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Report: US Building Secret Drone Bases in Africa, Arabian Peninsula
The United States is reported to be expanding a secret drone program in east Africa and the Arabian peninsula in order to gather intelligence and strike al-Qaida-linked militants in Somalia and Yemen.
Citing U.S. defense officials, The Washington Post reported that the U.S. is building a new military installation to host the unmanned aircraft in Ethiopia, where drones can more easily attack members of the militant group al-Shabab that is fighting for control of neighboring Somalia.
The report also said the U.S. has re-opened a drone base in the Seychelles, an island nation in the Indian Ocean, where a small Read more…
Madness Just Hit Record Highs: US Unable To Account For 36,000 Pounds Of Its Own Weapons Grade Uranium And Plutonium!
The U.S. Is Unable To Account For 36k Pounds Of Its Own Weapons Grade Uranium And Plutonium (Business Insider, Sep. 15, 2011):
Under special nuclear cooperation agreements, the United States sent 38,580 pounds of enriched uranium and plutonium to more than two-dozen foreign agencies and is unable to account for 36,000 pounds of the material.
The Government Accountability Office report says these 27 cooperation agreements, set up to facilitate cross border research, have no accountability and the U.S. has no way to enforce control.
Because there is no reporting process in place, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has been Read more…
US to Sell Israel Bunker-Busters
The U.S. Arsenal Is Antiquated And Falling Apart
Image: wikipedia commons
Despite the daily stories of billion dollar purchasesand enormous contracts, the military’s main arsenal of ships, tanks, helicopters, and planes is decades old and ready to be replaced.
The Wall Street Journal reports that because the U.S. spent the last decade developing weapons and equipment for two specific conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, updating the rest of the arsenal was left undone.
In one instance, an Air Force pilot flies the same 30-year-old F-15 his father flew; in another, an Air Force navigator bought an off-the-shelf GPS to get better weather data and aviation notices than what’s available in his C-130 cargo plane.
From WSJ:
Much of the equipment currently in service dates to the Reagan-era Read more…
We’re Watching You: Surveillance Expansion In the Land of the Free is Unprecedented In Human History
Have you ever heard of a Yottabyte? To put this number into perspective consider the size of a terabyte, which is about the size of a typical modern hard drive. It can hold roughly 100 high definition DVD’s.
A yottabyte is 1,099,511,627,776 terabytes – or over 1 trillion terabytes of information.
This is important because according to a recent report from Politico, the National Security Agency (NSA), which is the security apparatus responsible for monitoring electronic communications across the globe, is building a new data warehousing center in Utah at the cost of $2 billion dollars. It will be housed in a one million square foot complex and be capable of storing at least one yottabyte of data.
We pointed out the various ways that the U.S. government is monitoring Read more…
U.S., Romania Sign Interceptor Missile Deal
September 13, 2011Russia has agreed to cooperate on the initiative but disagrees over its implementation, saying it should be a single integrated shield rather than two separate defense systems.
Turkey said recently it had reached agreement on the deployment of a radar on its territory as part of NATO’s missile-defense system.
Poverty rate hits 15.1 percent, highest since 1993
WASHINGTON — The US poverty rate rose in 2010 to 15.1 percent, the highest since 1993, according to census data showing a record number of Americans classified as poor and highlighting a struggling economy after the end of the Great Recession.The Census Bureau report released Tuesday showed a sharp increase in the poverty rate from 14.3 percent in 2009, and a fourth consecutive rise in the number of people below the poverty line, to 46.2 million.
The number of Read more…
China: US Playing With Fire
China ramped up the pressure on the United States not to sell advanced arms to Taiwan, with the Communist Party’s official newspaper warning that US congressmen are ‘playing with fire’ over the issue.
Nebraskans say a Canadian oil pipeline poses unacceptable risks
Part of the Keystone pipeline (solid line) is already working. Construction on Keystone XL (red dotted line) is supposed to start soon so oil can flow to the GulfThe 20,000 miles of pipes that carry oil and gas across Nebraska’s open prairies don’t bother Randy Thompson at all. Neither do greenhouse gas emissions or oil geopolitics.
Yet the 63-year-old, Republican-voting rancher and other Nebraska landowners have begun to kick up a lot of dust over the Keystone XL, a 1,711-mile pipeline that, if built, will cut across Nebraska’s heartland as it funnels oil from the Athabasca sands of Alberta, Canada, to Read more…
China Analyst: U.S. Can’t Win in Space, So Why Bother Racing?
With access to more than 400 satellites plus at least two tiny, maneuverable robotic shuttles, the U.S. military is the clear leader in military spacecraft. But with 70 orbiters of its own, China is catching up fast. Last year, Beijing matched Washington in space launches for the first time, boosting no fewer than 15 satellites into orbit. It was the first time any nation kept a celestial pace with the U.S. since the height of the Cold War.
The new space race is on. But in the view of one influential analyst, the race isn’t worth the prize. Space “is expensive to enter, hard to sustain assets in, contains no defensive ground, and — barring energy-intensive maneuvering – forces assets into predictable orbits,” Andrew Erickson, a Naval War College professor and editor of the new book Chinese Aerospace Power, told me as part of a longer interview over at AOL Defense.
No one disputes that China is gaining “ground” in space. “The [People’s Liberation Army] is acquiring a range of Read more…
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