Beijing’s military advance into Bhutan-claimed territory leaves New Delhi floundering, raising concern over India’s own borders. Operating in the threshold between peace and war, China has pushed its borders far out into international waters in the South China Sea in a way no other power has done elsewhere. Less known is that China is using a similar strategy in the Himalayas to alter facts on the ground — meter by meter — without firing a single shot.
Many years later, as he faced how the Dalai Lama became a political inconvenience for an increasing number of world leaders, the former emissary of the Dalai Lama, Gelek Rinpoche was to remember those distant afternoons when the poet Allen Ginsberg, the composer Philip Glass, the author Robert Thurman and the actor Richard Gere jointly planned fully-booked glamorous events for his Buddhist Jewel Heart organizations based in Ann Arbor, Chicago, and New York. At that time, the end of the Cold War was so recent that many notions lacked names, and in order to describe them, it was necessary to invent.
The power corridors in New Delhi are abuzz with the prospects of a “reset” of India-China ties. It started with a missive from foreign secretary Vijay Gokhale on 22 February discouraging government functionaries from attending events organized by the Tibetan government in exile. A number of high-level visits have since taken place. Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi came to India in early March and Indian national security adviser Ajit Doval visited China last week. And there have been reports suggesting that India did not intervene in the Maldives despite grave provocation from the Abdulla Yameen government in deference to Chinese sensitivities.
Debt-ridden Pakistan is very vulnerable to Western sanctions, yet it is unclear whether US President Donald Trump’s administration is willing to squeeze it financially in a way that could help reform its behaviour. Washington also seems reluctant to strip Pakistan of its status as a Major Non-NATO Ally (MNNA) or target its military for rearing transnational terrorists. The main driver of Pakistan’s nexus with terrorists is its powerful military, whose generals hold decisive power and dictate terms to a largely impotent government. With the military’s rogue Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) rearing terrorists, Pakistan has long played a double game, pretending to be America’s ally while aiding its most deadly foes that have killed or maimed thousands of US soldiers in Afghanistan. Pakistani forces only target terrorists that fall out of line or threaten Pakistan itself.
If a person goes shopping at Suning, one of China’s largest electronics retailers, it’s possible that a camera in the store is tracking her behavior using SenseTime’s software. Later, if she opens Rong360, a peer-to-peer lending app, she’ll be asked to login using facial recognition—powered by SenseTime. She might send a video of herself to her friends on SNOW, a Snapchat-esque chat app, donning animated sunglasses built by SenseTime. And if she finds herself approached by police officers in the subway, it’s possible SenseTime helped identify her.
SYRIA-ISRAEL BORDER, Golan Heights — Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Syria is going to explode. I know, you have heard that one before, but this time I mean really explode. Because the U.S., British and French attack on Syria to punish its regime for its vile use of chemical weapons — and Russia’s vow to respond — is actually just the second-most dangerous confrontation unfolding in that country. Even more dangerous is that Israel and Iran, at the exact same time, seem to be heading for a High Noon shootout in Syria over Iran’s attempts to turn Syria into a forward air base against Israel, something Israel is vowing to never let happen. This is not mere speculation. In the past few weeks — for the first time ever — Israel and Iran have begun quietly trading blows directly, not through proxies, in Syria.
WASHINGTON—The Trump administration is seeking to assemble an Arab force to replace the U.S. military contingent in Syria and help stabilize the northeastern part of the country after the defeat of Islamic State, U.S. officials said.
The Marshall Plan, the historic U.S. aid initiative to speed western Europe’s recovery after World War II, is rightly legendary for its vision and accomplishments. The $13.2 billion the United States dedicated to the Plan from 1948 to 1952 would be worth a substantial $135 billion in today’s money. Although it is widely understood that the United States spent enormous sums fighting the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, it is much less well known how much was spent on reconstruction. Through 2017, the total was $208 billion, in today’s dollars. This is over 50% more than the totality of Marshall aid, in today’s dollars. Yet the United States has tragically little to show for it.
America’s leadership in the Asia Pacific was founded in the ashes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and on its status as the first atomic power. Nuclear weapons thereafter defined Asian geopolitics. Today, on the Korean Peninsula, nuclear technology is again set to feature in a dramatic shift in Asia’s power balance. With a summit meeting between President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un now in prospect, future historians may come to see North Korea’s nuclear-armed ballistic missiles as the trigger that unravels America’s strategic leadership of Asia.
Viktor Orbán’s post-victory intentions are clear: to extend Fidesz control over civil society and remaining independent media outlets. The stage is now set for the EU – with European People’s Party MEPs holding the balance – to take action on further violations of democratic principles and values. In late February this year, Hungary’s Fidesz party was rocked by losing a by-election in its normally solid stronghold city of Hódmezővásárhely. Until that moment, victory for the governing Fidesz-Christian Democrat coalition at the April general election had been largely a given. /arc-anglerfish-arc2-prod-mco.s3.amazonaws.com/public/GZPID6FPWJA47NZEDBWFVC4XIQ.JPG)
Nearly a decade after the formation of U.S. Cyber Command senior leaders at the Department of Defense are questioning the scope of the organization’s work due to the novelty of formalized military cyber operations and the dynamic cyber environment. In other words: where does Cyber Command’s work begin and end? The challenge associated with defining traditional military activities in the cyber domain is typically that is done by looking back historically at what are traditional types of military operations,” Kenneth Rapuano, assistant secretary of defense for homeland defense and global security and the principal cyber adviser for the Department of Defense, said during an April 12 hearing in front of a House Armed Services subcommittee./arc-anglerfish-arc2-prod-mco.s3.amazonaws.com/public/EDBY7UON5FGBFJ7R6YGGLBISWE.jpg)
Cybersecurity is often discussed in terms of mission-critical information in far-off databases or personal information stored on handheld devices, but what about the cybersecurity of bridges, power plants and dams? Securing old-school infrastructure against cyber attacks is critical now that they rely on digital interfacing for day-to-day operations, experts and government officials say. Power plants, drinking water facilities and even oil pipelines rely on strong cybersecurity to prevent service outages. While experts say the U.S. has never had a significant incident as a result of a cyber breach at one of these facilities, the repercussions of a successful attack could range from merely inconvenient to deadly.
That's far more than previously believed with whistleblower Christopher Wylie earlier putting the number at approximately 50 million. Commenting on the situation, Mark Zuckerberg said that "clearly we should have done more and we will going forward". The Facebook boss also said that "he previously assumed that when Facebook provided people with tools, it was their own responsibility about how to use them". He has now said that holding such a view was "wrong in retrospect".
If the courage of young men and women in battle truly does depend on the nature and quality of our civic society, we should be very worried. South of Fallujah’s Route Fran were hundreds of insurgents who’d spent months digging trench lines, emplacing roadside bombs, barricading streets, training with their weapons, reading the Koran, and watching videos of suicide bombers to inspire them for the fight to come. North of Route Fran were the roughly 1,000 men of 1st Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment, preparing themselves for the assault. Route Fran itself was a wide, four-lane highway. On November 9, 2004, the highway was wet—it’d rained the previous day—and the sky was gray and foreboding.
WASHINGTON: The Pentagon will submit a report to Congress this summer outlining plans for a new office to lead the military and intel agencies’ work developing and acquiring artificial intelligence tools, a high priority for the national security wing of the federal government alarmed at the huge leaps China is making in the field. Michael Griffin, the Pentagon’s research and engineering chief, told a crowd at the Hudson Institute on Friday that his office is still hammering out the details, but the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) will tie together the military’s efforts with those of the Intelligence Community, allowing them to combine efforts in a breakneck push to move government’s AI initiatives forward.
“All too often when we bring things up inside the Beltway, it immediately devolves to material and programs and technology," said Scales. "What we hope comes out of this is not just new machines but new ways of thinking about warfare at the tactical level.” Infantry training at the Joint Readiness Training Center, Fort Polk, La. ARLINGTON: Finding $2.4 billion for new infantry equipment was just the start for Defense Secretary Jim Mattis’s Close Combat Lethality Task Force. Now they’re taking on the hard part:getting the military to stop wasting the troops’ time.