Besieged by identity theft , Florida now faces a fast-spreading form of fraud so simple and lucrative that some violent criminals have traded their guns for laptops. And the target is the United States Treasury .

With nothing more than ledgers of stolen identity information — Social Security numbers and their corresponding names and birth dates — criminals have electronically filed thousands of false tax returns with made-up incomes and withholding information and have received hundreds of millions of dollars in wrongful refunds, law enforcement officials say.

The criminals, some of them former drug dealers, outwit the Internal Revenue Service by filing a return before the legitimate taxpayer files. Then the criminals receive the refund, sometimes by check but more often though a convenient but hard-to-trace prepaid debit card.

The government-approved cards, intended to help people who have no bank accounts, are widely available in many places, including tax preparation companies. Some of them are mailed, and the swindlers often provide addresses for vacant houses, even buying mailboxes for them, and then collect the refunds there.

Postal workers have been harassed, robbed and, in one case, murdered as they have made their rounds with mail trucks full of debit cards and master keys to mailboxes.

The fraud, which has spread around the country, is costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars annually, federal and state officials say. The I.R.S. sometimes, in effect, pays two refunds instead of one: first to the criminal who gets a claim approved, and then a second to the legitimate taxpayer, who might have to wait as long as a year while the agency verifies the second claim.

J. Russell George, the Treasury inspector general for tax administration, testified before Congress this month that the I.R.S. detected 940,000 fake returns for 2010 in which identity thieves would have received $6.5 billion in refunds. But Mr. George said the agency missed an additional 1.5 million returns with possibly fraudulent refunds worth more than $5.2 billion.

Florida, with its large population of elderly residents and health care facilities, provides a wealth of opportunities for swindlers. South Florida, which had the highest rate of identity theft in the nation, and Tampa have been hit hardest.

Ministers are preparing to publish a Justice and Security Bill in the next few days that could allow some cases to be held in their entirety behind closed doors.

David Cameron agreed to the change after pressure from the security services, MI5 and MI6, it was reported.

Whitehall sources said officials were “dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s” on the plans, which have exposed a rift at the heart of the Coalition.

The publication of the Bill has been delayed after the Liberal Democrats objected. The legislation is now due to be published this week.

Ministers are justifying extending closed trial procedures to civil cases because they want to be able to contest compensation claims, rather than settle them to avoid any disclosure of documents that could be damaging to Britain’s national security.

Sami al-Saadi and Abdel Hakim Belhadj, who allege that they were taken by rendition by Britain to Libya eight years ago, are expected to begin legal proceedings against Jack Straw, the former foreign secretary, and the Government next month.

Under the new Bill members of any jury hearing the case, as well as those suing the Government, would be unable to view some intelligence if it risked national security.

The measures have been criticised by civil liberties groups, forcing Kenneth Clarke, the Justice Secretary, to narrow the proposals solely to cases that compromise national security. MPs and peers on the Joint Committee on Human

Rights have said that the proposals amount to a radical departure from the “UK’s traditions of open justice and fairness”.

There is also concern that it falls to ministers, rather than a court, to decide when the closed-trial system would apply.

A member of the National Labor Relations Board accused of leaking inside information has resigned, the agency announced Sunday.

Terence Flynn had been under pressure to leave since March, when the board’s inspector general found that Flynn committed ethics violations by improperly revealing confidential details on the status of pending cases.

Flynn, a Republican, shared the information with two former board members, including a one-time labor adviser to presidential hopeful Mitt Romney’s campaign. That adviser, Peter Schaumber, left the Romney campaign in December, around the time the investigation into Flynn began.

Flynn submitted a letter to President Obama and to the board’s chairman, Mark Pearce, late Saturday saying he would resign effective July 24, but would recuse himself from all agency business until he departs.

While Flynn did not mention the allegations against him, he had previously denied any wrongdoing. Flynn’s personal lawyer had claimed any discussions about board proceedings were not illegal.

Flynn is one of five members of the board, which oversees union elections and enforces labor laws. It has been the focus of intense partisan wrangling, with Republicans and business groups complaining that it leans too heavily in favor of labor unions.

Obama bypassed the Senate to appoint Flynn and two Democratic nominees to the board in January. Republicans had filibustered the nominations for months.

In two separate reports, the board’s inspector general said Flynn improperly leaked information about the status of cases, how other board members planned to vote, and the board’s internal strategy for handling litigation against it.

In one instance, the inspector general found that Flynn secretly helped Schaumber draft an opinion column denouncing a board decision that favored unions.

The alleged ethical violations occurred in 2010 and 2011, when Flynn was a staff lawyer for the board.

The case has already been referred to the Justice Department for a separate investigation. It also has been forwarded to the U.S. Office of Special Counsel to investigate potential violations of the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from engaging in partisan political activity.

Congressional Democrats and union leaders had been calling on Flynn to resign, saying his disclosures compromised the agency’s integrity.

Today's ruling, coupled with Tuesday's, have presented police efforts to criminalize protest activity "a temporary roadblock," Stolar said, adding that the profusion of cameras at Occupy Wall Street protests have made it harder for police to get away with fabricating stories to justify arrests.

"I've seen this from the first arrests back in September," Stolar said. "Some people are charged with resisting arrest (which ups the stakes to a crime) and police are claiming in complaints that people are kicking their legs and twisting their bodies. And then when you look at the video, it's just not there -- the people are being totally cooperative, and those charges were just put in there to make the person arrested look bad."

Despite this pattern, Stolar said that police officers' qualified immunity mean it's unlikely they'll suffer any consequences for misrepresenting the facts to justify their arrests of protesters.

Governor Perry’s office and anti-choice lawmakers in the state have rallied behind the claim that “There are more than 2,500 qualified providers in the WHP that operate more than 4,600 locations across the state,” downplaying the significant role Planned Parenthood plays in bringing WHP access to low-income women. What Perry’s office doesn’t mention is that most of those providers are small clinics and individual doctors that aren’t currently equipped to take on the tens of thousands of women who will have to leave Planned Parenthood should the courts rule in favor of the State of Texas.

I set out to test the WHP’s non-Planned Parenthood provider listings over the past week and found that while initial searches of TexasWomensHealth.org turn up what appear to be hundreds of available providers, many of them don’t provide any kind of contraceptive care, don’t take Medicaid Women’s Health Program clients, or are simply misleading duplicate listings.

In Austin, for example, many WHP clients visit the Downtown Austin Clinic for contraceptives and cancer screenings. What if a resident of the 78702 zip code who formerly relied on Planned Parenthood had to suddenly find a new doctor?

A search for providers within 30 miles of 78702 turned up 137 doctors and clinics–initially, a very promising number. But once the duplicates were weeded out there were just 49 individual providers, including those like the Austin Endoscopy Center. When I called to try to make a gynecological appointment there, I was understandably turned down: “This is a colon cancer center,” the operator told us. No women’s health care there.

Several times, locations listed on the Texas WHP website weren’t taking new Medicaid clients, were only taking those within a limited age range, or simply did not accept Medicaid Women’s Health Program patients. The People’s Community Clinic, which serves low-income and uninsured clients, said they were only taking adolescents or pregnant women—and pregnant women are, by definition, excluded from the WHP.

The Austin Regional Clinic, which has several locations in Austin, looked promising, but they don’t accept Medicaid WHP clients. Neither does the similarly situated Austin Diagnostic Clinic.

Ultimately, I found nine providers within a 30-mile radius of the selected zip code that accepted the WHP and were taking new patients—some could see a patient for an annual exam as soon as the following day. Provided, of course, that clients are able to travel. The Lone Star Circle Of Care, which also focuses on underserved populations, had appointments in neighboring cities.

But for a WHP enrollee who may not have a car or who can’t afford to take a day or a half-day off from work, it may be a matter of having to make the difficult decision of choosing between several hours’ worth of pay—which could mean making rent or buying baby formula—or getting her annual exam.

And if Planned Parenthood is excluded from the WHP in Texas, there’s a good chance that WHP patients wouldn’t have the good luck to find nine available providers if, as a George Washington University study predicts, existing providers simply will not be able to fill in the gaps left by Planned Parenthood. From the study:

In FY 2010, PPFA clinics accounted for approximately 49 percent of all WHP-financed care, furnishing services to 51,953 WHP clients out of 105,998 WHP clients served. Of the 1,469 providers that billed the WGP in FY 2010, 908 (62 percent) served 10 or fewer patients, while 368 (25 percent) served only one patient. The authors conclude that the WHP program lacks any reasonable access alternative.

Multiply just one caller looking for care by 51,953, and it’s easy to imagine that a morning of phone calls to doctor after doctor—again, if a woman working and managing a family had the time to dedicate to it—might turn up no available appointments, or appointments that could only be made months in advance.

It’s also important to remember that an imagined Austin-based client lives in a major metropolitan area with public transportation and multiple hospitals and women’s health centers. WHP clients in other areas of Texas, especially those in rural towns, will have even fewer options.

I asked a Texas Planned Parenthood representative what area of Texas the group thought would suffer most if it could no longer participate in the WHP. The results were dismal: based on their research, nearly 80 percent of WHP clients get their care from family planning clinics, and they turned over a list of 25 cities that have no family planning clinics other than Planned Parenthood that serve WHP clients. The top four results–Edinburg, McAllen, San Juan and Weslaco, Texas—are all located near the Texas-Mexico border, an area that has been hit especially hard by clinics closing.

And if women in South Texas can’t see their Planned Parenthood doctors and nurses for WHP care, the Texas WHP website won’t be much help either: A search for doctors within the McAllen zip code on the WHP site turned up anesthesiologists, pediatricians and a night clinic in their top results–plus one provider that did not take WHP clients.

If the State of Texas wants to exclude Planned Parenthood from the Women’s Health Program, they’re going to need to go beyond technical support for their website to invest huge sums of money increasing access to care throughout the state, replicating the system they are seeking to eliminate.

But at the high-quality end of the Internet’s curve — how do you sort and rank the very best information? What if the information returned by two sites — Google Places and Yelp, for example — is nearly identical? Those decisions are judgment calls, coded into Google’s algorithm by humans. Not neutral, not the unbiased calculations of a machine, no matter how it works in a given instance. Volokh’s paper rests on this idea (he uses the word judgment 34 times) that in exercising judgment, Google’s engineers are essentially acting as editors, curators, or, even, parade organizers — all of whom the First Amendment protects in their decisions to include or exclude content, even when they themselves are not the creators of that content.

There’s a lot of support for Volokh’s argument including two lower court decisions (2003 and 2007), and, as First Amendment and technology law expert Marvin Ammori argues, other courts — and even the Court — would likely agree. The result would be greater protection for Google and its preference for its own products — something we may not like. But the First Amendment has never been interested in curating society to our liking — quite the opposite in fact. The results of a strong First Amendment are often distasteful in varying degrees, with hateful speech at the extreme end. But the converse is much worse — would we really want the government to have a say in the content of Google’s returns? Could you imagine what it would like to do with something like this?

The law is always under revision as new technologies emerge and challenge the old categories we had created. Is Google like a publication — such as the New York Times — or a utility like the gas company that merely conveys information “neutrally”? Which set of laws should we apply? These comparisons never work perfectly, and refining their raggedy edges is the work of the courts and the participants in their adversarial process. In the case of Google, its search results do seem more like the handiwork of a newspaper editor or a parade organizer than an electrical utility. But the impact of its choices — judgment, if you will — are so much greater, so much more central to our civic life that it can be scary to give it such free reign. But that free reign is at the core of our grand experiment with free speech and a free press, an experiment you just have to hold your breath and hope for, because the alternative is much, much worse.

You’d think Montgomery County, Texas, would’ve learned its lesson. In 2011, when its Sheriff’s Office was preparing to become the first police agency in America to order a drone that could carry weapons, Chief Deputy Randy McDaniel said, “I’m tickled to death,” adding, “It’s so simple in its design and the objectives, you just wonder why anyone would choose not to have it.” That was before the day of the most famous drone test in Texas. It seemed like a perfect photo-op. They’d get out the BearCat armored vehicle they own, which looks like a small military tank, and fly a bad-ass $300,000 drone above it. The problem came when the drone operator lost control of the unmanned aircraft, which plummeted earthward, hitting the BearCat on the way down.
The accident got them ridiculed on the Internet. But they never wavered in their commitment to drones. And now, apparently still tickled to death, Chief Deputy McDaniel has been quoted telling the press that tear gas and rubber bullets might be added to the unmanned aerial vehicle. CBS News quotes him explaining that “those are things that law enforcement utilizes day in and day out and in certain situations it might be advantageous to have this type of system.” That’s rather vague, but there’s no getting around one thing: the situations would all involve police deliberately shooting rubber bullets or tear gas clouds at civilians from an unmanned drone.

This transparency report gives Google a chance to highlight some of its good citizenship as an online service provider. Although the burden of liability is supposed to be on the organization that sends the takedown notice — it is required to claim under penalty of perjury to have a good-faith belief of copyright infringement — in practice many groups are willing to skirt those rules, sending takedown notices to silence unfavorable speech or even without human review . The 3% of takedown notices that Google chooses not to comply with is a large absolute number, and each of those are instances of legitimate speech that would have otherwise been shut down. Google deserves to be commended for that behavior.

The Metropolitan Police has implemented a system to extract mobile phone data from suspects held in custody.

The data includes call history, texts and contacts, and the BBC has learned that it will be retained regardless of whether any charges are brought.

The technology is being used in 16 London boroughs, and could potentially be used by police across the UK.

Campaign group Privacy International described the move as a “possible breach of human rights law”.

Until now, officers had to send mobiles off for forensic examination in order to gather and store data, a process which took several weeks.

Under the new system, content will be extracted using purpose built terminals in police stations.

It will allow officers to connect a suspect’s mobile and produce a print out of data from the device, as well as saving digital records of the content.

Shooting photos or video of police officers is a Constitutionally-protected right, says the U.S. Department of Justice.

In a win for technology, citizen journalism, and our Constitutional rights, the U.S. Department of Justice has issued a letter to the Baltimore City Police Department reconfirming that photographing, video- and audio-recording on-duty police officers is a Constitutional right protected by the First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendments.

“Because recording police officers in the public discharge of their duties is protected by the First Amendment, policies should prohibit interference with recording of police activities except in narrowly circumscribed situations,” reads the DoJ’s letter (pdf). “More particularly, policies should instruct officers that, except under limited circumstances, officers must not search or seize a camera or recording device without a warrant. In addition, policies should prohibit more subtle actions that may nonetheless infringe upon individuals’ First Amendment rights. Officers should be advised not to threaten, intimidate, or otherwise discourage an individual from recording police officer enforcement activities or intentionally block or obstruct cameras or recording devices.”

The letter, which was brought to our attention via photojournalist Carlos Miller of PixIQ (who says in his bio that he’s been arrested three times for recording police), comes in response to a lawsuit brought forth by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of Christopher Sharp, against the BPD, whose officers confiscated Sharp’s cellphone and deleted a video of police arresting his friend at the 2010 Preakness Stakes horse race.

After the DoJ first took interest in the lawsuit earlier this year, the BPD issued a seven-page General Order to officers stating that citizens have the “absolute right” to record police doing their duties, provided the recording does not violate any other laws, like obstruction of justice. Rather than stick to these principles, however, BPD simply adopted a broader interpretation of the law, which led to further crackdowns on recording. The DoJ’s most recent letter, issued on May 14, says that the BPD’s order does not go far enough to protect the rights of citizens.

The DoJ’s letter, written by Jonathan Smith, chief of the special litigation section of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, also reconfirms that members of the press and other private citizens share the same right to record police, and that displaying press credentials should not be a prerequisite for recording police officers.

Last week, the Nebraska Supreme Court upheld a decision that a woman from Kansas could be sent to jail if she refused to testify against the man she accused of sexual assault.

The 24-year-old woman initially filed charges in August 2012 against a 63-year-old Nebraska man for sexually assaulting her when she was 7 years old. Last year, however, she refused to testify in court because she felt it would bring further shame and humiliation to her family. In response, Lancaster County District Judge Paul Merritt threatened her with a contempt charge and ninety days of jail time, saying that the case hinged on her testimony.

Unfortunately, this case is not unique but part of growing trend of criminalizing rape survivors in order to guarantee their testimonies at trial.

In April, law enforcement officials in Sacramento, California, detained a 17-year-old girl for twice failing to appear in court against the man accused of raping her. Prosecutors argued that her testimony was crucial because the defendant, Fran William Rackley, was accused of sexually assaulting another victim and therefore posed a clear and present danger to the larger society.

For many victim rights advocates, the detention was seen as a violation of California Marsy’s Law, a state constitutional amendment that protects and expands the legal rights of victims. Thanks to the diligent efforts of her lawyer, Lisa Franco, and advocates, the judge ordered an ankle-monitoring bracelet as an alternative to more jail time after she already had been detained for more than a week.

In both cases, the judges recognized that threatening or detaining the victims might not be the best way to address the victim’s reluctance to take the stand. And yet, ultimately the rights of the victims were seen as secondary to public good.

The US state of Texas is likely to have executed an innocent man due to careless handling of the case, a report by US law students claims.

Carlos de Luna was killed by lethal injection in 1989 for the brutal murder of a single mother six years earlier.

Right up until his execution, de Luna maintained a fellow Hispanic called Carlos Hernandez was the real culprit.

The Columbia University report backs his claim. It says “shoddy police work” probably led to the wrong man dying.

Under the supervision of Professor James Liebman, 12 students spent five years painstakingly dissecting the 1983 murder of Wanda Lopez in the Texan city of Corpus Christi. The petrol station clerk was stabbed in the chest with a lock-blade buck knife.

The students combed through endless police files and crime scene footage, and interviewed more than 100 witnesses, including detectives who had worked on the case.

A German man who alleges he was subjected to “extraordinary rendition” by the CIA has taken his case to the European Court of Human Rights.

Khaled al-Masri claims he was abducted in Macedonia in 2003 and flown to a US detention centre in Afghanistan, where he says he was tortured.

He wants Macedonia to recognise its part in the alleged kidnap.

Mr Masri has already brought several cases against the US and German authorities, without success.

An attempt to sue the 13 CIA agents in the US courts failed, and a later approach to the German authorities to request their extradition was dropped.

His case is still pending at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

Lebanese-born Mr Masri claims he was abducted in Skopje, capital of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, and detained for five months in Afghanistan.

He says four of those months were spent in a secret prison outside Kabul, nicknamed the “salt pit”.

The Federal Reserve is worried about the impact on the US economy if government spending is cut sharply.

“The possibility of a sharp fiscal tightening in the United States was also considered a sizable risk,” the US central bank said in the minutes of its April meeting.

Automatic budget cuts that will slash $1.2bn (£754m) will happen at the end of this year if a budget deal is not reached.

The Fed held rates at a record low.

“If agreement is not reached on a plan for the federal budget, a sharp fiscal tightening could occur at the start of 2013,” the minutes said.

“Uncertainty about the trajectory of future fiscal policy could lead businesses to defer hiring and investment.”

After a fierce political debate that saw budget talks go to the wire, Republican and Democratic leaders reached an agreement in August 2011 on raising the US debt limit and avoiding a first default.

Under the the agreement, the US deficit will be reduced by at least $2.1tn over 10 years.

The House of Representatives Republican leader, John Boehner, has indicated he is again prepared to battle President Barack Obama over the budget.

The Fed has vowed to keep rates at “exceptionally low levels” all the way to late 2014.

“Several members” of the Fed also said, the minutes showed, that additional support could be needed if the economic recovery lost momentum.

He was the spitting image of the killer, had the same first name and was near the scene of the crime at the fateful hour: Carlos DeLuna paid the ultimate price and was executed in place of someone else in Texas in 1989, a report out Tuesday found.

Even “all the relatives of both Carloses mistook them,” and DeLuna was sentenced to death and executed based only on eyewitness accounts despite a range of signs he was not a guilty man, said law professor James Liebman.

Liebman and five of his students at Columbia School of Law spent almost five years poring over details of a case that he says is “emblematic” of legal system failure.

DeLuna, 27, was put to death after “a very incomplete investigation. No question that the investigation is a failure,” Liebman said.

FORT WORTH - The U.S. government didn’t offer a reward for the capture of Houston grandmother Elisa Castillo, nor did it accuse her of touching drugs, ordering killings, or getting rich off crime.

But three years after a jury convicted her in a conspiracy to smuggle at least a ton of cocaine on tour buses from Mexico to Houston, the 56-year-old first-time offender is locked up for life - without parole.

“It is ridiculous,” said Castillo, who is a generation older than her cell mates, and is known as “grandma” at the prison here. “I am no one.”

Convicted of being a manager in the conspiracy, she is serving a longer sentence than some of the hemisphere’s most notorious crime bosses - men who had multimillion-dollar prices on their heads before their capture.

The drug capos had something to trade: the secrets of criminal organizations. The biggest drug lords have pleaded guilty in exchange for more lenient sentences.

Castillo said she has nothing to offer in a system rife with inconsistencies and behind-the-scenes scrambling that amounts to a judicial game of Let’s Make A Deal.

“Our criminal justice system is broke; it needs to be completely revamped,” declared Terry Nelson, who was a federal agent for over 30 years and is on the executive board of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. “They have the power, and if you don’t play the game, they’ll throw the book at you.”

Castillo maintains her innocence, saying she was tricked into unknowingly helping transport drugs and money for a big trafficker in Mexico. But she refused to plead guilty and went to trial.

In 2010, of 1,766 defendants prosecuted for federal drug offenses in the Southern District of Texas - a region that reaches from Houston to the border - 93.2 percent pleaded guilty rather than face trial, according to the U.S. government. Of the defendants who didn’t plead not guilty, 10 defendants were acquitted at trial. Also, 82 saw their cases dismissed.

The statistics are similar nationwide.

The latest case in point came this week with the negotiated surrender of a Colombian drug boss Javier Calle Serna, whom the United States accuses of shipping at least 30 tons of cocaine.

While how much time Calle will face is not known publicly, he likely studied other former players, including former Gulf Cartel lord Osiel Cardenas Guillen.

Cardenas once led one of Mexico’s most powerful syndicates and created the Zetas gang. He pleaded guilty in Houston and is to be released by 2025. He’ll be 57.

But the statistics suggest the country has not lost its way due to laziness. If you look at the average annual hours worked by each worker, the Greeks seem very hard-working.

Figures from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) show that the average Greek worker toils away for 2,017 hours per year which is more than any other European country.

Out of the 34 members of the OECD, that is just two places behind the board leaders, South Korea.

On the other hand, the average German worker - normally thought of as the very epitome of industriousness - only manages 1,408 hours a year. Germany is 33rd out of 34 on the OECD list (or 24th out of 25 looking at the European countries alone).

New York City police officers stopped and questioned more than 200,000 people in the just the first three months of 2012, setting up a record pace for much criticized tactic. The “Stop, Question, Frisk” policy has been a major initiative for the NYPD, which credits the tactic as a key contributor to a years-long drop in street crimes. However, numerous studies have shown that the stops overwhelmingly target black and Latino males. A recent study by the ALCU released last week showed that were 168,000 stops of young black men last year, which exceeds the actual population of young black men living in the city.

Police have been given the authority ”stop and frisk” anyone on “reasonable suspicion” of being involved in a crime — a much lower standard than probable cause — yet more that 90 percent of those stopped are never charged with anything. Despite such criticisms, the department continue tout the policy as an important factor in keeping the peace. On they same day they released the street stop numbers, they NYPD also announced that there have been just 129 murders through the first 132 days of the year, putting the city on pace for fewest number of homicides since reliable statistics have been tracked. The 471 homicides in 2009 is the lowest total on record.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit has ruled that the First Amendment protects the right of private citizens to record the actions of police while they are performing their duties in public places. The decision resulted from a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois against the state’s unusually broad eavesdropping statute. It criminalizes all audio recordings made without the consent of the parties involved, even of public officials in public places.

“The act of making an audio or audiovisual recording is necessarily included within the First Amendment’s guarantee of speech and press rights as a corollary of the right to disseminate the resulting recording,” wrote the two-judge majority in a Tuesday decision. The Illinois statute “interferes with the gathering and dissemination of information about government officials performing their duties in public. Any way you look at it, the eavesdropping statute burdens speech and press rights and is subject to heightened First Amendment scrutiny.”

But Judge Richard Posner disagreed with his colleagues. Posner is the judge who raised concerns in oral arguments that striking down the statute would lead to more “snooping around by reporters and bloggers.”

The majority’s ruling “casts a shadow over electronic privacy statutes of other states,” Posner wrote in his dissent. He worried that crime victims would be hesistant to report crimes to police officers in public out of fear that the conversation might be recorded by a third party’s cell phone and posted to the Internet.

Documents just released by US Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) in response to one of EFF’s Freedom of Information Act requests show that DHS is considering collecting DNA from kids ages 14 and up—and is exploring expanding its regulations to allow collection from kids younger than that.

The proposal appears to be working its way through DHS in the wake of regulations from the Department of Justice that require all federal agencies—including DHS and its components such as ICE—to collect DNA from individuals arrested for federal crimes as well as “from non-United States persons who are detained under the authority of the United States,” whether or not they have been involved in criminal activity. While the law specifically exempts a few classes of “aliens,” the documents we received show DHS may start DNA collection from anyone it fingerprints. Currently, that’s any child over 14 who’s detained, but we also found records that show ICE could lower that age even more.

DHS estimates that as many as 1 million people who are subject to administrative detention or arrest annually could now be subject to DNA collection. But it’s important to note that many of these people are not involved in criminal activity. Collecting DNA from anyone detained by the government for any number of non-criminal reasons—especially juveniles—seems to be yet another step on the slippery slope to collecting DNA from everyone in the United States, no matter their status.

ICE is the first component within DHS to collect DNA under the new DOJ regulations. ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) offices in San Diego, St. Paul, and San Juan, Puerto Rico are part of a 6-month pilot program to test out the new procedures and were set to start collecting DNA around July 2010. After the pilot program, the rest of HSI’s offices (more than 200 throughout the US and abroad) will start collecting DNA and presumably all other DHS components will follow suit shortly thereafter.

A US judge has refused to throw out charges against two-time former presidential candidate John Edwards.

Lawyers for Mr Edwards argued that the prosecution had failed to prove he intentionally violated the law.

The former Democratic North Carolina senator’s lawyers will begin presenting their case on Monday.

The 58-year-old denies six counts of campaign finance law violations to hide a pregnant mistress, and faces up to 30 years in jail if convicted.

Prosecutors at the trial in Greensboro, North Carolina, rested their case on Thursday by playing a tape of a 2008 national television interview of Mr Edwards.

The video shows Mr Edwards confessing to his affair with Rielle Hunter, but denying having fathered her baby. At the time his late wife, Elizabeth Edwards, was fighting breast cancer.

In the ABC News recording, he also rejects suggestions that he used money from his campaign to hide an affair.

To prove Mr Edwards guilty, prosecutors must show that he knew about the money used in the cover-up, and also that he knew he was violating the law.

Sometimes during lengthy floor debates on bills, interesting things happen in the witching hours.

Such was the case late Wednesday, when Representative John Lewis of Georgia pushed back with a fiery speech directed at an amendment offered by Representative Paul C. Broun of Georgia that would have barred the Justice Department from using money to enforce a part of the Voting Rights Act.

At around 10 p.m., Mr. Lewis, a former civil rights leader, took to the podium to denounce the amendment, which sought to end financing for enforcement of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, designed to protect minority voters from being disenfranchised.

He began by saying it was “hard and difficult and almost unbelievable that any member, especially a member from the state of Georgia,” would offer the amendment. As he laid out various methods used before the civil rights movement to suppress the black vote, he added: “People died for the right to vote! Friends of mine! Colleagues of mine!”

Mr. Broun appeared shaken and, in an unusual move, withdrew his own amendment.

On Thursday, Meredith Griffanti, a spokeswoman for Mr. Broun, who is a medical doctor, said that he “fully believes in the intent of his amendment to prevent the Justice Department from enforcing Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act,” but added that “given the magnitude of this change and out of respect for his colleagues, Dr. Broun withdrew the amendment.”

“He felt as though it deserved ample debate time where all members could participate rather than during a closed-off discussion in the late hours of the evening,” she said. “Dr. Broun looks forward to having this debate in the future.”

Rush Limbaugh today dismissed a Washington Post report detailing “pranks” and “troubling incidents” Mitt Romney engaged in as a high school student, saying: “You had long hair in 1965, you were gonna get razzed. It didn’t matter. They weren’t gonna think you were in the Beatles. If you had long hair in 1965, you were gonna get made fun of.” Limbaugh added: “See, 1965’s a great year; bullying was legal.”

Limbaugh blamed a “pro-Obama media” for making this a story, saying, “The Washington Post can find out what Romney was doing in high school but they can’t be bothered to find out what Obama’s transcripts — even some of his writings from college and law school.” He continued:

LIMBAUGH: This is the campaign. This is exactly — you’ve been warned. You knew. You don’t need to be warned. You know this kind of stuff’s coming. This is what the drive-by media does in conjunction with the Democrat in the White House. When I saw this, I just — I started laughing.

[…]

LIMBAUGH: Now maybe I’m wrong, but I think most people are gonna laugh at this. It’s so obvious now — it is so pathetically transparently transparent what this is. Media ganging up on Romney — a pro-Obama media ganging up on Romney. 1965 — probably a stretch to say it had anything to do with the kid being presumed gay. You had long hair in 1965, you were gonna get razzed. It didn’t matter.

They weren’t gonna think you were in the Beatles. If you had long hair in 1965, you were gonna get made fun of. See, 1965’s a great year; bullying was legal.

Limbaugh added: “Watch that be a quote that shows up at Media Matters: ‘Limbaugh praising bullying while defending Romney.’ “

The US Department of Justice has sued an Arizona sheriff accused of racially profiling Latinos, among other alleged civil rights violations.

The lawsuit alleges sloppy police work and a disregard for minority rights by Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

US officials wanted the sheriff to agree to train his officers in how to perform duties such as traffic stops.

But Sheriff Arpaio, who denies the allegations, said the department’s demands would nullify his authority.

The self-styled toughest sherriff in the US, he shot to prominence forcing prisoners to wear pink underwear.

Assistant US Attorney General Thomas Perez told a news conference on Thursday: “We have invariably been able to work collaboratively with law enforcement agencies to build better departments and safer communities.”

He added that Sheriff Arpaio’s Maricopa County office had been “a glaring exception”.

In one case cited by the lawsuit, a sheriff’s officer stopped a Latino woman - a US citizen who was five months pregnant - as she pulled into her driveway and insisted she sit on the hood of her car.

“When she refused, the officer grabbed her arms, pulled them behind her back, and slammed her, stomach first, into the vehicle three times,” the suit said.

The woman failed to show she had motor insurance, but the matter was resolved when she provided such proof to a court, the lawsuit said.

In December, the justice department released a scathing report accusing his office of multiple offences, including punishing Hispanic jail inmates for speaking Spanish.

He previously apologised for his office’s botching of sex-crime investigations, including child abuse allegations. When cases were reopened, 19 arrests were made.

On the eve of the lawsuit, Sheriff Arpaio said: “If they sue, we’ll go to court. And then we’ll find out the real story. They’re telling me how to run my organisation.”

Maricopa County has also been under investigation for criminal abuse-of-power allegations since at least December 2009, an inquiry which has focused on the sheriff’s anti-public corruption squad.

Will the two screens be shown back to back? Will each screen last for 10 seconds each? Will each screen be unskippable? Yes, yes, and yes.

An ICE spokesman tells me that the two screens will “come up after the previews, once you hit the main movie/play button on the DVD. At which point the movie rating comes up, followed by the IPR Center screen shot for 10 secs and then the FBI/HSI anti-piracy warning for 10 secs as well. Neither can be skipped/fast forwarded through.”

The idea isn’t to deter current pirates, apparently (the new scheme requires all legal purchasers to sit through 20 seconds of warnings each time they pop in a film, but will be totally absent from pirated downloads and bootlegs). It’s to educate everyone else. As ICE Director John Morton announced in a statement yesterday, “Law enforcement must continue to expand how it combats criminal activity; public awareness and education are a critical part of that effort.”

With the financial sector sure to summon massive amounts of money and resources to battle any criminal or civil prosecutions over its role in the 2008 crisis, a key is how much resources authorities will have at their disposal to battle back.

When New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman appeared before the Congressional Progressive Caucus in late April, he asked the members to help him obtain funding for the Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities working group, which he co-chairs. “If you want to help me badger everybody, that’s good,” he said. “I’m a good badger by myself but I know there are some experts in this room.”

Yesterday, Representative Maxine Waters, a member of the caucus, made the first attempt to get the RMBS group funding—and it didn’t work.

She offered an amendment to a large appropriations bill, created by Republicans, that would fund, in part, the Department of Justice. The bill provided only a fraction of the $55 million the DoJ asked for in its budget request for “investigating and prosecuting financial and mortgage fraud.” Waters proposed re-appropriating some money in the bill from the NASA program to fully fund the $55 million request.

“Considering the retirement of the space shuttle program and a shift in NASA’s priorities, I believe we should use the funds in these accounts to help bring justice to defrauded investors, homeowners, and consumers,” she said on the House floor.

Representative Brad Miller also rose in support of Waters’ amendment. Though Miller was turned down for the job of executive director—because, he believes, the working group was afraid of industry blowback—Waters has been circulating a letter, signed by forty members of Congress, asking the working group to hire him anyway.

Miller strongly urged members to fully fund the RMBS investigation. “Every [Wall Street] defendant would have a defense team that would make the O.J. defense team look like a public defender, two years out of law school, handling 100 other cases,” he said. “We would be swamped by the opposition.

“But that is certainly no reason not to pursue those charges,” Miller continued. “In fact it’s all the more reason to go forward and pursue criminal fraud—to assure Americans that you…do not get a get out of jail free card because you are rich and powerful.”

Twitter has asked a New York state judge to throw out a court order requiring it to turn over three months worth of messages posted by an Occupy Wall Street protester being prosecuted for disorderly conduct.

In a motion (PDF) filed on Monday in New York City Criminal Court, Twitter lawyers argued the city’s district attorney’s office is overstepping its authority in ordering the tweets and other subscriber info of Malcolm Harris, whose handle on the microblogging site is @destructuremal . Prosecutors seeking the data failed to get a court warrant based on probable cause, making an order they obtained earlier a violation of federal law and the Constitution’s prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures, the Twitter brief argued.

“If the order stands, Twitter will be put in the untenable position of either providing user communications and account information in response to all subpoenas or attempting to vindicate its users’ rights by moving to quash these subpoenas itself—even though Twitter will often know little or nothing about the underlying facts necessary to support their users’ argument that the subpoenas may be improper,” Twitter’s attorneys argued.

Rather than get a warrant based on probable cause, the New York City prosecutors cited the Stored Communications Act, which requires only that investigators show the requested information is relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation. After receiving the demand, Twitter provided notification to Harris, who challenged the demand on the grounds the information prosecutors were seeking fell outside the limitations of the statute. Last month, New York Criminal Court Judge Matthew A. Sciarrino, Jr. denied Harris’s motion (PDF ), arguing he had no legal standing to challenge the subpoena because he had no proprietary interest in the data investigators sought.

US intelligence officials say they have disrupted a plot by al-Qaeda in Yemen to detonate an upgraded version of the failed 2009 “underwear bomb”, according to US media reports.

The device is said to be in US custody, with the FBI reportedly examining the bomb, which was seized by CIA agents.

Reports said no target had been chosen and no plane tickets purchased by the time the alleged plot was foiled.

There is no indication on the status of the would-be bomber.

It’s a little reported anecdote, but in 1981 presumptive Republican Presidential nominee Mitt Romney was arrested for disorderly conduct. The issue of Romney’s arrest first came to light during his 1994 Senate run against incumbent Senator Ted Kennedy, appearing at an unfortunate time while Romney was running ads talking to police officers with sirens in the background, promising to be tough on crime

According to what Romney told the Boston Globe in 1994, he had taken his family of to Wayland, Mass.’s Lake Cochituate, about an hour outside Boston, for a summer excursion. As Romney prepared to put his family boat into the water, a park officer told Romney not to launch because his license appeared to have been painted over. The officer told Romney if he put his boat into the water he would face a $50 fine.

Romney felt that his license was still visible and decided to ignore the order from the officer and pay the fine.

“I figured I was at the state park with my kids. My five kids were in the car wondering why we weren’t going out in the boat, so I said I’d launch and pay the fine,” Romney said in 1994.

Romney said the office didn’t tell him not to launch his boat, just that he would face a fine for doing so.

“I was willing to pay the fine. But if he had said don’t launch the boat and not mentioned the fine, I would not have done it,” Romney said.

After Romney put the family put into the water, the office reappeared visibly angry and arrested Romney for disorderly conduct. Romney was handcuffed on the scene, taken to the local police station, and booked.

“There I was, dripping wet in a bathing suit,” Romney told the Globe. A magistrate let him go without bail.

Several days later, Romney appeared in Natick District Court and threatened to sue the arresting office for a false arrest. The charges were dropped and sealed at Romney’s request.

“He did not have the right to arrest me because I was not a disorderly person. This was an obvious case of false arrest,” Romney said. “The officer obviously agreed because he agreed to dropping the case.”

This is beyond heinous:

A group of partiers on the roof of a Cornell frat house allegedly taunted black students and threw objects — including an empty Jack Daniels bottle — at them as they passed on the street.

Beverly Fonkwo, a sophomore, says she and a friend were walking home when people began throwing things at them from the Sigma Pi roof. When she confronted the crowd, she says, they threw more trash and a full beer can, saying “come on up here, Trayvon” and making other racist remarks.

The president of the fraternity, Zach Smith, told the Cornell Daily Sun on Sunday that the frat had “figured out who the perpetrator was, and will turn his name over to police.” Smith claimed that only one person was involved in the attack, and that the perpetrator was not a member of the fraternity.

The Cornell Sun reports that Cornell’s Chief of Police Kathy Zoner has confirmed people were making racist slurs and throwing bottles from the roof, but would not report more as an investigation by Ithaca Police is ongoing. But according to that statement and the students’ account of what must have have been a ridiculously fucked and scary experience, there were multiple people involved in the attack.

“I feel like it was targeted and racially motivated … we felt very threatened,” Beverly Fonkwo said, adding that the assailants “were just laughing at the whole situation until we called the police and then they ran inside.”

We’ll keep you posted on any updates.

After a year-long seizure and six more months of secrecy, the court records were finally released concerning the mysterious government takedown of Dajaz1.com – a popular blog dedicated to hip hop music and culture. The records confirm that one of the key reasons the blog remained censored for so long is that the government obtained three secret extensions of time by claiming that it was waiting for “rights holders” and later, the Recording Industry Association of America, to evaluate a “sampling of allegedly infringing content” obtained from the website and respond to other “outstanding questions.”

In other words, having goaded the government into an outrageous and very public seizure of the blog, the RIAA members refused to follow up and answer the government’s questions. In turn, the government acted shamefully, not returning the blog or apologizing for its apparent mistake, but instead secretly asking the court to extend the seizure and deny Dajaz1 the right to seek return of is property or otherwise get due process. The government also refused to answer Congressional questions about the case. ICE finally released the domain name in December of 2011, again with no explanation.

It’s not hard to guess what some of the unanswered “outstanding questions” might have been. Dajaz1.com, was seized with much fanfare by the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) division of the Department of Homeland Security over the 2010 Thanksgiving weekend. It was widely reported at the time that Dajaz1 should never have been targeted, that much of the blog’s content was lawful, and that many of the allegedly infringing links were given to the site’s owner by artists and labels themselves – including Kanye West, Diddy, and a vice president of a major record label. So, at a minimum, we imagine the government was asking the RIAA to provide some evidence that the seizure was justified in the first place.

When Glencore, the world’s biggest commodities brokerage firm, went public in May 2011, the initial public offering (IPO) on the London and Hong Kong stock exchanges made headlines for weeks in the Financial Times and the trade-industry press, which devoted endless columns to the company’s astonishing valuation of nearly $60 billion — higher than Boeing or Ford Motor Co. The massive new wealth turned nearly 500 employees into overnight multimillionaires and made billionaires of at least five senior executives, including CEO Ivan Glasenberg. “We are not going to change the way we operate,” vowed Glasenberg, who had started as a lowly coal trader for the Swiss firm nearly three decades earlier and, with the IPO, immediately became one of Europe’s richest men. “Being public will have absolutely no effect on the business.”

And what a business it is. The firm was forced to pull back the curtain on its famously secretive doings to go public, and what it revealed shocked even seasoned commodities traders. Glencore, which Reuters once called “the biggest company you never heard of,” turned out to be far more globally dominant than analysts had realized. According to its 1,637-page IPO prospectus , the company controlled more than half the international tradable market in zinc and copper and about a third of the world’s seaborne coal; was one of the world’s largest grain exporters, with about 9 percent of the global market; and handled 3 percent of daily global oil consumption for customers ranging from state-owned energy companies in Brazil and India to American multinationals like ExxonMobil and Chevron. All of which, the prospectus said, helped the firm post revenues of $186 billion in 2011 and employ some 55,000 people in at least 40 countries, generating an average return on equity of 38 percent, about three times higher than that of the gold-standard investment bank Goldman Sachs in 2010. Since then, the company has only gotten vaster in scale. It recently announced a $90 billion takeover of Xstrata, a global mining giant in which it already holds a 34 percent stake; if the deal goes through, Glencore will rule over an “empire stretching from the Sahara to South Africa,” as the Africa Confidential newsletter put it. As it is, Glencore already trades, manufactures, refines, ships, or stores at least 90 commodities in some three dozen countries. “Glencore is at the center of the raw material world,” said Peter Brandt, a longtime commodities trader. “Within this world there are giants, and Glencore is becoming a giant among giants.”

The Obama administration on Monday offered its first extensive explanation of how American officials decide when to use drones to kill suspected terrorists — a tactic that the government often treats as a classified secret even though it is widely known around the world.

“Yes, in full accordance with the law — and in order to prevent terrorist attacks on the United States and to save American lives — the United States government conducts targeted strikes against specific Al Qaeda terrorists, sometimes using remotely piloted aircraft, often referred to publicly as drones,” John O. Brennan , President Obama ’s top counterterrorism adviser, said before the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

The use of armed drones to strike at suspected militants in places like Pakistan and Yemen has grown dramatically under the Obama administration, and the emergence of the new technology — which has sharply reduced the cost and risk of warfare to its operators, making it easier to engage in sporadic combat in far-flung regions — has led to growing concerns both about civilian casualties and about a future in which other countries also acquire drones.

The United States government has been reluctant to talk openly about its use of drones, apparently in part because foreign governments that granted permission for strikes did so on the condition that the deals would remain secret.

Defending drone strikes as “legal, ethical, and wise,” Mr. Brennan said the president had directed officials to be more open about how they “carefully, deliberately and responsibly” decide to kill terrorism suspects — including what he described as “the rigorous standards and process of review to which we hold ourselves today when considering and authorizing strikes against a specific member of Al Qaeda outside the ‘hot’ battlefield of Afghanistan.”

Merely being a member of Al Qaeda or one of its allies is not enough to be targeted, Mr. Brennan said, because that describes many thousands of people. Rather, policymakers approve the killing of only those who pose a particular threat, he said, like operational leaders who are planning attacks against United States interests, lower-level militants training for such an attack, and those who possess “unique operational skills that are being leveraged in a planned attack.”

Mr. Brennan also said the administration preferred capturing such suspects alive — usually by telling a foreign government where to arrest them — and would authorize a strike only if that was not feasible.

Five young men from Cleveland are now in jail , accused of plotting to “blow up a bridge in the Cleveland area,” according to the FBI’s triumphant press release/criminal complaint. As is always the case with FBI terror stings, the “sting” part involved the bureau’s informant/agent provocateur mostly inventing the plot the accused have now been arrested for. In this case, the five planned to detonate smoke bombs as a distraction as they “topple[d] financial institution signs atop high rise buildings in downtown Cleveland.” But the informant (as usual, a sketchy unnamed character with a checkered past) strongly pushed the group to seriously consider different, more extreme plots. At the end, some or all of them were going to plant C-4 on the Route 82 Brecksville-Northfield High Level Bridge over the Cuyahoga Valley National Park.

So what was initially a political action aimed at financial institutions somehow morphed into a supposed attempt to destroy or damage a piece of publicly owned infrastructure in a national park. Anarchists sure do hate bridges, and parks, I guess. (No parliament of men has the authority to designate which spaces are “national parks”! The whole world is the worker’s national park!)

The FBI’s affadavit suggests that there was never actually a serious “plot.” The gang tossed around the idea of “taking out” a bridge in order to stop people from getting to work, but they also thought maybe they could use their (pretend) C4 on a Klan rally, or a neo-Nazi organization, or an oil well, or the Federal Reserve Bank. They eventually decided to maybe sink a ship. All of their many plans were super serious and well-thought out. (“To prevent capture, he suggested getting tacks that they could throw out of the back of a car if they get in a chase.”) Eventually they settled on the bridge thing, sort of, and bought fake IEDs from the guy they already suspected was a cop.

In other words, these are a bunch of dumbasses even by the standards of amateur “black bloc” dumbasses. Do you know how I know these morons weren’t serious? They planned to download the Anarchist Cookbook and follow its notoriously awful instructions. Every experienced anarchist knows that the Feds have a mole in your group house, but these guys were mainly concerned with having someone’s “hacker friend” explain to them how bitcoins work. Without the FBI’s intervention the most damage these idiots would’ve ever caused is a broken Starbucks window. So thank god they’re off the streets, and congrats to the FBI for getting this tale of dangerous, bomb-planting anarchists onto the news broadcasts on the day of Occupy’s big May Day action.

News Corp. executives Rupert and James Murdoch can give a small sigh of relief, perhaps, that U.K. lawmakers investigating the tabloid hacking and bribery scandal did not conclude they misled Parliament in earlier testimony.

But that may be just about the only relief the Murdochs receive.

The scathing report accuses the company and several of its former top British executives of lying to Parliament and of seeking to cover-up widespread phone hacking, computer hacking and bribing of government employees.

James Murdoch, who stepped down in recent months as chairman of the company’s British units, was accused by MPs of “willful blindness” in failing to realize he was authorizing a cover-up by making a huge confidential payment to a hacking victim. Rupert Murdoch, still CEO and chairman, was deemed “not a fit person” to lead a major international corporation.

The father and son find themselves bloodied at a time they are seeking to restore calm and show they still can assert control over the corporation.

News Corp. has its headquarters in New York City and is publicly traded on NASDAQ. But it is effectively run as a family concern. Despite the scandal, James Murdoch retains his role over global television operations as News Corp.’s deputy chief operating officer. The Murdoch family controls about 40 percent of shareholder votes; a friendly Saudi prince holds another seven percent of votes. That makes it nearly impossible for shareholders to dislodge the family’s control.

The conclusions of the panel were near-unanimous – save the assessment of Rupert Murdoch’s “fitness,” which was arrived by a majority vote. Conservative lawmakers voted against that language. That phrase has particular resonance because the U.K. media regulator Ofcom is reviewing whether News Corp. is a “fit and proper” controlling owner in the British pay TV giant BSkyB.

As mentioned in the quickies a few weeks ago, Sanal Edamaruku, president of the Indian Rationalist Association , revealed that a “weeping” cross was not actually a miracle at all, but in fact caused by a leaky drain. When he refused to retract his findings, the local Catholic Church filed a case against him for blasphemy and he now has arrest warrants out for him.

Some background: In March, Edamaruku was contacted by an Indian TV channel and asked to investigate a miracle in Mumbai. Edamaruku is no stranger to investigation. You may remember this story from a few years ago when he challenged a guru to kill him on live TV.

Edamaruku was being asked to investigate a crucifix in front of the Church of Our Lady of Velankanni. The crucifix had water dripping from the feet of the statue for several days. This water was being given to people to drink and claims of its healing powers had already begun to fly. When Edamaruku investigated, he quickly identified the the source of the water as a drain from a nearby washroom and explained the capillary action that caused the water to reach Jesus’ feet.

In presenting his findings on live TV , he also accused the priests of the church of ‘miracle mongering’ for publicity. The local church leaders quickly filed First Information Reports (FIR) against Edamaruku, accusing him of blasphemy, which is illegal under section 295A of the Indian Penal Code .

A US man who has spent more than 16 years in prison has been freed after new DNA evidence cleared his name.

Robert Dewey was sentenced to life for the rape and murder of a woman found strangled with a dog leash in Palisade, Colorado, in 1994.

But a court has now found him innocent, with the judge saying his exoneration marked a “historic day”.

Prosecutors say improved DNA techniques have led them to a new suspect, who is currently serving life.

Following his release, Mr Dewey met his girlfriend - whom he formed a relationship with by correspondence while in prison - for the first time.

Five men, including three self-described anarchists, are being questioned over an alleged plot to blow up an Ohio bridge.

The FBI says the accused were part of a plan to attack a four-lane bridge 15 miles (24km) from central Cleveland.

The public was not in danger because the explosives did not work and were being controlled by an undercover agent, the agency added.

None of the suspects are associated with foreign terror groups.

The overnight arrests were the result of an undercover sting operation as part of an investigation launched in October 2011, an FBI affidavit said.

The suspects, aged between 20 and 35, were due to appear in a federal court later on Tuesday.

Three of the men - Brandon Baxter, 20, Douglas Wright, 26, and Anthony Hayne, 35, face charges of conspiracy and trying to damage property and affect interstate commerce.

The other two, Connor Stephens, 20, and Joshua Stafford, 23, have not yet been charged.

“The individuals charged in this plot were intent on using violence to express their ideological views,” said Special Agent Stephen Anthony, of the FBI’s Cleveland division, in a statement.

“The Joint Terrorism Task Force will continue to be vigilant in its efforts to detect and disrupt any terrorism threat, domestic or international.”

An official from the US Department of Justice said that the plot was not connected to the first anniversary of Osama Bin Laden’s death.

A teenager in Georgia has decided to take things into her own hands after her school and police said they could do nothing about the classmates bullying her on Facebook.

Fourteen-year-old Alex Boston and her parents are filing suit against two classmates and their parents for libel after the two classmates allegedly created a fake Facebook account in her name, using a photo of her that they distorted. The account was also used to post a racist video to YouTube that implied that Boston hated African-Americans, and to leave crude comments on the Facebook pages of other friends, suggesting she was sexually active and smoked marijuana.

“All of these things were not true and they knew them to be not true,” says Boston’s attorney Natalie Woodward.

The activities exposed Boston to “hatred, contempt, and ridicule by her classmates and peers,” according to the complaint, which accuses the teens of defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress, and seeks punitive damages. The parents of the defendants are named in the suit because they paid for the Internet access that allowed their children to create the account and post the messages, and allegedly failed to supervise their activity.

Boston decided to take this novel route after learning of the Facebook page a year ago and complaining about the behavior to school officials at Palmer Middle School in Kennesaw, Georgia. They told her there was nothing they could do about it because the activity occurred off campus.

Police also said their hands were tied as well because there was no Georgia cyberbullying law they could apply to the situation.

In Georgia, schools can punish students if they bully others at school, but the law governing this does not extend to text messages and social media sites. Georgia does not have a law that covers off-campus harassment, though seven other states do have laws that cover this.

A key witness in the campaign finance case against John Edwards says he worried about using secret money to pay Mr Edwards’ mistress.

In his second day of testimony, Andrew Young told a jury that Mr Edwards assured him what they were doing was legal, but “it felt and smelled wrong”.

He was granted immunity from prosecution for testifying.

The two-time presidential hopeful denies the charges and could face up to 30 years in prison.

On the opening day of the trial, the court heard that Mr Young had contacted three other witnesses during the past fortnight to discuss their testimony, a potential violation of federal law.

Judge Catherine Eagles said the calls could be mentioned in court.

Fewer illegal immigrants stopped by police for minor traffic violations would be held for deportation under changes announced Friday to a federal fingerprinting program, Department of Homeland Security officials said.

The policy change on how federal agents will handle illegal immigrants arrested by state and local police for offenses like driving without a license came in the department’s response to a report by a task force on the federal program.

One of the task force’s central recommendations was that the program, called Secure Communities, should avoid deportations of traffic violators.

The sharply critical task force report, issued last September, argued that such deportations were inconsistent with the department’s stated priorities of removing foreigners with serious criminal records. The increase in deportations of minor offenders under Secure Communities, the task force concluded, was undermining vital ties of trust between local police and immigrant neighborhoods.

In a 19-page response released Friday, Homeland Security officials forcefully reasserted their support for the program, which has been the center of fierce controversy since it began in October 2008. The program has put President Obama at odds with governors in Illinois, Massachusetts and New York, who are his political allies, and eroded support for him in Latino communities. Both Democrats and Republicans acknowledge that Latinos will be crucial voters in the presidential election.

A US military judge has refused to dismiss the most serious charge against Private Bradley Manning, the alleged source of Wikileaks revelations.

The charge of aiding the enemy - one off 22 charges he faces - carries a life sentence in prison.

Col Denise Lind ruled against a defence argument that the government had not properly alleged that Pte Manning intended to help al-Qaeda.

Pte Manning’s court martial is set to begin on 21 September in Maryland.

In arguing the case for keeping the charge in place, prosecutors said Pte Manning knew the information would be seen by al-Qaeda, regardless of whether that was his main intention.

Col Lind eventually ruled that the charge must be proven during the court martial.

If prosecutors fail to prove Pte Manning knew he was giving information to the enemy, Col Lind said she would consider further motions from the defence.

Dozens of websites offering credit card details and other private information for sale have been taken down in a global police operation.

Britain’s Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) says raids in Australia, Europe, the UK and US are the culmination of two years of work.

Credit card numbers or bank account details of millions of unsuspecting victims were sold for as little as £2.

Two Britons and a man from Macedonia were arrested, with 36 sites shut down.

Some of the websites have been under observation for two years.

During that period the details of about two-and-a-half million credit cards were recovered - preventing fraud, according to industry calculations, of at least £0.5bn.

Lee Miles, the head of Soca’s cyber crime unit, told the BBC that criminals were now selling personal data on an “industrial” scale.

He said: “Criminals are turning over vast volumes of these cards. We must match the criminals - it’s an arms race.

“They are industrialising their processes and likewise we have to industrialise our processes to match them.”

Mr Miles said traditional “bedroom” hackers were being recruited by criminal gangs to write the malware or “phishing” software that steals personal information.

Other IT experts are used to write the computer code that enables the websites to cope, automatically, with selling the huge amounts of data.

“I’d rather arrest 10 code writers than 1,000 front-end fraudsters,” he said.

Hospital patients waiting in an emergency room or convalescing after surgery are being confronted by an unexpected visitor: a debt collector at bedside.

This and other aggressive tactics by one of the nation’s largest collectors of medical debts, Accretive Health, were revealed on Tuesday by the Minnesota attorney general, raising concerns that such practices have become common at hospitals across the country.

The tactics, like embedding debt collectors as employees in emergency rooms and demanding that patients pay before receiving treatment, were outlined in hundreds of company documents released by the attorney general. And they cast a spotlight on the increasingly desperate strategies among hospitals to recoup payments as their unpaid debts mount.

To patients, the debt collectors may look indistinguishable from hospital employees, may demand they pay outstanding bills and may discourage them from seeking emergency care at all, even using scripts like those in collection boiler rooms, according to the documents and employees interviewed by The New York Times.

In some cases, the company’s workers had access to health information while persuading patients to pay overdue bills, possibly in violation of federal privacy laws, the documents indicate.

The attorney general, Lori Swanson, also said that Accretive employees may have broken the law by not clearly identifying themselves as debt collectors.

Airport security staff screen millions of items of luggage each year
Four current and former security screeners at Los Angeles international airport have been arrested and charged with drug-trafficking and bribery.

The four accepted cash to allow large shipments of cocaine, methamphetamine and marijuana through X-ray machines, the US justice department said.

The charges allege 22 separate payments of up to $2,400 ($1,500) allowed drug-runners to bypass airport security.

A prosecutor said they “placed greed above the nation’s security needs”.

“The allegations in this case describe a significant breakdown of the screening system,” Andre Birotte said.

“Airport screeners act as a vital checkpoint for homeland security, and air travellers should believe in the fundamental integrity of security systems at our nation’s airports.”

Two of the four accused are current employees of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), while the other two used to work for the organisation.

The current employees, John Whitfield, 23, and Capeline McKinney, 25, are accused of allowing shipments of more than 20kg (44lb) to pass through a screening area while they were on shift.

Former TSA screener Joy White, 27, is accused of a similar offence, while Naral Richardson, 30, is alleged to have made arrangements for shipments to pass unhindered.

Other individuals named in the indictment are accused of being part of the smuggling ring, several working as drug mules.

Special Agent Briane Greyof the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) said the accused “traded on their positions at one the world’s most crucial airport security checkpoints”.

The TSA, created in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks, is part of the US Department of Homeland Security and has responsibility for screening millions air passengers and huge quantities of luggage and freight each year.

The agency faces frequent criticism from passengers who accuse screeners of over-zealous physical examinations. Over the past week an account posted on Facebook accusing agents of requiring a pat-down of a four-year-old girl has put the TSA back in the spotlight.

A former head of the TSA, Kip Hawley, recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the US security system is “broken” and needs root-and-branch reform.

Rep. Todd Akin is not one to mince words.

At a policy debate on Saturday, the Missouri Republican slammed federal student loans, saying that the government should quit the student loan market completely.

“America has got the equivalent of the stage three cancer of socialism because the federal government is tampering in all kinds of stuff it has no business tampering in,” Akin said, according to the Columbia Daily Tribune.

Akin is one of three candidates seeking the GOP nomination to challenge Sen. Claire McCaskill in November. McCaskill is seen as one of the more vulnerable Senate Democrats up for re-election this year. Conservative groups are wasting no time, spending more than $3 million on television and radio ads in Missouri to date, according to the Washington Post.

Akin’s opposition to federal student loans is nothing new. He voted against the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act in 2009, warning that it would result in lost jobs and increased government debt. “This bill should serve as a warning to the depth of the Democrat majority’s appetite for the consolidation of federal control and the dismantling of private industry,” he said in a press release.

The bill, which was signed into law in 2010, dramatically expanded financial aid for college students and restructured student aid programs.

Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, signaled a rare agreement with President Barack Obama on Monday when he said that he fully supports Obama’s effort to extend current interest rates on federal student loans. To the dismay of approximately 8 million students, the rate is set to double to 6.8 percent this summer.

Whether or not Akin will get the chance to face McCaskill in the fall is still unclear. He has the backing of at least two prominent social conservatives: Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) and Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) both endorsed him in April.

If he does end up winning the GOP nomination, the race has at least a chance of being civil. McCaskill found herself sitting behind Akin on a plane last month. “He’s always friendly and polite,” she tweeted. “I appreciate that.”

The German Federal Court of Justice in the southwestern city of Karlsruhe said on Tuesday that clients, and not banks, are responsible for money lost in online phishing scams.

The country’s highest civil court ruled that in the case of a German retiree who lost €5,000 ($6,608) in a bank transfer fraudulently sent to Greece, the man was negligent, and was therefore liable to pay the amount lost. In 2010, Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), received over 5,000 reports of phishing, a huge rise over the previous year.

According to the The Local, an English-language German news site, the incident involved an occasion when the man entered 10 transaction numbers, also known as TAN codes, which are commonly used in German banks. The codes are used as a way to verify that a given online transaction is accurate, and can be looked up on a printed sheet of paper, or sent by SMS, or can also be generated by a small electronic device.

However, the man entered his TAN codes onto a website designed to look like his bank’s site, Sparda Bank. The court ruled that the bank was not liable, as it had specifically provided warnings to its customers against this practice.

“The plaintiff argued that the bank had a duty to protect its customers from the abuse of these codes,” The Local reported. “But the federal court upheld previous judgements by the district and state courts, agreeing with the bank’s argument that the customer should bear responsibility for falling for the con.”

The site added that Sparda Bank said it was “widely known” that being asked to input multiple TAN codes was a sure sign of phishing.

Connecticut has become the 17th state in the US to abolish the death penalty.

Governor Dannel Malloy signed a bill in a low-key ceremony, after legislators voted earlier in April to end capital punishment for all future cases.

Mr Malloy hailed a “historic moment”, but said it was time for “sober reflection, not celebration”.

The Connecticut decision comes two days after California confirmed voters will be asked in November whether they want to abolish their own death penalty law.

Elsewhere, in North Carolina a convicted man was taken off death row last week after his trial was ruled tainted by racial bias.

Marcus Robinson’s case was the first to be heard under North Carolina’s Racial Justice Act (RJA).

The latest ugly (and seemingly needless) partisan fight on Capitol Hill concerns a measure designed to prevent domestic violence against women.

On Wednesday, women from both parties raced to hold news conferences in which they promoted bills (or in the Republicans’ case, a germ of a bill) that would extend the Violence Against Women Act, replete with upsetting personal anecdotes meant to demonstrate the need for reauthorization, if not bipartisanship in seeking it.

The act, first passed by Congress in 1994 and reauthorized, in a bipartisan and unremarkable manner, in 2000 and 2005, gives tools to law enforcement officers, courts and social service agencies to prevent and respond to domestic violence. Its passage is widely credited with reducing domestic violence.

The Senate version of the reauthorization, which passed the Senate Judiciary Committee along partisan lines, would continue existing grant programs that aid local law enforcement agencies and shelters and would strengthen federal stalking laws – measures supported by Republicans, who would also like to consolidate some programs and put caps on Justice Department salaries among other streamlining processes.

The version being offered by Senate Democrats has attracted some Republican resistance because it would give tribal authorities the ability to prosecute non-American Indians in cases of domestic violence on reservations. It would also include gay, bisexual and transgender victims in programs for domestic violence and allow more illegal immigrants who are victims of domestic violence to claim temporary visas.

Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, Republican of Texas, is working on her own version of the bill, which would be offered as an amendment to the Democrats’ version. It features many modifications, including making eligibility for services under the law gender-neutral and maintaining the current cap on visas.

In a news conference Wednesday morning, Senators Patty Murray of Washington, Barbara Boxer of California and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, all Democrats, berated Republicans for resisting their bill – even though its 61 co-sponsors, some of them Republicans, say that the bill will pass their chamber.

A British man convicted of plotting to blow up an aircraft has told a court that Osama Bin Laden said his attack would bring down the US economy.

Saajid Badat said he had intended to kill hundreds of passengers by detonating a device hidden in his shoe - but he pulled out at the last minute.

His recorded testimony was played at the New York trial of Adis Medunjanin.

In exchange for co-operating with prosecutors, Badat was released two years early from his 13-year jail term.

Details have also emerged of how Badat was radicalised by Babar Ahmad, a British terrorist suspect who has been held for over seven years awaiting extradition to the US on terrorism charges.

The US justice department has filed the first criminal charges linked to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

A former BP engineer was arrested on charges of intentionally destroying evidence.

Kurt Mix of Katy, Texas, faces two counts of obstruction of justice.

He is accused of trying to delete text messages between himself and a supervisor, in October 2010, containing details about how attempts to cap the leaking well were going.

In a sworn affidavit, FBI special agent Barbara O’Donnell said Mr Mix had “deleted numerous electronic records relating to the Deepwater Horizon disaster response, including records concerning the amount of oil potentially flowing from the well, after being repeatedly informed of his obligation to maintain such records”.

Mr Mix, 50, was involved in some of BP’s attempts to cap the well, including the unsuccessful Top Kill efforts in May 2010.

He resigned from BP earlier in 2012.

The justice department said he would make his first appearance in Houston federal court later on Tuesday.

The Deepwater Horizon rig, which had been leased by BP, exploded on 20 April 2010, killing 11 workers and eventually spilling more than 200 million gallons of crude oil.

Kurt Mix, a drilling and completions project engineer for BP during the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, has become the first employee of the oil company to be arrested. Mix is charged with obstruction of justice and allegedly deleting over 200 text messages from his iPhone pertaining to the explosion and repair of the oil well and rig in what became America’s worst offshore oil spill.

Mix was involved with estimating the flow rate of the oil from the ruptured well on the sea floor, and authorities are investigating his involvement with the Top Kill efforts, which pumped heavy mud into the broken well to try to stop the spill. Experts knew that if the oil was spilling out at the rate of 15,000 barrels per day or greater, Top Kill couldn’t work, but BP publicly claimed the well was spilling 5,000 barrels per day.

Forensic experts apparently recovered a deleted text from Mix’s iPhone from the first day of BP’s Top Kill effort saying “Too much flowrate—over 15,000.” The texts were allegedly deleted after Mix had been instructed to preserve documentation pertaining to the spill. In a statement, BP would not comment on the case but said it was cooperating with the Justice Department.

If convicted, Mix faces up to 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine for each of the two counts with which he’s charged.

The Tennessee House last week voted 80-18 to make miscarriage — or the killing of any fertilized egg — murder. Last night, the Tennessee Senate passed by a 28-2 margin a companion version of the bill. The bill specifically includes all embryos “at any state of gestation in utero.” Tennessee’s Republican Governor Bill Haslam has not indicated if he will sign the bill.

To be clear, this bill goes further than covering, say, a violent attacker harming an expectant mother who then, unfortunately, miscarries. This bill, House Bill 3517 and the Senate’s companion, makes anyone’s actions that presumably cause a miscarriage murder. Opponents of the bill question how law enforcement would actually enforce this law or determine if someone’s action was a direct cause of a miscarriage.

An American citizen who says he was illegally detained and repeatedly tortured in a US navy jail has asked the Supreme Court to reinstate his lawsuit against senior US officials.

Jose Padilla accuses current Defence Secretary Leon Panetta, former Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other officials of breaking the constitution.

Padilla was convicted of terrorism-related offences in 2007.

In January, a court upheld an earlier ruling dismissing the suit.

Padilla’s allegations relate to the more than three years from 2002 in which he was held an “enemy combatant”.

His civil lawsuit against several serving and former US officials alleges he was tortured by being kept in darkness and isolation, deprived of sleep and religious materials, and kept from family and lawyers.

In 2011 his case was dismissed by a US judge, who said the law did not offer clear guidelines on the detention of enemy combatants.

Padilla’s appeal against the decision was rejected in January this year by the US Appeals Court, which ruled that the officials in question had partial immunity.

The current appeal to the Supreme Court is being brought on Padilla’s behalf by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and his mother, Estela Lebron.

Padilla is currently serving a 17-year sentence after being found guilty of helping a US-based al-Qaeda cell.

He was arrested in Chicago on his arrival on a flight from Pakistan in 2002, after allegedly having undergone terrorism training in Afghanistan.

President George W Bush declared him an enemy combatant a month later, saying he possessed valuable intelligence about al-Qaeda.

Taken to a navy jail in South Carolina, he was held there for more than three years.

Padilla’s lawsuit argues that the US authorities created the category of enemy combatant to circumvent suspects’ normal constitutional rights.

The Cafferty case differs from Jacobson in two key ways. First, the government’s initial evidence of interest in child pornography was much stronger—”Sick Room” was far more obviously illegal than anything in Bare Boys at the time. The government wasn’t creating desire here.

But more interesting for our purposes is the amount of effort required in the two cases. To communicate with Jacobson back in the 1980s, investigators had to create documents, corporate logos, brochures, surveys—all bogus and all made without computers. All of this material then had to be mailed, and investigators could wait for weeks hoping their target would mail back a response. Finally, they had no easy way to see what non-government activities Jacobson was up to through the mail without an invasive and expensive search of all his incoming mail.

But with Cafferty, everything had become so much simpler. PayPal had initially turned over the information that gave the feds a juicy 5,000-name digital database of people to run down. The e-mails collected there made targeting simple, and the government could build a single website that it could use for many different people. Everything could be logged and tracked, and responses might be almost immediately compared to the years the government spent mailing Jacobson its surveys and catalogs.

Most importantly, search warrant and subpoenas now give the government access to incredible caches of information. Want to know what else a target is up to online? Search his e-mail. Want to find someone hidden? Use the fake site to log his IP address, then use an ISP to find the account holder. Want to track someone’s movements? Watch the changing IP addresses he uses to log into online services. Need to socially engineer some aspect of your investigation? Find his Facebook and dating site profiles. Need evidence for a trial? Simply search someone’s computer, which contains everything from browser logs to file storage to archived e-mail and instant messaging.

In the Jacobson case, investigators could only obtain their initial list by raiding a bookstore. Followups consisted of direct communications between the government and the suspect. Today, most of the information comes from third parties who are not themselves targets of suspicion: PayPal (money), Yahoo (e-mail), Facebook (social networking), Google (search history, Android phone unlocks, e-mail), Verizon (phone location tracking, text messages), etc. Each of these companies has dedicated units that exist to answer government orders for such information, and they provide it rapidly. In addition, investigators can conduct their searches without tipping off suspects.

While it took them a few years to shift to a digital mindset, cops everywhere now have real savvy about getting the information they need. It doesn’t take some elite federal squad of “cyber” police. In case after case today, we see even local detectives using cell phone tracking, e-mail searches, and more. And when they need the big guns, they know how to call in “tools” like the fake child porn site.

In combination, the digital techniques available offer incredible customization in investigating a target. While stories about online crime often tell tales of invisible bad guys using their elite skills from some untraceable Batcave, the Internet provides real benefits to law enforcement, too. If it has made it simpler for child pornographers to find each other and to build globe-spanning communities, it has also given creative investigators powerful tools of their own.

The White House says it has found no evidence its advance staff were implicated in the Secret Service sex scandal in Colombia.

Spokesman Jay Carney said there was “no indication of misconduct”, but revealed that an internal investigation had been launched by White House lawyers.

Meanwhile, a 12th military service member has been linked to the scandal.

One member of Congress says he expects more Secret Service agents to be forced out in the coming days.

Six agents have already resigned or been forced out.

Mr Carney said the White House investigation had been launched on Friday out of “due diligence”.

WASHINGTON — President Obama, seeking to expand his administration’s response to oppression in the Middle East, announced new sanctions on Monday against those who provide Syria and Iran with cutting-edge technology to track down dissidents for abuse, torture or death.

The measures underscored the role that computers, social media and cellphones have played not just in organizing resistance to authoritarian governments but also in helping security services crack down on those dissidents. The new sanctions are meant to put technology providers on notice that they will be held responsible for enabling human rights abuses.

The announcement came as Mr. Obama continues to search for a more effective response to the killings in Syria, where more than 9,000 people have died over the last year as the government of President Bashar al-Assad has tried to suppress a popular uprising. Critics have described Mr. Obama’s response as too passive and have called for more robust action to halt the violence. Mr. Obama argued on Monday that the focus on technology reflected an ever-widening set of actions that would eventually stop Mr. Assad.

“These technologies should be in place to empower citizens, not to repress them,” Mr. Obama said in a speech at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “It’s one more step toward the day that we know will come, the end of the Assad regime that has brutalized the Syrian people.”

The president, who toured the museum alongside Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, presented himself as a champion of Israel in the face of Republican complaints that he has not been supportive enough of America’s closest ally in the Middle East.

He noted that his administration had voted against United Nations resolutions condemning Israel and had worked to counter any threat from Iran. “The United States will do everything in our power to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon,” he said.

The executive orders, which Mr. Obama signed on Sunday and were first reported by The Washington Post, authorize restrictions on financial assets and bar those who provide technology to Iran and Syria from entering the United States. The restrictions primarily target those based inside the two countries.

A federal judge ruled Friday that Orlando, Fla., police violated a protester’s free speech rights when they arrested him for writing political messages in chalk on the plaza in front of city hall.

Timothy Osmar, who is homeless, was arrested twice last December for violating a city ordinance that prohibits writing or painting “advertising matter” on city streets and sidewalks, the Orlando Sentinel reported.

Osmar was arrested the first time after he wrote “the revolution will not be televised.” He was arrested again a week later after writing “All I want for Christmas is a revolution.”

U.S. District Magistrate Judge David A. Baker, in a 10-page ruling Friday, held that the ordinance had been misapplied because it was meant to regulate advertising, not political speech, The judge also said the issues Osmar raised go directly to open debate of important public concerns in the public square.

Baker pointed out that the Orlando Rotary Club has, with the city’s blessing, held a chalk art festival in the same plaza for several years. He also noted that Mayor Buddy Dyer encouraged local businesses to chalk up their sidewalks to show support for the Orlando Magic during the 2009 playoffs. “The city may not selectively interpret and enforce the ordinance based on its own desire to further the causes of particular favored speakers,” he wrote.

Currently in the state of New York, police and prosecutors use condoms as evidence of prostitution-related offenses, including the murky crime of “loitering for the purpose of engaging in a prostitution offense.” Even when they don’t use condoms as evidence to aid them in making arrests and convictions, in the process of doing their stop-and-frisks police often confiscate and destroy condoms.

When I tell people about this practice, they’re usually shocked. It makes no sense whatsoever. New York City has distributed ample free condoms in clinics since 1971; in 2007, New York City was the first city in the U.S. to launch a city-branded condom initiative. So there’s this: New York City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene distributes free condoms to people who are at risk for STIs, including HIV, and unplanned pregnancy, and the New York Police Department takes them away.

When this issue first started getting media attention, a lot of people were up in arms about it because, to paraphrase, “This could happen to anyone carrying condoms!” But let’s be clear: The use of condoms as evidence of prostitution and the confiscation of condoms is very much an issue of profiling. It’s an issue of who the police think might be trading sex: poor people of color, especially trans women, who police perceive as loitering in public space. The use of condoms as evidence of prostitution affects not just people who are trading sex, but also people profiled as trading sex.

But a coalition of sex worker rights groups, harm reduction agencies, reproductive rights groups and other allies are organizing to get New York State Assembly bill A1008/S323 , which bars condoms from being used as evidence of prostitution, passed into law. This bill, commonly referred to as the “No Condoms as Evidence” bill, has been reintroduced in every legislative session for more than a decade, so it has a depressing history of not getting passed. This time, however, there’s more organizing around the issue.

John Edwards , whose personal life and political career have publicly fallen apart over the last five years, will face a federal jury on Monday in the state that sent him to the Senate and twice rallied around his quest for the presidency.

Mr. Edwards stands accused of misusing campaign money to hide both an affair with a former campaign videographer and the child they conceived as he made his run for the 2008 Democratic nomination for president.

The trial in nearby Greensboro, which Judge Catherine C. Eagles of Federal District Court expects to take six weeks, promises to continue the long story of Mr. Edwards’s derailed career and scarred personal life.

But for the government, the case goes beyond the messiness of an affair that Mr. Edwards repeatedly denied, even as his wife, Elizabeth, was suffering from the cancer that eventually took her life in 2010.

Prosecutors have been unyielding in their pursuit of a case that they say represents a clear and flagrant misuse of $925,000 that they argue was used to try to influence the outcome of the election. If he is convicted on all six counts, Mr. Edwards, 58, faces up to 30 years in prison and $1.5 million in fines.

The government’s case is simple: Mr. Edwards knowingly accepted the money from two wealthy donors and used it to keep information from the public that would have surely torpedoed his presidential campaign. Thus, the money was a campaign contribution and its use a conspiracy.

Mr. Edwards’s legal team rejects that argument entirely: the money was a gift from two friends and was intended to help a candidate they believed in deal with a personal problem. Mr. Edwards, his lawyers say, was not aware of the donations.

They will try to characterize the case as being politically motivated. It began under the tenure of George Holding, a Republican appointee of President George W. Bush who stayed on as a United States attorney under the Obama administration to bring the case to trial.

Mr. Holding had long been politically hostile to Mr. Edwards, the defense lawyers say, and hoped the case would help his political ambitions. Mr. Holding retired last year, a month after securing Mr. Edward’s indictments, and then announced he was running for Congress in 2012.

But some political strategists dismiss the defense’s theory as mere posturing. The case has little political relevance, they say, especially so long after the alleged crimes were committed.

Tony Rudy, who served as deputy chief of staff to Tom DeLay , a former House majority leader, was sentenced on Friday to five months in a halfway house. Mr. Rudy, 45, pleaded guilty six years ago to conspiring with Jack Abramoff , a powerful Republican lobbyist, and others to accept gifts as a Congressional staff member and later to offering gifts to public officials as a lobbyist in exchange for legislative favors. His cooperation with prosecutors has led to 18 convictions.

On Tuesday, Wallace and his friend Albert Woodfox will mark one of the more unusual, and shameful, anniversaries in American penal history. Forty years ago to the day, they were put into solitary confinement in Louisiana’s notorious Angola jail. They have been there ever since.

They have spent 23 hours of every one of the past 14,610 days locked in their single-occupancy 9ft-by-6ft cells. Each cell, Amnesty International records, has a toilet, a mattress, sheets, a blanket, pillow and a small bench attached to the wall. Their contact with the world outside the windowless room is limited to the occasional visit and telephone call, “exercise” three times a week in a caged concrete yard, and letters that are opened and read by prison guards.

A new documentary film takes us into that cell, providing rare insight into the personal psychological impact of such prolonged isolation. Herman’s House tracks the experiences and thoughts of Wallace as he reflects on four decades banged away in a box.

Over on her new website, CNN HLN anchor Richelle Carey asks a very interesting question: Does ‘Stand Your Ground’ apply to domestic abuse?

The ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws that have become well-known in the wake of the killing of Trayvon Martin. The laws are supposed allow an individual to use lethal force if they reasonable believe they are in imminent harm. So what about victims of domestic abuse? On August 1, 2010, Marissa Alexander, a 31 year old Florida mother of 3, is about to be sentenced for aggravated assault after firing a warning shot at her husband. The shot she fired missed him, but the charges stuck.

Alexander’s friends and family claim that if the ‘Stand Your Ground’ law applies in other cases, it should certainly apply in this case where she was attempting to prevent abuse from her husband after 4 years of violence. (Alexander previously filed a protective order against him after he was arrested for abusing her.)

Her sister says, “She did what she had to do to live. I believe if she didn’t do that then I wouldn’t, my sister would be sitting in jail today — she’d be sitting in a coffin.” During a fight where her husband threatened her, Alexander fired a “warning shot into the ceiling.” Under ‘Stand Your Ground’, there is no duty to retreat if you fear for your life.

The judge in the case dismissed the ‘Stand Your Ground’ defense at the pre-trial hearing, which decides whether or not the law applies to the case before the court. Her defense attorney chose not to use the “Battered Spouse” defense, which requires an expert to validate her status as a victim of violence through measuring what psychological factors would lead her to defend herself with violence. Experts actually say that there are elements of both “Stand Your Ground” and “Battered Spouse” in this case, but that the facts given are difficult to prove either. And Alexander rejected a plea deal because she felt confident that the jury would find that she acted in self defense.

Apparently not. With Florida’s mandatory minimums and the fact the judge has no discretion to lessen the sentence given the fact that Alexander is a victim of domestic abuse, she awaits sentencing, which is expected to be 20 years.

US President Barack Obama says American soldiers shown in photos apparently abusing Afghan corpses in 2010 should be held accountable, a spokesman said.

“The conduct depicted in those photos is reprehensible,” White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters.

The pictures, published in the Los Angeles Times, shows the soldiers posing with the mangled remains of suspected suicide bombers.

Mr Carney also expressed disappointment that the Times published the photos.

It comes at a particularly sensitive time for US-Afghan relations, after a series of incidents - including the murder of 17 Afghan civilians in March - stirred up anti-Western sentiment.

Nato combat troops aim to leave Afghanistan in 2014.

Scarfing down chicken wings, losing thousands in a night at the table, men—and the occasional woman—flock to the Big Apple’s illegal poker parlors. A former waitress reveals what goes down there.

A federal appeals court has thrown out the conviction of a former Goldman Sachs programmer who stole source code from the firm’s high-frequency trading (HFT) system. The court holds that the defendant’s actions did not fit the definitions of the federal crimes for which he had been convicted. “We decline to stretch or update statutory words of plain and ordinary meaning in order to better accommodate the digital age,” the court wrote.

Sergey Aleynikov was a top programmer for Goldman Sachs until he left in 2009 to work for a start-up firm planning to build a competing high-frequency trading system. Just before he left, he uploaded a copy of Goldman’s HFT code to a remote server. He later downloaded the files to his home computer, but his actions were discovered and he was arrested by the FBI a few weeks later.

Digital books are not like that. There are fixed costs associated with getting the book together in the first place, but selling five copies costs about the same as selling 5,000 or 5 million. A properly motivated individual or organization might even give a digital book away for free the way the Center for Economic and Policy Research’s Dean Baker did last year.

A for-profit company like industry leader Amazon doesn’t want to give tons of books away for free, but they do have interests beyond pricing things at a profit-maximizing level. They’d like people to buy Kindles, for example, and they want as many folks as possible to start reading digital books. That’s why they launched the Kindle with a mandate that books be sold for a flat rate of $9.99 even when charging more in specific cases might have made more sense. And that’s also why they ignore bandwidth and storage costs and give public domain books away for free (I’ve been enjoying The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes).

Publishers were, of course, free not to release Kindle editions of their titles, but most could see the need to get on the digital bandwagon. This was a very dangerous situation for major publishers. They’d gone from lording it over a landscape of thousands of independent retailers to dealing with just a handful of major chains. Now they were threatened with being suppliers to a monopsony purchaser of e-books, perennially stuck under Amazon’s thumb. Enter Apple, the tech giant with an insatiable appetite to “control the whole widget.” Even though the Kindle Reader for iPad is, in my opinion, the very best way in the whole world to read books, Apple wanted its own iBooks store. And to get it, they were prepared to give publishers what they wanted—the right to set their own prices, in exchange for sending a hefty 30 percent cut to Cupertino, Calif.

So far, so good. Except the government is alleging that Apple didn’t just show up offering a better deal. They’re saying it actively colluded with the five major publishers to raise prices.

There’s no doubt that bullying does serious harm, both to those who are victimized as well as to perpetrators and bystanders. Combating bullying—alongside other forms of aggression and violence—should be a social priority. But bullying is not just a youth problem. If we want to help young people, we need to put an end to adult meanness and cruelty and take responsibility for how we perpetuate problematic values and intolerance. We cannot expect youth to treat each other kindly when we accept politicians berating each other for sport, parents talking behind their neighbors’ backs, and reality TV stars becoming famous for treating each other horribly. If we want to create a kinder, braver world, we must collectively work to develop compassion, empathy and respect.

WASHINGTON — The United States Secret Service placed 11 employees on leave on Saturday as the agency’s internal watchdog opened an investigation into accusations of misconduct involving prostitution in Cartagena, Colombia, where President Obama arrived on Friday for a summit meeting.

In addition, five United States military service members who were working with the Secret Service unit have been confined to quarters and are facing an investigation because they violated a curfew and might “have been involved in inappropriate conduct” in the same hotel as the agents, the military said.

The Secret Service employees, including both agents and officers, had been sent to Colombia to provide support to teams preparing security measures ahead of the president’s arrival. On Friday, the Secret Service abruptly replaced the entire unit.

Details about the episode, which took place on Wednesday night and involved at least two Secret Service supervisors, were coming into focus on Saturday night, though there were still some conflicting details in accounts of what had happened. Officials emphasized that the investigation was still in its early stages.

But in a phone interview, Representative Peter T. King, the New York Republican who is chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, which oversees the Secret Service, said that he was told in a briefing that the 11 agents and officers were suspected of bringing women back to their rooms.

While prostitution is legal in designated areas in Colombia, such behavior would violate agency rules of conduct, in part because it could expose the agents to blackmail or facilitate espionage, help an enemy get inside a security perimeter and otherwise distract agents when they are supposed to be focused on protecting the president, he said.

Jury selection has begun in the trial of a former US presidential candidate suspected of using secret campaign funds to hide his pregnant mistress.

John Edwards denies knowledge of money allegedly used for private jets, hotels and medical care for Rielle Hunter.

Prosecutors say Mr Edwards raised and used funds to keep up a public image as a “family man”, keep his affair secret and keep his presidential hopes alive.

Mr Edwards could face up to 30 years in prison and $1.5m (£940,000) in fines.

It is alleged that Mr Edwards, 58, illegally raised more than $900,000 from two wealthy campaign donors during his unsuccessful bid for the White House in 2008.

He allegedly used the funds to cover up an extramarital affair with a campaign worker, while his wife Elizabeth was suffering from cancer. Mr Edwards initially denied the affair.

The charges also suggest that he asked a colleague on his campaign to claim paternity of Ms Hunter’s daughter, who was born in February 2008.

A Florida neighbourhood watch volunteer has been charged with second-degree murder over the shooting of unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin.

George Zimmerman turned himself in on Wednesday and is now in custody, special prosecutor Angela Corey said.

Martin’s parents said the charge was a first step towards justice, but added there was “a long way to go”.

Mr Zimmerman, 28, claimed self-defence and was not arrested in the weeks after Trayvon Martin’s fatal shooting.

“Today we filed an information charging George Zimmerman with murder in the second degree,” Ms Corey told reporters.

“I can tell you we did not come to this decision lightly. Let me emphasise that we do not prosecute by public pressure or petition,” Ms Corey added, in a reference to the intense media scrutiny that has surrounded the case in recent weeks.

A prosecutor says she will not hold a hearing to determine if a Florida neighbourhood watchman should be tried for shooting dead unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin.

Angela Corey says her office is still investigating the incident. She could file charges or drop the case.

George Zimmerman gunned down the 17-year-old in February in a gated community in Sanford, Florida.

Mr Zimmerman, 28, claims he acted in self-defence.

Ms Corey told CNN that she had never used a grand jury - a panel of 25 civilians who establish if there is enough evidence in a case to proceed to trial - to decide on charges in a potential justifiable homicide.

“We do a thorough investigation,” she said. “We make that decision ourselves.”

The case has attracted national attention about racial profiling and Florida’s “stand your ground” law, which permits an individual to open fire in self-defence if he or she feels threatened.

Lawyers for the Florida man who killed an unarmed black teenager say they have lost contact with George Zimmerman and can no longer represent him.

Craig Sonner and Hal Uhrig said they had not heard from him since Sunday, but said he had personally contacted the special prosecutor’s office.

The lawyers added Mr Zimmerman was “probably suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome”.

Mr Zimmerman has said he shot Trayvon Martin, 17, in self-defence.

The death of Trayvon Martin has sparked a nationwide debate over self-defence laws and heightened racial tensions.

His family and protesters around the country have called for Mr Zimmerman’s arrest.

European judges will rule later whether six terror suspects, including radical Muslim cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri, can be extradited from the UK to the US.

They include alleged terror fundraiser Babar Ahmad and two men accused of a role in two 1998 US embassy bombings.

The European Court of Human Rights has considered whether human rights would be breached if the men receive lengthy sentences in certain prison conditions.

The suspects say they could be held in solitary confinement.

They argue that they might be held in a high-security prison in Colorado, known as a “supermax” prison and claim that if convicted there is very little or no prospect of ever being released.

The six suspects, who have been indicted on various charges of alleged terrorism in the US, say conditions of detention at a so-called “supermax” prison would amount to ill-treatment under article three of the human rights code.

The European code states: “No-one shall be subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”.

Five former New Orleans police officers who shot six unarmed civilians, two fatally, on a bridge in the wake of Hurricane Katrina have been jailed.

The prison terms range from six to 65 years for the shootings on the Danziger Bridge in September 2005.

Four of the officers were found guilty of firearms offences and the fifth was jailed for helping the cover-up.

The officers planted a gun and fabricated witnesses and false reports to make the shootings appear justified.

Kenneth Bowen, 38, Robert Gisevius, 39, Anthony Villavaso, 35, and Robert Faulcon, 48, were convicted of firearms charges, and civil rights violations in the shootings and cover-up.

Faulcon received the longest sentence of 65 years; Bowen and Gisevius received 40 years each; and Villavaso was sentenced to 38 years in prison.

Retired Sgt Arthur Kaufman, 55, the officer who was assigned to investigate the shootings, received a six-year prison sentence for helping to co-ordinate the cover-up.

Kaufman is the only officer who was not already imprisoned when the sentences were handed down. He is due to report to prison on 23 May, the Times Picayune newspaper reports.

The Defense Department has referred charges including terrorism, hijacking, murder and war crimes against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four others accused of planning the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to a commission for trial by a military judge at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the Pentagon said on Wednesday. The five, who will be arraigned within 30 days, could be sentenced to death if convicted. Earlier proceedings against the men were suspended when the Obama administration proposed a civilian trial in New York. Congressional and local opposition stymied the move.

In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education. In 2011, California spent $9.6 billion on prisons, versus $5.7 billion on higher education. Since 1980, California has built one college campus; it’s built 21 prisons. The state spends $8,667 per student per year. It spends about $50,000 per inmate per year.

Read: Deterring Iran is the best option.

Why is this happening? Prisons are a big business. Most are privately run. They have powerful lobbyists and they have bought most state politicians. Meanwhile, we are bankrupting out states and creating a vast underclass of prisoners who will never be equipped for productive lives.

I never thought I’d say this, but God bless you, Pat Robertson.

In essence, laws nationwide sanction reckless vigilantism in the form of self-defense claims. A bunker mentality is codified by law.

Those reducing this tragedy to racism miss a more accurate and painful picture. Why is a child dead? The rise of “secure,” gated communities, private cops, private roads, private parks, private schools, private playgrounds — private, private, private —exacerbates biased treatment against the young, the colored and the presumably poor.

The Center for Copyright Information, the organization tasked with overseeing a new anti-piracy scheme negotiated by the nation’s leading content companies and ISPs last summer, began to take shape Monday as the organization announced its executive director and several members of its advisory board. The picks suggest that the architects of the “Copyright Alert” system may be making a serious effort to strike a balance between the interests of copyright holders and the rights of users.

Leading the organization as its executive director will be Jill Lesser, whose résumé includes a stint at the liberal advocacy group People for the American Way and time as an executive at AOL Time Warner. In a statement, she pledged to focus on “education and deterrence, not punishment.”

CCI also named several people for its advisory board. Jerry Berman, founder of the Center for Democracy and Technology (where Lesser serves as a board member) will advise the organization. So will Marsali Hancock of iKeepSafe.org and Jules Polenetsky of the Future of Privacy Forum.

The most surprising choice for the advisory board is Gigi Sohn of Public Knowledge, who has been one of the most persistent critics of major content companies and their campaign for ever-harsher copyright laws. In an emailed statement, Sohn said that she still had some concerns about the way the “Copyright Alert” system works, but she hopes that serving on the CCI’s advisory board will allow her to “advocate for the rights of Internet users and to provide transparency.”

“If implemented reasonably, the Copyright Alert System should alleviate the push for government intervention and excessive litigation and ultimately be a net positive,” Sohn said. Sohn praised Lesser as “a person of great intelligence and integrity.”

Of course, the advisory board has little direct authority over the Copyright Alerts system. The real power lies in the hands of the CCI’s executive board, which is stocked with content companies and ISPs. Still, a seat on CCI’s advisory board gives public interest advocates like Berman and Sohn some leverage. Presumably, they would not have joined without assurances that their input would be taken seriously, and if they start to feel ignored, they can always resign in protest, giving the CCI a black eye in the press.

The Copyright Alerts system will provide users with an opportunity to appeal “alerts” to an independent entity. That independent review process will be overseen by the American Arbitration Association. The AAA will train independent reviewers who will, in turn, hear appeals by individual users.

Last week, the New York Times ran an interesting and important op-ed by Stuart Green , a law professor, who argues that although illegal downloading of songs or videos from the Internet may be wrong, it’s not really “theft” in the sense that the term has been understood historically in the law. Nor is it theft according to the moral intuitions of ordinary people (as Green’s own research with psychologist Matthew Kugler shows), who draw a sharp distinction between online file sharing and ordinary theft, even when the economic value of the property taken is the same.

That’s not to say that record companies and movie studios are not hurt by online piracy. But as Green points out, they’re really not hurt in the same way that victims of theft typically are. If a thief steals your car, he has it, and you don’t. But if someone illegally downloads your song, he has it — but so do you.

In economic terms, intellectual property is non-rival, whereas tangible property is rival. As a result, the “piracy” of intellectual property is simply not the same sort of zero-sum game that car theft — or theft of any tangible property — is. And that means that when Hollywood or the U.S. government says that music or movie downloaders are “pirates” or “thieves,” they are indulging in a bit of loose rhetoric. There are, in general, good moral reasons not to take what doesn’t belong to you. But as this video by filmmaker Nina Paley so beautifully illustrates, copying is not theft.