Report: Some at U.S. diplomatic posts earn less than $1 a day

A new State Department report says some local employees hired by U.S. embassies and other posts around the world are so poorly paid they have to cut back to one meal a day or send their children to peddle on the streets. The report from the department’s Office of the Inspector General looked at how the U.S.

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Former Mexican president calls for legalizing marijuana

Former Mexican President Vicente Fox has joined three other ex-leaders of Latin American nations calling for the decriminalization of marijuana. Fox, who was Mexico’s president from 2000 to 2006, said the current policy is clearly not working. “I believe it’s time to open the debate over legalizing drugs,” he told CNN on Tuesday.

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Al Qaeda figure who provided link to Iraq reportedly dead in Libya

The accused terrorist who said he was tortured into making a false connection between al Qaeda and Iraq has died in a Libyan prison, human rights monitors said Tuesday. Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi’s allegation that Iraqi agents trained al Qaeda operatives in the use of chemical and biological weapons was “pivotal” to the Bush administration’s case for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, said Stacy Sullivan, a counterterrorism adviser for the U.S.-based Human Rights Watch. “He’s a fairly significant figure in the counterterrorism world, and his testimony I would say provided the linchpin for the invasion of Iraq,” she said.

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The Other GM

At last month’s glitzy Shanghai auto show, held in the only significant car market in the world that’s still growing, Nick Reilly, the president of GM Asia-Pacific, knew the question would come. Still, he winced a bit when a Chinese journalist asked him what would happen to Detroit’s fallen giant if it was forced by the U.S. government to declare bankruptcy

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