All posts tagged: points

4 Key Points From New White House Counter-Terror Strategy

4 Key Points From New White House Counter-Terror Strategy

Published by Jenni Sidey

Authored by Ryan Morgan via The Epoch Times, President Donald Trump’s administration rolled out its new counterterrorism strategy overview on May 6, articulating recent policy shifts and new pledges going forward. The 16-page strategy guide seeks to articulate an “America First” approach to dealing with militants, extremists, and criminal enterprises. “For the 25th Anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks, America has returned to a common sense and reality-based Counterterrorism Strategy,” the document states. “President Trump has [effected] a complete revision of how we defeat threats to America predicated on national sovereignty and civilizational confidence and the objective of destroying the groups who would kill Americans or hurt our interests as a free nation.” Here are four key points in the new strategy rollout. Violent Left-Wing Groups Fall Under Expanded Counterterror Scope The new strategy document articulates a widened aperture for U.S. counterterrorism efforts. “We face new categories and combinations of violent actors that make the established ways of doing counterterrorism insufficient or obsolete,” the document reads. Although U.S. counterterror efforts have long focused on threats …

Iranian Propaganda vs. U.S. Talking Points: How We Determined the Real Damage to U.S. Military Bases

Iranian Propaganda vs. U.S. Talking Points: How We Determined the Real Damage to U.S. Military Bases

Published by Sam Flores

So in the early days of the war between the U.S., Israel and Iran, my colleagues and I started seeing a lot of these videos that were filmed on U.S. military bases and also foreign bases, where the U.S. operates in the Gulf and the Middle East. And they showed a number of Iranian, usually drone strikes, on key infrastructure. And then not too long after that, we started seeing a stream of Iranian satellite imagery that came out of Iranian state media that were then filtering down through social media. And these images claim to show very massive swaths of destruction at these bases that the U.S. operates out of. And normally, what we would do is we would hit these up against American satellite imagery. But the U.S. government requested for American satellite companies to restrict the release of this imagery in the Middle East and the Gulf — not even restrict it, but even to retroactively remove images going back to early March. And also, U.S. officials weren’t talking a whole lot …

Brazilian dinosaur discovery points to an ancient route from Europe to South America

Brazilian dinosaur discovery points to an ancient route from Europe to South America

Published by Jenni Sidey

A giant dinosaur lay buried about eight meters below a construction site in northeastern Brazil, hidden in sediments so old that the first people to see its bones thought they might belong to Ice Age mammals. Instead, the remains turned out to be something far older and far larger. It was a new species of long-necked sauropod that stretched roughly 20 meters, or about 65 feet, from head to tail. The animal, named Dasosaurus tocantinensis, lived about 120 million years ago in what is now Maranhão state. Its discovery, described in the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology, adds a new branch to South America’s dinosaur record. It also hints at an older story of movement between continents that no longer touch. For researchers, the surprise was not just the size of the animal. It was where its closest known relative turned up: Spain. A road cut, an 8-meter slope, and a very old skeleton The fossils were first spotted by archaeologist Daniel Ribeiro da Silva during monitoring work at a road-rail terminal in the city of …

Dr Winter warns UK PM normalised far-right, ‘legitimised migration talking points, policy positions’

Dr Winter warns UK PM normalised far-right, ‘legitimised migration talking points, policy positions’

Published by Sam Flores

As British voters head to the polls for local elections, Peter O’Brien is pleased to welcome Dr Aaron Winter, Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Lancaster University. He offers a stark diagnosis of Britain’s political drift: Dr Winter argued that the real story was not simply electoral volatility, but the gradual normalization of far-right narratives within mainstream politics itself. Labour’s attempts to neutralize the far right by echoing parts of its rhetoric have not weakened extremist currents but legitimized them. “We’ve seen this strategy fail again and again and again,” he warned. Keywords for this article Source link

U.S. and allies test capabilities near Asia’s flash points : NPR

U.S. and allies test capabilities near Asia’s flash points : NPR

Published by Sam Flores

Soldiers of the U.S. Army’s 25th Infantry Division build fighting positions along the beach of the La Paz sand dunes in Laoag City, Philippines, ahead of counterlanding exercises during annual Balikatan drills. Anthony Kuhn/NPR hide caption toggle caption Anthony Kuhn/NPR LAOAG CITY, Philippines — Silver drone boats scanned the azure waters for targets, rocket artillery rounds blasted out from behind sand dunes, mortars and machine guns raked the surf, and generator-powered air conditioners and tents cooled stacks of data servers on the beach, as U.S. and allied forces practiced repelling an amphibious assault. It’s part of a U.S.-led drill on Luzon, the Philippines’ largest island, dubbed Balikatan, or “shoulder to shoulder” in Tagalog. It put to test the U.S. military’s new weapons, emerging strategies and shifting alliances, amid geopolitical tensions and rapidly evolving technologies. “It’s really about ‘see, sense, strike and protect,’” Gen. Ronald Clark, commander of the U.S. Army Pacific (USARPAC), told NPR in an interview. “We want to see the enemy first,” he added, to repel any attack on the Philippines. More than …

Child Advocate Letter Points to DCF Failings as Connecticut House Approves New Oversight

Child Advocate Letter Points to DCF Failings as Connecticut House Approves New Oversight

Published by Sam Flores

Just as Connecticut lawmakers prepared to discuss a bill Thursday that would create new oversight for the state Department of Children and Families, the watchdog Office of the Child Advocate released a public letter condemning the quality of casework at the child welfare agency. The letter, which included detailed findings and research, described the apparent suicide last week of a child who died within an hour of asking to be moved into foster care. In that case, according to the letter, “DCF made a decision to leave the child with the parent, indicating that coming into care was not an option.” The Child Advocate called the incident alarming. “In fact, OCA has grown increasingly alarmed at the quality of case practice observed through our reviews of critical incidents and child fatalities, some of which have garnered significant public attention and some of which have not.” The letter said that such decisions are part of a pattern of declining quality of “the most meaningful” elements of casework, with social workers consistently diverging from policy and facing …

How to Lose an NBA Playoff Game by 50 Points

How to Lose an NBA Playoff Game by 50 Points

Published by Jenni Sidey

On Thursday night, as the New York Knicks and Atlanta Hawks battled it out in Game 6 of their opening round playoff series, I was at an event in Downtown Manhattan for an author promoting his new book. About midway through, a guy sitting in front of me pulled out his phone, and the logos of each respective team caught my eye. What followed was maybe my first ever quadruple take, as the man’s screen read: KNICKS 72, HAWKS 22. “Hey, is that…real?” I asked, sheepishly tapping him on the shoulder. Surely I had fallen victim to some elaborate prank. Maybe there was a glitch in Google’s box score software. The Hawks being down by 50 points, with four minutes still left in the first half, seemed legitimately impossible. Factor in the circumstances of the game—the Hawks needed a win to keep their season alive, they were playing on their home court, and the series had been relatively competitive in the five games prior—and the deficit seemed even more unlikely. Sadly for the ever-tortured Atlanta …

Antarctic seismic data points to an ancient structure circling Earth’s core

Antarctic seismic data points to an ancient structure circling Earth’s core

Published by Jenni Sidey

A layer only a few to a few dozen kilometers thick may be draped across the boundary between Earth’s core and mantle, and researchers say it likely consists of ancient ocean floor pushed deep underground over geologic time. That is the picture emerging from a study led by The University of Alabama, published in Science Advances, which used seismic data from Antarctica to probe a vast stretch of the Southern Hemisphere nearly 2,000 miles below the surface. The team found evidence that ultralow velocity zones, or ULVZs, are not just isolated patches in a few places. Instead, they may be widespread along the core-mantle boundary. These zones slow seismic waves and appear denser than the surrounding deep mantle. The researchers argue that the best explanation is old oceanic material that sank through subduction, then spread and accumulated along the bottom of the mantle. “Seismic investigations, such as ours, provide the highest resolution imaging of the interior structure of our planet, and we are finding that this structure is vastly more complicated than once thought,” said …

Barnes, Ingram Score 23 Points Apiece as Raptors Beat Cavaliers 93-89 and Tie Series at 2-All

Barnes, Ingram Score 23 Points Apiece as Raptors Beat Cavaliers 93-89 and Tie Series at 2-All

Published by Sam Flores

TORONTO (AP) — Scottie Barnes hit the go-ahead free throws in the final minute and finished with 23 points, Brandon Ingram also scored 23 and the Toronto Raptors beat the Cleveland Cavaliers 93-89 on Sunday, tying the Eastern Conference first-round playoff series at two games apiece. The best-of-seven series shifts to Cleveland for Game 5 on Wednesday. “Now it’s a best of three,” Cavaliers guard James Harden said. RJ Barrett scored 18 points and Collin Murray-Boyles had 15 points and 10 rebounds for the Raptors, who won despite shooting 4 for 30 from 3-point range. “We’re just trying to go out there and win, take it one possession at a time,” Barnes said. “That’s all we’re focussing on.” Barnes had nine rebounds and six assists as Toronto won back-to-back postseason games for the first time since a first-round loss to Philadelphia in 2022. “We just never, never flinched,” Raptors coach Darko Rajakovic said. “We continued guarding and guarding.” Donovan Mitchell scored 12 of his 20 points in the fourth quarter and Harden added 19, but …