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Saturday, November 2, 2013

LAX LATEST: Total of 5 people taken to hospitals

LOS ANGELES (AP) — A suspected gunman was in custody following a shooting at Los Angeles airport that killed a TSA officer and wounded other people. This is what AP reporters on the scene Friday are learning about the events unfolding:

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DETAILS ON INJURIES

Los Angeles Fire Department Battalion Chief Armando Hogan says five people were taken to hospitals after the shooting: the gunman, the TSA officer who died, two other people who were shot, and one person with a broken ankle. A sixth person was treated at the scene for ringing in the ears from gunfire.

The TSA said two of the people injured are TSA officers.

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SHOOTER HAD MORE AMMO

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti says the airport shooter was carrying a lot of additional ammunition. "There were more than 100 more rounds," he said.

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PASSENGERS ON WAY BACK IN

As two terminals reopened, hundreds of passengers pulled rolling suitcases across a road outside the facilities, standing shoulder-to-shoulder across all four lanes. Motorcycle police with megaphones followed slowly behind, trying to herd them onto the sidewalk.

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HUNDREDS OF FLIGHTS AFFECTED

Airport officials say 746 flights nationwide were affected by the incident. Some 46 were diverted, and others were held at LAX or at the originating airport. Terminal 3, where the shooting occurred, remains closed as the forensics investigation continues.

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AIRPORT SLOWLY REOPENING

Employees are being let back into two closed terminals, and taxis and buses are again running on a loop through the airport. In addition, the FAA has dropped its "ground stop" order, meaning airliners in other cities are allowed to resume flying to LAX. Nearly 200 flights were cancelled and others were diverted.

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Snowden seeks the world's help against US charges

BERLIN (AP) — The U.S. refused to show any leniency to fugitive leaker Edward Snowden on Friday, even as Secretary of State John Kerry conceded that eavesdropping on allies had happened on "automatic pilot" and went too far.

Snowden made his appeal for U.S. clemency in a letter released Friday by a German lawmaker who met with him in Moscow. In it, the 30-year-old American asked for international help to persuade the U.S. to drop spying charges against him and said he would like to testify before the U.S. Congress about the National Security Agency's surveillance activities.

Snowden also indicated he would be willing to help German officials investigate alleged U.S. spying in Germany, said Hans-Christian Stroebele, a lawmaker with the opposition Green Party and a member of the parliamentary committee that oversees German intelligence.

Stroebele met with Snowden for three hours on Thursday, a week after explosive allegations that the NSA had monitored Chancellor Angela Merkel's cellphone prompted her to complain personally to President Barack Obama. The alleged spying has produced the most serious diplomatic tensions between the two allies since Germany opposed the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

In his one-page typed letter, written in English and bearing signatures that Stroebele said were his own and Snowden's, the American complained that the U.S. government "continues to treat dissent as defection, and seeks to criminalize political speech with felony charges that provide no defense."

"However, speaking the truth is not a crime," Snowden wrote. "I am confident that with the support of the international community, the government of the United States will abandon this harmful behavior."

In Washington, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki would not respond directly to Snowden's appeal, but said the U.S. position "has not changed."

"Despite recent reports or recent pronouncements from Mr. Snowden, as we've stated many times before, he's accused of leaking classified information, faces felony charges here in the United States and we believe he should be returned as soon as possible, where he will be accorded full due process and protections applicable under U.S. law," Psaki said.

Snowden's father, Lon Snowden, who recently visited his son in Russia and continues to communicate with him, told The Associated Press on Friday that Snowden will not travel to Germany to talk to authorities as long as the U.S. charges remain in place.

"If they want to understand my son's position about Germany, read his letter. It's pretty clear. He is not going to Germany to testify as long as he is indicted by the United States and their position is what it is," the elder Snowden said, adding that his son would prefer to testify before Congress anyway.

"My son would love to come back to the United States but I'm not sure it will be safe for him, even if all charges are dropped," Lon Snowden said. "My advice would be to stay in Russia and move on with his life, and that's what I believe he will do."

Stroebele said Edward Snowden appeared healthy and cheerful during their meeting at an undisclosed location in Moscow. The German television network ARD, which accompanied Stroebele, said the Germans were taken to the meeting by unidentified security officials under "strict secrecy."

Snowden "said that he would like most to lay the facts on the table before a committee of the U.S. Congress and explain them," Stroebele said. The lawmaker, a prominent critic of the NSA's alleged activities, said Snowden "did not present himself to me as anti-American or anything like that — quite the contrary."

Merkel this week sent German officials to Washington for talks on the spying issue. Germany's parliament also is expected to discuss the NSA's alleged spying on Nov. 18.

Snowden's appeal came as Kerry conceded that because of modern technology, some NSA activities had gone too far and were carried out without the knowledge of Obama administration officials.

"The president and I have learned of some things that have been happening, in many ways on an automatic pilot, because the technology is there," Kerry said Thursday, speaking in a video link to an open government conference in London.

"In some cases, some of these actions have reached too far and we are going to try to make sure it doesn't happen in the future," Kerry said, adding that ongoing reviews of U.S. surveillance will ensure that technology is not being abused.

Snowden was granted a one-year asylum in Russia in August after being stuck at a Moscow airport for more than a month following his arrival from Hong Kong. Russian President Vladimir Putin has said Snowden got asylum on condition that he wouldn't harm U.S. interests.

Snowden's exact whereabouts in Russia and his activities there have been a mystery, though there has been wide speculation that he is under the control of Russia's security services.

Stroebele was tightlipped about where he met Snowden. The German politician said he had no contact with the German Embassy in Moscow nor with Russian authorities other than a passport control officer — although he did not explain who the security officials mentioned by German television were.

Snowden's lawyer says his client has accepted a technical-support job with a major Russian website but refused to name it.

"He enjoys living in Russia. ... We have opportunities to visit cultural events. We have opportunities to show him our places of interest," attorney Anatoly Kucherena said.

He also said Snowden is studying Russian and has developed some competency in it.

The Russian news site Life News on Thursday published a photo showing Snowden on a boat in the Moscow River with the Christ the Savior Cathedral in the background. It said the photo was taken in September.

"It's him," Kucherena told the AP on Friday.

_____

AP correspondents Vladimir Isachenkov and Jim Heintz in Moscow, Deb Riechmann in Washington, Michael Rubinkam in Pennsylvania, and David Rising and Robert H. Reid in Berlin contributed to this report.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/snowden-seeks-worlds-help-against-us-charges-162138932.html
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Friday, November 1, 2013

The Fight to Criminalize Early-Term Abortions

RU-486 — The raft of new efforts to regulate medication abortions are confusing, and the legal questions surrounding them are even more so.

In 2011, Oklahoma passed a law making it harder for doctors to prescribe abortion-inducing drugs. Oklahoma’s Supreme Court struck down the law as unconstitutional. Then the Supreme Court agreed to review the case, but asked the Oklahoma court (which had written only a few paragraphs) to clarify why they struck down the law in the first place. This week, the Oklahoma Court explained itself: The state’s effort to regulate abortion-inducing drugs amounted to a total ban on medication abortions. And so it was unconstitutional.

Dahlia Lithwick writes about the courts and the law for Slate. Follow her on Twitter.

One day earlier, a lower court in Texas, looking at a substantially similar (but not identical) effort to regulate medication abortions, upheld the provision, albeit with an exception. If a woman need a nonsurgical abortion to protect her health or life, she can still get it. The raft of new efforts to regulate medication abortions are confusing, and the legal questions surrounding them are even more so. How can we square what happened in Texas with what happened in Oklahoma, and what does it all mean for the future of this type of abortion at the Supreme Court, where the Oklahoma case may be heard in the near future?

The constitutional questions around medication abortions are new and complicated and different from the usual fights we’ve witnessed over surgical abortion and TRAP laws (Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers). Medication abortions mainly involve the drug mifepristone, or RU-486. They take place in the first trimester—and that means the state-erected limits are often thinly disguised state efforts to challenge what remains of Roe v Wade. Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin, signing her state’s bill in May 2011, called it “a critical part of our effort to promote the cause of life.” Gov. Rick Perry has expressly stated that his goal is to make abortion at any stage “a thing of the past.” In effect, these challenges force questions that have been unanswered for years at the court: Is Roe still on safe ground? Are state efforts to force the question back before the high court going to pay off? And what does it mean when courts seem to find it easier to write about the rights of doctors to practice good medicine than the rights of women to receive it?

Is Roe still on safe ground? Are state efforts to force the abortion question back before the high court going to pay off?

Twelve states, including Oklahoma, have some form of medication-abortion regulations on the books. The Oklahoma ban was incredibly poorly drafted, essentially sweeping in any “abortion inducing medication,” which made it easy for the state Supreme Court to see it as a total ban. The other states have been sneakier.

As Linda Greenhouse explained in September, the issue here is not the abortions themselves. The statues revolve around how doctors may prescribe the series of pills that induce them. Only one drug—mifepristone—has been approved by the FDA for inducing abortions, and only for the first nine weeks of pregnancy. But the way doctors use this drug and others related to it has changed in the intervening years. At this point, the most common medication-abortion protocol requires that women take two pills: mifepristone, which terminates the pregnancy, and misoprostol, two days later, which causes the uterus to expel the pregnancy. In most states, women can take the first pill at her doctor’s office and the second pill at home, which helps improve access for poor or rural women who live far from abortion clinics, can’t take off several days from work, and want to terminate as early as possible.

Under the 2011 Oklahoma law, the state required physicians to follow the dosage and procedures only as written on the F.D.A. label. The prohibition on allowing doctors to prescribe the pill in a manner considered "off-label" effectively means that although research and best practices have evolved (as they have for medications approved for cancer and migraines and most other things), physicians must continue to prescribe dosages that are medically outdated. As Amanda Marcotte explained in Slate, since the FDA label was approved, further research has shown that the second pill in the series can safely be taken at home, and that the 600 milligrams of Mifeprex required by the label is too high. Most doctors agree that only 200 milligrams are needed. Finally, as Greenhouse clarified, “While the original F.D.A. label specified that the drugs should be used only up to 49 days of pregnancy, doctors have found the regimen safe and effective for up to 63 days—nine weeks of pregnancy.”

To sum up, the FDA label mandates a protocol that is more cumbersome, expensive, and dangerous for most women. Emily Bazelon explained why FDA reauthorization has not been sought, even though, at this point “96 percent of all medication abortions now involve an evidence-based regimen that departs from the FDA protocol that’s on the label.” That’s why a district court judge in Oklahoma, looking at the restriction, found that limiting physicians to the label requirements was “so completely at odds with the standard that governs the practice of medicine that it can serve no purpose other than to prevent women from obtaining abortions and to punish and discriminate against those women who do.” In other words, he got it. And then he stopped Oklahoma’s law from going into effect.

Source: http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2013/11/oklahoma_says_laws_against_medication_abortions_are_unconstitutional_but.html
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The German Gambit

Edward Snowden leaked documents from the National Security Agency in the name of privacy and transparency. He believed that people around the world should know the NSA was spying on them. Now he’s using the anger of those people to protect himself from the U.S. government.

Will Saletan writes about politics, science, technology, and other stuff for Slate. He’s the author of Bearing Right. Follow him on Twitter.

In his first recorded interview with the Guardian, conducted on June 6, Snowden said he had joined the U.S. intelligence community as a naïve patriot. Over the years, he had learned that the government was “misleading all publics, not just the American public, in order to create a certain mindset in the global consciousness.” He had come to regard himself as a citizen of the world, rejecting the NSA’s premise that U.S. intelligence agencies had no duty to respect foreigners’ privacy. “The US Person/foreigner distinction is not a reasonable substitute for individualized suspicion,” Snowden wrote in a Q&A with the Guardian on June 17. Four weeks later, in a July 12 statement at the Moscow airport, he declared,

Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and numerous statutes and treaties forbid such systems of massive, pervasive surveillance. … I believe in the principle declared at Nuremberg in 1945: "Individuals have international duties which transcend the national obligations of obedience. Therefore individual citizens have the duty to violate domestic laws to prevent crimes against peace and humanity from occurring.”

I take Snowden at his word. He believes everyone has a right to privacy. That, above all, is why he has leaked these documents. But he’s also human. From the moment he revealed his identity, he has been pursued by the U.S. government, seeking his extradition and prosecution. His passport has been revoked, blocking his freedom to travel. He knows what happened to Chelsea Manning. To defend himself, Snowden needs friends. He needs governments that are willing to protect him from the U.S.

That’s one reason why Snowden went to Hong Kong in the first place. According to his principal collaborator, journalist Glenn Greenwald, Snowden fled there in part because he believed that “the Chinese government and the government of Hong Kong will not be simply subservient or complicit in adhering to U.S. dictates regarding what it is that they want to do to him.” Surely that’s why Snowden, while still in Hong Kong, picked China as the first country whose victimization by the NSA he would expose.

Since then, Greenwald and other reporters, armed with Snowden’s files, have exposed NSA surveillance against France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Brazil, Mexico, India, and many other countries. The Germans, in particular, are furious that the NSA tapped the phone of Chancellor Angela Merkel. They plan to investigate exactly what the NSA has done to them over the years. For that, they need Snowden’s help. They want his testimony.

And that, in turn, presents Snowden with an opportunity. On Oct. 31 he wrote a letter to the Germans. In the letter, released this morning, he describes his principles, his audience, and his mission in global terms. “I witnessed systemic violations of law by my government that created a moral duty to act,” he writes. “Citizens around the world as well as high officials—including in the United States—have judged the revelation of an unaccountable system of pervasive surveillance to be a public service.”

Now he needs help from these citizens and officials. “I have faced a severe and sustained campaign of persecution that forced me from my family and home,” he writes. “I am currently living in exile under a grant of temporary asylum.” He concludes,

[M]y government continues to treat dissent as defection, and seeks to criminalize political speech with felony charges that provide no defense. … I am confident that with the support of the international community, the government of the United States will abandon this harmful behavior. I hope that when the difficulties of this humanitarian situation have been resolved, I will be able to cooperate in the responsible finding of fact regarding reports in the media, particularly in regard to the truth and authenticity of documents, as appropriate and in accordance with the law. I look forward to speaking with you in your country when the situation is resolved …

You don’t need NSA software to decipher this message. Snowden is telling the Germans he’ll gladly testify in their investigation—though he’d prefer to do so before the U.S. Congress—but first he needs their help. He needs guarantees that he can fly to Germany, and remain there, under legal protection from extradition. The Germans, armed with his disclosures of U.S. espionage against them, must use that leverage, legally and politically, to stand up to the U.S.

Will they oblige him? I doubt it. But I’ve been wrong about this story before. When Snowden revealed his identity, I thought he was doomed. One man couldn’t escape the global reach and wrath of the U.S. government, could he? But Snowden’s leaks, regardless of his motives, have served him well. They have earned him friends around the world and have turned those friends against the U.S. Now we’ll see whether, for the man himself, it pays off.

Source: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/frame_game/2013/11/snowden_s_letter_to_merkel_will_germany_grant_him_asylum.html
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Syria peace envoy: No talks without opposition

DAMASCUS, Syria (AP) — The international envoy to Syria called on the divided opposition Friday to overcome differences and agree to attend peace talks with President Bashar Assad's government, warning the negotiations cannot go forward without them.

Lakhdar Brahimi, who wrapped up his five-day visit to Damascus, appeared uncertain about prospects for the meeting expected to take place later this month in Geneva.

The deeply fractured Syrian opposition groups are split on whether to attend the talks. They also disagree over conditions for taking part — from demands that Assad steps down right away to guarantees that he would not be part of a negotiated solution for the country's future. The opposition is also split between Damascus-based groups, who have said they will attend without preconditions, and the exiled opposition, which is more hard-line.

The government has rejected demands that Assad step aside, saying he will stay at least until the end of his term in mid-2014, and will then decide whether to seek re-election. Assad also has said he will not negotiate with armed rebels.

"The Syrian national opposition, armed and unarmed, have all been invited to form a convincing delegation," Brahimi said in Beirut after arriving from Syria. "I am counting on the Syrian people and those who claim to represent the Syrian people to realize the danger of the situation and for all sides to seek to save Syria and to save their country."

In New York, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told reporters the aim was to convene the talks "within the month of November."

U.N. spokesman Martin Nesirky said "a great deal is being done" to try to unite the opposition.

"Everybody knows that this is difficult," he said.

Nesirky said Brahimi will meet U.S. and Russian officials in Geneva on Nov. 5 for further discussions. They then will be joined by the other permanent members of the Security Council — Britain, China and France, he said. The U.S. and Russia have been pushing for a peace conference in November.

The Syrian opposition is made up of different factions, many of them politicians based in exile — the majority of whom are part of the main umbrella group, the Syrian National Coalition. The rebels themselves are a mix of various groups, from the mainstream Free Syrian Army to the extremist but powerful and effective al-Qaida-linked groups. That's made negotiations difficult.

The push for peace talks came as Syrian troops captured a strategic northern town Friday after weeks of intense battles, pushing rebels from a sprawling military complex believed to store chemical weapons.

The capture of Safira follows recent victories by government forces mainly around the capital Damascus and the embattled northern province of Aleppo where the town is located. Earlier this month, troops captured the nearby town of Khanaser, opening a key road linking the central heartland with Aleppo.

Rebels had been in control of Safira for more than a year.

Government forces also have pushed rebels further from the desert road used to send supplies to government-held areas in the north.

"The main aim of the offensive was to secure the Defense Factories and the second to secure the road used to send army supplies," said an Aleppo-based activist who goes with the name Abu Raed.

"The battle over the Defense Factories is over," said the man, suggesting it would not be possible for rebels to attack the complex after government troops captured Safira.

More than 120,000 people have been killed so far in the war, now in its third year, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights Observatory, a Britain-based watchdog that closely monitors the war through a network of activists in the country. The U.N. said in July that 100,000 Syrians have been killed, and has not updated that figure since. Millions of Syrians have fled their homes because of the fighting.

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Mroue reported from Beirut. Associated Press writer Edith Lederer contributed to this report from New York.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/syria-peace-envoy-no-talks-without-opposition-122150210.html
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Oculus CEO clarifies: one Oculus Rift headed to consumers, supports Android and PC

Despite contrary reports, Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe says that only one version of his company's consumer-ready virtual reality gaming headset is planned for launch. "We will be delivering a single Oculus Rift," Iribe tells Engadget. After giving a keynote during GamesBeat 2013 this week, it was ...

Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/hBuQgEVgmiw/
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Xbox One will act as a media server and play audio CDs

The Xbox One will stream media from your home network and play audio CDs, Microsoft tells Penny Arcade Report. In that way, the One is much like the Xbox 360. When it comes to MP3 playback, however, it's a little trickier. The Xbox One is a Play To device that supports Redmond's PC and mobile ecosystem, but not much else. This comes just days after Sony released its massive FAQ that said, among other things, that the PlayStation 4 wouldn't do any of the above. If you're looking for a new do-all device for your A/V rack, the Xbox One could be it.

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/11/01/xbox-one-dlna-streaming-mp3-playback/?ncid=rss_truncated
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