Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) and U.S. Rep. Albio Sires (D-8) expressed relief that Alan Gross, a U.S. government subcontractor for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) who was arrested in 2009 and accused of being a U.S. spy after allegedly supplying satellite photos and computer equipment to members of Cuba’s Jewish community, was released on Wednesday. Gross’ release was the opening move of a major policy shift that will lead to the restoration of regular diplomatic rules with Cuba, suspended in 1961, and the opening of an American embassy on the communist-ruled island.
Sires, who was born in Cuba, added
“Nothing the Cuban regime does is humanitarian in nature, particularly when it continues to deny the Cuban people basic human rights while utilizing fear, incarceration, and unwarranted force to maintain control,” said Sires in a written statement on Wednesday. “While I am relieved that Mr. Gross will finally be home with his family, I would be remiss not to wonder how the family of murdered New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster feels as his killer, Joanne Chesimard, still roams freely in Cuba. Chesimard [a.k.a. Assata Shakur] is currently listed by the FBI as the number one most wanted terrorist and has been enjoying political asylum in Cuba for 30 years.
WASHINGTON — The deal that freed an American jailed in Cuba and ended 53 years of diplomatic estrangement between the United States and Cuba was blessed at the highest levels of the Holy See but cut in the shadowy netherworld of espionage.
A personal appeal from Pope Francis, American officials said, was critical in persuading Cuba’s president, Raúl Castro, to agree to a prisoner swap and the freeing of the American aid worker Alan P. Gross. The pope, officials said, acted as a “guarantor” that both sides would live up to the terms of a deal reached in secret.
The most tangible breakthrough, however, came almost a year into the talks, when the United States, at loggerheads with Cuba, proposed to swap three Cuban agents jailed in the United States for a Cuban working for American intelligence who had been held in a jail in Cuba for nearly 20 years.
By introducing another figure to the talks — the kind of horse-trading that was standard in Cold War spy swaps — the White House was able to sidestep the appearance that it was trading Cuban spies directly for Mr. Gross. Cuba had sought a straight swap but the United States resisted, saying Mr. Gross had been wrongfully imprisoned.
All told, the negotiations to free Mr. Gross and reopen ties with Cuba took a year and a half. In nine meetings, held in Canada and the Vatican, a tiny circle of aides to Mr. Castro and President Obama hashed out the gritty details as well as grand questions of history.
Looming over their efforts was a mounting fear among the Americans that Mr. Gross’s health was deteriorating. Several months ago, Secretary of State John Kerry warned Cuba’s foreign minister, Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla, that if Mr. Gross died in captivity, all of the administration’s efforts to reopen relations with Cuba would be for naught.
Word of the talks was kept under extraordinarily tight wraps, but in March, Mr. Obama brought in an influential outsider. The president briefed Pope Francis, who was born in Argentina and is the first head of the Roman Catholic church from Latin America, in a one-on-one meeting over a spare desk adorned with a gold crucifix at the Vatican. Days later, the pope wrote letters to Mr. Obama and Mr. Castro, appealing to both to keep pushing for an agreement.
“You just cannot overstate the importance of this pope,” said a senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the negotiations. “This pope, coming from the region, has a resonance with leaders in the region, including Cuba.”
Obama’s First Move
The seeds of this week’s opening were laid soon after Mr. Obama took office in 2009, when he loosened restrictions on the ability of Cuban-Americans to visit relatives and send money to their families there. In April 2009, Mr. Obama told a gathering of Western Hemisphere leaders that the United States sought “a new beginning with Cuba.”
But the thaw quickly froze again in December 2009 when Mr. Gross, a contractor for the United States Agency for International Development, was arrested and accused of crimes against the Cuban state for bringing telecommunications equipment into the country. The State Department began a long, fruitless campaign for his release.
Hillary Rodham Clinton described her failure to win Mr. Gross’s freedom as one of her major regrets as secretary of state. But as she prepared to leave the State Department, she nevertheless wrote a memo to Mr. Obama urging him to reconsider the trade embargo against Cuba.
The president had been leaning in the same direction, officials said, and when he and his aides laid out their foreign-policy priorities for the second term, they put Cuba near the top. When the Cuban government loosened some restrictions on travel for its citizens, Mr. Obama decided the time was right to make a higher-level diplomatic overture.
To spearhead the effort, he chose two young aides: Benjamin J. Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser and speechwriter, and Ricardo Zuniga, a Cuba expert of Honduran descent, who is the National Security Council’s senior director for Western Hemisphere affairs. Mr. Zuniga, who had worked at the American Interests Section in Havana, was recruited to the White House to help with such an effort, a senior official said, while Mr. Rhodes had been involved in the White House’s opening to Myanmar.
For months, the two men took commercial flights to Canada to meet with an only slightly larger delegation from Cuba, a senior official said. The meetings usually lasted a day but sometimes stretched to a second day.
A Canadian government official, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said Canada arranged locations in Toronto and in Ottawa for about seven meetings. Canada did not participate in the talks.
“I don’t want to exaggerate Canada’s role,” Prime Minister Stephen Harper told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. “But look, I’m pleased the president acknowledged our role in this.”
What Cuba Wanted
In the early stages of the talks, officials said, it was not clear to the Americans what the Cuban government most wanted. Was it an end to American-sponsored pro-democracy programs? Did Cuba want to be taken off the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism? Or was it the release of the Cuban Five, five Cuban intelligence officers convicted of espionage and, in one case, murder?
The Cuban negotiators, for example, repeatedly objected to the American military prison at Guantánamo Bay.
In earlier negotiations, the Americans had played down Mr. Gross’s importance, calculating that this would increase the odds that the Cubans would release him after he was sentenced and had lost his appeal. Plus, after two of the Cuban Five were paroled, American officials hoped that the Cubans would release Mr. Gross on humanitarian grounds.
The first member of the Cuban Five, Rene González, was released in 2011 after serving 13 years of his sentence. He was required to serve three years of probation in the United States, but in 2013, a judge decided he could stay in Cuba after he went there for his father’s funeral if he renounced his United States citizenship. A second member of the Cuban Five, Fernando González, was released early in 2014 and was deported.
Yet the Cubans still would not release Mr. Gross. As the talks dragged on through 2013, it became clear to the American delegation that getting the remaining three members of the Cuban Five back was a top priority for the Cuban government — a point made clear in Mr. Castro’s statement on Wednesday, which hailed the prisoners as heroes.
At that point, the American side tabled the notion of a straight spy swap and proposed that the three remaining members of the Cuban Five be exchanged for a Cuban who had worked for American intelligence. It would be part of a broader move toward the normalization of relations in which Mr. Gross would be set free as a humanitarian gesture.
“When we raised this intelligence asset,” a senior official said, “that was not something the Cubans anticipated.”
American intelligence officials have said little about the Cuban agent, except that he was instrumental in exposing and disrupting a ring of Cuban operatives in the United States that included members of the Cuban Five. A senior American official identified him as Rolando Sarraf Trujillo. Multiple news accounts in recent years have identified Mr. Trujillo as a former Cuban intelligence officer who has been in prison in Cuba since 1995.
While Mr. Kerry was not involved in the secret channel in Canada, he played an important role in reinforcing the White House’s message. As the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Mr. Kerry had come to know Mr. Parrilla, Cuba’s foreign minister. That gave the United States another channel to deliver messages to the Cuban authorities.
In phone calls with Mr. Parrilla — Mr. Kerry held four of them last summer — he delivered a stark message: If any harm came to Mr. Gross, the entire deal would be off. Mr. Gross’s mother was in declining health, and the Americans were afraid if she died, his condition might deteriorate or he might even harm himself. After Evelyn Gross died last summer, Mr. Kerry sent him a handwritten letter urging him not to lose faith.
Mr. Kerry also reassured lawmakers on Capitol Hill, who were concerned that the administration was not doing enough to free Mr. Gross. At one meeting with his former Senate colleagues, he said, “Guys, trust me: We could have a backchannel cooking to bring Alan home and do something bold, and you wouldn’t know and you couldn’t know.”
Mr. Kerry cited similar secret negotiations between the United States and Iran held in the Persian Gulf state of Oman, which paved the way for an interim agreement on the Iranian nuclear program. Officials said Mr. Kerry viewed the opening to Cuba much like the opening to Vietnam, in which he played a role as a senator and a Vietnam veteran.
The Presidents Meet
Even as the two sides were talking, there was an impromptu meeting of Mr. Obama and Mr. Castro at the funeral of Nelson Mandela in December. The two men shook hands, though the White House said later that Mr. Obama had not raised Mr. Gross’s plight with Mr. Castro.
The Vatican’s role predated Pope Francis. One of his predecessors, Pope John Paul II, visited Cuba in 1998, and the church remains hugely influential among Cubans. The Obama administration first sought to enlist the Vatican’s support when Pope Benedict XVI was in office. It worked even more actively with the Vatican after Pope Francis came to the Vatican in 2013.
The pope’s new secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, an Italian, had served as papal nuncio in Venezuela and was well versed in Latin America politics. Mr. Kerry was also in contact with Cardinal Parolin, meeting him at the Vatican in June and again a week ago.
The Cuban government could not afford to ignore the church’s influence, and the Vatican used it, including to persuade the Cuban negotiations to go along with the idea of a prisoner swap.
CONTINUE READING THE MAIN STORY
64
COMMENTS
“It was less a matter of breaking some substantive logjam but more the confidence of having an external party we could rely on,” said a senior official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the negotiations. “This was a very complicated piece of business.”
In October, as negotiations reached a critical phase, the Vatican hosted a meeting of American and Cuban negotiators, in which they sealed the final terms of the agreement. On Nov. 6, two days after the midterm elections, Mr. Obama convened a meeting of his National Security Council to sign off on the new policy.
Still, the two delegations met one more time in Canada to work out the logistical details of the swap. Those details were complicated: Representative Chris Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat who was part of a delegation sent to pick up Mr. Gross in Havana, said their blue-and-white government plane was not allowed to take off for Washington until five minutes after the plane carrying the Cuban prisoners landed on Cuban soil.
The unscripted special is a first-person account of the life of the Oklahoma City Thunder superstar forward, from the moment his NBA basketball season ended on May 31, until he reported to training camp for the upcoming season in late September. The concept for the film was created by Durant, Patricof and Rich Kleiman, Durant's Roc Nation agent. Directed by Brendan and Emmett Malloy.
Bobby Shmurda and the GS9 crew were reportedly arrested last night at Quad Studios in NYC, according to Karen Civil. The cause of the arrest has yet to be confirmed, but a numerous amount of weapons were reportedly taken from the studio following the incident. Epic Records EVP of Urban A&R, Sha Money XL, who originally signed Shmurda and the crew to the label, was also reportedly arrested at the studio, though again, it hasn't been confirmed for what charge.
Sony Pictures will not release "The Interview" on Christmas Day, and the studio has "no further release plans" for the film, this according to a studio spokesperson. It had been speculated that Sony would consider releasing the film either via on-demand services or in theaters at a later date. The studio also announced that it would not release "The Interview" worldwide.
Sony announced it had pulled "The Interview" in a statement released on Wednesday:
In light of the decision by the majority of our exhibitors not to show the film The Interview, we have decided not to move forward with the planned December 25 theatrical release. We respect and understand our partners’ decision and, of course, completely share their paramount interest in the safety of employees and theater-goers.
Sony Pictures has been the victim of an unprecedented criminal assault against our employees, our customers, and our business. Those who attacked us stole our intellectual property, private emails, and sensitive and proprietary material, and sought to destroy our spirit and our morale – all apparently to thwart the release of a movie they did not like. We are deeply saddened at this brazen effort to suppress the distribution of a movie, and in the process do damage to our company, our employees, and the American public. We stand by our filmmakers and their right to free expression and are extremely disappointed by this outcome.
Sony's decision capped a whirlwind day, which saw the nation's five biggest theater chains cancel plans to screen "The Interview." Regal Entertainment, AMC Entertainment, Cinemark, Cineplex Entertainment and Carmike Cinemas pulled the comedy following a terror threat made Tuesday by hackers who had attacked Sony Pictures.
"Due to wavering support of the film 'The Interview' by Sony Pictures, as well as the ambiguous nature of any real or perceived security threats, Regal Entertainment Group has decided to delay the opening of the film in our theaters," a representative for Regal said in a statement to The Huffington Post. Sony had previously placed the decision to cancel showings of "The Interview" at the feet of theaters owners.
On Tuesday, the hackers referenced the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in a statement that threatened "the very time and places 'The Interview' be shown." Officials for the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security acknowledged they were aware of the threat, but downplayed the likelihood of an incident. Speaking to ABC News on Wednesday, President Barack Obama said people should feel safe about visiting their local theaters.
"Well, the cyberattack is very serious,” Obama said. “We're investigating it. We're taking it seriously. You know, we'll be vigilant. If we see something that we think is serious and credible, then we'll alert the public. But for now, my recommendation would be that people go to the movies."
Co-directed by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, "The Interview" focuses on an entertainment journalist (James Franco) and his producer (Rogen) and their eventually successful attempts to assassinate Kim Jong Un (Randall Park). In June, Kim Myong-choi, an unofficial spokesperson for Kim, slammed "The Interview" in a statement to The Telegraph.
"There is a special irony in this storyline as it shows the desperation of the U.S. government and American society," he said. "A film about the assassination of a foreign leader mirrors what the U.S. has done in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Ukraine. And let us not forget who killed [President John F.] Kennedy -- Americans."
The film's ending, which features Kim Jong Un dying in a helicopter explosion while Katy Perry's "Firework" plays on the soundtrack, was the source of much debate within Sony Pictures. As far back as August, The Hollywood Reporter noted that Sony executives had discussed altering the scene. Emails leaked online as part of the massive cyber attack on the studio revealed those conversations did take place and some concessions were made with how Kim's death was portrayed. According to Rogen, Sony reportedly tweaked little else before the film was finished.
"They made us digitally change some photos and images, because it was decided they weren't [legally] cleared," Rogen told The New York Times in an interview published Tuesday. "We couldn't source the photographer in North Korea who took the photograph of Kim Il Sung [Kim Jong Un's grandfather] 65 years ago. He could sue us. There was a moment where they were like: 'They've threatened war over the movie. You kill him [Kim Jong Un]. Would you consider not killing him?' And we were like, 'Nope.'"
According to reports from CNN and NBC, the United States government has determined North Korea to be behind the cyber attack on Sony.
Never in the 30 years since the the Federal Reserve first starting collecting wealth data has the divide between the rich and everyone else been so large, according to a new analysis by the Pew Research Center.
The wealth gap in the U.S. last year was the biggest since at least 1983, according to the report. The median wealth of upper-income families was 6.6 times that of middle-income families in 2013, up from 6.2 in 2010.
Those same upper-income families are now nearly 70 times wealthier than low-income families -- also a record gap.
There are two main reasons for the growing gulf between the rich and everyone else: stagnant middle-class wages and the rising wealth of America’s richest families. While median middle-income wealth was flat between 2010 and 2013 -- stuck at $96,500 -- the wealth of upper-income families jumped to $639,400 from $595,300. Lower-income wealth dropped slightly to $9,300 from $10,500.
"The latest data reinforce the larger story of America’s middle class household wealth stagnation over the past three decades,” Pew’s Richard Fry and Rakesh Kochhar wrote in a release. “Without any palpable increase in their wealth since 2010, middle- and lower-income families’ wealth levels in 2013 are comparable to where they were in the early 1990s.”
Pew divided the country’s families into three groups -- high, middle and low income -- by adjusting a family’s income according to its size and then comparing it to the nation’s median family income. If a family only made two-thirds of U.S. median income, it was considered low income. If it made between two-thirds and two times the median income, it was considered middle income. If it made more than that, it was considered high income.
The report focused on wealth, which may give a broader picture of a family's financial situation than income. Wealth consists of the assets people own, like houses and stocks, minus the debts they owe.
Wealth and income inequality have risen together in recent decades, to some extent feeding each other. The rich have enjoyed most of the fruits of the recovery, thanks at least in part to a ripping stock-market rally that padded their wealth while also boosting their incomes.
French economist Thomas Piketty has warned that unfettered capitalism will lead to even more grotesque wealth inequality because returns on investments like stocks and real estate -- stuff the wealthy own -- generally outpace economic growth and wages.
That warning is looking more and more like a reality in the U.S., which has seen much more of its income growth going to its top 1 percent of earners in recent decades than any other developed country:
BLACK OR WHITE is the story of a grandfather (Academy Award® winner Kevin Costner) who is suddenly left to care for his beloved granddaughter. When the little girl’s paternal grandmother (Academy Award® nominee Octavia Spencer) seeks custody, a legal battle ensues that forces the families to confront their true feelings on race, forgiveness and understanding. Anchored by an all-star cast and based on real events, the movie is a look at two seemingly different worlds, in which nothing is as simple as black or white.
Dale, Kurt and Nick decide to start their own business but things don't go as planned because of a slick investor, prompting the trio to pull off a harebrained and misguided kidnapping scheme.
Jim Bennett (Academy Award®-nominee Mark Wahlberg) is a risk taker. Both an English professor and a high-stakes gambler, Bennett bets it all when he borrows from a gangster (Michael Kenneth Williams) and offers his own life as collateral. Always one step ahead, Bennett pits his creditor against the operator of a gambling ring (Alvin Ing) and leaves his dysfunctional relationship with his wealthy mother (Academy Award®-winner Jessica Lange) in his wake. He plays both sides, immersing himself in an illicit, underground world while garnering the attention of Frank (John Goodman), a loan shark with a paternal interest in Bennett’s future. As his relationship with a student (Brie Larson) deepens, Bennett must take the ultimate risk for a second chance…
