Tuesday, April 26, 2016

Link roundup

1. "Up to $800m (£550m) in cash held by so-called Islamic State (IS) has been destroyed in air strikes, a US military official says."
In one case, he said, an estimated $150m was destroyed at a house in Mosul, Iraq.
2. "The Justice Department and FBI have formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000."
The cases include those of 32 defendants sentenced to death.
3. "The sweet spot for building drug tunnels [is] in San Diego's Otay Mesa neighborhood"
Go too far west and the ground will be sandy and potentially soggy from the water of the Pacific Ocean. That could lead to flooding, which wouldn’t be good for the drug business. Too far east and you’ll hit a dead end of hard mountain rock.

But, in a strip of land that runs between roughly the Tijuana airport and the Otay Mesa neighborhood in San Diego, there’s a sweet spot of sandstone and volcanic ash that isn’t as damp as the oceanic earth and not as unyielding as stone.
4. "Before the Stonewall Uprising, There Was the ‘Sip-In’"
According to Mr. Wicker and Mr. Leitsch, their battle to be served was a subset of a larger issue: the ritualized police entrapment of gay men for intent to have sex. “With this action, we were entrapping them into obeying the law,”