Steinbring Inc.

This is a little frightening.   The government can apparently listen to everything you say, even when your cell phone is turned off.

A recent court ruling in a case against the Genovese crime family revealed that the FBI has the ability from a remote location to activate a cell phone and turn its microphone into a listening device that transmits to an FBI listening post, a method known as a “roving bug.”  Experts say the only way to defeat it is to remove the cell phone battery.

…

“The FBI can access cell phones and modify them remotely without ever having to physically handle them,” James Atkinson, a counterintelligence security consultant, told ABC News.  “Any recently manufactured cell phone has a built-in tracking device, which can allow eavesdroppers to pinpoint someone’s location to within just a few feet,” he added.

If flatulance is a crime, why don’t the cops stake out every mexican restaurant in America?

His name is Brian Bruggeman, but the Nebraska inmate may get a nickname more like “Jack the Ripper” after constantly blasting his cellmate with flatulence.
Bruggeman, 38, is now charged with assault on a confined person for allegedly passing gas repeatedly, resulting in a fight at the Lincoln County Jail.
Guards were first alerted to the problem Dec. 14 when inmate Jesse Dorris began banging on his cell door, screaming he wanted out of his cell, according to the North Platte Bulletin.
Dorris couldn’t stand Bruggeman’s “bad gas,” said Sheriff Jerome Kramer.

Link [ Via Table of Malcontents ]

I personally believe that this is an event which should have happened after the country became more stable but at least we can now begin to put Saddam era Iraq behind us.

From Reuters:

Saddam Hussein was hanged at dawn on Saturday, a dramatic end for a leader who ruled Iraq by fear for three decades before a U.S. invasion toppled him and was then convicted of crimes against humanity.As day broke on one of the holiest days of the Muslim year and the call to prayer echoed out from minarets across a dark and bitterly cold Baghdad, officially-backed television channels flashed the news shortly after six a.m. (10:00 p.m. EST).

“It happened before my eyes,” one Iraqi official said.

…

“The three men were executed. First Saddam Hussein, then Barzan al-Tikriti and then Awad al-Bander,” an Iraqiya announcer said, reading what he said was an official statement.

The event was filmed but it was unclear when or if images would be shown to help convince Iraqis Saddam is dead.

It was not clear where the executions took place, although key officials who were to attend the hanging had told Reuters they had been told to gather in Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone government compound.

From Al Jazeera:
Iraq’s deputy foreign minister, Labeed Abbawi, said: “He has been executed. It has been officially announced that he has been executed.”

…

The former Iraqi president, who was ousted in April 2003 by a US-led invasion, had been convicted last month of crimes against humanity over the killings of 148 Shia villagers from Dujail after a failed assassination attempt in 1982.

An appeals court upheld the death penalty on Tuesday and the Iraqi government rushed through the procedures to hang him by the end of the year and before the Eid al-Adha holiday that starts on Saturday. 

NY Time Link, Wiki

There’s a large scale spam run underway, sending short e-mail messages. No text, just the subject field of “Happy New Year!” and a file named postcard.exe as an attachment.

The attachments are variable, but so far we detect them all as Trojan-Downloader.Win32.Tibs.jy. We have a description online too.

In general, kill all files named “postcard.exe”. They always seem to be bad news.

Link

Saddam Hussein could be executed within hours, an official close to the Iraqi Prime Minister told The Times.

“He should be executed this weekend, even within hours. It depends on finalising paperwork and deciding on the location,” the Iraqi official said.

Link