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JERUSALEM (AP) ? U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry shuttled between Israelis and Palestinians Friday in his latest diplomatic mission to coax the two sides back to the negotiating table and revive the Mideast peace process.
Kerry returned to Jerusalem for second visit in less than 24 hours after a 2?-hour meeting with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in Amman, Jordan, Kerry's base of operations during his stop in the Middle East.
That followed a lengthy dinner meeting Thursday night in Jerusalem with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The goal is to restart talks on finding a two-state solution to the conflict.
Kerry, who's on a two-week swing through the Middle East and Asia, met with Abbas in a diplomatic area of the Jordanian capital.
"It's good to be back and I look forward to our conversation. We have a lot to talk about, obviously, as you know," Kerry told Abbas.
As reporters and photographers were ushered out of the meeting, Kerry turned to Abbas and said: "We had a good long meeting." It was an apparent reference to his meeting with Netanyahu the night before. "We're going back."
The State Department said Kerry and Abbas had a "very constructive discussion" focused on advancing the peace process, and that Iran and Syria also came up.
After the first Netanyahu session, the department said the two had a "productive, in-depth and wide-ranging conversation" and that Kerry reiterated his commitment to working with all parties to achieve a two-state solution.
State Department officials say Kerry will continue to try to find common ground between the two sides that would lead to a resumption of negotiations. On this trip, Kerry is trying to pin down precisely what conditions Abbas and Netanyahu have for resuming talks and perhaps discuss confidence-building measures.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/kerrys-shuttle-diplomacy-lands-him-jerusalem-131327809.html
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QUITO, Ecuador (AP) ? President Barack Obama tried to cool the international frenzy over Edward Snowden on Thursday as Ecuador stepped up its defiance and said it was preemptively rejecting millions in trade benefits that it could lose by taking in the fugitive from his limbo in a Moscow airport.
The country seen as likeliest to shelter the National Security Agency leaker seemed determined to prove it could handle any repercussions, with three of its highest officials calling an early-morning news conference to "unilaterally and irrevocably renounce" $23 million a year in lowered tariffs on products such as shrimp and frozen vegetables.
Fernando Alvarado, the secretary of communications for leftist President Rafael Correa, sarcastically suggested the U.S. use the money to train government employees to respect human rights.
Obama, meanwhile, sought to downplay the international chase for the man he called "a 29-year-old hacker" and lower the temperature of an issue that has raised tensions between the U.S. and uneasy partners Russia and China. Obama said in Senegal that the damage to U.S. national security has already been done and his top focus now is making sure it can't happen again.
"I'm not going to have one case with a suspect who we're trying to extradite suddenly be elevated to the point where I've got to start doing wheeling and dealing and trading on a whole host of other issues, simply to get a guy extradited so he can face the justice system," Obama said at a joint news conference with Senegal's President Macky Sall.
While the Ecuadorean government appeared angry over U.S. threats of punishment if it accepts Snowden, there were also mixed signals about how eager it was to grant asylum. For days, officials here have been blasting the U.S. and praising Snowden's leaks of NSA eavesdropping secrets as a blow for global human rights.
But they also have repeatedly insisted that they are nowhere close to making a decision on whether Snowden can leave Moscow, where he is believed to be holed up in an airport transit zone, for refuge in this oil-rich South American nation.
"It's a complex situation, we don't know how it'll be resolved," Correa told a news conference Thursday in his first public comments on the case aside from a handful of postings on Twitter.
The Ecuadorean leader said that in order for Snowden's asylum application to be processed, he would have to be in Ecuador or inside an Ecuadorean Embassy, "and he isn't." Another country would have to permit Snowden to transit its territory for that requirement to be met, Correa said.
WikiLeaks, which has been aiding Snowden, announced earlier he was en route to Ecuador and had received a travel document. On Wednesday, the Univision television network displayed an unsigned letter of safe passage for him.
Officials on Thursday acknowledged that the Ecuadorean Embassy in London had issued a June 22 letter of safe passage for Snowden that calls on other countries to allow him to travel to asylum in Ecuador. But Ecuador's secretary of political management, Betty Tola, said the letter was invalid because it was issued without the approval of the government in the capital, Quito.
She also threatened legal action against whoever leaked the document, which she said "has no validity and is the exclusive responsibility of the person who issued it."
"This demonstrates a total lack of coordination in the department of foreign affairs," said Santiago Basabe, a professor of political science at the Latin American School of Social Sciences in Quito. "It's no small question to issue a document of safe passage or a diplomatic document for someone like Snowden without this decision being taken directly by the foreign minister or president."
The renunciation of trade benefits was a dramatic but mostly symbolic threat. The U.S Congress was widely expected to let the benefits lapse in coming weeks, for reasons unrelated to the Snowden case. And if they continued, it appeared highly unlikely that the Ecuadorean government would be able to unilaterally cancel tariff benefits that went directly to their country's exporters.
Behind Ecuador's mixed messages, some analysts saw not confusion but internal divisions in the Ecuadorean government.
Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a think tank focused on Latin America, said many in Washington believed that Correa, a leftist elected to a third term in February, had been telegraphing a desire to moderate and take a softer tack toward the United States and private business.
Harder-core leftists led by Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino may be seeking to maintain a tough line, he said, a division expressing itself in confusing messages.
"I think there really are different factions within the government on this," Shifter said. "Correa wants to become more moderate. That has been the signal that has been communicated in Washington."
Embarrassment for the Obama administration over the surveillance revelations continued as documents disclosed Thursday showed the Obama administration gathered U.S. citizens' Internet data until 2011, continuing a spying program started under President George W. Bush that revealed whom Americans exchanged emails with and the Internet Protocol address of their computer.
The National Security Agency ended the program that collected email logs and timing, but not content, in 2011 because it decided it didn't effectively stop terrorist plots, according to the NSA's director, Gen. Keith Alexander, who also heads the U.S. Cyber Command. He said all data was purged in 2011.
Britain's Guardian newspaper on Thursday released documents detailing the collection, though the program was also described earlier this month by The Washington Post.
The U.S. administration was expected to decide by Monday what export privileges to grant Ecuador under the Generalized System of Preferences, a program meant to spur development and growth in poorer countries.
Although the deadline was set long before the Snowden affair, U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman said Thursday that Ecuador's application to add a handful of products such as artichokes and cut flowers ? the latter a major industry here ? would not be decided immediately but would remain pending. That gives the U.S. additional leverage over Ecuador while Snowden's fate remains uncertain.
More broadly, a larger trade pact allowing reduced tariffs on more than $5 billion in annual exports to the U.S. is up for congressional renewal before July 21. While approval of the Andean Trade Preference Act has long been seen as doubtful in Washington, Ecuador has been lobbying strongly for its renewal.
On Wednesday, Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, pledged to lead an effort to block extension of U.S. tariff benefits if Ecuador grants asylum to Snowden, who turned 30 last week. Nearly half of Ecuador's billions a year in foreign trade depends on the United States.
The Obama administration said Thursday that accepting Snowden would damage the overall relationship between the two countries and analysts said it was almost certain that granting the leaker asylum would lead the U.S. to cut roughly $30 million a year in military and law enforcement assistance.
Granting asylum to Snowden would cause "great difficulties in our bilateral relationship," State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell said. "If they take that step, that would have very negative repercussions."
Alvarado, the communications minister, said his country rejects economic "blackmail" in the form of threats against the trade measures.
"The preferences were authorized for Andean countries as compensation for the fight against drugs, but soon became a new instrument of pressure," he said. "As a result, Ecuador unilaterally and irrevocably renounces these preferences."
Alvarado did not explicitly mention the separate effort to win trade benefits under the presidential order.
He did suggest, however, how the U.S. could use the money saved from Ecuadorean tariffs to train government employees to respect citizens' rights.
"Ecuador offers the United States $23 million a year in economic aid, an amount similar to what we were receiving under the tariff benefits, with the purpose of providing human rights training that will contribute to avoid violations of people's privacy, that degrade humanity," he said.
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Pace reported from Dakar, Senegal. Gonzalo Solano in Quito, Peter Orsi in Caracas, Venezuela, and Ken Thomas in Washington contributed to this report.
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Follow Michael Weissenstein on Twitter at http://twitter.com/mweissenstein
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/ecuador-heats-rhetoric-obama-downplays-snowden-194838354.html
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The Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating the relationship between the news organization Thomson Reuters and the Institute for Supply Management, CNBC has learned.
The two entities join forces to publish market-moving manufacturing data that is generated by ISM and published to high-speed data clients by Thomson Reuters.
CNBC reported earlier this month that ISM's manufacturing data was inadvertently sent out early by Thomson Reuters on June 3 to its high-speed clients, many of whom immediately traded on the information.
There was a sharp market reaction to that burst of trading, which prompted downward moves in the SPY ETF, which serves as an investing tool for traders to bet on the overall direction of the market. That downward surge came 15 milliseconds ahead of the official release time for the data. In an era of super-fast computer trading, 15 milliseconds is more than enough time to profit from early knowledge of market moving information.
(Read More:Thomson Reuters Gives Elite Traders Early Advantage)
ISM CEO Thomas Derry told CNBC Thursday that the SEC reacted to that report by asking Thomson Reuters for a copy of its contract with ISM. The two organizations released a redacted form of the contract to the SEC, Derry said. "The SEC did speak specifically to Thomson Reuters about our relationship," Derry said. "We have not been contacted by any government entity."
Derry said that in the wake of the incident ISM has spoken to Thomson Reuters about the mechanics of the release of data, and he's satisfied that the situation will not be repeated. "We have to be smart enough with our partners to manage the process appropriately so we're not giving anyone a running start," he said. "I'm very confident that Thomson Reuters has put itself in a place for no more repeat of the premature release," he said.
(Read More: Conference Board Ends Embargoes After Leaks)
A spokesperson for Thomson Reuters did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A spokesman for the SEC declined to comment.
The June 3 incident was spotted by an analyst at Nanex LLC, who alerted CNBC to it. Nanex data show as many as 30,000 shares of SPY traded in 1 millisecond during the course of the 15 millisecond gap between the inadvertent release and the official public dissemination of the information that day. In addition, Nanex said it saw downward moves in 369 stocks during the 15 milliseconds. All told, Nanex calculated that $28 million worth of shares were exchanged in a short time before the official release of the ISM data.
(Additional reporting by Katy Byron)
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DAKAR, Senegal (AP) ? President Barack Obama on Thursday praised the Supreme Court's ruling on gay marriage as a "victory for American democracy" but clashed with his African host over gay rights in a sign of how far the movement has to go internationally.
Obama said recognition of same-sex unions in the United States should cross state lines and that equal rights should be recognized universally. It was his first chance to expand on his thoughts about the ruling, which was issued Wednesday as he flew to Senegal, one of many African countries that outlaw homosexuality. Senegalese President Macky Sall rebuffed Obama's call for Africans to give gays equal rights under the law.
"We are still not ready to decriminalize homosexuality," Sall said, while insisting that the country is "very tolerant" and needs more time to digest the issue without pressure. "This does not mean we are homophobic."
Obama said gay rights didn't come up in their private meeting at the presidential palace, a mansion that looks somewhat similar to the White House. But Obama said he wants to send a message to Africans that while he respects differing personal and religious views on the matter, it's important to have nondiscrimination under the law.
"People should be treated equally, and that's a principle that I think applies universally," he said.
A report released Monday by Amnesty International says 38 African countries criminalize homosexuality. In four of those ? Mauritania, northern Nigeria, southern Somalia and Sudan ? the punishment is death. These laws appear to have broad public support. A June 4 Pew Research Center survey found at least nine of 10 respondents in Senegal, Kenya, Ghana, Uganda and Nigeria believe homosexuality should not be accepted by society.
Sall sought to reassure Obama that gays are not persecuted in Senegal.
Under Senegalese law, "an improper or unnatural act with a person of the same sex" can be punished by up to five years in prison.
And as recently as February of 2008, police rounded up men suspected of being homosexual after a Senegalese tabloid published photographs of a clandestine gay wedding in a suburb of Dakar. Gays went into hiding and those who could fled to neighboring countries, but they were pushed out of Gambia by the president's threat of decapitation.
As for Wednesday's court ruling, Obama said he's directing his administration to comb through every federal statute to quickly determine the implications of a decision that gave the nation's legally married gay couples equal federal footing with all other married Americans.
He said he wants to make sure that gay couples who deserve benefits under the ruling get them quickly. Obama said he personally believes that gay couples legally married in one state should retain their benefits if they move to another state that doesn't recognize gay marriage.
"I believe at the root of who we are as a people, as Americans, is the basic precept that we are all equal under the law," he said. "We believe in basic fairness. And what I think yesterday's ruling signifies is one more step towards ensuring that those basic principles apply to everybody."
Obama also offered prayers for former South African President Nelson Mandela, who is gravely ill, ahead of Obama's planned visit to his country this weekend. Obama said he was inspired to become political active by Mandela's example in the anti-apartheid movement of being willing to sacrifice his life for a belief in equal treatment.
"I think he's a hero for the world," Obama said. "And if and when he passes from this place, one thing I think we'll all know is that his legacy is one that will linger on throughout the ages."
Later Obama plans to reflect on the ties many African-Americans share with the continent as he takes a tour of Goree Island, Africa's westernmost point. Africans reportedly were shipped off into slavery across the Atlantic Ocean through the island's "Door of No Return."
Thousands of boisterous revelers welcomed Obama's motorcade Thursday morning in Dakar, cheering and waving homemade signs as the first African-American president made his way to the presidential palace. A large sign outside his hotel gate had pictures of smiling Obama and Sall that read, "Welcome home, President Obama."
Some in the crowd drummed, danced and sang, and many wore white as a symbol for peace. Sall and his wife, Marieme Faye Sall, greeted Obama and first lady Michelle Obama before entering the palace for a bilateral meeting between the two presidents.
Obama's focus in Senegal is on the modern-day achievements of the former French colony after half a century of independence. Sall ousted an incumbent president who attempted to change the constitution to make it easier for him to be re-elected and pave the way for his son to succeed him. The power grab sparked protests, fueled by hip-hop music and social media, that led to Sall's election.
"Senegal is one of the most stable democracies in Africa and one of the strongest parterns that we have in the region," Obama said. "It's moving in the right direction with reforms to deepen democratic institutions."
But such people-powered democratic transitions are not always the story of the African experience. Fighting and human rights abuses limited Obama's options for stops in his first major tour of sub-Saharan Africa since he took office more than four years ago. Obama is avoiding his father's homeland, Kenya, whose president has been charged with war crimes, and Nigeria, the country with the continent's most dominant economy. Nigeria is enveloped in an Islamist insurgency and military crackdown.
Obama's itinerary in Senegal was designed to send a message, purposefully delivered in a French-speaking, Muslim-majority nation, to other Africans in countries that have not made the strides toward democracy that Senegal has. Obama plans to meet with civil society leaders at the Goree Institute and visited the Supreme Court to speak about the importance of an independent judiciary and the rule of law in Africa's development.
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Follow Nedra Pickler on Twitter at https://twitter.com/nedrapickler
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/obama-promotes-gay-rights-africa-praises-court-131956021.html
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