In my college years, I purchased used books. I would go to the bookstore and try to find the cleanest ones I could – ones without too much scribbling, highlighting or even a piece of gum. In one student’s case the unexpected (and unwanted) gift-with-a-textbook-purchase was a bag of cocaine.

Sophia Stockton — a junior at Mid-America Nazarene University in Olathe, Kansas — recently ordered a textbook from an independent retailer through the Amazon online storefront. The book was intended for a spring course on terrorism and is called “Understanding Terrorism: Challenges, Perspectives and Issues.”

Maybe the book should have been titled something like, “Understanding Drug Abuse.”

When Stockton flipped through the textbook, she “discovered a bag of white powder had fallen to the ground.” According to WPTV, Stockton feared that the bag contained anthrax and took it to the local police department the next day.

Stockton said, “I told them white powder was in my terrorism textbook and so I put it on the table and they’re like, ‘oh, okay,’ And so he went back and tested it,” Stockton recalls. “ He comes back and says, ‘you didn’t happen to order some cocaine with your textbook, did you?’ And I was like, no!”

Gardner law enforcement officials speculate that there may have been up to $400 worth of cocaine in the bag.

Wow! That’s enough money to buy two – three more books.

Officials reached out to Amazon for more information about how such an incident could have occurred. While Stockton’s textbook was purchased through the online retailer, it comes from Warehouse Deals. This Amazon storefront offers “deep discounts on open-box, like-new, refurbished, or used products that are in good condition but do not meet Amazon.com’s rigorous standards as ‘new.’”

According to the Warehouse Deals’ page on Amazon, all items are inspected prior to being offered for sale: Prior to offering an item for sale on Warehouse Deals, we verify its physical and functional condition.

Items purchased through independent sellers on the Amazon website are covered by the company’s “A-to-z Guarantee,” so Stockton could theoretically file a claim on the grounds that the item she purchased was “not the item depicted in the seller’s description.” (We sincerely doubt that cocaine was mentioned in the product description, after all.)

At this time, it remains a mystery how $400 worth of cocaine wound up in a used textbook.

Stockton waited a day to alert authorities. If the bag in Stockton’s textbook did contain anthrax — as she initially feared — immediate and appropriate medical evaluation and treatment would’ve been essential.

Read story@ msnbc

Bugging Equipment

A search of several Mexican lawmakers’ offices turned up recording equipment, leading legislators to believe they have been spied on for years, a congressman said Wednesday.

Congressman Armando Rios said security personnel found microphones and other devices that seemed to have been installed years ago.

“Some of the equipment has newer technology, but other devices are from a long time ago, which leads us to believe they were installed years ago,” said Rios, a member of the leftist Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD.

Offices of key committees and of several lawmakers from different political parties were bugged.

Congress president Guadalupe Acosta, also of the PRD, has filed a complaint with federal prosecutors, who have opened an investigation.

Acosta wouldn’t identify the lawmakers who were being spied on or who he thinks was behind the espionage. Rios blamed the government of President Felipe Calderon, who belongs to the conservative National Action Party, or PAN. Interior Secretary Alejandro Poire denied Rios’ accusations and said the government has done nothing illegal.

Mexico’s main intelligence agency allegedly spied on the government’s political opponents during the 71 years of rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.

After PAN candidate Vicente Fox won the 2000 presidential election, he announced that the agency, the Center for National Security and Investigation, would no longer spy on political opponents. However, in 2008, under Calderon, the agency hired a private company to monitor the activities of legislators.

Legislators complained they were being spied on but the government said it was simply collecting public information.

Several secretly recorded telephone conversations of government officials or politicians have been made public in Mexico in the last few years.

In 2006, the former governor of Puebla state, Mario Marin, was implicated in a revenge plot against a journalist after Mexican news media released a recorded telephone conversation. In it, he allegedly speaks with a businessman about punishing Lydia Cacho, who had written a book that accuses one of their acquaintances of being a child molester.

In 2010, a radio station broadcast a telephone conversation between then federal lawmaker Cesar Godoy and alleged drug trafficker Servando Gomez, known as “La Tuta.” In it, Godoy and Gomez express support for each other and discuss bribing a reporter.

Shortly after the recording was released, Godoy, who is now a fugitive, was charged with aiding drug trafficking and money laundering.

Sources: blogspot.com, philstar.com

A German woman listed as missing from the Costa Concordia was located alive in Germany.

According to the Associated Press, Gertrud Goergens alerted police in Germany that she was alive and well. Goergens was removed from the official list of missing late Wednesday. There are still twenty-three passengers and three crew members missing.

Eleven bodies have been recovered. Currently, only one has been publicly identified as being crew member Sandor Feher, 38, of Hungary. The adult bodies, believed to be passengers, were all wearing life jackets and were found in the rear of the ship near an emergency evacuation point.

Jozsef Balog, a pianist who worked with Feher who was a violinist, told the Budapest newspaper Blikk that Feher was wearing a life-jacket when he decided to return to his cabin to pack his violin. Feher was last seen on deck en route to a lifeboat. According to Balog, Feher helped put life-jackets on several crying children before returning to his cabin.

I believe one thing that caught the attention of viewers as this story aired was how close the ship was to land.

The Costa Concordia took a nearly identical route past Giglio Island in August to the one Friday that led to the sinking of the ship, NBC News has learned.

Adam Smallman, editor of shipping magazine Lloyd’s List, said the route taken in August, based on satellite tracking, was “authorized by the company and the coast guard.”

“Our assessment of the route this vessel took (in August) is it must have come perilously close, and I mean possibly within touching distance of the rock that it hit this time … which the company is saying wholly unauthorized in terms of its proximity to the island,” Smallman said.

Capt. Francesco Schettino has come under close scrutiny due to his actions before the ship became endangered and for his actions after the ship hit a reef and turned on its side. Urine and hair samples have been taken from Schettino to determine if he might have consumed alcohol or used drugs before the accident.

The Costa Concordia had more than 4,200 passengers and crew on board when it slammed into a reef Friday off the tiny Tuscan island of Giglio. Apparently, Capt. Francesco Schettino made an unauthorized maneuver from the ship’s programmed course — allegedly to show off the luxury liner to the island’s residents.

Schettino’s lawyer, Bruno Leporatti, maintains that the captain never left the scene because he coordinated the evacuation from the shore after leaving the ship.

Captains and crew members of ships and airplanes are trained to remain with their crafts and passengers and do everything within their power to assist in the evacuation. The captain should not have left the ship unless he was in imminent danger. Considering others stayed behind to help, he also had an obligation to stay onboard and help until all reasonable efforts had been exhausted.

According to one report, the captain claims to have tripped and fallen into one of the lifeboats.

Martino Pellegrino, a crew-member on Costa Concordia, described Schettino as “authoritarian,” “stubborn” and “egocentric.”

A transcript of a conversation between Schettino and Capt. Gregorio De Falco of the Italian coast guard in Livorno, showed the coast guard official urgently commanding the captain to return to the cruise ship after he had abandoned it. “There are people trapped on board,” De Falco said. “Now you go with your boat under the prow on the starboard side. There is a pilot ladder. You will climb that ladder and go on board. You go on board and then you will tell me how many people there are. Is that clear? I’m recording this conversation, Cmdr. Schettino …”

Many passengers complained that crew members were ill-prepared to handle an emergency evacuation. “The crew members had no specialized training — the security man doubled as the cook and bartender, so obviously they did not know what to do,” passenger Claudia Fehlandt told Chile’s Channel 7 television after being embraced by relatives at Santiago’s airport.

“In fact, the lifeboats, even the ones that did get lowered, they did not know how to lower them and they cut the ropes with axes,” she said.

The search for missing passengers aboard the Costa Concordia is on hold over fears that the ship is shifting and making rescue efforts more dangerous. The captain in charge of the specialist divers performing the search said they need to blow four more holes into the ship to gain access to the bottom of the ship. He also said, despite poor visibility, there was visual evidence suggesting some bodies were at the bottom of the sea.

This is a horribly tragic accident that could have been prevented.

Read story@ msnbc

Amir Hekmati

An Iranian court has convicted an Iranian-American man of spying for the CIA and sentenced him to death, Iranian state news media reported Monday.

The alleged spy is 28 year-old Amir Mirzaei Hekmati. Hekmati ”has 20 days to appeal the court’s decision, which comes at a time of increasing tensions between Tehran and Washington,” according to a report in the Washington Post.

Hekmati, a former U.S. Marine Arabic language translator in Iraq, was born in Arizona and raised in Michigan. His family in Michigan, former colleagues and American government officials say Hekmati never served in the CIA and was in Iran to visit his grandmother.

Hekmati’s parents said they “are shocked and terrified” by the news, his mother Behnaz Hekmati wrote at the website they’ve set up to advocate for Amir’s release, FreeAmir. Hekmati’s father Ali is a professor of biology at a Flint Michigan community. “We believe that this verdict is the result of a process that was neither transparent nor fair.”

“Amir did not engage in any acts of spying, or ‘fighting against God,’ as the convicting Judge has claimed in his sentence,” his mother’s post continues. “A grave error has been committed, and we have authorized our legal representatives to make direct contact with the Iranian authorities to find a solution to this misunderstanding.”

Hekmati’s family said he had the permission of the Iranian interests section–the U.S. based diplomatic outpost for the Islamic republic–in Washington D.C. to travel to Iran in August to visit his elderly grandmother. After his arrest on August 29, Iranian officials told the family to keep quiet in order to facilitate his release.

However, in December, Iranian state media aired video of Hekmati allegedly confessing to having worked as a CIA agent. His family and friends vehemently deny these charges and said it appears he had given that “confession” under extreme duress. This would not be the first time an American was accused of spying in Iran, supposedly confessed and was put through a Kangaroo Court.

Hekmati joined the Marines in 2001 after graduating from high school. He had called a friend last year to propose launching a business together. Last month he told another friend he was thinking of going back to school to get a business degree. None of this sounds like a man preparing for a career as a government spy.

Until last month, Hekmati’s Facebook page displayed photos of  himself in various locales he had worked. This is an indication, his friends say, that he was not in any way seeking to conceal his recent activities or past work in the U.S. military. Several other associates and observers have cited Hekmati’s Facebook account as cause to doubt Iranian claims he was a deep-cover American spy.

Read full story@ yahoo