Israel Attacked ‘Syrian Scientific Studies and Research Center’
February 4th, 2013Via: New York Times:
The Israeli attack last week on a Syrian convoy of antiaircraft weapons appears to have damaged the country’s main research center for work on biological and chemical weapons, according to American officials who are sorting through intelligence reports.
While the main target of the attack on Wednesday seems to have been SA-17 missiles and their launchers — which the Israelis feared were about to be moved to Hezbollah forces in Lebanon — video shown on Syrian television backs up assertions that the research center north of Damascus also suffered moderate damage.
That complex, the Syrian Scientific Studies and Research Center, has been the target of American and Western sanctions for more than a decade because of intelligence suggesting that it was the training site for engineers who worked on chemical and biological weaponry.
Who Held Kevin McGeever in a Dark Room for Eight Long Months?
February 3rd, 2013Update: Kevin McGeever Arrested for Wasting Police Time
Via: BBC:
An Irish property developer who says he was kidnapped for eight months has been arrested on suspicion of wasting police time.
Kevin McGeever, 68, was found wandering on a country road near Ballinamore, County Leitrim in January eight months after he disappeared.
He was emaciated and barefoot and was taken to hospital.
A police spokesman confirmed a 68-year-old man had been arrested by detectives investigating the alleged abduction.
The man was arrested at his home in Craughwell, County Galway, on Thursday and held under Section Four of the Criminal Justice Act 1994, which contains provisions for wasting Garda (police) time and making false allegations.
—End Update—
This is a pretty weird one.
Via: Irish Independent:
THE enigma of the Irish property developer who claimed he was held captive for eight months and tortured deepened this weekend as more details emerged about his bizarre ordeal.
Kevin Michael McGeever was found wandering by the side of a Leitrim road last Tuesday, confused, emaciated, barefoot, with long fingernails and a lengthy beard. It soon transpired he was a wealthy property developer who sold apartments in Dubai and who was reported missing more than eight months ago.
World’s Largest Natural Sound Archive Is Now Online
February 3rd, 2013Via: Cornell:
After 12 years of work, Cornell’s Macaulay Library archive, the largest collection of wildlife sounds in the world, is now digitized and fully available online.
“In terms of speed and the breadth of material now accessible to anyone in the world, this is really revolutionary,” said audio curator Greg Budney. All archived analog recordings in the collection, going back to 1929, have and can be heard for free online.
“This is one of the greatest research and conservation resources at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology,” said Budney. The collection contains nearly 150,000 digital audio recordings equaling more than 10 terabytes of data with a total run time of 7,513 hours. About 9,000 species are represented. There’s an emphasis on birds, but the collection also includes sounds of whales, elephants, frogs, primates and more.
More: Macaulay Library
Don’t Let Them Pull Out Your Teeth
February 2nd, 2013Via: DailyKos:
A few years ago I was diagnosed with an advanced case of gum disease. I was showing pocket depths of 9s and 10s. Many of my teeth were actually loose. And it had become painful to eat certain foods.
My periodontist told me that in order to stop it from getting worse, I had to have as many as seven teeth pulled. Seven teeth! And, even with my insurance, it was going to cost many thousands of dollars.
The implications of this were devastating to me. Life-changing in some respects. As anyone with false teeth will tell you, it’s not a happy situation. From limiting what foods you eat, to actually altering your social behavior – including the way you smile – losing your teeth is no small affair.
…
Immediately, I found this: The nonsurgical treatment of patients with gum disease: results after five years. by Walter J. Loesche et al. (link)
I am not exaggerating when I say my heart jumped a beat. Could there be hope? I clicked on the link and saw this:
Abstract
BACKGROUND: In a previous study involving patients seen at the dental clinic of the Detroit Receiving Hospital, the authors found that 87 percent of teeth initially recommended for surgery or extraction were spared those treatments by a combination of debridement [cleaning] and short-term usage of antimicrobial agents. The objective of the present study was to determine how long the surgery-sparing benefits of less invasive treatment would persist.
Research Credit: ottilie
Gasoline at Highest Price Ever for This Time of Year
February 2nd, 2013Via: CNBC:
U.S. drivers are now paying more to fill up their gas tanks than they ever have at this time of year.
The national average price of retail gasoline posted its biggest one-day increase in 23 months on Friday, rising four cents to $3.46 a gallon, according to AAA. The average price has risen 13 cents — a 4 percent increase — in the past week.
Gasoline prices have followed in part the climb in the stock and oil prices. Oil and equities have risen sharply over the last few weeks, as the Dow Jones Industrial Average reached 14,000 for the first time since 2007, Brent crude oil futures hit at 4-month high near $117 a barrel, while the U.S. oi lprice is near $98 a barrel.
Retail gasoline prices have also hit a new milestone.
“This is the highest price record for February 1st,” says OPIS analyst Tom Kloza, who predicts the national average price of regular gasoline will climb a few more pennies to $3.50 a gallon this weekend.
The Spy Novelist Who Knows Too Much
February 2nd, 2013I wonder what these novels contain about 9/11…
Via: New York Times:
Last June, a pulp-fiction thriller was published in Paris under the title “Le Chemin de Damas.” Its lurid green-and-black cover featured a busty woman clutching a pistol, and its plot included the requisite car chases, explosions and sexual conquests. Unlike most paperbacks, though, this one attracted the attention of intelligence officers and diplomats on three continents. Set in the midst of Syria’s civil war, the book offered vivid character sketches of that country’s embattled ruler, Bashar al-Assad, and his brother Maher, along with several little-known lieutenants and allies. It detailed a botched coup attempt secretly supported by the American and Israeli intelligence agencies. And most striking of all, it described an attack on one of the Syrian regime’s command centers, near the presidential palace in Damascus, a month before an attack in the same place killed several of the regime’s top figures. “It was prophetic,” I was told by one veteran Middle East analyst who knows Syria well and preferred to remain nameless. “It really gave you a sense of the atmosphere inside the regime, of the way these people operate, in a way I hadn’t seen before.”
The book was the latest by Gérard de Villiers, an 83-year-old Frenchman who has been turning out the S.A.S. espionage series at the rate of four or five books a year for nearly 50 years. The books are strange hybrids: top-selling pulp-fiction vehicles that also serve as intelligence drop boxes for spy agencies around the world. De Villiers has spent most of his life cultivating spies and diplomats, who seem to enjoy seeing themselves and their secrets transfigured into pop fiction (with their own names carefully disguised), and his books regularly contain information about terror plots, espionage and wars that has never appeared elsewhere. Other pop novelists, like John le Carré and Tom Clancy, may flavor their work with a few real-world scenarios and some spy lingo, but de Villiers’s books are ahead of the news and sometimes even ahead of events themselves. Nearly a year ago he published a novel about the threat of Islamist groups in post-revolutionary Libya that focused on jihadis in Benghazi and on the role of the C.I.A. in fighting them. The novel, “Les Fous de Benghazi,” came out six months before the death of the American ambassador, J. Christopher Stevens, and included descriptions of the C.I.A. command center in Benghazi (a closely held secret at that time), which was to become central in the controversy over Stevens’s death. Other de Villiers books have included even more striking auguries. In 1980, he wrote a novel in which militant Islamists murder the Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, a year before the actual assassination took place. When I asked him about it, de Villiers responded with a Gallic shrug. “The Israelis knew it was going to happen,” he said, “and did nothing.”
Research Credit: conceptualdecay
Larger Student Loan Debts, Less Ability to Repay
January 31st, 2013So it goes…
Via: CNBC:
Americans now owe an average of $27,253 in student loans as the delinquency rate has increased by more than 47 percent since 2005, according to a new report.
Some 27 million borrowers, or slightly more than 13 percent of the country, have two or more outstanding student loans, according the report from FICO Labs, the research arm of the credit-score agency. That number has more than doubled in the past eight years. In the 2005 report, the average student loan debt was $17,233.
In the latest study, the average credit score for new loans was going down as students with less ability to repay their loans are being granted loans with fewer questions.
Hackers in China Attacked The New York Times for Last 4 Months
January 31st, 2013Via: New York Times:
For the last four months, Chinese hackers have persistently attacked The New York Times, infiltrating its computer systems and getting passwords for its reporters and other employees.
After surreptitiously tracking the intruders to study their movements and help erect better defenses to block them, The Times and computer security experts have expelled the attackers and kept them from breaking back in.
The timing of the attacks coincided with the reporting for a Times investigation, published online on Oct. 25, that found that the relatives of Wen Jiabao, China’s prime minister, had accumulated a fortune worth several billion dollars through business dealings.
Security experts hired by The Times to detect and block the computer attacks gathered digital evidence that Chinese hackers, using methods that some consultants have associated with the Chinese military in the past, breached The Times’s network. They broke into the e-mail accounts of its Shanghai bureau chief, David Barboza, who wrote the reports on Mr. Wen’s relatives, and Jim Yardley, The Times’s South Asia bureau chief in India, who previously worked as bureau chief in Beijing.
“Computer security experts found no evidence that sensitive e-mails or files from the reporting of our articles about the Wen family were accessed, downloaded or copied,” said Jill Abramson, executive editor of The Times.
The hackers tried to cloak the source of the attacks on The Times by first penetrating computers at United States universities and routing the attacks through them, said computer security experts at Mandiant, the company hired by The Times. This matches the subterfuge used in many other attacks that Mandiant has tracked to China.
The Rise of the Permanent Temp Economy
January 31st, 2013Via: New York Times:
Politicians across the political spectrum herald “job creation,” but frightfully few of them talk about what kinds of jobs are being created. Yet this clearly matters: According to the Census Bureau, one-third of adults who live in poverty are working but do not earn enough to support themselves and their families.
A quarter of jobs in America pay below the federal poverty line for a family of four ($23,050). Not only are many jobs low-wage, they are also temporary and insecure. Over the last three years, the temp industry added more jobs in the United States than any other, according to the American Staffing Association, the trade group representing temp recruitment agencies, outsourcing specialists and the like.
Low-wage, temporary jobs have become so widespread that they threaten to become the norm. But for some reason this isn’t causing a scandal. At least in the business press, we are more likely to hear plaudits for “lean and mean” companies than angst about the changing nature of work for ordinary Americans.
Cryptogon Reader Sends Contribution
January 31st, 2013Eileen sent $75. Thank you.
