Al Qaeda is plotting attacks on Europe's high-speed rail network, German newspaper Bild reported on Monday, citing a leaked National Security Agency (NSA) report.

Al Qaeda has been plotting attacks on Europe's high-speed railways, according to a leaked National Security Agency (NSA) report to a German daily.

The group was potentially targeting trains and tunnels, or planning to sabotage railway tracks themselves and the electric cabling serving them, according to Germany's widely-read Bild newspaper.

The NSA report is based on an intercepted conference call between top al Qaeda operatives, in which the terrorist attacks were reportedly a "central topic".

Berlin has responded to the threat with discreet measures such as deploying plain-clothed police officers at key stations and on main routes, Bild reported.

Egypt has pledged to hunt down an armed group that killed 25 policemen in the Sinai desert on Monday in an incident that will fuel fears about the country's already grave political crisis worsening to involve attacks by jihadi-type movements.

Egyptian state TV reports from the scene near the border with Israel and the Palestinian Gaza Strip town of Rafah said the terrorists had forced the police conscripts off two minibuses and murdered them in cold blood. Three others were injured. Cairo sources describe the killers as "Takfiris" - a term often used for al-Qaida and like-minded groups.

The policemen were in civilian clothes and had been returning to their base from leave. Their corpses were photographed lined up by the roadside.

A total of 70 troops and police have reportedly died in five days of large-scale bloodshed across Egypt, but this was the largest number of casualties suffered by the security forces in a single incident.

US says it did not sanction holding Glenn Greenwald's partner at Heathrow, but was told his name was on passenger list

Britain is facing intense pressure to give a detailed explanation of the decision to detain the partner of the Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald after the White House confirmed that it was given a "heads up" before David Miranda was taken into custody for nine hours at Heathrow.

As the UK's anti-terrorism legislation watchdog called for an overhaul of the laws that allowed police to confiscate Miranda's electronic equipment, the US distanced itself by saying British authorities took the decision to detain him.

The intervention by the White House will put pressure on Downing Street, which declined to comment on the detention of Miranda on the grounds that it was a police operational matter and added that the Met would decide whether its officers had acted in a proportionate manner.

If the police arrest you, do they need a warrant to rifle through your cellphone? Courts have been split on the question. Last week the Obama administration asked the Supreme Court to resolve the issue and rule that the Fourth Amendment allows warrantless cellphone searches.

In 2007, the police arrested a Massachusetts man who appeared to be selling crack cocaine from his car. The cops seized his cellphone and noticed that it was receiving calls from "My House." They opened the phone to determine the number for "My House." That led them to the man's home, where the police found drugs, cash and guns.

The defendant was convicted, but on appeal he argued that accessing the information on his cellphone without a warrant violated his Fourth Amendment rights. Earlier this year, the First Circuit Court of Appeals accepted the man's argument, ruling that the police should have gotten a warrant before accessing any information on the man's phone.

The Obama Administration disagrees. In a petition filed earlier this month asking the Supreme Court to hear the case, the government argues that the First Circuit's ruling conflicts with the rulings of several other appeals courts, as well as with earlier Supreme Court cases. Those earlier cases have given the police broad discretion to search possessions on the person of an arrested suspect, including notebooks, calendars and pagers. The government contends that a cellphone is no different than any other object a suspect might be carrying.

Before Eliot Spitzer's infamous resignation as governor of New York in March 2008, he was one of our fiercest champions against Wall Street corruption, in a state that had some of the toughest legislation for controlling the banks. It may not be a coincidence that the revelation of his indiscretions with a high-priced call girl came less than a month after he published a bold editorial in the Washington Post titled "Predatory Lenders' Partner in Crime: How the Bush Administration Stopped the States from Stepping in to Help Consumers." The editorial exposed the collusion between the Treasury, the Federal Reserve and Wall Street in deregulating the banks in the guise of regulating them, by taking regulatory power away from the states. It was an issue of the federal government versus the states, with the Feds representing the banks and the states representing consumers.

Five years later, Spitzer has set out to take some of that local regulatory power back, in his run for New York City comptroller. Mounting the attack against him, however, are not just Wall Street banks but women's groups opposed to this apparent endorsement of the exploitation of women. On August 17^th, the New York Post endorsed Spitzer's opponent and ran a scathing cover story attempting to embarrass Spitzer based on the single issue of his personal life.

Lynn Parramore, who considers herself a feminist, countered in an August 8^th Huffington Post article that it is likely to be in the best interests of the very women who are opposing him to forgive and move on. His stand for women's reproductive rights and other feminist issues is actually quite strong, and his role as Wall Street watchdog protected women from predatory financial practices. As New York Attorney General, he was known as the "Sheriff of Wall Street." He is one of the few people with not only the insight and experience to expose Wall Street corruption but the courage to go after the perpetrators.

Tensions are high in New Zealand over a new bill that would allow the country's GCSB agency to conduct warrantless NSA-style spying on citizens. Prime Minister John Key, who was grilled on the bill at a presser, cut the meeting short and left early.

The country's top official on Monday was showered with questions on the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) amendment bill, answering some of them, and effortlessly evading others. However, after less than 14 minutes of the presser, Key appeared to have lost patience with the journalists and walked off, leaving a question on privacy completely unanswered.

"Prime Minister, numerous legal jurors have informed us publicly that they disagree with you wholeheartedly, that you are taking broad powers, which would allow you to invade privacy...and you are saying that all those people are wrong..." a journalist said to Key.

"Correct," the Prime Minister said before immediately interrupting the rest of the question by asking, "Is this a question buddy?"

He then indicated that the question contains the answer, thanked everyone, and left.

The New Zealand Law Society has published a submission opposing the GCSB amendment bill, in which it summarized citizens' concerns and provided a detailed analysis of the absence of clear justification for several changes in the law.

The document particularly highlighted that "The Bill empowers the GCSB to spy on New Zealand citizens and residents, and to provide intelligence product to other government agencies in respect of those persons, in a way not previously contemplated," saying that this is "inconsistent with the rights to freedom of expression and freedom from unreasonable search and seizure under the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990 (NZBORA) and with privacy interests recognized by New Zealand law."

Top US lawmakers have quietly agreed to temporarily suspend most military aid to Egypt, indicating that behind the scenes Washington is starting to treat the military's ouster of President Morsi as a coup, according to a new report.

The Obama administration has temporarily halted the delivery of weapons to the Egyptian military as well as some forms of economic aid to the government, despite deciding not to officially describe the military takeover as a coup. The office of Senator Patrick Leahy, the head of the Appropriations State and Foreign Operations Subcommittee, told The Daily Beast on Monday that the administration has implemented these changes over the past month as it formulates an official determination on the coup.

UK authorities reportedly raided the Guardian's office in London to destroy hard drives in an effort to stop future publications of leaks from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger revealed in a Monday article posted on the British newspaper's website that intelligence officials from the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) told him that he would either have to hand over all the classified documents or have the newspaper's hard drives destroyed.

After more talks, two "security experts" from GCHQ - the British version of the National Security Agency - visited the Guardian's London offices.

Rusbridger wrote that the government officials then watched as computers, which contained classified information passed on by Snowden, were physically destroyed in one of the newspaper building's basements.

"We can call off the black helicopters," Rusbridger said one of the officials joked.

In the never-ending quest to get computers to process, really understand and actually reason, scientists at Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency want to look more deeply into how computers can mimic a key portion of our brain.

The military's advanced research group recently put out a call, or Request For information, on how it could develop systems that go beyond machine learning, Bayesian techniques, and graphical technology to solve "extraordinarily difficult recognition problems in real-time."

Current systems offer partial solutions to this problem, but are limited in their ability to efficiently scale to larger more complex datasets, DARPA said. "They are also compute intensive, exhibit limited parallelism, require high precision arithmetic, and, in most cases, do not account for temporal data. "

What DARPA is interested in is looking at mimicking a portion of the brain known as the neocortex which is utilized in higher brain functions such as sensory perception, motor commands, spatial reasoning, conscious thought and language. Specfically, DARPA said it is looking for information that provides new concepts and technologies for developing what it calls a "Cortical Processor" based on Hierarchical Temporal Memory.

Mohamed Badie, the organisation's supreme leader, is arrested in Cairo apartment, state TV reports.

Egyptian security forces have arrested the top leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Mohamed Badie, state media has reported.

Badie, 70, the supreme leader of the Brotherhood, was detained on Tuesday at a residential flat in Nasr City in northeast Cairo, the state news agency said.

"That was after information came to the security apparatus locating his place of hiding," it said.

ONTV, a private, pro-military satellite channel, aired pictures purporting to show Badie upon his detention.