44 years after conviction, Freedom Rider Sala Udin is pardoned by Obama

President Obama’s decision this week to issue 78 Christmas season pardons — the most of his presidency — should have special meaning for veterans of the civil rights movement.

Among the recipients was former Pittsburgh City Council member Sala Udin, a onetime Freedom Rider who was beaten up registering voters in 1960s Mississippi. But Udin had been haunted for decades by a criminal charge that grew out of his youthful activism: Driving fellow protesters home from the South, he was stopped for speeding in Kentucky and arrested after police found an unloaded shotgun and a jug of moonshine in the car.

“I’m ecstatic,” Udin emailed Yahoo News shortly after he got the call from his lawyer that his long-languishing bid for a pardon had finally been granted by Obama. After waiting patiently for years, Udin had all but given up hope. Only days earlier, amid reports that Obama was contemplating a final round of pardons, Udin had told a friend: “I refuse to allow myself to be optimistic because I don’t want to risk the disappointment. It’s not going to happen.”

Udin, 73, was the subject of a Yahoo News story last year that highlighted Obama’s relatively stingy record of using his constitutional powers to pardon criminal offenders; one critic even called him a pardon “Grinch.” At that point, Obama had issued fewer pardons than any president since James Garfield. (This is separate from Obama’s commutation of sentences, another of his broad clemency powers and one that he has used liberally to reduce the lengthy prison terms of nonviolent drug offenders — a key part of his administration’s initiative for criminal justice reform. Obama separately commuted the sentences of 153 such offenders Monday.)

Jihadi mum kisses tiny daughters, aged seven and nine, goodbye - then sends them off on suicide bomb mission

The harrowing moment a mother kisses her two young daughters goodbye before sending them off on a suicide mission has been captured on camera.

One of the two girls, believed to be aged seven and nine, died after detonating a suicide bomb at a police station shortly after.

The young children are pictured with a bearded male fanatic in one clip, while separate footage shows the cameraman lecturing the two young girls and instructing them how to carry out an attack.

A burka-clad woman, understood to be their mother, clutches the children and affectionately kisses their heads and hands as they stand in a sparse room decorated only by a black and white flag.

The footage shows the male fanatic brainwashing the girls, who are both dressed in woolly hats and scarves.

Berlin manhunt: Police tracking Tunisian suspect

The German police are looking for a Tunisian man after finding an identity document under the driver's seat of the truck that ploughed into a Christmas market on Monday, killing 12 people,according to Der Spiegel.

Der Spiegel, a German news magazine, said the document was in the name of Anis A, born in Tataouine in 1992. The suspect is also believed to go by two false names, it added.

The daily newspaper Bild reported that Anis A was known to the police as a possibly dangerous individual and part of a large Islamist network, according to Reuters.

Bild, which is owned by Business Insider's parent company Axel Springer, has published a photo of the suspect, who is said to be between 21 and 23 years old.

Michael Phelps releases photos of his super secret Mexico wedding to Nicole Johnson in October

Olympics legend Michael Phelps, 31, has finally released photos of his super secret October wedding to Nicole Johnson, 31, in October at Cabo San Lucas, Mexico.

In the cute photos they both can be seen kissing, while another photo shows them carrying their young son Boomer as they prepare to wed.

 23-time Olympic Gold medalist, Phelps, who released the photos to Brides.com, revealed to the website that he cried 'tears of happiness' when he saw Nicole walking down the aisle and that he and Nicole partied with their guests until close to 3am after the ceremony. The pair got legally married in June in a ceremony that had only 5 people in attendance at their backyard.

 More photos from the wedding below...

'The internet will shut down for 24 hours next year

It’s December — that time of the year when many industry experts make all sorts of predictions for the year ahead. But one prophecy caught Business Insider’s eye: the whole internet will shut down for 24 hours.

The dire forecast comes from US technology security vendor LogRhythm. According to the company’s chief information security officer and vice president James Carder, it won’t just be a technical issue stopping people from uploading their selfies on Instagram.

"In 2017, we’re going to see it hit big sometime, somewhere. If the internet goes down, financial markets will tank," he said.

The security expert told Business Insider that all the signs were there this year, with criminals "testing missiles by shooting them into the ocean".

DEA: Heroin Haul Largest Ever in Afghanistan, 'if Not the World'

A joint U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, American Special Forces and Afghan counternarcotics operation in October resulted in an eye-popping seizure of 20 tons of drugs, which officials said was the "largest known seizure of heroin in Afghanistan, if not the world."

The operation was kept under wraps until today, when a DEA official confirmed the contents of a field intelligence report obtained by ABC News but did not explain why a successful "superlab" takedown — which agency veterans agreed is an unprecedented narcotics haul — was not officially announced.

"This drug seizure alone prevented not only a massive amount of heroin hitting the streets throughout the world but also denied the Taliban money that would have been used to fund insurgent activities in and around the region," DEA spokesman Steven Bell told ABC News yesterday.

He said a conservative estimated street value was about $60 million for the 12.5 tons of morphine base, 6.4 tons of heroin base, 134 kilograms of opium, 129 kilograms of crystal heroin and 12 kilograms of hashish seized in the Oct. 17 raid, which took place in the western Afghan province of Farah, on the border with Iran.

"If that was Pablo Escobar's stash, that would be considered a lot of frickin' heroin," said one combat veteran of the DEA's 11-year counternarcotics mission to blunt the country's heroin trade, referring to the Medellin, Colombia, narcotics kingpin killed two decades ago. "That's going to make a dent in the European market."

The operation's success is all the more extraordinary, given that the footprint of the U.S. military in Afghanistan is now below 10,000 service members and the DEA's numbers have diminished to a handful in-country, sources said. This downsizing has eliminated the DEA's Foreign-Deployed Advisory Support Teams (FAST) in Afghanistan, which target drug traffickers.

A Green Beret A-team aided the agents in executing a warrant search in the western Afghanistan province. After a brief gunfight with insurgents near the compound outside a remote village, the teams also found tons of chemicals in what one report called a "superlab" used to process the poppy into heroin base.

Obama warns Russia on hacking: ‘We can do stuff to you’

President Obama warned Russia on Friday not to wage cyberwarfare against the United States, saying, “We can do stuff to you” as he defended his handling of Moscow’s alleged hacking of Democrats’ emails to influence the 2016 election.

“Our goal continues to be to send a clear message to Russia or others not to do this to us, because we can do stuff to you,” Obama told reporters at his final press conference of 2016.

His comments came shortly after it was disclosed that the FBI agrees with the CIA’s conclusions that Russia targeted Democrats with the aim of helping President-elect Donald Trump win on Nov. 8.

Obama promised that any U.S. retaliation against Russia would come “in a thoughtful, methodical way” that might be hidden from the U.S. public.

“Some of it we do publicly, some of it we will do in a way that they know but not everybody will,” he said. “The message will be directly received by the Russians and not publicized.”

Obama defended his response to Moscow’s alleged intrusion, saying, “We handled it the way it should have been handled.”