Gazette 04-15-14

Tuesday April 15 2014

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Ukraine says Donetsk 'anti-terror operation' under way

Ukraine's acting President Olexander Turchynov has announced the start of an "anti-terrorist operation" against pro-Russian separatists.

He told parliament it was being conducted "stage by stage, in a responsible... manner".
Hours later, gunfire was heard at an airfield which had been in the hands of militants.
Mr Turchynov said the airfield at Kramatorsk had been "liberated", according to Interfax.
The US and Russian presidents have discussed the crisis by telephone.
Barack Obama urged Vladimir Putin to use his influence to make separatists in Donetsk and other parts of eastern Ukraine stand down.
Mr Putin denied that Russia was intervening in the crisis.
Pro-Russian rebels have seized buildings in about 10 towns and cities across Ukraine's eastern provinces, which form the heartland of Ukraine's heavy industry.
Thousands of Russian troops are reported to be deployed along the border, kindling fears that any crackdown on the rebels could trigger an invasion.
Russia annexed the Ukrainian province of Crimea last month, after it broke away and held a controversial referendum on self-determination.

Report: 2 people wounded in gunbattle between Ukrainian troops, pro-Russian protesters

IZYUM, Ukraine –  Russia's state RIA-Novosti news agency says two pro-Russian insurgents have been wounded in a skirmish with the Ukrainian military near an airport in eastern Ukraine.
It said Ukrainian troops drove to the airport at Kramatorsk, outside the city of Slovyansk, in an armored personnel carrier Tuesday and started talking to the rebels who control the site. It said a skirmish erupted shortly after.

RIA-Novosti's report didn't say who started shooting or give any further details. The agency also reported the Ukrainian military has moved into Slovyansk itself.
The report could not be independently confirmed immediately.
Slovyansk is one of the cities in eastern Ukraine where pro-Russian protesters have seized government buildings and police stations.
Related Story: Ukraine crisis: Government troops recapture eastern airport

Jordan Ambassador Kidnapped: Gunmen Abduct Fawaz al-Etan In Libya, Official Says

TRIPOLI, Libya (AP) — Masked gunmen abducted the Jordanian ambassador in the Libyan capital early Tuesday, officials said, the latest in a wave of abductions in the North African nation still plagued by lawlessness more than two years after the ouster of dictator Moammar Gadhafi.

Assailants in two cars opened fire on Ambassador Fawaz al-Etan's vehicle in central Tripoli near the Jordanian Embassy, wounding his driver before forcing the diplomat out at gunpoint, said Libyan Foreign Ministry spokesman Said al-Aswad.

The Foreign Ministry said in a statement that it is closely following the case and will "exert all effort to ensure safety of the ambassador." It also called on the kidnappers to release him, and urged Libyans to "respect the diplomatic and foreign envoys in the country."

A spokeswoman for Jordan's Foreign Ministry, Sabah al-Rafie, confirmed the kidnapping but had no further details.

Nigeria unrest: 'Attackers abduct 200 schoolgirls'

Scores of girls have been abducted in an attack on a school in north-east Nigeria, parents say.

Gunmen reportedly arrived at the school in Chibok, Borno state, late last night, and ordered the hostel's teenage residents on to lorries.
Parents told the BBC's Hausa service that at least 200 girls had been abducted. The attackers are thought to be from the Islamist group, Boko Haram.
On Monday, bombings blamed on the group killed more than 70 people in Abuja.
Boko Haram, whose name means "Western education is forbidden" in the local Hausa language, has been waging an armed campaign for an Islamic state in northern Nigeria.
'Soldiers overpowered' The attack on the hostel in Chibok was confirmed by police, although they had no confirmation of the abductions.
Residents in the area reported hearing explosions followed by gunfire last night, said BBC reporter Mohammed Kabir Mohammed in the capital, Abuja.

Death toll rises to 75 in Nigeria bus station attack, health minister says

ABUJA, Nigeria –  The toll from a massive explosion at a busy bus station in Nigeria's capital rose to 75 dead Tuesday and is expected to grow.
There has been no claim of responsibility for the rush-hour blast, though President Goodluck Jonathan is blaming the attack on Islamic extremists.

Health Minister Onyebuchi Chukwu visited victims in hospitals Tuesday and put their number at 141. He said a previous figure of 164 wounded had counted some patients twice.
The death toll will increase, as the victims who were blown apart are counted, Chukwu said. "When you have piece of flesh here and there, limbs here and there, they need to be properly sorted out," he said. "By the time the pathologists are through, obviously, we will then have to revise the mortality data."
The explosion just miles from Nigeria's seat of government in the center of the country is increasing doubts about the military's ability to contain a 5-year-old Islamic uprising that has killed more than 1,500 people this year.
The attack, hundreds of miles from the insurgents' traditional strongholds in the northeast, comes after Abubakar Shekau, leader of the Boko Haram terrorist network, threatened to attack the capital and to take the conflict across the border to Cameroon if that country continues to assist Nigeria in its fight.

Afghan minister kidnapped in Kabul

Gunmen run Ahmad Shah Wahid's car off the road before dragging him into vehicle and driving off 

Gunmen have abducted the Afghan deputy public works minister in Kabul, officials say.
Ahmad Shah Wahid was on his way to work on Tuesday when five gunmen ran his car off the road in northern Kabul, dragged him into their four-wheel-drive vehicle and sped away, said Gul Agha Hashim, the city's police chief of investigations.
The armed men shot and wounded Wahid's driver when he tried to drive away to safety, said Soheil Kakar, a spokesman for the public works ministry.
It was not immediately clear who was behind the abduction. Kakar said there had so far been no ransom demand.
Wahid, who is in his mid-50s, studied engineering and road construction in Italy and has been deputy minister for four years. Before that, he worked in the ministry overseeing road reconstruction, Kakar said.
"He is a very professional man and had no disputes with anyone," Kakar added.
Kidnappings for ransom and abductions by Taliban insurgents are relatively common in Afghanistan, but Wahid is the highest-ranking government official abducted in years.
A Taliban spokesman said by telephone that he was not aware of Tuesday's abduction but would check to see if the insurgents were involved.

Canada cuts Commonwealth funding over Sri Lanka woes

Canada will suspend funding to the Commonwealth while the chair of the secretariat is occupied by Sri Lanka because of human rights concerns.

Canada will instead direct its planned $20m (£12m) contribution toward other Commonwealth programmes.
Sri Lanka has denied accusations by rights groups that its forces committed atrocities in the 1983-2009 war.
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper boycotted a Commonwealth summit in Sri Lanka last year.
Sri Lanka's army defeated separatist Tamil Tiger rebels in May 2009. The rebels have also been accused of atrocities.
"Canada remains deeply concerned about the absence of accountability for alleged serious violations of human rights and international humanitarian standards in Sri Lanka," Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird told Canadian media.
"We will reallocate the funds to assist in combating the practice of child, early and forced marriage, and help Commonwealth civil society advance the promotion of human rights," he added.
Mr Harper's government has been praised by human rights groups in the past for pushing for an investigation into the end of Sri Lanka's civil war.
Since then there have been allegations of mass civilian deaths at the end of the conflict.

 
US 'surprised' Israel did not support UN vote on Ukraine's territorial integrity

State Department spokesperson denies US is infuriated over Israel's lack of position on Russia-Ukraine crisis; Ukrainian troops disembark from helicopters in eastern Ukraine in special operation against pro-Russia separatists.

Amidst one of the deepest East-West crises since the Cold War over Russia and the Ukraine, the US expressed surprise that Israel did not support last month’s UN vote on Ukraine’s territorial integrity.
On Tuesday, NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said Russia is deeply involved  in eastern Ukraine where pro-Moscow separatists have seized control of a number of government buildings. 
A day earlier, in Washington, US State Department Spokesperson Jen Psaki said the US was “surprised” that Israel did not support a UN vote in March following Russia’s annexation of Crimea.   
Psaki was responding to a question regarding a recent report in the Israeli media that the US was infuriated with Israel because of its lack of a position on the Russia-Ukraine crisis. She said this was not how the US would characterize its reaction to Israel on this issue.  
“We were surprised that Israel did not join the vast majority of countries that voted to support Ukraine’s territorial integrity in the United Nations,” Psaki said.

In China, police seize thousands of weapons: Report

BEIJING: Police in China have seized a huge cache of weapons including 15,000 guns and 120,000 knives from an illegal arms ring and detained 15 suspects, state media reported on Monday.

The weapons were confiscated after a four-month investigation, according to the state-run China Daily newspaper, which called the operation the largest-ever such seizure in China.

Police were tipped off to the arms ring's existence after investigating a robbery in Guiyang, the capital of southwest China's Guizhou province, the newspaper said.

They traced the source of a gun used in the robbery to a family-run "gang" in neighbouring Hunan province that advertised itself as a factory but controlled several warehouses where guns and knives were sold.

The group's business covered 27 provinces and municipalities, the paper said.

Private gun ownership is banned in China, and knives exceeding certain measurements are classified as "controlled".

Violent crime is rare in the country, but authorities have pledged a wide-ranging crackdown after recent incidents including a mass stabbing at a train station in the southwestern city of Kunming that left 29 dead and 143 wounded.

American who fought against Assad's regime in Syria is dead, family says

A onetime U.S. Army soldier who joined forces with rebels in fighting against the Assad regime during Syria's bloody civil war has died.
The family of Eric Harroun announced on its Facebook page that the 31-year-old died, though the cause of death is still unknown. Relatives confirmed the death on Wednesday. Foul play is not suspected and toxicology reports are not expected for 60 to 90 days.

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Harroun gained international attention when it was discovered he was fighting alongside jihadists and America-hating terrorists and celebrating his bloody exploits on YouTube videos.
The FBI arrested Harroun upon his re-entry into the U.S. He was charged in June 2013 with conspiracy to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization and conspiracy to use destructive devices overseas. Harroun, a Phoenix native, pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and was sentenced to time served. He was released and returned home to his family in Arizona. 
Harroun's case posed a political dilemma for the Justice Department. Harroun was fighting for the Syrian rebels -- who were supported by the State Department -- in their battle against Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Russia Tests Multi-Warhead ICBM

Flight test comes amid heightened tensions over Ukraine

Russia’s military carried out a flight test of a new multi-warhead intercontinental ballistic missile on Monday amid growing tensions with the United States over the crisis in Ukraine.
The SS-27 Mod 2 road-mobile ICBM was launched around 2:40 a.m. EST from Russia’s Plesetsk launch facility, located about 500 miles north of Moscow.
“The main purpose of the launch is to validate the reliability of a batch of this class of missiles made at the Votkinsk Plant,” Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Yegorov told state-run Interfax-AVN.
An unspecified number of simulated nuclear warheads landed at an impact range on the Kura test range on the Kamchatka Peninsula, in the Russian Far East, Yegorov said. The distance is around 3,500 miles.
The SS-27 Mod 2 is Russia’s newest ICBM and has been touted by Russian officials as designed specifically to defeat U.S. missile defenses.
Mark B. Schneider, a missile specialist with National Institute for Public Policy, said there is evidence indicating the Russians have violated the START arms treaty by developing the SS-27 Mod 2 with multiple warheads.
“The original missile that Russia called the Topol M Variant 2 and we call the SS-27 was a single warhead missile,” Schneider told the Free Beacon. “START prohibits increasing the declared number of warheads.”
The missile test launch followed an incident Saturday when a Russian Su-24 jet conducted a dozen low-altitude passes over a U.S. warship in the Black Sea. The Pentagon called the maneuver “provocative.”
“The aircraft did not respond to multiple queries and warnings from USS Donald Cook, and the event ended without incident after approximately 90 minutes,” Army Col. Steven Warren said.
“The Donald Cook is more than capable of defending itself against two Su-24s,” the colonel said.
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Privacy fears over FBI facial recognition database

Campaigners have raised privacy concerns over a facial recognition database being developed by the FBI that could contain 52m images by 2015.

The civil liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) obtained information about the project through a freedom of information request.
It said it was concerned that images of non-criminals would be stored alongside those of criminals.
The FBI say the database will reduce terrorist and criminal activities.
The facial recognition database is part of the bureau's Next Generation Identification (NGI) programme which is a large biometric database being developed to replace the current Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS).
The programme, which is being rolled out over a number of years, will offer "state of the art biometric identification services" according to the bureau's website.
As well as facial recognition images the programme is being developed to include the capture and storage of finger prints, iris scans and palm prints.

Even The Nation's Top Law Enforcement Official Has Smoked Pot

Attorney General Eric Holder said he smoked pot in college during an interview with HuffPost published Tuesday.
And the way he put it, it really wasn't a big deal:

Asked about his own personal history with marijuana, Holder told HuffPost he used pot in college and had characterized it as "youthful experimentation" in background checks for various federal nominations.
"Yeah, I certainly have said in my four, five, whatever number confirmation hearings I've had that you fill out the forms, that I had youthful experimentation, I think was the phrase that we were told to use, when I was in college," Holder said.

Holder is in good company -- President Obama also smoked marijuana in his youth, and wrote about the experience in his memoir "Dreams From My Father."
Meanwhile, the war on drugs has left the U.S. with the world's highest incarceration rate, as HuffPost noted earlier:

More than half of federal prisoners are incarcerated for drug crimes in 2010, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and that number has only just dipped below 50 percent in 2011. Despite more relaxed attitudes among the public at large toward non-violent offenses like marijuana use, the number of people in federal prison for drug offenses spiked from 74,276 in 2000 to 97,472 in 2010, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
The punishment falls disproportionately on people of color. Blacks make up 50 percent of the state and local prisoners incarcerated for drug crimes. Black kids are 10 times more likely to be arrested for drug crimes than white ones -- even though white kids are more likely to abuse drugs.

A marijuana arrest happens roughy every 42 seconds in the U.S., according to a 2012 FBI report. In 2011, the number of arrests for marijuana possession surpassed arrests for all violent crimes combined.

‘Not over’? Feds coy over next move in Nevada rancher standoff

Tensions simmered Tuesday in the standoff between federal land managers and a Nevada rancher -- but the feds are being coy about how far they'll go to pursue Cliven Bundy as both sides regroup for their next move. 
Federal land managers backed down in a weekend standoff with Bundy after hundreds of states' rights protesters, including armed militia members, showed up to protest federal officials seizing his cattle. Some protesters had their guns drawn and pointed toward law enforcement, some of whom were also armed, on the scene -- ultimately, no shots were fired and the Bureau of Land Management reported that officials left over safety concerns. 
Nevada Sen. Harry Reid said afterward that the dispute is "not over." But whether the feds will keep plugging away with a court challenge or go further is unclear. 
One question is whether there will be any repercussions for armed protesters. 
Asked repeatedly by FoxNews.com whether the standoff might lead to a criminal investigation into possible threats against federal officers, administration officials would not say. 
A Justice Department spokesman said they had no comment on the matter. 
Asked whether BLM planned to ask for such an investigation, a BLM spokesman said "the gather is over" and referred to prior statements put out over the weekend.

Social Security stops trying to collect on old debts by seizing tax refunds

The Social Security Administration announced Monday that it will immediately cease efforts to collect on taxpayers’ debts to the government that are more than 10 years old.

The action comes after The Washington Post reported that the government was seizing state and federal tax refunds that were on their way to about 400,000 Americans who had relatives who owed money to the Social Security agency. In many cases, the people whose refunds were intercepted had never heard of any debt, and the debts dated as far back as the middle of the past century.
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Cable bill hike to pay for CBC?

OTTAWA -The head of the CBC is floating the idea of taking a percentage of every cable or satellite bill in Canada as a way to get the state broadcaster more money.
The comments came during a town hall meeting last week where CBC president Hubert Lacroix was discussing plans for 657 job cuts and changes in the wake of CBC's loss of NHL hockey broadcasts.
During a question and answer session, Lacroix suggested a CBC tax similar to that in Britain. The BBC is funded through a fee on every television in Britain, and in Lacroix's mind that money should come from cable and satellite companies, known in the industry as BDUs.
"Imagine if in Canada the BDUs decided to give us three or four or five percent of whatever bottom line number and they committed to that over years, maybe that could be something," Lacroix said.
A CBC spokesman declined to comment on whether the idea has been discussed with the government or industry leaders but did confirm it is something they are considering.
"Our goal is to achieve financial sustainability that allows us to evolve with our audience and stakeholders," spokesman France Belisle said.
Heritage Minister Shelly Glover's office threw cold water on the concept.
"The CBC already receives significant taxpayer funds. They can operate within their existing budget," Marisa Monnin said. "According to the CBC, it is declining viewership that is causing their challenges. It is up to the CBC to provide programming that Canadians actually want to watch."