Monthly Archives: January 2014

Brooklyn man arrested and charged in five hateful “knockout” attacks on women.

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Four individuals were arrested in the latest 'knockiout' game earlier this morning

NEW YORK—The New York Daily News and New York Post are reporting on the arrest of a Brooklyn man by the NYPD hate crimes unit for five alleged “knockout” attacks perpetrated against women.

Police sketch of Barry Baldwin, 35 of Brooklyn.

Police sketch of Barry Baldwin, 35 of Brooklyn.

According to the reports, 35 year-old Barry Baldwin attacked his hapless victims from November 9 through Christmas eve. Victims were Jewish women ranging from 20 to 78 years of age. One woman had a 7 year old child with her for which prosecutors added a charge of endangering a child.

Initial reports had police treating this as a hate crime since it was specifically against the Jewish community. But it was, unfortunately, reported as being downgraded. Prosecutors would not comment on the reason for the downgrade from a hate crime.

“Everyone will sleep a little easier,” said Assemblyman Dov Hikind, who has been warning the community about the menace.

Phil Everly of the Everly Brothers dies at 74

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everlyPhil Everly, who with his brother, Don, made up the most revered vocal duo of the rock-music era, their exquisite harmonies profoundly influencing the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Byrds and countless younger-generation rock, folk and country singers, died Friday in Burbank of complications from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, his wife, Patti Everly, told The Times. He was 74.

“We are absolutely heartbroken,” she said, noting that the disease was the result of a lifetime of cigarette smoking. “He fought long and hard.”

During the height of their popularity in the late 1950s and early 1960s, they charted nearly three dozen hits on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, among them “Cathy’s Clown,” “Wake Up Little Susie,” “Bye Bye Love,” “When Will I Be Loved” and “All I Have to Do Is Dream.” The Everly Brothers were among the first 10 performers inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame when it got off the ground in 1986.

“They had that sibling sound,” said Linda Ronstadt, who scored one of the biggest hits of her career in 1975 with her recording of “When Will I Be Loved,” which Phil Everly wrote. “The information of your DNA is carried in your voice, and you can get a sound [with family] that you never get with someone who’s not blood related to you. And they were both such good singers–they were one of the foundations, one of the cornerstones of the new rock ‘n’ roll sound.”

Read more at Los Angeles Times

Gun poll: 7 in 10 feel safer in an armed neighborhood

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An overwhelming seven in 10 Americans say they would feel safer living in a neighborhood where individuals could own a gun for self defense, the latest indication that support for comprehensive gun control is fading.

Rasmussen Reports found that 68 percent of voters polled would feel safer in an armed neighborhood. Just 23 percent said they’d feel safer in “a neighborhood where nobody was allowed to own a gun.”

The poll is the latest to show shrinking support for the type of gun control President Obama and Senate Democrats sought after the December 2012 slayings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. The president has put gun control on his 2014 agenda, but few in Washington expect action.

Read more at The Washington Examiner

Confirmed: Snapchat Hack Not A Hoax, 4.6M Usernames And Numbers Published

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snapchat_uhohA site called SnapchatDB.info has saved usernames and phone numbers for 4.6 million accounts and made the information available for download. In a statement to us, SnapchatDB says that it got the information through a recently identified and patched Snapchat exploit and that it is making the data available in an effort to convince the messaging app to beef up its security. We’ve also reached out to Snapchat.
SnapchatDB said:

Our motivation behind the release was to raise the public awareness around the issue, and also put public pressure on Snapchat to get this exploit fixed. It is understandable that tech startups have limited resources but security and privacy should not be a secondary goal. Security matters as much as user experience does.

We used a modified version of gibsonsec’s exploit/method. Snapchat
could have easily avoided that disclosure by replying to Gibsonsec’s private communications, yet they didn’t. Even long after that disclosure, Snapchat was reluctant to taking the necessary steps to secure user data. Once we started scraping on a large scale, they decided to implement very minor obstacles, which were still far from enough. Even now the exploit persists. It is still possible to scrape this data on a large scale. Their latest changes are still not too hard to circumvent.

We wanted to minimize spam and abuse that may arise from this release. Our main goal is to raise public awareness on how reckless many internet companies are with user information. It is a secondary goal for them, and that should not be the case. You wouldn’t want to eat at a restaurant that spends millions on decoration, but barely anything on cleanliness.

Earlier we speculated that SnapchatDB might be a hoax meant to call attention to the app’s security issues but, as it turns out, it’s real–at least one member of our editorial team has been affected. A reader also told us he found his own number, that of several friends and Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel in the list. On Hacker News, several people have had trouble downloading the data files (I just got an error message for both of them, but that may be because of high traffic), but a Jailbreak subreddit user who saw the list said that only numbers in some parts of the U.S. have been published so far. If you have not been able to download the list, you can use this site created by developer Robbie Trencheny to see if your username was included.

Read more at Tech Crunch

Christians targeted in Iraq on Christmas Day

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iraq_christmas_bombThe persecution of Christians in Muslim countries is one of the most under-reported stories out there. It’s widespread and constant, carried out by terrorist undergrounds when it’s not condoned or indulged by the local government. When Islam gains power, it often develops serious “co-existence” problems. The global media really hates to discuss it for ideological reasons, but sometimes it’s impossible to ignore. From the Associated Press:

Militants in Iraq targeted Christians in three separate Christmas Day bombings in Baghdad, killing at least 37 people, officials said Wednesday.

In one attack, a car bomb went off near a church in the capital’s southern Dora neighborhood, killing at least 26 people and wounding 38, a police officer said.

Earlier, two bombs ripped through a nearby outdoor market simultaneously in the Christian section of Athorien, killing 11 people and wounding 21, the officer said.

The Iraq-based leader of the Chaldean Catholic Church, Louis Sako, said the parked car bomb exploded after Christmas Mass and that none of the worshippers were hurt. Sako said he didn’t believe the church was the target.

There were well over a million Christians in Iraq 20 years ago; it’s down to less than half that number today, and maybe closer to a third, depending on which estimates of the current population are most reliable. The usual factional violence and government-toppling insurgent agenda was also in play:

The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad condemned the attacks in a statement.

“The Christian community in Iraq has suffered deliberate and senseless targeting by terrorists for many years, as have many other innocent Iraqis,” the statement read. “The United States abhors all such attacks and is committed to its partnership with the government of Iraq to combat the scourge of terrorism.”

Along with Christians, other targets include civilians in restaurants, cafes or crowded public areas, as well as Shiites and members of the Iraqi security forces, attacked in an attempt to undermine confidence in the Shiite-led government and stir up Iraq’s already simmering sectarian tensions.

Read more at Human Events

Fast and Furious gun turns up after Mexican resort shootout

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Washington (CNN) — A dramatic shootout between authorities and suspected cartel gunmen at a Mexican seaside resort this month has ties to a botched U.S. gun operation.

A U.S. official said Tuesday that investigators have traced at least one firearm recovered at a December 18 gunfight in Puerto Peñasco, across from the Arizona border, to Operation Fast and Furious.

That’s the disastrous operation run by agents in the Phoenix office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Agents allowed suspected gun smugglers to buy about 2,000 firearms with the goal of trying to find and prosecute high-level traffickers. They couldn’t track the firearms and most are believed to have ended up with cartels and gangsters in Mexico.

Many have turned up at crime scenes in Mexico and the United States, including at a shooting that killed a U.S. border agent in 2010.

The shootout in Puerto Peñasco, also called Rocky Point by Arizona tourists, two weeks ago left at least five suspected cartel gunmen dead, including possibly a high level Sinaloa cartel chief, according to Mexican authorities.

Read more at CNN

Global Warming Alarmists Stuck In Antarctic Sea Ice

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das-boot

The alarmists set sail for Antarctica with a plan to show the world how badly alleged man-made “global warming” was wreaking havoc across the region. Instead, their Russian-flagged ship was frozen in place after sea-ice coverage hit record-high levels this year. The dozens of global warmists onboard are still stuck as multiple ice-breaking rescue vessels were unable to reach the frozen ship. Climate realists and the alternative press, meanwhile, were quick to ridicule and poke fun at the stranded and beleaguered alarmists. However, the increasingly discredited establishment media has largely failed to notice or report the irony.

The doomed Antarctic “climate research” expedition that ended up being trapped in ice was led by Chris Turney, a professor of “climate change” at the University of New South Wales in Australia. He claims emissions of essential-to-life carbon dioxide — exhaled by all humans — must be drastically curtailed by government to stop “global warming,” which has been non-existent in recent years. The controversial alarmist, who boasts of setting up a “green” business known as “Carbonscape” to profit from increasingly discredited theories underpinning climate hysteria, was on a self-proclaimed mission to “discover and communicate the environmental changes taking place in the south.”

Presumably, being frozen in summer ice was not what Turney and his fellow alarmists had in mind. However, it should not have been entirely surprising. Despite hysterical fear-mongering by the United Nations and self-styled “climate experts,” sea-ice cover in the Southern Hemisphere hit a new record in September of 2013 for the second year in a row, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. The latest data show Antarctic sea ice is more than two standard deviations above normal, climate researchers reported.

Read more at The New American