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An immigration judge in Nashville, Tennessee ruled that parents Uwe and Hannelore Romeike, and their five children, are free to stay in the US, where they have been since 2008, news agency AP reported late on Tuesday.

The parents, who came from the state of Baden-Württemberg, allege they were persecuted for their faith and defiance of Germany’s compulsory school attendance since those who do not comply face fines and jail time.

According to Uwe Romeike, his family was fined the equivalent of some $10,000 over two years, but could not afford to make payments after their court appeals failed.

“I think it’s important for parents to have the freedom to choose the way their children can be taught,” Romeike told AP, later adding that German curriculum was increasingly “against Christian values.”

In October 2006, police forcefully took the family’s children to school in their home town of Bietigheim-Bissingen when they refused to do so themselves. One year later, the country’s high court ruled that in some similar cases the state could take children from their parents.

“We knew we had to leave the country,” Romeike, whose case was represented by the Home School Legal Defense Association, told the news agency.

Lachlan Cranswick, 41, who worked at the National Research Council’s Canadian Neutron Beam Centre, based at the Atomic Energy of Canada Limited Chalk River Laboratories, has been missing since Jan. 18 from the small community 200 kilometres northwest of Ottawa.

He was last seen leaving work that day.

Colleague Daniel Banks, who is the strategic planning and communications officer at the centre, said he was surprised to hear about Cranswick’s disappearance.

“There was no indication that anything was unusual,” he said.

None of the two dozen people who work at the centre reported noticing anything different about Cranswick’s mood in the days before his disappearance.

“He seemed quite normal as far as that goes,” Banks said.

He described Cranswick as quiet, but active in the community. He was on the executive of the local curling club, and was reported missing by club members when he failed to show up for a tournament.

Originally from Australia, Cranswick worked in England before starting as a research scientist at the neutron beam centre in 2003, Banks said. His job was to collaborate with scientists all over the world who wanted to make use of the facility. When they came to collect data, he would help them with measurements and analysis.

Cranswick has no relatives in Canada, but family members in Australia have been notified of his disappearance, Banks said. His colleagues believed he lived alone and was not in a relationship.

His co-workers at the neutron beam centre are currently contacting his collaborators around the world to see if they have any additional information about his plans.

Patrick F. Kennedy, an undersecretary for management at the State Department, said Abdulmutallab’s visa wasn’t taken away because intelligence officials asked his agency not to deny a visa to the suspected terrorist over concerns that a denial would’ve foiled a larger investigation into al-Qaida threats against the United States.

“Revocation action would’ve disclosed what they were doing,” Kennedy said in testimony before the House Committee on Homeland Security. Allowing Adbulmutallab to keep the visa increased chances federal investigators would be able to get closer to apprehending the terror network he is accused of working with, “rather than simply knocking out one solider in that effort.”

The committee’s hearing continues a series across Capitol Hill that started last week, all looking into the events leading up to and after the attempted bombing of Flight 253 over Detroit. Law enforcement officials say Abdulmutallab tried to detonate an explosive hidden in his underwear on board the flight from Amsterdam shortly before its landing at Detroit Metropolitan Airport in Romulus on Christmas Day.

Since the failed attack, criticism has swirled around leaders of the U.S. intelligence community who have indicated they were warned by the suspect’s father about a month before the flight of a potential terror threat, but failed to stop Abdmutallab, despite other warning signs like the fact that he purchased a one-way ticket to Detroit with cash.

Politicians have also criticized the decision to treat Abdulmutallab as a civilian after the arrest in Michigan, with Miranda rights being read to him after less than an hour of interrogation and without input from the intelligence community.

It also has prompted the student, openly accused by the professor of being an FBI informant and a killer, to hire a prominent local civil rights attorney, and led the university to launch an investigation into the educator. The school has taken the unusual step of stripping the tenured professor of his teaching responsibilities while it conducts its inquiry.

Meanwhile, others at PSU are divided along two lines: Those who think the professor did the right thing, if in an unorthodox way; and those who think his actions were strange and out of line.

Some questions remain unanswered: Why would a tenured professor choose to openly confront a student he viewed as dangerous; and what does the situation mean for the student, who has not been charged with a crime, yet is said to have offered to teach others how to make Molotov cocktails and buy assault rifles.

Professor John Hall has not taught on campus since Jan. 14, when, during a comparative economics course, he accused a 30-year-old student of being an FBI informant and threatened to place posters of him around campus. Depending on the outcome of the internal inquiry, Hall could face a range of sanctions, including termination, said Scott Gallagher, communications director for PSU. Gallagher did not know when the inquiry would be completed.

The Oregonian made several attempts to reach Hall, who has taught at the university for 25 years, but he didn’t return messages. However, Phil Lesch, executive director for the Portland State chapter of the American Association of University Professors, defended Hall and said by e-mail Friday that Hall had asked him to act as his spokesman. The association is the union that represents faculty members.

PSU student Brett Condron, 20, who is studying German, was in class that day. He said about 40 students witnessed the confrontation between Hall and the student.

Condron said with about 30 minutes left in class, Hall made a dramatic announcement: An FBI informant was enrolled in the class. He talked about his experience with government informants in East Germany, then identified the student as Zach Bucharest.

Hall put a letter detailing his accusations on the overhead projector so the class could read it. Condron said Hall then handed Bucharest a packet to give to “his superiors.”

“And then he proceeded to say a lot of unpleasant things about Bucharest,” Condron said. For instance, he said, Hall called Bucharest a killer and said that he had the “spirit of Cain and the spirit of Judas.”

During the confrontation, Condron said, Hall snapped a digital photo of Bucharest and said that if “he ever saw him on campus again, he would plaster his photo and copies of his photos all over campus and tell everybody who he was.”

Condron said Bucharest was stoic and silent as Hall lashed out at him. Afterward, Bucharest defended himself, then walked out.

The Oregonian tried to talk to Bucharest multiple times but his attorney, Elden Rosenthal, advised his client against talking to reporters.

In one of two statements Bucharest released through Rosenthal, the student said he has admired Hall and “cannot imagine what I did or said to cause him to treat me the way he did.”

Another student in Hall’s class is Daniel Dreier, a 26-year-old economics major. He was among those who had earlier become concerned about Bucharest’s behavior.

He said at a winter term Economics Department party in December, Bucharest told a campus activist how to make a particularly effective Molotov cocktail. Dreier said Bucharest also offered to act as a middleman to help students buy military style rifles — AR-15s or AK-47s — through a gun dealer he knew in Washington and that he had access to machine guns.

In a second interview, Dreier said that Bucharest frequently told stories about confrontations involving guns and said that Bucharest had shown him a gun that he carries on campus.

Meanwhile, Lesch, the union representative, confirmed that Hall confronted Bucharest in front of the class, but did so solely out of concern for the safety of his students and the community. Lesch said Hall’s actions came after other students went to Hall with concerns that Bucharest was trying to “create a cabal of students on campus oriented toward violence.”

“There were some students who ended up being very upset but there were also students who were grateful” to Hall for confronting Bucharest, Lesch said.

He said previously a group of eight students that Hall had been advising came to him with concerns about Bucharest.

They told Hall that Bucharest “was trying to get them interested in shooting and blowing things up — all kinds of weapons, not just rifles, illegal weapons,” Lesch said. “They were scared. They had a close relationship with Professor Hall and they brought it to his attention.”

Asked why Hall didn’t go to authorities with his concerns, Lesch said Hall had extensive experience with school bureaucracy and “did not feel like taking this to campus safety was the right way to go.”

Lesch added in an e-mail that in Hall’s years at PSU, “There have been a number of occasions where his personal safety has been threatened … Hall reported these incidents through proper channels at the time, but the university either did nothing to address his concerns or dismissed his reports outright.

University officials could not be reached late Friday for response to Hall’s perception of campus security.

“In addition,” Lesch said Friday in an e-mail, “several of Professor Hall’s students, in expressing their concerns about Bucharest, conveyed that Bucharest boasted on a number of occasions about a ’special’ relationship with campus public safety, which suggested that they might not take any complaint about him seriously.”

“Unfortunately, he ended up doing something that was very public and inflammatory and now his career is on the line,” Lesch said. “He ended up doing this knowing he could face personal negative consequences. He thought it was the most immediate way of resolving what he thought was a potential threat.”

Bucharest has been a PSU student since 2006, and a member of student government since 2009.

“Mr. Bucharest … is not and never has been an FBI agent, or an FBI informant,” Rosenthal wrote in a statement to The Oregonian.

The FBI in Portland confirmed last month, then again Thursday, that Bucharest is not an informant for the bureau.

“The suggestion that Mr. Bucharest in any way has tried to incite violence, or illegal activity, is false,” Rosenthal wrote. “The suggestion that Mr. Bucharest in any way has threatened any PSU student is false. Mr. Bucharest is disheartened that Professor Hall’s union representative is making inflammatory public statements, rather than letting the PSU investigation run its course.”

In a previous statement through Rosenthal, Bucharest said, “I truly hope that the university will take steps to clear my name.”

Hall has fans among his students at the downtown university, among them 23-year-old senior Allison Faris, who has spent five years as a college student in the United States and France.

The pupils will mark their fingerprints every time they go to church over three years and if they attend 200 masses they will be freed from the obligation of having to pass an exam prior to their confirmation, the paper said.

The pupils in the southern town of Gryfow Slaski told the daily they liked the idea and also the priest, Grzegorz Sowa, who invented it.

“This is comfortable. We don’t have to stand in a line to get the priest’s signature (confirming our presence at the mass) in our confirmation notebooks,” said one pupil, who gave her name as Karolina.

As part of its budget for the next year, Darpa is investing $6 million into a project called BioDesign, with the goal of eliminating “the randomness of natural evolutionary advancement.” The plan would assemble the latest bio-tech knowledge to come up with living, breathing creatures that are genetically engineered to “produce the intended biological effect.” Darpa wants the organisms to be fortified with molecules that bolster cell resistance to death, so that the lab-monsters can “ultimately be programmed to live indefinitely.”

Of course, Darpa’s got to prevent the super-species from being swayed to do enemy work — so they’ll encode loyalty right into DNA, by developing genetically programmed locks to create “tamper proof” cells. Plus, the synthetic organism will be traceable, using some kind of DNA manipulation, “similar to a serial number on a handgun.” And if that doesn’t work, don’t worry. In case Darpa’s plan somehow goes horribly awry, they’re also tossing in a last-resort, genetically-coded kill switch:

Develop strategies to create a synthetic organism “self-destruct” option to be implemented upon nefarious removal of organism.

“The problems currently faced by peripheral Europe could be a dress rehearsal for what the U.S. and U.K. may face further down the road,” Jim Reid, a strategist at Deutsche Bank in London, wrote in a research note today.

Credit-default swaps on the debt of Greece, Spain and Portugal rose to record highs today amid concern that European governments will struggle to fund their deficits. Contracts on Greece climbed 19.5 basis points to 446.5 before dropping to 422.5, CMA DataVision prices show. Spain’s increased 13 basis points to 183 before falling to 168, and Portugal’s rose 9.5 basis points to 239 before slipping to 223.5.

The U.S. and U.K. “have similar issues to those facing peripheral Europe but have the luxury of a flexible currency up their sleeves as a first defense if the market wants to attack them,” Reid said. “Such a defense means that the market, for now, thinks there are easier targets.”