PBS NewsHour Weekend | Full Episode | Saturday, August 16, 2014 - YouTube
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Published on Aug 16, 2014
Watch the full episode of PBS NewsHour Weekend for Saturday, August 16, 2014. On this edition, Texas Gov. Rick Perry is indicted on felony charges: what happens next? And later, unconventional efforts to boost declining museum attendance in unconventional ways.
Published on Aug 17, 2014
A Ukrainian MiG was shot down by pro-Russian forces, and an alleged video may confirm Russia's support of the rebels.
Aug. 16, 2014 4:15 p.m. ET
BERLIN—German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Saturday called on Moscow to respond to reports that tanks and troops had crossed from Russia into eastern Ukraine in support of separatist rebels there.
Ms. Merkel discussed the reports and their confirmation by separatist leaders in a telephone conversation with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko on Saturday, Steffen Seibert, Ms. Merkel's spokesman said in a statement.
The comments came as the foreign ministers of Germany, France, Ukraine and Russia were set to meet in Berlin on Sunday in a renewed attempt by Berlin to engineer a diplomatic solution to the crisis.
"The Chancellor said she expected the Russian government to comment on these reports and the statements of the separatists," Mr. Seibert said.
Ms. Merkel and Mr. Poroshenko said arms deliveries from Russian territory to the pro-Russia rebels in Ukraine should stop and a cease-fire be agreed, Mr. Seibert added.
The Ukrainian government said on Saturday it had destroyed most of a Russian column of military vehicles that had entered the country illegally, yet it played down the episode as a commonplaceoccurrence in recent weeks.
French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius and his Ukrainian and Russian counterparts, Pavlo Klimkin and Sergei Lavrov, would meet at the invitation of German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, his ministry said in a statement on Saturday.
The ministers are expected at the Villa Borsig, the ministry's guesthouse in Berlin's Tegel lake district, on Sunday evening.
Kiev and Moscow have clashed for days about Moscow's plan to send what it says is humanitarian aidto the rebel-held territories in eastern Ukraine. Kiev sees Moscow's aid convoy as a further attempt to destabilize the region.
Write to Bertrand Benoit at bertrand.benoit@wsj.com
Corrections & Amplifications
Kiev and Moscow have been clashing over Russia's so-called humanitarian aid to rebel-held territories. An earlier version of this story said Kiev and Berlin were clashing.
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Published on Aug 17, 2014
The main headlines on Al Jazeera English, featuring the latest news and reports from around the world.
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KAMENSK-SHAKHTINSKY, Russia — A Russian aid convoy rumbled toward rebel-held territory in eastern Ukraine on Thursday, stirring fears of a direct confrontation between Russia and Ukraine after months of hands-off sparring through armed proxies between the two bitterly estranged neighbors.
Warning that Ukraine would deploy “all forces available” to halt the convoy if it refused to submit to inspection by Ukrainian border guards, Ukraine’s military spokesman, Andriy Lysenko, said that “any attempt to introduce any convoy without the permission of Ukraine would be considered an act of open aggression.”
The convoy of around 260 trucks, mostly military vehicles that had been recently spray-painted white and covered with white tarpaulins, came within miles of the Ukrainian border on Thursday but then halted its advance, turning onto a long dusty road near a Russian military base on the outskirts of the Russian town of Kamensk-Shakhtinsky.
Ukraine and its Western allies have cast a mistrustful eye on the Russian mission from the start, regarding it more as a cynical ploy to help beleaguered rebel forces stave off defeat and thus extend a war that they say the Kremlin itself has covertly stoked, and is the primary cause of the humanitarian crisis that the aid convoy is supposed to relieve.
Those suspicions have deepened with Russia’s latest maneuvering over the convoy, which has led some analysts in Kiev to speculate that Moscow’s objective may not be to deliver arms, something it can already do with ease across a porous border, but to seed the conflict zone with Russian personnel, making it far more difficult for Ukrainian forces to complete an offensive that took on new vigor in late June after President Petro O. Poroshenko ended a unilateral cease-fire.
Amid mounting international concern that the convoy could escalate the bloody but relatively confined civil war in eastern Ukraine into a broader conflagration, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, spoke by telephone with his Ukrainian counterpart on Thursday to discuss “practical aspects” of Russia’s aid effort, including security guarantees for the delivery of aid.
Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, in one of his more conciliatory speeches since the Ukraine conflict began, said Thursday in Crimea that Russia was monitoring what he called a “major humanitarian catastrophe” in eastern Ukraine. “We will do everything we can to help secure an end to this conflict as soon as possible, so that there will be no more bloodshed in Ukraine,” Mr. Putin told Russian lawmakers gathered in Yalta, according to a summary of his remarks on the Kremlin website.
But Ukrainian officials reacted with fury to Mr. Putin’s decision to present himself as a peacemaker while visiting Crimea. One suggested that Kiev might open a criminal case against the Russian president for “illegal entry” into Ukrainian territory.
Mr. Putin has previously made conciliatory remarks about Ukraine, only to continue what the Ukrainian government and its Western supporters have described as a steady stream of men and arms to the separatists to destabilize the country. Russia denies those accusations.
But analysts said the speech seemed to signal that Mr. Putin wanted to avoid an open military confrontation over Ukraine. “It was indirect confirmation that Russia will not intervene,” said Fyodor Lukyanov, the editor of a Russian foreign affairs journal.
A factor that could push Russia toward moderation is new evidence that Western sanctions are causing serious problems. Rosneft, the crown jewel of Russia’s state-controlled oil industry, has asked for a $42 billion government loan to help offset the credit ban imposed by European and American banks, according to the business daily Vedomosti and other press reports.
When it first announced what it described on Tuesday as a humanitarian mission to help residents of the eastern Ukrainian city of Luhansk, Moscow said the convoy would enter Ukraine through a border crossing controlled by Ukrainian authorities near Kharkiv. But, after a daylong pause Wednesday at a Russian military base near the town of Voronezh, the convoy on Thursday veered away from Kharkiv and instead moved toward a section of the frontier largely under the control of pro-Russian rebels.
But then the convoy was diverted to the military base near Kamensk-Shakhtinsky. Once there, the trucks parked in orderly formations, supervised by hundreds of young men, many with short-cropped hair, who said they were volunteers but would not say for which organization. Each was dressed in an identical beige hat, beige T-shirt and beige shorts.
Fighting continued as a Russian humanitarian convoy advanced toward Ukraine, the latest update to the current visual survey of the continuing dispute, with maps and satellite imagery showing rebel and military movement.
The men denied they were in the army, but most said that they had served recently. One, who tore open a tarpaulin to reveal cardboard boxes containing sleeping bags, had a tattoo of a black panther with a parachute on his right shoulder, common for members of airborne units.
The Kremlin said earlier this week that the convoy was being sent to Ukraine under the auspices of the International Committee of the Red Cross, but that organization said on Thursday that it was still waiting for information from Russia about the cargo aboard the trucks. Andre Loersch, spokesman for the Red Cross in Kiev, said an agency representative managed to catch up with the convoy on Thursday near Kamensk-Shakhtinsky and had established direct contact with it for the first time.
He added: “We have so far received only general information from the Russian Federation. We need a precise list of all the items and how they are packaged.” A single Red Cross representative, he said, could not possibly examine the more than 260 trucks.
A Russian journalist with a state-media organization who is embedded with the convoy said that no plans had been made for an imminent crossing into Ukraine, and that the convoy could remain at its current position for several more days. This indicated that Moscow wanted to give diplomats time to arrange terms for the convoy’s peaceful passage into Ukraine and limit the risk of an armed clash with Ukrainian forces.
The fog of confusion surrounding the Russian convoy, comprising commercial vehicles and army trucks with white tarpaulins, has added a volatile new element to an already chaotic and increasingly bloody struggle for control of eastern Ukraine, where pro-Russian rebels are struggling to hang on to a rapidly shrinking band of territory along Ukraine’s eastern border with Russia.
The Ukrainian military said on Thursday that it recaptured the village of Novosvitlivka, a previously rebel-held settlement that straddles the road through which the Russian aid convoy would probably have to pass if it is to reach Luhansk.
Ukrainian officials have repeatedly denounced Russia’s efforts to deliver aid to Luhansk, which is still controlled by rebels, as a ruse to smuggle military supplies to the beleaguered pro-Russian separatist cause. A New York Times correspondent traveling with the convoy said that trucks he was allowed to view contained nothing of any potential military use.
But there was every indication that the aid convoy was under the direction of Russia’s military. The trucks used are standard for the army and had recently been spray-painted white. The field where the trucks parked on Thursday stands adjacent to a military base and a warehouse for military vehicles. Two MI-8 helicopters patrolled the highway used by the convoy, and military patrols guarded intersections between the highway and roads leading to the west toward Ukraine.
In a statement released late Thursday, the Russian Foreign Ministry called for “an immediate cease-fire” by Ukrainian and rebel forces, saying that “this is necessary to guarantee safety of the upcoming humanitarian action.”
A pause in fighting would also help pro-Russian rebels avoid a looming defeat that would be politically risky for Mr. Putin, as it would leave him open to criticism from increasingly vociferous Russian nationalists who cheered the annexation of Crimea but have become disenchanted with the Kremlin’s failure to intervene more decisively to bolster the separatists.
The Ukrainian military has made steady progress in recent weeks, with Mr. Lysenko, the military spokesman, asserting on Thursday that territory controlled by the rebels had shrunk to a fifth the size of what it was earlier this year. He also said the rebel leadership faced growing disarray in its ranks, a claim that was bolstered Thursday by the resignation of Igor Strelkov, one of the top separatist leaders, as “defense minister” of a rebel enclave in Donetsk.
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WASHINGTON — After President Obama delivered a speech in January endorsing changes to surveillance policies, including an end to the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of Americans’ domestic calling records, John Napier Tye was disillusioned.
A State Department official, Mr. Tye worked on Internet freedom issues and had top-secret clearance. He knew the Obama administration had also considered a proposal to impose what an internal White House document, obtained by The New York Times, portrayed as “significant changes” to rules for handling Americans’ data the N.S.A. collects from fiber-optic networks abroad. But Mr. Obama said nothing about that in his speech.
So in April, as Mr. Tye was leaving the State Department, he filed a whistle-blower complaint arguing that the N.S.A.'s practices abroad violated Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights. He also met with staff members for the House and Senate intelligence committees. Last month, he went public with those concerns, which have attracted growing attention.
When operating abroad, the N.S.A. can gather and use Americans’ phone calls, emails, text messages and other communications under different — and sometimes more permissive — rules than when it collects them inside the United States. Much about those rules remains murky. The executive branch establishes them behind closed doors and can change them at will, with no involvement from Congress or the secret intelligence court that oversees surveillance on domestic networks.
“It’s a problem if one branch of government can collect and store most Americans’ communications, and write rules in secret on how to use them — all without oversight from Congress or any court, and without the consent or even the knowledge of the American people,” Mr. Tye said. “Regardless of the use rules in place today, this system could be abused in the future.”
Mr. Tye, 38, is speaking out as Congress considers amending the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which governs how the N.S.A. operates domestically. The legislation resulted from the uproar over leaks by Edward J. Snowden, a former agency contractor.
But the proposed changes would not touch the agency’s abilities overseas, which are authorized by Executive Order 12333, a Reagan-era presidential directive. The administration has declassified some rules for handling Americans’ messages gathered under the order, but the scope of that collection and other details about how the messages are used has remained unclear.
“The debate over the last year has barely touched on the executive order,” said Jameel Jaffer, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer. “It’s a black box.”
The Times interviewed nearly a dozen current and former officials about 12333 rules for handling American communications, bringing further details to light. The rules are detailed in an accompanying chart.
By law, the N.S.A. cannot deliberately intercept an American’s messages without court permission. But it can “incidentally” collect such private communications as a consequence of its foreign surveillance.
The volume of incidental collection overseas is uncertain. Officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the delicate nature of the topic, said the N.S.A. had never studied the matter and most likely could not come up with a representative sampling. Mr. Tye called that “willful blindness.”
Still, the number of Americans swept up under 12333 could be sizable. As the N.S.A. intercepts content in bulk from satellite transmissions and from overseas fiber-optic hubs, Americans’ messages in the mix can be vacuumed up. By contrast, when operating on domestic networks under FISA, the agency may engage only in targeted, not dragnet, collection and storage of content.
Congress left the executive branch with a freer hand abroad because it was once rare for Americans’ communications to go overseas. But in the Internet era, that is no longer true.
Large email companies like Google and Yahoo have built data centers abroad, where they store backups of their users’ data. Mr. Snowden disclosed that in 2012 the N.S.A., working with its British counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters, penetrated links connecting the companies’ overseas data centers and collected 181.3 million records in 30 days.
Mr. Tye was a rebel within the system. Raised in a Boston suburb, he attended Duke University, Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, and Yale Law School. But his elite résumé and conservative appearance belie a history of nonconformity and social mission.
At Duke, he avoided fraternities, wore his hair long, became a wilderness enthusiast and created his own major, fusing economics, computer science and mathematics.
“I thought I was going to be a scientist,” Mr. Tye said in an interview. “But when I was graduating, I decided I wanted to do things that have more of an impact on real people.”
After studying at Oxford, he researched hate groups for the Southern Poverty Law Center before arriving at Yale just as legal issues raised by counterterrorism policies after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were crystallizing. He joined a civil liberties litigation clinic.
After Yale, he moved to New Orleans, where he represented poor people in housing-related problems. In early 2011, he landed a State Department job working on Internet issues.
Then came Mr. Snowden’s disclosures. Mr. Tye had a vantage point on administration deliberations about proposed changes. By February, he was planning to leave the government and file a whistle-blower complaint.
It yielded little. The House Intelligence Committee sent a letter saying it had “reviewed your allegations and has taken the action it deems appropriate in this matter.” The N.S.A. inspector general sent asimilar letter, emphasizing that Mr. Tye had acknowledged that he did not know the rules for handling Americans’ messages.
Brian Fallon, a Justice Department spokesman, defended the N.S.A.'s practices under the executive order as “respectful of the principles upon which the United States was founded and consistent with U.S. laws, including the Fourth Amendment.”
The proposal to increase protections for American messages gathered incidentally under Executive Order 12333 — the quiet rejection of which provoked Mr. Tye — came from a review group Mr. Obama appointed after Mr. Snowden’s leaks.
Its report recommended three changes for such messages. First, it said, analysts should purge them from the 12333 storehouse upon detection, unless they have foreign intelligence value or are necessary to prevent bodily harm.
A similar rule already exists, but has another major exception: Analysts must send any information about crimes to the Justice Department. The officials would not say how often criminal referrals have resulted.
Second, the review group said, prosecutors should not use incidental 12333 intercepts of Americans as direct evidence in criminal proceedings against them.
In practice, officials said, the government already avoids doing so, so as not to have to divulge the origins of the evidence in court. But the officials contend that defendants have no right to know if 12333 intercepts provided a tip from which investigators derived other evidence.
Third, the review group said, analysts should not search the storehouse for an American’s messages unless a court finds probable involvement with terrorism.
Officials said a current rule permits analysts to query for an American’s messages if the attorney general says the person is probably an “agent of a foreign power,” a broader category. Usually, they added, the N.S.A. also gets a court order for prospective surveillance. The only recent exception, one official said, involved a dead suspect.
The N.S.A. is also permitted to search the 12333 storehouse using keywords likely to bring up Americans’ messages. Such searches must have “foreign intelligence” purposes, so analysts cannot hunt for ordinary criminal activity.
For now, the N.S.A. does not share raw 12333 intercepts with other agencies, like the F.B.I. or the C.I.A., to search for their own purposes. But the administration is drafting new internal guidelines that could permit such sharing, officials said.
The administration secretly changed the rules in November 2010 to allow the N.S.A. to analyze Americans’ metadata — information showing who communicates with whom, but not content — gathered under 12333, Mr. Snowden’s leaks showed. The agency may do so without outside permission and for any foreign intelligence purpose, not just counterterrorism.
That means there are fewer restrictions on the agency’s use of Americans’ bulk metadata when gathered abroad than when gathered on domestic soil under FISA and court oversight. The N.S.A.'s 12333 power would not diminish under the bill to replace the phone metadata program.
Aware of leak prosecutions, Mr. Tye, who now works for a civic activist network, estimates he has spent $13,000 on lawyers to make sure he stays within the lines. He drafted a Washington Postopinion column about 12333 by hand to avoid introducing any classified information on an insecure computer, and submitted it for prepublication government review.
But he said he felt compelled to speak out. Because of Mr. Snowden’s disclosures, he said, there is growing awareness that it is now possible for the government to collect a huge share of private communications. The public and Congress, he argued, should decide what the rules for that growing power should be.
“We are at an inflection point in human history,” he said.
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Russian military personnel sit atop armoured vehicles outside Kamensk-Shakhtinsky, Rostov Region, August 15, 2014. Dozens of heavy Russian military vehicles amassed on Friday near the border with Ukraine where a huge Russian convoy with humanitarian aid came to a halt as Moscow and Kiev struggled to agree border crossing procedures. REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov (RUSSIA - Tags: POLITICS TRANSPORT CIVIL UNREST CONFLICT)
EDGARTOWN Mass. (Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama will travel to Estonia in September and meet with leaders from three Baltic states on his way to a NATO summit in Wales, the White House said on Friday.
Published on Aug 14, 2014
Los analistas constitucionalistas, el profesor Carlos Ramos y el licenciado Carlos Gorrín, analizan los efectos que podría tener un cambio en el estatus político de Puerto Rico en la ciudadanía americana de los puertorriqueños.
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