Windsor - Using the broad powers granted under the USA PATRIOT Act, the FBI demanded that 4 librarians produce private information about library patrons' reading habits, then used an endless gag order to force them to remain silent about the request for the rest of their lives under penalty of prison time.

In July 2005, two FBI agents came to the office of the Library Connection, located in Windsor, Connecticut. The Library Connection is a nonprofit co-op of library databases that arranges record-sharing between 27 different libraries. It facilitates book rental tracking and other services.

The FBI handed Library Connection's executive director George Christian a document which demanded that he produce "any and all subscriber information, billing information and access logs of any person or entity" that had used library computers between 4:00 p.m. and 4:45 p.m. on February 15, 2005, in any of the 27 libraries whose computer systems were managed by the Library Connection.

The FBI was demanding that the library hand over private data on library patrons en masse "to protect against international terrorism."

The document that Mr. Christian was given was a so-called National Security Letter (NSL), a type of administrative subpoena for personal information - self-written by the FBI without any probable cause or judicial oversight. The legal framework for these powerful NSLs was established by Section 505 of the USA PATRIOT Act in 2001.

The latest US census found that 43 per cent of the population in Santa Clara County, California, were members of a religious institution. This is slightly less than the American national average of 50 per cent, but you'd probably expect that because the area includes Silicon Valley, where geeks are busy designing our online, gadget-laden future. You might assume they would be pretty secular types.

You'd be wrong. As a measure of religious observance, that census is useless. Perhaps the geeks don't all belong to churches, but the reality is that the inhabitants of the Valley are in the grip of a religious mania so bizarre, so exotic, that it makes the Prince Philip-worshipping inhabitants of the island of Pacific Tanna look positively mainstream. For the geeks worship a machine that has not yet been built.

This machine will appear in about 2045 at a moment its worshippers call the Singularity. It will be the last machine we will ever build because, being superintelligent and able to redesign itself to be ever more intelligent, it will do everything we need, including make us medically immortal by curing all our ills, or, perhaps, genuinely immortal by uploading us into itself. Or it will kill us. The mood of the machine is as unpredictable as that of Prince Philip; it may be an Old rather than a New Testament god.

Rescuers on Sunday worked to free 17 miners trapped following a gas explosion at a coal mine in western China, the country's official news agency reported.

The blast at the mine 120 kilometers (70 miles) from Urumqi, the capital of the sprawling Xinjiang region, happened on Saturday evening, according to the Xinhua News Agency. It said three other people working inside the mine at the time had been rescued.

After this week's murder of an east Jerusalem Palestinian, calls to inflict violent revenge on Arabs over the killings of three Israeli teenagers have gathered momentum on social media websites.

Such incitement, including by serving soldiers, has featured photos on Facebook and Twitter and prompted Israel's authorities to urge restraint and threaten the culprits with disciplinary action.

The abduction and killing of three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank in June, which Israel blamed on Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, ignited intense public grief and an outpouring of anger.

Clean-up crews in Montana have their work cut out for them Saturday morning as they try to recover Boeing fuselages that crashed into the river on their way to Renton, Washington.

A freight train derailed in western Montana, sending three cars carrying 737, 777, and 747 aircraft components down a steep embankment and into the Clark Fork River.

Montana Rail Link spokeswoman Lynda Frost says 19 cars from a westbound train derailed Thursday about 10 miles west of Alberton. No injuries were reported, and the cause of the derailment is under investigation.

Thirteen of the cars that derailed were carrying freight, mostly aircraft parts with some soybeans and denatured alcohol. Six were empty. Frost says the alcohol didn't leak and no soybeans spilled. She said crews were working to remove the aircraft parts from the water.

Trains were being rerouted while repairs are made, and the line is expected to reopen by Saturday evening.

Tyrus Walter Vanmatre was arrested at St. Anthony Hospital in Lakewood. Related Media

On Wednesday, June 18, a nurse at a hospital in Lakewood overheard an 18-year-old man being treated for deep cuts on his face and hand talking on the phone about how he was attacked by Tyrus Walter Vanmatre.

The nurse recognized the name.

Vanmatre, 20, was being treated for a puncture wound on the same floor. He had checked himself into the hospital the day before. He said he fell out of tree and landed on a stick.

Hospital staff alerted the local police.

Soon the Summit County Sheriff's Office arrested Vanmatre, a former goalie for the Summit High School hockey team, in connection with an alleged assault on Swan Mountain and charged him with four felonies, including attempted murder.

He was soaking wet, had several deep cuts and told the deputy he was attacked by two people in the woods. He knew one of them, he said. "They must have planned on killing me."

After sealing the case records for a week, a district judge unsealed Vanmatre's arrest warrant on Monday, June 30. The document provides more details of what happened in the early morning hours of Tuesday, June 17, when a deputy driving on Swan Mountain Road near Sapphire Point found the 18-year-old man stumbling and covered in blood.

According to the report, the man waved down the deputy and told him, "Please help me. They're trying to kill me."

He was soaking wet, had several deep cuts and told the deputy he was attacked by two people in the woods. He knew one of them, he said. "They must have planned on killing me."

It's now been six months since Colorado enacted its historic marijuana legalization policy, and two big things have already happened:

1. Colorado's cash crop is turning out to be even more profitable than the state could have hoped.

In March alone, taxed and legal recreational marijuana sales generated nearly $19 million, up from $14 million in February. The state has garnered more than $10 million in taxes from retail sales in the first four months - money that will go to public schools and infrastructure, as well as for youth educational campaigns about substance use.

According to his latest budget proposal, Gov. John Hickenlooper expects a healthy $1 billion in marijuana sales over the next fiscal year. That's nearly $134 million in tax revenue. Sales from recreational shops are expected to hit $600 million, which is a more than 50% increase over what was originally expected.

2. Denver crime rates have suddenly fallen.

Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department is investigating an early morning shooting that injured several people.

Indianapolis Metro Police confirm seven people shot in Broad Ripple early Saturday morning.

Major UK shareholders in BP have joined together to sue the British energy giant in the US over lost earnings from the infamous Deepwater Horizon oil rig blast in 2010. The case is the first in the US, where awards are much bigger than in the UK.
The new litigation is led by Pomerantz Law, which has brought together 32 major BP shareholders from various countries, though mostly from Great Britain, who acquired their shares before the 2010 accident in the Gulf of Mexico and sustained financial losses as a result of the collapse in the value of shares that followed the disaster.

The Deepwater Horizon blowout caused the value of London-based BP shares to immediately plunge by over a half, and even today the shares have not recovered to their restored to their 2010 level.

"The fact that UK pension funds who bought stock on the London Stock Exchange can now participate in bringing claims in the US raises the prospect of recoveries where significant losses have been incurred," Pomerantz lawyer Jennifer Pafiti told the London Evening Standard.

So far only those investors who bought their BP shares on the US market, for example at the New York Stock Exchange, were allowed to file lawsuits in US courts. A number of rulings in Texas courts now appear to have opened the way for British investors to have their cases heard in the US under English law, however.American judges generally impose much higher fines than their British counterparts, so Pomerantz's lawsuit could potentially cost BP billions of dollars.

"All of the plaintiffs' securities claims relating to the Deepwater Horizon accident are meritless and we will continue to vigorously dispute them," a BP spokesman in London said Friday night, as quoted by The Guardian.

Among the new litigants preparing lawsuits against BP are over a dozen British and European pension funds, including a pension fund of BP's principal rival, Royal Dutch Shell.

It may not destroy your soul, but it turns out heavy metal music can be hazardous to your brain. At least in some rare cases.

German doctors say they have treated a Motorhead fan whose headbanging habit ultimately led to a brain injury, but that the risk to metal fans in general is so small they don't need to give up the shaking.

Last January, doctors at Hannover Medical School saw a 50-year-old man who complained of constant, worsening headaches. The patient, who was not identified, had no history of head injuries or substance abuse problems but said he had been headbanging regularly for years - most recently at a Motorhead concert he attended with his son.

After a scan, doctors discovered their patient had a brain bleed and needed a hole drilled into his brain to drain the blood. The patient's headaches soon disappeared. In a follow-up scan, the doctors saw he had a benign cyst which might have made the metal aficionado more vulnerable to a brain injury.