Bail Set for Billionaire Accused of Corruption With Mubarak

The billionaire, Hussein K. Salem, was arrested in Spain this week in what was considered a breakthrough for Egyptian prosecutors. They are seeking his extradition to try him in corruption cases relating to what they say are sweetheart deals that enriched him and Mr. Mubarak.

The Spanish charges of money laundering, fraud, bribery and corruption are related to the use of money that Mr. Salem is accused of obtaining illegally in Egypt, the police in Spain said.

The case is closely tied to accusations of corruption against Mr. Mubarak and other former officials ousted in Egypt’s revolution in February, and could open a window on Mr. Mubarak’s hidden foreign holdings, which are thought to exceed several billion dollars.

Egyptian prosecutors filed charges against both men last month, part of an effort by the transitional government to show that it is stamping out the corruption associated with the former government.

Mr. Salem, 77, left Egypt a week before Mr. Mubarak was forced to resign. Mr. Mubarak is under house arrest in Egypt, and is expected to face trial on corruption and other charges in August.

In one case, Mr. Salem is accused of squandering public funds by siphoning $714 million in public money out of a deal to sell natural gas to Israel. Prosecutors said Mr. Mubarak allowed a company in which Mr. Salem was a major shareholder to buy gas from the government below market price. Mr. Salem’s company may have then resold the gas to Israel at a substantial markup, enriching himself at the public’s expense.

It was unclear whether Mr. Mubarak personally benefited from the deal. The sale of gas to Israel raised widespread public outcry in Egypt, where the popular perception was that Israel received the special deal, cheating Egypt out of $714 million in profits.

The other Egyptian allegation was that Mr. Mubarak allowed Mr. Salem to buy a large tract of prime land on the Red Sea coast from the government at a steep discount. In return, the prosecutors said, Mr. Salem provided the Mubarak family with five luxury villas, including Mr. Mubarak’s 161,000-square-foot seaside estate at Sharm el Sheik, worth about $4.5 million, where he now lives under house arrest.

On Friday, Mr. Salem appeared before two Spanish judges, one concerning the money-laundering charges, the other on Egypt’s extradition case. Mr. Salem also holds Spanish citizenship, which could complicate the latter case.

After questioning, he was hospitalized in police custody with neurological problems, The Associated Press reported.

Mr. Salem was detained Wednesday at his villa in Marbella, Spain, the Egyptian news agency MENA reported.

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Woman in 2008 Affair Is Said to Have Accused I.M.F. Director of Coercing Her

One briefing was on the fund’s activities in Ghana. The fund’s operations in the small west African country were minimal. But Mr. Strauss-Kahn took a keen interest in the woman making the presentation — Piroska M. Nagy, a blond Hungarian-born economist who was 50 at the time and who had worked at the I.M.F. since 1986.

Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s subsequent brief affair with Ms. Nagy, who is married, soon became public — spurring an internal investigation at the fund that would ultimately clear him of having abused the power of his office.

Now, in the aftermath of Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s arrest on charges that include attempted rape, his past conduct is undergoing fresh scrutiny. A person with direct knowledge of Ms. Nagy’s version of what happened and her view of the I.M.F. investigation said that the affair — which was conducted at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland — was consensual, but that she had felt coerced because Mr. Strauss-Kahn was so forceful and so senior to her, making it hard for her to, in effect, say no.

This person, who declined to be identified because the matter was a sensitive one, said Ms. Nagy had felt that her claim about abuse of power was not taken into account by the board.

The I.M.F., whose investigation at the time concluded that Mr. Strauss-Kahn had shown poor judgment, declined comment. Ms. Nagy, who now works for the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in London, also declined comment.

Robert J. Smith, a partner at Morgan Lewis & Bockius who led the investigation, said it did take Ms. Nagy’s claims into account. “There was no evidence of coercion or abuse of his power,” he said.

Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s interest in Ms. Nagy materialized soon after her presentation, according to the person with knowledge of the matter. He began to call Ms. Nagy in an insistent fashion, asking many questions about Ghana’s economy, this person said.

It soon became clear to Ms. Nagy that Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s interest was more than professional, and he began asking her out and even using increasingly sexual language in his communications, this person said.

William Taylor, a lawyer for Mr. Strauss-Kahn, said Ms. Nagy responded in kind to this form of e-mail communication.

On one occasion, this person recalled, Mr. Strauss-Kahn even sent his secretary to summon Ms. Nagy from the bathroom with a message that the managing director wanted to see her. Ms. Nagy found herself in an increasingly awkward relationship with her ultimate boss, but for a while she put off his advances, the person said. In January 2008, however, she met up with Mr. Strauss-Kahn in Davos and had a very brief affair with him, a version of events that has been publicly accepted by both sides.

Ms. Nagy put an end to the affair after her husband became aware of it. In the spring of 2008, she left the fund, taking advantage of an attractive severance package when the organization cut staff, but also feeling uncomfortable in light of the affair.

After the I.M.F. board heard of the affair, it hired a law firm to investigate it, focusing on whether Ms. Nagy had received any advantages in promotion or pay as a result of her relationship.

The board concluded that Ms. Nagy had received no undue benefit from her relationship, and while it deemed Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s behavior inappropriate — and he apologized — it concluded that he had not abused his power.

In a letter to the board, Ms. Nagy disagreed, saying Mr. Strauss-Kahn had used his power as managing director to become intimate with her.

“I was damned if I did and damned if I didn’t,” she wrote in a letter to the investigators. In the letter, she went on to say that Mr. Strauss-Kahn was “a man with a problem that may make him ill-equipped to lead an institution where women work under his command.”

Graham Bowley contributed reporting.

 

Florida Men Accused of Supporting Pakistani Taliban

 

MIAMI — Six people, including two imams at South Florida mosques, have been indicted on federal charges of providing financial support and encouraging violence by the Pakistani Taliban, the United States attorney here announced Saturday.

The indictment, which was handed up on Thursday, charged Hafiz Muhammed Sher Ali Khan, 76, the imam at the Miami Mosque (also known as the Flagler Mosque), the oldest mosque in Miami. The indictment also charged two of the imam’s sons: Izhar Khan, 24, the imam at the Jamaat Al-Mumineen Mosque in nearby Margate, Fla.; and Irfan Khan, 37, of North Lauderdale, Fla. All three men are American citizens who are originally from Pakistan, the authorities said.

The four-count indictment charges the Khans, and three others living in Pakistan, with conspiring to provide material support to a conspiracy to murder, maim and kidnap people overseas, as well as with conspiring to provide about $45,000 in financial support to the Pakistani Taliban from 2008 to 2010.

“Despite being an imam, or spiritual leader, Hafiz Khan was by no means a man of peace,” Wilfredo A. Ferrer, the United States attorney for the Southern District of Florida, said in a statement. “Instead, as today’s charges show, he acted with others to support terrorists to further acts of murder, kidnapping and maiming.”

Hafiz and Izhar Khan are scheduled to be arraigned in federal court in Miami on Monday afternoon. Irfan Khan will be arraigned in Los Angeles on Monday. Each of the four counts in the indictment carries a maximum 15-year prison term.

Prosecutors said the indictment did not charge the mosques. They added that the defendants were charged “based on their provision of material support to terrorism, not on their religious beliefs or teachings.”

The Muslim Communities Association of South Florida announced that Hafiz Khan had been suspended indefinitely from his mosque.

“Our organizations, together through the Coalition of South Florida Muslim Organizations, has been working with the U.S. attorney’s office and the Miami F.B.I. office,” the association said in a statement released Saturday afternoon, “and appreciate the efforts of law enforcement to root out potential sources and supporters of terrorism.”

“We stand together with the U.S. attorney, Wilfredo Ferrer, and the men and women of the F.B.I., and have been and will be cooperating with law enforcement to our fullest ability,” the Muslim association added.

The charges of supporting the Pakistani Taliban but not actually carrying out operations are the most common types of terrorism prosecutions that American authorities have pursued since the Sept. 11 attacks. Of the 50 top terrorism cases since 9/11, about 70 percent have involved financing or other support to terrorist groups, according to the Center on Law and Security at the New York University School of Law.

The Pakistani Taliban is closely allied with Al Qaeda and is responsible for attacks against Pakistani police and military targets in recent years. Pakistani authorities believe that a splinter group of the Pakistani Taliban was responsible for the suicide attack in northwestern Pakistan on Friday that killed more than 80 cadets from a government paramilitary force.

The indictment comes at a tense moment in relations between the United States and Pakistan after Osama bin Laden was killed in a raid by the Navy Seals on May 2 in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

On Saturday, the Pakistani Parliament condemned the raid as a “unilateral action” and “a violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty,” and demanded a formal review of the country’s relationship with the United States.

F.B.I. agents arrested Hafiz Khan and his son Izhar in South Florida on Saturday, the authorities said. Irfan Khan was arrested in Los Angeles, they said.

Lizette Alvarez contributed reporting from Miami, and Eric Schmitt from Washington.

 

A Journal’s Statement May Aid a Harvard Researcher Accused of Misconduct

Some researchers said they saw the Science statement as a step toward the eventual exoneration of Dr. Hauser, an animal psychologist who specializes in the cognition and behavior of monkeys, while others said it had little bearing on the overall case against him. He is now on administrative leave,?unable?to teach classes; in February, the psychology department voted to?bar him from teaching for the coming academic year as well.

Dr. Hauser became known to a wider audience through his 2007 book “Moral Minds,” which argued that people have an innate sense of morality. But his career was jeopardized when his students complained about his research methods, prompting an inquiry by the Harvard faculty.

Though the precise charges have never been published, the faculty dean said they concerned three published articles and five unpublished articles. In two of the published articles, the inquiry found, Dr. Hauser could not locate the original data, prompting him and a colleague to redo the original experiments and submit the new data to the journals that had published the results, Science and Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

In a third article, published in Cognition in 2002, the data did not support the published results, a serious problem that has not yet been explained. Dr. Hauser retracted the article last year without admitting misconduct.

Given the problems with the Cognition article, the absence of the original data for the Science article suggested some more serious failing than bad archiving practices: that perhaps, for instance, the reported experiments had never been done. But Science’s referees seem to have assuaged such concerns by reviewing the submitted videotapes and other raw data and concluding, in a statement released Monday, that the results “replicate those reported in the original paper in terms of statistical significance.”

The case against Dr. Hauser is being reviewed by?the Office of Research Integrity, a government agency that investigates scientific misconduct, and both sides are meant to keep mum until the findings are released. But that has not stopped others from weighing in.

“The fact that two of the three published papers have now been replicated and the third has been withdrawn suggests something is wrong, and it’s not with Hauser,” said Bennett G. Galef Jr., an expert on animal behavior at McMaster University in Ontario. He said he believed Harvard’s inquiry was at fault.

The loss of original data for two papers may be sloppiness but does not amount to misconduct, Dr. Galef said, as is the case with the unpublished papers. “How in the world can they get in trouble for data they didn’t publish?” he asked. The only serious issue, in Dr. Galef’s view, concerns the Cognition article. “There’s no question that experiment was very deeply flawed,” he said.

Dr. Galef, because of his interest in research ethics, was asked by Dr. Hauser last year to review Harvard’s charges against him and concluded, based on material made available by Dr. Hauser’s lawyers, that the accusations were unfounded. But others in the field put a more guarded interpretation on the Science report.

Jonathan Haidt, a moral psychologist at the University of Virginia, said it might be legally helpful to Dr. Hauser. “But his fellow scientists will be more focused on evaluating his reputation, and that may depend more heavily on the credibility of the people who had expressed concerns than on whether any particular study can be replicated,” he said.

Gordon Gallup, a psychologist at the State University of New York at Albany, said, “To the extent this satisfied the people at Science it’s fine, but it doesn’t mean the issue is resolved.”

Bruce Alberts, the editor of Science, explained that “Science did not seek to confirm or refute Harvard’s broader findings; we sought only to determine whether the original findings could be replicated, and they were.”

A Harvard spokesman, Jeff Neal, said that the university was glad to see that concerns about the scientific record were being addressed but did not respond to a question about whether scientific misconduct was still an issue with the Science article.

Dr. Hauser said in an e-mail that he was pleased that Science’s publication of his data would let others examine his results.

 

A Journal’s Statement May Aid a Harvard Researcher Accused of Misconduct

Some researchers said they saw the Science statement as a step toward the eventual exoneration of Dr. Hauser, an animal psychologist who specializes in the cognition and behavior of monkeys, while others said it had little bearing on the overall case against him. He is now on administrative leave,?unable?to teach classes; in February, the psychology department voted to?bar him from teaching for the coming academic year as well.

Dr. Hauser became known to a wider audience through his 2007 book “Moral Minds,” which argued that people have an innate sense of morality. But his career was jeopardized when his students complained about his research methods, prompting an inquiry by the Harvard faculty.

Though the precise charges have never been published, the faculty dean said they concerned three published articles and five unpublished articles. In two of the published articles, the inquiry found, Dr. Hauser could not locate the original data, prompting him and a colleague to redo the original experiments and submit the new data to the journals that had published the results, Science and Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

In a third article, published in Cognition in 2002, the data did not support the published results, a serious problem that has not yet been explained. Dr. Hauser retracted the article last year without admitting misconduct.

Given the problems with the Cognition article, the absence of the original data for the Science article suggested some more serious failing than bad archiving practices: that perhaps, for instance, the reported experiments had never been done. But Science’s referees seem to have assuaged such concerns by reviewing the submitted videotapes and other raw data and concluding, in a statement released Monday, that the results “replicate those reported in the original paper in terms of statistical significance.”

The case against Dr. Hauser is being reviewed by?the Office of Research Integrity, a government agency that investigates scientific misconduct, and both sides are meant to keep mum until the findings are released. But that has not stopped others from weighing in.

“The fact that two of the three published papers have now been replicated and the third has been withdrawn suggests something is wrong, and it’s not with Hauser,” said Bennett G. Galef Jr., an expert on animal behavior at McMaster University in Ontario. He said he believed Harvard’s inquiry was at fault.

The loss of original data for two papers may be sloppiness but does not amount to misconduct, Dr. Galef said, as is the case with the unpublished papers. “How in the world can they get in trouble for data they didn’t publish?” he asked. The only serious issue, in Dr. Galef’s view, concerns the Cognition article. “There’s no question that experiment was very deeply flawed,” he said.

Dr. Galef, because of his interest in research ethics, was asked by Dr. Hauser last year to review Harvard’s charges against him and concluded, based on material made available by Dr. Hauser’s lawyers, that the accusations were unfounded. But others in the field put a more guarded interpretation on the Science report.

Jonathan Haidt, a moral psychologist at the University of Virginia, said it might be legally helpful to Dr. Hauser. “But his fellow scientists will be more focused on evaluating his reputation, and that may depend more heavily on the credibility of the people who had expressed concerns than on whether any particular study can be replicated,” he said.

Gordon Gallup, a psychologist at the State University of New York at Albany, said, “To the extent this satisfied the people at Science it’s fine, but it doesn’t mean the issue is resolved.”

Bruce Alberts, the editor of Science, explained that “Science did not seek to confirm or refute Harvard’s broader findings; we sought only to determine whether the original findings could be replicated, and they were.”

A Harvard spokesman, Jeff Neal, said that the university was glad to see that concerns about the scientific record were being addressed but did not respond to a question about whether scientific misconduct was still an issue with the Science article.

Dr. Hauser said in an e-mail that he was pleased that Science’s publication of his data would let others examine his results.

 

Submarine murder accused in court

 11 April 2011 Last updated at 06:36 ET Lt Cdr Molyneux's widow Gillian said he was "utterly devoted to his family" A sailor charged with murder and three counts of attempted murder after a shooting on board a nuclear submarine has appeared in court.

Lt Cdr Ian Molyneux, 36, of Wigan, Greater Manchester, was shot dead on HMS Astute while it was docked in Southampton on 8 April.

A second man, Lt Cdr Christopher Hodge, was also shot and remains in hospital.

Able Seaman Ryan Samuel Donovan, 22, appeared at the city's magistrates court and was remanded in custody.

The Royal Navy serviceman, has also been charged with the attempted murders of Petty Officer Christopher Brown, 36, Chief Petty Officer David McCoy, 37, and Lt Cdr Hodge, 45.

He is due to appear at Winchester Crown Court on Wednesday.

The charges follow an incident last Friday in which shots were fired from an SA80 rifle as local dignitaries, including the city council's mayor, chief executive and leader, were being given a tour of HMS Astute.

'Utterly devoted'

Nick Hawkins, prosecuting, said that the case could have been handled internally by the armed forces but it had been agreed that the case would be held in the civilian courts.

Mr Hawkins, the chief prosecutor for Hampshire Crown Prosecution Service, said: "Because the defendant is a serviceman he also falls under the jurisdiction of the Armed Forces.

"The Armed Forces do have jurisdiction but during the course of the weekend I had discussions with the director of service prosecutions and we are in agreement this case is to be properly tried in the civilian courts."

Lt Cdr Molyneux's widow, Gillian, described the father of four as "utterly devoted to his family".

HMS Astute has been cleared to leave Southampton this afternoon to return to its base at Faslane, Scotland.

The submarine has been berthed at the Eastern Docks since Wednesday on a five-day official visit.

The 97m (318ft)-long craft is the UK's newest nuclear-powered attack submarine and is based at the Faslane Naval Base on the River Clyde.

It was named and launched by the Duchess of Cornwall in June 2007 before being welcomed into the Royal Navy in August last year.