Four men injured in shooting – Smithfield 
Friday, 26 April 2013 10:42:08 PM 

**Please note – four men have been injured, not three as previously released **

Police will address the media after four men were shot in Sydney’s west tonight.

Emergency services responded to reports of a shooting outside a home on The Horsley Drive, Smithfield, just after 8pm (Friday 26 April 2013). . .
 

California police confiscated a mammoth joint during a 4/20 pot rally on Saturday, reports the Los Angeles Times.

As the paper notes, hundreds of UC Santa Cruz students gather each year for the event, and each year campus police confiscate things like bongs and dime bags. But Gennady Tsarinsky took things to a whole new level: what police say was a four-foot-long, two-pound joint.

The 25-year-old was arrested and charged with possessing more than an ounce of pot — which happens to be California’s limit for medical marijuana users. . .

A car bomb destroyed about half of the French Embassy in Libya early Tuesday, officials said, in the most significant attack against a Western interest in the country since the killing last September of the American ambassador, J. Christopher Stevens.

The explosion injured two French guards, one critically, but most employees had not yet arrived, Libyan and French officials said.

The attack, in Tripoli, was a new blow to the transitional government’s hope of improving the sense of public security after the ouster of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi nearly two years ago. It was one of the largest in a string of attacks on diplomatic missions since the end of his rule, and the first major one in the capital.

The French and Libyan governments labeled the explosion an act of terrorism, and the pattern of attacks on Western diplomatic missions indicated Islamist militants were responsible. Many Libyan militants have vowed to fight what they see as a foreign crusade to remake their country as a Western-style liberal democracy instead of an Islamic state. They resent the Western powers for their military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, to say nothing of the history of European colonialism in North Africa. . .

A federal judge said this week that the Obama administration is likely violating the law by telling immigration agents and officers not to arrest illegal immigrants they deem low priority, in a case that could upend President Obama’s enforcement policy.

For the last several years the administration has said it will no longer arrest most illegal immigrants, arguing it wants to focus only on those with serious criminal records or gang ties. The Homeland Security department said it was using “prosecutorial discretion.”. . .

Me: And not only are they still available online, they’re on sale!

More here from CNS News.

The Senate’s defeat of a package of popular proposals aimed at curbing gun violence last week seemed certain to foment public outrage at out-of-touch politicians who don’t listen to their constituents.

Not so much, according to a new Washington Post-Pew Research Center poll. Yes, a plurality (47 percent) describe themselves as either “angry” or “disappointed” about the failure of the gun legislation, but 39 percent call themselves “relieved” or “happy” about what happened. That’s a far cry from the 90-ish percent support that expanding background checks — the centerpiece of the proposed legislation — enjoyed. . .

Activists occupied an animal facility at the University of Milan, Italy, at the weekend, releasing mice and rabbits and mixing up cage labels to confuse experimental protocols. Researchers at the university say that it will take years to recover their work.

Many of the animals at the facility are genetic models for psychiatric disorders such as autism and schizophrenia.

No arrests have been made following the 12-hour drama, which took place on Saturday, although the university says that it will press charges against the protesters. The activists took some of the animals and were told during negotiations that they would be permitted to come back later and take more. . .

The immigration proposal pending in Congress would transform the nation’s political landscape for a generation or more — pumping as many as 11 million new Hispanic voters into the electorate a decade from now in ways that, if current trends hold, would produce an electoral bonanza for Democrats and cripple Republican prospects in many states they now win easily.

Beneath the philosophical debates about amnesty and border security, there are brass-tacks partisan calculations driving the thinking of lawmakers in both parties over comprehensive immigration reform, which in its current form offers a pathway to citizenship — and full voting rights — for a group of undocumented residents that roughly equals the population of Ohio, the nation’s seventh-largest state.

If these people had been on the voting rolls in 2012 and voted along the same lines as other Hispanic voters did last fall, President Barack Obama’s relatively narrow victory last fall would have been considerably wider, a POLITICO analysis showed. . .

A 15-year-old boy was found shot to death in the Grand Boulevard neighborhood Monday night — less than four blocks the home of President Barack Obama.

Cornelius German was found lying in the backyard of a home in the 5000 block of South Evans Avenue with a gunshot wound in his back about 9:40 p.m., authorities said.

German, of the 1000 block of East Hyde Park Boulevard, was pronounced dead at the scene at shortly after his body was discovered, authorities said.

Police said German was affiliated with a gang. . .

Spanish police arrested two suspected terrorists with apparent links to an al Qaeda-affiliated group Tuesday but said they had no indication of an imminent attack.

The Interior Ministry identified the suspects as Nou Mediouni, from Algeria, who was arrested in the north-central city of Zaragoza, and Hassan El Jaaouani, from Morocco, who was detained in the southeastern city of Murcia.

Spanish police worked with their counterparts in France and Morocco to carry out the latest arrests, the Interior Ministry statement said. . .

Canadian security forces thwarted a plot to blow up a rail line between Canada and the United States and will announce arrests on Monday afternoon, police and intelligence agencies said.

U.S. security and law enforcement sources also said the suspects had sought to attack the railroad between Toronto and New York City. Canadian media said two men had been arrested after raids in Toronto and Montreal, Canada’s two biggest cities.

Canadian police are holding a briefing about a “national security criminal investigation” at 3:30 p.m. ET (1930 GMT). . .

Three people have been killed and at least 13 others wounded in gun violence throughout the city since Friday afternoon.

Donald Holman, 37, was shot three times in the legs about 7:45 p.m. Friday in the 1100 block of North Menard Avenue, authorities said.

He was taken to Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood, where he died at 8:21 p.m., according to the Cook County Medical Examiner’s office.

Lucas Zimmerman, 34, was found unresponsive with multiple gunshot wounds in a convenience store parking lot in the 3900 block of North Kimball Avenue at about 12:10 a.m. Saturday. . .

Universal’s “Oblivion” didn’t exactly roar into theaters Friday, nor did it crater.

The Tom Cruise-starrer was on track for an estimated $13 million for the day and a healthy $35.5 million weekend, according to early estimates.

After earning $1.1 million Thursday night, B.O. observers feared the original sci-fier would take a hit from the drama unfolding in Boston, which accounts for roughly 2% of the nation’s market.

But on Friday evening, as the marathon bombing suspect was surrounded and eventually caught in Watertown, Mass., the early numbers began rolling in and execs at U sighed in relief: Auds nationwide were indeed on board for the $125 million film. . .

 Pakistani police took former president Pervez Musharraf into custody at their Islamabad headquarters on Friday, hours after a court had ordered him placed under house arrest, Musharraf’s spokesman said.

Mohammed Amjad said police had escorted the former army chief from his residence on the edge of the capital to a guest house at the city’s police headquarters where he will spend two days on remand ahead of a court hearing. . .

Britain and France have informed the United Nations that there is credible evidence that Syria has used chemical weapons on more than one occasion since December, according to senior diplomats and officials briefed on the accounts.

In letters to U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, the two European powers said soil samples, witness interviews and opposition sources support charges that nerve agents were used in and around the cities of Aleppo, Homs and possibly Damascus, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.

The European reports are in part aimed at countering accusations by the Syrian government that opposition forces had used chemical weapons during fighting in the town of Khan al-Asal near Aleppo on March 19, killing 26 people, including regime troops. Syrian rebels have said that government forces used chemical weapons in the incident.

James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, told a Senate panel Thursday that allegations that the Syrian government had used chemical weapons are still being evaluated. . .

The two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings led police on a wild and deadly chase through the suburbs here early Friday morning that ended in the death of one of the suspects as well as a campus police officer; the other suspect remained at large while hundreds of police officers conduct a manhunt through Watertown, about five miles west of downtown Boston.

The surviving suspect was identified as Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, 19, of Cambridge, Mass., a law enforcement official said. The suspect who was killed was identified as his brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, the law enforcement official said. Investigators believe that both of the suspects were Chechens. . .

. . .The suspects are Chechen brothers with the last name Tsarnaev, law enforcement officials told NBC News. The suspect at large, Dzhokar Tsarnaev, is 19 and has a Massachusetts driver’s license, they said. Law enforcement officials told NBC News that both men are legal permanent residents of the United States, had been here about a year and had military experience. . .

. . .The missing suspect has been identified by the Associated Press as 19-year-old Dzhokhar A Tsarnaev from nearby Cambridge, Massachusetts. NBC News is reporting that the dead suspect was his brother.

Both are reportedly from a Russian region near Chechnya and have been living in the US for at least a year.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev appears to been educated at at a Cambridge high school before receiving a scholarship to pursue higher education in 2011.His name appears on a list of 45 recipients of the Cambridge City Scholarship, handed to students from Cambridge Rindge and Latin School. . .

Two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing – identified to The Associated Press as coming from the Russian region near Chechnya – killed an MIT police officer, injured a transit officer in a firefight and threw explosive devices at police during their getaway attempt in a long night of violence that left one of them dead and another still at large Friday, authorities said.

A law enforcement intelligence bulletin obtained by the AP identified the surviving bomb suspect as 19-year-old Dzhokhar A Tsarnaev of Cambridge, Massachussets.