US ocean conservation meeting nets $5.3 billion in pledges

WASHINGTON - International participants at a high-level conference on the world's oceans pledged more than $5.3 billion for conservation and designated vast areas as protected waters, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on Friday.

More than 90 countries took part in the two-day conference, the third of its kind, in an effort to galvanize attention to the dangers that pollution, climate change and over-fishing may pose to the world's oceans.

"This ocean conference, in order to protect marine eco-systems, to prevent pollution, to address the crippling impacts of climate change, has committed over $5.3 billion of money and initiatives in order to achieve those goals," Kerry said at the meeting's closing session.

Earlier, U.S. State Department spokesman John Kirby said that more than 1.3 million square miles (3.4 million square km) gained protected designation.

The United States and more than 20 countries joined on Thursday at the conference to create 40 marine sanctuaries around the world to protect the oceans from the threat of climate change and pollution. They limit commercial fishing, oil exploration and other activities that affect ocean ecosystems.

President Barack Obama also designated the first U.S. marine reserve in the Atlantic Ocean: 4,913 square miles (12,724 square km) known for underwater mountains and canyons off the coast of New England.

The announcement was part of more than 136 new initiatives unveiled during the event by countries such as Britain, Canada, Cambodia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, France, Kuwait, Lebanon, Malaysia, Malta, Morocco, Norway, Palau, Panama, Seychelles, Sri Lanka and Thailand, as well as private charities and foundations.

Kerry, speaking to a Georgetown University audience on Friday as part of the conference, stressed the health of the world's oceans for national security and global stability.

"This is life and death. This is national security. It is international security," he said, saying nearly 50 percent of the world depends on food from the ocean and 12 percent of the world's work force relies on the ocean for their livelihood.

The European Union has committed to hold a similar conference next year, followed by Indonesia in 2018 and Norway in 2019, Kerry said.

(Reporting by Arshad Mohammed; Writing by David Alexander and Arshad Mohammed; Editing by Cynthia Osterman and Andrew Hay)

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com

US to withhold some Clinton emails with top secret information

WASHINGTON - The U.S. State Department conceded for the first time on Friday that intelligence officials were correct to say that at least 22 emails sent through Hillary Clinton's private server contain some of the government's most sensitive secrets.

The seven email chains from Clinton's time as secretary of state, amounting to 22 separate messages, will be withheld from the public as a result because the information in them is classified at the highest level as "top secret," State Department spokesman John Kirby said.

The announcement came three days before the Iowa caucuses, when the first votes are cast for the presidential nominations and where Clinton is locked in a tight race with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders to become the Democratic nominee for the November election.

"These documents were not marked classified at the time that they were sent," Kirby said. He added that the department was now investigating whether the information in them was classified at the time it passed through her private clintonemail.com email account run on a server in her New York home.

The department and intelligence officials have been arguing about the emails, which are being made public under a federal court order, for at least five months. The State Department initially maintained that Clinton might have obtained the same information independently through non-classified channels.

The decision to no longer pursue this argument will add to the questions Clinton has faced for months over her handling of sensitive government information as she seeks to maintain her position as the favorite to become the Democratic nominee.

The Clinton campaign criticized the State Department's decision as the result of "bureaucratic infighting" and "over-classification run amok," adding that the emails should be released.

Some information has been censored in more than 1,300 emails already made public because the State Department says it is classified, including the privately shared thoughts of foreign leaders and government officials. But this is the first time that entire chains are being withheld.

Congressional Republicans have criticized and investigated Clinton for her use of a private email server for her work as a secretary of state from 2009 to 2013. Some of her Republican rivals for the presidency, including New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, have called for her prosecution.

Reince Priebus, the Republican National Committee's chairman, said in a statement that Clinton had "put our national security and diplomatic efforts at risk."

The government forbids handling of classified information, which may or may not be marked that way, outside secure government-controlled channels, and sometimes prosecutes people who remove it from such channels. The government classifies information as top secret if it deems a leak could cause "exceptionally grave damage" to national security.

U.S. Representative Adam Schiff of California, the House Intelligence Committee's leading Democrat, defended Clinton in a statement, saying classification determinations are "often very complex" and she was "responding to world events in real time without the benefit of months of analysis after the fact."

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has taken Clinton's server and other computer equipment, but has declined to share details of its inquiries.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest downplayed questions about whether Clinton might be prosecuted by the Justice Department. "That's not something I'm worried about," he told reporters.

Clinton initially said she never sent or received classified information through her email. In recent weeks she has more often said none of her emails were marked that way.

Following a court-ordered schedule, the State Department has already released most of the roughly 30,000 work emails Clinton returned to the department.

The department had been ordered to release all the emails by Friday, but last week asked the court for a one-month extension.

The State Department also said it would agree with a request from the White House that Clinton's emails with President Barack Obama, 18 in all, be withheld from public release for several years under the Presidential Records Act.

(Additional reporting by Patricia Zengerle in Washington; Editing by Eric Beech, Lisa Shumaker and David Gregorio)

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com

3,000 Clinton emails to be released

WASHINGTON, United States - Some 3,000 pages of Hillary Clinton's emails from her time as top US diplomat will be made public online Tuesday by the State Department, following orders from a federal judge.

The email dump will occur around 9:00 pm (0100 GMT Wednesday) on the State Department's Freedom of Information Act website, officials said.

Clinton's electronic correspondence has been the focus of controversy since her admission in March that she had used a private account for all her email correspondence while secretary of state between 2009 and 2013.

Republican rivals contend that Clinton, frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, used the private account in order to keep it out of the public record.

But she has argued that as of late 2014 she had sent 55,000 printed pages from roughly 30,000 emails to officials who will archive the data and make it available to the public, as is required by law.

The remainder of the messages were deemed personal by Clinton and were deleted from her private server, she and her lawyers have said.

The State Department announced it intended to make the entirety of the archive public after purging it of classified or confidential information.

Clinton has backed the move, vowing transparency in the process after stressing she chose to use a private account for reasons of practicality and not obfuscation.

In May, a judge ordered the process accelerated.

The State Department's latest release would bring the amount of published emails to seven percent of the total, as required by the judge, State Department spokesman John Kirby said.

Half of the emails should be released by October 31, and the entirety of the archive screened and released by January 20, 2016.

The project is daunting, because officials will need to carefully review each document and redact sensitive data as necessary.

Speaking of the "enormity of the task," Kirby stressed that administration officials were "working right up to the deadline."

"There's been nothing but nearly non-stop work on this since the last tranche was released," he said, referring to nearly 300 Libya-related emails put out in late May.

Republican fodder

Republicans have seized on the email controversy in pressing their case that President Barack Obama's administration was unprepared for the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya that killed four Americans, including the US ambassador.

Administrative and congressional investigations have highlighted security vulnerabilities at the US mission in Libya while Clinton was secretary of state.

Republicans, insisting that the Obama administration sought to conceal the terrorist nature of the attack, have created a special Benghazi committee in the House of Representatives.

The panel has been criticized by Clinton allies as a political tool to trip up the candidate on her White House quest.

Fueling Republican suspicions, the State Department acknowledged that 15 messages sent or received by Clinton and gathered independently by the agency were not included in the tranche delivered by her team.

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com