Link — 18 Oct 2018

Urging the world community to prefer dialogue over pressure, he suggested: “Colonial-era diktat and coercion should be sent into the archive or the dustbin of history.”

As we follow the lurid news about the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, it’s important to realize that this ugly incident represents just a small piece of the much bigger geopolitical game playing itself out in the Gulf….

As elite US special operations fighters, they had years of specialized training by the US military to protect America. But now they were working for a different master: a private US company that had been hired by the United Arab Emirates, a tiny desert monarchy on the Persian Gulf.

On that night, December 29, 2015, their job was to carry out an assassination.

Their armed attack, described to BuzzFeed News by two of its participants and corroborated by drone surveillance footage, was the first operation in a startling for-profit venture. For months in war-torn Yemen, some of America’s most highly trained soldiers worked on a mercenary mission of murky legality to kill prominent clerics and Islamist political figures....

The company that hired the soldiers and carried out the attack is Spear Operations Group, incorporated in Delaware and founded by Abraham Golan, a charismatic Hungarian Israeli security contractor who lives outside of Pittsburgh. He led the team’s strike against Mayo....

Golan said that during his company’s months-long engagement in Yemen, his team was responsible for a number of the war’s high-profile assassinations, though he declined to specify which ones. He argued that the US needs an assassination program similar to the model he deployed. “I just want there to be a debate,” he said. “Maybe I’m a monster. Maybe I should be in jail. Maybe I’m a bad guy. But I’m right.”... 

A member of the 15-man team suspected in the disappearance of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi has died in an accident back in Saudi Arabia, according to Turkish media, prompting suspicion of a cover up.

If any nation decides to attack Russia with nuclear weapons, it may end life on Earth; but unlike the aggressors, the Russians are sure to go to heaven, President Vladimir Putin has said.

“Any aggressor should know that retribution will be inevitable and he will be destroyed. And since we will be the victims of his aggression, we will be going to heaven as martyrs. They will simply drop dead, won’t even have time to repent,” Putin said during a session of the Valdai Club in Sochi....

Researchers from Washington State University have published a new report of the Great Drought, the most destructive known drought of the past 800 years - and how it sparked the Global Famine that claimed the lives of 50 million people. The scientists warn that the Earth's current warming climate could spark a similar drought, but even worse.

One of the lead researchers, Deepti Singh, a professor in WSU's School of the Environment, used rainfall records and climate reconstruction models to characterize the environmental conditions leading up to the Great Drought, a period in the mid-1870s known for widespread crop failures across Asia, Brazil, and Africa. The drought was connected to the most extreme manifestation of the El Nino supercycle ever recorded.…

The release of the study came days before the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that global warming could cause intense droughts, floods, extreme heat and poverty for hundreds of millions of people....

Carrier killer? That would be a game-changer.

Flying at hypersonic speed poses a number of challenges in material sciences and engineering due to the high temperature and pressure affecting the vehicle. Russia has applied its technologies to develop a hypersonic cruise missile called Kinzhal, already in use with the military. It is presumed to be a countermeasure to aircraft carrier strike groups, the backbone of the US’ ability to project military power worldwide. Putin said Russia is ahead of other nations in terms of hypersonic weapons....