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Donald Trump embarks on marathon tour of Asia

US President Donald Trump has embarked on an 12-day trip to Asia during which he will visit Japan, South Korea, China, Vietnam and the Philippines.

It will be the longest tour of Asia by a US president in 25 years.

The trip comes at a time of heightened tensions with North Korea over its nuclear programme and missile tests.

Mr Trump is expected to show a united front with South Korea and Japan while pressing China to take a stronger line with Pyongyang.

President Trump flew first to the US state of Hawaii where he visited the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor – the scene of the 1941 Japanese attack that drew the US into World War Two.

He also took part in a briefing at the US Pacific Command.

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• Trump in Asia: A beginner's guide
• Trump vows to tackle N Korea on Asia trip
• What has Trump said about your country?

From Hawaii, he and First Lady Melania Trump will head to Japan and then on to South Korea.

Mr Trump has previously exchanged some fiery rhetoric with North Korea over its ballistic missile tests but aides said earlier this week that he would not go to the heavily fortified demilitarized zone (DMZ) on the border between the South and North.

He is, however, to visit Camp Humphreys, a US military complex south of the capital, Seoul.

In Vietnam, Mr Trump will attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation summit in Da Nang and make a state visit to Hanoi.

His final engagement was scheduled to be a summit of South East Asian nations in the Philippine capital, Manila, on 13 November but the trip has now been extended by an extra day so he can attend the East Asia Summit.

The last time a US president made such a marathon trip to Asia was when George HW Bush visited the region in late 1991 and early 1992.

President Trump's itinerary

• Sunday, 5 November: Arrives in Japan. Golf with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and professional player Hideki Matsuyama at Kasumigaseki Country Club. Bilateral meetings with Mr Abe
• Tuesday, 7 November: In South Korea for talks with President Moon Jae-in. Mr Trump will also address the National Assembly
• Wednesday, 8 November: Arrives in China for a series of events including meetings with President Xi Jinping
• Friday, 10 November: Travels to Da Nang, Vietnam, and will participate in the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (Apec) summit
• Saturday, 11 November: Travels to Hanoi, Vietnam, for talks with President Tran Dai Quang and other Vietnamese leaders
• Sunday, 12 November: Arrives in Manila, Philippines, to take part in a gala dinner for the 50th anniversary of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean)
• Monday, 13 November: Will attend the Asean summit in Manila and hold talks with President Rodrigo Duterte
• Tuesday, 14 November: He will now stay for the East Asia Summit, a wider regional gathering that includes the US, India and Russia

Source – bbc.com

Libya: Armed group shuts down comic book convention

An armed group in Libya has shut down a comic book convention in the capital Tripoli because it breached the country's "morals and modesty".

Special Deterrent Forces (SDF) said they had arrested organisers of the Comic Con convention.

It said on its Facebook page that photos published on social media from the convention caused "a widespread public outpouring of criticism".

The SDF is loyal to the UN-backed Government of National Accord.

Hundreds of young Libyans attended Tripoli's second Comic Con festival on Friday, some dressed up as characters from American and Japanese comics.

But later in the day members of the conservative Islamist group the SDF raided the gathering.

• Why is Libya so lawless?

Eyewitnesses quoted by the Libya Herald said that more than 20 people – including organisers, participants and visitors – were detained.

Six members of the main organizing committee are reported to be still under arrest.

Organisers of the fair told the newspaper they were shocked by the actions of the SDF, especially given they had obtained official permission to stage the event.

''Some of those who were [arrested were later] released had received a beating," an organiser told the Libya Herald.

"They were told that Libya is a Muslim country not a free/liberal country."

A statement from the SDF said such events were "derived from abroad and exploit weakness of religious faith and fascination with foreign cultures".

Comic Con began in 1970 as a gathering for fans who wanted to swap magazines from the US but has since expanded around the world.

Source – bbc.com

Explosive Martin Luther King document amid JFK files

A secret FBI dossier on civil rights leader Martin Luther King alleges that he had a string of affairs and other "sexual aberrations", as well as links to the Communist Party.

It is dated just three weeks before Dr King's assassination in April 1968.

The file was released in a tranche of documents relating to the assassination of John F Kennedy released on Friday.

Mr Kennedy is not referenced in the file and it is not clear why it was kept secret for almost 50 years.

There is no evidence that any of the claims in the report were verified.

Its cover shows it was assessed in 1994 by an FBI task force on the JFK assassination, which concluded none of the document should be released.

Many of the allegations contained in the paper appear to be reports of private conversations between others, or hearsay reported third-hand.

One allegation, that King had a mistress in California with whom he fathered a child, was attributed to "a very responsible Los Angeles individual in a position to know".

Among its other accusations are that:

• Dr King was surrounded by advisers with strong links to the Communist Party USA
• His statements were always subject to approval by the alleged communist sympathisers
• He was a secret supporter of communism, "a whole-hearted Marxist"
• His organisation, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, set up a "tax dodge" to raise funds for its activities
• Dr King took part in "drunken sex orgies" and coerced young women to participate
• He had love affairs with at least four women, including folk singer Joan Baez

The list of alleged indiscretions would likely have been deeply problematic for the civil rights leader if it had been made public in 1968.

The paper paints Dr King in an extremely negative light, despite his receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize and his contribution to passing the Civil Rights Act four years previously.

It is not entirely clear why the dossier was commissioned. But several pages of the 20-page document are concerned with Mr King's upcoming "Washington Spring project" which was scheduled for the coming months.

It warned that despite Dr King's history of calling for peaceful protest, "the combined forces of the communist influence and the black nationalists advocating violence give the 'Washington Spring Project' a potential for an extremely explosive situation."

Dr King was killed before the planned march.

A 'slow thinker' with 'abnormal' sexual preferences

Despite Dr King's historical reputation as a skilled speaker, the FBI file claimed that other advisers approved everything Mr King said.

"King is such a slow thinker he is usually not prepared to make statements without help from someone," it reads.

Linking Dr King to communism, it claimed:

"King is a whole-hearted Marxist who has studied it (Marxism), believes in it and agrees with it, but because of his being a minister of religion, does no dare to espouse it publicly."

And in another part says: "During the early 1960s, the CPUSA [the communist party] was striving to obtain a Negro-labor coalition to achieve its goals in this country… Martin Luther King, Jr, and his organisation were made to order to achieve these objectives."

The most salacious claims about Dr King's sex life are contained in a dense collection of rumours in the final two pages.

At a February 1968 workshop to train ministers in urban leadership, it is alleged: "One Negro minister in attendance later expressed his disgust with the behind-the scene drinking, fornication, and homosexuality that went on at the conference."

"Several Negro and white prostitute[s] were brought in from the Miami area. An all-night sex orgy was held with these prostitutes and some of the delegates."

The document alleged that Dr King also engaged in a "two-day drunken sex orgy" in Washington in January 1964.

"When one of the females shied away from engaging in an unnatural act, King and other of the males present discussed how she was to be taught and initiated in this respect," it added.

"It is a fact that King not only regularly indulges in adulterous acts but enjoys the abnormal by engaging in group sexual orgies."

Source – bbc.com

Lebanese PM Hariri resigns, saying he fears assassination plot

Lebanese Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri has resigned, saying in a televised broadcast from Saudi Arabia that he feared for his life, while also fiercely criticising Iran.

He accused Iran of sowing "fear and destruction" in several countries, including Lebanon.

Mr Hariri's father, former prime minister Rafik al-Hariri, was assassinated in 2005.

The Hariri family is close to Saudi Arabia, Iran's regional competitor.

Mr Hariri has been prime minister since December 2016, after previously holding the position between 2009 and 2011.

"We are living in a climate similar to the atmosphere that prevailed before the assassination of martyr Rafik al-Hariri," he said in the broadcast from the Saudi capital Riyadh.

"I have sensed what is being plotted covertly to target my life."

Mr Hariri also attacked the Iran-backed Shia movement Hezbollah, which wields considerable power in Lebanon.

Addressing "Iran and its followers" he said Lebanon would "cut off the hands that wickedly extend into it".

Iran said the resignation would create regional tensions and rejected Mr Hariri's accusations as "unfounded".

• What is Hezbollah?
• Read more about Lebanon

Mr Hariri has made several visits in the past few days to Saudi Arabia, whose leadership is strongly opposed to Iran.

His announcement came a day after a meeting in Beirut with Ali Akbar Velayati, an advisor to Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Kahmenei.

Taking up the prime minister's office last year, Mr Hariri promised a "new era for Lebanon" after two years of political deadlock.

The coalition government he led brought together almost all of the main political parties in Lebanon, including Hezbollah.

Rafik al-Hariri was killed by a bomb in 2005 in an attack widely blamed on Hezbollah.

A stunning resignation

By Martin Patience, BBC News, Beirut

The prime minister's resignation has opened up a chasm of uncertainty in Lebanon.

It's still not clear why he announced his decision in Saudi Arabia – an extraordinary move that left even his own MPs bewildered.

But the move will be seen through the lens of the great Shia-Sunni divide that's fuelling much of the violence across the Middle East.

It's pitted the Sunni power, Saudi Arabia, against the Shia power, Iran – with both sides backing different players to wield influence.

In Lebanon, the Saudis support Mr Hariri while Iran backs the Shia movement, Hezbollah.

In recent years, Lebanon has largely been spared the violence seen elsewhere in the region.

But with this stunning resignation, many Lebanese will now fear that their country is firmly in the crosshairs of the two regional superpowers.

Source – bbc.com

Couple given prison sentences in Hawaii fake Botox scheme

A New York City couple was handed prison sentences after pleading guilty on charges of illegally injecting women in Honolulu with wrinkle-reducing drugs similar to Botox.

Bu Young Kim was sentenced to three months in prison, and her husband, Chan Hui Cho, was sentenced to two months after federal authorities said they imported drugs from South Korea to administer in Hawaii, Hawaii News Now reported on Thursday. The couple was arrested in March 2016, and they entered guilty pleas in February.

The couple traveled to South Korea to pick up the drugs and would fly to Hawaii, where Kim would inject women in places like Honolulu hotel rooms, federal agents with Homeland Security Investigations said.

The couple charged between $100 and $500 for the treatments. They didn't tell customers that "Kim was administering and dispensing prescription drugs that only a licensed practitioner could administer and dispense," according to a court document. The drugs were not approved by the U.S.; Food and Drug Administration.

The scale of the operation was unexpected, Assistant U.S. Attorney Kenneth Sorenson said.

"We were initially surprised. The conduct was something we had not seen before," Sorenson said. "You can understand it happening on a small scale but this was a much larger scale than we had seen before."

Michael Green, Kim's attorney, said his client didn't realize the magnitude of the crimes, but she cooperated with authorities from the beginning.

"She didn't set out to hurt anyone," Green said. "This is what she knew, and she wound up getting arrested for it."

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Information from: KGMB-TV, http://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/

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Source – abcnews.go.com

Inside story: How Russians hacked the Democrats' emails

It was just before noon in Moscow on March 10, 2016, when the first volley of malicious messages hit the Hillary Clinton campaign.

The first 29 phishing emails were almost all misfires. Addressed to people who worked for Clinton during her first presidential run, the messages bounced back untouched.

Except one.

Within nine days, some of the campaign's most consequential secrets would be in the hackers' hands, part of a massive operation aimed at vacuuming up millions of messages from thousands of inboxes across the world.

An Associated Press investigation into the digital break-ins that disrupted the U.S. presidential contest has sketched out an anatomy of the hack that led to months of damaging disclosures about the Democratic Party's nominee. It wasn't just a few aides that the hackers went after; it was an all-out blitz across the Democratic Party. They tried to compromise Clinton's inner circle and more than 130 party employees, supporters and contractors.

While U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that Russia was behind the email thefts, the AP drew on forensic data to report Thursday that the hackers known as Fancy Bear were closely aligned with the interests of the Russian government.

The AP's reconstruction— based on a database of 19,000 malicious links recently shared by cybersecurity firm Secureworks — shows how the hackers worked their way around the Clinton campaign's top-of-the-line digital security to steal chairman John Podesta's emails in March 2016.

It also helps explain how a Russian-linked intermediary could boast to a Trump policy adviser, a month later, that the Kremlin had "thousands of emails" worth of dirt on Clinton.

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PHISHING FOR VICTIMS

The rogue messages that first flew across the internet March 10 were dressed up to look like they came from Google, the company that provided the Clinton campaign's email infrastructure. The messages urged users to boost their security or change their passwords while in fact steering them toward decoy websites designed to collect their credentials.

One of the first people targeted was Rahul Sreenivasan, who had worked as a Clinton organizer in Texas in 2008 — his first paid job in politics. Sreenivasan, now a legislative staffer in Austin, was dumbfounded when told by the AP that hackers had tried to break into his 2008 email — an address he said had been dead for nearly a decade.

"They probably crawled the internet for this stuff," he said.

Almost everyone else targeted in the initial wave was, like Sreenivasan, a 2008 staffer whose defunct email address had somehow lingered online.

But one email made its way to the account of another staffer who'd worked for Clinton in 2008 and joined again in 2016, the AP found. It's possible the hackers broke in and stole her contacts; the data shows the phishing links sent to her were clicked several times.

Secureworks' data reveals when phishing links were created and indicates whether they were clicked. But it doesn't show whether people entered their passwords.

Within hours of a second volley emailed March 11, the hackers hit pay dirt. All of a sudden, they were sending links aimed at senior Clinton officials' nonpublic 2016 addresses, including those belonging to longtime Clinton aide Robert Russo and campaign chairman John Podesta.

The Clinton campaign was no easy target; several former employees said the organization put particular stress on digital safety.

Work emails were protected by two-factor authentication, a technique that uses a second passcode to keep accounts secure. Most messages were deleted after 30 days and staff went through phishing drills. Security awareness even followed the campaigners into the bathroom, where someone put a picture of a toothbrush under the words: "You shouldn't share your passwords either."

Two-factor authentication may have slowed the hackers, but it didn't stop them. After repeated attempts to break into various staffers' hillaryclinton.com accounts, the hackers turned to the personal Gmail addresses. It was there on March 19 that they targeted top Clinton lieutenants — including campaign manager Robby Mook, senior adviser Jake Sullivan and political fixer Philippe Reines.

A malicious link was generated for Podesta at 11:28 a.m. Moscow time, the AP found. Documents subsequently published by WikiLeaks show that the rogue email arrived in his inbox six minutes later. The link was clicked twice.

Podesta's messages — at least 50,000 of them — were in the hackers' hands.

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A SERIOUS BREACH

Though the heart of the campaign was now compromised, the hacking efforts continued. Three new volleys of malicious messages were generated on the 22nd, 23rd and 25th of March, targeting communications director Jennifer Palmieri and Clinton confidante Huma Abedin, among others.

The torrent of phishing emails caught the attention of the FBI, which had spent the previous six months urging the Democratic National Committee in Washington to raise its shield against suspected Russian hacking. In late March, FBI agents paid a visit to Clinton's Brooklyn headquarters, where they were received warily, given the agency's investigation into the candidate's use of a private email server while secretary of state.

The phishing messages also caught the attention of Secureworks, a subsidiary of Dell Technologies, which had been following Fancy Bear, whom Secureworks codenamed Iron Twilight.

Fancy Bear had made a critical mistake.

It fumbled a setting in the Bitly link-shortening service that it was using to sneak its emails past Google's spam filter. The blunder exposed whom they were targeting.

It was late March when Secureworks discovered the hackers were going after Democrats.

"As soon as we started seeing some of those hillaryclinton.com email addresses coming through, the DNC email addresses, we realized it's going to be an interesting twist to this," said Rafe Pilling, a senior security researcher with Secureworks.

By early April Fancy Bear was getting increasingly aggressive, the AP found. More than 60 bogus emails were prepared for Clinton campaign and DNC staffers on April 6 alone, and the hackers began hunting for Democrats beyond New York and Washington, targeting the digital communications director for Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf and a deputy director in the office of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

The group's hackers seemed particularly interested in Democratic officials working on voter registration issues: Pratt Wiley, the DNC's then-director of voter protection, had been targeted as far back as October 2015 and the hackers tried to pry open his inbox as many as 15 times over six months.

Employees at several organizations connected to the Democrats were targeted, including the Clinton Foundation, the Center for American Progress, technology provider NGP VAN, campaign strategy firm 270 Strategies, and partisan news outlet Shareblue Media.

As the hacking intensified, other elements swung into place. On April 12, 2016, someone paid $37 worth of bitcoin to the Romanian web hosting company THCServers.com , to reserve a website called Electionleaks.com, according to transaction records obtained by AP. A botched registration meant the site never got off the ground, but the records show THC received a nearly identical payment a week later to create DCLeaks.com.

By the second half of April, the DNC's senior leadership was beginning to realize something was amiss. One DNC consultant, Alexandra Chalupa, received an April 20 warning from Yahoo saying her account was under threat from state-sponsored hackers, according to a screengrab she circulated among colleagues.

The Trump campaign had gotten a whiff of Clinton email hacking, too. According to recently unsealed court documents, former Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos said that it was at an April 26 meeting at a London hotel that he was told by a professor closely connected to the Russian government that the Kremlin had obtained compromising information about Clinton.

"They have dirt on her," Papadopoulos said he was told. "They have thousands of emails."

A few days later, Amy Dacey, then the DNC chief executive, got an urgent call.

There'd been a serious breach at the DNC.

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'DON'T EVEN TALK TO YOUR DOG ABOUT IT'

It was 4 p.m. on Friday June 10 when some 100 staffers filed into the Democratic National Committee's main conference room for a mandatory, all-hands meeting.

"What I am about to tell you cannot leave this room," DNC chief operating officer Lindsey Reynolds told the assembled crowd, according to two people there at the time.

Everyone needed to turn in their laptops immediately; there would be no last-minute emails; no downloading documents and no exceptions. Reynolds insisted on total secrecy.

"Don't even talk to your dog about it," she was quoted as saying.

Reynolds didn't return messages seeking comment.

Two days later, as the cybersecurity firm that was brought in to clean out the DNC's computers finished its work, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange told a British Sunday television show that emails related to Clinton were "pending publication."

"WikiLeaks has a very good year ahead," he said.

On Tuesday, June 14, the Democrats went public with the allegation that their computers had been compromised by Russian state-backed hackers, including Fancy Bear.

Shortly after noon the next day, William Bastone, the editor-in-chief of investigative news site The Smoking Gun, got an email bearing a small cache of documents marked "CONFIDENTIAL."

"Hi," the message said. "This is Guccifer 2.0 and this is me who hacked Democratic National Committee."

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'CAN IT INFLUENCE THE ELECTION?'

Guccifer 2.0 acted as a kind of master of ceremonies during the summer of leaks, proclaiming that the DNC's stolen documents were in WikiLeaks' hands, publishing a selection of the material himself and constantly chatting up journalists over Twitter in a bid to keep the story in the press.

He appeared particularly excited to hear on June 24 that his leaks had sparked a lawsuit against the DNC by disgruntled supporters of Clinton rival Bernie Sanders.

"Can it influence the election in any how?" he asked a journalist with Russia's Sputnik News, in uneven English.

Later that month Guccifer 2.0 began directing reporters to the newly launched DCLeaks site, which was also dribbling out stolen material on Democrats. When WikiLeaks joined the fray on July 22 with its own disclosures the leaks metastasized into a crisis, triggering intraparty feuding that forced the resignation of the DNC's chairwoman and drew angry protests at the Democratic National Convention.

Guccifer 2.0, WikiLeaks and DCLeaks ultimately published more than 150,000 emails stolen from more than a dozen Democrats, according to an AP count.

The AP has since found that each of one of those Democrats had previously been targeted by Fancy Bear, either at their personal Gmail addresses or via the DNC, a finding established by running targets' emails against the Secureworks' list.

All three leak-branded sites have distanced themselves from Moscow. DCLeaks claimed to be run by American hacktivists. WikiLeaks said Russia wasn't its source. Guccifer 2.0 claimed to be Romanian.

But there were signs of dishonesty from the start. The first document Guccifer 2.0 published on June 15 came not from the DNC as advertised but from Podesta's inbox , according to a former DNC official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press.

The official said the word "CONFIDENTIAL" was not in the original document .

Guccifer 2.0 had airbrushed it to catch reporters' attention.

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'PLEASE GOD, DON'T LET IT BE ME'

To hear the defeated candidate tell it, there's no doubt the leaks helped swing the election.

"Even if Russian interference made only a marginal difference," Clinton told an audience at a recent speech at Stanford University, "this election was won at the margins, in the Electoral College."

It's clear Clinton's campaign was profoundly destabilized by the sudden exposures that regularly radiated from every hacked inbox. It wasn't just her arch-sounding speeches to Wall Street executives or the exposure of political machinations but also the brutal stripping of so many staffers' privacy.

"It felt like your friend had just been robbed, but it wasn't just one friend, it was all your friends at the same time by the same criminal," said Jesse Ferguson, a former Clinton spokesman.

An atmosphere of dread settled over the Democrats as the disclosures continued.

One staffer described walking through the DNC's office in Washington to find employees scrolling through articles about Putin and Russia. Another said she began looking over her shoulder when returning from Clinton headquarters in Brooklyn after sundown. Some feared they were being watched; a car break-in, a strange woman found lurking in a backyard late at night and even a snake spotted on the grounds of the DNC all fed an undercurrent of fear.

Even those who hadn't worked at Democratic organizations for years were anxious. Brent Kimmel, a former technologist at the DNC, remembers watching the leaks stream out and thinking: "Please God, don't let it be me."

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'MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN'

On Oct. 7, it was Podesta.

The day began badly, with Hillary Clinton's phone buzzing with crank messages after its number was exposed in a leak from the day before. The number had to be changed immediately; a former campaign official said that Abedin, Clinton's confidante, had to call staffers one at a time with Clinton's new contact information because no one dared put it in an email.

The same afternoon, just as the American electorate was digesting a lewd audio tape of Trump boasting about sexually assaulting women, WikiLeaks began publishing the emails stolen from Podesta.

The publications sparked a media stampede as they were doled out one batch at a time, with many news organizations tasking reporters with scrolling through the thousands of emails being released in tranches. At the AP alone, as many as 30 journalists were assigned, at various times, to go through the material.

Guccifer 2.0 told one reporter he was thrilled that WikiLeaks had finally followed through.

"Together with Assange we'll make america great again," he wrote.

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Donn reported from Plymouth, Massachusetts. Desmond Butler, Ted Bridis, Julie Pace and Ken Thomas in Washington, Justin Myers in Chicago, Frank Bajak in Houston, Lori Hinnant in Paris, Maggie Michael in Cairo, Erika Kinetz in Shanghai and Vadim Ghirda in Bucharest, Romania contributed to this report.

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Editor's Note: Satter's father, David Satter, is an author and Russia specialist who has been critical of the Russian government. Several of his emails were published last year by hackers and his address is on Secureworks' list.

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Previously in this series: http://apne.ws/b8By82B

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Source – abcnews.go.com

Russia's hackers took only a week to pry into Clinton camp

Nineteen thousand lines of raw data associated with the theft of emails from Hillary Clinton campaign staffers show how the hackers managed the election-shaking operation.

Minute-by-minute logs gathered by the cybersecurity company Secureworks and recently shared with The Associated Press suggest it took the hackers just over a week of work to zero in on and penetrate the personal Gmail account of campaign chairman John Podesta.

One outside expert who reviewed the data said it showed how even the well-defended Clinton campaign fell prey to phishing, a basic cyberespionage technique that uses bogus emails to harvest passwords.

"They were the most security-aware campaign that I'm aware of," said Markus Jakobsson, the chief scientist at email security company Agari. "And yet this happened."

Hillaryclinton.com emails were locked down using two-factor authentication, a technique that uses a second passcode to keep accounts secure. Other measures included the automatic deletion of most messages after 30 days and phishing drills for staff. Security awareness even followed the campaigners into the bathroom, where someone put a picture of a toothbrush under the words: "You shouldn't share your passwords either."

But hackers who began their break-in attempts on March 10, 2016, with random emails to obsolete hillaryclinton.com addresses quickly learned their way around the campaign's address book, first targeting senior staffers at work before switching to their Gmail inboxes, some of which had not been protected with two-factor authentication.

On March 19 the hackers appear to have broken into Podesta's personal inbox, setting the stage for weeks of embarrassing disclosures.

Overall, the AP documented well over 400 attempts to break into Clinton staffers and Democratic operatives between March and May of 2016 — an illustration of what Jakobsson said was a key principal behind most phishing attempts.

"If you try enough, sooner or later you'll be lucky," he said.

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WHO SENT THE PHISHING EMAILS?

The AP's reporting has shown how the hackers who hit Podesta acted globally in close alignment with the Russian government's interests — backing assessments made by U.S. intelligence agencies that Russian spies were responsible. Here's a review of the evidence:

The hackers worked business hours, Moscow time

They created nearly all their links from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., Moscow time, according to AP's analysis of the data. They were busiest in the midday hours and took weekends off.

Russian rivals and global trouble spots dominate the targeted countries

At least 573 individuals or groups were targeted in the United States, which has been a focus of Russian spying since the Soviet era. Ukraine, where Russia is backing separatist rebels against the government in Kiev, came in second with 545 targets.

Other countries that were the focus of the operation were former Soviet state Georgia; Syria, where Russia has been backing the government in a bloody civil war; and Russia itself, where many government opponents were targeted. The AP has identified people in 116 countries whose accounts were targeted.

Weeks after the hack, a Trump adviser was told that emails were in Russian hands

In recently unsealed court documents, a former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser said he was told by a professor closely connected to the Russian government that the Kremlin had obtained thousands of emails with "dirt" about Clinton.

Experts who've examined the list say it's Russia

"It doesn't seem plausible that there is another country that would look to target the exact same set of people," said Secureworks senior security researcher Rafe Pilling.

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This story has been corrected to show that the poster in the bathroom said "shouldn't" not "wouldn't."

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Source – abcnews.go.com

Catalonia election: Puigdemont calls for united independence front

Catalan ex-leader Carles Puigdemont has called for separatist parties to unite in upcoming regional elections to continue a push for independence.

The snap poll was called by Spain after the Catalan parliament declared independence and Madrid reacted by imposing direct rule.

Mr Puigdemont's appeal came a day after a Spanish judge issued an EU warrant for his arrest – he is in Belgium.

Despite being sought by the courts, he says he is ready to run in the poll.

Four of his allies in Belgium also face possible extradition, while eight other former officials remain in custody in Spain.

They all face charges of rebellion, sedition and misuse of public funds for pursuing Catalan independence. There have been large demonstrations in Catalan cities in protest.

• Catalonia's longest week

• The man who wants to break up Spain

• Catalonia crisis: What next for Spain?

Mr Puigdemont has said he will not return to Spain unless he receives guarantees of a fair trial.

He says he can campaign in the December 21 election from outside Catalonia and the Spanish government has said that any accused politician can run in the election unless they are actually convicted, the Associated Press reports.

In a tweet on Saturday, he said it was time "for all democrats to unite. For Catalonia, for the freedom of political prisoners and for the republic."

He included a link to an online petition calling for secessionist parties to unite against Madrid in the regional vote. The petition now has more than 39,000 signatures.

Skip Twitter post by @KRLS

És el moment que tots els demòcrates s'uneixin. Per Catalunya, per la llibertat dels #presospolitics i la República https://t.co/W4WDeUIB43 pic.twitter.com/FwbnA2wMQE

— Carles Puigdemont ???? (@KRLS) November 4, 2017

Report

End of Twitter post by @KRLS

Belgian authorities, meanwhile, are reviewing the arrest warrants issued by the Spanish judge.

The process could take up to three months "under exceptional circumstances", the justice ministry said.

The other warrants are for:

• Meritxell Serret, former agriculture minister
• Antoni Comín, former health minister
• Lluís Puig, former culture minister
• Clara Ponsatí, former education minister

Spain issues warrant for Catalan ex-leader

Five senior members of the Catalan parliament, as well as Speaker Carme Forcadell, are facing the same charges but, because of their parliamentary immunity, their cases are being handled by the Supreme Court. Their hearings have been postponed until 9 November.

The regional parliament in Catalonia voted to proclaim an independent republic just over a week ago, following an illegal referendum on independence organised by the Catalan government on 1 October

No other country recognised the move and the Spanish central government moved swiftly to impose control, using emergency powers under the constitution.

Source – bbc.com

Belgium hopes to act on warrant for hiding Catalan leader

The ousted leader of Catalonia remained the subject of a European arrest warrant Saturday as questions mounted over how long he would elude the Spanish justice system by staying undercover in Belgium and delaying extradition.

Former Catalan President Carles Puigdemont and several members of his separatist government fled north to Brussels after Spanish authorities removed the region's top officials from office a week ago. It is thought that Puigdemont and four others still are in Belgium, but sources close to them would not reveal their whereabouts.

Puigdemont wrote in Dutch on his Twitter account Saturday that he would "cooperate" with Belgian authorities, although his lawyer has said the pro-independence politician would fight a forced return to Spain.

"We are prepared to fully cooperate with Belgian justice following the European arrest warrant issued by Spain," Puigdemont wrote in Dutch on his Twitter account.

Prosecutors in Belgium's capital, Brussels, said they were examining the arrest warrants for Puigdemont and four of his associates Saturday and hope to launch extradition proceedings as soon as possible.

Federal prosecutors in Belgium shared the warrants with their city counterparts due to links the five politicians from Catalonia have to Brussels, a statement from the Brussels prosecutors' office said.

The statement did not explain what those links are. Puigdemont spoke at a news conference in Brussels on Tuesday and appeared on Belgian state television on Friday.

Besides the Dutch tweet he posted on Saturday, Puigdemont also sent a Twitter message written in Catalan to political followers in northeastern Spain. He weighed in on a debate among secessionists in Catalonia regarding strategy for the December snap election Spain's government has called as part of its temporary takeover of the restive region.

"It's the moment for all democrats to unite. For Catalonia, for the freedom of political prisoners and the Republic," Puigdemont wrote, endorsing calls for pro-secession political parties to unite in a coalition for the upcoming election.

Spanish government spokesman Inigo Mendez de Vigo said Friday that politicians, even those who are jailed on suspicion of a crime, can run in the upcoming election unless they are convicted before it takes place. Puigdemont has left the door open to running.

Back in Barcelona, the government seat of Catalonia, pro-union parties criticized Puigdemont for his flight to Europe's capital 1,066 kilometers (662 miles) away.

Albert Rivera, the leader of the liberal Citizens party, said that Puigdemont had gotten what he asked for when he pushed ahead with plans for secession despite warnings from Spanish authorities that he was breaking the law.

"Mr. Puigdemont, wherever you are, come back to Spain and show your face before the law," Rivera said. "When you once bragged about flouting the law, you cannot now be indignant when a judge opens an investigation into your acts."

Miquel Iceta, leader of Catalonia's Socialists, said at a separate rally: "We have members of the government in prison, and others in Brussels trying to avoid the law. This is time to build bridges, not raise frontiers."

Puigdemont and the four former ministers are being sought for five crimes, including rebellion, sedition and embezzlement, for their roles in pushing regional lawmakers to declare independence from Spain.

But the longer Puigdemont can delay his arrest and extradition, the greater chance he would have of being a factor in the Dec. 21 election.

Legal experts have told The Associated Press that the process of getting another country's suspect turned over to face charges — from arrest to extradition, including appeals — could take about two months in Belgium.

Belgian Justice Minister Koen Geens said his government will have no influence over the future of Puigdemont or the other Catalan officials because the European arrest warrant "is a completely legal procedure."

He said, unlike a normal international extradition, "the executive power does not play any role in the EAW procedure. Everything goes through direct contact between the justice authorities."

Puigdemont's Belgian lawyer did not answer calls requesting comment on the arrest warrant but has said his client would fight extradition to Spain without requesting political asylum. Belgian federal prosecutors said they could question Puigdemont in coming days.

"We will study it, and put it in the hands of an investigating judge," prosecutors' spokesman Eric Van Der Sijpt told The Associated Press. "That could be tomorrow, the day after or even Monday … we are not in any hurry."

In all, Spanish prosecutors are investigating 20 regional politicians for rebellion and other crimes that could be punishable by up to 30 years in prison.

While Puigdemont and his four aides hid in Belgium, nine members of his deposed government complied with a summons to appear in a Madrid court. National Court judge Carmen Lamela jailed them all, although agreed to let one former regional minister go free on bail.

On the other side of the political divide over Catalonia, a senior official of a large separatist party, the Republican Left, conditioned her party's participation in the Dec. 21 elections on the release of all the jailed separatists.

One of them, Republican Left's president, Oriol Junqueras, is the region's former vice president.

"If (Spain) wants democratic elections, if it wants to show that it is really democratic, it is necessary that it releases the main leaders of one of the options that will run for elections," Republic Left general secretary Marta Rovira said.

Rovira appeared to issue a veiled threat that, saying that if her party's demands were not met, separatists could try to scuttle the elections by encouraging pro-independence local officials to not manage the election or open their town halls as polling places.

"Elections here can only happen here if we say they do," Rovira said.

Fueled by questions of cultural identity and economic malaise, secessionist sentiment has skyrocketed to reach roughly half of the 7.5 million residents of Catalonia, a prosperous region that is proud of its Catalan language spoken along with Spanish.

The separatist majority of Catalonia's Parliament voted in favor of a declaration of independence on Oct. 27. The next day, Spain's central government used extraordinary constitutional powers to fire Catalonia's government and dissolve its regional parliament.

Spain's Constitution says the nation is "indivisible" and that all matters of national sovereignty must be handled by the Spanish Parliament.

In the Basque city of Bilbao in northern Spain, several thousand people marched Saturday despite the rain to protest the intervention of the Spanish government in Catalonia's self-rule. The Basque Country region has its own separatist movement.

More rallies in support of secession are planned for the coming days in Catalonia.

———

Wilson reported from Barcelona, Spain.

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Find complete AP coverage of Catalonia here: https://apnews.com/tag/Spain

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Source – abcnews.go.com

Debate over Ken Burns Civil War doc continues over decades

From the time it aired nearly 30 years ago, Ken Burns' Civil War documentary has been a popular sensation and subject of debate.

The 11-hour, nine-part series premiered in September 1990 and became one of PBS' most widely seen educational programs, with some 40 million taking in at least part of the original broadcast. "The Civil War" was the rare documentary to inspire a skit on "Saturday Night Live" and helped make Burns, in his mid-30s at the time, the rare documentary maker recognizable to the general public.

During its initial run, then-President George H.W. Bush and Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, who would soon command the U.S.-led Gulf War, were among those who watched it. Earlier this week, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders cited the film in defense of Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, who had said the Civil War could have been avoided with more compromise.

"I don't know that I'm going to get into debating the Civil War, but I do know that many historians, including Shelby Foote in Ken Burns' famous Civil War documentary, agree that a failure to compromise was a cause of the Civil War," Sanders said. "There are a lot of historians that think that."

And a lot of historians who don't.

"There's no one who thinks intransigence was shared equally," says historian Harold Holzer. "Kelly accepted the old line idea that people were just arguing about tariffs and states' rights."

Burns himself challenged Sanders' interpretation on Twitter. He wrote that "Many factors contributed to the Civil War. One caused it: slavery." He noted that the documentary ends with commentary from Barbara Fields, a revered scholar of slavery and the Civil War, who says "the Civil War is still going on. It's still to be fought and regrettably it can still be lost."

As much as any book or film in recent years, Burns' series has shaped how Americans perceive the war. Holzer says "The Civil War" has a couple of important and productive legacies — it brought slavery to the center of the Civil War debate, erasing some of the damage caused by "Gone With the Wind" and other narratives of the past, and helped create an enduring popular following for Civil War stories. But he says "The Civil War" was "somewhat romanticized," notably in its treatment of Gen. Robert E. Lee and other Confederate leaders.

"Since the film and book appeared there's been a lot very good work done on Robert E. Lee," says historian Geoffrey Ward, who has collaborated with Burns on "The Civil War" and numerous other projects. "Had I the benefit of it all I'm sure we would have painted a harsher but more accurate portrait of Lee."

Sanders' comments do reflect what Foote said in the film: Scholars argue about the documentary in part because Burns included commentators with very different interpretations. Fields' perspective — that slavery was the cause, that the conflict was necessary and unavoidable and that initial hopes for black equality were fiercely resisted in the South and remain unmet — is common among historians now. But far more time in "The Civil War" is given to Foote, who died in 2005. Foote was a popular Southern historian and raconteur who scorned slave holders and abolitionists, and in Burns' film contended that the war happened "because we failed to do the thing we really have a genius for, which is compromise."

Ward praised Foote as a "master storyteller" but added that "his views on its causes were his own." The cause of the war, Ward added, was slavery.

"Ken Burns always looks for varied voices and he always looks for characters, and Shelby Foote was certainly a character," Holzer says. "The most amazing thing he said was that the two great geniuses of the war were Lincoln and (Confederate Gen.) Nathan Bedford Forrest. Foote somehow compared the great emancipator with a man who owned slaves, murdered blacks and joined the Ku Klux Klan. " The documentary inspired enough discussion to become a book, "Ken Burns' The Civil War: Historians Respond," a 1995 publication featuring contributions by such leading scholars as C. Vann Woodward and Eric Foner and responses from Burns and Ward.

The commentary ranges from praise by Woodward, a Pulitzer Prize winner and consultant for the film, for Burns thoroughness and dedication, to negative critiques by Foner and others. Catherine Clinton, who has worked on numerous books about the South, faulted the "wholesale neglect of women." Slavery historian Leon Litwack alleged that the film "revives the pernicious notion" that the "war need not happened at all." Foner, an authority on Reconstruction, criticized Burns for making "no attempt to convey the state of the nation at war's end in 1865."

"The word 'Reconstruction' is never mentioned, and what little information there is about the era is random and misleading," Foner wrote.

In the book, Ward acknowledged mistakes, including the wrong date for Lincoln's assassination (he had confused the date in April with the day of Franklin Roosevelt died in 1945). But he disputed the comments of Foner and others and noted that he and Burns had done their best within the boundaries of the medium, writing that "Television is better at narrative than analysis, better at evoking emotions than at expounding complex ideas."

Burns, in the book's final essay, wrote that he and his collaborators had worked hard to "question assumptions" and "doubt easy solutions." He consulted Confederate historians, Marxist historians and those in between. The film, he insisted, was not meant to be a definitive statement and had no set agenda, beyond the evil of slavery and the timidity of Union Gen. George C. McClellan.

"The rest of the war, North and South, male and female, black and white, civilian and military, was a vast and complicated drama," he wrote, "poetic as well as social in dimension, emotional as well as didactic in context and scope, instructive to the heart as well as the head."

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