Yeshiva World News

The FBI has linked two recent shootings at military buildings in the Washington D.C. area and is investigating a possible connection to a third shooting that happened within the last 24 hours.

In the early morning hours of October 19 police and FBI investigators responded in force when six shots were fired into the south side of the Pentagon, leaving bullets embedded in two different windows. Just two days earlier, police in Quantico, Virginia responded to a similar attack on the Marine Corps Museum, where bullets were also fired at windows in the early morning hours.

The FBI announced Tuesday it determined those shootings were carried out with the same weapon, which police said at the time of the Pentagon shooting was believed to be a high-powered rifle. Ballistic testing is now also underway for a third shooting that occurred sometime between Monday night and Tuesday morning at the Marine Corps recruiting station in Chantilly, Virginia.

So far the FBI has yet to identify any suspects. No one was injured in either attack. The section of the Pentagon that was hot was under construction and at the time no workers were there. $20,000 worth of glass panels were destroyed at the museum, but none of the museum’s artifacts — including a harrier jet hanging near the damaged windows — were hit.

The shootings all occurred with 40 miles of each other, and in the case of the Pentagon and Museum shootings, circumstances suggest the shots may have come from major highways that run past the buildings. The Pentagon faces I-395 on its south side, while the Marine Corps Museum sits just off the northbound lanes of I-95. At one point the Pentagon police closed down portions of I-395 to search for shell casings. A cleaning crew at the museum in Quantico called police when they noticed the bullet holes in windows high up in a part of the building that faces Interstate 95. Meanwhile, the Marine Corps recruiting station sits just over 100 yards from route 50, a 6-lane road that connects Washington to Virginia’s suburbs.

Have you checked out YWN Radio yet? Click HERE to listen!

(Read More: Fox News)

The death toll from a tsunami that slammed the Mantawai islands off Indonesia’s Sumatra two days ago may rise as rescue agencies struggle with disrupted telecommunications and difficult search conditions.

At least 113 people were killed and 150 others missing, Mujiharto, head of the crisis center at the Health Ministry, said in a mobile-phone text message last night. The National Disaster Management Agency said 31 people were confirmed dead and 174 missing as of late yesterday. The agency received its information from the regional disaster office on Sumatra, Maryadi, a spokesman at the national agency, said by phone.

“The numbers may be different because information is coming in remotely at different times,” Mujiharto said today by phone in Jakarta.

The 7.5-magnitude temblor struck the Kepulauan Mentawai region of Indonesia, about 150 miles from Padang, the provincial capital of West Sumatra, and 640 kilometers from Singapore at 9:42 p.m. local time Oct. 25, the US Geological Survey said. The quake triggered a 10- foot tsunami that that reached 400 meters inland, the agency said yesterday.

A tsunami generated by a magnitude-9.1 earthquake off northern Sumatra in December 2004 left about 220,000 people dead or missing in 12 countries around the Indian Ocean.

Have you checked out YWN Radio yet? Click HERE to listen!

(Source: Bloomberg News)

The Air Force lost partial communications with 50 nuclear missiles for almost an hour last weekend, an Air Force spokesman said Tuesday.

The problem, characterized as a “single hardware issue,” affected more than 10 percent of the country’s ICBM arsenal on Saturday morning, according to Air Force spokesman Lt. Col. Wesley Miller IV.

Because of redundant systems, at no time was the Air Force unable to monitor, communicate with or, if need be, launch the intercontinental ballistic missiles on the president’s command, several military officials said.

“Any time the president wanted to fire those missiles, he could have,” a senior defense official said. At no time was the public in jeopardy, according to another military official.

The Minuteman III ICBMs are multiple warhead missiles that are controlled from Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming but are in missile silos spread out over a wide area around the base.

After the problem was detected, each silo was inspected by base personnel to make certain all 50 missiles were safe and secure.

The exact nature of the problem is still under investigation.

“The specific cause for the disruption is currently being analyzed on site by engineers from the ICBM systems program office,” according to an Air Force statement.

A senior defense official said it was an underground cable that got disrupted.

The United States currently has 450 Minutemen III ICBMs. While the squadron of 50 that had problems Saturday represents 11 percent of America’s ICBM arsenal, the United States also has bomber-based and sea-based nuclear weapons.

The Air Force Chief of Staff, Gen. Norton Schwartz, informed Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, about the problem during the weekend.

Mullen made sure Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was informed. President Obama was briefed on the issue on Tuesday morning, according to a report in Atlantic Monthly.

Gates takes nuclear weapon security very seriously. In 2008, Gates took the unprecedented step of firing both the Air Force secretary and the Air Force chief of staff because of two highly publicized mistakes involving Air Force nuclear weapons.

First there was the embarrassing revelation in August 2007 that a B-52 bomber took off from North Dakota with six nuclear-tipped cruise missiles that no one knew were live weapons until after the plane landed in Louisiana.

Then came word that the Air Force mistakenly shipped fuses that are used in nuclear weapons to Taiwan in 2006 in crates believed to contain helicopter batteries.

Have you checked out YWN Radio yet? Click HERE to listen!

(Source: CNN)

Tens of thousands of times over the past six years, the police have stopped and questioned people on New York City streets without the legal justification for doing so, a new study has found.

And in hundreds of thousands of more cases, city officers failed to include essential details on required police forms to show whether the stops were justified, according to the study written by Prof. Jeffrey A. Fagan of Columbia Law School.

The study was conducted on behalf of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which is suing the New York Police Department for what the center says is a widespread pattern of unprovoked and unnecessary stops and racial profiling in the department’s stop-question-and-frisk policy. The department denies the charges.

The study examined police data cataloging the 2.8 million times from 2004 through 2009 that officers stopped people on the streets to question and sometimes frisk them, a crime-fighting strategy the department has put more emphasis on over the years.

Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly has rejected the accusation of racial profiling, and said the racial breakdown of the stops correlated to the racial breakdown of crime suspects. Mr. Kelly has also credited the tactic with helping to cut crime to low levels in the city and with getting guns off the street.

But as the number of stops has jumped — to more than 570,000 last year from 313,000 in 2004 — the practice has come under increasing scrutiny, from lawmakers at City Hall and Albany and from civil libertarians including the constitutional rights center and the New York Civil Liberties Union.

Professor Fagan found that in more than 30 percent of stops, officers either lacked the kind of suspicion necessary to make a stop constitutional or did not include sufficient detail on police forms to determine if the stops were legally justified. The study also found that even accounting for crime patterns in the city’s various neighborhoods, officers stopped minorities at disproportionate rates.

Nearly 150,000 of the stops — 6.7 percent of all cases in which an officer made a stop based on his own discretion, rather than while responding to a radio call in which some information had already been gathered — lacked legal sufficiency, the study concluded. Stops were considered unjustified if officers provided no primary reason articulating a reasonable suspicion for the stop.

Mr. Kelly, responding to the professor’s study, said, “I think you have to understand this was an advocacy paper.” He added that Professor Fagan was “paid $375 an hour to produce this report.”

“We haven’t had a chance to look at it,” Mr. Kelly added, “but I wouldn’t take the position that this is an objective document. This is a document prepared for plaintiffs who paid that amount of money to have this document prepared. If you pay that kind of money, you’re going to get a viewpoint that pretty much goes along with your view point.”

The commissioner acknowledged that the department was paying its own expert, Dennis C. Smith, a professor at the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University, to produce its own study in the case. Professor Smith’s report is due next month.

A report in The New York Times in July found that the highest concentration of stops in the city was in a roughly eight-block area of Brownsville, Brooklyn, that was predominately black. Residents there were stopped at a rate 13 times as much as the city average.

Have you checked out YWN Radio yet? Click HERE to listen!

(Read More: NY Times)

A former Staten Island resident is accused of traveling to Pakistan in a failed bid to join the Taliban.

Abdel Hameed Shehadeh, 21, who formerly lived in Arden Heights, was taken into custody in Hawaii Friday.

He is charged with lying to the FBI about a 2008 trip to Pakistan.

According to the criminal complaint, Shehadeh flew from New York to Pakistan but was denied entry and returned to the United States.

Authorities say he told the FBI and New York City Police Department detectives he was traveling to Pakistan to visit a university and to attend a wedding.

Later, he allegedly admitted his real intention was to join the Taliban or a similar fighting group.

Court papers say he also tried to recruit another person in his quest to be a terrorist when the two were discussing a sermon by the radical Islamic cleric Anwar al-Awlaki.

Officials say Shehadeh also tried to enlist in the army at the Times Square recruiting center.

Prosecutors say he wanted to be deployed to Iraq where he intended to desert and fight against the U.S. military.

Adam Hmidan, a cousin of Shehadeh, told NY1 that Shehadeh is a “typical Staten Island guy” who graduated from Tottenville High School.

“I knew him my whole life. I never heard anything about that. I knew FBI guys would come watch him and stuff, but I don’t know. That’s crazy,” said Hmidan.

A judge has ordered Shehadeh to be sent back to Brooklyn to face charges.

He could spend up to eight years in prison if convicted.

Have you checked out YWN Radio yet? Click HERE to listen!

(Source: NY1)