Last March, John T. Booker, a 20-year-old from Kansas,
checked himself into a mental health facility for evaluation. Now, a year
later, he faces the possibility of spending the rest of his
life in prison, charged with attempting to provide material support to a
terrorist organization and attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction
— the fake bomb that he was provided by undercover FBI informants.
It’s called Skunk, a type of “malodorant,” or in plainer language, a
foul-smelling liquid. Technically nontoxic but incredibly disgusting, it has
been described as a cross between “dead animal and human excrement.” Untreated, the smell lingers for weeks.The
Israeli Defense Forces developed Skunk in 2008 as a crowd-control weapon for
use against Palestinians. Now Mistral, a company out of Bethesda, Md., says
they are providing it to police departments in the United States.
A
damning new report, "All The President's Psychologists," claims that the American
Psychological Association collaborated directly with the Bush administration to
bolster its ethical and legal justifications for America's torture program. You
can read all about it in the New York Times. But long before that, award-winning
reporter Justine Sharrock was digging up the inside story of the complicity of
doctors, psychiatrists, and psychologists in the torture, and the failure of
those professions to take action against their colleagues—who broke their
professional oaths in the most egregious of settings.
As
the Saudi-led coalition continues its offensive in Yemen, thousands in Sanaa
took to the streets in protest against indiscriminate shelling that has claimed
civilian lives. Meanwhile the Russia-called UNSC session failed to produce any
results.Frustration, fury and raw anger prompted thousands of Yemenis to flood
the streets of the Yemeni capital following another wave of Friday morning
Saudi-led airstrikes.
Earlier this year,
StandWithUs (SWU), a pro-Israeli American advocacy group that coordinates its
activities closely with the Israeli government, finally unveiled an SWU-China
division for its organization in an event that marked a joint celebration of
the Chinese New Year and Jewish Tu B’Shvat in Jerusalem (involving,
interestingly enough, talks by three Israel Defense Force soldiers from China’s
Kaifeng Jewish community).
Recent weeks have seen
growing alarm over North Korea’s nuclear program. This month, numerous senior
U.S. military officials said that Washington believes North Korea has the
ability to strike the western United States with a nuclear-tipped KN-08
intercontinental ballistic missile. “Our assessment is that they have the
ability to put a nuclear weapon on a KN-08 and shoot it at the homeland. We
assess that it’s operational today,” William Gortney, commander of the North
American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) told reporters.
The Saudis are giving these fanatics lots of money
because they are religiously kindred and can be used as vehicles for spreading
Wahhabi dogma throughout the Middle East while weakening (usually by mass
slaughter) non-Sunni populations. Israel (the nation that,according to Prime Minister Netanyahu, is leading the fight against
al-Qaeda in the Middle East) is aiding these same groups because it sees them
as preferable to the Assad government in Syria, Hezbollah in southern Lebanon
and the Shiite governments of Iraq and Iran.
Acting far faster than
legal analysts expected, the Baltimore State’s Attorney has determined that
Freddie Gray’s death was a homicide and has slapped the six police officers
involved in Gray’s arrest and transport with multiple charges, including
manslaughter and misconduct. The Baltimore Sun reports that one of the officers, Caesar
R. Goodson, Jr. — the driver of the van in which Gray apparently suffered a
fatal injury — has been charged with second-degree murder.
Whatever the outcome of Britain’s election next week, the outlook for
the country’s banks is worsening. Almost seven years since the industry
received the biggest taxpayer bailout in history, public confidence in banks is
near an all-time low and lenders’ efforts to boost profit are being frustrated
by investigations into alleged currency and interest rate-rigging. Since the
coalition government took power in 2010, U.K. bank stocks have lost 7 percent. Their U.S. counterparts
have returned 46 percent.
Astronomers are
on the hunt for any witnesses to a meteor that exploded over Northern Ireland
with the force of an 'atomic bomb'.According to the Irish Times, the fireball appeared in the night sky at around 10pm on Sunday 25 April
- lighting huge swathes of both Northern Ireland and the north of England.
Uranium ore used to make
the atomic weapons used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was processed in
downtown St. Louis, which hosted the country’s only uranium plant until 1951.
In the decades following the end of WWII, hundreds of thousands of tons of
radioactive waste were haphazardly stored, shuffled around the region,
illegally dumped, and sometimes left unaccounted for. As the metropolitan area
expanded, suburban communities — such as the one Nickel’s parents moved their
family to in 1973 — were built downwind or downstream from contaminated
areas, government documents show.
President Obama asked
the Director of National Intelligence in February 2015 to create the Cyber Threat
Intelligence Integration Center (CTIIC). "The CTIIC will
be a national intelligence center focused on 'connecting the dots' regarding
malicious foreign cyber threats to the nation and cyber incidents affecting
U.S. national interests, and on providing all-source analysis of threats to U.S.
policymakers," according to the White House
press release. 
A
Colombian former intelligence chief was jailed for 14 years on Thursday for
spying on judges, journalists and opposition figures in a high-profile case
that stained the legacy of popular ex-president Alvaro Uribe.
The United States' National Security Agency (NSA) used
the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND) station in Bad Aibling
in Bavaria, to monitor Austrian authorities, said the publication
Bild am Sonntag, with reference to an internal email to the BND.
The top U.S. commander
for NATO says the alliance will begin to improve intelligence-sharing with
members and cooperation about the movement of foreign fighters from Iraq and
Syria to the U.S. and other Western countries.
For more than 30 years, Iran has
purchased goods for its nuclear program largely from the shadows. Sanctions and
an increasingly constrictive global nuclear supply regime have left it little
other option. So Iran has built a clandestine global network of front companies
and used it to obtain the key goods Tehran needs to keep its centrifuges
running and reactor construction on track.
China's Defence Ministry expressed concern on Thursday
at the Pentagon's updated cyber strategy that stresses the U.S. military's
ability to retaliate with cyber weapons, saying this would only worsen tension
over Internet security.The strategy presents a potentially far more muscular
role for the U.S. military's cyber warriors than the Pentagon was willing to
acknowledge in its last strategy rollouts in 2011 and singles out threats from
Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.
As Western counterterrorism and
intelligence officials worry about the increasing potential for an Islamist
jihadist group or inspired individual to carry out a chemical, biological or
radiological mass casualty attack in the United States, combined federal, state
and local public health spending has fallen below pre-recession levels at $75.4
billion in 2013 -- or $239 per person ($218 adjusted for inflation) compared to
$241 per person in 2009, according the new Trust for America’s Health (TFAH)
report, Investing in America's Health: A State-by-State Look at Public Health
Funding and Key Health Facts.
Two bills that would extend law enforcement retirement coverage to
Federal Protective Service (FPS) officers and make other needed improvements to
the security at federal facilities have been introduced by Rep. André Carson
(Ind.). 
Thursday the House passed the bipartisan National
Cybersecurity Protection Advancement Act (NCPA) by a vote of 355-63. The bill would help American businesses
better protect their digital networks from cyber attacks, help stop cyber
criminals and better protect American companies from cyber espionage by nation
states like China, Russia and Iran. 
TapLink introduced a new technology,
called Blind Hashing, that prevents offline password attacks by making
databases impossible to steal. TapLink is completely invisible to the end-user,
easy to integrate, has minimal impact on back-end systems, and works in
conjunction with existing password defenses, systems and processes. Protecting
password databases and users’ privacy is one of the world’s biggest problems.
Chemring Technology Solutions launched GroundHunter MHDS, the world's
first hand-held IED detector with interchangeable sensor heads for wire and
metal detection. 
German police
overnight thwarted a terrorist plot by a radicalized couple, a plan they
suspect involved bombing a bicycle race near Frankfurt, a German terrorism
researcher briefed by investigators told CNN on Thursday.German prosecutors and
police said that a man and a woman had been arrested in the Frankfurt-area town
of Oberursel on suspicion of planning a Boston-style attack, but the
authorities did not explicitly reveal the target.
A bill to end spy agencies' bulk collection of
Americans' telephone data advanced in the U.S. House of Representatives on
Thursday, setting up a potential showdown over the program, which expires on
June 1.The House Judiciary Committee voted 25-2 to approve the "USA
Freedom Act," seeking to tighten control of a program publicly exposed two
years ago by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.
Poor quality medicines
are a real and urgent threat that could undermine decades of successful efforts
to combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis, according to the editors of a
collection of journal articles published today. Scientists report up to 41 percent
of specimens failed to meet quality standards in global studies of about 17,000
drug samples. Among the collection is an article describing the discovery of
falsified and substandard malaria drugs that caused an estimated 122,350 deaths
in African children in 2013.
In the hours before
completing his suicide pact with Eva Braun, Hitler found time to leave orders
for his art, his people, and dismiss those he felt betrayed him. Swansong 1945: A Collective Diary of
the Last Days of the Third Reich is a volume from the World War II
series Echolof (Sonar) by German writer Walter Kempowski.
It combines letters, diary entries, memorandums, and reports by participants
and witness from WWII into a collage that paints a compelling portrait of the
Reich’s demise.![The elite in Pyongyang have not the slightest inclination to sacrifice the programme, writes Lankov [Reuters]](http://www.aljazeera.com/mritems/imagecache/mbdxxlarge/mritems/Images/2015/3/21/11b07afdafbd402bb3c112c8c0fd81b4_18.jpg)
According to a report leaked to the Wall Street
Journal, at a recent closed meeting of US and Chinese nuclear experts, Chinese
nuclear experts allegedly warned their US colleagues that the North Korean nuclear arsenal is growing faster than expected.
Seems like everywhere
you turn these days, there's a whistleblower breaking their silence and blowing
the whistle on some form of wrongdoing. But, surprisingly, what we don't hear
much about are Wall Street whistleblowers tapping into a giant $425 million
jackpot just waiting to be distributed.
Bradley Birkenfeld was released from
federal prison in August 2012 after serving 2½ years for his role as a Swiss
banker hiding millions of dollars for wealthy American clients.Five weeks
later, he found himself in the kitchen of a small rental house in Raymond, New
Hampshire. At that moment, Birkenfeld was an ex-con. He was out of work,
infamous in a famously discreet profession, and probably unemployable as a
private banker anywhere.
A
big new State Department assessment has identified a major threat to global
security. It's not ISIS or Vladimir Putin. It's not a rickety global economy or
climate change or the threat of global pandemics.Instead, the report argues,
these individual problems are symptoms of a much bigger issue — namely, a slow
breakdown in global governance. Many of the institutions that were created in
the past century to deal with economic and security risks around the world,
such as the UN and IMF, may no longer be adequate to the task.
To what extent must a bank make inquiries
as to the commercial purpose of a transaction, particularly a transaction
involving an offshore structure? And when is a bank liable to compensate a
victim of theft for receiving funds deriving from stolen assets and using them
for its own benefit?
Following the introduction of the Enterprise and
Regulatory Reform Act 2013, the rules on whistleblowing require disclosures
made on or after 25 June 2013 to be in the public interest. This
"public interest" test was introduced to reverse the effect of
previous case law (Parkins v
Sodexho Limited [2002] IRLR 109) so that a worker cannot rely on a breach of his own
employment contract where there are no wider public interest implications.
The West's economic
recovery has come with two major caveats. Activity has picked up, but it is
running below the levels that were the norm before the Great Recession.
Meanwhile, in a sign of mounting pessimism about the growth potential of the
Western world, economists are cutting their forecasts for long term growth. Some
economists think growth in the Western world actually started to slow at the
turn of the century and that the financial crisis accelerated this
process. 
Nearly all property fraud involves dishonest parties
posing as property professionals — often posing as bogus solicitors through
bogus law firms, or sometimes through bogus branch offices of bona fide law
firms. Figures for 2014 show that there were around 186 alerters on the
Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) website of incidents of the misuse of
names of bona fide solicitors or firms. The firms whose names were being used
included the complete spectrum, from magic circle firms to small high street
practices. A number of frauds also involve 'rogue'
property professionals.
FCC
suggested looking at the decision as guidance for other companies that process
personal data. The FCC decision shows the importance of putting the consumer
first not only when it comes to creating and selling products, but especially
when it comes to protect consumer's valuable information. At the same time, by
requiring to appoint privacy certified Compliance Officer, the FCC has
officially recognised the role of the privacy officer as a career speciality.
Over the last year
there has been an increasing focus by the Court of Justice of the European
Union ("CJEU") and courts in the UK on the Charter of Fundamental
Rights of the European Union (the "Charter") and especially the
fundamental right to privacy.The right to privacy is now overshadowing
conflicting rights such as the freedom of expression and freedom to conduct a
business and, in some instances, national data protection legislation. 
