FROM: U.S. JUSTICE DEPARTMENT
Monday, June 8, 2015
Kansas Man Pleads Guilty in Plot to Explode Car Bomb at Airport
A Wichita, Kansas, man pleaded guilty to attempting to explode a car bomb at the airport in Wichita, announced Assistant Attorney General for National Security John P. Carlin and U.S. Attorney Barry R. Grissom of the District of Kansas.
Terry Lee Loewen, 59, of Wichita, pleaded guilty today to one count of attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction. Loewen was arrested in December 2013 when he tried to enter the grounds of the Wichita Mid-Continent Airport for the purpose of exploding a bomb. (The airport recently was renamed Wichita Dwight D. Eisenhower National Airport).
“Terry Loewen utilized his privileged airport access to attempt a terrorist attack in Wichita,” said Assistant Attorney General Carlin. “Detecting, disrupting and holding accountable those who wish to harm Americans remains our highest priority.”
“Protecting the American people from terrorism is our primary mission,” said U.S. Attorney Grissom. “It is vital that we disrupt attacks against our homeland and bring terrorists to justice.”
In his plea, Loewen admitted he came to the attention of the FBI late in May 2013 when he became a Facebook friend of a person who was posting comments advocating violent jihad. The FBI began communicating with Loewen through an undercover employee. After Loewen expressed his desire to engage in violent jihad, the undercover employee offered to introduce him to someone who could help him do it.
Loewen told the undercover employee he was waiting for what he called “the green light” from Allah to carry out a violent attack on a civilian target. He said he did not expect to live through any of the attacks he had in mind. He also said he was inspired by the teachings of Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki, and that he had downloaded thousands of pages of information on jihad.
In September 2013, Loewen sent photos of airplanes on the tarmac at the Wichita airport. He commented that he could have “walked over there, shot both pilots … slapped some C4 on both fuel trucks and set them off before anyone even called TSA.”
In October 2013, Loewen met with a second undercover FBI employee who Loewen believed was a “brother” and would help him blow up a plane. Loewen said he had scouted the airport to determine a time and place for an attack that would be sure to kill as many people as possible.
Loewen assisted the second FBI employee in the final assembly of an improvised explosive device. He was not aware that the explosive materials used in the device were inert. In the early hours of Dec. 13, 2013, the second FBI employee picked up Loewen at a Wichita hotel. They drove to where the bomb was stored and finished wiring the device. When they reached the airport, Loewen twice used his airport badge at a card reader to attempt to get onto the tarmac before he was arrested.
Loewen’s sentencing will be scheduled at a later date. Both parties have agreed to recommend a sentence of 20 years in federal prison.
Assistant Attorney General Carlin and U.S. Attorney Grissom commended the FBI Wichita Joint Terrorism Task Force, which includes members from the FBI, Sedgwick County, Kansas, Sheriff’s Office and Kansas Highway Patrol. Assisting with the investigation were the FBI Kansas City Division, the Transportation Security Administration, the Wichita Airport Authority and the Wichita Police Department. Assistant Attorney General Carlin and U.S. Attorney Grissom also commended the prosecutors on the case, Assistant U.S. Attorneys David Smith and Tony Mattivi of the District of Kansas and Trial Attorney Erin Creegan of the Justice Department’s National Security Division.
Tuesday, June 9, 2015
SHAPE CHANGING WING FLAPS
Green Aviation Project Tests Shape Changing Wing Flaps
A NASA F-15D flies chase for the G-III Adaptive Compliant Trailing Edge (ACTE) project. This photo was taken by an automated Wing Deflection Measurement System (WDMS) camera in the G-III that photographed the ACTE wing every second during the flight. The ACTE experimental flight research project is a joint effort between NASA and the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory to determine if advanced flexible trailing-edge wing flaps, developed and patented by FlexSys, Inc., can both improve aircraft aerodynamic efficiency and reduce airport-area noise generated during takeoffs and landings.
The experiment is being carried out on a modified Gulfstream III (G-III) business aircraft that has been converted into an aerodynamics research test bed at NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center. The ACTE project involves replacement of both of the G-III's conventional 19-foot-long aluminum flaps with the shape changing flaps that form continuous bendable surfaces.
DOD ANNOUNCES ADDITIONAL LABS RECEIVED LIVE ANTHRAX SAMPLES
FROM: U.S. DEFENSE DEPARTMENT
Pentagon Provides DoD Laboratory Review Update
By Army Sgt. 1st Class Tyrone C. Marshall Jr.
DoD News, Defense Media Activity
WASHINGTON, June 8, 2015 – As part of its ongoing laboratory review, the Defense Department today announced additional laboratories and one new state have been added to the list of sites that received low concentrations of live anthrax samples.
In line with Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work’s pledge of a transparent DoD laboratory review process, Pentagon spokesman Army Col. Steve Warren provided the update to reporters on the number of labs and locations which received the samples.
Warren said 66 laboratories in 19 states and Washington, D.C., as well as three foreign countries are now known to have received the live anthrax samples.
“The new state that we’re adding is Pennsylvania,” he said. “Thirty-one people remain on post-exposure prophylaxis, so that’s no change.”
In addition to Washington, D.C., Warren said the states identified as having received live samples are California, Utah, Texas, Tennessee, Virginia, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Delaware, Washington, Illinois, Florida, Arizona, Ohio, North Carolina, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania.
“The [number of] countries remain the same,” he said, citing Australia, South Korea and Canada.
These locations include all identified academic, federal and civilian facilities affected, Warren said.
Pentagon Provides DoD Laboratory Review Update
By Army Sgt. 1st Class Tyrone C. Marshall Jr.
DoD News, Defense Media Activity
WASHINGTON, June 8, 2015 – As part of its ongoing laboratory review, the Defense Department today announced additional laboratories and one new state have been added to the list of sites that received low concentrations of live anthrax samples.
In line with Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work’s pledge of a transparent DoD laboratory review process, Pentagon spokesman Army Col. Steve Warren provided the update to reporters on the number of labs and locations which received the samples.
Warren said 66 laboratories in 19 states and Washington, D.C., as well as three foreign countries are now known to have received the live anthrax samples.
“The new state that we’re adding is Pennsylvania,” he said. “Thirty-one people remain on post-exposure prophylaxis, so that’s no change.”
In addition to Washington, D.C., Warren said the states identified as having received live samples are California, Utah, Texas, Tennessee, Virginia, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Delaware, Washington, Illinois, Florida, Arizona, Ohio, North Carolina, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania.
“The [number of] countries remain the same,” he said, citing Australia, South Korea and Canada.
These locations include all identified academic, federal and civilian facilities affected, Warren said.
FTC SENDS OUT CHECKS RELATED TO MORTGAGE RELIEF SERVICES SCAM
FROM: U.S. FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION
FTC Returns Money to Consumers in Mortgage Relief Scam
The Federal Trade Commission is mailing 2,653 checks totaling more than $467,000 to consumers who lost money to a scheme that charged large up-front fees for mortgage relief services that were not provided.
The FTC won a court action against Jackson, Crowder & Associates and Crowder Law Group, in which the FTC alleged that the defendants falsely promised to modify consumers’ mortgages and substantially reduce their monthly payments, exaggerated the role an attorney would play, and pretended to be affiliated with a government agency.
Consumers who receive the checks from the FTC’s refund administrator for this matter, Gilardi & Co. LLC, should deposit or cash them within 60 days of the mailing date. The FTC never requires consumers to pay money or to provide information before refund checks can be cashed. The amount of the check will vary based upon each consumer’s loss.
FTC Returns Money to Consumers in Mortgage Relief Scam
The Federal Trade Commission is mailing 2,653 checks totaling more than $467,000 to consumers who lost money to a scheme that charged large up-front fees for mortgage relief services that were not provided.
The FTC won a court action against Jackson, Crowder & Associates and Crowder Law Group, in which the FTC alleged that the defendants falsely promised to modify consumers’ mortgages and substantially reduce their monthly payments, exaggerated the role an attorney would play, and pretended to be affiliated with a government agency.
Consumers who receive the checks from the FTC’s refund administrator for this matter, Gilardi & Co. LLC, should deposit or cash them within 60 days of the mailing date. The FTC never requires consumers to pay money or to provide information before refund checks can be cashed. The amount of the check will vary based upon each consumer’s loss.
S. KOREA ROBOT WINS FIRST PRIZE AT DARPA ROBOT FINALS
Right: Team Kaist’s robot DRC-Hubo uses a tool to cut a hole in a wall during the DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals, June 5-6, 2015, in Pomona, Calif. Team Kaist won the top prize at the competition. DARPA photo
Robots from South Korea, U.S. Win DARPA Finals
By Cheryl Pellerin
DoD News, Defense Media Activity
POMONA, Calif., June 7, 2015 – A robot from South Korea took first prize and two American robots took second and third prizes here yesterday in the two-day robotic challenge finals held by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
Twenty-three human-robot teams participating in the DARPA Robotics Challenge, or DRC, finals competed for $3.5 million in prizes, working to get through eight tasks in an hour, under their own onboard power and with severely degraded communications between robot and operator.
A dozen U.S. teams and 11 from Japan, Germany, Italy, South Korea and Hong Kong competed in the outdoor competition.
DARPA launched the DRC in response to the nuclear disaster at Fukushima, Japan, in 2011 and the need for help to save lives in the toxic environment there.
Progress in Robotics
The DRC’s goal was to accelerate progress in robotics so robots more quickly can gain the dexterity and robustness they need to enter areas too dangerous for people and mitigate disaster impacts.
Robot tasks were relevant to disaster response -- driving alone, walking through rubble, tripping circuit breakers, using a tool to cut a hole in a wall, turning valves and climbing stairs.
Each team had two tries at the course with the best performance and times used as official scores. All three winners each had final scores of eight points, so they were arrayed from first to third place according to least time on the course.
DARPA program manager and DRC organizer Gill Pratt congratulated the 23 participating teams and thanked them for helping open a new era of human-robot partnerships.
Loving Robots
The DRC was open to the public, and more than 10,000 people over two days watched from the Fairplex grandstand as each robot ran its course. The venue was formerly known as the Los Angeles County Fairgrounds.
"These robots are big and made of lots of metal, and you might assume people seeing them would be filled with fear and anxiety," Pratt said during a press briefing at the end of day 2.
"But we heard groans of sympathy when those robots fell, and what did people do every time a robot scored a point? They cheered!” he added.
Pratt said this could be one of the biggest lessons from DRC -- “the potential for robots not only to perform technical tasks for us but to help connect people to one another."
South Korean Winning Team
Team Kaist from Daejeon, South Korea, and its robot DRC-Hubo took first place and the $2 million prize. Hubo comes from the words ‘humanoid robot.’
Team Kaist is from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, which professor JunHo Oh of the Mechanical Engineering Department called “the MIT of Korea,” and he led Team Kaist to victory here.
In his remarks at the DARPA press conference, Oh noted that researchers from a university commercial spinoff called Rainbow Co., built the Hubo robot hardware.
The professor said his team’s first-place prize doesn’t make DRC-Hubo the best robot in the world, but he’s happy with the prize, which he said helps demonstrate Korea’s technological capabilities.
Team IHMC Robotics
Coming in second with a $1 million prize is Team IHMC Robotics of Pensacola, Florida -- the Institute of Human and Machine Cognition -- and its robot Running Man.
Jerry Pratt leads a research group at IHMC that works to understand and model human gait and its applications in robotics, human assistive devices and man-machine interfaces.
“Robots are really coming a long way,” Pratt said.
“Are you going to see a lot more of them? It's hard to say when you'll really see humanoid robots in the world,” he added. “But I think this is the century of the humanoid robot. The real question is what decade? And the DRC will make that decade come maybe one decade sooner.”
Team Tartan Rescue
In third place is Team Tartan Rescue of Pittsburgh, winning $500,000. The robot is CHIMP, which stands for CMU highly intelligent mobile platform. Team members are from Carnegie Mellon University and the National Robotics Engineering Center.
Tony Stentz, NREC director, led Team Tartan Rescue, and during the press conference called the challenge “quite an experience.”
That experience was best captured, he said, “with our run yesterday when we had trouble all through the course, all kinds of problems, things we never saw before.”
While that was happening, Stentz said, the team operating the robot from another location kept their cool.
Promise for the Technology
“They figured out what was wrong, they tapped their deep experience in practicing with the machine, they tapped the tools available at their fingertips, and they managed to get CHIMP through the entire course, doing all of the tasks in less than an hour,” he added.
“That says a lot about the technology and it says a lot about the people,” Stentz said, “and I think it means that there's great promise for this technology.”
All the winners said they would put most of the prize money into robotics research and share a portion with their team members.
After the day 2 competition, Arati Prabhakar, DARPA director, said this is the end of the 3-year-long DARPA Robotics Challenge but “the beginning of a future in which robots can work alongside people to reduce the toll of disasters."
ED DEPT FACT SHEET ON MISLEADING CLAIMS BY CAREER COLLEGES
FROM: U.S. EDUCATION DEPARTMENT
Fact Sheet: Protecting Students from Abusive Career Colleges
Administration outlines new debt relief process for Corinthian Colleges’ students
JUNE 8, 2015
Over the past six years, the Education Department has taken unprecedented steps to hold career colleges accountable for giving students what they deserve: a high-quality, affordable education that prepares them for their careers. The Department established tougher regulations targeting misleading claims by colleges and incentives that drove sales people to enroll students through dubious promises. The Department has cracked down on bad actors through investigations and enforcement actions. The Department also issued "gainful employment" regulations, which will help ensure that students at career colleges don't end up with debt they cannot repay. The Department will continue to hold institutions accountable in order to improve the value of their programs, protect students from abusive colleges, and safeguard the interests of taxpayers.
"While some for-profit career colleges play a critical role in helping students succeed in their educational and training pursuits, too often, bad actors in the sector have preyed on some of our nation's most vulnerable students and taken advantage of hard-working Americans who simply want a better future for themselves and their families," said U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. "I am committed to ensuring that every student has access to an education that will put them on solid footing for a career, and I will hold schools accountable for practices that undercut their students and taxpayers. Where students have been harmed by fraudulent practices, I am fully committed to making sure students receive every penny of relief they are entitled to under law. We will make this process as easy as possible for them, including by considering claims in groups wherever possible, and hold institutions accountable."
Today, the Education Department is announcing new steps in this work, particularly to address the concerns of students who attended schools owned by Corinthian Colleges Inc.
How debt relief will work for Corinthian students
The Department has worked to rapidly develop a streamlined process for getting debt relief to Corinthian students. The Department's aim is to make the process of forgiving loans fair, clear and efficient—and to ensure that students who are eligible to participate know about this opportunity.
Some Corinthian schools closed down, while others were sold but remain open under different ownership. The announcements today are for:
Corinthian students whose schools have closed down.
Corinthian students who believe they were victims of fraud, regardless of whether their school closed.
Helping Corinthian students whose schools have closed
In general, when a college closes, students are eligible to discharge their federal student loans if they were attending when the school closed or who withdrew from the school within 120 days of the closing date. Given the unique circumstances for former Corinthian students, the Department is expanding eligibility for students to apply for a closed school loan discharge, extending the window of time back to June 20, 2014, to capture students who attended the now-closed campuses after Corinthian entered into an agreement with the Department to terminate Corinthian's ownership of its schools.
The Department's Federal Student Aid office has been and will continue to contact potentially impacted student borrowers to provide clear information about their options, including loan discharge applications, in addition to providing enhanced information on the Department's website.
In addition, the Department has worked with a group of organizations and institutions—including those within the California State University system, led by CSU Fullerton and C-REAL, Beyond 12, and the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators and its California and Western region affiliates—as they have established an independent volunteer advising corps that will help students navigate their options. The resource is available at www.NextStepsEDU.org, where students can sign up and be connected to a volunteer advisor from the field who can help students determine which option is best suited to their situation. (Note that as the Department is not managing this initiative, it cannot endorse any advice that a student may receive.)
Helping students who believe they were victims of fraud, regardless of whether their school closed
Provisions in the law called "defense to repayment" or "borrower's defense" allow borrowers to seek loan forgiveness if they believe they were defrauded by their college under state law. This provision has rarely been used in the past. Now, the Department is taking unprecedented action to create a streamlined process that is fair to students who may have been victims of fraud and that holds colleges accountable to taxpayers.
In taking these actions, as Under Secretary Ted Mitchell outlined in a blog post today, the Department is committed to helping support affected students. Given the pressing need presented by the unique situation for students who attended colleges owned by Corinthian, the Department is today announcing specific steps for students who attended those campuses, as well as outlining broader processes for all students that will be established moving forward.
Extending debt relief eligibility to groups of students wherever possible: In order to receive loan forgiveness under a "defense to repayment," students must assert that a college's actions violated state law and affected their provision of educational services or their federal loans. Wherever possible, the Department will rely on evidence established by appropriate authorities in considering whether whole groups of students (for example, an entire academic program at a specific campus during a certain time frame) are eligible for borrower defense relief. This will simplify and expedite the relief process, reducing the burden on borrowers.
For example, after analyzing the Department's findings in its investigation of Heald College and relevant California law, the Department has determined that evidence of misrepresentation exists for students enrolled in a large majority of programs offered at Heald College campuses between 2010 and 2015. Specifically, the Department has determined that students who relied on misrepresentations found in published job placement rates for many Heald programs qualify to have their federal direct student loans discharged. Students can have their loans forgiven and receive refunds for amounts paid based on a simple attestation. More information about this process—including the attestation form—is available on studentaid.gov/Corinthian. Additional details will be posted on the website in the coming weeks.
Providing loan forbearance and pausing payments: All former Corinthian students who apply for borrower defense have the option of having their federal loans immediately placed into forbearance, which stops their monthly payments to ensure they do not fall behind or default on their loans while the Department works to resolve the claim. For such students who are already in default on their loans, the Department will immediately halt collection activity. Students will receive a notification from their loan servicer to confirm the change in status of their loans.
Appointing a Special Master dedicated to borrower defense issues: The Department will appoint a Special Master to oversee borrower defense issues and charge that person with ensuring the process is simple, streamlined, and fair to students and taxpayers. While the specific steps announced today are for former Corinthian students, the Special Master will help develop a broader system that will support students at other institutions who believe they have a defense to repayment. The Special Master will be named in the coming weeks.
Establishing a streamlined process: As noted above, the Department will work to provide debt relief to groups of students wherever possible, as we already have determined is possible for many Heald College students. For other Corinthian students, with the help of the Special Master, the Department will create a simple application for debt relief, which borrowers can complete online or by email or postal mail. Starting today, former Corinthian students can visit studentaid.gov/Corinthian to learn more, and in the coming weeks, the Department will have an online form available for these borrowers. In addition, students can call a special toll-free borrower defense hotline at (855) 279-6207 to ask about their options.
Building a better system for debt relief for the future: The Department will develop new regulations to clarify and streamline loan forgiveness under the defense to repayment provision, while maintaining or enhancing current consumer protection standards and strengthening those provisions that hold colleges accountable for actions that result in loan discharges. That process will begin later this year and will not slow down the loan discharge process for current applicants.
Calling on Congress to do its part
The Department continues to take aggressive action that ensures defrauded borrowers get the debt relief they are entitled to, steps up oversight and enforcement to identify colleges that present the greatest risk to students and taxpayers, and holds schools accountable for their actions. But to fully address these issues, Congress must also take action. Congress needs to strengthen both consumer protections for students and accountability for colleges to make sure there are better oversight and enforcement tools in place to prevent colleges from harming students and leaving taxpayers holding the bag. The Department looks forward to working with Congress on such efforts, including:
Congress should strengthen—not roll back—efforts to protect students and taxpayers from waste and fraud.
Congress needs to enact rules that hold colleges and their executives responsible for fraudulent acts, not taxpayers.
Students deserve truth in advertising. Congress needs to ensure students have access to meaningful information about college costs and outcomes and are not bombarded by aggressive and deceptive marketing.
Students deserve borrower protections. Congress should also consider preventative action to protect prospective and current students by ensuring that students are not pressured into enrolling and can get relief when the program they signed up for is not what they were promised.
Congress must protect our service members and veterans by eliminating loopholes that make them targets for aggressive marketing and recruitment by for-profit colleges.
Additional Administration efforts to strengthen consumer protections
The Obama Administration has moved swiftly to take action on some of the most problematic practices in the for-profit industry. The steps the Department announced today are part of the Administration's comprehensive approach to protecting students, eliminating bad actors, and encouraging behavior that improves student outcomes—especially in making it easier to afford and complete a degree.
Too often, students at some of the largest career colleges—many run by for-profit companies—enroll with hopes of finding a good job but instead are left saddled with debt in exchange for a worthless degree or certificate.
For-profit students pay more up front: On average, attending a two-year for-profit institution costs a student four times as much as attending a community college.
They borrow more often: More than 80 percent of students at for-profits borrow federal student loans to pay for college, while less than half of students at public institutions do.
And they default on their student loans at disproportionately high rates: Ultimately, students at for-profit colleges represent only about 11 percent of the total higher education population but 44 percent of all federal student loan defaults, a clear sign that some of these colleges were not preparing students for good jobs.
Today's announcement, coupled with the work over the past six years and upcoming efforts, aim to crack down on these abuses and to strengthen consumer protections. Some of the additional steps the Department has taken and updates on its ongoing work include:
Establishing Regulations to Protect Students from Poor-Performing Career Colleges
Last year, the Department published regulations that will eliminate the flow of federal student aid to career training programs that leave students buried in debt with few opportunities to repay it. Those regulations take effect on July 1, 2015.
To qualify for federal student aid, the law requires that for-profit programs and certificate programs at private non-profit and public institutions prepare students for "gainful employment in a recognized occupation." In May 2015, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York upheld the Department's approach to the gainful employment regulations against a challenge from a for-profit industry trade association, saying the Department's regulations represented "reasoned decisionmaking."
Enforcing the Ban on Incentive Compensation
In 2010, the Obama Administration released a broad set of rules to: strengthen the Department's authority to protect students from aggressive recruiting practices fueled by incentive compensation; take action against colleges engaging in deceptive advertising, marketing and sales practices; and to clarify minimum requirements for states to oversee postsecondary programs and handle student complaints.
Under Secretary Mitchell recently issued a memo encouraging the Office of Federal Student Aid to recover funds from schools that are found to have violated the incentive compensation ban. The memo reverses a more lenient approach initiated in 2002 under the Bush Administration by Education Deputy Secretary Hansen, which both the Education Department Inspector General and the Government Accountability Office found to be a barrier to effective enforcement of the law.
Protecting military service members, veterans and their families
For-profit colleges can obtain no more than 90 percent of their revenue from Title IV federal student aid dollars, but federal education aid from programs like the Department of Defense Tuition Assistance and Department of Veterans Affairs GI Bill Benefits is not counted toward that limit. This has made service members and veterans particularly vulnerable to aggressive marketing and recruitment by for-profit colleges, which often pursue aid targeted to such individuals to make up the required 10 percent of their revenue.
In its FY 2016 budget proposal, the Department proposed to eliminate this loophole by including DOD's tuition assistance and GI Bill benefits into the 90 percent calculation. Now, it is up to Congress to act on this plan and protect our nation's military and their families.
In addition, through Executive Order 13607 (the Principles of Excellence for Educational Institutions Serving Service Members, Veterans, Spouses, and Other Family Members), the Administration has worked to protect our nation's military families by ensuring that federal military and veterans educational benefits programs are providing service members, veterans, spouses, and other family members with the information, support, and protections they deserve.
Strengthening accountability and oversight across the federal government through a career college task force
The Department has established an interagency task force, led by Under Secretary Ted Mitchell, to help ensure proper accountability for and oversight of career colleges and for-profit institutions. The task force will enhance the enforcement activity at the Department as well as at other federal and state agencies through tighter coordination of their activities and better information sharing to protect students from school practices and policies that are unfair, deceptive, and abusive, and that put taxpayer funds at risk.
The task force is building on efforts already under way among various federal agencies, and includes the Departments of Justice, Defense, Treasury, Veterans Affairs, and Labor, as well as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Federal Trade Commission, Internal Revenue Service, and Securities and Exchange Commission. In addition, the federal partners will continue engaging with state Attorneys General and other stakeholders. The task force gathered for its first official meeting in May.
Given the important responsibilities each of these agencies has and the vital role that states play, this team will leverage their resources and expertise to continue to assist one another in the enforcement of federal criminal and civil laws and regulations, including against institutions and individuals who commit fraud or other criminal activity, thereby making the best use of scarce resources and better protecting the interests of students and taxpayers. And to allow for greater transparency and participation from the higher education community in these efforts—including institutions, consumer advocates and student groups—the task force will periodically organize opportunities for public discussions beginning this summer.
Holding Corinthian Colleges Accountable
In the case of Corinthian Colleges, the Department began tightening oversight of the college's practices and uncovered misrepresentation of its job placement rates. The Department acted to hold Corinthian accountable and ensured students pursuing their education did not face abrupt disruption while enforcement action was being undertaken.
Since that process began in 2014, the Department has taken a series of steps to protect students by requiring the company to sell or close all of its programs, ensuring students received more information about what was happening and their options, requiring expanded refund rights for students, and establishing an independent monitor under the leadership of former U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, who ensured Corinthian remained accountable to students. Fitzgerald and his team ensured that students were made aware of their refund options, ensured that Corinthian's use of federal student aid was made in accordance with Department regulations, and ensured that students were provided correct information about the state of Corinthian's campuses and programs.
Most of Corinthian's campuses were acquired by the nonprofit Zenith Education Group, which agreed to provide a number of new consumer protections, such as providing refund and withdrawal opportunities to students in poorly-performing programs, and to take steps to strengthen programs and improve affordability, including by reducing tuition. The sale allowed most Corinthian students to continue pursuing their education and career goals without disruption, and the Department and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau have worked together to provide more than $480 million in loan forgiveness for borrowers who took out Corinthian's high-cost private student loans.
In April 2015, the Department informed Corinthian that it was being fined about $30 million for misrepresenting job placement rates to current and prospective students in its Heald College system. Since then, Corinthian announced it was closing down the last of its remaining campuses. Recognizing the challenges and uncertainty facing students, the Department continues to provide information directly to Corinthian's students about their federal student aid and their options, including both transferring to another school to continue their education or discharging their loan.
Creating options that make it easier to repay federal student loans
The Department is helping more students manage their student debt through flexible repayment options such as the Pay As You Earn plan (PAYE), which caps student loan payments at 10 percent of a borrower's monthly income. The Department is also acting on President Obama's Student Aid Bill of Rights proposal from earlier this year to support more borrowers to help borrowers enroll and participate in PAYE.
In addition, the Administration is continuing outreach to help borrowers who may be struggling to repay their loans, ensuring that they have the information they need to select the best repayment option for them and avoid default. Thanks to these comprehensive efforts, there are now 3.8 million borrowers enrolled in income-driven repayment plans, up from 760,000 in 2012.
Providing families with clear information to make a smart college choice
The Department has provided a wealth of consumer tools designed to help students and families decide which college is right for them. In addition to requiring institutions to provide accurate information about their graduates' job placement success and the types of employment their graduates obtained, the Administration has created resources such as the College Scorecard and the Financial Aid Shopping Sheet, which can help families compare financial aid packages apples-to-apples. Since the launch of the Shopping Sheet in 2012, more than 3,000 institutions—representing more than two-thirds of the entire undergraduate population—have voluntarily adopted the Shopping Sheet to provide prospective students.
The Department also believes there is more to be done to help increase student access to affordable higher education and to improve student outcomes, and will continue to take action toward that goal.
Fact Sheet: Protecting Students from Abusive Career Colleges
Administration outlines new debt relief process for Corinthian Colleges’ students
JUNE 8, 2015
Over the past six years, the Education Department has taken unprecedented steps to hold career colleges accountable for giving students what they deserve: a high-quality, affordable education that prepares them for their careers. The Department established tougher regulations targeting misleading claims by colleges and incentives that drove sales people to enroll students through dubious promises. The Department has cracked down on bad actors through investigations and enforcement actions. The Department also issued "gainful employment" regulations, which will help ensure that students at career colleges don't end up with debt they cannot repay. The Department will continue to hold institutions accountable in order to improve the value of their programs, protect students from abusive colleges, and safeguard the interests of taxpayers.
"While some for-profit career colleges play a critical role in helping students succeed in their educational and training pursuits, too often, bad actors in the sector have preyed on some of our nation's most vulnerable students and taken advantage of hard-working Americans who simply want a better future for themselves and their families," said U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. "I am committed to ensuring that every student has access to an education that will put them on solid footing for a career, and I will hold schools accountable for practices that undercut their students and taxpayers. Where students have been harmed by fraudulent practices, I am fully committed to making sure students receive every penny of relief they are entitled to under law. We will make this process as easy as possible for them, including by considering claims in groups wherever possible, and hold institutions accountable."
Today, the Education Department is announcing new steps in this work, particularly to address the concerns of students who attended schools owned by Corinthian Colleges Inc.
How debt relief will work for Corinthian students
The Department has worked to rapidly develop a streamlined process for getting debt relief to Corinthian students. The Department's aim is to make the process of forgiving loans fair, clear and efficient—and to ensure that students who are eligible to participate know about this opportunity.
Some Corinthian schools closed down, while others were sold but remain open under different ownership. The announcements today are for:
Corinthian students whose schools have closed down.
Corinthian students who believe they were victims of fraud, regardless of whether their school closed.
Helping Corinthian students whose schools have closed
In general, when a college closes, students are eligible to discharge their federal student loans if they were attending when the school closed or who withdrew from the school within 120 days of the closing date. Given the unique circumstances for former Corinthian students, the Department is expanding eligibility for students to apply for a closed school loan discharge, extending the window of time back to June 20, 2014, to capture students who attended the now-closed campuses after Corinthian entered into an agreement with the Department to terminate Corinthian's ownership of its schools.
The Department's Federal Student Aid office has been and will continue to contact potentially impacted student borrowers to provide clear information about their options, including loan discharge applications, in addition to providing enhanced information on the Department's website.
In addition, the Department has worked with a group of organizations and institutions—including those within the California State University system, led by CSU Fullerton and C-REAL, Beyond 12, and the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators and its California and Western region affiliates—as they have established an independent volunteer advising corps that will help students navigate their options. The resource is available at www.NextStepsEDU.org, where students can sign up and be connected to a volunteer advisor from the field who can help students determine which option is best suited to their situation. (Note that as the Department is not managing this initiative, it cannot endorse any advice that a student may receive.)
Helping students who believe they were victims of fraud, regardless of whether their school closed
Provisions in the law called "defense to repayment" or "borrower's defense" allow borrowers to seek loan forgiveness if they believe they were defrauded by their college under state law. This provision has rarely been used in the past. Now, the Department is taking unprecedented action to create a streamlined process that is fair to students who may have been victims of fraud and that holds colleges accountable to taxpayers.
In taking these actions, as Under Secretary Ted Mitchell outlined in a blog post today, the Department is committed to helping support affected students. Given the pressing need presented by the unique situation for students who attended colleges owned by Corinthian, the Department is today announcing specific steps for students who attended those campuses, as well as outlining broader processes for all students that will be established moving forward.
Extending debt relief eligibility to groups of students wherever possible: In order to receive loan forgiveness under a "defense to repayment," students must assert that a college's actions violated state law and affected their provision of educational services or their federal loans. Wherever possible, the Department will rely on evidence established by appropriate authorities in considering whether whole groups of students (for example, an entire academic program at a specific campus during a certain time frame) are eligible for borrower defense relief. This will simplify and expedite the relief process, reducing the burden on borrowers.
For example, after analyzing the Department's findings in its investigation of Heald College and relevant California law, the Department has determined that evidence of misrepresentation exists for students enrolled in a large majority of programs offered at Heald College campuses between 2010 and 2015. Specifically, the Department has determined that students who relied on misrepresentations found in published job placement rates for many Heald programs qualify to have their federal direct student loans discharged. Students can have their loans forgiven and receive refunds for amounts paid based on a simple attestation. More information about this process—including the attestation form—is available on studentaid.gov/Corinthian. Additional details will be posted on the website in the coming weeks.
Providing loan forbearance and pausing payments: All former Corinthian students who apply for borrower defense have the option of having their federal loans immediately placed into forbearance, which stops their monthly payments to ensure they do not fall behind or default on their loans while the Department works to resolve the claim. For such students who are already in default on their loans, the Department will immediately halt collection activity. Students will receive a notification from their loan servicer to confirm the change in status of their loans.
Appointing a Special Master dedicated to borrower defense issues: The Department will appoint a Special Master to oversee borrower defense issues and charge that person with ensuring the process is simple, streamlined, and fair to students and taxpayers. While the specific steps announced today are for former Corinthian students, the Special Master will help develop a broader system that will support students at other institutions who believe they have a defense to repayment. The Special Master will be named in the coming weeks.
Establishing a streamlined process: As noted above, the Department will work to provide debt relief to groups of students wherever possible, as we already have determined is possible for many Heald College students. For other Corinthian students, with the help of the Special Master, the Department will create a simple application for debt relief, which borrowers can complete online or by email or postal mail. Starting today, former Corinthian students can visit studentaid.gov/Corinthian to learn more, and in the coming weeks, the Department will have an online form available for these borrowers. In addition, students can call a special toll-free borrower defense hotline at (855) 279-6207 to ask about their options.
Building a better system for debt relief for the future: The Department will develop new regulations to clarify and streamline loan forgiveness under the defense to repayment provision, while maintaining or enhancing current consumer protection standards and strengthening those provisions that hold colleges accountable for actions that result in loan discharges. That process will begin later this year and will not slow down the loan discharge process for current applicants.
Calling on Congress to do its part
The Department continues to take aggressive action that ensures defrauded borrowers get the debt relief they are entitled to, steps up oversight and enforcement to identify colleges that present the greatest risk to students and taxpayers, and holds schools accountable for their actions. But to fully address these issues, Congress must also take action. Congress needs to strengthen both consumer protections for students and accountability for colleges to make sure there are better oversight and enforcement tools in place to prevent colleges from harming students and leaving taxpayers holding the bag. The Department looks forward to working with Congress on such efforts, including:
Congress should strengthen—not roll back—efforts to protect students and taxpayers from waste and fraud.
Congress needs to enact rules that hold colleges and their executives responsible for fraudulent acts, not taxpayers.
Students deserve truth in advertising. Congress needs to ensure students have access to meaningful information about college costs and outcomes and are not bombarded by aggressive and deceptive marketing.
Students deserve borrower protections. Congress should also consider preventative action to protect prospective and current students by ensuring that students are not pressured into enrolling and can get relief when the program they signed up for is not what they were promised.
Congress must protect our service members and veterans by eliminating loopholes that make them targets for aggressive marketing and recruitment by for-profit colleges.
Additional Administration efforts to strengthen consumer protections
The Obama Administration has moved swiftly to take action on some of the most problematic practices in the for-profit industry. The steps the Department announced today are part of the Administration's comprehensive approach to protecting students, eliminating bad actors, and encouraging behavior that improves student outcomes—especially in making it easier to afford and complete a degree.
Too often, students at some of the largest career colleges—many run by for-profit companies—enroll with hopes of finding a good job but instead are left saddled with debt in exchange for a worthless degree or certificate.
For-profit students pay more up front: On average, attending a two-year for-profit institution costs a student four times as much as attending a community college.
They borrow more often: More than 80 percent of students at for-profits borrow federal student loans to pay for college, while less than half of students at public institutions do.
And they default on their student loans at disproportionately high rates: Ultimately, students at for-profit colleges represent only about 11 percent of the total higher education population but 44 percent of all federal student loan defaults, a clear sign that some of these colleges were not preparing students for good jobs.
Today's announcement, coupled with the work over the past six years and upcoming efforts, aim to crack down on these abuses and to strengthen consumer protections. Some of the additional steps the Department has taken and updates on its ongoing work include:
Establishing Regulations to Protect Students from Poor-Performing Career Colleges
Last year, the Department published regulations that will eliminate the flow of federal student aid to career training programs that leave students buried in debt with few opportunities to repay it. Those regulations take effect on July 1, 2015.
To qualify for federal student aid, the law requires that for-profit programs and certificate programs at private non-profit and public institutions prepare students for "gainful employment in a recognized occupation." In May 2015, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York upheld the Department's approach to the gainful employment regulations against a challenge from a for-profit industry trade association, saying the Department's regulations represented "reasoned decisionmaking."
Enforcing the Ban on Incentive Compensation
In 2010, the Obama Administration released a broad set of rules to: strengthen the Department's authority to protect students from aggressive recruiting practices fueled by incentive compensation; take action against colleges engaging in deceptive advertising, marketing and sales practices; and to clarify minimum requirements for states to oversee postsecondary programs and handle student complaints.
Under Secretary Mitchell recently issued a memo encouraging the Office of Federal Student Aid to recover funds from schools that are found to have violated the incentive compensation ban. The memo reverses a more lenient approach initiated in 2002 under the Bush Administration by Education Deputy Secretary Hansen, which both the Education Department Inspector General and the Government Accountability Office found to be a barrier to effective enforcement of the law.
Protecting military service members, veterans and their families
For-profit colleges can obtain no more than 90 percent of their revenue from Title IV federal student aid dollars, but federal education aid from programs like the Department of Defense Tuition Assistance and Department of Veterans Affairs GI Bill Benefits is not counted toward that limit. This has made service members and veterans particularly vulnerable to aggressive marketing and recruitment by for-profit colleges, which often pursue aid targeted to such individuals to make up the required 10 percent of their revenue.
In its FY 2016 budget proposal, the Department proposed to eliminate this loophole by including DOD's tuition assistance and GI Bill benefits into the 90 percent calculation. Now, it is up to Congress to act on this plan and protect our nation's military and their families.
In addition, through Executive Order 13607 (the Principles of Excellence for Educational Institutions Serving Service Members, Veterans, Spouses, and Other Family Members), the Administration has worked to protect our nation's military families by ensuring that federal military and veterans educational benefits programs are providing service members, veterans, spouses, and other family members with the information, support, and protections they deserve.
Strengthening accountability and oversight across the federal government through a career college task force
The Department has established an interagency task force, led by Under Secretary Ted Mitchell, to help ensure proper accountability for and oversight of career colleges and for-profit institutions. The task force will enhance the enforcement activity at the Department as well as at other federal and state agencies through tighter coordination of their activities and better information sharing to protect students from school practices and policies that are unfair, deceptive, and abusive, and that put taxpayer funds at risk.
The task force is building on efforts already under way among various federal agencies, and includes the Departments of Justice, Defense, Treasury, Veterans Affairs, and Labor, as well as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Federal Trade Commission, Internal Revenue Service, and Securities and Exchange Commission. In addition, the federal partners will continue engaging with state Attorneys General and other stakeholders. The task force gathered for its first official meeting in May.
Given the important responsibilities each of these agencies has and the vital role that states play, this team will leverage their resources and expertise to continue to assist one another in the enforcement of federal criminal and civil laws and regulations, including against institutions and individuals who commit fraud or other criminal activity, thereby making the best use of scarce resources and better protecting the interests of students and taxpayers. And to allow for greater transparency and participation from the higher education community in these efforts—including institutions, consumer advocates and student groups—the task force will periodically organize opportunities for public discussions beginning this summer.
Holding Corinthian Colleges Accountable
In the case of Corinthian Colleges, the Department began tightening oversight of the college's practices and uncovered misrepresentation of its job placement rates. The Department acted to hold Corinthian accountable and ensured students pursuing their education did not face abrupt disruption while enforcement action was being undertaken.
Since that process began in 2014, the Department has taken a series of steps to protect students by requiring the company to sell or close all of its programs, ensuring students received more information about what was happening and their options, requiring expanded refund rights for students, and establishing an independent monitor under the leadership of former U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, who ensured Corinthian remained accountable to students. Fitzgerald and his team ensured that students were made aware of their refund options, ensured that Corinthian's use of federal student aid was made in accordance with Department regulations, and ensured that students were provided correct information about the state of Corinthian's campuses and programs.
Most of Corinthian's campuses were acquired by the nonprofit Zenith Education Group, which agreed to provide a number of new consumer protections, such as providing refund and withdrawal opportunities to students in poorly-performing programs, and to take steps to strengthen programs and improve affordability, including by reducing tuition. The sale allowed most Corinthian students to continue pursuing their education and career goals without disruption, and the Department and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau have worked together to provide more than $480 million in loan forgiveness for borrowers who took out Corinthian's high-cost private student loans.
In April 2015, the Department informed Corinthian that it was being fined about $30 million for misrepresenting job placement rates to current and prospective students in its Heald College system. Since then, Corinthian announced it was closing down the last of its remaining campuses. Recognizing the challenges and uncertainty facing students, the Department continues to provide information directly to Corinthian's students about their federal student aid and their options, including both transferring to another school to continue their education or discharging their loan.
Creating options that make it easier to repay federal student loans
The Department is helping more students manage their student debt through flexible repayment options such as the Pay As You Earn plan (PAYE), which caps student loan payments at 10 percent of a borrower's monthly income. The Department is also acting on President Obama's Student Aid Bill of Rights proposal from earlier this year to support more borrowers to help borrowers enroll and participate in PAYE.
In addition, the Administration is continuing outreach to help borrowers who may be struggling to repay their loans, ensuring that they have the information they need to select the best repayment option for them and avoid default. Thanks to these comprehensive efforts, there are now 3.8 million borrowers enrolled in income-driven repayment plans, up from 760,000 in 2012.
Providing families with clear information to make a smart college choice
The Department has provided a wealth of consumer tools designed to help students and families decide which college is right for them. In addition to requiring institutions to provide accurate information about their graduates' job placement success and the types of employment their graduates obtained, the Administration has created resources such as the College Scorecard and the Financial Aid Shopping Sheet, which can help families compare financial aid packages apples-to-apples. Since the launch of the Shopping Sheet in 2012, more than 3,000 institutions—representing more than two-thirds of the entire undergraduate population—have voluntarily adopted the Shopping Sheet to provide prospective students.
The Department also believes there is more to be done to help increase student access to affordable higher education and to improve student outcomes, and will continue to take action toward that goal.
Monday, June 8, 2015
DOD REPORTS ON ISIL OIL INFRASTRUCTURE DESTRUCTION
FROM: U.S. DEFENSE DEPARTMENT
Airstrikes Destroy ISIL Oil Infrastructure, Tactical Vehicles
From a Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve News Release
SOUTHWEST ASIA, June 8, 2015 – U.S. and coalition military forces have continued to attack Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant terrorists in Syria and Iraq, Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve officials reported today.
Officials reported details of the latest strikes, which took place between 8 a.m. yesterday and 8 a.m. today, local time, noting that assessments of results are based on initial reports.
Airstrikes in Syria
Bomber, attack and fighter aircraft conducted seven airstrikes in Syria:
-- Near Dayr Az Zawr, two airstrikes struck two ISIL crude oil collection points.
-- Near Kobani, five airstrikes struck one large and two small ISIL tactical units, destroying seven ISIL fighting positions, two ISIL vehicles and an ISIL improvised explosive device facility.
Airstrikes in Iraq
Attack, bomber, fighter and remotely piloted aircraft conducted 14 airstrikes in Iraq, approved by the Iraqi Ministry of Defense:
-- Near Baghdadi, two airstrikes struck two ISIL tactical units, destroying an ISIL tanker and an ISIL vehicle.
-- Near Beiji, three airstrikes destroyed two ISIL staging positions and seven ISIL vehicles.
-- Near Hit, one airstrike struck an ISIL tactical unit, destroying an ISIL checkpoint.
-- Near Makhmur, one airstrike struck two ISIL mortar firing positions.
-- Near Mosul, three airstrikes struck an ISIL tactical unit and an ISIL staging area, destroying two ISIL vehicles.
-- Near Sinjar, two airstrikes struck an ISIL mortar system, destroying two ISIL buildings, an ISIL rocket-propelled grenade and an ISIL heavy machine gun.
-- Near Tal Afar, two airstrikes struck an ISIL mortar firing position, destroying an ISIL tunnel entrance.
Part of Operation Inherent Resolve
The strikes were conducted as part of Operation Inherent Resolve, the operation to eliminate the ISIL terrorist group and the threat they pose to Iraq, Syria, the region, and the wider international community. The destruction of ISIL targets in Syria and Iraq further limits the terrorist group's ability to project terror and conduct operations, officials said.
Coalition nations conducting airstrikes in Iraq include the United States, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Jordan, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. Coalition nations conducting airstrikes in Syria include the United States, Bahrain, Canada, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Airstrikes Destroy ISIL Oil Infrastructure, Tactical Vehicles
From a Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve News Release
SOUTHWEST ASIA, June 8, 2015 – U.S. and coalition military forces have continued to attack Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant terrorists in Syria and Iraq, Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve officials reported today.
Officials reported details of the latest strikes, which took place between 8 a.m. yesterday and 8 a.m. today, local time, noting that assessments of results are based on initial reports.
Airstrikes in Syria
Bomber, attack and fighter aircraft conducted seven airstrikes in Syria:
-- Near Dayr Az Zawr, two airstrikes struck two ISIL crude oil collection points.
-- Near Kobani, five airstrikes struck one large and two small ISIL tactical units, destroying seven ISIL fighting positions, two ISIL vehicles and an ISIL improvised explosive device facility.
Airstrikes in Iraq
Attack, bomber, fighter and remotely piloted aircraft conducted 14 airstrikes in Iraq, approved by the Iraqi Ministry of Defense:
-- Near Baghdadi, two airstrikes struck two ISIL tactical units, destroying an ISIL tanker and an ISIL vehicle.
-- Near Beiji, three airstrikes destroyed two ISIL staging positions and seven ISIL vehicles.
-- Near Hit, one airstrike struck an ISIL tactical unit, destroying an ISIL checkpoint.
-- Near Makhmur, one airstrike struck two ISIL mortar firing positions.
-- Near Mosul, three airstrikes struck an ISIL tactical unit and an ISIL staging area, destroying two ISIL vehicles.
-- Near Sinjar, two airstrikes struck an ISIL mortar system, destroying two ISIL buildings, an ISIL rocket-propelled grenade and an ISIL heavy machine gun.
-- Near Tal Afar, two airstrikes struck an ISIL mortar firing position, destroying an ISIL tunnel entrance.
Part of Operation Inherent Resolve
The strikes were conducted as part of Operation Inherent Resolve, the operation to eliminate the ISIL terrorist group and the threat they pose to Iraq, Syria, the region, and the wider international community. The destruction of ISIL targets in Syria and Iraq further limits the terrorist group's ability to project terror and conduct operations, officials said.
Coalition nations conducting airstrikes in Iraq include the United States, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Jordan, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. Coalition nations conducting airstrikes in Syria include the United States, Bahrain, Canada, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
U.S. CONGRATULATES PEOPLE OF PORTUGAL ON PORTUGAL DAY
FROM: U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT
On the Occasion of Portugal Day
Press Statement
John Kerry
Secretary of State
Washington, DC
June 8, 2015
On behalf of President Obama and the people of the United States, I congratulate the Portuguese people as you celebrate Portugal Day on June 10.
Since the founding of the United States over two centuries ago, Portugal has been an important partner and ally. The relationship between our two countries, which spans the range of cultural, economic, and security ties, has strengthened the Atlantic community. Our two nations share a commitment to human rights, liberty, and democracy.
Portugal plays an important role in global affairs and international security through its commitments to NATO, the United Nations, and other multilateral organizations. The United States is proud to work with Portugal to defend freedom throughout the world. I enjoyed meeting with Foreign Minister Machete in April and look forward to continuing our work on important global issues in the year to come.
I wish the Portuguese people joy and continued success this Portugal Day as you celebrate your rich culture, history, and the life and work of Luís de Camões.
On the Occasion of Portugal Day
Press Statement
John Kerry
Secretary of State
Washington, DC
June 8, 2015
On behalf of President Obama and the people of the United States, I congratulate the Portuguese people as you celebrate Portugal Day on June 10.
Since the founding of the United States over two centuries ago, Portugal has been an important partner and ally. The relationship between our two countries, which spans the range of cultural, economic, and security ties, has strengthened the Atlantic community. Our two nations share a commitment to human rights, liberty, and democracy.
Portugal plays an important role in global affairs and international security through its commitments to NATO, the United Nations, and other multilateral organizations. The United States is proud to work with Portugal to defend freedom throughout the world. I enjoyed meeting with Foreign Minister Machete in April and look forward to continuing our work on important global issues in the year to come.
I wish the Portuguese people joy and continued success this Portugal Day as you celebrate your rich culture, history, and the life and work of Luís de Camões.
SOLDIERS TRAIN AT CHEMICAL, BIOLOGICAL, RADIOLOGICAL AND NUCLEAR DEFENSE CHAMBER
FROM: U.S. DEFENSE DEPARTMENT
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| Soldiers train chaplain candidates at the chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear defense chamber on Fort Jackson, S.C., May 27, 2015. The soldiers are chaplain candidates assigned to 104th Training Division. U.S. Army photo by Sgt. 1st Class Brian Hamilton. |
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| A soldier prepares the CS gas, which is similar to tear gas, for the chaplain candidates at the chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear defense chamber on Fort Jackson, S.C., May 27, 2015. U.S. Army photo by Sgt. 1st Class Brian Hamilton. |
LABOR SECRETARY PEREZ LISTS 5 THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT EMPLOYMENT NUMBERS
FROM: U.S. LABOR DEPARTMENT
Five things US Labor Secretary Thomas E. Perez says
you should know about the May employment numbers
WASHINGTON — With the release of the May 2015 Employment Situation Report today, U.S. Secretary of Labor Thomas E. Perez says there are five things you should know about its numbers:
Record streak continues: This is the best jobs report of 2015 so far. The economy added 280,000 jobs in May, bringing us to 12.6 million private-sector jobs over the last 63 months.
Low unemployment: The unemployment rate was essentially unchanged at 5.5 percent. It's the ninth straight month under 6 percent after 73 straight months above 6 percent. Over the last year, there has been a significant decrease in the unemployment rate for every demographic group except teens.
Meaningful progress on wages: Average hourly earnings for employees on private payrolls rose by 8 cents in May. The 2.3 percent increase from last May is the largest year-over-year increase since August 2013.
Long-term unemployment trending down: 28.6 percent of the unemployed have been out of work for 27 weeks or more — that's the lowest rate in six years. There are 849,000 fewer long-term unemployed people than a year ago.
The unfinished business: The recovery continues apace with strong and steady job growth. But the wind at our back isn't propelling everyone forward. From education and skills development to minimum wage and paid leave, the Obama administration continues to work every day to extend more opportunity to more people. We hope Congress will join us in our efforts to reward hard work and give everyone the chance to punch their ticket to the middle class.
Five things US Labor Secretary Thomas E. Perez says
you should know about the May employment numbers
WASHINGTON — With the release of the May 2015 Employment Situation Report today, U.S. Secretary of Labor Thomas E. Perez says there are five things you should know about its numbers:
Record streak continues: This is the best jobs report of 2015 so far. The economy added 280,000 jobs in May, bringing us to 12.6 million private-sector jobs over the last 63 months.
Low unemployment: The unemployment rate was essentially unchanged at 5.5 percent. It's the ninth straight month under 6 percent after 73 straight months above 6 percent. Over the last year, there has been a significant decrease in the unemployment rate for every demographic group except teens.
Meaningful progress on wages: Average hourly earnings for employees on private payrolls rose by 8 cents in May. The 2.3 percent increase from last May is the largest year-over-year increase since August 2013.
Long-term unemployment trending down: 28.6 percent of the unemployed have been out of work for 27 weeks or more — that's the lowest rate in six years. There are 849,000 fewer long-term unemployed people than a year ago.
The unfinished business: The recovery continues apace with strong and steady job growth. But the wind at our back isn't propelling everyone forward. From education and skills development to minimum wage and paid leave, the Obama administration continues to work every day to extend more opportunity to more people. We hope Congress will join us in our efforts to reward hard work and give everyone the chance to punch their ticket to the middle class.
TEXAN ARRESTED FOR ATTEMPTING TO JOIN THE TERRORIST GROUP ISIL
FROM: U.S. JUSTICE DEPARTMENT
Friday, June 5, 2015
Texas Man Sentenced to 82 Months in Prison for Attempting to Travel to Syria to Join ISIL
Michael Todd Wolfe aka Faruq, 24, of Austin, Texas, was sentenced this afternoon by U.S. District Court Judge Sam Sparks of the Western District of Texas to serve 82 months in federal prison for attempting to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization, announced Assistant Attorney General for National Security John Carlin, Acting U.S. Attorney Richard L. Durbin Jr. for the Western District of Texas and Special Agent in Charge Christopher Combs of the FBI’s San Antonio Division.
In June 2014, Wolfe pleaded guilty to the charge, admitting that from August 2013 to June 17, 2014, he planned to travel to the Middle East to provide material support to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). Wolfe previously acknowledged that he applied for and acquired a U.S. passport, participated in physical fitness training, practiced military maneuvers and made efforts to conceal his communications about his plans to travel overseas to engage in violent jihad. Wolfe also purchased airline tickets so that he could travel to Europe to meet an FBI undercover employee, whom the defendant then believed would facilitate travel to Syria through Turkey. In furtherance of his attempt to provide material support to ISIL, Wolfe travelled to Houston and was apprehended on June 17, 2014, on the jet-way, as he attempted to board a flight to Toronto, Canada. His ticketed itinerary had him traveling through Iceland and arriving in Copenhagen, Denmark, on June 18, 2014. He then planned to make his way to Syria to join with ISIL and engage in the armed conflict. Wolfe has remained in federal custody since his arrest.
The case was investigated by the agencies comprising the Central Texas JTTF, which include the FBI; Internal Revenue Service-Criminal Investigation; U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services; U.S. Army Intelligence; Austin Police Department; Round Rock, Texas, Police Department; Killeen, Texas, Police Department; University of Texas Police Department; Travis County, Texas Sheriff's Office; Texas Department of Public Safety, Office of the Texas Attorney General and the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission.
The case was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Gregg N. Sofer and Michael Galdo of the Western District of Texas, and Trial Attorneys Josh Parecki and Michael Dittoe of the National Security Division’s Counterterrorism Section.
Friday, June 5, 2015
Texas Man Sentenced to 82 Months in Prison for Attempting to Travel to Syria to Join ISIL
Michael Todd Wolfe aka Faruq, 24, of Austin, Texas, was sentenced this afternoon by U.S. District Court Judge Sam Sparks of the Western District of Texas to serve 82 months in federal prison for attempting to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization, announced Assistant Attorney General for National Security John Carlin, Acting U.S. Attorney Richard L. Durbin Jr. for the Western District of Texas and Special Agent in Charge Christopher Combs of the FBI’s San Antonio Division.
In June 2014, Wolfe pleaded guilty to the charge, admitting that from August 2013 to June 17, 2014, he planned to travel to the Middle East to provide material support to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). Wolfe previously acknowledged that he applied for and acquired a U.S. passport, participated in physical fitness training, practiced military maneuvers and made efforts to conceal his communications about his plans to travel overseas to engage in violent jihad. Wolfe also purchased airline tickets so that he could travel to Europe to meet an FBI undercover employee, whom the defendant then believed would facilitate travel to Syria through Turkey. In furtherance of his attempt to provide material support to ISIL, Wolfe travelled to Houston and was apprehended on June 17, 2014, on the jet-way, as he attempted to board a flight to Toronto, Canada. His ticketed itinerary had him traveling through Iceland and arriving in Copenhagen, Denmark, on June 18, 2014. He then planned to make his way to Syria to join with ISIL and engage in the armed conflict. Wolfe has remained in federal custody since his arrest.
The case was investigated by the agencies comprising the Central Texas JTTF, which include the FBI; Internal Revenue Service-Criminal Investigation; U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services; U.S. Army Intelligence; Austin Police Department; Round Rock, Texas, Police Department; Killeen, Texas, Police Department; University of Texas Police Department; Travis County, Texas Sheriff's Office; Texas Department of Public Safety, Office of the Texas Attorney General and the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission.
The case was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Gregg N. Sofer and Michael Galdo of the Western District of Texas, and Trial Attorneys Josh Parecki and Michael Dittoe of the National Security Division’s Counterterrorism Section.
BUSINESSMAN ACCUSED OF BRIBING BANK OFFICIALS, SENTENCED TO PRISON
FROM: U.S. JUSTICE DEPARTMENT
Thursday, June 4, 2015
Kentucky Businessman Sentenced in New York Federal Court for $53 Million Tax Scheme and Massive Fraud that Involved Bribery of Bank Officials
Acting Assistant Attorney General Caroline D. Ciraolo of the Department of Justice’s Tax Division and U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara of the Southern District of New York announced that a Kentucky businessman was sentenced today to serve 12 years in prison.
Wilbur Anthony Huff, 53, of Caneyville and Louisville, Kentucky, was also ordered to pay more than $108 million in restitution for committing various tax crimes that caused more than $50 million in losses to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and a massive fraud that involved the bribery of bank officials, the fraudulent purchase of an insurance company, and the defrauding of insurance regulators and an investment bank. In December 2014, Huff pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge Noemi Reice Buchwald of the Southern District of New York, who imposed today’s sentence.
“The department is committed to vigorously pursuing and prosecuting those individuals who violate the employment tax laws of the United States,” said Acting Assistant Attorney General Ciraolo. “Today’s significant prison sentence sends a loud and clear message to those engaged in such criminal conduct, including owners and operators of professional employer organizations like Mr. Huff, who steal employment taxes collected from their business clients to line their own pockets, instead of paying over those funds to the IRS.”
“Anthony Huff and his co-conspirators stole millions of dollars from taxpayers and engaged in extensive frauds, all in the pursuit of additional property, luxury cars and the like,” said U.S. Attorney Bharara. “His crimes have earned him 12 years in prison. I would like to thank our law enforcement partners for their assistance on this case.”
According to the information, plea agreement, sentencing submissions and statements made during court proceedings:
Huff was a businessman who controlled numerous entities located throughout the United States (Huff-Controlled Entities). Huff controlled the companies and their finances, using them to orchestrate a $53 million fraud on the IRS and other schemes that spanned four states, involving tax violations, bank bribery, fraud on bank regulators and the fraudulent purchase of an insurance company. As part of his crimes, Huff concealed his control of the Huff-Controlled Entities by installing other individuals to oversee the companies’ day-to-day functions and to serve as the companies’ titular owners, directors, or officers. Huff also maintained a corrupt relationship with Park Avenue Bank and Charles J. Antonucci Sr., the bank’s president and chief executive officer, and Matthew L. Morris, the bank’s senior vice president.
Tax Crimes
From 2008 to 2010, HUFF controlled O2HR, a professional employer organization (PEO) located in Tampa, Florida. Like other PEOs, O2HR was paid to manage the payroll, tax and workers’ compensation insurance obligations of its client companies. However, instead of paying $53 million in taxes that O2HR’s clients owed the IRS and $5 million to Providence Property and Casualty Insurance Company (Providence P&C) – an insurance company based in Oklahoma – for workers’ compensation coverage expenses for O2HR clients, Huff stole the money that his client companies had paid O2HR for those purposes. Among other things, Huff diverted millions of dollars from O2HR to fund his investments in unrelated business ventures and pay his family members’ personal expenses. The expenses included mortgages on Huff’s homes, rent payments for his children’s apartments, staff and equipment for Huff’s farm, designer clothing, jewelry and luxury cars.
Conspiracy to Commit Bank Bribery, Defraud Bank Regulators and Fraudulently Purchase an Oklahoma Insurance Company
From 2007 through 2010, Huff engaged in a massive multi-faceted conspiracy in which he schemed to bribe executives of Park Avenue Bank, defraud bank regulators and the board and shareholders of a publicly-traded company, and fraudulently purchase an Oklahoma insurance company. As described in more detail below, Huff paid bribes totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash and other items to Morris and Antonucci in exchange for their favorable treatment at Park Avenue Bank.
As part of the corrupt relationship between Huff and the bank executives, Huff, Morris, Antonucci and others conspired to defraud various entities and regulators during the relevant time period. Specifically, Huff conspired with Morris and Antonucci to falsely bolster Park Avenue Bank’s capital by orchestrating a series of fraudulent transactions to make it appear that Park Avenue Bank had received an outside infusion of $6.5 million, and engaged in a series of further fraudulent actions to conceal from bank regulators the true source of the funds.
Huff further conspired with Morris, Antonucci and others to defraud Oklahoma insurance regulators and others by making material misrepresentations and omissions regarding the source of $37.5 million used to purchase Providence Property and Casualty Insurance Company, an insurance company based in Oklahoma that provided workers’ compensation insurance for O2HR’s clients and to whom O2HR owed a significant debt.
Bribery of Park Avenue Bank Executives
From 2007 to 2009, Huff paid Morris and Antonucci at least $400,000 in exchange for which they: provided Huff with fraudulent letters of credit obligating Park Avenue Bank to pay $1.75 million to an investor in one of Huff’s businesses if Huff failed to pay the investor back himself; allowed the Huff-Controlled Entities to accrue $9 million in overdrafts; facilitated intra-bank transfers in furtherance of Huff’s fraud; and fraudulently caused Park Avenue Bank to issue at least $4.5 million in loans to the Huff-Controlled Entities.
Fraud on Bank Regulators and a Publicly-Traded Company
From 2008 to 2009, Huff, Morris and Antonucci engaged in a scheme to prevent Park Avenue Bank from being designated as “undercapitalized” by regulators – a designation that would prohibit the bank from engaging in certain types of banking transactions and that would subject the bank to a range of potential enforcement actions by regulators. Specifically, they engaged in a series of deceptive, “round-trip” financial transactions to make it appear that Antonucci had infused the bank with $6.5 million in new capital when, in actuality, the $6.5 million was part of the bank’s pre-existing capital. Huff, Morris and Antonucci funneled the $6.5 million from the bank through accounts controlled by Huff to Antonucci. This was done to make it appear as though Antonucci was helping to stabilize the bank’s capitalization problem, so that the bank could continue engaging in certain banking transactions that it would otherwise have been prohibited from doing, and to put the bank in a better posture to receive $11 million from the Troubled Asset Relief Program. To conceal their unlawful financial maneuvering, Huff created, or directed the creation of, documents falsely suggesting that Antonucci had earned the $6.5 million through a bogus transaction involving another company Antonucci owned. Huff, Morris and Antonucci further concealed their scheme by stealing $2.3 million from General Employment Enterprises Inc., a publicly-traded temporary staffing company, in order to pay Park Avenue Bank back for monies used in connection with the $6.5 million transaction.
Fraud on Insurance Regulators and the Investment Firm
From July 2008 to November 2009, Huff, Morris, Antonucci and Allen Reichman, an executive at an investment bank and financial services company headquartered in New York City (the Investment Firm), conspired to defraud Oklahoma insurance regulators into allowing Antonucci to purchase the assets of Providence P&C and defraud the Investment Firm into providing a $30 million loan to finance the purchase. Specifically, Huff and Antonucci devised a scheme in which Antonucci would purchase Providence P&C’s assets by obtaining a $30 million loan from the Investment Firm, which used Providence P&C’s own assets as collateral for the loan. However, because Oklahoma insurance regulators had to approve any sale of Providence P&C, and because Oklahoma law forbade the use of Providence P&C’s assets as collateral for such a loan, Huff, Morris, Antonucci and Reichman made and conspired to make a number of material misstatements and material omissions to the Investment Firm and Oklahoma insurance regulators concerning the true nature of the financing for Antonucci’s purchase of Providence P&C. Among other things, Reichman directed Antonucci to sign a letter that provided false information regarding the collateral that would be used for the loan, and Huff, Morris and Antonucci conspired to falsely represent to Oklahoma insurance regulators that Park Avenue Bank – not the Investment Firm – was funding the purchase of Providence P&C.
After deceiving Oklahoma regulators into approving the sale of Providence P&C, Huff took $4 million of the company’s assets, which he used to continue the scheme to defraud O2HR’s clients. Ultimately, in November 2009, the insurance company became insolvent and was placed in receivership after Huff, Morris and Antonucci had pilfered its remaining assets.
* * *
In addition to his prison sentence, Huff was sentenced to three years of supervised release, and ordered to forfeit $10.8 million to the United States and pay a total of more than $108 million in restitution to victims of his crimes, including, among others, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and the IRS.
In imposing today’s sentence, Judge Buchwald said Huff’s crimes were “truly staggering” and “eye popping.” Judge Buchwald described Huff’s conduct, which was preceded by a federal conviction and failure to pay millions in civil judgments, as “a living example” of “chutzpah,” which she defined as “shameless audacity and unmitigated gall.”
Morris and Reichman pleaded guilty for their roles in the above-described offenses on Oct. 17, 2013, and Feb. 20, 2015, respectively. Reichman is scheduled to be sentenced before Judge Buchwald on July 15, and Morris is scheduled to be sentenced before Judge Buchwald on Aug. 19.
Antonucci pleaded guilty to his role in the crimes described above on Oct. 8, 2010, and is scheduled to be sentenced on Aug. 20, also before Judge Buchwald.
Acting Assistant Attorney General Ciraolo and U.S. Attorney Bharara thanked the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the FBI, IRS-Criminal Investigation, the New York State Department of Financial Services, Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations, and the Office of Inspector General of the FDIC, for their work in the investigation, and the Tax Division and the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Southern District of Florida, for their assistance in the prosecution.
Today’s announcement is part of efforts underway by the President’s Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force. The task force was established to wage an aggressive, coordinated and proactive effort to investigate and prosecute financial crimes. With more than 20 federal agencies, 94 U.S. attorneys’ offices, and state and local partners, it’s the broadest coalition of law enforcement, investigatory and regulatory agencies ever assembled to combat fraud. Since its formation, the task force has made great strides in facilitating increased investigation and prosecution of financial crimes; enhancing coordination and cooperation among federal, state and local authorities; addressing discrimination in the lending and financial markets; and conducting outreach to the public, victims, financial institutions and other organizations. Since fiscal year 2009, the Justice Department has filed over 18,000 financial fraud cases against more than 25,000 defendants. For more information on the task force, please visit www.StopFraud.gov.
The case is being handled by the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Southern District of New York Complex Frauds and Cybercrime Unit. Assistant U.S. Attorneys Janis Echenberg and Daniel Tehrani and Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Tino Lisella of the Tax Division are in charge of the criminal case.
Thursday, June 4, 2015
Kentucky Businessman Sentenced in New York Federal Court for $53 Million Tax Scheme and Massive Fraud that Involved Bribery of Bank Officials
Acting Assistant Attorney General Caroline D. Ciraolo of the Department of Justice’s Tax Division and U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara of the Southern District of New York announced that a Kentucky businessman was sentenced today to serve 12 years in prison.
Wilbur Anthony Huff, 53, of Caneyville and Louisville, Kentucky, was also ordered to pay more than $108 million in restitution for committing various tax crimes that caused more than $50 million in losses to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and a massive fraud that involved the bribery of bank officials, the fraudulent purchase of an insurance company, and the defrauding of insurance regulators and an investment bank. In December 2014, Huff pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge Noemi Reice Buchwald of the Southern District of New York, who imposed today’s sentence.
“The department is committed to vigorously pursuing and prosecuting those individuals who violate the employment tax laws of the United States,” said Acting Assistant Attorney General Ciraolo. “Today’s significant prison sentence sends a loud and clear message to those engaged in such criminal conduct, including owners and operators of professional employer organizations like Mr. Huff, who steal employment taxes collected from their business clients to line their own pockets, instead of paying over those funds to the IRS.”
“Anthony Huff and his co-conspirators stole millions of dollars from taxpayers and engaged in extensive frauds, all in the pursuit of additional property, luxury cars and the like,” said U.S. Attorney Bharara. “His crimes have earned him 12 years in prison. I would like to thank our law enforcement partners for their assistance on this case.”
According to the information, plea agreement, sentencing submissions and statements made during court proceedings:
Huff was a businessman who controlled numerous entities located throughout the United States (Huff-Controlled Entities). Huff controlled the companies and their finances, using them to orchestrate a $53 million fraud on the IRS and other schemes that spanned four states, involving tax violations, bank bribery, fraud on bank regulators and the fraudulent purchase of an insurance company. As part of his crimes, Huff concealed his control of the Huff-Controlled Entities by installing other individuals to oversee the companies’ day-to-day functions and to serve as the companies’ titular owners, directors, or officers. Huff also maintained a corrupt relationship with Park Avenue Bank and Charles J. Antonucci Sr., the bank’s president and chief executive officer, and Matthew L. Morris, the bank’s senior vice president.
Tax Crimes
From 2008 to 2010, HUFF controlled O2HR, a professional employer organization (PEO) located in Tampa, Florida. Like other PEOs, O2HR was paid to manage the payroll, tax and workers’ compensation insurance obligations of its client companies. However, instead of paying $53 million in taxes that O2HR’s clients owed the IRS and $5 million to Providence Property and Casualty Insurance Company (Providence P&C) – an insurance company based in Oklahoma – for workers’ compensation coverage expenses for O2HR clients, Huff stole the money that his client companies had paid O2HR for those purposes. Among other things, Huff diverted millions of dollars from O2HR to fund his investments in unrelated business ventures and pay his family members’ personal expenses. The expenses included mortgages on Huff’s homes, rent payments for his children’s apartments, staff and equipment for Huff’s farm, designer clothing, jewelry and luxury cars.
Conspiracy to Commit Bank Bribery, Defraud Bank Regulators and Fraudulently Purchase an Oklahoma Insurance Company
From 2007 through 2010, Huff engaged in a massive multi-faceted conspiracy in which he schemed to bribe executives of Park Avenue Bank, defraud bank regulators and the board and shareholders of a publicly-traded company, and fraudulently purchase an Oklahoma insurance company. As described in more detail below, Huff paid bribes totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash and other items to Morris and Antonucci in exchange for their favorable treatment at Park Avenue Bank.
As part of the corrupt relationship between Huff and the bank executives, Huff, Morris, Antonucci and others conspired to defraud various entities and regulators during the relevant time period. Specifically, Huff conspired with Morris and Antonucci to falsely bolster Park Avenue Bank’s capital by orchestrating a series of fraudulent transactions to make it appear that Park Avenue Bank had received an outside infusion of $6.5 million, and engaged in a series of further fraudulent actions to conceal from bank regulators the true source of the funds.
Huff further conspired with Morris, Antonucci and others to defraud Oklahoma insurance regulators and others by making material misrepresentations and omissions regarding the source of $37.5 million used to purchase Providence Property and Casualty Insurance Company, an insurance company based in Oklahoma that provided workers’ compensation insurance for O2HR’s clients and to whom O2HR owed a significant debt.
Bribery of Park Avenue Bank Executives
From 2007 to 2009, Huff paid Morris and Antonucci at least $400,000 in exchange for which they: provided Huff with fraudulent letters of credit obligating Park Avenue Bank to pay $1.75 million to an investor in one of Huff’s businesses if Huff failed to pay the investor back himself; allowed the Huff-Controlled Entities to accrue $9 million in overdrafts; facilitated intra-bank transfers in furtherance of Huff’s fraud; and fraudulently caused Park Avenue Bank to issue at least $4.5 million in loans to the Huff-Controlled Entities.
Fraud on Bank Regulators and a Publicly-Traded Company
From 2008 to 2009, Huff, Morris and Antonucci engaged in a scheme to prevent Park Avenue Bank from being designated as “undercapitalized” by regulators – a designation that would prohibit the bank from engaging in certain types of banking transactions and that would subject the bank to a range of potential enforcement actions by regulators. Specifically, they engaged in a series of deceptive, “round-trip” financial transactions to make it appear that Antonucci had infused the bank with $6.5 million in new capital when, in actuality, the $6.5 million was part of the bank’s pre-existing capital. Huff, Morris and Antonucci funneled the $6.5 million from the bank through accounts controlled by Huff to Antonucci. This was done to make it appear as though Antonucci was helping to stabilize the bank’s capitalization problem, so that the bank could continue engaging in certain banking transactions that it would otherwise have been prohibited from doing, and to put the bank in a better posture to receive $11 million from the Troubled Asset Relief Program. To conceal their unlawful financial maneuvering, Huff created, or directed the creation of, documents falsely suggesting that Antonucci had earned the $6.5 million through a bogus transaction involving another company Antonucci owned. Huff, Morris and Antonucci further concealed their scheme by stealing $2.3 million from General Employment Enterprises Inc., a publicly-traded temporary staffing company, in order to pay Park Avenue Bank back for monies used in connection with the $6.5 million transaction.
Fraud on Insurance Regulators and the Investment Firm
From July 2008 to November 2009, Huff, Morris, Antonucci and Allen Reichman, an executive at an investment bank and financial services company headquartered in New York City (the Investment Firm), conspired to defraud Oklahoma insurance regulators into allowing Antonucci to purchase the assets of Providence P&C and defraud the Investment Firm into providing a $30 million loan to finance the purchase. Specifically, Huff and Antonucci devised a scheme in which Antonucci would purchase Providence P&C’s assets by obtaining a $30 million loan from the Investment Firm, which used Providence P&C’s own assets as collateral for the loan. However, because Oklahoma insurance regulators had to approve any sale of Providence P&C, and because Oklahoma law forbade the use of Providence P&C’s assets as collateral for such a loan, Huff, Morris, Antonucci and Reichman made and conspired to make a number of material misstatements and material omissions to the Investment Firm and Oklahoma insurance regulators concerning the true nature of the financing for Antonucci’s purchase of Providence P&C. Among other things, Reichman directed Antonucci to sign a letter that provided false information regarding the collateral that would be used for the loan, and Huff, Morris and Antonucci conspired to falsely represent to Oklahoma insurance regulators that Park Avenue Bank – not the Investment Firm – was funding the purchase of Providence P&C.
After deceiving Oklahoma regulators into approving the sale of Providence P&C, Huff took $4 million of the company’s assets, which he used to continue the scheme to defraud O2HR’s clients. Ultimately, in November 2009, the insurance company became insolvent and was placed in receivership after Huff, Morris and Antonucci had pilfered its remaining assets.
* * *
In addition to his prison sentence, Huff was sentenced to three years of supervised release, and ordered to forfeit $10.8 million to the United States and pay a total of more than $108 million in restitution to victims of his crimes, including, among others, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and the IRS.
In imposing today’s sentence, Judge Buchwald said Huff’s crimes were “truly staggering” and “eye popping.” Judge Buchwald described Huff’s conduct, which was preceded by a federal conviction and failure to pay millions in civil judgments, as “a living example” of “chutzpah,” which she defined as “shameless audacity and unmitigated gall.”
Morris and Reichman pleaded guilty for their roles in the above-described offenses on Oct. 17, 2013, and Feb. 20, 2015, respectively. Reichman is scheduled to be sentenced before Judge Buchwald on July 15, and Morris is scheduled to be sentenced before Judge Buchwald on Aug. 19.
Antonucci pleaded guilty to his role in the crimes described above on Oct. 8, 2010, and is scheduled to be sentenced on Aug. 20, also before Judge Buchwald.
Acting Assistant Attorney General Ciraolo and U.S. Attorney Bharara thanked the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the FBI, IRS-Criminal Investigation, the New York State Department of Financial Services, Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations, and the Office of Inspector General of the FDIC, for their work in the investigation, and the Tax Division and the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Southern District of Florida, for their assistance in the prosecution.
Today’s announcement is part of efforts underway by the President’s Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force. The task force was established to wage an aggressive, coordinated and proactive effort to investigate and prosecute financial crimes. With more than 20 federal agencies, 94 U.S. attorneys’ offices, and state and local partners, it’s the broadest coalition of law enforcement, investigatory and regulatory agencies ever assembled to combat fraud. Since its formation, the task force has made great strides in facilitating increased investigation and prosecution of financial crimes; enhancing coordination and cooperation among federal, state and local authorities; addressing discrimination in the lending and financial markets; and conducting outreach to the public, victims, financial institutions and other organizations. Since fiscal year 2009, the Justice Department has filed over 18,000 financial fraud cases against more than 25,000 defendants. For more information on the task force, please visit www.StopFraud.gov.
The case is being handled by the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Southern District of New York Complex Frauds and Cybercrime Unit. Assistant U.S. Attorneys Janis Echenberg and Daniel Tehrani and Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Tino Lisella of the Tax Division are in charge of the criminal case.
Sunday, June 7, 2015
GEMINI IV EARTHVIEW
FROM: NASA
June 4, 1965, Earth Observations From Gemini IV
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This photograph of the Florida Straits and Grand Bahama Bank was taken during the Gemini IV mission during orbit no. 19, on June 4, 1965, with a Hasselblad camera and a 70mm lens. The Gemini IV crew -- astronauts Jim McDivitt and Ed White -- conducted scientific experiments, including photography of Earth's weather and terrain, for the remainder of their four-day mission following White's historic first American spacewalk on June 3.
Astronauts have been photographing Earth from space since the early Mercury missions beginning in 1961. Today, they observe the Earth from their unique point of view aboard the International Space Station, providing researchers with key data and recording changes over time from human-caused changes like urban growth and reservoir construction, to natural dynamic events such as hurricanes, floods and volcanic eruptions.
Image Credit: NASA
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U.S. CALLING FOR INVESTIGATION INTO REPORTS OF INTERNATIONAL SOLDIERS ABUSING CHILDREN IN CAR
FROM: U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT
Samantha Power
U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations
New York, NY
June 5, 2015
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Since horrific allegations came to light that international soldiers may have abused children in the Central African Republic, the United States has been calling for a full and impartial investigation into these disturbing reports as well as into the manner in which they were handled. We thus welcome the Secretary General’s recent announcement of the establishment of an External Independent Review to examine the UN system’s response to the allegations.
The Secretary General’s establishment of this review is an opportunity for the UN to learn how it and member states can best safeguard the dignity and welfare of vulnerable people; ensure swift action to make certain potential abuses are investigated and halted; protect those who expose abuses; and provide appropriate privacy and other protection for witnesses who come forward with allegations of abuse. There are many questions that need to be answered, and we view this as an important opportunity for member states – and the people of the Central African Republic – to learn what went wrong at every point in this process.
Alongside this independent review, it is essential that all countries whose soldiers are alleged to have been involved in such abuses fully, urgently, and transparently investigate all claims to ensure that justice is served. Any individual found to have committed such heinous abuses must be held accountable.
The United States looks forward to reviewing the outcome of the Panel’s findings in a timely manner and working with all parties to prevent sexual exploitation and abuse.
Samantha Power
U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations
New York, NY
June 5, 2015
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Since horrific allegations came to light that international soldiers may have abused children in the Central African Republic, the United States has been calling for a full and impartial investigation into these disturbing reports as well as into the manner in which they were handled. We thus welcome the Secretary General’s recent announcement of the establishment of an External Independent Review to examine the UN system’s response to the allegations.
The Secretary General’s establishment of this review is an opportunity for the UN to learn how it and member states can best safeguard the dignity and welfare of vulnerable people; ensure swift action to make certain potential abuses are investigated and halted; protect those who expose abuses; and provide appropriate privacy and other protection for witnesses who come forward with allegations of abuse. There are many questions that need to be answered, and we view this as an important opportunity for member states – and the people of the Central African Republic – to learn what went wrong at every point in this process.
Alongside this independent review, it is essential that all countries whose soldiers are alleged to have been involved in such abuses fully, urgently, and transparently investigate all claims to ensure that justice is served. Any individual found to have committed such heinous abuses must be held accountable.
The United States looks forward to reviewing the outcome of the Panel’s findings in a timely manner and working with all parties to prevent sexual exploitation and abuse.
U.S. PRESS STATEMENT ON ANNIVERSARY OF TIANANMEN SQUARE PROTESTS IN CHINA
FROM: U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT
On the 26th Anniversary of Tiananmen Square
Press Statement
John Kirby
Department Spokesperson
Washington, DC
June 3, 2015
Twenty six years after the Chinese government’s violent suppression of peaceful protests in and around Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, the United States continues to call for an official accounting of the victims of these events, the release of those still serving Tiananmen-related sentences, and an end to the harassment and detention of those who wish to peacefully commemorate the anniversary.
While China has achieved social and economic progress since 1989, we remain concerned that human rights abuses continue. We are closely monitoring developments with respect to pending legislation in China relating to national security, counterterrorism, and the regulation of NGOs that appears to call into question China’s commitment to increased openness and could, if enacted in current form, result in rights abuses. On this twenty-sixth anniversary, the United States urges the Chinese government to uphold its international commitments to protect human rights and fundamental freedoms and to end the harassment, detention, and other mistreatment of individuals who peacefully seek justice and fairness, to practice their religion, or to express their views.
On the 26th Anniversary of Tiananmen Square
Press Statement
John Kirby
Department Spokesperson
Washington, DC
June 3, 2015
Twenty six years after the Chinese government’s violent suppression of peaceful protests in and around Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, the United States continues to call for an official accounting of the victims of these events, the release of those still serving Tiananmen-related sentences, and an end to the harassment and detention of those who wish to peacefully commemorate the anniversary.
While China has achieved social and economic progress since 1989, we remain concerned that human rights abuses continue. We are closely monitoring developments with respect to pending legislation in China relating to national security, counterterrorism, and the regulation of NGOs that appears to call into question China’s commitment to increased openness and could, if enacted in current form, result in rights abuses. On this twenty-sixth anniversary, the United States urges the Chinese government to uphold its international commitments to protect human rights and fundamental freedoms and to end the harassment, detention, and other mistreatment of individuals who peacefully seek justice and fairness, to practice their religion, or to express their views.
DOJ ANNOUNCES 27 CRIMINAL FOREIGN FUGITIVES ARRESTED IN U.S.
FROM: U.S. JUSTICE DEPARTMENT
WASHINGTON — Twenty-seven criminal foreign fugitives with active Interpol alerts were arrested across the United States this week by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) and the U.S. Marshals Service (USMS).
Those arrested are from 13 different countries and wanted for crimes abroad. Of the 27, five are wanted for homicide, two for kidnapping, one for raping a child and one for human sex trafficking.
“Criminals who create mayhem here in the United States or abroad should understand that law enforcement is a global partnership,” said ICE Director Sarah R. Saldaña. “We will find them, and we will bring them to justice.”
Arrests occurred nationwide in nine states during the three-day sweep, which took place Tuesday through Thursday. Those arrested fell squarely into the agency’s enforcement priorities, which ICE officers prioritize and enforce every day.
“The arrest of these foreign fugitives should send a strong message to anyone attempting to avoid prosecution for their crimes here in the U.S. or abroad,” said USMS Director Stacia Hylton. “Our men and women were relentless in their effort to locate and apprehend these criminals. We hope our effort gives victims a sense of comfort in knowing these individuals are no longer on the streets.”
“Information-sharing 24 hours, seven days a week, 365 days a year among U.S. law enforcement agencies like ERO and the USMS, along with the 189 other Interpol member countries and Interpol Washington, ensures transnational criminals have no place to hide,” stated Interpol Washington Director Shawn A. Bray. “By facilitating the sharing of this information with our law enforcement partners, together, we will continue to enhance safety and security for U.S. citizens and the global community.”
Arrests included:
On June 2, ERO arrested Nelson Garcia Orellana, 30, and his brother Jorge Garcia Rivera, 23, both natives of El Salvador, in Trenton, New Jersey, and Alexandria, Virginia, respectively. They are wanted by authorities in their home country for kidnapping [external link] and are the subjects of Interpol Red Notices [external link].
On June 2, ERO arrested Gabriel Collado Gonzalez, 40, a native of Nicaragua, in Miami. Gonzalez is wanted by authorities in his home country for embezzlement and criminal conspiracy and is the subject of an Interpol Red Notice [external link].
On June 2, ERO arrested Raul Ortiz Henriquez, 40, a native of El Salvador, in Santa Fe Springs, California. Henriquez is wanted by authorities in his home country for rape of a minor. In November 2013, Henriquez grabbed his victim by her arms and forced her into a van he was driving while she was leaving school. He drove away, parked, beat her in the chest and raped her. He is the subject of an Interpol Red Notice [external link].
The following individuals are all the subject of Interpol Red Notices and remain at-large:
Juan Chicas Ramos, 56, a native of El Salvador, is wanted by authorities in his home country on an Interpol Red Notice [external link] for homicide
Lisandro Medina Gamez, 33, a native of El Salvador, is wanted by authorities in his home country on an Interpol Red Notice [external link] for fraud
The ICE National Criminal Analysis and Targeting Center (NCATC) provided critical investigative support for this operation, including criminal and intelligence analysis from a variety of sources. The NCATC provides comprehensive analytical support to aid the at-large enforcement efforts of all ICE components.
ICE credits the combined efforts of the U.S. National Central Bureau-Interpol Washington, the U.S. Marshals Service, the U.S. Department of State Diplomatic Security Service, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Members of the public who have information about these fugitives are urged to contact ICE by calling the toll-free ICE tip line at 1-866-347-2423 or internationally at 001-1802-872-6199. They can also file a tip online by completing ICE’s online tip form.
Since Oct. 1, 2009, ERO has removed more than 720 foreign fugitives from the United States who were sought in their native countries for serious crimes, including kidnapping, rape and murder. ERO works with HSI’s Office of International Operations, foreign consular offices in the United States, and Interpol to identify foreign fugitives illegally present in the United States.
WASHINGTON — Twenty-seven criminal foreign fugitives with active Interpol alerts were arrested across the United States this week by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) and the U.S. Marshals Service (USMS).
Those arrested are from 13 different countries and wanted for crimes abroad. Of the 27, five are wanted for homicide, two for kidnapping, one for raping a child and one for human sex trafficking.
“Criminals who create mayhem here in the United States or abroad should understand that law enforcement is a global partnership,” said ICE Director Sarah R. Saldaña. “We will find them, and we will bring them to justice.”
Arrests occurred nationwide in nine states during the three-day sweep, which took place Tuesday through Thursday. Those arrested fell squarely into the agency’s enforcement priorities, which ICE officers prioritize and enforce every day.
“The arrest of these foreign fugitives should send a strong message to anyone attempting to avoid prosecution for their crimes here in the U.S. or abroad,” said USMS Director Stacia Hylton. “Our men and women were relentless in their effort to locate and apprehend these criminals. We hope our effort gives victims a sense of comfort in knowing these individuals are no longer on the streets.”
“Information-sharing 24 hours, seven days a week, 365 days a year among U.S. law enforcement agencies like ERO and the USMS, along with the 189 other Interpol member countries and Interpol Washington, ensures transnational criminals have no place to hide,” stated Interpol Washington Director Shawn A. Bray. “By facilitating the sharing of this information with our law enforcement partners, together, we will continue to enhance safety and security for U.S. citizens and the global community.”
Arrests included:
On June 2, ERO arrested Nelson Garcia Orellana, 30, and his brother Jorge Garcia Rivera, 23, both natives of El Salvador, in Trenton, New Jersey, and Alexandria, Virginia, respectively. They are wanted by authorities in their home country for kidnapping [external link] and are the subjects of Interpol Red Notices [external link].
On June 2, ERO arrested Gabriel Collado Gonzalez, 40, a native of Nicaragua, in Miami. Gonzalez is wanted by authorities in his home country for embezzlement and criminal conspiracy and is the subject of an Interpol Red Notice [external link].
On June 2, ERO arrested Raul Ortiz Henriquez, 40, a native of El Salvador, in Santa Fe Springs, California. Henriquez is wanted by authorities in his home country for rape of a minor. In November 2013, Henriquez grabbed his victim by her arms and forced her into a van he was driving while she was leaving school. He drove away, parked, beat her in the chest and raped her. He is the subject of an Interpol Red Notice [external link].
The following individuals are all the subject of Interpol Red Notices and remain at-large:
Juan Chicas Ramos, 56, a native of El Salvador, is wanted by authorities in his home country on an Interpol Red Notice [external link] for homicide
Lisandro Medina Gamez, 33, a native of El Salvador, is wanted by authorities in his home country on an Interpol Red Notice [external link] for fraud
The ICE National Criminal Analysis and Targeting Center (NCATC) provided critical investigative support for this operation, including criminal and intelligence analysis from a variety of sources. The NCATC provides comprehensive analytical support to aid the at-large enforcement efforts of all ICE components.
ICE credits the combined efforts of the U.S. National Central Bureau-Interpol Washington, the U.S. Marshals Service, the U.S. Department of State Diplomatic Security Service, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Members of the public who have information about these fugitives are urged to contact ICE by calling the toll-free ICE tip line at 1-866-347-2423 or internationally at 001-1802-872-6199. They can also file a tip online by completing ICE’s online tip form.
Since Oct. 1, 2009, ERO has removed more than 720 foreign fugitives from the United States who were sought in their native countries for serious crimes, including kidnapping, rape and murder. ERO works with HSI’s Office of International Operations, foreign consular offices in the United States, and Interpol to identify foreign fugitives illegally present in the United States.
REMARKS AT UN ON RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN EASTERN UKRAINE
FROM: U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT
Samantha Power
U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations
New York, NY
June 5, 2015
AS DELIVERED
Thank you, Mr. President, for organizing today’s meeting to speak to the recent developments in eastern Ukraine. And I join others in thanking our briefers, Under Secretary-General Feltman and OSCE Deputy Chief Monitor Hug, for providing the Security Council and the international community with the facts underlying the escalation in violence, which are critical in a conflict where some continue to try to obscure the truth.
On June 3rd, combined Russian-separatist forces launched multiple, coordinated attacks west of the Minsk line of contact in Donetsk. The attacks were concentrated on the towns of Marinka and Krasnohorivka.
The Russian Federation and its separatist allies have offered multiple – often conflicting – explanations for these attacks.
In some instances, Russia and the separatists have blamed Ukraine for inciting the attacks. For example, a Russian presidential spokesman attributed the violations of the ceasefire to the “provocative actions by the Ukrainian armed forces,” claiming, “the Ukrainian side has repeatedly taken similar efforts to escalate tensions against the backdrop of international operations.” Similarly, the so-called “Defense Minister” of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic blamed Ukraine for “provocations” and, what he called, “a breach in the Minsk agreements,” which led to the fighting. Exactly what the so-called provocations are was never explained.
This argument, this set of arguments, have been undermined by some of the separatists themselves, who seem to have forgotten to run their tweets and their blog posts by Moscow. During the attacks, one tweeted, “Marinka is ours!” – posting a photo of armed soldiers atop a tank flying the separatists’ flag. A post on a separatist website said, “As a result of a massive attack by [DPR] armed forces, Marinka has been liberated.”
In other instances, Russia has argued that the attacks were justified because the areas that are actually part of the separatist-controlled territory under the Minsk agreements are these areas. They are not. This was the case Russia made about Marinka and Krasnohorivka yesterday, at a meeting of the OSCE. We’ve seen this tactic before; when combined Russian-separatist forces encircled and attacked Debaltseve immediately after signing the package of measures at Minsk on February 12th, 2015. As a separatist commander Eduard Basurin told Reuters on February 15th, “Of course we can open fire [on Debaltseve]…The territory is internal: ours. And internal is internal. But along the line of confrontation there is no shooting.”
The problem with this line of argument is, quite simply, that it is false. At no point did the Minsk Agreements recognize Marinka and Krasnohorivka as separatist-controlled territory. Nor did they grant the separatists control over Debaltseve or other areas combined Russian-separatist forces have seized, or tried to seize. Yet for Russia and the separatists, it seems the contact line can shift to include the territories that they feel they deserve.
The Kyiv-born surrealist master Mikhail Bulgakov put this problem a different way: “The tongue can conceal the truth, but the eyes, never!” In this case, the objective eyes in eastern Ukraine belong to the OSCE’s Special Monitoring Mission, the SMM. And what they tell us is that, on the evening of June 2nd and early morning of June 3rd, “SMM observed the movement of a large amount of heavy weapons in DPR-controlled areas – generally in a westerly direction toward the contact line – close to Marinka, preceding and during the fighting.” So, to repeat: according to the SMM, heavy weapons from the Russian-backed separatist side moved westward “preceding as well as during the fighting.”
The SMM tried to contact high-ranking DPR personnel over an hour-and-a-half period on the morning of June 3rd, but reported, “Either they were unavailable or did not wish to speak to the SMM.” The eyes do not conceal the truth. And the truth here is that the recent violence was rooted in a combined Russian-separatist assault.
These and other joint attacks by Russian-separatist forces have deadly consequences. At least 5 Ukrainian soldiers were killed, and 38 wounded, in the assault on the towns. The number of casualties is surely higher, but we do not, unfortunately, have reliable reports from the separatists’ side. That is because, as the UN’s Human Rights Monitoring Unit noted in its May 15th report, independent media have been prosecuted, threatened, and otherwise muzzled in separatist-controlled territory.
We also do not know how many Russian soldiers were killed in recent attacks – or in any of their operations in eastern Ukraine, for that matter. Russia continues – despite incidents such as the recent capture of two special operations Russian soldiers in Schastya last month – to deny any military involvement in eastern Ukraine.
And just last week, President Putin signed a decree classifying any death of Russian soldiers in “special operations” in peacetime a state secret, a policy which previously was limited to wartime only. Not content with denying their military service in life, Russia now denies their loved ones the respect and closure – not to mention social services – for their service in death. And it denies the Russian people knowledge to which they are entitled – of a conflict their government has been fueling with weapons, training, and soldiers. No matter what your opinion of the open secret that is Russia’s military involvement in eastern Ukraine and occupied Crimea, the dignified recognition of one’s dead should have primacy.
Of course, suffering is hardly limited to those involved in the fighting. Civilians living near and along the front lines continue to endure profound hardship. Approximately 1.3 million Ukrainians have been displaced by the fighting. Small children on the front lines have gotten used to going to school and sleeping in basements. Families live underground for months at a time. The elderly and disabled are trapped with little access to vital medicine and other forms of assistance. A health professional working in Debaltseve said, “I’ve met elderly people who say that they would just like to die. They don’t have depression; they just don’t want to be 80 years old and living in a basement.”
By now, the international community is quite familiar with Russia’s playbook when it comes to efforts to occupy the territory of its sovereign neighbors – as it did in Crimea, and before that in Transnistria, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia. The consensus here, and in the international community, remains that Minsk’s implementation is the only viable way out of this deadly conflict.
The Ukrainian government has made good faith efforts to honor that consensus – notwithstanding the seemingly endless violations by Russia and the separatists – and deliver on the commitments made at Minsk. Ukraine is holding direct dialogue with the separatists, a bitter pill to swallow, but one they have swallowed for the sake of peace and for the sake of the implementation of the Minsk Agreements. At the same time, Ukraine has undertaken critical efforts, with the participation of Ukrainian civil society, to address pervasive problems it inherited from its predecessors, like widespread corruption, as well as to pursue crucial reforms such as decentralization. Ukraine cooperates with the international monitors and bodies, and has committed to address identified areas of concern. The United States will continue to raise tough issues and these areas of concern, including some raised here today by the briefers, with the Government of Ukraine, and we will support the government and Ukrainian people as they continue their efforts toward meaningful reform.
Yet Russia – and the separatists it trains, arms, fights alongside, and with whom it shares command and control systems in eastern Ukraine – continues to ignore this consensus, flouting the commitments it made at Minsk. It goes right on applying its playbook in new territories – as though this Council and the world are too blind, or too easily deceived to notice.
We must not let ourselves be deceived. The consequences of Russia’s contempt for Minsk and the rules undergirding our international peace and security are too great – both for the integrity of the international system, and for the rights and welfare of the Ukrainian people. We cannot fail to see and fail to act. We must not stop applying pressure until Ukrainians get the stable democracy, the territorial integrity, and sovereignty they yearn for and deserve. Thank you.
Samantha Power
U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations
New York, NY
June 5, 2015
AS DELIVERED
Thank you, Mr. President, for organizing today’s meeting to speak to the recent developments in eastern Ukraine. And I join others in thanking our briefers, Under Secretary-General Feltman and OSCE Deputy Chief Monitor Hug, for providing the Security Council and the international community with the facts underlying the escalation in violence, which are critical in a conflict where some continue to try to obscure the truth.
On June 3rd, combined Russian-separatist forces launched multiple, coordinated attacks west of the Minsk line of contact in Donetsk. The attacks were concentrated on the towns of Marinka and Krasnohorivka.
The Russian Federation and its separatist allies have offered multiple – often conflicting – explanations for these attacks.
In some instances, Russia and the separatists have blamed Ukraine for inciting the attacks. For example, a Russian presidential spokesman attributed the violations of the ceasefire to the “provocative actions by the Ukrainian armed forces,” claiming, “the Ukrainian side has repeatedly taken similar efforts to escalate tensions against the backdrop of international operations.” Similarly, the so-called “Defense Minister” of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic blamed Ukraine for “provocations” and, what he called, “a breach in the Minsk agreements,” which led to the fighting. Exactly what the so-called provocations are was never explained.
This argument, this set of arguments, have been undermined by some of the separatists themselves, who seem to have forgotten to run their tweets and their blog posts by Moscow. During the attacks, one tweeted, “Marinka is ours!” – posting a photo of armed soldiers atop a tank flying the separatists’ flag. A post on a separatist website said, “As a result of a massive attack by [DPR] armed forces, Marinka has been liberated.”
In other instances, Russia has argued that the attacks were justified because the areas that are actually part of the separatist-controlled territory under the Minsk agreements are these areas. They are not. This was the case Russia made about Marinka and Krasnohorivka yesterday, at a meeting of the OSCE. We’ve seen this tactic before; when combined Russian-separatist forces encircled and attacked Debaltseve immediately after signing the package of measures at Minsk on February 12th, 2015. As a separatist commander Eduard Basurin told Reuters on February 15th, “Of course we can open fire [on Debaltseve]…The territory is internal: ours. And internal is internal. But along the line of confrontation there is no shooting.”
The problem with this line of argument is, quite simply, that it is false. At no point did the Minsk Agreements recognize Marinka and Krasnohorivka as separatist-controlled territory. Nor did they grant the separatists control over Debaltseve or other areas combined Russian-separatist forces have seized, or tried to seize. Yet for Russia and the separatists, it seems the contact line can shift to include the territories that they feel they deserve.
The Kyiv-born surrealist master Mikhail Bulgakov put this problem a different way: “The tongue can conceal the truth, but the eyes, never!” In this case, the objective eyes in eastern Ukraine belong to the OSCE’s Special Monitoring Mission, the SMM. And what they tell us is that, on the evening of June 2nd and early morning of June 3rd, “SMM observed the movement of a large amount of heavy weapons in DPR-controlled areas – generally in a westerly direction toward the contact line – close to Marinka, preceding and during the fighting.” So, to repeat: according to the SMM, heavy weapons from the Russian-backed separatist side moved westward “preceding as well as during the fighting.”
The SMM tried to contact high-ranking DPR personnel over an hour-and-a-half period on the morning of June 3rd, but reported, “Either they were unavailable or did not wish to speak to the SMM.” The eyes do not conceal the truth. And the truth here is that the recent violence was rooted in a combined Russian-separatist assault.
These and other joint attacks by Russian-separatist forces have deadly consequences. At least 5 Ukrainian soldiers were killed, and 38 wounded, in the assault on the towns. The number of casualties is surely higher, but we do not, unfortunately, have reliable reports from the separatists’ side. That is because, as the UN’s Human Rights Monitoring Unit noted in its May 15th report, independent media have been prosecuted, threatened, and otherwise muzzled in separatist-controlled territory.
We also do not know how many Russian soldiers were killed in recent attacks – or in any of their operations in eastern Ukraine, for that matter. Russia continues – despite incidents such as the recent capture of two special operations Russian soldiers in Schastya last month – to deny any military involvement in eastern Ukraine.
And just last week, President Putin signed a decree classifying any death of Russian soldiers in “special operations” in peacetime a state secret, a policy which previously was limited to wartime only. Not content with denying their military service in life, Russia now denies their loved ones the respect and closure – not to mention social services – for their service in death. And it denies the Russian people knowledge to which they are entitled – of a conflict their government has been fueling with weapons, training, and soldiers. No matter what your opinion of the open secret that is Russia’s military involvement in eastern Ukraine and occupied Crimea, the dignified recognition of one’s dead should have primacy.
Of course, suffering is hardly limited to those involved in the fighting. Civilians living near and along the front lines continue to endure profound hardship. Approximately 1.3 million Ukrainians have been displaced by the fighting. Small children on the front lines have gotten used to going to school and sleeping in basements. Families live underground for months at a time. The elderly and disabled are trapped with little access to vital medicine and other forms of assistance. A health professional working in Debaltseve said, “I’ve met elderly people who say that they would just like to die. They don’t have depression; they just don’t want to be 80 years old and living in a basement.”
By now, the international community is quite familiar with Russia’s playbook when it comes to efforts to occupy the territory of its sovereign neighbors – as it did in Crimea, and before that in Transnistria, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia. The consensus here, and in the international community, remains that Minsk’s implementation is the only viable way out of this deadly conflict.
The Ukrainian government has made good faith efforts to honor that consensus – notwithstanding the seemingly endless violations by Russia and the separatists – and deliver on the commitments made at Minsk. Ukraine is holding direct dialogue with the separatists, a bitter pill to swallow, but one they have swallowed for the sake of peace and for the sake of the implementation of the Minsk Agreements. At the same time, Ukraine has undertaken critical efforts, with the participation of Ukrainian civil society, to address pervasive problems it inherited from its predecessors, like widespread corruption, as well as to pursue crucial reforms such as decentralization. Ukraine cooperates with the international monitors and bodies, and has committed to address identified areas of concern. The United States will continue to raise tough issues and these areas of concern, including some raised here today by the briefers, with the Government of Ukraine, and we will support the government and Ukrainian people as they continue their efforts toward meaningful reform.
Yet Russia – and the separatists it trains, arms, fights alongside, and with whom it shares command and control systems in eastern Ukraine – continues to ignore this consensus, flouting the commitments it made at Minsk. It goes right on applying its playbook in new territories – as though this Council and the world are too blind, or too easily deceived to notice.
We must not let ourselves be deceived. The consequences of Russia’s contempt for Minsk and the rules undergirding our international peace and security are too great – both for the integrity of the international system, and for the rights and welfare of the Ukrainian people. We cannot fail to see and fail to act. We must not stop applying pressure until Ukrainians get the stable democracy, the territorial integrity, and sovereignty they yearn for and deserve. Thank you.
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