Photo shows three potential conservative candidates for Iran’s June 14 presidential election: Iran’s former chief nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili (L), former foreign minister Ali Akbar Velayati (C) and Tehran’s Mayor Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf. — AFP Photo

DUBAI – Iranians are struggling with slower Internet speeds and limited access ahead of an unpredictable presidential election that has put hardline Islamist authorities on alert for possible unrest.

Experts and web users say they believe the Internet obstacles are related to the June 14 presidential vote, the first since 2009 polls in which accusations of fraud – denied by the government – kindled months of protests organised in part via social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Iranian officials denied any connection between the Internet disruptions and the upcoming vote. But, after the disputed re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad four years ago, they are wary of the possibility of further unrest this time around.

The last-minute entries of moderate former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Ahmadinejad ally Esfandiar Rahim Mashaie have shaken up what was expected to be a limited race between hardline conservatives close to clerical Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and hostile to Ahmadinejad.

The populist Ahmadinejad, who has fallen out with Khamenei, is limited by law to two consecutive presidential terms.

Iran’s Guardian Council was due to present a final list of approved candidates to the Interior Ministry on Tuesday. The ministry then has two days to announce the approved names.

The opposition website Kaleme reported on Monday that security had been heightened in Tehran, apparently to counter any protests should the candidacies of Rafsanjani or Mashaie be rejected by the council.

Iranian web users, who number some 45 million according to official figures, have grappled with increased obstacles to using the Internet since the 2009 election.

Kaleme said on Monday Internet speeds had dropped in much of Tehran and that in some parts of the capital, accessing the Web had become impossible – which would prevent dissidents from mustering protests online as they did after the 2009 vote.

Hamed, 33, a dissident freelance journalist living in Tehran, said his clients now have resorted to sending him files by loading them onto CDs and transporting them by courier.

“We get things done but with more time spent,” Hamed told Reuters via email.

INTERNATIONAL WEBSITES BLOCKED

Many Iranians used Virtual Private Network (VPN) software to bypass the government’s extensive web filter. But the government blocked access to most VPNs, which make computers look as if they are located in another country, in March.

Since then, experts said, Iranians have faced slower access to encrypted international websites using the Secure Sockets Layer protocol, with addresses beginning with “https”, such as Google Inc.’s email service Gmail, and this could push them to resort to unencrypted sites easily watched by the state.

“SSL services are being throttled by the government to create a system of incentives or coercion not to use them,” said Collin Anderson, a U.S.-based Internet researcher who focuses on Iran. “That affects Gmail and pretty much anything that you want a layer of security on.”

A similar Internet blockade was put in place in February 2012, ahead of parliamentary elections.

Several Iranian Web users said they have had trouble accessing their Gmail accounts in the last three weeks. Elham, an Internet user from the northeastern city of Mashhad, told Reuters that since late April, any VPN she tries to use only works for about two minutes before she is disconnected.

She and Hamed declined to be fully named for fear of repercussion for speaking to a foreign reporter.

One man in his 30s who works at an Internet Service Provider (ISP) company in Tehran confirmed that most VPNs were down and those still up were crashing within two minutes.

He added: “Fewer and fewer people are using Twitter in recent days which shows their problems accessing the net.”

Iranian officials denied any link between the disruptions and the election. “Numerous parameters contribute to the speed of the Internet and the approach of elections will not have any role,” Ali Hakim Javadi, head of Iran’s Information Technology Organisation, told ISNA news agency.

The Apple logo is seen in this September 11, 2012 file photo at the Yerba Buena Center for Arts in San Francisco. — AFP File Photo

DUBLIN – Ireland said on Tuesday it was not to blame for Apple Inc’s low global tax payments after the US Senate said the company paid little or nothing on tens of billions of dollars in profits stashed in Irish subsidiaries. 

The Irish government, which has seen the luring of US multinationals with low taxes as a key part of its economic policy since the 1960s, said its system was transparent and other countries were responsible if the tax rate paid by Apple was too low.

“They are issues that arise from the taxation systems in other jurisdictions, and that is an issue that has to be addressed first of all in those jurisdictions,” deputy prime minister Eamon Gilmore told national broadcaster RTE on Tuesday.

In a 40-page memorandum released ahead of an appearance by Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook before Congress on Tuesday, a Senate subcommittee identified three subsidiaries that have no tax residency either in Ireland, where they are incorporated, or in the United States, where those companies are managed.

The main subsidiary, a holding company that includes Apple’s retail stores throughout Europe, has not paid any corporate income tax in the last five years, the report said.

Apple’s arrangement has allowed it to pay just 1.9 percent tax on its $37 billion in overseas profits in 2012, despite the fact that the average tax rate in the countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), its main markets, was 24 percent in 2012.

The report said “Ireland has essentially functioned as a tax haven for Apple”.

Gilmore said Ireland was pursuing the issue of international tax avoidance “very strongly” at the European Union and the OECD, which is spearheading initiatives.

The issue will be discussed at a meeting of European Union officials on Tuesday, he said.

The Senate report said a subsidiary with a mailing address in Cork, Ireland’s second-largest city, received $29.9 billion in dividends from lower-tiered offshore affiliates from 2009 to 2012, comprising 30 percent of Apple’s global net profits.

It said it exploited a difference between Irish and US tax  residency rules.

Apple said in a comment posted online on Monday it did not use “tax gimmicks”. It said the existence of its subsidiary Apple Operations International in Ireland did not reduce Apple’s US tax liability and the company would pay more than $7 billion in U.S. taxes in fiscal 2013.  A number of US multinationals including web search leader Google, online retailer Amazon.com and coffee chain Starbucks have come under criticism for arranging their affairs in a way that leaves them liable to low rates of tax on billions of dollars of overseas sales.

Apple’s auditor, Ernst & Young, which also audits Google and Amazon.com, declined immediate comment.

FISCAL ATTRACTION

Apple said last year it would add 500 more people to its  Cork workforce of 2,800.

Ireland’s pro-business tax structures have attracted US multinationals including Google, Microsoft and Facebook, big employers who have helped offset an unemployment rate stuck above 14 percent, but its low corporate tax rate of 12.5 percent has drawn criticism elsewhere in Europe.

The government regularly touts its success in attracting international investment as one of its main achievements, and multinationals, which account for almost 10 percent of Ireland’s workforce, have taken the sting out of austerity measures prescribed under an EU/IMF bailout by creating jobs.

US firms invested $30 billion in Ireland last year, more than in China and the rest of emerging Asia combined, according to the American Chamber of Commerce.  In the 1960s Ireland turned around its economy by attracting foreign businesses with tax holidays. After joining what later became the European Union, it was no longer able to do this and instead shifted to a system of low tax rates – currently 12.5 percent – and a light touch approach to tax administration that allows companies to reduce their effective rate much lower.

A raft of mainly US companies have taken advantage of Ireland’s tax regime to minimise their tax bills.

A zoomed image of a computer screen showing the Amazon logo is seen in Vienna November 26, 2012. — Reuters Photo

SAN FRANCISCO, Tue May 21, 2013 – Amazon.com Inc has been given a security clearance by the US government that will make it easier for federal agencies to use its cloud computing services.

Amazon Web Services, known as AWS, was certified to operate as a cloud service provider for three years under the government’s new FedRAMP program. The accreditation covers all AWS data centers in the United States, the company said on Tuesday.

“This will cut the cost and time for agencies to deploy our systems,” said Teresa Carlson, vice president of Worldwide Public Sector at AWS. “It cuts costs for AWS too.”

Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer, has moved aggressively into the business of renting remote computing, storage and other IT services in recent years through AWS.

The business has been a hit with startups, but the company is now going after big corporations and government agencies, a much larger opportunity. However, these organizations are more demanding, especially on issues like security and regulatory compliance.

Last year, the US government launched FedRAMP to standardize and streamline security assessments of cloud services. Before this program, if a vendor wanted to sell IT services to a government agency it had to obtain authorization for each separate project, slowing down the process and making it more expensive.

Under FedRAMP, AWS will be able to get approved for a government agency once and then its services can be used many times on multiple projects by that agency.

AWS said it received its three-year clearance through the Department of Health and Human Services. The certification covers this agency and all its operational divisions which include the US Food and Drug Administration, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health.

A tornado moves past homes in Moore, Okla. on Monday, May 20, 2013. — Photo AP

OKLAHOMA:  A massive tornado tore through the Oklahoma City suburb of Moore on Monday, killing at least 91 people, including 20 children, with winds of up to 200 miles per hour (320 kph) that flattened entire tracts of homes, two schools and a hospital, leaving a wake of tangled wreckage.

Rescue workers raced against the setting sun to find survivors in Oklahoma as the dangerous storm system threatened as many as 10 US states with more twisters.

The Oklahoma medical examiner confirmed 91 deaths, making it the deadliest US tornado since one killed 161 people in Joplin, Missouri, two years ago, according to the National Weather Service.

There were 70 reported deaths in all of 2012. Some 20 to 30 school children were missing and feared dead beneath the rubble, KFOR television reported, citing unnamed officials from the scene.

Police and fire crews pulled third-graders from the devastated Plaza Towers Elementary school in Moore, a KFOR television reporter said from the scene, and aerial video showed teams sifting through the rubble left behind.

“I have never seen anything like this in my 18 years covering tornadoes here in Oklahoma City. This is without question the most horrific,” said Lance West, a reporter for KFOR.

The National Weather Service Storm Prediction Center provided the town with a warning 16 minutes before the tornado touched down at 3:01 p.m. local time (2001 GMT), which is greater than the average eight to 10 minutes of warning, said Keli Pirtle, a spokeswoman for the center in Norman, Oklahoma.

The notice was upgraded to emergency warning with “heightened language” at 2:56 p.m., or five minutes before the tornado touched down, Pirtle said.

‘A DEBRIS FIELD’

Television images showed blocks of homes leveled by the powerful tornado, cars piled atop one another and buildings on fire.

The National Weather Service assigned the twister a preliminary ranking of EF4 on the Enhanced Fujita Scale, meaning the second most powerful category of tornado with winds up to 200 mph (320 kph). Briarwood Elementary School, which also stood in the storm’s path, was all but destroyed.

On the first floor, sections of walls had been peeled away, affording clear views into the building, while in other areas, cars hurled by the storm winds were lodged in the walls.

While the school was a wreck, nearby playground equipment stood undamaged, though littered with rubble.
Across the street, people picked through the remains of their homes, looking for any possessions they might salvage. At least 45 people were injured, according to officials of four hospitals.

“They (injured) are coming in minute by minute,” said Integris Southwest Medical Center spokeswoman Brooke Cayot. Of the 19 injured there, seven were in critical condition, seven serious and five listed as fair or good, Cayot said.

The University of Oklahoma Medical Center had received at least 20 injured. St. Anthony Healthplex South in Oklahoma City said it received four patients and Midwest Regional received four.

Moore Medical Center sustained significant damage.

“The whole city looks like a debris field,” Glenn Lewis, the mayor of Moore, told NBC.

“It looks like we have lost our hospital. I drove by there a while ago and it’s pretty much destroyed,” Lewis said.

Fire, rescue and emergency medical teams from across the state converged on Moore, and members of the National Guard, activated by Governor Mary Fallin, were on the scene, said Terri Watkins, a spokeswoman for the Oklahoma Department of Emergency Management.

“They are going to going to go house to house, building to building to determine whether anyone is trapped,” Watkins said.
“If anyone is trapped we want to begin pulling them out as quickly as possible.” The massive twister struck at the height of tornado season, and more were forecast.

On Sunday, tornadoes killed two people and injured 39 in Oklahoma.

Witnesses said Monday’s tornado appeared more fierce than the giant twister that was among the dozens that tore up the region on May 3, 1999, killing more than 40 people and destroying thousands of homes. That tornado ranked as an EF5, meaning it had winds over 200 mph (320 kph).

The 1999 event ranks as the third-costliest tornado in US history, having caused more than $1 billion in damage at the time, or more than $1.3 billion in today’s dollars. Only the devastating Joplin and Tuscaloosa tornadoes in 2011 were more costly.

The National Weather Service predicted a 10 per cent chance of tornadoes in parts of Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri and Illinois. It said parts of four other states – Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan and Iowa – have a 5 perc ent risk of tornadoes.

SAN FRANCISCO/NEW YORK, Tue May 21, 2013 — Yahoo Inc. will buy blogging service Tumblr for $1.1 billion cash, giving the Internet pioneer a much-needed social media platform to reach a younger generation of users and breathe new life into its ailing brand.

The deal, announced on Monday, is a bold bet by Yahoo Chief Executive Marissa Mayer to revitalize the company by co-opting a Web property with strong visitor traffic but little revenue.

The combination of Yahoo and Tumblr creates an online powerhouse with roughly one billion users, which will draw in more advertisers and help Yahoo keep visitors on its properties for longer periods of time, Mayer told Reuters in an interview.

“Tumblr in terms of users and traffic is an immediate growth story for us,” she said.

Analysts say Yahoo appeared to be overpaying for a business that has never posted a profit, makes a fraction of Yahoo’s sales, and may not contribute significantly to revenue for years. But the company, rebuffed by the French government when it tried to pay $1 billion for video site Dailymotion earlier this year, had to do something to plug a hole in its social media efforts.

Yahoo made clear it was sensitive to concerns that it might damage Tumblr by making it less irreverent or more corporate.

“Per the agreement and our promise not to screw it up, Tumblr will be independently operated as a separate business,” Yahoo said in a statement.

The deal will make Tumblr founder and CEO David Karp, 26, a multimillionaire.

Tumblr is one of the Web’s most popular hubs of so-called user-generated content, drawing young people who use the platform to post pictures and text. It has more than 100 million blogs in its network, ranging from “White Men Wearing Google Glass” – a collection of photos poking fun at the early adopters of the wearable computing devices – to housing-focused “The Worst Room.”

Though Yahoo remains one of the Web’s most popular destinations, it has seen its revenue shrink in recent years as consumers and advertisers favor rivals such as Google Inc and Facebook Inc. The deal is expected to increase Yahoo’s audience by 50 percent.

The acquisition, which will use up about a fifth of Yahoo’s $5.4 billion in cash and marketable securities, is the largest by far since Mayer took the reins in July with the goal of reversing a long decline in Yahoo’s business and Web traffic.

RBC Capital Markets analyst Mark Mahaney called it a “long-shot/long-term investment” but one that fits into Mayer’s turnaround strategy.

“(Yahoo’s) fundamentals have been subpar for numerous years, in part because of the company’s missing presence in Social and Mobile. Tumblr may help (Yahoo) develop that presence,” Mahaney said in a note.

RICH PREMIUM

While Tumblr is certainly popular – it has tens of millions of monthly unique visitors in the U.S. – analysts questioned what kind of contribution it will make to Yahoo revenue, since advertising on the site is in its nascent stages.

Media reports have pegged Tumblr’s 2012 revenue at $13 million. The privately held company, based in Manhattan, does not disclose its financial results.

Yahoo expects that Tumblr will help boost revenue by 2014, Ken Goldman, Yahoo’s chief financial officer, said on a call with analysts. He did not provide specific numbers.

“Even if revenue was $100 million, it means Yahoo paid 10 times revenue,” said BGC Financial analyst Colin Gillis. “Ten times is what you pay to date the belle of the ball. It’s on the outer bands of M&A.”

Yahoo could quickly boost Tumblr’s revenue by combining the website with its own sales force, said Pivotal Research Group analyst Brian Wieser. But loading Tumblr up with banner ads risks alienating its users and probably wouldn’t provide a significant lift to Yahoo’s overall revenue, he said.

“It’s not clear that this deal will be favorable from a return-on-capital perspective,” Wieser said. “One billion (dollars) for one company is a big bet.”

Gillis and Wieser were contacted on Sunday after the deal was reported by the online publication All Things D.

Mayer, on the conference call, described the Tumblr deal as an exception and said Yahoo was not necessarily planning lots of similarly sized deals.

Yahoo is one of several companies that have coughed up considerable money for buzz-worthy start-ups that hold promise. Facebook bought the popular social media photo site Instagram for $1 billion last year. In 2006, Google paid $1.6 billion for YouTube.

Yahoo’s track record in acquisitions is patchy. Its $3 billion-plus purchase of Geocities – a free service that hosted personal home pages for consumers and once ranked among the most-trafficked websites – stands among the most glaring of its failed deals. Yahoo shut down the service in 2009.

“It’s not lost on me that there were some large acquisitions done in Yahoo’s history that did not go well,” Mayer said in the interview with Reuters. She said Yahoo now has a completely different management team, committed to making the Tumblr deal work.

The Tumblr team will remain in New York, Mayer noted, partly because she believes the most successful deals in the Internet industry, such as Google’s YouTube acquisition, have thrived by letting the acquired company operate somewhat independently.

Shares of Yahoo were up 27 cents, or 1 percent, at $26.78 in afternoon trading. Through Friday’s close, the shares had risen 70 percent since Mayer became CEO.

IMAGE ISSUES

One question Yahoo may have to address is Tumblr’s reputation as a home for pornographic blogs. At one point in 2009, about 80 percent of Tumblr’s top sites had something to do with adult content. Today that number is closer to 5 percent, according to Quantcast data, but the old image lingers.

Mayer, on the conference call, brushed off concerns that Tumblr has content that might not appeal to advertisers, saying the ability to reach more people is “really exciting.” She said Yahoo’s targeting tools would allow advertisers to zero in on specific demographics and content.

One area where Yahoo plans to ramp up advertising: Tumblr’s dashboard, the main landing point, akin to a newsfeed.

Dealing with that and other issues may fall to Karp, who founded Tumblr in 2007 and will remain CEO.

Karp, a self-taught programmer who left high school in favor of home schooling, did not take part in Mayer’s conference call. Media reports have suggested his take in the sale of Tumblr would top $200 million.

In a 2012 interview with The Guardian, Karp seemed to be less interested in money than in Tumblr’s prominence.

“There are a lot of rich people in the world. There are very few people who have the privilege of getting to invent things that billions of people use,” he said.

This undated US Air Force photo shows an MQ-1 Predator unmanned aircraft as it prepares for takeoff in support of operations in Southwest Asia. — Photo AFP

WASHINGTON: President Barack Obama’s administration has decided to give the Pentagon control of some drone operations against terrorism suspects overseas that are currently run by the CIA, several US government sources said on Monday.

Obama has pledged more transparency on controversial counterterrorism programs, and giving the Pentagon the responsibility for part of the drone program could open it to greater congressional oversight.

Obama will make a speech on Thursday at the National Defense University in Washington that will include discussion of the government’s use of drones as a counterterrorism tool. It is unclear whether he will announce the drone program shift in that speech or separately.

Four US government sources told Reuters that the decision had been made to shift the CIA’s drone operations to the Pentagon, and some of them said it would occur in stages.

Drone strikes in Yemen, where the US military already conducts operations with Yemeni forces, would be run by the armed forces, officials said.

But for the time-being US drone strikes in Pakistan would continue to be conducted by the CIA to keep the program covert and maintain deniability for both the United States and Pakistan, several sources said.

Ultimately, however, the administration’s goal would be to transfer the Pakistan drone operations to the military, one U.S.
official said on condition of anonymity.

The internal debate within the administration about whether to switch control of drone strikes to the military has been going on for months. Obama is under heightened pressure to show that his administration is transparent, after a series of scandals about civil liberties and allegations of government overreach broke last week.

A White House National Security Council spokeswoman and a CIA spokeswoman each declined comment.

DECISION AFTER MONTHS OF DEBATE

One of the reasons to make the shift is that it would help the CIA to return to more traditional spying operations and intelligence analysis, rather than paramilitary operations involving killing terrorism targets, officials have said.

The US military is not engaged in ground combat in Pakistan, where the population in tribal areas has been angered by drone strikes and governments do not want to acknowledge that they allow US unmanned aircraft to operate.

But in Yemen, the same sensitivities do not exist because the U.S. military is working with Yemeni forces in counterterrorism operations and so drone strikes in Yemen will shift to the Pentagon, two sources said.

There have been 355 drone strikes in Pakistan and 66 in Yemen, according to a widely cited drone attack database run by the New America Foundation think tank.

The United States has also carried out drone strikes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and East Africa, some of them operated by the military.

The use of armed drones jumped in 2008 when President George W. Bush authorized the use of “signature” strikes, allowing the targeting of terrorism suspects based on behavior and other characteristics without knowing the targets’ identities.

Rosa Brooks, a New America Foundation fellow and Georgetown University law professor, said the problem with the targeted killing program was “an assertion by the executive branch that it has this essentially unconstrained and unreviewable power to kill people.”

Brooks, who previously served at the Pentagon, said she hoped that Obama would publicly release the legal justifications and analysis for the targeted killings overseas, including of US citizens.

“I would also like to see the president say that we will acknowledge all strikes, that we will publicly report on identities of who was targeted, at least after the fact,” she said.