A whole nation just got hacked

By Ivana Kottasová, CNN

Updated 0417 GMT (1217 HKT) July 21, 2019

Hong Kong braces for another round of mass demonstrations

Police cordon off government complex ahead of Sunday’s pro-democracy march

Lily Kuo in Hong Kong

Sun 21 Jul 2019 06.21 BST

Police and demonstrators braced for more mass protests in Hong Kong on Sunday, the latest in weeks of unrest in a political movement that shows few signs of slowing.

A planned march on Sunday marks the seventh consecutive weekend when residents have come out en masse against the government. The protests, which began over a now suspended extradition bill, have turned into a wider democracy movement in the Chinese territory.

Ahead of Sunday’s march through the city centre, police built water barriers around their headquarters and set a security cordon around the government complex. Metal fences, garbage bins and other street materials, which demonstrators have dismantled and made into makeshift barricades in past protests, have been removed. Workers have also glued bricks onto the ground to ensure they are not used as weapons.

Living SustainablyCan We Save the Planet Without Having to Do Without?

Many in Germany are trying to do their part to slow climate change. They are conscientious about the purchases they make, they ride bikes and they try to reduce their trash and carbon footprint. They can’t solve the problem on their own, but they could force politicians and businesses to act.

By Simon Hage, Anton Rainer, Thomas Schulz and Gerald Traufetter

Saving the planet isn’t going to be easy. It’ll take effort. Like packing children’s lunches into recycled glass jars and wrapping them in wool socks to prevent them from shattering in kids’ backpacks. Or making homemade detergent out of curd soap, soda and water. Whatever it takes to avoid plastic packaging. The Meuser family has been living this way for half a year.

“We’re only taking small steps, but that alone feels so liberating,” says Maik Meuser, 42. “But we also have to invest time and energy,” says Nicole Kallwies-Meuser, 41.

Thousands rally in Moscow for free and fair local elections

More than 20,000 people packed a Moscow square Saturday to protest the authorities’ refusal to allow opposition candidates to register for local polls.

Profile: Farouk El-Baz, the Egyptian behind the Moon landings

Egyptian-born Farouk El-Baz was part of NASA’s Apollo 11 ground crew at just 31 years old.

by Alasdair Soussi

Half a century ago, as Apollo 11’s lunar module, known as the Eagle, made its way to the surface of the Moon, rows of scientists and space experts back in the United States state of Texas joined the rest of the world in holding their breath.

Onboard the spaceflight were commander Neil Armstrong and lunar module pilot, Edwin Eugene “Buzz” Aldrin, Jr. Michael Collins, whose role was to ferry the two men from Earth and back again, manned the command module, Columbia, in orbit.

Among those at Mission Control in Houston was Gene Kranz, one of Apollo 11’s flight directors. But joining the rest of the ground crew was a brilliant 31-year-old Egyptian scientist. His name was Farouk El-Baz – and his participation with Apollo 11 would launch his scientific career to dizzying heights.

Bianca Devins: The teenager whose murder was exploited for clicks

By Kelly-Leigh CooperBBC News

Like many other teenagers her age, Bianca Devins lived her life online.

The 17-year-old had recently graduated from high school and was looking forward to starting a psychology course at a community college later this year.

As last Saturday approached, she wrote on a gaming platform about how excited she was to be travelling the 250 miles from upstate New York to a concert in Queens. But before she could return home on Sunday morning, Bianca was dead.

The exact relationship she’d had with the man accused of killing her remains unclear. But in the hours after his arrest, it emerged he had shared graphic photographs of the murder online.

One of the interesting things about Star Trek is that it’s not an economy based on scarcity. Within the limitations of energy (and there is a whole lot of it even if you don’t think it’s quite enough to stop Implosion to a New Singularity) and ingenuity one may just say to the Computer, “Make it so,” and so it is. 3-D Printing on a molecular scale.

People pretty much get to do what they want and for every Reginald Endicott Barclay III who has a burning desire to be a Starfleet Officer despite appallingly little aptitude for it, and who is jollied along because one of the “leadership challenges” one must face to be good is to give even your most useless team members a task that will contribute to your over all goal and give them a sense of accomplishment without being too patronizing; you’ll find a dozen Roberts (pronounced the same as Colbert) who don’t like Computers or Replicators or Space and think it’s a perfectly fine and worth application of talent to grow Grapes in the same soil using the same methods as your family has for thousands of years.

Once we were a people who could aspire to goals like that.

11

Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon July 1969, A.D. WE CAME IN PEACE FOR ALL MANKIND.

Iran tanker seizure: UK ‘deeply concerned’

The UK government has said it is “deeply concerned” about Iran’s “unacceptable” seizure of a British-flagged tanker in the Gulf.

The Stena Impero’s owners say they have been unable to contact the ship, which was seized in the Strait of Hormuz, a key waterway in the region.

Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt has warned of “serious consequences” if the situation is not resolved quickly.

Iran said the ship was “violating international maritime rules”.

A second British-owned Liberian-flagged tanker, the MV Mesdar, was also boarded by armed guards but was released.

Yang Hengjun: China tells Australia to stop interfering in writer’s detention

Not the least of which is that Mohammed bin Salman is a brutal dictator who vivisects U.S. Journalists for his sadistic pleasure.

Yemen Has Been a Saudi Prince’s War. Now It’s His Quagmire.
By David D. Kirkpatrick, The New York Times
July 18, 2019

From the beginning of Saudi Arabia’s intervention in Yemen, it was Prince Mohammed’s war.

Prince Mohammed bin Salman, then 29 and in his third month as defense minister, was shown in official photographs surrounded by generals, poring over maps, inspecting a helicopter and even wearing a pilot’s headset while riding in the back of a military transport plane.

Four years later, the war is lodged in a stalemate and Prince Mohammed’s signature fight has become a quagmire, diplomats and analysts say. A steep pullout by his key ally, the United Arab Emirates, they say, raises questions about Saudi Arabia’s ability to lead the war on its own.

Emboldened by the hawkish comments of Trump administration officials, Prince Mohammed is now hoping Washington will help make up the difference with new American military support, according to diplomats with knowledge of the conversations.

But congressional opposition to the war makes that highly unlikely, leaving the prince with some potentially humbling choices.

“It hurts him because it injures his credibility as a successful leader,” said Kristin Smith Diwan, an analyst at the Arab Gulf States Institute. His personal investment, she said, could motivate him to search for some partial accommodation he could label a victory.

“Not many people in Saudi Arabia feel this is a wise investment for the future,” she added.

The Saudis launched the campaign in 2015 to try to roll back a takeover by the Houthis, a Yemeni faction backed by Iran. The war has killed thousands of civilians and put more than 12 million people at risk of starvation but has failed to dislodge the Houthis from control of the capital and much of the country.

While the Saudis have fought almost entirely from the air, the Emiratis, seasoned by years of combat alongside the American military in Afghanistan and elsewhere, led virtually every successful ground advance. Behind the scenes, Emirati officers, weapons and money played an equally critical role in holding together a fractious alliance of mutually hostile Yemeni militias, which have already begun jostling to fill the power vacuum left by the Emiratis.

As a result, analysts said, the Emirati exit makes the prospect of a Saudi military victory even more remote.

“Saudi Arabia can prevent peace from breaking out and can bleed the Houthis on a never-ending northern front,” Michael Knights, a researcher at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, argued in a report this week. “But only the U.A.E. had the military potency and local allied forces to credibly threaten defeat for the Houthis.”

But the Saudis cannot easily withdraw either, partly because of the kingdom’s 1,100-mile border with Yemen.
…
“The Saudis don’t have the luxury of walking out of Yemen,” said Farea al-Muslimi, chairman of the Sanaa Center for Strategic Studies, a research institute in the Yemeni capital. “There is no way to flee.”
…
But Prince Mohammed has now consolidated power as the crown prince and de facto ruler under his aging father, King Salman, and faces little domestic pressure to end the war, diplomats and analysts say.

The crown prince appears to have suppressed any opposition from within the royal family. The royal court controls the news media, and with Saudi forces largely in the air there have been few reports of Saudi casualties.
…
One reason the war has not generated more domestic opposition, he said, is that the fear of Iranian influence that motivated the intervention “is not just limited to the royal family — the Saudis just have an intense, passionate feeling that they are under threat.”

Yet the Emirati drawdown has also severely weakened the Saudis’ bargaining power, raising the potential cost to Prince Mohammed of any negotiations to end the Houthi attacks.

Boxed in, he has asked for more aid from the United States. The Americans already provide logistical support and sell weapons to the Saudis. The Saudis are hoping for at least greater sharing of American intelligence and possibly the deployment of special forces teams or military advisers, diplomats said.

But Washington, the Saudis complain, has sent mixed messages about its support for the war. To the surprise of the Saudi leaders, outrage over the Saudi killing and dismemberment last fall of the dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who lived in Virginia and wrote for The Washington Post, prompted American lawmakers to look more skeptically at the war in Yemen.

What?! You’re not just allowed to kill Journalists? They’re the scum of the earth (Happy Belated Stockton).

Congress passed legislation this year demanding an end to United States military support for the war, including arms sales to Saudi Arabia. Pentagon officials, meanwhile, have concluded on their own that the war has degenerated into an unwinnable quagmire and have urged the Saudis for months to try to negotiate an end to the fighting.

But President Trump has repeatedly vetoed legislation cutting off American support for the war. As tensions with Iran have heated up, other administration officials — like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and John R. Bolton, the national security adviser — have sounded almost as hawkish as the Saudis about the danger posed by the Iranian alliance with the Houthis.
…
The Saudis say statements like Mr. Pompeo’s remind them that Washington shares an interest in containing Iranian influence by rolling back the Houthis.

“Why haven’t the Americans carried out a single operation to help?” asked Mustafa Alani, a scholar at the Saudi-backed Gulf Research Center who is close to the royal court.

He recommended that the Saudis take a blunter approach to convincing Washington that the Houthis were an American problem: withdraw completely and let the United States deal with the anti-Western militants and Iranian surrogates he says would overrun Yemen.

“I would do what the Americans did in Somalia,” Mr. Alani said. “Turn off the light, shut the door, and say, ‘to hell with it.’”

Asked about Saudi plans to fill the void left by the Emirati drawdown, an official of the Saudi Embassy in Washington said last week that the kingdom would rely more on Yemeni allies.

“The coalition has implemented training programs that have enabled local partners to develop the capability to defend their country,” the official said in a written statement, issued on condition of anonymity under standard Saudi practices.

But the Yemeni militias have already started disagreeing about who will take charge in the Emiratis’ absence, underscoring the fragility of the alliance.

Last week, allies of Tareq Saleh, a maverick nephew of the former Yemeni strongman Ali Abdullah Saleh, floated the idea that the Saudi-led coalition had tapped him to be the new leader of the Yemeni forces previously under the Emiratis.

That did not last long. A powerful ultraconservative Islamist militia known as the Giants Brigade, also backed by the Emiratis, quickly issued a statement saying that it would never accept Mr. Saleh because he was from northern Yemen, not the south.

Then another powerful militia, composed of southern Yemeni separatists paid and armed by the Emiratis, began promoting itself as the favorite successor to Emirati leadership. A separatist television network broadcast video of a top Emirati general touring its bases.

The separatists are the sworn enemies of the Yemeni president sponsored by the Saudis, Abdu Rabbu Monsur Hadi.

“The problem for the Saudis today is that in contrast to the Emiratis, their main client is quite weak and ineffective,” said Emile Hokayem, a scholar at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, referring to Mr. Hadi.

Whatever happens now, Mr. Hokayem added, “whether they like it or not, the Saudis own that.”

Fun little War you’re having there, bombing Hospitals and civilians. Best of all you’re losing so the payouts to the Military Industrial Complex never stop.

You know, like a monkey.