Some radio devices turned up in roadside bombs in Iraq, prosecutors say

Washington - Five people and four companies have been indicted for allegedly plotting to export 6,000 radio control devices to Iran, including 16 of the items that were found in improvised explosive devices in Iraq, the Justice Department announced Tuesday.

Authorities in Singapore arrested four people in the case Monday. The fifth defendant is a resident of Iran who remains at large.

According to the indictment, in 2008 and 2009, U.S.-led forces in Iraq recovered numerous radio controls manufactured by a Minnesota firm used in a remote detonation system for IEDs. The radio devices can transmit data wirelessly as far as 40 miles with a powerful antenna.

The defendants allegedly made tens of thousands of dollars for arranging the transportation of the 6,000 radio devices in five shipments from June 2007 to February 2008.

Some of the defendants also are accused of conspiracy involving exports of military antennas to Singapore and Hong Kong.

The defendant who is at large, Hossein Larijani, is a citizen of Iran. The four people arrested are all citizens of Singapore. They are Wong Yuh Lan, Lim Yong Nam, Lim Kow Seng and Hia Soo Gan Benson.

Wong, Nam, Seng and Hia allegedly conspired in the shipment of 6,000 of the radio control devices from a Minnesota company through Singapore to Iran. Seng and Hia also are accused of conspiring to ship military antennas from a Massachusetts company to Singapore and Hong Kong.

Thirteen Observations made by Lemony Snicket while watching Occupy Wall Street from a Discreet Distance

1. If you work hard, and become successful, it does not necessarily mean you are successful because you worked hard, just as if you are tall with long hair it doesn't mean you would be a midget if you were bald.

2. "Fortune" is a word for having a lot of money and for having a lot of luck, but that does not mean the word has two definitions.

3. Money is like a child - rarely unaccompanied. When it disappears, look to those who were supposed to be keeping an eye on it while you were at the grocery store. You might also look for someone who has a lot of extra children sitting around, with long, suspicious explanations for how they got there.

Geneva - Swiss police say one person has died and 14 are injured after an explosion at an apartment block in the western city of Yverdon-les-Bains.

A spokesman for Vaud cantonal (state) police says the blast occurred shortly after 1:30 p.m. Tuesday (1130 GMT; 7.30 EST) on the fourth floor of a residential building in the center of the city.

The spokesman, Jean-Christophe Sauterel, told The Associated Press that police are still trying to determine the cause of the explosion.

Amateur footage taken from the scene, about 60 kilometers (37 miles) west of the capital Bern, showed a blackened hole in the side of the building and passers-by stepping over debris that was strewn across the street.

Sauterel says eight of the injured have been hospitalized.

Mother clutched infant to her chest when rescuers reached them

Ercis, Turkey - Rescuers pulled a two-week-old baby girl alive from the wreckage of a collapsed apartment block Tuesday as they battled to find survivors from a earthquake in eastern Turkey that killed at least 432 people and left thousands homeless.

The baby's mother and a grandmother were also brought out alive on stretchers to jubilant cries from onlookers who followed the dramatic rescue under cold, pouring rain.

"It's a miracle!," said Senol Yigit, the uncle of the baby, Azra, whose name means "purity" or "untouched" in Arabic. "I'm so happy. What can I say. We have been waiting for two days. We had lost hope when we first saw the building," he said sobbing.

Television footage showed rescuers in orange jumpsuits clapping as the baby was removed from the wreckage. A rescuer cradled the naked infant, who was wrapped in a blanket and handed over to a medic.

The baby's mother, Semiha, had been pinned next to a sofa inside the flattened building before her rescue. She had been clutching the infant to her chest when rescuers reached them.

Police in riot gear cleared anti-Wall Street protesters on Tuesday morning from the plaza in front of Oakland's City Hall where they have been camped out for about two weeks.

Television news footage showed numerous people in plastic handcuffs being led away from the site by police around 5 a.m. The protesters did not appear to be resisting, although an officer did fire a non-lethal projectile from a shotgun at a protester who lobbed a bottle, authorities told the San Francisco Chronicle.

One of those arrested, Aiyahnna Johnson, 30, of Oakland, had been living at the camp with her 2-year-old daughter. "We want the best for you guys, that's all," she was quoted by the San Francisco Chronicle telling two officers who were leading her away.

The police action began around 4:40 a.m. when an officer on a loud speaker told the protesters they were illegally blocking the plaza and were subject to arrest, according to the Chronicle. The newspaper reported that several hundred people appeared ready to defend the camp about an hour before police moved in, placing Dumpsters, boards, pallets and even metal police-style barricades around the plaza.

Gender selective abortions have skewed birthrates, so millions of men will never find wives, potentially causing strife.

Dr Neelam Singh is on the front line of India's battle to save its girls.

Modern medical technology - specifically ultrasounds for determining the baby's sex - coupled with ancient cultural values which give preference to boys, mean that hundreds of thousands of girls are never being born.

There were only 914 girls for every 1,000 boys under the age of six in India, according to the 2011 census, compared with 927 for every 1,000 boys in the 2001 census. Today's ratio is the highest imbalance since the country won independence in 1947.

Since the late 19th century, the very rich have been paying people to demand less government. The work of Herbert Spencer, for example, was sponsored by Andrew Carnegie, John D Rockefeller and Thomas Edison. Spencer believed that society changed according to evolutionary laws. Humans were evolving towards perfection, but this process was inhibited by interference from the state. By protecting people from the consequences of their own actions (or their own bad luck), it stopped the winnowing process that would otherwise result in the survival of the fittest.

Social security, publicly funded education, compulsory vaccination, laws enforcing safety at work all interrupted social evolution. But a self-regulated free market would swiftly ensure that those who were best adapted would survive and triumph. It's not hard to see why the millionaires loved him. They saw themselves as winners of the evolutionary race, taking their rightful place at the pinnacle of the social order. Any attempt to limit their freedoms would prevent society from achieving perfection.

Today, sponsorship by millionaires and corporations explains why free-market thinktanks outnumber and outspend the thinktanks arguing for public services and the distribution of wealth. Or so I guess. But their absence of accountability means that guesswork is all we've got. As I showed last month, only one of the rightwing thinktanks I contacted was prepared to reveal who funded it. All the others refused on the grounds that they had to respect the privacy of their donors. These organisations exert great influence in public life. But we have no means of discovering on whose behalf they do it.

Occupy Albany protesters in New York's capital city received an unexpected ally over the week: The state and local authorities.

According to the Albany Times Union, New York state troopers and Albany police did not adhere to a curfew crackdown on protesters urged by Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) and Albany mayor Gerald Jennings.

Mass arrests seemed to be in the cards once Jennings directed officers to enforce the curfew on roughly 700 protesters occupying the city owned park. But as state police joined the local cops, protesters moved past the property line dividing city and state land.

With protesters acting peacefully, local and state police agreed that low level arrests could cause a riot, so they decided instead to defy Cuomo and Jennings.

"We don't have those resources, and these people were not causing trouble," a state official said. "The bottom line is the police know policing, not the governor and not the mayor."

A school shooting in Cape Fear, N.C., has left one teen injured and two schools on lockdown while police hunt for a shooter this afternoon.

At least one student was shot and injured outside of Cape Fear High School, near Fayetteville, N.C., according to ABC News affiliate WTVD.

The girl, who is between 15 and 17 years old, was eating lunch outside a building on the school's campus just after 1 p.m. when the shooting occurred, police said. A manhunt is underway around the school for the gunman and to determine that the area is safe.

"No one has seen anyone on this campus with a gun," Cumberland County Sheriff Earl "Moose" Butler told WTVD.

Witnesses said they saw the teen fall to the ground, bleeding, but no one saw a gun, the report said. The teen was taken to a hospital.

A lot of us have to confess something about the Occupy Wall Street protests: we have a hippie problem. As a post-boomer, I've been trained to giggle at them my whole life. And anyone who has had to listen to an unsought diatribe about corporations in a line at Target, or has a friend who's been trying to talk you into going to Burning Man for a decade, will know what I'm talking about. The crustier edges of the fringe can be as smug as they are alienating - from replacing applause in Zuccotti Park with silent finger-wiggling to the occasional, asinine assertion that the U.S. government is a greater evil than al Qaeda. I have to say I feel exactly the same ambivalence toward the Tea Partiers, with their strange 18th-century costumes, occasional racist diatribes, and gun-toting. Their cultural signifiers distract from their message - which is diffuse and vague enough to begin with. Before too long, I find myself inclined to move on, to zoom out.

And yet this time, the goddam hippies, as South Park's Eric Cartman famously calls them, have slowly drawn me back in. Maybe it was seeing a more diverse crowd in D.C. than I expected, or absorbing online testimonies from 99 percenters, or reading yet another story about how corrupt the banking system has become (Citigroup was the latest to have me fuming). Maybe it was seeing the same kind of phenomenon popping up in Frankfurt and Madrid or Tel Aviv or outside St. Paul's Cathedral in London. From the massive crowds in Madrid, bursting at one point into a mass singing of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy," to the tent cities in Israel, bringing right and left together against poverty, it all suggested a much deeper shift in consciousness than a mere pop-cultural fad. So somewhere along the line, my skepticism began to falter. And in a strange kind of way, Occupy Wall Street made me think more fondly of the Tea Party as well.

The theme that connects them all is disenfranchisement, the sense that the world is shifting deeply and inexorably beyond our ability to control it through our democratic institutions. You can call this many things, but a "democratic deficit" gets to the nub of it. Democracy means rule by the people - however rough-edged, however blunted by representative government, however imperfect. But everywhere, the people feel as if someone else is now ruling them - and see no way to regain control. In Europe, you see millions unemployed because of a financial crisis that began thousands of miles away in the U.S. real-estate market - and grim austerity being imposed to save a currency union that never truly won mass democratic support in the first place. In the U.S., the hefty majority for sweeping reform behind Barack Obama's victory in 2008 has been stopped in its tracks by slightly more than half of one House in the Congress and by a historically unprecedented filibuster in the Senate. Even when it is perfectly clear what the only politically viable, long-term solution is to our debt crisis - a mix of defense and entitlement cuts and tax increases - it is beyond our democratically elected leaders to reach a deal. In fact, one major party has gone on record declaring that it would risk national default rather than cede a millimeter on taxes. The Tea Partiers too are revolting against a Republican establishment that overspent and overborrowed throughout the Bush-Cheney years, and treated principled conservative critics as traitors or irrelevant. Bush and Cheney also failed to do what any viable government must: secure the border so that it can recognize who is a citizen and who is not. Members of the Tea Party too feel disenfranchised and alienated - from a popular culture that seems hostile to traditional ways of life to a political system so in hock to special interests that pork and partisanship triumph over sane budgeting time after time after time.