Archive for the 'War' Category
Latest Attack in France Kills 4 Outside Jewish School
March 19th, 2012[???] Via: ABC: A motorcycle gunman opened fire Monday in front of a Jewish school in the French city of Toulouse, killing a rabbi, his two young sons and a schoolgirl, the prosecutor’s office said. It was the third deadly motorcycle shooting in the same area in recent days. French prosecutors were studying possible terrorist […]
Open Thread: Kony 2012
March 18th, 2012I haven’t watched this thing, and don’t plan to. From previous experience, when I see mainstream news talking about YouTube videos, and how “the blogosphere” has lost it’s mind over them, I just take a pass. (Also, I’m on limited bandwidth, so I wasn’t about to blow it on 30 minutes of video that looked […]
Bamford Claims NSA Has Made “An Enormous Breakthrough” in Cryptanalysis
March 16th, 2012Well, it has been the $64,000 question for a couple of decades: Can NSA break something like PGP? While there might be other black world technologies that could be up to the task (there’s no way to know), what we do know is that a practical quantum computing capability would be, for all intents and […]
The Libyan Job: Insiders Used War to Steal Priceless Artifacts
March 16th, 2012Via: Wired: The treasure was kept mostly in two wooden chests, and locked away in a bank vault: thousands of coins, jewelry and figurines, some around 2,600 years old. For decades it sat in the bank, unattended despite the historical and monetary value. Then, as a popular uprising erupted around the downtown bank last winter, […]
IRAN’S BANKS TO BE BLOCKED FROM GLOBAL BANKING SYSTEM ON SATURDAY
March 15th, 2012Flashback to a couple of weeks ago on Cryptogon: If SWIFT actually pulls the plug, I’d consider the fuse to be lit. Also, if SWIFT does it before 20 March, this is probably the real reason: Last week, the Tehran Times noted that the Iranian oil bourse will start trading oil in currencies other than […]
Marines Asked to Disarm Before Leon Panetta Speech; ‘Somebody Got Itchy’
March 14th, 2012Via: MSNBC: In a highly unusual move, around 200 U.S. Marines were asked to leave their weapons outside the tent where U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta was set to speak during his trip to Afghanistan on Wednesday. Although the military said the order was not given in response to Sunday’s shooting of 16 Afghan civilians […]
Cyborg Snails
March 14th, 2012Via: Nature: The dozen or so brown garden snails crawling around the plastic, moss-filled terrarium in Evgeny Katz’s laboratory look normal, but they have a hidden superpower: they produce electricity. Into each mollusc, Katz and his team at Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York, have implanted tiny biofuel cells that extract electrical power from the […]
Surreal Situation in U.S. Post Office
March 14th, 2012My dad went to his local post office to mail me some CDs that I had forgotten to pack when I left the U.S. back in 2006. He said that a bunch of other “old farts” in the post office were also sending packages to their children and grandchildren who were living overseas. He overhead […]
DARPA Director Quits Pentagon for Job at Google
March 12th, 2012So, no, she’s not in jail yet. Via: Wired: Darpa director Regina Dugan will soon be stepping down from her position atop the Pentagon’s premiere research shop to take a job with Google. Dugan, whose controversial tenure at the agency lasted just under three years, was “offered and accepted at senior executive position” with the […]
U.S. Funded, Trained and Equipped Afghan Air Force Running Guns and Drugs
March 10th, 2012Here are a few related posts to consider: Afghan Opium Production Rises by 61% Compared with 2010 Brother of Afghan Leader Is Said to Be on CIA Payroll U.S.-Built Bridge is Windfall for Illegal Afghan Drug Trade The Invisible Hand of the Market: British Troops Seize £50 Million of Afghan Opium Officials Puzzle Over Millions […]
