1UA TV

Iran is studying ways to keep exporting oil and other measures to counter U.S. economic sanctions, state news agency IRNA reported Saturday.

Since last month, when U.S. President Donald Trump pulled out of the nuclear deal that lifted most sanctions in 2015, the rial currency has dropped up to 40 percent in value, prompting protests by bazaar traders usually loyal to the Islamist rulers.

Speaking after three days of those protests, supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said the U.S. sanctions were aimed at turning Iranians against their government.

Other protesters clashed with police late Saturday during a demonstration against shortages of drinking water.

“They bring to bear economic pressure to separate the nation from the system … but six U.S. presidents before him [Trump] tried this and had to give up,” Khamenei said on his website Khamenei.ir.

With the return of U.S. sanctions likely to make it increasingly difficult to access the global financial system, President Hassan Rouhani has met with the head of parliament and the judiciary to discuss countermeasures.

“Various scenarios of threats to the Iranian economy by the U.S. government were examined and appropriate measures were taken to prepare for any probable U.S. sanctions, and to prevent their negative impact,” IRNA said.

One such measure was seeking self-sufficiency in gasoline production, the report added.

Looking for buyers

The government and parliament have also set up a committee to study potential buyers of oil and ways of repatriating the income after U.S. sanctions take effect, Fereydoun Hassanvand, head of the parliament’s energy committee, was quoted as saying by IRNA.

“Due to the possibility of U.S. sanctions against Iran, the committee will study the competence of buyers and how to obtain proceeds from the sale of oil, safe sale alternatives which are consistent with international law and do not lead to corruption and profiteering,” Hassanvand said.

The United States has told allies to cut all imports of Iranian oil by November, a senior State Department official said Tuesday.

In the separate unrest, demonstrators protesting against shortages of drinking water in oil-rich southwestern Iran clashed with police late Saturday after officers ordered about 500 protesters to disperse, IRNA reported.

Shots could be heard on videos circulated on social media from protests in Khorramshahr, which has been the scene of demonstrations for the past three days, along with the nearby city of Abadan. The videos could not be authenticated by Reuters.

A number of protests have broken out in Iran since the beginning of the year over water, a growing political concern because of a drought that residents of parched areas and analysts say has been exacerbated by mismanagement.

Speaking before the IRNA report on the clash, Khamenei said the United States was acting with Sunni Muslim Gulf Arab states, which regard Shiite Muslim Iran as their main regional foe, to try to destabilize the government in Tehran.

“If America was able to act against Iran, it would not need to form coalitions with notorious and reactionary states in the region and ask their help in fomenting unrest and instability,” Khamenei told graduating Revolutionary Guards officers, in remarks carried by state TV.
…

A senior U.S. diplomat for Asian affairs is leaving State Department at the end of July amid ongoing and critical negotiations with North Korea, weeks after the leaders of the U.S. and North Korea met in Singapore.

“Acting Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Susan Thornton has announced her intention to retire from the Foreign Service at the end of July,” State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said Saturday in a statement.

“We particularly appreciate her dedication to department and interagency colleagues, her extraordinary leadership, especially as acting assistant secretary over the past year and a half,” Nauert added.

Thornton was formally nominated by President Donald Trump as assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs last December. She began serving in the position in an acting capacity soon after Trump took office.

Thornton’s nomination, which requires Senate confirmation, has been blocked by key Republicans, including Senator Marco Rubio of Florida.

In a tweet in May, Rubio said Thornton was “undermining” Trump’s effort to negotiate with North Korea by suggesting that the U.S. might accept a “partial” surrender of its nuclear weapons at the start of the talks.

Rubio was quoting Thornton’s remarks at a Wall Street Journal conference in Tokyo.

The State Department later clarified, saying Thornton’s position was in line with that of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. 

“What Susan Thornton was talking about is very similar and the same thing to what Secretary Pompeo spoke about, and that is that we would like to see a bigger, bolder, different, faster deal than the kind of deals that have been proposed before,” Nauert said in a briefing May 17.

Pompeo is said to be working diligently on nominations to fill key leadership roles across the State Department, including the position of assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs.
…

A senior U.S. diplomat for Asian affairs is leaving State Department at the end of July amid ongoing and critical negotiations with North Korea, weeks after the leaders of the U.S. and North Korea met in Singapore.

“Acting Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Susan Thornton has announced her intention to retire from the Foreign Service at the end of July,” State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said Saturday in a statement.

“We particularly appreciate her dedication to department and interagency colleagues, her extraordinary leadership, especially as acting assistant secretary over the past year and a half,” Nauert added.

Thornton was formally nominated by President Donald Trump as assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs last December. She began serving in the position in an acting capacity soon after Trump took office.

Thornton’s nomination, which requires Senate confirmation, has been blocked by key Republicans, including Senator Marco Rubio of Florida.

In a tweet in May, Rubio said Thornton was “undermining” Trump’s effort to negotiate with North Korea by suggesting that the U.S. might accept a “partial” surrender of its nuclear weapons at the start of the talks.

Rubio was quoting Thornton’s remarks at a Wall Street Journal conference in Tokyo.

The State Department later clarified, saying Thornton’s position was in line with that of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. 

“What Susan Thornton was talking about is very similar and the same thing to what Secretary Pompeo spoke about, and that is that we would like to see a bigger, bolder, different, faster deal than the kind of deals that have been proposed before,” Nauert said in a briefing May 17.

Pompeo is said to be working diligently on nominations to fill key leadership roles across the State Department, including the position of assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs.
…

The National Security Agency is deleting more than 685 million call records the government obtained since 2015 from telecommunication companies in connection with investigations, raising questions about the viability of the program.

The NSA’s bulk collection of call records was initially curtailed by Congress after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked documents revealing extensive government surveillance. The law, enacted in June 2015, said that going forward, the data would be retained by telecommunications companies, not the NSA, but that the intelligence agency could query the massive database.

Now the NSA is deleting all the information it collected from the queries.

Program questioned, defended

The agency released a statement late Thursday saying it started deleting the records in May after NSA analysts noted “technical irregularities in some data received from telecommunication service providers.” It also said the irregularities resulted in the NSA obtaining some call details it was not authorized to receive.

That points to a failure of the program, according to David Kris, a former top national security official at the Justice Department.

“They said they have to purge three years’ worth of data going back to 2015, and that the data they did collect during that time, which they are now purging, was not reliable and was infected with some kind of technical error,” said Kris, founder of Culper Partners, a consulting firm in Seattle. “So whatever insights they were hoping to get over the past three years from this program of collection … is all worthless. Because of that, they are throwing all the data away and basically starting over.”

Christopher Augustine, an NSA spokesman, disagreed with the claim that the program had failed.

“This is a case in which NSA determined that there was a problem and proactively took all the right steps to fix it,” he said.

The agency has reviewed and re-validated the intelligence reporting to make sure it was based only on call data that had been properly received from the telecommunication providers, he said. The agency declined to assign blame, and said the “root cause of the problem has since been addressed.”

​Who is to blame?

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., a staunch advocate of privacy rights, placed the blame on the telecom companies providing the NSA with call records.

“This incident shows these companies acted with unacceptable carelessness, and failed to comply with the law when they shared customers’ sensitive data with the government,” he told The Associated Press in a written statement Friday.

What is legal

Under law, the government can request information, such as the type of details that might be printed on a phone bill: the date and time of a call or text, a telephone calling card number, the duration of a call and to what phone number it was made. The details provided to the government do not include the content of any communications, the name, address or financial information of a customer, cell site location or GPS information.

If government investigators have reasonable suspicion that a certain phone number is being used by a terrorist, who might be in the U.S. or overseas, the government asks the phone companies which other numbers have been in touch with the suspicious number, something known as the “first hops,” and then which numbers are in touch with those numbers, the “second hops.”

42 targets, 534.4 million details

The NSA collected more than 534.4 million details of calls and text messages in 2017 from American telecom providers like AT&T and Version, according to the most recent government report covering NSA surveillance activities that year. That was more than three times the 151.2 million collected in 2016.

The call records were part of an intelligence collection effort aimed at 42 targets in 2016 and 40 targets in 2017, according to the report. It defines a target as an individual, group of individuals, organization or entity.

Annual reports to Congress from the intelligence community are now required under the 2015 surveillance reform legislation. The law also requires the government to seek a court order to collect call records to obtain intelligence. Requests for records of U.S. citizens must be based on an investigation being conducted to protect against terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities and the probe cannot be conducted solely on activities protected by the First Amendment.

However, despite the reforms, the NSA still received some data from the telecommunications companies that the agency was not authorized to see and some of that data was erroneous, Augustine said.

“We cannot go into greater detail because those details remain classified. However, at no point in time did NSA receive the content of any calls, the name, address or financial information of a subscriber or customer, nor cell site location information or global positioning system information,” he said.

Privacy and civil rights advocates said the NSA announcement raised further concerns about the program.

“This is another in a series of failures that shows that many NSA spying programs have ballooned out of control and have repeatedly failed to meet the basic limits imposed by Congress and the FISA court,” said Neema Singh Guliani, legislative counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington. Guliani was referring to a U.S. federal court established and authorized under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to oversee requests for surveillance warrants.

She said the public has a right to know more about the cause and scope of the problem, such as how many of the records were obtained in error and whether the NSA notified any individuals that their information improperly ended up in the agency’s hands.
…

The National Security Agency is deleting more than 685 million call records the government obtained since 2015 from telecommunication companies in connection with investigations, raising questions about the viability of the program.

The NSA’s bulk collection of call records was initially curtailed by Congress after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked documents revealing extensive government surveillance. The law, enacted in June 2015, said that going forward, the data would be retained by telecommunications companies, not the NSA, but that the intelligence agency could query the massive database.

Now the NSA is deleting all the information it collected from the queries.

Program questioned, defended

The agency released a statement late Thursday saying it started deleting the records in May after NSA analysts noted “technical irregularities in some data received from telecommunication service providers.” It also said the irregularities resulted in the NSA obtaining some call details it was not authorized to receive.

That points to a failure of the program, according to David Kris, a former top national security official at the Justice Department.

“They said they have to purge three years’ worth of data going back to 2015, and that the data they did collect during that time, which they are now purging, was not reliable and was infected with some kind of technical error,” said Kris, founder of Culper Partners, a consulting firm in Seattle. “So whatever insights they were hoping to get over the past three years from this program of collection … is all worthless. Because of that, they are throwing all the data away and basically starting over.”

Christopher Augustine, an NSA spokesman, disagreed with the claim that the program had failed.

“This is a case in which NSA determined that there was a problem and proactively took all the right steps to fix it,” he said.

The agency has reviewed and re-validated the intelligence reporting to make sure it was based only on call data that had been properly received from the telecommunication providers, he said. The agency declined to assign blame, and said the “root cause of the problem has since been addressed.”

​Who is to blame?

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., a staunch advocate of privacy rights, placed the blame on the telecom companies providing the NSA with call records.

“This incident shows these companies acted with unacceptable carelessness, and failed to comply with the law when they shared customers’ sensitive data with the government,” he told The Associated Press in a written statement Friday.

What is legal

Under law, the government can request information, such as the type of details that might be printed on a phone bill: the date and time of a call or text, a telephone calling card number, the duration of a call and to what phone number it was made. The details provided to the government do not include the content of any communications, the name, address or financial information of a customer, cell site location or GPS information.

If government investigators have reasonable suspicion that a certain phone number is being used by a terrorist, who might be in the U.S. or overseas, the government asks the phone companies which other numbers have been in touch with the suspicious number, something known as the “first hops,” and then which numbers are in touch with those numbers, the “second hops.”

42 targets, 534.4 million details

The NSA collected more than 534.4 million details of calls and text messages in 2017 from American telecom providers like AT&T and Version, according to the most recent government report covering NSA surveillance activities that year. That was more than three times the 151.2 million collected in 2016.

The call records were part of an intelligence collection effort aimed at 42 targets in 2016 and 40 targets in 2017, according to the report. It defines a target as an individual, group of individuals, organization or entity.

Annual reports to Congress from the intelligence community are now required under the 2015 surveillance reform legislation. The law also requires the government to seek a court order to collect call records to obtain intelligence. Requests for records of U.S. citizens must be based on an investigation being conducted to protect against terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities and the probe cannot be conducted solely on activities protected by the First Amendment.

However, despite the reforms, the NSA still received some data from the telecommunications companies that the agency was not authorized to see and some of that data was erroneous, Augustine said.

“We cannot go into greater detail because those details remain classified. However, at no point in time did NSA receive the content of any calls, the name, address or financial information of a subscriber or customer, nor cell site location information or global positioning system information,” he said.

Privacy and civil rights advocates said the NSA announcement raised further concerns about the program.

“This is another in a series of failures that shows that many NSA spying programs have ballooned out of control and have repeatedly failed to meet the basic limits imposed by Congress and the FISA court,” said Neema Singh Guliani, legislative counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington. Guliani was referring to a U.S. federal court established and authorized under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to oversee requests for surveillance warrants.

She said the public has a right to know more about the cause and scope of the problem, such as how many of the records were obtained in error and whether the NSA notified any individuals that their information improperly ended up in the agency’s hands.
…

American political divisions are deepening, and so is the debate over acceptable political speech. Americans deeply value the constitutionally protected right to speak their mind, but are there limits? White House correspondent Patsy Widakuswara explores the debate.
…

American political divisions are deepening, and so is the debate over acceptable political speech. Americans deeply value the constitutionally protected right to speak their mind, but are there limits? White House correspondent Patsy Widakuswara explores the debate.
…

Most of the primary elections in the U.S. are over, but a handful still remain in states such as Florida, Georgia and Wyoming. So campaigning by candidates from both parties, Democrat and Republican, continues as they seek support from voters to be elected as their party’s candidate to run for office in the midterm elections in November. Mariia Prus looks at how candidates in primary elections go about seeking voter support. Joy Wagner narrates.
…

Most of the primary elections in the U.S. are over, but a handful still remain in states such as Florida, Georgia and Wyoming. So campaigning by candidates from both parties, Democrat and Republican, continues as they seek support from voters to be elected as their party’s candidate to run for office in the midterm elections in November. Mariia Prus looks at how candidates in primary elections go about seeking voter support. Joy Wagner narrates.
…

Ken Isaacs, the U.S. nominee to lead the U.N. migration agency, was knocked out of the race on Friday after coming third behind Portugal’s Antonio Vitorino and Costa Rica’s Laura Thompson in a secret ballot of member states in Geneva, delegates said.

Isaacs, vice president of U.S. evangelical charity Samaritan’s Purse, had caused controversy after being forced to apologize for tweets and social media posts in which he disparaged Muslims.

 
…

Ken Isaacs, the U.S. nominee to lead the U.N. migration agency, was knocked out of the race on Friday after coming third behind Portugal’s Antonio Vitorino and Costa Rica’s Laura Thompson in a secret ballot of member states in Geneva, delegates said.

Isaacs, vice president of U.S. evangelical charity Samaritan’s Purse, had caused controversy after being forced to apologize for tweets and social media posts in which he disparaged Muslims.

 
…