NSA surveillance cited in challenge

NSA surveillance cited in challenge

WASHINGTON

A Brooklyn man in prison for terrorism may have a new opportunity to challenge his conviction because the government only recently told him how it obtained evidence it intended to use against him. It was through one of the National Security Agency’s secret surveillance programs.

On Monday, the government notified Albanian citizen Agron Hasbajrami it had intended to use information from the warrantless surveillance program — something that federal law required him to be told in September 2011. Hasbajrami pleaded guilty in 2012 to a terrorism charge after admitting he tried to go to Pakistan to join a radical jihadist insurgent group. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

Russia war games prompt US warning

KIEV, Ukraine

Russia ordered 150,000 troops to test their combat readiness Wednesday in a show of force that prompted a blunt warning from the United States that any military intervention in Ukraine would be a “grave mistake.”

Vladimir Putin’s announcement of huge new war games came as Ukraine’s protest leaders chose a millionaire former banker to head a new government after the pro-Russian president went into hiding.

The new government is expected to be formally approved by parliament today.

In Kiev’s Independence Square, the heart of the protest movement against Yanukovych, the interim leaders who seized control after he disappeared proposed Arseniy Yatsenyuk as the country’s new prime minister. The 39-year-old served as economy minister, foreign minister and parliamentary speaker before fugitive president Vikto Yanukovych took office in 2010, and is widely viewed as a technocratic reformer who enjoys the support of the U.S.

Syria: Army troops killed 175 rebels

DAMASCUS, Syria

Syrian army troops Wednesday killed 175 rebels, many of them al-Qaida-linked fighters, in an ambush described as one of the deadliest attacks by government forces against fighters near Damascus, according to state media.

An opposition group said the dawn ambush — part of a government effort to secure the capital — was carried out by the Lebanese Hezbollah group, which has been instrumental in helping President Bashar Assad’s regime push back rebels entrenched in the suburbs of the capital city.

Inmates sue over drugs’ ‘secrecy’

OKLAHOMA CITY

Two Oklahoma death-row inmates scheduled to be executed next month sued state corrections officials Wednesday for details about the drugs that will be used to execute them, including their source.

Under state law, no one may disclose who provides Oklahoma with the three drugs it uses to execute condemned prisoners. Lawyers for Charles Warner and Clayton Lockett fear the men could suffer severe pain if Oklahoma is allowed to maintain a “veil of secrecy.”

YouTube ordered to take down video

SAN FRANCISCO

A U.S. appeals court ordered YouTube on Wednesday to take down an anti-Muslim film that sparked violent riots in parts of the Middle East and death threats to the actors.

The decision by a divided three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco reinstated a lawsuit filed against YouTube by an actress who appeared briefly in the 2012 video that led to rioting and deaths because of its negative portrayal of the Prophet Muhammad.

Associated Press