Morning News Roundup (10 May)

• Iraqi President Jalal Talabani has said more than 1,000 people were killed last month in Baghdad as a result of continuing sectarian violence. Earlier on Wednesday, at least 11 people were killed when gunmen ambushed a bus outside Baquba, north of Baghdad. The victims were reportedly employees of a state-run electricity company travelling to work. [BBC]
  
  
• As evidence mounts that Shiite police commandos are carrying out secret killings, Sunni Arab neighborhoods across Baghdad have begun forming citizen groups to keep the paramilitary forces out of their areas entirely. In large swaths of western Baghdad, and in at least six majority Sunni areas in its center, young men take turns standing in streets after the 11 p.m. curfew, to send out signals by flashlights and cellphones if strangers approach. [NYTimes]
  
  
• Former NSA director Bobby Ray Inman criticized Bush’s warrantless domestic wiretapping program earlier this week, “making him one of the highest-ranking former intelligence officials to criticize the program in public.” “This activity is not authorized,” Inman said. The administration, he said, “need(s) to get away from the idea that they can continue doing it.” [ThinkProgress' ThinkFast]
  
  
• House and Senate Republican negotiators reached a final agreement yesterday on a five-year, nearly $70 billion tax package that would extend President Bush's deep cuts to tax rates on dividends and capital gains, while sparing about 15 million middle-income Americans from the alternative minimum tax.
  
  Middle-income households would receive an average tax cut of $20 from the agreement, according to the joint Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center, while 0.02 percent of households with incomes over $1 million would receive average tax cuts of $42,000. [WaPo]
  
  
• More than 1.9 million U.S. workers earned the federal minimum wage ($5.15) or less last year. States are taking action by “using legislation and ballot initiatives to do what Congress has not done since 1997, when it last increased the federal minimum wage.” [ThinkProgress' ThinkFast]
  
  
• Two House Democrats on Tuesday called for a probe of contract decisions by the Housing and Urban Development Department under its current secretary, Alphonso Jackson, to determine if politics played a part in those awards. This follows statements made by Jackson in Dallas, saying that a contractor was not awarded a contract because he said he did not "like" President Bush. [Reuters/ABC]
  
  
• Britain, France and Germany said Tuesday that they are preparing a package of fresh incentives for Iran -- including affordable energy and greater trade with the West -- that would be granted if Tehran resumed negotiations on its nuclear program and agreed to halt the enrichment of nuclear fuel. The latest diplomacy is expected to delay for at least two weeks the U.S. effort to secure a U.N. resolution, according to diplomats. [WaPo]
  
  
• The Japanese unit of US beverage giant Coca-Cola Co. will expand a recall to withdraw 2.37 million bottles of soft drinks laced with iron powder. [Agence France Presse]
  
  
• Fast-growing China and India helped to drive up global greenhouse gas emissions by 15 percent over 1992-2002, fuelling the effects of climate change, the World Bank said Tuesday. In its annual "Little Green Data Book", the World Bank said industrialised nations led by the United States continue to be the worst offenders for emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2). The United States contributed 24 percent of total emissions and the 12 nations of Europe's eurozone emitted 10 percent. [AFP via TerraDaily]
  
  
• The number of butterflies migrating through the state has fallen to a nearly 40-year low as populations already hurt by habitat loss and climate change encountered a cold, wet spring. [AP via ENN]