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In December, MIT Media Lab researchers caused a stir by releasing a slow-motion video of a burst of light traveling the length of a plastic bottle. But the experimental setup that enabled that video was designed for a much different application: a camera that can see around corners.

In a paper appearing this week in the journal Nature Communications, the researchers describe using their system to produce recognizable 3-D images of a wooden figurine and of foam cutouts outside their camera’s line of sight. The research could ultimately lead to imaging systems that allow emergency responders to evaluate dangerous environments or vehicle navigation systems that can negotiate blind turns, among other applications.

According to the Shin Bet, Merah entered Israel after crossing the Allenby Bridge from Jordan in September 2010. He was investigated by the Shin Bet. The investigation did not bring up any suspicious information, and he was allowed to enter the country.

Furthermore, The Shin Bet investigation could not confirm a claim by the French intelligence that Merah was arrested in Israel with a knife.

Merah stayed in Israel for a total of three days, during which it is unknown whether he was involved in any terror-related activity.

Citing prison documents, Kandahar prison chief Ghulam Faruq had told Reuters that Afghan security forces detained Merah on December 19, 2007, and that he was sentenced to three years in jail for planting bombs in the southern province of Kandahar, the Taliban’s birthplace.

A senior Kandahar intelligence source confirmed Faruq’s account and said he had a file on a French Algerian of the same name, who was arrested in 2007 and broke out of prison in 2008.

But the Kandahar governor’s office said that account was “baseless”, citing judicial records. “Security forces in Kandahar have never detained a French citizen named Mohammad Merah,” the governor’s spokesman, Ahmad Jawed Faisal, said.

…

Police stormed the flat where Mohammed Merah was holed up at 09:30 GMT, after a siege that had lasted 32 hours.

Born in the southwestern French city of Toulouse on October 10, 1988, Merah had been tracked for years by France’s DCRI domestic intelligence service, but nothing suggested that he was preparing a major crime.

Interior Minister Claude Gueant said he was part of a group of around 15 followers of Islamic fundamentalist Salafist ideology in Toulouse, where he lived in the northern Izards neighbourhood.

Mr Claude Gueant said that the 24-year-old man had made several visits to Afghanistan and Pakistan and said that he was acting out of revenge for France’s military involvement overseas.

“He claims to be a mujahideen and to belong to al Qaeda,” Mr Gueant told journalists at the scene of the siege.

“He wanted revenge for the Palestinian children and he also wanted to take revenge on the French army because of its foreign interventions,” Mr Gueant said.

Heavily armed police in bullet-proof vests and helmets cordoned off the residential area where the raid was taking place, in a suburb a few kilometres from the Ozar Hatorah Jewish school which was the scene of Monday’s shootings.

Michael Mansfield QC said new evidence meant that an independent police force should be appointed to examine enduring concerns and inconsistencies relating to the death of Hilda Murrell in March 1984.

Murrell, 78, was abducted from her home in Shrewsbury and her body was discovered days later in a nearby copse. A high-profile campaigner against nuclear weapons, she had been due to present evidence to the public inquiry into the proposed Sizewell B nuclear reactor in East Anglia. Her death triggered numerous conspiracy theories and allegations relating to the involvement of MI5, with one MP, Tam Dalyell, telling parliament that “men of British intelligence” were involved.

Subsequent claims from intelligence sources that they never even opened a file on the rose-growing anti-nuclear campaigner have now been dismissed by Mansfield as “completely ludicrous”.

He said: “There must have been a file for a number of reasons. One of them being that she plainly was very active and very outspoken about a government policy that was extremely sensitive at that time – nuclear power.

“It was central to Margaret Thatcher’s thinking. They would have been watching closely what she was up to, who she was associating with and so on.

“The victim was consumed with anxiety that something was going to happen to her. A look at why that might be involves the evidence she was about to give to the Sizewell inquiry.”

The involvement of Mansfield, whose past cases include the Stephen Lawrence murder, follows the painstaking accumulation of evidence on the case by Murrell’s nephew, Commander Robert Green.

The former naval intelligence officer was one of a handful of people privy to details of the sinking of the Argentinian ship the General Belgrano, during the 1982 Falklands conflict. Green became embroiled in allegations that he leaked intelligence to Dalyell that the Belgrano had been attacked while steaming away from the Falklands, a revelation that undermined Britain’s justification for the sinking.

Just two days before Murrell was abducted, Dalyell began asking ministers detailed questions about the movements of the Belgrano when it was sunk.

Murrell’s links to Green and her outspoken nature may have placed her in the spotlight of the intelligence agencies. “They [the security services] must have noticed his connection with her. Therefore they might have thought that she possessed information of a sensitive nature,” said Mansfield.

Despite 28 years having passed since her death, Green will this week reveal details of what he claims are attempts to intimidate him in order to prevent him from investigating the case. Despite having moved to New Zealand, Green says he is the subject of continuing surveillance and that the tyres of his car have been slashed, his mail intercepted and, occasionally, his house broken into.

He has continued to investigate, arriving in London this week to share fresh evidence collated for his book on the murder, A Thorn In Their Side.

Among questions raised about the case are those casting fresh doubts on the conviction of a burglar, Andrew George, who was jailed for life in 2005 for Murrell’s murder. George was aged 16 at the time and in care at a children’s home near her home. The prosecution believed that he panicked during a burglary before abducting Murrell.

George’s DNA was found to match samples taken from the scene, yet a previously undisclosed witness statement made by a forensic scientist in the case, Michael Appleby, indicates that he found DNA under Murrell’s fingernails from another man.

Green claims that this information was withheld from the trial jury.

Another troubling aspect of the case relates to the testimony of the owner of the copse where the body was discovered. On the day after the murder, Captain Ian Scott visited the copse to check for trees that needed felling. Despite visiting the exact spot where her body was found, Scott somehow missed it. Yet photographs clearly show the body being visible from a distance. Subsequent police inquiries suggested that he was looking up at trees and would not have been studying the ground.

“He robbed me of my life savings,” Gary Liebschner of Carroll, Ohio told ABC News.

Financial regulators found that Bales “engaged in fraud, breach of fiduciary duty, churning, unauthorized trading and unsuitable investments,” according to a report on Bales filed in 2003. Bales and his associates were ordered to pay Liebschner $1,274,000 in compensatory and punitive damages but have yet to do so, according to Liebschner.

“We didn’t know where he was,” Liebschner told ABC News. “We heard the Bahamas, and all kinds of places.”

Liebschner says he recognized Bales after news reports named him as the American soldier accused of killing 16 Afghan villagers in a shooting rampage.

Russia, one of President Bashar al-Assad’s strongest allies despite international condemnation of the government’s violent crackdown on the country’s uprising, has repeatedly blocked the United Nations Security Council’s attempts to halt the violence, accusing the U.S. and its allies of trying to start another war.

Now the Russian Black Sea fleet’s Iman tanker has arrived in the Syrian port of Tartus on the Mediterranean Sea with an anti-terror squad from the Russian Marines aboard according to the Interfax news agency. The Assad government has insisted it is fighting a terrorist insurgency. The Russian news reports did not elaborate on the Russian troops’ mission in Syria or if they are expected to leave the port.

The presence of Russian troops in Syria could be a “pretty obvious” show of support to the regime, according to Russian security expert Mark Galeotti.

In a Sunday blog post, The Pirate Bay announced new “Low Orbit Server Stations” that will house the site’s servers and files on unmanned, GPS-controlled, aircraft drones.

Evidence of the castrations has emerged amid controversy that it was not included in the findings of an official investigation into sexual abuse within the church last year.

The NRC Handelsblad newspaper identified Henk Heithuis who was castrated in 1956, while a minor, after reporting priests to the police for abusing him in a Catholic boarding home.

Joep Dohmen, the investigative journalist who uncovered the Heithuis case, also found evidence of at least nine other castrations. “These cases are anonymous and can no longer be traced,” he said. “There will be many more. But the question is whether those boys, now old men, will want to tell their story.”

Mr Heithuis died in a car crash in 1958, two years after being castrated at the age of 20, while under the age of majority, which was then 21.

French prosecutors were studying possible terrorist links but the motive for the attack was unclear. The attack shocked the country and prompted strong emotions and high-level discussions in Israel.

Concerns emerged about a possible serial killer with racist motivations, as investigators examined whether the attack was linked to two other shooting attacks in the Toulouse region that killed three French paratroopers and left another seriously injured.