Archive for November, 2010

US and Mexican police discover tunnel used to smuggle drugs across the California-Mexico border

“US and Mexican police have discovered a tunnel used to smuggle drugs across the California-Mexico border and seized some 25 tonnes of marijuana.

The tunnel, equipped with ventilation, lighting and a pulley system, was 550m (1,800ft) long but just waist high.

Police said it connected a warehouse on the US side with one in Tijuana, the main gateway for drugs into California.”

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-11690556

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Body Armor – Free Webinar

From: IDGA

Armor Up: A Coalition Perspective on Personal Protective Gear

This FREE webinar will be on: December 8, 2010 9:00:00 AM EST

Presenters: Carl Thompson, Cameron Finch, Dr. Kelechi Anyaogu,

Body Armor is one of the most important pieces of equipment a soldier has and can mean the difference between life and death.

Amidst the heightened tempo of operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, body armor and personel protection equipment have attracted renewed interest. This interest has come from several sectors: military procurement, civilian defense production, operational units (regular and special forces), as well as command level strategists.

  • Yet NATO and the US Military still face many challenges, including: The extremely high price of underperforming and  obsolete technologies.
  • The employment (or deployment?) of such systems in the field can have direct and immediate impacts on soldier endurance and performance.
  • Aside from dollar cost per unit, the use of body armor exacts a certain physical toll—increased risk of heat exhaustion and reduced mobility and speed.

Body Armor in Action:

The first living Congressional Medal of Honor recipient since the Vietnam War, Staff Sgt Salvatore Giunta can attribute his survival to his personal protective  gear.  In Afghanistan Staff Sgt Giunta was shot in the chest while braving enemy fire to come to the aid of comrades and was saved by his ballistics vest.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Al Qaeda Unlucky Again in Cargo Bombing Attempt

Al Qaeda Unlucky Again in Cargo Bombing Attempt is republished with permission of STRATFOR.

By Scott Stewart

The Oct. 29 discovery of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) inside two packages shipped from Yemen launched a widespread search for other devices, and more than two dozen suspect packages have been tracked down so far. Some have been trailed in dramatic fashion, as when two U.S. F-15 fighter aircraft escorted an Emirates Air passenger jet Oct. 29 as it approached and landed at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. To date, however, no other parcels have been found to contain explosive devices.

The two parcels that did contain IEDs were found in East Midlands, England, and Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and both appear to have been sent by al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), al Qaeda’s jihadist franchise in Yemen. As we’ve long discussed, AQAP has demonstrated a degree of creativity in planning its attacks and an intent to attack the United States. It has also demonstrated the intent to attack aircraft, as evidenced by the failed Christmas Day bombing in 2009 involving Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who tried to detonate an explosive device concealed in his underwear on a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit.

A tactical analysis of the latest attempt suggests that the operation was not quite as creative as past attempts, though it did come very close to achieving its primary objective, which in this case (apparently) was to destroy aircraft. It does not appear that the devices ultimately were intended to be part of an attack against the Jewish institutions in the United States to which the parcels were addressed. Although the operation failed in its primary mission (taking down aircraft) it was successful in its secondary mission, which was to generate worldwide media coverage and sow fear and disruption in the West. Read the rest of this entry »

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US Frequency Allocations – Radio Spectrum

US Frequency Allocations -  The Radio Spectrum

From: NTIA Office of Spectrum Management

Graphic representation of frequency allocations in the United States – (PDF)

U.S. Frequency Allocation Wall Chart

U.S. Frequency Allocation Wall Chart

http://www.ntia.doc.gov/osmhome/allochrt.pdf

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Super Soldier Exoskeleton

Via Wired’s Danger Room: Lockheed Martin has developed an exoskeleton for the troops:

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Mexico: 4 U.S. citizens killed in separate attacks

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico (AP) — “Four U.S. citizens were shot to death in separate attacks in the border city of Ciudad Juarez, Mexican authorities said Monday.

Chihuahua state prosecutors’ spokesman Arturo Sandoval said Edgar Lopez, 35, of El Paso, was killed Sunday along with two Mexican men when gunmen opened fire on a group standing outside a house.

On Saturday, a 26-year-old U.S. woman and an American boy were slain shortly after crossing an international bridge from El Paso. Giovanna Herrera and Luis Araiza, 15, were shot to death along with a Mexican man traveling with them just after 11 a.m., Sandoval said.”

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2010-11-01-Mexico-drug-war_N.htm?csp=34

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SOCOM Wants Android Devices

SOCOM wants to use Google’s Android devices instead of developing a proprietary system:

From Danger Room:

SOCOM calls it the Tactical Situational Awareness Application Suite, or TactSA, and it has to work in low-connectivity areas — the middle-of-nowhere places you’d expect to send the military’s most elite troops. It’s got to be peer-to-peer, encrypted “at the application level” and able to recover from “network outages and substantial packet loss.”

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WikiLeaks and the Culture of Classification

WikiLeaks and the Culture of Classification is republished with permission of STRATFOR.

By Scott Stewart

On Friday, Oct. 22, the organization known as WikiLeaks published a cache of 391,832 classified documents on its website. The documents are mostly field reports filed by U.S. military forces in Iraq from January 2004 to December 2009 (the months of May 2004 and March 2009 are missing). The bulk of the documents (379,565, or about 97 percent) were classified at the secret level, with 204 classified at the lower confidential level. The remaining 12,062 documents were either unclassified or bore no classification.

This large batch of documents is believed to have been released by Pfc. Bradley Manning, who was arrested in May 2010 by the U.S. Army Criminal Investigations Command and charged with transferring thousands of classified documents onto his personal computer and then transmitting them to an unauthorized person. Manning is also alleged to have been the source of the classified information released by WikiLeaks pertaining to the war in Afghanistan in July 2010.

WikiLeaks released the Iraq war documents, as it did the Afghanistan war documents, to a number of news outlets for analysis several weeks in advance of their formal public release. These news organizations included The New York Times, Der Spiegel, The Guardian and Al Jazeera, each of which released special reports to coincide with the formal release of the documents Oct. 22. Read the rest of this entry »

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The Great Radio Spectrum Famine

Mobile broadband is consuming the available radio spectrum. Serving up more won’t be easy.

Read the full article here…

http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/wireless/the-great-radio-spectrum-famine/1

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