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Európai Unió European Union
2018. X. 9. Trump USA-ja új külpolitikai doktrína mellett döntött. Ez pedig: az USA az első! Számunkra ez azzal a következménnyel jár, hogy mi is, vagyis Európa is új doktrínára szorul! Ugyanis, ha ezen túl nem kötelező mindenben leképezni az amerikai mintát, akkor érdemes új megoldásokon is elgondolkozni. Vagyis, ha az új irány az, hogy az USA-nak az USA az első, akkor mindenkinek megengedett, sőt előnyös is, ha a saját érdekeit tekinti a legfontosabbnak. Nem mintha eddig nem így lett volna, a különbség azonban mégiscsak óriási, mert az álszentségi világbajnokságot mindig magabiztosan, utcahosszal nyerő USA ezúttal szabaddá tette a pályát másoknak is. Orbán, ahogy Bannon mondta: Trump volt Trump előtt. Orbán már akkor azt hirdette, hogy nekünk Magyarország az első, amikor még az USA ezerrel amerikanizált és ritkán tapasztalt hévvel erőszakolta ránk az egyedül érvényesnek tekintett világképét. Orbán ezzel valójában már akkor a 2008 óta érvényét vesztett, liberálisnak mondott diktátummal szállt szembe, amikor Tusványoson meghirdette, hogy illiberális demokráciát akarunk, vagyis ragaszkodunk a keresztény-demokráciához és a szociális piacgazdasághoz. Ez akkor azért keltett akkora visszhangot, mert szembeszállt azzal a kanonizált washingtoni diktátummal, ami akkor még mindenkire nézve kötelező volt. Macron minden belső baja ellenére szintén azzal próbálkozik, hogy Orbán ellenpólusaként fogjon magának európai pozíciót. Nehéz lenne megmondani, mit is képvisel valójában, mert hol a nemzetállamok Európája mellett áll ki, hol kétsebességes Európáról vizionál, hol teljes föderalizációt óhajt. De legalább hangosan gondolkozik! A többitől csak annyi telik, hogy megpróbálja megállítani az órát. (Forrás: LátószögBlog)
2 Oct 2018 France froze assets of Iran’s intelligence agency and two agents in retaliation for an alleged Iranian terror plot on French soil, seeking to punish Tehran for planning terror activities in Europe even as the French government tries to salvage the Iran nuclear deal. The plot targeted the annual meeting of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, an umbrella organization of Iranian opposition groups whose main backer is Khalq. The meeting typically draws a roster of U.S. politicians with hawkish views on Iran but who no longer hold office and lack direct influence over U.S. policy. This year, however, the headline speaker was Giuliani, one of President Trump’s personal attorneys and a close informal adviser. On June 30, the morning of the meeting, Belgian police arrested an Iranian-born couple in Brussels carrying 500 grams of TATP, a powerful homemade explosive, in their car. Belgian authorities alleged that the couple was planning to drive to the meeting outside Paris in Villepinte, France, and detonate the explosives. At the same time, German police arrested Mr. Asadi, who was stationed as a diplomat at the Iranian Embassy in Austria, as he was driving back from Luxembourg. Prosecutors allege that Mr. Asadi gave the bomb to the Iranian couple at a meeting in Luxembourg. In July, Dutch authorities said they had expelled two Iranian diplomats whom foreign officials say were linked to the assassinations of at least one Iranian dissident, Nissi. He was gunned down in November by a masked assassin in The Hague. (Source: TheWallStreetJournal)
China
5 Oct 2018 French police have opened an investigation after the wife of the president of Interpol, Meng, said she had not heard from her husband since he travelled home to his native China last week. Meng’s wife lives with him and their children in Lyon, south-east France, where the global organisation for police cooperation is based. The day-to-day running of the organisation was the responsibility of its secretary general, Stock, rather than the president, who chairs its executive committee. Meng, 64, was formerly China’s deputy minister of public security, a position which gave him control over the country’s secret police, and has also previously served as director of the coastguard and deputy head of the Chinese state oceanic administration. Meng was elected the organisation’s head in November 2016, replacing French police officer Ballestrazzi, and was due to serve until 2020. Since taking power in 2012, China’s president, Xi, has launched a sweeping crackdown, punishing more than a million officials, many accused of corruption. Communist party members, including Meng, are subject to a separate investigation system outside of China’s state legal system and those suspected of violated party rules can be held without many legal protections. Beijing saw Meng’s election as a chance to enlist international help in tracking down alleged economic criminals – including corrupt officials living abroad – who were targeted as part of Xi’s much-publicised anti-graft drive. In 2014, China issued an Interpol “red notice” – the closest thing to an international arrest warrant – for the country’s 100 most-wanted corruption suspects who had fled the country, many of whom have since been returned. Some countries have alleged the campaign, known as Operation Fox Hunt, has led to Chinese law agents operating undercover on their territory without consent. (Source: TheGuardian)
India
October 5, 2018 India agreed a deal with Russia to buy S-400 surface to air missile systems, as New Delhi disregarded U.S. warnings that such a purchase could trigger sanctions under U.S. law. The deal was sealed during President Putin’s ongoing visit to New Delhi for an annual summit with Indian Prime Minister Modi. The contract is estimated to be worth more than $5 billion and gives the Indian military the ability to shoot down aircraft and missiles at unprecedented ranges. New Delhi sees the weapons systems as a deterrent against China’s bigger and superior military. The two countries also signed eight agreements covering space, nuclear energy and railways. Russia will also help India in its plans to mount a manned space mission by 2022. Since the Cold War years, India has diversified arms purchases, closing $15 billion of deals with the United States. (Source: Reuters)
Iran
October 1, 2018 Iran’s Revolutionary Guard launched six ballistic missiles as well as drone bombers toward eastern Syria, targeting militants it blamed for an attack on a military parade last month while also threatening regional adversaries as Tehran’s nuclear deal with world powers unravels. The six missiles used as Zolfaghar and Qiam variants have ranges of 750 kilometers and 800 kilometers respectively, launched from western Iran, flew over Iraq and hit the is-held town of Hajin, just north of Boukamal in the far southeast of Syria. U.S.-allied Kurdish fighters have been battling is in and around Hajin for weeks. The missiles had enough range to strike regional U.S. military bases and targets inside both Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Iran’s supreme leader has called out the two Arab nations by name, accusing them of being behind the Sept. 22 attack on the parade in the Iranian city of Ahvaz. Last year, Iran fired ballistic missiles into Syria over a bloody is attack on Tehran targeting parliament and the shrine of Ayatollah Khomeini. In September, Iran fired missiles into Iraq targeting a base of an Iranian Kurdish separatist group. The separatists say that strike killed at least 15 people and wounded over 50. (Source: AP)
New Zealand
1 October 2018 Customs could stop anyone at the border and demand to see their electronic devices. Travellers must provide access - whether that be a password, pin-code or fingerprint - but officials would need to have a reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing. If people refused to comply, they could be fined up to $5000 and their device would be seized and forensically searched. (Source: RadioNZ)
United States Egyesült Államok
October 7, 2018 Air Force Gen. Walters is now considered the top candidate to lead the European command and become NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Europe, essentially the President's point man on military interactions with Russia. Walters currently heads US Air Force operations in Europe. He would replace Gen. Scaparrotti, who is also scheduled to retire. (Source: CNN)
October 4, 2018 China used a tiny chip to infiltrate U.S. companies. The attack by Chinese spies reached almost 30 U.S. companies, including Amazon and Apple, by compromising America’s technology supply chain. Hardware hacks are more difficult to pull off and potentially more devastating, promising the kind of long-term, stealth access that spy agencies are willing to invest millions of dollars and many years to get. Around May 2015, Amazon.com Inc. began quietly evaluating a startup called Elemental Technologies, a potential acquisition to help with a major expansion of its streaming video service, known today as Amazon Prime Video. Based in Portland, Ore., Elemental made software for compressing massive video files and formatting them for different devices. Elemental started working with American spy agencies in 2009 when the company announced a development partnership with In-Q-Tel Inc., the CIA’s investment arm, a deal that paved the way for Elemental servers to be used in national security missions across the U.S. government. The servers have been used inside Department of Defense data centers to process drone and surveillance-camera footage, on Navy warships to transmit feeds of airborne missions, and inside government buildings to enable secure videoconferencing. NASA, both houses of Congress, and the Department of Homeland Security have also been customers. This portfolio made Elemental a target for foreign adversaries. Amazon Web Services (AWS) was overseeing the prospective acquisition, hired a third-party company to scrutinize Elemental’s security. Nested on the servers’ motherboards, the testers found a tiny microchip, not much bigger than a grain of rice, that wasn’t part of the boards’ original design. Some of the chips were built to look like signal conditioning couplers, and they incorporated memory, networking capability, and sufficient processing power for an attack. Amazon reported the discovery to U.S. authorities, sending a shudder through the intelligence community. And Elemental was one of hundreds of Supermicro customers a San Jose-based company founded by Liang, a Taiwanese engineer who attended graduate school in Texas and then moved west to start Supermicro with his wife in 1993. Silicon Valley was then embracing outsourcing, forging a pathway from Taiwanese, and later Chinese factories to American consumers. Supermicro is one of the world’s biggest suppliers of server motherboards, the fiberglass-mounted clusters of chips and capacitors that act as the neurons of data centers large and small. Today, Supermicro sells more server motherboards than almost anyone else. It also dominates the $1 billion market for boards used in special-purpose computers, from MRI machines to weapons systems. Its motherboards can be found in made-to-order server setups at banks, hedge funds, cloud computing providers, and web-hosting services, among other places. Supermicro has assembly facilities in California, the Netherlands, and Taiwan, but its motherboards - its core product - are nearly all manufactured by contractors in China. There middlemen would request changes to the motherboards’ original designs, initially offering bribes in conjunction with their unusual requests. If that didn’t work, they threatened factory managers with inspections that could shut down their plants. Once arrangements were in place, the middlemen would organize delivery of the chips to the factories. The majority of Supermicro's workforce in San Jose is Taiwanese or Chinese, and Mandarin is the preferred language. Many routine calls are done twice, once for English-only workers and again in Mandarin. The investigators determined that the chips allowed the attackers to create a stealth doorway into any network that included the altered machines. The chips had been inserted during the manufacturing process, by operatives from a unit of the People’s Liberation Army. When a server was installed and switched on, the microchip altered the operating system’s core so it could accept modifications. The chip could also contact computers controlled by the attackers in search of further instructions and code. There are two ways for spies to alter the guts of computer equipment. One, known as interdiction, consists of manipulating devices as they’re in transit from manufacturer to customer. This approach is favored by U.S. spy agencies, according to documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Snowden. The other method involves seeding changes from the very beginning. China by some estimates makes 75 percent of the world’s mobile phones and 90 percent of its PCs. Apple made many of its most sophisticated electronics domestically. Then in 1992, it closed a state-of-the-art plant for motherboard and computer assembly in Fremont, Calif., and sent much of that work overseas. In 2014, Apple planned to order more than 6,000 Supermicro servers for installation in 17 locations, including Amsterdam, Chicago, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, New York, San Jose, Singapore, and Tokyo, plus 4,000 servers for its existing North Carolina and Oregon data centers. Those orders were supposed to double, to 20,000, by 2015. Apple was an important Supermicro customer and had planned to order more than 30,000 of its servers in two years for a new global network of data centers. Around 7,000 Supermicro servers were humming in Apple’s network by the time the company’s security team found the added chips. In the summer of 2015, a few weeks after it identified the malicious chips, Apple started removing all Supermicro servers from its data centers, U.S. officials had been warning for years that hardware made by two Chinese telecommunications giants, Huawei Corp. and ZTE Corp., was subject to Chinese government manipulation. Mindful of the Elemental findings, Amazon’s security team conducted its own investigation into AWS’s Beijing facilities and found altered motherboards there as well, including more sophisticated designs than they’d previously encountered. In one case, the malicious chips were thin enough that they’d been embedded between the layers of fiberglass onto which the other components were attached. In November 2017, Amazon sold the entire infrastructure to Beijing Sinnet for about $300 million. Supermicro was delisted from the Nasdaq on Aug. 23, 2015. In late September 2015, after months of negotiations, the U.S. had extracted from China a grand promise: it would no longer support the theft by hackers of U.S. intellectual property to benefit Chinese companies. China was willing to offer this concession because it was already developing far more advanced and surreptitious forms of hacking founded on its near monopoly of the technology supply chain. In the weeks after the agreement was announced, in McLean, Va., organized by the Pentagon, Defense Department officials briefed the technologists on a recent attack and asked them to think about creating commercial products that could detect hardware implants. White House officials have made it clear they think companies will begin shifting their supply chains to other countries. The security of the global technology supply chain had been compromised, even if consumers and most companies didn’t know it yet. (Source: Bloomberg)
October 4, 2018 A ongoing research program funded by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Dubbed “Insect Allies”. The idea is to create more resilient crops to help farmers deal with climate change, drought, frost, floods, salinity, and disease. But instead of modifying seeds in a lab, farmers would send fleets of insects into their crops, where the genetically modified bugs would do their work, “infecting” the plants with a special virus that passes along the new resilience genes. Genetic changes would be imposed upon living organisms, a process known as horizontal genetic alteration. Hence the technology’s name - Horizontal Environmental Genetic Alteration Agents, or HEGAAs. DARPA, in addition to helping out farmers, is also working on a potential weapon. The system would utilize leafhoppers, whiteflies, and aphids genetically altered in the lab using CRISPR, or some other gene-editing system, to carry an infectious virus to pre-existing crops. Each plant would be infected with a transgene, triggering the desired gain-of-function, such as improved resistance to drought or frost. Insect Allies was announced in November 2016, and it currently involves research contracts in excess of $27 million. DARPA is funding four teams, namely the Boyce Thompson Institute, Ohio State University, Pennsylvania State University, and the University of Texas, Austin. The program may be widely perceived as an effort to develop biological agents for hostile purposes and their means of delivery, which- if true - would constitute a breach of the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC). The introduction of this technology, the authors argue, would herald the advent of an entirely new class of biological, insect-dispatched weapons that could conceivably be used to introduce various deleterious characteristics. HEGGAs could be very dangerous. (Source: Gizmodo): https://tinyurl.com/y9klbz48
October 3, 2018 Farmers of the future: Robots. Iron Ox planted its first robot farm in an 8,000-square-foot warehouse in San Carlos, California, The startup relies on a hydroponic system that conserves water and automation in place of humans who seem increasingly less interested in U.S. farming jobs that pay an average of $13.32 per hour, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Nearly half of U.S. farmworkers planting and picking crops aren’t in the U.S. legally. (Source: AP)
2018. X. 1. Felkértem Angelinát táncolni. Irtózatosan kellemetlen számomra, a 2018-as eszemmel soha nem tennék ilyet, de felkértem. Nem targoncás tanfolyamra invitáltam, nem azt mondtam, hogy dobáljunk farönköket a Yukon folyó mellett, nem, nem. Táncolni hívtam. Táncoltunk, táncoltunk, és akkor úgy alakult, hogy áttáncoltunk egy félreeső szobába, ahol Pete nagyija lakott egyébként, de akkor éppen üresen állt. Leültünk a díványra, csókolózni kezdtünk, aztán levetkőztünk és én rávetettem magam Angelinára. Harminckilenc év távlatában nehéz visszaidézni, mi is történt pontosan, de úgy rémlik, hogy ő titkos morzejeleket küldött távírón, hogy még nem érett a testi-lelki egyesülésre, aztán pedig, amikor látta, hogy nem megy másképp, jeges rémületében kilenc teljes órán át másnap délig témázgatott velem. Akkor még nem voltak elterjedtek a beleegyezéses kérdőívek. Ma persze már hordunk magunknál ilyesmit, ha megismerkedek egy nővel, együtt kitöltjük, mit szeretne, mit nem, két tanú letanúzza, és állami felügyelettel, valamint munkahelyi engedéllyel akár pettingelhetünk is. (Forrás: 888)
October 1, 2018 The total federal debt started the fiscal year at $20,244,900,016,053.51 according to the Treasury, and finished the fiscal year at $21,516,058,183,180.23. The federal fiscal year runs from October 1 through September 30. (Source: CNS)
Venezuela
1 Oct 2018 Nearly two million people have fled Venezuela’s economic and political crisis since 2015. Some 5,000 people are now leaving Venezuela daily. Colombia has taken in more than a million Venezuelans. Oil income-dependent Venezuela’s economic woes began in 2014 with the crash in the price of crude. (Source: TheGuardian)
Globalizáció Globalization
2018. X. 5. Három fiatal kutató egy éven át kamu-tanulmányok sorát írta, hogy letesztelje, van-e akkora hülyeség, amit ideológiailag jól csomagolva nem lehet beadni a menő folyóiratoknak. Nincs igazán. Az első kísérletük 2017-ben: „A konceptuális pénisz mint társadalmi konstrukció” címen jelent meg - egy tanulmányuk, melynek az volt a fő állítása, hogy a férfi nemi szerv tehet a klímaváltozásról. Az elmúlt egy évben módszeresen tanulmányozták, hogy a nekik érdekes területen milyen szempontokra figyelnek a recenzensek, milyen érveléssel, szóhasználattal, tudományos stílussal lehet megnyerni őket, mik azok a kulcskifejezések és bogarak, amiket el kell ültetni a szövegben. A magát baloldalinak gondoló értelmiség a hagyományos baloldali témák helyett mára nagyrészt a szimbolikus, harcias kisebbségvédelemben éli ki magát. Ebben a perspektívában annál jobb, minél többféle hátrányos helyzet (erre vonatkozik a divatos interszekcionalitás kifejezés) tarthatatlanságára lehet rámutatni, kiállni az elnyomottakért a fehér, patriarchális, ciszheteró, transzfóbiás, öntudatlanul is előítéletes társadalmi renddel szemben. Megkérdőjelezhető minőségű szövegek miatt a valóban hátrányos helyzetűek valódi hátrányai is hiteltelenebbek lesznek... A WSJ újságírójának egy lektorált tudományos lapban megjelent, a tudományos sztenderdeknek azonban nyilvánvalóan nem megfelelő tanulmány tűnt fel. A „feminista geográfia” területén relevánsnak számító Gender, Place & Culture folyóiratban közölt tanulmány a portlandi kutyafuttatók súlyos problémájáról írt, arról, hogy a hím kutyák rendszeresen követnek el nemi erőszakot a szukákon. Kamu-statisztikákra hivatkozott (eszerint a portlandi parkokban minden órában megerőszakolnak egy kutyát). Alapvetése, hogy a „patriarchális rend” és annak leleplezése négylábúak esetén is életbevágó, valamint azt állította: a kutyaerőszak tanulmányozása sokat segíthet a humán nemi erőszak megértésében is. A folyóirat szerkesztői és a tanulmány recenzensei mindezt komolyan vették, a szerzőt pedig örömmel értesítették, hogy közlésre elfogadták a szövegét. Csodálatos tanulmány – hihetetlenül innovatív, nagyszerű elemzés, rendkívül jól megírt és strukturált szöveg, különös tekintettel a felhasznált szakirodalom és a diszkusszióba bevont elméleti kérdések hihetetlen sokszínűségére – írta a dönteni hivatott értékelő. A tanulmányt később beválogatták egy ünnepi kiadványba is, megítélve neki egy extra kiválósági díjat is. (Forrás: Index)
05 Oct 2018 The microbiota (and its collective genomes, the microbiome) encompasses bacteria, archaea, viruses, fungi, and other microeukaryotic colonizers that live in or on our bodies. They influence essential host processes, including nutrition, immunity, hormone activity, gut permeability, and neurochemistry. The microbiome, our “other genome,” is largely passed from generation to generation, in early life, from mothers to their children. People in industrialized and developing countries from across the world can be classified into two overall groups: low and high intestinal bacterial diversity, In many ways, the loss of our microbial diversity resembles climate change, Most urgently, we need to preserve the diversity of ancestral microbes from globally diverse human populations and especially include those who have had the least exposure to urbanization. Using current technology, and under the precautionary principle (to avoid the introduction of products and processes the ultimate effects of which are unknown), it is paramount that we expand the efforts to capture and preserve the human microbiota while it still exists. This is a needed step toward restoration and could help mitigate the potential risk to human health that urbanization encompasses. A global repository of human-associated microbes should back up existing research collections, similar in principle to the inspiring example of the Seed Vault established in the permafrost of Svalbard Island in Norway to preserve the natural biodiversity of plants. We owe future generations the microbes that colonized our ancestors for at least 200,000 years of human evolution. We must begin before it is too late. (Source: Science)
Space
October 3, 2018 The 10-kilogram box-shaped Mobile Asteroid Surface Scout, or MASCOT, lander on the asteroid Ryugu. The Japanese unmanned spacecraft Hayabusa2 about the size of a large fridge and equipped with solar panels dropped the German-French observation device which landed safely on Ryugu and was in contact with its team some 300 million kilometres from Earth. MASCOT's launch comes 10 days after the Hayabusa2 dropped a pair of MINERVA-II micro-rovers on the Ryugu asteroid. It was the first time that moving, robotic observation devices have been successfully landed on an asteroid. MASCOT will be largely immobile- it will "jump" just once on its mission, and it can turn on its sides. The Hayabusa2 is scheduled later this month to deploy an "impactor" that will explode above the asteroid, shooting a two-kilo copper object into it to blast a small crater on the surface. The probe will then hover over the artificial crater and collect samples using an extended arm. The Hayabusa2 mission costs around 30 billion yen ($260 million), was launched in December 2014 and will return to Earth with its samples in 2020. (Source: phys)
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