State Dept: Posts in 19 countries to remain closed

WASHINGTON (AP) — Amid online "chatter" about terror threats, U.S. diplomatic posts in 19 cities in the Muslim world will be closed at least through the end of this week, the State Department said.

Spokeswoman Jen Psaki said the decision to keep the embassies and consulates shuttered is a sign of an "abundance of caution" and is "not an indication of a new threat."

She said the continued closures are "merely an indication of our commitment to exercise caution and take appropriate steps to protect our employees, including local employees, and visitors to our facilities."

Diplomatic facilities will remain closed in Egypt, Jordan, Libya, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, among other countries, through Saturday, Aug. 10. The State Department announcement Sunday added closures of four African sites, in Madagascar, Burundi, Rwanda and Mauritius.

The U.S. has also decided to reopen some posts on Monday, including those in Kabul, Afghanistan, and Baghdad.

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Map shows U.S. embassies and consulates that will close; 3c x 3 inches; 146 mm x 76 mm;

The Obama administration announced Friday that the posts would be closed over the weekend and the State Department announced a global travel alert, warning that al-Qaida or its allies might target either U.S. government or private American interests.

The intercepted intelligence foreshadowing an attack on U.S. or Western interests is evidence of one of the gravest threats to the United States since 9/11, according to several lawmakers who made the rounds on the Sunday talk shows.

"This is the most serious threat that I've seen in the last several years," Sen. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia told NBC's "Meet the Press Sunday. "Chatter means conversation among terrorists about the planning that's going on — very reminiscent of what we saw pre-9/11."

Chambliss, the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said it was that chatter that prompted the Obama administration to order the Sunday closure of 22 embassies and consulates and issue the travel warning.

Rep. C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger of Maryland, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told ABC's "This Week" that the threat intercepted from "high-level people in al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula" was about a "major attack."

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A Yemeni soldier inspects a car at a checkpoint on a street leading to the U.S. embassy in Sanaa, Ye …

Yemen is home to al-Qaida's most dangerous affiliate, blamed for several notable terrorist plots on the United States. They include the foiled Christmas Day 2009 effort to bomb an airliner over Detroit and the explosives-laden parcels intercepted the following year aboard cargo flights.

Rep. Peter King, the New York Republican who leads the House Homeland Security subcommittee on counterterrorism and intelligence, told ABC the threat "was specific as to how enormous it was going to be and also that certain dates were given."

The Obama administration's decision to close the embassies and the lawmakers' general discussion about the threats and the related intelligence discoveries come at a sensitive time as the government tries to defend recently disclosed surveillance programs that have stirred deep privacy concerns and raised the potential of the first serious retrenchment in terrorism-fighting efforts since Sept. 11.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., has scoffed at the assertion by the head of the National Security Agency that government methods used to collect telephone and email data have helped foil 54 terror plots.

Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., a House Intelligence Committee member, said while he takes the threat seriously he hasn't seen any evidence linking the latest warnings to that agency's collection of "vast amounts of domestic data."

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A ,man walks past the U.S Embassy in Tel Aviv, Israel, Sunday, Aug. 4, 2013. The threat of a terrori …

Other lawmakers defended the administration's response and promoted the work of the NSA in unearthing the intelligence that led to the security warnings.

King, a frequent critic of President Barack Obama, said: "Whether or not there was any controversy over the NSA at all, all these actions would have been taken."

On Friday, the White House announced the weekend closures and the State Department announced a global travel alert.

The warning urged American travelers to take extra precautions overseas, citing potential dangers involved with public transportation systems and other prime sites for tourists.

It noted that previous terrorist attacks have centered on subway and rail networks as well as airplanes and boats. It suggested travelers sign up for State Department alerts and register with U.S. consulates in the countries they visit. The alert expires Aug. 31.

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A Yemeni soldier stops a car at a checkpoint in a street leading to the U.S. embassy in Sanaa, Yemen …

The intelligence intercepts also prompted Britain, Germany and France to close their embassies in Yemen on Sunday and Monday. British authorities said some embassy staff in Yemen had been withdrawn "due to security concerns."

Interpol, the French-based international policy agency, has also issued a global security alert in connection with suspected al-Qaida involvement in several recent prison escapes including those in Iraq, Libya and Pakistan.

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Associated Press writer Michele Salcedo contributed to this report.

Diplomatic posts in 19 cities will remain closed amid what one lawmaker calls the "most serious threat" in years.

Revealed: Bush and Blair Helped Gaddafi Avoid US$1.5bn Legal Payment For UTA Flight 772

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A view of the destroyed roof of the No.3 reactor building of Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO)'s tsunami-crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is seen in Fukushima prefecture February 20, 2012. REUTERS/Issei Kato

By Antoni Slodkowski and Mari Saito

TOKYO (Reuters) - Highly radioactive water seeping into the ocean from Japan's crippled Fukushima nuclear plant is creating an "emergency" that the operator is struggling to contain, an official from the country's nuclear watchdog said on Monday.

This contaminated groundwater has breached an underground barrier, is rising toward the surface and is exceeding legal limits of radioactive discharge, Shinji Kinjo, head of a Nuclear Regulatory Authority (NRA) task force, told Reuters.

Countermeasures planned by Tokyo Electric Power Co are only a temporary solution, he said.

Tepco's "sense of crisis is weak," Kinjo said. "This is why you can't just leave it up to Tepco alone" to grapple with the ongoing disaster.

"Right now, we have an emergency," he said.

Tepco has been widely castigated for its failure to prepare for the massive 2011 tsunami and earthquake that devastated its Fukushima plant and lambasted for its inept response to the reactor meltdowns. It has also been accused of covering up shortcomings.

It was not immediately clear how much of a threat the contaminated groundwater could pose. In the early weeks of the disaster, the Japanese government allowed Tepco to dump tens of thousands of metric tons of contaminated water into the Pacific in an emergency move.

The toxic water release was however heavily criticized by neighboring countries as well as local fishermen and the utility has since promised it would not dump irradiated water without the consent of local townships.

"Until we know the exact density and volume of the water that's flowing out, I honestly can't speculate on the impact on the sea," said Mitsuo Uematsu from the Center for International Collaboration, Atmosphere and Ocean Research Institute at the University of Tokyo.

"We also should check what the levels are like in the sea water. If it's only inside the port and it's not flowing out into the sea, it may not spread as widely as some fear."

NO OTHER OUTLET FOR WATER

Tepco said it is taking various measures to prevent contaminated water from leaking into the bay near the plant. In an e-mailed statement to Reuters, a company spokesman said Tepco deeply apologized to residents in Fukushima prefecture, the surrounding region and the larger public for causing inconveniences, worries and trouble.

The utility pumps out some 400 metric tons a day of groundwater flowing from the hills above the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant into the basements of the destroyed buildings, which mixes with highly irradiated water that is used to cool the reactors in a stable state below 100 degrees Celsius.

Tepco is trying to prevent groundwater from reaching the plant by building a "bypass" but recent spikes of radioactive elements in sea water has prompted the utility to reverse months of denials and finally admit that tainted water is reaching the sea.

In a bid to prevent more leaks into the bay of the Pacific Ocean, plant workers created the underground barrier by injecting chemicals to harden the ground along the shoreline of the No. 1 reactor building. But that barrier is only effective in solidifying the ground at least 1.8 meters below the surface.

By breaching the barrier, the water can seep through the shallow areas of earth into the nearby sea. More seriously, it is rising toward the surface - a break of which would accelerate the outflow.

"If you build a wall, of course the water is going to accumulate there. And there is no other way for the water to go but up or sideways and eventually lead to the ocean," said Masashi Goto, a retired Toshiba Corp nuclear engineer who worked on several Tepco plants. "So now, the question is how long do we have?"

Contaminated water could rise to the ground's surface within three weeks, the Asahi Shimbun said on Saturday. Kinjo said the three-week timeline was not based on NRA's calculations but acknowledged that if the water reaches the surface, "it would flow extremely fast."

A Tepco official said on Monday the company plans to start pumping out a further 100 metric tons of groundwater a day around the end of the week.

The regulatory task force overseeing accident measures of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station, which met Friday, "concluded that new measures are needed to stop the water from flowing into the sea that way," Kinjo said.

Tepco said on Friday that a cumulative 20 trillion to 40 trillion becquerels of radioactive tritium had probably leaked into the sea since the disaster. The company said this was within legal limits.

Tritium is far less harmful than cesium and strontium, which have also been released from the plant. Tepco is scheduled to test strontium levels next.

The admission on the long-term tritium leaks, as well as renewed criticism from the regulator, show the precarious state of the $11 billion cleanup and Tepco's challenge to fix a fundamental problem: How to prevent water, tainted with radioactive elements like cesium, from flowing into the ocean.

(Additional reporting by Kentaro Hamada; Editing by Edmund Klamann and Raju Gopalakrishnan)

LONDON (Reuters) - British prompt gas prices rose on Monday as summer maintenance outages reduced output from North Sea fields, leaving the UK gas market undersupplied.

The within-day gas contract added 0.50 pence to 65.75 pence per therm, while day-ahead gas traded at 65.35 pence, up 0.65 on Friday's closing level.

Britain's gas market was around 5 million cubic metres per day (mcm/d) short of supply on Monday morning, National Grid data showed, after maintenance work cut flows through the Bacton Seal, St. Fergus and Teesside terminals.

"There also seems to be a trip in Norway," one UK gas trader at a utility said, referring to an unplanned production cut announced by Norway's Statoil.

Output was set to be reduced by 8.6 mcm/d until midday on Monday, Statoil said in a market message.

Britain's storage levels remained well below the same time last year, but sites were gaining stock steadily.

Britain's largest storage site at Rough was 69 percent full on Sunday, compared with 95 percent the same time last year, Thomson Reuters Commodities data showed.

Three liquefied natural gas (LNG) deliveries are scheduled to arrive in Britain over the coming week, with a rare cargo from Algeria expected at the Isle of Grain terminal on Tuesday.

Front-month September rose in line with the bullish prompt, adding 0.50 pence on its previous close to 65.30 pence.

A fall in crude prices on Monday morning led to losses on the benchmark front-season gas contract.

The winter 2013 contract traded down 0.90 pence to 71.60 pence, after Brent crude slipped back below the $109 per barrel level.

In Britain's over-the-counter power market prices rose mildly on the back of the strong gas market but gains were limited by a healthy power supply picture.

All of Britain's nuclear power units were generating power again on Monday following the restart of the 620-megawatt (MW) Hartlepool 1 unit.

Day-ahead baseload power rose 30 pence to 48.45 pounds per megwatt-hour.

Analysts at Marex Spectron expected that temperatures around seasonal averages could lift demand for cooling in Britain, which is fuelled by electricity.

"Showery conditions are expected to continue this week, but temperatures around the seasonal average could support the air-cooling load," they said in a report.

(Reporting by Karolin Schaps; editing by Keiron Henderson)