Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Israel stops French boat headed to Gaza -

JERUSALEM — The Israeli navy intercepted a French boat carrying pro-Palestinian activists as the vessel attempted to breach Israel’s naval blockade of the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, boarding it after the skipper ignored radio calls to change course, the military said.

An army spokeswoman said that naval commandos seized control of the French-flagged yacht Dignite/Al Karama without resistance.

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2010 flotilla raid aftermath: Israel found itself facing a wave of international criticism after storming a flotilla en route to Gaza on May 31, 2010. Nine people died in the incident.

The vessel was being led to the port of Ashdod in southern Israel, the spokeswoman said. Sixteen people were reported to be aboard, including three crew members and three journalists.

Activists had reported earlier that their vessel was surrounded by at least three Israeli navy ships in international waters some 40 miles off the coast of Gaza.

The French yacht was the lone remnant of a planned 10-vessel flotilla to the Gaza Strip, whose boats were mostly blocked in Greek ports after authorities banned their departure to Gaza.

Despite the ban, the Dignite sailed Saturday from the Greek island of Kastellorizo. It declared its destination to be Alexandria, Egypt, according to Greta Berlin of the Free Gaza Movement.

Flotillas to Gaza have drawn significant global attention since last year, when an Israeli naval commando raid on a Turkish ship leading an aid flotilla led to violent clashes with activists on board and the deaths of nine people.

Israel says it is maintaining the naval blockade to prevent the smuggling of arms to the Gaza Strip, which is ruled by the militant Islamist group Hamas. An army statement said that any group wishing to transfer supplies to Gaza could do so through “established land crossings.”

Auditors to IRS: Tell taxpayers when their personal data is exposed - The Federal Eye - The Washington Post

Posted at 06:00 AM ET, 07/19/2011

Auditors to IRS: Tell taxpayers when their personal data is exposed

By Lisa Rein

The Obama administration is compelling private businesses to adopt new standards to protect themselves and the consumers they serve from hackers and cyber theft.

Now federal auditors are scolding the government for not protecting consumers from itself.

In a recent report, the Treasury Department Inspector General for Tax Administration reprimanded the Internal Revenue Service for failing to notify taxpayers in a timely way — if they were told at all —when the tax agency inadvertently exposed their personal information.

IRS records showed 4,081 inadvertent disclosures of taxpayers’ personal information in fiscal years 2009 and 2010.

The IRS sent letters to taxpayers whose privacy was violated 86 days after the fact in 20 percent of the cases auditors examined in a sample of incidents from July 2010 to February 2011.

Draft cybersecurity legislation proposed by the White House this spring would require companies to inform consumers within 60 days if their personal information has been disclosed.

The inspector general considers 45 days to be an acceptable notification period after a breach.

“It is troubling that, although the IRS has many processes and regulations that protect taxpayer information, there are times when [the information] is inadvertently disclosed,” Inspector General J. Russell George said in a statement.

In 5 percent of the leaks auditors evaluated, the IRS could not notify the taxpayers at all because the staff did not document the identities of the people whose information was exposed.

And 10 percent of the time, IRS staff did not notify the affected taxpayers because its definition of sensitive personal information did not include the tax data that was exposed.

Another 21 percent of victims were never told of the data breaches because the information was unintentionally passed on to state officials, law firms, payroll processors or others, including those with power of attorney, who the IRS believed did not pose a threat.

Auditors recommended that the IRS implement a timeliness measure for notifying consumers and controls to make sure every breach is accurately documented. The inspector general also recommended that the IRS educate its employees better on the seriousness of these kinds of disclosures.

The IRS agreed, saying it plans to strengthen procedures to tackle identity theft and improve the time it takes the agency to notify taxpayers of any release of their personal information.

Accusations of impropriety fly in wake of Rep. Waters’s ethics investigation

A report offering new details regarding the House ethics committee’s handling of the investigation of Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) has led to

This followed a Washington Post report last December that the investigation had been derailed by infighting within the committee, and that the Democratic committee chairman’s attempt to fire two investigators had been stymied by the top Republican on the panel.

On Monday, the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington urged House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to appoint an outside counsel to investigate the committee.

“At this point, far more important than an inquiry into the conduct of any specific member of Congress is an investigation into the committee itself,” CREW executive director Melanie Sloan wrote the House leaders. “A thorough review of the committee’s actions in the Waters case should be conducted by well-respected outside counsel. . . . It is imperative for House leadership to step in and take decisive action to reinvigorate and instill public and member confidence in the ethics process.”

The new details in the Politico report cast serious doubt on the future of the Waters case as well as on the ability of the secretive panel to carry out its mission of overseeing members’ ethical conduct.

Waters faces allegations of improperly working to secure federal aid for a minority-owned bank in which her husband was a large investor.

The ethics committee had scheduled her trial for last November, but before it could begin, it was abruptly postponed as the panel announced it had come across newly discovered evidence in the case.

The panel’s chairman at the time, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), suspended the two lead lawyers in the investigation, former federal prosecutors Morgan Kim and Stacy Sovereign, over a dispute with the committee’s top attorney, Blake Chisam. Chisam later left the committee and has since joined a top immigration law firm.

Rep. Jo Bonner (R-Ala.), the current chairman of the committee, accused Lofgren earlier this year of trying to oust Sovereign and Kim “without cause.”

Politico reported that Chisam had written to Lofgren late last year with concerns that the two attorneys had improperly shared information on another ethics case, involving Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) with several of the panel’s Republican members; Chisam also wrote to Lofgren that Kim and Sovereign had improperly withheld information from Waters’s defense team.

Meanwhile, Kim and Sovereign wrote to each other as well as to Republican members of the committee that Chisam had withheld evidence that could have been damaging to Rangel.

In a statement Monday evening, Waters’s attorney, Stan Brand, said that the Politico report and its accompanying documents “leave no doubt that the House Ethics Committee violated both its own rules and Representative Waters’ constitutional rights during its investigation of her matter last Congress.”

“Given that both current Members and staff are implicated” in these violations, Brand wrote, the case against Waters should be dismissed.

In March, CREW and several other watchdog groups called on the ethics panel to resume its investigation of Waters. But the panel had remained without a top lawyer until May, when it announced the hiring of Daniel A. Schwager, a former counsel to the Senate Select Committee on E

GOP’s second crack at N.C. redistricting map even more perilous for Democrats - The Fix

Posted at 03:39 PM ET, 07/19/2011

GOP’s second crack at N.C. redistricting map even more perilous for Democrats

By Aaron Blake

A new redistricting map proposed by the North Carolina Republican Party would continue to seriously endanger Democratic Reps. Heath Shuler, Mike McIntyre, Brad Miller and Larry Kissell.

Unlike the state GOP’s first proposal, though, this one puts McIntyre’s and Miller’s homes into other members’ districts. Furthermore, it would make both McIntyre’s and Kissel’s even more Republican than before.

According to numbers obtained by The Fix, under the new plan both McIntyre’s 7th district and Kissell’s 8th district would both have gone about 57 percent for Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in the 2008 presidential race. Under the first proposal, the districts would have gone 55 percent for McCain.

The new map also would likely force McIntyre — perhaps the toughest of the four targets for Republicans to defeat — to move into the new 7th to run for reelection. And Miller, who is drawn into Rep. David Price’s (D-N.C.) district, would also face a tough reelection decision.

In the end, the map appears to be even better for the GOP than the first map proposed (details on that map here), concentrating more Republicans into the vulnerable Democrats’ districts while putting more Democratic voters in non-competitive districts.

Republicans said they made the changes in response to concerns raised by Rep. G.K. Butterfield (D-N.C.) that his majority-black district may not meet the requirements set forth by the Voting Rights Act. Because of this, Butterfield’s safe Democratic district would become even more Democratic than the first proposal, allowing Republicans to put even more of their voters in other districts.

Miller’s district would actually become a little bit more Democratic than in the first proposal, too, but still considerably more Republican than its current configuration. Under the new map, Miller’s district would go from a seat that went 40 percent for McCain in 2008 to one that would have given McCain 54 percent of the vote two years ago.

Miller’s district would experience the biggest changes under the plan, but Kissell, McInytre and Shuler would all get several points more Republican as well. All four would become among the national GOP’s top targets for the 2012 election.

North Carolina has long been considered the GOP’s prize pig when it comes to redistricting. In no other state where Republicans control the redistricting process can they imperil so many seats currently held by Democrats as in the Tarheel State.

Obama hails deficit-reduction plan gaining momentum in Senate

President Obama on Tuesday hailed an ambitious new deficit-reduction plan that is gaining momentum in the Senate, calling it a “very significant step” and saying it could provide the vehicle to break an impasse over raising the federal borrowing limit while cutting the nation’s debt.

Appearing at the regular White House news briefing, Obama said the bipartisan proposal is “broadly consistent” with the approach he has advocated, in that it reduces discretionary spending and tackles health-care spending and entitlements while also raising additional revenue.

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Debt ceiling war of the words: Quotes that shocked, tickled and grabbed: As talks between President Obama and congressional Republicans over a deal to raise the debt ceiling grow increasingly partisan, their commentary is becoming heated.

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President Barack Obama says there has been 'some progress' in negotiations with bipartisan lawmakers over raising the nation's debt ceiling. (July 19)

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But in the event that an agreement capable of passing Congress is not reached before a looming deadline to raise the federal debt ceiling, Obama said, lawmakers should finishing hammering out a backup plan now being negotiated by the Senate’s Democratic and Republican leaders.

“The problem we have now is we’re in the 11th hour, and we don’t have a lot more time left,” Obama said. “We don’t have any more time to engage in symbolic gestures. We don’t have any more time to posture.” He was referring to a House Republican plan, called the “Cut, Cap and Balance Act,” which aims to slash federal spending, impose a cap on future outlays and amend the Constitution to require a balanced budget — without increasing revenue. “That is not an approach that could pass both chambers, it’s not an approach that I would sign, and it’s not balanced,” Obama said.

Obama spoke after more than 40 Republicans and Democrats attended a morning briefing on the new Senate proposal, which would slice $3.7 trillion from the federal budget over the next decade.

The plan, drafted by a bipartisan group of senators known as the “Gang of Six,” has been in the works for months. After struggling to reach consensus and apparently disbanding last week, the group now says it’s nearing agreement on a proposal, which could offer an alternative strategy for pushing an increase in the debt limit through Congress before an Aug. 2 deadline.

“We’ve gone from a Gang of Six to a mob of 50,” exulted Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W. Va.), as he emerged from the meeting. The proposal, Manchin said, “shows great promise.”

“I will support it. It is a fair compromise,” added Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Tex.). “This is a way forward where we can do the work that we have come here to do.”

Obama called the plan “good news.” He told reporters: “What it says is we’ve got to be serious about reducing discretionary spending both in domestic spending and defense; we’ve got to be serious about tackling health care spending and entitlements in a serious way; and we’ve got to have some additional revenue so that we have an approach in which there is shared sacrifice and everybody is giving up something.”

He said he would urge Senate and House leaders of both parties to be “prepared to start talking turkey” on Wednesday and craft a plan that can meet the Aug. 2 deadline.

Details of the plan were sketchy, and it was not immediately clear how the proposal might be combined with existing debt-limit strategies. As described by its creators, the framework calls for $500 billion in immediate spending cuts as a downpayment on a broader debt-reduction effort that would be carried out largely by existing legislative committees.

Nearly 30 percent of House skips votes as debt-limit deadline looms - 2chambers

Posted at 07:59 PM ET, 07/18/2011

Nearly 30 percent of House skips votes as debt-limit deadline looms

By Felicia Sonmez

The House was in session Monday – but some lawmakers were quicker to return to Washington than others.

Nearly 3 in 10 House members failed to show up for votes Monday evening despite an announcement by leaders earlier this month that they were canceling the chamber’s previously scheduled week-long recess in light of the ongoing debt-limit negotiations.

Of 432 sitting House members, only 312 – or 72 percent – were present to vote Monday evening on a non-controversial bill regarding church pension plans.

Among the 120 lawmakers not present were 63 Democrats and 57 Republicans. Only one of the three House Republicans who have announced presidential bids showed up: Rep. Ron Paul (Tex.) joined most lawmakers in voting “yes” on the measure; Reps. Thaddeus McCotter (Mich.) and Michele Bachmann (Minn.) did not vote.

Both parties’ leadership teams were present Monday night.(House Speaker John Boehner was among them, although in keeping with longstanding custom for speakers, he did not cast a vote.)

The Senate, meanwhile, had a better turnout: 93 of the chamber’s 100 members were present to vote on the nomination of Paul Oetken to serve as U.S. District Judge for the Southern District of New York. Oetken was confirmed on an 80-to-13 vote.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) announced earlier Monday that the chamber would remain in session, even on the weekends, until a debt-limit deal is reached.

Head of Washington nonprofit accused of acting as illegal agent of Pakistani government - Checkpoint Washington

Head of Washington nonprofit accused of acting as illegal agent of Pakistani government

By Jason Ukman

The head of a Washington nonprofit group was arrested Tuesday for allegedly running a front organization on behalf of elements of the Pakistani government, including its spy agency, for more than two decades in an effort to influence U.S. lawmakers and other top officials.

Syed Ghulam Nabi Fai, 62, a U.S. citizen and resident of Fairfax, was charged in federal court in Virginia with participating in a long-term conspiracy to act as an agent of the Pakistani government without disclosing his affiliation.

Zaheer Ahmad, 63, a U.S. citizen and resident of Pakistan, was also charged, but remains at large. He was accused of trying to recruit “straw donors” who would provide money that was actually traced back to the Pakistani government.

Fai is the longtime director of the Kashmiri American Council, which describes itself as a nonprofit dedicated to “raising the level of knowledge in the United States about the struggle of the Kashmiri people for self-determination.” In an affidavit filed in support of a criminal complaint, however, the FBI alleged that the center is one of three so-called “Kashmir Centers” that are run by elements of the Pakistani government, including the Inter-Services Intelligence agency.

Since the mid-1990s, the affidavit said, the Kashmiri American Council has received at least $4 million from the Pakistani government.

“Mr. Fai is accused of a decades-long scheme with one purpose – to hide Pakistan’s involvement behind his efforts to influence the U.S. government’s position on Kashmir,” said Neil H.
MacBride, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, where the charges were filed. “His handlers in Pakistan allegedly funneled millions through the Kashmir Center to contribute to U.S. elected officials, fund high-profile conferences, and pay for other efforts that promoted the Kashmiri cause to decision-makers in Washington.”

Fai and Ahmad are accused of violating the
Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), which requires anyone acting on behalf of a foreign power to file disclosures with the Justice Department. Neither faces espionage charges.

It could not be immediately determined whether Fai had an attorney, and the Kashmiri American Council could not be reached for comment.

The long-running dispute over Kashmir is the signature point of conflict between Pakistan and India. Pakistan has for years sought greater international engagement, particularly from the United States, in resolving the issue.

In a statement, the Justice Department said that Fai, when questioned about his relationship with the Pakistani government last year, said neither he nor his group had ever engaged in any activities or provided any services to Pakistan or any foreign entity. When questioned three years earlier by the FBI, he said he had never met anyone who identified himself as being affiliated with the ISI.

The affidavit alleged that Fai acted at the direction of the Pakistani government for more than 20 years, and had been in touch with his “handlers” more than 4,000 times since June 2008.

There is no evidence that any elected official who received financial contributions from Fai or his group was aware that the money originated from any part of the Pakistani government, according to the Justice statement.