In a summer of suffering, America's military death toll in Afghanistan is rising, with back-to-back record months for U.S. losses in the grinding conflict. All signs point to more bloodshed in the months ahead, straining the already shaky international support for the war.
Six more Americans were reported killed in fighting in the south — three Thursday and three Friday — pushing the U.S. death toll for July to a record 66 and surpassing June as the deadliest month for U.S. forces in the nearly nine-year war.
U.S. officials confirmed the latest American deaths Friday but gave no further details. Five of the latest reported deaths were a result of hidden bombs — the insurgents' weapon of choice — and the sixth to an armed attack, NATO said in statements.
U.S. commanders say American casualties are mounting because more troops are fighting — and the Taliban are stiffening resistance as NATO and Afghan forces challenge the insurgents in areas they can't afford to give up without a fight. [ YAHOO NEWS ]
A former CIA director says military action against Iran now seems more likely because no matter what the U.S. does diplomatically, Tehran keeps pushing ahead with its suspected nuclear program.
Michael Hayden, a CIA chief under President George W. Bush, says that during his tenure a strike was "way down the list" of options. But he tells CNN's "State of the Union" that such action now "seems inexorable."
He predicts Iran will build its program to the point where it's just below having an actual weapon. Hayden says that would be as destabilizing to the region as the real thing.
U.S. officials have said military action remains an option if sanctions fail to deter Iran.
Iran says its nuclear work is for peaceful purposes such as power generation. [ YAHOO NEWS ]
The risk of weapons of mass destruction falling into the hands of terrorists is the gravest threat facing the United States, a Pentagon official has said.
Asked about the existential threats against Washington, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy said there were many, but warned that "the thing that keeps me awake at night is a nexus between terrorism and massive destruction."
She told a Washington symposium on US security that the United States needs to better prepare for "the possibility that a terrorist organization could either acquire a ready-made weapon or fabricate something improvised that would have a catastrophic effect for us." [ YAHOO NEWS ]
A North Korean envoy said on Thursday that war could erupt at any time on the divided Korean peninsula because of tension with Seoul over the sinking of a South Korean warship in March.
"The present situation of the Korean peninsula is so grave that a war may break out any moment," Ri Jang Gon, North Korea's deputy ambassador in Geneva, told the United Nations-sponsored Conference on Disarmament.
North Korea's troops were on "full alert and readiness to promptly react to any retaliation," including the scenario of all-out war, he told the forum.
The U.S. and South Korea are planning two major military exercises off the Korean Peninsula in a display of force intended to deter North Korean acts like the March torpedo attack on a South Korean warship.
President Barack Obama ordered his military commanders to coordinate closely with their South Korea counterparts "to ensure readiness and to deter future aggression" by North Korea, the White House said.
Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman told reporters on Monday the joint exercises will be conducted in the "near future." He said the operations will test the nations' ability to defeat submarines and to monitor and prevent illicit activities.
British scientists experimented with ways to use the planned release of human and animal diseases against the enemy during the Second World War .
Cholera, dysentery, typhoid and foot-and-mouth disease were all trialled as potential weapons of war , according to previously secret files released to the National Archives. The list revealed in the new documents demonstrates the breadth of the British research into biological weapons during the conflict, which was already known to have included experiments with anthrax. Experts recognised that "biological warfare" was against the 1925 Geneva protocol, but still carried out a number of tests, the majority of them at Porton Down, near Salisbury, and Pirbright in Surrey.
Richard Clarke claims that America's lack of preparation for the annexing of its computer system by terrorists could lead to an "electronic Pearl Harbor".
In his warning, Mr Clarke paints a doomsday scenario in which the problems start with the collapse of one of Pentagon's computer networks. Soon internet service providers are in meltdown. Reports come in of large refinery fires and explosions in Philadelphia and Houston. Chemical plants malfunction, releasing lethal clouds of chlorine. Air traffic controllers report several mid-air collisions, while subway trains crash in New York, Washington and Los Angeles. More than 150 cities are suddenly blacked out. Tens of thousands of Americans die in an attack comparable to a nuclear bomb in its devastation.
Yet it would take no more than 15 minutes and involve not a single terrorist or soldier setting foot in the United States. The scenario is contained the pages of his book, Cyber War: The Next National Security Threat, written with Robert Knake.
After a debate within the administration lasting several months, it has been decided to declassify the numbers.
The move would be seen as an attempt to encourage openness from other states by demonstrating America's progress in reducing its Cold War nuclear arsenal . The announcement could be made as early as Monday when Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State, speaks at the UN meeting to review the progress of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, according to The Washington Post.
Arms-control groups estimate the US nuclear arsenal contains 9,000 weapons, roughly 5,000 of them active and the rest in line for disassembly.
If Iran decides to go for nuclear weapons, the US may not be able to permanently stop this from happening unless it is willing to occupy the country.
This is the candid conclusion of one army general testifying in front of the Senate but one that seems to have gone mostly unnoticed amid a flurry of statements on Iran over the past few days in Washington.
Gen James Cartwright, one of America's top uniformed officers, slowly edged towards that conclusion during a Senate testimony last week, underscoring the difficult choices facing the Obama administration as it weighs what do about Iran. [ BBC NEWS ]
Tension between the US and Iran heightened dramatically today with the disclosure that Barack Obama is deploying a missile shield to protect American allies in the Gulf from attack by Tehran.
The US is dispatching Patriot defensive missiles to four countries – Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Kuwait – and keeping two ships in the Gulf capable of shooting down Iranian missiles. Washington is also helping Saudi Arabia develop a force to protect its oil installations.
American officials said the move is aimed at deterring an attack by Iran and reassuring Gulf states fearful that Tehran might react to sanctions by striking at US allies in the region. Washington is also seeking to discourage Israel from a strike against Iran by demonstrating that the US is prepared to contain any threat.
Britain's terrorist threat level was raised tonight from “substantial” to “severe” - meaning that counter-terrorism agencies believe an attack is “highly likely”.
The measure was approved at a meeting of the Government’s Cobra emergency committee and announced by Alan Johnson, the Home Secretary.
The Times understands that the decision to raise the threat level is connected to the conference on Afghanistan taking place at Lancaster House, London, next Thursday.
Sources said there had been intensive discussions throughout the day relating to intelligence suggesting a possible attempted “spectacular” by an al-Qaeda affiliated group.
Some experts call the genocide in Darfur the world's first conflict caused by climate change. After all, the crisis was sparked, at least in part, by a decline in rainfall over the past 30 years just as the region's population doubled, pitting wandering pastoralists against settled farmers for newly scarce resources, such as arable land.
"Is Darfur the first climate change war?" asked economist and Scientific American columnist Jeffrey Sachs at an event at Columbia University in 2007. "Don't doubt for a moment that places like Darfur are ecological disasters first and political disasters second."
But new research would suggest the answer to Sachs's question is no, at least regarding the novelty of Darfur. Agricultural economist Marshall Burke of the University of California, Berkeley and his colleagues have analyzed the history of conflict in sub-Saharan Africa between 1980 and 2002 in a new paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The next world war could take place in cyberspace, the UN telecommunications agency chief warned Tuesday as experts called for action to stamp out cyber attacks.
"The next world war could happen in cyberspace and that would be a catastrophe. We have to make sure that all countries understand that in that war, there is no such thing as a superpower," Hamadoun Toure said.
"Loss of vital networks would quickly cripple any nation, and none is immune to cyberattack," added the secretary-general of the International Telecommunications Union during the ITU's Telecom World 2009 fair in Geneva. (Breitbart)
Valery Yarynich glances nervously over his shoulder. Clad in a brown leather jacket, the 72-year-old former Soviet colonel is hunkered in the back of the dimly lit Iron Gate restaurant in Washington, DC. It's March 2009 - the Berlin Wall came down two decades ago - but the lean and fit Yarynich is as jumpy as an informant dodging the KGB. He begins to whisper, quietly but firmly.
"The Perimeter system is very, very nice," he says. "We remove unique responsibility from high politicians and the military." He looks around again.
Yarynich is talking about Russia's doomsday machine . That's right, an actual doomsday device - a real, functioning version of the ultimate weapon, always presumed to exist only as a fantasy of apocalypse-obsessed science fiction writers and paranoid über-hawks. The thing that historian Lewis Mumford called "the central symbol of this scientifically organized nightmare of mass extermination ." Turns out Yarynich, a 30-year veteran of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces and Soviet General Staff, helped build one.
Ephraim Sneh, Israel's deputy defence minister until 2007, said a nuclear-armed Iran was an unacceptable threat to Israel. No Israeli government could put its faith in President Barack Obama's efforts to bring Tehran to the negotiating table over its nuclear program, he said.
"The Israeli government is the only entity that is responsible for the existence of the Jewish people," he said. "Iran has been explicit in its hostility to Israel time and again. They would use these weapons.
"We believe that Iran has the capacity and the delivery capability for nuclear weapons. They can proceed to production. We have got two months to act - before the end of 2009."
Walking through the flat and endless Kazakh steppe, Nemytov Oleg suddenly stops, fumbles in his desert camouflage trousers and pulls out a Geiger counter. The device bleeps into life. He peers pensively at the reading. When we got out of the car it read 3. Now, within a couple of hundred yards, it has jumped to 10. He unwraps breathing masks and two pairs of disposable shoe coverings. "If we want to go any further we will have to wear these," he says.
Further along the dusty road he checks his device once more. "You see, the meter is now reading 21," he says. "If we were in a city far away from here it would read about 0.1. The radiation increases very quickly."
The reason Mr Oleg is keeping such a close eye on background radiation is because we are standing on the very spot where, 60 years ago, the Soviet Union launched the Cold War, with the detonation of its first nuclear bomb . Watched from a lead-lined bunker by Stalin's feared secret police chief Lavrenti Beria, First Lightning exploded at exactly 7am on 29 August 1949, throwing up an enormous mushroom cloud which billowed over the steppe and, unbeknownst to people nearby, dumping huge quantities of radioactive material on them, their houses and their fields.
At the conference, held behind closed doors in Monterey Bay, California, leading researchers warned that mankind might lose control over computer-based systems that carry out a growing share of society’s workload, from waging war to chatting on the phone, and have already reached a level of indestructibility comparable with a cockroach.
“These are powerful technologies that could be used in good ways or scary ways,” warned Eric Horvitz, principal researcher at Microsoft who organised the conference on behalf of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.
Punching their fists into the air and shouting "Let's crush them!" some 100,000 North Koreans packed Pyongyang's main square Thursday for an anti-U.S. rally as the communist regime promised a "fire shower of nuclear retaliation" for any American-led attack.
Several demonstrators held up a placard depicting a pair of hands smashing a missile with "U.S." written on it, according to footage taken by APTN in Pyongyang on the anniversary of the day North Korean troops charged southward, sparking the three-year Korean War in 1950.
North Korean troops will respond to any sanctions or U.S. provocations with "an annihilating blow," one senior official vowed—a pointed threat as an American destroyer shadowed a North Korean freighter sailing off China's coast, possibly with banned goods on board.
North Korea's communist regime has warned of a nuclear war on the Korean peninsula while vowing to step up its atomic bomb-making program in defiance of new U.N. sanctions.
The North's defiance presents a growing diplomatic headache for President Barack Obama as he prepares for talks Tuesday with his South Korean counterpart on the North's missile and nuclear programs.
Nuclear bombs are humankind's most powerful weapon, but their destructive impact would unlikely alter the spinning of the Earth on its axis.
One way to see this is to compare the energy of a nuclear blast to that of the rotational motion of the Earth. The largest nuclear bombs have an explosive energy of several tens of megatons, or about 10^17 Joules, whereas the Earth's rotational energy is around 10^29 Joules.
So even if all the force of a nuclear explosion was used to push the Earth in a particular direction, the energy in this push would be less than a trillionth that of the rotational energy.
It would be like trying to divert a speeding car with the energy of a flying mosquito.
Even the largest earthquakes have only a miniscule effect on our planet's spinning. Scientists calculated that the colossal tsunami-causing 2004 Sumatra earthquake caused a slimming of the Earth that shortened the day by a few millionths of a second and shifted the North Pole by an inch.
Russia is taking security measures as a precaution against the possibility tension over North Korea could escalate into nuclear war, news agencies quoted officials as saying on Wednesday.
Interfax quoted an unnamed security source as saying a stand-off triggered by Pyongyang's nuclear test on Monday could affect the security of Russia's far eastern regions, which border North Korea.
"The need has emerged for an appropriate package of precautionary measures," the source said.
North Korea today risked further international isolation after it claimed to have successfully tested a nuclear weapon as powerful as the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.
The test comes less than two months after the North enraged the US and its allies by test firing a long-range ballistic missile.
The KNCA news agency, the regime's official mouthpiece, said: "We have successfully conducted another nuclear test on 25 May as part of the republic's measures to strengthen its nuclear deterrent."
Religion has always shaped politics. In the Middle Ages religion made the laws and government enforced them by judgement and punishment.
Even today, religion propels politics; the right wing and the left wing are on the same bird.
Religious institutions hold more wealth than governments. They own hospitals, real estate, colleges, universities, private schools, and have their hands in most every commercial venture through their stock portfolios.
He who controls the wealth rules the world.
Research polls show that over the past several years, many people who followed the traditions of various religions have left the churches. They have lost a greater number than ever before and new converts are few. This poses a danger to the structure of our society; churches are beginning to loose both their wealth and control of the masses.
Many of these drop-outs have started to ask real questions for the first time. They are realizing that their religions are based on mysticism and superstition. They have been lied to and duped.
The accessibility of information through the internet has had a lot to do with the re-education of these mesmerized crowds.
Now, these people face a greater danger.
You Know the Secret; Now We Must Kill You
I believe there is a plan in place to try to stop the awakening of the masses. In order for the religious element to hold on to the few they still have they need to silence the dissidents and the educators.
From the pulpit, the battle cry has begun.
The wolves in sheep's clothing are preparing the sheep to accept the slaughter of all those who have not been corralled in the pen. They say:
We have been given the Great Commission: "Go ye therefore and teach all nations, baptising them in the name of...."
We have. The word of the gospel has now reached every nation throughout the world. The heathens and the pagans have had the chance to "hear the word." They have not conformed. Time is up!
Here is an excerpt from a very creepy and foretelling sermon:
Quote:
"The lOrd will rise up as he did at Mount Perazim; he will rouse himself as in the Valley of Gibeon to do his work---his strange work---and perform his task, his alien task. Now stop your mocking or your chains will become heavier; the Lord, the Lord Almighty, has told me of the destruction decreed against the whole land. (Isaiah 28:21)
Sometimes God does a strange work with his own people---a work of destruction, not of salvation.
He does this when his people act strangely toward him, acting not as his children, but as his enemies.
This is especially true of people who have been born and brought up in the church.
.... The use of the word strange means that this is not a work god delights in doing. Ezekiel 18:32 tells us "For I take no pleasure in the death of anyone, declares the soverign lord. Repent and live!"
But when his own people mock him, God must punish them.
In the book of Lamentations, Jeremiah speaks about this judgement of god on his own people. It is a work so strange that it makes ones blood curdle.
This excerpt was copied from a church sermon. It seems to be a threat to the defectors. And why not? Because they are afraid of these people who can influence the others. Never mind that there are many published sources of information to find truth; they fear that personal relationships are more influential. They do not want defectors spilling the beans and enlightening others to their tricks.
There is a plan in place to silence the educators. The sheep must be kept dumb. Religions are now seeing a great threat to their finances and power. The great depopulation plan will take place soon.
There is no sky daddy directing this. It is a body of evil psychopaths who have manipulated this plan for a long time. It will soon come to fruition.
This has nothing to do with any local preachers; many are deluded themselves. Many ministers are unaware that they themselves, are being used to accomplish this.
With tensions already rising due to the Chinese navy becoming more aggressive in asserting its territorial claims in the South China Sea, the U.S. Navy seems to have yet another reason to be deeply concerned.
After years of conjecture, details have begun to emerge of a "kill weapon" developed by the Chinese to target and destroy U.S. aircraft carriers.
First posted on a Chinese blog viewed as credible by military analysts and then translated by the naval affairs blog Information Dissemination, a recent report provides a description of an anti-ship ballistic missile (ASBM) that can strike carriers and other U.S. vessels at a range of 2000km.
Six new atomic submarines, armed with improved nuclear-tipped cruise missiles, will join the Russian navy. The Defence Ministry said the first, the Severodvinsk, will be launched in 2011 and at least five others of the same type will be built by 2017.
The new hypersonic cruise missiles with increased range are designed to strike "aircraft carriers of the potential enemy if they pose a direct threat to Russia's security," the ministry said. It added that the missiles are also capable of hitting land targets. Russia has increasingly relied on nuclear weapons to compensate for the decline of its conventional forces. In December, the chief of the Russian general staff, General Nikolai Makarov, said Russia will keep its arsenal of tactical nuclear weapons , which he said were necessary to counter a massive Nato advantage in conventional weapons. Tactical nuclear weapons have a much shorter range compared to strategic nuclear weapons. They are intended for use within a theatre of battle. Earlier this week, the Russian navy's deputy chief of staff said the role of tactical nuclear weapons in the Russian navy may grow. Vice-Admiral Oleg Burtsev said the increasing range and precision of tactical nuclear weapons makes them an important asset. - Independent
Terrorist group al-Qa'ida is likely to fragment in the coming years but an attack on Britain involving chemical or nuclear weapons is now "more realistic", the Government warned today.
Home Secretary Jacqui Smith highlighted the danger posed by new technologies and failed states around the world as she published an updated counter-terror strategy.
The report - known as Contest Two - is the first unclassified document to contain a detailed account of UK officials' assessment of the underlying causes of the terrorist threat and its likely future direction. It contains a stark warning about the likelihood of an attack involving a "dirty bomb".
War / Draft 
