Unidentified special task forces are conducting a
special operation in the area of the township of Avdeyevka in Donbas to render
harmless a battalion of Ukrainian nationalists, Eduard Basurin, an official
spokesman for the Defence Ministry of the self-proclaimed unrecognized Donetsk
People’s Republic said on Thursday.
Top defense contractors
are poised to compete in a major industry battle to develop autonomous missiles
for the U.S. Navy that can kill enemy ships at sea and demolish air-defense
radar sites inland.
Taking U.S. and
Russian missiles off high alert could keep a possible cyberattack from starting
a nuclear war, a former commander of U.S. nuclear forces says, but neither
country appears willing to increase the lead-time to prepare the weapons for
launch.Retired Gen. James Cartwright said in an interview that
"de-alerting" nuclear arsenals could foil hackers by reducing the
chance of firing a weapon in response to a false warning of attack.
Yemen's Shiite rebels
and their allies advanced in the southern city of Aden on Wednesday, capturing
parts of an upscale neighborhood and seizing men they accuse of fighting them
from their homes.Security officials in the city said the rebels, known as
Houthis, aided by military forces loyal to former President Ali Abdullah Saleh,
had moved up the seaside road in the neighborhood of Khormaksar, taking an area
stretching from the Russian Consulate to the Crater business district.
The House Armed
Services Committee early Thursday adopted a $612 billion defense authorization
bill which would radically reform military retirement but reject changes to a
host of other benefit trims proposed by the Pentagon.By a 60-2 vote, the panel
approved the annual budget legislation after almost 19 hours of debate, setting
the stage for a full House vote in mid-May. 
The director general of Rosoboronexport, Russia’s main
defense exporter, recently confirmed the existence of a contract to sell S-400
surface-to-air missile systems to China. Based on anonymous sources, the
Russian media began reporting on the sale as early as November 2014. The
contract itself had likely been signed even earlier. It is useful to keep this
timeline in mind when estimating the probable date by which China will obtain
the missile systems—most likely sometime in 2016. 
During the Cold War, the potential for nuclear weapons
to be used was determined largely by the United States and the Soviet Union.
Now, with 16,300 weapons possessed by the seven established nuclear-armed states—China,
France, India, Pakistan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United
States—deterrence is increasingly complex.
Less than four months
after ascending the throne, Saudi King Salman bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud has made
unprecedented changes in the line of succession that benefit his own son Prince
Mohammed bin Salman. These shifts come as Salman pursues the most assertive
foreign policy in recent Saudi history.
On the way to work at
the Library of Congress during the year just past, I was stopped on more than
one occasion by activists from the Lyndon LaRouche movement. Among the many
interesting theories they regaled me with one sunny Spring morning, one stuck
out: Queen Elizabeth II, through dastardly means, exerted a secret and
nefarious influence on American foreign policy, manipulating it to serve
British imperial interests. This, they said, explained America’s recent wars in
the Middle East.
The current debate
about how the U.S. military can maintain its technological superiority is
dominated by offset strategies — use of an asymmetric advantage to mitigate an
adversary’s advantage. The elegance and efficacy of prior
offset strategiesmakes them attractive as a reference point. But given the United States’current
and future strategic circumstances might a hedging strategy be
more effective?
A third day of declines pushed European stocks to their first monthly
drop of the year, as the Federal Reserve left open the prospect of
interest-rate increases even amid weak U.S. growth.The Stoxx Europe 600 Index
slid 0.4 percent to 395.79 at the close of trading, after earlier losing as
much as 1 percent. Shares briefly rose 0.2 percent after data showed U.S.
jobless claims fell to a 15-year low. 
For years, close ties
between Israel and Turkey were understood to be the reason Jerusalem has
avoided the repeated requests of Armenians for the international community to
recognize the genocide their community suffered at the hands of the Ottoman
Turks during World War I. Not only has Israel refused to recognize that the
massacre was premeditated and planned by the Ottoman government in Istanbul, it
has also exerted its influence in Washington to prevent the United States from
recognizing the genocide. 
Skin cancer
affects 1 in 5 Americans, and more than 3.5 million cases of nonmelanoma
skin cancer will be diagnosed this year, according to the American Academy
of Dermatology. "When skin cancers are caught early, they are often
curable,” says Dr. Desiree Ratner, director of the Comprehensive Skin
Cancer Program at Mount Sinai Beth Israel.
Chinese combat engineers have a new mine
clearing robot that's going to accompany troops onto the battlefield. While
many other nations have built mine sweeping robots, such as the U.S.'s Panther
(an unmanned M60 tank chassis with chainlink flails), this new robot is
actually armed with exploding mine clearing line charges (MCLC). Imagine it a
bit like a rocket-armed R2-D2 or BB-8.
In a paper published in Biogeosciences, researchers describe pockets of
low-oxygenated water traveling across the Atlantic Ocean. They found these
so-called dead zones in 100-mile long eddies, giant whirlpool-like structures
that form in the open ocean and that can spin for months at a time. Dead zones
get their morbid nickname from their waters' low levels of oxygen, which make
it nearly impossible for any animal
life to
survive. Animals caught in these regions of the ocean face a simple choice:
move, or die.
The celebration of Nazi
Germany's surrender in World War II, one of the most important holidays in
Russia, has taken on a new meaning as Moscow presses on with its efforts to
portray Ukraine's new pro-European leadership as Nazi sympathizers. 
Vietnam is commemorating the 40th anniversary of the fall of Saigon. The
withdrawal of U-S troops from the city marked the end of the Vietnam War
and the more-than-decade-long U.S. involvement in Vietnam. A
military parade took place Thursday in Ho Chi Minh City, which was known as
Saigon before being named after the leader of North Vietnam upon
reunification. Some 6-thousand children, women, veterans and soldiers
marched towards the Presidential Palace reenacting when North Vietnamese
tanks crash through the gates on April 30th in 1975. U.S. stocks dropped
Thursday as a spate of downbeat corporate results and mixed economic data
revealed a recent downshift in the U.S. economy, dampening market sentiment. The
Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 195.01 points, or 1.08 percent, to 17,840.52.
The S&P 500 was down 21.34 points, or 1.01 percent, to 2,085.51. The Nasdaq
dropped 82.22 points, or 1.64 percent, to 4,941.42. The slide reversed the bulk
of the month's gains for stocks.
The State Department,
when it was under Hillary's command, had approved of a deal in which the
Canadian mining company Uranium One was sold to the Russian state nuclear
corporation Rosatom. Since uranium is a strategic mineral resource, any sales
of companies to foreign owners must by law be approved by several U.S.
government structures. During the course of the acquisition of Uranium One, the
former owners of the company made vast donations to the Clinton Foundation. )
Radiation
levels remain normal in Russia as wildfires continue to burn in the Chernobyl
exclusion zone, Anna Popova, director of the consumer rights watchdog
Rospotrebnadzor and Russia's chief epidemiologist, told Interfax on Thursday.
Intelligence is the art
and science of evidence-based decision-support. Intelligence is not defined by
its inputs (spies, secrecy, money, risk) but rather by its outputs – tailored
actionable decision-support. In this context, the fastest, least expensive, and
very often the best intelligence is achievable using mostly – and sometime only
– open sources and methods.
If Syrian President
Bashar al-Assad meets the same fate as Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi or Iraq’s Saddam
Hussein, much of Official Washington would rush out to some chic watering hole
to celebrate – one more “bad guy” down, one more “regime change” notch on the
belt. But the day after Damascus falls could mark the beginning of the end for
the American Republic.
North Korea's Kim Jong-Un
ordered the execution of 15 senior officials this year, including several who
complained about the young leader's policies, South Korea's intelligence agency
said Wednesday. Those executed included two vice minister-level
officials, the Yonhap news agency reported, citing legislators who attended a
briefing by the National Intelligence Service (NIS).
A
new report released on Tuesday details fraud and waste totaling more than $200
million of uncovered fraud and waste of taxpayer funds in the charter school
sector, but says the total is impossible to know because there is not
sufficient oversight over these schools. It calls on Congress to include
safeguards in legislation being considered to succeed the federal No Child Left
Behind law.
There were signs that President
Barack Obama might rein in the mass militarization of America's police forces
after he won the White House. Policing is primarily a local issue, overseen by
local authorities. But beginning in the late 1960s with President Richard
Nixon, the federal government began instituting policies that gave federal
authorities more power to fight the drug trade, and to lure state and local
policymakers into the anti-crime agenda of the administration in charge.
Russian saber-rattling in Eastern
Europe, homegrown Islamic State fighters in Scandinavia and human traffickers
sending thousands of migrants across the Mediterranean to Italy are three very
different problems facing Europe, but they have produced one result — a push to
strengthen borders through increased homeland security spending.
When Colombian authorities intercepted phone calls between a young woman
and a member of Colombia's most powerful drug cartel, the Urabenos, they heard
the woman offer merchandise with "zero kilometers".But the
23-year-old human trafficker, known by her alias Paola, was not referring to a
car's mileage but to virgin girls she had recruited and groomed to serve as sex
slaves for kingpins of the notorious organised crime network.
In cities across
the United States, marchers took to the streets to show support for protesters
in Baltimore and to complain about police violence in their own towns.On Wednesday night, several hundred
people streamed into Union Square for an "NYC Rise Up & Shut It Down
With Baltimore" rally. Protesters headed west on 17th Street and were met
by New York City Police officers who pushed them back.
The Salafist Islamist groups scattered around the world may disagree
with each other on everything about how to best conduct Jihad, mayhem and
murder; but they all seem to agree that slaughtering Christians is their key to
entering Paradise.They may be identified by different names like Al-Qaeda, Al
Nusra Brigade, Boko Haram, Hamas, Hizbollah, the Daesh or the current Islamic
State or ISIS; but they are all driven and justified by their universal belief
that they are obeying the command of their religion as stated in the Koran.
Only one-in-three Americans knows how many women serve
on the Supreme Court, but 91 percent can identify Martin Luther King Jr., 47
years after his assassination.
