War crimes

What happens to SEALs who testify about war crimes?

At least seven SEALs are slated to testify in the May 28 war crimes trial against Chief Special Warfare Operator Edward “Eddie” Gallagher, but attorneys continue to question what will happen to their careers once in the public spotlight.

That’s one of the issues expected to be raised during a Tuesday hearing in a Naval Base San Diego courtroom, according to documents provided to Navy Times.

“I’m going to give a speech about this,” said Timothy Parlatore, Gallagher’s civilian defense attorney. “The issues go beyond this trial, and they’re important.”

It all stems from a larger debate over the immunity deals offered to past and present members of SEAL Team 7 in exchange for their testimony against Gallagher, 39, who’s accused of stabbing to death a wounded Islamic State prisoner of war, shooting two Iraqi civilians and then attempting to cover up the alleged 2017 incidents.

Lost secrets

Crashed F-35A fighter jet located, US general says

A U.S. Air Force commander told reporters here Monday that the F-35A stealth fighter that crashed off the coast of Japan had been located, and that recovery efforts were underway. 

"The aircraft's been located. ... It's now in the recovery aspect," said Charles Brown, four-star general and commander of the Pacific Air Forces, in a briefing for reporters in New York.

But later in the day, Colonel John Hutcheson, the director of public affairs at U.S. Forces Japan, contacted the Nikkei Asian Review and said "the aircraft has not been located at the bottom of the sea. The U.S. military is still working with the Japan Air Self-Defense Force to locate the wreckage."

Since the Japanese-built jet disappeared April 9, Japan time, the Japan Air Self-Defense Force and the U.S. military have poured resources into searching for its wreckage, which could expose sensitive American military technology secrets if retrieved by China or Russia.

The F-35, a fifth-generation fighter developed by American defense contractor Lockheed Martin, evades radar and is expected to play a crucial role in the defense strategies of the U.S. and its allies for decades to come.

Drug trafficking

US No Longer Using F-22s to Bomb Afghan Drug Labs, Watchdog Says

The U.S. military has quietly ended a once-touted bombing campaign against drug labs in Afghanistan aimed at cutting off Taliban funding, according to John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.

"They're no longer doing it, which may indicate how effective it was," Sopko told defense reporters at a breakfast Wednesday.

He said the Operation Iron Tempest bombing campaign, begun in late 2017, "didn't have the intended effect of hitting the Taliban's purse and was probably a waste of resources."

U.S. Central Command referred questions on the bombing campaign to U.S. Forces-Afghanistan, which did not respond directly to whether the operation had been called off.

"United States Forces-Afghanistan's efforts are aimed at setting conditions for a political settlement and safeguarding our national interests," a spokesman said in an email. "The grand majority of our strikes are lethal strikes against the Taliban or ISIS."

Genetic security

Author Jamie Metzl says the "genetic revolution" could threaten national security

Recent advances in reproductive technologies and genetic screening hold tremendous promise for the elimination of harmful inherited diseases, but they also may pose significant national security challenges, said Jamie Metzl, a technology and geopolitics expert and author of a new book on the genetics revolution.

Especially as societies decide whether or how much to allow citizens to screen and edit human embryos, the chances of division, and potentially conflict, could rise."Certainly if these technologies work as I believe they will, they will potentially confer tremendous benefits on people," Metzl said. But, he said, if certain technologies are unevenly adopted by different societies, "we run the very real risk of bifurcating our communities, bifurcating the world into the genetic haves and have-nots."

Foreign trade security

Illicit global trade of counterfeit goods is national security threat

There is quite literally an army of pirates overseas that is plundering the intellectual property of American and European citizens and businesses. Last week, President Trump issued an executive memorandum about combating pirated goods that calls for a detailed study of counterfeit trafficking and how the United States can better defend its intellectual property. The White House order is one of many initiatives by the United States and European Union to secure our democracies and free markets from the onslaught of authoritarian corruption, kleptomania, and crime.

Who are the victims of this systematic thievery? A recent report by the Organisation for Cooperation and Economic Development showed that innovators in the United States bear the brunt of the costs, as almost 25 percent of all seized goods have American intellectual property rights. France, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and Japan are under assault as well. Their total losses represent more than 50 percent of the total seizures of counterfeit goods. In many cases, foreign trade zones are key facilitators. The tidal wave of counterfeit and pirated goods, accounting for more than 3 percent of global trade in 2018 according to the report, comes from, you guessed it, China. In fact, China accounts for over half of total fake goods in the world and more than 75 percent if you include Hong Kong.

Information security

How Much Did WikiLeaks Damage U.S. National Security?

To its supporters, the WikiLeaks disclosures have revealed a wealth of important information that the U.S. government wanted to keep hidden, particularly in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This included abuses by the military and a video that showed a U.S. helicopter attack in Iraq on suspected militants. Those killed turned out to be unarmed civilians and journalists.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, now under arrest in Britain, has often argued that no one has been harmed by the WikiLeaks disclosures.

But many in the national security community say the leaks were harmful to a broad range of people. However, they generally say the damage was limited and has faded since the first big WikiLeaks dump in 2010, which included hundreds of thousands of classified documents from the U.S. military and the State Department.

Innovations & technologies

Is autonomy the next frontier for hypersonic vehicles?

On April 25, Sandia National Laboratories announced a proposal to add autonomous navigation to hypersonic vehicles.

Hypersonics themselves are hardly new technology. At White Sands in 1949, the United States pushed a modified V-2 rocket to a speed of 5,150 miles per hour, making it likely the first human-produced object to reach hypersonic speed, though the rocket was destroyed in the testing. By 1981, Albuquerque’s Sandia Labs had conducted the “Sandia Winged Energetic Reentry Vehicle Experiment,” which yielded information about hypersonic vehicles if not useful prototypes. Sandia also worked on the Strategic Target System program from 1985 into the 1990s, which explored guidance systems at hypersonic speeds, and has worked on other hypersonic projects in the years since.

The latest initiative, then, is less about the physics of hypersonic flight, and more about the software guiding flight decisions at hypersonic speeds.

“At extreme speeds, the flight is incredibly challenging to plan for and program,” said Alex Roesler, a senior manager at Sandia who leads the coalition. Sandia Labs is looking to AI as a way around the difficulty of planning hypersonic flight in advance of launch.

Science

Physicists set a new record of quantum memory efficiency

Like memory in conventional computers, quantum memory components are essential for quantum computers—a new generation of data processors that exploit quantum mechanics and can overcome the limitations of classical computers. With their potent computational power, quantum computers may push the boundaries of fundamental science to create new drugs, explain cosmological mysteries, or enhance accuracy of forecasts and optimization plans. Quantum computers are expected to be much faster and more powerful than their traditional counterparts as information is calculated in qubits, which, unlike the bits used in classical computers, can represent both zero and one in a simultaneous superstate.

Photonic quantum memory allows for the storage and retrieval of flying single-photon quantum states. However, production of such highly efficient quantum memory remains a major challenge as it requires a perfectly matched photon-matter quantum interface. Meanwhile, the energy of a single photon is too weak and can be easily lost into the noisy sea of stray light background.

Research

Creativity Is Not Just for the Young

The two methods found that conceptual laureates peaked at about either 29 or 25 years of age. Experimental laureates peaked when they were roughly twice as old – at about 57 in one method or the mid-50s in the other.

Most other research in this area has studied differences in peak ages of creativity between disciplines, such as physics versus medical sciences. These studies generally find small variations across disciplines, with creativity peaking in the mid-30s to early 40s in most scientific fields.

“These studies attribute differences in creative peaks to the nature of the scientific fields themselves, not to the scientists doing the work,” Weinberg said.

“Our research suggests than when you’re most creative is less a product of the scientific field that you’re in and is more about how you approach the work you do.”

The researchers were supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Institute on Aging, the National Institutes of Health’s Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research and the Ewing Marion Kauffman and Alfred P. Sloan foundations.

Cybersecurity

Rapidly spreading cryptomining malware uses NSA hacking code

A new form of cryptomining malware that utilizes U.S. National Security Agency hacking code has been detected rapidly spreading across Asia.

Dubbed “Beapy” by security researchers at Symantec Corp. who identified it last week, the malware is primarily targeting enterprise networks, with the majority of infections detected in China but also other countries in Asia as well. A small number of infections have been detected in the U.S.

Beapy is being spread via emails that have a malicious Excel attachment with them. Once they’re clicked on, Beapy uses the NSA DoublePulsar code to open a backdoor on infected machines that is then exploited to gain access to a corporate network to install cryptomining scripts.

“Beapy is particularly effective for hackers because it targets corporations and leverages NSA technology to spread throughout employees’ devices and perform large-scale, clandestine cryptojacking,” Anurag Kahol, chief technology officer and founder of Bitglass Inc., told SiliconANGLE. “This practice mines cryptocurrency at an extremely accelerated rate and wastes enterprises’ processing and storage power, costing thousands of additional dollars in electricity bills.”

Cybersecurity

Ransomware: The key lesson Maersk learned from battling the NotPetya attack

Speaking in a keynote session at CYBER UK 19 – a cybersecurity conference hosted by the UK's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) – Woodcock was reliving the events of 27 June 2017 when the shipping and logistics giant Maersk was an unintended victim of NotPetya ransomware.

Developed as a disk-wiping cyber weapon by the Russian military and helped along by a leaked version of the NSA's EternalBlue hacking tool – which is the same exploit that powered the WannaCry ransomware outbreak, NotPetya's target was businesses in Ukraine – but the malware quickly got out of hand. Soon it was spreading around the world, taking down networks and causing billions of dollars in damage and lost revenue.

Headquartered in Denmark with hundreds of sites in countries across the globe, Maersk plays a huge role in global shipping, with one of its massive ships – each carrying up to 20,000 containers – arriving in a port somewhere around the world every 15 minutes.

International cooperation

Russia, Turkey jointly developing aircraft and helicopters

Russia and Turkey are jointly working on creating promising aircraft and helicopters, and also components for the armor, the press office of Russia’s state arms seller Rosoboronexport (part of the state hi-tech corporation Rostec) reported on Monday.

"We have a number of joint projects for developing promising aircraft and rotorcraft platforms, components for the armor and the after-sale maintenance of the armaments supplied," the press office quoted Rosoboronexport CEO Alexander Mikheyev as saying.

Turkey also shows interest in the newest Russian combat modules, air defense systems with different range capabilities and anti-tank weapons. Despite the rivals’ interference in the bilateral relations, Russia and Turkey are coping with the difficulties that arise, the chief executive stressed.

"At present, we are discussing with the Turkish partners the implementation of some most important projects in the sphere of military and technical cooperation and in the civilian industry… We are undoubtedly ready for various formats of technological cooperation, including in such science-intensive spheres as the aerospace industry,

Electronic surveillance


Murder suspect caught out by facial recognition at Chinese airport


A Chinese fugitive who evaded the authorities for three years with dozens of fake identities has finally been caught thanks to the country’s growing network of facial recognition surveillance technology.

Wu Xieyu, 24, was on the run suspected of killing his mother in 2016. He was arrested on April 21, minutes after he appeared in an airport in the southwest city of Chongqing. The airport had upgraded its surveillance system to include facial recognition about six months ago.

The airport surveillance system flagged Mr Wu four times, alerting the authorities that there was a 98 per cent chance that he was their suspect, according to The Paper, a government-run news site, before police approached him and asked if they could see his identity papers.

Health security

'I want justice': contaminated blood victims speak out

The long-awaited inquiry into the treatment of haemophiliacs who were given contaminated blood products is to begin on Tuesday. Below, two victims of the scandal describe what happened to them.

Maria Fletcher

Fletcher has learned to live with the discomfort and medical intervention caused by beta thalassemia, the blood disorder with which she was born. She requires transfusions every three weeks to top up the iron-containing protein in the red blood cells that carry oxygen around her body.

She was diagnosed with the condition aged one and endured regular hospital visits during her school years. After leaving education, she obtained a traineeship with a cosmetics company.

At 21, however, she started to feel extremely fatigued. After a series of tests she was informed she had contracted hepatitis C from the blood she had received.

“It wasn’t screened properly,” she says. “It was from donors living in England. I haven’t lived like a normal person and a lot of that has been due to hepatitis C. I kept working for a bit, but there were a lot of side-effects mentally and physically.

“My white cell count would drop and I had [temperature fluctuations] and shivers. I had a really good job and had to give it up. You couldn’t continue a normal life at home and work.”

Radiation safety

Japan's nuclear horror relived as people return to Fukushima's ghost towns

The government is keen residents return as soon as it is safe, and this month around 40% of the town of Okuma, which sits just west of the plant, was declared safe for habitation thanks to ongoing decontamination efforts carried out on an superhuman scale.

The official mandatory evacuation order was lifted, and while reports reveal just 367 residents of Okuma's original population of 10,341 have so far made the decision to return, and most of the town remains off-limits, the Japanese government is keen this be seen as a positive start to re-building this devastated area.

"This is a major milestone for the town," Toshitsuna Watanabe, mayor of Okuma, told Japanese news outlets, as six pensioners locally dubbed 'The Old Man Squad', who had taken it upon themselves to defy advice and keep their town secure, finally ceased their patrols.

Food security

Glyphosate in Food: Complete List of Products and Brands Filled with Popular Cancer-Causing Weed-Killer

Concern over glyphosate in food is on the rise after Monsanto was found guilty in covering up their cancer-causing product, Roundup. Monsanto has been under scrutiny ever since they were ordered to pay $289 million in damages to plaintiff, Dewayne Johnson.

Just after the first successful trial in taking down Monsanto, the Environmental Working Group (EWG) published a haunting report on the levels of glyphosate in food. According to the independent laboratory tests commissioned by the EWG, popular oat cereals, oatmeal, granola and snack bars come with a heavy dose of the cancer-causing weedkiller, Roundup.

Why Should We Care About Glyphosate in Food?

Glyphosate is the main ingredient found in the popular weed-killer Roundup. Back in 2015, a famous study published by the International Agency for Research of Cancer (IARC) came to the conclusion that glyphosate is “probably carcinogenic to humans (1).”

The link between glyphosate and Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma is particularly strong. One study, published in 2008 by Swedish researchers, found that exposure to glyphosate tripled the risk of a subtype of non-Hodgkin called small lymphocytic lymphoma...

Innovations & technologies

In this league, drone races are won by brainwaves alone

Guided only by the furrowed brow of its stern pilot, the drone hovers forward. The scale is small — an EEG headset, two 30-foot-long tracks in a college gymnasium, and a handful of small, palm-sized quadcopters — but the possibilities are not.

The competition, put on Feb. 4 by the Brain Drone Racing League at the University of South Florida, awarded its winner a trophy and a take-home quadcopter. Despite the modest scale of the event, the Brain Drone Racing League offers insights into the potential and limitations of brain-control interfaces for controlling vehicles.

February’s race was the fourth for the league, which bills the sport as a level playing field across ability distinctions. There’s an esport version, which served as the trial for piloting the drones in physical space. In the virtual and real versions, players wearing an electroencephalogram, or EEG, headset look at the image of a block on a screen. As players concentrate on moving the block, the EEG interprets that electrical activity and translates it into movement, guiding a simulated drone in the virtual competitions or a real one in the live competitions.

Opinion

President Trump, This Is Why It's Time For A Full-Scale Purge Of The Intelligence Community: A 'Red Thread' Still Runs Through It 

President Trump inherited from President Obama an Intelligence Community deeply partisan and biased to favor the Democrat Party.

Indeed, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) General James Clapper, CIA Director John Brennan, and FBI Director James Comey, and other Intelligence Community leaders, launched what amounts to an attempted coup d’etat—framing candidate and President Trump with false charges of colluding with Russia and obstruction of justice, setting him up for impeachment. 

How someone like John Brennan, who once voted for Communist Party USA candidate Gus Hall for president, could become CIA Director, is a mystery worthy of investigation all by itself. A good start is Diana West’s new book “The Red Thread” that traces the hard-Left ideological tilt of Brennan and several other Intelligence Community coup plotters. 

Although President Trump replaced its top leaders, this is by no means sufficient to “drain the swamp” in the Intelligence Community ranks, corrupted by bad leadership for many years. Contrary to the common view that Intelligence Community political bias existed only at the top among “the generals”, over the years too many “foot soldiers” have become politically biased too, endangering our nation with Left-leaning non-objective analysis. 

Military

‘An intellectual investment in our officer corps’ — Pentagon partners with Johns Hopkins on new program

Military officers with dreams of one day taking a greater role steering the United States on the world stage now have a new way to pursue that goal.

The Office of the Secretary of Defense has partnered with Johns Hopkins University to create the Secretary of Defense Strategic Thinkers Program, which will allow a select group of officers to work toward a master’s degree in international public policy.

“The heart of it is our people, their talents and capabilities,” said Fred Drummond, deputy assistant secretary of defense for force education and training. “And what we’re doing is ensuring that they have the education to expand their talents.”

The program will launch in August and run through Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies. Officers will be schooled in “the art and science of war fighting,” according to Drummond, and they will learn the strategic-thinking skills necessary to plan and execute military operations.

One of the program’s goals is to prepare more officers to eventually take on high-level policy positions with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other influential panels, according to Drummond.

International security

US rolls ‘100K tons of international diplomacy’ into the Med. Will Russia get the message?

A commercial airline pilot has a lot of leeway on landing. Airport runways are long and wide, and the flight crew has time to get things just right before setting the wheels down gently. On an aircraft carrier, this is not the case. One minute you are flying, and the next moment — before your body can work out what it is enduring — you are not.

Defense News experienced a carrier landing firsthand on April 23, hitting the deck of the Abraham Lincoln aboard a U.S. Navy C-2A Greyhound aircraft with U.S. Ambassador to Russia Jon Huntsman and Adm. James Foggo, commander of U.S. Naval Forces Europe. The purpose of the visit was twofold — to kick off a dual-carrier exercise with sister ship John C. Stennis on April 24, and to deliver a sternly worded message to Russia: Stand down.

“Each of the carriers operating in the Mediterranean as this time represent 100,000 tons of international diplomacy,” Huntsman said aboard the Lincoln, according to a Navy news release. “Diplomatic communication and dialogue, coupled with the strong defenses these ships provide, demonstrate to Russia that if it truly seeks better relations with the United states, it must cease its destabilizing activities around the world.”

Moscow received the message loud and clear, and though the response was predictable — at least publicly — it may not be the one Huntsman and Foggo were hoping for.

Terror threat

ISIS Claims the Easter Sunday Bombings in Sri Lanka. Here’s Why We Should Have Seen Them Coming.

The Islamic State terror group has claimed involvement in the horrific Easter Sunday bombings that killed more than 320 people at Catholic services and in luxury hotels in Sri Lanka. In a brief statement from its Amaq “news agency,” ISIS declared the attackers “were ISIS” and targeted “citizens of states” in the anti-ISIS coalition.
Sri Lanka is not part of the coalition, and while some Europeans and Americans, including children, died in the attacks, most of the victims were Sri Lankan, and all those arrested in connection with the bombings so far reportedly have been from Sri Lanka.
The Amaq statement offered no further proof of ISIS involvement, and Sri Lankan officials have focused most of their attention on a little-known local group, after admitting that warnings from foreign intelligence sources that attacks on churches were imminent were largely ignored.
Sri Lanka’s state minister for defense said Tuesday that the attacks were carried out as revenge for the slaughter at mosques by a white-nationalist terrorist in Christchurch, New Zealand, last month.

Whistleblowing

Home Office chaos and incompetence lead to unlawful detentions, claim whistleblowers

Chaos, incompetence and bullying of Home Office employees is resulting in failed deportations and the unlawful detention of vulnerable and desperate people, whistleblowers allege.

The Dublin Cessation Team (DCT) – until last week known as the Third Country Unit – is a little-known but crucial department that, under the EU Dublin convention, determines which EU member state is responsible for considering an asylum claim and transferring the asylum seeker to the responsible state.

“Mistakes by overworked, under-skilled, bullied and highly stressed DCT caseworkers are directly and frequently leading to immigration detentions that are later proved to be unlawful,” claimed one source.

Navy

Whale found with harness on 'may belong to Russian navy'

A beluga whale wearing a harness which was spotted by fishermen off Norway's coast could belong to the Russian navy, according to reports.

The Norwegian directorate of fisheries posted pictures and video on social media saying: "White whale off the Finnmarkkysten coast that had tight straps fastened around the body is free.

"Crew from the Fisheries Directorate's Sea Service are trained to release whales from ropes and fishing gear and, together with the local fisherman Joar Hesten, they managed to liberate the whale."

One of the fishermen told Norway's national broadcaster NRK that there were "two round straps" fastened around the whale.

"They were clipped with buckles," he added.

Defense spending

Russia drops out of world’s top-5 military spenders, first time since 2006 — SIPRI

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) ranked Russia sixth in the 2018 annual update of the SIPRI Military Expenditure Database published on Monday.

This means that for the first time since 2018, Russia was out of the top five of countries with the biggest defense budget.

"Russian military spending was $61.4 billion in 2018, which accounted for 88 per cent of East European military spending," the Swedish think tank said.

According to SIPRI data, Russia’s major military modernization program, which started in 2010, led to significant annual increases in military spending (between 4.9% and 16%) through 2015.

Starting from 2016, Russia’s military budget has trended downwards. However, due to a one-off government debt repayment of almost $11.8 billion to Russian arms manufacturers in 2016, spending rose by 7.2%; without this payment, Russian military spending would have fallen by 11% The payment also explains a large part of the sharp 19% drop in 2017: excluding the repayment, spending would have decreased by 2.8 per cent. Russia’s spending fell again in 2018 (by 3.5%), but it is still 27% higher than in 2009.

Innovations & technologies

Why The Army's New Palantir Contract Won’t Fix Battlefield Intelligence

The U.S. Army recently announced that Palantir won the contract to build the new battlefield intelligence platform.

Palantir has a great reputation for use on the battlefield, especially for counter-IED functions, and has attained an almost legendary status among some analysts and communities in the Army. When compared to the Distributed Common Ground System – Army (DCGS-A), its success is not surprising; most users of DCGS-A would agree that it is problematic.

In particular, Palantir has a much friendlier user interface than DCGS-A, and its Gothamsystem is excellent at linking reports or other pieces of intelligence together. But Palantir’s Gotham system, the model for a new battlefield intelligence system, is susceptible to quickly becoming the next DCGS-A. Without some important changes, Palantir’s software will not satisfy battlefield intelligence needs and be doomed to repeat the failures of its predecessor.

There are two critical areas that Palantir must address to develop a superior battlefield intelligence platform: inter-operability and customization of analysis by an end-user.

Drug trafficking

Deadly fentanyl bought online from China being shipped through the mail

By now, you may know a family shattered by the opioid epidemic. In 2017, there were 47,000 opioid deaths. That's more Americans than were killed in vehicle accidents or by firearms. One drug, fentanyl, is like rocket fuel in the sharp rise of this crisis. Fentanyl is a painkiller invented in the 1960's and used to relieve the agony of advanced cancer. It is 50 times more potent than heroin. But today fentanyl can be ordered on the internet, by drug dealers and addicts, for an online overdose. Tracking the source of this illicit trade is a story that begins with James Rauh. Like most in Akron, Ohio, he'd never heard of fentanyl until the police told him his son was dead.

Terror threat

Destroyed on the battlefield, ISIS begins new chapter of terror

The 59-second video shows eight men clasping hands and pledging allegiance to the "Emir of the Believers" and the "Caliphate of the Muslims." They were about to launch a series of devastating attacks in Sri Lanka, an atrocity that took the lives of more than 250 people and simultaneously declared that ISIS is far from extinguished as a global threat.

Within days of the attacks, ISIS' online publication al Nabaa crowed about "raising the Caliphate banner in new arenas... The days are pregnant with more disappointments for the enemies of Allah." The video was released by a news agency linked to ISIS.

There is much yet to be learned about the organization behind the Sri Lankan attacks, but counterterrorism experts are united on one point: the small Islamist groups on the island could not have carried out such a complex attack without outside help.

Planetary defense

What If an Asteroid Was Going to Hit Earth? NASA Will Make Believe This Week

What would we do if we knew an asteroid would hit Earth in 2027? That's what NASA personnel will explore during a simulation taking place next week.

The project will play out as a tabletop exercise held during the 2019 Planetary Defense Conference in College Park, Maryland. NASA asteroid experts have prepared a fictional scenario in which scientists identify an asteroid that seems poised to crash into Earth in 2027. They'll talk through how to determine what regions face what risks and how to respond — all in the hopes that if they ever face a similar situation in real life, they'll be ready for it.

"These exercises have really helped us in the planetary defense community to understand what our colleagues on the disaster management side need to know," Lindley Johnson, NASA's Planetary Defense Officer, said in a statement. "This exercise will help us develop more effective communications with each other and with our governments."

You'll be able to watch the Planetary Defense Conference live here, beginning Monday, April 29, at 8 a.m. EDT (1200 GMT), courtesy of NASA. You can watch directly from NASA and its partners here.

Spycraft

The Spycraft Revolution

The world of espionage is facing tremendous technological, political, legal, social, and commercial changes. The winners will be those who break the old rules of the spy game and work out new ones. They will need to be nimble and collaborative and—paradoxically—to shed much of the secrecy that has cloaked their trade since its inception.

The balance of power in the spy world is shifting; closed societies now have the edge over open ones. It has become harder for Western countries to spy on places such as China, Iran, and Russia and easier for those countries’ intelligence services to spy on the rest of the world. Technical prowess is also shifting. Much like manned spaceflight, human-based intelligence is starting to look costly and anachronistic. Meanwhile, a gulf is growing between the cryptographic superpowers—the United States, United Kingdom, France, Israel, China, and Russia—and everyone else. Technical expertise, rather than human sleuthing, will hold the key to future success.

US elections

Election 2020 – Week to 28 Apr 2019

Biden seems bent on self-destruction, does not see the pedophilia stream-roller coming (or sincerely believes he can survive millions of views of him mis-fondling kids and being creepy with older women). Clinton and Biden will be the big losers in 2020, followed by Harris and Buttigieg. This election is going to be about authenticity, inclusion, and truthfulness.  No one now running can match the incumbent, but the incumbent cannot match the possible coalition that could challenge him.  This election is also going to be about traditional values, and stopping  the normalization of pedophilia, transgenders, and other forms of perversion. Trump is still edging Sanders, Sanders is neither holistic nor inclusive, both required to defeat an incumbent however handicapped. Latest: Wall Street calls it for Trump — it’s the economy, stupid, he stopped the planned collapse of the market and may be about to nationalize the Fed.