By Nancy Ing and Alastair Jamieson, ABC News, April 23, 2013
France became the 14th country in the world to allow same-sex couples to wed Tuesday, when its parliament approved a law that has sparked often violent street protests and a rise in homophobic attacks.
Lawmakers in the lower house National Assembly, where President Francois Hollande’s Socialists have an absolute majority, passed the bill by 331 votes for and 225 against.
The law also allows same-sex couples to adopt children [.....]
Video plays at link.....The footage shows children who appear to be as young as five-years-old firing an array of weaponry, including handguns, AK47 rifles and heavy machine guns.....
A group called the Turkistan Islamic Party, based in the lawless Waziristan region of north west Pakistan, is believed to have filmed the video, which is titled "Little Commandos'. It is thought the group operates camps to train militants for operations inside neighbouring Afghanistan.
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.
French neuroscientists say babies at age 5 months have the ability to perceive objects in adult-like ways, even though they cannot tell us
By Geoffrey Mohan, Los Angeles Times, April 19, 2013
[.....] What do those little people know, and when do they know it?
A team of French neuroscientists who compared brain waves of adults and babies has come up with a tentative answer: At 5 months, infants appear to have the internal architecture in place to perceive objects in adult-like ways, even though they can't tell us.
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 [....]
Police say 2 accused were getting 'direction and guidance' from al-Qaeda elements in Iran
Canadian police say they have arrested two men and thwarted a plot to carry out a major terrorist attack on a Via passenger train in the Greater Toronto Area. [....] The two men arrested are not Canadian citizens, police said Monday, but would not provide any details about their nationalities.
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.
Plan to spend $10bn on updating nuclear bombs goes against 2010 pledge not to deploy new weapons, say critics
By Julian Borger, guardian.co.uk, 21 April, 2013
[....] Joseph Cirincione, the president of the Ploughshares Fund, an arms control pressure group, said the B61 modernisation plans were largely driven by domestic political considerations but risked sending mixed messages to Russia at a time when Washington and Moscow needed to strike a deal.
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.
By Becky Bratu, Kerry Sanders and Tom Winter, NBC News, April 19, 2013, 3am
Police, federal agents and even National Guardsmen descended on Boston suburb where there were reports of violence, gunshots and two loud booms Thursday night into early Friday morning — all following the fatal shooting of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer.
The large law-enforcement presence gathered in Watertown, Mass, just a few miles from the shooting on MIT's Cambridge campus, where two men had reportedly shot at police officers.
Former Pakistani military ruler Pervez Musharraf and his security team pushed past policemen and sped away from a court in the country's capital on Thursday after his bail was revoked in a case in which he is accused of treason.
By James Kanter and Rick Gladstone, New York Times, April 16/17, 2013
BRUSSELS — The authorities in Belgium raided 48 homes nationwide on Tuesday and detained six men implicated in what prosecutors described as a jihadist recruitment drive for the insurgency in Syria, where an increasingly international array of rebels is fighting to topple President Bashar al-Assad.
The raids, the result of an investigation that began last year, reflected Syria’s growing allure to militant Islamist fighters who see Syria as a prime battleground [....]
[....] Il Woo Park is a 64-year-old South Korean national with legal permanent resident status in the United States. According to court documents, news reports, and filings with the government, Park has had extensive dealings with North Korea, South Korea — and the FBI. His unique relationships with the United States and the two Koreas remain murky and perhaps unprecedented.
By Jordy Yager and Jeremy Herb, The Hill, April 16, 2013
A letter addressed to Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) tested positive for ricin on Tuesday, according to U.S. Capitol Police.
Capitol Police intercepted a letter at an off-site postal screening center Tuesday morning and advised senators in an evening briefing that none of their offices were in danger, Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) said. [....]
By Paige Williams, Elements blog @ newyorker.com, April 17, 2013
[.....] Hall said he was particularly intrigued, looking at pictures from the marathon scene, by the smoke. It was white, and immediate, and there was lots of it, which he said isn’t usually the case. “I was puzzled about that,” he said. Hall is thirty-five but has silvering hair, buzzed short— not unlike that of military guys or the law-enforcement officers he worked with early in his career—and now he ran a hand through it. To him, the color of the smoke, and the volume, suggested a high explosive.
By Constanze Letsch in Istanbul, guardian.co.uk, 15 April, 2013
A Turkish court has convicted pianist and composer Fazil Say of blasphemy and inciting hatred over a series of comments he made on Twitter last year.
The musician was given a suspended 10-month jail term. His lawyer, Meltem Akyol, said his client would have to serve the term if he committed a similar offence within the next five years.
By Adam Nossiter, New York Times, April 15/16, 2013
[....] The stakes were high. Millions in cash, guns and drugs were on the table, and a swaggering figure around town, the former chief of the Guinea-Bissau Navy, Rear Adm.José Américo Bubo Na Tchuto, was determined to claim his share: a cool $1 million for each 1,000 kilos of cocaine brought in under his front company. He would then store it in an underground bunker.
