"A British man and his Haitian partner were attacked by dozens of locals who threw molotov cocktails and rocks at the couple’s private engagement ceremony, police said. Several people were injured, two cars were set ablaze and windows were smashed at the residence where the ceremony took place in Port-au-Prince late Saturday. Police arrived just in time to prevent people being killed, inspector Patrick Rosarion told AFP." Continue reading →
"A judge on Sunday blocked a threatened San Francisco-area rail worker strike that could have disabled a critical part of the region’s transportation system serving 400,000 daily passengers. The BART rail system was shut down for 4-1/2 days in July when union workers walked off the job, creating severe roadway congestion and forcing commuters to miss work or crowd onto a limited number of other public transportation options. BART management says the average employee gets an annual salary of $79,500 plus $50,800 in benefits, and it is concerned the cost of benefits will continue to climb after increasing by nearly 200 percent in 10 years." Continue reading →
"The PirateBrowser website explains that the application combines Tor client Vidalia – which anonymises data connections – with the FireFox Portable Edition browser, the FoxyProxy add-on and 'some custom configs'. The site also claims that the browser is an anti-censorship tool rather than purely for piracy, citing countries including Iran and North Korea alongside the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium, Finland, Denmark, Italy and Ireland as places it expects PirateBrowser to be particularly useful." Continue reading →
"The Justice Department plans to change how it prosecutes some non-violent drug offenders, so they would no longer face mandatory minimum prison sentences, in an overhaul of federal prison policy that Attorney General Eric Holder will unveil on Monday. The United States imprisons a higher percentage of its population than other large countries, largely because of anti-drug laws passed in the 1980s and 1990s. Holder will also reveal a plan to create a slate of local guidelines to determine if cases should be subject to federal charges." Continue reading →
"The federal government, at a time when it is cutting education spending, is preparing to spend $415,000 over the next 15 years to imprison a man for innocently possessing seven shotgun shells while trying to help a widow in the neighborhood. And, under the law, there is no early release: Young will spend the full 15 years in prison. This case captures what is wrong with our 'justice' system: We have invested in mass incarceration in ways that are crushingly expensive, break up families and are often simply cruel. With less than 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States has almost one-quarter of the world’s prisoners." Continue reading →
"The FBI opened a criminal investigation into the missing documents. No charges were filed in the case. But the Holocaust museum has gone on to recover more than 150,000 documents, including a trove held by Kempner’s former secretary, who by then had moved into the New York state home of an academic named Herbert Richardson. The Rosenberg diary, however, remained missing. Early this year, the Holocaust museum and an agent from Homeland Security Investigation tried to locate the missing diary pages. They tracked the diary to Richardson, who was living near Buffalo." Continue reading →
"A British has inventor has unveiled the ultimate Star Trek gadget - a £650 handheld scanner that could be used to copy almost any item. The Fuel3D scanner, originally developed at Oxford University, can capture everything from a flower’s petals to the contours of human skin. It is able to capture images in seconds, and they can then be sent to a computer for processing. When combined with a 3D printer, it could be used to create 3D copies of everything from broken parts to 3D portraits." Continue reading →
"Tomorrow’s tax havens could be fueled by new technology like Bitcoin and Litecoin — online currencies that can be used to purchase everything from coffee to illegal drugs. The problem for government coffers: There’s no mechanism to ensure that people who make money through such digital currency report the income to the IRS. In its fight against tax evasion, the U.S. is largely focused on shining a light into bank accounts held by Americans in other countries. But experts say the rise of Bitcoin, which doesn’t require a bank account, could force the U.S. to rethink its approach." Continue reading →
"New York's top banking regulator has issued subpoenas to roughly two dozen companies associated with bitcoin as part of a wide-ranging inquiry into the business practices of the fledgling virtual-currency industry. The department also plans on Monday to issue a memo expressing concern that virtual-currency companies aren't complying with the state's money-transmission laws. As a result, the state is considering setting new guidelines that are specifically aimed at virtual currencies. Companies that received subpoenas include some of the best-known names in the nascent industry, including Coinbase Inc., BitInstant and Coinsetter." Continue reading →
"The entire upstate New York town of Bovina was placed on lockdown Sunday while police were engaged in a standoff with an armed man. A New York Alert notification was activated at about 2 p.m. Sunday, but a Delaware County Sheriff’s Office dispatcher said people in the town of Bovina were not in imminent danger and nobody was injured. There were no official details released about the man or why police were after him, the newspaper reported. Police officers were seen swarming on the ground as helicopters flew overhead, and residents were stopped by police and advised not to pick up hitchhikers, the paper reported." Continue reading →