State Dept.: Clinton email storage not secured
WASHINGTON – The State Department has told Senate investigators that it didn’t provide Hillary Rodham Clinton’s lawyer with a secure-enough method to read now-highly classified material from her homebrew email server because it didn’t anticipate that the messages would be deemed so secret.
In July, State Department officials installed a safe at the office of attorney David Kendall after the government determined some of Clinton’s emails may have contained classified information. But it said last week the safe wasn’t suitable for so-called top secret, sensitive compartmented information, known as TS/SCI, which the government has said was found in some messages.
Assistant Secretary of State Julia Frifield wrote to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley on Sept. 22 that “while the safe was suitable for up to (top secret) information, it was not approved for TS/SCI material” because the material wasn’t held in a facility set up for discussing highly secret information, known as a SCIF, or sensitive compartmented information facility.
Shell dims on Arctic oil, delighting greens
ANCHORAGE, Alaska – Royal Dutch Shell has abandoned its long quest to become the first company to produce oil in Alaska’s Arctic waters, darkening the nation’s long-term oil prospects and delighting environmental groups that tried to block the project.
After years of effort, Shell is leaving the region “for the foreseeable future” because it failed to find enough oil to make further drilling worthwhile.
The company has spent more than $7 billion on the effort, slogged through a regulatory gauntlet and fought environmental groups that feared a spill in the harsh climate would be difficult to clean and devastating to polar bears, walruses, seals and other wildlife.
Key Afghan city falls to Taliban
KABUL, Afghanistan – The Taliban captured the strategic northern Afghan city of Kunduz on Monday in a multi-pronged attack involving hundreds of fighters, the first time the insurgents have seized a major urban area since the 2001 U.S.-led invasion.
The fast-moving assault took military and intelligence agencies by surprise as the insurgents descended on the city, one of Afghanistan’s richest and the target of repeated Taliban offensives as the militants spread their fight across the country following the withdrawal last year of U.S. and NATO combat troops.
NASA: Mars appears to have flowing water
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – Mars appears to have flowing rivulets of salty water in summer, scientists reported Monday.
“It suggests that it would be possible for there to be life today on Mars,” NASA’s science mission chief, John Grunsfeld, said at a news conference.
Scientists in 2008 confirmed the existence of frozen water on Mars. But instruments aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have yielded the strongest evidence yet that salt water in liquid form flows down certain Martian slopes each summer, according to the researchers.
Associated Press
