There were no U.S. fatalities in the previous two suicide attacks this week, indicating that massive defenses erected at American facilities were paying off. Three Iraqis were killed in the car that exploded Thursday, the military source said.
mr ed - explain to me 3 suicide bombers in one car????????

Also Thursday, the military reported one U.S. soldier drowned and another was missing after a patrol-boat accident on the Tigris River in Baghdad.
"The soldiers were conducting routine patrols on the Tigris River when one of the soldiers fell overboard, and the other soldier jumped in to save him," the U.S. Central Command in Florida said in a statement.

If it is confirmed that the Apache was shot down, it would be the sixth military helicopter downed in six weeks.

In Baghdad, guerrillas struck a U.S. Air Force C-17 transport plane on takeoff with a ground-fired missile, forcing it to return to the capital's international airport, a senior Pentagon (news - web sites) official said Wednesday.

mred - that plane coulda been AF1... the article doesnt mention it - and it also got buried at the end of a long line of detail

"This is hugely important," says Sam Hirsch, an attorney for the Pennsylvania Democrats. "Gerrymandering on this scale is corrupting US democracy. This was not what the framers of the US constitution intended."
Gerrymandering is an established American political tradition. Its name derives from Elbridge Gerry, a governor of Massachusetts who in 1811 endorsed an electoral district said to look like a salamander. "Call it a Gerry-mander," a wit said, and the term stuck.
The House of Representatives is almost ossified. Only 20 or 30 of the 435 seats are competitive. Add to that gerrymandering on the scale of Texas and Pennsylvania, and the Republican majority - a narrow 229 to 206 on paper - is all but impregnable.

All major antidepressant drugs other than Prozac, known as SSRIs, are set to be be banned for children under 18 by the Government today, amid concerns that the drugs cause young patients to commit suicide.
Sources at the Department of Health confirmed reports last night that four antidepressant drugs would be banned for children. Two drugs in the same group, Seroxat and Efexor, were banned in June and September respectively. An announcement is expected in Parliament today from the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA).
Doctors will be told not to prescribe Lustral (chemical name setraline), Cipramil (citalopram), Cipralex (escitalopram) and Faverin (fluvoxamine) to under-18s.
It will also warn that Prozac will help only one child out of 10.
Seroxat was said to have been prescribed to up to 8,000 children by June and was used by 600,000 to 800,000 adults. It was banned after research showed it could trigger suicidal thoughts and thoughts of self-harm.

gwb on the beeB "international law????? (snarl, feigned surprise,) id better call my lawyer (snarl, guffaw) - he didnt mention that to me"
mr ed - he is disgusting

President George W. Bush is grateful for help in the war on terrorism and is ''working'' to include Canada in hefty contracts to help rebuild Iraq
Bush's comments to Chretien seemed to fly in the face of what he was saying at home.
''The prime minister said to Bush: 'You know we've had a few disagreements in the past, but relations between our two countries have never been better.''

The US government needs to explain why the missile shipment on a vessel intercepted a year ago on the high seas by the Spanish navy ended up in Libya, a spokesman from Spain's Defense Ministry said this week.
The official was referring to declarations made by sources from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to the Madrid daily El Mundo that claim 15 complete Scud missiles, a set of conventional warheads and 85 containers of chemical products - some 20 holding nitric acid - were ultimately delivered to Libya under a Washington decision.
The NATO sources cited in El Mundo said that at the time the shipment was intercepted, the United States was secretly negotiating the possibility that Libya would accept Saddam Hussein, then still president of Iraq, in exile.

In fact, Spain has not drawn up a list of countries it considers terrorist, noted a Foreign Ministry spokesperson, but the United States has, and Libya, which figures on that list, is subject to a commercial and military embargo. No US company is authorized to sell weapons to Libya directly or indirectly, nor to facilitate the delivery of arms.

When the United Nations Security Council lifted sanctions against Libya, then-US ambassador James Cunningham abstained from the vote, stating that Washington did not want to give the idea that it believed Libya had done an about-face, because, said the ambassador, the country continued to try to obtain weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles. But things appear to have changed radically, given that the weapons shipment intercepted by Spain, and which ended up in Libya, includes such arms.

The Project for the New American Century, which boasts its affiliation with many key administration officials, wrote an open letter to Bush just after 9-11. The letter strongly urged the president to pursue a "war on terror," invade Afghanistan, alienate Yasir Arafat, attack Iraq, and target Iran. While it does not seem politically, militarily, or economically feasible now, Tehran is still on the to-do list

But let's be clear about one thing: This mounting scandal, which centers on whether Boeing improperly offered Pentagon procurement official Darleen Druyun a job while she was negotiating the terms of a $20-billion deal to lease 747s from the company, goes well beyond a few misguided executives at one corporation.

Perle also has a Boeing connection. The company is the biggest investor by far in Trireme. Perle has been a staunch advocate of the Boeing tanker lease, writing and speaking out on behalf of it — a year after Boeing committed to invest up to $20 million in his company. Was the Boeing investment in Trireme a recognition of Perle's investment savvy or a not-so-transparent ploy to curry favor with a close Rumsfeld confidant?
Does it bother Rumsfeld that two of Perle's colleagues on the Defense Policy Board, retired Adm. David Jeremiah and retired Air Force Gen. Ronald Fogelman, have simultaneously been working as paid consultants to Boeing, also promoting the lease deal?
Boeing's misdeeds are undoubtedly the tip of a very large iceberg.

The father of a soldier who died of pneumonia this spring said Thursday the Army has excluded her death from its investigation of deadly pneumonia because it wants to cover up vaccine side effects.
mred - interesting that this detailed story is in UPI

One Republican who speaks regularly to White House officials said there was serious thought about pursuing the earliest and most aggressive of the plans under consideration: putting Mr. Bush into full campaign mode soon after he delivers the State of the Union address in late January. In that way, the Republican said, Mr. Bush could get a quick start on defining Dr. Dean as too far to the left for the country before the former Vermont governor can wrap up the primaries and begin trying to move himself toward the political center.

Throughout the year, many Republicans have been longing for a Bush-Dean matchup, saying Dr. Dean's opposition to the war with Iraq, his call for rolling back Mr. Bush's tax cuts and his support for civil unions between gay people would open the door to a Republican landslide in November.

Karl Rove, Mr. Bush's senior adviser and political strategist, was reported by The Washington Post this summer to have exhorted the crowd at his neighborhood Fourth of July parade to cheer for marchers wearing Dean T-shirts and carrying Dean signs.

People close to Mr. Bush, who prides himself on his personal and political discipline, describe Dr. Dean as a sloppy candidate who gets himself in trouble too often by shooting from the hip and who is slow to clean up messes.
mred: huh???????????????

"There is a broad belief among the president's political advisers at the White House and the campaign, from top to bottom, from Cheney to Mehlman to Karl and Andy and all the other players, that Dean is very likely, extremely likely, to be the candidate,"
mred - "extremely likely"

Angry West Texans and some state officials are demanding a halt to a deal that allows a group of politically well-connected Midland oilmen to tap the desert and sell billions of gallons of water from the state's public reserves.
"The big question, the only question, is how much water is there, is there enough to export without doing harm to the local community?" Mr. Patterson said at the Alpine meeting. But Mr. Patterson and Rio Nuevo said they could afford to survey the supply only after a lease was signed.
mred - do they have no shame????//

He said that because the land office had no track record for letting a water contract, the first one would have to be awarded without bidding.
mred - do they have no shame????

Rio Nuevo partners gave a total of $83,136 to Republican state candidates in 2001 and 2002 — the bulk of it, $72,886, from Gary Martin, an oil investor and businessman.

The agency exempted Prozac, from Eli Lilly, but recommended against the use of six drugs: Paxil, from GlaxoSmithKline; Zoloft, from Pfizer; Effexor, from Wyeth; Celexa and Lexapro, from Forest Laboratories Inc., and Luvox, from Solvay.
One big problem for outside researchers, and for the public, is that the data that seems to show a link between the drugs and suicide is privately held by drug companies, though it has been provided to the government agencies.
Even for those who have the data, determining if a link exists is complicated, Dr. Katz and other experts said, because it is not always clear that the patients described as suicidal actually are. For example, experts say, some teenagers may cut or harm themselves but do not intend to commit suicide.

President Bush found himself in the awkward position on Wednesday of calling the leaders of France, Germany and Russia to ask them to forgive Iraq's debts, just a day after the Pentagon said it was excluding those countries and others from $18 billion in American-financed Iraqi reconstruction projects.
White House officials were fuming about the timing and the tone of the Pentagon's directive, even while conceding that they had approved the Pentagon policy of limiting contracts to 63 countries that have given the United States political or military aid in Iraq.
Those officials apparently did not realize that the memorandum, signed by Paul D. Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defense, would appear on a Defense Department Web site hours before Mr. Bush was scheduled to ask world leaders to receive James A. Baker III, the former treasury secretary and secretary of state, who is heading up the effort to wipe out Iraq's debt. Mr. Baker met with the president on Wednesday.

Under the Pentagon rules, only companies whose countries are on the American list of "coalition nations" are eligible to compete for the prime contracts, though they could act as subcontractors.
mr ed - where is the national security concern if they can subcontract?

The result is that the Solomon Islands, Uganda and Samoa may compete for the contracts, but China, whose premier just left the White House with promises of an expanded trade relationship, is excluded, along with Israel.

Richard A. Boucher, the State Department spokesman, said the World Bank and International Monetary Fund "may have different, or their own, rules for how they contract."

As a matter of trade law, countries are often allowed to limit trade with other nations on national security grounds.
"The intent was to give us the legal cover to make the decision," one official said. But the phrase angered officials of other nations because it seemed to suggest they were a security risk.

Moreover, the United States Trade Representative's office said on Wednesday that contracts with the occupation authority "are not covered by international trade procurement obligations because the C.P.A. is not an entity subject to these obligations."
"Accordingly, there is no need to invoke the `essential security' exception to our trade obligations," the office added. That raised the question of why Mr. Wolfowitz included the phrase.