U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said the Pentagon and American intelligence agencies are seeing an increase in cyber threats that could become as devastating as the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks if they aren’t stopped. “A cyber attack perpetrated by nation states or violent extremist groups could be as destructive as the terrorist attack of 9/11,” Panetta said last night. “Such a destructive… Read more →
I didn’t buy into the idea last week that the Labor Department “cooked the books” on the September jobs report. If you were going to go to the trouble of fixing the numbers, wouldn’t you come up with good numbers for both parts of the report? The household survey, upon which the unemployment numbers is based, is historically very volatile…. Read more →
Soon, Earth will pass through a stream of debris from Halley’s Comet, source of the annual Orionid meteor shower. Forecasters expect 25 meteors per hour when the shower peaks on Oct. 21st.
Many had thought the award would go to human rights activists in Russia this year. But on Friday, the Norwegian Nobel Committee honored the European Union with this year’s peace prize for its contribution “to the advancement of peace and reconciliation” in Europe. The list of candidates for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize was long, ranging from outsiders such as… Read more →
(Reuters) – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denied a newspaper report on Friday that said he had agreed in principle to hand back land annexed from Syria as part of secret U.S.-mediated peace talks that broke off last year. Syria has long set a complete withdrawal from the Golan Heights as a condition for making peace with the Jewish state. Israel captured… Read more →
A former U.S. government official says American authorities firmly believe that Iranian hackers, likely supported by the Tehran government, were responsible for recent cyberattacks against oil and gas companies in the Persian Gulf and that they appeared to be in retaliation for the latest round of U.S. sanctions against the country. The former official spoke to The Associated Press shortly… Read more →
Iraq is reportedly considering replacing US oil major ExxonMobil with Russian companies in the West Qurna-1 project, as the authorities are angered by ExxonMobil’s deal signed with the Kurdistan regional government without Baghdad’s approval.
The raging debate on Capitol Hill over the Libya consulate attack has put a spotlight on the State Department’s security spending, with some questioning whether money spent on electric cars and green-embassy programs could have been put to better use. Federal contract records show the department in May spent $108,000 on Chevy Volt charging stations for the American Embassy in… Read more →
MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russia will not renew a decades-old agreement with Washington on dismantling nuclear and chemical weapons when it expires next year, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov was quoted as saying on Wednesday. The death of the 1991 agreement, which had been renewed twice, is the latest in a series of hitches in relations between the United States and… Read more →
DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz told a stunned Piers Morgan on Wednesday that although the White House made incorrect statements about the Libya attack, it didn’t mean “they were false” because the White House didn’t actually know they were incorrect statements. Discovered on Breitbart
