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Pelosi: Automakers must be accountable

WASHINGTON, Nov. 23 (UPI) -- House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said Sunday that accountability must be required of U.S. automakers if they are to get taxpayer-funded help.

Appearing on CBS' "Face the Nation," Pelosi said executives at the Big Three automakers -- Ford Motor Co., General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC -- need to have their compensation packages retooled.

"The U.S. taxpayer is not willing, nor are the representatives in Congress going to vote for an infusion of cash in the companies, so that these CEOs can be amply rewarded for their lack of success," Pelosi said. "But what we are saying to Detroit should be very good news to them, and that is, we want to be their partners to go forward. We have to subject everything to scrutiny."

As for the financial markets, Pelosi said there is a lack of confidence brought on by the way the White House has handled the $700 billion industry bailout package.

"We thought that this money was going to circulate credit, put credit out there so many more people could function in a business sense," Pelosi said. "And that doesn't seem to be happening. They tell us it will."

Obama wants to see Big Three recovery plan

WASHINGTON, Nov. 23 (UPI) -- A top adviser to U.S. President-elect Barack Obama said Sunday that the Big Three automakers need to change the way they do business.

"Some of the practices of the last 20, 25 years are the reason that they're in the hole they're in. And we certainly aren't going to encourage them to go forward in the same vein," Obama adviser David Axelrod said in an appearance on "Fox News Sunday."

General Motors Corp., Ford Motor Co. and Chrysler LLC, he said, need to develop a recovery plan if they are to convince Congress to provide them with much-needed cash.

Axelrod said without a plan there is little the taxpayer can do to help them make ends meet.

"What we can't give is a blank check for an industry that isn't prepared to reform itself, to rationalize itself, and to retool for the markets of today and tomorrow," he said, adding that Obama "expects that they will do that."

Axelrod: Obama wants big stimulus package

WASHINGTON, Nov. 23 (UPI) -- U.S. President-elect Barack Obama will push for a more aggressive economic stimulus package than the one he proposed on the campaign trail, an aide said Sunday.

Incoming White House senior adviser David Axelrod, in an appearance on ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos" that Obama wants a stimulus package larger than the $175 billion plan he called for previously.

"He wants a plan big enough to deal with the large challenges we face. And I think there's a growing consensus across the spectrum among economists that we're going to have to do something big," Axelrod said.

Appearing on the same program, Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., the Joint Economic Committee chairman, priced the stimulus package between $500 billion and $700 billion. But the ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee, Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., said Schumer's number was too high.

"That's a lot of money," he said. "One thing, we'd better be careful about not just throwing money, borrowing a lot of money and throwing it at deal and creating no jobs to speak of."

5 survive fiery Canadian plane crash

THOMPSON, Manitoba, Nov. 23 (UPI) -- A pilot on a medical evacuation mission in northern Canada crash-landed his burning plane in the brush in the dead of night, saving all five people aboard.

Royal Canadian Mounted Police Sgt. Line Karpish told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. Sunday that tribal police had seen a large fireball above the tree line shortly before the twin-engine aircraft went down about 9:45 p.m. Saturday, a couple of miles northwest of the Gods Lake Narrows aboriginal reserve in Manitoba.

"Clearly at the onset, the outlook was not looking very well, but you know, clearly the pilot was skilled in landing the plane in very thick bush," Karpish said. "The fact he was able to put that plane down and everybody walked out is amazing in itself."

The pilot had been transporting a woman, her ill 10-month-old son and two other people from Gods Lake Narrows to a hospital in Thompson when flames erupted in the cockpit, forcing him to turn the aircraft around and soon thereafter perform the crash-landing.

It took a search team on snowmobiles five hours to locate the five people, who stayed warm by the flames of the plane's wreckage, the CBC reported.

The cause of the accident was to be investigated by federal authorities.