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CHINA used a top-secret SC-19 anti-satellite (ASAT) missile in a test last year against a target missile as part of a missile-defense system that remains shrouded in secrecy. The ASAT missile was fired against a new medium-range missile and details were disclosed in a State Department cable made public recently by WikiLeaks that included an outline of a diplomatic protest note to Beijing about both Chinese weapons programs. The cable provides the first detailed U.S. assessment of what defense officials say is a major strategic advancement in China’s military buildup. It reveals that China’s anti-satellite system was developed for use...

LONDON, March 8 (Reuters) - Western cuts and swiftly rising defence spending in emerging economies are redrawing the global strategic map, a leading think-tank said on Tuesday, with the danger of conflicts between states also rising. In its annual Global Military Balance report, the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) said the shift in economic power was already beginning to have a real military effect and closing any strategic gap. "Western states' defence budgets are under pressure and their military procurement is constrained," said IISS director general John Chipman. "But in other regions -- notably Asia and the Middle...

FRANKFURT — To hear family, friends and neighbors tell it, Arid Uka was a model youth: never involved in violence, or in trouble with the police, unlike many other young men in his predominantly immigrant neighborhood in Frankfurt. Mr. Uka, 21, they said, was calm and quiet. In 2005, he and some classmates won a government prize for a school project on how to prevent violence in society and posed proudly with Gerhard Schröder, then chancellor of Germany. The young man from Kosovo helped his mother at home, cleaned floors, took out the trash and even gave her half his...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - While Congress brawls over how to shrink a $1.6 trillion budget deficit this year, an even tougher battle has begun over cutting popular Social Security retirement benefits to achieve long-term savings. It's unclear whether Congress will be able to agree on how to reform the massive government pension program, which has provided a social safety net for the elderly since 1935. That in part will depend on whether President Barack Obama throws his weight behind a reform effort that politicians of all stripes fear could be full of political risks. While the president has invited a conversation...

Like so many jihad plots and actual jihad attacks and attempted attacks these days, the jihad murder of two U.S. airmen and the wounding of two others outside the Frankfurt Airport in Germany Wednesday was initially dismissed as having nothing to do with terrorism. According to the German news agency DAPD, Boris Rhein, the interior minister for the German state of Hesse hurried to the airport and almost immediately declared that there were no indications that the shootings had been a terror attack. One wonders what actually would constitute a terrorist attack for such analysts. Would the murderer have to...

Access to the professional networking site LinkedIn was disrupted in China on Thursday, following online calls on other sites for gatherings inspired by protests against authoritarian regimes across the Middle East. Many users in China were unable to access LinkedIn, which is planning an initial public offering set to raise up to US$175-million. LinkedIn could be accessed as recently as Thursday morning, according to two regular users, one a Reuters employee and the other a business consultant, who declined to be identified. Some users who later found they could not access it via the Chinese Internet said the site was...

North, China trade tips on democracy protests February 24, 2011 Meng Jianzhu, China’s minister of public security, made a trip this month to North Korea to discuss ways to prevent the wave of democracy protests in the Middle East from spreading to China and North Korea, according to several South Korean sources. North Korea’s official news agency reported on Feb. 15 that Meng had been received by North Korean leader Kim Jong-il the day before. The visit was initially seen as an endorsement of the plan for Kim Jong-un to succeed his father Kim Jong-il as the country’s leader, as...

Oakland police are investigating reports that a 7-year-old boy was sexually assaulted by other children at a Boys and Girls Club in East Oakland, authorities said today.

A Vienna-born Serbian Muslim named Nedžad Balkan (a.k.a. Ebu Muhammed) is believed to have been behind the most recent terror attack in the central Bosnian town of Bugojno, and his connection to Bosnia and Herzegovina signals the rise of a new and avowedly violent sect of Wahhabis that has regional intelligence agencies on alert. Nedžad Balkan Nedžad Balkan, born in Vienna, Austria, is the son of Bosniaks from Serbia’s predominately Muslim Sandžak region straddling the border of the Republic of Montenegro. A former boxer and night club bouncer in his younger days, Balkan, now in his mid-30s, is the leader...

The exploitation of children is not something that’s happening in the shadows. It’s happening at a place used by some 500 million people. It’s happening on Facebook and it’s a growing problem "Pedophiles have made child pornography, rape, bestiality, incest, mainstream on Facebook,” says Weis. FOX23’s Abbie Alford investigates the plague of child porn on Facebook and what’s being done to stop it. Graphic photos are found on Facebook, "These are underage girls. She can't be more than 10 years old," says Tulsa’s Chapter Director for Stop Child Trafficking Now, Jason Weis. "That looks like a little tiny girl tied...

Chinese officials recently unveiled a new, high-tech stealth fighter that could pose a significant threat to American air superiority - and some of its technology, it turns out, may well have come from the U.S. itself. Balkan military officials and other experts have told The Associated Press that in all probability the Chinese gleaned some of their technological know-how from an American F-117 Nighthawk that was shot down over Serbia in 1999. Nighthawks were the world's first stealth fighters, planes that were very hard for radar to detect. But on March 27, 1999, during NATO's aerial bombing of Serbia in...

A teacher at Oakland’s Markham Elementary School has been suspended indefinitely after school officials said a pair of second-graders performed sex acts on each other in class – with the teacher present. “I think everyone is taken aback over this shocking incident,” Troy Flint, the spokesman for the Oakland Unified School District, told CBS 5 on Thursday. “Of course, it is hard to understand how that could have occurred.” Flint said the sex acts incident was one of two separate cases under investigation involving the teacher; both incidents occurred last week in the same classroom but he said they didn’t...

And we don't need a death penalty in this country. This teacher is sick and needs to be removed from society, permanently. With no chance of being accidently put back into society

China is still years away from being able to field a stealth aircraft, despite the disclosure of images indicating that it appears to have a working prototype, Pentagon officials said on Wednesday. The images have been posted on a number of websites and were published on the front page of The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday. The Pentagon said they appeared to show a Chinese J-20 stealth fighter prototype making a high-speed taxi test. The disclosure of the photographs comes just days before U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates is due to travel to Beijing on Sunday, and analysts could only...

BEIJING (AFP) – China's first Mars probe is expected to be launched in October this year in a joint operation with Russia after a two-year delay, state media reported Sunday. The probe, Yinghuo-1, was due to blast off in October 2009 with Russia's "Phobos Explorer" from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan but the launch was postponed, the official Xinhua news agency said. Quoting an unnamed expert at the China Academy of Space Technology, the report said the blast-off had been pushed back to October this year. It added that China planned to launch a Mars probe on its own in...

China's military is deploying a new anti-ship ballistic missile that can sink U.S. aircraft carriers, a weapon that specialists say gives Beijing new power-projection capabilities that will affect U.S. support for Pacific allies. Adm. Robert Willard, commander of the U.S. Pacific Command, disclosed to a Japanese newspaper on Sunday that the new anti-ship ballistic missile (ASBM) is now in the early stages of deployment after having undergone extensive testing. "An analogy using a Western term would be 'initial operational capability (IOC),' whereby
I think China would perceive that it has an operational capability now, but they continue to develop it,"...

Kosovo’s Organized Crime Burden Dec 20, 2010 By Ioannis Michaletos | In Kosovo, the main managers of illicit drugs are the so-called “15 families,” which represent the core power of the region, because of their financial clout and political connections. In a 67-page report published in 2005, BND (German intelligence agency) analysts concluded that there is “close interaction between the leading members of the Kosovo-Albanian society and the domestic and international underworld currently domiciled in Pristina.” Moreover, “the criminal networks don’t support the creation of a stable political and economic environment, since that will reduce their clout.” What is more...

[...] You will recall how Goldman Sachs wowed the whole world with its dazzling trading. Day in, day out, the traders at Goldman made money. The firm turned in “perfect” trading quarters, with not a single day showing a loss. Surely, one of the junior traders would have miscalculated at least once? Or a seasoned old pro, after a well-irrigated lunch, take his fat finger and hit the wrong button? Nope. Not once did Goldman’s trading machine err. It was uncanny. Almost unnatural. Who was on the other side of those Goldman trades, we wondered? Trading is a zero sum...

Thanks for the Tax Cut!By LARRY DAVID Published: December 20, 2010 THERE is a God! It passed! The Bush tax cuts have been extended two years for the upper bracketeers, of which I am a proud member, thank you very much. I’m the last person in the world I’d want to be beside, but I am beside myself! This is a life changer, I tell you. A life changer! To begin with, I was planning a trip to Cabo with my kids for Christmas vacation. We were going to fly coach, but now with the money I’m saving in taxes,...