China trains army of messenger pigeons

and

North Korea Nears Completion of Electromagnetic Pulse Bomb

La Nacion — the largest newspaper in Costa Rica — says the Nicaraguan commander, Eden Pastora, used Google Maps to “justify” the incursion even though the official maps used by both countries indicate the territory belongs to Costa Rica. Pastora blames Google Maps in the paper:

See the satellite photo on Google and there you see the border. In the last 3,000 meters the two sides are from Nicaragua.

The paper points out that Bing Maps shows the correct and officially recognized border.

Then in 1986 I was in the back bar of a pub off Sauchiehall Street and I noticed, sitting alone at the end of the bar, there was a man, crying. I knew him. He was the only Catholic to drink in this back bar where some of the men wore the tiny lapel badges of their Orange Lodges.

I knew him well enough to ask why he was crying and he said it was because he had just been to see his mother and she had been crying. It was the seventieth anniversary of the Battle of the Somme, and she always cried on the anniversary of that battle. Her three brothers had been killed on the same day but the telegrams had arrived a week apart.

That year, I bought a poppy. And I bought one this year, as I have every year since.

WARNING
DETONATION OF EXPOSIVE IS GREATLY DISCOURAGED
PORCINE CONTENTS- PORK
NOTICE IS HEREBY GIVEN that the frangible glass amulet
affixed to this Shield contains a significant quantity of pig’s blood in a
liquid state. It has been treated with preservative and anticoagulant
additives. Further, this Shield is imbued with pig bone. Detonation of
an explosive charge within close proximity of this Shield is greatly
discouraged. Such explosive event is likely to cause the catastrophic
failure of the containment properties of the glass amulet and this Shield,
resulting in the indiscriminate disbursal of porcine derivatives over a vast
area of the immediate surroundings.

Via

Abstract—We’re about to acquire a significant new cyber-vulnerability. The world’s energy utilities are starting to install hundreds of millions of ‘smart meters’ which contain a remote off switch. Its main purpose is to ensure that customers who default on their payments can be switched remotely to a prepay tariff; secondary purposes include supporting interruptible tariffs and implementing rolling power cuts at times of supply shortage.

The off switch creates information security problems of a kind, and on a scale, that the energy companies have not had to face before. From the viewpoint of a cyber attacker – whether a hostile government agency, a terrorist organisation or even a militant environmental group – the ideal attack on a target country is to interrupt its citizens’ electricity supply. This is the cyber equivalent of a nuclear strike; when electricity stops, then pretty soon everything else does too. Until now, the only plausible ways to do that involved attacks on critical generation, transmission and distribution assets, which are increasingly well defended.

Smart meters change the game. The combination of commands that will cause meters to interrupt the supply, of applets and software upgrades that run in the meters, and of cryptographic keys that are used to authenticate these commands and software changes, create a new strategic vulnerability, which we discuss in this paper.

Don’t overlook that bit about “secondary purposes include supporting interruptible tariffs and implementing rolling power cuts at times of supply shortage.” This is where Green energy policies are leading us. They’re even installing the meters to be prepared.