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Nov. 13, 2001, 11:25PM Enron offers reasons for selling to Dynegy Underperforming assets, heavy debt cited By LAURA GOLDBERG Copyright 2001 Houston Chronicle Among Enron Corp.'s reasons for agreeing to be bought out by rival Dynegy: Underperforming assets were draining cash and earnings, and debt load was stretching the company. That Enron faced a loss of confidence from financial markets and departures of some senior executives also played into the decision, documents filed by Enron on Tuesday with federal securities regulators said. Before agreeing to a merger with Dynegy, Enron also considered staying independent, an infusion of private equity and ...

Houston, Nov. 13 (Bloomberg) -- Dynegy Inc. Chief Executive Charles Watson got word at about 7:00 a.m. last Thursday that his plan to take over Enron Corp., the largest energy trader, was in danger because Moody's Investors Service planned to lower Enron's credit rating to junk. With barely an hour before Moody's was to announce the downgrade, Watson enlisted his bankers, including Lehman Brothers Holding Inc. Chief Executive Richard Fuld, to lobby the credit rating agency to hold off. One argument: with the U.S. economy contracting after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the country didn't need another bankruptcy. The ...

Nov. 12, 2001, 10:23PM Jackson says coalition wants role in energy deal By NELSON ANTOSH Copyright 2001 Houston Chronicle Activist Jesse Jackson says the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition intends to be a part of the regulatory process leading to the closing of the Enron-Dynegy deal. The organization, which he founded, owns Enron stock and shares in several other large Houston-based energy firms. "Dynegy needs our participation to get approval," Jackson said Monday. The organization's interest in the acquisition of Enron by Dynegy is in assuring minority inclusion in any possible spinoffs, employment, contract commitments and EEOC rulings. Jackson is here for the ...

Dynegy and Enron confirmed today they are in merger talks but said they had not yet agreed to a deal. The rival Houston energy companies issued statements this morning acknowledging the negotiations but said they didn't plan to make any other announcements until an agreement is reached or talks fail. Sources said Wednesday that a merger could be announced as early as today between the two energy traders, which have been talking for about a week. If the smaller Dynegy does buy Enron -- known as a pioneer in the world of energy trading -- it would mark a surprising ...

At the direction of Rep. Henry A. Waxman, the Special Investigations Division of the Committee's minority staff is investigating allegations of misconduct at Enron Corp., including fraud, mismanagement, self-dealing, and improper political activities. Below is a copy of an FEC Disclosure. Apparently Dynegy Inc. gave Mr. Waxman a $1,000 dollar donation. What do you think?

Why we were caught off-guard © 2001 WorldNetDaily.com Some people are still wondering why and how the United States of America was caught off-guard by the terrorist attack of Sept. 11. Let me explain. Back in 1999, well after the first attack on the World Trade Center, after the Oklahoma City bombing and after the downing of TWA Flight 800, the Clinton administration's FBI put out a report on terrorism. It was called Project Megiddo. And it explained, in no uncertain terms, that right-wing Christian terrorists posed the gravest danger to the republic and were most likely to incite violence in ...

When we learned last December that Senator John Ashcroft was President-elect Bush’s choice for Attorney General, we were elated. Reed sent him a letter of congratulation coupled with a little advice. He said he had been concerned about the culture of corruption that has characterized the Clinton administration. Even with control of both houses of Congress, the Republicans were unable to do much about it. One reason was that the Justice Department made sure that high government officials were rarely prosecuted. Perjury by government officials was virtually decriminalized. I told John Ashcroft that some of Clinton’s executive orders should ...

Armed Conflict in America McVeigh and the Oklahoma Bombing Part 10: From Ruby Ridge to Waco by Robert L. Kocher Sammy Weaver came to find the dog screaming in pain and dragging itself by its front legs just before it died. Sammy fired a wild shot into the woods. One of the agents immediately shot him and nearly blew his arm off. When the now mortally wounded Sammy turned and started to run from the agents, one of them shot him in the back with a submachine gun to finish killing him. Kevin Harris saw the dog being shot ...

They weren't a gun cult, they weren't a militia, and they weren't right-wing. They had never heard of the "patriot movement," and wouldn't have approved of it if they had. Like the SDA denomination of which all but seven of the 140 persons at Waco had been members (and most still were)...they were hardly a right-wing group: blacks alone were a third of the members; well over half were people of color. Like the parent group, most of those who voted had backed the president who incinerated them--Bill Clinton. Fewer than half were US citizens by birth. As Seventh-day Adventists ...

Officials from a national car rental chain say that a Middle Eastern journalist wasn't targeted because of his ethnicity when a clerk at the Waco Regional Airport reported him to security after a dispute. Mohammed Al-Alami, a correspondent for the Arab satellite news network Al Jazeera, was in town for the meeting between U.S. President George W. Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin on Nov. 14. When paying for a rental car, there was a dispute over a business credit card that Al-Alami used. It belonged to Al Jazeera, and Al-Alami said he was told the card couldn't be processed. ...

Friday, 7 December 2001 GUNFIRE CALLED LIKELY Optics expert rebuts Waco standoff report Benjie Sanders / Staff Barbara Grant says she relied on science in her analysis of what happened at the Branch Davidian compound. By Alan D. Fischer ARIZONA DAILY STAR Tucson optics consultant Barbara Grant used science - not politics - to determine that law enforcement agents likely fired guns at the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, in the moments leading up to the building burning to the ground. A November 2000 report said agents fired no shots at Branch Davidians that day in 1993. Grant ...

New Waco Revelations Stoke GOP Fears That Investigation May Backfire Politically Updated 2.51 p.m. ET (2151 GMT) October 8, 1999    Congressional Republicans are beginning to consider the effect new hearings on the 1993 Waco siege will have on their prospects in next year's elections. Susan Weems/AP The FBI admits its agents fired potentially flammable tear gas canisters at the compound. Democrats need only pick up six seats in 2000 to win control of the House, leading some Republicans to speculate that yet another GOP-led investigation of the Clinton administration could backfire with voters. "There's a feeling that the political ...

Levels of support among Americans for moderate Arab states and Washington's Arab allies have dropped to an all-time low, according to new survey by Zogby International. Arab American groups have called the results "shocking," saying that the figures show a dramatic shift in Americans' attitude toward the Arab world. Only 10 percent of Americans view the Palestinian Authority favorably, compared to a huge 72 percent that are totally unsympathetic toward the PA, according to a recent comprehensive poll in the U.S. on Washington's attitude toward the Middle East and the Israeli-Arab conflict. The lowest ever level of support was recorded ...

Q&A: Islamic fundamentalism | csmonitor.com posted October 04, 2001 - http://www.csmonitor.com/2001/1004/p25s1-wosc.html Q&A: Islamic fundamentalism A world-renowned scholar explains key points of Islam. By Josh Burek and James Norton | csmonitor.com staff writers Islam is one of the world's largest – and fastest-growing – religions. Yet its most basic tenets remain mysterious to many nonMuslims. To shed light on a religion that has become the source of intense discussion following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, csmonitor.com interviewed Professor Charles A. Kimball, chair of the Department of Religion at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, NC. He is the author of three ...

LONDON, Dec. 26 (UPI) -- A man who authorities say tried to blow up a passenger jet by igniting a bomb in his shoes was associated with "extreme elements" at a London mosque and may be one of about 100 would-be suicide bombers, a British Muslim leader said Wednesday. Richard Reid was detained after an incident in which he allegedly tried to set off explosives on a plane over the Atlantic Ocean. The 28-year-old man faces charges of assault and intimidation of the crew of American Airlines Flight 63 from Paris to Miami. Abdul Haqq Baker, chairman of Brixton mosque ...

LONDON -- John Walker Lindh, the California Talib, captured the public imagination with his odyssey from Marin County to Mazar-e-Sharif. Yet his tale, arguably, is an exotic one, a sui generis conceit. More disconcerting was Mohammad Junaid, the New York-born Pakistani-American who, after Sept. 11, ditched his $70,000-a-year job as a computer techie and joined the Taliban to "kill Americans." He did so to the cheers of his mother, who, astonishingly, had been rescued from the World Trade Center. We may not have many John Walkers, but how many Junaids does the U.S. harbor? Britain's experience with its Muslims ...

JERUSALEM (December 24) - The area in which Muslim activists are building a mosque near the Basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth contains Jewish tombs, according to Christians protesting the project. The demonstrators, who stood outside the Prime Minister's Office yesterday, said that during a visit on Saturday, they saw the entrance to at least one tomb as bulldozers carted away dressed stones and other archeological remains. "They left antiquities in plain view," said Stephen Pfann, an archeologist and president of the University of the Holy Land, a center for the study of early Christianity. He said that he saw ...

When the US government released the tape where Osama bin Mohammed bin Laden boasted about the 9/11 attacks, too many people said it was a fake. They said it was manufactured by the CIA and so on. But why did OBL mention Holland? He said: Some of them said that in Holland, at one of the centers, the number of people who accepted islam during the days that follwed the operations were more than the people who accepted islam in the last eleven years. Why would anybody who wanted to make a fake tape include such information? Why would they ...

December 24, 2001 -- JOHN Walker Lindh's case may seem eccentric and unique. How many 20-year-olds from Marin County, Calif., especially ones named after a Beatle and children of a convert to Buddhism, end up in a dank cellar in Afghanistan fighting with the most fanatical of al Qaeda terrorists? Obviously, not many. But Walker illustrates three important and troublesome trends. * One concerns the powerful lure of militant Islam for alienated Westerners. What Walker, also known as Abdul Hamid, told his Islamic teacher in Pakistan - "In the U.S. I feel alone. Here I feel comfortable and at home" ...

With unbridled audacity, the Muslim population of the world has adopted the technique of Hitler's Big Lie to accuse the other of crimes they themselves have been guilty of for thousands of years and are still guilty of today: apartheid, racism, genocide, and ethnic cleansing. It is the Muslims, not the Christians, not the Nazis, and not the Serbs, who first taught the world such atrocities. It began with the Muslims, centuries before the Crusades, and continues openly and shamelessly into the 21st century, without an objection from the U.N. FACTS THE U.N. AND ITS MUSLIM ALLIES WANT YOU TO ...