Air Force Global Strike Command tested another ICBM by launching it across the Pacific(Source Business Insider) US Air Force Global Strike Command tested an ICBM at Vandenberg Air Force Base early on February 5.

The missile flew about 4,200 miles across the Pacific, reaching Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. A team of Air Force Global Strike Command Airmen from the 341st Missile Wing at Malmstrom Air Force Base, Montana, the 90th Missile Wing at F.E. Warren Air Force Base, Wyoming, and the 91st Missile Wing at Minot Air Force Base, North Dakota, launched an unarmed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile equipped with a test reentry vehicle at 12:33 a.m. Pacific Time on February 5 from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California.

The ICBM’s reentry vehicle traveled approximately 4,200 miles to the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. These test launches verify the accuracy and reliability of the ICBM weapon system, providing valuable data to ensure a continued safe, secure and effective nuclear deterrent.

RUSSIAN EVACUEES FROM CHINA TO BE QUARANTINED IN REMOTE SIBERIAN REGION

(Source zero Hedge)

The Russian Air Force on orders from President Vladimir Putin is currently in the midst of evacuating some over 150 Russian nationals from China and sending them to be “monitored” for coronavirus symptoms in a region of Western Siberia.

“Russian citizens and people from other countries evacuated from China will be temporarily accommodated in the Tyumen Region where they will be placed under quarantine, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova told reporters on Tuesday,” official news agency TASS reports.

This also after the first two cases of coronavirus in Russia were confirmed last Friday. Two Chinese nationals have already been quarantined in Tyumen and the far eastern Zabaykalsky region, and are expected to recover. Tyumen Region is in Western Siberia, and was among the first regions of the harsh and remote eastern areas of Russia to be settled starting in the 16th century. During pre-revolutionary Russia and into Soviet times, the region historically served as a place of exile, including as part of the gulag system of labor camps in the north.

Some 147 people will be flown by the Russian Air Force from Wuhan and Hubei Province to the Tyumen area where they are expected to be monitored by medical authorities for at least 14 days.

Russian authorities over the weekend restricted direct flights to China and shut the massive land border with China, which extends for 2,600 miles, which will no doubt have significant economic impact for both countries, given China remains Russia’s largest and most important trading partner.

“Our citizens as well as citizens of the Eurasian Economic Union and Ukraine will be accommodated in the Tyumen Region as the best prepared region where they will be placed under quarantine,” Deputy Prime Minister Golikova said in her statement Tuesday.

Trump tells Dems to nominate ‘Mini Mike Bloomberg ASAP (Source Yahoo News) In the wake of the Democratic Party’s Iowa caucus debacle, President Trump took to Twitter Wednesday morning to offer his opponents some sarcastic advice. “Iowa is a complete disaster for the Dems,” Trump tweeted. “They should bring in Mini Mike Bloomberg ASAP!”

Bloomberg, the multibillionaire former mayor of New York, immediately retweeted Trump’s “endorsement,” adding a chin-scratch emoji as if to say, “Now that’s something worth pondering.” Bloomberg’s viability is certainly something that people — or at least pundits — have been pondering in recent days. As the Iowa fiasco unfolded Monday night, and as the talking heads struggled to fill hours of cable news airtime set aside for caucus results that ultimately never came, many started to speculate about how the muddled outcome could boost Bloomberg’s candidacy. Hot takes about Bloomberg as the “real winner” of the Iowa caucuses followed the next day. Soon, Bloomberg himself was jumping on the bandwagon, announcing that he would double his behemoth ad budget and expand his gargantuan field staff to capitalize on the post-caucus confusion. Bloomberg’s strategy is unprecedented. By skipping all four early-voting states and pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into advertising and organizing for the later, larger-state primaries — particularly in key battlegrounds such as Pennsylvania and Michigan and delegate-rich places such as Massachusetts and California — he has bet that no consensus candidate will emerge by Super Tuesday and that Democrats will eventually turn to him (and his $60-billion fortune) to fill the void.  

China reports outbreak of deadly bird flu among chickens in Hunan province, close to coronavirus epicentre of Wuhan(Source South China Morning Post) China has reported an outbreak of the deadly H5N1 bird flu in Hunan province, which lies on the southern border of Hubei province, the epicentre of the rapidly spreading coronavirus. “The outbreak occurred in a farm in the Shuangqing district of Shaoyang city. The farm has 7,850 chickens, and 4,500 of the chickens have died from the contagion. Local authorities have culled 17,828 poultry after the outbreak,” according to a statement by China’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs on Saturday. No human cases of the Hunan H5N1 virus have been reported. The Hunan H5N1 outbreak comes even as the Chinese authorities continue to scramble to contain the spread of the novel coronavirus, further stretching the nation’s already heavily strained resources needed to combat the health threats.

Raytheon engineer arrested for taking US missile defense secrets to China(Source qz.com)

When Wei Sun, a 48-year-old engineer at Raytheon Missile Systems, left for an overseas trip last year, he told the company he planned to bring his company-issued HP EliteBook 840 laptop along.

Sun, a Chinese-born American citizen, had been working at Raytheon for a decade. He held a secret-level security clearance and worked on highly sensitive missile programs used by the US military.

Since Sun’s computer contained large amounts of classified data, Raytheon officials told him that taking it abroad would not only be a violation of company policy, but a serious violation of federal law, as well. While he was out of the country, Sun connected to Raytheon’s internal network on the laptop. He sent an email on Jan. 7, suddenly announcing he was quitting his job after 10 years in order to study and work overseas. When Sun returned to the United States a week later, he told Raytheon security officials that he had only visited Singapore and the Philippines during his travels. But inconsistent stories about his itinerary led Sun to confess that he traveled to China with the laptop.

A Raytheon lawyer examined the machine, and confirmed it contained technical specifications prohibited from export by the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), in addition to security software that is itself export-controlled and requires a special license to take outside the United States. Sun was arrested by FBI agents the next day. Court documents reviewed by Quartz refer to Sun possessing classified files related to several different air defense systems designed by Raytheon for the US military. China’s security services have already compromised dozens of crucial US weapons systems, such as the Army’s Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) ballistic missile defense system, and the Aegis ballistic missile defense system used by the Navy. In 2018, Chinese hackers stole top-secret plans for a supersonic anti-ship missile being developed by the Navy known as Sea Dragon. The intruders reportedly managed to get massive amounts of sensitive signals and sensor data, in addition to the Navy’s entire electronic warfare library.

The Global System Nearing Financial and Climate Collapse: Capitalism(Source globalresearch.ca)

What was once called a sea of debt on which we floated has become an ocean of debt into which we are sinking, and still our ruling minority programs us to ask “where can we get the money to fund health care and education” as though we all had doctoral degrees from the London School of Economics. Stop spending it on weapons, drugs, waste and garbage and redirect it to what humans need most: shelter, food, clothing, health care, and other stuff like that. The incredible amount of debt which global capitalism treats as a systemic foundation now threatens to structurally collapse. That is not just a problem for the 1% or smaller percentile that still exercises power over space, time and life itself. The last collapse a few years ago reduced millions of former homeowners and jobholders to a struggle for survival that has not ended for most of them – that finds more people working for less pay and less people enjoying the fruits of their labor. No different than what began with industrial capitalism back in the 19th century when people who previously lived off the land, or tried to, were herded into cities and factories and mills to create wealth, some of which trickled down to them but mostly defied nature and gravity by flowing up to the ruling powers whose wealth was beyond that of previous feudal lords.

US Boosts ‘Glide Breaker’ Program To Shoot Down Putin’s “Invincible” Hypersonic Missiles (Source Zero Hedge) Hypersonic weapons have been the big talk at the Pentagon of late. Early this week US defense officials unveiled that America’s classified hypersonics program will undergo a “very aggressive” expansion over the course of the next year. This is to include expanded testing, including at least “four initial flight tests of prototypes for glide bombs that can fly five times the speed of sound and maneuver en route,” according Bloomberg. But after over the past two years both Russia and China have hyped their own advancing programs (Putin has touted that his Avangard hypersonic missile as “invincible”), which many analysts believe could be further along than the US program, the more pressing worry is how to defend against the nearly impossible to stop high-tech weapon. Hypersonic missiles, such as the kind Russia has lately tested, “are hard to stop, they can maneuver, they’re unpredictable” and “hard to detect” so “you don’t have a lot of time” to respond — Mike White, the Defense Department’s assistant director for hypersonics was quoted this week as saying. Toward this end, the Pentagon is pursuing experimental interceptor technology designed to take out possible incoming hypersonics.

Explosive Bomb Cyclone Engulfs Alaska With Hurricane-Force Winds, Major Swell, and Intense Snowstorm(Source strangesounds.org)

This winter, rapidly-intensifying cyclones are forming over and over again in the northern Pacific.

The new bombogenesis has dropped an amazing 23 mbar in 12 hours and 36mbar in 24 hours (explosive cyclogenesis = 24mbar drop in 24 hours). The exploding storm will affect south and southeast Alaska with hurricane-like winds, major waves and swell as well as intense snowstorms.

The chilling details of the Arab Slave Trade in Africa and the barbaric castration of black boys(Source face2faceafrica.com) With so much emphasis on the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, details about the equally horrifying Sub-Saharan slave trade have been swept under the carpet for many years creating a heap of undiscovered history of a more disheartening experience for victims. Starting more than 700 years before the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, the Sub-Saharan Slave Trade, also known as the Arab Slave Trade began in the late 7th century after the Arabs successfully defeated and took over Egypt and soon controlled North Africa, East Africa and parts of West Africa such as Northern Senegal, Mali, Ivory Coast and Nigeria. With full control of a great part of Africa, the Arabs began to capture young boys and girls and took them to Egypt where they were sold into slavery within Africa or taken across the Indian Ocean to Indonesia, China, South West Asia and India. By the tenth century, the demand for slaves from Africa to work as plantation hands, sex slaves, domestic maids and slave warriors had increased greatly so much so that an estimated number of 5000 slaves were shipped out of Africa a year according to an article in the New African Magazine.

Trump plan for an Israel-Palestinian settlement is most realistic in decades(Source New York Post)

President Trump just offered the most realistic plan in decades for an Israeli-Palestinian settlement. It won’t work magic overnight, but it shifts the conversation in the right direction.

A long string of US presidents tried to solve all the problems of the Middle East by pushing Israel to sacrifice its security and even its identity as a Jewish state. By contrast, Team Trump has crafted an approach that would protect Israel while addressing Palestinians’ core demands.

Notably, this marks the first time Israel has put its support behind a plan for a Palestinian state with defined borders. It would double Palestinian territory and allow for a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem, “where the United States will happily open an embassy,” the president said.

“No Palestinians or Israelis will be uprooted from their homes,” he noted, as Israel would get sovereignty over its major settlements in the West Bank but halt new construction for four years.

Palestinians would get a demilitarized state after meeting certain goals: instituting some measure of free speech and political reform, while ending terrorism and the “pay to slay” program that rewards the killing of Israelis. “Our vision will end the cycle of Palestinian dependence on charity and foreign aid,” Trump said as he promised $50 billion in international investment that he predicted would cut poverty in half and bring unemployment under 10 percent by creating a million Palestinian jobs in the next decade. It “presents a win-win opportunity for both sides, a realistic two-state solution that resolves the risk of Palestinian statehood to Israel’s security,” he said, reassuring those who had worried the administration would abandon US support for a Palestinian state.