UK designers Westwood, Hamnett join campaign to save bees

LONDON (Reuters) - Top British fashion designers Vivienne Westwood and Katharine Hamnett joined bee campaigners outside the Houses of Parliament in London on Friday to urge the government to support a proposed European Union (EU) ban on pesticides which harm bees.

Britain is currently one of a group of countries blocking attempts to introduce a Europe-wide ban on the world's most widely used insecticides, neonicotinoids, arguing their impact on bees is unclear.

A vote takes place in Brussels on April 29 on whether to ban the poisons on flowering crops.

"If there's any chance that they're killing the bees as a precautionary measure they need to be banned," Hamnett, who has campaigned against pesticides for decades, told Reuters TV.

"The British government is committing political suicide I think by not supporting this ban."

Britain, Germany and three other countries abstained from a vote earlier this year.

Hamnett questioned whether this was because two major pesticide companies, Germany's Bayer and Swiss company Syngenta, which has operations in Britain, are lobbying against the ban, saying the impact of pesticides on bees is unproven.

"Are they in bed with Syngenta or Bayer or are they just stupid?" said Hamnett.

The companies have proposed a plan which includes planting more flowering margins around fields to provide bee habitats, monitoring to detect the neonicotinoid pesticides blamed for the decline, and research into the impact of parasites and viruses.

The fashion duo then handed in a petition to Prime Minister David Cameron's Downing Street office, urging the government to put environmental concerns ahead of pressure from the agribusiness lobby.

"Why is government supporting big business because it doesn't help people at all? What is good for the planet is good for the economy," said Westwood.

Bees are currently suffering a sharp decline and colony collapse due to a variety of reasons.

Campaigners argue that bees are crucial for the planet as they perform a vital role in pollinating crops and their disappearance will have catastrophic effects on the world.

They want pre-emptive action taken on banning pesticides while more research is carried out to fully assess how seriously pesticides affect bees.

"This could become a really serious problem. There are parts of China where they have to pollinate fruit trees by hand because they have wiped out their insects through overuse of chemicals," said Quentin Gibon who joined the protest wearing a bee costume.

Earlier this year EU governments failed to agree a ban on three widely used pesticides linked to the decline of honeybees, but the European Commission is threatening to force such a ban through unless member states agree a compromise next week.

(Reporting by Georgina Cooper of Reuters Television, Editing by Belinda Goldsmith)

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Magazine releases recording of senior Republican's campaign meeting

By Steve Holland and David Ingram

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell's re-election campaign said on Tuesday it has asked the FBI to investigate how a campaign strategy meeting was recorded in which ways to attack a potential rival, actress Ashley Judd, were reportedly discussed.

The magazine, Mother Jones, said it had obtained a recording of the meeting and that McConnell and his aides discussed criticizing Judd "for her past struggles with depression and her religious views."

Judd has since ruled out running against McConnell in 2014.

Mother Jones, which has a liberal slant, reported that at the February 2 meeting in Louisville, Kentucky, McConnell and his aides discussed how to attack Judd.

McConnell's campaign did not dispute the authenticity of the recording. "We've always said the Left would stop at nothing to attack Sen. McConnell, but Watergate-style tactics to bug campaign headquarters are above and beyond," the McConnell campaign statement said.

McConnell's campaign said it is working with the FBI and at the request of the FBI had notified the U.S. attorney's office in Louisville about the recordings.

"Obviously a recording device of some kind was placed in Senator McConnell's campaign office without consent. By whom and how that was accomplished presumably will be the subject of a criminal investigation," McConnell's campaign said.

Mother Jones was the magazine that obtained a recording of a fund-raising speech by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney last year in which Romney said 47 percent of Americans were dependent on government and unlikely to vote for him. When disclosed, the recording dealt Romney a damaging blow.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Louisville declined to comment on the existence of an investigation. An FBI spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

One thing any investigation would focus on is whether any law was in fact broken. Federal law and the law in many states prohibit the intercept of oral communication, but that might not apply depending on who made the recording and how.

(Reporting by Steve Holland; Editing by Fred Barbash and Jackie Frank)

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McConnell Campaign Looks For 'A Needle In A Haystack' Against Potential Challenger

ABC News' Michael Falcone and Shushannah Walshe report:

It's clear that the most salacious details of the leaked Mitch McConnell campaign tape focus on what one McConnell campaign aide described as the "wealth of material" they were able to dig up on Ashley Judd. It's also clear that none of it will be of much use after Judd announced last month she would not be running in 2014.

Worth noting, however, is the comparatively meager body of opposition research McConnell staffers gathered on the Kentucky politician who appears most likely to challenge the Senate Majority Leader - Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes.

In fact, the aide leading the secretly-taped strategy session suggested researchers were struggling to find ammunition with which to attack Grimes, comparing finding dirt on her to searching for "needle in a haystack."

"The best hit we have on her is her blatantly endorsing the 2008 Democratic national platform," the aide said during the Feb. 2 meeting at McConnell campaign headquarters.

Grimes's relatively low name recognition in the state (recent polls have found only about half of Kentuckians know who she is) may be a disadvantage, but her relatively short time in public life (she began her term as secretary of state in 2012) could also be an asset for the 34-year-old lawyer. Still, Grimes comes from a well-connected political family: Her father was a former state party chairman and her family has close ties to Bill and Hillary Clinton.

McConnell's campaign team was evidently planning to link her to the 2008 Democratic Party platform, which she supported, as well as President Obama, who she publicly backed in 2012. Even though Kentucky is a red state, neither move seems particularly surprising for Grimes.

But, as was the case with the Republican campaign's research on Judd, which identified the actress's mental health challenges and religious beliefs as potential vulnerabilities, McConnell's team appeared similarly interested in Grimes's quirks.

"If you see a lot of footage of her, she definitely has a very sort of self-centered, sort of egotistical aspect," one aide said. "She's very sort of a, sort of it's all about her, the theme that I would call this. And this is sort of an example about this. She uses her, like in speeches, she'll frequently use herself in the third person."

Indeed, Grimes has referred to herself in the third person at campaign events (a parody video has been circulating on the Internet) although it is unclear what practical effect that would have on voters in a Senate race.

Dale Emmons, a Kentucky Democratic operative and adviser to Grimes, said the early glimpse at the McConnell campaign's playbook should do nothing to discourage her from entering the race.

"If this is how small his thinking is, if this is how they begin their campaign planning, it should tell us a whole lot," Emmons told ABC News.

As recently as last weekend, however, Grimes said she was undecided.

"I don't know what the next step is for me," Grimes told a crowd at a Democratic fundraising dinner in Bardstown, Ky., according to a local news report.

Politically, Emmons said, "there wasn't really that much of a surprise" to the issues the Republican strategists raised about Grimes in the recording, which was leaked to Mother Jones. But if she does run, there is little doubt McConnell would employ the same take-no-prisoners strategy he has used against other opponents. (On the tape, the five-term Kentucky senator can be heard comparing the early months of a campaign to a game of "Whac-A-Mole.")

"It's typical of Mitch McConnell," Emmons said. "He guts his opponents and watches them bleed out."

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Egypt steps up campaign against TV satirist

CAIRO (AP) — Egyptian authorities on Tuesday stepped up a campaign against a popular TV comedian accused of insulting the president, threatening to revoke the license of a private TV station that airs his weekly program and angrily dismissing U.S. criticism of legal proceedings against him.

The satirist, Bassem Youssef, was questioned by state prosecutors earlier this week over accusations that he insulted Islamist President Mohammed Morsi and Islam. On his Jon Stewart-inspired show, Youssef frequently satirizes everything from the president's policies to his mannerisms, as well as hardline Islamic clerics, while highlighting contradictions in their comments.

The questioning of Youssef, along with arrest warrants issued days earlier against five anti-government activists on charges of inciting unrest, have raised warnings by opponents of Morsi of a campaign to intimidate his critics. A new case was opened Tuesday, with prosecutors looking into whether participants in a talk show on another private channel who criticized the Youssef case "endangered national security."

Morsi's supporters deny any campaign, saying prosecutors are merely enforcing the law and insisting that Youssef has crossed the line with his mockery.

The Youssef case turned into a side spat with Washington after U.S. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland on Monday spoke of a "disturbing trend" of growing restrictions on freedom of expression in Egypt, pointing to the questioning of Youssef and the arrest warrants.

"There does not seem to be an evenhanded application of justice here," Nuland added, saying the Egyptian government has been slow to investigate police brutality or attacks on anti-Morsi protesters and journalists.

The Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party denounced Nuland's comments as "blatant interference" in Egypt's internal affairs.

Morsi's office joined in, criticizing the U.S. Embassy in Cairo after it tweeted a link to Monday night's episode of The Daily Show, in which host Stewart came to the defense of Youssef and criticized the Egyptian president, saying it was undemocratic to prosecute the Egyptian comic.

Replying to the embassy on Twitter, the presidency wrote, "It's inappropriate for a diplomatic mission to engage in such negative political propaganda."

Meanwhile, Egypt's top prosecutor, a Morsi appointee, asked state security prosecutors to investigate the head of another private TV network, ONTV, a presenter of a show on the network and a phone-in guest to the show over complaints they "disturbed public security" and insulted the judiciary, the state daily Al-Ahram and the Committee to Protect Journalists said.

The complaint was prompted when the guest, Shaimaa Abulkhair, a consultant with the New York-based CPJ, criticized the case against Youssef.

Morsi's government has sought to distance itself from the legal proceedings against Youssef, and the prosecutor's office has said it is not acting on the president's behest. Information Minister Abdel-Moneim Abdel-Maqsoud said the complaints against Youssef's show came from private citizens concerned over the prestige of Egypt's first freely elected president.

"Some of it (Bassem Youssef's criticism) is permissible. And some isn't. Some of it contradicts the morals of Egyptian society," Abdel-Maqsoud, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, said in a TV interview, professing his commitment to freedom of expression.

The government Investment Authority, which grants operating licenses to private TV networks, threatened to revoke the license of the CBC network that airs Youssef's show over what it called the show's violations of standards.

It said it has received complaints that in his program — titled "El-Bernameg," Arabic for "The Program" — Youssef ridiculed and insulted "symbols of the nation and prominent figures" and used sexual innuendos and indecent language. It said these acts violated rules against airing material not conforming with society's values and objectivity and warned that it would consider revoking the license if "the causes of the violations are not eliminated."

Bassem's show, aired every Friday, is preceded by a warning that it may contain "unsuitable content" and that it is only for viewers over the age of 18.

A trained heart surgeon, Youssef started his program online during the 2011 popular uprising that toppled Hosni Mubarak. Since then he has become a sharp critic of Morsi, his Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamists — though he also regularly jibes against opposition figures as well.

In his questioning, Youssef was asked about an episode in which a guest comedian mocked people who build mosques just to escape real estate taxes — apparently one basis for the "insulting Islam" charge, according to Abulkhair, who attended the questioning.

He was also asked about a show in which he satirized a TV interview by Morsi on the night of the Oscar awards ceremony. In the bit, Youssef awarded Morsi a "best actor" prize for seeming to evade questions and gave the interview itself "best montage" for several visible cuts and edits.

Youssef was released on bail Sunday after the questioning while prosecutors decide whether to pursue charges.

In its reply Tuesday to the U.S. State Department, the Brotherhood's party said it received Nuland's comments with "extreme reservation."

It said Nuland gave the impression that "the issue is to do with insulting the president when in fact the core of the complaints is to do with contempt for the Muslim faith and ridicule of religious practices."

"If proven, this contempt constitutes a grave breach of the law, customs, social and cultural constants in the Egyptian society," the party said in a statement.

It made no mention of Nuland's comment on the slow pace of investigation into cases of attacks against anti-Morsi protesters and reporters or police brutality. Critics have said the addition of the insulting Islam charge against Youssef likely aims to taint him in the eyes of Egyptian Muslims.

Nuland dismissed the party's criticism, saying her comments reflected the U.S. government's position.

"Our point here yesterday was to say that rule of law needs to be applied appropriately in all circumstances. It's the same point that we make with regard to countries around the world. So no, we reject the notion that we were interfering," she said.

Youssef denies the charges of contempt for religion.

"Islam is a wonderful religion, it's a great and peaceful religion," Youssef, a Muslim himself, told CNN this week. "There are some people who claim to be the sole (representatives) of Islam; they are actually giving a bad image, and they're basically insulting the image of Islam."

The moves against Youssef and the activists come amid an intense polarization in the country between Morsi's Islamist backers and his opponents. Morsi's nine months in office has seen the country plunging deeper into an economic crisis, surging crime rates and a seemingly endless series of protests, strikes and deadly riots.

The Egyptian leader accuses the media and politicians he has not named of inciting violence and charged that foreign powers, which again he has not named, of meddling in the country's internal affairs. Islamist supporters of the president have increasingly called for action against the media, at one point holding a sit-in outside of TV network studios.

The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists called the escalation of anti-press "rhetoric" by Morsi and his supporters "deeply troubling."

One of Youssef's attorneys, Gamal Eid, said his case fits into a widening campaign against government critics, media personalities, and activists, saying "the prosecution has become a tool to go after the regime's opposition and intimidate it."

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Associated Press reporters Amir Makar in Cairo and Matthew Lee in Washington contributed to his report.

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Vatican: anti-clerical campaign against pope

VATICAN CITY (AP) — The Vatican is lashing out at "defamatory" and "anti-clerical left-wing" forces seeking to discredit Pope Francis over his actions during Argentina's 1976-1983 military junta.

The Vatican says no credible accusation had ever stuck against the new pope.

While the former Jorge Mario Bergoglio, like most other Argentines, failed to openly confront the murderous dictatorship, human rights activists differ on how much responsibility he personally deserves.

The Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi noted Friday that a Jesuit who was kidnapped during the dictatorship in a case that involved Bergoglio had issued a statement saying the two had reconciled.

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Vatican criticizes campaign against pope

VATICAN CITY (AP) — The honeymoon that Pope Francis has enjoyed since his remarkable election hit a bump Friday, with the Vatican lashing out at what it called a defamatory and "anti-clerical left-wing" media campaign questioning his actions during Argentina's murderous military dictatorship.

On Day 2 of the Francis pontificate, the Vatican denounced news reports in Argentina and beyond resurrecting allegations that the former Jorge Mario Bergoglio failed to openly confront the junta responsible for kidnapping and killing thousands of people in a "dirty war" to eliminate leftist opponents.

Bergoglio, like most Argentines, didn't publicly confront the dictators who ruled from 1976-83, while he was the leader of the country's Jesuits. And human rights activists differ on how much blame he personally deserves.

Top church leaders had endorsed the junta and some priests even worked alongside torturers inside secret prisons. Nobody has produced any evidence suggesting Bergoglio had anything to do with such crimes. But many activists are angry that as archbishop of Buenos Aires for more than a decade, he didn't do more to support investigations into the atrocities.

On Thursday, the old ghosts resurfaced.

A group of 44 former military and police officers on trial for torture, rape and murder in a concentration camp in Cordoba province in the 1970s wore the yellow-and-white ribbons of the papal flag in Francis' honor. Many Argentine newspapers ran the photo Friday.

The Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi noted that Argentine courts had never accused Bergoglio of any crime, that he had denied all accusations against him and that on the contrary "there have been many declarations demonstrating how much Bergoglio did to protect many persons at the time."

He said the accusations against the new pope were made long ago "by anti-clerical left-wing elements to attack the church. They must be firmly rejected."

The harsh denunciation was typical of a Vatican that often reacts defensively when it feels under attack, even though its response served to give the story legs for another day.

It interrupted the generally positive reception Francis has enjoyed since his election as pope on Wednesday, when even his choice of footwear — his old black shoes rather than the typical papal red — was noted as a sign of his simplicity and humility.

There was one clearly unscripted moment Friday, when the 76-year-old Francis stumbled briefly during an audience with the cardinals, but he quickly recovered. And for the second day in a row, Francis slipped out of the Vatican walls, this time to visit an ailing Argentine cardinal, Jorge Mejia, who suffered a heart attack Wednesday and was in the hospital.

This upbeat narrative of a people's pope who named himself after the nature-loving St. Francis of Assisi has clashed with accusations stemming from Bergoglio's past.

The worst allegation is that as the military junta took over in 1976, he withdrew support for two Jesuit priests whose work in the slums of Buenos Aires had put them in direct contact with the leftist guerrilla movement advocating armed revolution. The priests were then kidnapped and interrogated inside a clandestine torture center at the Navy Mechanics School.

Bergoglio said he had told the priests — Orlando Yorio and Francisco Jalics — to give up their slum work for their own safety, and they refused. Yorio later accused Bergoglio of effectively delivering them to the death squads by declining to publicly endorse their work. Yorio died in Uruguay in 2000.

Jalics, who had maintained silence about the events, issued a statement Friday saying he spoke with Bergoglio years later and the two celebrated Mass together and hugged "solemnly."

"I am reconciled to the events and consider the matter to be closed," he said.

Bergoglio told his official biographer, Sergio Rubin, in 2010, that he had gone to extraordinary, behind-the-scenes lengths to save the men.

The Jesuit leader persuaded the family priest of feared dictator Jorge Videla to call in sick so Bergoglio could say Mass instead and take the opportunity to successfully appeal for their release, Rubin wrote.

Lombardi said the airing of the accusations following Francis' election was "characterized by a campaign that's often slanderous and defamatory."

Earlier this week, Lombardi issued a similar denunciation of an advocacy group for victims of sexual abuse, accusing it of using the media spotlight on the conclave to try to publicize old accusations against cardinals. The accusations, Lombardi said, are baseless and the cardinals deserve everyone's "esteem."

The accusations against Bergoglio were fanned by Horacio Verbitzky, an investigative journalist who was a leftist militant in the 1970s and is now closely aligned with the government. He has written extensively about the accusations in Argentina's Pagina12 newspaper, a left-wing daily known for advocacy journalism.

Adolfo Perez Esquivel, who won the 1980 Nobel Peace Prize for documenting the junta's atrocities, said this week that "Bergoglio was no accomplice of the dictatorship."

"Perhaps he didn't have the courage of other priests, but he never collaborated with the dictatorship," Esquivel said on Buenos Aires' Radio de la Red.

Argentine political analyst Ignacio Fidanza concurred.

"What they're demanding is that during the dictatorship he should have planted himself in the Plaza de Mayo and shouted against it," he told The Associated Press. "It was probably more effective to speak in silence, since it was an extreme situation."

Human rights investigators in Argentina have been unable to make any other cases against Bergoglio from the junta years, other than the allegations concerning the two Jesuits and that he failed to help a family find their murdered daughter's illegally adopted baby.

But activists are also angry that as leader of the Argentine church, he has never acknowledged or apologized for what they describe as the church's active institutional support of the military government, said Gaston Chillier, who tracks the country's human rights cases as director of the Center for Legal and Social Studies.

The church was so deeply in league with the dictators that when the Inter-American Human Rights Commission came for an inspection in 1979, the Argentine navy moved many detainees to an island owned by the diocese during the visit.

"He is responsible during Argentina's period of democracy for continuing a cover-up," Chillier told the AP. "His knowledge of these cases clearly shows that he cannot deny the torture and the systematic theft of babies."

Bergoglio testified in 2010 that he didn't know anything about baby thefts until well after the dictatorship.

Since Bergoglio became archbishop in 1998, his church has issued several apologies for failing to do more to protect people from violence that came from both the right and the left. The latest, in October 2012, was the most forceful, and it also, for the first time, asked Catholics to come forward with whatever evidence they may have to support Argentina's human rights trials.

But Chillier says Bergoglio could have done more to make the church help identify children and the bodies of detainees as well as identify those responsible for atrocities.

"It's one thing to acknowledge what you failed to do, but another entirely to apologize for what you actually did," Chillier said.

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Warren and Almudena Calatrava contributed from Buenos Aires. David Rising in Berlin contributed.

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Follow Nicole Winfield at www.twitter.com/nwinfield

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