Ex-cop says Royal family member was investigated as part of paedophile ring before cover-up

© Getty Image

A member of the Royal family was claimed to be part of a suspected paedophile ring under investigation by police in the late 1980s, a former police officer has said.

The former Metropolitan Police officer says he was told by a detective sergeant that the investigation into the ring, which was also claimed to include an MP, was shut down for national security reasons.

"I was in a car with two other vice squad officers. ... The detective sergeant said he had just had a major child abuse investigation shut down by the CPS regarding a royal and an MP," he told the newspaper.

"He did not mention names, but he said the CPS had said it was not in the public's interest because it 'could destabilise national security'."

The police officer identified the two colleagues, the newspaper said.

Sir Allan Green, the Director of Public Prosecutions and head of the CPS at the time the conversation took place, said he was not aware of any child abuse investigations shut down for national security reasons.

He however said he had been asked by a "senior person" if he had heard anything about a named MP being involved in child abuse. He said he had not.

The MP he was asked about has since died, Mr Green said.

A Buckingham Palace spokesperson told the : "If detailed, substantive allegations are made they will be taken seriously and looked into. However, we are not in a position to comment on speculative stories based on a chain of unnamed sources."

The Metropolitan Police has pledged to investigate historical crimes by establishment figures "without fear of favour".

Deputy Assistant Commissioner Steve Rodhouse told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that he was pleased that allegations of cover-ups were coming to light.

"We do think we are getting somewhere with these wider enquiries and we are seeing people coming forward. We have seen lots of coverage this week around allegations of cover-ups, and I think it's helpful that this is being spoken about and people are coming forward.

"We will go where the evidence takes us, without fear or favour, I think that is what the public expect and that is what the investigators are doing and are keen to continue to do."

The Independent Police Complaints Commission is investigating 14 related allegations of impropriety by officer stretching from the 1970s to 2005.

The Home Secretary Theresa May said earlier month that child sexual abuse ran through British society like a "stick of Blackpool rock" and warned that the public did not fully "appreciate the true scale" of exploitation.

Read More

ACLU finds Chicago police overwhelmingly target minorities with stop-and-frisk policy

© Reuters / Jim Young

Move over, Manhattan. The controversial stop-and-frisk practice once common among the New York Police Department has spread to Chicago, according to a new report, and is more prevalent in the Windy City than in the Big Apple.

A report published by the American Civil Liberties of Illinois on Monday accuses Chicago Police Department officers of overwhelmingly targeting minorities during an apparent stop-and-frisk surge last year.

African-Americans accounted for around 72 percent of civilians stopped by the CPD during a four-month period last summer, according to the ACLU. This is despite them accounting for less than one-third of Chicago's population. Whites and Hispanics were subjected to stop-and-frisk policing 17 percent and 9 percent of the time respectively.

From May through August 2014, according to the report, the CPD stopped around a quarter of a million people without making an arrest. With statistics showing that minorities are predominantly the victims of these searches, the ACLU report suggests constitutional violations may be afoot.

"What this data shows should be a wake-up call for residents of the city," Karen Sheley, a senior legal counsel with the Illinois ACLU and one of the authors of the report, said in a statement . "[The] CPD is engaging in wholesale stop-and-frisks of African American youth, without any link to criminal activity in most cases.

"These stops don't make us safer, they simply drive a wedge further between the police and the public they serve," Sheley added.

In 2013, a federal court judge ruled stop-and-frisk tactics, which had become commonplace in New York City, had established a "policy of indirect racial profiling" and declared it unconstitutional. Roughly 83 percent of the stops in NYC between 2004 and 2012 involved blacks and Hispanics, the reported when US District Court Judge Shira A. Scheindlin made her decision. Those groups made up only around 50 percent of the city's population.

Despite the court's ruling, stop-and-frisk is still rife in Chicago, according to the ACLU.

"While most of the media coverage has suggested that the stop-and-frisk was a New York phenomena, its use is not limited to New York," Harvey Grossman, the ACLU's legal director, said in a statement.

"Chicago has been systematically abusing this practice, for reasons that are not justified by our constitution," added Grossman. "And just like New York, we see that African Americans are singled out."

The 23-page ACLU report out this week contains recommendations the organization believes the CPD should adopt to ensure that alleged constitutional violations taper off, as had finally happened in New York after years of litigation. Among the suggestions are that the CPD begin collecting data on all instances involving individuals who are stopped and frisked, and then making that information available for public scrutiny. The ACLU says the department could also benefit from offering police officers training on the legal requirements concerning stop-and-frisk, to ensure they are aware of when and why they can stop civilians.

According to the ACLU, CPD officers are often lax at documenting instances of stop-and-frisk, making it hard to enumerate them accurately.

#Chicago is 32% Black, yet Blacks made up 72% of pedestrians stopped last yr by city police. @ACLUofIL #stopandfrisk http://bit.ly/1BcJdKj

— ACLU National (@ACLU) March 23, 2015

"In the face of a systemic abuse of this law enforcement practice, Chicago refuses to keep adequate data about its officers' stops," the report reads. "Officers do not identify stops that result in an arrest or ordinance violation, and they do not keep any data on when they frisk someone. This failure to record data makes it impossible for police supervisors, or the public, to identify bad practices and make policy changes to address them."

"The data makes clear that stop-and-frisk is a problem in Chicago and needs to be reformed," added Grossman, the legal director. "The city has an opportunity to make modest fixes now, rather than risk further alienation with large swaths of the public."

Weighing in on the report, CPD spokesperson Superintendent Garry McCarthy told the the department "flatly prohibits racial profiling and other race-based policing."

Read More

Four cops fired for racists texts and KKK video

© Reuters / Lucy Nicholson

Four cops are out of a job after an internal review within the Ft. Lauderdale Police Department in Florida uncovered a slew of racially-charged messages sent between officers, and even a homemade movie that's ripe with hateful epithets.

Three officers have been fired, Ft. Lauderdale Police Chief Frank Adderley said at a news conference on Friday, and a fourth, Alex Alvarez, had already resigned in the midst of a five-month probe launched late year when his former fiancée filed a complaint with the department.

The woman, who has not been named, approached authorities in October 2014 about text messages sent between Alvarez and other officers with the Ft. Lauderdale police.

"She said she had personally seen it herself and felt it was inappropriate," Adderley said.

A subsequent review of text messages sent between the cop and his colleagues uncovered several instances in which the officers used derogatory terms.

"I had a wet dream that you two found those two n*****s in the VW and gave them the death penalty right there on the spot," reads one of the text messages in question.

Additionally, authorities uncovered a movie trailer allegedly made by Alvarez for a film called 'The Hoods' which contains references to the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), an image of United States President Barack Obama with fake gold teeth and a photograph of a dog biting a victim who appears to be black.

Adderley said that although the officers didn't engage in criminal conduct, their actions and behavior could not be ignored.

"The four officers' conduct was inexcusable, and there is zero tolerance for this type of behavior within the Fort Lauderdale Police Department," the chief said.

"We can't have people like this protecting us," Alvarez's former fiancée said when approached by a local CBS News affiliate upon the release of the department's report.

Watch: Racist texts and mock video trailer cost four #FortLauderdale cops their jobshttp://bit.ly/1BcJb52 http://bit.ly/1BcJb53

— Sun Sentinel (@SunSentinel) March 21, 2015

The three officers whose termination was announced on Friday are James Wells, 30; Jason Holding, 31; and Christopher Sousa, 25. Alvarez, 22, resigned in late January. An investigation into the conduct of all four men concluded they "exchanged text messages that included derogatory comments towards Hispanics and homosexuals," among other findings.

"Based on the investigation, they felt, in their words, that it was a joke," Adderley said of the officers.

"I sent it being as a joke. Something I never shoulda said. Something I'm disappointed that I've ever, ever said," Sousa told investigators, according to Sun Sentinel journalists who read the report. "When I saw everybody else was texting, I felt, you know, maybe it - the way I could possibly fit in is saying something along those lines."

Others, however, say there's nothing funny about the officers' actions.

"I'm very disappointed, disgusted and shocked by this incident," Mayor Jack Seiler said in a statement."The inappropriate racist behavior exhibited by those involved is unacceptable and reprehensible. It violates the trust we place in our law enforcement officers; it damages the bond we have established with our community; and it undermines the standards to which each and every City employee is held accountable."

"It's attempt was to damage our agency, and I just hope that the people in the public realize that we're not going to tolerate it, and that anyone that's engaged in this behavior, it's going to be addressed immediately," Chief Adderley added.

According to the , two sergeants, five officers and two detectives were questioned during the department's probe, in addition to the four who are no longer with the force.

Chief Adderley spoke with federal agents over the weekend, the CBS affiliate reported, and the Civil Rights Division of the US Dept. of Justice has asked for a meeting to take place in the coming days.

"We'll be meeting this week with the FBI Civil Rights Division and I'm pretty sure they are very interested in what [the officers'] activity has been since they've been on our department," Adderley said. "That's something the FBI will come back later after they make their evaluations and tell us."

It comes less than a month after a Ft. Lauderdale officer was suspended after a video surfaced of him pushing, shoving and slapping a homeless man.

Read More

Researchers find that walking in a forest optimizes natural immunity

Anyone who has walked in a forest knows by common sense the beauty of it. It's why some people choose to live in forests, or next to them, and why other people travel thousands of miles to stand in Redwood forests, or the rain forests of Costa Rica or Ecuador. But researchers in Japan, where the tradition called shinri-yoku, or "forest bathing" is still strong, have discovered some biochemical reasons why. Researchers found that forest bathing optimizes natural immunity, which is important to prevent cancer as well as other chronic illnesses. How does that happen?

[embedded content]

When researchers sampled people before and after a 2-hour forest walk, they found all but one forest walker had a 50% higher killer T-cell count. They also had lower blood pressure, and felt calm and clear headed. Researchers explained the phenomenon: the forest trees and plants infused the environment with "antimicrobial allelochemic volatile organic plant-derived compounds called phytoncides that exterminate fungi and bacteria". Translation please? Fungi and bacteria can spell trouble for our immune system. Turns out trees don't like them either. Forests trees are often hundreds, if not thousands, of years old. The trees, and other plants, have evolved a protection, a compound they can produce, that kills fungi and bacteria. When you walk in the forest, you breathe and are infused with these compounds. The effect lasts for about 2 months.

Let's say, when you walk in a forest, you bathe in the forest's natural immunity. You're immersed in the forest's phytochemical immune system.

Professor Qing Li, of the Department of Hygiene and Public Health at Nippon Medical School in Tokyo, gave this story to American Scientist writer Anna Lena Phillips. There's more specific info in the article about effects on specific hormones as well, including noradrenaline and DHEA that affect stress response, and adiponectin, lower levels of which is associated with Type 2 Diabetes and obesity. The study appeared in the European

Read More

Strong winds sweep wild fire in North Korea across South Korean border

© Evan Collis / DFES / AFP

The cause of the blaze was not known, and damage estimates were not immediately available.

Strong winds swept a wild fire in North Korea across the heavily armed border with South Korea, prompting a suspension of cross-border movements into a jointly-run factory park in the North.

About 50 firefighters and three helicopters were battling the fire on the south side of the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) border, according to an official at the South Korean border town of Paju, adding that there were no reports of casualties.

Access to the area is normally restricted.

An official at the South's Unification Ministry, which handles inter-Korean affairs, said that due to the fire South Korean workers were restricted from going in and out of Kaesong factory park, which lies in the North just over the border.

In the latest spat over the Kaesong complex, a group of South Korean businessmen last week visited the complex to protest North Korea's decision to increase wages paid to workers there.

The cause of the blaze was not known, and damage estimates were not immediately available.

Read More

Feces to fortune: US sewage may contain billions in precious metals

© Heather Lowers, USGS Denver Microbeam Laboratory

Microscopic gold-rich and lead-rich particles in a municipal biosolids sample.

Scientists are perusing poop at America's wastewater treatment facilities for gold, silver, copper and other useful metals. The sewage from one million people could net $13 million in metals each year, all while making fertilizer more efficient.

More than seven million dry tons biosolids (read: poop) are generated in the US annually by more than 16,500 municipal wastewater treatment facilities. And that sewage contains metals that people ingest and otherwise flush down the toilet, or rinse out in the laundry and shower.

"There are metals everywhere," Dr. Kathleen Smith of the US Geological Survey (USGS) said in a statement, noting that they are "in your hair care products, detergents, even nanoparticles that are put in socks to prevent bad odors."

Smith leads a team of researchers looking to get metals out of biosolids because about half of all human waste ‒ about 3.5 million tons in the US ‒ is used as fertilizer on farms and in forests, while the other half is incinerated or sent to landfills.

If you can get rid of some of the nuisance metals that currently limit how much of these biosolids we can use on fields and forests, and at the same time recover valuable metals and other elements, that's a win-win Smith said.

It may be odd thinking of precious metals like silver and gold as nuisances, but they impede the usefulness of fertilizers.

"We have a two-pronged approach," Smith said. "In one part of the study, we are looking at removing some regulated metals from the biosolids that limit their use for land application."

"In the other part of the project, we're interested in collecting valuable metals that could be sold, including some of the more technologically important metals, such as vanadium and copper that are in cell phones, computers and alloys," she added.

Smith's team has collected samples from small towns in the Rocky Mountains, rural communities and big cities, but will also combine their findings with years of existing data collected by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the USGS. They will present their research at 249th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society on Tuesday.

The EPA analyzed 28 metals for their 2009 Targeted National Sewage Sludge Survey, using samples randomly selected from 3,337 facilities that treat more than one million gallons of sewage per day, Smith wrote in her paper's abstract. The agency discovered that the samples averaged 30 mg of silver per kilogram, 563 mg of copper per kilogram and 36 mg of vanadium per kilogram of waste.

© Environmental Science & Technology/Arizona State University/Paul Westerhoff

A similar eight-year study by the USGS involved monthly sampling and analysis of biosolids from a municipal wastewater treatment plant. Those samples contained an average 28 mg of silver, 638 mg of copper, 49 mg of vanadium and less than one milligram of gold per kilogram of waste.

About 80 percent of vanadium is used in producing rust resistant and high-speed tool steels, according to Los Alamos National Laboratory.

"The gold we found was at the level of a minimal mineral deposit," Smith said, meaning that if that amount were in rock, it might be commercially viable to mine it. She added that "the economic and technical feasibility of metal recovery from biosolids needs to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis."

In a January Environmental Science & Technology paper, scientists at Arizona State University (ASU) in Tempe calculated that the waste from one million Americans could contain as much as $13 million worth of metals, including $2.6 million in gold and silver.

The group analyzed sewage sludge for 58 regulated and non-regulated elements, and used electron microscopy to explore opportunities for removal and recovery. Based on their model to capture the relative potential for economic value from biosolids, the 13 most lucrative elements (silver, copper, gold, phosphorus, iron, palladium, manganese, zinc, iridium, aluminum, cadmium, thallium, gallium and chromium) present had a combined value of US $280 per ton of sludge.

The study's lead author, environmental engineer Paul Westerhoff, says it could prove worthwhile for cities looking for ways to gain value from something that can be a costly disposal problem.

One place has already figured out how to profit from poop: A sewage treatment facility in Japan has been mining sludge for gold since 2009, Reuters reported at the time. The Nagano prefecture, northwest of Tokyo, once recorded finding 1,890 grams of gold per ton of ash from incinerated sludge. The district expected to earn about 15 million yen (currently US$125,000) for that fiscal year, depending on the price of gold.

Read More

Another GMO: Research aims to create gluten-free grains amid rise of celiac disease

© Reuters/Bogdan Cristel

Kansas farmers are funding a genetic research project aimed at developing gluten-free grains, as an increasing number of Americans are being diagnosed with an autoimmune condition preventing them from safely digesting wheat, barley and rye.

The Kansas Wheat Commission earmarked $200,000 for the first two years of the project, which is seeking to catalog the DNA sequences of wheat which can trigger reactions in people suffering from celiac disease. The research is being led by Engrain, a Kansas-based company specializing in improving baked goods.

"If you know you are producing a crop that is not tolerated well by people, then it's the right thing to do," Chris Miller, senior director of research for Engrain and the project's lead researcher, told AP.

According to the National Foundation for Celiac Awareness, approximately one percent, or one in 133 Americans, have celiac disease - an autoimmune disorder that damages the small intestine and interferes with the absorption of nutrients from food. Celiac disease is genetic, and there is no treatment other than a gluten-free diet which is free of any foods that contain wheat, rye or barley.

Sales of gluten-free bread, pasta, crackers and other products in the US reached $973 million in 2014, up from $810 million the year before, according to consumer research firm Packaged Facts.

Research has already identified about 20 protein fragments in wheat that cause celiac reactions, but the new project hopes to identify all of them, and ultimately breed a variety of wheat safe for consumption by celiac sufferers.

According to the Whole Grains Council, most grains - for example, buckwheat, corn, millet, rice, wild rice, sorghum and quinoa - don't have gluten. Oats don't have gluten naturally, but frequently receive residual traces when processed on equipment used for wheat, barley and rye.

A 2013 report by the Institute for Responsible Technology (IRT) indicated that the introduction of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) to the American food supply in the mid-1990s could have been a "possible environmental trigger" for the sudden rise in the number of celiac cases. The IRT cited data from the US Department of Agriculture, as well as US Environmental Protection Agency records, medical journal reviews, and international research.

An Italian company is testing wheat that is purged of gluten via a special fermentation process, and is conducting live studies on celiac patients. Initial studies have shown 100 percent tolerance to baked goods made with the "digested flour." A third, long-term study is still underway.

Read More