The Star Online: World Updates
The Star Online: World Updates |
- Magnitude 6.8 earthquake shakes New Zealand
- NSA broke privacy rules thousands of times per year - report
- China rejects appeal by Nobel laureate's brother-in-law
| Magnitude 6.8 earthquake shakes New Zealand Posted: WELLINGTON (Reuters) - An earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 6.8 struck south of New Zealand's capital, Wellington, on Friday, sending panicked workers and residents into the streets just weeks after a similar size quake struck the city. The quake, which hit near the northern tip of New Zealand's South Island, was at a depth of about 10 km (6 miles), according to NZ Geonet, which originally gave it a magnitude of 6.0. While fire authorities said it was too early to assess the impact, there were some reports of superficial damage to buildings from the quake, which did not cause a wider tsunami alert, but sent items tumbling from shop shelves. Air and rail services were being suspended while officials checked tracks and runways for damage. There were also widespread power outages across the north of the South Island. There was no specific threat of a widespread tsunami, according to the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center. New Zealand has been hit by a string of quakes since a shallow, 6.3 magnitude tremor devastated the South Island's Canterbury region in 2011, killing nearly 200 people and levelling Christchurch, the country's second largest city. Earthquakes are common in New Zealand, whose two islands lie along the Australia-Pacific tectonic plate boundary. (Reporting by Naomi Tajitsu; Editing by Paul Tait and Mark Bendeich) |
| NSA broke privacy rules thousands of times per year - report Posted: WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. National Security Agency has broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since 2008, the Washington Post reported on Thursday, citing an internal audit and other top-secret documents. Most of the infractions involved unauthorized surveillance of Americans or foreign intelligence targets in the United States, both of which are restricted by law and executive order, the paper said. They ranged from significant violations of law to typographical errors that resulted in unintended interception of U.S. emails and telephone calls, it said. The Post said the documents it obtained were part of a trove of materials provided to the paper by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who has been charged by the United States with espionage. He was granted asylum in Russia earlier this month. The documents included a level of detail and analysis that is not routinely shared with Congress or the special court that oversees surveillance, the paper said. In one of the documents, agency personnel are instructed to remove details and substitute more generic language in reports to the Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. In one instance, the NSA decided it need not report the unintended surveillance of Americans, the Post said. A notable example in 2008 was the interception of a "large number" of calls placed from Washington when a programming error confused U.S. area code 202 for 20, the international dialling code for Egypt. The Post said the NSA audit, dated May 2012, counted 2,776 incidents in the preceding 12 months of unauthorized collection, storage, access to or distribution of legally protected communications. The paper said most were unintended. Many involved failures of due diligence or violations of standard operating procedure. It said the most serious incidents included a violation of a court order and unauthorized use of data about more than 3,000 Americans and green-card holders. In 2008, the FISA Amendments Act granted NSA broad new powers in exchange for regular audits from the Justice Department and the office of the Director of National Intelligence and periodic reports to Congress and the surveillance court, the Post said. "We're a human-run agency operating in a complex environment with a number of different regulatory regimes, so at times we find ourselves on the wrong side of the line," a senior NSA official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told the Post. "You can look at it as a percentage of our total activity that occurs each day," he said. "You look at a number in absolute terms that looks big, and when you look at it in relative terms, it looks a little different." In what the Post said appeared to be one of the most serious violations, the NSA diverted large volumes of international data passing through fibre-optic cables in the United States into a repository where the material could be stored temporarily for processing and selection. The operation collected and commingled U.S. and foreign emails, the Post said, citing a top-secret internal NSA newsletter. NSA lawyers told the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that the agency could not practicably filter out the communications of Americans. In October 2011, months after the program got underway, the court ruled that the collection effort was unconstitutional. Some members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, including Democrat Ron Wyden of Oregon, have been trying for some time to get the NSA to give some kind of accounting of how much data it collects "incidentally" on Americans through various electronic dragnets. The Obama administration has strongly resisted such disclosures. (Writing by Eric Beech; Editing by David Brunnstrom) |
| China rejects appeal by Nobel laureate's brother-in-law Posted: HUAIROU, China (Reuters) - A Chinese court on Friday rejected an appeal by the brother-in-law of jailed Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, upholding his 11-year sentence on fraud charges, a case seen as another example of official retribution on the Liu family. Supporters of Liu Hui say his case was trumped up, aimed at thwarting the increasing attention by the rights community on the plight of Liu Xia, who has remained under effective house arrest since her husband won the Nobel Prize in 2010. The ruling - announced by a court in Huairou, a one-hour drive northeast of Beijing - was not unexpected as China hardens its stance towards the rights community under the rule of newly-installed President Xi Jinping. The Huairou court upheld the June sentence that Liu Hui, a manager in a real estate company in the southern city of Shenzhen, defrauded a man called Zhang Bing of 3 million yuan ($490,000), along with another colleague. Liu Hui has maintained his innocence, according to his lawyers. Liu Tong, Liu Hui's brother, told reporters he was furious at the verdict. "This result fundamentally will make anyone angry, especially his family members. Because at its heart, it's a miscarriage of justice," he said. "The government says daily it wants to prevent wrongful convictions, miscarriages of justice from happening, but everyone knows that this is a miscarriage of justice." Shang Baojun, one of Liu Hui's lawyers, said the decision was "unreasonable". "I met with Liu Hui. He thought that the verdict is completely unfair. Frankly speaking, this verdict is a mistake. He does not think he was defrauding anyone," Shang said, adding Liu Hui was considering a further appeal. The case has also renewed international concern about the plight of Liu Xiaobo's family, which has attracted considerable attention in the United States and European Union. Charles Parton, political affairs counsellor for the EU's mission in Beijing, said the EU expressed regret at the upholding of the sentence. "Liu's prosecution and conviction may have been linked to the situation of Liu Xiaobo and his sister, Liu Xia, Liu Xiaobo's wife, and therefore may have been politically motivated," he told reporters outside the courthouse. Liu Hui was allowed out on bail last September, but arrested again in January, after several rights activists and foreign reporters forced their way past security guards late last year to visit Liu Xia, lawyer Shang told Reuters previously. NOBEL LAUREATE'S WIFE RARELY ALLOWED OUT Liu Xiaobo, a veteran dissident involved in the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests crushed by the Chinese army, was jailed for 11 years in 2009 on subversion charges for organising a petition urging the overthrow of one-party rule. His wife Liu Xia is rarely allowed out and is almost never allowed to receive visitors. She has not been convicted of any crime. Liu Xia did not appear at the court on Friday as she was feeling unwell, Liu Tong said. She is currently resting at home and her physical condition is "very fragile", he added. (Writing by Ben Blanchard; Editing buy Ron Popeski) |
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