The Secret Service sent three agents home from the Netherlands just before President Barack Obama’s arrival after one agent was found inebriated in an Amsterdam hotel.
The three agents were benched Sunday for “disciplinary reasons,” said Secret Service spokesman Ed Donovan, declining to elaborate. Donovan said the incident was prior to Obama’s arrival Monday in the country and did not compromise the president’s security in any way.
Still, the incident represents a fresh blemish for an elite agency struggling to rehabilitate its reputation following a high-profile prostitution scandal and other allegations of misconduct. An inspector general’s report in December concluded there was no evidence of widespread misconduct, in line with the service’s longstanding assertion that it has no tolerance for inappropriate behavior.
Secret Service agent drunk, sent home with two others
US pharmacists urged not to give lethal drugs to states for executions
Several human rights and anti-death penalty groups have asked the American Pharmacists Association to prohibit members from participating in executions, a request that comes as states increasingly turn to pharmacists for lethal injection drugs.
The groups, which include Amnesty International, the NAACP and the American Civil Liberties Union, are targeting drugs made by compounding pharmacies. Such drugs, which are not federally regulated, are individually mixed versions of medications that prison systems are finding increasingly difficult to obtain.
The Security Cracks In Your Smartphone
Law enforcement's ability to depends on "exploits," hacker tricks that take advantage of vulnerabilities in the phones' operating systems. Many exploits are kept quiet, to be sold to criminals or security companies. Others leak out. Here's a list of some of the known cracks in the security of the two major types of smartphone.
Brute force attack: : The most direct way past a password is to throw a lot of guesses at it. If you're using Apple's basic four-digit PIN, it'll take no more than 10,000 guesses. That's a lot of guesses to enter by thumb; it's child's play for a computer. Apple for brute force attacks on its newest operating system, iOS 7, though hackers are most likely probing it for new vulnerabilities.
Disputing Study, U.S. FDA Says Generics From Abroad Safe
A top U.S. regulator is discrediting research published a year ago that found impurities in dozens of generic heart drugs made overseas, saying the investigators contaminated the samples during their testing.
The study by Preston Mason, a researcher at the Harvard-affiliated Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston, was one of the first independent probes into generic heart drugs. Outlined by Mason at a congressional briefing last month, it has been at the center of a growing debate over the quality of copycat drugs as insurers increasingly demand their use to trim medical costs.
WHO: Air pollution kills 7 million prematurely worldwide annually
In 2012, about 7 million people died worldwide as a result of air pollution exposure -- making air pollution the world’s largest single environmental health risk, World Health Organization officials in Geneva say.
Dr. Flavia Bustreo, assistant director-general of WHO's Family, Women and Children’s Health, says the new estimates are not only based on more knowledge about the diseases caused by air pollution, but also a better assessment of human exposure to air pollutants using improved technology.
Human rights group labels Syria’s use of barrel bombs a war crime
The Syrian government’s campaign to clear rebels from the city of Aleppo by pummeling residential neighborhoods with so-called barrel bombs constitutes a war crime because the weapons cannot be aimed at combatants, according to a detailed report released Monday by the advocacy group Human Rights Watch.
The report, which cataloged what it said were 266 bombings that affected 340 different sites around the city from Nov. 1, 2013, to the end of February this year, provided a legal rationale for viewing the barrel bombs, which often are nothing more than barrels filled with explosives dropped from helicopters, as different from other munitions used in the war.
Environment Climate change Global warming to hit Asia hardest, warns new report on climate change
People in coastal regions of Asia, particularly those living in cities, could face some of the worst effects of global warming, climate experts will warn this week. Hundreds of millions of people are likely to lose their homes as flooding, famine and rising sea levels sweep the region, one of the most vulnerable on Earth to the impact of global warming, the UN states.
The report – Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability – makes it clear that for the first half of this century countries such as the UK will avoid the worst impacts of climate change, triggered by rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. By contrast, people living in developing countries in low latitudes, particularly those along the coast of Asia, will suffer the most, especially those living in crowded cities.
Recording shows that Army punished soldiers who asked for help
After three combat tours, Sgt. Dennis Tackett was kicked out of the Army for punching a man in the face while drunk. It didn’t matter that he had been diagnosed with PTSD (by the Army) and had tried to get help (from the Army) for the drinking it led to. It didn’t matter that he was in the late stages of a medical discharge that would get him out soon anyway — with benefits.
What mattered to the commanding general at Fort Carson, Colo., who spoke to him that day in November 2012 was that he had tried to fight the discharge with the help of a pair of civilian watchdogs, Georg-Andreas Pogany and Robert Alvarez.
Exoxon Valdez 25years later: 'Beaches and wildlife will never entirely recover'
[On March 24, 1989] more than 11 million gallons of black crude gushed into the pristine waters of Prince William Sound.
...Oil reached beaches 650 miles away. Killer whales, eagles, otters, seals and thousands of sea birds died excruciating deaths while Alaska's famous salmon and herring were ruined. The pictures of distressed animals expiring and grief-stricken locals trying to scrub beaches coated with toxic filth shocked the world.
The event is still seared into the minds of those who witnessed it, even a quarter of a century later. But the Exxon Valdez has left more than memories.
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