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Iran has been blamed for a major cyber-attack on Parliamentary email accounts, including those of cabinet ministers.
Whitehall officials say Iran was behind a “sustained” cyber-attack on 23 June with hackers making repeated attempts to guess passwords of 9,000 accounts.
Up to 30 accounts are thought to have been compromised.
Security sources now believe the attackers came from Iran, although none of the information appears to have been used and the motive remains unclear.
BBC security correspondent Gordon Corera described the June attack as “not especially sophisticated” but told BBC Radio 4 it was a sign that Iran was becoming “more aggressive and capable as a cyber power”.
Source: President Trump’s decision to decertify does not withdraw the U.S. from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JPCOA). Congress will now debate whether the U.S. should continue sanctions relief. Trump’s strategy also promised that the U.S. would focus more broadly on addressing Iran’s destabilizing behavior in the region, among other aspects.
President Hassan Rouhani slammed Trump’s speech and new strategy, and claimed that Trump has only distanced himself from his European allies and unified Iran. UK Prime Minister Theresa May, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and French President Emmanuel Macron stressed their commitment to upholding the JCPOA in a statement following Trump’s speech.
European leaders issue statement following Trump’s speech. UK Prime Minister Theresa May, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and French President Emmanuel Macron issued a joint statement conveying their commitment to the JCPOA following President Trump’s announcement that he will not certify that the deal is in the national security interests of the U.S. The European leaders cautioned President Donald Trump and U.S. lawmakers to carefully consider the implications of taking actions that could undermine the JCPOA, such as “re-imposing sanctions [that were] lifted under the [JCPOA].” They also expressed their concern about Iran’s ballistic missile program and disruptive regional activities, stating that they “stand ready to take further appropriate measures to address these issues.” European leaders have voiced their continuous support for the JCPOA. Several European countries have signed a myriad of financial deals with Iran since the implementation of the JCPOA in January 2016. The imposition of new sanctions or the reintroduction of previously lifted sanctions could imperil existing and future deals reached between Europe and Iran. (GOV.uk)
Primer: The Drug Enforcement Administration has proposed hiring its own prosecutor corps to bring cases related to drug trafficking, money laundering and asset forfeiture — a move that advocacy groups warn could exceed the DEA’s legal authority and reinvigorate the 1980s-era war on drugs.
Citing the epidemic in opioid-related overdoses, the DEA said it wants to hire as many as 20 prosecutors to enhance its resources and target the biggest offenders. The DEA said the new force of lawyers “would be permitted to represent the United States in criminal and civil proceedings before the courts and apply for various legal orders.” The agency would use money it gets from companies that manufacture and dispense certain kinds of prescription drugs under the federal Controlled Substances Act.
Sen. Joe Manchin urged President Trump on Monday to withdraw his nomination for drug czar, Rep. Tom Marino, after a report noted he was the chief backer behind legislation that made it more difficult for the federal government to go after prescription drug companies for suspicious narcotic shipments.
Manchin does not mention in his letter that at the time he also had voted in favor of passing the bill, which received unanimous support in the Senate and was signed into law by former President Barack Obama.
“Congressman Marino led the effort in Congress to move through a bill that has made it significantly harder for the Drug Enforcement Agency to enforce our nation’s anti-drug diversion laws,” Manchin, D-W.Va., wrote to Trump in a letter. “For years, wholesale drug distributors were sending millions of pills into small communities – far more than was reasonably medically necessary.”
Manchin was responding to a report published Sunday by the Washington Post and CBS “60 Minutes,” which concluded that the Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act of 2016 made it so the DEA could no longer bring enforcement actions against opioid distributors who give the painkillers to corrupt doctors and pharmacists.
As a result of the legislation one prescription opioid company shipped 20 million doses of oxycodone and hydrocodone to pharmacies in West Virginia between 2007 and 2012, including 11 million doses in a county where 25,000 people lived, according to the news investigation.
Trump tapped Marino, a Pennsylvania Republican, in September to lead the Office of National Drug Control Policy, which administers programs aimed at combating opioid abuse, including through drug monitoring programs or helping people access treatment.
“The head of this office … is a key voice in helping to push and implement strategies to prevent drug abuse, stop drug trafficking, and promote access to substance use disorder treatment,” Machin said, adding that the Washington Post report “calls into question Congressman Marino’s ability to fill this critical role in a manner that will serve the American people and end the epidemic. Congressman Marino no longer has my trust or that of the public that he will aggressively pursue the fight against opioid abuse.”
The opioid epidemic, which started after doctor overprescribing of prescription painkillers, resulted in more than 33,000 deaths in 2015, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Because of such CDC reports, lawmakers were aware of the rising death toll and the contribution of the prescription drug industry to the trend when Obama signed the bill in April of 2016.
Many patients who were prescribed the drugs to treat pain then moved onto the drug’s cheaper alternative, heroin, which comprised an increased proportion of such deaths. West Virginia, in particular, has been hit hard, with 700 people dying from opioid overdoses in 700, according to Manchin’s office.
Let THAT sink in… Plus…we have no clue where those 5 Taliban commanders are in the world, or do we?
As many as 90 Obama administration officials knew about plans to swap five captured Taliban leaders for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl. The National Defense Authorization Act requires Obama to inform Congress about a prisoner swap 30 days in advance.
Humm…
Only a handful of people knew about Saturday’s extraction, Hagel told reporters traveling with him.
“We couldn’t afford any leaks anywhere, for obvious reasons,” he said.
“We found an opportunity. We took that opportunity,” Hagel said later on Meet the Press. “I’ll stand by that decision.”
The Taliban handed Bergdahl over to special operations forces in eastern Afghanistan, and later in the day the detainees were flown from the Guantanamo detention center to Qatar.
Hagel said the special operations forces conducting the mission took every precaution, using intelligence gathering, surveillance, well-positioned security assets and a lot of helicopters to ensure that things did not go wrong.
***
FORT BRAGG, N.C. (AP) — Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl told a military judge on Monday that he’s pleading guilty to desertion and misbehavior before the enemy.
“I understand that leaving was against the law,” Bergdahl said.
“At the time, I had no intention of causing search and recovery operations,” Bergdahl added, saying that now he does understand that his decision to walk off his remote post in Afghanistan in 2009 prompted efforts to find him.
Bergdahl, 31, is charged with endangering his comrades by walking away from his post. Despite his plea, the prosecution and defense have not agreed to a stipulation of facts in the case, according to one of his lawyers, Maj. Oren Gleich, which is an indication that they did not reach a deal to limit his punishment.
The misbehavior charge carries a maximum penalty of life in prison, while the desertion charge is punishable by up to five years. He appears to be hoping for leniency from the judge, Army Col. Jeffery R. Nance.
The guilty pleas bring the highly politicized saga closer to an end eight years after his disappearance in Afghanistan set off search missions by scores of his fellow service members. President Barack Obama was criticized by Republicans for the 2014 Taliban prisoner swap that brought Bergdahl home, while President Donald Trump harshly criticized Bergdahl on the campaign trail.
The serious wounds to service members who searched for Bergdahl are still expected to play a role in his sentencing. The guilty pleas allow him to avoid a trial, but he still faces a sentencing hearing that’s expected to start on Oct. 23. Bergdahl’s five years of captivity by the Taliban and its allies also will likely factor into what punishment he receives.
Bergdahl, who’s from Hailey, Idaho, previously chose to have his case heard by a judge alone, rather than a jury.
Legal scholars have said that several pretrial rulings against the defense have given prosecutors leverage to pursue stiff punishment against Bergdahl. Perhaps most significant was the judge’s decision in June to allow evidence of serious wounds to service members who searched for Bergdahl at the sentencing phase. The judge ruled that a Navy SEAL and an Army National Guard sergeant wouldn’t have wound up in separate firefights that left them wounded if they hadn’t been searching for Bergdahl.
The defense also was rebuffed in an effort to prove President Donald Trump had unfairly swayed the case with scathing criticism of Bergdahl, including suggestions of harsh punishment. The judge wrote in a February ruling that Trump’s campaign-trail comments were “disturbing and disappointing” but did not constitute unlawful command influence by the soon-to-be commander in chief.
Defense attorneys have acknowledged that Bergdahl walked off his base without authorization. Bergdahl himself told a general during a preliminary investigation that he left intending to cause alarm and draw attention to what he saw as problems with his unit. He was soon captured.
But the defense team has argued that Bergdahl can’t be held responsible for a long chain of events that included many decisions by others on how to conduct the searches.
The military probe of Bergdahl began soon after he was freed from captivity on May 31, 2014, in exchange for five Taliban prisoners. Facing Republican criticism, Obama noted that the U.S. doesn’t leave its service members behind.
Bergdahl has been assigned to desk duty at a Texas Army base while his case unfolds.
Staff Sergeant Clayton Bowen, 29, of San Antonio, Texas, and Private 1st Class Morris Walker, 23, of Chapel Hill, N.C., were killed by a roadside bomb in Paktika province on Aug. 18, 2009, while trying to find Bergdahl. Like Bergdahl, they were part of the 4th BCT from Fort Richardson, Alaska.
Bowen’s mother last heard from her son the night before he died. “Clay called me around midnight to tell me I
wouldn’t hear from him for a few days,” she said. She never heard from him again, although she can still hear his voice in the two CDs he recorded with the 82nd Airborne All-American Chorus. “He was the only bass in the group,” she said, “so you could always hear him.”
“What I think of first when I think of Morris is his smile because he was always smiling,” his junior-high teacher,
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Wanda Bordone, told the Associated Press after he died. “He had a great sense of humor, lots of friends.”
Staff Sergeant Kurt Curtiss, 27, of Murray, Utah, died Aug. 26 in Paktika Province, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered when he was shot while his unit was supporting Afghan security forces during an enemy attack. Like Bergdahl, Bowen and Walker, he was part of the 4th BCT.
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“I’ll never forget you Kurt,” Adrian Ramirez a fellow soldier from Fort Richardson, posted on a memorial site. “You were my first team leader from the beginning and my squad leader to the end. I will miss you and all the memories I have shared with you.”
2nd Lieutenant Darryn Andrews, 34, of Dallas, Texas, died Sept. 4 in Paktika Province when enemy forces attacked his vehicle with an improvised explosive device and a rocket-propelled grenade. Like Bergdahl, Bowen, Walker and Curtiss, Andrews was part of the 4th BCT.
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“We grew up with an enormous amount of pride for our nation,” Andrews’ mother, Sondra, told the Amarillo Globe-News. That was understandable: his father. grandfather and uncle had served in uniform. “We passed it on to our children, never thinking we would pay the ultimate sacrifice.”
Staff Sergeant Michael Murphrey, 25, of Snyder, Texas, died Sept. 6 in Paktika province after being wounded by an IED. Like Bergdahl, Bowen, Walker, Curtiss and Andrews, Murphrey was part of the 4th BCT.
“On his 17th birthday his family took him skydiving and after that,” his obituary read, “he decided he wanted to be an Army paratrooper.”
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On Sept. 4, 2009, Private 1st Class Matthew Martinek, 20, of DeKalb, Ill., was seriously wounded in Paktika province when Taliban forces attacked his vehicle with an improvided explosive device, a rocket-propelled grenade and small-arms fire.
The U.S. military rushed him to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Landstuhl, Germany—the same medical facility where Bergdahl is now being treated.
Bergdahl is expected to fly home to the U.S. soon for additional care and counseling.
Martinek never got that chance. He died a week after the attack—on Sept. 11.
Martinek “tried not to talk too much about what he was doing, but he said he liked helping people,” his brother, Travis Wright, told the AP.
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Like Bergdahl, Bowen, Walker, Curtiss, Andrews and Murphrey, Martinek was part of the 4th BCT.
The diversion of these men and their units to the hunt for Bergdahl thinned the ranks of U.S. troops elsewhere in the region, contributing to several more American KIAs, U.S. soldiers who were there at the time believe.
Military justice can be swift and merciless, although that appears unlikely in this case. But the past cannot be erased, and it’s that legacy that gives the troops involved a markedly different view of Bergdahl and his rescue than that of most Americans sitting at home, paying scant attention to the nation’s only soldier missing in action in Afghanistan until Saturday.
The reason, for anyone who has been in combat, is pretty simple. Soldiers never forget. Civilians rarely remember.
The Iran Deal (JCPOA) has taken an inordinate amount of attention away from all of the other ways Iran destabilizes and attempts to dominate the region. The Trump team will now take a holistic approach to Iran that uses all aspects of US power and engages our allies in the effort as well. The goal is to roll back Iranian use of their proxies in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and elsewhere to extend Iranian influence toward eventual hegemony. It will also address Iranian support of terrorism and violations of other international agreements such as US Security Council Resolutions.
This will take many forms, one of which is the President declining to certify that the JCPOA as it currently exists is in the national interest. It most certainly is not and it’s time to either fix it or forget it. The entire reason to do a deal was to ensure Iran never got nuclear weapons, the JCPOA actually paved Iran a path to them with “sunset clauses” that remove all prohibitions after no more than 15 years.
Iran’s ballistic missile program was specifically excluded from the JCPOA in a stunning case of national security malfeasance. There is no use for these other than to deliver a nuclear warhead and allowing Iran to continue their development cannot be tolerated. This will be another area where the US will focus all elements of our influence on ensuring Iran will be unable to deliver any payload to our shores.
It remains to be seen if a better deal can be made, but we need to make the effort. That will require some leverage and another piece of the plan will be designating all of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps as a terrorist organization. They are and recognizing this will make it much tougher for them to use the many businesses and front groups they have developed to conduct and support terror operations worldwide.
There will also be actions to rein in the Iranian-led militias operating across Iraq and Syria. While they may be mostly made up of Iraqi citizens, too many have loyalty to the Mullahs in Tehran. These Shia militias now control large swaths of territory in the Sunni areas of Iraq that were just liberated from ISIS. They conducted amounts of massive sectarian slaughter during the counter-ISIS operations and it is still going on. They must be moved out.
Hezbollah is another Iranian proxy which has sent tens of thousands of fighters into Syria. They are flush with some of the hundreds of millions of dollars Iran has given them out of the cash bonanza from the Iran Deal. They have been receiving US funds which were given to the Lebanese Armed Forces and then funneled to Hezbollah. This will come to a stop under the new plan. More here.
(Reuters) – President Donald Trump is likely to take a major step against the international nuclear deal with Iran on Friday, laying out a more aggressive approach to Iranian activities in the Middle East that risks upsetting U.S. relations with European allies.
“It is time for the entire world to join us in demanding that Iran’s government end its pursuit of death and destruction,” Trump said in a White House statement that flagged key elements of the strategy.
He is to present his plan in a 12:45 p.m. EDT (1645 GMT)speech at the White House, the product of weeks of internal discussions between him and his national security team.
U.S. officials said Trump was expected to announce that he will not certify the 2015 nuclear accord between Iran and six world powers, one he has called the “worst deal ever” as it was not, in his view, in the U.S. national interest.
Trump found himself under immense pressure as he considered de-certifying the deal, a move that would ignore warnings from inside and outside his administration that to do so would risk undermining U.S. credibility abroad.
He had formally reaffirmed it twice before but aides said he was reluctant to do so a third time.
De-certification would not pull the United States out of the deal but would give the Congress 60 days to decide whether to reimpose sanctions on Tehran that were suspended under the pact, negotiated during the administration of President Barack Obama.
U.S. House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul told Reuters he thinks Trump “is likely to not completely pull out of the deal, but decertify compliance.”
IRANIAN WARNING
If Washington quits the deal, that will be the end of it and global chaos could ensue, Iran’s influential parliament speaker, Ali Larijani, was quoted by the Russian news agency TASS as saying during a visit to St Petersburg on Friday.
U.N. nuclear inspectors say Iran is in compliance with the accord, which limited the scope of Iran’s nuclear program to help ensure it could not be put to developing bombs in exchange for a lifting of international sanctions on Tehran.
Trump says Tehran is in violation of the spirit of the agreement and has done nothing to rein in its ballistic missile program or its financial and military support for the Lebanese Shi‘ite movement Hezbollah and other militant groups.
White House Chief of Staff John Kelly said on Thursday the U.S. approach toward Iran is to work with allies in the Middle East to contain Tehran’s activities.
“We have footprints on the ground, naval and Air Force is there to just demonstrate our resolve, our friendship, and try to deter anything that any country out there may do,” Kelly told reporters.
European allies warn of a split with the United States over the nuclear agreement, in part because they are benefiting economically from a relaxation of sanctions.
A variety of European allies, including the leaders of Britain and France, have personally appealed to Trump to re-certify the nuclear accord for the sake of allied unity.
Germany’s government pledged on Friday to work for continued unity if Trump de-certified the deal as Berlin remain convinced the agreement was an important tool to prevent Iran developing nuclear weapons.
Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel underscored German views in a telephone call with U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson late on Thursday, his spokeswoman Maria Adebahr told reporters.
Gabriel said on Thursday U.S. behavior was driving a wedge between Europe and its close ally United States and bringing Europeans closer to Russia and China. “It’s imperative that Europe sticks together on this issue,” said Gabriel.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said on Friday that if the United States withdrew from the deal, “this will damage the atmosphere of predictability, security, stability and non-proliferation in the entire world”.
U.S. MOVE AGAINST REVOLUTIONARY GUARDS
McCaul said he expected Trump also to announce some kind of action against the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the country’s most powerful security force. Trump is under a legal mandate to impose U.S. economic sanctions on the Revolutionary Guards as a whole by Oct. 31 or waive them.
U.S. sanctions could seriously hurt the IRGC as it controls large swaths of Iran’s economy. The Guards’ foreign paramilitary and espionage wing, the Quds Force, is under U.S. sanctions, as is the Quds Force commander, other officials and associated individuals and entities.
The 2015 nuclear agreement, signed by the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China, the European Union and Iran, has been denounced by Trump as “an embarrassment” and “the worst deal ever.”
CNBC: The Trump administration will immediately stop making critically important payments to insurers who sell Obamacare health plans, a bombshell move that is expected to spike premium prices and potentially lead many insurers to exit the marketplace.
The decision to end the billions of dollars worth of so-called cost-sharing reduction (CSR) payments came after months of threats by President Donald Trump to do just that. The news came only hours after Trump signed an executive order that Obamacare advocates said could badly harm the individual insurance marketplaces.
Advocates, along with insurers, health-care provider groups, patient groups and officials in many states, have expressed concerns for months that the cost-sharing reimbursements would be cut off by Trump.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., sharply criticized Trump in a series of Twitter posts late Thursday.
Two months ago, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that individual health plan premiums would be 20 percent higher than originally projected if the payments ceased. It also projected that premiums would be 25 percent higher than they otherwise would be by 2020, and that the federal deficit would be increased by almost $200 billion if the subsidies ended.
The payments, worth $7 billion or so to insurers this year and up to $10 billion or more next year, reimburse insurers for discounts in out-of-pocket health costs they give to low-income Obamacare customers. The discounts must be offered by law.
However, congressional Republicans successfully challenged in a lawsuit the Obama administration’s decision to make the reimbursement payments to insurers without getting the express budgetary authorization from Congress.
Now, both California Attorney General Xavier Becerra and New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said they would file lawsuits seeking to prevent Trump from ending the subsidies.
The two were part of a group of 18 state attorneys general who were given permission this year to intervene in the pending appeal of the federal court decision that had ruled the payments were illegal given their lack of congressional authorization.
*** While the democrats are crying sabotage, they refuse to tell you that there is a legal ruling that says this funding is illegal. The Obama administration via the Treasury Department essentially stole money from various government agencies to subsidize insurance providers since Congress did not appropriate the funds.
In part it played out this way:
When House Republicans first came up with the idea to take the president to court nearly two years ago, they planned to sue the administration over a completely different part of Obamacare. Then-Speaker John Boehner was, as usual, facing pressure from conservatives who were frustrated at Obama’s liberal use of executive authority and their inability to derail the hated health-care law. So he and his leadership team hatched a plan to file a lawsuit accusing the president and his administration of exceeding their authority by unilaterally delaying the implementation of the employer mandate in Obamacare. The requirement that businesses with more than 50 employees provide insurance to their workers had long been a big target for Republicans and one of the more contentious policies in the law. It was the middle of the mid-term congressional campaigns, and Republicans suspected the administration was delaying the mandate to put off the political pain of compliance until after the election.
“The president changed the health-care law without a vote of Congress, effectively creating his own law by literally waiving the employer mandate and the penalties for failing to comply with it,” Boehner said in a statement at the time. “That’s not the way our system of government was designed to work. No president should have the power to make laws on his or her own.” The irony was that House Republicans had repeatedly assailed the employer mandate as a jobs killer, and yet here they were suing to force the administration to implement it faster. Read more here.
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Staff Sergeant Clayton Bowen, 29, of San Antonio, Texas, and Private 1st Class Morris Walker, 23, of Chapel Hill, N.C., were 
