About 80 percent of tunnels used to smuggle goods and arms into the Gaza Strip from Egypt are "no longer functioning" due to a crackdown by the Egyptian military after it ousted President Mohamed Morsy this month, a U.N. official said on Tuesday.
By Anahad O'Connor, Well blog @ nytimes.com, July 25, 2013
Around the world, Australia may be known for its rugged outdoor lifestyles. But recent statistics suggest a different reality. Australia and its equally outdoorsy neighbor, New Zealand, are now two of the fattest countries in the developed world.
Staking out new ground in the noisy debate about technology and privacy in law enforcement, the New Jersey Supreme Court on Thursday ordered that the police will now have to get a search warrant before obtaining tracking information from cellphone providers.
By Phil Stewart in Aspen, CO, Reuters, July 18, 2013
[....] Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter told a security forum that the government was already moving to better isolate intelligence so that all of it isn't accessible in one place, and to implement a "two-man rule" - similar to procedures used to safeguard nuclear weapons.
By Travis Andersen, Metro Desk @ The Boston Globe, July 18, 2013
A State Police sergeant, incensed by the controversial Rolling Stone magazine cover of accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, has released dramatic photographs of the apprehension of the accused terrorist to a local magazine without permission from his agency.
By Ian Sample, Science Correspondent, The Guardian, July 17, 2013
Scientists have corrected the genetic fault that causes Down's syndrome – albeit in isolated cells – raising the prospect of a radical therapy for the disorder.
By Ed Pilkington in New York, guardian.co.uk, July 17, 2013
Alarming number of databases across US are storing details of Americans' locations – not just government agencies
Millions of Americans are having their movements tracked through automated scanning of their car license plates, with the records held often indefinitely in vast government and private databases.
As an aside during testimony on Capitol Hill today, a National Security Agency representative rather casually indicated that the government looks at data from a universe of far, far more people than previously indicated [....]
By Nicole Perlroth & David E. Sanger, New York Times, July 13/14, 2013
Governments pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to learn about and exploit weaknesses in the computer systems of foreign adversaries.
[....] All over the world, from South Africa to South Korea, business is booming in what hackers call “zero days,” the coding flaws in software like Microsoft Windows that can give a buyer unfettered access to a computer and any business, agency or individual dependent on one.
[....] Dzhokhar Tsarnaev will appear in federal court Wednesday in Boston to face charges that he used weapons of mass destruction to kill three people and wound more than 260 others at the Boston Marathon.
He can't say much, but sometimes questions are as telling as statements.
By Emma Green, The Atlantic, July 9, 2013
Justice Stephen Breyer won't officially comment on the Edward Snowden situation, but that didn't stop him from offering some broad thoughts on the legal and philosophical issues at stake during an interview with Harvard Law professor Noah Feldman at the Aspen Ideas Festival last week [....]
ROME -- Against a backdrop of growing anti-immigration sentiment in Europe, Pope Francis on Monday used his first papal trip outside the Vatican to denounce the "globalization of indifference" to migrants, calling their suffering "a painful thorn in my heart."
Pakistan says its senior political and military leaders are to blame for not detecting Osama bin Laden’s presence in the country and then failing to respond when U.S. forces moved into Pakistani airspace to kill him in 2011, according to a government report that became public Monday.
By Connor Simpson, The Atlantic Wire, July 7, 2013
On July 4th, documentary filmmaker named Chris Barrett took his newly acquired pair of Google Glasses out for a stroll on the very busy, proudly recovered Jersey Shore boardwalk. What happened next was either something extraordinary, or something completely innocuous, depending on how much hyperbole you like to put behind things that happen on Google Glass [.....]
Police in Dubai have arrested a man whose YouTube film alerted them to an alleged attack by an Emirati man on an expatriate driver.