More homes evacuated in Western wildfires

An Erickson Air-Crane and a Chinook pass each other while fighting the Doce Fire near Prescott, Ariz., Wednesday, June 19, 2013. The wildfire that has burned nearly 8 square miles just west of Prescott had moved into people's backyards and has forced the evacuation of 460 homes. (AP Photo/The Arizona Republic, Pat Shannahan)

EVERGREEN, Colo. (AP) — Firefighters attacked dozens of blazes in Western states where hot and windy conditions persisted Thursday, including two blazes that forced hundreds of people out of their homes in Colorado.

Air and ground crews resumed work against a 500-acre fire in the Rocky Mountain foothills about 30 miles southwest of Denver that impacted more than 100 people. The Lime Gulch Fire, possibly triggered by lightning, threatened no structures in Pike National Forest.

In southern Colorado, a 300-acre fire in Huerfano County forced at least 175 people to stay at a Red Cross shelter at a high school.

In Arizona, firefighters braced for more hot, windy weather Thursday as they battled a wildfire in Prescott National Forest that scorched nearly 12 square miles. The blaze erupted Tuesday afternoon and led to the evacuation of 460 homes.

To the north, smoke from another fire that broke out Wednesday was visible from Grand Canyon National Park. No structures were immediately threatened.

A blaze in southern New Mexico's Gila National Forest has grown to 57 square miles just as firefighters finish setting up protections around a nearby historic mining town.

In Northern California, hundreds of residents returned home as crews aided by lower temperatures and higher humidity extended their lines around a wildfire near a main route into Yosemite National Park. Only about 50 homes on two mountain roads remained under evacuation orders, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection said. The fire, sparked Sunday by a campfire that wasn't fully put out, led to the evacuation of about 800 homes at its peak.

In Southern California, a nearly 6-square-mile fire in the San Bernardino National Forest was 83 percent contained.

The fire near Denver was burning in steep, heavily forested mountain terrain, south of where last year's Lower North Fork Fire damaged and destroyed 23 homes and killed three people. That fire was triggered by a prescribed burn that escaped containment lines.

Some residents said they were ready to leave in minutes, having practiced fire evacuations after the Lower North Fork Fire.

Karalyn Pytel was at home vacuuming when her husband called, saying he had received an alert on his cellphone telling the family to leave. She quickly grabbed her 6-year-old daughter's favorite blanket, a laptop computer, a jewelry box and some family heirlooms before fleeing.

"I grabbed a laundry basket and just threw stuff in it. I don't even know what clothes they are," Pytel said as she arrived at an evacuation center.

Firefighters were aided by two U.S. Air Force Reserve C-130s.

The planes also were used at a 22-square-mile wildfire near Colorado Springs that has destroyed 509 homes and killed two people since it started June 11.

In southwestern Colorado, two backcountry fires started by lightning last week and fueled by large swaths of beetle-killed trees swelled in Wednesday's heat and wind.

The largest, the West Fork Fire, nearly tripled in size to nearly 19 square miles, while the 700-acre Windy Pass Fire grew to within a quarter-mile of buildings on the south side of the Wolf Creek Ski Area. Firefighters have largely let the fires burn but were working to keep them away from the ski resort now that the area burning has fewer dead trees and some open spaces, fire spokeswoman Anne Jeffery said Thursday.

Some summer cabins are threatened by the fire, but no communities were in immediate danger.

In Colorado's northwest corner, an 850-acre wildfire in Rio Blanco County forced Encana Corp. to shut down oil and gas facilities, the Bureau of Land Management said. Firefighters protecting buildings at an Encana station spotted embers up to a half-mile away from the blaze.

Insight: Who wants to bet on a 'Nicaragua Canal'?

By Ivan Castro and Lomi Kriel

MANAGUA/PANAMA CITY (Reuters) - For centuries since the colonization of the New World, entrepreneurs have dreamed of building a canal spanning Nicaragua to make it easier to tap Asia's riches.

Sixteenth century Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes yearned to cleave the isthmus, and ever since, French, American and Dutch financiers have all made abortive, Quixotic attempts to bisect the Central American country's volcano-studded terrain.

Now it's the turn of the Chinese. And skepticism is as strong as ever.

The Hong Kong-based company that won a concession to design, build and manage a $40 billion canal to rival Panama's says it has been lured by an energy renaissance in the United States and its belief that world trade could double by 2030.

The company, HKND Group, was registered last year in the Cayman Islands. This would be its first infrastructure project, and its 40-year-old boss, Wang Jing, is relatively unknown.

There is still no firm route for the proposed canal, which would cost about four years' worth of Nicaragua's annual gross domestic product, and would likely be three times longer than the 48-mile (77-km) Panama Canal, which took a decade to build. Engineers also note that the geography poses some major challenges - not least a 20 foot tide differential between the two coasts.

For all those reasons, investors and infrastructure experts are highly dubious that a canal will ever be built.

"Are international shipping companies going to trust a one-guy shop with minor telecommunications experience to be the system integrator on a $40 billion project in a country whose transparency is already subject to question?", said Evan Ellis, a professor of national security studies at the U.S. Government's National Defense University.

Greg Miller, a shipping consultant at IHS Fairplay, a global maritime intelligence company, was also highly skeptical.

"The Nicaragua canal will never be built and the only people who'll financially profit from this proposal are the consultants paid to do the feasibility studies," he said.

Rosario Murillo, the wife of President Daniel Ortega and his government spokeswoman, said at a ceremony with Wang after the concession was granted: "This is a day of miracles, of wonders." Government officials declined to comment on skepticism that has emerged since then.

BETTING ON ENERGY BOOM

HKND Group is a unit of holding company the HK Nicaragua Canal Development Investment Co., Ltd. which was incorporated last year, according to the Hong Kong Companies Registry.

It bases its projections for the future success of a Nicaragua canal on the U.S. shale revolution, which has unlocked decades of oil and gas supply. If the United States wants to export more to Asia, the theory goes, it will need to send more and bigger ships from Gulf Coast refineries by canal to the Pacific, and Panama won't be able to handle it all.

"This project can be undertaken now, and only now, thanks to the discovery of prodigious amounts of gas and oil in the United States," said Ronald MacLean-Abaroa, HKND Group's spokesman, who is a former mayor of Bolivia's La Paz and one-time World Bank governance specialist.

"Three years ago that didn't exist," he told Reuters in an interview, saying the company would seek to raise private financing in Asia. On its website, the company also pointed to growth in U.S. exports of iron ore, coal and grains.

The Panama canal is already expanding to accommodate growth in traffic, and experts say the shale oil boom could benefit a Nicaraguan project, if it is ever completed.

Maersk Line, the world's largest container shipping company and the Panama Canal's top customer, has rerouted services from Asia to the East Coast of the United States via the Suez Canal. Its newest ships are too big for the Panama Canal, even after a third lane is built.

A spokesman for Maersk Line Central America and Caribbean said it was too early to speculate on the Nicaragua project, but it would be monitoring developments.

"We applaud bold initiatives that can boost the possibilities for container shipping for the benefit of both lines and our customers," Ariel Frias said.

Panama Canal officials have said it is too early to speculate on the viability of the Nicaraguan waterway or how it could affect trade.

OUT OF THE BLUE

Little is known about the Chinese lawyer and businessman behind the canal project, Wang Jing.

According to his identity card data, Wang was born in Beijing on December 24, 1972, but there is no information on him publicly available until 2010, when he became the head of the Xinwei Telecom Enterprise Group, a wireless communications company. Wang visited Nicaragua in 2012 and signed a wireless telecoms deal.

Xinwei's website says the group's core markets include public telecoms operations, public security, oil fields, power grids, water conservancy and transportation and emergency communication, and lists several subsidiaries in China, Hong Kong, Russia and Cyprus.

The site, which does not mention HKND Group, carries photographs of Xi Jinping, now China's president, and Li Keqiang, now premier, visiting Xinwei.

"Your future is very bright. Full of hope," the site quotes Li as saying of Xinwei, picturing Wang with the leader. It said the visit took place on December 21, 2010.

At Wang Jing's listed office in Hong Kong, a woman declined to say where he was. HKND Group's plush office takes up a large part of the 18th floor of Two International Finance Centre, which it occupied in May.

The office is large and brand new with a view of Victoria Harbor outside its floor-to-ceiling windows. Big LED screens by the front door play the company's promotional videos in a loop. The office was very quiet and few people were working there.

An HKND spokesperson contacted by email said Wang was not available to comment for this story.

The company has given little information on the practicalities of building the proposed canal. The concession simply lists a shipping canal, ports and terminals, an oil pipeline, a railway, free trade zones and an airport.

Unlike the Panama Canal, a canal cutting across Nicaragua could theoretically be built at sea level, without locks, but there is a problem with the tides at either end. The timing and height of the tides are different, meaning that the water level can be as much as 20 feet higher at one end.

"It means a lot of water is going to come from west to east," said J. David Rogers, professor or geological engineering at Missouri University of Science & Technology.

"Everybody would love to have a sea-level canal between the Pacific and the Atlantic," he said, adding that engineers would likely have to consider tidal weirs.

"I'm not saying you can't do it, but it has some major engineering challenges that have to be overcome, and if it's your first project, I wouldn't invest in it."

Environmentalists are concerned the project could contaminate Lake Nicaragua, Central America's largest reserve of fresh water, which would almost certainly be part of any route.

President Ortega said last week the government was going ahead with feasibility studies that should be done by 2015, when work on the canal could begin.

Under the terms of the concession, HKND Group would face no legal or economic sanctions for failing to complete the project.

"Who knows if this is actually going to happen or not, but it seems much more serious at this point. There's some real heavy-weights involved," said Margaret Myers, director of the China and Latin America program at the Washington D.C.-based Inter-American Dialogue.

She noted HKND Group says it is working with several respected international companies, including Environmental Resources Management, a leading sustainability consultancy, and consulting firm McKinsey & Company.

McKinsey declined to comment, citing client confidentiality. Environmental Resources Management confirmed it had been hired to do a study.

SHOW ME THE MONEY

Another open question is the financing.

Christopher Erckert is a partner at the U.S. Mayer Brown law firm, which advised the Panama Canal Authority in its $5.25 billion expansion. A specialist in Latin American project finance, he said the main risk would be if Nicaragua nationalized the canal in the future.

"Nicaragua is not an investment grade country. That's a fact," he said. "That makes this a speculative grade investment... which limits the kind of investors who can play."

Several project financiers Reuters spoke to, who asked not to be named, said they had seen no signs in the industry of interest in the project.

If the project does go ahead, it might depend on China's desire to flex its muscles in America's backyard.

Alfonso Guzman, managing director at Castalia Strategic Advisors, an international economic and financial advisory firm, said it was hard to see how the project would be commercially viable.

"The only way it can be viable is if someone like the Chinese government provides a lot of grants and low-cost money so that the cost of the project is low and the prices charged for using this canal are lower or comparable to what the Panama canal offers," he said.

(With reporting by Lomi Kriel in Panama City, Isabella Cota in San Jose; Krista Hughes, Gabriel Stargardter and Simon Gardner and Elinor Comlay in Mexico City, Jonathan Standing and Koh Guiqing in Beijing, Lavinia Mo, Anne Marie Roantree and James Pomfret in Hong Kong and Kristen Hays in Houston; Writing by Gabriel Stargardter and Simon Gardner; Editing by Claudia Parsons)

After a Two-Year Break, Iceland Starts Killing Whales Again

If you think whaling belongs to a time when the 19th-century English of Moby-Dick was actually spoken in pubs across England, you’d be right, but that doesn’t mean whaling rests in peace like Herman Melville.

Despite the 1986 International Whaling Commission’s moratorium on commercial whaling, Icelandresumed whaling off its shores in 2006. Then when Japan’s economy suffered after the earthquake and tsunami, whalers went on a two-year hiatus, since Japan is the main consumer of whale products. Now that the break is over, Iceland is at it again, setting itself a quota of about 180 fin whales, one of which, the first of the season, was taken at sea this week.

“The killing of an endangered fin whale makes it absolutely clear that years of international diplomatic efforts have failed, and that Iceland is determined to act as a rogue whaling nation, no matter the cost to this species, and to the country’s own tourism and seafood industries,” said Susan Millward, executive director of the Animal Welfare Institute.

“Contrary to statements from Icelandic government officials, these majestic animals, second in size only to blue whales, are not ‘Icelandic’; they belong to no one country” continued Millward. “Fin whales are highly migratory, endangered, and are protected under a number of international treaties.”

“Whaling is brutal and belongs to a bygone era, not the 21st century,” said John Sauven, director of Greenpeace U.K. “It is deeply regrettable that a single Icelandic whaler backed by the government is undermining the global ban on commercial whaling, which is there to secure the future of the world’s whales”

The Natural Resource Defense Council has begun a petition calling on the Obama Administration to impose economic sanctions on Icelandic whaling companies and companies with cooperate ties to them.

“No one should profit from the senseless slaughter of there magnificent creatures,” writes Taryn Klekow, a staff attorney at NRDC.

Iceland’s controversial resumption of whaling already gathered a great deal of negative publicity earlier in the year, when AWI showed that some of the meat from this endangered species was ending up as luxury dog treats in Japan. The Japanese company marketing these treats has since withdrawn them from the market in response to the overwhelming public outcry.

Related stories on TakePart:

• Japan Offers Bribes of Cash, Prostitutes for Whaling Votes

Watchdog faults background check of NSA leaker

WASHINGTON (AP) — A government watchdog testified Thursday there may have been problems with a security clearance background check conducted on the 29-year-old federal contractor who disclosed previously secret National Security Agency programs for collecting phone records and Internet data — just as news media disclosed more information about those programs.

Appearing at a Senate hearing, Patrick McFarland, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management's inspector general, said USIS, the company that conducted the background investigation of formerNSA systems analyst Edward Snowden, is now under investigation itself.

McFarland declined to say what triggered the inquiry of USIS or whether the probe is related to Snowden. But when asked by Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., if there were any concerns about the USIS background check on Snowden, McFarland answered: "Yes, we do believe that there may be some problems."

Meanwhile, new details emerged about the scope of two recently disclosed NSA programs — one that gathers U.S. phone records and another that is designed to track the use of U.S.-based Internet servers by foreigners with possible links to terrorism.

Two new documents published Thursday by The Guardian newspaper — one labeled "top secret" and the other "secret" — said NSA can keep copies of intercepted communications from or about U.S. citizens indefinitely if the material contains significant intelligence or evidence of crimes.

McFarland declined after the Senate hearing to describe to reporters the type of investigation his office is conducting. Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., said she was told the inquiry is a criminal investigation related "to USIS' systemic failure to adequately conduct investigations under its contract."

"We are limited in what we can say about this investigation because it is an ongoing criminal matter," said McCaskill, chairwoman of the Senate subcommittee on financial and contracting oversight. "But it is a reminder that background investigations can have real consequences for our national security."

McCaskill's panel conducted the hearing jointly with Tester's subcommittee on efficiency and effectiveness of federal programs.

USIS, based in Falls Church, Va., said in a statement that it has never been informed that it is under criminal investigation. USIS received a subpoena from the inspector general's office in January 2012 for records, the statement said. "USIS complied with that subpoena and has cooperated fully with the government's civil investigative efforts," according to the company.

USIS declined to comment on whether it conducted a background investigation of Snowden. The company said it performs thousands of background investigations each year for OPM and other government agencies. "These investigations are confidential and USIS does not comment on them," the USIS statement said.

The background check USIS performed on Snowden was done in 2011 and was part of periodic reinvestigations that are required for employees who hold security clearances, according to McFarland and Michelle Schmitz, the assistant inspector general for investigations at OPM.

Schmitz said the investigation of USIS commenced later in 2011.

Booz Allen Hamilton, the company where Snowden was working at the time of the disclosures, fired him for violations of the firm's code of ethics and firm policy. The company said he had been a Booz Allen employee for less than three months.

Snowden worked previously at the CIA and probably obtained his security clearance there. But like others who leave the government to join private contractors, he was able to keep his clearance after he left and began working for outside firms.

Of the 4.9 million people with clearance to access "confidential and secret" government information, 1.1 million, or 21 percent, work for outside contractors, according to a January report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Of the 1.4 million who have the higher "top secret" access, 483,000, or 34 percent, work for contractors.

OPM's Federal Investigative Services division performs almost all the background investigations for federal agencies and nearly 75 percent of the investigators who perform background checks are contractors, according to information on the agency's website.

At the hearing, McFarland called for much closer oversight of the investigators who conduct background checks. He said that 18 background investigators and record searchers have been criminally convicted since 2006 for fabricating information in background reports.

McFarland's office is actively working on 11 fabrication cases and another 36 cases involving background investigators are pending, according to data he provided to the subcommittees.

Of the 18 investigators who were criminally convicted, 11 were federal employees and seven were contractors. Of the 47 active and pending cases, six involve federal employees and 41 involve contractors, according to McFarland.

The new documents revealed by The Guardian were signed by Attorney General Eric Holder. They include point-by-point directions on how an NSA employee must work to determine that a person being targeted has not entered the United States. If NSA finds the target has entered the U.S., it will stop gathering phone and Internet data immediately, the documents say.

If supervisors determine that information on a U.S. person or a target who entered the U.S. was intentionally targeted, that information is destroyed, according to the documents.

But if a foreign target has conversations with an American or a U.S.-based person whom NSA supervisors determine is related to terrorism, or contains significant intelligence or evidence of crimes, that call or email or text message can be kept indefinitely. Encrypted communications also can be kept indefinitely, according the documents.

Administration officials had said the U.S. phone records NSA gathered could only be kept for five years. A fact sheet those officials provided to reporters mentioned no exceptions.

The documents outline fairly broad authority when the NSA monitors a foreigner's communications. For instance, if the monitored foreigner has been criminally indicted in the U.S. and is speaking to legal counsel, NSA has to cease monitoring the call. The agency, however, can log the call and mine it later so long as conversation protected by attorney-client privilege is not used in legal proceedings against the foreigner.

The NSA had no comment when asked about the newly revealed documents.

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