cryptogon.com

A reconnaissance flight taken in a modified C-130 Hercules aircraft found a vast clump of mainly plastic waste at the northern edge of what is known as the “great Pacific garbage patch”, located between Hawaii and California.

Lawyers for the Justice Department on Monday filed a motion in federal court in Phoenix to drop the case against the arms dealer, an American named Marc Turi, whose lawyers also signed the motion.

The deal averts a trial that threatened to cast additional scrutiny on Hillary Clinton’s private emails as Secretary of State, and to expose reported Central Intelligence Agency attempts to arm rebels fighting Libyan leader Moammar Qadhafi.

Government lawyers were facing a Wednesday deadline to produce documents to Turi’s legal team, and the trial was officially set to begin on Election Day, although it likely would have been delayed by protracted disputes about classified information in the case.

A Turi associate asserted that the government dropped the case because the proceedings could have embarrassed Clinton and President Barack Obama by calling attention to the reported role of their administration in supplying weapons that fell into the hands of Islamic extremist militants.
WH spokesman dings Filipino president’s latest Obama jab

The company complied with a classified U.S. government demand, scanning hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts at the behest of the National Security Agency or FBI, said three former employees and a fourth person apprised of the events.

Some surveillance experts said this represents the first case to surface of a U.S. Internet company agreeing to an intelligence agency’s request by searching all arriving messages, as opposed to examining stored messages or scanning a small number of accounts in real time.

The accounts, which could not be independently confirmed, raised new questions about how prisoners were treated in a former CIA prison in Afghanistan that remains shrouded in secrecy.

Ryan Trapani, a CIA spokesman, said the “CIA reviewed its records and found nothing to support these new claims.”

But Daniel Jones, who led a Senate investigation into the CIA detention program, said the accounts given by the two men, Ridha al-Najjar, 51, and Lotfi al-Arabi El Gherissi, 52, were important because so little is known about the “Cobalt” black site, where an Afghan detainee froze to death in 2002.

“The committee found that the COBALT detention site kept so few written records that it was impossible for the Senate, or the CIA, to determine how many individuals were detained there,” Jones said. “And what exactly was done to those detained.”

The two men had not publicly described their treatment before, Human Rights Watch said. Interrogators accused Najjar of being a bodyguard of Osama bin Laden and Gherissi of being an al Qaeda member, but both were returned to Tunisia in 2015 and released.

Gherissi said his guards put him in the makeshift electric chair, which he said had plugs for prisoners’ fingers with wires attached and a metal cap for a prisoner’s head. The former detainees said they were not electrocuted and the chair was attached to a wall pipe.

An independent medical expert hired by Human Rights Watch said that X-rays of Najjar showed his ankle had been broken and had not healed properly. Gherissi was missing two teeth.

A September 2002 CIA cable described Najjar as a “clearly broken man” when he was held at Cobalt who was “on the verge of a complete breakdown.”

SpaceX has been investigating the early September failure of a Falcon 9 rocket that caught fire and exploded on a Cape Canaveral launch pad just days before it was scheduled to launch.

The Washington Post reported on Friday that the inquiry has taken a “bizarre twist,” suggesting SpaceX is considering sabotage a possible cause of the explosion. According to the Post, a SpaceX employee sought access to facilities belonging to SpaceX competitor United Launch Alliance — a partnership between Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

SpaceX investigators came across something suspicious when reviewing video of the failure—”an odd shadow and then a white spot” on the roof of a ULA building, according to the Post. A SpaceX employee seeking access to the building was turned away, but Air Force investigators later dispatched to the facility did not find anything on the roof.

The company’s Kirobo Mini is meant to help provide a companion. It looks like a baby – and could even serve that purpose for people in Japan, where it will be sold and where falling birth rates mean there are fewer and fewer children.

Bell Pottinger’s output included short TV segments made in the style of Arabic news networks and fake insurgent videos which could be used to track the people who watched them, according to a former employee.

The agency’s staff worked alongside high-ranking U.S. military officers in their Baghdad Camp Victory headquarters as the insurgency raged outside.

Bell Pottinger’s former chairman Lord Tim Bell confirmed to the Sunday Times, which has worked with the Bureau on this story, that his firm had worked on a “covert” military operation “covered by various secrecy documents.”

Bell Pottinger reported to the Pentagon, the CIA and the National Security Council on its work in Iraq, he said.

A new Kickstarter campaign is making copies of that golden record available to the public. Other than the two copies on NASA’s twin Voyager spacecraft, only 10 copies exist, most of which are on display in NASA facilities. Even Carl Sagan, who led the golden record project, could not get his hands on a copy.

The legislation applies only to a pilot project by the Contra Costa Transportation Authority at an autonomous-vehicle testing facility at the former Concord Naval Weapons Station, and at a San Ramon business park containing public roads.