President Donald Trump signed into law on Tuesday legislation that bans the use of Kaspersky Lab within the U.S. government, capping a months-long effort to purge the Moscow-based antivirus firm from federal agencies amid concerns it was vulnerable to Kremlin influence.

The ban, included as part of broader defense policy spending legislation that Trump signed, reinforces a directive issued by the Trump administration in September that civilian agencies remove Kaspersky Lab software within 90 days. The law applies to both civilian and military networks.

“The case against Kaspersky is well-documented and deeply concerning. This law is long overdue,” said Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen, who led calls in Congress to scrub the software from government computers. She added that the company’s software represented a “grave risk” to U.S. national security.

Kaspersky Lab has repeatedly denied that it has ties to any government and said it would not help a government with cyber espionage. In an attempt to address suspicions, the company said in October it would submit the source code of its software and future updates for inspection by independent parties.

U.S. officials have said that step, while welcomed, would not be sufficient.

In a statement on Tuesday, Kaspersky Lab said it continued to have “serious concerns” about the law “due to its geographic-specific approach to cybersecurity.”

It added that the company was assessing its options and would continue to “protect its customers from cyber threats (while) collaborating globally with the IT security community to fight cybercrime.”

On Tuesday, Christopher Krebs, a senior cyber security official at the Department of Homeland Security, told reporters that nearly all government agencies had fully removed Kaspersky products from their networks in compliance with the September order.

Kaspersky’ official response to the ban did not appear to contain any information that would change the administration’s assessment of Kaspersky Lab, Krebs said.
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Congress will allow the deadline on reimposing sanctions on Iran to pass this week, congressional and White House aides said Tuesday, leaving a pact between world powers and Tehran intact at least temporarily.

In October, Trump declined to certify that Iran was complying with the nuclear agreement reached among Tehran, the United States and others in 2015. His decision triggered a 60-day window for Congress to decide whether to bring back sanctions on Iran.

Congressional leaders have announced no plans to introduce a resolution to reimpose sanctions before Wednesday’s deadline, and aides say lawmakers will let the deadline pass without action.

By doing that, Congress passes the ball back to Trump, who must decide in mid-January whether he wants to issue a waiver to keep old sanctions from being imposed on Iran.

If Trump doesn’t issue the waiver, the nuclear deal would collapse. That course is opposed by European allies, Russia and China, the other parties to the accord, under which Iran got sanctions relief in return for curbing its nuclear ambitions.

Iran says its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes and denies it has aimed to build an atomic bomb. It has said it will stick to the accord as long as the other signatories respect it, but will “shred” the deal if Washington pulls out.

A senior administration official said Tuesday that the White House planned on leaving the sanctions issue to Congress for the moment and was not asking for sanctions to be reimposed.

Efforts to find common ground with Europe on the Iran deal were complicated again last week, when Trump announced Washington would recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, breaking with international consensus.

‘Worst deal ever’

Trump has called the Iran pact the “worst deal ever” and has threatened to pull the United States out of it.

His fellow Republicans control both chambers of Congress but their Senate majority is so small that they need some Democratic support to advance most legislation. Senate Democrats, even those who opposed it two years ago, do not want to tear up the nuclear accord.

Republican Bob Corker of Tennessee, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, declined to say whether he thought Trump would carry through on a threat to tear up the nuclear pact in January if Congress did not pass legislation to further clamp down on Iran.

Corker told reporters he and Democratic Senator Ben Cardin of Maryland met national security adviser H.R. McMaster last week to see “if there’s language that fits the bill here within Congress but also … keeps [the Europeans] at the table with us and not feeling like we’ve gone off in a different direction.”

Corker declined to elaborate on specifics of the discussions.

Trump threatened to withdraw from the nuclear agreement if lawmakers did not toughen it by amending the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act, or INARA, the U.S. law that opened the possibility of bringing sanctions back.

Cardin, the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations panel, has said he would not support changes to the nuclear pact that are not supported by Europe.

Democrats also insist that, while sanctions should be imposed over Iran’s ballistic missile program or human rights violations, they must be separate from the nuclear agreement.
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A group of women who have publicly accused President Donald Trump of sexual misconduct renewed their claims Monday, calling on U.S. lawmakers to investigate and hold the president accountable. The focus on Trump’s accusers comes in the wake of a national conversation on sexual harassment in the workplace and across industries ranging from media and politics to Hollywood and beyond. VOA’s Elizabeth Cherneff reports.
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Some stinging mistakes in stories involving President Donald Trump have given him fresh ammunition in his battle against the media while raising questions about whether news organizations need to peel back the curtain on how they operate.

The president tweeted six attacks on what he calls “fake news” over the weekend, saying the “out of control” media puts out purposely false and defamatory stories. That led to a contentious exchange at Monday’s White House press briefing between press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and CNN’s Jim Acosta.

“Journalists make honest mistakes,” Acosta said. “That doesn’t make them fake news.”

When Sanders responded that reporters should own up to their mistakes, one said, “we do.”

“Sometimes, but a lot of times you don’t,” she said. “There’s a very big difference between honest mistakes and purposely misleading the American people.”

Trump has his own issues: the Washington Post’s fact-checking blog counted 1,628 false or misleading claims made by the president in his first 298 days in office.

Still, it was an undeniably bad week for news organizations reporting on investigations into the Trump campaigns dealings with Russia. ABC News suspended Brian Ross for incorrectly reporting the timing of a Trump directive to Michael Flynn. Several news outlets wrongly reported that Trump and his family’s bank records were the subject of the special prosecutor’s subpoena. And CNN corrected a story on the timing of a tip to the Trump campaign about damaging information on Democrats.

With the hyper-speed of the modern news environment, the stories spread swiftly beyond their original source.

News organizations corrected themselves but fell short in their explanations, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a communications professor and the director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

“When a mistake is made, the public really needs to understand why it was made and what corrections have been put in place to make sure it doesn’t happen again,” she said.

In announcing Ross’ four-week suspension, ABC News issued a two-paragraph statement saying the story “had not been fully vetted through our editorial standards process.” Executives were not made available to explain to the public what exactly that meant.

Ironically, the only time ABC News President James Goldston’s reaction to the error was heard came from a leaked tape of him talking to staff members obtained by CNN’s media reporting team.

Sanders specifically cited Ross’ story when asked for an example of one that was purposely misleading.

When CNN made its mistake a week later, its own executives did not talk publicly about it – even when the topic was discussed on the network’s weekend show about the media, “Reliable Sources.”

Network representatives, speaking without allowing a name to be attached, blamed the error on sources that provided information to reporters Manu Raju and Jeremy Herb. That still left questions: New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen wondered, for example, how it was possible that different sources made the same error about a date.

CNN earlier this year fired journalists involved in a discredited story about former Trump aide Anthony Scaramucci. CNN said – again, without allowing a name to be attached- Raju and Herb followed the network’s procedures for sensitive stories. In the Scaramucci case, the reporters didn’t. Again, it was up to consumers to decipher precisely what that meant.

CNN’s communications staff, responding Monday to Trump’s tweet that he once called anchor Don Lemon “the dumbest man on television,” said “in a world where bullies torment kids on social media to devastating effect on a regular basis with insults and name calling, it is sad to see our president engaging in the very same behavior himself. Leaders should lead by example.”

With politicians targeting journalists, it is more important than ever to be clear, Jamieson said. People need to know that there are consequences when reporters make mistakes, and what those consequences are, she said.

She pointed to The Washington Post, which last Friday began what it said will be an occasional series of videos about its operations. The first, titled “How to Be a Reporter,” featured interviews with two journalists who worked on the newspaper’s story about Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore dating young girls. The reporters explained how they were tipped to the story and went about reporting it.

“As corny as it sounds, the agenda is to find out what the reality is, what the truth is of the story,” said reporter Stephanie McCrummen.” That’s it.”

Over the weekend, Trump demanded an apology from the Post for a photo that he said was deceptive about the number of people who attended his Florida rally, since it had been taken while people were waiting outside. Post reporter Dave Weigel apologized; Trump later said he should be fired.

On Monday, Trump said a Times story exaggerated the amount of time he watched television each day, and that he seldom watched CNN or MSNBC. The Times said its story was based on interviews with 60 people, “including many who interact with President Trump every day.”
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A U.S. soldier who deserted to North Korea more than half a century ago, but who was eventually allowed to leave the secretive state, has died in Japan aged 77.

One of the Cold War’s strangest dramas began in 1965 when Charles Robert Jenkins, then a 24-year-old army sergeant nicknamed “Scooter” from tiny Rich Square in North Carolina, disappeared one January night while on patrol near the demilitarized zone between the two Koreas.

At an emotional court martial in Japan in 2004, Jenkins – who had never gone to high school – said he deserted to avoid hazardous duty in South Korea and escape combat in Vietnam.

“It was Christmas time, it was also cold and dark. I started to drink alcohol. I never had drunk so much alcohol,” he said in a thick Southern accent, choking back sobs.

He drank 10 beers, took his men on patrol and told them to wait while he checked the road below. He then walked towards North Korea, holding a rifle with a white t-shirt tied around it. He said he had planned to go to Russia and turn himself in, and had not expected North Korea to keep him.

While in North Korea, where he taught English to soldiers and portrayed an evil U.S. spy in a propaganda film, Jenkins met and married Hitomi Soga, a Japanese woman 20 years his junior who had been kidnapped by North Korea to help train spies.

Fear for his safety and the family he built with Soga made it impossible to refuse any demands made on him, Jenkins said.

“You don’t say no to North Korea. You say one thing bad about Kim Il-sung and then you dig your own hole, because you’re gone,” Jenkins told his court martial, referring to the founder of the secretive state.

Soga was allowed to return to Japan in 2002 and Jenkins followed with their two North Korean-born daughters in 2004.

After serving a token 30-day sentence for desertion, Jenkins moved with his family to Sado, Soga’s rural hometown, late in 2004. He subsequently worked in a gift shop and wrote a book about his experiences in North Korea.

A Sado town official confirmed his death, but could give no further details.
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