Paris Riots Sparked by Police Identity Check on Veiled Muslim Woman

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Photo Credit: Miguel Medina/AFP/Getty ImagesTwo nights of rioting in the Paris suburb of Trappes have left dozens of cars destroyed, at least 10 arrests and a 14-year-old injured, after police carried out an identity check on a Muslim woman in a full-face veil.

On Friday night, about 250 people hurling stones and paving slabs clashed with police firing teargas, while 400 others gathered to protest across the high-rise suburb west of Paris, torching cars, bins and bus-shelters.

On Saturday, a further 20 cars were burned and four people arrested after 50 people were involved in a standoff with police as the violence spread to towns in the surrounding area.

The Versailles state prosecutor said the trouble started on Thursday after police stopped and carried out an identity check on a woman in a niqab, or full-face veil.

The prosecutor said the woman’s husband had assaulted one of the officers and tried to strangle him so was immediately taken into custody at the police station. Muslim full-face veils have been banned from all public places in France after a controversial law introduced by President Sarkozy in 2011. The Collective Against Islamophobia in France released a statement complaining of “heavy-handedness” and “provocation” by the police during the identity check.

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Don’t Underestimate North Korea

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Photo Credit: US Mission GenevaEarlier this year, there were cyber-attacks on South Korean computers that erased much data, harmed bank records, and silenced the websites of anti-North Korea political groups. Some speculated that these attacks were planned intrusions of North Korean cyber-warfare agents.

Recent official reports confirm that these attacks are indeed the work of North Korean government agencies. Japan Times reported the findings of an extensive study by South Korea, including work by the American company McAfee. North Korea was indeed the culprit, as witnessed by the cyber-“fingerprints” left by the perps…

The image of North Korea in the United States is that of a backward country that can barely feed itself, let alone engage in sophisticated computer intrigue. Nah, it couldn’t be North Korea, some wags would say. It must be China behind the scenes, they speculate.

The recent investigations into the March and June cyber-attacks on South Korea brought to light the shape and methodology of North Korea’s cyber-weapon. They do indeed have their own resources to do damage over the internet. Although much of the country may live hand-to-mouth, North Korea cultivates quite a serious computer-hacking capability.

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Courageous CEO Discloses that the Secret FISA Court Ordered His ISP to Install Black Box to Copy Data

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Photo Credit: FlickrIn the wake of the Snowden revelations, this courageous CEO of a small Internet Service Provider (ISP) in Utah decided to go public with what one of the US’s secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Courts ordered him to do. The CEO is outraged over this apparent violation of the Bill of Rights. Here’s part of his statement:

[The federal agents] came in and showed me papers. It was a court order from the FISC (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court) for the intercept, with the agent’s name… and the court’s information. I think it was three or four pages of text. They wouldn’t let met me copy them. They let me take notes in regards to technical aspects of what they wanted to do…

It was open ended. I called six months into it and said, “How long is this going to go on?” and they said, “I don’t know.” I went on for nine months. If it were still there, I would have probably smashed it by now. There have been no [related] arrests that I have heard of…

These programs that violate the Bill of Rights can continue because people can’t go out and say, “This is my experience, this is what happened to me, and I don’t think it is right”…

We run a Tor node, in some ways as an affirmation of our belief that there are legitimate reasons for being anonymous on the internet. That is where the majority of requests come in from these days. Some illegal traffic comes in through Tor node and we get a federal request through the FBI or DOJ (Department of Justice). I respond to them and say that this is a Tor node [and therefore inaccessible, even to the ISP]; that is usually the end of it. They realize what that is, and it is a dead end.

I am in a little bit of a different situation than large companies. I don’t have a board of directors to answer to. A number of [larger] companies are getting paid for the information. If you go establish a tap on Google’s network, they will charge X amount per month. Usually the government pays it. It isn’t worth it to me to do that kind of wholesale monitoring at any price, and lot of companies disagree with that, because it is a financial issue for them. [They say] if it is worth this much profit, let’s go for it. The return for standing up for people’s constitutional rights and privacy is much greater and more satisfying.

Alaska’s Senators Murkowski and Begich Both Complain that there is “Stubborn Opposition” in US Senate to Law of the Sea Treaty

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Photo Credit: L.C. Smith and S.R. Stephenson, PNASAt a meeting in Washington last week, top U.S. Arctic officials at the Coast Guard, Navy, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and other agencies acknowledged that the U.S. lags behind other nations in dealing with the rapidly changing Arctic environment. The agencies are facing serious deficiencies in the ability to map the sea floor and develop enforceable environmental policies, as well as construct onshore infrastructure that would be used for search and rescue and oil recovery operations…There is also a big void in diplomacy, and how the U.S. will deal with other countries on issues involving the Arctic.

The U.S. has not ratified the United Nations agreement that irons out how countries make claims to offshore Arctic resources. That’s despite the agreement having the overwhelming support of the military and both political parties.

Ratification of the treaty, which is known as the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea or UNCLOS, has been a top priority for national security officials for several years, but it remains stalled in the Senate due to a handful of senators’ concerns that it would compromise U.S. sovereignty…

[US Navy Oceanographer Rear Admiral Jonathan] White and others said the U.S. needs to ratify UNCLOS by 2015, when the U.S. takes over the rotating two-year chairmanship of the Arctic Council. Otherwise, he said, the country will speak with a weaker voice as Council president, since the U.S. is the only Arctic Council member nation that has not ratified the treaty. Such a scenario would be “sort of like driving a bus without a driver’s license,” he said.

Senator Murkowski, and fellow Alaskan, Sen. Mark Begich (D), who also addressed the conference, said they hope to try again to get the treaty through the Senate in the coming year, but that there is still some stubborn Senate opposition to it.

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High-End Stores Use Facial Recognition Tools To Spot VIPs

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Photo Credit: Getty ImagesWhen a young Indian-American woman walked into the funky L.A. jewelry boutique Tarina Tarantino, store manager Lauren Twisselman thought she was just like any other customer. She didn’t realize the woman was actress and writer Mindy Kaling.

“I hadn’t watched The Office,” Twisselman says. Kaling both wrote and appeared in the NBC hit.

This lack of recognition is precisely what the VIP-identification technology designed by NEC IT Solutions is supposed to prevent.

The U.K.-based company already supplies similar software to security services to help identify terrorists and criminals. The ID technology works by analyzing footage of people’s faces as they walk through a door, taking measurements to create a numerical code known as a “face template,” and checking it against a database.

In the retail setting, the database of customers’ faces is comprised of celebrities and valued customers, according to London’s Sunday Times. If a face is a match, the program sends an alert to staff via computer, iPad or smartphone, providing details like dress size, favorite buys or shopping history.

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Thousands Rally to Support Police Photographer Who Leaked Alleged Bomber Photos to Media (+video)

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Photo Credit: Fox NewsThe Massachusetts State Police photographer who may lose his job after leaking photos of accused Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is receiving an outpouring of support on social media, with thousands on Facebook calling for him to be reinstated.

A Facebook page called “Save Sgt. Sean Murphy” has received nearly 35,000 “likes,” with many commenting Murphy made the right decision in leaking the photos of Tsarnaev bloodied while surrendering to authorities, The Boston Herald reports.

“Sean Murphy should be commended not condemned … he and those who brought this to a conclusion should be honored and not harassed … kudos and thank you,” one user said according to the Boston Herald.

Murphy faces a hearing to determine if he will be suspended until an internal investigation is complete. He was relieved of duty for one day after he released the photos to Boston Magazine in response to a controversial image on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine.

The photos show a downcast, disheveled Tsarnaev with the red dot of a sniper’s rifle laser sight boring into his forehead. They were taken when Tsarnaev was captured April 19, bleeding and hiding in a dry-docked boat in a Watertown backyard.

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China Earthquake: Strong Temblor Claims Dozens Of Lives, Injures Nearly 300

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Photo Credit: ReutersA strong earthquake struck a rural part of western China on Monday morning, killing at least 47 people and seriously injuring 296, according to the local government.

The quake hit near the city of Dingxi in Gansu province, a region of mountains, desert and pastureland with a population of 26 million. That makes it one of China’s more lightly populated provinces, although the Dingxi area has a greater concentration of farms and towns, with a total population of about 2.7 million.

The deaths and injuries were reported in Min County and other rural southern parts of the municipality, Dingxi mayor Tang Xiaoming told the state broadcaster CCTV. Tang said damage was worst in the counties of Zhang and Min, where scores of homes were damaged and telephone and electricity services knocked out.

Residents described shaking windows and swinging lights but little major damage and little panic. Shaking was felt in the provincial capital of Lanzhou and as far away as Xi’an, 250 miles (400 kilometres) to the east.

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AFRICOM General Now Weighs In: Obvious from Beginning Benghazi was Terror, Not YouTube Demonstration

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Photo Credit: CNNThe former head of U.S. forces in Africa said the September 11, 2012, attack on the American mission in Benghazi quickly appeared to be a terrorist attack and not a spontaneous protest.

It was clear “pretty quickly that this was not a demonstration. This was a violent attack,” former Gen. Carter Ham told the Aspen Security Forum on Friday. Ham is the former chief of U.S. Africa Command, commonly known as AFRICOM.

Five days after the attack, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice went on the Sunday news shows to say it was the result of a spontaneous demonstration, not a terrorist strike.

While the State Department has maintained that Rice’s erroneous talking points were the result of getting and reacting to information in real time, critics accuse the Obama administration of orchestrating a politically motivated cover-up over a botched response, and continue to press for answers as to when the administration knew they were dealing with a terrorist attack.

When asked whether he specifically thought it was a terrorist attack, Ham said, “I don’t know that that was my first reaction. But pretty quickly as we started to gain understanding within the hours after the initiation of the attack, yes. And at the command I don’t think anyone thought differently.”

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Congressional Black Caucus Now Lining Up Behind Jesse Jackson’s “Boycott Florida for Trayvon” Campaign

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Photo Credit: david_shankboneA number of House Democrats are lining up behind the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s threat for an economic boycott of Florida following the not-guilty verdict in the death of Trayvon Martin.

The lawmakers, all members of the Congressional Black Caucus, are fierce critics of the process that led to George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the fatal shooting last year of the Florida teenager. Exerting pressure on Florida’s economy as Jackson is suggesting, they said, could help overturn the state’s controversial stand-your-ground laws that many contend contributed to the tragedy.

“That’s probably the best strategy, because people understand dollars and cents,” Rep. Lacy Clay (D-Mo.) said Friday. “And they understand, if there’s a significant drop-off in revenues – at conventions, at Disney World and Universal Studios – that that will get the attention of the powerful.”

Clay said he’d like to see “a multi-pronged strategy” that includes legislation, “getting laws overturned by courts, as well as an economic boycott.”

Rep. Bennie Thompson echoed that message. The Mississippi Democrat called the verdict “a travesty” that “does not speak well for this country,” and said he would “absolutely” support an economic boycott of the state.

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Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Praying for Spiritual Revival In America

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Photo Credit: CBNBy David Brody. It was a sight to behold inside a conference ballroom at the downtown Marriott hotel in Des Moines, Iowa, as hundreds of Iowa pastors called out to God and prayed over two U.S. senators, both of whom seem interested in running for president of the United States.

Sen. Ted Cruz and Sen. Rand Paul came to Iowa Friday to speak at this Pastors and Pews event, organized by influential evangelical political operative David Lane. The Brody File got an up close look and access to the private event. We will be posting compelling video early next week. For now, we are releasing a few pictures from the event.

Ted Cruz, who received a warm greeting, spoke for about 30 minutes and then took questions from the audience. He outlined how he championed religious freedom cases ranging from the Ten Commandments to the Mojave Cross case. He touched on how to go about eliminating Obamacare; he called for abolishing the IRS (which received a standing ovation), and on the issue of marriage he said, “There’s no issue where we need to be more on our knees…we are facing an assault on marriage.”

On spiritual matters, he told the pastors that, “We are in a battle to turn this country around.” Later, in a one-on-one sit-down interview with The Brody File, he said this country is badly in need of spiritual revival (More on those comments coming Monday). He charged the pastors to step up and speak boldly about the issues facing our country today. He compared all of them to Esther, saying the biblical woman was put in a position of leadership, “for such a time as this.” Read more from this story HERE.

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Sen. Cruz and Paul Urge Conservative Christians to Get Involved

By Greg Richter. Two Republican senators who are widely considered to be viable contenders for a 2016 presidential run, were in Des Moines, Iowa, on Friday urging conservative Christians to get involved politically.

Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Rand Paul, R-Ky., spoke to a group of at least 400 evangelical pastors and their wives at the Iowa Renewal Project, with Cruz telling them “to hold party leaders accountable,” The Washington Post reports.

“Jesus reminds us what our goal should be when he proclaims: ‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God,'” Paul said. “This does not mean we never go to war. But it means we should do so reluctantly, and seek an end expeditiously.” Read more from this story HERE.