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The private spacecraft SpaceX Dragon docked with the International Space Station today, a milestone in a new era of commercial space flight.

A rare two-seater car found buried under a cowshed in Gloucestershire wins a Best Vintage Car award.

A rare two-seater car found buried under a cowshed in Gloucestershire wins a Best Vintage Car award.

Whatever the outcome of Facebook's public offering of stock, the social network has already enriched quite a few ? as well as famously offered many hundreds of millions of people a new virtual social world. Yet critics claim that Facebook is hastening the demise of privacy, which as the cliché goes, is already on life support.

The Vatican says it has detained a person - said by sources to be the Pope's butler - on suspicion of leaking confidential documents to the Italian media.

The man held over the 1979 vanishing of six-year-old Etan Patz in New York is charged with one count of second-degree murder.

Defendant was illegally stopped for a traffic offense, but it was not flagrantly illegal. When the defendant’s DL was run, an outstanding warrant was found on him, and he was arrested for that. After surveying the law, the court decides that there is no per se rule requiring the finding of the outstanding warrant be suppressed. It is a concern that its holding would potentially encourage illegal stops, but the court is not persuaded that always is the case. Remanded for further proceedings. State v. Mazuca, 2012 Tex. Crim. App. LEXIS 697 (May 23, 2012) (dissent here and here):

We agree with the Arizona Supreme Court's general assessment. In our view, the first Brown factor is certainly relevant, but, even though it usually favors suppression of evidence that is discovered in the immediate aftermath of an illegal pedestrian or roadside stop, it will sometimes prove to be, in the context of the seizure of physical evidence, "the least important factor"—at least relative to the other two. And while we are hesitant to confirm as a categorical matter that the intervening circumstance of a valid arrest warrant is "of minimal importance"—after all, without it, there can usually be no attenuation of taint when physical evidence is unearthed immediately after an illegal stop—we agree that it should not be overemphasized to the ultimate detriment to the goal of deterrence that animates the exclusionary rule. Finally, we agree that the more important factor is the purposefulness and flagrancy, vel non, of the primary illegal conduct—whether the police have deliberately perpetrated what they know to be an illegal stop in the specific hope or expectation that it will generate some legitimate after-the-fact justification to arrest and/or search, or they have otherwise conducted themselves in particularly egregious disregard of the right to privacy and/or personal integrity that the Fourth Amendment protects. For, when this is the case, to admit the physical evidence because of the fortuity that an arrest warrant happens to come to light before the evidence is discovered perversely serves to encourage, rather than discourage, official misconduct and renders the Fourth Amendment toothless.

To summarize: When police find and seize physical evidence shortly after an illegal stop, in the absence of the discovery of an outstanding arrest warrant in between, that physical evidence should ordinarily be suppressed, even if the police misconduct is not highly purposeful or flagrantly abusive of Fourth Amendment rights. Under this scenario, temporal proximity is the paramount factor. But when an outstanding arrest warrant is discovered between the illegal stop and the seizure of physical evidence, the importance of the temporal proximity factor decreases. Under this scenario, the intervening circumstance is a necessary but never, by itself, wholly determinative factor in the attenuation calculation, and the purposefulness and/or flagrancy of the police misconduct, vel non, becomes of vital importance. To the extent that our pre-Brown analysis on direct appeal in Johnson placed practically exclusive emphasis on the intervening circumstance of an arrest warrant to justify the admission of evidence following an illegal stop, we disapprove it.

. . .

The court of appeals nevertheless affirmed the judgment of the trial court out of what it deemed an overriding concern that a contrary ruling would "encourage" the police to undertake unlawful stops on a pretext, "for the purpose of establishing probable cause or discovering the existence of arrest warrants." We certainly share that concern. However, we think that prioritizing the purposefulness and flagrancy factor satisfactorily addresses that concern without fashioning a rule that would altogether remove the intervening discovery of an arrest warrant as a factor relevant to the attenuation of taint analysis, as the court of appeals opinion tended to do. The court of appeals adopted an approach that would effectively presume purposeful and/or flagrant police misconduct from the fact of the primary illegality alone rather than assessing the character of that illegality, and of any subsequent police conduct, to determine whether it indicates that they actually behaved purposefully or flagrantly in the particular case. We hold that the court of appeals erred to rely upon this de facto presumption to affirm the trial court's ruling on the appellee's motion to suppress. Applying the appropriate analysis today, we hold that the trial court should have denied that motion.

Former England footballer Kevin Beattie sorry over benefits claim

The Olympic torch begins its relay run through Wales on Friday as thousands of people line the route from Monmouth to Cardiff on Friday

British mountaineer Kenton Cool takes a gold medal from the 1924 Winter Olympics to the summit of Mount Everest.

There were no objective manifestations that the place to be searched was actually two residences. It was one with defendant staying as a guest, and the search warrant for the building was particular. United States v. Melton, 2012 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 71151 (E.D. Tenn. February 7, 2012):

Nevertheless, even assuming there were two residences, the Court finds nothing that would have put Investigator Butler on notice that the River Road house contained two dwellings. The house was a single family dwelling, not an apartment building, a duplex, or a townhouse. The affidavit states [Exh. 1, ¶3] that the officers verified the confidential informant's description of the residence. The record is devoid of evidence that the residence had two mailboxes, driveways, or other physical indication that it contained two residences. The confidential informant's statement to Investigator Butler that he lived in the downstairs portion of the residence did not indicate that the informant was renting a separate residence, rather than staying as Ms. Burgess and the Defendant's guest. ...

The reason for defendant’s traffic stop was a reasonable mistake of fact, and defendant was acting furtively when the officer walked up on him. The furtive gestures justified a frisk of the vehicle producing a gun, then a search warrant issued for the vehicle. United States v. Jenkins, 2012 U.S. App. LEXIS 10431 (1st Cir. May 23, 2012).*

Western nations should lift sanctions on Zimbabwe and its President Robert Mugabe, says UN high commissioner for human rights Navi Pillay.

Identification of person to be arrested in the arrest warrant by street name and description and where to find him was particular enough. United States v. Dunaway, 2012 U.S. App. LEXIS 10244 (3d Cir. May 22, 2012):

Here, the warrant did not include the appellant's proper name, Nisia Dunaway, referring to him instead merely as "BLIZZ." But the warrant did provide a physical description of him, including his height, skin color, hair style and color, and build— though not, as Dunaway points out, his age. Further, the warrant specified that he would be found arriving by train in Johnstown at 6:00 pm on April 10, 2010.

The warrant's physical description of "Blizz" and the specific location where he would be found at a precise time were, together, sufficiently particular that an executing officer could identify the appellant with reasonable certainty. Compare Doe, 703 F.2d at 747 (holding that warrant to arrest "John Doe a/k/a "Ed?" was unconstitutional for lack of particularity), with Ferrone, 438 F.2d at 389 (upholding search of defendant's person pursuant to warrant to search "John Doe, a white male with black wavy hair and stocky build observed using the telephone in Apartment 4-C 1806 Patricia Lane, East McKeesport, Pennsylvania"). See also 2 LaFave, supra, § 4.5(e), at 598 n.134 (collecting cases). Thus, we reject Dunaway's contention that the warrant to search his person was so lacking in particularity as to be an unlawful general warrant.

The BBC's Jonathan Amos explains how the SpaceX capsule will dock with the International Space Station.

African Union (AU) forces in Somalia say they have captured a strategic town near the capital, Mogadishu, after Islamist militants pulled out.

An obese teenager, whose house had to be modified so she could be transferred to an ambulance, has spent a "settled night" in hospital say health officials.

Senior Chinese leader Wu Bangguo has cancelled a trip to the UK in protest at David Cameron's meeting with the Dalai Lama.

An IP address traced to defendant’s house was probable cause for a search warrant for computers hooked up to the premises for child pornography. Barrett v. State, 2012 Tex. App. LEXIS 3988 (Tex. App. – Amarillo May 15, 2012).*

The fact that defendant pursued a motion to suppress at the state trial court level shows that he had a full and fair opportunity to litigate the search claim, so he could not make a Fourth Amendment habeas claim. Kidwell v. Martin, 2012 U.S. App. LEXIS 10172 (10th Cir. May 21, 2012).*

(1) It was 1:15 a.m.; (2) criminal activity had recently increased in the area; (3) defendant was standing on the private property of an auto body shop; (4) the shop was closed; (5) no other businesses in the area were open; (6) no other people were nearby; (7) the officer heard a loud crash; (8) defendant fled; and (9) defendant was carrying bags. The officer reasonably concluded that he had reasonable suspicion that a theft had occurred. The motion to suppress was improperly granted. People v. Funez-Paiagua, 2012 CO 37, 2012 Colo. LEXIS 350 (May 21, 2012).*

A guitar manufacturer which has made customised instruments for some of the world's biggest stars, including Bruce Springsteen and Van Morrison, is going into liquidation.

A pupil who made cakes containing cannabis in a cookery lesson is expelled from his Newcastle school.