Someone Strapped a Bomb Around the Neck of a Girl Who Is Part of One of Sydney’s Wealthiest Families
August 3rd, 2011Update: ‘Safe and Well’
Via: Sydney Morning Herald:
An 18-year-old Sydney schoolgirl is safe and well after a ten-hour bomb ordeal in her Mosman house.
—End Update—
Via: Daily Telegraph:
POLICE are trying to defuse a bomb strapped to a teenage girl at a multimillion dollar house at Burrawong Avenue in Mosman, Sydney.
The drama unfolded at 2.40pm this afternoon when an 18-year-old girl called police to the mansion “following discovery of a suspicious device”, The Daily Telegraph reported.
It was not clear how the device came to be strapped to the girl but it is understood she did not place it there herself.
A senior police poice officer described the device as an unusual “collar bomb” which has never been seen before in Australia.
He said they believed it was an extortion attempt and that the initial details of the situation were being conveyed to police via the girl’s father.
See: The Incredible True Story of the Collar Bomb Heist
The Secret Patriot Act Is Staying Secret
August 3rd, 2011Via: Wired:
The secret Patriot Act is staying secret.
Two Senators have been warning for months that the government has a secret legal interpretation of the Patriot Act so broad that it amounts to an entirely different law — one that gives the feds massive domestic surveillance powers, and keeps the rest of us in the dark about the snooping.
“There is a significant discrepancy between what most Americans – including many members of Congress – think the Patriot Act allows the government to do and how government officials interpret that same law,” wrote the Senators, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall. “We believe that most members of the American public would be very surprised to learn how federal surveillance law is being interpreted in secret. ”
The Senators tried to get the government to reveal some of the law’s contents, by forcing the Director of National Intelligence and the Attorney General to produce a report outlining when this secret surveillance has gone overboard. Yesterday, the effort failed. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence said no to the report by rejecting Wyden and Udall’s amendment to the FY2012 Intelligence Authorization Act.
In other words: we are all still in the dark about how the government is spying on us.
The Senators won’t say, exactly, what elements of this secret Patriot Act have them so spooked. But Wyden told Danger Room in May that the so-called “business-records provision” is a major source of concern. It empowers the FBI to get businesses, medical offices, banks and other organizations to turn over any “tangible things” it deems relevant to a security investigation.
U.S. Indirectly Arming Al-Qaida-Allied Somali Insurgents
August 3rd, 2011Via: Wired:
Bad news in the five-year-old U.S. proxy war against al-Qaida–allied Somali insurgents. Half of the U.S.-supplied weaponry that enables cash-strapped Ugandan and Burundian troops to fight Somalia’s al-Shabab terror group is winding up in al-Shabab’s hands.
The kicker: It’s the cash-strapped Ugandans who are selling the weapons to the insurgents.
This revelation, buried in U.N. reports and highlighted by controversial war correspondent Robert Young Pelton at his new Somalia Report website, raises some unsettling questions about Washington’s plans to out-source more wars in the future.
Moody’s Confirms U.S. AAA Rating; Food Stamp Use Rises to Record
August 3rd, 2011Just a quick juxtaposition of two stories to demonstrate how absurd the kabuki theater has become.
Moody’s Confirms U.S. AAA Rating, Assigns Negative Outlook
Record Numbers Are Receiving Food Stamps
‘The Chinese Guy’: Chinese Firm Floods U.S. with Fake IDs
August 3rd, 2011Via: Seattle Times / Washington Post:
A Chinese company mails untold thousands of fake driver’s licenses to the United States, many of them to college students.
Research Credit: ottilie
Israeli-Style Airline Passenger Screening Starting in Boston
August 2nd, 2011Via: Boston Herald:
Boston’s TSA screeners — part of a security force whose competency has come under fire nationwide — soon will be carrying out sophisticated behavioral inspections under a first-in-the-nation program that’s already raising concerns of racial profiling, harassment of innocent travelers and longer lines.
The training for the Israeli-style screening — a projected $1 billion national program dubbed Screening Passengers by Observation Techniques — kicks off today at Logan International Airport and will be put to use in Terminal A on Aug. 15. It requires screeners to make quick reads of whether passengers pose a danger or a terror threat based on their reactions to a set of routine questions.
But security experts wonder whether Transportation Safety Administration agents are up to the challenge after an embarrassing string of blunders — including patting down a 95-year-old grandmother in Florida and making her remove her adult diaper and frisking a 3-year-old girl who screamed “stop touching me” at a checkpoint in Tennessee.
“I’m not convinced that the TSA has good enough people to make the Israeli approach work on a large scale,” said Glenn Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor who has followed the TSA at his blog, Instapundit.com.
But he noted, “Almost anything would be an improvement over the clown show we’ve got now.”
Gold Still Running Higher
August 2nd, 2011Update: $1661.07
—End Update—
Update: Korea on the Bid
Via: The Street:
Gold prices were hitting record highs Tuesday as the Bank of Korea announced it bought gold for the first time since 1998, reminding investors of gold’s large safe haven appeal as global economies slow.
—End Update—
New record high: $1641.05.
Internet Archivist Seeks One Copy of Every Book Ever Published
August 2nd, 2011Here’s one for your Svalbard Seed Vault Gives Me The Willies file folder.
Via: AP:
Tucked away in a small warehouse on a dead-end street, an Internet pioneer is building a bunker to protect an endangered species: the printed word.
Brewster Kahle, 50, founded the nonprofit Internet Archive in 1996 to save a copy of every Web page ever posted. Now the MIT-trained computer scientist and entrepreneur is expanding his effort to safeguard and share knowledge by trying to preserve a physical copy of every book ever published.
“There is always going to be a role for books,” said Kahle as he perched on the edge of a shipping container soon to be tricked out as a climate-controlled storage unit. Each container can hold about 40,000 volumes, the size of a branch library. “We want to see books live forever.”
New Zealand Medical Establishment Attempted to Murder Man Rather Than Let Him Recover from Terminal Pneumonia With High Doses of Vitamin C
August 2nd, 2011Watch and learn.
Via: 3News:
The amazing story of a King Country dairy farmer who caught swine flu and very nearly died.
Debt Bill Vote
August 1st, 2011Reuters: Passed in House.
Live CSPAN: Passed in Senate.
