Testimony starts in Zimmerman trial

SANFORD, Fla. (AP) ? George Zimmerman was fed up with "punks" getting away with crime and shot 17-year-old Trayvon Martin "because he wanted to," not because he had to, prosecutors argued Monday, while the neighborhood watch volunteer's attorney said the killing was self-defense against a young man who was slamming Zimmerman's head against the pavement.

The prosecution began opening statements in the long-awaited murder trial with shocking language, repeating obscenities Zimmerman uttered while talking to a police dispatcher moments before the deadly confrontation.

The defense opened with a knock-knock joke about the difficulty of picking a jury for a case that stirred nationwide debate over racial profiling, vigilantism and Florida's expansive laws on the use of deadly force.

"Knock. Knock," said defense attorney Don West.

"Who is there?"

"George Zimmerman."

"George Zimmerman who?"

"Ah, good. You're on the jury."

Zimmerman, 29, could get life in prison if convicted of second-degree murder for gunning down Martin on Feb. 26, 2012, as the unarmed black teenager, wearing a hoodie on a dark, rainy night, walked from a convenience store through the gated townhouse community where he was staying.

The case took on racial dimensions after Martin's family claimed that Zimmerman had racially profiled Martin and that police were dragging their feet in bringing charges. Zimmerman, whose mother is Hispanic and whose father is white, has denied the confrontation had anything to do with race.

Prosecutor John Guy's first words to the jury recounted what Zimmerman told a dispatcher in a call shortly after spotting Martin: "F------ punks. These a-------. They always get away."

Zimmerman was profiling Martin as he followed him, Guy said. He said Zimmerman viewed the teen "as someone about to a commit a crime in his neighborhood."

"And he acted on it. That's why we're here," the prosecutor said.

Zimmerman didn't have to shoot Martin, Guy said. "He shot him for the worst of all reasons: because he wanted to," he said.

The prosecutor portrayed the watch captain as a vigilante, saying, "Zimmerman thought it was his right to rid his neighborhood of anyone who did not belong."

West told jurors a different story: Martin sucker-punched Zimmerman and then pounded the neighborhood watch volunteer's head against the concrete sidewalk, and that's when Zimmerman opened fire.

Showing the jury photos of a bloodied and bruised Zimmerman, the defense attorney said, "He had just taken tremendous blows to his face, tremendous blows to his head."

West said the story that Martin was unarmed is untrue: "Trayvon Martin armed himself with a concrete sidewalk and used it to smash George Zimmerman's head."

The prosecutor, however, disputed elements of Zimmerman's story, including his claim that Martin put his hands over Zimmerman's mouth and reached for the man's gun. Guy said none of Zimmerman's DNA was found on Martin's body, and none of the teenager's DNA was on the weapon or the holster.

But West said that doesn't prove anything, arguing that crime-scene technicians didn't properly protect Martin's hands from contamination.

Two police dispatch phone calls that could be important evidence for both sides were played for the jury by the defense. Martin's mother, Sybrina Fulton, left the courtroom before the second recording, which has the sound of the gunshot that killed Martin.

The first was a call Zimmerman made to a nonemergency police dispatcher, who told him he didn't need to be following Martin.

The second 911 call, from a witness, captures screams in the distant background from the struggle between Zimmerman and Martin. Martin's parents said the screams are from their son, while Zimmerman's father contends they are his son's.

Circuit Judge Debra Nelson ruled last weekend that audio experts for the prosecution won't be able to testify that the screams belong to Martin, saying the methods used were unreliable.

On Monday, one of the first witnesses for the prosecution was a custodian of police dispatch calls. During the witness' testimony, prosecutors started playing police calls Zimmerman had made in the months before he shot Martin. The defense objected, arguing the calls were irrelevant.

The judge said she would address the matter Tuesday and sent the jurors to the hotel where they are being sequestered for the duration of the trial, which could last several weeks

Other witnesses who testified Monday included a convenience store clerk and the 911 dispatcher who took Zimmerman's call when he was following Martin. Martin had gone to the convenience store to buy Skittles and a can of iced tea.

The 911 dispatcher, Sean Noffke, testified that he had advised Zimmerman not to follow Martin.

Randy McClean, a criminal defense attorney in Florida with no connection to the case, called the prosecution's opening statement "brilliant" in that it described Zimmerman's state of mind. But he described the knock-knock joke as less than stellar.

"If you're defending your client for second-degree murder, you probably shouldn't start your opening with a joke," McClean said.

___

Follow Kyle Hightower on Twitter at http://twitter.com/KHightower

Follow Mike Schneider on Twitter at http://twitter.com/MikeSchneiderAP

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/testimony-starts-zimmerman-trial-212912403.html

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Communications of Millions Subject to US-UK Spying | Global ...

Whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed on Friday that the UK intelligence agency GCHQ and the NSA record the content of phone calls, email messages, Facebook posts and browser histories of tens of millions of people. By tapping into fiber-optic cables?the infrastructure through which all Internet traffic must pass?the two agencies have created a systematic procedure for procuring, filtering and storing private communications.

The leak is the latest in a series that have left the US and UK governments scurrying to cover up their deeply antidemocratic maneuvers with scripted lies. It comes one day after the release of secret FISA Court documents showing the NSA has almost complete latitude to monitor the communications of US residents (See, ?NSA monitoring US communications without a warrant, documents show?)

Hours after the release of the latest documents, the US government announced that it was filing charges against Snowden under the Espionage Act, which contains a possible penalty of execution.

?Nobody is listening to your telephone calls,? President Obama said in a public speech two weeks ago. UK Foreign Minister William Hague told MPs last week that there is ?a strong framework of democratic accountability and oversight? within the national intelligence apparatus.

According to documents leaked to the?Guardian, and reported by Glenn Greenwald, however, GCHQ and the NSA have set up a complex scheme by which the intelligence agencies collect data and content from the communications of at least tens of millions of people. Officials monitor the data and content of those communications and then store what they deem valuable.

Described by GCHQ with the revealing titles ?Mastering the Internet? and ?Global Telecoms Exploitation,? the programs expose the repeated claims of President Obama and his coconspirators as outright lies.

Through the ?Tempora? program, the two agencies have been tapping and storing hundreds of petabytes of data from a majority of the fiber-optic cables in the UK over the past 18 months. The NSA has a similar program in the US, as revealed in an Associated Press report last week.

First, GCHQ handles 600 million ?telephone events? each day by tapping over 200 fiber-optic cables, including those that connect the UK to the US. According to the?Guardian, GCHQ is able to collect data at a rate ?equivalent to sending all the information in all the books in the British Library 192 times every 24 hours? by processing data from a minimum of 46 fiber-optic cables simultaneously.

The data is then transmitted to a government database and shared with the NSA, which is given top clearance. Lawyers for the GCHQ told their American counterparts that it was ?your call? as to what limitations should be in place for data sifting and storage.

According to the leaked documents, these massive databases have been built up over the past several years through widespread corporate collaboration. GCHQ colludes with an array of companies it calls ?intercept partners,? and sometimes forces them to hand over huge quantities of data for inspection and storage. The corporate agreements were kept highly guarded under fears that public knowledge of the collusion would lead to ?high-level political fallout.?

Once the data is collected, the agencies then filter information through a process known as Massive Volume Reduction (MVR). Through this process, information is pared down to specific individuals, email addresses, or phone numbers. The NSA identified 31,000 ?selector? terms, while GCHQ identified 40,000. The leaked documents reveal that a majority of the information extracted is content, including word-for-word email, text and phone recordings.

Through Tempora, GCHQ and the NSA have set up Internet buffers that allow the agencies to watch data accumulate in real-time and store it for less than a week for content or 30 days for metadata.

?Internet buffers represent an exciting opportunity to get direct access to enormous amounts of GCHQ?s special source data,? agents explained in the leaked documents. Valuable information is presumably removed from this temporary buffer and kept on file in intelligence storage facilities.

This information filtration system is not aimed at eliminating the possibility of storing the data of innocent people. In fact, this is precisely the purpose of the surveillance programs. Rather, unnecessary information is sifted out because the governments do not yet have the ability to store such vast quantities of communications content and metadata.

Despite these technological limitations, the immensity of the Tempora program was best described by GCHQ attorneys who acknowledged that listing the number of people targeted by the program would be impossible because ?this would be an infinite list which we couldn?t manage.?

GCHQ officials bragged that its surveillance program ?produces larger amounts of metadata than NSA,? and were told by GCHQ attorneys that ?[w]e have a light oversight regime compared with the US.? The latter statement is extraordinary given the fact that the FISA Court allows the NSA to operate almost entirely without constraint.

Friday?s revelations highlight the international character of the global surveillance programs. Far from being satisfied by storing the content of the communications of its own residents, the US and UK governments are working together to create an unprecedented database of international intelligence.

The intimacy of the two spy agencies is evidenced by an order given by NSA head Keith Alexander in 2008: ?Why can?t we collect all the signals, all the time? Sounds like a good summer homework project for [British and American spy center] Menwith!?

Snowden noted Friday that ?it?s not just a US problem. The UK has a huge dog in this fight. They [GCHQ] are worse than the US.?

Just like their American counterparts, the GCHQ attorneys have attempted to place a legal veneer over the facially illegal spying operations of the government.

GCHQ lawyers have invoked paragraph four of section 8 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa) to run around the legal requirement that intelligence officials acquire a warrant before performing a wiretap. Since this would have required GCHQ to acquire a warrant for every person in the UK, the attorneys instead have claimed that they can perform indiscriminate data mining operations with a ?certificate? from a minister.

In a briefing document released by Snowden, GCHQ attorneys claim that these certificates ?cover the entire range of GCHQ?s intelligence production.?

Under Ripa, GCHQ officials may also seek a Sensitive Targeting Authority (STA), which would allow them to spy on any UK citizen ?anywhere in the world? or on a foreign person in the UK.

A lawyer for GCHQ also noted in the secret documents that the parliamentary intelligence and security committee, which oversees the intelligence agencies, has ?always been exceptionally good at understanding the need to keep our work secret,? and that a tribunal set up to monitor the agencies has ?so far always found in our favor.?

Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, to which the UK is a signatory, states: ?Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence,? and that ?[t]here shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society??

In Britain as much as the United States, the ruling class is engaged in activity that is in flagrant violation of these democratic principles.

Source: http://www.globalresearch.ca/communications-of-millions-subject-to-us-uk-spying/5340025

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Windows 8 Music update brings in-app searching, login-free trial ...

Windows 8 has built-in search tools for apps, but a tweak in the June update to Xbox Music is making that feature more accessible. The media player now lets you search for songs on both your PC and Xbox Music through an in-app button. If you don't have any local tunes, you won't have to sign in to start listening -- Music now lets you stream 15 tracks through Xbox Music's ad-supported free tier without using an account. While other bug fixes and UI enhancements are minor in nature, what's here is enough to justify a trip to the Windows Store for the new version.

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/06/22/windows-8-music-update-brings-in-app-searching/

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Virginia court, home to spying and cyber cases, to hear Snowden case

By Diane Bartz

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The federal court in Virginia where the Justice Department has decided to charge Edward Snowden with leaking secrets about U.S. surveillance programs has a long track record of hearing cases related not only to national security cases but also to cyber crime.

The United States filed a criminal complaint including charges under a U.S. espionage law against Snowden, a former U.S. National Security Agency contractor, in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. The charges are the government's first step in an effort to arrest and extradite Snowden from Hong Kong, where he is in hiding, to try him in the United States.

Snowden has acknowledged leaking secrets about classified U.S. surveillance programs to the Washington Post and Britain's Guardian newspaper. On Saturday, Hong Kong's South China Morning Post said Snowden had divulged information to the newspaper showing how computers in Hong Kong and China had been targeted.

On Friday, the Guardian reported that documents made available by Snowden showed that Britain's electronic eavesdropping agency, known as GCHQ, downloaded masses of data from telecommunications cables it had tapped into.

In the past 20 years, the U.S. government has racked up remarkable success rates in winning convictions or guilty pleas from people brought before the federal court in Virginia who were accused of espionage or terrorism. Because of its speed, the court is considered a "rocket docket."

But its most high-profile cyber case - that of accused copyright pirate Kim Dotcom - has proved a tougher nut to crack.

The U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Neil MacBride, has worked as chief counsel to then-Senator Joe Biden, as a prosecutor in Washington handling homicide and other criminal cases, and as a general counsel for the anti-software piracy group Business Software Alliance.

The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia is where the government charged Russian spies like former CIA officer Aldrich Ames in 1994 and former FBI agent Robert Hanssen in 2001; and Zacarias Moussaoui, who pleaded guilty to an al Qaeda conspiracy linked to the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and the Pentagon, outside Washington.

Its Norfolk court is where the Justice Department prosecuted five Somalis accused of piracy in attacking the USS Ashland in 2010 off the coast of Africa. They were convicted and are scheduled to be sentenced next month.

Sources say the same court has had a grand jury probe underway of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange after the website put online confidential U.S. documents allegedly acquired by U.S. soldier Bradley Manning. Court papers show that prosecutors in the Eastern District have subpoenaed message records generated by some of Assange's contacts or associates.

Manning is being court-martialed in connection with the case while Assange has taken refuge in Ecuador's Embassy in London, trying to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he faces allegations of sexual assault, or the United States.

In addition to espionage cases, the court is also where the U.S. government has opted to try some of the biggest cyber crime cases - like the prosecution of Kim Dotcom's Hong Kong company Megaupload for what is alleged to be a massive scheme to help users swap pirated movies and music.

While the espionage cases led to convictions, the Megaupload case has hit some rocky shoals in a battle over whether prosecutors properly notified defendants in the case. Kim Dotcom is fighting extradition from New Zealand.

An extradition hearing is scheduled for August, but may be delayed due to separate cases linked to another court ruling that unlawful warrants were used in the police raid.

(Reporting by Diane Bartz; Additional reporting by Mark Hosenball and Nate Raymond; Editing by Eric Beech)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/virginia-court-home-spying-cyber-cases-hear-snowden-195317753.html

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Box Office: Brad Pitt's 'World War Z' Earns Solid $3.6M on Thursday

By Brent Lang

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) - So much for bad buzz, because "World War Z" is not the box-office disaster that some observers had gleefully speculated it would be.

The zombie thriller grossed a solid $3.6 million in late night showings Thursday night, according to studio estimates. The Brad Pitt-led cast of thousands racked up those numbers in 2,600 screens. It expands to more than 3,600 screens on Friday and is projected to generate roughly $50 million over the weekend.

The midnight numbers fall short of those generated by blockbusters like "Man of Steel" and "Iron Man 3," but they compare favorably with "The Great Gatsby," which earned $3.25 million in its late night showings on its way to a $50 million opening.

Despite the hot start, "World War Z" is not expected to be the weekend's top film. That honor will likely go to "Monsters University." The 3D prequel to 2001's "Monsters Inc." is projected to matriculate with around $70 million. If tracking holds, that will give Pixar its 14th consecutive first place opening.

Still it's a remarkable turn around for the $190 million-budgeted "World War Z," which had been plagued with reports of cost-overruns and expensive re-shoots, including an 11th hour decision to cook up a new ending.

The global backdrop of the zombie pandemic film appeared to be paying off as well. "World War Z" grossed a total of $5.7 million internationally on Thursday from territories like Korea, Argentina and Australia.

"World War Z" finds Pitt as a United Nations bureaucrat racing around the world in the hopes of stopping a virus that's turning the population into flesh-eating members of the undead. Reviews have been decent with the film earning a respectable 68 percent "fresh" rating on the critics aggregator Rotten Tomatoes.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/box-office-brad-pitts-world-war-z-earns-224647346.html

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Should pro-amnesty Republicans be ?primaried?? (Powerlineblog)

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Video: Flood evacuations in Canada

Heavy flooding in western Canada could force evacuation of as many as 100,000 people, city officials in Calgary, Alberta, said Friday.

Torrential rains and widespread flooding throughout that province washed out roads and bridges, floated away cars, couches and refrigerators, and left at least one person missing.

Mud slides also forced closure of the Trans-Canada Highway, the Associated Press reported, isolating the mountain towns of Banff and Canmore.

The uploader of this video, Kevin Heinrichs, marked it as footage of people being evacuated during severe flooding in the High River area of Alberta on Thursday. Rescuers employed heavy machinery to try to move people to safety.

In this video, uploaded Thursday to YouTube by Tristan Zaba, a house floats down Bragg Creek, which has obviously swelled to a torrent, and smashes against a bridge.

This video was posted to YouTube by prairieboy18, showing flooding in downtown Calgary itself, including MacLeod Trail and the Stampede Grounds where the city's famed rodeo is held.

This dawn-light view Friday of Louise Bridge in Calgary, showing the swollen Elbow River, was uploaded to YouTube by Dong Kim.
The Elbow began carving out the structure around this bridge southwest of Bragg Creek, Alberta, on Thursday. The bridge carried Highway 66, but later collapsed, according to the uploader of this video, Andrew Morrison.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/news/video-canada-flood-victims-evacuated-huge-bulldozer-floating-145638179.html

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