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Australia reveals tough new security measures

By Matt Siegel

SYDNEY (Reuters) - Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott on Monday announced a national security crackdown that could deny welfare payments to people seen as potential threats, strip the passports of those with dual nationality and curb travel overseas.

Abbott, bruised politically and facing pressure for dramatic action after surviving a leadership challenge this month, unveiled the measures in the wake of a hostage siege in a Sydney cafe that left three dead in December.

He said some personal freedoms would have to be curtailed to fight a rapidly growing threat from radical groups such as Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

"For too long, we have given those who might be a threat to our country the benefit of the doubt," Abbott said.

"We will never sacrifice our freedoms in order to defend them, but we will not let our enemies exploit our decency either."

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Australia's Prime Minister Tony Abbott attends the ASEAN-Australia 40th Anniversary Commemorativ …

He was speaking a day after releasing a report on the siege, in which two hostages and a radical self-styled sheikh who had sought to align himself with Islamic State were killed.

The conservative Abbott said new laws would remedy failings on the immigration, welfare, policing and intelligence fronts by clamping down on supporters of radicals, especially welfare recipients.

But one opposition leader called the measures an attempt by a "failing and flailing" leader to regain popularity by stoking community fear.

"It worked for him in opposition, he thinks it's going to work for him in government," Greens Party leader Senator Christine Milne told reporters. "Australians are not going to fall for it."

Although Abbott this month fended off a leadership challenge from within his ruling Liberal Party, his poll numbers have languished at historic lows since early last year.

The laws will also target so-called "hate preachers", Abbott said, citing as an example the radical but non-violent Islamist group Hizb-ut-Tahrir.

He explicitly linked welfare to terrorism, accusing dozens of Australians fighting in Syria and Iraq of having been on the dole, and adding that payments to "individuals assessed to be a threat to security" could soon be canceled.

"People who come to this country are free to live as they choose. Provided they don't steal that same freedom from others," he said.

Australia, a staunch ally of the United States and its action against the Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq, has been on heightened alert for attacks by home-grown Islamist radicals since last year.

(Reporting by Matt Siegel; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)

Wochit
France Cyberdefense Chief: 19,000 Cyberattacks in Last Week

PARIS (AP) — President Francois Hollande says France's millions of Muslims should be protected and respected and in turn they should also respect the nation's strict secular policies.

Hollande spoke Thursday after three radical Muslim gunmen killed 17 people last week in France's worst attacks in decades. Two of the attackers claimed allegiances to al-Qaida in Yemen and another to the Islamic State group.

The terror attacks have prompted scattered retaliatory attacks on Muslim sites around France and have put many French Muslims on the defensive.

Hollande said that "anti-Muslim acts, like anti-Semitism, should not just be denounced but severely punished."

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.

A car ran into and slightly injured a policewoman guarding the French presidential palace Thursday, raising tensions in a country on high alert after the worst terrorist attacks in decades. Funerals are being held for staff killed in the attack on irreverent newspaper Charlie Hebdo amid continued huge demand for its first post-attacks edition.

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French president, Francois Hollande, delivers a speech as he visits the Arab Institute building in P …

The incident overnight at the Elysee Palace had no apparent links to last week's shootings and might have been an accident, prosecutors and police said. But it comes at a time when about 120,000 police and other forces are deployed around France as the government seeks to prevent future attacks. Twenty people, including the three gunmen, were killed in last week's rampage.

Officials with Paris police and the presidential palace said in the new incident a car carrying four people took a one-way street in the wrong direction then drove off when the police officer tried to stop them. She sustained slight leg injuries.

Police said two people were later arrested, and two others in the car fled. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to be publicly identified.

U.S. and French intelligence officials are leaning toward an assessment that the Paris terror attacks were inspired by al-Qaida but not directly supervised by the group, a view that would put the violence in a category of homegrown incidents that are extremely difficult to detect and thwart.

French justice officials began cracking down by arresting dozens of people who glorified terrorism or made racist or anti-Semitic remarks.

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A security officer directs released hostages after they stormed a kosher market to end a hostage sit …

The attacks targeted Charlie Hebdo's offices, a kosher market and police. Charlie Hebdo had been repeatedly threatened for caricatures of the Muslim prophet Muhammad.

Funerals were being held Thursday for at least four Charlie Hebdo contributors killed in the attack.

Customers lined up again Thursday to try to get copies of Charlie Hebdo's first edition since the attacks, which again had Muhammad on the cover. Even though it has a special increased print run of 5 million copies, it sold out before dawn in Paris kiosks for a second day straight.

Muslims believe their faith forbids depictions of the prophet, and some reacted with dismay — and occasional anger — to the new cover. Some who had supported Charlie Hebdo after the attacks felt betrayed and others feared the cartoon would trigger yet more violence.

A leader of Yemen's al-Qaida branch officially claimed responsibility for the attacks by two gunmen that left 12 dead at the weekly publication, saying in a video posted online that the slayings were in "vengeance for the prophet."

___

Lori Hinnant, Angela Charlton and Nicolas Vaux-Montagny in Paris contributed to this report.

CBSTV Videos
Icy winter weather turns deadly in Tennessee

By Lisa Maria Garza

DALLAS (Reuters) - An ice storm battered parts of Texas on Monday, knocking out power to thousands of homes, causing hundreds of traffic accidents and prompting more than 1,500 flight cancellations.

The storm, which packed high winds and dumped freezing rain, covered highways with sheets of ice, and authorities advised commuters to stay off the roads. The cold was expected to last another day, keeping roads slick.

A large section of the U.S. South from Arkansas to North Carolina was expected to experience freezing temperatures and winter storms on Monday, the National Weather Service said.

Snow and freezing rain fell in parts of New Mexico, and Colorado, Utah and northern Arizona were also under winter storm warnings, the weather service said.

At Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, one of the busiest in the United States and a hub for American Airlines, nearly 1,100 flights were canceled as of 3 p.m. CST (2100 GMT), according to tracking service FlightAware.com. At Love Field in Dallas, a major airport for Southwest Airlines, more than 100 flights were canceled, it said.

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Framed by trees, a lone shoveler toils on a sidewalk after a winter storm sent temperatures plunging …

In Tennessee, at least 22 people have been killed in the past few days because of icy winter conditions, the state's Emergency Management Agency said.

Eleven people have died in Kentucky from the snow and ice that began pummeling the state on Feb. 16, officials said.

Texas schools were closed on Monday around Dallas and Fort Worth, one of the largest U.S. metropolitan areas, while traffic on highways was sparse. Iced-over trees knocked down power lines and left thousands without electricity, officials said. Police in Texas reported hundreds of car accidents.

BreeAnna Moore, 27, skipped driving to work in Fort Worth after watching live traffic camera footage.

"I really can't afford to miss a day, but then again I don't think it's worth my life or my car trying to make it in," she said.

The trial of the man accused of killing Chris Kyle, the former U.S. Navy SEAL who was the subject of the movie "American Sniper," was called off on Monday because of ice that coated the Texas city of Stephenville, southwest of Fort Worth.

Salt trucks were deployed in Oklahoma, where about an inch of ice and snow coated roads.

(Writing by Jon Herskovitz; Additional reporting by Tim Ghianni in Nashville, Heide Brandes in Oklahoma City, Steve Barnes in Little Rock and Lisa Bose McDermott in Texarkana, Arkansas; Editing by Susan Heavey, Andrew Hay and Peter Cooney)

London (AFP) - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's claim that Iran was a year away from making a nuclear bomb was contradicted by his secret services, according to reports Monday citing leaked documents.

The inconsistency was revealed in a cache of communications between South African intelligence services and their global partners -- including Israel's Mossad and America's CIA -- that were leaked to Qatar-based news network Al-Jazeera and Britain's The Guardian daily.

In 2012 Netanyahu told world leaders at the United Nations that Iran could create a nuclear weapon within a year, brandishing a diagram in the form of a lit bomb to indicate the advanced state of Tehran's development effort.

He warned the world that unless Iran was stopped, as of mid-2013 it would only need "a few months, or even a few weeks" of additional uranium enrichment activity to develop a bomb.

But weeks after the speech, Mossad shared a report with South African intelligence which concluded Iran was "not performing the activity necessary to produce weapons," according to the Guardian.

The discrepancy, the paper said, "highlights the gulf between the public claims and rhetoric of top Israeli politicians and the assessments of Israel's military and intelligence establishment."

The revelations come at a politically sensitive moment as the United States, China, Russia, Britain, France and Germany face a March 31 deadline to reach a deal with Iran to limit its nuclear programme in return for an easing of economic sanctions.

Iran denies seeking an atomic bomb, insisting that its nuclear programme is purely for peaceful energy purposes.

An Israeli government official told the Guardian that there was no contradiction between Netanyahu's statements and the report, claiming both state Iran was enriching uranium to produce weapons.

The leaked documents dating from 2006 to late 2014 consist mainly of communications between South Africa's intelligence agency and other agencies around the world, such as Britain's MI6, Russian intelligence and the CIA.

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