When Pittsburgh wakes up on Wednesday morning, some residents will have the choice of going about their day in an Uber that drives itself.
The launch of Uber’s self-driving pilot program marks the public unveiling of the company’s secretive work in autonomous vehicles and the first time self-driving cars have been so freely available to the U.S. public.
That project, believed to have been expanded significantly, is likely the source of up to 150 kilograms (330 pounds) of highly enriched uranium a year, said Siegfried Hecker, a leading expert on the North's nuclear program.
That quantity is enough for roughly six nuclear bombs, Hecker, who toured the North's main Yongbyon nuclear facility in 2010, wrote in a report on the 38 North website of Johns Hopkins University in Washington published on Monday.
Added to an estimated 32- to 54 kilogram plutonium stockpile, the North will have sufficient fissile material for about 20 bombs by the end of 2016, Hecker said.
Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton said on Thursday the success of the Syrian ceasefire brokered by the United States and Russia depends on whether Moscow decides it is in its interest to follow through with the agreement.
“We gave [our Gulf Arab allies] our best analysis of the enormous needs that Iran has internally and the commitment that Iran has made to its people in terms of shoring up its economy and improving economic growth,” Mr. Obama said at the conclusion of a meeting with leaders of Saudi Arabia, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain.
The [American] officials also claimed that most of the sanctions, including multilateral sanctions, could be snapped back into place if Iran cheated, and they argued that giving Iran tens of billions of dollars in cash won’t dramatically increase Iran’s spending on terrorism and other nefarious activities.
The government budget did increase 35 percent this year but not a lot of the additional $25 billion went to fostering economic growth. The defense budget nearly doubled, to $19 billion.
According to a September 1st report by Saeed Ghasseminejad of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), when Tehran finalized its 2016-2017 budget in April, they invoked what's known as article 22, "which required the executive branch to transfer to the military the funds it receives from settling legal disputes with foreign countries and companies."
"The following month, a member of the parliament’s presiding board confirmed that the legislature had indeed allocated $1.7 billion from legal settlements to the defense budget."
Could [State Department Mark] Toner rule out the chance that the nuke agreement “has served as a cause for [Iran's recent] more aggressive posture”?
The spokesman’s unexpectedly candid reply: “I can’t rule that out.” While acknowledging Obama’s hope for change in Iran’s behavior, he admitted, “We’ve not seen that shift to a constructive engagement.”
Of course, after citing incidents that “needlessly escalate tensions” Toner then said it all makes the deal even “more important, because the last thing anyone would want to see in the region is a nuclear-armed Iran.”
I haven't written much about the polling in the presidential race. Until Labor Day, I think it is rather pointless. Most people have lives and mental health stability, and so don't focus on the election starting 44 months out like the Washington crowd and those who read them (including me, truth be told--but I at least know that it isn't normal). Really, wait until the polls are of likely voters before figuring out the state of the race.
I was going to write about the problem with polling fever and how the race would tighten once polls starting using "likely voters" rather than "registered voters" or--God help us all--"all adults." This article beat me to it.
I'm sure there are reasons to use registered voter polls so far out--it may be too soon to refine models of who is a likely voter, for example.
Or maybe the press just likes to have drama to have a fake closing the gap as polls shift from Democrat-favoring registered voters to more Republican-friendly likely voters.
Anyway, the race will likely tighten a bit as people start to pay attention and answer polls on more than name recognition, and as likely voters are defined.
Canada needs to stop pretending that it cares about the North. but it could extend their control in the Arctic at the expense of Canada. Decades of false rhetoric has created expectations among those few who do live up North that someone “has their back.” No one does. They’re on their own and they have been for generations. We tell the world the North is ours, that we are protecting our sovereignty and our vast mineral wealth. But the truth is we aren’t, and those resources are so far from the nearest railhead they may as well be on the moon.
Russia wants the UN Security Council to adopt a resolution endorsing the deal hammered out between Moscow and Washington to halt fighting in Syria and jointly target Islamist rebels, its ambassador said Thursday.
The modern humanitarian conscience is often cited as one of the West’s proudest achievements, but its indifference to Russia’s crimes reveals an underlying ideology that is essentially an artifact of the Cold War. Born in a period in which the fate of the world was being determined by the bipolar contest of the United States and the Soviet Union, the humanitarian critique is configured to accommodate two easily recognizable characters and a straightforward narrative. Its tolerance for ambiguity is correspondingly low. As such, Ukraine’s fragile, corruption-plagued democracy and the bewildering array of Syrian rebels are not the uncomplicated “good guys” the Western imagination demands. [emphasis added]
Britain's vote in June to leave the European Union did not have too much of an impact on the labor market in the first month after the decision, official figures showed Wednesday. ...
Though the decision proved a huge surprise to many in the financial markets and prompted a dramatic slide in the value of the pound, the real economy has exhibited a relatively high degree of resilience. Retail sales, house prices and industrial production have all held up — to the surprise of many.
The president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, sought on Wednesday to rally support for the European Union, saying the bloc battered by the UK Brexit referendum was not about to break up despite its existential crisis.
"The European Union doesn't have enough union," Juncker told the European Parliament in Strasbourg, noting his own executive was limited in its response to problems by division among states that was the worst he had seen in three decades in EU politics.
"There are splits out there and often fragmentation exists," he said. "That is leaving scope for galloping populism."
Relations between the U.S. and Iran have warmed since the agreement, to the dismay of U.S. allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia. The once hostile foes are cooperating to end Syria's civil war. [emphasis added]
The agreement that Secretary of State John Kerry announced with Russia to reduce the killing in Syria has widened an increasingly public divide between Mr. Kerry and Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter, who has deep reservations about the plan for American and Russian forces to jointly target terrorist groups.
“I think we’d have some reasons to be skeptical that the Russians are able or are willing to implement the arrangement consistent with the way it’s been described,” Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, said Monday at a briefing. He added, darkly, “But we’ll see.”
Chief among Pentagon concerns is whether sharing targeting information with Russia could reveal how the United States uses intelligence to conduct airstrikes, not just in Syria but in other places, which Moscow could then use for its own advantage in the growing confrontations undersea and in the air around the Baltics and Europe.
Oh, and the Russians will get a nice close look from the inside at how our Air Force conducts combat operations. The Russians won't take notes on that insight, now will they?
It is a measure of the sensitivity of the agreement — for Washington, for Moscow and for an array of other countries and opposition groups — that the State Department has not released text of the agreement with the Russians, or even a fact sheet summarizing it.
The sketch shows the president with a bloodied head and a bandage wrapped around it with the secretary asking if he is alright.
To which the actor depicting Obama replies: 'I smacked my head on the bathroom floor and broke four tiles on it as I was so shocked from the North's hydrogen bomb detonation!
This prompts the secretary to say: 'So Mr President, you were testing the hardness of your skull while the North was testing its hydrogen bomb?', which draws uproars of laughter from the audience.
No matter that Ukraine was dismembered a little bit this month and faces threats of future dismemberment, Ukraine should be honored to be sacrificed in the name of greater Green energy opportunities! In a "grand bargain!" Isn't dismemberment grand?
Yeah, you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet.
I used to just mock Friedman. I'd write that I'm not saying that you can't drown in a pool of Tom Friedman's wisdom. But you would have to be drunk and face down to do so.
Yes, the man is a fool who pretends to be deep, sustained by the applause of fans who know even less than him and so don't know any better. So he deserves that derision.
But that is too kind. Friedman's long-time Chinese autocrat crush has plumbed new depths and reached the point where he dismisses the fate of Ukraine, which is trying to take its place in the West free of domination by Putin's fledgling empire that looms over their land, and thinks their loss of Crimea is nothing more than a wedge issue to promote solar and wind power.
Now Friedman is visible as a monster dismissive of mere people who stand in the way of his windmills and solar panels. There is no disguising that, even with his usual nonsense.
I'm done with the man. He disgusts me. Friedman can write for the Upper West Side and enjoy their fawning awe.
Between rude comments, violent drug crackdowns, and a slew of anti-US rhetoric, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has been keeping the United States on its toes since his election in May.
On Monday, Mr. Duterte called for US special forces to leave the southern Philippine island of Mindanao, where the US military has maintained a presence since 2002. The demand is the latest move by the president to raise questions about the stability of the Philippine-US relationship uncertain.
Duterte, while highly popular in his own country, has been a controversial figure abroad.
The Philippines moved to shore up relations with the United States on Tuesday with guarantees that a treaty between them would be honored and security ties were "rock solid", despite President Rodrigo Duterte's railings against Washington.
A dozen US warplanes destroyed nearly 50 targets at an "Islamic State" chemical weapons production plant in northern Iraq, the Pentagon said on Tuesday.
The barrage of airstrikes near the terrorist group's stronghold of Mosul targeted a converted pharmaceutical manufacturing plant and headquarters.
The operation to drive so-called Islamic State (IS) from Iraq's second-largest city has been long promised and much delayed.
At a fundraiser on Friday night, Hillary Clinton said, “You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of [Donald] Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that.” She then went on to call these people “irredeemable.”
A Democratic megadonor told Colin Powell that Hillary Clinton “HATES” President Obama for beating her for the 2008 nomination, and she dismissively referred to him as “that man,” according to emails hacked from the general’s account.
Russian special forces today launched a rapid assault on a key border town in eastern Ukraine, shattering the ceasefire agreement signed just two weeks ago.
According to the Investigative Committee and Moscow-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine, Kyiv has sent a team of seven teenage terrorists into the occupied areas of Donetsk Oblast to carry out acts of sabotage. ...
Just last month, the Kremlin accused Ukraine of sending agent-saboteurs to the annexed Crimean Peninsula to carry out terrorist attacks.
There was no real evidence and the story was so full of holes and contradictions that it quickly fell apart and nobody took it seriously. And this time around, the evidence looks just as flimsy.
The Ukrainian intelligence service claims to have captured Kremlin agents operating deep within territory not embroiled in fighting, as telephone intercepts were published revealing a Moscow plot to seize half the country.
Eventually, I think Russia will be incorporated into the West as Germany, Eastern Europe, Japan and South Korea have been since World War II.
Two opposition candidates have been elected to parliament in ex-Soviet Belarus, the first time since 2008 that critics of strongman president Alexander Lukashenko have made it into the rubber-stamp legislature.
The election of the tiny opposition contingent comes as Lukashenko, once dubbed by the US as Europe's last dictator, tries to burnish his image further with the West after the EU dropped sanctions against Belarus earlier this year.
Alas, we are keeping our plans to go down to a single paratrooper brigade and a single Stryker brigade in Europe. Those are fine for the initial forces in the arc of crisis, but aren't sufficient for reassuring our new NATO allies in eastern Europe and keeping the Russians quiet as they shift west.
I hope we hedge a bit by putting heavy brigade sets in Poland.
And while I welcome NATO efforts to build small, high quality forces capable of being projected abroad that can work with our forces, I hope that the Europeans don't neglect the capability to regenerate conventional forces by maintaining a core conventional heavy capability backed by reserves and the capacity to build new units if the Russian threat is rebuilt by Moscow.
Look, Russia is a long way from threatening to march to the Rhine. But they are much more close to being able to threaten and bully a small country like any of the Baltic nations, as the 2008 Georgia War demonstrated. Ultimately, if we are reducing our presence in Europe to focus our shrinking military on Asia and the rest of the world, we need NATO Europe capable of holding their own territory without immediate and massive US help.
Europe's Competition Directorate commands the shock troops of the EU power structure. Ensconced in its fortress at Place Madou, it can dispatch swat teams on corporate dawn raids across Europe without a search warrant.
It operates outside the normal judicial control that we take for granted in a developed democracy. The US Justice Department could never dream of acting in such a fashion.
Known as 'DG Comp', it acts as judge, jury, and executioner, and can in effect impose fines large enough to constitute criminal sanctions, but without the due process protection of criminal law. It misused evidence so badly in pursuit of the US chipmaker Intel that the company alleged a violation of human rights.
Apple is just the latest of the great US digital companies to face this Star Chamber. It has vowed to appeal the monster €13bn fine handed down from Brussels this week for violation of EU state aid rules, but the only recourse is the European Court of Justice. This is usually a forlorn ritual. The ECJ is a political body, the enforcer of the EU's teleological doctrines. It ratifies executive power.
Friction between Switzerland and the European Union over the bloc's plans to tighten gun control following a rise in militant attacks could turn into another serious snag in ties already tested by Swiss efforts to curb immigration.
The proposed directive, which applies to non-EU member Switzerland only because it is part of Europe's Schengen open border system, has raised hackles among the Swiss, who resent intervention from Brussels.
Christoph Blocher, a leading voice of the Swiss right and a eurosceptic, says Switzerland should consider abandoning Europe's Schengen system of passport-free travel if the Swiss people rejected the proposed measures in a referendum.
Drafted after militants killed scores in attacks in Paris last year, the EU plans on gun control aimed to curb online weapons sales and impose more restrictions on assault weapons.
But the initial proposal provoked an outcry in Switzerland because it meant a ban on the long Swiss tradition of ex-soldiers keeping their assault rifles.
Bolsheviks were never very good at material inventions, but they excelled at political technology, inventing an entirely new system we call totalitarian. As they say today, it went viral. There is still no vaccine.
Of course, lots of conquering groups have annihilated or enslaved other groups—just think of the Trojan war or Tamerlane’s mountains of skulls—but no form of government had ever been so brutal to those it regarded as its own people. Soviet Russia was far crueler than its tsarist predecessor, which had long been proverbial as “the gendarme of Europe.”
