Local gang suspect in Mexico City mass kidnapping

Edna Ponce, center, speaks to the reporters after meeting with chief prosecutor Rodolfo Rios, in Mexico City, Tuesday, June 4, 2013. Ponce is the aunt of Jerzy Ortiz, one of a group of men and women who went missing on May 26, 2013 from a Mexico City bar. Another young woman has been added to the list of young people apparently abducted as a group from an after-hours bar in a normally calm district of Mexico City, raising the number of missing to 12, prosecutors said Tuesday night. (AP Photo/Ivan Pierre Aguirre)

Friends and family hold signs asking for justice for the persons they believe were abducted in broad daylight, outside the office of chief prosecutor Rodolfo Rios, in Mexico City, Tuesday, June 4, 2013. Another young woman has been added to the list of young people apparently abducted as a group on May 26, 2013 from an after-hours bar in a normally calm district of Mexico City, raising the number of missing to 12. Rios also announced that two of the bar's waiters and a woman he did not identify had been detained in the case. (AP Photo/Ivan Pierre Aguirre)

MEXICO CITY (AP) — The mysterious disappearance of 12 people from a Mexico City after-hours bar nearly two weeks ago was the work of a local gang, authorities said, with the possible motive being a dispute between rival groups over drug dealing.

There has been no word of the 12 since they vanished in broad daylight on May 26 just a block from Mexico City's leafy Paseo de Reforma. City Prosecutor Rodolfo Rios showed a surveillance videotape to reporters late Friday that disputes witness' accounts that the missing people were taken by masked commandos with large guns and SUVs.

The videotape shows several compact cars pulling up, and people being herded in just a couple at a time. The men taking them are in civilian clothes, and there are no signs of weapons or force, explaining why so many people could disappear without detection in the middle of a busy Sunday. There was both a mass bike ride and 5-kilometer (3.1 mile) foot race less than a block away when they were seen leaving the bar about 11 a.m.

Rios said the abduction involved at least 17 people in eight vehicles. He said so far authorities can only place eight of the 12 at the after-hours bar known as Heaven, which was located on a small side street in an upscale business district of towering high-rises. Four people have been detained so far in the crime, including an owner of the bar and two employees.

The missing all lived in Tepito, one of Mexico City's most dangerous neighborhood's and home to its largest black market.

Four people were gunned down in a gym late Thursday night in the same neighborhood, raising fears that a wave of cartel-style violence was hitting the city. Two men were detained but later let go, Rios said.

Mexico City authorities spent all day Friday assuring residents that the two crimes were not related and that the incidents are not signs of large-scale drug violence seen in other parts of Mexico.

The crime in the gym, an assassination targeted at two brothers, is not related to the disappearance of the young, he added.

"I don't have any indication of any cartel in Mexico City," Mayor Miguel Angel Mancera told the Televisa television network. "It's not a cartel. What we have in Tepito is an upswing in violence, and an upswing in some gangs."

A witness to the alleged kidnapping told authorities that is was the result of a dispute between two rival groups of drug dealers operating in Tepito, Rios said, but added that it's just one line of investigation.

Tepito is the main clearinghouse for millions of dollars of contraband, from guns and drugs to counterfeit handbags that come through Mexico City.

Mancera said authorities were investigating whether the alleged mass kidnapping might have been related to the execution on May 24 of a low-level drug dealer outside a bar in the trendy Condesa neighborhood. A public security official who was not authorized to be quoted by name had said that the killing of the dealer outside the "Black Bar" was related to the disappearances two days later, and that both may have been part of a turf battle between drug gangs.

"The Heaven bar and the Black bar have some threads in common, which prosecutors are investigating," Mancera said. "These two events could lead us to the conclusion that they are related."

But he said "we have found nothing to connect" the Thursday gym shootings with the bar case.

US officials long denied massive data trawling

WASHINGTON (AP) — For years, top officials of the Bush and Obama administrations dismissed fears about secret government data-mining by reassuring Congress that there were no secret nets trawling for Americans' phone and Internet records.

"We do not vacuum up the contents of communications under the president's program and then use some sort of magic after the intercept to determine which of those we want to listen to, deal with or report on," then-CIA Director Michael Hayden told a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in July 2006.

But on Friday, President Barack Obama himself acknowledged the existence of such programs even as he gave the government's standard rationale to ease fears that Americans' privacy rights are being violated.

"By sifting through this so-called metadata, they might identify potential leads of people who might engage in terrorism," Obama said during an exchange with reporters at a health care event in San Jose, Calif.

Obama's comments marked the first time a U.S. president publicly acknowledged the government's electronic sleuthing on its citizens. They came in response to media reports and published classified documents that detailed the government's secret mass collection of phone and Internet communications.

When top officials in the Obama and Bush administrations have been asked in recent years whether U.S. citizens' communications were swept up as part of government surveillance, they've often responded with swift, flat denials. The denials were often carefully constructed to avoid any hints of the activities they were denying.

Even Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush, sidestepped what he described as a kerfuffle about his administration's secret electronic intelligence-gathering.

During a March 2006 appearance at the City Club of Cleveland, Bush described the NSA effort only as "a program that will enable us to listen from a known al-Qaida person and/or affiliate from making a phone call outside the United States in or inside the United States out, with the idea of being able to pick up quickly information for which to be able to respond in the environment we're in." He added: "I believe what I'm doing is constitutional, and I know it's necessary. And so we're going to keep doing it."

His vice president, Dick Cheney, was more blunt during a radio appearance, denying the government was engaging in domestic surveillance.

"This is not a domestic surveillance program," Cheney told radio host Hugh Hewitt, adding that "what we're interested in are intercepting communications, one end of which are outside the United States and one end of which we have reason to believe is al-Qaida-related."

Technically, Cheney's description of the program was accurate. His insistence that the Bush administration was not engaged in domestic surveillance is more debatable.

Reports that first appeared in Britain's Guardian newspaper and The Washington Post indicate that the NSA pulls in phone records, though not the actual content of the calls, from its secret warrants allowing it to collect data from major telecom companies. The program is aimed at detecting the calling patterns of terrorist suspects. A separate government program also collects massive amounts of data from at least nine Internet and electronic firms, pulling in everything from emails to photographs. Obama said Friday that the electronic data-mining is not aimed at American citizens or inside the U.S.

Several top Bush administration officials adamantly insisted that the government was not engaged in mass data-trawling as part of its secret NSA programs.

After a New York Times expose raised concerns about NSA targeting Americans' phone records, Hayden told a National Press Club audience in January 2006 that there was no effort to cast a wide net over communications data.

"This is targeted and focused," said Hayden, the principal deputy director of national intelligence at the time. "This is not about intercepting conversations between people in the United States. This is hot pursuit of communications entering or leaving America involving someone we believe is associated with al-Qaida."

Bush's attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, also minimized the reach of the NSA data-gathering, telling a Senate Judiciary hearing in February 2006 that "this surveillance is narrowly focused and fully consistent with the traditional forms of enemy surveillance found to be necessary in all previous armed conflicts."

Bush administration officials were repeatedly pressed by Congress about the NSA efforts in 2005 and 2006, as the Senate and House debated whether to extend the Patriot Act and many of its provisions that gave the government broad power to conduct surveillance and data collection. But once the Patriot Act's main provisions were reauthorized and signed into law by Bush in March 2006, public congressional concerns over the NSA's authority seemed to dissipate.

A review of congressional transcripts shows that from 2006 well into Obama's first term, top administration officials were rarely questioned publicly about the NSA's data-gathering activities. Instead, the agency's new director, Keith B. Alexander, was most often pressed about the NSA's growing efforts in cyberwarfare and security.

It was not until May 2011, as the Patriot Act again faced another reauthorization, that the NSA's secret programs began to receive cryptic attention from two Democratic senators, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado. Hobbled by the classified nature of the secret programs, the two senators offered up only guarded warnings.

"When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act, they will be stunned and they will be angry," Wyden said during a floor speech in May 2011. He added: "Many members of Congress have no idea how the law is being secretly interpreted by the executive branch, because that interpretation is classified."

Still hamstrung by the programs' security classification in 2013, Wyden pressed National Intelligence Director James Clapper at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in March about the NSA. "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?" he asked.

"No, sir," Clapper replied. He added: "Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently perhaps collect but not wittingly."

This week, after the new revelations about the NSA's massive data haul, Clapper acknowledged the existence of both of the agency's secret operations and denounced the media disclosures as "reprehensible."

When contacted by the National Journal about his earlier exchange with Wyden, Clapper stood by his earlier comments denying that the NSA is collecting massive troves of data.

"What I said was, the NSA does not voyeuristically pore through U.S. citizens' emails," Clapper said. "I stand by that."

Syrian forces capture final rebel stronghold in Qusair region

By Mariam Karouny

BEIRUT (Reuters) - Syrian government troops backed by Hezbollah guerrillas seized the western village of Buwayda on Saturday, extinguishing final rebel resistance around the town of Qusair in a fresh success for President Bashar al-Assad.

The swift fall of Buwayda came just three days after rebels were swept out of Qusair, denying them a previously important supply route into neighboring Lebanon and giving renewed momentum to Assad's forces battling a two-year civil war.

Activist sources said dozens of rebels, including a number of foreigner fighters, were captured alive in Buwayda, but there was no immediate word of their fate.

"We can now declare Qusair and the surrounding area to be a fully liberated area. We will go after the terrorists wherever they are," an unnamed, senior Syrian army officer told state television from the rubble-filled streets of Buwayda.

Fighting flared elsewhere in Syria, including close to the capital Damascus and in the northern Aleppo province, which is expected to be the focus of renewed attack by Assad's forces following the collapse of the Qusair front.

Video posted on YouTube showed what activists said was a twin missile strike on the village of Kfarhamra, near Aleppo, sending a huge cloud of smoke billowing into the blue sky.

There was no immediate word on casualties.

The United Nations estimates at least 80,000 people have died in the conflict. U.N. humanitarian agencies launched a $5 billion appeal on Friday, the biggest in their history, to cope with the fallout from the fighting that has sent some 1.6 million refugees fleeing to neighboring countries.

SACRIFICE

Syrian state television broadcast live from the deserted streets of Buwayda, 13-km (eight miles) northeast of Qusair, showing destroyed buildings, debris-strewn roads and large numbers of boxes full of unused ammunition.

"We sacrifice our blood and souls for you Syria," a group of soldiers chanted in the background.

Rebel groups from across Syria had sent hundreds of men into the Qusair area to try to stave off the assault by the Syrian army and well-trained Hezbollah fighters from Lebanon, but they were rapidly overwhelmed, with activists complaining of a lack of arms and poor coordination.

"We want weapons, we want ammunition and advanced weapons," the head of the rebel Free Syria Army, Selim Idris, told Al Arabiya television via Skype.

A Lebanese security source said at least 28 wounded fighters from Syria had been evacuated to hospitals in Western Bekaa and Rashaya.

Hezbollah's role has proved decisive, but it has also fueled sectarian tensions that have inflamed the region.

Hezbollah and its Iranian backers both follow the Shi'ite strand of Islam, while most of the rebels are Sunni Muslims. Assad himself is from the Alawite minority, an offshoot of Shi'ite Islam.

Sunni Muslim preachers across the Middle East condemned Iran and its "Satanic" Shi'ite allies in sermons on Friday.

"Wake up, this is a war of religion," hardline cleric Imad al-Daya told worshippers in the Gaza Strip, whose Palestinian Hamas rulers were once close allies of Assad and Hezbollah.

(This story adds name dropped in paragraph 12)

(Writing Crispian Balmer; Editing by Matthew Tostevin and Janet Lawrence)

This Is Pakistan's Answer to U.S. Drone Defiance

This Is Pakistan's Answer to U.S. Drone Defiance

Pakistan's newly-elect prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, announced the country would no longer permit U.S. drone strikes on his country's soil during his first speech earlier this week. So when the U.S. openly defied him with another drone strike late Friday, he called the U.S. envoy in Pakistan for a little chat. What happened behind those closed doors, or what was said during the ensuing conversation, is unknown at this time. We know Sharif was "protesting" the drone strike that killed nine people in north western Pakistan late Friday. All we can know is this sternly worded statement released by Pakistan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. "It was conveyed to the U.S. charge d' affaires that the government of Pakistan strongly condemns the drone strikes, which are a violation of Pakistan's sovereignty and territorial integrity," they say. "The importance of bringing an immediate end to drone strikes was emphasized."

RELATED: Pakistan Really Doesn't Want to Be a U.S. Drone Target Anymore

This all comes just days after Sharif assumed power in Pakistan and promised this end of the U.S. drone strikes in their country during his very first speech. "This daily routine of drone attacks, this chapter shall now be closed," Sharif said before parliament. "This campaign should come to an end." The dirty agreement between the U.S. and Pakistan for drone-rights has long been broken. Pakistan said they stopped consenting to drone strikes in September.

RELATED: The C.I.A.'s Silence on Drone Strikes Is Getting Awkward

Friday's drone strike was the first since Sharif declared Pakistan a drone-free zone. But, also, it was only ten days removed from the previous U.S. drone strike in Pakistan. These things happen fast. Weraised questions about what Pakistan might do, or even could do, to stop the U.S. from carrying out drone strikes there when Sharif made his promise. This appears to be the initial answer.

RELATED: What the Toll of Drones Looks Like, in Just One Country

San Onofre nuke plant to close after bitter fight

Showdown over Calif's troubled San Onofre nuclear plant ends, reactors to close permanently

Associated Press -

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- The demise of California's San Onofre nuclear power plant began with an attempt to fix it.

A $670 million equipment swap in 2009 and 2010 went haywire, leaving Southern California Edison on Friday with two idle reactors, more than $500 million in bills and a federal decision on a possible restart nowhere in sight.

The company decided to close it, permanently. The announcement triggered a celebration among environmentalists and other critics of the nuclear power industry who argued the plant was too damaged to operate safely.

"There's a huge sense of relief for us," said Laguna Beach Councilwoman Toni Iseman, whose community is about 20 miles up the coast from San Onofre's twin domes. "We were just sitting with a time bomb just to the south of us."

Erich Pica, president of Friends of the Earth, said San Onofre's closing represents an opportunity for California to use more wind, solar and other clean energy. The group waged a long fight to block the restart.

The U.S. nuclear industry, Pica said, "is on its final trajectory downward."

The San Onofre reactors — situated along the Pacific Coast in the densely populated corridor of millions of people between San Diego and Los Angeles — are the largest to shut down permanently in the U.S. in the past 50 years, federal officials said.

It was a jolt to the nation's nuclear power industry, which had been encouraged in recent years by development of new plants in the Southeast. Steve Kerekes, a spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry group, described San Onofre's problems as unlike any other reactor and said Edison's decision highlights a flawed, plodding regulatory system.

"This is a blow to California's energy diversity but is not an indicator of the industry's larger ability to reliably supply low-carbon electricity," he said.

Edison's decision brought to a sudden end a dispute that began in January 2012, when a small radiation leak led to a shutdown and the discovery of unusual damage to hundreds of tubes that carry radioactive water in the plant's virtually new steam generators.

San Onofre never produced electricity again.

The company was facing a tangle of investigations and regulatory hurdles, along with political pressure from Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., among others. In a conference call with reporters, Ted Craver, chairman of the utility's corporate parent, Edison International, acknowledged the company suffered a major blow last month when the NRC's Atomic Safety and Licensing Board split with the NRC staff and rejected Edison's arguments to restart the plant.

That left Edison facing months of possible appeals and motions, with no certainty a restart would occur.

"We've made our decision based on the facts in front of us," he said.

San Onofre — whose first reactor operated from 1968 to 1992, with two others added in the 1980s — was capable of powering 1.4 million homes. California officials have said they can make it through the hot season without the plant as long as the summer is uneventful, but warned that wildfires or another disruption in supply could cause power shortages.

It wasn't clear how the electricity from the plant would be replaced permanently. The California Public Utilities Commission said it will work with governments to ensure Southern California has enough electricity, which could require increased energy efficiency and conservation, as well as upgrades to equipment.

Mitsubishi Nuclear Energy Systems, which built San Onofre's steam generators, said it is disappointed with the decision and remains confident the plant can be operated safely.

It will take months, and possibly years, to complete the closing of the reactors, which will involve removing all fuel from the reactor cores.

And still unresolved: who pays for all the trouble, customers or shareholders.

Boxer, who heads the Environment and Public Works Committee, said in a statement the plant "had a defective redesign and could no longer operate as intended. Modifications to the San Onofre nuclear plant were unsafe and posed a danger to the 8 million people living within 50 miles of the plant."

The problems center on four new, much-heavier steam generators that were installed during in 2009 and 2010. Just a few years later, tests found some generator tubes so badly eroded that they could fail and possibly release radiation, a startling finding for nearly new equipment.

Federal investigators last year concluded that a botched computer analysis resulted in design flaws that were largely to blame for the heavy tube wear. Edwin Lyman, a nuclear expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a watchdog group, said the mistake raises broad questions for an industry that regularly relies on computer tools.

"That has larger importance, especially for new reactors," Lyman said

Each generator has 9,727 alloy tubes, which function somewhat like a radiator. The tubes circulate hot, radioactive water, which then heats a bath of non-radioactive water surrounding them. That makes steam, which drives the turbines to generate electricity.

In other nuclear-industry shutdowns over the years, decaying generator tubes helped push San Onofre's original reactor into retirement in 1992, even though it was designed to run until 2004. In 1993, the Trojan plant near Portland, Ore., was shuttered years earlier than planned because of microscopic cracks in steam tubes. The Shoreham plant on New York's Long Island was completed in 1984 for $6 billion but never opened because of community opposition.

In February, Duke Energy Corp. decided to close the Crystal River nuclear plant in Florida after workers cracked a concrete containment building during a 2009 upgrade, and an attempt to fix it in 2011 caused more cracks. Last fall, Dominion Resources Inc. said it would close the Kewaunee Power Station in Wisconsin after it was unable to find a buyer.

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