By Julianne Pepitone, CNNMoneyTech, April 23, 2013

If Twitter needed any more evidence that it has a serious security problem, this should do it: Stocks plunged sharply on Tuesday after a hacker accessed a newswire's account and tweeted about a false White House emergency.

The shocking tweet came from the Associated Press earlier this afternoon: "Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured." The AP's communications team quickly tweeted from its own account that the main AP Twitter was compromised, but investors had already panicked. The Dow Jones industrial average (INDU) immediately plunged by more than 140 points.

And there it is: After years of hacks that typically involved little more than obscene language, Twitter's subpar security measures have now caused serious real-world consequences.[....]

From the New York Times:

A cautiously worded study based on data collected in Sweden has found that “in utero exposure to both selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (S.S.R.I.’s) and nonselective monoamine reuptake inhibitors (tricyclic antidepressants) was associated with an increased risk of autism spectrum disorders, particularly without intellectual disability.”

The Swedish medical birth register, which contains data on current drug use reported by mothers early in their pregnancies, along with a system of publicly funded screenings for autism spectrum disorders and extensive national and regional registers of various health details, makes a detailed, case-control study possible — one that controls for other variables like family income, parent educational level, maternal and paternal age and even maternal region of birth (all factors the authors note have been previously associated with autism).

This is the second study in two years to associate antidepressant use during pregnancy with an increased incidence of autism in exposed children. An earlier, smaller study in California also found a modest increase in risk. The Sweden-based study could not exclude the possibility that it was the severe depression, rather than the use of antidepressants, that created the association, but the smaller California study (which considered only S.S.R.I.’s) found “no increase in risk” for mothers with a history of mental health treatment in the absence of prenatal exposure to S.S.R.I.’s.

By Alissa J. Rubin, New York Times, April 22/23, 2013

KABUL, Afghanistan — An emergency landing by a helicopter ferrying foreign engineers in eastern Afghanistan turned into a mass abduction by the Taliban, officials said Monday [....]

In all, 11 people were abducted, according to reports from the Turkish foreign ministry and Afghan government officials. They included eight Turkish engineers, one Afghan man and the two pilots of the Russian-made helicopter. One pilot was confirmed to be Russian, and the other was either Russian or perhaps Kyrgyz, said a spokesman for the Russian Embassy in Kabul.

“It’s a lot of people to take hostage — a lot of civilians,” said a senior Western official here, speaking on condition of anonymity “It gives the Taliban bargaining chips, no question about that.” Afghan officials, one of whom described the abductions as “very terrible” said they were worried that the hostages might be taken to Pakistan, where many international terrorist groups are based. The area where the helicopter landed is less than 20 miles from the Pakistani border [....]

Also see:

Study Finds Sharp Rise in Attacks by Taliban
By Rod Nordland, New York Times, April 19/20, 2013

[.....] No one doubts that the Taliban have stepped up their attacks, but what is less clear is whether they are trying — or able — to mount an all-out attempt to test the Afghan security forces as they begin to take over completely from withdrawing foreign forces. By early summer, Afghan forces plan to be in charge throughout the country, with American and other allies in a supporting role.

The American military, which last year publicized data on enemy attacks with meticulous bar graphs, now has nothing to say. “We’re just not giving out statistics anymore,” said a spokesman, Col. Thomas W. Collins, suggesting that the Afghan Ministry of Defense might do so. [.....]

According to a respected independent group, the Afghanistan NGO Safety Office, the recent increase in violence has been dramatic, based on data for the first quarter of 2013, which the organization released Thursday.

There were 2,331 attacks by armed opposition groups in the first quarter, compared with 1,581 in the same period last year, an increase of 47 percent, the statistics show [.....]

By David M. Herszenhorn and Andrew Roth, New York Times, April 21/22, 2013

includes a bunch of stuff about his six-month visit, gleaned from relatives, neighbors and friends from MAKHACHKALA, Russia —

but the following is the excerpt I find most interesting:

....Dagestan may have made him feel more at home than the United States, but it was a strange place to find comfort, given the nearly nonstop violence and the persistent unease it engenders among those who live here.

In the days just before Mr. Tsarnaev visited, a 13-year-old was wounded after picking up a package booby-trapped with a hand grenade, and a traffic police post was fired upon by someone with a grenade launcher.

Two weeks after his arrival, another grenade was tossed in a residential area. It was apparently meant to draw the police into an ambush, because several minutes later, in a pattern eerily similar to the marathon bombing, a larger bomb hidden in a garbage pail went off, killing a small child and injuring another.

And so it went all the time he was in Dagestan: two or three deadly bombings a month on average, constant “special operations” in which the federal police killed dozens of people they said were Muslim insurgents, and numerous other attacks.

After a police operation in early February 2012, the Russian authorities boasted that they had killed the last known suspect in the Moscow subway bombings. Capturing militants alive to put them on trial is not necessarily a priority....

By Gardiner Harris, New York Times, April 20/21, 2013

{.....] Anger at the authorities began to build after the parents of the 5-year-old said that the police had failed to take their complaint seriously, failed to carry out an adequate search and then offered them 2,000 rupees — about $37 — if they would keep quiet about the case. Then on Friday, television news channels showed a large mustachioed police officer slapping a small female protester in the face.

The government’s concerns about the case ratcheted up so quickly on Friday night that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh expressed regrets about the episode. And on Saturday, the president of the Indian National Congress Party, Sonia Gandhi — whose house was also the site of protests on Saturday — released a statement condemning the rape and saying that “action and not words are required to ensure that such incidents never happen again.”

Two police officers, including the lead investigator on the case and the one seen slapping the protester, were suspended. The lead investigator is being investigated after being accused of trying to bribe the child’s family to remain silent, said Mr. Bhagat, the police spokesman.

The quick arrest of the suspect may do little to calm the anger surrounding the case since fairly quick police work also led to the arrests of five suspects in the December rape case. Such rapid resolutions are not the norm in India, where highly politicized police forces and a backlogged and inefficient judiciary often mean that cases remain unresolved for years.

Today we are more likely to associate fertilizer explosions with intentional acts of terror, from the high profile events in Oklahoma City and Oslo to the countless daily acts of violence across the Middle East.  And yet, the expansion of the fertilizer industry over the last one hundred years has also led to a number of unintentional catastrophic explosions similar to the occurrence in West, Texas this week.  As the small Central Texas community regroups after this tragic event and investigators seek its cause, it is worth reflecting on some of the inflammatory consequences of a volatile commodity that we cannot live without.

By Garance Francke-Ruta, The Atlantic, April 19, 2012

Even with the status of the two suspects unknown, the Boston bombing is already influencing the debate on overhauling current laws.

Also see:

It's Hard to Legislate Immigration Law From the Boston Bombing
By David A. Graham, The Atlantic, April 19, 2012

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was a naturalized American citizen, officials say. That shows why it's hard to connect this incident to proposed reforms.

When Thomas Herndon, a student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst's doctoral program in economics, spotted possible errors made by two eminent Harvard economists in an influential research paper, he called his girlfriend over for a second look.

As they pored over the spreadsheets Herndon had requested from Harvard's Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, which formed the basis for a widely quoted 2010 study, they spotted what they believed were glaring errors.

.........

Their study, which found economic growth slows dramatically when a government's debt exceeds 90 percent of a country's annual economic output, has been cited by policymakers around the world as justification for slashing spending.

Former U.S. vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan, a Republican congressman from Wisconsin, is one influential politician who has cited the report to justify a budget slashing agenda.

Using the two professors' data, Herndon found that instead of a dramatic fall in growth, the decline was much milder, slowing to about 2.2 percent, instead of the slump to minus 0.1 percent that Reinhart and Rogoff predicted.

.........

(Edward Krudy, Reuters online, earlier today)

Dallas News: The fertilizer plant that exploded Wednesday night in West, Texas, reported to the Environmental Protection Agency and local public safety officials that it presented no risk of fire or explosion, documents show.

West Fertilizer Co. reported having as much as 54,000 pounds of anhydrous ammonia on hand in an emergency planning report required of facilities that use toxic or hazardous chemicals.

But the report, reviewed Wednesday night by The Dallas Morning News, stated “no” under fire or explosive risks....

Firefighting and Anhydrous ammonia: On small fires dry chemical or CO2 may be used. ......On large fires ... water spray, fog, or regular foam. DO NOT GET WATER INSIDE THE AMMONIA CONTAINERS.....

Apparently, anhydrous ammonia, which is not the same as the McVeigh 'fertilizer bomb' of ammonium nitrate, is at risk for explosion when the chemical containers are heated, or when hydrated with water. Were the small town firemen were given sufficient or any training in fighting fires in the environment of this plant, when the owners claimed there was 'no risk' of explosion (above)?

As expected this afternoon, the Manchin-Toomey amendment on background checks was defeated by filibuster: A solid majority of the Senate supported the amendment, but with 60 votes needed the amendment fell five votes short. The actual vote was 54-46, with Harry Reid switching to “no” for procedural reasons in order to be able to bring it back in the future. However, its return is not expected, given how far short the measure fell.

This is obviously a substantial setback for those who support stronger gun legislation, and for one of the president’s top agenda items.However, I think Greg’s long-term optimism from this morning is entirely appropriate. The bottom line about legislating in any system — let alone America’s convoluted Madisonian system — is that it’s really hard to do. Never mind the procedural hurdles, including the Senate supermajority that filibustering Republicans insist upon for all measures; never mind the need to either have unified party control of government (rare) or bipartisan support (hard to get). Just start at the beginning: Getting agreement among those who feel strongly about an issue is really difficult; getting agreement among those strong supporters and the willing-to-support that are usually needed to get anything done is even harder.

...........

And so while today is clearly a crushing setback for proponents of tougher gun legislation, overall the effort has been a very solid step towards eventual passage. If, that is, the people who strongly supported today’s amendment keep working to reward Senators who supported them, to make life difficult for those who opposed them; and, most of all, to make it a must-support for future candidates.

..........

(Jonathan Bernstein, writing yesterday at Greg Sargent's WaPo The Plum Line blog, taking the "if outrage leads to rededication rather than resignation" view)

In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing, a columnist for Pakistan’s largest English newspaper reflects on why violent attacks leave a more lasting impression if they happen on American soil.