HughPickens.com writes: Christopher Ingraham reports at the Washington Post that the Department of Justice has announced that it's suspending a controversial asset forfeiture program that allows local police departments to keep a large portion of assets seized from citizens under federal law and funnel it into their own coffers. Asset forfeiture has become an increasingly contentious practice in recent years. It lets police seize and keep cash and property from people who are never convicted — and in many cases, never charged with wrongdoing. Recent reports have found that the use of the practice has exploded in recent years, prompting concern that, in some cases, police are motivated more by profits and less by justice. Criminal justice reformers are cheering the change. "This is a significant deal," says Lee McGrath, legislative counsel at the Institute for Justice. "Local law enforcement responds to incentives. And it's clear that one of the biggest incentives is the relative payout from federal versus state forfeiture. And this announcement by the DOJ changes the playing field for which law state and local [law enforcement] is going to prefer."

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Report by The Times of London newspaper says less than a tenth of tip-offs on the Prevent scheme came from Muslims.

Ishaq Khalil Hassan seen gunned down by border guards shortly after swimming into Egyptian waters from Gaza Strip.

simple web application tests

Dijkstra computations with methods to input/output graph datasets from/to supported file formats

Read individual characters from the keyboard using Win32::Console

Sim::OPT it a tool for detailed metadesign managing parametric explorations in simulation-assisted design and performing optimization by block coordinate descent.

Indian Prime Minister met his Pakistani counterpart during a surprise visit to Lahore on Friday.

Sectarian fear runs deep among Sunni tribesmen who fled Salahuddin where Shia militias are aiding troops battling ISIL.

jones_supa writes: Developer Julian Andres Klode has this week made some improvements to significantly increase the speed of incremental updates with Debian GNU/Linux's APT update system. His optimizations have yielded the apt-get program to suddenly yield 10x performance when compared to the old code. These improvements also make APT with PDiff now faster than the default, non-incremental behavior. Beyond the improvements that landed this week, Julian is still exploring other areas for improving APT update performance. More details via his blog post.

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Fighting results in deaths of 21 soldiers in Taliban stronghold, where government has lost control over four districts.

New submitter writes: I just replaced my dishwasher with a basic, inexpensive Sears model. It works fine, but only has 3 different wash cycles. I'm betting that the code to manage more cycles (as in more-expensive models) is already in the microcontroller and just needs inputs to select it. Is there any information available on this? Beyond dishwashers, have you done any useful hacks to household appliances more generally? I'd probably support a Kickstarter project that adds nice wireless notifications to my oven, clothes washer, and dishwasher.

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The Steam bug that allowed users to see other users' account details may not have been as harmful as it first appeared. Valve said in a statement (reported on Mashable) that while cached data showed usernames, "sensitive details such as credit card numbers are automatically censored on user account pages, which mitigates the potential harm of someone having seen your personal data." From Mashable's report: "Steam is back up and running without any known issues," Valve told Game Informer in a statement. "As a result of a configuration change earlier today, a caching issue allowed some users to randomly see pages generated for other users for a period of less than an hour. This issue has since been resolved. We believe no unauthorized actions were allowed on accounts beyond the viewing of cached page information and no additional action is required by users."

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Tourist flow dries up amid crisis but refugees provide alternate source of income for vendors on Mediterranean islands.

Abe could become Japan's third-longest serving prime minister if he stays in power until 2018.