North Korea Details Plan To Fire Missile Salvo Toward Guam

The U.S. Pacific territory of Guam is a major military hub to U.S. bombers.

SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA (AP, AUGUST 10, 2017) — North Korea has announced a detailed plan to launch a salvo of ballistic missiles toward the U.S. Pacific territory of Guam, a major military hub and home to U.S. bombers. If carried out, it would be the North's most provocative missile launch to date.

The announcement Thursday warned that the North is finalizing a plan to fire four of its Hwasong-12 missiles over Japan and into waters around the tiny island, which hosts 7,000 U.S. military personnel on two main bases and has a population of 160,000.

Japan and South Korea vowed a strong reaction if the North were to go through with the plan. It said the plan, which involves the missiles hitting waters 30 to 40 kilometers (19 to 25 miles) from the island, could be sent to leader Kim Jong Un for approval within a week or so. It would be up to Kim whether the move is actually carried out.

It is unclear whether — or exactly why — North Korea would risk firing missiles so close to U.S. territory. Such a launch would almost compel the United States to attempt an intercept and possibly generate further escalation.

North Korea, no stranger to bluffing, frequently uses extremely bellicose rhetoric with warnings of military action to keep its adversaries on their heels. It generally couches its threats with language stating it will not attack the United States unless it has been attacked first or has determined an attack is imminent.

But the statement raised worries amid threats from both sides. Following reports that U.S. intelligence suggests the North might be able to pair a nuclear warhead with a missile capable of reaching targets on the United States mainland, President Donald Trump warned North Korea that "it faces retaliation with fire and fury unlike any the world has seen before."

Pyongyang, meanwhile, has been louder in its complaints against a new and tough round of sanctions imposed by the United Nations, with strong U.S. backing, and Washington's use of Guam as a staging ground for its stealth bombers, which could be used to attack North Korea and are a particularly sore point with the ruling regime in Pyongyang.

Its reported plan is extremely specific, suggesting it is actually plotting a launch. The report said the Hwasong-12 rockets would fly over Shimane, Hiroshima and Koichi prefectures in Japan and travel "1,065 seconds before hitting the waters 30 to 40 kilometers away from Guam." It said the Korean People's Army Strategic Force will finalize the plan by mid-August, present it to Kim Jong Un and "wait for his order."

"We keep closely watching the speech and behavior of the U.S.," it said. Such a move would not merely be a test launch, but a demonstration of military capabilities that could easily lead to severe consequences.

South Korea's military responded by saying North Korea will face a "stern and strong" response from Washington and Seoul. Taking it a step further, Japan's Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera told parliament a missile attack on the U.S. territory would be a Japanese national emergency because it would threaten Japan's existence as a nation.

If North Korea were to actually carry it out — even if it aimed at hitting the waters off Guam and not the island itself — that would clearly pose a potential threat to U.S. territory and put the United States in a much more complicated situation than it has been during previous missile launches.

Guam lies about 2,100 miles (3,400 kilometers) from the Korean Peninsula, and it's extremely unlikely Kim's government would risk annihilation with a pre-emptive attack on U.S. citizens. It's also unclear how reliable North Korea's missiles would be against such a distant target, but no one was writing off the danger completely.

Washington has been testing its missile defenses in response to the North's stepped-up development and the current escalation of tensions could lead to pressure for the U.S. military to try to shoot down the North's missiles in midflight if they are heading toward Guam.

That would likely open up a set of very major problems, including the possibility of both a very high-profile failure or a miscalculation of Washington's intentions and a more deadly pre-emptive strike by the North — which has missiles able to hit Tokyo and conventional weapons that could devastate South Korea's capital of Seoul.

The Hwasong-12, which was revealed for the first time at a military parade in April, is an intermediate-range ballistic missile that is believed to have a radius of more than 3,700 kilometers (2,300 miles). It can be fired from mobile launchers, making it hard to detect and destroy on the ground.

By launching a salvo of four, the North would be attempting to make it harder for the U.S. to intercept all of the incoming missiles. Its stated flight path over Japan is also very aggressive — it has recently tried to avoid flying over neighboring countries by shooting its missiles up at a very high angle to land in the ocean.

Washington, meanwhile, has been giving out mixed signals about its intentions. While Trump was threatening annihilation and boasting from the New Jersey golf resort where he's vacationing that he has made the U.S. nuclear arsenal "far stronger and more powerful than ever before," Secretary of State Rex Tillerson sought to calm the sense of crisis.

"Americans should sleep well at night," Tillerson told reporters. "Nothing that I have seen and nothing that I know of would indicate that the situation has dramatically changed in the last 24 hours."

FBI Agents Searched Former Trump Campaign Chair's Home

Then-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort walks around the convention floor before the opening session of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. A spokesman for President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, says that FBI agents served a search warrant at one of his homes.

WASHINGTON (AP, AUGUST 09, 2017) — FBI agents looking for financial documents have searched one of the homes of President Donald Trump's former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, whose past foreign political work has been swept into the investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election. A Manafort spokesman confirmed the search Wednesday.

Manafort spokesman Jason Maloni said in a statement that FBI agents had obtained a warrant and searched one of Manafort's homes, but he would not say when the search occurred or what it was for. "Mr. Manafort has consistently cooperated with law enforcement and other serious inquiries and did so on this occasion as well," Maloni said.

The Associated Press has learned the warrant for the search on July 26 at Manafort's home in Alexandria, Virginia, sought information including tax documents and banking records. The Washington Post first reported the raid.

Manafort has been a subject of a longstanding FBI investigation into his dealings in Ukraine and work for the country's former president, Viktor Yanukovych. That investigation has been incorporated into the probe led by special counsel Robert Mueller, who is also scrutinizing Manafort's role in the Trump campaign as he looks into Russia's meddling in the 2016 election and any possible collusion with Trump associates.

Manafort, who led the Trump campaign for several months, has denied any wrongdoing. He also spoke behind closed doors to Senate investigators for an interview just one day before the search of his home.

The use of a search warrant indicates that law enforcement officials have convinced a judge there is probable cause to believe a crime may have been committed. A house raid can be seen as an aggressive tactic given that Manafort has been cooperating with congressional investigators and has turned over hundreds of pages of documents. It could indicate law enforcement was looking for records beyond what Manafort provided.

Word of the raid is the latest revelation about Mueller's investigation, which had been operating in relative secrecy compared with numerous congressional probes looking at the election. In recent days, it's become clear the former FBI director is using a grand jury in Washington in addition to one in the Eastern District of Virginia, where investigators also have been looking into former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn.

Also, FBI agents have been asking witnesses since the spring about $530,000 worth of lobbying and investigative work carried out by Flynn's firm, Flynn Intel Group, according to a person familiar with the investigation. That work sought the extradition of an exiled Turkish cleric living in the U.S. Through his attorney, Flynn has declined to comment on the investigation.

The person, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive details of the investigation, said FBI agents have also been asking about Flynn's business partner, Bijan Kian, who served on the Trump presidential transition . Kian has not responded to multiple attempts to contact him over several months.

In recent months, Flynn and Manafort have turned over documents to congressional committees investigating the election interference. One focus of the multiple probes, including Mueller's, is a June 2016 meeting Manafort attended with Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and Donald Trump Jr. That meeting, held at Trump Tower in New York, was described to Trump Jr. in emails as part of a Russian government effort to help the Trump campaign by passing along information that could be used against Democrat Hillary Clinton.

During his Senate intelligence committee interview , Manafort provided his recollection of the Trump Tower meeting and turned over contemporaneous notes he took during the gathering. The interview was confined to that meeting.

Manafort has also turned over other documents to the Senate intelligence committee as well as about 400 pages of records to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Meanwhile, the Judiciary Committee said Wednesday it has also received about 250 pages of documents from Trump Jr. and about 20,000 pages from the Trump campaign.

The content of the documents was not immediately clear. The committee said it received the Manafort and Trump campaign documents on Aug. 2 and the records from Trump Jr. on Aug. 4. Judiciary committee leaders have also been in talks with Trump Jr. and Manafort about private interviews. The committee initially called for them to testify publicly, but lawmakers have since said they were negotiating the terms of their appearances.

Follow Chad Day and Eric Tucker on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ChadSDay and https://www.twitter.com/etuckerAP

Vote Count Begins In Kenya's Fiercely Contested Election

Lydia Gathoni Kiingati, 102, casts her vote just after dawn at a polling station in Gatundu, north of Nairobi, Kenya, Tuesday, Aug. 8, 2017. Kenyans are going to the polls to vote in a general election after a tightly-fought presidential race between incumbent President Uhuru Kenyatta and main opposition leader Raila Odinga.

NAIROBI, KENYA (AP, AUGUST 08, 2017) — Polls closed across Kenya after millions voted peacefully Tuesday in a fiercely contested election pitting President Uhuru Kenyatta against challenger Raila Odinga in the East African country known for its stability but also its divided ethnic allegiances.

Long lines formed at many of Kenya's 40,000 polling stations before dawn, but the Kenyan election commission tweeted in the evening that the balloting concluded "with minimal hitches." Some sites remained open to process those people still waiting to cast their votes.

In preliminary results, Kenyatta was ahead with 55.4 percent while Odinga had 43.9 percent after votes from nearly one-quarter of 40,883 polling stations had been counted, according to the Kenyan election commission.

Authorities hope to avoid the post-election violence a decade ago when ethnic divisions fueled unrest that killed more than 1,000 people. A 2013 vote was mostly peaceful despite opposition allegations of vote-tampering.

Reaction to the result could partly depend on the performance of Kenya's electoral commission, which will collect and count the ballots in the coming days. In addition to the bitterly contested presidential race, more than 1,800 elected positions were at stake, including governors, legislative representatives and county officials.

By law, election officials have up to a week to announce results, though many analysts believe the outcome of the presidential race will be declared far sooner, possibly within one or two days. Former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who is the chief election observer for The Carter Center, described it as "an inspiring day in Kenya watching democracy in action."

"Enthusiastic voters not fazed by long lines," he tweeted. More than 300 people, including ethnic Maasai draped in traditional red blankets, waited for hours in the dark before a polling station opened in the Rift Valley town of Il Bissil. Kenyan TV also showed lines of voters in the port city of Mombasa. In some locations, inmates in striped prison garb cast ballots under the watch of guards.

Because Kenya is an African leader, its election is a closely watched event across the continent and beyond. Its diversity, symbolized by the gulf between its so-called Silicon Savannah ambitions for a booming tech industry and the poverty and lack of services found in shantytowns or remote rural areas, as well as its complex ethnic patchwork, mirror the potential for advancement, and the obstacles to it, across the wider region.

"If the elections are not fair, if there was rigging, people will definitely go to the streets," said Sophia Ajwang, a 29-year-old student in Kisumu city. However, Moses Otieno, a 33-year-old businessman, said that Kenyans desperately want to avoid another bout of election unrest.

"We've learned a lot in the past, so we don't want such repetition in this election," Otieno said. "That's why we will accept whatever outcome it is." Three polling stations in the Laikipia area were "affected by insecurity," but security forces restored order and polling resumed, the election commission said. Farms and homes in Laikipia County have been under siege for more than a year from herders who say they are desperate for grazing land for their animals; some farmers believe the land invasions are politically motivated.

Kenyatta, the 55-year-old son of Kenya's first president after independence from British colonial rule, campaigned on a record of major infrastructure projects, many backed by China, and claimed strong economic growth. Odinga, 72, also the son of a leader of the independence struggle, has cast himself as a champion of the poor and a harsh critic of endemic corruption.

However, many voters were expected to vote along ethnic lines. Kenyatta is widely seen as the candidate of the Kikuyu people, the country's largest ethnic group. Odinga is associated with the Luo voting bloc, which has never produced a head of state. There are six other presidential candidates, though they lack the wide support of the top two.

"I feel positive because we ran a positive campaign," Kenyatta, who seeks a second term, said after voting in his birthplace of Gatundu, north of Nairobi. Odinga voted in the poor area of Kibera, an opposition stronghold in the capital, Nairobi.

"Uhuru must go," chanted his supporters, referring to the president by his first name. The winner of the presidential race must get more than 50 percent of the votes as well as one-quarter or more votes in at least 24 of Kenya's 47 counties, according to officials. If the front-runner falls short of those benchmarks, the two top contenders will contest a run-off vote.

Kenyatta and Odinga also faced off in the 2013 election. Kenyatta won by a thin margin, with just over 50 percent of the vote; Odinga alleged voting irregularities and took his case to Kenya's highest court, which ruled in Kenyatta's favor by validating the results.

Kenya has nearly 20 million registered voters out of a population of more than 40 million.

Associated Press journalists Tom Odula in Nairobi and Jerome Delay in Il Bissil contributed.

Report Reveals Underground US Haven For Heroin, Drug Users

A man prepares heroin he bought on the street to be injected at the Insite safe injection clinic in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The facility is promoted by its founders as a safe, humane facility for drug abusers. A report released Tuesday, Aug. 8, 2017, in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine revealed that a safe haven for drug users to inject themselves with heroin and other drugs has been quietly operating in the United States for the past three years. Researchers didn’t disclose the location of the site. (Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press via AP, File)

NEW YORK (AP, AUGUST 08, 2017) — A safe haven where drug users inject themselves with heroin and other drugs has been quietly operating in the United States for the past three years, a report reveals. None were known to exist in the U.S. until the disclosure in a medical journal, although several states and cities are pushing to establish these so-called supervised injection sites where users can shoot up under the care of trained staff who can treat an overdose if necessary.

In the report released Tuesday, two researchers said they've been evaluating an underground safe place that opened in 2014. As a condition of their research, they didn't disclose the location of the facility — which is unsanctioned and potentially illegal — or the social service agency running it.

The researchers offered little data, and their main finding was that no one died while injecting at the safe place. There were two overdoses on site, which were reversed by staff members using the overdose medication naloxone.

Advocates and some politicians in recent years have called for government-sanctioned injection sites as the U.S. grapples with the opioid epidemic. More than 52,000 Americans died from drug overdoses in 2015 — the most ever — fueled by soaring abuse of heroin and prescription painkillers. Government statistics for the first nine months of last year, also released Tuesday, show overdose death rates continuing to spiral.

Some say the new report could have an impact on efforts to establish safe injection sites around the U.S. Such sites have been backed by lawmakers in New York, California and other states, along with officials in cities like Seattle, San Francisco and Ithaca, New York.

"It shows people that it's possible" to operate one of these in the U.S., said Lindsay LaSalle, an attorney with Drug Policy Alliance who has helped draft safe haven legislative proposals in six states.

Injection sites are legal in countries including Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain and Switzerland where medical professionals monitor drug users. They also provide clean needles to prevent the spread of infectious diseases like HIV or hepatitis C. Ideally, they also steer users into treatment and other services.

Some experts say new approaches are needed to fight the opioid epidemic, including safe havens. But they've faced legal and political hurdles. Critics have argued these places may undermine prevention and treatment, and seem to fly in the face of laws aimed at stopping use of deadly illicit drugs.

Safe injection sites are different from syringe exchange programs, which were once controversial but now exist in 33 states. The underground safe haven is open between four and six hours a day, five days a week, according to Alex Kral, a San Francisco-based researcher with RTI International, and Peter Davidson of the University of California, San Diego. Their report was published online in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

The space consists of two rooms — an "injection room" with five stainless steel stations with mirrors and stools and a room next door where users are monitored afterward. There are trained staff on hand, but no one who is medically licensed, according to the researchers. Smoking is not allowed there, but drugs like heroin, pain pills, cocaine and methamphetamine are.

Use of the space was by invitation only. Most visitors are white, homeless men. It was used 2,500 times over two years by over 100 people, although researchers say the exact number of participants isn't known because the facility relies on anonymous surveys.

There's no data on deaths or drug use by clients who injected when the site was closed and it's not known whether any went into treatment, Kral said. The study also didn't look at issues opponents worry about, like whether creation of a safe place is associated with an increase in people beginning to try drugs, said Jonathan Caulkins, a drug policy expert at Carnegie Mellon University who nonetheless applauded the organization's effort to try to stop overdose deaths.

Entrenched Poverty Tough To Shake In The Mississippi Delta

BY EMILY WAGSTER PETTUS

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

AUGUST 07, 2017

Graph, Otibehia Allen, a single mother of five, stands outside her rented mobile home in Jonestown, Miss. Allen works 30 hours a week as a data entry clerk and transportation dispatcher for a medical clinic, pulling in barely over minimum wage. She doesn’t own a car, and public transportation is not widely available. To get from home in Jonestown to work or even to go grocery shopping about 13 miles (21 kilometers) away in Clarksdale, Allen often pays people for a ride, sometimes $20 a pop.

JONESTOWN, MISS. (AP) — Otibehia Allen is a single mother who lives in a rented mobile home in the same isolated, poor community where she grew up among the cotton and soybean fields of the Mississippi Delta

During a summer that feels like a sauna, the trailer's air conditioner has conked out. Some nights, Allen and her five children find cooler accommodations with friends and relatives. Other nights, they sleep in the trailer with box fans circulating the stuffy air.

Allen works 30 hours a week as a data entry clerk and transportation dispatcher for a medical clinic, pulling in barely over minimum wage. She doesn't own a car, and public transportation is not widely available. To get from home in Jonestown to work or even to go grocery shopping about 13 miles (21 kilometers) away in Clarksdale, Allen often pays people for a ride — sometimes $20 a pop.

"It's not easy raising five children alone," Allen said, fighting back tears. "No, you didn't ask me to have them, true. So, I chose to. So that means I'm responsible for these people." Persistent poverty shapes daily existence in this expanse of agricultural flatland that gave birth to the blues. Jobs are scarce. Schools struggle for funding. Tens of thousands of families receive government food aid and health insurance.

Fifty years ago, Democratic Sens. Robert F. Kennedy of New York and Joe Clark of Pennsylvania toured the Delta and saw ramshackle houses and starving children.

Curtis Wilkie was a young reporter covering the senators' tour for a Delta newspaper, the Clarksdale Press Register.

At one stop, Wilkie recalled, "There was a little infant in a dirty diaper crawling around on the floor and eating rice — grains of rice that were on the floor that were dirty. ... Kennedy knelt by the child and didn't say a word, was stroking the little child's cheeks and his forehead."

Mississippi's congressional delegation in 1967, led by Democratic Sens. James Eastland and John Stennis and Rep. Jamie Whitten, resisted federal funding for food programs and for Head Start, a preschool program that many conservatives saw as a threat to the state's white, segregationist power structure because it educated poor black children.

Wilkie said the trip had an enormous impact on Kennedy, whose eyes welled with tears at the sight of the child: "No question that once he got back to Washington, he became a more passionate advocate for rural people."

Kennedy ran for president in 1968. Moments after winning the California primary, he was assassinated.

Mississippi's second-term Republican governor, Phil Bryant, was born to a blue-collar family in the Delta in 1954. He frequently says he doesn't want people to be dependent on government. Under his tenure, Mississippi's been one of 19 states rejecting expansion of Medicaid, the federal and state health insurance program for the poor, under the health care law signed by former President Barack Obama.

Bryant, who supports President Donald Trump, says job creation is the best way to combat poverty. Since he became governor, Mississippi has offered incentives to attract two tire manufacturing plants — one is open, the other being built. Neither is in the Delta.

Although opportunities have improved in the past 50 years, the Delta remains one of the most deprived regions in the U.S. The national poverty rate is about 15 percent; it's 22 percent for Mississippi. In most Delta counties, it's 30 to 40 percent.

Kennedy and Clark were accompanied to the Delta in 1967 by Marian Wright, a young civil rights lawyer working in Mississippi. In 1973, after she married and added to her name, Marian Wright Edelman founded Children's Defense Fund, a national group that advocates for social services for the poor.

Edelman recently returned to Mississippi to examine how poverty continues shaping lives of people like Allen, the 32-year-old single mother. Both Edelman and Allen said they worry the Trump administration will cut social services that help the poor.

In Allen's two-bedroom trailer, her boys sleep in one room, her girls in another while she stays on the couch. She buys groceries in bulk because it's cheaper, and she knows how far she can stretch a family pack of chicken from the Piggly Wiggly.

Allen's children, 9 to 14, are covered by Medicaid. She got a raise a few months ago — 40 cents an hour, just enough to make her lose her own Medicaid coverage. Her back and arms are in constant pain, but she won't see a doctor.

"I don't want to make a bill that I can't pay," Allen said.

Dr. Barbara Ricks, a 49-year-old pediatrician, grew up poor in the Delta. Her family received food stamps; she attended Head Start and paid for college with scholarships and jobs.

She has practiced medicine since 1999 in Greenville, one of the larger Delta cities — population 31,500.

Ricks said about 95 percent of her patients are on Medicaid, some from small, rural communities 40 or 50 miles away because there are few clinics closer to home. She said patients from financially stable households generally are in better health than those living in poverty, who often deal with stress, obesity and diabetes.

Concealing names to protect privacy, she said one of her patients is an 11-year-old boy with asthma who lives with his grandmother because his mom, single and unemployed, is overwhelmed raising his five younger siblings. He's been hospitalized because his grandmother, who also cares for an adult relative, leaves him "minimally supervised" and misses regular asthma treatments, the doctor said.

Ricks said another patient is an infant whose mother is a 15-year-old student. Though the mother intends to go to college, she sometimes misses days or weeks of class to care for her baby.

"Poverty is a social problem, but it's also a medical problem," Ricks said. "These kids have so many things working against them. And, although poor outcomes are expected, we should not accept it."

Follow Emily Wagster Pettus on Twitter: http://twitter.com/EWagsterPettus .

State-Of-The-Nation: Senators To Talk With Buhari – Ben Bruce

BY LEVINUS NWABUGHIOGU

VANGUARD NIGERIA

AUGUST 05, 2017

Senator Ben Bruce (Via Vanguard)

ABUJA, NIGERIA (VANGUARD) – To urgently rescue Nigeria from pangs of poverty and under development, the Senator representing Bayelsa East in the Nigerian Senate, Mr. Ben Bruce on Friday gave hints of a possible high powered meeting between the Senate and President Mohammadu Buhari anytime next week upon his return to Nigeria.

Recall that President Buhari left the shore of the country on May 7 for a follow-up on his medical consultations.

 Though, no specific date had been officially given for the president’s return, speculation is however, rife of his possible return next week.

Speaking to Vanguard on Friday on the State of the Nation, Bruce who fumed at the incremental hardship agreed to the feelings that Nigeria has seriously lagged behind in its developmental strides in the last two years, saying that the country was momentarily in a big trouble.

According him, a lot of public policies have become antiquated and could not drive Nigeria’s economy in a 21 century world.

He said: “Nigeria has not really made any progress in the last 2 years. I think we are in big trouble right now. When the President gets back, we would need to sit down with him and have a conversation. There is no point having a conversation with anybody who is not a president.

“I am thinking the Senate. We will have a conversation. A bipartisan team will go and meet with Mr. President and have a conversation with him. Not APC senators meeting the president but the Senate meeting him and have a conversation on the future of Nigeria. That’s what I am gonna propose. That we sit down with him and discuss the issues. He’s the president and you can’t change that and I respect constitutional authority. He is the President of Nigeria and we will sit down with him and discuss the problems facing the country. In 2019 when there is another president, that will no another issue. But right now, he is the president and we need to sit down with him and discuss the issues. I understand he will be here next week.

“Let’s talk to the President directly. I think it is important to speak with the President Buhari.

” On the issues to confront the President with, Senator Bruce said it was all encompassing.

“All the issues affecting the country. This is my proposal. I am going to sit down with the Senate President and say, look, let’s sit down with the President. He’s not an APC President. He’s president of Nigeria. So, I don’t want say APC governors, senators seeing him. He should see Nigeria not APC. This is what I am gonna request, hopefully it will be granted and we are gonna have a conversation.

 “Everything agitates my mind. The economy is in trouble, there is inflation, unemployment, schools, every year, a million kids cannot go to school. Automobile policy of Nigeria is 1922 policy. Mass transit policy is 1825. Our educational policy is 1942 policy. Are you kidding? We are in the stone age. These are not caused by him. I don’t want to accuse anybody but previous government did a lousy job. You have a educational policy set up by the colonial masters, have you changed that? Do you have a policy on Power, Health? Name one rich man who does not send his child, or himself to be treated abroad. You spend millions of Naira in Ghana every year on education. You have the health stories in India. So, what is going right? That has to be dealt with. We need to discuss it. I am not a critic, not here to run down anybody but I have a solution to our problem”, he said.

The Senator who hails from oil rich Bayelsa State in the Niger Delta region stated that the zone is a time bomb waiting to explode.

He said that the agitations were becoming so serious that an urgent dialogue between the agitators and the federal government needed to hold.

He said: “I think there should be a discussion. The Niger Delta is heavily underdeveloped. There is a lot of people to blame. In the past, federal government, state government, NDDC, everybody made a terrible mistake about Niger Delta. Nobody is exempt. It doesn’t matter whether you are military, PDP, APC, whoever, everybody is guilty. Now, I cannot erase the past. The past is the past but going forward, the area must be developed. There has to be a programme to develop the Niger Delta. And dialogue must take place for the place to be developed. I cannot look at a young man who is dying of poverty and say he has no right to agitate.

“I have no right to say that and at the same time I will not encourage him to go carry a gun and kill somebody. At the same time, I am encouraging the government to understand there is a time bomb that had exploded several times and the next time, it explodes, there will be no oil for anybody. So, I urge everybody to sit on a roundtable and resolve the problem and should be focusing on developments not enriching individuals.

 I will never support enriching individuals.” Senator Bruce also regretted that devolution of power Bill didn’t pass in the last constitutional amendment voting by the National Assembly.

He however gave a glimpse of hope that the Bill would be revisited when the National Assembly resumes from its 6 weeks holiday.

 The Senator also expressed the same optimism on the two gender Bills: Indegeneship/Citizenship and 35 percent affirmative action for women as Commissioners and Ministers that failed during the voting exercise.

 “I voted for devolution of power. But I think there was not enough education. A lot of people didn’t really understand it. I think we moved too fast. But the Senate President has said when we come back, we will sit down. I think a lot fears from our brothers in the other parts of the country. So, I don’t want to blame anybody on that issue. I think we did very well with the Bills we passed. When we come back, we may explain it properly to those who have opposed it. I think there will be consensus and it will pass. I am confident about that.

“One of the senators got up and said, look in his state, they don’t have enough qualified women and we burst out laughing. I don’t wanna run down anybody. But I think we need to educate people. Don’t assume everybody is as smart as you are or as liberal as you are. I think the biggest mistake is that you have a collection of people we need to educate and tell them that gender equality is the greatest gift you can give a people. It doesn’t destroy anybody or take away the right of a man. So, instead of attacking them, let’s educate them. I don’t wanna run down anybody. Let’s educate them”, he said.

Speaking on the performance of N-Power job which is one of the social intervention prgrammes on job creations, Bruce who is also a business magnate likened the scheme to a waste of financial resources.

“When you spent 75 percent of your budget on current expenditure, I have a bill coming up which will limit expenditure by 50 percent by law and it will pass. You have DGs flying first class. You have people traveling all over the world to have meetings. Why can’t you have meetings in Nigeria? I saw the budget. Do you know the waste in the budget? If you run Nigeria as private company, you will fire 75 percent of people who run the country. Go and see the budget, it is total waste and this has been going on for a long time. It has nothing to do with APC”, he said.

Huff, Puff, Pass? AG's Pot Fury Not Echoed By Task Force

Attorney General Jeff Sessions attends a news conference at the Justice Department in Washington, Friday, Aug. 4, 2017. Sessions has warned of a crackdown on marijuana. But documents obtained by The Associated Press show he’s getting no fresh avenues from a special task force formed to find the best strategy. (AP Andrew Harnik)

WASHINGTON (AP, AUGUST 05, 2017) — The betting was that law-and-order Attorney General Jeff Sessions would come out against the legalized marijuana industry with guns blazing. But the task force Sessions assembled to find the best legal strategy is giving him no ammunition, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press.

The Task Force on Crime Reduction and Public Safety, a group of prosecutors and federal law enforcement officials, has come up with no new policy recommendations to advance the attorney general's aggressively anti-marijuana views. The group's report largely reiterates the current Justice Department policy on marijuana.

It encourages officials to keep studying whether to change or rescind the Obama administration's more hands-off approach to enforcement — a stance that has allowed the nation's experiment with legal pot to flourish. The report was not slated to be released publicly, but portions were obtained by the AP.

Sessions, who has assailed marijuana as comparable to heroin and blamed it for spikes in violence, has been promising to reconsider existing pot policy since he took office six months ago. His statements have sparked both support and worry across the political spectrum as a growing number of states have worked to legalize the drug.

Threats of a federal crackdown have united liberals, who object to the human costs of a war on pot, and some conservatives, who see it as a states' rights issue. Some advocates and members of Congress had feared the task force's recommendations would give Sessions the green light to begin dismantling what has become a sophisticated, multimillion-dollar pot industry that helps fund schools, educational programs and law enforcement.

But the tepid nature of the recommendations signals just how difficult it would be to change course on pot. Some in law enforcement support a tougher approach, but a bipartisan group of senators in March urged Sessions to uphold existing marijuana policy. Others in Congress are seeking ways to protect and promote pot businesses.

The vague recommendations may be intentional, reflecting an understanding that shutting down the entire industry is neither palatable nor possible, said John Hudak, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies marijuana law and was interviewed by members of the task force.

"If they come out with a more progressive, liberal policy, the attorney general is just going to reject it. They need to convince the attorney general that the recommendations are the best they can do without embarrassing the entire department by implementing a policy that fails," he said.

The task force suggestions are not final, and Sessions is in no way bound by them. The government still has plenty of ways it can punish weed-tolerant states, including raiding pot businesses and suing states where the drug is legal, a rare but quick path to compliance. The only one who could override a drastic move by Sessions is President Donald Trump, whose personal views on marijuana remain mostly unknown.

The Justice Department declined to comment. Rather than urging federal agents to shut down dispensaries and make mass arrests, the task force puts forth a more familiar approach. Its report says officials should continue to oppose rules that block the Justice Department from interfering with medical marijuana programs in states where it is allowed. Sessions wrote to members of Congress in May asking them — unsuccessfully so far — to undo those protections. The Obama administration also unsuccessfully opposed those rules.

The report suggests teaming the Justice Department with Treasury officials to offer guidance to financial institutions, telling them to implement robust anti-money laundering programs and report suspicious transactions involving businesses in states where pot is legal. That is already required by federal law.

And it tells officials to develop "centralized guidance, tools and data related to marijuana enforcement," two years after the Government Accountability Office told the Justice Department it needs to better document how it's tracking the effect of marijuana legalization in the states.

Most critically, and without offering direction, it says officials "should evaluate whether to maintain, revise or rescind" a set of Obama-era memos that allowed states to legalize marijuana on the condition that officials act to keep it from migrating to places where it is still outlawed and out of the hands of criminal cartels and children. Any changes to the policy could impact the way pot-legal states operate.

The recommendations are not surprising because "there's as much evidence that Sessions intends to maintain the system and help improve upon it as there is that he intends to roll it back," said Mason Tvert, who ran Colorado's legalization campaign. He pointed to Sessions' comment during his Senate confirmation hearing that while he opposed legalization, he understood the scarcity of federal resources and "echoed" the position of his Democratic predecessors.

But in July, he sent letters to Colorado and Washington that stirred concern, asking how they would address reports they were not adequately regulating the drug. It remains unclear how much weight Sessions might give the recommendations. He said he has been relying on them to enact policy in other areas. Apart from pot, the task force is studying a list of criminal justice issues. The overall report's executive summary says its work continues and its recommendations "do not comprehensively address every effort that the Department is planning or currently undertaking to reduce violent crime."

Hacker Who Helped Stop Global Cyberattack Arrested In US

British IT expert Marcus Hutchins speaks during an interview in Ilfracombe, England. Hutchins, a young British researcher credited with derailing a global cyberattack in May, has been arrested for allegedly creating and distributing banking malware, U.S. authorities say. Hutchins was detained in Las Vegas on Wednesday, Aug. 2, 2017, while flying back to Britain from Defcon, an annual gathering of hackers of IT security gurus. A grand jury indictment charges Hutchins with “creating and distributing” malware known as the Kronos banking Trojan.

LAS VEGAS (AP, AUGUST 04, 2017) — Marcus Hutchins, a young British researcher credited with derailing a global cyberattack in May, was arrested for allegedly creating and distributing malicious software designed to collect bank-account passwords, U.S. authorities said Thursday.

Hutchins was detained in Las Vegas on his way back to Britain from an annual gathering of hackers and information security gurus. A grand jury indictment charged Hutchins with creating and distributing malware known as the Kronos banking Trojan.

Such malware infects web browsers, then captures usernames and passwords when an unsuspecting user visits a bank or other trusted location. News of Hutchins' detention came as a shock to the cybersecurity community. Many had rallied behind the researcher whose quick thinking helped control the spread of the WannaCry attack that crippled thousands of computers last May.

The indictment, filed in a Wisconsin federal court last month, alleges that Hutchins and another defendant — whose name is redacted — conspired between July 2014 and July 2015 to advertise the availability of the Kronos malware on internet forums, sell the malware and profit from it. The indictment also accuses Hutchins of creating the malware.

Authorities said the malware was first made available in early 2014, and "marketed and distributed through AlphaBay, a hidden service on the Tor network." The U.S. Department of Justice announced in July that the AlphaBay "darknet" marketplace was shut down after an international law enforcement effort.

A court hearing was scheduled for Hutchins on Thursday afternoon in Las Vegas. It was not immediately clear if he has a lawyer. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based digital rights group, said it was "deeply concerned" about Hutchins' arrest and was attempting to reach him.

Hutchins recently attended Def Con, an annual cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas that ended Sunday. On Wednesday, Hutchins made some routinecomments on Twitter that suggested he was at an airport getting ready to board a plane for a flight home. He never left Nevada.

A Justice Department spokesman confirmed the 22-year-old Hutchins was arrested Wednesday in Las Vegas. Officer Rodrigo Pena, a police spokesman in Henderson, near Las Vegas, said Hutchins spent the night in federal custody in the city lockup.

Andrew Mabbitt, a British digital security specialist who had been staying in Las Vegas with Hutchins, said he and his friends grew worried when they got "radio silence" from Hutchins for hours. The worries deepened when Hutchins' mother called to tell him the young researcher hadn't made his flight home.

Mabbitt said he eventually found Hutchins' name on a detention center website. News of his indictment Wednesday left colleagues scrambling to understand what happened. "We don't know the evidence the FBI has against him, however we do have some circumstantial evidence that he was involved in that community at the time," said computer security expert Rob Graham.

The big question is the identity of the co-defendant in the case, whose name is redacted in the indictment. Why was it blacked out? "Maybe the other guy testified against him," said Graham. The co-defendant allegedly advertised the malware online. Hutchins is accused of creating and transmitting the program.

The problem with software creation is that often a program includes code written by multiple programmers. Prosecutors might need to prove that Hutchins wrote code with specific targets. "I've written code that other people have injected malware into," said Graham. "We know that large parts of Kronos were written by other people."

One legal scholar who specializes in studying computer crime said it's unusual, and problematic, for prosecutors to go after someone simply for writing or selling malware — as opposed to using it to further a crime.

"This is the first case I know of where the government is prosecuting someone for creating or selling malware but not actually using it," said Orin Kerr, a law professor at George Washington University. Kerr said it will be difficult to prove criminal intent.

"It's a constant issue in criminal law — the helping of people who are committing a crime," Kerr said. "When is that itself a crime?"

O'Brien reported from Providence, Rhode Island. Associated Press writers Raphael Satter in Paris and Frank Bajak in Houston contributed to this report.

NIGERIA: FG Bars Foreign Professionals Without Nigeria Certification

__Declares state of emergency on science and technology 

__Gives 3-yr tax rebate to pioneer industries in Nigeria 

BY JOHNBOSCO AGBAKURU, VANGUARD NIGERIA

Ogbonnaya Onu, Fed Minister Of Science & Technology 

ABUJA, NIGERIA (VANGUARD, AUGUST 02, 2017) –ABUJA – The Federal Executive Council, FEC, Wednesday approved a new policy that for any foreign professionals to practice in Nigeria, they have to be registered and certified by all the necessary regulatory bodies.

This is as the Federal Government has declared a state of emergency on science and technology to boost technological acquisition for the industrial growth of the country.

Meantime, to attract foreign industries, the Federal Executive Council has approved tax rebate which will serve as an incentive for pioneer industries operating in Nigeria. 

Briefing State House Correspondents after weekly FEC meeting at the Council Chamber, Presidential Villa Abuja, the Minister of Science and Technology, Dr. Ogbonnaya Onu said, “We agreed that from now on, any person who wants to practice any profession that has anything to do with science, engineering and technology, medical doctors, accountants, quantity surveyors just to mention but a few, that first they have to be certified by appropriate regulatory bodies in Nigeria.”

 The Minister said that FEC in its deliberations approved policy that will help to change the direction that will be taken as a nation, a direction that will be very useful in helping to start looking inwards to produce the things that the country needs as against depending on outside to import our requirements.

 He said, “Some of the highlights will involve where we have bulk purchases major items that will bring into the country those who normally would have supplied from outside the country will now come to Nigeria and establish their factories to produce in Nigeria.

 “By doing so, they will offer job opportunities to our people, tax will be paid to government, wealth will be created and most importantly, Nigeria will now acquire the necessary technology that will help us build capacity. 

“This is very important in our building our local capacity. There are so many areas that this new policy has coved because the aim of this new policy is to make sure that in the next ten years, Nigeria firms will be in a position to carry out very complex jobs. A sort of jobs that we don’t currently have the expertise to do in the country.

 “And for such jobs, we will rely on foreign expertise and foreign firms for now but when they come, they have to work with Nigerian firms so that these Nigerian firms will understudy them and this will be from the conception to the commissioning.

 “That is the only way that we can hope to acquire to acquire the necessary technology to build our local capacity because our aim is like in the next ten years like I said we will be able to have own domestic firms, Nigerian firms to carry out all these jobs.

 “And in about 20 years, we want to see Nigerian firms competing with the very best in the world. 

“So, the Federal Executive Council, accepted to declare a state of emergency for science and technology and this is very important because even the economic recovery and growth plan 2018 to 2020 recognizes the cardinal place of science and technology in driving this recovery and growth plan of government.

 “We are not looking for transfer of technology because we know it will not happen, what we are looking for is acquisition of technology and we are interested in building our own capacity. 

“We are convinced that we can do this and we believe that with the approval given to this policy once implemented, we will be in a position to acquire technology. 

“This policy is a very comprehensive policy. We will pay a lot of attention to training. We will make sure that we have all the artisans we need, all the technicians that we need so that once somebody is building a house, once you get up to finishing of that house, you are most likely going to bring people from outside country. Many of them come from our neighboring countries. This we will not allow to continue. So we want to build the requisite manpower.

 “We will also use the Ministry of Interior to help us with a new classification in our immigration policy. Those areas that we lack expertise as of now, we will use that classification to bring in those who have such expertise particularly from African countries.

 “Then we will also be working closely with Nigerians in the Diaspora because many Nigerians outside the country have a lot of skills which we need at this time particularly in order to implement this policy, we will be working with them.

” FG approves tax rebate for pioneer industries

Also briefing journalists, the Minister of Industry, Trade and Investment, Okechukwu Enalema said government has approved tax rebate for pioneer industry to establish in the country, noting that the policy was to serve as an incentive to attract new investors.

 The Minister said, “FEC approved a memorandum that was presented to amend the list of pioneer industries and products that will enjoy pioneer status going forward. 

“As many of you know the pioneer incentive scheme is governed by ye Industrial Development Income Tax Relief Act and the whole purpose is to give tax holidays to industries we consider pioneer. 

\“Pioneer doesn’t mean that they are new it only means that they are not yet mature, we want those industries to grow. We want to attract investment in them and you will find that this covers a wide range of industries and those tax holidays ranges from three to five years. 

“The pioneer list was last reviewed by the Federal Executive Council in 2006, so you could see that this was long overdue. 

“On doing the review, special attention was paid to the ERGP to capture the current realities that will help to implement the plan to make sure we attract the kind of investment, industries and players that will help to implement and realize our objectives in the ERGP. 

“I should also point out that there was multi stakeholder engagement, private and public sector in arriving at the industries that will be included in the pioneer incentive scheme. 

“In terms of the recommendations approved by FEC today: we have tried to remove all ambiguities in the definition of industries by reclassifying industries according to the international standard in industrial classification which is the global standard which is also the standard that is used by the Nigeria Bureau of Statistics. 

“The other thing we also did is to agree that the pioneer list will be reviewed regularly every two years, biannually so that just that if things come up, we live in a fast changing world and we are being responsive to our world. In the case of additions to the list they will be effected immediately, for deletion of industries that we consider mature there will be a three year window that will be allowed for those that are already investing in that industry that were enjoying pioneer status to carry on till the end of that three year period.

 “Against this backdrop, we then approved 27 industries that were recommended for addition to the pioneer list today.

 “We also recommended and it was accepted by the Council that mineral oil prospecting which is governed by the Petroleum Profit Tax should not be part of the pioneer industries list which is really industries governed by the Companies Income Tax Act. 

“It was also accepted that given the success we have achieved in cement which are now net exporters, maybe that is an industry which we could say that we are now where we want to be in terms of maturity even though there is still a lot of scope for the application and the use of cement and you know that will continue. We already have critical mass in cement

 “The scheme will ensure that it will not deprive us of revenue. It is an incentive to make people enter your market, new enter industries, invest more for people who are already here. It will increase our tax base over time.”

4 Sanctuary Cities Facing Loss Of Crime-Fighting Assistance

Attorney General Jeff Sessions speaks in Columbus, Ohio. Sessions moved Thursday, Aug. 3, 2017, to again punish so-called sanctuary cities, this time threatening to deny federal crime-fighting resources to four cities beset by violence if they don’t step up efforts to help detain and deport people living in the country illegally.

WASHINGTON (AP, AUGUST 03, 2017) — Attorney General Jeff Sessions moved Thursday to again punish so-called sanctuary cities, this time threatening to deny federal crime-fighting resources to four cities beset by violence if they don't step up efforts to help detain and deport people living in the country illegally.

The Justice Department sent letters to cities struggling with gun violence, telling them they will be ineligible for a new program that aims to root out drug trafficking and gang crime unless they give federal immigration authorities access to jails and provide advance notice before releasing someone in custody who is wanted on immigration violations. The cities — Baltimore, Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Stockton and San Bernardino in California — all expressed interest in the Justice Department's new Public Safety Partnership, which enlists federal agents, analysts and technology to help communities find solutions to crime.

"By taking simple, common-sense considerations into account, we are encouraging every jurisdiction in this country to cooperate with federal law enforcement," Sessions said in a statement that accompanied the letters. "That will ultimately make all of us safer — especially law enforcement on our streets."

In the letters, the department asked the four prospective cities' police departments to show proof of their compliance by Aug. 18. The threat marks Sessions' latest effort to force local authorities to cooperate with federal immigration authorities, part of a push to reduce crime he believes is linked to illegal immigration. Sessions has pledged to make fighting street crime the Justice Department's top priority, but the strategy is putting him at odds with some city leaders, who say the best way to fight crime and build community trust is to keep local police out of federal immigration matters.

Sessions last week told jurisdictions they need to meet the same conditions or lose out on millions of dollars from a separate program that aims to send grant money to support law enforcement. That move made some local officials more defiant.

The Justice Department in June tapped 12 cities to receive aid through the Public Safety Partnership, and officials said the four cities that were sent the letters had expressed interest in the next chance at participating. Cities were chosen based on higher-than-average rates of violence and willingness to receive the help and training. Cities that want to be involved going forward will have to show they allow unfettered communication between police and federal immigration authorities, give agents access to jails in order to question immigrants, and provide them 48-hours' notice when someone in the country illegally is about to be released.

Rwanda’s Forever President

BY BERT INGELAERE

NEW YORK TIMES

AUGUST 02, 2017

Paul Kagame Supporters At A Political Rally In The Burera District Of Rwanda Image: Clement Uwiringiyimana/Reuters

ANTWERP, BELGIUM (NEW YORK TIMES) — There is an election in Rwanda on Friday, but its outcome already is nearly certain: President Paul Kagame will win a third seven-year term. Elections there are not a contest for power. They are the ritual confirmation of the power in place.

Mr. Kagame generally wins by margins that would make a dictator proud: In 2010, he scored some 93 percent of the vote. He is the only ruler most Rwandans born since the 1994 genocide know. The Rwandans who remember leaders before him have reason to wonder if they will ever see another: The state’s mighty security apparatus is quietly eloquent, with all those soldiers and police officers routinely patrolling both city streets and the countryside.

Mr. Kagame is up against two innocuous candidates after the national election commission disqualified Diane Rwigara, his strongest opponent, and two other independent contenders. The opposition leader Victoire Ingabire, who was placed under house arrest in the lead-up to the 2010 election, is now in jail serving a dubious 15-year sentence for threatening state security, among other things. Journalists have also been intimidated and stifled; Freedom House categorizes Rwanda as “not free.”

Mr. Kagame wasn’t supposed to run this time because he would be coming up against the two-term limit set by the Constitution. But in 2015 the government proposed an amendment and had it sanctioned in a referendum (roundly criticized by human rights groups), opening the way for Mr. Kagame to stand for re-election this year — and again until 2034.

Burundi was condemned internationally in 2015 after President Pierre Nkurunziza flouted term limits to run for a third mandate. Last year, President Joseph Kabila of the Democratic Republic of Congo skirted term restrictions by simply delaying the next election, triggering protests and then a crackdown that led to sanctions against his government. Yet nothing of the sort has happened to Mr. Kagame or his administration despite its ploys to keep him in power basically unchallenged.

Why? Because Mr. Kagame has been masterful at deflecting criticism of his illiberalism by pointing to Rwanda’s economic performance. The country is touted as a model: The government claims that the economy grew by an average of about 8 percent a year between 2001 and 2014, and that the rate of poverty dropped from nearly 57 percent in 2006 to less than 40 percent in 2014. Neither Mr. Nkurunziza nor Mr. Kabila could proffer such results.

Mr. Kagame’s supporters, in Rwanda and beyond, sing to his tune. In a way, they have to. Western donors and international organizations may well prefer democratic values to big-man politics. But having poured great sums of money into Rwanda since the 1994 genocide, they want to be impressed by the headway Mr. Kagame claims to have made — on economic growth and poverty reduction, but also maternal health care and the prosecution of suspected mass killers. Asia has tigers; now Africa has found its lion. Many want to believe that while Mr. Kagame may have been cutting corners on democracy, he has delivered on development.

Has he, though?

In fact, his government’s record is shakier than it looks, including on some of the major achievements it is credited with.

Consider poverty reduction. Back in 2005, I was stationed in Rwanda with a World Bank team, working on a large-scale study of poverty. Six months into it, after we had collected hundreds of survey questionnaires about the well-being of ordinary Rwandans and conducted hundreds of discussions with villagers, the Rwandan security forces seized half of our files on the pretext that our research’s design was tainted by “genocide ideology” — a vague notion supposedly something like sectarianism that the government often invokes to criminalize what it sees as challenges to its authority. After lengthy negotiations between World Bank and Rwandan officials, the project was abandoned. We never determined what the poverty trends were: The information we had collected was destroyed before it could be analyzed.

Matters have hardly improved. Major studies can only be carried out by the Rwandan authorities or under their close supervision. Independent researchers have come to question the government’s methodology for analyzing data.

Officially, the poverty rate decreased by nearly 6 percentage points between 2011 and 2014. But Filip Reyntjens, a Rwanda expert at the University of Antwerp, has argued that it might actually have increased by about 6 percentage points during that period. Several articles published by the Review of African Political Economy also challenge Rwanda’s official poverty figures, as well as its G.D.P. growth rates.

I’m of the view that expanding individual freedoms is essential, not incidental, to a country’s long-term development. As Angus Deaton, a Nobel laureate in economics, said to a Rwandan minister in 2015, “improvements in public health can never be truly secure in nondemocratic states.” But I concede that Rwanda has made remarkable economic progress since facing near-total destruction in 1994, and that some think it is still worth debating the merits of trade-offs between democracy and development.

Whatever one thinks of these issues, however, everyone should be concerned that the Kagame government has been fudging, hiding or selectively presenting the raw facts of its economic record. Rwanda may be forgoing democracy for development only to wind up with no democracy and far less development than many think.

Bert Ingelaere is a lecturer in development studies at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. He is the author of “Inside Rwanda’s Gacaca Courts: Seeking Justice After Genocide.”