Sunday, Jul 06th
Last update08:10:46 AM GMT
Special Interest Glance
Former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft is joining the security firm once known as Blackwater. Investment group USTC Holdings, LLC, said Wednesday that Ashcroft is serving as an independent director for Moyock, N.C.-based Xe (ZEE) Services.
The director positions were created in December when USTC purchased Xe. The private company became famous as Blackwater, which provided guards and services to the U.S. government in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
President Barack Obama has decided not to release death photos of terrorist Osama bin Laden, he said in an interview with CBS's "60 Minutes," amid concerns that the gruesome image could prove inflammatory.
Obama's decision was reported on the CBS News Web site Wednesday after the president sat for an interview with the news magazine program. Releasing graphic images of bin Laden's corpse after his shooting in a U.S. raid on his compound could have dispelled doubts that bin Laden is indeed dead. The worry, though, was that it would feed anti-U.S. sentiment.
Victims of sexual abuse at the hands of clergy and their advocates say the trial of a Canadian Roman Catholic bishop who faces child pornography charges is a step in the right direction.
Bishop Raymond Lahey's trial is scheduled to begin Wednesday in an Ottawa court - a rare case of high ranking Canadian Church official facing charges over sexual misconduct.
Former chief U.N. nuclear inspector Mohamed ElBaradei suggests in a new memoir that Bush administration officials should face international criminal investigation for the "shame of a needless war" in Iraq.
Freer to speak now than he was as an international civil servant, the Nobel-winning Egyptian accuses U.S. leaders of "grotesque distortion" in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq invasion, when then-President George W. Bush and his lieutenants claimed Iraq possessed doomsday weapons despite contrary evidence collected by ElBaradei's and other arms inspectors inside the country.
News that certain mobile phone manufacturers have embedded technology in their devices that tracks owners' movements has raised alarms among privacy rights advocates even though it has been somewhat of an open secret since last year.
The controversy flared up this week when technology bloggers started commenting on a report by two security technology researchers that was presented at a conference in Santa Clara, Calif.
In 2008, New York City Special Narcotics Prosecutor Bridget G. Brennan began leading a team of undercover investigators targeting the drug dealers who used Craigslist to advertise their wares. She sounded confident.
"It's like shooting fish in a barrel," she told the Daily News. That year, a Citigroup vice president, Mark Rayner, was caught moving ecstasy and cocaine from his Midtown offices using Craigslist. "We see lots of professionals, people with good jobs, doing it," Brennan said.
Three years later, drug dealing on the classified-ads website is still blatant and ubiquitous.
Scouring the anthrax-laced mail that took five lives and terrorized the East Coast in 2001, laboratory scientists discovered a unique contaminant — a tiny scientific fingerprint that they hoped would help unmask the killer.
One senior FBI official wrote in March 2007, in a recently declassified memo, that the potential clue "may be the most resolving signature found in the evidence to date." Yet once FBI agents concluded that the likely culprit was Bruce Ivins — a mentally troubled, but widely regarded Army microbiologist — they stopped looking for the contaminant, after testing only a few work spaces of the scores of researchers using the anthrax strain found in the letters.
They quit searching, despite finding no traces of the substance in hundreds of environmental samples from Ivins' lab, office, car and home.
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