Mr. Mohammad, a farmer from Karim Dad village, was 23 when he was arrested on Nov. 21 by A Team members on quad bikes.

http://youtu.be/NTHBC6JOc4M

While the reality of Gladio’s existence in Europe is a matter of historical record, the same strategy was adopted by the Pentagon in the 1990s in a new theatre of operations, namely, Asia. “Instead of using neo-Nazis, they used mujahideen working under various bin Ladens, as well as al-Zawahiri”
The last publicly known Gladio meeting occurred in NATO’s Allied Clandestine Committee (ACC) in Brussels in 1990. While Italy was a focal point for the older European operations, Turkey and Azerbaijan served as the main conduits for a completely new, different set of operations in Asia using veterans of the anti-Soviet campaign in Afghanistan, the so-called “Afghan Arabs” that had been trained as al-Qaeda.

In a recent  book Classified Woman, Sibel Edmonds, a former translator for the FBI, describes how the Pentagon, CIA and State Department maintained intimate ties to al-Qaeda militants as late as 2001. Her memoir, Classified Woman: The Sibel Edmonds Story, published last year, charged senior government officials with negligence, corruption and collaboration with al Qaeda in illegal arms smuggling and drugs trafficking in Central Asia.

In interviews with this author in early March, Edmonds claimed that Ayman al-Zawahiri, current head of al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden’s deputy at the time, had innumerable, regular meetings at the U.S. embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan, with U.S. military and intelligence officials between 1997 and 2001, as part of an operation known as ‘Gladio B’. Al-Zawahiri, she charged, as well as various members of the bin Laden family and other mujahideen, were transported on NATO planes to various parts of Central Asia and the Balkans to participate in Pentagon-backed destabilisation operations.

According to two Sunday Times journalists speaking on condition of anonymity, this and related revelations had been confirmed by senior Pentagon and MI6 officials as part of a four-part investigative series that were supposed to run in 2008. The Sunday Times journalists described how the story was inexplicably dropped under the pressure of undisclosed “interest groups”, which, they suggest, were associated with the U.S. State Department.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/16/google-buys-a-quantum-computer/?ref=technology

The survey was commissioned by Ernst & Young’s fraud investigation and dispute services group, which does not perform standard corporate audits but instead is hired by companies to look for signs of corruption or fraud in their own operations. It did not include either China or the United States. The responses indicated that corruption and bribery are rare in the Scandinavian countries, but common in some Southern and Eastern European countries, as well as in India, the Middle East and Africa.

Professor Alessandro Acquisti of Carnegie Mellon, who researches how technology impacts privacy, stunned Stahl with an experiment. He photographed random students on the campus and in short order, not only identified several of them, but in a number of cases found their personal information, including social security numbers, just using a facial recognition program he downloaded for free. Acquisti says smart-phones will make “facial searches” as common as Google searches in the future. And nearly everybody can be subject to such prying, even those who are careful about their Internet use.

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=50146970n

“One of the participants, before doing the experiment, told us, ‘You’re not going to find me because I’m very careful about my photos online.’ And we found him,” says Acquisti, “Because someone else had uploaded a photo of him.”

“We’ve consistently said that we won’t add new face recognition features to our services unless we have strong privacy protections in place,”
Google has faced punishments over privacy violations with past products, including a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission over a social networking tool and another one with 38 states over data collection during its Street View mapping project.

Microsoft, which owns Skype, reported receiving 4,713 requests in 2012 from law enforcement, which covered just over 15,000 Skype accounts; the company said it released only “noncontent data, such as a Skype ID, name, e-mail account, billing information and call detail records” if an account is connected to a telephone number.

During a month of testimony before the three-judge panel that found General Ríos Montt guilty last Friday, the prosecution never raised the issue of American military backing in the army’s war against leftist guerrillas. The 86-year-old former dictator barely mentioned the United States when he argued in his own defense that he had no operational command over the troops that massacred and terrorized the Maya-Ixil population during his rule in 1982 and 1983.

The current American ambassador, Arnold A. Chacon, sat as a spectator in a show of support for the trial.

After the 1954 coup deposed the reformist President Jacobo Arbenz, the United States supported a series of military dictators, particularly after the victory of the Cuban revolution in 1959.

In the 1990s, the American government revealed that the C.I.A. had been paying top military officers throughout the period (of massacres).

For some in Guatemala, the virtual invisibility of the American role in the trial was disturbing.

“Who trained them?” asked Raquel Zelaya, a former peace negotiator for the government who now runs a research institute, referring to American support for the military. The trial seemed to be removed from all historical context, she said.

Lawmakers are considering enacting a new authorization, because the original Qaeda network has been largely decimated, while the current threat is increasingly seen as arising from terrorist groups in places like Yemen that share Al Qaeda’s ideology but have no connection to the 2001 attacks.  Senator Angus King, independent of Maine, noted that the 2001 statute said nothing about “associated forces” of Al Qaeda. He said the administration’s theory had “essentially rewritten the Constitution here today” because it was up to Congress to declare war.

A $15m computer that uses “quantum physics” effects to boost its speed is to be installed at a Nasa facility.

It will be shared by Google, Nasa, and other scientists, providing access to a machine said to be up to 3,600 times faster than conventional computers.

Unlike standard machines, the D-Wave Two processor appears to make use of an effect called quantum tunnelling.

http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/513696/deep-learning/