4-30-09

4-30-09—According to restructuring plans proposed this week, [UAW] will have more than half the stock in Chrysler and a third of GM, meaning it will have tremendous influence, along with the government, in determining the future of the companies. ... “We believe the offer to be a blatant disregard of fairness for the bondholders ...” a group of GM bondholders said ... NYT B1

4-29-09

4-29-09—Phoenix has the unwelcome distinction of becoming the first major city where home prices have fallen by half since 2006. NYT A1, B1

--US high school students haven’t made significant gains in reading or math since the early 1970s a report said. WSJ A, A5

--[Prof. Christopher Blakesley, former friend of torture memo signer and now federal appeallate court judge Jay Bybee] said that while he liked Judge Bybee, “he has some basic flaws about including being very naïve about leaders.” “He has too much respect for authority and will avoid a confrontation no matter what.” NYT A12

4-28-2009

4-28-09—[On Dec. 10, 2007] John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer who had participated in the capture of suspected terrorist Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan in 2002, appeared on ABC News to say that while he considered waterboarding a form of torture, the technique worked and yielded results very quickly. M. Zubaydah started to co-operate after being waterboarded for “probably 30, 35 seconds,” Mr. Kiriakou told ABC’s Brian Ross. “From that day on he answered every question.” His claims—unverified at the time, but repeated by dozens of broadcasts, blogs and newspapers—have been sharply contrasted by a newly classified Justice Department memo that said waterboarding had been used on Mr. Zubaydah “at least 83 times.” NYT A1

--Today the United States stands tenth, along with Australia, Spain, and Sweden, behind Canada, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand, Belgium, Ireland, Norway Denmark and France in the percentage of its young people (ages 24-34) who have earned a post-secondary degree. Since secondary education abroad is often stronger than in the United States, the comparative educational attainment of Americans is probably even worse than these rankings suggest. Among adults in the age 55-64, we still lead the world in the percentage who are college graduates—which means not only that over the past three decades many nations have surpassed us, but that, in the aggregate, younger Americans are less well educated than their elders. –NYRB, May 14, 2009, p. 38.

weekend update April 25/26, 2009

4-26-09—[The Senate Armed Services Committee report released last week] found that Maj. Paul Burney, a US Army psychiatrist assigned to interrogations in Guantanamo Bay that summer of 2002, told Army investigators of another White House imperative: “A large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful.” As higher-ups got more “frustrated” at the inability to prove this connection, the major said, “there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce that intelligence. In other words, the ticking time bomb was not another potential Qaeda attack on America but the Bush administration’s ticking timetable for selling a war in Iraq; it wanted to pressure Congress to pass a ear resolution before the 2002 midterm elections. –Frank Rich, NYT WK 14

4-26-09—Mr. Siggfusson [53 year old Left-Green Party leader and former truck driver] was finance minister in [Iceland’s] caretaker government, a position he is expected to keep after the election, and he tells interviewers he wants to free Iceland from the consequences of embracing the unrestrained free-marketing that had its origins in the United States. “What are the people of the United States made about now?” he said in a recent interview. “It is the same poisonous philosophy that we had here, based on a lack of moral awareness and greed, and people who thought nothing of flying Elton John into Iceland fo their 50th birthday and paying him 70 million Icelandic kronors,” or roughly $600,000. NYT A8

4-25-06—In a confidence game that made a mockery of the US military’s most secure compound in Iraq, a ring of Americans posing as contractors and their Nepalese truck drivers used tanker trucks, forged documents and sheer brazenness to steal at least $40 million worth of jet and diesel fuel from an Army depot... NYT A6

4-24-09

4-24-09—[Even as the Global Climate Commission, a group representing industries with profits tied to fossil fuels] worked to sway opinion, its own scientific and technical experts were advising that the science backing the role of greenhouse gases in global warming could not be refuted. NYT A1

--23 [Notre Dame student] groups endorse ... decision to invite President Barack Obama as this year’s commencement speaker. SBT A1

4-22-08

4-22-09—The top [Bush] officials which [GWB CIA Director Tenet] did not learn that waterboarding had been prosecuted by the US in war crimes trials after World War II and was a sell-documented favorite of despotic government since the Spanish Inquisition; one waterboard used under Pol Pot was even on display at the genocide museum in Cambodia. NYT A1

--Record demand among faculty seeking tickets to the May 17 commencement ceremony featuring Barack Obama means not all University of Notre Dame professors who want to be there will be able to attend. SBT A1

i'll take half a loaf, then...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama left the door open on Tuesday to prosecuting some U.S. officials who laid the legal groundwork for harsh interrogation of terrorism suspects during the Bush administration.