UBL #2 mock US President

In a new video , al-Qaida's No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahri mocked President Bush as a "failure" in the war on terror, called him a "butcher" for killing innocent Pakistanis in a miscarried airstrike and chastised the United States for rejecting Osama bin Laden's offer of a truce.
Al-Zawahri, wearing white robes and a white turban and speaking in a forceful and angry voice, also threatened a new attack in the United States — "God willing, on your own land."
The video, broadcast on Al-Jazeera TV a day before Bush delivers his State of the Union address, provided the first concrete evidence that al-Zawahri was still alive after the Jan. 13 airstrike in eastern Pakistan that targeted him but killed four other al-Qaida leaders and 13 villagers.
The message came on the heels of a Jan. 19 audiotape by bin Laden, the al-Qaida leader's first tape in more than a year. Bin Laden said his followers were preparing an attack in the United States and offered the Americans a conditional truce, though he did not spell out terms.
A U.S. counterterrorism official, who spoke on condition of anonymity in compliance with office policy, said there is no reason to doubt the authenticity of the al-Zawahri video, which U.S. intelligence officials were analyzing.

Bush Looks for Boost From State of Union

President Bush, in his State of the Union speech Tuesday, will offer ideas for dealing with domestic problems like high energy prices and health care and international troubles like Iran's suspected nuclear ambitions. The unspoken agenda underpinning the address, Bush's fifth, is the rescue of his presidency from arguably its worst year.
His poll numbers fell to the lowest point of his presidency under the weight of missteps following Hurricane Katrina, soaring energy costs, the withdrawal of a Supreme Court nominee, the failure of his high-profile effort to drive a Social Security overhaul, and increasing scrutiny from the public and Congress of the unpopular Iraq war.
While Bush's approval rating has recovered slightly, it remains in the still-anemic low 40s. It is a matter of concern for Republicans as they worry about maintaining control of Congress in this fall's midterm elections.
''I can't tell you how upbeat I am about our future, so long as we're willing to lead,'' Bush said at a photo opportunity Monday with his Cabinet. Referring to the bitter political tone in Washington, Bush said, ''I'll do my best to elevate the tone here in Washington, D.C., so we can work together to achieve big things for the American people.''
Unlike last year's focus on Social Security, an initiative that failed, Bush's emphasis will be more diffuse, with proposals aimed at taming health care costs, moving America away from its dependence on foreign energy sources, remaining competitive in the global economy, and getting the ballooning federal deficit under control.

White House Declines to Provide Storm Papers

The Bush administration, citing the confidentiality of executive branch communications, said Tuesday that it did not plan to turn over certain documents about Hurricane Katrina or make senior White House officials available for sworn testimony before two Congressional committees investigating the storm response.
The White House this week also formally notified Representative Richard H. Baker, Republican of Louisiana, that it would not support his legislation creating a federally financed reconstruction program for the state that would bail out homeowners and mortgage lenders. Many Louisiana officials consider the bill crucial to recovery, but administration officials said the state would have to use community development money appropriated by Congress.
The White House's stance on storm-related documents, along with slow or incomplete responses by other agencies, threatens to undermine efforts to identify what went wrong, Democrats on the committees said Tuesday.
"There has been a near total lack of cooperation that has made it impossible, in my opinion, for us to do the thorough investigation that we have a responsibility to do," Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, said at Tuesday's hearing of the Senate committee investigating the response. His spokeswoman said he would ask for a subpoena for documents and testimony if the White House did not comply

White House Had Early Warning on Katrina

Documents obtained by The Washington Post reveal, according to the newspaper, that in the 48 hours before Hurricane Katrina hit last August, the White House "received detailed warnings about the storm's likely impact, including eerily prescient predictions of breached levees, massive flooding, and major losses of life and property."
The 41-page assessment by the Department of Homeland Security's National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center (NISAC) was delivered by e-mail to the White House's "situation room" in the early hours of Aug. 29, the day the storm hit, according to an e-mail cover sheet.The NISAC paper warned that a storm of Katrina's size would "likely lead to severe flooding and/or levee breaching" and noted the potential for levee failures along Lake Pontchartrain. "It predicted economic losses in the tens of billions of dollars, including damage to public utilities and industry that would take years to fully repair," writes Washington Post reporter Joby Warrick in the Tuesday paper. "Initial response and rescue operations would be hampered by disruption of telecommunications networks and the loss of power to fire, police and emergency workers, it said.

Google shares hammered after government challenge

After climbing for a year and a ,Google shares fell 8.5 percent on Friday to $399.46 a share. It was the largest one-day percentage drop for the company and the highest volume -- more than 41 million trades -- since August 18, 2004, when the search giant went public.
The market move comes one day after news that Google is challenging a U.S. Department of Justice request for Web search data. While Yahoo, AOL and MSN have complied with a subpoena to provide information on random Web searches and Web sites indexed, Google said "no."
The government is trying to resurrect the 1998 Child Online Protection Act, which would make it a crime for commercial Web sites to post material that could be deemed harmful if minors came across it, such as pornography. The administration wants the information to help bolster its argument that Web filtering software is ineffective.
Google contends that the government's request for information -- one million random Web addresses indexed by the search engine and all the keywords used in searches for a specified one week period -- is overreaching and too broad. None of the information sought could be traced back to any individual users.
Privacy advocates applauded Google's action, saying that while the government's subpoena covers Web search data that is not personally identifiable, future requests could go further and invade Web surfers' privacy.

U.S. Approves Cuba for World Baseball Event

By JACK CURRY
Cuba has been granted a license to participate in the World Baseball Classic by the Treasury Department, two people with direct knowledge of the process said today, enabling the country to compete in the 16-team tournament that runs from March 3-20. The license eliminates a thorny complication and potentially fatal blow to the event. If Cuba had been denied a license, the inaugural event would have been jeopardized because the International Baseball Federation said it would remove its sanction.

The two people with knowledge of the decision spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not yet authorized to discuss it. Officials from Major League Baseball and the Players Association were certain to be relieved that Cuba, which won the 2004 Olympic gold medal, could participate in the World Baseball Classic. Cuba, a traditional baseball power, is in Pool C in the four-pool event, with Puerto Rico, Panama and the Netherlands. An official announcement about the license was expected this afternoon.
When the World Baseball Classic first sought a license for Cuba, the Treasury Department denied it because the Cubans would have made American dollars. That would have violated the United States' trade embargo against Cuba. The tournament organizers submitted a second license request on Dec. 22 and eliminated any possibility that the Cubans would earn money. Paul Archey, baseball's senior vice president for international matters, and Doyle Pryor, a union lawyer, met with Cuban officials last week to gather information that had been requested by the Office of Foreign Assets Control, a division of the Treasury Department. After Mr. Archey and Mr. Pryor gave the information to the Treasury Department, they were optimistic that Cuba would soon get a license, and the approval came through today. The deadline for provisional rosters has already passed so Cuba will have to provide its roster as soon as possible.

Sunni Parties Net Gains After Boycotting Previous Election

A coalition of Shiite parties won 128 of 275 seats in last month's parliamentary elections, falling 10 votes short of a majority, Iraqi election officials announced today.
The results mean that the Shiite group will remain the dominant force in Iraq's new government, but will still need to form a coalition. In second place came a coalition of Kurdish parties, who took 53 seats. The largest Sunni party, the Iraqi Accordance Front, won 44 seats and another Sunni party won 11. A party headed by former prime minister Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite, took 25 seats. The Sunnis will have more representatives in the new parliament than they did in the old, whose elections they mostly boycotted last January.

Google Rebuffs Feds on Search Requests

Google Inc. is rebuffing the Bush administration's demand for a peek at what millions of people have been looking up on the Internet's leading search engine — a request that underscores the potential for online databases to become tools for government surveillance.
Mountain View-based Google has refused to comply with a White House subpoena first issued last summer, prompting U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales this week to ask a federal judge in San Jose for an order to hand over the requested records.
The government wants a list all requests entered into Google's search engine during an unspecified single week — a breakdown that could conceivably span tens of millions of queries. In addition, it seeks 1 million randomly selected Web addresses from various Google databases.
In court papers that the San Jose Mercury News reported on after seeing them Wednesday, the Bush administration depicts the information as vital in its effort to restore online child protection laws that have been struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Release of prisoners 'not linked' to kidnap deadline

Iraqi officials called for the release of six women prisoners held by the US military but emphasised that the move had not been made in response to demands set out by the kidnappers of an American reporter.
A Justice Ministry official said that its decision to free six of the eight women held in US-controlled prisons had been taken by a review board last Monday, the day before the kidnappers of Jill Carroll said that they would kill her unless all women prisoners were released by the Americans. “There was no outside pressure on the commission” to release the women, another Human Rights Ministry official said. The women are due to be released in the coming days, leading to hopes that the kidnappers will extend their 72-hour deadline, set on Tuesday night, to murder the freelance journalist if their conditions are not met.

Rush to Sell Shuts Down Tokyo Stock Exchange

TOKYO, Japan ­- An avalanche of sell orders forced Tokyo’s stock market to close early Wednesday, with the main benchmark closing down 2.94 percent, after plunging almost as much on Tuesday when it lost 2.84 percent.
The trigger was a prosecutors' raid Monday night on the offices of Livedoor Co., a fastgrowing Internet services group. Livedoor shares did not trade Wednesday for lack of buy orders but were marked down by the daily 100-yen limit for a second day in a row to 496 yen.
At that price, more than $1.8 billion of the company's market value would be wiped out.
With the abrupt tumble, analysts debated whether the damage would stop Thursday with Internet stocks or whether it would pull down the world’s second largest market, a bourse that grew 40 percent last year, drawing investors from around the world.