Pentagon: Anthrax shipments broader than first thought

May 30, 2015

» Putin getting left out of G-7 meeting, but not much else
30/05/15 04:13 from AP Top Headlines At 7:05 a.m. EDT
WASHINGTON (AP) -- When President Barack Obama and other world leaders gather in Germany next week, Russia's Vladimir Putin will be left off the guest list, part of his punishment for more than a year of alleged Kremlin-supported aggress...

» Pentagon chief criticizes Beijing's South China Sea moves
30/05/15 01:33 from AP Top Headlines At 7:05 a.m. EDT
SINGAPORE (AP) -- China's land reclamation in the South China Sea is out of step with international rules, and turning underwater land into airfields won't expand its sovereignty, Defense Secretary Ash Carter told an international securi...

» U.S. Surveillance on Island Reveals Chinese Arms
29/05/15 19:55 from WSJ.com: World News
Imagery shows China has positioned weaponry on one of the artificial islands in the South China Sea, supporting suspicions that Beijing is building up reefs for military purposes.

» Chinese weaponry spotted on artificial island, US says
29/05/15 17:33 from AP Top Headlines At 7:05 a.m. EDT
SINGAPORE (AP) -- U.S. surveillance detected two large artillery vehicles on one of the artificial islands that China is creating in the South China Sea, U.S. officials said Friday, heightening concerns that Beijing could use the land re...

» Pentagon: Anthrax shipments broader than first thought
29/05/15 22:10 from AP Top Headlines At 7:05 a.m. EDT
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Pentagon said Friday that the Army's mistaken shipments of live anthrax to research laboratories were more widespread than it initially reported, prompting the Defense Department's second-ranking official to order ...

» Washington removes Cuba from US list of terrorism sponsors
29/05/15 18:25 from AP Top Headlines At 7:05 a.m. EDT
HAVANA (AP) -- The Obama administration formally removed Cuba from the U.S. terrorism blacklist Friday, a decision hailed in Cuba as the healing of a decades-old wound and an important step toward normalizing relations between the Cold W...

» Cuba removed from US terror list
29/05/15 15:31 from AP Top Headlines At 7:05 a.m. EDT
HAVANA (AP) -- The Obama administration on Friday formally removed Cuba from a U.S. terrorism blacklist, a decision hailed in Cuba as the healing of a decades-old wound and an important step toward normalizing relations between the Cold ...

» AP source: Hastert paid to conceal claims of sexual abuse
29/05/15 21:33 from AP Top Headlines At 7:05 a.m. EDT
CHICAGO (AP) -- Former House Speaker Dennis Hastert paid hush money to conceal claims that the Illinois Republican sexually molested someone decades ago, a person familiar with the allegations said Friday....

» Hastert rose to speakership among the scandals of others
29/05/15 20:05 from AP Top Headlines At 7:05 a.m. EDT
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Dennis Hastert's career as House speaker both arose and ended amid the sex-related scandals of others....

» Holmes: Mind 'was kind of falling apart' before shooting
29/05/15 23:06 from AP Top Headlines At 7:05 a.m. EDT
CENTENNIAL, Colo. (AP) -- James Holmes said his "mind was kind of falling apart" and he began to have homicidal thoughts months before he killed 12 people and injured 70 others in a Colorado movie theater, according to a video excerpt pr...

» ISIS suicide bomber dressed in burka blows up car at Saudi Arabian mosque
29/05/15 17:22 from the Mail online | News
The attacker was stopped by security outside the Shia Imam Hussein mosque in Dammam this morning when he detonated, killing four people, including himself.

» IS claims suicide bombing on Shiite mosque in Saudi, 4 dead
29/05/15 16:13 from AP Top Headlines At 7:05 a.m. EDT
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia (AP) -- A suicide bomber disguised as a woman blew himself up in the parking lot of a Shiite mosque during Friday prayers, killing four people in the second such attack in as many weeks claimed by the Islamic State g...

Authorities in India nab suspected spy pigeon
Saturday May 30th, 2015 at 8:37 AM

Story highlights

The bird is found on a home, with an illegible Urdu message on its wings and carrying a wired object
Residents of the Pathankot district of Indian Punjab turn it over to police
So far, police have found nothing improper about the detained pigeon

New Delhi (CNN)James Bond just might have an unusual competitor.

This suspected secret agent is a flying ace -- a pigeon that perched on a home in an Indian village Thursday, barely 2½ miles (4 kilometers) from the border with Pakistan.

An illegible Urdu message stamped on its wings and a small wired object around it were enough for residents of the Pathankot district of Indian Punjab to turn it over to police.

"We are looking at this case only from that angle," said Rakesh Kaushal, Pathankot's police chief, when asked whether officers were investigating the bird for possible Pakistani espionage.

Suspected spy pigeon has markings on its wings.

"It's the first instance of its kind in my area. It's a sensitive border here," he told CNN on the phone from Pathankot.

So far, police have found nothing improper about the detained pigeon. They say it was X-rayed, but nothing related to spying was found in its body.

Investigators have not been able to decipher the Urdu part of the message written on its wings. "It's very dim," Kaushal said.

Police are also investigating numerals printed on the bird. "They are neither landline nor mobile phone numbers, which were initially suspected. But we are investigating further," the police chief said.

Hindu-majority but officially secular India and Islamic Pakistan share a long history of hostilities since independence from British rule in 1947. They have fought four wars, three over the Himalayan region of Kashmir, which both claim as their own.

A military Line of Control divides the disputed region between them, and both sides admit to what they call a trust deficit. Talks to normalize relations haven't yielded a breakthrough over most of their outstanding issues, including Kashmir.

Ties turned sour again this year when a top leader of the terror group Lashkar-e-Tayyiba, Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, was released on bail in Rawalpindi. Lakhvi was charged in Pakistan in 2009, accused of masterminding the November 2008 terror attacks that killed more than 160 people in Mumbai, India's financial capital.

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Islamic State suicide bomber in women's garb kills three in Saudi Arabia
Saturday May 30th, 2015 at 8:36 AM

ABU DHABI/DUBAI An Islamist militant suicide bomber disguised as a woman blew himself up outside a Shi'ite mosque in eastern Saudi Arabia on Friday, killing himself and three other people, the second attack of its kind in the world's top oil exporter in one week.

The bombing, which was claimed by Islamic State, could further escalate sectarian strife in the kingdom, where anti-Shi'ite sentiment has been stoked by a military campaign against Iranian-allied Houthi militias in neighboring Yemen since March.

The Interior Ministry said a suicide bomber disguised in women's clothes blew himself up outside the al-Anoud mosque's entrance in the city of Dammam during noon prayers.

Witnesses said a suicide bomber, who wore an Abaya used by women in Saudi Arabia, blew himself up in the mosque's parking lot when guards searching worshippers became suspicious of him.

The ministry said four people, including the bomber, were killed in the blast, which also set several cars ablaze.

Residents circulated pictures of the body of a man believed to be the suicide bomber as well as pictures of black clouds of smoke billowing over a parking lot outside the mosque.

Video posted on social media showed the congregation inside the mosque reacting with shock and alarm to the noise of the explosion outside the building.

An Islamic State statement named the suicide bomber as Abu Jandal al-Jizrawi and said he had managed to reach his target despite heightened security.

Islamic State claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing last week at a Shi'ite mosque in al-Qadeeh village, near al-Qatif city, that killed 21 and wounded nearly 100 in the bloodiest militant attack in the kingdom in years.

Saudi Arabia, which is leading an Arab coalition in a campaign against the Houthis who have seized power from Yemeni President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, had sought to calm sectarian tensions.

Saudi Arabia's King Salman has denounced the al-Qadeeh bombing and promised to punish anyone linked to it. King Salman also sent Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef to convey condolences to the families.

SECTARIAN CONFRONTATION

Members of Saudi's Shi'ite minority staged separate protest in Dammam and in the village of al-Qadeeh on Friday evening, demanding an end to sectarianism, witnesses said.

Islamic State openly acknowledges it is trying to stir sectarian confrontation as a way of hastening the overthrow of the ruling Al Saud family, and has urged young Saudi Sunnis in the kingdom to attack targets including Shi'ites.

Some commentators in Saudi Arabia discussing the Qadeeh bombing have said the kingdom has not done enough to crack down on online abuse of Shi'ites, a discourse which Shi'ites say provides an incubator for violence against the minority sect.

Sunni power Saudi and Shi'ite Iran are locked in a tussle for influence in the region, where wars have claimed hundreds of thousands of lives mainly in Syria, Iraq and Yemen.

(Reporting By Sami Aboudi; Writing By Maha El Dahan and William Maclean; Editing by Angus MacSwan)

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Russian Rights Activists Slam Putin's Crackdown on NGOs
Saturday May 30th, 2015 at 8:34 AM

Voice Of America

MOSCOW—

Russian President Vladimir Putin recently signed into law a bill giving prosecutors the power to declare foreign and international organizations "undesirable" in Russia, shut them down, and punish any Russian citizens involved. Supporters say the legislation is to prevent threats to Russia's constitutional order, defense, or state security.

Rights activists say it extends a crackdown on dissenting voices that criticize or challenge Putin's rule.

Putin quietly signed the bill on “undesirable” foreign and international organizations into law after little debate and only a few quick readings in the Duma, Russia's parliament.

The response to this latest legal threat to civil society groups, however, was loud cries of opposition, both foreign and domestic.
Condemnation of law

The European Union and the United States condemned the law, which allows prosecutors to not only shut down foreign NGO's but also to punish Russian citizens involved with them.

The vague measure allows for interpretation on what is considered "undesirable" while specifying fines or prison terms of up to six years for repeat offenders.

Russia's rights ombudsman, Ella Pamfilova, this week criticized the new law for lacking any legal ground. She said the power to declare groups "undesirable" without going to court was against the constitution and criticized the failure to allow the right of appeal.

Russian anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny on Thursday said he believes the law adds to previous restrictions aimed at keeping Putin in power. He spoke in an exclusive interview with VOA's Moscow bureau.

"I think this is very strongly connected to the 2015 and 2016 elections." he said.

"For the Kremlin, it's extremely important to eliminate any NGO's that could not only finance but could also develop programs, gather people, or be an intellectual center. Putin wants to clear the field of any organized structures," he added.

Navalny, however, went on to explain he thinks the Kremlin's actions are not completely cynical.

"I think that it's part of paranoia of Putin and his circle," he said, adding, "first of all the secret services, who still believe that foreign money comes to the opposition. They can't believe that Moscow protests in 2011 and 2012 happened on their own as the result of Putin's corruption," he added.

Navalny was one of the main leaders of the anti-government protests that challenged Putin's continued rule with street demonstrations numbering over 100,000 people. He was frequently arrested and only recently released from house detention.

Putin's supporters say the tighter regulations will help prevent Western forces from sparking a revolution against the Kremlin.

In 2012, they passed legislation allowing the branding of any group that receives foreign funding and engages in activity deemed political as a “foreign agent.”

Some 64 organizations have been designated as “foreign agents” and have to register as such or pay thousands of dollars in fines.
Human Rights Watch program director Tanya Lokshina said a number have closed down because of the label, which implies being a spy or traitor.

“The new law on undesirables is definitely part of the same trend of repression against independent voices but it takes it even further," she said. "While supposedly aiming to prevent foreign and international groups from undermining national security, it is evidently meant to silence Russian groups and activists and cut them off from international networks, from their friends and partners from the international community.”

She says the new undesirable law is part of a crackdown on independent voices unleashed with Putin's return to the Kremlin three years ago.
Kremlin targets critics

The Kremlin has also fueled a campaign to label its critics as part of a “fifth column” of national traitors that includes well-known opposition leaders like Navalny.

A young and unknown lawmaker in Russia's parliament, Vitaly Zolochevsky, requested five organizations be investigated under the new “undesirables” law.

He pointed the finger at Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the Carnegie Center Moscow, Transparency International, and the Russian organization Memorial International.

Memorial's Human Rights Center was already labeled a “foreign agent” and board member Oleg Orlov says Zolochevsky's move seems aimed at gaining popularity.

Orlov says the lawmaker "... wants to run ahead and take initiative, to promote himself - to be more Catholic than the pope, so to speak," adding,"He wanted to be the first to use the law as soon as it took effect."

Orlov says while the law on foreign agents strangles Russians who work inside Russia, the law on undesirable organizations isolates Russian organizations from their international partners.

Russia's Justice Ministry this week placed a leading scientific group, the Dynasty Foundation, on its “foreign agent” list.

Officials defended the action, saying the designation poses no threat to any organization's existence and just requires transparency in foreign financing.

The Russian businessman who leads Dynasty, told the Interfax news agency he would stop funding the foundation because of the “foreign agent” label.

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· · · ·

Report: Dennis Hastert Hush Money Was for Sexual Misconduct
Saturday May 30th, 2015 at 8:33 AM

Comments On: Report: Dennis Hastert Hush Money Was For Sexual Misconduct

Indicted former House Speaker Dennis Hastert was paying an individual from his past to conceal sexual misconduct, two federal law enforcement officials said Friday.

One of the officials, who would not speak publicly about the federal charges in Chicago, said “Individual A,” as the person is described in Thursday’s federal indictment, was a man and that the alleged misconduct was unrelated to Hastert’s tenure in Congress. The actions date to Hastert’s time as a Yorkville, Ill., high school wrestling coach and teacher, the official said.

“It goes back a long way, back to then,” the source said. “It has nothing to do with public corruption or a corruption scandal. Or to his time in office.” Thursday’s indictment described the misconduct “against Individual A” as having “occurred years earlier.”

Read the rest of the story here.

***

CHICAGO, May 29 (UPI) — Former U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert allegedly violated banking laws to obtain money to hide a sexual relationship he had while teaching high school in Illinois, officials said.

Two federal law enforcement officials told the Los Angeles Times on Friday that Hastert agreed to pay $3.5 million to a man he allegedly had a sexual relationship with when he taught at a Yorkville, Ill., high school. The alleged sexual misconduct happened prior to Hastert’s time in Congress.

“It goes back a long way, back to then,” one of the sources said. “It has nothing to do with public corruption or a corruption scandal. Or to his time in office.”

Both sources said the alleged misconduct was sexual in nature.

Sources told NBC News the alleged sexual misconduct happened with a student.

Hastert taught social studies and coached wrestling at Yorkville High School from 1965 to 1981. The school district told NBC News it had “no knowledge of Mr. Hastert’s alleged misconduct, nor has any individual contacted the district to report any such misconduct.”

Hastert was indicted Thursday for allegedly violating U.S. banking laws that require the disclosure of all cash transactions that exceed $10,000.

Hastert was paying the money to an unnamed individual to “compensate for and conceal” the unspecified past misconduct, the indictment said. In the course of the payments, Hastert allegedly made numerous cash withdrawals from four bank accounts without notifying proper officials, as required by law.

From 2010 to 2015, payments totaling $1.7 million were made to the unnamed individual, often in increments of $100,000 and $50,000, the indictment alleges.

The FBI and Internal Revenue Service began looking into the transactions in 2013.

After cutting his withdrawals to less than $10,000 to get around the banking laws, the indictment says, Hastert made payments totaling $952,000 to the recipient — an amount that was achieved through at least 106 different bank withdrawals.

When asked about the transactions in December, the indictment says, Hastert lied to federal authorities and said he withdrew the cash due to a lack of confidence in the four banks holding his money.

“Yeah… I kept the cash. That’s what I’m doing,” the indictment quotes Hastert as telling FBI agents.

The grand jury, which was convened in February, said the response was a lie because Hastert, at that time, knew he had been supplying the money to the unnamed recipient.

Hastert, 73, has been a Washington lobbyist since stepping down as House speaker in 2007.

He is expected to be arraigned on the charges in U.S. District Court. Each count carries a possible penalty of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine, the U.S. Attorney’s office in Chicago said.

Doug G. Ware contributed to this report.

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· · ·

IS Skilled at Gathering Intelligence, Adjusting Tactics
Saturday May 30th, 2015 at 8:32 AM

Voice Of America

While U.S. and coalition partners pluck intelligence on Islamic State extremists from the militants’ communications or movements and then bomb them from the air, the militant group is gathering its own intelligence from city streets and preparing the ground for its next battlefield moves.

The result, according to experts, is that Washington is consistently lagging behind in its effort to destroy the Islamic State group.

“We are about 60 to 90 days behind ISIS,” former intelligence officer and military adviser Michael Pregent told VOA, referring to the Islamic State by one of its acronyms.

Last year when Washington finally paid attention to Mosul, Pregent said, the extremists were already planning their next move. And this pattern has repeated itself as IS has moved across Iraq: “We are now looking at Ramadi, and ISIS is looking ahead at pushing into Baghdad,” he said.

Pentagon’s CENTCOM spokesman, Colonel Patrick Ryder, defended U.S. airstrikes. “We’ve demonstrated the ability to put ordinance on a target within minutes,” he said.

Sleeper cells

But Iraqi President Fuad Masum, in an exclusive interview with VOA, said that the Islamic State’s intelligence sources make them hard to defeat.

“Eliminating Daesh is not easy, because they have many types of sleeping cells, not only in Iraq, but in other countries, too,” Masum said, using the acronym for Islamic State's Arabic name.

Many Iraqi cities have mixed Sunni-Shi’ite populations. Pregent said IS sleeper cells are in traditionally Sunni neighborhoods. These “cells” could be groups or individuals not necessarily affiliated with the Islamic State, but willing to provide the extremists with information.

“They would provide information on whom ISIS could likely work with, whom they need to intimidate, whom they need to kidnap, whom they need to coerce and whom they need to curry favor with, and what Iraqi security forces are willing to do, what their disposition and presence is,” Pregent explained.

Harleen Gambhir, a counterterrorism analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, agreed that IS has a robust internal and external intelligence apparatus, part of which is used to gauge the strength of the Iraqi military and other security forces.

“We do know that they have tried to gather as much intelligence as they can about the Iraqi security forces, and frequently try to kidnap, interrogate and execute members of those militaries,” Gambhir said. Islamic State extremists then use that information to plan their assaults.

Misleading tactics

In addition, according to Jennifer Cafarella, a fellow at the Institute for the Study of War, the extremist group has become adept at misinformation and diversionary tactics. “ISIS can mold, and shape, and mislead its followers if it needs to do that as a tactic to draw attention elsewhere,” said Cafarella.

“We do see these kinds of shaping operations across both Iraq and Syria in ways that don’t necessarily directly portray the image of what ISIS will go for next, because it does have that initiative to set conditions somewhere and then conduct a surprise attack on an additional front,” she said.

Pregent said the United States simply does not have enough assets on the ground to get valuable intelligence on the Sunni extremists.

Syria has become a morass of various competing government, rebel and extremist groups. And the Iraqi intelligence services that conduct raids, round up Sunni males, torture and interrogate them are mainly Shi’ite, Pregent said. “It’s pretty much a blunt instrument.”

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With no peace, Ukraine is beset by humanitarian risks: U.N.
Saturday May 30th, 2015 at 8:32 AM

GENEVA Ukraine's flawed ceasefire has left pensioners, infants and women mired in a humanitarian crisis that could get rapidly better or rapidly worse, the U.N.'s top representative in the country said in an interview on Friday.

A Feb. 12 Minsk ceasefire agreement was "not really working", with hundreds of shelling incidents every day, said Neal Walker, U.N. resident coordinator in Ukraine.

"Very clearly, you have a huge humanitarian risk if the conflict escalates," Walker told Reuters. "We are ready if it happens. But at the same time, I would rather express some pragmatic optimism that the Minsk process will yield results. But if it doesn't, we have taken contingency measures."

The violence has killed around 7,000 people, including 2,500 civilians, in the past year, and wounded 16,000. It has left 5 million people in need of humanitarian aid, driven 1.3 million from their homes, and created 800,000 refugees.

Ukraine's defense minister said on Thursday Russia had moved forces into eastern Ukraine and there was a risk of fighting resuming in coming months.

The U.N. has received only 28 percent of the $316 million it needs for humanitarian aid this year. Full funding would help it reach further into non-government-controlled areas, where almost 2 million needy people are out of reach.

"This is a country, unlike many crisis countries, where there really is potential for people to pick up and continue with their lives," Walker said. "The humanitarian situation could be addressed very quickly if we had a sustainable peace. But right now we need that humanitarian assistance."

One in nine Ukrainians had been directly affected by the crisis - more than were affected by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986, and most wanted nothing to do with the argument between separatists and the government in Kiev, Walker said.

"This country is in the middle of Europe. This is a country that has faced over the past year, quite frankly, tank battles that are reminiscent of World War Two."

Walker said 60 percent of those who had fled their homes were pensioners, and many pensioners in non-government controlled areas were in dire straits.

"They don't have access to cash, there's no banking system, they're not getting their salaries."

There was anecdotal evidence of a rise in sexual exploitation and violence against women, and a worrying change in the pattern of HIV transmission, in a region with one of the highest rates of HIV/AIDS in the world.

"HIV transmission had traditionally been from one drug user to another," Walker said. "Now there's evidence that more than half the new cases, if not two-thirds, are heterosexual transmission, which means that the nature of the HIV crisis is going to change and could potentially explode."

(Reporting by Tom Miles; editing by Stephanie Nebehay, Larry King)

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Next Page of Stories

Page 2

‘Novorossiya’ Falls From Putin’s Vocabulary as Ukraine Crisis Drags
Saturday May 30th, 2015 at 8:30 AM

MOSCOW—When Vladimir Putin first mentioned Novorossiya over a year ago, alarm bells went off in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev.

The czarist-era term, which means New Russia, refers to a large swath of modern-day Ukraine that Catherine the Great won from the Ottomans and Cossacks at the end of the 18th century. Hearing it from the Russian president in April 2014 reinforced fears that Moscow’s designs on its neighbor extended beyond the Crimean peninsula and across Ukraine’s southern shores to Odessa.

ENLARGE

But now, as abruptly as the Novorossiya movement appeared, it has begun to fade. Mr. Putin has stopped using the term. More modest borders for the Russia-backed rebel republics in eastern Ukraine have begun settling into place. The word is heard less and less on Russian state television.

Oleg Tsaryov, a separatist politician who became the frontman for the movement on Russian television, announced this month that the Novorossiya parliament he proclaimed to unite Ukraine’s rebel regions had suspended operations. His reason: The project violates the cease-fire agreement Mr. Putin helped to broker.

It is unclear whether such signs signal a real shift in Kremlin policy or mark a temporary bid to relax tensions ahead of a likely June decision by the European Union on whether to renew sanctions against Russia. So far, Russia’s negotiating partners in the West appear skeptical that any change is substantive.

A year ago, what appeared to be a mild thaw in relations arose ahead of a summit in France, where world leaders made their first attempt to broker peaceful relations between Mr. Putin and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. But Moscow’s rhetoric turned cold soon after and fighting reignited in eastern Ukraine.

ENLARGE

A demonstrator holds a portrait of President Vladimir Putin during a rally in St. Peterburg, Russia, last November to support the self-proclaimed Novorossiya. Photo: Ruslan Shamukov/Zuma Press

Moscow has shown no sign lately of easing support for the separatists there, much less returning Crimea, which it formally annexed in March 2014.

Yet the Kremlin has sent other, modest signs of a softening approach to the West, as Russia copes with a deepening recession at home.

This month, Mr. Putin met U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Russian soil for the first time in two years. The Russian president also called to congratulate U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron on his re-election, during which he expressed Russia’s willingness to help counter Islamic State in the Middle East. On Tuesday, Deputy Security Council Secretary Yevgeny Lukyanov said Moscow was open to cooperation with the West on global security issues.

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov also has emphasized that the rebel Donetsk and Luhansk republics should be reintegrated into Ukraine.

“There’s a desire to show the West that Russia is subtly limiting its game in Ukraine and localizing it to Donetsk and Luhansk,” says Alexei Makarkin, deputy director of the Moscow-based political consultancy Center for Political Technologies.

Those rebel states have entered a period of consolidation, according to Mr. Makarkin, who says Russia ultimately hopes to keep them integrated with Ukraine as levers of influence over Kiev.

ENLARGE

A woman holds a map of Ukraine divided into two parts, the eastern carrying the name Novorossiya, during a peace rally in Donetsk, eastern Ukraine, in June 2014. Photo: Evgeniy Maloletka/ASSOCIATED PRESS

European officials caution that they believe the Kremlin’s goal of seeking to block Ukraine’s reorientation toward the West by maintaining a low-level conflict hasn’t changed, and that Moscow could back military escalation if Russia fails to achieve desired results politically.

There are few signs the EU is prepared to ease sanctions next month, nor to ramp them up, suggesting a continuation of the status quo.

Even if the shift in Kremlin rhetoric lasts, the pattern of behavior on the ground in east Ukraine has shown little sign of change.

On a recent trip to Moscow, Assistant U.S. Secretary of State Victoria Nuland expressed hope for deeper cooperation in east Ukraine but warned that the cease-fire was sill being “violated on a daily basis.”

“Unfortunately, there’s too much combustible kindling on the ground in Donbas as we head into the summer season, which last year was a time of heavy fighting,” said Andrew S. Weiss, a vice president at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

A senior Obama administration official said evidence of Russia’s intentions will be whether substantive progress is made to implement the February peace plan, including a local cease-fire for Shyrokyne, near the government-held port city of Mariupol, and movement toward elections.

The next round of ground-level talks are set for Tuesday and “we will be watching those very closely,” the official said.

ENLARGE

A Ukrainian serviceman walks Thursday past a destroyed house on the frontline facing pro-Russian separatists near Donetsk in eastern Ukraine. Photo: genya savilov/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Mr. Putin’s use of the Novorossiya term endowed the separatist cause with a sense of historical legitimacy and rallied Russian nationalists and revanchists on the battlefield. In the de facto rebel states, separatist officials still hang the revived red and blue Novorossiya flag alongside their own new ones.

The idea of Novorossiya “cannot be frozen, and to some degree has already been accomplished,” Mr. Tsaryov, the separatist politician, said in a phone interview.

Alexander Kofman, the foreign minister of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, suggested that the curtailment of the parliament project signaled a rollback of efforts to spread separatist fervor outside the existing rebel areas.

“We will be waiting for the other regions to rise up and follow our lead,” Mr. Kofman said a week ago on the Russian network LifeNews, in a noted shift from more-bellicose past statements. “We don’t have the right to rise up for them.”

In a May 15 blog post, Mr. Tsaryov, 44 years old, suggested now was the time for consolidation. The only way to turn Ukraine as a whole toward Russia is to create a standard of living in the rebel-held regions, known collectively as Donbas, that exceeds the rest of Ukraine, he wrote.

For now, people in government-held areas view Donbas with trepidation, he suggested. “Today the southeast of Ukraine is afraid of a repeat of the fate of Donbas,” he wrote. “Donbas came out in favor of the Russian world and today they are being shot at.”

—Philip Shishkin contributed to this article.

Write to Paul Sonne at paul.sonne@wsj.com

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· · · · · · · · · · ·

Obama Steps Up Pressure for Renewal of Surveillance Measures
Saturday May 30th, 2015 at 8:29 AM

Voice Of America

CAPITOL HILL—

President Barack Obama is stepping up pressure on the U.S. Senate, which appears set for a political showdown Sunday when it meets only hours before some key surveillance powers of the National Security Agency are set to expire.

Before both chambers of Congress left for a one-week recess, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed the USA Freedom Act. That compromise legislation would end bulk collection of Americans’ phone records but let the NSA search the records held by phone companies on a case-by-case basis.

Obama strongly urged the Senate to act quickly Sunday to pass the House bill before three provisions of the USA Patriot Act, enacted in 2001, expire. The president said Friday that he met with Attorney General Loretta Lynch at the White House to discuss a number of issues, including the NSA measures.

The president said he needed to remind everyone that at midnight Sunday, a range of authorities that the U.S. intelligence community uses to track terrorists would expire.
He said he had indicated to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell that he expected the Senate to act quickly to pass the USA Freedom Act. Obama said there are Democratic and Republican lawmakers in both the House and the Senate who think the compromise bill is the way to go. He said the only thing in the way is a handful of senators who are resisting reform.

The president said "heaven forbid" a terrorist attack occur that could have been prevented if these programs were in place.

Battle expected Sunday

McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, is insisting on an extension of current Patriot Act surveillance programs, including the collection of Americans’ phone records, despite strong bipartisan support in the Senate for the House-passed USA Freedom Act.

The Senate was unable to pass an extension in a late-night session before the recess, leading McConnell to call his members back for a rare Sunday meeting ahead of the deadline.

Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, who is running for president, is opposed to both an extension of the current law and the House bill, and he spent more than 10 hours on the Senate floor calling for the provisions to expire. Paul was joined in his efforts to thwart the extension by Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon. Paul has threatened to again take to the Senate floor to prevent action to renew the surveillance powers.

The NSA has been collecting phone records under a section of the Patriot Act that grants the U.S. government broad powers to probe and thwart terrorist plots. A federal appeals court recently ruled the bulk phone data collection program illegal.

Unless Congress acts by midnight Sunday, the National Security Agency would have to at least temporarily shut down its phone records program, a “lone wolf” tracking provision that has never been used, and a roaming wiretap program. Analysts say it is unclear whether the Senate will be able to reach a compromise to keep the programs from expiring.

White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Friday that there was no reason for Congress to take valuable tools away from intelligence agencies at a time of heightened terrorist threats from the self-declared Islamic State and other groups. He said that U.S. national security was at stake and that there was “no plan B” for intelligence agencies if the provisions expired.

Pendulum swing?

The debate over whether to renew some of the NSA surveillance powers is cutting across the usual political divides between Democrats and Republicans, creating rare alliances.

On Friday, the American Civil Liberties Union joined with the Tea Party Patriots conservative group to call for the Senate to let the provisions expire, saying the government had overreached with its data collection and had violated Americans’ right to privacy.

ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero said this is the first time in 13 years that Congress has had a robust debate on the trade-off between national security concerns and respect for Americans’ civil liberties. Romero said after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the U.S. government overreacted by passing the sweeping surveillance powers in the USA Patriot Act. He said the pendulum now is swinging back.

Tea Party Patriots President Jenny Beth Martin said her organization and the ACLU — often on opposite sides of the political spectrum — are joining together to stand up against the Washington establishment, and that Congress should listen to their concerns. Martin and Romero both said that even if some of the provisions expire, the U.S. government still has plenty of surveillance tools at its disposal to protect Americans from terrorists.

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· · ·

Puerto Rico's governor signs tax bill into law
Saturday May 30th, 2015 at 8:28 AM

World | Fri May 29, 2015 7:53pm EDT

Puerto Rico's governor on Friday signed into law a tax bill that is expected to provide the commonwealth with about $1.2 billion in much-needed additional tax revenue for the next fiscal year.

The tax law, signed in by Governor Alejandro Garcia Padilla, allows Puerto Rico to pursue negotiations with hedge funds and other creditors over a bond deal of up to $2.95 billion. Finance officials have said the island could run out of money by the end of September without financing.

"This consensus measure mitigates the difficult fiscal situation facing the Puerto Rico government," said Victor Suarez, the chief of staff of the governor's office. "Now we must complete the presentation of a balanced budget and the implementation of austerity measures to secure services and essential projects for our development."

The key component of the tax plan is an increase in the local sales tax to 11.5 percent from its current 7 percent. It comes after weeks of wrangling sparked when House lawmakers defeated a bill to create a 16 percent value added tax.

(Reporting by a contributor in San Juan; Editing by Megan Davies and Lisa Shumaker)

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F.B.I. Investigates Whether Harm From Surgical Power Tool Was Ignored
Saturday May 30th, 2015 at 8:27 AM

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has begun looking into whether medical device makers, doctors and hospitals broke the law by failing to report problems linked to a power tool used during gynecologic surgery, according to two people who said they were interviewed by investigators.

The tool, called a morcellator, has rapidly spinning blades that cut tissue into pieces that can be removed from the body through the tiny slits made during minimally invasive surgery. Morcellators have often been used in surgery to remove the uterus, but in some women with undetected cancers they have sprayed malignant cells around inside the abdomen like seeds, speeding the progression of the disease.

The inquiries were first reported on Wednesday by The Wall Street Journal, which said the agents worked out of the F.B.I. office in Newark, N.J.

Celeste Danzi, a spokeswoman for the F.B.I.’s Newark office, declined to confirm the inquiry. “We just don’t comment on the existence or nonexistence of any investigation,” she said.

In an interview with The New York Times, Dr. Hooman Noorchashm, whose wife, Dr. Amy Reed, was harmed by the device, confirmed that they had spoken a number of times to an F.B.I. agent from Newark. A retired pathologist from Pennsylvania, Dr. Robert W. Lamparter, also said he had spoken to investigators. Both men declined to give any details about whom they spoke with, saying they had been warned that disclosing too much information could interfere with the investigation.

Dr. Reed, 42, an anesthesiologist, had a hysterectomy because of fibroid tumors in her uterus in October 2013 at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. Fibroids are benign, but they sometimes hide cancer. A biopsy after Dr. Reed’s surgery found a hidden sarcoma, an aggressive type of cancer. The tumor spread, resulting in advanced Stage 4 cancer. Dr. Reed underwent numerous rounds of chemotherapy and radical surgery, but the cancer recurred in March of this year, near her spine, requiring still more surgery.

The couple, who have six children, have conducted a ceaseless nationwide campaign to ban morcellation. Gynecology groups have resisted, saying that sarcomas are uncommon and that morcellation makes surgery less invasive and safer for the majority of women.

In November, the Food and Drug Administration said that morcellators should no longer be used in “the vast majority” of women. But the agency did not take the devices off the market or ban their use.

Dr. Noorchashm said he contacted an agent from the Newark F.B.I. office last fall, because he suspected that morcellator manufacturers and some doctors and hospitals using the devices had violated a federal law requiring that adverse events be reported to the F.D.A. He said that he and his wife spoke with the agent a number of times over a few months, and that the F.B.I. seemed increasingly interested.

Dr. Lamparter said that he had also recently spoken to the F.B.I., and that the conversation had focused on his 2006 correspondence with Ethicon, the unit of Johnson & Johnson that sold power morcellators. At that time, he warned Ethicon of the potential for the morcellators to spread undetected cancer, according to email correspondence he provided to The Times and other news outlets. Johnson & Johnson withdrew its morcellators from the market last July.

Johnson & Johnson has said that after Dr. Lamparter raised his concerns, it added new language to the instructions for use of the device, and that the company had already recommended that, in patients where a cancer was suspected, doctors should use a special bag to remove the tissue.

In a telephone interview Wednesday, Dr. Lamparter said that he considered the change a “legal fig leaf” and that the gynecologists at his hospital, Evangelical Community Hospital in Lewisburg, Penn., reported that the training they received from the company in using the device did not substantially change after he raised his alarm.

Dr. Lamparter said he initially believed that the morcellator could still be used, but not on women at high risk for cancer. However, he added, “I’ve come to believe that the morcellator, as it is used now, is just a bad idea.”

Ernie Knewitz, a Johnson & Johnson spokesman, said it was unaware of any investigation.

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· · ·

Thousands Fleeing Ramadi Are Stuck at Baghdad Checkpoint
Saturday May 30th, 2015 at 8:25 AM

Voice Of America

GENEVA—

The United Nations refugee agency reports thousands of Iraqis who have fled the bloody takeover of Ramadi by so-called Islamic State militants are stuck at checkpoints in Anbar province and barred from entering the Iraqi capital, Baghdad. The UNHCR is appealing to Iraqi authorities to ease restrictions.

The U.N. refugee agency estimates 85,000 people have fled the latest escalation of violence by IS militants in Ramadi since May 15. It says the majority of this latest wave of displaced individuals remains in Anbar governorate, boosting the numbers of homeless people in this area to 180,000.

UNHCR staff in the area report many people on the move face obstacles at various checkpoints out of Anbar into neighboring provinces. It says local authorities in Babylon and Karbala governorates are imposing restrictions and are not allowing displaced people from Anbar to enter their territory.

Spokesman William Spindler said the Bzebiz bridge, the main entry point from Anbar into Baghdad, was closed for four days, leaving many people stranded in soaring temperatures.

“While the bottleneck at the bridge has now eased, our monitoring teams report that the requirement for displaced people to have a local sponsor in Baghdad remains a concern," aid Spindler. "It hampers swift access to safety, leaves people waiting in searing heat without proper shelter and makes the displaced vulnerable to exploitation.”

The government in Baghdad reportedly fears IS militants may be among the crowd of displaced trying to infiltrate the capital. So, as a security measure, it is demanding that a resident of Baghdad sponsor a displaced person, guaranteeing that he or she poses no threat.

In answer to a question, another UNHCR spokesperson, Ariane Rummery, told VOA the agency does not have a mandate to do security screening. That is up to the government. She says, however, that the agency has made some specific suggestions, which could speed up the process.

‘We think, for example, there could be much quicker screening mechanisms," said Rummery. "There could be exceptions for very vulnerable people, perhaps some easing of the onerous requirements.
"UNHCR has had to help some 600 people with serious medical conditions actually get transport back into Anbar to get documentation to prove at the checkpoint that they have medical conditions so that they can go into Baghdad to get treatment.”

The UNHCR says thousands of people unable to move to other provinces are in desperate need of life-saving assistance. It says many of the displaced are living in overcrowded conditions, without access to clean water or proper sanitation.

The UNHCR says daily temperatures exceed 40 degrees Celsius and warns that displaced people without adequate shelter will incur great risks to their health from the sweltering heat.

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· ·

Reports say Hastert Case Linked to Sexual Misconduct
Saturday May 30th, 2015 at 8:25 AM

Voice Of America

Reports say Hastert Case Linked to Sexual Misconduct

FILE - Rep. Dennis Hastert announces that he will not seek re-election to the U.S. House as he stands on the steps of the old Kendall County, Ill., courthouse with family members, Aug. 17, 2007.

Former US House Speaker Indicted for Alleged Corruption

Molly McKitterick

May 29, 2015 9:51 PM

Former U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert was paying a man not to reveal that Hastert had sexually molested him decades earlier, according to media reports citing a variety of unnamed sources, including federal law enforcement officials.

Federal prosecutors on Thursday announced the indictment of Hastert on charges of violating banking laws in his effort to pay $3.5 million to someone to keep silent about “prior misconduct.” The individual is not identified. But the indictment notes that Hastert was a high school teacher and wrestling coach in the Chicago suburb of Yorkville, Illinois, from 1965 to 1981.

Hastert was charged with making cash withdrawals in increments small enough to avoid bank reporting requirements and for lying to federal officials about the purpose of the withdrawals.

The indictment says that from 2010 to 2012, Hastert made 15 withdrawals of $50,000 each from bank accounts and paid the money to a person referred to as "Individual A" about every six weeks.

Officials say the indictment against Hastert has nothing to do with his time in office in the U.S. Congress.

A Republican congressman from Illinois, Hastert served as speaker of the House of Representatives from 1999 to 2007.

The speaker is second in line to take over the presidency of the U.S. after the vice president.

Current House Speaker John Boehner said in a statement Friday that he was “shocked and saddened” to learn of the charges against Hastert.

“The Denny I served with worked hard on behalf of his constituents and the country,” he said.

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Page 3

Pentagon Reports Higher Number of Anthrax Shipments
Saturday May 30th, 2015 at 8:23 AM

Voice Of America

Pentagon Reports Higher Number of Anthrax Shipments

Spores from the Sterne strain of anthrax bacteria (Bacillus anthracis) are pictured in this handout scanning electron micrograph, May 28, 2015.

Pentagon Accidentally Sent Anthrax to US Labs, Overseas Base

VOA News

May 29, 2015 10:13 PM

The Pentagon said Friday that there were more accidental deliveries of live anthrax spores to U.S. and overseas laboratories than originally thought and that it had ordered an in-depth review.

Pentagon spokesman Colonel Steven Warren said live anthrax was shipped to 24 laboratories in 11 U.S. states, South Korea and Australia.

The Pentagon had reported Thursday that a U.S. military laboratory in Utah accidentally sent live anthrax spores to civilian commercial labs in nine U.S. states and a military lab in South Korea.

In his statement Friday, Warren said Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work had ordered a "comprehensive review" of the Pentagon's laboratory procedures, processes and "protocols associated with inactivating spore-forming anthrax."

Warren also said there was "no known risk to the general public and an extremely low risk to lab workers" from the inadvertent shipments, and that the Department of Defense was working closely with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in investigating the shipments.

Contact with live anthrax can lead to a severe, flu-like illness that can be fatal if not treated early.

The Pentagon said Thursday that it had stopped shipping anthrax spores while the incident was being investigated.

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· · ·

US Defense Chief to China: Halt Land Reclamation
Saturday May 30th, 2015 at 8:21 AM

Voice Of America

SINGAPORE—

The U.S. defense secretary delivered a blunt rebuke to China for being “out of step” with international norms amid its unprecedented pace of reclamation efforts in the disputed South China Sea, saying “it is unclear how much farther China will go.”

The actions are increasing “the risk of miscalculation and conflict,” the secretary of defense, Ashton Carter, said in a speech Saturday in Singapore at the Shangri-La Dialogue.

Carter noted China has reclaimed over 800 hectares, more than all other claimants combined, and has done so in only the last 18 months.

“There should be an immediate and lasting halt to land reclamation by all claimants. We also oppose any further militarization of disputed features,” he said. “We all know there is no military solution to the South China Sea disputes.”

The defense secretary also made it clear the United States would not recognize any Chinese attempt to assert a 22-kilometer territorial sea limit around disputed islands, reefs and shoals.

“There should be no mistake: the United States will fly, sail and operate wherever international law allows, as U.S. forces do all around the world,” he said.

“After all, turning an underwater rock into an airfield simply does not afford the rights of sovereignty or permit restrictions on international air or maritime transit,” Carter added.

Beijing responds

China, in recent weeks, has expressed strong dissatisfaction with American military flights near its new artificial islands.

A senior Chinese military official in the audience Saturday at the annual security dialogue took advantage of the subsequent question-and-answer session with the U.S. defense secretary to rebut Carter’s remarks, calling them “groundless and not constructive.”

"The freedom of navigation in the South China Sea is not at all an issue because the freedom has never been affected," said Senior Colonel Zhao Xiaozhuo of China's Academy of Military Science. "It is wrong to criticize China for affecting peace and stability through construction activities."

Carter, in his speech, also announced a new $425 million regional maritime initiative to assist Southeast Asian nations in improving their naval and coast guard capabilities.

US congressional reaction

At a news conference on site following Carter’s speech, a bipartisan U.S. congressional delegation touring the region backed up the defense secretary.

“We believe that what Secretary Carter said today was very important. Now we want to see it translated into action. I do,” said Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee.

“Our country is not going to back off,” added Senator Mazie Hirono, a Democrat from the state of Hawaii, where the U.S. Pacific Command is headquartered.

Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsieng Loong, in a speech Friday evening in front of the more than two dozen defense chiefs, called on China and ASEAN members “to break the vicious cycle” by adhering to international law and concluding a Code of Conduct on the South China Sea.

The Shangri-La Dialogue is taking place just days after the release of an assertive Chinese defense white paper.

Analysts have interpreted the Chinese document, issued Tuesday, as a strong warning to Beijing’s Asian neighbors and to Washington about “busy meddling” by the U.S. military in the South China Sea, where China is intensively building islands.

U.S. Defense Department officials confirmed Friday that American surveillance imagery recently detected Chinese military weapons on one of the artificial islands built by China in the Spratly archipelago.

Although posing no military threat to U.S. ships or planes in the area, the motorized artillery pieces were reported to be within range of an island claimed by Vietnam, on which it has deployed various weaponry for some time.

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· · ·

Obama says 'handful of senators' blocking surveillance reforms
Saturday May 30th, 2015 at 8:18 AM

WASHINGTON U.S. President Barack Obama warned on Friday that surveillance powers used to prevent attacks on Americans could lapse at midnight on Sunday unless "a handful of senators" stop standing in the way of reform legislation.

Obama said he had told Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and other senators that he expects them to act swiftly on a bill passed by the House of Representatives that would renew certain powers and reform the bulk collection of telephone data.

"I don't want us to be in a situation in which for a certain period of time, those authorities go away and suddenly we're dark and heaven forbid we've got a problem," Obama told reporters in the Oval Office.

McConnell has called the Senate back to Washington for a rare Sunday session to deal with the expiration of three provisions of the Patriot Act, including Section 215, used to justify the National Security Agency's collection of billions of Americans' telephone call records.

The NSA program has worried privacy advocates since it was exposed to journalists two years ago by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, now a fugitive in Russia.

On Friday, online activists blocked congressional offices' access to thousands of websites to protest the Patriot Act.

Republicans, who control both the Senate and House, have been unable to agree on how to deal with the expiration. Late last week, the Senate failed by three votes to advance the USA Freedom Act, the reform bill backed by Obama and passed overwhelmingly by the House.

A senior Republican leadership aide said late on Friday that the party's leaders in the House wanted the Senate to take up and pass the Freedom Act.

The Freedom Act would end the bulk collection of telephone records and replace it with a more targeted system for retrieving the information.

In the Senate, the measure is supported by Democrats, but opposed by Republican security hawks, who want to extend the Patriot Act provisions, and libertarian-leaning Senator Rand Paul, a 2016 Republican presidential candidate.

Paul and other privacy advocates have blocked Senate efforts to pass any extension.

Congressional aides said backers might be able to win the additional three Senate votes to advance the Freedom Act, possibly by allowing opponents to offer amendments.

(Reporting by Patricia Zengerle, Roberta Rampton and Richard Cowan; editing by Doina Chiacu andChristian Plumb)

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· ·

U.S. says China's island-building erodes security; Beijing angered
Saturday May 30th, 2015 at 8:17 AM

SINGAPORE U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter said on Saturday that China's island-building in the South China Sea was undermining security in the Asia-Pacific, drawing a scathing response from the foreign ministry in Beijing.

Carter, speaking to top defense officials from the Asia-Pacific at the annual Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, acknowledged that several countries had created outposts in the region's disputed islands, but he said the scope of China's activity created uncertainty about its future plans.

"China has reclaimed over 2,000 acres, more than all other claimants combined ... and China did so in only the last 18 months," Carter told the Shangri-La Dialogue security forum. "It is unclear how much farther China will go."

He said the United States was "deeply concerned" about the scale of China's land reclamation and the prospect of further militarization of the islands, saying it would boost "the risk of miscalculation or conflict."

A Chinese delegate at the forum initially gave a measured response, in which he said Carter's comments were not as hostile as those made at the Shangri-La Dialogue in previous years, but the foreign ministry reacted strongly.

"The United States disregards history, legal principles and the facts," spokeswoman Hua Chunying said. "China's sovereignty and relevant rights were established a long time ago in the South China Sea.

China's island-building is "legal, reasonable, conforms to the situation and neither impacts nor targets any country."

Despite the rhetoric, Carter said there was no military solution to the South China Sea disputes. "Right now is the time for renewed diplomacy, focused on a finding a lasting solution that protects the rights and interests of all," he said.

Admiral Sun Jianguo, the head of Beijing's delegation, addresses the conference on Sunday.

China took a measured tone after bilateral meetings with Japan and Vietnam on Friday, two of the states it is embroiled with in maritime sovereignty disputes.

COMPETING CLAIMS

China, Malaysia, Taiwan, Brunei, Vietnam and the Philippines have overlapping claims in the resource-rich South China Sea. Japan and China both claim islands that lie between them in the East China Sea.

But earlier this week, Beijing was assertive about the disputes. In a policy document issued by the State Council, the country's cabinet, China vowed to increase its "open seas protection", switching from air defense to both offence and defense, and criticized neighbors who took "provocative actions" on its reefs and islands.

Carter's remarks in Singapore came a day after the Pentagon confirmed reports that China had put mobile artillery at one of its reclaimed islands in the South China Sea.

The U.S. defense chief insisted U.S. forces would continue to "fly, sail and operate" in the region to ensure the freedom of navigation and overflight permitted by law.

"America, alongside its allies and partners ... will not be deterred from exercising these rights...," Carter said. "Turning an underwater rock into an airfield simply does not afford the rights of sovereignty or permit restrictions on international

air or maritime transit."

Japan's defense minister said China and other parties in the dispute had to behave responsibly.

"If we leave any unlawful situation unattended, order will soon turn to disorder, and peace and stability will collapse," Gen Nakatani told the forum. "I hope and expect all the countries, including China, to behave as a responsible power," he said.

Malaysia's defense minister, Hishammuddin Hussein, urged all parties in the South China Sea dispute to exercise restraint or face potentially dangerous consequences.

"This has the potential to escalate into one of the deadliest conflicts of our time, if not history," he said. "Inflamed rhetoric does not do any nation any good".

(Additional reporting by Rujun Shen, Masayuki Kitano, Siva Govindasamy and Sue-Lin Wong in Shanghai; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)

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· · ·

Russia imposes travel ban on 89 EU politicians
Saturday May 30th, 2015 at 8:16 AM

BERLIN Russia has imposed an entry ban on 89 European politicians and military leaders, according to a list seen by Reuters, a move that has angered Europe and worsened its standoff with the West over Moscow's role in the Ukraine conflict.

More than 6,200 people have been killed in fighting between Ukrainian government forces and pro-Russian separatists. Russia dismisses accusations from Ukraine, NATO and Western powers that it is supporting the separatists with arms and its own troops.

The list, which says it was compiled by the Russian foreign ministry and handed to a European Union delegation in Moscow this week, includes outspoken critics of Russia as well as security officials.

Since Russia annexed Crimea in March 2014, the EU has imposed economic sanctions, visa bans and asset freezes on scores of Russian and Ukrainian citizens and organizations.

A spokesperson for EU foreign affairs told Reuters that in recent months Russia had denied entry to a number of EU politicians, based on their inclusion on a "confidential 'stop list'".

"We take note that the Russian authorities have decided to share the list. We don't have any other information on legal basis, criteria and process," the spokesperson said.

Asked about the list while on a visit to Ukraine, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said it would hamper peace efforts.

"At a time in which we are trying to defuse a persistent and dangerous conflict, this does not contribute towards that," Steinmeier said.

The Russian Foreign Ministry was not immediately available for comment.

BLACKLISTED

Among those on the list is Uwe Corsepius, current secretary general of the European Union council in Brussels who is due to take over as foreign affairs advisor to German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Others blacklisted include Britain's former deputy prime minister Nick Clegg and former Belgian premier Guy Verhofstadt, who heads the Liberal group in the European parliament.

The list also carries the names of several former and acting ministers, such as Poland's deputy Justice Minister Robert Kupiecki and former British defense minister Malcolm Rifkind, as well as Swedish tax authority head Eva Lidstrom Adler.

Last Monday, Germany protested to Russia over its refusal to let a conservative German lawmaker Karl-Georg Wellmann, who had called Russia a "warmonger" earlier this year, into the country.

Speaking at a press conference on Friday, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said the list had no basis in international law.

"[It] is not transparent and cannot be challenged before a judge. And so we condemn this act by Moscow and will tell them this."

(Additional reporting by Julia Fioretti in Brussels and Jason Bush in Moscow; Writing by Caroline Copley; Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky)

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· ·

Russia Produces Blacklist of EU People Banned From Entering Country
Saturday May 30th, 2015 at 8:15 AM

BRUSSELS—Russia has produced a blacklist of prominent people from the European Union who won't be allowed to enter the country, European Union authorities confirmed Saturday.

The Russian move comes after a number of EU politicians were denied entry when arriving in Russia, with authorities saying the individuals were on a confidential “stop list.” The EU and member states had repeatedly asked Moscow for the list.

The EU has also denied visas to dozens of Russian officials and lawmakers over the last 14 months because of Moscow’s role in the conflict in eastern Ukraine.

“We take note that the Russian authorities have decided to share the list. We don’t have any other information on legal basis, criteria and process,” said Maja Kocijancic, a spokesperson for the bloc’s foreign policy chief, Federica Mogherini.

The EU didn't confirm who was on the list and neither did Russia’s embassy in the EU. Russia’s foreign ministry also didn’t comment.

However, Jacek Saryusz-Wolski, a Polish member of the European Parliament, tweeted a list of 89 names which include himself. Mr. Saryusz-Wolski said the list was the official one communicated to European Union embassies by Russian authorities.

“It’s an honor to be on this list. Because if the Kremlin says that I am unfriendly or dangerous, it means that I am doing my job right,” said the lawmaker, who has been a prominent critic of Kremlin policies in Ukraine from the main center-right bloc in parliament.

Other names on the list included the EU’s former enlargement chief Stefan Füle, former British Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, and Guy Verhofstadt, former Belgian prime minister and current leader of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe group in the European Parliament.

Also named were Uwe Corsepius, who will be a top adviser to German Chancellor Angela Merkel; Andrew Parker, the Director-General of the British Security Service MI5; and a number of military officials. No current EU leaders or foreign ministers were on the list.

“I’m banned from #Russia again—first time since 1972! #45 on the hit list,” said Ed McMillan-Scott in a message on Twitter. Mr. McMillan-Scott is a Liberal member of the European Parliament who tweeted the same list of names as Mr. Saryusz-Wolski.

EU courts have struck down a number of sanctions listings of foreign individuals in the past. It isn’t clear if there is any such form of legal redress for those on the Russian blacklist.

The EU has banned visas for and frozen the European assets of 151 people over the crisis in east Ukraine, including dozens of Russian citizens as well as pro-Russian separatists. The EU list includes some senior Kremlin advisers, lawmakers and military officials but not Russian President Vladimir Putin or Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

The EU is due to review that list of names by mid-September. The bloc has also imposed broad economic sanctions on Russia because of the Ukraine crisis. Russia responded by banning most agricultural imports from the EU’s 28-nation member states.

—-Paul Sonne in Moscow contributed to this article.

Write to Laurence Norman at laurence.norman@wsj.com

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Page 4

Inside the Mind of a Criminal
Friday May 29th, 2015 at 10:13 PM

FOR decades, researchers have interviewed criminals to find out how and why they break the law. But the accounts are not always accurate: Narrators manipulate, suffer from faulty memory or justify actions rather than recount facts.

For psychologists, it’s best to observe actual behavior, in real time, and afterward interview research participants. Yet for obvious ethical and safety reasons, it’s almost never possible to observe a crime as it happens.

Still, in years of studying the field in the United States and Britain, my colleagues and I have come up with ways of getting closer to what happens at the scene of a crime, from interviewing active street robbers about how they appraise potential victims to using maps and slides of residential neighborhoods to see how burglars pick their targets.

But recently the video game industry and simulation technology gave us another idea: Could we use simulated environments to “observe” offending behavior? After all, virtual reality has been used to train fighter pilots and surgeons.

For a recent study in the journal Psychology, Crime and Law, we devised a simulated environment and got willing, experienced ex-burglars to commit a mock burglary in it.

To establish “proof of concept,” we had to show that experienced ex-burglars would burgle a simulated house the same way they burgled a real house. So we had to have them actually burgle a house.

This presented two challenges. We needed a residential house that would be popular with burglars (e.g., as we’ve learned from previous research, a semidetached three-bedroom house with side and rear access). But not many homeowners want to allow even ex-offenders to mock-burgle their home.

A local police department provided a house in a quiet residential area that they used for interviewing traumatized victims of crime. My collaborators, Dr. Martin White and his team from the creative technologies department at the University of Sussex, created a simulated version of the house on a laptop that could be navigated using a mouse or a game controller. Items (of value and otherwise) were placed in identical spots in the real house and in the simulated house, and in the latter could be “stolen” by clicking on them.

The second hurdle was to find ex-offenders. We had to be convinced that our participants had truly ended their criminal careers and would not be tempted back into it by our experiment. A charity supporting ex-offenders became our source. We also recruited a comparison group of postgraduate students, of a similar age as our experienced ex-burglars.

At the real house, participants wore head-mounted cameras and were asked to start at the front gate, enter the house and burgle it in their own time by touching the items they would take in a real burglary. We then replayed the video recording of their “burglary” to them and asked them to talk through their decisions during the task. They then completed a second mock burglary using the simulated environment on the laptop.

From previous interviews and experimental studies, burglars had alluded to what we call “dysfunctional expertise” in the way they approach the environment, select their targets and navigate around the property, and it was fascinating to see this unfold in real time.

Ex-burglars approached the task in a dramatically different way from the students. Burglars entered and exited the house at the rear, while students, unaware of the cover that the side and rear of the house afforded, entered at the exposed front. Burglars spent significantly more time in areas of the house with high-value items and navigated it much more systematically than the students did. They also showed greater discernment, by stealing fewer but more valuable items.

Most important, all participants burgled the real and the simulated houses almost identically. We concluded that using simulations can be a robust way to study crime, and in studying it this way, we will not be limited to just burglary.

This paradigm will expand our understanding of decision making in and around the crime scene — for example, a burglar’s heightened awareness of vulnerable entrances, locks and window types. We can also learn how emotion (arousal, reward, anxiety) connects with the thought processes characteristic of expertise, which will have a strong effect on how difficult it is to give up crime. This has been largely ignored in the field.

A better understanding of criminal behavior will help us reduce opportunities for crime in our neighborhoods. By knowing what the burglar is looking for — what signals wealth, occupancy, ease of access and security in properties — we can make adjustments in awareness and protection. And by better understanding the decision-making sequence of a crime (which often starts days before and at a distance from it), we can address this in rehabilitation by helping the offender to become more conscious of these decisions at an early stage (when it is easier to abandon the idea).

This innovation could have a big impact on the way we address criminal behavior.

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· · ·

Hastert Case Is Said to Be Linked to Decades-Old Sexual Abuse
Friday May 29th, 2015 at 10:10 PM

WASHINGTON — J. Dennis Hastert, who served for eight years as speaker of the House of Representatives, was paying a former student hundreds of thousands of dollars to not say publicly that Mr. Hastert had sexually abused him decades ago, according to two people briefed on the evidence uncovered in an F.B.I. investigation.

Federal prosecutors on Thursday announced the indictment of Mr. Hastert, 73, on allegations that he made cash withdrawals, totaling $1.7 million, to evade detection by banks. Federal authorities also charged him with lying to them about the purpose of the withdrawals.

The man — who was not identified in court papers — told the F.B.I. that he had been inappropriately touched by Mr. Hastert when the former speaker was a high school teacher and wrestling coach, the two people said Friday. The people briefed on the investigation spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to be identified discussing a federal investigation.

It was not clear when the suspected behavior, which was first reported by The Los Angeles Times, occurred. Mr. Hastert was a high school teacher and coach in Yorkville, Ill., from 1965 to 1981, and the indictment said the recipient of the payments was from Yorkville and had known Mr. Hastert for decades.

It was also unclear whether the authorities considered pursuing charges against the man on suspicion of extorting payments from Mr. Hastert in exchange for keeping silent. Such a prosecution would likely have required Mr. Hastert to allege that he was the victim of an extortion. But the indictment said Mr. Hastert denied to the F.B.I. that he was making payments to the individual, saying he withdrew the cash because he no longer trusted the banking system.

Mr. Hastert, a Republican who had a highly lucrative career as a lobbyist since leaving Congress in 2007, could not be reached for comment at his office in Washington. A spokeswoman for the United States attorney for the Northern District of Illinois said Friday that there was no lawyer of record on file for Mr. Hastert.

The allegations against a man who was once one of the most powerful people in Washington has stunned lobbyists, lawmakers and veteran Capitol Hill staff members who worked alongside him as he rose to become second in line to the presidency in 1999.

“The Denny I served with worked hard on behalf of his constituents and the country,” House Speaker John A. Boehner said in a statement late Friday evening. “I’m shocked and saddened to learn of these reports.”

The indictment also surprised Mr. Hastert’s former students and high school teachers back home in Illinois. Several of them said Friday that they were struggling to make sense of the federal charges against him.

“They are all stunned at the news,” said George Dyche of Aurora, Ill., a coach who competed against Mr. Hastert’s team for years, and worked closely with him to develop the Illinois state wrestling association. “They all say, ‘Are they talking about our Denny?’ ”

In Yorkville, about 50 miles southwest of Chicago, Mr. Hastert is a larger-than-life figure, not just because he rose to be speaker of the House, but because the wrestling team he coached at tiny Yorkville High School won the state championship in 1976 — a triumph still listed as a historical event on the town’s official website.

A statement released Friday by the Yorkville Community Unit School District said it had “no knowledge of Mr. Hastert’s alleged misconduct, nor has any individual contacted the district to report any such misconduct. If requested to do so, the district plans to cooperate fully with the U.S. attorney’s investigation into this matter.”

In the lobby of Yorkville High School, where final exams were underway on Friday, Ron Kiesewetter, the principal, referred all questions to office of the school district superintendent.

In his years at Yorkville High School, Mr. Hastert taught a range of topics — history, economics, sociology and speech — but he seemed best known at the school for his efforts to build the wrestling team, the Yorkville Foxes, over more than 15 years.

In Mr. Hastert’s 2004 memoir, “Speaker: Lessons from Forty Years in Coaching and Politics,” Mr. Hastert acknowledged the wrestling squad of 1976, a championship team, on a dedications page.

“While many of our teams did well, you were the very best,” he wrote, addressing the Yorkville Foxes of 1976. “For me, winning the state championship was among the finest moments of my life. So many of the fine athletes I had the good fortune to coach are today raising and coaching boys and girls of their own. They’re mentoring the next generation. For me, it doesn’t get any better than that.”

Mr. Hastert also worked with the Boy Scouts for 16 years, according to an address he gave in 2008 to a Boy Scout group at Pikes Peak in Colorado.

“We did a lot of neat things,” he said to the group, including taking high-school-aged boys on trips to the Bahamas, the Grand Canyon and float trips on the Green River in Utah. “I saw those kids develop and meet challenges and change,” he said.

Yearbooks from Mr. Hastert’s tenure at the high school said he also was an adviser to the Yorkville Explorer Post 540, and had traveled in the late 1960s with the Explorers to the Bahamas for a week, as well as on a canoe trip to Canada.

“He is now planning a trip for the future around the world,” the Mi-Y-Hi of 1970, the school’s yearbook, said.

In 1979, the yearbook noted the wrestling team’s successful season — a record of 16-6 — and Mr. Hastert’s having finished his 14th year as coach, ending up “one meet short of 200 varsity wins.”

Mr. Dyche said Mr. Hastert helped build the sport in his home state, was president of the wrestling association and started a state wrestling newspaper called The Word in the 1970s. Mr. Hastert still regularly attends Big 10 Conference collegiate wrestling championships, said Mr. Dyche, who said he saw him there this year.

“He was a quiet guy in the corner, not a yelling, screaming coach, very pragmatic, cool under fire,” Mr. Dyche said. “I would go up after losing to him and say: ‘Damn it, you did it again. I know what your kids are going to do, but my kids still couldn’t stop them.’ ”

Mr. Dyche said Mr. Hastert “ruled his program with a calm but firm hand. He was extremely successful and respected.” And he said he was stunned by the allegations.

“Of all the people in the world, it’s not the Denny Hastert I know,” Mr. Dyche said. “He was a man of character, a pillar in the community.”

Mr. Hastert was already an affluent man during his service in the House, largely from land holding, according to financial disclosure forms.

He owned land in Kendall County, Ill., a farm in Wisconsin, and a home and property in Plano, Ill., worth between $3 million and $15 million, along with savings and investment accounts worth as much as $310,000. His cash income while in office consisted of a congressional salary of $212,100 and an Illinois pension of $34,000.

His pay soared after he left Congress and opened his own lobbying firm. He also worked for Dickstein Shapiro, where he lobbied for Lorillard Tobacco, Peabody Energy, Bridgepoint Education and an Illinois real estate developer.

The indictment said that in 2010, after several meetings, Mr. Hastert agreed to pay the unidentified man $3.5 million “in order to compensate for and conceal his prior misconduct against” him. The authorities alleged that Mr. Hastert structured the cash withdrawals, totaling $1.7 million so far, in increments designed to avoid bank reporting requirements.

Kim Nerheim, a spokeswoman for the United States attorney’s office, said Friday that Mr. Hastert’s case had been assigned to Judge Thomas M. Durkin of Federal District Court, who will schedule an arraignment for the former speaker, perhaps as early as next week.

Preliminary bail in Mr. Hastert’s case was set at $4,500, according to court documents.

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· · · · ·

Why the IRS’s efforts to help identity theft victims are likely to fall short
Friday May 29th, 2015 at 10:07 PM

The 104,000 people who had their most sensitive tax information stolen by hackers as part of the latest cyber-attack on the Internal Revenue Service are getting free credit monitoring services, courtesy of the agency.

However, there’s one major way that the protection might fall short: Much of the identity theft these consumers are vulnerable to now will not show up anywhere on their credit reports. Armed with more sensitive information from the tax records, criminals can now attempt to fraudulently claim government benefits such as unemployment insurance, Medicare and food stamps, none of which are tracked in people’s credit histories, security experts say.

“The big money to be made with that information is not in getting credit in your name or a car loan in your name,” says Frank Abagnale, who was convicted of fraud-related crimes when he was younger and now works as a security consultant. “The criminals have started to realize that where the big money is is the government — federal, county and state.”

The criminals who stole old tax refunds through the “Get Transcript” tool on the IRS Web site already had personal information such as names, Social Security numbers, home addresses and birthdays. But after accessing the tax records, they now know a lot more about the people they are pretending to be.

[Criminals want your tax returns. Here’s what you can do about it.]

The tax returns stolen can include information as sensitive as children’s names and Social Security numbers, how much money the victims made and what their tax refund was last year. Armed with those details about a person’s family, criminals can pose as the victims to claim government benefits, or sell the information to other people who do.

Credit monitoring, a solution commonly turned to by companies and health-care providers that have experienced a security hack, can help consumers look out for identity thieves attempting to open credit cards, take out loans or apply for jobs in their name. But the close surveillance would need to last much longer than the year or so of protection that is typically offered, consultants say. Victims need to guard their identities for the rest of their lives.

“There’s not too much they can do,” says Gavin Reid, vice president of threat intelligence for Lancope, a firm that helps companies detect hacks. “They can’t change who they’ve been. They can’t change their Social Security numbers.”

The IRS is flagging the identities of the people whose transcripts were stolen so that it can be extra cautious when processing their returns at tax time. But the best thing agencies and companies with access to personal information can do to protect consumers is to reduce the chances that personal information can get stolen in the first place.

That highlights a broader vulnerability that many criminals are exploiting. Many companies and even government agencies are relying on information from people’s credit histories to verify their identities — just as that information is getting easier to find.

The “Get Transcript” tool, for example, asked people to enter “out of wallet” questions such as the size of a person’s car payment. The rise of sharing on social media sites, combined with a proliferation of Web sites that make it easier for people to look up records that may contain sensitive information, is making it easier for criminals to overcome those security measures and access accounts, security pros say. “They’ve really got to consider are those types of questions enough?” Reid says.

[How the breach of IRS tax returns is part of a much bigger problem facing taxpayers]

The IRS might consider using some of the fraud detection programs being used by some banks and retailers, which study consumers’ behavior to notice activity that seems out of the ordinary, says Michael Sussmann, a partner in the privacy and data security practice at Perkins Coie. For instance, some banks will text consumers when they make a purchase that seems larger than usual or from a location they haven’t been to before. “A company may scrutinize more about where you’re logging in, how you’re logging in,” Sussmann says.

Tax-related identity theft is ramping up at a time when deep budget cuts are leaving the IRS with fewer resources to fight that fraud. A spokesperson pointed out that this year the agency requested an additional $82 million to improve its identity-theft efforts, deal with a backlog of cases and invest in technology that can help it protect taxpayer information. Meanwhile, its annual budget has been cut to $10.9 billion this year from $12.15 billion in 2010.

Hackers stole personal information from 104,000 taxpayers, IRS says

Congress to question IRS officials about how data was stolen

What to do if your tax refund is stolen

Jonnelle Marte is a reporter covering personal finance. She was previously a writer for MarketWatch and the Wall Street Journal.

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Pentagon: Anthrax shipments broader than first thought
Friday May 29th, 2015 at 10:06 PM

FILE - In this May 11, 2003, file photo, Microbiologist Ruth Bryan works with BG nerve agent simulant in Class III Glove Box in the Life Sciences Test Facility at Dugway Proving Ground, Utah. The specialized airtight enclosure is also used for hands-on work with anthrax and other deadly agents. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said it is investigating what the Pentagon called an inadvertent shipment of live anthrax spores to government and commercial laboratories in as many as nine states, as well as one overseas, that expected to receive dead spores. (Douglas C. Pizac, File/Associated Press)

By Brady McCombs and Robert Burns | AP May 29 at 7:11 PM

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon said Friday that the Army’s mistaken shipments of live anthrax to research laboratories were more widespread than it initially reported, prompting the Defense Department’s second-ranking official to order a thorough review.

In a statement issued Friday evening, the department said 24 laboratories in 11 states and two foreign countries — South Korea and Australia — are believed to have received suspect anthrax samples.

The broadening scope of the problem suggests more extensive flaws in procedures used by the Army’s Dugway Proving Ground in Utah to ensure that anthrax samples were made fully inert before shipping them to labs. Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work on Friday ordered a comprehensive review of laboratory procedures associated with inactivating anthrax.

Dugway, in a desolate stretch of the Utah desert, has been testing chemical weapons since it opened in 1942.

Earlier Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said suspect samples from Dugway had been sent to 18 labs in nine U.S. states and a military base in South Korea. Later, the Pentagon said the Army may have mistakenly sent live anthrax to a laboratory in Australia in 2008.

CDC spokeswoman Kristen Nordlund said the agency is testing to see which anthrax samples were live. The results are coming in slowly, she said, and the first full set of findings isn’t expected until next week.

A Wisconsin commercial laboratory, meanwhile, confirmed Friday it was among the labs that received live anthrax spores last week. BBI Detection of Madison, which employs fewer than 20 people, remains partially closed. No employees have gotten sick or are in danger, and there is no danger to the public, said Jackie Lustig, a spokeswoman for Massachusetts-based Alere Inc., which owns BBI.

CDC spokesman Jason McDonald said four people at labs in Delaware, Texas and Wisconsin were recommended to get antibiotics as a precaution, although they are not sick. About two dozen people were being treated for possible exposure at Osan Air Base in South Korea.

___

McCombs reported from Salt Lake City. Associated Press reporter Mike Stobbe contributed from New York.

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Saudi Arabia is no friend to the United States
Friday May 29th, 2015 at 10:03 PM

Saudi Arabia’s King Salman on May 5. (Fayez Nureldine/Agence France-Presse via Getty Images)

By Colbert I. King May 29 at 9:05 PM

In my Post colleague Charles Krauthammer’s May 21 op-ed column, “You want hypotheticals? Here’s one,” former Saudi Arabian intelligence chief Prince Turki al-Faisal was quoted approvingly as complaining: “We were America’s best friend in the Arab world for 50 years.” Note the past tense.

If my arithmetic is correct, that would date the beginning of Turki’s cherished Saudi-U.S. relationship to 1965. But “best friend”?

As Oscar Wilde is credited with saying, “True friends stab you in the front.”

America’s back was turned in 1973 when Saudi Arabian-led oil producers imposed an embargoagainst the United States in retaliation for U.S. military support of Israel in that country’s 1973 war with Egypt and Syria.

America’s “best friend” instigated a doubling, then a quadrupling, of the price of oil. Our good buddies in the Middle East watched as long lines formed at U.S. filling stations and consumer costs skyrocketed. The Saudi monarchy showed no regret as the pain it inflicted on the U.S. economy set in.

That’s because the Saudis, in their piety, sought to teach their American “best friend” a lesson: namely, that they could yank our chain whenever they wanted.

The Nixon White House got the message. It started negotiations with the Saudi-controlled oil producers to end the embargo and began putting pressure on Israel to withdraw from the Golan Heights and the Sinai.

Manipulation of oil prices has been a handy Saudi weapon.

George W. Bush knows.

With oil at more than $127 a barrel in May 2008, then-President Bush appealed to Saudi Arabia to increase production and bring down the price. The Saudis said no. That was the second time. The Saudis had rebuffed Bush that January when he made the same request.

And what, pray tell, has America’s “best friend” done over the past four decades as all of that petrodollar loot, once estimated at $116 billion a year, poured in, as noted by a PBS “Frontline”report? Besides spending like mad on airports, hotels, highways, hospitals and schools — much-needed domestic projects and infrastructure — Saudi billions also found their way to other channels, such as religious charities that funded networks of madrassas: religious schools steeped in the conservative anti-Western Wahhabi strain of Islam that laid the groundwork for the creation of al-Qaeda. All those billions did little to erase the repression of Saudi women or end inflammatory teachings about Christians and Jews.

Where did the cash and arms that helped create the Taliban come from? Yep, you guessed it, the kingdom.

In fact, after the Taliban took over the Afghan capital of Kabul in September 1996, Saudi Arabia was among the three countries to establish diplomatic relations. That relationship ended on the rocks in September 2001, however, when the Saudis concluded, the kingdom said, that the Taliban was up to no good, attracting and training Muslims, including Saudi citizens, “to carry out criminal acts” against Islamic law.

Throughout Prince Turki’s fabled 50 years of best friendship, the Saudis, when piqued, have never hesitated to publicly snub U.S. presidents. King Salman’s last-minute decision to pull out of this month’s Arab summit with President Obama at Camp David is only the latest such no-show.

In 2001, then-Crown Prince Abdullah, then the de facto leader of Saudi Arabia and a backer of the Palestinian intifada, didn’t think the United States was doing enough to oppose Israeli action in the Palestinian territories. So when he was invited to visit the White House to meet with newly elected Bush in May 2001, Abdullah chose to stay at home, haughtily announcing, “We want [the United States] to consider their own conscience.”

A few months later, Abdullah fired off a letter angrily warning Bush that “A time comes when peoples and nations part. We are at a crossroads. It is time for the United States and Saudi Arabia to look at their separate interests.” Remember that, Prince Turki?

Today, the Saudis are in a tight spot, but it’s not because of the United States. The roiling Islamic struggle, pitting the Sunni Saudi and Persian Gulf states against their Shiite rivals in Iran, is of the Islamic world’s own doing. The United States can’t save them from themselves.

Still, some good has come out of the Saudi oil blackmail. It woke us up to the vulnerability caused by dependence on foreign oil. The oil shocks forced a succession of U.S. presidents, beginning with Richard Nixon, to initiate efforts to raise fuel-economy standards, increase conservation measures and double down on other power sources.

Now, shale production has propelled the United States way up the ladder as an oil producer, making us far less dependent on the kingdom than we were when we got blindsided in ’73.

And the response from our “best friend”?

The Saudis have been pumping up oil production to cause prices to fall, preserve their market share and thus undermine U.S. shale oil development.

What a friend we have in Saudi Arabia.

Read more from Colbert King’s archive.

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Marco Rubio: Obama’s strategy for the Middle East has backfired
Friday May 29th, 2015 at 10:01 PM

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) (Michael Reynolds/EPA)

By Marco Rubio May 29 at 9:02 PM

The fall of the Iraqi city of Ramadi to the Islamic State and recent gains by the group in Syria are the latest signs that President Obama’s strategy to defeat this brutal terrorist group is failing. But the problem is far bigger than that. The president’s entire approach to the Middle East has backfired.

The Middle East is more dangerous and unstable than when Obama came into office — a time when Iraq and Syria were more stable, the Iranian nuclear program was considerably less advanced and the Islamic State did not yet exist.

Much of this instability is a result of Obama’s disengagement from the region, best symbolized by the withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq in 2011. The vacuum created by America’s pullback has been filled by bad actors, including terrorist extremists, both Sunni and Shiite, who have flourished in the absence of U.S. leadership.

On one side are the radical Sunni extremists of al-Qaeda, the Islamic State and affiliated groups. The Islamic State has capitalized on the political grievances many Iraqi Sunnis have with their sectarian Shiite leaders, as well as the divisions between Syrian Sunnis and the brutal Alawite-dominated Assad regime, which is supported by Iran. The Islamic State’s black banner is now spreading as far afield as Libya and Afghanistan.

On the other side is Iran, a country run by a militant Shiite clerical regime that is the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism and has as its primary goal regional domination and the export of the Iranian revolution. As the Obama administration has focused on negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran, Tehran has exploited U.S. weakness and expanded its reach into Syria, Iraq and Yemen, among other countries.

To begin to deal with the challenges we face, we need a reassertion of U.S. leadership in the region and specifically in the fight against the Islamic State. This should include the following:

● Broaden the coalition. We should build and lead a coalition of our regional partners that will work to defeat the Islamic State. In addition to the Kurds and Sunni tribes, this should include the Persian Gulf countries and those such as Egypt, Jordan and Turkey, many of which realize that this fight is not just a military one but also an ideological battle for the heart and soul of Islam. The current coalition is suffering because our allies and friends doubt our commitment to this effort.

● Increase U.S. involvement in the fight. As part of this multinational effort, the president should increase the number of U.S. forces in Iraq and remove restrictions on their ability to embed with the Iraqi units they are training and advising. Having the proper number of U.S. forces in Iraq is crucial for both weaning the Iraqi government off its reliance on Iran for military assistance and moving toward a unified and inclusive Iraq.

We also need to increase the frequency and pace of airstrikes and Special Operations raids against the Islamic State — and ensure that we are assisting a wide range of local actors, especially Sunni tribes — not just the central government in Baghdad, which has been overly reliant on Shiite militias controlled by Iran. We need to make clear to Iran that any attacks by its proxies in Iraq against U.S. personnel will result in a response from the United States.

● Not cut a bad deal with Iran. Among the reasons that I have been so vocally opposed to the outline of the Iranian deal announced by Obama is that, in addition to leaving Iran as a nuclear threshold state, we will also be providing the regime with billions of dollars of sanctions relief to fuel its export of terrorism and further its regional expansionism, including its efforts to undermine Iraq’s stability.

● Prevent the Islamic State’s expansion beyond Iraq and Syria. We need to act more quickly to prevent the emergence of other failed and failing states that are fertile territory for the Islamic State and other terrorist groups. Addressing instability before countries devolve into anarchy is essential. Libya is a prime example.

Because of the Obama administration’s “lead from behind” approach to the effort to topple Moammar Gaddafi, Libya is a growing haven for the Islamic State, where the group is able to freely control large swaths of territory for training and recruitment for the fight in Iraq and Syria, just as al-Qaeda once used Afghanistan for its operations against the United States.

Despite the enormousness of the challenge, we can still defeat the enemies that we face in a Middle East that remains crucial to U.S. national interests and security. Doing so will require urgent action and leadership from President Obama before our options get even worse.

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Hastert indictment is related to old allegations of sexual misconduct, law enforcement says
Friday May 29th, 2015 at 9:30 PM

Former House speaker Hastert indicted on federal charges(1:13)

Former House speaker J. Dennis Hastert was indicted on federal charges Thursday, including lying to the FBI in an alleged effort to hide $3.5 million in payments to a person to conceal past misconduct. (Reuters)

YORKVILLE, Ill. — The indictment of former House speaker J. Dennis Hastert was triggered by his alleged effort to hide payments of hush money to a male student he allegedly sexually molested decades ago, a federal law enforcement official said Friday.

The indictment asserts that the acts Hastert wanted to conceal date back to a time when he was a teacher and coach in Illinois before entering politics in the early 1980s, the official said. Authorities said the victim, who has spoken with law enforcement officials, was one of Hastert’s students.

Hastert, the longest-serving Republican speaker in House history, is not expected to face molestation charges because authorities don’t think they have enough evidence to bring a case against him.

A federal grand jury in Chicago on Thursday indicted the former speaker, 73, on charges that he violated banking laws in a bid to pay $3.5 million to an unnamed person to cover up “past misconduct.” The male victim is that person, the official said.

The case has riveted and shocked Washington, where Hastert has been a high-paid lobbyist since his 2007 retirement from Congress.

Hastert announces that he will not seek reelection for a 12th term as he stands on the steps of the Kendall County courthouse with, from left, his son Josh; wife, Jean; daughter-in-law Heidi and grandson Jack, in Yorkville, Ill., on Aug. 17, 2007. (Brian Kersey/AP)

“The Denny I served with worked hard on behalf of his constituents and the country. I’m shocked and saddened to learn of these reports,” House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) said in a statement released Friday.

Law enforcement officials said they, at first, didn’t know what to make of a series of large cash withdrawals Hastert began making in 2010.

It was only after FBI agents interviewed Hastert in December, officials said, that investigators began piecing together the details. In that interview, the indictment said, Hastert lied to the agents, telling them he made the withdrawals because he didn’t feel safe keeping his money in the banking system.

“Yeah . . . I kept the cash. That’s what I’m doing,’’ Hastert was quoted as telling agents.

Actually, court documents said, Hastert was scheming to mask more than $950,000 in withdrawals from various accounts, in violation of federal banking laws that require the disclosure of large cash transactions.

Hastert has not spoken publicly about the case and efforts to reach him have been unsuccessful. One of his sons, a Chicago lawyer, has not responded to requests for comment. No lawyer or representative has spoken out on Hastert’s behalf, either.

If convicted of seeking to evade banking laws and lying to the FBI, the former House speaker could face up to 10 years in prison, prosecutors said.

A look inside Dennis Hastert's indictment(2:07)

The Post's Chris Cillizza breaks down former House speaker Dennis Hastert's indictment on charges that he broke bank laws by withdrawing large sums of money and lying about it to federal authorities. (Nicki DeMarco/The Washington Post)

From Washington to Yorkville, former Hastert associates were left stunned at the turn of events, calling and e-mailing each other to express confusion. They said they did not know where their former boss was holed up during the biggest crisis of his career.

“Anyone who knows Denny is shocked and confused” by the indictment,’’ Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) said Friday. He said Hastert should have “his day in court to address these very serious accusations,” and called the case “a very troubling development.”

Don Davidson, who taught history with Hastert at Yorkville Community High School between 1970 and 1977, said he was “astounded. . . . He was a good teacher, and he treated the students fairly.’’

Davidson, who also coached the basketball team at Yorkville, said he “never heard anything along those lines” about allegations of misconduct on the part of the former speaker.

The allegations have landed with near-universal disbelief in the small communities along the Fox River in northeast Illinois where Hastert grew up, worked and lived for decades. While tract houses and strip malls continue to claim farmland here, about 50 miles west of Chicago, it’s still a place where a slow-moving combine can slow a commute.

On Friday, the release of students from Yorkville High School was made even more hectic by the presence of news trucks and TV cameras. Across the street, in a small upstairs room in the Yorkville Public Library, reporters pored over old yearbooks, seeking photos of Hastert and his champion wrestling teams.

In a statement Friday, the Yorkville school district that employed Hastert from 1965 to 1981 said it first learned about the charges when Hastert was indicted.

“Yorkville Community Unit School District #115 has no knowledge of Mr. Hastert’s alleged misconduct, nor has any individual contacted the District to report any such misconduct,” the statement said. “If requested to do so, the District plans to cooperate fully with the U.S. Attorney’s investigation into this matter.”

Bob Evans, 70, who taught alongside Hastert for 14 years at Yorkville High, serving as his assistant wrestling coach for some of them, said he never heard even a whisper about any wrongdoing on Hastert’s part.

“I can’t believe it,” he said, standing in his driveway, on a street where Hastert once lived. “The people I’ve talked to in Yorkville that know him, they’re just absolutely shocked.”

Evans recalled Hastert as being devoted to wrestling to the point that he would travel across the country to learn a new wrestling move to give his wrestlers an advantage in Illinois.

“He mentored a lot of kids. He was an integral part of their lives,” he said. “He was never a screamer. He was a demander. He wanted the best from them.”

As a coach, Evans said, Hastert had a knack for getting the most out of wrestlers with average athletic talent through hard work. Hastert’s coaching career culminated in a 1976 state championship.

“It throws a black cloud over what he did all those years,” he said. “They won conference championships, state championships. They were good people. They were good kids.”

“If it did happen,” Evans added, “then get it out . . . but you just got to hope it isn’t as bad as it seems.”

Dan McNeive was a social studies teacher and basketball coach at Yorkville High from 1978 to 1981. His classroom adjoined Hastert’s. “I came there from a much larger high school, so it was kind of culture shock for me. But Denny was certainly a good colleague and he kind of taught me the ways of the small town,” said McNeive, who is now retired and living in Arizona. “We were pretty close the three years I was there.”

McNeive said many of the teachers at Yorkville were friends and did things together socially. “It was a pretty tight group,” he said. He said he had received many phone calls from former Yorkville colleagues since news broke about the allegations against Hastert. “Everyone pretty much says the same thing – it’s just hard to believe and no clue at all,” McNeive said. “It definitely came as a total shock to us.”

Hastert became House speaker almost by accident, but wound up serving in the post for nearly a decade. Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), far more flamboyant than the low-key Hastert, stepped down as speaker following the disappointing Republican performance in the 1998 midterm elections.

After revelations that Gingrich’s would-be replacement, Rep. Bob Livingston (R-La.), had engaged in extramarital affairs, Hastert emerged as a unity candidate.

Some conservative activists, who had clashed with Hastert in the past, on Friday recalled him as a figure known for his avuncular personality but rarely — if ever — embraced by the GOP’s base.

“I called for his resignation during the Mark Foley scandal for mishandling it,” said David Bossie, a former House GOP staffer, referring to the 2006 resignation of Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.) in the wake of allegations that he had for years sent explicit messages to male congressional pages.

“If he had lifted his finger to find one shred of evidence, he would have found evidence of what Foley was up to,’’ said Bossie, who is now president of Citizens United, a conservative advocacy group.

Democrats mostly resisted criticizing Hastert. Former Republican National Committee chairman Haley Barbour warned Democrats to not make the controversy a political cudgel.

“It doesn’t matter a bit politically,” Barbour said in a telephone interview from Mississippi, where he previously served as governor. “Democrats hope it does, but I don’t think so.”

The indictment did not spell out the nature of what it described as “prior misconduct” by Hastert, but it noted that before entering state and federal politics in 1981, Hastert served for more than a decade as a teacher and wrestling coach in Yorkville.

In 2010, confronted about the “prior misconduct,” the former speaker agreed to pay $3.5 million to the person “to compensate for and conceal his prior misconduct against Individual A,” prosecutors alleged.

A review of Hastert’s real estate holdings and other investments, as well as his lobbying career, shows he may have been equipped to handle such a payment. He made a small fortune in real estate before leaving Congress, then embarked on a lucrative lobbying career after leaving. Among his clients: Peabody Energy, the Secure ID Coalition, Lorillard Tobacco Co. and Fuels America.

[Jaw-dropping indictment stirs deeper mystery]

The person who Hastert agreed to pay had known Hastert most of his life, growing up in Yorkville, the city next to Hastert’s home town of Plano, in the exurbs west of Chicago, the indictment said. Prosecutors said the actions “occurred years earlier” than the 2010 meeting that sparked the payments.

Over five years, Hastert withdrew about $1.7 million in cash from his various bank accounts — at one point in 2014 delivering $100,000 a month to the person in question, the indictment alleged.

The case has been assigned to U.S. District Judge Thomas M. Durkin, who will set dates for Hastert’s arraignment and other court proceedings, Kim Nerheim, a spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney’s office for the Northern District of Illinois, said Friday. At the arraignment, Hastert will be asked to enter a plea.

Durkin, 61, is a former federal prosecutor nominated to the federal bench by President Obama in 2012. He is the older brother of Jim Durkin, a Republican member of the Illinois House of Representatives, where Hastert served in the 1980s.

Horwitz and Markon reported from Washington. Robert Costa, Paul Kane, Alice Crites, Scott Higham, Robert O’Harrow, William Branigin and Emma Brown contributed to this report.

Mike DeBonis covers Congress and national politics for The Washington Post. He previously covered D.C. politics and government from 2007 to 2015.

Sari Horwitz covers the Justice Department and criminal justice issues nationwide for The Washington Post, where she has been a reporter for 30 years.

Jerry Markon covers the Department of Homeland Security for the Post’s National Desk. He also serves as lead Web and newspaper writer for major breaking national news.

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FBI notifies crime labs of errors used in DNA match calculations since 1999
Friday May 29th, 2015 at 9:28 PM

This undated image shows the 46 human chromosomes, where DNA resides and does its work. (National Cancer Institute/via Associated Press)

The FBI has notified crime labs across the country that it has discovered errors in data used by forensic scientists in thousands of cases to calculate the chances that DNA found at a crime scene matches a particular person, several people familiar with the issue said.

The bureau has said it believes the errors, which extend to 1999, are unlikely to result in dramatic changes that would affect cases. It has submitted the research findings to support that conclusion for publication in the July issue of the Journal of Forensic Sciences, the officials said.

But crime labs and attorneys said they want to know more about the problem before conceding it would not make much difference in any given case.

“The public puts so much faith in DNA testing that it makes it especially important to make those the best estimates possible,” said Wright State University professor of statistics Daniel R. Krane, an expert whose work has been cited by defense attorneys. “There is no excuse for a systematic error to many thousands of calculations in such a context.”

Krane, who identified errors 10 years ago in the DNA profiles the FBI analyzed to generate the population statistics data, called the consequences of the disclosure appalling, saying the data have been used in tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of cases worldwide in the past 15 years. He said when he flagged the problems a decade ago, the FBI downplayed his findings.

The issue centers around the FBI’s “Pop stats,” which are built into the software programs used by 9 in 10 U.S. labs and many overseas, Krane said.

While juries might well reach the same decision if errors mean that an individual has a 1 in a billion chance of matching a crime scene sample instead of 1 in 10 billion, for example, that may not be so if errors were to halve, say, assertions that person had a 1 in 180 chance of matching, as Krane said came up in a case that he testified in last week.

Such low ratios are increasingly common as state and local labs analyze smaller and smaller traces of DNA found on objects such as guns or countertops — known as “low-copy” and “touch DNA” — and often are sifting through DNA mixtures, or profiles contributed by multiple people.

Stephen Mercer, chief of the forensic division of Maryland’s Office of the Public Defender, said his office on Wednesday notified its attorneys about the issue and suggested they consider asking prosecutors about such problems in cases involving DNA evidence.

“The prediction that the errors are likely to have a nominal impact has to be assessed by the defense in the individual circumstances of each particular case,” Mercer said.

In a bulletin sent to crime labs, the FBI said the problem stemmed from “clerical mistakes in transcriptions of the genotypes and to limitations of the old technology and software.”

The disclosure comes as some private researchers and lawyers in recent years questioned whether errors in the FBI’s national database of 13 million DNA profiles may have led judges and juries to give undue weight to DNA matches, long considered the “gold standard” in forensic science. They have called on the government to open the database for private research.

Crime lab analysts in the United States generally develop a DNA profile by analyzing 13 or more specific locations on chromosomes, called loci, for specific markers that appear at different frequencies in a given population. Match probabilities are derived by toting up the likelihood of a person sharing the same markers at each point.

The FBI is preparing to transition to using more than 20 loci, which theoretically should significantly improve the accuracy of results and allay concerns about the population statistics it used to generate those frequencies, officials said.

With new commercial test kits available using more loci, the FBI commissioned a study that re-tested DNA samples used for its original work and uncovered the errors.

“We are of the view that these discrepancies are unlikely to materially affect any assessment of evidential value,” the FBI stated in its May 11 bulletin to crime labs, according to a person who has a copy. “However, given that statistics based on these data have been included in thousands of lab reports and in testimonies, we believe the discrepancies require acknowledgment.”

In a public statement late Friday, the FBI said it found errors in 33 of 1,100 profiles used, or 3 percent. The FBI added that the DNA community has cautioned that match probabilities should be viewed as varying by a factor of 10, saying, “Though these discrepancies are within the internationally accepted range, the FBI is committed to correcting the inaccurate values in a transparent manner.”

The FBI has prepared a letter to the editor to be published by the Journal of Forensic Sciences, which originally published the bureau’s study 16 years ago.

David Coffman, chairman of the accreditation arm of the American Society of Crime Lab Directors, said it would be premature to comment on the significance of the errors until the FBI releases more data.

“They said it would be very minor,” said Coffman, who is director of forensic services for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement in Tallahassee, Fla. “We are waiting to see the Journal article to see which [data] would be affected, so we could evaluate it.”

In a statement, the National District Attorneys Association applauded the “transparent and responsible manner in which the FBI has disclosed this internal finding,” adding that “notification to all interested parties is an excellent first step in addressing this issue.”

Spencer S. Hsu is an investigative reporter, two-time Pulitzer finalist and national Emmy award nominee.

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Iran’s revolutionary courts are criticized as swift and unjust
Friday May 29th, 2015 at 9:27 PM

Iran’s revolutionary courts, where Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian is being tried on espionage and related charges, are notorious among human rights activists as venues where verdicts are preordained and proceedings can finish in minutes.

“Nobody thinks the result is ever in question,” said Rod Sanjabi, executive director of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, a New Haven, Conn.-based group that the Iranian government has labeled as subversive.

The trial of Rezaian, The Post’s Tehran bureau chief who has been jailed for more than 10 months, is shining the spotlight anew on the branch of Iran’s court system that hears national-security cases, broadly defined to include the prosecution of dissidents and journalists.

“Anything that’s a crime against the system or a threat to the system itself winds up under the rubric of the revolutionary courts,” said Suzanne Maloney, a former State Department official who studies Iran at the Brookings Institution.

Rezaian’s case may stem from infighting among hard-liners and moderates at a critical moment in the country’s negotiations over its nuclear program with the United States and five other world powers.

Pragmatists, represented by President Hassan Rouhani and Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, appear to want a deal that would end Iran’s isolation by easing economic sanctions in return for outside monitoring and cuts in its nuclear program. Such an outcome could undermine the power of hard-liners, who are sustained by enmity with the West.

“The revolutionary courts are a very powerful tool for hard-liners to challenge reformists,” said Mehrangiz Kar, a lawyer who once argued cases in the revolutionary courts and later was a defendant accused of espionage and propaganda against the Islamic Republic. She now lives in suburban Washington.

“Now that the direction of foreign policy is shifting in the negotiations, someone like Jason Rezaian can be trapped in the courts. The hard-liners are very afraid that after success in negotiations, they will probably be weakened.”

White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Friday that the United States would not turn Rezaian and other American citizens held in Iran into “bargaining chips.”

“We’re not going to negotiate for their release,” he said. “They should be released because they are being held unjustly.”

The State Department, several journalistic organizations and human rights groups condemned the closed proceeding at the opening of Rezaian’s trial on Tuesday. The hearing adjourned after a few hours with no indication of when, or if, it would resume.

Iran has pushed back against the criticism of its judicial system. In a statement on the Foreign Ministry Web site, spokeswoman Marzieh Afkham said it was up to the judge to decide Rezaian’s fate.

“In any country, questions of justice, judicial process and inquiry have their own procedures,” she said. “There is no room for premature judgement and speculation.”

The revolutionary courts emerged amid the chaos after Iran’s 1979 revolution. They were backed by Ayatollah Khomeini, who encouraged competing institutions with dual authority during the power struggles of the post-shah era. Thousands of people who had worked for the shah were put to death by the courts.

Today, 36 years after the revolution, the courts technically are overseen by the judicial branch. But in reality, they are a political instrument and answer to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Some of the courts’ judges are clerics who studied Islamic sharia law; others have bachelor’s degrees with a focus on the law. It is not known whether Abolghassem Salavati, the hard-line judge overseeing Rezaian’s case, has any training in the law, Sanjabi said.

“Revolutionary courts, although originally expected to be temporary, remain in place because they have proven extremely useful as an instrument [for] prosecuting politically motivated cases,” said Hadi Ghaemi, executive director of the New York-based International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran.

The courts handed down lengthy prison sentences to many opposition protesters after the disputed 2009 presidential election.

They also convicted two American hikers of espionage and sentenced them to eight years in prison in 2011 after they inadvertently wandered across the border with Iraq. They were eventually released. In 2000, 10 Jewish men were convicted of being spies for Israel after the court said their religious piety was merely a cover. They received prison sentences ranging from four to 14 years.

Besides Rezaian, two other American citizens — Amir Hekmati of Michigan and Saeed Abedini of Idaho — are confirmed to be in Iranian prisons. Both were tried and convicted by the revolutionary courts. Abedini, a pastor who was charged with “threatening national security” by establishing house churches in Iran, got eight years. Hekmati, who was accused of designing video games disparaging the Middle East at the behest of the CIA, was sentenced to death, a penalty later overturned on appeal.

Another American, former FBI agent Robert Levinson, disappeared on Iran’s Kish Island in 2007.

Because the public is barred from most trials in the revolutionary courts, the little that is known about them comes from Iranians who have appeared there and later recounted their experiences.

Roxana Saberi, a former Miss North Dakota who is now a reporter for Al Jazeera America, was held for 101 days after being accused of espionage while working as a journalist in Iran. She was convicted but released after appeal, and she later wrote a book, “Between Two Worlds,” about her ordeal.

“I had a difficult time determining who was directing the show in which I felt I was merely a puppet,” she said in an e-mail.

“My trial, like Jason’s, was closed. The judge had made up his mind about me before the proceedings even began. The day before, he asked me: “How could you agree to spy for the U.S.? Don’t you care about the Islamic Republic?” I suspect the outcome was predetermined by higher powers. My eventual release likely was as well.”

Haleh Esfandiari, director of the Middle East Program at the Wilson Center, was running the program from Tehran when she was arrested in 2007 and accused of conspiring to overthrow the Islamic Republic through “propaganda against the system and espionage for foreigners.” After an international outcry, she was released on bail of $333,000 and the deed to her mother’s apartment. She fled the country, believing she would never get a fair trial.

“They are so suspicious of foreigners, especially dual citizens who work on sensitive issues, like a journalist or a teacher in academia,” she said. “The security forces are scared stiff of a velvet revolution. Why would they go after someone like Jason? Common sense would tell them a journalist has to collect information. But there is this sense of paranoia.”

Ghaemi, of the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, said Rezaian’s main chance for acquittal has less to do with evidence than the politics of the nuclear-program negotiations.

If Rezaian is acquitted, “it would be based on a cost-benefit analysis that Jason’s release would show goodwill in the negotiations and also get them some international positive coverage as to the ‘fairness’ of their system,” he said.

Steven Mufson contributed to this report.

Carol Morello is the diplomatic correspondent for The Washington Post, covering the State Department.

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Snowden’s Dirty Work for Putin
Friday May 29th, 2015 at 8:58 PM

‘Handygate” is another instance of foreigners hijacking what they think is American English and hip. A “handy” is a cellphone in German. Melded with “gate,” it stands for the U.S. National Security Agency’s assault on Germany’s national dignity: hacking into Chancellor Angela Merkel’s mobile, as trumpeted by defector Edward Snowden from his Moscow hideout in 2013.

Now the German media are engaged in equal-opportunity bashing. The NSA gets it but so does the BND, Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service. Earlier this month the cover of Der Spiegel read: “The Betrayal.” Inside, the magazine claimed that the government and its spooks had undermined the nation’s interests, with the BND spying on German citizens and European companies on behalf of the villainous NSA. The hero of the drama is Mr. Snowden, who keeps dribbling out pilfered classified data.

“Friends don’t spy on friends” was the line out of the chancellor’s office during Handygate. But they do. In the real world, everybody spies on everybody. Ask such best friends as the CIA and Israel’s Mossad. Germany is also a favorite playground for British and French intelligence, not to mention Russians and Chinese. Berlin, after all, is the fulcrum of the strategic balance in Europe and capital of the world’s third-largest arms exporter.

The BND stands accused of delivering massive amounts of metadata—such as account details and phone-call histories—to the NSA as well as reams of intelligence on European arms consortia, European Union institutions and EU leaders. It also allegedly supplied phone numbers the NSA presumably used to eavesdrop on the French.

Prosecutors are filing charges against “persons unknown.” Parliament is investigating. Opposition parties of the left are smearing Ms. Merkel, yesterday’s NSA victim, as a “poodle” of the Americans. But the basic story is as fresh as last week’s weather report.

Helmut Schmidt, Germany’s chancellor from 1974 to 1982, likes to quip that all his phone calls were monitored by somebody or other. Helmut Kohl, chancellor from 1982 to 1998, devised a low-tech defense: a Mason jar full of coins kept in his Mercedes. For sensitive calls, he was driven to a lonely phone booth in the Bonn countryside. One can imagine scenes of Mr. Kohl fumbling for one-mark pieces while pleading with French President Chirac: “Hang on, Jacques, while I drop more silver into the slot. Now, what did you say?”

What is the difference between then and now? In the old days, when West Germans huddled under America’s strategic umbrella, U.S. agents caught spying were discreetly told to go home. After Handygate, Berlin’s CIA station chief was kicked out in full public view. Every time Mr. Snowden parcels out another chunk, it is rumble time between Washington and Berlin.

Is this anti-Americanism? True, the chattering classes are none too fond of Uncle Sam. But nine out of 10 Germans ranked the U.S. first when the Allensbach Institute for Public Opinion Polling asked in 2013 which country is “particularly important” as guardian of world peace; 64% believe that Germany should “cooperate closely” with the U.S. So realism will prevail.

Listen to BND President Gerhard Schindler. “The NSA is our partner, not our opponent,” he told a parliamentary panel last week. “We are dependent on the NSA, not the other way round.” Mr. Schindler added that the U.S. had provided Germany with “significant” intelligence on terrorist plots. And in the snooping business you have to give in order to get. Hence the BND delivers what the market demands.

But doesn’t the NSA conduct “industrial espionage,” as the current indictment has it, like the Chinese? Not quite. If it did, Detroit would build better cars. Take the Airbus Group EADSY -3.11 %(formerly EADS), the Franco-German concern that manufactures Airbus as well as sophisticated weaponry. The state as hired gun of Big Business à la China isn’t the American way. If the NSA were to slip Airbus Group blueprints to Boeing, BA -1.27 % its domestic rivals would scream “foul” and hit the federal government with multibillion-dollar lawsuits.

But you can’t blame the U.S. for wanting to know about illegal arms transfers, underhanded subsidies or bribes to foreign buyers. It would likewise be as legitimate for Europeans to find out what Boeing or Raytheon RTN -1.13 % were doing out of the public eye. So instead of grandstanding, my advice to Europeans is get some respect from those imperious Americans by acquiring the means to play tit for tat.

Unfortunately, the U.S. can do what the Europeans cannot. The BND used to be first rate during the Cold War when it had a leg up on its Western partners in scoping out the Warsaw Pact. This made the BND a valued trading partner. Today it needs to tap the vast global network of the U.S.—and give in return.

Dependency grates. That is at the core of the recurrent flareups and protestations of superior morality in Europe. Yet in a nasty world, sanctimony and badmouthing the NSA and BND have a price. Annoyed by the leaks coming out of Berlin, the NSA is threatening a “reappraisal” of the relationship while German politicos are openly agitating for its “curtailment.” How will that improve German intel?

Mr. Putin must be smiling as he watches Berlin and Washington, the West’s strongest powers, going mano-a-mano—thanks to Edward Snowden, who will keep ladling out the venomous brew. As kingpin of Russia’s divide-and-conquer strategy, Mr. Snowden will rank as the greatest counterintelligence disaster since the Rosenbergs and Klaus Fuchs, who betrayed America’s most precious nuclear secrets to Moscow.

Mr. Joffe teaches U.S. foreign policy at Stanford, where he is a fellow of the Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Hoover Institution. His latest book is “The Myth of America’s Decline” (W.W. Norton, 2014).

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Stunning indictment raises questions about ex-speaker
Friday May 29th, 2015 at 2:08 PM

Home - CBSNews.Com

Prosecutors allege Dennis Hastert tried to cover up "prior misconduct" with person identified only as "Individual A"

Water Revolution in Israel Overcomes Any Threat of Droughtby ISABEL KERSHNER
Friday May 29th, 2015 at 2:08 PM

NYT > World

The Sorek desalination plant rises out of the sandy ground about nine miles south of Tel Aviv. Said to be the largest plant of its kind in the world, it produces 40 billion gallons of potable water a year, enough for about a sixth of Israel’s roughly eight million citizens.

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