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Speaking on the Monday Night Club, former Premier League defender Nedum Onouha says new Tottenham head coach Roberto De Zerbi is right to focus on raising morale rather than tactics as he looks to keep the club in the Premier League.

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WASHINGTON — The House on Monday approved allocating an extra $30 million to community and migrant medical centers, a move aimed at reducing infant deaths.

The bill, passed on a voice vote, requires the Department of Health and Human Services to give spending priority to centers that serve high-risk areas and to population groups with high infant mortality rates.

The bill was sent to the Senate, which passed a similar measure Aug. 6. Conferees will work on a compromise between the two.

The Reagan Administration opposes the legislation. It has proposed instead to test innovative ways of providing services to Medicaid-eligible pregnant women and infants up to a year old.

When the House Energy and Commerce Committee approved the House version last month, several Republican members called it unnecessary and said they found no reason to believe the extra spending would help more newborns survive.

In rejecting a key element of a legal challenge to the government’s warrantless wiretapping program, federal appellate judges on Friday demonstrated once again the willingness of U.S. courts to give the Bush administration considerable latitude in handling the war on terror.

The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, by a 3-0 vote, barred an Islamic charity from using a confidential government document to prove that it had been illegally spied upon, agreeing with the administration that disclosure would reveal “state secrets.”

The lawsuit, filed by Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation and two of its attorneys, challenged the National Security Agency’s spying endeavor, the Terrorist Surveillance Program, launched after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The U.N. Security Council has declared that Al-Haramain, which operates in more than 50 countries, belongs to or is associated with Al Qaeda.

The suit was one of 50 legal challenges brought across the country after the program’s existence was revealed in the New York Times.

Other courts have shown similar deference to the Bush administration on the state secrets privilege, which permits the government to bar disclosure in court of information if “there is a reasonable danger” it would affect national security.

But the ruling in this case was particularly striking because it came from a panel of three liberal jurists, all appointed by Democratic presidents.

Moreover, the charity, unlike other plaintiffs, says it has evidence of surveillance — a call log from the National Security Agency that the government inadvertently turned over in another proceeding.

In the ruling, Judge M. Margaret McKeown wrote that the judges accepted “the need to defer to the executive on matters of foreign and national security and surely cannot legitimately find ourselves second-guessing the executive in this arena.”

Erwin Chemerinsky, a liberal constitutional law professor at Duke University law school, said the court showed “how much deference even a liberal panel of judges is willing to give the executive branch in situations like this, and I find that very troubling.”

Doug Kmiec, a conservative constitutional law professor at Pepperdine law school, said “the opinion is consistent with” a ruling by the federal appeals court in Cincinnati earlier this year striking down a challenge to the surveillance filed by the American Civil Liberties Union.

He said the dual rulings indicated that “federal courts recognize that the essential aspects of the Terrorist Surveillance Program both remain secret and are important to preserve as such.”

The court’s ruling was not an absolute victory for the government. McKeown rejected the Justice Department’s argument that “the very subject matter of the litigation is a state secret.”

That finding could prove important in numerous other cases in which the government contends that even considering legal challenges to warrantless wiretapping would endanger national security.

In addition, the 9th Circuit panel sent the case back to a lower court to consider another issue: whether the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires approval by a special court for domestic surveillance, preempts the state secrets privilege. McKeown said that issue “remains central to Al-Haramain’s ability to proceed with this lawsuit.”

Georgetown University constitutional law professor David Cole said he thought Friday’s ruling showed partial victories for both sides.

Indeed, lawyers for the government and for the charity said they were happy with the outcome.

“The 9th Circuit upheld the government’s position that release of this information would undermine the government’s intelligence capabilities and compromise national security,” the Justice Department said.

Oakland attorney Jon Eisenberg, who argued for Al-Haramain before the 9th Circuit, said: “The government wants this case dead and gone. It is not. We are alive and kicking.”

Eisenberg expressed optimism that his client would prevail under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a statute enacted in the aftermath of revelations of illegal spying on civil rights and antiwar activists in the 1960s and ‘70s.

“That provision would be meaningless if the government could evade any such lawsuit merely by evoking the state secrets privilege,” Eisenberg said.

In support of her opinion, McKeown detailed statements by government officials — including President Bush, then-Atty. Gen. Alberto Gonzales and Gen. General Michael V. Hayden, principal deputy director for national intelligence — acknowledging the existence of the Terrorist Surveillance Program and extolling its importance.

“In light of extensive government disclosures about the TSP, the government is hard-pressed to sustain its claim that the very subject matter of this litigation is a state secret,” wrote McKeown, an appointee of President Clinton. “Unlike a truly secret or ‘black box’ program that remains in the shadows of public knowledge, the government has moved affirmatively to engage in public discourse about the TSP.”

Nonetheless, after privately reviewing the secret document, McKeown said she and her colleagues Michael Daly Hawkins, another Clinton appointee, and Harry Pregerson, a Carter appointee, agreed it was protected by the state secrets privilege.

“Detailed statements underscore that disclosure of information concerning the Sealed Document and the means, sources and methods of intelligence gathering in this context of this case would undermine the government’s intelligence capabilities and compromise national security,” she said.

The state secrets privilege was first utilized successfully by the government in a case shortly after the Civil War.

The leading case in the area, U.S. vs. Reynolds, was issued by the Supreme Court in 1953 to block a lawsuit after the crash of a B-29 bomber.

Three widows of crewmen sued and sought the official accident reports. The Air Force said the reports could not be revealed because the bomber was on a secret test mission.

(When the reports were declassified in 2000, they revealed that the aircraft was in poor condition, evidence that might have helped the widows’ suit.)

The Bush administration has evoked the state secrets privilege numerous times in recent years. In most instances, courts have accepted the word of government lawyers, often with a fairly cursory review, according to George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, who, like Cole, has challenged the privilege in court.

McKeown took pains to say that the 9th Circuit had carefully scrutinized the government’s assertions.

She said the judges had taken “very seriously our obligation to review the documents with a very careful, indeed a skeptical eye, and not to accept at face value the government’s claim or justification of privilege.”

But she said the panel could go no further than what already has been publicly disclosed that “the Sealed Document has something to do with intelligence activities.”

When the court heard the Al-Haramain case in August, it also entertained arguments in a related case, Hepting vs. AT&T; Corp. In that case, lawyers representing millions of AT&T; customers are seeking damages from the telecommunications giant for allegedly sharing their private records with the National Security Agency as part of the surveillance program.

On Friday, the 9th Circuit panel issued a brief order saying that the AT&T; case had been severed from the Al-Haramain matter. A decision is expected in the next several months, although there is no deadline.

—

henry.weinstein@latimes.com

“Whatever we do, we do together, and as far as possible, in confidence.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to back US strikes on Iran’s power grid if Tehran does not reopen the Strait of Hormuz, as he visited the site of an Iranian strike in Arad. He urged world leaders to join the war effort as US-Israeli attacks on Iran have killed more than 1,500 people and injured thousands.

March 17 (Asia Today) — This commentary is the Asia Today Editor’s Op-Ed.

South Korea’s ruling Democratic Party and the government have decided to raise the operating rates of nuclear and coal-fired power plants to respond to rising oil prices triggered by the war in the Middle East, a move critics say marks a late reversal of the party’s long-standing opposition to nuclear energy.

Ahn Do-geol, secretary of the party’s economic task force on the Middle East crisis, said Monday the government will expand electricity generation from nuclear and coal plants to manage supplies of liquefied natural gas, or LNG, which has relatively limited reserves.

Under the plan, the government will lift a cap limiting coal-fired power generation to 80% of installed capacity and accelerate repairs on six nuclear reactors currently under maintenance. Two reactors are expected to return to service by the end of this month and four more by May, raising nuclear utilization rates from the current high-60% range to about 80%.

The decision signals a clear shift for the Democratic Party, which long supported a phase-out of nuclear energy.

Former President Moon Jae-in formally declared a nuclear phase-out policy in 2017, pledging to abandon nuclear-centered electricity generation after attending a ceremony marking the permanent shutdown of the Kori Unit 1 reactor.

At the time, Moon argued South Korea should move toward a nuclear-free era and halted or scrapped most plans to build new nuclear plants.

The party’s stance began to soften after the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war in 2022, which triggered global energy supply disruptions. Near the end of his presidency, Moon said nuclear power would need to remain a major baseload energy source for decades and called for delayed reactors including Shin Hanul Units 1 and 2 and Shin Kori Units 5 and 6 to begin operations as soon as possible.

The latest shift reflects renewed energy concerns linked to instability in the Middle East, which has pushed oil prices higher.

Supporters of nuclear power argue it remains a critical energy source despite safety risks highlighted by past disasters such as the Fukushima accident in Japan.

Opponents warn that nuclear accidents can cause catastrophic damage, pointing to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant in Ukraine, which has faced repeated safety concerns amid the ongoing war.

However, critics of the phase-out policy argue that abandoning nuclear energy without reliable alternatives risks creating energy shortages.

South Korea currently has only about nine days’ worth of LNG reserves, raising concerns about energy security during geopolitical crises.

Supporters of the policy shift say governments must adjust energy strategies as global conditions change but argue that long-term policies on energy and food security should be developed with careful planning rather than reactive decisions.

— Reported by Asia Today; translated by UPI

© Asia Today. Unauthorized reproduction or redistribution prohibited.

Original Korean report: https://www.asiatoday.co.kr/kn/view.php?key=20260316010004672