Attorney: Girl Charged in Stabbing is Mentally Ill

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Photo Credit: MSNA 12-year-old girl accused of plotting to kill a friend to curry favor with a fictional character she read stories about online shows signs of mental illness and should be in a hospital, her defense attorney said Tuesday.

The girl and another 12-year-old have been charged as adults with first-degree attempted homicide in a stabbing that nearly killed another child the same age. The two girls told investigators they plotted for months to kill their friend because a character called Slenderman required them to kill someone before they could become his “proxy.”

Both girls are being held at a juvenile detention center. Anthony Cotton, the attorney for one girl, said a judge rejected his request Monday to have the girl transferred to a mental health facility, but he will renew that request when she returns to court next week.

“From what I know, we’ve got a young girl here who has no previous criminal record at all, and if the record is accurate, probably suffers from very serious mental health issues,” said Cotton, who planned to meet with the girl later Tuesday.

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White House Blows Top CIA Official’s Cover

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Photo Credit: WikimediaIn an embarrassing flub, the Obama administration accidentally revealed the name of the CIA’s top official in Afghanistan in an email to thousands of journalists during the president’s surprise Memorial Day weekend trip to Bagram Air Field.

The officer’s name — identified as “chief of station” in Kabul — was included by U.S. embassy staff on a list of 15 senior American officials who met with President Obama during the Saturday visit. The list was sent to a Washington Post reporter who was representing the news media, who then sent it out to the White House “press pool” list, which contains as many as 6,000 recipients.

The Associated Press is withholding the officer’s name at the request of the Obama administration, who said its publication could put his life and those of his family members in danger. A Google search appears to reveal the name of the officer’s wife and other personal details.

White House officials realized the error after the Post reporter notified them, and sent out a new list without the station chief’s name. Other major news organizations, including the Post, also agreed not to publish the officer’s name.

The reporter who distributes the pool report sends it to the White House to be checked for factual accuracy and then forwarded to the thousands of journalists on the email distribution list, so in this case the White House failed on at least two occasions to recognize that the CIA official’s name was being revealed and circulated so broadly.

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Google Privacy Law ‘Means Total Rethink of Basic Freedoms’

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Photo Credit: dannysullivanHundreds of millions of people across Europe will be forced to change completely the way they use the internet, according to one of Google’s key advisers.

The era of freely available information is now over in Europe, warns Professor Luciano Floridi, who has been appointed by the £225bn search engine firm to find out how it should comply with a landmark ruling that allows people to ask for personal information to be taken down.

His warning comes as The Independent reveals that 12,000 requests were made on Friday, around 20 a minute, from people across Europe demanding to have their personal details removed from Google. More than 1,500 of these are believed to have come from people in the UK who were looking to take advantage of a service launched by Google to make it easier for people to apply for personal data to be removed.

The move follows a European court’s ruling earlier this month that gave people the “right to be forgotten”; convicted criminals are among those trying to hide links to stories from online search engines. An ex-MP who is seeking re-election is another of the thousands who have approached Google.

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After IG Report Confirms VA Horrors, Carney Says There Will Be Accountability “If” Allegations Are True

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Photo Credit: TownHallBy Katie Pavlich.

Less than 24 hours after a preliminary Veterans Affairs Inspector General report showed that not only was there widespread misconduct and excruciatingly long wait times at hospitals for veterans, but that the problem is worse than first reported, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said President Obama will wait for a broader review before making any further personnel decisions about the VA, specifically when it comes to VA Secretary Eric Shinseki. Shinseki has been asked to resign by Republicans, Democrats and a number of veterans groups, including the American Legion.

“I’m not going to speculate about personnel [at the VA],” Carney said.

Read more from this story HERE.

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VFW Calls For Immediate Firings At VA

By Debra Heine.

Following Wednesday’s release of the preliminary report by the VA Office of the Inspector General, the national commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States (VFW) called on General Shinseki to immediately fire everyone who “knowingly gamed the reporting system.” Included among those the VFW says should be held accountable are those “in senior leadership who should have known but didn’t, or knew but didn’t care.”

“We call on VA Secretary Eric Shinseki to immediately fire every employee and supervisor who knowingly gamed the reporting system,” demanded William A. Thien, national commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States. “The VA is entrusted with the care and treatment of our nation’s heroes, and there are people in Phoenix and possibly elsewhere who failed miserably, and quite possibly, criminally,” he said. “There are no second chances when you deal with people’s lives, and that includes everyone in senior leadership who should have known but didn’t, or knew but didn’t care.”

“Military veterans are used to waiting in lines, but no veteran should ever have to wait for timely access to care for their wounds, illnesses and injuries, said Thien. “In light of the interim report, I want to make it clear to Secretary Shinseki that he needs to move immediately to terminate the employment of those bearing any responsibility for this travesty. And if the final IG report confirms willful negligence, then those responsible need to be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law. Anything less will not be tolerated by the VFW.”

This represents a change in stance from Saturday, when the leadership of the VFW torched Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) for writing an open letter that was critical of unnamed veterans groups because they had not yet called for new leadership at the VA.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Emails Track How VA Officials Conspired to Manipulate Wait Times

By Melissa Clyne.

Despite years of repeated complaints and evidence showing patient wait-time fraud at the Central Texas VA, the inspector general never held anyone accountable and even bestowed the Robert W. Carey Performance Excellence Award on the facility, The Daily Beast reports.

A Texas whistleblower provided the publication with emails and internal memos detailing “how high-level VA hospital employees conspired to game the system” by doing things like entering the next available appointment date instead of a patient’s desired appointment date into the computer system, according to The Daily Beast, which was often a difference of weeks and months.

Fifty percent of VA executives’ “field bonus” pay hinged on wait times, according to the whistleblower.

This “low-risk, high-reward form of cheating” was pervasive throughout the VA, the whistleblower said, yet the outcome of a 2011 inspector general investigation that found “significant delays” and “widespread manipulation” of appointments didn’t result in disciplinary action against any VA officials.

“Every doctor, nurse, and clerk in the hospital knows it’s true, but the VA’s investigative team wasn’t able to find any evidence,” the whistleblower said. “They didn’t interview any of us or really try to find out what was going on. This was reported in 2011 and it’s still not fixed today.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Think Internet Data Mining Goes Too Far? Then You Won’t Like This

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Photo Credit: EmotivThese days, you can hop on the Internet and buy yourself a consumer-grade brain scanning device for just a few hundred dollars. Technically, they’re called brain computer interfaces, or BCIs. As these devices develop, researchers are thinking a few steps ahead — they’re worried about how to keep marketers from scanning our brains.

The technology, which is basically headgear that senses electrical patterns in your brain, can tell if you’re excited, relaxed or focused. Fed into a computer, that brain wave information can be used for any number of applications. One of the most popular ideas is to use the brain as a “third hand” to control video games. Believe it or not, the second neurogaming expo was held recently in San Francisco.

“It’s happening somewhat faster than we thought,” says Howard Chizeck, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Washington. “A couple of the new products that have shown up are already along the pathway that I think we thought were a couple of years away.”

He believes we’re at the edge of a boom in BCI-mediated products, and he’s in a hurry to get out in front of the technology’s potential threat to privacy. He’s working with graduate students Tamara Bonaci and Jeffrey Herron to study how invasive these brain sensors could become.

In the study, funded by the National Science Foundation, human subjects wear a research-grade BCI while playing a video game the researches have dubbed “Flappy Whale.” While the subjects play the game, images of commercial logos flicker on the screen. The sensor cap records the subject’s involuntary emotional responses to those logos.

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Family: V.A. Cops Stomped On Veteran’s Head, Killing Him

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Photo Credit: REUTERS / Jonathan ErnstBy Chuck Ross.

The family of a 65 year-old veteran claims that VA police stomped on the veterans head and neck, causing him to suffer a stroke and die several weeks later, a new lawsuit alleges.

On May 25, 2011, Jonathan Montano was waiting several hours to undergo dialysis treatment at the Loma Linda VA facility when he grew frustrated, reports Courthouse News Service.

With an IV still in his arm, Montano made his way towards the hospital exit, saying that he would get treatment at the Long Beach VA facility instead.

Norma Montano, the veteran’s wife of 44 years, left the hospital to retrieve the couple’s car.

But VA police wouldn’t let Montano leave, the lawsuit alleges.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: APTexas VA Run Like a ‘Crime Syndicate,’ Whistleblower Says

By Jacob Siegel.

Last week, President Obama pledged to address allegations of corruption and dangerous inefficiencies in the veterans’ health-care system. But before the president could deliver on his pledge, the scandal has spread even further. New whistleblower testimony and internal documents implicate an award-winning VA hospital in Texas in widespread wrongdoing—and what appears to be systemic fraud.

Emails and VA memos obtained exclusively by The Daily Beast provide what is among the most comprehensive accounts yet of how high-level VA hospital employees conspired to game the system. It shows not only how they manipulated hospital wait lists but why—to cover up the weeks and months veterans spent waiting for needed medical care. If those lag times had been revealed, it would have threatened the executives’ bonus pay.

What’s worse, the documents show the wrongdoing going unpunished for years, even after it was repeatedly reported to local and national VA authorities. That indicates a new troubling angle to the VA scandal: that the much touted investigations may be incapable of finding violations that are hiding in plain sight.

“For lack of a better term, you’ve got an organized crime syndicate,” a whistleblower who works in the Texas VA told The Daily Beast. “People up on top are suddenly afraid they may actually be prosecuted and they’re pressuring the little guys down below to cover it all up.”

“I see it in the executives’ eyes,” the whistleblower added. “They are worried.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Oldest Lawmaker Kicked Out

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Photo Credit: Getty Images Rep. Ralph Hall (R-Texas), the oldest member in House history, has lost his primary to a conservative challenger.

The Associated Press has called the race for former U.S. Attorney John Ratcliffe (R), who led Hall by 52 percent to 48 percent with 68 percent of precincts reporting.

Hall is the first incumbent to lose a reelection campaign this year. Originally elected as a Democrat in 1980, he’d switched to the GOP in 2004 and hadn’t faced a serious challenge since.

Hall, 91, was caught off guard by Ratcliffe, who jumped into the race right before the filing deadline and loaned himself more than $600,000 for the race. The longtime congressman took a while to kick his campaign into gear, raising and spending very little for the first round of voting in March, when Ratcliffe and other challengers held him to 45 percent of the vote.

Ratcliffe ran a disciplined campaign focused on generational change. He also sought to position himself to Hall’s right — and received a boost on that front as the runoff began, when he received endorsements from the conservative Club for Growth, Madison Project and Senate Conservatives Fund.

Read more from this story HERE.

State Department Forced to Apologize for Promoting Muslim Cleric Who Supported Killing of U.S. Soldiers

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Photo Credit: IJ Review In yet another embarrassment to Obama’s State Department, conservative news outlet Free Beacon forced the Counter Terrorism Bureau to apologize for promoting a Muslim cleric who supported a 2004 fatwa (an Islamic religious order), endorsing the killing of U.S. soldiers fighting in Iraq:

The apology came on the heels of a Friday Washington Free Beacon report detailing the CT Bureau’s promotion of Sheik Abdallah Bin Bayyah, the vice president of a radical Muslim scholars group that was founded by a radical Muslim Brotherhood leader who has called “for the death of Jews and Americans.”

…The CT Bureau apologized multiple times on Tuesday for tweeting in favor of Bin Bayyah and promoting an article on his website.

Read more from this story HERE.

Columbia University Is Spending Millions Of Tax Dollars On Fake Climate-Change Death Voicemails

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller Columbia University in New York City is spending a $5.7 million grant from the National Science Foundation to produce projects that show several conjectural scenarios that promoters of global-warming science swear will happen soon if the developed world doesn’t mend its evil ways.

One of the taxpayer-funded creations is a large series of fictitious voicemails in which people complain and gasp for breath, reports Campus Reform.

For example, in one of the pretend voicemails, set in 2065, a man tells his mother that he is really worried about dying from either rising temperatures or a huge tsunami.

“If the tsunami doesn’t get us, the heat might,” the man says. “I’m just calling to say I love you and I miss you and it might be the last time you hear my voice. Bye.”

In another fake voicemail, a woman struggles frantically for breath because she is “out of CO2 credits,” according to Campus Reform.

Read more from this story HERE.

Raises All Around? Federal Agency Scraps Employee Rating System

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Photo Credit: REUTERSAmerica’s new consumer watchdog agency has come up with a unique solution for its troubled employee-rating system: Give almost everyone a gold star.

The independent Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — created under the 2010 “Dodd-Frank” financial industry overhaul to serve as a consumer watchdog — says it’s scrapping its system of employee ratings in response to concerns that it was discriminatory.

That rating system assigned workers a score of between one and five. Due to concerns with the system, everyone who scored a three or above, regardless of performance, will now be getting the top rating of five — along with the corresponding retroactive pay raises that the top rating brings.

Those raises will likely cost more than $5 million, according to the American Banker, which first reported on the ratings troubles in a March 6 article.

Going forward, the bureau is looking at using a new two-tiered rating system for at least two years while officials evaluate the old system.

Read more from this story HERE.