• Judge upholds New York gun restrictions -- except 7-round per magazine limit

    A federal judge on Tuesday ruled that New York’s strict new gun laws, including an expanded ban on assault weapons, were constitutional. He struck down, though, a provision prohibiting gun owners from loading more than seven rounds into a magazine. The 54-page ruling by William M. Skretny of Federal District Court in Buffalo should be considered a victory for gun control advocates who saw gun control measures on the federal level stall. Judge Skretny, writing that “whether regulating firearms is wise or warranted is not a judicial question; it is a political one,” said that expanded bans on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines were legally sound because they served to “further the state’s important interest in public safety.”

  • Volgograd under lockdown as Winter Games security worries grow

    Volgograd has been placed under tight security after a Monday suicide bombing on trolleybus killed sixteen, one day after seventeen people were killed at a train station. For the Russian government, the attacks represent the worst possible scenario: an orchestrated bombing campaign during the run-up to the Winter Olympics – and during the games themselves — in a region too big, and with too many soft targets, to be secured effectively. Such a broad and well-coordinated terror campaign will overshadow – and might even seriously disrupt — the biggest international event on Russian soil since the 1980 Moscow Olympics.

  • FAA approves testing, developing standards for commercial use of drones

    The Federal Aviation Administration(FAA) yesterday (Monday) has authorized test sites for UAVs. The FAA has selected six institutions to run the tests and operate the test sites. The test sites are part of a program to develop safety and operational rules for drones by the end of 2015, as mandated by Congress. Experts anticipate an exponential growth of drone use in the agriculture and law enforcement sectors. Analysts predict that more than 70,000 jobs would be created in the first three years after Congress approves drone use in U.S. skies, and that the global commercial drone market will reach $89 billion in the next decade.

  • Judge rules NSA’s collection of telephony metadata is legal

    A federal judge on Friday ruled that the collection of large amounts of phone metadata by the National Security Agency (NSA) is legal. The decision by Judge William H. Pauley III in New York adds yet another legal interpretation to an increasingly contentious debate over the legality of the NSA collection programs. In just eleven days, two judges and a presidential review panel reached significantly different conclusions about key issues related to the NSA surveillance program, among them the intelligence value of the data the program collects, the privacy interests – and expectations — at stake, and the constitutionality of the program in its present form.

  • Telephony metadata: Matching numbers to names

    Explaining why American should not be worried about the NSA collection of telephony metadata, President Obama, in a PBS interview, said: “You have my telephone number connecting with your telephone number…. [T]here are no names … in that database.” Two Stanford graduate students set out to discover just how much effort it would take to identify the names of phone number owners. Their answer: a trivial amount of effort. themselves the task out to find out. Querying the Yelp, Google Places, and Facebook directories, and running their sample numbers with Intelius, a cheap consumer-oriented service, they matched 91 percent of the sample numbers with the number owners. “If a few academic researchers can get this far this quickly, it’s difficult to believe the NSA would have any trouble identifying the overwhelming majority of American phone numbers,” they write.

  • Nigeria wants Cameroon’s help on Islamic insurgency

    Nigeria has a problem: in the face of growing military campaign by the federal government against Islamist insurgents n three states in north-east Nigeria, some of the insurgents have found it safer to relocate to neighboring Cameroon. They launch their attacks against targets in north-east Nigeria – then retreat to the safety of Cameroon, where they know the Nigerian military will not pursue them. Nigeria wants Cameroon to take a more active role in preventing Islamist insurgents from using Cameroon’s territory as a safe haven.

  • No evidence al -Qaeda was involved in Benghazi attack: NYT report

    In the most detailed examination to date of the origins of the 2012 attack on the U.S. Benghazi facility, the New York Times, in a 6-part, 8,000 word in-depth report found no evidence that al Qaeda or any international terrorist groups played any role in the attack. The report says that a crude anti-Muslim video, made by an Egyptian with a checkered past now residing in California, in large part fueled the attack. The report says that the attack was not well-planned, but that it also was not a completely spontaneous reaction to the video. The report says that those who argue that al Qaeda was involved in the attack are confusing local extremist organizations like Ansar al-Shariah for al Qaeda’s international terrorist network.

  • Arafat died of natural causes, not radiation poisoning: Russian investigators

    A team of Russian physicians and scientists investigating the 11 November 2004 death of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat has concluded that his death was not caused by radiation poisoning. The conclusions of the Russian team are a blow to the Palestinian leadership, which, since 2004, has accused Israel of being behind Arafat’s death. The Russian team’s findings follow the findings of two other scientific investigative teams: a Swiss medical team, funded by Arafat’s widow, concluded that the radiation poisoning of Arafat could not be ruled out. The French scientific team, appointed by a French judge, concluded that the levels of polonium-210 in Arafat’s personal effects, and the complete absence of the radioactive isotope in his body tissues, made it impossible for Arafat to have been poisoned by polonium. The Russian team, hired by the Palestinian authority, reached the same conclusion the French team did. “It was a natural death; there was no impact of radiation,” Vladimir Uiba, the head of the Russian Federal Medical and Biological Agency, said.

  • Egypt designates Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization

    Accusing the Muslim Brotherhood of being behind a Tuesday car-bomb attack on the police headquarters in the Niles Delta city of Mansoura, an attack which killed sixteen people and wounded more than 100, the Egyptian government on Wednesday designated the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist group, thus making it a state crime not only to take part in the movement’s activities and contribute money to it, but criminalizing even registering for membership in the organization.

  • Student cannot sue TSA, FBI agents over airport detention for Arabic flashcards

    A student detained at Philadelphia International airport over his Arabic flashcards cannot sue the individual TSA and FBI agents who held him in custody, an appeals court has ruled. The student, double-majoring in physics and Middle Eastern studies, carried Arabic-English flashcards in his backpack. Most of the cards carried everyday words such as “nice”, “sad,” and “friendly.” Some of the cards, however, included words like “bomb,” “terrorist,” and “explosion.” Chief Judge Theodore McKee of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia noted that the student clearly had the right to have the materials, but “it is simply not reasonable to require TSA officials to turn a blind eye to someone trying to board an airplane carrying Arabic-English flashcards with words such as ‘bomb,’ ‘to kill,’ etc.” He added: “Rather, basic common sense would allow those officials to take reasonable and minimally intrusive steps to inquire into the potential passenger’s motivations.”

  • Not all questions about the Tsarnaev brothers have been answered

    What caused Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to plant two bombs at the Boston Marathon finish line continues to puzzle investigators. Understanding the information which was available to local and federal law enforcement authorities before and after the attack might help prevent a future attack.

  • U.S. nuclear weapon programs to cost $355 billion over a decade: CBO

    In its most recent review of U.S. nuclear policy, the Obama administration decided to maintain all three types of systems that can deliver nuclear weapons over long ranges — submarines that launch ballistic missiles (SSBNs), land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), and long-range bombers — known collectively as the strategic nuclear triad. The administration also decided to preserve the ability to deploy U.S. tactical nuclear weapons carried by fighter aircraft overseas in support of allies. Nearly all of these delivery systems and the nuclear weapons they carry are nearing the end of their planned operational lives and will need to be modernized or replaced by new systems over the next two decades. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that between 2014 and 2023, the costs of the administration’s plans for nuclear forces will total $355 billion.

  • How effective are renewable energy subsidies? It depends

    Renewable energy subsidies have led to explosive growth in wind power installations across the United States, especially in the Midwest and Texas. Electricity produced by wind is emission free, so the development of wind-power may reduce aggregate pollution by offsetting production from fossil fuel generated electricity production. Emission rates of fossil fuel generators, however, vary greatly by generator (coal-fired, natural gas, nuclear, hydropower). Thus, the quantity of emissions offset by wind power will depend crucially on which generators reduce their output. In other words, the quantity of pollutants offset by wind power depends crucially on which generators reduce production when wind power comes online.

  • Breed-specific legislation does not protect the public from dangerous dogs

    Research conducted by animal behavior experts challenges the basis of breed-specific legislation designed to protect the public from “dangerous” dogs.The researchers concluded that rather than making people safer, current legislation in the United Kingdom could be lulling them into a false sense of security.

  • Global terrorism increasing, but fewer attacks in Western world

    Terrorism touched eighty-five countries in 2012, but just three — Pakistan, Iraq, and Afghanistan — suffered more than half of 2012’s attacks (54 percent) and fatalities (58 percent), according to new data released the other day by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) Global Terrorism Database (GTD). In addition to illustrating a continued shift in location of attacks, the new data — with more than 8,400 terrorist attacks killing more than 15,400 people in 2012 — also show an increase in attacks and fatalities over the past decade. Al-Qaeda central was not directly responsible for any attacks in 2012, but the six deadliest terrorist groups in the world were all affiliated to some extent with the organization. These include the Taliban, Boko Haram, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan, al-Qaeda in Iraq, and al-Shabaab.