#federal ministry of works recruitment july 2017

[thetens-blog1]

Graduate Relationship Officers recruitment in a Shipment, Clearing & Freight Forwarding Company, July 2017

Graduate Relationship Officers recruitment in a Shipment, Clearing & Freight Forwarding Company, July 2017

Graduate Relationship Officers recruitment in a Shipment, Clearing & Freight Forwarding Company, July 2017 Dragnet Solutions Limited – Our client, a 3rd Party Logistics Service Provider of Shipment, Clearing & Freight Forwarding services, is currently looking for suitably qualified candidates to fill the position below:   Job Title: Relationship Officer Location: Nigeria Job Description We are…

[ledenews]

Wheeling University: Pressing Forward Through it All

Tumultuous times have reigned at Wheeling University for the last 13 months, and in reality, since 2017 when the Diocese of Wheeling-Charleston took ownership of the physical campus, leasing it back to the University whilst agreeing to pay off more than $30 million in bond debt. Two years later, the declaration of financial exigency in March of 2019 put the status of the school, then still called Wheeling Jesuit, into question. Course offerings were trimmed considerably, as was the staff. The lack of pathways of study in history, philosophy and theology cost the University its official Jesuit affiliation, necessitating the name change to the current Wheeling University. But a combination of new leadership, a strong show of support from students and faculty to the community itself, and the willingness to innovate have things looking positive for the state’s only Catholic institution of higher learning. That was BEFORE the coronavirus pandemic took the country, and the world, by storm. Difficult changes were needed, and made, by the university. But it hasn’t done anything to dampen the spirit of the university or the upward path that it continues to march.

New President Inherits Difficult Task

Ominous or not, Ginny Favede became the school’s 13th president since its inception in 1954 and did so during one of the darkest times in its history.  Not only did Favede need to find a way to help generate renewed interest, and students, for the university, but it had to be done with a trimmed course offering list, a name change and numerous questions surrounding the viability as a university. It’s hard to recruit a student to attend a school they aren’t sure was going to be around for the next four years. Favede, who had a successful career in both local and county government along with the careers in the private sector, had recently joined the university’s board of trustees and was named chair in July of 2019. A few months later, she received a request, and an opportunity she couldn’t pass up. “Word got home before I did and the first thing my husband asked me was why,” Favede recalled. “I told him, ‘It was the Archbishop. I’m Catholic. It never occurred to me to say no.” Favede’s background in local government aided her immensely in the transition. She did several mid-year budget reviews, seeing where money was being spent, and where it didn’t need to be. Remaining faculty and staff joined her in helping to find dollars. Soon the dollars started to make sense and she was able to hire a vice president on enrollment management and start to work on rebuilding the school’s student base, as well as its reputation with its students. “When you operate a city or county budget, it’s not like a federal budget, you have employees, and a set amount of money and you have to manage them. When I was with Belmont (County as a commissioner) back in 2009, we were just going into the recession and we were able to weather the situation. That background has helped tremendously.” Favede admits she now understands what it means to have a calling. For a woman who never put less than her best effort forward, this is truly her labor of love. “I love it. I love the kids, love the business aspect of it, love the challenge,” Favede said. “Seeing what our hard work is able to create has been amazing.”

Despite criticism of cost and need, Wheeling University pushed on with the debut season of its football team, once that Favede believes will only help the university in battling back.

Seeing is Believing

Heading into the 2019-2020 season, the Wheeling University softball team was a microcosm of the school’s issues. When things went bad, coaches and players bailed, understandably so, for more stable pastures. The incoming squad had three seniors, no coaching staff and barely enough players to field a roster. Not the ideal situation to lure a coach to. But Tiffany Buckmaster, then an assistant coach at NAIA Lourdes University in Sylvania was convinced this was the place for her. It’s a decision she hasn’t regretted. “Truthfully, everything they’ve told me has held true,” Buckmaster said. “President Favede is the right person with the job. She’s a transparent, honest, fantastic person who believes in this university. She told us to believe in one another and believe in the program, even when no one else would. That’s her technique, she believes.” After the coronavirus necessitated the cancellation of the spring sports season by the NCAA, Buckmaster looked back pleased on a positive season, however short it was. Now, like the other sports’ teams and the university itself, she’s off to work building back up the numbers. The coach feels her own tale of coming to WU can be used as a selling point. “Honestly, it’s been a little bit easier for me because of the fact that I chose to say yes,” Buckmaster said. “That gives them the confidence to do so too. I came here, despite all that was going on, because I believe in Wheeling University.” Favede knows the important of collegiate athletics, especially at a school like Wheeling. They help to generate excitement and provide an identity. No sport has a greater impact in that area, especially in the Ohio Valley, quite like football. So, despite the school’s financial troubles, the overall cost of football and the fact Wheeling was set to play only its first official season, Favede and the university decide to press forward with football. It’s a decision she never wavered on, despite hearing a good deal of criticism. She knows the dedication that head coach Zac Bruney and his staff, along with the Bruney family at large have put into the program already. She knows it will pay off and success looms right now the road, not only for the program, but for the school at large. “If you had been here on campus for any of the home games, the excitement and energy that football brought to campus; it will make a significant difference in our ability to turn this university around,” Favede said. “People want to go where that excitement and energy is.”

Pandemic Problems and a Familial-Feel Response

Wheeling University’s seniors have battled through quite the ordeal, showing tremendous faith in staying the course and making it to their final semester. That’s why the adjustments the university has made in response to the coronavirus have been so tough for Favede to make, no matter the need. “It’s been heartbreaking,” Favede said. “Things were going so well for us here. The kids were happy, which was our first and primary objective. We are giving the students a great, quality education, but we also wanted to make these the best four years of their lives. I vowed to myself never to let these kids get hurt again, so it was very hard to make the decisions that we’ve had to make.” The university’s spring break came earlier than other local institutions, so the students were out whilst the first major adjustments to daily life were being experienced. Favede credits her staff for being able to shift on the fly and basically get an online education plan and program off the ground in less than 72 hours. It started March 16. Three days later, and three before West Virginia Governor Jim Justice’s official stay-at-home order, Wheeling U decided to send its students home. It was a sad time for both faculty and staff but one that the university worked to minimize the immediate impact on its students. Favede noted that the school obtained many moving boxes from Lowe’s in Wheeling and had staff members help students box up and remove their belongings from the dorms. Some students who lived clear across the country were unable to transport all their belongings home. To assist, the university rented a moving van to help these students transfer their things to storage lockers located at The Highlands for safe keeping until the next semester begins. The president recalls sitting and talking with several students that waited until the last minute to vacate as they simply didn’t want to leave. This had become their home and they wished to take in all they could. That’s part of the reason Favede opted to delay spring graduation until Winter 2020. She wants the students to be able to officially walk across and receive their degrees they’ve worked so hard for, and she wants to be there to hand it to them. The university and its alumni association has developed a president’s emergency fund to help offset the costs both the students and faculty are dealing with. A part of that will go toward helping any of the graduating international students who otherwise might not be able to afford to come back and receive their degrees in person. If they wish to return, Favede said, the university is going to help find a way to make that happen.

While the Jesuit name and affiliation on longer are associated with the school, the state's lone Catholic institution of higher learning still has its members involved in campus ministry and other activities. The Theology major is also making a return for Fall 2020.

Moving Forward

There is good news going forward for the university. Favede noted the school already has its 100th deposit for the 2020-2021 school year for incoming freshman, a number that exceeds the previous two years collectively at this time. There are roughly 400 undergraduate students with another near 200 in graduate programs. New students are showing interest, as other student athletes. A quick scan of the athletic department’s Twitter account at @WUCardinals shows a number of athletes across various sports committing to play for the Cardinals. “Our coaches and our school are recruiting virtually. We’re being innovative and learning new ways to do things and, in the end, it will make us a better university.” Favede also mentioned that starting in 2020-21, all the school’s general education classes will be available online. The Theology major is also making a comeback, and with it, a pastoral ministry certificate. She also noted that while plans are still being finalized, they are looking at a certificate of hotel management and creating a school of construction management.  Another moved aimed at bolstering enrollment in the face of the pandemic’s disruption of the academic world is the school is temporarily waiving the SAT/ACT score entrance requirements for next year. While this doesn’t apply to student athletes needing NCAA Clearinghouse eligibility, it will help the general student population. SAT and ACT testing has been suspending because of the pandemic and Favede felt it was the right thing to do, taking away one less stressor for incoming students. “The University’s flexibility at this crucial time will ensure prospective students aiming for Wheeling University get a full and fair shot—no matter their current challenges. We encourage any students who have questions to contact our Admissions Office.” It’s a trying time, both for the university and the nation. But steps have been taken to ensure that Wheeling University, like America, will recover and press onward. Read the full article

[freelanews-blog]

PMB's Anti-Corruption Crusade Suffers Big Blow As Illegal Recruitment Rocks PEF

Smarting from the outcome of a probe panel where some management staff were dismissed, demoted and disengaged for actions bordering on forgery, fake certificates, implementation of financial increments without necessary approvals. The Petroleum Equalisation Fund is once again emmessed in a case of illegal recruitment of one Mallam Aminu Ahmed which is made worse because there was a deliberate contravention of NYSC Act and other recruitment extant laws of the Public Service Rules on employment and Federal Character Commission on same by the management of PEF in the employment of Aminu Said Ahmed. In what seems to be a litmus test for the Federal Government in its resolve to fight illegal recruitment into the Federal Civil Service, this is coming on the heels of the recent alarm raised by the Acting Secretary to Government who informed an aghast nation that illegal recruitment into the nation's civil service is going on a large scale. This development is  not only worrisome; it indeed undermines Government projections and efforts to keep overheads manageable .Facts emerging from PEF says staff are up in arms against management who have recommended the sack of staffs who used fake credentials. A probe panel was allegedly set up and targetted against a select group of staff where a staff was found to have presented forged certificate, and another probe to be set up for those who are yet to submit their certificates after decades in service. The aggrieved PEF staff accused PEF management of selective justice and refusal to sack and persecute Mallam Aminu Said Ahmed and his collaborators who were the first to circumvent in PEF the Nigerian employment procedure especially as it relates to the NYSC Act because of Aminu's links in the Emirate Council of Adamawa. Staff have vowed to also expose management's selective fight against corruption, and resist any probe and sanctions against any staff if the glaring infractions in Aminu Said Ahmed illegal employment is not addressed. Incontrovertible documents were made available to this medium in order to emphasis the state of things.Mallam Aminu Said Ahmed was employed illegally into the public service during the eight years administration of Alhaji Gurin as the Executive Secretary of PEF. Aminu Said Ahmed graduated from Bauchi Tafawa Balewa University Bauchi with a 3rd class honour in Oct 2003.

An array of documents available to us shows that Aminu Said Ahmed proceeded on the mandatory National Youth Service-NYSC on the 8th of September 2003 and his call-up letter with NYSC number KD/ATB/03/0702010 completed his National Youth Service on the 7th of September 2004. However against the NYSC Act which stipulates thus:"...12. Production of Certificate for employment purposes(1) For the purposes of employment anywhere in the Federation and before employment, it shall be the duty of every prospective employer to demand and obtain from any person who claims to have obtained his first degree at the end of the academic year 1973-74 or, as the case may be, at the end of any subsequent academic year the following—(a) a copy of the Certificate of National Service of such person issued pursuant to section 11 of this Act;(b) a copy of any exemption certificate issued to such person pursuant to section 17 of this Act; and(c) such other particulars relevant thereto as may be prescribed by or under this Act. (2) It shall also be the duty of every employer to produce on demand to a police officer, not below the rank of an assistant superintendent of Police, any such certificate and particulars or copies thereof.13. Offences and penalties, etc.(1) Any person—(a) who fails to report for service in the service corps in the manner directed by the Directorate or as the case may be, prescribed pursuant to the provisions of this Act; or(b) who refuses to make himself available for service in the service corps continuously for the period specified in subsection (2) of this section, is guilty of an offence and liable on conviction to a fine of N2,000 or to imprisonment for a term of twelve months or to both such fine and imprisonment.(2) Any person who—(a) under the provisions of this Act is not eligible to participate in the service corps so participates or attempts to so participate is guilty of an offence; or(b) having served in the service corps and has been duly issued with a Certificate of National Service or certificate of exemption, as the case may be, and is not eligible to serve under the same service corps so participates or attempts to so participate is guilty of an offence, and liable on conviction to a fine of N4,000 or to imprisonment for a term of two years or to both such fine and imprisonment. (3) Any person who fails to comply with or who contravenes or causes or aids or abets another to contravene any provision of this Act (not being a provision relating to the calling up of members of the service corps) is guilty of an offence and liable on conviction to a fine of N5,000 or to imprisonment for a term of three years or to both such fine and imprisonment. (4) Any person who—(a) in giving any information for the purposes of this Act knowingly or recklessly makes a statement which is false; or(b) forges or uses or lends to or allows to be used other than in the manner provided by this Act by any other person any certificate issued pursuant to the provisions of this Act; or(c) makes, or has in his possession any document so closely resembling any certificate so issued as to be calculated to deceive, is guilty of an offence and liable on conviction to a fine of N5,000 or to imprisonment for a term of three years or to both such fine and imprisonment. (5) Where an offence under subsection (3) of this section which has been committed by a body corporate is proved to have been committed with the consent or connivance of, or to be attributable to any neglect on the part of any director, manager, secretary or other official of the body corporate, or any person purporting to act in such capacity, he as well as the body corporate shall be deemed to be guilty of that offence and shall be liable to be proceeded against and punished accordingly...."Aminu Said Ahmed, with a Third Class degree was the only one offered employment in PEF in the whole of Nigeria in 2004 through a letter with number PEF/C/123/S.3 dated 22/7/04 in clear violation of the NYSC Act which required that Aminu Said Ahmed must have completed his NYSC service before any employment. Aminu Said Ahmed received and signed the Acceptance letter addressed to his residence at 54 Ahmadu Bello Way, P. O. Box 4848, Yola, Adamawa state on the 26th of July 2004, agreeing to resume work on the 27th of July 2004. Meanwhile, he finished his Youth Service in September 2004. What is yet to be determined is how someone that should be in active service was able to receive a letter in far away Yola.He did not only benefit from this illegal recruitment but was also granted overseas study leave to study a Masters in Computer and Network Engineering in Sheffield Hallam University UK, with full study leave allowance paid for by the management of PEF before the confirmation of his appointment as required by the extent laws in the Civil Service Rules. The system was always skewed to favour him to the detriment of civil service cohesion and discipline. Public service rules and all extant laws which required him to have completed his two years probation and be confirmed before enjoying such benefit were disregarded. PEF staff have vowed not to let this matter be swept under the carpet as more facts of its operations will be sent to the public domain.Presidency blows whistle on illegal recruitments in ministries, parastatalsJuly 17, 2017 0The Presidency has exposed illegal, large scale and indiscriminate clandestine recruitments in federal ministries, department and agencies (MDAs).A circular by the former acting Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF), Dr. Habiba Lawal to the Chief of staff to the President, National Assembly, service chiefs, heads of ministries and agencies amongst others, said many MDAs have been carrying out recruitments in the guise of replacement of existing staff without following due process.The memo is titled “Streamlining procedures for recruitment into federal agencies.”While condemning the scam, which has led to Federal Government’s payroll ballooning, the circular warned MDAs to follow due process in their operations. It stated that if the practices continued unabated without reference to budgetary provisions and due process, government was at risk of owing workers salaries, budget shortfalls and the threat of increasing the cost of payroll, which was already over 40 per cent of total government expenditure.It said government has seen the need to take drastic action to arrest the situation in view of the current economic situation facing the country.The former acting SGF who frowned at the recruitments, which she said, were in flagrant disregard of rules and established procedures for recruitment in the public service, noted that the recruitments had affected the ongoing reform of the payroll and personnel cost management, as it had created ghost workers in the payroll who receive fraudulent and erroneous salaries and also perpetuated nepotism and regional imbalances in the public service. “The attention of the President has been drawn to reports of massive and indiscriminate clandestine recruitments in federal ministries, department and agencies (MDAs) in flagrant disregard of rules and established procedures for recruitment in the public service.“Many MDAs have been carrying out recruitments in the guise of replacement of existing staff without following due process,” she claimed.Lawal also argued that the current ongoing reforms aimed at providing a high level assurance on the integrity of the payroll and personnel cost would be jeopardised. The fromer acting SGF explained that government has decided to streamline the process and procedures for recruitment and appointment into the public service in conformity with the certain guidelines.She listed the guidelines to include: adherence to manpower budget for proposed recruitment, which must be approved by the supervising agency or ministry; obtaining of waiver to recruit from the office of the Head of Service of the Federation; appropriate budgetary provisions to accommodate the proposed recruitment and letter of clearance from the director general of the budget office of the federation to confirm budgetary provision for the proposed recruitment. Other guidelines include approval of Federal Character Commission for the distribution of vacancies for the proposed recruitment to ensure equitable distribution of vacancies among the states; obtaining certificate of clearance for the Federal Character Commission for the recruitment; representation of the Federal Civil Service Commission as observers in the recruitment process in the ministries, representatives of the office of the head of service of the federation in other to ensure compliance with extant rules and provision of recruitment.“In case of agencies/parasatals appropriate representation of supervising ministries and agencies to provide necessary guidance and give credibility to the exercise. Permanent secretaries and heads of extra- ministerial departments would be held personally responsible for ensuring strict compliance with this circular. “The implementation of the provisions of the circular takes immediate effect. Please bring the contents of this circular to the attention of all staff and ensure strict compliance,” she stated.This revelation no doubt will further cast aspersions on the anti-corruption crusade of President Mohammadu Buhari-led administration which many public affairs analysts and social critics believe is way too lopsided.Also, according to our impeccable sources in the parastatal, the interesting thing about the whole saga is that the indicted gentleman is about to be promoted whilst other sources say he's actually being lined up for a juicy appointment in a matter of weeks. Read the full article

[news4dzhozhar]

**Long but a very interesting read with alot of new info** Was Tamerlan Tsarnaev a federal informant? On April 15, 2013, Tamerlan and his younger brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, attacked the Boston Marathon. It was one of the worst terrorist attacks on U.S. soil since 9/11. In all, the Tsarnaevs killed four people and injured hundreds more. One of the most intense manhunts in recent history culminated in a violent shootout with police in Watertown, on April 19. Tamerlan was killed in that shootout. Dzhokhar was arrested. Two years later, Dzhokhar was tried on federal terrorism charges. He was found guilty of the bombing and formally sentenced to death. However, four years after the bombing, after a high-profile federal terrorism trial and multiple government investigations, there are still many unanswered questions, particularly about Tamerlan. In this special report, we'll investigate some of the most controversial unanswered questions about Tamerlan Tsarnaev: - Was he a federal informant? - How does the federal informant program work? - How do federal agencies recruit Muslims and other immigrants to become informants? - Did Tamerlan Tsarnaev receive special treatment through this program for his application to become a U.S. citizen? Part 1: The Theory In 2014, as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev prepared his defense, his lawyers filed a motion seeking all documents relating to FBI contact with Tamerlan. Why? They believed Tamerlan had been a federal informant. They wrote: "We base this on information from our client’s family and other sources that the FBI made more than one visit to talk with ... Tamerlan ... and asked him to be an informant, reporting on the Chechen and Muslim community." It was the first time that claim had entered the official record. The government denied then, as it does today, that Tamerlan was ever a federal informant. An FBI spokesperson referred us back to an Oct. 18, 2013 statement the FBI issued along with Boston police and Massachusetts state police. The statement says law enforcement officials did not know the identities of the Tsarnaev brothers before the Watertown shootout, and that they "were never sources for the FBI nor did the FBI attempt to recruit them as sources." The theory was most recently picked up by investigative reporter Michele McPhee in her new book, "Maximum Harm: The Tsarnaev Brothers, The FBI, and the Road to the Marathon Bombing." "Tamerlan Tsarnaev was the perfect recruit," says McPhee. "He had tentacles in the drug world. He spoke multiple languages. He could mix in anywhere. He was tall and handsome. He had an American wife. Here was a guy that really was the perfect recruit." McPhee is an Emmy-nominated investigative journalist for ABC News. She’s also a former AM talk radio host and to some, a controversial columnist. But McPhee also has deep sources within local law enforcement, a network she’s developed after years of working at the Boston Herald and as police bureau chief for the New York Daily News. In "Maximum Harm," McPhee gathers a constellation of law enforcement sources and new evidence that lead her to a startling allegation: She believes federal authorities offered to help Tsarnaev become a U.S. citizen in exchange for being an informant. "'You help us, we help you,' " McPhee tells Radio Boston. Tsarnaev desperately wanted citizenship. In 2010 he was featured in a magazine article titled, “Will Box for Passport: An Olympic Drive to Become a United States Citizen.” Younger brother Dzhokhar was naturalized in 2012, something that could have intensified Tamerlan's desire for citizenship. "I mean, his little brother was doing better than he was," says McPhee. And in Dzhokhar's trial, a Tsarnaev relative testified that "it is better to be a dog than the younger son." "Tamerlan was more than motivated to become a citizen," McPhee says. Our investigation begins with a journey. On Jan. 21, 2012, Tsarnaev flew to Russia, 15 months before the Marathon bombing. U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents allowed Tsarnaev to board his flight without any additional screening, even though a year earlier Russian intelligence services had issued specific warnings about Tsarnaev to both the FBI and CIA. "Those warnings were: Tamerlan is going to come to Russia and join the jihad," McPhee says. "Well, Tamerlan did indeed go to Russia to join the jihad, was there for six months, came back, and breezed through customs despite the fact he was on multiple terror watch lists on this very day." Tsarnaev was indeed on U.S. terror watch lists. But what exactly was Tsarnaev doing in the Northern Caucasus region of Dagestan from January to July 2012? McPhee alleges that Tsarnaev was sent there to aid counter-terrorism operations against Russian Islamic radicals. There is no definitive evidence to back this claim. But there are curious coincidences, such as the fact that Tsarnaev was recording conversations he had with family members while in Dagestan. Why would he do that, McPhee wonders. There was also a flurry of counter-terrorism operations in the region during the same six-month period Tsarnaev was there. "There were seven high level terror targets who were killed by the Russian Interior Ministry, after meeting with Tamerlan Tsarnaev," she says. "Coincidence? Maybe." When pressed if she is certain Tsarnaev met with radicals, McPhee says, "There are reports of Tamerlan going to this radical mosque in Dagestan. He had met with this man [who] was a recruiter for a roadside bombing that killed a number of first responders and civilians." Mahmoud Nidal was reportedly a recruiter for Islamist insurgents in Dagestan. "They were looking for this recruiter," she says. "The recruiter met with Tamerlan at this mosque, and days later he was tracked at his hideout and killed." Nidal was killed by Russian forces on May 19, 2012, while Tsarnaev was in Dagestan. However, it is unclear if the two men ever actually met. In 2014, the U.S. House Homeland Security Committee put out a report, "The Road to Boston: Counterterrorism Challenges and Lessons from the Marathon Bombings." It cites a former Russian investigator who says that Nidal would not have been afraid to emerge from hiding to meet with Tsarnaev. But the report also states that American investigators stationed in Moscow uncovered no evidence of a relationship between Nidal and Tsarnaev, nor did they discover proof that Tsarnaev had made any attempts to join Chechen rebel groups. Russian investigative journalists disagree. They told Massachusetts U.S. Rep. William Keating in 2014 that their sources say Tsarnaev did try to join Chechen fighters, but that he was rejected in part because of his "conspicuously Western style." Russian forces also killed a second man while Tsarnaev was in Dagestan: William Plotnikov. "Plotnikov was a Canadian who sparked the warnings that the FSB [Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation], the Russian counterintelligence agencies, had given to both the Boston FBI and to the CIA in 2011," says McPhee. She adds: "Plotnikov was picked up, intercepted, by the Russian FSB in 2010. They demand his phone and they intercept text messages between William Plotnikov and Tamerlan Tsarnaev." The 2014 House Homeland Security report says it is unlikely that Tsarnaev and Plotnikov met face-to-face while Tsarnaev was in Dagestan. But it also says FBI officials in Moscow did indicate "that electronic communication between the two may have been collected." Less than a month after the Marathon bombing, Keating sent staff to Russia to investigate alleged ties between Tsarnaev, Plotnikov and Nidal. "[Plotnikov] was a boxer in Canada. Tamerlan was a boxer. And somehow they had known each other before," Keating said in May 2013. Plotnikov died in a shootout with Russian security services on July 14, 2012. Three days later Tamerlan Tsarnaev flew back to the United States. Why then? We don’t know. It could simply be that Tsarnaev had been in Russia for almost six months and being outside of the U.S. for that long may have jeopardized his immigration status. Keating posited a less benign reason during a Homeland Security Committee hearing in July 2013: Keating: "We had reports that our office was able to get that he was meeting with a known terrorist, insurgent Mahmoud Nidal. Someone already on their radar screen in Russia, had they known this. Yet there was another gap where that could have been closed. Now he came back to the U.S. after the person he met with, reportedly, was killed, and the other person that was known to him, was killed. So he sort of beat feet and went home, I think." The Ticket McPhee sees entirely different forces at work. "The ticket that allowed him to return to Boston, well it was paid in cash, which is another huge red flag that's not supposed to happen," she says. "Somebody paid 2050 euro for this ticket. Now remember, Tamerlan was unemployed. So who paid for the ticket? How is it in cash? And a receipt which I have as part of the court record. Somebody wanted him right out of the country and they wanted him out fast." McPhee refers to an airline receipt that investigators found in the bedroom of Tsarnaev’s Cambridge apartment after the Marathon bombing. A photograph of the receipt was entered into evidence during Dzhokhar’s trial. According to trial transcripts, attorneys and an FBI witness refer to it as looking like a receipt for "an old fashioned plane ticket" on Aeroflot, the Russian carrier. We asked travel experts familiar with the Russian airline to examine the photograph of the receipt. They confirm that it is from Aeroflot, and that it was issued to Tamerlan in relation to travel on July 17, 2012. However, it is not a receipt for a 2050 euro airline ticket, as McPhee says. It is only a receipt for excess baggage, not the entire cost of travel. The receipt is in rubles, not euros. Someone paid 2050 rubles, or about $37, so that Tsarnaev could haul extra luggage onto the plane. 'He Did Not Have A Passport' Tamerlan flew from Moscow to JFK International Airport in New York, and then to Boston. He was on multiple terror watch lists. McPhee says Tsarnaev should have never been let back into the country. And yet he was. Easily. In 2016, following Freedom of Information requests from multiple organizations, the Department of Homeland Security released a redacted version of Tsarnaev’s entire immigration file, also known as an A-file. In the file: the Customs and Border Protection record that was created when Tamerlan stepped up to the immigration desk at JFK. "This is really interesting document," McPhee says, "because what it is, is every single time we reenter the county, all of us, you me, you have a DHS Customs Border Patrol Air Entry. So you know, you can do it yourself, or they take the picture at customs. This is a photo of Tamerlan Tsarnaev when he returned on July 17, 2012." Tsarnaev stares directly into the camera. His face is round and he has a full beard. His hair is slightly disheveled. His name and date of birth are both correct. He was fingerprinted. Under "Docs Associated with this Encounter," one document is listed as "Issuing Country: USA." McPhee says, "That's his green card ... the Legal Permanent Resident card. He did not have a passport." McPhee says Tsarnaev had told his family that he had lost his Kyrgyzstan-issued passport. He applied for a new Russian passport while in Dagestan, but left Russia without picking it up. U.S. Customs and Border Protection rules explicitly state that legal permanent residents are not required to have a passport to reenter the U.S. They simply need to present their green cards. However, Tsarnaev had been outside the U.S. for 178 continuous days in a region known for terrorist activity. He was just short of the 180-day absence that would have automatically triggered additional screening. Tsarnaev was also on two terror watch lists. Given these factors in combination, McPhee says Tsarnaev should not have been able to breeze through immigration at JFK Airport. McPhee: “Think about it. He was still on these terror watch lists. The fact that he had been gone so long should have triggered a secondary alarm, several sources say. In and of itself. The fact they didn't have a passport. The fact that his travel documentations were essentially the green card he was issued because he claimed if he ever went back to Russia he'd be killed. All of it just smacks of either incredible incompetence or a blatant cover-up.” Chakrabarti: “You’re saying that those coincidences could only have happened if he had some — if he was getting some special attention from the government.” McPhee: “Someone was pulling the strings. 1,000 percent.” 'Disturbing That Such A Detailed Lookout Could Be Missed' To McPhee, the constellation of evidence indicates that Tsarnaev had been getting special assistance from the government. There is a more mundane explanation. In 2011, Russian intelligence services had warned both the FBI and the CIA of their concerns about Tsarnaev, and his potential travel to Russia. In March 2011, the FBI, through the Boston Joint Terrorism Task Force, opened an investigation into Tsarnaev. As part of the investigation, a CBP officer put him in the TECS system, one of the government’s terror watch lists. In October 2011, after receiving another warning from Russia, the CIA placed Tsarnaev in a different terror database, known as TIDE. Did the system alert Customs and Border Protection agents when Tsarnaev flew to Russia in January 2012? That was what Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa wanted to know when then-Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in April 2013, just days after the Watertown shootout. Grassley: "Is it true that his identity document did not match his airline ticket, and if so, why did TSA miss the discrepancy?" Napolitano: "There was a mismatch there ... but, even with the misspelling, under our current system there are redundancies, um uh, and so the system did ping when he was leaving the United States." Grassley pressed further. Napolitano answered. Napolitano: "... On the, um, misspelling of Tamerlan's name and what that meant ... I think it would be better if we could discuss those with you in a classified setting." Two government reports published in 2014 reveal what actually happened. The TECS database did "ping" when Tsarnaev flew out of JFK on Jan. 21, 2012. His name was put on a list of "passengers of concern" that was sent to Customs and Border Protection in Boston and New York. There were 22 CBP officers assigned to examine passengers on the list that day at JFK. CBP officers determined Tsarnaev was a low priority compared to other passengers on the list. The reports state that "there is no indication that CBP officials at the John F. Kennedy International Airport reviewed the record related Tamerlan Tsarnaev." It’s a stunning oversight. The March 2014 House Homeland Security report on the Marathon bombings concluded that Tsarnaev should have been a high-priority target because, "[The] TECS alert was unambiguous in its requests ... that officials encountering Tamerlan Tsarnaev 'Escort [him] to CBP secondary and detain is mandatory whether or not the office believes there is an exact match.' It is disturbing that such a detailed lookout could be missed." On July 17, 2012, Tsarnaev flew back to JFK. Again, he was not pulled aside at immigration. Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, asked Napolitano why: Graham: "When he left to go back to Russia in 2012, the system picked up his departure but did not pick up him coming back, is that correct?" Napolitano: "That’s my understanding and I can give you the detail in a classified setting. But I think the salient fact there, senator, is that the FBI TECS alert on him at that point was more than a year old and had expired." That turns out not to be true. The alert had not expired. Tsarnaev was still on the watch list. All that had changed was how the TECS database alerted border agents, according to a subsequent government report. The initial alert on Tsarnaev instructed CBP officers to conduct more extensive inspection of Tsarnaev, known as secondary inspection, whenever he attempted to reenter the United States. In March 2012, that alert was set to no longer display on the computer screens of border protection agents working at JFK immigration counters. Therefore, on July 17, 2012, all Tamerlan Tsarnaev had to do was hand the immigration officer his green card, take a picture, and get fingerprinted, and he was back in the United States. There was no secondary inspection. Graham observed one more disturbing fact about Tsarnaev’s travel back and forth to Russia: Graham: "The point I’m trying to make … the FBI ... they had no knowledge of him leaving or coming back." How is this possible? The TECS database did in fact send alerts to the Joint Terrorism Task Force in Boston, specifically the CBP officer who first put Tsarnaev on the watch list. The 2014 House Homeland Security report states that "it is not clear that this information was shared with others on the Boston JTTF." The April 2014 report published by the inspectors general of the intelligence community, CIA, Department of Homeland Security and Justice Department goes even further. It says the CBP officer followed normal procedures in communicating with Tsarnaev’s FBI case officer. He passed along the information about the terror watch list alerts via "email, orally, or by passing a 'sticky note.' " "This is where we are in the war on terror," says McPhee, "that border patrol is putting a sticky note on an FBI counter-terrorism officer’s desk ... give me a break." The 2014 House Homeland Security report offers an even more withering assessment: "This lack of communication represents a failure to proactively share information that could potentially save lives." Part 2: Immigration Vulnerabilities And Informants Despite these clear bureaucratic reasons that explain why Tsarnaev so easily passed in and out of the United States, McPhee still believes there’s more to the story. She believes that the federal government offered Tsarnaev a chance to become a U.S. citizen in exchange for being an informant, and that’s why he walked through immigration without a second look. Boston has unique experience with the FBI informant program. There is precedent for the government protecting criminal activity of its own informants. James "Whitey" Bulger was a murderous criminal mobster. In 1975, he began cooperating with the government and became a "Top Echelon Informant." "The FBI gave the exact same denials about Whitey Bulger for decades," says McPhee, "and we all know now that there is evidence. And I sat through the Whitey Bulger trial every single day; the summer of Whitey. I was there. I mean, it was staggering." Bulger murdered people while he was an informant. The FBI protected him. In 1995, Bulger was finally indicted. But before he could be arrested, Bulger ran; his FBI handler had tipped him off. Bulger successfully evaded capture for 16 years before he was finally arrested in June 2011. After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, law enforcement shifted its focus from the mob to counter-terrorism. McPhee says the new focus also made its way into the federal informant program. "After 9/11, there was a huge push to recruit Muslims to inform on other Muslims in mosques," says McPhee. "They call it 'mosque crawling' — raking." The program was pioneered by the New York City Police Department. McPhee watched the program up close in her work as police bureau chief for the New York Daily News. "I worked out of One Police Plaza for decades," she says, a reference to the NYPD headquarters. "I know a lot about the terrorist interdiction unit. And what they did, which was genius, was they recruited Muslims who had taken the civil service just to come up become police officers. And they went to [CIA headquarters in] Langley and they were trained just like CIA agents. And the program was wildly successful." One measure of that success: Nearly half of more than 500 recent federal terrorism convictions came from informant-based cases. 'The Perfect Terrorist' The use of informants in counter-terrorism cases is also highly controversial. Federal informants have been directly involved in several high-profile attempted and successful terrorist attacks. The most spectacular of these cases involves David Headley. In 2010, he pleaded guilty to masterminding the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attack that killed more than 160 people. Headley is Pakistani-American. In the mid-1990s, he was arrested for drug trafficking. He became an informant for the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), in exchange for a reduced sentence. After 9/11, the DEA turned its attention to counter-terrorism and told Headley to gather intelligence on extremists in New York and Pakistan. But Headley did not abandon his own extremist views. He told friends he celebrated al-Qaida's attack on New York, which lead the FBI to open the first of several investigations into Headley. The PBS series "Frontline" covered the case in its documentary, "A Perfect Terrorist." The DEA sent Headley to Pakistan as an American intelligence operative, but off the books, according to U.S. officials who spoke with "Frontline." While there, Headley began training with a Pakistani terrorist group, a fact he did not hide from his family. His wife grew so concerned, she went to the U.S. Embassy in Lahore to report her husband. The FBI made inquiries into Headley’s activities at least six times before the Mumbai attack, but they interviewed Headley only once. They never took action against him. Why? The government would not respond to "Frontline’s" inquiries, and vast portions of Headley’s trial remain under seal. Headley's case is extreme, but there are thousands of federal informants whose activities are difficult for Congress to monitor. In 2016, an audit of the DEA's confidential informant program found the agency itself "did not appropriately track all confidential source activity." Massachusetts U.S. Rep. Stephen Lynch is calling for greater oversight of informant programs. In April 2017, he filed the Confidential Informant Accountability Act, citing crimes committed by other federal informants, including one who had been arrested in 43 states. Lynch: "Good luck to him on the remaining seven states. But if a guy’s been arrested in 43 states, he should not be eligible as a confidential informant, especially one highly paid. Zero credibility. That’s disgraceful ... The bill would also require law enforcement agencies to report, just report, all serious crimes committed by their confidential informants. Including an accounting of the total number of each type and category of crime." 'The FBI Began To View The Entire Muslim Community As Suspect' There are currently 18,000 informants working for the DEA. At the FBI, there could be more than 15,000. "That number 15,000 gets thrown around, but I would actually find that number to be fairly small," says Michael German, a national security expert with the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. German is also a former FBI special agent and worked undercover on domestic terrorism cases for 16 years from 1988 to 2004. "Every FBI agent is required to participate in the informant program, and to have actively producing informants," he says. "There are roughly 13,000 FBI agents. Do the math. The fact that you would have two per agent wouldn’t be very surprising to me." German says no one else should be surprised either. German: "Informants are the bread and butter of law enforcement — always have been, always will be. The problem after 9/11 is the FBI began to view the entire Muslim community as suspect. So the idea was FBI agents, we need to have better information about what's going on. But because the entire Muslim community was viewed as suspect, basically any Muslim that the government had some leverage over could be coerced into becoming an informant." However, German says it's unlikely that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was a federal informant. He takes a law enforcement veteran’s measured approach, pointing to the fact that the CIA and FBI put Tsarnaev on terrorist watch lists in 2011, not something they would usually do for one of their own "assets." But he also adds, "The idea that the FBI would approach an individual who is in the immigration process to encourage them to become an FBI informant with the — not the promise of — but at least dangling the idea that that might be beneficial to their interests, certainly wouldn't be out of the realm of possibilities and would probably be likely." In 2013, German authored a report for the American Civil Liberties Union titled, "Unleashed and Unaccountable: The FBI’s Unchecked Abuse of Authority." The report claims that "the FBI has aggressively pressured members of the American Muslim community to become informants for the FBI, particularly on immigrants who rely on the government to process their ... citizenship applications in a fair and timely manner." The ACLU points to an FBI training presentation — a PowerPoint the group obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request. The 2012 document contains sections that teach FBI agents to recruit Muslim informants by exploiting "immigration vulnerabilities," and that agents should have a "firm grasp on immigration law." "Immigrants who need assistance by the government to process their immigration papers — that's an opportunity to try to put pressure on somebody to convince them that it's in their best interest and might assist in acquiring their immigration benefits if they participate in becoming an informant," says German. The FBI is not allowed to make explicit offers of citizenship to potential informants. In 2006, then-U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales issued guidelines on confidential human sources that said, "No promises or commitments can be made, except by the United States Department of Homeland Security, regarding the alien status of any person or the right of any person to enter or remain in the United States." However, German says, "The implication is often that they can, right? The FBI is trying to give that person the impression that they can help them. And whether that's true or not, the FBI is allowed to lie to somebody." This is where things get even murkier. While the FBI is not allowed to use explicit offers of citizenship to entice potential informants, German says law enforcement agencies in fact do have significant sway on an immigrant’s citizenship application. "It's often a very fuzzy line," he says. "And there is a program called CARRP where the FBI can put a delay on the provision of immigration benefits." CARRP, or the Controlled Application Review and Resolution Process, was first implemented covertly by United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) in 2008. Its goal is to "ensure that immigration benefits are not granted to individuals and organizations that pose a threat to national security." CARRP casts a wide net. Immigration officials will not say exactly how many people fall under the program, but last year Buzzfeed reported that between 2008 to 2012, the case files of over 19,000 people from 18 Muslim-majority countries were rerouted through CARRP. More importantly, CARRP gives law enforcement agencies significant say in the immigration proceedings for any person of national security concern. Through a process known as "deconfliction," CARRP allows the FBI to request that USCIS "grant, deny or place in abeyance" an immigrant’s citizenship application. The ACLU concluded that, "Under CARRP, USCIS officers are instructed to follow FBI direction. ... As a result, CARRP has effectively turned the immigration benefits adjudication process over to the FBI." The ACLU also claims that the FBI uses its authority under CARRP to recruit immigrant informants. "Clearly under the current program, the FBI could delay or halt the immigration proceedings," says German. "It's certainly possible that the FBI would look at somebody who is processing to obtain citizenship and attempt to use that leverage to gain cooperation." We sent a detailed list of questions to the FBI, USCIS, and the Department of Homeland Security seeking more information. The FBI would not respond and instead referred all CARRP-related questions to Homeland Security. DHS and USCIS did not answer our inquiries. Part 3: The A-File In August 2012, following his six month trip to Russia, Tamerlan Tsarnaev submitted his application for U.S. citizenship. DHS released a heavily redacted version of Tsarnaev’s entire immigration file, also known as an A-File, in February 2016, following years of Freedom of Information requests from multiple media organizations. Documents and routing slips in the file indicate that Tsarnaev's naturalization application was processed through CARRP. "There are specific officers that are deemed CARRP officers and they get the file before a person is even interviewed by immigration," says Susan Church, former chair of the New England chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. Immigration attorneys say those specially trained CARRP officers should have noted multiple red flags in Tsarnaev’s naturalization application. For example, his six-month trip to Russia in 2012. Tsarnaev reported that trip on his naturalization form, but back in 2003, Tsarnaev was first allowed into the United States as the son of an asylum seeker. "No asylum seeker should be going back to their own country without raising concern and red flags on the part of the U.S. government," says Ellen Kief, an immigration attorney in Boston. Kief says USCIS looks harshly upon such trips. "USCIS's position is that, if somebody travels abroad back to their home country, it suggests that they may no longer be in need of protection in the U.S.," Kief says. USCIS considers such travel as evidence of immigration fraud. People can get deported even if they hold a green card. Yet in Tsarnaev’s case, his six-month trip to Dagestan appeared to raise no flags at all. In fact, immigration experts tell us that Tsarnaev’s application was processed with unusual speed. He appeared for his final naturalization interview and civics tests in January 2013, just five months after he began the application process. "Absolutely, I would say that's definitely fast for what we believe is the norm," Church says. She also says applicants caught up in CARRP usually wait much longer. "I would say in the last five years, they are taking at a bare minimum a year. I haven't seen any gone through in less than a year, and sometimes I've seen them take two years." In Tsarnaev’s case, immigration officials did make direct inquires to counter-terrorism agents. They contacted the FBI and the Boston Joint Terrorism Task Force multiple times in October and November 2012, asking whether Tsarnaev was a national security concern. McPhee: "The USCIS officer repeatedly went back to the FBI and said, 'This guy is on a terror watch list. Why would I give him citizenship?' The FBI would say, 'We found nothing wrong with him. He is wonderful. Give him citizenship.' This went back and forth for months." Following each request, law enforcement officials sent back replies to USCIS stating, "There is no national security concern related to [Tamerlan Tsarnaev]." Immigration officials even once met directly with the FBI counter-terrorism agent assigned to Tsarnaev. They discussed intelligence on Tsarnaev that Russian security services had provided the FBI in 2011. The FBI agent told the immigration officer that he had no "derogatory information” about Tsarnaev and that he had “no opposition to [his] naturalization." "How many times have you heard the ACLU talk about how Muslims are not getting citizenship even if they are here — they don't have a criminal record, they're employed, they've been sponsored by a major company, they can't get citizenship," she says. "But you have an unemployed Muslim who's on multiple terror watch lists, who is connected to drug dealers, and this guy is the perfect candidate that the FBI is pushing him through? It makes no sense." It’s another one of those unanswered questions whose answer could be sensational, or mundane. A mundane explanation: The Boston FBI had no objection to Tsarnaev becoming a citizen because it had closed its assessment of him on June 24, 2011. They had found nothing at the time to connect Tsarnaev to any "nexus of terrorism." However, the FBI’s legal attache in Moscow kept its case file on him open. More Puzzling Inconsistencies In April 2014, inspectors general of the U.S. Intelligence Community, the CIA, the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security released an unclassified summary of their report on federal information handling prior to the Boston Marathon bombing. The report concludes that Tamerlan was given his final naturalization interview on Jan. 23, 2013. It says no decision about his citizenship was made at that time because USCIS was waiting for court records related to a prior assault and battery charge. In 2009, Tsarnaev had been arrested in Cambridge for slapping his girlfriend. The charges were dropped. The inspectors general report contains this remarkable passage: "The USCIS officer told the [Homeland Security inspector general] that had the court records been processed before [January] ... he would have had no grounds to deny the application." Why would the inspectors general of the U.S. intelligence community, who presumably had access to Tsarnaev’s complete, unredacted immigration file, conclude that his criminal court records were not in his application prior to the Marathon bombings, when in fact, they were? We asked Homeland Security and USCIS. Neither agency answered our inquiry. Who Is This Other Person? There are two other documents in Tamerlan’s immigration file that beg explanation. One page contains what looks like the screenshot of a computer window. Written across the top of the window: "Oath Ceremony Schedule for TAMERLAN TSARNAEV." The window also contains oath ceremony location information, and a time and date: Oct. 16, 2012, 8 a.m. Tsarnaev did not complete naturalization interview until Jan. 23, 2013, so what is this document that seems to indicate a final oath ceremony was scheduled two months before his interview? Again, neither DHS nor USCIS responded to our requests for more information. Finally, there are two copies of a medical examination form dated July 10, 2003. The exam was required prior to Tsarnaev’s first arrival in America on asylum in 2003. The forms are virtually identical -- names, signatures, even the shape of check marks and stamps. They resemble exact color photocopies of each other, except for one thing. The forms contain photographs of two different people! On one form, the picture of a young Tamerlan Tsarnaev. On the other, a photograph of a different person. His eyes are different, his eyebrows are lighter, his nose is a different shape. And yet, he’s wearing the exact same patterned shirt and dark collar as Tsarnaev is. The passport number near the picture of the unidentified person is not redacted. That number matches the one on Tamerlan’s Kyrgyzstan passport. There may be a straightforward explanation, but USCIS is not providing it. Instead, the agency sent us the same statement it made in 2016: "While USCIS found no errors in the processing of Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s ... application, we are always seeking to strengthen our very intensive screening processes." On Jan. 23, 2013, an immigration officer interviewed Tsarnaev at the JFK federal building in Boston. He passed the English and U.S. history tests. The officer recommended the government grant Tsarnaev citizenship. All that remained was one final approval from a higher level supervisor, due to his 2009 assault and battery charge. Investigative reporter McPhee says there’s no way Tsarnaev could have known that. All he was told by the immigration officer that day was that a decision could not be made at that time. "He stormed out and 12 days later, he’s at Phantom Fireworks buying the biggest and loudest pyrotechnics in the store," she says, referring to the store in Seabrook, New Hampshire. Less than three months later, Tamerlan and his brother bombed the Marathon. Part 4: 'Maybe The Answers Will Emerge Over Time' McPhee spent three years investigating these questions. She too recognizes that the truth about Tsarnaev remains elusive. Meghna Chakrabarti: "But you see what I’m getting at? There's a lot of interesting pieces and all this documentation that you've come up with -- I mean, heck of a lot of smoke --but some people are going to say there's no fire here because no one has been, you know, we don't have the piece of paper that puts Tamerlan Tsarnaev on the list of FBI informants." McPhee: "People say it's not a smoking gun. But what I've created is a map and the road to the end of this map leads to the fact that somebody was helping Tamerlan Tsarnaev. Somebody with a lot of power and that's somebody I believe was in the federal government. Now can you definitively say he was an FBI informant? Well, I mean the government is masterful at semantics. So perhaps, he was listed under a different agency. Perhaps he was an informant on loan. I mean the Department of Homeland Security has multiple units that would have used Tamerlan successfully including the Drug Enforcement Unit. So there are a lot of unanswered questions and yet you say it, there's smoke everywhere. Well look, if a building is billowing with black smoke it is very likely that there is a fire somewhere within the walls." Chakrabarti: "I mean Michele, what you're saying — people are going to hear — and I mean — because another way of interpreting what you're saying is that the FBI made him. Or that if he became radicalized by doing work as an informant on behalf of the United States government and then because he wasn't allowed to become a citizen at the end, that that radicalization tipped him over into bombing the Boston Marathon." McPhee: "It wouldn't be the first time. I mean Tamerlan, believe me, I believe he's a sociopath. You can't put a backpack behind a row of children like he did, like his brother did, without being sick in the head to begin with. I don't think it's malfeasance. I don't believe anyone in any federal capacity knew that they were going to blow up the marathon. I think it’s just bureaucratic incompetence." On this point, former FBI special agent German agrees. "Hindsight is 20-20," he says. "When the FBI swears in a new agent, they gave him a gun and a badge, but they don't give him a crystal ball." Question, after question, after unanswered question — many asked by other reporters over the years — and mostly met with official denial or silence. Ultimately, the story about all that we do not know about Tamerlan Tsarnaev is really a story about what we, the public, will accept as truth. There are many ways to process the theory that the government offered Tamerlan help with citizenship in exchange for being a federal informant. You can believe all of it. Or, you can dismiss it all as wild conspiracy theory. Or, you can acknowledge something in between. Why aren’t federal authorities more eager to answer these questions? Especially when the government has asked one of the biggest questions itself. Who Built The Bombs? In 2014, one year before Dzhokhar’s death penalty trial began, prosecutors filed a pretrial motion that stated the bombs were sophisticated devices that "... would have been difficult for the Tsarnaevs to fabricate successfully without training or assistance from others ... searches of the Tsarnaevs' residences, three vehicles, and other locations associated with them yielded virtually no traces of black powder, again strongly suggesting that others had built, or at least helped the Tsarnaevs build, the bombs, and thus might have built more." The motion was signed by the lead prosecutor in the case, then-Assistant U.S. Attorney William Weinreb, now acting U.S. attorney for Massachusetts. WBUR asked Weinreb in February 2017 if the government still believes other bomb-makers may be out there. Weinreb: "I've prosecuted a lot of cases. The Boston Marathon bombing case was one of the most thoroughly investigated cases that I have ever come across. There were many, many, many investigators. And they looked under every rock and left nothing unexamined. Despite all of that investigation, I think it is fair to say that there are still a number of questions unanswered about that case. Maybe the answers will emerge over time." The government itself can pursue the answer to that question. We do not know if there is an ongoing investigation into who made the Marathon bombs. Part 5: Should We Want To Know? How much secrecy should Boston accept in the name of security? We put the question to McPhee. "That's why [the book, "Maximum Harm"] was so important to me," she says. "I do not blame anyone for what happened at the Boston Marathon. It's a horrible set of circumstances but I think that we are owed the truth at the very least." And McPhee adds, "Now, again, there are so many hardworking agents all over the nation who are quite literally giving up their entire lives to protect us from terrorism. I recognize that all day. But at the same time when things go wrong there has to be some sunshine and there has to be some questions that has to make sure that that doesn't happen again." German, the former FBI special agent, agrees. "I see a huge problem with the government not being more forthcoming," he says. "And I think the FBI is its own worst enemy in this situation where we know that the absence of evidence or gaps in information are playgrounds for conspiracy theorists." German does not believe Tamerlan was a federal informant, but he says something even more important is at stake. German is now at the NYU Brennan Center for Justice. He says a full accounting is still possible through the justice system, because the truth about the government’s relationship with terrorists comes out in the course of their criminal trials. German: "Ultimately, the FBI and the intelligence community survive because the public trust them. And when when you have these gaps in the story it makes it harder for the public to trust them and easier to trust theories that suggest that it's the government itself that is the problem. And I think that's very dangerous to our national security. Whether it's the Fort Hood attacks, the Mumbai attacks that I mentioned, the Boston Marathon bombing. What happens after an attack is we tend to find the government knew a lot more and didn't properly manage that information and address all the leads." But in Boston's case, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was put on trial. Not Tamerlan. To be clear, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev are guilty of attacking a beloved Boston event. They are guilty of killing and maiming innocent people. Dzhokhar’s own lawyers said he did it. No one doubts that. Dzhokhar was convicted on federal terrorism charges on April 8, 2015. A judge formally sentenced him to death on June 24, 2015. Immediately before the sentencing, Dzhokhar addressed his victims for the first time saying, "I am sorry for the lives that I’ve taken, for the suffering that I’ve caused you, for the damage that I’ve done. Irreparable damage." There is still a tight shroud of secrecy wrapped around much of this case. Major portions of the trial remain under seal. Tsarnaev’s defense team is currently preparing his appeal. In January 2017, they filed a motion requesting access to 13 documents that prosecutors never disclosed to the defense during Tsarnaev’s original trial. The government will not even disclose the subject area of the documents to the defense. Prosecutors opposed the defense motion, and bolstered their argument to keep the trial documents secret by submitting even more secret information to the court. German, the former FBI special agent, concludes with a somber caution. "Instead of doing a full accounting for what happened, there is a knee jerk reaction to shut the lid on it," he says. "But that causes more problems than it solves and just ensures that we're going to have future catastrophes like this that that could have been prevented."

[newstfionline]

Many Organizations Banned in Pakistan Thrive Online

AP, July 11, 2017

ISLAMABAD--It’s dusk. The shadows of three men brandishing assault rifles welcome the reader to the Facebook page of Lashkar-e-Islam, one of 65 organizations that are banned in Pakistan, either because of terrorist links or as purveyors of sectarian hate.

Still more than 40 of these groups operate and flourish on social media sites, communicating on Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and Telegram, according to a senior official with Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Agency, or FIA, who is tasked with shutting down the sites. They use them to recruit, raise money and demand a rigid Islamic system. It is also where they incite the Sunni faithful against the country’s minority Shiites and extoll jihad, or holy war, in India-ruled Kashmir and in Afghanistan.

“It’s like a party of the banned groups online. They are all on social media,” the FIA official told The Associated Press. He spoke on condition his name not be used because agency officials are not allowed to be quoted by name.

Meanwhile, Pakistan is waging a cyber crackdown on activists and journalists who use social media to criticize the government, the military or the intelligence agencies. The Interior Ministry even ordered the FIA, Pakistan’s equivalent of the American FBI, to move against “those ridiculing the Pakistan Army on social media.”

The FIA official said the agency has interrogated more than 70 activists for postings considered critical. All but two have been released and a third is still under investigation, he said.

Activists, journalists and rights groups who monitor Pakistan’s cyberspace say the banned groups active on social media operate unencumbered because several are patronized by the military, its intelligence agencies, radical religious groups and politicians looking for votes.

Even the FIA official concedes state support for some of the banned groups but said it is a global phenomenon engaged in by all intelligence agencies.

“Everyone is protecting their own terrorists. Your good guy is my bad guy and vice versa,” he said, adding that some sites belonging to banned groups are intentionally ignored to gain intelligence.

On one Facebook page, the Afghan Taliban flag welcomes viewers, its masthead emblazoned with Arabic script identifying the page as belonging to the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Still another Facebook site features one of India’s most wanted, Hafiz Saeed, the founder of Lashkar-e-Taiba, another banned organization and a U.S. declared terrorist group.

Saeed even has a $10 million U.S.-imposed bounty on his head. Yet his group, which has been resurrected under several names, is billed as a charity and has several Facebook pages. Currently called Falah-e-Insaniat, the group boasts of its community work, but its pages feature anti-India videos, call Syria a bleeding wound, rail against India and chastise the Pakistan government for siding with the U.S. following the 9/11 attacks.

Facebook and Twitter have said that they ban “terrorist content.” In the second half of last year, Twitter said on its site it had suspended 376,890 accounts because they were thought to promote terrorism, although they say less than 2 percent of the removals were the result of requests from governments. Facebook, meanwhile, said in a blog last month it uses artificial intelligence and human reviewers to find and remove “terrorist content.”

Shahzad Ahmed, of the Islamabad-based social media rights group BytesForAll, said Pakistan’s powerful military and intelligence agencies are waging a “communication war” against progressive, moderate voices and those who criticize the government and more particularly the military and its agencies. They use radical religious groups to promote their narrative, he said.

“Their connectivity on the ground, the mosques, madrassas and supporters translates into social media strength and they are (further) strengthened because they feel ‘no one is going to touch us,’” he said.

Ahmed Waqass Goraya is a blogger who was picked up and tortured by men he believes belonged to the country’s powerful intelligence agency, known by its acronym ISI. He said Pakistan’s social media space is dominated by armies of trolls unleashed by the military, intelligence agencies and allied radical religious groups to push their narrative. That narrative includes promoting anti-India sentiment--India is Pakistan’s longtime enemy against whom it has fought three wars.

Critics who openly accuse the military of using extremists as proxies are under attack, said Goraya. He fled Pakistan after social media was used to suggest the he and other bloggers were involved in blasphemy, a charge that carries the death penalty. In Pakistan even the suggestion that someone insulted Islam or its prophet can incite mobs to violence.

Earlier this month, Taimoor Raza, a minority Shiite, became the first person sentenced to death under Pakistan’s blasphemy law for a social media posting.

[cnrgcommons]

Open Position: Staff Attorney

Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon’s(EMO) SOAR Immigration Legal Services has the following open position. For more information about EMO please visit our website www.emoregon.org.

Position: Staff Attorney

PURPOSE: To provide direct legal services to low income and culturally diverse immigrants in Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon’s (EMO) SOAR Immigration Legal Services’ Washington County Office.

TO APPLY: Please email a cover letter and resume to emo@emoregon.org no later than 4 p.m. on July 3, 2017.

ACCOUNTABILITY: To the mission and goals of EMO as determined by the Board of Directors, and as administered by the Executive Director and his/her delegates.

REPORTS TO: SOAR Legal Managing Attorney.

MAJOR RESPONSIBILITIES:

Provide direct legal representation to low income clients with USCIS administrative applications and selected cases in immigration court on a broad range of immigration cases including: family-based petitions, adjustment of status, naturalization, temporary protected status, consular processing, deferred action for childhood arrivals, U visas, and other immigration remedies.

Plan and coordinate SOAR Citizenship Day Clinics as needed throughout the state.

Hold community presentations on immigration topics.

Conduct outreach to the immigrant community.

Recruit, coordinate training, and provide support for volunteer attorneys, law students, and legal assistants.

Submit monthly reports on services rendered.

Other duties as assigned.

QUALIFICATIONS:

Ability to work within the mission, vision and ethics of Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon.

Willingness and ability to work with people of diverse ethnicity, socio-economic circumstance, religion, culture and sexual orientation.

Must be a lawyer in good standing with the Oregon Bar Association or a lawyer who is certified to practice federal immigration law in Oregon and meets the requirements of ORS 9.280 and the Oregon Rules of Professional Conduct.

Attorney with at least two years of experience in immigration law.

Proven organizational skills and ability to maintain calm, professional manner.

Ability to be self-directed and work as a member of a team.

Ability to handle highly sensitive matters with confidentiality, diplomacy and professionalism.

Excellent time management and attention to deadlines.

Proven proficiency using software programs for data and word processing.

Ability to communicate fluently in Spanish and English.

Must possess valid driver’s license and evidence of insurability.

WORK HOURS: Full time.

SALARY: $44,000-$48,000 per year.

BENEFITS: All regular employees (does not include on-call or temporary) are eligible for vacation, holidays, sick leave, employee assistance program and employee trainings. Employees in exempt positions that are at least 0.50 FTE or non-exempt positions that are 20 hours per week or more also receive medical insurance, dental insurance, disability insurance and life insurance, per eligibility requirements.

LOCATION: Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon’s SOAR Immigration Legal Services Washington County program site and other sites as assigned.

[yeskraim]

Tourist visa scam traps Indian workers in abusive jobs in UAE

Exploitative employers in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are increasingly using tourist visas to hire Indian nationals in a scam that leaves migrants open to labour abuse, police and activists said.

Indian migrants on visit visas – quicker and cheaper to obtain than work permits – are wary of reporting exploitation on the job for fear of revealing their illegal status, they say.

The scale of the problem is unknown as visit visas do not appear in Indian or UAE migration or employment records.

But workers, police and lawyers said the practice is on the rise in a nation with more than three million Indian migrants, often hired at short notice to work on large construction projects.

“Employers and recruiters have colluded and invented this visit visa route,” said Bheem Reddy, president of the Emigrants Welfare Forum in the southern Indian state of Telangana.

Reddy’s charity estimates at least 10,000 migrants from the state – just one of 29 in India – have found work in the UAE having entered the country on visit visas since July last year.

A demand for short-term workers in the run-up to big events such as Dubai’s Expo 2020 world fair in October has further fuelled the scam, a United Nations official said on condition of anonymity.

No workers’ rights

Indian migration into the Gulf has been steady for decades but using tourist visas to abuse workers is new, activists say.

Anuradha Vobbilisetty, who works on migrant labour cases in Dubai courts, said she had supported about 270 workers on tourist visas since 2018 who had not been fully paid.

Whereas work permits are issued by embassies and leave a paper trail, visit visas are sold by hotels and airlines, giving workers no rights and freeing employers from all responsibility.

“Their passports were taken by agents at the airport itself, they didn’t get paid for months,” Vobbilisetty said.

“But they continued working without salaries as they feared complaining about working illegally,” she said, adding that 227 of the workers ended up being paid after the police stepped in.

The number of complaints made by Indian migrant workers against recruiters relating to jobs overseas tripled to more than 600 between 2016 and 2019, according to government data.

Many Indian workers in the Gulf – from cleaners to builders – say they have spoken to the government and charities about abuses from withholding wages and debt bondage to torture.

Scared to speak out

More than a third of the UAE’s registered eight million migrant workers were Indian nationals as of 2017, the latest United Nations data shows.

Yet the number of Indians going to the UAE, at least officially, has dropped due to an economic crunch and the rising use of visit visas, India’s external affairs ministry has said.

India‘s consul general in Dubai – the UAE’s most populous city – said workers using the official channel are protected as details of the employer and the recruitment agent are recorded.

UAE embassy officials in India said they had no record of migrants working in the country after entering on visit visas.

Some smaller employers cut corners and save costs with the visit visas, said Sureshkumar Madhusudanan of the Federation of Overseas Recruitment Associations of India, an umbrella group.

Many employers also use visit visas to hire workers quickly then convert them to work permits, according to activists.

Mohammad Pasha lodged a police complaint in Telangana last November against a job agent who arranged a supermarket job for him in Dubai on a visit visa.

When asked by police at Mumbai airport if he was going for work, Pasha lied and said he was sightseeing as the recruiter said he risked jail if the authorities discovered the truth.

Pasha said he worked 16-hour days without overtime and was paid 800 dirhams ($218) monthly, not the 1,000 promised – but his employer warned him to keep quiet.

“They said I would be behind bars if I spoke up,” he said by phone from Telangana. “I wanted to approach the labour court but I was scared as I was working illegally on a visit visa.”

After three months in Dubai, Pasha gathered enough money to fly home. Telangana police said they had arrested the agent and his accomplice – who had got Pasha the job and his visa – for fraud and launched awareness-raising campaigns in villages.

“We are telling them (would-be migrants) that these (visit) visas are different from job visas,” said officer Upender Reddy.

Bheem Reddy, of the Emigrants Welfare Forum, questioned whether Indian authorities were being vigilant enough when examining migrants leaving the country to work abroad.

“It is visible whether they are real tourists or going for employment,” he said. “A visibly poor labourer going in slippers for tourism … how is this being allowed?

Read More

The post Tourist visa scam traps Indian workers in abusive jobs in UAE appeared first on Gadgets To Make Life Easier.

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[bountyofbeads]

‘The enigma of the entire Mueller probe’: Focus on origins of Russian investigation puts spotlight on Maltese professor

https://wapo.st/31XQgvj

‘The enigma of the entire Mueller probe’: Focus on origins of Russian investigation puts spotlight on Maltese professor

By Rosalind S. Helderman, Shane Harris and Ellen NAKASHIMA | Published June 30 at 6:07 PM ET | Washington Post |

Posted July 1, 2019 |

Shortly after Joseph Mifsud’s efforts to help connect a Trump adviser with the Kremlin were detailed in court filings, an Italian reporter found him at a university in Rome, where he was serving as a visiting professor.

“I never got any money from the Russians: my conscience is clear,” Mifsud told La Repubblica. “I am not a secret agent.”

Then Mifsud disappeared.

The Maltese-born academic has not surfaced publicly since that October 2017 interview, days after Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about details of their interactions. Among them, Papadopoulos told investigators, was an April 2016 meeting in which Mifsud alerted him that the Russians had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails.”

The conversation between Mifsud and Papadopoulos, eventually relayed by an Australian diplomat to U.S. government officials, was cited by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III as the event that set in motion the FBI probe into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia.

With Attorney General William P. Barr’s review of the counterintelligence investigation underway, the origins of the inquiry itself are now in the spotlight — and with them, the role of Mifsud, a little-known figure. 

In Mifsud’s absence, a number of President Trump’s allies and advisers have been floating a provocative theory: that the Maltese professor was a Western intelligence plant.

Seizing on the vacuum of information about him, they have promoted the idea that he was working for the FBI, CIA or possibly British or Italian intelligence, citing exaggerated and at times distorted details about his life.

Trump attorney Rudolph Giuliani told Fox News in April that Mifsud was a “counterintelligence operative, either Maltese or Italian,” who took part in what sounded to him like a “counterintelligence trap” against Papadopoulos. 

Spokeswomen for the FBI, Justice Department and CIA declined to comment, as did a spokesman for Italy’s Security Intelligence Department. 

Such a notion runs counter to the description of Mifsud in the Mueller report, which states Mifsud “had connections to Russia” and “maintained various Russian contacts,” including a former employee of the Internet Research Agency, the Russian organization that carried out a social media disinformation campaign in 2016.

Former FBI director James B. Comey, in an opinion column for The Washington Post in May, described Mifsud bluntly as “a Russian agent.” 

Mifsud did not respond to requests for comment made through Stephan Roh, a Swiss lawyer who says he represents the professor. Roh said suggestions that the professor had ties to Russian intelligence are “defamatory accusations.”

Mueller’s report is silent on whether Mifsud’s interactions with Papadopoulos were part of the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the presidential campaign and boost Trump. 

Officials familiar with U.S. intelligence reports told The Post that Mifsud had been identified by intelligence agencies as a potential Russian agent before he met Papadopoulos, an assessment drawn from reporting collected over several years.

An examination of Mifsud’s activities also shows that he began forging ties in Russia years earlier — and that he was working to expand his network in that country around the same time he met Papadopoulos in 2016, including by trying to broker new academic deals with a powerful Russian state university. 

Mifsud visited Moscow just weeks before the U.S. presidential election to mark the signing of the deal, according to Russian media reports at the time. In a previously unreported episode, he welcomed a Kremlin-linked academic to speak at Rome’s Link Campus University in December 2016, shortly after Trump’s election.

A video of the event shows Mifsud announcing that he hoped the visit by Alexey Klishin, who teaches at an elite institute run by Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and has done legal work for the Kremlin, would not be a “one-off thing.”

“Friendship is very important,” Mifsud said.

The idea that Mifsud was working for the West has been pushed by Roh, who wrote a book called “The Faking of Russia-Gate: The Papadopoulos Case.” 

In an email to The Post, Roh said Mifsud was a “Western intelligence element to be protected,” saying that is why the professor felt the need to hide for the past two years.

He said Mifsud has been living “mainly in Rome but moving in Europe.” He also claimed, without providing evidence, that Mifsud cooperated with Mueller in 2018 and was interviewed by “U.S. investigators” this year.

Asked to specify the Western intelligence agency for whom Mifsud worked and in what capacity, Roh said only that “this will be a matter of the upcoming declassification,” an apparent reference to the review ordered by Barr. Roh, who has business connections in Russia of his own, did not respond to follow-up questions.

Once a fringe idea, the theory that Mifsud was a Western operative has now been adopted and amplified by mainstream voices in Trump’s world and received significant airtime on Fox News’s prime-time shows.

“When you look into Mifsud closer, you realize he’s connected with all kinds of intelligence agencies, including our own FBI,” Rep. Devin Nunes (Calif.), the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, told Fox in May. “If he is in fact a Russian agent, this would be one of the biggest intelligence scandals for the United States and our allies.”

Nunes declined to comment further. 

Giuliani told The Post that “Mifsud is a mystery to be explored,” adding that the Papadopoulos episode “looks like a rogue counterintel operation.”

Papadopoulos, too, has adopted the theory, tweeting recently that Mifsud was “an Italian intelligence asset who the CIA weaponized” against him to drop “fake Russia” information into his lap as part of a broader plot.

“He is the enigma of the entire Mueller probe,” Papadopoulos said in an interview, insisting he wants the truth to come out about Mifsud, regardless of what it entails. But, he added, “whatever remnant of my reputation that I have left, I would bet it all that he was a Western intelligence operative.” 

Multiple former intelligence officials in the United States and the United Kingdom said that theory does not make sense. 

John Sipher, a former CIA officer who once ran the agency’s Russia operations, called the idea that Mifsud was a CIA asset who set up Papadopoulos “nonsense,” noting that the CIA is not allowed to target Americans. 

Steve Hall, who retired in 2015 after 30 years running and managing Russian operations for the CIA, said that in counterintelligence, “you can almost never rule anything out completely.” 

But he added that Mifsud’s known activities closely parallel long-standing Russian techniques of targeting academic institutions to spot possible recruits and gather information, making it more likely that Mifsud was working with the Russians than a Western intelligence agency.

“Oftentimes, you can cut through a lot of BS by saying, what makes the most sense here?” he said.

A GLOBAL NETWORKER

Born in Malta and educated in Italy and Northern Ireland, Mifsud cycled through European academic institutions, traveling to conferences, networking and pitching partnerships between schools in various cities, according to people who encountered him at the time. 

Multilingual, urbane and well traveled, Mifsud was an inveterate networker and name-dropper, according to people who met him. They said he floated ambitious dreams of creating international academic institutions that would share professors and students. 

Mifsud has said that he spent several years as a diplomat for the Maltese government. Based on that credential, Mifsud in 2010 was named director of the London Academy of Diplomacy, a small graduate school catering to embassy officials living in the U.K.

The program provided Mifsud with access to London’s diplomatic set, including the Russian Embassy, where photographs posted online show he met with the ambassador in 2014. 

“He was in­cred­ibly well connected with various people in embassies and that world in London,” said Douglas Brodie, who was then a dean at the University of Stirling in Scotland, which partnered with Mifsud’s school to ensure Mifsud’s students could receive British degrees. 

Brodie, who said he liked Mifsud and found him good company, said the Maltese professor appeared to be a genuine academic — though one with little interest in the administrative details of the school. “He was far more interested in trying to bring in highflying guest speakers and much more interested in working the embassy drink circuit than the nuts-and-bolts stuff,” Brodie said, adding: “He loved all of that.”

Mifsud would later claim that in this time, he became a “member” of the Clinton Foundation. A person familiar with the foundation said the organization has received just two donations from people named “Joseph Mifsud” — a series of small donations from a Michigan man totaling $30 between 2000 and 2002 and one for $50 from a London resident in 2015.

Beginning at least around 2010, Mifsud made multiple trips to Russia, attending conferences and academic conferences, according to Russian media accounts and university news releases.  

In 2012, Mifsud’s London Academy of Diplomacy formed a partnership to exchange students and conduct joint research with Lomonosov Moscow State University’s Faculty of Global Processes, which an official advertised in a promotional video as a steppingstone for graduates to work “in the Russian government, the presidential administration, federal ministries and agencies, the special services.”

About once a year between 2013 and 2017, Mifsud attended events at the university, where he delivered lectures and appeared in university photos.

“He was famous to us within the sphere of diplomats and those working on diplomacy,” said Yury Sayamov, a professor at the school who said he met Mifsud after he delivered a lecture on diplomacy in Moscow in 2015, adding: “Many people in academia know him — in Russia and in other countries.” 

Mifsud’s former assistant, Natalia ­Kutepova-Jamom, told The Post in 2017 that Mifsud accelerated his efforts to build high-level contacts in Russia around 2014, claiming at one point to have secured a brief meeting with Russian President Vladi­mir Putin.

A Kremlin spokesman denied that Mifsud and Putin met.

In emails to The Post sent in August 2017, Mifsud wrote that his Russia “contacts and interest [were] academic.” He said he was a visiting professor at Moscow State University but said it was “an unpaid honorary position, similar to those I have with other institutions and think tanks globally.”

“I am an academic, I do not even speak Russian,” he wrote. He told The Post then that he had “absolutely no contact with the Russian Government.”

When interviewed by the Italian reporter in Rome two months later, he offered a different account. He told La Repubblica that he had discussed the possibility that the election would result in a change to U.S.-Russian relations with various people in Europe and Moscow, including Russian government figures. 

OFFER OF RUSSIAN CONNECTIONS

Papadopoulos and Mifsud met in the spring of 2016 as Trump was rising in the polls.

At the time, Papadopoulos, a young energy consultant from Chicago, was working for a start-up think tank called the London Center for International Law Practice and had just been drafted to be an unpaid foreign policy adviser for the Trump campaign.  

On the day after he agreed to join the campaign, Papadopoulos said his boss at the London think tank offered to introduce him to “a very important person” who would be “very useful” in his new position. 

This VIP, Papadopoulos wrote in his book “Deep State Target,” was Mifsud. 

Papadopoulos said he was told by Nagi Idris, the director of the London Center for International Law Practice, that a London attorney affiliated with the think tank named Arvinder Sambei would be setting up a meeting for Papadopoulos and Mifsud at an upcoming conference to be held at Link Campus University in Rome, a private university that was formerly affiliated with the University of Malta.

Sambei is a former government prosecutor in the United Kingdom who had for a time served as a liaison with the U.S. Justice Department on American extradition requests.   

Trump allies have seized on her connection to the think tank where Papadopoulos worked as evidence that Mifsud was working with the British government. 

But in an interview, Sambei said she played no role in Papadopoulos’s introduction to Mifsud. She said that by the time she became affiliated with the London think tank, she was in private practice and had had no affiliation with the British government for 11 years. She did not attend the meeting in Italy and said her only brief encounter with Papadopoulos came in the coffee break room, shortly before he left London.

“It’s baffling to me where this is coming from,” Sambei said. “I don’t even know George. I’ve never even been formally introduced to him.”

In an interview, Papadopoulos maintained that he was told Sambei arranged his introduction to Mifsud. 

Idris did not respond to requests for comment.

That March, Papadopoulos said he traveled to Rome with Idris, who introduced him to Mifsud. Over dinner at a restaurant near the Trevi Fountain, Papadopoulos wrote that Mifsud dropped a “lure,” bringing up Russia and promising to be Papadopoulos’s “middleman around the world.”

“ ‘I’m going to introduce you to everyone and set up a meeting between Trump and Putin,’ ” Mifsud told him, according to Papadopoulos’s book.

According to the Mueller report, Mifsud contacted Papadopoulos after both men returned to London, beginning a courtship that would lead to the opening of the Russia investigation. 

Mifsud introduced Papadopoulos to a Russian graduate student who Papadopoulos believed was Putin’s niece, according to Mueller’s report. Before disappearing, Mifsud said the woman was a Russian graduate student and denied telling Papadopoulos she had Putin links.

Mifsud also connected Papadopoulos to a Russian think tank director with ties to the Russian Foreign Ministry and promised to help set up a meeting with the Russian ambassador, according to the special counsel’s report.

Papadopoulos has said that, at the time, he hoped that Mifsud would provide introductions he could use to ingratiate himself with Trump campaign officials, who he believed were looking for ways to better American relations with Russia.

The conversation that kicked off the Russia investigation occurred on April 26, 2016 — the day after Mifsud returned to London from a trip to speak at the Russian government-linked Valdai Discussion Club meeting in Moscow, according to Mueller’s report.

On his return, Mifsud met Papadopoulos at the Andaz Hotel in London, and over breakfast, told him that he had just met with high-level Russian government officials, Papadopoulos later told investigators. 

The Russians, Mifsud said, had “dirt” on Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails,” according to the Mueller report. 

Mifsud has denied ever telling Papadopoulos that the Russians had Clinton emails.

In a lengthy response to written questions from The Post, Roh suggested that Papadopoulos was “directed and used” by the FBI — perhaps unwittingly — to get in contact with Russians in a failed effort to locate emails that Clinton had deleted from her private server. Mifsud, he wrote, was “operating on behalf of Western intelligence agencies when they met” and Papadopoulos’s interaction with him “was surveilled.” 

Roh provided a power-of-attorney letter that appeared to be signed by Mifsud in May 2018 to show that he is authorized to speak on the professor’s behalf, but he did not provide any evidence of recent contact with the professor.

The Swiss attorney has his own Russian ties. In addition to his law practice, he leads an investment firm and a consulting business with Moscow offices, according to their websites. Photos show he appeared with Mifsud at the Valdai panel discussion in Moscow in 2016.

Last year, Roh changed the name of a company he registered in London to “The No Vichok Ltd.,” an apparent reference to the poisoning of a former Russian spy in the United Kingdom with the nerve agent Novichok. British authorities have presented significant evidence that the attack was undertaken by Russian intelligence officers, and senior U.S. intelligence officials have concurred with that assessment.

Roh told BuzzFeed, which first reported the registration, that the company would conduct research about the attack, which he suggested was in fact a plot by Western intelligence. He did not respond to a question from The Post about the company. He said he had “no business interests in Russia” and noted he is not licensed to practice law there.

A UNIVERSITY IN THE SPOTLIGHT

The Rome university where Papadopoulos met Mifsud has been cited repeatedly by Trump supporters as evidence that Mifsud was working for Western intelligence.

In his book, Papadopoulos calls Link Campus University “Spook University” and claims it is “a training school for Western-allied spies, including CIA, FBI, and MI6,” the British Secret Intelligence Service. 

He and others have seized on a 2004 CIA-sponsored conference that was loosely affiliated with Link. 

The unclassified event, titled “New Frontiers of Intelligence Analysis,” was attended by analysts from more than 30 countries, according to people with knowledge of the gathering and conference materials reviewed by The Post, some of which were published online.

The CIA’s Sherman Kent School for Intelligence Analysis organized the conference with the Gino Germani Institute, an Italian social sciences and strategic studies think tank, which was affiliated at the time with Link. But the university didn’t plan the content, and the conference wasn’t held on its campus.

The speakers included historians and government officials, including some who were widely quoted in the press at the time about a variety of security topics. Post columnist David Ignatius was invited and wrote about the panels and speakers. 

In an interview, Link President Vincenzo Scotti scoffed at the notion that the school is a front for the CIA or other intelligence services. “People say such stupid things,” said Scotti, an Italian politician who served as minister of interior affairs for two years in the early 1990s. “We have no relationships with the CIA.” 

Founded in 1999 as a branch of the University of Malta, the campus went private in 2011.

Roberto Di Nunzio, a businessman who previously taught at Link, said it was one of the first private universities in Italy to offer a master’s degree program about intelligence and security. But he said the goal from the start was to cater to private industry and not government intelligence services, which have their own training schools.

Scotti played down Mifsud’s connections with the Roman university. He said Mifsud began visiting when Link was affiliated with the University of Malta in 2000 and would attend events and seminars there periodically over the subsequent years. Mifsud formally served as a visiting professor for just one semester, in 2017, he said.

But a former employee of the school who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal matters said Mifsud played a key role at the school in developing academic partnerships between Link and universities in other countries, including Russia. 

During the same months in 2016 when Mifsud was wooing Papadopoulos, Link was negotiating a new deal to exchange students and professors and host joint events with Moscow State University — the same Russian state school that Mifsud was visiting annually.  

In a 2017 article about the arrangement in a Russian international affairs journal, Sayamov, the Russian professor, wrote that Mifsud had been the first to suggest the idea. Roh too told The Post that Mifsud was “instrumental in negotiating and building that partnership like he was instrumental in negotiating and building partnerships with other universities.” 

Mifsud can be seen in a video of the Oct. 8, 2016, signing ceremony for the deal, which aired on Russian television.

Scotti, however, disputed the characterization of Mifsud as a key player in the partnership with the Russian university. 

“He played no role in the arrangement — no principal role,” Scotti told The Post. The idea that Mifsud brokered the agreement, he said, is “categorically” false.

As the deal with the Russian university was being negotiated, Link officials vetoed proposals by faculty members to co-sponsor conferences that would highlight the security challenges Russia posed to Europe, according to the former employee. 

“They said, we can’t do this, because we’re in negotiations with the Russians and they’re suspicious of us, because they think we’re linked to the Americans and we have to reassure them that we’re not,” said the former employee.

Scotti denied that academic events that could offend Russia were torpedoed, noting that Link hosted a conference on cybersecurity in January 2015. “The allegations against Link University are fake news, since [the university] was actually issuing a warning against Russian misinformation,” he said.

The former employee said Link merely provided a hall for the conference and did not organize the event, which was not focused solely on Russia and predated Link’s negotiations in Moscow.

Di Nunzio said similar events after 2015 omitted references to Russian disinformation.  He added that at Link, “there were people who felt unnerved” about the agreement with the Russian university, adding that it “did indeed raise some eyebrows.”

Roh said the university severed ties with Mifsud after his conversation with Papadopoulos about Clinton’s emails was made public in court filings. 

“I can’t afford to have the university embroiled in shady situations,” Scotti said. “As long as I have no reason to suspect anyone of a problem, they will have the utmost freedom to pursue their work. But as soon as I see a sign of a problem, that’s it. The relationship ends.”

A VISIT TO ROME

About two months after Link brokered its partnership with Moscow State University, a top Russian academic from a different university paid a visit to Rome.

Klishin held a formal role as a professor and a department head at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, an elite campus with decades of history training future diplomats. The school is run by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, whose current chief, Sergei Lavrov, is a graduate. 

Klishin, who did not respond to requests for comment, was also a former member of the upper house of the Russian parliament and had performed legal work for the Kremlin, according to his official biography. 

During Klishin’s visit to the Link campus, Mifsud told a group assembled around a large conference table that he hoped it would be one of “many, many more,” according to a video of the event. 

Klishin began his remarks by “personally” thanking Mifsud and Roh, who was also in attendance.

Scotti said that the event was arranged by Mifsud and that he had no reason to question Klishin, who had spoken at universities around the world, including in the United States. “I can’t tell you anything about that individual’s activities, as he was, and still remains, totally foreign to me,” he said.

By February 2017, Mifsud was in the United States, where he spoke on a panel held at the visitor’s center of the U.S. Capitol at a meeting hosted by the nonprofit group Global Ties U.S., which helps organize foreign exchange programs in the United States. 

His invitation from the group, which receives State Department funding for some of its programs, has been cited by Trump allies as evidence that Mifsud was trusted by the U.S. government. 

However, in a statement, the organization said the event at which Mifsud spoke was privately funded and not affiliated with the State Department. Mifsud was invited to provide a “European perspective” about the future of public diplomacy, the group said.

While he was in Washington, the FBI approached Mifsud in the lobby of his hotel and questioned him about his interactions with Papadopoulos, prosecutors have said. Mueller wrote in his report that the Maltese professor made various inaccurate statements but that lies Papadopoulos had told the FBI about his interactions with Mifsud when he was interviewed 12 days earlier “undermined investigators’ ability to challenge Mifsud.”

Mifsud was allowed to leave the country. Mueller’s report does not say whether U.S. investigators ever located him again.

Papadopoulos said he is more eager than anyone for the Maltese professor to be found.

“Some of the other strange characters in my story have gone public,” he said. “Mifsud is the only one who has not come up for air — and I don’t know why.”

Anton Troianovski and Amie Ferris-Rotman in Moscow; Stefano Pitrelli and Chico Harlan in Rome; and Matt Zapotosky, Carol D. Leonnig and Alice Crites in Washington contributed to this report.

[thetens-blog1]

Action Against Hunger recruitment for Graduate Community Mobilization Assistants, July 2017

Action Against Hunger recruitment for Graduate Community Mobilization Assistants, July 2017

Action Against Hunger recruitment for Graduate Community Mobilization Assistants, July 2017 Action Against Hunger works to save lives by combating hunger and diseases that threaten the lives of vulnerable communities, through nutrition, food security, water and sanitation, health and advocacy.We are recruiting to fill the vacant position below: Job Title: Community Mobilization Assistant…

[wavenetinfo]

John Calipari would prefer to focus on the players he wants and the offense he’ll run.

This time, there are other concerns.

When he leads the U.S. basketball team into the Under-19 World Cup for men, they will travel to Egypt, home to enough violence lately that the Americans questioned whether it was safe enough to even go defend their title.

Calipari spoke to parents seeking answers he didn’t even have for himself, but he knew where he could get them. Gen. Martin Dempsey, the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is now USA Basketball’s chairman, and a conversation a few weeks ago that detailed the Americans’ security plans and procedures put Calipari’s mind at ease.

“I’m trying to figure out basketball, let alone trying to figure out security and so all I can say to the parents is I’m comfortable making this trip,” the Kentucky coach said. “And believe me, three or four weeks ago I was like, ‘Come on now, talk to me, how are we going to do this?’ And from that point when I was on the phone with Gen. Dempsey, I knew at the end of the day either he was going to feel real comfortable with what was going on or we wouldn’t go.”

USA Basketball CEO Jim Tooley said the U.S. and other federations raised concerns with basketball’s governing body a year ago when it selected Cairo to host the July 1-9 event. Any fears only heightened in recent months when more than 100 people were killed since December in four separate attacks targeting Christians claimed by the Islamic State group.

But Dempsey stressed that most of the danger is beyond Cairo, while the capital city is well protected. And Tooley said that during a recent discussion with FIBA it was revealed that security for the event had now fallen under the control of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, rather than the office of sports ministry.

“So while we are very much aware of the challenges of security in Egypt, we have concluded that the venue — that is to say where the games will be played, the hotel, the transit zones — will be secured adequately and gives us confidence to send a team over there,” Dempsey said.

USA Basketball took the unusual step of deciding that the U-19 team would be given the same level of security as an Olympic team, with more staff on the ground and greater intelligence shared. The Americans have been criticized for the lengths they go to comfort their millionaire players, such as staying on a cruise ship rather than the athletes’ village in Rio, but NBA Finals MVP Kevin Durant said he’s always felt safe while winning two Olympic golds and a world title with the Americans.

“I’m sure they’ve been doing their work for years in advance on this thing and trying to make sure it’s perfect for the players, so I have no concerns that USA Basketball won’t get it done,” Durant said. “So hopefully everybody’s comfortable going and have a great time and win a gold.”

Though the Americans have won two straight golds in the 16-nation tournament, fielding a team is challenging. Many college coaches would prefer their incoming recruits on campus in summer school, and with the security concerns this time, Tooley figures some players Calipari may have wanted passed on invites to training camp next week.

But Chuma Okeke of Atlanta, who will be a freshman next season at Auburn, will be among the 28 players in Colorado Springs, Colorado. His mother, Renee, reached out to a USA Basketball official with some questions, but ultimately decided to let her son attend after getting the answers and doing enough research on her own into the situation in Egypt that she said she’d even feel comfortable going.

“It was explained to me that the USA Basketball security team is really experienced in that area so I really don’t have any worries,” she said. “They reassured me that my young man will be safe so I’m OK with it. And you know what, even if I wasn’t, I could not stop Chuma from going. I could not. He understands what the climate is but he still wants to go.”

And Dempsey feels the Americans should, not only to give their younger players experience with the international game, but to show FIBA they’re a good partner. With their precautions in place, Dempsey said the Americans have done everything they can to be prepared — and now it’s Calipari’s turn.

“I said, ‘OK Cal, now that we’ve got this behind us, how about you stop worrying about that?'” Dempsey said. “‘We’ll keep worrying about that, you go win us a gold medal.'”

14 June 2017 | 6:17 am

Source : ABC News

>>>Click Here To View Original Press Release>>>

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[scholarshipsforafrica]

DAAD In-Country / In-Regions (Masters & PhD) Scholarship Progamme 2017 for Sub-Saharan African Students.

Application Deadline: July 28th 2017

The DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service), as a publicly funded, self-governing organisation of the institutions of higher education in Germany, promotes international academic exchange as well as educational co-operation with developing countries through a variety of funding and scholarship programmes. As part of the “In-Country / In-Region Scholarship Progamme“ DAAD offers scholarships for PhD and Master studies. The programme is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and aims at university staff in the first line, without neglecting the public sector demand of academically trained personnel. The target group for scholarships are graduates and postgraduates from Sub-Saharan Africa with a first academic degree if applying for a master’s programme, or with a Master’s degree if applying for a doctoral programme who want to pursue Master’s or PhD courses in their home country (so called In-Country scholarships) or in another Sub-Saharan African country (In-Region scholarships). It has been agreed upon that DAAD cooperates with Centred’Etude Régional pour l’Amélioration de l’Adaptation à la Sécheresse (CERAAS) by offering up to 2 In- Region and 1 In-Country scholarships for PhD and up to 3 In-Region and 1 In-Country scholarships for Master studies at CERAAS for the intake 2017.

Eligibility:

Applicants have successfully completed generally a three-year university degree (Master candidates) or a two-year university degree (doctoral candidates) with above average results (upper forth of class)

clearly show motivation and strong commitment

have thorough knowledge of the language of instruction

have completed their last university degree not more than 6 years ago at the time of application

must be nationals or permanent residents of a Sub- Saharan African country

should generally be a) staff member of a public or private university, b) candidate considered for teaching or research staff recruitment, c) from the public sector or d) DAFI-Alumni (Albert Einstein German Academic Refugee Initiative)

Female applicants and candidates from less privileged regions or groups are especially encouraged to participate in the programme.

Benefits:

  DAAD In-Country/In-Region scholarship holders are also encouraged to apply for a research grant in Germany for 2 up to 6 months.

The short-term research scholarship includes:

a monthly scholarship payment for living costs which amounts to €1,000 per month

health/accident/personal liability insurance

a lump sum for travel expenses

Eligible fields The In-Country/ In-Region Scholarship Programme Scholarships supports studies in subject areas with strong relevance to national development. The scholarships at CERAAS are available in the following fields:

Physiology

Genetics

Genomics

Agronomy

Plant Breeding

Plant Health

Agroforestry

The duration

of the PhD programme is three years

of the Master programme is two years

Starts in December 2017.

Application Procedure:

The application process contains two steps.

First step:

Applicants must apply for their studies at CERAAS using the contacts and the method that is prescribed by the institution. CERAAS has set their own deadlines. CERAAS will screen, pre-select (according to DAAD selection criteria) and short-list the applicants.

A detailed report consisting of the shortlisting procedure, the entire list of applicants, the ranked shortlist and the shortlisting panel members will also be availed to DAAD.

The ranked shortlist will contain at least double or triple (optional) the number of scholarships that have been attributed to the institution. DAAD reserves the right of final selection.

Second step:

Pre-selected candidates are asked to log into the DAAD portal and register themselves and submit an DAAD application.

The institution is requested to communicate the following information to the shortlisted candidates:

Register online via the DAAD-Portal (if not already registered): https://portal.daad.de

Apply online via the DAAD Portal under the tab “Personal Funding“/“Application“ Documents to be submitted:

DAAD application form duly filled (available in the DAAD-Portal) – Hand signed curriculum vitae (please use the european specimenform at http://europass.cedefop. Europa.eu), including a list of publications (if applicable).

– Recommendation letter by university lecturers (Master 1, PhD 2)

Official letter of admission or any other binding document guaranteeing admission to the host university / institution / network Certified copies of university degree certificates including transcripst Letter of motivation (if applicable: mentioning the planned research stay in Germany, see “Additional benefits”)

Copy of the passport.

PhD candidates have to submit the following additional documents:

Declaration of acceptance from the academic supervisor

Detailed and precise PhD proposal, including detailed work and timetable (if applicable: mentioning the planned research stay in Germany, see “Additional benefits”)

Abstract of the proposal on one page (please include name and title of proposal

  Download the DAAD In-Country / In-Regions (Masters & PhD) Scholarship Progamme 2017 pdf here for more info.

The post DAAD In-Country / In-Regions (Masters & PhD) Scholarship Progamme 2017 for Sub-Saharan African Students. appeared first on Scholarships for Africa.

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