Hot Docs: How to Close Guantánamo, Not Ready for Digital TV

Closing Guantánamo: A liberal think tank has come up with a five-part plan to close down the U.S. government's detention center for suspected terrorists at Guantánamo Bay. The plan, by the Center for American Progress, includes setting a hard timetable to close the prison, bringing a small number of "detainees into the Untied States to stand trial in regular federal or military courts" as test cases, creating a "resettlement and rehabilitation program" with other countries to find homes for some detainees, bringing the remaining detainees to trial after the courts "demonstrate their effectiveness and legitimacy" and transferring to a NATO-controlled detention center in Afghanistan those who are not candidates for trial but still represent a threat. "This program can reduce the population of Guantánamo to zero within 18 months," the report says.

Not Ready for Digital TV: With less than a month to go before the switchover, more than 6.5 million homes are not ready for all-digital broadcasting, a report has found. The report by the Nielsen Company notes that this is "an improvement of more than 1.3 million homes since Nielsen reported readiness status at the end of December" but found that "low-income households, large numbers of senior, minority and disabled viewers" are at greatest risk of losing television service when the switchover to digital programming occurs on February 17. The survey found that in the 56 markets that Nielsen measures, the Albuquerque-Santa Fe area was the worst prepared, with more than 12 percent of the households unready. Dallas-Fort Worth was next with more than 10.21 percent not ready, and then Houston with 9.95 percent. Best prepared was the Hartford-New Haven area with just 1.8 percent not ready.

Crimes Against Children: An audit of the FBI's handling of crimes against children found a "significant backlog" in handling of digital evidence, a failure to track the "timeliness of its response to child abductions," and a lack of a program to track international sex tourism cases. In its report, "The Federal Bureau of Investigation's Efforts to Combat Crimes Against Children," the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of the Inspector General notes that in fiscal year 2007, the FBI conducted 2,891 investigations into crimes against children, using the equivalent of 326 agents. The investigations fell into three categories—online child sexual exploitation, child abductions, and "noncyber" sexual exploitation of children. The report made some 13 recommendations that include that "the FBI continue to develop strategies to help decrease the backlog of digital evidence, develop a mechanism to track the timeliness of the FBI's response to reports of child abductions, improve its coordination with other nationwide child abduction programs, and develop a strategy and guidelines for addressing child sex tourism."

Corporate Travel Safety Restrictions Vary: A survey of more than 100 corporations finds that 16 percent do not have a policy limiting the number of executives that can travel together on a plane. The survey, by the Association of Corporate Travel Executives, was taken in the wake of reports that more than 20 employees of one financial firm were on the US Airways plane that crashed into the Hudson River. The survey queried companies in the United States, Canada, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia-Pacific. Of the 84 percent that had a policy, many apply it only to the executive level and had varying ideas on how many employees were too many on one flight. Some 40 percent limit the number to three or four while 33 percent allowed more than 10 employees to travel together. "The reliability of air travel makes the unthinkable seem impossible," said Susan Gurley, ACTE executive director. "Yet it may take one accident, one malfunction, or even a chain of the most unlikely events to spawn disaster and bring a company to its knees."

Leaders to Watch: President Barack Obama tops the list of Leaders to Watch in 2009, according to a report by the Eurasia Group, a global political risk research and consulting firm. The ranking notes that the world economic crisis is one of the major forces driving politics in 2009 and "U.S., Chinese and Russian leaders ... will be hard-pressed by the challenges presented by the global economy." Other leaders on the list are China's Wang Qishan, Russia's Vladmir Putin, Pakistan's Asif Ali Zardari, Iran's Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, IMF's Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu, Iraq's Nouri al Maliki, France's Nicolas Sarkozy, and Germany's Angela Merkel. The report notes that Obama faces more challenging and complex problems than any incoming U.S. president since Franklin D. Roosevelt. "Obama enters 2009 with substantial political capital, and he will have to draw heavily upon that reserve throughout the year."

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