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Company to note
The Obama administration wants to send tens of thousands of additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan; these troops will need protection from land mines and IEDs; Force Protection, a company producing Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MARP) vehicles, stands to benefit
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Nine countries around the Gulf of Aden sign an accord enhancing cooperation in the fight against piracy in the Indian Ocean and Gulf of Aden
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Nuclear matters
Terrorists may try to smuggle nuclear materials into the United States through Ireland; Irish government will build radioactive waste facility near Shannon airport in case radiological screening of aircraft bound for the United States discovers such material
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IEDs have killed 161 coalition troops in Afghanistan last year, and wounded additional 722; this is more than double 2007 casualties; the Pentagon is turning to specialized UAVs to combat the deadly weapons
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Liverpool University researchers develop blast-resistant concrete; the Ultra High Performance Fiber Reinforced Concrete is able to absorb a thousand times more energy than conventional mixtures
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UAV update
Dutch military rents Israeli UAVs for Dutch units serving in Afghanistan; Israeli citizens are not allowed to serve in Afghanistan, so the Dutch will have to hire contractors from the U.S. or .. to operate the UAVs
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In Vietnam, the United States used Agent Orange to defoliate jungles and deny the Viet Cong cover; in northern Israel, the IDF uses antelopes to eat the foliage to deny Hezbollah fighters cover
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Study finds that 62 percent of the prescription-only medicines offered on the Internet are fakes; some of the fake-drug schemes are operated by terrorist organizations as a means of raising funds
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IDF deploys antelopes to Israel’s northern borders to clear the foliage which the military fears could function as cover for Hezbollah fighters
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New, mammoth database will include not only enhanced fingerprint capabilities, but also other forms of biometric identification like palm prints, iris scans, facial imaging, scars, marks, and tattoos — in one searchable system
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Trend: Homeland security as a job source
CBP launches National Career Day around the United States to announce CBP’s goal for hiring approximately 11,000 frontline and mission and operations support positions in 2009
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The shape of things to come
Looking for an answer to stop fleeing cars or suicide trucks hurtling toward their target, an Arizona company developed a tentacle-based device that ensnares the vehicle and brings it to a halt
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40 al-Qaeda members died after being exposed to the plague during a biological weapons test; test took place in cave hideouts in Tizi Ouzou province, 150 kilometres east of the Algerian capital Algiers
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After assassinating a high official involved in building the high-speed rail connecting three Basque cities to Madrid, ETA, the Basque separatists group, warns it will use terror to stop the project
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The Gaza campaign
In no other conflict have UAVs been integrated more deeply into both surveillance and attack missions as they have during the Gaza war; how does a UAV-based war look to a UAV operator on the ground?
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Gaza news flash
An Israel Air Force strike kills Hamas’s interior minister Said Siam and the head of Hamas security apparatus, Salah Abu Shreh
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Hovering petrol-powered prowler patrols to check Afghan ambush alleys so soldiers do not have to; device may be used by law enforcement in urban areas — and future systems may carry weapons
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The Gaza campaign: News analysis // Ben Frankel
The Israeli military campaign in Gaza has so far been a success — if brutal success — by any objective measure of war: relative destruction and the number of dead and injured on both sides; Hamas, though, is not going to raise the white flag of surrender regardless of these objective measures; Israelis debate on how to end a war with an adversary that does not sign surrender agreements; we should watch carefully, because the war we see in Gaza shows us the future of armed conflict
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Rice University researchers develop artificial intelligence-based computer program which can scan news reports quickly to identify which terrorist group is behind a terrorist attack being covered in the reports
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The Gaza campaign: Analysis // Ben Frankel
The strategy Israel’s defense minister Ehud Barak is pursuing in Gaza harks back to an earlier Israeli approach — the unalloyed realism of David Ben Gurion; this approach has served Israel well; alternative approaches have not
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The long view
To prevent Iranian nukes, a negotiated deal better than a military strike: David Albright
David Albright is the founder and president of the Washington, D.C.-based non-profit Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), and author of several books on fissile materials and nuclear weapons proliferation. In a testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday, and an interview with Deutsche Welle on Thursday, Albrights says that there is every reason to be suspicious of Iran because it has cheated on its obligations in the past and has been uncooperative on an ongoing basis. Iran has also built many sites in secret, so any agreement with Iran should have extra insurance — a more powerful inspection and verification tool to try to ferret out any secret nuclear activities or facilities that Iran would build. Still, a negotiated deal, if it includes sufficiently robust inspection and verification measures, would be a more effective way than a military strike to make sure Iran does not develop nuclear weapons.
Fusion centers, created to fight domestic terrorism, suffering from mission creep: Critics
Years before the 9/11 attacks, law enforcement agencies throughout the country, alarmed by the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, began to monitor and investigate signs of domestic terrorism. That increased monitoring, and the need for coordination among various law enforcement agencies, gave rise to the fusion centers. A new report, which is supported by current and former law enforcement and government officials, concludes that post-9/11, fusion centers and the FBI teams which work with them shifted their focus from domestic terrorism to global terrorism and other crimes, including drug trafficking.Experts say that at a time when the number of domestic terrorism threats, many of which are linked to right-wing extremist groups, is surging, law enforcement must refocus their attention on the threats from within.
Lack of evidence-based terrorism research hobbles counterterrorism strategies
The Global Terrorism Database at the University of Maryland estimates that groups connected with al-Qaeda and the Islamic State committed almost 200 attacks per year between 2007 and 2010. That number has increased to about 600 attacks in 2013. As terrorism becomes more prevalent, the study of terrorism has also increased, which, in theory, should lead to more effective antiterrorism policies, and thus to less terrorism. The opposite is happening, however, and this could be partly due to the sort of studies which are being conducted. The problem: few of these studies are rooted in empirical analysis, and there is an “almost complete absence of evaluation research” concerning anti-terrorism strategies, in the words of a review of such studies.
California drought highlights the state’s economic divide
As much of Southern California enters into the spring and warmer temperatures, the effects of California’s historic drought begin to manifest themselves in the daily lives of residents, highlighting the economic inequality in the ways people cope. Following Governor Jerry Brown’s (D) unprecedented water rationing regulations,wealthier Californians weigh on which day of the week no longer to water their grass, while those less fortunate are now choosing which days they skip a bath.