Soon after he won the White House, President Obama declared to the world, “The interests that we share as human beings are far more powerful than the forces that drive us apart.” It was a hopeful sentiment, one aimed at reversing a conflict-based way of thinking that had long pervaded American politics and foreign policy.

Yet an us-versus-them mentality seems to have been par for the course among United States spy agencies, starting long before the Obama era. Revelations by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden allege that the NSA tapped the cellphones of as many as 35 world leaders, even German Chancellor Angela Merkel, a close ally.

The excuses for this high-level spying do not fit the normal “everybody does it” rationale among nations. Electronic snooping of an ally’s personal phone is particularly invasive and unnecessary. It hints at paranoia and pessimism run amuck, even in a post-9/11 threat environment. It harks back to the days of Watergate and McCarthyism.

As Mr. Obama now tries to restore trust in the US, he must tell his security officials to be careful in not accepting the view that all people should be pigeonholed into a class or grouping, such as friend or foe. That can easily lead to an oversimplified, black-and-white mode of operation that creates enemies more imagined than real. And it certainly does not reflect Obama’s view that humans share more interests than the forces that drive them apart.

Human beings are too complex and varied to be stuffed into a label that is then considered determinative of how they will behave. Men are not always from Mars, for example, nor women from Venus. A person’s identity lies in individual qualities of thought, not an assemblage of perceptions about them in a mass grouping based on past behavior.

Sifting people into categories is a way to polarize them by “the other” and set everyone up for conflict. While much of written history assumes that change comes out of conflicts over differences – barbarian versus civilized, Christians versus Muslim, women versus men – the fact is that progress has been achieved more through cooperation than by contention.

“Human relations are ... about blending, borrowing, interacting, and interconnecting,” says British historian David Cannadine. “A divided past is in fact only part of the human story. It may be the one that makes the headlines, but, arguably, it’s not the only one and it’s probably not the most important one either.”

Journalists are particularly prone to typecast people into gender, social class, religion, nationality, or even race and ethnicity, a tendency made stronger as the news business struggles to retain audiences. Such an unexamined bias, for example, has led more TV news stations to compartmentalize themselves into liberal (MSNBC) and conservative (Fox News), even though Americans tend to mix and match their political views.

Most people prefer to affirm their individuality while discovering and building their common humanity. They don’t see the world as only a “clash of civilizations” or a Manichean struggle between good and evil.

Language by its very nature tends towards labels. That tendency, while helpful at times, can often mislead.

As Obama now seeks to change how US intelligence agencies select targets for surveillance, he must insist they resist the “impulse ... to sunder all the peoples of the world into belligerent collectivities,” as historian Cannadine states. A balanced view is needed by taking into account people’s commonalities as well as their contrasts.

“I note the obvious differences between each form and type,” wrote poet Maya Angelou. “But we are more alike, my friends, than we are unalike.”

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Washington (AFP) - The United States flatly denied Sunday that President Barack Obama had been informed years ago that US spy agencies were monitoring German Chancellor Angela Merkel's phone calls.

German media reported that eavesdropping on Merkel's phone may have started in 2002, when she was Germany's main opposition leader and three years before she became chancellor.

The National Security Agency stopped spying on Merkel after the White House learned of the snooping in an internal mid-year review, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday, the first public acknowledgement that there was US eavesdropping.

The review , which the president ordered in August, showed that the NSA had tapped the phones of some 35 world leaders. The White House ended programs tracking several of the leaders including Merkel, according to the Journal.

US intelligence sources told Germany's Bild am Sonntag newspaper that NSA chief General Keith Alexander had briefed Obama on the operation against Merkel in 2010.

"Obama did not halt the operation but rather let it continue," an unnamed high-ranking NSA official told the newspaper.

Documents leaked by fugitive US defense contractor Edward Snowden showed that Merkel's phone had appeared on a list of spying targets for more than a decade, and was still under surveillance weeks before Obama visited Berlin in June, German news weekly Der Spiegel reported.

NSA spokeswoman Vanee Vines however denied the Alexander briefing claims.

Alexander "did not discuss with President Obama in 2010 an alleged foreign intelligence operation involving German Chancellor Merkel, nor has he ever discussed alleged operations involving Chancellor Merkel," Vines said on Sunday.

"News reports claiming otherwise are not true," she said.

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US President Barack Obama walks with daughter Malia after attending Sunday services at Saint John's …

According to the Journal, Obama was "briefed on and approved of broader intelligence-collection 'priorities,'" but deputies decided on specific intelligence targets because it would have been impractical to brief the president on all of eavesdropping operations.

"These decisions are made at NSA," the unnamed official told the Journal. "The president doesn't sign off on this stuff."

However ending a surveillance program is complicated because a world leader like Merkel may be communicating with another leader that Washington is monitoring, officials told the newspaper.

"Today's world is highly interconnected, and the flow of large amounts of data is unprecedented," National Security Council spokesperson Caitlin Hayden told AFP via e-mail.

"That's why the president has directed us to review our surveillance capabilities, including when it comes to our closest foreign partners and allies."

The review is looking at intelligence gathering methods "to ensure that we properly account for the security concerns of our citizens and allies," privacy concerns, "and to ensure that our intelligence resources most effectively support our foreign policy and national security objectives," she said.

The leaked Snowden documents indicate that US spy agencies accessed the electronic communications of dozens of world leaders and possibly millions of foreign nationals.

Obama should "stop apologizing"

US lawmakers on Sunday sought to play down the scandal.

Representative Peter King, a Republican who chairs the House Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence, said Obama should "stop apologizing" about the NSA phone-tapping, claiming the programs had saved "thousands" of lives.

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Demonstrators hold placards supporting former US intelligence analyst Edward Snowden during a protes …

And House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, a fellow Republican, told CNN: "The bigger news story here would be . . . if the United States intelligence services weren't trying to collect information that would protect US interests both (at) home and abroad."

Merkel confronted Obama over the allegations in a phone call Wednesday, saying that if true it would be a "breach of trust".

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung said Obama told Merkel in the call that he had been unaware of spying against her, while Spiegel said he assured her that he would stop the operation at once.

Merkel's office declined to comment on what Obama said.

The White House has said it is not monitoring Merkel's phone calls and will not do so in future, but refused to say whether it did so previously.

Bild said Obama wanted to be informed about Merkel, who has played a decisive role in the eurozone debt crisis and is seen as Europe's most powerful leader.

As a result, the NSA stepped up its surveillance, targeting the mobile phone she uses to communicate with her conservative Christian Democratic Union party and her encrypted official device.

Bild said US agents monitored her conversations and her text messages, but that her secure office land line was out of reach.

According to the report, the NSA sent the intelligence gathered straight to the White House, bypassing the agency's headquarters.

Bild said Merkel's predecessor Gerhard Schroeder was also in the NSA's sights because of his opposition to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and his close relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Merkel's deputy spokesman Georg Streiter said Friday that "high-ranking government representatives" will soon travel to Washington to discuss the spying allegations.

German media reported that the delegation will include top officials from the German secret service.

U.S. denies Obama knew about Merkel spying

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People walk along the promenade as waves crash against the seafront at Dawlish in Devon, south west England October 28, 2013. REUTERS/Stefan Wermuth

By Marie-Louise Gumuchian and Rhys Jones

LONDON (Reuters) - A strong storm battered Britain and the Netherlands on Monday, killing three people, cutting power and forcing hundreds of plane and train cancellations as it moved on across mainland Europe.

Winds of up to 99 miles per hour (160 km per hour) lashed southern England and Wales, disrupting the travel plans of millions of commuters - the worst storm recorded in Britain in a decade.

A 17-year-old girl was killed when a tree fell onto her home while she slept in the county of Kent, southeast of London, while a man in his 50s was killed when a tree crushed his car in the town of Watford, just north of the capital.

Thin volumes on London's financial markets suggested many traders had been stuck at home. A crane smashed into the Cabinet Office, a ministry in the heart of London, forcing Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg to cancel a press conference.

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Emergency services work at the scene of a fallen tree at Bath road in Hounslow, west London October …

Heavy winds also swept across the low-lying Netherlands, uprooting trees and shutting down all train traffic to Amsterdam. They were forecast to peak at more than 130 kph by early afternoon.

A woman was killed and two people were seriously hurt by falling trees in the Dutch capital and a ferry carrying 1,000 people from the English city of Newcastle was unable to dock in the port of IJmuiden and returned to sea, RTL television said.

Fifty flights at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport were cancelled and Rotterdam Port, Europe's busiest, said incoming and outgoing vessels were delayed.

In France, winds topping 100 kph struck the north and northwest, felling trees, whipping up seas and cutting power supplies to around 75,000 homes, according to the ERDF electricity distribution company.

"The thing that's unusual about this one is that most of our storms develop out over the Atlantic so that they've done all their strengthening and deepening by the time they reach us," said Helen Chivers, spokeswoman for Britain's Met office on Sunday.

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Emergency services work at the scene of a fallen tree at Bath Road in Hounslow, west London October …

"This one is developing as it crosses the UK, which is why it brings the potential for significant disruption ... and that doesn't happen very often."

The worst of the storm in Britain had passed by late morning, despite strong winds still battering the east coast, a Met Office spokeswoman said. It was headed towards the Netherlands.

TRADING HIT

London-based trading in sterling against the dollar and the euro was particularly hit, with volumes at around two thirds of normal levels, while British government bond trading was running at barely half its normal volume.

In southern England, toppled trees damaged properties and flooding made some roads impassable.

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Theo Harcourt, a 13-year-old student, jumps over a fallen tree as he makes his way to school in Isli …

About 180,000 customers in Britain were left without power in one of the worst storms to hit England since the 1987 "Great Storm" which killed 18 people and felled around 15 million trees.

A 14-year old boy was missing after being swept out to sea on Sunday afternoon before the storm hit. Police said rescuers were forced to call off a search for him late on Sunday due to the pounding waves.

London's Heathrow airport said 130 flights were cancelled, the majority between 0600 and 1100 GMT and told passengers to check with their airlines before travelling.

As the working week began, London's commuter train service was shut down while several Tube lines, which run both underground and overground, were partially suspended due to obstructed tracks.

The Highways Agency, which operates the road network in England, said high winds had forced the closure of the Dartford Crossing, a major motorway bridge linking London to the county of Essex in the east. The Severn motorway bridge linking England to South Wales was also shut down.

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Emergency services work at the scene of a fallen tree at Bath Road in Hounslow, west London October …

Met Office spokesman Dan Williams said the last such comparable storm - taking into consideration the time of year and area affected - was in October 2002.

(Additional reporting by Andrew Osborn, Guy Faulconbridge, Estelle Shirbon, Joshua Franklin in London, Anthony Deutsch in Amsterdam and Brian Love in Paris; Writing by Marie-Louise Gumuchian; Editing by Andrew Heavens)


Britain battered by its worst storm in years

The Netherlands and France were also affected by flooding and winds that reached 99 mph.
See dramatic photos

NEW YORK — Members of the United Nations met with distinguished astronauts and cosmonauts this week in New York to begin implementing the first-ever international contingency plan for defending Earth against catastrophic asteroid strikes.

Six of the space travelers involved in these U.N. discussions discussed the asteroid defense effort Friday (Oct. 25) in a news conference hosted by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson at the American Museum of Natural History. Their goal: to drive home the very-real threats posed by near-Earth objects (NEOs), or asteroids traveling within the radius of Earth's orbit with the sun. You can see a video of the asteroid defense discussion here.

Scientists estimate that there are roughly 1 million near-Earth asteroids that could potentially pose a threat to the planet, but only a small fraction of these have actually been detected by telescopes. There are about 100 times more asteroids lurking in space than have ever been located, said Edward Lu, a former NASA astronaut and co-founder of the non-profit B612 Foundation advocating asteroid defense strategies. "Our challenge is to find these asteroids first, before they find us," Lu said. [Photos: Potentially Dangerous Asteroids Up Close]

To help achieve this goal, Lu co-founded an organization called the B612 Foundation in 2002. Today, the group is developing a privately built infrared space telescope — called the Sentinel Space Telescope — with the sole purpose of locating threatening asteroids. The foundation hopes to launch the telescope by 2018.

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This NASA graphic shows the orbits of all the known Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs), numberin …

The Sentinel telescope will help space agencies identify threatening near-Earth objects years before they hit Earth, providing governments and space agencies with enough time to take action, Lu and his colleagues said. Such action would entail deploying a spacecraft — or multiple spacecrafts, depending on the size of the space rock — toward the asteroid in order to smack it off course.

The technology and funds to deflect an asteroid in this way already exist, the panel explained, but the Association of Space Explorers, a group that includes active and retired astronauts, decided to involve the United Nations in their decision-making efforts to avoid nationally biased action in the event of an emergency.

"The question is, which way do you move [the asteroid]?" former NASA astronaut and B612 co-founder Russell Schweickart said in the news conference. "If something goes wrong in the middle of the deflection, you have now caused havoc in some other nation that was not at risk. And, therefore, this decision of what to do, how to do it and what systems to use have to be coordinated internationally. That's why we took this to the United Nations."

The panel hopes that the discussions with the United Nations this week —which extend from discussions dating back to 2008, when the panel presented the United Nations with the first draft of a report titled "Asteroid Threats: A Call for Global Response" —will improve public awareness of the threats at hand, and encourage policymakers to develop plans and appoint leaders to deal with threats in a timely manner.

The explosion of a truck-size asteroid over Chelyabinsk, Russia, this past February —which blew out windows throughout the entire city and injured more than 1,000 people —helped draw public attention to what the panelists described as the often-overlooked and underappreciated threat to the planet.

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An artist's illustration of a massive asteroid impact on earth. Some single-celled organisms may be …

"It did make a difference in policymakers realizing that this is not just a science-fiction concept, or something that will happen in 100 or 500 years in the future," Thomas Jones, former NASA astronaut and senior research scientist at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, told SPACE.com at the news conference. "The fact that it happened right now, I think, enforced the reality."

The recommendations that the group presented to the United Nations this week provide an outline of what governments will ultimately implement in the event of an emergency. However, the details of these recommendations are still in the works, Schweickart said.

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Follow Laura Poppick on Twitter. Follow SPACE.com on Twitter, Facebook and Google+. Original article on SPACE.com.

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — A federal judge has determined that new Texas abortion restrictions violate the U.S. Constitution, a ruling that keeps open — at least for now — dozens of abortion clinics that were set to halt operations Tuesday had key parts of the law taken effect.

In a decision released Monday that the state is certain to appeal, District Judge Lee Yeakel wrote that the regulations requiring doctors to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital creates an undue obstacle to women seeking an abortion.

"The admitting-privileges provision of House Bill 2 does not bear a rational relationship to the legitimate right of the state in preserving and promoting fetal life or a woman's health and, in any event, places a substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking an abortion of a nonviable fetus and is thus an undue burden to her," he wrote.

While Yeakel found that the state could regulate how a doctor prescribes an abortion-inducing pill, he said the law did not allow for a doctor to adjust treatment taken in order to best protect the health of the woman taking it. Therefore he blocked the provision requiring doctors to follow U.S. Food and Drug Administration protocol for the pills in all instances.

"The medication abortion provision may not be enforced against any physician who determines, in appropriate medical judgment, to perform the medication-abortion using off-label protocol for the preservation of the life or health of the mother," Yeakel, appointed by President George W. Bush, wrote.

Lawyers for Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers that brought the lawsuit had argued the requirement that doctors have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of the abortion clinic would force the closure of a third of the clinics in Texas. They also complained that requiring doctors to follow the FDA's original label for an abortion-inducing drug would deny women the benefit of recent advances in medical science.

Chaos and Filibuster Kills Texas Abortion BillPlay video."

Other portions of the law, known as House Bill 2, include a ban on abortions after 20 weeks and a requirement beginning in October 2014 that all abortions take place in a surgical facility. Neither of those sections was part of this lawsuit.

Amy Hagstrom Miller, president of Whole Woman's Health, celebrated the victory on admitting privileges but said the judge did not go far enough in overturning the requirement that doctors follow an 18-year-old protocol in prescribing medical abortions.

"Nearly 40 percent of the women we serve at Whole Woman's Health choose medication abortion and now Texas is preventing these women from the advances in medical practice that other women across the United States will be able to access," she said. "These restrictions are not based on sound medical practice."

The Texas attorney general's office had argued that the law protects women and the life of the fetus. Attorney General Greg Abbott was expected to file an emergency appeal of Yeakel's order to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans.

"Today's decision will not stop our ongoing efforts to protect life and ensure the women of our state aren't exposed to any more of the abortion-mill horror stories that have made headlines recently," Republican Gov. Rick Perry said in a statement. "We will continue fighting to implement the laws passed by the duly-elected officials of our state, laws that reflect the will and values of Texans."

The law requiring admitting privileges was the biggest obstacle facing abortion clinics in Texas, and the ruling gives them a temporary reprieve until new regulations go into effect next year.

A Walk in Wendy Davis' Shoes: The Woman Behind the …Play video."

Mississippi passed a similar law last year, which a federal judge also blocked pending a trial scheduled to begin in March. Mississippi's attorney general asked the 5th Circuit to lift the temporary injunction so the law could be enforced, but the judges have left it in place signaling they believe there is a legitimate constitutional question.

Unlike the Mississippi case, Yeakel's order is a final decision, setting the groundwork for the 5th Circuit to review the merits of the law, not just an injunction against it.

The proposed restrictions were among the toughest in the nation and gained notoriety when Democratic state Sen. Wendy Davis launched a nearly 13-hour filibuster against them in June. The law also bans abortions at 20 weeks of pregnancy and beginning in October 2014 requires doctors to perform all abortions in surgical facilities.

The filibuster forced Gov. Rick Perry to call a second special legislative session for the Republican-controlled Legislature to pass the law. Davis is now running for governor on a women's rights platform. Since Perry is retiring, Abbott is Davis' likely Republican opponent, adding a political layer to the legal drama.

During the trial, officials for one chain of abortion clinics testified that they've tried to obtain admitting privileges for their doctors at 32 hospitals, but so far only 15 accepted applications and none have announced a decision. Many hospitals with religious affiliations will not allow abortion doctors to work there, while others fear protests if they provide privileges. Many have requirements that doctors live within a certain radius of the facility, or perform a minimum number of surgeries a year that must be performed in a hospital.

Beth Shapiro, chairwoman of board of directors of Lubbock's Planned Parenthood Women's Health Center, said no hospital in Lubbock has granted privileges to the lone doctor from East Texas who flies in to do abortions when there are procedures scheduled. There is not incentive for hospitals to do so, she said.

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Protesters gather outside W.G. Thomas Coliseum in Haltom City, Texas October 3, 2013, where Wendy Da …

"I don't see why local hospitals would give privileges to someone who's not going to admit patients," Shapiro said. "I don't see what the business and financial incentive would be. ...it's "more work and not going to increase patient load."

Hospitals are required to do yearly reviews on physicians to keep accreditation up to date, she said.

Shapiro said she wasn't aware of a woman getting an abortion in Lubbock who had complications and needed hospital care.

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AP correspondent Betsy Blaney contributed to this story from Lubbock.

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Follow Chris Tomlinson on Twitter at http://twitter.com/cltomlinson

A federal judge's decision will halt new restrictions passed by the state from going into effect this week.
Ruling is final