Suicide bombers kill 78 Christians outside Pakistani church Reuters Canada By Fayaz Aziz. PESHAWAR, Pakistan (Reuters) - A pair of suicide bombers blew themselves up outside a 130-year-old Anglican church in Pakistan after Sunday Mass, killing at least 78 people in the deadliest attack on Christians in the predominantly Muslim ...
De Chaos Computer Club, een Duitse hackersorganisatie, is er in geslaagd om de vingerafdrukscanner van de iPhone 5s te omzeilen met een foto van een vingerafdruk. Daardoor kan een telefoon die met een vingerafdruk is beveiligd, worden ontgrendeld.
Artist Benjamin Muzzin has spun the humble digital monitor into something much more fascinating in an installation called Full Turn. By taking a flat display and rotating it at a very high speed, Muzzin transformed what would have been a 2D image into a protean, 3D sculpture of light — one that twists, pulsates, ebbs, and grows with mesmerizing fluidity.
No doubt capitalizing on the launch of the new iPhone 5S, NBC polled the US House of Representatives to ask a simple question: what kind of smartphone do you use? The results are that they overwhelmingly prefer the iPhone, to the tune of 58 percent. The runner-up is, unsurprisingly, BlackBerry at 23 percent, while Android is a very distant third at four percent. There's a small difference between Republicans and Democrats, with the former using iOS slightly more and the latter using BlackBerry at higher rates.
Android's very poor showing amongst House members could be due to a variety of factors — including questions about security and the cold, hard facts of congressional demographics. Whatever the reason, Congress is not in step...
Netflix made history tonight, winning three Emmy awards for House of Cards, becoming the first company to win the awards for online-only shows. Original shows produced by Netflix had received 14 nominations — 9 of those for House of Cards alone. David Fincher won for best directing in a drama series for House of Cards, "Chapter 1." House of Cards also won two "creative arts" Emmys, for outstanding casting and outstanding cinematography. Netflix's series had been nominated for other big awards, including best drama, but those awards went to established TV networks.
The Emmy nods, coming nearly 15 years after The Sopranos became the first cable series to earn an Emmy nomination for best television drama, signal an important validation...
Oud-hoogleraar Mart Bax van de Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam heeft zich zeker vijftien jaar lang schuldig gemaakt aan ernstig wetenschappelijk wangedrag, valsheid in geschrifte en zelfplagiaat, schrijven de Volkskrant en NRC Next. De VU zet vandaag een onderzoeksrapport over de zaak online, melden de kranten.
Bax, een politiek antropoloog, zou zeker 61 publicaties hebben verzonnen en zijn eigen artikelen onder een andere naam opnieuw hebben gepubliceerd. Ook zou hij hebben gelogen over onderscheidingen, nevenfuncties, interviews en een documentaire.
Stapel
Volgens de Volkskrant is Bax' zaak veel groter dan de fraude van de Tilburgse hoogleraar Diederik Stapel.
Ook beweerde Bax dat hij betrokken was bij het Srebrenica-onderzoek van het NIOD. Dat instituut heeft verklaard daar niets van af te weten.
De VU startte vorig jaar een onderzoek naar Bax, na de eerste berichten over mogelijke fraude. De universiteit neemt geen juridische stappen, schrijven de kranten, omdat Bax al sinds 2002 met pensioen is.
Last weekend’s high-profile cyberattack against telco Belgacom could have been part of a long-running spying campaign by Britain’s GCHQ, German magazine Spiegel Online has suggested after studying documents leaked by Edward Snowden.
A local leader of the Al-Qaeda-affiliated Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant was killed in clashes with other rebels in the Syrian province of Idlib on Sunday, a monitoring group said.
Abu Abdullah al-Libi, a local chief of the group, was killed along with 12 other fighters from the jihadist organisation, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
"He was killed in clashes with a group of rebel fighters near the town of Hazano," Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP.
He said six people from Hazano were also reported killed on Sunday, but it was unclear if they were civilians or fighters participating in the clashes.
The town lies in northwestern Idlib province, large parts of which lie under control of the Syrian opposition.
The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), Al-Qaeda's Iraqi branch which has expanded into Syria, has clashed with other rebel groups elsewhere in the country in recent days.
Violence between the group and rebels affiliated with the mainstream Free Syrian Army broke out this week in the town of Azaz in northern Aleppo province close to the Turkish border.
Syrian rebel fighters initially welcomed the arrival of hardened jihadists affiliated with Al-Qaeda, but have turned against the hardline fighters in several places after abuses and disputes over tactics and ideology.
When ISIS announced it would expand into Syria, it initially said it planned to merge with an existing jihadist rebel force -- the Al-Nusra Front.
But Nusra, which has pledged allegiance to Al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahri, rejected the merger and there were reports that it had clashed with ISIS in northeastern Hasakeh province on Saturday.
The folks who run BlackBerry were apparently among the last to realize how dire the company's situation has become.
In July, at the beginning of a quarter that saw the company lose $1 billion and ended with the announcement that it would fire 40% of its workforce, BlackBerry added a Bombardier Global Express to its private jet fleet, report Will Connors and Mark Maremont of the Wall Street Journal.
Used Global Expresses go for about $25-$30 million, Connors and Maremont report. They can fly from New York to Tokyo without refueling.
The newly acquired plane replaced a smaller jet that BlackBerry sold earlier this year.
A BlackBerry spokesman acknowledged to the Wall Street Journal that the company had taken delivery of the new jet two months ago. The spokesman also said that BlackBerry has now decided to sell all three of its planes on account of its financial challenges.
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - An Israeli soldier was shot dead on Sunday during a Jewish festival in the West Bank city of Hebron, a hotbed of tensions where some 500 Israeli settler families live among 100,000 Palestinians.
He was the second Israeli serviceman killed since Friday by suspected Palestinian gunmen as tensions rise in the occupied territory despite a resumption of stalled U.S.-brokered peace talks in July.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded with an order to permit settlers to move into a once disputed building in Hebron near the scene of the attack, saying "whoever tries to uproot us from the city of our fathers will achieve the opposite."
The United States condemned the killing of two Israel soldiers, in a statement issued in New York, where diplomats are gathering for the U.N. General Assembly.
"Such violence and terror are unacceptable, and undermine efforts to establish the positive atmosphere the parties need to progress in peace negotiations," spokesperson Jen Psaki said in an emailed statement.
Israeli military spokesmen said the soldier had died in a hospital in Jerusalem after a suspected sniper shot him in the neck while he was on patrol near the Tomb of Abraham, a Jewish and Islamic holy site in Hebron.
The attack occurred as the city, venerated as the burial site of the biblical patriarch Abraham, was packed with Jewish visitors for a week-long Jewish festival. Israeli media said crowds were ushered away from the site as troops hunted for the perpetrator.
Hebron has long been a flashpoint of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Palestinians seek statehood in the West Bank, which Israel captured in a 1967 war.
"Shots were fired near the Machpela Cave," police spokesman Mickey Rosenfeld said earlier, using the Hebrew name for the holy site, adding that police believed the perpetrator was Palestinian.
On Saturday, Israeli authorities said a soldier had been killed by a Palestinian who had lured him to his hometown in the West Bank. A Palestinian suspect has been arrested.
A week ago a Palestinian militant was killed in a confrontation with Israeli forces, the fourth Palestinian fatality since July, and one of about two dozen fatalities since the start of the year.
Netanyahu issued a statement after the soldier died, vowing to "strengthen settlement" in land Palestinians want for a state, and settlers move back into a building Israel evacuated in Hebron in April 2012 after a dispute over its ownership.
About 500,000 Israelis and 2.5 million Palestinians live in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, areas which, along with the Gaza Strip, were captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war. Most world powers deem the Jewish settlements illegal and Palestinians fear their presence will deny them a viable state.
Israel disputes this and has vowed to keep major settlement blocs under any eventual peace accord with the Palestinians.
(Additional reporting by Arshad Mohammed)
(Writing by Allyn Fisher-Ilan; Editing by Kevin Liffey and Eric Walsh)
"As you may have read recently, a class action lawsuit was filed against LinkedIn last week. The lawsuit alleges that we “break into” the email accounts of our members who choose to upload their email address books to LinkedIn. Quite simply, this is not true, and with so much misinformation out there, we wanted to clear up a few things for our members.
We do not access your email account without your permission. Claims that we “hack” or “break into” members’ accounts are false.
We never deceive you by “pretending to be you” in order to access your email account.
We never send messages or invitations to join LinkedIn on your behalf to anyone unless you have given us permission to do so.
We do give you the choice to share your email contacts, so you can connect on LinkedIn with other professionals that you know and trust. We will continue to do everything we can to make our communications about how to do this as clear as possible.
As we’ve said before, our core value at LinkedIn is Members First. This guides all the decisions that we make when it comes to our members, including how we communicate with them and how we use their data. That’s why we felt we needed to explain we believe that the claims in this lawsuit are without merit, and we wanted to correct the false accusations and misleading headlines."
De opkomst bij de verkiezingen in Duitsland lijkt hoger te worden dan vier jaar geleden. Om twee uur had al 41,4 procent van de 62 miljoen stemgerechtigden gestemd. In 2009 was dat op dat tijdstip 36,1 procent.
In 2009 bleef de opkomst uiteindelijk steken op 70,8 procent. Dat was 7 procent minder dan in 2005, en de laagste opkomst ooit in Duitsland.
Voor vandaag werd een nog lagere opkomst verwacht. Dat lijkt dus mee te vallen.
Woorden hebben een bepaalde lading. Een bepaalde waarde. En het is volledig cultuurafhankelijk welke woorden een bepaalde lading hebben op een bepaald moment. Het hangt er zelfs vanaf wie het woord uitspreekt. Denk maar aan het woord 'neger'. Context is...
"It isn't too different from an indie movie shoot," says Joanna Angel. "There's the challenge of a budget, which is a challenge for any movie, but when you're dealing with sex you're dependent on male genitalia to do a certain thing."
Joanna Angel makes porn. It began in 2002 when she and her Rutgers University roommate started a website called Burning Angel. "We just came up with the name. It had a good girl/bad girl thing going, so we liked it," she told Business Insider recently. "Initially I thought of being a journalist, possibly a sex advice column type person kind of like a Carrie Bradshaw. I also had this odd dream to teach English classes to people in prison. Burning Angel was a very small experiment at first. I never imagined it would become my career."
Burning Angel distinguished itself by offering some exceptionally different fare from your conventional Playboy-style airbrushed nudity. While other porn operations are often focused the size of their models' members and mammary glands, Burning Angel went a different way and became a progenitor of what's now known as "alt-porn": pierced and dyed punk rock girls wearing tattoos and little else.
Today, as an 11-year veteran of the adult industry, Angel has served a number of roles in front of and behind the camera. Burning Angel is now a serious business with 10 other people involved in the day-to-day operation. It seems to run much like a startup.
"I think we started at the right time and developed a lot of fans early on. I had a passion for it and I did anything and everything to get the word out about my site," she said. And the word did indeed get out.
Alt-porn is "kind of a silly name," she once told Complex. "It's just supposed to mean porn that is different. It's like, what is alternative music really? It's just music that's different from pop music, you know? But I think what makes alt-porn is the community and the culture behind it in addition to the content."
Angel's site also differs from regular porn because it has a focus on community and culture. There are your standard offerings in picture and video, of course. But Burning Angel also has live events, both online and in the physical world, and there's also an active forum for members to discuss music or tattoos or pop culture in general. Engaging with other members (and even the performers) gives paying users a reason to return to the site again and again.
Burning Angel has to make money in a variety of ways since it's competing the endless world of free porn on the Internet. The lion's share of revenue comes from user subscription fees. After that, there's money in selling DVDs, hosting events, booking appearances, and selling branded clothing. Burning Angel even sells its own line of sex toys.
A subscription to Burning Angel content costs $29.95 per month, $68.95 per quarter, or $95.40 per year. A three-day trial run is three bucks. The site sees about 30,000 unique hits per day, and after a relaunch two months ago, this number is starting to grow. In terms of user base, there are about 60,000 active members, and because Burning Angel was built with community in mind, members stick around to socialize after they watch their porn.
Burning Angel's success didn't happen overnight. "When we started, I had a part-time job as a waitress. I wanted to quit so that I'd have as much time as possible to work on the company. I didn't want to work for myself during the day and for someone else at night," Angel says.
She won an Adult Video News Award (think: the Academy Awards of porn) for Most Outrageous Sex Scene in 2006, catapulting Burning Angel to mainstream attention. She has since won plenty more awards, written and directed a number of films, and has obviously appeared in many as well.
And in 11 years of work to date, she still hasn't tired of it: "I oversee everything, especially on the creative side. Nothing creative gets shown to anyone unless it goes through me first. I don't work on the day-to-day stuff anymore, but I still kinda do a little of everything. And sometimes I'm on camera too."
If Joanna has it her way, the future will only hold more work and opportunity for Burning Angel. "Porn is definitely tough," she said, "but this is my career and this is what I do. We want to expand the brand and do even more with it. At this point, we've been around for a while. But we're still growing because we're still a small business."
Last week Apple not only released iOS 7 for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad, but also Apple TV Software 6.0 for the Apple TV. For some people it went smoothly, those in the U.S. got iTunes Radio support, and those everywhere got support for Shared Photo Streams, and an AirPlay update that lets you play your content on other people’s Apple TV’s. For others, it was ruinous, bricked their Apple TV’s and forced a generation completely unfamiliar with the process to find or buy a Micro-USB cable and connect to iTunes on their Windows or Mac PC and restore that way. Now the update appears to have been pulled.
There’s been no official word from Apple, but in our tests and quick polling of our readers, Software Update on the Apple TV currently shows Apple TV 5.3 as the current version and states no updates are available. (Apple TV still has odd versions, with Apple TV Software 5.x matching iOS 6 and Apple TV Software 6.x matching iOS 7.)
For anyone familiar with the Apple TV jailbreak scene, connecting to iTunes is old hat and likely more annoying than anything else. For the vast majority of people who’ve never had to do anything more than push a button to update in the past, a bricked Apple TV is likely disastrous.
If you haven’t updated yet, wait and hopefully a safer version of the Apple TV Software 6.0 update returns soon. If you tried updating already and had problems, we’ll post a set of instructions for restoring over USB with iTunes.
In the meantime, tell us what’s going on with your Apple TV – updated and good to go, stuck in bricked hell, or still waiting and watching?
Earlier this week we posted a chart from a Stanford study that shows the difference between novice and experienced beer drinkers.
Essentially, experts are much more inclined to give strong ales a higher rating. Experts also have much stronger opinions about all beers. They dislike cheap lagers (like Bud Light) more than the novices hate cheap lagers. And they like the strong ales more than the novices like the strong ales.
So why do experts like these strong ales so much?
Reddit user psychguy — who characterizes himself as a serious beer drinkers who does his own homebrewing — wrote a fascinating, highly-rated comment explaining what's going on.
There are two factors at play, he says. One is taste-fatigue: The more beer you drink, the more you need a strong beer to keep interested. The other element is social conformity. Once the group has decided that strong tastes are superior, then everyone in the group feels the need to conform to that. He relates a fascinating observation that when he enters beer competitions, his mediocre strong beers tend to rate higher than his well-executed mild beers.
He was kind enough to give us permission to republish his comment here:
As an avid homebrewer who has been very involved in the craft beer movement for a couple decades, I have to say that this article also highlights a strong beer bias among experts, as well as the more commonly realized lager bias among beginners. I have noticed that the longer one is in the field (either brewing or being a connoisseur), the most tastes shift towards stronger beers. There is an assumption that this is due to expertise, but I think that taste fatigue and social conformity may also play a role. When you are regularly drinking strong beers, certainly within a session, but also between sessions, you are going to experience some taste fatigue and have difficulty appreciating nuances of weaker beers. Also, when you are embedded in a community that universally prizes certain experiences (Pliny the Elder, etc.), if you don't express appreciation for those beers your competency is questioned. This is a form of social conformity, and it would produce the exact same statistical convergence in expert opinions that expertise would produce.
I have some personal anecdotes that support this as well. I am very good at brewing medium body malty beers; I have three medals from the AHA nationals and one from my local state fair for brown ales, Octoberfests and Vienna lagers. I am very good at self-critiquing, so I generally know which of my beers are good and which are mediocre. When I bring beers to professional tastings, my rather mediocre barleywines and imperial stouts get much better accolades than my far superior browns, California commons, milds, bitters, Octoberfests, and Vienna lagers. It is only when being judged within style in a formal competition that the strong beer bias does not show itself, and even there, there is still a tendency for out-of-style beers with high alcohol content to make surprise showings in competitions.
Het partijbureau van de PvdA aan de Herengracht is beklad. Onbekenden hebben met rode verf de tekst: "Hier is je participatie" op de deur gespoten.
De tekst is een verwijzing naar een passage uit de Troonrede die koning Willem-Alexander dinsdag uitsprak. De koning zei daarin dat de klassieke verzorgingsstaat langzaam verandert in een participatiesamenleving. "Van iedereen die dat kan, wordt gevraagd verantwoordelijkheid te nemen voor zijn of haar eigen leven en omgeving."
In de jongste peiling van Maurice de Hond laat 74 procent van de PvdA-stemmers zich negatief uit over de overgang van een verzorgingsstaat naar een participatiesamenleving.
Bij een vermoedelijke gasexplosie in een appartementencomplex in Den Haag, is een bewoner om het leven gekomen. Over de identiteit van het slachtoffer is nog niets bekendgemaakt. Volgens de brandweer Haaglanden is verder niemand gewond geraakt.
A new community guide video for Arma 3, Bohemia Interactive's tactical military shooter, shares tips and tricks for combining the game's vehicles and units in combat.
The video first details the game's infantrymen and how to properly match them with other elements — otherwise known as combined arms warfare. According to the video's narrators, this "creates limitless tactical options." Other topics include getting into the fight via ground, air or sea and how to best use vehicles.
"When it comes to mission design with combined arms scenarios, the best thing to remember is that every element — be they infantry or a vehicle — should play a role," the narrator said. "Keep it fun and engaging for the whole team. Having one powerful...
Enabling grid lines in the default Camera app can help make sure your photo is not only straight, but that you’re using the rule of thirds in order to capture the most interesting photo you can. In iOS 7, the way you turn grid lines on and off in the Camera app has changed slightly. If you’re fumbling around trying to figure out how to turn them on, follow along and we’ll help.
Launch the Settings app from the Home screen of your iPhone or iPad.
Scroll down and tap on Photos & Camera.
Again scroll down towards the bottom of the page and under the Camera section, there is an option for Grid. Turn the feature On by tapping on the slider.
That’s all there is to it. Grid lines should now be activated inside the native Camera app.
MOST people would agree that some drugs are worse than others: Heroin is probably considered to be more dangerous than marijuana, for instance. Because governments formulate criminal and social policies based upon classifications of harm, a study published by the Lancet on Nov., 1, 2010, makes interesting reading.
Researchers led by Professor David Nutt, a former chief drugs adviser to the British government, asked drug-harm experts to rank 20 drugs (legal and illegal) on 16 measures of harm to the user and to wider society, such as damage to health, drug dependency, economic costs and crime.
Alcohol is the most harmful drug in Britain, scoring 72 out of a possible 100, far more damaging than heroin (55) or crack cocaine (54). It is the most harmful to others by a wide margin, and is ranked fourth behind heroin, crack, and methamphetamine (crystal meth) for harm to the individual.
The authors point out that the model's weightings, though based on judgment, were analysed and found to be stable as large changes would be needed to change the overall rankings.
"Drug harms in the UK: a multi-criteria decision analysis", by David Nutt, Leslie King and Lawrence Phillips, on behalf of the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs. The Lancet.
A live demonstration of Square Enix's upcoming free-to-play smartphone title, Final Fantasy Agito, offers a look at travel, battles and general gameplay.
The demo, which you can watch above, was presented at Tokyo Game Show 2013. Agito takes place in the same world as Final Fantasy Type-0, a title released for PSP in Japan two years ago. The upcoming game is a retelling of Type-0 from the point of player-customized characters.
Square Enix announced Final Fantasy Agitoearlier this month for iOS and Android. According to game director Hajime Tabata, Agito will "definitely be localized" for Western players.
The Chaos Computer Club – a Germany-based group of computer hackers – claims to have fooled Apple’s Touch ID fingerprint technology, which makes its debut on the new iPhone 5s. While a YouTube video demonstrating the trick is entitled “hacking iphone 5S touchID” (and is being reported by some organizations similarly) it is in point of fact not a hack. But we’ll get to that in a moment.
In a blog post describing the procedure, Chaos Computer Club says:
A fingerprint of the phone user, photographed from a glass surface, was enough to create a fake finger that could unlock an iPhone 5s secured with TouchID. This demonstrates – again – that fingerprint biometrics is unsuitable as access control method and should be avoided.
The one minute video shows someone using their index finger to register Touch ID on a newly set-up iPhone 5s. Once the setup has been completed, they then apply a tape to their middle finger which, presumably, contains a transfer of the index fingerprint. That unlocks the phone.
The Chaos Computer Club explains how the process to produce the fingerprint was made. It involves photographing a fingerprint at 2400 dot per inch resolution.
The resulting image is then cleaned up, inverted and laser printed with 1200 dpi onto transparent sheet with a thick toner setting. Finally, pink latex milk or white woodglue is smeared into the pattern created by the toner onto the transparent sheet. After it cures, the thin latex sheet is lifted from the sheet, breathed on to make it a tiny bit moist and then placed onto the sensor to unlock the phone. This process has been used with minor refinements and variations against the vast majority of fingerprint sensors on the market.
So this isn’t a procedure that someone is likely to casually reproduce just for the sake of unlocking your phone. But Chaos Computer Club spokesman Frank Rieger says biometric security like Touch ID has more nefarious implications.
Biometrics is fundamentally a technology designed for oppression and control, not for securing everyday device access.
To its credit, Chaos Computer Club isn’t calling the spoof a hack, but that isn’t stopping it from being widely misreported, thanks in part to the sloppy title on the YouTube video. But what is the point of accuracy when there are page views to be had?
Germany's Chaos Computing Club claim to have tricked Apple's new TouchID security feature this weekend. In a blog post on the breakthrough, the CCC writes they bypassed the fingerprint-reader by simply starting with "the fingerprint of the phone user photographed from a glass surface."
The entire process is documented by hacker Starbug in the video above, and the club outlines it in a how-to. For this particular initiative, the CCC started by photographing a fingerprint with 2400 dpi. Next the image was inverted and laser printed at 1200 dpi. To create the fingerprint mask Starbug finally used, latex milk was poured into the pattern, eventually lifted, breathed on (for moisture), and pushed onto the sensor to unlock the phone. In this sense, it's hard to definitively state the hackers "broke" the TouchID precautions, because they did not circumvent the security measure without access tothe fingerprint. (TouchID could similarly be cleared with a GTA V-like strategy of knocking the phone user unconscious and pressing finger-to-sensor.) However, the CCC did successfully trick TouchID into working as advertised for an individual who wasn't the phone user.
The CCC and Starbug in particular are well-known critics of biometric security systems. Back in 2008, Starbug even cloned the fingerprint of a German politician who advocated for collecting citizens' unique physical characteristics as a means of preventing terrorism.
The Touch ID fingerprint scanner on Apple's new iPhone 5S appears to have been hacked.
BuzzFeed points to a video from a European hacker group (embedded above) that shows a person tricking the sensor into accepting a photographed fingerprint applied to latex.
The group says it was able to photograph a fingerprint from a glass surface, clean up the image in a computer, and print it onto a piece of latex. The latex can be placed over any finger and placed on the iPhone's Touch ID sensor to trick it.
We've reached out to Apple for comment and will update if we hear back.
Al-Shabab, Arabic for "The Youth," is a U.S.-designated terrorist organization based in Somalia. There are varying accounts of exactly when they formed, but most place it between 2003 and 2006. According to reporter Jeremy Scahill in his book "Dirty Wars," around that time many Somalis were fed up with the rule of warlords and stood up the "Islamic Courts Union" (ICU) to administer at least some form of justice in a country ruled less by the state, and more by warlords intent on remaining in power for their own ends.
The ICU was a disparate group of 12 regional courts used to govern specific clans around the country. Al-Shabab, formed by a number of jihadists, allied with the ICU as the 13th (and much more extremist) court to battle against the warlords.
How many fighters do they have?
There are a number of estimates. One defector says it's around 7,000 to 8,000, while an officer in the African Union says it's more like 4,000 to 6,000, according to the AP. Al-Shabab has been actively recruiting foreigners to join their ranks as well, and they had at least 40 or more Americans fighting with them in 2011, according to a House Committee on Homeland Security investigation.
Do they have al-Qaida links?
Yes. The U.S. alleges that one of their original founders, Aden Hashi Farah Ayro, received training at al-Qaida camps in Afghanistan, according to Scahill. The group has also openly pledged loyalty and support to al-Qaida and another affiliate group in Yemen, al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).
What other attacks have they carried out?
Al-Shabab grabbed headlines in 2005 for carrying out a number of high profile assassinations in Somalia of ex-military generals, businessmen, activists, and professors, according to Scahill. U.S. counterterrorism officials also report the group is responsible for a number of bombings and suicide attacks.
Likely responsible for five coordinated suicide car bombings, Oct. 2008, killed at least 26
Claimed responsibility for twin suicide bombings in Uganda, July 2010, killed more than 70
Blocked aid relief from NGO's supporting Somalis, 2011 famine, tens of thousands killed
Why are they attacking inside Kenya?
A number of groups have been battling al-Shabab inside Somalia for some time now. Mainly U.S.-backed Ethiopian forces and the Transitional Federal Government inside the country. Al-Shabab drew the ire of Kenya after conducting a number of attacks against foreign aid workers and tourists inside their borders around 2011.
That led to Kenyan military forces conducting their own battles against the group inside Somalia. The attack at the Westgate shopping mall is "retributive justice for crimes committed by their military," according to a posting the group made to Twitter.
Lamenting the fifth time he has appeared at a mass shooting's memorial service as president, Barack Obama said that tears, words, and prayers were no longer enough.
"If we really want to honor these 12 men and women — if we really want to be a country where we can go to work, go to school and walk our streets free from senseless violence without so many lives being stolen with a bullet from a gun — then we're going to have to change," Obama said at a memorial service for the victims of Monday's shooting at the Washington Navy Yard.
Even more so than a similar speech he gave following the elementary-school massacre in Newtown, Conn., last December, Obama's speech Sunday served as a plea for new gun laws.
Obama said that he worried the country was becoming numb to this sort of mass violence. He said it "ought to lead to some sort of transformation" as it did in other countries, like the United Kingdom and Australia.
"What is different in America is that it's easy to get your hands on a gun," Obama said, "and a lot of us know this."
He also addressed the reality — that members in Congress are not inclined to take up new measures, or even ones that failed during the last gun-control push. He said that change on the issue won't come from Washington — it will come from the outside, from people demanding action.
Obama noted that he has grieved with five communities in the wake of mass shootings — including in Newtown last December and in Tucson, Ariz., after the shooting that critically wounded former Rep. Gabby Giffords. Again, he wished it would be the last.
"We cannot accept this. As Americans bound in grief and love, we must insist here today there is nothing normal about innocent men and women being gunned down where they work," he said.
Most people held at a shopping centre in Nairobi by suspected al-Shabab militants have been freed, officials tell the BBC, but the operation continues.
Today, as an 11-year veteran of the adult industry, Angel has served a number of roles in front of and behind the camera. Burning Angel is now a serious business with 10 other people involved in the day-to-day operation. It seems to run much like a startup.
She won an Adult Video News Award (think: the Academy Awards of porn) for Most Outrageous Sex Scene in 2006, catapulting Burning Angel to mainstream attention. She has since won plenty more awards, written and directed a number of films, and has obviously appeared in many as well.
