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LONDON (AP) ? British police searched two east London properties Wednesday as part of the investigation into the activities of a man and a woman arrested on suspicion of supporting terrorism offenses in Syria.
Police took the pair, both aged 26, into custody late Tuesday, after they flew into Heathrow Airport from Egypt. Police provided few details.
Most of those fighting the regime of President Bashar Assad are believed to be ordinary Syrians and soldiers who have defected, having become fed up with the authoritarian government, analysts say. But increasingly, foreign fighters and those adhering to an extremist Islamist ideology are turning up on the front lines.
The rebels are trying to play down their influence for fear of alienating Western support, but as the civil war grinds on, the influence of these extremists is set to grow.
The Syrian government has always blamed the uprising on foreign terrorists, despite months of peaceful protests by ordinary citizens that only turned violent after repeated attacks by security forces. The transformation of the conflict into an open war has given an opening to the foreign fighters and extremists.
Talk about the role of foreign jihadists in the Syrian civil war began in earnest, however, with the rise in suicide bombings. U.S. National Director of Intelligence James Clapper said in February that those attacks “bore the earmarks” of the jihadists in neighboring Iraq.
Rebel commanders are quick to dismiss the role of the foreign fighters and religious extremists, describing their numbers as few and their contribution as paltry.
A U.N. panel warned last month that the number of foreign fighters in the conflict was growing ? a development which it said could radicalize the rebellion against Assad’s rule. The Quilliam Foundation, a London-based think tank studying extremism, estimated that there were a total of 1,200-1,500 foreign fighters across Syria.
Britain’s Foreign Secretary William Hague warned Britons against traveling to Syria to take part in the fight to depose Assad. Hague told the BBC that the government is aware of some Britons joining the pitched battles for control of Syria.
“That’s not something we recommend, and we do not want British people taking part in violent situations anywhere in the world,” he said.
Fears that British Muslims might be slipping into Syria to join extremists were heightened in August when freelance photographer John Cantlie claimed he had been held hostage by a group of extremists including a man he identified as having a London accent.
The British police statement said the man and woman were arrested on suspicion of the “commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism.” The statement did not include the suspects’ names, nationalities, or any other identifying information.
The suspects were taken to a central London police station and remain in custody.
________
Elizabeth A. Kennedy in Beirut and Raphael Satter in London contributed.
Associated Press
Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/cae69a7523db45408eeb2b3a98c0c9c5/Article_2012-10-10-Britain-Terror%20Arrests/id-7a619038af424cd2896c880f1c4b72d3
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New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg served notice on Friday that the New York Police Department (NYPD) would do everything in its power to root out terrorists in the US, even if it means sending officers outside the city limits or placing law-abiding Muslims under scrutiny.
?We just cannot let our guard down again,? Bloomberg said.
The mayor laid out his doctrine for keeping the city safe during his weekly radio show following a week of criticism over a secret police department effort to monitor mosques in several cities and keep files on Muslim student groups at colleges in Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and upstate New York.
Several college administrators and politicians have complained that the intelligence-gathering pried too deeply into the lives of innocent people.
With about 1,000 officers -dedicated to intelligence and counterterrorism, the police department has one of the most aggressive domestic intelligence operations in the US. Its methods have stirred debate in legal circles over whether it has crossed the line and violated the civil liberties of Muslims.
In perhaps his most vigorous defense yet of some of the department?s anti-terrorism efforts, Bloomberg said it is ?legal,? ?appropriate? and ?constitutional? for police to keep a close eye on Muslim communities that terrorists might use as a base to strike the city. He also said that investigators were duty bound to pursue ?leads and threats wherever they come from,? even across state lines.
?It would just be naive to think we should stop following threats when they get to the border,? Bloomberg said.
Critics have said it is not appropriate for the police to spy on citizens without reason to believe they have committed a crime.
The American Civil Liberties Union issued a statement on Friday accusing the NYPD of turning the city into a ?surveillance state.?
Faiza Patel, co-director of a civil rights program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University?s law school, said guidelines in federal court rulings do not allow the department to hold on to files detailing the conversations of mosque worshipers ?unless the information relates to potential terrorist or criminal activity.?
Bloomberg said the police would continue to do ?everything that the law permits us to do? to detect terrorists operating in the US before they have a chance to act.
He warned of dire consequences if the city fails to detect plots, citing the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks on New York and Washington, and the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, which was carried out by followers of Omar Abdel-Rahman, a radical sheik who recruited -jihadists from Brooklyn mosques.
?We are not going to repeat the mistakes that we made after the 1993 bombing,? the mayor said. ?We cannot slack in our vigilance. The threat was real. The threat is real. The threat is not going away.?
Newark Mayor Corey Booker was among several New Jersey officials who said they were surprised and concerned to learn that the New York police had broadly monitored Muslims and mosques in that state.
Bloomberg acknowledged that Booker himself had not been briefed by the NYPD, but said the Newark police department had been informed. In any case, he said, it is ?100 percent legal? for city police officers to operate in other states.
?You have to also remember an awful lot of the 9/11 hijackers stayed in New Jersey for extended periods of time, training, planning their attacks,? Bloomberg said.
Source: http://libertytimes.feedsportal.com/c/33098/f/535597/s/1ceeb90b/l/0L0Staipeitimes0N0CNews0Cworld0Carchives0C20A120C0A20C260C20A0A3526437/story01.htm
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LONDON (Reuters) ? British police will examine a batch of email exchanges between climate scientists which appeared on the Internet on Tuesday as part of an inquiry into the hacking of the private documents, police said on Wednesday.
The University of East Anglia, whose Climate Action Research Unit is considered one of the world’s leading institutions on climate science, said the emails appeared to be “a carefully-timed attempt to reignite controversy over the science behind climate change.”
Negotiators from almost 200 countries meet from November 28 in South Africa for a U.N. climate summit, where only modest steps are expected toward a deal on cutting greenhouse gas emissions despite warnings from scientists that extreme weather will likely increase as the planet warms.
An anonymous group or individual called FOIA posted a file on a Russian server, http:/files.sinwt.ru/download.phpfile=25FOIA2011.zip,
which included more than 5,000 emails.
Two years ago, a series of emails written by climate experts from the university were stolen by unknown hackers and spread across the Internet in what became known as “Climategate,” just before a U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen.
The leaked emails contained private correspondence from 1995 to 2009. Climate change skeptics claimed they showed scientists manipulating data to support global warming.
However, independent inquiries cleared the university of all accusations of fraud and data manipulation, although they did recommend it change the way it handled requests for information.
“We are aware of the release of the document cache. The contents will be of interest to our investigation which is ongoing,” said police spokeswoman Nicola Atter.
“Nothing so far leads us to believe the emails raise any new issues. If, on closer study, we see anything that requires further investigation, that we will do,” Edward Acton, vice chancellor of the university, told reporters on Wednesday.
“It may throw more light on the perpetrator rather than the victims of this invasion of privacy. I am very keen to know who did it,” he added.
Police would not reveal information about suspects.
Acton said the way numbers appeared, using full stops instead of commas, was uncommon among British or American English speakers.
In addition to the 5,000 emails released on Tuesday, there are another 39,000 pages which cannot be accessed yet as they require a password, the vice-chancellor said.
Those seen so far include quotes on discussions between scientists over how to portray climate data, the workings of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and how to share information.
“I have looked at 100 or so and those highlighted are quite cherry-picked (…) They are quite representative of frank and honest discussion between scientists,” said Phil Jones, head of the university unit.
In a statement immediately after the emails appeared on the Internet on Tuesday, the university said: “This appears to be a carefully-timed attempt to reignite controversy over the science behind climate change when that science has been vindicated by three separate independent inquiries and a number of studies.”
(Reporting by Nina Chestney; Editing by Janet Lawrence)
Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/internet/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111123/wr_nm/us_climate_emails
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§ November 11th, 2011 § Filed under hail § Tagged police § No Comments
ALIQUIPPA, Pa. (AP) ? A western Pennsylvania man has been cited for animal cruelty and other crimes because police say he tried to pick a fight with his grandmother’s 15-year-old dog.
Online court records don’t list an attorney for 21-year-old Nicholas Wooddell, of Hopewell Township, who was briefly jailed Sunday after the incident.
The Beaver County Times (http://bit.ly/sRRSHU ) say the incident occurred Oct. 10 when Wooddell pounded on the woman’s door to get inside. Once there, police say Wooddell punched the dog which was lying on the floor and left. Police say Wooddell had recently been staying at his grandmother’s home but was asked to leave.
Wooddell does not have a listed phone. A relative’s phone could not take incoming calls when The Associated Press tried to located Wooddell for comment Monday morning.
___
Information from: Beaver County Times, http://www.timesonline.com/
Associated Press
Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/aa9398e6757a46fa93ed5dea7bd3729e/Article_2011-11-07-PA-ODD-Man-Fights-Dog/id-04bb7ddb534349779a1d720c0c5e6608
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§ November 10th, 2011 § Filed under hail § Tagged police § No Comments
NEW YORK ? Even before it showed up in a secret police report, everybody in Bay Ridge knew that Mousa Ahmad’s cafe was being watched.
Strangers loitered across the street from the cafe in this Brooklyn neighborhood. Quiet men would hang around for hours, listening to other customers. Once police raided the barber shop next door, searched through the shampoos and left. Customers started staying away for fear of ending up on a blacklist, and eventually Ahmad had to close the place.
But when asked if he would consider legal action against the police, Ahmad just shrugs.
“The police do what they want,” he said, standing in front of the empty storefront where his cafe used to be. “If I went to court to sue, what do you think would happen? Things would just get worse.”
It’s a common sentiment among those who are considering their legal options in the wake of an Associated Press investigation into a massive New York Police Department surveillance program targeting Muslims. Many of the targets feel they have little recourse ? and because privacy laws have weakened dramatically since 9/11, they may be right, legal experts say.
“It’s really not clear that people can do anything if they’ve been subjected to unlawful surveillance anymore,” said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union.
The AP investigation revealed that the NYPD built databases of everyday life in Muslim neighborhoods, cataloguing where people bought their groceries, ate dinner and prayed. Plainclothes officers known as “rakers” were dispatched into ethnic communities, where they eavesdropped on conversations and wrote daily reports on what they heard, often without any allegation of criminal wrongdoing.
The NYPD did not respond to repeated requests for an interview, but it has insisted that it respects the rights of people it watches. Commissioner Ray Kelly says each request for surveillance is thoroughly examined by the department’s lawyers.
“The value we place on privacy rights and other constitutional protections is part of what motivates the work of counterterrorism,” Kelly told a city council committee. “It would be counterproductive in the extreme if we violated those freedoms in the course of our work to defend New York.”
But critics of the surveillance say the NYPD is taking advantage of a general weakening of state and federal restraints, many of them forged during the 1960s and following the Watergate scandal:
_The USA PATRIOT Act, passed after the 9/11 attacks, reduced legal limits on wiretaps imposed by the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968. The same law also amended the Right to Financial Privacy Act of 1978 to allow banks to release records to intelligence agencies investigating terrorism.
_A 2007 law changed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, originally a reaction to former President Richard Nixon’s spying on political groups, to allow wiretaps of international phone calls.
_In 2002 the Supreme Court decision ruled that students cannot sue universities under the 1974 Federal Education Rights and Privacy Act. That could make it harder for Muslim student groups to seek redress over infiltration by NYPD undercover officers.
The U.S. Department of Justice still has some tools it can use to discipline local police forces.
It can withhold federal money from any police agency that discriminates on the basis of race, color, sex or national origin. Another law allows the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division to sue state and local police forces for any “pattern or practice” that deprives people of their Constitutional rights. In September it cited the statutes in a scathing report about corruption and abuse within the Puerto Rico Police Department.
Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J. has asked the Justice Department to investigate the NYPD surveillance program.
But in Puerto Rico and elsewhere, the Justice Department has typically focused only on issues of excessive force, illegal traffic stops and other clear violations of police procedure. Since 9/11, the department has not used its civil rights authority against a police department in a national security case.
Lawsuits filed by surveillance targets themselves are notoriously hard to win, said Paul Chevigny, a law professor at New York University and expert on police abuse cases.
“The fact that you feel spooked and chilled by it doesn’t constitute an injury,” Chevigny said. Even in cases where surveillance notes leak out, the chances of winning a lawsuit are “marginal” unless the leaking was done with the clear intent of harming someone, he said.
In Ahmad’s case, police documents obtained by the AP show officers were compiling a report on Moroccan neighborhoods as part of an effort to map the city’s Muslim communities. Ahmad’s Bay Ridge International Cafe appears with two other nearby restaurants, along with notes about their ownership, customers and size.
Neighbors were especially suspicious about one physically fit man in his 50s who would spend hours sitting on a bench outside a doughnut shop across from the cafe, said Linda Sarsour, director of the Arab-American Association of New York, which has its offices down the street.
“It’s like, `Why don’t you have a job, bro? Why are you always hanging out in every coffee shop?’” Sarsour said. “That was shady.”
In 2009 neighbors got fed up and asked for a meeting with the commander of the local police precinct, Ahmad said. They met in Ahmad’s cafe. The commander did not confirm any surveillance operation, but the strange men on street corners disappeared after that, he said.
Still, the stigma remained, Ahmad said. He changed the cafe’s name, but business never recovered. Finally he sold it, but the new owner did no better and eventually closed it for good.
Over the last 40 years, there has been only one class-action lawsuit that has forced serious changes to an NYPD surveillance program, lawyers say, and those changes have been eroded since the 9/11 attacks.
In 1971, 16 leftists led by lawyer Barbara Handschu sued the police department for spying on them. In 1985 they settled the case in exchange for a set of rules, known as the Handschu Guidelines, that set up a three-member panel to oversee NYPD surveillance operations.
The rules also said detectives could only start an investigation when they had “specific information” about a future crime.
“An individual’s or organization’s political, religious, sexual or economic preference may not be the sole basis upon which the (police intelligence division) develops a file or index card on that individual or organization,” the rules said.
In 2003 a judge agreed to relax the rules. Under the new rules, known as the Modified Handschu Guidelines, NYPD intelligence chief David Cohen can act alone to authorize investigations for a year at a time. He can also authorize undercover operations for four months at a time.
Most importantly, the rule requiring police to have “specific information” was loosened. It now says only that facts should “reasonably indicate” a future crime.
Activists say they have not ruled out going to court over the latest NYPD program. But at a “strategy meeting” held in Manhattan on Wednesday, the discussion centered on preparing for a Nov. 18 protest march and on organizing “know your rights” seminars at mosques and community centers.
Organizers believe they need to build a mass movement against the surveillance program first, so that people like Ahmad will feel more confident about coming forward and filing lawsuits, said Cyrus McGoldrick, civil rights manager for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, who ran Wednesday’s meeting.
“That way if there’s a court date, it’s not just 10 people sitting there, it’s 1,000 people outside the courthouse, every day,” he said. “People need to feel there is a movement protecting them before they take on the police. Apathy is not our problem ? fear is our problem.”
As the 9/11 attacks recede into the past, state and federal rules may eventually swing toward privacy rights again, said Judith Berkan, a member of the advisory board of the National Police Accountability Project, a group of civil rights lawyers.
But until then, surveillance targets would likely face a difficult court battle, she said.
“I think if the government treats you different because you’re from a particular part of the world, even if the surveillance is in a public place, it might violate the constitution,” Berkan said. “But it’s not a favorable judicial climate for me to make those kinds of arguments today.”
Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/topstories/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111108/ap_on_re_us/us_nypd_intelligence_legal_recourse
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Pakistani media follow a senior police officer at outside the house of a abducted American citizen in Lahore, Pakistan on Saturday, Aug. 13, 2011. Gunmen abducted an American man after raiding his home in the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore on Saturday, Pakistani officials said, an unusually brazen attack on a foreigner in a country where kidnappings are believed to help fund Islamist militant movements. (AP Photo/K.M. Chaudary)
Pakistani media follow a senior police officer at outside the house of a abducted American citizen in Lahore, Pakistan on Saturday, Aug. 13, 2011. Gunmen abducted an American man after raiding his home in the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore on Saturday, Pakistani officials said, an unusually brazen attack on a foreigner in a country where kidnappings are believed to help fund Islamist militant movements. (AP Photo/K.M. Chaudary)
ISLAMABAD (AP) ? Authorities were still searching Sunday for clues about who kidnapped an American in Pakistan but came up with no leads after questioning the guards at his house when he was abducted, police said Sunday.
Gunmen snatched development expert Warren Weinstein before dawn Saturday after tricking his guards and breaking into his house in the eastern city of Lahore, a brazen raid that heightened fears among aid workers, diplomats and other foreigners already worried about Islamic militancy and anti-U.S. sentiment in Pakistan.
Weinstein is the Pakistan country director for J.E. Austin Associates, a development contractor that has received millions of dollars from the aid arm of the U.S. government, according to a profile on LinkedIn, a networking website. He had told his staff that would be wrapping up his latest project and moving out of Pakistan by Monday, just a couple days after he was kidnapped.
Police were hoping the guards could shed some light on who targeted Weinstein but came up empty-handed, said Shoaib Khurram, a senior police official in Lahore.
“We do not yet have any concrete information that there was a specific threat,” Khurram told The Associated Press.
Kidnappings for ransom are common in Pakistan, with foreigners being occasional targets. Criminal gangs are suspected in most abductions, but Islamic militants, are believed to also use the tactic to raise money.
J.E. Austin Associates stressed Weinstein’s commitment to Pakistan’s economic development in a written statement and said he has worked with a wide range of Pakistani government agencies, including the Pakistan Furniture Development Company and the Pakistan Dairy Development Company.
“His efforts to help make Pakistani industries more competitive have resulted in many hundreds of well-paying jobs for Pakistani citizens and contributed to raising the standard of living in the communities where these businesses are located,” it said.
Shahab Khawaja, a former official at Pakistan’s Ministry of Industries and Production, said Weinstein has been working in Pakistan since 2004 and was scheduled to finish his contract with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) on August 15. The two men, who are close friends, met in the capital, Islamabad, in recent days.
“I was shocked and deeply disturbed by his kidnapping,” said Khawaja.
Police said Weinstein, believed to be in his 60s, had returned to his home in Lahore on Friday evening from Islamabad.
According to Pakistani police, two of the kidnappers showed up at Weinstein’s house Saturday and told the guards inside the gate of the walled compound that they wanted to give them food, an act of sharing common during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
The guards opened the gate, and five other men suddenly appeared. The armed assailants overpowered the guards and stormed into the house. Some gunmen are believed to have entered through the back. They snatched the American from his bedroom but took nothing else.
Hussain Bhatti, who worked with Weinstein in Pakistan, said the American decided to replace the security company guarding his house in recent months because of general threats to U.S. citizens working in Pakistan. But he did not know who would have targeted Weinstein.
Americans in Pakistan are considered especially at risk because militants oppose Islamabad’s alliance with Washington and the war in Afghanistan. The unilateral U.S. raid that killed al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden on May 2 in northwest Pakistan only added to tensions between the two countries.
____
Associated Press writer Sebastian Abbot contributed to this report.
Los Angeles Times
Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/3d281c11a96b4ad082fe88aa0db04305/Article_2011-08-14-AS-Pakistan-American-Abducted/id-f334e79a69ff4184b0715dcf6e7e7cc0
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