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A California man was charged Monday with operating a ring of illegal test-takers who helped dozens of Middle Eastern nationals obtain U.S. student visas by passing proficiency and college-placement exams for them. Eamonn Daniel Higgins, 46, of Laguna Niguel made an appearance in U.S. District Court in Santa Ana on one count of conspiracy to commit visa fraud as immigration agents arrested 16 of his suspected clients who remained in Southern California... The allegations revealed a potentially dangerous security breach in the country's student visa system and underscored the vulnerability of a tracking process that relies on schools to verify...

Porfirio Lobo, Honduras president elect, said on Sunday he is committed to enable ousted president Manuel Zelaya to leave the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa, where he remains under refuge following a frustrated attempt last week. Honduras now made it clear what it will accept: "It was decided at the highest level of government: it will be a territorial asylum and he may not go to any nation which borders Honduras, ie that is in Central America," said the Foreign Ministry spokesman, Milton Mateo. According to the Honduran government, Zelaya will not be allowed to travel to Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua...

Christmas 2009, 23 year old Omar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to blow up a plane heading from the Netherlands to Detroit Michigan. He was not successful. Philip Haney was a founding member of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2002, serving as a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officer. Fluent in Arabic and knowledgeable about Islamic culture, he played a significant role in identifying potential terrorist threats. He left DHS after 15 years and became a whistleblower. In an article he wrote for The Hill, he stated that the Obama administration had forced him to remove raw intelligence data...

ACAPULCO, Mexico -- The dismembered bodies of two men were hung from a bridge Tuesday on a highway leading to Acapulco, the second such discovery in three days in a region where two drug lords are fighting for control of their divided cartel. The men were hung from their feet at the entrance of Chilpancingo, the city nearest to Acapulco along the highway connecting the Pacific coast resort to Mexico's capital, according to police in the state of Guerrero, where Acapulco is located. Their arms had been cut off, and a message was left threatening extortionists, kidnappers, police and the...

WASHINGTON (AFP) – A top US lawmaker on Monday blasted the source of a huge cache of leaked military documents on the Afghan war and said such leakers belong in the "orange jump suits" of jailed criminals. "It is shocking that any American, much less someone in the Pentagon, would betray his country and possibly put our soldiers at risk by leaking information on the ongoing war in Afghanistan," said the senior Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Kit Bond. "The damage to our national security caused by leaks like this won't stop until we see more perpetrators in orange...

We all knew Obama winning the election would be bad. But did any of you really believe it could be this bad? Every day is just another astounding move of stupidity, treason, or both. Witness: If you were president of the United States, would you hire an alleged former spy for Fidel Castro to be ambassador to El Salvador, a country teetering on the brink of hard-core socialism? President Obama just did. On Dec. 9, Obama nominated Mari Del Carmen Aponte to be ambassador to El Salvador, despite the fact that in the late 1990s, the FBI discovered that she...

If you were president of the United States, would you hire an alleged former spy for Fidel Castro to be ambassador to El Salvador, a country teetering on the brink of hard-core socialism? President Obama just did. On Dec. 9, Obama nominated Mari Del Carmen Aponte to be ambassador to El Salvador, despite the fact that in the late 1990s, the FBI discovered that she was working with Cuban intelligence officers. According to Insight Magazine, "When the FBI eventually questioned her about her involvement with Cuban intelligence, she reportedly refused to cooperate." Why would Aponte escape the Obama administration's scrutiny?...

Somali pirates have captured two ships with 45 crew off the East African coast, officials say. A UK-flagged chemical tanker, the St James Park, was reportedly captured in the Gulf of Aden on Monday while on its way to Thailand from Spain. Its 26 crew hail from Russia, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, Georgia, India, Turkey and the Philippines. The Navios Apollon, a Panamanian-flagged Greek cargo ship with 19 crew, was hijacked north of the Seychelles. The 50,000-tonne carrier - which had been sailing from the US state of Florida to India - was boarded on Monday by 10 men in...

The British hostage Peter Moore was dramatically set free yesterday after the United States handed over an Iraqi insurgent suspected of planning the deaths of five American servicemen. Mr Moore, an IT consultant, was freed by League of the Righteous, or Asaib al-Haq (AAH) — an extremist Shia group allied to Iran — after 31 months and spent his first night of freedom at the British Embassy in Baghdad. He is expected to fly home today.

This will confirm for the first time that Ibrahim al-Asiri, a senior al-Qa’ida bomb maker and terrorist coordinator, was killed two years ago in a United States counterterrorism operation in Yemen. Al-Asiri built explosive devices that were used in the failed Christmas Day 2009 underwear bomb attack and the disrupted printer cartridge bomb plot in 2010. He also built an explosive device intended to be used against a passenger aircraft in 2012, and the device used in the attempted assassination of the former Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. Al-Asiri’s death significantly handicapped al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula. The United States...

Here is the Russian Collusion "A" Team who coordinated Brennan, Hillary, and the CIA. Michael Joseph Morell is a former American intelligence analyst. He served as the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency as well as its acting director twice, first in 2011 and then from 2012 to 2013. From July 1, 2011, to September 6, 2011, he served his first stint as acting director of the Central Intelligence Agency, replacing Leon Panetta who was named as Secretary of Defense. On November 9, 2012, Morell once again became acting director after the resignation of David Petraeus, following a sex...

Soon after Jeffrey Epstein completed his time in ‘prison,’ his lawyers petitioned the court with a request. Epstein, 66, had pressing legal affairs to attend to, they claimed, with documents that could only be viewed at his lawyer’s office. The judge denied the defense team’s initial attempt, but in December 2009, Epstein was approved to travel unaccompanied to New York for one day. A few days after that first trip, Epstein was approved to travel any weekday he wished and stay overnight provided he gave 48 hours notice to his probation officer for the final eight months of his probation.

China's most popular search engine, Baidu, has been targeted by the same hackers that took Twitter offline in December, according to reports. A group claiming to be the Iranian Cyber Army redirected Baidu users to a site displaying a political message. The site was down for at least four hours on Tuesday, Chinese media said. Last year's attack on micro-blogging service Twitter had the same hallmarks, sending users to a page with an Iranian flag and message in Farsi...

Gov. Bill Richardson's office wouldn't answer Journal questions this week regarding the governor's whereabouts and whether he was working in state or traveling outside New Mexico. Turns out Journal reporters weren't the only people left out of the loop. Lt. Gov. Diane Denish, who is supposed to be in charge of state government when the governor is out of state, said Wednesday morning that she didn't know where Richardson was [and] had only a vague idea of when he would be returning. So are privacy concerns enough to keep his schedule from Denish, too?

New details have emerged of the failures that led to the deaths of seven CIA agents in Afghanistan. Christina Lamb and Miles Amoore reportIt was the week after Christmas and there was a line of paper Santas hanging in the small chow house at Forward Operating Base Chapman, sent to Afghanistan by loved ones back home. Among the CIA agents waiting in the morning chill, amid the exercise bicycles and weights, were a mother of three and a father of three who had had to tell their children they would not be home for Christmas. This was not the first...

<p>Pentagon and defense operations must zero in on a problem and bypass the red herrings when seeking solutions; Law enforcement has to do the same thing in a murder investigation like that of John P, Wheeler III. Red herrings in the John Wheeler case include too much of a focus on his alleged erratic behavior and more.</p>

If they have a "What I Did On My Summer Vacation" contest at the Bridgeview Mosque, Kifah Mustapha will probably win. Sheikh Mustapha, the Imam in charge, was in summer school. At the FBI. By one measure, Mustapha was a perfect fit for the FBI's Citizens' Academy. The 10-session regimen is intended for business, civic and religious leaders in Chicago and the 55 other FBI field offices where it is offered. Mustapha is the well-known leader at one of the nation's most popular mosques and is a national figure in American Islam. So considering his civic stature, it isn't surprising...

Iran has accused the US of abducting one of its nuclear scientists who has been missing since June. Shahram Amiri disappeared in Saudi Arabia while on a Muslim pilgrimage.

An illicit North Korean arms shipment seized in Thailand last week was destined for the Middle East, the head of US intelligence said Friday. About 30 tonnes of sanctions-busting weapons were confiscated in Bangkok on Saturday but it had remained unclear where the North Korean shipment was headed. "Teamwork among different agencies in the United States and partners abroad just last week led to the interdiction of a Middle East-bound cargo of North Korean weapons," Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence, wrote in a commentary in the Washington Post. Blair's reference marked the first public comment by the administration...

A familiar mistrust descends. hopes that Mr Obama and his Cuban counterpart, Raúl Castro, would end a 50-year freeze in relations between their countries have proved wildly premature. Mr Obama began with some gestures. The latest round of talks took place in late February. They were overshadowed by familiar rows. The American officials demanded the release of Alan Gross, who was working under contract to USAID and was arrested in Havana in December. His family says he was helping Jewish groups in Cuba ... Four days after the talks Orlando Zapata, an imprisoned dissident, died in custody in a Havana...