394 items found for your search. If no results were found please broaden your search.
(03/26/07 4:00am)
BERLIN – British Prime Minister Tony Blair said Sunday that the 15 British sailors and marines captured by Iran as they searched for smugglers off the Iraqi coast were not in Iranian waters and warned that Britain viewed their fate as a “fundamental” issue.\nThe group was seized at gunpoint on Friday, and the Foreign Office in London said British officials do not know where Iran is holding them.\n“It is simply not true that they went into Iranian territorial waters,” Blair said at a news conference in Berlin, calling the situation “very serious.”\n“I want to get it resolved in as easy and diplomatic a way as possible,” he said, but added he hoped the Iranians “understood how fundamental an issue this is for the British government.”\nBlair’s comment, at celebrations for the 50th birthday of the European Union, follows British and European Union demands for Iran to release the 15, who were seized at gunpoint in disputed waters between Iran and Iraq on Friday.\nBritain and the United States have said the sailors and marines had just completed a search of a civilian vessel in the Iraqi part of the Shatt al-Arab waterway when they were intercepted by the Iranian navy.\nIran, however, says they illegally entered Iranian waters. Iranian state television reported that its Foreign Ministry called in British Ambassador Geoffrey Adams, “to protest the illegal entry.” Britain disputed the Iranian account, saying the meeting was called at the ambassador’s request.\nThe U.N. Security Council on Saturday agreed to moderately tougher sanctions against Iran for its refusal to meet U.N. demands that it halt uranium enrichment. Many in the West fear Tehran’s nuclear program is not for power generation but for arms making, a claim Iran denies.\nThe approved sanctions included ban on Iranian arms exports and freezing the assets of 28 additional people and organizations involved in Iran’s nuclear and missile programs. About a third of those are linked to the Revolutionary Guard, an elite corps whose navy seized the British sailors and marines.\nThe British Foreign Office said requests for access to the 15 Britons had been denied and officials did not know where they were being held.\nIran’s Gen. Ali Reza Afshar said Saturday that the seized Britons were taken to Tehran for questioning where they “confessed” to illegally entering Iranian waters.\nLord Triesman, a Foreign Office undersecretary who had held talks with Iran’s ambassador on Saturday, told Sky News the issue of whether the sailors had strayed into Iranian waters was a technical one.\n“I’ve been very clear throughout that the British forces do not ever intentionally enter into Iranian waters,” he said.\n“There’s no reason for them to do so, we don’t intend to do so, and I think people should accept there’s good faith in those assertions.”\n“We believe there’s good strong evidence that they were in Iraqi water at the time,” Triesman said. “That’s a technical issue and I think it could be resolved as a technical issue.”\nIran’s top military official, Gen. Ali Reza Afshar, said on Saturday the seized Britons were taken to Tehran for questioning and had confessed to what he called an “aggression into the Islamic Republic of Iran’s waters.”
(03/26/07 4:00am)
RAMALLAH, West Bank – U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, declaring the atmosphere “not fully ripe,” shunned officials from the Islamic militant Hamas group on Sunday, dealing a setback to the new Palestinian government’s efforts to win international recognition.\nBan’s comments came on a day of high-profile diplomacy, with the U.N. chief and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice both in the region for talks with Israeli and Palestinian leaders. Both hope their clout will help to prod the two sides to start talking peace again.\nHamas, branded a terrorist group by the U.S. and European Union, joined the more moderate Fatah Party in a coalition government last week. The bitter rivals have expressed hope their alliance would end international isolation of the previous hard-line Hamas government.\nU.S. and European diplomats have held a stream of contacts with moderate members of the new coalition while avoiding Hamas ministers.\nWhile welcoming the new government’s formation, Ban said “the atmosphere is not fully ripe” for talks with Hamas, which has killed more than 250 Israelis in suicide bombings and refuses to recognize the Jewish state.\nAfter a meeting with President Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah, Ban said he hoped the new government would “show a genuine commitment to the basic principles ... of peace.”
(03/26/07 4:00am)
WASHINGTON – The White House and a key Republican senator reaffirmed support Saturday for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales even as Democrats questioned his credibility for apparently misrepresenting his role in firing eight federal prosecutors.\nCritics said the latest document disclosure – more than 280 pages of e-mails, calendar notations and other documents sent to Congress late Friday – bolstered their case for Gonzales’ ouster.\nYet one longtime ally who largely has kept quiet about the attorney general’s fate issued a statement of support.\n“He has always been straightforward and honest with me,” said Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah. “So, unless there is clear evidence that the attorney general deliberately lied or misled Congress, I see no reason to call for his resignation.”\nGonzales has said he participated in no discussions and saw no memos about plans to carry out the firings on Dec. 7 that Democrats contend were politically motivated.\nHis schedule, however, shows he attended at least one hourlong meeting, on Nov. 27, where he approved a detailed plan to execute the prosecutors’ firings.\nDemocrats said the new documents appear to show Gonzales was more involved than he claimed earlier.\n“How much scrutiny do we have to put behind everything the attorney general says?” the House Judiciary Committee chairman said in an interview with The Associated Press. “I know he’s busy, and he could have done things that he didn’t remember, but we’re going to give him as much rope as he needs,” said Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich.\nDemocratic Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, who heads the Senate Judiciary Committee, said the Nov. 27 meeting “widens the gap between the evolving explanations the Bush administration has offered and the facts that keep coming to light.”\nBut White House deputy press secretary Dana Perino said the documents do not conflict with Gonzales’ earlier statements.\n“The president continues to have confidence in the attorney general,” Perino said. “As the Justice Department said last night, these new documents are not inconsistent with its previous statements.”\nJustice spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said Saturday there are no plans for Gonzales to resign.\nAlso, several Republicans in both the House and Senate said they needed to learn more about how closely he was involved in the firings. Still stopping short of calling for Gonzales’ resignation, Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Ore., “thinks it’s better to have an attorney general that Congress has confidence in,” spokesman R.C. Hammond said.\nAt issue were statements Gonzales made at a March 13 news conference that appear to conflict with what the documents show.\nOn that day, Gonzales portrayed himself as largely unaware of the process of firing the prosecutors, depending instead on then-chief of staff Kyle Sampson – who resigned March 12 – to handle it.\n“I never saw documents,” Gonzales said then. “We never had a discussion about where things stood. What I knew was that there was ongoing effort that was led by Mr. Sampson, vetted through the Department of Justice, to ascertain where we could make improvements in U.S. attorney performances around the country.”
(03/26/07 4:00am)
A magnitude 6.9 earthquake struck central Japan on Sunday, killing at least one person and injuring 170 others as it toppled buildings, triggered landslides and generated a small tsunami along the coast. The quake was followed throughout the day by aftershocks.
(03/23/07 4:00am)
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. – John Edwards said Thursday his wife’s cancer has returned, but said he will continue his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.\n“The campaign goes on. The campaign goes on strongly,” Edwards told reporters, his wife by his side.\nThe recurrence of the cancer – this time on Elizabeth Edwards’ bone – presents a setback for the couple, both personally and politically. But both said they would stick with their plans to campaign vigorously for the nomination.\n“From our perspective, there was no reason to stop,” Edwards said. “I don’t think we seriously thought about it.”\nEdwards had canceled a Tuesday evening house party in Iowa to go with his wife to a doctor’s appointment, which his campaign described as a follow-up to a routine test she had Monday.\nFaced with questions about how his wife’s illness affected his political future, Edwards said he will pursue his second bid for the presidency, but: “Any time, any place I need to be with Elizabeth I will be there – period.”\nElizabeth Edwards, 57, was first diagnosed with cancer in the final weeks of the 2004 campaign. The day after Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry and Edwards, his running mate, conceded the election to George W. Bush, Edwards announced that his wife had invasive ductal cancer, the most common type of breast cancer, and would undergo treatment.\nElizabeth Edwards underwent several months of radiation and chemotherapy for the lump in her breast. Her husband’s campaign has said she had recovered from the illness.\n“I don’t look sickly, I don’t feel sickly. I am as ready as any person can be for that,” she said at the news conference.\nJohn Edwards said a biopsy of her rib had showed that the cancer had returned.\nThe bone is one of the most common places where breast cancer spreads, and once it does so it is not considered curable.\nBut how long women survive depends on how widespread the cancer is in the bone, and many can survive for years. The longer it takes for cancer to spread after the initial tumor, the better the prognosis. She was diagnosed in 2004.\nChemotherapy and radiation are standard treatments, along with use of drugs that specifically target the bones called bisphosphonates. Other treatments include hormone therapy if the cancer is responsive to estrogen.\nDr. Lisa Carey, Elizabeth Edwards’ physician, said that initial tests showed some very small suspicious spots elsewhere, but that the therapy focus would be on the bone. Asked where else, she said “possibly involving the lung.”\nCarey spoke to reporters following the news conference.\nThe couple, married 30 years, have a grown daughter, Cate, and two young children, Emma Claire and Jack. Their teenage son, Wade, died in 1996 when high winds swept his Jeep off a North Carolina highway.\n“We’ve been confronted with these kind of traumas and struggles already in our life,” Edwards said. “When this happens you have a choice – you can go and cower in the corner or you can go out there and be tough.”\nElizabeth Edwards added: “We’re always going to look for the silver lining – it’s who we are as people.”\nEdwards is running in the top tier of Democratic presidential candidates. Polls show Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama ahead of him, but he is making a strong showing in Iowa, site of the nation’s first presidential caucus. To emphasize his commitment to the race, Edwards said he was leaving North Carolina to go to New York, Boston and later California – all big fundraising locales.
(03/23/07 4:00am)
WASHINGTON – A Senate panel, following the House’s lead, authorized subpoenas Thursday for White House political adviser Karl Rove and other top aides involved in the firing of federal prosecutors.\nThe Senate Judiciary Committee decided by voice vote to approve the subpoenas as Republicans and Democrats sparred over whether to press a showdown with President Bush over the ousters of eight U.S. attorneys.\nDemocrats angrily rejected Bush’s offer to grant a limited number of lawmakers private interviews with the aides with no transcript and without swearing them in. Republicans counseled restraint, but at least one, Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, backed the action.\nA House Judiciary subcommittee authorized subpoenas in the matter Wednesday, but none has been issued.\nDemocrats said the move would give them more bargaining power in negotiating with the White House to hear from Bush’s closest advisers.\n“We’re authorizing that ability but we’re not issuing them,” Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said of the subpoenas. “It’ll only strengthen our hand in getting to the bottom of this.”\nRepublicans countered, however, that subpoenas were premature.\n“I counsel my colleagues, both Democrats and Republicans, to work hard to avoid an impasse. We don’t need a constitutional confrontation,” said Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the panel’s top Republican.\nEven as Democrats derided the White House’s offer, Bush spokesman Tony Snow maintained that lawmakers will realize it is fair and reasonable once they reflect on it.\n“We’re not trying to hide things. We’re not trying to run from things,” he said. “We want them to know what happened.”\nDemocrats, however, called Bush’s position untenable.\n“What we’re told we can get is nothing, nothing, nothing,” said Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., the Judiciary chairman. “I know he’s the decider for the White House – he’s not the decider for the United States Senate.”\nAttorney General Alberto Gonzales, fighting for his job amid the prosecutor furor, vowed he would not step aside and promised to cooperate with Congress in the inquiry.\n“I’m not going to resign,” Gonzales told reporters after an event in St. Louis. “No United States attorney was fired for improper reasons.”\nThe Senate panel voted to approve subpoenas for Rove, former White House counsel Harriet Miers and her former deputy, William Kelley. The House subcommittee Tuesday authorized subpoenas for Rove, Miers and their deputies.
(03/23/07 4:00am)
A rocket landed near the prime minister’s office Thursday during the first visit to Iraq by the head of the United Nations in nearly a year and a half, sending Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon ducking unharmed behind a podium at a news conference. The attack came as Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s government said it had been negotiating with Sunni insurgents for months, and the U.S. military said that it had released a senior aide to Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr on al-Maliki’s request.
(03/22/07 4:00am)
BEIJING – Talks on disarming North Korea’s nuclear program remained stalled Wednesday, stuck over a dispute on when $25 million of Pyongyang’s funds will be released from a Macau bank.\nNorth Korea said it would not take part in the six-party negotiations in China’s capital to meet goals outlined in a landmark Feb. 13 disarmament agreement until the money was transferred.\n“I can’t say with confidence how long it will take for the money to be transferred as North Korea wants, or what kind of technical obstacles remain,” said South Korean envoy Chun Yung-woo.\nHe told reporters it would be difficult to hold a planned meeting of the heads of the delegations “if North Korea insists that it cannot take part in negotiations before they confirm the transfer.”\nPlanned group talks were called off Tuesday, with some participants holding bilateral meetings instead, when North Korea said it would not take part until the money was in its account.\nNorth Korea boycotted the six-nation talks for more than a year after Washington blacklisted the tiny, privately run Banco Delta Asia on suspicion the funds were connected to money-laundering or counterfeiting.\nBut U.S. officials announced Monday that the money would be transferred to a North Korean account in Beijing, saying it was up to the Monetary Authority of Macau, a Chinese territory, to release the funds.\nThe authority has declined to say if it will announce when the funds have been released. “I have no instructions from my superiors regarding when the money will be transferred,” Wendy Au, a spokeswoman for the authority, said Wednesday.\nJapan’s chief delegate, Kenichiro Sasae, said he was still optimistic of progress once the transfer dispute was resolved.\n“As soon as the current problem, which is a technical issue, is resolved, I believe things will start moving forward,” he told reporters.\n“I hope talks among the heads of the delegations will resume, paving the way for progress on the discussions on the denuclearization issue,” he said.\nThe setback comes as the two Koreas, the U.S., Japan, Russia and host China are trying to fine-tune a timetable for North Korea’s disarmament under the February agreement.\nUnder the deal, North Korea is to receive energy and economic assistance and a start toward normalizing relations with the U.S. and Japan, in return for beginning the disarmament process.\nNorth Korea would ultimately receive assistance equivalent to 1 million tons of heavy fuel oil if it fully discloses and dismantles all its nuclear programs.
(03/22/07 4:00am)
Al Gore made an emotional return to Congress on Wednesday in an appeal for an even more dramatic rescue: saving the planet. Gore implored lawmakers to adopt a list of policy prescriptions to stop global warming.
(03/19/07 4:00am)
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa – The spokesman for Zimbabwe’s main opposition leader was assaulted by security forces as he tried to leave the country Sunday, a party official said, accusing the government of continuing to target dissident activists.\nThe latest assault happened as President Robert Mugabe’s government comes under increasing international criticism for cracking down on the country’s opposition, disrupting its gatherings, and beating and detaining its leaders.\nSunday’s attack on Nelson Chamisa follows the re-arrests at the airport Saturday of three opposition activists, who were allegedly assaulted when police broke up a March 11 protest meeting.\nChamisa, aide to Movement for Democratic Change leader Morgan Tsvangirai, was assaulted at Harare International Airport as he was trying to leave for a meeting of the European Union and Africa Caribbean Pacific in Brussels, Belgium, the party’s secretary general, Tendai Biti, said from Johannesburg.\n“He was beaten on the head with iron bars. There was blood all over his face. He is in a critical condition at a private hospital in Harare,” Biti said.\nMugabe accused the opposition of being terrorists supported by Britain and the West, as Tsvangirai said the crisis in Zimbabwe had reached a decisive moment.\n“Things are bad,” Tsvangirai told the British Broadcasting Corp.’s Sunday AM program, “but I think that this crisis has reached a tipping point, and we could see the beginning of the end of this dictatorship in whatever form.”\nIn Saturday’s re-arrests, Grace Kwinje and Sekai Holland, among the activists most severely injured March 11, were prevented from leaving to receive medical care abroad. Arthur Mutambara, leader of an opposition faction, was later also arrested at the airport.\nA lawyer for Mutambara, Beatrice Mtetwa, said Sunday her client was being kept at the Harare central police station, and that he was being charged with inciting public violence in relation to last week’s incident.\nHowever, she said he and the others were never formally charged. In a letter to police, Mutambara’s lawyers called his arrest “contemptuous, arrogant and malicious defiance” of a High Court order last week that stipulated he could not be taken into custody on the same charge.\nThe director of the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa, Tawanda Mutasah, said the Kwinje and Holland had tried to travel to Johannesburg to receive specialist post-traumatic care.\nHe said the ambulance carrying the two women from Harare’s Avenues clinic to the airport, where they were to leave in a medical rescue aircraft, was stopped on the tarmac by officers from Zimbabwe’s security forces.\nThe women’s passports were taken and they were told they needed clearance from the Department of Health. They were then instructed to go to Harare’s central police station, but were later allowed to return to the clinic under police guard.\nZimbabwean police used tear gas, water cannon and live ammunition to crush the March 11 gathering, and beat activists, during and after arrests, according to opposition members.\nThe latest violence has drawn new attention to a deteriorating situation in the southern African country, where the increasingly autocratic Mugabe is blamed by opponents for repression, corruption, acute food shortages and inflation of 1,600 percent – the highest in the world.\nMugabe, 83, has rejected the international condemnation following the arrests and alleged beating, lashing out at critics and telling them to “go hang,” and he vowed to crackdown on further protests.\nSpeaking at a ceremony to mark International Women’s Day in Harare on Saturday, Mugabe accused the opposition party of resorting to violence sponsored by former colonial power Britain and other Western allies to oust his government, a newspaper reported Sunday.\n“We have given too much room to mischief-makers and shameless stooges of the West. Let them and their masters know that we shall brook none of their lawless behavior,” Mugabe was quoted as saying in the Sunday Mail.\n“Scores of innocent people going about their legitimate business have fallen prey to terrorist attacks that are part of the desperate and illegal plot to unconstitutionally change the government of the country,” he said.
(03/19/07 4:00am)
BAGHDAD, Iraq – The U.S. military on Sunday announced the deaths of seven more troops in Iraq, including four killed by a roadside bomb while patrolling western Baghdad – the latest American casualties in a monthlong security crackdown in the capital.\nThough violence has receded slightly in the capital, a car bomb killed eight Iraqis in a predominantly Shiite district on Sunday, police said. The attack targeted people cooking food at open-air grills in the street, to offer as charity on a Shiite Muslim holiday commemorating the anniversary of the Prophet Muhammad’s death. Police said 28 others were wounded in the attack.\nA U.S. official, meanwhile, blamed al-Qaida in Iraq for chlorine bomb attacks that struck villagers in Anbar province earlier this week but said tight Iraqi security measures prevented a higher number of casualties.\nThe attacks killed at least two people and sickened 350 Iraqi civilians and six U.S. troops, the U.S. military said Saturday.\nU.S. military spokesman Rear Adm. Mark Fox said at least one of the attackers detonated his explosives after he was unable to get past an Iraqi police checkpoint in Amiriyah, just south of Fallujah, killing only himself. Fox conceded that many Iraqis were exposed to the chemical fumes but insisted that steps Iraqi security forces were increasingly effective.\n“Insurgent attempts to create high-profile carnage are being stopped at checkpoints across the country,” he said at a news conference in Baghdad.\nIraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh appealed to Iraqis to help stop the violence.\n“Opportunity is still available to all honest Iraqis to rescue this country from the criminals,” he said at a joint news conference with Fox. “The chlorine attack was a kind of punishment against the people who stood against terrorist organizations.”\nThere is a growing power struggle between insurgents and Sunnis who oppose them in Anbar, the center of the insurgency, which stretches from Baghdad to the borders with Syria, Saudi Arabia and Jordan. The Anbar assaults came three days after Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite, traveled there, hoping to reach out to Sunni clan chiefs and to undermine tribal support for the insurgency.\nAfter the explosion that killed four U.S. soldiers on Saturday, the unit came under fire and another soldier was wounded. During this month’s crackdown in the capital, the battalion had found eight weapons caches and two roadside bombs and helped rescue a kidnap victim, the military said.\nAn explosion in Diyala province northeast of Baghdad killed another soldier Saturday and injured five. A U.S. Marine also was killed Saturday in fighting in Anbar, according to a separate statement. A seventh service member died Saturday in a noncombat related incident, the military said.\nSaturday’s deaths brought to at least 3,217 members of the U.S. military who have died since the Iraq war started in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.
(03/19/07 4:00am)
Search teams combed North Carolina’s rugged mountain terrain Sunday to look for a 12-year-old Boy Scout who went missing Saturday during a group hike. About 10 scouts and their adult leaders of Troop 230 from Greensboro noticed the boy was missing when they returned to their campsite Saturday afternoon after hiking in Stone Mountain State Park, said Saundra Lewis, communications officer for the Wilkes Rescue Squad.
(03/19/07 4:00am)
BEIJING – The top American nuclear envoy said Sunday that he believed North Korea and the U.S. had “gotten past” a dispute over $25 million in frozen North Korean funds, and the communist nation was moving toward nuclear disarmament.\nChristopher Hill, the American envoy, said he met with North Korean representatives on Saturday and Sunday to explain the U.S. position on the funds held in Macau’s Banco Delta Asia bank, and was hopeful that the issue had been resolved.\nHe had yet to meet with his North Korean counterpart, Kim Kye Gwan. Kim arrived Saturday but did not participate in meetings leading up to a formal resumption of six-party nuclear talks on Monday.\nThe talks are meant to assess progress in implementing a Feb. 13 disarmament agreement. The deal gave North Korea 60 days to shut down both its main reactor and a plutonium processing plant, allowing U.N. monitors to verify the shutdown. In return, North Korea is to receive energy and economic assistance and a start toward normalizing relations with the U.S. and Japan.\nWashington also promised to settle the frozen funds issue as an inducement for North Korea to disarm. The funds, some of which U.S. authorities suspect may be linked to counterfeiting or money laundering by cash-starved North Korea, had become a key issue in the talks leading up to the deal.\nKim, the North Korean envoy, told reporters upon his arrival in Beijing on Saturday that North Korea “will not stop its nuclear activity” until the entire $25 million in the frozen accounts is released.\nHill told reporters late Sunday that, “I think we have gotten past the BDA issue and that will not be an impediment to our six-party process.”\nHill said the North Korean officials he spoke with “made it very clear that they have begun their tasks for the purpose of denuclearization.”\nDelegates from the six countries involved in the talks – China, the two Koreas, Russia, Japan and the United States – met Sunday.\nJapan’s representative to the talks, Akio Suda, said North Korean delegates at the meeting said “they are prepared to do what they are supposed to do on the condition that the five other members do what they are required to do,” without giving details.\nSouth Korean envoy Chun Yung-woo said that he expected the funds issue to be resolved “within a short period of time in a way that will not be an obstacle to the progress of the six-party talks.”\nChinese State Councilor Tang Jiaxuan told a group of visiting Japanese lawmakers that the U.S. and North Korea had already resolved the dispute, Hidenao Nakagawa, secretary-general of Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party, told reporters. Nakagawa was in Beijing to meet China’s leaders.\nU.S. allegations in 2002 that North Korea has a secret uranium enrichment program prompted the North to expel U.N. inspectors and eventually led to North Korea detonating its first nuclear device last year.\nU.S. Deputy Assistant Treasury Secretary Daniel Glaser arrived in Beijing on Sunday following meetings in Macau to discuss the issue with government officials, who have the authority to release the funds. Macau is a semiautonomous Chinese territory that maintains its own legal and financial systems.
(03/19/07 4:00am)
WASHINGTON – The Senate Judiciary Committee chairman said Sunday he intends to subpoena White House officials involved in ousting federal prosecutors and is dismissing anything short of their testimony in public.\nThe Bush White House was expected to announce early this week whether it will let political strategist Karl Rove, former White House counsel Harriet Miers and other officials testify or will seek to assert executive privilege in preventing their appearance.\nThe chairman, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., last week delayed a vote on the subpoenas until Thursday as the president’s counsel, Fred Fielding, sought to negotiate terms. But on Sunday, Leahy said he had not met Fielding nor was he particularly open to any compromises, such as a private briefing by the administration officials.\n“I want testimony under oath. I am sick and tired of getting half-truths on this,” Leahy said. “I do not believe in this, we’ll have a private briefing for you where we’ll tell you everything, and they don’t.”\nPennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter, the top Republican on the committee, said he had a long talk with Fielding on Friday and was reserving judgment. Specter said he would like to see Rove and Miers’ open testimony because there were numerous precedents for it.\n“I want to see exactly what the White House response is,” Specter said. “Maybe the White House will come back and say, ‘We’ll permit them to be interviewed and we’ll give them all the records.’”\nWhite House spokeswoman Emily Lawrimore declined to comment Sunday as to whether Rove and Miers would testify. Fielding was taking additional time to review the matter “given the importance of the issues under consideration and the presidential principles involved,” she said.\nAt issue is the firing of eight U.S. attorneys, dismissals that Democrats say were politically motivated. Such prosecutors serve at the pleasure of the president.\nAttorney General Alberto Gonzales initially had asserted the firings were performance-related, not based on political considerations.\nBut e-mails released last week between the Justice Department and the White House contradicted that assertion and led to a public apology from Gonzales over the handling of the matter.\nThe e-mails showed that Rove, as early as Jan. 6, 2005, questioned whether the U.S. attorneys should all be replaced at the start of Bush’s second term, and to some degree worked with Miers and former Gonzales chief of staff Kyle Sampson to get some prosecutors dismissed.\nAdditional e-mails are expected to be released this week to the Senate and House Judiciary committees. Each committee planned votes on subpoenas for Rove and Miers.\nThe Senate committee already has approved using subpoenas, if necessary, for Justice Department officials and J. Scott Jennings, deputy to White House political director Sara Taylor, who works for Rove.\nLawmakers also were scheduled Thursday to quiz Gonzales about his agency’s budget request in a hearing that was expected to focus in part on the prosecutor scandal.\nSeveral Democrats and a few Republicans, including Sen. John Sununu of New Hampshire, have called for Gonzales to resign, saying he had lost the support and confidence of Congress and the nation.\nSampson, Gonzales’ chief of staff until he resigned last week, released a statement making clear that senior Justice officials were aware that the department and the White House “had been discussing the subject since the election” of 2004. Gonzales has said he was kept in the dark about the communications.\nSen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said Sunday that Sampson’s attorney told the committee that the former Gonzales aide wants to testify.\n“The stories keep changing from so many people,” Schumer said. “A good lawyer will tell you when the witnesses keep changing their stories, they’re usually not telling the truth and they have something to hide.”
(03/09/07 5:00am)
WASHINGTON – President Bush was ready to challenge a widespread perception in Latin America that U.S. neglect has empowered leftist leader Hugo Chavez as he left Thursday on a five-nation tour of the region.\nBush argues that strong democratic governments hold the promise of prosperity. He hopes his trip will resonate with the one in four impoverished Latin Americans, who live on less than $2 a day and wonder whether democracy will ever deliver them a better life.\n“The trip is to remind people that we care,” Bush said in an interview Wednesday with CNN En Espanol. “I do worry about the fact that some say, ‘Well, the United States hasn’t paid enough attention to us,’ or ‘The United States really isn’t anything more than worried about terrorism.’ And when, in fact, the record has been a strong record.”\nBut Bush, with just two years left in his presidency, has a weak hand. Anti-Americanism and Bush’s poor image, tainted by the war in Iraq, have only fueled Chavez’s influence in the region and beyond.\nThe fiery leader of oil-rich Venezuela, who has labeled Bush “the devil” and dismisses him as the “little gentleman from the North,” plans to play to this discontent. He has called for protests during Bush’s stay and is leading a rally in Argentina when the president visits neighboring Uruguay.\nThe president’s message: “Regardless of what Hugo Chavez says about us, we’re not the bogeyman,” said Russell Crandall, a former Western Hemisphere director at the National Security Council who is now at the Center for American Progress.\nBush has packed a suitcase of strategies for nurturing trade, fighting drug-traffickers and curbing poverty and social inequality for his trip, which also will take him to Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico and Brazil, where protests on Wednesday preceded his visit.\nProtesters, most of them women from the Via Campesina farmworkers movement, briefly shut down an iron ore mine, invaded an ethanol distillery and took over the Rio de Janeiro offices of Brazil’s National Development Bank. Fresh graffiti reading “Get Out, Bush! Assassin!” in bright red letters popped up along busy highways near the locations in Sao Paulo where Bush will appear as he kicks off his Latin American tour.\nProtest organizers denounced foreign investment in the vast sugarcane fields that are used to produce Brazil’s ethanol.
(03/09/07 5:00am)
WASHINGTON – In a direct challenge to President Bush, House Democrats unveiled legislation Thursday requiring the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Iraq by the fall of next year. The White House said Bush would veto it.\nSpeaker Nancy Pelosi said the deadline would be added to legislation providing nearly $100 billion the Bush administration has requested for fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.\nShe told reporters the measure would mark the first time the new Democratic-controlled Congress has established a “date certain” for the end of U.S. combat in the four-year-old war that has claimed the lives of more than 3,100 U.S. troops.\nSenior White House adviser Dan Bartlett, accompanying Bush on a flight to Latin America, told reporters, “It’s safe to say it’s a nonstarter for the president.”\nWithin an hour of Pelosi’s news conference, House Republican Leader John Boehner attacked the measure. He said Democrats were proposing legislation that amounted to “establishing and telegraphing to our enemy a timetable” that would result in failure of the U.S. military mission in Iraq.\n“Gen. (David) Petraeus should be the one making the decisions on what happens on the ground in Iraq, not Nancy Pelosi or John Murtha,” the Ohio Republican added. Murtha, a Pennsylvania Democrat, has been heavily involved in crafting legislation designed to end U.S., participation in the war.\nAccording to an explanation of the measure distributed by Democratic aides, the timetable for withdrawal would be accelerated if the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki did not meet goals for providing for Iraq’s security.\nDemocrats won control of Congress last fall in midterm elections shadowed by public opposition to the war, and have vowed since taking power to challenge Bush’s policies.\nPelosi made her announcement as Senate Democrats reviewed a different approach – a measure that would set a goal of a troop withdrawal by March of 2008. Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada called a closed-door meeting of the rank-and-file to consider the measure.\nIn the House, Pelosi and the leadership have struggled in recent days to come up with an approach on the war that would satisfy liberals reluctant to vote for continued funding without driving away more moderate Democrats unwilling to be seen as tying the hands of military commanders.\nThe decision to impose conditions on the war risks a major confrontation with the Bush administration and its Republican allies in Congress.\nBut without a unified party, the Democratic leadership faced the possibility of a highly embarrassing defeat when the spending legislation reaches a vote, likely later this month. establishing a deadline for troop withdrawals.\nTalking to reporters aboard Air Force One, Bartlett called it “a political compromise in the Democratic caucus of the House aimed at bringing comity to their internal politics, not reflective of the conditions on the ground in Iraq.”\n“It would unnecessarily handcuff our generals on the ground, he said. “Obviously, the administration would vehemently oppose and ultimately veto any legislation that looks like what was described today.”
(03/09/07 5:00am)
Two leaders of an Albany, N.Y., mosque who were snared in an FBI sting involving a fictional terror strike were sentenced Thursday to 15 years in federal prison. The former imam, Yassin Aref, professed innocence before his sentencing and criticized the government’s treatment of Muslims.
(03/06/07 5:00am)
Benjamin Franklin, while a minister to France, first suggested the idea of daylight saving time in an essay titled “An Economical Project for Diminishing the Cost of Light.”\nThat was in an essay was published in the Journal de Paris in April 1784. But it was more than a century before an Englishman, William Willett, suggested it again, in 1907.\nThis year, 2007, daylight saving time will begin on a new date: 2 a.m. on the second Sunday in March (March 11). Then, daylight saving will revert to standard time on a new date: 2 a.m. on the first Sunday in November (Nov. 4). This is the new pattern from now on:\n–DST begins the second Sunday in March.\n–DST ends the first Sunday in November.\nFor children, daylight saving may mean more time to play during the summer months. But one of the most significant reasons why we change our clocks to daylight saving time is that it saves energy.\nEnergy use and the demand for electricity for lighting homes is directly connected to when we go to bed and when we get up. Bedtime for most of us is late evening through the year. When we go to bed, we turn off the lights and TV.\nIn the average home, 25 percent of all the electricity we use is for lighting and small appliances, such as TVs, VCRs and stereos. A good percentage of energy consumption for lighting and appliances occurs in the evening when families are home. By moving the clock ahead one hour, we can cut the amount of electricity we consume each day.\nThere are those who hate daylight saving time. Frequent complaints are the inconvenience of changing many clocks and adjusting to a new sleep schedule. For most people, this is a mere nuisance, but some people with sleep disorders find this transition very difficult.\nSome people argue that the energy savings offered by DST are offset by the energy used by those living in warm climates to cool homes during summer afternoons and evenings. Similarly, the argument can be made that more evening hours of light encourage people to run errands and visit friends, thus consuming more gasoline.\nBut studies done in the 1970s by the U.S. Department of Transportation show that we trim the entire country’s electricity usage by about 1 percent every day during daylight saving time.\nMost people plan outdoor activities in the extra daylight hours. When we are not at home, we don’t turn on the appliances and lights. A poll done by the U.S. Department of Transportation indicated that Americans liked daylight saving time because there is more light in the evenings, and they can do more.\nThe latest change of dates for when we go onto and off daylight saving time may cause a bit of upset around your home, since there are many features in the home that we take for granted.\nProgramming your VCR, for example, may be a problem, especially if it has an automatic daylight-saving conversion feature. In fact, we are surrounded in our home by appliances that automatically convert from standard time to daylight saving time. This means you will have to manually change your clock on these appliances to daylight saving time, and then move them to the correct time once again when they catch up and automatically reset themselves.\nAll the experts agree that there is big money to be saved with DST as we know it – and tests have shown that observing DST year round would not save much. So, you can almost certainly be assured that you will be changing your clocks as often as ever.
(03/06/07 5:00am)
WASHINGTON – A White House privacy board has determined that two of the Bush administration’s controversial surveillance programs – electronic eavesdropping and financial tracking – do not violate citizens’ civil liberties.\nAfter operating mostly in secret for a year, the five-member Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board is preparing to release its first report to Congress next week.\nThe report finds that both the National Security Agency’s warrantless eavesdropping program and the Treasury Department’s monitoring of international banking transactions have sufficient privacy protections, three board members told The Associated Press in telephone interviews.\nBoth programs have multiple layers of review before sensitive information is accessed, they said.\n“We looked at the program, we visited NSA and met with the top people all the way down to those doing the hands-on work,” said Carol Dinkins, a Houston lawyer and former Reagan administration assistant attorney general who chairs the board.\n“The program is structured and implemented in a way that is properly protective and attentive to civil liberties,” she said.\nSome board members were troubled by the Department of Homeland Security’s error-ridden no-fly lists, which critics say use subjective or inconclusive data to flag suspect travelers.\nOne area the board will focus on in its report is the computerized anti-terrorism screening system recently announced by DHS and used for years without travelers’ knowledge to assign risk assessments to millions of Americans who fly abroad.\n“That’s a place where there’s a lot of opportunity for improvement,” Dinkins said.\nLanny Davis, a former Clinton White House counsel and the lone Democrat on the panel, described the board’s first report to Congress as modest. He explained that most of the work in the past year was spent being briefed on the administration’s surveillance programs.\nAfter several classified briefings, the board was reassured by the eavesdropping program’s “multiple layers of checks and balances and accountability,” he said. “The people running the program themselves are very well-trained and identified bright lines.”\nThe board’s initial findings come as Congress is moving forward on measures to give the board more authority and make it more independent of the president.\nBoth conservative and liberal civil liberties groups have called on the members to aggressively review the eavesdropping program and have questioned whether board members would stand up to the president if he were flouting the law.\nIn recent weeks, the administration has agreed to let a secret but independent panel of judges oversee the program. But many lawmakers and civil libertarians have remained skeptical about its legality, and the Justice Department’s inspector general is investigating whether the agency used any of the information improperly.\nMarc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, called it absurd that the board effectively gave the eavesdropping program its stamp of approval even before the administration was forced to backtrack and submit it to court oversight.\n“I have no confidence in the current board in its ability to provide meaningful evaluation of important programs such as the no-fly lists, based on its work on the domestic surveillance program,” he said. “It is critical that Congress make the civil liberties board independent of the executive branch.”\nThe board does not have subpoena power, and the White House can check its annual reports to Congress. The members serve at the pleasure of Bush, and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has final say over whether officials must comply with the board’s recommendations.\nSeparate House and Senate measures would require that the entire board – not just the chairman and vice chairman – be confirmed by the Senate.
(03/06/07 5:00am)
A coalition airstrike destroyed a mud-brick home, killing nine people from four generations of an Afghan family during a clash between Western troops and militants, Afghan officials and relatives said Monday. It was the second report in two days of civilian deaths at the hands of Western forces. On Sunday, U.S. Marines fired on cars and pedestrians as they fled a suicide attack. Up to 10 Afghans died in that violence, and President Hamid Karzai condemned the killings.