House committee presses
official on Patriot Act


Democratic and Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives' Committee on the Judiciary have questioned why the National Security Agency is collecting the phone records of millions of Americans when the majority of the calls are not relevant to any terrorist investigations.

The focus on Capitol Hill is shifting away from the former contractor who revealed the surveillance programs, Edward Snowden, to privacy and civil liberty concerns.

Snowden, who has now applied for temporary asylum in Russia, unleashed a firestorm of controversy in the United States and abroad when he revealed massive phone and email surveillance programs conducted by the NSA. The House Committee on the Judiciary focused on the program authorized under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which was designed to prevent another major terror attack on the United States after Sept. 11, 2001. 

Under Section 215, the NSA has been collecting the phone records of millions of Americans and can store them for five years.

"Do you think a program of this magnitude, gathering information involving a large number of people involved with telephone companies and so on, could be indefinitely kept secret from the American people," asked Rep. Bob Goodlatte, a Republican and committee chairman.

"Well, we tried," replied Robert Litt of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Ranking member John Conyers, a Democrat, said he believes the gathering itself of millions of phone records violates the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution guaranteeing the right to be free of unreasonable searches or seizures.

"I feel very uncomfortable about using aggregated metadata on hundreds of millions of Americans, everybody, including every member of Congress and every citizen who has a phone in the United States of America," he said. "This is unsustainable, it is outrageous and must be stopped immediately."

Deputy Attorney General James Cole defended the program, explaining that the phone records collected do not include any names of individuals, but just the numbers and the length of the calls.

"And they do not include the content of any phone calls," he said. "These are the kinds of records that under longstanding Supreme Court precedent are not protected by the Fourth Amendment."

But most of the members of the committee said their constituents are concerned about a possible breach of privacy, and said they as lawmakers were never aware of the scope of the program.

Rep James Sensenbrenner, also a Republican, has been a staunch defender of the Patriot Act. Sensenbrenner, however, said the current phone records program has gone too far and must be changed before it expires in 2015.

"And unless you realize you have a problem, that is not going to be renewed. There are not the votes in the House of Representatives to renew Section 215," he said.

Government officials testifying at the hearing said they are willing to work with Congress, and stressed that the sole purpose of collecting the records is to help U.S. intelligence agencies defend against terror attacks. Some lawmakers suggested that the NSA negotiate with phone companies to get them to agree to store records for five years, instead of the NSA collecting and storing them, and then if there were a reasonable suspicion, the NSA could obtain a warrant to get the records of a targeted individual.

 
Amgen pays $15 million fine
for promotion of its cancer drug
 
 
Biopharmaceutical company Amgen, Inc., Wednesday paid the United States more than $15 million to resolve allegations that the Ventura County, California, company provided illegal financial incentives to physicians and physician groups to induce them to prescribe the cancer drug Xgeva.

Amgen, which is headquartered in Thousand Oaks, paid the money pursuant to a settlement agreement with the United States to resolve allegations that it violated the Medicare Anti-Kickback Statute and the federal False Claims Act. The Medicare Anti-Kickback Statute prohibits anyone from offering, paying, soliciting or receiving anything of value to generate referrals for items or services payable by any federal health care program.

Xgeva, which is the brand name of the drug denosumab, was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in late 2010 for use with certain cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy. It is most commonly prescribed for patients with metastatic bone disease in order to prevent skeletal-related adverse events.

In order to increase sales of Xgeva, Amgen used data purchase agreements, which the company called the “Deep Dive” contracts, to provide financial incentives to oncologists and urologists to prescribe Xgeva. The original plan for the Deep Dive contracts called for Amgen to pay doctors to fill out a short survey on the Internet on how they were treating patients with bone cancer, including which drugs were used – whether or not Xgeva was prescribed. However, Amgen altered the original Deep Dive program design by increasing the amount of money it would pay doctors and by offering such payments only to doctors who prescribed Xgeva for their patients. 

Amgen’s Xgeva marketing team also was not supposed to know the identities of the doctors who received Deep Dive contracts, but team members had access to that information.  Additionally, in a further effort to influence doctors to prescribe Xgeva, Amgen provided cash payments characterized as honoraria to oncologists and urologists for participating in audience response sessions, data market research surveys, and  advisory board programs which touted the benefits of Xgeva.

This settlement resolves a lawsuit filed under the whistleblower provisions of the False Claims Act, which allow private citizens with knowledge of fraud to bring civil actions on behalf of the United States and share in any recovery. The case was filed last year in federal court in Los Angeles by two Amgen employees, who will collectively receive $2.75 million as part of the settlement.
    

Cuba and U.S. meet again
to discuss immigration issues


 The United States and Cuba resumed immigration talks in Washington Wednesday after a two-year hiatus and U.S. officials said they had again pressed for the release of jailed American contractor Alan Gross.
 
The last migration roundtable between the United States and Cuba was in January 2011 when officials met in Havana.
 
The talks were led by Alex Lee, acting U.S. deputy assistant secretary for Western Hemisphere affairs, and Josefina Vidal Ferreiro, Cuba's foreign ministry director general for U.S. affairs.
 
The State Department said the U.S. delegation reiterated a call for the release of Gross, who is serving a 15-year sentence in Cuba for installing Internet networks for Cuban Jews as part of a U.S. program that Cuba considers subversive.
 
Gross' arrest in late 2009 and sentencing in March 2011 halted a brief thaw in U.S.-Cuba relations after Barack Obama took office in January 2009.
 
The department said Lee made it clear that Gross was trying to facilitate communications between Cuba's citizens and the rest of the world.
 
The sides also discussed the application of U.S.-Cuba Migration Accords, which seek to promote safe, legal and orderly migrations between the two countries.
 
Over the past half century, thousands of Cubans have died trying to cross the treacherous Florida Straits in flimsy boats and homemade rafts.
 

Rolling Stone rattles readers
with boom suspect's photo


The American magazine, Rolling Stone, has stirred up a hornets’ nest of controversy by putting a photo of Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on the cover of its August issue.
 
The magazine says its article on Tsarnaev was based on interviews with his friends, neighbors, teachers and Boston area law enforcement officials. It describes the story as a “heartbreaking account of how a charming kid with a bright future became a monster.”
 
The cover photo of Tsarnaev looks like those on many of Rolling Stone’s issues featuring rock stars. Some Twitter users described its use as disgraceful.
 
“This is unacceptable and a slap in the face for those he killed and maimed,” said one comment on the magazine’s Facebook page.
 
“I will never buy a Rolling Stone ever again. Disgraceful,” said another.
 
Tsarnaev and his older brother Tamerlan are accused of carrying out the April 15 attack in Boston that killed three people and wounded more than 260 others. Tamerlan was killed in a shootout with police, and Dzhokhar has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
 
Rolling Stone has often stirred controversy with its covers. One of the most controversial came in 1970 when the magazine put serial killer Charles Manson on the cover.


Zimmerman juror says law
needs to be changed in Florida


A member of the jury that found George Zimmerman not guilty in the shooting death of unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin called for changes in Florida's self-defense law, which she said gave jurors no option but to acquit the defendant.
 
The juror's statement adds to pleas from around the country to change the Stand Your Ground laws that more than 30 states have adopted. In Florida, demonstrators occupied a part of the governor's office demanding that the state repeal or curtail its 2005 law.
 
With her identity kept secret, the juror, designated B-37, gave an interview to CNN on Monday that stirred further debate in the case that captivated the U.S. public and triggered  lengthy discussions about race, guns and self-defense laws.
 
After receiving a torrent of criticism, including a statement to CNN from four other jurors who said she did not speak for them, the juror issued a statement further stressing her position that Florida's self-defense law, commonly known as Stand Your Ground, forced the jury to vote not guilty.
 
“My prayers are with all those who have the influence and power to modify the laws that left me with no verdict option other than 'not guilty' in order to remain within the instructions,” juror B-37 said in the statement. “No other family should be forced to endure what the Martin family has endured.”
 
According to the instructions given to the jury, Zimmerman had “no duty to retreat and had the right to stand his ground and meet force with force” if he reasonably feared for his life or great bodily harm.
 
Tuesday, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder questioned those laws in a speech. Wednesday, the Florida president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People urged Republican Gov. Rick Scott to return to the state capital, Tallahassee, to meet with scores of young demonstrators occupying his office to protest the verdict.
 
The protesters, hastily organized by a group called Dream Defenders, are among those demanding Scott call a special session of the Republican-led Florida legislature to repeal or curtail the 2005 Stand Your Ground law. The governor has said he supports the law, which was strongly backed by the National Rifle Association.
 
“The consequence of this verdict and the Stand Your Ground law has made Florida an increasingly unsafe state for its citizens, especially its black and Latino youth,” Adora Obi Nweze, president of the Florida State Conference of the NAACP, wrote in a letter hand-delivered to Scott's office.
 
After three weeks of testimony and 16 hours of deliberation, the jury of five white women and one of mixed race acquitted Zimmerman of second-degree murder and manslaughter in the shooting death, inside a gated community in the central Florida town of Sanford Feb. 26, 2012.

Shortly before the shooting, Zimmerman called police from his car to report a suspicious person, Martin, a house guest of his father's fiancee, who lived inside the gated community. Zimmerman left his car and got into a fight with Martin that left Zimmerman with a bloody nose and head injuries. It ended when Zimmerman shot Martin through the heart with a 9-mm. pistol he had concealed and was licensed to carry.
 
The Democratic leaders of Florida's legislature, who are in the minority in both chambers, were due to hold a news conference in Fort Lauderdale today to announce plans for action in response to the Zimmerman acquittal. They tried to get the Stand Your Ground law changed in the past session but never even got a committee hearing on the issue.
 
Juror B-37, a mother of two who grew up in a military family and used to have a permit to carry a concealed weapon, said one holdout juror switched her vote to “not guilty” after half an hour of agonizing over the law.
 
“She wanted to find him guilty of something but couldn't because of the law. The way the law was written, he wasn't responsible for  things that he had done leading up to that point,” she said.
 
“I wanted to find him guilty of not using his senses but ... you can't charge him with anything because he didn't do anything unlawful,” said juror B-37, who also said she believed Martin attacked Zimmerman.
 
Four other jurors responded with a statement distancing themselves from B-37, who told CNN nobody on the jury felt raced played a role in the case.
 
“We also wish to point out that the opinions of juror B-37  expressed on the Anderson Cooper show were her own, and not in any way representative of the jurors listed below,” said the statement, which listed their juror numbers.


Suspect in lengthy abductions
might try to make a court deal


A former Cleveland school bus driver accused of kidnapping and holding three women captive for years pleaded not guilty on Wednesday to hundreds of criminal charges, but his lawyers said they are seeking a plea agreement to avert a trial.
 
A grand jury on Friday added 648 charges to a previous indictment against Ariel Castro, bringing the total number of charges against him to 977.
 
Castro, 53, is accused of abducting the first of the women in 2002 and holding them captive until they escaped from his house on May 6 along with a 6-year-old girl he fathered with one of the women.
 
During a brief court appearance, a lawyer for Castro entered the not guilty plea, and the judge kept in place an $8 million bond, and an order that Castro have no contact with the three women and the child.
 
Law enforcement officials have said that the women, Gina DeJesus, 23, Michelle Knight, 32, and Amanda Berry, 27, were kept bound in chains or rope for periods of time and that they endured starvation, beatings and repeated sexual assaults.
 
The most serious of the charges against Castro, two counts of aggravated murder under a fetal homicide law over allegations he forced Knight to miscarry, could potentially carry a death sentence if prosecutors choose to pursue it.
 
Joe Frolik, a spokesman for the Cuyahoga County prosecutor, told reporters a committee that considers death penalty charges is still deliberating and prosecutors have reserved the right to bring a third indictment that includes a death penalty charge.
 
According to the indictment, Knight was pregnant at least three times from September 2002 to December 2003. Castro's aggravated murder charge stems from allegations that he forced her to miscarry in a fourth pregnancy from 2006 to 2007.
 
But legal experts have said that it would be difficult to prove murder without physical evidence of the miscarriage.
 
Castro has not sought to delay the start of his trial, which is scheduled for Aug. 5, but defense attorneys again said on Wednesday they are seeking a plea agreement in the case.
 
“We are preparing for that trial however with the goal in mind to try to resolve this for the fairness of the women as well as the community so everyone can put this behind them,” Castro's attorney, Craig Weintraub, told reporters.
 
“Either we are going to have a plea or we are going to have a trial on Aug. 5,” he said.
 
Ian Friedman, a Cleveland lawyer who defended a teenager who opened fire at an Ohio school last year killing three people, said he would be shocked if the Castro trial begins as early as Aug. 5 because of the complexity and number of charges.
 
“Ariel Castro will never leave prison to the taste of freedom. This case is only about whether he receives life or death,” Friedman said.
 
Castro is charged with kidnapping the three women from 2002 to 2004 and brutalizing them over the next 10 years. He is also charged with kidnapping the 6-year-old girl and three counts of endangering her.
 
In Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court Wednesday, Castro's lawyers waived a reading of the full indictment, which also includes 512 counts of kidnapping, 446 counts of rape, seven counts of gross sexual imposition, six counts of felony assault, and one count of possessing tools such as a Ruger handgun used to aid in the crimes.
 
Judge Pamela Barker summarized the charges against Castro.  When she asked if he understood the charges, Castro replied, “yes.” Barker several times told Castro, who was wearing orange prison clothes, to raise his head and to open his eyes.
 
DNA evidence has confirmed that Castro was the father of the girl, who was born to Ms. Berry. At a court appearance in early July, Castro asked to be allowed jail visits from his daughter. A judge rejected the request immediately as not appropriate.


Belief in China a being No. 1
grows among world population


A new poll by the Pew Research Center says the world increasingly believes China will eventually overtake the United States as the world's top superpower.

In just over half of the 39 countries polled, the U.S. is still recognized, accurately, as the world's largest economy. But a majority of people in 18 of the countries said China will eventually surpass the U.S.

The survey released Thursday suggests the U.S. continues to enjoy a more favorable global image than China. It put the U.S. favorability rating at 63 percent, compared with 50 percent for China.

Favorability ratings varied widely according to region. The survey found that China's image is poor among its immediate neighbors. It said the United States' image is the most negative in Muslim-majority countries.

However, even those nations with the widest animosity toward the U.S. said they believe that it offers more personal freedom for its citizens. A median of 70 percent told Pew that the U.S. respects individual freedoms, while only 36 percent said the same of China.

The report also suggests that American and Chinese citizens are becoming more suspicious of each other. Just 37 percent of Americans expressed a positive view of China, down from 51 percent two years ago. In China, 40 percent had a favorable impression of the U.S., down from 58 percent in 2010.

The survey by Pew Research Center's Global Attitudes Project is the U.S.-based organization's largest since 2007. It was conducted before ex-U.S. intelligence analyst Edward Snowden leaked a series of classified documents revealing several domestic and international surveillance programs that have generated controversy in the U.S. and many countries around the world.


Mandela has 95th birthday
as health said to be better


South Africa says former president Nelson Mandela's health is steadily improving as he turns 95 years old today.

President Jacob Zuma wished Mandela happy birthday in a statement, saying South Africa is proud to call the international icon its own.

Mandela has been hospitalized for more than a month with a recurring lung infection. Officials describe his condition as critical but stable.

South Africans have big celebrations planned for his birthday today, which has been designated an international day of service.

Known as "Mandela Day," people are asked to give 67 minutes of their time doing something charitable, or one minute for each year he dedicated to his struggle for social justice.

U.S. President Barack Obama, who visited South Africa last month, said in a statement late Wednesday that people everywhere can honor Mandela by "heeding his example" through acts of service.

Obama said he and his family will forever draw strength and inspiration from Mandela's moral courage, kindness and humility.

Wednesday, Mandela's daughter, Zindzi Mandela, said he is making remarkable progress and may be going home anytime soon.

She also said people were at one time preparing for the worst, but that her father continues to amaze. She said he is responding very well.

Mandela, who was hospitalized on June 8, is revered in South Africa and beyond for his role in ending official racial discrimination and white minority rule. After spending 27 years in prison, he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993 and was elected South Africa's first black president the following year.


Commission in Brazil to study
spending for 2014 World Cup


The Brazilian congress will investigate the billions of dollars spent on soccer stadiums for next year's World Cup, one of the main complaints that fueled massive street protests last month against the country's political establishment.
 
Lawmakers gathered enough signatures to establish a joint investigation by both chambers of congress that will look into cost overruns and allegations of corruption in the building or overhaul of 12 stadiums that will host the global soccer event.
 
The signatures still have to be verified and the petition confirmed by both chambers, which will not happen until August, allowing time for the government to convince lawmakers to withdraw their support and scuttle the probe.
 
In a sudden outburst of national discontent that shocked politicians, Brazilians took to the streets in June to express their anger at the high cost of living and poor quality of public transport, health and education services, as well as overspending on the stadiums for the World Cup, an event that is meant to crown Brazil's emergence as a world economic power.
 
The main target of public ire was Brazil's political class,  which most Brazilians see as corrupt and self-serving.
 
Protests were fueled by the hosting of the Confederations Cup, a warm-up for the World Cup. Demonstrators demanded improved public services rather than costly mega-events like the World Cup and the Olympic Games set for 2016 in Rio de Janeiro.
 
“In the wake of the protests, Congress must change its attitude and open this investigation demanded by the people,” said Sen. Alvaro Dias of the main opposition party PSDB, which initially requested the probe.
 
“No doubt there will be major revelations,” Dias said.
 
The investigation will look at cost-overruns in building new stadiums such as the Mane Garrincha National Stadium in Brasilia, which is expected to cost more than 1.2 billion reais ($535.33 million) or double the original price tag.
 
Six of the 12 stadiums have been delivered for what some analysts say will be the most costly World Cup.
 
President Dilma Rousseff's government originally hoped to build the stadiums with private capital, but the arenas ended up depending on public funding. She has said the money will be repaid to the state.