U.S. intelligence document obtained by The Interceptconfirms that the sprawling U.S. military base in Ramstein, Germany serves as the high-tech heart of America’s drone program. Ramstein is the site of a satellite relay station that enables drone operators in the American Southwest to communicate with their remote aircraft in Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan and other targeted countries. The top-secret slide deck, dated July 2012, provides the most detailed blueprint seen to date of the technical architecture used to conduct strikes with Predator and Reaper drones.
E.U. vows to boost migrant search-and-rescue efforts
Spurred by Sunday’s migrant disaster, which authorities feared would be the deadliest ever in the Mediterranean Sea, the European Union on Monday vowed to ramp up lifesaving search-and-rescue operations even as more rickety vessels bound for Europe fell into distress.
In a candid mea culpa, European officials conceded that they had acted too slowly to address what has become a mounting humanitarian emergency on the continent’s southern flank. They announced a 10-point proposal to shore up its refugee management system, including an effort to seize and destroy the ships used by migrant traffickers.
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The dangerous journeys from North Africa and elsewhere have gone on for years, but now a surge is unfolding. Officials estimate that as many as 1 million migrants are bottlenecked in lawless Libya, having arrived there from pockets of misery and conflict in Africa, the Middle East and beyond.
The number of migrants crossing the Mediterranean rose sharply last year to more than 220,000, with the majority arriving in Italy, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. This month alone, more than 13,300 migrants have arrived — a number roughly equal to the first three months of the year combined.
The death toll has also jumped. Even before Sunday’s disaster, 950 migrants had died in the central Mediterranean this year, compared with only 50 during the same period last year, the U.N. refugee agency said.
FDA Ponders Putting Homeopathy To A Tougher Test →
Aurigemma went to medical school and practiced as a regular doctor before switching to homeopathy more than 30 years ago. He says he got disillusioned by mainstream medicine because of the side effects caused by many drugs. "I don't reject conventional medicine. I use it when I have to," Aurigemma says.
In 2005, the British medical journal The Lancet attacked the use of homeopathic treatments saying that doctors should be honest about homeopathy's lack of benefit.
Throughout his career, homeopathy has been regulated differently from mainstream medicine.
In 1988, the Food and Drug Administration decided not to require homeopathic remedies to go through the same drug-approval process as standard medical treatments. Now the FDA is revisiting that decision. It will hold two days of hearings this week to decide whether homeopathic remedies should have to be proven safe and effective.
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For years, critics like Novella have been asking the FDA to regulate homeopathy more aggressively. The FDA's decision to revisit the issue now was motivated by several factors, including the growing popularity of homeopathic remedies and the length of time that has passed since the agency last considered the issue.
The FDA is also concerned about the quality of remedies, according to Cynthia Schnedar, director of the FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research Office of Compliance. The agency has issued a series of warnings about individual homeopathic products in recent years, including one that involved tablets being sold to alleviate teething pain in babies.
Australia and Iran agree to share ISIL intelligence →
Australia and Iran have agreed to share intelligence to track foreign fighters associated with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), the Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said.
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Bishop said it would be an informal arrangement.
"We have a common purpose with Iran in defeating Daesh and helping the Iraqi government," she told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, using an Arabic acronym to refer to ISIL.
"During my discussions with the national leadership here, it was agreed that we could share intelligence, particularly on the foreign terrorist fighters from Australia who are taking part in this conflict in Iraq."
More than 100 Australians have travelled to Iraq and Syria to fight with the group
Iran, Afghanistan Announce Security Cooperation Against Islamic State →
Afghanistan and Iran announced Sunday plans for enhanced security cooperation to combat threats from the Islamic State group, including possible joint military operations.
Standing alongside visiting Afghan leader Ashraf Ghani, Iran's President Hassan Rouhani said the tumult hitting the region meant intelligence must be shared.
His comments came after IS, which holds swathes of Syria and Iraq, said it was responsible for a suicide bombing in Afghanistan's eastern city of Jalalabad which killed 33 people.
The attack on Saturday at a state-owned bank where government workers were drawing their salaries was the first in Afghanistan claimed by IS. More than 100 people were also wounded.
Ghani's two-day visit to Iran is his first since taking over from president Hamid Karzai in September, and he was accompanied on the trip by his foreign minister and minister for oil and mines.
The Afghan leader has repeatedly raised the prospect of IS making inroads in his country, though the jihadist group has never formally acknowledged having a presence in Afghanistan.
Greece on the Brink →
The story so far: At the end of 2009 Greece faced a crisis driven by two factors: High debt, and inflated costs and prices that left the country uncompetitive.
Europe responded with loans that kept the cash flowing, but only on condition that Greece pursue extremely painful policies. These included spending cuts and tax hikes that, if imposed on the United States, would amount to $3 trillion a year. There were also wage cuts on a scale that’s hard to fathom, with average wages down 25 percent from their peak.
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By late 2014 Greece had managed to eke out a small “primary” budget surplus, with tax receipts exceeding spending, excluding interest payments. That’s all that creditors can reasonably demand, since you can’t keep squeezing blood from a stone. Meanwhile, all those wage cuts have made Greece competitive on world markets — or would make it competitive if some stability can be restored.
The shape of a deal is therefore clear: basically, a standstill on further austerity, with Greece agreeing to make significant but not ever-growing payments to its creditors. Such a deal would set the stage for economic recovery, perhaps slow at the start, but finally offering some hope.
But right now that deal doesn’t seem to be coming together. Maybe it’s true, as the creditors say, that the new Greek government is hard to deal with. But what do you expect when parties that have no previous experience in governing take over from a discredited establishment? More important, the creditors are demanding things — big cuts in pensions and public employment — that a newly elected government of the left simply can’t agree to, as opposed to reforms like an improvement in tax enforcement that it can. And the Greeks, as I suggested, are all too ready to see these demands as part of an effort either to bring down their government or to make their country into an example of what will happen to other debtor countries if they balk at harsh austerity.
Keeping Track of the US Intelligence Community’s Leakers →
... Way back in June 2013, Glenn Greenwald said that “courage is contagious.” He seems to be correct.
Debating "Robots Taking Our Jobs"
There is historical precedent, and it seems almost impossible that they aren't:
Today, machines can process regular spoken language and not only recognize human faces, but also read their expressions. They can classify personality types, and have started being able to carry out conversations with appropriate emotional tenor.
Machines are getting better than humans at figuring out who to hire, who’s in a mood to pay a little more for that sweater, and who needs a coupon to nudge them toward a sale. In applications around the world, software is being used to predict whether people are lying, how they feel and whom they’ll vote for.
...Most of what we think of as expertise, knowledge and intuition is being deconstructed and recreated as an algorithmic competency, fueled by big data.
On the other hand, there may be little evidence that this is happening:
We have a very good way to measure the extent to which machines are taking our jobs. It's called "productivity growth." It means the extent to which we can produce more output with the same amount of human labor. If the machines are taking our jobs, productivity growth should be very fast.
It isn't. Productivity growth was very fast in the years from 1947-73. It grew at a pace of roughly 3.0 percent annually. This was a period of strong wage growth and low unemployment. It then fell to around 1.5 percent annually from 1973-1995. There was then a pick-up to close to 3.0 percent annually in the years from 1995 to 2005. (For some technical reasons, like a faster pace of depreciation in the more recent period, the 1947-73 productivity growth was much stronger.) Since 2005 productivity growth has fallen to an average rate of about 1.5 percent. In the last two years it has been under 1.0 percent.