SUMMARY: After nearly 18 months, two Reuters journalists have left prison in Myanmar. The crime that put them there: Revealing information the country’s government wanted to suppress, about its persecution campaign against Myanmar's Rohingya Muslim minority. John Yang talks to Priscilla Clapp, a former U.S. diplomat who served as chief of mission in the American embassy in Myanmar, about the developments.
SUMMARY: A Russian government-controlled think tank had outlined plans on how to swing the 2016 U.S. election toward Donald Trump, according to a Reuters report Thursday. New documents reveal a strategy of using social media to bolster Mr. Trump and undermine faith in America's electoral system. William Brangham learns more from former CIA officer John Sipher and Ned Parker of Reuters.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM (NewsHour): Reuters reported today that a think tank controlled by the Russian government outlined detailed plans how to swing the 2016 U.S. election toward Donald Trump.
In two different papers, the think tank said Russia should use social media and Russian-backed media to bolster Trump and to undermine faith in America's electoral system.
For more on these developments, I'm joined now by Ned Parker — he's one of the reporters who broke the story — and by John Sipher. He served 28 years in the CIA's clandestine service, stationed in Russia and Eastern Europe. He's now with the consulting firm CrossLead.
Gentlemen, welcome to you both.
Ned Parker, I would like to start with you.
Can you tell us a little bit more? What is it that you found? What did you report today?
NED PARKER, Reuters: Right.
Well, we found are that there are two documents drafted by an in-house policy shop for the Kremlin that reports back to President Vladimir Putin. And this organization is also headed by former foreign intelligence service officers.
This organization called the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies drafted two reports last year, one in June and one in October. The first in June talked about, how do you influence the U.S. electorate through a media and social media campaign to overturn the policies of then-President Obama and promote — persuade the U.S. public to chose a new U.S. administration that would promote policies beneficial to both Russia and the United States?
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: And, Ned, just staying with you for a second, is this evidence, is this in line with what U.S. intelligence agencies believe the Russians did, in fact, do during the election?
NED PARKER: Right.
I think that's the significance of these documents. They came in after the election. The second document, which is from October, talked about how Hillary Clinton was likely to win the election, so it made sense to change tack in terms of propaganda, and rather than work for her defeat and a new administration under Donald Trump, instead, they should push for a weak Clinton administration, and to bring question about the integrity of the U.S. electoral process through different media and social media information packets.
Now, getting these two documents after the election, it sort of crystallized what the U.S. already knew about motive and intent, including the hacking, for instance, which there was forensics all over the place linking the hacking of the DNC and the Clinton campaign to Russia's military intelligence.
SUMMARY: On Tuesday, Michigan's attorney general filed new criminal charges in Flint's lead contamination case. But Flint is not alone. Reports from both USA Today and Reuters find that lead contamination is widespread, affecting some millions of Americans, usually in rural communities with small water systems. Judy Woodruff speaks with Laura Ungar, the lead reporter on the USA Today investigation.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): As we reported earlier, Michigan's attorney general filed criminal charges against city officials in Flint for operating that city's water systems in an unsafe manner.
Well, it turns out Flint is not alone in having a lead contamination problem. Two recent news investigation find two startling numbers.
A Reuters investigation of lead levels in blood found nearly 3,000 areas in the country with contamination levels higher than those in Flint.
And a USA Today report found that some four million Americans get water from utilities that do not meet federal safe drinking water standards.
Laura Ungar was a lead reporter on the USA Today investigation. And she joins me now.
Laura Ungar, welcome to the program.
You and your colleagues focused on smaller communities around the country. Why?
LAURA UNGAR, USA Today: Well, we wanted to look at the problem beyond Flint and look to see just how big the scope was.
And so, basically, we looked at where the problem was the worst, and we found that, in these small water systems, which are generally located in rural areas, small, remote communities, the problem was worse in those communities.
JUDY WOODRUFF: And give us an example of what you found. You got a number of families you write about in this series.
LAURA UNGAR: Yes.
For example, one family in Ranger, Texas, they have a situation where their 2-year-old son has high levels of lead in his blood. And they lived there for about a year, almost a year, before finding out from a citywide letter that they had high lead in their city, in their city's water supply.
And then they — actually, their tap was tested, and they didn't find out the results of that from the city. They found it out from me, actually. I told them the levels that were found in their own tap.
So — and they were very upset about that situation, because, you know, their son is 2, and he's facing high lead, which, as you know, just causes all sorts of problems with children.
JUDY WOODRUFF: And, again, it wasn't just this one small community. You found something like four million Americans affected.
LAURA UNGAR: Yes, it's more than four million.
That four million is places where — or people affected by places that either tested improperly or skipped tests. There are even more than that when you talk about where high lead has been found and, in some cases, has not been fixed.
SUMMARY: There is a well-established link between lead exposure and learning disabilities, but early childhood education has been shown to counteract the effects. In Flint, Michigan, where the youngest residents have been the most vulnerable to lead poisoning, the city has opened a free child care center in an attempt to counteract the harmful effects on developing brains. Hari Sreenivasan reports.
Last year was Earth's hottest on record in new evidence that people are disrupting the climate by burning fossil fuels that release greenhouse gases into the air, two U.S. government agencies said on Friday.
The White House said the studies, by the U.S. space agency NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), showed climate change was happening now and that action was needed to cut rising world greenhouse gas emissions.
The 10 warmest years since records began in the 19th century have all been since 1997, the data showed. Last year was the warmest, ahead of 2010, undermining claims by some skeptics that global warming has stopped in recent years.
Record temperatures in 2014 were spread around the globe, including most of Europe stretching into northern Africa, the western United States, far eastern Russia into western Alaska, parts of interior South America, parts of eastern and western coastal Australia and elsewhere, NASA and NOAA said.
"While the ranking of individual years can be affected by chaotic weather patterns, the long-term trends are attributable to drivers of climate change that right now are dominated by human emissions of greenhouse gases," said Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies in New York.
"The data shows quite clearly that it's the greenhouse gas trends that are responsible for the majority of the trends," he told reporters. Emissions were still rising "so we may anticipate further record highs in the years to come."
U.N. studies show there already are more extremes of heat and rainfall and project ever more disruptions to food and water supplies. Sea levels are rising, threatening millions of people living near coasts, as ice melts from Greenland to Antarctica.
PARIS MEETING IN DECEMBER
Next December, about 200 governments will meet in Paris to try to reach a deal to limit global warming, shifting to renewable energies. China and the United States, the top emitters of greenhouse gases, say they are cooperating more to achieve a U.N. accord.
The new data "is another reminder that climate change is not a problem for the future - it's happening here and now and we can't wait to take action," a White House official said in a statement.
Opponents of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline that would transport Canadian crude oil across the United States said the new data made it all the more pressing to prevent the construction of the pipeline.
But U.S. Senator James Inhofe, a Republican who is the Senate's leading climate change skeptic, said the temperature difference between 2014 and 2010 was so insignificant as to prove there was no need for more stringent regulations by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
"Human activity is clearly not the driving cause for global warming, and is not leading our planet to the brink of devastation that many alarmists want us to believe," he said.
The U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says it is at least 95 percent probable that human activities, rather than natural variations in the climate caused by factors such as sunspots, are to blame for rising temperatures.
Still, a Paris deal will be hard to achieve since curbs on fossil fuel use are unpopular in many nations. Low oil prices may also discourage a shift to cleaner wind and solar power.
"The political challenges of organizing countries to respond, particularly through the UN process, remain very high," Michael Levi, a fellow on energy and environment at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, told Reuters.
Rowan Sutton, director of climate research at Britain's National Center for Atmospheric Science at the University of Reading, said a single year did not mean much because it might be a freak hot year.
"But the fact that now 14 of the 15 warmest years on record have occurred since the turn of the century shows just how clear global warming has become," he said.
Even so, temperatures have not risen as fast as they did in the 1980s or 1990s, taking an unusually warm 1998 as a starting point. The IPCC has described it as a hiatus in warming.
NO EL NINO FACTOR
Since 1880, Earth's average surface temperature has warmed by about 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit (0.8 degree Celsius), NASA said. The NASA and NOAA analyses showed that the world's oceans all warmed last year, offsetting somewhat more moderate temperatures over land.
The average temperature across global land and ocean surfaces was 1.24 degrees F (0.69 degree C) above the 20th century average, NOAA said.
The scientists noted that the record was set in a year that did not have the weather pattern known as El Niño, which can heat up the atmosphere and has been a factor in many past record-setting years, including 1998.
The United Nations says it is already clear that promises for emissions curbs at the Paris summit will be too weak to get on track for a U.N. goal of limiting global warming to 3.6 degrees F (2 degrees C) above pre-industrial times. (Additional reporting by Timothy Gardner, Roberta Rampton, Caren Bohan, Valerie Volcovici and Alistair Bell in Washington; David Adams in Miami; Nina Chestney and Susanna Twidale in London; Writing by Will Dunham and Alister Doyle; Editing by Alden Bentley, Howard Goller and Leslie Adler)
A Novo Nordisk drug combining its long-acting insulin degludec with its type 2 diabetes treatment Victoza has been recommended for approval in Europe, in an important boost for the Danish company.
The European Medicines Agency said on Friday it had issued a positive opinion for Xultophy, previously known as IDegLira, implying the medicine is likely to be formally approved by the European Commission within three months.
Novo said it planned to launch Xultophy in the first European markets in the first half of 2015.
Jakob Riis, executive vice president of marketing and medical affairs at Novo Nordisk, said Britain, Germany and Denmark were likely to be among the first launch markets for the product.
Clinical trial results have shown that the once-daily injection lowers blood sugar more than each medicine taken on its own, setting a new standard for sugar control in diabetic patients.
Prospects for degludec - already on sale separately in Europe under the brand name Tresiba - and the new combination with Victoza are critical for Novo, which is the world's biggest insulin maker.
Shares in Novo gained 1.6 percent on news of the favorable European decision, outperforming the European drugs sector which slid 0.3 percent by 1200 GMT.
Victoza has been a major growth driver for the group in the past few years but its sales are now rising more slowly, and Novo suffered a major setback in 2013 when U.S. regulators demanded more data on the safety of Tresiba before approving it.
With diabetes affecting 382 million people worldwide and the number of cases expected to rise to 592 million by 2035, according to the International Diabetes Federation, the disease represents a huge market for pharmaceutical companies.
Novo's main rivals in the space are Sanofi and Eli Lilly, which are also major suppliers of insulin.
Combination therapies for the growing type 2 diabetes health crisis are becoming increasingly common as patients continually require additional medicines as the disease progresses.
In addition to good blood sugar control, patients taking Xultophy also tend to lose weight. Weight loss is a particularly beneficial effect as obesity is a leading cause of type 2 diabetes and insulin tends to cause weight gain.
Russian assets slipped on Friday as investors took the view that a possible new wave of European Union sanctions over Moscow's involvement in the Ukraine crisis could cause severe damage to whole sectors of the Russian economy.
In a sign policymakers are nervous about the impact of sanctions - which are also being ratcheted up by the United States - the central bank unexpectedly raised its key interest rate by 50 basis points.
"It's clear that the key factor for market dynamics today is the expectation of EU sanctions. ... All other information is for the moment beyond the border of what's influencing trades," said Artyom Argetkin from BCS brokerage.
The dollar-denominated RTS index was down 1.5 percent at 1248.3 points at 1200 GMT, while the ruble-based MICEX traded 1.4 percent lower at 1389.9 points.
Russian sovereign dollar bonds fell across the curve on the sanctions fears, while the ruble weakened slightly against the dollar, despite being boosted by the central bank rate decision and the end-of-month tax period.
Ambassadors of the 28-nation EU are discussing options to curb Russian access to capital markets, arms and energy technology in response to last week's downing of a Malaysian airliner in an area of eastern Ukraine held by Russian-backed separatists.
The EU is also expected to expand its list of those targeted by sanctions including asset freezes on Friday due to Moscow's perceived backing of the pro-Russian separatists fighting Ukrainian government forces.
Earlier, the United States said Russia was firing artillery across its border, targeting Ukrainian military positions, and that Moscow intends to deliver heavy weapons to separatist forces.
Russia's $1.5 billion 2043 dollar bond fell almost 2 cents while the 2030 issue fell half a cent. Russian yield spreads over U.S. Treasuries widened 7 basis points to 285 bps on the EMBI Global index.
The ruble, meanwhile, was down 0.08 percent against the dollar to trade at 35.07 but strengthened 0.08 percent versus the euro to 47.16.
"Markets-wise, the [central bank] move is marginally supportive for the ruble, even though it won't be able to stop foreign capital repatriation if bolder sanctions are approved," Dmitry Polevoy, chief economist for Russia and CIS at ING bank.
The Russian currency was 0.03 percent weaker at 40.51 against the dollar-euro basket the central bank uses to gage the rouble's nominal exchange rate.
Investors pulled $172 million from Russia-dedicated funds between July 17 and 23, the largest outflow since January, analysts at VTB Capital said in a note, citing data from Emerging Portfolio Fund Research released on Friday.
Poor weather was the most likely cause of the crash of an Air Algerie flight in the West African state of Mali that killed 118 people on board, French officials said on Friday.
Investigators at the scene of the crash in northern Mali concluded the airliner broke apart when it hit the ground, the officials said, suggesting this meant it was unlikely to have been the victim of an attack.
"French soldiers who are on the ground have started the first investigations. Sadly, there are no survivors," French President Francois Hollande told reporters.
A column of 100 soldiers and 30 vehicles from the French force stationed in the region arrived early on Friday morning to secure the crash site near the northern Mali town of Gossi and to recover bodies, a Defense Ministry official said.
Hollande said one of the black box flight recorders had already been recovered and would be analyzed quickly.
"The plane's debris is concentrated in a small area, but it is too early to draw conclusions," Hollande said of the wreckage of the plane carrying at least 51 French nationals that crashed near the border with Burkina Faso, from where it had taken off.
"There are theories, especially the weather, but I'm not excluding any theory."
The death toll was revised to 118 from 116 after a final passenger manifest was issued.
"They have to do everything to reassemble the bodies and bring them home so that we can mourn properly," said Alidou Ouedraogo, whose daughter was among the 27 citizens of Burkina Faso killed in the crash.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): For more we’re joined via Google Plus from St. Petersburg by Paul Ingrassia, managing editor for the Reuters News Service. He and a group of foreign journalists met today with Russian President Putin. So, it was a very small audience, what are the headlines from this meeting?
PAUL INGRASSIA, Reuters: Well, you know, it was an interesting meeting. It was three hours. And I think what really became clear during the whole meeting was that, you know, President Putin feels a real sense of aggrievement by the west. And especially, I would say by the United States, you know, for not taking into account what he regards as Russia’s needs, Russia’s security interests, etc. He said he does not want the resumption of a Cold War. He said he does not want to recreate the former U.S.S.R., or anything like that.
But he also clearly feels that Russia’s entitled to the respect of his interests as he sees them from western countries. He was, you know, clearly more oriented toward Europe and the European Union, reaching out to there more than to the United States. At one point he was asked do you talk very often with President Obama and the answer, he sort of shrugged, and said, well, we talk occasionally, but I have to leave now, so I’m going to talk to Mr. Hollande and Mrs. Merkel.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Everybody has got to have probably been asking him about the election coming up tomorrow and what that does for Russia and the troops that are right along the Ukrainian border.
PAUL INGRASSIA: Yeah, he did say he would honor, respect the wishes of the Ukrainian people, but it wasn’t quite as simple as an answer, if you will, Hari. What he did say was he’ll respect the results of the election, the decision of the Ukrainian people, but he thinks they’re doing it all wrong. He said several times there was a coup d’état in Ukraine, and it’s basically an unlawful government. He said he’s offered to have mediation with Ukraine, and that he’s been rebuffed about that.
You know, he maintained time and again, of course, that Crimea voted freely and independently to join Russia, and therefore, you know, the right to self-determination should be respected. He said he believed that really the replacement, the deposement really of President Yanukovych of Ukraine was something that was outside of the bounds of law, and he’s the lawful president of the country.
HARI SREENIVASAN: All right, was there anything that surprised you about the meeting?
PAUL INGRASSIA: Well, I think, what did surprise me, honestly, was the intensity, if you will, of his feeling of aggrievement. He really seems to feel that the west sort of willfully ignored Russia and relegated Russia to more of a second-class status over the last 20 years, and he thinks Russia’s legitimate interests were ignored. And as he put it, we had no choice but to take decisive action to prevent independent Ukraine from joining NATO. Just the depth of his feeling, about this aggrieved sentiment, was sort of surprising, actually.
HARI SREENIVASAN: All right, Paul Ingrassia of Reuters News Service joining us from St. Petersburg via Google Plus, thanks so much.
PAUL INGRASSIA: Okay, thank you.
Almost certainly orchestrated by Vladimir Putin, Crimea's appeal to join Russia pits the president directly against the West in a standoff that has increasingly high stakes and unpredictable consequences.
The vote by the Crimean parliament gives Putin the upper hand in the crisis over Ukraine, but risks antagonizing the pro-Western leaders in Kiev who have refused until now to resort to military action and increase tensions in Ukraine's Russian-speaking south and east.
"We are at a very dangerous point, and it threatens to push a political crisis in the direction of a military situation," said former Kremlin spin doctor Glob Pavlovsky.
He said there was now a greater danger of shots being fired in Crimea, a Ukrainian region with an ethnic Russian majority, adding: "Russia is encouraging the action of 'local forces'."
Putin has in effect thrown back in Western diplomats' faces their argument that the ouster of Moscow-backed Viktor Yanukovich as Ukraine's president on February 22 must be accepted because his removal was the will of the people.
Now they will have to accept the will of the Crimean people.
The former KGB spy looked serene as he chaired a meeting of his most senior officials in the Security Council on Thursday, seemingly oblivious to turmoil on Russian markets and Kiev's defiance that a referendum on Crimea's status would be illegal.
The 61-year-old appears to feel he holds all the cards.
After appealing for membership of the Russian Federation, Crimea's pro-Russian leaders, installed after Russian-speaking armed men took over the local parliament, said they would have to wait for Putin's answer to hold a referendum on status.
They plan to hold the referendum on March 16, asking Crimea's just over 2 million people whether they want to unite with Russia or stay with Ukraine.
Moscow's move to get a tighter grip on Crimea has been perfectly choreographed over the last few days.
Calls to help Russian-speaking citizens in Ukraine's southeast defend themselves against "extremists" from western Ukraine, accused of trying to rid the country of Russians, have given way to draft laws speeding up citizenship requests from native Russian speakers.
Twinned with legislation to simplify the procedure for "parts of foreign states" to join the Russian Federation, this leaves Moscow better positioned to take control of a strip of land Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev handed to Kiev in 1954.
"Speaking plainly, this bill was introduced by me for the sake of Crimea," said Sergei Mironov, author of the bill.
A witness in the murder trial of neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman testified on Friday that he saw Trayvon Martin on top of Zimmerman during a struggle that led to the unarmed black teenager's shooting death in a central Florida gated community last year.
But Jonathan Good, a former resident at the townhouse complex, told the jury in Seminole County criminal court that he never saw Martin slam Zimmerman's head into the concrete sidewalk, undermining a key element in Zimmerman's defense.
"I did not see that," Good told the court under questioning by a state prosecutor about the racially charged case that triggered civil rights protests and debates about the treatment of black Americans in the U.S. justice system.
Police did not arrest Zimmerman, who is white and Hispanic, for 44 days. Zimmerman does not deny killing Martin but he says he did so in self-defense after he was attacked and Martin smashed his head repeatedly into the sidewalk.
Good was the fourth former neighbor who partially witnessed the death of Martin on February 26 last year to testify in the trial. Each has given slightly different accounts, but Good is the first to state that Martin was on top during the struggle.
Zimmerman, 29, was a neighborhood watch volunteer in the Retreat at Twin Lakes community in Sanford at the time of the killing. He has pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder and could face life imprisonment if convicted.
Martin, 17, was a student at a Miami-area high school and a guest of one of the homeowners. He was returning after buying snacks at a convenience store when he was shot in the chest during a confrontation with Zimmerman.
Several former Twin Lakes residents have testified for the prosecution that they heard and caught glimpses of the fight between Zimmerman and Martin, and heard cries for help, on a dark and rainy night near a walkway between units in the community of townhomes.
A federal judge on Friday ordered the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to make "morning-after" emergency contraception pills available without a prescription to all girls of reproductive age, while blasting top Obama administration officials for interfering with the process.
The ruling in a Brooklyn court is the latest step in the years-long legal saga over the pill known as "Plan B," which has sparked political controversy.
Currently, only women age 17 or older can obtain emergency contraception pills without a prescription. Point-of-sale restrictions require that all women present identification to a pharmacist before obtaining the drug.
In his ruling, U.S. District Judge Edward Korman said the FDA's rejection of requests to remove age restrictions was "arbitrary, capricious and unreasonable."
FDA spokeswoman Erica Jefferson declined to comment on the ruling, saying it was an ongoing legal matter.
The Center for Reproductive Rights and other groups had petitioned the FDA to strike down age and access limits, saying there was no scientific proof that girls younger than 17 could not safely use the drug without supervision.
Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, hailed the ruling. "Women all over the country will no longer face arbitrary delays and barriers just to get emergency contraception," she said.
The ruling is also likely to be well received by medical groups like the American Academy of Pediatrics, which recommended last year that pediatricians write advance prescriptions for patients under 17.
But opponents of abortion decried the ruling and warned that the pill's widespread availability could spur criminal activity.
"When these are right out there with the bubble gum, they're going to be part of the date rape cocktail," said Karen Brauer, president of Pharmacists for Life.
Some pharmacists across the United States have refused to dispense emergency contraceptives because it violates their religious faith. Making the pills available over the counter removes the pharmacist's role in dispensing the drug, which Brauer welcomed.
POLITICAL CONTROVERSY
Teva Pharmaceuticals Ltd's Plan B in 1999 became the first emergency contraceptive available for prescription use in the United States. The company also markets Plan B One-Step, a one-pill version of Plan B.
"Teva has received the Court's decision and we are currently reviewing it," said company spokeswoman Denise Bradley. "We have no additional comment at this time."
Emergency contraceptives generally sell for $10 to $80. Although they can work as long as 120 hours after unprotected sex, they are most effective in the first 24 hours.
Sanford Bernstein analysts estimate Teva's 2013 sales for Plan B at just $1.5 million, though, because of generic competition like Next Choice from Actavis Inc.
In 2005 the FDA declined to approve over-the-counter sales of the drug, overruling its panel of outside experts as well as its own scientists.
In December 2011 the FDA reversed that stance and moved to approve over-the-counter sales with no age limits. But Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius overruled it, ordering that girls under 17 could only get the pills with a prescription.
As a result of that policy, women well beyond their teens are often asked to present proof of age to show that they are old enough to purchase the pills without a prescription, Judge Korman said.
'QUESTION HER GOOD FAITH'
In his ruling on Friday, Korman said Sebelius' actions were clearly political.
"Nevertheless, even with eyes shut to the motivation for the secretary's decision, the reasons she provided are so unpersuasive as to call into question her good faith," he wrote.
Representatives of the Department of Health and Human Services were not immediately available to comment on the ruling.
One FDA veteran praised the decision, though.
"This has been a 10-year saga during which the FDA was not allowed to do its role properly, not allowed to make science-based decisions," said Susan Wood.
Wood resigned from the FDA as assistant commissioner for women's health in 2005 over its decision not to approve over-the-counter sales of emergency contraception. She is now director of the Jacobs Institute of Women's Health at George Washington University in Washington.
"This decision gives the FDA the chance to reclaim its ability to make decisions based on science, medicine and evidence," Wood said, "not politics."
