Group items tagged

Joint Chiefs say invasion 'only way' to totally disarm N Korea

A Pentagon assessment has declared the only way to completely destroy all parts of North Korea's nuclear weapons programme is through a ground invasion.

The risks involved included a potential nuclear counter-attack by North Korea while US forces attempted to disable its "deeply buried, underground facilities"

At least 10 people have been killed in an explosion between two underground stations in St Petersburg.

President Vladimir Putin said all causes, including terrorism, were being investigated.

two explosions, one at each of the two stations.

North Korea test-launched what it called a newly developed tactical guided missile ​on Thursday, violating international sanctions.

It was the country’s first ballistic missile test in a year and its first provocation to the Biden administration, prompting the​ American president to warn that there will be “responses” if North Korea continues to escalate tensions on the Korean Peninsula.

North Korea​ has rapidly expanded its nuclear program and modernized its missile fleet under Kim Jong-un, the country’s young leader. The expansion of the arsenal is a growing threat to the United States and allies​ in the region. ​Here’s what’s in it.

It seemed like an easy payday. The Japanese government was conducting a study of potential locations for storing spent nuclear fuel — a review of old geological maps and research papers about local plate tectonics. It put out a call for localities to volunteer. Participating would commit them to nothing.

There are few places on earth eager to host a nuclear waste dump. Only Finland and Sweden have settled on permanent repositories for the dregs of their atomic energy programs. But the furor in Suttsu speaks to the deep anxiety that remains in Japan 10 years after an immense earthquake and tsunami caused the meltdown of three nuclear reactors in Fukushima Prefecture, the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl.

Even before the Fukushima calamity, which led to three explosions and a release of radiation that forced the evacuation of 150,000 people, ambivalence toward nuclear energy was deeply ingrained in Japan.

A scathing report by the US Capitol Police watchdog obtained by CNN reveals that there were even more law enforcement failures prior to January 6 than previously known, including new details about expired ammunition, ineffective shields and a previously unreported warning more than two weeks ahead of the insurrection about a map of the Capitol's underground tunnels that was posted on a pro-Donald Trump website.

Further, the report points out Capitol Police leadership knew as far back as July 2020 the department needed to make significant changes, but inexplicably failed to do so.

On that day, "the Department of Homeland Security notified the Department of a blog referencing tunnels on U.S. Capitol grounds used by Members of Congress and research of the website identified four 'threads/blog topics containing comments of concern,'" the summary states.

Shortly after rampaging Trump supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, a fan of the president posted a message on the pro-Donald Trump website TheDonald.win. Inspired by the mob’s attempt to stop lawmakers from confirming President-elect Joe Biden’s electoral win, user CONN_WYNN said in an all-caps message, replete with an expletive, that it was “TIME TO LEAVE THE KEYBOARD” and “FIGHT FOR MY...COUNTRY.”

Before the Capitol attack, such a post may not have elicited a follow-up visit. But in the aftermath of the riot, which left five people dead, federal law enforcement agencies have intensified their scrutiny of extremist chatter online, activity that officials warn could be early warning signals of planned attacks around Biden’s inauguration in Washington on Jan. 20.“You don’t want to be the ones to have FBI agents knocking on your door at 6 a.m.,” Director Christopher Wray said on Thursday during a televised briefing with Vice President Mike Pence. “Anybody who plots or attempts violence in the coming week should count on a visit.”

Extremists seeking a politically motivated civil war and those seeking a race war “may exploit the aftermath of the Capitol breach by conducting attacks to destabilize and force a climactic conflict in the United States,” officials wrote in a joint bulletin issued on Wednesday by the National Counterterrorism Center and the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security and seen by Reuters

After his deftly persuasive opening argument that cutting back on machine-made cooling is the most pressing environmental task of our generation, Wilson walks us through the science of chemical coolants in detail, both the chemistry and physics of these miracle molecules, and the horrifying discovery of the havoc they wreak within the thin protective layers of the Earth’s atmosphere.

is an interesting fable about how our best efforts toward environmental regulation can bring out the worst in us.

the Montreal Protocol effectively ended the production of CFCs in 1987, forcing the temperature-control industry to switch to less powerful fluorocarbon compounds. Since then, while the production of CFCs has been banned, their use has not been. This has created a vigorous underground market in previously hoarded Freon that caters to small-time farmers and mechanics

“These companies were not bringing the investment that was expected, particularly to infrastructure,” Badstuber says. “To me, this is all leading up to a realisation that, actually, you need a large amount of capital investment in the system. That’s what TfL got, and that’s what TfL needed – and to me that’s what any large system needs.

Crucially, central government also committed to new funding.

Nearly two-thirds of all trips in London are now made on foot, bicycle or public transit. The goal is to increase that “modal share” to 80% by 2040

But their rapid expulsions from the U.S. are part of the Trump administration's unprecedented efforts to use the COVID-19 pandemic as justification to sidestep legal protections for minors who arrive at America's borders without documents.

By designating them public health threats who could spread the virus, the Trump administration has expelled at least 8,800 unaccompanied migrant children, some as young as 10, without a court hearing or asylum screening, circumventing safeguards Congress created to shield them from trafficking, exploitation and persecution.

For the first time, Joe Biden's campaign on Sunday said the former vice president would order a review of the policy if elected.

Hallowell “was a power in Harvard athletics,” according to one of the earliest histories of football, who enlisted in the Union Army in 1861 just after graduating. But what you can be sure of is that he was a hell of a rower and a swimmer. During the Battle of Ball’s Bluff, the 22-year-old swam across the Potomac River three times through bullet-pocked water to rescue trapped and wounded comrades.

Pen Hallowell had something more than physical courage, and so did his elder brother, Edward “Ned” Needles Hallowell. “The Fighting Quakers,” as they were nicknamed, were sons of a Philadelphia abolitionist whose home was a stop on the Underground Railroad. As boys they spirited fugitive slaves to safety in the family carriage. As men they volunteered as officers with the legendary all-black 54th and 55th Massachusetts regiments.

While those men were towing a locomotive by ropes, Pen Hallowell was beating in the doors of Congress trying to get them paid equal to white soldiers. The 54th and 55th were offered just $7 a month, while white soldiers got $13. Largely thanks to the brothers’ efforts, Congress finally approved equal pay for black soldiers in 1864.

“It’s part of the Canadian national narrative of positioning ourselves in juxtaposition to the United States. That’s how we get this ‘exceptional Canada’ of being welcoming and warm – and not paying attention to our own parallel history of racial exclusion and the dispossession.”

n addition to being factually inaccurate, this popular view speaks to a “refusal to take responsibility” for two centuries of slavery within the country’s history, says Henry.

For generations, Canadian history has concentrated on the country’s position as the last stop on the Underground Railroad – a place which meant freedom for those who escaped slavery in the US. But the same narrative omits the experiences of thousands of enslaved people within Canada, says Henry.

Neo-Nazi groups and other extremists call it Day X — a mythical moment when Germany’s social order collapses, requiring committed far-right extremists, in their telling, to save themselves and rescue the nation.

Today Day X preppers are drawing serious people with serious skills and ambition. Increasingly, the German authorities consider the scenario a pretext for domestic terrorism by far-right plotters or even for a takeover of the government.

“I fear we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg,” said Dirk Friedriszik, a lawmaker in the northeastern state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, where Nordkreuz was founded. “It isn’t just the KSK. The real worry is: These cells are everywhere. In the army, in the police, in reservist units.”

When people look back on this surreal election year, I suspect they will see plague as the core actor. If you take a normal, functioning society and then force it to go underground for months, freezing it in place, forcing its members into long and unnatural mutual isolation, suspending the usual ways in which people make a living, ratcheting up financial insecurity … well, that’s a recipe for serious social upheaval.

it strikes me that this medical achievement doesn’t resolve the psychological trauma, the suspension of normality, the anxiety of an invisible enemy. It merely diverts it away from the illness itself toward broader social and political grievances. I don’t think you can fully explain the sudden increase in intensity of the social justice cult, for example, and its explosion in our streets and in our media in the last couple of months, without taking account of this. I don’t just mean the pent-up plague-driven frustration of young people, who, often forced to live at home with their parents, took the opportunity to finally get out, get together and do something, after the horrifying murder of George Floyd. I mean the more general frustration and despair of a generation with a gloomy and unknowable economic future—suddenly finding shape and voice in a simple, clarion call to reshape all of society. 

I wrote about the Flagellants in the essay—a new group of fanatical, radical penitents who challenged and mocked the church authorities during the Black Death, whipping themselves bloody in large crowds across Germany, calling everyone to account for their sins. It’s the same dynamic now: a movement to use a plague to cleanse ourselves of the past and indict the entire community for its iniquity

Secret Service agents rushed President Donald Trump to a White House bunker on Friday night as hundreds of protesters gathered outside the executive mansion, some of them throwing rocks and tugging at police barricades.

Trump spent nearly an hour in the bunker, which was designed for use in emergencies like terrorist attacks

The abrupt decision by the agents underscored the rattled mood inside the White House, where the chants from protesters in Lafayette Park could be heard all weekend and Secret Service agents and law enforcement officers struggled to contain the crowds.

At the end of last year, the president was impeached for that abuse of power.

As the 2020 election grew closer, the president increasingly ignored the policies developed by his own government and instead pursued transactions guided by self-interest and instinct.

The deal Mr. Trump looked to close on the phone was the culmination of a scheme cooked up by Russian agents and Trump loyalists. The result: Too many in Washington and Kyiv were left trying to figure out what the United States policy was.

Carbon capture has been a popular idea within the coal, oil and gas sectors for years now. The technology is not out of reach. Plenty of pilot projects have been launched. But so far no one has been able to make it a paying proposition. A pioneering $7.5 billion carbon capture power plant in Mississippi was razed with dynamite on Oct. 9 after its owners wrote it off as an 11-year-old economic failure. North Dakota hopes to break through that last barrier, for both coal and oil.

“True wealth is created by a partnership between man and earth,” said Bohrer. If Project Tundra can show that stuffing carbon dioxide back into the earth is economically feasible, he said, “it’s opening the door for a CO2 economy. It gives the lignite industry a way to survive.”

His group has launched a promotional campaign called Drive Electric North Dakota, which sponsors promotional events, conducts public attitude surveys and lobbies for EVs in the state capital. It has been an uphill struggle so far, but the idea is that the electricity needed to charge cars and trucks can’t all come from unreliable wind or solar, and this will give coal a way to stay in the mix and help keep the grid in fine tune. “The more demand we have in North Dakota,” Bohrer said, “the easier it is to soak up our domestically produced electricity.”

as the Presidential campaign exposed increasingly toxic divisions in America, Antonio García Martínez, a forty-year-old former Facebook product manager living in San Francisco, bought five wooded acres on an island in the Pacific Northwest and brought in generators, solar panels, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. “When society loses a healthy founding myth, it descends into chaos,” he told me. The author of “Chaos Monkeys,” an acerbic Silicon Valley memoir, García Martínez wanted a refuge that would be far from cities but not entirely isolated. “All these dudes think that one guy alone could somehow withstand the roving mob,” he said. “No, you’re going to need to form a local militia. You just need so many things to actually ride out the apocalypse.” Once he started telling peers in the Bay Area about his “little island project,” they came “out of the woodwork” to describe their own preparations, he said. “I think people who are particularly attuned to the levers by which society actually works understand that we are skating on really thin cultural ice right now.”

In private Facebook groups, wealthy survivalists swap tips on gas masks, bunkers, and locations safe from the effects of climate change. One member, the head of an investment firm, told me, “I keep a helicopter gassed up all the time, and I have an underground bunker with an air-filtration system.” He said that his preparations probably put him at the “extreme” end among his peers. But he added, “A lot of my friends do the guns and the motorcycles and the gold coins. That’s not too rare anymore.”

Tim Chang, a forty-four-year-old managing director at Mayfield Fund, a venture-capital firm, told me, “There’s a bunch of us in the Valley. We meet up and have these financial-hacking dinners and talk about backup plans people are doing. It runs the gamut from a lot of people stocking up on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, to figuring out how to get second passports if they need it, to having vacation homes in other countries that could be escape havens.” He said, “I’ll be candid: I’m stockpiling now on real estate to generate passive income but also to have havens to go to.” He and his wife, who is in technology, keep a set of bags packed for themselves and their four-year-old daughter. He told me, “I kind of have this terror scenario: ‘Oh, my God, if there is a civil war or a giant earthquake that cleaves off part of California, we want to be ready.’ ”

They worry that it may fuel separatist yearnings in the far-western region. But in 2014, as the authorities stepped up their campaign to crush terrorism there, the government still tolerated displays of pride in Uyghur culture

after the death of Mao Zedong, Uyghur culture was allowed to flourish, as long as it avoided any hint of support for a separate Uyghur state. Uyghur writers produced poems and songs filled with universally familiar themes such as love and loss, but also conveying pride in their identity

But it fell victim to a security clampdown, launched in response to sporadic attacks by Uyghurs on Chinese belonging to the ethnic-Han majority.

“Let’s dash into renewable energy at lightning speed,” said European Green Deal Commissioner, Frans Timmermans announcing Europe’s plans to reduce its dependency on Russian fossil fuels after the country’s invasion of Ukraine. “Putin’s war in Ukraine demonstrates the urgency of accelerating our clean energy transition.”

The proposal earlier this week aims to make Europe independent from Russian fossil fuels well before 2030, starting with gas, and to reduce EU demand for Russian gas by two thirds before the end of the year.

“Geopolitics and climate transitions are one and the same today,” said Olivia Lazard, a visiting scholar at Carnegie Europe.

Chinese authorities have been so proactive about regulating some uses of AI, especially those that allow the general public to create their own content, that compliance has become a major hurdle for the country’s companies.

As the use of AI explodes, regulators in Washington and around the world are trying to figure out how to manage potential threats to privacy, employment, intellectual property and even human existence itself.

But there are also concerns that putting any guardrails on the technology in the United States would surrender leadership in the sector to Chinese companies.