Share prices on Bursa Malaysia opened higher in early trade driven by gains in selected heavyweights, dealers said.
As at 9.14am, the FTSE Bursa Malaysia KLCI (FBM KLCI) gained 1.72 points to 1,778.87 after opening 0.16 of a point higher at 1,777.31.
The local bourse continued its positive momentum inspite of the flat performance on US stocks which was on a correction mode after the recent spike.
The Finance Index rose 43.02 points to 16,882.62, the Plantation Index, however, declined 1.08 of a point to 8,298.36 and the Industrial Index slipped 12.53 points to 3,025.45.
The FBM Emas Index gained 23.62 points to 12,400.13 and the FBMT100 advanced 19.85 points to 12,159.79.
The FBM Mid 70 Index soared 56.04 points to 14,372.98 while the FBM Ace Index increased 6.89 points to 4,848.68.
Gainers led losers 321 to 88, with 192 counters unchanged, 996 untraded and 20 others were suspended.
Turnover stood at 238.5 million shares worth RM126.2 million.
Among actives, Trinity Corporation reduced half-a-sen to 6.5 sen, Ingenuity Consolidated and Luster Industries was flat at 12.5 sen and 18 sen, respectively while Daya Materials gained one sen to 27.5 sen.
Heavyweights, Maybank and Axiata gained two sen each to RM10.10 and RM6.94, respectively, CIMB Group increased seven sen to RM8.50 and Sime Darby slipped one sen to RM9.47.-- Bernama
The ringgit was traded slightly higher against the US dollar on mild buying interest from investors, a dealer said.
At 9.27am, the local unit was quoted at 3.0125/0155 to the greenback from Monday's 3.0130/0160.
The dealer said investors' interest were shifted towards the local currency following speculation that the US Central bank might trim its bond purchases sooner than expected.
However, the ringgit was traded mixed against other major currencies.
The local currency was sharply higher against the Singapore dollar at 2.3977/4011, from 2.4027/4057 yesterday, and rose against the yen to 2.9339/9374 from 2.9372/9404, on Monday.
The ringgit weakened against the British pound to 4.5892/5947, from Monday's 4.5801/5858 and depreciated against the euro to 3.8780/8825 from 3.8783/8828 yesterday.-- Bernama
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
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.
Share prices on Bursa Malaysia opened higher in early trading Monday, driven by gains in selected heavyweights and lower liners, dealers said.
As at 9.18am, the barometer index, the FTSE Bursa Malaysia KLCI (FBM KLCI), gained 4.84 points to 1,774 after opening 3.83 points higher at 1,772.99.
Dealers said the sharp rally in share prices in regional markets, mainly among the US and Japanese stocks due to exuberant consumer sentiments in the US and improved economic outlook in America, led market sentiments today for the local bourse.
The Nikkei share index as well as the Dow and S&P 500 index soared to a record high.
The Finance Index surged 46.881 points to 16,795.89, the Plantation Index rose 31.24 points to 8,260.54, and the Industrial Index gained 13.33 points to 3,037.78.
The FBM Emas Index jumped 52.36 points to 12,324.54 and the FBMT100 perked 44.01 points to 12,098.51.
The FBM Mid 70 Index advanced 95.92 points to 14,187.91 while the FBM Ace Index soared 58.52 points to 4,737.93.
Gainers led losers 391 to 78, 162 counters unchanged, 968 untraded and 18 other susepended.
Turnover stood at 254.165 million shares worth RM131.597 million.
Actives, Luster Industries gained two sen to 17.5 sen, Instacom Group rose two sen to 41.5 sen, Daya Materials earned one sen to 25.5 sen, Ingenuity Consolidated added half a sen to 13 sen.
Heavyweights, Maybank gained eight sen to RM10.10, CIMB Group rose one sen to RM8.34, Axiata Group increased three sen to RM6.94 and Sime Darby Group advanced seven sen to RM9.57.-- Bernama
The ringgit was traded slightly weaker against the US dollar in the early session today as demand has yet to pick up, a dealer said.
At 9am, the local unit was quoted at 3.0235/0265 to a greenback from Friday's close at 3.0200/0240.
However, the ringgit was traded higher against other major currencies.
The local currency appreciated against the Singapore dollar to 2.4025/4058 from 2.4027/4076 on Friday and rose against the yen to 2.9397/9441 from 2.9417/9471 last week.
The ringgit also strengthened against the British pound to 4.5866/5921 from Friday's 4.5976/5046 close and was sharply higher against the euro at 3.8770/8818 from 3.8846/8901 last week.-- Bernama
President Barack Obama speaks on the Internal Revenue Service's targeting of conservative groups for extra tax scrutiny in the East Room of the White House in Washington, Wednesday May 15, 2013. Obama announced the resignation of Acting IRS Commissioner Steven Miller, the top official at the IRS. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)AP2013
WASHINGTON – White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer told "Fox News Sunday" that President Obama learned about the Internal Revenue Service targeting Tea Party groups applying for tax-exempt status only after it had come out in the media but that the administration would make sure "it never happens again."
Pfeiffer defended Obama's statement that he didn't know anything about the incidents or the investigation until he heard about them in the press.
"No president would get involved in an independent IRS investigation," Pfeiffer said. "It would be wholly inappropriate."
Wallace asked if Sarah Ingram, the IRS commissioner who once oversaw the division that processes tax-exempt applications and now tapped to oversee the new tax laws in ObamaCare, would be pulled from the spot given the recent scandal. It is not clear when Ingram stopped being the head of the tax-exempt office or how active her role was there while she was implementing ObamaCare.
"There will be a 30-day review and everybody who did anything wrong will be held accountable," Pfeiffer said, adding that Ingram was never named in the inspector general's report on the scandal.
Joseph Grant, the official who succeeded Ingram, announced Thursday he would be retiring after being on the job for a week.
The IRS actions and allegations have brought anger from both parties, with Obama calling it "outrageous" and promising change.
Pfeiffer, who made the full round of Sunday talk shows, continued the calls for change in an effort to calm growing frustrations over a series of scandals that have rocked the White House this week, including claims of political intimidation, stepping on the constitutional rights of the media and backpedaling on what the administration knew about the Sept. 11, 2012, terrorist attacks in Benghazi, Libya.
Democrats have long said the GOP is trying to keep the Benghazi attacks in the spotlight to discredit former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's possible 2016 presidential bid.
Last week, more than100 pages of government emails and notes in the Benghazi investigation were released.
The documents show that State Department officials repeatedly objected to and tried to scale back references of involvement by Islamic extremist groups and prior security warnings in the administration's initial internal narrative of the Sept. 11, 2012, attacks that killed a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans.
Pfeiffer told Wallace the emails were doctored and given out to the press. He added that the talking point references were changed by the CIA and not the White House and said Republicans should be more focused on trying to find the culprit than blaming Obama.
One winning ticket was sold for last night's record Powerball drawing. It was bought at a supermarket in Florida, and is worth more than $590 million.
Only one winning ticket for a record U.S. Powerball lottery jackpot worth $590.5 million was sold in Florida, organizers said, but there was no official word about who won it.
The winning numbers from Saturday night's drawing were: 10, 13, 14, 22 and 52, with a Powerball number of 11, and the odds of winning were put at one in 175 million.
The winning ticket was sold at a Publix supermarket in Zephyrhills, a suburb of Tampa, according to CNN.
The grand prize, accumulated after two months of drawings, surpassed the previous record Powerball payoff of $587.5 million, set in November 2012, but fell short of the $600 million sum lottery officials had been advertising.
Organizers had said the final jackpot total could end up slightly higher or lower than expected depending on final sales reported by all 43 participating states, plus the District of Columbia and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
The largest jackpot in U.S. history stands at $656 million, won in the Mega Millions lottery of March 2012. That prize was split between winners in Maryland, Kansas and Illinois.
The Multi-State Lottery Association, based in Iowa, announced Saturday's Powerball results in a brief message on its website, saying, "There was one winner sold by the Florida Lottery for the last drawing's $590,500,000 grand prize."
There was no further information immediately disclosed about the winning ticket, such as where inFlorida it was sold or whether more than one individual purchased it.
Had Saturday's drawing failed to yield a winner, the jackpot for the next drawing, set for Wednesday, would have risen to $925 million. After Saturday's results were announced, the jackpot was reset back to $40 million.
"IF I WIN"
The extremely long odds of winning did not deter people from buying up tickets at staggering rates.California was selling $1 million in tickets every hour on Saturday, said Donna Cordova, a spokeswoman for the California Lottery, which has only been selling Powerball tickets since April 8.
Texas Lottery officials reported $1.2 million in hourly sales between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. local time, with ticket sales for the Saturday draw topping $18.4 million.
The ticket sale rate on Saturday was nearly double Friday's rate, Kelly Cripe, a spokeswoman for theTexas Lottery, said, and a jump of some 686 percent over last Saturday.
Many Americans were playing the "if I win" game ahead of Saturday's drawing.
"If I win, I'm going to spend a lot of it on liquor, women and gambling," said Austin lawyer Donald Dickson. "I'll likely squander the rest of it."
In New York City, talent acquisition agent Michelle Amici was more philanthropic. "Not sure that I'd buy anything," she said. "Rather, I'd attempt to quench my wanderlust by traveling the world. I'd also donate a large portion to education reform."
Lottery players such as Austin marketing professional Becky Arreaga were not discouraged by the long odds.
"As long as the odds are 1 in anything, I'm in," said Arreaga, a partner at Mercury Mambo marketing firm. "I truly believe I could be the one."
The $2 tickets allow players to pick five numbers from 1 to 59, and a Powerball number from 1 to 35.
WASHINGTON There's an irony in the Internal Revenue Service's crackdown on conservative groups.
The nation's tax agency has admitted to inappropriately scrutinizing smaller tea party organizations that applied for tax-exempt status. But the IRS largely maintained a hands-off policy with the much larger, big-budget organizations on the left and right that were most influential in the 2012 elections and are organized under a section of the tax code that allows them to hide their donors.
"The IRS goes AWOL when wealthy and powerful forces want to break the law in order to hide their wrongful efforts and secret political influence," said Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat who is among a small Senate group pushing campaign finance reform measures that would force these big outside groups to disclose their donors. "Picking on the little guy is a pretty lousy thing to do."
Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS and the Koch brothers' Americans for Prosperity were among those that spent tens of millions of dollars on TV ads and get-out-the-vote efforts to help Republicans. Democrats were aided in similar fashion by Priorities USA, made up of former Barack Obama campaign aides, and American Bridge 21st Century Foundation, an opposition research group led by a former adviser to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
And yet those groups so far have escaped investigations into whether they have crossed the blurry line under the law between what constitutes a tax-exempt "social welfare" organization that is free from donor reporting requirements and a political committee subject to taxes and disclosures.
Watchdog groups and lawmakers who have sought more disclosure and restrictions on such groups claim an injustice. They say the IRS saga over the targeting of smaller groups shines a bright light onto the agency's failure to guard against the flood of secret money into the political system through the creation of the deep-pocketed groups.
Yet other advocates of reform worry that, in light of the IRS disclosure of targeting small groups, government regulators will be less likely to scrutinize the tax-exempt status of the bigger, more powerful groups out of fear that they will appear to be targeting groups for political reasons.
"We expect that opponents of disclosure will try to use the recent developments to allow the groups that are misusing the tax laws to hide donors to continue misusing them. But that's a battle that we will engage in," said Fred Wertheimer, founder and president of watchdog group Democracy 21.
Since a series of court decisions including the Supreme Court's ruling in the 2010 Citizens United case, the IRS has seen an influx of applications - from 1,735 in 2010 to 3,357 in 2012 - by so-called social welfare groups wanting to form under section 501(c)(4) of the federal tax code. That section grants tax-exempt status as long as the primary mission of these organizations is not politics and influencing elections. The IRS makes that determination. Such nonprofits can keep secret the names of their donors, which are not subject to traditional campaign finance limits.
The rules are fuzzy. The law says that these groups can only be involved in social welfare activity and not politics. But IRS regulations give the groups leeway to conduct political activities - as long as that is not its "primary activity." That conflict opens the door to potential abuses and different interpretations of what is allowed and what is prohibited.
An IRS inspector general's report released this week recommended developing for the first time specific guidelines to measure the primary activity of social welfare organizations, and some in Congress have shown a willingness to review big groups like the nonprofit Crossroads GPS and its sister super PAC, American Crossroads. They spent a combined $176 million in the last election cycle, much of it on television advertisements to benefit Republican candidates.
A Senate investigative panel led by Democrat Carl Levin of Michigan and Republican John McCain of Arizona has been reviewing the use of social welfare groups for political causes for the past year and now is examining the agency's handling of the tax-exempt reviews.
And in a letter to congressional investigators Thursday, Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., urged the House Ways and Means Committee not to ignore the influx of groups that may be abusing the tax code as part of its upcoming IRS probe, saying: "I hope we can remove the incentive for any group, regardless of its political orientation, to seek 501(c)(4) tax-exempt status to engage in significant political campaign activities while hiding their donors."
Despite the bipartisan outcry over the IRS scandal, there's little incentive for lawmakers on either side of the aisle to push for reforms because Republicans and Democrats alike benefit from these big outside groups.
In fact, just the opposite may be happening.
Some congressional Democrats, fearful of being tied to the scandal, are backing the push for more aggressive enforcement of these groups. And some conservative leaders and Republican donors are using the IRS scandal to help protect the status quo while preparing to pump hundreds of millions of dollars - raised anonymously in many cases with no contribution limits - into the next election cycle, just as they did last fall.
"I would hope that this new information about the politicization of the IRS should put the brakes on any sort of disclosure of donors who wish to remain anonymous," said Charlie Spies, who helps raise money for several conservative organizations and previously led the super political action committee that raised more than $140 million to benefit Mitt Romney's presidential bid. "We're now seeing exactly what the risk is for donors to be disclosed."
At least some tea party groups are unwilling to trust the agency with more enforcement power in the wake of such damaging revelations.
"The IRS' integrity is shattered," said Jenny Beth Martin, chairman of the Tea Party Patriots, which was among the largest nonprofit conservative groups the IRS targeted. She said that now, more than ever, donors need freedom to give money anonymously "without fear of retribution" from a politicized IRS. In the meantime, she says her organization's influence is growing, fueled by anonymous unlimited donations.
Wertheimer, of Democracy 21, said the "laundering of secret money into elections" will become a greater scandal than IRS misconduct unless something is done.
"There will be efforts to sweep this under the rug," he said. "They may succeed on a temporary basis for a relatively short period, but they are not going to succeed in the long term."
As the Obama administration grapples with a series of recent controversies within its ranks, political observers in Washington have begun to calculate their potential political impacts. But while many Republicans believe the scandals could prove a boon to the party's prospects in the 2014 midterm elections, they it's equally important not to "overreach" on the issue -- and risk having their efforts blow up in their face.
Within the last week, President Obama has been dogged by ongoing questions about last year's terrorist attack in Benghazi; the revelation that the IRS was targeting conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status; and the news that the Justice Department seized two months of phone records from the Associated Press. Unless this confluence of controversies fades away quickly, strategists say, their impact may be felt in elections across the country in 2014.
"The more these scandals hurt the president, the more they historically hurt the party," said Trey Hardin, a Republican strategist, in an interview with CBSNews.com. "It's a natural drag on the party."
Republicans will be doing their best to make sure that's the case. With a shot at taking back the Senate, and a decent chance of keeping the House in Republican control, the GOP would benefit by associating statewide candidates with a president who's perceived as unpopular or untrustworthy.
"The main victim of this White House's mistakes will be the people in his political party that are up for election the next time," said Terry Holt, a Republican strategist and former campaign strategist for former President George W. Bush. "The Senate is more in play in 2014, and the Republicans sort of fumbled the ball with regard to the Senate races last time. This may make it marginally easier for them."
Republicans face a risk, however, when it comes to treading the thin line between taking advantage of an opportunity and acting with crass political calculation, as evidenced by the 1998 midterm elections, when Democrats made gains despite a scandal-ridden Clinton administration.
"Republicans have to be very careful about overreaching and overplaying this," Hardin said. "I lived through impeachment and it was a dicey time... I think there are many in this country who identify the Republican Party as the party that went after impeachment which, at the end of the day, is not the most popular thing to do."
Particularly coming off the last election, during which the GOP was branded as "the party that's against people," Hardin says, it's important to step carefully.
"They've got to be careful about going too far," he said. "I don't think it is effective to be asking people to resign, because I think that when you do that you're preempting the strategy of exposing more wrongs. The old saying is, if your opponent's shooting himself in the foot, don't take the gun away."
Instead, he said, the party needs to push a specific agenda while keeping up the investigations.
"The Republican Party has to still be very actively promoting their initiatives and messaging... There can't be a vacuum on their normal responsibilities for succeeding as a political party. But if they can effectively do that, then I think both pushing their agenda as well as investigating these very real scandals can coexist."
"Fix it and let the politics take care of itself," Holt added. "Because the president and its people have already demonstrated where they're coming from; they're already committing the sin."
The longer the scandals are in the news, the greater the possibility they'll make an impression on voters, potentially casting a pall over the Obama administration that might lead to political ramifications down the road. According to Democratic strategist Chris Lehane, a former Clinton administration official and crisis management expert, that's why the administration should lay all its cards on the table immediately, promise tough consequences for wrongdoing, and let the public move on.
"On two out of three of these issues they did the right thing," he said. Even if Republicans attempt to keep the scandals in the news by holding congressional hearings, he said, "hearings need oxygen - new oxygen, fresh oxygen - to generate any type of real estate with the free press."
That's where the administration went wrong on Benghazi, he said. "The administration should have put out all those emails [abut the CIA talking points] right from the very beginning," he said. "They would have put them out under their terms, they would have gotten the benefit of the doubt, and dealt with it all in one fell swoop... But now that they're all out here and presumably most if not all of the information is now public, there's a predictable waning level of interest unless there's actually real new news out there."
According Lehane, the challenge for the Obama administration is proving that Republicans are using the controversies as an excuse to score political points.
"The whole battle here is, are the Republicans able to brand this as a legitimate inquiry? Or is Obama able to brand what the Republicans are up to as overtly partisan?" Lehane said.
Holt argues Republicans have more leeway to sound partisan on something like the IRS controversy, because the agency's targeting was based on political keywords.
"The IRS is a very tangible bogeyman for most people, and to think that the political opposition to the party in power could be targeted by the government is very scary," he said. "If there were a war analogy, it'd be that they started shooting first with the weapons they are privileged to have as the administration of the American government. They started it."
Amid Republican criticism over alleged discrimination in IRS targeting practices, acting IRS commissioner Steven Miller on Friday apologized on behalf the agency for "the mistakes that we made and the poor service we provided," but he said he did not think partisanship drove the practices now under investigation. Miller also insisted he did not "mislead" either the American people or Congress.
"First and foremost, as acting commissioner, I want to apologize on behalf of the Internal Revenue Service," Miller said. "Partisanship or even the perception of partisanship has no place at the IRS. It cannot even appear to be a consideration in determining the tax exemption of an organization."
Public questioning over the controversy began Friday morning in the House Ways and Means Committee, where Miller and J. Russell George, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA), faced questions about an internal policy whereby the IRS targeted for higher, often burdensome scrutiny conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status. Earlier this week, TIGTA released a report detailing the implementation of these practices by IRS officials. Republicans have suggested the IRS was acting with political motives, and President Obama announced this week that his administration had requested and accepted Miller's resignation. He will continue to serve until early June.
Miller acknowledged that the IRS had used improper practices in assessing tax-exempt applications, but he vehemently denied any political motives by the part of IRS officials.
"I do not believe that partisanship motivated the people who engaged in the practices described in the treasury inspector general's report," he told the Ways and Means Committee. "I think that what happened here was that foolish mistakes were made by people trying to be more efficient in their workload selection. The listing described in the report, while intolerable, was a mistake and not an act of partisanship."
According to George, the I.G. report found evidence that the IRS was targeting conservative groups for higher scrutiny; was delaying tax-exempt applications for those groups; and was requesting unnecessary information when scrutinizing those applications. But both George and the report indicated there was no evidence the practices were driven by political motivation.
Miller, a former deputy commissioner who replaced former IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman late last year, delivered congressional testimony about the agency's process for dealing with tax-exempt applications in July 2012, two months after he reportedly learned of the IRS's targeting policy. In his testimony, he did not mention the agency's heightened scrutiny for the applications of conservative groups. Instead, when asked about complaints of being "harassed" from politically active groups, Miller said the IRS "did group those organizations together to ensure consistency, to ensure quality," but he did not state that they had been specifically targeted by political affiliation for higher scrutiny.
On Friday, Miller insisted he had answered "truthfully" all the questions he had been asked at the time.
"I did not mislead Congress nor the American people," Miller said. "I answered the questions as they were asked."
He also denied the implication that Shulman, who in March 2012 testified that there was "absolutely no targeting" taking place at the IRS, had been untruthful to Congress.
"It was incorrect, but whether it was untruthful or not -- look, when you talk about targeting... it's a pejorative term," he said. "What happened here is that someone saw some tea party cases come through. They were acknowledging that they were going to be engaged in politics. This was the time frame in 2010 when Citizens United was out. There was a lot of discussion in the system about the use of (c)(4)s. People in Cincinnati decided, 'Let's start grouping these cases. Let's centralize these cases.'"
Miller argued that while the way these officials grouped the cases was "troublesome," the general idea of centralization was not. Miller also said that he did not believe Shulman knew about the practice at the time of his March testimony.
The committee's chairman, Rep. Dave Camp, R-Mich., accused the Obama administration of fostering a "culture of cover-ups and intimidation in this administration," alluding to but not specifically mentioning the controversies over the administration's actions in the aftermath of last
September's terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, and the Justice Department's collection of the Associated Press' phone records in an investigation aimed at finding government leakers.
Camp's statements drew rebukes from Democrats on the committee. The committee's top Democrat, Rep. Sander Levin, R-Mich., who was extremely critical of the IRS responded to Camp saying, "If this hearing becomes, essentially, a bootstrap to continue the campaign of 2012, and to prepare for 2014, we will be making a very, very serious mistake and, indeed, not -- meeting our obligation of trust to the American people."
Rep. Joe Crowley, D-N.Y., added, "What I'm trying to point out, and basically to debunk, is the notion or idea of the political statements and, I believe, non-factual statements by Chairman Camp to link these scandals to the White House, or solely the targeting of conservative groups."
Mr. Obama has repeatedly decried the IRS' discriminatory practices, and has pledged that anyone found culpable of wrongdoing will be held accountable.
Until the Justice Department completes its investigation into the controversial IRS practices, which were outlined in an inspector general's report released Tuesday, it's impossible to say what resulting disciplinary actions will look like. But according to legal experts, the case will be a tough one to prosecute criminally, while the IRS can more easily take administratively within the IRS or the Treasury Department.
(CNN) -- An earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 5.1 struck eastern Canada on Friday morning, the government said.
The quake was centered about 13 miles from Shawville, Quebec, near the Ontario border.
Authorities say it is unlikely the quake, which occurred at 9:43 a.m., caused significant damage. An aftershock was recorded as well.
"We had a lot of shaking, that's for sure," said Kim Bulmer, town clerk of nearby Renfrew, Ontario. "But I just checked with the public works director and there does not seem to be any reports of damage so far."
Eastern Canada has a relatively low rate of earthquake activity, according to the Natural Resources Canada agency, but there have been large earthquakes before, with about four exceeding a magnitude 4 per year.
"A decade will, on average, include three events greater than magnitude 5," the agency said.
There were reports that the Friday quake was felt in Toronto, more than 260 miles away.
Share prices on Bursa Malaysia opened higher in early trading today, supported by mild buying interest, dealers said.
At 9.01am, the FTSE Bursa Malaysia KLCI (FBM KLCI) was 2.59 points better at 1,769.31, after opening 1.8. points higher at 1,768.55.
Market breadth was positive, with 90 gainers, 45 losers, 96 counters unchanged, 1,369 untraded and 16 others suspended.
Turnover stood at 33.032 million shares worth RM13.51 million.
HwangDBS Vickers Research said Wall Street was down last night, with Key US equity indices slipping between 0.2 per cent and 0.5 per cent at the closing bell as sentiments were dented by weak economic data.
"This could put added pressure on Malaysian equities today," it said.
Following a 16.3 point or 0.9 per cent decline yesterday, the research house expects the benchmark FBM KLCI to ease a bit more ahead, possibly retreating towards the immediate support line of 1,750.
On the scoreboard, the Finance Index slid 1.439 points to 16,688.14, but the Industrial Index fell 2.29 points to 3,026.30, while the Plantation Index rose 18.919 points to 8,208.02.
The FBM Emas Index gained 14.74 points to 12,256.28, while the FBMT100 improved 15.171 points to 12,047.69, and the FBM Mid 70 Index added 7.85 points to 14,052.75.
The FBM Ace Index rose 21.85 points to 4,636.07.
Among actives, Luster Industries inched down a sen to 15.5 sen, Hubline-Warr was flat at two sen, Luster Industries-Warr shed half-a-sen to 11 sen while Ingenuity Consolidated added a sen to 12.5 sen.
Heavyweights, Maybank and CIMB fell two sen each to RM10.00 and RM8.32, Axiata added two sen to RM6.93 while Sime Darby was flat at RM9.50.-- Bernama
The ringgit rebounded in early trading against the US dollar Friday on renewed buying interest after recent losses, dealers said.
At 9am, the local unit was quoted at 3.0090/0120 to a greenback from yesterday's 3.0130/0160 close.
Meanwhile, the ringgit was traded mostly lower against other major currencies.
The local currency appreciated against the Singapore dollar to 2.4026/4057 from 2.4058/4084 on Thursday but fell against the yen to 2.9434/9462 from 2.9395/9430 yesterday.
The ringgit also weakened against the British pound to 4.5959/6002 from Thursday's 4.5813/5867 and depreciated against the euro to 3.8756/8788 from 3.8747/8789 yesterday.-- Bernama
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