Category: z-Exclude

Davis-Monthan Air Force Base begins retiring A-10 fleet

The first set of A-10 Warthogs from the 355th Wing at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, Arizona, have moved to the boneyard after nearly a half-century of flight. Both of the aircraft, which belonged to the 354th Fighter Squadron, didn’t have to go far to retire, according to an announcement Thursday. The second of the two aircraft taxied to its final…

Foreign Affairs: Spying From Space

  In 2023, the Department of Defense announced an ambitious plan to launch 1,000 satellites over the next decade. Over the same period, the National Reconnaissance Office, which runs the country’s spy satellites, plans to quadruple the size of its fleet of a couple dozen satellites.   The U.S. government can expand its fleet this quickly because satellites have become…

FTC orders Blackbaud to boost security after massive data breach

Blackbaud has settled with the Federal Trade Commission after being charged with poor security and reckless data retention practices, leading to a May 2020 ransomware attack and a data breach affecting millions of people. Blackbaud is a U.S.-based company listed on NASDAQ with operations in multiple countries and a provider of cloud-based donor data management software catering to nonprofit organizations,…

Iran’s Policies Intensify: From Punishments to Worker Protests

In a disturbing turn of events, an imprisoned Iranian, Mehdi Mousavian, has initiated a hunger strike to protest the Iranian judiciary’s plan to gouge out his left eye as a retribution for allegedly blinding a policeman during a 2017 protest. Mousavian was sentenced in 2019 to retribution-in-kind, for throwing a stone at the policeman’s eye, a sentence he vehemently denies….

US Reviewing Venezuelan Sanctions Policy in Wake of Court Decision

  The U.S. is reviewing its sanctions policy against Venezuela after a court in that country upheld a ban preventing presidential candidate Maria Corina Machado from holding office, the U.S. State Department said Saturday. The ruling by Venezuela’s Supreme Justice Tribunal on Friday means Machado, a 56-year-old industrial engineer, cannot register her candidacy for presidential elections scheduled for the second…

Canada Starts Inquiry Into Election Interference by China, Others

Vancouver, British Columbia — An official commission is about to get underway in Ottawa as Canada tries to determine to what extent China and other countries interfered in its last two elections. The investigation also will examine whether Russia and India interfered as well. All three countries have denied the allegations. Former Conservative Member of Parliament Kenny Chiu (Canadian House of…

Donald Trump attends defamation trial after win

WASHINGTON: Fresh off his victory in the Iowa Republican caucuses, Donald Trump arrived in a Manhattan courtroom for the next high-stakes trial of his crowded legal calendar – this time in a defamation lawsuit by E. Jean Carroll, the writer who won a separate sexual-abuse case against him last year. US district judge Lewis Kaplan, who is overseeing the trial,…

Residents of Iceland town ordered to evacuate again as new volcanic fissures pose threat

REYKJAVIK: Residents of the Icelandic fishing town of Grindavik are facing a second evacuation as new volcanic fissures have opened nearby, prompting the National Commissioner of Police to issue an evacuation order, CNN reported. Grindavik, situated approximately 70 kilometres southwest of Reykjavik on the Reykjanes peninsula, had previously been evacuated in November due to heightened seismic activity that culminated in…

Share with Care: 2,217 Domains Blocked, the Majority for Circumvention

At the height of the online file-sharing boom, the phrase ‘Sharing is Caring’ was a reminder that peer-to-peer file-sharing systems lived or died on the availability of upload bandwidth. Its presentation allowed it to be about much more than that. The ‘give to get’ philosophy forms part of the BitTorrent protocol even today, but Sharing is Caring was a phrase…

Cubans face soaring fuel prices as Canadian tourists swoop in for winter getaways

Whatever the weather in Cuba this February, people may be feeling gloomy about the cost of living. The Cuban government is set to raise fuel prices fivefold at the start of next month. Havana says the move is a must, as it seeks funds to trim its deficit spending and buy needed goods from abroad. The change is not expected to have…

Microsoft debates what to do with AI Lab in China

SEATTLE – When Microsoft opened an advanced research lab in Beijing in 1998, it was a time of optimism about technology and China. The company hired hundreds of researchers for the lab, which pioneered Microsoft’s work in speech, image and facial recognition and the kind of artificial intelligence that later gave rise to online chatbots such as ChatGPT. The Beijing…

Ukrainian hacker spins up 1 million virtual servers to illegally mine crypto

A 29-year-old man in Ukraine was arrested this week for using hacked accounts to create 1 million virtual servers used to mine $2 million in cryptocurrency.  As announced today by Europol, the suspect is believed to be the mastermind behind a large-scale cryptojacking scheme that involves hijacking cloud computing resources for crypto-mining. By using the computing resources of others’ servers to…

Airbus sets sales record in 2023 amid surging jet demand

LONDON – Airbus set a sales record in 2023 by racking up more than 2,000 net orders, as airlines splashed out on purchases amid surging demand for fuel-efficient aircraft following the Covid-19 pandemic. The European plane-maker registered 2,094 net orders, driven largely by mega deals from India’s IndiGo and Air India, as well as a purchase by Turkish Airlines that…

‘Science’ in Service of Agenda

Starting in the mid-20th century, companies began distorting and manipulating science to favor specific commercial interests. Big tobacco is both the developer and the poster child of this strategy. When strong evidence that smoking caused lung cancer emerged in the 1950s, the tobacco industry began a campaign to obscure this fact. The Unmaking of Science The tobacco industry scientific disinformation…

The likely cause of mid-air blowout and the other airlines operating the same Boeing plane

A mid-air blowout aboard a Boeing 737-9 MAX passenger plane has led to dozens of aircraft worldwide being grounded while engineers try to establish what went wrong. Six people aboard Alaska Airlines flight 1282 from Portland to California were injured after a window and chunk of fuselage blew out of the plane in mid-air shortly after takeoff on 5 January….

‘Loose hardware’ on 737-9 Max jets, flights still running: Latest in the Alaska Airlines investigation

NEW DELHI: Alaska Airlines flight 1282 made an emergency landing as a part of the plane flew off mid-flight going from Portland, Oregon to Ontario, California on January 5, causing panic and worldwide concerns on flight safety. Following the incident, aviation authorities and airline companies are conducting checks on their own planes to prevent any more potential disasters.An investigation has…