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Granted, Obama administration spokespersons and the mainstream media (but I repeat myself) describe this week’s event differently than does this column title. Something about a “Cuban embassy” formally “opening?” in “Washington, D.C. ?” If I read these things correctly? Nonetheless, the people actually in-the-know about these matters are cutting to the heart of the issue: “All Cuban personnel now working in the [U.S] Interests Section [in Havana] work for Cuban State Security,” said high-ranking Cuban intelligence defector Pedro Riera Escalante. “All housing for [U.S.] officials may have microphones and other devices installed.” "Virtually every member of Cuba's U.N mission is...

This week, Google released a research paper chronicling one of its latest forays into artificial intelligence. Researchers at the company programmed an advanced type of “chatbot” that learns how to respond in conversations based on examples from a training set of dialogue. And the bot doesn’t just answer by spitting out canned answers in response to certain words; it can form new answers from new questions. This means Google's researchers could get a little creative with it, and they certainly did — they asked the bot everything from boring IT questions to inquiries about the meaning of life. The responses...

 In an indication of just how desperate the Republican establishment and their Big Business paymasters are to revive the package of fast track Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) and Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) bills that went down last week, the House Rules Committee slipped the rule for reconsideration of the failed TAA bill into the rule for H.R. 2596, the Fiscal Year 2016 Intelligence Authorization bill.Along with the National Defense Authorization bill, the Intel Authorization bill is considered to be one of the “must pass” bills of each legislative year.According to the existing Rules, the Motion to Reconsider the vote on...

Michael Morell, the former deputy director of the CIA, has been out pimping his book The Great War of Our Time in which he spends 47 pages massaging the issue of Benghazi. I have not read the book, but I did read his recent column in Politico. If his book is anything like his column then it is clear we still need to dig deeper as to what happened and what was done by the U.S. government. Morell did not stoop as low as Julian Castro, current HUD secretary and prospective running mate for the anointed Hillary, in his comments...

One of the best lessons I learned in my years of service in the military is a quote often share with y’all: “the enemy has a vote.” You can try and sell the American people — and others — a politicized line such as “al-Qaida has been decimated and destroyed” or “we have reached the framework of a deal with Iran” or “ISIS is not Islamic,” but the bad guys are not affected by empty rhetoric. And here we go again with the Obama administration and the conflagration against Islamic terrorism. We’ve been told that ISIS has stalled. Their recruiting...

The ZuckerBorg has assimilated yet more humans from academia and industry into its Facebook Artificial-Intelligence Research Team (FART). Facebook claims their work will focus on several aspects of machine learning, with applications to image, speech and natural language understanding. The free global ad platform announced that it had "bolstered" the team eam with some of the world's leading researchers from Microsoft and academia. Among those assimilated is the award-winning Leon Bottou, whose long-term goal "is to understand how to build human-level intelligence". Also on board are Laurens van de Maaten and Anitha Kannan, who will continue their research into deep...

I remember the righteous smugness I used to feel when the one conservative friend in my social circle would begin expressing his opinions at a dinner gathering. I and the other ‘enlightened’ diners would shift uncomfortably and glance at one another, rolling our eyes: "Here he goes again." My stomach would tighten with a worry not fit for the occasion. I began to feel personally offended. And the smugness sometimes boiled over into anger, as I'd listen to my friend, loyal and kind, simply share his "crazy" ideas and opinions with us.What I thought then was only my frustration with...

Social scientists have found that by the time children enter kindergarten, there is already a large academic achievement gap between students from wealthy and poor families. We still don't know exactly why that's the case. There's a sense that it at least partly has to do with the fact that affluent mothers and fathers have more intensive parenting sytles—they're more likely to read to their kids, for instance—and have enough money to make sure their toddlers grow up well-nourished, generally cared for, and intellectually stimulated. At the same time, poor children often grow up in chaotic, food-insecure, stressful homes that...

[Editor's note: This article orginally appeared on the cover of the May 27, 2002, issue of HUMAN EVENTS.]Sen. Bob Graham (D.-Fla.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told HUMAN EVENTS May 21 that his committee had received all the same terrorism intelligence prior to September 11 as the Bush administration. "Yes, we had seen all the information," said Graham. "But we didn't see it on a single piece of paper, the way the President did." Graham added that threats of hijacking in an August 6 memo to President Bush were based on very old intelligence that the committee had seen...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Christine Iverson202-863-8614Washington, DC—RNC Communications Director Jim Dyke released the following statement regarding Senator Bob Graham’s conference call today for the Kerry Campaign. “Senator Graham is right. Intelligence does matter. That's why it's so troubling that John Kerry did not bother to show up for 76 percent of his Senate Intelligence Committee hearings. The Kerry campaign says the percentage would change if non-public committee hearings were included but refuses to release the records” “However, we know Senator Graham keeps notebooks which are obsessive in their attention to detail. Perhaps one of these notebooks sheds light on Senator...

I put a briefing together and spoke at the Pentagon around Christmastime in 2005. The briefing culminated in a slide that raised two central questions: Can overdependence on “moderates” to explain non-Western motivations and beliefs lead us to (overly) depend on them for the decisions we make? Is there a point where the outsourcing of an understanding of events leads to the outsourcing of the decisionmaking associated with those events? Underlying both questions was my concern that decisions central to the warfighting effort are based solely on the inputs of experts on subjects that the decisionmakers themselves do not understand....

Presidential candidate Ted Cruz loved to argue as a Harvard student and boasted he'd get the best grades in his class, only to lose out to two other classmates. In a series of exclusive interviews with Metro, several of his former classmates painted a complex portrait of the Tea Party's most beloved presidential candidate. Laurence Tribe, a longtime Harvard law professor, said Cruz took his constitutional law class, challenged his teacher in interesting and "invariably right-leaning" ways at every turn. Tribe said Cruz bragged to many of his classmates that he would receive the highest grade in the class, which...

Not Every Leak Is Fit to Print Why have federal prosecutors subpoenaed a New York Times reporter?by Gabriel Schoenfeld 02/18/2008, Volume 013, Issue 22 Investigations of national-security leaks in Washington are not all that rare. But until Judith Miller of the New York Times was sent to jail for 85 days by a special prosecutor digging into the Valerie Plame imbroglio, investigations of such leaks in which journalists are subpoenaed were about as common as unicorns wandering the National Mall. We now have another such unicorn. On January 24, a federal grand jury in Alexandria issued a subpoena to...

Yemen's crisis is getting worse and then some. Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies have started bombing rebel positions inside Yemen. The Sunni Kingdom added that it would do "anything necessary" to deter the Iran-backed Shiite rebels who are taking over Yemen and trying to oust US-backed President Abd Rabbah Mansur Hadi. A Saudi source told Reuters that ground troops might be needed in Yemen to "restore order." Saudi Arabia is reportedly contributing as many as 150,000 troops and 100 warplanes to the campaign against the Houthis.

Secret intelligence files held by Yemeni security forces and containing details of American intelligence operations in the country have been looted by Iran-backed militia leaders, exposing names of informants and plans for U.S.-backed counter-terrorism operations, U.S. officials say. U.S. intelligence officials believe additional files were handed directly to Iranian advisors by Yemeni officials who have sided with the Houthi militias that seized control of the capital of Sana last September and later toppled the U.S.-backed president. For American intelligence networks in Yemen, the damage has been severe. Until recently, U.S. forces deployed in Yemen had worked closely with President Abdu...

The 3D printing industry is still very much in its infancy. But that could change if the CIA has its way. The intelligence agency's venture capital firm just invested in Voxel8, the company behind the first multi-material, 3D electronics printer. What does the CIA want with 3D printing? We can only guess at this point, but we may hear stories one day of how some futuristic James Bond 3D-printed his own gadgets in the field. What's the potential impact for consumers? The move might just jumpstart a field that has so far been struggling to find its footing. Voxel8 says...

(AUDIO-AT-LINK)Scientists studying the difference between human and chimpanzee DNA have found one stretch of human DNA that can make the brains of mice grow significantly bigger. "It's likely to be one of many DNA regions that's critical for controlling how the human brain develops," says Debra Silver, a neurobiologist at Duke University Medical School. It could also help explain why human brains are so much bigger than chimp brains, says Silver, who notes that "there are estimates of anywhere from two to four times as big." In addition to having bigger brains, Silver says, humans also "have more neurons, and...

If education is an escalator to lift people from poverty, young African American males are languishing at the bottom level. Only about 60 percent of them will earn high school diplomas, and roughly four in 10 drop out before graduation day. That’s compared with a 65-percent graduation rate for Latino males and 80 percent for young white men. Meanwhile, the graduation gap between young black men and their white peers has grown even wider, jumping about 10 percent in a little over a year. Those are just some of the sobering takeaways from the 10th biannual Schott Foundation report on...

Awkward. Members of the House Intelligence Committee were not briefed on the plans the White House announced today for a new cyber integration center modeled on the National Counterterrorism Center, a source with knowledge of the discussions told POLITICO. And they’re not happy about it. The Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center, projected to have a staff of 50 when it is fully operational next year, is funded by a $35 million line item in the “black budget” request for intelligence funding. Representatives from the Office of the Director for National Intelligence briefed committee members on the budget last week,

Retired attorney Kurt Richard Haskell conjectured on the Paris attacks on Sunday during an interview from Costa Rica with 1776 Channel, which can neither confirm nor readily dismiss his theories. “The Muslims being used in these plots are being trained overseas by undercover CIA pretending to be Al Qaeda/ ISIS. I think all of them were trained that way. They think they are in terrorist training camps when they are instead being trained to be patsies.” -Kurt Haskell during interview with 1776 Channel Haskell ran for U.S. Congress in 2012 as a Democrat in Michigan’s 7th District where he received...