"Nearly all of the highest-profile domestic terrorism plots in the United States since 9/11 featured the "direct involvement" of government agents or informants, a new report says."

"Alarming regional and world powers, the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) claimed universal authority when it dropped the local element in its name and said its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, as leader of the Islamic State, was now caliph of the Muslim world - a mediaeval title last widely recognized in the Ottoman sultan deposed 90 years ago after World War One."

"What if every book for the past 500 years had been reporting its readers at headquarters?"

"Sorrow never stops in the Balkans. It’s the favorite topic, the inspiration, the poetic lament. It’s the history."

"Of course he is.  Who sold him on the approach?  Apparently, he has an advisor called Vladislav Surkov who is a science fiction writer."

"Last month, Dmitry Andreyev of the Russian Strategic Missile Forces announced that mobile robots would be standing guard over five ballistic missile installations. These robots can detect and destroy targets, without human involvement. Russia, it seems, is taking the lead in a new robotic arms race."

"Autonomous weapons systems cannot be guaranteed to predictably comply with international law," Prof Sharkey told the BBC. "Nations aren't talking to each other about this, which poses a big risk to humanity."

"Russia's energy ministry said Ukraine had missed a deadline to pay debts worth $3.5bn and that all gas sent from June will have to be paid in advance."

"Following the June 2013 Edward Snowden leaks we observe an increased pace of innovation, specifically new competing jihadist platforms and three (3) major new encryption tools from three (3) different organizations – GIMF, Al-Fajr Technical Committee, and ISIS – within a three to five-month time frame of the leaks."

Archaeological evidence of the earliest repeating crossbow from Tomb 47 at Qinjiazui, Hubei Province has been dated to the 4th century BC, during the Spring and Autumn period.[2] However, its invention is commonly attributed to Zhuge Liang (181–234 AD), a strategist of the Three Kingdoms period; Zhuge Liang improved the design of the repeating crossbow, and made a version which shot two to three bolts at once and was used in massed formations. For this reason, it was named after him.[citation needed] Other repeating crossbows fired as many as 10 bolts before exhausting the magazine.[3]

"After World War II, Picatinny refocused its efforts on developing new weapons and munitions. Its support to the American forces in Korea included an improved bazooka and an illuminating rifle grenade. In periods of peace, the arsenal made important contributions to progress in the areas of radar, pyrotechnics, missiles, time fuzes, and nuclear munitions (including the M65 Atomic Cannon 280mm howitzer known as Atomic Annie)."

"This is not a dilemma without a solution, however. Professional Foresight (aka Futurism) also went through a period where specialists would offer up a single prediction of a certain future. In more recent decades -- arguably since Hermann Kahn's On Thermonuclear War in 1960, but more generally since the advent of Shell-derived Scenario Planning in the 1990s -- futurism has been more comfortable with uncertainty, and more willing to offer multiple rival forecasts of possible outcomes instead of singular, certain predictions. Multi-scenario foresight has evolved various iterations since then, but they all come down to a core idea: you can't predict the future, but you can see the shape of different possible futures."

"For its part, Russia can use its staging ground in Transnistria to exert continued pressure on Ukraine through Odessa, a major Ukrainian seaport. Protests here have mirrored protests in Ukraine as a whole, with contingents of both pro- and anti-Russian demonstrators taking to the streets."

"Yearly reminder: unless you're over 60, you weren't promised flying cars. You were promised an oppressive cyberpunk dystopia. Here you go."

"Britain’s own The Angry Brigade took a gentler approach, trying to avoid hurting anyone if possible but, ultimately, they proved to be utterly ineffectual and got caught and imprisoned, so it was not a massively successful policy. I’m glad that they didn’t kill anybody, of course, but they might have got further if they had."

"Last year, one or two people shot up a electrical substation in central California that fed Silicon Valley.  As is usual in this type of attack, it was successful yet nobody was arrested or hurt -- which makes attacks like this easier to recruit for and easier to repeat."

"Hypersonic weapons use cutting edge technology for flying and maneuvering at ultra-high speeds in space and air. Future weapons will include powered and unpowered hypersonic vehicles fired from the last stages of ICBMs and submarine missiles, and from the bomb-bays of strategic bombers. Hypersonic cruise missiles and surveillance drones also are expected."

"For the second year running, more journalists have been killed in Syria than anywhere else in the world, according to a report released Monday by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). In 2013, 29 were killed there in the course of reporting; in 2012, the grim toll reached 31."

"...torturers expressing their disappointment in the tortured. This disappointment quickly becomes anger. What is the matter with these blacks? The tortured act troubled, it is observed. They consistently fail to live up to the hopes the torturers have for them."

"“At the same time, based on authorization from President Eisenhower’s statements at an NSC meeting on August 18, 1960, discussions began to develop highly sensitive, tightly-held plans to assassinate Lumumba. After Lumumba’s death at the hands of Congolese rivals in January 1961, the U.S. Government authorized the provision of paramilitary and air support to the new Congolese Government….”"

In the KGB for example, only agents promoted to the prestigious X2, nicknamed the steel professors

THE STEEL PROFESSORS

violent extremism knowledge base

Isaias Afewerki, Eritrea’s president, was a charming and progressive leader at one point in his career, but he has since shunned Western aid, locked up dissidents in underground shipping containers and turned his country into the North Korea of Africa. Significantly, all these men were rebel leaders who fought their way up from the trenches to the presidential suite.

"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."