It was a confluence of magnificent proportions that led six agents from the joint terrorism task force to knock on my door Wednesday morning. Little did we know our seemingly innocent, if curious to a fault, Googling of certain things was creating a perfect storm of terrorism profiling. Because somewhere out there, someone was watching. Someone whose job it is to piece together the things people do on the internet raised the red flag when they saw our search history.

Most of it was innocent enough. I had researched pressure cookers. My husband was looking for a backpack. And maybe in another time those two things together would have seemed innocuous, but we are in "these times" now. And in these times, when things like the Boston bombing happen, you spend a lot of time on the internet reading about it and, if you are my exceedingly curious news junkie of a twenty-ear-old son, you click a lot of links when you read the myriad of stories. You might just read a CNN piece about how bomb making instructions are readily available on the internet and you will in all probability, if you are that kid, click the link provided.

Which might not raise any red flags. Because who wasn't reading those stories? Who wasn't clicking those links? But my son's reading habits combined with my search for a pressure cooker and my husband's search for a backpack set off an alarm of sorts at the joint terrorism task force headquarters.

That's how I imagine it played out, anyhow. Lots of bells and whistles and a crowd of task force workers huddled around a computer screen looking at our Google history.

This was weeks ago. I don't know what took them so long to get here. Maybe they were waiting for some other devious Google search to show up but "what the hell do I do with quinoa" and "Is A-Rod suspended yet" didn't fit into the equation so they just moved in based on those older searches.

WISN 12 News investigates an operation raising questions about the use of government resources and the state policy that meant a death sentence for a fawn.

"It was like a SWAT team," shelter employee Ray Schulze said.

Two weeks ago, Schulze was working in the barn at the Society of St. Francis on the Kenosha-Illinois border when a swarm of squad cars arrived and officers unloaded with a search warrant.

"(There were) nine DNR agents and four deputy sheriffs, and they were all armed to the teeth," Schulze said.

A New York woman says her family's interest in the purchase of pressure cookers and backpacks led to a home visit by six police investigators demanding information about her job, her husband's ancestry and the preparation of quinoa.

Michele Catalano, who lives in Long Island, New York, said her web searches for pressure cookers, her husband's hunt for backpacks, and her "news junkie" son's craving for information on the Boston bombings had combined somewhere in the internet ether to create a "perfect storm of terrorism profiling".

Members of what she described as a "joint terrorism task force" descended on Catalano's home on Wednesday.

Catalano was at work, but her husband was sitting in the living room as the police arrived. She retold the experience in a post on Medium.com on Thursday.

She attributed the raid largely to her ongoing hunt for a pressure cooker, an item used devastatingly by the two Tsarnaev brothers in Boston, but also used by millions across the country to prepare vegetables while retaining most of their nutrients.

Conspiracy theorists, start your engines: On the wind-blown steppes of central Asia, in an isolated corner of Kazakhstan, there's a large pentagram etched into the Earth's surface.

The five-pointed star surrounded by a circle shows up vividly on Google Maps. There are almost no other signs of human habitation in the area; the closest settlement is the city of Lisakovsk, about 12 miles (20 kilometers) to the east.

What is this bizarre symbol, measuring roughly 1,200 feet (366 meters) in diameter, doing on the side of a desolate lake in northern Kazakhstan? Naturally, many online comments have already linked the site with devil worship, nefarious religious sects or denizens of the underworld.

He was a 'mess of a child' who was tormented for being gay, kicked out of home at 18 by his father and once threatened to stab his step mother with a knife.

His own mother drank too much, he could not hold down a job and once literally crawled up a wall because he felt his family were ignoring him.

Perhaps it was no surprise then, that Bradley Manning was angry at the world - angry enough to hit back at any figure of authority that was within his grasp.

He has now been convicted of leaking classified information but given the troubled life he led Manning was always a time bomb waiting to go off.

His family left him scarred, his school days left him feeling like a loner - meaning that when he enlisted he was deeply disillusioned with life already.

An Asheville clinic that performs abortions had its license suspended Tuesday by the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services.


DHHS says inspectors found nearly two-dozen health and safety violations at FEMCARE during a routine survey conducted July 18th and 19th

"Do you believe that shape-shifting reptilian people control our world by taking on human form and gaining political power to manipulate our societies, or not?"

Uh...

This was one of the 20 questions in a survey conducted by the American firm Public Policy Polling (PPP) and released yesterday (as in, not an April Fools' Day joke).

The remaining 19 covered a wide swath of conspiracy theories, from JFK's assassination (did Lee Harvey Oswald act alone?) to a potential link between childhood vaccinations and autism. You can find the full list here.

A University of California student spent five days forgotten in a windowless jail cell without food and water, and was forced to drink his own urine to survive. Now, the US government is voluntarily paying the young man $4.1 million to avoid a lawsuit.

Daniel Chong, a 25-year-old economics student at UC San Diego, was one of nine people taken into custody during a drug raid in April 2012. Chong was at a friend's house when officers discovered 18,000 ecstasy pills at the home. He was locked in a Drug Enforcement Administration jail cell, but after questioning the young man, a police officer authorized to perform DEA work told the student that he would not be charged.

"Hang tight, we'll come get you in a minute," the officer told Chong, according to Attorney Eugene Iredale.

But the officer never returned, and Chong spent five dismal days in the 5 by 10 ft. windowless cell. The student, who was still handcuffed, had no food, water, or access to a toilet, and barely survived his living nightmare.

"It sounded like it was an accident - a really, really bad, horrible accident," he said at a news conference this week, in which he described how close he came to death.

After three days in the cell, the famished young man said he began to hallucinate. He imagined that DEA agents were trying to poison him with gases that entered his cell through the vents. Deprived of food and water, he started to accept the idea that he would not survive. He bit into his glasses to break them, and used a shard of glass to carve a farewell message to his mom on his arm.

"Sorry Mom," he tried to carve into his bleeding skin, but he only managed to write the "S".

In a last-ditch attempt to stay alive, he urinated on the metal bench in his cell and then drank his own urine.

To try to capture the attention of the guards, he then stacked a blanket and his clothing on the bench to try to reach an overhead fire sprinkler. Chong desperately tried to set it off by hitting it with his handcuffed hands. He failed.

On the fifth day, Chong screamed at the top of his voice, trying to get the attention of the agents outside.

"I didn't just sit there quietly. I was kicking the door yelling," he said.

He slid a shoelace under the door, hoping to garner the attention of the guards. He succeeded, and "five or six people" came to the cell and found him starved and lying in his own feces. Chong had lost 15 pounds, and was immediately hospitalized for five days.

When the Occupiers took an interest in moving San Francisco's money into a city-owned bank in 2011, it was chiefly on principle, in sympathy with the nationwide Move Your Money campaign. But recent scandals have transformed the move from a political statement into a matter of protecting the city's deposits and reducing its debt burden. The chief roadblock to forming a municipal bank has been the concern that it was not allowed under state law, but a legal opinion issued by Deputy City Attorney Thomas J. Owen has now overcome that obstacle.

Establishing a city-owned San Francisco Bank is not a new idea. According to City Supervisor John Avalos, speaking at the Public Banking Institute conference in San Rafael in June, it has been on the table forover a decade. Recent interest was spurred by the Occupy movement, which adopted the proposal after Avalos presented it to an enthusiastic group of over 1000 protesters outside the Bank of America building in late 2011. David Weidner, writing in the Wall Street Journal in December of that year, called it "the boldest institutional stroke yet against banks targeted by the Occupy movement." But Weidner conceded that:

Creating a municipal bank won't be easy. California law forbids using taxpayer money to make private loans. That would have to be changed. Critics also argue that San Francisco could be putting taxpayer money at risk.

Spanish transport minister Mr Rafael Catala has confirmed in a radio broadcast that excessive speed is believed to be a factor in the derailment of a Madrid - Ferrol service 4km south of Santiago de Compostela on July 24, which killed 78 people.

Police are waiting to question the hospitalised driver, who is under formal investigation, and the train event recorder has now been recovered from the wreckage for analysis.

The accident occurred in the transition section between ETCS Level 1, which is used on the 87km Ourense - Santiago high-speed line over which the train had travelled, and the standard Spanish Asfa system used on the conventional network. Santiago is one of dozens of ETCS-Asfa transition points on the Spanish network.

IRJ has learned from a senior source at Renfe that while ETCS is operable on the Ourense - Santiago high-speed line, class 730 sets of the type involved in the derailment operate exclusively on Asfa on this route despite the fact that they are equipped with ETCS. All other passenger trains operating on this line, including the fleet of class 121 Avant emus, operate on ETCS. The reasons for this have not yet been firmly established.