Politicians ask questions about Bush aid request

WASHINGTON – Hit by sticker… Politicians ask questions about Bush aid request

WASHINGTON – Hit by sticker shock, lawmakers in Congress said Monday that, eventually, they will approve President Bush’s request for $87 billion more for Iraq and the war on terror, but they want to know more about how the money will be spent and efforts to share the financial burden.

“We’ll have to work on it as quickly as possible. I think it’s a bill that we have to pay,” said Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. Rep. Bill Young, R-Fla., who chairs the House Appropriations Committee, cited the need to protect “troops in harm’s way” and pledged to “aggressively expedite” the budget request.

Even Sen. Tom Daschle, D-S.D., the Senate minority leader, sounded a conciliatory note and said he would work with the administration. “The stakes for our troops and our national security are too great for us to fail,” Daschle said. “The president and Congress must now work together to provide the resources needed to both prevail in these troubled areas and to meet pressing needs at home.”

But Democratic candidates for president blasted Bush’s spending request as the result of failed policies and miscalculations.

“A 15-minute speech does not make up for 15 months of misleading the American people on why we should go to war against Iraq or 15 weeks of mismanaging the reconstruction effort since we have been there,” said former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, widely regarded as the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Federal spending on education will total $59.4 billion this year, fiscal 2003. The Homeland Security budget is $28.1 billion. Federal aid to highways totals $28.6 billion. The Environmental Protection Agency’s budget is $7.96 billion.

Most of Bush’s new spending request for the coming year – $51 billion – would support military operations in Iraq, the White House Office of Management and Budget announced Monday. An additional $15 billion would go to military operations in Afghanistan.

The remaining $21 billion would be spent on reconstruction of those nations’ broken infrastructure – schools, roads, utilities, hospitals.

-Frank Davies and Sumana Chatterjee

Knight Ridder Newspapers (KRT)

Iraqi families still live in aftermath of Hussein’s reign

BAGHDAD, Iraq – The 6-year-old girl with the Raggedy Ann red hair and the pink flowered dress is giggling madly.

Barefoot, she rolls an old truck tire up a small hill, eyes wide. She’s chasing her 10-year-old brother, who’s also rolling a big tire.

A few feet away, their mother glances over at them as she works, picking crushed blue Pepsi cans from the field of garbage that surrounds them as far as the eye can see. The stench of burning trash fills the hazy air.

This is home: a garbage dump.

“We’ve gotten used to this kind of life. That’s why we look happy,” said Naeyema Sa’ad, the children’s mother.

“It’s a hard life, but what can we do? It’s the only way we can survive.”

Sa’ad and her family are Marsh Arabs. They were born in Iraq’s south, in the wetlands near the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. It’s where their ancestors had lived for thousands of years.

After the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Saddam Hussein began draining the wetlands, in part to punish the Marsh Arabs for joining a Shiite Muslim uprising. Ecologists call it one of the greatest environmental crimes in history.

The Sa’ads are refugees from that crime.

They came to the dump north of Baghdad about five years ago, when the marshes dried up. With no more water and no more food, they’d had to leave.

They pitched a burlap tent in the middle of the garbage field, next to several dozen other tents. The settlement has about 30 families.

Sa’ad lives with her three children, her 75-year-old mother, her brother and a male cousin. She is married, but she is a second wife – polygamy is common among Marsh Arabs – so her husband comes only once a month. Jobless, he isn’t much help.

The arithmetic of their survival is simple. Each morning, they pick aluminum cans and plastic bottles out of the trash, put them in sacks and sell them for about 12 cents a bag. The money buys food for them and their animals, and pays trash-truck drivers to dump loads of refuse. Each family has its own sector of the dump.

If they don’t make enough from the trash, sometimes they have to sell a sheep.

-Ken Dilanian

Knight Ridder Newspapers (KRT)

American Muslims may get Muslim-themed cable channel

WALNUT CREEK, Calif. – Are U.S. television audiences ready for an American Muslim version of the game show “Jeopardy?” Or a Muslim sitcom? How about a stand-up routine about the Muslim experience after Sept. 11, 2001?

Former Concord, Calif., resident Muzzammil “Mo” Hassan and his supporters are betting on it: They are trying to start the country’s first Muslim-themed cable channel.

They have enlisted hundreds of mosques around the country, including many in the Bay Area, to spread the word and help get Bridges TV into living rooms by next summer.

The idea came to Hassan’s wife, Assiya Hassan, in November 2001 as the couple were driving in their current home state of New York, listening to a commercial talk-radio station, the Bridges TV CEO said.

“She became upset that the host and the callers were turning negative toward Muslims, and she felt there was a need for American Muslims to create their own programs and show themselves both as Americans and as Muslims,” Hassan said.

“We want to help build bridges of understanding between American Muslims and non-Muslims.”

First, Hassan and his backers need to convince major cable and satellite companies that their idea has legs, which means enrolling at least 10,000 paid subscribers before a single program airs. The station has signed up 2,500 subscribers so far.

Hassan has recruited the financial and moral support of prominent American Muslims, including boxing legend Muhammad Ali and basketball player Hakeem Olajuwon, to help raise the $15 million needed to start the channel.

As reflected on the Bridges TV Web site, some American Muslims wonder if such a cable channel would be censored for presenting Muslim viewpoints at a time when thousands of people of that faith are being detained, questioned and deported.

Earlier this year, Comcast refused to air advertisements during President Bush’s State of the Union speech that opposed a U.S.-led attack on Iraq, a position that many American Muslims espouse.

The channel will eschew violence, foul language and excess exposure of flesh, in accordance with Muslim values, said Aleem, who is also organizing what she said will be the nation’s first Muslim Film Festival. It will take place in the Bay Area in March.

“That’s another reason why Muslims don’t relate to what’s on TV,” Aleem said. “We see moral values degrading to Muslims.”

But how will a TV station speak to everyone from Indonesians to black Muslims to the curious masses?

“We will focus on things unique to the American Muslim experience,” Hassan said. “The melting of ethnicities, free-speech issues, or how my daughter is being told by her Islamic schoolteacher that she can’t go out for Halloween because it’s pagan or satanic.

“We could build a whole sitcom on that.”

-Jack Chang

Knight Ridder Newspapers (KRT)

Space shuttle flight will happen, but with new concerns after Columbia

WASHINGTON – The next flight of a space shuttle – when it happens – will be a test run to try out safety modifications that will be added to the fleet in the coming months, NASA officials said Monday.

The mission, as scheduled before the Feb. 1 Columbia accident, was supposed to be another step in the construction of the international space station. But while shuttle Atlantis, with astronaut Eileen Collins at the helm, will still dock with the orbiting laboratory, managers are leaning against the idea of using the mission to take a new crew to the station, shuttle-program manager Bill Parsons said at a press briefing in Houston.

That’s because Collins and her crew, in addition to opening the post-Columbia era for the shuttle, will be asked to perform a host of tests and demonstrations on the new additions to the orbiter. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which Monday publicly released its preliminary plan for returning to flight, hopes to have everything from new cameras to an in-orbit repair kit on board by the time of the next launch.

William Readdy, NASA’s top spaceflight official, said the agency is working on implementing the recommendations issued last month by the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, plus additional changes of its own devising.

Readdy and Parsons stressed that, while the return-to-flight plan is aimed at a launch window between March 11 and April 16, there is so much work to be done that it’s impossible to set a concrete date.

“We’re going to be safety-driven, not schedule-driven,” Readdy said.

An even thornier issue, Readdy said, is taking the Columbia board’s most amorphous recommendation – that NASA needs a cultural and organizational overhaul to replace its “broken” safety culture – and making it happen.

“There’s a challenge there. There is very much a ‘can-do’ culture that we’d like to keep. There was a culture that stifled communication that we somehow have to eliminate,” he said. “(But) we don’t want to throw the baby out with the bath water. We want to value the culture that came back after Apollo and came back after Challenger.”

-Gwyneth K. Shaw

The Orlando Sentinel (KRT)