MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia's Federal Security Service has detained four men it says are members of the Ukrainian nationalist organization Right Sector on suspicion of plotting bomb attacks in Crimea, a charge denied by the group.

The four are suspected of involvement in two arson attacks in April on the Black Sea peninsula, annexed by Russia from Ukraine in March, the FSB said in a statement on Friday.

It said the suspects were also part of a group accused of plotting two bomb attacks during World War Two commemorations in Crimea in early May although neither took place, and that explosive materials and arms had been found in their homes.

Right Sector played a role in protests that toppled Ukraine's Russia-friendly president in February, and the group is often a target of accusations by Russian officials and media.

In Kiev, the group said it was checking whether those detained had any link to the group and dismissed the allegation that it was involved in such attacks as "a blatant lie".

"Right Sector operates according to the Ukrainian law," said Artem Skoropadsky, Right Sector's press secretary. "Right Sector has never planned, is not planning and never will plan terrorist acts."

He described the accusations as propaganda and a provocation by the FSB, a successor to the Soviet-era KGB.

Itar-Tass news agency said the FSB was investigating plans for attacks in the cities of Simferopol, Sevastopol and Yalta, and said targets included power lines and railway bridges.

Russia's state-run First Channel television showed FSB footage of three suspects and said they had been brought to the Lefortovo pre-trial detention center in Moscow.

(Reporting by Steve Gutterman in Moscow and Natalia Zinets in Kiev, Writing by Steve Gutterman, Editing by Timothy Heritage and Alison Williams)

Wochit

Rape Victim's Mother Attacked In Northern India

JERUSALEM (AP) — Israeli troops manning a checkpoint inside the West Bank on Friday caught a would-be Palestinian suicide bomber en route to an attack after being alerted by the fact that he was wearing a heavy coat on a hot day.

Soldiers called on the man to stop, and a search revealed explosives connected with wires strapped around his torso, Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, a military spokesman, said. The man told the soldiers he had intended to carry out a suicide bombing. The explosive belt was later detonated by military sappers.

Lerner said it was not yet known whether the man was acting alone or if he belonged to a Palestinian group like Hamas or Islamic Jihad, which carried out suicide bombings on buses and in cafes in the years that followed the Palestinian uprising, or Intifada, in 2000. Lerner said it was also not clear what the intended target was.

He said it has been years since a suicide bomber was detained, but the military has reported scores of shooting and stabbing attacks in the West Bank in recent years.

The incident occurred at a checkpoint south of Nablus in the northern part of the West Bank, which Israel captured from Jordan in the 1967 war. Palestinians are demanding the territory along with east Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip for their future state.

Talks aimed at resolving the conflict by establishing a Palestinian state alongside Israel collapsed last month.

South Korean President Park Geun-hye warned this week that if North Korea conducts another nuclear test, it could prompt the volatile country's neighbors to seek their own nuclear defense. "North Korea would effectively be crossing the Rubicon," she told the Wall Street Journal.

North Korea's last nuclear test, which took place in 2013, prompted increased Western sanctions against the country and escalating tensions between Pyongyang and its rivals. At the height of the tensions, North Korea temporarily shuttered an industrial complex that it operates jointly with South Korea, harming its own economy in the process, and offered repeated invectives against Seoul and Washington. Now, however, Western officials fear that the next round of tests could prove more threatening to the North's neighbors.

Back in March, North Korea threatened to carry out a "new form" of nuclear testing. The country's foreign ministry didn't offer more specifics, but some in the west suspect this means they will test out small nuclear devices that could be carried by intercontinental ballistic missiles. According to the WSJ, some experts fear that another test — the nation's fourth ever — would enable North Korea to successfully develop such weapons. Most experts believe they have working nuclear weapons, but still lack the capacity to deliver them via rocket.

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Park thinks that this would prompt neighbors, like Japan and (presumably) South Korea itself, to explore their own nuclear options further. "It would be difficult for us to prevent a nuclear domino from occurring in this area," she said.

Even China, North Korea's only significant ally, agreed that the situation is threatening. South Korea's foreign ministry said in anticipation of a visit from their Chinese counterpart that "the two ministers agreed to step up cooperation based on the united position that they object to the North's nuclear test and that recent nuclear activities by the North pose a serious threat to the peace and stability of the Korean peninsula and the region." Chinese President Xi Jinping is expected be the first to visit South Korea before taking a trip to the North.

The relationship between North and South Korea has been especially rocky in recent weeks. In April, the North’s Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea — which is supposedly tasked with actual reconciliation — referred to Park as a "dirty prostitute" and a "comfort woman," after she met with President Barack Obama. And two weeks ago, theNorth threatened to "wipe out" the South Korean government. To be fair, a South Korean official had just said the North "must disappear soon."

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But South Koreans appear to be hopeful that ties between the neighbors could be restored. According to the country's Yonhap news agency, a survey of 1,000 people found that 58.2 percent of respondents thought South Korea should cooperate with North Korea, and 22.8 percent said Seoul should provide assistance to its neighbor.

In other news, North Korean scientists have apparently developed a mushroom-based sports drink, which is "very effective in enhancing physical ability of sportspersons and recovering from their fatigues.” Just what you need when preparing for all-out regional war.

This article was originally published at http://www.thewire.com/global/2014/05/north-koreas-next-nuclear-test-could-serve-as-a-regional-tipping-point/371878/

NSA Releases Snowden Email He Told NBC About – After NSA Denied its Existence

NBC’s Brian Williams and Edward Snowden, excerpted from the May 28, 2014 TV primetime special. (AFP Photo)

From RT.com – May 29, 2014 – http://tinyurl.com/ohgfdp4

Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden did raise questions with top NSA lawyers, the agency admitted on Thursday. Snowden responded by saying the released emails are incomplete, and that NSA misdirection “raises serious concerns.”

The Office of the Director of the National Intelligence announced through its website on Thursday that it has located a lone email inquiry sent by Mr. Snowden in April 2013 to the Office of General Counsel, confirming in part allegations the former contractor made during an interview with NBC’s Brian Williams that aired Wednesday evening.

“I actually did go through channels, and that is documented,” Snowden told Williams when the two sat down in Moscow for an interview recently. “The NSA has records, they have copies of emails right now to their Office of General Counsel, to their oversight and compliance folks, from me raising concerns about the NSA’s interpretations of its legal authorities.”

“I would say one of my final official acts in government was continuing one of these communications with a legal office. And in fact, I’m so sure that these communications exist that I’ve called on Congress to write a letter to the NSA to verify that they do,” Snowden said.

Yet the NSA has, until now, denied the existence of any such correspondence. In fact, previously the agency said any such emails simply couldn’t be found.

“After extensive investigation, including interviews with his former NSA supervisors and co-workers, we have not found any evidence to support Mr. Snowden’s contention that he brought these matters to anyone’s attention,” the NSA said last year.

This past March, Snowden testified before the European Parliament that he had reported “clearly problematic programs to more than ten distinct officials, none of whom took any action to address them,” before he took a trove of classified NSA documents and supplied them to national security journalists.

Thursday’s blog post from the ODNI falls short of confirming that he reached out to ten individuals, but it does for once discredit the NSA’s earlier statement concerning Mr. Snowden’s supposed failure to speak out about his issues through the appropriate channels.

In the April 5 email, the ODNI wrote, Snowden “did not raise allegations or concerns about wrongdoing or abuse, but posed a legal question that the Office of General Counsel addressed.”

Indeed, the email published on the ODNI’s blog shows that one month to the day before the first news articles based off of his leaks was published, Snowden pushed the Office of the General Counsel for answers about the hierarchy of governing authorities and documents. According to a screenshot posted by the ODNI, Snowden asked for clarification with regards to what authority, if any, presidential executive orders have over federal law, as well as who has precedence in matters between the ODNI and the Pentagon at large.

The one email – with blacked out details – that the NSA has now released.

“There are numerous avenues that Mr. Snowden could have used to raise other concerns or whistleblower allegations,” the ODNI wrote with Thursday’s post. “We have searched for additional indications of outreach from him in those areas and to date have not discovered any engagements related to his claims.”

Yet Snowden countered the ODNI release later on Thursday, saying that the offerings are an incomplete record of his correspondence with the Office of General Counsel.

“Today’s release is incomplete, and does not include my correspondence with the Signals Intelligence Directorate’s Office of Compliance, which believed that a classified executive order could take precedence over an act of Congress, contradicting what was just published,” Snowden told the Washington Post.

“It also did not include concerns about how indefensible collection activities – such as breaking into the back-haul communications of major US internet companies – are sometimes concealed under E.O. 12333 to avoid Congressional reporting requirements and regulations.”

He went on to say, as he has before, that the in-house system for whistleblowing is inadequate and not designed to address illegalities of the type he pointed out.

“Ultimately, whether my disclosures were justified does not depend on whether I raised these concerns previously,” he said. “That’s because the system is designed to ensure that even the most valid concerns are suppressed and ignored, not acted upon.”

He added that there are other emails he sent to agency lawyers that the US government has yet to reveal. In addition, he said he addressed “numerous colleagues” about the spying programs he eventually exposed.

“The bottom line is that even though I knew the system was designed to reject concerns raised, I showed numerous colleagues direct evidence of programs that those colleagues considered unconstitutional or otherwise concerning,” he said. “Today’s strangely tailored and incomplete leak only shows the NSA feels it has something to hide.”

Snowden said the NSA’s track record of repeatedly lying about the existence or scope of its vast, secret surveillance operations around the world is proof that any of its claims about his own record of speaking out – already proven false by Thursday’s email release – should be viewed skeptically.

“Now that they have finally begun producing emails, I am confident that truth will become clear rather sooner than later.”

On June 5, the Guardian first began reporting on documents pertaining to the NSA’s broad but highly secretive surveillance apparatus. Snowden currently resides in the vicinity of Moscow after the US Department of State revoked his passport while en route to Latin America after his identity was disclosed last year.

Speaking before the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe last month, Snowden said there is an “unprecedented form of political interference that I don’t believe can be seen elsewhere in western governments,” and that “no legal means currently exist to challenge such activities or to see penalties for such abuses.”