International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde is facing questions at a special Paris court 00over a controversial financial deal that she oversaw as French finance minister.The 2008 arbitrage deal handed about 400 million euros ($520 million) to magnate Bernard Tapie to settle a dispute with state-owned bank Credit Lyonnais over the botched sale of Adidas in the 1990s.

Tapie was close to then-French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who was Lagarde’s boss. Critics have said the deal was too generous to Tapie at the expense of the French state, and that the Adidas case shouldn’t have gone to a private arbitration authority because it involved a state-owned bank.

More broadly, the deal was seen by many as an example of the cozy relationship between big money and big power in France. And the case threatens to sully the reputation of Lagarde, who has earned praise for her negotiating skills through Europe’s debt crisis and is seen as a trailblazer for women leaders.

Lagarde, smiling at reporters, left her Paris apartment Thursday morning and appeared at a special court that handles cases involving government ministers. She has denied wrongdoing.

Investigators opened an inquiry in 2011 into possible charges of “complicity to embezzlement of public funds” and “complicity to forgery.” The probe may not result in a trial. If it does, and if Lagarde were to be convicted, she could face up to 10 years in prison, according to prosecutors.

She and the Washington-based IMF were aware of the probe when she took over as managing director of the fund from Dominique Strauss-Kahn in 2011. The IMF has expressed its confidence in Lagarde throughout the investigation.

In March, French investigators searched Lagarde’s Paris home. Her lawyer said at the time that Lagarde welcomed the search as a step toward proving her innocence.

French Finance Minister Pierre Moscovici told Le Monde newspaper this week that the government may seek to annul the arbitration deal if enough evidence emerges of wrongdoing.

Tapie – a flashy tycoon and former football club owner who has served as an actor, singer and government minister – insists that he deserved the settlement. He says the investigation into the deal is “bogus,” a politically motivated hunt by the governing Socialists against Sarkozy’s conservatives.

“Lagarde’s fate doesn’t concern me,” Tapie said on Europe-1 radio Thursday. “When evidence is discovered, then we’ll talk.”

Tapie himself may be targeted in a separate probe.

 

 

 

The White House plans to send some Guantanamo Bay inmates back to Yemen in a new push to close the prison, officials said President Obama will say Thursday.

The president will also announce new limits to unmanned combat drone strikes, the officials said of the program that has been central to White House efforts to combat terrorism.

Obama’s 2 p.m. speech at the Defense Department’s National Defense University in Washington will lay out how he intends to bring his counter-terrorism policies in line with the legal structure and values he promised four years ago this week.

In a May 21, 2009, address, the president argued U.S. national security interests needed to conform with the nation’s commitment to human rights and the rule of law.

“I believe with every fiber of my being that in the long run we cannot also keep this country safe unless we enlist the power of our most fundamental values,” he said at the National Archives and Records Administration.

But Obama has not always embodied those values in his counter-terrorism policies, rights activists say.

As part of the new phase of restrictive drone use — a reversal of the administration’s expansion of the program begun by President George W. Bush in 2004 — the administration formally acknowledged for the first time it killed four U.S. citizens in drone strikes outside the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Attorney General Eric Holder told Congress in a letter the only specifically targeted American was Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S.-born Yemeni cleric and al-Qaida member killed in a Sept. 30, 2011, drone strike in Yemen.

The other Americans were Awlaki’s son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, and al-Qaida propagandist Samir Khan, both killed in Yemen, and Jude Kenan Mohammad, killed in Pakistan.

Mohammad, 20, was a reputed member of a Raleigh, N.C., jihad group and was on the FBI’s most-wanted list for supporting terrorism.

A new “presidential policy guidance” Obama signed will sharply restrict instances when combat drones can be used in countries such as Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, which are not overt war zones, The New York Times reported.

The rules will impose the same standard for strikes on foreign enemies as well as U.S. citizens deemed to be terrorists, the newspaper said.

The standard could end so-called signature strikes, the Times said. Signature strikes are attacks on unknown people whose behavior patterns, or intelligence “signatures,” suggest involvement in terrorist activities.

Administration critics, including some two dozen Democratic lawmakers, say signature strikes have resulted in many civilian casualties.

In his address Obama plans to renew his long-stalled effort to close the U.S. military prison within Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba, saying he’ll end a ban on sending detained suspected Yemeni terrorists back to Yemen, officials told several news organizations.

To that end, the president plans to reappoint a high-level State Department official to oversee an effort to reduce the prison population, officials said after White House spokesman Jay Carney alluded to the possibility Wednesday.

“I would say that one of the options is reappointing a senior official at the State Department to renew our focus on repatriating or transferring those detainees,” Carney told reporters.

Of 166 detainees held in Guantanamo, 86 have been cleared for transfer, including 56 from Yemen.

Transfers to Yemen could still be months away, an official told The Wall Street Journal.

Washington is also talking with Kabul about transferring Afghan detainees from Guantanamo, the Journal said. Human-rights advocates told the Journal they believed these detainees could be among the first transferred.

At least 102 Guantanamo detainees are on a hunger strike to protest their confinement and the slow pace of transfers.

Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., who has led congressional efforts to block the transfer of Guantanamo detainees to the United States, told the Journal past Guantanamo detainees returned to the terrorist battlefield in Yemen.

“We know there is significant al-Qaida activity in Yemen,” she said. “I obviously have some serious questions about Yemen.”

Obama is expected to say Thursday he foresees an unspecified time when the “global war on terror” will all but be over, officials told the Times.

He will speak of a time when al-Qaida is so incapacitated wartime authority will end, the officials said.

A Pentagon official last week indicated the war on terror, triggered by the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, would likely continue for a decade or two, the Times said.

 

 

Anthony Weiner set out to reintroduce himself to voters Thursday as he embarked on a mayoral bid after leaving Congress in a sexting scandal. He found a much more supportive reception in his first campaign stop than he did from his party’s leadership, who bluntly criticized his candidacy a day earlier.

Residents greeted the Democratic candidate at a Harlem subway station with handshakes and plenty of concerns – about teacher contracts, manufacturing jobs, the problems of the mentally ill and other public policy issues. But not about the risque tweets and obfuscating explanations that have largely defined his image for the last two years.

Weiner seemed to relish his first time stumping since his last congressional race in 2010, answering voters and a throng of reporters with a combination of enthusiasm about airing his ideas for the city, humility about his past transgressions and occasional flashes of the wisecracking demeanor for which he was known in Washington. When one reporter asked how voters had embraced him so far, Weiner asked one of the residents in the crowd, Linda Smalls, for a hug.

“This is how they’ve embraced me,” he said.

“If citizens want to talk to me about my personal failings, that’s their right, and I’m going to do everything I can to answer them,” he said a few minutes later. But “frankly, I think most New Yorkers, particularly those in the middle class in communities like this, they want to talk about the solutions to the challenges that New York City faces. That’s what they care about, and I want to try to provide some answers.”

After about a month of maybes, Weiner officially launched his comeback campaign with a video posted online late Tuesday. However he does when the polls close, he’s certain to add drama to the heated race to succeed term-limited Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Wednesday it would be a “shame” if Weiner were elected mayor.

Speaking to editors at the Syracuse Post-Standard newspaper, the governor, who also leads the state Democratic Party, said that if Weiner won, “Shame on us.”

Weiner, a former councilman and seven-term congressman, ran for mayor in 2005 and nearly did in 2009. He’s getting into this year’s race with a $4.8 million campaign bank account and the possibility of $1 million more in public matching money. A Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday found Weiner getting 15 percent of the Democratic primary vote, behind all other Democratic contenders except City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, with 25 percent.

Outside the subway station Thursday, Smalls said she’d vote for Weiner “because I like the work that he’s done in the past.

“Even though he made a mistake, you know, we’re human. He’s human. He apologized for it, and it’s time to move on,” she said, though she couldn’t resist a wink at his notoriety: “Instead of a hug, I really wanted a text,” she joked.

With less than four months left before the primary, Weiner also is confronting some clear challenges.

The Quinnipiac poll found that 49 percent of city voters think he shouldn’t even run. He has only recently hired campaign staffers, and some influential players in Democratic politics have already endorsed other contenders. Weiner said he’d made calls Wednesday to some community leaders and officials to tell them about his candidacy but didn’t ask them for endorsements.

And the scandal that forced him from office continues to spur questions. During an interview Thursday with WNYC-AM radio, he said he wouldn’t make such mistakes again – “I have put these things behind me” – but he said it was possible that more of his past messages might emerge if recipients chose to come forward now.

After a photo of a man’s bulging underpants appeared on Weiner’s Twitter account in 2011, he initially claimed his account had been hacked. Then more risque photos surfaced, including one of him bare-chested in his congressional office, and the married congressman ultimately acknowledged exchanging inappropriate messages with several women and resigned.

“It was simply a blind spot. It was a thoughtlessness that I had about my private behavior,” he told WNYC, reiterating that he lied about the tweets because he didn’t want his then-pregnant wife, Huma Abedin, to find out about them.

She has said she has forgiven him, a message reified in a campaign announcement video that opened with the two feeding their toddler son.

For Weiner’s campaign, it’s key to “be extremely honest and demonstrate that the most important person in his life has forgiven him,” in the hopes that voters will also, Pace University political scientist Gregory Julian said.

Weiner is positioning himself as a champion for the middle class and those working to get there. His proposals range from creating a city-run, single-payer health system for the uninsured – he’d use Medicaid money to pay for it – to sending vans to shopping centers so business owners needn’t trek to city offices to contest fines. He was due to face some of his opponents for the first time at a Democratic candidate forum Thursday evening.

Some of his rivals have said they welcome him to the race, including Democratic former City Comptroller William Thompson, whose campaign used Weiner’s arrival as a jumping-off point for a fundraising email. But others quickly started leveling criticisms, including Democratic former City Councilman Sal Albanese and Republican John Catsimatidis, who both rapped Weiner as a “career politician.”

By JENNIFER PELTZ

President Barack Obama is lifting his self-imposed ban on transferring Guantanamo Bay detainees to Yemen, where a leadership upheaval has improved the country’s security but not eliminated a terrorist organization trying to recruit jihadists.

Lifting the ban is a step toward Obama’s goal of closing the Navy-run prison in Cuba since nearly 100 of the 166 terrorist suspects held there are from Yemen and have had nowhere to go even if they had been cleared for transfer. Obama wouldn’t send them home and no other country was welcoming them, and their hopelessness after a decade or more of imprisonment had contributed to a hunger strike at the detention facility that helped reignite the long-stalled effort to close it.

But Obama’s decision is not without risk – detainees who have been released to Yemen in the past have joined terrorist fighters in the Arab nation. The security concerns prompted Obama to suspend transfers to Yemen in January 2010 after a Nigerian man attempted to blow up a U.S.-bound flight on Christmas Day 2009 with explosives hidden in his underwear on instructions from al-Qaida operatives in Yemen.

Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., was among those on Capitol Hill criticizing Obama’s change in policy.

“Between December 2009 and today, has Yemen shown any indication that they are more capable of looking after those individuals? Absolutely not,” Chambliss said. “And If we were to transfer those individuals to Yemen, it would be just like turning them loose.”

Yemeni watchers in the U.S. say there is reason to hope security has improved since longtime authoritarian leader Ali Abdullah Saleh was ousted after mass uprisings last year. Al-Qaida had been on the upswing under Saleh, but his successor Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi has made fighting terrorism a top goal and restored cooperation with the United States in the effort.

Obama announced that he was lifting the moratorium on Yemeni transfers in a speech Thursday at the National Defense University in which the president also defended targeted killings by U.S. aerial drones and pushed Congress anew to authorize Guantanamo’s closure. The president did not explain his rationale behind the change in Yemen policy, but senior administration officials cited Hadi’s leadership as an increasingly able partner to the U.S.

A Yemeni official told The Associated Press that a delegation, including the country’s human rights minister, returned this week after a trip to Washington, where they agreed to set up of a rehabilitation center to help reintegrate detainees, with the support of the United States and other Arab nations.

Rageh Badi, an adviser to Yemen’s prime minister, said in an interview that the transfer ban had cast a shadow on the relations with the United States. Badi said lifting the ban is a “welcome step, a progressive one that removes much of the ambiguity and confusion between the U.S. administration and the Yemeni government.”

Yemeni authorities previously had a system to monitor returned detainees, but it ceased to function after massive anti-government protests swept most of the country, starting in early 2011. Of the estimated 30 Yemenis who returned from Guantanamo, only a handful had stayed in Sanaa, the capital, while the rest moved to remote areas where government authority is minimal, or nonexistent.

David Remes, an attorney who represents many Guantanamo detainees, described a system roughly like parole for his clients who have been released to Yemen. He said they have been flown in shackles aboard a military aircraft back to Sanaa and turned over to state forces who spend a couple days debriefing them about their years of captivity before they return to their families. If they want to leave town, they are required to register with state security forces who keep track of their movements, Remes said.

“Although there is no such thing as zero risk, the men who have returned from Guantanamo are overwhelmingly living peaceful lives,” Remes said. “And you can’t hold 99 of 100 men captive because one might engage in bad acts when he is released, even two.”

Yet some have returned to jihad. Among them is Saeed Ali al-Shihri, who emerged as the second-most senior commander of Yemen’s branch of al-Qaida after being released from six years of detention at Guantanamo Bay. Yemini officials said in January that al-Shihri was killed in a U.S. drone attack, but al-Qaida denied he was killed and last month released an audio recording of him criticizing Yemen’s neighbor Saudi Arabia for its policy of allowing the U.S. to launch drone strikes from bases in the kingdom.

In confusion that underscores how difficult it can be to keep tabs on former detainees, it was the second time the group denied al-Shihri’s death. U.S. officials had previously announced al-Shihri’s death in an airstrike in September last year. A DNA test, however, proved that the body recovered was not that of al-Shihri.

According to security officials in Yemen, there has not been any evidence to link any of the returnees with suicide bombings in the country. However, some of them are thought to have fought against government forces in the southern Abyan province in 2011 and 2012 , when al-Qaida fighters took advantage of the security vacuum to seize large swathes of the area before they were pushed back by security forces last year. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

Christopher Swift of the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service said research has shown the recidivism rate for former detainees sent to Yemen has been about 15 to 20 percent.

“That would great progress if you were talking about drug dealers, but you are talking about terrorism,” Swift said. “The political class in America has a zero tolerance approach to these issues.”

Swift said there have been improvements to security under Hadi’s leadership, who with support from the United States and other Arab nations has dispersed the terrorists out of their strongholds and left fighters struggling to reorganize. But he said al-Qaida has not been eliminated and the government has more improvements to make.

“Suffice it to say the government is highly dysfunctional, but it is much more functional than it was a year ago or even two years ago,” Swift said.

By NEDRA PICKLER

 

All that is left of Shayne Patterson’s three-bedroom home is the tiny area where his wife hunkered down under a mattress to protect their three children when a tornado packing winds of at least 200 mph slammed through his neighborhood.

Patterson vowed to rebuild, likely in the same place, but said next time he will have an underground storm shelter.

“That is the first thing that will be going into the design of the house, is the storm shelter and the garage,” he said as he looked around piles of bricks and plywood where their home once stood.

Patterson’s home was among as many as 13,000 homes damaged or destroyed Monday when the twister plowed through the Oklahoma City suburb of Moore. About 33,000 people were affected, officials said, though the number left homeless was still unknown because most of the displaced were believed to have been taken in by relatives; only two dozen or so have stayed overnight at Red Cross shelters.

Officials estimated the damage could top $2 billion.

At the same time, more details emerged on the human toll, including heartbreaking stories about the final moments of some of the children who were among the 24 people killed. One elementary school was reduced to rubble when the tornado hit. Another was heavily damaged.

While anguish over the deaths was palpable as residents began picking up their shattered neighborhoods, many remained stunned that the twister didn’t take a higher human toll during its 40 minutes on the ground.

“The tornado that we’re talking about is the 1 or 2 percent tornado,” Oklahoma Department of Emergency Management Director Albert Ashwood said of the twister, which measured a top-of-the-scale EF5 with winds of at least 200 mph. “This is the anomaly that flattens everything to the ground.”

The medical examiner reported that six of the children who died at the Plaza Towers Elementary School suffocated after being buried under a mass of bricks, steel and other materials as the building collapsed. A seventh child who perished there, 8-year-old Kyle Davis, was killed instantly by an object – perhaps a large piece of stone or a beam – that fell on the back of his neck.

The first of the funerals is to take place Thursday morning, for 9-year-old Antonia Candelaria, who also died at the school.

With all of the missing now accounted for, response teams transitioned into cleanup and recovery, and authorities formally allowed residents back into the damage zone Wednesday to start the monumental task of rebuilding their lives.

Moore Mayor Glenn Lewis said Wednesday he would propose an ordinance in the next couple of days to require all new homes to have storm shelters.

The town already has some. After a massive tornado tore through a nearly identical path in 1999, the city provided incentives like federal grant dollars to help residents cover the costs of safe rooms. This time, though, Lewis thinks it is necessary to compel people to include them in all new construction.

The scale of the destruction is also bound to mean higher insurance premiums for homeowners, said Dan Ramsey, president of the Independent Insurance Agents of Oklahoma.

“Three years of hail bombardments of apocalyptic proportions and then this? It has to result in some give someplace,” he said.

Residents clearing massive piles of debris were also trying to get hold of essentials like mobile phones and prescription drugs lost in the destruction. Cellular service providers set up mobile retail outlets and charging stations. At least one was offering free phone calls and loaner phones.

Insurance companies have also set up emergency operation centers to take calls from people trying to get prescriptions filled and handle other health care needs.

Elsewhere in town, several hundred volunteers took it upon themselves to clean the city cemetery, which was covered in debris, so it will be ready for Memorial Day. Some veterans are buried there and it’s where the town’s residents gather on the holiday, placing flowers and flags among the gravestones.

By RAMIT PLUSHNICK-MASTI and SEAN MURPHY