UBS loses $19 Billion

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ZURICH, Switzerland (AP) — UBS AG's chairman abruptly resigned Tuesday as the Swiss bank reported a first-quarter loss of $12.1 billion and said it would seek $15.1 billion in new capital.

UBS revealed more serious damage from exposure to the U.S. subprime crisis and said it expects write-downs of approximately $19 billion.

As UBS Chairman Marcel Ospel stepped down, Deutsche Bank AG, Germany's largest bank, announced similar write-downs of about $4 billion.

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Ex-Terror Detainee Says U.S. Tortured Him

Tells 60 Minutes He Was Held Underwater, Shocked And Suspended From the Ceiling


Go to CBS original
(CBS) At the age of 19, Murat Kurnaz vanished into America's shadow prison system in the war on terror. He was from Germany, traveling in Pakistan, and was picked up three months after 9/11. But there seemed to be ample evidence that Kurnaz was an innocent man with no connection to terrorism. The FBI thought so, U.S. intelligence thought so, and German intelligence agreed. But once he was picked up, Kurnaz found himself in a prison system that required no evidence and answered to no one.

The story Kurnaz told 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley is a rare look inside that clandestine system of justice, where the government's own secret files reveal that an innocent man lost his liberty, his dignity, his identity, and ultimately five years of his life.

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Israel Planning to Build Hundreds of New Homes on Occupied Land

Palestinians say Israeli settlements are the
'most dangerous obstacle to peace'


Go to Al Jazeera original
Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, has reiterated calls for a halt to settlement construction as Israel announced plans to build up to 1,400 new homes on occupied Palestinian land.

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Military Issues New Rules on Recruiters on Campuses

From DemocracyNow.org:
In education news, colleges and universities may soon be forced to hand over more information about students to military recruiters. According to the Marine Corps Times, the military recently announced a new get-tough policy with schools that interfere with the work of military recruiters and ROTC programs. Under rules that will take effect this month, military officials said they want the exact same access to student directories that is provided to all other prospective employers. The new policy also no longer lets schools ban military recruiters from working on campuses. Federal funding can be cut off if colleges and universities do not give recruiters and ROTC programs campus access. In other recruiting news, a press conference is scheduled in Berkeley California today to announce the closing of a Marine recruiting center that has sparked a wave of protests in recent weeks.

Military Report: Secretly 'Recruit or Hire Bloggers'

Go to Wired original
A study, written for U.S. Special Operations Command, suggested "clandestinely recruiting or hiring prominent bloggers."

Since the start of the Iraq war, there's been a raucous debate in military circles over how to handle blogs -- and the servicemembers who want to keep them. One faction sees blogs as security risks, and a collective waste of troops' time. The other (which includes top officers, like Gen. David Petraeus and Lt. Gen. William Caldwell) considers blogs to be a valuable source of information, and a way for ordinary troops to shape opinions, both at home and abroad.

This 2006 report for the Joint Special Operations University, "Blogs and Military Information Strategy," offers a third approach -- co-opting bloggers, or even putting them on the payroll. "Hiring a block of bloggers to verbally attack a specific person or promote a specific message may be worth considering," write the report's co-authors, James Kinniburgh and Dororthy Denning.

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Indian workers storm White House, protest slave conditions

Go to Times of India original
WASHINGTON: Braving a steady drizzle and the cold, nearly 65 Indian workers, who claim they were lured to move to the US by false promises of permanent jobs, have protested before the White House against the "abuses" in the H2B visa system, which was used to traffic them.

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Doctors support universal health care: survey

Go to Reuters original
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - More than half of U.S. doctors now favor switching to a national health care plan and fewer than a third oppose the idea, according to a survey published on Monday.

The survey suggests that opinions have changed substantially since the last survey in 2002 and as the country debates serious changes to the health care system.

Of more than 2,000 doctors surveyed, 59 percent said they support legislation to establish a national health insurance program, while 32 percent said they opposed it, researchers reported in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine.

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