See also: Al Qaeda holds big rally in Yemen Candidate Bill de Blasio was “deeply troubled” by NYPD surveillance of mosques, and now his police commissioner is dropping the program. Matt Apuzzo and Joseph Goldstein report ion the New York Times: The New York Police Department has abandoned a secretive program that dispatched plainclothes detectives into Muslim neighborhoods to eavesdrop on conversations and built detailed files on where people ate, prayed and shopped, the department said. The decision by the nation’s largest police force to shutter the controversial surveillance program represents the first sign that William J. Bratton, the department’s new commissioner, is backing away from some of the post-9/11 intelligence-gathering practices of his predecessor. The Police Department’s tactics, which are the subject of two federal lawsuits, drew criticism from civil rights groups and a senior official with the Federal...(Read Full Post)