Commandos Now Play Digital Brain Games as War Prep
May 8th, 2012Via: Danger Room:
U.S. special operations forces carry out some the military’s toughest, most high-stakes missions. To pull them off, the commandos need speed, agility and swift perception skills akin to those of top-tier professional athletes. That might explain why the military’s latest commando training program will rely on a virtual-reality system already employed by pro sports teams.
The system, called “NeuroTracker,” was designed by CogniSens, a company spun out of the neurophysics lab of Dr. Jocelyn Faubert, a researcher at Canada’s University of Montreal. NeuroTracker has until now been deployed almost exclusively for athletic training: It’s used by several teams in the NFL and NHL, as well as at Olympic training centers in a handful of European countries.
Now commandos are going to get the NeuroTracker treatment as well. According to an announcement released last week, U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) plans to purchase the NeuroTracker system in an effort to “improve situational awareness, multiple target tracking and decision-making efficiency” among operatives.
U.S. Companies Selling Drones to Undisclosed Foreign Governments
May 8th, 2012Via: The American Independent:
A Texas-based defense contractor is selling drones overseas to foreign governments for use in combating narcotics trafficking and terrorism. Which countries are buying them and exactly how they are being used, however, is largely unknown. This uncertainty has led to calls from human rights activists for greater transparency and accountability for drone proliferation.
As sales of drones increase worldwide, human rights activists are concerned about the potential for such technology to be used by oppressive governments against citizen uprisings. This past weekend, human rights organizations and those affected by drone warfare met for the first international drone summit.
Vanguard Defense Industries, is among the companies at the forefront of the emerging drone market. As The Texas Independent reported, Vanguard projects its domestic sales for next year at between $35 million and $40 million, which would represent a 25 percent increase. However, despite the increase in the domestic market, the majority of Vanguard’s sales will be overseas.
France and Greece Want to Print the Confetti
May 8th, 2012I like the picture of Merkel in the story below. She’s doing a good *pffft*
Via: Guardian:
Europe’s 30-month effort to save the euro by slashing spending and debt levels risks turning into a crisis of political legitimacy after EU leaders’ strategies collided spectacularly with the wishes of voters in Greece and France.
The impasse was most graphically demonstrated when Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, insisted Athens must comply with the stringent terms of its €130bn (£100bn) bailout even though more than 60% of the Greek electorate had voted for parties rejecting those terms.
Following a French election campaign in which she strongly backed the loser, Nicolas Sarkozy, and snubbed the president-elect, François Hollande, Merkel stressed her opposition to Hollande’s central campaign pledge: reopening the euro’s new rulebook, or fiscal pact.
“That’s just not on,” she told a Berlin press conference called to address the huge shift from right to left in France.
The first attempt to cobble together a new Greek government collapsed quickly when Antonis Samaras, the centre-right leader, called off negotiations. Greece appears to be on the brink of ungovernability as a result of a messy election triggered by the euro crisis. The stock market suffered its worse fall since 2008, losing as much as 8% of its value before closing 6.7% down. The country’s banking index was 13% lower.
Market analysts shortened the odds against the country’s chances of surviving in the single currency.
“The irresistible force of German austerity has clashed with the immovable object of Greek popular resistance,” said Tristan Cooper, sovereign debt analyst at Fidelity Worldwide Investment. “The eurozone’s weakest link just got weaker. Although it should be no surprise that Greeks are spurning the bitter medicine, the violence of the rejection is a shock. A Greek eurozone exit is now firmly on the cards.”
Fullerton: Video of Kelly Thomas Beating Death Released
May 8th, 2012Via: pixq:
The city surveillance video that shows a group of Fullerton police officers beating a homeless mentally ill man to death last year was finally released today, laying to rest any argument that Kelly Thomas was a threat to officers.
The shocking video, which was combined with an audio recorder worn by one of the police officers on the night of July 5, 2011, was shown in court today, then later released to the media.
“Now you see my fists?” Fullerton police officer Manny Ramos asked Thomas while slipping on a pair of latex gloves.
“Yeah, what about them?” Thomas responded.
“They are getting ready to fuck you up,” said Ramos, a burly cop who appears to outweigh Thomas by 100 pounds.
…
Last year, Ron Thomas, a retired Orange County Sheriff’s deputy, said the City of Fullerton offered him $900,000 to just go away, which would have allowed the two cops to remain on the force unpunished for killing his son.
Thomas was pronounced dead on July 10, five days after the beating that left him in a coma.
U.S. Army Wants Magic 8 Ball Watching Over All of Its Computer Users
May 8th, 2012Via: Army Times:
In the wake of the biggest dump of classified information in the history of the Army, the brass is searching for ways to watch what every soldier is doing on his or her Army computer.
The Army wants to look at keystrokes, downloads and Web searches on computers that soldiers use.
Maj. Gen. Steven Smith, chief of the Army Cyber Directorate, said the software was one of his chief priorities, joking that it would take the place of a lower-tech solution: “A guy with a large bat behind every user as they go to search the Internet.”
“Now we’ve been in the news — I don’t know if you’ve seen it — with a little insider threat issue,” Smith continued.
Smith did not mention Pfc. Bradley Manning by name. However, the effort comes in the wake of the former intelligence analyst’s alleged leak of hundreds of thousands of pages of classified documents to the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks in 2009 and 2010. Manning faces a military trial on 22 counts, including aiding the enemy.
According to Smith, the Army will soon shop for software pre-programmed to detect a user’s abnormal behavior and record it, catching malicious insiders in the act. Though it is unclear how broadly the Army plans to adopt the program, the Army has more than 900,000 users on its computers.
Related: Companies Pass IT Staff Emails Through Monitoring Software Designed to Spot ‘The Enemy Within’
Research Credit: ms
JPMorgan Chase Whistleblower: ‘Essentially Suicide’ to Stand Up to Bank
May 8th, 2012Via: Huffington Post:
When Linda Almonte alerted her boss at JPMorgan Chase about potential fraud in a major deal she was helping to close, she expected him to applaud her great catch.
Instead, he fired her.
“We went down fast,” said Almonte, 41, about her family. She had been making $100,000 a year as a division vice president at Chase, enough to support her stay-at-home husband, their four kids, ages 12 to 22, and rent a three-bedroom house in San Antonio, Texas.
Her move at Chase amounted to “essentially suicide,” Almonte told The Huffington Post. No bank in town would hire her after word spread that she had stood up to the banking giant, she said. After more than a year of fruitless job hunting, Almonte and her family left town, landing at a hotel near Disney World, paying $300 a week for a two-bedroom with a kitchenette.
Made in China: Capsules Containing Powdered Babies
May 8th, 2012Update: China to Open Inquiry After South Korea Seizes Powdered Human Flesh in Capsules
Via: AP:
An investigation will be launched into allegations that drug capsules filled with powdered flesh from dead babies were being manufactured in China.
The official Xinhua News Agency quoted a ministry spokesman as saying an investigation in August found no such capsules in China.
A new inquiry was opened after new reports of the pills being smuggled into South Korea yesterday.
—End Update—
Via: AP:
South Korea has seized thousands of smuggled drug capsules filled with powdered flesh from dead babies, which some people believe can cure disease, officials said Monday.
The capsules were made in northeastern China from babies whose bodies were chopped into small pieces and dried on stoves before being turned into powder, the Korea Customs Service said.
Customs officials refused to say where the dead babies came from or who made the capsules, citing possible diplomatic friction with Beijing. Chinese officials ordered an investigation into the production of drugs made from dead fetuses or newborns last year.
The customs office has discovered 35 smuggling attempts since August of about 17,450 capsules disguised as stamina boosters, and some people believe them to be a panacea for disease, the customs service said in a statement. The capsules of human flesh, however, contained bacteria and other harmful ingredients.
The smugglers told customs officials they believed the capsules were ordinary stamina boosters and did not know the ingredients or manufacturing process.
Ethnic Koreans from northeastern China who now live in South Korea were intending to use the capsules themselves or share them with other Korean-Chinese, a customs official said. They were carried in luggage or sent by international mail.
Americans: Too Broke to Go Bankrupt
May 7th, 2012Via: CNN:
This year, hundreds of thousands of Americans are expected to be too broke to file for bankruptcy.
The average cost to file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection, the most common form of consumer bankruptcy, is more than $1,500, according to recent research submitted to the National Bureau of Economic Research.
As a result, anywhere between 200,000 and one million consumers are estimated to be unable to afford that steep cost this year.
MIT Professor Has Been Running LENR Device Outputting Excess Heat That’s 14X Input Power Since January
May 7th, 2012Update: Cryptogon Requesting Responses from Qualified Individuals to NANOR Device and Data
University faculty in Physics or Electrical Engineering departments are invited to submit comments on the Jet Energy Inc. NANOR device and data presented by Dr. Peter Hagelstein of MIT at the “Atom Unexplored” conference in Torino Italy. The slides are here: Demonstration of Excess Heat from the JET Energy NANOR® at MIT by Mitchell R. Swartz and Peter L. Hagelstein (.pdf).
Please send your comment from your university email account so that I can verify your identity.
—End Update—
Via: E-Cat World:
At the recent “Atom Unexplored” conference in Torino Italy, Dr. Peter Hagelstein of MIT gave a presentation about some of his work in the field of low energy nuclear reaction research, concentrating on the work of his colleague Dr. Mitchell Swartz. Swartz has invented a palladium-based device he names a NANOR. When an electric current is passed through the palladium, excess energy in the form of heat is produced which, according to Hagelstein, is over 14 times the input energy.
In this talk, Hagelstein says that this NANOR has been running at MIT since January, and it has continued to produce excess heat far beyond anything that could be accounted for by a chemical reaction. Hagelstein says that the public is invited to take a look at the device in action.
As we have come to expect these days, there has been very little reporting of this development outside a few blogs on the Internet. It would be interesting if some of Hagelstein’s peers at MIT would take a look at the NANOR and make some comments — or even if some outside experts could pay a visit.
Research Credit: cm
‘Iceland Holds the World Record in Household Debt Relief’
May 7th, 2012This story has been circulating for weeks in the form of this Spanish language video clip. I was not able to find any confirmation of the story when it first appeared.
I just tried to confirm it again and found this Bloomberg piece.
Via: Bloomberg:
Icelanders who pelted parliament with rocks in 2009 demanding their leaders and bankers answer for the country’s economic and financial collapse are reaping the benefits of their anger.
Since the end of 2008, the island’s banks have forgiven loans equivalent to 13 percent of gross domestic product, easing the debt burdens of more than a quarter of the population, according to a report published this month by the Icelandic Financial Services Association.
“You could safely say that Iceland holds the world record in household debt relief,” said Lars Christensen, chief emerging markets economist at Danske Bank A/S in Copenhagen. “Iceland followed the textbook example of what is required in a crisis. Any economist would agree with that.”
The island’s steps to resurrect itself since 2008, when its banks defaulted on $85 billion, are proving effective. Iceland’s economy will this year outgrow the euro area and the developed world on average, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development estimates. It costs about the same to insure against an Icelandic default as it does to guard against a credit event in Belgium. Most polls now show Icelanders don’t want to join the European Union, where the debt crisis is in its third year.
The island’s households were helped by an agreement between the government and the banks, which are still partly controlled by the state, to forgive debt exceeding 110 percent of home values. On top of that, a Supreme Court ruling in June 2010 found loans indexed to foreign currencies were illegal, meaning households no longer need to cover krona losses.
…
Iceland’s special prosecutor has said it may indict as many as 90 people, while more than 200, including the former chief executives at the three biggest banks, face criminal charges.
Larus Welding, the former CEO of Glitnir Bank hf, once Iceland’s second biggest, was indicted in December for granting illegal loans and is now waiting to stand trial. The former CEO of Landsbanki Islands hf, Sigurjon Arnason, has endured stints of solitary confinement as his criminal investigation continues.
That compares with the U.S., where no top bank executives have faced criminal prosecution for their roles in the subprime mortgage meltdown. The Securities and Exchange Commission said last year it had sanctioned 39 senior officers for conduct related to the housing market meltdown.
