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Globalization
4 May 2019 The introduction of 5G mobile phone networks could seriously affect weather forecasters’ ability to predict major storms. The 23.8 gigahertz (GHz) frequency; water vapour emits a faint signal at this specific natural wavelength, and this data is monitored and measured by weather satellites. Forecasters then use this information to work out how a storm or weather system is likely to develop. Some 5G phone networks may transmit near a frequency similar to that emitted by water vapour, and so would produce a signal that looks very like its presence in the atmosphere. US Federal Communications Commission and similar agencies in other countries have already started to auction off frequencies close to the 23.8 GHz frequency to future 5G network providers. In addition, other bands that are used to probe our weather include the 36-37 GHz band, which is used to study rain and snow; the 50 GHz band, which is used to measure atmospheric temperature; and the 86-92 Ghz band, which helps to analyse cloud and ice. (Source: TheGuardian)
May 3, 2019 "An emblematic figure for the Trump era." The Blackwater company had become infamous after Blackwater security contractors shot and killed 17 Iraqi civilians and wounded dozens more in Baghdad’s Nisour Square in 2007. By 2010, Prince had changed Blackwater’s name and sold the company, ceasing to work on any U.S. government contracts. As Prince negotiated a settlement with the Justice Department for a series of Blackwater arms trafficking violations, then-CIA Director Panetta discovered a secret assassination program involving Blackwater operatives that former Vice President Cheney had hidden from Congress. Prince was bitter, blaming the Obama administration for leaking his CIA role. A converted Catholic raised by Christian fundamentalists and the scion of a Midwestern auto-parts fortune would seem to be an unlikely ally to the Muslim crown prince of a tiny, oil-rich Arab kingdom, but from their first meeting in 2009, Prince and bin Zayed hit it off. Prince sold bin Zayed on the idea of creating a half-billion-dollar program in which he would train, equip, and lead an elite cadre of foreign soldiers called the Security Support Group that would serve as a presidential guard for the Emirati monarchies and help quell any internal unrest. Bin Zayed insisted that Prince use non-Muslim ex-soldiers. Prince also sold bin Zayed on the creation of an armed aviation wing, a team to protect the Emirates from a weapons of mass destruction attack, and a separate force to combat Somali piracy. Somali pirates were engaging in a more traditional form of robbery off the Horn of Africa, harming UAE shipping interests. Prince had a solution: a sea, air, and land battalion to eradicate the pirates. He established a group for this purpose within Reflex Responses known as Special Projects and hired a former South African special forces officer named Luitingh, who also worked for Executive Outcomes, a private military company comprised mainly of apartheid-era South African soldiers. Together, Prince and Luitingh created the Puntland Maritime Police Force in northeastern Somalia, in a semiautonomous region home to the most active Somali pirates. A United Nations monitoring team subsequently documented extensive violations of the U.N. arms embargo of Somalia, including falsifying export paperwork for small arms and attacks that left civilian casualties by Luitingh’s company, Saracen, a subcontractor on the project. The two-year program resulted in an elite force outside any legal framework answerable only to the Puntland presidency. The U.N. report said, “This externally financed assistance programme has remained the most brazen violation of the arms embargo by a private security company.” Among the items that were never returned or accounted for were several aircraft, including at least one cargo plane and two helicopters, as well as several ships. The UAE stopped funding him. They shared common enemies: Islamic militants and, especially, Iran. Under bin Zayed’s leadership, the UAE had used its oil wealth to become one of the world’s largest arms purchasers and the third largest importer of U.S. weapons. A new American president meant new opportunities for the tiny Gulf nation to exert its outsized military and economic influence in the Gulf region and beyond. Prince had known bin Zayed, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi and de facto ruler of the UAE, since 2009, when he sold the sheikh on creating an elite counterterrorism unit. Trump’s election had recalibrated his usefulness. As a prominent Trump supporter and close associate of Bannon, not to mention the brother of incoming cabinet member DeVos, Prince was invited to the meeting as an unofficial adviser to the incoming administration. Prince, in bin Zayed’s view, had built and established an elite ground force that bin Zayed had deployed to wars in Syria and Yemen, the first foreign conflicts in his young country’s history. It was because of Prince, bin Zayed said, that the Emiratis had no terrorists in their country. Prince had solved their problem with Somali pirates. Although he continues to dream of deploying his military services in the world’s failed states, and persists in hawking a crackpot scheme of privatizing the U.S. war in Afghanistan, Prince has diversified his portfolio. No longer satisfied with contracting out former special forces operators to the State Department and Pentagon, Prince is now attempting to offer an entire supply chain of warfare and conflict. He wants to be able to skim a profitable cut from each stage of a hostile operation, whether it be overt or covert, foreign or domestic. His offerings range from the traditional mercenary toolkit, military hardware and manpower, to cellphone surveillance technology and malware, to psychological operations and social media manipulation in partnership with shadowy operations like O’Keefe’s Project Veritas. The picture that emerges is one of a man desperately trying to avoid U.S. tax and weapons trafficking laws even as he offers military services, without a license, in no fewer than 15 countries around the world. Bin Zayed, whom Prince often referred to as “the boss,” gave him ownership of two side-by-side villas in Abu Dhabi, which were originally worth $10 million each. The wealthy enclave was built as a luxury community, each villa with a private beach, and quickly housed several foreign embassies. Prince’s neighboring houses sat at the end of a residential peninsula and had expansive views of central Abu Dhabi across a sea channel, a pool, and beachfront in the Persian Gulf. The former SEAL and self-described CIA “asset” saw in bin Zayed a willing buyer who shared his desire to play soldier. Prince had long tried to own a piece of each part of the foreign conflict supply chain: planes, ships, vehicles, weapons, intelligence, men, and logistics. Reflex Responses gave him a blank check to do just that. Structurally, Reflex Responses became a model for how Prince masks his involvement in selling or providing military services, which was a necessity given that he’s unlikely to obtain an arms trafficking license under the U.S. State Department’s International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR). Prince recruited and hired the subcontractors who fulfilled Reflex’s contractual requirements. Prince flew to South America, where he helped oversee the recruitment of former Colombian soldiers who served as both hired guns and a training cadre for the fledgling Emirati security force. Prince generally works to control the entire supply chain of any mercenary or security contract. He will run a contract through two companies and then dictate that those two companies have to subcontract out to another eight companies. He owns all or part of those eight companies and will take 25 percent from each company. Then, he can use those same eight entities to make the money disappear. Over the next several years, Prince looked to China for new funds, creating Frontier Services Group with an investment banker named Smith. For Smith, the business model seemed simple enough: Frontier Resource would find undervalued, distressed assets, and Frontier Services would transport the materials out of Africa. Some Chinese investors made it clear that they wanted a “Blackwater China.” Prince proposed creating counterterrorism forces, a private air force, and a “black ops” program for Nigeria to defeat Boko Haram. He made a similar pitch to President Mayardit of South Sudan to help him defeat rebels there. There were meetings and proposals for Libya, Cameroon, and Kurdish Iraq, none of which found a buyer. Although Prince failed to sell an entire paramilitary force, he did make money across the continent and the Middle East “advising” countries on how to fight wars. Over a roughly five-year period, Prince earned as much as $10 million from his meetings. Since he left Blackwater, Prince has sold or pitched his war supply chain in no fewer than 15 countries, nearly all of them with majority Muslim populations. In 2014, he demonstrated a cellphone geolocation software that he said he had licensed from an Israeli company. At a strip mall diner in Washington, D.C., Prince pulled out a laptop and punched in a cellphone number. The program identified the most recent cell tower the phone had connected with, allowing the user to locate the target within 300 meters and revealing the last 10 calls the targeted user made. Later, he claimed that they sold the program to the Saudi and Emirati air forces to locate bombing targets in Yemen. In 2015, Prince became involved in the ongoing conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the disputed area of Nagorno-Karabakh. Azerbaijan spent hundreds of millions of dollars equipping and training their small military. Prince was brought in by a former Russian weapons supplier to help create a training force. Prince would ultimately be kicked off the contract after his business partners accused him of wildly padding the proposed contract by adding a series of unnecessary expenditures that would have been provided by companies to which Prince had financial ties. The 2016 presidential election and the rise of Trump now promised a full-scale rehabilitation. After Trump had clinched the Republican nomination, Prince told his Chinese business and government contacts that if Trump won, he would be the next secretary of defense. Prince became an enthusiastic Trump supporter. After Trump won the election, Prince began sending defense and intelligence policy proposals to the Trump team via Bannon, including his plan for privatizing the war in Afghanistan. The plan called for removing all U.S. troops and replacing them with a small cadre of security trainers, a small fleet of light attack aircraft, and a surge of covert CIA operations. Prince tweaked his proposal with a plan to secure mining concessions for Afghanistan’s vast untapped mineral resources. The national security establishment was uniformly opposed and it failed to gain traction. Prince was invited back to bin Zayed’s royal court. Prince is currently hawking proposals to for the Emirate’s despised rival, Qatar for preventing social and political unrest from its foreign laborers who make up almost 90 percent of the country’s population of roughly 2.3 million, before and during the 2022 FIFA World Cup. By marrying two capabilities - social media manipulation and undercover surveillance by trained operatives - Prince has moved further along the spectrum of contemporary warfare. If a government won’t pay him for a heavily armed paramilitary force in a hot conflict, he appears prepared to offer services that utilize a less obvious, but perhaps more insidious, kind of weaponry. The FBI is currently probing Prince’s work at Frontier Services Group. As in so many other episodes involving Prince over the last decade, his involvement in the Trump-Russia political scandal is a result of his relentless ambition, combined with his snake-oil salesmanship and his ability to gain entry to rooms with genuine power, even if it quickly becomes apparent that he doesn’t belong there. (Source: TheIntercept)
May 1, 2019 Microsoft is one of the few companies looking to eliminate passwords entirely. Google has been testing stronger alternatives to passwords alone, like its USB key fobs which plug into customers’ computers and provide a second factor of authentication for logging in. Google said last year this method reduced successful phishing attempts against its own employees completely. Cisco is also banking on a future beyond simple passwords, after acquiring dual-factor authentication start-up Duo last year. (Source: CNBC)
Earth
May 06, 2017 The essential, interconnected web of life on Earth is getting smaller and increasingly frayed. A three-year global assessment on the state of nature from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) has involved more than 450 experts from 50 countries. Series of scenarios for the future: a shift away from concentrating on economic growth, bringing in wildlife-friendly farming, restoring habitats such as native forests, cutting food waste, creating marine protected areas and effective quotas for fishing, reducing pollution and creating more green space in cities. (Source: IrishExaminer)
Space
May 02, 2019 The rock Apophis, after the Egyptian god of chaos. Nasa is already preparing for the arrival of a huge asteroid named the “God of Chaos” that will skirt past Earth in 10 years, on 13 April, 2029. There is only a 1 in 100,000 chance the asteroid will hit Earth. It will first be visible to the naked eye when it arrives in the night sky over the Southern Hemisphere, shooting across the east coast to the west coast of Australia. It will make its way around the world, cross the Indian Ocean on its way to the US. Its closest approach will be over the Atlantic Ocean, as the evening arrives in the US. It will move so fast that it will cross the ocean in just an hour, and will then fly off into space. (Source: TheIndependent)
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