The US' Homeland Security Department is undergoing a massive overhaul to centralize its analyses of terror intelligence and work more on bioterrorism.
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff was resetting top priorities in a bid to spur a sluggish bureaucracy beset by turf wars and growing pains.
Creation of an intelligence director to centralize terrorism analyses and a chief medical officer to focus on bioterrorism were among top changes to be announced by Chertoff yesterday. These are two areas where experts believe the department has lagged.
Chertoff ordered a review in March, shortly after he took office, to ensure Homeland Security puts most of its resources into the nation's most vulnerable areas.
"Our department must drive improvement with a sense of urgency," Chertoff said in remarks prepared for yesterday and provided to The Associated Press. "Our enemy constantly changes and adapts, so we as a department must be nimble and decisive."
Transportation and border security are among Chertoff's top priorities and will get more personnel, detection and screening technology and other resources, according to department officials. They spoke on Tuesday on condition of anonymity because the changes had not been announced.
Some lawmakers Chertoff briefed on Tuesday said the overhaul was headed in the right direction, but remained skeptical that bureaucratic reorganization would make the country safer.
"We appreciated him coming and talking to us, but ... at the end of the day you have to show Congress and the public what you have done will in fact make us safer" said Representative Bennie Thompson, the top Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee.
Thompson said that Chertoff highlighted immigration and vulnerabilities at chemical and nuclear plants as top priorities.
Meanwhile, the Senate was engaged in what promised to be a weeklong debate over the department's spending priorities.
Republican Senator Judd Gregg, who oversees domestic security spending, faced a fight with another senior Republican lawmaker over how much to increase funds for protecting mass transit after the London bombings.
As part of a US$31.8 billion bill for Homeland Security next year, Republican Senator Richard Shelby planned to offer a measure allocating US$1.16 billion for commuter rail, subways and bus systems.
Gregg, who chairs the Senate Appropriations homeland security panel, said he would only consider doubling mass transit security spending to about US$200 million.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
RSS