• British state-backed reinsurer has £4.5 billion to cover Olympic Games terror-related losses

    Pool Re, the British state-backed reinsurer which covers commercial property losses from  terror attack-related activities, has £4.5 billion ($7.327 billion) of assets to cover the Summer Olympic Games. Pool Re said it had no plans to jack up premiums for the event. If the damage from bombings or other terror-related incidents were to cost more than that amount, the British taxpayer, under the Pool Re structure, would step in to cover the difference. Pool Re was set up in the 1990s when the U.K. government was worried that the terror campaign pursued by Irish militant groups could make London property uninsurable and damage the national economy.

  • Surface-to-air missiles to protect London Olympic Games

    British security sources revealed that the security envelope developed to protect the Summer Olympic Games in London will include six Rapier surface-to-air missile (SAM) batteries. The British security forces will conduct, between 2 and 10 May, a massive exercise, called Exercise Olympic Guardian, on land, sea, and in the air in the London and Weymouth areas. For those familiar with London: For the exercise, six sites were selected for deployment of the SAM dummies: the Lexington Building in Tower Hamlets; the Fred Wigg Tower in Waltham Forest, east London; Blackheath Common; Oxleas Wood, Eltham; William Girling Reservoir, Enfield; and Barn Hill in Epping Forest.

  • NATO prepares for a new, futuristic war

    NATO’s Operation Locked Shields, an international military exercise the military alliance conducted last month, was different from trasditional war games. There were no bullets, tanks, aircraft, ships, or camouflage face-paint. The troops involved in the exercise spent most of their time in air-conditioned rooms within a high security military base in Estonia. The exercise, a window into what a future war would look like, had one team of IT specialists detailed to attack nine other teams, located in different parts of Europe. The IT experts, working from their terminals in the Nato Co-operative Cyber Defense Center of Excellence, created viruses, worms, Trojan Horses, and other Internet attacks, aiming to hijack and extract data from the computers of their “enemies.”

  • Post-cold warPost-communist depression

    A new study reveals how a radical economic policy devised by Western economists put former Soviet states on a road to bankruptcy and corruption

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  • Law enforcementU.K. police learning to battle cartels in El Paso

    This week law enforcement officers from the United Kingdom are in El Paso, Texas to train with DHS; the special agents from the U.K.’s Serious Organized Crime Agency are in town specifically to learn how to combat the growing threat of trafficking