Not enough evidence to explain circumstances of Noah Donohoe’s death, partly due to police mistakes, inquest finds
An inquest into the death of a teenager whose body was found in a Belfast storm drain has found there is not enough evidence to explain the puzzling circumstances of how he died, partly because of mistakes by police investigators.
Noah Donohoe, 14, was last seen on 21 June 2020 when he left his south Belfast home on his bicycle, telling his mother he was going to visit friends. His naked body was found six days later, deep inside an underground water tunnel in the north of the city.
Continue reading...Estimated 100,000 Yemenis displaced amid renewed fighting as Qatar sounds alarm over Bab al-Mandab strait
Saudi cities faced the threat of a second day of Houthi attacks as fighting across Yemen led the UN to warn of a humanitarian crisis with 100,000 Yemenis already displaced.
As oil prices remained well over $100 (£74) a barrel, Qatar warned of a catastrophe if the Iran-backed Houthi militants won full control of the Bab al-Mandab strait, the narrow waterway at the bottom of the Red Sea dominating the key naval route to Asia. The strait has become vital to Saudi crude oil exports as the wider Middle East war chokes the strait of Hormuz in the Gulf.
Continue reading...Senators question FBI chief on move to cut restrictions on agent applicants who have engaged in bestiality
FBI director Kash Patel defended his agency’s decision to roll back restrictions on agent applicants who have previously engaged in bestiality, arguing the FBI “did not want to punish victims of bestiality” by automatically disqualifying them.
The unusual topic of bestiality emerged during a Senate judiciary committee oversight hearing on Tuesday after Democrat Dick Durbin and Republican John Kennedy questioned Patel’s decision to remove barriers that previously prevented applicants who engaged in prostitution and bestiality from being qualified for a job at the FBI.
Continue reading...Last summer, a cop with the Lake County, Indiana Sheriff's Department used Flock's surveillance search engine to look for a license plate across more than 19,000 cameras in 1,558 cities and towns. The cop's stated reason for the search, according to a record of Flock's system, was "LMAO."
The cop is one of dozens who put gibberish, jokes, or other nonsense into Flock's "reason" box, highlighting the casualness and lack of care some cops have when searching an incredibly powerful surveillance system. This is on top of the thousands upon thousands of cops who simply wrote something like "investigation," "test," or left the box blank as their search "reason," according to a new analysis by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and shared with 404 Media.
EFF's investigation found cops across dozens of jurisdictions writing "LMAO," "LOL," "Hehe," "Haha," "idk," "blah," "TBD," and "robbery I don't remember the case number leave me alone" in Flock's "reason" box for searches.
They found cops writing "idiot," "fuck this new search engine," "dickhead," "shithead," and "WEIRD KID" in the reason box. And they found an entire class of police button mashers, who ran searches for reasons of "asdfg," "gyghkkghghjkghjk," "jhjhjkhj," "jkhhkjhjk," "nmbvcbnm," and so on and so forth. The searches came from police departments across the country from 2023 through late 2025, when Flock changed how the "reason" box in its search system functions...
Each time a search is performed, a record of it is saved in the Flock system, which can be obtained by the public using government records requests. These audit logs show hundreds of thousands of searches of the system; after 404 Media and other news outlets used these types of logs to show police using the Flock system to look for undocumented immigrants on behalf of ICE, a woman in Texas who had an abortion, and protesters, cops were warned by government surveillance centers to be "as vague as permissible" about the reasons for their searches...
A police department said it investigated a cop who wrote "driving around being weird" in the reason field but found it was for "legitimate public safety purposes."
If a police chief "stood in front of a city council and asked for permission to install hundreds of cameras just so his officers could investigate the high crime of 'haha,' they would be laughed out of the room," argues the EFF blog post, calling this proof that agencies can't be trusted to oversee themselves.
But judges aren't being asked to authorize searches or review evidence, which the EFF post argues shows laws and courts haven't caught up yet with a new technology. Whatever auditing happens is clearly "deficient," the EFF warns, and while many jurisdictions require by law an actual reason for searches, "this keeps happening because police use automated license plate readers as a convenient shortcut around constitutional privacy safeguards." The EFF sees police officers "making a mockery of our civil liberties" by logging reasons like "LOL", "LMAO", "sexy", and "idk" while accessing sensitive location data.
In fact, they argue the warrant-less databases fostered a culture of abuse that "allowed police to treat a mass surveillance network like their own personal search engine, permitting the tracking of the movements of everyday citizens for low-level complaints, personal whims, and sometimes, seemingly, for the lols."
Flock Safety claims it has improved its system by requiring officers to select from a dropdown list of crimes before running a search-but that only makes it easier for officers to hide improper searches behind the veneer of uniformity. The system does not require proof that the dropdown reason actually matches the true purpose of the search... Since this update, officers are no longer required to type out why they are digging through a driver's movement history, and instead can select a pre-packaged option like "Traffic infraction" or "Other" in half a second...
Mass surveillance is incompatible with a free society, and especially so when the people with access to this data are treating it like a joke. This ALPR mass surveillance — the indiscriminate, continuous collection and retention of location data on every driver, regardless of suspicion — should not exist. But because it does, EFF continues to urge courts and state legislatures to immediately step in and impose strict, enforceable restrictions to rein in this abuse. At an absolute minimum, this means mandating rigid data deletion deadlines and an ironclad warrant requirement.
If police want the power to track a person's movements, they must be required to convince a judge with evidence and probable cause. They should not be able to bypass the Constitution with a search for "haha."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
De Miljoenennota bevat diverse politieke ‘cadeautjes’ voor links en rechts, maar oppositiepartijen spreken van een richtingloos kabinet. „We zien een vleugellam kabinet dat nog steeds niet weet hoe het tot een meerderheid wil komen.”
/s3/static.nrc.nl/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/15121915/150926DEN_2036696637_prinsjesdag.jpg)