US secretly created ‘Cuban Twitter’ to stir unrest

WASHINGTON: In July 2010, Joe McSpedon, a US government official, flew to Barcelona to put the final touches on a secret plan to build a social media project aimed at undermining Cuba's communist government.

McSpedon and his team of high-tech contractors had come in from Costa Rica and Nicaragua, Washington and Denver. Their mission — to launch a messaging network that could reach hundreds of thousands of Cubans. To hide the network from the Cuban government, they would set up a byzantine system of front companies using a Cayman Islands bank account, and recruit unsuspecting executives who would not be told of the company's ties to the US government.

McSpedon didn't work for the CIA. This was a programme paid for and run by the US Agency for International Development, best known for overseeing billions of dollars in US humanitarian aid.

According to documents obtained by Associated Press and multiple interviews with people involved in the project, the plan was to develop a bare-bones "Cuban Twitter,'' using cellphone text messaging to evade Cuba's strict control of information and its stranglehold restrictions over the Internet. In a play on Twitter, it was called ZunZuneo — slang for a Cuban hummingbird's tweet.

Documents show the US government planned to build a subscriber base through "non-controversial content''— news messages on soccer, music, and hurricane updates. Later when the network reached a critical mass of subscribers, perhaps hundreds of thousands, operators would introduce political content aimed at inspiring Cubans to organize "smart mobs'' — mass gatherings called at a moment's notice that might trigger a Cuban Spring, or, as one USAID document put it, "renegotiate the balance of power between the state and society.''

At its peak, the project drew in more than 40,000 Cubans to share news and exchange opinions. But its subscribers were never aware it was created by the US government, or that American contractors were gathering their private data in the hope that it might be used for political purposes.

"There will be absolutely no mention of United States government involvement,'' according to a 2010 memo from Mobile Accord, one of the project's contractors. "This is absolutely crucial for the long-term success of the service and to ensure the success of the mission.''

The programme's legality is unclear — US law requires that any covert action by a federal agency must have a presidential authorization. Officials at USAID would not say who had approved the programme or whether the White House was aware of it. McSpedon, the most senior official named in the documents obtained by the AP, is a mid-level manager who declined to comment.

USAID spokesman Matt Herrick said the agency is proud of its Cuba programmes and noted that congressional investigators reviewed them last year and found them to be consistent with US law.

"USAID is a development agency, not an intelligence agency, and we work all over the world to help people exercise their fundamental rights and freedoms, and give them access to tools to improve their lives and connect with the outside world,'' he said.

"In the implementation,'' he added, "has the government taken steps to be discreet in non-permissive environments? Of course. That's how you protect the practitioners and the public. In hostile environments, we often take steps to protect the partners we're working with on the ground. This is not unique to Cuba.''

But the ZunZuneo programme muddies those claims, a sensitive issue for its mission to promote democracy and deliver aid to the world's poor and vulnerable — which requires the trust of foreign governments.

"On the face of it there are several aspects about this that are troubling,'' said Sen Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. and chairman of the Appropriations Committee's State Department and foreign operations subcommittee.

"There is the risk to young, unsuspecting Cuban cellphone users who had no idea this was a US government-funded activity. There is the clandestine nature of the programme that was not disclosed to the appropriations subcommittee with oversight responsibility. And there is the disturbing fact that it apparently activated shortly after Alan Gross, a USAID subcontractor who was sent to Cuba to help provide citizens access to the Internet, was arrested.''

Associated Press obtained more than 1,000 pages of documents about the project's development. The AP independently verified the project's scope and details in the documents — such as federal contract numbers and names of job candidates — through publicly available databases, government sources and interviews with those directly involved in ZunZuneo.

Taken together, they tell the story of how agents of the US government, working in deep secrecy, became tech entrepreneurs — in Cuba. And it all began with a half a million cellphone numbers obtained from a communist government.

ZunZuneo would seem to be a throwback from the Cold War, and the decades-long struggle between the United States and Cuba. It came at a time when the historically sour relationship between the countries had improved, at least marginally, and Cuba had made tentative steps toward a more market-based economy.

It is unclear whether the plan got its start with USAID or Creative Associates International, a Washington, DC, for-profit company that has earned hundreds of millions of dollars in US contracts. But a "key contact'' at Cubacel, the state-owned cellphone provider, slipped the phone numbers to a Cuban engineer living in Spain. The engineer provided the numbers to USAID and Creative Associates "free of charge,'' documents show.

In mid-2009, Noy Villalobos, a manager with Creative Associates who had worked with USAID in the 1990s on a programme to eradicate drug crops, started an IM chat with her little brother in Nicaragua, according to a Creative Associates email that captured the conversation. Mario Bernheim, in his mid-20s, was an up-and-coming techie who had made a name for himself as a computer whiz.

"This is very confidential of course,'' Villalobos cautioned her brother. But what could you do if you had all the cellphone numbers of a particular country? Could you send bulk text messages without the government knowing?

"Can you encrypt it or something?'' she texted.

She was looking for a direct line to regular Cubans through text messaging. Most had precious little access to news from the outside world. The government viewed the Internet as an Achilles' heel and controlled it accordingly. A communications minister had even referred to it as a "wild colt'' that "should be tamed.''

Yet in the years since Fidel Castro handed over power to his brother Raul, Cuba had sought to jumpstart the long stagnant economy. Raul Castro began encouraging cellphone use, and hundreds of thousands of people were suddenly using mobile phones for the first time, though smartphones with access to the Internet remained restricted.

Cubans could text message, though at a high cost in a country where the average wage was a mere $20 a month.

Bernheim told his sister that he could figure out a way to send instant texts to hundreds of thousands of Cubans — for cheap. It could not be encrypted though, because that would be too complicated. They wouldn't be able to hide the messages from the Cuban government, which owned Cubacel. But they could disguise who was sending the texts by constantly switching the countries the messages came from.

"We could rotate it from different countries?'' Villalobos asked. "Say one message from Nica, another from Spain, another from Mexico''?

Bernheim could do that. "But I would need mirrors set up around the world, mirrors, meaning the same computer, running with the same platform, with the same phone.''

"No hay problema,'' he signed off. No problem.

After the chat, Creative hired Bernheim as a subcontractor, reporting to his sister. (Villalobos and Bernheim would later confirm their involvement with the ZunZuneo project to AP, but decline further comment.) Bernheim, in turn, signed up the Cuban engineer who had gotten the phone list. The team figured out how to message the masses without detection, but their ambitions were bigger.

Creative Associates envisioned using the list to create a social networking system that would be called "Proyecto ZZ,'' or "Project ZZ.'' The service would start cautiously and be marketed chiefly to young Cubans, who USAID saw as the most open to political change.

"We should gradually increase the risk,'' USAID proposed in a document. It advocated using "smart mobs'' only in "critical/opportunistic situations and not at the detriment of our core platform-based network.''

USAID's team of contractors and subcontractors built a companion website to its text service so Cubans could subscribe, give feedback and send their own text messages for free. They talked about how to make the website look like a real business. "Mock ad banners will give it the appearance of a commercial enterprise,'' a proposal suggested.

In multiple documents, USAID staff pointed out that text messaging had mobilized smart mobs and political uprisings in Moldova and the Philippines, among others. In Iran, the USAID noted social media's role following the disputed election of then President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in June 2009 — and saw it as an important foreign policy tool.

USAID documents say their strategic objective in Cuba was to "push it out of a stalemate through tactical and temporary initiatives, and get the transition process going again towards democratic change.'' Democratic change in authoritarian Cuba meant breaking the Castros' grip on power.

USAID divided Cuban society into five segments depending on loyalty to the government. On one side sat the "democratic movement,'' called "still (largely) irrelevant,'' and at the other end were the "hard-core system supporters,'' dubbed "Talibanes'' in a derogatory comparison to Afghan and Pakistani extremists.

A key question was how to move more people toward the democratic activist camp without detection. Bernheim assured the team that wouldn't be a problem.

"The Cuban government, like other regimes committed to information control, currently lacks the capacity to effectively monitor and control such a service,'' Bernheim wrote in a proposal for USAID marked "Sensitive Information.''

ZunZuneo would use the list of phone numbers to break Cuba's Internet embargo and not only deliver information to Cubans but also let them interact with each other in a way the government could not control. Eventually it would build a system that would let Cubans send messages anonymously among themselves.

At a strategy meeting, the company discussed building "user volume as a cover ... for organization,'' according to meeting notes. It also suggested that the "Landscape needs to be large enough to hide full opposition members who may sign up for service.''

In a play on the telecommunication minister's quote, the team dubbed their network the "untamed colt.''

At first, the ZunZuneo team operated out of Central America. Bernheim, the techie brother, worked from Nicaragua's capital, Managua, while McSpedon supervised Creative's work on ZunZuneo from an office in San Jose, Costa Rica, though separate from the US embassy. It was an unusual arrangement that raised eyebrows in Washington, according to US officials.

McSpedon worked for USAID's Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI), a division that was created after the fall of the Soviet Union to promote US interests in quickly changing political environments — without the usual red tape.

In 2009, a report by congressional researchers warned that OTI's work "often lends itself to political entanglements that may have diplomatic implications.'' Staffers on oversight committees complained that USAID was running secret programmes and would not provide details.

"We were told we couldn't even be told in broad terms what was happening because 'people will die,''' said Fulton Armstrong, who worked for the Senate Foreign Relations committee. Before that, he was the US intelligence community's most senior analyst on Latin America, advising the Clinton White House.

The money that Creative Associates spent on ZunZuneo was publicly earmarked for an unspecified project in Pakistan, government data show. But there is no indication of where the funds were actually spent.

Tensions with Congress spiked just as the ZunZuneo project was gearing up in December 2009, when another USAID programme ended in the arrest of the US contractor, Alan Gross. Gross had traveled repeatedly to Cuba on a secret mission to expand Internet access using sensitive technology typically available only to governments, a mission first revealed in February 2012 by AP.

At some point, Armstrong says, the foreign relations committee became aware of OTI's secret operations in Costa Rica. US government officials acknowledged them privately to Armstrong, but USAID refused to provide operational details.

At an event in Washington, Armstrong says he confronted McSpedon, asking him if he was aware that by operating secret programmes from a third country, it might appear like he worked for an intelligence agency.

McSpedon, through USAID, said the story is not true. He declined to comment otherwise.

On September 20, 2009, thousands of Cubans gathered at Revolution Plaza in Havana for Colombian rocker Juanes' "Peace without Borders'' concert. It was the largest public gathering in Cuba since the visit of Pope John Paul II in 1998. Under the watchful gaze of a giant sculpture of revolutionary icon Ernesto "Che'' Guevara, the Miami-based Juanes promised music aimed at "turning hate into love.''

But for the ZunZuneo team, the concert was a perfect opportunity to test the political power of their budding social network. In the weeks before, Bernheim's firm, using the phone list, sent out a half a million text messages in what it called "blasts,'' to test what the Cuban government would do.

The team hired Alen Lauzan Falcon, a Havana-born satirical artist based in Chile, to write Cuban-style messages. Some were mildly political and comical, others more pointed. One asked respondents whether they thought two popular local music acts out of favor with the government should join the stage with Juanes. Some 100,000 people responded — not realizing the poll was used to gather critical intelligence.

Paula Cambronero, a researcher for Mobile Accord, began building a vast database about the Cuban subscribers, including gender, age, "receptiveness'' and "political tendencies.'' USAID believed the demographics on dissent could help it target its other Cuba programmes and "maximize our possibilities to extend our reach.''

Cambronero concluded that the team had to be careful. "Messages with a humorous connotation should not contain a strong political tendency, so as not to create animosity in the recipients,'' she wrote in a report.

Falcon, in an interview, said he was never told that he was composing messages for a US government programme, but he had no regrets about his involvement.

"They didn't tell me anything, and if they had, I would have done it anyway,'' he said. "In Cuba they don't have freedom. While a government forces me to pay in order to visit my country, makes me ask permission, and limits my communications, I will be against it, whether it's Fidel Castro, (Cuban exile leader) Jorge Mas Canosa or Gloria Estefan,'' the Cuban American singer.

Carlos Sanchez Almeida, a lawyer specializing in European data protection law, said it appeared that the US programme violated Spanish privacy laws because the ZunZuneo team had illegally gathered personal data from the phone list and sent unsolicited emails using a Spanish platform. "The illegal release of information is a crime, and using information to create a list of people by political affiliation is totally prohibited by Spanish law,'' Almeida said. It would violate a US-European data protection agreement, he said.

USAID saw evidence from server records that Havana had tried to trace the texts, to break into ZunZuneo's servers, and had occasionally blocked messages. But USAID called the response "timid'' and concluded that ZunZuneo would be viable — if its origins stayed secret.

Even though Cuba has one of the most sophisticated counter-intelligence operations in the world, the ZunZuneo team thought that as long as the message service looked benign, Cubacel would leave it alone.

Once the network had critical mass, Creative and USAID documents argued, it would be harder for the Cuban government to shut it down, both because of popular demand and because Cubacel would be addicted to the revenues from the text messages.

In February 2010, the company introduced Cubans to ZunZuneo and began marketing. Within six months, it had almost 25,000 subscribers, growing faster and drawing more attention than the USAID team could control.

Saimi Reyes Carmona was a journalism student at the University of Havana when she stumbled onto ZunZuneo. She was intrigued by the service's novelty, and the price. The advertisement said "free messages'' so she signed up using her nickname, Saimita.

At first, ZunZuneo was a very tiny platform, Reyes said during a recent interview in Havana, but one day she went to its website and saw its services had expanded.

"I began sending one message every day,'' she said, the maximum allowed at the start. "I didn't have practically any followers.'' She was thrilled every time she got a new one.

And then ZunZuneo exploded in popularity.

"The whole world wanted in, and in a question of months I had 2,000 followers who I have no idea who they are, nor where they came from.''

She let her followers know the day of her birthday, and was surprised when she got some 15 personal messages. "This is the coolest thing I've ever seen!'' she told her boyfriend, Ernesto Guerra Valdes, also a journalism student.

Before long, Reyes learned she had the second highest number of followers on the island, after a user called UCI, which the students figured was Havana's University of Computer Sciences. Her boyfriend had 1,000. The two were amazed at the reach it gave them.

"It was such a marvelous thing,'' Guerra said. "So noble.'' He and Reyes tried to figure out who was behind ZunZuneo, since the technology to run it had to be expensive, but they found nothing. They were grateful though.

"We always found it strange, that generosity and kindness,'' he said. ZunZuneo was "the fairy godmother of cellphones.''

By early 2010, Creative decided that ZunZuneo was so popular Bernheim's company wasn't sophisticated enough to build, in effect, "a scaled down version of Twitter.''

It turned to another young techie, James Eberhard, CEO of Denver-based Mobile Accord Inc. Eberhard had pioneered the use of text messaging for donations during disasters and had raised tens of millions of dollars after the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti.

Eberhard earned millions in his mid-20s when he sold a company that developed cellphone ring tones and games. His company's website describes him as "a visionary within the global mobile community.''

In July, he flew to Barcelona to join McSpedon, Bernheim, and others to work out what they called a "below the radar strategy.''

"If it is discovered that the platform is, or ever was, backed by the United States government, not only do we risk the channel being shut down by Cubacel, but we risk the credibility of the platform as a source of reliable information, education, and empowerment in the eyes of the Cuban people,'' Mobile Accord noted in a memo.

To cover their tracks, they decided to have a company based in the United Kingdom set up a corporation in Spain to run ZunZuneo. A separate company called MovilChat was created in the Cayman Islands, a well-known offshore tax haven, with an account at the island's Bank of N.T. Butterfield & Son Ltd. to pay the bills.

A memo of the meeting in Barcelona says that the front companies would distance ZunZuneo from any US ownership so that the "money trail will not trace back to America.''

But it wasn't just the money they were worried about. They had to hide the origins of the texts, according to documents and interviews with team members.

Brad Blanken, the former chief operating officer of Mobile Accord, left the project early on, but noted that there were two main criteria for success.

"The biggest challenge with creating something like this is getting the phone numbers,'' Blanken said. "And then the ability to spoof the network.''

The team of contractors set up servers in Spain and Ireland to process texts, contracting an independent Spanish company called Lleida.net to send the text messages back to Cuba, while stripping off identifying data.

Mobile Accord also sought intelligence from engineers at the Spanish telecommunications company Telefonica, which organizers said would "have knowledge of Cubacel's network.''

"Understanding the security and monitoring protocols of Cubacel will be an invaluable asset to avoid unnecessary detection by the carrier,'' one Mobile Accord memo read.

Officials at USAID realized however, that they could not conceal their involvement forever — unless they left the stage. The predicament was summarized bluntly when Eberhard was in Washington for a strategy session in early February 2011, where his company noted the "inherent contradiction'' of giving Cubans a platform for communications uninfluenced by their government that was in fact financed by the US government and influenced by its agenda.

They turned to Jack Dorsey, a co-founder of Twitter, to seek funding for the project. Documents show Dorsey met with Suzanne Hall, a state department officer who worked on social media projects, and others. Dorsey declined to comment.

The state department under then-secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton thought social media was an important tool in diplomacy. At a 2011 speech at George Washington University, Clinton said the US helped people in "oppressive Internet environments get around filters.'' In Tunisia, she said people used technology to "organize and share grievances, which, as we know, helped fuel a movement that led to revolutionary change.''

Ultimately, the solution was new management that could separate ZunZuneo from its US origins and raise enough revenue for it to go "independent,'' even as it kept its long-term strategy to bring about "democratic change.''

Eberhard led the recruitment efforts, a sensitive operation because he intended to keep the management of the Spanish company in the dark.

"The ZZ management team will have no knowledge of the true origin of the operation; as far as they know, the platform was established by Mobile Accord,'' the memo said. "There should be zero doubt in management's mind and no insecurities or concerns about United States Government involvement.''

The memo went on to say that the CEO's clean conscience would be ``particularly critical when dealing with Cubacel.'' Sensitive to the high cost of text messages for average Cubans, ZunZuneo negotiated a bulk rate for texts at 4 cents a pop through a Spanish intermediary. Documents show there was hope that an earnest, clueless CEO might be able to persuade Cubacel to back the project.

Mobile Accord considered a dozen candidates from five countries to head the Spanish front company. One of them was Francoise de Valera, a CEO who was vacationing in Dubai when she was approached for an interview. She flew to Barcelona. At the luxury Mandarin Oriental Hotel, she met with Nim Patel, who at the time was Mobile Accord's president. Eberhard had also flown in for the interviews. But she said she couldn't get a straight answer about what they were looking for.

"They talked to me about instant messaging but nothing about Cuba, or the United States,'' she told the AP in an interview from London.

"If I had been offered and accepted the role, I believe that sooner or later it would have become apparent to me that something wasn't right,'' she said.

By early 2011, Creative Associates grew exasperated with Mobile Accord's failure to make ZunZuneo self-sustaining and independent of the US government. The operation had run into an unsolvable problem. USAID was paying tens of thousands of dollars in text messaging fees to Cuba's communist telecommunications monopoly routed through a secret bank account and front companies. It was not a situation that it could either afford or justify — and if exposed it would be embarrassing, or worse.

In a searing evaluation, Creative Associates said Mobile Accord had ignored sustainability because "it has felt comfortable receiving USG financing to move the venture forward.''

Out of 60 points awarded for performance, Mobile Accord scored 34 points. Creative Associates complained that Mobile Accord's understanding of the social mission of the project was weak, and gave it 3 out of 10 points for "commitment to our Programme goals.''

Mobile Accord declined to comment on the programme.

In increasingly impatient tones, Creative Associates pressed Mobile Accord to find new revenue that would pay the bills. Mobile Accord suggested selling targeted advertisements in Cuba, but even with projections of up to a million ZunZuneo subscribers, advertising in a state-run economy would amount to a pittance.

By March 2011, ZunZuneo had about 40,000 subscribers. To keep a lower profile, it abandoned previous hopes of reaching 200,000 and instead capped the number of subscribers at a lower number. It limited ZunZuneo's text messages to less than one percent of the total in Cuba, so as to avoid the notice of Cuban authorities. Though one former ZunZuneo worker — who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about his work — said the Cubans were catching on and had tried to block the site.

Toward the middle of 2012, Cuban users began to complain that the service worked only sporadically. Then not at all.

ZunZuneo vanished as mysteriously as it appeared.

By June 2012, users who had access to Facebook and Twitter were wondering what had happened.

"Where can you pick up messages from ZunZuneo?'' one woman asked on Facebook in November 2012. "Why aren't I receiving them anymore?''

Users who went to ZunZuneo's website were sent to a children's website with a similar name.

Reyner Aguero, a 25-year-old blogger, said he and fellow students at Havana's University of Computer Sciences tried to track it down. Someone had rerouted the website through DNS blocking, a censorship technique initially developed back in the 1990s. Intelligence officers later told the students that ZunZuneo was blacklisted, he said.

"ZunZuneo, like everything else they did not control, was a threat,'' Aguero said. "Period.''

In incorrect Spanish, ZunZuneo posted a note on its Facebook page saying it was aware of problems accessing the website and that it was trying to resolve them.

" iQue viva el ZunZuneo!'' the message said. Long live ZunZuneo!

In February, when Saimi Reyes, and her boyfriend, Ernesto Guerra, learned the origins of ZunZuneo, they were stunned.

"How was I supposed to realize that?'' Guerra asked. "It's not like there was a sign saying 'Welcome to ZunZuneo, brought to you by USAID.''

"Besides, there was nothing wrong. If I had started getting subversive messages or death threats or 'Everyone into the streets,''' he laughed, "I would have said, 'OK,' there's something fishy about this. But nothing like that happened.''

USAID says the programme ended when the money ran out. The Cuban government declined to comment.

The former web domain is now a placeholder, for sale for $299. The registration for MovilChat, the Cayman Islands front company, was set to expire on March 31.

In Cuba, nothing has come close to replacing it. Internet service still is restricted.

"The moment when ZunZuneo disappeared was like a vacuum,'' Guerra said. "People texted my phone, 'What is happening with ZunZuneo?'

"In the end, we never learned what happened,'' he said. "We never learned where it came from.''

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'Iraq forces kill dozens of militants near Baghdad'

BAGHDAD: Iraqi security forces killed more than 40 militants on Thursday in clashes in a town southwest of Baghdad, the interior ministry said in a statement.

The firefight in the town of Yusifiyah also left one army officer dead, the statement said, adding that two heavy machineguns, 15 rifles and five grenade launchers were seized, along with other equipment.

"Iraqi security forces confronted a failed attempt by Daash gang members to break into a military camp," the statement said, referring to the Arabic abbreviation for the powerful Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant jihadist group.

"The security forces ... killed more than 40 terrorist attackers, and the attack resulted in the death of one of our officers when he was confronting these criminal gangs."

The clashes in Yusifiyah come after days of fighting in the Zoba and Zaidan areas west of Baghdad, spurring concerns that militants who have for months controlled the town of Fallujah could be looking to open a new front to encroach on the capital.

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British Queen meets Pope Francis for first time

VATICAN CITY: Queen Elizabeth II met Pope Francis for the first time on Thursday on a visit that coincides with the anniversary of the Falklands War and is also the 87-year-old monarch's first foreign trip since 2011.

Dressed in lilac and clutching a bouquet of flowers, the queen smiled as she arrived at Ciampino airport, shaking hands with dignitaries on the red carpet.

She and her husband Prince Philip then had lunch with Italian President Giorgio Napolitano at the Quirinale Palace, where they were greeted with a military salute and crowds of supporters, some waving Union Jack flags.

Wearing one of her trademark hats decorated with flowers, and with a black purse over her arm to match her shoes, the monarch looked pleased to see the 88-year-old president.

The British royals were then seen arriving at the Vatican for the private audience with Francis in a room next to the Paul VI auditorium in the Vatican, with hundreds of people cheering as their car drove in.

The queen's talks with the Argentine pope come a day after the 32nd anniversary of the start of the Falklands War between Britain and Argentina and come amid thorny Anglican-Catholic relations.

But British officials have played down the prospect of any contentious issues on the agenda as the queen, the "supreme governor" of the Church of England, holds talks with the head of the world's Catholics.

Britain's ambassador to the Holy See Nigel Baker told Vatican radio that there had been "extraordinary" progress in Britain-Vatican and Anglican-Catholic relations since the Queen's coronation in 1952.

"She will want I think to understand from Pope Francis how he sees the role of faith in the world," he said.

On the Falklands War, he said: "The Vatican has been clear with us, including in the last week and at a very senior level, that their long-standing position of neutrality on this issue remains in force".

Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi said the meeting was "very informal".

Francis will be the fifth pope the queen has met, starting with Pius XII in 1951 when she was still a princess.

She has also met John XXIII, John Paul II and pope emeritus Benedict XVI, who stepped down last year.

The couple's last foreign trip was to Australia in 2011, and the one-day visit will last only a few hours, without much of the pomp usually associated with royal travel to avoid tiring the ageing royals.

While the talks are likely to be purely formal, Anglican-Catholic ties are an issue because of resentment in Britain over the Vatican's move to bring conservative Anglican priests who dissented from the Church of England over female ordination.

But relations between Pope Francis and the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, the spiritual leader of the Church of England, are cordial and the two met in 2013 and are expected to hold talks later this year.

The Anglican church, which separated from Rome in the 16th century, has around 80 million faithful compared with the world's 1.2 billion Catholics.

Another potentially divisive issue is over the British-ruled Falkland Islands- referred to in Argentina as the Malvinas-to which Latin America's first pope has shown he is sensitive by once referring to them as "ours" before becoming pope.

He also said Britain had "usurped" the islands. Francis last month met a group of 12 Argentine war veterans holding a placard for "peace in the South Atlantic" during a general audience in St Peter's Square.

Argentine forces invaded the islands on April 2, 1982, but were forced to surrender in June after British forces recaptured them in fighting that left 649 Argentinians, 255 British and three islanders dead.

Following Pope Francis's election last year, British Prime Minister David Cameron said he "respectfully" disagreed with the pope, after a referendum, also in 2013, in which 99.8 percent of Falkland Islanders voted in favour of remaining British.

"The white smoke over the Falklands was pretty clear," he quipped - a reference to the smoke signal used by cardinals in the Sistine Chapel to show that a new pope has been elected.

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Japan assesses tsunami threat after Chile quake

TOKYO: Japan's meteorological agency said it was assessing on Wednesday whether to issue a tsunami advisory after an 8.2-magnitude earthquake struck off Chile's Pacific coast, as authorities braced for waves potentially as high as one metre (3.3 feet).

The quake struck late on Tuesday, sending tsunami waves of more than two metres crashing into Chile's northern coast.

The Japanese meteorological agency said tsunami waves could reach coastal zones of the Pacific country early Thursday, but that it was still assessing the danger.

"There is possibility that tsunami of an advisory level could come, which should be in a range between about 20 centimetres and one metre at the highest," an agency official told reporters.

Another agency official told AFP: "We are still assessing whether to issue an advisory as we are collecting updated information now.

"But if it's issued, do not go close to the sea shore until it's lifted."

The agency said it would issue a tsunami advisory or warning at around 3:00am Thursday if necessary.

Television footage showed officials in Kochi, southwestern Japan, closing a metal barrier to seal their local breakwater in preparation for possible high waves there.

Large areas of the coastline that are subject to a possible tsunami alert following the Chile quake were also hit by a 2011 quake and tsunami, which killed more than 18,000 and triggered a nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant.

Tokyo Electric Power, which runs the crippled plant, will suspend part of operations scheduled for early Thursday near the sea shore at the plant in preparation for any possible waves, Jiji Press said.

In 1960, a 9.5-magnitude earthquake in Chile sent a tsunami across the Pacific that killed more than 140 people in Japan.

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Palestinians defy US and Israel, leaving peace talks in peril

JERUSALEM JERUSALEM: Defying the United States and Israel, the Palestinian leadership formally submitted applications on Wednesday to join 15 international agencies, leaving the troubled Middle East talks brokered by Secretary of State John Kerry on the verge of breakdown.

The applications were signed by President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority on Tuesday evening as part of a move to gain the benefits of statehood outside the negotiations process.

They were delivered on Wednesday morning to Robert Serry, the United Nations special coordinator in the region, and, in cases where relevant, to representatives of Switzerland and the Netherlands, according to Palestinian officials.

Riyad al-Malki, the Palestinian foreign minister, delivered the letters to Mr Serry at a meeting in the West Bank city of Jericho between Mr Serry and Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator.

Saskia Ramming, a spokeswoman for Mr Serry, said the letters now would be relayed to the appropriate body for each of the 15 treaties and conventions the Palestinians want to join, and that there is "a whole procedure involved of examining" the documents. "You basically submit that you want to accede and then it goes to the depository and there's a process of review," Ms Ramming said. "To say this takes effect tomorrow, that's a bit misleading."

Muhammad Shtayyeh, a senior adviser to Mr Abbas and a former negotiator, said that the Palestinian move was a reaction to Israel's failure to release a fourth batch of long-serving Palestinian prisoners by March 29 and that the time for additional diplomatic maneuvering had run out.

"We waited three days, from March 29 until April 1, to give American diplomacy a chance and to give the Israelis a chance," Mr Shtayyeh said.

Mr Abbas's actions, which appeared to catch American and Israeli officials by surprise, prompted Secretary of State John Kerry to cancel a planned return to the region on Wednesday, in which he had expected to complete an agreement extending negotiations through 2015.

In that planned deal, the United States would release an American convicted of spying for Israel more than 25 years ago, while Israel would free hundreds of Palestinian prisoners and slow down construction of Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

Mr Abbas, who had vowed not to seek membership of international bodies until the April 29 expiration of the talks that Mr Kerry started last summer, said he was taking this course because Israel had failed to release the fourth batch of Palestinian prisoners.

Israeli officials say they are not bound by their pledge because no meaningful negotiations have taken place since November.

American officials, while rattled, said the Palestinians appeared to be using leverage against Israel rather than trying to scuttle the negotiations. Mr Abbas, they noted, did not move toward joining the International Criminal Court, a step Israel fears most because the Palestinians could use the court to contest Israel's presence in the West Bank.

Still, a senior American official said Mr Kerry's decision not to return to the region immediately reflected a growing impatience in the White House, which believes that his mediating efforts have reached their limit and that the two sides need to work their way out of the current impasse.

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In announcing the moves on Tuesday, Mr Abbas said, "This is our right." He has been under pressure from other Palestinian leaders and the public to leverage the nonmember observer-state status they won at the United Nations in 2012 to join a total of 63 international bodies.

"We do not want to use this right against anybody or to confront anybody," he said, as he signed the membership applications live on Palestinian television. "We don't want to collide with the U.S. administration. We want a good relationship with Washington because it helped us and exerted huge efforts. But because we did not find ways for a solution, this becomes our right."

The United States voted against the Palestinians' 2012 bid in the United Nations General Assembly, and it blocked a similar effort in 2011 at the Security Council, arguing that negotiations with Israel were the only path to peace and statehood.

Washington has also vigorously opposed Palestinian membership in the international agencies, which under a law passed by Congress could prompt a withdrawal of financial aid to the Palestinian Authority and a shutdown of the Palestinian diplomatic mission in Washington.

While the Palestinians' pursuit of the international route is widely viewed as a poison pill for the peace talks, Mr Abbas and Mr Kerry held out hope on Tuesday night that they could still be salvaged. The agencies Mr Abbas moved to join include the Geneva and Vienna Conventions and those dealing with women's and children's rights.

"It is completely premature tonight to draw any kind of judgment, certainly any kind of final judgment, about today's events and where things are," Mr Kerry told reporters in Brussels, where he was meeting with NATO foreign ministers on the Ukrainian crisis.

"I'm not going to get into the who, why, what, when, where, how of why we're where we are today," he added. "The important thing is to keep the process moving and find a way to see whether the parties are prepared to move forward."

"Even tonight," Mr Kerry said, "both parties say they want to continue to try to find a way forward."

President Obama has given Mr Kerry broad latitude to try to keep the process alive, even authorizing him to discuss the possible release of Jonathan J Pollard, a former Navy intelligence officer serving a life sentence in the United States for espionage, whose release Israel has long sought. That would only be as part of a broader package of measures that American officials said would give the negotiations a genuine chance to succeed.

Such a move would antagonize the nation's intelligence agencies, senior officials said, but might be worth the cost to keep the talks from collapsing. Mr Pollard is eligible for parole in 2015, they noted, so his value as a bargaining chip is diminishing.

Mr Obama, officials said, was in frequent contact with Mr Kerry when both were in Europe last week, and during Mr Kerry's travels there this week. The president has rejected previous pleas by the Israelis to release Mr Pollard, but with Mr Kerry having invested so deeply in the peace process, officials said, Mr Obama wanted to back him up.

Whether, and how, to use Mr Pollard has been vigorously debated within the administration. While some officials argue that he should be used only to break the logjam on final-status issues — the borders of a new Palestinian state, for example — Mr Kerry has argued that these issues will all be decided as a package at the end of the talks. Mr Kerry has argued that Mr Pollard could be more useful now in keeping the talks alive, given the possibility of parole, according to officials.

Still, the crisis is the most significant yet for talks that have been troubled from the start, with few beyond Mr Kerry and his team believing there was much chance of closing the gaps in the two sides' positions. Mr Kerry has made the peace process a personal mission, with a dozen trips to the region in the past year, including two over the past week, interrupting his efforts to counter Russia's aggression toward Ukraine.

While Middle East analysts widely praised Mr Kerry's determination, many thought he was on a fool's errand. He long ago abandoned his original goal of achieving a final-status agreement within nine months, and in recent weeks he even de-emphasized his proposed framework of core principles for a deal, focusing instead simply on extending the timetable.

"It's a process leading nowhere," Khalil Shikaki, a Palestinian pollster and political scientist, said on Tuesday morning. "The basic compromises that this Israeli government is willing to endorse are unacceptable to the majority of the Palestinians." He added, "There is no chance."

Daniel C Kurtzer, a former American ambassador to Israel, said: "All of the indications are that this is moribund. We're now into Plan B, which has two parts: the blame game, which is well underway, and a last-ditch effort by the United States not to have the collapse lead to violence."

Israeli officials remained silent about Mr Abbas's move Tuesday night. A spokesman for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declined to discuss it, or how it might affect the deal that had emerged earlier in the day to continue the talks for at least another nine months.

Mr Abbas's actions came after a frenzied day of rumors in Israel, where officials said a deal was emerging in which Mr Pollard would be freed before the Passover holiday, which starts on April 14. Israel would free the remaining long-serving prisoners — including 14 Palestinian citizens of Israel, whose release is particularly delicate because it raises questions of sovereignty — as well as 400 others, many of them women and children, who had not committed murder.

In addition, Israel would promise to "show restraint" in settlement construction, according to an official involved in the negotiations, by not starting new government housing projects in the West Bank. Projects underway would be allowed to continue, the official said, and East Jerusalem would not be included.

(Jodi Rudoren reported from Jerusalem, Michael R Gordon from Brussels and Mark Landler from Washington. Isabel Kershner contributed reporting from Jerusalem.)

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Democracy doesn't suit China: President Xi

BEIJING: Making waves with trade deals worth billions of dollars during his first European tour, President Xi Jinping put up a strong defence of the monopoly of power by the CPC saying that China had settled for a one-party system after unsuccessful experiments with multi-party democracy.

China cannot copy the political system or development model of other countries "because it would not fit us and it might even lead to catastrophic consequences," Xi said, addressing students of the College of Europe at Bruges in Belgium, winding up his week-long tour to the EU.

"The fruit may look the same, but the taste is quite different," he said.

The uniqueness of China's cultural tradition, history and circumstances determines that China needs to follow a development path that suits its own reality, he said.

"In fact, we have found such a path and achieved success along this path," he said making out a case for the one-party system in his country in a rare elaboration by a Chinese leader for an external audience.

He said after the 1911 revolution led by Sun Yat-sen overthrew the autocratic monarchy that had ruled China for several thousand years, China experimented with many systems.

The Chinese people experimented with constitutional monarchy, imperial restoration, parliamentarianism, multi-party system and presidential government, yet nothing really worked, he said.

"Finally, China took on the path of socialism. Admittedly, in the process of building socialism, we have had successful experience and also made mistakes," state-run Xinhua news agency quoted Xi as saying.

"We have even suffered serious setbacks," apparently referring to the decade-long Cultural Revolution led by Communist Party of China (CPC) founder Mao Zedong, in which millions were killed.

"After the 'reform and opening-up' was launched under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, we have, acting in line with China's national conditions and the trend of the times, explored and blazed a trail of development and established socialism with Chinese characteristics," he said.

Belgium is the last leg of Xi's four-nation Europe trip, which has already taken him to the Netherlands, France and Germany during which he signed a number of trade deals amounting to billons of dollars. He also attended the third Nuclear Security Summit at The Hague.

In his speech at the EU college Xi, who took over power last year after a once-in-a-decade power transfer of the CPC, also said China is undergoing profound changes and the country's reform has entered a deep-water zone.

"We know keenly that reform and opening-up is an ongoing process that will never stop. China's reform has entered a deep-water zone, where problems crying to be resolved are all difficult ones," he said adding that "what we need is the courage to move the reform forward".

"We must get ready to go into the mountains, being fully aware that there may be tigers to encounter," Xi said, quoting a Chinese saying. He returned home today after completing the tour.

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Australia applauds Japan whaling ban

SYDNEY: Australia and New Zealand on Tuesday applauded a court decision that Japan must halt its annual Antarctic whale hunt, but raised fears it could sidestep the order and begin whaling again under a new "scientific" guise.

The United Nations' Hague-based international court of justice (ICJ) ruled on Monday that Japan's whaling programme was a commercial activity disguised as science, and said it must revoke existing whaling licences.

A "deeply disappointed" Tokyo said it would honour the ruling but did not exclude the possibility of future whaling programmes, with New Zealand expressing concerns Japan may try to circumvent the order.

"The ICJ decision sinks a giant harpoon into the legality of Japan's whaling programme," New Zealand foreign minister Murray McCully said.

"It still does leave Japan with a decision to make after they've digested this, which is to look at whether they try to devise a new programme that is scientifically based that they could embark upon whaling in the Southern Ocean again.

"Our task is to make sure that we carry out a diplomatic conversation that dissuades them from embarking on that course."

A Japanese minister on Tuesday defended whaling — seen by some as an important cultural practice — but stopped short of detailing what next steps Japan would take.

"Whale meat is an important source of food, and the government's position to use it based on scientific facts has not changed," agriculture, forestry and fisheries minister Yoshimasa Hayashi told a press conference.

"We will scrutinise the verdict and study (measures to be taken) swiftly," he said according to the Jiji news agency. Japan also has a coastal whaling programme which is not covered by the ban.

Australia, backed by New Zealand, hauled Japan before the ICJ in 2010 in a bid to end the annual Southern Ocean hunt.

Tokyo has long been accused of exploiting a legal loophole in the 1986 ban on commercial whaling that allowed the practice to collect scientific data. Japan has killed 10,000 of the giant mammals under the scheme since 1988, Australia has alleged.

International law expert Steven Freeland, from the University of Western Sydney, said Japan could simply redesign its whaling programme to skirt the ruling. He pointed out that the ICJ confirmed scientific research can include killing whales — just not so many.

"The problem for Japan was its failure to take proper account of non-lethal methods of research or to justify the actual catch numbers it had declared," he said.

"Japan may instead take a very close look at why its implementation of (its research programme) fell foul of its legal obligations and perhaps seek to design and ultimately implement a new whaling programme that takes into account all of those elements."

Japan had argued that its JARPA II research programme was aimed at studying the viability of whale hunting, but the ICJ found it had failed to examine ways of doing the research without killing whales, or at least while killing fewer of them.

Masayuki Komatsu, a former head negotiator for Japan on the whaling issue, said Tokyo had been a victim of its own lax approach over the last decade.

"It became clear in the court procedure and hearings... that Japan was not ambitious enough about its scientific research as it did not catch as many whales as it needed for obtaining data," he said.

"As a result, the entire research whaling programme was judged as a commercial hunt."

A respected blogger and social commentator on Japanese issues, who goes by the name of Hikosaemon, said the narrow issue of whether or not the whaling programme was "science" largely missed the point.

"I think it is clear that both sides here... were seeking moral vindication of their positions," he told AFP.

"Even if it can fix the technical issues with its scientific whaling programme... Japan will need to weigh up whether it is worth the increasing PR damage this issue causes."

The irony, added Hikosaemon, is that the issue of whaling is itself not particularly important for many Japanese.

But efforts "to demonise Japan over this issue have galvanised a siege mentality that has transformed this from an issue about the right to hunt and eat whales, into a more fundamental issue of fair treatment among countries with different cultural values."

Among the 16 judges, 12 — including ones from Russia and China — supported the verdict which ordered Japan to stop Antarctic whaling, according to Japanese press reports.

The four judges who opposed it were Japan's Hisashi Owada, and judges from France, Morocco and Somalia. Owada, 81, a former Japanese vice foreign minister and ambassador to the United Nations, is the father of Crown Princess Masako, the wife of Crown Prince Naruhito.

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Over 150,000 killed in Syria conflict

BEIRUT: More than 150,000 people have been killed in Syria since the conflict began in March 2011, a monitoring group said in a new toll released on Tuesday.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said it had documented the deaths of 150,344 people, 51,212 of them civilians, including nearly 7,985 children.

The group said 37,781 members of the armed opposition had been killed in the fighting, including jihadists from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, and al-Qaida affiliate al-Nusra Front.

A total of 58,480 regime forces, including more than 35,000 soldiers had also been killed.

Among those killed fighting on the government side were 364 members of Lebanon's Shia Hezbollah movement, the Observatory added.

Another 2,871 people were recorded as having died but their identities remained unknown, the group said.

The conflict in Syria began in March 2011 with peaceful anti-government demonstrations, inspired by similar movements elsewhere in the region.

After a regime crackdown that saw protesters killed, part of the opposition took up arms and the conflict spiralled into civil war.

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CIA 'misled' public about interrogation methods

WASHINGTON: The CIA misled the government and the public about parts of its interrogation program for years, Washington Post said on Tuesday, quoting a report by the Senate intelligence committee.

Specifically, the US agency hid details about the severity of its methods, overstated the significance of plots and prisoners and took credit for critical pieces of intelligence that detainees had in fact provided before they were subjected to harsh techniques, Post said, quoting officials who have seen the 6,300-page report.

It was constructed with detailed chronologies of dozens of CIA detainees.

The paper said the report describes a long-standing pattern of unsubstantiated claims the CIA sought permission to use — and later tried to defend — excruciating interrogation methods that yielded little to no significant intelligence, according to US officials who have reviewed the document.

"The CIA described (its program) repeatedly both to the department of justice and eventually to Congress as getting unique, otherwise unobtainable intelligence that helped disrupt terrorist plots and save thousands of lives," said one US official briefed on the report.

"Was that actually true? The answer is no." Current and former US officials describing the report spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue and because the document remains classified.

The report includes what officials described as damning new disclosures about a sprawling network of secret detention facilities, or "black sites", that was dismantled by President Barack Obama in 2009.

The report describes previously undisclosed cases of abuse including the alleged repeated dunking of a terror suspect in tanks of iced water in Afghanistan.

This method bore similarities to waterboarding but never showed up on any list of techniques approved by the justice department, Post said.

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Russian PM Medvedev visits Crimea

SIMFEROPOL, Crimea: Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev visited Crimea on Monday, flaunting his country's grip on the Black Sea peninsula following its annexation from Ukraine.

Medvedev took several government officials with him on the highest-level visit to Crimea since President Vladimir Putin signed legislation on absorbing it into Russia on March 21.

"(I'm) in Simferopol," Medvedev said on Twitter after his plane landed in the main city in the region. "Today the government will discuss the development of Crimea here."

The visit is likely to irk Kiev and Western governments which accuse Moscow of illegally seizing Crimea from Ukraine after the region voted to join Russia in a referendum they described as a sham.

Russia's swift takeover of Crimea, following the ouster of Moscow ally Viktor Yanukovich as Ukraine's president in late February, has caused the biggest crisis in East-West relations since the Cold War.

Medvedev arrived in Simferopol hours after US secretary of state John Kerry met Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov in Paris late on Sunday and reiterated that Washington considered Russia's actions in Crimea "illegal and illegitimate".

The United States and EU have imposed sanctions on Russian officials, lawmakers and allies of Putin over Crimea. They are threatening broader measures if Russia, which has forces massed near Ukraine's eastern border, seeks to take more territory.

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