The US security alert, which has closed many US embassies and consulates in the world, has been described by some Congresspeople and Senators as quite serious and specific. Nonetheless, there is really no basic information about the nature or character of the threat. The DebkaFile is a website that has close contacts with the Israeli government, and in the past the website has been quite reliable. I don’t regularly read it, however, because there is a paywall. This entry, however, does not require a fee (a curious fact in and of itself), and it is a particularly chilling entry. It contains speculation, and some concrete evidence, that the radical groups opposed to the US have figured out how to surgically implant plastic explosives into the bodies of suicide bombers. If true, there are very few security measures that could detect the explosives other than intelligence identifying the bombers.
The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA) has issued its climate report for 2012. It found that 2012 was among the top ten warmest years on record. The report found that CO2 concentrations breached 400 parts per million, a level that many climatologists regard as a tipping point, and that sea levels reached their highest recorded levels. The full report can be accessed here.
US President Obama has cancelled his scheduled bilateral talks with Russian President Putin. The cancellation is calculated to show US displeasure over the Russian decision to grant asylum to NSA leaker Edward Snowden. Obama still intends to attend the scheduled G20 meeting in St. Petersburg but will not meet one-on-one with Putin. Russia said that it was “disappointed” but the cancellation comes in the context of already frosty relations between the two leaders.
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