According to my field operatives, gas is still only $2.80 across the street here in Hinghm, but it was $3.40 for 87 in Weymouth. How bad is it where y’all are? Stupid hurricanes.

And while I’m at it, because no one else has gotten around to posting it, to all the folks down there, good luck & we’re sorry for your losses.

Just below is the article about fuel prices. Now, sure, this sucks. Mrs. X’s Honda Civic will be drinking about $40 to $60 a week. The Infamous Black Jeep will probably be drinking about $55 once or twice a week, if not more.

But let’s put OUR petty problems aside and go back to all those folks in the disaster area, specifically those in New Orleans. I wonder how they feel about this ACT OF LUNACY.

Yay, Congress! Yay, W!

——-

Experts: $4 a gallon gas coming soon
Pricing analysts say consumers can expect even higher prices at the pump.

August 31, 2005: 12:46 PM EDT

By Grace Wong, CNN/Money staff writer

NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Consumers can expect retail gas prices to rise to $4 a gallon soon but whether they stay there depends on the long-term damage to oil facilities from Hurricane Katrina, oil and gas analysts said Wednesday.

“There’s no question gas will hit $4 a gallon,” Ben Brockwell, director of pricing at the Oil Price Information Service, said. “The question is how high will it go and how long will it last?”

OPIS tracks wholesale and retail oil prices and provides pricing information for AAA’s daily reports on fuel prices.

Brockwell said with gasoline prices now exceeding $3 a gallon before even reaching the wholesale level, it “doesn’t take a genius” to expect retail prices to hit $4 a gallon soon.

“Consumers haven’t seen the worst of it yet,” Brockwell said.

He expects consumers in the Southeast and Northeast to be pinched first, following the impact of Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast region.

Katrina pressures gas supplies
Katrina forced operators to close more than a tenth of the country’s refining capacity and a quarter of its oil production, which sent gasoline prices surging.

Two major pipelines that supply gasoline to key terminals and distribution centers along the Eastern U.S. were shut down due to power outages caused by the storm. (Video of Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman discussing U.S. plans to tap strategic oil reserve to help refiners — 4:16. Click here to watch).

Colonial Pipeline said it hopes to be back in partial operation soon, while the date of Plantation Pipeline’s restart is not clear. Each day the pipelines are closed, supplies get backlogged and distribution centers must rely on reserves.

“With this kind of hiccup in refinery capacity, in stretched markets like California, you could see over $4 a gallon in gas,” Evan Smith, an analyst at U.S. Global Investors, told CNN/Money.

While it’s still too early to fully assess the damage caused by Katrina, efforts to build up inventories of crude oil, natural gas and other products like gasoline will be set back by the storm, according to Nariman Behravesh, chief economist at Global Insight.

In a research note, Behravesh laid out a worst-case scenario that puts average prices for regular unleaded gasoline at about $3.50 a gallon for the next four to six months.

“The impact on consumer spending in such a scenario would be very dramatic, cutting the growth rate by as much as 3 percent and pushing real GDP growth in the fourth quarter closer to zero,” he wrote.

In a best-case scenario, he forecast retail pump prices to peak at $3 a gallon for a couple of months, but then fall back to around $2.50 by year-end.

The nationwide average price for a gallon of regular unleaded hit a fresh high of $2.619 Wednesday, according to AAA, the largest U.S. motorist organization, formerly known as the American Automobile Association.

Average gasoline prices have gained 40 percent in the last year.

Prices for crude oil are also up sharply and are currently hovering near record highs just under $70 a barrel.

http://www.freenewmexican.com/news/31883.html

Wal-Mart shooting was first under concealed carry permit
(33 comments; last comment posted Today 10:58 am) print | email this story

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
August 30, 2005

ALBUQUERQUE (AP) - A fatal shooting at an Albuquerque Wal-Mart last week was the state’s first by someone with a concealed-carry gun permit, authorities said.

Police said Felix Vigil was attacking his ex-wife with a knife near the store’s deli counter where she worked when an armed customer intervened and shot him. The woman, Joyce Cordova, was treated for multiple stab wounds and later released from an Albuquerque hospital.

The armed customer, 72-year-old Due Moore, was interviewed after the shooting last Thursday and released.

Police spokeswoman Officer Trish Hoffman said it appeared the shooting was justified. However, it will be up to the district attorney to decide whether Moore, a volunteer with the police department’s cold case unit, will be prosecuted.

Moore could not be reached for comment.

New Mexico allows citizens age 21 and over to carry concealed weapons if they complete firearms training and pass national and local criminal background checks.

Moore’s fatal shot was the first fired by someone with a permit, according to state Department of Public Safety spokesman Peter Olson. The state has issued more than 3,100 permits since the gun law went into effect Jan. 1, 2004.

Moore took a class to get his permit just 13 days after the law went into effect, said Cody Patton, a manager at Calibre’s National Shooters Sports Center in Albuquerque. That’s where Moore was certified.

“He was the fourth person ever to sign up for a permit,” Patton said. “I’ve now done more than 300 of them.”

Patton said there has been a fair amount of interest in concealed-carry permits at his range _ in particular during the first four months after the law passed.

——

My two hundreths of a dollar.

I’m outraged by the comments in this article. So let’s make our own.

I see no problem with a person who witnessed a stabbing taking a shot and killing the stabber. I would like someone to say “STOP” before they let off that first shot, but the dude with the knife has about .5 seconds to stop in that case. And of course, he could have shot dude in the hip.

I see people getting mad that this man was 72 or that he shot at all or that he was the 4th person in the state to sign up for a license. Bullshit - the man was deemed safe to carry a gun, did so and took action when it was needed. I’m glad there are some people willing to take the responibility to carry a gun - I don’t like crazies with guns. I don’t want to carry a gun. But if someone told me that if I carried a gun that I would save a person’s life then I would do it.

Let’s go.

Midnight

I’m sure The Infamous Mrs. X joins me in hoping Ann defeats Man, just because he sounds like he needs a few more shots to the head, but this is still the stupidest thing I’ve seen in a long time.

Back in the day, Vice Dictator and I used to watch boxing almost every week, and would look forward more to the undercard than the main event, usually because the undercard would have at least one or two female matches. Man, those girls would fight. Maybe they didn’t move like de la Hoya, or throw hammers like Foreman, but damn. Those girls could fight something fierce. And they MEANT IT. Some (including myself) say that boxing is rigged but you could tell that what was going on in lady’s boxing was legitimate.

Putting a woman in the ring with man isn’t necessarily the end of the world, but it’s getting close to dangerous irresponsibility. Maybe I’m just all messed up in the head after movie night and the disturbing images & sleepless night that went with it (it’s possible, being as I am very sensitive person), but I think this is a recipe for disaster.

This isn’t to say that on some levels women CAN’T compete with men. Hell, I remember the Match to End All Matches at the Belmont High Xmas Invitational. Every kid at the meet (except the ones actually wrestling their own matches), had to be about 300 of us, stood around the red mat near the emergency exits cheering themeselves hoarse and going absolutley bonkers for just under 5 minutes, watching a young lady at 112 lbs PIN her male opponent. I think half the crowd asked her on a date. No one ever saw the kid she pinned again. Ever.

So, anyway, it’s not like women can’t compete with men in certain situations. But overall, I think it’s likely that women will suffer serious damage when put into a male-dominated arena. I think that Ann vs. Man is a mistake, and hopefully, it will not be repeated regardless of who wins.

So what do you think? Am I a big jerk? Should chicks be in the ring with guys? If boxing goes totally co-ed, should the NBA? The NFL? MLB? Where do we draw the line between “equality” and “criminal negligence”?
————

August 28, 2005

Ann vs. Man
Ann Wolfe says Laila Ali is ducking her. So to make ends meet, the female street thug steps into the ring Oct. 15 against a guy

By TIM DAHLBERG, AP

Ann Wolfe wants to do what a lot of women just dream about - beat up a man.

She’ll try to do it in a fair fight, with gloves on and, hopefully, a referee to keep order. The guy she plans to beat up on says he’s just a poor country boy, but knows a little something about the fairer gender.

“I love kissing a woman and hugging on them. That’s what they’re made for,” Bo Skipper says. “But if she wants to beat on me, I’m gonna hit her back.”

Those aren’t exactly fighting words, unless you shout them out at a National Organization for Women convention. Around Laurel, Mississippi, where Skipper lives, that’s just kind of the way most guys look at things.

Wolfe, though, isn’t exactly the cuddly sort.

She is a 34-year-old fighting machine who channels into her sport the anger she was filled with while homeless and on the streets. It doesn’t pay to get in this woman’s way.

“If I stop fighting, there’s no telling what’s going to happen to me. It’s in me to fight. If I didn’t box, I’m the kind of person who would kill 50 people,” Wolfe said. “Boxing saved me. It gave me the chance to be as gentle and kind-hearted as I am.”

Great. This isn’t just woman versus man.

This is hayseed against potential serial killer.

Indeed, this freak show is too freaky even for Las Vegas, which is why they’re holding it in Mississippi. Mark your calendar for Oct. 15 if for some reason you feel compelled to buy the pay-per-view.

Get about 20 of your buddies, load up on the beer and have a good ol’ time.

Just make sure the women are in the other room.

“You know how women are - they’re going to try and take it further and further,” Skipper said on the phone the other day during his lunch break from his job at a machine shop in Laurel. “I got to stop it in its tracks.”

It’s hard to give boxing a black eye because the sport keeps hitting itself below the belt. Boxing has survived scandal, tragedy, Mike Tyson and ear biting, but matching a man against a woman takes it to another level, one just below pro wrestling.

At least with Hulk Hogan and the Rock you get some comedy relief.

IT’S SAD AND DANGEROUS

This charade is just sad - and dangerous, too.

“I can’t even fathom anyone letting it happen,” said Marc Ratner, who regulates boxing in Nevada. “People get injured anyway in this sport without this. It just frightens me.”

Sadly enough, fighters do get injured. Last month one of them died in Las Vegas after a fight.

So why increase the risks by having a man fight a woman, even a woman who seems to be far more talented than Skipper, who has been knocked out in his last two fights and has never beaten a fighter with a winning record.

If it wasn’t for finishing third in a tough man competition at the bar at a local Ramada Inn a few years back, Skipper never would have become a fighter.

As it is, he’s never made more than $1,200 US for a fight. So he leaped at the chance to make some money by being the foil for Wolfe.

“At first I said, ‘Man, I ain’t fighting no woman,’ ” Skipper said. “But she challenged me, and I can’t see a woman beating me. I’m going to train like I never did before.”

Wolfe, who is 21-1 with 15 knockouts, says the fight wasn’t exactly her idea, either. She wants desperately to make some big money by fighting Laila Ali, who is perhaps the only woman boxer who can sell tickets.

But she claims Ali has been running from her, so she’s taking the money where she can get it.

And money means a lot to a fighter who says she sometimes got only one dollar for her bouts.

“I didn’t really want to fight boys; I didn’t want to fight a man,” Wolfe said. “But what else am I supposed to do?”

OK, here’s where Skipper is supposed to insert the line about women belonging in the kitchen. But that would make this too funny, and there’s nothing funny about either this fight or the way Wolfe approaches boxing.

LIFE THAT WAS GOING NOWHERE

The sport saved her from a life that was going nowhere, helped her channel her aggression and, she says, made her a better person. Her family was so poor as a child they had no running water or indoor toilet, and she’s proud she has made something of herself with only a sixth-grade education.

“Now people want to put me under the microscope, but I had to fight to eat, to sleep, to live, and nobody said nothing,” Wolfe said. “In the streets they’d say, ‘Ann is tough as hell, one tough son of a gun.’ I’ve been fighting all my life.”

Fighting is one thing. Being part of a circus act is another.

The fight at the Mississippi Coast Coliseum is billed as “Ann versus Man,” and will be fought at 165 pounds. The purists may hate it, but it will likely sell to two kinds of people - those who want to see a woman put in her place and those who want to laugh at a man who can’t do it.

“This ain’t about fighting, it’s about living,” Wolfe said. “Some people don’t agree with it. But after they speak to me they still may not agree, but they understand what is going on.”

They should because it’s really not that hard to understand.

It’s just tough to stomach.

This article is from Wired. I’m a regular Party Poker player. This freaks me the hell out. What do you think? Whether you’re an online or realtime shark, or don’t partake at all, I’d love to hear your opinion. Is this cheating? Is this, as Bonnert claims, ‘arming yourself’? Is this an atrocity? I am totally aghast, but am willing to entertain alternate viewpoint. Check, bet, or fold…

————–

On the Internet, Nobody Knows You’re a Bot

In the booming world of online poker, anyone can win. Especially with an autoplaying robot ace in the hole. Are you in, human?

By David Kushner for Wired

It’s late one Wednesday afternoon, and CptPokr is logged on to PartyPoker.com and ready to play. Onscreen, the captain exudes a certain brash charisma - broad shoulders, immaculate brown hair, restless animatronic eyes. He looks like he should be playing synth in Kraftwerk. Instead, he is seated at a virtual table with nine other avatars, wagering on limit Texas hold ‘em.

There’s plenty at stake. An estimated 1.8 million gamblers around the world ante up for online poker every month. Last year, poker sites raked in an estimated $1.4 billion, an amount expected to double in 2005.

Ever since the aptly named accountant Chris Moneymaker parlayed a $40 Internet tournament buy-in into a $2.5 million championship at the World Series of Poker in 2003, card shark wannabes have been chasing their fantasies onto the Net. Some even quit their day jobs and try to make a living at online poker. And why not? This shadowy world is driven by no less a force than the great American dream. As the tournament’s motto goes, “Anyone can win.” There’s one problem, though, as CptPokr is about to demonstrate: The rules of the game are different online.

CptPokr is a robot. Unlike the other icons at the table, there is no human placing his bets and playing his cards. He is controlled by WinHoldEm, the first commercially available autoplaying poker software. Seat him at the table and he will apply strategy gleaned from decades of research. While carbon-based players munch Ding Dongs, yawn, guzzle beer, reply to email, take phone calls, and chat on IM, CptPokr (a pseudonym) is running the numbers so it will know, statistically, when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em.

Smart, skilled players are rewarded in the long run, especially online, where there are plenty of beginners who would never have the nerve to sit down at a real table. But WinHoldEm isn’t just smart, it’s a machine. Set it to run on autopilot and it wins real money while you sleep. Flick on Team mode and you can collude with other humans running WinHoldEm at the table.

For years, there has been chatter among online players about the coming poker bot infestation. WinHoldEm is turning those rumors into reality, and that is a serious problem for the online gambling business. Players come online seeking a “fair” shot - a contest against other humans, not robots. But an invasion of bots implies a fixed game (even though, like their mortal counterparts, they can and do lose if their hands are bad enough or opponents good enough). So the poker sites loudly proclaim that automated play is no big deal. At the same time, they are fighting back by quietly scanning for and eliminating suspicious accounts. “We’re making sure we never have bots on our site,” says PartyPoker marketing director Vikrant Bhargava.

That’s an impossible promise to keep, says Ray E. Bornert II, WinHoldEm’s elusive creator. He’s trying to flood the online world with his bot - and make a killing in the process. Bornert offers an elaborate justification for what many view as outright cheating: Online poker is already rife with computer-assisted card sharks and - thanks to him - a growing number of outright bots. Players should get wise and arm themselves with the best bot available, which is, of course, WinHoldEm.

There’s a quiet knock at the door of a hotel room in Atlanta. It’s Bornert. A stocky, wide-faced 43-year-old with a neat goatee and nervous manner, he’s carrying a router in a plastic bag. To demonstrate his software, he insists on meeting here in private, several miles from his office. He doesn’t want anyone from the poker business to know where he is. “Our guard is constantly up,” he says.

For Bornert, a former evangelical student, outsmarting the poker sites is not just a mission, it’s a market. A suite of WinHoldEm programs is available for download at www.winholdem.net. For $25, you get a bare-bones setup: run-of-the-mill poker-hand analysis software. For $200, you can buy the full package: a one-year subscription to the team edition, which includes the autoplaying bot and a card-sharing module that allows multiple players to communicate during a game. Bornert won’t say how many customers he has; he’ll admit only that he makes a living selling WinHoldEm.

For customers, buying the bot is just a starting point. The program works something like a music equalizer, but instead of adjusting bass and treble, you tweak betting strategies - how to play a pair of fives early in the game, for example, or when to fold cards that might look promising to a beginner. Most users customize the software by inputting a batch of rules, called a formula set. Bot aficionados scour poker manuals and online forums to cull the best strategies. They swap formula sets like gamers swap mods. “This is from Sklansky’s Tournament Poker for Advanced Players, pages 122-133,” reads a typical note posted to the WinHoldEm forums.

Bornert isn’t claiming he can create millionaires. Bots are subject to the same cold streaks as real players. But, unlike humans, the machines play with relentless cunning and tireless discipline, raking in small pots from low-limit tables where less-experienced opponents hang out. Traditionalists in the poker chat rooms scorn Bornert. “You are a pathetic immoral piece of shit loser,” reads a recent post, “completely devoid of morals and ethics.”

He hardly cares. Bornert insists that he’s bringing to light the hypocrisy of the gambling sites. It’s an unlikely role for a guy who grew up in Dallas and Phoenix as a self-described “geek jock” playing football and studying biblical history. “I’d always been taught gambling was evil,” he says. He went on to Oral Roberts University, where he became fascinated with cards after seeing a late-night infomercial for a blackjack scheme.

Bornert was pursuing a degree in computer science, and the ad intrigued him. He set up some simulations to test the card-counting technique and found that a player could, in fact, get the edge. That’s when a light went on: Blackjack wasn’t really gambling after all. With enough smarts, a player could master it and win. “No one could say I was addicted to a losing game,” Bornert says. “It was beatable.” After seven consecutive profitable trips to Vegas, Bornert got hooked on winning.

As the poker boom hit the Net, Bornert found himself working for the house. He took a job as a senior systems engineer with RealTime Gaming, an Atlanta-based developer of online casino software. While working on blackjack software in 2001, he started tinkering with his own card-analysis software on the side. Such programs - Poker Tracker, Poker Edge, Holdem Winner - have since become an acceptable and indispensable part of the scene. They’re used like calculators to keep tabs on shifting stats. It didn’t take long for Bornert to make the next logical connection - what he calls the “golden goose” of online poker. Rather than consult card-analysis software while playing, why not hook up the software directly to the game?

Bornert had no ethical qualms about creating a poker bot. The way he saw it, the poker sites were duping people into believing that a game of hold ‘em online was as safe and secure as one at any casino in Vegas. “The reality is that the game changed the moment it moved to the Internet,” Bornert says. Bots and bot-aided collusion were inevitable. Rather than seduce anyone into thinking such things didn’t exist, Bornert had another notion: Put the power in the players’ hands. By democratizing computer-assisted firepower, he’d make it part of the competition. “It’s like football - if you don’t wear a helmet and pads, you’re going to get hurt,” he says. “A poker bot is your equipment.” And if that is considered unethical, then so be it. “I’d rather be unethical than be a victim,” he says. “This is intentional civil disobedience.”

In 2003, Bornert quit his job at RealTime Gaming and devoted himself to writing WinHoldEm. He quickly had a working prototype, which serves as the template for the bot he sells today. When a user boots up the software and logs on for a game, all the players’ cards and chips are represented onscreen. WinHoldEm first scans the screen for information. The data is put into memory and analyzed according to the player’s formula set. Each action - calling, raising, going all-in - is controlled by a series of yes-no formulas.

By fall, Bornert was ready to test his software. He logged on to a $5-limit hold ‘em tournament on Paradise Poker and watched the program go. A crucial element of the test was to see how long the application could stay online without being detected. Eventually, Bornert went to bed - but the bot didn’t. The next morning when he checked his computer, WinHoldEm had won. It wasn’t a lot of money, only $30, but it proved a point. “I almost shed tears,” he recalls. “I know what Dr. Frankenstein felt like. It was a totally intoxicating experience.”

On Super Bowl Sunday 2004, Bornert began offering his program online. It didn’t take long for the poker sites to catch on and fight back. Within weeks, they were scanning games to see if anyone was running WinHoldEm, and users were getting booted off poker sites before they could cash out. “Players no longer feel comfortable if they think they’re playing a computer,” says Scott Wilson, director of operations for Paradise Poker. “You would lose credibility fast if they felt your environment wasn’t human-to-human.”

Players themselves also took steps against the bots, using a site’s chat function to smoke out the software. Moneymaker likes to engage players in small talk between hands. “Poker bots can’t make conversation,” he says. Meanwhile, bot users started developing their own counter-countermeasures, like limiting their time at any one table to minimize the appearance that a relentless machine is involved. And they can control their bots from a remote computer to evade detection by poker sites that scan for WinHoldEm on a hard drive.

The battle goes beyond Bornert’s app. Other bots are appearing on the scene - including some that were never intended for online play. For the past 14 years, computer scientists at the University of Alberta Games Group have been building the poker version of Deep Blue: a program that can beat a top player, just as IBM’s bot trumped Garry Kasparov in chess. “I’d love to be there when the computer raises the stakes by $100,000,” says UA’s Jonathan Schaeffer. “I want to see the bead of perspiration going down the human opponent’s forehead. That’s my dream.”

There’s reason to sweat even now. Not because Schaeffer’s bot is taking on world champs - that’s a few years off - but because bits of the underlying UA code have escaped into the wild. Schaeffer licensed his team’s software to the makers of applications like Poker Academy, which trains players in the game’s finer points. But hackers have extracted the underlying code and are putting it to use in their poker bots.

Poker site operators say there’s nothing to worry about, and for them there isn’t. For now, sites continue to earn healthy profits because they make money by taking a percentage - the “rake” - of every pot. “If anyone’s losing money because of the bots, it’s the players,” says Poker Academy CEO Kurt Lange. “It’s inevitably going to become a serious problem when they figure out that bots win hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.” Indeed, PartyPoker reportedly has 100 employees scanning for the presence of bots.

PartyPoker’s Bhargava insists that the game is still fair. “There are people who spend all their waking hours dreaming about how to bring us down,” he says. “They can dream about creating fantasy bots that will play for them or make them money while they sleep, but that’s not going to happen.”

“All right, we’re on!” says Bornert, as the two laptops in the hotel room fire up WinHoldEm and join a game of Texas hold ‘em on none other than PartyPoker. “Awesome!”

As the bot folds onscreen, Bornert leans back in his chair and soaks it in. Though he’s watched this scene countless times, he’s still impressed with his own technology. He imagines a day when sites acknowledge the presence of bots and when players embrace them as part of the action. But this won’t happen, he says, until players take up the cause. “You’ve been woken up,” he says, as the bot rakes in its chips. “Now what are you going to do?” Bornert hopes they reach the obvious conclusion: Use a bot, too.

Associated Press

Thursday, August 25, 2005

ROME — Italy’s Red Cross (search) treated four Iraqi insurgents with the knowledge of the Italian government last year and hid them from U.S. forces in exchange for the freedom of two kidnapped aid workers, a top Italian Red Cross official said in an interview published Thursday.

Maurizio Scelli, the outgoing chief of the Italian Red Cross, told the Turin newspaper La Stampa that he kept the deal secret from U.S. officials, complying with “a nonnegotiable condition” imposed by Iraqi mediators who helped him secure the release of Italians Simona Pari and Simona Torretta. They were abducted in Baghdad Sept. 7 and freed Sept. 28.

“The mediators asked us to save the lives of four alleged terrorists wanted by the Americans who were wounded in combat,” Scelli was quoted as saying. “We hid them and brought them to Red Cross doctors, who operated on them.”

They took the wounded insurgents to a Baghdad hospital in a jeep and an ambulance, smuggling them through two U.S. checkpoints under blankets and boxes of medicines, Scelli said.

Also as part of the deal, four Iraqi children with leukemia were brought to Italy for treatment, he said.

Scelli said he informed Premier Silvio Berlusconi’s government of the deal and of the decision to hide it from the United States through Gianni Letta, an undersecretary in charge of Italy’s hostage crises in Iraq.

“Keeping quiet with the Americans about our efforts to free the hostages was an irrevocable condition to guarantee the safety of the hostages and ourselves,” he told La Stampa. He said Letta agreed.

Officials at the Italian Red Cross headquarters in Rome said Scelli was out of the office and could not be immediately contacted.

In a statement Thursday, the Italian government stopped short of denying it knew about the deal. It said Scelli acted independently and that the government “never conditioned or oriented his action, which … was developed in complete autonomy.”

The statement also did not directly address if Italy had kept the United States in the dark about Scelli’s efforts but reiterated that Italy has always maintained a “full and reciprocal” cooperation with its American allies in Iraq.

In Washington, U.S. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack sidestepped questions on whether the United States has asked the Italian government for an explanation.

“Our views, the United States policies with respect to negotiation with hostage-takers are well known. We don’t do it,” McCormack said, adding that Rome and Washington are “close friends” and allies in the war on terror.

The head of the Italian parliamentary commission overseeing secret services, Enzo Bianco, said the commission would hold hearings soon with Scelli and government representatives, news agency ANSA reported.

Opposition leaders called on the government to tell Parliament what really happened and contended the alleged deal endangered Red Cross neutrality.

“Scelli conducted an improper negotiation using the symbol of the Red Cross as a shield,” said opposition lawmaker Tana De Zulueta. “The Red Cross is obliged to offer assistance to all parties involved in a conflict.”

The International Red Cross said it was not involved in or informed of Scelli’s activities. It said the Italian Red Cross is an independent organization that doesn’t answer to the Geneva-based International Committee of the Red Cross.

“Scelli worked mostly in a personal capacity,” said spokeswoman Antonella Notari. “I would not qualify what he did as an Italian Red Cross activity.”

Notari would not comment on whether Scelli’s initiatives violated the ICRC’s pledge of neutrality, saying the commission needed more information from the Italian branch.

Iraqi Deputy Foreign Minister Labeed Abbawi, in Rome, declined to comment about Scelli’s allegations, saying “we were not part of that negotiation.”

“All we ask countries is that they should not give any political or financial concessions” to insurgents, he added.