US Long Suspected Pakistan Of Sheltering Late Taliban Leader
U.S. intelligence officials suspected Pakistan of sheltering Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar, one of the world’s most wanted men, for years before his death, according to a published report.
On Wednesday, Afghan officials announced that they believed Omar had died in a Pakistan hospital sometime in 2013. On Thursday, the Taliban issued a statement confirming the death of the man known as “The Commander of the Faithful”, but did not specify when or how he had died. The Taliban statement also specifically claimed that Mullah Omar never left Afghanistan, “even to go to Pakistan or to any other country.”
Mullah Mohammad Omar
However, the Washington Post, citing diplomatic and intelligence documents, reported that the CIA had a lead on the reclusive Omar’s whereabouts several times in 2010 and 2011, always placing him in Pakistan.
One such document cited by the Post quotes then-Army Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute as telling Pakistani officials during a White House strategy review in 2010 “while Pakistan has done a lot to deny safe havens to terrorists … senior leadership of the Quetta Shura ([Council) including Mullah Omar resides between Karachi and Quetta.”
Early the next year, the Post reports, then-CIA Director Leon Panetta informed Pakistan’s then-President Asif Zardari that the CIA had learned that Omar was being treated at a hospital in the bustling port of Karachi. Zardari’s reaction to Panetta’s disclosure is not recorded in the Post report. However, the reported presence of Omar in a major city in Pakistan did nothing to assuage suspicions that he was there with at least tacit official approval.
A spokesman for the Pakistan Embassy in Washington who was contacted by the Post cited the Taliban statement in dismissing claims that Omar had ever been in Pakistan or that the Islamabad government had knowledge of his presence. However, a former Pakistani official tells the Post that some sections of the government may have wished to keep Mullah Omar’s death a secret to preserve Islamabad’s ability to influence peace talks between a united Taliban and Kabul. The official also said that Pakistan’s powerful ISI intelligence agency told Pakistani leaders that Omar was alive as recently as March of this year.
Despite suspicions about his whereabouts, the search for Mullah Omar always took a backseat to the hunt for Usama bin Laden, who was killed by a team of Navy SEALs in May 2011. U.S. officials tell the Post that to the best of their knowledge, there was never any CIA plan to capture of kill the Taliban leader.
“We were overwhelmingly focused on Al Qaeda, and there were many fewer instances where we had what we thought was halfway-reliable information on the whereabouts of senior members of the Taliban,” said Robert Grenier, the former CIA station chief in Pakistan, told the Post. Grenier also said that the ISI intelligence agency proved less adept at tracking down members of the Taliban than apprehending members of Al Qaeda.
The ISI had long been accused by Afghanistan of protecting Mullah Omar, with former President Hamid Karzai making precisely that claim in a 2006 interview with the Associated Press. The ISI does have long links with Islamic militants in Afghanistan, including the Taliban, since at least the 1980s, when it funneled weapons and money to insurgents battling Soviet forces.
(Courtesy Fox News)
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Suspect Arrested After Six Stabbed At Jerusalem’s Annual Gay Pride Parade
Revelers dancing and singing through the streets of Jerusalem during the holy city’s annual gay pride parade were left stunned Thursday night as an antigay extremist lunged into the march’s leaders and stabbed six people, Israeli police and witnesses said.
Police said the attacker, Yishai Schlissel, who was arrested at the scene, had been released from prison three weeks ago after serving a sentence for stabbing several people at a gay pride parade in Jerusalem in 2005.
Eli Bin, a spokeman for Israel’s emergency service, said six young people were wounded in the attack, two of them seriously.
The parade was proceeding as planned with party music, Israeli flags, and rainbow-clad marchers wending their way through the heart of the barricaded streets of central Jerusalem, under a heavy police presence.
An Associated Press photographer saw the attacker enter the throng of people with his hand in his coat, and within seconds raise a knife and begin stabbing people in the back.
Police pounced on him and arrested him.
The parade continued after the wounded were taken for treatment, but in a far more somber atmosphere.
Journalists reported that thousands of Jerusalem residents who had not initially participated in the parade joined in after the attack, in a show of support.
(Courtesy Bostan Globe)
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Facebook Project To Beam Data From Drones – A Step Closer To Flight
Facebook has moved several steps closer to fulfilling its grand ambition of building an Internet network in the sky, announcing on Thursday that it has built its first unmanned drone and found a way to vastly increase the capacity of the lasers that will eventually beam data between the drone network and the ground.
A team in Britain has been working on building the solar-powered drone, known as Aquila, for about 14 months. Now the company says that the unmanned aerial vehicle, made of ultralight composite materials and weighing 880 pounds, is ready for in-flight tests in the upper atmosphere, most likely in the United States.
“We have completed plane No. 1,” Jay Parikh, Facebook’s vice president for global engineering and infrastructure, said at a news conference at the company’s headquarters in Silicon Valley.
A rendering of a Facebook drone, which will weigh less than a small car, has the wingspan of a Boeing 767. Facebook hopes to use about 1,000 drones to connect people to the web.
Facebook, whose primary business is operating the world’s largest social network, has been working on a range of projects to extend Internet access to the four billion or so people who don’t have it, including teaming with phone carriers to offer free access to Facebook and other basic services in developing countries through its Internet.org app.
The drones are part of a long-term project intended to deliver the Internet to people who live far away from cell towers and fiber optic lines. Although Facebook is designing the drones and the network as well as solving technical problems, it says it will share its knowledge with partners and hopes to enlist telecommunications companies, aircraft manufacturers and perhaps governments in the actual construction and operation of the system.
Google, Facebook’s rival for the attention of Internet users, is pursuing its own plan, called Project Loon, to provide Internet access through a network of drifting high-altitude balloons. Sri Lanka said this week that it had signed a pact to eventually bring the Loon project to that country, although Google said many details remained.
In Facebook’s vision, hundreds of drones will be lifted into the sky by helium balloons and left to circle at altitudes of 60,000 to 90,000 feet — far above commercial airliners and weather systems. The network would be supplemented by satellites orbiting even higher up.
However, there remains a significant amount of work to do on the technology required to make the system a reality, including devising better batteries that can keep each plane aloft for three months and building lasers for data transmission that can track a moving receiver the size of a dime from 11 miles away.
Like a watch, “there are a lot of moving parts here that need to move in concert to make the network work,” Yael Maguire, director of engineering at Facebook’s connectivity lab, said at the news conference.
Maguire said that under the leadership of Hamid Hemmati, a former NASA laser scientist, Facebook has figured out how to transmit data using lasers at a speed of tens of gigabits per second — roughly 10 times as fast as previous technologies allowed.
Facebook is approaching its drone program almost as it would a software “hackathon.” Teams working on issues like battery power and lasers are exchanging ideas with other people working on artificial intelligence and Facebook’s data centers.
That is one reason, the company says, that it has been able to make so much progress in 14 months.
Facebook also hopes to speed development by making available much of its research and many of its discoveries without cost. The arrangement is similar to an open-source software project, where anyone can draw on a core of publicly available code but is obligated to share improvements with the community. Facebook has already used this method in building computer servers. The drone network is a much bigger project, however, and would most likely involve discoveries in a broader range of fields.
“Getting people to adopt the Internet faster is our end goal,” Parikh said in an interview. “If this gets used by car companies, and that comes back and helps us with batteries for drones, great.”
Parikh said Facebook would even be willing to share information with Google to help both companies’ data-in-the-sky efforts. “We would love to collaborate,” he said.
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Myanmar President Not Ruling Out Second Term
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yanmar President Thein Sein has indicated willingness to have a second five-year term in office after a parliamentary election in November, citing few younger people capable of continuing his government’s reform agenda.
Thein Sein, 70, will not run in the ballot due to health concerns. But that does not rule him out of the presidency under Myanmar’s hybrid military-civilian system, where there is no law stopping the new legislature from nominating him as one of its three presidential candidates.
“With my age and with some health concerns, I want to retire… But frankly speaking, in our country, there are very few young or even middle-aged people who could steer the country in the right direction,” he told Friday’s Nikkei Asian Review.
A second term, he said, depends on “the country’s situation, the prevailing circumstances and wishes of the people.”
Myanmar’s stream of liberal reforms has won Thein Sein plaudits and helped transform an image tainted by his previous role as fourth-in-command of a military dictatorship shunned by the West for trampling on human rights.
Two allies from the president’s reformist clique, Soe Thein and Aung Min, are also opting out of the election, a senior official from their Union Solidarity and Development Party told Reuters on Friday.
Though Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy party is expected to do well in the ballot, the complex makeup of Myanmar’s system means a sizable house presence gives no guarantee of positions in the executive.
The military-drafted constitution’s controversial qualifications criteria also prevent Oxford-educated Suu Kyi from becoming president, because her two sons are British.
It is unlikely there will be clarity on presidential candidates until after the election, although several high-profile players have hinted at their interest.
(Courtesy Reuters)
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French Probe Into MH370 Debris Expected To Take Days
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piece of airplane debris that washed up on the remote Indian Ocean island of Réunion was to be sent to France on Friday, but authorities cautioned it would be at least days before investigators come to any conclusion about whether it is part of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.
An Australian official suggested the plane part discovered on the French overseas territory off the eastern coast of Africa was “very likely” from a Boeing 777, the same model as the jetliner that went missing nearly 17 months ago.
French authorities are preparing for a more thorough technical assessment once the wreckage is brought to the southwestern French city of Toulouse this weekend. French television showed images of the aircraft piece wrapped and sealed and ready to board an aircraft.
The debris is due to leave on Friday evening, a spokeswoman for the Paris prosecutor’s office said. It will then be several days before an expert can start an assessment.
The discovery of the aircraft part on French soil puts France in a leading role, but its active involvement adds another layer of complication to what has already been a multi-jurisdictional probe.
Efforts to ascertain what happened to Flight 370 have at times been hobbled by multinational authorities that slowed responses. Malaysia leads the crash probe and Australia has been directing the search for wreckage taking place in a 23,200-square-mile area off the country’s western coast.
China meanwhile, has put pressure on Malaysia for progress on the probe after early missteps. Two thirds of the victims were Chinese.
The flight is believed to have crashed in the Indian Ocean on March 8, 2014 after veering sharply off its intended flight path from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people onboard.
If a link is established with the aircraft debris, which measures about 10 feet by 5 feet, it would be the first piece of the plane to be recovered in what has been modern aviation’s greatest mystery.
Martin Dolan, chief commissioner of Australia’s Air Transport Safety Bureau, said Friday that the winged fragment appears to come from a 777 aircraft, “and if it is from a 777 aircraft, then it is from MH370.”
“We are not saying we’re 100% certain at this stage. But we are assuming at this stage that it is very likely,” he said.
French judicial authorities had already opened an investigation due to the presence of four French nationals on board the Malaysia Airlines flight. But that probe didn’t go very far.
Paris prosecutor François Molins has appointed an investigative magistrate to lead the new probe into what appears to be a flaperon control surface. If the item is connected to Flight 370 it could then be transferred to Malaysian authorities, the prosecutor’s spokeswoman said. “We’re not there yet,” she said.
(Courtesy Wall Street Journal)
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Myanmar President Not Ruling Out Second Term
Myanmar President Thein Sein has indicated willingness to have a second five-year term in office after a parliamentary election in November, citing few younger people capable of continuing his government’s reform agenda.Thein Sein, 70, will not run in the ballot due to health concerns. But that does not rule him out of the presidency under Myanmar’s hybrid military-civilian system, where there is no law stopping the new legislature from nominating him as one of its three presidential candidates.
“With my age and with some health concerns, I want to retire… But frankly speaking, in our country, there are very few young or even middle-aged people who could steer the country in the right direction,” he told Friday’s Nikkei Asian Review.
A second term, he said, depends on “the country’s situation, the prevailing circumstances and wishes of the people.”
Myanmar’s stream of liberal reforms has won Thein Sein plaudits and helped transform an image tainted by his previous role as fourth-in-command of a military dictatorship shunned by the West for trampling on human rights.
Two allies from the president’s reformist clique, Soe Thein and Aung Min, are also opting out of the election, a senior official from their Union Solidarity and Development Party told Reuters on Friday.
Though Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy party is expected to do well in the ballot, the complex makeup of Myanmar’s system means a sizable house presence gives no guarantee of positions in the executive.
The military-drafted constitution’s controversial qualifications criteria also prevent Oxford-educated Suu Kyi from becoming president, because her two sons are British.
It is unlikely there will be clarity on presidential candidates until after the election, although several high-profile players have hinted at their interest.
(Courtesy Reuters)
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French Probe Into MH370 Debris Expected To Take Days
A piece of airplane debris that washed up on the remote Indian Ocean island of Réunion was to be sent to France on Friday, but authorities cautioned it would be at least days before investigators come to any conclusion about whether it is part of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.An Australian official suggested the plane part discovered on the French overseas territory off the eastern coast of Africa was “very likely” from a Boeing 777, the same model as the jetliner that went missing nearly 17 months ago.
French authorities are preparing for a more thorough technical assessment once the wreckage is brought to the southwestern French city of Toulouse this weekend. French television showed images of the aircraft piece wrapped and sealed and ready to board an aircraft.
The debris is due to leave on Friday evening, a spokeswoman for the Paris prosecutor’s office said. It will then be several days before an expert can start an assessment.
The discovery of the aircraft part on French soil puts France in a leading role, but its active involvement adds another layer of complication to what has already been a multi-jurisdictional probe.
Efforts to ascertain what happened to Flight 370 have at times been hobbled by multinational authorities that slowed responses. Malaysia leads the crash probe and Australia has been directing the search for wreckage taking place in a 23,200-square-mile area off the country’s western coast.
China meanwhile, has put pressure on Malaysia for progress on the probe after early missteps. Two thirds of the victims were Chinese.
The flight is believed to have crashed in the Indian Ocean on March 8, 2014 after veering sharply off its intended flight path from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people onboard.
If a link is established with the aircraft debris, which measures about 10 feet by 5 feet, it would be the first piece of the plane to be recovered in what has been modern aviation’s greatest mystery.
Martin Dolan, chief commissioner of Australia’s Air Transport Safety Bureau, said Friday that the winged fragment appears to come from a 777 aircraft, “and if it is from a 777 aircraft, then it is from MH370.”
“We are not saying we’re 100% certain at this stage. But we are assuming at this stage that it is very likely,” he said.
French judicial authorities had already opened an investigation due to the presence of four French nationals on board the Malaysia Airlines flight. But that probe didn’t go very far.
Paris prosecutor François Molins has appointed an investigative magistrate to lead the new probe into what appears to be a flaperon control surface. If the item is connected to Flight 370 it could then be transferred to Malaysian authorities, the prosecutor’s spokeswoman said. “We’re not there yet,” she said.
(Courtesy Wall Street Journal)
(Courtesy New York Times)
