• FBI agent says Mexican drug cartels more violent than al Qaeda

    An FBI Web page quoted an agent calling Mexico’s drug cartels more violent than al Qaeda; the quote, from an unidentified senior agent based in El Paso, Texas, says, “We think al Qaeda is bad, but they’ve got nothing on the cartels”; the FBI says the quote was taken out of context

  • Mexican drug cartel offers $1 million for Sheriff Arpaio's head

    Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio is well-known for creating a tent city jail in the Arizona desert, providing pink underwear for inmates, and bragging that he spends more to feed his dog than a prisoner in his jail; on 29 July, the day parts of Arizona’s immigration law, SB 1070, went into effect, Arpaio was in the news for another reason: there was a price put on his head

  • Russian researcher: Moscow's heat wave the result of secret U.S. "climate weapon"

    It has been unusually hot in Russia this summer, and a Russian researcher asks whether this heat wave is the result of a secret U.S.“climate weapon”; the author writes that “climate weapons may be reaching their target capacity and may be used to provoke droughts, erase crops, and induce various anomalous phenomena in certain countries”

  • Foreign firms have largely escaped the worst of Mexico violence, so far

    Foreign companies have so far escaped the worst of a rising tide of crime in Mexico; if they can be shielded from violence, foreign companies are likely to focus on the virtues of doing business in Mexico, such as low labor costs, proximity to the American consumer, and favorable trade treatment

  • License plate readers help police nab criminals

    Six Ohio law agencies are set to deploy Automated License Plate Readers; these devices can scan thousands of license plates per day with the purpose of flagging down license plates that have already been entered into a database because of felony warrants, expired plates, stolen vehicles, or various other crimes

  • Detroit public schools outsource security

    Detroit Public Schools (DPS) fired all of its 226 security officers Friday and hired a private company to provide in-school security; the move will save the district an estimated $5.5 million through a one-year contract

  • Cholera spreads in flood-ravaged Pakistan

    With stagnant water throughout Pakistan, water-borne diseases such as gastroenteritis, malaria, and typhoid, now threaten the nation; there are reports of diarrhoea and cholera among the hundreds of thousands left homeless, and food and drinking water are in short supply

  • High-tech opportunities of lab-produced silk

    Tougher than a bullet-proof vest yet synonymous with beauty and luxury, silk fibers are a masterpiece of nature whose remarkable properties have yet to be fully replicated in the laboratory; thanks to their amazing mechanical properties as well as their looks, silk fibers have been important materials in textiles, medical sutures, and even armor for 5,000 years; Tufts researchers are getting close to producing silk in the lab

  • Better to teach old dogs new tricks

    DHS recently announced that it wants to buy 3,000 dogs from breeders — at a cost of $4,535 per dog — to increase its force of canines who sniff out explosives, cash, and drugs; since only 20 percent of dogs who are selected for service programs successfully complete the training process, this plan will actually result in breeding 15,000 dogs, of which 12,000 will end up in shelters; one expert offers an alternative: DHS should follow the lead of the Hearing Ear Dog Program and many police departments and fill its ranks with dogs adopted from shelters

  • The world (supposedly) safest locks easily defeated by paper clips, screw drivers

    Security experts demonstrate how locks which tout themselves as the safest lock available — fingerprints-based Biolock Model 333; Kwikset, a programmable “smartkey” lock , the innovative iLoq C10S which uses the action of a key being pushed into the lock to generate power for electronics that then checked data in a chip on the key to determine whether the user is cleared for access; AMSEC electronic safe Model es1014; KABA InSync deadbolt — can be easily defeated by using nothing more than wires, magnets, air, shock, paper clips, screw drivers, and other improvised tools

  • Secure Communities to have greater impact than Arizona immigration law

    Since 27 October 2008 through the end of May 2010, almost 2.6 million people have been screened with Secure Communities; of those, almost 35,000 were identified as illegal immigrants previously arrested or convicted for the most serious crimes, including murder and rape; more than 205,000 who were identified as illegal immigrants had arrest records for less serious crimes; during an eight-month period between 1 October 2009 to 7 June 2010, ICE figures show that 113,453 foreign nations with criminal records had been deported

  • End to water-boarding: Using brain waves to reading terrorists minds about imminent attacks

    There may soon be no need for water-boarding or other “enhanced interrogation” to extract vital information about pending attacks from captured terrorists or terrorism suspects; Researchers at Northwestern university were able to correlate P300 brain waves to guilty knowledge with 100 percent accuracy in the lab

  • Japanese rescue robot can sniff out, and help, buried disaster survivors

    Japanese emergency services are testing a search-and-rescue robot that can search rubble for survivors and deliver water, food, or cellphones in disaster zones; the device has a robotic arm that can be remote-controlled to turn doorknobs, maneuver through rubble and carry crucial survival items after an earthquake or other disaster

  • Huge jump in IED attacks in Afghanistan

    Monthly IED “incidents” in Afghanistan — incidents are defined as IEDs placed by insurgents and either found or detonated — from January 2004 to April 2010 has risen dramatically; data shows that an astounding jump in IED incidents occurred beginning summer 2009 — coinciding with the Marine offensive in the Helmand River Valley — and IED attacks have steadily mounted; there were more than 1,000 IED incidents during March, April, and May of this year; one expert says: data shows “that IEDs have become the equivalent of the Stinger [during the mujahedin war against the USSR in the 1980s] in allowing irregular forces to pose a major threat even to the most advanced military forces in the world”

  • UAVs fail to penetrate India's dense forests to track Maoist militants

    Indian security forces, battling the militants of the Naxals Maoist group, say that UAVs which perform well in the deserts of Iraq and the barren mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan, are useless in the densely forested areas of eastern India; Indian security experts say that issues concerning internal security in the country have now reached the board room of Indian business companies and that the new technology these companies produce should be able to meet the specific needs of Indian security forces rather than offer something which is not applicable to Indian conditions