Free Internet Press Newsletter - Saturday February 28 2009 - (813)

Saturday February 28 2009 edition
Free Internet Press is operated on your donations. Donate Today
Economic Downturn Threatens To Undermine Government Spending Plan 2009-02-28 00:40:19 The economy is spiraling down at an accelerating pace, threatening to undermine the Obama administration’s spending plans, which anticipate vigorous rates of growth in years to come. A sense of disconnect between the projections by the White House and the grim realities of everyday American life was enhanced on Friday, as the Commerce Department gave a harsher assessment for the last three months of 2008. In place of an initial estimate that the economy contracted at an annualized rate of 3.8 percent - already abysmal -  the government said that the pace of decline was actually 6.2 percent, making it the worst quarter since 1982. The fortunes of the American economy have grown so alarming and the pace of the decline so swift that economists are now straining to describe where events are headed, dusting off a word that has not been invoked since the 1940s: depression. Economists are not making comparisons with the Great Depression of the 1930s, when the unemployment rate reached 25 percent. Current conditions are not even as poor as during the twin recessions of the 1980s, when unemployment exceeded 10 percent, though many experts assert this downturn is on track to be significantly worse. Read The Full Story Gov. Schwarzenegger Declares Drought Emergency In California 2009-02-28 00:39:48 Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proclaimed a statewide drought emergency Friday, urging Californians to cut water use by 20% and easing the way for water sales from Northern California to Southern California cities and San Joaquin Valley farms. The proclamation amplifies a drought emergency that Schwarzenegger declared last year in several agricultural counties, where more than 100,000 acres of farmland have gone unplanted for lack of water. The drought declaration stops short of mandatory water rationing; but it asks urban water users to step up conservation efforts and it directs state agencies to cut back on landscape irrigation, including along highways. The directive also orders the state to streamline permitting for water projects, such as recycling or desalination operations, and expedite water transfers to needy irrigation districts and urban areas in Southern California. Read The Full Story Federal Court Rejects Obama Administration Bid To Stop Wiretapping Suit 2009-02-28 00:39:19 The Obama administration has lost its argument that a potential threat to national security should stop a lawsuit challenging the government's warrantless wiretapping program. A federal appeals court in San Francisco on Friday rejected the Justice Department's request for an emergency stay in a case involving a defunct Islamic charity. Yet government lawyers signaled they would continue fighting to keep the information secret, setting up a new showdown between the courts and the White House over national security. The Obama administration, like the Bush administration before it, claimed national security would be compromised if a lawsuit brought by the Oregon chapter of the charity, Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, was allowed to proceed. Read The Full Story U. Of Florida Professor Accused Of Pocketing NASA Money 2009-02-28 00:38:47 Federal investigators are accusing a University of Florida professor and three members of his family of fraudulently receiving millions of dollars from NASA and then funneling money to their personal bank accounts, court documents show. Agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation raided the office of the university’s Innovative Nuclear Space Power and Propulsion Institute, which was founded by the professor, Samim Anghaie, who is its director and teaches radiological engineering. According to court documents, Dr. Anghaie and his family members set up a company called New Era Technology, or Netech. His wife, Sousan Anghaie, was its president. Court documents assert that the company submitted fraudulent proposals to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration for research contracts. As a result, the company received several NASA contracts. The company is also accused of submitting fraudulent invoices to NASA for hours it said were worked by employees. Investigators say Dr. Anghaie and his wife diverted hundreds of thousands of dollars of illegally obtained government money from their corporate bank account to personal accounts. The government says some money was diverted to their sons, Ali Anghaie and Hamid Anghaie. Read The Full Story U.S. Shares Move Lower, Dow Closes Down 119 Points 2009-02-27 17:13:37 Investors steadied themselves Friday after initially dumping stocks when Citigroup announced details of its plan to turn over more of the company to the government. Financial shares still dragged on the market Friday afternoon and shares turn lower in the last hour of trading. Other worries about the economy, and a report that the General Electric Company cut its dividend by 68 percent also weighed on traders. At the close, the Dow Jones industrial average was down 119.15 points or 1.6 percent to 7,062.93. Broader stock indicators were also down. The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index fell 17.74 points, or 2.3 percent, to 735.09. The index breached its Nov. 21 trading low of 741.02, which came during the height of the credit crisis.  Investors had hoped would mark the bottom of the market’s fall from October 2007. The Nasdaq composite index fell 13.63 points or 0.98 percent, to 1,377.84. Read The Full Story U.K. Police Hunt Radioactive School Principal Wanted On Child Pornography Charges 2009-02-27 17:12:50 British police appealed Friday for help hunting a "dangerously radioactive" college principal wanted on child porn charges. Seriously-ill Thomas Leopold, who had been given large doses of radiation for a thyroid condition, skipped bail shortly before his trial two weeks ago. He then drove on to a ferry heading for Rosslare in County Wexford, southeast Ireland. The 42-year-old head of a tutorial college in Harrow, Middlesex, has not been seen since. Read The Full Story U.S. Recession Deepens As GDP Shrinks 6.2 Percent In Last Quarter 2009-02-27 12:19:22 The depths of the recession became much clearer Friday morning as the government announced that the economy shrank at a dramatic pace of 6.2% in the final three months of last year, the country's worst economic performance since 1982. The Commerce Department sharply revised its earlier estimate of a 3.8% contraction in the fourth quarter for gross domestic product, the value of all goods and services produced by the economy. That initial figure was more optimistic than the 5% to 6% drop that most economists had predicted. Given those predictions, Friday's announcement wasn't too surprising, said Diane Swonk, chief economist of Mesirow Financial, but it still represents a sobering view of the depths of the recession, she said. "It's one thing to know reality. It's another thing to actually be faced with it," she said. Read The Full Story Obama Administration To Rescind 'Conscience' Regulation 2009-02-27 12:18:57 The Obama administration has begun the process of rescinding sweeping new federal protections that were granted in December to health-care workers who refuse to provide care that violates their personal, moral or religious beliefs. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) announced this morning that it was reviewing a proposal to lift the controversial "conscience" regulation, the first step toward reversing the policy. Once the OMB has reviewed the proposal it will published in Federal Register for a 30-day public comment period. "We are proposing rescinding the Bush rule," said an official with the Health and Human Services Department, which drafted the rule change. The administration took the step because the regulation was so broadly written that it could provide protections to health-care workers who object not only to abortion but also to a wide range of health-care services, said the HHS official, who asked not to be named because the process had just begun. Read The Full Story U.S. Senate To Investigate CIA's Actions Under Bush 2009-02-27 12:18:05 The U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee is preparing to launch an investigation of the CIA's detention and interrogation programs under President George W. Bush, setting the stage for a sweeping examination of some of most secretive and controversial operations in recent agency history. The inquiry is aimed at uncovering new information on the origins of the programs as well as scrutinizing how they were executed - including the conditions at clandestine CIA prison sites and the interrogation regimens used to break al-Qaeda suspects, according to Senate aides familiar with the investigation plans. Officials said the inquiry was not designed to determine whether CIA officials broke laws. "The purpose here is to do fact-finding in order to learn lessons from the programs and see if there are recommendations to be made for detention and interrogations in the future," said a senior Senate aide, who like others described the plan on condition of anonymity because it had not been made public. Still, the investigation is likely to call new attention to the agency's conduct in operations that drew condemnation around the world. It is also bound to renew friction between Democrats and Republicans who have spent much of the last five years fighting over the Bush administration's prosecution of the war on terrorism. Read The Full Story Rocky Mountain News, Colorado's Oldest Newspaper, Shuts Down 2009-02-27 12:17:04 Colorado's oldest newspaper, the Rocky Mountain News, is shutting down Friday, and industry analysts say it won't be the last to be pulled under by a rising tide of financial woes. E.W. Scripps announced Thursday that it is closing the 150-year-old Rocky, which has won four Pulitzer Prizes in the last decade, leaving Denver, like most American cities, a one-newspaper town. These are dark days for the struggling news business. Hearst threatened this week to close the San Francisco Chronicle unless major budget cuts are imposed or a buyer is found, and is also prepared to close the Seattle Post-Intelligencer if it cannot be sold. The Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News filed for bankruptcy protection this week, joining Chicago's Tribune Co. and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune in Chapter 11 status. Industry analyst John Morton called the Rocky's failure to find a buyer unsurprising. "The market is awash in newspapers for sale, and nobody is buying them," he said. "This recession has so impacted advertising revenue, particularly classifieds, that it's driven into unprofitability those who are in a precarious position." Read The Full Story Vatican Says Bishop's Holocaust Apology Fell Short 2009-02-27 12:16:36 The Vatican said on Friday that an apology by a bishop who has denied the scope of the Holocaust was not sufficient to restore him to full communion with the Roman Catholic Church. Last month, Pope Benedict XVI provoked worldwide outrage when he revoked the excommunication of four schismatic bishops, including Richard Williamson, who in a television interview broadcast a few days earlier had denied the existence of the Nazi gas chambers. In a statement published Thursday by the Zenit Catholic news agency, Bishop Williamson apologized to the pope, the church and “survivors and relatives of victims of injustice under the Third Reich.” But he did not address the substance of his views on the Holocaust. In an informal statement to reporters on Friday, the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said that Bishop Williamson’s apology “does not seem to meet the expectations” set forth by the Vatican earlier this month. Read The Full Story Democrats In Congress Complain About Iraq Withdrawal 2009-02-27 03:47:47 President Obama sought Thursday to quell growing complaints from members of Congress about his plans for drawing down troops in Iraq, inviting lawmakers to a White House meeting on the eve of a North Carolina speech in which he is expected to announce that he will pull out many combat troops by August of 2010. After House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) complained that the level of troops - 50,000 - who would remain in Iraq is too high, other senior Democrats voiced similar concerns. Not one member of the Democratic leadership, except for Sen. Richard J. Durbin (Illinois), defended the new Obama plan, which will take three months longer than he promised and still leave a significant force structure on the ground. White House officials said Obama had reached his decision after consulting with military commanders and would unveil the details in his address today during a trip to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. Yet even before making the plan official, Obama faced stiff resistance from members of his party as well as from some Republicans who said the idea of a withdrawal would not have been possible without the additional troops - or "surge" - that he opposed. Most lawmakers left the White House quickly after the event. Aides later said that Democrats seemed no more pleased during the meeting than before. Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona) issued a positive statement, saying he "supports the plan to leave 50,000 troops in Iraq as briefed by Admiral Mullen and Secretary Gates at the White House this afternoon." Read The Full Story	U.S. Soldiers In Iraq React Cautiously To Obama Pullout Plan 2009-02-28 00:40:07 Soldiers here at Forward Operating Base Warhorse, a dusty base in one of Iraq’s most volatile provinces, knew that at some point, the American war would end, but few here said they thought it would happen anywhere close to the deadline President Obama  announced Friday. “At some point, we have to draw a line,” Sgt. First Class Michael C. Miller said as he waited, for hours, for a helicopter ride that never came because of winds that churned fine dust into the sky. “But I still think they need our help.” President Obama’s plan echoed those sentiments, but the resoluteness of his deadlines - removing American combat troops by Aug. 31, 2010, and the rest by the end of 2011 - still caught some by surprise. “I thought the war would go on and on,” said Pvt. John R. Brown, a mechanic with the First Stryker Combat Brigade of the 25th Infantry Division. He watched the president’s speech on the Armed Forces Network in a recreation building named after a soldier who died here in Diyala Province more than five years ago. “I thought it would never end.” Read The Full Story Editorial: President Obama's Budget - Finally, Some Honesty About Taxes 2009-02-28 00:39:36 Intellpuke: This editorial appeared in the New York Times edition for Friday, February 27, 2009. President Obama’s first budget recognizes what most of Washington has been too scared or ideologically blind to admit: to recover from George W. Bush’s reckless economic policies, taxes must go up. Mr. Obama’s blueprint, released on Thursday, commits to cutting by more than two-thirds, by 2013, the $1.75 trillion budget deficit that Mr. Bush dumped on the nation. A credible pledge to reduce the deficit is imperative. Without it, foreign lenders - who financed the Bush-era deficits and are now paying for the stimulus and bailouts - could lose faith in the nation’s ability or willingness to repay in anything other than rapidly depreciating dollars. That would send interest rates up and the economy down, the worst-case scenario. Controlling the deficit is also necessary to sustain a recovery - when it comes. The collapse of the Bush-era economy is ample and awful evidence of the folly of unconstrained debt-fueled growth. The Obama administration has acknowledged the need for deficit spending to stimulate the economy but has vowed that unpaid-for government will not become the norm. Judging from the blueprint, Mr. Obama is not just talking the talk. A lot of the projected budget improvement is premised on economic recovery beginning in 2010, which may or may not happen. But much of it is premised on raising taxes. The proposed increases signal a serious attempt to tame deficits in a way that restores fairness to a tax code that has for too long been tilted in favor of the wealthiest Americans, resulting in budget shortfalls that disproportionately burden everyone else. At the same time, Mr. Obama has proposed a separate, targeted increase to help pay for health care reform in a way that doesn’t dig a deeper budget hole. Read The Full Story California's Unemployment Rate Hits 10 Percent 2009-02-28 00:39:05 More than 1 in 10 California workers were unemployed in January, the largest percentage in nearly 26 years, the state reported Friday. The 10.1% jobless rate is the highest since June 1983 and not far below the 11% record set in November 1982 at the worst point of a severe recession, according to the governor's office. Job losses escalated in January, with the state's unemployment rate jumping by 1.4 percentage points from a revised 8.7% for December. The grim California job numbers tracked closely with data released earlier in the day by the U.S. Commerce Department that showed that the national economy contracted by 6.2% in the last three months of 2008, the biggest slowdown in 26 years. Both numbers underscore that the U.S. and California economies are locked up because of a wrenching drop in demand for goods and services from businesses and consumers alike, said economists. Read The Full Story Obama Details Iraq Pullout Plan To Marines At Camp Lejeune 2009-02-27 17:13:53 President Obama declared Friday that the United States has now “begun the work of ending this war” in Iraq as he announced the withdrawal of most American forces by the summer of next year while leaving behind as many as 50,000 troops for more limited missions. Nearly six years after American troops crossed the border into Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein, said Obama, “renewed cause for hope” produced by improved security would allow Americans to begin disentangling militarily and turn the country over to the Iraqis themselves. “Let me say this as plainly as I can,” the president told thousands of Marines stationed here at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. “By August 31, 2010, our combat mission in Iraq will end.” The “transitional force” he will leave behind will no longer participate in major combat missions but instead train and advise Iraqi security forces, hunt down terrorist cells and protect American civilian and military personnel working in Iraq. Obama promised that all of them will leave as well by December 2011 in accordance with a security agreement with Iraq negotiated by President George W. Bush before he left office last month. Read The Full Story Lloyds Banking Group Heading For 75 Percent Government Ownership 2009-02-27 17:13:29 The taxpayer could end up with a near 75% stake in Lloyds Banking Group it emerged Friday after the U.K.'s biggest high street bank admitted the HBOS mortgage lender it rescued had incurred £10.8 billion of losses last year. Already 43% owned by the taxpayer, Lloyds bank could end up having to relinquish more control to the government as a result of its negotiations to buy insurance for its most troublesome assets - mainly those acquired when it took over HBOS in a deal brokered by the prime minister. The City (London's financial district) was disappointed after Lloyds admitted it was yet to reach agreement with the Treasury about the terms of participating in the so-called asset protection scheme. Its shares lost almost a quarter of their value to close at 58.3p amid anxiety that the talks had stalled even though chairman Sir Victor Blank insisted there was nothing untoward. The delay was merely because the treasury's negotiators were "absolutely and completed knackered, if you'll excuse the expression" after three days of intense discussion with Royal Bank of Scotland, Blank said. RBS could end up 95% owned by the taxpayer which is on course to inject another £25.5bn in to the Edinburgh-based bank in return for insuring £325 billion of its toxic assets in an agreement announced on Thursday. Read The Full Story Man Sets Self Afire In Front Of British Parliament 2009-02-27 17:12:42 A man was taken to a hospital Friday after setting himself afire outside Britain's Houses of Parliament, said police. Police and ambulance crews were called to Parliament Square, which faces the Palace of Westminster, at about 4 p.m.. The area is popular with demonstrators but it is not known at this stage if the injured man was a protester. A Metropolitan Police spokesman said: "We were called at around 4 p.m. to a man ablaze in Parliament Square. He has been taken to a south London hospital." The man is believed to be in his 40s, said police. Read The Full Story Oil Below $43 On Record Lows 2009-02-27 12:19:11 A record U.S. economic contraction dragged oil prices below $43 a barrel Friday after a surge in crude just a day earlier on evidence that protracted weak U.S. demand could be recovering. Thursday's bullish crude price path turned bearish as reports by the Commerce Department showed the economy shrank by 6.2 percent in the last quarter of 2008 - a 26 year record low. Benchmark crude for April delivery slid $2.42 cents to $42.87 a barrel by mid-afternoon in Europe on the New York Mercantile Exchange.The contract jumped $2.72 Thursday to settle at $45.22. The Commerce Department report released Friday showed the economy sinking much faster than the 3.8 percent annualized drop for the October-December quarter first estimated by the government last month. It also was considerably weaker than the 5.4 percent annualized decline economists expected. Read The Full Story FDIC To Raise Fees To Replenish Bank Fund 2009-02-27 12:18:35 Declaring the decline in its insurance fund to be an emergency, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC)  board is scheduled to vote Friday morning to impose an historic one-time $15 billion increase in insurance fees that will be collected from the nation’s banks. When combined with a longer term fee increase that will also be voted on Friday, the new fees would mean that banks must pony up $27 billion to replenish the insurance fund this year, compared with $3 billion last year, a jump that is certain to draw protests. FDIC officials said Friday morning that such a drastic step was necessary because the insurance fund - with the surging number of bank failures in the last year - has dropped below a legally mandated minimum. The agency, which insures deposits at 8,300 banks, now estimates it will lose $80 billion from 2008 to 2013 as a result of bank failures, double the losses estimated in the fall. Read The Full Story Mexico To Send 5,000 More Troops To Ciudad Juarez 2009-02-27 12:17:26 Amid growing alarm over drug violence in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, the Mexican government will deploy as many as 5,000 more troops to the border city, officials said Thursday. The increase would triple the number of troops and federal police officers operating there as part of President Felipe Calderon's offensive against drug traffickers. Ciudad Juarez Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz said the added troops would give the military a higher profile by taking control of police functions, including street patrols. Currently, soldiers tend highway checkpoints, guard crime scenes and take part in special operations, such as house searches. The city is without a police chief. Roberto Orduna Cruz quit last week after several officers were slain and someone posted threats saying more would be killed unless he stepped down. On Wednesday, top Mexican security officials traveled to Ciudad Juarez to reassure local leaders and vowed to significantly boost the federal presence. Read The Full Story Computer Maker Dell Income Drops 48 Percent 2009-02-27 12:16:51 During past downturns in technology spending, Dell tended to boast about its ability to weather the conditions better than competitors bogged down by higher-priced goods and cumbersome business models. In 2009, no such gloating has been heard. Like its peers, Dell has watched as businesses and consumers have sharply curtailed technology purchases. The decline in sales has proved so severe that Dell’s earnings have fallen to the lowest level since 2002. On Thursday, Dell reported that net income for the fourth quarter, ended Jan. 30, fell 48 percent, to $351 million from $679 million reported in the fourth quarter of the prior year. Revenue tumbled 16 percent, to $13.4 billion from $16 billion. Read The Full Story U.S. Plans Bigger Stake In Citigroup 2009-02-27 03:47:57 The federal government plans to take a substantial ownership stake in Citigroup, launching the Obama administration's new strategy to prevent the failure of any more large banks, according to sources familiar with the matter. The deal, which the sources said was still being negotiated Thursday night, is designed to reassure investors that Citigroup has the resources needed to survive the recession by increasing the company's reserves against future losses. The deal would not involve new money from taxpayers. The government already has invested $45 billion in the troubled New York bank. Citigroup now will be allowed to repay up to $25 billion by issuing the government shares of its common stock, which carry ownership rights. The government could end up owning about a third of the company, said the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the talks were ongoing. A key feature of the deal is that Citigroup must find private investors to match the public support. The government will accept common shares equal to the amount accepted by those investors, up to a limit of $25 billion, on a one-for-one basis. Under the plan, the government would forgo billions of dollars in dividend payments that Citigroup was required to make on the existing investments, which paid annual interest of 5 percent. However, taxpayers would benefit if Citigroup's shares rise in value. Read The Full Story Fannie Mae's Red Ink Prompts U.S. Aid 2009-02-27 03:47:32 Fannie Mae, the federally run mortgage giant, said last night that it lost $59 billion in 2008, prompting a government cash injection of $15 billion. The Washington, D.C.-based company said it lost $25.2 billion in the fourth quarter of 2008 on the decline of mortgage-related investments. The cash injection came in at the higher range of what Fannie Mae said it would need late last month. It represents the first government money invested in Fannie Mae; Freddie Mac, its McLean, Virginia, sibling, has already received $14 billion and said recently that it may need up to $35 billion more when it reports earnings in the coming days. Fannie Mae's losses are likely to continue, the company said. "We expect the market conditions that contributed to our net loss for each quarter of 2008 to continue and possibly worsen in 2009," the company said. "We now expect that we will experience a peak-to-trough home price decline of 20 percent to 30 percent, rather than the 15 percent to 19 percent decline we predicted last year," the company said. 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 February 27 2009 - (813)

Friday February 27 2009 edition
Free Internet Press is operated on your donations. Donate Today
U.S. Plans Bigger Stake In Citigroup 2009-02-27 03:47:57 The federal government plans to take a substantial ownership stake in Citigroup, launching the Obama administration's new strategy to prevent the failure of any more large banks, according to sources familiar with the matter. The deal, which the sources said was still being negotiated Thursday night, is designed to reassure investors that Citigroup has the resources needed to survive the recession by increasing the company's reserves against future losses. The deal would not involve new money from taxpayers. The government already has invested $45 billion in the troubled New York bank. Citigroup now will be allowed to repay up to $25 billion by issuing the government shares of its common stock, which carry ownership rights. The government could end up owning about a third of the company, said the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the talks were ongoing. A key feature of the deal is that Citigroup must find private investors to match the public support. The government will accept common shares equal to the amount accepted by those investors, up to a limit of $25 billion, on a one-for-one basis. Under the plan, the government would forgo billions of dollars in dividend payments that Citigroup was required to make on the existing investments, which paid annual interest of 5 percent. However, taxpayers would benefit if Citigroup's shares rise in value. Read The Full Story Fannie Mae's Red Ink Prompts U.S. Aid 2009-02-27 03:47:32 Fannie Mae, the federally run mortgage giant, said last night that it lost $59 billion in 2008, prompting a government cash injection of $15 billion. The Washington, D.C.-based company said it lost $25.2 billion in the fourth quarter of 2008 on the decline of mortgage-related investments. The cash injection came in at the higher range of what Fannie Mae said it would need late last month. It represents the first government money invested in Fannie Mae; Freddie Mac, its McLean, Virginia, sibling, has already received $14 billion and said recently that it may need up to $35 billion more when it reports earnings in the coming days. Fannie Mae's losses are likely to continue, the company said. "We expect the market conditions that contributed to our net loss for each quarter of 2008 to continue and possibly worsen in 2009," the company said. "We now expect that we will experience a peak-to-trough home price decline of 20 percent to 30 percent, rather than the 15 percent to 19 percent decline we predicted last year," the company said. Read The Full Story Former RBS Chief: 'Minister Approved My Pension And I'm Keeping It' 2009-02-26 18:35:07 An embarrassing squabble broke out Wednesday night between City minister Lord Myners and Sir Fred Goodwin over the refusal by the former Royal Bank of Scotland chief executive to give up his £693,000 (over $1 million) a year pension. Goodwin insisted that ministers had known about his £16 million ($28 million) pension pot for months and accused Myners of threatening him with more bad publicity if he did not hand back some of the pension he was awarded when he left the loss-making bank last month. "You highlighted that the absence of such a gesture would give rise to significant adverse media comment," Goodwin wrote in a defiant and combative letter to Myners which explicitly contradicts the government's insistence that it did not know the details of his payoff. Just hours later Myners issued his own letter telling Goodwin his refusal to reconsider his position was "unfortunate and unacceptable" and that he hoped "that on reflection you will now share my clear view that the losses reported by the bank which you ran until October cannot justify such a huge reward". RBS had earlier admitted it had made a record-breaking  £24 billion loss in 2008 and that the taxpayers' stake could rise to 95% after a further injection of up to £25.5 billion of government funds. Read The Full Story Thousands Of Europe's Opel Workers Demonstrate Against GM 2009-02-26 18:34:41 Some 60,000 employees of GM subsidiaries in Europe laid down their tools on Thursday to take part in protests aimed at saving their jobs. Huge losses in Detroit threaten to doom the German car maker Opel, and the workers want a divorce from the parent company. With American automotive giant General Motors struggling to survive amid the worst car industry downturn since 1982, employees of the company's European subsidiary Opel laid down their tools on Thursday to take part in mass demonstrations in a last ditch effort to save their jobs. Over 15,000 workers gathered at Opel's flagship factory in the western German industrial city of Russelsheim near Frankfurt with a total of 60,000 people joining protests at 14 Opel factories across Europe. "It is no longer five to midnight, the clock has already struck midnight," Klaus Franz, head of Opel's works council, told the gathered workers at Opel headquarters. "There is only one single chance, and that is spinning off Opel from the GM group." Germany's Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who will be running against Chancellor Angela Merkel in general elections this September, also attended the Thursday protest, saying he was doing everything he could for Opel. "We all agree that it is up to GM management. GM has long earned good money with Opel. It would be obscene were they now to throw away European factories like a squeezed-out lemon." Read The Full Story Weak Health Care Stocks Drag Stock Market Lower 2009-02-26 16:19:28 Health care stocks, one of the better performers on Wall Street lately, led the market lower Thursday after the White House proposed cutting payments to private insurance plans. The Obama administration's $3.55 trillion budget plan for 2010 includes cuts to Medicare, and private health insurance plans serving Medicare seniors would take the biggest hit. As investors became aware of the impact the budget, if enacted, could have on the companies, they turned against what had been one of the strongest industries in the stock market recently. In late afternoon trading, the Dow Jones industrial average fell 90.16, or 1.2 percent, to 7,180.73. The Standard & Poor's 500 index fell 12.36, or 1.6 percent, to 752.54 and the Nasdaq composite index fell 31.87, or 2.2 percent, to 1,393.56. The Russell 2000 index of smaller companies fell 8.52, or 2.1 percent, to 392.92. Declining issues outnumbered advancers by about 3 to 2 on the New York Stock Exchange, where volume came to 1.07 billion shares. Read The Full Story 667,000 New Jobless Claims In U.S., Continuing Claims Top 5 Million 2009-02-26 14:57:42 New jobless claims rose more than expected last week and the number of laid-off Americans continuing to receive unemployment benefits topped 5.1 million, fresh evidence the recession is increasingly forcing employers to shed jobs. The Labor Department said Thursday that first-time requests for unemployment benefits jumped to 667,000 from the previous week's figure of 631,000. Analysts had expected a slight drop in claims. The 667,000 new claims are the most since October 1982, though the labor force has grown by about half since then. The number of people receiving unemployment insurance for more than one week also increased more than expected to 5.1 million. That's the fifth straight week the figure has set a new record-high on data going back to 1967, and compared with only about 2.8 million people a year ago. As a proportion of the work force, the number of people continuing to receive benefits has reached its highest point since July 1983. Read The Full Story Villanueva, Mexico, Fed Up With Violence, Asks Military To Take Over 2009-02-26 14:57:15 The people of Villanueva said they'd had enough. Men in cowboy hats, women with hand-scrawled signs, children on bikes - they gathered outside town and blocked the main interstate highway. "If you can't do it, quit!" they told their police force. They demanded that the army take over. The army rolled into this town in Zacatecas state last month and ordered the police to stand down and surrender their weapons. They did. Things only got worse. A few days later, Police Chief Romulo Madrid, a former military man said to be eager to cooperate with the army, was shot and killed outside his house at 10:30 on a bright morning. The mayor's chauffeur, a first cousin, was arrested in the shooting. Read The Full Story U.S. Congress Urged To Change Century-Old Mining Law 2009-02-26 14:56:28 Contradicting a Barack Obama campaign position, a former transition team official said mining companies could pay federal royalties of up to 8 percent for gold, silver and other hard-rock mining on public lands. John Leshy, who served on the president's Interior Department transition team, told a House panel Thursday that revisions to a 137-year-old hard-rock mining law were long overdue. He said the government should reinstate environmental restrictions for hard-rock mining on public land that were wrongly abandoned by the Bush administration, contending that legislation that would impose environmental controls and first-ever royalty fees would not hurt the industry. "Gold is, and has been for quite a long time, a very profitable industry," Leshy, a professor at the University of California Hastings College of Law, told the House Natural Resources subcommittee. "Its current position is indeed enviable in comparison to the economic carnage currently being visited across much of the American economy." He said the industry "can readily absorb the modest royalties levied." Leshy also expressed support for legislative provisions that would direct the Interior secretary to veto any mining proposal that causes substantial environmental harm. As the Interior Department's top lawyer in the Clinton administration, Leshy issued a 1999 legal opinion that said such mining proposals must be blocked by the department under current law - only to see it reversed during the Bush administration. Read The Full Story JPMorgan To Cut 12,000 Jobs 2009-02-26 14:55:12 JPMorgan Chase & Co. said Thursday it expects to realize about $2 billion in savings related to its acquisition of Washington Mutual Inc. (WaMu), the failed Seattle, Washington, thrift the bank acquired at the end of September. The majority of the savings will be realized by the end of this year, according to slides on the company's Web site from an investor day presentation. This includes about $1.35 billion related to job cuts, said the bank. JPMorgan said about 12,000 jobs will be eliminated related to the acquisition. In December, the bank said it would cut a total of 9,200 jobs related to the WaMu deal. The 12,000 figure includes 2,800 jobs expected to be lost through attrition. At the end of December, the bank had a total of 224,000 employees worldwide. Shares jumped $1.83, or 8.4 percent, to $23.56 in afternoon trading amid a rise in the banking sector as a whole. JPMorgan's purchase of Washington Mutual, the largest bank ever to fail in U.S. history, added massively to the bank's consumer banking business and helped the company book a $1.1 billion gain in the fourth quarter. However, analysts and investors have been worried that corroding loans, particularly soured mortgages, inherited from WaMu could mar JPMorgan's results going forward. Read The Full Story Former CIA Official Gets 3-Year Prison Sentence 2009-02-26 14:54:35 A former high-ranking CIA official has been sentenced to more than three years in prison for a fraud scheme in which he steered procurement contracts to an old friend. The 37-month sentence for Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, who held the CIA's No. 3 rank from 2004 to 2006, matched prosecutors' recommendations. He pleaded guilty to a single count of fraud. Defense lawyers had argued for probation and cited Foggo's good deeds over two decades with the CIA, many of which remain classified. Read The Full Story Obama Budget Anticipates Revenue From Auto Emission Limits 2009-02-26 03:01:15 A mandatory cap on the nation's greenhouse gas emissions, which President Obama embraced on Tuesday as central to his domestic agenda, would be designed to generate badly needed revenue for the government while addressing arguably the world's most pressing environmental issue. Thursday, the White House will unveil a budget that assumes there will be revenue from an emissions trading system by 2012. Sources familiar with the document said it would direct $15 billion of that revenue to clean-energy projects, $60 billion to tax credits for lower- and middle-income working families, and additional money to offsetting higher energy costs for families, small businesses and communities. In testimony to Congress in September, Peter Orszag - then director of the Congressional Budget Office and now Obama's budget director - estimated that revenue from a cap-and-trade bill that died on the Senate floor last year would have reached $112 billion by 2012 and would have kept rising afterward. By 2020, Orszag estimated, a cap-and-trade program might generate $50 billion to $300 billion a year. But only hours after Obama's speech Tuesday to Congress, the cap-and-trade proposal triggered a heated exchange among senators on a key committee, underscoring that efforts to come up with a system that limits emissions, puts a price on carbon and allows industries to trade pollution allowances will be a difficult sell on Capitol Hill, especially in the current economic crisis. Read The Full Story Stimulus Aid Set Aside To Help Military Families Avoid Foreclosure 2009-02-26 03:00:55 The orders came while Navy Lt. Adam Diaz was winding down a one-year stint in Baghdad: Report to the Navy Annex in Arlington, Virginia, for a new assignment in April.  Given the military lifestyle, the prospect of a move came as no surprise to Diaz, 31, who has spent his adult life in the Navy. The shock came when he spoke with his wife, Stephanie Diaz, about the value of the Jacksonville, Florida, home they bought in June 2006, near the height of the housing bubble. "Hey, by the way," she recalls telling him. "The house has been valued for about 50 grand less than when we bought it." The housing crisis is hitting military families particularly hard, according to real estate agents and service member advocacy groups. Many who bought during the boom and must now relocate because of fresh orders are faced with selling their homes at a big loss. They are finding few buyers, or even renters, particularly in the hardest-hit markets. That is leaving some families facing options including renting at a loss, separation from their loved ones or, in some cases, foreclosure. The issue has caught the attention of Congress, which included language in the economic stimulus package to compensate service members who sell their home at a loss or have been foreclosed upon because they were forced to move after a base closure, reassignment or a combat wound required them to be relocated near a health facility. The program also covers surviving spouses of those killed in combat. Under the new provision, the government will cover 95 percent of a loss if a service member is forced to sell. The government can also choose to acquire the title of a home by paying off the balance of a service member's mortgage or paying the owner up to 90 percent of the home's previous value. No dollar ceiling has been set. Read The Full Story Housing Report Drags Down Stocks 2009-02-26 03:00:27 Stocks fell Wednesday in volatile trading as new details emerged about how the government will test the stability of some of the country's largest banks and poor housing data were released. The Dow Jones industrial average fell 80.05 points, or 1.1 percent, to 7270.89, while the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index fell 8.24 points, also 1.1 percent, to 764.90. The tech-heavy Nasdaq composite index lost 16.40 points, or 1.1 percent, to 1425.43. Prices have swung wildly this week, with stocks plunging Monday on fears that the government could be forced to nationalize banks, then rebounding sharply Tuesday. But, analysts said, investors remain concerned about the state of the economy. Most of the market's focus Wednesday was on details of the "stress test" the Obama administration will use to measure how much capital many of the largest banks will need to survive. Under the plan, the government could purchase preferred shares of bank stocks that could be converted to common shares, a change meant to give financial markets greater confidence. That helped address some of the uncertainty that has been plaguing Wall Street, said analysts. Read The Full Story	Democrats In Congress Complain About Iraq Withdrawal 2009-02-27 03:47:47 President Obama sought Thursday to quell growing complaints from members of Congress about his plans for drawing down troops in Iraq, inviting lawmakers to a White House meeting on the eve of a North Carolina speech in which he is expected to announce that he will pull out many combat troops by August of 2010. After House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) complained that the level of troops - 50,000 - who would remain in Iraq is too high, other senior Democrats voiced similar concerns. Not one member of the Democratic leadership, except for Sen. Richard J. Durbin (Illinois), defended the new Obama plan, which will take three months longer than he promised and still leave a significant force structure on the ground. White House officials said Obama had reached his decision after consulting with military commanders and would unveil the details in his address today during a trip to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. Yet even before making the plan official, Obama faced stiff resistance from members of his party as well as from some Republicans who said the idea of a withdrawal would not have been possible without the additional troops - or "surge" - that he opposed. Most lawmakers left the White House quickly after the event. Aides later said that Democrats seemed no more pleased during the meeting than before. Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona) issued a positive statement, saying he "supports the plan to leave 50,000 troops in Iraq as briefed by Admiral Mullen and Secretary Gates at the White House this afternoon." Read The Full Story Britain's Defense Secretary Admits U.K. Aided Iraq Terror Renditions 2009-02-26 18:35:54 The British government admitted Thursday that its troops in Iraq handed over terror suspects to the U.S., which then secretly rendered them to a prison in Afghanistan. After a year of allegations and repeated ministerial assurances to the contrary, the admission was made in the Commons by John Hutton, the defense secretary, who apologized to Parliament members for inaccurate information ministers had previously given them. He said British soldiers, believed to have been SAS troops, handed over two terrorist suspects to the U.S. in Iraq in February 2004. The men had been captured outside the U.K.-controlled zone covering southeastern Iraq. Hutton said the pair, believed to be Pakistanis, were still being held in Afghanistan. He said they were members of Lashkar-e-Taiba, a banned organization that he said was linked to al-Qaeda. The U.S. had assured Britain the two continued to represent "significant security concerns" and it was "neither possible or desirable to transfer them to either their country of detention or country of origin", Hutton told Parliament members. The U.S. had assured him the men were being held in humane conditions and had access to the Red Cross, Hutton said. Read The Full Story Geronimo Descendant Sues Yale University, Skull And Bones 2009-02-26 18:34:55 The great-grandson of Apache warrior Geronimo argues in a lawsuit that a secretive society at Yale University holds the remains of his great-grandfather. Harlyn Geronimo has sued Yale and the society - the Order of Skull and Bones - to try to recover the remains. "I think what would be important is that the remains of Geronimo be with his ancestors," he said. Skull and Bones, a collegiate society that's been around since 1832, includes alumni such as former President George W. Bush and his grandfather, Prescott Bush. Author Alexandra Robbins said evidence backs up the younger Geronimo's claim that Skull and Bones has the Apache warrior's remains. Read The Full Story Anti-Globalization Campaigner: 'We're Not Paying For Your Crisis!' 2009-02-26 18:34:20 Anger rises in Germany as the economy falls. Trade unions and globalization-critical protesters are planning demonstrations in Berlin and Frankfurt under the banner: "We're not paying for your crisis." Alexis Passadakis, 31, an activist from the group Attac, tells Spiegel what's wrong with the system. SPIEGEL: What do you mean with your battle cry, "We're not paying for your crisis"? Don't you want to pay taxes anymore? Passadakis: We believe that the cost of the economic crisis should be footed by those who profited most from globalization. SPIEGEL: As a leading exporter, Germany too has profited. Passadakis: No, the majority of people have not earned much from the boom - instead they have had to deal with restraint in their wage agreements. The rich, on the other hand, have seen strong increases in their wealth. So it is only fair that they should pay extra duties. SPIEGEL: You want to fleece the Aldi brothers and the Klatten and Otto families (Germany's richest people) among others? Read The Full Story Obama Plans Major Shifts In Government Spending 2009-02-26 14:57:58 President Obama's new budget blueprint estimates a stunning deficit of $1.75 trillion for the current fiscal year, which began five months ago, then lays out a wrenching change of course as he seeks to finance his own priorities while stanching the flow of red ink. By redirecting enormous streams of deficit spending toward programs like health care, education and energy, and paying for some of it through taxes on the rich, pollution surcharges, and cuts in such inviolable programs as farm subsidies, the $3.55 trillion spending plan President Obama is undertaking signals a radical change of course that Congress has yet to endorse. The deficit he inherited, a shortfall of more than $1 trillion as the current fiscal year began, has continued to swell in recent months with additional bank bailouts, the first wave of spending from a newly enacted stimulus plan and the continuing costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The administration, as it had announced, will try to cut that amount sharply by 2013, when Obama’s first term ends, to $533 billion, even as it escalates spending on crucial priorities. “There are times when you can afford to redecorate your house,” Obama said on Thursday morning as he released an outline of the budget for the next fiscal year, which begins in October, “and there are times when you have to focus on rebuilding its foundation.” Read The Full Story U.S. FDA Knew Of Firm's Bacteria-Tainted Syringes 2009-02-26 14:57:29 The operators of a company that shipped bacteria-tainted syringes linked to at least five deaths had been warned by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration about serious problems at a previous plant. The Aug. 11, 2005, warning letter, provided by the FDA on Wednesday, foreshadowed the legal problems now facing AM2PAT Inc. and its officials, who have been charged with falsifying sterility records on pre-filled heparin and saline syringes that sickened more than 100. The violations, which arose while AM2PAT operated its plant south of Raleigh, North Carolina, on Ransdell Road, were "symptomatic of serious underlying problems" in the company's quality control system, the FDA's warning letter stated. Investigators noted lax documentation of sterility tests, workers untrained for their jobs, and slack efforts to maintain and monitor a sterile environment. "Evidence of improperly trained personnel included an employee chewing gum while filling syringes and an employee improperly gowning during sterility test," the warning letter stated. In all, the 2005 letter cited nine serious breaches, suggesting a company in chronic violation of FDA rules designed to assure that drug devices are safe. Read The Full Story CIA Adds Economy To Security Threat Updates 2009-02-26 14:56:59 The daily White House intelligence report that catalogs the top security threats to the nation has a grim new addition, reflecting the realities of the age: a daily update on the global financial crisis and its cascading effects on the stability of countries through the world. The first Economic Intelligence Briefing report was presented to the White House Wednesday by the CIA, the agency's new director, Leon Panetta, revealed at a news conference. The addition of economic news to the daily roundup of terrorist attacks and surveillance reports appears to reflect a growing belief among intelligence officials that the economic meltdown is now preeminent among security threats facing the United States. "We've seen the impact of a worldwide recession occur throughout the world," said Panetta, who described the agency's newest product at his first news briefing since his confirmation. Instigated at the request of the White House, the daily report will ensure that U.S. policymakers are "not surprised" by the aftershocks from bank failures and rising unemployment, he said. The spy agency is following worrisome trends in many corners of the globe, from East Asia to Latin America. In private meetings Wednesday, Latin American intelligence officials warned their U.S. counterparts of a crisis spreading throughout the hemisphere, particularly in Argentina, Ecuador and Venezuela, said Panetta. "Clearly, it's related: What happens in the economy, and what's happening as a result of that, is affecting the stability of the world," he said. Read The Full Story GM Posts $9.6 Billion Loss, Burns Through $6.2 Billion Cash 2009-02-26 14:55:25 General Motors Corp. posted a $9.6 billion fourth-quarter loss and said it burned through $6.2 billion of cash in the last three months of 2008 as it fought the worst U.S. auto sales climate since 1982 and sought government loans to keep the century-old company running. The nation's biggest domestic automaker said Thursday it lost $30.9 billion for the full year and expects to state in its upcoming annual report whether its auditors believe the company remains a "going concern." GM and its auditors must determine whether there is substantial doubt about the automaker's ability to continue it operations. Chief Financial Officer Ray Young said the determination will depend a lot on whether GM gets further government loans and whether it can accomplish its restructuring goals. Young said that auditors are studying the future of the company because "there's uncertainty with how the Treasury will view our viability plan," and "uncertainty on whether we're going to be able to execute the terms of our loan agreement." The company has received $13.4 billion in federal loans since Dec. 31 and says it needs up to $30 billion to stay out of Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Top GM executives were in Washington, D.C., Thursday to meet with the Obama administration's auto task force to talk about restructuring and additional loans. Read The Full Story Obama Budget Would Cap Civilian Federal Employee Pay Raises 2009-02-26 14:54:54 Civilian employees of the federal government will be limited to a 2 percent pay increase in 2010 under the proposed budget released this morning by the Obama administration. The administration describes the proposed increase as reflective of the current economic crisis and bringing federal pay and benefit practices more in line with what workers in the private sector are experiencing. The fiscal 2010 budget summary released this morning notes that Obama has ordered a freeze of White House senior staff pay. "In this budget, federal employees also will be asked to do their part," the summary states. The proposed increase compares with a 3.9 percent increase for federal workers in 2009 and 3.5 percent in 2008. A senior official for the nation's largest federal employee union described the small increase as understandable. Read The Full Story Science Fiction Writer Philip Jose Farmer Dies At 91 2009-02-26 14:54:20 Philip José Farmer, a science fiction writer who shocked readers in the 1950s by depicting sex with aliens and who went on to challenge conventional pieties of the genre in caustic fables set on bizarre worlds of his own devising, died Wednesday. He was 91 and lived in Peoria, Illinois. His official web site announced his death, saying he “passed away peacefully in his sleep.” Mr. Farmer’s distinctive blend of intellectual daring and pulp-fiction prose found a worldwide audience. His more than 75 books have been translated into 22 languages and published in more than 40 countries. Though he wrote many admired short stories, he was best known for his multi-novel series. These sprawling, episodic works gave him room to explore every nuance of a provocative premise while indulging his taste for lurid, violent action. In his Riverworld series Mr. Farmer imagined a river millions of miles long on a distant planet where virtually everyone who has died on Earth is physically reborn and given a second chance to make something of life. In his Dayworld series, Earth’s overpopulation crisis has been relieved by a technical fix; each person spends one day of the week awake and the other six days in suspended animation. In his World of Tiers series, mad demigods create pocket universes for their own amusement, only to face rebellion from their putative creatures. Read The Full Story U.S. Is A Vast Arms Bazaar For Mexican Drug Cartels 2009-02-26 03:01:06 The Mexican agents who moved in on a safe house full of drug dealers last May were not prepared for the fire power that greeted them. When the shooting was over, eight agents were dead. Among the guns the police recovered was an assault rifle traced back across the border to a dingy gun store here in Phoenix, Arizona, called X-Caliber Guns. Now, the owner, George Iknadosian, will go on trial on charges he sold hundreds of weapons, mostly AK-47 rifles, to smugglers, knowing they would send them to a drug cartel in the western state of Sinaloa. The guns helped fuel the gang warfare in which more than 6,000 Mexicans died last year. Mexican authorities have long complained that American gun dealers are arming the cartels. This case is the most prominent prosecution of an American gun dealer since the United States promised Mexico two years ago it would clamp down on the smuggling of weapons across the border. It also offers a rare glimpse of how weapons delivered to American gun dealers are being moved into Mexico and wielded in horrific crimes. “We had a direct pipeline from Iknadosian to the Sinaloa cartel,” said Thomas G. Mangan, a spokesman for the U.S. federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in Phoenix. Read The Full Story U.S. Interior Secretary Salazar Scraps Oil-Shale Leasing 2009-02-26 03:00:38 In a second reversal of the Bush administration, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said Wednesday he is scrapping leases for oil-shale development on federal land in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming. Salazar rescinded a lease offer made last month for research, development and demonstration projects that could have led to oil-shale works on 1.9 million acres in the three states, greatly expanding the program. "I am withdrawing that Jan. 14 solicitation because in my view it was a midnight decision, and it was flawed," Salazar told reporters on a teleconference call from Washington, D.C. He said he also is scrapping an initial 5 percent royalty rate on oil-shale production that "sells taxpayers short." Conventional oil and gas production on public land produces royalties of up to 18.8 percent. Read The Full Story FDA: India's Largest Drug Firm Faked Tests On Generic Drugs Sold In U.S. 2009-02-26 02:59:43 India's largest drug maker has falsified laboratory tests for generic drugs that had been approved for sale in the United States, say officials at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The FDA cited the fraudulent laboratory tests Wednesday as it took the unusual step of stopping its review of all pending applications from Ranbaxy Laboratories. Federal investigators said the problems centered on the company's plant in Paonta Sahib, which has produced 25 drugs that have been approved by the FDA. Most of those medications are not thought to be on U.S. pharmacy shelves; since September, Ranbaxy has been prevented from exporting more than two dozen drugs to the United States. The FDA is not seeking a recall, because regulators do not believe the drugs pose a health risk. "There is no concern about the safety or efficacy of Ranbaxy's drugs on the U.S. market," said Deborah Autor, director of compliance at the FDA. The affected drugs include medications for high cholesterol and an antihistamine, but the FDA would not provide a specific list. Patients using the drugs should not stop, said Douglas Throckmorton, deputy director of the FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. 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 - Thursday February 26 2009 - (813)

Thursday February 26 2009 edition
Free Internet Press is operated on your donations. Donate Today
Obama Budget Anticipates Revenue From Auto Emission Limits 2009-02-26 03:01:15 A mandatory cap on the nation's greenhouse gas emissions, which President Obama embraced on Tuesday as central to his domestic agenda, would be designed to generate badly needed revenue for the government while addressing arguably the world's most pressing environmental issue. Thursday, the White House will unveil a budget that assumes there will be revenue from an emissions trading system by 2012. Sources familiar with the document said it would direct $15 billion of that revenue to clean-energy projects, $60 billion to tax credits for lower- and middle-income working families, and additional money to offsetting higher energy costs for families, small businesses and communities. In testimony to Congress in September, Peter Orszag - then director of the Congressional Budget Office and now Obama's budget director - estimated that revenue from a cap-and-trade bill that died on the Senate floor last year would have reached $112 billion by 2012 and would have kept rising afterward. By 2020, Orszag estimated, a cap-and-trade program might generate $50 billion to $300 billion a year. But only hours after Obama's speech Tuesday to Congress, the cap-and-trade proposal triggered a heated exchange among senators on a key committee, underscoring that efforts to come up with a system that limits emissions, puts a price on carbon and allows industries to trade pollution allowances will be a difficult sell on Capitol Hill, especially in the current economic crisis. Read The Full Story Stimulus Aid Set Aside To Help Military Families Avoid Foreclosure 2009-02-26 03:00:55 The orders came while Navy Lt. Adam Diaz was winding down a one-year stint in Baghdad: Report to the Navy Annex in Arlington, Virginia, for a new assignment in April.  Given the military lifestyle, the prospect of a move came as no surprise to Diaz, 31, who has spent his adult life in the Navy. The shock came when he spoke with his wife, Stephanie Diaz, about the value of the Jacksonville, Florida, home they bought in June 2006, near the height of the housing bubble. "Hey, by the way," she recalls telling him. "The house has been valued for about 50 grand less than when we bought it." The housing crisis is hitting military families particularly hard, according to real estate agents and service member advocacy groups. Many who bought during the boom and must now relocate because of fresh orders are faced with selling their homes at a big loss. They are finding few buyers, or even renters, particularly in the hardest-hit markets. That is leaving some families facing options including renting at a loss, separation from their loved ones or, in some cases, foreclosure. The issue has caught the attention of Congress, which included language in the economic stimulus package to compensate service members who sell their home at a loss or have been foreclosed upon because they were forced to move after a base closure, reassignment or a combat wound required them to be relocated near a health facility. The program also covers surviving spouses of those killed in combat. Under the new provision, the government will cover 95 percent of a loss if a service member is forced to sell. The government can also choose to acquire the title of a home by paying off the balance of a service member's mortgage or paying the owner up to 90 percent of the home's previous value. No dollar ceiling has been set. Read The Full Story Housing Report Drags Down Stocks 2009-02-26 03:00:27 Stocks fell Wednesday in volatile trading as new details emerged about how the government will test the stability of some of the country's largest banks and poor housing data were released. The Dow Jones industrial average fell 80.05 points, or 1.1 percent, to 7270.89, while the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index fell 8.24 points, also 1.1 percent, to 764.90. The tech-heavy Nasdaq composite index lost 16.40 points, or 1.1 percent, to 1425.43. Prices have swung wildly this week, with stocks plunging Monday on fears that the government could be forced to nationalize banks, then rebounding sharply Tuesday. But, analysts said, investors remain concerned about the state of the economy. Most of the market's focus Wednesday was on details of the "stress test" the Obama administration will use to measure how much capital many of the largest banks will need to survive. Under the plan, the government could purchase preferred shares of bank stocks that could be converted to common shares, a change meant to give financial markets greater confidence. That helped address some of the uncertainty that has been plaguing Wall Street, said analysts. Read The Full Story U.S. Stocks Fall Sharply On Housing Report 2009-02-25 14:59:05 Stocks fell sharply lower Wednesday morning after a new report showed that existing home sales fell to their lowest level in 11 years, providing fresh concern about the continuing downward spiral of the housing market. The Dow Jones industrial average was down nearly 2 percent, or 145 points, in the early afternoon, and the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index also was down 1.9 percent, or 15 points. The tech-heavy Nasdaq lost 2 percent, or 30 points. Existing home sales fell 5.3 percent to a seasonally adjusted 4.49 million units in January, according to the National Association of Realtors. They are down 8.6 percent from January 2008. The sales rate was much worse than the forecast and the lowest level on record, according to Mike Larson, real estate analyst at Weiss Research. It would take more than nine months to sell all of the homes on the market at the current sales rate. "The list of challenges for housing is long, and familiar, at this point," said Larson. "You can try to minimize foreclosures to stem the flood of supply hitting the market. But if Americans are worried they won't have a job next month, next quarter, or next year, you've got a real problem. ... People just aren't going to buy many houses." Read The Full Story Pakistan: American Missile Strikes Worsen Al-Qaeda Threat 2009-02-25 14:58:44 American missile strikes have reduced al-Qaeda's global reach but heightened the threat to Pakistan as the group disperses its cells here and fights to maintain its sanctuaries, said Pakistani intelligence officials. The officials acknowledge that the strikes and raids by the Pakistani military are proving effective, having killed as many as 80 al-Qaeda fighters in the past year, but they express growing alarm that the drone strikes in particular are having an increasingly destabilizing effect on their country. They also voiced fears that the expected arrival of 17,000 American troops in Afghanistan this spring and summer would add to the stresses by pushing more Taliban fighters into Pakistan. The assessment was provided during a two-hour briefing by senior analysts and officials of Pakistan’s main spy service, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in keeping with the agency’s policy. The analysis reflected the increasing public pressure on the Pakistani government to oppose the drone attacks, which are deeply unpopular here for the civilian casualties they have inflicted. Read The Full Story Iran Tests Its First Nuclear Plant 2009-02-25 14:58:09 The first nuclear power plant built in Iran was tested successfully by Iranian and Russian officials Wednesday, said Iranian officials. The power plant is projected to be fully operational by the end of this year. "This, in simple terms, means that Bushehr power plant is completed today and its operation is definite," Gholamreza Aqazadeh, head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization, told Iranian state television. "The political concerns about Bushehr plant are now completely addressed today." The launch of operations at the 1,000-megawatt light-water reactor near the southern Iranian port of Bushehr - built with Russian assistance under a $1 billion contract - had long been delayed over financial ambiguities as well as construction and supply glitches. The plant is a highly symbolic facet of Iran's controversial nuclear program. The United States, Israel and some European nations have charged that Iran is trying to produce nuclear weapons. Read The Full Story Sweeping U.S. Arrests Target Mexican Drug Cartels 2009-02-25 14:57:39 U.S. federal agents have rounded up more than 700 suspects in a wide-ranging crackdown on Mexican drug cartels operating inside the United States. A law enforcement official familiar with the sweep said the arrests culminated in a series of Drug Enforcement Administration raids Tuesday night and Wednesday morning around the country. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because authorities were still gathering evidence. The operation has led to the arrests of 751 individuals and the seizure of $59 million in suspected criminal proceeds, said the official, though it was not immediately clear how many of the arrests came in the overnight raids. Attorney General Eric Holder plans to announce results of the crackdown at an afternoon news conference in Washington, D.C. Read The Full Story	U.S. Is A Vast Arms Bazaar For Mexican Drug Cartels 2009-02-26 03:01:06 The Mexican agents who moved in on a safe house full of drug dealers last May were not prepared for the fire power that greeted them. When the shooting was over, eight agents were dead. Among the guns the police recovered was an assault rifle traced back across the border to a dingy gun store here in Phoenix, Arizona, called X-Caliber Guns. Now, the owner, George Iknadosian, will go on trial on charges he sold hundreds of weapons, mostly AK-47 rifles, to smugglers, knowing they would send them to a drug cartel in the western state of Sinaloa. The guns helped fuel the gang warfare in which more than 6,000 Mexicans died last year. Mexican authorities have long complained that American gun dealers are arming the cartels. This case is the most prominent prosecution of an American gun dealer since the United States promised Mexico two years ago it would clamp down on the smuggling of weapons across the border. It also offers a rare glimpse of how weapons delivered to American gun dealers are being moved into Mexico and wielded in horrific crimes. “We had a direct pipeline from Iknadosian to the Sinaloa cartel,” said Thomas G. Mangan, a spokesman for the U.S. federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in Phoenix. Read The Full Story U.S. Interior Secretary Salazar Scraps Oil-Shale Leasing 2009-02-26 03:00:38 In a second reversal of the Bush administration, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said Wednesday he is scrapping leases for oil-shale development on federal land in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming. Salazar rescinded a lease offer made last month for research, development and demonstration projects that could have led to oil-shale works on 1.9 million acres in the three states, greatly expanding the program. "I am withdrawing that Jan. 14 solicitation because in my view it was a midnight decision, and it was flawed," Salazar told reporters on a teleconference call from Washington, D.C. He said he also is scrapping an initial 5 percent royalty rate on oil-shale production that "sells taxpayers short." Conventional oil and gas production on public land produces royalties of up to 18.8 percent. Read The Full Story FDA: India's Largest Drug Firm Faked Tests On Generic Drugs Sold In U.S. 2009-02-26 02:59:43 India's largest drug maker has falsified laboratory tests for generic drugs that had been approved for sale in the United States, say officials at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The FDA cited the fraudulent laboratory tests Wednesday as it took the unusual step of stopping its review of all pending applications from Ranbaxy Laboratories. Federal investigators said the problems centered on the company's plant in Paonta Sahib, which has produced 25 drugs that have been approved by the FDA. Most of those medications are not thought to be on U.S. pharmacy shelves; since September, Ranbaxy has been prevented from exporting more than two dozen drugs to the United States. The FDA is not seeking a recall, because regulators do not believe the drugs pose a health risk. "There is no concern about the safety or efficacy of Ranbaxy's drugs on the U.S. market," said Deborah Autor, director of compliance at the FDA. The affected drugs include medications for high cholesterol and an antihistamine, but the FDA would not provide a specific list. Patients using the drugs should not stop, said Douglas Throckmorton, deputy director of the FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. Read The Full Story At Least 9 Dead As Turkish Airliner Crashes Near Amsterdam 2009-02-25 14:58:56 A Turkish Airlines jet carrying 135 people crashed into a field on its approach to Amsterdam’s international airport on Wednesday, killing at least nine people and injuring dozens, said airport authorities and Turkish officials. Most of the passengers were Turkish, but there were four Americans, one Briton, and 33 Dutch on the plane as well, according to NTV television. One of the Americans aboard the plane, a Boeing 737-800, was a Boeing official, NTV reported. Television images showed the plane lying fractured into three parts after it slammed into the ground. The aircraft did not catch fire. Witnesses said the plane’s engines broke off and landed about 100 yards from the fuselage in a plowed field. Michel Bezuijen, the acting mayor of nearby Haarlemmermeer, told a news conference that there was no immediate word on the cause of the accident. The crash took place in calm weather with a light drizzle. Read The Full Story Japan's Exports Plunge As Financial Crisis Hits Asia 2009-02-25 14:58:30 Japan's exports fell by 46 percent in January, and Hong Kong’s economy contracted 2.5 percent in the last three months of 2008, further signs that the economic downturn in Asia is set to drag on through this year, data released Wednesday showed. Much of Asia’s growth in recent years was based on an export boom, allowing the recession in the United States and Europe to spread through a region that had been insulated from the American financial troubles that ignited the current downturn. The Japanese economy was one of the first in Asia to tip into recession last year as weakness stemming from poor domestic demand was compounded by evaporating demand from overseas. During the last three months of 2008, Japan’s economy shrank 12.7 percent from the year-earlier period, and the trade data for January, which was released Wednesday, underpinned economists’ views that the start of 2009 was looking even worse. Exports plunged 46 percent from a year earlier and imports dropped 32 percent, echoing similarly sharp declines reported recently by China and Taiwan. Overseas demand is unlikely to pick up soon; Ben S. Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, said late on Tuesday that full recovery could be at least a year away. Read The Full Story Washington Post Co. Earnings Drop 77 Percent 2009-02-25 14:57:54 The Washington Post Co. earnings fell 77 percent in the fourth quarter of last year compared with the same period in 2007, as a large impairment charge drove down net income. The Post Co. reported fourth-quarter net income of $18.8 million ($2.01 per share) on revenue of $1.16 billion, compared with net income of $82.9 million ($8.71) on revenue of $1.13 billion in the fourth quarter of 2007. The company's newspaper division, which includes the flagship Washington Post, reported a $14.4 million operating loss for the fourth quarter and a $192.7 million operating loss for all of 2008, nearly half of which came from the cost of early-retirement packages taken by some 231 Post employees. The charge dragged the Post Co. into the red in the second quarter of 2008, for the first time in its 37-year history as a publicly traded company. The company's magazine division - largely Newsweek - reported a $10.9 million operating profit for the fourth quarter but a $16.1 million operating loss for 2008. 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 - Wednesday February 25 2009 - (813)

Wednesday February 25 2009 edition
Free Internet Press is operated on your donations. Donate Today
Amid Gloom, Obama Pledges A Recovery 2009-02-24 21:49:48 President Obama appealed to the determination and optimism of the American people on Tuesday evening, telling them that it will take a long time for the teetering economy to right itself, but that better days will come if they join him in building a new economic foundation for a new century. “Now is the time to act boldly and wisely, to not only revive this economy, but to build a new foundation for lasting prosperity,” the president said. “Now is the time to jump-start job creation, re-start lending, and invest in areas like energy, health care, and education that will grow our economy, even as we make hard choices to bring our deficit down.” In speaking to a joint session of Congress and to the American people, President Obama was trying for a message at once bracing and heartening, and also trying to gain momentum for ambitious policy objectives like health care and education reform and lower federal deficits, and all this in a time of economic unease. “While our economy may be weakened and our confidence shaken; though we are living through difficult and uncertain times, tonight I want every American to know this: We will rebuild, we will recover, and the United States of America will emerge stronger than before,” Mr. Obama said. “The weight of this crisis will not determine the destiny of this nation,” the president said. “The answers to our problems don’t lie beyond our reach. They exist in our laboratories and universities; in our fields and our factories; in the imaginations of our entrepreneurs and the pride of the hardest-working people on Earth.” “Those qualities that have made America the greatest force of progress and prosperity in human history we still possess in ample measure. What is required now is for this country to pull together, confront boldly the challenges we face, and take responsibility for our future once more.” Read The Full Story In Britain, Fight Against Terror 'Spells End Of Privacy' 2009-02-24 20:53:56 Privacy rights of innocent Britons will have to be sacrificed to give the security services access to a sweeping range of personal data, one of the architects of the government's national security strategy has warned. Sir David Omand, the former Whitehall security and intelligence co-ordinator, sets out a blueprint for the way the state will mine data - including travel information, phone records and emails - held by public and private bodies and admits: "Finding out other people's secrets is going to involve breaking everyday moral rules." His paper provides the most candid assessment yet of the scale of Whitehall's ambitions for a state database to track terrorist groups. It argues that while the measures are essential, public trust will be maintained only if such intrusive surveillance is carried out within a strong framework of morality and human rights. "Modern intelligence access will often involve intrusive methods of surveillance and investigation, accepting that, in some respects this may have to be at the expense of some aspects of privacy rights," he writes in a newly published Institute for Public Policy research paper. "This is a hard choice, and goes against current calls to curb the so-called surveillance society - but it is greatly preferable to tinkering with the rule of law, or derogating from fundamental human rights. Being able to demonstrate proper legal authorization and appropriate oversight of the use of such intrusive intelligence activity may become a major future issue for the intelligence community, if the public at large is to be convinced of the desirability of such intelligence capability." Read The Full Story Commentary: Fiddling While Europe Burns 2009-02-24 20:53:30 Intellpuke: This commentary was written by Guardian assistant editor and foreign affairs columnist Simon Tisdall, and appeared in the Guardian edition for Tuesday, February 24, 2009. In his commentary, Mr. Tisdall writes: "As the financial crisis deepens, the E.U.'s indecision and failure to act threatens to shatter the vision of a united Europe." His commentary follows: If the European Union has an answer to the intensifying financial firestorm in eastern Europe, it is keeping it to itself. But the longer member states fiddle about, the greater the risk of a pan-continental conflagration - and of lasting damage to the E.U.'s core aspiration for wider and deeper union. A fractious meeting of foreign ministers at E.U. headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, this week seemed to sum up all that is wrong and doesn't work in the E.U. Rather than urgently address massive Hungarian debt defaults, plunging Polish output, splintering Baltic coalitions, or Ukrainian street protests, they wasted time arguing over Slovenia's arcane Adriatic fishing boat dispute with Croatia. Richer west European states, led by Germany, fear eastern instability could further harm their struggling economies. Austrian bank lending in eastern Europe, for example, is equivalent to about 80% of Austria's entire GDP. Eastern borrowers must repay $400 billion in debt owed to western banks this year - or else everybody gets burned. Yet worries about spreading contagion did not prevent "old Europe" holding up an E.U. commission plan to spend €5bn on energy and other infrastructure projects, part of a €200 billion stimulus package that southern members like Spain and Greece say unfairly favours the east. The main concern of Gordon Brown's Euroskeptic Britain, meanwhile, seems to be stopping its pocket being picked by recent arrivals. Read The Full Story UPDATE: Toddler, Six Others Shot On Mardi Gras Parade Route 2009-02-24 20:53:04 A Mardi Gras parade erupted into chaos on Fat Tuesday when a series of gunshots struck seven people, including a toddler. The child was not seriously injured and two suspects were in custody, said police. The shootings happened near the Garden District about 1:40 p.m. after the last major parade of the celebration, Rex, had ended. A stream of truck floats that follow the parade were passing by when gunfire broke out. "It sounded like a string of fireworks, so I knew it was more than one shooter," said Toni Labat, 29, a limousine company manager. She was with her two children, a 2-year-old boy and a 10-year-old girl. "Everybody was petrified. They hit the ground, the floats stopped, everybody on the floats ducked," said Labat. Labat said one man dragged himself on the ground screaming for help after being wounded and another man was gasping for air and bleeding from his mouth. Read The Full Story Solis Confirmed As U.S. Labor Secretary 2009-02-24 20:52:28 The U.S. Senate Tuesday afternoon confirmed Rep. Hilda Solis (D-California) as labor secretary, more than two months after she was nominated for the post by President Obama. The Senate voted 80 to 17 to confirm Solis, after Senate Republicans Tuesday assured Democrats that they would not filibuster the nomination. Solis had come under fire from Senate Republicans, who thought she was unresponsive to many of their questions during her confirmation hearing, a situation that was compounded by her work as treasurer for American Rights at Work, a pro-labor group. There were also concerns among some Republicans about her support for a measure that would make it easier for workers to organize unions. Consideration of Solis' nomination was further delayed when it was revealed that her husband had recently paid about $6,400 to settle tax liens against his California auto repair business. Read The Full Story Dow Gains 236 Points In Tuesday's Trading 2009-02-24 17:13:42 Wall Street bounced back on Tuesday from its lowest levels in 11 years after the chairman of the Federal Reserve  tamped down investor fears that the government would nationalize major banks. “We are committed to ensuring the viability of all major financial institutions,” the Fed chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, told the Senate Banking Committee. His reassurance on nationalization followed earlier statements from the White House saying that the government supported a privately held banking system. At 3:45 p.m., the Dow Jones was 230 points higher, nearly erasing all of Monday’s losses. The broader Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index was 3.8 percent higher and the technology-heavy Nasdaq was up more than 3.6 percent. Bank shares, which have tumbled since the start of the year, sprang back as investors pushed aside concerns about a government takeover that could wipeout existing shareholders. Shares of Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo and Citigroup rose by double digits. Crude oil rose again, settling at $39.90 a barrel, up $1.46 in New York trading. Read The Full Story Officials: U.S. To Pull Out Of Iraq In 19 Months 2009-02-24 17:12:07 The United States will withdraw most of its troops from Iraq by August 2010, 19 months after President Barack Obama's inauguration day, according to administration officials who expect Obama to make the announcement this week. The withdrawal plan would fulfill one of Obama's central campaign pledges, albeit a little more slowly than he promised. He said he would withdraw troops within 16 months, roughly one brigade a month from the time of his inauguration. The U.S. military would leave behind a residual force, between 30,000 and 50,000 troops, to continue advising and training Iraqi security forces. Also staying beyond the 19 months would be intelligence and surveillance specialists and their equipment, including unmanned aircraft, according to two administration officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because the plan has not been made public. A further withdrawal would take place before December 2011, when the U.S. has already agreed with Iraq that it would remove all American troops. A senior White House official said Tuesday that Obama is at least a day away from making a final decision. He further said an announcement on Wednesday is unlikely, but Obama could discuss Iraq during a trip to North Carolina on Friday. Read The Full Story Sen. Durbin Asks Sen. Burris To Consider Resignation, Burris Declines 2009-02-24 17:11:46 Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) suggested Sen. Roland Burris (D-Ill.) resign in a meeting between the pair, but Burris told Durbin he would not step down. "I told him, 'If I were in your shoes, I would consider resigning'," Durbin told reporters outside of his office in the Capitol, following a meeting with Burris that lasted more than 30 minutes. "He said 'I will not resign.'" Burris brushed by reporters after the meeting and would not comment except to say, "It was a good meeting." Durbin spoke at a length and abandoned any pretense of support for Burris following the recent disclosures that Burris had spoken with several associates of then-Gov. Rod Blagojevich (D) before his appointment to the Senate seat, and even tried to raise money for the now-impeached governor. Durbin said he would not support Burris if he ran to retain the seat next year, which Burris has not ruled out. Durbin repeatedly said he was "disappointed" that Burris had not disclosed all of his contacts with Blagojevich, which Durbin and Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) had demanded as a condition of the Senate seating Burris last month. Read The Full Story Fed Chief Bernanke Vows To Use Every Tool To Stem Financial Crisis 2009-02-24 14:32:49 While the United States economy is likely to worsen significantly over the next year, the Federal Reserve is “committed to using all available tools” to stanch the financial crisis and unfreeze credit markets, the Fed chairman, Ben S. Bernanke,told the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday. He added that the economy was suffering through a “severe contraction” and could get even worse than recent forecasts. In the first leg of his twice-annual report to both houses of Congress on the state of the economy and the Fed’s actions, Bernanke painted a dire picture of the financial markets going forward, but assured the committee that government agencies were taking all necessary actions to thaw credit markets. “The measures taken by the Federal Reserve, other U.S. government entities and foreign governments since September have helped to restore a degree of stability to some financial markets,” Bernanke said in his testimony. “Nevertheless, despite these favorable developments, significant stresses persist in many markets.” In particular, he said, most securitization markets “remain shut.” Read The Full Story French Court Reverses Terror Convictions 2009-02-24 14:32:27 A French appeals court on Tuesday overturned terrorist conspiracy convictions for five former inmates of the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, prison camp who had been tried and convicted in 2007, after they were returned to France.  The court ruled that information gathered by French intelligence officials in interrogations at Guantanamo Bay violated French rules for permissible evidence, and that there was no other proof of wrongdoing. None of the men, who were originally captured in Afghanistan in 2001 and 2002, is currently in jail, having been given time off for time already served. Yet the ruling is likely to be seen as a precedent for similar cases, as well as inject more uncertainty into the sensitive process of repatriating inmates being released from Guantanamo Bay, which President Obama has vowed to shut down. Various European countries have expressed willingness in principle to take some of the inmates, depending on their potential for dangerous behavior and whether the United States also accepts some. Some European countries prefer that the European Union come up with a unified position, so Washington cannot play one country against another while trying to negotiate placements. Read The Full Story U.S. Home Prices Continue Record Slide 2009-02-24 14:31:37 U.S. single family home prices ended 2008 with record declines, continuing that trend for a second straight year, according to a leading index released Tuesday. The Standard & Poors/Case-Shiller U.S. national home price index fell 18% in the fourth quarter of 2008 compared to the same period a year ago, the largest decline in the index's 21-year history. The sharpest declines from the previous year were in Phoenix, Arizona (down 34%), Las Vegas, Nevada (down 33%), San Francisco, California (down 31%), Miami, Florida (down 29%) and Los Angeles, California, which includes Orange County, (down 26%). Las Vegas, Phoenix, Miami and San Francisco home prices were down more than 40% from their market peaks, which occurred at different times. Los Angeles-area home prices ended 2008 down 37% from their late 2006 peak. "Most of the nation appears to remain on a downward path, with all of the 20 metro areas reporting annual declines," said David M. Blitzer, chairman of the index committee at Standard & Poors. Read The Full Story NASA Climate Change Satellite Crashes Minutes After Launch 2009-02-24 14:30:57 A rocket carrying a NASA satellite designed to study global warming crashed near Antarctica, failing to reach orbit after it was launched this morning, according to officials. The Orbiting Carbon Observatory satellite never reached orbit after it took off about 2 a.m. Pacific Standard Time from Vandenberg Air Force Base, NASA said in a posting on its website. "The spacecraft did not reach orbit and likely landed in the ocean near Antarctica," said John Brunschwyler, the program manager. An investigation into the cause of the launch failure will be started. "Preliminary indications are that the fairing on the Taurus XL launch vehicle failed to separate," according to the posting on the NASA website. "The fairing is a clamshell structure that encapsulates the satellite as it travels through the atmosphere." Read The Full Story Health Care Tops Obama's Fiscal Needs List 2009-02-24 02:08:53 President Obama will make reforming the U.S. health-care system his top fiscal priority this year, administration officials said Monday, contending that reining in skyrocketing medical costs is critical to saving the nation from bankruptcy. At a summit on "fiscal responsibility" convened by the White House, top administration officials said they also are committed to stabilizing the Social Security system and to revising a tax code that generates too little money to cover the cost of government. The White House offered no timetable for those goals and few explicit ideas for how to achieve them, disappointing some lawmakers and other participants, who had hoped the summit might produce greater momentum to fix the chronic imbalance between government spending and tax collections that is driving the national debt to dangerous levels. Instead, the 3 1/2 -hour session was designed to demonstrate that the White House could foster a civilized conversation among an ideologically diverse group of lawmakers, academics, economists and interest groups. Obama assured the more than 100 participants that the debate over the nation's long-term financial health "doesn't end when we go home today." "We've got a lot of hard choices to make," Obama told them. "We need to build off this afternoon's conversation and work together to forge a consensus." Read The Full Story U.S. Pressured To Add Billions To Bailout 2009-02-24 02:08:23 The government faced mounting pressure on Monday to put billions more in some of the nation’s biggest banks, two of the biggest automakers and the biggest insurance company, despite the billions it has already committed to rescuing them. The government’s boldest rescue to date, its $150 billion commitment for the insurance giant American International Group, is foundering. A.I.G. indicated on Monday it was now negotiating for tens of billions of dollars in additional assistance as losses have mounted. Separately, the Obama administration confirmed it was in discussions to aid Citigroup, the recipient of $45 billion so far, that could raise the government’s stake in the banking company to as much as 40 percent. The U.S. Treasury Department named a special adviser to work with General Motors and Chrysler, two of Detroit’s biggest automakers, which are seeking $22 billion on top of the $17 billion already granted to them. Read The Full Story Survey Shows Broad Support For President Obama 2009-02-24 02:05:59 President Obama is benefiting from remarkably high levels of optimism and confidence among Americans about his leadership, providing him with substantial political clout as he confronts the nation’s economic challenges and opposition from nearly all Republicans in Congress, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll. A majority of people surveyed in both parties said Obama was striving to work in a bipartisan way, but most faulted Republicans for their response to the president, saying the party had objected to the $787 billion economic stimulus plan for political reasons. Most said Obama should pursue the priorities he campaigned on, the poll found, rather than seek middle ground with Republicans. Obama will deliver his first address to Congress on Tuesday evening against a backdrop of deep economic anxiety among the public, with worries spanning party, class and regional divides. A majority of Americans, 55 percent, say they are just making ends meet, with more than 6 in 10 concerned that someone in their household might lose his job in the next year. Americans are under no illusions that the country’s problems will be resolved quickly, but the poll suggested that they will be patient when it comes to the economy, with most saying it would be years before significant improvement. Read The Full Story New Bank Plan Might Result In Nationalization 2009-02-24 02:04:45 The Obama administration Monday revamped the terms of its emergency aid to troubled financial firms, setting a course that could culminate with the government nationalizing some of the country's largest banks by taking a controlling ownership stake. Administration officials said the change, which allows banks to repay the government with common stock rather than cash, is intended to give banks more capital to withstand a continued deterioration of the economy, and not to nationalize the banking system. In seeking to bolster investor confidence in troubled companies such as Citigroup, the government said it is willing to acquire large chunks of their shares. . The move is a significant gamble. The magnitude of the effort could underscore the severity of the crisis, further alarming investors. The government could also forego billions of dollars in dividend payments. Some investors welcomed the announcement. Even as the Dow Jones industrial average fell 251 points to its lowest close since 1997, shares of Citigroup climbed 10 percent. Shares of another troubled firm, Bank of America,rose about 3 percent. Read The Full Story What Did Tony Blair Know About U.S. Rendition? 2009-02-24 02:03:25 Binyam Mohamed has been released from Guantanamo and arrived back in London on Monday. The case of the Ethiopian man's ordeal may still unveil evidence about how much the British government knew about the rendition and torture of terror suspects. Binyam Mohamed's seven years of incarceration came to end on Monday at 1:11 p.m. The 30-year-old Ethiopian, with a British residency permit, had finally left the Guantanamo Bay detention center in Cuba, and after a 10-hour flight he landed at the Royal Air Force military airbase in Northholt near London. Waiting for him at the airport were his British lawyers, Clive Stafford Smith and Gareth Pierce, his U.S. military lawyer Yvonne Bradley and his sister Zuhra. The slender man, wearing white tennis shoes, jeans and a beige sweater, left the aircraft a short time later with faltering steps. Mohamed had spent the last few weeks on hunger strike in protest over his ongoing imprisonment. The fact that he has now been released makes him the first inmate to leave Guantanamo under the new U.S.  administration. For President Barack Obama the Ethiopian man from Great Britain had been a kind of test case, one that would test the credibility of his assertions that he would put an end to the Bush administration's legal aberrations. Read The Full Story	Text Of President Obama's Address To The Nation 2009-02-24 21:49:33 Intellpuke: Following is the prepared text of President Obama's address to the joint session of Congress Tuesday night, as provided to news organizations by the White House: Madame Speaker, Mr. Vice President, Members of Congress, and the First Lady of the United States: I’ve come here tonight not only to address the distinguished men and women in this great chamber, but to speak frankly and directly to the men and women who sent us here. I know that for many Americans watching right now, the state of our economy is a concern that rises above all others. And rightly so. If you haven’t been personally affected by this recession, you probably know someone who has - a friend; a neighbor; a member of your family. You don’t need to hear another list of statistics to know that our economy is in crisis, because you live it every day. It’s the worry you wake up with and the source of sleepless nights. It’s the job you thought you’d retire from but now have lost; the business you built your dreams upon that’s now hanging by a thread; the college acceptance letter your child had to put back in the envelope. The impact of this recession is real, and it is everywhere. But while our economy may be weakened and our confidence shaken; though we are living through difficult and uncertain times, tonight I want every American to know this: We will rebuild, we will recover, and the United States of America will emerge stronger than before. The weight of this crisis will not determine the destiny of this nation. The answers to our problems don’t lie beyond our reach. They exist in our laboratories and universities; in our fields and our factories; in the imaginations of our entrepreneurs and the pride of the hardest-working people on Earth. Those qualities that have made America the greatest force of progress and prosperity in human history we still possess in ample measure. What is required now is for this country to pull together, confront boldly the challenges we face, and take responsibility for our future once more. Now, if we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll admit that for too long, we have not always met these responsibilities â€" as a government or as a people. I say this not to lay blame or look backwards, but because it is only by understanding how we arrived at this moment that we’ll be able to lift ourselves out of this predicament. The fact is, our economy did not fall into decline overnight. Nor did all of our problems begin when the housing market collapsed or the stock market sank. We have known for decades that our survival depends on finding new sources of energy. Yet we import more oil today than ever before. The cost of health care eats up more and more of our savings each year, yet we keep delaying reform. Our children will compete for jobs in a global economy that too many of our schools do not prepare them for. And though all these challenges went unsolved, we still managed to spend more money and pile up more debt, both as individuals and through our government, than ever before. In other words, we have lived through an era where too often, short-term gains were prized over long-term prosperity; where we failed to look beyond the next payment, the next quarter, or the next election. A surplus became an excuse to transfer wealth to the wealthy instead of an opportunity to invest in our future. Regulations were gutted for the sake of a quick profit at the expense of a healthy market. People bought homes they knew they couldn’t afford from banks and lenders who pushed those bad loans anyway. And all the while, critical debates and difficult decisions were put off for some other time on some other day. Well that day of reckoning has arrived, and the time to take charge of our future is here. Now is the time to act boldly and wisely â€" to not only revive this economy, but to build a new foundation for lasting prosperity. Now is the time to jumpstart job creation, re-start lending, and invest in areas like energy, health care, and education that will grow our economy, even as we make hard choices to bring our deficit down. That is what my economic agenda is designed to do, and that’s what I’d like to talk to you about tonight. It’s an agenda that begins with jobs. Read The Full Story Britain's Straw: Iraq War Motives Must Remain A Secret 2009-02-24 20:53:45 The British government took the unprecedented decision Tuesday to block the release of cabinet minutes about the invasion of Iraq on the grounds that it would undermine democratic decision-making, the very argument used by freedom of information bodies which had ordered their disclosure. Britain's Justice Secretary Jack Straw told Parliament members the government had decided to use its veto powers under the Freedom of Information Act because publication "risked serious damage to cabinet government". He argued that the potential damage "far outweighs" any potential public benefit of publication and added that the decision to go to war had already been examined "with a fine-toothed comb" in several inquiries. Straw denied he was trying to "circumvent" the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act and said he had finally come to the decision on Monday afternoon, after the "final cabinet discussion of the matter". There had already been at least four inquiries into the war and the prime minister would consider the case for a further inquiry once the troops were home, he said. "Confidentiality serves to promote thorough decision-making. Disclosure of the cabinet minutes in this case jeopardizes that space for thought and debate at precisely the point where it has its greatest utility." Read The Full Story Even Small Amounts Of Alcohol Increase A Woman's Risk Of Cancer 2009-02-24 20:53:15 Women who drink a glass of wine a day are more likely to develop a range of cancers than are teetotalers, according to the largest study ever conducted into drinking and cancer.  A daily drink was found to significantly raise the risk of breast, liver and rectal cancer, and is estimated to account for more than 7,000 extra cases of cancer each year in the U.K. Researchers at the University of Oxford said the findings, which are part of the Million Women Study, make clear that even light, regular drinking can be a serious threat to health. Naomi Allen, a cancer epidemiologist who led the research, used medical records to identify cases of cancer among a group of 1,280,296 middled-aged women. Of the women who drank, the average intake was one unit per day, the equivalent to a small glass of wine or 8 grams of alcohol. A pint of beer would count as two units. Very few of the women consumed more than three drinks a day. Over a seven-year period, 68,775 women were diagnosed with cancer. Read The Full Story Newsblog: Fast-Spreading Phishing Scam Hits GMail Users 2009-02-24 20:52:45 Google just can’t get a break today (Tuesday). First, Google’s e-mail service froze for several hours, locking out millions of users. Now its chat service appears to be the conduit for a rapidly spreading phishing scam. Gmail users who are logged into the accompanying chat service Google Chat, as most are, have been getting messages that appear to be from friends, urging them to click on a Web address starting with tinyurl.com that takes them to a site called ViddyHo. The site asks for the person’s Gmail log-in information and then hijacks the account, sending out chat messages to all of the user’s contacts and spreading itself further. The online service Twitter had a steady stream of complaints and warnings about the attack. “To anyone who receives a Viddyho invite from me, please ignore it,” a Twitter user named Zaffi cautioned. “I think I’ve been duped.” Avivah Litan, a security analyst with the research firm Gartner, said phishing attacks luring Web surfers to click on videos have been steadily increasing over the last six months. Consumers have “wised up” to e-mail messages masquerading as notes from banks and credit card companies, said Ms. Litan. Now, she said, phishers are sending video invites that play on hot topics and news events (in this case, a video starring the comedy troupe The Lonely Island and the singer T-Pain). While the video plays, the site might be downloading so-called malware in the background to infect the victim’s computer. Read The Full Story Gov. Palin To Pay Alaska Nearly $7,000 For Children's Trips 2009-02-24 20:52:16 Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin will reimburse the state nearly $7,000 for costs associated with nine trips taken by her children, her attorney said Tuesday. Palin must reimburse the state within 120 days, according to a settlement agreement filed by a special investigator hired by the Alaska Personnel Board to investigate an ethics complaint filed against her. The exact amount will be determined by the Alaska Department of Administration, said Palin's attorney, Thomas Van Flein. He estimated the amount would be $6,800. There is no state law prohibiting the governor's family from traveling with her and the personnel board found no wrongdoing on the part of the governor. But the investigator, Timothy Petumenos, interpreted the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act to require that state only pay if the first family serves an important state interest. Petumenos said "some of the travel raised by the Complaint does not meet this standard," according to the agreement. Van Flein said 72 travel authorizations were studied, with nine found to be of questionable state interest. Read The Full Story U.S. Supreme Court Rules For State In American Indian Land Case 2009-02-24 17:12:24 The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday limited the federal government's authority to hold land in trust for Indian tribes, a victory for Rhode Island and other states seeking to impose local laws and control over development on Indian lands. The court's ruling applies to tribes recognized by the federal government after the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act. The U.S. government argued that the law allows it to take land into trust for tribes regardless of when they were recognized, but Justice Clarence Thomas said in his majority opinion that the law "unambiguously refers to those tribes that were under the federal jurisdiction" when it was enacted. The ruling comes in a case involving the Rhode Island-based Narragansett Indian Tribe and a 31-acre tract of land that the tribe purchased in rural Charlestown, about 40 miles south of Providence. At issue was whether the land should be subject to state law, including a prohibition on casino gambling, or whether the parcel should be governed by tribal and federal law. Read The Full Story BREAKING NEWS: Infant, 4 Others Shot Near Mardi Gras Parade Route 2009-02-24 17:11:56 Police say an infant and four other people have been injured in a shooting along a Mardi Gras parade route. New Orleans police spokesman Bob Young says the shootings were reported near the Garden District about 1:40 p.m. after the last major parade of the celebration had ended. Truck floats that follow the Rex parade were going by when gunfire broke out. Two suspects are in custody and three weapons believed used in the shooting have been recovered. Read The Full Story Afghanistan Bomb Kills 4 U.S. Soldiers, 1 Afghan Civilian 2009-02-24 17:11:35 A roadside bomb killed four U.S. troops patrolling in southern Afghanistan on Tuesday in the deadliest single attack on international forces this year. An Afghan civilian working with the Americans also died. The troops were patrolling with Afghan forces when their vehicle struck a bomb Tuesday afternoon, the U.S. military said in a statement. The military did not release the attack's location pending the notification of relatives. The previous deadliest attack against U.S. forces this year was an explosion in Zabul province in January that killed three troops. Twenty-nine Americans troops have died in Afghanistan this year, far surpassing the eight U.S. forces killed in the first two months of 2008. The U.S. is increasing troop levels in Afghanistan. A record 38,000 U.S. forces now operate in the country, many in Taliban strongholds in the dangerous south. Read The Full Story U.S. Supreme Court Upholds Conviction In Gun Case 2009-02-24 14:32:38 The Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld the conviction of a West Virginia man for violating a federal law barring people convicted in domestic violence cases from possessing firearms. In a 7-2 vote, the court ruled that a federal appeals court in Richmond, Virginia, wrongly threw out the conviction of Randy Edward Hayes. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote the majority opinion. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Antonin Scalia dissented. The federal government, gun control groups and women's rights advocates worried that a ruling for Hayes would have weakened the federal law enacted in 1996 that applied the 40-year-old ban on gun possession by a felon to people convicted of domestic violence misdemeanors. The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Hayes' favor because the West Virginia state law on battery under which he was convicted did not contain specific wording about a domestic relationship between the offender and the victim. Nine other appeals courts rejected that interpretation. Read The Full Story Editorial: What Part Of 'Stimulus' Don't They Get? 2009-02-24 14:32:07 Intellpuke: This editorial appeared in the New York Times edition for Monday, February 23, 2009. Imagine yourself jobless and struggling to feed your family while the governor of your state threatens to reject tens of millions of dollars in federal aid earmarked for the unemployed. That is precisely what is happening in poverty-ridden states like Louisiana and Mississippi where Republican governors are threatening to turn away federal aid rather than expand access to unemployment insurance programs in ways that many other states did a long time ago. What makes these bad decisions worse is that they are little more than political posturing by rising Republican stars, like Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina. This behavior reinforces the disturbing conclusion that the Republican Party seems more interested in ideological warfare than in working on policies that get the country back on track. Fortunately, as President Obama prepares for his first address to Congress on Tuesday evening, voters of both parties have noticed. About three-quarters of those polled in a recent New York Times/CBS News survey - including more than 60 percent of Republicans - said Mr. Obama has been trying to work with Republicans. And 63 percent said Republicans in Congress opposed the stimulus package primarily for political reasons, not because they thought it would be bad for the economy. It should be sobering news for Republicans that about 8 in 10 said the party should be working in a bipartisan way. The Republican Party’s attacks on the unemployment insurance portion of the stimulus package are a perfect example. States that accept the stimulus money aimed at the unemployed are required to abide by new federal rules that extend unemployment protections to low-income workers and others who were often shorted or shut out of compensation. This law did not just materialize out of nowhere. It codified positive changes that have already taken place in at least half the states. Read The Full Story As Eastern Europe Falters, Risks To Financial Stability Rise 2009-02-24 14:31:17 Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the countries of Eastern Europe have emerged as critical allies of the United States in the region, embracing American-style capitalism and borrowing heavily from Western European banks to finance their rise. Now the bill is coming due. The development boom that turned Poland, Hungary and other former Soviet satellites into some of Europe’s hottest markets is on the verge of going bust, raising worrisome new risks for the global financial system that may ricochet back to the United States. Last week, Wall Street plunged after Moody's Investors Service warned that Western banks that had recently beat a path to Eastern Europe’s doorstep now faced “hard landings,” spooking investors with new fears that the exposure could spread beyond Europe’s shores. Read The Full Story Los Angeles Sheriff Considers Closing Jail Due To Budget Cuts 2009-02-24 14:30:40 Los Angeles County, California, Sheriff Lee Baca said Tuesday he is considering closing at least one jail and possibly a second to cope with a $72-million budget gap. Baca said his plans are still preliminary because he’s not sure exactly how much the Sheriff’s Department budget is will be cut. He said the facility most likely to close would be the aging Men’s Central Jail, which over the years has been hit by unrest and several murders by inmates. Jailers have long said the facility is outdated and extremely difficult to patrol. Such a move would probably require the department to release some inmates earlier than they do now, because the capacity of the county jail system would drop. Baca said he is trying to avoid any cuts in sheriff street patrols, leaving jails the only place to trim. Read The Full Story Global Warming Lays Waste To Spain's Glaciers 2009-02-24 02:08:38 The Pyrenees mountains have lost almost 90% of their glacier ice over the past century, according to scientists who warn that global warning means they will disappear completely within a few decades. While glaciers covered 3,300 hectares of land on the mountain range that divides Spain and France at the turn of the last century, only 390 hectares remain, according to Spain's environment ministry. The most southerly glaciers in Europe are losing the battle against warming and look set to be among the first to disappear from the continent over the coming decades. Their loss will have a severe impact on summer water supplies in the foothills and southern plains south of the Pyrenees. "This century could see (perhaps within a few decades) the total, or almost total, disappearance of the last reserves of ice in the Spanish Pyrenees and, as a result, a major change in the current nature of upper reaches of the mountains," said the authors of the report on Spain's glaciers. Scientists have ruled out the idea that the progressive deterioration of glaciers around the globe are part of normal, long-term fluctuations in their size. Europe's glaciers are thought to have lost a quarter of their mass in the last eight years. Read The Full Story The Steep Decline Of The British Economy 2009-02-24 02:06:22 As the global economic crisis takes hold, hardly any other country has seen its fortunes wane as brutally as the United Kingdom. Once a model economy, the country has been overcome by a deep sense of uncertainty. It is a gloomy February in Great Britain, yet another month in which the economy is shrinking and the pound is faltering, and yet another month of record growth in unemployment. It is a month that has seen Ed Balls, the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, refer to the current recession as the "worst in 100 years," and which has witnessed the heads of the country's largest banks appear on television to apologize to the nation for the harm they have caused. Meanwhile, Britons are asking themselves how things could have come to this. Ash Akhtiar, who works for an employment agency in a Birmingham suburb, says that he wants to see someone pay for all of this. David L., a banker who, fearing for his job does not wish to see his name in print, is considering buying a gun to protect his family. Read The Full Story Swiss Try To Block U.S. Moves To End Banking Secrecy 2009-02-24 02:05:44 Pressure is growing in Switzerland to pass new laws to protect the confidentiality of its banks, as a U.S. court ruling against UBS threatens to blow open centuries of secrecy. Right-wing political parties in the country have started the task of amassing 100,000 signatures to hold a referendum to legally enshrine banking secrecy in its constitution, but the move will trigger a fight for Switzerland's soul, with intellectuals, left-leaning lawyers and campaigners joining forces to demand the end to a centuries-old tradition to avoid becoming isolated at a time when international attempts to stamp out tax haven abuse are gaining momentum. The debate comes in the wake of a potentially ruinous court case between UBS, one of the largest wealth managers in the world, and the U.S. Department of Justice. Last week, the DOJ demanded the identities and details of 52,000 accounts held by rich Americans whom it believes may have illegally evaded taxes. The case dates back to when a senior UBS banker revealed in a U.S. court statement eight months ago that he had smuggled diamonds in toothpaste tubes, destroyed offshore bank records on behalf of clients and helped one Florida property tycoon evade millions of dollars of taxes . The action by the DOJ has caused shockwaves in Switzerland, which also faced criticism from the U.K.'s chancellor of the exchequer, Alistair Darling, in a strongly worded attack last weekend. Read The Full Story U.S. May Set Greenhouse Gas Standard For Vehicles 2009-02-24 02:04:19 The Obama administration is considering establishing national rules for regulating greenhouse gas emissions for automobiles, according to White House officials, a move backed by both auto manufacturers and some environmentalists. For weeks, administration officials have been meeting with car companies as well as green groups and representatives from California - which is awaiting word on whether it will receive a federal waiver to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles - to try to broker a deal on the issue. On Sunday, Carol M. Browner, assistant to the president for energy and climate, said she and others backed the idea of a single standard for cars and trucks. "The hope across the administration is that we can have a unified national policy when it comes to cleaner vehicles," Browner said at the Western Governors' Association meeting in Washington. Monday, a White House official, who asked not to be identified because the policy has yet to be finalized, said Browner's comments did not mean the administration was seeking to usurp Congress' role in regulating carbon dioxide and other emissions linked to global warming. "The administration recognizes that these are hard times for the auto industry, and we are exploring a process to develop a national policy for autos within the context of larger restructuring negotiations," said the official. "The administration is engaged with Congress to pass cap-and-trade legislation, which the president believes is far superior to a regulatory approach using the existing Clean Air Act. If [the Environmental Protection Agency] finds that greenhouse gases endanger health or welfare, the next steps would be taken thoughtfully and with input from all stakeholders." 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