Plus hacking galore and so much more. . .
We begin with a bold presidential action to head off a truly horrific domestic security threat, via the Independent:
President of Argentina adopts Jewish godson to ‘stop him turning into a werewolf’
The tradition to stop stigma about the ‘lobison’ has continued for a century
President Christina Fernández de Kirchner met Yair Tawil and his family at her office last week to mark the unusual ceremony, which dates back more than 100 years.
According to Argentinian folklore, the seventh son born to a family turns into the feared “el lobison”. The werewolf-like creature shows its true nature on the first Friday after boy’s 13th birthday, the legend says, turning the boy into a demon at midnight during every full moon, doomed to hunt and kill before returning to human form.
As well as feeding on excrement, unbaptized babies, and the flesh of the recently dead, the lobison was said to be unnaturally strong and able to spread its curse with a bite.
Fear of the lobison was so rife in 19th Century Argentina that some families abandoned or even murdered baby boys – an atrocity that sparked the unusual Presidential practice of adoption, aimed at stopping the deadly stigma.
Starting in 1907, the tradition was formally established by a decree in 1973 by Juan Domingo Peron, which also extended the practice to baby girls. Seventh sons or daughters – now much rarer than 100 years ago – gain the President as their official godparent as well as a gold medal and full educational scholarship.
Reminds us of a certain scene from a certain film:
From CNN, a vastly more credible threat to the security of us all:
Is AI a threat to humanity?
This year, arguably the world’s greatest living scientific mind, Stephen Hawking, and its leading techno-industrialist, Elon Musk, voiced their fears about the potentially lethal rise of artificial intelligence (AI). They were joined by philosophers, physicists and computer scientists, all of whom spoke out about the serious risks posed by the development of greater-than-human machine intelligence.
In a widely cited op-ed co-written with MIT physicist Max Tegmark, Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek, and computer scientist Stuart Russell, Hawking sounded the AI alarm. “One can imagine [AI] outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating human leaders, and developing weapons we cannot even understand. Whereas the short-term impact of AI depends on who controls it, the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all.”
Musk was reportedly more emphatic, expanding on his tweeted warnings by calling AI humanity’s biggest “existential risk” and likening it to “summoning the demon.”
The debate over AI was given a big boost this year by the publication of philosopher Nick Bostrom’s “Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies,” which makes a close study of just why and how AI may be so catastrophically dangerous (2013’s “Our Final Invention” by documentarian James Barrat makes a similar case).
From the Guardian, signs of cultural division:
‘I Can’t Breathe’ T-shirts see high-school basketball team disinvited from event
Mendocino High School teams out of Fort Bragg tournament
Too few members of girls team promised not to wear the shirts
A high school basketball tournament on the Northern California coast has become the latest flashpoint in nationwide protests over police killings of unarmed black men.
The boys and girls varsity basketball teams from Mendocino High School were disinvited from a tournament that starts on Monday at nearby Fort Bragg High, because of concerns players would wear T-shirts with the words “I Can’t Breathe” printed on them while warming up.
Several professional basketball players have worn “I Can’t Breathe” shirts during pre-game warmups, as have stars of the NFL. The slogan refers to the final words of Eric Garner, a New York man who died after being placed in an illegal chokehold during an arrest by NYPD officers in July. A grand jury decision not to indict the officer involved led to widespread protests in New York last month.
From the Washington Post, ditto — with emphasis added:
Michael Brown memorial destroyed overnight
People hurriedly cleaned and rebuilt a memorial to Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., on Friday morning after they said a car intentionally destroyed it.
Flowers, signs and other mementos, left in remembrance of the 18-year-old who was killed in a police shooting in August, were scattered throughout the streets, stirring supporters who saw pictures on social media to gather to restore the makeshift shrine.
Officer Timothy Zoll, the Ferguson Police Department’s public relations officer, said that no crime had been reported in connection to the memorial’s destruction. He suggested that the department would look at any video of the incident, but he did not specify whether the department would investigate.
“I don’t know that a crime has occurred,” Zoll said Friday. “But a pile of trash in the middle of the street? The Washington Post is making a call over this?”
From the Guardian, a shocking display of disdain for electoral oversight of people with guns:
Police turn backs on de Blasio at funeral of NYPD officer Rafael Ramos
Ramos and Officer Wenjian Liu were shot dead last Saturday
Union chief Lynch says police feel ‘betrayal’ by mayor
Hundreds of police officers turned their backs on the New York mayor Bill de Blasio on Saturday as he spoke during the funeral service for Rafael Ramos, one of two New York Police Department officers killed in an ambush shooting in Brooklyn last week.
Thousands of officers gathered outside Christ Tabernacle Church in Queens for the funeral, where speakers included vice-president Joe Biden, New York governor Andrew Cuomo and NYPD commissioner Bill Bratton.
Ramos and his partner, Wenjian Liu, were shot dead last Saturday by Ismaaiyl Brinsley, who had posted anti-police statements on social-media. Police have said Brinsley, who killed himself, was troubled and had first shot and wounded his ex-girlfriend in Baltimore before travelling to Brooklyn.
At a hospital after the shooting, the police union’s president, Patrick Lynch, and others turned their backs on the mayor in a sign of disrespect. Lynch blamed the mayor then for the officers’ deaths and said he had blood on his hands, because of comments made by de Blasio in relation to protests in the city last month over the death of Eric Garner, a Staten Island man, at the hands of police in July.
Another shocking display, via the Los Angeles Times:
LAPD wrongly reclassified some serious crimes as minor, Times review finds
The Times reviewed dozens of cases the Los Angeles Police Department initially documented as serious but later downgraded to minor offenses. A third of the time, the decision to reclassify the incident was wrong, The Times concluded.
When presented with the findings, LAPD officials acknowledged the errors but offered no explanation for them.
“They should not have been reclassified,” said Deputy Chief Kirk Albanese, who oversees the LAPD’s detective bureau and reviewed the Times’ analysis. “They should have been left as they were.”
The errors raise new questions about the accuracy of LAPD crime statistics, which have come under scrutiny this year, criminal-justice experts said.
A Times investigation last summer found that the LAPD significantly understated the city’s true level of crime when it misclassified nearly 1,200 violent crimes from a recent one-year period ending in September 2013.
From RT, Cold War 2.0:
‘Nuke trains’ with up to 30 Yars missiles rolling out from 2018 – Russian defense source
A Russian military source outlined the capabilities of Barguzin strategic missile train. The country may roll out five such disguised mobile launch platforms each carrying six RS-24 Yars missiles in five years.
A ‘nuclear train’ – properly called BZhRK, short for ‘combat railway missile complex’ in Russian – is a mobile platform for transporting and launching strategic nuclear missiles. Similarly to nuclear submarines, such trains are hard to wipe out in a preemptive strike because of their mobility and ability to be disguised as regular freight trains.
The Soviet Union had 12 such nuclear trains, each carrying three RT-23 Molodets (SS-24 Scalpel in NATO disambiguation) missiles, but they were released from combat duty after Russia and the US signed the START-2 treaty in 1993 and eventually decommissioned.
Last year the Russian military said that nuclear trains – which are no longer banned under the New START treaty – would be revived.
On to the spooky world, first with the Intercept:
The Mysterious Case of Prisoner 212
Researchers and reporters had long counted the total number of prisoners who cycled through Guantanamo at 779, but the Senate intelligence committee’s report on CIA torture revealed that there was one more previously unknown detainee. Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, also known as prisoner 212, was held at a secret black site at Guantanamo Bay, according to the report, bringing the total number of detainees to 780.
That al-Libi was held by the CIA is long established. After all, al-Libi’s name is notorious as the source of bad information used by the Bush administration to tie Saddam Hussein to Al-Qaeda to support the US invasion of Iraq — information he provided while being tortured in Egyptian custody, and later recanted.
More than a single digit change in the tally, al-Libi’s hitherto unknown presence at Guantanamo underscores how much remains unknown about the total number of detainees and their fates. The Senate report includes a list of 119 men– a rare official disclosure of the individuals held and in many cases tortured by the CIA. Only a fraction of those had previously been acknowledged as CIA detainees, though journalists and human rights groups had pieced together the population of prisoners from disclosures about Guantanamo, leaked documents, and court proceedings.
And from the New York Times, no Hope™ and no Change™:
After Scrutiny, C.I.A. Mandate Is Untouched
The Obama administration has made clear that it has no plans to make anyone legally accountable for the practices described by the C.I.A. as enhanced interrogation techniques and the Intelligence Committee as torture. The American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch sent a letter to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. this week asking him to appoint a special prosecutor to examine the report’s allegations, but the request will almost certainly be rejected.
And while Senator King called the Intelligence Committee’s report “Church Committee II,” he, like many other Democrats on the Intelligence Committee, remains a broad supporter of the C.I.A.’s paramilitary mission that Mr. Obama has embraced during his time in the White House.
During the presidential campaign in 2008, Mr. Obama railed against the agency’s use of torture and secret prisons during the Bush administration, and shuttered the detention program during his first week in office. But he has empowered the agency in other ways — including allowing its director, not the White House, to make the final decisions about drone strikes in Pakistan.
“Many presidents tend to be smitten with the instruments of the intelligence community. I think Obama was more smitten than most,” said one former senior Obama administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified intelligence matters. “This has been an intelligence presidency in a way we haven’t seen maybe since Eisenhower.” The C.I.A. had shifted from capturing and interrogating terrorism suspects to targeting them with armed drones even before Mr. Obama came to office. It was a tactic championed by Congress at the same time that lawmakers were beginning to criticize the agency’s detention and interrogation program.
Political business as usual, a matter of timing, via the Guardian:
ACLU accuses NSA of using holiday lull to ‘minimise impact’ of documents
Released on Christmas Eve, the documents are heavily redacted versions of reports by the NSA to the President’s Intelligence Oversight Board
The National Security Agency used the holiday lull to “minimise the impact” of a tranche of documents by releasing them on Christmas Eve, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said on Friday.
The documents, which were released in response to a legal challenge by the ACLU under the Freedom of Information Act, are heavily – in some places totally –redacted versions of reports by the NSA to the President’s Intelligence Oversight Board dating back to 2007.
A court ordered the documents released this past summer, and a 22 December deadline for that release was agreed upon, according to Patrick Toomey, a staff attorney at the ACLU’s national security project, because the NSA said it needed “six or seven months” to complete its review and redaction process.
A spokesperson for the NSA said that the 22 December deadline, “which was agreed to by all parties,” was met.
But according to Toomey, the ACLU didn’t receive the documents until “late in the day on the 23rd” – the NSA sent them by FedEx late on the 22nd – and the NSA didn’t publicly release them until Christmas Eve. “I certainly think the NSA would prefer to have the documents released right ahead of the holidays in order to have less public attention on what they contain,” Toomey said.
After the jump, Paraguay gets its first spookshop, another [regional] Hollywood film shutdown, a hacking denial and racist rhetoric from Pyongyang, another attack on the North Korean internet, box office numbers for The Interview, a YouTube bonanza, bad reviews from Asia, Beijing plays the grownup, and a growing Trans-Pacific political blowback crisis, fears of a Congressional hack, a Christmas hack and the reason why, China suffers a railway ticket hack, a major banking hack explained, denial of service/domain name attacks hit most organizations, Yemen’s spy boss briefly snatched, another Pakistani sectarian killing, a school massacre masterminded slain, more drone killings in Pakistan, Vietnam extends missile reach to China and mulls a blockade, Controversy over allegations of Korean border tunnels, a Tokyo/Seoul/Washington intelligence pact, China’s insular addition expands, Abe pushes a militarized Japanese constitution while he snubs a contrarian governor, and finally, cyberfacilitating the stalker. . .
Spy vs. Spy gets a new player, via MercoPress:
Paraguay’s first intelligence service created
The new national security network is aimed at detecting and neutralizing threats from domestic and international terrorist groups
President Horacio Cartes signed into law the creation of Paraguay’s first National Intelligence System (Sinai) service with the purpose of “detecting, neutralizing and counterbalancing the actions of domestic and international terrorist groups, and of transnational criminal organisations.” The Sinai shall be formed by a National Intelligence Council (CNI) and a National Intelligence Secretariat (SNI) reporting directly to the President, according to the decree available on the web since Wednesday.
The Sinai shall include the Ministries of the Interior and Defence, the National Antidrugs Secretariat (Seand) and the Money Laundering Prevention Secretariat (Sprelad) to “gather and process information domestically and internationally.” It shall “file bi-monthly secret reports” to the President and to the ministers and authorities deemed relevant in each case.
In addition to that, the role of the new body will be “to guarantee peace and the security of the State, protect national sovereignty, and preserve the [existing] constitutional order and democratic form of government.” The decree also specifies that the CNI shall be of advisory nature and will assemble every two months or whenever summoned by the national Secretary of Intelligence.
And from BBC News, strike up the bans:
Egypt bans Exodus Hollywood film
Egypt has banned a Hollywood film based on the Biblical book of Exodus because of what censors described as “historical inaccuracies”.
The head of the censorship board said these included the film’s depiction of Jews as having built the Pyramids, and that an earthquake, not a miracle by Moses, caused the Red Sea to part.
Exodus: Gods and Kings stars Christian Bale as Moses.
There have also been reports that the film is banned in Morocco.
Although the state-run Moroccan Cinema Centre (CCM) had given the film the green light, Moroccan business website Medias24.com said that officials had decided to ban the movie from being screened the day before its premiere.
On to the hack of the year, first with ongoing blowback via The Hill:
Internet goes down again in North Korea
North Korea’s Internet was “paralyzed” Saturday, according to reports, the second outage to hit the country in the last week.
China’s Xinhua news agency said that the country had lost connectivity, with both Internet and 3G mobile networks being affected, according to Reuters.
The report of a new disruption comes after North Korea earlier Saturday hurled a racial insult at President Obama and accused the U.S. of being a massive Internet outage over the past week.
While Xinhua covers a denial from Pyongyang:
DPRK rebuffs U.S. accusation of cyber attack on Sony movie
The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) on Saturday rebuffed the U.S. accusation that Pyongyang was involved in a cyber attack on a Sony movie.
The United States groundlessly linked the unheard-of hacking at the Sony Pictures Entertainment to the DPRK, a spokesman for the Policy Department of the National Defence Commission of the DPRK said in a statement.
Reiterating that the DPRK has nothing to do with the hacking attacks against Sony Pictures, the spokesman urged the U.S. to conduct a joint investigation with the DPRK.
And a nasty bit of rhetoric via the Guardian:
North Korea calls Obama a ‘monkey’ as it blames US for internet shutdown
Pyongyang accuses US of responsibility for recent outages
Chinese state media reports new internet outage on Saturday
North Korea has compared President Barack Obama to a monkey and blamed the US for recent internet shutdowns, amid the hacking row over the movie The Interview.
On Saturday, the North’s powerful National Defense Commission, which is led by Kim and is the country’s top governing body, said Obama was behind the release of The Interview. It described the movie as illegal, dishonest and reactionary.
“Obama always goes reckless in words and deeds like a monkey in a tropical forest,” an unidentified spokesman at the commission’s policy department said in a statement carried by North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency.
Income for The Interview, via the Los Angeles Times:
Box office: Sony’s ‘The Interview’ grosses $1 million Christmas Day
Sony Pictures’ controversial comedy “The Interview” began its atypical release with about $1 million in ticket sales from 331 theaters on Christmas Day, the studio estimated.
“The audience reaction was fantastic — the limited release, in under 10% of the amount of theaters originally planned, featured numerous sell-outs and a first-day gross over $1 million,” said Rory Bruer, Sony Pictures’ president of worldwide distribution, in a statement on Friday.
Sales figures for the on-demand market were not available.
More from the Verge:
The Interview is YouTube’s most popular video right now
The Interview is top of YouTube’s Popular Right Now chart after being released online on December 24th through four digital channels: Google Play, SeeTheInterview.com, Xbox Video, and YouTube Movies.
From a nationwide US opening in 331 small and independent theaters, The Interview is thought to have taken $1 million in Christmas day ticket stubs according to reports from both Variety and Deadline. The top earner in the same time period was the Angelina Jolie-directed war flick Unbroken (an estimated $15.6 million), followed by Disney’s musical Into the Woods ($13.6 million), and Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies ($12.7 million).
The Interview’s digital takings were almost certainly hurt by piracy. Although the hackers who targeted Sony Pictures didn’t release unfinished edits of the film online (as they did for both Annie and Fury), internet users have noticed that the DRM on Sony’s official streaming site is woefully inadequate. Users who paid $5.99 to rent the film for 48 hours could simply copy and paste the site’s URL to share the film with friends. Variety estimates that high-quality versions of the movie were torrented more than 900,000 times in the 24 hours after the film’s legitimate release.
From Reuters, bad reviews:
In Asia, ‘The Interview’ is watched illegally online, and panned
Hundreds of thousands of people viewed illegal copies of “The Interview” in China and South Korea on Friday, just hours after the controversial movie on the fictional assassination of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un was released in the United States.
Most viewers said they watched the low-brow spoof because of the devastating cyberattack on the Hollywood studio that produced it, Sony Pictures, but they were not impressed. Even in South Korea, technically at war with the North, viewers panned the movie.
“A lot of it is unrealistic and the people who play North Koreans are so bad at speaking Korean,” said a viewer on Naver, an online portal. “In the scene where Kim Jong Un gets mad…I couldn’t quite understand what he was saying.”
Beijing plays the grownup, via NHK WORLD:
China calls for a calm response to ‘The Interview’
China’s foreign ministry is urging the United States and North Korea to respond calmly to US movie “The Interview”. It is a comedy about the fictional assassination of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
A spokesperson for the foreign ministry, Hua Chunying, said at a news conference on Friday that the movie has created controversy.
She said the United States and North Korea should solve their problems in a calm and appropriate manner.
While Nikkei Asian Review covers political damage:
Relationship deteriorating over alleged cyberattack on Sony Pictures
Both the U.S. and North Korea are ratcheting up heat over an alleged North Korean cyberattack on Sony Pictures Entertainment to retaliate for the company’s recent release of a film depicting the assassination of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.
A spokesperson for North Korea’s National Defense Commission on Saturday said in a statement that the U.S. had launched a cyberattack on North Korea and lashed out at U.S. President Barack Obama.
The spokesperson also said that Pyongyang had not been involved in the hacking of Sony Pictures and accused the U.S. of being responsible for Internet outages the country experienced in the last week. Earlier this month, the U.S. accused North Korea of hacking into Sony Pictures’ computer system.
Pyongyang contends that Sony Pictures’ film “The Interview” portrays an assassination plot on Kim, which it refers to by the honorific “Supreme Dignity.” This portrayal insults the country’s top leadership, and is thus a very grave issue, it said. In the statement, North Korea hinted that it may take some retaliatory action against the U.S.
From The Hill, fears of a Congressional hack:
Sony hack: Is Congress next?
Government agencies and congressional offices are vulnerable to the same kind of cyberattack that hit Sony Pictures, experts say.
Lawmakers on Capitol Hill are well aware of the growing threat online, and many tell staff to act as if everything they write in email could one day become public.
“I try to inspire my staff often that when they write an email, they write it as if it should be right on the front page of your newspaper,” said Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.), whose district includes Hollywood, in an interview with The Hill.
RT covers Christmas hacking:
Kim Dotcom manages to ‘save Christmas for gamers’ by bribing hackers
Gamers frustrated with the Christmas DDoS attack on X-box and PlayStation networks may have to thank fugitive filesharing mogul Kim Dotcom for the service being back online. At least, that’s what their Twitter exchange implies.
Dotcom, the founder of the Megaupload filesharing service, who is wanted by the US for trial over copyright infringement related crimes, is an affluent videogamer often calling on others to join him for a session of the multiplayer shooter game, Destiny.
But on Friday, he along with millions of others couldn’t play – due to access problems with gaming networks operated by Sony and Microsoft for their consoles.
The team’s Twitter accounts have been altering between taunting angered gamers, demanding a ‘ransom’ of 100,000 retweets for bringing the service back online, and bragging about the amount of grief they have caused.
But apparently, unlike other gamers, Dotcom found he had something to offer – 3,000 lifetime premium vouchers of his relaunched Mega service. Lizard Squad accepted the offer and the attack was stopped.
Sky News has the inside story on the hack:
Cyber Attacker: Why I Took Down Xbox and PlayStation
Program notes:
Notorious hackers, ‘Lizard Squad’, gained international attention after taking down the network services of Xbox and Playstation on Christmas Day.
China suffers a railway ticket hack, via Xinhua:
Two detained for data hack on China railway ticket booking website
The China Railway Corporation announced on Friday that police have detained two people suspected of illegally obtaining and disclosing personal information stored in its official ticket booking website, http://www.12306.cn.
A statement from the company said that the two suspects, surnamed Jiang and Shi respectively, were arrested Thursday night.
The company said that the two suspects illegally get access to user information stored in the ticket sale system using account names and passwords that have been leaked by other websites. They also sold such information for profit.
A major banking hack explained, via Threatpost:
Two-Factor Snafu Opened Door to JPMorgan Breach
The biggest U.S. banking breach of all time came down to the smallest of details.
The New York Times, citing sources close to the ongoing investigation of the JPMorgan data breach, said hackers found a server unprotected by two-factor authentication to break in using a stolen user name and password combination. JPMorgan disclosed in August that it was investigating a “computer hacking attack” along with the FBI and Secret Service.
The oversight exposed data belonging to an estimated 76 million consumer households and seven million businesses, and worse for the financial institution’s bottom line, neatly hurdled JPMorgan’s staggering $250 million IT security budget.
Denial of service attacks hit most organizations, via SecurityWeek:
Nearly 50 Percent of Organizations Hit With DNS Attack in Last 12 Months: Survey
New research from Vanson Bourne found that more than three quarters of organizations in the United States and U.K. have suffered a domain name system (DNS) attack.
Just less than half (49 percent) of the organizations surveyed said they had experienced such an attack in the past 12 months. The most common DNS threats reported were DDoS (74 percent), DNS exfiltration (46 percent), DNS tunneling (45 percent) and DNS hijacking (33 percent) by those who had suffered an attack.
The research surveyed 300 U.S. and U.K. key IT decision makers in organizations with 1,000+ employees. It covered a variety of verticals including financial services, retail, distribution and transport, IT and manufacturing and production. The study was commissioned by Cloudmark.
Yemen’s spy boss briefly snatched, via intelNews:
Shiite rebels abduct, then release, Yemen’s intelligence chief
Shiite rebels, who are in control of most of Yemeni capital Sana’a, released the country’s intelligence chief a few hours after abducting him from his home, according to local sources.
The chief, Major General Yehia al-Marani, directs Yemen’s Political Security Organization (PSO), and is regularly referred to as the second most powerful security official in the country, after the director of the country’s National Security Bureau.
The Associated Press reported early on Thursday that about 20 armed militia members appeared outside al-Marani’s home in Sana’a at daybreak and demanded that the general come with them. The PSO chief ordered his bodyguards to lay down their weapons and then went away escorted by the rebels.
Another Pakistani sectarian killing, via Reuters:
Man from Ahmadi religious minority killed in Pakistan after Muslim leader calls them ‘enemy’
Gunmen in eastern Pakistan shot dead a member of the Ahmadi religious minority on Saturday, an Ahmadi spokesman said, five days after a Muslim leader denounced Ahmadis on a popular Pakistani television talk show.
Luqman Ahmad Shehzad was shot in the back of the head near Bhiri Shah Rehman village, a small community of Ahmadis in the Gujranwala district, said Saleem ud Din, the spokesman.
He is the eleventh person killed for being Ahmadi in Pakistan this year. Ahmadis consider themselves Muslim but believe that a prophet came after the Prophet Mohammed, who in Islam is revered as the last of God’s messengers.
In 1984, a Pakistani law declared them non-Muslims and made it possible to jail Ahmadis for “posing as a Muslim” or “offending a Muslim’s feelings”.
Channel NewsAsia Singapore covers the death of a mass murderer:
‘Facilitator’ of Taliban school attack killed in Pakistan
Pakistani security forces have killed a Taliban commander who allegedly facilitated the Peshawar school massacre, which left 150 people dead in the country’s worst ever terror attack, officials said
Pakistani security forces have killed a Taliban commander who allegedly facilitated the Peshawar school massacre, which left 150 people dead in the country’s worst ever terror attack, officials said on Friday (Dec 26).
Named only as “Saddam”, the militant was killed Thursday night in a gunfight with security forces in the restive Khyber tribal area, which borders the northwestern city of Peshawar where last week’s horrific attack took place.
“Commander Saddam was a dreaded terrorist, who was killed in an exchange of fire with the security forces in Jamrud town of Khyber tribal region,” top local administration official Shahab Ali Shah told a press conference in Peshawar. “Six of his accomplices were injured and arrested.”
He added that Saddam is believed to have facilitated the school attack, although the extent or capacity of his alleged involvement was not yet known. “Authorities are currently interrogating the injured terrorists,” Shah said.
The Guardian covers more drone killings in Pakistan:
Pakistan suspects US drone strikes killed at least seven near militant hideout
Officials say attacks took place in the same area where the Pakistani army has been mounting an air-and-ground operation against Pakistani Taliban insurgents
Two suspected US drones fired missiles at militant hideouts in northwest Pakistan on Friday, killing at least seven fighters, Pakistani intelligence officials said.
The attacks took place in the same area where the Pakistani army has been mounting an air-and-ground operation against Pakistani Taliban insurgents who are fighting against the government in order to set up a sharia state in Pakistan.
Areas along Pakistan’s porous border with Afghanistan are home to a range of domestic and foreign militants, and the authorities have been under pressure to do more to eliminate the insurgents who cross into Afghanistan and stage attacks there. Pakistani Taliban are based on both sides of the border.
On Friday, intelligence officials said both of the latest air strikes took place in Pakistan’s remote North Waziristan region, targeting Uzbek and Punjabi Taliban hideouts.
Vietnam extends its ballistic reach, from Want China Times:
Vietnam’s ballistic missile can strike southern China: Kanwa
With an attacking range of 280 kilometers, the Vietnamese navy’s 3M-14E Klub-S submarine-launched ballistic missile can be used against China’s Hainan and Guangdong provinces when launched from southern Vietnam’s Cam Ranh Bay, military analyst Andrei Chang, also known as Pinkov, wrote in an article for the Kanwa Defense Review, a Chinese-language military magazine based in Canada.
The purchase of 3M-14E ballistic missiles from Russia makes Vietnam’s six Kilo-class 636MV submarines more powerful than their Chinese counterparts. Pinkov said the 3M-14E is only allowed to be exported to Algeria, India and Vietnam. It is not allowed to be installed aboard China’s Kilo-class MV submarines yet. In a war between China and Vietnam, the Vietnamese navy is very likely to use the submarines in the vanguard against the PLA Navy.
The Vietnamese subs have also undergone a number of modifications to make them quieter. In a potential operation against China’s South Sea Fleet based in Zhanjiang in Guangdong, the ballistic missile can be used in coordination with satellites. Compared to China’s 3M-54E ballistic missile which has a range of only 220 kilometers, Vietnam’s 3M-14E can reach 280 kilometers. This is enough for the People’s Navy of Vietnam to attack critical Chinese naval targets in Hainan and Guangdong.
A blockade considered, via Want China Times:
Vietnam’s Kilo-submarines to potentially blockade Spratly islands
Vietnam’s six Kilo-class submarines purchased from Russia are very likely to be used to cut off the supply line of the People’s Liberation Army’s garrison at the disputed Spratly islands according to the Duowei News on Dec. 24.
China’s nationalist tabloid the Global Times said that the People’s Navy of Vietnam had already received three Kilo-class submarines from Russia. Vietnam’s Kilo-class submarines are all equipped with 3M-14E Klub-S ballistic missiles. With an attacking range of 280 kilometers, the missile can reach Guangdong province’s Zhanjiang, where China’s South Sea Fleet headquarters is located. China’s major naval facilities on Hainan island are also within reach. In addition, the Kilo-submarines can attack PLA supply ships with its GE2-01 radar-guided torpedoes.
The Global Times did say however that the PLA Navy has something up its sleeve to counter the new Vietnamese subs. Three Type 094 Jin-class ballistic missile submarines have already been sent to Hainan island just in case of a potential conflict over the Spratlys. China would also deploy its Type 093 Shang-class nuclear-powered attack submarines to the region if needed.
Controversy over allegations of Korean border tunnels, from the Asahi Shimbun:
S. Korean military dismisses existence of ‘secret invasion tunnels’ dug by North
The existence of an underground network of tunnels covertly dug by Pyongyang to facilitate an invasion by North Korean forces is simply nonsense, the South Korean military says.
“After conducting an extensive survey, we found no evidence of tunnels (dug by North Korea to invade South Korea),” said an official of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the South Korean Armed Forces at a Dec. 5 news conference in the city of Namyangju, Gyeonggi province.
But that view is not shared by everybody in the government.
“We do not deny it is possible that tunnels separate from those found so far exist,” said a defense ministry spokesman. “We think there are about 20 such tunnels.”
An intelligence deal reached, via the Japan Times:
Tokyo, Washington, Seoul agree to share intelligence on North Korea
The United States, Japan and South Korea have agreed to form a rare trilateral military arrangement to share intelligence about North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs, officials said Friday.
South Korea’s defense ministry said the deal will be signed on Monday. It comes at a time of heightened concern about North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs, which are seen as a major security concern in the Pacific region and beyond.
But in a sign of the long-held distrust between Seoul and Tokyo, South Korea will not pass military information directly to Japan, and will instead use the U.S. as an intermediary.
China’s insular addition expands, from Want China Times:
Land reclamation project boosts Woody Island’s size by 40%
A set of aerial photos show that the size of disputed Woody Island in the South China Sea has increased by 40% since last year, due to China’s land reclamation projects on the largest of the Paracel Islands, reports Shanghai’s Guancha Syndicate.
Over the last year, the government of China has embarked on projects to reclaim land in the sea around the island, while similar projects are being carried out on several other disputed islands in both the Spratly and Paracel island groups.
Rocky island, located northeast of the island, has now merged with Woody island. The airstrip in the island’s airport has increased its length from 2.7 km to 3 km and is expected to accommodate heavy carriers.
China is not the only country reclaiming land on the islands on the South China Sea but it is the most efficient by far in terms of the size of the land that has been reclaimed and the speed these projects are carried out. These projects have been seen as attempts to strengthen power and influence and have caused regional tension.
From the Asahi Shimbun, Abe pushes a militarized Japanese constitution:
Abe strives to meet ‘historical challenge’ of revising Constitution
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe did not hide the fact that revising the Constitution is a major objective of his administration, saying he has received a public mandate to forge ahead with his long-cherished goal.
“It can be described as a historical challenge,” Abe said at a news conference Dec. 24 after he was easily re-elected prime minister by the Lower House. “It will not be easy.”
The pacifist Constitution, drafted by U.S. occupation forces after Japan’s defeat in World War II, has never been amended. Constitutional revisions must follow strict procedures, including approval of two-thirds of members of each Diet chamber followed by a national referendum.
The Japan Times delivers a snub:
Abe snubs Okinawa’s new anti-base governor
In a veiled attempt to put pressure on Okinawa Gov. Takeshi Onaga, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe did not meet the newly elected anti-base leader during his three-day visit to the capital.
Onaga, who opposes the government’s push to move a contentious U.S. military base further north in his prefecture, defeated Hirokazu Nakaima in a closely watched election in November, after the former governor approved a landfill project needed to move U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, stirring strong local opposition.
Following up on recent reports, several government sources said Tokyo has also decided to reduce its fiscal 2015 budget for Okinawa, which was initially estimated at ¥379.4 billion.
And for our final item, facilitating victimization, via the New York Times:
Risks in Using Social Media to Spot Signs of Mental Distress
The Samaritans, a well-known suicide-prevention group in Britain, recently introduced a free web app that would alert users whenever someone they followed on Twitter posted worrisome phrases like “tired of being alone” or “hate myself.”
A week after the app was introduced on its website, more than 4,000 people had activated it, the Samaritans said, and those users were following nearly 1.9 million Twitter accounts, with no notification to those being monitored. But just about as quickly, the group faced an outcry from people who said the app, called Samaritans Radar, could identify and prey on the emotionally vulnerable — the very people the app was created to protect.
“A tool that ‘lets you know when your friends need support’ also lets you know when your stalking victim is vulnerable #SamaritansRadar,” a Briton named Sarah Brown posted on Twitter. A week and a half after the app’s introduction, the Samaritans announced it was reconsidering the outreach program and disabled the app.
