U.S. may accept less stringent controls for Taliban detainees

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Obama administration has signaled a willingness to accept less-stringent controls on former Talibanleaders who could be transferred to Qatar as part of a deal between the United States and the Afghan militants to kick-start Afghan peace talks, U.S. officials said.

The administration, in negotiations led by the Defense Department, has indicated to Qatar that it would be willing to transfer five Taliban detainees now at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, prison to the Gulf emirate on condition that Qatari authorities provide assurances the men would not be allowed to leave Qatar, the officials said.

In indicating that it would expect Qatar to restrict the travel of the Taliban leaders, the United States has also signaled that it is willing to forgo tighter restrictions which it had originally discussed with the Qataris, such as imprisonment, house arrest or continuous monitoring by security forces.

Administration officials insist, however, that they will only agree even to the less onerous restrictions on the transferred prisoners if they believe the arrangements will serve U.S. counterterrorism objectives adequately. "The goal is for detainees not to have the option to return to the fight," a U.S. official said.

While the restrictions the Obama administration is willing to accept are less than it first demanded, a U.S. official familiar with the issue said that Qatar is nonetheless balking at agreeing to restrict the Taliban detainees' travel. U.S. officials say the Taliban are also rejecting the notion that detainees transferred from Guantanamo to Qatar should be subjected to any restrictive conditions.

These diplomatic complications, U.S. officials said, are causing temporary deadlock in negotiations between Washington and Qatar, as well as stalling broader peace discussions between U.S. and Taliban negotiators.

"The prospect of detainees returning to the fight is problematic - it's a very strong concern," the official said.

The hoped-for peace talks between the U.S.-backed government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai and the Taliban have emerged as a key part of President Barack Obama's strategy for stabilizing the country. Most foreign troops are scheduled to leave by the end of 2014.

MINIMAL CONTROL

U.S. officials, who asked for anonymity when discussing a sensitive topic, said that despite the hiccups, negotiations with Qatar are continuing, as is the broader peace effort. George Little, a Pentagon spokesman, declined to comment.

However, Obama's political opponents, who have questioned his efforts to negotiate any kind of accommodation with Afghan Taliban, are expected to step up their criticism if Taliban detainees are moved to Qatar under conditions of minimal control.

Officials said U.S. intelligence agencies, in non-public reports, have already criticized Qatar for loosely and ineffectively keeping tabs on militant ex-detainees transferred to them by U.S. authorities.

U.S. officials said the conditions under which the Taliban detainees would be transferred to Qatar is the sole remaining stumbling block in a larger diplomatic package that the United States has been discussing with authorities in Doha regarding the possible Taliban transfer.

Some officials said that in initial discussions with Qatar, the U.S. government had discussed tighter restrictions which might be placed on Taliban detainees who could be transferred to the country. The officials said the U.S. position subsequently changed. A spokesman for the Qatari Embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who must personally vouch for the transfer, is taking a personal interest in both the Taliban transfer plan and details of the negotiations with Qatar, officials said.

By law, the administration must provide formal notification to U.S. lawmakers 30 days in advance of any detainee transfers such as the proposed Taliban deal. So far no such notification has been given.

Under current law, lawmakers have no power to block any prisoner transfers. The only legal means Congress would have to halt proposed transfers would be to pass new legislation banning them, which would be subject to a possible presidential veto.

Nonetheless, in an election year, a detainee transfer deal in which former prisoners would not be under tight supervision could provide Obama's political rivals with fodder for criticizing his counterterrorism policies.

Some congressional critics have already raised questions about the publicly known details of the proposed transfer of Taliban detainees. Previously classified Pentagon dossiers on the detainees which were made public by WikiLeaks suggested that some of the five detainees have histories of particularly violent or anti-American activity.

Official sources indicate that one of the detainees, Mullah Mohammed Fazl, is alleged to have been responsible, as a top Taliban military commander, for killing thousands of Afghanistan's minority Shiites.

(Reporting by Missy Ryan and Mark Hosenball in Washington; Editing by Warren Strobel and Eric Beech)

Apple assembly line gets pay raise, fewer hours

NEW YORK (AP) — Chinese workers who often spend more than 60 hours per week assembling iPhones and iPads will have their overtime hours curbed and their pay increased after a labor auditor hired by Apple Inc. inspected their factories.

The Fair Labor Association says Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., the Taiwanese company that runs the factories in China, is committing to a reduction of weekly work time to 49 hours, the legal Chinese maximum.

That limit is routinely ignored in factories throughout China. Auret van Heerden, the CEO of the FLA, said Hon Hai, also known asFoxconn, is the first company to commit to following the legal standard.

Apple's and FLA's own guidelines call for work weeks of 60 hours or less.

Foxconn's moves are likely to have an impact across the global technology industry. The company employs 1.2 million workers in China to assemble products not just for Apple, but for Microsoft Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. and other pillars of U.S. technology.

Foxconn's factories are the last step in the process of manufacturing iPhones and other Apple devices, most of which have hundreds of components. Research firm IHS iSuppli estimates that Apple pays $8 for the assembly of a 16-gigabyte iPhone 4S and $188 for its components. It sells the phone wholesale for about $600 to phone companies, which then subsidize it to be able to sell it for $200 with a two-year service contract.

Ricardo Ernst, a professor at Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business, said companies play a risky game when they raise their manufacturing costs. U.S. consumers have shown little inclination to pay more for products that are made in the U.S. as opposed to China.

But iSuppli's figures suggest that if Apple were to absorb a Foxconn wage increase that keeps salaries level while cutting average working hours from 60 to 49 per week, it would pay less than $2 extra to have an iPhone made.

Other electronics companies, particularly PC makers such as Dell and HP, earn less profit on what they sell and could see a deeper impact.

Thomas Dinges, an analyst at iSuppli, said Apple's competitors will probably have to accept the price increase too, since it's framed as a moral issue.

"At this point, it's politics. It's not really economics," he said, adding that there are few alternatives to Chinese factories for most of these products.

The FLA auditors visited three Foxconn complexes in February and March: Guanlan and Longhua near the coastal manufacturing hub of Shenzhen, and Chengdu in the inland province of Sichuan. They employ a total of 178,000 workers, with an average age of 23.

Average monthly salaries at the factories ranged from $360 to $455. Foxconn recently raised salaries by up to 25 percent in the second major salary hike in less than two years.

Apple enormous profits — $13 billion in October-to-December quarter — have made it the world's most valuable company, worth more than $570 billion. It's also put the spotlight on the way its products are made.

In one-man Broadway play, actor Mike Daisey told of visiting China and talking to underage and injured Foxconn workers. Public radio program "This American Life" used Daisey's monologue in a show about Foxconn on Jan. 6, but retracted it two weeks ago, saying that Daisey had fabricated key parts of it, including him meeting 13-year-old workers.

The FLA said it didn't find instances of child or forced labor.

Apple has kept a close watch on its suppliers for years, and in January took the further step of joining the FLA. The organization has audited overseas suppliers for clothing manufacturers, but Apple was the first electronics company to join. It also commissioned the FLA to produce a special audit of Foxconn's factories.

"Our team has been working for years to educate workers, improve conditions and make Apple's supply chain a model for the industry, which is why we asked the FLA to conduct these audits," Apple said in a statement.

Apple CEO Tim Cook visited a Foxconn factory in Zhengzhou, China, on Wednesday.

The Washington-based FLA has its roots in a 1996 meeting of multinational companies and nonprofits convened by President Clinton, who challenged industry to improve conditions for garment and shoe workers. Its 19-member board is composed equally of representatives from member companies, universities and nonprofits like the Global Fairness Initiative. The organization is funded by participating companies.

Labor unions have criticized Apple's use of the FLA, insisting that audits are a "top-down" approach. Foxconn's workers would be better served, they believe, by being able to organize.

"The report will include new promises by Apple that stand to be just as empty as the ones made over the past 5 years," said SumOfUS.org, a coalition of trade unions and consumer groups, ahead of the release of the report.

The FLA found few safety violations, noting that the company had already dealt with problems like blocked fire exits and defective protective gear. It's also taken step to reduce the amount of aluminum dust in the air, after the metal created an explosion at a Foxconn factory in Chengdu last year, killing four workers.

The FLA said Foxconn has been recording only accidents that caused work stoppage but is now committing to recording and addressing all accidents that result in an injury.

Heerden said his auditors found Foxconn workers are the happiest with their jobs when they work 52 hours a week, well below the amount they often put in. Reducing their hours to 49 hours should help Foxconn retain workers in the long run, he said.

The FLA found that many workers at the Foxconn factories want to work even more overtime, so they can make more money. Foxconn told the FLA that it will raise hourly salaries to compensate workers for the reduced hours.

Heerden said that it's common to find workers in developing countries looking for more overtime, rather than less.

"They're often single, they're young, and there's not much to do, so frankly they'd just rather work and save," he said.

The auditors examined one years' worth of payroll and time records at each factory, conducted interviews with some workers and had 35,000 of them fill out anonymous surveys.

Apple has started tracking the working hours of half a million workers in its supply chain, and said that 89 percent of them worked 60 hours or less in February, even though the company was ramping up production of the new iPad. Workers averaged 48 hours per week.

Latest buzz on bee decline: Maybe it's pesticides

WASHINGTON (AP) — A common class of pesticide is causing problems for honeybees and bumblebees, important species already in trouble, two studies suggest.

But the findings don't explain all the reasons behind a long-runningbee decline, and other experts found one of the studies less than convincing.

The new research suggests the chemicals used in the pesticide — designed to attack the central nervous system of insects — reduces the weight and number of queens in bumblebee hives. These pesticides also cause honeybees to become disoriented and fail to return to their hives, the researchers concluded.

The two studies were published online Thursday in the journal Science.

Just last week activists filed a petition with more than a million signatures asking the government to ban the class of pesticides called neonicotinoids. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agencysaid it is re-evaluating the chemicals and is seeking scientific help.

For more than a decade, pollinators of all types have been in decline, mostly because of habitat loss and perhaps some pesticide use. In the past five years, a new mysterious honeybee problem, colony collapse disorder, has further attacked hives. But over the last couple of years, that problem has been observed a bit less, said Jeff Pettis, lead bee researcher at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's lab in Beltsville, Md.

Other studies have also found problems with the pesticide class singled out in the new research. These "strengthen the case for more thorough re-assessing," said University of Illinois entomology professor May Berenbaum, who wasn't involved in the new studies. "But this is not a slam-dunk indictment that could compel a ban. It's complicated."

In the honeybee study, French scientists glued tiny radio transmitters to the bees managed for orchard pollination. The bees were tracked when they came and left the hive. Those that were dosed with neonicotinoids were two to three times more likely not to return.

"Where'd they go? We have no clue about that actually," said study author Mickael Henry, a bee ecologist for the French national agriculture institute. His study said the pesticide likely contributes to colony collapse.

In the bumblebee study, British researchers dosed bees with the pesticide and moved their hives out into the field. After six weeks, they found the pesticide-treated hives were 10 percent lighter than those that weren't treated. And more important, the hives that had pesticides lost about 85 percent of their queens.

"Queen production is in some sense the be all and end all," study author David Goulson of the University of Stirling in Scotland said.

Bayer Crop Sciences, which is the leading producer of neonicotinoids, says it is used on 90 percent of the corn grown in the U.S. and is safe. Bayer eco-toxicologist David Fischer said the honeybee study used unrealistically high doses of the chemicals, amounts that would not be used on crops bees normally pollinate.

Berenbaum, Pettis and a third outside scientist said the bumblebee study was more convincing than the honeybee research because it used lower doses and didn't make as many assumptions.

Bayer's Fischer said perhaps bumblebees are more sensitive to the pesticide and that issue is worthy of more study. But he said his company is one of the biggest canola growers in Canada and it uses the pesticide. The honeybees that pollinate Bayer's fields are "some of the healthiest bees in Canada," he said.

But environmental activists and some beekeepers are convinced the pesticide is a problem.

"The simple fact is, we know enough to take decisive action on this class of pesticides which covers well over 143 million acres of U.S. countryside," said Heather Pilatic, co-director of the Pesticide Action Network North America.

The EPA, in a prepared statement said the decline in bee health, is due to "complex interactions" that involve inadequate food sources, diseases caused by parasites and viruses, habitat loss and bee management practices, as well as pesticides.

Bees are needed to pollinate fruit, vegetables and nuts. Without them experts say our diets would be very bland. Honeybees, which aren't native to America, are managed by professional beekeepers, carted from farm to orchard and raised to produce honey. Bumblebees, native to this country, are wild pollinators.

Without bees, Berenbaum said, "we'd be a scurvy-ridden society."