Pay Czar Quietly Meets With Rescued Companies
Deadline to Propose Compensation Looms
By Brady Dennis and Tomoeh Murakami Tse
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, August 9, 2009
President Obama’s compensation czar has been meeting for weeks with executives at some of the country’s largest and most troubled companies as they face a Thursday deadline to propose how much they will pay their top employees.Kenneth R. Feinberg has the unprecedented task of deciding executive compensation at seven companies that received large government bailouts. His meetings with American International Group, Citigroup, Bank of America, General Motors, Chrysler, Chrysler Financial and GMAC have been conducted in secret, with neither Feinberg nor the companies willing to say much in public.
But one window into this opaque process is an account provided by people familiar with his discussions with AIG, the crippled insurer that has received tens of billions of dollars in federal rescue money.
We cannot eliminate all risk of torture, ministers admit
It is impossible to guarantee that information used by the security services has not been obtained through torture, David Miliband and Alan Johnson now admit.
By Patrick Hennessy, Political editor
In a joint article for The Sunday Telegraph, the two Cabinet ministers hit back strongly at claims that the government is colluding in torture by insisting that everything possible is done to minimise the risk of mistreatment by foreign regimes.
However, the Foreign and Home Secretaries say Britain’s security and intelligence services (MI5 and MI6) face “hard choices” and the overriding aim is to “defend both our citizens’ rights and their security”.
The rare joint intervention by the pair, whose departments are responsible for MI5 and MI6, comes at the end of the week where ministers have faced detailed allegations of British complicity in torture – including providing questions for detainees to be asked under interrogation.
USA
Climate Change Seen as Threat to U.S. Security
By JOHN M. BRODER
Published: August 8, 2009WASHINGTON – The changing global climate will pose profound strategic challenges to the United States in coming decades, raising the prospect of military intervention to deal with the effects of violent storms, drought, mass migration and pandemics, military and intelligence analysts say.
Such climate-induced crises could topple governments, feed terrorist movements or destabilize entire regions, say the analysts, experts at the Pentagon and intelligence agencies who for the first time are taking a serious look at the national security implications of climate change.
Criminal investigation into CIA treatment of detainees expected
Insiders say Atty. Gen. Eric Holder is close to naming a prosecutor to look into reports of excessive waterboarding and other unauthorized methods. Convictions could be hard to get.
By Greg Miller and Josh Meyer
August 9, 2009
Reporting from Washington — U.S. Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. is poised to appoint a criminal prosecutor to investigate alleged CIA abuses committed during the interrogation of terrorism suspects, current and former U.S. government officials said.A senior Justice Department official said that Holder envisioned an inquiry that would be narrow in scope, focusing on “whether people went beyond the techniques that were authorized” in Bush administration memos that liberally interpreted anti-torture laws.
Current and former CIA and Justice Department officials who have firsthand knowledge of the interrogation files contend that criminal convictions will be difficult to obtain because the quality of evidence is poor and the legal underpinnings have never been tested.
Europe
20 years on, life is still tough for Romania’s street children
When Ed Vulliamy visited Bucharest in 1996, he discovered a group of youngsters living underground. Here, he revisits ‘the hole’ 20 years after the fall of the Ceausescu dictatorship and finds that a drug-free life and hard work have brought hope
Ed Vulliamy
The Observer, Sunday 9 August 2009
“Come,” Anca had said 13 years ago, “I want you to meet some interesting people.”Beside a Bucharest fairground – and by the drive-through McDonald’s, shining symbol of change in post-communist Romania – Anca Dionosisie, a young volunteer for Save the Children, led me down a manhole in the street. We inhaled a shot of warm, stinking, putrid air and encountered an underground scene straight from Dostoevsky. Here, children were living ragged lives among the subterranean pipes.
The leader of the group, Laurentiu, had lived on the streets for years, surviving via drugs and prostitution around the railway station, before he established this subterranean colony and laid out the rules of “the hole”: no glue-sniffing, no prostitution and you had to look for work.
Ossetians warm to Moscow’s embrace
A year after Georgia and Russia fought over the tiny territory, fears of a land grab are not unfounded. Shaun Walker reports
Sunday, 9 August 2009
Ayear on from last August’s war, the evidence on the ground shows that despite claims to the contrary, tiny South Ossetia has effectively been absorbed into Russia, adding fuel to Georgia’s claims that Russia’s aim in the war was to annex Georgian territory.Thousands gathered in the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali this weekend to mark a year since Georgia launched an attack to regain the breakaway territory. Alongside remembrance of the roughly 200 Ossetians who died in the war, there were also celebrations of the territory’s “independence”, officially recognised by Russia in the aftermathof the conflict.
Asia
Taliban commander denies the death of Baitullah Mehsud
Jason Burke
The Observer, Sunday 9 August 2009
The Pakistani army is “waiting for the dust to settle” before deciding whether to launch a major ground offensive into the restive south Waziristan tribal agency, following the presumed death of local militant leader Baitullah Mehsud by a unmanned US drone last week.“We are still waiting for full confirmation, and we will be reassessing the options for the resolution of the south Waziristan militant problem,” said Major-General Atta Abbas, the military’s chief spokesman.
The man who is in effect Mehsud’s deputy insisted yesterday that the Pakistani Taliban’s leader was still alive. Hakimullah Mehsud, a former driver and one of the most powerful commanders in the tribal region, described reports of Mehsud’s death as “ridiculous”, said the BBC Urdu service website. It is likely that the Pakistani Taliban’s leadership is divided over who should become the next chief and that the denial is aimed at buying time until a new leader is chosen.
Pyongyang lured US reporters into trap
From The Sunday Times
August 9, 2009
Michael Sheridan, Far East Correspondent
CHRISTIAN activists who work on the North Korean border believe two American television reporters may have blundered into a trap when they were detained in March and say their arrests led to a crack-down on refugees.The pair, Laura Ling, 32, and Euna Lee, 36, were freed last week after Bill Clinton, the former president, flew to Pyongyang to secure a pardon from Kim Jong-il, the North Korean dictator.
There is still confusion about the exact events on March 17, when soldiers stopped the two women on the frozen Tumen River, which divides North Korea and China.
Africa
Is Somalia the new Afghanistan?
he wartorn nation is acting as a dangerous new magnet for terror
Jon Swain and Michael GillardFrom The Sunday Times
Loading ammunition into the m
August 9, 2009agazine of his AK-47 assault rifle, the young suicide bomber looked straight into the camera. “Jihad is real,” he said. “There’s no way you can understand the sweetness of jihad until you come to jihad.”His accomplice joined in, his face hidden by a scarf. “How dare you sit at home and look on the TV and see Muslims getting killed … Those who are in Europe and America, get out of those countries,” he ordered.
Moments later a column of black smoke appeared as a battered Toyota truck exploded.
Threat of bloodshed muffles Kenyan refugees’ calls for justice
Displaces villagers fear that attempts to hold the country’s leaders accountable for killings will lead to a new wave violence, reports David Blair.
Published: 12:01AM BST 09 Aug 2009
AT the base of the Great Rift Valley, two rows of white tents serve as a refuge for Esther Wangari Mwaura and 1,300 other victims of Kenya’s remorseless political violence.
The people of Vumiliya camp were all driven from their homes after the last presidential election, and they now inhabit a barren if breathtaking landscape of sweeping savannah, crowned by the volcanic summit of Mount Longonot.
Mrs Mwaura lost everything when a mob brandishing axes burned down her house. “They did the same to all the homes nearby. Everywhere was fire and smoke,” she said.
That was a few days after the election of Dec 2007 triggered two months of relentless violence, claiming at least 1,100 lives and turning another 300,000 people into refugees.
Middle east
Iraqis Take the Lead, With U.S. Trailing Closely
By ROD NORDLAND
Published: August 8, 2009
SOUTH BALAD RUZ, Iraq – “Yes, we are in charge now,” said an Iraqi Army soldier, Sgt. Salman Fallah Jassim, as he led a mixed Iraqi and American patrol through the saw grass of a dried up irrigation canal, sweeping the ground in front of him with the long wand of a metal detector. “But we need help all the time.”
The United States military, in fact, provided the metal detector, the explosives-sniffing dog and even transportation on a joint mission at the end of July to find a weapons cache in an area of Diyala Province only recently cleared of insurgents.The Iraqi company’s sole armored Humvee, an American hand-me-down, had no spare tire, so they left it behind.
With Iran Blaming West, Dual Citizens Are Targets
Location of 2 Men Unknown, Families Say
By Tara Bahrampour
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 9, 2009
Among the more than 100 people on trial after Iran’s disputed presidential election are two dual citizens: Kian Tajbakhsh, 47, an American Iranian urban planner, and Maziar Bahari, 42, a Canadian Iranian filmmaker and Newsweek reporter.
Bahari was arrested June 21 at his mother’s Tehran apartment, where he was staying while reporting on the post-election turmoil. Tajbakhsh, who lives in Tehran with his wife and daughter, was arrested July 9 while leaving his home to attend a party.Friends and family members say they do not know where the men are being held. They have not been allowed visitors or access to lawyers, though both have been allowed a few phone calls and appeared in a Tehran courtroom last week.