Unprecedented wave of shark attacks causes terror in North Carolina
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Seven people have been bitten since June but wildlife experts say it is down to several different sharks and is not "a Jaws situation"
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HELENA, Mont. (AP) -- A Montana man said Wednesday that he was inspired by last week's U.S. Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage to apply for a marriage license so that he can legally wed his second wife....
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Pentagon confident of US strategy for countering ISIS despite recent setbacks
CNN Washington (CNN) Despite ISIS's continued ability to hold and control vast swaths of Iraq and Syria, top Pentagon officials are confident that the U.S. program of training and equipping forces in those countries will help defeat the terror group. "That ... Door to RAF strikes in Syria opensBBC News US blocks attempts by Arab allies to fly heavy weapons directly to Kurds to ...Telegraph.co.uk Be firm with ISISToronto Sun Financial Times- Mirror.co.uk-Ynetnews all 82 news articles » |
Study: Fish Use Whole Bodies When They Eatby webdesk@voanews.com (Rosanne Skirble)
About half of all vertebrates – those animals with a back bone – are fish with bony rays or spines. These 30,000 ray-finned fish species have evolved a similar feeding motion. As VOA's Rosanne Skirble reports, scientists have long hypothesized about the mechanics of that process, but now researchers at Brown University have x-ray video that shows it in action, in great detail.
US Defense Secretary: 'No Anticipation' of Giving Up Base in Cuba by webdesk@voanews.com (Reuters)
The United States does not anticipate giving up its naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, despite Wednesday's historic agreement by the former Cold War enemies to restore diplomatic ties, U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter said. President Barack Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro agreed to soon reopen embassies in each other's capitals, a move Obama acknowledged might have seemed impossible only a year ago. But to have normal overall relations, Cuba's communist ...
At first the call for a referendum was bold enough to seem clever, or at least typical of the chutzpah that helped bring Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras to power in Greece in the first place. Its logic was simple. With talks between Greece and its creditors at an impasse, why not give the people a chance to demand a better deal at the ballot box? Would Germany and the other European powers be so callous as to ignore the outcome of a democratic vote? At the very least, the referendum would renew the government’s mandate in its struggle for debt relief.
Germany, however, didn’t flinch. Chancellor Angela Merkel called the bluff on Tspiras’s last-minute gambit with an almost taunting composure. “Before a referendum, as planned, is carried out, we won’t negotiate on anything new at all,” she said on Tuesday. In other words, her response to the threat of a referendum was simple: knock yourself out.
The Chancellor was not just being stubborn. She had seen the Greek opinion polls suggesting the July 5 referendum would not come out as Tsipras hopes. Although the polls since then have been more mixed, an early majority seemed to emerge this week in favor of a bailout deal, one that would save Greece from abandoning the euro even at the price of higher taxes and more austerity.
On Tuesday evening, tens of thousands of Greeks gathered outside the parliament in Athens to support this position, defying their Prime Minister with calls for Greeks to vote in favor of the deal. Their numbers, to the surprise of many in the crowd, clearly dwarfed the demonstration that had gathered the night before to back Tsipras in rebuffing Greece’s creditors.
The Prime Minister then appeared to lose his nerve. On Tuesday night, he sent a letter to European finance ministers asking for another bailout – and apparently conceding to most of their demands for more cuts to the welfare system and higher taxes. The concessions were shocking, as they bowed to many of the terms that Tsipras had so vehemently opposed for months. Nevertheless, it took just a few hours for the European ministers to reject his appeal, surely not without the influence of Germany.
“This government has done nothing since it came into office,” German Finance Minister Woflgang Schaeuble said in a speech the next day. “It has only reversed measures. It reneged on previously agreed commitments. It negotiated and negotiated.”
By that point, Greek workers and pensioners had been given a taste of what it could mean to defy their nation’s creditors. The European Central Bank had cut off its emergency cash injections to Greek banks as of Sunday, forcing them to limit the amount of money their clients could withdraw from ATMs. This measure soon caused crowds of elderly Greeks to gather outside banks in Athens to collect at least a portion of their pensions, their outstretched hands providing a grim image of what Greece could turn into without the support of its European peers.
It was not what Tsipras had in mind when he gambled on the referendum. On Friday afternoon, hours before the Prime Minister announced the vote, a senior official in his government had explained the logic of this option to TIME. “This government is determined to keep struggling to persuade the European community that Greece wants to stay in,” said Rania Antonopoulos, the deputy minister in charge of combating Greece’s sky-high unemployment. “But we cannot accept conditions that would bring about even more recession.”
Her reasoning was sound. When Greece first accepted austerity in exchange for a bailout in 2010, its creditors badly underestimated the damage it would do to the Greek economy. The country’s GDP wound up shrinking by a quarter over the next five years, creating a recession that has been deeper and more protracted than the U.S. Great Depression. Unemployment also rose to a peak of around 28% in February, with half of young people now jobless in Greece.
Tsipras came to power in January with a promise to change course, and he immediately took his core election promises to Greece’s creditors. The 40-year-old leftist demanded a reduction of his country’s debt, relief to the poor and, above all, no more austerity imposed on Greece from without.
“They are not carelessly engaging in this dialogue,” Antonopoulos says of Tsipras and her other Syriza party leaders. “They are exhausting all possible options before they say, ‘Well, they are kicking us out [of the eurozone]. And if they are kicking us out and we have no other way, then of course we will take it to the people, and the people will decide what is our next move.’”
But Syriza may have overestimated the people’s resolve. Among the party’s core supporters were many of Greece’s poorest citizens, who are ill prepared to face the reality of cash shortages, bank runs and a future without the euro as their currency. In the past few days, the European Union has done its best to demonstrate how painful that reality would be.
“If they vote No, it would be disastrous for the future,” said Jean-Claude Juncker, the President of the European Commission, which along with the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank makes up the so-called troika of Greece’s creditors. “No would mean they are saying No to Europe,” he told a press conference on Monday.
To many in Greece, this seemed like a blatant attempt to influence the outcome of the referendum, as did the European move to cut the flow of emergency liquidity to Greek banks. The European Central Bank could have kept that assistance alive for just a few more days, allowing banks to stay open at least until the referendum. Instead it chose to turn off the faucet the day after Tsipras called the vote.
Stefanos Manos, a Greek conservative who served as Minister of Finance in the early 1990s, says he’s glad Europe is sending such a clear message. He was among the first to point out how wasteful and inefficient the Greek state had become — and, he says, was considered an “extremist” for doing so. He now sees the referendum as a chance for Greeks to finally accept that he was right – and that perhaps, Merkel is too. “It seems we will come out on top,” Manos says.
The Prime Minister isn’t so sure. In a televised address on Wednesday, Tsipras continued to defy the troika by urging Greeks to vote against the bailout deal – not as a rejection of the European Union or its currency, he said, but as a means of giving him a stronger position in negotiations going forward.
That doesn’t seem like much of an upside when compared to the referendum’s risks. If the people side with Tsipras, he’ll just have to return to the same negotiating table, albeit with a slightly better hand and a revitalized mandate to take a tough position. If voters turn against him, he won’t have any hand to play at all.
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GCHQ spied on Amnesty International, tribunal tells group in email by Owen Bowcott Legal affairs correspondent
Human rights group denounces revelation as outrageous as after Investigatory Powers Tribunal says its communications have been illegally retained
The government’s electronic eavesdropping agency GCHQ spied illegally on Amnesty International, according to the tribunal responsible for handling complaints against the intelligence services.
Confirmation that surveillance took place emerged late on Wednesday when the human rights group revealed that the Investigatory Powers Tribunal sent it an email correcting an earlier judgment.
Continue reading...A Bankrupt Greece Is Struggling to Stay Afloatby LIZ ALDERMAN and JACK EWING
Any new bailout deal between the country and its creditors is likely to include harsher austerity measures based on an increasingly grim economic outlook, analysts said.
About half of all vertebrates – those animals with a back bone – are fish with bony rays or spines. These 30,000 ray-finned fish species have evolved a similar feeding motion. As VOA's Rosanne Skirble reports, scientists have long hypothesized about the mechanics of that process, but now researchers at Brown University have x-ray video that shows it in action, in great detail.
Originally published at - http://www.voanews.com/media/video/study-says-fish-use-whole-bodies-when-they-eat/2845798.html
Senior advisor Valerie Jarrett attends attends the annual Iftar dinner celebrating the Muslim holy month of Ramadan hosted by U.S. President Barack Obama in the East Room of the White House June 22, 2015 in Washington, DC. (Olivier Douliery-Pool/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — Valerie Jarrett, the close personal friend and top adviser to the Obamas, will travel to Atlanta on Tuesday to promote the city’s policies for working families.
Jarrett’s visit to City Hall, where she will join Mayor Kasim Reed, is part of her “Lead on Leave: Empowering Working Families Across America” tour, according to the White House.
As the White House described it in a press release:
This event builds on the President’s State of the Union announcements supporting greater workplace flexibility for families, and the City of Atlanta’s recent decision to offer paid maternity and paternity leave. White House Senior Advisor and Chair of the White House Council on Women & Girls Valerie Jarrett and Mayor Kasim Reed will discuss how flexible workplace policies can benefit families, businesses, and the economy as a whole.
The leave policies were included in this year’s city budget, according to Creative Loafing:
For the first time, the city has set aside $1.4 million to provide employees with 12 weeks of paid maternity and paternity leave — a first for any metro Atlanta government.
The 11 a.m. Tuesday meeting is open to the news media.
Reed was scheduled to leave Cuba today after a trade mission to the newly opened island.
(Note: A version of this post appeared in today’s Morning Jolt.)
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A database containing the classified personnel records of US spies may have been merged with the database of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) before the latter was hacked, Shane Harris of The Daily Beast reports.
When administration officials asked intelligence agencies in 2010 to merge their records with OPM's, creating a unified security-clearance system, intelligence officials initially refused to comply.
They refused out of concern that combining Scattered Castles — the US spy-agency database — with OPM's database of federal employees could give hackers access to the identities of covert operatives if the massive OPM database ever suffered a breach.
By 2014, however, according to The Daily Beast, OPM security-clearance files were being uploaded into Scattered Castles' database, beginning a process of linking the databases.
"If there are connections between the two — as that recent government report suggests there are — it could be exploited by hackers, giving them a pathway from OPM into the most highly classified personnel records in the entire government," Harris reports.
US officials contacted by The Daily Beast denied that Scattered Castles was affected by the OPM hack, but they never said explicitly that the two databases were not linked.
"I have high confidence that the agencies do not have a clear understanding of the architecture of their systems and how they're interconnected," Michael Adams, who served more than two decades in the US Special Operations Command, told The Daily Beast.
Adams noted that because administration officials lacked this understanding, they could not say with certainty that the intelligence community's records were unaffected by the hack.
"I further believe that the US government either doesn't understand or is obfuscating the national-security implications of this cyberattack," he said. "These people either need serious help or need to come clean now."
APOffice of Personnel Management director Katherine Archuleta on Capitol Hill in Washington on June 16.
If they were linked, then hackers who infiltrated OPM's database, stealing the sensitive security-clearance and background information of more than 18 million federal employees, were most likely able to steal the same information from the nation's spies.
The massive hack, allegedly perpetrated by the Chinese, was "classic espionage" on an unprecedented scale, a senior administration official told The New York Times.
Jeff Stein of Newsweek reported last week that the hackers who infiltrated OPM also breached FBI agents’ personnel files.
Joel Brenner, who from 2006 to 2009 served as the Intelligence Community's top counterintelligence official, described the hack to the Associated Press as "crown jewels material, a goldmine" for China, adding: "This is not the end of American human intelligence, but it's a significant blow."
Mark Wilson/Getty ImagesThe Theodore Roosevelt Federal Building that houses OPM headquarters seen June 5.
"I'm really glad to be out of the game," a recently retired CIA senior operations officer told former NSA counterintelligence analyst John Schindler in a Daily Beast article.
"There's bad, there's worse — and there's this," he said, referring to the breach. "CIA officers are not supposed to be anywhere in OPM files, but I'm glad I'm not posted overseas right now, hoping that's true."
Hackers who infiltrated OPM had access to the agency's security-clearance computer system for over a year, giving them ample time to steal as much information as possible from OPM's database of military and intelligence officials — and ample time to uncover a pathway to Scattered Castles, if such a pathway existed.
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