Gun control again raised
in wake of D.C. shootings


One day after deadly shootings at Washington’s Navy Yard, U.S. lawmakers are asking how a man reported to have mental health issues and a history of firearms misuse was able to secure federal employment and gain access to a secure military facility.
 
But the legislators disagree on whether Congress should revisit gun control legislation in response to the nation’s latest mass shooting incident.
 
Sen. Chris Murphy, who represents Newtown, Connecticut, where 26 people, mostly children, were gunned down last year at Sandy Hook Elementary School, has been one of the Senate’s most vocal proponents of gun control legislation.
 
He said the Navy Yard shootings are a bitter reminder of why tougher laws are needed.
 
“People out there do not understand why Congress does nothing as these shootings continue to mount," the Democrat said. "I think people in Newtown shake their heads when they see another shooting and further potential indifference from Congress.”
 
A fellow Democratic senator, Richard Durbin of Illinois, noted that, earlier this year, gun control legislation died in the Senate as a result of mostly Republican opposition to new restrictions and requirements for firearms purchases.
 
“We have to do everything we can to keep guns out of the hands of those who would misuse them — felons who have a history of misusing firearms, the mentally unstable who cannot be trusted to have a firearm.”
 
Republican lawmakers show little interest in revisiting gun control, but several said the Navy Yard incident raises other important issues.
 
Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said the gunman, Aaron Alexis, never should have been cleared for duty as a military contractor.
 
“To me, it is not about gun control," he said. "It is about what has happened with our contractor force. How could he pass a background check to get a job with the federal government after he had misused a weapon twice? When you shoot a guy’s tires out because you are mad at him, you are a good candidate not to work for the federal government.”
 
Fellow Republican John McCain of Arizona noted that, in addition to gun-related brushes with the law, Alexis had been receiving mental health treatment.
 
“We also should focus our attention on people who show mental instability and whether they should have access to weapons or not," he said. "I think all Americans are in agreement on that.”
 
But Murphy said that addressing mental health issues, though long overdue, is not enough.
 
“I am ready to put more money into mental health any day that Republicans are willing to join me, but that is not a gun bill," he said.
 
At the White House, spokesman Jay Carney accused gun control opponents of disregarding the will of the people in favor of the nation’s politically potent gun rights groups.
 
“When you vote against 80 or 90 percent of the American people, when you vote against a majority of your constituents, in answer to, or at the behest of, a special interest, you are serving that narrow special interest," he said. "You are not serving your constituents.”
 
At the Capitol, lawmakers are likely to take note of the fate of two state legislators in Colorado who recently were ousted in a recall vote after backing gun control legislation.


Brazilian president discards
plans for Washington visit


Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff has called off plans for a state visit to Washington in October because of revelations that the United States spied on her personal communications and those of other Brazilians.

Ms. Rousseff's decision, which came despite a 20-minute telephone call from President Barack Obama Monday night in an attempt to salvage the trip, is a big blow to relations between the two biggest economies in the Americas.

Both the White House and Ms. Rousseff's office billed the decision as a mutually agreed postponement, and said a state visit could take place at an unspecified later date. However, two officials with knowledge of Ms. Rousseff's decision said that such a visit was unlikely to happen anytime soon.

White House spokesman Jay Carney said the presidents agreed on the phone the disclosures of alleged U.S. intelligence activities could overshadow their meeting so they decided it would be best to postpone. But U.S. moves to address the surveillance complaints may take months.

“As the president previously stated, he has directed a broad review of U.S. intelligence posture, but the process will take several months to complete,” Carney said.

Ties between Brazil and the United States had been improving steadily since Ms. Rousseff took office in 2011 and before the revelations that the U.S. National Security Agency had snooped on emails, text messages and calls between the president and her aides. The spying revelations came from documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

“Illegal surveillance practices intercepting the communication and data of citizens, companies and members of the Brazilian government constitute a serious affront to national sovereignty and individual rights, and are incompatible with democratic cooperation between friendly nations,” the Brazilian government said in a statement.

In the absence of explanations and a “commitment to cease such surveillance activities, the conditions are not in place for the visit to go ahead as previously scheduled,” it said.

U.S. officials said the NSA surveillance was aimed at tracking suspected terrorist activity and did not pry into personal communications, but Ms. Rousseff was not convinced.

The trip was expected to be a platform for deals on oil exploration and biofuels technology, and Brazil's potential purchase of fighter jets from Chicago-based Boeing Co.

A defense contract worth more than $4 billion that Boeing is seeking for the sale of 36 F-18 fighter jets to the Brazilian Air Force could be the main victim of the spying affair. Brazilian officials have said Brazil cannot buy such strategic aircraft from a country it cannot trust.

The spying revelations sparked a political uproar in Brazil that Ms. Rousseff could not ignore. A senior government official said that her top advisers, including her mentor and predecessor as president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, encouraged her to scrap the state visit.

The issue is not likely to go away soon in a country that has long harbored suspicions that the United States wants to control its rich mineral resources in the Amazon basin and off its Atlantic coast, where Brazil has made the world's largest oil deep-water discoveries in decades.

Brazil's Congress has opened an investigation and on Tuesday questioned oil industry regulator Magda Chambriard on whether NSA spying could have given U.S. companies the edge in bidding for offshore production rights to be auctioned next month.

The committee also wants to send members to Moscow to interview Snowden, who has been granted temporary asylum by Russia.

The decision to cancel the visit to Washington will add tensions to the U.S.-Brazilian relations and increase risks for U.S. companies operating in sensitive sectors in Brazil, the Eurasia consultancy in Washington said in a note to clients.

This mainly affects the defense, telecom and energy sectors, and Boeing's chances of securing the jet fighter contract will be “significantly reduced,” Eurasia's analysts said.

“In the energy sector, there will certainly be a political firestorm if an American company wins the bid round in October,” Eurasia said, referring to the deep sea oil deposits that sit beneath a thick layer of salt under the ocean floor.


As flu season approaches,
U.N. agency issues warning


Avian flu continues to pose serious health threats to both human and animal health, especially as the flu season approaches. That’s the warning issued by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.

The agency is calling on the international community to be vigilant for any signs of H5N1 and the new H7N9 avian flu. The former has been around for years, but H7N9 was first reported in China only last April. About 130 human infections were confirmed. Many of those patients had reported contact with poultry. Most had severe respiratory illness. Forty-four people died.

Food and Agriculture Organization senior animal health officer Ian Douglas said timing of the warning is important.

“We’ve had over a decade of experience with H5N1 avian influenza virus and generally speaking we’ve seen this pattern of increase of incidence of the disease with the coming of cooler weather following summer. The experience with H7N9 version of avian influenza virus is much more limited. But whilst the number of human cases of that infection have declined, there is the possibility that it could reemerge and become a more prevalent infection.”

While both strains can jump from poultry to humans, there is a difference between the two.

Douglas said, “The difference perhaps is significant in so far as H7N9 has not been observed to cause much of clinical disease in poultry. And this constitutes a much greater challenge because it’s not immediately obvious where the birds are infected and therefore, of course, the root of transmission to humans is somewhat more concealed.”

The lack of clinical signs makes is difficult to detect.

Health officials are very concerned that avian flu viruses might mutate and allow infections between people, not just between people and poultry. But is there any evidence, so far, that human to human transmission has occurred?

“There have been some suggestions,” he said, “of clusters where with very close contact that might have been the case. But of course the possibilities exist for a common exposure to an animal source. Avian influenza viruses can survive for some time outside of the bird or human host and contamination of the environment, at least for a reasonably short period of time, is possible.”

Douglas said that avian influenza viruses have the potential to produce a pandemic of human infection.

“In the case of H5N1, fairly rapidly. Over 60 countries in the world reported some cases occurring either in domestic or wild birds. That number is much reduced. Today, however, the infections remain endemic from Egypt across South and Southeast Asia and somewhat entrenched in those populations.”

He said it’s not clear whether H7N9 would behave the same way, adding there’s much to learn about the virus.

Established control methods involve culling -- and vaccinations in the case of the H5N1 virus. But the response must also include tracking where the birds came from and their intended destinations – and ensure that poultry markets adhere to sanitation guidelines.


U.S. surveillance court issues
defense of snooping programs


The surveillance court that oversees the U.S. government's massive collection of telephone data gave its fullest defense to date Tuesday of why it considers the program lawful, despite the uproar after its existence was made public in June.
 
In an opinion dated Aug. 29, Judge Claire Eagan of the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court wrote that the program did not violate the basic privacy rights of Americans and was authorized under the 2001 law known as the Patriot Act.
 
“The court concludes that there are facts showing reasonable grounds to believe that the records sought are relevant to authorized investigations,” wrote the judge, one of 11 who serve on the surveillance court.
 
Britain's Guardian newspaper disclosed the telephone database's existence in June. It was the first of a series of disclosures from documents provided by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.
 
The program warehouses daily telephone metadata such as numbers called and the length and time of calls going back seven years. It does not include the content of calls or the names of callers, U.S. officials have said.
 
U.S. officials have said the database is valuable in preventing attacks by al-Qaida and other militant groups, and that access to the database is limited to trained personnel who are investigating international terrorist organizations.
 
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court reviews the program periodically, but its opinions generally are classified and are rarely known to the public.
 
Eagan's opinion is notable for its sweeping grant of authority to the government, perhaps because lawyers from the U.S. Justice Department are the only ones who argue before the secretive court, said Alex Abdo, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union.
 
“When the court has in front of it only the government's arguments, it's not surprising that the opinion reads like a brief written by the government,” Abdo said.
 
Eagan alluded to the attention Snowden's disclosures had received, writing: “This court is mindful that this matter comes before it at a time when unprecedented disclosures have been made about this and other highly sensitive programs designed to obtain foreign intelligence information and carry out counter-terrorism investigations.”
 
The court may disclose more. On Friday, at the request of the American Civil Liberties Union, the court ordered a declassification review of certain other opinions related to the Patriot Act's Section 215, which authorizes the FBI to seize, with court approval, business records that are relevant to terrorism investigations.


Colorado flood total put
at eight lives, many homes


At least eight people have died as a result of massive floods engulfing parts of the western U.S. state of Colorado.

State officials say another 600 people remain unaccounted for.

Bolstered by clear skies and receding waters, rescue efforts continued Tuesday with local, state and federal responders attempting to reach people stranded by the rising water. Twenty helicopters scoured the area dropping supplies and providing airlifts to those in need of help.

Authorities say at least 1,600 homes were destroyed and more than 17,000 others have been damaged.  

Local news outlets say more than 50 bridges linking rural communities have been destroyed or damaged, along with hundreds of miles of roads.

President Barack Obama has declared Colorado a major disaster zone and ordered federal help to boost state and local recovery efforts.:


Professional hackers in China
said to be behind attacks


Computer security experts have discovered a group of highly sophisticated computer hackers operating for hire, a U.S computer security firm said Tuesday, and it linked the group to some of the best-known cyber-espionage attacks out of China in recent years.

Symantec Corp said the hacker group, which it dubbed “Hidden Lynx,” was among the most technically advanced of several dozen groups believed to be running cyber espionage operations out of China. Unlike a previous report by another company, Symantec did not allege Chinese government involvement in the cyberattacks.

Symantec's 28-page report said its researchers believe the Hidden Lynx group may have been involved with the 2009 Operation Aurora attacks, the most well-known cyber espionage campaign uncovered to date against U.S. companies.

In Operation Aurora, hackers attacked Google, Inc., and dozens of other companies including Adobe Systems, Inc., Google disclosed the attacks in January 2010, in which hackers tried to read Gmail communications of human rights activists and also attempted to access and change source code at targeted companies.

Symantec researcher Liam O'Murchu said his firm was unable to determine which individuals were behind Hidden Lynx or if it was linked to the Chinese government.

A separate study, released in February from the U.S. computer security firm Mandiant, said a secretive unit of the Chinese military was engaged in cyber espionage on American companies. Beijing vehemently denied the accusations in that document, which contained photos of the building that Mandiant alleged was the unit's headquarters.

Symantec believes the group is based in China, O'Murchu said, because much of the infrastructure used to run the attacks is based there and because the malicious software was written using Chinese tools and with Chinese code.

The Symantec report also provides new details about who is behind several recent attacks, including a breach at cyber security firm Bit9 and follow-on attacks at three Bit9 clients.

It also connects Hidden Lynx to a major campaign dubbed Voho, which was discovered last year by the security firm RSA, which is owned by EMC Corp. Voho targeted hundreds of organizations including financial firms, technology and healthcare companies, defense contractors and government agencies.

Symantec described the Hidden Lynx group as a professional organization staffed by between 50 and 100 people with a variety of skills needed to breach networks and exfiltrate data. The arsenal of tools included Trojan Naid and Trojan Moudoor, which the gang use to siphon data from infected computers.

Symantec, which sells software and services to protect corporate and consumer computer systems from cyber attacks like the ones mentioned in the report, said Naid was also used by hackers in Operation Aurora.

The Hidden Lynx hackers “were either responsible for the Aurora attack or were working in conjunction with the Aurora attackers,” O'Murchu said.


Pandora wins music case
over publishers association


Pandora Media Inc. has won a Manhattan federal court decision rejecting efforts by some music publishers to narrow a license that enables the largest U.S. Internet radio service to play their music.
 
U.S. District Judge Denise Cote said an existing antitrust consent decree that requires the American Society of Composers, Authors & Publishers, known as ASCAP, to license its works to Pandora from 2011 to 2015 unambiguously covers all of its works, even if publishers seek to withdraw authority to license to new media services.
 
“We're obviously gratified by the result,” said Kenneth Steinthal, a partner at King & Spalding in San Francisco who represents Pandora, which is based in nearby Oakland.
 
The decision could strengthen Pandora's case as it pursues related litigation on what constitutes reasonable licensing fees. Cote has scheduled a Dec. 4 trial on that matter.
 
ASCAP has about 470,000 members, and said it represents music from artists like Leonard Bernstein, Beyonce, Duke Ellington, George Gershwin, Alan Jackson, Jay-Z and Katy Perry.
 
The case arose after publishers including EMI Music Publishing Ltd, Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC and Universal Music Publishing Group withdrew or tried to withdraw new media licensing rights from ASCAP, allowing them to negotiate directly with Internet radio services.
 
Concerned that it would lose access to some music content for its roughly 72 million active listeners, Pandora in July sought a court ruling that publisher withdrawals would not affect the ASCAP license.
 
In response, ASCAP argued that Pandora had understood that the consent decree license could be narrowed. Cote, however, rejected its argument.
 
“ASCAP argues that 'ASCAP repertory' refers only to the rights in music works that ASCAP has been granted by its members as of a particular moment in time,” the judge wrote. “Pandora argues that ‘ASCAP repertory’ is a defined term articulated in terms of ‘works’ or ‘compositions,’ as opposed to in terms of a gerrymandered parcel of ‘rights.’ Pandora is correct.”
 
Lauren Iossa, an ASCAP spokeswoman, had no immediate comment. A lawyer for ASCAP did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
 
Pandora shares closed up $1.20, or 5 percent, at $25.19 in Tuesday trading on the New York Stock Exchange. Ms. Cote issued her decision after U.S. markets closed.

 





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