthony and Carol Lopilato of Redondo Beach booked their bargain fares from New York's JFK Airport to Rome, Italy, flying out Dec. 19 and back Jan. 2, on Alitalia. Then, they booked an American Airlines flight from LAX scheduled to arrive at JFK more than three hours before their Alitalia flight. It didn't. Read The Full Story Dollar Chilled By Rise Of Euro 2008-03-30 03:31:50 The once-unchallenged world hegemony of the U.S. currency is under threat as its value plummets and investors desert it. Lurking behind the headline-grabbing stories about the credit crunch, the U.S. housing crash and the near-death experiences of Northern Rock and Bear Stearns, is the bigger one about the slump in the value of the American dollar. So steeply has the greenback fallen in value against its main rivals - the euro and the Japanese yen - that economists are talking about the dollar losing its status as the world's reserve currency, a position it has held since 1945. Commentators have written the dollar's obituary on countless occasions over the past 40 years, principally in the late 1970s and early 1990s, when America's economic performance compared badly with that of Japan or Germany. Read The Full Story Commentary: Those Who Control Oil And Water Will Control The World 2008-03-30 03:30:43 Intellpuke: This commentary was written by by John Gray and appeared in The Observer edition for Sunday, March 30, 2008. Mr. Gray is author of "Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia", published by Allen Lane. His commentary follows: History may not repeat itself, but, as Mark Twain observed, it can sometimes rhyme. The crises and conflicts of the past recur, recognizably similar even when altered by new conditions. At present, a race for the world's resources is underway that resembles the Great Game that was played in the decades leading up to the First World War. Now, as then, the most coveted prize is oil and the risk is that as the contest heats up it will not always be peaceful. But this is no simple rerun of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Today, there are powerful new players and it is not only oil that is at stake. It was Rudyard Kipling who brought the idea of the Great Game into the public mind in Kim, his cloak-and-dagger novel of espionage and imperial geopolitics in the time of the Raj. Then, the main players were Britain and Russia and the object of the game was control of central Asia's oil. Now, Britain hardly matters and India and China, which were subjugated countries during the last round of the game, have emerged as key players. The struggle is no longer focused mainly on central Asian oil. It stretches from the Persian Gulf to Africa, Latin America, even the polar caps, and it is also a struggle for water and depleting supplies of vital minerals. Above all, global warming is increasing the scarcity of natural resources. The Great Game that is afoot today is more intractable and more dangerous than the last. The biggest new player in the game is China and it is there that the emerging pattern is clearest. China's rulers have staked everything on economic growth. Without improving living standards, there would be large-scale unrest, which could pose a threat to their power. Moreover, China is in the middle of the largest and fastest move from the countryside to the city in history, a process that cannot be stopped. Read The Full Story Acid Bacteria Are Threat To Park Beauty 2008-03-30 03:29:51 Many areas of Britain's Peak District are being destroyed by acid excreted by metal-eating bacteria, a legacy of the industrial revolution. Large sections of hillside have been left badly eroded and acid build-up in streams now threatens to poison reservoirs. In addition, blanket bogs in the Peaks - which are home to rare plants, such as bog rosemary and wild orchids, as well golden plovers and mountain hares - are also threatened by acid build-up. Details are to be presented to delegates at the Society for General Microbiology's annual meeting in Edinburgh, Scotland, Monday. Dr. Patricia Linton, of Manchester Metropolitan University, who with co-workers carried out the study, said the discovery is now "extremely worrying". "This is a legacy of the pollution that has poured from factories and mines in the area," she said. "Much of that pollution stopped 50 years ago, with the introduction of clean air legislation. However, there has been no improvement to the Peak District's ecology. The damage is still getting worse." Read The Full Story Zimbabwe Opposition Claims Huge Election Win 2008-03-30 03:28:10 Zimbabwe's opposition party claimed an overwhelming victory against President Robert Mugabe in Saturday's presidential election, saying that the flow of results showed its candidate, Morgan Tsvangirai, had "massacred" the ruling Zanu-PF party. The Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) defied a government ban on pre-empting the official announcement of the election results and released the count from polling stations that showed Tsvangirai beating the man who has ruled Zimbabwe for 28 years, even in the president's home territory of Mashonaland. "We've won this election," said Tendai Biti, the MDC's secretary-general. "The results coming in show that in our traditional strongholds we are massacring them. In Mugabe's traditional strongholds they are doing very badly. There is no way Mugabe can claim victory unless it is through fraud. He has lost this election." The government's electoral commission has yet to release the counts formally, but the MDC said that declarations posted at polling stations across Zimbabwe last night, and gathered from its agents observing the counts, showed Tsvangirai ahead of Mugabe in every province where results were available. The most dramatic gap was in Mashonaland West, where the MDC candidate had 88 per cent of the vote to the president's 12 per cent. Read The Full Story
Original materials on this site © Free Internet Press. Any mirrored or quoted materials © their respective authors, publications, or outlets, as shown on their publication, indicated by the link in the news story. Original Free Internet Press materials may be copied and/or republished without modification, provided a link to http://FreeInternetPress.com is given in the story, or proper credit is given. Newsletter options may be changed in your preferences on http://freeinternetpress.com Please email editor@freeinternetpress.com there are any questions. XML/RSS/RDF Newsfeed Syndication: http://freeinternetpress.com/rss.php

Free Internet Press Newsletter - Sunday March 30 2008 - (813)

Sunday March 30 2008 edition
Free Internet Press is operated on your donations. Donate Today
Dollar Chilled By Rise Of Euro 2008-03-30 03:31:50 The once-unchallenged world hegemony of the U.S. currency is under threat as its value plummets and investors desert it. Lurking behind the headline-grabbing stories about the credit crunch, the U.S. housing crash and the near-death experiences of Northern Rock and Bear Stearns, is the bigger one about the slump in the value of the American dollar. So steeply has the greenback fallen in value against its main rivals - the euro and the Japanese yen - that economists are talking about the dollar losing its status as the world's reserve currency, a position it has held since 1945. Commentators have written the dollar's obituary on countless occasions over the past 40 years, principally in the late 1970s and early 1990s, when America's economic performance compared badly with that of Japan or Germany. Read The Full Story Commentary: Those Who Control Oil And Water Will Control The World 2008-03-30 03:30:43 Intellpuke: This commentary was written by by John Gray and appeared in The Observer edition for Sunday, March 30, 2008. Mr. Gray is author of "Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia", published by Allen Lane. His commentary follows: History may not repeat itself, but, as Mark Twain observed, it can sometimes rhyme. The crises and conflicts of the past recur, recognizably similar even when altered by new conditions. At present, a race for the world's resources is underway that resembles the Great Game that was played in the decades leading up to the First World War. Now, as then, the most coveted prize is oil and the risk is that as the contest heats up it will not always be peaceful. But this is no simple rerun of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Today, there are powerful new players and it is not only oil that is at stake. It was Rudyard Kipling who brought the idea of the Great Game into the public mind in Kim, his cloak-and-dagger novel of espionage and imperial geopolitics in the time of the Raj. Then, the main players were Britain and Russia and the object of the game was control of central Asia's oil. Now, Britain hardly matters and India and China, which were subjugated countries during the last round of the game, have emerged as key players. The struggle is no longer focused mainly on central Asian oil. It stretches from the Persian Gulf to Africa, Latin America, even the polar caps, and it is also a struggle for water and depleting supplies of vital minerals. Above all, global warming is increasing the scarcity of natural resources. The Great Game that is afoot today is more intractable and more dangerous than the last. The biggest new player in the game is China and it is there that the emerging pattern is clearest. China's rulers have staked everything on economic growth. Without improving living standards, there would be large-scale unrest, which could pose a threat to their power. Moreover, China is in the middle of the largest and fastest move from the countryside to the city in history, a process that cannot be stopped. Read The Full Story Acid Bacteria Are Threat To Park Beauty 2008-03-30 03:29:51 Many areas of Britain's Peak District are being destroyed by acid excreted by metal-eating bacteria, a legacy of the industrial revolution. Large sections of hillside have been left badly eroded and acid build-up in streams now threatens to poison reservoirs. In addition, blanket bogs in the Peaks - which are home to rare plants, such as bog rosemary and wild orchids, as well golden plovers and mountain hares - are also threatened by acid build-up. Details are to be presented to delegates at the Society for General Microbiology's annual meeting in Edinburgh, Scotland, Monday. Dr. Patricia Linton, of Manchester Metropolitan University, who with co-workers carried out the study, said the discovery is now "extremely worrying". "This is a legacy of the pollution that has poured from factories and mines in the area," she said. "Much of that pollution stopped 50 years ago, with the introduction of clean air legislation. However, there has been no improvement to the Peak District's ecology. The damage is still getting worse." Read The Full Story Zimbabwe Opposition Claims Huge Election Win 2008-03-30 03:28:10 Zimbabwe's opposition party claimed an overwhelming victory against President Robert Mugabe in Saturday's presidential election, saying that the flow of results showed its candidate, Morgan Tsvangirai, had "massacred" the ruling Zanu-PF party. The Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) defied a government ban on pre-empting the official announcement of the election results and released the count from polling stations that showed Tsvangirai beating the man who has ruled Zimbabwe for 28 years, even in the president's home territory of Mashonaland. "We've won this election," said Tendai Biti, the MDC's secretary-general. "The results coming in show that in our traditional strongholds we are massacring them. In Mugabe's traditional strongholds they are doing very badly. There is no way Mugabe can claim victory unless it is through fraud. He has lost this election." The government's electoral commission has yet to release the counts formally, but the MDC said that declarations posted at polling stations across Zimbabwe last night, and gathered from its agents observing the counts, showed Tsvangirai ahead of Mugabe in every province where results were available. The most dramatic gap was in Mashonaland West, where the MDC candidate had 88 per cent of the vote to the president's 12 per cent. Read The Full Story High Cost Of Rice Is Creating Fears Of Unrest In Asia 2008-03-29 17:01:24 Rising prices and a growing fear of scarcity have prompted some of the world’s largest rice producers to announce drastic limits on the amount of rice they export. The price of rice, a staple in the diets of nearly half the world’s population, has almost doubled on international markets in the last three months. That has pinched the budgets of millions of poor Asians and raised fears of civil unrest. Shortages and high prices for all kinds of food have caused tensions and even violence around the world in recent months. Since January, thousands of troops have been deployed in Pakistan to guard trucks carrying wheat and flour. Protests have erupted in Indonesia over soybean shortages, and China has put price controls on cooking oil, grain, meat, milk and eggs. Food riots have erupted in recent months in Guinea, Mauritania, Mexico, Morocco, Senegal, Uzbekistan and Yemen. But the moves by rice-exporting nations over the last two days - meant to ensure scarce supplies will meet domestic needs - drove prices on the world market even higher this week. This has fed the insecurity of rice-importing nations, already increasingly desperate to secure supplies. On Tuesday, Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, afraid of increasing rice scarcity, ordered government investigators to track down hoarders. Read The Full Story Bush Finalizing Mortgage Aid Plan 2008-03-29 02:50:33 The Bush administration is finalizing details of a plan to rescue thousands of homeowners at risk of foreclosure by helping them refinance into more affordable mortgages backed by public funds, said government officials. The proposal is aimed at assisting borrowers who owe their banks more than their homes are worth because of plummeting prices, an issue at the heart of the nation's housing crisis. Under the plan, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) would encourage lenders to forgive a portion of those loans and issue new, smaller mortgages in exchange for the financial backing of the federal government. The plan is similar to elements in legislation proposed two weeks ago by U.S. Rep. Barney Frank (D-Massachusetts), who chairs the House Financial Services Committee, said officials. Administration officials said they believe they can accomplish some of the same goals through regulatory changes, though important details have yet to be nailed down. If enacted, the plan would mark the first time the White House has committed federal dollars to help the most hard-pressed borrowers, people struggling to repay loans that are huge relative to their incomes and the diminished value of their homes. That may offer encouragement to the banking industry and help silence Democrats, who have accused the White House of rescuing Wall Street investment banks while ignoring distressed homeowners, but it could agitate conservatives, who are likely to view the FHA plan as yet another government bailout. Read The Full Story We're Fighting For Survival, Says Mahdi Army Commander 2008-03-29 02:49:50 A senior commander in the Mahdi army said Friday the militia is fighting a battle for survival in Basra against a rival Shia faction seeking to obliterate it ahead of September elections. Fighting broke out in Basra on Tuesday when Iraqi government forces launched an offensive against Shia militia in the city. Overnight, U.S. jets carried out air strikes in support of Iraqi forces in at least two locations. Shiek Ali al-Sauidi, a prominent member of the Moqtada al-Sadr-led movement in Basra, said his men were being targeted not by the Iraqi government but by government militias loyal to the rival Supreme Islamic Council faction. "They are a executing a very well drawn plan. They are trying to exterminate the Sadrists and cut and isolate the movement before the September local elections," he said in a telephone interview with the Guardian. Read The Full Story White House Staffer Resigns Amid Investigations 2008-03-29 02:49:09 A mid-level White House staff member has resigned after informing officials of allegations that he misused federal grant money for personal gain before he joined the government, a White House official said yesterday. Felipe Sixto quit as special assistant to President Bush on March 20 after learning that the nonprofit Center for a Free Cuba planned to take legal action against him, said White House spokesman Scott Stanzel. Sixto was chief of staff at the Washington, D.C.,-based group for about three years before joining the White House's Office of Intergovernmental Affairs last July. The matter has been referred to the Justice Department, and the inspector general at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the source of the grant funds, was investigating as well, said Stanzel. "The president was notified about this," said Stanzel. "He thought the proper actions were being taken and the matter should be appropriately investigated." Sixto, 28, did not return two telephone messages left Friday at his home in Frederick, Maryland. Read The Full Story	Europe-wide Radio Network Could Pick Up Alien Broadcast 2008-03-30 03:31:31 Scientists are finalizing plans to link radio wave detectors in five countries and create a device sensitive enough to pick up signals from worlds the other side of the galaxy. By connecting banks of detectors in fields across Britain, France, Holland, Sweden and Germany, astronomers aim to create a radio telescope that will have the accuracy of a machine the size of Europe. They believe it could solve some of the universe's most important secrets - including the discovery of radio broadcasts from intelligent extraterrestrials. "This system works by collecting radio waves over a range of frequencies," said cosmologist Robert Nichol, of Portsmouth University. "These can then be analyzed using arrays of computers which can identify patterns from the data streaming from our detectors. "Some of these signals will reveal information about the early universe, for example. However, broadcasts by alien intelligences would also be revealed by our computers because we will, primarily, be collecting radio signals. Signals that have regular patterns will give themselves away as the possible handiwork of extraterrestrials. Such work is a bonus, however. The main work of the system is basic research," added Nichol. Read The Full Story Environment: Times Runs Out For Islanders On Global Warming's Front Line 2008-03-30 03:30:16 Rising sea levels threaten to flood many of the islands in the fertile Ganges Delta, leading to an environmental disaster and a refugee crisis for India and Bangladesh. Dependra Das stretches out his arms to show his flaky skin, covered in raw saltwater sores. His fingers submerged in soft black clay for up to six hours a day, he spends his time frantically shoring up a crude sea dyke surrounding his remote island home in the Sundarbans, the world's largest delta. Alongside him, across the beach in long lines, the villagers of Ghoramara island, the women dressed in purple, orange and green saris, do the same, trying to hold back the tide. For the islanders, each day begins and ends the same way. As dusk descends, the people file back to their thatched huts. By morning the dyke will be breached and work will begin again. Here in the vast, low-lying Sundarbans, the largest mangrove wilderness on the planet, Das, 70, is preparing to lose his third home to the sea in as many years; here global warming is a reality, not a prediction. Over the course of a three-day boat trip through the Sundarbans, The Observer found Das' plight to be far from unique. Across the delta, homes have been swept away, fields ravaged by worsening monsoons, livelihoods destroyed. It confirms what experts are already warning: that the effects of global warming will be most severe on those who did the least to contribute to it but can least afford measures to adapt or save themselves. For these islanders, building clay walls is their only option. Read The Full Story British Army Joins Battle To Control Basra 2008-03-30 03:28:44 British troops became involved in the intense fighting in Basra Saturday night as clashes continued between Iraqi government forces and Shia militia. The army launched artillery shells at a mortar position of the Shia Mahdi Army, led by the radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, in the al-Klalaf area in the north of the city that had been firing on Iraqi troops. Military sources admitted that the militia had consolidated a number of "criminal strongpoints" in the city. The involvement of the British is the first time U.K. forces have engaged militias since the Iraqi army operation, personally supervised by the Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, began in the city last Tuesday morning. British army spokesman in Basra, Major Tom Holloway, told the BBC the engagement had been successful: "This is something we were always prepared to do. There are still a number of militia criminal strongpoints in the city, and we know where they are. Elsewhere they are consolidating their positions and gains." British aircraft have been patrolling above the city during the course of the operation, but have not so far been used to attack militia positions. Read The Full Story Plea To Save Homes Puts Republican Lawmakers In Bind 2008-03-29 17:01:41 In Los Portales, a pink and terra cotta condominium complex in Hialeah, Florida, full of hard-striving Hispanic immigrants and often harder luck, many of Juan Carpio’s neighbors are losing their homes. To the right of his ground-floor unit, two apartments are in the early stages of foreclosure. Across the street, a three-bedroom unit has been seized by a bank. To the left, another one is up for auction. “The government should help,” said Carpio, 57, a former truck driver whose wife is a security guard. “Somebody ought to do something.” In Carpio’s view, that somebody could be Representative Lincoln Diaz-Balart, an eight-term Republican who represents Hialeah and whose district slices through Miami-Dade into Broward, two counties in the top 10 of foreclosures nationwide. Yet, as Congress returns from a two-week recess on Monday for a furious debate over whether to help homeowners on the brink of default, Diaz-Balart is caught in a crunch of his own. Read The Full Story Iraqi, U.S. Assault On Basra Militias Stalls 2008-03-29 17:01:08 Shiite militias in Basra openly controlled wide swaths of the city on Saturday and staged increasingly bold raids on Iraqi government forces sent in five days ago to wrest control from the gunmen, witnesses said, as Iraqi political leaders grew increasingly critical of the stalled assault. Witnesses in Basra said that members of the most powerful militia in the city, the Mahdi Army, were setting up checkpoints and controlling traffic in many places ringing the central district controlled by some of the 30,000 Iraqi Army and police forces involved in the assault. Fighters were regularly attacking the government forces, then quickly retreating. Senior members of several political parties said Saturday that the operation, ordered by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, had been poorly planned. The growing discontent adds a new level of complication to the American-led effort to demonstrate that the Iraqi government had made strides toward being able to operate a functioning country and keep the peace without thousands of American troops. Since the Basra assault began Tuesday, violence has spread to Shiite districts of Baghdad and other places in Iraq  where Shiite militiamen hold sway, raising fears that security gains often attributed to a yearlong American troop buildup could be at risk. Any widespread breakdown of a cease-fire called by Moktada al-Sadr, the Shiite cleric who founded the Mahdi Army, could bring the country right back to the sectarian violence that racked it in 2006 and 2007. Read The Full Story Asking A Judge To Save The World, And Maybe A Whole Lot More 2008-03-29 02:50:05 Two men are pursuing a lawsuit to stop scientists from using a giant particle accelerator, claiming it could create a black hole that may eat up the Earth. More fighting in Iraq. Somalia in chaos. People in this country can’t afford their mortgages and in some places now they can’t even afford rice. None of this nor the rest of the grimness on the front page today will matter a bit, though, if two men pursuing a lawsuit in federal court in Hawaii turn out to be right. They think a giant particle accelerator that will begin smashing protons together outside Geneva this summer might produce a black hole that will spell the end of the Earth - and maybe the universe. Scientists say that is very unlikely - though they have done some checking just to make sure. Read The Full Story Treasury Dept. Plan Would Widen Fed Reserve's Power 2008-03-29 02:49:29 Plan that would give the Federal Reserve broad authority to oversee financial market stability could expose Wall Street to new scrutiny, but it avoids a call for tighter regulation. The Treasury Department will propose on Monday that Congress give the Federal Reserve broad new authority to oversee financial market stability, in effect allowing it to send SWAT teams into any corner of the industry or any institution that might pose a risk to the overall system. The proposal is part of a sweeping blueprint to overhaul the nation’s hodgepodge of financial regulatory agencies, which many experts say failed to recognize rampant excesses in mortgage lending until after they set off what is now the worst financial calamity in decades. Democratic lawmakers are all but certain to say the proposal does not go far enough in restricting the kinds of practices that caused the financial crisis. Many of the proposals, like those that would consolidate regulatory agencies, have nothing to do with the turmoil in financial markets. And some of the proposals could actually reduce regulation. According to a summary provided by the administration, the plan would consolidate an alphabet soup of banking and securities regulators into a powerful trio of overseers responsible for everything from banks and brokerage firms to hedge funds and private equity firms. Read The Full Story Indians Pressure Dow On Bhopal Cleanup 2008-03-29 02:48:52 Twenty-three years after a Union Carbide chemical plant in India spewed poisonous gas in what remains the world's worst industrial disaster, survivors are demanding a cleanup of toxic chemicals at the abandoned factory site that have contaminated their groundwater. On Friday, about 70 protesters arrived in New Delhi after marching 500 miles from Bhopal, the city whose name has become synonymous with the catastrophe. Organizers of the march said about 50 more people will arrive by train every day until their demands are met. The marchers say Michigan-based Dow Chemical Co., which acquired Union Carbide Corp. in 2001, is responsible for cleaning up the site and paying the medical bills incurred after their exposure to the toxic water. They have also asked Dow to produce representatives of Union Carbide who have been charged with culpable homicide in the disaster. "After 23 years, the neighborhood around the factory still shows a high rate of birth defects, cancer and other disabilities," said Nafisa Khan, 40, who marched from her home near the factory site to New Delhi. "The toxic chemicals buried in and around the factory have entered groundwater, and we use the contaminated water for drinking, cooking and bathing. First we were hit by the poisonous gas and then by this bad water that gives us skin diseases, chest pain and loss of appetite." Read The Full Story
Original materials on this site © Free Internet Press. Any mirrored or quoted materials © their respective authors, publications, or outlets, as shown on their publication, indicated by the link in the news story. Original Free Internet Press materials may be copied and/or republished without modification, provided a link to http://FreeInternetPress.com is given in the story, or proper credit is given. Newsletter options may be changed in your preferences on http://freeinternetpress.com Please email editor@freeinternetpress.com there are any questions. XML/RSS/RDF Newsfeed Syndication: http://freeinternetpress.com/rss.php

Free Internet Press Newsletter - Saturday March 29 2008 - (813)

Saturday March 29 2008 edition
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Bush Finalizing Mortgage Aid Plan 2008-03-29 02:50:33 The Bush administration is finalizing details of a plan to rescue thousands of homeowners at risk of foreclosure by helping them refinance into more affordable mortgages backed by public funds, said government officials. The proposal is aimed at assisting borrowers who owe their banks more than their homes are worth because of plummeting prices, an issue at the heart of the nation's housing crisis. Under the plan, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) would encourage lenders to forgive a portion of those loans and issue new, smaller mortgages in exchange for the financial backing of the federal government. The plan is similar to elements in legislation proposed two weeks ago by U.S. Rep. Barney Frank (D-Massachusetts), who chairs the House Financial Services Committee, said officials. Administration officials said they believe they can accomplish some of the same goals through regulatory changes, though important details have yet to be nailed down. If enacted, the plan would mark the first time the White House has committed federal dollars to help the most hard-pressed borrowers, people struggling to repay loans that are huge relative to their incomes and the diminished value of their homes. That may offer encouragement to the banking industry and help silence Democrats, who have accused the White House of rescuing Wall Street investment banks while ignoring distressed homeowners, but it could agitate conservatives, who are likely to view the FHA plan as yet another government bailout. Read The Full Story We're Fighting For Survival, Says Mahdi Army Commander 2008-03-29 02:49:50 A senior commander in the Mahdi army said Friday the militia is fighting a battle for survival in Basra against a rival Shia faction seeking to obliterate it ahead of September elections. Fighting broke out in Basra on Tuesday when Iraqi government forces launched an offensive against Shia militia in the city. Overnight, U.S. jets carried out air strikes in support of Iraqi forces in at least two locations. Shiek Ali al-Sauidi, a prominent member of the Moqtada al-Sadr-led movement in Basra, said his men were being targeted not by the Iraqi government but by government militias loyal to the rival Supreme Islamic Council faction. "They are a executing a very well drawn plan. They are trying to exterminate the Sadrists and cut and isolate the movement before the September local elections," he said in a telephone interview with the Guardian. Read The Full Story White House Staffer Resigns Amid Investigations 2008-03-29 02:49:09 A mid-level White House staff member has resigned after informing officials of allegations that he misused federal grant money for personal gain before he joined the government, a White House official said yesterday. Felipe Sixto quit as special assistant to President Bush on March 20 after learning that the nonprofit Center for a Free Cuba planned to take legal action against him, said White House spokesman Scott Stanzel. Sixto was chief of staff at the Washington, D.C.,-based group for about three years before joining the White House's Office of Intergovernmental Affairs last July. The matter has been referred to the Justice Department, and the inspector general at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the source of the grant funds, was investigating as well, said Stanzel. "The president was notified about this," said Stanzel. "He thought the proper actions were being taken and the matter should be appropriately investigated." Sixto, 28, did not return two telephone messages left Friday at his home in Frederick, Maryland. Read The Full Story 5 Former U.S. Secretaries Of State Urge Closure Of Guantanamo, Talks With Iran 2008-03-28 16:26:01 Five former U.S. secretaries of State on Thursday urged the next presidential administration to close the Guantanamo Bay prison camp and open a dialogue with Iran. The former chiefs of American diplomacy, who served in Democratic and Republican administrations, reached a consensus on the two issues at a conference in Athens, Georgia, aimed at giving the next president some bipartisan foreign policy advice. Each of them said closing the prison in Cuba would bolster America's image abroad. "It says to the world: 'We are now going back to our traditional respective forms of dealing with people who potentially committed crimes'," said Colin L. Powell, who served as President Bush's first secretary of State. Read The Full Story Sen. Leahy Says Clinton Should Drop Out Of Presidential Race 2008-03-28 16:25:37 Sen. Patrick Leahy has gone where no Democratic leader has dared go. It's time, the Vermont senator said, for Hillary Clinton to get out of the presidential race. "She ought to withdraw and she ought to be backing Senator Obama," he told Vermont Public Radio. Clinton's campaign has spent the past two weeks trying to fight off such talk. The New York senator has argued her case that there are still 10 contests left on the calendar and that millions of Democrats deserve to be heard. She has argued that neither she nor Obama can hit the magic threshold of 2,024 delegates without the help of uncommitted superdelegates. She has argued - correctly - that pledged delegates aren't actually legally pledged to any candidate and can switch sides. In every way possible, her campaign is trying to keep open any avenue that would help preserve a path to the nomination. Some of her leading fundraisers have tried to intimidate House Speaker Nancy Pelosi into backing away from comments widely interpreted as sympathetic to Obama. Her advisers continue to look for a solution that will bring Florida and particularly Michigan voters back into play. Those advisers have continued to seed doubts about Obama's strength as a general election candidate. The bitterness and frustration on both sides is growing. Near-daily conference calls by the two campaigns heap invective upon invective. Even if most of what is said on those calls is quickly lost to history, their fevered nature enlarges the gulf that eventually will have to be bridged once there is a nominee. Read The Full Story U.S. Seen Taking Lead In Baghdad Fighting 2008-03-28 16:24:30 U.S. forces in armored vehicles battled Mahdi Army fighters Thursday in the vast Shiite stronghold of Sadr City, and military officials said Friday that U.S. aircraft bombed militant positions in the southern city of Basra, as the American role in a campaign against party-backed militias appeared to expand. Iraqi army and police units appeared to be largely holding to the outskirts of the Sadr City fighting, as U.S. troops took the lead. Four U.S. Stryker armored vehicles were seen in Sadr City by a Washington Post correspondent, one of them engaging Mahdi Army militiamen with heavy fire. The din of U.S. weapons, along with the Mahdi Army's AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades, was heard through much of the day. U.S. helicopters and drones buzzed overhead. The clashes suggested that American forces were being drawn more deeply into a broad offensive that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite, launched in the southern city of Basra on Tuesday, saying death squads, criminal gangs and rogue militias were the targets. The Mahdi Army of cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, a Shiite rival of Maliki, appeared to have taken the brunt of the attacks; fighting spread to many southern cities and parts of Baghdad. As President Bush told an Ohio audience that Iraq was returning to "normalcy," administration officials in Washington, D.C., held meetings to assess what appeared to be a rapidly deteriorating security situation in many parts of the country. Read The Full Story Economists Warn Of Long-Term Effects Of Bush Tax Cuts, But Are Candidates Listening? 2008-03-28 16:23:48 When President Bush pushed big tax breaks through Congress in 2001 and 2003, Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona)  joined Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-New York) and other Democrats in opposing them as fiscally reckless. But now that McCain and Clinton are running for president, neither is looking to get rid of the cuts. Instead, they are arguing over which ones to keep. The same is true of Clinton's rival for the Democratic nomination, Sen. Barack Obama (Illinois), who recently blamed the Bush tax cuts for driving the nation toward recession. But he, too, wants to preserve about half the cuts, and pile on new ones. The direction of the tax debate is frustrating deficit hawks in Washington, who worry that none of the candidates is charting a course toward a balanced budget. Meanwhile, Bush and other politicians are telling voters alarmed by a sagging economy that keeping the cuts past their 2010 expiration date can help revive the nation's fortunes, a claim many economists say is nonsense. Far from acting as an economic tonic, the tax cuts "are neither sustainable nor beneficial" without massive cuts in government spending far beyond what Bush or any candidate to succeed him has proposed, said Alan D. Viard, a former economist in the Bush White House who is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. The most popular cuts - those known as "middle-class" tax cuts - are more likely to slow economic growth than promote it, said Viard and others. "Those are the provisions that detract from long-term growth even if you finance them with a reduction in government spending," said Robert Carroll, a former Bush Treasury official who teaches at America University. "If you pay for them with future tax increases, I think that would be awful." Read The Full Story	Asking A Judge To Save The World, And Maybe A Whole Lot More 2008-03-29 02:50:05 Two men are pursuing a lawsuit to stop scientists from using a giant particle accelerator, claiming it could create a black hole that may eat up the Earth. More fighting in Iraq. Somalia in chaos. People in this country can’t afford their mortgages and in some places now they can’t even afford rice. None of this nor the rest of the grimness on the front page today will matter a bit, though, if two men pursuing a lawsuit in federal court in Hawaii turn out to be right. They think a giant particle accelerator that will begin smashing protons together outside Geneva this summer might produce a black hole that will spell the end of the Earth - and maybe the universe. Scientists say that is very unlikely - though they have done some checking just to make sure. Read The Full Story Treasury Dept. Plan Would Widen Fed Reserve's Power 2008-03-29 02:49:29 Plan that would give the Federal Reserve broad authority to oversee financial market stability could expose Wall Street to new scrutiny, but it avoids a call for tighter regulation. The Treasury Department will propose on Monday that Congress give the Federal Reserve broad new authority to oversee financial market stability, in effect allowing it to send SWAT teams into any corner of the industry or any institution that might pose a risk to the overall system. The proposal is part of a sweeping blueprint to overhaul the nation’s hodgepodge of financial regulatory agencies, which many experts say failed to recognize rampant excesses in mortgage lending until after they set off what is now the worst financial calamity in decades. Democratic lawmakers are all but certain to say the proposal does not go far enough in restricting the kinds of practices that caused the financial crisis. Many of the proposals, like those that would consolidate regulatory agencies, have nothing to do with the turmoil in financial markets. And some of the proposals could actually reduce regulation. According to a summary provided by the administration, the plan would consolidate an alphabet soup of banking and securities regulators into a powerful trio of overseers responsible for everything from banks and brokerage firms to hedge funds and private equity firms. Read The Full Story Indians Pressure Dow On Bhopal Cleanup 2008-03-29 02:48:52 Twenty-three years after a Union Carbide chemical plant in India spewed poisonous gas in what remains the world's worst industrial disaster, survivors are demanding a cleanup of toxic chemicals at the abandoned factory site that have contaminated their groundwater. On Friday, about 70 protesters arrived in New Delhi after marching 500 miles from Bhopal, the city whose name has become synonymous with the catastrophe. Organizers of the march said about 50 more people will arrive by train every day until their demands are met. The marchers say Michigan-based Dow Chemical Co., which acquired Union Carbide Corp. in 2001, is responsible for cleaning up the site and paying the medical bills incurred after their exposure to the toxic water. They have also asked Dow to produce representatives of Union Carbide who have been charged with culpable homicide in the disaster. "After 23 years, the neighborhood around the factory still shows a high rate of birth defects, cancer and other disabilities," said Nafisa Khan, 40, who marched from her home near the factory site to New Delhi. "The toxic chemicals buried in and around the factory have entered groundwater, and we use the contaminated water for drinking, cooking and bathing. First we were hit by the poisonous gas and then by this bad water that gives us skin diseases, chest pain and loss of appetite." Read The Full Story Pennsylvania U.S. Sen. Casey To Endorse Obama 2008-03-28 16:25:49 Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey plans to endorse Sen. Barack Obama for president Friday in Pittsburgh, sending a message both to the state's primary voters and to undecided superdelegates who might decide the close race for the Democratic presidential nomination. Dan Pfeiffer, deputy communications director for the Obama campaign, confirmed that Casey would announce his support during a rally at the Soldiers and Sailors Military Museum and Memorial and that he would then set out with the Illinois senator on part of a six-day bus trip across the state. The endorsement comes as something of a surprise. Casey, a deliberative and cautious politician, had been adamant about remaining neutral until after the April 22 primary. He had said he wanted to help unify the party after the intensifying fight between Obama and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. "There are few stronger advocates for working families in Pennsylvania than Sen. Casey," said Pfeiffer. By coming out for Obama, Casey puts himself at odds with many top state Democrats - including Gov. Rendell, Rep. John P. Murtha and Mayor Nutter - who are campaigning for Clinton. Read The Full Story Editorial: Broken Ice In Antarctica 2008-03-28 16:24:48 Intellpuke: This editorial appeared in the New York Times edition for Friday, March 28, 2008. Winter is coming to Antarctica, and that may be the only thing that keeps another of its major ice shelves from collapsing. On Tuesday, scientists from the British Antarctic Survey announced that there had been an enormous fracture on the edge of the Wilkins ice shelf, which started breaking last month. That province of ice, a body of permanent floating ice about the size of Connecticut, lies on the western edge of the Antarctic Peninsula, the part of the continent regarded as most vulnerable to climate change. Scientists flew over the break - itself covering some 160 square miles - and what they saw is remarkable: huge, geometrically fractured slabs of ice and, among them, the rubble of a catastrophic breach. A great swath of the ice shelf is being held in place by a thin band of ice. What matters isn’t just the scale of this breakout. Changes in wind patterns and water temperatures related to global warming have begun to erode the ice sheets of western Antarctica at a faster rate than previously detected, and the total collapse of the Wilkins ice shelf is now within the realm of possibility. Read The Full Story Commentary: Beijing, Tibet And The West 2008-03-28 16:24:09 Intellpuke: This commentary was written by Jean-Jackques Mevel, Beijing correspondent for Italy's Le Figaro newspaper. It appeared in the Le Figaro edition for Wednesday, March 26, 2008. Le Figaro's correspondent in Beijing finds that "Beijing is wrong about Tibet; the West is wrong about China, and the Tibetans are wrong about Westerners." The powerful machine of the Party-State surely did not foresee things happening this way. Beijing still wants the Games to be the brilliant showcase for its success. But right at the kick-off of the Olympic season, propaganda was forced to close the curtain. Chinese television cut the retransmission of the ceremony in Olympia and deprived its hundreds of millions of viewers of pictures - signaling that the Olympic Games have not won everyone over. Of course, repression of the Tibetan revolt explains the controversy and the censorship. The incident is not the last. The flame's trek should be a triumphant ascent to the Games' Beijing opening on August 8. Instead, it will be an odyssey under elevated police protection in London, Paris, San Francisco and Nagano. The Chinese round will escape the booing. But in Lhasa June 21, throats will be choked up. The Olympic ideal is a bit of sloppy multicultural mush. The peculiarity of this crisis is that all sides think they've been betrayed. Three misunderstandings crystallize this formidable debacle. China has erred with respect to Tibet. The West has been deluded about China. And to complete the circle, Tibetans run the risk of paying dearly for their illusions if they expect much more from democracies than smoke and mirrors. Read The Full Story Former Alabama Gov. Sieggelman Freed On Appeal 2008-03-28 16:23:25 Former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman was released on bond from a federal prison Friday, saying he remains upbeat despite serving nine months for corruption. Leaving the prison in a black sport utility vehicle, he stopped on a road outside the lockup to comment. He wore a ragged shirt that appeared to be prison clothing. ''I may have lost my freedom for awhile, but I never lost faith,'' Siegelman, 62, told reporters. A federal appeals court ruled Thursday that Siegelman should be released while he appeals his conviction. He declined further comment, saying, ''I want to be with my family for a few days.'' But he said he would make a statement when he reaches his home in Birmingham, Alabama. Read The Full Story
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Free Internet Press Newsletter - Friday March 28 2008 - (813)

Friday March 28 2008 edition
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Obama Urges Tighter Regulation In Wake Of Housing Slump 2008-03-27 15:34:59 Senator Barack Obama called Thursday for tighter regulation of mortgage lenders, banks and other financial institutions, even as he spoke of pumping $30 billion into the economy to shield homeowners and local governments from the worst effects of the collapse of the housing bubble. He laid much of the blame for the current financial difficulties on the industry lobbyists and politicians who dismantled much of the regulatory framework overseeing energy, telecommunications and financial services. Speaking in the Great Hall at the Cooper Union in Manhattan, Obama blamed Democrats no less than Republicans for policies that now cast a shadow of foreclosure and insolvency over millions of Americans. He did not mention former President Bill Clinton by name, but the implied criticism seemed clear. “Under Republican and Democratic administrations, we failed to guard against practices that all too often rewarded financial manipulation instead of productivity and sound business practices,” said Obama. “The result has been a distorted market that creates bubbles instead of steady sustainable growth - a market that favors Wall Street over Main Street, but ends up hurting both.” Obama proposed to rebuild the government’s regulatory structure and promised not to clamp a too-tight hand on economic innovation, but he was unsparing in his view that industry lobbyists and weak legislators produced a misshapen deregulation of the economy. Read The Full Story Arms Supplier Under Scrutiny For Selling Old Weapons, Ammunition To Afghan Forces 2008-03-27 15:34:22 Intellpuke: This article was reported by New York Times writers C. J. Chivers, Eric Schmitt and Nicholas Wood and written by Mr. Chivers. Since 2006, when the insurgency in Afghanistan sharply intensified, the Afghan government has been dependent on American logistics and military support in the war against al-Qaeda and the Taliban; but to arm the Afghan forces that it hopes will lead this fight, the American military has relied since early last year on a fledgling company led by a 22-year-old man whose vice president was a licensed masseur. With the award last January of a federal contract worth as much as nearly $300 million, the company, AEY Inc., which operates out of an unmarked office in Miami Beach, Florida, became the main supplier of munitions to Afghanistan’s army and police forces. Since then, the company has provided ammunition that is more than 40 years old and in decomposing packaging, according to an examination of the munitions by the New York Times and interviews with American and Afghan officials. Much of the ammunition comes from the aging stockpiles of the old Communist bloc, including stockpiles that the State Department and NATO have determined to be unreliable and obsolete, and have spent millions of dollars to have destroyed. In purchasing munitions, the contractor has also worked with middlemen and a shell company on a federal list of entities suspected of illegal arms trafficking. Moreover, tens of millions of the rifle and machine-gun cartridges were manufactured in China, making their procurement a possible violation of American law. The company’s president, Efraim E. Diveroli, was also secretly recorded in a conversation that suggested corruption in his company’s purchase of more than 100 million aging rounds in Albania, according to audio files of the conversation. Read The Full Story Israel Says Hezbollah Has Dramatically Increased Range Of Its Rockets 2008-03-27 15:33:05 With Iranian backing, Hezbollah guerrillas have dramatically increased their rocket range and can now threaten most of Israel, say senior Israeli defense officials. The Lebanese group has acquired new Iranian rockets with a range of about 300 kilometers, said the officials. That means the guerrillas can hit anywhere in Israel's heavily populated center and reach as far south as Dimona, where Israel's nuclear reactor is located. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to divulge the confidential intelligence assessment to the media. When Israel and Hezbollah fought a month-long war in 2006, Hezbollah fired nearly 4,000 rockets into Israel. The longest-range rockets fired, which Israel said were Iranian-made, hit some 73 kilometers inside Israel. Read The Full Story Thousands In Baghdad Protest Basra Assault 2008-03-27 15:32:37 Thousands of supporters of the powerful Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army militia took to the streets of Baghdad on Thursday to protest the Iraqi Army’s assault on the southern port city of Basra, as intense fighting continued there for a third day. In Basra, there seemed to be no breakthrough in the fighting by either side. As much as half of the city remained under militia control, hospitals in some parts of the city were reported full, and the violence continued to spread. Clashes were reported all over the city and in locations 12 miles south of Basra. The Iraqi Army’s offensive in Basra is an important political test for the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki and for American strategy in Iraq. President Bush sought to portray the fighting in a positive light on Thursday, declaring the offensive by Maliki’s government a “bold decision.” If the army’s assault in Basra leads the Mahdi Army to break completely with its current cease-fire, which has helped to tamp down attacks in Iraq during the past year, there is a risk of escalating violence and of replaying 2004. That year, the militia fought intense battles with American forces that destabilized the entire country. Read The Full Story British Columbia Suspends Issuing Licenses For Salmon Farms 2008-03-27 15:31:35 British Columbia will not issue new licenses and tenures for finfish aquaculture, including salmon farms, on the central coast while it examines a new approach to managing the controversial industry. Salmon farms have been blamed for destruction of wild salmon stocks and have drawn ire from environmentalists and First Nations in the province. Agriculture Minister Pat Bell said the new approach will be developed in collaboration with First Nations to protect the health of wild salmon. Elmer Derrick of the First Nations Leadership Council Aquaculture Group said the announcement is good news for the survival of coastal ecosystems. Read The Full Story Woman Files Taxes For 28 Dead People 2008-03-27 15:30:46 An Atlantic County woman hoping to collect more than $100,000 in tax refunds  will get two years in federal prison instead. Candy L. Atohi, 37, of Buena Vista Township, was sentenced yesterday for filing 30 fraudulent claims for federal tax refunds, all but two of them in the names of deceased New Jersey residents, according to U.S. Attorney Christopher J. Christie. "What amazes us year after year is what people think they will get away with," said Christie. "Filing fraudulent returns on behalf of dead people is about as brazen as I've seen, and the case is a good and timely reminder of the consequences of tax evasion and fraud" Read The Full Story Cybersquatting Cases On The Rise 2008-03-27 15:09:46 If you tried to guess the web domain for FIFA without knowing the exact address, chances are, you would get to an Internet page that has nothing to do with the International Football Federation. Cases of so-called cybersquatting -- or abusive registration of trademarks on the Internet --- are on the rise, the World Intellectual Property Organisation said Thursday. A record 2,156 complaints were filed with the organisation's arbitration and mediation centre, 18 percent more than 2006 and 48 percent more than 2005. "These increases confirm that 'cybersquatting' remains a significant issue for rights holders," said WIPO Deputy Director General Francis Gurry. Against the background of an unprecedented number of cybersquatting cases in 2007, the evolving nature of the domain name registration system is causing growing concern for trademark owners around the world, said the UN agency. Read The Full Story Site To Raise Awareness Of Mesothelioma 2008-03-27 14:56:40 Current statistics show 2,000-3,000 people are diagnosed with malignant pleural mesothelioma in the U.S. each year, and 10,000 Americans die from all asbestos-related diseases, according to statistics compiled by the Environmental Working Group. Mesothelioma was not tracked as a specific cause of death by federal health officials until 1999, so actual totals for mesothelioma may be much higher. It is the primary goal of www.MyMeso.org to raise awareness in the public about mesothelioma and related asbestos diseases, to provide a forum for those affected by mesothelioma, and to create a network of information and resources expanding hope for a cure. MyMeso.org is a public awareness and community outreach effort of Beasley, Allen, Methvin, Portis & Miles, P.C. Mesothelioma is a rare form of cancer affecting the mesothelium, or the protective lining around our internal organs. It most commonly affects the linings of the lungs, abdomen and heart. Unfortunately, many symptoms of mesothelioma (shortness of breath, severe cough, chest pain) do not appear for 20 or more years, making it difficult to diagnose early. For this reason, the cancer is often diagnosed in the later stages, making it difficult for proper treatment and survival. Read The Full Story U.S. Initially Unconcerned About Missile Parts To Taiwan 2008-03-27 03:44:39 After Taiwanese officials reported in early 2007 that four packages they had received from the U.S. military did not contain the helicopter batteries they had expected, U.S. officials suggested that Taiwan simply dispose of the incorrect items - which turned out to be parts for U.S. nuclear missiles. In e-mail correspondence over several months between U.S. defense officials and Taiwan, the U.S. officials assumed that the erroneous shipment simply contained the wrong type of batteries, not that Taiwan had received four classified nuclear-related items that never should have left U.S. soil. U.S. government officials familiar with the communications said yesterday that at some point between August 2006 and last week, Taiwan opened the drum-shaped packages and noticed that the items inside were labeled "secret" and that they included Mark 12 nose cones, which are used with U.S. intercontinental ballistic missiles. Since early 2007, Taiwan had been asking U.S. officials to either reimburse it for the missing batteries or replace them, as part of billions of dollars in U.S. military sales to Taiwan over the past decade, but after the situation was resolved and U.S. authorities told the Taiwanese to get rid of the items they had received - missing warning signs of a serious breach - the Taiwanese double-checked the packages because of worries that discarding them could be dangerous. Read The Full Story	'Carbon Tariff' Could Bring Canadian Jobs Back From China 2008-03-27 15:34:45 Manufacturers that have relocated to China may soon be coming home if the Western world imposes a “carbon tariff” on countries that spew greenhouse gas emissions, according to Jeff Rubin, chief strategist and economist at CIBC World Markets. Rubin, in a report issued on Thursday morning, said it is clear Western countries are moving quickly to reduce their own greenhouse gas emissions and he highlighted that China's estimated emissions in 2007 supplanted the United States after rising rapidly through this decade. Given the increasing emissions imbalance between the developed world and countries such as China, Rubin said the “only leverage is through trade access,” specifically a “carbon tariff.” Rubin predicted such a tariff, based on $45 per ton of carbon dioxide or equivalent, would be $55-billion annually, a 17-per cent levy on all Chinese imports to the U.S. - almost six times greater than the effective current import tariffs. The main impact of such a scenario would be on companies that have moved their factories to China - and consumers in North America. In a world where carbon emissions cost nothing, moving to China, with its cheap labor, made perfect sense, said Rubin. That situation is unlikely to last, he added. Read The Full Story Superbug MRSA Spreading Fast Warns Canadian Report 2008-03-27 15:33:36 A staggering 29,000 Canadian hospital patients acquired the superbug MRSA in a one-year period, including an estimated 2,300 whose deaths were partly attributed to the pernicious bacteria, federal figures released today show. The increase in methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus translates into 12,000 new infections plus 17,000 patients who became colonized, said Andrew Simor, co-chairman of the Canadian Nosocomial Infection Surveillance Program (CNISP). (Being colonized with MRSA means the patients are carriers who are not infected and show no symptoms.) "Hospital infections are a major burden to good medical care," said Dr. Simor, who made the projections based on the just-released 2006 rates from 48 hospitals in nine provinces. As the modern day scourge of the health-care system, hospital-acquired infections such as MRSA afflict 220,000 Canadians each year. The number who die from them - at least 8,000 - is equal to those killed by car accidents and breast cancer combined. It's no wonder, then, that the Public Health Agency of Canada has taken on the superbug as a priority. Read The Full Story Delta Cancelling Flights To Re-Inspect MD-88 Planes 2008-03-27 15:32:54 Flight cancellations caused headaches for people taking flights on Delta Air Lines from Atlanta on Thursday because of the company's voluntary re-inspection of wiring on its MD-88 airplanes. Delta began the inspections Wednesday night, causing flights to be canceled and unsuspecting passengers to become frustrated. Officials were expecting heavy volumes at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport on Thursday, Delta spokeswoman Chris Kelly said. Both Delta and the Transportation Security Administration were bringing in extra staff to handle the crowd of travelers, she said. Kelly said she didn't yet have estimates on how many passengers were affected by the flight cancelations and urged travelers to check their flight's status on Delta's Web site. Read The Full Story North Korea Expels All South Korean Diplomats 2008-03-27 15:32:14 South Korea on Thursday said that it was “deeply regrettable” that North Korea had ordered South Korea officials to leave its territory, but that South Korea was undaunted by the move. The predawn expulsion on Thursday followed an announcement on Wednesday by the new South Korean president, Lee Myung-bak, that his government would not expand economic cooperation with North Korea unless it cooperated in dismantling its nuclear weapons programs. All 11 South Korean government officials who were based in a jointly operated factory complex in Kaesong, a small town 37 miles from Seoul on the north side of the border between the two countries, returned to South Korea early Thursday after the North Korean authorities gave them three days to leave. South Korea on Thursday warned that North Korea was worsening its own isolation by disrupting budding economic cooperation between the two Koreas. That cooperation can be seen in the industrial complex in Kaesong where 69 South Korean companies employ 23,000 North Koreans to produce shoes, clothing, watches and other goods. “We will deal with this issue in a pragmatic way,” said Lee’s spokesman, Lee Dong-kwan. He said that the response would mix “flexibility” and “stern principle,” but did not elaborate. Read The Full Story Britain Swoons For French First Lady 2008-03-27 15:31:03 Nicholas Sarkozy did most of the talking, but it was his wife who made the headlines. On his first state visit to Britain, the French president discussed matters of international importance, sealed a string of big bilateral deals and hailed a new era of Franco-British brotherhood. So what did Britain's media focus on Thursday? Pictures of model-turned-first lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, alongside discussion of her chic Dior outfits, her effortless elegance - and her sensible low-heeled shoes. Even Britain's notoriously Francophobe tabloid press was entranced. ''Carla, first lady of chic,'' proclaimed the Daily Mail. ''Ooh la la, Madame Sarko,'' said the Daily Express. Read The Full Story AAA Cites Corvette, Scion As Insurance Extremes 2008-03-27 15:09:58 A 2007 Toyota Scion xD costs about $1,104 per year to insure, while a Chevy Corvette costs $2,039 to insure, according to an Automobile Club of Southern California survey released today. Sticker prices are only one factor in determining insurance costs, according to the Auto Club, which noted that the Corvette lists for $44,170 and the Scion for $14,000. "Our analysis shows that the least expensive vehicle isn't always the least expensive to insure, and that two similar models can have vastly different insurance premiums when optional features are added," said Steve Mazor, manager of the Auto Club's Automotive Research Center. "New car buyers should remember to research how much the car of their dreams will cost to insure before they buy it." Read The Full Story States, Cities Move To Refinance Debt 2008-03-27 15:09:38 States, cities, hospitals and major public agencies battered by wild interest rate swings in one sector of the municipal bond market are scrambling to refinance the debt as they add up the damages to their budgets and nurse some hard feelings. The highest-profile fallout so far is the tightening of the student-loan market, including the suspension of new student loans by agencies in Pennsylvania, Iowa and Michigan. Read The Full Story U.S. Increases Unilateral Strikes In Pakistan's Tribal Areas 2008-03-27 03:44:50 The United States has escalated its unilateral strikes against al-Qaeda members and fighters operating in Pakistan's tribal areas, partly because of anxieties that Pakistan's new leaders will insist on scaling back military operations in that country, according to U.S. officials. Washington is worried that pro-Western President Pervez Musharraf, who has generally supported the U.S. strikes, will almost certainly have reduced powers in the months ahead, and so it wants to inflict as much damage as it can to al-Qaeda's network now, said the officials. Over the past two months, U.S.-controlled Predator aircraft are known to have struck at least three sites used by al-Qaeda operatives. The moves followed a tacit understanding with Musharraf and Army chief Gen. Ashfaq Kiyani that allows U.S. strikes on foreign fighters operating in Pakistan, but not against the Pakistani Taliban, said the officials. About 45 Arab, Afghan and other foreign fighters have been killed in the attacks, all near the Afghan border, said U.S. and Pakistani officials. The goal was partly to jar loose information on senior al-Qaeda leaders, including Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants, by forcing them to move in ways that U.S. intelligence analysts can detect. Local sources are providing better information to guide the strikes, said the officials. Read The Full Story
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Free Internet Press Newsletter - Thursday March 27 2008 - (813)

Thursday March 27 2008 edition
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U.S. Increases Unilateral Strikes In Pakistan's Tribal Areas 2008-03-27 03:44:50 The United States has escalated its unilateral strikes against al-Qaeda members and fighters operating in Pakistan's tribal areas, partly because of anxieties that Pakistan's new leaders will insist on scaling back military operations in that country, according to U.S. officials. Washington is worried that pro-Western President Pervez Musharraf, who has generally supported the U.S. strikes, will almost certainly have reduced powers in the months ahead, and so it wants to inflict as much damage as it can to al-Qaeda's network now, said the officials. Over the past two months, U.S.-controlled Predator aircraft are known to have struck at least three sites used by al-Qaeda operatives. The moves followed a tacit understanding with Musharraf and Army chief Gen. Ashfaq Kiyani that allows U.S. strikes on foreign fighters operating in Pakistan, but not against the Pakistani Taliban, said the officials. About 45 Arab, Afghan and other foreign fighters have been killed in the attacks, all near the Afghan border, said U.S. and Pakistani officials. The goal was partly to jar loose information on senior al-Qaeda leaders, including Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants, by forcing them to move in ways that U.S. intelligence analysts can detect. Local sources are providing better information to guide the strikes, said the officials. Read The Full Story Shuttle Endeavour Ends 16-Day Mission With Night Landing 2008-03-26 23:05:06 The space shuttle Endeavour returned safely to earth on Wednesday evening, completing a record-breaking 16-day mission to the International Space Station. The shuttle landed at 8:39 p.m., roughly an hour after the shuttle’s commander, Capt. Dominic L. Gorie, fired twin braking rockets that brought the spacecraft out of orbit. Mission managers canceled the day’s first landing opportunity, which would have brought the Endeavour to the runway at 7:05 p.m.; clouds threatened to obscure the site. After consulting with weather officers and Captain Gorie, however, the managers determined that conditions were improving by the time the second opportunity of the day came around and ordered Captain Gorie to bring the shuttle out of orbit and bring it and its crew of seven astronauts down to the 15,000-foot landing strip at the Kennedy Space Center. Read The Full Story Update: Huge Blast Kills L.A. Firefighter, Injures Another 2008-03-26 23:04:33 An explosion rocked the Westchester area Wednesday, killing a Los Angeles firefighter and critically injuring another. The firefighters were called to Sepulveda and La Tijera boulevards at 1:57 p.m. after a report of smoke from a possible fire. After they arrived, there was a larger explosion that sent several manhole covers flying, said Ron Myers, spokesman for the Los Angeles Fire Department. Firefighters called in a rescue helicopter to transport the injured individuals to a nearby hospital, said Myers. The names of the firefighters have not been released, said Myers. A source close to the investigation told the Los Angeles Times that the blast was so powerful it sent one of the firefighters through a wall and into a parking lot. The investigation into the bast is focusing on a possible electrical malfunction, said the source. Read The Full Story Small U.S. Stations Sue Over Digital TV Plan 2008-03-26 21:02:13 The low-power television industry is facing a "death sentence" because of a flaw in the government's plan to force broadcasters to shift to digital broadcasting and have asked a federal judge for a reprieve. The Community Broadcasters Association, which represents owners of small television stations, wants the Federal Communications Commission to ban all digital set top converter boxes that are not equipped to receive an analog signal, a request that has the potential to derail the biggest broadcasting transition since color television. As of Feb. 18, 2009, all full-power television stations in the U.S. are required to stop broadcasting an analog signal. Anyone who gets programming through an antenna and does not have a newer-model digital TV set will need to buy a box that converts the digital signal to analog. The government is providing two $40 coupons per household that can be used to buy these boxes. The problem facing the 2,600 low-power television stations represented by the association is that they are not subject to the deadline. Most of the converter boxes now on sale will actually block the low-power analog signal from those stations, while the full-power digital signal will display normally. Read The Full Story Report Assails KPMG Auditor For Work At New Century Financial 2008-03-26 20:41:37 In a sweeping accusation against one of the country’s largest accounting firms, an investigator released a report on Wednesday that said “improper and imprudent practices” by a once high-flying mortgage company were condoned and enabled by its auditors. KPMG, one of the "Big Four" accounting firms, endorsed a move by New Century Financial, a failed mortgage company, to change its accounting practices in a way that allowed the lender to report a profit, rather than a loss, at the height of the housing boom, an independent report commissioned by a division of the Justice Department concluded. The result of a five-month investigation, the report is the most comprehensive and damning document that has been released about the failings of a mortgage business. Some accusations echoed claims that surfaced about the accounting firm Arthur Andersen during the collapse of Enron, the energy giant, more than six years ago. The 580-page report documents how New Century lowered its reserves for loans that investors were forcing it to buy back even as such repurchases were surging. Had it not changed its accounting, the company would have reported a loss rather a profit in the second half of 2006. The company first acknowledged that its accounting was wrong in February 2007 and sought bankruptcy protection less than two months later as its lenders stopped doing business with it. Read The Full Story Saddam Paid For Congressmen's 2002 Trip To Iraq 2008-03-26 20:41:07 Saddam Hussein's intelligence agency secretly financed a trip to Iraq for three U.S. lawmakers during the run-up to the U.S.-led invasion, federal prosecutors said Wednesday. An indictment unsealed in Detroit, Michigan, accuses Muthanna Al-Hanooti, a member of a Michigan nonprofit group, of arranging for three members of Congress to travel to Iraq in October 2002 at the behest of Saddam's regime. Prosecutors say Iraqi intelligence officials paid for the trip through an intermediary. At the time, the Bush administration was trying to persuade Congress to authorize military action against Iraq. The lawmakers are not named in the indictment but the dates correspond to a trip by Democratic Reps. Jim McDermott, of Washington, David Bonior, of Michigan, and Mike Thompson, of California. None was charged and Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd said investigators ''have no information whatsoever'' any of them knew the trip was underwritten by Saddam. Read The Full Story Iraq: Maliki Gives Shiite Militias 72 Hours To Halt Fighting 2008-03-26 15:05:21 A day after launching a huge operation that ignited heavy fighting in two of Iraq's largest cities, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki gave the Shiite militias controlling the southern oil city of Basra an ultimatum on Wednesday: lay down their weapons within 72 hours or face more severe consequences. As the fighting in Basra and Baghdad intensified on Wednesday, the American military command, speaking for the first time about the crackdown, characterized it as an Iraqi-led operation in which American-led forces were playing only an advisory role. An Iraqi hospital official said that the battle in Basra between Iraqi forces and Shiite militias led by Moktada al-Sadr, the anti-American cleric, had so far claimed the lives of 40 people and wounded at least 200, figures that include militia members as well as Iraqi officers. The fighting threatens to destabilize a long-term truce that had helped reduce the level of violence in the five-year-old Iraq war. Maliki, who considered the operation so important that he traveled to the city to direct the fighting himself, issued his ultimatum on Iraqi state television. “Those who were deceived into carrying weapons must deliver themselves and make a written pledge to promise they will not repeat such action within 72 hours,” he said. “Otherwise, they will face the most severe penalties.” Read The Full Story India's Tata Motors To Buy Jaguar, Land Rover For $2.3 Billion 2008-03-26 15:04:25 India's Tata Motors Ltd. on Wednesday announced a $2.3 billion deal to buy Jaguar and Land Rover from Ford Motor Co. in a transaction that gives the emerging Indian automaker a model line-up ranging from ultra-cheap to high-end luxury. For Tata, which plans to launch the ultra-cheap $2,500 Nano or "People's Car," the addition of the profitable Land Rover brand provides an edge against its Indian rival, Mahindra & Mahindra, which had also pursued a deal with Ford. Ford, for its part, gets to shed the money-losing Jaguar brand and gains a cash infusion at a time when the U.S. market is slumping and it is attempting to bounce back from combined losses of more than $15 billion over the past two years. The sale price is roughly 40 percent of what Ford paid for the two brands. Ford acquired Jaguar for $2.5 billion in 1989 but failed to turn the storied British nameplate into a higher-volume brand as losses mounted. Ford paid $2.75 billion for Land Rover in 2000. Read The Full Story American Airlines Cancels 200 Flights 2008-03-26 15:03:19 American Airlines canceled about 200 flights on Wednesday so its crews can inspect some wire bundles aboard its MD-80 aircraft. The cancelled flights represent less than 10 percent of the nation's biggest airline's scheduled service for the day. The need for the new inspections became known during an audit of American by a joint team of inspectors from the Federal Aviation Administration and the Fort Worth-based airline, according to a statement from American. ''We are reinspecting the MD-80s to make sure the wiring is installed and secured exactly according to the directive,'' American spokesman Tim Wagner said in the statement, which did not describe the function of the wiring. Read The Full Story Cigarette Company Paid For Lung Cancer Study 2008-03-26 03:20:23 In October 2006, Dr. Claudia Henschke of Weill Cornell Medical College jolted the cancer world with a study saying that 80 percent of lung cancer deaths could be prevented through widespread use of CT scans. Small print at the end of the study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, noted that it had been financed in part by a little-known charity called the Foundation for Lung Cancer: Early Detection, Prevention & Treatment. A review of tax records by The New York Times shows that the foundation was underwritten almost entirely by $3.6 million in grants from the parent company of the Liggett Group, maker of Liggett Select, Eve, Grand Prix, Quest and Pyramid cigarette brands. The foundation got four grants from the Vector Group, Liggett’s parent, from 2000 to 2003. Dr. Jeffrey M. Drazen, editor in chief of the medical journal, said he was surprised. “In the seven years that I’ve been here, we have never knowingly published anything supported by” a cigarette maker, said Dr. Drazen. An increasing number of universities do not accept grants from cigarette makers, and a growing awareness of the influence that companies can have over research outcomes, even when donations are at arm’s length, has led nearly all medical journals and associations to demand that researchers accurately disclose financing sources. Read The Full Story German Spy Chief Warns Of Al-Qaeda's Growing Strength In North Africa 2008-03-26 03:19:49 Intellpuke: Spiegel, Germany's news magazine, recently interviewed Ernst Uhrlau, the president of Germany's foreign intelligence agency, the BND, about the risk of attack by Islamist terrorists in Germany, how German Muslims are training in camps in Afghanistan and the risk from al-Qaeda in North Africa. The interview follows: The fight against Islamist terrorism is becoming increasingly globalized as intelligence agencies around the world cooperate and share information. One of the major nodes in that network is Germany's foreign intelligence agency, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), which is based in Pullach in Bavaria. Together with Germany's domestic intelligence agency, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the BND keeps an eye on the activities of Muslim extremists in Germany and abroad. Although there has never been a major Islamist terror attack in Germany, a number of Islamist plots have been hatched in the country - the most famous of which being the 9/11 attacks, which were partly planned by a terror cell in Hamburg. In recent years, there have been two major plots to carry out attacks in Germany, both of which failed for different reasons. In 2006, two Lebanese men - popularly known as the "suitcase bombers" - tried to detonate bombs on trains in Germany. The plan failed when the bombs failed to explode, due to flaws in their construction. Then in 2007, German authorities foiled a plot by a three-strong terror cell in the Sauerland region. The men, two of whom were German converts to Islam, had planned to target U.S. Army bases and airports in Germany. The conspiracy, which was uncovered after a months-long surveillance operation by the German authorities, sparked fears that the kind of "home-grown" terrorism seen in the United Kingdom had spread to Germany. Spiegel talked to Ernst Uhrlau, head of the BND, about the fight against Islamist terror, the dangers posed by converts to Islam and how marginalization of Muslims can lead to radicalization. SPIEGEL: Mr. Uhrlau, last September three Islamists were arrested in the village of Oberschledorn in the Sauerland region. They were in the process of storing explosives for use in a number of potentially devastating attacks. Six years after Sep. 11, 2001, are terrorists now taking aim at Germany? Uhrlau: We are part of a broad European danger zone. Militant Islamists have already planned attacks seven times. According to information obtained by Germany's Federal Criminal Police Office, we must now assume that it is highly likely that further attacks are planned. We are worried that in the future we will not be able to prevent all the operations. SPIEGEL: What role does Germany play in the terrorists' strategy? Uhrlau: On the one hand, we are a target for attack by Islamist terrorists. One example is the Cologne suitcase bombers -- two Lebanese men who deposited homemade explosive devices in German regional trains in the summer of 2006. The fact that the device didn't explode was apparently due to mistakes the men had made in assembling the bombs. On the other hand, we are also a place where terrorists prepare attacks they intend to carry out in other countries. For example, the so-called Meliani Group used Frankfurt as a base in 2000 when it planned an attack on a Christmas market in Strasbourg, France. Read The Full Story Commentary: Banks In Question 2008-03-26 03:18:50 Intellpuke: This commentary was written by Jean-Pierre Balligand, a Socialist Party member in the French Parliament representing Aisne, and appeared in France's Le Monde newspaper's edition for Wednesday, March 19, 2008. M. Balligand's commentary follows: Virtually each week we see central banks - with the American Federal Reserve in the lead - injecting hundreds of millions of dollars to increase the liquidity of financial markets threatened by the crisis. Despite some people's reassuring projections, that they should be brought in this way to play fireman - on a grand scale and with great urgency - shows that this crisis and the risks it brings to bear on the global economy are far from extinguished. The central banks' interventions amount to helping out the actors - that is, the banks - that to differing degrees are the cause of the present crisis. From that perspective, and although the means they use are very different, one may compare the U.S. initiative to the British Treasury's temporary nationalization of the Northern Rock bank. Both sets of decisions were based on the old "too big to fail" principle, which maintains that when the consequences that certain banks' failure could provoke are too significant, it's necessary to socialize their losses. This necessity to alleviate banks' problems with the public's money may understandably surprise when we compare it to the customary litany of profits the major banks realize. To take French examples only: BNP, the Credit mutuel, Societe generale, Dexia and the Banque populaire, Caisse d'epargne and Credit agricole groups posted cumulative net profits from 2004 to 2006 of close to $75 billion. Privatization of the profits when all goes well and socialization of the losses when all goes badly raises four questions. First of all, are banks businesses like any other? Some are rediscovering that banks are not businesses like any other: unlike businesses, they are the object of special regulation and must respect specific rules with respect to their capitalization. Read The Full Story	U.S. Initially Unconcerned About Missile Parts To Taiwan 2008-03-27 03:44:39 After Taiwanese officials reported in early 2007 that four packages they had received from the U.S. military did not contain the helicopter batteries they had expected, U.S. officials suggested that Taiwan simply dispose of the incorrect items - which turned out to be parts for U.S. nuclear missiles. In e-mail correspondence over several months between U.S. defense officials and Taiwan, the U.S. officials assumed that the erroneous shipment simply contained the wrong type of batteries, not that Taiwan had received four classified nuclear-related items that never should have left U.S. soil. U.S. government officials familiar with the communications said yesterday that at some point between August 2006 and last week, Taiwan opened the drum-shaped packages and noticed that the items inside were labeled "secret" and that they included Mark 12 nose cones, which are used with U.S. intercontinental ballistic missiles. Since early 2007, Taiwan had been asking U.S. officials to either reimburse it for the missing batteries or replace them, as part of billions of dollars in U.S. military sales to Taiwan over the past decade, but after the situation was resolved and U.S. authorities told the Taiwanese to get rid of the items they had received - missing warning signs of a serious breach - the Taiwanese double-checked the packages because of worries that discarding them could be dangerous. Read The Full Story Environment: Virus Kills Chile's Salmon 2008-03-26 23:04:49 Looking out over the low green mountains jutting through miles of placid waterways here in southern Chile, it is hard to imagine that anything could be amiss. But beneath the rows of neatly laid netting around the fish farms just off the shore, the salmon are dying. A virus called infectious salmon anemia, or I.S.A., is killing millions of salmon destined for export to Japan, Europe and the United States. The spreading plague has sent shivers through Chile’s third-largest export industry, which has left local people embittered by laying off more than 1,000 workers. It has also opened the companies to fresh charges from biologists and environmentalists who say that the breeding of salmon in crowded underwater pens is contaminating once-pristine waters and producing potentially unhealthy fish. Some say the industry is raising its fish in ways that court disaster, and producers are coming under new pressure to change their methods to preserve southern Chile’s cobalt blue waters for tourists and other marine life. “All these problems are related to an underlying lack of sanitary controls,” said Dr. Felipe C. Cabello, a professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at New York Medical College in Valhalla that has studied Chile’s fishing industry. “Parasitic infections, viral infections, fungal infections are all disseminated when the fish are stressed and the centers are too close together.” Read The Full Story Update: Giant Antarctic Ice Shelf Breaks Into The Sea 2008-03-26 21:02:26 A vast hunk of floating ice has broken away from the Antarctic peninsula, threatening the collapse of a much larger ice shelf behind it, in a development that has shocked climate scientists. Satellite images show that about 160 square miles of the Wilkins ice shelf has been lost since the end of February, leaving the ice interior now "hanging by a thread". The collapsing shelf suggests that climate change could be forcing change much more quickly than scientists had predicted. "The ice shelf is hanging by a thread," said Professor David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS). "We'll know in the next few days or weeks what its fate will be." The Wilkins shelf covers an area of 5,600 square miles (14,500 square kilometers). It is now protected by just a thin thread of ice between two islands. Read The Full Story Eli Lilly Settles Alaska Suit Over Zyprexa 2008-03-26 20:41:47 Eli Lilly has agreed to pay $15 million to the state of Alaska to settle a lawsuit claiming that the company’s schizophrenia drug Zyprexa caused patients to develop diabetes, Lilly and the state said Wednesday morning. The settlement is something of a surprise, coming three weeks into a trial over the state’s claims in Anchorage. The state sued to recoup medical bills it said were generated by Medicaid patients who developed diabetes while taking Zyprexa. The case had not yet reached the jury, although closing arguments were expected this week. Because Alaska is such a small state, with only 670,000 residents, the $15 million figure is a relatively large payment by Lilly. Many other states have sued Lilly with similar claims or are participating in settlement talks led by federal prosecutors in Pennsylvania. There is no way of knowing whether the $15 million payment to Alaska will represent a benchmark for the broader talks, but if it does, Lilly might need to pay billions of dollars to resolve the bigger cases. Lilly and the prosecutors have already discussed an overall settlement of the state and federal investigations and suits that would require Lilly to pay $1 billion to $2 billion in fines and restitution, according to people who have been briefed on the talks. Read The Full Story Explosion Sends Manhole Covers Flying, 1 L.A. Firefighter Killed, Another Critically Injured 2008-03-26 20:41:21 A Los Angeles firefighter was killed and another critically injured Wednesday afternoon after they were apparently hit by exploding manhole covers while responding to a call in Westchester, said a department spokesman. The firefighters were called to Sepulveda and La Tijera boulevards at 1:57 p.m. after a report of smoke from a possible fire. Once they arrived, there was a larger explosion, and they were hit by the manhole covers, said Ron Myers, spokesman for the Los Angeles Fire Department. Firefighters called in a rescue helicopter to fly the injured individuals to a nearby hospital, Myers said. Just before the blast, officials noticed smoke coming from two manhole covers. The names of the firefighters have not been released, he said. The blast also did significant damage to a bank building on Sepulveda Boulevard. TV footage showed the front of the building sheared off. Read The Full Story U.S. Treasury Secretary Paulson Wants Investment Firms Regulated 2008-03-26 15:05:38 The crash of Wall Street's once mighty Bear Stearns underscores the need to bring investment houses under the kind of federal oversight that has long been given to commercial banks, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said Wednesday. In a speech to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Paulson said the Bush administration will soon release just such a blueprint in an effort to promote a smoother functioning of financial markets. For months the financial markets 0 rocked by the double blows of a housing and credit crises - have been suffering through extreme turmoil, threatening to plunge the U.S. economy into a deep recession. The modern U.S. financial system is a complex web of financial players - institutions and individuals and practices that are subject to different rules and regulations. Commercial banks, long a financial bedrock, are subject to regulations and supervision. "This latest episode has highlighted that the world has changed as has the role of other non-bank financial institutions and the interconnectedness among all financial institutions," Paulson said. "These changes require us all to think more broadly about the regulatory and supervisory framework that is consistent with the promotion and maintenance of financial stability," he added. Read The Full Story Arrests In Tibet Protests In The Hundreds 2008-03-26 15:04:43 China said Wednesday that 660 people implicated in Tibetan protests and riots in western China over the past two weeks had surrendered to the authorities. The announcement was part of the government’s effort to quell continuing unrest in the area, which includes Tibet and adjoining provinces with large Tibetan populations. It is the worst outbreak of anti-Chinese violence in 20 years. It was unclear from the announcement how many of the 660 had surrendered voluntarily and how many would be formally charged with criminal offenses. Nor was it clear whether all were ethnic Tibetans. The unrest, which began with a March 14 riot in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, has already cast a pall over preparations for the Olympic Games in Beijing this summer and energized human rights advocates and others who contend that China’s rule over the area has been harsh and that Tibet should be independent. Read The Full Story Remains Of Human Ancestors Found In Spain 2008-03-26 15:03:51 Excavations in a cave in the mountains of northern Spain have uncovered the oldest known remains of human ancestors in Western Europe, scientists reported Wednesday. The fossils of a lower jaw and teeth, more than 1.1 million years old, were found in sediments along with stone tools and animal bones that appeared to have been butchered. The remains have been attributed to the previously known species Homo antecessor, a possible ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans. The discovery is described in the current issue of the journal Nature by a team of Spanish and American scientists led by Eudald Carbonell of the Catalan Institute of Human Paleontology and Social Evolution at Tarragona, Spain. The scientists, noting that the earliest presence of human ancestors in Europe is “one of the most debated topics in paleoanthropology,” said the site of Sima del Elefante in the Atapuerca Mountains held the “oldest, most accurately dated record” of both fossils and artifacts of human occupation in Western Europe. Read The Full Story Actor Richard Widmark Dies At 93 2008-03-26 15:02:50 Richard Widmark, who created a villain in his first movie role who was so repellent and frightening that the actor became a star overnight, died Monday at his home in Roxbury, Connecticut. He was 93. His death was announced Wednesday morning by his wife, Susan Blanchard. She said that Mr. Widmark had fractured a vertebra in recent months and that his conditioned had worsened. As Tommy Udo, a giggling, psychopathic killer in the 1947 gangster film “Kiss of Death,” Mr. Widmark tied up an old woman in a wheelchair (played by Mildred Dunnock) with a cord ripped from a lamp and shoved her down a flight of stairs to her death. “The sadism of that character, the fearful laugh, the skull showing through drawn skin, and the surely conscious evocation of a concentration-camp degenerate established Widmark as the most frightening person on the screen,” the critic David Thomson wrote in “The Biographical Dictionary of Film.” The performance won Mr. Widmark his sole Academy Award nomination, for best supporting actor. Read The Full Story U.S. Credit Losses Will Hit $1.2 Trillion 2008-03-26 03:20:07 Goldman Sachs forecasts that worldwide credit losses from the ongoing market turmoil will reach $1.2 trillion, and that Wall Street will account for nearly 40 per cent of the losses. U.S. leveraged institutions, which include banks, broker-dealers, hedge funds and government-sponsored enterprises, will suffer roughly $460 billion in credit losses after loan loss provisions, Goldman Sachs economists wrote in a research note. Losses from this group of players are crucial because they have led to a dramatic pullback in credit availability, as they cut back lending to shore up their capital and preserve capital requirements, said the Goldman note. Goldman estimated that $120 billion in write-offs have been reported by these leveraged institutions since the credit crunch began last northern summer. Read The Full Story Chevron Reportedly In Talks To Tap Iraq's Oil 2008-03-26 03:19:18 Chevron Corp. and other international oil companies are negotiating with the Iraq Ministry of Oil to begin tapping into some of the country's largest oil fields, according to published reports. Specifically, the companies are negotiating for two-year contracts that would help Iraq boost production at existing oil fields. For years, the companies have had their eyes on long-term contracts to find and develop new oil fields in Iraq, which is believed to hold the world's third-largest oil reserves. The contracts under discussion are far more limited than that, but they represent an important step in opening Iraq's oil industry to foreign involvement after years of state control. San Ramon's Chevron already has held discussions with the Iraqi Oil Ministry about one of the short-term contracts, according to reports in the Associated Press, Dow Jones, Reuters and United Press International news services. BP, Exxon Mobil, Shell and Total also are pursuing the contracts. Read The Full Story
Original materials on this site © Free Internet Press. Any mirrored or quoted materials © their respective authors, publications, or outlets, as shown on their publication, indicated by the link in the news story. Original Free Internet Press materials may be copied and/or republished without modification, provided a link to http://FreeInternetPress.com is given in the story, or proper credit is given. Newsletter options may be changed in your preferences on http://freeinternetpress.com Please email editor@freeinternetpress.com there are any questions. XML/RSS/RDF Newsfeed Syndication: http://freeinternetpress.com/rss.php