Paris returns to cafes as hunt for terror suspects continues

A week after terrorist attacks shattered a French Friday evening, Parisians grasped for the things they love -- cafes and bistros.

The search for normalcy in a city shaken to its core persisted even as suspects remained on the run and investigators desperately fought to keep terrorists from striking again.

Back to the bar

The cafes and bistros of Paris are the French capital's living room. 

At the coaxing of President Francois Hollande and restaurateurs, Parisians have rallied behind the hastag #TousAuBistrot, basically "everyone to the bistro" or "back to the bar."

"What would our country be without its cafes, concerts, sport events, museums?" Hollande asked this week.

Keeping a wary eye on developments, Parisians sipped their wine and nibbled on quiche.

Ringleader dead

They did so knowing French authorities had identified the body of Abdelhamid Abaaoud. He was killed during a dramatic raid that shook the Saint-Denis neighborhood and collapsed an entire floor of an apartment building. But investigators say their work is far from finished.

A series of raids in Belgium and a search of a home on the outskirts of Paris on Thursday were the latest signs of investigators' efforts to piece together -- and take down -- the network of terrorists behind the attacks before they can strike again.

Official sources in France have also identified a woman who blew herself up during the raid: 26-year-old Hasna Ait Boulahcen, a relative of Abaaoud.

Investigators haven't revealed much about the suicide bomber. Friends of her family in their hometown of Aulnay-sous-Bois, on the northeastern outskirts of Paris, said she had lived there until recently. Residents in the area told CNN authorities had taken her mother and brother into custody. And the Paris prosecutor's office told CNN that police were searching the mother's home.

Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said Abaaoud "played a decisive role" in the Paris attacks and played a part in four of six terror attacks foiled since spring, with one alleged jihadist claiming Abaaoud had trained him personally.

Facebook's New Tool To Ease A Broken Heart

optional feature will allow members to opt out of seeing pictures and posts made by their former spouse or lover on the website.

It works after people change their relationship status to reflect the break-up, allowing users to remove their name from previous posts that link them to their former partner.

Users will be able to edit who can see their past posts with an ex, untag themselves from posts with that person and their ex-partner will no longer be suggested when a user is writing a new message or tagging photos.

Designed for those who are not quite ready to "unfriend" their ex-partner - or even block them - the feature will be tested on mobile devices in the US before Facebook decides whether to offer it to all 1.5 billion users worldwide.

Facebook product manager Kelly Winters says: "Facebook is a place for sharing life's important moments, which for many people include their romantic relationships.

"Starting today, we are testing tools to help people manage how they interact with their former partners on Facebook after a relationship has ended.

"This work is part of our ongoing effort to develop resources for people who may be going through difficult moments in their lives.

"We hope these tools will help people end relationships on Facebook with greater ease, comfort and sense of control."

The 10 best stores for Black Friday deals

This holiday season, each American shopper will spend an average of $594.80 on gifts for family and friends, according to the National Retail Federation.

The annual deluge of competing Black Friday ads, promotions and coupons from retail chains and e-commerce sites alike can make it tough to figure out where best to apportion that budget.

With just over a week to go until this year’s Black Friday shopping bonanza, WalletHub is here to help.

Data gurus from the personal finance site surveyed 8,000 Black Friday ad scans from 30 of the biggest U.S. retailers, including those known for ‘doorbuster’ deals over the Thanksgiving weekend like Walmart and Best Buy.

WalletHub calculated the average discount offered by each of these companies on Black Friday, weighted based on the pre-discounted price of each sale item in order to give more credit to stores discounting higher-ticket products like electronics or jewelry.

Department store chain JCPenney leads the pack, with an average discount of 68%. Kohl'scomes in second with an average savings of 66.7% off.

Here are the top ten stores for Black Friday deals, according to WalletHub’s data: 

JCPenney 68.0%

Kohl’s 66.7%

Stage 63.9%

Groupon 63.7%

Belk 59.5%

Macy’s 56.0%

Kmart 50.1%

Panasonic 47.0%

Fred Meyer 45.3%

Office Depot and OfficeMax 42.8%

Perhaps surprisingly, big-box giant Walmart comes in fairly far down the list, at number 23 with an average discount of 30.1%.

Amazon, which has been promoting early access Black Friday deals for Prime members, ranks 28th out of 30 with an average 25.8% off.

Walmart’s members-only subsidiary Sam’s Club and its competitor Costco round out the list at 29 and 30 respectively.

France PM says Paris attacks ringleader used migrant crisis

France’s Prime Minister Manuel Valls said Friday some of the Paris attackers, including the mastermind Abdelhamid Abaaoud, exploited the Syrian refugee crisis to slip into the country unnoticed.

Abaaoud, the ringleader behind last Friday’s bombings and shootings in the French capital that killed 129 people, was able to get into Europe undeterred, according to French authorities. The 28-year-old had also been linked to several plots around France including a thwarted attack by a gunman on a high-speed train in August.

French officials confirmed Thursday Abaaoud was killed in an anti-terror raid Wednesday in a suburb north of Paris. He was identified from skin samples after the Saint-Denis apartment raid.

Abaaoud had claimed he successfully moved back and forth from Europe to Syria coordinating terror attacks, and narrowly escaped a January police raid in the Belgian city of Verviers. “Allah blinded their vision and I was able to leave... despite being chased after by so many intelligence agencies," he told the ISIS magazine Dabiq.

Two counterterrorism officials told Fox News on Thursday that Abaaoud is comparable to Mohammed Atta – the “tactical guy” who identified and pulled together the operatives.

Police say they launched Wednesday's operation after receiving information from tapped phone calls, surveillance and tipoffs suggesting that Abaaoud was holed up in the apartment. Investigators said it was still unclear how he died. Eight other people were arrested.

French authorities did not know he was in Europe before the massacre, France's interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve said Thursday. He demanded Europe do everything in its power to "vanquish terrorism."

Valls said some of the Paris attackers had taken advantage of the massive influx of migrants into Europe fleeing war in the Middle East.

"These individuals took advantage of the refugee crisis ... of the chaos, perhaps, for some of them to slip in" to France, he told French TV. "Others were in Belgium already. And others, I must remind you, were in France."

Valls also warned that the passport-free Schengen zone is a risk of Europe fails to “take responsibility” over border controls, according to Sky News. European Union ministers are expected to meet in Brussels where they are expected to tighten border security in each of the 26-member nations.

Hasna Aitboulahcen, described as Abaaoud’s cousin, was also killed in the anti-terror raid Wednesday when she activated a suicide belt and blew herself up.

Police now turn their attention to two other suspects who are believed to have participated in the attacks. Police have identified one of them as Salah Abdeslam, who grew up in the same Belgian district as Abaaoud, the Brussels suburb of Molenbeek.

There was no indication Abdeslam escaped to neighboring Spain or tried to do so, Spanish Interior Miniister Jorge Fernandez Diaz said. He told Antena 3 television that security officials from several countries were called together in Paris to discuss the possibility that Abdeslam might try to cross into a country bordering France.

Spanish police say French authorities sent a bulletin to officers across Europe asking them to watch out for a Citroen Xsara car that could be carrying Abdeslam.

Abaaoud's death may provide some relief not only for Europeans, but also for his own family. “We are praying that Abdelhamid really is dead,” his sister, Yasmina, said last year, The New York Times reported. At the time, there was word he died fighting for ISIS, but it eventually emerged that he escaped Syria for Europe.

His own father, Omar, said the jihadi "dishonored" his family, the Times added.

The Doomsday Scam

he hunt for the ultimate weapon began in January 2014, when Abu Omar, a smuggler who fills  shopping lists for the Islamic State, met a jihadist commander in Tal Abyad, a Syrian town near the Turkish border. The Islamic State had raised its black flag over Tal Abyad several days before, and the commander, a former cigarette vendor known as Timsah, Arabic for ‘‘crocodile,’’ was the area’s new security chief. The Crocodile had an order to place, which he said he had received from his bosses in Mosul, a city in northwestern Iraq that the Islamic State would later overrun.

Abu Omar, a Syrian whose wispy beard hinted at his jihadist sympathies, was young, wiry and adaptive. Since war erupted in Syria in 2011, he had taken many noms de guerre — including Abu Omar — and found a niche for himself as a freelance informant and trader for hire in the extremist underground. By the time he met the Crocodile, he said, he had become a valuable link in the Islamic State’s local supply chain. Working from Sanliurfa, a Turkish city north of the group’s operational hub in Raqqa, Syria, he purchased and delivered many of the common items the martial statelet required: flak jackets, walkie-talkies, mobile phones, medical instruments, satellite antennas, SIM cards and the like. Once, he said, he rounded up 1,500 silver rings with flat faces upon which the world’s most prominent terrorist organization could stamp its logo. Another time, a French jihadist hired him to find a Turkish domestic cat; Syrian cats, it seemed, were not the friendly sort.War materiel or fancy; business was business. The Islamic State had needs, it paid to have them met and moving goods across the border was not especially risky. The smugglers used the same well-established routes by which they had helped foreign fighters reach Syria for at least three years. Turkish border authorities did not have to be eluded, Abu Omar said. They had been co-opted. ‘‘It is easy,’’ he boasted. ‘‘We bought the soldiers.’’

This time, however, the Crocodile had an unusual request: The Islamic State, he said, was shopping for red mercury. Abu Omar knew what this meant. Red mercury — precious and rare, exceptionally dangerous and exorbitantly expensive, its properties unmatched by any compound known to science — was the stuff of doomsday daydreams. According to well-traveled tales of its potency, when detonated in combination with conventional high explosives, red mercury could create the city-flattening blast of a nuclear bomb. In another application, a famous nuclear scientist once suggested it could be used as a component in a neutron bomb small enough to fit in a sandwich-size paper bag.

Abu Omar understood the implications. The Islamic State was seeking a weapon that could do more than strike fear in its enemies. It sought a weapon that could kill its enemies wholesale, instantly changing the character of the war. Imagine a mushroom cloud rising over the fronts of Syria and Iraq. Imagine the jihadists’ foes scattered and ruined, the caliphate expanding and secure.
Imagine the price the Islamic State would pay.
Abu Omar thought he might have a lead. He had a cousin in Syria who told him about red mercury that other jihadists had seized from a corrupt rebel group. Maybe he could arrange a sale. And so soon Abu Omar set out, off for the front lines outside Latakia, a Syrian government stronghold, in pursuit of the gullible man’s shortcut to a nuclear bomb.

To approach the subject of red mercury is to journey into a comic-book universe, a zone where the stubborn facts of science give way to unverifiable claims, fantasy and outright magic, and where villains pursuing the dark promise of a mysterious weapon could be rushing headlong to the end of the world. This is all the more remarkable given the broad agreement among nonproliferation specialists that red mercury, at least as a chemical compound with explosive pop, does not exist.

Legends of red mercury’s powers began circulating by late in the Cold War. But their breakout period came after the Soviet Union’s demise, when disarray and penury settled over the Kremlin’s arms programs. As declining security fueled worries of illicit trafficking, red mercury embedded itself in the lexicon of the freewheeling black-market arms bazaar. Aided by credulous news reports, it became an arms trafficker’s marvelous elixir, a substance that could do almost anything a shady client might need: guide missiles, shield objects from radar, equip a rogue underdog state or terrorist group with weapons rivaling those of a superpower. It was priced accordingly, at hundreds of thousands of dollars a kilogram. With time, the asking price would soar.

As often happens with durable urban legends, the red-mercury meme found just enough public support to assure an unextinguishable life. Chief among its proponents was Samuel T. Cohen, the American physicist and Manhattan Project veteran often called the father of the neutron bomb, who before his death in 2010 spoke vividly of the perils of nuclear terrorism and what he said was poor government preparation for such attacks. Cohen joined the red-mercury bandwagon as it gathered momentum in the early 1990s, staking a lonely position by asserting that the substance could be used to build nuclear weapons of exceptionally small size.

In one edition of his autobiography, he claimed red mercury was manufactured by ‘‘mixing special nuclear materials in very small amounts into the ordinary compound and then inserting the mixture
into a nuclear reactor or bombarding it with a particle-accelerator beam.’’ The result, he said, ‘‘is a remarkable nonexploding high explosive’’ that, when detonated, becomes ‘‘extremely hot, which allows pressures and temperatures to be built up that are capable of igniting the heavy hydrogen and producing a pure-fusion mini neutron bomb.’’ Here was a proliferation threat of an order never before seen.

The establishment largely dismissed him. ‘‘If he did ever reveal evidence, I never saw it,’’ said Peter D. Zimmerman, a nuclear physicist who served as chief scientific adviser for the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency at the time. He added, ‘‘I would have seen it, at that point in history.’’ Jeffrey Lewis, a nonproliferation analyst at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, Calif., put matters less delicately, saying Cohen followed a classic formula for conspiracy theories, mixing ‘‘nonscientific mumbo jumbo’’ with allegations that governments were withholding the truth. ‘‘I could never figure out where Sam Cohen the physicist ended and Sam Cohen the polemicist began,’’ he said.

Russian news organizations in the 1990s nevertheless relayed claims of red mercury’s destructive potential at face value, and foreign news outlets occasionally repeated them, boosting the material’s credibility and mystique. Britain’s Channel 4 elevated the material’s profile with two documentaries — ‘‘Trail of Red Mercury’’ and ‘‘Pocket Neutron’’ — that presented, according to their producers, ‘‘startling evidence that Russian scientists have designed a miniature neutron bomb using a mysterious compound called red mercury.’’ Cohen held a news conference after one broadcast to say it confirmed his fears.

Outside this circle of the faithful, red mercury faced doubters. The substance was almost everything but scientifically verifiable. It was not even reasonably explicable. ‘‘Over all it doesn’t make much sense,’’ an engineer at Los Alamos National Laboratory wrote to a supervisor in 1994. It was also devilishly elusive, turning up in tales of smuggling mafias but never quite finding its way to a law-enforcement body or nuclear agency for proper frisking. When hopeful sellers were caught, substance in hand, it reliably turned out to be something else, sometimes a placebo of chuckle-worthy simplicity: ordinary mercury mixed with dye. The shadowy weaponeer’s little helper, it was the unobtainium of the post-Soviet world.

Among specialists who investigated the claims, the doubts hardened to an unequivocal verdict: Red mercury was a lure, the central prop of a confidence game designed to fleece ignorant buyers. ‘‘Take a bogus material, give it an enigmatic name, exaggerate its physical properties and intended uses, mix in some human greed and intrigue, and voilà: one half-baked scam,’’ the Department of Energy’s Critical Technologies Newsletter declared. In 1998, 15 authors from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which helps maintain the American nuclear-weapons stockpile, published an article in The Journal of Radioanalytical and Nuclear Chemistry that called red mercury ‘‘a relatively notorious nuclear hoax.’’ In 1999, Jane’s Intelligence Review suggested that the scam’s victims may have included Osama bin Laden, whose Qaeda purchasing agents were ‘‘nuclear novices.’’ The most accommodating theory held that red mercury might have been a Soviet code name for something else — maybe lithium-6, a controlled material with an actual use in nuclear weapons — and traffickers repurposed the label for whatever nuclear detritus they were trying to move.

A true believer of the legends might interject that official skepticism in public did not preclude another discussion playing out on classified channels. But when WikiLeaks published American diplomatic cables in 2010 and 2011, snippets of the internal red-mercury dialogue were consistent with the public statements. In 2006, according to one cable, Sri Lanka notified the American Embassy in Colombo of concerns that the Tamil Tigers, a secessionist militant group, had tried to procure the substance. ‘‘Red Mercury is a well-known scam material,’’ a State Department nonproliferation official told the embassy. ‘‘There is nothing to be concerned about.’’

Tiger Woods Net Worth: $700 Million In 2015

Tiger Woods ranks No. 26 on our inaugural list of the top 40 richest entrepreneurs under the age of 40. He is the only athlete to make the cut. Here’s a quick look at the reasons why.

Name: Tiger Woods

Net worth: $700 million

Age: 39 (Woods turns 40 on Dec. 30)

Woods has earned $1.35 billion since turning pro in 1996 with barely 10% of the total derived from prize money on the golf course. The bulk of Woods’ fortune was generated from endorsements with the likes of Accenture, AT&T, Buick, Gatorade, Nike. All of those blue-chip brands have left Woods, but Nike who has stuck by the 14-time Majors winner and pays him more than $20 million a year. Nike built a $711 million-in-sales golf division on the back of Woods. Woods other current partners include Hero MotoCorp, Kowa, MusclePharm, Rolex and Upper Deck.

In addition to his sponsor haul, Woods has a wildly lucrative pension thanks to the PGA Tour’s generous retirement plan. Woods’ net worth did take a hit with his $100 million divorce in 2010 from Elin Nordegren.

All of Google's Confusing, Intertwined Music

Last week, Google launched YouTube Music to a few cheers, a few groans, and a lot of “don’t they already have a music service?” In fact, they have several: Google Play Music and YouTube Red, for starters. But don’t be fooled—they seem separate, but they actually complement one another.

Between the new YouTube Music, recently-unveiled YouTube Red, Google Play Music, and the Google Play Store, no one could blame you for being a little confused about where you should listen to your music and where you should spend your money. Toss the old names for some of these services into the mix, like “YouTube Music Key” (now YouTube Red) and “Google Play Music All Access” (now just Google Play Music and both great examples of how badly Google sucks at naming things) and it’s no wonder people are confused.

Even so, take another look at the big four there and you’ll see they really fall into two categories: YouTube and Google Play. The real question is where you like to get your music and how you like to listen to it. That’ll decide which of these two is best for you. Bonus: If you sign up for one, you get the other included in your subscription.