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Thursday, March 28, 2013
Search warrants in Newtown school massacre might reveal more on motive
Lucas Jackson / Reuters file
Nancy Lanza's home in Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 18.
By Gil AegerterStaff Writer, NBC News
Search warrant documents in the Sandy Hook massacre are expected to be released early Thursday and could shed more light on gunman Adam Lanza?s state of mind and motive in carrying out the second-deadliest school shooting in U.S. history.
The records were sealed in the immediate aftermath of Lanza?s Dec. 14 shooting rampage through the Newtown, Conn., elementary school, and Connecticut Superior Court Judge John F. Blawie extended the order for 90 days on Dec. 27 (here in .pdf). It covered the applications, affidavits and returns for five search warrants for the home in Sandy Hook where Lanza lived with his mother, Nancy, and for the black 2010 four-door Honda Civic sedan that he parked in front of Sandy Hook Elementary School.
Rhonda Stearley-Hebert, communications manager for the Connecticut Judicial Branch, said Wednesday that the documents would be available Thursday morning. A statement from prosecutors working on the case also was expected to be made public.
On Wednesday afternoon, Blawie granted a motion from the state's attorney to redact some information in the records, including a witness name, a credit card number and telephone numbers. The sealing orders will be lifted at midnight Wednesday, and the documents were to be released by email at 9:01 a.m. Thursday.
Authorities say Lanza shot his 52-year-old mother to death at the home they shared on the morning of Dec. 14, then drove about five miles to the school, where he killed 20 first-graders and six teachers and staff members before fatally shooting himself. Two other teachers were wounded. The death toll is second only to the 32 killed in the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre among U.S. school shootings.
Lanza, 20, used a Bushmaster .223-caliber XM15-E2S rifle with a 30-round magazine to shoot the victims at the school, authorities have said. In addition to the Bushmaster, authorities found a Glock 10mm semiautomatic pistol and a Sig-Sauer 9mm semiautomatic pistol in the school ? one of which Lanza used to kill himself. In the Civic parked outside, police found an Izhmash Canta-12 12-gauge shotgun, which looks similar to a Kalashnikov rifle; it was not used at the school.
All those weapons were legally owned by Nancy Lanza, authorities have said. There have been reports that several more guns were found in her home, though NBC News has not confirmed that.
Authorities have kept tight control over information in the case, including any evidence that might give clues to Adam Lanza?s motivation.
Alaine Griffin and Josh Kovner from the Hartford Courant teamed up with PBS's "Frontline" for a special report on Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook shooter. After finding news articles in his bedroom, they believe Lanza could have been inspired by the deadly Norway attacks, and they also note that his mom Nancy wanted him to be more independent.
There have been reports that he was obsessed with mass killers, including Norway?s Anders Breivik, who killed 77 people in a shooting and bomb attack in 2011. A law enforcement official told NBC News last month that Lanza had collected material on previous mass shootings, although the source said there was no indication that it played a role in the school massacre. Some reports also have suggested that investigators believe violent video games might have helped propel Lanza to violence, though authorities have not confirmed that. Like many young adults, Lanza was known to play a variety of video games, some violent and some not.
Connecticut State Police spokesman Lt. Paul Vance told NBC?S TODAY in February that investigators ?are a long way? from determining Lanza?s motive. Vance said investigators hope to have their report on the shooting completed by early June.
Access to information has become an issue with state lawmakers working on bipartisan gun-control legislation stemming from the massacre.
Lawmakers complained last week after the New York Daily News reported that a state police commander had disclosed evidence about the case at a law enforcement seminar in New Orleans. State House Republican Rep. Larry Cafero said lawmakers should be getting more information for their deliberations, and in response, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy said the Office of the Chief State?s Attorney had agreed to release more information this week.
Mark Dupuis, spokesman for the state Division of Criminal Justice, said Wednesday that the release would include the search warrant documents and a statement from prosecutors.
Adam Joseph, communications director for the state Senate Democrats, told NBC News on Wednesday morning that lawmakers still did not have a final agreement on the legislation and were waiting to see the search warrants before scheduling a vote, which could come as early as next week.
NBC News producer Tom Winter contributed to this report.
Brendan Smialowski / AFP - Getty Images
A nation mourns after the second deadliest school shooting in U.S. history left 20 children and six staff members dead at Sandy Hook Elementary.
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Commuters text while driving more than teens, AT&T-sponsored survey finds
Some 77 percent of kids say their parents aren't setting a good example
A pair of recent surveys commissioned by AT&T found that 49 percent of commuters reported having texted while driving, compared to 43 percent of teenagers in a companion study.
Some 97 percent of the 1,200 teens surveyed in April 2012 said they knew texting while driving was dangerous, with 70 percent recognizing that texting while at a stoplight also wasn't safe.
Perhaps more sobering for those of us with children is that 89 percent of the teens surveyed said they believed their parents were bad role models for not texting while driving, and 77 percent of them believed their parents text "all the time" in the car.
It's simple. Do not text and drive. Better yet, keep the phone in your pocket. Period.
Source: AT&T; More: Commuter survey (pdf), teenager survey (pdf)
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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/androidcentral/~3/OlcrNaaRNq0/story01.htm
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Record-breaking cyberattack hits anti-spam group
LONDON (AP) ? A record-breaking cyberattack targeting an anti-spam watchdog group has sent ripples of disruption coursing across the Web, experts said Wednesday.
Spamhaus, a site responsible for keeping ads for counterfeit Viagra and bogus weight-loss pills out of the world's inboxes, said it had been buffeted by the monster denial-of-service attack since mid-March, apparently from groups angry at being blacklisted by the Swiss-British group.
"It is a small miracle that we're still online," Spamhaus researcher Vincent Hanna said.
Denial-of-service attacks overwhelm a server with traffic ? like hundreds of letters being jammed through a mail slot at the same time. Security experts measure those attacks in bits of data per second. Recent cyberattacks ? like the ones that caused persistent outages at U.S. banking sites late last year ? have tended to peak at 100 billion bits per second.
But the furious assault on Spamhaus has shattered the charts, clocking in at 300 billion bits per second, according to San Francisco-based CloudFlare Inc., which Spamhaus has enlisted to help it weather the attack.
"It was likely quite a bit more, but at some point measurement systems can't keep up," CloudFlare chief executive Matthew Prince wrote in an email.
Patrick Gilmore of Akamai Technologies said that was no understatement.
"This attack is the largest that has been publicly disclosed ? ever ? in the history of the Internet," he said.
It's unclear who exactly was behind the attack, although a man who identified himself as Sven Olaf Kamphuis said he was in touch with the attackers and described them as mainly consisting of disgruntled Russian Internet service providers who had found themselves on Spamhaus' blacklists. There was no immediate way to verify his claim.
He accused the watchdog of arbitrarily blocking content that it did not like. Spamhaus has widely used and constantly updated blacklists of sites that send spam.
"They abuse their position not to stop spam but to exercise censorship without a court order," Kamphuis said.
Gilmore and Prince said the attack's perpetrators had taken advantage of weaknesses in the Internet's infrastructure to trick thousands of servers into routing a torrent of junk traffic to Spamhaus every second.
The trick, called "DNS reflection," works a little bit like mailing requests for information to thousands of different organizations with a target's return address written across the back of the envelopes. When all the organizations reply at once, they send a landslide of useless data to the unwitting addressee.
Both experts said the attack's sheer size has sent ripples of disruptions across the Internet as servers moved mountains of junk traffic back and forth across the Web.
"At a minimum there would have been slowness," Prince said, adding in a blog post that "if the Internet felt a bit more sluggish for you over the last few days in Europe, this may be part of the reason why."
At the London Internet Exchange, where service providers exchange traffic across the globe, spokesman Malcolm Hutty said his organization had seen "a minor degree of congestion in a small portion of the network."
But he said it was unlikely that any ordinary users had been affected by the attack.
Hanna said his site had so far managed to stay online, but warned that being knocked off the Internet could give spammers an opening to step up their mailings ? which may mean more fake lottery announcements and pitches for penny stocks heading to people's inboxes.
Hanna denied claims that his organization had behaved arbitrarily, noting that his group would lose its credibility if it started flagging benign content as spam.
"We have 1.7 billion people who watch over our shoulder," he said. "If we start blocking emails that they want, they will obviously stop using us."
Gilmore of Akamai was also dismissive of the claim that Spamhaus was biased.
"Spamhaus' reputation is sterling," he said.
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GameStick gets GameStop-backing, pre-loaded titles
OUYA may have nabbed the spotlight in the Android-based, Kickstarter-supported console wars, but the diminutive GameStick's got some heat behind it, too. The device's makers are putting on a bit of a show at this year's GDC, announcing a slew of news around the forthcoming product. At the top of the list are a number of backers, including, most prominently, the similarly-named GameStop, which clearly sees a viable future in such products, as the world continues to move away from brick-and-mortar outlets. Shadowgun and Smash Cops were also revealed as pre-installed titles for the console, "ensuring GameStick users have free, quality content ready to go out of the box."
Filed under: Gaming
Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/03/27/gamestick-gamestop/
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Exclusive: Wal-Mart may get customers to deliver packages to online buyers
By Alistair Barr and Jessica Wohl
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Wal-Mart Stores Inc is considering a radical plan to have store customers deliver packages to online buyers, a new twist on speedier delivery services that the company hopes will enable it to better compete with Amazon.com Inc.
Tapping customers to deliver goods would put the world's largest retailer squarely in middle of a new phenomenon sometimes known as "crowd-sourcing," or the "sharing economy."
A plethora of start-ups now help people make money by renting out a spare room, a car, or even a cocktail dress, and Wal-Mart would in effect be inviting people to rent out space in their vehicle and their willingness to deliver packages to others.
Such an effort would, however, face numerous legal, regulatory and privacy obstacles, and Wal-Mart executives said it was at an early planning stage.
Wal-Mart is making a big push to ship online orders directly from stores, hoping to cut transportation costs and gain an edge over Amazon and other online retailers, which have no physical store locations. Wal-Mart does this at 25 stores currently, but plans to double that to 50 this year and could expand the program to hundreds of stores in the future.
Wal-Mart currently uses carriers like FedEx Corp for delivery from stores - or, in the case of a same-day delivery service called Walmart To Go that is being tested in five metro areas, its own delivery trucks.
"I see a path to where this is crowd-sourced," Joel Anderson, chief executive of Walmart.com in the United States, said in a recent interview with Reuters.
Wal-Mart has millions of customers visiting its stores each week. Some of these shoppers could tell the retailer where they live and sign up to drop off packages for online customers who live on their route back home, Anderson explained.
Wal-Mart would offer a discount on the customers' shopping bill, effectively covering the cost of their gas in return for the delivery of packages, he added.
"This is at the brain-storming stage, but it's possible in a year or two," said Jeff McAllister, senior vice president of Walmart U.S. innovations.
Indeed, the likelihood of this being broadly adopted across the company's network of more than 4,000 stores in the United States is low, according to Matt Nemer, a retail analyst at Wells Fargo Securities.
"I'm sure it will be a test in some stores," he added. "But they may only keep it for metro markets and for higher-priced items."
LEGAL BOUNDARIES
Start-ups such as TaskRabbit and Fiverr already let individuals rent out their time and expertise to companies and people looking for small jobs to be completed.
Zipments was founded in 2010 as a crowd-sourced delivery network that allowed anyone over 18 years old with a vehicle, a text-enabled phone, and a PayPal account to bid on courier services for local businesses.
Such online match-making businesses often push legal boundaries - and a Wal-Mart crowd-sourced delivery program would be no different, according to Nemer.
Online packages delivered by customers may never reach their destination, either through theft or fraud, the analyst said.
Such a crowd-sourced delivery service may not be as reliable as FedEx or United Parcel Service, which have insured drivers, he added.
"You are comfortable with a FedEx or UPS truck in your driveway, but what about a stranger knocking on your door?" Nemer said.
ZIPMENTS EVOLVES
While Zipments started out with a pure crowd-sourcing approach, the company now does more screening of drivers before allowing them to be part of its delivery network, Chief Executive and co-Founder Garrick Pohl said in an interview. It now serves big cities including New York and Chicago.
Theft, fraud and late deliveries have never been a problem, but insurance and licenses were an obstacle, Pohl explained.
Drivers often need personal liability insurance to cover package delivery activities. Cargo insurance is also needed. Zipments self-insures this risk up to $250, but the firm encourages its couriers to buy additional coverage for higher-value packages, Pohl said.
In some areas, like downtown Chicago, people also need a courier license to deliver things, he added.
"Zipments now helps people get all these things set up before allowing them to deliver goods," Pohl said.
Still, he said the issues are not insurmountable, citing pizza restaurants, which have used part-time drivers to deliver pies for years.
"It's a great solution for large retailers like Wal-Mart," Pohl said. "We'd like to see them move quicker, but it's great that they are considering it."
Zipments is trying to provide such services to retailers, although Pohl declined to say which companies the start-up is talking to about this.
(Reporting by Alistair Barr and Jessica Wohl; Editing by Jonathan Weber, Martin Howell and Leslie Gevirtz)
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Wednesday, March 27, 2013
Obesity may be linked to microorganisms living in the gut
Mar. 26, 2013 ? How much a person eats may be only one of many factors that determines weight gain. A recent Cedars-Sinai study suggests that a breath test profile of microorganisms inhabiting the gut may be able to tell doctors how susceptible a person is to developing obesity.
The study, published online Thursday by The Endocrine Society's Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, shows that people whose breath has high concentrations of both hydrogen and methane gasses are more likely to have a higher body mass index and higher percentage of body fat.
"This is the first large-scale human study to show an association between gas production and body weight -- and this could prove to be another important factor in understanding one of the many causes of obesity," said lead author Ruchi Mathur, MD, director of the Diabetes Outpatient Treatment and Education Center in the Division of Endocrinology at Cedars-Sinai.
The study, which will also appear in JCEM's April 2013 issue, analyzed the breath content of 792 people. Based on the breath tests, four patterns emerged. The subjects either had normal breath content, higher concentrations of methane, higher levels of hydrogen, or higher levels of both gases. Those who tested positive for high concentrations of both gases had significantly higher body mass indexes and higher percentages of body fat.
The presence of methane is associated with a microorganism called Methanobrevibacter smithii. This organism is responsible for the majority of methane production in the human host.
"Usually, the microorganisms living in the digestive tract benefit us by helping convert food into energy. However, when this particular organism -- M. smithii -- becomes overabundant, it may alter this balance in a way that causes someone to be more likely to gain weight," Mathur said.
These organisms scavenge hydrogen from other microbes and use it to produce methane -- which is eventually exhaled by the host. Researchers theorize this interaction helps neighboring hydrogen-producing bacteria thrive and extract nutrients from food more efficiently. Over time, this may contribute to weight gain.
"Essentially, it could allow a person to harvest more calories from their food," Mathur said.
In an ongoing study funded by the American Diabetes Association, Mathur is working to confirm the link between M. smithii, obesity and pre-diabetic conditions by determining how efficiently people digest food before and after eliminating the microorganism with a targeted dose of antibiotic. Participants who have evidence of methane on their breath are given a standard diet over three days, undergo an oral glucose challenge, and swallow a "smart pill" to track how fast the food moves through their bodies. In addition, their stool is collected and sent for calorie analysis allowing researchers to determine how many calories are being harvested during digestion. Participants then repeat the same tests after taking the antibiotic regimen to see if elimination of the organism results in measureable changes.
"This should let us know just how energy balance is affected by M. smithii," Mathur said, "We're only beginning to understand the incredibly complex communities that live inside of us. If we can understand how they affect our metabolism, we may be able to work with these microscopic communities to positively impact our health."
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Story Source:
The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.
Journal Reference:
- Ruchi Mathur et al. Methane and Hydrogen Positivity on Breath Test is Associated with Greater Body Mass Index and Body Fat. Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, 2013; (in press)
Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_health/~3/1rYGnU62ogc/130326095058.htm
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