1 Massive US phone snooping (San Francisco Chronicle) A leaked document has laid bare the monumental scope of the government's surveillance of Americans' phone records — hundreds of millions of calls — in the first hard evidence of a massive data collection program aimed at combating terrorism under powers granted by Congress after the 9/11 attacks.
At issue is a court order, first disclosed Wednesday by The Guardian newspaper in Britain, that requires the communications company Verizon to turn over on an "ongoing, daily basis" the records of all landline and mobile telephone calls of its customers, both within the US and between the US and other countries. Intelligence experts said the government, though not listening in on calls, would be looking for patterns that could lead to terrorists — and that there was every reason to believe similar orders were in place for other phone companies.
Some critics in Congress, as well as civil liberties advocates, declared that the sweeping nature of the National Security Agency program represented an unwarranted intrusion into Americans' private lives. But a number of lawmakers, including some Republicans who normally jump at the chance to criticize the Obama administration, lauded the program's effectiveness. Leaders of the House Intelligence Committee said the program had helped thwart at least one attempted terrorist attack in the US, "possibly saving American lives."
Separately, The Washington Post and The Guardian reported the existence of another program used by the NSA and FBI that scours the nation's main Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, emails, documents and connection logs to help analysts track a person's movements and contacts. It was not clear whether the program, called PRISM, targets known suspects or broadly collects data from other Americans.
The companies include Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple. The Post said PalTalk has had numerous posts about the Arab Spring and the Syrian civil war. It also said Dropbox would soon be included
2 ‘India rupee may plumb new lows’ (Khushita Vasant in The Wall Street Journal) The Indian rupee is hanging on by a thread. With the currency hovering around 57 to the US dollar — an important technical and psychological level — where do technical analysts see the rupee heading?
The rupee on Thursday regained ground to 56.84 by mid-afternoon trade. Technical analysts say the worst may be over for the near term. But few are willing to rule out the currency moving to test an all-time low of 57.33, a level it hit on June 22, 2012. David Sneddon and Christopher Hine, currency analysts at Credit Suisse in Singapore, said in a note that the rupee has fallen through the 56.43/44 technical support level. “The spotlight stays on the 57.33 record. We would expect a correction back from here, but above would establish a fresh new record,” the analysts said.
The rupee’s fall has been precipitous. At the end of April, the currency was trading at 53.80. It then fell 5% in May, hit by a rush into dollars amid encouraging signs of growth in the US economy. Concerns over India’s current account deficit have exacerbated the fall. Oil and gold importers fear future weakness, prompting them to buy dollars now, pressuring the rupee even more. On the other hand, exporters are waiting for the dollar to rise more before buying rupees.
3 Eurozone forecast cut (BBC) The European Central Bank
(ECB) has revised down its eurozone growth forecast as it voted to hold rates
at historic lows. The ECB now expects the euro area to contract by 0.6% this
year, having earlier predicted a GDP fall of 0.5%. ECB President Mario Draghi
said the Bank still saw "downside risks" for the eurozone economy,
but insisted a gradual recovery would begin in 2014. The ECB's benchmark rate
was kept at 0.5%, after being cut last month.
The decision not to cut rates
further came despite an ongoing recession across the 17 countries that use the
euro. Mr Draghi said the bank had also marginally revised up its 2014 forecast
to 1.1% growth. "The governing council continues to see downside risks
surrounding the economic outlook for the euro area," he said.
4 Chocolate ‘price-fixing’
(Johannesburg Times) Authorities have charged Nestle, Mars and a network of
independent wholesale distributors in an alleged criminal conspiracy to fix
prices of chocolates in Canada. An investigation prompted by a whistleblower's
tip uncovered "evidence suggesting that the accused conspired, agreed or
arranged to fix prices of chocolate products," the Competition Bureau said
in a statement.
5 China may wait for stimulus (Straits Times) China's new leaders have adopted a greater tolerance for a slowdown in the economy than their predecessors and are likely to allow quarterly growth to slip as far as 7% before triggering fresh stimulus to lift activity, sources say.
The government of President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang has flagged for some time that the rapid gross domestic product (GDP) growth of the past three decades needed to shift down a gear as the economy moves towards consumer-led expansion. But it was not clear where Mr Xi and Mr Li would draw the line in the sand, leaving financial markets guessing over how the government would respond to successively weak economic data.
Government economists at top think tanks involved in policy discussions say that line is likely to be 7%, compared with their predecessors who implicitly observed a level of 7.5-8%.
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