Obama seeking a review
of intelligence gathering


U.S. President Barack Obama is directing his national intelligence chief to review how agencies gather information on security threats while making sure the public trusts what the government is doing.

Obama wrote in a memo to James Clapper that it is important to assess how technological advances have changed intelligence gathering.

Clapper's Review Group will look at whether the United States uses new technology in a way that protects national security and advances foreign policy while protecting privacy.

Many U.S. citizens and lawmakers were outraged when former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the National Security Agency gathers their telephone and Internet records. The NSA also tracks overseas communications.

Obama said at a news conference last week that the United States must be more transparent. He said he is confident the surveillance programs are not being abused, but that Americans must have trust in them.

The NSA says its surveillance foiled several terrorist plots. Snowden fled to Hong Kong and now has temporary asylum in Russia. The United States wants him back for trial.


Justice Department moving
to free some drug offenders


The Justice Department is taking steps to reduce the number of non-violent drug offenders who face long mandatory prison terms.

U.S. laws dating from the 1980s require long jail terms for anyone convicted of certain drug crimes. But in a speech Monday to the American Bar Association in San Francisco, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said he has ordered prosecutors to make sure minor offenders are not charged with crimes that carry sentences appropriate for drug kingpins.

Those laws impose five-year prison terms for first-time offenders caught with certain amounts of drugs, such as 100 grams of heroin, 500 grams of cocaine powder or 100 kilograms of marijuana. Higher amounts bring 10-year mandatory sentences.

Holder said offenders will instead be charged with offenses carrying sentences "better suited to their individual conduct." He said the current system traps too many Americans in a cycle of poverty and incarceration.

Federal prisons hold more than 219,000 inmates, of which 47 percent are serving time for drug offenses. Holder said the United States should remain strict, but be smarter about tackling crime.

Mandatory minimum sentences have drawn criticism for their lack of flexibility, which critics say puts too many people in prison for too long.

Holder will ask federal prosecutors to develop guidelines for determining which cases are lower-level crimes that can be handled with state and local charges, and which are the more serious crimes that should be classified as federal crimes.

He also endorsed efforts in the U.S. Congress to give judges more discretion in sentencing defendants convicted of drug offenses.

Before a 2010 amendment, five grams of crack cocaine brought the same five-year sentence for first-time offenders as 500 grams of cocaine powder. The new guidelines close that gap to 28 grams of crack cocaine for the same sentence.

The United States Sentencing Commission reported in June that inmates who appealed their sentences to get those new standards applied to their cases have had their terms reduced by an average of 20 percent.

The attorney general says the reforms he announced Monday will save the United States billions of dollars.

In addition to altering the guidelines for sentences leading to prison, he wants to encourage the use of alternatives for offenders, including drug treatment and community service. Holder also announced a policy to reduce sentences for elderly, non-violent inmates.


Kerry in Colombia reports
NSA spying was minor topic


U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry says the National Security Agency's controversial surveillance program was a very small part of his talks in Colombia.

Kerry was in Bogota Monday for meetings with Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos and Foreign Minister María Angela Holguin. He travels to Brazil today.

Colombian and Brazilian officials were angered that their countries were included in the NSA's efforts to track telephone and Internet communications.

Kerry said the U.S. is engaged in very complex efforts to stop terrorists from killing people in many different places. He said he is confident he was able to explain to the Colombians the legality of the spying and its intentions.

Holguin said she received what she calls the necessary assurances that allow Colombia and the U.S. to keep working together on the matter.

Kerry also pledged U.S. support for Colombia's efforts to negotiate an end to the 50-year-long battle with leftist rebels.

Kerry is on his first trip to South America since becoming secretary of state earlier this year.


New York police technique
ruled to be discriminatory


A U.S. judge has ruled the New York Police Department has violated the rights of tens of thousands of people by intentionally discriminating against racial minorities with its controversial stop-and-search policy.
 
But New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg says the city will appeal the decision.  He says the possibility of being stopped by police acts as a vital deterrent to crime.
 
Police say they have made about five million stops during the past decade, mostly of black and Hispanic men.
 
The judge said the practice has become "a fact of daily life in some New York City neighborhoods," but is flawed because "the stopped population is overwhelmingly innocent, not criminal.''  She said she is not putting an end to the policy, but is reforming it and ordered a court monitor to oversee its use.
 
City lawyers argued the police department does a good job of monitoring itself.
 
New YOrk Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly defended the policy by saying the notion the police department engages in racial profiling is recklessly untrue.
 
Legal experts say the ruling on the nation's largest police department may affect how other U.S. police departments operate.


Bradley Manning put forward
for 2013 Nobel Peace Prize


A U.S. rights group has collected over 100,000 signatures urging the Norwegian Nobel committee to give this year's Peace Prize to Bradley Manning, a U.S. soldier convicted of leaking classified U.S. government files touching on military policy.
 
Recognizing Manning, the head of the RootsAction group said, would also help repair the Nobel panel's reputation after it chose President Barack Obama for the Peace Prize in 2009, only a few months into his first term of office.
 
“There's a cloud hanging over the Nobel Peace Committee,” Norman Solomon, co-founder of RootsAction said on Monday, as he prepared to hand his 5,000-page petition to the committee.
 
“In a sense, the Nobel Peace Prize at this point needs Bradley Manning more than Bradley Manning needs the Nobel Peace Prize ... There has now grown a question about the Nobel Committee's commitment to human rights and peace in an even handed, independent way.”
 
Private First Class Manning was convicted earlier this month of charges that included espionage and theft for releasing more than 700,000 battlefield videos, diplomatic cables and other secret documents to the anti-secrecy Web site WikiLeaks. He now faces up to 90 years in prison.
 
Solomon argued that the disclosures shortened the U.S. military involvement in Iraq and made it more difficult for the country to engage in conflict. A representative of the Nobel committee said the petition would not influence its decision.
 
“The Nobel Peace Prize is not a popularity contest, and a large number of signatures will neither help nor hinder his candidacy,” Asle Toje, the Norwegian Nobel Committee's research director said.
 
“It will be reviewed on its merit, based on the principles laid out in the will of Alfred Nobel. It's not unprecedented that we receive a large volume of supporting material for a candidate ... but these do not influence the committee.”
 
Manning, 25, was a low-level intelligence analyst in Iraq in 2010 when he was charged with leaking files including videos of a 2007 attack by a U.S. Apache helicopter gunship in Baghdad that killed a dozen people, two of them from the Reuters news staff.
 
The Nobel committee, which also came under fire for awarding the Peace Prize to the European Union last year, has repeatedly rejected criticism over its selection of Obama before the first black U.S. president had achieved anything notable in office.
 
The 2013 Peace Prize will be announced on Oct. 11. A total of 259 people and groups were nominated by the February deadline, including Manning, Pakistani schoolgirl Malala Yousufzai, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos and Myanmar President Thein Sein.



Drones ready to take to air
to track hurricanes from above


The U.S.-based National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says this Atlantic hurricane season will likely be even more active than usual.  And, as the hemisphere heads into peak hurricane season, the U.S. space agency, NASA, is planning to investigate the tropical storms and hurricanes that churn over the Atlantic Ocean. 

Two unmanned Global Hawk aircraft will take to skies above the Atlantic storms and collect measurements so scientists can see how hurricanes evolve.  It's the second year of NASA's Hurricane and Severe Storm Sentinel field campaign, says Scott Braun, a research meteorologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center outside Washington. 
 
"What we're really after, scientifically, is to better understand the relative roles of the environment and those inner-core processes in the formation and intensification of hurricanes in the Atlantic," said Braun, the campaign's principal investigator.

Global Hawks can reach an altitude of almost 20 kilometers, roughly twice as high as a commercial airliner.  On-board instruments, such as the High-Altitude Imaging Wind and Rain Profiler, allow scientists to gather details about storms from high above them.  

The Global Hawks will monitor the environment near the storms to see how surrounding conditions affect their intensity and also collect data about the storms themselves.  One craft will deploy dropsondes, instruments that measure temperature, humidity, pressure, wind speed and wind direction.  The dropsondes have parachutes that slow their descent, and Braun says it takes about 20 minutes for them to travel from above the storm down to the surface. 

The robotic planes in this mission launch from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, on the eastern U.S. coast, and they can fly as far as 20,000 kilometers.  

That's just one of the benefits of using this kind of craft, says Braun.

"With the Global Hawk, we can fly for up to about 28 hours, and because all the crew and the scientists are on the ground rather than on the plane, we can swap out shifts," he said.  "That just means that you can go much farther or stay out over a storm much longer than you can with a manned aircraft." 

Researchers will analyze the data in depth after the field campaign, but Braun says they also plan to do a quick analysis and share some of the information they collect while the Global Hawks are flying over the storms. 

The mission also looks into something else that perplexes researchers.

"In addition to wind speed and wind direction, we're also interested in temperature in the environment, particularly in association with something called the Saharan Air Layer," Braun said.  "It's a very hot, dry, dusty air mass that comes off Africa."
     
Last year, the Global Hawks gathered some data about the dust layer that accompanied Tropical Storm Nadine.  Scientists debate whether Saharan dust fuels or suppresses the development of tropical storms.    

This year's flights run from Aug. 20 to Sept. 23.



Pneumatic tube transports
advanced by SpaceX boss


Inventor Elon Musk, founder of Tesla Motors, SpaceX and PayPal, is proposing what he’s calling a fifth mode of transportation after planes, trains, cars and boats.

In a release posted Monday on the Tesla Motors Web site, Musk calls the Hyperloop idea a “safer, faster, lower cost, more convenient, immune to weather, sustainable self-powering and resistant to earthquakes” mode of transport compared to the high-speed rail link that has been approved to run between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

The solar-powered Hyperloop as conceived, would be a tube structure that would shoot pods filled with passengers through the tubes at speeds approaching 1,000 kilometers per hour.

He wrote that the system could be “some enlarged version of the old pneumatic tubes used to send mail and packages within and between buildings. You could, in principle, use very powerful fans to push air at high speed through a tube and propel people sized pods all the way from L.A. to San Francisco.“

While still very much a concept, Hyperloop was described by Musk last May as “a cross between a Concorde and a railgun and an air hockey table.”

Musk expressed disappointment in the high-speed rail link set to run between the two cities.

“How could it be that the home of Silicon Valley and JPL – doing incredible things like indexing all the world’s knowledge and putting rovers on Mars – would build a bullet train that is both one of the most expensive per mile and one of the slowest in the world?” he wrote., referring to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Musk said something like the Hyperloop would be the best solution for cities between 1,500 kilometers apart.

“Around that inflection point, I suspect that supersonic air travel ends up being faster and cheaper,” he wrote.

Musk said while he thinks the idea is viable, he won’t have the time to dedicate to it.

“I think I kind of shot myself by ever mentioning the Hyperloop,” he said during a Tesla earnings call last week. “I don’t have any plans to execute, because I must remain focused on SpaceX and Tesla.”


Dell computers grappling
with battle for control


Months of public bickering, secretive backroom negotiations and eleventh-hour deals for control of Dell, Inc., belie the fact that the combatants are vying for a company facing steadily declining sales prospects.

The tussle between chief executive Michael Dell and firebrand activist investor Carl Icahn is also starting to spook some customers.

It's the last thing a company, grappling with the ever-darkening global outlook for personal computers, needs. Dell's PC shipments slid 4.2 percent in the second quarter, compared to a year earlier, according to one estimate.

Some customers have begun asking if Dell is even going to be around in the longer term, said Michael Gavaghen, vice president of sales and marketing at Florida-based Dell reseller SL Powers. Sales are taking longer to close as well, he said.

”We hold their hand and gently say to just table the purchasing decision another few weeks,” said Gavaghen. He stressed, however, that customers are not fleeing by any means.

The cacophony surrounding the $25 billion buyout bid proposed by Michael Dell and Silver Lake Partners has picked up over the past month. Icahn threatened to wage a campaign to replace the CEO and his board, and sued the company in Delaware to try to force an earlier shareholder vote.

Michael Dell raised his offer twice to try to win over major investors. A shareholder vote has been scheduled for September after being delayed three times.

Morale within the company is stable for now, say some employees, though they add that could change rapidly if Icahn has his way and were to reshuffle management.

John Pucillo-Dunphy, senior engineer and owner of Miracle Networking Solutions, a Dell reseller based in Middleboro, Massachusetts, said he supports Dell's going private and is more comfortable with Michael Dell's leadership since it remains unclear what Icahn's long game is.

”I have seen the emails from Michael Dell. I haven't seen anything from Icahn,” Pucillo-Dunphy said.

Icahn, who with 8.9 percent of the company is now its second-largest shareholder, has said little about what future he envisions for the company beyond that it has promising prospects based on its large base of PC customers, and that it should remain partly public.

Pucillo-Dunphy said customers are not overly concerned about the drama.

The company declined to comment on the issue. Michael Dell sent employees an email on Thursday exhorting the troops to stay focused. He followed that up on Friday with a similar assurance for customers.

”I know this hasn't been an easy time. The competition has been aggressive during this period of uncertainty, but we are, as we have always been, determined to prove to you why Dell is the best solutions provider to meet your needs,'' the CEO said.

China's Lenovo zipped into first place for PC sales globally in the second quarter, and its 16.7 percent market share now takes it past Hewlett-Packard's 16.4 percent, according to an industry estimate. Dell is No. 3 at 12.2 percent.

Apart from personal computers, analysts say arch-rival HP already outpaces Dell in key areas of the industry including networking and storage. HP is also making strides into enterprise computing, catching attention with its just-launched Moonshot micro-servers, intended to save on power and costs for corporations.

”Without individual specifics, safe to say that the roadmap is robust,” said Dell spokesman David Frink, adding that the company will soon host a number of customer conferences around the world to showcase new products and services.

Analysts have so far refrained from estimating the longer-term impact of the battle on Dell's business. They are watching the situation carefully ahead of the company's quarterly earnings release Aug. 20. “It's going to be a high-risk and painful process,” Morningstar analyst Carr Lanphier said, adding that the unsettled outcome makes customers leery.

The average Wall Street forecast is for a quarterly profit of $417 million, about half the $875 million reported a year ago. Revenue is expected to slip 2 percent to $14.2 billion.

Dell's fortunes remain closely tied to PC sales, despite $13 billion in acquisitions since 2008 to expand into everything from software to networking. PC sales, which have been shrinking for the last three years, still yield half of revenue.

Global PC sales are expected to fall 6 percent this year and 4.5 percent next year, according to analysts. Dell's revenue is seen shrinking every year through 2016, according to Boston Consulting Group, the firm hired by Dell's board to review the buyout offer.

”Investors should take the Silver Lake-Michael Dell bid and run for the hills,” said Brian Marshall, an analyst. He said the company may end up underperforming his earnings forecast of 26 cents per share on revenue of $14.3 billion.

The CEO, responding to opposition to his buyout, had raised his offer price this month by a dime to $13.75 a share and tacked on a special dividend of 13 cents per share. Before the offer was announced in February, shares were trading around $10 apiece.

Michael Dell, who holds roughly a 16 percent stake in the company he started in college in 1984, wants to overhaul it without interference from shareholders. His option involves sticking to a path established years ago, of transforming the company into a provider of services like storage and computing to corporations and government agencies, in IBM's mold.

Yet even if he should triumph over Icahn, some analysts think it may be too late, since a large swathe of the corporate market has been locked up by IBM and Hewlett-Packard Co.

”HP and IBM have being doing this for the last seven to 10 years,” said Steven Nathasingh, managing director at research and consulting firm Vaxa Inc. “Dell has just started.”


Aging Boston gangster
guilty of many crimes


A jury in the northeastern U.S. city of Boston has found former crime boss James "Whitey" Bulger guilty on charges of murder and racketeering, following a two-month high-profile trial.
 
The 83-year-old Bulger was charged with committing or ordering 19 murders in the 1970s and 1980s while running the so-called Winter Hill crime gang.

He was found guilty of 31 charges and 11 murders.  He faces a court sentence of life in prison.

Bulger pleaded not guilty to 32 separate criminal charges, although his lawyers acknowledged their client was an organized criminal, drug dealer, extortionist and loan shark. 

Several former friends and gang members testified against Bulger during the trial.

Bulger was one of the nation's most wanted fugitives after fleeing Boston in 1994, and was captured in Santa Monica, California, in 2011.

Family members of Bulger's victims have long waited for verdicts on the killings, and about a half dozen survivors have been a regular presence in the courtroom.


Hungarian who helped deport
many Jews dies in a hospital


A 98-year-old Hungarian man who topped the dwindling list of surviving Nazi war crimes suspects has died in the hospital while awaiting trial for allegedly sending nearly 16,000 Jews to the death camps. The announcement about Laszlo Csatary's death was made Monday in Budapest.

Csatary's lawyer said the Nazi war crimes suspect died in the hospital over the weekend after contracting pneumonia. His death came as a setback for Holocaust survivors seeking some justice.

Csatary was allegedly involved in the deportations of as many as 15,700 Jews from a town in present-day Slovakia to Nazi death camps during World War II. After being sentenced to death in absentia in 1948, he made it to Canada, where he lived and worked as an art dealer before being stripped of his citizenship in the 1990s.

He returned to Hungary, where he lived undisturbed for years. Prosecutors only began investigating his case in late 2011 after pressure from the Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Center.

Csatary was eventually charged with involvement and assisting in the 1944 deportations of Jews from a ghetto in Kassa, now known as Kosice.

The former police officer also allegedly "regularly beat the interned Jews with his bare hands and whipped them with a dog-whip without any special reasons, regardless of their sex, age or health."

Csatary was placed under house arrest in June of last year, and activists demanded he be put on trial.

"We shall never forget," shouted both elderly and younger people outside his home in Budapest while they formed a human chain.

Eventually, a court suspended the trial, saying Csatary had already been convicted.