VOCR Gazette - 061413

Friday June 14 2013

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Syria condemns chemical weapon 'lie'

Syria has dismissed as "a caravan of lies" claims it used chemical weapons after the US said it would give the rebels "direct military aid".

President Obama made the decision after his administration concluded Syrian forces under Bashar al-Assad were using chemical weapons, a spokesman said.
A rebel leader, Salim Idris, told the BBC it was a "very important step".
But Syria's foreign ministry said the US had used "fabricated information" on chemical weapons to justify the move. 

Washington was resorting to "cheap tactics" to justify Mr Obama's decision to arm the rebels, said a statement from the ministry.

On the ground, there were reports of the fiercest fighting in months in Syria's largest city, Aleppo.
Two years of conflict had killed at least 93,000 people, the UN said on Thursday, at a current rate of 5,000 people a month. More than 1,700 children under the age of 10 have died, it added.
CIA training? Ben Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser to Mr Obama, said the president had made the decision to increase assistance, including "military support", to the rebels' Supreme Military Council (SMC) and Syrian Opposition Coalition.
The US was "comfortable" working with Gen Idris, leader of the SMC, and aimed to isolate some of the more extremist elements of the opposition, such as Sunni militant group al-Nusra, he added.

Iran's leader jabs US as presidential vote begins to replace Ahmadinejad

Iranian voters appeared to heed calls to cast ballots Friday in a presidential election that has suddenly become a showdown across Iran's political divide: Hard-liners looking to cement their control and re-energized reformists backing the lone moderate left in the race.

The balloting kicked off with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei delivering a salty rebuke to U.S. questions over the openness of the presidential contest , telling Washington "the hell with you" after casting his ballot in a race widely criticized in the West as rigged in favor of Tehran's ruling system.
Later, long lines snaked outside some voting stations in Tehran and elsewhere. The enthusiasm suggests an election that was once viewed as a pre-engineered victory for Iran's ruling establishment has become a chance for reform-minded voters re-exert their voices after years of withering crackdowns.

Syria No-Fly Zone Considered By U.S., Western Diplomats Say

ANKARA/BEIRUT, June 14 (Reuters) - The United States is considering a no-fly zone in Syria, potentially its first direct intervention into the two-year-old civil war, Western diplomats said on Friday, after the White House said Syria had crossed a "red line" by using nerve gas.
After months of deliberation, President Barack Obama's administration said on Thursday it would now arm rebels, having obtained proof the Syrian government used chemical weapons against fighters trying to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad.
Two senior Western diplomats said Washington is looking into a no-fly zone close to Syria's southern border with Jordan.
"Washington is considering a no-fly zone to help Assad's opponents," one diplomat said. He said it would be limited "time-wise and area-wise, possibly near the Jordanian border", giving no further details.
Imposing a no-fly zone would require the United States to destroy Syria's sophisticated Russian-built air defences, thrusting it into the war with the sort of action NATO used to help topple Muammar Gaddafi in Libya two years ago. Washington says it has not ruled it out, but a decision is not "imminent".

Turkey puts park project on hold

The Turkish government says it has agreed to suspend redevelopment plans for an Istanbul park until a court ruling, after talks with protesters.

The plan to rebuild an old barracks on Gezi Park has sparked Turkey's biggest anti-government protests in decades.
A government spokesman said there would be no attempt to start the project until a court decided whether or not it was legal.
If the court backed the government, the project would be put to a popular vote.
'Positive outcome' Turkey's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, held late-night talks in the capital Ankara with delegates from the Taksim Solidarity group.
The negotiations came hours after he had delivered a "final warning" to the protesters to leave the park.
Tayfun Kahraman of the protest group Taksim Solidarity described the prime minister's pledge that the development would not continue before a final court decision as "a positive outcome" from Thursday night's talks.
He said the protesters would evaluate the outcome of the meeting and would present their decision on Friday evening.
Five people have died and thousands have been injured since the protests began in Gezi Park on 31 May, spreading to the adjacent Taksim Square a day later and other cities across Turkey.

Egypt Brotherhood backs Syria jihad, denounces Shi'ites

Muslim Brotherhood spokesman in Cairo accuses Hezbollah of launching a new "sectarian war" by joining Iran, Assad in a fight that pits mainly Sunni rebels against Assad's Alawite minority, a Shi'ite offshoot.

CAIRO - Egypt's ruling Muslim Brotherhood blamed Shi'ites for creating religious strife throughout Islam's history, as the movement joined a call by Sunni clerics for jihad against the Syrian government and its Shi'ite allies.

In a striking display of the religious enmity sweeping the region since Lebanon's Iran-backed Hezbollah committed its forces behind Syrian President Bashar Assad, a Brotherhood spokesman in Cairo told Reuters on Friday: "Throughout history, Sunnis have never been involved in starting a sectarian war."

Until recently, Egypt's new Islamist president, the Brotherhood's Mohamed Morsi, was promoting rapprochement with Iran, the bastion of Shi'ite political power and in February he hosted the first visit by an Iranian president in over 30 years.

But spokesman Ahmed Aref said Hezbollah had launched a new "sectarian war" last month by joining Tehran's other key ally Assad in a fight that pits mainly Sunni rebels against a Syrian elite drawn from Assad's Alawite minority, a Shi'ite offshoot.

For that reason, Aref said, the Brotherhood, which emerged from oppression after the fall of military rule two years ago to run by far the most populous Arab state, had joined a call made on Thursday by leading Sunni clerics for holy war in Syria.

Radio presenter sacked over Australian PM Gillard interview

SYDNEY: An Australian radio presenter was sacked on Friday after sparking outrage by pressing embattled Prime Minister Julia Gillard on air whether her hairdresser boyfriend Tim Mathieson is gay.

The startling exchange came with Gillard's Labor Party far behind in the polls ahead of September elections. Personal attacks are mounting against her, including a recent menu item at an opposition party fundraiser that she called "grossly sexist and offensive".

Howard Sattler, known as a shock jock for his blunt style, posed the "gay" question late Thursday after challenging Gillard to answer a series of rumours, myths and innuendos.

He suggested Mathieson, who has been Gillard's partner for seven years and is known in Australia as the "First Bloke", must be homosexual because of his line of work, although he no longer cuts hair for a living.

"Tim's gay. That's not me saying it, that's a myth," he asked her.

"Well, that's absurd," Gillard, who met Mathieson in a Melbourne hairdressing salon before becoming prime minister, responded.
"Yeah, but you hear it, he must be gay, he's a hairdresser," Sattler said.
Gillard, Australia's first women leader, accused Sattler of making generalisations about male hairdressers.

China company to build canal

The Nicaraguan Congress has approved a proposal to have a canal built linking the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans.

A Hong Kong-based company has been granted a 50-year concession to build the waterway, which will rival the Panama Canal.
The $40bn (£25bn) plan has been criticised by environmentalists, who say cargo ships will create a permanent risk to Lake Nicaragua.
But President Daniel Ortega says the project will bring prosperity.
Nicaraguan leaders have for centuries dreamt of building a canal linking its Caribbean coast to the Pacific.
Several initiatives failed and the project suffered what seemed to be a final blow when the United States decided to build a canal in Panama, which opened in 1914. 

Suspected commander of Nazi SS-led unit found living in Minnesota

A commander of a Nazi SS-led unit accused of burning villages filled with women and children lied to American immigration officials to get into the US and has been living in Minnesota since shortly after the second world war, according to evidence uncovered by Associated Press.
Michael Karkoc, 94, told US authorities in 1949 that he had performed no military service during the war, concealing his work as an officer and founding member of the SS-led Ukrainian Self Defence Legion and later as an officer in the SS Galician Division, according to records obtained by AP through a Freedom of Information Act request.
The Galician Division and a Ukrainian nationalist organisation in which he served were both on a secret US government blacklist of organisations whose members were forbidden from entering the US at the time.
Though records do not show that Karkoc had a direct hand in war crimes, statements from men in his unit and other documentation confirm that the Ukrainian company he led massacred civilians, and suggest that Karkoc was at the scene of these atrocities as the company leader. Nazi SS files say he and his unit were also involved in the 1944 Warsaw uprising, in which the Nazis brutally suppressed a Polish rebellion against German occupation.

Welcome to Utah, the NSA's desert home for eavesdropping on America

Drive south down Camp Williams Road, a highway outside Salt Lake City, and your eye is drawn to the left. A gun-mounted helicopter and other military hardware marks the entrance of the Utah army national guard base. The ice-capped Rockies soar in the distance.
To the right there is little to see: featureless scrubland, a metal fence, some warehouses. A small exit – not marked on ordinary maps – takes you up a curving road. A yellow sign says this is military property closed to unauthorised personnel.
Further up the hill, invisible from the highway, you encounter concrete walls, a security boom and checkpoint with guards, sniffer dogs and cameras. Two plaques with official seals announce the presence of the office of the director of national intelligence and the National Security Agency.
A spokesperson at NSA headquarters in Maryland did not welcome a Guardian request to visit its western outpost. "That is a secure facility. If you trespass on federal property security guards will be obliged to do their jobs." An interview was out of the question.
Welcome to the Utah Data Center, a new home for the NSA's exponentially expanding information trove. The $1.7bn facility, two years in the making, will soon host supercomputers to store gargantuan quantities of data from emails, phone calls, Google searches and other sources. Sited on an unused swath of the national guard base, by September it will employ around 200 technicians, span 1m sq ft and use 65 megawatts of power.
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Obama approves arms for Syria rebels

The US is to supply direct military aid to the Syrian opposition for the first time, the White House has announced.

President Obama made the decision after his administration concluded Syrian forces under Bashar al-Assad were using chemical weapons, a spokesman said.
Ben Rhodes did not give details about the military aid other than to say it would be "different in scope and scale to what we have provided before".
The Syrian government said the US statement was "full of lies".
The White House "relied on fabricated information" about chemical weapons use in Syria in order to justify its decision to arm the rebels, the foreign ministry said.
The BBC's Jim Muir in Beirut says the US announcement is one that the Syrian opposition has been pushing and praying for for months.

Texas Gov. Perry signs 'Merry Christmas' bill into law

Surrounded by sleigh bell-ringing Santa Claus impersonators, Gov. Rick Perry on Thursday signed a law protecting Christmas and other holiday celebrations in Texas public schools from legal challenges - but also stressed that freedom of religion is not the same thing as freedom from religion.

It was a serious tone for an otherwise fun bill-signing and should bolster the governor's Christian conservative credentials before he travels to Washington for the Faith & Freedom Coalition's "Road to Majority" conference with the likes of tea party darlings and U.S. Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida, Kentucky's Rand Paul and fellow Texan Ted Cruz.
Dubbed the "Merry Christmas" bill, the bipartisan measure sailed through the state House and Senate to reach Perry's desk.
It removes legal risks of saying "Merry Christmas" in schools while also protecting traditional holiday symbols, such as a menorah or nativity scene, so long as more than one religion and a secular symbol are also reflected.
"I realize it's only June. But it's a good June and the holidays are coming early this year," Perry said. " It's a shame that a bill like this one I'm signing today is even required, but I'm glad that we're standing up for religious freedom in this state. Religious freedom does not mean freedom from religion."

Polls show Obama's real worry: NSA leaks erode trust in government

Thursday, the Guardian released a poll conducted on Monday and Tuesday nights by Public Policy Polling looking at America's reaction to the National Security Agency (NSA) controversy. The public appears to be reacting negatively to the revelations – and it seems to be hurting President Obama.
We found 50% of American voters believe the NSA should not be collecting telephone or internet records, compared to the 44% who think they should. The results hold even when respondents were told that the data the government is collecting is "metadata" (and not necessarily actual content of communications).
These results are consistent with a CBS News poll, Fox News poll, and YouGov survey that showed only 38%, 32%, and 35% of Americans respectively approved of phone record collection in order to reduce the chance of a terrorist attack. A Gallup poll was consistent with these, showing only 37% approved monitoring of Americans' phone and internet use.
The results conflict with a Pew Research/Washington Post survey, which showed 56% of Americans found the NSA's tracking of phone records to be acceptable. Why the difference?
As Mark Blumenthal pointed out Wednesday, the difference could well have to do with the Pew Research/Washington Post poll pointing out that the government had a "court order". A court order would, to most, probably imply something less sinister; other pollsters had not made this distinction.
That said, the Guardian survey confirms the Pew survey in another important way. Nate Cohn recognized Wednesday that only 45% of Americans approved of the government monitoring of Americans' emails and computer information. The Guardian survey discovered a very similar 41% of Americans who feel this way. 

House Spurns Obama, Votes To Keep Gitmo Open

WASHINGTON -- A worsening hunger strike and a fresh plea by President Barack Obama to close the Guantanamo Bay prison fell on deaf ears in Congress Friday, as the House of Representatives voted to keep the increasingly infamous jail open.
The House voted to make it harder for Obama to begin shifting inmates, adding a restriction to the National Defense Authorization Act of 2014 that bars any of the roughly 56 prisoners who have been cleared by military and intelligence officials to be sent to Yemen from being transferred there for one year. Some 30 other Gitmo inmates of the 166 kept there have also been cleared for release.
"The Defense Department should not transfer detainees to Yemen because they represent some of the most dangerous terrorists known in the world," said Rep. Jackie Walorski (R-Ind.), who sponsored the fresh ban on shipping anyone out of Gitmo.
Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), who offered a competing amendment to create a plan to close Gitmo, found the new restriction especially ironic, noting that federal authorities believe the Yemeni detainees are safe enough to be set free.
"Not everybody that we rounded up and took to Guantanamo, unfortunately, turned out to be the very dangerous terrorists that we thought they were," Smith said, adding that continuing to hold them -- at a facility costing $1.6 million a year for each inmate -- was not sensible.
"Determining that if there is any minimimal threat whatsoever we're simply going to hold them forever is, well, quite frankly, un-American. That is contrary to our values to say we're going to hold somebody indefinitely -- I gather forever -- because we think there might possibly be some risk," Smith said. "That's not the way the Constitution is supposed to work."
Walorski's amendment passed, 236 to 188. Smith's, also backed by Reps. Jim Moran (D-Va.) and Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), failed 174 to 249 after Republicans argued that it was simply too dangerous to send terrorsim suspects to the United States.
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