Saturday, June 8, 2013

WASHINGTON (AP) — Eager to quell a domestic furor over U.S. spying, the nation’s top intelligence official stressed Saturday that a previously undisclosed program for tapping into Internet usage is authorized by Congress, falls under strict supervision of a secret court and cannot intentionally target a U.S. citizen. He decried the revelation of that and another intelligence-gathering program as reckless.

For the second time in three days, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper took the rare step of declassifying some details of an intelligence program to respond to media reports about counterterrorism techniques employed by the government.

“Disclosing information about the specific methods the government uses to collect communications can obviously give our enemies a ‘playbook’ of how to avoid detection,” he said in a statement.

Clapper said the data collection under the program, first unveiled by the newspapers The Washington Post and The Guardian, was with the approval of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court and with the knowledge of Internet service providers. He emphasized that the government does not act unilaterally to obtain that data from the servers of those providers.

Clapper’s reaction came a day after President Barack Obama defended the counterterrorism methods and said Americans need to “make some choices” in balancing privacy and security. But the president’s response and Clapper’s unusual public stance underscore the nerve touched by the disclosures and the sensitivity of the Obama administration to any suggestion that it is trampling on the civil liberties of Americans.

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Lifting secrecy on surveillance confronts country with tough choices of Internet era

NEW YORK (AP) — For more than a decade now, Americans have made peace with the uneasy knowledge that someone — government, business or both — might be watching.

We knew that the technology was there. We knew that the law might allow it. As we stood under a security camera at a street corner, connected with friends online or talked on a smartphone equipped with GPS, we knew, too, it was conceivable that we might be monitored.

Now, though, paranoid fantasies have come face to face with modern reality: The government IS collecting our phone records. The technological marvels of our age have opened the door to the National Security Agency’s sweeping surveillance of Americans’ calls.

Torn between our desires for privacy and protection, we’re now forced to decide what we really want.

“We are living in an age of surveillance,” said Neil Richards, a professor at Washington University’s School of Law in St. Louis who studies privacy law and civil liberties. “There’s much more watching and much more monitoring, and I think we have a series of important choices to make as a society — about how much watching we want.”

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Koreas meet in border village after tensions marked by nuclear threats, factory closure

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — Government delegates from North and South Korea began preparatory talks Sunday at a “truce village” on their heavily armed border aimed at setting ground-rules for a higher-level discussion on easing animosity and restoring stalled rapprochement projects.

The meeting at Panmunjom, where the truce ending the 1950-53 Korean War was signed, is the first of its kind on the Korean Peninsula in more than two years. Success will be judged on whether the delegates can pave the way for a summit between the ministers of each country’s department for cross-border affairs, which South Korea has proposed for Wednesday in Seoul. Such ministerial talks haven’t happened since 2007.

The intense media interest in what’s essentially a meeting of bureaucrats to iron out technical details is an indication of how bad ties between the Koreas have been.

Any dialogue is an improvement on the belligerence that has marked the relationship over recent years, which have seen North Korean nuclear tests and long-range rocket launches, attacks in 2010 blamed on the North that killed 50 South Koreans, and a steady stream in recent months of invective and threats from Pyongyang and counter-vows from Seoul.

“Today’s working-level talks will be a chance to take care of administrative and technical issues in order to successfully host the ministers’ talks,” one of the South Korean delegates, Unification Policy Officer Chun Hae-sung, said in Seoul before the group’s departure for Panmunjom.

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White House says Obama pushed China’s leader to do more against cybersecurity, with examples

RANCHO MIRAGE, Calif. (AP) — President Barack Obama used an unusually lengthy and informal desert summit to present Chinese President Xi Jingping with detailed evidence of intellectual property theft emanating from his country, as a top U.S. official declared Saturday that cybersecurity is now at the “center of the relationship” between the world’s largest economies.

While there were few clear policy breakthroughs on cybersecurity, U.S. officials said Obama and Xi were in broad agreement over the need for North Korea to be denuclearized. And both countries expressed optimism that the closer personal ties forged between the two leaders during the California summit could stem the mistrust between the world powers.

Still, Obama’s national security adviser Tom Donilon said resolving cybersecurity issues would be “key to the future” of the relationship.

Obama told Xi that “if it’s not addressed, if it continues to be this direct theft of United States property, that this was going to be very difficult problem in the economic relationship and was going to be an inhibitor to the relationship really reaching its full potential,” Donilon said during a briefing with reporters following the summit.

In their own recap of the meetings, Chinese officials said Xi opposed all forms of cyberspying, but claimed no responsibility for attacks against the U.S.

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Police chief says Santa Monica killings premeditated; gunman had 1,300 rounds of ammo

SANTA MONICA, Calif. (AP) — Police investigating why a heavily armed gunman plotted a rampage that killed four people and wounded several others were focused Saturday on how the violence began: directed at his own family.

What started as domestic violence led to a chaotic street shooting spree and ended less than 15 minutes later in a college library where the gunman was killed Friday by police as students studying for finals ran for cover or hunkered down to avoid whizzing bullets.

Investigators were looking at family connections to find a motive because the killer’s father and brother were the first victims, an official briefed on the probe who requested anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak publicly told The Associated Press.

The killer, who died a day shy of his 24th birthday, was connected to the home that went up in flames after the first shootings, said Police Chief Jacqueline Seabrooks. She refused to elaborate or name the suspect because a surviving family member was out of the country and couldn’t immediately be notified.

At an afternoon news conference next to the weapons and ammo found at multiple crime scenes, Seabrooks said the “cowardly murderer” planned the attack and was capable of firing 1,300 rounds.

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Equipment operator surrenders to face charges in deaths of 6 in Philadelphia building collapse

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — A heavy equipment operator with a lengthy rap sheet who is accused of being high on marijuana when a downtown building collapsed onto a thrift store, killing six people, surrendered Saturday to face charges in the deaths, police said.

Sean Benschop faces six counts of involuntary manslaughter, 13 counts of recklessly endangering another person and one count of risking a catastrophe. A warrant had been issued for his arrest and police had been searching for him.

Authorities believe the 42-year-old Benschop had been using an excavator Wednesday when the remains of the four-story building under demolition gave way and toppled onto an attached Salvation Army thrift store, killing two employees and four customers and injuring 13 others.

Deputy Mayor Everett Gillison said a toxicology report showed evidence that Benschop was high on marijuana. That finding, combined with witness statements and evidence from the scene, led to the decision Friday to raid his North Philadelphia home and later seek an arrest warrant, he said.

Benschop’s attorney, Daine Grey, said his client was not at fault.

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Over 50 years, local activists helped gay-rights movement surmount setbacks, make huge gains

Go back 50 years in time.

Homosexuality was deemed a mental disorder by the nation’s psychiatric authorities, and gay sex was a crime in every state but Illinois. Federal workers could be fired merely for being gay.

Today, gays serve openly in the military, work as TV news anchors and federal judges, win elections as big-city mayors and members of Congress. Popular TV shows have gay protagonists.

And now the gay-rights movement may be on the cusp of momentous legal breakthroughs. Later this month, a Supreme Court ruling could lead to legalization of same-sex marriage in California, and there’s a good chance the court will require the federal government to recognize same-sex marriages in all U.S. jurisdictions where they are legal — as of now, 12 states and Washington, D.C.

The transition over five decades has been far from smooth — replete with bitter protests, anti-gay violence, backlashes that inflicted many political setbacks. Unlike the civil rights movement and the women’s liberation movement, the campaign for gay rights unfolded without household-name leaders.

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Central Iowa residents ‘full of sadness’ after discovery of body believed to be missing girl

DAYTON, Iowa (AP) — Members of a small central Iowa city and its surrounding communities expressed sadness and said they felt “robbed of some innocence” on Saturday following the discovery of a body in a river believed to be that of a 15-year-old girl who was abducted more than two weeks ago.

Along streets and businesses in Dayton, about 60 miles north of Des Moines, purple ribbons were neatly tied on trees, blooming flower pots and utility poles. One large sign near a grocery store on the city’s main street read, “PRAY FOR KATHLYNN.”

It all signified hope for finding Kathlynn Shepard alive.

But investigators are confident that the body a fisherman found Friday night in the Des Moines River under a bridge near Boone is that of the high school freshman, who was abducted on May 20 along with a 12-year-old girl who later escaped and found help.

“Everyone is full of sadness,” said Mary Housken, 45, a utility secretary from nearby Duncombe. “We’re glad she’s home, but there was a glimmer of hope the circumstances would be different.”

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NBA veteran center Jason Collins joins US Rep. Joe Kennedy to march in Boston gay pride parade

BOSTON (AP) — NBA veteran center Jason Collins, the first active athlete in one of the four U.S. major professional sports leagues to come out as being gay, marched Saturday for nearly three miles in Boston’s gay pride parade with U.S. Rep. Joe Kennedy III, his onetime roommate at Stanford University.

Collins wore a T-shirt that read (hash)BeTrue when he joined thousands of marchers in the parade, chatting with well-wishers, greeting other marchers and holding babies as people came up to him to express their support.

The parade also featured former U.S. Rep. Barney Frank — the first sitting member of Congress to enter into a same-sex marriage — who also represented Massachusetts’ 4th Congressional District before Kennedy. U.S. Rep. Ed Markey, the Democratic U.S. Senate candidate seeking the seat once held by John Kerry, who stepped down to become secretary of state, also marched.

The parade’s grand marshal, Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, did not march because he is recovering from prostate surgery. Still, he came out of the city-owned house to greet Collins, Kennedy and other marchers as they passed by.

In coming out as gay in April, Collins wrote in an article for Sports Illustrated that his decision to go public came when Kennedy marched in last year’s parade and Collins didn’t feel that he could join him.

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Palace Malice gives trainer Todd Pletcher another Belmont Stakes win

NEW YORK (AP) — The two Hall of Fame jockeys were just about nose to nose as their horses hit the middle of the final turn of the Belmont Stakes.

Gary Stevens, aboard Preakness winner Oxbow, was going to relinquish the lead to the hard-charging Palace Malice, and he knew it. He glanced over to his right and looked at good friend Mike Smith and told him: “You go on with him big boy, you’re moving better than me.”

Was he ever.

Palace Malice seized the lead with a quarter-mile to go Saturday in the final leg of the Triple Crown and ran off to a 3¼-length victory over Oxbow at Belmont Park, with Kentucky Derby winner Orb another 1¾ lengths back in third.

“Mike rode a superb race,” Stevens said. “Midway around the turn, I said, ‘Well maybe.’ But I have ridden long enough to know that he (Oxbow) was going to walk home. To finish second, I am really surprised.”