hackingbear writes: Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison demanded an apology after a senior Chinese official posted a “fake image” of an Australian soldier holding a knife with blood on it to the throat of an Afghan child, calling it “truly repugnant” and demanding it be taken down. The Australian government has asked Twitter to remove the image, posted on Monday by…
Tag: Afghanistan
Afghan Youth Find Escape in a Video Game
An anonymous reader shares a report: Rifle fire, hurried footsteps and distant explosions. The rat-a-tat of a firefight. Cars mangled from grenades. The young man was transfixed. It could have been any day in Kabul, where targeted assassinations, terrorist attacks and wanton violence have become routine, and the city often feels as if it is under siege. But for Safiullah Sharifi,…
How the US Military Buys Location Data from Ordinary Apps
Joseph Cox, reporting for Motherboard at Vice: The U.S. military is buying the granular movement data of people around the world, harvested from innocuous-seeming apps, Motherboard has learned. The most popular app among a group Motherboard analyzed connected to this sort of data sale is a Muslim prayer and Quran app that has more than 98 million downloads worldwide. Others include…
Controversial Data Firm Palantir Fetches Market Value of Nearly $22 Billion In Its Debut On the NYSE
US tech firm Palantir, known for supplying controversial data-sifting software to government agencies, has fetched a market value of nearly $22 billion in its debut on the New York Stock Exchange. The BBC reports: The firm, which launched in 2003 with backing from right-wing libertarian tech investor Peter Thiel and America’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), builds programs that integrate massive data…
Africa Declared Free of Wild Polio in ‘Milestone’
Africa has been declared free from wild polio by the independent body, the Africa Regional Certification Commission. From a report: Polio usually affects children under five, sometimes leading to irreversible paralysis. Death can occur when breathing muscles are affected. Twenty-five years ago thousands of children in Africa were paralysed by the virus. The disease is now only found in Afghanistan and…
What the Heroin Industry Can Teach Us About Solar Power
ljw1004 writes: Helmand Province in Afghanistan produces two thirds of the world’s opium. Its opium production has more than doubled in the past eight years, due mostly to solar power. “Solar is by far the most significant technological change” in the region for decades, says Dr. Mansfield, author of the report (PDF). The first solar panels were introduced there in 2013….
How a Chinese Agent Used LinkedIn to ‘Lure’ American Targets
Today the BBC told the story of Jun Wei Yeo, “an ambitious and freshly enrolled Singaporean PhD student” who was gradually recruited by Chinese intelligence. Yeo “would end up using the professional networking website LinkedIn, a fake consulting company and cover as a curious academic to lure in American targets.”
Some of the targets that Yeo found by trawling through LinkedIn were…
April’s birthstone is the diamond
Happy birthday April babies! Your birthstone, the diamond, is the rich cousin of graphite. Source: https://earthsky.org/earth/april-birthstone-diamond…
US Declares Public Health Emergency Over Coronavirus
The Trump administration on Friday declared a public healthy emergency over the coronavirus outbreak and said any foreign national who has traveled within China in the last 14 days will not be allowed to enter the country. The Wall Street Journal reports: The announcement [from U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar] came as stock markets tumbled amid concern about…
‘Space unites us’: First Iranian-American astronaut reaches for stars
Jasmin “Jaws” Moghbeli earned her fierce nickname during her time as a decorated helicopter gunship pilot who flew more than 150 missions in Afghanistan. Source: https://phys.org/news/2020-01-space-iranian-american-astronaut-stars.html…