The Michigan Daily - michigandaily.com Thursday, September 26, 2013 - 3A NEWS BRIEFS LANSING, Mich. Snyder signs law to expand off-road vehicle use All 83 Michigan counties can allow off-road recreation vehicles on road shoulders under legislation signed by Gov. Rick Snyder. Current law lets eight coun- ties in the Lower Peninsula and every county in Upper Peninsula authorize the vehicles on local road shoulders. Laws signed Wednesday allow off-road vehicles on more roads if municipalities pass an ordinance. Local governments can ask the state transportation department for permission to allow off-road vehicles on high- way shoulders, not including interstates. One law will expand off-road vehicle uses not requiring a license. KENNEBUNK, Maine George H.W. Bush witnesses Maine same-sex wedding Former President George H.W. Bush was an official witness at the same-sex wedding of two longtime friends, his spokesman said Wednesday. Bush and his wife, Barbara Bush, attended the ceremony joining Bonnie Clement and Helen Thorgalsen as private citizens and friends on Saturday, spokesman Jim McGrath said. Thorgalsen posted a photo on her Facebook page showing Bush signing the marriage license as a witness. She captioned the photo: "Getting our marriage license witnessed!" In the photo, Bush is seated in a wheelchair, a stack of papers on his lap and his left hand poised with a pen. One bright red sock and one bright blue one peek out S below the cuffs of his blue slacks. KARACHI, Pakistan Earthquake off Pakistani coast creates island Alongside the carnage of Paki- stan's massive earthquake came a new creation: a small island of mud, stone and bubbling gas pushed forth from the seabed. Experts say the island was formed by the massive movement of the earth during the 7.7-mag- nitude quake that hit Pakistan's Baluchistan province on Tuesday, killing at least 285 people. "That big shock beneath the earth causes a lot of disturbance," said Zahid Rafi, director of the National Seismic Monitoring Center. The island appeared off the coast of Gwadar, a port about 330 miles (533 kilometers) from Paki- stan's largest city of Karachi and 75 miles (120 kilometers) from Iran. DAKAR, Senegal Water cuts shorten UN visit For nearly two weeks, Dakar residents have bathed in the ocean, dug makeshift wells along the beach and waited in long lines near distribution trucks in search of water that is no longer running from the taps. The capital city's poor outer suburbs and wealthy expatriate neighborhoods alike have been affected by water cuts that offi- cials blame on faulty equipment located hundreds of kilometers away. Frustration with the govern- S ment has mounted daily-com- pounded by the fact that Senegal is in the middle of the rainy sea- son and large sections of the city are simultaneously dealing with flooding. Though water and power cuts are common in devel- oping countries, a two-week cut in services is unprecedented in Sen- egal, and young men have burned tires in the streets in protest. -Compiled from Daily wire reports Mall saftey is focus after deadly Nairobi attacks European Union Commissioner Kristalina Georgieva, left, speaks to the media alongside Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Nick Clegg during a news conference following the High Level Ministerial Event on the Humanitarian situation in Syria meeting at the European Union Delegation offices. Russia expects a resolution on Syria within two days Chemical weapons to be dismantled under agreement UNITED NATIONS (AP) - The U.N. Security Council, long paralyzed by deep divisions over how to deal with the Syrian conflict, is about two days away from agreeing on a resolution to require Damascus to dismantle its chemical weapons stock- piles, Russia's deputy foreign minister said Wednesday. Gennady Gatilov told The Associated Press that the text of the resolution will include a reference to Chapter 7 of the U.N. Charter, which allows for military and nonmilitary actions to promote peace and security. But he stressed that there will not be an automatic trig- ger for such measures, which means the council will have to follow up with another resolu- tion if Syria fails to comply. The U.S. and Russia had been at odds on how to enforce the resolution. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov met for nearly 90 minutes at the United Nations, and American officials said that while there had been progress in some areas, they couldn't agree on the text, which the U.S. had been insisting be enforceable. President Barack Obama's threatened U.S. strikes against President Bashar Assad's regime following an Aug. 21 suspected poison gas attack has led to a flurry of diplomatic activity. Kerry made a surprise offer that Syria could avert U.S. military action by turn- ing over "every single bit of his chemical weapons" to interna- tional control within a week. Russia, Syria's most important ally, and Assad's government quickly agreed on the broad proposal, but it has taken time and tough negotiations to work out the details. The five permanent veto- wielding members of the Secu- rity Council - the U.S., Russia, China, Britain and France - known as the P-S have been discussing for the past few weeks what to include in a new resolution requiringthat Syria's chemical weapons stockpile be secured and dismantled. The council has been blocked on Syria, with Russia and China vetoing three Western-backed resolutions aimed at pressuring President Bashar Assad to end the violence which has killed over 100,000 people. But Gatilov told AP the nego- tiations are "going quite well" and the draft resolution should be finalized "very soon - with- in the next two day, I think." As for Chapter 7, he said, "It will be mentioned but there is the understanding, of course, (that) there is no automaticity in engaging Chapter 7." Britain's U.N. Ambassador Mark Lyall Grant also reported progress. "We are still working in the P-5 constructively on a text," he told AP. "But there are still some dif- ferences," Lyall Grant said. "We hope to be able to iron them out, maybe even today, but cer- tainly in the next few days so that we can adopt a resolution - a strong binding enforceable resolution with a united voice of the Security Council as soon as possible." Mixed reactions globally to security change proposal NEW YORK (AP) - Some malls around the world have been scramblingto add securityguards to look for suspicious people fol- lowing a deadly attack on a shop- ping center in Nairobi over the weekend. But for other malls, it's been business as usual. The mixed reactions by malls across the globe isn't unusual in an industry whose secu- rity efforts vary from unarmed guards in most shopping centers in the U.S. to metal detectors and bag searches in places like Israel to main entrances that resemble airport security lines in India. The disparity offers a glimpse of why any moves following the Nai- robi incident to increase mall secu- rityin countriesthat have less strict procedures aren't likely to last: The industry continues to struggle with how to keep shoppers safe without scaringthem away. "No one wants, when you go shopping, to be strip searched, to be interviewed in a room by a security guard," said Simon Ben- nett, director, Civil Safety and Security Unit at the University of Leicester in England. "That might be acceptable in aviation, but it is not in commercial retail." Security concerns come after 12 to 15 militants from the Somali Islamic extremist group al-Sha- bab, wielding grenades, took con- trol of the upscale Westgate mall in Nairobi. Terrorists held Kenya security forces for four days, kill- ing at least 67 civilians and gov- ernment troops and injuring 175 others. The Kenyan government said Tuesday that the attackers were defeated, with several suspects killed or arrested. On Wednes- day, FBI agents began fingerprint, DNA and ballistic analysis to help figure out the identities and nationalities ofthevictims and al- Shabab gunmen. In the aftermath of the attack, security was tight at the Junc- tion Mall in Nairobi. Two of three entry gates were locked shut. Cars were searched more carefully than usual, with guards look- ing in glove compartments. Two armed soldiers were stationed inside the mall and mall secu- rity guards who search patrons with metal detector wands at entry points said the soldiers had been deployed after the Westgate attack. In the U.S., the International Council of Shopping Centers, a trade group of shopping centers representing about one third of retail space globally, said the U.S. government's Department of Homeland Security is reaching out to corporate security at all malls. At the same time, the group said some of the malls in the U.S. and South Africa are beefing up private security personnel, while others are bringing in more off dutypolice officers. Mall ofAmer- ica, the biggest U.S. mall, added extra uniformed security officers and stepped up other measures, but officials at the Blooming- ton, Minn.-based mall declined to elaborate. "We will ... remain vigilant as we always do in simi- lar situations," said Dan Jasper, a mall spokesman. In general, U.S. malls focus on reacting to a shooting more than preventing one. Malls depend on private security personnel, most of whom don't carry guns, though they do work with local police. And while they're trained to look for suspicious behavior and report that to authorities, they're dis- couraged from intervening. "Shoppers at this point perhaps don't have an appetite for extraor- dinary measures," said Kenneth Hamilton, executive vice presi- dent of IPC International, the largest provider of shopping cen- ter security of malls in the U.S. Scalia expects legality of of NSA surveillence to be decided in U.S. courts Justice said suveillance best determined by gov't McLEAN, Va. (AP) - Supreme Court Justice Anto- nin Scalia said Wednesday that the courts ultimately will have to determine the legality of surveillance programs by the National Security Agency. And he's not sure that's a good thing in an era of complex security threats against the United States. Scalia told the Northern Virginia Technology Council that questions about how much information the NSA can col- lect about Americans' telephone calls and under what circum- stances the agency can monitor conversations are best answered by the elected branches of gov- ernment. But he said that the Supreme Court took that power for itself in 1960s-era expansions of pri- vacy rights, including prohibi- tions on wiretapping without a judge's approval. "The consequence of that is that whether the NSA can do the stuff it's been doing ... which used to be a question for the people ... will now be resolved by the branch of government that knows the least about the issues in question, the branch that knows the least about the extent of the threat against which the wiretapping is directed," he said. Scalia did not raise the issue in his speech, but instead responded to a question about it. He repeatedly used the term "wiretap" in his comments, but indicated later that he was speaking more generally about NSA surveillance, including the massive collection of Ameri- cans' phone records. In July, following the disclo- sures by NSA leaker Edward Snowden about the extent of the agency's surveillance programs, the Electronic Privacy Informa- tion Center asked the Supreme Court directly to bar NSA from collecting phone call records on millions of U.S. customers. The court has not yet decided whether to hear the case. Civil liberties groups also have filed lawsuits challenging the program as a violation of Americans' privacy. Earlier this year, the Court ruled in a 5-4 vote that clients represented by the American Civil Liberties Union lacked standing to challenge a 2008 law under which the NSA conducts aspects of its surveillance. Scalia voted with the majority to turn away that challenge to the law. Scalia said the Constitu- tion calls for a balancing test to determine whether any search or seizure is reasonable, and that depends on the threat that is posed - another question he said courts are ill-equipped to answer. He talked about the pat- downs and other searches that occur at airports as an example of that balancing act. "That's a terrible intrusion of privacy," he said. "But you're willing to do it because of the seriousness of the threat." Among the issues in the chal- lenges to the collection of phone records is that the court ruled EV in 1979 that police ordinarily do A not need a judge-approved war- A rant to get information about who someone has called, as opposed to monitoring the call itself. As for the question about tech companies' obligations to inform clients about an illegal 8fl1 iTVII 5 intrusion of their information, Scalia said that, yes, a company titiiOtiErDONnr should speak up if it knows a tU1II NLtNIL IQ customer has had its data ille- gally seized. "But it's pretty hard to know that.... If it's a gov- ernmental wiretap, presumably it's been approved by somebody, H R° some lawyer expert in the field who said it was OK, and you bet- ter be damn sure you're right m s1 before you blow the cover." 1