Deadly bomb blast hits bus in southern Russia

At least five people killed and 17 injured after explosion rocks passenger bus in city of Volgograd.

 

An explosion on a bus in the southern Russian city of Volgograd has killed at least five people and injured 17 others, emergency officials say.
The blast was caused by "an unspecified explosive device," the National Anti-Terrorism Committee said in a statement.
Investigators suspected that a female suicide bomber was responsible for the bombing, the Interfax news agency reported.
Citing a source in the regional Investigative Committee office, Interfax said identity documents belonging to the suspected bomber were found near the site and that she was believed to have been the wife of an Muslim fighter.
Irina Gogolyeva, a spokeswoman for the Emergency Situations Ministry, said 40 people were on the bus when the explosion occurred on Monday afternoon.
North Caucasus attacks
Officials had initially said investigators were probing whether the blast may have been caused by a leaking gas canister used by some city transport vehicles as a source of fuel.
Fighters who say they are fighting to create an Islamic state in Russia's mostly Muslim North Caucasus have carried out deadly bombings inside and outside the region, made up of several provinces along Russia's southern border.
The fighters claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing that killed 37 people at Moscow airport in January, 2011, and two nearly simultaneous suicide bombings that killed 40 people on the Moscow subway in 2010.
Volgograd is a city of around one million people that lies 900km southeast of Moscow and a few hundred kilometres north of the North Caucasus and Black Sea resort city of Sochi, where Russia will host the 2014 Winter Olympics.
President Vladimir Putin has staked his reputation on the Games and ordered authorities to boost security in the North Caucasus.

This special edition of the show delves into the continuing crackdown on whistleblowers in Barack Obama’s America.

Listening Post

The US: Surveillance, secrets and security

This special edition of the show delves into the continuing crackdown on whistleblowers in Barack Obama’s America. Listening Post Last Modified: 24 Aug 2013 09:18

This week on the Listening Post, we feature a special edition of the show. On August 21, Bradley Manning, the US soldier convicted of leaking a trove of secret government documents to anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks, was sentenced to 35 years in prison having been convicted in July of 20 charges against him, including espionage. This is one of the latest developments in the ongoing story of secrecy and surveillance in Barack Obama’s America. When we first took an extended look at the White House’s war on whistleblowers a year ago, little did we know that there was another figure waiting in the wings, about to make political history. Edward Snowden took the stage in June 2013, revealing the sweeping extent of the NSA's surveillance programme. He has gone down as one of US' most important whistleblowers of all time, becoming the seventh person to be charged by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act, more than double the number of prosecutions of all previous presidential administrations combined. For the most part, coverage of this story by the US mainstream media has been interesting, to say the least. At the beginning of Manning’s trial, many mainstream organisations did not even bother turning up. And across the airwaves, both Manning and Snowden had their characters assassinated, their pasts smeared and their motives pathologised. Then the journalist who broke the Edward Snowden story, the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald, became the subject of a hostile media reception himself, something that the other messenger, Julian Assange, can relate to. And in an ironic twist, the US media establishment has not been immune to government surveillance itself, as news outlets like The Associated Press and Fox News, discovered the government was eavesdropping on some of their own reporting on national security issues. Facing mounting pressure, President Obama acknowledged that his government needs to be more transparent about surveillance. He has pledged to carry out a review of the Patriot Act to see what changes need to be made to protect privacy and civil liberties. This is a story journalists and citizens in the US and around the world will be watching closely. Taking us through the debate are Michael Ratner, the president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights; Ed Pilkington, a chief reporter for the American edition of The Guardian newspaper; Chase Madar, the author of The Passion Of Bradley Manning; Michael German, a former FBI agent and member of the American Civil Liberties Union; and Jeffrey D Gordon, former Defense department spokesman. In the second half of the show we speak to Matthew Miller, a defender of the Obama administration’s crackdown on whistleblowers and a former director of Public Affairs at the Department of Justice. He has also served as Attorney General Eric Holder’s spokesman during Obama’s first two years in office. Early last year, he wrote a piece in The Daily Beast, defending the administration’s approach to those who leak classified information. “Some things are secret for a reason,” he argued, “and when government employees violate the law, to disclose information that undermines our national security, there must be consequences.” Listening Post can be seen each week at the following times GMT: Saturday: 0830, 1930; Sunday: 1430; Monday: 0430. Click here for more Listening Post

 

France summons US ambassador over 'spying'

Move comes after newspaper publishes claims of large-scale spying on French citizens by US National Security Agency.

France has called in the US ambassador to protest against allegations in Le Monde newspaper about large-scale spying on French citizens by the US National Security Agency, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said. "I have immediately summoned the US ambassador and he will be received this morning at the Quai d'Orsay [the French Foreign Ministry]," Fabius told reporters at a European Union foreign ministers' meeting in Luxembourg on Monday. France and Mexico have demanded prompt explanations from Washington following fresh spying allegations leaked by former US security contractor Edward Snowden. Reports in Le Monde and German weekly Der Spiegel have revealed that the National Security Agency secretly recorded tens of millions of phone calls in France and hacked into former Mexican President Felipe Calderon's email account. The spy agency taped 70.3 million phone calls in France over a 30-day period between December 10 and January 8 this year, Le Monde reported in its online version, citing documents from Snowden. Manuel Valls, France's interior minister, said the revelations were "shocking". "If an allied country spies on France or spies on other European countries, that's totally unacceptable," Valls told Europe 1 radio. According to Le Monde, the NSA automatically picked up communications from certain phone numbers in France and recorded text messages under a programme code-named "US-985D".  Le Monde said the documents gave grounds to believe that the NSA targeted not only people suspected of being involved in terrorism but also high-profile individuals from the world of business or politics. Charles Rivkin, the US ambassador to France, declined immediate comment on reports that he had been called in by the French foreign ministry but stressed that French ties with Washington were close. "This relationship on a military, intelligence, special forces ... level is the best it's been in a generation," Rivkin told the Reuters news agency as John Kerry, the US secretary of state, arrived in Paris. In July, Paris prosecutors opened a preliminary inquiries into the NSA's programme, known as Prism, after Der Spiegel and Britain's The Guardian revealed wide-scale spying by the agency leaked by Snowden. "We were warned in June [about the programme] and we reacted strongly but obviously we need to go further," Fabius said. "We must quickly assure that these practices aren't repeated