CIA Report Reveals Gruesome Torture Methods Used In Terrorist Investigations

This month the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released a report on the CIA interrogations of known and suspected terrorists. Various methods including sleep deprivation, waterboarding, freezing temperatures, force feeding, and forcing inmates to stand for days on end have been received with disgust by those following the story.

Foreign relations have also been affected, especially when human rights are discussed between the U.S. Government and other nations. A Chinese Foreign Minister, Hong Lei, said recently that “The United States is not looking at the facts and intentionally smearing China’s rights situation, exposing even more the U.S. hypocrisy and double standards on the issue of human rights.”

Recent polls asking the public for their reaction to the story drew mute results from the few that actively follow the story. A poll from the Pew Research Center shows that only 23% of those polled are actively following the news and 51% say the torture methods were justified. In fact, more people were in disagreement about the actual release of the information than of the report itself.

Mars Rover Curiosity Discovers Methane On Mars

The Mars rover Curiosity reported large methane spikes on Tuesday, leading scientists to rethink the possibility of life on Mars. Methane gas is strongly tied to life here on Earth and only lasts around a few hundred years meaning that any methane on Mars must have been created recently.

While this doesn’t mean that Curiosity will be getting pictures of aliens walking around anytime soon, it does mean that life could have, and maybe still does, exist on Mars. Other evidence of life on Mars can be found in photographs sent by the rover to Nasa that show the sides of hills and plains that resemble riverbeds on Earth, leading to the possibility of water on Mars.

However, two months after Curiosity detected the spike in methane, it discovered almost no gas at all. This means that somehow methane is being actively destroyed or dissipated quickly since methane should last a few hundred years. This is quite surprising to scientists whose job just got a whole lot more interesting.

Hackers Steal Massive Amounts of Data From Sony

On November 24, 2014, Sony became the victim of the largest hack in terms of data ever to a company. Hackers reportedly stole more than one hundred terabytes (one terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes), which is a huge amount of data after you consider that the entire Library of Congress could fit in a ten terabyte file. The hackers left a photo on every Sony computer at the same time showing a red skeleton and the words “Hacked By #GOP.”

The hackers released five Sony movies, four of them unreleased, salaries, emails including one calling Angelina Jolie a “minimally talented spoiled brat”, and thousands of confidential files. The hackers have also said that this is only the beginning and that more data is going to be released unless their demands are met.

Some suspect North Korea to be involved in the hacking since a recent Sony movie called “The Interview” portrays a plot to kill the North Korean leader. Other evidence comes from the method of the hack that was similar to a hack in 2013 to a South Korean company. Terrorist threats have been made against the movie “The Interview”, resulting in Sony’s decision on Wednesday to cancel the release of the film altogether.

Photograph by NASA/JPL-CALTECH/MSSS