The Central Intelligence Agency secretly developed an Osama bin Laden action figure whose face peeled off to reveal a scary devil beneath, according to an account first published this week in The Washington Post.
The 2005 effort was meant to produce a toy that could be distributed in Afghanistan. The point was to frighten children and their parents and lower their esteem for the then-hidden Al Qaeda leader, said the Post.
Bin Laden 'demon toy' and three other wacky CIA plots
Hobby Lobby aims for Obamacare win, Christian nation
The evangelical owners of Hobby Lobby made a fortune selling crafts supplies and made headlines fighting government-mandated birth control coverage. They’re also using their billions to sell the American public on the literal truth of scripture — through a public-school Bible curriculum, a huge museum around the corner from the Smithsonian and public forums on the faith of the founding fathers.
The Green family may be best known in secular circles for their lawsuit against Obamacare, a high-stakes — and highly political — case that could undercut the administration’s goal of setting minimum standards for health care coverage. By the end of this month, the Supreme Court will decide if the federal government can force the Greens to include methods of contraception they deem sinful as part of employees’ health insurance.
Georgia backs down on law requiring drug tests for food stamp recipients
Georgia will not drug-test food stamp recipients under a controversial new law that federal and state officials concluded was illegal, the governor's office said Friday.
The Republican-controlled legislature this spring passed a law that required testing if authorities had a “reasonable suspicion” of drug use. Adults failing the test would temporarily lose food stamp benefits, although children could still receive them.
Las Vegas police officers gunned down at pizza restaurant, one civilian killed
Two Las Vegas police officers and a civilian are dead after two shooters ambushed the cops at a pizza restaurant on Sunday afternoon and then got into a gunfight at a busy Walmart.
The two shooters, a man and woman, stormed into CiCi’s Pizza at around 11:20 a.m. and confronted two uniformed officers with Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department eating pizza on a break and gunned them down.
N.S.A. Collecting Millions of Faces From Web Images
The National Security Agency is harvesting huge numbers of images of people from communications that it intercepts through its global surveillance operations for use in sophisticated facial recognition programs, according to top-secret documents.
The spy agency’s reliance on facial recognition technology has grown significantly over the last four years as the agency has turned to new software to exploit the flood of images included in emails, text messages, social media, videoconferences and other communications, the N.S.A. documents reveal. Agency officials believe that technological advances could revolutionize the way that the N.S.A. finds intelligence targets around the world, the documents show. The agency’s ambitions for this highly sensitive ability and the scale of its effort have not previously been disclosed.
6 climbers missing on Mount Rainier
Six climbers are missing on Mount Rainier, and a helicopter search was launched on Saturday for them, a National Parks spokeswoman said.
The missing group includes four clients of Seattle-based Alpine Ascents International and two guides. They were due to return from the mountain on Friday. When they did not return, the climbing company notified park officials, Park Ranger Fawn Bauer said.
"The last contact with them was at 12,800 feet," Bauer said.
Former Counterterrorism Czar Richard Clarke: Bush, Cheney Committed War Crimes
Richard Clarke, the nation’s top counterterrorism official under former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, accused Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney of committing war crimes in their 2003 invasion of Iraq during an interview Tuesday with Democracy Now! that will air next week.
"I think things that they authorized probably fall within the area of war crimes. Whether that would be productive or not, I think, is a discussion we could all have,” said Clarke, who resigned in 2003 after the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq. “But we have established procedures now with the International Criminal Court in The Hague, where people who take actions as serving presidents or prime ministers of countries have been indicted and have been tried.”
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