The People’s Liberation Army has developed a new large phased array radar based north of Hui’an in southern China’s Fujian province which is capable of jamming Taiwan’s long-range radar system also known as the Surveillance Radar Program, according to military experts Richard Fisher and Sean O’Connor in a recent article for the London-based Jane’s Defense Weekly.
The Surveillance Radar Program (SRP), which cost US$1.4 billion, intends to provide Taiwan very early warning of Chinese long-range air and missile activity. SRP is based on the Raytheon AN/FPS-115 Pave Paws large phased array radar, which is capable of detecting enemy target as far as 5,000 kilometers away. It was even able to track a North Korean satellite launched in December last year, which was around 1,800km from Taiwan, according to the experts.
The sale of the SRP was approved by then-president Bill Clinton back in 2000, but the radar was never made operational until last year following repeated delays and cost overruns. China’s radar array meanwhile was constructed sometime before 2008, and it has since become a serious threat to Taiwan’s surveillance radar program, the article said.
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At least one pair of parents is fuming after their eighth-grade daughter came home from school saying that every student in her class had to indicate – publicly – how far they are prepared to go sexually.
The incident happened this week at Woodland Park Middle School in the San Diego, Calif. suburb of San Marcos, reports local ABC affiliate KGTV.
The parents, who don’t want to be named, say their 14-year-old daughter was embarrassed because the teacher in her family life and health class instructed her and all of her classmates to stand under one of several signs. Each sign was labeled with a different phrase.
Some of the labeled signs were innocuous, according to KGTV. These included “smiled at,” “hugged” and “kissed.”
Other signs, such as “above the waist,” “below the waist” and…
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Over the past three years, photographer Lindsay Morris has been documenting a four-day camp for gender nonconforming boys and their parents.
The camp, “You Are You” (the name has been changed to protect the privacy of the children and is also the name of Morris’ series), is for “Parents who don’t have a gender-confirming 3-year-old who wants to wear high heels and prefers to go down the pink aisle in K-Mart and not that nasty dark boys’ aisle,” Morris said with a laugh.
It is also a place for both parents and children to feel protected in an environment that encourages free expression.
“Some practice for the talent show all year, and others create their own gowns with their mothers or friends of the family,” Morris said. “The focus and enthusiasm is really pretty incredible. Also, it can be very emotional for the parents, especially the families who are new to camp and are experiencing this kind of group acceptance for the very first time.”
Although it is unknown if the kids at the camp will eventually identify as gay or transgender—or even if the way gender and sexuality are defined throughout society will evolve—the camp allows the kids to look at themselves in a completely different way.
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The Archbishop of Dublin called on the Irish government to establish a fully-fledged independent inquiry into secret graveyards for infants and mothers consigned to nursing homes run by the Roman Catholic church in the last century.
Dr Diarmuid Martin, the second-highest ranking prelate in the country, said only an independent commission of investigation with judicial powers could address public concerns in the wake of the discovery of a mass grave of infants and children found in the grounds of a convent run by the Bon Secours order of nuns in Tuam, Co Galway last week.
The Government has established a preliminary inter-departmental official inquiry to set the scope of a more thorough investigation.
“The indications are that if something happened in Tuam it probably happened in other mother-and-baby homes around the country,” Archbishop Martin told state radio. “That’s why I believe we need a full-bodied investigation.”
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Northern Manitoba was blanketed with snow in early June as an unseasonal storm hit the region Thursday night and continued Friday.
A snowfall warning continued for Brochet, Tadoule Lake and Churchill, Man., on Friday morning. The same warning ended for Lynn Lake, Leaf Rapids and Pukatawagan, Man.
Environment Canada issued the warning earlier Thursday, saying 10 to 20 centimetres of snow was expected in areas that are usually well into spring weather by June.
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Heavy rain and snow has been affecting several regions of Chile since last Friday, directly affecting more than 3500 people.
Another 10,000 Chileans are currently stranded due to flooding or covered roads, according to officials.
Most of the affected are in the Biobio and Los Lagos regions where 12 homes were destroyed and another 140 left uninhabitable.
The system also left more than 27,000 people without power.
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A huge 2.7-metre-long great white shark was eaten by an even bigger “mystery sea monster”, according to scientists.
Researchers had tagged the healthy shark to track its movements as part of a study, but were shocked when the tracking device washed up on a beach in Australia four months later, just four kilometers away.
Data captured on the device showed there was a rapid temperature rise along with a sudden, sharp 580-metres plunge.
The researchers believe the data proves it was eaten by something much bigger, saying the temperatures recorded indicate it went inside another animal’s digestive system.
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Many Americans have been puzzled by the bizarre behavior of soldier Bowe Bergdahl’s father, Robert, during a White House Rose Garden ceremony on Saturday celebrating the exchange of his son for five top Taliban commanders.
The father began by saying his son was having trouble speaking English after five years away from home.
He then uttered the Arabic phrase that begins every chapter of the Quran, except one, “Bismillah al-Rahman al-Rahim.” It means, “In the name of Allah, the merciful, the compassionate.”
Brigitte Gabriel of Act for America explained to Sean Hannity in a Fox News interview Wednesday night it declares the greatness of Allah over the land, calling it a “war cry of Allah” and a Muslim victory call.
Essentially, it means Robert Bergdahl was claiming the White House as a spoil of war, she said.
However, Gabriel said she doubts the elder Bergdahl understood the significance of what he was saying and did not intend to claim the White House, or America, in the name of Islam.
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Nevertheless, Obama defended his decision Thursday, saying he offered no apologies for releasing five Guantanamo detainees – who had been determined to be too dangerous to be freed – in exchange for Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who has been accused of desertion.
West, in a promotion for his political action committee, took aim at Obama’s unapologetic stance.
“Obama and his aides have lost their minds,” he said in an email for the Allen West Guardian Fund.
West’s outrage reverberated throughout his comments.
“One of his aides was quoted as saying the administration believed it had won another ‘kill bin Laden moment’ that would earn them praise,” West said, “Praise?!! Even Sen. John McCain, a prisoner of war in Vietnam, called the released terrorists the ‘hardest and toughest of all’ and ‘wanted war criminals.’
“One is suspected of war crimes including the murders of thousands and another was ‘directly associated’ with Osama bin Laden and was an Afghan drug lord,” West said.
“Consider this – this is Obama is his own words: ‘That’s been true of all the prisoners that were released from Guantanamo. There’s a certain recidivism rate that takes place. Is there a possibility of some of them trying to return to activities that are detrimental to us? Absolutely.”
West earlier was among critics saying that dealing with terrorists for Bergdahl was the last straw and that impeachment should be considered.
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The flood of young children pouring across the southwestern border is worse than the administration has previously acknowledged, and efforts to deal with unaccompanied minors are overwhelming the Border Patrol, distracting it from going after smugglers and other illegal immigrants, according to an internal draft memo from the agency.
The four-page memo, authored by Deputy Border Patrol Chief Ronald D. Vitiello and dated May 30, contradicts the administration’s argument that the border is secure enough to begin legalizing current illegal aliens already in the U.S.
Instead, Chief Vitiello paints a picture of a government struggling to cope, leaving the children suffering poor conditions, agents unable to focus on major security threats and little sense that it will get better.
Known within the Homeland Security Department as Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC), their numbers have skyrocketed this year, forcing the department to siphon manpower and money from its other critical border duties.
“The large quantity of DHS interdiction, intelligence, investigation, processing, detention and removal resources currently being dedicated to address UAC is compromising DHS capabilities to address other transborder criminal areas, such as human smuggling and trafficking and illicit drug, weapons, commercial and financial operations,” Chief Vitiello wrote in the memo, which was viewed by The Washington Times.
“Insufficient attention to these mission areas will have immediate and potentially long-lasting impacts on criminal enterprise operations within the Rio Grande Valley and across the country,” Chief Vitiello wrote.
According to the draft memo’s estimates, agents and officers will apprehend more than 90,000 unaccompanied children on the border this year, rising to 142,000 in 2015. By contrast, there were fewer than 40,000 caught last year.
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The European Central Bank ventured into uncharted territory Thursday with a raft of unusual measures meant to revive the eurozone economy by getting credit flowing to companies and preventing a debilitating bout of deflation.
The ECB was spurred into action by evidence that growth in the 18-country eurozone is too weak to keep consumer price inflation at a healthy level. The fear is the low inflation will last or, worse still, become an outright drop in prices that, if sustained, can snuff out what little growth Europe has.
Expectations were high for the central bank to show it would finally act to prevent such a scenario after months of hesitation in which the inflation rate kept falling. The last measure, for May, showed inflation was only 0.5 per cent, far below the bank’s goal of 2 per cent.
The ECB’s 24-member governing council finally struck on Thursday, announcing a package of measures that included interest rate cuts, including lowering one rate into negative territory for the first time. On top of that, it promised billions in cheap loans for banks on condition they lend more, and announced a new program to use financial markets to round up more cash for companies.
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The People’s Liberation Army Navy will send four warships to Hawaii to participate for the first time in the Rim of the Pacific Exercise, also known as RIMPAC, held by the United States Navy every two years, according to the Hong Kong-based Ta Kung Pao on Jun. 5.
The official website of the US Pacific Fleet reported the four Chinese ships deployed for RIMPAC 2014 are the Haikou, a Type 052C guided-missile destroyer; the Yueyang, a Type 054A guided-missile frigate; the Qiandaohu, a Type 903 replenishment ship and the Peace Ark, a Type 920 hospital ship. RIMPAC 2014 is the 24th exercise in the series to take place since 1971. It is also the first time PLA Navy warships will have taken part in the exercises with the US and its allies in the region.
The Royal Norwegian Navy will also be participating for the first time despite not being a Pacific country. A total of 47 ships, six submarines, more than 200 aircraft and 25,000 personnel have been mobilized by 23 nations for the exercises, according to the official website of the United States Navy. Huang Dong, a military analyst from Macau, said the Haikou and Yueyang are the most advanced surface combat vessels in the PLA Navy.
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A small group of political and religious leaders from the United States, including Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, met privately with Pope Francis at the Vatican today.
Part of a multiday, unofficial visit to Italy to promote ecumenical prayer and interfaith understanding, Lee was joined in the private audience by former U.S. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne; Lakewood Church pastor and televangelist Joel Osteen; Tim Timmons, a pastor and author based in Newport Beach, California; and Gayle D. Beebe, president of Westmont College, an evangelical school in Santa Barbara, California.
Lee said The International Foundation, a private nonprofit, arranged the trip.
The Utah Republican conversed with the Pope in Spanish, which is the pontiff’s mother tongue, about the need for faith in Jesus Christ and to build families. Lee, who served a two-year mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, speaks fluent Spanish.
“I was told it would not only be the proper protocol, but also appreciated if I were to address him in Spanish,” Lee said in a telephone interview from Rome. “The invitation to meet came from Pope Francis’ desire to invite more people to come unto Jesus Christ,” he added.
Lee said Francis asked his guests to pray that more people would serve and protect the family.
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Prominent Jewish Democrats have formally launched an effort to mobilize fellow American Jews to support Hillary Clinton for president in 2016.
Joining the well-established Ready for Hillary Super PAC, a grassroots political action committee, the new subgroup seeks to “substantially increase the number” of American Jews encouraging the former secretary of state to run.
Clinton says she has not made a decision whether or not to run for president, but expects to announce her intentions after the midterm elections.
“We all wear many hats,” says Rachel Schneider, Jewish Americans Ready for Hillary’s director, who also serves as Young Americans Ready for Hillary’s director.
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Bank of America Corp (BAC.N ) could pay more than $12 billion to settle probes by the U.S. Justice Department and a number of states into the bank’s alleged handling of shoddy mortgages, the Wall Street Journal said on Thursday, citing people familiar with the negotiations.
At least $5 billion of that amount is expected to go toward consumer relief consisting of help for homeowners in reducing principal amounts and monthly payments, and paying for blight removal in struggling neighborhoods, the paper said, citing people with knowledge about the issue.
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Queen Elizabeth, Prince Charles and other royalty are on a three-day state visit to France to mark the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landings in Normandy during WWII.
On a rare foreign trip, the 88-year-old queen arrived in Paris on Thursday via the under-Channel train from England. She laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the Arc de Triomphe before heading to a meeting with French President Francois Hollande.
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Vodafone, one of the world’s largest mobile phone groups, has revealed the existence of secret wires that allow government agencies to listen to all conversations on its networks, saying they are widely used in some of the 29 countries in which it operates in Europe and beyond.
The company has broken its silence on government surveillance in order to push back against the increasingly widespread use of phone and broadband networks to spy on citizens, and will publish its first Law Enforcement Disclosure Report on Friday . At 40,000 words, it is the most comprehensive survey yet of how governments monitor the conversations and whereabouts of their people.
The company said wires had been connected directly to its network and those of other telecoms groups, allowing agencies to listen to or record live conversations and, in certain cases, track the whereabouts of a customer. Privacy campaigners said the revelations were a “nightmare scenario” that confirmed their worst fears on the extent of snooping.
In Albania, Egypt, Hungary, India, Malta, Qatar, Romania, South Africa and Turkey, it is unlawful to disclose any information related to wiretapping or interception of the content of phone calls and messages including whether such capabilities exist.
“For governments to access phone calls at the flick of a switch is unprecedented and terrifying,” said the Liberty director, Shami Chakrabarti. “[Edward] Snowden revealed the internet was already treated as fair game. Bluster that all is well is wearing pretty thin – our analogue laws need a digital overhaul.”
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Google is calling on the world’s software developers to help it build software for the experimental 3-D-modeling tablet it calls Project Tango.
The tablet can tap the power of motion sensors and machine vision to create realistic models of the environment around it, and with the introduction of a new Tango development kit on Thursday, Google hopes that coders will create new kinds of mapping and immersive-gaming applications that tap the device’s unique hardware.
Previously, the company shared the Tango prototype with a few handpicked developers, but this is the first time it had opened up the platform to all engineers. Priced at $1,024, the kit will include a 7-inch tablet outfitted with all the necessary sensors and software to take advantage of this new creation, and according to Google, it will be available later this year. Nvidia—-the company that makes the processors for the Tango tablet–says they could arrive as early as July.
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Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid took a cue from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Thursday, angrily asking “what difference does it make?” when asked when President Obama first informed him of the trade of five dangerous Taliban prisoners from Guantanamo Bay for likely Army deserter Bowe Bergdahl.
Reid made the remarks during a press conference Thursday afternoon, after a reporter asked the Nevada senator about the way the transfer was rolled out — specifically the lack of a 30-day notification of Congress, as required by law.
“Listen,” Reid said. “The timeline was very, very brief here . . . We all know that the president had a very short period of time to make a decision. He made a decision to bring him home, and I’m glad he did, because in my opinion — based on nothing in the classified briefing — in my opinion, every day that he was there was a day closer to his dying.”
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The focus on retail in 2014 is on the future, especially in Canada, with companies large and small scrambling to catch up to the U.S. when it comes to e-commerce.
But what does the more distant future hold? What will retail look like in 10 years? Bob Johansen, distinguished fellow, Institute for the Future, has immersed himself in scouting for what might be next.
The Institute for the Future is a California-based non-profit research centre specializing in long-term forecasts.
Here are examples Johansen brought to retailers who attended the annual Retail Council of Canada conference in Toronto this week.
The invisible store
In 2011, advertising firm Y&R teamed with skateboard shoemaker Airwalk to set up two temporary invisible stores for the limited-edition relaunch of the popular Airwalk Jim shoe, using geotagging and augmented reality. With bloggers spreading word of the event, sneaker enthusiasts were invited to two specific locations in New York City and Los Angeles. Once they got there and downloaded an app, they could use their smartphones or iPads to make the store appear on the devices, and choose the shoe they wanted. Airwalk e-store had its busiest weekend ever.
WiFi-free zones
Not free WiFi, WiFi-free. Now that WiFi is everywhere, there are people willing to pay more to get away from it, Johansen said. Rooms without any connectivity (no tech at all, including phones or televisions) are already available in at least one hotel in Japan — at a higher price than regular rooms, Johansen said. KitKat recently set up a free “No WiFi” zone in downtown Amsterdam to promote the idea of taking a break.
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Three US B-52 Stratofortress strategic bombers have landed at RAF Fairford, a Royal Air Force base in Gloucestershire, England, for training, according to a US Air Forces in Europe press-release published Wednesday.
During the two-week deployment, the bombers are to participate in various training exercises in the US European Command “providing opportunities for aircrews to sharpen skills in several key operational sets, and become familiar with airbases and operations in the region.”
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Fox News reporter James Rosen told radio host Hugh Hewitt Wednesday intel sources “in and out of government” and “in and out of military” are concerned Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl may have been an enemy collaborator.
“There is a major classified file associated with Sgt. Bergdahl that has been compiled by the intelligence community,” Rosen said. “Many in that community harbor ongoing, outstanding, and serious concerns that Sgt. Bergdahl may not have been just a deserter, but that he may have been an active collaborator with the enemy.”
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Retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. William “Jerry” Boykin says Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl is clearly a deserter who should never draw a free breath, and President Obama is guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors for once again ignoring federal law in pursuit of an administration goal.
Boykin is also ripping the president for releasing five key Taliban figures in exchange for Bergdahl and slamming the Obama administration for attacking the character of Afghanistan veterans who publicly denounce Bergdahl’s actions in Afghanistan.
The general said Obama’s actions in this episode demonstrate why he is unfit for office. He categorically dismissed Obama’s contention that the exchange had to happen to honor America’s commitment to leave no Americans behind. Boykin said that clearly wasn’t true in Benghazi and that the administration seems to have little regard for a U.S. Marine jailed in Mexico, an American pastor imprisoned in Iran or the Sudanese Christian in custody for her faith along with her two American children.
“This was about emptying out Guantanamo,” he said. “This was a backdoor deal. The reasons for it, the details of it will probably never come out in its entirety, but this is an ugly story.”
The general is also taking the commander in chief to task for once again flouting the law, this time skirting a requirement to give Congress 30 days notice of his intent to free any Guantanamo detainees. Boykin said he understands why Obama would feel constrained by the law and admits that it might not be constitutional. However, as long as it is the law, he said Obama is required to abide by it instead of ignoring statutes he doesn’t like, whether on this issue or several others.
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A 911 emergency call has revealed a good Samaritan cyclist saved the life of the 12-year-old girl who was stabbed 19 times and left for dead by two of her friends in a bid to conjure up the fictional “Slender Man”.
Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier allegedly lured their friend into the woods in Wisconsin and took turns stabbing her before running off.
Prosecutors have charged the two girls in adult court with attempted homicide. The girls told detectives they conspired for months to kill the other girl in hopes of pleasing Slender Man, a fictional character they read about on a horror website.
Neighbors of the two accused girls said they’re struggling to reconcile the crime with what they know about the 12-year-olds and their upbringings.
The girls came from good families and that the parents were responsible guardians who doted on their children, they said.
Emily Edwards, 15, babysat one of the girls for about two years. She told The Associated Press the girl seemed to be a well-adjusted child who was never mean or violent. She said the girl never even picked on her younger brother, and if anything acted as a peacekeeper whenever others teased him.
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The US Secret Service is looking to buy software that can spot sarcasm on social media.
Yeah, good luck with that.
The agency wants to buy software that, among other things, has the ability to “detect sarcasm” and language that may mean something different than it appears on first glance.
Government agencies and corporations have long used social media to try to influence the public and get their messages out, while law enforcement agencies increasingly monitor such sites for signs of trouble.
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But getting a computer to detect sarcasm and its linguistic complexities can be difficult – and some experts worry at the prospect of attempts to parse speech by a government agency that has the power to arrest people for posting alleged threats online.
“It does appear that it’s going to be a pretty broad monitoring program. It will likely sweep in some First Amendment protected expression,” said Ginger McCall, associate director of the United States’ Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC). “It is troubling, because it really stifles people’s ability to freely express themselves and it has a tendency to quell dissent to make people think twice before they express themselves online.”
The Secret Service request for the software, first reported by nextgov.com, was posted on Monday. The agency is accepting proposals until Monday.
The work order asks for a long list of specific tools, including the ability to identify influential figures on social media, analyse data streams in real time, access old Twitter data and use heat maps. (It also wants the software to be compatible with the five-year-old Internet Explorer 8 browser – a sign of the government’s outdated technology.)
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Dozens of sailors were overcome by heat exhaustion when temperatures rose dramatically on board a British nuclear submarine after a “catastrophic” air-conditioning failure.
Eight submariners were left in a “life-threatening condition” as temperatures on HMS Turbulent passed 60 degrees with 100 per cent humidity.
The previously undisclosed incident in the Indian Ocean has come to light three years later, after the commanding officer at the time gave a dramatic account of the crisis, saying that the situation had been so bad that he thought crew members were going to die.
Ryan Ramsey said: “I genuinely thought there was going to be a loss of life on board. People were going to die.”
The 44-year-old, who recently retired from the Royal Navy after 25 years’ service, said the extreme temperatures left crew “just collapsing everywhere, many at their work stations”.
The hunter-killer submarine was only three hours from Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates on May 26, 2011, when the incident took place.
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The last of the 29 Navajo Americans who developed a code with their native language to encrypt military messages in World War 2 has died.
Chester Nez, 93, of Albuquerque, New Mexico, had told US media he was “very proud” of his part developing the cipher the Japanese never broke.
It was credited with saving the lives of thousands of US troops in the Pacific.
Nez, who was also a painter, died of kidney failure on Wednesday.
“It saddens me to hear the last of the original code talkers has died,” Navajo Nation President Ben Shelly told Reuters, adding he was ordering flags to be flown at half-mast in Nez’s honour.
“We are proud of these young men in defending the country they loved using their Navajo language.”
Nez was chosen from among 250 Navajos who arrived at the Army base in Arizona for the project. He was in high school at the time of his enlistment and lied about his age.
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The European Central Bank is poised to impose negative interest rates on its overnight depositors, seeking to cajole banks into lending instead and to prevent the euro zone falling into Japan-like deflation.
At its meeting on Thursday, ECB policymakers may also launch a loan program for banks with strings attached to make sure the money actually gets out into the euro zone economy.
It will be the first of the “Big Four” central banks – ECB, Bank of England, Bank of Japan and U.S. Federal Reserve – to go the negative interest rate route, essentially charging banks to deposit with it.
Even though the risks are limited of the euro zone entering a spiral of falling prices, slowing growth and consumption, the ECB is increasingly concerned that persistently low inflation and weak bank lending could derail the recovery.
The economy grew just 0.2 percent in the first quarter, and euro zone annual inflation unexpectedly slowed to 0.5 percent in May, official data showed this week, piling additional pressure on the central bank to step in.
“Consensus for action is high so there is a … risk the ECB under-delivers relative to the market’s lofty expectations,” said Andrew Bosomworth, a senior portfolio manager at bond fund Pimco in Munich.
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The New York Attorney General’s sweeping investigation into the U.S. stock market will include whether trading centers known as “dark pools” are conducting themselves properly, an official said on Wednesday.
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is seeking information from exchanges and alternative trading platforms about their relationships with high-frequency trading firms, as part of its probe into allegedly unfair trading practices on Wall Street, sources have previously told Reuters.
Broker-run trading systems known as dark pools, where participants are anonymous and trading information is hidden until after the trades are completed, are a key focus, said Chad Johnson, head of the agency’s Investor Protection Bureau.
“We remain highly interested in this area,” he said at a conference held by Sandler O’Neill and Partners.
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President Obama said electricity bills would “necessarily skyrocket” as a result of his energy policies. Rural Americans are about to find out how much.
At least six electric cooperative utilities across the U.S. mid-and-southwest could raise electricity rates up to 40 percent if the Environmental Protection Agency imposes new permitting regulations on coal-fired power plants.
The regulations would cost Deseret Power Electric Cooperative (DPEC) $200 million to install advanced equipment to qualify for a Clean Air Act Title V permit.
DPEC is made up of six rural electrical cooperatives that serve more than 45,000 customers in Utah, Nevada, Wyoming and Colorado. Rural cooperatives have been heavily opposed to excessive EPA regulations targeting coal plants, which they say raise rates for their customers.
“This could be true if EPA requires us to implement new regulations to meet Title V regulations,” Yankton Johnson, spokesman for Moon Lake Electric Association, told The Daily Caller News Foundation. Moon Lake is one of the six rural power cooperatives belonging to DPEC.
The EPA is currently deciding whether to apply Title V permitting requirements to DPEC’s Bonanza Power Plant, which is on Native American tribal lands in Utah.
“This will cost Deseret power approximately 200 million dollars in advanced equipment,” Johnson said. “Should this pass EPA it could cost 6 cooperatives up to a 40 percent rate increase to cover the cost.”
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Pentagon, Intelligence officials used Top Secret intelligence to prevent previous release of Taliban Five, officials tell TIME.
To pull off the prisoner swap of five Taliban leaders for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the White House overrode an existing interagency process charged with debating the transfer of Guantanamo Bay prisoners and dismissed long-standing Pentagon and intelligence community concerns based on Top Secret intelligence about the dangers of releasing the five men, sources familiar with the debate tell TIME.
National Security Council officials at the White House decline to describe the work of the ad hoc process they established to trade the prisoners, or to detail the measures they have taken to limit the threat the Taliban officials may pose. They say consensus on the plan was reached by the top officials of Obama’s national security team, including representatives from the Pentagon, State Department, intelligence community and Joint Chiefs of Staff. “These releases were worked extensively through deputies and principals,” says National Security Counsel Deputy for Strategic Communications Ben Rhodes. “There was not a dissent on moving forward with this plan.”
But officials in the Pentagon and intelligence communities had successfully fought off release of the five men in the past, officials tell TIME. “This was out of the norm,” says one official familiar with the debate over the dangers of releasing the five Taliban officials. “There was never the conversation.” Obama’s move was an ultimate victory for those at the White House and the State Department who had previously argued the military should “suck it up and salute,” says the official familiar with the debate.
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Tuesday on NewsMax TV, former U.S. Marine Corps Lt. Col. Oliver North said U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl was not a prisoner of war because he was actually being held “hostage” by the Haqqanis, a terrorist group separate from the Taliban and associated heavily with al Qaeda.
North said he knew there was at least a $1 million dollar ransom being demanded for Bergdahl some time ago so he estimated the price paid to release the hostage must be close to $5-6 million now.
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An Alaska volcano that has been spewing ash and lava for years began erupting with new intensity this week, pushing a plume of smoke and ash as high as 24,000 feet (7,315 meters) and prompting scientists to issue their highest volcanic alert in five years, authorities said on Tuesday.
But the intense action at the Pavlof Volcano, located in an uninhabited region nearly 600 miles (966 km) southwest of Anchorage, has so far not disrupted any regional air traffic, thanks to favorable weather that has made it easier for flights to navigate around the affected area.
Still, the eruption was intense enough for Alaska Volcano Observatory scientists to issue their first red alert warning since 2009, when the state’s Mount Redoubt had a series of eruptions that spewed ash 50,000 feet (15,240 meters).
“This means it can erupt for weeks or even months,” observatory research geologist Michelle Coombs said…
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I may have figured out why the Department of Veterans Affairs had such difficulty finding time to treat patients. It’s because it was working overtime to give its chapels a religiously neutral makeover.
But as VA officials in Iron Mountain, Mich., learned, one man’s renovation is another man’s desecration.
The chapel still has stained glass windows, though for how long is unclear. A VA hospital spokesman told me they are still trying to figure out what to do with the windows.
The decision to hide the religious icons came after the National Chaplain Center conducted an on-site inspection and determined the hospital’s chapel was not in compliance with government regulations.
Richard Riley, pastor of Our Saviour’s Lutheran Church, called the move “exceedingly disappointed.”
He posted photographs of the hidden religious icons on the church’s Facebook page.
“We are not a politicizing kind of church,” Pastor Riley told me. “But we also believe Christians have constitutional rights. We have a right to voice our opinion. Just because you are a Christian doesn’t mean you lose your First Amendment rights.”
Riley said the decision to turn the formerly Christian chapel into a religiously neutral room is evidence of a bigger problem.
“Christianity, not only globally, but particularly in the United States, is really under attack,” he said. “Christianity is coming under some horrendous conflict from the media and to some degree from our own government.”
The situation in Michigan is not unique. In April something similar took place at Fort Meade Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Fort Meade, South Dakota. There was concern over a makeover to the facility’s chapel.
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The judge in the case acknowledged there would be “public revulsion” at a criminal who was carrying a “football-sized block of cannabis” winning the right to sue the Government.
And last night, taxpayers’ groups reacted with anger that Britain was being dictated to by “obscure European rules” giving our cash to drug dealers.
But Mr Justice Jay explained at the High Court in London that Sean Delaney was entitled to “substantial” damages because the Government was in “serious breach” of European Community law concerning motor insurance.
Giving the Transport Minister permission to appeal, the judge said: “Many readers may be wondering how it comes about that a drug dealer is entitled to compensation against Her Majesty’s Government in circumstances where he was injured during the course of a criminal joint enterprise.
“The understandable reaction might be, there must be some rule of public policy, reflecting public revulsion, which bars such a claim. The short answer is that there is not.”
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A routine request in Florida for public records regarding the use of a surveillance tool known as stingray took an extraordinary turn recently when federal authorities seized the documents before police could release them.
The surprise move by the U.S. Marshals Service stunned the American Civil Liberties Union, which earlier this year filed the public records request with the Sarasota, Florida, police department for information detailing its use of the controversial surveillance tool.
The ACLU had an appointment last Tuesday to review documents pertaining to a case investigated by a Sarasota police detective. But marshals swooped in at the last minute to grab the records, claiming they belong to the U.S. Marshals Service and barring the police from releasing them.
ACLU staff attorney Nathan Freed Wessler called the move “truly extraordinary and beyond the worst transparency violations” the group has seen regarding documents detailing police use of the technology.
“This is consistent with what we’ve seen around the country with federal agencies trying to meddle with public requests for stingray information,” Wessler said, noting that federal authorities have in other cases invoked the Homeland Security Act to prevent the release of such records. “The feds are working very hard to block any release of this information to the public.”
Stingrays, also known as IMSI catchers, simulate a cellphone tower and trick nearby mobile devices into connecting with them, thereby revealing their location. A stingray can see and record a device’s unique ID number and traffic data, as well as information that points to its location. By moving a stingray around, authorities can triangulate a device’s location with greater precision than is possible using data obtained from a carrier’s fixed tower location.
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Vladimir Putin keeps turning up like a bad penny.
Kicked out of the Group of Eight two months ago over his swift annexation of Crimea from Ukraine, instead of hosting a scheduled gathering of those world leaders in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, the diminutive Russian president will still share centre stage with more or less the same cast, plus Queen Elizabeth, at the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landing in France this week.
Millions of Russians died in the Second World War and Soviet citizens suffered terribly through years of brutal fighting against Nazi Germany. But virtually all of the Red Army’s fighting was done in the east. Only one Soviet soldier is known to have been buried in a war grave on the Western Front.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who has arguably used the toughest language of any western leader to describe Putin’s recent behaviour in Ukraine, intends to ignore him in Normandy on Thursday. Ditto for U.S. President Barack Obama. But for the leaders of two of the biggest European countries in the NATO military alliance, it is as if Russia had never seized Crimea and does not continue to menace eastern Ukraine.
France — which is selling the Russian navy two helicopter assault ships for US$1.6 billion, including one to be named the Sevastopol that will be based in the Crimean port city of that name — pointedly refused to disinvite Putin from the party it is hosting. In fact, President Francois Hollande is to have Putin over to dinner on Thursday in Paris. Britain’s David Cameron has arranged to have a private tete-a-tete with the man from the Kremlin at the conclusion of Friday’s ceremonies in Normandy.
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The United States is preparing to boost its military presence in Europe at a cost of up to $1 billion, President Barack Obama says, as tensions in the region simmer over Russia’s aggressive actions in Ukraine.
Standing with Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski, Obama said the US plans to send more military equipment and rotate additional American troops into the region. He called on lawmakers in Washington to provide the funding to sustain the effort.
Obama’s announcement marks a significant departure from a two-decade trend toward a smaller US military presence in Europe amid a shift by the Obama administration to a more visible and active naval and air power presence in the Asia-Pacific region. Just three years ago the Pentagon downgraded the top US Army Europe commander from a four-star to a three-star general.
“Today, I’m announcing a new initiative to bolster the support of our NATO allies here in Europe,” Obama said at Warsaw’s Belweder Palace.
“Under this effort, and with the support of Congress, the United States will preposition more equipment in Europe.”
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Same sex marriages can take place in the British consulates of more than 20 countries where the ceremonies are not legal including Russia, Azerbaijan, Serbia and Hungary.
The Foreign Office has opened the doors of its missions to British nationals and their partners who wish to wed but are unable to under foreign laws.
Chris Bryant, the former Foreign office minister and openly gay Labour MP, said he hoped the move would be “celebrated” in countries like Russia where homosexuals face prejudice and persecution.
In June last year Vladimir Putin, the Russian President, signed into law a bill punishing people for homosexual “propaganda”.
The law imposed fines on those who disseminate information aimed at minors ‘directed and forming non-traditional sexual set-up’, or which may cause a ‘distorted understanding’ that gay and heterosexual relationships are equal.
Activists and celebrities have repeatedly called on Mr Putin to repeal the law but to no avail, while there were also calls to boycott the Winter Olympics in Sochi earlier this year.
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In the near future, companies, hell even the NSA could be mining our brainwaves for data. It’s bad enough that private details about our lives revealed in hoovered up in emails and phone calls; imagine if Big Brother was literally reading our minds? That’s some dystopian shit.
We’re heading in that direction. Brainwave-tracking is becoming increasingly common in the consumer market, with the gaming industry at the forefront of the trend. “Neurogames” use brain-computer interfaces and electroencephalographic (EEG) gadgets like the Emotiv headset to read brain signals and map them to in-game actions, basically giving the player virtual psychic superpowers.
Now there’s a fear that we’re not doing enough to protect our raw thoughts from being hacked with “brain spyware” or tracked and gathered like the rest of our personal data. The concern was raised last month at the 2014 Neurogaming Conference in San Francisco, NPR reported.
“We may wake up in a few years and say, ‘Oh, we should have done something. We should have thought about the privacy of this data,’” Arek Stopczynski, a neuroinformatics researcher at MIT told me in an interview.
It’s possible to glean private information like PIN numbers, credit cards, addresses, and birthdays “leaked” from brain signals.
EEG data is extremely rich, or “high-dimensional,” meaning a single signal can reveal a lot of information about you: if you have a mental illness, are prone to addiction, your emotions, mood, and taste.
Raw brainwave data uploaded to a server for the gaming purposes could also be tapped to get a detailed read-out of your psyche. It’s possible to glean private information like PIN numbers, credit cards, addresses, and birthdays “leaked” from brain signals, as researchers demonstrated in a 2013 paper on the privacy and security implications of brain-controlled consumer products.
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A new Chinese report accusing the United States of cyber espionage has “exposed” the staggering scale of America’s hacking activities and the involvement of major American corporations like Microsoft and Google, reports the Beijing-based China Economic Weekly magazine.
Released on May 26, the US Global Surveillance Record report by China’s Internet Media Research Center slams the US government and in particular its secretive National Security Agency for spying on the Chinese government and its leaders, state-owned enterprises, research organizations, and even ordinary netizens and mobile phone users.
“This behavior is a flagrant violation of international law, a serious human rights violation, and a threat to global network security,” the report said, adding that the spying activities have gone “far beyond the legal rationale of ‘anti-terrorism’ and have exposed the ugly face of its pursuit of self-interest in complete disregard for moral integrity,” it said.
The report relies heavily on documents leaked by former NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden last year, which lifted the veil on the NSA’s mass electronic surveillance data mining programs such as Prism, Trunk, Dock and Nuclear. Global internet giants such as Microsoft, Google and Apple were said to have “cooperated” in the schemes.
Key Chinese enterprises allegedly targeted include China Telecom, China Mobile, China Unicom, Bank of China, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, and China Construction Bank. Private telecommunications companies such as Huawei were also hacked, with private user data, millions of text messages and staff emails also stolen, the report said.
The NSA also allegedly hacked top Chinese universities such as Beijing’s Tsinghua University, including an attack in January 2013 that infiltrated 63 computers and servers. The report said Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android are regarded as data “gold mines” for the NSA, which first began monitoring smartphone operating systems back in 2007, with its budget on this front rising since from US$204 million to US$767 million.
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