31 October 2017
Retribution
The recent terror attack in New York City only reinforces Rico's hope that we can locate and kill as many of these weasels as possible...
More sea-going stupidity
Karma Allen and Emily Shapiro have a Good Morning America article about some dumb mariners:
Jennifer Appel, one of the two sailors rescued by a Navy ship after being stranded in the Pacific Ocean for almost five months, told ABC News via email that she and her fellow mariner didn't activate their emergency beacon because they weren't in "an immediate life-threatening scenario".Rico says the Coast Guard should bill these idiots for the cost of 'rescuing' them...
Appel, an experienced sailor, and Natasha “Tasha” Fuiava, a sailing novice, left Honolulu, Hawai'i on their sailboat on 3 May 2017 with their two dogs, Valentine and Zeus, bound for Tahiti, 2,600 miles away in the South Pacific. Less than a month into their voyage, during a spell of bad weather, Appel and Fuiava's sailboat's engine stopped running for good. Two months into their voyage, they began issuing daily distress radio calls.
They told Coast Guard officials that they never turned on the boat’s Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon (EPIRB) because they never felt "truly in distress," nor did they think the situation was "dire" enough to warrant it, a spokesperson for Coast Guard District 14 said.
The EPIRB, which the Coast Guard confirmed was properly registered, would have immediately notified search and rescue teams of a vessel in distress, officials said.
Appel said via email to ABC News today that "EPIRB calls are for people who are in an immediate life-threatening scenario. It would be shameful to call on Coast Guard resources when not in imminent peril and allow someone else to perish because of it."
"The USCG Honolulu Sector receives many calls a day," Appel wrote. "They have limited resources for the enormous span of water their area covers. A fair amount of those calls are for people in the process of losing their boat and swimming in the ocean. While I do not deny that a broken spreader, blown backstay and non-functioning motor are all disabling situations, and we had all at the same time when we were at the Equator and 160 degrees West, our boat was still afloat; we had food, water, and limited maneuvering capability due to fortifying the broken items at the mast. (Yes, I climbed the mast in open ocean to make hack patches so we could continue as any good sailor would.)" She added: "Pahn Pahn calls, which we made, are different than EPIRB or Mayday calls," Appel wrote. "Pahn Pahn calls let the Coast Guard and other boats know that the vessel has issues, but they are not immediately life-threatening."
USS Ashland, carrying two women who were rescued after months at sea on their storm-damaged sailboat, arrives at White Beach Naval Facility in Okinawa, Japan on Monday, 30 October 2017.
"The Pahn Pahn distress calls that we made daily after we realized we could not return the last 726 nautical miles to Oahu from roughly 8 degrees North and 156 degrees West, that went unanswered and allowed us to reach Wake Island, were determined to be due to antenna issues that only allowed for a one to two nautical mile of reception. We thought we had about two hundred miles reception and were notified of the discrepancy once aboard the Navy vessel," she wrote. "Had we known our calls were going nowhere -- we would have used the EPIRB, but hindsight is 20/20."
"We did a Mayday call for assistance only when it was absolutely necessary and help did arrive because the resources were available," she wrote. "We are grateful for that."
The women were rescued last Wednesday by the USS Ashland in the western Pacific, nine hundred miles southeast of Japan, nearly five thousand miles from their intended destination. Appel said in an interview provided by the Navy that their rescue was the "most amazing feeling because we honestly did not believe that we would survive another day in the current situation."
The women and their dogs have since made it to solid ground in Okinawa, Japan.
USS Ashland, carrying two women who were rescued after months at sea on their storm-damaged sailboat, arrived at White Beach Naval Facility in Okinawa, Japan Monday, Linus Wilson, a boating expert and author of three sailing books, told ABC News that he wondered if the women had fabricated some of their claims. “Several of Appel’s statements about her voyage do not check out and don’t ring true to many experienced sailors,” he said in an e-mailed statement. “I think a reasonable person may start out thinking that Appel was just a foolish skipper, but it seems likely many events that she recounts may have been fabricated to sensationalize the story. It would be a shame if someone used a very expensive Navy rescue as a publicity stunt,” he added.
Similarly, Phillip Johnson, a retired Coast Guard officer who was responsible for search and rescue operations, said something about the women’s story just does not add up.
"There's something wrong there," Johnson told The Associated Press on Monday. "I've never heard of all that stuff going out at the same time."
The Coast Guard said it has some additional questions for the women, but it characterized its process as a routine "review" and not an "investigation."
Blatant arrogance, rampant stupidity
Bess Levin has a Vanity Fair article about Mnuchin's use of a government jet for personal use:
The Mario & Marie Antoinette of the Trump administration
Steven Mnuchin is a very rich man. Prior to becoming Donald Trump’s Treasury Secretary, he was a partner at Goldman Sachs, started a hedge fund named for a spot near his house in the Hamptons, and ran OneWest, a mortgage lender that foreclosed on more than thirty thousand homeowners during Mnuchin’s tenure. Despite failing to mention about nine figures of assets on his financial disclosure forms, his net worth is estimated to be at least three hundred million dollars. So, naturally, he thought the government should provide him with a plane for his European honeymoon with new jewel-encrusted wife Louise Linton, Washington’s very own Marie Antoinette (photo, above).Rico says Trump's appointees continue to display unbelievable arrogance and stupidity...
ABC News reports that Mnuchin requested a Federal government jet for his and Linton’s getaway to France, Italy, and Scotland this summer. According to an Air Force spokesman, an Air Force jet typically costs around $25,000 an hour to operate, whereas two roundtrip tickets from DC to Paris— first class, of course— during the height of the tourist season, would set you back about half that. Shockingly, Mnuchin’s request was denied. “You don’t need a giant rulebook of government requirements to just say yourself, ‘This is common sense, it’s wrong,’” Senator Ron Wyden told ABC. “That’s just slap-your-forehead stuff.”
A senior Treasury official told ABC News that military planes, usually reserved for Cabinet members whose jobs deal directly with national security, would be used by a Treasury secretary only in “extreme” circumstances, like if the secretary needed to meet with the president immediately. A former Treasury official who worked with Jack Lew said it would have been “exceedingly rare” for Mnuchin’s predecessor to use a government plane even for official business. For private travel? “There’s not a chance in hell that Secretary Lew would have considered using military air.”
Mnuchin’s request to, essentially, make taxpayers help fund his honeymoon, comes on the heels of another aircraft imbroglio. Obviously, we are referring to the daytrip to Lexington, Kentucky, that Linton posted about on Instagram, hashtagging the many designer items she wore for the getaway, which inspired some snark from her followers and led to 2017’s least self-aware social-media meltdown. (Linton later apologized for the episode while wearing a series of ball gowns.) “Aw! Did you think this was a personal trip?! Adorable!” Linton wrote in response to a commenter who called her “deplorable” for her gaudy display of wealth while disembarking a government plane. “Did you think the US government paid for our honeymoon or personal travel?! Lololol.”
The answer, we now know, is no, but not because Mnuchin didn’t try. A spokesman for the Treasury Department confirmed that Mnuchin requested use of a government plane for his honeymoon due to “concern for maintaining a secure method of communication,” according to ABC News. “The Secretary is a member of the National Security Council and has responsibility for the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence,” the spokesman said in a statement. “It is imperative that he have access to secure communications, and it is our practice to consider a wide range of options to ensure he has these capabilities during his travel, including the possible use of military aircraft.” The spokesman said that ultimately, it became “apparent that other methods for secure communication were available.”
Apple for the day
Alex Cranz has a Gizmodo article about the end of Touch ID:
When the thousand-dollar iPhone X eventually arrives in November, it will come loaded with a futuristic camera module that, if all goes right, should let you securely open your phone with little more than a glance. The promise is enticing— a perfect blend of convenience and security that’s hard to come by in mobile computing devices. After an impressive demo of the tech, we’re left with a glaring question: if it works as intended, then what happens to Touch ID?Rico says
Touch ID is Apple’s original futuristic security measure. Press your thumb to a capacitive touch sensor that rapidly searches for a (relatively) unique pattern formed by the whorls of your fingertips. Once it spies it, the phone unlocks, and like a 90s-era hacker “you’re in.” It feels like magic, and even now it can feel like the future if you’ve been stuck on a phone with a lesser fingerprint scanner or none at all. There’s no peering at the screen and racking your brain for a pin. All you need is a touch.
Only this futuristic technology isn’t especially new. “Fingerprint scanners have been around a long time,” Nasir Memon, a computer scientist with a focus on cyber security and chair of the New York University Tandon School of Engineering told Gizmodo. Toshiba actually introduced the tech into phones back in 2007 with the Portege G500 and G900. That’s six years before Apple introduced the tech in the iPhone 5s, and Apple only introduced the tech after first acquiring one of the biggest names in fingerprint technology, AuthenTec. It bought its way into the land of Touch ID, and, while the Apple-branded tech has since popularized opening your phone with a touch, it’s not without problems. Chief among them is the security risk.
Touch ID doesn’t just secure one unique fingerprint scan in your phone, it can have dozens depending on how many fingers you register. Memon claims that “what it’s doing is capturing small, small squares—little partial fingerprints.” According to Memon, who recently published a paper in IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics & Security based on his findings, each fingerprint creates eight to ten of these partial fingerprints, and due to the size of the sensor those partials are tiny. The more fingers you add to open the phone, the more tiny partials you produce, and the more at risk you become of someone randomly (or more likely purposely) finding the right tiny partial needed to get into the device.
Memon is careful to point out this problem isn’t the end of the world. The chance of a stranger randomly touching your phone and opening it is small. But it makes the device less secure, and if you’re carrying big coveted secrets on your device, it makes it more likely a bad actor could have an easier time getting in. Face ID is more secure. Phil Schiller senior VP or Worldwide Marketing at Apple claimed that Touch ID had a 1 in 50,000 chance of opening with the wrong finger. He claimed Face ID had a far less scary 1 in 1,000,000 chance. There should be only one face that looks like yours, with the same curve of cheek and jut of chin. Matching to one face instead of one of ten or more partial fingerprints is instantly more secure—provided your identical twin isn’t an asshole.
The bigger problem Touch ID faces is the trend of phone design. Look at the iPhone X, the Samsung Note 8 and S8, the LG G6, or even devices from less known (in America) makers like Huawei and Xiaomi. The bezel is quickly getting killed off on premium phones. Instead, the display takes up the whole front of the device, leaving little room for a fingerprint scanners. While most Android makers have simply moved the scanner to the back of the device, it’s an inelegant solution. Blindly looking for the right spot to touch on the back of your phone is a minor but crucial inconvenience compared to a quick press of the home button on the front.
Qualcomm, the chief provider of CPUs to Android phone makers (and one of the primary providers of wireless chips to Apple) introduced its own solution to this thumbprint problem last year. This solution was based on the much newer ultrasonic fingerprint scanning tech, which blasts your finger with harmless ultrasonic waves to quickly create a 3D image of the skin, detailing the exact depth of every ridge and valley in your whorls.
The original solution Qualcomm introduced last year could go through glass and...not much else. That meant it couldn’t go through OLED displays like those in the new iPhone X or the Samsung S8. According to Seshu Madhavapeddy, VP of Product Management of Qualcomm (and before that VP and GM of Mobile Computing there), in a conversation with Gizmodo, the limitations of the sensor made it difficult to integrate into the designs of a lot of the major phone makers. So difficult that exactly one phone launched with the tech, the Xiaomi Mi 5s. “The first generation of fingerprint sensor we had could not be universally used by all smartphone makers,” he told Gizmodo.
Which is why this year the company introduced a second generation that can go through thicker glass and through other substances—like an OLED display. Problem solved, right? Apple, Samsung, and the rest should be able to immediately fold this tech into their newest neatest phones and let TouchID and its competitors happily live on.
Not exactly. Because ultrasonic fingerprint sensors are still, in many ways, bleeding edge technology, and bleeding edge doesn’t gel with the demands of security technology. When it comes to securing the device you use all day every day you need to balance cool-as-hell new tech with stability and consistency.
“I think I could foresee some challenges because of the plate that is adopted that might result in some ultrasonic phenomena that might be a deterrent to getting a good quality fingerprint,” Arun Ross, professor of computer science and engineering at Michigan State University told Gizmodo. Basically, it’s much easier to acquire a bad scan with an ultrasonic fingerprint sensor. You have to account for every little aspect of the device. Errant signals, a bad bit of soldering, even a scratch in the glass could potentially contaminate a scan and ruin the phones ability to open with a touch. The technology is possible, but between limitations of the tech and manufacturing its much more difficult to implement than the capacitive touch sensors Apple first put in a phone four years ago.
This is a fact supported by a report in the Wall Street Journal earlier this month. “Apple tried to embed the Touch ID function, or fingerprint scanner, in the new display, which proved difficult.” It proved so difficult to implement in the phone that Apple, and its manufacturers, reportedly had to scuttle the whole idea, focusing on Face ID instead.
This all seems to imply that the new flagship of the iPhone lineup probably won’t be getting Touch ID anytime soon, and that means the just introduced Face ID might be the future. As with the headphone jack, Firewire, and the CD drive, it feels like Apple looked at the lay of the land, saw where the future was, and decided to just go there, flipping the past off as it sped away.
Whether or not Apple bungled the manufacturing, focusing on Face ID and the tech behind it actually feels like a smart forward looking move (I’ll still miss Touch ID). Unlike ultrasonic fingerprint readers, the basic tech behind Face ID has been around a while. This is mature, relatively reliable technology that doesn’t produce the frustrating manufacturing and design problems the alternative has provided. Microsoft released a version of facial recognition back in 2015 as part of the Windows 10 launch. The tech, which uses an IR camera to scan your face regardless of lighting scenarios, has achieved a measure of stability two years in—even if it will sometimes fail to read your face if you take the glasses off that you normally wear.
Apple’s version of facial recognition has the potential to be even more accurate and secure. The camera module used doesn’t just include an IR camera and photo camera. There’s also a projector shooting 30,000 IR dots at your face to create a map. By mapping, Apple claims, it can get around problems faced by face recognition technologies by competitors like Microsoft’s Windows Hello. Chief among them—Apple should be able to recognize your face whether you’re wearing glasses or not.
I say “should” because Apple actually had trouble with Face ID during the live demo at the iPhone X event. During the demo Craig Federighi, senior VP of Software at Apple, failed to actually open the phone with a glance. Instead he had to, embarrassingly, open the phone by inserting a pin number.
If Face ID performs that poorly in the model shipping to consumers in November, it will leave the company’s biometric security array in a world of hurt. If I can’t open the phone of the future with my face than it’s not actually, you know, the phone of the future.
“It all comes down to how good the facial recognition is,” noted Apple fan John Gruber wrote last week amidst rumors there would be no Touch ID on the iPhone X. “If it’s as fast, reliable, trustworthy, and convenient as Touch ID, then omitting Touch ID is a legitimate design choice. Forward progress on biometrics. If it’s worse than Touch ID in any meaningful way, it’s an inexcusable mistake.”
Gruber is absolutely right, but retiring the thumb print tech (it will likely appear in cheaper iPhones for the foreseeable future) to lean on rapidly maturing and potentially more secure technology feels like a very Apple move. The company isn’t always the first to arrive at a solution, but it usually does with the kind of aplomb that makes us wonder why we haven’t been using it for decades.
Why Rico's not on Facebook
Yahoo has a Reuters article by David Ingram about Facebook's Russian hack:
Facebook Inc. said on Monday that Russia-based operatives published about eighty thousand posts on the social network over a two-year period in an effort to sway American politics and that over a hundred million Americans may have seen the posts during that time.Rico says it's a new world, the Internet, with old enemies...
Facebook's latest data on the Russia-linked posts, possibly reaching around half of the U.S. population of voting age, far exceeds the company's previous disclosures. It was included in written testimony provided to US lawmakers, and seen by Reuters, ahead of key hearings with social media and technology companies about Russian meddling in elections on Capitol Hill this week.
Twitter Inc. separately found nearly three thousand accounts linked to Russian operatives, a source familiar with the company's written testimony said. That estimate is up from a tally of 201 accounts that Twitter reported in September.
Google, owned by Alphabet Inc., said in a statement on Monday it had found nearly five thousand dollars in Russia-linked ad spending during the 2016 election cycle, and that it would build a database of election ads.
Executives from Facebook, Twitter, and Google are scheduled to appear before three congressional committees this week on alleged Russian attempts to spread misinformation in the months before and after the 2016 US presidential election.
The Russian government has denied any attempts to sway the election, in which President Donald Trump, a Republican, defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Facebook's general counsel, Colin Stretch, said in the written testimony that the eighty thousand posts from Russia's Internet Research Agency were a tiny fraction of content on Facebook, equal to one out of twenty-three thousand posts.
However, the posts violated Facebook's terms of service, and any amount of such activity using fake accounts is too much, Stretch wrote. "These actions run counter to Facebook's mission of building community and everything we stand for. And we are determined to do everything we can to address this new threat," he wrote.
The posts were published between June of 2015 and August of 2017. Most of them focused on divisive social and political messages such as race relations, Facebook said.
Twitter's revised estimate of how many Russian-linked accounts were on its service comes a month after an influential Democratic senator, Mark Warner, slammed it for what he called an insufficient investigation.
Twitter has suspended all 2,752 accounts that it tracked to Russia's Internet Research Agency, and it has given US congressional investigators the account names, the source familiar with the company's testimony said. "State-sanctioned manipulation of elections by sophisticated foreign actors is a new challenge for us, and one that we are determined to meet," Twitter said in written testimony, according to the source.
30 October 2017
The wolves are circling
Yahoo has a Huffington Post article by Jesselyn Cook about some of Trump's boys:
Paul Manafort, (photo, top) onetime campaign chairman to President Donald Trump, and former Manafort business associate Rick Gates (photo, bottom, hiding) were charged with conspiracy and money laundering in an intensifying investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.Ryan Reilly has a Yahoo article (originally on Huffington Post) about yet more:
Manafort left his Virginia condo and, with his attorney, walked into the FBI field office in Washington early Monday. A twelve-count grand jury indictment includes charges of conspiracy against the US, conspiracy to launder money, failure to file foreign bank reports, and false statements.
Manafort and Gates are the first to be charged in the probe led by the office of special counsel Robert Mueller. The arrests come three days after news broke that a Federal grand jury in Washington had filed charges stemming from Mueller’s investigation.
“Manafort and Gates generated tens of millions of dollars in income as a result of their Ukraine work,” the indictment says. “In order to hide Ukrainian payments from United States authorities, from approximately 2006 through at least 2016, Manafort and Gates laundered the money through scores of United States and foreign corporations, partnerships, and bank accounts.”
Failing to pay taxes allowed Manafort a “lavish lifestyle in the United States”, according to the indictment, which alleges he “spent millions of dollars on luxury goods and services for himself and his extended family through payments wired from offshore nominee accounts to United States vendors.”
Reports have suggested Federal investigators could use criminal charges as way to pressure those arrested into providing more information about alleged collusion between Trump’s campaign and the Kremlin to influence the election.
Trump has aggressively denied allegations that his team colluded with Russia to win the election.
A former prosecutor and FBI director, Mueller partnered with New York attorney General Eric Schneiderman in August to look into Manafort’s possible financial crimes, including money laundering.
Manafort ran Trump’s presidential campaign from June 2016 until his resignation in August of that year, after reports surfaced about his past lobbying work for pro-Russian Ukrainian oligarchs. He retroactively registered as a foreign agent and disclosed more than seventeen million dollars in payments for his firm’s consulting work in the Ukraine, which occurred before he joined Trump’s campaign.
“You can get rid of Manafort,” said Robby Mook, who was the campaign manager for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, “but that doesn’t end the odd bromance Trump has with Putin.”
Manafort met with Senate Intelligence Committee investigators in July to discuss a meeting between Trump associates and a Russian lawyer that was held during the election campaign to obtain dirt on Clinton. The next day, FBI agents seized documents and other items from Manafort’s house in Virginia without warning.
Investigators have also issued subpoenas seeking testimony from a number of people linked to Manafort throughout the probe.
Trump described the pre-dawn raid of Manafort’s home as “pretty tough stuff.”
“I’ve always found Paul Manafort to be a very decent man,” Trump said at the time. “He’s like a lot of other people, probably makes consultant fees from all over the place, who knows, I don’t know, but I thought it was pretty tough stuff to wake him up, perhaps his family was there.”
Trump fired FBI director James Comey, who was leading the agency’s investigation into Russian interference in the election, in May of 2017. The following week, the Justice Department appointed Mueller as special counsel to oversee the Federal inquiry into the Trump campaign’s alleged Russian ties. “Led by some very bad and conflicted people,” Trump tweeted in June, the Russia probe is “the single greatest witch hunt in American political history.”
A foreign policy adviser to President Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has pleaded guilty to a charge of lying to FBI agents.Rico says this is what Watergate looked like in the beginning...
George Papadopoulos (photo) pleaded guilty on 5 October 2017, but the case wasn’t unsealed until Monday, when two other Trump associates were indicted by a Federal grand jury. Papadopoulos reached a plea deal with prosecutors, and has since been cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Prosecutors’ statement of the offense alleges Papadopoulos “made material false statements and material omissions” during a 27 January 2017, interview with the FBI. He was arrested on 27 July 2017. Prosecutors agreed to recommend between no prison time to six months under the plea agreement.
Papadopoulos told the FBI an overseas professor had “told him about the Russians possessing ‘dirt’ on then-candidate Hillary Clinton in the form of ‘thousands of emails’, but stated multiple times that he learned that information prior to joining the campaign,” according to court documents. In fact, Papadopoulos was contacted after he learned he’d be joining the campaign, and the professor only mentioned the “thousands of emails” after he’d been on the Trump campaign for more than a month.
The professor, the statement indicates, had “substantial connections to Russian government officials” even though Papadopoulos claimed the professor was “a nothing.”
History for the day: 1938: Welles scares nation
-----Original Message-----
From: "HISTORY | This Day In History" <tdih@emails.history.com>
Sent: Monday, 30 October, 2017 06:01
To: "mseymour@proofmark.com" <mseymour@proofmark.com>
Subject: 1938: Welles scares nation
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| American Revolution |
| 1775 |
| Naval committee established by Congress » |
| Automotive |
| 1893 |
| The World's Columbian Exposition closes in Chicago » |
| Civil War |
| 1862 |
| Ormsby MacKnight Mitchell dies » |
| Cold War |
| 1953 |
| Eisenhower approves NSC 162/2 » |
| Crime |
| 1890 |
| Oakland, California, enacts anti-drug law » |
| Disaster |
| 1991 |
| Perfect storm hits North Atlantic » |
| General Interest |
| 1908 |
| Queen of American high society dies » |
| 1975 |
| Juan Carlos assumes power in Spain » |
| 1995 |
| Quebec separatists narrowly defeated » |
| Hollywood |
| 1945 |
| Henry "The Fonz" Winkler is born » |
| Literary |
| 1811 |
| Sense and Sensibility is published » |
| Music |
| 1944 |
| Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring premieres at the Library of Congress » |
| Old West |
| 1864 |
| The city of Helena, Montana, is founded after miners discover gold » |
| Presidential |
| 1735 |
| John Adams is born » |
| Sports |
| 1974 |
| Muhammad Ali wins the Rumble in the Jungle » |
| Vietnam War |
| 1965 |
| Marines repel attack near Da Nang » |
| 1970 |
| Heavy monsoon rains hit Vietnam » |
| World War I |
| 1918 |
| Ottoman Empire signs treaty with Allies » |
| World War II |
| 1941 |
| FDR approves Lend-Lease aid to the USSR » |
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Movie for the day: Victoria & Abdul
Rico and his fiancé finally went to the movies again, and saw Victoria & Abdul, a splendid period piece about the end of Victoria's reign (because she died):
Rico says that Judy Dench was, as ever, incredible, and the young man playing Abdul, Ali Fazal, was also. The rest of the Brits were, as usual, uptight and prissy...
29 October 2017
Strippers, surveillance and assassination plots, oh my: The wildest JFK Files UF
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28 October 2017
Spain for the day
Yahoo has a Reuters article about the Catalan situation:
The upper house of Spain's parliament has authorized the government of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy to rule Catalonia directly from Madrid, minutes after the restive region declared independence from Spain.Rico says this ain't over...
Rajoy is now expected to convene his cabinet to adopt the first measures to govern Catalonia. This could include firing the government in Barcelona and assuming direct supervision of Catalan police forces.
Siberia
Space.com has an article by Calla Cofield about yet another mysterious Siberian object:
The illuminated ball looming over the forest was seen clearly in the town of Salekhard, on the Arctic Circle, but was also visible over a swathe of northern Siberia in the night sky. Residents from the Yamalo-Nenets region reported 'shivers down their spines' and the social media went alive with claims of aliens arriving in an awesome UFO.
The extraordinary sight was captured by leading Siberian photographer Sergey Anisimov who admitted that: 'at first I was taken aback for a few minutes, not understanding what was happening. The glowing ball rose from behind the trees and moved in my direction.
My first thought was about the most powerful searchlight, but the speed of changing everything around changed the idea of what was happening. 'The ball began to turn into an arc and gradually dissipated.' After the multi-colored light show was over he went home. 'Kids walking in the yard emotionally began to tell me about an unusual phenomenon, using the words 'aliens', 'the portal to another dimension' and the like....'
This was the launch of a Topol-M intercontinental ballistic missile from Plesetsk cosmodrome, aimed at the Kura testing range in Kamchatka on the country's Pacific coast.
Another photographer, Alexey Yakovlev, spotted the spectacle at Strezhevoi, in the north of the Tomsk region, some nine hundred kilometers away. 'At first I thought that it is such a radiance of such an unusual form - round in shape. 'But gradually the ball began to expand, it became clear that this is not some radiance and it became scary
'It's good that I was not alone... they made it clear that the group of people cannot hallucinate.'
Anastasia Boldyreva posted simply: 'Aliens have arrived.'
Vasily Zubkov said: 'I went out to smoke a cigarette and thought it was the end of the world.'
Another local, Nurgazy Taabaldievm said: 'It's a gap in the space-time continuum.'
In fact, the reason photographers were out watching the sky was an amazing show of northern lights, the Aurora Borealis, but there was an extra dimension too, the launch of a Topol-M intercontinental ballistic missile from the Plesetsk cosmodrome, aimed at the Kura testing range in Kamchatka on the country's Pacific coast.
The launch was one of several last night in exercises by the Russian strategic nuclear forces, as confirmed by the Russian defense ministry.
It was the the trace of the Topol rocket, capable of carrying nuclear missiles, that caused this extraordinary phenomenon in the sky.
As photographer Yakovlev posted accurately: 'It seems I accidentally shot the launch of a secret space rocket from Plesetsk'.
Rico says no, not that Topol... (But it's not much of a secret if everybody takes pictures of it.)
27 October 2017
JFK, fifty years on
Yahoo has an article by Adam Kelsey and Jack Date of Good Morning America about the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy:
The National Archives released nearly three thousand previously classified or redacted records related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy on Thursday, but will withhold some of the records due to national security concerns, according to a memo from President Donald Trump.Rico says he remembers it like it was yesterday...
The documents related to the investigation into Kennedy's murder, consisting of files from the CIA, the FBI, the Defense and State departments, and other agencies, were scheduled to be released 25 years after the passage of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. The law called for the records to be made available based on the approval of the then-President.
The newly released documents illustrated the broad swath of the probe that included memos about Communist sympathizers, anti-Fidel Castro activities, and US intelligence assets offering information on Cuba. Still others discussed investigative leads about assassin Lee Harvey Oswald’s travels, including a trip to Mexico before the assassination, which has long generated speculation about who he may have met with.
One memo from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover details information from a source within the USSR on the Soviet reaction to Kennedy's death. The source says the news was met with "great shock and consternation and church bells were tolled in the memory of President Kennedy". The Soviets were shocked by the development, and preferred Kennedy as the head of the American government. The Soviet Communist Party believed the assassination was an "ultraright" act and in effect a "coup". The source also said the Soviets immediately began instructing their agents to gather information on the new president, Lyndon Johnson.
Another Hoover memo, dictated on 24 November 1963 just hours after Jack Ruby shot Oswald, says the FBI had sent an agent to the hospital hoping for a confession from Oswald before he died. After not getting that confession, the memo illustrates Hoover's urgent desire to have "something issued so that we can convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin."
A document memorializing information obtained by the CIA said that "circumstances already developed here point to possibility that Oswald may have been Castro’s agent. Mexicans are also keenly aware of the possibility." A note in the margin makes clear that the source of that information is unknown, and the information "varies" from at least one other account.
It is important to remember many of the documents contain raw intelligence information that is uncorroborated, but will surely fuel further speculation about the plot. It is also worth noting that the total collection contains more than five million records, and any single document should be examined in that context.
Trump issued a memo to the heads of executive departments certifying declassification on Thursday, but also noted that some expressed reservations and therefore ordered that Federal agencies be given 180 days to re-review whether certain documents related to national security require continued redaction or withholding.
"Executive departments and agencies have proposed to me that certain information should continue to be redacted because of national security, law enforcement, and foreign affairs concerns," reads the memo from Trump. "I have no choice today but to accept those redactions rather than allow potentially irreversible harm to our nation's security. To further address these concerns, I am also ordering agencies to re-review each and every one of those redactions over the next 180 days."
The three thousand records that were released were posted on the National Archives' website, with more expected to be made public following the review.
Trump said on Twitter Friday that the files are being "carefully released", but his hope to get "just about everything to the public."
The vast majority of records related to the assassination, roughly ninety percent, have been available since the late 1990s, with an additional ten percent of the documents released, with redactions, since then.
26 October 2017
WW2 ain't over
Tom McKay has a Gizmodo article about a bomb, still around:
Large sections of central Frankfurt, Germany were evacuated on Sunday in preparation for authorities to defuse a World War Two-era, 1.4-ton HC 4000 air mine, with CNN reporting at least sixty thousand people being asked to leave the area while the bomb defusing operation proceeded.Rico says some parts of war last a long time...
Take a big sigh of relief and wipe that bead of sweat off your brow: the bomb was successfully defused, but still needs to be removed from the area with utmost caution, according to Deutsche Welle.
The air mine, one of the largest varieties of ordnance used during the War, is of a type sometimes referred to as a blockbuster, due to its ability to destroy entire rows of buildings. It was presumably dropped during the 1939-1945 air war the Allies waged on Germany, and was only discovered during recent construction work after sitting underground for at least seventy years.
“This bomb has more than one ton of explosives,” Frankfurt fire department chief Reinhard Ries said, according to ABC News. “It’s not just fragments that are the problem, but also the pressure that it creates that would dismantle all the buildings in a hundred-meter radius.”
According to the BBC, the evacuation zone contained “twenty retirement homes, an opera house, and Germany’s central bank where half the country’s gold reserves are stored.”
“We want to avoid not being able to return to these buildings on Monday morning,” Ries added. “That would create a very difficult situation for Frankfurt.”
Experts estimate thousands of tons of explosives from World War Two-era saturation bombing still remain scattered around Germany, holdouts from the estimated three million tons of bombs that Allied air forces dropped to eviscerate German military and industrial capacity. According to the Smithsonian, authorities discover approximately two thousand tons of explosives a year, and from 2000 to 2016, eleven bomb technicians were killed in failed defusing attempts.
Just the day before, authorities evacuated twenty thousand people in preparation to defuse a US-made bomb in the city of Koblenz.
One town, Oranienburg, hosted Nazi chemical facilities, aircraft manufacturing plants, railway junctions and an SS arms depot, according to Deutsche Welle, leading the Allies to drop more than ten thousand bombs on the area. Technical University of Cottbus bomb expert Wolfgang Spyra told the news agency he estimated seven to fifteen percent of the bombs were duds, meaning hundreds still lie under the town.
Explosives used in World War Two-era Allied ordnance were generally stable enough to remain dangerous for long amounts of time, though other components of the bombs often degrade, making them particularly hazardous to try and defuse.
“The scale of this bomb is overwhelming,” Ries said, according to CNN. “I have never seen anything like it.”
More Trump-bashing
Esquire has an article by Jack Holmes and a video about Trump:
Unfortunately, he is the President."
President Trump has devised more than one way to give an interview that makes you fear for the future of your country. This weekend, he responded to Maria Bartiromo's softballs on Fox Business by babbling incoherently about policy he's never really even pretended to understand. But Wednesday afternoon, he went with a more direct approach: standing on the White House lawn with Marine One running in the background (photo), he yelled at those assembled about how smart he was, how he went to an Ivy League school, and how he has "one of the great memories of all time". This was all too much for Stephen Colbert:
To recap, here are some of the things the President of the United States, the world's most powerful man, said in one sitting yesterday:Rico says the article text says it all: "There's an old man yelling things on the White House lawn.
On the Republican "unity" lunch: "I called it a lovefest. It was almost a lovefest. Maybe it was a lovefest." (The president tweeted three different times that Republican senators gave him "standing ovations." As Colbert pointed out, "you're the President. They have to stand up when you walk in the room.")
"I'm very high in Arizona."
"I certainly respect La David, he, who, by the way, I called La David from the beginning. Just so you understand, they put a chart, in front—La David. Says La David Johnson. So I called—right from the beginning, there was no hesitation."
"I have one of the great memories of all time," he said, while pointing to his brain.
"I think the press makes me more uncivil than I am. You know, people don't understand. I was a nice student...I went to an Ivy League college. I did very well. I'm a very intelligent person."
God help us.
Unfortunately, he is the President."
Trump for the day
Andrew Taylor has an Associated Press article about the latest move by Congress:
The House on Thursday gave a significant boost to President Donald Trump's promise to cut taxes, narrowly passing a GOP budget that shelves longstanding concerns over Federal deficits in favor of a rewrite of the tax code that Republicans promise will jump-start the economy.Rico says that of course Trump's tax plan would benefit the wealthy and corporations; that's why they elected him.
The 216-212 vote permits Republicans to begin work on a follow-up trillion-dollar tax cut and move it through Congress without fear of blocking tactics by Democrats. The tax bill is the top item on the GOP agenda, and would be Trump's first major win in Congress and, Republicans hope, a much-needed boost for the party's political fortunes on the eve of next year's midterm elections.
GOP leaders scrambled in recent days to overcame opposition from House conservatives unhappy about deficits and debt, and lawmakers from Democratic-leaning high-tax states, who are upset about plans to curb the state and local tax deduction.
The Senate passed the measure last week and the House endorsed it without changes, a step designed to allow Republicans to move quickly in hopes of passing it into law this year. The goal is a full rewrite of the inefficient, loophole-laden tax code in hopes of lower rates for corporations and other businesses and a burst of economic growth.
"Big news: Budget just passed," tweeted Trump.
Republicans view passage of the upcoming tax measure as a career-defining dream, and its importance has only grown in the wake of the party's debacle on health care. But the tax plan's popularity is not a given with voters, and fissures among Republicans already threaten to slow the measure.
Twenty Republicans opposed the measure, a mix of spending hawks and centrists. Several lawmakers from New York and New Jersey who supported the House plan earlier this month opposed the measure over worries about the state and local tax deduction.
"This isn't over," said Representative Tom MacArthur, a Republican from New Jersey, who opposed the budget after voting for it earlier this month. House Speaker Paul Ryan, a Republican from Wisconsin, said concerns by lawmakers such as MacArthur about the deduction would be addressed in coming days, and it was the topic of a post-vote meeting that included top GOP leaders.
"We stood firm to let them know we're not kidding," said Representative John Katko, a Republican from New York, as he exited the session.
A battle over tax-free contributions to retirement accounts has also broken open, and Republican tax writers have yet to lock down dozens of crucial details on tax rates and preferences. Republicans may also drop efforts to fully repeal taxes on multimillion-dollar estates, even though the idea is a longstanding feature of the party's tax agenda.
The underlying budget measure abandons the Republican Party's longstanding promise to rein in deficits in favor of Trump's boast of "massive tax cuts". The measure drops proposed cuts to mandatory programs such as food stamps, though conservatives promise to take on spending cuts later.
"I still feel strongly about addressing unsustainable mandatory spending," said Representative Diane Black, a Republican from Tennessee, who chairs the House Budget Committee. "I think we will tackle this important issue in the future. We don't have a choice."
Democrats united against the plan, arguing its tax cuts will pad the bank accounts of the wealthy and the balance sheets of corporations, while delivering modest relief, or none at all, to middle-income taxpayers. "These tax cuts will not create an economic boom, but will instead lead to a higher concentration of wealth among the rich, while dramatically increasing deficits and debt," said Representative John Yarmuth, a Democrat from Kentucky.
The budget plan calls for five trillion dollars in spending cuts over the decade, including cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and the Obama-era health care law, though Republicans have no plans to actually impose those cuts with follow-up legislation. Some Democrats criticized the measure for ruthless spending cuts; others took the opposite approach, failing it for tackling the deficit.
Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady, a Republican from Texas, said immediately after the vote that he'll release the tax measure on 1 November 2017 and a panel vote is expected the week of 6 November in hopes of a House vote before Thanksgiving. That timetable is ambitious, as numerous details, including ways to raise revenues to help finance cuts to individual and corporate tax rates, remain unresolved.
House Republicans, for instance, are looking at curtailing tax-free deposits in 401(k) retirement accounts, a move that could raise revenue in the near term as retirement savings shift to Roth-style accounts that are funded with after-tax earnings.
Trump says he opposes curbing 401(k) donations, however, which tossed a monkey wrench into the process. And Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican from Wisconsin, came out squarely against reducing the cap on 401(k) contributions in an interview on CNN.
"To do tax reform, you need money. Right now, even as we speak, they appear to be going wobbly on some of the issues they've raised with great certainty in previous weeks," said top Ways and Means panel Democrat Richard Neal of Massachusetts. "They've got a revenue problem, a real revenue problem. And you have to make some dramatic changes to benefits that people across America have come to expect and enjoy."
An Associated Press-NORC poll found most Americans saying Trump's tax plan would benefit the wealthy and corporations, and less than half believing his message that "massive tax cuts" would help middle-class workers.
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