World News Thread & Breaking News!!

[Jeff Head]

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A total of 15 people died in an "attack" in China's Xinjiang region on Friday, with eight "terrorists" shot dead by police and three blowing themselves up, having killed four people, authorities said.

The incident in Aksu prefecture is the latest violence in the restive region home to mostly Muslim ethnic Uighurs.

"Eight terrorists were killed by police and three by their own suicide bomb during a terrorist attack Friday afternoon," the Xinhua official news agency said, citing police.

Riding motorbikes and cars carrying LNG cylinders, the group approached police officers near a park in Wushi county as they prepared to go on patrol, it said.

The Tianshan web portal, which is run by the Xinjiang government, said that as well as the 11 attackers, two police and two passersby were killed, and one assailant detained. Photos posted on the site showed a charred police van and jeep.

Xinjiang police and information officers reached by phone declined to comment to AFP. Wushi government and police officials could not be reached.

Aksu, in the far west of Xinjiang near the border with Kyrgyzstan, was the scene of triple explosions in late January that killed at least three people, according to Tianshan. Police shot dead six people soon afterward.

Xinhua, citing a police investigation, described those blasts as "organised, premeditated terrorist attacks".

The vast and resource-rich region of Xinjiang has for years been hit by occasional unrest carried out by Uighurs, which rights groups say is driven by cultural oppression, intrusive security measures and immigration by Han Chinese.

Authorities routinely attribute such incidents to "terrorists", and argue that China faces a violent separatist movement in the area motivated by religious extremism and linked to foreign terrorist groups.

"Terrorist attacks" totalled 190 in 2012, "increasing by a significant margin from 2011", Xinhua said, citing regional authorities.

But experts question the strength of any resistance movement, and information in the area is hard to independently verify.

The most serious recent incident took place in the Turpan last June, leaving at least 35 people dead.

In October three family members from Xinjiang died when they drove a car into crowds of tourists on Tiananmen Square in Beijing, the symbolic heart of the Chinese state, killing two, before the vehicle burst into flames, according to authorities.

 

[Verum]

They should phone the equipment suppliers of NATO forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. Chinese authorities are not as experienced as the NATO force, whom they could really learn from.

 

[AssassinsMace]

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How did Snowden swipe all those NSA documents? The answer is far less thrilling than you think

BGR.com
By Zach Epstein


To some, he’s a hero. To others, a treasonous saboteur. But of one thing, there is no doubt: former NSA contractor Edward Snowden changed the course of history by leaking a mountain of confidential documents detailing various NSA programs used to covertly monitor communications around the world. Whether or not you agree with what Snowden did, there has always been a bit of curiosity surrounding exactly how the huge NSA breach went down. As it turns out, reality is far less thrilling than you might imagine.

A movie about the events surrounding Snowden and the NSA documents he leaked might feature Mission:Impossible style covert operations where the protagonist narrowly escapes capture in dramatic fashion. In reality, Snowden stole many of the documents he leaked by asking a civilian NSA worker with a higher security clearance to log into his workstation. When the employee did, Snowden apparently stole his password.

A memo obtained by NBC detailed the humdrum event, and the worker whose password Snowden allegedly stole has resigned and is no longer with the NSA.

Numerous stories since yesterday about this. It's one of those things where it's very manipulative yet very dumb. Yeah now paint Edward Snowden as a typical criminal that steals passwords by looking over people's shoulders. They have to make a connection to what the public dislikes that could affect them personally. Which means Obama is feeling most of the heat and not Edward Snowden over this.

 

[Equation]

They should phone the equipment suppliers of NATO forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. Chinese authorities are not as experienced as the NATO force, whom they could really learn from.

Why should China phone a failed NATO force in Iraq and Afghanistan? China pretty much contain all of its terrorists activities in Xingjiang province with little or no effect on the population.

 

[TerraN_EmpirE]

Equation, I think he is trying to say that they should try and procure nato spec MRAPs and IED Jammers. Of course he failed to realize that the PRC would never get anything really useful from the lead forces as the US would never sell, and China would never buy, most of the Nato designed MRAPs would be blocked from China the rest well in their case The nations to consult would be South Africa and Israel.

 

[broadsword]

In reality, Snowden stole many of the documents he leaked by asking a civilian NSA worker with a higher security clearance to log into his workstation. When the employee did, Snowden apparently stole his password.

That means Snowden most likely had a keylogger proggie installed. It has come to light that security with NSA itself was lax.

 

[B.I.B.]

^^^^^^^^^

I read somewhere that he used a cheap web crawler

 

[broadsword]

^^^^^^^^^

I read somewhere that he used a cheap web crawler

After gaining access, I suppose.

 

[Equation]

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Japan's chief cabinet secretary rejects charges country lurching toward militarism

TOKYO (Reuters) - Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's most influential aide on Saturday rejected criticism from China that Japan is lurching toward militarism and said Tokyo would keep seeking dialogue with both Beijing and Seoul, ties with which have been badly strained by rows over territory and wartime history.

Sino-Japanese ties, long plagued by China's bitter memories of Tokyo's wartime aggression, have worsened since a feud over disputed East China Sea islands flared in 2012. Relations with South Korea are also badly frayed by a separate territorial row and the legacy of Japan's 1910-1945 colonization.

"For the 69 years since the end of World War Two, we have built the present-day Japan based on the notions of freedom, democracy and peace," Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, who acts as Japan's top government spokesman and is one of Abe's most trusted aides, told Reuters in an interview.

"They say that Japan is a military power but (the defense budget increase in the year to March) was just 0.8 percent, while China has kept increasing its defense budget by more than 10 percent annually for 20 years," Suga said. "To be called 'militarist' by such a country is completely off the mark."

China's announcement late last year of a new air defense identification zone, including the skies over the disputed isles, increased tensions with Beijing, while Abe's December visit to a controversial shrine for war dead seen by critics as a symbol of Japan's past militarism further marred Tokyo's ties with its two Asian neighbors.

Japan's close ally the United States has made clear it is keen to see a dialing down of tensions in the region.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, in Asia ahead of President Barack Obama's April visit to the region, on Thursday urged Tokyo and Seoul to "put history behind them" and calm tensions in the face of the threat from a volatile North Korea.

Looming large among the issues fraying Japan's relations with South Korea is the question of compensation and an apology to so-called "comfort women", as the women who were forced to work in Japanese wartime military brothels are euphemistically known. Many of those women were Korean.

DOOR TO DIALOGUE

Suga reiterated Japan's stance that the matter of compensation was settled in the framework of a 1965 treaty establishing diplomatic ties. In 1993 Japan's then-government spokesman, Yohei Kono, issued a statement apologizing for the involvement of Japan's military in the brothels.

In 1995, Japan set up a fund to make payments to the women from private contributions, but South Korea says that was not official and so not enough.

Japanese media have speculated about a possible summit between Abe and South Korean President Park Geun-hye during a international nuclear security summit at The Hague next month, but Suga declined to comment on the prospects.

"China and South Korea are neighboring countries, so the door to dialogue is always open, and while stressing what we must stress, we want to deal with both countries calmly and from a broad perspective," he said.

Suga also said that Tokyo's ties with Washington were solid despite Abe's visit to the Yasukuni Shrine, where wartime leaders convicted as war criminals are honored along with other war dead.

The United States issued a rare public statement of disappointment after the December pilgrimage, which Abe said was not intended to honor the "Class-A" war criminals enshrined there but to pay his respects to those who died for their country and to promise never again to go to war.

"The U.S.-Japan relationship is not wavering," Suga said.

He cited progress on a plan to relocate a U.S. Marine Corps air base on Japan's Okinawa island, Abe's decision to join talks on Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) free-trade pact and Tokyo's decision to join a treaty for cross-border child custody disputes, steps urged when Obama met Abe last February.

The governor of Okinawa has signed off on a plan to relocate the Futenma air base from a crowded part of the southern Japanese island to the less populated city of Nago. But Abe suffered a setback when the incumbent mayor of Nago, who opposes the plan, was re-elected last month.

The central government has nonetheless vowed to go ahead with the controversial relocation plan, which is opposed by many residents who link the U.S. bases with crime, accidents and pollution.

 

[delft]

Here's an article about Argentina on the front page the Economist that I shared with Miragedriver.

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Reminds me of the US Congress.