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| Tornadoes hit Plains, Midwest; 2 dead in Okla. - USA Today - USA TODAY Posted: 20 May 2013 09:18 AM PDT A storm system stretching from Texas to Minnesota on Monday threatened another round of tornadoes and high winds that has already killed two people in Oklahoma and injured more than 20. The body of one victim 79-year-old Glen Irish, was found in an open area of the neighborhood after a twister slammed into Shawnee, Okla., on Sunday, leveling a mobile home park. The Oklahoma medical examiner on Monday confirmed the second fatality, Billy Hutchinson, 76. Both victims were from Shawnee, but it was not immediately clear if both lived in the Steelman Mobile Home Park, which was destroyed. "You can see where there's absolutely nothing, then there are places where you have mobile home frames on top of each other, debris piled up," Pottawatomie County Sheriff Mike Booth said after surviving damage. "It looks like there's been heavy equipment in there on a demolition tour. "It's pretty bad. It's pretty much wiped out," Booth said. More than 60 million Americans are at risk of severe storms Monday, with the primary targets including Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri and Arkansas, the National Weather Service's Storm Prediction Center warned. "Damaging wind gusts, large hail and tornadoes are possible in all areas," Weather Channel meteorologist Kevin Roth said. Tornadoes and severe weather struck the states from Texas to Minnesota on Sunday. The worst damage reported is in Oklahoma, where one person was killed and at least 21 injured. (May 19) Oklahoma City, Tulsa, St. Louis, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and Minneapolis are among the cities most at risk for severe weather Monday, AccuWeather meteorologist Meghan Evans said. Chicago, Detroit, Dallas and Indianapolis also are in the danger zone. Sunday, there were 24 reports of tornadoes in five states, the Storm Prediction Center said. "In what has otherwise been a quiet spring for tornadoes, May 19 appeared to have been the second-most active day for tornadoes in the nation so far in 2013," Weather Channel meteorologist Jon Erdman said. The storms in Oklahoma on Sunday that ripped off roofs and tossed big trucks like toys were part of a severe weather outbreak that stretched from Texas to Minnesota. Twisters were also reported Sunday in Iowa and Kansas. Across Oklahoma, 21 people were injured, not including those who suffered bumps and bruises and chose not to visit a hospital, said Keli Cain, a spokeswoman for the Oklahoma Department of Emergency Management. Booth said six at Steelman Estates were hurt. Gov. Mary Fallin declared an emergency for 16 Oklahoma counties. Interstate 40 was closed by the Oklahoma Highway Patrol after winds overturned semi-tractor trailer trucks and other vehicles, Newsok.com reported. KFOR-TV showed footage of homes damaged and cars and trucks flipped from highways near Shawnee. Other video showed flashes from electrical transformers blowing out as they were hit by high winds or debris from the tornado near Edmond. A tornado touched down in Golden City, Mo., early Monday morning and tore through two counties, Barton County Emergency Management Director Tom Ryan told CNN. The number of injuries and extent of damage were not immediately clear. Christopher Apgar and John Spain captured highly destructive tornadoes on camera near Shawnee, Oklahoma. They say one was nearly half a mile to a mile wide. Sedgwick County, Kan., emergency management director Randy Duncan said officials are grateful for few reports of damage from a tornado that touched down near Wichita Mid-Continent Airport. He told CNN the area emerged "relatively unscathed.'' Forecasters had been warning for days that severe storms were likely across the region. "I knew it was coming," said Randy Grau, who huddled with his wife and two young boys in their Edmond's home when a tornado hit. He said he peered out his window as the weather worsened and believed he saw a flock of birds heading down the street. "Then I realized it was swirling debris.'' In Iowa, a tornado touched down Sunday about 30 miles west of Des Moines near the town of Earlham, the Des Moines Register reported. Meteorologist Kurt Kotenberg said a large low-pressure system is parking itself over the middle of the country and "really isn't going to move much over the course of the next few days. … It's basically going to keep pulling up that nice Gulf (of Mexico) moisture that keeps fueling everything." The threat of twisters comes less than a week after tornadoes left six dead, dozens injured and hundreds of homes destroyed in Texas and just shy of the two-year anniversary of the Joplin, Mo., twister. Contributing: William M. Welch; The Des Moines Register; The Associated Press |
| Records give rare look at how feds probed one reporter - The Seattle Times Posted: 20 May 2013 08:20 AM PDT Originally published May 19, 2013 at 9:34 PM | Page modified May 20, 2013 at 6:53 AM WASHINGTON — When the Justice Department began investigating possible leaks of classified information about North Korea in 2009, investigators did more than obtain telephone records of a working journalist suspected of receiving the secret material. They used security-badge access records to track the reporter's comings and goings from the State Department, according to a newly obtained court affidavit. They traced the timing of his calls with a State Department security adviser suspected of sharing the classified report. They obtained a search warrant for the reporter's personal emails. The case of Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, the government adviser, and James Rosen, the chief Washington correspondent for Fox News, bears striking similarities to a sweeping leaks investigation disclosed last week in which federal investigators obtained records over two months of more than 20 telephone lines assigned to The Associated Press. At a time when President Obama's administration is under renewed scrutiny for an unprecedented number of leak investigations, the Kim case provides a rare glimpse into the inner workings of one such probe. Court documents reveal how deeply investigators explored the private communications of a working journalist. Obama last week defended the Justice Department's handling of the investigation involving the AP, which is focused on who leaked information to the news organization about a foiled plot involving the al-Qaida affiliate in Yemen. AP executives and First Amendment watchdogs have criticized the Justice Department in part for the broad scope of the phone records it secretly subpoenaed. "The latest events show an expansion of this law-enforcement technique," said attorney Abbe Lowell, who is defending Kim on federal charges filed in 2010 that he disclosed national-defense information. A trial is tentatively scheduled for 2014. The Kim case began in June 2009, when Rosen reported that U.S. intelligence officials were warning that North Korea was likely to respond to United Nations sanctions with more nuclear tests. The CIA had learned the information, Rosen wrote, from sources inside North Korea. The story was published online the same day that a top-secret report was made available to a small circle within the intelligence community — including Kim, a State Department arms expert with security clearance. The FBI used the security-badge data, phone records and email exchanges to build a case that Kim shared the report with Rosen soon after receiving it, records show. In the documents, FBI agent Reginald Reyes described in detail how Kim and Rosen moved in and out of the State Department headquarters a few hours before the story was published June 11, 2009. The court documents don't name Rosen, but his identity was confirmed by several officials, and he is the author of the article at the center of the investigation. Rosen and a spokeswoman for Fox News did not return messages seeking comment. Reyes wrote that there was evidence Rosen had broken the law, "at the very least, either as an aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator." That fact distinguishes his case from the probe of the AP, in which the news organization is not the likely target. Using italics for emphasis, Reyes explained how Rosen allegedly used a "covert communications plan" and quoted from an email exchange between Rosen and Kim that seems to describe a secret system for passing information. Court documents show abundant evidence gathered from Kim's office computer and phone records, but investigators said they needed to go a step further to build their case, seizing two days' worth of Rosen's personal emails — and all of his email exchanges with Kim. Privacy protections limit searching or seizing a reporter's work, but not when there is evidence that the journalist broke the law against unauthorized leaks. A federal judge signed off on the search warrant. In the hours before Rosen's story was published, Kim was one of more than 95 people who saw the intelligence report through a classified database, according to court documents. Kim's phone records showed that seven calls lasting from 18 seconds to more than 11 minutes were placed between Kim's desk telephone and Rosen's cellphone and desk phone at the State Department, according to the court documents. Investigators pulled at least two months of phone records from Kim's desk and found 36 calls with numbers associated with Rosen. Investigators also scrutinized computer records and found that someone who had logged in with Kim's user profile viewed the classified report "at or around" the same time two calls were placed from his desk phone to Rosen, according to the documents. Two months later on an August evening, diplomatic security secretly entered Kim's office and found a copy of Rosen's article next to his computer. Kim, who worked in a secure facility, was subject to daily office inspections. The Fox News article was also in "plain view" during follow-up visits in late September. Kim initially told the FBI in an interview that month that he had met the reporter in March but had not had contact since. Later, Kim admitted to having additional contacts, according to the affidavit. |
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