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Venezuela
December 14, 2018 Russia has decided to develop a long-term military presence in the Caribbean in conjunction with the socialist nation of Venezuela, on La Orchila, one of its islands in the Caribbean Sea, located 200 kilometers northeast of Caracas which has a naval base and a military airfield. The recent flights of Russian Tu-160 long-range nuclear bombers are part of this effort, theirs arrival to Central America is kind of a signal to Trump to make him realize that abandoning nuclear disarmament treaties will have a boomerang effect - a Russian military expert said. This development could only increase the Trump administration’s focus on regime change in Caracas as the people continue to suffer immensely under Venezuelan President Maduro and his socialist policies which have destroyed the oil-rich nation’s economy. (Source: Tzarism)
United States
December 20, 2018 Secretary Mattis resignation letter. (Source: DocumentCloud): https://tinyurl.com/y85ybcp3
2018. december 20. The U.S. Justice Department announced indictments accusing Chinese officials of coordinating a decade-long espionage campaign to steal intellectual property and other data from dozens of companies. Two Chinese nationals, Zhu and Zhang, were accused of coordinating with state security officials in an “extensive” hacking campaign, allegedly infiltrating 45 U.S. companies and government agencies, as well as other firms in more than a dozen countries. The hackers, known in the cybersecurity community as Advanced Persistent Threat 10, stole information from companies in an array of industries, including banking and finance, telecommunications, biotechnology, automotive, health care and mining, according to the indictment. The group hacked the U.S. Navy, making off with the personal data of more than 100,000 personnel, and successfully infiltrated computers linked to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Zhu and Zhang were indicted in abstentia. The defendants named in the U.S. indictment worked for Huayhing Haitei Science and Technology Development Co. in Tianjin, China, and acted in coordination with the Chinese Ministry of State Security’s Tianjin State Security Bureau. (Source: Bloomberg)
Dec 18, 2018 In 2017, outsourcing and automation are reducing the overall employment. 153.3 million Americans were employed in either full- or part-time jobs, up 5.4% from 2008. Job growth was not uniform across all industries, America’s increasing reliance on the internet and connected devices spelled disaster for printed media. Technological advancement has also given way to increased automation in factories, reducing the need for workers. Many industries in the manufacturing sector were also affected by outsourcing. industries on this list had employment declines of at least 37% in the last decade. Eight industries lost over half of their workers during that time. Book and periodical merchant wholesalers is one of many industries that has been hit hard by the rise in the digital media industry. Employment has dropped 37.6% over the past decade. Once essential supplies like pens, pencils, staplers, and stamps are being phased out in offices worldwide. The number of new homes being built fell below one million for the first time since at least the 1950s in 2008, and remained there until 2014. This year, a decade after the housing market crash, employment for drywall and insulation contractors is about 38% below pre-crash levels. This industry will be relatively stable for the next several years. The political organization industry shed 38.4% of its workers from 2008 to 2017. These include people working in political action committees, political parties, campaigns, and interest groups at the local, state, and national level. Political organization wages fell 10% over the past decade. Since 2008, employment in the telephone apparatus manufacturing industry shrank by more than 40% to fewer than 20,000 workers. All products have been made virtually obsolete by the cell phone. In America, 95% of people have a cell phone of some kind. Domestic textile manufacturers have been replaced by many U.S. apparel companies with manufacturers from developing countries from across the world to reduce costs. In the past decade, the industry shed 41.3% of its workforce. The industry may stand to benefit from tariffs on textiles imposed on China by the Trump administration. Cut and sew apparel face increasing competition from overseas. There was a 41.5% decline in employment in the industry. Tobacco manufacturing jobs have decreased significantly. The share of Americans who smoke has declined considerably, from 45% of U.S. adults in the 1950s to 16% today, an all-time low. Automation has ever increasing role in production. While employment in the wired and wireless telecommunications industry rose slightly over the past 10 years, employment in other, more specialized telecommunications activities – such as satellite tracking, communications telemetry, and radar station operation – declined 42.4%, one of the largest declines of any industry. The number of workers in stationery product manufacturing fell by 42.6%. Handcrafted journals, heavy cardstock, and Moleskine notebooks, is on the rise and may help to slow falling employment in the industry. The pace of depository credit intermediation, or bank lending, declined substantially during the 2008 financial crisis and remains far below its pre-recession levels. Employment in commercial banking fell by 2.2% from 2008 to 2017, and the number of workers in other depository credit intermediation activities – which includes industrial banks and private banks – fell by 42.6%. With the growing use of digital media, from newspapers to magazines to books, as well as growing competition from online retailers, the book retailing industry has taken a battering. Amazon has about 50% of the U.S. market book market share, while the largest brick-and-mortar book retailer, Barnes & Noble, has about 20%. One in eight Barnes & Noble locations have shuttered in the past seven years. Overall, employment in the book stores and news dealers industry has declined by 43.3% from 2008 to 2017. Fewer than 24,000 Americans remain working in the support activities for printing industry, down from nearly 43,000 in 2008. The industry includes book binding, embossing, and engraving. But books, magazines, and stationary are quickly being replaced with online versions of the products. art prints, calendars, or greeting cards. This industry, like many other printing industries, struggles to compete with digital media. Traditional art print publishers now also compete with independent artists, who can print and sell their own work on a variety of online platforms like Etsy. Over the last decade, employment in the industry fell by 48.2%. Business and secretarial schools offer courses in office procedures like secretarial skills, stenographic skills, and word processing. These duties are being replaced by automated procedures or executives are handling these tasks themselves. Secretary jobs will decline by 192,200 by 2026. The number of people working in business and secretarial schools has declined by 48.3% over the past decade. The land subdivision industry, which divides land into parcels for housing and other purposes, suffered as a result of the market's struggles. As of 2017, industry employment is just about half of what it was a decade before. Employment change 2008-17: -49.3%. There are now just 160,739 newspaper publishers workers in the United States, compared to more than 320,000 a decade earlier. Since 2008 the industry's average annual wages dropped 17.8%. Hosiery and sock mills which were once made by hand, are now being mass-manufactured by machines. Total industry employment declined by 51.2% since 2008. The convenience of the internet is driving the directory and mailing list publisher industry out of business. Over the past decade, the industry's employment has dropped by 56%. More and more Americans choose to share their photos online rather than print a physical copy. In photofinishing industry there are 57.9% fewer people working now than there were in 2008. With the advent of digital cameras and smartphones, people can instantly snap, edit, and share their photos digitally, eliminating the need for a middleman in most cases. Americans become less reliant on physical media in favor of streaming and cloud storage services. Streaming media services like Netflix and digital downloads of films on services like iTunes are phasing out older technology. In magnetic media manufacturing and reproducing employment dropped from more than 30,000 workers to 14,449. Nearly 60% of port and harbor operations jobs have been eliminated in the past decade as cargo handling and ship navigation are being phased out by automation. The industry still is incredibly important to the U.S. economy. The economic impact of U.S. port was $4.6 trillion in 2014, or more than a quarter of U.S. economic output. The number of Americans working in women's, girls', infants' cut-sew apparel manufacturing industry declined by more than 61% in the past decade. There were 229 mills classified as other apparel knitting mills in 2008; places that knit outerwear, underwear, and nightwear. A decade later, the number of these types of mills fell to 139. During that period, employment in the industry fell by 64%. (Source: USAToday)
Globalization
December 14, 2018 Facebook has just revealed a Photo API bug gave app developers too much access to the photos of up to 5.6 million users. Facebook says the bug ran for 12 days from September 13th to September 25th. Facebook tells TechCrunch it discovered the breach on September 25th, and informed the European Union’s privacy watchdog the Office Of The Data Protection Commissioner (IDPC) on November 22nd. The company plans to notify people it suspects may have been impacted by the bug via Facebook notification that will direct them to the Help Center where they’ll see if they used any apps impacted by the bug. It’s recommending users log into apps to check if they have wrongful photo access. It follows Facebook’s massive security breach that allowed hackers to scrape 30 million people’s information back in September. There was also November’s bug allowing websites to read users’ Likes, October’s bug that mistakenly deleted people’s Live videos, and May’s bug that changed people’s status update composer privacy settings. And it seems Facebook is so tired of its failings that it couldn’t put forward even a seemingly heartfelt apology is telling. (Source: Techcrunch): https://tinyurl.com/y8txo45
December 14, 2018 What are the underlying causes of these 21st-century crises of Western democracies? Certainly, globalization, with its creation of ties among transnational elites at the expense of nation-states and their indigenous peoples is one. Capitals – Washington, London, Paris, Berlin – seem ever more distant from the countries they rule. Then there is demography. The native-born of almost all Western nations are aging, shrinking and dying. Death rates exceed birth rates. While peoples of the West are living longer, they are producing fewer children to replace them. At the same time, Western elites have welcomed foreign workers and left borders unsecured against mass migration. And the people coming in, almost all now from the Third World, are not assimilating as the children of 19th- and 20th-century European immigrants to the USA had largely done by 1960. A consequence and related cause is the rise of tribalism, or ethno-nationalism, the search for identity and community with one’s own. Loyalties to family, tribe, neighborhood, culture and country appear paramount, rising above intellectual and political alignments. The establishment Trump detests and defeated in 2016 will use every weapon in its considerable arsenal to break and bring him down, as it did half a century ago to Nixon. By spring 2019, Americans will be unable to escape the vitriol on cable and social media. And the outside world will see America again as a house divided. Great Britain. Prime Minister Theresa May was just forced to pledge that she would not lead her party in the next election – to survive a no-confidence vote in Parliament. A third of all Tory members voted to throw her out. The no-confidence vote was called after May had to cancel a vote on the Brexit plan she had negotiated with the EU, when it was evident that a coalition of Tories and Labor would vote to kill her plan. May has been humiliated. Yet her humiliation solves nothing. The clock is running toward a March deadline for concluding a Brexit deal. And no plan acceptable to both Parliament and the EU is on the table. The possibility exists that Britain could simply crash out of the EU, causing severe economic damage to both. In France, after four Saturdays of anarchy, arson, looting and vandalism of her national monuments, President Macron capitulated to the rioters. He withdrew the fuel tax that triggered the uprisings. He agreed to have his government add $113 a month to those earning the minimum wage, and to let workers get overtime pay and Christmas bonuses tax-free, and to revoke higher social charges on modest pensions. The cost of Macron’s retreat is estimated at $11 billion, 0.4 percent of France’s GDP. Today, one poll puts Macron’s approval at 21 percent. The idea that he can replace Angela Merkel as the recognized leader of the EU seems ridiculous. As for Merkel herself, hailed as leader of the West in the time of Trump, her party and coalition lost so much support in the recent election that she stepped down as leader of the CDU and pledged not to run for another term as chancellor. Europe’s fourth-largest economy, Italy, is now led by a coalition of the populist-left Five Star Movement and populist-right Lega party. The coalition seeks greater freedom on spending than Brussels is willing to allow, and a halt to migration from across the Med. With Poland and Hungary at odds with Brussels over alterations in their political systems, the EU has never seemed less united. (Source: WND)
December 13, 2018 A signal that people are ready to embrace nonhumans as celebrities is Miquela, created by a Los Angeles startup called Brud. Brud launched Miquela on Instagram in 2016. With carefully composed images, she appeared lifelike and didn’t identify herself as artificial until April as part of a staged drama that played out over a series of posts. Over ensuing months, the Miquela character on Instagram professed to be angry at Brud for lying to her about her true origin story. If Miquela were human, her 1.5 million followers on Instagram could command about $12,000-$25,000 per post to promote a product, according to experts in influencer marketing. Like human influencers, Miquela posts photos showing herself at premium restaurants such as Blue Hill at Stone Barns in the New York City suburbs, which features a menu for January that costs more than $400 with drinks. In addition to collaborating with high-end fashion brands - Ugg declined to say what it paid to use Miquela’s image - she has released singles on Spotify. Brud declined to comment, and it has tried to cultivate an air of mystery around Miquela. Miquela’s story lines are composed by a group of writers at Brud in Los Angeles. (Source. TheWallStreetJournal)
Space
December 2018 Competing in space. Developing trends in the space domain, growing challenges posed by foreign space assets, threats to U.S. and allied use of space, and an outlook for the evolution of these trends. To date, the international community has not achieved a global consensus on new laws or norms despite efforts to increase transparency in space operations, avoid deliberate debris-generating events (e.g., anti-satellite weapon tests, orbital collisions), and prevent the placement of weapons in space. A decade ago, foreign remote sensing satellites numbered nearly 100 - by mid-2018, that number reached over 300. As of May 2018, the Chinese reconnaissance and remote sensing fleet consisted of more than 120 satellites designed to collect data for civil, commercial, or military owners and operators. China plans to expand services beyond Asia by providing satellite communications to users worldwide and exporting domestically developed systems. China is testing multiple next-generation capabilities, such as the world’s first quantum communications satellite. Russia maintains a satellite communications fleet that provides resilient services to civil, government, and military users within its borders and worldwide. The low cost of launching and operating satellites in low Earth orbit makes it particularly attractive for space service providers. Several proposed large constellations of communications satellites in low Earth orbit, combined with the rapid growth of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets in this orbit, threaten to congest the space environment nearest to Earth. This congestion presents a higher potential for orbital collisions and increases the need for timely and thorough space situational awareness. Russia and the European Union currently operate worldwide satellite navigation systems (GLONASS and Galileo, respectively), while India and Japan operate regional navigation systems (NavIC and QZSS, respectively). China’s satellite navigation system, known as BeiDou, offers satellite navigation services in Asia. In 2017, China began deployment of its next-generation, worldwide BeiDou constellation, scheduled for full operation in 2020. Russia’s GLONASS constellation provides worldwide satellite navigation services. With full capacity regained in 2011, Russia now launches satellites as needed to maintain the constellation while developing next generation GLONASS satellites. Today, nine countries and one international organization can independently launch spacecraft: China, India, Iran, Israel, Japan, Russia, North Korea, South Korea, the U.S., and the European Space Agency. Iran and North Korea maintain independent space launch capabilities that could also test ballistic missile technologies. China and Russia are updating their medium- and heavy-lift launch fleets. China has developed and fielded light, quick response space launch vehicles capable of expedited launches. The quick response systems require little launch infrastructure, can relocate by road or rail, can be stored launch-ready for longer periods, but are only capable of launching small satellite payloads into low orbits. China designed quick response space launch vehicles to increase its attractiveness as a commercial small satellite launch provider and to rapidly reconstitute space capabilities in low Earth orbit during disasters or conflicts. China and Russia are currently in the early stages of developing super heavy-lift space launch vehicles similar to the U.S. Space Launch System. Adversaries may jam global navigation and communications satellites used for command and control of naval, ground, and air forces, to include manned and unmanned vehicles. Weapons, for example, lasers can temporarily or permanently blind imagery satellites and other strategic sensors. Adversaries may use anti-satellite missiles to shoot down satellites in low Earth orbit. China used an anti-satellite missile against its own defunct weather satellite in 2007. The result of a missile shooting down a satellite can produce debris that may threaten satellites in nearby orbits. Cyber capabilities could target space systems and supporting infrastructure. Foreign competitors are capable of conducting electronic attacks to disrupt, deny, deceive, or degrade space services. Uplink jamming is directed toward the satellite, and must operate at the same frequency and approximate power level as the target signals. Effects can be widespread. Conversely, downlink jamming is directed at users on the ground, and its effects are more localized. China and Russia consider both offensive cyber capabilities and electronic warfare as key assets for maintaining military advantage. Anti-satellite missiles destroy targeted satellites. Counterspace directed-energy weapons are designed to produce reversible or non-reversible effects against space systems by emitting highly focused radiofrequency or laser energy. Reversible effects include temporarily blinding optical sensors. Russia is reportedly developing an airborne laser weapon system intended for use against space-based missile defense sensors. Space-based anti-satellite systems can include kinetic kill vehicles, radiofrequency jammers, lasers, chemical sprayers, high-power microwaves, and robotic mechanisms. Development of some space technologies could lead to a misperception of intent, driving countries to adopt a more hostile posture. Understanding the risks created by emerging technologies is critical to maintaining a peaceful space domain. Foreign competitors have looked to lunar missions as key demonstrations of technological sophistication and economic prosperity. Russia plans to launch a robotic Moon mission in 2021. Recently, Russia has partnered with the European Space Agency in the European-led ExoMars program, which launched a Mars orbiter in 2016 and plans to launch a rover in 2020. Future concepts will advance Space system capabilities; 3D printing in space could allow competitors to nearly eliminate the cost of space launch by servicing, repairing, or manufacturing new systems entirely on orbit. (Source: MediaDefense): https://tinyurl.com/y7js7hf4
17 December 2018 Changing the ionosphere over enemy territory can also disrupt or cut off their communication with satellites. China and Russia have modified an important layer of the atmosphere above Europe to test a controversial technology for possible military application. The Sura base fired up an array of high-power antennas and injected a large amount of microwaves into the high atmosphere. The peak power of the high frequency radio waves could reach 260 megawatts, enough to light up a small city. The pumping and fly-by required precise coordination to achieve effective measurement. Zhangheng-1, a Chinese electromagnetic surveillance satellite, collected the data from orbit with cutting-edge sensors. The earthquake administration was involved because the Zhangheng-1, launched in February, was the first Chinese satellite capable of picking up precursory signals linked to earthquakes. It is operated by the Chinese military and has served both civilian and defence uses.The June 7 experiment caused physical disturbance over an area as large as 126,000 sq km, or about half the size of Britain. The modified zone, looming more than 500km high over Vasilsursk, a small Russian town in eastern Europe, experienced an electric spike with 10 times more negatively charged subatomic particles than surrounding regions. In another experiment on June 12, the temperature of thin, ionised gas in high altitude increased more than 100 degrees Celsius because of the particle flux. The particles, or electrons, were pumped into the sky by Sura, an atmospheric heating facility in Vasilsursk built by the former Soviet Union’s military during the cold war. The Sura base in Vasilsursk is believed to be the world’s first large-scale facility built for the purpose. Up and running in 1981, it enabled Soviet scientists to manipulate the sky as an instrument for military operations, such as submarine communication. High-energy microwaves can pluck the electromagnetic field in ionosphere like fingers playing a harp. This can produce very low-frequency radio signals that can penetrate the ground or water – sometimes to depths of more than 100 metres in the ocean, which made it a possible communication method for submarines. The Sun and cosmic rays produce a large amount of free-flying, positively charged atoms known as ions at altitudes from 75km to 1,000km. The layer, or ionosphere, reflects radio waves like a mirror. The ionosphere allows radio signals to bounce long distances for communication. The militaries have been in a race to control the ionosphere for decades. In the China-Russian experiment, researchers found that even with a small power output of 30MW, the radio beam could create a large abnormal zone. The effects dropped sharply after sunrise, as the man-made perturbation easily became lost in the noise created by sunlight. The National Centre for Space Studies, a French government agency under the supervision of the ministries of defence and research, has deployed the micro satellite DEMETER to monitor Sura’s radio emissions. The Defence Meteorological Satellite Programme run by the US Department of Defence has also contributed fly-by data in several heating experiments conducted at the Russian site before 2012. China is now building an even larger and more advanced facility in Sanya, Hainan, with capability to manipulate the ionosphere over the entire South China Sea. There have been concerns that such facilities could be used to modify weather and even create natural disasters including hurricanes, cyclones and earthquakes. The ultra-low frequency waves generated by these powerful facilities could even affect the operation of human brains. (Source: SouthChinaMorningPost)
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