U.S. says free expression was restricted in Russian election

People walk past a sign reading "United Russia" on a building in central Stavropol, Russia,

WARSAW, Sept 19 (Reuters) – Opposition politicians were at a sharp disadvantage in Russia’s parliamentary election because of limits on freedom of expression and barriers that made it hard for them to register, a U.S. human rights envoy said on Monday.

“The elections were well administered, but there were also significant restrictions to the rights of free expression and assembly,” Tom Malinowski, Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labour, told reporters.

The ruling United Russia party took three-quarters of the seats, providing a likely springboard for President Vladimir Putin to seek re-election to another term in the Kremlin in 2018. Liberal opposition parties failed to win a single seat in the weekend election.

“There were obstacles to the registration of political parties and candidates,” Malinowski said in Warsaw, where he was attending a conference of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) on human rights and democracy.

“For all these reasons, it remains very, very hard for non-systemic political parties and candidates in Russia to
compete with the ruling party.”

Earlier on Monday, the OSCE criticized the elections, saying they had been marred by curbs on basic rights and a lack of distinct political alternatives.

(Reporting by Wojciech Strupczewski and Maria Wejcman; Writing
by Marcin Goettig; Editing by Mark Trevelyan)

Florida declares neighborhood Zika free; CDC remains cautious

Florida Gov. Rick Scott speaks at a press conference about the Zika virus in Doral, Florida,

By Julie Steenhuysen and Ransdell Pierson

(Reuters) – U.S. health officials on Monday continued to advise pregnant women and their partners to consider postponing non-essential travel to Miami to avoid the risk of exposure to Zika, even as Florida Governor Rick Scott declared the city’s Wynwood neighborhood Zika-free and invited visitors to return.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a statement that the Wynwood neighborhood of Miami had been considered an area of active Zika virus transmission from June 15 to Sept. 18, 2016. It urged pregnant women who lived in or traveled to the neighborhood to consider getting tested for Zika.

“We want to continue to emphasize to pregnant women that they still should consider postponing non-essential travel for all of Miami-Dade (County). That is still in effect,” said CDC spokesman Tom Skinner.

Wynwood is the first neighborhood in the continental United States to have a local outbreak of Zika, a mosquito-borne virus that has been shown to cause birth defects.

Florida’s governor, at a news conference earlier on Monday, said there have not been any cases of Zika in the Wynwood neighborhood in the past 45 days, and declared that “everybody should be coming back here and enjoying themselves.”

“We had an issue, everybody took it seriously and we solved it,” he said.

Scott’s pronouncement followed news on Friday that the state had expanded the zone with active Zika transmission to nearby Miami Beach after five new cases of the virus were detected.

The Zika zone in Miami Beach, a popular tourist destination, tripled in size, growing from 1.5 square miles to 4.5 square miles. As of Friday, Florida has a total of 93 cases of Zika caused by local mosquitoes.

Zika is a particular threat to pregnant women because the virus can cause serious birth defects in babies whose mothers were infected during pregnancy, including microcephaly, a condition in which the brain is undersized, reflecting arrested development.

Scott also called on the U.S. government to approve spending to arrest any future spread of the virus in Florida and elsewhere, including funds for mosquito abatement, education and testing for Zika. A spending bill has been delayed in Congress.

(Reporting by Colleen Jenkins, Julie Steenhuysen and Ransdell Pierson; Editing by Dan Grebler)

U.S., Israel sign $38 billion military aid package

U.S. President Barack Obama meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval office of the White House in Washington

y Matt Spetalnick

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States will give Israel $38 billion in military aid over a decade, the largest such aid package in U.S. history, under an agreement disclosed this week and signed on Wednesday.

The deal, whose details were reported by Reuters earlier, will allow Israel to upgrade most of its fighter aircraft, improve its ground forces’ mobility and strengthen its missile defense systems, a top U.S. official said.

While the package constitutes the most U.S. military aid ever given to any country, it entails concessions by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, according to officials on both sides.

Those include Israel’s promise not to seek additional funds from Congress beyond what will be guaranteed annually in the new package, and to phase out a special arrangement that has allowed Israel to spend part of its U.S. aid on its own defense industry instead of on American-made weapons, the officials said.

The $38 billion memorandum of understanding covers U.S. fiscal years 2019-2028 and succeeds the current $30 billion MOU signed in 2007, which expires at the end of fiscal 2018.

“Prime Minister Netanyahu and I are confident that the new MOU will make a significant contribution to Israel’s security in what remains a dangerous neighborhood,” U.S. President Barack Obama said in a written statement.

The agreement was signed at the State Department by U.S. Undersecretary of State Thomas Shannon and by Jacob Nagel, acting head of Netanyahu’s national security council.

According to a White House “factsheet,” the deal includes:

-annual payments of $3.3 billion in so-called foreign military financing, typically used to purchase U.S. equipment.

-$500 million a year for Israeli missile defense funding, the first time this has been formally built into the aid pact.

-A phasing-out of a special arrangement that for decades has allowed Israel to use 26.3 percent of the U.S. aid on its own defense industry instead of on American-made weapons.

-Elimination of a longstanding provision that has allowed Israel to use a portion of the U.S. aid to buy military fuel.

-The funding will allow Israel to update “the lion’s share” of its fighter aircraft, including purchasing additional F-35 Joint Strike Fighters. Israel is scheduled to receive 33 F-35 aircraft, the first two of which will be delivered in December.

(Reporting by Matt Spetalnick and Arshad Mohammed; Editing by Susan Heavey)

U.S. government posts $107 billion deficit in August up 66% since last year

A security guard walks in front of an image of the Federal Reserve following the two-day Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) policy meeting in Washington, DC

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. government posted a $107 billion budget deficit in August, a 66 percent increase from the same month last year, the Treasury Department said on Tuesday.

This compared to a deficit of $64 billion in August 2015, according to Treasury’s monthly budget statement.

Analysts polled by Reuters had expected a $108 billion deficit for last month.

When accounting for calendar adjustments, August would have shown a $118 billion deficit compared with an adjusted $107 billion deficit in the same month in 2015.

The fiscal year-to-date deficit was $621 billion through August, up 17 percent from a $530 billion deficit at the same time last year. There were no calendar adjustments.

Receipts last month totaled $231 billion, a 10 percent increase from August 2015, while outlays stood at $338 billion, a 23 percent rise from the same month a year ago.

(Reporting by Lindsay Dunsmuir; Editing by Andrea Ricci)

U.S. says payment to Iran used as leverage for prisoners’ release

Jason Rezaian, Washington Post reporter and one of the U.S. citizens recently released from detention in Iran, poses to media outside the Emergency Room of the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center (LRMC) in the southwestern town of Landstuhl, Germany

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. State Department said on Thursday it released $400 million in cash to Iran under a tribunal settlement only once it was assured that American prisoners had been freed and had boarded a plane.

“The payment of the $400 million was not done until after the prisoners were released,” State Department spokesman John Kirby told reporters.

“We took advantage of that to make sure we had the maximum leverage possible to get our people out and get them out safely,” Kirby added.

It was the first time the administration has said publicly that it used the payment as leverage to ensure the prisoners were released by Iran.

Three of the five prisoners, including Jason Rezaian, the Washington Posts’s Tehran bureau chief; Saeed Abedini, a pastor from Idaho and Amir Hekmati, a former U.S. Marine from Flint, Michigan, as well as some family members, were part of a prisoner exchange that followed the lifting of most international sanctions against Iran following a nuclear deal in 2015.

One more prisoner, Nosratollah Khosravi-Roodsari, chose to remain in Iran, while a fifth prisoner, American student Matthew Trevithick, was released separately.

Both U.S. President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry have denied that the payment was ransom for the release of the prisoners or tied to the Iran nuclear deal.

The White House announced on Jan. 17 it was releasing $400 million in funds frozen since 1981, plus $1.3 billion in interest owed to Iran, as part of a settlement of a long-standing Iranian claim at the Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal in The Hague.

The funds were part of a trust fund Iran used before its 1979 Islamic Revolution to buy U.S. military equipment that was tied up for decades in litigation at the tribunal.

The payment was made by the United States in cash due to international sanctions against Iran.

The administration has maintained that negotiations over the funds and the prisoners were conducted on separate tracks and were in no way linked.

Representative Jason Chaffetz, chairman of the House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, has asked Kerry to appear at a future committee hearing to discuss the payment.

(Reporting by Lesley Wroughton; Editing by Jonathan Oatis)

U.S. seeks Latin American help amid rise in Asian, African migrants

Detainees sleep and watch television in a holding cell where hundreds of mostly Central American immigrant children are being processed and held at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection

By Julia Edwards

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Washington is seeking closer coordination with several Latin American countries to tackle a jump in migrants from Asia, Africa and the Middle East who it believes are trying to reach the United States from the south on an arduous route by plane, boat and through jungle on foot.

U.S. agents deployed to an immigration facility on Mexico’s southern border have vetted the more than 640 migrants from countries outside the Americas who have been detained at the center since October 2015, according to U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) documents reviewed by Reuters.

The migrants often fly to Brazil, obtain fake passports there, and are smuggled to Panama before heading through Central America to Mexico’s porous southern border, according to transcripts of 14 interviews conducted at the center and other internal briefing documents seen by Reuters.

The U.S. agents’ findings come as Mexican immigration data show 6,342 Asian, African and Middle Eastern migrants were apprehended trying to enter Mexico in the first six months of this year. That was up from 4,261 in all of 2015, and 1,831 in 2014.

U.S. border apprehensions point to the same trend. Between October 2015 and May 2016, U.S. agents apprehended 5,350 African and Asian migrants at the U.S. Southwest border. That’s up from 6,126 in all of fiscal year 2015 and 4,172 in all of fiscal year 2014.

U.S. concerns about potential security risks from migrants using the unusual and circuitous southern route have been growing in recent years, following a string of Islamic State-inspired attacks in the West and the surge in Syrian refugees fleeing that country’s civil war.

Five Syrian nationals detained in Honduras last November were part of a wider group of seven Syrians who acquired forged passports in Brazil and then went by land to Argentina on their way north, a U.S. government source familiar with that case said. There was no evidence to suggest the men were militants.

“The reality is that the vast majority of the people that Mexico encounters that are extra-continental will eventually end up on our border,” a U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) official said.

At the detention camp in Tapachula, near Mexico’s border with Guatemala, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agents have been training their Mexican counterparts on interview techniques, and using U.S. criminal databases to investigate detainees, according to internal documents seen by Reuters.

Two to three U.S. agents have been stationed there since at least October, according to the documents and U.S. officials. Mexican officials have previously acknowledged the presence of U.S. agents at Mexico’s southern border, but few details of the cooperation have been reported.

U.S. Customs and Border Patrol began a pilot program for a similar operation in Panama earlier this fiscal year, according to an internal memo sent in May that has not previously been reported. Homeland Security officials told Reuters that Panama requested U.S. training. A spokesman for Panama’s National Migration Service said Panama accepted an offer from the U.S. embassy for training on subjects like “defense techniques” and “management of persons.”

U.S. proponents of the program have pushed for a greater U.S. footprint to build a “comprehensive intelligence picture” of migration patterns across the Colombia-Panama border, according to the memo sent in May.

Panama is leading the effort in Central America to detain illegal migrants, DHS assistant secretary for international affairs Alan Bersin told a House committee in March, but it stymied by lack of detention space and the difficulty of deporting migrants to countries with whom they have no diplomatic ties. As a result, most are released after 30 days.

Bersin acknowledged the rise in migrants from outside the Americas and the potential security threat they pose.

“While many citizens of these countries migrate for economic reasons or because they are fleeing persecution in their home countries, this group may include migrants who are affiliated with foreign terrorist organizations, intelligence agencies, and organized criminal syndicates,” Bersin told the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.

DHS has deployed additional “mentor” teams throughout South and Central America to professionalize immigration authorities and gain intelligence about potentially threatening migrants, said DHS officials, who declined to specify which countries host U.S. agents.

Another DHS official said the agency is asking Brazil through diplomatic channels to put a stop to fake passport manufacturing. Brazilian officials did not respond to Reuters’ request for comment.

The U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, a unit of DHS, is “actively working to enhance regional collaboration with border and customs authorities from Mexico all the way down to Argentina,” a DHS official said.

ON FOOT IN THE JUNGLE

The apprehension documents from the Tapachula center show how migrants are willing and able to pay thousands of dollars to obtain flights and fake passports and then make grueling journeys on buses, boats and on foot.

It was not clear how many of those apprehended at the center were deported, claimed asylum or simply released.

Several of the 14 migrants — in testimony given from May 18-23 this year — said they paid more than $10,000 to smugglers, walked for days through jungles, and were temporarily detained by various countries before being stopped in Tapachula.

Six of the men — who included Pakistanis, Syrians and Afghans– had obtained fake passports, claiming to be from Israel, Morocco, Belgium or Britain.

In Panama, several of the men said they were kept in a migration detention camp for about a month. From Panama, the migrants described traveling in larger groups, sometimes as many as 50 men.

One Pakistani national — whose identity U.S. officials asked not to be revealed because he is still under investigation — told U.S. and Mexican officials that he paid a smuggler in Pakistan $9,000 to be smuggled to Brazil where he received a fake Belgian passport.

In Brazil, he paid $4,000 to a woman to be taken on bus, boat and on foot through across Colombia and into Panama.

He said he was detained in Panama but then released. From there, a smuggler from Lebanon took the man and 35 other migrants of different nationalities to Honduras, where he said he was robbed of all of his belongings.

His family wired him more money from Pakistan and the man was able to pay $40 to be smuggled into Guatemala. He paid $5 to be taken by raft into Mexico. There he got a taxi, which was halted by authorities who took him to the Tapachula center.

SENSITIVE TOPIC FOR MEXICO

Accepting U.S. help on immigration issues is politically sensitive for Mexico, said Adam Isacson, a security and border policy analyst at The Washington Office on Latin America, a non-profit human rights advocacy group.

“But the Mexicans have quietly been open to the equipment and training they have received,” he said.

A CBP spokesman said the agency deployed to Tapachula at the Mexican government’s request. Mexico’s immigration agency is the Instituto Nacional de Migracion (INM).

“CBP personnel train INM officers in the collection of biometric information, and review and share biometric information on people of interest,” the spokesman said.

INM declined Reuters’ request for comment and access to the Tapachula facility.

In testimony before the Mexican Senate on Aug. 3, Mexico’s chief immigration officer Ardelio Vargas Fosado said his agency was aware of the influx of migrants from outside the Americas. But the lack of diplomatic relationships between Mexico and many African countries has made it difficult to deport those apprehended, he said.

Under law, U.S. agents cannot arrest or deport migrants from other countries, but as foreign-based trainers, they can gather intelligence on who may be headed for the U.S. border.

Isacson said most of the migrants taking the Latin American path northward are seeking economic opportunity in the United States. But DHS is focused on security risks.

“The Tapachula area is along a permeable border. DHS views it as one of the areas where a terrorist group that wants to do harm on U.S. soil would be most likely to come in,” he said.

(Reporting by Julia Edwards, Additional reporting by Richard Cowan in Washington, Frank Jack Daniel, Enrique Andres Pretel and Joanna Bernstein in Mexico; Editing by Kevin Drawbaugh and Stuart Grudgings)

White House Prepares for Solar Flares and Other Space Weather Events

The U.S. Government has released its National Space Weather Strategy showing a multiagency plan that details how the U.S. will prepare for and deal with a massive EMP from Space Weather.  

An EMP or geomagnetic solar storm event has long been talked about in the media but steps are being taken now to show how serious this is to the government.

The six-step plan requires government agencies, schools, the media, the insurance industry, nonprofits, and more to work together.

“This is a real and present danger,” the White House’s assistant director for space weather told the Houston Post.   Back in 1859, a huge solar storm did impact Earth and caused some sparking telegraph lines. If a geomagnetic storm as strong as that one were to strike today it would likely cause $600 billion to $2.6 trillion worth of damage in the United States alone, according to a recent study.

NASA says that we had a scary near miss when we were nearly hit by two plasma clouds in 2012.  “If it had been hit, we would still be picking up the pieces,” one physicist says.

According to news reports, the White House’s new plan calls for the U.S. to get better at predicting space weather, shore up our infrastructure against EMPs and more. These plans, may truly be needed: The Post quotes NASA as stating there’s a 12% chance of a giant solar flare in the next 10 years.

In a  report released by the United Kingdom’s Department of Business Innovation and Skills said that the Earth can indeed experience a massive solar storm, with mankind having only 12 hours to prepare for such a potentially disastrous event.

To read the full plan you can go to: https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/final_nationalspaceweatherstrategy_20151028.pdf

Trunews: U.S. will hit debt ceiling no later than Nov. 3: Treasury’s Lew

The U.S. government will hit a legal debt limit and be unable to borrow more money no later than Nov. 3, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew said on Thursday.

In a letter to congressional leaders, Lew added that a remaining cash balance of less than $30 billion would swiftly deplete.

“In fact, we do not foresee any reasonable scenario in which it would last for an extended period of time,” Lew said, as he urged Congress to raise the debt cap.

Trunews – Trunews: U.S. will hit debt ceiling no later than Nov. 3: Treasury’s Lew