Tag Archives: intelligence
Gunfire erupts after Kenya claims total control over mall
Gunfire erupts after Kenya claims total control over mall (Reuters) / 24 September 2013 Kenya said its security forces were in control of the Nairobi shopping mall where fighters killed at least 62 people, and police were doing a final sweep of shops early on Tuesday after rescuing the last hostages. An overnight silence outside the large, upmarket Westgate mall was broken at daybreak with a loud burst of gunfire from inside, suggesting the complex had not yet been fully secured. A lone military chopper circled above. “Our forces are combing the mall floor by floor looking for anyone left behind. We believe all hostages have been released,” the Ministry of Interior said on Twitter early on Tuesday, adding his forces were “in control” of the building. A trickle of survivors left on Monday, but the fate of the missing was unclear four days after a group of between 10 and 15 militants stormed the mall, which with its rich clientele epitomised the African consumer bonanza that is drawing foreign investment to one of the world’s fastest growing regions. Mohamed told the “PBS Newshour” show the Americans were “young men, about between maybe 18 and 19” years old. They were of Somali origin or Arab origin, and had lived in the US, “in Minnesota and one other place”, she said. US authorities are urgently looking into information from the Kenyan government that residents of Western countries, including the United States, may have been among the militants, US security sources said. “We do monitor very carefully and have for some time been concerned about efforts by Al Shabaab to recruit Americans or US persons to come to Somalia,” White House deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes said. He told reporters travelling with US President Barack Obama to the United Nations in New York that he had no direct information that Americans had participated in the attack. Obama offered US support, saying he believed Kenya – the scene of one of al Qaeda’s first major attacks, in 1998, and a neighbour of chaotic Somalia – would continue to be a regional pillar of stability. Obama, whose father was born in Kenya, said the United States stood with Kenyans against “this terrible outrage.” Patience Kenyan officials have tried to reassure the country that it would seize control of the situation. “We appeal for patience, keep calm, avoid Westgate at all costs and wait for the official communication,” the Ministry of Interior and Coordination of National Government in The Office of the President said on Twitter. A press briefing was expected later on Tuesday. Al Qaeda killed more than 200 people when it bombed the US Embassy in Nairobi in 1998. When fighters from its Somali ideological counterpart stormed the mall on Saturday, they hit a high-profile symbol of Kenya’s economic power. Kenya has sent troops to Somalia as part of an African Union force trying to stabilise the country, which was long without a functioning government, and push back Al Shabaab. It has also suffered internal instability. President Uhuru Kenyatta, who lost a nephew in the weekend bloodbath, faces charges of crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court for his alleged role in coordinating violence after disputed elections in 2007. He denies the charges. Kenyatta has dismissed a demand that he pull Kenyan forces out of Somalia, saying he would not relent in a “war on terror.” British Defence Secretary Philip Hammond said he believed six Britons had died in the attack. Other known foreign victims are from China, Ghana, France, the Netherlands and Canada. Kenyan officials said the total death toll was at least 62. Speculation rose about the identity of the attackers. Interior Minister Joseph Ole Lenku had earlier said they were all men but that some had dressed as women. Despite his comments, one intelligence officer and two soldiers told Reuters that one of the dead militants was a white woman, likely to fuel speculation that she is the wanted widow of one of the suicide bombers who together killed more than 50 people on London’s transport system in 2005. Called the “white widow” by the British press, Samantha Lewthwaite is wanted in connection with an alleged plot to attack hotels and restaurants in Kenya. Asked if the dead woman was Lewthwaite, the intelligence officer said: “We don’t know.” From Mali to Algeria, Nigeria to Kenya, violent millitants groups – tapping into local poverty, conflict, inequality or exclusion but espousing a similar anti-Western, anti-Christian creed – are striking at state authority and international interests, both economic and political. Continue reading
Genetically Engineering Jatropha Plants for Large Scale Production
By Futurity | Thu, 18 July 2013 Benefit From the Latest Energy Trends and Investment Opportunities before the mainstream media and investing public are aware they even exist. The Free Oilprice.com Energy Intelligence Report gives you this and much more. Scientists have identified the first step toward engineering a more drought-resistant variety of Jatropha, a potential biofuel plant. Jatropha has seeds with high oil content. But the oil’s potential as a biofuel is limited because, for large-scale production, this shrub-like plant needs the same amount of care and resources as crop plants. “It is thought that Jatropha‘s future lies in further improvement of Jatropha for large-scale production on marginal, non-food croplands through breeding and/or biotechnology,” says John E. Carlson, professor of molecular genetics at Penn State. “The more that is known about the genetic basis of Jatropha‘s key attributes such as drought tolerance, the more readily Jatropha improvement will progress.” According to Carlson, Jatropha currently grows best in tropical countries and is already being cultivated as a biofuel on a small scale in India, Southeast Asia, and Africa. Breeding a strain that could do well in arid, barren conditions could enable mass cultivation, but large-scale production may still be decades away. Researchers looked at a little known gene—JcPIP1—because a similar gene in the model plant Arabidopsis is known to play a role in drought response. They also examined JcPIP2, a potential drought response gene in Jatropha identified in 2007 by researchers at Sichuan University. They reported their findings today in the Journal of Plant Physiology. The JcPIP genes code for membrane channels called aquaporins, which are responsible for transporting and balancing water throughout the plant, though exactly how each gene affects aquaporin behavior under environmental stress remains unclear. However, researchers have found that JcPIP1 and JcPIP2 are expressed at different times during a stressful situation, which hints at what roles they play in response and recovery. By growing unmodified Jatropha samples in conditions simulating high soil salinity and low water availability, the researchers showed that Jatropha was normally more vulnerable and slower to recover from high salinity than from drought conditions. Using a tobacco mosaic virus to transiently transform Jatropha, the researchers created plants in which JcPIP2 or JcPIP1 was temporarily disabled. They subjected the modified samples to six days of stress and six days of recovery. To gauge the plants’ stress responses, they noted physical changes and measured root damage, leaf growth, electrolyte leakage in the leaves, and sap flow and volume. The researchers found that these stress responses were about the same between the two variants under drought conditions. However, plants with JcPIP1 disabled were slower to recover from salt damage. Analysis of plant parts during the stress and recovery stages showed that JcPIP2 was mostly active in the early stages of stress while JcPIP1 exp ression was greater during recovery. The timing indicates that JcPIP1 may be crucial in helping Jatropha recover from damage while JcPIP2 may play a role in prevention. How the two genes affect other plant functions remains unknown, and how large a part they play in the entire network of drought resistance relies on further study. “Plants have complex genetic and biochemical pathways for environmental stress resistance, that includes (multiple) genes and pathways,” says Carlson. “This inherent redundancy in stress responses ensures survival under varying environmental conditions, and provides many possible approaches to improving resistance.” According to the research team, the next step is to find how the JcPIP genes work at the cellular level, which can provide more detailed profiles of each gene’s exact function. Other researchers on this project contributed from Chonnam National University in Korea, University of Copenhagen, and Wonkwang University in Korea. The Korea Rural Development Agency, National Research Foundation of Korea, and the Korean Ministry of Education, Science, and Technology funded this study. By. A’ndrea Elyse Messer Continue reading
Global netizens worried over US spying
Global netizens worried over US spying (AP) / 8 June 2013 News that the US government has been snooping on Internet users worldwide came as little surprise to global netizens, who said they have few expectations of online privacy as governments increasingly monitor people’s digital lives, often with Internet companies’ acquiescence. Privacy activists concerned over the US National Security Agency’s selective monitoring of Internet traffic called on people to take measures to better protect their digital data ranging from emails to photos to social network posts. But most people eschew encryption and other privacy tools and seemed resigned to the open book their online lives have become. “It doesn’t surprise me one bit. They’ve been doing it for years,” said Jamie Griffiths, a 26-year-old architect working on his laptop in a London cafe. “I wouldn’t send anything via email that I wouldn’t want a third party to read.” This combination photo shows (clockwise from top L) Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer at the Bill Graham Auditorium in San Francisco; Google’s headquarters on 8th Avenue in New York; people walking past the Apple Store at Grand Central Terminal in New York; the “Like” icon at the Facebook main campus in Menlo Park, California. US spies are secretly tapping into servers of nine Internet giants including Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Google in a vast anti-terror sweep targeting foreigners, reports said on June 7, 2013. AFP From Baghdad, to Bogota, Colombia, many said they already carefully censor what they write online and assume governments are regularly spying on online activity, be it as part of global counter-terrorism or domestic surveillance efforts. “The social networks and email have always been vulnerable because tech-savvy people know how to penetrate them,” said Teolindo Acosa, a 34-year-old education student at Venezuela’s Universidad Central who was leaving a cybercafe in Caracas. Leaked confidential documents show the NSA and FBI have been sifting through personal data by directly accessing the US-based servers of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, AOL, Skype, PalTalk, Apple and YouTube. Following Thursday’s revelation, US President Barack Obama said Friday that the surveillance did not “target” US citizens or others living in the US — which does not mean their communications were not caught up in the dragnet. But that didn’t dampen the outrage of people who resent what they consider Washington’s self-anointed role as the world’s policeman. “To the United States, everyone is suspicious, even the pope!” said leftist Colombian Sen. Alexander Lopez. “Everyone is under observation these days and this should be taken up by the United Nations.” Lopez said he has no plans to close his Google and Microsoft email accounts. He figures he’ll be spied on no matter what he does. The revelation of global data vacuuming could hurt US technology companies if Internet users become disillusioned and abandon them in favor of homegrown alternatives that offer greater security. US privacy activist Christopher Soghoian said he finds it “insane” that so many politicians outside the United States use Google gmail accounts. “This has given the NSA an advantage over every other intelligence system in the world. The Americans don’t have to hack as much, because everyone in the world sends their data to American companies,” he said. Hossam El Hamalawy, a blogger with Egypt’s Revolutionary Socialists, one of the Egyptian groups that helped spearhead the 2011 uprising, said the dearth of locally developed Web tools means many around the world are simply stuck with US sites, even if they know the government is monitoring them. “The problem is that there is no alternative,” he said. “If you don’t use Facebook, what is the alternative social network available for the Internet user who is not an IT geek?” Soghoian predicted an increasing push by governments and companies in Europe in particular, where privacy has been a much bigger issue for voters than in the United States, away from storing data in US-based server farms. Indeed, under US law it is not illegal for the NSA to collect information on foreigners. The disclosure of the NSA data-vacuuming program known as PRISM is only the latest “of many US government programs created to infringe on personal freedoms,” said Carlos Affonso Pereira de Souza, a technology policy professor at FGV think tank in Rio de Janeiro. Going back well into the 20 th century, the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand ran a secret satellite communications interception network that became known as Echelon and searched information including telexes, faxes and emails, according to experts including US journalist James Bamford. The system was the subject of a 2001 European Parliament inquiry. According to a UN report released this week, such surveillance has been on a global upsurge with governments increasingly tapping into online personal data and even discouraging online anonymity by passing laws prohibiting it. The UN report said such activity has been expanding as technology advances, and that countries should prioritize protecting people’s online rights. “In order to meet their human rights obligations, States must ensure that the rights to freedom of expression and privacy are at the heart of their communications surveillance frameworks,” the report reads. Its author, Guatemalan Frank La Rue, calls for legal standards to ensure “privacy, security and anonymity of communications” to protect people including journalists, human rights defenders and whistleblowers. Civil libertarians in the United States were much more upset about a different revelation published Wednesday, that the NSA has been collecting the phone records including the calls, numbers, times and duration of all US citizen customers of the telecommunications giant Verizon. Continue reading
