Free Internet Press Newsletter - Monday June 30 2008 - (813)

Monday June 30 2008 edition
Free Internet Press is operated on your donations. Donate Today
Thousands Riot In China Over Alleged Coverup In Girl's Death 2008-06-29 16:27:18 Thousands of people thronged a police station in southwestern China to protest the alleged cover-up of a teenage girl's rape and murder, witnesses and officials reported Sunday. The crowd set fire to a government building complex and several police vehicles. The violence, which began Saturday, was brought under control by authorities around 2 a.m. Sunday. There were conflicting reports about the number of injuries and arrests as news of the riot spread over the Internet. Pictures and video from the incident were posted on Chinese online discussion forums and Web sites but quickly became inaccessible, ostensibly as government censors stepped in. Spasms of public anger against perceived injustices or government corruption occur periodically in China, but this weekend's riot, in the seat of Weng'an County in Guizhou province, was larger and more destructive than many. The government has been anxious to contain such incidents, especially as it prepares to host the Olympic Games in August, pledging to show the world its prosperous, "harmonious" society, as the ruling Communist Party calls it. Children as young as 12 began blocking the entrance to the police station sometime after 4:30 p.m. Saturday, said a middle school teacher who witnessed the incident. The teacher, who identified himself only by his surname, Zhang, said he then saw students carry two police cruisers into the building's first floor and set them ablaze. "Police could not control them," he said in a telephone interview. Read The Full Story Obama, McCain In Agreement On Immigration Reform 2008-06-29 16:26:56 Courting the increasingly influential Latino vote, the rival presidential candidates each pledged Saturday to make overhauling the nation's immigration policies a top priority. In separate appearances before the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain looked for every possible way to connect with their audience and emphasize distinctions between themselves. Before the candidates spoke, Adolfo Carrion, Jr., the association president and Bronx Borough president, laid down the stakes: "I believe that we will determine the outcome of the 2008 presidential election." Perhaps with that in mind, Obama delivered a few lines in Spanish - "Sí, se puede," or "Yes, we can," he said - and recalled marching in the streets of Chicago, Illinois, in support of immigration reform. He offered his historic campaign to become the first African American president as a signpost for others. "I'm hoping that somewhere out there in the audience sits the person who will be the first Latino nominee in their party," he said. Read The Full Story Commentary: The Shrinking Influence Of The U.S. Federal Reserve 2008-06-29 16:25:45 Intellpuke: This commentary was written by Spiegel Online columnist Gabor Steingart. It appeared in the Spiegel Online edition for Thursday, June 26, 2008. Humiliation for Mr. Dollar: Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the United State Federal Reserve Bank, is facing an investigation by the International Monetary Fund. Just one more example of the Fed losing its power. The United States Federal Reserve Bank, or Fed, seems as much a part of America as Coca-Cola or Pizza Hut. But at least one difference has become apparent in recent days. While the pizza chain and soft-drink maker are likely to expand their scope of influence in the age of globalization, the U.S. central bank is finding that its power is shrinking. No Fed chief in U.S. history has been forced to submit to the kind of humiliation that Ben Bernanke is facing. This is partly down to circumstances. Inflation is going up and up, and this year's average will likely top 4 percent. But this time Mr. Dollar is also Mr. Powerless. He can raise interest rates in the fall, or he can pray, which would probably be the better choice. At least prayer would not prevent the U.S. economy from growing, a highly likely outcome if interest rates go up. After years of growth, the United States is now on the brink of a recession, one that is more likely to be deepened than softened by a tight money policy. Investments will automatically become more expensive, consumer spending will be curbed and economic growth will slow down, immediately affecting unemployment figures and wages. Read The Full Story Iraq To File Oil-For-Food Lawsuit In U.S. Courts 2008-06-29 16:25:14 The Iraqi government announced Sunday that it intends to file suit in United States courts to recover funds allegedly embezzled from the United Nations oil-for-food program during Saddam Hussein's rule. A statement by government spokesman Ali Dabbagh said the lawsuits would target companies and individuals that conspired to corrupt the U.N. program. Dabbagh did not name any companies or say how much the government hoped to gain by going to court, but his statement cited the findings of a 2005 U.N. inquiry into the program. That investigation, headed by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul A. Volcker, concluded that 2,400 companies and individuals participated in fraud that included $1.8 billion in kickbacks to Hussein. Read The Full Story U.S. Army Iraq Study Faults Pentagon 2008-06-29 03:15:12 A new Army history of the service's performance in Iraq immediately after the fall of Saddam Hussein faults military and civilian leaders for their planning for the war's aftermath, and it suggests that the Pentagon's current way of using troops is breaking the Army National Guard and Army Reserve.  The study, "On Point II: Transition to the New Campaign," is an unclassified and unhindered look at U.S. Army  operations in Iraq from May 2003 to January 2005. That critical era of the war has drawn widespread criticism because of a failure to anticipate the rise of an Iraqi insurgency and because policymakers provided too few U.S. troops and no strategy to maintain order after Iraq's decades-old regime was overthrown. Donald P. Wright and Col. Timothy R. Reese, who authored the report along with the Army's Contemporary Operations Study Team, conclude that U.S. commanders and civilian leaders were too focused on only the military victory and lacked a realistic vision of what Iraq would look like following that triumph. "The transition to a new campaign was not well thought out, planned for, and prepared for before it began," write Wright and Reese, historians at the Army's Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.  "Additionally, the assumptions about the nature of post-Saddam Iraq on which the transition was planned proved to be largely incorrect." Read The Full Story In Britain, Home-Grown Vegetables Ruined By Toxic Fertilizer 2008-06-29 03:14:51 Gardeners across Britain are reaping a bitter harvest of rotten potatoes, withered salads and deformed tomatoes after an industrial herbicide tainted their soil. Gardeners have been warned not to eat home-grown vegetables contaminated by a powerful new herbicide that is destroying gardens and allotments across the U.K. The Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) has been inundated with calls from concerned gardeners who have seen potatoes, beans, peas, carrots and salad vegetables wither or become grossly deformed. The society admitted that it had no idea of the extent of the problem, but said it appeared "significant". The affected gardens and allotments have been contaminated by manure originating from farms where the hormone-based herbicide aminopyralid has been sprayed on fields. Dow AgroSciences, which manufactures aminopyralid, has posted advice to allotment holders and gardeners on its website. Colin Bowers, Dow's U.K. grassland marketing manager, told The Observer that links to their products had been proved in some of the cases, but it was not clear whether aminopyralid is responsible for all of them and tests were continuing. "It is undoubtedly a problem," he said, "and I have got full sympathy for everyone who is involved with this." Read The Full Story Reported U.S. Raid In Iraq On al-Maliki Relatives Triggers Outrage 2008-06-29 03:14:22 Iraqi officials in the home town of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki are calling for an investigation into a reported raid by the U.S. military  early Friday that resulted in the death of a man identified by some Iraqi officials as a relative of the prime minister. The raid was carried out shortly after midnight in the town of Hindiyah, 50 miles southwest of Baghdad in Karbala province. According to Iraqi officials in Karbala, a team of about 60 U.S. soldiers traveling in four helicopters descended on a sparsely populated area a few miles from the town, where the prime minister owns a villa. "We are shocked by the news of the raid," Karbala Gov. Aqeel al-Khazaly said at a news conference Friday afternoon. "The aerial landing and subsequent operations led to the death of an innocent civilian and the arrest of another." Karbala is one of nine Iraqi provinces where the U.S. military has handed over responsibility for security to local officials. Khazaly, who has been a U.S. ally, said Iraqi officials were not notified about the operation and called it a violation of the handover agreement. "Iraqi forces in Karbala had reached a level that qualified them to pursue criminal gangs and outlaw groups" on their own, he said. Read The Full Story After Severe Storms, Omaha Residents Face Up To A Week Without Power 2008-06-29 03:13:36 Nebraska's largest city struggled Saturday to restore power to thousands of residents a day after a severe storm damaged homes, uprooted trees and killed two people in a neighboring community. It could take a week to fully restore electricity after high winds from Friday's storm, officials said. The storm is one of the worst the Omaha Public Power District has dealt with, said CEO Gary Gates. Nearly 50,000 customers remained without power Saturday afternoon, said utility spokesman Jeff Hanson. At the peak of the failures, 126,000 customers lacked electricity. "We've made very good progress so far with our restoration efforts, but as the work proceeds we're going to see fewer repairs that restore power to large numbers of customers," said Gates. Some customers might not have power restored until next Saturday, he said. Read The Full Story	Editorial: More Waste, Fraud And Abuse 2008-06-29 16:27:06 Intellpuke: This editorial appeared in the New York Times edition for Sunday, June 29, 2008. Representative Henry Waxman recently asked a question for which we would also like an answer: “How did a company run by a 21-year-old president and a 25-year-old former masseur get a sensitive $300 million contract to supply ammunition to Afghan forces?” Mr. Waxman raised the issue after executives of a Miami Beach arms dealer, AEY, were indicted on fraud charges this month, accused of pawning off tens of millions of banned and decrepit Chinese cartridges on the United States Army to supply Afghan security forces. The Pentagon’s folly with the fly-by-night trafficker is just the latest example of the Bush administration’s cynically cozy contracting practices and shockingly weak oversight that have wasted billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money. Congressional investigators took testimony from a United States military attaché who accused the American ambassador in Albania of helping to cover up the Chinese ammunition’s origins. The ambassador, John Withers, denies wrongdoing. But Rep. Waxman is wisely working to map the dimensions of fraud and waste. The AEY fraud case followed a detailed investigation by the New York Times, which found the company scored the Afghan contract despite a record of failure and risky corner-cutting in a half-dozen other plum contracts. (Along the way, Efraim Diveroli, the company president who is now indicted, had the gall to fight off a court case accusing him of abusing his girlfriend by claiming national security privilege “in the fight against terrorism.”) Read The Full Story In Environmental Flip-Flop, McCain Sides With Big Oil 2008-06-29 16:26:24 A heated debate erupted in the United States over oil drilling in coastal waters and Alaska. To the delight of business and the chagrin of environmentalists, President Bush and candidate John McCain are pushing to have a 26-year-old ban lifted - and fallaciously promising that the move would lower energy and gasoline prices. John McCain has discovered the environment. The Republican candidate for president is suddenly a friend of the environment and a proponent of climate protection. Donning his new green mantle, he has taken to tramping through giant rainforests in the northwestern United States, inspecting wind farms and portraying himself as one of the first politicians to have "sounded the alarm about global warming". Hardly a day goes by without McCain proclaiming some new idea to protect the environment, from strict greenhouse gas emission limits to new automobile technologies. From one day to the next, he touts the benefits of nuclear energy, wind energy, solar cells, biodiesel and even coal. At times he lumps everything together, as he did recently when he rattled off a motley staccato of proposals as part of his "great national campaign to achieve energy security for America." But with his latest idea, McCain is hoping to reduce his opponent Barack Obama's lead in the polls. It amounts to a single word: oil. Or rather: more oil, and not just from the Middle East, but also from domestic production. Read The Full Story Editorial: Oil And Inflation 2008-06-29 16:25:34 Intellpuke: This editorial appeared in the New York Times edition for Sunday, June, 29, 2008. This month, Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, broke from the usually banal official pronouncements about the dollar to talk bluntly about the risks of inflation. He told an international conference that a weakening dollar had caused an “unwelcome rise” in inflation and pledged to guard against such dangers. Until this recent round of comments - which other Fed officials have now joined - the Fed had focused on the turmoil in the financial markets and slowing growth, not rising prices. With the markets relatively calm during most of June, it apparently felt freer to raise warnings about inflation. The Fed’s decision Wednesday to hold interest rates steady - after a string of cuts to stabilize financial markets and support the economy - underscored its growing concern about prices. Then came Thursday and Friday. The stock market plunged into bear market territory, leaving no doubt that the credit crunch persists and the economy is still very fragile. At the same time, oil prices surged, sharply increasing inflationary pressure. The Fed would have preferred to deal with the threats of recession and inflation sequentially. But it does not have that luxury. The Fed is in a bind. If it keeps rates low and loans plentiful to combat a recession, inflation could worsen. If it raises rates and tightens the money spigot to fight inflation, the downturn could be deepened and prolonged. Read The Full Story Shooting Demonstration In France Leaves 16 Wounded, Including Children 2008-06-29 16:23:09 A military shooting demonstration in southeast France on Sunday left 16 people wounded, including children, when real bullets were used instead of blank ones, said officials. Four of the wounded were in serious condition, including a 3-year-old child, Bernard Lemaire, chief of the regional administration in Aude, said on France-3 television. Fifteen of the injured were civilians. A Defense Ministry official said the incident occurred during a demonstration of hostage-freeing techniques at the Laperrine military barracks. The official said investigators will look into why real bullets were used. No information was immediately available about what kind of weapon was used. Read The Full Story Shadow Of War Looms As Israel Flexes Its Muscle 2008-06-29 03:15:04 Israeli fighter jets flew 1,500 kilometers across the Mediterranean this month, in a dry run for an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities. Tehran has threatened to treat such a declaration of war. As the Middle East braces itself for a standoff of epic proportions, how close is the region to that nightmare scenario? The meeting at the home of Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was not supposed to be public. The man invited into Olmert's official residence in Jerusalem was Aviam Sela, architect of Operation Opera in 1981, when Israel launched a long-range strike against Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor. Regarded as a brilliant aviation tactician, in particular in the field of in-flight refueling, Olmert's office tried to play down the meeting, but the rumors in Israel's defense establishment were already flying. Sela, according to sources close to the meeting, had been called in so that Olmert could ask his opinion on the likely effectiveness of a similar raid to Opera on the nuclear installations of Iran. Peace in the Middle East depends on Sela's and Israel's answer. Saturday, responding to the Israel's increasingly bellicose language, Iran's top Revolutionary Guards Commander, General Mohammad Ali Jafari, warned that it would respond to any attack by hitting Israel with missiles and threatened to control the oil shipping passage through the Straits of Hormuz. Read The Full Story Tax Scandal Leaves Swiss Bank Reeling, Could Lose License To Bank In U.S. 2008-06-29 03:14:39 It was an offer the Californian real-estate billionaire Igor Olenicoff couldn't refuse. For several years, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service had been on his tail. Suspecting serial tax evasion running into tens of millions of dollars, the IRS painstakingly amassed enough information to jail the Russian immigrant for decades. In 2006, tax investigators offered Olenicoff, a man who has strong connections with Boris Yeltsin, a deal. In return for the identity of those who helped him evade taxes, his sentence would be slashed. It took Olenicoff, who owned 11,000 houses and a large collection of high-grade offices, less than 30 seconds to make up his mind. After two years of further investigations, Olenicoff's evidence resulted this month in a dramatic development. UBS, the most powerful bank in Switzerland, is now on the edge of a steep cliff. Ten days ago, Bradley Birkenfeld, who between 2001 and 2006 was a senior UBS banker, signed a U.S. court statement detailing how he smuggled diamonds in toothpaste tubes, deliberately destroyed offshore bank records on behalf of clients and helped Olenicoff evade taxes of $200 million on offshore assets worth $7.26 billion. In an explosive seven-page deposition, Birkenfeld claims he was encouraged to win clients at UBS-sponsored tennis tournaments and major art events. UBS bankers, he said, assisted wealthy Americans to conceal ownership of their assets by creating "sham" offshore trusts. Misleading and false documentation was routinely prepared to facilitate this, and the motivation, he concluded, was to ensure that UBS continued to manage a staggering $20 billion of assets owned by wealthy U.S. individuals, which generated the bank $200 million in fees each year. "By concealing U.S. clients' ownership and control in the assets held offshore, [UBS] managers and bankers... defrauded the IRS and evaded U.S. income tax," reads the statement. The U.S. Department of Justice has scented blood and is moving in for the kill. UBS denies authorizing or encouraging any breaches of applicable laws and regulations and has put out a statement saying it will fully cooperate with all authorities and address any issues raised by the investigation (see below). It is now faced with having to hand over details of its 20,000 U.S. clients to the authorities. Read The Full Story Mugabe Rush To Be Sworn In After Election 'Landslide" 2008-06-29 03:13:52 Robert Mugabe is expected to be sworn in as President of Zimbabwe again Sunday after one of the bloodiest and most controversial elections in African history. Zimbabwean officials said that Mugabe had won a landslide victory with most of the count completed in Friday's widely derided presidential run-off. Officials were reported as saying that, with two-thirds of the count completed, there had been a dramatic reversal of Morgan Tsvangirai's lead in the first round of elections three months ago, giving Mugabe a resounding victory before he heads to an African Union summit to confront growing criticism from the continent's other leaders. The ruling Zanu-PF party's claims that voters have deserted the opposition Movement for Democratic Change in droves to support Mugabe's claim that the vote is part of a struggle to maintain Zimbabwe's independence have met with incredulity and anger. Washington called the vote a sham and said it will seek a United Nations Security Council resolution this week to send a "strong message of deterrence" to Zimbabwe's leader. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Washington "will use everything in our power for appropriate sanctions". The U.S. is also expected to press for an arms embargo on Zimbabwe and a travel ban on its officials. Britain's Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Saturday that Zimbabwe had reached a new low point with the election. "We will work with international partners to find a way to close this sickening chapter that has cost so many lives,"said  the prime minister. 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 June 29 2008 - (813)

Sunday June 29 2008 edition
Free Internet Press is operated on your donations. Donate Today
U.S. Army Iraq Study Faults Pentagon 2008-06-29 03:15:12 A new Army history of the service's performance in Iraq immediately after the fall of Saddam Hussein faults military and civilian leaders for their planning for the war's aftermath, and it suggests that the Pentagon's current way of using troops is breaking the Army National Guard and Army Reserve.  The study, "On Point II: Transition to the New Campaign," is an unclassified and unhindered look at U.S. Army  operations in Iraq from May 2003 to January 2005. That critical era of the war has drawn widespread criticism because of a failure to anticipate the rise of an Iraqi insurgency and because policymakers provided too few U.S. troops and no strategy to maintain order after Iraq's decades-old regime was overthrown. Donald P. Wright and Col. Timothy R. Reese, who authored the report along with the Army's Contemporary Operations Study Team, conclude that U.S. commanders and civilian leaders were too focused on only the military victory and lacked a realistic vision of what Iraq would look like following that triumph. "The transition to a new campaign was not well thought out, planned for, and prepared for before it began," write Wright and Reese, historians at the Army's Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.  "Additionally, the assumptions about the nature of post-Saddam Iraq on which the transition was planned proved to be largely incorrect." Read The Full Story In Britain, Home-Grown Vegetables Ruined By Toxic Fertilizer 2008-06-29 03:14:51 Gardeners across Britain are reaping a bitter harvest of rotten potatoes, withered salads and deformed tomatoes after an industrial herbicide tainted their soil. Gardeners have been warned not to eat home-grown vegetables contaminated by a powerful new herbicide that is destroying gardens and allotments across the U.K. The Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) has been inundated with calls from concerned gardeners who have seen potatoes, beans, peas, carrots and salad vegetables wither or become grossly deformed. The society admitted that it had no idea of the extent of the problem, but said it appeared "significant". The affected gardens and allotments have been contaminated by manure originating from farms where the hormone-based herbicide aminopyralid has been sprayed on fields. Dow AgroSciences, which manufactures aminopyralid, has posted advice to allotment holders and gardeners on its website. Colin Bowers, Dow's U.K. grassland marketing manager, told The Observer that links to their products had been proved in some of the cases, but it was not clear whether aminopyralid is responsible for all of them and tests were continuing. "It is undoubtedly a problem," he said, "and I have got full sympathy for everyone who is involved with this." Read The Full Story Reported U.S. Raid In Iraq On al-Maliki Relatives Triggers Outrage 2008-06-29 03:14:22 Iraqi officials in the home town of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki are calling for an investigation into a reported raid by the U.S. military  early Friday that resulted in the death of a man identified by some Iraqi officials as a relative of the prime minister. The raid was carried out shortly after midnight in the town of Hindiyah, 50 miles southwest of Baghdad in Karbala province. According to Iraqi officials in Karbala, a team of about 60 U.S. soldiers traveling in four helicopters descended on a sparsely populated area a few miles from the town, where the prime minister owns a villa. "We are shocked by the news of the raid," Karbala Gov. Aqeel al-Khazaly said at a news conference Friday afternoon. "The aerial landing and subsequent operations led to the death of an innocent civilian and the arrest of another." Karbala is one of nine Iraqi provinces where the U.S. military has handed over responsibility for security to local officials. Khazaly, who has been a U.S. ally, said Iraqi officials were not notified about the operation and called it a violation of the handover agreement. "Iraqi forces in Karbala had reached a level that qualified them to pursue criminal gangs and outlaw groups" on their own, he said. Read The Full Story After Severe Storms, Omaha Residents Face Up To A Week Without Power 2008-06-29 03:13:36 Nebraska's largest city struggled Saturday to restore power to thousands of residents a day after a severe storm damaged homes, uprooted trees and killed two people in a neighboring community. It could take a week to fully restore electricity after high winds from Friday's storm, officials said. The storm is one of the worst the Omaha Public Power District has dealt with, said CEO Gary Gates. Nearly 50,000 customers remained without power Saturday afternoon, said utility spokesman Jeff Hanson. At the peak of the failures, 126,000 customers lacked electricity. "We've made very good progress so far with our restoration efforts, but as the work proceeds we're going to see fewer repairs that restore power to large numbers of customers," said Gates. Some customers might not have power restored until next Saturday, he said. Read The Full Story Pakistan Ends Talks With Taliban, Shells Insurgents' Strongholds Outside Peshawar 2008-06-28 17:35:11 Pakistan government forces Saturday attacked the strongholds of Taliban fighters who for the first time had appeared poised to make at least a symbolic strike at a major Pakistani city. The offensive in the Khyber tribal agency just outside Peshawar, the main city in the country's troubled northwest, marked an abrupt about-face for Pakistan's new government, made up of former opposition figures. Until Saturday's action, the governing coalition had sought to negotiate with the insurgents instead of taking them on militarily. It was unclear whether the operation marked a long-term change in the Pakistani government's approach to dealing with the Taliban. Western nations, including the United States, have expressed deep misgivings about Pakistan striking truces with local Taliban commanders. In a sign of the central government's ambivalence about fighting the militants, only paramilitary soldiers, who are lightly equipped and poorly trained in comparison with regular army troops, took part in the Khyber operation. Read The Full Story Commentary: All Too Human 2008-06-28 17:34:41 Intellpuke: This commentary was written by Bob Herbert, an op-ed columnist for the New York Times and appeared in that newspaper's edition for Saturday, June 28, 2008. Mr. Herbert's commentary follows: Thursday was the 21st anniversary of the United Nations Convention Against Torture. It was also the same day that two Bush administration lawyers appeared before a House subcommittee to answer questions about their roles in providing the legal framework for harsh interrogation techniques that inevitably rose to the level of torture and shamed the U.S. before the rest of the world. The lawyers, both former Justice Department officials, were David Addington, who is now Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, and John Yoo, now a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. There is no danger of either being enshrined as heroes in the history books of the future. For most Americans, torture is something remote, abstract, reprehensible, but in the eyes of some, perhaps necessary -  when the bomb is ticking, for example, or when interrogators are trying to get information from terrorists willing to kill Americans in huge numbers. Reality offers something much different. We saw the hideous photos from Abu Ghraib. And now the Nobel Prize-winning organization Physicians for Human Rights has released a report, called “Broken Laws, Broken Lives,” that puts an appropriately horrifying face on a practice that is so fundamentally evil that it cannot co-exist with the idea of a just and humane society. Read The Full Story Obama To Visit Middle East, Europe 2008-06-28 17:33:56 Senator Barack Obama will make his first international trip as a presidential candidate this summer, his campaign announced Saturday, traveling to the Middle East and Europe in an effort to bolster his foreign policy experience in his fall campaign against Senator John McCain.  Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee, will visit Jordan, Israel, Germany, France and Britain. On a separate trip, he also is planning to tour Iraq and Afghanistan, although aides declined to disclose details or the dates of his travel for security reasons. While the domestic economy is a resounding issue in the presidential campaign, several major distinctions between  Obama and McCain revolve around their foreign policy, particularly the United States’ military strategy in Iraq. McCain has criticized Obama for not visiting Iraq in more than two years, saying he has not seen the progress achieved in the country. In the middle of a presidential campaign, candidates often have shied away from taking foreign trips, investing their time instead in battleground states. But this week, McCain heads to Colombia and Mexico, following a European tour in March and a visit to Canada this month. “This trip will be an important opportunity for me to assess the situation in countries that are critical to American national security and to consult with some of our closest friends and allies about the common challenges we face,” said Obama.  “France, Germany and the United Kingdom are key anchors of the transatlantic alliance and have contributed to the mission in Afghanistan, and I look forward to discussing how we can strengthen our partnership in the years to come.” Read The Full Story Envisioning A World Of $200 A Barrel Oil 2008-06-28 01:37:16 As forecasters take the possibility of $200-a-barrel oil more seriously, they describe fundamental shifts in the way we work, where we live and how we spend our free time. The more expensive oil gets, the more Katherine Carver's life shrinks. She's given up RV trips. She stays home most weekends. She's scrapped her twice-a-month volunteer stint at a Malibu wildlife refuge - the trek from her home in Palmdale just got too expensive. How much higher would fuel prices have to go before she quit her job? Already, the 170-mile round-trip commute to her job with Los Angeles County Child Support Services in Commerce is costing her close to $1,000 a month - a fifth of her salary. It's got the 55-year-old thinking about retirement. "It's definitely pushing me to that point," said Carver. The point could be closer than anyone thinks. Three months ago, when oil was around $108, a few Wall Street analysts began predicting that it could rise to $200 a barrel. Many observers scoffed at the forecasts as sensational, or motivated by a desire among energy companies and investors to drive prices higher. Yet, with oil closing over $140 a barrel Friday, more experts are taking those predictions seriously - and shuddering at the inflation-fueled chaos that $200-a-barrel crude could bring. They foresee fundamental shifts in the way we work, where we live and how we spend our free time. "You'd have massive changes going on throughout the economy," said Robert Wescott, president of Keybridge Research, a Washington, D.C., economic analysis firm. "Some activities are just plain going to be shut down." Read The Full Story Salmonella-Tainted Tomatoes May Still Be In Markets 2008-06-28 01:34:16 Tomatoes carrying a rare form of salmonella that has sickened more than 800 people may still be on the market, federal officials said Friday, two weeks after they first warned consumers about the risk. Investigators are considering the possibility that other produce may be spreading the bacteria. "We continue to see a strong association with tomatoes, but we are keeping an open mind about other ingredients," said Patricia Griffin, a top epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).  The FDA has not changed its guidelines that it is safe to eat Roma, red plum and red round tomatoes not attached to a vine that were grown in certain areas. All cherry tomatoes, grape tomatoes and tomatoes attached to the vine are also okay. (For a list of safe areas, go to: http://www.fda.gov .) Read The Full Story As Flames Approach Big Sur Buddhist Monastery, Monks Prepared To Fight 2008-06-28 01:33:43 In this remote Zen enclave on Big Sur's forested backside, wildfires lurk on three sides. As flames edge closer and ash falls from a crimson sky, the Buddhist monks are readying for a final stand. Priests and students alike at the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center have been doffing their traditional black robes, hefting picks and shovels, and forging 10-foot-wide fire breaks. Atop the roofs of the monastery's old retreat cabins and meditation hall, they've jury-rigged plastic pipe sprinkler systems. Perhaps more serene than some, they were among a multitude of Northern Californians coping Friday with more than 1,200 blazes from the Nevada border to the Pacific. The fires, triggered by fierce lightning storms last weekend, have charred more than 193,000 acres and destroyed at least 20 homes - 16 of them just over the mountains along Big Sur's legendary 70-mile coastline. The blazes prompted Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Friday to ask that President Bush declare a state of emergency in the region. In a news conference, the governor suggested that fire-stricken counties consider banning Fourth of July fireworks. Read The Full Story Traveler's In U.S. Face Deep Flight Cuts By Summer's End 2008-06-28 01:30:55 Traveler's In U.S. Face Deep Flight Cuts By Summer's End With summer barely under way, it may seem too early for travelers to start thinking about Labor Day, but that is when significant cuts in the airlines’ fleets and schedules will begin taking effect, making for a particularly jarring end to summer. Across the United States, airports from La Guardia in New York to Oakland in California will be affected by flight cuts, bringing the industry down to a size last seen in 2002, when travel fell sharply after the 9/11 attacks. Over all, the cuts will reduce flights this year by American carriers by almost 10 percent, industry analysts estimate, with even deeper cuts in store for 2009. If oil prices keep rising, airlines may have to keep paring their schedules, as they struggle to find ways to make money in light of rapidly rising jet fuel prices, which have climbed more than 80 percent in the last year. This week, the country’s two biggest airlines, American and United, announced plans to lop cities like Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and San Luis Obispo, California, out of their networks. Cuts also are taking place on international routes to cities like London and Buenos Aires, and even to popular vacation destinations in the United States like Las Vegas, Nevada,  Honolulu, Hawaii, and Orlando, Florida. Read The Full Story Obama, Clinton Set New Phase '08 Campaign 2008-06-28 01:29:44 Sen. Barack Obama wanted a symbolic beginning for his alliance with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, and he achieved it Friday when the former rivals traveled here together for an afternoon rally designed to unite Democrats for the fall campaign. Besides the message its name sent, the town of Unity also had the distinction of splitting its votes evenly in New Hampshire's presidential primary, with Clinton and Obama each picking up 107 votes, and it served as a carefully chosen backdrop for transitioning the senator from New York into a substantial role in the Obama campaign. "I know what we start here in this field in Unity will end on the steps of the Capitol when Barack Obama takes the oath of office as our next president," said Clinton, speaking to a crowd of 4,000 outside Unity Elementary School on a steamy day. "I don't think it's at all unknown among this audience that this was a hard-fought primary campaign," she continued. "But today and every day going forward, we stand shoulder to shoulder for the ideals we share, the values we cherish and the country we love." Neither side expects major problems in melding the two operations, but after the party's closest nominating contest in modern history, there is no expectation that it will happen overnight. The emotions from the primary fight remain raw for some Clinton supporters, but Obama advisers were encouraged by Friday's first step. Read The Full Story Scientist In Anthrax Lawsuit Is Paid Millions By U.S. 2008-06-28 01:28:40 The Justice Department announced Friday that it would pay $4.6 million to settle a lawsuit filed by Steven J. Hatfill, a former Army biodefense researcher intensively investigated as a “person of interest” in the deadly anthrax letters of 2001. The settlement, consisting of $2.825 million in cash and an annuity paying Dr. Hatfill $150,000 a year for 20 years, brings to an end a five-year legal battle that had recently threatened a reporter with large fines for declining to name sources she said she did not recall. Dr. Hatfill, who worked at the Army’s laboratory at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland, in the late 1990s, was the subject of a flood of news media coverage beginning in mid-2002, after television cameras showed Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents in biohazard suits searching his apartment near the Army base. He was later named a “person of interest” in the case by then Attorney General John Ashcroft, speaking on national television. In a news conference in August 2002, Dr. Hatfill tearfully denied that he had anything to do with the anthrax letters and said irresponsible news media coverage based on government leaks had destroyed his reputation. Read The Full Story	Shadow Of War Looms As Israel Flexes Its Muscle 2008-06-29 03:15:04 Israeli fighter jets flew 1,500 kilometers across the Mediterranean this month, in a dry run for an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities. Tehran has threatened to treat such a declaration of war. As the Middle East braces itself for a standoff of epic proportions, how close is the region to that nightmare scenario? The meeting at the home of Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was not supposed to be public. The man invited into Olmert's official residence in Jerusalem was Aviam Sela, architect of Operation Opera in 1981, when Israel launched a long-range strike against Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor. Regarded as a brilliant aviation tactician, in particular in the field of in-flight refueling, Olmert's office tried to play down the meeting, but the rumors in Israel's defense establishment were already flying. Sela, according to sources close to the meeting, had been called in so that Olmert could ask his opinion on the likely effectiveness of a similar raid to Opera on the nuclear installations of Iran. Peace in the Middle East depends on Sela's and Israel's answer. Saturday, responding to the Israel's increasingly bellicose language, Iran's top Revolutionary Guards Commander, General Mohammad Ali Jafari, warned that it would respond to any attack by hitting Israel with missiles and threatened to control the oil shipping passage through the Straits of Hormuz. Read The Full Story Tax Scandal Leaves Swiss Bank Reeling, Could Lose License To Bank In U.S. 2008-06-29 03:14:39 It was an offer the Californian real-estate billionaire Igor Olenicoff couldn't refuse. For several years, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service had been on his tail. Suspecting serial tax evasion running into tens of millions of dollars, the IRS painstakingly amassed enough information to jail the Russian immigrant for decades. In 2006, tax investigators offered Olenicoff, a man who has strong connections with Boris Yeltsin, a deal. In return for the identity of those who helped him evade taxes, his sentence would be slashed. It took Olenicoff, who owned 11,000 houses and a large collection of high-grade offices, less than 30 seconds to make up his mind. After two years of further investigations, Olenicoff's evidence resulted this month in a dramatic development. UBS, the most powerful bank in Switzerland, is now on the edge of a steep cliff. Ten days ago, Bradley Birkenfeld, who between 2001 and 2006 was a senior UBS banker, signed a U.S. court statement detailing how he smuggled diamonds in toothpaste tubes, deliberately destroyed offshore bank records on behalf of clients and helped Olenicoff evade taxes of $200 million on offshore assets worth $7.26 billion. In an explosive seven-page deposition, Birkenfeld claims he was encouraged to win clients at UBS-sponsored tennis tournaments and major art events. UBS bankers, he said, assisted wealthy Americans to conceal ownership of their assets by creating "sham" offshore trusts. Misleading and false documentation was routinely prepared to facilitate this, and the motivation, he concluded, was to ensure that UBS continued to manage a staggering $20 billion of assets owned by wealthy U.S. individuals, which generated the bank $200 million in fees each year. "By concealing U.S. clients' ownership and control in the assets held offshore, [UBS] managers and bankers... defrauded the IRS and evaded U.S. income tax," reads the statement. The U.S. Department of Justice has scented blood and is moving in for the kill. UBS denies authorizing or encouraging any breaches of applicable laws and regulations and has put out a statement saying it will fully cooperate with all authorities and address any issues raised by the investigation (see below). It is now faced with having to hand over details of its 20,000 U.S. clients to the authorities. Read The Full Story Mugabe Rush To Be Sworn In After Election 'Landslide" 2008-06-29 03:13:52 Robert Mugabe is expected to be sworn in as President of Zimbabwe again Sunday after one of the bloodiest and most controversial elections in African history. Zimbabwean officials said that Mugabe had won a landslide victory with most of the count completed in Friday's widely derided presidential run-off. Officials were reported as saying that, with two-thirds of the count completed, there had been a dramatic reversal of Morgan Tsvangirai's lead in the first round of elections three months ago, giving Mugabe a resounding victory before he heads to an African Union summit to confront growing criticism from the continent's other leaders. The ruling Zanu-PF party's claims that voters have deserted the opposition Movement for Democratic Change in droves to support Mugabe's claim that the vote is part of a struggle to maintain Zimbabwe's independence have met with incredulity and anger. Washington called the vote a sham and said it will seek a United Nations Security Council resolution this week to send a "strong message of deterrence" to Zimbabwe's leader. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Washington "will use everything in our power for appropriate sanctions". The U.S. is also expected to press for an arms embargo on Zimbabwe and a travel ban on its officials. Britain's Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Saturday that Zimbabwe had reached a new low point with the election. "We will work with international partners to find a way to close this sickening chapter that has cost so many lives,"said  the prime minister. Read The Full Story As Legislation Evolves, Mortgage Debt Is Snowballing 2008-06-28 17:35:23 When Congress started fashioning a sweeping rescue package for struggling homeowners earlier this year, 2.6 million loans were in trouble, yet the problem has grown considerably in just six months and is continuing to worsen. More than three million borrowers are in distress, and analysts are forecasting a couple of million more will fall behind on their payments in the coming year as home prices fall further and the economy weakens. Those stark numbers not only illustrate the challenges for the lawmakers trying to provide some relief to their constituents but also hint at what the next administration will be facing after the election. While the proposed program would help some homeowners, analysts say it would touch only a small fraction of those in trouble - the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates it would be used by 400,000 borrowers - and would do little to bolster the housing market. “It’s not enough, even in the best of circumstances,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody's Economy.com . The number of people who will be helped “is going to be overwhelmed by the three million that are headed toward default.” Last week, the Senate voted overwhelmingly to advance the bill, and the House passed a version last month. Because of procedural delays in ironing out differences between the two houses, the Senate is not expected to pass the bill until after the Fourth of July recess. Read The Full Story Commentary: It Was Oil, All Along 2008-06-28 17:34:57 Intellpuke: This commentary was written by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, managing editor and senior writer, respectively, for the weekly public affairs program "Bill Moyers' Journal", which airs Friday nights on PBS. Their commentary follows: Oh, no, they told us, Iraq isn't a war about oil. That's cynical and simplistic, they said. It's about terror and al-Qaeda and toppling a dictator and spreading democracy and protecting ourselves from weapons of mass destruction. But one by one, these concocted rationales went up in smoke, fire and ashes. And now the bottom line turns out to be ... the bottom line. It is about oil. Alan Greenspan said so last fall. The former chairman of the Federal Reserve, safely out of office, confessed in his memoir, "Everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil." He elaborated in an interview with the Washington Post's Bob Woodward, "If Saddam Hussein had been head of Iraq and there was no oil under those sands, our response to him would not have been as strong as it was in the first Gulf War. "Remember, also, that soon after the invasion, Donald Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, told the press that war was our only strategic choice. "We had virtually no economic options with Iraq," he explained, "because the country floats on a sea of oil." Shades of Daniel Plainview, the monstrous petroleum tycoon in the movie, "There Will Be Blood." Half-mad, he exclaims, "There's a whole ocean of oil under our feet!" then adds, "No one can get at it except for me!" No wonder American troops only guarded the Ministries of Oil and the Interior in Baghdad, even as looters pillaged museums of their priceless antiquities. They were making sure no one could get at the oil except ... guess who? Read The Full Story Scholar Looks For First Link In E-Mail Chain About Obama 2008-06-28 17:34:17 The e-mail landed in Danielle Allen's queue one winter morning as she was studying in her office at the Institute for Advanced Study, the renowned haven for some of the nation's most brilliant minds. The missive began: "THIS DEFINITELY WARRANTS LOOKING INTO." Laid out before Allen, a razor-sharp, 36-year-old political theorist, was what purported to be a biographical sketch of Barack Obamathat has become one of the most effective - and baseless - Internet attacks of the 2008 presidential season. The anonymous chain e-mail makes the false claim that Obama is concealing a radical Islamic background. By the time it reached Allen on Jan. 11, 2008, it had spread with viral efficiency for more than a year. During that time, polls show the number of voters who mistakenly believe Obama is a Muslim rose - from 8 percent to 13 percent between November 2007 and March 2008. And some cited this religious mis-affiliation when explaining their primary votes against him. As the general-election campaign against Sen. John McCain has gotten underway, Obama's aides have made the smears a top target. They recently launched FightTheSmears.com to "aggressively push back with the truth," said Obama campaign spokesman Tommy Vietor, and go viral with it. The Web site urges supporters to upload their address books and send e-mails to all of their friends. " Long before this, Allen had been obsessing about the origins of her e-mail at the institute, which is most famous for having been the research home of Albert Einstein. Allen studies the way voters in a democracy gather their information and act on what they learn. She was familiar, of course, with the false rumors of a secret love child that helped sink McCain's White House bid in 2000, and the Swift boat attacks that did the same to Democrat John Kerry in 2004; but the Obama e-mail was on another plane: The use of the Internet made it possible to launch anonymous attacks that could reach millions of voters in weeks or even days. Read The Full Story Commentary: The Nuclear Expert Who Never Was 2008-06-28 17:33:31 Intellpuke: This commentary was written by Scott Ritter, who was a U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq from 19991 to 1998. This commentary was first posted on truthdig.com's website on Thursday, June 26, 2008. Mr. Ritter's commentary follows: I am a former U.N. weapons inspector. I started my work with the United Nations in September 1991, and between that date and my resignation in August 1998, I participated in over 30 inspections, 14 as chief inspector. The United Nations Special Commission, or UNSCOM, was the organization mandated by the Security Council with the implementation of its resolutions requiring Iraq to be disarmed of its weapons-of-mass-destruction capabilities. While UNSCOM oversaw the areas of chemical and biological weapons, and ballistic missiles, it shared the nuclear file with the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA. As such, UNSCOM, through a small cell of nuclear experts on loan from the various national weapons laboratories, would coordinate with the nuclear safeguards inspectors from the IAEA, organized into an "Action Team" dedicated to the Iraq nuclear disarmament problem. UNSCOM maintained political control of the process, insofar as its executive chairman was the only one authorized to approve a given inspection mission. At first, the IAEA and UNSCOM shared the technical oversight of the inspection process, but soon this was transferred completely to the IAEA's Action Team, and UNSCOM's nuclear staff assumed more of an advisory and liaison function. In August 1992 I began cooperating closely with IAEA's Action Team, traveling to Vienna, where the IAEA maintained its headquarters. The IAEA had in its possession a huge cache of documents seized from Iraq during a series of inspections in the summer of 1991 and, together with other U.N. inspectors, I was able to gain access to these documents for the purpose of extracting any information which might relate to UNSCOM's non-nuclear mission. These documents proved to be very valuable in that regard, and a strong working relationship was developed. Over the coming years I frequently traveled to Vienna, where I came to know the members of the IAEA Action Team as friends and dedicated professionals. Whether poring over documents, examining bits and pieces of equipment (the IAEA kept a sample of an Iraqi nuclear centrifuge in its office) or ruminating about the difficult political situation that was Iraq over wine and cheese on a Friday afternoon, I became familiar with the core team of experts who composed the IAEA Action Team. I bring up this history because during the entire time of my intense, somewhat intimate cooperation with the IAEA Action Team, one name that never entered into the mix was David Albright. Albright is the president of the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS, an institute which he himself founded), and has for some time now dominated the news as the "go-to" guy for the U.S. mainstream media when they need "expert opinion" on news pertaining to nuclear issues. Most recently, Albright could be seen commenting on a report he authored, released by ISIS on June 16, in which he discusses the alleged existence of a computer owned by Swiss-based businessmen who were involved in the A.Q. Khan nuclear black market ring. According to Albright, this computer contained sensitive design drawings of a small, sophisticated nuclear warhead which, he speculates, could fit on a missile delivery system such as that possessed by Iran. Read The Full Story Taliban Imperil Peshawar, One Of Pakistan's Largest Cities 2008-06-28 01:34:41 In the last two months,  Taliban militants have suddenly tightened the noose on Peshawar, a city of three million people and one of Pakistan’s biggest, establishing bases in surrounding towns and, in daylight, abducting residents for high ransoms. The militants move unchallenged out of the lawless tribal region, just 10 miles away, in convoys of heavily armed, long haired and bearded men. They have turned up at courthouses in nearby towns, ordering judges to stay away. On Thursday they stormed a women’s voting station on the city outskirts, and they are now regularly kidnapping people from the city’s bazaars and homes. There is a feeling that the city gates could crumble at any moment. The threat to Peshawar is a sign of the Taliban’s deepening penetration of Pakistan and of the expanding danger that the militants present to the entire region, including nearby supply lines for NATO and American forces in Afghanistan. For the United States, the major supply route for weapons for NATO troops runs from the port of Karachi to the outskirts of Peshawar and through the Khyber Pass to the battlefields of Afghanistan. Maintaining that route would be extremely difficult if the city were significantly infiltrated by the very militants who want to defeat the NATO war effort across the border. NATO and American commanders have complained for months that the government’s policy of negotiating with the militants has led to more cross-border attacks in Afghanistan by Taliban fighters based in Pakistan’s tribal areas. Read The Full Story Battered By Oil Prices, Dow Touches Bear 'Territory 2008-06-28 01:34:02 After eight brutal months on Wall Street, the Dow Jones industrial average finally made it official: Blue-chip stocks have stumbled into bear territory. A brief 155-point slide on Friday afternoon brought the decline in the Dow to 20 percent from its October peak, an ignominious figure that is generally regarded as marking the start of a bear market. The index ended down 107 points, a mere 0.1 percent above the threshold. The broader Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index has not fallen quite as much. The eight-month journey has roughly followed the twists of the subprime mortgage crisis, with a significant drop after the Bear Stearnscollapse and a tantalizing rally when the economy appeared to recover slightly last month. In June, as the price of oil kept rising and the pain in the financial industry showed no signs of easing, the losses gained momentum. Many investors concluded that the economy was in worse shape than they had initially feared. This month, as the price of crude has gained about $13, the Dow has shed more than 1,000 points. The index closed at 11,346.51. Few of the 30 companies in the Dow industrial index were spared Friday, reflecting growing concern among investors that the ongoing credit squeeze and record energy prices are taking a severe toll on industries throughout the economy. Proicter & Gamble fell 2.2 percent. Boeing sank almost 1.9 percent. General Motors, which had plunged to its lowest level in decades on Thursday, eked out a small gain. Read The Full Story Cost Of Radiation Monitors Jumps From $500,000 To $778,000 - Each! 2008-06-28 01:33:19 The cost to put a new kind of radiation monitor in place at borders and ports across the country would be far more than the Department of Homeland Securityinitially told Congress, according to budget documents and interviews with officials. The department's Domestic Nuclear Detection Office said in a report two years ago that the monitors would cost more than $500,000 each to buy and deploy. On the basis of that report, Congress allowed the office to move ahead with a $1.2 billion plan to begin deploying the devices. Now the nuclear detection office estimates that the total cost for each machine will work out to at least $778,000. The office said it needs almost $68 million "for the procurement and deployment" of 87 machines for one portion of the project, according to budget documents. A spokesman for the nuclear detection office said the new cost estimates appear higher because they include current expenses to deploy the machines, such as infrastructure construction, calibration of the machines' software and labor. Spokesman Russ Knocke said Capitol Hill was advised from the beginning that there would be additional costs for deployment of the machines, known as advanced spectroscopic portal monitors, or ASPs. Read The Full Story Residents Of Missouri Community Evacuated As Levee Breaks 2008-06-28 01:30:06 Floodwaters surging down the Mississippi River broke through an earthen levee near the eastern Missouri town of Winfield Friday, overwhelming a massive sandbagging effort and forcing die-hard residents to evacuate their homes. The Pin Oak agricultural levee gave way shortly before 5:30 a.m. Central time, the latest of dozens of such structures to be breached or overtopped by floodwaters that have poured into the Mississippi after heavy rains in May and June. Officials said muskrat burrows weakened the levee, contributing to the breach. The National Weather Service subsequently issued a flash-flood warning for eastern Lincoln County, Missouri, saying that "water is expected to ultimately inundate the eastern portion of the town of Winfield." The flooding threatened to swamp about 100 homes and 3,000 acres of farmland. Undaunted by the breach, residents and National Guardsmen used sandbags to build another levee about four feet high in an effort to protect the threatened homes. Read The Full Story A Candidate Runs Despite Republican Chorus Of 'Don't' 2008-06-28 01:29:12 He has been called a spoiler. A would-be Ralph Nader. A thorn in the side of Senator John McCain and the Republican establishment. None of it bothers Bob Barr, the former Republican congressman from Georgia turned Libertarian Party candidate for president, who gleefully recounted what he says a group of Republicans told him at a recent meeting in Washington: Don’t run. “ â€˜Well, gee, you might take votes from Senator McCain’,” Barr said this week, mimicking one of the complainers, as he sat sipping Coca-Cola in his plush corner office, 12 stories above Atlanta. “They all said, ‘Look, we understand why you’re doing this. We agree with why you’re doing it. But please don’t do it’.” With the Libertarian nomination in hand, Barr hopes to follow in the footsteps of Ross Perot and Nader, whose third-party presidential bids wreaked general-election havoc. For one, he is hoping to hitch his wagon to the enormous grass-roots movement behind Representative Ron Paul, the libertarian-minded Republican from Texas who recently abandoned his own presidential bid; and, with presidential elections increasingly boiling down to state-by-state battles for Electoral College votes, many political analysts think a Barr candidacy, no matter how marginal, could have some impact. 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 June 28 2008 - (813)

Saturday June 28 2008 edition
Free Internet Press is operated on your donations. Donate Today
Envisioning A World Of $200 A Barrel Oil 2008-06-28 01:37:16 As forecasters take the possibility of $200-a-barrel oil more seriously, they describe fundamental shifts in the way we work, where we live and how we spend our free time. The more expensive oil gets, the more Katherine Carver's life shrinks. She's given up RV trips. She stays home most weekends. She's scrapped her twice-a-month volunteer stint at a Malibu wildlife refuge - the trek from her home in Palmdale just got too expensive. How much higher would fuel prices have to go before she quit her job? Already, the 170-mile round-trip commute to her job with Los Angeles County Child Support Services in Commerce is costing her close to $1,000 a month - a fifth of her salary. It's got the 55-year-old thinking about retirement. "It's definitely pushing me to that point," said Carver. The point could be closer than anyone thinks. Three months ago, when oil was around $108, a few Wall Street analysts began predicting that it could rise to $200 a barrel. Many observers scoffed at the forecasts as sensational, or motivated by a desire among energy companies and investors to drive prices higher. Yet, with oil closing over $140 a barrel Friday, more experts are taking those predictions seriously - and shuddering at the inflation-fueled chaos that $200-a-barrel crude could bring. They foresee fundamental shifts in the way we work, where we live and how we spend our free time. "You'd have massive changes going on throughout the economy," said Robert Wescott, president of Keybridge Research, a Washington, D.C., economic analysis firm. "Some activities are just plain going to be shut down." Read The Full Story Salmonella-Tainted Tomatoes May Still Be In Markets 2008-06-28 01:34:16 Tomatoes carrying a rare form of salmonella that has sickened more than 800 people may still be on the market, federal officials said Friday, two weeks after they first warned consumers about the risk. Investigators are considering the possibility that other produce may be spreading the bacteria. "We continue to see a strong association with tomatoes, but we are keeping an open mind about other ingredients," said Patricia Griffin, a top epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).  The FDA has not changed its guidelines that it is safe to eat Roma, red plum and red round tomatoes not attached to a vine that were grown in certain areas. All cherry tomatoes, grape tomatoes and tomatoes attached to the vine are also okay. (For a list of safe areas, go to: http://www.fda.gov .) Read The Full Story As Flames Approach Big Sur Buddhist Monastery, Monks Prepared To Fight 2008-06-28 01:33:43 In this remote Zen enclave on Big Sur's forested backside, wildfires lurk on three sides. As flames edge closer and ash falls from a crimson sky, the Buddhist monks are readying for a final stand. Priests and students alike at the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center have been doffing their traditional black robes, hefting picks and shovels, and forging 10-foot-wide fire breaks. Atop the roofs of the monastery's old retreat cabins and meditation hall, they've jury-rigged plastic pipe sprinkler systems. Perhaps more serene than some, they were among a multitude of Northern Californians coping Friday with more than 1,200 blazes from the Nevada border to the Pacific. The fires, triggered by fierce lightning storms last weekend, have charred more than 193,000 acres and destroyed at least 20 homes - 16 of them just over the mountains along Big Sur's legendary 70-mile coastline. The blazes prompted Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Friday to ask that President Bush declare a state of emergency in the region. In a news conference, the governor suggested that fire-stricken counties consider banning Fourth of July fireworks. Read The Full Story Traveler's In U.S. Face Deep Flight Cuts By Summer's End 2008-06-28 01:30:55 Traveler's In U.S. Face Deep Flight Cuts By Summer's End With summer barely under way, it may seem too early for travelers to start thinking about Labor Day, but that is when significant cuts in the airlines’ fleets and schedules will begin taking effect, making for a particularly jarring end to summer. Across the United States, airports from La Guardia in New York to Oakland in California will be affected by flight cuts, bringing the industry down to a size last seen in 2002, when travel fell sharply after the 9/11 attacks. Over all, the cuts will reduce flights this year by American carriers by almost 10 percent, industry analysts estimate, with even deeper cuts in store for 2009. If oil prices keep rising, airlines may have to keep paring their schedules, as they struggle to find ways to make money in light of rapidly rising jet fuel prices, which have climbed more than 80 percent in the last year. This week, the country’s two biggest airlines, American and United, announced plans to lop cities like Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and San Luis Obispo, California, out of their networks. Cuts also are taking place on international routes to cities like London and Buenos Aires, and even to popular vacation destinations in the United States like Las Vegas, Nevada,  Honolulu, Hawaii, and Orlando, Florida. Read The Full Story Obama, Clinton Set New Phase '08 Campaign 2008-06-28 01:29:44 Sen. Barack Obama wanted a symbolic beginning for his alliance with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, and he achieved it Friday when the former rivals traveled here together for an afternoon rally designed to unite Democrats for the fall campaign. Besides the message its name sent, the town of Unity also had the distinction of splitting its votes evenly in New Hampshire's presidential primary, with Clinton and Obama each picking up 107 votes, and it served as a carefully chosen backdrop for transitioning the senator from New York into a substantial role in the Obama campaign. "I know what we start here in this field in Unity will end on the steps of the Capitol when Barack Obama takes the oath of office as our next president," said Clinton, speaking to a crowd of 4,000 outside Unity Elementary School on a steamy day. "I don't think it's at all unknown among this audience that this was a hard-fought primary campaign," she continued. "But today and every day going forward, we stand shoulder to shoulder for the ideals we share, the values we cherish and the country we love." Neither side expects major problems in melding the two operations, but after the party's closest nominating contest in modern history, there is no expectation that it will happen overnight. The emotions from the primary fight remain raw for some Clinton supporters, but Obama advisers were encouraged by Friday's first step. Read The Full Story Scientist In Anthrax Lawsuit Is Paid Millions By U.S. 2008-06-28 01:28:40 The Justice Department announced Friday that it would pay $4.6 million to settle a lawsuit filed by Steven J. Hatfill, a former Army biodefense researcher intensively investigated as a “person of interest” in the deadly anthrax letters of 2001. The settlement, consisting of $2.825 million in cash and an annuity paying Dr. Hatfill $150,000 a year for 20 years, brings to an end a five-year legal battle that had recently threatened a reporter with large fines for declining to name sources she said she did not recall. Dr. Hatfill, who worked at the Army’s laboratory at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland, in the late 1990s, was the subject of a flood of news media coverage beginning in mid-2002, after television cameras showed Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents in biohazard suits searching his apartment near the Army base. He was later named a “person of interest” in the case by then Attorney General John Ashcroft, speaking on national television. In a news conference in August 2002, Dr. Hatfill tearfully denied that he had anything to do with the anthrax letters and said irresponsible news media coverage based on government leaks had destroyed his reputation. Read The Full Story Commentary: This Recession, It's Just Beginning 2008-06-27 13:05:00 Intellpuke: This commentary was written by Washington Post business columnist Steven Pearlstein. It appeared in the Washington Post edition for Friday, June 27, 2008. So much for that second-half rebound. Truth be told, that was always more of a wish than a serious forecast, happy talk from the Fed and Wall Street desperate to get things back to normal. It ain't gonna happen. Not this summer. Not this fall. Not even next winter. This thing's going down, fast and hard. Corporate bankruptcies, bond defaults, bank failures, hedge fund meltdowns and 6 percent unemployment. We're caught in one of those vicious, downward spirals that, once it gets going, is very hard to pull out of. Only this will be a different kind of recession - a recession with an overlay of inflation. That combo puts the Federal Reserve in a Catch-22 - whatever it does to solve one problem only makes the other worse. Emerging from a two-day meeting this week, Fed officials signaled that further recession-fighting rate cuts are unlikely and that their next move will be to raise rates to contain inflationary expectations. Read The Full Story Oil Jumps To $142 A Barrel 2008-06-27 13:04:31 Oil held near a record high of more than $142 a barrel on Friday, extending gains after surging nearly 4 percent in the previous session, as tumbling global stock markets helped to trigger a wider commodities rally. U.S. light crude for August delivery was up 70 cents at $140.34 a barrel by 1514 GMT, off a record high of $142.26. London Brent crude was up 33 cents at $140.16, off a record high of $142.13. World stocks sank to three-months lows initially on Friday, pressured by a fast deteriorating global inflation picture which has intensified concerns over the outlook for corporate profits. This hastened the rush of investors' funds into commodities. "It has a lot to do with asset allocations. The equity markets are under serious pressure, breaking support levels. When equities are going nowhere, the money is parked into commodities," said Olivier Jakob at Petromatrix. Read The Full Story North Korea Destroys Cooling Tower At Nuclear Site 2008-06-27 13:03:33 In a gesture demonstrating its commitment to halt its nuclear weapons program, North Korea blew up the most prominent symbol of its plutonium production Friday. The 60-foot cooling tower at the North’s main nuclear power plant collapsed in a heap of shattered concrete and twisted steel, filmed by international and regional television broadcasters invited to witness the event. The tower is a technically insignificant structure, relatively easy to rebuild. North Korea also has been disabling - but not destroying - more sensitive parts of the nuclear complex, such as the 5-megawatt reactor, a plant that makes its fuel and a laboratory that extracts plutonium from its spent fuel. Nonetheless, the destruction of the tower, the most visible element of the nuclear complex at Yongbyon, 60 miles north of Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, affirmed the incremental progress that has been made in American-led multilateral efforts to end North Korea’s nuclear weapons programs. Read The Full Story	Taliban Imperil Peshawar, One Of Pakistan's Largest Cities 2008-06-28 01:34:41 In the last two months,  Taliban militants have suddenly tightened the noose on Peshawar, a city of three million people and one of Pakistan’s biggest, establishing bases in surrounding towns and, in daylight, abducting residents for high ransoms. The militants move unchallenged out of the lawless tribal region, just 10 miles away, in convoys of heavily armed, long haired and bearded men. They have turned up at courthouses in nearby towns, ordering judges to stay away. On Thursday they stormed a women’s voting station on the city outskirts, and they are now regularly kidnapping people from the city’s bazaars and homes. There is a feeling that the city gates could crumble at any moment. The threat to Peshawar is a sign of the Taliban’s deepening penetration of Pakistan and of the expanding danger that the militants present to the entire region, including nearby supply lines for NATO and American forces in Afghanistan. For the United States, the major supply route for weapons for NATO troops runs from the port of Karachi to the outskirts of Peshawar and through the Khyber Pass to the battlefields of Afghanistan. Maintaining that route would be extremely difficult if the city were significantly infiltrated by the very militants who want to defeat the NATO war effort across the border. NATO and American commanders have complained for months that the government’s policy of negotiating with the militants has led to more cross-border attacks in Afghanistan by Taliban fighters based in Pakistan’s tribal areas. Read The Full Story Battered By Oil Prices, Dow Touches Bear 'Territory 2008-06-28 01:34:02 After eight brutal months on Wall Street, the Dow Jones industrial average finally made it official: Blue-chip stocks have stumbled into bear territory. A brief 155-point slide on Friday afternoon brought the decline in the Dow to 20 percent from its October peak, an ignominious figure that is generally regarded as marking the start of a bear market. The index ended down 107 points, a mere 0.1 percent above the threshold. The broader Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index has not fallen quite as much. The eight-month journey has roughly followed the twists of the subprime mortgage crisis, with a significant drop after the Bear Stearnscollapse and a tantalizing rally when the economy appeared to recover slightly last month. In June, as the price of oil kept rising and the pain in the financial industry showed no signs of easing, the losses gained momentum. Many investors concluded that the economy was in worse shape than they had initially feared. This month, as the price of crude has gained about $13, the Dow has shed more than 1,000 points. The index closed at 11,346.51. Few of the 30 companies in the Dow industrial index were spared Friday, reflecting growing concern among investors that the ongoing credit squeeze and record energy prices are taking a severe toll on industries throughout the economy. Proicter & Gamble fell 2.2 percent. Boeing sank almost 1.9 percent. General Motors, which had plunged to its lowest level in decades on Thursday, eked out a small gain. Read The Full Story Cost Of Radiation Monitors Jumps From $500,000 To $778,000 - Each! 2008-06-28 01:33:19 The cost to put a new kind of radiation monitor in place at borders and ports across the country would be far more than the Department of Homeland Securityinitially told Congress, according to budget documents and interviews with officials. The department's Domestic Nuclear Detection Office said in a report two years ago that the monitors would cost more than $500,000 each to buy and deploy. On the basis of that report, Congress allowed the office to move ahead with a $1.2 billion plan to begin deploying the devices. Now the nuclear detection office estimates that the total cost for each machine will work out to at least $778,000. The office said it needs almost $68 million "for the procurement and deployment" of 87 machines for one portion of the project, according to budget documents. A spokesman for the nuclear detection office said the new cost estimates appear higher because they include current expenses to deploy the machines, such as infrastructure construction, calibration of the machines' software and labor. Spokesman Russ Knocke said Capitol Hill was advised from the beginning that there would be additional costs for deployment of the machines, known as advanced spectroscopic portal monitors, or ASPs. Read The Full Story Residents Of Missouri Community Evacuated As Levee Breaks 2008-06-28 01:30:06 Floodwaters surging down the Mississippi River broke through an earthen levee near the eastern Missouri town of Winfield Friday, overwhelming a massive sandbagging effort and forcing die-hard residents to evacuate their homes. The Pin Oak agricultural levee gave way shortly before 5:30 a.m. Central time, the latest of dozens of such structures to be breached or overtopped by floodwaters that have poured into the Mississippi after heavy rains in May and June. Officials said muskrat burrows weakened the levee, contributing to the breach. The National Weather Service subsequently issued a flash-flood warning for eastern Lincoln County, Missouri, saying that "water is expected to ultimately inundate the eastern portion of the town of Winfield." The flooding threatened to swamp about 100 homes and 3,000 acres of farmland. Undaunted by the breach, residents and National Guardsmen used sandbags to build another levee about four feet high in an effort to protect the threatened homes. Read The Full Story A Candidate Runs Despite Republican Chorus Of 'Don't' 2008-06-28 01:29:12 He has been called a spoiler. A would-be Ralph Nader. A thorn in the side of Senator John McCain and the Republican establishment. None of it bothers Bob Barr, the former Republican congressman from Georgia turned Libertarian Party candidate for president, who gleefully recounted what he says a group of Republicans told him at a recent meeting in Washington: Don’t run. “ â€˜Well, gee, you might take votes from Senator McCain’,” Barr said this week, mimicking one of the complainers, as he sat sipping Coca-Cola in his plush corner office, 12 stories above Atlanta. “They all said, ‘Look, we understand why you’re doing this. We agree with why you’re doing it. But please don’t do it’.” With the Libertarian nomination in hand, Barr hopes to follow in the footsteps of Ross Perot and Nader, whose third-party presidential bids wreaked general-election havoc. For one, he is hoping to hitch his wagon to the enormous grass-roots movement behind Representative Ron Paul, the libertarian-minded Republican from Texas who recently abandoned his own presidential bid; and, with presidential elections increasingly boiling down to state-by-state battles for Electoral College votes, many political analysts think a Barr candidacy, no matter how marginal, could have some impact. Read The Full Story U.S. Car Maker Are Flat-Out Hurting 2008-06-27 13:05:13 America's Big Three automakers are looking awfully small these days. Speculation about asset sales, takeovers and even bankruptcy for the former titans of Detroit raged Thursday as a stock market rout after a downgrade by Goldman Sachs brought shares of General Motors Corp. to their lowest level since December 1974. When the selling was over, the stock price of GM, the nation's largest automaker, stood at $11.43 - a decline of $1.38, or 11%. With a market capitalization of $6.47 billion, it would take 23 GMs to equal the $148.8-billion valuation of Japanese rival Toyota Motor Co. Ford Motor Co.'s stock, meanwhile, fell 17 cents to $5.07, near its 52-week low and more than a third below its value of one year ago. Ford's market cap stood at $11.37 billion at day's end. Chrysler is privately held. Read The Full Story Honeybee Collapse Claims Record Number Of Hives This Year 2008-06-27 13:04:47 A record 36 percent of U.S. commercial bee colonies have been lost to mysterious causes so far this year and worse may be yet to come, experts told a congressional panel Thursday. The year's bee colony losses are about twice the usual seen following a typical winter, scientists warn. Despite ambitious new research efforts, the causes remain a mystery. "We need results," pleaded California beekeeper Steve Godlin. "We need a unified effort by all." The escalating campaign against what's generically called colony collapse disorder includes more state, federal and private funding for research. Publicity efforts are getting louder - a costumed Mr. Bee was seen wandering around Capitol Hill this week - and lawmakers are becoming mobilized. On Thursday, Congress heard from farmers with troubled crops, from beekeepers struggling with lost hives, from frustrated researchers and even from corporate leaders worried about their own economic futures. Read The Full Story American Airlines Will Layoff 8 Percent Of Employees In September 2008-06-27 13:04:08 A long-expected wave of layoffs at American Airlines began to materialize Thursday, when employees were informed that about 8 percent of management and support staff will be cut in September. The cutbacks accompany plans to shrink the airline’s schedule by about 12 percent later this year. American executives have said they expect thousands of jobs to be eliminated as the carrier downsizes. Pilots, flight attendants and ground workers will likely face furloughs as well in the near future. "Our frontline staffing is very closely tied with flying," said Tim Wagner, a spokesman. "We’re still working to determine our staffing needs based on the new schedule." He added, "We don’t have the numbers yet but should have some estimates soon." Read The Full Story California Judge Removed From Bench 2008-06-27 13:03:08 An Orange County, California, judge was ordered removed from office Thursday by state officials who said the former county prosecutor filed false and misleading expense claims for a legal conference in San Diego and then lied when questioned about them. Orange County Superior Court Judge Kelly MacEachern is the first judge in the county and the 24th in California ordered removed from office since 1960. The jurist's attorney said MacEachern intended to appeal the split decision by the state Commission on Judicial Performance. In a 7-3 ruling made public Thursday, the commission concluded that MacEachern "engaged in willful misconduct" in misrepresenting her attendance at the Continuing Judicial Studies Program in summer 2006. The decision was based on findings by three masters appointed by the state Supreme Court to investigate the allegations. 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 - Friday June 27 2008 - (813)

Friday June 27 2008 edition
Free Internet Press is operated on your donations. Donate Today
Dow Drops More Than 358 Points On Oil Prices, Bad Corporate News 2008-06-26 21:46:34 U.S. stocks fell sharply Thursday, closing at a low not seen since September 2006, after oil prices spiked and a round of negative corporate news undermined confidence in the technology sector and anticipated further trouble among U.S. banks and brokerage firms. The Dow Jones industrial average was down more than 358 points at 11,453, a 3 percent drop. The tech-heavy Nasdaq experienced an even steeper decline, losing 3.3 percent, or nearly 80 points, to close at 2,321. The Standard & Poor's 500-stock index was also down about 2.9 percent, with a 39-point decline to 1,283. There was no single event that seemed to drive the sell-off. In fact, the two main pieces of economic news Thursday were positive. The government reported that gross domestic product in the first three months of the year grew a bit faster than initially thought. GDP expanded by a full 1 percent in the first quarter - sluggish, but still in positive territory, and better than the 0.9 percent initially estimated. Sales of existing homes also increased by 2 percent in May. Although prices continued falling, the increase in sales was a respite from months of recent declines. Read The Full Story Tests Show Mars Soil 'Friendly' To Life 2008-06-26 21:46:08 Early results from the first-ever "wet" chemical analysis of the surface soil of Mars show the planet harbors many of the nutrients needed for life and none of the acidity that some feared would make life highly unlikely. "There's nothing about it that would preclude life. In fact, it seems very friendly," said mission scientist Samuel P. Kounaves, of Tufts University. "We were flabbergasted." Kounaves said the soil was similar to what people would find in their back yards on Earth and that, if organic material was added, "You could probably grow asparagus, but not strawberries." Carbon-based organic material, however, has not been found and may be impossible to detect with the equipment now on Mars. The Viking missions to Mars in the 1970s failed to find evidence of carbon. The new findings come from the suite of chemistry labs on the Phoenix lander, which has been digging up soil from the northern polar area of Mars since it touched down late last month. Read The Full Story Le Telepresident: Sarkozy Tightens His Grip Over French State T.V. 2008-06-26 21:45:36 Nicolas Sarkozy's plans to increase government control over state TV Thursday sparked an outcry from his political opponents who accused him of tightening a Berlusconi-style grip on the airwaves and dragging France back into its dark age of postwar censorship and propaganda. The French president's proposed "cultural revolution" for France's five state TV channels prompted an uproar when he announced that in future, he and his cabinet would appoint the head of French state TV, instead of an independent body. Sarkozy, known as the Telepresident, prides himself on his numerous TV appearances, carefully studies his own ratings and has privately confided that he would have liked to have been a TV executive. So it was no surprise that he took direct control of the project to overhaul French state TV. He argued that a government appointment of the head of France Televisions was more "democratic". This has reopened the festering row over the president's influence over the media and closeness to his press and TV baron friends who are willing to lean on, censor or even sack journalists who displease him. Last month, a fresh row erupted after Sarkozy was accused of influencing the appointment of a newsreader, Laurence Ferrari, to the leading private channel TF1, run by one of the his closest friends. Her ousted predecessor was rumoured to have upset the president, who is conscious of his height, by asking if he ever felt "like a little boy in a big boy's playground". Read The Full Story U.S. Supreme Court Strikes Down Washington, D.C. Ban On Handguns 2008-06-26 15:48:51 The Supreme Court, splitting along ideological lines, Thursday declared that the Second Amendment protects an individual's right to own guns for self-defense, striking down the District of Columbia's ban on handgun ownership as unconstitutional. The 5 to 4 decision, written by Justice Antonin Scalia represented a monumental change in federal jurisprudence and went beyond what the Bush administration had counseled. It said that the government may impose some restrictions on gun ownership, but that the District's strictest-in-the-nation ban went too far under any interpretation. Scalia wrote that the Constitution leaves the District a number of options for combating the problem of handgun violence, "including some measures regulating handguns." "But the enshrinement of constitutional rights necessarily takes certain policy choices off the table," he continued. "These include the absolute prohibition of handguns held and used for self-defense in the home." The court also held unconstitutional the requirement that shotguns and rifles be kept disassembled or unloaded or outfitted with a trigger lock. The court called it a "prohibition against rendering any lawful firearm in the home operable for the purpose of immediate self-defense." Read The Full Story Oil Prices Jump On OPEC Statement 2008-06-26 15:48:31 Oil futures shot up to nearly $139 a barrel Thursday after OPEC's president said oil prices could rise well above $150 a barrel this year and Libya said it may cut oil production. Light, sweet crude for August delivery rose as high as $138.95 a barrel shortly after the New York Mercantile Exchange opened before retreating to trade up $3.61 at $138.16 Thursday afternoon. Chakib Khelil, president of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, said he believes oil prices could rise to between $150 and $170 a barrel this summer before declining later in the year. Khelil said he doesn't think prices will reach $200 a barrel. The head of Libya's national oil company said the country may cut crude production because the oil market is well supplied, according to news reports. Read The Full Story Commentary: More Phony Myths 2008-06-26 15:47:49 Intellpuke: This commentary was written by New York Time op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd and appeared in the New York Times edition for Wednesday, June 25, 2008. Karl Rove was impressed with Barack Obama when he first met him. But now he sees him as a “coolly arrogant” elitist. This was Rove’s take on Obama to Republicans at the Capitol Hill Club Monday, according to Christianne Klein of ABC News: “Even if you never met him, you know this guy. He’s the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by.” Actually, that sounds more like W. The cheap populism is really rich coming from Karl Rove. When was the last time he kicked back with a corncob pipe to watch professional wrestling? Read The Full Story 2 Suicide Bombers Kill At Least 30 In Iraq Attacks 2008-06-26 15:47:03 Two suicide bomb blasts struck at pro-American Iraqi targets just west of Baghdad and in the northern city of Mosul on Thursday, killing at least 30 people and wounding nearly 80. The bombings extended a pattern of multiple-casualty attacks in recent days that are clearly intended to kill local Iraqi leaders, in particular the Awakening Councils of Sunni tribal chieftains who have collaborated with American forces against Sunni insurgents. The more significant of the two attacks on Thursday took place in the town of Garma in Anbar Province, where the Awakening Councils have achieved notable progress over the past few years in battling Sunni insurgents. The American pacification of Anbar - once considered Iraq's most dangerous province at the height of the Iraq war a few years ago - has been so successful that American forces there are preparing to hand control of the province back to the Iraqi government.l The Garma attack was clearly aimed at participants at a weekly meeting of the leaders of the local Awakening Council, the Iraq police said. Initial reports from the police were that the bomb killed 12 people and wounded 27. Read The Full Story Delicate Talks For Democrats On Path To A Unified Party 2008-06-26 00:01:10 With the help of one of Washington’s best-connected lawyers, Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton are negotiating a thicket of complicated issues, like how to repay Clinton’s campaign debt and her role at the Democratic convention. The talks come as they try to leave behind their intense rivalry and work out a plan to cooperate this fall. At Clinton’s request, the lawyer, Robert B. Barnett, who has brokered multimillion-dollar book deals for clients including Obama, Clinton and Bill Clinton, is working to hash out questions large and small as the two camps work toward a political merger. Perhaps the thorniest question - what to do about Bill Clinton, who friends say continues to refight the bitter primary fight - has yet to be raised by either side, said advisers. On some levels, the melding of the two operations is moving ahead relatively smoothly. Clinton will introduce some of her top donors to Obama on Thursday night in Washington, D.C., and on Friday the two of them will appear together at a rally in Unity, New Hampshire. Obama is in talks to hire one of Clinton’s most prominent advisers - Neera Tanden, her policy director - and has hired and dispatched a few of Clinton’s field operatives to work in Missouri and Ohio. Yet, nearly three weeks after Clinton suspended her campaign and endorsed Obama, some loyalists, especially on the Clinton side, are having trouble moving on. Read The Full Story Nissan And Others Add Factories In Emerging Markets 2008-06-26 00:00:32 On a dusty sun-baked field, in a ceremony presided over by a chanting Brahmin priest tossing water and rice, the Japanese car maker Nissan Motor made a bold step into the Indian auto market. The traditional Hindu ritual this month, attended by a half-dozen sweating Japanese and European executives, blessed the site where Nissan will build its first passenger vehicle factory in India, a sprawling $1.1 billion complex where rice paddies once stood. The plant, built jointly with its French partner Renault an hour outside the southern city of Chennai, will turn out 400,000 cars a year when completed in two years. Japan’s Big Three - Toyota, Honda and Nissan - led the world in factory automation and eco-friendly technology, but until now they have been cautious about venturing far from the roads they know: the mature markets of North America and developing markets closest to home, particularly China and Thailand. Now, in a radical shift, Japan’s staid Big Three are plowing into exotic terrain, from Saharan Africa to the former Soviet Union to the scorching plains of southern India. They are determined not to repeat the mistakes of a decade ago, when they were late to the party in China, and where they have since trailed rivals like Volkswagen and General Motors. They have been particularly quick to expand in India, a nation of 1.1 billion that is just beginning its automotive revolution, and that many call the world’s next megamarket after China. Read The Full Story	U.S. Appeals Court Says No Deadline For EPA On Global Warming 2008-06-26 21:46:20 A U.S. federal appeals court refused Thursday to make a resistant Bush administration speed up a decision on whether greenhouse gases and global warming threaten public health and welfare. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia denied a petition by 17 states and several environmental groups asking it to order the Environmental Protection Agency  (EPA) to make that determination within 60 days. Such a finding is a necessary first step to regulating carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from motor vehicle tailpipes and the smokestacks of refineries, power plants and factories. The Supreme Court more than a year ago ruled that the EPA has the authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, a step President Bush has repeatedly refused to take. Instead, EPA is expected to issue a proposal in coming weeks that seeks public comment on a range of options the agency could take to control greenhouse gases under current law. It will take no position on whether carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases should be regulated, according to a draft obtained by the Associated Press. Read The Full Story FCC Opens Inquiry Into Stealthy Advertising 2008-06-26 21:45:58 A stealthy form of advertising in which products are featured on television shows as props and even woven into story lines has drawn the government's attention. The Federal Communications Commission said Thursday it will consider new rules to make it clear to viewers when brand-name products appear in shows in exchange for money. Spending on so-called "embedded advertising" has grown as advertisers look for new ways to reach viewers who flip channels during commercials or use digital video recorders like TiVo to fast-forward past them. In an order released Thursday, the agency is considering whether sponsorship identification notices should be in larger type, appear for a lengthier period of time on the screen and whether they should appear at both the beginning and the end of programs. Read The Full Story Russia President Medvedev In Siberia For Tough Negotiations On E.U. Pact 2008-06-26 21:45:25 Dmitry Medvedev, Russia's president, flew into Siberia last night for his international debut - a summit with European Union leaders . The E.U. wants to reach a deal with the Kremlin on legally binding strategic pact, but negotiations, which start formally Friday in the booming oil town of Khanty-Mansiisk, could drag on for years, analysts predict. Russia favors a concise format, but the E.U. wants a comprehensive pact to lay out details of cooperation in areas such as energy, justice and security. Brussels (where the E.U. headquarters is located) will hope that Medvedev adopts a more conciliatory tone than his predecessor, Vladimir Putin, now prime minister, who Russian officials said will not attend. Fyodor Lukyanov, editor-in-chief of Russia in Global Affairs, said Putin's absence is likely to make negotiations easier. "Medvedev won't use the same ugly metaphors that Putin did. This isn't insignificant," he said. But Russia was less enthusiastic about rebuilding its troubled relations with the E.U., he suggested. Read The Full Story Markets Drop On Worries About Banks, Oil Prices, Dwindling Dollar 2008-06-26 15:48:41 Stocks on Wall Street took a sharp plunge on Thursday after a discouraging report on the prospects of the nation’s biggest brokerage firms. The Dow Jones industrial average fell more than 250 points to its lowest level of the year. A report from Goldman Sachs predicted a new round of write-downs at Citigroup and Merrill Lynch, and downgraded Citi to a strong “sell” rating. Shares of Citi slipped 6 percent; Merrill Lynch shares were down 5.3 percent. The sell-off in brokerage firms helped push the Dow down 2.2 percent, past its intraday low for the year. The blue-chip index is now lower than it was at the height of the Bear Stearns debacle. A downgrade of General Motors also put pressure on stocks. Shares of G.M. were off by 11 percent in midday trading. Shares of Ford were down 4.5 percent Read The Full Story U.S. Supreme Court Rejects Campaign Finance Provision 2008-06-26 15:48:13 The Supreme Court Thursday narrowly overturned a controversial provision of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance legislation, ruling that it is unconstitutional to allow candidates to accept larger-than-normal contributions if their opponents use their own fortunes to finance election bids. Writing for the majority in the 5 to 4 decision, Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., said the provision - known as the "Millionaire's Amendment" - imposes "an unprecedented penalty on any candidate who robustly exercises" his or her First Amendment right to self-finance a campaign. Alito was joined in his opinion by Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., and Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer - the more liberal wing of the court - broke with the majority on most of the key points of the case. The law, Alito wrote, forces candidates who spend their own money to "shoulder a special and potentially significant burden" for making that choice, and they become subject to a "scheme of discriminatory contribution limits." The burden imposed by allowing one candidate to receive outside contributions triple the amount others may receive "is not justified by any governmental interest in eliminating corruption or the perception of corruption," wrote Alito. Read The Full Story Political Blog: Obama Leads McCain In 4 Key States 2008-06-26 15:47:36 Democrat Barack Obama holds narrow leads over Republican rival John McCain in Colorado and Michigan, two of the most competitive states in two of the most competitive regions of the country heading into the general-election campaign, according to surveys conducted by Quinnipiac University for washingtonpost.com and the Wall Street Journal. In two other states that were closely contested in the 2004 presidential election - Wisconsin and Minnesota - Obama holds double-digit edges among likely voters, an indication that these states may not be in the swing category this election. The Democratic Party's presidential nominee carried both Wisconsin and Minnesota in each of the last four elections, although Sen. John Kerry (Massachusetts) won each by slim margins in 2004. The four surveys are the kickoff of a four-month effort to measure voter sentiment in key battleground states. They echo several recent national polls - including surveys conducted for Newsweek and the Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg - showing Obama with a double-digit lead over McCain, the GOP candidate. However, other national surveys - including the Gallup daily tracking poll - show the race to be much closer. The path to the presidency runs through a handful of battleground states, as both Obama and McCain seek the 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House. Thus, the four states surveyed in this project provide a snapshot of where things stand less than five months before Election Day. Read The Full Story Feds Raid Blackwater's Armory In Firearms Probe 2008-06-26 15:46:45 Federal agents have raided an armory owned by security contractor Blackwater Worldwide. The North Carolina-based company said the raid was part of an investigation into a deal that allowed a local sheriff's office to store high-powered assault rifles at the company's armory at its headquarters in Moyock, North Carolina. Blackwater spokeswoman Anne Tyrrell says that investigators with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives searched Blackwater's armory Tuesday. Read The Full Story Why Is Moscow Risking A New Cold War? 2008-06-26 00:00:53 Strategic bombers off the American coast, battleships in the Mediterranean - the Russian military is displaying its might once again with Moscow pumping billions into new weapons, but where does the Kremlin see its enemies today and why is it risking another nuclear arms race with Washington? At eleven o'clock at night, when the moon is reflected in the slow-moving waters of the Volga River, when the steppes are exhaling the heat of the day, and when the last bars are closing in Yekaterinburg and Pokrovsk - old provincial cities on the river's left bank that are now called Marx and Engels - Gennady Stekachov is on his way into world politics. And everyone can hear it. The shutters shake in the crooked old wooden houses German settlers built 250 years ago, and the windowpanes rattle in the prefabricated high-rise apartment buildings from Soviet days. The cause of the commotion is Stekachov guiding his 150-ton, long-range bomber down a runway outside the city and, together with his crew of seven other men, taking off into the night sky. He follows his usual route north, up to the Arctic Sea and the Barents Sea, and then turns sharply to the West to circle the polar ice cap. The first NATO fighters, now on high alert, have appeared by the time Stekachov reaches the Norwegian coast. From there on the jets - French Mirages, British Tornados or Norwegian F-16s - escort the Tupolev Tu-95 past the Shetland and Faeroe Islands to a point off the American coast. Read The Full Story Oxfam Warns Poor Nations Against Biofuels 2008-06-26 00:00:13 Biofuels have pushed up world food prices and won't ease global warming, a new Oxfam report warns. Developing nations, the charity organization argues, should "move with extreme caution" before switching from staple food crops. The backlash against biofuels gained momentum on Tuesday when Oxfam International, the anti-poverty group, claimed in a new report that 30 percent of the recent rise in global food prices could be traced to the shift in world agriculture toward energy crops. The report criticized biofuel policies in Europe and the United States, and warned developing nations to "move with extreme caution" before raising lucrative biofuel crops at the expense of staple foods. "Rich countries' demands for more biofuels in their transport fuels are causing spiraling production and food inflation," said Oxfam biofuel policy adviser Rob Bailey, the report's author, at a news conference. "Grain reserves are now at an all-time low." 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