The pound-for-pound sprinting king reclaimed an old crown on Sunday despite miserable conditions and a nagging injury. Usain Bolt won the 100 meter gold medal at the world championships in Moscow, Russia because he's still the best in the world.
Bolt's 9.77 second time was his slowest in a major 100 meter final, according to the Guardian's Sean Inge, and he had to come from behind to earn the victory, but there's little reason to believe the 26-year-old is going to start losing any time soon. The track was wet after a downpour shocked the Russian crowd a few moments before the race. Lighting flashed across the skyline, too, leading to this fantastic AFP photo that was passedaround Sunday afternoon:
Bolt also admitted to fighting through an injury Sunday to compete. "My legs were sore after the semi-finals, I don't know why, but the world record wasn't on so I came out just to win," he told the BBC after the race. Something seemed off at the beginning of the race when the reigning Olympic champion came out of the gates behind American sprinter Justin Gatlin, who finished second with with a time of 9.85 seconds. But the Jamaican motored forward, passing Gatlin with a little less than half way to go.
Things went terribly the last time Bolt raced at the world championships. He false started twice and was disqualified in 2011. His fellow countryman Yohan Blake, who sat out this year with an injury, won the gold that year. "It's always great to get back your title," Bolt said after today's win.
Some of Bolt's biggest rivals were absent Sunday after testing positive for performance enhancing drugs. American Tyson Gay and Bolt's Jamaican teammate Asafa Powell are both serving bans from the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency after getting busted last month. "I'm just doing my part by running fast, winning titles and letting the world know you can do it clean," Bolt said Sunday.
The secure email service said to be used by Edward Snowden has abruptly shut down.
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“I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit,” Ladar Levison, the company’s head, wrote in a letterposted on the site. “After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations. I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot.”
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Lavabit uses encryption to prevent emails from being read by anyone but the sender and intended recipient. Snowden was revealed to be using it when a representative from Human Rights Watch posted a message (registration required) believed to be from Snowden along with an email address, edsnowden@lavabit.com.
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It’s not clear what prompted Lavabit to shut down. It had suspended service, supposedly for technical reasons, for some 24 hours before the announcement was posted, leading to a mix of consternation and annoyance among its users on Twitter.
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Levison couldn’t immediately be reached for comment. But from his letter, reproduced below, it’s not too hard to speculate that he was asked by the US government to provide information from Lavabit’s servers about one or more of its users:
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My Fellow Users,
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I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit. After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations. I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot. I feel you deserve to know what’s going on–the first amendment is supposed to guarantee me the freedom to speak out in situations like this. Unfortunately, Congress has passed laws that say otherwise. As things currently stand, I cannot share my experiences over the last six weeks, even though I have twice made the appropriate requests.
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What’s going to happen now? We’ve already started preparing the paperwork needed to continue to fight for the Constitution in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. A favorable decision would allow me resurrect Lavabit as an American company.
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This experience has taught me one very important lesson: without congressional action or a strong judicial precedent, I would stronglyrecommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States.
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Sincerely, Ladar Levison Owner and Operator, Lavabit LLC
PHILADELPHIA — A bomb threat investigation that prompted a search of a trans-Atlantic flight and questioning of its passengers has turned up nothing suspicious, officials said.
US Airways Flight 777 from Shannon, Ireland, landed in an isolated part of Philadelphia International Airport on Wednesday afternoon and was met on the tarmac by fire trucks and federal and local authorities.
A telephone threat about a bomb was made about the plane before it landed, Philadelphia police Chief Inspector Joe Sullivan said.
The plane's 171 passengers and eight crew members exited via staircases and were taken to waiting buses. The Boeing 757 was searched by a bomb-sniffing dog, passengers were questioned and their luggage was screened, investigators said.
US Airways said in a statement it was aware of a possible security issue with the flight and "out of an abundance of caution taxied the aircraft to a remote location, where it was met by law enforcement and emergency personnel."
Nothing was found, and the all-clear was given about an hour later.
Officials did not disclose the specific nature of the bomb threat or details about from where it may have originated. The FBI, Philadelphia police department and Transportation Security Administration were involved in the investigation and said the person who placed the call could face serious criminal charges.
U.S. customs officials have screening facilities at Shannon Airport, and the passengers aboard the plane would have gone through them before boarding.
The plane continued as planned to Pittsburgh after its scheduled stop in Philadelphia. Inbound flights were briefly delayed while the investigation was underway.
Pyongyang said today that it would reopen an economic zone operated by North and South Korea, one of the few points of cooperation between the rival Koreas whose closure since April has meant the loss of millions of dollars for both sides.
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Interestingly, North Korea’s announcement to reopen the Kaesong Industrial Complex (KIC) came about an hour and a half after Seoul seemed to finally give up on cajoling North Korea into reopening the zone. South Korean authorities said today that they would begin compensating the South Korean companies that had operated factories in Kaesong, a sign observers interpreted as South Korea moving on—or at least wanting to give such an impression. Previous proposals to Pyongyang to reopen the zone had gone unanswered, prompting officials in Seoul to say “we cannot wait forever” in late July.
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The two counties are still technically at war since an armistice was struck after the 1950-53 war and relations reached a low point earlier this year when Pyongyang conducted a third nuclear test and threatened again to turn South Korea “into a sea of fire” in a nuclear strike.
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The zone is a rare thawing point in relations between one of the world’s wealthiest countries and one of the poorest, most reclusive states. Kaesong generates an estimated $90 million a year in wages paid to North Korea and is a critical source of foreign currency. South Korea has said that its companies had lost 1.05 trillion won ($910 million) since the Kaesong industrial park was closed in April. Talks about when to reopen the zone will be held on Aug 14.
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Here are some recent photos of Kaesong:
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South Korean workers and employers from Kaesong call for its reopening.Reuters/Kim Hong Ji
North Koreans in Kaesong cleaning a street after a storm.AP Photo/David Guttenfelder
Demonstrators outside of Kaesong call for inter-Korean dialogue.Reuters/Kim Hong Ji
A guard patrols a road connecting KIC with South Korea.Reuters/Kim Hong-Ji
A checkpoint on the Grand Unification Bridge that leads into the Kaesong Industrial Complex.Reuters/Kim Hong-Ji
South Korean soldiers guard the bridge leading into KIC.Reuters/Lee Jae Won
Some of the made-in-KIC wares available for purchase at Kaesong.Reuters/Kim Hong Ji
A South Korean worker with products made in the KIC
In a rare diplomatic rebuke, President Barack Obama on Wednesday canceled his Moscow summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The decision reflected both U.S. anger over Russia’s harboring of National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden and growing frustration within the Obama administration over what it sees as Moscow’s stubbornness on other key issues, including missile defense and human rights.
Obama will still attend the Group of 20 economic summit in St. Petersburg, Russia, but a top White House official said the president had no plans to hold one-on-one talks with Putin while there. Instead of visiting Putin in Moscow, the president will add a stop in Sweden to his early September travel itinerary.
Obama, who is traveling in California, said in an interview Tuesday that he was “disappointed” by Russia’s move to grant Snowden asylum for one year. But he said the move also reflected the “underlying challenges” the U.S. faces in dealing with Moscow.
“There have been times where they slip back into Cold War thinking and a Cold War mentality,” Obama said in an interview on NBC’s “The Tonight Show.”
White House deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes said Russia’s decision last week to defy the U.S. and grant Snowden temporary asylum only exacerbated an already troubled relationship. And with few signs that progress would be made during the Moscow summit on other agenda items, Rhodes said the president decided to cancel the talks.
“We’ll still work with Russia on issues where we can find common ground, but it was the unanimous view of the president and his national security team that a summit did not make sense in the current environment,” Rhodes said.
Obama’s decision to scrap talks with Putin is likely to deepen the chill in the already frosty relationship between the two leaders. They have frequently found themselves at odds on pressing international issues, most recently in Syria, where the U.S. accuses Putin of helping President Bashar Assad fund a civil war. The U.S. has also been a vocal critic of Russia’s crackdown on Kremlin critics and recently sanctioned 18 Russians for human rights violations.
For its part, Moscow has accused the U.S. of installing a missile shield in Eastern Europe as a deterrent against Russia, despite American assurances that the shield is not aimed at its former Cold War foe. Putin also signed a law last year banning U.S. adoptions of Russian children, a move that was seen as retaliation for the U.S. measure that cleared the way for the human rights sanctions.
Obama and Putin last met in June on the sidelines of the Group of 8 summit in Northern Ireland. While there, they announced plans to hold the additional talks in Moscow.
White House spokesman Jay Carney said the U.S. told the Russian government Wednesday morning that Obama believed “it would be more constructive to postpone the summit until we have more results from our shared agenda. “
Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., welcomed the decision, saying Putin was “acting like a school-yard bully and doesn’t deserve the respect a bilateral summit would have accorded him.”
The 30-year-old Snowden is accused of leaking highly secretive details about NSA surveillance programs. He first fled from the U.S. to Hong Kong, then made his way to Russia. He was marooned in the transit zone of a Moscow airport for more than a month before Russia granted him asylum last week.
For Russia, the decision could be used as cover to depict itself of a defender of human rights amid criticism from the U.S. and other nations of its tough crackdown on dissent.
Even as Obama scraps plans to meet with Putin, Secretary of State John Kerry and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel are preparing for meetings in Washington on Friday with their Russian counterparts. Snowden’s status is expected to be a main topic of conversation.
The lower-level meetings with Russia underscore that the U.S. cannot completely sever ties with the Kremlin. Russian transit routes are critical to the U.S. as it removes troops and equipment from Afghanistan. And despite deep differences over Syria’s future, the White House knows it will almost certainly need some level of Russian cooperation in order to oust Assad.
Still, some congressional lawmakers have called for Obama to not only scrub the Moscow summit but also demand that Russia forfeit its right to host the G-20 summit. Others have spoken of boycotting next year’s Winter Olympics in the Russian city of Sochi.
In his interview Tuesday, Obama defended his decision to attend the G-20 summit, an annual gathering of the world’s largest economies. Given the U.S. role in an increasingly interdependent global economy, Obama said it made sense to have high-level representation.
The G-20 summit is scheduled to take place in St. Petersburg on Sept. 5-6. Obama will make his first visit to Sweden ahead of the summit, though his itinerary is unclear.
Rhodes said Sweden has been an important U.S. partner on clean energy issues and will be part of a U.S. trade agreement being negotiated with the European Union.
By devising an ingenious series of possibly undetectable airline bombs, a wiry Saudi named Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri has become the latest personification of the ever-changing al Qaeda threat. You can thank him and his tradecraft for much of the frenzy of counterterrorism activity in recent days. That includes pretty much every country shutting down its embassy in Sana’a, Yemen and evacuating government personnel, and dire warnings of a possibly large-scale imminent attack in North Africa or the Middle East—or possibly somewhere else.
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The global war on terrorism has never lacked a face of evil to embody the threat; Osama bin Laden, of course, as well as Ayman Zawahiri, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and others. But authorities are now pursuing Asiri with an especially high level of urgency and concern. The reason: not only is he a bomb-maker for the terror network’s most dangerous affiliate, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), he’s apparently a very capable and creative one who has trained other al Qaeda operatives.
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Asiri also seems to know exactly how to exploit what is arguably the biggest hole in the vast counter-terrorism safety net that has been constructed since the 9/11 attacks—airline security. US authorities in recent weeks disclosed that Asiri has probably designed a sophisticated and powerful explosive device that can avoid detection by trained dogs and bomb detection machines at airport security checkpoints. And there are now concerns that AQAP—presumably at Asiri’s direction—is developing an ingenious new generation of liquid explosive that is also undetectable, and possibly being used in planned (and imminent) attacks. Operatives reportedly can dip ordinary clothing into a liquid explosive and turn the clothes themselves into bombs once dry.
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“He is a man of great experience and his experience is specifically in explosives, so that makes him more dangerous than others,” a senior Yemeni official told Quartz today. “We have been looking for him for quite some time now. Anything he does is problematic.”
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Asiri is believed to be a savant of sorts, a trained chemist and the son of a retired Saudi soldier, who is about 31 years old. He has attacked numerous Western, Middle Eastern and North African targets, devising various high-tech devicesincluding shoe bombs, underwear bombs, printers fitted with high-grade explosives, and metal-free bombs.
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Counter-terrorism authorities have been playing a cat-and-mouse game with Asiri and other al Qaeda explosives experts for many years, changing their security posture—especially for commercial aviation—with each new bomb-making development. Those include the use of explosives like Triacetone Triperoxide(TATP) and Pentaerythritol Tetranitrate (PETN), which required new methods of detection. Asiri has been a particularly frustrating quarry. The CIA thought it had killed him at least once, in a drone strike in Yemen. Then an al Qaeda operative tasked with carrying out an attack with a new version of Asiri’s underpants bombdefected to the CIA and Arab intelligence agencies—with the bomb—but Asiri was able to slip away again.
A skydiving instructor on a tandem jump in Mississippi died and his student was critically injured after their parachutes failed to open, the Lamar County sheriff said Sunday.
The body of James "Jimmie" Horak, Jr., 66, was found Saturday in heavy mud in a swampy wooded area about a mile from the airport in Lumberton where they planned to land, Sheriff Danny Rigel said. The other person, whose name was not released, was in critical condition with broken bones and head injuries.
Horak and the student were with a group of three others who jumped from the plane at the same time around midmorning Saturday, under sunny skies, Rigel said. Horak and the student were the only ones doing a tandem jump.
The others noticed that Horak had had some kind of equipment trouble -- perhaps a problem with his lines -- but didn't appear to realize how serious it was until after they landed at the airport and the pair didn't emerge from the woods, Rigel said.
Horak and the student landed on leased hunting land, and a hunting club member who knew the jumpers were missing then found them, Rigel said.
Deputies had to carry Horak and the student for a "considerable distance" to get them out of the woods, and the student was then airlifted to Forrest General Hospital in nearby Hattiesburg, Rigel said.
The Federal Aviation Administration will inspect the parachutes to determine if they were properly rigged by a qualified parachute rigger, and if the parachute operation was in compliance with federal regulations, FAA spokeswoman Kathleen Bergen said.
Local authorities will investigate the event and determine probable cause, she said.
Horak's cause of death won't be known until after an autopsy, likely to take place Monday, Rigel said.
Horak, of Pensacola, Florida, is listed as an instructor with the Emerald Coast Skydiving Center in Elberta, Alabama, just across the Florida-Alabama state line. A different skydiving company, Gold Coast Skydivers, is based at the airport in Lumberton where Horak was supposed to land.
It wasn't immediately clear who organized Saturday's jump. Neither company could be reached for comment Sunday.
"Although it doesn't officially advertise it, Las Vegas has long been known for its thriving sex industry. It’s a place where prostitutes come “direct to your room” and outcall entertainment services advertise in the Yellow Pages."
Vegas has long been associated with the sex industry, but today's street trade has a much darker underbelly, as a recent shooting on the Strip reveals.
But when representatives of the city’s night-clubbing pimp subculture took their quarrel onto Las Vegas Boulevard in the early-morning hours of Feb. 21, national news consumers were again reminded that what happens in Vegas doesn’t always stay there. The ensuing shooting and fiery crash left three dead and the Strip in chaos.
Self-proclaimed pimp Ammar Harris is accused of setting the chain of events into motion and now faces the possibility of the death penalty. Prosecutors contend Harris shot and killed reputed pimp and rapper Kenneth “Kenny Clutch” Cherry Jr. after their vehicles left the Aria resort. The mortally wounded Cherry lost control of his Maserati and the car careened into a taxicab, causing it to burst into flames. Cabdriver Michael Boldon and passenger Sandra Sutton-Wasmund of Maple Valley, Wash., were killed.
For all the academic chatter about prostitution being a victimless crime, a large percentage of the working women turned out in their mid-teens.
The grisly incident briefly flipped the sewer lid on the local street prostitution racket that thrives on the endless flow of partying tourists who annually sojourn to Sin City. Prostitution negotiations are common inside some clubs, where investigators say men of Harris’s ilk are treated like high rollers.
Local police are anything but surprised. Rampant prostitution may be the worst-kept secret in Las Vegas. With so many consenting adults and an undeniable double standard to deal with – prostitution is legal in some rural Nevada counties – Metro’s 28-person Vice Unit must choose its battles carefully. That’s why on most nights you’ll find Metro vice Lt. Karen Hughes and her undercover crew focused on separating teenage prostitutes from the street wolves. There’s no shortage of under-age sex trafficking here.
For all the academic chatter about prostitution being a victimless crime, Las Vegas police know that a large percentage of the working women they encounter were turned out in their mid-teens. Bolstered by the 2013 passage of Assembly Bill 67, a state law that increases penalties for pandering, along with a cooperative arrangement with the Las Vegas office of the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation, the vice detectives try to focus on the violent pimps and their most vulnerable victims.
From 1994 to 2012, the years the statistics have been kept, Metro Vice identified 2,229 minor sex trafficking victims, defined by federal law as any prostitute under the age of 18. In the past two years, 238 minors, the youngest just 13 years old, were taken from their pimps. Although Las Vegas attracts visitors from all over the world, most of the young prostitutes are recruited locally with nearly two-thirds of those hustled from the African-American community.
The market is dynamic, and the myth that prostitution is legal, or at the very least openly tolerated, doesn’t help. The sex business is booming, and pricy Strip nightclubs and ultra lounges – many of which are subleased by operators who pay high rents to casino corporations – have become a seemingly safe place to hook up.
“The challenge is the demand,” Hughes says. “Many people come here believing prostitution is legal, and they don’t distinguish between the counties. It’s a huge problem for us. But it doesn’t excuse their behavior, especially when they’re engaging in sex with a child.”
Identifying sex trafficking victims in what Hughes calls a “very sexualized landscape” is also difficult. Persuading the young girls, many dazzled by the nightlife and infatuated with their pimps, that they’re slipping into darkness can be tougher still.
“A lot of times when these pimps recruit the girls, whether they’re juveniles or close to that age, the lure of coming to a tourist destination such as Las Vegas is very appealing to a young girl,” Hughes says. “They get caught up in the nightlife, and it’s very exciting. Before they know it, they get thrown into that pit, so to speak.”
In a sworn affidavit in a child custody case, one of the girls who allegedly worked for Cherry said she was forced to work while she was pregnant and was ordered not to return home until she made $1,500.
The FBI’s recent “Operation Cross Country” nationwide sex trafficking sting netted just one child prostitute in Las Vegas, but Hughes’ team finds them just about every time they set up a surveillance in the hotels or along one of the off-Strip strolls favored by local pimps. Through June of this year, Metro had identified 68 juvenile prostitutes working the streets and hotels.
“The more we police those venues, the more juvenile victims we identify,” Hughes says. Although she appreciates the annual interest from the FBI, the veteran street cop adds, “It really doesn’t change how Metro does business. Basically, we do this every day of the week, around the clock.”
But don’t expect the blood of pimps and innocent bystanders spilled on one of the world’s most recognized boulevards to greatly alter the way Las Vegas police focus personnel on the prostitution racket. Still reeling from the debilitating sting of the economic recession, with tax revenues down and budgets tight, Clark County Sheriff Doug Gillespie is having enough trouble keeping plenty of cops on the streets.
“I do not have enough personnel to effectively, from a criminal standpoint, deal with the clubs or the sex industry,” Gillespie says.
Between belt-tightening and a Las Vegas gambling culture that has long marketed sex to lure the suckers, Metro’s Vice detectives will continue to pick their spots and focus on saving as many wayward teenagers as they can.
“We do our best to not only divert that individual, but also go after that pimp even more aggressively because of the age of the victim,” the sheriff says.
The US state department has issued a global travel alert because of an unspecified al-Qaeda threat.
In a statement, the department said the potential for an attack was particularly strong in the Middle East and North Africa.
It comes shortly after the US announced nearly two dozen embassies and consulates would be shut on Sunday.
The alert expires on 31 August 2013, the department said. It recommended US citizens travelling abroad be vigilant.
"Current information suggests that al-Qa'ida and affiliated organizations continue to plan terrorist attacks both in the region and beyond, and that they may focus efforts to conduct attacks in the period between now and the end of August," the statement said.
The alert warned of "the potential for terrorists to attack public transportation systems and other tourist infrastructure".
'Not chit chat'
Dutch Ruppersberger, the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee, said the threat was not prompted by "the regular chit chat" gleaned from would-be militants online or elsewhere.
"The most important thing we have to do is protect American lives," he told the Associated Press news agency.
Four Americans died in an attack last year on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya
An unnamed senior US official told NBCthe threat may be related to the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, which ends next week.
In the Muslim world, Sunday is a work day. In other parts of the world US diplomatic offices are shut on Sunday.
"It is possible we may have additional days of closing as well," a senior state department official told the BBC on Thursday.
The official said the state department had "been apprised of information" leading it to take these "precautionary steps... out of an abundance of caution".
Last year on 11 September, the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya, was attacked, leaving four Americans dead.
Other embassies are routinely targets of protesters.
The US diplomatic missions to be closed on Sunday are in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates; Algiers, Algeria; Amman, Jordan; Baghdad, Iraq; Cairo, Egypt; Dhahran, Saudi Arabia; Djibouti, Djibouti; Dhaka, Bangladesh; Doha, Qatar; Dubai, United Arab Emirates; Erbil, Iraq; Jeddah, Saudi Arabia; Kabul, Afghanistan; Khartoum, Sudan; Kuwait City, Kuwait; Manama, Bahrain; Muscat, Oman; Nouakchott, Mauritania; Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; Sanaa, Yemen and Tripoli, Libya.
