|  |  |  | | | | | The Guardian World News | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Harry Potter sold millions and made her one of the richest women in the world. Now JK Rowling has written her first book for grown-ups. But is the magic still there? JK Rowling's new novel arrives with the high drama and state secrecy of a royal birth. Its due date is announced in February, and in April the disclosure of its title, The Casual Vacancy, makes international news. The release of the cover image in July commands headlines again, and Fleet Street commissions a "design guru" to deconstruct its inscrutable aesthetic, in search of clues as to what might lie within. Waterstones predicts the novel will be "the bestselling fiction title this year". Literary critics begin to publish preliminary reviews, revealing what they think they will think about a book they have not yet even read. I am required to sign more legal documents than would typically be involved in buying a house before I am allowed to read The Casual Vacancy, under tight security in the London offices of Little, Brown. Even the publishers have been forbidden to read it, and they relinquish the manuscript gingerly, reverently, as though handling a priceless Ming vase. Afterwards, I am instructed never to disclose the address of Rowling's Edinburgh office where the interview will take place. The mere fact of the interview is deemed so newsworthy that Le Monde dispatches a reporter to investigate how it was secured. Its prospect begins to assume the mystique of an audience with Her Majesty – except, of course, that Rowling is famously much, much richer than the Queen. In the 15 years since she published her first Harry Potter, Rowling has become both universally known and almost unrecognisable. The scruffy redhead who used to write in the cafes of Leith has slowly transformed into a glossy couture blonde, unknowable behind an impregnable sheen of wealth and control. Once a penniless single mother, she became the first person on earth to make $1bn by writing books, but her rare public appearances suggested a faint ice maiden quality, less Cinderella than Snow Queen. Sometimes she didn't appear to be enjoying the fairytale at all, complaining to Leveson of having had to hire privacy lawyers on more than 50 occasions, and suing a fan for writing an encyclopedia of Potter facts. The press began to hint at a coldly grandiose recluse. Famous people who appear incredibly controlling are generally one of two things: monstrous megalomaniacs, or unusually sane souls insulating themselves from insane circumstances. There is seldom much middle ground, and I find out where Rowling belongs when her publicist calls an hour before we're due to meet. I fear the worst. Is there going to be some ludicrous last-minute cloak-and-dagger demand? No, it's just that Rowling has been stuck in her office for ages and fancies a change of scene. Could we meet round the corner instead? I find them in the lobby of a modest hotel. Surely we're not going to talk here, in earshot of every passing guest? But Rowling is completely relaxed about this arrangement. Warm and animated, quick to laugh, she chatters so freely that her publicist gets jumpy and tells her to lower her voice. "Am I speaking too loud?" She doesn't look a bit concerned. "Well, I can't get passionate and whisper!" When I tell her I loved the book, her arms shoot up in celebration. "Oh my God! I'm so happy! That's so amazing to hear. Thank you so much! You've made me incredibly happy. Oh my God!" Anyone listening would take her for a debut author, meeting her first ever fan. In a way, that's what she is. Rowling has written seven Harry Potter books, and sold more than 450m copies, but her first novel for adults is unlike them in every respect – unless you count the location where the concept came to her. "Obviously I need to be in some form of vehicle to have a decent idea," she laughs. Having dreamed up Potter on a train, "This time I was on a plane. And I thought: local election! And I just knew. I had that totally physical response you get to an idea that you know will work. It's a rush of adrenaline, it's chemical. I had it with Harry Potter and I had it with this. So that's how I know." The story opens with the death of a parish councillor in the pretty West Country village of Pagford. Barry had grown up on a nearby council estate, the Fields, a squalid rural ghetto with which the more pious middle classes of Pagford have long lost patience. If they can fill his seat with one more councillor sympathetic to their disgust, they'll secure a majority vote to reassign responsibility for the Fields to a neighbouring council, and be rid of the wretched place for good. The pompous chairman assumes the seat will go to his son, a solicitor. Pitted against him are a bitterly cold GP and a deputy headmaster crippled by irreconcilable ambivalence towards his son, an unnervingly self-possessed adolescent whose subversion takes the unusual but highly effective form of telling the truth. His preoccupation with "authenticity" develops into a fascination with the Fields and its most notorious family, the Weedons. Terri Weedon is a prostitute, junkie and lifelong casualty of chilling abuse, struggling to stay clean to stop social services taking her three-year-old son, Robbie, into care. But methadone is a precarious substitute for heroin, and most of what passes for mothering falls to her teenage daughter, Krystal. Spirited and volatile, Krystal has known only one adult ally in her life – Barry – and his sudden death casts her dangerously adrift. When anonymous messages begin appearing on the parish council website, exposing villagers' secrets, Pagford unravels into a panic of paranoia, rage and tragedy. Pagford will be appallingly recognisable to anyone who has ever lived in a West Country village, but its clever comedy can also be read as a parable about national politics. "I'm interested in that drive, that rush to judgment, that is so prevalent in our society," Rowling says. "We all know that pleasurable rush that comes from condemning, and in the short term it's quite a satisfying thing to do, isn't it?" But it requires obliviousness to the horrors suffered by a family such as the Weedons, and the book satirises the ignorance of elites who assume to know what's best for everyone else. "How many of us are able to expand our minds beyond our own personal experience? So many people, certainly people who sit around the cabinet table, say, 'Well, it worked for me' or, 'This is how my father managed it' – these trite catchphrases – and the idea that other people might have had such a different life experience that their choices and beliefs and behaviours would be completely different from your own seems to escape a lot of otherwise intelligent people. The poor are discussed as this homogeneous mash, like porridge. The idea that they might be individuals, and be where they are for very different, diverse reasons, again seems to escape some people. "They talk about feckless teenage mothers looking for a council flat. Well, how tragic is it that that's what someone regards as the height of security or safety? What would your life be like if that's the only possible path you can see for yourself? But I don't know if that's a question some people ask themselves. There has been a horribly familiar change of atmosphere [since the 2010 election], it feels to me a lot like it did in the early 90s, where there's been a bit of redistribution of benefits and suddenly lone-parent families are that little bit worse off. But it's not a 'little bit' when you're in that situation. Even a tenner a week can make such a vast, vast difference. So, yeah, it does feel familiar. Though I started writing this five years ago when we didn't have a coalition government, so it's become maybe more relevant as I've written." Like so many British novels, The Casual Vacancy is inescapably about class. "We're a phenomenally snobby society," Rowling nods, "and it's such a rich seam. The middle class is so funny, it's the class I know best, and it's the class where you find the most pretension, so that's what makes the middle classes so funny." The book is so funny I was halfway through before noticing that every character is, to a varying degree, monstrous. Written from multiple perspectives, the novel invites the reader into their heads, where internal logic helps make sense of what can look, from the outside, inexcusable. But Rowling waits a long time before leading us inside the Weedons' minds, to reveal unspeakable traumas. The delay serves to amplify the shock, but runs the risk of showing only their dysfunction for so long that the reader might start to laugh at them. "I was aware that a reader might think I was laughing at Krystal. And I'm not. At all. Not for a second," Suddenly she is intently serious. "One person who has read it said he found it very funny when Krystal told Robbie to eat his crisps before his Rolos. Well, I wasn't making a joke. At all. To me, that was quite a bleak moment. To me, it's heartbreaking. To me, that makes me want to cry. "So I suppose you can never know. But then," and she starts to smile, "in some people's eyes, Harry Potter was a book of the occult and devil worship, so I do know that you can't legislate for what readers will find." Someone else told Rowling they felt sorry for her daughter's friends, assuming they were the inspiration for The Casual Vacancy's teenagers. "But I haven't laid them bare, I've laid my friends bare." Rowling grew up near the Forest of Dean in a community not unlike Pagford. "And this was very much me vividly remembering what it was like to be a teenager, and it wasn't a particularly happy time in my life. In fact, you couldn't give me anything to make me go back to being a teenager. Never. No, I hated it." Her mother, a school lab technician, was diagnosed with MS when Rowling was 15. "But it wasn't just that – although that did colour it a lot. I just don't think I was very good at being young." She and her younger sister, Dianne, had a difficult relationship with their father, and Rowling "couldn't wait to get out of there"; she studied French and classics at Exeter University, went to work for Amnesty in London, lost her mother at 25 and moved abroad to teach English, returning at 28 with a six-month-old daughter, Jessica, following a short and catastrophic marriage to a Portuguese journalist. Broke, clinically depressed and suicidal, she moved to Edinburgh to be near her sister and survived on benefits while writing the first Harry Potter. After many rejections, the manuscript was bought by Bloomsbury for £2,500. Her editor advised Rowling to get a teaching job, the likelihood of her earning a living from children's books being, in his view, decidedly remote. A 2007 documentary shows her 10 years later, soaring into a stratosphere of unimaginable wealth and fame. Watching it now, what's striking is the discrepancy between the happily-ever-after finale of her rags-to-riches miracle and the unhappiness etched upon her face. There is a hunted expression in her eyes, a wary tension in her features and a slightly brittle chippiness in her comments. None of this is discernible today, so I ask if it took time for the emotional DNA of unhappy early years to mutate and catch up with her new life. "Well, it has now. But there was a definite lag. For a few years I did feel I was on a psychic treadmill, trying to keep up with where I was. Everything changed so rapidly, so strangely. I knew no one who'd ever been in the public eye. I didn't know anyone – anyone – to whom I could turn and say, 'What do you do?' So it was incredibly disorienting." She'd had therapy when at "rock bottom" while writing the first Potter. "And I had to do it again when my life was changing so suddenly – and it really helped. I'm a big fan of it, it helped me a lot." Her other salvation came with her second husband, Neil Murray, a doctor she married in 2001 and with whom she has a son of nine and a daughter aged seven. "When I met Neil, it felt as if he stepped inside everything with me. He changed my life. But, prior to that, to be alone with it all, with a small child, was…" She searches for the word, and opts for understatement. "Difficult." Sudden wealth was not a straightforward joy. "You don't expect the kind of problems it brings with it. I am so grateful for what happened that this should not be taken in any way as a whine, but you don't expect the pressure of it, in the sense of being bombarded by requests. I felt that I had to solve everyone's problems. I was hit by this tsunami of demands. I felt overwhelmed. And I was really worried that I would mess up." Having always longed to be a writer, she now found herself in charge of a business empire stretching all the way to Hollywood, as the Harry Potter films began smashing box office records. "And it's a real bore. Should I be more diplomatic? Oh, I don't care. No, there is literally nothing on the business side that I wouldn't sacrifice in a heartbeat to have an extra couple of hours' writing. Nothing. That sounds hideously ungrateful because it's made me an awful lot of money, and I'm very grateful for that. But it's not something that interests me, and there have been lots of opportunities to do things that make more money, and I've said no." Advertisers were forever offering fortunes to use Potter characters, and McDonald's wanted to sell Harry Potter Happy Meals, but all to no avail. "I just hate meetings. Though it's true that once you've made a lot of money people around you might be full of ideas about ways to make lots more money and might be disappointed that you don't want to seize every opportunity to do so." Has her accountant ever suggested Jimmy Carr-style tax avoidance schemes? She looks appalled. "No! God, no, he's not that kind of accountant. No. No one's ever put that kind of thing to me – but then, they wouldn't, they just wouldn't. I do take a pretty dim view of those things. I actually chose my accountant because he said to me, 'You have to make a fundamental decision. You have to choose whether you organise your money around your life or your life around your money.'" When I ask her to name the worst thing about her life today, she can't think of anything. After a long pause, "The very worst thing right now, this second, is that we've got no food in the fridge – what are we going to have for dinner tonight? Big deal. But no, I can't think of anything dreadful in my life." And fame has had its upsides; meeting Barack Obama and the legendary Democrat speechwriter Bob Shrum were the two greatest starstruck moments of her life. She has only ever once resorted to a disguise in order to go out without being recognised, but that was to buy her wedding dress. "I just wanted to be able to get married to Neil without any rubbish happening." She won't say what the disguise was – "In case," she grins, "I need to use it again." She's stopped minding that people get her name wrong (it rhymes with bowling, not howling), and quite likes being JK as a writer and Jo in real life. "Jo the mother is where I want to be the most private." She is not so private that she won't say which way she'll vote in the Scottish referendum – "I'm pro union" – and seems sanguine about the speculation that surrounds her every public move. The endless rumours that The Casual Vacancy would be a crime thriller just made her laugh. "It was all started by Ian Rankin. Ian and I did once have a conversation in which he rightly said the Potter novels are in the main whodunnits, so we were talking about that, and that led to him telling everyone that I was writing a crime novel, which was never the case." Whodunnits are her literary guilty pleasure – "I love a good Dorothy L Sayers" – but then again, she doesn't really feel guilty about that: "There's no shame in a Dorothy." She hasn't read Fifty Shades Of Grey, "because I promised my editor I wouldn't." She doesn't look as if she feels she's missing out. "Not wildly," she agrees drily. Her emotional world is now, she thinks, finally reconciled to her external reality. "In the end you reach a very healthy point, I think, where you disconnect. You really do. And I am there. And it's been glorious for five years, it's been thrilling, the sheer freedom. I am the freest author in the world. I can do whatever the hell I like. My bills are paid – we all know I can pay my bills – I was under contract to no one, and the feeling of having all of these characters in my head and knowing that no one else knew a damned thing about them was amazing. It was just blissful. Pagford was mine, just mine, for five years. I loved that. I wrote this novel as exactly what I wanted to write. And I loved it." I quote to her from a 2005 interview: "The first thing I write post-Harry could be absolutely dreadful and, you know, people will buy it. So you're left with this real insecurity." Rowling nods vigorously. "But it's true, isn't it? Absolutely, that was my worst nightmare. The moment I said I'd finished a book, I knew what would happen. There would be a bidding war, and I would end up with someone who'd got the fattest wallet, who had bought it because I'd written Harry Potter. That would have been why. "But I was really lucky on this, because I had a meeting with David Shelley, who's now my editor, without him knowing there was a book. So we just had a conversation, and I could tell he was really on my wavelength. So then I sort of vaguely mentioned what I might have, without saying it's virtually finished. There was no auction. It was just a great way to find an editor." She swears she doesn't care how well the book sells. "I'm not being snotty about that, but I feel quite disconnected from that sort of expectation." There may be no commercial ambition left, but still perhaps an artistic point to prove? Some critics were always sniffy about Potter's literary merit – "In an arbitrarily chosen single page of the first Harry Potter book," despaired Harold Bloom, "I count seven clichés" – and I wonder if Rowling wrote The Casual Vacancy with those critics in mind. "No, I truly didn't sit down and think, right, now it's time to prove I can…" She breaks off and sighs. "I don't think I physically could write a novel for that reason." To write such an ambitious book without ambition was neither a contradiction for Rowling, nor even a choice. "I just needed to write this book. I like it a lot, I'm proud of it, and that counts for me." She did consider publishing under a pseudonym. "But in some ways I think it's braver to do it like this. And, to an extent, you know what? The worst that can happen is that everyone says, 'Well, that was dreadful, she should have stuck to writing for kids' and I can take that. So, yeah, I'll put it out there, and if everyone says, 'Well, that's shockingly bad – back to wizards with you', then obviously I won't be throwing a party. But I will live. I will live." I don't doubt her, but her certainty has the faint zeal of a convert, so I ask how she can be sure. "Because I'm not the person I was a few years ago. I'm not. I'm happier" • The Casual Vacancy is published on Thursday by Little Brown at £20. To order a copy for £15 with free UK p&p, go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846.
  | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Dick Costolo says site was 'put between a rock and a hard place' when judge ordered release of Occupy activist's tweets The chief executive of Twitter, Dick Costolo, has said the company will continue to fight legal challenges brought against its users by officials who want access to their archived tweets. Costolo said Twitter found itself in an invidious position in the case of Malcolm Harris, an Occupy Wall Street protester whose tweets were sought by prosecutors in New York. Speaking at the Online News Association's annual conference in San Francisco, Costolo said: "We strongly believe it's important for us to defend our users' right to protest the forced publication of their private information." He said the company had spent a large amount of its money and the time of its top in house legal resources to fight the Harris case. Earlier this month a court in New York ordered Twitter to turn over three months' worth of Harris's tweets relating to protests on Brooklyn Bridge in New York last year. The court allowed for the information to be sealed until an appeal is heard. Costolo said Twitter was disappointed that it was forced to hand over the information in advance of the appeal, even in sealed form. "We have been put between a rock and a hard place," he said. He acknowledged that Twitter faced wrangles over free speech all over the world and it did not have a "one-size-fits-all solution". He said: "There are things you can't say about Attaturk in Turkey because they are illegal but people hop on Twitter and say these things." Costolo also addressed concerns associated with changes made to Twitter's API in recent months, which have provoked howls of criticism from within the developer community. "We haven't done as good a job of communicating the 'what' and 'why' as we should have done ... I think that has hurt us," he said. He said Twitter would continue to develop new features, including the ability for users to download all their tweets. That would be available by the end of the year, he said – although he conceded that it was easy for him as CEO to make this promise. The engineer working on the project might have another view, he joked.
  | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 20 years of summaries – shared amid Democratic pressure – show couple's federal tax rate varied between 13.6% and 20.2% Mitt Romney bowed to sustained pressure from the Democrats on Friday by releasing a summary of his tax returns for the last two decades. The summary shows that, contrary to suspicions voiced by the Democrats that he was hiding his returns because he had paid no taxes some years, he and his wife Ann paid federal and state income tax every year since 1990. Their average federal tax rate over that period was 20.2% and at no time dropped below 13.6%, according to the summary prepared by his accountants PriceWaterhouseCoopers. But it will not satisfy the Democrats who will focus on many remaining unanswered questions. They will continue to press him to release his full tax returns going back at least five years, question him over his use of offshore tax havens and investigate further Bain Capital, the investment company where he made his fortune. Brad Woodhouse, a Democratic national committee spokesman, wrote on Twitter: "Summaries? What is Romney hiding? This isn't just abt rates — how about Swiss Bank Accts, Bermuda Shell Cos and Caymans Investments?" Romney, as he promised earlier this year he would do, also released Friday his tax return for 2011 in which he paid $1.9m, a tax rate of 14.1% on an income of $13.7m, mainly from investments. The top rate of income tax is 35% but Romney's income is mainly from investments, which attracts a 15% rate. The couple paid more than $4m, about 30% of their income, to charity. They also, unusually, limited the amount they could claim as a tax deduction on charitable givings. In August, Romney said he had paid at least 13% in taxes in each of the last 10 years. His campaign team said his tax bill for 2011 would have been higher but, in order to comply with the 13% comment, the Romneys limited the amount they could have deducted from the charitable contributions. Earlier this year, he released his tax returns for 2010, mainly as a result of criticism from Republican opponents during the hard-fought primary season that he had not released any. At the time, he promised he would release his 2011 returns too. The rates paid by the Romneys, who have an estimated fortune of more than $200m, are much lower than many low- or middle-income families. He had repeatedly refused to follow the convention set by previous White House challengers in releasing multiple tax returns, including his own father George, who released 12 years' worth during the 1968 Republican presidential campaign. Obama has also released 12 years' worth of tax returns. Publication of some of his tax details comes at the end of a week which has been the candidate's worst period on the campaign trail, dominated by the release of a secret video of a speech behind-closed-doors in Florida in May. In the speech, he portrayed 47% of the American population as freeloaders, dependent on federal government help, who pay no tax and who vote for Barack Obama. The senate majority leader Harry Reid, in an interview in July, said he had heard from a source that the reason Romney refused to release his tax returns was because he had not paid any for a decade. An ad paid for by the Obama campaign also questioned whether he had paid any taxes at all. Discussing his tax returns in January, Romney said: "I pay all the taxes that are legally required and not a dollar more. I don't think you want someone as the candidate for president who pays more taxes than he owes." Romney's running-mate, Paul Ryan, released his 2011 tax return earlier this year, paying $65,000 on $323,416 in income, a 15% rate. A doctor's letter released by the Romney campaign alongside his tax return confirms he is in good health. It records the usual details about his diet, heart rate and tablets to lower his cholesterol and low-dosage aspirin in hopes of reducing the chance of a heart attack. But the doctor goes beyond that to make what almost sounds like a political broadcast. "He has shown the ability to be engaged in multiple, varied, simultaneous activities requiring complex mental, social, emotional and leadership skills." The doctor, Randall Gaz, goes on to say: "He is a vigorous man who takes excellent care of his physical health. He has reserves of strength, energy and stamina that provide him with the ability to meet unexpected demands. There are no physical impairments that should interfere with his rigorous and demanding political career as the next president of the United States." Ryan's doctor, Timothy Kronquist, said the candidate's overall health was excellent. "You have practised important preventive lifestyle choices to include regular vigorous aerobic and strength-building exercises, a heart healthy diet, smoking abstinence and infrequent alcohol use."
  | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Mitt Romney's campaign has published the candidate's 2011 tax return along with new tax and medical records
  | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | An armed man who took a hostage at a Pittsburgh office building surrendered to police and released the hostage unharmed A Pittsburgh man who took a business-owner hostage during a five hour stand-off with police, posting Facebook updates as officers attempted to talk him round, has surrendered to authorities. Klein Michael Thaxton sparked a mass police response after entering the 16th floor office of a benefits administration firm at around 8am on Friday. Thaxton updated his Facebook, which was open to the public, during the saga, complaining that he had "lost everything". He finally released his unharmed hostage, identified by police as 58-year-old Charles Breitsman, just after 2pm, and surrendered to police. Three Gateway Center in downtown Pittsburgh was evacuated as Thaxton detained Breitsman, the owner of CW Breitsman Associates. The firm runs employee-benefits programs, but police said it wasn't immediately clear why he was targeted. "[Thaxton] is a sick young man and we do need to take measures to see he is taken care of as well," said police spokeswoman Diane Richard. "We don't know if he's related to this company. We don't know what the tie-in is he has with this individual." She said Breitman was able to meet with his family afterward. "He is doing OK at this point, a little shaken up," Richard said, adding he was taken to police headquarters so that he could talk about the incident. A worker on the 16th floor told the Associated Press that the hostage-taking unfolded inside CW Breitsman Associates' offices. Kathi Dvorak, an administrative assistant at AXA Advisors, said a woman ran into her office yelling for someone to call 911. Police surrounded the building and hundreds of workers were evacuated as Thaxton posted updates to his Facebook wall, which was quickly picked up and spread across other social networking sites. At around 9am he wrote: "i cant take it no more im done bro," later adding: "how this ends is up to yall bro real shyt". Thaxton's profile is no longer available on the site, a message instead stating the page "was not found". Later Thaxton said: "this life im livn rite now i dnt want anymore ive lost everything and i aint gettn it back instead of walkn around all broke n shyt while niggas stunt on me n shyt". In another entry he appeared to address his father, saying "welln pops youll never have to woryy about me again". People had begun to post messages to Thaxton's profile urging him to release his hostage before the page was taken offline at around 1pm. Pittsburgh police said they had asked Facebook to remove the profile – Pittsburgh chief Nate Harper told Associated Press that the social media use had the potential to both help and harm negotiations. It was helpful that Thaxton could see ''that people are concerned about his well-being,'' Harper said, but he added that "it was a distraction for negotiating". Police described Thaxton as having a military background, while he also has a criminal record that includes a guilty plea to robbery earlier this year and a minimum six-month jail sentence.
  | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Revealed: the steady flow of funds to members of Congress, lobbying firms and former officials in support of Iranian group
• Exiles, lobbyists and the campaign to delist the MEK
• Q&A: what is the MEK? Supporters of a designated Iranian terrorist organisation have won a long struggle to see it unbanned in the US after pouring millions of dollars into an unprecedented campaign of political donations, hiring Washington lobby groups and payments to former top administration officials. A Guardian investigation, drawing partly on data researched by the Centre for Responsive Politics, a group tracking the impact of money in US politics, has identified a steady flow of funds from key Iranian American organisations and their leaders into the campaign to have the People's Mojahedin Organisation of Iran removed from the list of terrorist organisations. The US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, is expected to notify Congress that the MEK will be removed from the terrorism list in the coming days. The campaign to bury the MEK's bloody history of bombings and assassinations that killed American businessmen, Iranian politicians and thousands of civilians, and to portray it as a loyal US ally against the Islamic government in Tehran has seen large sums of money directed at three principal targets: members of Congress, Washington lobby groups and influential former officials. Prominent among the members of Congress who have received fund is Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the chair of the House of Representatives foreign affairs committee. She has accepted at least $20,000 in donations from Iranian American groups or their leaders to her political campaign fund. Other recipients include Congressman Bob Filner, who was twice flown to address pro-MEK events in France and has pushed resolutions resolutions in the House of Representatives calling for the group to be unbanned. More than $14,000 in expenses for Filner's Paris trips were met by the head of an Iranian American group who also paid close to $1m to a Washington lobby firm working to get the MEK unbanned. A Texas Congressman, Ted Poe, received thousands of dollars in donations from the head of a pro-MEK group in his state at a time when he was a regular speaker on behalf of its unbanning at events across the US, describing the organisation as the ticket to regime change in Iran. Mike Rogers, chairman of the House of Representatives intelligence committee, has also received the backing of individuals and groups that support the unbanning of the MEK. Rogers has been among the strongest supporters in Congress of delisting the group, sponsoring resolutions and pressing other members of Congress to support the cause. A leading advocate of unbanning the MEK and chairman of the foreign affairs committee's oversight subcommittee, congressman Dana Rohrabacher, has received thousands of dollars in donations from supporters of the banned group this year alone. The Guardian sought comment from Ros-Lehtinen, Rogers, Filner, Poe and Rohrabacher. Only Rohrabacher responded. He said he was comfortable accepting donations from MEK supporters but that the money has no influence on his position that it should be unbanned. "I wouldn't doubt that people would donate to my campaign if it's something that they see as beneficial to them, to what they believe in, whether it's the MEK or whether it's anybody else," he said. "The question is whether it's the right position to take or not and whether it's a benefit to the people of the United States as a whole. In this case I've no doubt that supporting the MEK under this brutal attack from the Mullah regime [in Tehran] is in the interests of what I believe in but also in the interests of the people of the United States." Rohrabacher said the MEK's past attacks on Americans, its bombing campaign in Iran that killed top politicians and civilians, and its support of Saddam Hussein were history and the group has turned its back on violence. He also denied that public support for a designated terrorist organisation might put him in conflict with the law. "This isn't a bad group. A long time ago, in their history, they certainly had a questionable time – 20, 30, 40 years ago. But I don't know of any evidence they've engaged in terrorism for many, many years," he said. "They're not a terrorist group simply because some bureaucrats in the state department say so." Three top Washington lobby firms - DLA Piper; Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld; and DiGenova & Toensing - have been paid a total of nearly $1.5 million over the past year to press the US administration and legislators to support the delisting of the MEK and protection for its members in camps in Iraq. Two other lobby groups were hired for much smaller amounts. The firms employed former members of Congress to press their ex-colleagues on Capitol Hill to back the unbanning of the MEK. Scores of former senior officials have been paid up to $40,000 to make speeches in support of the MEK's delisting. Those who have received money include the former chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, General Hugh Shelton; ex-FBI director Louis Freeh; and Michael Mukasey, who as attorney general oversaw the prosecution of terrorism cases. The former Pennsylvania governor, Ed Rendell, has accepted more than $150,000 in speaking fees at events in support of the MEK's unbanning. Clarence Page, a columnist for the Chicago Tribune, was paid $20,000 to speak at the rally. Part of the money has been paid through speakers bureaus on the US east coast. Others accepted only travel costs, although in some cases that involved expensive trips to Europe. In June, Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the US House of Representatives and Republican presidential candidate, flew to Paris to address a pro-MEK rally and meet its co-leader, Maryam Rajavi. He was criticised for bowing to her. Congressman Rohrabacher has described the lobbying campaign as one of the most effective he has seen on Capitol Hill. It has galvanised powerful support for delisting the MEK far beyond those receiving political contributions, lobbying fees or other payments. Ros-Lehtinen has been a vigorous proponent of recognition of the MEK, flying around the country to speak in support of unbanning the group and pressing the issue among fellow members of Congress. She has accepted an award from one group funding the campaign to delist the MEK. Other recipients of political donations, including Rogers, Filner and Rohrabacher, have also lobbied other members of Congress to support the unbanning. As a result, nearly 100 members of Congress have co-sponsored a resolution demanding the Obama administration to delist the MEK. Last month, 17 former senior officials and US generals called on the state department to remove the group's terrorist designation. Among them were General James Jones, Barack Obama's former national security adviser; Tom Ridge, the former homeland security director; as well as Mukasey, Freeh and Rendell. Some of the same politicians and former officials have also targeted newspapers and online publications in a campaign of opinion articles and letters aimed at changing the image of the MEK as a terrorist group. The campaign has in part been funded by substantial donations from Iranian Americans and a web of organisations they lead from Florida to Texas and California. The most generous benefactors include: • Saeid Ghaemi, head of Colorado's Iranian American Community, who paid close to $900,000 of his own money to a Washington lobby firm for its work to get the MEK unbanned. • Ali Soudjani, president of the Iranian American Society of Texas. He gave close to $100,000 over the past five years to congressional campaign funds. His organisation paid more than $110,000 in fees to lobbyists last year. • Ahmad Moeinimanesh, leader of the Iranian American Community of Northern California. The group paid $400,000 to a lobby firm. Moeinimanesh made personal donations to Ros-Lehtinen's campaign even though her constituency is several thousand miles from where he lives. Some of the payments have prompted an investigation by the US treasury department. It is examining the fees paid to Shelton, Freeh, Mukasey and Rendell, and possibly others, to see if they breach laws against "material support for a terrorist group". In cases involving links to other banned organisations, such as Hamas and Hezbollah, individuals have received long jail sentences for indirect financial support. The original source of the considerable sums involved is not always clear as groups making political donations or funding lobby firms are not required to declare their origin. Previously the MEK has relied in part on funding from Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Soudjani told the Guardian that the moneys were raised from Iranian Americans in the US. "The Iranian community is wealthy. It has more than $600bn in the United States. This is pennies for supporting freedom," he said. Asked if his own donations to members of Congress was specifically because of their positions on the MEK, he replied: "Yes, it is." However, Soudjani was careful to say that the support is not for the MEK as an organisation, which could open donors to investigation under anti-terrorism laws. "We are not giving material support to the MEK. We are supporting freedom of speech for justice and peace in Iran," he said.
  | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Revealed: the steady flow of funds to members of Congress, lobbying firms and former officials in support of Iranian group Supporters of a designated Iranian terrorist organisation have won a long struggle to see it unbanned in the US after pouring millions of dollars into an unprecedented campaign of political donations, hiring Washington lobby groups and payments to former top administration officials. A Guardian investigation, drawing partly on data researched by the Centre for Responsive Politics, a group tracking the impact of money in US politics, has identified a steady flow of funds from key Iranian American organisations and their leaders into the campaign to have the People's Mojahedin Organisation of Iran removed from the list of terrorist organisations. The US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, is expected to notify Congress that the MEK will be removed from the terrorism list in the coming days. The campaign to bury the MEK's bloody history of bombings and assassinations that killed American businessmen, Iranian politicians and thousands of civilians, and to portray it as a loyal US ally against the Islamic government in Tehran has seen large sums of money directed at three principal targets: members of Congress, Washington lobby groups and influential former officials. Prominent among the members of Congress who have received fund is Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the chair of the House of Representatives foreign affairs committee. She has accepted at least $20,000 in donations from Iranian American groups or their leaders to her political campaign fund. Other recipients include Congressman Bob Filner, who was twice flown to address pro-MEK events in France and has pushed resolutions resolutions in the House of Representatives calling for the group to be unbanned. More than $14,000 in expenses for Filner's Paris trips were met by the head of an Iranian American group who also paid close to $1m to a Washington lobby firm working to get the MEK unbanned. A Texas Congressman, Ted Poe, received thousands of dollars in donations from the head of a pro-MEK group in his state at a time when he was a regular speaker on behalf of its unbanning at events across the US, describing the organisation as the ticket to regime change in Iran. Mike Rogers, chairman of the House of Representatives intelligence committee, has also received the backing of individuals and groups that support the unbanning of the MEK. Rogers has been among the strongest supporters in Congress of delisting the group, sponsoring resolutions and pressing other members of Congress to support the cause. A leading advocate of unbanning the MEK and chairman of the foreign affairs committee's oversight subcommittee, congressman Dana Rohrabacher, has received thousands of dollars in donations from supporters of the banned group this year alone. The Guardian sought comment from Ros-Lehtinen, Rogers, Filner, Poe and Rohrabacher. Only Rohrabacher responded. He said he was comfortable accepting donations from MEK supporters but that the money has no influence on his position that it should be unbanned. "I wouldn't doubt that people would donate to my campaign if it's something that they see as beneficial to them, to what they believe in, whether it's the MEK or whether it's anybody else," he said. "The question is whether it's the right position to take or not and whether it's a benefit to the people of the United States as a whole. In this case I've no doubt that supporting the MEK under this brutal attack from the Mullah regime [in Tehran] is in the interests of what I believe in but also in the interests of the people of the United States." Rohrabacher said the MEK's past attacks on Americans, its bombing campaign in Iran that killed top politicians and civilians, and its support of Saddam Hussein were history and the group has turned its back on violence. He also denied that public support for a designated terrorist organisation might put him in conflict with the law. "This isn't a bad group. A long time ago, in their history, they certainly had a questionable time – 20, 30, 40 years ago. But I don't know of any evidence they've engaged in terrorism for many, many years," he said. "They're not a terrorist group simply because some bureaucrats in the state department say so." Three top Washington lobby firms - DLA Piper; Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld; and DiGenova & Toensing - have been paid a total of nearly $1.5 million over the past year to press the US administration and legislators to support the delisting of the MEK and protection for its members in camps in Iraq. Two other lobby groups were hired for much smaller amounts. The firms employed former members of Congress to press their ex-colleagues on Capitol Hill to back the unbanning of the MEK. Scores of former senior officials have been paid up to $40,000 to make speeches in support of the MEK's delisting. Those who have received money include the former chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, General Hugh Shelton; ex-FBI director Louis Freeh; and Michael Mukasey, who as attorney general oversaw the prosecution of terrorism cases. The former Pennsylvania governor, Ed Rendell, has accepted more than $150,000 in speaking fees at events in support of the MEK's unbanning. Clarence Page, a columnist for the Chicago Tribune, was paid $20,000 to speak at the rally. Part of the money has been paid through speakers bureaus on the US east coast. Others accepted only travel costs, although in some cases that involved expensive trips to Europe. In June, Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the US House of Representatives and Republican presidential candidate, flew to Paris to address a pro-MEK rally and meet its co-leader, Maryam Rajavi. He was criticised for bowing to her. Congressman Rohrabacher has described the lobbying campaign as one of the most effective he has seen on Capitol Hill. It has galvanised powerful support for delisting the MEK far beyond those receiving political contributions, lobbying fees or other payments. Ros-Lehtinen has been a vigorous proponent of recognition of the MEK, flying around the country to speak in support of unbanning the group and pressing the issue among fellow members of Congress. She has accepted an award from one group funding the campaign to delist the MEK. Other recipients of political donations, including Rogers, Filner and Rohrabacher, have also lobbied other members of Congress to support the unbanning. As a result, nearly 100 members of Congress have co-sponsored a resolution demanding the Obama administration to delist the MEK. Last month, 17 former senior officials and US generals called on the state department to remove the group's terrorist designation. Among them were General James Jones, Barack Obama's former national security adviser; Tom Ridge, the former homeland security director; as well as Mukasey, Freeh and Rendell. Some of the same politicians and former officials have also targeted newspapers and online publications in a campaign of opinion articles and letters aimed at changing the image of the MEK as a terrorist group. The campaign has in part been funded by substantial donations from Iranian Americans and a web of organisations they lead from Florida to Texas and California. The most generous benefactors include: • Saeid Ghaemi, head of Colorado's Iranian American Community, who paid close to $900,000 of his own money to a Washington lobby firm for its work to get the MEK unbanned. • Ali Soudjani, president of the Iranian American Society of Texas. He gave close to $100,000 over the past five years to congressional campaign funds. His organisation paid more than $110,000 in fees to lobbyists last year. • Ahmad Moeinimanesh, leader of the Iranian American Community of Northern California. The group paid $400,000 to a lobby firm. Moeinimanesh made personal donations to Ros-Lehtinen's campaign even though her constituency is several thousand miles from where he lives. Some of the payments have prompted an investigation by the US treasury department. It is examining the fees paid to Shelton, Freeh, Mukasey and Rendell, and possibly others, to see if they breach laws against "material support for a terrorist group". In cases involving links to other banned organisations, such as Hamas and Hezbollah, individuals have received long jail sentences for indirect financial support. The original source of the considerable sums involved is not always clear as groups making political donations or funding lobby firms are not required to declare their origin. Previously the MEK has relied in part on funding from Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Soudjani told the Guardian that the moneys were raised from Iranian Americans in the US. "The Iranian community is wealthy. It has more than $600bn in the United States. This is pennies for supporting freedom," he said. Asked if his own donations to members of Congress was specifically because of their positions on the MEK, he replied: "Yes, it is." However, Soudjani was careful to say that the support is not for the MEK as an organisation, which could open donors to investigation under anti-terrorism laws. "We are not giving material support to the MEK. We are supporting freedom of speech for justice and peace in Iran," he said.
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Sources reveal Mariano Rajoy plans to save €4bn a year as part of strategy to pre-empt eurozone's conditions for help Spain crept closer to a bailout as the government leaked plans to cut pension spending and senior bankers and business leaders called for the prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, not to postpone his decision too long. Spain will cut up to €4bn (£3.2bn) of spending a year by freezing pensions and forcing workers to retire later, sources close to the government told Reuters. The leak on Friday was part of a strategy by Rajoy's government to hurriedly put into place as many as possible of the changes that eurozone countries might demand before signing a bailout agreement with them. A new set of proposals will be announced next week, along with the budget for 2013. Rajoy's centre-right government hopes this will allow Spain to sign a deal with fewer conditions imposed by Brussels, making the bailout easier to digest for ordinary Spaniards who are fed up with government austerity measures and soaring unemployment. Greece, which is negotiating with the troika of the EU, European Central Bank (ECB) and International Monetary Fund (IMF), played down speculation that negotiations over its second bailout would be delayed until after the US elections. Officials said talks were continuing and the Greek parliament would be given a full list of spending cuts and tax rises by next week. Concerns that the €11.5bn of savings in Greece will be rejected by parliament were heightened this week when several senior ministers warned they would resign if plans for 50,000 public sector job cuts are included in the austerity package. International bondholders, which have loaned peripheral eurozone countries hundreds of billions of euros, fear that delays over negotiations in Athens and Madrid will cause greater political instability and undermine efforts to reduce debts and push through changes. On Thursday the head of one of Spain's biggest banks, BBVA boss Francisco González, called on the government to ask for the bailout as soon as possible. The ECB announcement that it would buy bonds to drive down borrowing costs in Spain or any other country that agreed a bailout with the eurozone's rescue fund has already lowered bond yields, allowing Spain to continue financing itself on the markets – but at relatively high interest rates. That has given Rajoy's government breathing space and some observers now expect him to wait for a bailout until after 21 October elections in the northern regions of Galicia and the Basque country. Others believe he will act before the ratings agency Moody's decides this month whether to downgrade Spain's debt to junk status. The head of Spain's employers' federation, Juan Rosell, also called for the government to act, but asked it to negotiate carefully and unhurriedly to make sure conditions were not stifling for the economy. His organisation has already warned that Spain's economy, which is set to shrink 1.7% this year, will suffer the same sort of decline in 2013. As a double-dip recession drags on, unemployment will rise from 25% to 26.5%, it says. The government reportedly hopes that it can reduce the impact of a bailout even further by asking eurozone countries to allow it to draw on a €100bn rescue package set aside for Spain's ailing banks. The banks may take only half of that sum and the terms agreed with the European Financial Stability Facility allow for Spain to ask for whatever money is left to be used for something else. Terms might be agreed quickly and could allow the ECB to start buying Spanish bonds on the secondary market.
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Violent demonstrations leave 15 dead as Pakistan, Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka witness Islamic anger at America Fifteen people were killed and nearly 200 injured in Pakistan on Friday as angry protests that have raged all week against a blasphemous US film mocking the prophet MUhammad continued to engulf the Muslim world. There were violent demonstrations in Pakistan after the government took the questionable decision to declare a national holiday to allow people to rally against the video. Tens of thousands took to the streets in all major cities. Many protests descended into serious unrest. Protesters threw objects at police, who retaliated with teargas canisters and live rounds. The provocative US trailer, Innocence of Muslims, also prompted protests in at least half a dozen other countries on Friday, with demonstrators burning American flags and effigies of Barack Obama. The unrest capped a tumultuous 10 days that has seen the murder of the US ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens, in what the White House says was a well-plotted terrorist attack, possibly linked to al-Qaida. The film has caused a deep crisis for the US administration. It has also provoked a pained discussion in Europe and the US over the boundaries of free speech. Several of the latest protests were also directed at France after the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo published fresh Muhammad caricatures. France took a tough line on protests on Friday, with the interior minister, Manuel Valls, saying no demonstrations against the cartoons would be allowed. Paris closed its embassy in Egypt, where a few dozen protesters congregated on Friday. Germany also shut its Egypt mission. But it was Pakistan that saw the most inflammatory scenes. Some 195 people were reportedly wounded in the cities of Peshawar, Karachi and Islamabad – with nine killed in Karachi and four in Peshawar. One of the Karachi dead was a policeman. He was apparently killed in an exchange of gunfire with protesters. Unknown gunmen also shot and wounded three other policemen. In Peshawar, the frontier city close to the Afghan border, mobs attacked buildings and set fire to cinemas. One victim, Muhammad Amir, was the driver of broadcast truck owned by the television network ARY. He was hit by police fire. He later died of his wounds in hospital but not before the television station broadcast continuous loops of him in obvious pain being attended to in an emergency room. In Karachi rioters torched police vans, looted shops and even attacked the coastal port city's fire brigade. For a second day running in Islamabad, the normally sedate capital, violence was concentrated in front of the five-star Serena hotel,situated on a road that leads to the entrance to the fenced-off diplomatic quarter where the US embassy is located. "America has challenged the Muslim nation by making this movie," said a 19-year-old called Mohammad Fayyaz, who kept his face covered as he joined the violence in the capital. He added: "We will not go until the man who made the film is hanged." The White House has made desperate efforts over the past week to defuse the protests. Speaking on television and radio adverts, the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, has emphasised that the US government had nothing to do with the film's production. The acting US ambassador in Pakistan, Richard Hoagland, met with government officials to once again to reiterate that the US government "condemned this video's content and its message". But the US's vigorous campaign of public diplomacy appears not to have worked. In many places in Pakistan, crowds were able to break through barricades placed in their way by police. Images streaming in from all over the country on Pakistan's frenetic cable news channels got steadily grimmer as what the government had billed as "love of prophet Muhammad day" wore on and protests descended into battles and looting. Mobile phone networks had been turned off in 15 cities in an effort to frustrate the ability of crowds to organise themselves, but it appeared to have no effect and services were restored well before the originally advertised time of 6pm. In Lahore, the grand colonial era Mall Road was the setting for skirmishes by demonstrators who also attempted to approach the US consulate in the city. In Iraq about 3,000 protesters condemned the film as well as the French caricatures. The protest in the southern city of Basra was organised by Iranian-backed Shia groups. Some protesters raised Iraqi flags and posters of Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, while chanting "death to America". In the Sri Lankan capital of Colombo, about 2,000 Muslims burned effigies of Obama and US flags at a protest after Friday prayers. In Bangladesh, over 2,000 people marched through the streets of the capital, Dhaka, to express outrage at the film. Small and mostly orderly protests were also held in Malaysia and Indonesia. Thousands also gathered in Lebanon's Bekaa valley for the latest in a series of protest rallies organised by the militant group Hezbollah. There was also unrest in Indian-administered Kashmir. Police imposed a day-long curfew in the Kashmir valley, and in the main city, Srinagar, police chased away protesters. Authorities in the region also temporarily blocked mobile and internet services. Critics in Pakistan lambasted the decision of the government to make Friday a national holiday. They said hardline religious parties, many of them fronts for banned terrorist organisations, hijacked the day off as a chance to show off their street power. Raza Rumi, a prominent analyst and newspaper columnist, said the government had chosen a policy of appeasement. "The government is under immense pressure to appear as Islamic and as pious as anyone," he said. "But it could have chosen alternative strategy of engaging with the various religious groups and launched a public campaign to educate people rather than letting them take to the streets." Earlier in the day, Pakistan's prime minister, Raja Pervaiz Ashraf, addressed a gathering of politicians and top clerics in Islamabad. While he called for peaceful protests, he also used language likely to inflame the many protests that have claimed the video is part of a plot involving Jewish, Israeli and US interests. "It is ironical that denial of holocaust is considered a crime but no consideration is paid to the feelings of Muslims," he said. "I hope the international community and Islamic world will be successful in preventing such things." If the intention of the government was to burnish its Islamic credentials in the run-up to the election in six months, many protesters were not convinced. "[President Asif Ali] Zardari is a man with no grace, he should resign," said Tabarak Lateef, a 22-year-old protester in Islamabad. "Our rulers are traitors, they are American slaves and they should be ashamed of themselves."
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Romney has $35m to president's $88m heading into final six weeks before election as polls show more supporting Obama Mitt Romney faced a fresh setback Friday at the end of his worst week since the presidential campaign began when newly released figures showed he has come off second-best to Barack Obama in an area the Republicans had expected to be dominant: fundraising. The Obama campaign team, after a series of frantic appeals for funds from small donors throughout the summer, has $88m on hand to spend on ads and campaign staff in the coming weeks. Romney has $50m but that includes $15m he has to repay on a loan, leaving him with $35m. So far this campaign, Obama has raised $774m, giving him an edge over Romney, whose supporters have raised $736m. The Romney strategy for winning the White House was based largely on a promise that he would outspent Obama by about two to one in the biggest ad blitz America has ever seen in the final months of the campaign. But, in spite of his personal wealth and the support of billionaires, that strategy appears to be going up in smoke. Although the election is still a month and a half away, some senior Republicans are already beginning to write off their hopes of retaking the White House unless there is some major international event, such as a Middle East crisis that pushes up the price of petrol, or some bad economic news or a major gaffe by Obama. The former Republican speechwriter Peggy Noonan, in an comment piece in the Wall Street Journal on Friday, voiced the criticism many Republicans have being making in private and joined calls for a change at the top of the campaign team. It was the second time this week that Noonan has been critical. Referring to her earlier piece about the campaign, she wrote: "This week I called it incompetent, but only because I was being polite. I really meant rolling calamity." Romney's wife, Ann, offered a rare glimpse of the growing sense of frustration inside the camp in the face of such criticism. In an interview with Radio Iowa, she told critics: "Stop it. This is hard. You want to try it? Get in the ring." It was not a helpful intervention, only adding to the sense of disarray.
Obama ahead in the polls both nationally and in almost all the seven swing states that will decide the election: Florida, Ohio, New Hampshire, Virginia, Iowa, Colorado and Nevada. One poll had Obama ahead of Romney by 5% in Colorado and 8% in Iowa. Romney embarked on a new strategy Friday, his second campaign re-launch in the space of five days. The first relaunch, announced by one of his strategists Ed Gillespie, on Monday promised Romney would become more specific about what policies he would pursue in office rather than the negative approach of concentrating almost solely on attacking Obama's record. That strategy lasted little more than a few hours until Romney, in the biggest setback to his campaign yet, was confronted with A devastating secret video of his speech to a small, $50,000-a-place dinner for Republican donors in Florida in which he characterised 47% of the American population as freeloaders, dependent on federal government help. At a 12,000-strong campaign rally on Friday in Virginia – a key battleground state – Obama stepped up his attack on Romney's 47% remark. ""I don't see a lot of victims in this crowd today. I see a lot of hard working Virginians," he told the crowd in Woodbridge. As part of the new-look strategy, Romney, who, unusually for a candidate at this stage in the election cycle, has been largely absent from the campaign trail over the last two weeks, is visiting the swing states where his hoping to address large rallies and stick to a scripted speech rather than the off-the-cuff remarks that have landed him in trouble. The Democratic party is warning against complacency, stressing that there are still weeks of campaigning left, including three presidential debates, the first on October 3. Early voting begins in some states next week. Former president Bill Clinton, who provided the star turn at the Democratic convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, this month, warned that while Romney will have to do a lot of explaining about what he meant about is 47% comment, Democrats should not believe that gaffe amounts to a knock-out punch. He told CNN: "I still think you have to assume it's going to be a close race, assume it's a hard fight and then fight through it. But I think the president has the advantage now. We did have a very good convention. He got a good boost out of it." The Clinton call for caution was reinforced when Obama, in an interview with Latinos, said that "change", the slogan on which he campaigned on in 2008, could not come from inside Washington but outside. Romney is to push this line during a tour this weekend of Ohio and Colorado, saying he cannot believe the president who won on a slogan of "Yes we can" was now saying he could not implement change from inside Washington. The details of fundraising for August, released on Thursday night as required by law, show that Obama's coffers were boosted mainly by small donors.
Obama's campaign team, separate from the Democratic effort, raised $85m compared with Romney's $67m. Obama's campaign, combined with a separate fundraising efforts by the Democratic party, raised $114m to Romney's and the Republican party's $111.6m. The Obama Super Pac Priorities USA also out-raised for the first time this year its conservative counterpart Restore Our Future. Priorities was helped by big individual donors such as billionaire hedge manager Jim Simons who gave $2m. According to the figures submitted to the federal election commission, Obama's campaign spent more than $83m in August and Romney $66m.
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | News that Rupert Murdoch's son could soon lead Fox Networks met with shock and anger from News Corp shareholders News Corp shareholders have reacted angrily to news that James Murdoch could soon run the media giant's flagship Fox TV channel. The son of News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch was heavily criticised on Thursday by British regulators over his role in the hacking scandal. On the same day, news broke he may soon be given control of some of the media firm's most high profile assets. One dissident shareholder called the news a "slap in the face for shareholders, not to mention victims of the hacking scandal". Murdoch is reportedly set to take over the running of Fox Networks, News Corp's US TV business that includes its national Fox channel, home to American Idol and The Simpsons, and cable businesses including FX. The news, first reported by the Financial Times, came the same day that British regulator Ofcom issued a report that took Murdoch to task over his role in the phone-hacking scandal. James Murdoch was head of News Corp's UK newspaper business as the hacking scandal broke. The regulator concluded he "repeatedly fell short of the conduct to be expected of as a chief executive and chairman" and that his lack of action in was "difficult to comprehend and ill-judged". But in a ruling that handed a major victory to James' father Rupert Murdoch, Ofcom ruled that BSkyB, the satellite broadcaster whose largest shareholder is News Corp, remains a fit and proper owner of broadcast licences. News Corp declined to comment on the reports of James Murdoch's role at US operations. Julie Tanner, director of socially responsible investing for New York-based Christian Brothers Investment Services, said: "This move proves that Rupert Murdoch is running News Corp solely for the benefit of the Murdoch family." Last year Tanner led a shareholder revolt that ended with the majority of independent shareholders voting against the re-election of James Murdoch, his brother Lachlan and most of the News Corp board. She has lodged a similar resolution ahead of this year's meeting. "While we are disappointed – and frankly, somewhat amazed – by this move, I also hope it sheds light on the importance of voting for our resolution to appoint an Independent Chair at the New Corp AGM. This is a clear example of the need for improved corporate governance at the company," she said. The promotion would come as News Corp continues to face legal investigations into the phone-hacking scandal on both sides of the Atlantic. The justice department is investigating News Corp under the foreign corrupt practices act (FCPA), a statute that prosecutes US firms found guilty of bribing foreign officials. Some 50 people have so far been arrested in the UK over the scandal, including two journalists at The Sun newspaper and a policeman arrested this week during an ongoing bribery investigation. James Murdoch resigned as chairman of News International, the media group's UK newspaper business, in February and from BSkyB in April. He relocated to the US and has so far kept a lower profile. But his elevation would likely to trigger a new round of criticism from shareholders and pressure groups. In August lobby group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew) filed a complaint with the broadcast regulator the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) arguing News Corp was unfit to run US broadcasting licenses. Crew executive director Melanie Sloan said the possible elevation of James Murdoch would strengthen their case. "It seems to me that there is a lot more to come out about James Murdoch. There are plenty more questions that need answers," she said.
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Latest fundraising figures show Mitt Romney's election campaign burning through cash at unexpectedly fast rate
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Police identify suspect as 22-year-old Klein Michael Thaxton, who has posted to Facebook that he has 'lost everything' A man who has taken a hostage inside a downtown Pittsburgh high-rise is posting Facebook updates as police try to negotiate the release of the man he's holding. Pittsburgh police chief Nate Harper identified the suspect as 22-year-old Klein Michael Thaxton. On his Facebook page, Thaxton says he's tired of the life he's lived and has "lost everything". Harper said Thaxton entered the 16th floor office of a benefits administration firm around 8am Friday, asking for the man he eventually took hostage. Harper said Thaxton has been calm and co-operative but hasn't made any demands. Police earlier described the hostage-taker as "ex-military". Officers from Pittsburgh police evacuated the building, Three Gateway Center, and surrounded it along with county, state and federal agents. Thaxton has posted a series of comments to his Facebook wall, which is publicly available. At around 9am he wrote: "i cant take it no more im done bro," later adding: "how this ends is up to yall bro real shyt". Later Thaxton said: "this life im livn rite now i dnt want anymore ive lost everything and i aint gettn it back instead of walkn around all broke n shyt while niggas stunt on me n shyt". In another entry he appeared to address his father, saying "welln pops youll never have to woryy about me again". A worker on the 16th floor told the Associated Press that the hostage-taking unfolded inside the offices of CW Breitsman Associates, a firm that runs employee-benefits programmes. Kathi Dvorak, an administrative assistant at AXA Advisors, said a woman ran into her office yelling for someone to call 911. A second woman ran in and said her office was being robbed. Several hundred people milled around about a half-block from the 24-storey building after police evacuated it. A light rail stop nearby was closed and at least 20 emergency vehicles surrounded the building. Other Facebook users have posted comments to Thaxton's wall urging him to release the hostage. "Don't give this society another reason to make you a statistic man...Talk with the negotiator, and let him know "your hurting man", das all you hurtin, and we hear you!! Damn I hear you!!! we all hear you...," wrote Cosmo Retro B Smith. Another user wrote: "Dont do this honey! Things will get better for yoy".
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Sentences to range between 15-20 years for officers as civilian government flexes muscles against once-supreme army A Turkish court has convicted 330 former and current military officers of plotting a coup to overthrow prime minister Tayyip Erdogan's government. The court earlier sentenced three former generals to life in prison, which was reduced to 20 years each because the coup plot was unsuccessful, and two serving and one former general to 18 years. Sentencing is still to come for the remaining 324 defendants convicted of a role in the plot. The court earlier acquitted 34 officers in the case, which has underlined civilian dominance over the once all-powerful military in Turkey. The "Sledgehammer" conspiracy is alleged to have included plans to bomb historic mosques in Istanbul and trigger conflict with Greece to pave the way for an army takeover. Prosecutors had demanded 15-20 year jail sentences for the 365 defendants, 364 of them serving and retired officers. The Turkish army has traditionally played a dominant role in politics, staging three coups between 1960 and 1980 and pushing the country's first Islamist-led government from office in 1997. Its authority has been reined in sharply since Erdogan first came to power nearly a decade ago and the trial has been seen as a show of strength by a government that has emerged from its shadow.
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | From Girls to Game of Thrones to Louie CK, here are our picks for the underdogs and the sure things in Sunday's awards This year's Emmy awards should be one of the tightest in years with close fought races in almost every category. Here's our guide to the biggest questions set to be answered on Sunday. Is Modern Family beatable?The Emmy voters are notorious for their tendency to reward the same shows and despite strong competition it's hard to see this year being any different. After a slowish start Modern Family had a solid season. It has one of the best casts on television and is intelligently scripted with mass appeal. Personally I'd love to see Girls win. It may not be to everyone's taste but it has a fresh voice and comes as a welcome antidote to the female fantasy world peddled by shows such as Sex and the City. Is this Breaking Bad's year?Given the academy's love for repeat rewards Mad Men remains the favourite in the drama category despite a relatively bumpy season. If it wins it will be a record-breaking fifth consecutive victory but this is a very tight category. Homeland was a critical and audience favourite (and has won the Golden Globe), Downton Abbey is an academy-pleaser (and has won a best mini-series award last year), and both Boardwalk Empire and Game of Thrones had strong second seasons. I'd love to see Game of Thrones give the lie to the notion that fantasy can't win Emmys but increasingly the buzz is all about Breaking Bad. Vince Gilligan's dark-hearted yet moral drugs tale has got stronger with every season, and the taut first half of the fifth season is fresh in voters' minds, which could help swing the drama award its way. Even if Breaking Bad doesn't take the main category I expect Bryan Cranston to win best actor for a drama again and Giancarlo Esposito to beat out equally strong turns by Jared Harris and Peter Dinklage in the supporting actor category. Can Downton Abbey spring a surprise? It's just about feasible that Julian Fellowes' period drama will pull off a shocking victory. The subject matter – posh Brits and proles in big houses – is catnip to academy voters and the show has become inescapable on both sides of the Atlantic. The fact it picked up nods in many of the acting categories makes it a strong contender despite a patchy second season with some glaring plot issues [" will never walk again"; "No wait, hang on, I can"]. That said the better bet is for Maggie Smith to take best supporting actress. No one can resist the Dowager Countess of Grantham. Will American Horror Story's category gamble pay off?Possible the most surprising nomination was that of American Horror Story in the best mini-series or movie category, a decision made possible because the show's characters, plot and setting changes every season. So can Ryan Murphy's campy horror fest actually win? This is a pretty tough category traditionally dominated by HBO, which this year submits the election drama Game Change and biopic Hemmingway & Gelhorn. There are nods also for two British shows, the much-garlanded Sherlock and the often ridiculous but very addictive Luther. The real competition however is the multi-nominated Hatfields & McCoys. It's a western. With Kevin Costner. And Bill Paxton. The rest of the field stands no chance. Is best actress in a comedy too close to call?If ever there was a sure thing about this year's Emmys it's that Claire Danes will win best actress in a drama for her outstanding work in Homeland. The comedy award, however, is much harder. There's Amy Poehler, wonderful in Parks & Recreation; Zooey Deschanel and Lena Dunham as two very different types of girl; old stalwarts Tina Fey and Edie Falco; last year's winner Melissa McCarthy and Emmy favourite Julia Louis-Dreyfus, nominated for Veep. My heart says Poehler, who brings warmth and wit to the role of Leslie Knope, but Louis-Dreyfus was great in Veep and it's the sort of smart, sharp performance that Emmy voters will love. Will the academy take a chance on Louie CK?He's the creator of the most singular voice on television so will the Academy do the right thing and give Louie CK the best actor in a comedy award for his work this season? Louis is easily the most interesting show nominated (particularly as the academy persisted in ignoring Community) and Louie CK's off-kilter performance is the downbeat heart of that show. Sadly it remains a long shot. The academy loves Jim Parsons' performance in nerd comedy The Big Bang Theory and it's a show that gets more successful with each season. I'd say this is Parsons' award to lose, although the love of all things cable means that Don Cheadle might spring a surprise. Can anyone take on Modern Family in the supporting categories?The decision by Modern Family's cast to enter themselves in the supporting categories has led to some ridiculously dominant line-ups. The best supporting actor category is particularly lopsided featuring every male cast member plus Saturday Night Live's Bill Hader and New Girl's Max Greenfield. I'd quite like to see Greenfield win for his scene-stealing turn as the self-regarding yet ragingly insecure Schmidt, but the smart money will be on either the ever-reliable Ty Burrell (Modern Family's hapless dad Phil Dunphy) or Ed O'Neill, whose grumpy patriarch Jay had the best moment this season when he attempted to dance with his granddaughter to ease her ballet recital nerves. As to supporting actress in a comedy, conventional wisdom says it's between Modern Family's Julie Bowen and Sofia Vergara, but I wouldn't be surprised if Mayim Bialik, much-praised for her turn as awkward neuroscientist Amy Farrah Fowler in The Big Bang Theory, won the day. Finally is Jon Hamm too good looking to win an Emmy?Stop laughing, silence your inner Derek Zoolander and hear me out. Basically this question is related to my Brad Pitt theory of life, which goes as follows: Pitt is an excellent character actor trapped in a leading man's body. Thus he's very good in supporting/more unusual roles such as Fight Club, Snatch, Seven, 12 Monkeys but less good when asked to carry a film as a traditional leading man (A River Runs Through It, Meet Joe Black, The Mexican). Similarly I think Hamm's looks overshadow how subtle his work is on Mad Men. Because he makes the art of being Don Draper look effortless, voters don't necessarily see the craft behind the turn. That's not to say that his fellow nominees Bryan Cranston, Damian Lewis, Steve Buscemi, Michael C Hall and Hugh Bonneville aren't all very good (and in the cases of Cranston and Lewis exceptional) just that Hamm's skill is often under-rated. Join Sarah Hughes, Emma Keller and the Guardian US team for the Emmys liveblog on Sunday from 7pm ET.
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | West Side Story-esque show of rivalry stokes Thai debate over gang violence and demonstrates wide appeal of K-pop video The dance has inspired a host of parodies, the song has hit the top of the charts in South Korea, Malaysia, Finland and Latvia, and the YouTube video has accumulated more than 227m views. Now, according to Thai media, Gangnam Style, by the K-pop star Psy, has inspired a West Side Story-esque show of rivalry between two Bangkok gangs who are said to have had a dance-off before engaging in a gun battle. The INN website reported that the two gangs were dining in the same restaurant when "the younger members of both groups danced provocatively at each other in the manner of top hit Gangnam Style". The dance-off escalated into an argument and, eventually, a gun attack in the upmarket Ekkamai neighbourhood, in which one of the gangs fired at least 50 bullets from a carbine and an 11mm gun. No one was injured in the incident, police Lt Col Apichart Thongchandee told the Bangkok Post. He said the two gangs had a history of confrontation and would face arrest warrants. The shootout has stoked debate over gang violence in Thailand. Much of the violence plays out in secondary schools and vocational colleges – the latter primarily cater to working-class children – where students seek to defend their school's honour with guns, knives, machetes and even homemade grenades. Between January and July this year, Bangkok police registered more than 1,000 cases of student rivalry, according to a recent report by Agence France-Presse. Several students have been killed or injured since the start of the school year in May. Thai authorities recently established an army-style boot camp where, according to AFP, repeat offenders must endure regular fitness drills and 5am wake-up calls side by side with their rivals. Not all those attending went back home reformed, Lt Col Wanchana Sawasdeem said, "but for 90% it will work, even if it just means they hesitate before fighting … At least the camp will have made them think." That the two gangs apparently engaged in a Gangnam Style dance-off is indicative of the video's popularity. Psy, otherwise known as Park Jae-Sang, told Radio 1's Scott Mills this week that his distinctive dance style emulated "riding an invisible horse in your lower body". The video features Park doing the dance all over Seoul – from car parks to steam rooms – with a supporting cast dressed as geishas, nuns and boxers. Park sports various outfits, among them a blue tuxedo together with shellacked bouffant and sunglasses. "This is the point of the Gangnam Style," Park told Mills. "Dress classy and dance cheesy." The track, which is said to mock the affluent Seoul suburb Gangnam, could become the first Korean pop song to reach number one in the UK charts, according to the BBC. Park has already featured on numerous US TV shows, taught the horse-riding dance to Britney Spears, and helped inspire a flash-mob wedding proposal in Malaysia. The video has been parodied by Los Angeles lifeguards (who, according to LA news outlets, were fired for the stunt), an American college football team and even the government of North Korea. Park recently signed a record deal with Justin Bieber's management team.
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Tens of thousands take to city streets in anger over anti-Islam film, with several killed as protests turn violent Violent anti-US demonstrations have erupted across Pakistan after a week of rising anger and the fateful decision by the government to declare a national day of protest against the US film that mocks Islam's prophet. Tens of thousands of people took to the streets of all major cities, with many protests descending into serious unrest that killed at least 15 people, injured around 120 and did significant damage to businesses. In street battles across the country, protesters threw objects at police, who retaliated with teargas canisters and live rounds, mostly shot into the air. Three people were killed in Peshawar, close to the Afghan border, as mobs attacked buildings, including a number of cinemas that were set on fire. One victim was the driver of a broadcast truck owned by the television network ARY who was caught in police fire. He later died of his wounds in hospital but not before the television station broadcast continuous loops of him in obvious pain being attended to in an emergency room. In many places crowds were able to break through barricades erected by police, who struggled to control mobs enraged by the blasphemous video Innocence of Muslims that sparked the crisis. Images streaming in from all over the country on Pakistan's cable news channels got steadily grimmer as what the government had billed as "Love of Prophet Muhammad Day" wore on and protests descended into street battles and looting. Mobile phone networks had been turned off in 15 cities in an effort to frustrate the ability of crowds to organise themselves, but it appeared to have no effect and services were restored well before the originally advertised time of 6pm. In Lahore the grand colonial-era Mall Road was the setting for skirmishes by demonstrators who also attempted to approach the US consulate in the city. In Karachi, where two people were killed, including a police officer, rioters torched police vans, looted shops and even attacked the port city's fire brigade. And for a second day running in the normally sedate capital of Islamabad violence was concentrated in front of the five-star Serena hotel, which is on a road that leads to the fenced entrance of the diplomatic quarter where the US embassy is located. While police succeeded in holding back the several thousand strong crowd they also battled to prevent more protesters entering the city from the south. "America has challenged the Muslim nation by making this movie," said a 19-year-old called Mohammad Fayyaz, who kept his face covered as he joined the violence in the capital. "We will not go until the man who made the film is hanged." The US embassy continued a vigorous campaign of public diplomacy, which in recent days has included television and radio adverts featuring the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, emphasising that the US government had nothing to do with the production of the film. Yesterday the acting ambassador, Richard Hoagland, met government officials to once again reiterate that Washington "condemned this video's content and its message". Critics have lambasted the Pakistani government's decision to make Friday a national holiday, saying it was hijacked by hardline religious parties, many of them fronts for banned terrorist organisations, who used the national strike as a chance to demonstrate their street power. Raza Rumi, a prominent analyst and newspaper columnist, said the government had chosen a policy of appeasement. "The government is under immense pressure to appear as Islamic and as pious as anyone," he said. "But it could have chosen an alternative strategy of engaging with the various religious groups and launched a public campaign to educate people rather than letting them take to the streets." Earlier in the day the prime minister addressed a gathering of politicians and top clerics in Islamabad. He called for peaceful protests, but also used language likely to inflame the many protesters who have claimed the video is part of a plot involving Jewish, Israeli and US interest. "It is ironical that denial of Holocaust is considered a crime but no consideration is paid to the feelings of Muslims," he said. "I hope the international community and Islamic world will be successful in preventing such things." If the intention of the government was to burnish its Islamic credentials in the runup to an election in the next six months, many protesters were not convinced. "[President Asif Ali] Zardari is a man with no grace, he should resign," said Tabarak Lateef, a 22-year-old protester in Islamabad. "Our rulers are traitors, they are American slaves and they should be ashamed of themselves."
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Thousands of investors defrauded by the infamous broker will receive checks ranging from $1,784 to $526.9m Bernard Madoff's victims will soon receive $2.48bn to help cover their losses, by far the largest payout since the swindler's massive fraud was uncovered nearly four years ago. Checks ranging from $1,784 to $526.9m were mailed on Wednesday to 1,230 former customers of Bernard L Madoff Investment Securities LLC, according to Irving Picard, the trustee liquidating the firm. The latest payout more than triples the total recovery to $3.63bn, Picard said on Thursday. It will result in 1,074 customers with valid claims, or 44 percent of the total number, being fully repaid, he added. Customers had previously recovered $1.15bn, including sums committed by the Securities Investor Protection Corp, which helps customers of failed brokerages. The average payout in Wednesday's distribution was $2.02m. According to a September 13 report by the US Government Accountability Office, the largest valid customer claims are $1.57bn by Optimal Multiadvisors Ltd, part of Spain's Banco Santander SA; and $741m by M-Invest Ltd, a "feeder" fund created by Switzerland's Union Bancaire Privee. It is not immediately clear who received the largest payout. A spokeswoman for Picard was not immediately available to comment. Representatives for Santander and Union Bancaire Privee were also not immediately available. Madoff was arrested in December 2008 and pleaded guilty three months later to running a giant Ponzi scheme. The 74-year-old is serving a 150-year sentence in a North Carolina federal prison. US bankruptcy judge Burton Lifland in Manhattan authorized the latest distribution last month following two legal victories for the trustee. In June, the US supreme court let stand a lower court decision that endorsed Picard's methods for calculating losses. Then in July, a former Madoff customer dropped a court challenge to a $7.2bn forfeiture by the estate of Madoff investor Jeffry Picower. Of that sum, $5bn would go to the Madoff firm's estate, and the rest to the US government. Picard has recovered $9.15bn, or 53 percent of the $17.3bn he believes was lost in Madoff's Ponzi scheme. The trustee is holding some funds in reserve as some Madoff victims pursue their own cases to recover more money. Picard said this litigation is delaying further distributions. The trustee is also appealing court decisions that have limited his claims against banks such as JPMorgan Chase that did business with Madoff. The market for trading claims on potential recoveries from Madoff's estate will adjust for the distribution, according to Joseph Sarachek, managing director of claims trading at CRT Capital Group LLC, a Stamford, Connecticut-based broker-dealer. He said claims that recently traded at around 69 cents on the dollar will likely soon trade in the 30s. "The Madoff market is fairly volatile," Sarachek said. "The real question is when people think the next distribution will be." Lifland has authorized Picard and his law firm, Baker & Hostetler, to bill $321.2m of legal fees to pursue Madoff cases for the period ended January 31, 2012.
  | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Study of Flame malware used in Middle East and north Africa reveals programmers probably had national backing The covert cyberwar being waged in the Middle East and north Africa – particularly against Iran and its allies – is even more sophisticated and widespread than had previously been understood, according to new research. Two leading computer security laboratories – Kaspersky Lab and Symantec – have been studying a series of powerful cyberweapons used against targets including the Iranian nuclear programme and Lebanese banks accused of laundering money for Iran and its ally Hezbollah. They are now convinced that all were probably created by a national government or governments working together. They have also identified key similarities in the weapons' computer coding suggesting some – if not all – were worked on at different times by the same or related groups of programmers. Suspicion over the most likely culprit has centred on the US and Israel – not least after anonymous briefings to the Washington Post by an unnamed former senior US intelligence official this year. In June the New York Times disclosed that one of the weapons identified in the last two years – Stuxnet, a sabotage program used to attack Iran's nuclear centrifuge in 2010 – was part of a joint US-Israel cyberwar plan, codenamed Olympic Games, targeting the Islamic republic, which suggests that the other cyber weapons could be part of the same wide operation. The latest disclosures follow forensic analysis by Symantec and the Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab of two command and control servers used by a sophisticated espionage worm named Flame, which was discovered by Iran this year stealing data from its computers. Analysts believe from studying fragments of Flame that it was only one of four similar weapons being used simultaneously, the other three of which have not been identified. Equally intriguing was the discovery that Flame and Stuxnet are related, with an early version of Stuxnet appearing in Flame as a plug-in. "The Flame malware, including all of its components, was very large and our ongoing investigation revealed more and more details since that time," Kaspersky Lab and Symantec said in a statement this week, after being commissioned by the International Telecommunication Union to study the new cyberweapon. "Flame was so advanced that only the world's top cryptographers could be able to implement it." They added: "In June we definitively confirmed that Flame developers communicated with the Stuxnet development team, which was another convincing fact that Flame was developed with nation-state backing." According to the researchers Flame itself was a huge operation. Kaspersky Lab's Alexander Gostev said estimating the scale was problematic but researchers had been able to discover data intended to be kept by one of several command-and-control servers. "Based on this we can see that more than five gigabytes of data was uploaded to this particular server a week, from more than 5,000 infected machines. This is certainly an example of cyber-espionage conducted on a massive scale." According to the researchers' analysis: "During a period of just one week (25 March-2 April) 5,377 unique IPs were seen connecting to the server, the vast majority in Iran: 3,702. What is also surprising is the large number of IPs from Sudan: 1,280. "Our previous statistics did not show a large number of infections in Sudan, so this must have been a dedicated campaign targeting systems in Iran and Sudan. "If just one server handled 5,000-plus victims during a one-week period and given several servers were available, we can estimate the total number of victims for Flame is probably higher than previously estimated, exceeding 10,000." Flame is the latest to be identified in a series of related cyberweapons targeting Iran since June 2010, when the existence of Stuxnet was disclosed – including Duqu, an espionage program first detected last year, and Flame and Gauss this summer. Vitaly Kamluk, chief malware expert at Kaspersky Lab, said that it had considered three possible sources of such programs. "It is not the sort of cyberweapon you see developed by criminals looking to access bank accounts nor is it the sort of weapon used by activists to make a political point. Those often use very available tools to write the programs." Last week's report said the data stolen by Flame was encrypted "in such a way that only the attackers can read it through strong public key cryptography. These features are not normally found in malware created by everyday cybercriminals, reaffirming our initial conclusions that Flame is a nation-state sponsored attack." Kamluk added: "Flame was massive and complex and we have identified the nicknames of at least four individuals involved in developing it." He said considerable effort had been put into disguising the program, not least in how it had been designed to attack a small and specific set of targets rather than spread rapidly across the internet. "The discovery of Stuxnet, Duqu, Gauss and Flame is changing our entire view of cyberwarfare." Nor does it seem likely that – even with the new discoveries – the cyberwar plan has been slowed. There is evidence that some aspects of the latest cyberweapons have yet to be launched, recalling the claim to the Washington Post this summer by its anonymous former intelligence source. "This is about preparing the battlefield for another type of covert action," the source said then. "Cyber-collection against the Iranian programme is way further down the road than this."
  | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Prosecutors said attacks were an attempt to shame members of community who leader believed were straying from their beliefs Sixteen Amish men and women in Ohio face lengthy prison terms after being convicted of hate crimes including forcibly cutting off fellow sect members' beards and hair. The defendants, with about 50 children between them and including six couples, were convicted on Thursday after four days of deliberations. The defendants had rejected plea deals, and some could now get sentences of 20 years or more. Sentencing was scheduled for January. Members of the defence team said appeals were likely. All the defendants are members of a settlement in eastern Ohio. Rhonda Kotnik, representing one of the defendants, Kathryn Miller, said the verdicts would destroy the community of about 25 families. "The community is going to be ripped apart. I don't know what's going to happen to all their children," she said. Samuel Mullet Sr, 66, the leader of the breakaway group, was found guilty of orchestrating the attacks. The government said the cuttings were an attempt to shame members of the community who he believed were straying from their beliefs. His followers were found guilty of carrying out the attacks. Prosecutors and witnesses described how sons pulled their father out of bed and chopped off his beard in the moonlight and how women surrounded their mother-in-law and cut off two feet of her hair, taking it down to the scalp in some places. The court heard that they targeted hair because it carried spiritual significance in the Amish faith. Federal officials said the verdicts would send a message about religious intolerance. "The victims in this case are members of a peaceful and traditional religion who simply wanted to be left to practice their religion in peace," the US attorney Steven Dettelbach said. "Unfortunately, the defendants denied them this basic right and they did so in the most violent way." Defence lawyers said their clients were bewildered by the verdicts. "They really don't understand the court system the way the rest of us have, being educated and reading newspapers," said Joseph Dubyak, who represented Linda Schrock. The defendants argued that the Amish were bound by different rules guided by their religion and that the government had no place getting involved in what amounted to a family or church dispute. Prosecutors said Mullet thought he was above the law and free to discipline those who went against him based on his religious beliefs. Before his arrest last November, Mullet said: "You have your laws on the road and the town – if somebody doesn't obey them, you punish them. But I'm not allowed to punish the church people?" The hair cuttings, he said, were a response to continuous criticism he had received from other Amish religious leaders about him being too strict, including shunning people in his own group. Witnesses testified that Mullet had complete control over the settlement that he founded two decades ago and described how his religious teachings and methods of punishments deviated from Amish traditions. One woman testified that Mullet coerced women at his settlement into having sex with him, and others said he encouraged men to sleep in chicken coops as punishment.
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Biggest queues yet as Apple's new iPhone 5 goes on sale around the world Bad publicity around Apple's new Maps service – which has displaced landmarks and even towns – has not discouraged eager shoppers from creating the UK's largest-ever retail queue to buy the iPhone 5 outside the company's Regent Street store in London. A total of 1,297 people were queueing as the doors opened at 8.01am, according to researchers from 63336, a question-and-answer service that has monitored the queues for Apple launches over the past few years. That beats the previous record, also set by Apple, with the iPhone 4S in October 2011, when 778 people were queueing as the doors opened. It wasn't only London. As many as 1,000 people were waiting outside the Apple Store in the Bluewater shopping centre in Kent, some having arrived at 2am to create the biggest queue ever seen there. The store opened at 8am, two hours earlier than normal. Robert Goodman, Bluewater's general manager, said: "That today has created a new record in terms of the number of people is a testament to both the unique appeal of the Apple brand and Bluewater's reputation as the place to buy the latest and greatest products." The huge queues were in stark contrast to the criticism aimed at Apple on social media sites and by commentators over the functionality of its new Maps product on the iPhone 5, and in the software now being rolled out to all its phones released since 2009. Apple has been widely criticised for the poor quality of the mapping data in the new iOS6 software powering the iPhone 5, and which has been made available for existing iPhones back to 2009's iPhone 3GS. Rather than using Google's mapping software, as it has done since the original iPhone in 2007, Apple has dumped the search giant's data and is now using a combination of data from satnav company TomTom and its own sources – leading to errors such as relocating London to Ontario, losing Paddington station, turning Helsinki railway station into a park and turning a 35-acre Irish greenfield site called "Airfield" into an airport. In a statement on Thursday night, Apple said: "We launched this new map service knowing it is a major initiative and that we are just getting started with it. Maps is a cloud-based solution and the more people use it, the better it will get. We appreciate all of the customer feedback and are working hard to make the customer experience even better." None of the criticism about the maps seems to have punctured enthusiasm among the growing number of people who own Apple iPhones and iPads to download the software – with internet providers showing a huge spike in traffic as people began installing iOS6 on Thursday night – and, in some cases, to buy the phones at retail. Buyers of the phones will face the challenge that the iPhone 5 does not work with existing SIM cards, but requires a new "nano-SIM" whose specifications were only agreed earlier this year. Helen Wright, general manager of 63336 said: "We honestly felt that Apple queues were starting to shrink with pre-orders taking over and without the allure of Steve Jobs' cult following. In fact, the queue for the iPad 3 was a few hundred smaller than the 4S. Today's queue, on the other hand, is almost double that of last year's iPhone 4S."
  | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Deputy foreign minister says Israeli policy is to stay away from US domestic politics, after Netanyahu footage used in US ad An Israeli government minister has sought to defuse accusations that Binyamin Netanyahu is attempting to influence the outcome of the US presidential election, saying Israel's official policy is "to stay as far away as possible" from its ally's domestic politics. Danny Ayalon, Israel's deputy foreign minister and a former ambassador to the US, told a conference in New York that Israel "makes no distinctions" between Democrats and Republicans. "Israel has no better friend than the US and no better friend than President Obama in the international community," he said, according to a report in Haaretz. Footage of Netanyahu featured in a political advertisement broadcast in the swing state of Florida. The ad was produced by Secure America Now, a hawkish non-profit organisation, without the consent of the Israeli prime minister's office. Ayalon told the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organisations that he wanted to set the record straight in case there was any "misreading" of Israel's intentions. The current "noise" over US-Israel relations was a result of "not very well judiciously planned remarks from both sides" being misconstrued. On the issue of Iran, Israel and the US "see eye to eye", Ayalon said. Relations between the US and Israel have been severely strained in recent weeks over the issue of how to deal with Iran's nuclear programme. Netanyahu has publicly demanded that the US sets clear "red lines" beyond which it would take military action to destroy Iran's nuclear facilities. The US has declined to do so. After a press conference at which Netanyahu said that without red lines there could be no "red light" to unilateral military action by Israel, he and Obama spent an hour on the phone in an attempt to repair the breach. But officials in Jerusalem subsequently claimed that the White House had rejected a request for a face-to-face meeting when Netanyahu visits the US next week. US officials denied this version of events. Obama's opponent in the election, Mitt Romney, has adopted a significantly more hawkish stance on Iran. Netanyahu's warm relationship with Romney contrasts with the froideur between him and Obama. A spokesman for the Israeli foreign ministry said he could not confirm the veracity of Ayalon's remarks.
  | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Vladimir Putin's party took part in US-funded activities, says state department as row deepens over expulsion of USAid The US has hit back at the Kremlin following the closure of its aid agency in Moscow for attempting to influence the country's politics, by pointing out that the ruling United Russia party participated in US-funded activities. The Russian government has given the local division of the US agency for international development (USAid) until 1 October to shut up shop because of what it called its "attempts to exert influence, via the distribution of grants" upon elections and civil society institutions. United Russia, which won a majority in parliamentary elections last year marred by widespread allegations of fraud, had taken part in programmes offered through the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute, said state department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland. There are at least eight cases over the last six years of high-level figures from United Russia attending conferences and training sessions funded by US-institutions, the opposition leader and former deputy prime minister, Boris Nemtsov, wrote in his blog on Friday. "For years the Party of Crooks and Thieves has with pleasure partnered with the Americans," Nemtsov wrote, using the popular nickname for United Russia employed by opposition activists who have taken to the streets in mass anti-Putin protests over the last nine months. President Putin has repeatedly attacked groups that receive foreign funding and accused protesters of following orders issued by the US secretary of state, Hilary Clinton. United Russia countered that the accusation was petty. "The announcement looks like an unfounded and emotional reaction," said senior party member Aleksei Chesnakov, Itar-Tass news agency reported. The closure of USAid, which spent £33.3m in Russia in 2011, will hit groups helping the disabled and working to control the spread of Aids as well as civil society organisations promoting democracy and human rights.
  | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Frank Jacobs, founder of Strange Maps, introduces 10 curious maps to marvel at
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Follow live updates as protests spread over an Islamophobic film and cartoons of the Prophet in a French magazine
  | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Boats retreat after crossing western sea boundary that has been contested since the end of the Korean war South Korea's navy has fired warning shots towards North Korean fishing boats that crossed a disputed maritime boundary, a South Korean official said. No North Korean navy ships were involved in the incident on Friday along a western sea boundary that North Korea has long refused to recognise, an official with South Korea's joint chiefs of staff said, speaking anonymously because of office policy. The shots did not hit the fishing boats, which then retreated, the official added. Violence often erupts in the seafood-rich Yellow Sea waters claimed by both countries. Boats routinely jostle for position during crab-catching season, and three deadly naval clashes since 1999 have resulted in a few dozen deaths. The disputed sea boundary is not clearly marked, and incursions by North Korean military and fishing boats are not unusual. Last week, North Korean fishing boats crossed the boundary but retreated soon after being warned by South Korea. Seoul says North Korean fishing boats also crossed the boundary in April. The Korean war ended nearly 60 years ago with a truce, not a peace treaty, so the US-led UN Command divided the Yellow Sea without Pyongyang's consent. The boundary favoured South Korea, cutting off North Korea from rich fishing waters and boxing in one of its crucial deep-water ports. North Korea has contested the line ever since, arguing it should run farther south. But for Seoul, accepting such a line would endanger fishing around five South Korean islands and hamper access to its port at Incheon. In 2010, a North Korean artillery barrage on Yeonpyeong Island, which is near the boundary, killed four South Koreans, including two civilians. The same year an explosion ripped apart a South Korean warship in the area, killing 46 sailors. Seoul says Pyongyang torpedoed the vessel. North Korea denies responsibility.
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Follow live updates as security forces in Muslim countries prepare for new protests over an Islamophobic film and cartoons of the Prophet in a French magazine
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Chinese leaders to decide whether to prosecute disgraced former party boss Bo Xilai once Wang Li verdict is announced The former police chief at the centre of a political scandal will be sentenced on Monday as Chinese leaders move to dispatch a messy affair that has upset a tricky transition of power. The intermediate people's court in Chengdu announced the verdict date on Friday for Wang Lijun, whose two-day trial on charges of defecting, abuse of power and other alleged misdeeds ended on Tuesday. Once the verdict is pronounced, Chinese leaders are expected to decide whether to prosecute Wang's former boss, former rising political star Bo Xilai. Wang, a headline-grabbing, imperious police chief in the inland city of Chongqing, set off the scandal when he sought refuge in a nearby US consulate in February. Inside, he told American diplomats that Bo's wife, Gu Kailai, had murdered a Britishman over a business dispute. Prosecutors said Wang also applied for asylum, though he later surrendered to Chinese authorities. The crimes Wang is charged with are generally punishable by up to 10 years in prison – 20 years if the sentences are served consecutively – though life in prison or even the death sentence are possible for egregious breaches. In an official account of his trial, prosecutors argued Wang was entitled to a more lenient punishment because he later co-operated in exposing Gu's murder of Briton Neil Heywood. They said his information about others' crimes "should be considered a major meritorious service". The account also suggests that "the Chongqing party committee's main responsible person at the time" – meaning Bo – knew about the murder and did nothing. The glancing reference in the trial account suggests Bo is likely to face criminal charges. Wang's tale of murder and coverup triggered infighting among a leadership that works hard to project an image of unanimity and affirmed to an already sceptical public a Communist party consumed with power grabs and corruption. The scandal led to Bo's suspension from the politburo, his wife's suspended death sentence for the murder and fiercer bargaining for positions in a new leadership that is supposed to be installed this autumn. In the tumult, a top aide to President Hu Jintao was sidelined after his son died after crashing his Ferrari sports car. Vice-president Xi Jinping, who is supposed to replace the retiring Hu, also disappeared from public view for nearly two weeks earlier this month, cancelling meetings with foreign dignitaries without explanation and sparking rumours about his health. Xi resurfaced last weekend and resumed an active schedule, meeting this week with US defence secretary, Leon Panetta, and then travelling to southern China to open an annual China-south-east Asia business exhibition on Friday.
  | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | • Pakistan blocks mobile phone signals in 15 cities
• French embassies and schools closed in around 20 countries
• Tunisia bans protests against Charlie Hebdo cartoons Security forces in Islamic countries are bracing for a day of anti-western fury, with international protests planned against a YouTube video ridiculing Muslims and French cartoons mocking the prophet Muhammad. France has closed embassies and schools in about 20 countries around the world after the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo published a series of cartoons depicting the prophet, including two showing him naked. Pakistan has drafted in troops to protect foreign embassies and blocked mobile phone signals in about 15 cities after thousands of violent protesters clashed with police on Thursday. The government has declared Friday "a day of love for the prophet", a move welcomed by the Taliban and that risks substantially increasing the already high threat of violence on the traditional Islamic holy day. The American embassy in Pakistan has been running television advertisements, one featuring the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, emphasising that the US government had nothing to do with the film. The US and French embassies were closed on Friday in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, and diplomatic missions in the Afghan capital, Kabul, were on lockdown. The cartoons in the French satirical weekly have provoked relatively little street anger, although about 100 Iranians demonstrated outside the French embassy in Tehran. In Tunisia, the birthplace of the Arab spring revolts, the Islamist-led government banned anti-cartoon protests planned for Friday. Four people died and almost 30 were wounded last week when protesters incensed by the anti-Islam film stormed the US embassy. Condemning the publication of the cartoons in France as an act verging on incitement, Egypt's grand mufti, Ali Gomaa, said on Thursday it showed how polarised the west and the Muslim world had become. Muhammad and his companions had endured "the worst insults from the non-believers of his time", he wrote on the Reuters blog Faith World. "Not only was his message routinely rejected, but he was often chased out of town, cursed and physically assaulted on numerous occasions. "But his example was always to endure all personal insults and attacks without retaliation of any sort. There is no doubt that, since the prophet is our greatest example in this life, this should also be the reaction of all Muslims." Last week, Egyptian protesters scaled the US embassy walls and tore down the flag. They clashed with police for four days, although most of the thousands who took to the streets did so peacefully. Gomaa said insults to Islam and the response, including the killing of the US ambassador in Libya and attacks on other western embassies in the region, could not be dissociated from other points of conflict between the west and the Muslim world. He cited the treatment of Muslims at the US detention centre in Guantánamo Bay, the US-led war in Iraq, drone attacks in Yemen and Pakistan, and the demonisation of Muslims by far-right European parties as "underlying factors" for the tension. "To then insist on igniting these simmering tensions by publishing hurtful and insulting material in a foolhardy attempt at bravado – asserting the superiority of western freedoms over alleged Muslim closed-mindedness – verges on incitement," he wrote. After the invasion of the US embassy in Tunis on Friday last week, the Tunisian interior ministry banned protests against the cartoon this Friday "to prevent human and material losses". In an attempt to defuse tensions, the EU, the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, the Arab League and the African Union issued a joint message. "We share a profound respect for all religions," it said. "We are united in our belief in the fundamental importance of religious freedom and tolerance. We condemn any advocacy of religious hatred that constitutes incitement to hostility and violence. While fully recognising freedom of expression, we believe in the importance of respecting all prophets, regardless of which religion they belong to. "The anguish of Muslims at the production of the film insulting Islam, posting of its trailer on the internet and other similar acts, is shared by all individuals and communities who refuse to allow religion to be used to fuel provocation, confrontation and extremism." The furore over the anti-Islam film and the cartoons has presented a tough challenge to authorities in Arab countries where popular uprisings have overthrown entrenched autocrats. In Libya, where militias that helped overthrow Muammar Gaddafi still wield much power, the foreign minister offered a further apology for the death of the US ambassador, Chris Stevens, to the visiting US deputy secretary of state, William Burns, on Thursday. Stevens and three other embassy staff died in an attack on the US consulate in the eastern city of Benghazi by gunmen among a crowd protesting against the film that denigrated the prophet.
 | | | | | | | | | |  | |  | |  |
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire