Take a tour of the 'doomsday Disneyland'

Guardian Centers may be a place to practice how to respond to a

disaster, but that doesn't mean real danger is nonexistent.

When we headed over to see its mock subway station, complete with eight cars donated from Washington's Metro system, we were told we had a limited window to view it. The reason -- they were going to be pumping actual toxic gas into the building to simulate a chemical attack.

As smoke rose from chunks of concrete representing an obliterated building, Chris Schaff put it this way: "As soon as you come in here, the pretend goes away."He's a fire and rescue battalion chief with Fairfax County, Virginia, and his words carry a lot of weight. His elite team of urban search and rescue operatives has been deployed to numerous disasters, including Hurricane Sandy, the 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami, and the 2010 Haiti quake.Luis Fernandez, a two-decades-plus veteran of disaster response, agreed the Perry, Georgia, facility passes muster.

"The temperature extremes, the building extremes, the noises, the environment, are incredibly lifelike," said Fernandez, Miami-Dade Fire Rescue chief of staff and.a spokesman for the Federal Emergency Management Agency.From the aforementioned subway station, to a mock bridge with crushed cars, to a devastated structure made to look like the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, Guardian Centers' 830-acre site is designed to allow a variety of responders to do a variety of drills in one location.

This kind of "doomsday Disneyland" owes its vision to Geoff Burkart, a telecommunications executive who was in Louisiana in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. During Katrina, he saw "what was being done there, and what was not being done."

From there the idea was born, and a former Cold War missile plant became the location.

The subway station is especially convincing, fashioned from an elongated building originally designed to be an assembly line for the weapons.Open for less than two years, the Centers facility has changed the game for disaster response training. Clients can tell Burkart's team what their specific needs are. If it's a group from the Pacific Northwest, they can request the ground be saturated to simulate the region's heavy rainfall.

Many agencies have "script writers" that work with Guardian Centers on specifications, from smoke to rebar.

"We're primarily just a tool, and we want to be the best tool," Burkart said.

He doesn't want to slight government training facilities but points out the advantages to being privately run.

"We can adapt and provide everything the client needs almost on demand," he said.

And by being able to provide a number of different training types in one place, Burkart says, he's saving the taxpayers money.

Still, the process to create such scenarios takes time. A recent weeklong earthquake response drill for FEMA and the U.S. Agency for International Development took months to plan, according to spokespeople.

And things must always be changed up. A pair of dog handlers from a New Mexico search and rescue team pointed out that the animals are smart enough to remember where the holes in the rubble are.

As for Burkart, he hopes his vision will extend well beyond the rolling hills of central Georgia.

"If we can make this entire campus successful, we would like to put one of these in (each of) the four corners of the United States," he said.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' teaser trailer released

Cowabunga, it's here and it's totally radical! A teaser trailer for Michael Bay's anticipated "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" film, starring Megan Fox, has been released.
filming a chaotic fight scene on what appears to be a subway platform with her smartphone, glimpses of what appears to be the experiment that led to the accidental creation of the mutant Turtles, who are hero ninja warriors. We see The Shredder mask and the man who will wear it to become the famed villain, warrior and enemy of the Turtles. Unmasked, he tells April that he and her father were the ones who created them in a bid to make "heroes."

The four turtles -- Michelangelo, Leonardo, Donatello and Raphael -- are played by Noel Fisher, known for his role as Mickey Milkovich in the Showtime series "Shameless," Pete Ploszek, who appeared on an episode of the show last year, Jeremy Howard, who portrayed Drew Lou Who in the 2000 film "How the Grinch Stole Christmas," and Alan Ritchson, who recently played Gloss in "The Hunger Games: Catching Fire" and portrayed Aquaman on the CW show "Smallville."

William Fichtner, known for roles in films such as "The Dark Knight" and "Black Hawk Down," plays The Shredder and Danny Woodburn stars as his arch nemesis Splinter, a mutant rat who is the Turtles' mentor. "Arrested Development" actor Will Arnett and "SNL" alum Abby Elliott play Vernon Fenwick and Irma Langinstein, who work with O'Neil at her news station, while Whoopi Goldberg plays their editor, Bernadette Thompson -- a nod to a past male counterpart, Burne Thompson.

The is the first big screen adaptation of Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird's popular 1980s comic that incorporates live action since the 1993 movie "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III." An animated film, "TNMT," hit theaters in 2007. Several animated TV shows have also aired over the years. In the teaser trailer, Fox sports a yellow jacket. In a 1990s series, O'Neil wore a yellow jumpsuit.

Bay had also directed Fox in the first two "Transformers" films.

Did you know? Judith Hoag, who played April O'Neil in the first "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" movie that was released in 1990, now stars in ABC's "Nashville" as Tandy Hampton, sister of Rayna James, Connie Britton's character.

Watch the teaser trailer for Michael Bay's 2014 movie "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" below. The movie is set for release on August 8.

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Flight MH370: 122 'new objects' spotted - Malaysia minister

A further 122 objects potentially from missing Malaysian flight have been identified by satellite, Malaysia's acting transport minister has said.

The images, taken on 23 March, showed objects up to 23m (75 ft) in length, Hishammuddin Hussein said.

Some of the objects captured by France-based Airbus appeared bright and were possibly of solid material.

Flight MH370 from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing disappeared on 8 March with 239 people on board.

The objects were located in a 400 sq km area around 2,557km (1588 miles) from Perth in Western Australia, Mr Hussein said.

The information was handed to the Australian Rescue and Co-ordination Centre in Perth on 25 March, he added.

The area being searched in the southern Indian Ocean has now been split into an east and west section, he said.

"This is another new lead that will help direct the search operation", Mr Hussein said.

The Australian Maritime Safety Authority (Amsa), co-ordinating the search, said on Wednesday that flights had resumed and conditions had improved after rough seas and heavy rain forced air and sea operations to be suspended the previous day.

It said seven military and five civilian planes were taking part and a total of six countries were now involved - Australia, New Zealand, the US, Japan, China and the South Korea.

Google tries to NSA-proof Gmail

Google just beefed up the security of Gmail to make mass surveillance of its customers' email nearly impossible. It's not quite NSA-proof, but it's close.

To accomplish the feat, Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) secured how you connect to its servers. Gmail is now strictly using a secure communications protocol called HTTPS, which encrypts your email on its entire journey: from your computer to Google, between Google's servers, and from Google to the person receiving your email.

In a blog post Thursday, top Gmail security engineer Nicolas Lidzborski said the increased security was in response to disclosures about government surveillance made by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

"This ensures that your messages are safe ... something we made a top priority after last summer's revelations," Lidzborski wrote. Google is trying to limit the abilities of the U.S. government's secretive PRISM program, which can spy on citizens' communications. The NSA declined to comment for this story.
As the New York Times explained last year, government spies have been tapping the fiber-optic cables between big tech companies' data centers. Data typically travels unencrypted between giant computer server farms, allowing for easy interception.
But by encrypting the flow of data between company servers, Google has made that kind of mass collection technologically unfeasible.

This drone can hack your phone

"That should be effective," said Mikko Hypponen, a top security researcher in Finland. "By protecting the connection between you and Google servers, they protect you against tons of attackers." Hypponen explained that the HTTPS encryption method is essentially uncrackable at the moment.
That doesn't stop the federal government from eventually worming its way into your personal data, though. The FBI could still send Google a National Security Letter demanding client records -- something it does all the time. In 2012 alone, Google received Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act requests on the content of 20,000 to 22,000 users' communications.
Google is taking the kind of approach to combating surveillance that top privacy researchers advocate: Make mass collection unfeasible by making it more difficult and more expensive to accomplish. "I wouldn't call it NSA-proofing," Eugene H. Spafford, a computer science professor at Purdue University. "But they're doing something reasonable to protect against that and any other similar kind of eavesdropping."
That includes hackers that routinely spy on unsecured Internet connections, including hackers that lurk on public Wi-Fi connections and employers that snoop on workers in the office.
Privacy experts say Google's encryption is long overdue.
"This is something they could have done years ago," Spafford said. "It was a known problem with known solution. They and others have been very slow to adopt it."
The solution also only works if the email stays within Google's walls. The fix won't work if a Gmail user emails someone with a Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500) or Yahoo (YHOO, Fortune 500) account, because those companies don't yet support encryption between email providers, according to Christopher Soghoian, principal technologist for the American Civil Liberties Union.
Why haven't they made the change yet?
"Because they're lazy," Soghoian said. "It takes engineers. And these are not features that are salient to regular users. Companies prioritize features that users notice."
In November, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said her company is working on encrypting information that moves between Yahoo servers and its users. She made no mention of that working with outside email providers. But Microsoft is working on all of the above, according to a December blog post from its top attorney, Brad Smith.

Westboro church founder Fred Phelps dies

Fred Phelps -- the founding pastor of a Kansas church known for its virulently anti-gay protests at public events, including military funerals -- has died, the church said Thursday.

The 84-year-old died of natural causes at 11:15 p.m. Wednesday, according to church spokesman Steve Drain.

Phelps founded Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas, in 1955 and molded it in his fire-and-brimstone image. Many members of the small congregation are related to Phelps through blood or marriage.

In a statement Thursday, the church chided the "world-wide media" for "gleefully anticipating the death."

God forbid, if every little soul at the Westboro Baptist Church were to die at this instant, or to turn from serving the true and living God, it would not change one thing about the judgments of God that await this deeply corrupted nation and world."

According to Westboro, the church has picketed more than 53,000 events, ranging from Lady Gaga concerts to funerals for slain U.S. soldiers. Typically, a dozen or so church members -- including small children -- will brandish signs that say "God Hates Fags" and "Thank God for Dead Soldiers."

Phelps was often called "the most hated man in America," a label he seemed to relish.

"If I had nobody mad at me," he told the Wichita Eagle in 2006, "what right would I have to claim that I was preaching the Gospel?"

Under Phelps' leadership, Westboro members have preached that every calamity, from natural disasters to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, is God's punishment for the country's acceptance of homosexuality. Phelps had advocated for gays and lesbians to be put to death.

"Fred Phelps will not be missed by the LGBT community, people with HIV/AIDS and the millions of decent people across the world who found what he and his followers do deeply hurtful and offensive," the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force said in a statement.

Phelps began his anti-gay protests in Wichita in 1991 after complaining that the city refused to stop gay activities in a public park. He rose to national notoriety in 1998, when Westboro members picketed at the funeral of Matthew Shepard, a Wyoming man who was tortured and murdered because he was gay. Phelps and his church carried signs that said Shepard was rotting in hell.

The Southern Poverty Law Center calls Westboro Baptist Church "arguably the most obnoxious and rabid hate group in America."

In 2011, the Supreme Court upheld Westboro's right to picket military funerals on free speech grounds. Congress and several states, though, have passed laws aimed at keeping church members at a distance from funerals.

In 2013, more than 367,000 petitioners called on the White House to legally recognize Westboro Baptist Church as a hate group. The White House called Westboro's protests "reprehensible" but said that "as a matter of practice, the federal government doesn't maintain a list of hate groups."

Born in Meridian, Mississippi, on November 29, 1929, Phelps had his sights set on West Point before he attended a Methodist revival. He said the sermon inspired him to enter the ministry.

"I felt the call, as they say, and it was powerful," Phelps told the Topeka Capital-Journal in 1994. "The God of glory appeared." Later, Phelps was ordained by a Southern Baptist church in Utah.

He bounced around several Christian colleges as his preaching and his theology took a hard right turn.

A Time magazine article from 1951 describes Phelps as a "craggy-faced engineering student" who harangued fellow students about the dangers of promiscuity and profanity.

Tim Miller, a professor of religious history at the University of Kansas who has studied Westboro Baptist Church, said Phelps liked to consider himself a "primitive Baptist preacher who held to the old ways."

Despite its "Baptist" name, Westboro is not affiliated with any larger church denomination. Most Christians criticize the congregation's harsh anti-gay rhetoric and penchant for pursuing the limelight at inappropriate moments.

Phelps married his wife, Marge, who survives him, in 1952. The couple moved to Topeka on May 4, 1954, the day the Supreme Court handed down its landmark decision Brown v. Board of Education, which desegregated public schools.

Phelps interpreted that as a sign and soon began a law career that centered on civil rights, winning awards for his work and praise from local leaders.

"Most blacks -- that's who they went to," the Rev. Ben Scott, president of the NAACP's Topeka branch, told CNN in 2010. "I don't know if he was cheaper or if he had that stick-to-it-ness, but Fred didn't lose many back then."

Phelps was disbarred from practicing law in state courts, however, after being accused of badgering a witness and making false claims in court affidavits. The Kansas Supreme Court said that Phelps "has little regard for the ethics of his profession."

Phelps surrendered his license to practice law in federal courts in 1989, according to the Topeka Capital-Journal, after nine U.S. District Court judges filed disciplinary complaints against him.

Most of the members of Phelps' Westboro Baptist Church are members of his large family. Phelps has 13 children; 11 are attorneys. One son, Nathan, is estranged from his father and from organized religion. He is an atheist.

Nathan Phelps posted a Facebook message March 15 saying that his father had been excommunicated from the church. Later, though, Nathan Phelps said it was "unclear" whether his father had been expelled from Westboro.

A church statement issued on March 16 said that "membership issues are private" and that eight unnamed elders lead the congregation.

On Thursday, the church added, "Listen carefully; there are no power struggles in the Westboro Baptist Church, and there is no human intercessor -- we serve no man, and no hierarchy, only the Lord Jesus Christ."

For years, Phelps joked about the possibility that his own funeral would draw protests. During a sermon in 2006, he said a CNN reporter once asked how he would feel if that occurred.

"I'd love it. I'd invite them," Phelps told the reporter, according to the Wichita Eagle. "I said: 'I'll put in my will to pay your way. But not first class.' "

But Shirley Phelps-Roper, Phelps' daughter, said Westboro will not hold a funeral.

Truck in Amber Alert Found in Md.; Search for 8-Year-Old Relisha Tenau Rudd Continues

Police have found the vehicle described in an Amber Alert for an 8-year-old girl, but there's still no sign of the missing girl or the man police believe may have her.

Relisha Tenau Rudd was last seen Feb. 26 at the D.C. Shelter for Families on the grounds of the old D.C. General Hospital in Southeast. Police think she is in the company of 51-year-old Kahlil Malik Tatum, who works as a janitor at the shelter.

Police found the white 1976 GMC truck they believed the two were traveling in Thursday night in Hyattsville, Md.

Earlier in the day, Prince George's County Police found the body of a woman who appeared to have been beaten in a room at the Red Roof Inn in Oxon Hill. Sources say that woman has been identified as Tatum's wife. Her death is being investigated as a homicide.

Relisha was reported missing Wednesday by her school because she hadn't been in class for weeks. Sources tell News4 that her mother, Shamika, refused to file a missing persons report. 

Family members say Shamika had told them her daughter was on a school trip to Georgia.

Relisha is four feet tall and weighs 70 to 80 pounds. She has black hair, brown eyes and a medium complexion. Police said she may be in need of medication.

An Amber Alert was issued Thursday for Relisha.

Tatum is 5 feet 9 inches tall and weighs 200 pounds. Police say he has brown eyes and black hair. 

Sources tell News4 that a witness told police Relisha may have been spotted in D.C. Thursday morning with an unidentified woman.

If you've seen Rudd or Tatum, call police at 202-727-9099 or 911.