Category: Threats

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Event: 29-31 July 2010, Berkeley CA, Open Science Summit

01 Poverty, 02 Infectious Disease, 04 Education, 07 Health, 10 Security, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Commerce, Government, Reform, Technologies
event link

Objectives:  Create an annual flagship event and news hub to build and maintain the identity of the international Open Science Movement.  Organize the various sub-communities into an effective, global, socio-technological force for rapid change in science/innovation policy. An attempt to gather all stakeholders who want to liberate our scientific and technological commons and enable a new era of decentralized, distributed innovation to solve humanity’s greatest challenges. Continue reading “Event: 29-31 July 2010, Berkeley CA, Open Science Summit”

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Video: Social Experiments to Fight Poverty

01 Poverty, 02 Infectious Disease, 04 Education, 07 Health, International Aid, Videos/Movies/Documentaries

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About this talk

Alleviating poverty is more guesswork than science, and lack of data on aid's impact raises questions about how to provide it. But Clark Medal-winner Esther Duflo says it's possible to know which development efforts help and which hurt — by testing solutions with randomized trials.

About Esther Duflo

Esther Duflo takes economics out of the lab and into the field to discover the causes of poverty and means to eradicate it. Full bio and more links

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NIGHTWATCH Extract: Korean POWs Alive Ergo VN?

07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards

South Korea-China-North Korea: For the record. An 81-year-old South Korean prisoner of war from the Korean War is known to have been sent back to North Korea after having been arrested in China in August last year.

The POW fought in the Korean War in the 3rd division of the South Korean Army's 5th Corps and was captured by North Korean forces in 1952. After years in captivity, he managed to escape North Korea with the help of a South Korean group and a “refugee broker.” The refugee broker who had helped the soldier escape reported him to Chinese police after arguing with the South Korean group over money

The POW was arrested on 24 August last year, eight days after he fled North Korea, according to Dong-A Ilbo.

Continue reading “NIGHTWATCH Extract: Korean POWs Alive Ergo VN?”

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Journal: What Revolution in Military Affairs? Shattering the illusion of bloodless victory

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security
Chuck Spinney Recommends

It is not as if the disaster described below, in the Afghan war logs released by Wikileaks to the Guardian, the New York Times, and der Spiegle, was not foreseeable.  Here, for example, is an op-ed I wrote for Defense Week in April 2001, well before we began the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

And I was hardly alone or invisible.  Readers familiar with the work of reformers Colonel John Boyd, Pierre Sprey, Colonel James Burton, Colonel Mike Wylie, Colonel GI Wilson, Colonel Bob Dilger, and Tom Christie, among others, will know that they have been highly visible canaries in the high-tech coal mine since the late 1960s.  For those unfamiliar with their critical analyses, I refer you to  James Fallows' National Defense (Random House 1981), and Robert Coram's Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War (Little Brown, 2002), or The Winds of Reform, Time (7 March 1983).  Emphasis below added. Chuck.

Afghanistan war logs: Shattering the illusion of a bloodless victory

Norton-Taylor, Guardian, 25 July 2010

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/25/revolution-in-military-affairs-shock-awe

Real picture of a conflict longer than Vietnam, or either world war, refutes the idea of a ‘revolution in military affairs'

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NIGHTWATCH Extract: Strategic Prisoners in AF…

07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards

Afghanistan: Taliban militants said on 25 July they had killed one of two US military personnel captured on the 24th in Logar Province, south of Kabul, and that they are holding the other hostage, Reuters reported, citing an interview with a Taliban spokesman. The spokesman said the group has taken the living captive and the dead one's body to a “safe place” and that the group's leadership would decide the fate of the captive later.

NIGHTWATCH Comment: US authorities announced that two US Navy personnel have been missing since Friday. Taliban state they ambushed the two, killing one. The memory of Vietnam's handling of American prisoners of war is still fresh enough to revive horrible memories, but the Pashtun Taliban are more brutal and less organized than the Vietnamese and lack a French colonial-built prison system for hiding POWs. The leadership safe havens in Pakistan do not include access to provincial prisons or kidnappings would be much more frequent.

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