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The body charged by President Obama with protecting the civil liberties and privacy of the American people exists in shadows almost as dark as the intelligence agencies it is designed to oversee. The Privacy & Civil Liberties Board (PCLOB) was due to meet Obama at the White House on Friday afternoon at 3pm in the situation room to discuss growing concerns over US surveillance of phone and internet records – or, at least, that´s what unnamed "senior administration officials" said would happen. The meeting did not appear on the president´s official diary issued to journalists, nor has

All is not as it appears in the case of Richard Windsor, the alias used by outgoing EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, apparently to shield email messages from discovery and disclosure. Under court order to cough up the email messages to Chris Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and having turned over a first installment of 2,100 such email messages earlier this week, the Obama administration is making this a case that might challenge the ingenuity of Sherlock Holmes. With Horner’s assistance, my daughter Eliana tries to pierce the fog of administrative war in her NRO column “Lisa Jackson’s gadfly.”

A feature on the floor of the Baltic Sea that was discovered last summer by Swedish treasure hunters is making headlines once again. The latest media coverage draws upon an hour-long radio interview with Peter Lindberg, head of the Ocean X Team (which made the "discovery"), in which Lindberg delivers a string of cryptic and titillating statements about the "strange" and "mysterious" seafloor object his team has been exploring for a year. Lindberg discusses various possibilities for what the object might be: "It has these very strange stair formations, and if it is constructed, it must be constructed tens of...

LITCHFIELD, Conn. (AP) — Authorities in northwestern Connecticut say they didn't find anything after a state trooper and another person reported a large object falling out of the sky in Litchfield. The Republican-American of Waterbury reports (http://bit.ly/HEwTYZ ) that a person driving in Litchfield at about 2 a.m. Tuesday reported that a green, glowing object the size of a whale fell from the sky and crashed into Bantam Lake. Officials say that at about the same time, a state trooper 10 miles away in Warren called dispatchers to report that something fell out of the sky and landed near Bantam...

CLINTONVILLE, Wis. (AP) -- ... The strange disturbance sounds like distant thunder, fireworks or someone slamming a heavy door. At first, many people were amused or merely curious. But after three restless nights, aggravation is mounting. And some folks are considering leaving town until investigators determine the source of the racket. There have been no reports of injury or damage, despite some residents saying they could feel the ground roll beneath their feet. City officials say they have investigated every possible human cause. They checked water, sewer and gas lines, contacted the military about any exercises in the area, reviewed...

A mysterious metal ball reportedly fell from space , landing in a grasslands area of the African nation of Namibia. So far experts claim the object is not of alien origin. It has two bumps on each end, appears to be hollow and weights about 13 pounds. Namibia's National Forensic Science Institute Director Paul Ludik said the sphere is 3.6 feet around and is made out of a "sophisticated" alloy that is not unknown to modern science, although it has no identifying markings to link it with a country or a company. So far that's about all we're told. But...

News of UFO Sighting in East El Paso. Very similar to NYC and other sightings recently.

HANOI (AFP) – One of the world's rarest animals, the secretive and mysterious twin-horned saola, has been seen for the first time in a decade, conservationists say. Villagers in Laos captured a saola in August and took it to their remote community, but it died after a few days in captivity, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) said in a statement. The animal was photographed before its death, the first confirmed record since 1999 when pictures of wild saola were taken by automatic cameras in Laos, said IUCN, a Swiss-based network of scientists and environmental organisations. No biologist...

Q-balls zoom through the Universe, according to CERN physicist Brian Cox, vaporizing stars and flouting the laws of physics. Each one is like a new universe in a nutshell. Inside a Q-ball, the familiar forces that hold our world together don't exist, which means that a single Q-ball can eat the heart out of a super-dense star,causing it to self-destruct in an almighty cosmic explosion. This was the scientific premise of the scifi thriller, Sunshine, directed by Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, The Beach). That's the fiction. The fact is that a Q-ball would travel through a light star like the sun...

A European spacecraft zoomed by past a mysterious asteroid Saturday to take the first-ever close look at the space rock while flying more than 282 million miles from Earth. The European Space Agency's (ESA) Rosetta space probe flew past the asteroid Lutetia, an object discovered in 1852 that appeared only as a bright speck in the sky to astronomers until today. The first new photos of the asteroid revealed Lutetia to be a lumpy rock with a potato-like appearance. Rosetta was about 1,900 miles (3,100 km) from the asteroid at its closest approach. The enigmatic space rock, which is about...

TEL AVIV // A mysterious arrest carried out recently by Israel’s security services has renewed condemnation from human rights groups about the country’s treatment of prisoners and its possible infringement of press freedoms. A report last week on the website of Israel’s biggest newspaper, Yediot Ahronot, said that a so-called “Mr X” is being held in complete seclusion at the maximum-security Ayalon prison, and his identity is being kept so closely under wraps that it is not even known to his prison guards or fellow inmates. The report cited an unidentified official at Israel’s penitentiary service as saying: “I don’t...

KABUL (AFP) – As the pink poppy fields of southern Afghanistan yield their sticky harvest, opium production in the country that supplies the world with heroin is set to fall, farmers and officials say. That's good news for the fight against the multi-billion-dollar drugs trade but it could be bad news for Afghan farmers struggling to feed their families as the war against Taliban insurgents and drugs gangs escalates. "This year we had less poppy cultivation, which I think was because of our public awareness campaign which we launched before cultivation started," said Gul Mohammad, head of the counter-narcotics department...

A strange and mysterious new object in space may the brightest and long-lasting "micro-quasar" seen thus far, a miniature version of the brightest objects in the universe. The object suddenly began pumping out radio waves last year in the relatively nearby galaxy M82, some 10 million light-years away. Its discovery was announced Tuesday. "The new object, which appeared in May 2009, has left us scratching our heads — we've never seen anything quite like this before," said researcher Tom Muxlow, a radio astronomer at the University of Manchester's Jodrell Bank Observatory in England. M82 is a "starburst galaxy," one that...

Nearly 200 years ago, a ship sank in the Gulf of Mexico, about 35 miles off Louisiana's coast. It stayed, undiscovered, on the seabed, about 4,000 feet below the surface, until 2002, when a crew happened upon the wreckage while checking out a pipeline. An expedition led by Texas A&M University found no skeletal remains and nothing to indicate the vessel's name, where it came from or how it sank. But underwater sleuths discovered plenty of artifacts, including a telescope, pottery, French bottles, swords, English mustard jars, hourglasses, a cast-iron stove and a Scottish cannon, Louisiana State Museum spokesman Arthur...

For the past quarter century, dark matter has been a mystery we've just had to live with. But the time may be getting close when science can finally unveil what this befuddling stuff is that makes up most of the matter in the universe. Dark matter can't be seen. Nobody even knows what it is. But it must be there, because without it galaxies would fly apart. Upcoming experiments on Earth such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator in Switzerland, and a new spacecraft called Gaia set to launch in 2011, could be the key to closing the...

As if the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy weren't vexing enough, another baffling cosmic puzzle has been discovered. Patches of matter in the universe seem to be moving at very high speeds and in a uniform direction that can't be explained by any of the known gravitational forces in the observable universe. Astronomers are calling the phenomenon "dark flow." The stuff that's pulling this matter must be outside the observable universe, researchers conclude. When scientists talk about the observable universe, they don't just mean as far out as the eye, or even the most powerful telescope, can see....

WASHINGTON — Some mysteries are such fun you almost don't want to know the truth. That may help explain why people are fascinated with crystal skulls. "People like to believe in something greater than themselves," Smithsonian anthropologist Jane MacLaren Walsh said, and crystal skulls are mysterious and beautiful.

Earth gives off a relentless hum of countless notes completely imperceptible to the human ear, like a giant, exceptionally quiet symphony, but the origin of this sound remains a mystery. Now unexpected powerful tunes have been discovered in this hum. These new findings could shed light on the source of this enigma. The planet emanates a constant rumble far below the limits of human hearing, even when the ground isn't shaking from an earthquake. (It does not cause the ringing in the ear linked with tinnitus.) This sound, first discovered a decade ago, is one that only scientific instruments -...

SCOTTISH MASONS' MYSTERIOUS SIGNATURES IN STONE TO BE RECORDED By 24 Hour Museum Staff 08/02/2008 Courtesy Historic Scotland Mysterious symbols carved into Scotland’s medieval churches, castles and bridges are to be studied and recorded in a new scheme supported by Historic Scotland. Masons’ marks are enigmatic signatures cut into stone wherever they worked, and hold clues as to dates of construction as well as the craftsmen who worked on the structure. However, little is known about the identities and life stories of these men who played such an important role in creating the country’s most cherished buildings from the Middle...

Mysterious MigrationsOur prehistoric ancestors journeyed out of Africa on contested roads Bruce Bower It was the most momentous immigration ever, a population realignment that marked a startling departure for our species, Homo sapiens. After emerging in eastern Africa close to 200,000 years ago, anatomically modern people stayed on one continent for roughly 140,000 years before spreading out in force around the world. Then, from 40,000 to 35,000 years ago, our forerunners advanced into areas stretching from what is now France to southeastern Asia and Australia. DIGGING THE PAST. Workers excavate deep into a site near the Russian village of Kostenki,...