A firm contracted by the U.S. government to help set up a Twitter-like network in Cuba held secret level security clearance and was warned the operation could involve classified work, according to documents seen by Al Jazeera. And documents show that the program was managed by a section of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) tasked with helping manage regime change in countries where U.S. interests are at stake.
Details contained in the terms a $1.5 billion contract between USAID and Washington-based contractor Creative Associates International (CAI) outline the security clearance arrangements required by the U.S. government. Signed in 2008, the document had been obtained by researcher Jeremy Bigwood through a FOIA request, and shared with Al Jazeera.
U.S. Revealed: USAID ‘Cuban Twitter’ contractor given secret level clearance
Guardian and Washington Post win Pulitzer prize for NSA revelations
The Guardian and the Washington Post have been awarded the highest accolade in US journalism, winning the Pulitzer prize for public service for their groundbreaking articles on the National Security Agency’s surveillance activities based on the leaks of Edward Snowden.
The award, announced in New York on Monday, comes 10 months after the Guardian published the first report based on the leaks from Snowden, revealing the agency’s bulk collection of US citizens’ phone records.
A year later, West, Texas is still a long way from recovery
Two flags, tattered by an explosion blocks away, have flown at half-staff at the Emergency Medical Services station since shortly after a fertilizer mixing operation blew up April 17, 2013, devastating this quiet central Texas town and killing 15.
The dead included three out-of-town men attending a course at the EMS facility, who then joined local volunteer firefighters to fight the blaze.
Window Opens On Secret Camp Within Guantanamo
Attorney James Connell has visited his client inside the secret Guantanamo prison complex known as Camp 7 only once, taken in a van with covered windows on a circuitous trek to disguise the route on the scrub brush-and-cactus covered military base.
Connell is allowed to say virtually nothing about what he saw in the secret camp where the most notorious terror suspects in U.S. custody are held except that it is unlike any detention facility he's encountered.
"It's much more isolating than any other facility that I have known," the lawyer says. "I've done cases from the Virginia death row and Texas death row and these pretrial conditions are much more isolating."
This Fish Crawled Out of the Water…and Into Creationists' Nightmares
We all know the Darwin fish, the car-bumper send-up of the Christian "ichthys" symbol, or Jesus fish. Unlike the Christian symbol, the Darwin fish has, you know, legs. Har har.
But the Darwin fish isn't merely a clever joke; in effect, it contains a testable scientific prediction. If evolution is true, and if life on Earth originated in water, then there must have once been fish species possessing primitive limbs, which enabled them to spend some part of their lives on land. And these species, in turn, must be the ancestors of four-limbed, land-living vertebrates like us.
Magnitude 7.5 quake strikes off Solomons, sparks tsunami warning
A powerful magnitude-7.6 earthquake triggered large waves in the Solomon Islands on Sunday, and authorities were trying to determine if there was any serious damage or injuries.
Government spokesman George Herming said people throughout the Pacific island chain awoke to the strong quake at 7:14am. He said that people on Makira and nearby islands southeast of the capital, Honiara, reported seeing three large waves after the quake. He said there were no immediate reports of damage or injuries.
Climate panel warns emissions rising, blurs reason
The U.N.'s expert panel on climate change on Sunday highlighted the disconnect between international goals to fight global warming and what is being done to attain them.
Emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases must drop by 40-70 percent by 2050 to keep the global temperature rise below the 2-degree C (3.6-degree F) cap set in U.N. climate talks, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said.
The opposite is happening now. On average global emissions rose by 2.2 percent — or 1 gigaton — a year between 2000 and 2010, outpacing growth in previous decades to reach "unprecedented levels" despite some efforts to contain them, the IPCC said.
Gunmen seize two buildings in east Ukraine
Armed men have seized a police station and a security services building in eastern Ukraine, officials say. Police said the men fired shots and used stun grenades to seize the offices in Sloviansk, near the Russian border.
The interior minister called the gunmen "terrorists" and said special forces would repel the attack.
Pro-Russian activists have seized government buildings elsewhere in east Ukraine. Kiev accuses Moscow of orchestrating the unrest.
CIA’s use of harsh interrogation went beyond legal authority, Senate report says
A classified U.S. Senate report found that the CIA's legal justification for the use of harsh interrogation techniques that critics say amount to torture was based on faulty legal reasoning, McClatchy news service reported on Thursday.
The Central Intelligence Agency also issued erroneous claims about how many people it subjected to techniques such as simulated drowning, or "water boarding," according to the news service, citing conclusions from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report obtained by McClatchy.
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