White House disappointed
by Snowden's Russian asylum


White House officials say they are extremely disappointed by Russia’s decision to grant asylum for one year to Edward Snowden, who is accused of leaking U.S. government secrets.  Officials are deciding how to respond.

White House press secretary Jay Carney said Thursday Russia’s offer of asylum to Snowden has undermined Russia’s record of law enforcement cooperation with the United States.

“We are extremely disappointed that the Russian government would take this step, despite our very clear and lawful requests, in public and and in private, to have Mr. Snowden expelled to the United States to face the charges against him,” he said.

The former National Security Agency contract systems analyst had been living in a Moscow airport for the past six weeks.  Russian President Vladimir Putin has dismissed the Obama administration’s demand that Snowden be returned to the U.S. to face espionage charges for leaks that revealed American surveillance practices.

Carney described Snowden as a security risk who has been in possession of classified information both in China and in Russia.

“Mr. Snowden is not a whistleblower.  He is accused of leaking classified information and has been charged with three felony counts, and he should be returned to the United States as soon as possible, where he will be accorded full due process and protections,” he said.

Moscow’s move could further strain U.S.-Russian relations, which are already under pressure from disagreements over Syria and other issues.

Carney said advisers were discussing whether to go ahead with President Barack Obama’s meeting with President Putin in Russia, scheduled to coincide with the September G20 summit in St. Petersburg.

“I do not have a scheduling announcement for you today, but obviously, this is not a positive development, and we have a wide range of interests with the Russians, and we are evaluating the utility of a summit,” he said.

Carney said Russia did not give the Obama administration notice of its asylum decision.  He said this was not just a legal matter, but also a matter of U.S. relations with Russia.

The president’s spokesman, however, called the relationship between the two countries broad and important.  Carney said the benefits of engagement with Russia have been worth the accompanying conflicts and disagreements.

He said officials in Washington would continue to discuss the Snowden situation with their counterparts in Moscow.

Some U.S. lawmakers have called on the president to take a tough stand against Russia, possibly including a U.S. boycott of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.



Other NSA workers skipped
to Moscow during Cold War


Edward Snowden isn't the first National Security Agency insider to leave the United States and spill spy agency secrets.
 
It hasn't gone according to plan for Snowden, who fled to Hong Kong and then spent more than a month marooned in the transit zone of a Moscow airport before finally getting his temporary asylum papers Thursday.
 
And it didn’t go well for a couple of NSA defectors who came long before him.
 
William Martin and Bernon Mitchell were friends working at the National Security Agency in the late 1950s. The two were working in a highly technical field, the code-related work known as cryptology.
 
In the course of their work, Martin and Mitchell came across highly-secret documents, says David Barrett, a national security expert now teaching at Villanova University.
 
“For example, they became aware that not only was the NSA listening in to the communications of foreign countries that were enemies or rivals, like the Soviet Union, they discovered that the National Security Agency was also monitoring communications of countries that were our allies,” Barrett said. “And they thought this was deeply offensive and just wrong.”
 
Barrett said the two also learned that the American government was intercepting and reading mail that came into the U.S. from other countries.
 
And now more than half a century later, Snowden, is accusing the agency of doing more or less the same thing.
 
Barrett says Martin and Mitchell were disillusioned and decided to do something about it.
 
 “They noticed the idealistic language that President Eisenhower used in his speeches – public speeches – and compared it to some of what they knew the government was doing and so they decided to defect to the Soviet Union.”
 
Barrett says that in June of 1960, Martin and Mitchell told their superiors they were going on a month-long vacation to visit family and friends. But instead, they made their way to Moscow via New Orleans, Mexico City and Cuba.
 
When they didn’t return from vacation, their superiors got suspicious. Barrett says two months later, the NSA issued a statement saying agency mathematicians might have defected behind the Iron Curtain.
 
“But they said there is no way that anything that these two guys know could do any harm to the security of the U.S.,” he said. “And so it was treated as sort of a small event and initially, the press simply accepted that story that it was a small event.”
 
On Sept. 6, 1960, Martin and Mitchell held a news conference in Moscow. Barrett says “there was a real outpouring of information about the National Security Agency.”
 
“It became on the public record what the National Security Agency was, what it was doing,” he said. “Honestly, until this defection, there was almost no public knowledge of the NSA. And in fact, people around Washington who knew that it existed would joke that NSA stood for ‘No Such Agency.’”
 
Barrett says President Dwight Eisenhower referred to the two defectors as “self-confessed traitors,” and former president Harry Truman said “they ought to be shot.”
 
“There wasn’t much that Martin and Mitchell offered the Soviets after the passage of some months or maybe a year – and they just became these sorts of exiles in the Soviet Union,” Barrett said.
 
“They chose the Soviet Union in part because they thought it was a workers’ paradise,” he continued. “They thought it would be a wonderful place to live. And the story after that is not really a happy story because they became disillusioned with life in the Soviet Union. It was no kind of paradise.”
 
Peter Savodnik, who has written about American defectors, says Martin, Mitchell and others were far different from those who decided to move to the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s.
 
“In the Cold War era, they tended to be a much sadder set of people – people who are really disenfranchised, who really feel sort of spiritually at sea,” Savodnik said. “The Soviet Union was not so much a beacon of hope for them, as it was an escape.”
 
William Martin died in 1987 at the age of 56, while Bernon Mitchell died in 2001 at the age of 72.
 


Politicians facing grim numbers
in latest public opinion polls


Politicians in Washington are no strangers to negative public opinion polls.  But a recent spate of dismal surveys suggests the political polarization and dysfunction in Washington is reaching new depths. 

The numbers are mind-numbingly bad. In the latest Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll, Congress has a disapproval rate of 83 percent, an all-time high for that survey.

President Barack Obama’s approval rating is 45 percent, which matches that of George W. Bush at a similar point in his presidency.

Only 29 percent see the country on the right track at the moment, down from the 41 percent who held that view in the same poll at the end of last year.

Several other recent national surveys contain similar negative results, and experts say all of this has consequences for the president and members of Congress from both major political parties.

Charlie Cook, a political analyst with the National Journal, says the president’s weakening poll numbers could hurt Democrats in next year’s congressional mid-term elections.

“Obviously you watch the president’s approval rating because mid-term elections do typically become to a certain extent a referendum on the incumbent president and he has been dropping since mid-January about a point every three or four weeks," he said.

Despite signs the economy is growing, many Americans still have a negative overall view, especially when it comes to jobs and their future standard of living.

Obama has embarked on a speaking tour to refocus on economic issues and has not been shy about laying much of the blame for the political gridlock in Washington on Republicans.

“Wasting the country’s time by taking something like 40 meaningless votes to repeal Obamacare is not a jobs plan," the president said.

But Republicans, including House Speaker John Boehner, are doing plenty of finger-pointing of their own.

“We are not just over here making noise.  The House Republicans are continuing to take action," said Boehner.

Steve Bell of the Bipartisan Policy Center says the president has a tough job in trying to change public perceptions about where the country is headed.

“I think he realizes that the American people are getting a little bit frightened and a little bit, I think, dismayed," he said. "By about a two to one margin, Americans think the country is going in the wrong direction and has gotten off track."

Quinnipiac pollster Peter Brown says Obama has been losing steam in his recent polls as well.  But Brown says Obama has shown an ability to mount a political comeback.

“His numbers are not good but it is worth mentioning that he has been here before.  Much of 2009, 2010 and 2011 his job approval was in the mid 40s and he still wound up being re-elected fairly comfortably," he said. "Historically second term presidents generally have rough patches."

The president may be down in the polls but the Republican brand is even worse off at the moment, says analyst Charlie Cook.

“For Republicans to take advantage of Democratic problems they really need to get their numbers, their party favorable numbers up and the unfavorable numbers down, and that simply hasn’t happened," he said.

As bad as the public perception is at the moment, it might actually get worse when Congress returns to work in September.  Lawmakers are sharply divided on funding levels for the government, on immigration reform and on a move by some Republicans to defund the president’s health care law.



Samantha Power confirmed
to represent U.S. at U.N.


The U.S. Senate has voted to confirm President Barack Obama's selection for ambassador to the United Nations, approving human rights advocate Samantha Power by a vote of 87-10.

Ms. Power, a 43-year-old former journalist and National Security Council staff expert, was described Thursday by Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Robert Menendez as "a tireless defender of human rights." 

Ms. Power won one of journalism's highest awards - the 2003 Pulitzer Prize - for a book describing what she called timid U.S. responses to human rights crises, including massacres in Rwanda and Bosnia in the 1990s. She most recently called the U.N. failure to end widespread killing in Syria's civil war "a disgrace that history will judge harshly."

A White House statement Thursday called Ms. Power a fierce advocate for universal rights and one of America's leading foreign policy thinkers.

Ms. Power is among seven presidential nominees approved by the Senate since Republican and Democratic leaders struck a deal in mid-July aimed at averting drastic Senate rules changes.

The rules changes would have ended the ability of minority parties to block votes on presidential nominees by launching endless debate aimed at stalling or preventing actual votes.

Faced with the permanent loss of the stalling tactic known as the filibuster, minority Republicans agreed to move forward with votes on the seven nominees in the Democrat-controlled chamber.



U.S. jobless claims take
biggest dip since 2008


The U.S. government says the number of Americans making their first claims for jobless benefits fell last week to the lowest level in more than five years.

The government said Thursday that 326,000 people sought unemployment compensation, a drop of 19,000 from the previous week. It is the lowest weekly total since January 2008.

The dip in the number of jobless claims signals that employers are laying off fewer workers.

The good news on jobs sent stocks to another record high Thursday. The Dow Jones rose 128 points and the Standard & Poors 500 closed at 1,707 - its all-time high.

The government is set Friday to release its monthly jobs and employment report for July. Analysts predict the country added another 183,000 jobs last month and and that the unemployment rate will fall to 7.5 percent. The U.S. has added more than 200,000 jobs a month since January.

Financial analyst Greg McBride at Bankrate.com said the U.S. economy needs to add even more jobs before the jobless rate dips significantly.

"We'll see continued job growth, but it's at a pace that makes for nice headlines but really doesn't do much to move the needle in terms of getting people back to work. If we see 175,000, 200,000 new jobs, I mean that's nice, but you know what we really need to be seeing on a consistent basis is something north of 250,000 jobs a month, so that we can not only account for population growth, but actually get all those unemployed, particularly long-term unemployed, back to work, rather than seeing the unemployment rate drop because people are giving up their job search altogether," said McBride.

 

U.S. embassies to be closed
for unstated security reasons


The United States will close a number of its embassies and consulates around the world on Sunday for security reasons.

In a written statement, the State Department did not specify which missions have been asked to close, nor the type of threat they face.

The statement said the embassies and consulates that have been told to close are ones normally open on Sundays. That would include embassies in the Muslim world, where the work week generally is from Sunday to Thursday.

Officials said the closures could be extended after an evaluation.



Uruguay lower house votes
to legalize growing marijuana


Uruguay's leftist President Jose Mujica said his country would not become a haven for pot smokers the day after its lower chamber of Congress narrowly voted to legalize the cultivation and sale of marijuana.

The bill, which needs to pass the senate to become law, goes beyond the no penalization policy in the Netherlands and creates a government body to regulate legal sales and public smoking clubs and to monitor marijuana consumption for Uruguayans.

To avoid making the country a drug tourism destination, only Uruguayans would be allowed to use marijuana. The use of marijuana is already legal in the South American nation, but the sale and cultivation is not.

“No one should think implementing this law would create disorder or encourage consumption,” said Mujica, a former guerrilla fighter and strong supporter of the measure.

Controlling the marijuana trade under strict guidelines would instead help undermine drug-smuggling gangs and fight petty crime, he told a local radio program on Thursday.

“No where in the world has repression yielded results,” he said. “We know we are embarking on a cutting edge experiment for the whole world.”

A recent poll showed 63 percent of Uruguayans oppose the measure. Critics say it would lure people to harder drugs and create problems for Latin American countries that have battled drug-related violence, like Colombia and Mexico.

The legislation would establish a national cannabis institute to control the drug's production and distribution, impose sanctions on rule-breakers and design educational policies to warn about the risks of marijuana use.

Households would be permitted to grow up to six plants, or as much as 480 grams (about 17 ounces) of marijuana per year under the measure.

Mujica, 78, said on Thursday he had never smoked pot.

“I'm old - I've had the vice of smoking and a drink now and then but never in my life have I tried a joint,” he said.

“But I've realized it's the life of these youth, consumption is there on the corners and it's produced a clandestine market with ferocious rules. It's a monopoly of the mafia,” he added.

 

Americans visiting Cuba told
not to go near the water


After several frenetic days of traveling, listening to lectures, walking through historic Havana and meeting Cubans, Terry McAbee did not hesitate when asked what the trip with her fellow West Virginia school teachers was missing.

"Beach time,'' she said with a laugh. "They have these beautiful beaches, and we can't go.''
 
"We're not supposed to be having fun,'' another teacher, Steve Stanley, joked as they sat sipping drinks with 20 fellow travelers in a small Havana bar.

They are part of the growing flow of Americans to Cuba on so-called "people-to-people'' trips, the only kind the United States government allows for most citizens under its 51-year-long trade embargo of the one-party state.

The trips are regulated to be more like work than fun — "meaningful'' in the political parlance of the times — so no beach time on heavily scheduled sprints through Cuban society.

Despite that, people pay a lot of money to visit the Caribbean island that has been mostly off limits the past half century even though it is just 90 miles (145 km) from Florida.

A four-day trip to Havana for two costs nearly $5,000, not including airfare, but the forbidden fruit aspect of Cuba is a big draw, said Edward Piegza, who led the first trip for his San Diego, California-based travel company Classic Journeys.

"It is a place and a people so close, yet off limits to us that it creates the natural desire of wanting what you can't have,'' Piegza said. It is, he said, a place many travelers want to see before they die.

Tourists from other parts of the world, mostly Canada and Europe, freely visit the island for its beaches, vintage American cars and Spanish colonial architecture.

 In its short history, people-to-people' travel has been a political football, a reflection of the tug-of-war between those who want to change U.S. policy toward Communist Party-ruled Cuba and those who do not.

 It was authorized in 1999 under President Bill Clinton, then shut down by his successor President George W. Bush in 2003 and reinstated in 2011 by President Barack Obama.

While the United States tightly controls licenses for travel to Cuba, Havana approves the itineraries.

Cuba's dissidents, considered by Havana to be mercenaries of the U.S. government, are predictably not part of the people-to-people' contacts.

The Office of Foreign Assets Control, the U.S. Treasury agency which enforces the embargo, said it has granted  250 licenses since Obama reopened the program.

One travel agency, Insight Cuba, will bring 150 groups to Cuba this year, its president Tom Popper said. Popper estimates as many as 75,000 travelers could go to the island in 2013.

 The first trips of the Obama era began in August 2011 and since then Americans, once so rare as to be almost exotic, have become a common sight, particularly in Havana.

So far, the groups are made up mostly of white, middle-aged and retired people, but the most famous visitors were two young, black superstars: rapper Jay-Z and singer Beyonce.

The married couple attracted international media coverage in April as they strolled through Old Havana, met Cuban artists and enjoyed the music scene, often accompanied by adoring crowds.

 The trip touched off a controversy among Cuban-American groups and politicians who oppose liberalization of U.S.-Cuba policy and questioned its legality.

As it turned out, the couple had a proper people-to-people' license and did not visit the beach.

Before Cuba's 1959 revolution, it was a playground for American celebrities and socialites, among them singer Frank Sinatra, author Ernest Hemingway and actress Ava Gardner.

 For the West Virginians in Cuba in 2013, their trip was organized by Washington-based Cuba Educational Travel. That meant conversations with artists, historians, teachers, priests, and small business owners, who described their work and lives in a country that is slowly modernizing its economy.

They sat on the floor of a cramped Central Havana apartment to talk with hip hop artist Magia López Cabrera and watch her music videos on a laptop. They went to the Madrigal, one of the stylish new private bars opened under economic reforms by President Raúl Castro, where they talked with university students and the bar owner, filmmaker Rafael Rosales.

 "Now I have to worry about paying the bills, paying my employees,'' Rosales said with a wan smile.

After a few questions, they rewarded him with a spontaneous rendition of the unofficial anthem of West Virginia, "Take Me Home, Country Roads,'' by late singer John Denver.