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BRUSSELS (AP) -- Iran was effectively cut off from global commerce on Thursday, when the company that handles financial transactions said it was severing ties with many Iranian banks - part of an international effort to discourage Tehran from developing nuclear weapons....

ROBRES, Spain (AP) -- Fernando Luna, a burly Spanish farmer, yanks a barley sprout from a field as dry as powder. He examines its roots, which are mostly dead, then tosses the stunted shoot away in disgust....

A technique to vaporise photocopied ink from paper has been developed by engineers at the University of Cambridge.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The federal judge overseeing Roger Clemens' trial has moved jury selection in the case up one day, to Monday, April 16....

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) -- School districts soon will be able to opt out of a common ammonia-treated ground beef filler critics have dubbed "pink slime."...

Disgraced former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich begins his 14-year prison term for corruption, telling a media pack that his conscience is clear.

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Federal regulators are sending a special team to investigate the San Onofre nuclear power plant on the Southern California coast after tubes that carry radioactive water failed a pressure test....

CHICAGO (AP) -- Convicted former Gov. Rod Blagojevich stepped off a plane in Colorado on Thursday and headed to a federal prison to begin a 14-year sentence for corruption, the latest chapter in the downfall of a charismatic politician that seemed more like a bizarre reality TV show than a legal battle....

Attenuation was found with a two hour delay, (unnecessary) Miranda warnings, defendant counseling with his father on his cell phone who told him not to cooperate, and finally thinking about his predicament for at least an hour. United States v. Conrad, 2012 U.S. App. LEXIS 5285 (7th Cir. March 14, 2012)*:

If ordered, suppression of unconstitutionally obtained evidence can permit "[t]he criminal ... to go free because the constable has blundered." People v. Defore, 150 N.E. 585, 587 (N.Y. 1926) (Cardozo, J.). Given a blunder that the Government does not dispute here, Defendant David Conrad argues that the district court should have suppressed all the evidence of child pornography that was recovered following an illegal entry into his father's home. As we explain below, however, the district court correctly denied exclusion of evidence obtained from Mr. Conrad's own home—an hour's drive away from the home that had been illegally entered and which Mr. Conrad authorized the Government to search. That evidence was sufficiently attenuated from the original illegal entry so as to have been purged of the unconstitutional taint.

. . .

Consistent with existing precedent, the district court identified intervening circumstances that favored attenuation: Mr. Conrad's repeated consents to search and his waiver of Miranda rights (which law enforcement was not even required to give because he was not in custody), about two hours after the underlying constitutional violation and in a completely different location. As for the different location, we note that in contrast to cases where no attenuation was found after the defendant was taken, for example, to a police station, e.g., Taylor, 457 U.S. 687, here Mr. Conrad volunteered to go from his family home, a location where, according to the unchallenged findings of the district court, he "was undoubtedly comfortable," Conrad, 578 F. Supp. 2d at 1037, to a location that was as yet unknown to the agents, the Chicago Apartment. He was likely as or more comfortable there, and thus in a better position to decide whether to stand on his constitutional rights there. Furthermore, because the Chicago Apartment was independently protected under the Fourth Amendment, extending the scope of the exclusion would have little additional deterrent effect. Cf. Harris, 495 U.S. at 20 ("Even though we decline to suppress statements made outside the home following a Payton violation, the principal incentive to obey Payton still obtains: the police know that a warrantless entry will lead to the suppression of any evidence found, or statements taken, inside the home. If we did suppress statements like Harris', moreover, the incremental deterrent value would be minimal.").

Although the district court did not explicitly rely on it for this second factor, we also attach particular significance to another, rather unusual, circumstance. Mr. Conrad not only could use his cell phone to obtain advice about his predicament, but he actually did—and was, as the district court found, specifically told by his father "not to talk to the officers." Conrad, 578 F. Supp. 2d at 1025. While he suggests that his decision to ignore that advice was in recognition that he had already confessed to so much that he had no choice but to continue, the district court found, and he does not contest, that his statements were voluntary. Id. at 1036-37. The voluntariness of his statements—made despite superfluous Miranda warnings, a specific warning from his father, and after an hour to think in the car and twenty minutes to think while tending to his cats and showing off music equipment—help establish that his conduct at the Chicago Apartment was "sufficiently an act of free will to purge the primary taint of the unlawful invasion." Wong Sun v. United States, 371 U.S. 471, 486 (1963) (footnote omitted).

GENEVA (AP) -- Relatives of the 28 people killed when a bus from Belgium crashed inside a Swiss tunnel faced a heartbreaking task Thursday: identifying the bodies ahead of their repatriation. Most of the dead were children....

A convicted serial sex attacker accused of raping a woman two decades ago claims the alleged victim offered him sex.

A congressional committee has given the federal government a below-average C-minus grade on its ability to track basic information about the processing of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests it receives, according to a report released Thursday.

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee found that 11 of 17 Cabinet-level ...

BAE Systems is to pay at least £29.5m towards educational projects in Tanzania following an agreement with the Serious Fraud Office.

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) -- NATO forces swooped in by helicopter before dawn Saturday to rescue two female foreign aid workers and their two Afghan colleagues who were held by militants for nearly two weeks in a cave in northern Afghanistan....

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — School districts soon will be able to opt out of a common ammonia-treated ground beef filler critics have dubbed "pink slime."

Amid a growing social media storm over so-called "lean finely textured beef," the U.S. Department of Agriculture was set to announce Thursday that starting in ...

More than 26,000 people download an operating system which members of the Anonymous hacker group claim to have created.

Ethiopian forces launch a military attack on three camps inside its long-time rival Eritrea, Ethiopian officials say.

FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) -- A Texas mother whose infant son vanished eight years ago will soon be reunited with him, after authorities found the boy living with his former baby sitter and her family in another part of the state....

Lawrence Lessig says the roots of the problems at Goldman Sachs are its publicly traded stock and the weakening of financial regulation