When the Delaware Supreme Court revived a family’s lawsuit late last month over a school resource officer’s intense interrogation of their third-grade son, it reignited the debate about having police officers stationed at schools to investigate matters that used to be handled by school administrators.

According to court papers, the questioning was so intense, complete with threats of the children being sent to a juvenile facility for lying, that the 8-year-old — who was not a suspect — burst into tears.

Environmental and human rights activists, church leaders and gun rights advocates found common ground on Tuesday, filing a lawsuit against the federal government to halt a vast National Security Agency electronic surveillance program.

It seeks an injunction against the NSA, Justice Department, FBI and directors of the agencies, and challenges what the plaintiffs describe as an “illegal and unconstitutional program of dragnet electronic surveillance.”

Investigators said Crawford approached Jewish organizations last year looking for funding and people to help him with technology that could be used to surreptitiously deliver damaging and even lethal doses of radiation against those he considered enemies of Israel. He and Feight assembled the mobile device, which was to be controlled remotely, but it was inoperable and nobody was hurt, authorities said.

Investigators gave Feight $1,000 to build the control device and showed the men pictures of industrial X-ray machines they said they could obtain. They planned to provide him access to an actual X-ray system to assembly with the remote control Tuesday.

Two of the football players were actually charged and found guilty of rape. They were sentenced to one and two years of juvenile detention.

But now one of the hackers who brought national attention to their crime could be locked up longer than they will be. Lostutter could go to prison for 10 years if he's convicted of hacking into Big Red's fan page, Mother Jones reports.

"I stood up for a rape victim, I shared information that was public, I had an opinion, and now I am needing you to stand up for me," he wrote on his blog.

The authorities in Iraq say they have uncovered an al-Qaeda plot to use chemical weapons, as well as to smuggle them to Europe and North America.

As the defence ministry spokesman spoke on Iraqi TV, footage was shown of four men with black hoods on their heads, our correspondent adds. Three of them were wearing bright yellow jumpsuits and a fourth was in a brown jumpsuit.

The High Court judge used some fairly strong language to describe the way in which the search and arrest warrants were issued (and how the subsequent SWAT-style raid on Kim Dotcom’s mansion was handled). “This has given rise to a miscarriage of justice,” Chief Justice Helen Winkelmann wrote in her decision.

Justice Winkelmann quoted from her own previous decision in which she found the warrants invalid, and she has now ruled that “in respect of items containing only relevant material, [clones of the seized data] must be provided to the plaintiffs before a clone is provided to the United States.”

Late last year, a vigorous and secretive patent troll began sending out thousands of letters to small businesses all around the country, insisting that they owed between $900 and $1,200 per worker just for using scanners. The brazen patent-trolling scheme, carried out by a company called MPHJ technologies and dozens of shell companies with six-letter names, has caught the attention of politicians.

But Vermont investigators were able to get additional information not available to defense lawyers (or journalists). For instance, they discovered that there were forty different shell companies sending out the letters, all under the control of MPHJ.

Patent trolling is a well-established business that's been around in its modern form for more than a decade and has been accepted as legitimate by federal courts.

“The 400 gigabytes of data is still being analysed but early results show the use of companies and trusts in a number of territories around the world including Singapore, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands and the Cook Islands,” HM Revenue & Customs said in a statement.

The ICIJ reckons the files show cash transfers, incorporation dates and links between companies and individuals that illustrate how "offshore financial secrecy has spread aggressively around the globe, allowing the wealthy and the well-connected to dodge taxes and fueling corruption and economic woes in rich and poor nations alike".

In a decision issued today, the US Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that Monsanto must be allowed to patent its seeds—and it must be able to punish farmers who try to dodge the patents.

Bowman bought Roundup Ready each year for his first crop and observed that restriction. But for his riskier second crop, he bought "commodity" soybeans that were intended for consumption, not planting. Still, he found that most of the soybeans had the Roundup Ready resistance trait because Monsanto's product is everywhere.

It is noteworthy and a bit worrisome that the court upheld a finding that Bowman was "copying" the soybeans by simply planting seeds and applying herbicide. In the court's view, that counts as "making" a new item—a patented item in this case—and so it is barred by the patent laws.

The Methuen, Mass., high school student was arrested last week after posting online videos that show him rapping an original song that police say contained “disturbing verbiage” and reportedly mentioned the White House and the Boston Marathon bombing. He is charged with communicating terrorist threats, a state felony, and faces a potential 20 years in prison.

The way law enforcement agencies approach online activity that appears sinister is this: “If you’re not a terrorist, if you’re not a threat, prove it,” he says.

“This is the price you pay to live in free society right now. It’s just the way it is,” Mullins adds.