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"Cuban Twitter" -- a communications network designed to undermine the communist government in Cuba, built with secret shell companies and financed through foreign banks, The Associated Press has learned.
• The project, which lasted more than two years and drew tens of thousands of subscribers, sought to evade Cuba's stranglehold on the Internet with a primitive social media platform. First, the network would build a Cuban audience, mostly young people; then, the plan was to push them toward dissent.
• Yet its users were neither aware it was created by a U.S. agency with ties to the State Department, nor that American contractors were gathering personal data about them, in the hope that the information might be used someday for political purposes.
• It is unclear whether the scheme was legal under U.S. law, which requires written authorization of covert action by the president and congressional notification. Officials at USAID would not say who had approved the program or whether the White House was aware of it. The Cuban government declined a request for comment.
• At minimum, details uncovered by the AP appear to muddy the U.S. Agency for International Development's longstanding claims that it does not conduct covert actions, and could undermine the agency's mission to deliver aid to the world's poor and vulnerable -- an effort that requires the trust and cooperation of foreign governments.
• ___

• PERTH, Australia (AP) -- Malaysia's prime minister said Thursday the search for the missing jetliner will not stop until answers are found, as his Australian counterpart Tony Abbott called it "the most difficult in human history."
• Prime Minister Najib Razak met with Abbott at the Australian base near Perth that is serving as the hub for the multinational effort and was briefed by Angus Houston, the head of a joint agency coordinating the search in the southern Indian Ocean.
• No trace of the Boeing 777 has been found nearly a month after it vanished in the early hours of March 8 on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board.
• "It is a very difficult search -- the most difficult in human history. But as far as Australia is concerned, we are throwing everything we have at it," Abbott told report

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