Friday, May 15, 2009

Fla. terrorism prosecutors benefited from 3 trials

http://www.wsvn.com/news/articles/local/MI120764/

Fla. terrorism prosecutors benefited from 3 trials

MIAMI (AP) -- Learning from two previous mistrials, federal prosecutors changed their strategy to win hard-fought convictions against five men who plotted to destroy Chicago's Sears Tower and bomb FBI offices, legal experts and attorneys said Wednesday.

Jurors in the third trial on Tuesday convicted ringleader Narseal Batiste and four others on charges of plotting with an FBI informant posing as an al-Qaida emissary to use bombings to start an anti-government insurrection. They face sentences in July of between 30 and 70 years.

"The government is able to fix the mistakes it made in the past and is able to carefully craft responses to defense arguments it heard at the first trial," said Miami defense attorney David O. Markus, who was not involved in the so-called "Liberty City Six" case.

In the previous trials, prosecutors focused on Batiste's threatening words captured on FBI tapes and evidence such as lists he gave the informant of items the group was seeking, such as specific weapons, boots and vehicles. Each time, Batiste claimed that his terrorism talk and lists were faked to get money for himself.

The prosecutors in the latest trial, Jacqueline Arango and Richard Gregorie, were expecting Batiste's responses and revised their questioning of witnesses to refute them. Witnesses including two FBI informants agreed Batiste wanted money, but this time said the cash was for weapons and supplies to carry out his terrorist mission.

They also used Batiste's own admiring comments about a past Chicago terrorism figure named Jeff Fort to draw parallels between the two. Fort, who has no direct connection with Batiste, was convicted in 1987 of conspiring with Libya to commit terrorist acts.

While Fort was only mentioned in passing by prosecutors previously, this time they called as an expert witness a former Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agent to testify about Fort and his Chicago gangs, the Black P. Stones or El Rukns.

"You're giving these people three bites at the apple. These are experienced prosecutors," said Richard Houlihan, attorney for 25-year-old Naudimar Herrera who was cleared of all charges. Another group member was acquitted after the first trial.

Prosecutors declined to comment on their strategy because sentencing has yet to take place.

When Batiste and the others were arrested in June 2006, then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales held a Washington news conference to describe the group as an example of "home grown terrorists" that represented a new front in the war against al-Qaida. The case was praised as an example of the FBI's new, post-Sept. 11 strategy of disrupting potential terrorist plots at the earliest possible stages.

But testimony at all three trials showed that most of the evidence was just talk -- driven by the two well-coached FBI informants -- and that Batiste never took steps to acquire weapons or explosives needed to pull off such major attacks. He did supply an informant known as "Brother Mohammed" with lists of items he wanted, and members of the group took pictures of potential Miami targets such as the FBI office and downtown courthouses.

That was enough for the FBI to take them seriously, without apology. "We identified and disrupted a terrorist threat, and as a result our community and nation are a much safer place," Jonathan I. Solomon, FBI agent in charge of the Miami field office, said after the guilty verdicts.

Former Texas U.S. Attorney Matthew Orwig, who has closely followed the case, said the Liberty City convictions don't represent a ringing endorsement of the early prevention strategy, which can suffer from a lack of concrete evidence.

"Any time the government has to prosecute a case three times, it's an indication there is a problem," Orwig said. "The government needs to analyze and do some soul-searching as to why these cases don't come to a quicker resolution, and why jurors seem to be so skeptical."

Powell aide says torture helped build Iraq war case

http://us.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/05/14/iraq.torture/index.html

Powell aide says torture helped build Iraq war case

Story Highlights
Lawrence Wilkerson criticizes Dick Cheney for defending interrogation methods
Interrogations aimed at finding "smoking gun" linking Iraq and al Qaeda, he says
By 2002, U.S. officials decided "we had al Qaeda pretty much on the run," he says
Representatives of former vice president decline comment on allegations

By Matt Smith
CNN

(CNN) -- Finding a "smoking gun" linking Iraq and al Qaeda became the main purpose of the abusive interrogation program the Bush administration authorized in 2002, a former State Department official told CNN on Thursday.

Dick Cheney's office ordered use of "alternative" techniques against CIA's recommendations, aide says.

The allegation was included in an online broadside aimed at former Vice President Dick Cheney by Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff for then-Secretary of State Colin Powell. In it, Wilkerson wrote that the interrogation program began in April and May of 2002, and then-Vice President Cheney's office kept close tabs on the questioning.

"Its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at preempting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al Qaeda," Wilkerson wrote in The Washington Note, an online political journal.

Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel, said his accusation is based on information from current and former officials. He said he has been "relentlessly digging" since 2004, when Powell asked him to look into the scandal surrounding the treatment of prisoners at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.

"I couldn't walk into a courtroom and prove this to anybody, but I'm pretty sure it's fairly accurate," he told CNN.

Most of Wilkerson's online essay criticizes Cheney's recent defense of the "alternative" interrogation techniques the Bush administration authorized for use against suspected terrorists. Cheney has argued the interrogation program was legal and effective in preventing further attacks on Americans.

Critics say the tactics amounted to the illegal torture of prisoners in U.S. custody and have called for investigations of those who authorized them.

Representatives of the former vice president declined comment on Wilkerson's allegations. But Wilkerson told CNN that by early 2002, U.S. officials had decided that "we had al Qaeda pretty much on the run."

"The priority had turned to other purposes, and one of those purposes was to find substantial contacts between al Qaeda and Baghdad," he said.

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The argument that Iraq could have provided weapons of mass destruction to terrorists such as al Qaeda was a key element of the Bush administration's case for the March 2003 invasion. But after the invasion, Iraq was found to have dismantled its nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs, and the independent commission that investigated the 2001 attacks found no evidence of a collaborative relationship between the two entities.

Wilkerson wrote that in one case, the CIA told Cheney's office that a prisoner under its interrogation program was now "compliant," meaning agents recommended the use of "alternative" techniques should stop.

At that point, "The VP's office ordered them to continue the enhanced methods," Wilkerson wrote.

"The detainee had not revealed any al Qaeda-Baghdad contacts yet. This ceased only after Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under waterboarding in Egypt, 'revealed' such contacts."

Al-Libi's claim that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's government had trained al Qaeda operatives in producing chemical and biological weapons appeared in the October 2002 speech then-President Bush gave when pushing Congress to authorize military action against Iraq. It also was part of Powell's February 2003 presentation to the United Nations on the case for war, a speech Powell has called a "blot" on his record.

Al-Libi later recanted the claim, saying it was made under torture by Egyptian intelligence agents, a claim Egypt denies. He died last week in a Libyan prison, reportedly a suicide, Human Rights Watch reported.

Stacy Sullivan, a counterterrorism adviser for the U.S.-based group, called al-Libi's allegation "pivotal" to the Bush administration's case for war, as it connected Baghdad to the terrorist organization behind the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington.

And an Army psychiatrist assigned to support questioning of suspected terrorists at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp in Cuba told the service's inspector-general that interrogators there were trying to connect al Qaeda and Iraq.

"This is my opinion," Maj. Paul Burney told the inspector-general's office. "Even though they were giving information and some of it was useful, while we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between aI Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful in establishing a link between aI Qaeda and Iraq. The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish this link ... there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results."

Burney's account was included in a Senate Armed Services Committee report released in April. Other interrogators reported pressure to produce intelligence "but did not recall pressure to identify links between Iraq and al Qaeda," the Senate report states.

Cheney criticized Powell during a television interview over the weekend, saying he no longer considers Powell a fellow Republican after his former colleague endorsed Democratic candidate Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election.

Wilkerson said he is not speaking for his former boss and does not know whether Powell shares his views.

All About Dick Cheney • Colin Powell • Iraq War • Al Qaeda

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Thursday, May 14, 2009

The Cherokee Nation is determined to deny black folks citizenship. Descendants of Freedmen cannot let that happen.

Slaves to Denial

The Cherokee Nation is determined to deny black folks citizenship. Descendants of Freedmen cannot let that happen.

By: Kenneth J. Cooper | Posted: May 13, 2009 at 6:05 AM

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The Cherokee Nation is determined to deny black folks citizenship. Descendants of Freedmen cannot let that happen.

kenneth.cooper

The Cherokee Nation is determined to deny black folks citizenship. Descendants of Freedmen cannot let that happen.

05/13/2009 06:05

I am a descendant of Cherokee Freedmen, the former slaves owned by the Cherokees and a smaller number of free blacks who lived among the tribe before the end of the Civil War. So watching the PBS series We Shall Remain, which aired last month, I empathized with Native Americans and silently condemned the white settlers and government officials for all that they so inhumanely inflicted on the native tribes. I felt angry about the forcible removal of the Cherokees from the Southeast to Indian Territory or modern Oklahoma.

But in recent years, I have found myself as angry with the Cherokees themselves as I am with the white settlers who wronged them in the past.

From the end of the war until Oklahoma statehood in 1907, black Freedmen were accorded rights as citizens of Cherokee Nation, if not exactly equal rights. A century later, Freedmen descendants find themselves battling the Cherokee Nation in the courts to restore their tribal citizenship.

By rejecting a people whose history is so bound up with their own, the Cherokees are engaging in a massive case of denial. The history of every family descended from Freedmen reflects close relations with Cherokees, down to some last names still in use today. Watching the PBS documentary, I was reminded more than once how interlaced the Cherokees’ family history is with my own.

A scene shows a replica of the signature of a Cherokee leader who signed the duplicitous 1835 treaty that led to the tribe's and their slaves' relocation. Two decades later, that Cherokee leader, John Adair Bell, kidnapped and re-enslaved my third great-grandmother, Malinda, and two of her children. He carted them to Texas, and that family was never whole again.

Another sequence dramatizes the brutal assassinations of three other Cherokees who signed that treaty. The killings happened soon after the tribe arrived in Indian Territory, touching off prolonged infighting between two factions.

Similar assassinations of two of Bell's cousins in 1853 appear to have scared him enough that he fled to Texas. For some reason, he felt that exile entitled him to Malinda—who was born a slave to Bell’s in-laws but had been freed—and her two young daughters.

One of the living commentators who appears later on in the documentary is Gayle Ross, a descendant of the most famous Cherokee chief, John Ross, who led the tribe through the Trail of Tears and the Civil War, a period covering almost 30 years.

Ross and I met, acrimoniously, last summer in Chicago after I publicly blasted Cherokee Principal Chief Chad Smith for his inaccurate and dismissive rendering of the freedmen history and their claim to tribal citizenship.

Ross told me she was upset by my description of her ancestor as a slaveholder. “He was much more than that,” she said when I encountered her on an escalator in the city’s convention center.

My comments came during a forum about freedmen citizenship at a conference of African-American, Native American, Asian and Hispanic journalists. The quadrennial conference has the ambitious title, UNITY!

The conversation with Ross spilled out of the meeting room and back onto the escalator and, up to that point, had been polite and intense. Then, with a sharp note of hostility, she said something about not letting “other people” tell “our” history. Our history. Suddenly, me and my family were defined as the outsiders.

I responded with some shared history she probably didn’t know. In 1875, a relative of hers—another descendant of John Ross—shot and killed the first wife of my second great-grandfather (Malinda’s son). The tribe then manipulated the court system to ensure the shooter got off without a trial. Those revelations were enough for her to back off.

As it turns out, Gayle Ross and I are cousins by marriage. After the Civil War, a Cherokee cousin of hers and a freedman cousin of mine (Malinda’s nephew) married and had eight children in the Cherokee Nation.

The names of our married distant relatives are in the History of the Cherokee Indians and Their Legends and Folklore by Emmet Starr, the eminent Cherokee genealogist. On page 417: Sarah Cynthia Clark (Ross’ relative) and Allen Lynch (mine).

How did I come to know this? The lawsuit seeking Cherokee citizenship for freedmen descendants cites discrepancies in how children were categorized in a census at the turn of the 20th century that determines eligibility for Cherokee citizenship. Some children were recorded as black, some as Cherokee by blood.

The Cherokee Nation’s attempt to disown part of its history, and those who share it, is actually doing more to bring that history into the open.

Kenneth J. Cooper, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, is a freelance journalist based in Boston.

The 'Real American' Test

The Other Community Organizer

History Lived, Lessons Learned

http://www.theroot.com/views/slaves-denial?auto=true

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Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Mubarak to Israel: Progress in peace process before Arab recognition

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1085206.html

Last update - 04:47 13/05/2009
Mubarak to Israel: Progress in peace process before Arab recognition
By The Associated Press
Tags: Israel News, Hosni Mubarak

Progress in peace negotiations must come before Arab recognition of Israel, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said in an interview with Israel TV broadcast late Tuesday. Mubarak also addressed American suggestions that the 2002 Arab initiative, offering Israel normal relations with the Arab world if Israel withdraws from all of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, east Jerusalem and Golan Heights, could be amended. He categorically rejected that idea and said the only road to peace is the creation of a Palestinian state. Mubarak met Israel's new Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday in the Red Sea resort of Sharm El Sheik. Netanyahu has not endorsed the idea of a Palestinian state, preferring economic development first.
In the TV interview, Mubarak said he believes the Israeli leader wants peace, but stressed that he must accept the idea of a Palestinian state or terrorism and violence would take hold. The interview was aired on Israel TV's main evening newscast while Egypt's official MENA news agency carried a transcript. Netanyahu, Mubarak and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas are heading to Washington later this month for separate meetings with President Barack Obama. Arab diplomats have said that Washington asked Arab countries to amend the Arab initiative to make it more palatable to Israel. The plan offers Israel collective Arab recognition, peace and normal relations in exchange for an Israeli withdrawal from territory it occupied in the 1967 Mideast war, the establishment of a Palestinian state with east Jerusalem as its capital and a just solution to the issue of Palestinian refugees. "Obama is very precise in all what he does. He acts rationally and logically, after he listens to his advisers well, and listens to the opinions of the countries he deals with," Mubarak said. Mubarak said Arab countries will not normalize relations with Israel until there is progress toward peace between Israel and the Palestinians. "You shouldn't say normalization (with Arab countries) and then we make progress (on peace). No. You make some great progress and encourage Arab countries," he said. "If we reach a solution on the peace question, the Arab countries will be ready to have relations with Israel." Israel has said that since it was not a party to drawing up the initiative, it does not have to endorse it and instead proposes negotiations based on the initiative. Among other problems, Israelis are concerned that the Arab proposal can be interpreted to endorse the right of return of Palestinian refugees and millions of their descendants to Israel - a prospect Israel has always rejected. Several diplomats have said that the Americans are asking Arab nations to drop demands for a right of return for Palestinian refugees and agree to either resettle them in the host countries or in the Palestinian territories. Mubarak ruled out amending the initiative. "Don't keep asking for an amendment. It will not be amended so long as you ask for it. All the countries are not approving the amendment," he said. In Sharm el Sheik, Netanyahu sought Egypt's help in building a coalition of Arab nations against Iran, according to Israeli officials. He has sought to redirect the Middle East agenda by focusing on Iran as the key threat to stability, framing the Middle East conflict as one between moderates and extremists. Mubarak said in the interview that Egypt's views on the threat Iran poses are different from those of Israel. He also said Egypt favors a Middle East without nuclear weapons, broadly hinting that he meant eliminating Israel's stockpile of nuclear bombs. Israel does not confirm or deny possessing nuclear weapons.

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Swine Flu May Be Human Error; WHO Investigates Claim (Update1)

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=afrdATVXPEAk&refer=worldwide

Swine Flu May Be Human Error; WHO Investigates Claim (Update1)

By Jason Gale and Simeon Bennett
May 13 (Bloomberg) --

The World Health Organization is investigating a claim by an Australian researcher that the swine flu virus circling the globe may have been created as a result of human error.

Adrian Gibbs, 75, who collaborated on research that led to the development of Roche Holding AG’s Tamiflu drug, said in an interview that he intends to publish a report suggesting the new strain may have accidentally evolved in eggs scientists use to grow viruses and drugmakers use to make vaccines. Gibbs said he came to his conclusion as part of an effort to trace the virus’s origins by analyzing its genetic blueprint.
“One of the simplest explanations is that it’s a laboratory escape,” Gibbs said in an interview with Bloomberg Television today. “But there are lots of others.”
The World Health Organization received the study last weekend and is reviewing it, Keiji Fukuda, the agency’s assistant director-general of health security and environment, said in an interview May 11. Gibbs, who has studied germ evolution for four decades, is one of the first scientists to analyze the genetic makeup of the virus that was identified three weeks ago in Mexico and threatens to touch off the first flu pandemic since 1968.
A virus that resulted from lab experimentation or vaccine production may indicate a greater need for security, Fukuda said. By pinpointing the source of the virus, scientists also may better understand the microbe’s potential for spreading and causing illness, Gibbs said.
Possible Mistake
“The sooner we get to grips with where it’s come from, the safer things might become,” Gibbs said by phone from Canberra yesterday. “It could be a mistake” that occurred at a vaccine production facility or the virus could have jumped from a pig to another mammal or a bird before reaching humans, he said.
Gibbs and two colleagues analyzed the publicly available sequences of hundreds of amino acids coded by each of the flu virus’s eight genes. He said he aims to submit his three-page paper today for publication in a medical journal.
“You really want a very sober assessment” of the science behind the claim, Fukuda said May 11 at the WHO’s Geneva headquarters.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta has received the report and has decided there is no evidence to support Gibbs’s conclusion, said Nancy Cox, director of the agency’s influenza division. She said since researchers don’t have samples of swine flu viruses from South America and Africa, where the new strain may have evolved, those regions can’t be ruled out as natural sources for the new flu.
No Evidence
“We are interested in the origins of this new influenza virus,” Cox said. “But contrary to what the author has found, when we do the comparisons that are most relevant, there is no evidence that this virus was derived by passage in eggs.”
The WHO’s collaborative influenza research centers, which includes the CDC, and sites in Memphis, Melbourne, London and Tokyo, were asked by the international health agency to review the study over the weekend, Fukuda said. The request was extended to scientists at the Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome, the World Organization for Animal Health in Paris, as well as the WHO’s influenza network, he said.
“My guess is that the picture should be a lot clearer over the next few days,” Fukuda said. “We have asked a lot of people to look at this.”
Virus Expert
Gibbs wrote or co-authored more than 250 scientific publications on viruses during his 39-year career at the Australian National University in Canberra, according to biographical information on the university’s Web site.
Swine flu has infected 5,251 people in 30 countries so far, killing 61, according to WHO data. Scientists are trying to determine whether the virus will mutate and become more deadly if it spreads to the Southern Hemisphere and back. Flu pandemics occur when a strain of the disease to which few people have immunity evolves and spreads.
Gibbs said his analysis supports research by scientists including Richard Webby, a virologist at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, who found the new strain is the product of two distinct lineages of influenza that have circulated among swine in North America and Europe for more than a decade.
In addition, Gibbs said his research found the rate of genetic mutation in the new virus was about three times faster than that of the most closely related viruses found in pigs, suggesting it evolved outside of swine.
Gene Evolution
“Whatever speeded up the evolution of these genes happened at least seven or eight years ago, so one wonders, why hasn’t it been found?” Gibbs said today.
Some scientists have speculated that the 1977 Russian flu, the most recent global outbreak, began when a virus escaped from a laboratory.
Identifying the source of new flu viruses is difficult without finding the exact strain in an animal or bird “reservoir,” said Jennifer McKimm-Breschkin, a virologist at the Commonwealth Science and Industrial Research Organization in Melbourne.
“If you can’t find an exact match, the best you can do is compare sequences,” she said. “Similarities may give an indication of a possible source, but this remains theoretical.”
The World Organization for Animal Health, which represents chief veterinary officers from 174 countries, received the Gibbs paper and is working with the WHO on an assessment, said Maria Zampaglione, a spokeswoman.
Genetic Patterns
The WHO wants to know whether any evidence that the virus may have been developed in a laboratory can be corroborated and whether there are other explanations for its particular genetic patterns, according to Fukuda.
“These things have to be dealt with straight on,” he said. “If someone makes a hypothesis, then you test it and you let scientific process take its course.”
Gibbs said he has no evidence that the swine-derived virus was a deliberate, man-made product.
“I don’t think it could be a malignant thing,” he said. “It’s much more likely that some random thing has put these two viruses together.”
Gibbs, who spent most of his academic career studying plant viruses, said his major contribution to the study of influenza occurred in 1975, while collaborating with scientists Graeme Laver and Robert Webster in research that led to the development of the anti-flu medicines Tamiflu and Relenza, made by GlaxoSmithKline Plc.
Bird Poo
“We were out on one of the Barrier Reef islands, off Australia, catching birds for the flu in them, and I happened to be the guy who caught the best,” Gibbs said. The bird he got “yielded the poo from which was isolated the influenza isolate strain from which all the work on Tamiflu and Relenza started.”
Gibbs, who says he studies the evolution of flu viruses as a “retirement hobby,” expects his research to be challenged by other scientists.
“This is how science progresses,” he said. “Somebody comes up with a wild idea, and then they all pounce on it and kick you to death, and then you start off on another silly idea.”
To contact the reporters on this story: Jason Gale in Geneva at j.gale@bloomberg.net; Simeon Bennett in Singapore at sbennett9@bloomberg.net.
Last Updated: May 13, 2009 01:36 EDT

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World seabed disputes face U.N. deadline

Tue May 12, 2009 8:45am EDT

http://www.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUSTRE54B2YX20090512?sp=true
By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent

OSLO (Reuters) - The world faces disputes over the seabed from the South China Sea to the North Pole at a May 13 U.N. deadline for claims meant as a milestone toward the final fixing of maritime boundaries.
Most coastal states have to define their continental shelves, areas of shallower water offshore, by Wednesday to a U.N. Commission that aims to set limits for national rights to everything from oil and gas to life on the ocean floor.
"This is the sweep after which the maritime limits should be fixed ... the final big adaptation of the world map," said Harald Brekke, a Norwegian official who is a vice-chair of the U.N. Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf.
"We are seeing many overlapping submissions," he told Reuters of the deadline, set in 2004. Forty-eight nations have made full claims and dozens more have made preliminary submissions under the deadline.
Russia has made the most spectacular claim by using a mini-sub to plant a flag on the seabed beneath the North Pole in 2007, an area that Denmark also says it will also claim.
And submissions have highlighted territorial disputes between Japan and Russia in the Pacific, between China and neighbors over the South China Sea and between Britain and Argentina over the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic.
"China possesses indisputable sovereignty ... over the South China Sea islands and their near areas," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu said of islands disputed with countries including Malaysia, Vietnam and the Philippines.
Brekke said the commission cannot decide ownership of the seabed around disputed islands.
LIMITS
Under existing law, nations can exploit the seabed if their continental shelves extend beyond territorial seas stretching 200 nautical miles from the coast. But the exact limits have not been defined on the map -- until now.
So far, the U.N. Commission has approved large parts of claims by Russia, Brazil, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, Norway, Mexico and a joint submission by European countries around the Bay of Biscay and the Celtic Sea.
The distant offshore seabed had long been viewed as of little commercial interest. But factors such as global warming that is melting the Arctic ice and better drilling technology are bringing change.
A rig owned by oil and gas drilling group Transocean holds the depth record for drilling in water 10,011 feet deep in the Gulf of Mexico in 2003 -- the water under the North Pole, for instance, is 4,261 meters (13,980 ft) deep.
One of a new generation of rigs, capable of drilling in 12,000 feet of water has left a shipyard in South Korea for acceptance testing in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico, said Guy Cantwell of Transocean in Houston.
Brekke said it would take years to resolve all claims, even those which do not overlap. Any country missing the deadline -- set as midnight in New York (0400 GMT Wednesday) -- risks losing the chance of U.N. endorsement.
The United States is among dozens of nations not bound by the May 13 deadline, since it has not ratified the Convention on the Law of the Sea. President Barack Obama hopes to ratify.
About 50-60 developing nations, including many in Africa, have had help in making claims from the U.N. Environment Program (UNEP) with the Norwegian Grid-Arendal foundation, which sees it as a step toward safeguarding the oceans.
"The connections we make with these countries mean that UNEP may be able to help with marine management in future," Peter Prokosch, head of Grid-Arendal, told Reuters.
(Editing by Alison Williams)
© Thomson Reuters 2009 All rights reserved

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