SAN FRANCISCO - A police bomb squad is at the scene of a suspicious device near a newspaper rack at the Ferry Building along the San Francisco waterfront.
A spokesman for the San Francisco police department says some evacuations are underway in that area as authorities deal with the device. The All-Star baseball game is happening just a few blocks away at AT & T Park, so there are a lot of people in the downtown area today.
http://www.kesq.com/Global/story.asp?S=6771945&nav=9qrx
Portland Bomb Squad Detonates Suspicious Package (Oregon)
7/10/2007
Portland's bomb squad detonated a suspicious package near the federal courthouse Tuesday afternoon. The package was found behind the building that houses the Chamber of Commerce, Bullmoose Music and Videoport. That's right across the street from U.S. District Court.
The package contained batteries, circuit boards and wires, but no explosives. A similar incident took place on June 8th in Falmouth. As it did then, the bomb squad used a so-called disruptor, firing a concentrated burst of water to break up the device.
A British woman has married a son of Osama bin Laden after a holiday romance and is to apply for a visa so that he can visit Britain, The Times has learnt.
Jane Felix-Browne, a 51-year-old grandmother and parish councillor from Cheshire, has until now kept her marriage to Omar Ossama bin Laden, 27, secret from everyone apart from her immediate family and close friends. But she has now agreed to speak about her relationship with bin Laden’s fourth eldest son.
Excerpted
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article2056380.ece
FBI databases being sifted to identify risks posed by possible terrorists
July 10, 2007
WASHINGTON – The FBI is gathering and sorting information about Americans to help search for potential terrorists, insurance cheats and crooked pharmacists, according to a government report obtained Tuesday.
Records about identity thefts, real estate transactions, motor vehicle accidents and complaints about Internet drug companies are being searched for common threads to aid law enforcement officials, the Justice Department said in a report to Congress on the agency's data-mining practices. In addition, the report disclosed government plans to build a new database to assess the risk posed by people identified as potential or suspected terrorists.
All but one of the databases – the one to track terrorists – have been up and running for several years, the report showed. The lone exception is the System to Assess Risk, or STAR, program to rate the threat posed by people already identified as suspected terrorists or named on terror watch lists.
The system, still under construction, is designed to help counterterror investigators save time by narrowing the field of people who pose the greatest potential threat and will not label anyone a terrorist, Boyd said.
Excerpted
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/nation/20070710-1803-fbi-datamining.html