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In a one-page memo, Executive Director John James Jr. wrote that in recent months government employees and contractors were detected “engaging in inappropriate use of the MDA network.”

“Specifically, there have been instances of employees and contractors accessing websites, or transmitting messages, containing pornographic or sexually explicit images,” James wrote in the July 27 memo obtained by Bloomberg News.

Obama’s order, approved earlier this year and known as an intelligence “finding,” broadly permits the CIA and other U.S. agencies to provide support that could help the rebels oust Assad.

This and other developments signal a shift toward growing, albeit still circumscribed, support for Assad’s armed opponents – a shift that intensified following last month’s failure of the U.N. Security Council to agree on tougher sanctions against the Damascus government.

Alexander spoke at the annual Def Con computer hacking conference in Las Vegas. It was a symbolic appearance that he said was motivated by a need to interest the hacker community in helping to make the Internet more secure.

Alexander, who is also commander of the U.S. Cyber Command, described the Internet as “at great risk from exploitation, disruption, and destruction.”

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“About half of all people don’t take medications like they’re supposed to,” says Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute in La Jolla,California. “This device could be a solution to that problem, so that doctors can know when to rev up a patient’s medication adherence.” Topol is not affiliated with the company that manufactures the device, Proteus Digital Health in Redwood City,California, but he embraces the sensor’s futuristic appeal, saying, “It’s like big brother watching you take your medicine.”

Authorities say the family has been notified. An official identification of the body will be done by the coroner’s office.

Ivens, 35, was last seen on May 10 near his home in the 1700 block of Scott Road.

On Monday night, two hikers walking in the foothills above Burbank smelled a suspicious odor in the 3600 block of Scott Road. They found what appeared to be human remains and immediately called police.

Police said a weapon was recovered at the scene.

“I see mothers with children, I see fathers with children, I see fathers with mothers, I see kids playing soccer,” Brenton tells the New York Times. Drone operators see their intended targets “wake up in the morning, do their work, go to sleep at night,” explains Dave, another high-tech murderer who killed from an office cockpit at Nevada’s Creech Air Force Base and who now trains new recruits to the cyber-killer corps at New Mexico’s Holloman Air Force Base.

When instructed to kill someone he has stalked from the air for a prolonged period, “I feel no emotional attachment to the enemy,” Brenton insists. I have a duty, and I execute my duty.” When the deed is done, he points out, nobody “in my immediate environment is aware of anything that has occurred.”

“There was a good reason for killing the people that I did, and I go through it in my head over and over and over,” insists another drone operator named Will, who — like Dave — served a deskbound “combat” tour at Creech and now trains others to do likewise at Holloman Air Base.

Like the soldier Bates in Henry V, it’s sufficient for Will — and others of his ilk — to render obedience to their Leader, confident that “if his cause be wrong, our obedience to the king wipes the crime of it out of us.” The more concise and notorious formula, of course, is: We are only obeying orders. Besides, drone operators (who insist on being called “combat pilots”) are carrying out an indispensable function by picking off Afghan “militants” — or at least those “suspected” of such tendencies — who unreasonably resent the presence of foreign military personnel in their country.

The New York Times profile is part of a campaign by the state-aligned media to “humanize” the state functionaries who murder by remote control — and to normalize this mode of mass murder as drones become part of the domestic apparatus of surveillance, regimentation, and repression. Readers are invited to share the anguish of these conflicted people, who for reasons of duty have to do terrible but necessary things.

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Michael Foreman, 48, fell from a fifth-floor balcony in the members’ bar area of the gallery on the South Bank last Tuesday evening.

The banker, who lived in Grays, Essex, with his wife Janet, was reported missing the day before he died.

Horrified witnesses described seeing a man dressed in a suit without a tie plunge from the bar area shortly before the gallery, whose imposing building was once a power station, closed at 6pm. Police are not treating the incident as suspicious.

Mr Foreman was named today as an inquest into his death opened at Southwark Coroner’s Court.

The short hearing was told that he was a “senior bank manager with HSBC” and died from “multiple traumatic injuries”. He was formally identified by his wife.

In fact, while his party gathers to formally nominate Mitt Romney for President, Cheney will be out of the country.

He tells me he is going fishing – in Canada.

Hundreds of trains stalled across the country and traffic lights went out, causing widespread traffic jams in New Delhi. Electric crematoria stopped operating, some with bodies half burnt, power officials said. Emergency workers rushed generators to coal mines to rescue miners trapped underground.

The protest took a dramatic turn when the crowd began marching en masse on Harbor Boulevard, saying they were headed to Disneyland. But police in riot gear corralled them, and many returned to police headquarters.

The demonstration stretched long into the afternoon, with more than 200 protesters initially chanting in front of police headquarters and taking over a parking lot where they drew chalk outlines of bodies and wrote messages condemning the police.