CAMDEN — The official designation is bad: This is the poorest town in America, the Census Bureau said last week.

But the personal view’s even worse: “Camden is the saddest place on earth,” declared Adrian Bartholomew, who was part of a knot of methadone clinic clients milling outside City Hall on Friday morning.

An estimated 42.5 percent of Camden’s nearly 80,000 residents live below the poverty line, according to a Census Bureau review of 2011 figures. The impoverished city also is considered the nation’s second-most violent — but a recent spate of homicides means the city may bump Flint, Mich., from the top spot.

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Britain silent on Ecuador Assange proposal

The Foreign Office was tightlipped on Saturday over a proposal from Ecuador that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange be transferred from London to Sweden but stay under Quito’s protection.

Ecuador’s Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino said he was weighing such a transfer as a possible alternative for Assange

[...]

Assange, a 41-year-old Australian, fears Sweden will hand him over to the United States, where he could face prosecution over the release of a vast cache of leaked Iraq and Afghanistan war reports and diplomatic cables.

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Apparently, Hillary Clinton never watched The West Wing - “The West Wing” Dream of Democracy

On Wednesday, in a speech at an event honoring Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi with the Congressional Gold Medal, Hillary Clinton remarked on the difficult journey that that country faces in becoming a fully-functioning democracy, and added, in an anecdote that brought laughter from the audience, that last year Myanmar’s speaker of the lower house of parliament had told her that he and his colleagues had been watching old clips of Sorkin’s “The West Wing” to learn about the mechanics of self-government. It is worth pausing to imagine scores of Burmese bureaucrats walking briskly through the halls of government offices, trading witty barbs and inspirational quotations on their way to creating a contemporary democratic utopia. Clinton, however, seemed skeptical of what the show might have to offer: “I said, ‘I think we can do better than that, Mr. Speaker.’ ”

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Facebook suspends facial recognition after European crackdown

The European Union has stricter privacy regulations than the United States, where Facebook has been criticized and sued but not censured for its lax privacy policies. Facebook, in turn, on Friday said it will shut off the feature in Europe and delete the millions of European photos it's collected over the years by Oct. 15.

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I had not heard this before. I don't know if it's true, but definitely want to look into this further.

I can tell you that everybody that attended an Occupy Wall Street protest, and didn't turn their cell phone off, or put it -- and sometimes even if they did -- the identity of that cell phone has been logged, and everybody who was at that demonstration, whether they were arrested, not arrested, whether their photos were ID'd, whether an informant pointed them out, it's known they were there anyway. This is routine.

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What could possibly go wrong here?

Civilian 'hacktivists' wage online war on terrorism

Working from a beige house at the end of a dirt road, Jeff Bardin switches on a laptop, boots up a program that obscures his location, and pecks in a passkey to an Internet forum run by an Iraqi branch of al-Qaeda.

Soon the screen displays battle flags and AK-47 rifles, plus palm-lined beaches to conjure up a martyr's paradise.

"I do believe we are in," says Bardin, 54, a computer security consultant.

Barefoot in his bedroom, Bardin pretends to be a 20-something Canadian who wants to train in a militant camp in Pakistan. With a few keystrokes, he begins uploading an Arabic-language manual for hand-to-hand combat to the site.

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What? No administrative leave? No, "An investigation is underway, we are looking into it, it will take us like forever to investigate?"

A South Carolina police officer has been fired after posting details of a traffic stop of Clemson coach Dabo Swinney on a University of South Carolina message board.

CPl. Michael McClatchy was fired Monday for using company equipment to detail his version of the events, Pickens (S.C.) Police Department chief Rodney Gregory said in a statement Friday.

On Sept. 3, McClatchy stopped a vehicle driven by Swinney for speeding, according to Gregory, who said the Clemson coach was traveling 63 mph in a 35 mph zone.

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It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas -- WAY TOO EARLY

Halloween is more than a month away, but it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas at many stores in the area.

If you walk into a retail store today, there’s a good chance you will see a Christmas display. Retailers are hoping to maximize sales by getting an extra early jump this year.

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The World's Least-Popular Four-Digit PIN: 8068

How easy would it be for a thief to guess your four-digit PIN? If he were forced to guess randomly, his odds of getting the correct number would be one in 10,000—or, if he has three tries, one in 3,333. But if you were careless enough to choose your birth date, a year in the 1900s, or an obvious numerical sequence, his chances go up. Way up.

Researchers at the data analysis firm Data Genetics have found that the three most popular combinations—"1234," "1111," and "0000"—account for close to 20 percent of all four-digit passwords. Meanwhile, every four-digit combination that starts with "19" ranks above the 80th percentile in popularity, with those in the late—er, upper—1900s coming in the highest. Also quite common are MM/DD combinations—those in which the first two digits are between "01" and "12" and the last two are between "01" and "31." So choosing your birthday, your birth year, or a number that might be a lot of other people's birthday or birth year makes your password significantly easier to guess.