A senior al Qaida operative was killed in Iran earlier this year by Israeli agents supported by US intelligence.

Abu Mohammed al-Masri was killed by assassins in Tehran during a period in which the Trump administration was ramping up pressure on Iran.

He was killed on August 7, the anniversary of the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

Al-Masri was widely believed to have participated in the planning of those attacks and was wanted on terrorism charges by the FBI.

The US provided intelligence to the Israelis on where they could find al-Masri and the alias he was using at the time, while Israeli agents carried out the killing, according to two officials.

Another two other officials confirmed al-Masri’s killing but could not provide specific details.

His death is a blow to al Qaida, the terror network that orchestrated the September 11 attacks in the US and comes amid rumours in the Middle East about the fate of the group’s leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

The officials could not confirm those reports but said the US intelligence community was trying to determine their credibility.

Two of the officials – one within the intelligence community and with direct knowledge of the operation and another former CIA officer briefed on the matter – said al-Masri was killed by Kidon, a unit within the secretive Israeli spy organization Mossad allegedly responsible for the assassination of high-value targets.

The official in the intelligence community said al-Masri’s daughter, Maryam, was also a target of the operation.

The US believed she was being groomed for a leadership role in al Qaida and intelligence suggested she was involved in operational planning, according to the official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence.

Al-Masri’s daughter was the widow of Hamza bin Laden, the son of al Qaida mastermind Osama bin Laden.

Both the CIA and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office, which oversees the Mossad intelligence agency, declined to comment.

Read more: Iran continues to stockpile and enrich uranium, says UN

A federal appeals court on Tuesday said printing “In God We Trust” on U.S. currency is constitutional, citing its longstanding use and saying it was not coercive.

The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St Paul, Minnesota rejected claims by 29 atheists, children of atheists and atheist groups that inscribing the national motto on bills and coins violated their First Amendment free speech and religious rights.

While other courts have allowed the motto’s use on currency, Circuit Judge Raymond Gruender said it also did not constitute an establishment of religion under a 2014 Supreme Court decision requiring a review of “historical practices.”

Gruender said the Constitution lets the government celebrate “our tradition of religious freedom,” and that putting the motto on currency “comports with early understandings of the Establishment Clause” without compelling religious observance.

“In God We Trust” began appearing on U.S. coins in 1864 during the Civil War, a period of increased religious sentiment, and was added to paper currencies by the mid-1960s (https://www.treasury.gov/about/education/Pages/in-god-we-trust.aspx).

President Dwight Eisenhower signed a law making the phrase the national motto in 1956.

Tuesday’s 3-0 decision upheld a Dec. 2016 lower court ruling, though one judge refused to join part of its analysis.

The federal appeals court in Chicago upheld the use of “In God We Trust” on currency in May.

Michael Newdow, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, in an email called it “utterly revolting” that “the history of governmental denigration of a suspect class should trump [the] principle” that neutrality be the “touchstone” for analysing claims under the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause.

Newdow is also known for unsuccessful litigation challenging the inclusion of “under God” in the U.S. Pledge of Allegiance.

Gruender has been on U.S. President Donald Trump’s list of potential candidates for open Supreme Court seats.

The case is New Doe Child #1 et al v U.S. et al, 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, No. 16-4440.

A Vietnamese court found two Vietnamese-Americans guilty of terrorism on Wednesday and sentenced them to 14 years in prison for masterminding a series of bomb plots earlier this year, a court official told Reuters.

James Nguyen and Angel Phan were convicted, along with 10 accomplices who received short jail terms, after a two day trial. All defendants had been charged with “attempting to overthrow the state”.

Phan and Nguyen had been accused of organising at least three attacks, including the attempted bombing of Vietnam’s largest international airport in Ho Chi Minh City last April, and the successful bombing of a police station in June this year.

“The remaining 10 defendants in the same trial received prison terms of between five and 11 years,” an official at the Ho Chi Minh City People’s Court told Reuters by phone.

According to state media, Phan and Nguyen were acting on behalf of the “Provisional Government of Vietnam”, a California-based organisation run by Vietnamese-Americans still loyal to the now defunct state of South Vietnam.

The U.S. organisation, which was listed as a “terrorist” group by Hanoi in January this year, dispatched Phan and Nguyen to Vietnam in February 2017 to carry out attacks on Vietnamese national holidays, the Ministry of Public Security said in a statement on its website.

Phan and Nguyen ran a network of underground operatives in Vietnam, some of whom were given titles in a shadow government such as “governor of Saigon”, or “commander of national defence guards,” the Ministry of Public Security said on Wednesday.

The pair assigned “counter-revolutionary” missions to the group’s members in Vietnam, the ministry said, including a plan to broadcast anti-government propaganda from local radio stations, organise protests, and “insult the image” of former president Ho Chi Minh.

Phan and Nguyen will be deported after serving their jail term, Voice of Vietnam radio reported.

In June, a court in Ho Chi Minh City upheld prison sentences against 15 members of the group it said were guilty of planting bombs in the international terminal of Tan Son Nhat airport in April last year.

Last month, police said it had arrested seven people from the group over the bombing of a Ho Chi Minh City police station.

The incident, in which two small explosive devices were detonated, injured three people in what police said was a “terrorist case against the people’s government”.

A police warehouse, where confiscated vehicles, mostly motorbikes, were stored, was also blown up.

The Provisional Government of Vietnam did not respond to a request for comment made via its website.

In a statement, the U.S. Embassy in Hanoi said it had been providing consular services for James Nguyen.

“We will continue to monitor Mr. Nguyen’s welfare, advocate for him, and provide consular services until his release,” spokesman Pope Thrower said in the statement, which did not mention Angel Phan or address the terrorism charges.

The U.N. rights chief said on Monday that U.S. President Donald Trump bears “a heavy responsibility” for how the media is portrayed and that his remarks could have a knock-on effect that could hurt journalists in other countries.

U.S. newspapers across the country ran editorials last Thursday defending freedom of the press in response to President Donald Trump calling some media organizations enemies of the American people.

“To label the press in this way is very worrisome,” U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein said in a wide-ranging interview days before his four-year term ends.

“The President should be aware that a heavy responsibility lies on his shoulders when it comes to the way in which the media is being portrayed,” Zeid said, speaking to Reuters, Associated Press and Agence France Presse in his Geneva office.

“Because it also has a demonstration effect, other leaders in authoritarian settings will do same thing. We’ve seen now how they mimic President Trump and so what could already be a difficult situation in other countries becomes even more difficult for the press to operate and for journalists to uncover stories and for lawyers to do their work and for human rights defenders to do their work,” he added.

Trump’s comments reflect a view held by many conservatives that many media outlets distort, make up or omit facts because of a bias against them. The Republican president has said he supports the principle of press freedom, but has described much of what the media publishes as “fake news”.

VETOES, CRISES

Zeid has been outspoken about human rights violations, earning rebukes from the United States and its ally Israel, as well as China, Myanmar, Hungary, Syria, and his native Jordan.

On Monday, he criticised world powers in the U.N. Security Council – singling out the United States, Russia and China – for casting vetoes and preventing resolution of crises or their being referred to the International Criminal Court (ICC).

“And I think that has to change, in the end the organisation can collapse at great cost to the international community and to international peace and security,” Zeid warned.

“The threats to the system altogether are very real.”

On China, he called for access to the far western region of Xinjiang following reports by activists and independent U.N. rights monitors this month about mass detention of Muslim Uighurs.

China has rejected allegations raised by the U.N. panel that 1 million Uighurs may be held in internment camps in the restive region, but said that some people underwent re-education after being deceived by extremists.

“As with all countries, the request is let us in or else we will assume the absolute worst,” Zeid told Reuters.

Hackers linked to Russia’s government tried to target the websites of two right-wing U.S. think-tanks, suggesting they were broadening their attacks in the build-up to November elections, Microsoft said.

The software giant said it thwarted the attempts last week by taking control of sites that hackers had designed to mimic the pages of The International Republican Institute and The Hudson Institute. Users were redirected to fake addresses where they were asked to enter usernames and passwords.

There was no immediate comment from Russian authorities, but the Kremlin was expected to address the report later on Tuesday. It has regularly dismissed accusations that it has used hackers to influence U.S. elections and political opinion.

Casting such allegations as part of an anti-Russian campaign designed to justify new sanctions on Russia, it says it wants to improve not worsen ties with Washington.

“We’re concerned that these and other attempts pose security threats to a broadening array of groups connected with both American political parties in the run-up to the 2018 elections,” Microsoft said in a blog post overnight.

The International Republican Institute has a roster of high-profile Republican board members, including Senator John McCain of Arizona who has criticized U.S. President Donald Trump’s interactions with Russia, and Moscow’s rights record.

The Hudson Institute, another conservative group, has hosted discussions on topics including cybersecurity, according to Microsoft. It has also examined the rise of kleptocracy, especially in Russia and has been critical of the Russian government, the New York Times reported.

“They (the Russians) are pursuing attacks that they perceive in their own national self-interest,” Eric Rosenbach, the director of the Defending Digital Democracy project at Harvard University, told the New York Times.

“It’s about disrupting and diminishing any group that challenges how Putin’s Russia is operating at home and around the world.”

CYBER-TENSIONS

Microsoft’s report comes amid increasing cyber-tensions between Moscow and Washington ahead of the congressional votes in November.

A federal grand jury in the U.S. indicted 12 Russian intelligence officers in July on charges of hacking the computer networks of 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller is investigating Russia’s role in the 2016 election and whether Trump’s campaign team colluded with Russians during the vote. Russia denies meddling in the elections while President Trump has denied any collusion.

Microsoft said its digital crimes unit (DCU) had acted on a court order to take control of six internet domains created by a group known variously as Strontium, Fancy Bear and APT28, which it said was associated with the Russian government.

As well as the two think-tanks, other home pages had been set up to mimic the websites of the U.S. Senate and Microsoft’s own Office software suite, it added.

The type of attack is known as “spear fishing,” in which the hackers trick victims into entering their username and password into the fake site in order to steal their credentials.

“To be clear, we currently have no evidence these domains were used in any successful attacks before the DCU transferred control of them, nor do we have evidence to indicate the identity of the ultimate targets of any planned attack involving these domains,” Microsoft said on the blog.

Facebook said late last month it had removed 32 pages and fake accounts from its platforms in a bid to combat foreign meddling ahead of the U.S. votes.

The company stopped short of identifying the source of the misinformation. But members of Congress who had been briefed by Facebook on the matter said the methodology of the influence campaign suggested Russian involvement.

(Reporting by Brendan O’Brien; Additional reporting by Andrew Osborn in Moscow; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore and Andrew Heavens)

Google has added a section to its twice-yearly transparency report to show who buys U.S. election ads on its platform and how much money is spent on political advertising, the search engine giant said on Wednesday.

The move follows similar steps from Twitter and Facebook in late June, as social media platforms face the threat of U.S. regulation over the lack of disclosure on such spending.

The new data from Alphabet Inc gives details on advertisers who have spent more than $500 on political ads from May 31, 2018.

With a spend of $629,500, the Trump Make America Great Again Committee, a fundraising organization for President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, stood as the top U.S. political ad spender, according to the data.

Google said it would update the report every week and the public can view new ads that get uploaded or new advertisers that decide to run ads.

The U.S. ambassador joined a ceremony in Nairobi on Tuesday to commemorate 20 years since truck bombs hit the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 258 people and marking the start of al Qaeda’s global campaign of violence.

Some 200 Kenyans and Americans, many of them survivors of the attack, gathered at Nairobi’s August 7th Memorial Park to pray and remember the victims.

“We forgive those who hurt us, but we may not forget. Let’s pray for them to change their mind so that we can live happily together,” said Thaddeus Mutiiria Nyaga, whose son, Emmanuel, was killed on Aug. 7. His name was read out along with those of the other victims, as candles were lit during the ceremony.

The blasts killed 12 Americans, and wounded several thousand people in what was al Qaeda’s first big attack in a campaign by the Islamist militants.

Three years later, the group would conduct its most notorious attack, flying passenger planes into New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing some 3,000 people.

“The terrorists really sought to divide us. They sought to divide Kenyans and Americans. They sought to attack civilization. And they failed,” U.S. Ambassador Robert Godec said at the ceremony.

Kenya’s director of counter-terrorism, Martin Kimani, said terrorism remained a threat, “but our country has taken giant strides to prepare better to be more ready, and part of that readiness is our cooperation with our friends”.

In 2013, gunmen from the Somali militant group al-Shabaab, an al Qaeda affiliate, killed at least 67 people inside a shopping mall and held out for four days as security forces laid siege to the complex.

Kenyan troops are fighting in neighbouring Somalia against al-Shabaab as part of an African Union peacekeeping force that has been deployed there for more than a decade.

Mourner Ali Mwadama said militants who say they kill in the name of religion do not represent Islam or any faith.

“We can’t call them Muslims,” he said. “If you are a Muslim you must follow the rules of Allah.”

Creators of fake accounts and news pages on Facebook are learning from their past mistakes and making themselves harder to track and identify, posing new challenges in preventing the platform from being used for political misinformation, cyber security experts say.

This was apparent as Facebook tried to determine who created pages it said were aimed at sowing dissension among U.S. voters ahead of congressional elections in November. The company said on Tuesday it had removed 32 fake pages and accounts from Facebook and Instagram involved in what it called “coordinated inauthentic behavior.”

While the United States improves its efforts to monitor and root out such intrusions, the intruders keep getting better at it, said cyber security experts interviewed over the past two days.

Ben Nimmo, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Digital Forensic Research Lab, said he had noticed the latest pages used less original language, rather cribbing from copy already on the internet.

“Linguistic mistakes would give them away before, between 2014 and 2017,” Nimmo told Reuters. “In some of these newer cases it seems they’ve caught on to that by writing less (original material) when posting things. With their longer posts sometimes it’s just pirated, copy and pasted from some American website. That makes them less suspicious.”

Facebook’s prior announcement on the topic of fake accounts, in April, directly connected a Russian group known as the Internet Research Agency to a myriad of posts, events and propaganda that were placed on Facebook leading up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

This time, Facebook did not identify the source of the misinformation.

“It’s clear that whoever set up these accounts went to much greater lengths to obscure their true identities than the Russian-based Internet Research Agency (IRA) has in the past,” the company said in a blog post, https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/07/removing-bad-actors-on-facebook, on Tuesday, announcing the removal of the pages. “Our technical forensics are insufficient to provide high confidence attribution at this time.”

Facebook said it had shared evidence connected to the latest flagged posts with several private sector partners, including the Digital Forensic Research Lab, an organization founded by the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank.

Facebook also said the use of virtual private networks, internet phone services, and domestic currency to pay for advertisements helped obfuscate the source of the accounts and pages. The perpetrators also used a third party, which Facebook declined to name, to post content.

Facebook declined to comment further, referring back to its blog post.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s top national security aides said on Thursday that Russia is behind “pervasive” attempts to interfere in November’s elections and that they expect attempts by Russia, and others, will continue into the 2020 elections.

They say they are concerned that attempts will be made to foment confusion and anger among various political groups in the United States and cause a distrust of the electoral process.

Two U.S. intelligence officials who requested anonymity told Reuters this week there was insufficient evidence to conclude that Russia was behind the latest Facebook campaign. However, one said “the similarities, aims and methodology relative to the 2016 Russian campaign are quite striking.”

‘PREVIOUS MISTAKES’

Experts who track online disinformation campaigns said the groups who launch such efforts have changed how they post content and create posts.

“These actors are learning from previous mistakes,” said John Kelly, chief executive of social media intelligence firm Graphika, adding they do not use the same internet addresses or pay in foreign currency.

“And as more players in the world learn these dark arts, it’s easier for them to hide among the multiple actors deploying the same playbook,” he said.

Philip Howard, an Oxford University professor of internet studies and director of the Oxford Internet Institute, said that suspicious social media accounts like those taken down this week were once more easily identifiable because they shared the same information from high-profile publications like RT, the Russian English-language news service, or Breitbart News Network.

But now, the content they often share is more diverse and less discernible, coming from lesser known sites, including internet forums that mix political news with other topics, he said.

“The junk news they’re sharing is using better quality images, for example, more believable domains, less-known websites, smaller blogs,” Howard added.

U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that Russia meddled in the 2016 presidential campaign using tactics including fake Facebook accounts. The Internet Research Agency was one of three Russian companies charged in February by U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller with conspiracy to tamper with the 2016 election.

Moscow has denied any election interference.

Every few weeks, Susan Bro walks down 4th Street in downtown Charlottesville, Virginia, until she gets to a brick wall covered in chalked messages like “Love over hate” and “Gone but not forgotten.”

“I come just to absorb the energy of the place,” Bro, 61, said on Tuesday as she stood on the block now named for her daughter, Heather Heyer, who was killed a year ago while marching against a white supremacist rally.

Since August 12, 2017, when James Fields rammed his car into counter-protesters, killing 32-year-old Heyer and injuring several others, Bro has channelled her rage and grief into spreading the same message that drew her daughter downtown that day.

Bro said she made a promise to her daughter at her funeral, when she saw her bruised, broken body for the first time and broke down in tears.

“I held her hand and said, ‘I’m going to make this count.'”

Heyer’s death capped a day of clashes after hundreds of white supremacists, neo-Nazis and others descended upon the city, drawing national attention to the “alt right” movement that had grown bolder since President Donald Trump’s election.

Trump faced intense criticism after the protests when he seemed to equate the white nationalists with the counter-protesters, saying there were “very fine people on both sides.”

Bro said she chose not to return several phone calls from the White House after learning of the president’s remarks.

As the city prepares for the first anniversary of the so-called “Unite the Right” rally, Bro is readying herself for another difficult milestone in a year full of painful moments without Heather.

“The ‘firsts’ are always hardest,” she said, her voice cracking. “I got through the others: Mother’s Day, her birthday, Christmas. This will be the last one.”

Bro said she would bring flowers to Heather Heyer Way on August 12 before speaking at an event to mark the anniversary.

Law enforcement agencies have made extensive plans to combat any potential violence, though the leader of last year’s gathering, local white nationalist Jason Kessler, failed to secure a permit for a sequel this year. Instead, he has obtained a permit to hold a rally in Washington outside the White House.

Before last summer, Bro, a former elementary schoolteacher, led a relatively quiet life, doing secretarial work and living in a modest trailer home about 30 minutes north of Charlottesville.

At Heyer’s memorial service, which drew nearly 2,000 mourners and was broadcast live on large screens, Bro said the national response to the tragedy was “just the beginning of Heather’s legacy.”

“They tried to kill my child to shut her up. Well guess what? You just magnified her,” she said, drawing a standing ovation.

Within weeks of Heyer’s death, Bro created the Heather Heyer Foundation, in part to install a formal and legal structure to handle the hundreds of thousands of dollars in funds that poured in from sympathizers around the country.

Bro runs the foundation from her home and from an office at a Charlottesville law firm, filled with tributes to Heyer that she has received over the last year: a portrait painted by an artist, a humanitarian award given posthumously by the Muhammad Ali Center, notes written by Heyer’s friends at her memorial service.

The foundation has organised a scholarship programme and is planning to launch a social justice youth programme.

Bro found herself making appearances on Ellen DeGeneres’ talk show and at MTV’s Video Music Awards. She acknowledged that the intense media attention has caused resentment among some activists in Charlottesville who feel the focus on Heyer, a white woman, has distracted from the racial issues at the core of the clashes.

It has been a bit of a balancing act, she said, to amplify Heyer’s message without making it seem as though her daughter was the only victim who mattered. She noted that violence against black people often does not generate the same level of interest and warned against the “white-centred” narrative that portrayed Heyer as a leader rather than simply one of many people who decided to march.

“The issues have not changed,” Bro said. “We still have police shootings, over-policing, a lack of affordable housing, the prison pipeline.”

A year after burying her daughter, Bro reflected on the activism that brought Heyer to the protests.

“The point of Heather’s death is that we have a responsibility to rise up to address that hate,” Bro said. “Don’t sit by and wring your hands.”

Turkey will retaliate against a U.S. decision to impose sanctions on two senior ministers over the imprisonment of Pastor Andrew Brunson, the foreign ministry said on Wednesday.

Washington sanctioned Justice Minister Abdulhamit Gul and Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu over the pastor’s detention. White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said the two men played leading roles in his 2016 arrest and later detention.

“We call on the U.S. administration to walk back from this wrong decision,” a statement by the Turkish foreign ministry said, calling Washington’s action a “hostile stance”.