Obama Poised to Name New Defense, Treasury Chiefs

With the "fiscal cliff" crisis behind him, President Obama is poised to name two new key players to his cabinet, with both announcements expected to come next week.

Obama will name the replacement for outgoing Defense Secretary Leon Panetta as soon as Monday, sources told ABC News. Former Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel is the likely nominee, they said.

Meanwhile, the president is also eyeing a replacement for outgoing Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, the longest-serving member of Obama's first-term economic team and one-time lead negotiator for the administration in the "fiscal cliff" talks.

Current chief of staff Jack Lew is all but certain to get the nod for Treasury, according to people familiar with Obama's thinking.

A White House spokesman cautioned that the president has not yet made a final decision on either post, calling reports about Hagel and Lew "merely guessing."

Still, when Obama returns from his Hawaiian vacation on Sunday, he's expected to waste little time filling out his team for a second term.

Geithner has said he would remain at his post "until around the inauguration" Jan. 20, a Treasury spokesperson said Thursday, putting the department potentially in transition just as the administration confronts the next financial "cliffs" over automatic spending cuts and the nation's debt limit.

Brendan Hoffman/Getty Images

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During an appearance on ABC's "This Week" in April, Geithner said the next Treasury secretary would need to be someone who is "willing to tell [Obama] the truth and, you know, help him do the tough things you need to do."

Lew, a former two-time Office of Management and Budget director and trusted Obama confidant who has held the chief of staff role since early 2012, is the front-runner for the job.

Meanwhile, Sen. John Kerry -- Obama's nominee to replace outgoing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton -- has begun making more regular appearances at the U.S. State Department before his expected confirmation later this month.

His Senate hearings are set to begin shortly after Obama's inauguration, sources say. The administration still expects Clinton to testify about the Sept. 11 Benghazi, Libya, attacks before Kerry is confirmed.

But it is the potential nomination of Republican Hagel that has caused the most stir.

Critics from across the political spectrum have taken aim at the former senator from Nebraska's record toward Israel and what some have called a lack of experience necessary to lead the sprawling Pentagon bureaucracy or its operations. The controversy has set the stage for what would be a contentious confirmation process.

"A lot of Republicans and Democrats are very concerned about Chuck Hagel's position on Iran sanctions, his views toward Israel, Hamas and Hezbollah, and that there is wide and deep concern about his policies," Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., told "Fox News Sunday."

He would not say whether Republicans felt so strongly as to expect a filibuster of the nomination.

"I can tell you there would be very little Republican support for his nomination," Graham said. "At the end of the day, they will be very few votes."

Still, Hagel, 66, a former businessman and decorated veteran who served in the Vietnam War, has won praise and admiration from current and former diplomats for his work on Obama's Intelligence Advisory Board and Panetta's Policy Advisory Board.

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Eleven dead in Damascus gas station blast

AZAZ, Syria (Reuters) - At least 11 people were killed and 40 wounded when a car bomb exploded at a crowded petrol station in the Syrian capital Damascus on Thursday, opposition activists said.

The station was packed with people queuing for fuel that has become increasingly scarce during the country's 21-month-long insurgency aimed at overthrowing President Bashar al-Assad.

The semi-official al-Ikhbariya television station showed footage of 10 burnt bodies and Red Crescent workers searching for victims at the site.

The opposition Revolution Leadership Council in Damascus said the explosion was caused by a booby-trapped car.

There was no immediate indication of who was responsible for the bombing in the Barzeh al-Balad district, whose residents include members of the Sunni Muslim majority and other religious and ethnic minorities.

"The station is usually packed even when it has no fuel," said an opposition activist who did not want to be named. "There are lots of people who sleep there overnight, waiting for early morning fuel consignments."

It was the second time that a petrol station has been hit in Damascus this week. Dozens of people were incinerated in an air strike as they waited for fuel on Wednesday, according to opposition sources.

In northern Syria, rebels were battling to seize an air base in their campaign against the air power that Assad has used to bomb rebel-held towns.

More than 60,000 people have been killed in the uprising and civil war, the United Nations said this week, a much higher death toll than previously thought.

DRAMATIC ADVANCES

After dramatic advances over the second half of 2012, the rebels now hold wide swathes of territory in the north and east, but they cannot protect towns and villages from Assad's helicopters and jets.

Hundreds of rebel fighters were attempting to storm the Taftanaz air base, near the highway that links Syria's two main cities, Aleppo and Damascus.

A rebel fighter speaking from near the Taftanaz base overnight said much of the base was still in loyalist hands but insurgents had managed to destroy a helicopter and a fighter jet on the ground.

The northern rebel Idlib Coordination Committee said the rebels had detonated a car bomb inside the base.

The government's SANA news agency said the base had not fallen and that the military had "strongly confronted an attempt by the terrorists to attack the airport from several axes, inflicting heavy losses among them and destroying their weapons and munitions".

Rami Abdulrahman, head of the opposition-aligned Syrian Observatory for Human Rights which monitors the conflict from Britain, said as many as 800 fighters were involved in the assault, including Islamists from Jabhat al-Nusra, a powerful group that Washington considers terrorists.

Taftanaz is mainly a helicopter base, used for missions to resupply army positions cut off by the rebels, as well as for dropping crude "barrel bombs" on rebel-controlled areas.

Near Minakh, another northern air base that rebels have surrounded, government forces have retaliated by shelling and bombing nearby towns.

NIGHTLY BOMBARDMENTS

In the town of Azaz, where the bombardment has become a near nightly occurrence, shells hit a family house overnight. Zeinab Hammadi said her two wounded daughters, aged 10 and 12, had been rushed across the border to Turkey, one with her brain exposed.

"We were sleeping and it just landed on us in the blink of an eye," she said, weeping as she surveyed the damage.

Family members tried to salvage possessions from the wreckage, men lifting out furniture and children carrying out their belongings in tubs.

"He (Assad) wants revenge against the people," said Abu Hassan, 33, working at a garage near the destroyed house. "What is the fault of the children? Are they the ones fighting?"

Opposition activists said warplanes struck a residential building in another rebel-held northern town, Hayyan, killing at least eight civilians.

Video footage showed men carrying dismembered bodies of children and dozens of people searching for victims in the rubble. The provenance of the video could not be independently confirmed.

In addition to their tenuous grip on the north, the rebels also hold a crescent of suburbs on the edge of Damascus, which have come under bombardment by government forces that control the center of the capital.

On Wednesday, according to opposition activists, dozens of people died in an inferno caused by an air strike on a petrol station in a Damascus suburb where residents were lining up for fuel.

The civil war in Syria has become the longest and bloodiest of the conflicts that rose out of uprisings across the Arab world in the past two years.

Assad's family has ruled for 42 years since his father seized power in a coup. The war pits rebels, mainly from the Sunni Muslim majority, against a government supported by members of Assad's Shi'ite-derived Alawite minority sect and some members of other minorities who fear revenge if he falls.

The West, most Sunni-ruled Arab states and Turkey have called for Assad to step down. He is supported by Russia and Shi'ite Iran.

(Additional reporting by Khaled Yacoub Oweis in Amman and Dominic Evans in Beirut; Writing by Peter Graff; Editing by Ruth Pitchford and Giles Elgood)

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GIC names Lim Chow Kiat as new group CIO

SINGAPORE: The Government of Singapore Investment Corporation (GIC) has named Lim Chow Kiat as its next group chief investment officer, effective 1 February 2013.

GIC said in a statement on Friday that Mr Lim will succeed Mr Ng Kok Song who is retiring.

Mr Lim, 42, is currently GIC's deputy group chief investment officer. He joined the sovereign wealth fund in 1993 after graduating with first class honours in accountancy from Nanyang Technological University.

He was appointed head of GIC's Fixed Income, Currency and Commodities Department, as well as deputy president of GIC Asset Management (GAM) in 2008.

He became president of GAM in July 2011 and deputy group CIO in April 2012.

- CNA/al

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Sony said to be developing online TV service

The Sony XBR-84X900 could feature the company's new television service, which is rumored to be in the works.

(Credit:
Sony)

Word on the street is that Sony is creating a Net-connected multichannel television service that could roll out as soon as this year, according to Variety. Purportedly, the company is in talks with at least two big content companies about channel licensing.

Such a service would put Sony in direct competition with both satellite and cable TV, as well as other tech companies that are branching out into the television market, such as Intel; Google, with Google Fiber; and Dish.

This isn't the first time rumors have floated that Sony has been looking to develop a TV service. In November 2011, The Wall Street Journal reported that Sony was working to distribute television channels through Net-connected TV sets as an alternative to cable. According to Variety, the negotiations Sony is currently working on are far more advanced than they were a year ago.

Sony already has a few channels, such as the Game Show Network, as well as Video and Music Unlimited, but the rumored new service is said to be far more comprehensive, with dozens of channels. Additionally, the deal could theoretically help Sony sell more of its entertainment-focused products, such as the
PlayStation 3 gaming console, Bravia TV sets, and Blu-ray players.

When asked about the possibility of a television service, a Sony representative told CNET that the company does not comment on rumors or speculation.

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Veteran's improbable survival gives heart to shell-shocked surgeon

(CBS News) AUBURN, Ala. -- The carnage Lee Warren encountered in the combat hospital at Balad, Iraq, in 2005 was like nothing he had ever seen as a neurosurgeon. And no patient was worse-off than a soldier brought in by helicopter after being hit by a roadside bomb.

"I unwrapped his head in the emergency room and looked at him and thought he was dead," Warren says.

He was, Warren later wrote, "one of the most horrifically injured people I have ever operated on."

"His scalp and the front part of his face was all gone, and then I could see his frontal lobe on the left side sort of protruding out onto his face," he says. "His brain was exposed and hanging out."

After four hours in surgery, Warren and three other doctors managed to get him on a medevac flight out of Iraq still alive. Warren called the soldier's father but could offer little hope.

"I just didn't see how anybody with that injury could survive," he says.

Warren left the military and started a successful practice, but he had nightmares about all the wounded soldiers whose fates he never learned.

Finally, he faced his demons by opening a trunk he had brought back from Iraq. He found bullets and shrapnel he had pulled from brains and a thumb-drive with files of his cases, including the soldier with that horrible head wound. Warren looked him up online.

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"And he popped up on a CBS interview -- very much alive and well," Warren says.

Army Spc. Paul Statzer

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CBS News

He was Army Spc. Paul Statzer, and CBS had met him at Walter Reed Army Medical Center six months after he was hit.

He took off his helmet to show his injuries. Statzer had lost part of his frontal lobe but was still cogent.

"I'm a little slow on certain things but not that bad," he said at the time.

Asked what lesson a brain surgeon can draw from Statzer's case, Warren says, "The power of the human spirit and -- and indomitable faith can do a lot, sometimes more than I can with my two hands."

Over the years, Paul Statzer has suffered multiple infections and seizures. He's not able to work, and he's not up for another television interview. But when they met, he told the surgeon who thought he would never make it that he is up for living.

"That was one of the questions I asked him: 'Are you happy?' and he said, 'Yeah,' and he said, 'Thanks for saving me,'" Warren says.

And with that, the patient helped save the doctor from his own demons of Iraq.

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Senate Panel Probes Bin Laden Movie Torture Scenes

The Senate Intelligence Committee has launched a new probe to determine how much the CIA may have influenced the portrayal of torture scenes shown in "Zero Dark Thirty," the Hollywood dramatization of the decade-long hunt for Osama bin Laden.

The probe, as first reported by Reuters and confirmed to ABC News by a spokesperson for the committee's chairman, will attempt to answer two questions: Did the CIA give filmmakers "inappropriate" access to secret material and was the CIA responsible for the perceived suggestion that harsh interrogation techniques aided the hunt for America's most wanted man?

In a press release today, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Sen. Dianne Feinstein's office said Feinstein, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D.-Mich.) and former Presidential candidate John McCain (R.-Ariz.) – the latter two are ex officio members of the Intelligence Committee – sent two letters to acting CIA Director Michael Morell in December asking just what the CIA might have told the filmmakers about the effectiveness of enhanced interrogation.

The first letter, dated Dec. 19, focused on the possibility that the CIA "misled" the filmmakers into showing torture as an effective tactic.

"As you know, the film depicts CIA officers repeatedly torturing detainees. The film then credits CIA detainees subjected to coercive interrogation techniques as providing critical lead information on the courier that led to the [bin Laden] compound," the letter says. "The CIA cannot be held accountable for how the Agency and its activities are portrayed in film, but we are nonetheless concerned, given the CIA's cooperation with the filmmakers and the narrative's consistency with past public misstatements by former senior CIA officials, that the filmmakers could have been misled by information they were provided by the CIA."

Two days after the letter was sent, Morell posted a statement on the CIA website explaining that the movie was "not a realistic portrayal of the facts" but said some information did come from detainees subjected to enhanced interrogation.

"...[T]he film creates the strong impression that the enhanced interrogation techniques that were part of our former detention and interrogation program were key to finding Bin Laden. That impression is false," Morell said. "As we have said before, the truth is that multiple streams of intelligence led CIA analysts to conclude that Bin Laden was hiding in Abbottabad. Some came from detainees subjected to enhanced techniques, but there were many other sources as well. And, importantly, whether enhanced interrogation techniques were the only timely and effective way to obtain information from those detainees, as the film suggests, is a matter of debate that cannot and never will be definitively resolved."

The trio of Feinstein, Levin and McCain wrote the second letter on New Year's Eve in apparent frustration with that statement and asked Morell to provide information on what exactly the CIA learned from detainees who underwent harsh interrogation – and if it was learned before, during or after the detainees' ordeals.

A CIA spokesperson told ABC News today the agency had received the letters and "take[s] very seriously our responsibility to keep our oversight committees informed and value[s] our relationship with Congress."

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Central African Republic rebels halt advance, agree to peace talks

DAMARA, Central African Republic (Reuters) - Rebels in Central African Republic said they had halted their advance on the capital on Wednesday and agreed to start peace talks, averting a clash with regionally backed troops.

The Seleka rebels had pushed to within striking distance of Bangui after a three-week onslaught and threatened to oust President Francois Bozize, accusing him of reneging on a previous peace deal and cracking down on dissidents.

Their announcement on Wednesday gave the leader only a limited reprieve as the fighters told Reuters they might insist on his removal in the negotiations.

"I have asked our forces not to move their positions starting today because we want to enter talks in (Gabon's capital) Libreville for a political solution," said Seleka spokesman Eric Massi, speaking by telephone from Paris.

"I am in discussion with our partners to come up with proposals to end the crisis, but one solution could be a political transition that excludes Bozize," he said.

Bozize on Wednesday sacked his Army Chief of Staff and took over the defense minister's role from his son, Jean Francis Bozize, according to a decree read on national radio, a day after publicly criticizing the military for failing to repel the rebels.

The advance by Seleka, an alliance of mostly northeastern rebel groups, was the latest in a series of revolts in a country at the heart of one of Africa's most turbulent regions - and the most serious since the Chad-backed insurgency that swept Bozize to power in 2003.

Diplomatic sources have said talks organized by central African regional bloc ECCAS could start on January 10. The United States, the European Union and France have called on both sides to negotiate and spare civilians.

Central African Republic is one of the least developed countries in the world despite its deposits of gold, diamonds and other minerals. French nuclear energy group Areva mines the country's Bakouma uranium deposit - France's biggest commercial interest in its former colony.

RELIEF IN BANGUI

News of the rebel halt eased tension in Bangui, where residents had been stockpiling food and water and staying indoors after dark.

"They say they are no longer going to attack Bangui, and that's great news for us," said Jaqueline Loza in the crumbling riverside city.

ECCAS members Chad, Congo Republic, Gabon and Cameroon have sent hundreds of soldiers to reinforce CAR's army after a string of rebel victories since early December.

Gabonese General Jean Felix Akaga, commander of the regional force, said his troops were defending the town of Damara, 75 km (45 miles) north of Bangui and close to the rebel front.

"Damara is a red line not to be crossed ... Damara is in our control and Bangui is secure," he told Reuters. "If the rebellion decides to approach Damara, they know they will encounter a force that will react."

Soldiers armed with Kalashnikovs, rocket propelled grenade launchers and truck-mounted machineguns had taken up positions across the town, which was otherwise nearly-abandoned.

Some of the fighters wore turbans that covered their faces and had charms strung around their necks and arms meant to protect them against enemy bullets.

Chad's President Idriss Deby, one of Bozize's closest allies, had warned the rebels the regional force would confront them if they approached the town.

Chad provided training and equipment to the rebellion that brought Bozize to power by ousting then-president Ange Felix Patasse, who Chad accused of supporting Chadian dissidents.

Chad is also keen to keep a lid on instability in the territory close to its main oil export pipeline and has stepped in to defend Bozize against insurgents in the past.

A CAR government minister told Reuters the foreign troop presence strengthened Bozize's bargaining position ahead of the Libreville peace talks.

"The rebels are now in a position of weakness," the minister said, asking not to be named. "They should therefore stop imposing conditions like the departure of the president."

Central African Republic is one of a number of countries in the region where U.S. Special Forces are helping local soldiers track down the Lord's Resistance Army, a rebel group which has killed thousands of civilians across four nations.

France has a 600-strong force in CAR to defend about 1,200 of its citizens who live there.

Paris used air strikes to defend Bozize against a rebellion in 2006. But French President Francois Hollande turned down a request for more help, saying the days of intervening in other countries' affairs were over.

(Additional reporting by Paul-Marin Ngoupana in Bangui and Jon Herskovitz in Johannesburg; Writing by Richard Valdmanis; Editing by Andrew Heavens and Janet Lawrence)

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Israel arresting Palestinians to preempt uprising: security

JERUSALEM: Israel plans to step up arrests of suspected militants in the occupied West Bank to prevent a rising tide of low-intensity conflict and civil unrest from turning into an uprising, security sources say.

"There is a certain (Palestinian) awakening," one source told AFP.

"As a consequence a decision was taken within the security establishment to increase intelligence activity and arrests among members of Hamas or activists against Israel," he added. "It started in the past few days and will increase."

Recent events, however, suggest that such a policy could backfire.

On Tuesday, undercover Israeli troops attempting to arrest a suspected Islamic Jihad militant were pelted with rocks by an angry crowd.

The squad made their arrest, but Palestinian security sources said dozens were lightly injured when soldiers fired rubber bullets, live rounds and tear gas at their attackers.

Israeli public radio's military affairs reporter quoted military sources on Wednesday as saying the arrest operation was routine, but the Palestinian response was anything but so.

"What is exceptional is the grave disturbances," she quoted her sources as saying. "An operation like this would not in the past have brought disturbances of this kind."

"There is a certain rise in disturbances in the territories but talk of a third intifada is premature," she added.

Earlier this month, troops in a southern West bank village were forced to abort an attempt to arrest a Palestinian policeman suspected of militant activity when crowds of local residents pelted them with rocks.

They seized the man later at a military checkpoint near Hebron.

The Palestinians have twice risen up against their Israeli occupiers in so-called intifadas (uprisings) -- in December 1987 and September 2000.

But neither movement succeeded in ending the Israeli occupation of the West Bank that began in 1967. Now, with direct talks between Israel and the Palestinians on hold since September 2010, observers have raised the spectre of a third uprising breaking out.

Ghassan Khatib, a veteran of the first intifada, who later became a Palestinian cabinet minister and now teaches at the West Bank's Birzeit University, does not see a guiding hand in the current round of clashes.

Violence "spontaneous"

He considers as "spontaneous" the daily confrontations between Palestinian farmers and Jewish settlers, the hurling of rocks and petrol bombs at Israeli motorists in Palestinian areas and the clashes with troops.

"I don't think that it can be connected to any specific event; it's been building up gradually," he told AFP.

"I think it's a result of the dangerous combination of a complete absence of any political horizon together with serious economic and financial crisis that is leading to increased unemployment and poverty," he added, noting an increase in settlement activity.

"In my view the situation is not sustainable," he said.

Israel's Shin Bet domestic security service tied an upswing in clashes to November's eight-day battle between Israel and Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip.

"In response to the operation, Jerusalem and the (West Bank) also saw an increase in the level of violence," Shin Bet said in its monthly summary for November.

It recorded 122 Palestinian attacks on Israelis in the West Bank, compared with 39 in October, and 44 incidents in Jerusalem, up from 31 the month before.

Israeli police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said Palestinian youngsters seemed to be heavily involved in the unrest, which some Israeli media are already calling "a mini-intifada."

"In general there's been an increase in the number of incidents that have taken place, stone-throwing incidents as well as Molotov cocktails on the main highways," he told AFP.

"The majority of incidents take place in the morning when Palestinian children are on their way to school and in the afternoon when Palestinian children are returning from school," he said.

-AFP/ac

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Does Apple's shadow still loom over CES?

Apple's presence looms large over CES.

(Credit:
Uncover)

At the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, one company always comes up during the cocktail conversations and hallway chats of the show. Its presence looms large and can be seen everywhere, even though it never attends
CES.

That company is Apple, the undisputed juggernaut of the consumer electronics world and the planet's most valuable company (even with its recent stock slump).

Ever since Apple unveiled the iPhone, the rest of the consumer electronics world has been playing catchup. Samsung, Acer, Dell, Motorola, HTC, Nokia, Microsoft and others have been making up ground in the smartphone wars (especially Samsung with the Galaxy series), but still trail badly when it comes to
tablets. CES is the time when these companies (except Microsoft) announce their latest hardware and show them off to hundreds of thousands of industry shakers and tech enthusiasts.

But over the last couple of years, Apple has found a way to dominate the headlines during CES, all from the comfort of its headquarters in Cupertino. In 2010, it was the nonstop chatter about the fabled Apple tablet. 2011 was dominated by Verizon iPhone rumors. And during last year's CES, Apple launched the Mac App Store and stole some of CES's thunder. Oh, and don't forget about the still-a-mystery Apple TV that dominated the chatter last year. MG Siegler's right when he says that Apple has won CES the last couple of years without even showing up.

Will this year be any different? To answer this question, let's look at the latest from the Apple rumor mill in the last week alone:

None of these rumors is as big as Apple TV last year or the Apple tablet rumors of 2010, but the sheer number of rumors will provide good conversation starters for this year's CES. None of these rumors will scare consumer electronic manufacturers like the Apple TV rumors did last year, though (they won't admit it, but they absolutely were scared).

I wouldn't be surprised if Apple decides to rain on CES's parade, however. It would be an Apple-like thing to do. A Waze acquisition or a well-timed announcement could be just the thing to put a damper on all the Android talk that will dominate the headlines next week.

Does Apple's shadow still loom over CES? Of course it does, even if it isn't as big as last year's shadow. The better question to ask is this: what will Apple do this year to steal the show?

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Hillary Clinton discharged from hospital

WASHINGTONSecretary of State Hillary Clinton was discharged from a New York hospital Wednesday, after spending 72 hours under observation following the discovery of a blood clot in her head, the State Department said.

In a statement, spokesperson Philippe Reines said: "Her medical team advised her that she is making good progress on all fronts, and they are confident she will make a full recovery. She's eager to get back to the office."

Clinton and her family thanked her medical team "for the excellent care she received," Reines said.

Earlier Wednesday, Clinton had been seen in public for the first time in three weeks when she walked out of the Harkness Eye Institute in New York City and into a secure van along with a smiling Bill and Chelsea Clinton and accompanied by a security detail, reports CBS News correspondent Margaret Brennan.

The State Department had said Secretary Clinton was active in speaking with staff and reviewing paperwork while she continued to recover at New York Presbyterian Hospital.

Clinton was admitted to a New York hospital Sunday and was treated with blood thinners to dissolve a clot in the vein behind the right ear. Doctors found the clot during a follow-up exam stemming from a concussion she suffered in early December. She has been hospitalized for around 72 hours, which is a window of time during which it is possible to establish the proper blood thinner dosage that would be required prior to discharge according to doctors.

Clinton's doctors say there was no neurological damage.

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