U.S. to beef up missile defense against North Korea, Iran
March 16, 2013 -- Updated 0455 GMT (1255 HKT)
(CNN) -- The United States will deploy additional ground-based missile interceptors on the West Coast as part of efforts to enhance the nation's ability to defend itself from attack by North Korea, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced Friday.
Still relatively new in his post, the Pentagon chief told reporters that 14 additional interceptors to be installed by 2017 would bring the total to 44. It is part of a package of steps expected to cost $1 billion, officials said.
"The reason that we are doing what we are doing and the reason we are advancing our program here for homeland security is to not take any chances, is to stay ahead of the threat and to assure any contingency," Hagel said.
President Hollande fiddles as desperate French workers self-immolate
‘Where are your promises?’ young protester shouted before police led him away
Before he died on February 13th, Djamal Chaar wrote to a local newspaper in Nantesto complain he had been refused unemployment benefits to which he believed he was entitled. He threatened to take his life. The police and firemen were waiting for him in front of the unemployment benefits office but Chaar outsmarted them: he doused himself in petrol out of sight, struck a match and appeared at the street corner in flames before crumpling to the ground.
On March 4th, a France Telecom employee in Pau who had just been laid off repeated Chaar’s desperate ending. The police and fire department has been called some 50 times in recent weeks in response to threats of self-immolation.
INTERNET
Iran blocks use of tool to get around online filter
Iranian authorities have blocked the use of most virtual private networks (VPNs), a tool that is often used to get around a widespread Iranian internet filter.
Tehran often blocks foreign websites, including social networks, on the grounds that they are "immoral" or "counterrevolutionary."
It uses a filter to prevent people from accessing many sites on the official grounds that they are offensive or criminal.
The regime has been trying to build up a "Halal Internet" for some time now in order to stop activists and bloggers from using illegal means to access the Internet and disseminate information.
Coptic Christians claim torture in Libyan detention center
Dozens of Coptic Christians were tortured inside a detention center run by a powerful militia in eastern Libya, two of the recently released detainees told The Associated Press on Friday amid a wave of assaults targeting Christians in Benghazi and the latest instance of alleged abuse by Libyan security forces.
The two, among an estimated 50 Egyptian Christians who have been detained in Libya on suspicion of proselytizing, told of being rounded up in a market by gunmen who checked their right wrists for tattoos of crosses.
"They first checked our wrists searching for the crosses and if they found them, we (had to) get into their cars," said 26-year-old Amgad Zaki from the southern city of Samalout in Minya province, 220 kilometers south of Cairo.
Lessons from Iraq... in 1958.
Still with some relevance today.
The Atlantic recently re-posted a piece they'd commissioned from William R. Polk in 1958 and I stumbled across it when I was looking for some of Mr. Polk's more recent work this morning.
Mr. Polk's essay was published five months after the July 1958 coup that ended the pro-Western monarchy that the British had installed in Iraq in 1921 and came at a time of enormous regional upheaval, when forms of government were being upended, new ideologies were burbling throughout the Arab cultural and social sphere, and the US and its closest allies were desperately scrambling for a new regional modus videndi. The essay is simply titled "The Lesson of Iraq" and I'm putting it straight into my "the more things change..." file.
Greater China
China cyber-war: don't believe the hype
By Peter Lee
By Peter Lee
The United States has made the interesting and perhaps significant decision to generate a crisis around Chinese cyber-intrusions as the Obama administration enters its second term. With its typical careful, methodical preparation, the Obama administration has been gradually rolling out the Chinese cyber-threat product since November 2011 with escalating evidentiary indictments of Chinese hacking, but without overtly linking these activities to the Chinese government or military. [1]
The most recent shoes to drop were the detailed brief drawn up by Mandiant Corp against the PLA's Unit 61398, allegedly the PLA
outfit in the white office building in Shanghai's Pudong District that phished, lurked, and drained information from the New York Times and many other US businesses, and the subsequent calling out of the PRC by name for its cyber-sins by National Security Advisor Tom Donilon.
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