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New Zealand seems to be the destination of choice for wayward Antarctic penguins.

The BBC reports that a Royal penguin was found Sunday washed ashore on a beach in New Zealand, where another penguin, a three-year-old emperor dubbed "Happy Feet," turned up in June 2011. Months later, Happy Feet was released, ostensibly destined for a return to his homeland. Sadly though, he is believed to have been eaten, possibly by a shark, sometime after his release into the Southern Ocean.

Veterinarians say the latest arrival, "Happy Feet, Jr.," is being cared for at a Wellington Zoo. Scientists there believe the "young male" may have departed about a year ago from a breeding colony on Macquarie Island, more than 1,200 miles away, and drifting been around since then.

The BBC quotes Lisa Argilla, a vet at the zoo, as saying the flightless aquatic bird had possibly struggled to find enough food and come ashore to go through his seasonal molting.

"It's very weak, doesn't want to stand. It's making very small progress every day but it's still in critical condition," Ms. Argilla told the TVNZ channel.

Argilla told the French news agency AFP that Happy Feet, Jr. was having some kidney trouble and she said "hopefully we can reverse that, feed him up and bring him back to good health," but she added that it's "touch and go for at the moment."

The penguin was found on Sunday by Jenny Boyne, who was walking along Tora beach on New Zealand's Wairarapa coast, says The New Zealand Herald.

"She saved this bird's life. I don't think he would've survived another night without veterinary attention," Argilla said.

Couch couldn't wait to prosecute Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian radical imam (who is still being held at Guantanamo Bay) — but it didn't take long before he concluded that the evidence he had to work with was inadmissible if not worthless. As Bravin reports, at Guantanamo Slahi was stripped naked and subjected to a probe of his anal cavity; beaten so hard that he suffered "rib contusions"; exposed to extreme temperatures under a heater or in a room known as "the freezer"; forced to stay awake amid blaring rock music and strobe lights; and taken to a room whose walls were covered with images of women's genitalia while female interrogators rubbed their breasts over his body.

Eventually he provided his interrogators with some kind of testimony. But Couch, a devout Christian, at first had religious misgivings about torture, then legal ones. When he told his superior that Slahi's interrogation had violated the Geneva Conventions and other treaties, he was waved away. So he refused to prosecute. "I hate to say it," he tells his wife, "but being a Christian is going to trump being an American."

Couch, like other brave figures in the military and the administration, spoke out about the inadequacy of the tribunals, but that hasn't made them go away. When he came to office in 2009, President Obama promised to shut down Guantanamo Bay (he did not, of course), but he didn't exactly promise to end the military tribunals that were taking place there. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — the Sept. 11 mastermind whom Eric Holder attempted and failed to have tried in New York — is currently being prosecuted in one of these tribunals, and as Bravin witnesses from the press box at Gitmo, it's a fiasco. The defendants fail to acknowledge the legitimacy of the court, while a military censor hits a button to cut the audio feed to journalists, families of Sept. 11 victims and the rest of the outside world.

Why has Obama, a distinguished constitutional law scholar in an earlier life, failed to roll back the massive expansion of executive power orchestrated by the last administration's lawyers and advisers, people whose vision of justice he doesn't come close to sharing? Bravin speculates that the president really did want to end the program but thought "his political capital was better spent on other priorities — health care, economic recovery, the Iraq drawdown." Given Obama's embrace of drone strikes and other elements of Bush's military strategy, that may be a wishful read. Whatever the reason, the military commissions now have "a bipartisan imprimatur that virtually ensures they will be a fixture of American law for years to come." It's a stark conclusion to this essential book, but a necessary one. The Terror Courts may read like a thriller at times, but really it's something else: a bona fide American tragedy.

Read an excerpt of The Terror Courts

Author Interviews

'I Accepted Responsibility': McChrystal On His 'Share Of The Task'

Unless Congress acts, across-the-board spending cuts scheduled to take effect March 1 will be felt throughout the government. Some of the most visible effects will be noticed by air travelers.

Officials predict that cutbacks at the Federal Aviation Administration could lead to takeoff delays and fewer flights overall.

The FAA's work is done largely out of public view, in airport control towers and regional radar centers, in hangars and workshops. But if the spending cuts, known in Washington-speak as sequestration, start taking effect on schedule, the importance of that backstage work will move front and center.

Danny Werfel of the Office of Management and Budget said at a Senate hearing last week that the sequester will take a toll at the FAA.

"FAA is going to face a cut of roughly $600 million under sequester," Werfel said. "A vast majority of their 47,000 employees will be furloughed for one day per pay period for the rest of the year, and, as importantly, this is going to reduce air traffic levels across the country, causing delays and disruptions for all travelers."

In a letter to agency employees, FAA Administrator Michael Huerta said the temporary layoffs would require "a reduction in FAA services to levels that can be safely managed by remaining staff."

Marion Blakey, who used to head the FAA and is now CEO of the Aerospace Industries Association, says she agrees cutbacks will not go unnoticed.

"If sequestration goes into effect, level-headed people all over this town, all over Washington, are saying, 'Yes, it will have a major effect on the aviation system,' " she says. "And this isn't doomsday; this isn't some sort of science-fiction plot that we're all talking about. This is reality, and it's reality coming up next month."

Blakey says more than 2,000 air traffic controllers will be furloughed at one time or another, and there will be ripple effects.

"It's one of those things that when you start cutting back on service, it affects even community airports, because, after all, they don't have the flights coming in," she says. "The landing fees, the concessions, the parking lot — all of those sources of revenue suffer."

Blakey says that could mean an annual loss of $1 billion in tax revenues.

It's not only controllers who face furloughs. There are thousands of FAA technicians, who fix equipment such as radar and navigation systems.

It's All Politics

Whose Sequester Is It Anyway?