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Russian military doctrine states that Russia would use nuclear weapons in the event of attacks against key Russian assets or threats to the existence of the state, and experts believe Russia could use nuclear weapons first in a crisis to signal resolve.

Russia has seen how important space-based assets can be on the battlefield in Ukraine. Starlink, with its thousands of satellites orbiting Earth, provides Ukrainian forces with uninterrupted communication. The U.S. Department of Defense openly discusses its investments in large satellite constellations. Hundreds of satellites used for missile warning, intelligence and communications are seen as a way to be more resilient against a variety of growing space threats. Moscow would look for ways to target these large satellite constellations and to erode the advantage they provide.

Russia has been testing weapons that target space capabilities or using them on the battlefield in Ukraine. In November 2021, Moscow conducted an antisatellite test by launching a missile at one of its own defunct satellites. It has also employed systems designed to jam Starlink and GPS to degrade Ukraine’s communication systems, as well as the drones and munitions the country uses to defend itself. It is not surprising that Moscow would seek to develop a more powerful way to cause widespread damage to constellations of satellites.

But a nuclear detonation in space is indiscriminate. It would degrade or destroy any satellites in its path and within the same orbital region. It wouldn’t just affect U.S. satellites but also the aggressor’s own satellites, as well as an unknown number of satellites owned by the over 90 countries operating in space, and astronauts living on the International Space Station and Chinese space station

Russia, however, has less to lose: Its once vaunted space program is in decline, dinged by sanctions, and said it intends to withdraw from the International Space Station program after 2024. Moscow is now well behind China in its total number of operating on-orbit satellites.

Third, we need to be realistic about prospects for future arms control with Russia. Moscow has shown a disregard for its treaty commitments. Just last month, Moscow rejected attempts by the Biden administration to restart bilateral arms control talks. Rather than trying again, the administration should instead focus on strengthening deterrence by improving our own capabilities and building multilateral coalitions for responsible nuclear behavior

Finally, policymakers need to protect our intelligence sources and intelligence gathering methods

With Russian officials already demanding proof of what the United States knows, declassifying those sources and methods plays directly into Moscow’s hands and jeopardizes those channels for future intelligence collection.

North Korea said the launch of the satellite Kwangmyongsong-4, named after late leader Kim Jong Il, was a "complete success" and it was making a polar orbit of Earth every 94 minutes. The launch order was given by his son, leader Kim Jong Un, who is believed to be 33 years old.

"If it can communicate with the Kwangmyongsong-4, North Korea will learn about operating a satellite in space,"

"Even if not, it gained experience with launching and learned more about the reliability of its rocket systems."

North Korea had notified United Nations agencies that it planned to launch a rocket carrying an Earth observation satellite, triggering opposition from governments that see it as a long-range missile test.

The U.N. Security Council condemned the launch in an emergency meeting on Sunday, and vowed to take "significant measures" in response to Pyongyang's violations of U.N. resolutions, Venezuela's U.N. ambassador said.

an epochal event in developing the country's science, technology, economy and defense capability by legitimately exercising the right to use space for independent and peaceful purposes".

NEW MISSILE DEFENSE?South Korea and the United States said that if the advanced missile defense system called Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) was deployed to South Korea, it would be focused only on North Korea.

Within the standard cosmological framework, however, the new satellite data underscored the existence of puzzling anomalies that may yet lead theorists back to the drawing board. The universe appears to be slightly lumpier, with bigger and more hot and cold spots in the northern half of the sky as seen from Earth than toward the south, for example. And there is a large, unexplained cool spot in the northern hemisphere.

“Our ultimate goal would be to construct a new model that predicts the anomalies and links them together. But these are early days; so far, we don’t know whether this is possible and what type of new physics might be needed. And that’s exciting.”

The microwaves detected by the Planck date from 370,000 years after the Big Bang, which is as far back as optical or radio telescopes will ever be able to see, cosmologists say. But the patterns within them date from less than a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang, when the universe is said to have undergone a violent burst of expansion known as inflation that set cosmic history on the course it has followed ever since. Those patterns are Planck’s prize.

Analyzing the relative sizes and frequencies of spots and ripples over the years has allowed astronomers to describe the birth of the universe to a precision that would make the philosophers weep. The new data have allowed astronomers to tweak their model a bit. It now seems the universe is 13.8 billion years old, instead of 13.7 billion, and consists by mass of 4.9 percent ordinary matter like atoms, 27 percent dark matter and 68 percent dark energy.

The biggest surprise here, astronomers said, is that the universe is expanding slightly more slowly than previous measurements had indicated. The Hubble constant, which characterizes the expansion rate, is 67 kilometers per second per megaparsec — in the units astronomers use — according to Planck. Recent ground-based measurements combined with the WMAP data gave a value of 69, offering enough of a discrepancy to make cosmologists rerun their computer simulations of cosmic history.

a Planck team member from the University of California, Berkeley, said it represents a mismatch between measurements made of the beginning of time and those made more recently, and that it could mean that dark energy, which is speeding up the expansion of the universe, is more complicated than cosmologists thought. He termed the possibility “pretty radical,” adding, “That would be pretty exciting.”

The data also offered striking support for the notion of inflation, which has been the backbone of Big Bang theorizing for 30 years. Under the influence of a mysterious force field during the first trillionth of a fraction of a second, what would become the observable universe ballooned by 100 trillion trillion times in size from a subatomic pinprick to a grapefruit in less than a violent eye-blink, so the story first enunciated by Alan Guth of M.I.T. goes.

Submicroscopic quantum fluctuations in this force field are what would produce the hot spots in the cosmic microwaves, which in turn would grow into galaxies. According to Planck’s measurements, those fluctuations so far fit the predictions of the simplest model of inflation, invented by Andrei Linde of Stanford, to a T. Dr. Tegmark of M.I.T. said, “We’re homing in on the simplest model.”

Cosmologists still do not know what might have caused inflation, but the recent discovery of the Higgs boson has provided evidence that the kinds of fields that can provoke such behavior really exist.

another clue to the nature of inflation could come from the anomalies in the microwave data — the lopsided bumpiness, for example — that tend to happen on the largest scales in the universe. By the logic of quantum cosmology, they were the first patterns to be laid down on the emerging cosmos; that is to say, when inflation was just starting.

“Bulldozers, heavy equipment, sledgehammers, possibly explosives turned those stone walls into this field of grey-white dust. They destroyed it completely,” he said.

chief executive of Allsource Analysis, who pinpointed the destruction between August and September 2014.

Stephen Wood,

Isis, which controls large parts of Iraq and Syria, has killed thousands of civilians in the past two years. During that time, its fighters destroyed whatever they considered contrary to their interpretation of Islam.

“I would imagine that many people are feeling like: ‘What were the last 10 years for if these guys can go in and destroy everything?’” said US army reserve Col Mary Prophit, who was deployed there in 2004 and 2009.

St Elijah’s was built in 590. In 1743, up to 150 monks who refused to convert to Islam were massacred by a Persian general. In 2003 St Elijah’s shudderedas a wall was smashed by a tank turret blown off in battle. Iraqi troops had already moved in, dumping garbage in the cistern.

Why we treat each other like this is beyond me,” he said. “Elijah the prophet must be weeping.”

Night lights pose their own challenges. One is accounting for the phases of the moon, which constantly varies the amount of light shining on earth. Then there's atmospheric effects due to aerosols, water vapour and ozone, and extraneous light sources such as solar illumination. But the latest sensors on satellites have been yielding richer spatial details like detecting lit roads and dimly lit sources. Scientists have been developing new software and algorithms to make night lights imagery clearer, more accurate and readily available.

During a recent appearance on “The Alex Jones Show,” a far-right radio program that peddles conspiracy theories, Mr. Stone said that ballots in Nevada should be seized by federal marshals, claiming that “they are already corrupted” and that Mr. Trump should consider nationalizing the state police. Mr. Stone, a felon whose sentence was commuted this year by the president, has ties to the Proud Boys.

The Republican National Committee has been allowed to participate in poll watching only because the courts in 2018 lifted a consent decree that had barred them from doing so for three and a half decades, after the party undertook an operation to intimidate New Jersey voters in 1981.

But while the official poll watchers are being schooled in legal procedures, Mr. Trump and some of his closest surrogates, including his longtime confidant Roger J. Stone Jr. and his son Donald Trump Jr., have recently floated conspiracy theories that also sound like calls to arms.

The poll watchers will challenge ballots and the eligibility of voters, but they are not supposed to interact with voters themselves.

“The radical left are laying the groundwork to steal this election from my father, President Donald Trump,” the younger Mr. Trump says on the video, posted on Twitter.

The assessment said that “open-air, publicly accessible parts of physical election infrastructure,” including polling places and voter registration events, could be “flash points for potential violence.”

Both parties recruit volunteer poll watchers, a process Republicans previously led at the state level amid the consent decree. In a new video tailored for Pennsylvania, prospective poll watchers are told they must wear identification and remain outside an enclosed space designated for voting.

he seven locations in Philadelphia were satellite election offices where voters could request, fill out and submit absentee ballots; they were not official polling locations and therefore not open to poll watchers.

Now, however, he effectively controls the party.

Whether Trump means the things he says or not, he’s convincing his most ardent supporters that the only way he loses is if the Democrats cheat.”He added, “That’s profoundly destabilizing and scary.”

At an emergency meeting Sunday, members of the U.N. Security Council "strongly condemned" the launch and reaffirmed that "a clear threat to international peace and security continues to exist

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the launch is "deeply deplorable" and in violation of Security Council resolutions "despite the united plea of the international community against such an act.

With tensions high, South Korea fired warning shots Monday morning after a North Korean patrol boat crossed the maritime border between North and South Korea, South Korea's Defense Ministry said. The North Korean boat withdrew about 20 minutes later, the ministry said.Such incidents are not uncommon, CNN's Paula Hancocks reports. But the timing of this one -- so soon after North Korea's rocket launch -- will likely bring additional scrutiny to the incident, she said.

The Kwangmyongsong carrier rocket blasted off from the Sohae launch facility at 9 a.m Sunday (7:30 p.m. ET Saturday), entering orbit nine minutes and 46 seconds after liftoff, North Korea's state news agency KCNA reported.

“It is really the doubling of the speed of glacier melt that is most concerning.” The new understanding of past melting means forecasts can now be made with far more confidence but the outlook is dire, he said. “It looks devastating and there is no doubt in my mind, not a single grain of doubt, that [the impact of the climate crisis] is what we are seeing.

Temperature data from the region also shows an average rise of 1C from 2000-16 compared with 1975-2000. Calculations show this rise is consistent with the amount of ice being lost. “Even glaciers in the highest mountains of the world are responding to global air temperature increases driven by the combustion of fossil fuels,”

at least a third of the ice in the Hindu Kush-Himalaya ranges was already doomed to melt by the end of the century, even if drastic action to cut emissions was taken immediately. Without action, two-thirds would go.

The scientists used this data to track the changes in 650 Himalayan glaciers. On average, the glacier surfaces sank by 22cm (8.6 inches) a year from 1975 to 2000. But the melting has accelerated, with an average loss of 43cm a year from 2000 to 2016.

“Increasingly uncertain and irregular water supplies will impact the 1 billion people living downstream from the Himalaya mountains in south Asia.”

“For the wellbeing of the people there, our results are of course the worst possible. But it is what it is, and now we have to prepare for that scenario. We have to worry a lot, because so many people are affected

“To stop the temperature rises, we have to cool the planet,” he said. “We have to not only slow down greenhouse gas emissions, we have to reverse them. That is the challenge for the next 20 years.”

— Russia and China “possess precision-strike capabilities, integrated air defenses, cruise and ballistic missiles, advanced cyberwarfare and anti-satellite capabilities.”

— “If the United States had to fight Russia in a Baltic contingency or China in a war over Taiwan . . . Americans could face a decisive military defeat.”

“Air superiority, which the United States has taken for granted since World War II, is no longer assured. And, without control of the skies, U.S. ships and soldiers would be [highly] vulnerable.”

The slippage in our military power has at least three causes, only two of which we can influence.

The first is other countries’ decisions to beef up their militaries; we can’t change that. The second is the shifting nature of warfare, with the rise of cyberwarfare and other new technologies (communications satellites and the like). We can do better here by addressing the third cause: unwise cuts in defense spending.

The time has long passed since the Pentagon was the driving force behind the federal budget. In 1960, defense was 52 percent of federal outlays and 9 percent of overall economic activity (gross domestic product). In 2017, the comparable figures were 15 percent of outlays and 3 percent of GDP.

In truth, military spending is in a quiet competition with the American welfare state

he Pentagon is losing badly. Welfare programs have vast constituencies of voters. Defense has fewer. Politicians straddle the conflict. They vote for welfare while insisting that the U.S. military is still the world’s most powerful. This rationalizes inaction on defense but conveniently forgets that the military’s margin of superiority has dramatically shriveled

It’s hard to miss the parallels with the period before World War II, when England, France and the United States allowed Adolf Hitler to rearm Germany, altering the global balance of power. The delusional complacency recalls John F. Kennedy’s book, “Why England Slept.”

This is not a call for war. It is a call for stopping many self-inflicted wounds. We need to stop underfunding the military, especially on research and cyberwarfare, even if that means less welfare. We need to keep our commitments — Trump’s abrupt withdrawal from Syria devalues our word. And we need to repair our alliances.

War is changing, and we need to change with it. Otherwise, we may drift into a large war impossible to win

The analysis of satellite data has revealed the astounding loss of ice in just a few months of abnormally high temperatures around the northern pole. Last year was the hottest on record for the Arctic, with the annual minimum extent of sea ice in the region its second-lowest on record.

More recent research has found that Antarctica, the largest ice sheet on Earth, is also losing mass at a galloping rate, although the latest University of California and Nasa works reveals a nuanced picture.

“It is easy for us to be distracted by fluctuations, so the highly reliable long data sets from Grace and other sensors are important in clarifying what is really going on, showing us both the big signal and the wiggles that help us understand the processes that contribute to the big signal.”

NO2 levels also dropped in South Korea, which has long struggled with high emissions from its large fleet of coal-fired power plants but also from nearby industrial facilities in China.The country has avoided putting entire regions under lockdown but is meticulously tracing and isolating suspected coronavirus cases.

The World Health Organization describes NO2 as “a toxic gas which causes significant inflammation of the airways” at concentrations above 200 micrograms per cubic metre. Pollution particles may also be a vector for pathogens, as well as exacerbating existing health problems. The WHO is now investigating whether airborne pollution particles may be a vector that spreads Covid-19 and makes it more virulent.

Monks, the former chair of the UK government’s science advisory committee on air quality, said that a reduction in air pollution could bring some health benefits, though they were unlikely to offset loss of life from the disease.

The source is not yet clear. One possibility is a slowdown of activity in Italy’s industrial heartland. Another factor is likely to be a reduction in road traffic, which accounts for the biggest share of nitrogen dioxide emissions in Europe.

Although the UK is more than a week behind Italy in terms of the spread of the disease and the government’s response, roadside monitors already show significantly reduced levels of pollution at hotspots such as Marylebone in London.

“What I think will come out of this is a realisation - because we are forced to - that there is considerable potential to change working practices and lifestyles. This challenges us in the future to think, do we really need to drive our car there or burn fuel for that,” said Monk.

It is not unreasonable to expect that a Musk-owned and controlled Twitter will, in the name of free speech, allow disinformation and misinformation to be tweeted ad infinitum so long as it discredits his political opponents and celebrates and enriches himself and his allies.

Mr. Musk is correct that “free speech” must be honored and protected. But is it not time that we, as a people and a nation, engage in a wide-ranging, inclusive public debate on when and how free speech creates “a clear and present danger” — as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote a century ago — and whether we need government to find a way, through law or regulation or persuasion, to prevent this from happening?

Elon Musk is a product of his — and our — times. Rather than debate or deride his influence, we must recognize that he is not the self-made genius businessman he plays in the media. Instead, his success was prompted and paid for by taxpayer money and abetted by government officials who have allowed him and other billionaire businessmen to exercise more and more control over our economy and our politics.

Other countries have different goals. The South Korean government announced a plan to install 1 gigabit per second of symmetric fiber data access in every home by 2012. Hong Kong, Japan and the Netherlands are heading in the same direction. Australia plans to get 93 percent of homes and businesses connected to fiber. In the U.K., a 300 Mbps fiber-to-the-home service will be offered on a wholesale basis.

The first step is to decide what the goal of telecommunications policy should be. Network access providers -- and the FCC -- are stuck on the idea that not all Americans need high-speed Internet access. The FCC’s National Broadband Plan of March 2010 suggested that the minimum appropriate speed for every American household by 2020 should be 4 megabits per second for downloads and 1 Mbps for uploads. These speeds are enough, the FCC said, to reliably send and receive e-mail, download Web pages and use simple video conferencing.

In a sense, the FCC adopted the cable companies’ business plan as the country’s goal. The commission’s embrace of asymmetric access -- slower upload than download speeds -- also serves the carriers’ interests: Only symmetric connections would allow every American to do business from home rather than use the Internet simply for high-priced entertainmen

Think of it this way: With a dialup connection, backing up 5 gigabytes of data (now the standard free plan offered by many storage companies) would take 20 days. Over a standard (3G) wireless connection, it would take two and a half days. Over a 4G connection it would be more than seven hours, and over a cable DOCSIS 3.0 connection, an hour and a half. With a gigabit fiber-to-the-home connection, it can be done in less than a minute.

If the U.S. had a fully fiber-based network, Hollywood blockbusters could be downloaded in 12 seconds, video conferencing would become routine, and every household could see 3D and Super HD images. Americans could be connected instantly to their co-workers, their families, their teachers and their health-care monitors. To make this happen, though, the U.S. needs to move to a utility model, based on the assumption that all Americans require fiber-optic Internet access at reasonable prices. How much would it cost to bring fiber to the homes of all Americans? Corning Inc. (GLW), the American glass manufacturer, and others have estimated that it would take between $50 billion and $90 billion.

The Internet has taken the place of the telephone as the world’s basic, general-purpose, two-way communication medium. All Americans need high-speed access, just as they need clean water, clean air and electricity. But they have allowed a naive belief in the power and beneficence of the free market to cloud their vision. As things stand, the U.S. has the worst of both worlds: no competition and no regulation.

The last several months have been particularly contentious on the Korean Peninsula, after North Korea claimed to have tested its first hydrogen bomb and fired a satellite into orbit.

he Russian military has denied reports that it had lost helicopters at the base as a result of an IS attack.

"Burning of four Russian attack helicopters and 20 trucks loaded with missiles inside T4 airport in eastern Homs [province] as a result of a nearby fire," it said in an urgent report, leading to speculation that it could have been accidental.

'Not an accident'

"What the imagery tells us is that first of all this was not an accidental explosion, as some of the rumours kept saying,

"It shows very clearly that there are several different sources of explosions across the airport, and it shows that the Russians took a quite a bad hit.

"An entire combat helicopter unit was wiped out - four helicopters in total

Mr Tack described Amaq's account as "very accurate", and suggested the helicopters and depot were destroyed by IS attacks.

In this case, we haven't seen any of those materials come out yet. One possibility is that by making the statement they were intending to claim it while not necessarily phrasing it that way."

The province of Homs stretches out into the Syrian desert towards Raqqa, the capital of the "caliphate" proclaimed by IS in 2014, and Deir al-Zour, on the way to the border with Iraq, he notes.

A Kurdish-Arab alliance has announced the launch of a military campaign against IS north of Raqaa.

The assault will be supported by air strikes from the US-led coalition bombing IS in Iraq and Syria, it added.

"The regime and the Russians are facing notable challenges in trying to disconnect those two.