It seems that someone belonging to the Anonymous group has allegedly been kidnapped in Veracruz.
Anonymous, or at least someone claiming to be part of the group, thinks the Zetas drug cartel is responsible for the kidnapping.
So they’ve posted a video…
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I would say “pass the popcorn”, but this is the sort of thing you want to watch from a very safe distance. The dark side of the moon seems just about safe enough…
Or, what do you do when you find a cargo container at your port that’s emitting large amounts of ionizing radiation?
This is the kind of article I think Wired does well (see also the story of the Cougar Ace, or Neal Stephenson’s transatlantic cable story.)
Ten of the officers involved are “officials” in the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association (aka the NYPD police union).
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(Hattip: TJIC on the Twitter. Though oddly enough, NYT links on his Twitter feed always come up with the NYT asking me to subscribe. That doesn’t happen with freeNYTimes or other Twitter feeds.)
Robert “Ratso” Rizzo sold his house in Huntington Beach.
It went for $939,000. Ratso paid $1.13 million in 2007. (Four bedrooms, three baths, two stories, 3,250 square feet, “…a cherry-wood walk-in closet in the master bedroom, built-in cherry-wood bookshelves in the living room and a formal dining room and travertine, granite and marble surfaces throughout. There are crystal chandeliers in the bathroom.”)
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Harris County District Attorney Pat Lykos has been asked to testify in an ongoing DWI trial.
And if you’re not reading “Life at the Harris County Criminal Justice Center” already, why not?
Here’s the longer HouChron story I expected about yesterday’s decision to bar the Harris County DA from participation in a grand jury investigation that may implicate the DA’s office.
I also wanted to note another story out of Houston: Roderick Fountain was convicted of murdering his 3-year old son. What makes this story noteworthy (in my opinion) is that he was convicted even though nobody has ever found the son’s body, and mostly based on the word of jailhouse informants.
Murder convictions without a body are not unheard of, but they are certainly rare and unusual enough to be noteworthy. (As a side note, the phrase “corpus delicti” does not mean the body of the victim, but the “body of the crime”; that is, all the evidence that indicates a crime has been committed. It is entirely possible to have a “corpus delicti” without a murder.)
It does seem, though, that the murder conviction without a body is becoming more common. This is the second case I can think of in Texas in the past year or so. (Here’s a link to some press coverage of the other case.) Does this point to improvements in forensic science? Or is there something more sinister going on?
Short piece in the HouChron: I expect a longer one in tomorrow’s paper.
The article goes on to quote the judge’s order as stating “that grand jurors are investigating ‘possible criminal conduct by members of the Harris County district attorney’s office.'”
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Latest update from the runaway Harris County grand jury:
They’re asking for an extension of their term, and for the district judge who set up the grand jury to appoint a special prosecutor.
They’ve also issued subpoenas to at least some of the assistant DAs in the office. Wonderful thing, a subpoena.
More from the Honorable Murray Newman.
Edited to add: And more from The Hon. Mr. Newman. I do loves me a good Nixon reference.
I’ve been holding back on this one until I found a reliable source.
John McCarthy, influential computer scientist, passed away on Monday. NYT obit.
Dr. McCarthy may not have had the same level of fame as Dennis Ritchie or Steve Jobs, but his influence was still significant. He co-founded the legendary MIT A.I. Lab – indeed, he was one of the early pioneers of artificial intelligence in general – developed LISP, and later went on to found the Stanford AI Lab as well.
At Stanford, he influenced folks like Wozniak, Joba, and Whitfield Diffie (one of the inventors of public-key cryptography).
Dr. McCarthy was one of the unsung heroes of the early hacker culture. We seem to be losing more and more of them.
A little something for all the folks who hang out in the FARK Sports tab:
After the jump…
A few people made note of the 10th anniversary of the iPod over the weekend.
That’s pretty nifty. But today is the 150th anniversary of the completion of the first transcontinental telegraph line, which is even more significant (in my humble opinion).
The article I linked above does a pretty good job of explaining the significance of the telegraph, especially by making an analogy with the Internet. It surprises me a little that the article doesn’t quote Tom Standage at all, however: his The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-line Pioneers
If you haven’t already read it, I enthusiastically recommend Standage’s book. He’s a good writer, and the early history of the telegraph is a fascinating subject. (For example, how much do you know about Thomas Edison, other than the standard facts? Did you ever realize Edison was basically a hacker? He was able to build Menlo Park out of the money he got for banging on early telegraph machines.)
While we’re on the subject of the slaughter of the innocents, I wanted to throw up a link to this NYT story.
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NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
Miami
Indianapolis (Wow.)
St. Louis
Here’s a longer and more detailed second day story from the HouChron about l’affair BATVan and the grand jury probe.
By the way, there are eight different events going on in and around downtown Austin this weekend (according to the article).
We have previously covered Harris County’s problems with their Blood Alcohol Testing (BAT) vans. Those problems can perhaps best be summed up as: they weren’t reliable.
Now comes word from the HouChron that:
The DA’s office is…not pleased. As Murray Newman, a former DA, puts it: “The Grand Jurors excluding the prosecutors from the testimony is kind of the equivalent of the President being booted out of a Cabinet meeting.”
The HouChron piece is short. The Hon. Mr. Newman’s piece over at his site provides more background: he has his own spin on things, but he’s also more familiar with the background and the people involved than I am. Summarizing his position, it seems like the DA was trying to get revenge on the BATVan whistle blowers by pushing for a grand jury indictment, but it looks like the grand jury is digging into the conduct of the DA’s office instead.
This could turn interesting real quick.