Post by Admin on Dec 10, 2019 10:29:47 GMT
North Korea may have tested a new rocket engine on Saturday. Satellite images appear to show ground disturbed at the Sohae Satellite Launching Ground in the northwest, "where North Korea has conducted banned satellite launches and missile engine tests in recent years," AP reports, citing North Korean statements and Arms Control Wonk Jeffrey Lewis.
The test comes as Kim Jong Un ups the pressure on Donald Trump to return to nuclear talks with concessions by year's end. North Korean officials returned to insults, calling Trump a "heedless and erratic old man" who is running scared, a separate AP report said.
The test is likely related to a satellite-launch vehicle, not an ICBM, according to Kim Dae-young, an analyst at South Korea's Korea Research Institute for National Strategy. AP:"The fact that North Korea hasn't revealed what kind of test it conducted also indicates the country is still interested in diplomacy with the United States."
The Russian military just entered Raqqa, Syria, "in one of the starkest examples yet of how Moscow has filled the vacuum created by President Donald Trump's decision to pull U.S. forces from northern Syria," Reuters reports today from Moscow. This new backfilling is on top of the former U.S. helicopter base the Defense Department abandoned hastily in October. A bit more from Reuters, here.
As well: Turkey says it just deported 11 French terrorism suspects, including four women and seven children, Reuters reports separately today.
By the way: Get to better Turkey's military drones, since they're "an export product that's disrupting NATO," as Dan Gettinger of the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College wrote in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists last week.
Nearly half of military respondents say Russia's an ally, according to a public-opinion survey released by the Reagan Foundation last week, Voice of America reports. The same is believed by 28% of all respondents, up from 19% last year.
This would appear to be a remarkable information-warfare victory for a country that seized Crimea in 2014, interfered with the U.S. general election, and is continuing to inject propaganda into Americans' social-media feeds.
VOA: "Russian efforts to weaken the West through a relentless campaign of information warfare may be starting to pay off, cracking a key bastion of the U.S. line of defense: the military...nearly half of armed services households questioned, 46%, said they viewed Russia as ally." Read on, here.
Happening today in Paris: a four-nation summit to end the war in Ukraine. AP reports: "The leaders of Ukraine, Russia, Germany and France are holding a series of meetings at the Elysee presidential palace to try to revive a 2015 peace deal that's been largely ignored."
But don't hold your breath since "A major breakthrough at the summit is unlikely," AP writes, "and Ukrainian protesters in Kyiv are heaping pressure on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy not to surrender too much to Russian President Vladimir Putin at their first face-to-face meeting." Read on, here.
The Afghanistan papers. Thanks to some FOIA work from the Washington Post's Craig Whitlock, we can now see for ourselves "more than 2,000 pages of interviews and memos [that] reveal a secret history" of the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan…and how the whole thing has been going pretty poorly for quite a while now.
For what it's worth: "The World Bank has warned that the war-stricken country will still require billions of dollars in international aid over many years after a peace deal to deliver basic services and sustain any potential peace," the New York Times reported Friday.
See for yourself what a case looks like as it's heard by an AI judge, here.
On that note: Researchers are finding that "AI programs can be sabotaged by even subtle tweaks to the data used to train them," WIRED reported around Thanksgiving. Read over some of that research, here.
