Police stopped an attempt to smuggle trailers filled with large amounts of Captagon pills into Syria Saturday, security sources told The Daily Star.

Six trailers heading to Syria were seized by a patrol of the Internal Security Forces in the town of Saadnayel in the Bekaa Valley.

The trailer trucks were accompanied by another vehicle, a blue Nissan Sunny, which had three Syrians in it.

I'm sure many of you have heard about Lavabit shutting down rather than cooperating with a plan to expose their customers' communications to the government. It was quite a laudable response and, indeed, there was much celebratory banter. Then everybody went home and moved on with their lives.

Then, in response to what had occurred to Lavabit, Groklaw (and separately, SilentCircle), announced it was shutting down, based on what had happened to Lavabit. Response ranged from mystified wonderment, to insinuations that it was a publicity stunt. How that publicity would benefit a company that had just shut down, I don't know. Such is the internet. I suspect that the underwhelming support and negativity arose from the fact that most folks had never heard of Groklaw before the announcement.

So What Was Groklaw?

Groklaw was started in 2003 as a blog that reported and discussed legal issues as they related to software. This was mainly centered on free and open-source software, and also included topics related to software patents, DMCA, RIAA and, as a natural consequence, did some reporting on commercial software and their parent companies.

So, how did Groklaw and Lavabit come to be mentioned in the same sentence?

It's pretty simple. Think of people's communications as candy, and software as the candy machine. The government has a key to pretty much every candy machine on the planet for the moment, and can gorge endlessly on their ill-gotten gains. In the real world, that would be every 8 year old's dream. But, much like that 8 year old's reality, the candy machines are continually being upgraded and being made more secure. So the government, unlike the 8 year old, undertook to perpetually have the key to every new candy machine that came on the market.

An American journalist has accused the Israeli spy agency Mossad of cooperating with the US government over spying on people.

"Israel was heavily involved with the spying on American citizens, working in cooperation with the National Security Agency," Mark Glenn told Press TV on Monday.

"Hi-tech Israeli companies tied with Israel's Mossad and with Israeli military intelligence were working closely with the National Security Agency," said Glenn, co-founder of Crescent and Cross Solidarity Movement.

Israel's involvement with the NSA was mentioned in the media when the story first broke out in June by American whistleblower Edward Snowden, "but then this story quickly lost contraction; it didn't get mentioned anymore," Glenn said.

Japan scrambled fighter jets on Sunday as a pair of Russian military planes flew along the nation's northern coastline, the defence ministry said.

Two IL-38 planes flew along shorelines of Hokkaido, Aomori and Akita, facing the Sea of Japan (East Sea), but stayed away from Japanese airspace, the ministry added.

Japan's Self-Defence Forces "responded by scrambling fighters," according to a brief press release from the ministry which came with a map of the Russian planes' flight path.

Japanese defence officials could not be reached for immediate comment.

Is there any way of escaping the theatre of chemical weapons? First, Israeli "military intelligence" says that Bashar al-Assad's forces have used/have probably used/might have used/could use chemical weapons. Then Chuck Hagel, the US Defence Secretary, pops up in Israel to promise even more firepower for Israel's over-armed military - avoiding any mention of Israel's more than 200 nuclear warheads - and then imbibing all the Israeli "intelligence" on Syria's use/probable use/possible use of chemical weapons.

Then good ol' Chuck returns to Washington and tells the world that "this is serious business. We need all the facts." The White House tells Congress that US intelligence agencies, presumably the same as Israeli intelligence agencies since the two usually waffle in tandem, have "varying degrees of confidence" in the assessment. But Senator Dianne Feinstein, chairman of the Senate intelligence committee - she who managed to defend Israel's actions in 1996 after it massacred 105 civilians, mostly children, at Qana in Lebanon - announces of Syria that "it is clear that red lines have been crossed and action must be taken to prevent larger-scale use". And the oldest of current White House clichés - hitherto used exclusively on Iran's probable/possible development of nuclear weapons - is then deployed: "All options are on the table."

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell on Sunday warned fellow Republicans that voting restrictions designed to reduce the turnout of minorities, young people and seniors were "going to backfire" on the party.

Powell told CBS host Bob Schieffer that the Supreme Court's decision to overturn part of the Voting Rights Act had been followed by states "putting in place procedures and new legislation that in some ways makes it a little bit harder to vote, you need a photo ID."

"And they claim there is widespread abuse and voter fraud, but nothing documented, nothing substantiates that," he pointed out. "There isn't widespread abuse. And so these kinds of procedures that are being put in place to slow the process down and make it likely that fewer Hispanics and African-Americans might vote, I think, are going to backfire because these people are going to come out and do what they have to do in order to vote. And I encourage that."

Daniel Somers was a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom. He was part of Task Force Lightning, an intelligence unit. In 2004-2005, he was mainly assigned to a Tactical Human-Intelligence Team (THT) in Baghdad, Iraq, where he ran more than 400 combat missions as a machine gunner in the turret of a Humvee, interviewed countless Iraqis ranging from concerned citizens to community leaders and and government officials, and interrogated dozens of insurgents and terrorist suspects.

In 2006-2007, Daniel worked with Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) through his former unit in Mosul where he ran the Northern Iraq Intelligence Center. His official role was as a senior analyst for the Levant (Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel, and part of Turkey). Daniel suffered greatly from PTSD and had been diagnosed with traumatic brain injury and several other war-related conditions. On June 10, 2013, Daniel wrote the following letter to his family before taking his life. Daniel was 30 years old. His wife and family have given permission to publish it.

I am sorry that it has come to this.

The fact is, for as long as I can remember my motivation for getting up every day has been so that you would not have to bury me. As things have continued to get worse, it has become clear that this alone is not a sufficient reason to carry on. The fact is, I am not getting better, I am not going to get better, and I will most certainly deteriorate further as time goes on. From a logical standpoint, it is better to simply end things quickly and let any repercussions from that play out in the short term than to drag things out into the long term.

Defense lawyers for Guantanamo detainees asked the judge in the military tribunal on Friday to suspend pretrial hearings as mysterious computer glitches are just the latest technological setbacks to complicate the legal proceedings.

Defense lawyers for Guantanamo detainees asked the military tribunal judge to suspend pretrial hearings as mysterious computer glitches have made their job a 'hot mess' forcing some of them to draft motions with pen and paper.

"We're basically put back in the 19th century," Army Major Jason Wright, who represents the alleged mastermind of the terrorist attacks, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, said on Friday, as quoted by Reuters. "It takes about five to 10 times what it would normally take to do defense functions."

Defense lawyers for five Guantanamo detainees said email correspondences they sent were never received, investigative records that took years to compile had disappeared and external monitors were unable to access their internet searches. Even the prosecuting and defense teams had been given access to each other's files.

The Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem issued a report on Thursday stating that "Palestinian citizens, mostly minors, have been subjected to harassment and torture at the hands of Israeli interrogators in an attempt to force them to confess to private security offenses related to throwing stones."

The organization added that since November 2009, it has received dozens of statements made by Palestinian residents of Bethlehem and the Hebron districts, mostly minors, where they spoke about their exposure to extreme violence during interrogation, and either the threat of torture or actual torture itself at Gush Etzion police station.

It is clear from the statements that the investigators asked those minors to confess to the offenses, mostly stone throwing, and in the vast majority of the cases, the investigators had only stopped using violence against them upon their confession to the charges.

The report included a statement made by a 14 year-old minor from the village of Hosan in Bethlehem, in which he said "the interrogator brought me to a room, he grabbed my head and began to hit my head on the wall, and then punched me with his fist, slapped me and kicked me on my leg."

"The pain was a tremendous and I felt that I was unable to stand on my feet. Then the detective offended me verbally in a very vulgar way where he called my mother bad names. He threatened to rape me and commit sexual acts with me if I wouldn't confess to throwing stones."

"I was very scared of his threats because he was too harsh and we were alone in the room, and I remembered what I saw in the news when British and American soldiers raped and photographed naked Iraqi citizens."

B'Tselem said that by July 2013 its researchers had gathered 64 testimonies from throughout the eight Palestinian towns located south of the West Bank. In the statements, Palestinians spoke about the violence perpetrated against them by detectives in Gush Etzion police station, including 56 minors.

The report noted that the interrogations included slapping, punching, kicking and beating using different tools, such as a gun or stick, and some said they had been subjected to sexual threats against them or the women of their families, or "electric shock" torture that would affect their fertility.

A military jury has convicted Army Maj. Nidal Hasan of 13 counts of murder and 32 counts of attempted murder in a November 5, 2009, shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas, making it possible for the death penalty to be considered as a possible punishment.

Hasan is charged with 13 counts of murder and 32 counts of attempted murder in the November 5, 2009, shooting rampage at a deployment processing center where prosecutors say he targeted soldiers he was set to deploy with to Afghanistan.

A judge handed the case to the jury, a panel of 13 senior officers, on Thursday afternoon after 12 days of testimony in a court-martial where Hasan was acting as his own attorney.

After nearly three hours of deliberations, the panel asked to rehear the testimony of the police officer who shot Hasan, ending the rampage that left 13 people dead and dozens wounded.

Jurors also asked to see a map marked by the police officer, Mark Todd, indicating where he shot Hasan.