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While there were similarities between the lynchings of blacks and Mexicans, there were also clear differences. One was that local authorities and deputized citizens played particularly conspicuous roles in mob violence against Mexicans.

Between 1915 and 1918, vigilantes, local law officers and Texas Rangers executed, without due process, unknown thousands of Mexicans for their alleged role in a revolutionary uprising known as the Plan de San Diego.

White fears of Mexican revolutionary violence exploded in July and August 1915, after Mexican raiders committed a series of assaults on the economic infrastructure of the Lower Rio Grande Valley in resistance to white dominance. The raids unleashed a bloody wave of retaliatory action amid a climate of intense paranoia.

While there are certainly instances in the history of the American South where law officers colluded in mob action, the level of engagement by local and state authorities in the reaction to the Plan de San Diego was remarkable

Historians have often ascribed to the South a distinctiveness that has set it apart from the rest of the United States. In so doing, they have created the impression of a peculiarly benighted region plagued by unparalleled levels of racial violence. The story of mob violence against Mexicans in the Southwest compels us to rethink the history of lynching

Any Democrat would try to preserve the 2010 financial reform, which has recently been looking much more effective than critics suggested. Any Republican would seek to roll it back, eliminating both consumer protection and the extra regulation applied to large, “systemically important” financial institutions.

And any Democrat would try to move forward on climate policy, through executive action if necessary, while any Republican — whether or not he is an outright climate-science denialist — would block efforts to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

How did the parties get this far apart? Political scientists suggest that it has a lot to do with income inequality. As the wealthy grow richer compared with everyone else, their policy preferences have moved to the right — and they have pulled the Republican Party ever further in their direction. Meanwhile, the influence of big money on Democrats has at least eroded a bit, now that Wall Street, furious over regulations and modest tax hikes, has deserted the party en masse. The result is a level of political polarization not seen since the Civil War.

George W. Bush, by contrast, was determined to be a “game changer.” Even as a candidate, notes former speechwriter Michael Gerson, “[T]he governor consistently pushed his policy team to ‘think big’; his most damning characterization of any proposal was, ‘This is small ball.’”

After 9/11, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz pushed for an attack on Iraq, arguing that the true terrorist threat lay not with Al Qaeda but with terrorism’s alleged state sponsors. But Bush could have overruled them. Secretary of State Colin Powell opposed war with Iraq, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice expressed no strong position. Counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke considered the idea insane.

The reason Bush sided with Cheney and company, I suspect, is because attacking Iraq rather than stopping with the invasion of Afghanistan was the bigger, bolder move. During post-9/11 discussions, Bush often said he didn’t want to “pound sand,” as he believed Bill Clinton had done in response to previous terrorist attacks or “swat flies.” He repeatedly described the “war on terror” as a struggle on the magnitude of the Cold War and World War II.

Bush never tempered this grandiosity with a serious inquiry into the risks. “I’m not a textbook player. I’m a gut player,” he told his National Security Council two weeks after the attacks. According to Condoleezza Rice, there was little Bush disliked more than being told that a foreign policy issue was “complex.” And he didn’t see invading Iraq as particularly complex, in part, according to Iraqi exiles who met the President in January 2003, because he seemed unaware that Iraq was divided between Sunni and Shia Muslims.

"The whole suicide bombing network and its supporters were arrested in the 48 hours following the explosion," Mashnuq said.

Beirut-based political analyst Ali Rizk told Al Jazeera that the bombings signal a shift in ISIL's tactics.

"The Beirut bombing is also an indication that the idea of Islamic caliphate, as envisioned by ISIL, is facing major reality checks, and is failing apart," he added, explaining that the attacks on foreign lands are because the group is failing to maintain power in its previous strongholds in Syria and Iraq.

"Those killed in the Beirut bombing, many of whom were children and the elderly, have paid an unnecessary price," Meqdad said. "ISIL is engaged in terrorism only to defame the good name of Islam and it is serving only those who wish to keep Islam stigmatised by the terrorism label."

Defence lawyers said the pair had given false confessions under torture in close-door interrogations, an allegation denied by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Shin Bet security agency.

"I doubt such confessions will stand up in court," lawyer Hai Haber told reporters. "We know there's no significant external evidence linking the suspects to this incident."

The attack in Duma village and ensuing Israeli investigation laid bare fissures in Netanyahu's coalition government, where one ultra-nationalist partner voiced misgivings about the handling of Jewish suspects.Thirteen other Israeli Jews, most of them minors, were also indicted for hate crimes, including assaulting a Palestinian, vandalism of Arab property and setting fire to a church.

Referred to in Israel as "price-tag attacks", such offences have usually been carried out in what the attackers say are reprisals for Palestinian violence against Israelis or government curbs on unauthorized West Bank settlement building.

Saad Dawabsheh's brother Naser said he hoped the defendants would receive the maximum penalty, but was skeptical of Israel's seriousness in prosecuting the case."We have no trust in the Israeli judiciary. They would not have launched an investigation were it not for the international pressure on them," he said, accusing the government of effectively "support(ing) the terrorism conducted by (West Bank) settlers against our people".

The time it has taken Israel to crack down on the Jewish militants, compared to the speedy and sometimes lethal response by state security forces to similar actions by Arabs, has angered Palestinians, contributing to a wave of stabbings, car-rammings and shooting attacks against Israelis since Oct. 1.

Twenty-one Israelis and a U.S. citizen have died in the latest bloodshed, a number that will rise if police deem a Tel Aviv shooting that killed two people on Friday as a pro-Palestinian attack. The gunman, an Israeli Arab, is at large. Israeli forces or armed civilians have killed at least 132 Palestinians, 82 of whom authorities described as assailants. Most of the others were killed in clashes with security forces.

Israeli officials said their investigation into the attacks by far-right Jews were hampered by the suspects' operating in small, tight-knit cells and eluding electronic surveillance.Netanyau said the indictments demonstrated the rule of law in Israel, telling his cabinet in broadcast remarks: "We oppose murder of all kinds. We oppose violence of all kinds."

If that comparison sounds overwrought, consider the words of Denny Gioia, a management professor at Penn State who, in the early 1970s, was the coordinator of product recalls at Ford. At the time, the Ford Pinto was showing a tendency to explode when hit from behind, incinerating passengers. Twice, Gioia and his team elected not to recall the car—a fact that, when revealed to his M.B.A. students, goes off like a bomb. “Before I went to Ford I would have argued strongly that Ford had an ethical obligation to recall,” he wrote in the Journal of Business Ethics some 17 years after he’d left the company. “I now argue and teach that Ford had an ethical obligation to recall. But, while I was there, I perceived no strong obligation to recall and I remember no strong ethical overtones to the case whatsoever.”

Executives are bombarded with information. To ease the cognitive load, they rely on a set of unwritten scripts imported from the organization around them. You could even define corporate culture as a collection of scripts.

back to Volkswagen. You cannot unconsciously install a “defeat device” into hundreds of thousands of cars. You need to be sneaky, and thus deliberate.

The most troubling thing, says Vaughan, is the way scripts “expand like an elastic waistband” to accommodate more and more divergence.

Embarrassed and unable to overturn the script they themselves had built in the preceding years, Morton-Thiokol’s brass buckled. The “no launch” recommendation was reversed to “launch.”

“It’s like losing your virginity,” a NASA teleconference participant later told Vaughan. “Once you’ve done it, you can’t go back.” If you try, you face a credibility spiral: Were you lying then or are you lying now?

Scripts are undoubtedly efficient. Managers don’t have to muddle through each new problem afresh, Gioia wrote, because “the mode of handling such problems has already been worked out in advance.” But therein lies the danger. Scripts can be flawed, and grow more so over time, yet they discourage active analysis

the final decision to deceive was, on an individual level, rational—the logical end to a long sequence.

This sequence of events fits a pattern that appears and reappears in corporate-misconduct cases, beginning with the fantastic commitments made from on high.

All of which placed personnel in a position of extreme strain.

We know what strain does to people. Even without it, they tend to underestimate the probability of future bad events. Put them under emotional stress, some research suggests, and this tendency gets amplified. People will favor decisions that preempt short-term social discomfort even at the cost of heightened long-term risk. Faced with the immediate certainty of a boss’s wrath or the distant possibility of blowback from a faceless agency, many will focus mostly on the former.

What James Burke, Johnson & Johnson’s CEO, did was anticipate the possible results of these pressures, well before they built up. He shared Henry James’s “imagination of disaster.” And it’s why he introduced, if you will, a set of counterscripts. It was a conscious effort to tinker with the unconscious criteria by which decisions at his company were made. The result was an incremental descent into integrity, a slide toward soundness, and the normalization of referencing “Our Credo” in situations that might otherwise have seemed devoid of ethical content.

This reaction isn’t excusable. But it is predictable.

What we know of Ferdinand Piëch, Volkswagen’s chairman before the scandal, is that he was no James Burke. At a 2008 corruption trial that sent one VW executive to jail, Piëch referred to alleged widespread use of VW funds on prostitutes as mere “irregularities,” and chided a lawyer for mispronouncing Lamborghini. (“Those who can’t afford one should say it properly” were his precise words.) This was around the time the emissions cheating began.

“Culture starts at the top,” a businessman recently said in an interview with the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners. “But it doesn’t start at the top with pretty statements. Employees will see through empty rhetoric and will emulate the nature of top-management decision making … A robust ‘code of conduct’ can be emasculated by one action of the CEO or CFO.”

Many think Mr Cunha could be next. His name has cropped up repeatedly in the context of the affair.

A charismatic populist, Mr Collor’s main sins were a failure to quash hyperinflation—and

tion—and

Brazil has been here before. In 1992 Fernando Collor, Brazil’s first directly elected president after two decades of military rule, was impeached over corruption two years into his term (he was subsequently cleared of the charges on a technicality). A charismatic populist, Mr Collor’s main sins were a failure to quash hyperinflation—and,

Ms Rousseff appears finally to have grasped that budgetary belt-tightening is the first step to recovery. But, like Mr Collor, she lacks the skill to negotiate Brasília’s fragmented political landscape.

And Ms Rousseff will no doubt be more adamant than ever that she is not stepping down of her own accord, as some in the opposition had been hoping. Responding calmly to Mr Cunha, she spoke of her “indignation”.

Sadly, the furore will divert Brazilian politicians’ already scattered attention away from fixing the country’s many problems, starting with the ballooning budget deficit. History may judge this to be Mr Cunha’s greatest sin.

Ms. Howerton herself can delete the comments under her own YouTube video. On Twitter, some of the accounts that have attacked Ms. Howerton and her family have been suspended; some have not. Twitter makes the determination about what constitutes hate or harassment

Her reaction encourages Danielle Citron, a professor of law at the University of Maryland and the author of “Hate Crimes in Cyberspace,” who notes that the support of the overall online community is key. Anyone who makes a living writing and speaking “can catch the attention of a hate group anytime,” she said, and shouldn’t be expected to shoulder the blame for the attacks. “There is nothing that constitutes a meaningful provocation for something like this,” she said. The more we recognize that, the less destructive these kinds of attacks will be.

It isn’t just the racist attacks that could silence Ms. Howerton, and deter other parents from writing and sharing their family experiences online. It’s the shame and fear that accompanies those attacks — the sense of being judged for putting their children’s images at risk, and the fear that their children will suffer as a result. The racist attacks themselves may be inevitable, but the judgment is not.

With the stories, we’re talking about people. Without them, it’s all abstract. To have a real conversation about race, we need some people willing to stand up and take a bigger risk. To support that conversation, the rest of us need to stand with them.

A year after the DOJ announced the findings of its investigation into the Ferguson Police Department, Lynch said the people of Ferguson should not have to wait any longer for "their city to adopt an agreement that would protect their rights and keep them safe." She said the violations by the police and courts in Ferguson "were not only egregious — they were routine."

She also said she was disappointed that Ferguson had not approved the deal, as the goal of the negotiation was to avoid litigation.

"A few weeks ago, the Department of Justice and Ferguson's own negotiators came to an agreement that was both fair and cost-effective — and that would provide all the residents of Ferguson the constitutional and effective policing and court practices guaranteed to all Americans. As agreed, it was presented to the Ferguson City Council for approval or rejection. And last night, the city council rejected the consent decree approved by their own negotiators. Their decision leaves us no further choice."

The lawsuit alleges a "pattern or practice of law enforcement conduct that violates the First, Fourth and 14th Amendments of the Constitution and federal civil rights laws," Lynch said. "We intend to aggressively prosecute this case and I have no doubt that we will prevail."

Within hours, Turkish warplanes bombed bases in northern Iraq of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has waged a three-decade insurgency against the Turkish state and which Davutoglu accused of collaborating in the car bombing.

Turkey's armed forces would continue their shelling of recent days of YPG positions in northern Syria, Davutoglu said, promising that those responsible would "pay the price".

President Tayyip Erdogan also said initial findings suggested the Syrian Kurdish militia and the PKK were behind the bombing and said that 14 people had been detained.

The co-leader of the YPG's political wing denied that the affiliated YPG perpetrated the Ankara bombing and said Turkey was using the attack to justify an escalation in fighting in northern Syria.

The attack was the latest in a series of bombings in the past year mostly blamed on Islamic State militants.

Turkey is getting dragged ever deeper into the war in neighboring Syria and is trying to contain some of the fiercest violence in decades in its predominantly Kurdish southeast.

The political arm of the YPG, denied involvement in the bombing, while a senior member of the PKK said he did not know who was responsible.

Hundreds of Syrian rebels with weapons and vehicles have re-entered Syria from Turkey over the last week to reinforce insurgents fending off the Kurdish-led assault on Azaz, rebel sources said on Thursday.

The YPG militia, regarded by Ankara as a hostile insurgent force deeply linked to the PKK, has taken advantage in recent weeks of a major Syrian army offensive around the northern city of Aleppo, backed by Russian air strikes, to seize ground from Syrian rebels near the Turkish border.

Turkey has said its shelling of YPG positions is a response, within its rules of engagement, to hostile fire coming across the border into Turkey, something Muslim also denied.

Turkey has been battling PKK militants in its own southeast, where a 2-1/2 year ceasefire collapsed last July and pitched the region into its worst bloodshed since the 1990s. Six soldiers were killed and one wounded on Thursday when a remote-controlled handmade bomb hit their vehicle, the military said.

Davutoglu named the suicide bomber as Salih Necar, born in 1992 and from the Hasakah region of northern Syria, and said he was a member of the YPG.

A senior security official said the alleged bomber had entered Turkey from Syria in July 2014, although he may have crossed the border illegally multiple times before that, and said he had contact with the PKK and Syrian intelligence.

Davutoglu also accused the Syrian government of a hand in the Ankara bombing and warned Russia, whose air strikes in northern Syria have helped the YPG to advance, against using the Kurdish militant group against Turkey.

Russian President Vladimir Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told a teleconference with reporters that the Kremlin condemned the bombing "in the strongest possible terms".

money was supposed to be used to help train and support poor Kenyan athletes who dream of running their way out of poverty.

immediately sucked out of the federation’s bank account by a handful of Kenyan officials and kept off the books.

does not appear to be under investigation by the United States authorities.

all three Kenyan athletics officials accused of taking money from Nike have been suspended

For more than 20 years, Nike Inc. has been paying the Kenyan national runners’ association millions of dollars in exchange for the Kenyans wearing Nike’s signature swoosh, superb advertising in the running world.

Ethiopian runners, who also excel at middle- and long-distance races, have a sponsorship agreement with Adidas, but an official there said their contract contained no commitment bonus

In a sworn statement provided to Kenyan investigators, the former assistant said the $500,000 commitment bonus was “bribe money from Nike” so that the top officials could pay back the $200,000 from the scuttled deal with the Chinese company and then make even more by agreeing to sign up again with Nike.

Nearly every day there seems to be allegations of some new scandal: a government ministry buying plastic pens for $85 apiece, a Supreme Court judge taking a $2 million bribe, questions about what exactly happened to the proceeds of a multibillion-dollar bond deal.

Kenyan athletes were so outraged when they learned in November that hundreds of thousands of dollars from Nike had been stolen by their bigwigs that they staged a protest at their headquarters in Nairobi, with elite athletes camped out in the grass and holding up signs that read “blood sucers.” (Some of the runners never finished school.) Advertisement Continue reading the main story

But those complaints may have been a ruse by Kenyan officials to get out of the Nike contract so they could receive a bribe from another company, said a member of the executive board of Kenya’s track and field federation, known as Athletics Kenya.

The sports-marketing agent who made the payment, Papa Massata Diack, was recently banned for life by the International Association of Athletics Federations, a global governing body for track and field.

After they received a letter from a Nike lawyer saying there were no legal grounds to terminate the contract, the Kenyan officials abruptly changed course.

They negotiated a new contract in which Nike agreed to pay Athletics Kenya an annual sponsorship fee of $1.3 million to $1.5 million — plus $100,000 honorariums each year and a one-time $500,000 “commitment bonus.”

Nike executives refused to discuss the contract, issuing a short statement that the money paid to Athletics Kenya was supposed to support the athletes. It said that Nike conducted business with integrity and that “we are cooperating with the local authorities in their investigation,” a point the Kenyan detectives dispute.

Western nations have threatened sanctions, and the United States government has been especially vocal about corruption, with White House officials unveiling a 29-point plan to root it out.

He said corruption in the athletics federation was so ingrained and so brazen that officials routinely extorted money from athletes who failed drug tests. He also said the organization’s chairman, Isaiah Kiplagat, had asked Nike to wire the bonus directly to his personal account, a request that Nike refused.

Within days, according to bank records, the $500,000 was withdrawn by Athletics Kenya’s top officials. There were no major track and field activities going on at the time, and the board member and the former administrative assistant said just about all of the money had been concealed from Athletics Kenya’s executive committee, including $200,000 sent to a bank account in Hong Kong.

Analysts said this case was especially tricky because it did not appear to fall under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the American law that covers crimes involving American companies and foreign government officials.

The Kenyan running association, while it receives some government money, is not a Kenyan government agency.

He noted that sports federations, like Athletics Kenya and FIFA, international soccer’s governing body, which is embroiled in its own corruption saga, often fell between the cracks of the rules that governed businesses, public agencies and traditional nonprofit organizations, even though sports federations have qualities of all three.

Two others were sentenced to death along with him and all were ordered to repay embezzled funds. The ruling can be appealed.

Before the oil embargo imposed by the EU in 2012, one in every five barrels of crude Iran exported was sold to refineries in Europe.

"We believe that Babak Zanjani in this case is just a debtor," the lawyer said.

Played a key role in helping Iran get around sanctions to sell oil abroad during the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

Born in Tehran, attended a Turkish university and became a driver for Iran's central bank head in 1999, when he started out in currency exchange

He reciprocated in kind. “How do you describe coming into a warm room from out of the cold?” he once said. “Never waking up bored? The only thing wrong is, she’s made a coward out of me. Whenever she’s out of sight, I’m a worrier about her.”

But this was a convention in a day when women were not encouraged to have careers outside the home. In his book “Reagan’s America: Innocents At Home,” Garry Wills disputed the prevalent view that Miss Davis had just been marking time in Hollywood while waiting for a man. She was “the steady woman,” he wrote, who in most of her 11 films had held her own with accomplished actors.

In the late 1940s, Hollywood was in the grip of a “Red Scare,” prompted by government investigations into accusations of Communist influence in the film industry. In October 1949, the name “Nancy Davis” appeared in a Hollywood newspaper on a list of signers of a supporting brief urging the Supreme Court to overturn the convictions of two screenwriters who had been blacklisted after being found guilty of contempt for refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee.Such newspaper mentions could mean the end of a career, and Nancy Davis sought help from her friend Mervyn LeRoy, who had directed her in “East Side, West Side.” LeRoy found it was a case of mistaken identity: another Nancy Davis had worked in what he called “leftist theater.” He offered to call Ronald Reagan, president of the Screen Actors Guild, to make sure there would be no problems in the future. Instead, Miss Davis insisted that LeRoy set up a meeting with Mr. Reagan.

From the first, Mrs. Reagan was part of the campaign planning. “They were a team,” said Stuart Spencer, who with Bill Roberts managed the Reagan campaign. New to politics, she said little at first. But Mr. Spencer found her “a quick learner, always absorbing.” Before long she was peppering Mr. Roberts and Mr. Spencer about their strategy and tactics.

The mansion episode, and Mrs. Reagan’s unalloyed preference for Southern California, aroused parochial resentment in Sacramento. She in turn disliked the city’s locker-room political culture, which required her to socialize with the wives of legislators who had insulted her husband. She bristled at press scrutiny, which became more intense after Joan Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, wrote an unflattering article, “Pretty Nancy,” in The Saturday Evening Post in 1968. The article described Mrs. Reagan’s famous smile as a study in frozen insecurity.

Mr. Reagan decided to debate and did so well that he surged ahead in the polls and won convincingly a week later.

After the assassination attempt, Mrs. Reagan turned to Joan Quigley, a San Francisco astrologer, who claimed to have predicted that March 30 would be a “bad day” for the president. Her relationship with Ms. Quigley “began as a crutch,” Mrs. Reagan wrote, “one of several ways I tried to alleviate my anxiety about Ronnie.” Within a year, it was a habit. Mrs. Reagan conversed with Ms. Quigley by telephone and passed on the information she received about favorable and unfavorable days to Mr. Deaver, the presidential assistant, and later to the White House chief of staff, Donald Regan, for use in scheduling.

Mr. Regan disclosed Mrs. Reagan’s astrological bent in his 1988 book, “For the Record: From Wall Street to Washington,” asserting that the Quigley information created a chaotic situation for White House schedulers. Mrs. Reagan said that no political decisions had been made based on the astrologist’s advice, nor did Mr. Regan allege that any had been.But the disc

losure was nonetheless embarrassing to Mrs. Reagan; she and many commentators saw it as an act of revenge for the role she had played in forcing Mr. Regan out after the Iran-contra disclosures. Mrs. Reagan’s low opinion of Mr. Regan was well known; she had said tartly that he “liked the sound of chief but not of staff.”

The Iraqi government and much of its military officer corps are mostly made up of Shi’a Muslims, whereas much of the areas ISIS has retained in Iraq are predominantly Sunni

the Iraqi military forces are often operating in areas where the local population may be more willing to tolerate, or even support ISIS

The U.S.-led coalition against ISIS expanded its aggressive bombing campaign against the group into Syria in September 2014 and has bombarded the terror group virtually daily since.

ISIS primarily focused its attention on its regional ambitions prior to the U.S.-led bombing campaig

One of the gunmen in a dual terror attack in Paris in January 2015 claimed that he was part of ISIS, though the other shooters in that attack were linked to an al Qaeda affiliate.

authorities in the U.S. announced they had arrested an Ohio man and ISIS supporter who planned to bomb the U.S. Capitol.

, Western intelligence agencies are concerned about those who travel to Syria and Iraq to fight with ISIS before coming back home.

"The way my wife appeared, wearing a full niqab, the way I am wearing a turban on my head, wearing an Islamic dress. "Because people talk and say rubbish things about you, about your wife. Eyes chasing you everywhere you go.

Aamer denies he was an associate of terrorism suspects 20 years ago - but freely admits having attending talks in London given by Abu Qatada, a radical preacher who, as years went by, became increasingly extreme.

"I used to sit and listen to his speeches. And I know he's not a bad guy, that's exactly what I know [from the time]. According to my own knowledge he got nothing to do with bin Laden and he never, he never preached about him in his circles. And he never encouraged anybody to go to Afghanistan."

Soon after the 9/11 attacks on America, Aamer was detained in Afghanistan by bounty hunters tracking down and handing over possible al-Qaeda suspects.

He was first held by US forces at Bagram air force base near Kabul. He says a British intelligence officer was in the room when his head was slammed into a wall.

He was then taken to Kandahar air field where the treatment got "a lot worse", with US soldiers "given the right to do anything they want"."They have something called 'welcoming party'. Where they really beat you up so that while you are still on the concrete, on the airport, before even they move you to check you and process your case. They did it for two, three hours and truly, truly, that's one of the times where I felt like I'm not going to live that night."

He says he was forced to stay awake for nine days, denied food, doused in freezing water and made to stand on concrete in the winter for 16 hours a day. One interrogator threatened to sexually assault his then-five-year-old daughter, he says.

"That was the hardest thing, the hardest thing that I ever hear. If you don't start talking, we will rape your daughter and you will hear her crying 'daddy, daddy'. That was completely inhumane. It was worse than the beating as well, worse than everything, just thinking of my daughter and I just sat there silent completely."

"A government spokesman says the UK stands 'firmly against' abuse, adding: 'We do not participate in, solicit, encourage or condone the use of torture or cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment or punishment for any purpose.' The problem is, nobody knows if, in the wake of 9/11, some UK officials did collude in such behaviour.

More than 10 police personnel arrived at the house in the Sydney suburb of Gordon at about 1.30pm. Two police staff wearing white gloves could be seen from the street searching the cupboards and surfaces of the garage. At least three more were seen from the front door.

The Australian Federal police said in a statement that the raids were not related to the bitcoin claims. “The AFP can confirm it has conducted search warrants to assist the Australian Taxation Office at a residence in Gordon and a business premises in Ryde, Sydney. This matter is unrelated to recent media reporting regarding the digital currency bitcoin.”