Poll results

Comedian Volodymyr Zelensky ahead in first round of Ukraine election, exit polls show

Comedian Volodymyr Zelensky came out ahead in the first round of the Ukrainian presidential election on Sunday, according to exit polls.

Incumbent President Petro Poroshenko was in second place, according to an exit poll from a consortium of polling organizations broadcast on Ukrainian television. But former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko was close behind, and it appeared that she and Poroshenko would be vying for second place as results came in Sunday evening.

No candidate will win more than half the vote, according to exit polls. That means that Zelensky will face either Poroshenko or Tymoshenko in a run-off scheduled for April 21.

The exit poll from a consortium of polling organizations showed Zelensky with 30.4 percent, Poroshenko with 17.8 percent and Tymoshenko with 14.2 percent.

Internet security

Zuckerberg asks governments for more internet regulation in self-flagellation exercise

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has asked governments and regulators to tighten the screws on digital companies such as his own, and slap them with sanctions if they refuse to abide by rules on privacy, political or harmful content.

Facebook has been under immense pressure from US lawmakers to crack down on supposedly Russia-linked political ads and bots they accused of sowing discord in the run-up to the 2016 election, as well as combating hate speech and protecting the personal data of its millions of users from being harvested by third parties such as the infamous Cambridge Analytica research firm.

Corruption

Spygate: The Inside Story Behind the Alleged Plot to Take Down Trump

Efforts by high-ranking officials in the CIA, FBI, Department of Justice (DOJ), and State Department to portray President Donald Trump as having colluded with Russia were the culmination of years of bias and politicization under the Obama administration.

The weaponization of the intelligence community and other government agencies created an environment that allowed for obstruction in the investigation into Hillary Clinton and the relentless pursuit of a manufactured collusion narrative against Trump.

A willing and complicit media spread unsubstantiated leaks as facts in an effort to promote the Russia-collusion narrative.

The Spygate scandal also raises a bigger question: Was the 2016 election a one-time aberration, or was it symptomatic of decades of institutional political corruption?

This article builds on dozens of congressional testimonies, court documents, and other research to provide an inside look at the actions of Obama administration officials in the scandal that’s become known as Spygate.

Remote sensing

Ocean Remote Sensing Program Reaches New Stage

The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has been advancing its Ocean of Things (OoT) program. The program seeks to enable persistent maritime situational awareness over large ocean areas by deploying thousands of small, low-cost floats that could form a distributed sensor network.

Each smart float would contain a suite of commercially available sensors to collect environmental data – such as ocean temperature, sea state, and location – as well as activity data about commercial vessels, aircraft, and even maritime mammals moving through the area. The floats would transmit data periodically via satellite to a cloud network for storage and real-time analysis, according to darpa.mil.

While several programs over the past decade have measured the ocean environment on a large scale (>10 km), the Ocean of Things(OoT) program will provide measurements that are orders of magnitude finer (<10m).  

DARPA’s Strategic Technology Office has recently granted Numurus, a company specializing in smart IoT solutions, a $2.3M contract to integrate its Smart IoT Ecosystem into thousands of satellites connected remote monitoring devices.   

The technology will provide smart information ecosystems for the increasing number of robotic inspection solutions and smart device fleets.

Climate security

"As Many As A Million Calves Lost In Nebraska" – Beef Prices To Escalate Dramatically In Coming Months

According to Agriculture Secretary Sunny Purdue, there “may be as many as a million calves lost in Nebraska” due to the catastrophic flooding that has hit the state. 

This is not a rumor, this is not an exaggeration, and this is not based on any sort of speculation.  This number comes to us directly from the top agriculture official in the entire country, and it means that the economic toll from the recent floods is far greater than most of us had anticipated.  You can watch Purdue make this quote on Fox Business right here, and it is important to remember that this number is just for one state.  It is hard to imagine what the final numbers will look like when the livestock losses for all of the states affected by the flooding are tallied up.  This is already the worst agricultural disaster in modern American history, and the National Weather Service is telling us that there will be more catastrophic flooding throughout the middle portion of the nation for the next two months.

Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts says that this is the worst flooding that his state has ever experienced.  Ricketts originally told us that 65 out of the 93 counties in his state have declared a state of emergency, but that number has now risen to 74.  Hundreds of millions of dollars of damage has been done in his state alone, and that is just an initial estimate.

Politics

Liz Peek: Biden accused of unwanted kiss, may have kissed his chance for Dem nomination goodbye

Former Vice President Joe Biden, who was expected to rescue the party from the clutches of the progressive left, has emerged as Creepy Uncle Joe once again. This time, in our #MeToo era, serious damage has been done.

Lucy Flores, one-time member of the Nevada Legislature, wrote in a piece published Friday in New York Magazine’s The Cut about a disturbing 2014 encounter with Biden. Her articleis headlined: “An Awkward Kiss Changed How I Saw Joe Biden.”

Biden had come Nevada to boost Flores’ run for lieutenant governor at a campaign rally, but as they waited to go on stage, she says he put his hands on her shoulders, breathed in the scent of her hair, and then planted a “big, slow kiss” on her head.

Foreign policy

British Foreign Policy in the Middle East: A Secret History of Self Interest

The U.K. has elections every five years, an independent judiciary, freedom of speech and association, and strong laws protecting the equality of all citizens and civil liberties. Yet real power rests in the hands of an elite few who control policy-making institutions and the dominant ideas in society.

British foreign policy-making is so centralized that it is akin to an authoritarian regime. A prime minister can send troops into action without even consulting parliament.

Britain is currently fighting several covert wars with no parliamentary authorization or debate. Away from Yemen, special forces are operating on the ground in Syria, despite parliament only having approved air strikes against the Islamic State (IS) group. The British covert war in Syria has been going on since 2011, with almost no discussion by elected MPs.

In 1976, Lord Hailsham famously termed the U.K. an “elective dictatorship” because parliament is easily dominated by the government of the day and faces few constraints on its power. But this was before former prime minister Margaret Thatcher centralized decision-making still further, regularly bypassing the cabinet and relying on a small set of advisers – a strategy continued by Tony Blair, leading to the disastrous invasion of Iraq.

Simulations

China's missiles could dust the US military in minutes — here's what would happen if they tried

Experts at the cutting edge of simulated warfare have spoken: China would handily defeat the US military in the Pacific with quick bursts of missile fired at air bases.

The exact phrasing was that the US was getting "its ass handed to it" in those simulations, Breaking Defense reported the RAND analyst David Ochmanek as saying earlier in March.

"In every case I know of," Robert Work, a former deputy secretary of defense, said, "the F-35 rules the sky when it's in the sky, but it gets killed on the ground in large numbers."

Against China, which has emerged as the US's most formidable rival, this problem becomes more acute. China's vast, mountainous territory gives it millions of square miles in which to hide its extensive fleet of mobile long-, medium-, and short-range missiles.

Defense procurement

U.S. military turns away from drones

The secretive and lethal technology that has defined U.S. counterterror operations for the last decade – and remains the subject of global controversy – appears to be diminishing in importance as America prepares for the next era of combat.

New Pentagon documents show the military plans to invest next year in the lowest number of new drones in more than a decade. Though the complexity of Defense Department budgets makes it difficult to isolate a single reason for the shift, budget analysts agree the Trump administration's stated intention of withdrawing from costly and deadly Middle East wars and instead focus on a resurging China and Russia is driving a focus on other technologies.

Since it was first employed on an industrial scale in Afghanistan, drone technology has evolved, become more lethal and expanded to conflict zones in Iraq and Syria, Libya, Yemen and across sub-Saharan Africa from Somalia to Nigeria. Their ability to exceed prior limits imposed on manned aircraft and to kill America's enemies without putting its warfighters in harm's way has proven irresistible to U.S. presidents since George W. Bush, and a tempting way to obscure involvement in foreign conflict.

Health security

Mental health doctors are told to check social media use of every child referred to them amid growing concerns of the impact of the internet

Every child assessed for mental health issues must be asked about their social media use, psychiatrists have been told.

The advice, issued by the Royal College of Psychiatrists, said clinicians should check if youngsters are spending too much time online.

It comes amid growing evidence of possible links between poor mental health and content seen on the internet. 

Experts estimate the average 14-year-old is now using social media for three to four hours a day. 

At this level of use, 27 per cent of youngsters have symptoms of mental health problems – compared to 12 per cent of those who do not use social media at all.

MPs this month said addiction to social media should potentially be classed as a disease as they called for tough new regulations to protect children from an ‘online Wild West’.

They said sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram should be regulated by Ofcom and forced to abide by a statutory code of conduct.

Information security

NSA contractor pleads guilty to data theft

A former computer contractor who stole terabytes of data from the US National Security Agency (NSA) has pleaded guilty to taking classified documents.

Harold T Martin amassed documents and disk drives at his home, but is not believed to have sold or shared them.

Mr Martin is reported to have pleaded guilty as part of a sentencing deal struck with the prosecutors.

The deal means some charges have been dropped but also lets prosecutors seek a nine-year jail sentence.

Mentally ill

The crime that Mr Martin has pleaded guilty to is one count of wilfully retaining national defence information. In return, prosecutors have dropped 19 separate charges, including spying, levelled in the early stages of the case.

Criminal investigation

Russia police probe 'dark net' murder case

Police in Russia are investigating what could be the world's first documented case of a contract killing ordered via the so-called dark net.

High-ranking police investigator Yevgeniya Shishkina was shot dead outside her home near Moscow in October 2018.

Five months later, local police announced they had arrested two people in connection with the killing - a 19-year-old medical student called Abdulaziz Abdulazizov, and a 17-year-old schoolboy, who cannot be named for legal reasons. Both are from St Petersburg.

Drug sales

Preliminary details of the case, which has shocked Russian investigators, have been shared unofficially with BBC Russian by sources close to the investigation. A court case is expected later this year, in which the two students face prosecution.

The documents allege that the pair were paid one million rubles (£12,000) to carry out the murder. According to the police reports, the order was placed by the owner of a drug-dealing site on an illegal online trading platform on part of what is known as the dark net.

Spy story

Operation Whitewash: Judi Dench’s latest role sees her play a suburban widow who ‘nobly’ leaked secrets to Soviets to ‘ensure world peace’…but who in reality gave Russia the keys to the atom bomb

In 1932, Norwood, aged 20, began working in the clerical department of a metallurgy research group — the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association (BN-FMRA) — where she remained until her retirement in 1972.

Her appointment had fateful consequences during the forthcoming nuclear age, as BN-FMRA soon developed close links with the British top-secret project to develop a nuclear weapon codenamed ‘Tube Alloys’. Two years later, Norwood started to spy for the Soviet NKVD — the forerunner of the KGB.

The man who recruited her? None other than Andrew Rothstein, the son of Theodore — the founder of the CPGB. 

Tellingly, as Norwood would later admit to her biographer, David Burke, in 2000, it was she who approached the Russians, and not the other way round.

‘I must have thought if any of the work the BN-FMRA was doing, not secret stuff, might be useful,’ she said. ‘But I didn’t immediately think of pinching it. I made the approach.’

So began almost four decades of treachery, motivated by what Professor Christopher Andrew accurately describes as a ‘myth-image of the Soviet Union which bore little relationship to the brutal reality of Stalinist rule’.

Mass surveillance

DEA Never Checked If Its Massive Surveillance Operations Are Legal, Watchdog Says

The Drug Enforcement Administration skirted numerous legal checks on a trio of bulk data collection programs dating back to the early 1990s, according to an internal watchdog.

In a heavily redacted, 144-page report published Thursday, the Justice Department Inspector General revealed the administration failed to fully assess the legal basis for three massive international surveillance operations that ran largely unchecked from 1992 to 2013. Two of the programs remain active in some form today.

Under one initiative, which investigators called “Program A,” the administration used “non-target specific” subpoenas to force multiple telecom providers to provide metadata on every phone call made from the U.S. to as many as 116 countries with “a nexus to drugs.” Investigators found some companies also provided the officials with data on all calls made between those foreign countries.

The administration also conducted two other bulk surveillance programs during that time without assessing their legality, investigators found. Under “Program B,” officials used similarly sweeping subpoenas to collect information on anyone who purchased specific products from participating vendors. Through “Program C,” DEA purchased telephone metadata for targets of ongoing investigations through a contractor for a separate government agency.

Electronic surveillance

Workplace Surveillance Is Central to Capitalist Exploitation

Surveillance of employees in the workplace through the use of advanced technology represents the latest phase in the long history of capitalism to maintain control of workers and to increase productivity through intensified forms of exploitation. Is surveillance capitalism an updated version of Big Brother or something even more sinister? Does it really increase productivity? Are workers accepting of surveillance? And how do we ensure that surveillance capitalism does not completely wipe out privacy and individual rights? In this exclusive Truthout interview, Ivan Manokha, a lecturer at Oxford University and a leading scholar in surveillance studies, offers penetrating insights into the above questions.

Immigration security

Hijacking of an Oil Tanker Is a Turning Point in Migrant Crisis

Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini called them “pirates.” But the women and children who disembarked from a cargo ship hijacked by migrants in European waters were simply desperate.

They were among the 108 people escaping what human rights groups say is torture and sexual assault in Libya, a country left broken by a NATO-backed uprising that ousted a dictator but failed to bring peace.

Over the course of 24 hours, a group of men wrested control of the vessel on Wednesday when it became clear it was returning to Tripoli only for Maltese special forces, backed by helicopters, to board the ship at nightfall and redirect it to Valletta by Thursday morning.

As the Turkish-flagged El Hiblu 1 docked at the capital’s port a toddler and a young girl in torn jeans and a pink jacket were the first off as armed personnel stood guard on deck. Four men in handcuffs, believed to have been those who commandeered the ship, were escorted away by police.

Politicized intel

Rand Paul: Former Obama CIA chief promoted ‘dossier,’ demands investigation of Obama team

Sen. Rand Paul escalated his demand for an investigation into former Obama officials who “concocted” the anti-Trump Russia scandal, revealing that former CIA Director John Brennan was the key figure who legitimized the charges and discredited “dossier” against the president.

In an interview, the Kentucky Republican said the Senate Judiciary Committee should immediately ask Brennan about his involvement in the document that helped to kick off the Russia collusion investigation of President Trump.

“I think we need to find the truth,” he told Washington Secrets. He said the goal would be to stop similar faulty investigations into future administrations, “Democratic or Republican.”

In a tweet, he said that he heard from a high level source that Brennan helped to validate the “dossier” in intelligence reports.

“A high-level source tells me it was Brennan who insisted that the unverified and fake Steele dossier be included in the Intelligence Report ... Brennan should be asked to testify under oath in Congress ASAP,” he tweeted.

In an earlier tweet Wednesday, Paul called for wide investigation into former President Barack Obama and his team. “Time for Congress to investigate. What did President Obama know and when? How did this hoax go on for so long unabated?

Opinion

Former CIA Director David Petraeus has five "big ideas" to combat Islamic extremism

The U.S. should adopt a policy of "sustained presence" to effectively combat Islamic extremism abroad, says former CIA director and retired General David Petraeus, who led coalition forces in Iraq from 2007 to 2008 and in Afghanistan from 2010 to 2011.

"This is a generational struggle at the least," Petraeus said. "I understand fully why presidents want to end wars rather than to start them, why they want to get out of wars and do nation-building at home."

"But we do have to stay with this," he said. "We need a sustained presence, a sustained commitment."

In an interview with Intelligence Matters host and CBS News senior national security contributor Michael Morell, Petraeus offered four additional "big ideas" intended to frame an effective strategic approach to combatting Islamic extremism.

Chemical security

16 years ago, the US invaded Iraq — CIA agents already on the ground knew it would be a disaster

While the CIA did find some modest chemical and biological weapons factories, they belonged to Ansar al-Islam (AAS), the Al Qaeda-linked insurgent group operating in Kurdistan, which had no ties to Hussein. Once it became clear AAS was a serious threat, and that a contingent of Al Qaeda fighters had snuck into the country after the US invaded Afghanistan, Faddis and his team developed a plan to destroy both groups in August of 2002.

But when they requested SOCOM assets, they were turned down cold, marking, Faddis says, the second missed opportunity to take out Al Qaeda (the first being in the mountains of Tora Bora, Afghanistan, the year before).

As time went on, they increasingly concentrated their efforts on picking up sources — men with information about the regime who were eager to share it with US intelligence. Since no Americans were officially operating in Iraq at the time, such operations involved a fair amount of risk. Crews was fond of comparing his job to that of a rodeo clown.

"The Agency guys were the ones riding the bull," he said, and the commandos "were the ones running in front making sure they didn't get hurt. We were the trigger pullers on the ground."

EMP security

Trump orders feds to prep for EMP attack

President Trump has ordered federal government agencies to harden the nation’s infrastructure against potentially devastating attacks by a nuclear-bomb-produced electromagnetic pulse, or EMP.

“The federal government must foster sustainable, efficient, and cost-effective approaches to improving the nation’s resilience to the effects of EMPs,” Mr. Trump stated in an executive order signed Tuesday.

EMP is produced from nuclear blasts, special electronic weapons or solar storms and can damage or disrupt critical infrastructure.

The order notes that a high-altitude EMP can be set off by a nuclear detonation at about 24 miles above Earth or higher. Another danger is an EMP caused by a natural sun-caused geomagnetic storm. Both can affect electronics over large geographic areas.

The directive sets U.S. policy to prepare for the EMP incidents through governmentwide efforts and encouraging the private sector, which owns much of the electrical infrastructure, to adopt protective measures.

Electronic surveillance

INSIDE THE VIDEO SURVEILLANCE PROGRAM IBM BUILT FOR PHILIPPINE STRONGMAN RODRIGO DUTERTE


JAYPEE LAROSA WAS standing in front of an internet cafe in Davao City, a metropolitan hub on the Philippine island of Mindanao, when three men in dark jackets pulled up on a motorcycle and opened fire. That summer evening, Larosa, 20, was killed. After the shooting, according to witnesses, one of the men reportedly removed Larosa’s baseball cap and said, “Son of a bitch. This is not the one.” Then they drove off.

Larosa’s murder, on July 17, 2008, was one of hundreds of extrajudicial killings carried out in Davao City, now a city of 1.6 million, while Rodrigo Duterte, now president of the Philippines, was mayor there. Years before launching his notorious, bloody “drug war” across the country, Duterte presided over similar tactics at the local level. During his tenure as mayor, according to a 2009 investigation by Human Rights Watch, death squads assassinated street children, drug dealers, and petty criminals; in some cases, researchers found evidence of the complicity or direct involvement of government officials and police.

Duterte has consistently denied any connection to this campaign of killings, but at times, his support for the violence was barely concealed. As mayor, Duterte would publicly announce the names or locations of “criminals,” and some of them would later be killed, according to human rights groups and local newspapers.

Terror threat

White nationalism is now a global terror threat

The recent massacre of 50 Muslim worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand is the latest confirmation that white supremacy is a danger to democratic societies across the globe.

Despite President Donald Trump’s suggestion that white nationalist terrorism is not a major problem, recent data from the United Nations, University of Chicago and other sources show the opposite.

As more people embrace a xenophobic and anti-immigrant worldview, it is fueling hostility and violence toward those deemed “outsiders” — whether because of their religion, skin color or national origin.

Most of the Western world — from Switzerland and Germany to the United States, Scandinavia and New Zealand — has witnessed a potent nationalist strain infecting society in recent years.

Driven by fear over the loss of white primacy, white nationalists believe that white identity should be the organizing principle of Western society.

AI security

The controversy surrounding military artificial intelligence is rooted in “grave misperceptions” about what the department is actually trying to do, according to current and former Defense officials.

Protecting the U.S. in the decades ahead will require the Pentagon to make “substantial, sustained” investments in military artificial intelligence, and critics need to realize it doesn’t take that task lightly, according to current and former Defense Department officials.

Efforts to expand the department’s use of AI systems have been met with public outcry among many in the tech and policy communities who worry the U.S will soon entrust machines to make life-and-death decisions on the battlefield. Last year, employee protests led Google to pull out an Air Force project that used machine-learning to sort through surveillance footage.

On Wednesday, officials said the Pentagon is going to great lengths to ensure any potential applications of AI adhere to strict ethical standards and international norms. Even if the U.S. military balks on deploying the tech, they warned, global adversaries like Russia and China certainly will not, and their ethical framework will likely be lacking.

“The Department of Defense is absolutely unapologetic about pursuing this new generation of AI-enabled weapons,” former Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work said Wednesday at an event hosted by AFCEA. “If we’re going to succeed against a competitor like China that’s all in on this competition … we’re going to have to grasp the inevitability of AI.”

Health security

The cholesterol and calorie hypotheses are both dead — it is time to focus on the real culprit: insulin resistance

...Even minimal exercise can help to reverse insulin resistance. A recent article stated that regular brisk walking, just 30 minutes per day more than three times per week, can reverse insulin resistance^[39], while another study suggested that just 15 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise per day can increase lifespan by 3 years.

Time to redefine CVD risks

In summary, for many patients at high risk of CVD, one of the safest and most effective ways to reduce the risk of heart attack and stroke is to consume a high fat and low glycaemic load Mediterranean diet and engage in regular exercise. At the very least, exercise interventions are often similar to drug interventions in terms of their mortality benefits in the secondary prevention of coronary heart disease, and do not come with side effects...

Spy missions

Top 10 most damaging spy missions in history

The Espionage Act of 1917 defined espionage as the notion of obtaining or delivering information relating to national defense to a person who is not entitled to have it. The Act made espionage a crime punishable by death, but there are always men and women willing to risk it — for country, for honor, or maybe just for some quick cash.

Whether they infiltrated the enemy's ranks or sweet-talked the details out of careless persons who ignore all those "loose lips sink ships" posters, these are the most notorious spies with the most successful espionage missions in history, ranked by the operations they disrupted, the damage they dealt, and the odds stacked against them.

Aldrich Ames is a 31-year CIA veteran turned KGB double agent. In 1994, he was arrested by the FBI for spying for the Soviets along with his wife, Rosario Ames, who aided and abetted his espionage. Following his arrest and guilty plea, Ames revealed that he had compromised the identities of CIA and FBI human sources, leading some to be executed by the Soviet Union.

During a nearly year-long investigation into his subterfuge — and his subsequent trial — it was revealed that Ames had been spying for the Soviets since 1985, passing details about HUMINT sources, clandestine operations against the USSR, and providing classified information via "dead drops" in exchange for millions of dollars.

It was, in fact, the Ames' lavish spending that finally led to their downfall, but by then, he had already nearly destroyed the American intelligence program in the Soviet Union.

Ames is currently serving his life sentence, while his wife, as part of a plea-bargain agreement, served only five years and walked free.