Internet blacklist power to be stripped from Senate's PROTECT IP Act

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) doesn't want to give up his DNS-based Interent blacklisting plans—but he's willing to put them on hold. One of the key drivers of the PROTECT IP Act in the Senate announced today that he will recommend stripping the DNS-blocking provisions from his bill while further technical studies are underway.

The complaints against DNS-based blocking have been vocal ones. Leahy announced his plan today to introduce a "manager's amendment" to the current bill after hearing from "engineers, human rights groups, and... a number of Vermonters." Not that he's convinced DNS blocking is really problematic.

I remain confident that the ISPs—including the cable industry, which is the largest association of ISPs—would not support the legislation if its enactment created the problems that opponents of this provision suggest. Nonetheless, this is in fact a highly technical issue, and I am prepared to recommend we give it more study before implementing it.

As I prepare a managers’ amendment to be considered during the floor debate, I will therefore propose that the positive and negative effects of this provision be studied before implemented, so that we can focus on the other important provisions in this bill, which are essential to protecting American intellectual property online, and the American jobs that are tied to intellectual property. I regret that law enforcement will not have this remedy available to it when websites operating overseas are stealing American property, threatening the safety and security of American consumers. However, the bill remains a strong and balanced approach to protecting intellectual property through a no-fault, no-liability system that leverages the most relevant players in the Internet ecosystem.

Federal judges could still order sites cut off by US-based payment processors and ad networks, but actual Internet blacklisting would be provisionally off the table.

While these sorts of issues seem like they should have come up during drafting or during hearings on the bill, PROTECT IP has already moved out of committee and to the Senate floor, where it currently suffers a hold by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR). Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) will try to move the bill forward regardless on January 24, and the late change from Leahy appears designed to get the current legislation passed now rather than allow opposition to crystallize around a totally different approach, like the OPEN Act now being pitched by Wyden.

DNS blocking remains in the House version of the bill, called SOPA, though rumors suggest it too could be altered soon.

Opponents like Public Knowledge aren't satisfied. "We appreciate the action Chairman Leahy is taking to improve his legislation," said attorney Sherwin Siy. "Even with that change, however, the bill would still be unacceptable. The definitions in the bill are still far too sweeping, it still grants too much enforcement power to private parties, and still confers inappropriate blanket immunity for private companies."

Missing Teenager Natalee Holloway Declared Dead

The parents of Natalee Holloway looked on somberly as a judge on Thursday declared their child dead, more than six years after the American teenager vanished during a high school graduation trip to the Caribbean island of Aruba.

"We've been dealing with her death for the last six and a half years," Dave Holloway said after a brief hearing. He said the judge's order closes one chapter in a long ordeal, but added: "We've still got a long way to go to get justice.

Natalee Holloway disappeared in Aruba on May 30, 2005. The 18-year-old was last seen leaving a bar early that morning with a young Dutchman, Joran van der Sloot. Her body was never found and the ensuing searches for the young woman would reap intense media scrutiny and worldwide attention.

Thursday's hearing was scheduled long before van der Sloot — a suspect questioned in Holloway's disappearance — pleaded guilty Wednesday in Peru to the 2010 murder of a woman he met at a casino in Lima. Stephany Flores, 21, was killed five years to the day after Holloway, an 18-year-old from the wealthy Birmingham suburb of Mountain Brook, disappeared.

Shortly after Flores' death on May 30, 2010, van der Sloot told police he killed the woman in Peru in a fit of rage after she discovered on his laptop his connection to the disappearance of Holloway. Police forensic experts disputed the claim.

Dave Holloway told the judge in September he believed his daughter had died and he wanted to stop payments on her medical insurance and use her $2,000 college fund to help her younger brother.

The teen's mother originally objected, but her lawyer, Charlie DeBardeleben, said she subsequently changed her mind once she understood her husband's intentions.

Natalee Holloway's parents were divorced in 1993 and Beth Holloway sat in the back row of the courtroom, mostly staring at her hands in her lap through the hearing Thursday afternoon in a probate court in Birmingham.

Although Beth Holloway declined to speak to journalists, her attorney signaled it was a difficult moment for her to witness a judge signing the order declaring her daughter dead.

"She's ready to move on from this," DeBardeleben added.

Mark White, an attorney for Dave Holloway, told the judge just before he announced his decision, that there was no evidence that Holloway was alive.

"Despite all that no evidence has been found Natalee Holloway is alive," he told the judge, noting that exhaustive searches, blanket international media coverage and even the offer of rewards had turned up nothing new.

King had ruled in September that Dave Holloway had met the legal presumption of death for his daughter and it was up to someone to prove she didn't die on a high school graduation trip. He had set the hearing after a period of several months in the event anyone might come forward with new information.

However, investigators have long worked from the assumption that the young woman was dead in Aruba, where the case was officially classified as a homicide investigation.

That investigation remains open, though there has been no recent activity, said Solicitor General Taco Stein, an official with the prosecutor's office on the Dutch Caribbean island.

"The team that was acting in that investigation still is functioning as a team and they get together whenever there is information or things are needed in the case or a new tip arrives," Stein said in a phone interview Thursday.

Dave Holloway said he hopes the 24-year-old van der Sloot, who is awaiting sentencing in Lima, gets a 30-year prison term sought by Peruvian prosecutors.

"Everybody knows his personality. I believe he is beyond rehabilitation," Holloway said.

AP

David Holloway, left, looks over papers as he... View Full Caption

Attorneys said both parents also expressed hope that van der Sloot's next stop is Birmingham, where he faces federal charges accusing him of extorting $25,000 from Beth Holloway to reveal the location of her daughter's body.

Prosecutors said the money was paid, but nothing was disclosed about the missing woman's whereabouts.

"I expect to see him in Birmingham," Dave Holloway said Thursday.

Bolivia scraps controversial highway plan

President Morales cancels plans to build highway through a nature reserve after sustained protest from Amazon Indians.

Protesters camp out in front of the government palace to protest against the construction of the highway [Reuters]

Evo Morales, the president of Bolivia, has announced that he is scrapping plans to build a highway through a nature reserve in Bolivia's jungle lowlands, bowing to public pressure after a two-month protest march by Amazon Indians.
Morales did not abandon the idea of a highway through Bolivia linking Brazil with the Pacific coast, but said on Friday it would no longer cut through the pristine Isiboro-Secure Indigenous Territory National Park, or TIPNIS.
"And so the matter is resolved," Morales told reporters. "For me, this is called governing by obeying the people."

FROM THE BLOGS

Indigenous Bolivians march against Amazon road By Gabriel Elizondo in The Americas Blog

More than 100 protesters remained camped in front of the presidential palace on Friday, two days after activists ended their trek from the Amazon reserve to La Paz, the world's highest capital.
The march galvanised opposition to the Brazilian-funded highway and highlighted claims that Morales-an Aymara-has favoured Bolivia's majority Aymara and Quechua highland Indians over indigenous groups from the country's lowland jungle.
Bolivia's leftist president said he would veto a law passed last week that green-lighted the highway as originally proposed. He said he would insist it be amended to declare the reserve off limits to the highway as well as to the settlement by colonists.
Al Jazeera's Gabriel Elizondo, reporting from La Paz , said the announcement was a major reversal for the president who has been supporting the construction project all along.
"After more than sixty days of walking across the country in protest of this road project, it looks like the indigenous
people have gotten one major victory. President Morales said he is sending a bill to the assembly that if approved will permanently block any road or development projects through the TIPNIS national park area, where these indigenous people live," he said.
"But you notice that there aren't a lot of celebrations going on right now. That is because they [the protesters] had over 15 different demands they wanted met by the president and it is unclear at this point, at least in their eyes, if he has met all those."  
Morales' popularity
Protest leader Fernando Vargas responded cautiously to Morales' announcement.
"It's a good signal, but we need to talk with the president and analyze several pending topics," Vargas told reporters before an afternoon meeting with Morales.
The 15,000 Indians who inhabit the reserve fear encroachment by coca growers and other settlers, while the highway's supporters argue it is needed to promote the development of Bolivia's poorer regions.
Morales' popularity plunged after he insisted on the route through TIPNIS and was further battered when police used tear gas and truncheons September 25 to try to break up the march.
The police crackdown backfired. The defence minister quit in protest and the interior minister resigned.
Bolivians harangued Morales for the use of force against peaceful protesters and for allegedly betraying his credentials as an environmentalist and champion of Bolivia's long downtrodden indigenous majority.
Critics were also suspicious of Morales' announcement during the ensuing uproar that he would leave it to residents of the two affected states, Beni and Cochabamba, to decide the highway's fate at the ballot box. Cochabamba is
more populous and home to coca growers who are Morales' core constituency.

Morales, who grew up poor, championed a new constitution in 2010 that declared Bolivia a plurinational state and granted its 36 indigenous groups an as yet ill-defined autonomy.
Nearly six years and one landslide re-election later, however, Bolivia's first indigenous president has been forced to weigh development against environmental protection.

Obama: All US troops to leave Iraq in 2011

US president says "America's war in Iraq will be over" as he confirms final withdrawal will take place by end of year.

US President Barack Obama has confirmed that all 39,000 US troops still stationed in Iraq will be withdrawn by the end of the year, bringing to an end an almost nine-year presence in the country since the 2003 invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.
Obama's statement on Friday ended months of speculation over whether Washington would continue to base forces in the country beyond the end-of-year departure date set in place by Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush.
"After nearly nine years, America's war in Iraq will be over," Obama said in a statement at the White House, shortly after a private video conference with Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister.
Obama's statement represents the fulfillment of a central promise of his 2008 election campaign to end US involvement in Iraq, and comes with Washington also seeking to reduce its troop presence in Afghanistan.
Despite continuing controversy over the legality of the 2003 invasion and the years of violence that followed the end of Saddam's decades-long dictatorship, Obama said US troops would leave Iraq "with their heads held high, proud of their success."
When the 2008 agreement requiring all US forces to leave Iraq by 2012 was passed, many US officials assumed it would inevitably be renegotiated so that US forces could stay longer.
The US said repeatedly this year it would entertain an offer from the Iraqis to have a small force stay behind, and the Iraqis said they would like US military help.
But US-Iraqi talks broke down because the two sides were unable to agree on granting legal immunity for a small contingent of American troops who would have stayed in place to help train Iraqi forces.

Rosiland Jordan on what Obama's announcement means for US-Iraqi relations

Throughout the discussions, Iraqi leaders had adamantly refused to give US troops immunity from prosecution in Iraqi courts, while US military officials had refused to stay without it.
Moreover, Iraq's leaders have been split over whether they wanted US forces to stay.
"It had become increasing apparent that it was going to be difficult for the two to reach a deal to allow some US forces to remain on Iraqi soil, come January 1, 2012, because of the details of the agreement they has signed," said Al Jazeera's Rosiland Jordan.
Obama said that he had invited Maliki to visit the White House in December, as the two sides revert to a normal sovereign relationship between two nations.
The US's military role in Iraq has been mostly reduced to advising the security forces in a country where levels of violence had declined sharply from a peak of sectarian strife in 2006-2007, but attacks remain a daily occurrence.
More than 4,400 American military personnel have been killed since the US-led invasion in March 2003.

Sentencing due in US insider-trading case Hedge-fund founder Raj Rajaratnam may get long prison sentence if federal judge grants the government's request.

Prosecutors are seeking a 20-year prison term for Rajaratnam's conviction on security fraud charges [AFP]

A hedge-fund founder once recognised as one of the richest citizens in the US would serve the longest sentence in history for an insider trading conviction if a federal judge grants the government's request to send him to prison for two decades.
Raj Rajaratnam's sentencing was scheduled for Thursday in Manhattan.
Prosecutors are asking US District Judge Richard Holwell to send the 54-year-old former billionaire to prison for at least 19 and a half years for his May conviction on securities fraud charges. They say federal sentencing guidelines call for a sentence up to 24 and a half years.
The prosecution has placed Rajaratnam's profits from illegal trades between $70m and $75m, saying he moved so much money around within his multibillion dollar funds that the movement of price in individual
stocks could be traced to his trading whims.
The sentencing comes as the nearly month-old Occupy Wall Street protests march on, sending daily messages opposing Wall Street greed and corporate excess.
Danny Schechter, a filmmaker who handed out leaflets at the protests on Wednesday calling Wall Street a "crime scene", said the prosecution and sentencing of Rajaratnam might miss the point.
He said prosecutors too often seem determined to protect investors rather than shield the public at large and consumers from corporate greed.
He said the larger crime was collusion by corporations, which should be prosecuted as well. "The government is not doing that," he said.
Leniency sought
Lawyers for Rajaratnam, a Sri Lanka native, argue that his sentence should be much lower - six and a half to nine years - for what they say was illegal profits of about $7m, when the trades at his Galleon Group of hedge funds are disregarded.
The defence also has asked for leniency partly based on Rajaratnam's "failing health" and his "unique constellation of ailments." They say a lengthy prison term will amount to a death sentence.
The sentencing culminates a series of convictions and sentencings that followed the October 2008 announcement of the arrest of Rajaratnam in what prosecutors labelled the biggest hedge fund insider trading case in US history.
In all, more than two dozen people were arrested. All were convicted with the sentences ranging from a few months to 10 years. Since the first arrests, Preet Bharara, the US attorney, has widened the probe. A year ago, he said insider trading is "rampant and may even be on the rise".
Using information gleaned from the many cooperators in the Rajaratnam case, prosecutors have focused lately on consultants who are paid to arrange conversations between employees of public companies and hedge fund managers.
Too often, prosecutors say, they have found a nest for insider trading rather than for the discussion of legitimate research.In their pre-sentence submissions, prosecutors say Rajaratnam lacks remorse, even after a trial that featured the playing of dozens of taped conversations in which Rajaratnam was heard discussing financial news events that were not yet publicly known.
"Rajaratnam has neither acknowledged responsibility for his crimes nor remained silent. Instead, Rajaratnam's post-conviction statements show that he remains defiant that he never committed insider trading and, incredibly, he maintains that the line between legal and illegal conduct was not always clear to him,'' prosecutors wrote.
They quoted from a report that is not public that he told the probation department: "In my own mind, the line between permissible 'detective work' and impermissible insider trading was not always clear, especially with
regard to companies broadly covered by the news media as to which there was a wealth of publicly available information, including frequent leaks, rumours and speculation about corporate transactions and other  important developments."
Lacking respect
The prosecutors wrote that Rajaratnam's comments "do not reflect the proper respect for the jury's verdict, the evidence in the trial record or the laws against insider trading."
Prosecutors also have asked the judge to force Rajaratnam to reveal his medical issues since he is relying on them in his plea for leniency.
The judge has not yet ruled on the request. And, in a filing Wednesday, they asked the judge to revoke Rajaratnam's $100m bail and force him to report to prison within three weeks. He currently is confined to his Manhattan apartment.
In their written submissions, defence lawyers said Rajaratnam should receive leniency with a sentence substantially below the guidelines range because of his failing health and his extensive community service.
"Such a sentence would by no means return Mr Rajaratnam to the life he enjoyed before his arrest, nor would it exempt Mr Rajaratnam from a meaningful loss of liberty. It would simply save him from a loss of life,''
the lawyers wrote.

Hurricane Jova strikes Mexico coast

Four southern states on high alert as category two storm brings heavy rains and threatens deadly mudslides.

 

Hurricane Jova has struck Mexico's Pacific coast, according to the national weather service, causing heavy rains and threatening devastating mudslides.

The US-based National Hurricane Center (NHC) had earlier predicted that Jova would weaken after hitting land but warned of heavy rains and life-threatening mudslides.

"Jova is landing on the coast of Jalisco, 45 kilometres southeast of Punta Farallon," Marco Antonio Lugo, a meterologist, said on Tuesday.

He said it was a category two storm on the five-point Saffir-Simpson wind scale.

The port city of Manzanillo had been bracing for the storm's arrival, as Mexico issued hurricane alerts for large swaths of the Pacific coast and placed four southern coastal states on high alert.

A zone of about 500km could be affected by the storm, stretching from the port of Lazaro Cardenas in Michoacan state to the popular tourist area of Cabo Corrientes in Jalisco state.

The Miami-based NHC said in its most recent advisory, at 03:00 GMT, that the storm was bearing down on the coast with maximum sustained winds of 160km per hour.

"Hurricane conditions are likely beginning to spread over the coast of Mexico within the hurricane warning area," it said.

"A dangerous storm surge is expected to produce significant coastal flooding near and to the east of where the center makes landfall. Near the coast ... the surge will be accompanied by large and destructive waves."

It said the storm would move across western Mexico throughout Wednesday, dumping as much as 50 centimeters of rain in some places, which "could cause life-threatening flash floods and mudslides over steep terrain."

Several major storms or hurricanes have buffeted Mexico's Pacific coast in recent months but most have remained offshore.

The season's first named storm, Arlene, left at least 16 people dead and drenched much of the country in July.

Tropical storms and hurricanes last year caused flooding and mudslides in Mexico that killed 125 people, left hundreds of thousands homeless and caused more than $4 bn in damage.

Authorities are keeping their fingers crossed that any damage caused by the storm will not affect the 16th Pan American Games, one of the major events on the international sports calendar.

The games are to be held from October 14-30 in Jalisco and other cities, including Ciudad Guzman, Puerto Vallarta, Lagos de Moreno and Tapalpa, with up to 6,000 athletes from 42 nations expected to participate.