The watchdog's annual report revealed Mr Carter's total pay package rose to £414,463 in the year to 31 March, from £370,769 the previous year His base salary rose to £267,500 from £250,000. Mr Paulson become one of the most heavyweight figures to join the campaign to force Mr Grasso to step down in 2003.Mr Grasso is fighting the legal action. Mr Spitzer is uing Mr Grasso and Ken Langone, who was chairman of the compensation committee and approved Mr Grasso's pay.According to the document that was prepared by Mr Webb and his team of investigators, Mr Paulson "expressed concern that people might ask where he was in earlier years".When Mr Paulson had a closer look in 2003 at the money Mr Grasso had been taking home, he was "shocked", according to the document.While Mr Grasso was liked and admired on Wall Street, the controversy caused by his bumper pay eventually turned powerful friends against him. Mr Grasso's successor as chief executive of the exchange is John Thain, who joined from Goldman.Separately, the NYSE's board was meeting yesterday to discuss the Archipelago deal. He and his supporters have countered that Goldman has been involved in its own ethically questionable behaviour recently. The bank owns a 15 per cent stake in Archipelago, the electronic exchange which is merging with the NYSE, and was also an adviser on the deal. Mr Paulson, well known for his passion for the environment, said it was "embarrassing to him" that he did not attend many of the NYSE's compensation committee meetings when Mr Grasso's pay was discussed.

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Mr Paulson's comments were contained in interviews he gave to Dan Webb, a lawyer for the NYSE, which gave the findings to Eliot Spitzer, New York's attorney general.

Nigeria, which is the richest country in the area, has provided some food to its neighbours but has echoed the aid agencies' pleas for extra help to be provided.. Hank Paulson, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, has admitted to lawyers suing the New York Stock Exchange's former chairman, Dick Grasso, over his $140m (£80m) pay package, that he missed a crucial NYSE board meeting because he was birdwatching in Brazil. We're completely overwhelmed, there'd better be other people coming quickly to help us out - I mean, the response has been desperately slow." MSF has also warned that the rains, which have finally arrived, are now making conditions worse by spreading malaria and diarrhoea in the camps.Niger's neighbours, Mali and Mauritania, were also hit by the plague of locusts that swept through the southern Sahel last year and are also suffering from similar food shortages. While I used to be able to buy one bag of 100kg millet after selling one or two healthy goats I would now need to sell three to five goats for the same amount."By November last year, thousands of families had left rural villages and headed for Niamey and neighbouring countries such as Nigeria, Benin and Togo to look for food and work. Aid workers tell of how hundreds of people are walking through a desert littered with cattle carcasses looking for feeding centres and Nigerian immigration officials say thousands of people are trying to cross the border each day.Milron Tetonidis of M?cins Sans Fronti?s (MSF) told reporters: "There are children dying every day in our centres. It was the only region not to support Mr Thaksin in the February election.Thailand is overwhelmingly Buddhist but three-quarters of the two million residents in the deep south are Malay-speaking Muslims. They have complained for many years about being marginalised and impoverished.

Daily ambushes and drive-by shootings have forced many people to abandon the provinces for a safer life elsewhere in Thailand. Turf wars over smuggling rackets in the area around the porous border with Malaysia are common.Government officials blame the unrest on Islamic separatists, and estimate that 10,000 rebels are active in the south.Generals in the Thai military have cautioned that these mostly youthful insurgents are ripe for exploitation by al-Qa'ida, but there is no evidence that outside forces are recruiting or arming the militants yet.The funding of Islamic schools is under tight scrutiny after a raid on one southern boarding school, Jihad Wittaya, yielded black-market Arabic training tapes and guns, according to the security forces.. A Japanese high court has rejected appeals by 180 Chinese who were demanding compensation for damage caused by Japan's Second World War germ warfare programme. But last year, drought and locusts destroyed most of the harvest and almost 40 per cent of livestock fodder.