Jul. 22- With the financial system on the verge of collapse in late 2008, a group of troubled banks doled out more than $2 billion in bonuses and other payments to their highest earners. Now, the federal authority on banker pay says that nearly 80 percent of that sum was unmerited.
In a report to be released on Friday, Kenneth R. Feinberg, the Obama administration's special master for executive compensation, is expected to name 17 financial companies that made questionable payouts totaling $1.58 billion immediately after accepting billions of dollars of taxpayer aid, according to two government officials with knowledge of his findings who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the report.
The group includes Wall Street giants like Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and the American International Group as well as small lenders like Boston Private Financial Holdings. Mr. Feinberg's report points to companies that he says paid eye-popping amounts or used haphazard criteria for awarding bonuses, the people with knowledge of his findings said, and he has singled out Citigroup as the biggest offender.
Jul. 22- Three out of every four lobbyists who represent oil and gas companies previously worked in the federal government, a proportion that far exceeds the usual revolving-door standards on Capitol Hill, a Washington Post analysis shows.
Key lobbying hires include 18 former members of Congress and dozens of former presidential appointees. For other senior management positions, the industry employs two former directors of the Minerals Management Service, the since-renamed agency that regulates the industry, and several top officials from the Bush White House. Federal inspectors once assigned to monitor oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico have landed jobs with the companies they regulated.
With more than 600 registered lobbyists, the industry has among the biggest and most powerful contingents in Washington. Its influence has been on full display in the wake of the BP oil disaster: Proposals to enact new restrictions or curb oil use have stalled amid concerted Republican opposition and strong objections from Democrats in oil-producing states.
Even considering the generally friendly relationship between K Street and Capitol Hill, the number of well-connected oil lobbyists is remarkable. The nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics calculates that fewer than one in three registered lobbyists in 2009 had revolving-door connections -- less than half the oil industry rate found by The Post.
Officials with the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit group that tracks Interior Department officials who cross over to the oil sector, said they were surprised by the findings. "With these numbers, you can see how the revolving door between the Hill and industry allowed problems in the agency to happen and not be addressed," said Mandy Smithberger, an investigator for the group.
Jul. 20- More than 40 percent of homeowners seeking help from the Obama administration's flagship effort to rescue those at risk of foreclosure have dropped out of the program.
The latest report on the program suggests foreclosures could rise in the second half of the year and weaken an ailing housing market.
About 530,000 borrowers have fallen out of the program as of last month, the Treasury Department said Tuesday. Nearly 1.3 million homeowners had enrolled since March 2009.
Treasury officials say few of these borrowers will wind up in foreclosure. But many analysts are concerned that a new wave of foreclosures could greatly impact the struggling housing industry.
Another 390,000 homeowners, or 30 percent of those who started the program, have received permanent loan modifications and are making payments on time.
Many borrowers complain of a bureaucratic nightmare. They say banks often lose their documents and then claim borrowers did not send back the necessary paperwork.
Jul. 16- A former New Orleans resident was charged Thursday with federal hate crimes for his alleged role in a racially motivated shooting of three black men in the days after Hurricane Katrina.
Roland J. Bourgeois Jr., 47, is accused of plotting to defend his Algiers Point neighborhood "from outsiders" including African-Americans, constructing barricades on public streets and using racial epithets to describe black people, according to the five-count indictment.
At one point, Bourgeois allegedly said, "Anything coming up this street darker than a paper bag is getting shot."
The indictment charges Bourgeois with doing just that when three black males walked through the neighborhood toward a makeshift Coast Guard evacuation center on Sept. 1. Bourgeois fired a shotgun at the trio, felling Donnell Herrington and wounding Herrington's two companions near the corner of Pelican Avenue and Vallette Street, according to the indictment.
Later, Bourgeois plucked Herrington's bloodied baseball cap from the ground and proudly displayed it to others, boasting that he "got one" and had shot a "looter," according to a witness.
Jul. 25- Thousands of mentally disabled immigrants are entangled in deportation proceedings each year with little or no legal help, leaving them distraught, defenseless and detained as their fates are decided.
Their plight is detailed in a report issued Sunday by Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union, who exhort federal authorities to do better.
Shortcomings outlined by the two groups include no right to appointed counsel, inflexible detention policies, insufficient guidance for judges on handling people with mental disabilities, and inadequately coordinated services to aid detainees while in custody.
"No one knows what to do with detainees with mental disabilities, so every part of the immigration system has abdicated responsibility," said Sarah Mehta, the report's lead author. "The result is people languishing in detention for years while their legal files - and their lives - are transferred around or put on indefinite hold."
The report, "Deportation by Default," documents cases of non-citizens who could not understand questions, were delusional, couldn't tell the date or time, and didn't understand the concept of deportation - for example, saying they wanted to be deported to New York.
Jul. 27- Closing a key chapter in one of the most controversial police shootings in recent memory, New York City agreed on Tuesday to pay more than $7 million to settle a federal lawsuit filed by the family and two friends of Sean Bell, a 23-year-old black man who was fatally shot by the police in 2006 on what would have been his wedding day.
The decision by the city came after two days of intense negotiations in Federal District Court in Brooklyn. The children whom Mr. Bell had with his fiancée, Nicole Paultre Bell, will receive $3.25 million, and two friends of Mr. Bell's who were injured in the episode will also receive payments, with Joseph Guzman getting $3 million, and Trent Benefield $900,000.
The lawsuit, filed in 2007, accused the police of wrongful death, negligence, assault and civil rights violations. But it had repeatedly stalled as the state and federal governments and city police officials investigated the shooting.
Our coast is like a cancer patient who has come down with pneumonia. That's serious, but curable. After the fever breaks, he'll still have cancer.
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-- Bob Marshall, environmental reporter for the New Orleans Times Picayune, on the relative insignificance of the BP oil spill in the context of decades of environmental degradation along the Gulf Coast.
