By the end of 2015 the BND, the German foreign intelligence service, had grown so concerned that it warned the government about Saudi Arabia’s new Deputy Crown Prince and defence minister, 30-year-old Muhammad bin Salman. “The previous cautious diplomatic stance of older leading members of the royal family,” it wrote, “is being replaced by an…
If you have or had accounts on Fitbit, Uber, OkCupid, Medium, or Yelp, you should probably change your passwords. In a blog post published on Thursday, the web performance and security company Cloudflare said it had fixed a critical bug, discovered over the weekend, that had been leaking sensitive information such as website passwords in plain text…
Coconut oil is the extracted oil from coconut, the fruit of the coconut tree that’s well-known for growing in tropical areas. It’s also an outrageously popular topic among social media and health outlets in recent years. Typically coconut oil is refined, bleached and deodorized using high heat. The bleach filters the oil to eliminate any…
Europe, relatively integrated, lives today in a de facto two-speed reality. Eurasia integration, a work in progress and with vastly more reach, is for the moment a three-speed process, as seen through the positioning of three Central Asian “stans”. Away from the hysterical 24/7 news cycle, Turkmenistan quietly went to the polls. President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, in power for 10…
The propaganda war being waged by the well-fed mainstream Western media has received a boost since it became clear that President Trump’s chief counsellors and associates are almost without exception relentlessly anti-Russian. His newly-appointed National Security Adviser, General HR McMaster, was noted by Reuters as believing Moscow to be “an adversary rather than a potential…
Any US general providing candid views on fighting and winning a war admit the impossibility of victory as long as the source of an enemy’s fighting capacity remains intact. In fact, as an excuse for why the US is still struggling in Afghanistan over a decade and a half after initially invading the Central Asian…
