Source: The Mercury News

A shortage of equipment and staff has contributed to the spread of fires across the state, according to frustrated fire commanders trying to subdue the state's 320 raging wildland blazes.

<snip>

More than 725,000 acres have burned - and 100 homes lost - since a series of wildfires scorched the state. One firefighter has died and 233 have been injured, according to Sen. Barbara Boxer.

<snip>

On Thursday afternoon, secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff promised to provide federal helicopters to dump water. He also said he would send out-of-state firefighters to train incoming National Guardsmen. FEMA director R. David Paulison, a former U.S. Fire Administrator, said he is mapping
out an integrated federal response, in coordination with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's staff, to quickly meet the state's needs.

<snip>

Pleas for assistance

In their reports submitted to U.S. Forestry Service and Cal Fire, fire commanders have also been asking for help.

In Kern County's Piute fire, commander Chris Hoff asked repeatedly for more officers, writing "lack of overhead positions continue to hamper suppression efforts." In a Humboldt County fire, called Hell's Half Complex, commander Jess Secrest wrote that "continued inability to fill critical resource orders increases the fire's ability to enter residential areas."

Read more: http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_9848630

Source: The Hill

Libertarian Party presidential candidate Bob Barr, who has some Republicans worried that he might take votes from their nominee, on Sunday accused the GOP and its standard-bearer Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) of saying one thing and doing another.

“What’s wrong with John McCain is symptomatic of what’s wrong with the Republican Party in these first years of the 21st century,” said Barr, a former Republican congressman from Georgia. “They talk one thing but do something different, and that’s become very obvious to the American people.”

When asked about his potential role as spoiler, Barr said on Fox News Sunday that, “if wins on November 4th and Sen. McCain and I lose, it will be because he presented a vision and a platform and a candidacy to the American people that resonated with a plurality of the voters.”

Despite his former party affiliation, the Libertarian candidate also said that he did not necessarily view McCain as preferable over Obama.

Read more: http://thehill.com/campaign-2008/barr-gop-...

Source: The Guardian

The US army has told of errors, poor planning and complacency among its own top commanders in a warts-and-all official history of the steep descent into violence that followed the Iraq war.

In a 696-page account, army historians fault military and political leaders for focusing excessively on toppling Saddam Hussein in 2003 without looking towards a broader transition towards a stable society. Actions by the former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the top US commander during the Iraq invasion, Tommy Franks, are singled out in the study, which was delayed for six months to allow senior army figures to review drafts.

"The transition to a new campaign was not well thought out, planned for and prepared for before it began," says the history, On Point II: Transition to the New Campaign, published by an internal army thinktank called the contemporary operations study team. "The assumptions about the nature of the post-Saddam Iraq on which the transition was planned proved to be largely incorrect."

It says Franks took senior colleagues by surprise by moving to a slimmed-down, short-staffed headquarters shortly after the invasion of Iraq was complete. He told his officers to be ready to cut back on forces in preparation for "an abbreviated period of stability operations".

The study describes defence chiefs in Washington as ambivalent from the start about a "ponderous, troop-heavy, logistics intensive and costly" ongoing campaign to restore stability. "The did commit resources to the planning of post-invasion operations," it says. "In retrospect, however, the overall effort appears to have been disjointed and, at times, poorly coordinated, perhaps reflecting the department's ambivalence towards nation-building."



Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jun/3...

Source: Washington Post

The Defense Department, the nation's biggest polluter, is resisting orders from the Environmental Protection Agency to clean up Fort Meade and two other military bases where the EPA says dumped chemicals pose "imminent and substantial" dangers to public health and the environment.

The Pentagon has also declined to sign agreements required by law that cover 12 other military sites on the Superfund list of the most polluted places in the country. The contracts would spell out a remediation plan, set schedules, and allow the EPA to oversee the work and assess penalties if milestones are missed.

The actions are part of a standoff between the Pentagon and environmental regulators that has been building during the Bush administration, leaving the EPA in a legal limbo as it addresses growing concerns about contaminants on military bases that are seeping into drinking water aquifers and soil.
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Under executive branch policy, the EPA will not sue the Pentagon, as it would a private polluter. Although the law gives final say to EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson in cleanup disputes with other federal agencies, the Pentagon refuses to recognize that provision. Military officials wrote to the Justice Department last month to challenge EPA's authority to issue the orders and asked the Office of Management and Budget to intervene.

Experts in environmental law said the Pentagon's stand is unprecedented.

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...

Source: New York Times

A group of American advisers led by a small State Department team played an integral part in drawing up contracts between the Iraqi government and five major Western oil companies to develop some of the largest fields in Iraq, American officials say.

The disclosure, coming on the eve of the contracts’ announcement, is the first confirmation of direct involvement by the Bush administration in deals to open Iraq’s oil to commercial development and is likely to stoke criticism.

In their role as advisers to the Iraqi Oil Ministry, American government lawyers and private-sector consultants provided template contracts and detailed suggestions on drafting the contracts, advisers and a senior State Department official said.

It is unclear how much influence their work had on the ministry’s decisions.

The advisers — who, along with the diplomatic official, spoke on condition of anonymity — say that their involvement was only to help an understaffed Iraqi ministry with technical and legal details of the contracts and that they in no way helped choose which companies got the deals.

Repeated calls to the Oil Ministry’s press office for comment were not returned.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/30/world/mi...

More than a half-dozen years after 9/11, little may prevent an innocent traveler from becoming an imagined threat.

NEW YORK — "So. Turns out I'm the security threat," I told my editor, calling him from my airline seat. The police with their assault rifles had left, along with the cop who moments before had shoved me against a jetway wall.

Like many regular fliers, I have a finely honed security routine. Lotions and hand sanitizer in the little plastic bag. Laptop in a form-fitting case for X-ray adventures. My shoes almost untie themselves.

But I recently found that there are still things you can't predict. Almost seven years after 9/11, little may prevent an innocent traveler from becoming an imagined threat.

<snip>

I was talking to my editor when a JetBlue worker told my row to get up. He directed me to go to the front while he gathered my bags.

Read more here: http://www.statesman.com/insight/content/e...

Source: Associated Press

WASHINGTON - The Army has discharged a decorated medic who was deployed to Iraq despite acknowledging he was gay.

Darren Manzella, 30, said he revealed his sexual orientation to his military supervisor in August 2006, and was redeployed to Iraq anyway. He has since spoken out publicly several times about being a gay service member.

Manzella was discharged this month for "homosexual admission." His commander's discharge recommendation included a transcript of an interview he gave to television show "60 Minutes" in December 2007, in which Manzella said he is gay.

He did the same in a number of other interviews and even at a Washington news conference. The military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy prohibits active-duty service members from openly acknowledging they are gay or lesbian.

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080627/ap_on_...

Source: Associated Press

ATLANTA - The Southwest has the lowest health insurance coverage in the country, with 30 percent of non-elderly adults and 18 percent of children uninsured, according to a new government study.

New England — with a rate of uninsured people less than half that of the Southwest — has the largest proportion of its population covered, the study found.

The study marks the first time the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has compared different regions of the country by health insurance status, said Robin Cohen, the lead researcher.

Cohen declined to theorize why Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and Oklahoma together have higher rates of uninsured people than other parts of the country.

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080625/ap_on_...

Source: New York Times

WASHINGTON — A bipartisan group of 200 former government officials, retired generals and religious leaders plans to issue a statement on Wednesday calling for a presidential order to outlaw some interrogation and detention practices used by the Bush administration over the last six years.

The executive order they seek would commit the government to using only interrogation methods that the United States would find acceptable if used by another country against American soldiers or civilians.

It would also outlaw secret detentions, used since 2001 by the Central Intelligence Agency, and prohibit the transfer of prisoners to countries that use torture or cruel treatment. The C.I.A. has allowed terrorism suspects to be taken to such countries.

Among the signers is George P. Shultz, secretary of state under President Ronald Reagan. “It’s a good time to step back, take a deep breath and set a standard,” Mr. Shultz said in an interview.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/25/us/25tor...

Source: New York Times

The White House in December refused to accept the Environmental Protection Agency’s conclusion that greenhouse gases are pollutants that must be controlled, telling agency officials that an e-mail message containing the document would not be opened, senior E.P.A. officials said last week.

The document, which ended up in e-mail limbo, without official status, was the E.P.A.’s answer to a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that required it to determine whether greenhouse gases represent a danger to health or the environment, the officials said.

This week, more than six months later, the E.P.A. is set to respond to that order by releasing a watered-down version of the original proposal that offers no conclusion. Instead, the document reviews the legal and economic issues presented by declaring greenhouse gases a pollutant.

Over the past five days, the officials said, the White House successfully put pressure on the E.P.A. to eliminate large sections of the original analysis that supported regulation, including a finding that tough regulation of motor vehicle emissions could produce $500 billion to $2 trillion in economic benefits over the next 32 years. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter.

Both documents, as prepared by the E.P.A., “showed that the Clean Air Act can work for certain sectors of the economy, to reduce greenhouse gases,” one of the senior E.P.A. officials said. “That’s not what the administration wants to show. They want to show that the Clean Air Act can’t work.”

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/25/washingt...

Source: Associated Press

BAGHDAD - The U.S. military says three American soldiers and an interpreter have been killed in a bombing in northern Iraq.

A command statement says the deaths occurred about 10:45 p.m. Tuesday in Nineveh province. That's an area where Sunni insurgents are active and includes the city of Mosul, where operations against al-Qaida have been going on for weeks.

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080625/ap_on_...

Source: The Hill

The Senate has ended a months-long stalemate that left the Federal Election
Commission (FEC) paralyzed throughout the Democratic and Republican presidential primaries.

Senators on Tuesday evening voted to confirm nominees to the federal agency tasked with overseeing presidential and congressional elections. The action means the agency will be able to issue advisory opinions and investigate possible campaign violations during the final crucial months of the 2008 election.

The final obstacle facing the nominees lifted when Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) withdrew his objections. Feingold interviewed four of the nominees Tuesday. He interviewed the fifth before Tuesday.

The Senate confirmed three Republicans and two Democrats to join sitting Democratic commissioner Ellen Weintraub. Republican commissioner David Mason will step down.

Read more: http://thehill.com/leading-the-news/senate...

Source: The Hill

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) on Tuesday said that the U.S. is not doing enough to make sure funds sent to Pakistan to help that country fight terrorism are actually used for that purpose.

“Our assessment found that while played a key role in Pakistan’s support for our war on terror, had not followed its existing guidance and provided little oversight of the effort at the embassy in Pakistan,” the GAO found.

“As a result, we conclude that Defense cannot accurately determine how much of the $5.56 billion in costs reimbursed to Pakistan since 2001 were actually incurred,” the report stated.

Democrats seized on the findings.

“It seems as though the Pakistani military went on a spending spree with American taxpayers’ wallets and no one bothered to investigate the charges. To this day we do not have proper verification for how our money was used,” said Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa). “How hard would it have been to confirm that a road we paid $15 million for was ever built? It is appalling that the Defense Department did not send any embassy officials working in Pakistan to verify these enormous costs.”

Read more: http://thehill.com/leading-the-news/gao-u....

Source: USA Today

Tropical diseases that ravage Africa, Asia and Latin America commonly occur among the poor in the USA, leaving thousands of people shattered by debilitating complications including mental retardation, heart disease and epilepsy, an analysis showed Monday.

The diseases, caused by chronic viral, bacterial and parasitic infections, disproportionately strike women and children and are largely overlooked by doctors, says author Peter Hotez of the Global Network for Neglected Tropical Diseases, part of Sabin Vaccine Institute.

Hotez says the diseases go untreated in hundreds of thousands of poor people who live mainly in inner cities, the Mississippi Delta, Appalachia and the Mexican borderlands.

In many cases, he says, the infections cause disabilities that trap sufferers in lasting poverty. His analysis, called "Neglected Infections of Poverty in the United States," appears in the journal he edits, PloS Neglected Tropical Diseases.

Read more: http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2008-0...

Source: Associated Press

WASHINGTON - Skeptical states are shoving aside millions of federal dollars for abstinence education, walking away from the program the Bush administration touts for slowing teen sexual activity. Barely half the states are still in, and two more say they are leaving.

Some $50 million has been budgeted for this year, and financially strapped states might be expected to want their share. But many have doubts that the program does much, if any good, and they're frustrated by chronic uncertainty that it will even be kept in existence. They also have to chip in state money in order to receive the federal grants.

Iowa Gov. Chet Culver, a Democrat, made his decision to leave based on the congressionally mandated curriculum, which teaches "the social, psychological and health gains of abstaining from sexual activity." Instructors must teach that sexual activity outside of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects.

"It was just too strict," said Emily Hajek, policy adviser to Culver. "We believe local providers have the knowledge to teach what's going to be best in those situations, what kind of information will help those young people be safe. You cannot be that prescriptive about how it has to be taught."

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080624/ap_on_... ;_ylt=At02TtmQxYqJTaLBsefhvp.s0NUE