BOSTON (AP) — Sixteen hours after investigators began interrogating him, the surviving suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings went silent: he’d just been read his constitutional rights.Dzhokhar Tsarnaev immediately stopped talking after a magistrate judge and a representative from the U.S. Attorney’s office entered his hospital room and gave him his Miranda warning, according to four officials of both political parties briefed on the interrogation. They insisted on anonymity because the briefing was private.Before being advised of his rights, the 19-year-old suspect told authorities that his older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, only recently had recruited him to be part of the attack that detonated pressure-cooker bombs at the marathon finish line, two U.S. officials said.The CIA, however, had named Tamerlan to a terrorist database 18 months ago, said officials close to the investigation who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the case with reporters.The new disclosure that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was included within a huge, classified database of known and suspected terrorists before the attacks was expected to drive congressional inquiries in coming weeks about whether the Obama administration adequately investigated tips from Russia that Tsarnaev had posed a security threat.Continue Reading… … Read More
Apple retains Siri voice data for up to two years
Apple recently revealed the fact that they keep all Siri inquiries stored on their servers for up to two years. That’s right, every question, comment or message spoken to the personal assistant gets anonymized and archived to improve the service, according to Apple spokesperson Trudy Muller. … Read More
Beyoncé and Jay-Z trip to Cuba reportedly licensed by U.S. Treasury
The GOP continues to question how celebrity couple Beyoncé and Jay-Z were allowed to visit Cuba, a country that the US has restricted tourism to for over 50 years. Although Obama loosened American travel restrictions to allow educational and cultural visits in recent years, media reports indicate that the celebrity couple went on vacation to celebrate their fifth wedding anniversary.Prompted by inquiries into the trip from Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, sources have come forward to say that the US Treasury sanctioned the visit. From the Guardian:Continue Reading… … Read More
White House stonewalling drone investigation say congressman from both sides of the aisle
US lawmakers have accused the White House of rebuffing their inquiries into CIA drone bombing raids abroad and vowed to assert more congressional oversight over the secretive drone war. Both Republicans and Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday denounced President Barack…
Lance Armstrong will not cooperate with U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, attorney says
Lance Armstrong said Wednesday that he will not cooperate with a US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) investigation into dope cheats in cycling but would be willing to help other anti-doping inquiries. The move greatly diminishes Armstrong’s chances of having his life ban from World Anti-Doping…
Titanic Replica In China Drawing ‘Overwhelming’ Interest, Australian Billionaire Says
HONG KONG — The Australian billionaire who’s planning to build a high-tech replica of the Titanic at a Chinese shipyard has received an “overwhelming” response from people who want to be the first paying passengers.
Representatives for Clive Palmer, who in April announced a preliminary agreement with state-owned Chinese company CSC Jinling Shipyard to build Titanic II, said Saturday that his shipping company had received inquiries from people in the United States, Britain, Asia and South America.
Russian ‘Clean Internet’ experiment gets green light
(RIA Novosti / Kirill Braga)A non-commercial partnership will limit Internet users’ access to websites; inquiries for controversial content will require personal requests.The experiment will give users access to half a million hand-picked sites. The Safe Internet League has announced that they had secured an agreement between itself, the governor of the Kostroma Region and all 29 internet services’ providers that work there to conduct the experiment dubbed ‘Clean Internet’. The experiment will start in February once providers change their user agreements so that subscribers will only have access to a so called “white list” of web-sites approved by the league’s experts. Those who wish to venture beyond the 500,000 approved websites will have to sign an additional agreement stating that they are doing so at their own risk.Kostroma Region has a population of about 660,000 about 70% of whom live in urban areas. The watchdog claims that by April they plan to expand the white list to one million sites, but as the Russian domain zone currently has about two million active sites (of four million registered), the initiative would most likely bar Kostroma residents from visiting half of all Russian web-sites. Representatives of the League say that web-site owners would have to file requests to list their resources among the safe content and such a move would happen only after experts check into the application. If experts find pornography, violence, extremism or other illicit or illegal content on the site it will be excluded from the white list forever. The Safe Internet League is a non-commercial organization launched by several major internet providers and a Christian charity. The declared aim of the group is ridding the Internet of dangerous content through self-regulation in order to prevent government censorship. However, it was the Safe Internet League that initiated the nationwide bill on internet blacklists that came into force in November. The new rule allows the authorities to force web-sites offline in an out-of-court order. Before this bill only courts could shut down illegal web-sites and prosecutors had to prove that the content posted there dangerous or harmful. Internet professionals and activists are extremely sceptical about the initiative. The head of the unregistered Pirate Party of Russia, Pavel Rassudov, said the Safe Internet experiment was pure censorship and violated the Russian Constitution that guarantees the right to information access. The activist also said the Safe Internet League’s monopoly on judgment seemed strange and creating a broader panel for the purpose woul
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d be more appropriate. An executive from the Foundation for Development of Internet Technologies and Infrastructure, Matvey Alekseyev, also said that it was not clear who granted the league’s experts the right to dictate their understanding of safety to ordinary internet users. He called on activists to start fighting actual paedophiles, not the internet videos as once the paedophiles are defeated the videos would also disappear. … Read More
