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The U.S. Justice Department announced Monday it has successfully accessed data stored on the iPhone that belonged to the San Bernardino gunman without Apple's help, ending the court case against the tech company. The surprise development effectively ends a pitched court battle between Apple and the Obama administration. The government told a federal court Monday, without any details, that it accessed data on gunman Syed Farook's iPhone and no longer requires Apple's assistance.

Apple won a major victory in its showdown with the government when the US Justice Department (DOJ) abandoned its plans on Monday to force the company to write software to bypass iPhone security measures. The Justice Department told a federal court on Monday that it no longer needed Apple's help to access data on an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters, and requested that its original order for Apple's technical assistance be withdrawn. According to the DOJ, the reason it withdrew is because it was successfully able to access the data on the iPhone without Apple's help....

Words fail us. Well, not really. Here are some words: BS, Farce, Con job, Sham, Travesty, Mockery. We could go on, but those should suffice for now to describe the official narrative around the Brussels bombings last week. Suicide bombers, they told us, were behind the blasts in the airport and metro station. Yet a preponderance of lower leg injuries at both sites argued strongly for bombs that were placed on the floor, not attached to the chest of some wild-eyed jihadi of the type that appears only in the best wet dreams of NATO officials. But we have proof!...

Much of counterterrorism is really security theater. TSA searches that have yet to stop a terrorist. Bombing raids that don't drop bombs. Soldiers standing with rifles that have no bullets in them. It looks impressive. But there's no substance behind it. Rabbi Menachem Hadad of Brussels’ Shomre Hadas haredi Orthodox community said that soldiers who were posted outside a synagogue and the city’s Chabad House following the slaying of four Jews in Brussels’ Jewish Museum of Belgium in 2014 told him that for months, they used to guard the area with no bullets in their rifles. “It was just a...

Belgian police arrested six people in their probe of Tuesday's Islamic State suicide bombings in Brussels, while authorities in France said they thwarted a militant plot there "that was at an advanced stage." The federal prosecutor's office in Belgium said on Thursday that the arrests came during police searches in the Brussels neighbourhoods of Schaerbeek in the north and Jette in the west, as well as in the centre of the Belgian capital. The arrests came days after suicide bombers hit the Brussels airport and a metro train, killing at least 31 people and wounding some 270 in the worst...

VATICAN CITY — For the first time in seven centuries, support for a new Crusade topped all other economic, religious, and foreign policy concerns, according to yesterday’s Vatican/CNN survey of “self-identified” Christians in Europe and the United States. Nearly 95 percent of respondents reported that they “strongly supported” the building of an army to place the entirety of modern day Israel, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon under the banner of the Holy See. Those polled indicated that though they “sort of” enjoyed the basic tenets of democracy, the terror attacks in Belgium made them willing to cede all political and military...

Paris and London — Four months ago, in the aftermath of the deadly Paris attacks, there was widespread agreement among European leaders that the continent’s intelligence agencies needed to share more information to prevent radicals’ future attacks. Today, the disconnect between intelligence agencies still gapes. According to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkish authorities deported Brussels attack suspect Ibrahim el-Bakraoui to the Netherlands last summer – and warned Belgium of his terrorist ties. Yet Bakraoui, a Belgian national, was released without charge. He is believed to have been a suicide bomber in Tuesday's attacks in Brussels which left more than...

DONALD TRUMP OPEN TO NUCLEAR RETALIATION AFTER BRUSSELS ATTACK Reena Flores CBS News March 24, 2016 Donald Trump is not ruling out the use of nuclear weapons in the U.S. fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), according to an interview with the GOP front-runner that aired on Bloomberg TV Wednesday. Asked if he would consider nuclear retaliation after this week's terror attacks in Brussels, Trump responded: "Well, I'm never gonna rule anything out. And I wouldn't wanna say. Even if I felt -- it wasn't going -- I wouldn't wanna tell you that because, at a...

Many voters have already heard of Donald Trump’s plan to ban all Muslims entering the country “until we can figure out what’s going,” as he suggested in December. His other ideas have included bombing oil fields controlled by the Islamic State, shutting down portions of the Internet used by the Islamic State for recruiting, and going after the family members of the Islamic State. ... “This is, as I understand it, a war for the soul of Islam and if that is the case, the Muslim countries in that area have got to stand up and they have got to fight. They have got to provide...

BRUSSELS — The four men — two of them brothers — who turned ordinary morning commutes in Brussels into blood-soaked nightmares may have been spurred into action by fears that authorities were closing in on them, according to a note left by one of the attackers that was described by a prosecutor Wednesday. Days before the attacks on Tuesday, counter­terrorism police had raided their Brussels safe houses. An ally who took part in November’s Paris carnage was shot and captured by authorities. And Ibrahim el-Bakraoui, a 29-year-old Belgian with a thick rap sheet, wrote that he did not want to...

The New York Police Department has been directed by a U.S. court to remove from its online records an investigation pertaining to the rise of Islamic extremists in the West and the threats these individuals pose to American safety, according to legal documents. As part of a settlement agreement reached earlier this month with Muslim community advocates in U.S. District Court, the NYPD will purge from its website an extensive report that experts say has been critical to the department’s understanding of radical Islam and its efforts to police the threat. The court settlement also stipulates that the NYPD make...

The tragedies in Paris and Brussels show us that we need more, not less, of former NYPD commissioner Ray Kelley’s approach to counter-terrorism.Yesterday, in the wake of the horrific Islamic terrorist attack on Brussels, Ted Cruz said we must ignore political correctness and “empower law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslims neighborhoods before they become radicalized.” As has often been the case this election cycle, Cruz’s measured and rational words have been twisted into some kind of fascistic call for rounding up Muslims. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Later in the day Cruz clarified his comments, citing the...

Gov. John Kasich of Ohio on Tuesday cautioned against monitoring Muslim-Americans after the attacks in Brussels, saying that such a step would create division and harm the country’s ability to gather intelligence.

In one simple sentence, Ted Cruz just advocated an American apartheid of Muslims in our country. "We need to empower law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized," the Texas senator said in a statement Tuesday, as news of the Brussels attack came out. Sen. Ted Cruz's call to patrol Muslim American neighborhoods after the Brussels attacks is ridiculous and dangerous. It is despicable. It is xenophobic. It is ridiculous. It is dangerous. To be clear, the attacks in Brussels earlier today were terrible. I say that without the slightest equivocation. ISIS has taken responsibility for...

Tuesday on Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends,” Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump reacted to the apparent terrorist attack that resulted in at least 28 dead and 130 injured in Brussels earlier in the day. Trump made the case to close the U.S. borders until “we figure out what is going on.”

Tuesday on Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends,” Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump reacted to the apparent terrorist attack that resulted in at least 28 dead and 130 injured in Brussels earlier in the day. Trump made the case to close the U.S. borders until “we figure out what is going on.”

The FBI wants Apple to do something no private company has ever been forced to do: break its own technology. Specifically, the FBI wants Apple to build a new version of its mobile operating system (iOS, or GovOS) so that the contents of an iPhone can be removed from an iPhone used by Syed Farook, one of the gunmen in the San Bernardino shooting.A magistrate judge recently ordered Apple to comply with this request; Apple in turn filed a Motion to Vacate (MTV) the magistrate’s order. The key point made in the MTV — and the key issue on which...

What the FBI wants to do would make us less secure, even though it’s in the name of keeping us safe from harm. Powerful governments, democratic and totalitarian alike, want access to user data for both law enforcement and social control. We cannot build a backdoor that only works for a particular type of government, or only in the presence of a particular court order.” In the age of Obama and Hillary Clinton, that is a very serious concern. What the FBI wants to do would make us less secure, even though it’s in the name of keeping us safe...

The Apple-FBI squabble over encryption signals a new age dawning. One of the dead San Bernardino mass murderers, a terrorist committed to Islamic jihad, possessed a password-locked Apple iPhone. The FBI claims that it has not been able to crack it. A judge has ordered Apple to do the job. Apple CEO Tim Cook resisted, in an open letter, directed mainly at his company's clientele. "The United States government has demanded that Apple take an unprecedented step which threatens the security of our customers. We oppose this order, which has implications far beyond the legal case at hand." Some folks...

Muslims Should Be Executed With Bullets Dipped In "Pig's Blood," Trump Says Tyler Durden's picture Submitted by Tyler Durden on 02/20/2016 13:26 -0500 Donald Trump MSNBC None South Carolina Donald Trump has no filter - and that’s served him well. Much to the chagrin of the GOP establishment and much to the horror of voters who believe America’s commander-in-chief should aspire to some modicum of political correctness, an endless stream vitriol emanates from Trump’s mouth and none of it, no matter how inflammatory, dents his poll numbers. Over the last nine months, Trump has called Mexicans rapists, derided John McCain’s...