Nearly 400 children have been rescued and 348 adults arrested following an expansive and "extraordinary" international child pornography investigation, Canadian police announced Thursday.

The three-year project, named Project Spade, began when undercover officers with the Toronto Police Service Child Exploitation service made contact with a Toronto man allegedly sharing "very graphic images" of child sexual abuse in Oct. 2010, Toronto Police Service Chief William Blair said at a press conference on Thursday.

Police said their investigation revealed an entire child movie production and distribution company in Toronto operating under via the web site azovfilms.com.

The site was run by 42-year old Brian Way, according to police, and sold and distributed images of child exploitation to people across the world.

Inspector Joanna Beaven-Desjardins, head of Toronto's Sex Crimes Unit, said they enlisted the help of the United States Postal Inspection Service since many of the videos were being exported to the U.S. and began a joint investigation.

After a seven-month long investigation, officers executed search warrants across the city of Toronto including at the business, located in the city's West End.

Investigators catalogued hundreds of thousands of images and videos of "horrific sexual act against very young children, some of the worst they have ever viewed," Inspector Beaven-Desjardins said at the press conference.

Police seized over 45 terabytes of data from the $4-million business that distributed to over 50 counties including Australia, pain, Mexico, Sweden and Greece.

Poland has offered an apology to Russia for an attack on its Warsaw embassy by nationalists on Monday. Both the Polish president and prime minister condemned the incident publicly as "an unacceptable act of aggression."

A number of nationalist demonstrators hijacked a march of thousands of people on Polish Independence Day and attacked the Russian embassy in Warsaw.

Protesters shouting anti-Russia slogans hurled stones at police and attempted to scale the walls of the embassy building. Police eventually dispersed the mob with rubber bullets and pepper spray and arrested around a dozen people.

President Bronislaw Komorowski apologized to Russia for the "acts of hooliganism" witnessed in the Polish capital and said the incident had been detrimental to the image of Poland on the international stage.

"I need to apologize on behalf of the Polish state," Komorowski told Polish radio station RaioZet, branding the unrest as an "absolute scandal." Moreover, he said that some were attempting to use the incident "to create the impression that Poland is a Russphobic" nation.

Airline passengers rallied around a blind man Wednesday night after he and his guide dog were removed from the plane.

Albert Rizzi and his seeing eye dog tried to board a US Airways express flight from Philadelphia International Airport to Long Island, but passengers said flight attendants would not allow him to bring the animal onto the plane unless it could travel under a seat.

The flight was delayed for about an hour and a half on the tarmac, and the dog became restless, and other passengers said a flight attendant ordered Rizzi and his guide dog off the plane.

John F. Kennedy and All Those "isms"


Today, I want to come back to my JFK project. Twelve days from now is the 43rd anniversary of the assassination - a virtual coup d'etat effected by Corporate America and its various connections. As I mentioned when I began this little series in commemoration of John F. Kennedy, a close and careful study of American history reveals that the American system was set up to promote the rule of the rich. It was Calvinism with a kick, and that kick was that it appealed to deviant persons without conscience for whom it seems the Capitalistic system was invented.

Custom officials at a Shanghai airport uncover a snakes on a plane situation after they uncover 121 endangered snakes stuffed into a traveller's suitcase


Customs officials at a Shanghai airport noticed the unnamed man was carrying something suspicious as his luggage was passed through a scanner.

Opening up his bags, they found 121 snakes wrapped in black stockings and stuffed inside 21 plastic boxes.

The animals were later indentified as endangered ball pythons. The man may face up to life imprisonment for trafficking rare animals.

Source: ITN

A U.S. War veteran has uploaded a shockingly tragic confessional to YouTube detailing her brutal treatment by V.A. doctors. The Air Force veteran, Robin Temple, spends the 12 minute video describing her story, which includes repeated malpractice incidents brought about by doctors working for the V.A.

Her story begins with a description of her going to a VA hospital in order to undergo a surgery that would remove her ovary. The VA surgeon, however, damaged her colon. When she insisted that she had something wrong, they dismissed her physical issues as mental ones.

"[They] told me because I had PTSD, it was all in my head," Temple says.

A train in India has ploughed into a herd of elephants, killing five adults and two calves and injuring at least 10 others.

Officials said the crash, which occurred at dusk last night in the eastern Chapramari Forest, is the worst of its kind in recent memory.

Wildlife activists have hit out at transport ministers in the aftermath of the accident, blaming them for the unrestricted speed of trains in the area - a busy and well-known elephant corridor.

The passenger train was travelling at 80 kmph (50 mph) through the forest when it drove through a herd of 40 elephants crossing the tracks, West Bengal forestry minister Hiten Burman said.

"The herd scattered, but returned to the railway tracks and stood there for quite some time," Mr Burman said.

Cleveland -- An Ohio Jury convicted mysterious mustachioed man John Donald Cody, also known as Bobby Thompson, on Thursday for masterminding a $100 million charity scam that preyed on people's sympathy for American military veterans.

The charges of theft, fraud, money laundering and the use of false identities stemmed from Cody's stewardship of the U.S. Navy Veterans Association, which raised millions, but when examined by authorities, offered little proof that money was used to assist veterans.

After the scheme fell apart, Cody, who had identified himself as a retired lieutenant commander named Bobby Thompson, went on the run for two years and was ultimately captured in Oregon. But even after his arrest, Cody refused to confirm his real name, going so far as to sign his name "Mr. X" on court papers.

Now, Cody, 66, faces a sentence of at least 10 years in prison, and possible as many as 80 years. Sentencing for the defendant is expected to take place next month.

The swift verdict came after a series of stunning twists this week in the bizarre month-long case. After the prosecution took weeks to build its case, Cody on Tuesday surprised even his own lawyer when he announced he would not testify as he was scheduled to.

After consulting with his client, Cody's lawyer informed the judge that his client "would not be able to survive" cross examination.

Then Wednesday, after prosecutors walked the jury meticulously through the charges in a two-hour closing argument, Cody's lawyer revealed he was waiving his closing statement. In other words, Cody never mounted a defense.

Small-town military exercise cloaked in secrecy led to man being questioned for taking photos
A man with a camera who stumbled on a military special forces exercise in a small Cape Breton town had his patriotism gruffly questioned by an undercover soldier, and was quizzed about whether he belonged to an anti-government movement.

Robert Westbrook said he was also threatened with arrest and he worried the undercover soldier would lash out and strike him.

"He takes a few steps back and clenches his fist and jaw angrily," Westbrook wrote in an account he posted online. " I truly think for a moment that he's going to take a swing at me."

Police in Seattle, Washington have responded to a major public outcry by disabling a recently discovered law enforcement tool that critics said could be used to conduct sweeping surveillance across the city.

Last week, Seattle's The Stranger published an in-depth look at a little known new initiative taking place within the city that involved the installation of dozens of devices that would create a digital mesh network for law enforcement officers. The devices - small white-boxes equipped with antennas and adorned on utility poles - would broadcast data wirelessly between nodes so police officers could have their own private network to more easily share large amounts of data. As The Stranger pointed out, however, those same contraptions were able to collect data on internet-ready devices of anyone within reach, essentially allowing the Seattle Police Department to see where cell phones, laptops and any other smart devices operating within reach were located.

The SPD said they had no bad intentions with installing the mesh network, but The Stranger article and the subsequent media coverage it spawned quickly caused the system to receive the type of attention that wasn't very welcomed. Now only days after citizens began calling for the dismantling of the mesh network, The Stranger has confirmed that the SPD are disabling the devices until a proper policy could be adopted by the city.

"The wireless mesh network will be deactivated until city council approves a draft policy and until there's an opportunity forvigorous public debate," Police Chief Jim Pugel told The Stranger for an article published late Tuesday.

"Our position is that the technology is the technology," Whitcomb said, "but we want to make sure that we have safeguards and policies in place so people with legitimate privacy concerns aren't worried about how it's being used."

The SPD told The Stranger previously that the system was not being used, but anyone with a smart phone who wandered through the jurisdiction covered by the digital nodes could still notice that their devices were being discovered by the internet-broadcasting boxes, just as a person's iPhone or Android might attempt to connect to any network within reach. In theory, law enforcement could take the personal information transmitted as the two devices talk to each other and use that intelligence to triangulate the location of a person, even within inches.