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Ukraine’s former security chief, Aleksandr Yakimenko, has reported that the coup-plotters who overthrew the elected government in Ukraine, “basically lived in the (U.S.) Embassy. They were there every day.” We also know from a leaked Russian intercept that they were in close contact with Ambassador Pyatt and the senior U.S. official in charge of the coup, former Dick Cheney aide Victoria Nuland, officially the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs. And we can assume that many of their days in the Embassy were spent in strategy and training sessions with their individual CIA case officers.

The U.K.-based newspaper will launch a monthly print edition in the U.S. on Wednesday dubbed #Open001, filled with stories selected by a proprietary algorithm.

EFF received these records in response to our Freedom of Information Act lawsuit for information on Next Generation Identification (NGI)—the FBI’s massive biometric database that may hold records on as much as one third of the U.S. population. The facial recognition component of this database poses real threats to privacy for all Americans.

What is NGI?

NGI builds on the FBI’s legacy fingerprint database—which already contains well over 100 million individual records—and has been designed to include multiple forms of biometric data, including palm prints and iris scans in addition to fingerprints and face recognition data. NGI combines all these forms of data in each individual’s file, linking them to personal and biographic data like name, home address, ID number, immigration status, age, race, etc. This immense database is shared with other federal agencies and with the approximately 18,000 tribal, state and local law enforcement agencies across the United States.

Many children aged just three or four can “swipe a screen” but have little or no dexterity in their fingers after spending hours glued to iPads, it was claimed.

The 80-pound bricks, which were seized in two separate cases in Southwestern Caribbean waters, were handed over to federal agents and will be destroyed. The drugs are worth about $110 million wholesale.

“We can safely assume that these drugs probably would have ended up here,” said U.S. Coast Guard Lt. Junior Grade Meaghan Gies, who handles the drug program for District 7.

Gies and other Coast Guard members stood at the Miami Beach base Tuesday morning waiting for the Virgina-based ship’s arrival.

We’ll report more as information becomes available.

PLEASE DO NOT SPREAD SPECULATION!

MCR was my friend, my client (I was his attorney) and business partner in CollapseNet. We will gather and report THE FACTS about MCR’s death, and nothing else. On my honor, the truth of MCR’s death WILL BE TOLD, and his memory will be honored.

Media inquiries should come right here, to me, via ceo@collapsenet.com.

Rest In Peace Mike. I am so sorry that you are gone. You fought the greatest of fights, you opened thousands of eyes and you have earned your place in history, and in our hearts.

Much more to come…

A routine inventory check at Paris’ Pasteur Institute revealed that 2,349 tubes containing fragments of the virus responsible for the deaths of 774 people in 2002 were missing, the centre named after French chemist Louis Pasteur said.

The institute was quick to reassure the public and said that the contents of the missing vials had no infectious potential. They contained only part of the virus and had no ability to spread.

“Independent experts referred by health authorities have qualified such potential as ‘non-existing’ according to the available evidence and literature on the survival of the Sars virus,” the institute said.

In 2002 more than 8,000 people were infected by a pandemic of Sars – severe acute respiratory syndrome. The virus spread from China through Hong Kong and on to other countries before it was eventually brought under control.

It is not clear how the tubes disappeared from one of the institute’s safest laboratories. Management were made aware of the loss in January, Le Monde newspaper reported.

For weeks, staff at the institute tried to find the missing vials, general director Christian Bréchot said.

“We’ve looked for those boxes [containing the tubes] everywhere,” Bréchot explained.

“We went thought the lists of all the people who have worked here in the past year and a half, including trainees. We have scrutinised their profile to check if there was any conflict.”

Bréchot said that foul play was “highly improbable” but had not been ruled out.

The tubes were stored in a high-security laboratory dedicated to research into highly infective viruses.

Access to the lab is limited to a restricted number of personnel, who have to go through a disinfection process before they can leave.

Bréchot suggested that the tubes, which were moved from one freezer to another in March 2013, might have been destroyed by a member of staff who forgot to record the procedure.

I put “assault weapon” and “high-capacity” in quotes because their definitions vary by state—they’re political terms. In New York State, the SAFE Act passed by the legislature and signed by Governor Andrew Cuomo in January 2013, uses an expansive and elaborate definition of “assault weapon” that includes a lot more than AR-15s. Now even a semiautomatic Remington Model 1100 shotgun—a popular shotgun first made in 1963 that is used by millions of hunters and skeet shooters—is an “assault weapon” in New York State if the shotgun has a pistol grip. Many other commonly owned pistols, shotguns and rifles are also now labeled “assault weapons” in New York State.

The technology company announced Monday that it has acquired Titan Aerospace, a start-up founded in 2012 that makes high-altitude, solar-powered drones.

The purchase is part of the new push in Silicon Valley to find ways of delivering Internet service to underserved areas, particularly in the developing world.

“Titan Aerospace and Google share a profound optimism about the potential for technology to improve the world,” Google said. “It’s still early days, but atmospheric satellites could help bring internet access to millions of people, and help solve other problems, including disaster relief and environmental damage like deforestation.”

The Titan team will operate separately from Google, but will collaborate with divisions including Google Maps and Project Loon, which has been working on delivering Internet service from high-altitude balloons.

Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

Titan touts a variety of applications for its drones, including data delivery, crop monitoring and search-and-rescue aid. The vehicles can stay aloft for up to five years without having to land or refuel, making them an intriguing possibility for beaming out Internet service.