NATION/WORLD
Friday, June 17, 2016
East Oregonian
Page 9A
CIA director: U.S. has been
unable to curb IS global reach
Associated Press
NASA/JPL-Caltech via AP
This artist’s rendering made available by NASA/
JPL-Caltech in 2015 shows the Juno spacecraft
above Jupiter.
NASA spacecraft to
reach Jupiter July 4
LOS ANGELES (AP)
— A NASA spacecraft is
bound for a Fourth of July
encounter with Jupiter in
the latest quest to study how
the largest planet in the solar
system formed and evolved.
As Juno approaches
Jupiter’s harsh radiation
environment, it will ire its
main engine to slow down
and then slip into orbit
around the planet.
“It’s a one-shot deal,”
mission chief scientist Scott
Bolton from the Southwest
Research Institute in San
Antonio,
Texas,
said
Thursday. “Everything is
riding on it.”
If all goes as planned,
Juno will spend nearly a
year circling Jupiter’s poles
and peering through clouds
to scrutinize the planet’s
southern and northern lights,
which are considered the
strongest in the solar system.
“Jupiter is a planet on
steroids. Everything about it
is extreme,” Bolton said.
Since
the
1970s,
spacecraft have circled or
zipped past Jupiter, sending
back stunning views of the
planet’s signature Great
Red Spot — a long-lived
storm — and its numerous
moons. The most extensive
study came from the Galileo
spacecraft, which dropped
a probe on the surface.
Galileo explored Jupiter and
its moons for 14 years.
Unlike Earth, which is
a rocky planet, Jupiter is a
gas giant made up mostly
of hydrogen and helium.
Scientists still don’t know
whether Jupiter has a solid
core or how much oxygen
“Jupiter is
a planet on
steroids.”
— Scott Bolton,
Mission chief scientist
and water the planet has —
information that could help
unravel how Earth and the
solar system came to be.
The trip to Jupiter —
the ifth planet from the
sun — took nearly ive
years, allowing Juno to
loop around the inner solar
system and use Earth as a
gravitational slingshot to
propel itself into deep space.
Previous missions to
Jupiter have relied on
nuclear power sources
because of the distance from
the sun. Juno is running on
solar power, with panels
designed to face the sun
during most of the mission.
Juno will be about 500
million miles from the sun
on the evening of July 4
when it prepares to enter
orbit.
To protect against radi-
ation, Juno’s instruments
are tucked inside a titanium
vault. The spacecraft also
carries a camera and scien-
tists said the public will get
a chance to decide what
pictures to take.
After Juno completes
its mission in 2018, it will
plunge into Jupiter and
burn up. Scientists planned
this inale to eliminate the
possibility it could smack
into Europa, one of Jupiter’s
watery moons.
WASHINGTON — The U.S. battle
against the Islamic State has not yet
curbed the group’s global reach and
as pressure mounts on the extremists
in Iraq and Syria, they are expected
to plot more attacks on the West and
incite violence by lone wolves, CIA
Director John Brennan told Congress on
Thursday.
In a rare open hearing, Brennan
gave the Senate intelligence committee
an update on the threat from Islamic
extremists and shared his views on
a myriad of other topics, including
encryption, Russia and Syria.
Brennan said IS has worked to build
an apparatus to direct and inspire attacks
against its foreign enemies, as in the
recent attacks in Paris and Brussels —
ones the CIA believes were directed by
the top IS leaders.
“ISIL has a large cadre of Western
ighters who could potentially serve
as operatives for attacks in the West,”
Brennan said, using a different acronym
for the group.
“Furthermore, as we have seen in
Orlando, San Bernardino and elsewhere,
ISIL is attempting to inspire attacks by
sympathizers who have no direct links
to the group.”
Brennan said the CIA has not been
able to uncover any direct link between
the Orlando shooter and a foreign
terrorist organization.
He said the U.S.-led coalition has
killed IS leaders, forced the group to
surrender large swaths of territory in
Iraq and Syria and that fewer ighters
are traveling to Syria and others have
defected. While the group’s ability
to raise money has been thwarted, it
still generates at least tens of millions
of dollars every month, mostly from
taxation and sales of crude oil on black
markets in Syria and Iraq.
“Unfortunately, despite all our prog-
ress against ISIL on the battleield and in
the inancial realm, our efforts have not
reduced the group’s terrorism capability
and global reach,” he said.
He said IS is slowly cultivating its
branches into an interconnected global
network and that the number of IS
ighters now far exceeds what al-Qaida
had at its peak.
The CIA estimates there are 18,000
to 22,000 IS ighters in Syria and Iraq —
down from about 33,000 last year. The
branch in Libya, with between 5,000
and 8,000 ighters, is the most advanced
and most dangerous, but IS is trying to
increase its inluence in Africa.
He said Boko Haram is now the IS
branch in West Africa and has
AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite
CIA Director John Brennan arrives on Capitol Hill in Washington Thursday,
to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on IS.
several thousand ighters. Brennan
described the IS branch in the Sinai as
the most active and capable terrorist
group in Egypt, attacking Egyptian
military and government targets as well
as foreigners and tourists, such as in the
downing of a Russian passenger jet last
October.
The Yemen branch, with several
hundred ighters, has been riven with
factionalism. And the Afghanistan-Pa-
kistan branch, also with hundreds of
ighters, has struggled to maintain its
cohesion, in part because of competition
with the Taliban, he said.
The issue of encryption arose several
times during the nearly two-hour
hearing.
Law enforcement oficials say data
encryption is making it harder to hunt
for terror suspects and intercept their
messages. They say they need access to
encrypted communications and that tech
companies should maintain the ability
to unlock the data from their customers.
They face ierce opposition from
Silicon Valley companies that say
encryption safeguards their customers’
privacy rights and protects them from
hackers, spies and other breaches.
Committee chairman Sen. Richard
Burr, R-N.C., said the “feud between
the tech companies and the intelligence
community and law enforcement has to
stop.”
Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said that
requiring companies to build back doors
into their products to weaken strong
encryption will put the personal safety
of Americans at risk. “I want to make
it clear I will ight such a policy with
everything I have,” Wyden said.
In the House, wary lawmakers
on Thursday rejected a measure
that would have prohibited the U.S.
government from searching the online
communications of Americans without
a warrant. The vote came days after
the mass shooting in Florida. Oppo-
nents of the amendment to the annual
defense spending bill said the measure
would have blocked investigators from
searching lawfully collected informa-
tion to determine whether the gunman
had contacted terrorists overseas.
The CIA chief embraced a bill that
seeks to set up a commission to bring
together intelligence, law enforcement
and the business and tech communities
to work on the issue. Brennan also
expressed his views on other issues:
RUSSIA
Brennan said Russian military forces
have bolstered Syrian President Bashar
al-Assad and are carrying out attacks
against the U.S.-backed forces trying
to unseat him. He said Assad is in a
stronger position now than he was in
June 2015 and that the agreed cessation
of violence is “holding by a thread.”
TORTURE
Brennan said individuals within
the CIA have been held accountable
for problems in the agency’s former
detention and interrogation program
set up after Sept. 11. He said he could
elaborate in a classiied setting.
TWITTER
Brennan conirmed a May report in
The Wall Street Journal that the data
mining company, Dataminr Inc., had
ended its contract with the CIA.
The New York-based company,
which monitors information streaming
across Twitter and sends alerts to clients,
continues to provide data to Russia
Today, a television network backed by
the Russian government.
BRIEFLY
Few if any minority execs
in Trump’s empire
WASHINGTON (AP) — There are
few, if any, black executives in the upper
ranks of the Trump Organization, a review
by The Associated Press has found. Other
minorities are also scarce at that level
though Republican presidential nominee
Donald Trump has employed scores of
executives.
Former executives say they cannot
recall a single black vice president-level
executive at Trump’s headquarters during
their combined tenures at the Trump
Organization LLC, which ranged from 1980
to late in the past decade. Reviews of social
media postings by Trump and his family
and Trump’s acknowledgements thanking
executives in his books also fail to identify
any senior black employees past or present.
Asked about the lack of African-
American vice presidents in an interview
last month, Trump assured the AP that he
had hired minorities as senior executives
and said his staff could readily provide
speciic details.
“I am the least discriminatory person in
the world,” Trump said. “I have people that
do the hiring, if you want to speak to them.”
The Trump Organization, however, did
not grant subsequent requests by the AP to
provide such information or say whether
Trump had hired an African-American vice
president over the past 35 years.
The AP limited its review to the circle
of senior executives who hold titles of
vice president or higher within the Trump
Organization, an amorphous corporate
entity in which Trump and a group of top
executives oversee hundreds of different
companies and partnerships that control
real estate, licensing and hospitality
businesses. Some subsidiary businesses
have their own hierarchies of presidents and
vice presidents, but those executives are
generally not located within Trump Tower
headquarters and do not have the same
authority and prestige.
Philadelphia becomes irst
major U.S. city with soda tax
PHILADELPHIA (AP) — Philadelphia
became the irst major American city
with a soda tax on Thursday despite a
multimillion-dollar campaign by the
beverage industry to block it.
The city council gave inal approval to
a 1.5 cent-per-ounce tax on sugary and diet
beverages.
Only Berkeley, California, had a similar
law. Soda tax proposals have failed in
more than 30 cities and states in recent
years. Such plans are typically criticized as
disproportionately affecting the poor, who
are more likely to consume sugary drinks.
But Democratic Mayor Jim Kenney
sold the council on the idea with a plan to
spend most of the estimated $90 million
in new tax revenue next year to pay for
prekindergarten, community schools and
recreation centers.
The tax, which passed 13-4, is a
hard-fought win for the city. The soda
industry spent millions of dollars in
advertising against the proposal, arguing
the tax would be costly to consumers. The
plan also attracted national attention and
dollars, with former New York Mayor
Michael Bloomberg and Texas billionaires
John and Laura Arnold, advocates for less
consumption of sugary drinks, funding ads
in support.
The American Beverage Association
called the soda tax “discriminatory and
highly unpopular.”
“The tax passed today is a regressive
tax that unfairly singles out beverages,
including low- and no-calorie choices,” it
said a statement.
The association and beverage bottling
businessman Harold Honickman promised
to ight the tax in court, with Honickman
saying the tax would mean sales will go
down and jobs will be lost.
After fatal attack, theme parks
weigh alligator warnings
LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. (AP) — It’s
an unwritten rule for Florida residents:
Keep your kids away from lakes because
alligators are everywhere.
But after a gator killed a 2-year-old
Nebraska boy at a Walt Disney World
resort, attention soon turned to tourists. In a
state with an estimated 1 million alligators,
how should theme parks and other
attractions warn visitors, and did Disney do
enough?
Disney beaches remained closed
Thursday after the death of Lane Graves,
and the company said it was reviewing
policies that do not currently include
posting alligator warnings around park
waters.
The review “includes the number,
placement and wording of our signage and
warnings,” Jacquee Wahler, vice president
of Walt Disney World Resort, said.
Local law enforcement and state wildlife
oficials publicly praised the company for
spotting and removing nuisance gators
from park waters.
Disney’s wildlife management system
has ensured “that their guests are not
unduly exposed to the wildlife in this area,”
Sheriff Jerry Demings said during the
search for the child.
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