A court in Iran has sentenced billionaire businessman Babak Zanjani and two accomplices to death for embezzlement, the country's judiciary said on Sunday, in a case widely watched due to the tycoon's prominent role in helping the Iranian government evade oil sanctions during the rule of former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Iran's Islamic court convicted the defendants of "spreading corruption on earth," a capital offense, and ordered them to repay funds embezzled from, among others, state-run National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC), judiciary spokesman Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei said during a live television broadcast.

earliest known use in its usual spelling was in a diary entry of February 1763 by John Adams, later to be the second president of the USA:

This day learned that the Caucus Club meets at certain times in the garret of Tom Dawes, the adjutant of the Boston (militia) regiment. He has a large house, and he has a movable partition in his garret, which he takes down, and the whole club meets in one room. There they smoke tobacco until you cannot see from one end of the room to the other. There they drink flip, I suppose, and there they choose a moderator, who puts questions to the vote regularly; and selectmen, assessors, collectors, wardens, fire-wards, and representatives, are regularly chosen before they are chosen in the town.

Flip is now better known as eggnog.

Between 1991 and 2010, Alabama averaged three tornadoes in February per year.

In February 2016, the National Weather Service has documented 21 tornado touchdowns across the Yellowhammer State.

Tornado touchdowns have been most numerous across central and far southern Alabama.

The National Weather Service in Birmingham says February 2016 had the most tornado touchdowns of any February since 2008, when 26 tornadoes occurred. February 2008 is a notorious tornado month following the Super Tuesday outbreak; two violent EF-4s touched down in Alabama in the predawn hours of February 6, 2008.

The tornadoes so far in 2016 have been relatively weak; seven EF-0s, 11 EF-2s and 2 EF-3s have occurred.

While Apple is fighting the FBI in court over encryption, Amazon quietly disabled the option to use encryption to protect data on its Android-powered devices.

The tech giant has recently deprecated support for device encryption on the latest version of Fire OS, Amazon’s custom Android operating system, which powers its tablets and phones. In the past, privacy-minded users could protect data stored inside their devices, such as their emails, by scrambling it with a password, which made it unreadable in case the device got lost or stolen. With this change, users who had encryption on in their Fire devices are left with two bad choices: either decline to install the update, leaving their devices with outdated software, or give up and keep their data unencrypted.

For privacy and encryption advocates, this move goes against the recent trend to make encryption available by default, and puts Amazon customers’ data at risk, given that they won’t be able to protect the information in their tablets and phones with encryption.

“This is a terrible move as it compromises the safety of Kindle Fire owners by making their data vulnerable to all manner of bad actors, including crackers and repressive governments,” Aral Balkan, a coder, human rights activist, and owner of a Kindle Fire, told Motherboard. “It’s clear with this move that Amazon does not respect the safety of its customers.”

Balkan also highlighted the hypocrisy of Amazon using encryption to protect its copyright with digital rights management or DRM technology.

Sessions, who became the first senator to endorse Trump earlier this week, will advise the candidate on matters of foreign policy and national security.

"We need to understand the limits of our ability to intervene successfully in other nations," said Sessions, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, in a statement. "It is time for a healthy dose of foreign policy realism. In the Middle East, this means forming partnerships based on shared interests, not merely overthrowing regimes in the dangerous attempt to plant democracies."

Sessions reiterated his support for safe zones in the Middle East as a means to keep migrants from coming to the United States and elsewhere. "The only path to long-term stability and resolution of this humanitarian crisis for the United States and our European allies is to work towards the safe return of migrants to their home countries, as Mr. Trump has noted," Session said. "This strategy will also protect our own national security.”

"A national-interest foreign policy, combined with a military second to none, stands in contrast to interventionist ideas that could enmesh us further in the region's chaos," Sessions said. "After over a decade of war and conflict, this country has a host of smart, experienced, and proven leaders. That wisdom must be sought. These meetings will be the beginning of a process that Mr. Trump has called for and which he believes must result in a clear and realistic bipartisan global strategy that will guide our nation for years to come.”