Joint Chiefs Chairman Nominee Says Russia Is Top Military Threat Thursday July 9th, 2015 at 6:17 PM
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Gen. Joe Dunford, President Barack Obama’s nominee to become the Pentagon’s top military officer, said Thursday he believes Russia poses the biggest threat to U.S. national security.
A naked man steals a police officer's car in Curry County, New Mexico. In footage shot by police, Jesus Tarango, 37, is seen stumbling along the road without clothes. As a police officer questions the man, he jumps into the police cruiser and drives off down the road Continue reading...
Though the EU has doubled its aid budget for Ukraine, where 1.5 million people have received vital humanitarian assistance, the conflict is blighting their future
There is a humanitarian crisis right on the doorstep of the EU. More than 2.2 million people have been forced to leave their homes because of the fighting between Ukrainian forces and Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine. As many as 900,000 have sought refuge in neighbouring countries.
Last week, I visited eastern Ukraine for the second time this year to see for myself the impact of our humanitarian aid programmes on the lives of those affected, and to discuss the challenges ahead.
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The director just wants every device and software manufacturer to volunteer to create backdoors for the government to snoop on Americans
It’s never a good sign when you have to declare during a debate that “I really am not a maniac.”
But that’s what FBI director Jim Comey found himself saying in advance of his testimony to the senate on Wednesday where he once again argued that tech companies need to figure out a way to install backdoors in all their communications tools so that there’s never an email, text or phone call that the US government can’t get its hands on.
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We can’t get enough of it, but the long-term environmental impacts of bottling and transporting water across countries are doing more damage than we realise
Globally, we now drink as much packaged water as we do milk. At 30 litres per person per year, bottled water is the second most popular liquid refreshment after carbonated drinks – a market that it is set to supplant carbonates this year if predictions prove correct.
Continue reading...LAPD 'opens investigation' into allegations of sexual abuse by Bill Cosbyby Nicky Woolf in New York and Rory Carroll in Los Angeles
Despite statute of limitations for criminal charges, Los Angeles police tell ABC News they willinvestigate the allegations no matter when crimes took place
The Los Angeles police department has told ABC News that it has opened an investigation into allegations of sexual abuse by Bill Cosby – including into those for which the statute of limitations has expired.
A Los Angeles police department spokesperson told the Guardian on Thursday that it would explore any sexual assault accusations against Cosby, including those for which the statute of limitations has expired.
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They know it’s not an ancient tradition, or even typically Spanish. But veterans of Pamplona’s encierro still see it as much more than just another extreme sport
In Pamplona, rumour has it that Hemingway never ran in front of the bulls during the festival of San Fermín. It’s an urban myth: he did run – several times. What is not true is that he was injured, as he would later claim to a news agency.
In fact, Hemingway was close enough to the action to witness a man being gored by a bull in 1924. This was actually the very first fatality in the modern history of the encierro, as the running of the bulls is called in Spanish.
Continue reading...Former Saudi foreign minister Prince Saud al-Faisal diesby Agence France-Presse in Riyadh
Prince had overseen nation’s emergence as a major diplomatic player, facing successive regional crises and maintaining a focus on relations with the west
Saudi Arabia’s Prince Saud al-Faisal, who was the world’s longest-serving foreign minister, has died, according to family members and a foreign ministry spokesman.
Faisal, who was born in 1940, was one of the highest-profile members of Saudi Arabia’s ruling elite and steered the diplomacy of the world’s leading oil exporter for four decades before stepping down in April for health reasons.
Continue reading...Vatican bewildered by Bolivia's 'communist crucifix' gift to Pope Francis by Jonathan Watts Latin America correspondent
Bolivian president Evo Morales presented pontiff with crucifix depicting Jesus nailed to hammer and sickle, which pope returned after a brief examination
Vatican officials appear to have been flummoxed after Pope Francis was presented with a communist crucifix depicting Jesus nailed to a hammer and sickle by Bolivia’s president Evo Morales.
The gift from the leftwing leader caused an immediate stir among conservative Catholics who said the pontiff was being manipulated for ideological reasons.
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The European project rejects the consolidation of power in one country’s hands. Does Angela Merkel understand that?
Prince Saud, who served for four decades, was known for his behind-the-scenes, conservative diplomacy in a time of major changes.
Saud al-Faisal, former Saudi foreign minister, diesby By ABDULLAH AL-SHIHRI and LEE KEATH
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia (AP) -- Saudi Arabia's Prince Saud al-Faisal, who was the world's longest-serving foreign minister with 40 years in the post until his retirement this year, has died, the ministry spokesman said Thursday. He was 75....
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BERLIN (Reuters) - The U.S. National Security Agency tapped phone calls involving German Chancellor Angela Merkel and her closest advisers for years and spied on the staff of her predecessors, according to WikiLeaks.
TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan is interested in joining a NATO missile building consortium that would give Tokyo its first taste of a multinational defense project, a move the U.S. Navy is encouraging because it could pave the way for Japan to lead similar partnerships in Asia, sources said.
WASHINGTON — The Office of Personnel Management revealed on Thursday that “sensitive information” about 21.5 million people was obtained last year by hackers who intruded into its computer networks.
The agency said the incident was separate from, but related to, a previous breach that compromised the personnel data of 4.2 million federal employees.
The extent of the breach announced on Thursday included 19.7 million people who had applied for background investigations and 1.8 million others who were mostly their spouses or cohabitants.
The agency said in a statement that a forensic investigation had concluded “with high confidence” that the individuals’ information, including Social Security numbers, was stolen from background investigation databases. Some of the records included material from interviews conducted by background checkers, and about 1.1 million of them included fingerprints.
In a blog post on Thursday, Katherine Archuleta, the agency’s director, said she was taking a series of steps in response to the hacking, including creating a cybersecurity adviser position at the agency, consulting with private-sector experts on technological threats and establishing an online cybersecurity incident resource center. She also said the office would offer credit and identity theftmonitoring and protection services to those whose information was compromised.
“It is critical that all of O.P.M.’s constituents – most importantly, those who are directly impacted by these breaches – receive information in a timely, transparent and accurate manner,” Ms. Archuleta wrote. “As I have said before, we take these incidents extremely seriously and, accordingly, are taking a number of steps to address both our cybersecurity and our process going forward.”
VIENNA — Secretary of State John Kerry said on Thursday that the United States would continue to negotiate on a nuclear agreement with Iran that could endure “for decades,” but cautioned that the talks would not be open-ended.
“We will not rush, and we will not be rushed,” Mr. Kerry said, appearing before reporters in front of Vienna’s Coburg Palace, where the negotiations are underway.
A deadline set by a United States law for a 30-day review by Congress is hours away, but Mr. Kerry’s remarks made it all but certain that if an accord is reached here, it will not come on Thursday. Under the same law, missing the deadline would extend the congressional review period to 60 days, allowing a prolonged debate that the White House hoped to avoid.
But Mr. Kerry said that in a discussion Wednesday night with President Obama, they had decided that the strength of a prospective deal, which is meant to guarantee that Iran’s nuclear activities are peaceful, was more important than adhering to a rigid timetable.
An outline of major developments since the framework agreement in April that could influence the final round of talks.
“All that we are focused on is the quality of the agreement,” Mr. Kerry said. “If, in the end, we are able to reach a deal, it has to be one that can withstand the test of time. It is not a test of a matter of days or weeks or months. It is a test for decades.”
Mr. Kerry’s wording appeared to suggest a sensitivity to one of the main criticisms of the emerging deal: that it does not constrain Iran’s nuclear capabilities for long enough.
One of the sticking points in recent weeks has been the schedule for Iran’s research and development of more efficient centrifuges to enrich uranium after the first 10 years of the agreement.
That schedule depends on constraints that Energy Secretary Ernest J. Moniz is trying to negotiate with his Iranian counterpart, Ali Akbar Salehi.
A guide to help you navigate the talks between Western powers and Tehran.
OPEN Graphic
Mr. Kerry did not set a deadline, or even a target date, for completing the talks, but he said Mr. Obama was prepared to walk away if progress could not be made.
It was a similar message to the one Mr. Kerry sent on Sunday from the same spot in front of the Coburg.
A senior Obama administration official told reporters this week that the American negotiating team believed there were risks in interrupting the talks, because the Iranian side might be under political pressure at home to back away from elements of a prospective agreement.
“It is pretty darn hard for the Iranians to go home and deal with the politics in Iran,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity under the ground rules for the briefing. “Everyone understands that once we leave here, we are in less control of what happens in this negotiation. It gets more complicated, not less complicated.”
As Mr. Moniz and Mr. Salehi tried to resolve the final issues Thursday morning, Federica Mogherini,the foreign policy chief for the European Union, convened a separate session with Mr. Kerry and senior diplomats from Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia, the five other world powers that are taking part in the negotiations.
The foreign ministers of China and Russia are the only top diplomats among the six world powers negotiating with Iran who are not in Vienna, but they are expected to return if an accord is reached.
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In Baltimore, new police commissioner will face a demoralized department, distrustful public
The sensitive information of nearly 22 million Americans was stolen from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), according to the latest investigation by federal officials.
The investigation concluded with "high confidence" that personal information, including the Social Security numbers of 21.5 million individuals, was stolen from the agency's background investigation databases.
The newest damage assessment by OPM is significantly larger than the initial reports in June, when federal agencies said the hacks compromised the records of as many as 18 million people. A separate but related hack discovered earlier this year compromised the personnel data of 4.2 million people -- a cyber crime that affected not only OPM but also records at Department of the Interior. About 3.6 million people were affected by both crimes.
"This was a challenging investigation," the Department of Homeland Security's Andy Ozment told reporters in a conference call Thursday. Though some in the Obama administration have attributed these hacks to Chinese state actors, officials would not confirm the identity of the hackers. They did, however, say that the separate incidents were perpetrated by "the same actor moving between different networks." The "adversary" responsible for the OPM hack discovered in April had been on the agency's network for eleven months -- from May of 2014 to April of 2015 -- with compromised credentials from an outside contractor.
In addition to Social Security numbers, hackers also stole information about people's financial, personal, and employment histories. The cyber attack also compromised the information of close acquaintances and family members of former, current, and potential federal employees.
Officials at OPM also announced Thursday that they would continue the investigation and implement new protections for those who had been affected by the hack. These include providing a comprehensive suite of monitoring and protection services for the agency's background investigations and establishing a call center specifically to respond to victims of the cyberattack.
Congressmen from both sides of the aisle immediately responded with concern about the news.
House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chair Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, called for OPM Director Katherine Archuleta to resign her post after more information was revealed about the hacks.
"Their negligence has now put the personal and sensitive information of 21.5 million Americans into the hands of our adversaries," Chaffetz said in a statement. "Such incompetence is inexcusable."
"I have been deeply disturbed by the information Members of the Intelligence Committee received from OPM since the disclosure of these hacks," House Intelligence Committee Chair Rep. Adam Schiff, D-California, said in a statement. "I do not believe OPM was fully candid in its original briefing to the Committee and omitted key information about two distinct hacks and the breadth of the potential compromise. To the degree OPM has not been fully forthcoming with Congress or has sought to blame others for a lack of its own inadequate security, OPM has not inspired confidence in its ability to safeguard our networks and most sensitive databases."
When asked Thursday if Archuleta would resign, the agency head said she would not.
"I am committed to the work I am doing at OPM," Archuleta told reporters. "I have trust in the staff that is there including [OPM Chief Information Officer] Donna Seymour."
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The latest OPM investigation finds that several million more people than initially thought were affected
The massive hack last year of the Office of Personnel Management’s system containing security clearance information affected 21.5 million people, including current and former employees, contractors and their families and friends, officials said Thursday.
That is in addition to a separate hack – also last year — of OPM’s personnel database that affected 4.2 million people. That number was previously announced.
Together, the breaches arguably comprise the most consequential cyber intrusion in U.S. government history. Administration officials have privately said they were traced to the Chinese government and appear to be for purposes of traditional espionage.
The 21.5 million figure includes 19.7 million individuals who applied for a background investigation, and 1.8 million non-applicants, predominantly spouses or people who live with the applicants. Some records also include findings from interviews conducted by background investigators, and about 1.1 million include fingerprints, officials said.
Individuals who underwent a background investigation through OPM in 2000 or afterwards are “highly likely” affected, officials said. Background checks before 2000 are less likely to have been affected, they said.
The lapse enabled hackers to gain access not only to personnel files but also personal details about millions of individuals with government security clearances – information a foreign intelligence service could potentially use to recruit spies.
“There is no information at this time to suggest any misuse or further dissemination of the information that was stolen from OPM’s system,” the agency said.
Because the exposed records included information on individuals who served as references on security clearance applications, U.S. official said that stolen data includes details on certain employees’ relatives and friends.
Thursday’s announcement only seemed to strengthen Republican calls on Capitol Hill for OPM Director Katherine Archuleta and her chief information officer, Donna Seymour, to resign.
“Since at least 2007, OPM leadership has been on notice about the vulnerabilities to its network and cybersecurity policies and practices,” Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said in a statement.
“Their negligence has now put the personal and sensitive information of 21.5 million Americans into the hands of our adversaries,” Chaffetz said. “Such incompetence is inexcusable. Again, I call upon President Obama to remove Director Archuleta and Ms. Seymour immediately.”
The government says it will offer the affected employees at least three years of credit monitoring and other identity protection services. But federal employee unions, who say they have received little information from OPM in the last month, were angry.
“Today’s new number is staggering,” Drew Halunen, legislative director for the National Federation of Federal Employees, said in a statement. “Now, not only do federal employees have to worry about their own personal information being exposed – but they must also worry about their spouse and children having their information compromised. The magnitude of worry has grown exponentially for federal employees in the wake of this news.”
The intrusion of OPM’s system containing security clearance data took place in June or early July of 2014, officials said. In December, a separate OPM database containing personnel records was also hacked, affecting 4.2 million current and former employees.
In both cases, officials said, the hackers worked for the Chinese government, although the Obama administration has not formally accused Beijing. “It is an enormous breach, and a huge amount of data that is personal and sensitive… was available to adversaries,” FBI Director James Comey said at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing Wednesday.
“We’re talking about millions and millions of people affected by this,” he said. “I’m sure the adversary has my SF86 now,” referring to the Standard Form 86, which all applicants for security clearances must fill out.
He noted it lists “every place I’ve lived since I was 18, every foreign trip I’ve taken, all of my family and their addresses…I’ve got siblings. I’ve got five kids. All of that is in there.”
Said Comey: “It is a huge deal.”
At a roundtable with reporters on Thursday, Comey called the heist a “treasure trove of information.”
Just imagine, he said, “if you were a foreign intelligence service and you had that data – how it would be useful.’’
Not every spy’s data is in the system. The CIA conducts its own security clearance investigations and keeps that data to itself. Even so, some U.S. officials have said that a foreign spy service might be able to identify U.S. intelligence operatives by comparing stolen OPM records with rosters of U.S. personnel at embassies overseas.
Names that appear on U.S. embassy lists but are missing from the OPM files might enable a foreign intelligence service with sophisticated computer capabilities to identify CIA operatives serving overseas under diplomatic cover.
“That’s not conclusive that the person might be undercover CIA,” said one official, who requested anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic.“But it’s certainly worth taking a look at.” Such are the concerns that some officials have about the lack of security over the government’s data systems. “This is something that we must do better at defending against, because you can’t really blame our adversaries for trying to get this information,” the official said. “It’s really about how do we defend against it.” OPM has been under fire for the breaches.
OPM officials have defended the agency, saying that it was only because of a strategic plan put in place by Archuleta shortly after she became director in November 2014 that the breaches were discovered.
“There are certainly some people I would like to see given the boot for not paying attention to cybersecurity, but Katherine Archuleta is not one of them,” said one administration official, requesting anonymity to discuss personnel issues. Maybe they didn’t move as fast as they should have but they were at least moving in the right direction and were prioritizing it in an agency that didn’t think of itself as having a security mission.”
It has taken weeks for the agency to come up with the number, in large part because of the difficulty, officials say, of reviewing data contained in numerous computers that make up the background check system. Many of the computers are antiquated. There were many instances of names being duplicated – sometimes because someone was listed as a reference in several background checks as well as having their own clearance.
Employees are angry and two class action lawsuits have been filed against the agency and Archuleta.
The White House has been discussing possible response options, to include covert actions that would not be publicly announced. Among the options on the table, officials said, is economic sanctions. President Obama recently signed an executive order creating a sanctions tool to punish cyber attacks and cyber economic espionage.
However, some U.S. officials caution against taking actions against foreign states when the cyber theft is conducted for traditional spying motives. The United States has not officially named China or the motive, but privately officials say it appears China was conducting a form of traditional espionage. The data taken does not appear to fall into the category of intellectual property or commercial secrets that can be used to benefit another country’s industry.
“I think we have to be careful about the importance of continuing to draw a line between theft for economic advantage and traditional foreign intelligence activities, which may look untraditional now that they’re in the cyber realm,” said Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), a member of the House Intelligence Committee. “We want to draw a bright line” that hacking for economic benefit “is a violation of international norms.”
If the United States blurs the line between economic spying and foreign intelligence spying, “we risk undermining the fight against economic theft.”
The government has already begun taking steps to mitigate the damage in the intelligence and counterintelligence arena, Schiff said. “We’re going to be doing that for years, in terms of the whole range of steps that we’ll have to take to protect our people and our sources and methods.”
He added: “the consequences will be very far-reaching.”
Lisa Rein contributed to this story
Ellen Nakashima is a national security reporter for The Washington Post. She focuses on issues relating to intelligence, technology and civil liberties.
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Kerry: U.S. ‘will not rush’ Iran nuclear deal(1:25)
Secretary of State John Kerry said "tough decision" remain, but negotiators are making progress on a nuclear deal with Iran. (Reuters)
VIENNA — Secretary of State John F. Kerry said Thursday that the United States and its negotiating partners “will not rush, and we will not be rushed” into finalizing a nuclear deal with Iran, but warned they will abandon talks soon if Iran doesn’t make the “tough decisions” needed for an agreement.
“This is not open-ended,” he said after walking on crutches to a podium outside the Coburg Palace hotel here where the talks are being held.
“President Obama made it very clear to me last night, we can’t wait forever for the decision to be made,” Kerry said. “We know that. If the tough decisions don’t get made, we are absolutely prepared to call an end to this process.”
But Kerry didn’t specify just how much longer he is willing to remain in Vienna in search of a deal that would place curbs on Iran’s nuclear program in return for sanctions relief.
Kerry spoke at the end of a day of back-to-back negotiations and just hours before the White House must submit a finalized deal to Congress if it is to avoid an extended review by lawmakers.
U.S. Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz, right, and Ali Akbar Salehi, head of the Iranian Atomic Energy Organization, meet Thursday at a hotel where the Iran nuclear talks are being held in Vienna. (Carlos Barria/AFP/Getty Images)
Sending the text to Capitol Hill is a complicated, time-consuming process, involving not just submitting copies of the agreement, but a written explanation of how Iran will be blocked from pursuing a path to nuclear weapons.
The deadline is midnight Thursday in Washington and by missing it, as now seems likely, Congress will have 60 days for review instead of 30 days, potentially leaving more time for the deal’s opponents to marshal their arguments.
“We are not going to sit at the negotiating table forever,” said Kerry. “We also recognize that we shouldn’t get up and leave simply because the clock strikes midnight.”
Shortly before Kerry spoke, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius approached reporters and said the negotiations would continue into the night in an effort to resolve the remaining differences between Iran and six world powers, known as the P5+1--the United States, France, Britain, Russia, China and Germany.
Fabius compared the negotiations to the end of a marathon race.
“There are difficult points that remain, but things are all the same going in the right direction,” he said, adding “I hope we will be able to complete the meters that need to be run.”
If talks continue beyond Friday, negotiators will also have to formally extend an interim agreement reached in November 2013 or let it expire.
This round of talks, which began two weeks ago, has been extended twice, along with the interim agreement.
The admission that unresolved issues are still blocking a final deal came one day after Obama held a secure video conference with Kerry and the State Department team.
In the call that ended early Thursday morning in Vienna, Obama “provided guidance related to our ongoing efforts to achieve a good deal between the P5+1 and Iran that meets our requirements,” according to the State Department.
Diplomats from the world powers met Thursday morning for a little over an hour, as some of the foreign ministers who had left the Austrian capital on Tuesday returned to join the talks. Kerry followed that up with a series of separate meetings with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and their counterparts from Britain and France.
Separately, Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz and Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, held a meeting, a by-now routine daily discussion between the two nuclear physicists who are charged with ironing out the technical details in any agreement.
Abbas Araghchi, a deputy foreign minister taking part in the negotiations, told Iranian TV that “only a handful” of key issues remain, including the timetable under which Iran would allow international inspectors to visit nuclear sites while the United Nations, the United States and the European Union prepare to lift sanctions.
He also said the two sides are still discussing a key Iranian demand, the lifting of a U.N. embargo on conventional arms sales to Iran. The United States has opposed dropping that ban.
Russia, which hopes to sell arms to Iran, has come out in support of lifting the arms embargo, but under the framework agreement settled three months ago, the arms embargo would stay in place.
“We want the arms embargo, in principle, to be one of the listed sanction restrictions lifted in the first turn,” Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said at a news conference in Russia, according to the Interfax news agency.
In seeking to bridge the different viewpoints, diplomats are believed to be discussing ways to postpone the lifting of the arms embargo, perhaps for several years, according to diplomatic sources.
William Branigin in Washington and Natasha Abbakumova in Moscow contributed to this report.
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Carol Morello is the diplomatic correspondent for The Washington Post, covering the State Department.
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