Air Force Seeks Laser Weapons for Next Generation Fighters
November 21st, 2013Via: U.S. Naval Institute:
The U.S. Air Force has released a new request for a high-powered laser weapon that could be mounted on a next-generation air dominance fighter in the post-2030 era.
How Somebody Forced the World’s Internet Traffic Through Belarus and Iceland
November 21st, 2013Via: AllThingsD:
The attack — and Renesys maintains that it was an attack — targeted large Internet carriers in every major city in the U.S. and numerous major cities in Europe and around the world.
The first incident took place during most of the month of February, when Internet traffic was silently redirected through an Internet service provider called GlobalOneBel, based in the Belarusian capital, Minsk. The targets of these attacks included financial institutions, government agencies and network service providers.
US and UK Struck Secret Deal to Allow NSA to ‘Unmask’ Britons’ Personal Data
November 21st, 2013Via: Guardian:
The phone, internet and email records of UK citizens not suspected of any wrongdoing have been analysed and stored by America’s National Security Agency under a secret deal that was approved by British intelligence officials, according to documents from the whistleblower Edward Snowden.
In the first explicit confirmation that UK citizens have been caught up in US mass surveillance programs, an NSA memo describes how in 2007 an agreement was reached that allowed the agency to “unmask” and hold on to personal data about Britons that had previously been off limits.
The memo, published in a joint investigation by the Guardian and Britain’s Channel 4 News, says the material is being put in databases where it can be made available to other members of the US intelligence and military community.
Britain Operated Death Squad in Belfast in 1972
November 20th, 2013Via: BBC:
Soldiers from an undercover unit used by the British army in Northern Ireland killed unarmed civilians, former members have told BBC One’s Panorama.
Speaking publicly for the first time, the ex-members of the Military Reaction Force (MRF), which was disbanded in 1973, said they had been tasked with “hunting down” IRA members in Belfast.
The former soldiers said they believed the unit had saved many lives.
The Ministry of Defence said it had referred the disclosures to police.
The details have emerged a day after Northern Ireland’s attorney general, John Larkin, suggested ending any prosecutions over Troubles-related killings that took place before the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.
The proposal has been criticised by groups representing relatives of victims.
Panorama has been told the MRF consisted of about 40 men handpicked from across the British army.
Manned Fly-By Mission to Mars in 2017?
November 20th, 2013Via: Washington Post:
Billionaire Dennis Tito, tired of being told that we can’t send humans to Mars just yet, on Wednesday revealed his scheme for launching two astronauts to the red planet as early as December 2017.
Dubbed “Inspiration Mars,” the fly-by mission would exploit a rare alignment of Earth and Mars that minimizes the time and the fuel it would take to get to Mars and back home again. The astronauts would come within 100 miles of the Martian surface before being slung back to Earth.
“It would be a voyage of around 800 million miles around the sun in 501 days,” Tito testified Wednesday at a hearing of the House subcommittee on space. “No longer is a Mars fly-by mission just one more theoretical idea. It can be done. Not in a matter of decades, but in a few years.”
Grab this opportunity or risk seeing China get to Mars first, the space buff told the members of Congress.
The plan has a lot of moving parts, and would require cooperation from NASA and a great deal of NASA hardware. The agency is building a jumbo rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS), that is supposed to be ready for its inaugural, uncrewed test flight in 2017. Tito’s plan would essentially borrow the SLS for the Mars mission.
#Let’s Cook: Feds Stop North Korean Meth ‘Floodgate’ Into New York
November 20th, 2013Via: New York Observer:
Is Walter White working out of North Korea?
According to federal authorities, five men were arrested in New York this week for attempting to bring over 200 pounds of methamphetamine from the dictatorial regime into the Empire State.
(Mirroring the quality of “Blue Magic” meth produced in Breaking Bad, the illegal drugs seized “had a purity of over 99%,” according to the indictment.)
The five men–whose nationalities include the United Kingdom, China and the Philippines–were arrested in Thailand in September and were extradited to the United States yesterday evening, where they were arrested by U.S. authorities.
U.S. May Have Let ‘Dozens’ of Terrorists Into Country As Refugees
November 20th, 2013Via: ABC News:
Several dozen suspected terrorist bombmakers, including some believed to have targeted American troops, may have mistakenly been allowed to move to the United States as war refugees, according to FBI agents investigating the remnants of roadside bombs recovered from Iraq and Afghanistan.
The discovery in 2009 of two al Qaeda-Iraq terrorists living as refugees in Bowling Green, Kentucky — who later admitted in court that they’d attacked U.S. soldiers in Iraq — prompted the bureau to assign hundreds of specialists to an around-the-clock effort aimed at checking its archive of 100,000 improvised explosive devices collected in the war zones, known as IEDs, for other suspected terrorists’ fingerprints.
Liquid Metal Printer Lays Electronic Circuits on Paper, Plastic and Even Cotton
November 20th, 2013Via: MIT Technology Review:
Today, Jing Liu and pals at the Technical Institute of Physics and Chemistry in Beijing say they’ve worked out how to print electronic circuits on a wide range of materials using an inkjet printer filled with liquid metal. And they’ve demonstrated the technique on paper, plastic, glass, rubber, cotton cloth and even an ordinary leaf.
The new technique is straightforward. The magic sauce is a liquid metal: an alloy of gallium and indium which is liquid at room temperature. They simply pump it through an inkjet printer to create a fine spray of liquid metal droplets that settle onto the substrate.
The droplets rapidly oxidise as they travel through the air and this oxide forms a surface layer on each drop that prevents further oxidisation. That’s handy because the liquid metal itself does not easily adhere to the substrates. But the metal oxides do and this is the reason, say Jing and co, that the circuits adhere so well to a wide range of surfaces.
Behind the Pentagon’s Doctored Ledgers, a Running Tally of Epic Waste
November 20th, 2013Never forget: Trillions:
I would argue that Chalmers Johnson’s estimate was corroborated on September 10, 2001, on the eve of the worst terrorist attack in US history, when Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld acknowledged during a press conference that the Department of Defense (DoD) could not account for $2.3 trillion of the massive Pentagon budget, a number so large as to be incomprehensible. Any remaining hope that the US military might still get its budgetary house in order were dashed at 9:38 am the next morning, when the west wing of the Pentagon exploded in flames and smoke, the target of a terrorist strike. Incredibly, the exact point of impact was the DoD’s accounting offices on the first floor. The surgical destruction of its records and staff, nearly all of whom died in the attack, raises important questions about who benefited from 9/11.
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Reader JP notes the original source [mirror] of the $2.3 trillion figure; Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, The Pentagon, Monday, September 10, 2001:
According to some estimates, we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions.
Via: Reuters:
For two decades, the U.S. military has been unable to submit to an audit, flouting federal law and concealing waste and fraud totaling billions of dollars.
Research Credit: alvinroasting
The City Addicted to Crystal Meth: The Methamphetamine Zombie Apocalypse in Fresno
November 20th, 2013This is a documentary from 2009. I think that YouTube recommended it to me because I was looking at videos about Breaking Bad.
Via: BBC:
