Espionage charges dropped against ex-NSA manager

A former National Security Agency manager accepted a plea deal Thursday that cleared him of espionage charges stemming from the alleged leak of classified information to a Baltimore Sun reporter.

Thomas Drake had been charged with 10 felonies but will plead guilty to a misdemeanor: exceeding the authorized use of a computer. If convicted of the felonies, he could have faced 35 years in prison. Under the plea bargain, he is not expected to serve any time.

Drake, a former Air Force officer, had been charged under the Espionage Act even though he allegedly leaked information to a newspaper, not an enemy power.

"He feels a profound mixture of emotions after five years of investigation and one year of being under indictment," said Jesselyn Radack, a supporter and a director at the Government Accountability Project, which seeks to protect whistle-blowers. Drake is not allowed to comment until after his court appearance in Baltimore on Friday, she said.

The onetime senior NSA manager was indicted last year on charges of taking classified information from the Fort Meade, Md.-based agency for the purpose of leaking it to then-Sun reporter Siobhan Gorman, who wrote a series of articles about waste and mismanagement at the nation's largest spy agency, which monitors electronic signals such as phone calls and emails.

Gorman, who was not named in the indictment, now works at the Wall Street Journal. Spokeswomen for the Sun and the Journal declined to comment on the plea deal.

Drake has insisted he did not provide the reporter with any classified information.

The case is one of five that the Obama administration has been pursuing against those accused of leaking government secrets, a trend that alarmed advocates of greater transparency in government.

Gorman wrote articles for the Sun in 2006 and 2007 about flawed programs at the NSA, including an expensive antiterrorism technology called Trailblazer that was embraced by the agency but later abandoned.

"This whole thing was to shut people up," said former NSA mathematician Bill Binney, a Drake ally whose home was raided by federal agents as part of a leak investigation in 2007. Binney, who was not charged, contends that the probe was in retaliation for a complaint to the NSA's inspector general about what he viewed as mismanagement related to contracts for a massive surveillance program.

But others rued the outcome of the Drake case.

"I think it's sad. It sends all the wrong signals," said Robert Turner, co-founder of the Center for National Security Law at the University of Virginia School of Law. "I think what he did was a betrayal of trust, and he's essentially walking on it."

Allowing government employees to leak secrets without facing strong penalties has serious consequences for national security, he said. "If we cannot keep secrets, we will not get many secrets," said Turner, a former intelligence advisor for the White House and Congress.

Drake had rejected two settlement offers because he was "adamant that he would not plea-bargain with the truth," Radack said.

The case could have established "a horrible precedent" if Drake had been found guilty of espionage, she said, because whistle-blowers who reveal government wrongdoing are not spies.

"If you paint someone with the word espionage," Radack said, "you paint them with the brush of being a traitor to their country."

Weakened winds aid fight against Arizona fire

Reporting from Springerville, Ariz., and Los— More than 3,000 firefighters battling one of the largest wildfires in Arizona history got a break from nature Thursday when high winds driving the flames lost strength.

The Wallow fire, chewing through 386,000 acres of pine, fir and spruce in the White Mountains of eastern Arizona, continued to burn on the edge of small towns scattered across the sparsely populated area. At least two dozen homes have been lost and more than 4,000 structures are threatened.

A thick haze hung over the region and the blaze was only 5% contained. But that was an improvement from a day earlier, when containment was 0%. The fierce winds that earlier in the week knocked small trees sideways abated, aiding fire crews who planned to use a DC-10 air tanker from California to dump fire retardant on the blaze's troublesome northwestern corner.

Thursday morning, the fire was half a mile from the New Mexico border and about a mile from Springerville and Eagar. Crews had burned out a line of defense, and officials said residents of the two towns would probably be able to return to their homes on Saturday.

Flames romped across the east side of the resort community of Greer on Wednesday, destroying 22 homes and a number of outbuildings. "Greer is not out of danger," said Jim Whittington, a spokesman for the firefighting efforts. "There's a lot of fire out there."

The flames threatened power and fiber-optic lines needed for cellphone and Internet service. "If we only had one problem area, we'd be able to knock it out," Whittington said.

Residents of the region are all too familiar with monster blazes. The biggest wildfire in the state's history, the 2002 Rodeo-Chediski fire, also tore through the White Mountains. Just as they did then, many locals are angrily pointing a finger at national forest management.

On Wednesday night, as most of Springerville was emptying out, a handful of people huddled in the Safire Restaurant's lounge to watch TV.

Outside, a giant wall of smoke hovered. Dark at the bottom and fluffy and white on top, it resembled a crashing wave. The main drag was ghostly, with a blinking sign outside Rusty's Meat Shop announcing the evacuation and a trail of cars heading one way: out of town.

Safire co-owner Barry Harris, 61, who has lived in the area for two decades, blamed the fire's spread on parched brush. He said the forest hadn't been logged and grazed enough, which left it clogged with dead wood and trees. He believed environmental protections were partly at fault.

"A person could not physically walk through it," he said, dismissing U.S. Forest Service officials as East Coast bureaucrats — a common insult in these parts. "This is our forest and they won't let us take care of it."

It is an argument heard on public lands across the West, but experts say the logging of big trees and heavy grazing in the last century helped lay the foundation for the Wallow and the Rodeo-Chediski conflagrations.

Cutting the old ponderosa pines opened the forest floor to dense young growth. Grazing eliminated the grasses that fed the frequent, low-intensity fires to which the pineland vegetation had adapted. Federal policies to quench forest fires as quickly as possible compounded the problem by promoting the buildup of brush and unnaturally thick stands of trees.

"We need to turn forestry on its head," said Wally Covington, director of the Ecological Restoration Institute at Northern Arizona University. "Leave the old growth alone … and instead focus on harvesting the small-diameter trees. Open the forest to restore more natural conditions and then reintroduce fire."

A pioneering program in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest that embraces the White Mountain towns has been doing just that. About 35,000 acres have been thinned near the communities as part of an ongoing Forest Service project to reduce the fire risk and supply local wood operations with small trees they turn into fencing, wood pellets and lumber.

Rick Davalos, supervising ranger of the Alpine Ranger District, said forest thinning that created buffers as wide as half a mile spared the summer resort communities of Alpine and Nutrioso.

When the Wallow, which was barreling through treetops, reached the thinned-out stretches, the flames died down and spread across the ground, where they were easier to snuff out. "The fire did exactly what we predicted," he said. "It couldn't go from tree to tree because it's not as dense."

A handful of structures have been lost, but "it's not even 1%," Davalos said. "If we hadn't thinned around here, firefighters probably wouldn't have had time to save a lot of structures."

The Forest Service, working with local residents and conservationists, is planning a more ambitious project that would treat 2.4 million acres of ponderosa pine lands in northern Arizona's national forests over the next several decades. Smaller trees would be removed on 1 million acres and prescribed burns would be conducted on all the land.

"We've really poured our hearts and souls into community protection and landscape restoration," said Todd Schulke of the Center for Biological Diversity, who noted that environmentalists had not filed a lawsuit on the Apache-Sitgreaves for a decade. "It's unfortunate people are still stuck in the 1990s. Our hope is with success, the narrative will change."

Schindler's List typist dies in Germany

The man who typed up Oskar Schindler's list which helped save more than 1,000 Jews from the Nazis, Mietek Pemper, has died in Germany aged 91.Mr Pemper died on Tuesday in Augsburg, southern Germany, and is to be buried in the city's Jewish cemetery on Friday, when municipal authorities will order flags to be lowered to half-mast in his honour.Born Mieczyslaw Pemper in 1920 in the Polish city of Krakow to a Jewish family, he was imprisoned at the Nazi concentration camp of Plaszow, where he worked as the personal typist for its feared commandant Amon Goeth from March 1943 to September 1944.It was there that he linked up with German industrialist Schindler.Mr Pemper secretly read in Goeth's mail from Berlin that all factories that were not producing goods for the Nazi effort should be closed.He convinced Schindler, an ethnic German from Czechoslovakia and a member of the Nazi party who first sought to profit from Germany's invasion of Poland, to abandon enamel production at his plant and make anti-tank grenade rifles.Then Mr Pemper, at great risk to his own life, supplied Schindler with a typed list of the names of more than 1,000 fellow prisoners to be recruited for work.Schindler is credited with saving the lives of some 1,200 Jews through such work schemes as well as bribes paid to German officers.Mr Pemper later testified against Goeth and other war criminals in trials in Poland after the war. Goeth was hanged in 1946.Schindler died in anonymity in Germany in 1974 at the age of 66, although he and Mr Pemper remained close friends, but his story was later unearthed by Australian writer Thomas Keneally.US director Steven Spielberg adapted the book into the 1993 film Schindler's List which won seven Oscars. Mr Pemper served as an adviser on the picture.In 2005 he published his memoirs under the title The Road to Rescue: The Untold Story of Schindler's List."After being forced to work for Amon Goeth and after having had the privilege to work for Oskar Schindler, I've often wondered what would have happened had there been no war and no Nazi ideology with its racist mania," he wrote."Goeth would probably not have been a mass murderer, nor Schindler a saver of lives. It was only the extraordinary circumstances of war and the immense power granted to individual men that revealed the nature of these men to such an impressive and terrifying degree."Fate had placed me between the two of them and it was like having an angel on one side and a demon on the other."Mr Pemper moved with his father after his mother's death in 1958 to Augsburg, where his brother had settled immediately after the war. He became a German citizen and worked as a management consultant.Gernot Roemer, a longtime friend of Mr Pemper's and the author of several books on Jewish life in Augsburg, described him as an "unusually modest man" who broke his silence years after the war to relate his experiences to university, school and adult audiences."I am sure he never wanted to become famous or be celebrated," he wrote in the Augsburger Allgemeine newspaper. "He never married and was a very lonely person."Mr Roemer noted that years ago Mr Pemper had sought out Goeth's daughter, who he said never came to terms with the legacy of her sadistic father.Augsburg Mayor Kurt Gribl called Mr Pemper a tireless advocate of intercultural understanding."With Mietek Pemper, the city has lost an important builder of bridges between the Jewish and Christian religions and a contributor to reconciliation," he said in a statement.Augsburg awarded Mr Pemper a civic medal in 2003 and made him an honorary citizen in 2007.

Health Protection Agency: E. coli bug 'is alarming'

Three British nationals in the UK have been infected with E. coli linked to the outbreak in Germany, according to the Health Protection Agency.

It brings the total number of cases in the UK to seven, the other four are from Germany.

It is believed that all patients caught the infection in Germany and brought it back to the UK.

Dr Dilys Morgan from the Health Protection Agency says the outbreak is 'alarming' and continues to advise people travelling to Germany that they should not eat raw cucumber, lettuce or tomatoes and that they should seek medical advice if they have bloody diarrhoea.