Secret Service in disarray, fueling questions over Obama's safety

#GNN U.S: When Secret Service officer Timothy McCarthy took a bullet to protect Ronald Reagan in a 1981 assassination attempt and agent Jerry Parr shoved the president into a limousine, their quick reflexes projected a Hollywood-style image of invincibility around the agency.

Fast-forward to today: the 149-year-old Secret Service is struggling to emerge from a succession of scandals that have tarnished that iconic reputation, forced the abrupt resignation of its director and raised questions about its ability to fulfill its most critical duty: protecting President Barack Obama and his family.

Sources inside and outside the administration say many problems such as low morale, a leadership crisis and a culture of covering up mistakes can be traced back 11 years to when the Secret Service was pulled out of the Treasury Department and absorbed into the sprawling new Department of Homeland Security, where it had to compete for turf and money.

Even as the agency's workload has mushroomed, its manpower levels stagnated and its funding increases have failed to keep pace with growth in overall federal spending in the past decade, a Reuters examination of Secret Service budget data shows.

There is also growing pressure to consider whether the Secret Service’s divided mission, which includes investigating financial fraud and cybercrime, is diverting resources and attention from providing security for the president, his family and other top officials.

"We’ve seen what many think was a high point for the Secret Service," said Carolyn Parr, who co-authored a memoir with her husband, Jerry Parr, the agent who raced a wounded Reagan away from the scene of the shooting after John Hinckley Jr. opened fire outside a Washington hotel 33 years ago.

"What’s happening now is sad. I don’t know why the ball got dropped."

"MORE POLITICIZED"
The damage has been piling up, costing Secret Service director Julia Pierson her job on Wednesday. First came a Sept. 19 incident in which an Iraq war veteran with a knife scaled the White House fence and got deep inside the executive mansion.

That was followed by the disclosure that an armed private security contractor with a criminal record rode on an elevator with Obama in Atlanta on Sept. 16, along with new details of a 2011 incident in which shots were fired at the White House.

Pierson, appointed in 2013 to clean up the agency after an embarrassing prostitution scandal in Colombia the year before, defended her agency in congressional testimony, acknowledging "mistakes were made" but failing to quell the firestorm.

Some see the troubles rooted in the 2003 decision by President George W. Bush to shift the agency into the newly formed Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as part of a centralizing of the “war on terrorism” after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The move ended the quasi-independence the Secret Service enjoyed at Treasury, where it was established in 1865 to suppress currency counterfeiting. At the DHS, it faced competition from other security agencies for funds and staffing.

"It became more politicized and more compliant ... often bowing to pressure from political staff at the White House or congressional staff during campaigns," said Ron Kessler, a national security consultant and author of the newly published book “The First Family Detail.”

"HOUSE-CLEANING IS NEEDED"
Some question if the Secret Service has spread itself too thin to adequately perform its dual roles of financial investigator and presidential protector, especially as online crime surges and threats to the presidency grow increasingly complex in an era of global terrorism.

The Secret Service first began the work of presidential protection in 1901 after the assassination of President William McKinley. It has steadily expanded since. In recent years, its mandate has mushroomed to include investigations of cyber theft, credit-card fraud and computer-based attacks on financial, banking and telecommunications infrastructure.

"Are the two missions of the Service compatible and how should they be prioritized?" the Congressional Research Service asked in a report on the agency released in mid-June.

Some former agents blame the Secret Service's troubles on a culture of rule-bending they say became entrenched years ago.

"If only the director goes, very little changes," said Dan Emmett, a former senior officer in the Secret Service’s Presidential Protective Division and author of the book "Within Arm’s Length." "A house-cleaning is needed at the top."

Other concerns include accusations the agency has favored men in promotions and condoned racism, a point reinforced in a class-action lawsuit filed in 2000 by African-American agents who accuse the Secret Service of a pattern of failing to address allegations of racial discrimination over many years.

The Secret Service's defenders point to half a century without an American president assassinated and say criticism of the agency has brewed for years, including in 1981 when it was forced to strengthen security measures after allowing a gunman to get so close to the president unscreened.

Asked whether Obama still felt safe, White House spokesman Eric Schultz said on Thursday: "Absolutely".

A tight budget complicates its mission. Pierson testified on Tuesday that the Secret Service had been stretched and was operating with around 550 fewer employees than its "optimal level." Despite an expansion in its work, its full-time workforce of 6,572 is just 66 higher than in fiscal 2005, according to DHS documents. link.reuters.com/fuw92w

And while its fiscal 2014 annual budget of $1.585 billion is up 35 percent from a decade ago, that lags federal spending, which is up 48 percent since 2005. The agency's budget has also failed to keep pace with the DHS' overall budget, which is up 54 percent in the same period, DHS budget data show.

"What many of us have taken for granted is that the president is always going to be well protected," Mark Meadows, a Republican on the House Oversight Committee, told Reuters.

(GNN, AIP)(Reuters)(Editing by Jason Szep and Tom Brown)

U.S. defends Ebola response, about 50 under observation

#GNN U.S: U.S. officials on Friday broadly defended the response to the country's first case of Ebola, although one acknowledged that while the government was confident of containing the virus, it had been "rocky" in Dallas where the patient is in serious condition.

Health officials in Dallas charged with checking the spread of Ebola have narrowed their focus to about 50 people who had direct or indirect contact with an infected Liberian visitor, including 10 at high risk who are being checked twice daily for symptoms.

In Washington, officials were asked at a news conference why the visitor, Thomas Eric Duncan, was able to get past screening in his journey from Liberia on Sept. 19 and then be sent home after telling a Dallas hospital a few days later about his travel to a country where there had been an Ebola outbreak.

“There were things that did not go the way they should have in Dallas, but there were a lot of things that went right and are going right," Dr. Anthony Fauci, a director at the National Institutes of Health, told reporters at the White House.

“So, although certainly it was rocky" in terms of how people perceived the response, "the reason I said there wouldn’t be an outbreak is because of what is going on right now," Fauci said.

Fauci said although it "may be entirely conceivable" that there would be another Ebola case in the United States, the strength of the healthcare infrastructure "would make it extraordinarily unlikely that we would have an outbreak.”

The case has put authorities and the public on alert over concerns that the worst epidemic of Ebola on record could spread from West Africa, where it began in March. The World Health Organization on Friday updated its death toll to at least 3,439 out of 7,492 suspected, probable and confirmed cases. The epidemic has hit hardest in impoverished Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea.

At Friday's news conference, White House adviser Lisa Monaco was asked whether she would recommend to President Barack Obama that he impose a travel ban on West Africa, as some public officials have called for.

"Right now we believe those types of steps actually impede the response," Monaco said.

U.S. Senator Lamar Alexander, a Republican from Tennessee, urged Obama to order U.S. airports to screen travelers coming from Ebola-hit countries.

As part of the U.S. effort to help contain the spread of Ebola, the Pentagon on Friday said the number of military personnel that could be deployed to West Africa could reach nearly 4,000, more than earlier estimates of about 3,000.

DECONTAMINATING APARTMENT
A cleanup crew was decontaminating the Dallas apartment where Duncan had been staying before he was admitted to the hospital five days ago. Four people close to Duncan who were quarantined in the apartment in a northeastern section of the city have been moved to an undisclosed location, said Sana Syed, the public information officer for the City of Dallas.

The handling of the Dallas case in the early stages of Duncan's illness has raised questions about how prepared local and national health officials were to handle that case and whether people were unnecessarily exposed.

Out of 100 people who had direct or indirect contact with Duncan, health officials are monitoring 50 on a daily basis and closely watching 10 people at higher risk, said Dr. David Lakey, commissioner of the Texas Department of State Health Services.

The observations include fever checks at least twice daily. Ebola, which can cause fever, vomiting and diarrhea, spreads through contact with bodily fluids such as blood or saliva.

Sheets and other items used by the man in the apartment have been sealed in plastic bags, but questions have been raised about the delay in sanitizing it.

A crew from the Cleaning Guys, a hazardous materials cleanup company, garbed in yellow hazardous material suits and masks, went inside the apartment and packed the soiled sheets, Duncan's luggage and other personal items into blue barrels, the county fire marshal said. The mattress was being cut into pieces to fit into the barrels. Another official said the cleaners would take the containers to a secure location.

Since Duncan's diagnosis, people have visited hospitals in a few states and were checked for Ebola symptoms. On Friday, Howard University Hospital in Washington said it admitted and isolated a patient with possible symptoms who had recently traveled from Nigeria "in an abundance of caution." The CDC says outbreaks in Nigeria and Senegal appear to have been contained.

In Congress, U.S. House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers, a Republican, and ranking Democrat Nita Lowey set an Oct. 17 deadline for the Obama administration to provide details of its plan to deal with the outbreak, including how each agency is contributing and monthly costs.

The critical issue of how hospitals in the United States should handle and dispose of medical waste from Ebola patients is being addressed, the government said. The U.S. Department of Transportation said it expected to release new guidelines on Friday that would allow Texas hospitals to dispose safely of Ebola-infected medical wastes.

NBC News said on Thursday that one of its freelance cameramen, Ashoka Mukpo, 33, had contracted Ebola in Liberia, the fifth American to be diagnosed after being infected in West Africa. NBC has said the entire reporting crew would return to the United States under quarantine for 21 days, the maximum incubation period for Ebola.

The Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha said in a statement that an Ebola patient was scheduled to arrive for treatment on Monday morning. Mukpo's father, Mitchell Levy, told Reuters his son was going to Nebraska for treatment.

(GNN, AIP)(Reuters)(Reporting by Bill Trott and Eric Beech in Washington, Julie Steenhuysen in Chicago, Colleen Jenkins in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Lisa Maria Garza and Marice Richter in Dallas; Writing by Jim Loney and Grant McCool; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn, Jonathan Oatis and Lisa Shumaker)

Missouri police make arrests as protests persist over black teen killing

#GNN U.S: Police in Ferguson, Missouri arrested several people, an official said on Friday, following another night of protests over the police shooting of a black teenager in August.

Protests have been staged almost every night in the predominantly black St. Louis suburb, since white policeman, Darren Wilson, shot 18-year-old Michael Brown dead on Aug. 9.

A Ferguson Police Department official said that several people were arrested outside the police station overnight. She declined to say exactly how many arrests were made or give any other information.

The Washington Post reported that at least six people were detained after a small group of protesters chanted loudly despite a late night noise ordinance.

On Thursday, four people joined a lawsuit alleging illegal assaults and detentions by police officers in the city and seeking roughly $60 million, claiming police used "wanton and excessive force" as they dealt with protesters.

Demonstrations over Brown's killing have included some vandalism and looting, and police have responded, at times, with riot gear, tear gas, rubber bullets and military equipment.

A grand jury is exploring charges against Wilson.

(GNN, AIP)(Reuters)(Reporting by Curtis Skinner in San Francisco; Editing by Louise Ireland)

Fire burning at Pennsylvania memorial for 9/11 victims: official

#GNN U.S: A major fire broke out on Friday at the Flight 93 National Memorial's headquarters complex in Pennsylvania, causing no reported injuries but extensive damage near the site of the Sept. 11, 2001, crash of a hijacked airliner.

The National Park Service said there was no damage to the memorial site itself, in a field where a United Airlines flight went down in one of four hijackings staged by al Qaeda militants on that day. The three-building complex is two miles (3.2 km) away from the crash site.

The cause of the fire was under investigation, the service said in a statement.

The 2,200-acre (890-hectare) memorial park near Shanksville, about 80 miles (130 km) southeast of Pittsburgh, features a wall of names that partially surrounds a field where the flight went down, killing all 44 people on board, including four hijackers.

A visitors center is under construction and slated to open in late 2015. The fire did not affect the center, the service said.

"Initial reports are of extensive damage to the complex," it said in a statement. "All employees and volunteers were safely evacuated."

Seven fire companies responded to the alarm, a Somerset County dispatcher said.

Television footage showed thick, black smoke billowing in the distance across a rolling field, with a construction crane at the unfinished center standing unaffected in the foreground.

On the same day of the Flight 93 attack, hijacked airliners crashed into the Pentagon outside Washington and the World Trade Center in New York. Some 3,000 people were killed.

(GNN, AIP)(Reuters)(Reporting by Daniel Kelley in Philadelphia; Writing by Frank McGurty; Editing by Scott Malone, Eric Beech and Mohammad Zargham)

New Mexico police shooting ruled unjustified, charges weighed

#GNN U.S: A special prosecutor may soon be appointed to determine whether to press criminal charges against two New Mexico police officers after a grand jury ruled that a 2013 shooting of a motorist in Santa Fe was unjustified, the District Attorney said on Friday.

The grand jury determined on Thursday that the shooting was not justified but was not asked to rule on whether prosecution was warranted.

Santa Fe District Attorney Angela Pacheco said she was now in a position to appoint a special prosecutor from another district to consider whether or not to file charges against the officers, Stephen Fonte and John DeBaca.

"The only purpose of this grand jury was to determine if the shooting was justified not to file charges," Pacheco said. "It was a secret proceeding so I do not know why they determined the shooting to be unjustified."

The move comes as police in nearby Albuquerque are working with the U.S. Department of Justice to implement reforms to fix a pattern of excessive use of force uncovered by an 18-month federal probe, including several fatal police shootings.

In Santa Fe, Pacheco said the two police officers are accused of having shot Roberto Mendez, 25, in the face after police said he tried to run them down in a convenience store parking lot in August 2013 with a stolen vehicle.

The Albuquerque Journal newspaper reported that the vehicle Mendez was driving had been full of passengers, including a young child, at the time of the shooting.

The paper reported that video showed Mendez had backed up in an apparent attempt to flee, hitting a police cruiser and prompting the two officers to jump out of the way, and that the officers appeared to fire on the vehicle as it pulled away.

Pacheco said Mendez, who survived the shooting, had been among those who testified to the grand jury. She declined to disclose which officer is thought to have actually shot Mendez.

Matt Ross, spokesman, for the City of Santa Fe, said the city has placed both officers on alternate duty pending a determination by the district attorney on whether criminal charges will be filed.

Ross declined further comment, and could not immediately say whether the officers had secured legal representation or identify who was representing them.

(GNN, AIP)(Reuters)(Editing by Cynthia Johnston)

I Just Used Nimbl To Get 40 Bucks Delivered To The AOL Office

And now there’s an Uber for cash.

I first became aware Nimbl earlier this afternoon, when I saw some skeptical commentary about it on Twitter. The idea, basically, is that you can use the app to call a Nimbl “runner”, who will bring cash to your location.

The idea might seem a little silly at first, like the latest startup catering to lazy techies — techies who, in this case, can’t be bothered to find an ATM. On the other hand, I can definitely think of multiple instances in the past couple of months when I needed cash, and there were no ATMs nearby.

A lot of other people have been in similar situations, at least judging from the handful of folks (inside and outside TechCrunch) who I’ve discussed this with. Almost all of them immediately said, “I would totally use that!” (They were less enthusiastic about the $5 fee, which is supposed to take effect after a user’s first few deliveries.)

Naturally, I wanted to try it out for myself, so I ordered a delivery of $40 to the AOL office in Manhattan. (That’s where TC New York has a few desks, because AOL owns TechCrunch.) Someone from Nymbl was at our doorstep about 20 minutes later, with an envelope containing two twenties. I showed him my order in the app, and after some fiddling with Venmo, paid him $40. Then he handed over the cash and we were good to go.

One thing that became clear in that process: Couriers aren’t driving (or walking or biking) around the city with your cash. As explained to me by Jim Luo, CEO at GreenOps (the self-funded startup that created Nimbl), the runners withdraw money from the company bank account — and they’re only taking as much as they need to fill the order, so they’re not traveling around with enormous sums of cash, either. Then when you pay via Venmo, or another service like PayPal, you’re the company.

Oh, and if you’re wondering about the runners themselves, they’re background-checked contractors who work with Nimbl — Luo compared them to the people who do deliveries for services like WunWun and Postmates.

Luo also said that this is definitely solving a problem he’s faced himself, since “I literally never carry cash anymore,” turning him into “that guy in my circle of friends”, the guy who always has to ask his friends to spot him in cash-only situations.

And while delivering cash might not seem as intuitive as delivering food, Luo noted that cash actually has some advantages on this front, because it’s “purely a commodity.” That means Nimbl doesn’t have to worry about people getting mad if every little thing about their order isn’t just right— as long as you get your cash in a reasonable period of time, you’re probably going to be happy.

Looking ahead, he added that he hopes to work more closely with businesses. A cash-only bar, for example, might be willing to refer customers to Nimbl rather than sending them out to look for an ATM (and maybe find another bar in the process). The bar could also open a tab for them once the bartenders knows the money is on its way. Luo also suggested that businesses could use Nimbl if they themselves need more cash on-hand.

Nimbl is currently available in San Francisco and New York as an iPhone app, with an Android app planned, too. Luo emphasized that the service is very much in beta testing, and that he expects to work out many of the early kinks in the service over the next few weeks.

Airbnb Lifestyle: The Rise Of The Hipster Nomad

Editor’s note: Prerna Gupta is a serial entrepreneur and angel investor, currently working on a stealth project; she is also a nomad.

For the past year, I’ve lived exclusively in temporary housing I’ve found on sites like Airbnb.

I didn’t set out with this goal in mind, but it just sort of happened. And now that it’s happened, I’m starting to wonder whether I really want to go back to a pre-Airbnb life.

It all started about a year ago, when my husband and I got struck by a serious bout of travel lust and decided to step out of the Silicon Valley rat race for a while to wander the globe and explore what it was like to live in different parts of the world.

Over the past year, we have lived, for weeks or months at a time, in Costa Rica, Panama, El Salvador, Switzerland, Sri Lanka, India, and Crete. And all of this living has occurred in temp housing we found via the sharing economy.

The only possessions we’ve had with us during this time have fit in a suitcase and a couple of carry-on bags. Everything else – housing, furniture, cars, pots and pans – has been rented as and when it was needed.

Before we left for our vagabond adventure, my husband and I packed all of what we considered to be possessions we couldn’t live without into an embarrassingly large storage unit, which has cost us $160 per month. Possessions like a salvaged-wood dining table, an L-shaped sectional, fancy speakers and a projector screen, a hefty mattress, and a wide assortment of God only knows what else.

But we’ve found that we haven’t missed a single one of those possessions since we left. We simply haven’t needed them.

As our year of travels draws to an end, and I think about settling back down again, I can’t help but wonder – why settle down at all? Why not just continue living in temp rentals from Airbnb, and get up and go again when we want?

Trending Toward The Airbnb Lifestyle
If I could “borrow” most of my material possessions, leaving myself free to wander at will, I would do it in a heartbeat.

And I think this sharing-economy-driven nomadic lifestyle has a decent chance of becoming the dominant mode for younger generations.

Here are some trends that I believe will make the Airbnb lifestyle more common in Gen Y:

1. Ownership is a pain. I honestly can’t imagine ever wanting to own a house. Because I can’t stand the thought of having to deal with all the crap that comes with owning such a large and expensive thing. Renting is so much more convenient, and the fact is, I’m willing to pay for that convenience.

2. FOMO. Likewise, everyone knows Gen Y is allergic to commitment. I find the idea of committing to a specific place to live for years at a time depressing.

3. Freelancers are kings. Freelancing is becoming a way of life, too. I’ve been hearing from a lot of highly talented engineers, designers and product managers recently who are going freelance by choice. Work is becoming much more fluid, and workers have increasing control over when and where they work. This makes them less tied down.

4. The royal we. Families are getting smaller. Many of us may never have kids or get married at all. As family sizes shrink, there’s less incentive to settle down.

5. Democratization of style. There is a convergence happening in aesthetic style. We all basically like the same things, at approximately the same time. But, what we like changes relatively quickly, according to the latest hipster fashions. Ergo, borrowing is better for us than owning.

Outgrowing The Sharing Economy
Odds are that I won’t become a permanent nomad just yet, though, because it’s still tough for me to find things that sufficiently match my tastes on existing “sharing economy” sites.

This is because the sharing economy has mostly been thought of, up to this point, as a peer-to-peer rental economy, focused on allowing individual owners to monetize excess capacity on things they own.

As the Airbnb lifestyle becomes pervasive, however, the sharing economy will start to outgrow itself. Renting will start replacing buying across the board, which means there will no longer be enough owners to support peer-to-peer lending, and, in many cases, businesses will step in to pick up the slack.

We can see the very beginnings of this today, with startups like Le Tote and Rent the Runway, where you can borrow clothes, and Lumoid, where you can borrow high-end electronics.

It’s still early, though, and it seems likely that I’ll end up owning more than I’d like for a few more years to come.

But for me, at least, living an Airbnb lifestyle for the past year has led to a palpable change in my relationship with stuff. I am slowly beginning to think about material goods not in terms of possession, but in terms of my time.

Yahoo Acquires Mobile Messaging App MessageMe

#GNN #Yahoo has acquired #mobile #messaging application MessageMe, a Whatsapp-like service with $11.9 million in reported outside funding. The deal, we’re hearing from multiple sources, is a talent acquisition falling into the “single-digit” millions. [Update: We're hearing now that the deal may actually better than this.

Word is the deal is actually in the double-digit millions, and has been structured to be favorable to investors and employees alike.]  Yahoo is announcing the acquisition internally today, and the MessageMe team begins work Monday.

MessageMe raised $10 million in Series A funding early in 2013, in a round led by ex-Mozilla CEO John Lilly of Greylock Partners. Other investors in the startup include a number of high-profile VCs, including True Ventures, First Round Capital, Google Ventures, SVAngel, Resolut.vc, Andreessen Horowitz, and Social+Capital Partnership, and other angels – many of whom also financed a prior $1.9 million seed round in March 2013.

The company was largely able to raise such funds on the strength of its team and what appeared to be ever-quickening growth. Co-founders Arjun Sethi and Justin Rosenthal had extensive experience in social gaming prior to founding MessageMe. Sethi used to run an early social gaming company called LOLApps, before it merged with a publisher 6Waves.

The belief was that their backgrounds would help them to better understand how to grow a product quickly and virally.

MessageMe reached its first 1 million users and closed on seed funding – a sort of no-brainer for investors looking for the next breakout hit in mobile messaging. By May 2013, it hit 5 million users only 2.5 months after it debuted. But that growth was not sustainable, as it turned out.

The deal will see MessageMe’s small team of 8-10 joining Yahoo.

While we don’t know what terms made the deal favorable to employees, specifically, we’re hearing that it’s not a “fire sale,” so to speak. MessageMe still had money in the bank at the time of the deal.

Despite big gains from its Alibaba stake, Yahoo’s acquisition pipeline has slowed down, we’ve also heard, so this buy doesn’t necessary signal that Yahoo is about to start picking up a large number of startups yet again.

It’s possible that MessageMe’s team will be assigned to work on a mobile messaging app that Yahoo is building internally, which we’ve heard is being referred to as “Yahoo Instant.” The project has been in the works for years now, but has suffered from delays.

It’s unclear if Yahoo will ever launch this app, which features Yahoo’s modern design language (similar to what’s found in Yahoo Weather), or if now MessageMe will somehow continued to be developed under Yahoo’s own brand.

Yahoo, of course, currently has its own mobile messaging client on the market with Yahoo Messenger. But this product is a holdover from an earlier era of messaging – basically a port of its desktop IM client to mobile. The app is popular overseas in markets like Asia and India, where cell phone plans don’t include the same sorts of unlimited messaging plans that are found here in the U.S.

Yahoo Messenger isn’t popular at all in the U.S., where it’s currently ranked #566 Overall on iTunes, according to App Annie. That leaves Yahoo with a need to get its foot back in the mobile messaging market – something the MessageMe deal could aid.

We’ve reached out to Yahoo for comment on this story, and will update when/if we hear back.

'Earnings stripping': The next tax-dodging strategy in Obama's crosshairs?

#GNN finance / WASHINGTON: When the Obama administration clamped down last month on companies that reincorporate abroad to escape high U.S. taxes, it did not address a tax-dodging technique known as "earnings stripping," leaving some to wonder if it is the next target.

Earnings stripping is widely practiced and covers a range of financial dealings that shrink the taxable U.S. profits of multinationals, including those that have moved their tax domiciles abroad in "inversion" deals and others.

"I think there's still nervousness about what's going on here," said Michael Hirschfeld, a partner at law firm Dechert LLP and the immediate past chair of the American Bar Association's tax section. "What will they do with earnings stripping?"

New rules unveiled by the U.S. Treasury Department on Sept. 22 targeted certain tax-avoidance strategies in an effort to stem a rising tide of deals in which a U.S. company buys out a smaller, foreign rival and then adopts its tax nationality.

Inversions, as the deals are known, can put companies in position to strip earnings out of the United States. In its announcement, Treasury asked for public comments on other ways to "make inversions less economically appealing." Analysts interpreted the request as inviting ideas on how to confront earnings stripping.

But there was no anti-earnings stripping component in Treasury's package of rules. Congressional aides and lobbyists said the administration was likely uncertain about its legal authority to tackle the practice and did not want to overreach.

FBR Capital Markets downplayed the possibility of additional Treasury action in a research note to clients on Thursday.

"We do not expect any additional notices or regulations from Treasury in the near future," said the Arlington, Virginia-based investment bank. The request for comment on earnings stripping "is likely intended to preserve a chilling effect rather than a foreshadowing of future regulations on the topic," FBR said.

Businesses particularly fear action from Congress, which they said could ban even more tax practices that lawmakers oppose, said one mergers and acquisitions lawyer who was not authorized to speak to the media.

Senators Chuck Schumer and Dick Durbin, both Democrats, have proposed cracking down on earnings stripping.

For inverted companies, the practice typically involves a foreign parent lending money to a U.S. unit, which sends U.S. profits back as partially U.S. tax-deductible interest. Schumer and Durbin propose reducing the deductions a company can claim to 25 percent from 50 percent of income, even for companies that inverted years ago, and ending a rule that lets less-leveraged companies avoid the deduction limits.

But Congress is adjourned until after the Nov. 4 elections, and in the subsequent "lame duck" session before 2015 other issues are likely to occupy lawmakers' time. Tax lobbyists said they doubted lawmakers would pass inversion legislation unless something significant happens, like a major deal announcement.

"I'm sort of a little bit dubious as to what Congress is going to do," Hirschfeld said.

(GNN)(Reuters)(AIP)(GA)(Additional reporting by Soyoung Kim in New York; Editing by Kevin Drawbaugh and Douglas Royalty)

ECB targets bundled-debt market to boost economy

#GNN finance / NAPLES Italy: The European Central Bank laid out plans on Thursday to buy rebundled packets of debt within weeks to shore up the flagging euro zone economy and its president said the bank would do more if needed.

It was, nonetheless, one of the last arrows in the ECB's quiver before the broad buying of assets known as quantitative easing.

Just months after unveiling a multi-pronged attack to help the economy, with cheap bank loans, lower interest rates and a pledge to buy reparceled debt, President Mario Draghi insisted the ECB had been making progress.

"We've done a lot," Draghi told reporters in the southern Italian city of Naples as protesters nearby paraded banners saying: 'Free us from the ECB!'

"Just go back with your memory to the last three years, even four or five years. We've done really a lot to improve the financing conditions. And now, of course, we are waiting," he said, commenting on a long-awaited improvement in lending.

Draghi, speaking after the central bank's governors had decided to keep interest rates unchanged at just 0.05 percent, also urged euro zone countries to keep up with budget targets, just days after France announced a budget that would flout them.

He outlined an ECB program to buy reparceled debt known as asset-backed securities as well as covered bonds, secured on solid assets such as property, and raised the prospect of bolstering this market and, in turn, lending.

It is a scheme that will start in mid-October for covered bonds, with other purchases of asset backed securities following before the end of the year. Draghi said the potential 'universe' for the type of debt that the ECB was interested in was up to 1 trillion euros, although ECB buys may not be that high.

The ECB will cast its net widely to include debt from Greece and Cyprus with a credit rating of junk on condition that such countries are under a formal international financial program.

"We want to be as inclusive as possible, but with prudence," Draghi said, adding that conditions would apply.

The ECB hopes the program, which will last for at least two years, will spur a market for such credit and support lending to the small- and medium-sized firms that form the backbone of the euro zone economy.

"As all our measures work their way through to the economy they will contribute to a return of inflation rates to levels closer to our aim," Draghi said.

He said the intention was to pump money into the economy by expanding the ECB's balance sheet back to the sort of level it was in early 2012, which would mean adding hundreds of billions of euros

GROWING DOUBTS
There a doubts among market analysts and economists that this can be achieved with purchases of asset backed securities.

A Reuters poll on Monday showed money market traders on average expect the ECB to buy a total of 200 billion euros of ABS and covered bonds over a year.

A separate scheme to boost lending by offering banks up to 400 billon euros of cheap four-year loans attracted a disappointing initial take-up last month.

Market expectations that the ECB will launch quantitative easing have shot up in recent months as the bloc teeters on the edge of deflation.

Draghi said the ECB council was unanimous that it would take further steps if it needed to - commonly accepted as code for QE. But that ultimate move remains a difficult one for the ECB to take, given stiff internal opposition.

The euro gained against the dollar while euro zone bond yields rose as the ECB chief gave no hints of an imminent sovereign bond buying program.

Draghi faces opposition on a number of fronts.

Bundesbank chief Jens Weidmann has already voiced doubts about the ABS purchase plan and his predecessor, Axel Weber, who resigned over an earlier ECB bond-buying program, was strongly opposed.

Underscoring the sensitivity of the issue in Germany, Hans-Werner Sinn, the head of Germany's influential IFO economic research institute, attacked the ECB's new project.

"The ECB will finally be turned into a bail-out authority and a European bad bank," he said.

Asset-backed securities are created by banks pooling mortgages and corporate, auto or credit card loans and selling them to insurers, pension funds or now the ECB.

Covered bonds are similar instruments but the underlying assets are ringfenced so if the bank goes bust, the assets are still there. That makes them safer than ABS.

Draghi has appealed to governments to back the purchase plan with guarantees for some riskier ABS tranches, a step that would add a seal of security to the market and encourage other buyers.

But France and Germany have rejected that.

One thing that has gone the ECB's way is a significant fall in the euro to near two-year lows which should push import prices up and help growth via exports.

(GNN)(Reuters)(AIP)(GA)(Additional reporting by John O'Donnell, Paul Taylor and Rene Wagner. Writing by Paul Carrel/Mike Peacock. Editing by Jeremy Gaunt)

Denmark says EU green energy deal best way to sanction Russia

#GNN Russia: A European Union deal to cut fuel use and increase renewable energy would be a better punishment on Moscow than more sanctions as it would clearly show the EU means to cut reliance on Russian gas, Denmark's foreign minister said on Thursday.

In a telephone interview, Martin Lidegaard told Reuters it was not the time to strengthen or weaken economic sanctions imposed on Moscow by the EU over Russia's actions in Ukraine.

But Lidegaard said Moscow's seizure of Crimea and a gas row between Ukraine and Russia should change the EU's energy relationship with Russia once and for all.

EU climate and energy regulation for 2030 should serve as a clear message that Europe was weaning itself off Russian fuel.

"Right now, I think the present regime is the right one. I don't think we should relinquish it," Lidegaard said of EU sanctions.

"But an ambitious climate and energy package that will impact investment now, if everybody knows we are heading in another direction, that would be a non-aggressive action, rather than going for more sanctions right now. That would be the right way to send a firm signal."

The European Commission, the EU executive, in January outlined climate and energy policy for 2030 and a meeting of EU leaders later this month will seek to get agreement on it from the 28 EU member states.

Commission officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, have said they expect an agreement on a goal to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent compared with 1990 levels, to increase energy savings to 30 percent compared with business as usual and to increase the share of renewable energy to 27 percent of use. Some say this could be rounded to 30 percent.

Denmark is ranked as one of the more environmentally ambitious member states and Lidegaard said he hoped for a deal, but it would be difficult.

Poland, for instance, with its high dependency on carbon-intensive coal, is still "probably the country having the most difficulties," said Lidegaard, a former Danish energy minister.

GAME CHANGER
But Lidegaard said the Russia-Ukraine crisis should focus everyone's minds.

"Russia should be a game changer," he said. "I think it has become very visible that our current dependency on Russia has a price, a political price and a security price."

Russia has cut off supplies to Ukraine because of Ukraine's unpaid gas bills and Gazprom has been varying the amounts of gas it supplies to its EU customers.

The EU sanctions on Moscow target Russia's finance, defense and energy sectors, but have carefully avoided touching physical supplies of oil and gas.

The EU relies for about a third of its energy, while Russia's state-controlled exporter Gazprom earns around $6 billion per month from selling gas to the EU.

The proposed EU goal to reduce energy use through measures such as better building insulation would automatically cut carbon emissions and curb reliance on Russian gas.

"Energy efficiency and renewables solve all our problems at once," Lidegaard said.

For the medium term, he said gas had a role in "a beautiful partnership" with renewables, which are intermittent and so at times difficult to integrate into the energy system.

"I think gas is a stepping stone to replace coal and nuclear over the next 10 to 20 years," he said, but added the gas must come from a range of countries.

(GNN)(Reuters)(AIP)(GA)(Editing by David Evans)

Liberia says may prosecute man who flew to U.S. with Ebola

#GNN Health Africa: Liberia could prosecute a national who flew to the United States and was diagnosed with the Ebola for making a false statement on travel documents, the head of the West African nation's airport authority said on Thursday.

Binyah Kesselly said the Liberian patient, Thomas Eric Duncan, was asked in a questionnaire as he left Monrovia airport if he had come in contact with any Ebola victim or was showing symptoms of the disease and he had replied 'no'.

"I raised the question with the justice minister if we can prosecute people for knowingly making false declaration on forms where you willingly, knowingly and mortally put people's lives at risk ... She is of the opinion that we can," said Kesselly.

"We hope he has a speedy recovery. We wait his arrival in Liberia: we will be open to prosecution. Knowingly making a false declaration is not a joke," Kesselly said.

The Liberian government said Duncan failed to declare that he helped neighbor Marthalene Williams after she fell critically ill on Sept. 15. Duncan tried to arrange for a car to take her to a hospital, but failed.

"He took her on a wheelbarrow and sought help from a friend and called his office for assistance to take her to a health facility," Information Minister Lewis Brown told the news conference. "But we know that she passed away in the wheelbarrow while en route to the health center."

Duncan fell sick a few days after arriving in the United States and sought treatment at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital last week but was sent home even though he told a nurse he had recently arrived from West Africa.

By Sunday, he needed an ambulance to return to the same hospital, where he was admitted and tested positive for Ebola.

Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf told Canadian Broadcasting Corp. on Thursday that she was angry with Duncan for what he had done, especially given how much the United States was doing to help tackle the crisis.

"The fact that he knew (he might be a carrier) and he left the country is unpardonable, quite frankly."

Sirleaf said she wanted Duncan to be sent back to Liberia once he had been treated "and then we will have to deal with him". She did not give details.

He was the second Liberian to carry Ebola to another country by air travel after Patrick Sawyer took the virus to Nigeria in July. Eight people died from that outbreak in Africa's most populous nation.

However, Kesselly said that while Sawyer was already showing signs of Ebola when he left Liberia -- and knew therefore that he was placing other travelers at risk -- Duncan had no symptoms when he boarded his flight.

(GNN)(Reuters)(AIP)(GA)(Additional reporting by David Ljunggren in Ottawa; Editing by Daniel Flynn adn Andrew Heavens)

French troops edge closer to Libya border to cut off Islamists

#GNN PARIS: France is setting up a base in northern Niger as part of an operation aimed at stopping al Qaeda-linked militants from crisscrossing the Sahel-Sahara region between southern Libya and Mauritania, officials said.

Paris, which has led efforts to push back Islamists in the region since intervening in its former colony Mali last year, redeployed troops across West Africa earlier this year to form a counter-terrorism force.

Under the new plan, about 3,000 French troops are now operating out of Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad -- countries straddling the vast arid Sahel band -- with the aim of stamping out Islamist fighters across the region. Another 1,000 soldiers are providing logistical support in Gabon and Senegal.

"A base is being set up in northern Niger with the throbbing headache of Libya in mind," a French diplomat said.

Neither France nor Niger has said where the base will be but military sources in Niger said it was likely to be around Madama, a remote desert outpost in the northeast, where Niger already has some troops based.

French officials have repeated for several months they are concerned by events in Libya, warning that the political void in the north is creating favourable conditions for Islamist groups to regroup in the barren south of the country.

Diplomatic sources estimate about 300 fighters linked to al Qaeda's North African arm AQIM, including a splinter group formed by veteran Islamist commander Mokhtar Belmokhtar, are operating in southern Libya, a key point on smuggling and trafficking routes across the region.

French and American drones are already operating out of Niger's capital Niamey.

Echoing the French push to get assets closer to Libya, U.S. officials said last month that the United States was preparing to possibly redeploy its drones to Agadez, some 750 km (460 miles) to the northeast.

Three years after they launched air strikes to help topple Muammar Gaddafi, Western powers including France have ruled out military intervention in Libya, fearing that it could further destabilise the situation given that countries across the region are backing different political and armed groups in Libya.

However, with France particularly exposed in the Sahel-Sahara region and its forces now engaged in a support role against Islamic State militants in Iraq, Paris is stepping up efforts to squeeze militants in the area.

FRONTLINE
The murder of a French citizen last week in neighbouring Algeria by former AQIM militants who pledged allegiance to Islamic State also appears to have toughened Paris' resolve.

"The approach to (fighting terrorism) is global," Army spokesman Gilles Jaron said on Thursday. "We are on the frontline in the Sahel-Sahara region and supporting in Iraq."

The French operation, dubbed Barkhane after the name of a kind of sand dune formed by desert winds, has set up its headquarters in the Chadian capital N'Djamena, but also placed an outpost in northern Chad about 200 km from the Libyan border.

Jaron said the new Niger base was still being finalised, but would have capacity for as many as 200 soldiers with aerial support. "The aim is to bring together areas that interest us. The transit points which terrorists are likely to use," he said.

There have been some successes in recent weeks. Two diplomatic sources said Abou Aassim El-Mouhajir, a spokesman for Belmokhtar's "Those Who Sign in Blood" brigade, was captured by French troops in August.

French media said he had been taken in Niger. Niger intelligence sources said French troops had passed through Madama around the time of the operation.

Jaron said four suspected militants were also captured on Sept. 24 near Gao in northern Mali, where France has handed the bulk of security control to U.N. MINUSMA peacekeeping forces.

At the same time there has been an increase in attacks on foreign troops in Mali, including the death of 10 Chadian soldiers in September.

The U.N.'s peacekeeping chief, Herve Ladsous, said last week that with many French troops leaving the north of Mali, U.N. forces were being targeted and finding it difficult to respond due to a lack of helicopters and special forces.

"It's a problem that is being resolved. We want the MINUSMA to be up to scratch so we can focus on our number one job: getting rid of AQIM," said a French defence ministry source.

(GNN)(Reuters)(AIP)(GA)(Additional reporting by David Lewis in Dakar and Abdoulaye Massalaki in Niamey; Editing by Robin Pomeroy)

Rousseff widens Brazil election lead, challengers even

#GNN Brazil: Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff has extended her lead ahead of Sunday's election and would win re-election in a likely second-round runoff, while her main challengers are running neck-and-neck for second place, polls showed on Thursday.

Environmentalist Marina Silva has continued to slip and is now only 3 percentage points ahead of centrist candidate Aecio Neves, according to the Datafolha polling firm, a statistical tie because it is within the poll's margin of error.

If no candidate wins an outright majority in first-round voting, the presidential election will be decided in a runoff between the two leading candidates on Oct. 26.


Both Datafolha and a second poll by the Ibope research firm show Rousseff winning re-election in the runoff by 7 percentage points.

Rousseff increased her lead in the first round to 16 percentage points in both polls, with 40 percent of voter support to 24 percent for Silva.

Neves, the market favorite who has been stuck in third place since Silva's late entry into the race, increased his support by 1 percentage point to 21 percent, Datafolha said, and now has a fighting chance of making the runoff.

The polls confirmed that Silva, a popular anti-establishment figure, has continued to lose ground since peaking in late August. Silva surged after entering the race when her party's original candidate was killed in a plane crash, and initially gained a 10-point advantage over Rousseff.

She lost ground under a barrage of criticism from Rousseff's campaign that portrayed her pro-market policies as a threat to Brazil's poor and questioned her ability to govern Brazil without a solid party coalition.

Rousseff's increased chances of winning re-election have weighed down Brazil's markets where investors are hoping for a change of government. Some blame Rousseff's interventionist policies for the stagnation of Latin America's largest economy.

Silva, a renowned conservationist who has embraced market-friendly policies, is promising to jumpstart Brazil's stagnant economy, while Rousseff vows to extend social programs that have lifted millions of Brazilians out of poverty and reduced inequality in Latin America's largest nation.

The seven main candidates in the race were to face each other in a final television debate late on Thursday, the last day of campaigning.

In her last television ad, Silva assailed Rousseff for lying about the government's role in a bribery and kickback scandal rocking state-run oil company Petroleo Brasileiro SA.

The Datafolha poll surveyed 12,022 respondents nationwide between Oct. 1 and Oct. 2 and the Ibope surveyed 3,010 respondents nationwide between Sept. 27 and Oct. 2. Both polls have a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.

(GNN, AIP)(Reuters)(Reporting by Anthony Boadle; Editing by Tom Brown)

An environmentalist's calculated push toward Brazil's presidency

#GNN Brazil: In March 2003, three months into her tenure as Brazil's environment minister, Marina Silva gathered a half-dozen aides at the modernist ministry building in Brasilia, the capital.

She told them the new government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was about to embark on a pharaonic infrastructure project for Brazil's arid Northeast.

The project, a still-ongoing effort to reroute water from one of Brazil's biggest rivers, had previously been opposed by environmentalists, including Silva herself.


Rather than explain how she would thwart the plan, however, the former activist said she would work to make it as sustainable as possible.

"I was shocked," says Marijane Lisboa, a former Greenpeace director and Silva's secretary of environmental quality then. "Instead of fighting, she was merely trying to mitigate."

Lisboa would not be the last person surprised by Silva, a former rubber tapper and maid and now a frontrunner in Brazil's presidential election race.

Once considered a leftist radical, the pioneer of Amazon conservation and icon of the global environmental movement has over the years marched steadily to the political center.

A 56-year-old-mother of four and evangelical Christian, Silva barely trails President Dilma Rousseff in forecasts for an expected runoff three weeks after a first round of voting on Sunday.

She is buoyed by discontent over corruption, political horse-trading, a stagnant economy and poor public services that last year sparked mass protests across Brazil.

But Silva is also a pragmatic, calculating and deal-making politician who defies efforts by rivals to cast her as inexperienced, or worse, erratic.

After moving across three parties in recent years, Silva now represents the second-tier Brazilian Socialist Party and vows to expand popular social welfare programs even as she slashes government spending.

She would pursue renewable energy programs, like biomass and solar power, but promises to keep developing the "one-time harvest" of offshore oil.

"Why does one activity have to come at the expense of another?" she said during a recent interview with Reuters in Rio de Janeiro. "A strong economy is diversified."

Silva's shift outrages some militant former followers and former colleagues in the ruling Workers' Party.

But it attracts disparate others - fellow evangelicals, São Paulo financiers, youth sick of the status quo.

If elected, her biggest struggle could be weaving the sundry strands of support into a manageable harness for Brazil's rambunctious multi-party democracy.

FROM ACTIVISM TO PRAGMATISM
In interviews, more than a dozen of those who know Silva describe a thoughtful politician firm enough to lead but pliant enough to bend when an opposing argument prevails. They say her five years as minister, and political comeback since a high-profile resignation in 2008, show her ability to set priorities, pursue goals and compromise.

"Call her anything but dumb," says Roberto Rodrigues, a former agriculture minister who clashed with Silva in the Lula administration over genetically modified crops and forestry laws. "She knows a militant cannot be president."

Silva's remarkable rise from illness and illiteracy in the rainforest to the Senate and beyond is already political lore. But her evolution from activist to possible president still puzzles many who thought her incapable of the give-and-take needed at the highest levels of politics.

In 2002, Brazilians elected Lula, a fiery former union leader. After naming a market-friendly finance minister, who soothed fears the president would be fiscally reckless, Lula made Silva his second cabinet appointment, garnering praise from conservationists worldwide.

Upon taking office in January 2003, Silva told department heads to plot priorities for the four-year term. The previous administration, of centrist Fernando Henrique Cardoso, had been too busy taming Brazil's volatile economy to pay much attention to environmental issues.

Silva held big meetings and fielded proposals for waste policies, watershed management and parkland.

But she had one overriding concern: soaring deforestation. Loggers and ranchers were pushing so quickly into the Amazon that an area the size of Belgium was being destroyed annually.

Silva proposed setting targets for curbing the rate of deforestation. She told a committee to map out a plan to reach them and rebuffed aides who suggested such targets could doom her politically if unmet.

"I'll deserve political failure if we don't reach them," she said, recalls former forestry secretary João Paulo Capobianco, still one of her closest advisors. "Whatever we do in other areas, deforestation is the measure by which we will be judged."

Some aides complained she paid little mind to anything else.

When it came to rerouting the São Francisco river, she offered sparse resistance, settling for a commitment that long-polluted parts of the river be cleaned up during the project. "If it was outside the Amazon, it was not a priority," says Gilney Viana, secretary for sustainable development then.

Soon, political conflicts intruded on her agenda.

Big meetings gave way to individual discussions with aides able to help her negotiate with the rest of the administration. "She spent more time courting Lula and other ministers than running the ministry," recalls one aide, who asked not to be identified because of continued ties to the government.

POWERFUL OPPONENTS
The agriculture ministry, a powerful force in one of the world's largest exporters of crops, was particularly problematic.

Early on, it sought to convince Lula that genetically modified soybeans growing in southern Brazil be allowed for sale. So-called "Maradona seeds," smuggled from Argentina, were still illegal in Brazil but farmers planted them anyway.

Silva lobbied against their sale. She also sought to ensure that her ministry control a new government body to regulate genetically modified crops.

She lost on both counts.

Already, environmentalists pushed her to resign in protest.

Instead, she secured a legal change forcing manufacturers to label foods containing genetically modified ingredients. "She knew how to negotiate," says Beto Albuquerque, a former congressman from the state where the soy was planted.

Once an antagonist, Albuquerque is now Silva's running mate.

Meanwhile, Silva progressed against deforestation.

Whereas the ministry had once battled alone, she convinced 12 other federal agencies, from the army to the justice ministry, to help. The science ministry, headed by a promising young politician named Eduardo Campos, ceded government satellites to track clearings.

In 2006, deforestation plunged to half the rate in 2004.

The following year, soaring demand for Brazil's commodity exports was fueling an economic boom. With re-election in sight, a group of ministers convinced Lula to dust off a series of long-proposed infrastructure projects, including hydroelectric dams on Amazon tributaries.

Some ministers, including Rousseff, Lula's chief of staff, pushed for speedy licensing. Silva resisted, angering Rousseff and the large builders who help finance Workers' Party coffers.

When Lula was re-elected, Silva was the last existing minister re-appointed.

In late 2007, gains against deforestation stalled, in part because of speculation on rainforest near proposed infrastructure sites. Silva convinced Lula to double down, introducing measures to block credit for those caught buying or selling goods from illegally cleared woodland.

When farmers complained, Lula considered revoking the measures.

In May 2008, Silva resigned. "I may lose my head," she said, "but I haven't lost my judgment."

Where some saw defeat, supporters saw wile.

"Lula could drop the measures and take the blame when deforestation worsened," says Tasso Azevedo, a forestry engineer who still advises Silva, "or he could keep them and take the credit for improvement."

Lula left them intact. The pace of deforestation during his two terms decreased by 75 percent.

'STRATEGIC VISION'
After resigning, Silva quit the Workers' Party and found a brief home with Brazil's Green Party. More importantly, she courted resourceful allies, especially Guilherme Leal, the billionaire behind Natura, a cosmetics empire built on locally-sourced ingredients, many of them from the Amazon.

Leal says he admired Silva's "strategic vision" for a country with the world's largest rainforest and abundant sources of water and clean energy. He also admired her political chops.

"It's in her DNA," Leal says. "She puts the knife between her teeth and goes. Not after power for power's sake, but for the sake of political action."

Leal financed a presidential campaign for Silva in 2010 and joined her ticket as running mate. He also introduced her to an influential group of economists, business people and financiers.

Now an important part of her power base, those people repel some of Silva's former fans.

Leonardo Boff, a prominent theologian and anti-poverty activist who has known Silva since her youth, says she has surrounded herself with "neoliberals" – capitalist types unpopular with some leftists.

Still, Silva surprised. She reaped 20 percent of the vote in 2010, far more than expected.

Green Party leaders were annoyed that a newcomer had eclipsed them so Silva defected and tried to form a new party.

When a court ruled last year that the party did not meet electoral requirements for this election, she turned to another ally: Campos, the former science minister, by now a popular governor and a presidential aspirant himself.

Campos made Silva his vice-presidential candidate. He then died in a plane crash in August and Silva moved to the top of the ticket.

At a recent rally in Rio, Silva denounced "savage marketing" by opponents suggesting she would halt oil exploration in the region. She chastised the Workers' Party, itself the target of scaremongering before it came to power, for painting her as a radical.

"I fought against lies back then," she said. "Now they want to use the same rusty knife against me."

(GNN, AIP)(Reuters)(Editing by Todd Benson and Kieran Murray)

Mexico captures drug lord Beltran Leyva: government source

#GNN MEXICO CITY: Hector Beltran Leyva, head of a family crime syndicate that waged a bloody conflict in Mexico with a former ally, drug kingpin Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman, was captured on Wednesday, an interior ministry source said.

The snaring of the boss of the Beltran Leyva drug cartel is likely a serious blow to the gang, which has been substantially weakened since its founding by a group of brothers who gave the outfit its name and split from Guzman, accusing him of betraying them.

There were few details available about the circumstances of the detention of Beltran Leyva, one of the highest profile Mexican drug bosses still at large. Officials said tests were being carried out to confirm his identity.

The detention of Beltran Leyva marks another major victory for President Enrique Pena Nieto, who has sought to shift the focus away from combating drug violence and onto a raft of economic reforms he has pushed through Congress.

By the time he was caught, Hector, 49, was the only one of the clan's brothers known to be involved in drug trafficking not dead or behind bars.

When Mexican special forces arrested Alfredo Beltran Leyva in early 2008, the brothers reportedly believed Guzman had sold out their sibling to the government, sparking a war with Mexico's most wanted man and his powerful Sinaloa Cartel.

Over the next three years, the rupture with Guzman, who was eventually captured by Mexican marines in February 2014, ushered in a new brutality to the criminal violence that dominated the 2006-2012 administration of then-President Felipe Calderon.

In May 2008, four months after Alfredo's capture, gunmen shot dead Edgar Guzman, a 22-year-old son of the Sinaloa boss, and the bloody spiral of exchanges between the two gangs sowed chaos in cities across northern Mexico.

By 2010, the Beltran Leyvas had lost several leaders and Hector, alias "The Engineer," was in control.

Hector was born in 1965 in the northwestern state of Sinaloa. His gang had a reputation as one of the most vengeful and ruthless in the business.

When Hector's older brother Arturo was cornered and killed by Mexican marines in December 2009, the government honored one of the young marines slain in the raid and images of the family funeral were broadcast around the country.

The next day, gunmen swept into the family home and killed the marine's mother, sister, brother and an aunt.

The Beltran Leyva cartel diversified into numerous side businesses, including money laundering, extortion, human trafficking, contract killings and arms smuggling.

(GNN, AIP)(Reuters)(Writing by David Alire Garcia; Editing by Steve Orlofsky)

Kidnapped Texas girl found in Mexico after 12-year search: police

BY TONY C. DREIBUS / #GNN - AUSTIN Texas: A Texas girl kidnapped 12 years ago at the age of four and taken to Mexico by her mother has been found, law enforcement officials said on Wednesday.

Sabrina Allen was taken from Austin, Texas, in April 2002 by Dara Llorens, who was divorced from Allen's father, according to the Austin Police Department.

Llorens and the child assumed new identities and moved frequently to evade capture, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which assisted in the hunt for the girl. The pair was found Tuesday in Mexico and the 17-year-old was to be reunited with her father, authorities said.

“It was a big relief ... now we get to start the healing process," the girl's father, Greg Allen, said in a press conference. "I'm going to ask her if I can give her a hug. She's in pretty bad shape, is my understanding, so I just pray for healing."

Allen said his daughter was told that he was a wife beater and child molester.

According to charging documents, Llorens, now 44, took the child for a scheduled weekend visit on April 19, 2002, as part of a court-ordered custody arrangement. She failed to return the child to the father, who had primary custody, at the end of the weekend.

According to an account of the girl's recovery provided by Klein Investigations & Consulting, agents with the Mexican Federal Police, the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Marshals Service took custody of Llorens near Mexico City, on Tuesday morning after help from a confidential informant.

Llorens was wanted on warrants that include interference with child custody and unlawful flight to avoid prosecution, the Klein group said.

One Mexican police officer sustained a minor injury in the apprehension of Llorens during a struggle, the group said.

Investigators followed up on hundreds of leads and tips over the 12-year search, and the case was profiled twice on the television show “America’s Most Wanted.”

(Editing by Carey Gillam and Eric Walsh)(GNN)(Reuters)(AIP)

Reaction: Pakistan welcomes US-Afghan deal

#GNN - #Pakistan has welcomed the bilateral security agreement between the US and Afghanistan, saying that it would help in providing the new Afghan government with economic and military resources.

Talking to the BBC Urdu, Prime Minister’s Adviser on National Security and Foreign Affairs Sartaj Aziz said Pakistan has always regarded it as an issue which concerns Afghanistan and the United States.

He said experts believe “this [agreement] will provide a protective shield to the Afghan forces”.

“The US and Nato force will stay for training and protection of the Afghan forces. Analysts believe that more than 300,000 Afghan security troops need help and the presence of US and Nato troop will be very helpful,” he added.

Another important thing is that Afghanistan would get security and economic resources it needs, Sartaj said and termed the maiden speech of the new Afghan president ‘very positive’.

“The Afghan president has issued a policy statement that he will not let his territory be used against Pakistan or any other country and this is also Pakistan’s stance,” he said.

Published in GNN, AIP, Express Tribune, October 1st, 2014.

Successful talks: Govt and #PAT likely to strike a deal

#GNN - #ISLAMABAD: Negotiations between the #government and Pakistan Awami Tehreek (PAT) are likely to bear fruit in a day or two as both parties are continuously engaged with each other to reach a final consensus draft, sources privy to the development told Media.

The government committee, led by Federal Minister for Planning and Development Ahsan Iqbal, held important round of talks with the PAT delegation, led by Raheeq Abbasi on Tuesday night in Islamabad during which they came close to a consensus, according to sources.

Following an agreement the PAT might wind up its sit-in in Islamabad before Eidul Azha, they added.
According to details shared by sources, PAT chief Dr Tahirul Qadri’s two key demands have been accepted.
Now Punjab government will form a Joint Investigation Team on Model Town incident with consensus of the PAT and all cases registered against Dr Qadri or his followers will be quashed. Apart from this, around 600 of the PAT’s workers will also be released.

A top official in PML-N said the party believed that someone had assured Dr Qadri that Model Town incident’s FIR – in which 21 people including Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif were nominated – would lead to the punishment of all allegedly involved in the crackdown in which 14 PAT worker died.

Some sources in the PAT said Dr Qadri was going to hire some legal experts from UK to file a case on the ground of Model Town FIR.

Information Minister Pervaiz Rashid confirmed the development. “I am 100% sure that negotiation will be successful in one or two days,” he said.

Meanwhile, addressing his supporters, the PAT chief said he would move across the country and expand his movement in each town and city particularly in Punjab.

Published in GNN, Express, AIP, Tribune, October 1st, 2014.

Fighting for rights: Asma Jehangir receives French honour

#GNN - #ISLAMABAD: Honouring the efforts of the lawyer and human rights activist Asma Jehangir, the French Ambassador Philippe Thiebaud presented her with the award of ‘Officier de la Legion d’Honneur’ on Tuesday at a ceremony attended by diplomats, human rights activists and lawyers.

Speaking at the ceremony, Thiebaud said the French government recognised Jehangir for all her accomplishments. “It would be a bit preposterous to explain your contributions for the protection of human rights… you are recognised worldwide for the dedication to the promotion of human rights,” he added.

As a prominent lawyer, he said, Jehangir has been involved in putting up an effort for upholding rule of law in this country for quite some years now.

“I think I’m more notorious than famous,” said Jehangir.

Pakistan, she said, was also being recognised in another perspective, adding that we have our difficulties and horrible human rights problems.

Published in GNN, Express, AIP, Tribune, October 1st, 2014.

ECP issues list of lawmakers who failed to submit their asset details

#GNN - #ISLAMABAD: Election Commission of Pakistan on Wednesday issued a list of lawmakers who have not submitted details of their assets, Express News reported.

The deadline to submit details expired on September 30.

The lawmakers included Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) chief Imran Khan, Finance Minister Ishaq Dar, Pakistan Muslim League – Quaid leaders Chaudhry Shujaat and Pervaiz Elahi and PTI member Shireen Mazari.

According to the ECP list, 230 members of Punjab Assembly, 63 of K-P Assembly, 37 of Balochistan Assembly and 78 of Sindh Assembly are among those who have not submitted asset details so far.

Nineteen members of Senate and 96 members of National Assembly are among the 523 lawmakers who are yet to give details of their assets to the poll body.