The instinctive response to the latest folly emanating from the Ministry of Defence – from Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman herself – has been outrage. On September 16, Sitharaman said that the Army would clean upthe garbage left behind by irresponsible civilians in high-altitude tourist spots.
Statements emanating from the recent Chinese Communist party congress suggest potentially increasing pressure on India with regard to the Dalai Lama and the Central Tibetan Administration in Dharamsala, notes former RA&W officer Jayadeva Ranade. The secretariat is headed by Wang Huning, second from left, who has been a member of Tibet Autonomous Region delegations to the National People's Congress.
There may be a silver, if risky, lining for Kurdish nationalists in their devastating loss of Kirkuk and other cities on the periphery of their semi-autonomous region as they lick their wounds and vent anger over the deep-seated internal divisions that facilitated the Iranian-backed Iraqi blitzkrieg. Mounting popular anger coupled with US Congressional fury could position the Kurds as a key player in potential US efforts to roll back Iranian influence in Iraq and counter the Islamic Republic as part of President Donald J. Trump’s tougher approach towards Tehran.
ISIS is facing defeat and liquidation, but its members are dispersing throughout the world and establishing local branches. The idea of the Islamic Caliphate is not dead, and the struggle in the West is not over. ISIS may disappear as an organization, but the world will continue to suffer from the evil spirit that this organization has instilled among too many Muslims. As the city of Raqqa, the capital of the “Islamic State in Iraq and Syria,” falls to the Free Syrian Army, made up primarily of Kurdish and Syrian militias, the question is what the aftermath of ISIS will look like.
This post is part of Blinkist's books-in-blinks series. The series provides key messages from books that you might not have time to read in their entirety. Here are the key messages from Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. Last year, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Barack Obama all recommended the book. Who should read this book?
With three U.S. Nimitz-class supercarriers in the U.S. 7th Fleet’s area of operations (AOO), the United States Navy is underlining its presence in the Indo-Asia-Pacific unambiguously. The USS Nimitz, USS Ronald Reagan, and USS Theodore Roosevelt carrier strike groups are in the 7th fleet’s AOO, which ranges from the international date line to the western Indian Ocean—a large swathe of the earth’s oceans. This kind of convergence of three supercarriers in rare, but not entirely unprecedented.
Representatives from Facebook, Twitter, and Google are set to testify before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee on Tuesday, then the Senate and House intelligence committees on Wednesday. The hearings begin just a day after Mueller charged former Trump campaign Chair Paul Manafort with 12 counts of money laundering, tax fraud, and foreign-lobbying violations, and former Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos admitted to lying to the FBI about meetings with Russians connected to the Kremlin. The charges have renewed public interest in an investigation that Republicans in Congress last week said they were close to concluding.Representatives from Facebook, Twitter, and Google are set to testify before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee on Tuesday, then the Senate and House intelligence committees on Wednesday. The hearings begin just a day after Mueller charged former Trump campaign Chair Paul Manafort with 12 counts of money laundering, tax fraud, and foreign-lobbying violations, and former Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos admitted to lying to the FBI about meetings with Russians connected to the Kremlin. The charges have renewed public interest in an investigation that Republicans in Congress last week said they were close to concluding.
Earlier this year, 116 technology luminaries signed an open letter (PDF) imploring the United Nations to ban “lethal autonomous weapons systems,” warning that they would “permit armed conflict to be fought at a scale greater than ever.” According to the Independent, it “marks the first time that artificial intelligence (AI) experts and robotics companies have taken a joint stance on the issue.” Not all observers are as concerned; Andrew Ng, up until recently Baidu's chief scientist, concludes that “worrying about killer robots is like worrying about overpopulation on Mars—we'll have plenty of time to figure it out.”
WASHINGTON — Executives from Facebook, Google and Twitter appeared on Capitol Hill for the first time on Tuesday to publicly acknowledge their role in Russia’s influence on the presidential campaign, but offered little more than promises to do better. Their reluctance frustrated lawmakers who sought stronger evidence that American elections will be protected from foreign powers.
The key question as representatives from Facebook, Twitter and Google testify Tuesday and Wednesday before Congress is not how Russia used social media to interfere in last year’s presidential election, but rather what role U.S. voters, the federal government and social media companies should play in building resiliency against such disinformation campaigns in the future. However, in the short-term, collaboration between the government and private industry to institute transparency of ads may minimize the impact of nefarious foreign actors. 
For the Jewish people, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement (which fell this year on September 30), is the holiest day of the year. It is a day for solemn retrospection and repentance. In Israel, Yom Kippur is a phenomenon: it is the one day of the year when Israel’s borders and airspace are closed; while no law forbids it, only emergency vehicles are on the road in Jewish cities and neighborhoods; all shops are closed. Sixty percent of Jewish Israelis report that they fast on Yom Kippur./arc-anglerfish-arc2-prod-mco.s3.amazonaws.com/public/3EUIE53TONHOBL6MYJQ3JG3U7A.jpg)
The U.S. Army is currently in the throes of a massive change in the way it handles IT systems. After an intensive internal process and insight from congressionally mandated studies, the service has determined that drastic changes are needed for its network and command posts. One of the Army’s previous challenges involved several programs of record that were unable to talk to each other and weren’t built around threats, but rather toward predetermined standards or baselines. With these large-scale programs, adding new technology or updates to adjust for security concerns can be difficult because tech can evolve on a regular basis.
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