"The Boston bombing investigation continues to reveal new information on the two primary suspects, but quietly reported last Friday was the discovery of jihadi propaganda Inspire Magazine - produced by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) - on a computer belonging to the elder Tsarnaev brother’s widow. The publication, particularly its first issue containing instructions for building a pressure cooker bomb, was spotlighted as a possible resource immediately after the bombings."

"Yes, it's undetectable, but more importantly it's unobservable by institutions and countries and sovereigns.... This might be a politically important object."

"You are walking down the street with a friend. A shot is fired. The two of you duck behind the nearest cover and you pull out your smartphone. A map of the neighborhood pops up on its screen with a large red arrow pointing in the direction the shot came from."

"So on Saturday, Syrian rebels in the east of the country attacked another government checkpoint along the Iraqi border, al-Ya`rabiya, and took it. Some of the besieged Syrian troops, many wounded, escaped to the Iraqi side and were being escorted by Iraqi troops south when they were ambushed early on Tuesday and 48 were killed, along with 8 Iraqi border guards. The attackers had rocket propelled grenades and left three vehicles burning. It is not clear if the attackers were Syrian rebels in hot pursuit across the border or if local Sunni Iraqi clans, who are related to the largely Sunni insurgents in Syria, struck for themselves."

"The government has secretly ramped up a controversial programme that strips people of their British citizenship on national security grounds – two of whom have been subsequently killed by US drone attacks."

"Long-time readers know that I think Iran wants nuclear latency or ‘the Japan option,’ i.e. they don’t want to make or stockpile nuclear warheads, but do want the deterrence of invaders that comes with the known ability to put one together in short order"

"...the Tigris and Euphrates basins -- which are ripe with border disputes, conflict over Kurdish minorities, and now major conflicts in Syria and Iraq -- might be more prone to the insidious effects of water instability than other places around the globe."

"Half a world away from the battlefield, a soldier controls his avatar-robot that does the actual fighting on the ground. Another one wears a sticky fabric that enables her to climb a wall like a gecko or spider would. Returning from a traumatic mission, a pilot takes a memory-erasing drug to help ward off post-traumatic stress disorder. Mimicking the physiology of dolphins and sled-dogs, a sailor is able to work his post all week without sleep and only a few meals. All of these scenarios are real military projects currently in various stages of research...."

"The Senate moved last week to restrain the rapid growth of the Defense Clandestine Service, the Pentagon’s human intelligence operation."

"What's the hashtag for terror? For propaganda? I've been talking about the role of social media as a possible enabler of political violence for years. In my June 2009 talk at Mobile Monday in Amsterdam, I argued that Twitter and similar media had the potential to serve a role similar to the radio stations used to drive the 1990s Rwandan genocide. I went into more detail on the idea in this article at Fast Company a short while later..."

“the drone also, for me, stands in part for the network itself: an invisible, inherently connected technology allowing sight and action at a distance. Us and the digital, acting together, a medium and an exchange. But the non-human components of the network are not moral actors, and the same technology that permits civilian technological wonder, the wide-eyed futurism of the New Aesthetic and the unevenly-distributed joy of living now, also produces obscurantist “security” culture, ubiquitous surveillance, and robotic killing machines."

"Ultimately, these hard-shelled aircraft shelters holds the two most commonly wanted superpowers: Flight vs. Invisibility. In John Hodgeman’s ‘informal’ survey, the desire for flight was really an ‘inflated mythical, heroic” image that people only aspired superficially. Ultimately, nobody wanted to use the powers to fulfil our traditional sense of ‘good’. As it turned out, being a Superhero was no fun."

“The government must prove only that the defendant had a ‘reason to believe’ that the information ‘could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation’…. The defendant’s intent to injure or serve the United States is not at issue.”

"Cyberattacks are happening constantly across the globe, and now you can see what that looks in real-time with this map by the Honeynet Project that shows so many attacks, it looks and feels like it's straight out of an apocalyptic war movie."

"Here are the five most important questions about Beijing's defense strategy that remain stubbornly unanswered."

"The Switchblade, produced by California-based AeroVironment, can be guided into a target and explode on impact, almost like a hand grenade"

"Forty-nine mutilated bodies were found dumped along a highway on Sunday near Monterrey, Mexico’s third-largest city, according to officials."

@jackieearle: @warrenellis Big Brother test site??? http://t.co/Jlu71uCw http://twitter.com/jackieearle/status/201715438760116226

"Claimed to be near invisible to radar and able to dominate any future battlefield, the F-35 will replace most of the air-combat aircraft in the inventories of the U.S. Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, and at least nine foreign allies, and it will be in those inventories for the next 55 years. It's no secret, however, that the program -- the most expensive in American history -- is a calamity."

"Not only are high officials and former officials of the Israeli security establishment pushing hard back against Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s seeming rush to war with Iran, they appear actually to be attempting to unseat him, as it becomes possible that Israel may go to early elections in September."

"South Sudan announced last week that it was withdrawing from the disputed Heglig border region in order to avoid all-out war, but the scope of the current attacks seem to go beyond Heglig, and Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir has vowed not to negotiate until all South Sudanese troops are out of Sudan since southern leaders “do not understand anything but the language of the gun and ammunition." Last week, he referred to the South Sudanese leadership as "insects" and vowed to drive them from power."

"On our face our pores are large, for filtering, while our back pores are small, to form a more protective barrier"

"Things got a bit odd with Assange's last question, in which he asked the reglious extremist, "Isn’t Allah, or the notion of God, the ultimate superpower? Shouldn’t you as a freedom fighter also seek to liberate people from the totalitarian concept of a monotheistic god"

"Guinea-Bissau, an impoverished former Portuguese colony, has been plagued by a long series of coups since gaining independence in 1974 - and has recently become an important staging post for gangs smuggling drugs from Latin America to Europe."

"‘When I got to Bab Dreib, there were 16 corpses, all women and children. Some of the children had been hit on the head with sharp objects. The brain was outside the skull’"

“Underlying the ‘pivot’ is a conviction that the center of gravity for U.S. foreign policy, national security, and economic interests is being realigned and shifting towards Asia, and that U.S. strategy and priorities need to be adjusted accordingly,”

"Cap Amadou Sanogo told the BBC he overthrew the government on Wednesday in order to restore security."

"Once, on a trip to Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit, he purchased a video disc from a tea shop. Unlike Starbucks, which once sold music intended to relax the listener, the offering in Tikrit was titled "Anger." It was a compilation of bloody images of U.S. and insurgent attacks that was sickening to watch. Anthony bought it not because of its shock value, but because he knew he needed to see it to understand how Iraqi public opinion was being shaped."

"In the world of robotic warfare, human pilots are apparently still good for something:  shooting down wayward drones."

"Section 7 of the 1994 Intelligence Services Act offers protection not only to spies involved in bugging or bribery, but also to any who become embroiled in far more serious matters, such as murder, kidnap or torture – as long as their actions have been authorised in writing by a secretary of state."

"The video was created in 2003 as a series expressing Hashimoto's view of, "the fear and the folly of nuclear weapons." The video represents nuclear tests with a colored dot and a beep on a map. It starts slow in 1945, showing a world view of a couple flashes in the southwestern United States before zooming in on the two bombs dropped in Japan. The video then pans out and continues for the duration from a birds-eye view of the world. The climax comes between 1955 and 1970 as the Soviet Union joined the U.S. as a nuclear power and England, France, India and Pakistan eventually joined the arms race."

"The battle between the Prime Minister and the former spymasters got so intense that Netanyahu ordered an investigation into leaks about an impending Israeli attack on Iran, which he believed had been perpetrated by the retired spooks. How do we know about this secret leak investigation? The Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz picked up a report from a Kuwaiti newspaper which cited an unnamed Israeli source. Such arcane telegraphs reek of covert struggle. The public is the last to know what’s really going on, or why."

"...the town is a post-apocalyptic industrial hellhole. When you first get there you think, “This is the ugliest place I’ve ever seen. There’s nothing attractive about it, there’s nothing inviting, let’s just leave.” After two hours, you realize that every place you’re going is numbered, as if you’re inside the guts of a circuit board or you’re living in a combination lock. The two people I was traveling with would send me a text, “Oh we’re in Region 8” or “Come meet us at 8174.” After the first three or four hours we started looking around and saying “Oh my god, we’re in an Alphaville set...”"

"The North Korea drones are based on Raytheon’s MQM-107D Streaker target drones, which are used by the U.S. Army, and imported from a Middle East nation believed to be Syria, Yonhap news agency reported."

"We needed a court order to eavesdrop on him," Hayden notes, "but we didn't need a court order to kill him. Isn't that something?"

"The Arab uprisings, however, have shifted the dynamics of the struggle. With the regime's firepower focused on dissenters in the major cities, Saada quietly slid out of its control. A mini-state has sprung up, run almost entirely by the Houthis, who have taken on the responsibilities of government. They have appointed their own governor (a notorious arms dealer), police the streets, and rebuilt schools and houses destroyed in the war. Despite their efforts, Saada remains a destitute city, filled with sprawling graveyards, bullet-pocked mud-brick houses and lean-looking children on crutches hobbling frantically alongside lines of moving traffic, begging for food and money."

"A recent McClatchy report revealed that it takes nearly 170 people to keep a single Predator drone in the air for 24 hours."

"Paddy Ashdown claims that we are living in a moment in history where power is changing in ways it never has before. In a spellbinding talk at TEDxBrussels he outlines the three major global shifts that he sees coming." Also, a quote: "Mao described (WW1 and WW2) as 'the European Civil Wars.'"

"The Occupy Network/Brand is a perma protest against the future. ". interesting characterisation of Occupy, with many facets to it, some presumably unintended by the author.

"When Foreign Policy asked the International Crisis Group to evaluate which manmade disasters could explode in the coming year, we put our heads together and came up with 10 crisis areas that warrant particular concern."

A former factory worker from the British Midlands may be the last living master of the centuries-old Sikh battlefield art of shastar vidya. The father of four is now engaged in a full-time search for a successor.

'In his book The One Percent Doctrine, journalist Ron Suskind reported on CIA plans, unveiled in September 2001 and known as the “Worldwide Attack Matrix,” for “detailed operations against terrorists in 80 countries.” '

"My students were former child soldiers. Let me say that after the
schools had been out of business for more than 10 years, say starting
around 1990, the wars were more like Lord of the Flies with pickup
trucks, automatic rifles, light and heavy machineguns, and mortars...

"...Illiterate 20-somethings leading uneducated armed bands of teens and children across the countryside, enticed by rice and magic. And some drugs, it's true, but chiefly rice and magic. These were hungry children empowered by an AK-47 and some sadistic charismatic leaders.

"...Funny how quickly a new generation will believe in the power of magic in as few as 10 or 12 years after the schools close."

"South Korean officials have arrested a North Korean defector on suspicion of plotting to kill high-profile activist Park Sang-hak, reports from Seoul say."

"Indians of the Guarani tribe in Brazil have demanded that energy giant Shell stop using their ancestral land for ethanol production."

"“Since the Taliban moved in, we can plant the poppy. The people are not starving anymore, because they have opium. And if the government tries to bully us, we have weapons.”"

This is one of a series of attacks on these Guarani since the beginning of August 2011. It follows attempts by the Indians to reclaim their ancestral land, which was seized by ranchers in the 1970s and has been occupied ever since.

Two posters left near the bodies declared that the pair -- a young man and woman -- were killed for posting denouncements of drug cartel activities on a social network.

"an "encounter killing" -- an extrajudicial execution framed to look like the police foiled a bona fide terrorist attack. In some cases the victim is killed while in custody or after having been unofficially arrested, and brought to a (usually) isolated location where the officers later announce they had prevailed in a shoot-out with a hardened criminal or hard-core terrorist."

Turkish prime minister warns further sanctions likely after Israel refuses to apologise for 2010's deadly raid on aid flotilla

Working with the CIA, the New York Police Department maintained a list of "ancestries of interest" and dispatched undercover officers to monitor Muslim businesses and social groups, according to new documents that offer a rare glimpse inside an intelligence program the NYPD insists doesn't exist.

..."about 80% of the businesses in Mexico are involved in one manner or another with the drug racket. Now once you start publishing things like that and looking into it, you’re getting to the power centers of Mexican society, and they’re simply not going to want to be exposed." If they can use the drug assassins to stop it, they will.

"Two days ago we caught a Nigerian woman sniper. She was bloody brilliant," he said.

Ravens are now being upgraded to use a communications system that provides enough bandwidth for 40 of them to fly in the same area, instead of the current four. This digital upgrade also turns the drones into networked devices that can communicate with other robots and systems. 

By combining several metals with standard manufacturing techniques, High-Density Reactive Material (HDRM) has the potential to dramatically increase the explosive impact of most weapons with little or no compromise in strength or design.

"Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST), a US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) programme designed to spot people who are intending to commit a terrorist act, has in the past few months completed its first round of field tests at an undisclosed location in the northeast, Nature has learned."

"Looking like something straight from a 1950’s science fiction magazine, the stealthy Phantom Ray unmanned airborne system (UAS) successfully completed its first flight on April 27, 2011 at NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base in California."

"It helps to have friends in the right places. Al Jazeera has reported that advertisements have been appearing in Guinea and Nigeria offering would-be mercenaries up to $2,000 to come to Qaddafi's aid. The reports are vague so far, but if the Libyan strongman has indeed been shopping for mercenaries, West Africa would be a good place to start. Recent conflicts in Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and the Ivory Coast have generated a steady supply of unemployed ex-fighters willing to move from conflict to conflict for the right price. Foreign mercenaries, often paid in diamonds, kept Sierra Leone's brutal civil war going for years..."

"“Iran will soon create an internet that conforms to Islamic principles, to improve its communication and trade links with the world,” he said, apparently explaining that the new network would operate in parallel to the regular Internet and would possibly eventually replace the open Internet in Muslim countries in the regions."

"There, in a nearby poppy field, they began looking for someone to kill. "The general consensus was, if we are going to do something that fucking crazy, no one wanted anybody around to witness it," one of the men later told Army investigators."

"Libya's rebel commanders have freed two MI6 officers and six SAS soldiers captured by farm guards on Thursday morning, after the British government vouched for their identities."

"Every Beijing mobile phone user will be tracked through the use of the latest global positioning technology, the municipal government announced on Tuesday."

"An American jihadist who set up the terrorist training camp where the leader of the 2005 London suicide bombers learned how to manufacture explosives, has been quietly released after serving only four and a half years of a possible 70-year sentence, a Guardian investigation has learned."

"A Pakistani anti-terrorism court has issued an arrest warrant for former military ruler Pervez Musharraf over the assassination of opposition leader Benazir Bhutto in 2007."

"Burma's state media have published their first direct criticism of the democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi since her release from house arrest. The commentary said she and her party would "meet their tragic end" if they continued to endorse Western sanctions."

"The model, named the Predictive Societal Indicators of Radicalism Model of Domestic Political Violence Forecast, is currently five for five in predicting which countries will likely experience an escalation in domestic political violence against their governments within the next five years..."