A hostage situation and mass shooting that ended this morning with seven people dead in the South Florida town of Hialeah began when an elderly couple who managed the apartment complex left the granddaughter they were watching and went to talk to a tenant living with his mother, according to reports.
That commonplace act led to a barrage of gunfire that killed the couple, a man walking his children home and three other people apparently going about their business Friday night, according to police. The incident ended when a SWAT team stormed the apartment early Saturday where two hostages were being held by a man suspected of shooting six people.
Gunman among 7 dead after Fla. hostage standoff
U.S. allowed Italian kidnap prosecution to shield higher-ups, ex-CIA officer says
A former CIA officer has broken the U.S. silence around the 2003 abduction of a radical Islamist cleric in Italy, charging that the agency inflated the threat the preacher posed and that the United States then allowed Italy to prosecute her and other Americans to shield President George W. Bush and other U.S. officials from responsibility for approving the operation.
Confirming for the first time that she worked undercover for the CIA in Milan when the operation took place, Sabrina De Sousa provided new details about the “extraordinary rendition” that led to the only criminal prosecution stemming from the secret Bush administration rendition and detention program launched after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Reuters' climate-change coverage 'fell by nearly 50% with sceptic as editor'
Reuters' climate-change coverage fell by nearly 50% after a climate sceptic joined the news agency as a senior editor, a study has found.
The sharp decline in coverage since 2011, recorded by the Media Matters for America advocacy group, reinforces charges from a former staffer that Reuters cut back on climate stories under the influence of Paul Ingrassia, who is now the agency's managing editor.
Halliiburton pleads guilty to destroying Gulf spill evidence
Halliburton Co has agreed to plead guilty to destroying evidence related to the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, the U.S. Department of Justice said on Thursday.
The government said Halliburton's guilty plea is the third by a company over the spill and requires the world's second-largest oilfield services company to pay a maximum $200,000 statutory fine.
Halliburton also agreed to three years of probation and to continue cooperating with the criminal probe into the April 20, 2010, explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig.
Truthout investigation: Fracking in the Ocean Off the California Coast
The Pacific Ocean may be the next frontier for fracking technology.
A Truthout investigation has confirmed that federal regulators approved at least two hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," operations on oil rigs in the Santa Barbara Channel off the coast of California since 2009 without an updated environmental review that critics say may be required by federal law.
The offshore fracking operations are smaller than the unconventional onshore operations that have sparked nationwide controversy, but environmental advocates are still concerned that regulators and the industry have not properly reviewed the potential impacts of using modern fracking technology in the Pacific outer continental shelf.
Scientists can implant false memories into mice
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False memories have been implanted into mice, scientists say.
A team was able to make the mice wrongly associate a benign environment with a previous unpleasant experience from different surroundings.
The researchers conditioned a network of neurons to respond to light, making the mice recall the unpleasant environment. Reporting in Science, they say it could one day shed light into how false memories occur in humans.
US prosecutors launch largest ever hacking fraud case
US prosecutors have launched what they say is the country's largest ever hacking fraud case.
Five men in Russia and Ukraine have been charged with running a hacking operation that allegedly stole more than 160 million credit and debit card numbers from a number of major US companies over a period of seven years.
Losses from the thefts amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars. Corporate victims included Nasdaq, Visa, Dow Jones and JC Penney.
Justice Department to challenge states’ voting rights laws
The Justice Department is preparing to take fresh legal action in a string of voting rights cases across the nation, U.S. officials said, part of a new attempt to blunt the impact of a Supreme Court ruling that the Obama administration has warned will imperil minority representation.
The decision to challenge state officials marks an aggressive effort to continue policing voting rights issues and follows a ruling by the court last month that invalidated a critical part of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The justices threw out a part of the act that determined which states with a history of discrimination had to be granted Justice Department or court approval before making voting law changes.
Former UBS bankers get prison terms for muni bid-rigging
Three former UBS AG (UBSN.VX) bankers were sentenced to prison on Wednesday for deceiving U.S. municipalities by rigging bids to invest municipal bond proceeds, with the longest sentence at 27 months, a fraction of what prosecutors had sought.
Gary Heinz, 40, a former bank vice president who was caught on recordings discussing the scheme, received the prison sentence of 27 months. U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood also ordered Heinz to pay a $400,000 fine.
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