Search of Tsarnaevs' Phones, Computers Finds no Indication of Accomplice, Source Says (+video)

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Photo Credit: compujerameyA preliminary examination of the cellphones and computers used by the Tsarnaev brothers has found no indication of an accomplice in the Boston Marathon bombing, according to a U.S. counter-terrorism source briefed on the FBI investigation.

The source stressed that the investigation is ongoing, but bureau officials at this point appear increasingly confident that “nobody else was involved,” said the source.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has told investigators he and his brother acted alone, learned to build the pressure-cooker bombs over the Internet and were motivated by a desire to defend Islam because of “the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,” said the source, who has received multiple briefings on the probe.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has also told investigators that he and his brother got instructions on building bombs from an online magazine published by al Qaeda, federal law enforcement officials told NBC News.

He told investigators that the brothers read the instructions in Inspire, an online, English-language magazine that terror monitoring groups say al Qaeda began publishing in 2010.

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eCurrency Experiment Gone Bad: Bitcoin Crashes

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Photo Credit: Agence France PresseMany saw it coming, but that didn’t stop the Bitcoin bubble from bursting: after rising to dizzying heights, the digital currency suffered its first true crash this week.

The price of the virtual “geek” currency had soared through the stratosphere in recent weeks, trading for a high of $266 on Wednesday — only to come hurtling back to Earth in just three days.

By Friday, a single Bitcoin was worth just $54, according to the Mt. Gox platform, which manages 80 percent of the Bitcoin transactions and had to briefly shut down trading Thursday.

“There was a LOT of short-term speculation happening” from people who wanted to earn a buck from the soaring prices and cash out before the fall, Bitcoin Foundation chief scientist Gavin Andresen told AFP.

“Wild price swings are not good for Bitcoin.”

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Former Reuter's Editor Charged With Hacking Tribune's Computer System

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Photo Credit: Reuters Former Reuters.com Deputy Social Media Editor Matthew Keys pleaded not guilty on Tuesday to federal charges that he aided members of the Anonymous hacking collective.

Keys, 26, on Monday said he was fired by Thomson Reuters (TRI.TO), the parent company of Reuters News.

Keys was indicted in March by a federal grand jury in Sacramento on three criminal counts, alleging he entered an Internet chatroom used by members of the hacking collective Anonymous and helped hackers gain access to the computer system of Tribune Co. in December 2010. A story on the Tribune’s Los Angeles Times website was altered by one of those hackers, the indictment said.

The alleged events occurred before he joined Reuters in 2012, the indictment indicated.

Keys was silent during the hearing in federal district court in Sacramento as his lawyer Jay Leiderman entered the plea. A status conference was set for June 12.

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Video: Sessions Grills Napolitano on ICE Morale, Enforcement

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Photo Credit: Gage SkidmoreDepartment of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano acknowledged low morale among Immigration and Customs Enforcement employees and tension with ICE union leadership, after being pressed by Sen. Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.) during a Tuesday hearing.

The exchange centered around a lawsuit filed by a group of ICE agents last year, which takes issue with the executive actions taken by the Obama administration on immigration rules:

SESSIONS: [Chris Crane, head of the National ICE Council] testified that agents are prohibited from enforcing the law and that, indeed, ICE Officers have filed a lawsuit… I have never heard of a situation in which a group of law officers sued their supervisor, and you, for blocking them from following the law… [ICE Agents] were saying that the very oath they took to enforce the law is being blocked by rules and regulations and policies established from on high, and that this is undermining their ability to do what they are sworn to do.

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Now That Syria Has Crossed Obama's 'Red Line' with Nerve Gas, What Next?

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Photo Credit: Reuters Israel’s top military intelligence analyst said in Tel Aviv on Tuesday that Syrian government forces had used chemical weapons – probably the nerve gas sarin – in their fight against rebels trying to force out President Bashar al-Assad.

He cited photographic evidence of victims foaming at the mouth, their pupils contracted.

The Israeli allegations, which came during a week-long visit by Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel to the Middle East, followed similar concerns of chemical weapons use voiced by Britain and France.

But so far, those assessments appear to lack the concrete proof Washington would need to accept the kind of deeper U.S. involvement in Syria’s civil war that Obama has resisted. That, in turn, raises questions about just how well-defined the president’s “red line” is.

White House spokesman Jay Carney walked a cautious line speaking to reporters, making clear that Washington was taking the Israeli accusations seriously but would require “conclusive evidence” before deciding whether to move forward.

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Scientists Find Way to Turn Stem Cells Into Brain Cells

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Photo Credit: US NewsScientists have discovered an antibody that can turn stem cells from a patient’s bone marrow directly into brain cells, a potential breakthrough in the treatment of neurological diseases and injuries.

Richard Lerner, of the Scripps Research Institute in California, says that when a specific antibody is injected into stem cells from bone marrow—which normally turn into white blood cells—the cells can be triggered to turn into brain cells.

“There’s been a lot of research activity where people would like to repair brain and spinal cord injuries,” Lerner says. “With this method, you can go to a person’s own stem cells and turn them into brain cells that can repair nerve injuries.”

Antibodies are Y-shaped proteins that the immune system uses to help identify foreign threats to the body. They bind to foreign invaders in the body in order to alert white blood cells to attack harmful bacteria and viruses. There are millions of known antibodies.

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New Persian Rulers: Iran's Military has Apparently Supplanted the Clerics

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Photo Credit: APIranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei “has become a hostage” of an elite branch of Iran’s army that has quietly consolidated its economic and political power, a top analyst said Tuesday.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) appears to have supplanted Khamenei and other top clerics in a significant power shift that has left Iran a “military dictatorship,” according to Ali Alfoneh, who has spent years investigating the IRGC.

Khamenei “has become a hostage in the hands of his own praetorian guard,” Alfoneh said Tuesday during a discussion hosted by the American Enterprise Institute.

Thirty-four years since the Iranian revolution installed an extremist Islamic leader, the country has “degenerated into a military dictatorship which is disguising itself. … They want to preserve the illusion the regime” is still in power, he said.

The IRGC, Iran’s principal fighting force in its 1980 war with Iraq, has quietly seized control of Iran’s economy and political bodies and controls around $80 billion in private economic assets, according to Alfoneh.

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Syria: Two Prominent Christian Leaders Kidnapped by Rebels

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Photo Credit: FreedomHouseTwo prominent Syrian bishops, who had warned of the threat to religious tolerance and diversity from the two-year conflict in their country, were kidnapped on Monday by armed rebels in the northern province of Aleppo, state media said.

SANA news agency said the Syriac Orthodox and Greek Orthodox Archbishops of Aleppo, Yohanna Ibrahim and Paul Yazigi, were seized by “a terrorist group” in the village of Kfar Dael as they were “carrying out humanitarian work.”

A Syriac member of the opposition Syrian National Coalition, Abdulahad Steifo, said the men had been kidnapped on the road to Aleppo from the rebel-held Bab al Hawa crossing with Turkey.

Several prominent Muslim clerics have been killed in Syria’s uprising against President Bashar al-Assad, but the two bishops are the most senior church leaders caught up in the conflict which has killed more than 70,000 people across Syria.

Christians make up less than 10 percent of the country’s 23 million people and, like other religious minorities, many have been wary of the mainly Sunni Muslim uprising against Assad, whose Alawite sect is an offshoot of Shiite Islam.

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A Bill of Goods: Obama Administration Stages Multimillion-Dollar PR Campaign to Promote Obamacare

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The federal agency charged with implementing the Affordable Care Act announced a multimillion-dollar public relations contract last week in order to convince people to join the program and keep it from collapsing, critics claimed.

Enrollment in Obamacare’s health insurance exchanges is lagging, raising concerns about the viability of the exchanges, which are the law’s primary means of delivering health insurance. The bill’s congressional architects have warned the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) may be unable to establish a functional health insurance marketplace.

HHS announced on Friday it would pay public relations firm Weber Shandwick $8 million to promote enrollment in Obamacare’s exchanges.

Ben Domenech, a health care expert with the Heartland Institute, said problems with implementation of the law could “scare off” some health care consumers who are already confused by the government-led overhaul of the nation’s health care system.

“Obamacare’s functional defects are becoming a liability, and the train wreck is getting closer, so the administration wants to get as many people dependent on it as fast as possible when it launches, whether the exchanges and other systems are ready for them or not,” Domenech told the Washington Free Beacon.

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Steyn: There Ain't Nobody Here but Us Chechens

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As is now traditional in these stories, we’re now being told that the Brothers Tsarnaev are merely the latest card-carrying members of Local 473 of the Amalgamated Union of Lone Wolves. No broader pattern can be discerned, or should be discerned. All jihad is local. Nobody could have seen this coming:

Boston bombing suspects Tamerlan, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev appeared to lead normal lives

If by “normal lives”, you mean reported to the US Government by a major foreign power as possible terrorists, interviewed by the FBI, had your citizenship application put on hold, and cheerily posting a series of videos to YouTube as part of your “Terrorists” playlist. No doubt millions of people in America lead lives that “normal”.

The beatification of the pre-Marathon Tsarnaevs obscures a very disquieting pattern. As Michael Mukasey writes: “Tamerlan Tsarnaev is the fifth person since 9/11 who has participated in terror attacks after questioning by the FBI. He was preceded by [Fort Hood “workplace violence” facilitator] Nidal Hasan; drone casualty Anwar al Awlaki; Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad (born Carlos Leon Bledsoe), who murdered an Army recruit in Little Rock in June 2009; and David Coleman Headley, who provided intelligence to the perpetrators of the Mumbai massacre in 2008. That doesn’t count [Detroit’s incoming Pantybomber] Abdulmutallab, who was the subject of warnings to the CIA that he was a potential terrorist.”

That’s quite a high failure rate, with quite a cumulative death count.

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