World
Much talk about the most recent Islamist attack in Paris and how that might swing the vote towards the Right and anti-immigration Marine Le Pen. In the attack, a gunman opened fire on police and killed one before being killed by police fire.
She “showed no signs of elation” when the police arrived to rescue her and charge the man, according to authorities.
Some attended information sessions on the practical ins and outs of running for office, motivated by a sense that Trump is antagonistic towards independent research-based science, particularly when it involves climate change.
The group owes around $1.1t of the America’s $3.6t in consumer debt, and consumer debt it getting closer to 20% of GDP.
Where is the debt coming from? A lot comes from rising student and auto loans.
In addition to the economic risk involved in this kind of debt, it also has effects on psychology and behavior: A large portion of Americans reportedly worry about defaulting on loans in the next 12 months, and over 50% of those worriers are millennials. The group, aged 21 to 34 in 2017, are also changing spending habits by doing more searching and more waiting for lower prices before buying smaller items. Analysts are concerned that this trend will be the same when the group, entering the age where people usually buy homes and start families, shop or hold off shopping for large purchases.
So these tiny satellites being sent up into space in bundles …
The buzz company is called Planet, and they started in 2010 with a team of ex-NASA scientists.
They recently launched 88 new little imaging satellites in one go from the Satish Dhawan Space Center in Sriharikota, India.
Their satellites are called Doves, and they’re shoebox-like machines weighing around 11 pounds. They take a lot of pictures: right now, they can capture 58 million square miles per day, the equivalent of the land on our planet.
The company also recently bought Terra Bella, another imaging company, from Google (for an undisclosed amount, and in a deal that included Google buying data back from Planet). That added 7 better-quality camera satellites to their flock. They can now use their lower-res satellites to build a large picture of Earth and look for changes, and use the 7 Terra Bella units (which have 4 – 6x better resolution) to get details.
They also bought another satellite company that gave them an archive of satellite images dating back to 2008, as well as some more satellites.
Planet doesn’t have a monopoly in the field, though. While they have the lead in whole-Earth imaging, other companies that have better resolution, like DigitalGlobe, provide other services. DigitalGlobe’s resolution exceeds Planet’s: they can make make images from orbit in which they can resolve a laptop screen into a pixel.
140,000 Americans are now employed by 3,200 Chinese companies operating in the U.S., according to Chinese state media organization Xinhua.
The 140k is 9 times the 2009 number. And the dollar figure for investment, $46b, is three times what it was a year earlier.
According to the White House, the President invited the president over the phone this week, but didn’t give further details about a meeting. The White House also said the two leaders talked about concerns about North Korea on the phone.
Trump is also scheduled to visit the Philippines in November.
Q1 for 2017 GDP was weak: 0.7% annualized.
Of that, one of the weaker components was consumer spending, which rose only 0.3%, the weakest level for spending since Q4 2009.
The first daughter, invited to participate on the panel of a women’s summit in Berlin received groans and hisses as she stated that her father was a “tremendous champion of enabling women and families.”
Afterward, Ivanka commented, “It’s fine. I’m used to it,” and said that it was a matter of “politics.”
Wikileaks dumped a large amount of classified CIA documents this week. Thousands of pages detailed how the CIA’s software and techniques gather information, including how they hack into smartphones, computers, and internet-connected TVs. Wikileaks said the release was just the first installment of a larger collection.
Many apps were named specifically with details about how the CIA is able to enter them. There was also mention of a technique used to “crash” computers.
CIA insiders said the likeliest source of the breach was contractors the CIA worked with, according to PBS NewsHour, who interviewed former CIA Director Leon Panetta, who served during the Obama administration.
Panetta said that the most important thing with the leak was going to be “how do you replace those important tools that have now been made public, and try to reestablish our intelligence capabilities so we can gather the information that is absolutely essential in order to protect our country.
“This has been seriously damaging to the CIA and its ability to conduct intelligence operations. So I imagine that our first focus is on ‘What do we do to try to replace our ability to go after terrorists.”
Panetta commented on earlier leaks and steps that would have been taken to try to make their tools more secure but, “We are clearly living in a world in which the ability to hack has developed to a point where I happen to think that probably anything is vulnerable today.
“So I think you try to take steps to try to protect that kind of sensitive information, try to do what you can to make sure that those who are working for you are taking steps to protect it, contractors are taking steps to protect it, but the bottom line is that in today’s world I think you always have to be prepared that somebody may very well be able to get access to that kind of information, and if they do that they will make it public. I think that’s the world we live in right now.”
Panetta was asked about why the CIA needs these tools, when the NSA is responsible for those things. He said that the CIA is responsible for gathering information from overseas.
“There’s a reason we have not had another 9-11 attack in this country, and a lot of that is because our intelligence agencies, our law enforcement agencies, are sharing information and gathering information that makes sure we protects the United States.”