The Central Intelligence Agency has acknowledged after years of denial that it kept a file on Noam Chomsky, though the file appears to have been destroyed.

Chomsky, 84, an American academic who works as a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was an anti-war activist in the 1970s. He also is a vociferous critic of Israel.

Freedom of Information Act requests to the CIA over the years had not turned up Chomsky’s file, but a request to the Federal Bureau of Investigation by Chomsky biographer Frederic Maxwell turned up a memo between the CIA and the FBI confirming the existence of a CIA file on Chomsky, according to The Cable blog in Foreign Policy.

An expert contacted by the blog said the FBI memo confirms that a Chomsky file once existed, though it was likely destroyed.

Two New York residents, one of them identified with the Ku Klux Klan, tried to sell to Jewish groups a deadly X-ray radiation device that one of them described as “Hiroshima on a light switch” and which he designed to zap people to death, according to the FBI, which unsealed its complaint in Albany on Wednesday.

The FBI charged Glendon Scott Crawford, 49, who is an industrial mechanic with General Electric in Schenectady, and alleged co-conspirator Eric J. Feight, 54, who works for an electronics company in Columbia County, with material support to terrorists, including use of a weapon of mass destruction.

Crawford told undercover FBI agents dujring a year-long investigation that he is “a member of the Ku Klux Klan, specifically, the United Northern & Southern Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.”

His device was designed to be mounted on a truck and remotely controlled with the capability of aiming a laser beam of radioactivity at people.

He searched for a source of radiation and found supposed a ready supplies who actually were FBI agents, working after apparent tip-offs from two Albany synagogues Crawford approached.

He approached one synagogue in April 2012 and “asked to speak with a person who might be willing to help him with a type of technology that could be used by Israel to defeat its enemies, specifically, by killing Israel’s enemies while they slept,” the FBI complaint says.

The “enemies” referred to by Crawford are Muslims and enemies of the United States to whom he referred as “medical waste.”

Crawford contacted a second Albany area synagogue the same day with a similar offer.

The FBI complaint states, “Crawford also told the (FBI source) that the target of his radiation emitting device would be the Muslim community. Crawford described the device’s capabilities as ‘Hiroshima on a light switch’ and that ‘everything with respiration would be dead by the morning.’”

He ended his meeting with the agent by stating, “How much sweeter could there be than a big stack of smelly bodies?”

The investigation advanced to the point that in December, the FBI requested and received a search warrant enabling agents to monitor Crawford’s and Feight’s cell phone calls, emails and text messages.

Crawford had successfully tested the remote triggering system, without a radiation supply, which could work from a little less than a half mile away from the weapon, according to the complaint. The suspects met in Albany on May 20 with the device in hand, and they planned to test it in a dry run out at a hotel, without a radiation system.

Crawford and Feight met again last Wednesday, when Crawford was to have been provided with an unfinished radiation system.

FBI agents, posing as South Carolina Ku Klux Klan members, who were interested in buying the device and financing the plot, arrested them on the spot.

Graffiti scrawled in a bathroom in a Yale University science building threatened an arson attack on the Slifka Center for Jewish Life on the campus.

The graffiti was discovered late last month but was first reported in the local media on Tuesday. A Slifka Center board member said the news of the graffiti was not released to the public sooner in order to allow the police to do some investigation quietly.

The exact wording of the graffiti has not been released, but it reportedly threatened an attack for May 16, the second day of the Shavuot holiday.

Police in New Haven, Conn., and the FBI are investigating, the New Haven Register reported.

“This is a very disturbing incident for a community such as ours, in which tolerance of all races, religions and points of view is a fundamental value,” Yale Vice President Linda Koch Lorimer said in a statement. “A threat to any community within our university is a threat to us all.”

SlifkaCenter programs have continued on schedule, and upcoming events including Shavuot programs have not been altered.

“Difficult times can serve to remind us of our many blessings,” a statement issued by the center said. “Slifka Center is fortunate to be a vibrant hub of Jewish and interfaith life within a welcoming community, in which incidents such as this one are very rare.”

Two former associates of New York Democratic mayoral candidate John Liu were convicted in an illegal campaign fundraising scheme uncovered in an FBI investigation, according to CBS New York.

Jurors heard secretly recorded tapes that prosecutors said showed Liu’s two associates, Jia “Jenny” Hou and Xing “Oliver” Wu Pan, plotted to cheat the city out of campaign matching funds and then lied about it.

An FBI agent posed as a potential donor to the campaign, offering $16,000.

The donation was to be much larger than the law allows if the campaign wants to get matching funds from the city.

Jurors found with that, the plot was hatched to use straw donors to conceal the source of the large illegal donation.

Prosecutors charged that coded language was used by Pan and Hou to make sure that Liu knew the source of the money.

Even the vicious mass murderer Ted Bundy had admirers who swore he was innocent. But in this age in which there are pictures of Dzokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev at the Boston Marathon finish line pre-explosions with backpacks and post explosions without backpacks, and also pictures of the exploded backpacks, not to mention the reported admission by Dzhokhar that he and his brother built and detonated the bombs, it is hard to believe there are those who insist the Tsarnaevs are innocent.

But there are.

And some of those who maintain this position have very carefully put together loving video homages to the Tsarnaevs, complete with pictures that have not yet been shown in the media.

Some of the pictures in the video are of the boys growing up, many are of the older brother, Tamerlan, in the gym, quite a few show Dzokhar hanging out with friends. There are some artistic renderings and some of various milestone events.  In one picture Dzokhar is shown in front of the Chechen flag, in another he looks out seductively from behind a tangle of dark curls.

Interspersed between the photographs are messages in Russian, proclaiming the innocence of the Tsarnaevs.  The images slide by, the music is eastern and hypnotic.  An audiovisual ode to monsters.

The Boston Marathon bombers had planned to stage a major attack on a crowded area of the city during July 4th Independence Day celebrations, but they struck on Patriots’ Day because they had assembled their pressure cooker bombs sooner than expected.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, whose brother Tamerlan was killed in  the massive manhunt for the perpetrators of the Marathon bombings, told the FBI that had planned grisly “fireworks” by attacking a large celebration along the city’s Charles River.

Having finished constructing the bombs in Tamerlan’s apartment ahead of schedule, they drove around Boston until they decided to strike at the finish line of the Marathon, where three people were killed. Many of the more than 260 who were wounded lost logs and arms.

One law enforcement official told The Washington Post that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s version may not be true because the bombs were so complex that it is not certain they could have built the bombs as quickly as they claim without outside help.

Both law enforcement officials expressed some skepticism about Tsarnaev’s account, saying that the complexity of the bombs made it unlikely that the brothers could have completed them as fast as he claimed.

“Maybe we will never know. This is the story that he is telling us,” the official said.

The younger Tsarnaev said he and his brother struck out of anger at the United States for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They also were influenced by radical Muslim clerics who incite their followers to kill and be glorified by Allah.

Regardless of whether the brothers acted alone, and regardless of the fine legal point distinguishing between “terrorists” and “murders,” there is a basic similarity between them and terrorist organizations, particularly  Al Qaeda, Hezbollah and Hamas.

All three of these terrorist groups are involved in Gaza, which Hamas controls but with increasing difficulty because of their rivals’ appetite for blood.

That is a common thread, or gene, that seems to connect terrorists and murderers.

Hamas has amassed thousands of tons of explosives and advanced weapons far beyond what most people imagine. Hezbollah in Lebanon has stockpiled so many missiles it has been described as having more  than any government in the world outside of the United States.

Like the Tsarnaev brothers, these terrorist groups live by a creed of  “attack or perish.”

There mission in life is to kill Jews, Westerners, Christians, homosexuals and even Muslims who are in anyway linked to one of the above.

That is why every senior Israeli military officer involved with Gaza and Lebanon has said that it is only a matter of time until the “next round” will come and with worse consequences than the previous.

That’s is why a “ceasefire” agreement is only a pause, and why the “Second Intifada” is not the last.

When Hamas first began attacking Israelis more than 20 years ago, it was with primitive Kassam rockets. With each round of violence, their missiles reached deeper into Israel.

Everyone knows they had longer-range missiles, but the government agreed with “ceasefires” to calm down the terrorists – until their need for rage could not be contained any more.

Before the IDF’s Operation Cast Lead counterterrorist campaign four years ago, Hamas struck Ashkelon and Ashdod.

Before and during the Pillar of Defense campaign last November, they struck Tel Aviv and  the outskirts of Jerusalem.

They have even more devastating weapons, such as anti-aircraft missiles than can down a commercial airline,. That is why military and civilians airlines have changed their landing and take-off patterns to steer clear of Gaza.

And that is why Dzhokhar and Tamerlan did not wait for the Fourth of July.

Unless terrorists and murders disarmed, they usually are driven buy their objective to use the rigger finger, and nothing usually stops them except bullets.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev no longer is around to attack more Americans in Boston, Times Square or anywhere else. Tamerlan probably die in jail if not executed.

No one knows if America is seething with a few, or dozens or hundreds or thousands of terrorist-in-the-making.

But wherever they are, like Hamas, Hezbollah and  Al Qaeda, they will attack as soon as they can – unless someone gets them first.

Bomb threats on two Houston synagogues Wednesday closed classes, one day after a similar threat on a court forced a quick evacuation.

The synagogue bomb threats were called in to called in to Congregation Beth Israel, a Reform temple, and the Conservative Congregation Or Ami on Wednesday afternoon.

Both synagogues canceled Hebrew school classes for Thursday but said they would reopen Friday with more security. Officials searched the buildings and did not find anything suspicious.

The Houston Police Department, Anti-Defamation League, FBI and Department of Homeland Security all were notified about the threats, Congregation Beth Israel told the Houston Chronicle.

A message on the Beth Israel website said that a congregational dinner scheduled for Friday night was canceled; it did not say if the cancellation was related to the bomb threat.

Tuesday’s bomb threat on the HoustonMunicipalCourtsBuilding resulted in the evacuation of several courtrooms.

No explosive device was found.