company:the washington post

  • Neo-Nazis Bet Big on Bitcoin (And Lost) – Foreign Policy
    https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/03/19/neo-nazis-banked-on-bitcoin-cryptocurrency-farright-christchurch


    Several hundred white supremacists carrying tiki torches march through the University of Virginia campus in Charlottesville on Aug. 11, 2017.
    Evelyn Hockstein/For The Washington Post via Getty Images

    How the far-right’s failed cryptocurrency gamble became a bad joke for the Christchurch killer.

    The neo-Nazi terrorist who takes credit for murdering 50 people in Christchurch, New Zealand, on March 15 released a manifesto. One of the claims inside it is that he did very well investing in cryptocurrency—specifically, a collapsed Ponzi scheme called Bitconnect.

    Like much of the shooter’s manifesto, the claim about cryptocurrency is almost certainly nonsense—thrown in to get the media to chase their tails as they try to make sense of a deliberately confusing stew of alt-right memes and neo-Nazi in-jokes.

    The reason it works as an in-joke is exactly because cryptocurrencies have become a favorite resource for the far-right—if rarely a successful one. White nationalists were known to be getting into cryptocurrencies during the 2017 bitcoin bubble, because PayPal kept cutting them off. The further joke is that Bitconnect is best known not for having helped its investors succeed but for taking them for millions, if not billions, of dollars. And Bitconnect started in 2016—but the shooter claimed to have made the money before he went traveling in 2010 or so.
    […]
    Bitcoin ideology is not a neo-Nazi ideology. However, bitcoin’s right-libertarian anarcho-capitalism is very much in range of far-right extremism, particularly in the degree to which both propagate “international banker” and Rothschild-style conspiracy theories, and there are social spaces where the two cross directly, such as the /biz/ cryptocurrency forum on 4chan.

    David Golumbia is the author of the 2016 book The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism. He documents the history of the ideas that went into bitcoin—such as long-running anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about “international,” i.e., Jewish, bankers—and how these extremist ideas are propagated by the subculture, even as present-day enthusiasts would utterly repudiate the ideas’ origins.

    I think only a small number of cryptocurrency users are out-and-out fascists or Nazis,” Golumbia told Foreign Policy. “But I also suspect that the proportion of fascists in that world is higher than it is in the general population. That’s due to the widespread presence of conspiratorial ideas in cryptocurrency communities. Many in cryptocurrency actively promote ignorance about what should be clear and uncontroversial facts about the world.

  • Isn’t It Time for Another Washington Post Article Touting the Growth of Mexico’s Middle Class Under NAFTA? | Beat the Press | CEPR
    http://cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/isn-t-it-time-for-another-washington-post-article-touted-the-growth-of-mexico-

    Mexico seems all but certain to elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a left-wing candidate, as president this weekend. One of the main factors is the contempt with which the Mexican public regards a political and economic elite that have run the country in a way that has produced few benefits for the bulk of the population. It is striking that this uprising is taking place almost a quarter century into the NAFTA era.

    We were told endlessly by our elites that NAFTA was doing great things for Mexico. The Washington Post stands out as a particular villain in this story. It repeatedly ran fantasy pieces on how NAFTA was creating a thriving middle class in Mexico.

    The Post even went full Trump back in 2007 when it made up the absurd claim that NAFTA had led Mexico’s economy to quadruple between 1998 and 2007. The actual figure was 84.2 percent. Unfortunately, the Washington Post has not been the only institution to make up numbers to promote NAFTA. The World Bank got into the act too.

    A true assessment of the impact of NAFTA on Mexico would require considerable research, but just at the basic level of GDP growth it has been a disaster. Mexico’s per capita GDP has risen at just a 1.2 percent annual rate since 1993. This compares to a 1.5 percent annual rate in the United States. This means that the countries are even further apart economically today than when the agreement took effect in 1994, but don’t hold your breath waiting for the NAFTA proponents to acknowledge that it might not have been a good deal.

    #libre_échange#MSM #mauvaises_saletés #bonnes_saletés

  • Inside the secret U.S. stockpile meant to save us all in a bioterror attack - The Washington Post
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/04/24/inside-the-secret-u-s-stockpile-meant-to-save-us-all-in-a-bioterror-

    This is quite a different kind of warehouse. It and several others across the country are part of the $7 billion Strategic National Stockpile, a government repository of drugs and supplies ready for deployment in a bioterrorism or nuclear attack, or against an infectious disease outbreak — of either a known pathogen or some unknown threat with pandemic potential, which global health officials dub “Disease X” — or other major public health emergency. There are antibiotics, including the powerful medication Ciprofloxacin, vaccines for smallpox and anthrax and antivirals for a deadly influenza pandemic.

    #Etats-Unis

  • How the “Heart Balm Racket” Convinced America That Women Were Up to No Good | History | Smithsonian
    https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-heart-balm-racket-convinced-america-women-were-no-good-180968144

    By Tori Telfer
    smithsonian.com
    February 13, 2018

    She was 27, with a “winning smile” and a penchant for hanging around ocean liners. He was 45, a widower with an 18-year-old daughter, and they were sailing to Europe for the summer. The two girls became fast friends and spent a delightful trip together, innocent as could be.

    But all along, this “Siren on Ocean Liner”—as the Washington Post called her—was plotting. After traveling through Europe with the family, the woman, also referred to as Myrtle MaGee by the papers, visited them back in the States (where she secretly destroyed all the letters she’d written to the widower’s daughter, effectively erasing the platonic nature of her relationship to the family). She then blithely launched a lawsuit against the widower, claiming that he had promised to marry her and was now trying to back out of it.

    This case, reported breathlessly by the Washington Post in 1915, was not an isolated incident. In fact, it was only one in a long line of scandalous, seedy, and over-reported cases in which unscrupulous women tried to blackmail wealthy men out of large sums of money, helped along by a weird little piece of legislation that allowed people to sue their exes after a broken engagement. These ladies were “gold-diggers,” “schemers” and “adventuresses,” and what they were doing, the papers crowed, was nothing short of a racket.

    The legislation in question was something called the “breach of promise” or “heart balm” suit, and it was based on the premise that an engagement was a binding contract between two people. If one person were to break off the contract without consulting the other, the law could step in and award damages to the brokenhearted party.

    Granted, no one was terribly happy about these laws in the first place—feminists thought they made women look dependent, while misogynists thought they allowed women to tap into their naturally devious natures—but as controversial, high-profile breach of promise suits kept making the papers, the public grew increasingly paranoid about the implications of such legislation. By 1935, the paranoia had grown so extreme that lawmakers were calling for a wholesale elimination of heart balm laws, and soon enough states were abolishing them right and left—abolishing them so quickly, in fact, that the constitutionality of some of the reform statues was later called into question. Still, the message had been made clear: it was no longer possible to sue over a shattered heart, real or false.

    The idea that people should be punished for trying to back out of an engagement was nothing new in 1935. For centuries, it was possible to take action—first through the church, and then in the courtroom—against the one who loved and left you. (The earliest successful breach of promise suit took place in 1638; men could—and occasionally did—sue their ex-fiancées, but the legislation was mostly used by women.) Opponents of these suits mocked them as either “blackmail or vulgarity unspeakable,” but there was nothing silly or saccharine about the underlying premise, at least not at first. For most of human history, marriage was an extraordinarily practical arrangement, one with significant financial and social benefits, especially for women. Getting engaged meant you could start anticipating those benefits—and you might change your actions accordingly. You might, for example, begin spending money on an expensive trousseau. You might enjoy a change in social status. You would almost certainly break it off with all other marriage prospects. And you might finally decide to sleep with your fiancéé.

    A bride’s virginity was still a pretty big deal in the 1920s and 1930s (and remained that way until at least the 1950s), but engagement provided something of a loophole. Women who were intent on remaining virgins until marriage might consider engagement close enough—and so, if their fiancé suddenly broke things off, they found themselves dealing with a literal drop in value. A broken engagement didn’t just mean a loss of future income, but it could damage a woman’s reputation and make it harder for her to get engaged again. Even if she’d never actually had sex, there was a chance she’d be tainted by association.

    Into this land of hearts and hymens, the law strode bravely. These heart balm laws were unusual, to say the least: no matter how many times you argued financial loss, or tried to put virginity into a legal box, the core of these suits was something uncomfortably personal. “Clearly the principal ground of the action is disappointed hope, and the injury complained of is a violation of faith,” wrote one lawyer in 1906.

    The question was how to turn “disappointed hope” and “violation of faith” into cold hard cash. Juries found themselves compensating plaintiffs for things like, “loss of social and worldly advancement,” “disappointment and incidental suffering,” injury to future marriage prospects, and even emotions like experiencing humiliation “in the social circles in which she moves.” The fact that these compensations all seemed to rely on “emotional sympathy and moral indignation,” as another lawyer wrote in 1935, made some people uncomfortable—especially as all-male juries seemed to be passing down awfully lucrative settlements when the plaintiff was a very pretty woman and the defendant was a very rich man.

    Naturally, these lucrative settlements—with their whiff of sex and drama—were big news, especially when women were walking out of the courtroom with $100,000, $200,000, or even $450,000 from their former suitors. This wasn’t justice, the papers said. This wasn’t restitution. This was a racket—a heart balm racket. And they weren’t entirely wrong.

    ********

    “Fair Sirens Who Seek to Blackmail Rich Men Weave Cunning Webs Which Enmesh Innocent in Hopeless Tangle,” crowed that Washington Post report on that “Siren on Ocean Liner” and all sorts of other nefarious females who used the slipperiness of heart balm laws to con upstanding men out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. The article claimed that female blackmailers were lurking around restaurants, cafes, hotels and other affluent watering holes, where they would pick up wealthy, unsuspecting men, go on a few dates with them (ensuring that they’d be spotted by witnesses or even secretly photographed), and then slap them with a breach of promise suit. As far as the innocent widower from the ocean liner? Upon receiving notice of the lawsuit against him, the article reported that he was “stunned almost out of his senses.”

    Polite society, too, was stunned out of their senses by the idea that women with winning smiles were wreaking havoc on men with the aid—nay, with the blessing of the legal system. These dodgy lawsuits played perfectly on people’s fears, tapping into the worst possible clichés of the battle of the sexes: dumb men seduced into trouble, wicked women using their looks for evil. It wasn’t that people thought all jilted women were evil; they just thought that innocent women didn’t sue.

    “A woman whose heart is really broken doesn’t take it into court,” wrote the popular advice columnist Dorothy Dix in 1915, and this sentiment was shared by many. A woman shrewd enough to save love letters as future evidence surely wasn’t the bruised, delicate flower she claimed to be.

    To be fair, the public’s hysteria had some basis in reality. A particularly bold lady blackmailer who went by the name Chicago May ran so many heart balm rackets that she boasted about them in her 1928 memoir. One involved a wealthy suitor who started sending her dirty drawings out of nowhere—the perfect evidence for a fake heart balm suit. (“The drawing was fairly good, but the subject matter was revolting,” she noted.) At one point, she was even conducting her blackmail business intercontinentally: living in London but occasionally popping back over to New York to check up on a heart balm racket or two. She referred to these as her “American investments.”

    Still, the angry editorials and cries for abolishment were mostly fueled by paranoia, not practicality. “Reading the editorials…one would conclude that there had seldom been an actual contract of engagement to marry that was unjustifiably broken,” one lawyer wrote in the Fordham Law Review. “The experience of practicing lawyers is decidedly otherwise.” It was “undue newspaper publicity,” another lawyer argued in the Michigan Law Review, that led to this impassioned public outcry against breach of promise suits. While there were plenty of ordinary suits led by ordinary jilted women (and occasionally a jilted man), it was the sleazy, salacious, high-profile cases that convinced people that these breach of promise laws had to go, and go fast.

    It wasn’t just the sleaziness that bothered people, though. Women’s roles were changing, and the core premise behind the breach of promise laws—that a broken engagement could wreck a woman’s future—was weakening. A woman dumped by her fiancé in 1930 wasn’t ruined the way she might have been a mere generation earlier. “There are many, many ways in which a girl can now earn her own living,” one journalist noted in The Hartford Courant. By the mid-1930s, public sympathy for the brokenhearted had mostly drained away, and the breach of promise suit was on its deathbed.

    ********

    In 1935, a young state legislator named Roberta West Nicholson introduced an anti-heart balm bill in Indiana. Other states quickly followed her lead, and by 1945, 16 states had abolished the breach of promise laws. Today, only a few jurisdictions still cling to them. (You’ll have to move to, say, North Carolina if you want to sue an ex-fiancé.)

    Some violently opposed Nicholson’s bill—one senator noted that it removed women’s civil rights “against philanderers and men who prey upon them.” Others praised her, while misunderstanding her reasons for writing the bill. To this day, certain men’s rights activists love Nicholson for leading the charge against what they see as a war on men; an “Anti-Misandry Legislator,” they call her. The irony is that Nicholson wrote the bill not to protect men, but because she thought women were better than heart balm. “I was pretty young and didn’t realize at first I was challenging a basic common law, that the woman was a chattel and that the man, in marrying her, was saying, ‘I buy you and agree to feed and clothe you,’” she told a journalist decades later. “I was an early woman’s libber and didn’t know it.”

    Yes, the outcry against the so-called heart balm racket wasn’t just from people convinced that unscrupulous women were abusing the system. There was an odd feminism to it. “It is gallantry gone to seed,” wrote Dix. “Moreover, it is not justice, for a woman capable of bringing suit is perfectly able to take care of herself in a love affair or any other business deal.”

    Where once marriage was something that gave women some semblance of power, now—the critics said—women had power of their own, married or not. They could make their own money. They could work on their own American investments. They were no longer defenseless, and so they did not need the law to defend them. In the midst of all the paranoia about blackmail and “vulgarity unspeakable,” a surprisingly modern portrait of marriage was emerging: a union of two people who could make up their own minds about each other and didn’t need the law to save them from themselves.

  • First France, Now Brazil Unveils Plan to Empower the Government to Censor the Internet in the Name of Stopping “Fake News”
    https://theintercept.com/2018/01/10/first-france-now-brazil-unveils-plans-to-empower-the-government-to-cen

    YESTERDAY AFTERNOON, THE official Twitter account of Brazil’s Federal Police (its FBI equivalent) posted an extraordinary announcement. The bureaucratically nonchalant tone it used belied its significance. The tweet, at its core, purports to vest in the federal police and the federal government that oversees it the power to regulate, control, and outright censor political content on the internet that is assessed to be “false,” and to “punish” those who disseminate it. The new power would cover both social media posts and entire websites devoted to politics.

    “In the next few days, the Federal Police will begin activities in Brasília [the nation’s capital] by a specially formed group to combat false news during the [upcoming 2018 presidential] election process,” the official police tweet stated. It added: “The measures are intended to identify and punish the authors of ‘fake news’ for or against candidates.” Top police officials told media outlets that their working group would include representatives of the judiciary’s election branch and leading prosecutors, though one of the key judicial figures involved is the highly controversial right-wing Supreme Court judge, Gilmar Mendes, who has long blurred judicial authority with his political activism.

  • Germany’s new Nazis see Israel as role model |

    The Electronic Intifada
    https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/germanys-new-nazis-see-israel-role-model

    “Unfortunately, our worst fears have come true,” Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said of the electoral success in Sunday’s general election of Alternative for Germany.

    Known by its German initials AfD, the extreme nationalist party won almost 100 seats in Germany’s lower house.

    “A party that tolerates far-right views in its ranks and incites hate against minorities in our country is today not only in almost all state parliaments but also represented in the Bundestag,” Schuster said.

    The party is notorious for harboring all manner of racists and extremists, including [apologists for Germany’s war record and Holocaust revisionists.

    It was a disaster that Germany’s mainstream politicians saw coming.

    Sigmar Gabriel, the country’s foreign minister, warned earlier this month that if AfD scored well at the ballot box, “then we will have real Nazis in the German Reichstag for the first time since the end of World War II.”

    Pro-Israel funder backs new Nazis
    While Germany needs no lessons in how to be racist, this catastrophe can in part be attributed to leaders in Israel and their fanatical supporters: for years they have made common cause with Europe’s far right, demonizing Muslims as alien invaders who must be rejected and even expelled to maintain a mythical European purity.

    It can also be attributed to German leaders who for decades have strengthened this racist Israel by financing Israel’s military occupation and oppression of Palestinians.

    What happened in Germany is another facet of the white supremacist-Zionist alliance that has found a home in Donald Trump’s White House.

    In the past few weeks, liberal flagships The New York Times and The Washington Post have been hunting for the nonexistent shadows of Russian interference in the German election.

    Meanwhile, as Lee Fang reported for The Intercept, the Gatestone Institute, the think tank of major Islamophobia industry funder Nina Rosenwald, was flooding German social media with “a steady flow of inflammatory content about the German election, focused on stoking fears about immigrants and Muslims.”

    The Gatestone Institute is chaired by John Bolton, the neoconservative former US diplomat notorious for his hawkish support of the invasion of Iraq.

    Gatestone articles making claims about Christianity becoming “extinct” and warning about the construction of mosques in Germany were regularly translated into German and posted by AfD politicians and sympathizers.

    Story after story claimed that migrants and refugees were raping German women and bringing dangerous diseases to the country, classic themes of the Nazi propaganda once used to incite genocidal hatred of Jews.

    In a tragic irony, Rosenwald’s father, an heir to the Sears department store fortune, used his wealth to help Jewish refugees flee persecution in Europe.

  • Ten sailors missing after U.S. warship, tanker collide near Singapore
    https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-navy-crash-idUSKCN1B100C
    ça devient une habitude…
    mais cette fois à babord, donc, a priori, c’est lui qui a priorité…

    Ten sailors are missing after a U.S. warship collided with an oil tanker east of Singapore before dawn on Monday, tearing a hole beneath the waterline and flooding compartments that include a crew sleeping area, the U.S. Navy said.

    The collision between the guided-missile destroyer USS John S. McCain and the tanker Alnic MC was the second involving U.S. Navy destroyers and merchant vessels in Asian waters in little more than two months.

    The ships collided while the U.S. warship was heading to Singapore for a routine port call, the Navy said in a statement.

    • Ici, il est hors de question d’imaginer une quelconque défaillance de la veille sur l’un ou l’autre navire : ça doit être l’endroit où le trafic est le plus dense au monde et on est aux abords immédiats du port…

      En revanche, le communiqué de la Navy laisse songeur. Le John McCain est abordé à babord (à l’arrière de sa seconde cheminée), vraisemblablement à l’endroit où s’achève la dernière ligne droite de la trajectoire) alors que le pétrolier vient de l’est et se dirige vers le terminal pétrolier (dans l’axe de cette ligne droite). Difficile à imaginer si le John McCain entrait au port ; normalement, il présentait son flanc tribord…

      Au vu des photos, et de l’enfoncement des tôles, il semblerait que le pétrolier venait de l’arrière.

    • Stricken destroyer John S. McCain arrives in Singapore, 10 crew still missing
      http://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2017/08/20/navy-destroyer-john-s-mccain-collides-with-merchant-vessel

      Mounting questions
      The details of how the collisions occurred remain unkown, But incidents such as those with the McCain and Fitzgerald incidents are troubling, said Jan van Tol, a retired commander of three war ships who now serves as an analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

      Navy destroyers are remarkably nimble and responsive, including rapid acceleration ability, thus should certainly be able to get out of the way of almost anything approaching ‘too close,’” van Tol said in an email.

      Such close quarters situations should NEVER be allowed to develop without various watchstanders and watchteams being well aware that they are developing,” he said.

      It is unknown whether McCain had suffered any kind of casualty to its engineering or steering systems ahead of the collision that would have contributed to the disaster.

      The collision was the fourth significant safety incident of 2017 involving a U.S. 7th Fleet ship. In January, the cruiser Antietam ran aground in Tokyo Bay and in May, the cruiser Lake Champlain collided with a Korean fishing boat in the Sea of Japan.

      (outre le Fitzgerald)

    • Complètement dingue !

      La collision a eu lieu nettement plus à l’est, juste à l’entrée du dispositif de séparation de trafic. Dans les derniers instants, on voit l’Alnic NC abattre en grand sur la gauche en ralentissant fortement, indice évident d’une manœuvre en catastrophe, qui ne peut se justifier (on est dans le rail, bon sang !) que par une tentative d’évitement désespérée…

      Mille sabords !, que fabriquait cet amiral de bateau-lavoir de USS John S. McCain à cet endroit là ?
      (NB : le père et le grand-père du sénateur, John S. McCain III, ont tous les deux terminé leur carrière comme amiral et, pour faire simple portaient également le même middle name, Sidney. On fait dans la dynastie ou pas…)

      Comment a-t-il pu couper la route d’un bateau dont la route est absolument rectiligne et prévisible (il est dans le rail) ? Peut-être le McCain n’y était-il pas et a-t-il manœuvré brutalement pour s’y placer ?
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlrA36GzHNs

      EDIT (24/08)
      pour gCaptain, l’abattée à gauche est le résultat de la collision, ce qui parait tout à fait crédible et explique bien la forme de l’enfoncement sur l’arrière de l’ouverture. Le McCain devait filer vite pour dévier à ce point la trajectore.
      Du coup, on peut élaborer un scénario où le McCain coupe, pour des raisons qu’il reste à préciser, le rail « conformément aux règles internationales » : perpendiculairement et le plus vite possible. Et dans ce cas, il est responsable à 100%…

      Comment, elle a dit déjà l’amirauté ? ah oui, #poor_seamanship

      http://gcaptain.com/uss-john-s-mccain-collision-ais-animation-shows-tankers-track-during-colli

    • The Latest: US Navy vessel arrives to help damaged destroyer - The Washington Post
      https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/the-latest-us-warship-sailing-on-own-power-after-collision/2017/08/20/9c7ae012-860e-11e7-96a7-d178cf3524eb_story.html

      5:00 p.m.
      The oil tanker involved in a collision with the USS John S. McCain destroyer in busy Southeast Asian waters had four deficiencies including navigation safety violations in its last port inspection.

      An official database for ports in Asia shows the Alnic MC was inspected in the Chinese port of Dongying on July 29 and had one document deficiency, one fire safety deficiency and two safety of navigation problems.

      The database doesn’t go into details and the problems were apparently not serious enough for the Liberian-flagged and Greek-owned vessel to be detained by the port authority.
      […]
      4:10 p.m.
      The chief of Malaysia’s Maritime Enforcement Agency says the collision between an oil tanker and the USS John S. McCain guided missile destroyer early Monday occurred at the start of a designated sea lane for ships sailing into the Singapore Strait, one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes.

      Zulkifli Abu Bakar said the incident occurred 4.5 nautical miles (8.3 kilometers) from Malaysia’s coast. He said a Malaysian warship was in the area monitoring the cleanup of an oil spill from an unrelated collision of two merchant ships and was contacted by the McCain.

      Both Malaysia and Singapore say the accident happened in their waters, likely reflecting a dispute about ownership of some rocky outcrops in the area.

      It happened in Malaysian territorial waters, specifically in Teluk Ramunia waters,” Zulkifli said. “For this moment, we shouldn’t argue about whose waters. Most important thing is we focus on the search and rescue.

    • Frontière entre la Malaisie et Singapour — Wikipédia
      https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontière_entre_la_Malaisie_et_Singapour

      La délimitation de cette frontière maritime a fait l’objet d’un recours devant la Cour internationale de justice, effectué conjointement le 24 juillet 2003 par la Malaisie et Singapour. Le différend portait sur l’île de Pedra Branca, les Middle Rocks (deux rochers inhabités) et South Ledge, un haut-fond découvrant. Par un arrêt du 23 mai 2008, la Cour a attribué Pedra Blanca à Singapour, les Middle Rocks à la Malaisie, et South Ledge à l’État dans les eaux territoriales duquel il se trouve (la Cour n’ayant pas reçu mandat des parties pour délimiter leurs eaux territoriales respectives).

      L’arrêt de la CIJ
      Affaire relative à la souveraineté sur Pedra Blanca/Pulau Batu Puteh, Middle Rocks et South Ledge –(Malaisie/Singapour)
      Arrêt du 23 mai 2008
      http://www.icj-cij.org/files/case-related/130/130-20080523-JUD-01-00-FR.pdf

      (il me semblait avoir vu passer ce contentieux ici)


      (extrait de l’arrêt de la CIJ)

    • Serrage de boulons généralisé…

      Admiral to order operational pause in Navy after warship, merchant ship collide - CNN
      http://edition.cnn.com/2017/08/20/asia/us-navy-destroyer-collision-singapore/index.html

      Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson is expected to order a one-day pause in operations “to ensure we are taking all appropriate immediate measures to enhance the Navy’s safe and effective operation around the world,” according to a US Defense official and an advanced copy of Richardson’s statement obtained by CNN.

      The stand-down will take place over the next couple of weeks, at the discretion of individual commands, the defense official said.

      The order comes after a US Navy guided-missile destroyer collided early Monday with an oil tanker east of Singapore, the fourth accident this year involving a US warship in Asian waters.

      This is the second major collision in the last three months, and is the latest in a series of major incidents, particularly in the Pacific theater. This trend demands more forceful action,” Richardson’s statement says.

      C’est le moment de ressortir la vanne éculée du phare et du porte-avions états-unien… #lighthouse_vs_US_Navy

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighthouse_and_naval_vessel_urban_legend

    • US Navy also considering ’cyber intrusion or sabotage’ as possible causes for USS John McCain collision
      http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/us-navy-also-considering-cyber-intrusion-sabotage-possible-causes-uss-joh

      A steering failure, or maybe even hacked systems – the US Navy is considering all possible reasons after launching a broad investigation into the collision of the US guided-missile destroyer USS John McCain with an oil tanker off the coast of Singapore on Monday (21 August).

      Plusieurs médias reprennent l’hypothèse, apparemment émise par l’US Navy, de panne de l’appareil à gouverner (#avarie_de_barre, un des entrainements les plus fréquents en passerelle dans mon souvenir, presqu’autant que #un_homme_à_la_mer à babord/tribord suivie du Boutakov règlementaire…) Je ne trouve pas le communiqué original. Pas plus que, l’évocation officielle d’une #cyber-attaque qui aurait déjà été plus ou moins éliminée par la marine.

      Apparemment, la source initiale est CNN

      Ships, aircraft search for crashed US destroyer’s 10 missing crew - CNNPolitics
      http://edition.cnn.com/2017/08/21/politics/uss-john-s-mccain-collision/index.html?sr=twCNN082217uss-john-s-mccain-collision0958AMVODtop

      What caused the accident?
      The warship suffered a steering failure as the warship was beginning its approach into the Strait of Malacca, causing it to collide with a commercial tanker Monday, a US Navy official told CNN.
      The official said it was unclear why the crew couldn’t utilize the ship’s backup steering systems to maintain control of ship.
      Earlier, another US Navy official told CNN there were indications the destroyer experienced a loss of steering right before the collision, but steering had been regained after the collision.

      Évidemment, l’option #hacker circule pas mal (déjà pour l’USS Fitzgerald), Popular Mechanics explique de son côté que ça ne peut pas être du #GPS_spoofing, etc.
      No, the USS McCain Wasn’t a Victim of GPS Spoofing
      http://www.popularmechanics.com/military/navy-ships/news/a27854/uss-mccain-collision-gps

    • Ah, ben Les Échos relaient le complotisme, bravo…
      (oubliant au passage l’hypothèse de l’avarie de barre, mise en avant par l’amiral Richardson (CNO : Chief of naval operations)

      Après la collision d’un destroyer américain, des experts agitent la piste de la cyberattaque
      https://www.lesechos.fr/industrie-services/air-defense/010189757977-apres-la-collision-dun-destroyer-americain-des-experts-agitent

      L’amiral n’a pas exclu que la collision ait pu être provoquée par un facteur extérieur ou une cyberattaque. Cet accident n’est pas le premier (voir encadré) et intrigue certains spécialistes de la Défense.

      « Il y a quelque chose de plus que la simple erreur humaine car sinon cela impliquerait énormément de gens », avance par exemple Jeff Stutzman interrogé par le site McClatchyDC.

      Pour cet ancien spécialiste de la guerre de l’information et de la marine, qui travaille désormais chez Wapack Labs, une société de sécurité informatique, tout bâtiment qui s’avance dans le détroit de Singapour aura sur le pont une équipe complète de vigiles et d’opérateurs radars.

      De son côté, interrogé par le site « International Business Times », Todd Humphreys, un professeur à l’Université du Texas et spécialiste en systèmes de navigation par satellite, va plus loin dans la suspicion.

      Pour lui, cet accident semble « statistiquement très suspect ». Et il n’hésite pas à faire un parallèle avec un incident intervenu en juin en Mer noire et au cours duquel des signaux GPS auraient été trafiqués via, selon lui, « un signal qui provenait du continent russe ».

      La piste russe n’est cependant pas la seule à être soulevée. Interrogé par le site australien news.com, Itay Glick, un autre expert de cybersécurité qui a travaillé pour les services de renseignements israéliens, avance que si la Russie a les capacités d’effectuer une telle attaque, la Chine l’a également.

      « Je ne crois pas aux coïncidences », explique-t-il encore en rappelant que « l’erreur humaine » est toujours une solution de facilité pour expliquer un accident.

      À « l’expert » dont les pontifications concluent l’article, on fera remarquer que la Navy a viré tout l’état-major de l’USS Fitzgerald et on rappellera aux Échos que l’amiral Richardson met en avant une deuxième hypothèse « matérielle ».

      Certains font remarquer que les nombreuses gesticulations de la Navy dans un contexte où le nombre de bâtiments baisse pourraient avoir aboutir à une fatigue des équipements et des équipages…

      Enfin, on sourira à la légende de la photo (bizarrement fournie par le SIPA) ouvrant l’article…


      Toutes les pistes sont envisagées y compris celle d’une cyberattaque, a laissé entendre l’amiral John Richardson, chef des opérations de la marine américaine.
      Daniel Chan/AP/SIPA

      … où on a un peu de mal à reconnaître l’amiral Richardson…

      la légende d’AP est la suivante
      Malaysian Maritime Director Indera Abu Bakar points to damage on USS John S. McCain at press conference in Putrajaya on Monday.
      AP Photo/Daniel Chan

    • China Calls U.S. Navy ’Arrogant’ After USS John Mccain Collision Accident
      http://www.newsweek.com/china-us-arrogant-john-mccain-653395

      A Chinese state-run newspaper claimed Monday that the most recent collision of a U.S. Navy destroyer with a merchant ship was an example of the U.S.’s “arrogance” in conducting patrols in and around the South China Sea.

      The nationalist Global Times ran an editorial Monday shortly after the USS John S. McCain was hit by an oil tanker east of Singapore in the Strait of Malacca and 10 sailors were reported missing.

      While stating the collision was an example of the U.S. military’s decline and that Chinese society’s “applause” was tantamount to the nation’s feelings toward the U.S. encroaching on its territory, the opinion piece also claimed that the U.S. is not trying to avoid such collisions.

      U.S. warships are constantly involved in accidents around the South China Sea,” the op-ed, which is often considered direct thoughts from the Chinese government, read. “On the one hand, the U.S. Navy has behaved arrogantly in the Asia-Pacific region. It lacks respect for huge merchant ships and fails to take evasive action in time, thus resulting in serious accidents.

      On n’est pas loin de la blague du phare…
      Blague qu’évoque le deuxième commentateur de l’article du Monde sur le sujet.
      https://seenthis.net/messages/623860

    • CNN sur la même – et évidente – question, mais beaucoup plus terre à terre : quand il y a série, c’est qu’il y a problème de fond…

      Why are so many Navy ships crashing ? - CNNPolitics
      http://edition.cnn.com/2017/08/21/politics/navy-ships-crashing-readiness/index.html

      The US Navy is facing difficult questions about the health of its fleet in the aftermath of the USS John S. McCain’s collision with an oil tanker east of Singapore on Monday, the latest in a series of naval accidents in the Pacific.

      Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson ordered a rare, one-day operational pause in response to the latest collision. And while the cause of the USS McCain crash is still to be determined, the spate of accidents — four since January — suggests there could be a more systemic issue.
      Lawmakers and defense analysts are warning that the Navy’s readiness problems — which have led to longer deployments for ships and less time and money for maintenance and training — could be playing a role in the uptick in crashes.
      In addition to the Navy’s stand-down, the Marine Corps grounded all of its aircraft for 24 hours earlier this month on the heels of two deadly crashes “to focus on the fundamentals of safe flight operations, standardization, and combat readiness.

      House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, said it was unprecedented that “two military services have now had to take a knee to review safety and training procedures.
      […]
      Former Virginia Republican Rep. Randy Forbes, who is now a fellow at the Naval War College, said the concern over the recent incidents goes beyond just determining why the collisions occurred, but points to a broader issue if the Navy had to ramp up in a significant conflict.

      When our ships are having this much difficulty sailing in open waters, it gives us a lot of concern about what would happen if we were in a major conflict and how we would operate there,” Forbes said. “The Navy is in desperate need of additional resources so that they can do the kind of training they need, they can do the kind of ship maintenance they need.
      […]
      Thomas Callender, a defense analyst at the Heritage Foundation and former Navy submarine officer, noted that the destroyer collisions occurred in low-light times of day and highly trafficked areas.

      Those are some of the most difficult times, sunset and sunrise, of trying to determine what your contact picture is, what you’re really seeing with this,” Callender said.
      Forbes said traffic congestion would likely be a commonality, too.

      It’s like when you have accidents on roads: Normally it’s going to be where more vehicles are,” he said. “It still doesn’t justify it — we’ve got to operate in those waters.
      But the fact that all four Navy collisions this year occurred in the Pacific could also point to issues with training that are specific to the region, Hendrix said.
      The fact this is so regional ... it strikes me there’s a degradation in training standards and operational procedures,” he said.

    • Déclaration, ce soir à Singapour, de l’amiral Scott Swift, commandant de la Flotte du Pacifique (3è et 7è flotte)
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4YIXBf03eo


      pas d’info particulière dans la déclaration liminaire (tout bien, tout corporate)

      • toute première question (7:00) (on ne les entend pas bien, mais les réponses permettent de les reconstituer) : cyberattaque ?
      – j’ai entendu cette hypothèse, mais on n’a rien vu qui puisse laisser penser à quelque chose de cette nature, mais nous (il cite le CNO) n’écartons aucune hypothèse

      • des modifications dans la chaîne de commandement
      – c’est trop tôt pour conclure quoi que ce soit, laisser se dérouler l’enquête

      • la flotte n’est-elle pas épuisée ? y a-t-il eu des négligences ?
      – ce n’est pas ce que j’ai vu ce matin lors de ma visite du navire, les équipages sont déterminés et opérationnels, ils ont bien bossé pour le damage control

      • découverte de corps ?
      – la marine malaisienne a récupéré un corps (en mer, donc) et va nous le restituer ; les plongeurs ont trouvé des corps, nous sommes en train de les identifier

    • U.S. Navy to relieve admiral of command after collisions: WSJ
      https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-navy-crash-admiral-idUSKCN1B3034

      The U.S. Navy plans to remove from duty the commander of the fleet that has suffered four recent collisions in Asia and the deaths of a number of sailors, the _Wall Street Journal _reported on Tuesday, citing U.S. officials.

      Vice Admiral Joseph Aucoin, the three-star commander of the U.S. Seventh Fleet based in Yokosuka, Japan, will be relieved of command on Wednesday in connection with four collisions since January, including two involving fatalities, two U.S. officials said, according to the Journal. It said Navy officials declined to comment.

    • La Chine remet une couche…

      After U.S. destroyer collision, Chinese paper says U.S. navy a hazard
      https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-navy-crash-china-idUSKCN1B20O2

      The state-run China Daily said in an editorial on Tuesday that people will wonder why such a sophisticated navy keeps having these problems.

      The investigations into the latest collision will take time to reach their conclusions, but there is no denying the fact that the increased activities by U.S. warships in Asia-Pacific since Washington initiated its rebalancing to the region are making them a growing risk to commercial shipping,” it said.

      China has been upset at U.S. freedom of navigation operations near Chinese controlled islands in the disputed South China Sea, where China has been reclaiming land, building air bases and increasing its military presence.

      While the U.S. Navy is becoming a dangerous obstacle in Asian waters, China has been making joint efforts with the members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations to draw up a Code of Conduct for the South China Sea and it has boosted navigational safety by constructing five lighthouses on its islands,” the China Daily said.

      Anyone should be able to tell who is to blame for militarizing the waters and posing a threat to navigation.

    • Ah, quand même, on se décide enfin à demander leur avis à des experts en autre chose que les cyberattaques !

      US Navy 7th Fleet commander dismissed, Navy says - CNNPolitics
      http://edition.cnn.com/2017/08/22/politics/uss-mccain-7th-fleet-commander-dismissal/index.html

      Carl Schuster, a Hawaii Pacific University professor and former director of operations at the US Pacific Command’s Joint Intelligence Center, said that he thought it was unlikely that the ship would have been hacked.

      Navigating a ship in a shipping channel is a manual operation. It comes down to watch attention and awareness. It’s a training procedure issue and a watch qualification issue,” he said.

      He added that even if the steering had been compromised it would be possible for the McCain to outrun the tanker, and that some degree of directionality would be possible by changing the speed of the port and starboard propellers.

      The “traffic situation” in the shipping channel at that time should be the focus of investigation, Ridzwan Rahmat, a senior defense and security analyst at Jane’s suggests.

      The signs were that the merchant ship was in compliance and the damage on the USS John S. McCain suggests that it wasn’t in compliance” of traffic rules at the time, he said.

    • Si vous ne l’avez pas déjà lu, peut-être faites un petit détour sur le fil concernant le Fitzgerald, l’article de gCaptain, Red over red, concernant le rapport préliminaire sur l’abordage d’il y a deux mois est à lire absolument.
      https://seenthis.net/messages/607667#message624112

      Je reprends ici mon commentaire qui concernait plutôt les événements du McCain (je finis par m’y perdre…)
      https://seenthis.net/messages/607667#message624116

      Sur l’incompétence des commentateurs, je remarque qu’aucun n’a fait la remarque que le navire de guerre coupe la route d’un bâtiment de commerce dans un rail…

      L’hypothèse d’une cyberattaque relève du délire. Mais peut-être que les hackers russes ou chinois dont déjà capables aujourd’hui de liquéfier les cervelles d’une équipe de quart en passerelle, après tout de quoi ne sont-ils pas capables ?

      Si le GPS est tombé en rade ou a été piraté, on dispose d’autres moyens de navigation, mille sabords, notamment en vue de terre. Bon sang, l’abordage a eu lieu à 5 miles du principal phare de la région et à 10 miles de la côte ! Si la passerelle a besoin du GPS pour naviguer, il y a lieu de s’interroger sur les compétences requises pour être officier de quart dans l’US Navy.

      Mais, de fait, on en est bien là : couper la route d’un navire dans le rail (je sais je me répète, mais ça ne passe pas !…)

      d’où mon soulagement (enfin, presque…) dans le commentaire précédant immédiatement celui-ci…

    • Search for Missing U.S. Sailors Slowed by Extensive Damage to Vessel - The New York Times
      https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/24/world/asia/mccain-collision-destroyer-united-states-navy.html

      In the McCain case, the search is taking longer because the damage to the vessel appears to be more extensive. According to one Navy official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because investigations were underway, the Alnic appears to have hit the McCain nearly head-on, whereas the Fitzgerald suffered more of a glancing blow.

      C’est en effet compatible avec l’enregistrement de la trajectoire de l’Alnic MC (j’ai complété mon commentaire de la vidéo des relevés AIS https://seenthis.net/messages/623510#message623551 )

      Par ailleurs, le corps repêché par la marine malaisienne n’avait pas de lien avec l’abordage.

      A Malaysian Navy vessel found a body at sea on Tuesday, but it turned out to be the decomposed corpse of an elderly man and was unrelated to the collision, the United States Navy said.

    • China suspected after crashes of USS John S McCain and USS Fitzgerald | World | The Times & The Sunday Times
      https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0988b8f8-88fa-11e7-a8f3-117a3aea90d9

      The collision on Monday between a Liberian tanker and a US warship, the latest in a series of incidents in Asia, has provoked questions about possible Chinese involvement.

      A former Royal Navy officer said that the movements of the Guang Zhou Wan, a Chinese commercial vessel, could be significant in explaining the fatal crash off Singapore that left at least one sailor dead. A further nine are missing.

      Tracking data indicates that the tanker that collided with U_SS John S McCain_ was followed by the Chinese vessel, which appeared to steer out of the way before the incident.

      “You get the impression that fleet forces command are going to be looking at wider potential problems — hacking, crew training, how they are navigating, validating of ship-watch…

    • With the USS McCain collision, even Navy tech can’t overcome human shortcomings | Ars Technica
      https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/08/with-the-uss-mccain-collision-even-navy-tech-cant-overcome-human-shortc

      Initial reports from the organization suggest that a “steering casualty”—a loss of control over steering from the bridge—contributed to the McCain’s fatal collision. That, and the nature of the ship’s steering and navigation system, has led to speculation that the McCain was “hacked” and that perhaps some sort of malicious electronic attack was also involved in the Fitzgerald’s collision.

      But so far, available evidence suggests something much less sinister—though potentially more threatening to the overall readiness of the service. There was no hacking, no GPS spoofing or jamming, nor any other deliberate enemy electronic attack on the Navy ships involved in this year’s accidents. Instead, much more human factors were at work—and some of them are endemic to the Navy’s current management culture and operational readiness.
      […]
      Watch standers aboard modern warships may have more technology to help them, but they still face a daunting task when they enter high-traffic areas as treacherous as the Strait of Gibraltar—or the Strait of Malacca, the approaches to the Bosporus and Dardanelles, and the approaches to Tokyo Bay. In each, hundreds of other vessels may be visible to the naked eye or on the radar scope. The resulting sea of data points can overwhelm even an experienced bridge crew regardless of how good their technology is.

      Long article, où je finis par perdre le fil de ce qu’il cherche à dire…

    • U.S. Navy Provides Details of Surface Fleet Review In Wake of ’Disturbing Trend’ of Accidents – gCaptain
      http://gcaptain.com/u-s-navy-provides-details-surface-fleet-review-wake-disturbing-trend-accid

      The U.S. Navy has provided details of a comprehensive review of the Navy’s global surface fleet operations after the destroyers USS Fitzgerald and John S. McCain were both involved in major collisions with commercial vessels just two months apart.

      http://navylive.dodlive.mil/files/2017/08/MEMO-FOR-USFF_COMPREHENSIVE-REVIEW-OF-RECENT-SURFACE-FLEET-INCIDEN

      2. You are directed to lead a Comprehensive Review of surface fleet operations and incidents at sea that have occurred over the past decade with emphasis on SEVENTH Fleet operational employment to inform improvements Navy-wide. This review should address the follow areas:

      a. Individual training and professional development, to include seamanship, navigation, voyage planning, leadership development, officer and enlisted tactical training in formal schools and on the job;

      b. Unit level training and operational performance, to including manning, personnel management, watchbill management, bridge (and CIC) team resource management, contact management, contact avoidance, leadership oversight and risk assessment/mitigation at all levels of the chain of command;

      c. Development and certification of deployed operational and mission standards (Force Generation) with particular emphasis on Forward Deployed Naval Force (FDNF), to include validation of required certification standards, gaps between required standards and actual employment practices, effectiveness of leadership and oversight at all levels of administrative and operational chains of command, maintaining and enforcing standards throughout FDNF assignment including self-assessment practices, external inspection reinforcement, remedial action mitigation plans;

      d. Deployed Operational Employment and Risk Management (Force Employment), to include Combatant Commander mission requirements, theater security cooperation requirements, maintenance impacts, other competing priorities (fleet experimentation, concept development), and their corresponding impact to operational tempo (OPTEMPO) and fundamental mariner and seamanship proficiency;

      e. Material Readiness of electronic systems to include navigation equipment (e.g. AIS, radars, ECDIS, VMS, WSNs), propulsion machinery to include steering systems, combat system modernization, and material availability;

      f. Practical Utility of current navigation equipment and combat systems including sensors, tracking systems, displays, and internal communications networks to evaluate their effectiveness at integrating tactical data and providing situational awareness to our people.

    • Fatigue and Training Gaps Spell Disaster at Sea, Sailors Warn - The New York Times
      https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/27/world/asia/fatigue-and-training-gaps-spell-disaster-at-sea-sailors-warn.html

      The bridge of each Navy destroyer is controlled by a round-the-clock shift of young officers, who must pass written and oral exams to qualify for the positions. Still, they typically are under 25 and may have little shipboard experience. Junior officers also move on to other assignments after limited tours.

      Are we shortchanging their basic training, especially as we rotate our junior officers every 18 to 24 months?” asked Admiral Crowder.

      Training for junior ship officers has changed significantly in recent years. In 2003, the Navy dropped what had been an intensive six-month training course on navigation, basic seamanship, engineering and maintenance before new officers were assigned to their first ship.

      Instead, the new officers were sent directly to a ship where they were supposed to learn on the job. Some said they got practical training on deployments, and noted that the Seventh Fleet had a reputation as being the most experienced in the Navy. But, many commanders said, crews were too busy to provide that kind of instruction.

      By last year, the Navy had largely reversed course, sandwiching a junior officer’s first sea tour between 14 weeks of classroom work.
      […]
      Most ships use a traditional “five and dime” watch rotation, in which sailors serve five hours of watch, then have 10 hours off, he said. But during those 10 hours, sailors often have daytime duties.

      The rotation can lead to a watch officer pulling a 20-hour day every three days, Mr. Cordle said, adding that even designated sleep time can be interrupted by drills or refueling operations that can keep sailors up for days at a time. A recent Government Accountability Office report said sailors were on duty up to 108 hours each week.

      I averaged 3 hours of sleep a night,” someone described as a Japan-based Navy officer wrote on Reddit last week. “I have personally gone without sleep for so long that I have seen and heard things that weren’t there. I’ve witnessed accidents that could have been avoided because the person was so tired they had no right to be operating heavy machinery.

      Navy tests of sailors on the five-and-dime schedule found lack of sleep led to blunted decision-making and reflexes that were roughly the same as those of sailors who had downed several beers.

      The Naval Postgraduate School has developed a shorter watch schedule to match circadian rhythms, which uses three hours of watch duty and nine hours off. Recognizing the benefits, submarines were ordered to move to a similar schedule in 2015.

      Mr. Cordle said adopting the schedule could result in greater safety. But the Navy has left scheduling up to individual captains, and three quarters of ships still use the five and dime.

    • Ship Collisions : Address the Underlying Causes, Including Culture | U.S. Naval Institute
      https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2017-08/ship-collisions-address-underlying-causes-including-culture

      Un think tank naval, grosse institution privée (estd 1873…), entre dans la danse (après plusieurs autres dont gCaptain). Dans le collimateur :
      • l’organisation des tours de quart
      • la non-spécialisation des officiers entre pont et machine
      • la (non-)formation au quart
      (j’ai lu sur un blog que, sur les navires modernes de la Navy (classe Ticonderoga !), il n’y aurait plus de table à carte en passerelle (support traditionnel du point à la main) mais uniquement de l’électronique…, à confirmer)

      In the wake of the USS Fitzgerald (DDG-62) and USS John S. McCain (DDG-56) collisions, the Navy is conducting investigations, relieving commanding officers, conducting safety stand downs (operational pauses), and retraining. This is a similar response to past mishaps, but this time the Navy must include true root cause analysis . Analysis after mishaps invariably uncovers human error and training deficiencies as causal factors. Some people get fired and others retrained. The Navy has begun to dig deeper with the CNO’s mandate for a fleet-wide investigation last week. I predict some of the findings of root causes will include the Navy’s approach to training and career development, surface warfare officer (SWO) culture, and high operational tempo (OpTempo) driving mission over people. 

      When a junior officer (JO) reports to a warship, he or she immediately has three jobs: standing watch under instruction, running a division, and earning qualifications (first as an officer of the deck and then as a SWO). Once qualified to be a watchstander, a JO is on the watch bill and expected to train the next batch of JOs. Depending on the number of qualified watchstanders on board, the watch rotation varies: “port and starboard” (6 hours on watch and 6 hours off); “five and dime” (5 hours on and 10 hours off watch, rotating); three or four section “chow to chow” rotating (based around mealtimes); “3 on/9 off” or “4 on/8 off” with two watches per day that do not change for a given underway. The “off” time is when a JO can accomplish day work, run the division, and work on qualifications—along with a little sleep and maybe squeeze in a run on the treadmill.
      […]
      The U.S. Navy appears to be the only maritime organization in the world that does not have dedicated watchstanders and separate dedicated professional tracks for deck and engineering.
      […]
      Another root cause likely will be the alertness level of those watchstanders. Watch rotations vary greatly in the fleet, partly because of the variability in the number of qualified watchstanders and partly because of SWO culture. Many COs will direct the watches be run the way he or she experienced as a JO. The vast majority of Navy ships still use rotating watches, which is completely against human circadian rhythms. With rotating watches, everyone sleeps when they are off watch because they are in a constant state of exhaustion. Myriad sleep deprivation studies have proven that lack of sleep is cumulative. You can’t “catch up” on sleep, and decision-making is impaired just like being under the influence of alcohol or drugs. Yet the Navy has not addressed watch rotations to maximize crew rest. Instead, it perpetuates a culture where lack of sleep is a rite of passage, and the main risk assessment tool does not account for crew rest.

    • Singapore-led safety investigation underway into USS John S McCain collision - Channel NewsAsia
      http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/singapore-led-safety-investigation-underway-into-uss-john-s-9174198

      The Singapore Transport Safety Investigation Bureau (TSIB) launched a marine safety investigation following the collision of the USS John S McCain and Liberian-flagged oil tanker Alnic MC on Aug 21. 

      A TSIB spokesperson said on Thursday (Aug 31) that the investigation was launched immediately after the collision, and the probe was being conducted in accordance with the International Maritime Organization’s Casualty Investigation Code in Singapore’s capacity as a coastal state.

      The US Coast Guard, on behalf of the US National Transportation Safety Board, and the Liberian Maritime Administration are participating in Singapore’s safety investigation as Substantially Interested States,” the spokesperson said. 

      To date, investigators have interviewed the crew members of the Alnic, while TSIB has been coordinating with the US Coast Guard to gather relevant information on the US guided-missile destroyer, including statements of account from its crew. 

      TISB has also obtained shipboard data from the Alnic and other ships in the vicinity at the time of the collision to support the Singapore-led safety investigation, the spokesperson said.

      Si on lit entre les lignes, il semblerait que le TSIB rende public l’ouverture de leur enquête (avec 10 jours de retard) pour faire pression sur la Navy qui, à son habitude, ne semble pas particulièrement coopérative…

      Clairement, il n’est pas prévu qu’ils aient accès directement aux témoignages des marins du McCain

    • U.S. Navy to Haul Damaged Destroyer John S. McCain to Japan for Damage Assessment – gCaptain
      http://gcaptain.com/u-s-navy-to-haul-damaged-destroyer-john-s-mccain-to-japan-for-damage-asses

      The U.S. Navy is planning to haul the damaged guided missile destroyer USS John S. McCain to its ship repair facility in Yokosuka, Japan where damage assessments will continue to take place.

      The Navy said Tuesday it intends to issue a task order on an existing contract, for the salvage patching and transport via heavy lift of USS John S McCain (DDG 56) from Changi Naval Base in Singapore to the U.S. Navy’s Ship Repair Facility-Japan Regional Maintenance Center in Yokosuka, Japan. The Navy did not specify which existing contract it was referring to.

    • Une hypothèse circule depuis quelques jours : l’USS John S McCain aurait été en train de doubler l’Alnic NC, suffisamment près (ie beaucoup trop près…) pour que, vers la fin du dépassement, la perturbation hydrodynamique due à la vague d’étrave de l’Alnic vienne perturber le safran du McCain, provoquant une embardée à gauche, voire mettant en panne l’appareil à gouverner.
      http://forum.gcaptain.com/t/uss-j-mccain-alnic-mc-collision-near-singapore/45819/327

    • Un peu de ménage…
      Pour l’instant, l’état-major du destroyer n’a pas été touché.

      Admiral, Captain Removed in Ongoing Investigations into USS John S. McCain, USS Fitzgerald Collisions
      https://news.usni.org/2017/09/18/admiral-captain-removed-part-investigation-uss-john-s-mccain-uss-fitzgera

      The commander of the Navy’s largest operational battle force and his subordinate in charge of the attached destroyer squadron have been removed from their positions as a result of ongoing investigations into a string of incidents this year that resulted in the death of 17 sailors and hundreds of millions of dollars in damages, USNI News has learned.

      U.S. 7th Fleet Commander Vice Adm. Philip Sawyer removed Rear Adm. Charles Williams, commander of Combined Task Force 70, and Capt. Jeffery Bennett, commodore of Destroyer Squadron 15, from their positions on Monday (Tuesday local time) due to a loss of confidence in their ability to command, two Navy officials told USNI News and later confirmed by a statement from the service.

    • Les réparations auront lieu « localement », à Yokosuka. Localement, parce qu’il faut encore acheminer l’USS John S McCain de Singapour à Yokosuka (transfert prévu dans le courant de ce mois). Contrairement à l’USS Fitzgerald qui lui était à Yokosuka et va être acheminé à Pascagoula dans le Mississippi (probablement en décembre).

      USS John S. McCain to Be Repaired in Japan – gCaptain
      http://gcaptain.com/uss-john-s-mccain-to-be-repaired-in-japan

      The U.S. Navy will repair the guided-missile destroyer USS John S. McCain (DDG 56) at the U.S. Naval Ship Repair Facility-Japan Regional Maintenance Center in Yokosuka, Japan.

      Repairs will begin upon arrival from Singapore aboard a heavy lift vessel in October, the Navy said.

      Accessoirement, on profitera de l’immobilisation pour faire un peu de remise à niveau :

      In addition to supporting repairs, the McCain’s crew will focus on training, readiness, and certifications to prepare the ship for its return to the Seventh Fleet, according to the Navy.
      […]
      On Thursday, the USS John S. McCain departed Changi Naval Base to meet the heavy lift transport vessel MV Treasure, which will transport it to Fleet Activities Yokosuka for repairs.

    • U.S. Navy says deadly McCain collision was #preventable, relieves ship commander
      https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-navy-asia/u-s-navy-says-deadly-mccain-collision-was-preventable-relieves-ship-command

      The commanding officer exercised poor judgment, and the executive officer exercised poor leadership of the ship’s training program,” the USS Seventh Fleet said in a statement released in Japan on Wednesday.
      […]
      The McCain’s captain, Commander A. Sanchez, and his executive officer, Commander J. Sanchez, were reassigned to other duties in Japan, where the Seventh Fleet is headquartered, the Navy said.

      On attend le rapport préliminaire d’enquête…

  • The opioid epidemic in the US: A national health emergency - World Socialist Web Site
    http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/07/18/pers-j18.html

    The Washington Post recently published an extraordinary article on policies to address the spiraling drug epidemic in the United States. The article—“As opioid overdoses exact a higher price, communities ponder who should be saved”—did not feature calls for emergency health care or rehabilitation programs, but rather suggestions by some local officials that the state should just let drug addicts die.

    The Post highlighted, among others, the proposal of Middletown, Ohio Council Member Daniel Picard that emergency responders should not use the drug naloxone to save overdose victims more than two times. The newspaper noted that the drug is often “the only thing separating whether an overdose victim goes to the hospital instead of the morgue,” and draws the conclusion that it is perfectly reasonable to adopt policies to ensure that many more go to the latter rather than the former.

    That such fascistic measures—what might be called the “Duterte solution” to the drug epidemic in the US—are being treated as a rational and legitimate part of the political debate is an expression of the debased political psychology that dominates in the American ruling class. As far as the corporate and financial elite is concerned, if tens of thousands more people die from drug overdoses, this is not only acceptable, it is a positive good.

  • Trump Intensifies His Attacks on Journalists and Condemns F.B.I. ‘Leakers’ - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/24/us/politics/white-house-sean-spicer-briefing.html

    Reporters from The Times, BuzzFeed News, CNN, The Los Angeles Times, Politico, the BBC and The Huffington Post were among those shut out of the briefing. Aides to Mr. Spicer admitted only reporters from a group of news organizations that, the White House said, had been previously confirmed.

    Those organizations included Breitbart News, the One America News Network and The Washington Times, all with conservative leanings. Journalists from ABC, CBS, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and Fox News also attended.

    Reporters from The Associated Press and Time magazine, who were set to be allowed in, chose not to attend the briefing in protest of the White House’s actions. The Washington Post did not send a reporter to the session.

    Still, the Committee to Protect Journalists, which typically advocates press rights in countries with despotic regimes, issued an alarmed statement on Friday about Mr. Trump’s escalating language.

    “It is not the job of political leaders to determine how journalists should conduct their work, and sets a terrible example for the rest of the world,” said the group’s executive director, Joel Simon. “The U.S. should be promoting press freedom and access to information.”

    Mr. Trump, in his attack on the news media at the conservative gathering, complained at length about the use of anonymous sources in news stories, charging that some reporters were fabricating unnamed sources to level unfair charges against him.

    “They shouldn’t be allowed to use sources unless they use somebody’s name,” Mr. Trump said. “Let their name be put out there.”

    At another point, he said, “A few days ago, I called the fake news the enemy of the people because they have no sources — they just make it up.” He added that his “enemy of the people” label applied only to “dishonest” reporters and editors.

    #journalisme #USA #Trump

  • Résurrection du mythique minibus Volkswagen en version tout électrique autonome. Pour l’instant, juste un #concept_car

    Auto show concepts: Would you build them or forget them? - The Washington Post
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/auto-show-concepts-would-you-build-them-or-forget-them/2017/01/14/ebe3d60e-da6f-11e6-a0e6-d502d6751bc8_story.html


    Tony Ding, File/Associated Press

    In a Jan. 9, 2017, file photo, Herbert Diess, chairman of the Volkswagen brand, poses with the #I.D._Buzz all-electric concept van, at the North American International Auto Show, in Detroit. The I.D. Buzz seats up to eight and lets the driver’s seat face the rear when the minivan is in self-driving mode. VW minibuses haven’t been sold in the U.S. since the 1970s, but the company has released several concepts over the years that take their styling cues from the beloved minibus.

    • Tiens, WP le nomme #Budd-e.

      Volkswagen Combi — Wikipédia
      https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_Combi

      Malgré le scandale du « dieselgate » de Volkswagen, cette marque a dévoilé une première photo teaser d’un concept-car électrique qui est dévoilé au salon CES de Las Vegas en 2016, qui s’ouvre du 6 au 9 janvier. Ce concept prend l’aspect d’un fourgon : ce serait alors la renaissance d’un Combi qui sera 100 % électrique et autonome et qui se situera entre les véhicules utilitaires de VW, les Caddy, Transporter et Crafter. Il s’appellera Budd-e et sera produit en 2019.

  • The Arctic is showing stunning winter warmth, and these scientists think they know why - The Washington Post
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/12/23/the-arctic-is-behaving-so-bizarrely-and-these-scientists-think-they-

    And now this week, as you can see above, we’re seeing another huge burst of Arctic warmth. A buoy close to the North Pole just reported temperatures close to the freezing point of 32 degrees Fahrenheit (0 Celsius), which is 10s of degrees warmer than normal for this time of year. Although it isn’t clear yet, we could now be in for another period when sea ice either pauses its spread across the Arctic ocean, or reverses course entirely.

    But these bursts of Arctic warmth don’t stand alone — last month, extremely warm North Pole temperatures corresponded with extremely cold temperatures over Siberia. This week, meanwhile, there are large bursts of un-seasonally cold air over Alaska and Siberia once again.

    It is all looking rather consistent with an outlook that has been dubbed “Warm Arctic, Cold Continents” — a notion that remains scientifically contentious but, if accurate, is deeply consequential for how climate change could unfold in the Northern Hemisphere winter.
    […]
    We continue to see this Arctic behaving so bizarrely, I think we’re in for a #very_interesting_winter ,” said [Rutgers University climate scientist and Arctic specialist Jennifer] Francis.

  • Glenn Greenwald: Trump will have vast powers. He can thank Democrats for them. - The Washington Post
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/11/11/glenn-greenwald-trump-will-have-vast-powers-he-can-thank-democrats-f

    Obama’s approach to executive power flipped so quickly and diametrically that it is impossible to say if he ever believed his campaign-era professions of restraint. As early as May 2009, Jack Goldsmith, a Justice Department official under George W. Bush, celebrated Obama’s abandonment of his promises to rein in these authorities, writing that “the new administration has copied most of the Bush program, has expanded some of it, and has narrowed only a bit.” He added that the “Obama practices will be much closer to late Bush practices than almost anyone expected in January 2009.”

    By putting a prettier liberal face on these policies, and transforming them from a symbol of GOP radicalism into one of bipartisan security consensus, the president entrenched them as permanent fixtures of the American presidency. As Goldsmith put it, Obama’s actions were “designed to fortify the bulk of the Bush program for the long-run.”

  • 9月20日のツイート
    http://twilog.org/ChikuwaQ/date-160920

    My Tweeted Times tweetedtimes.com/ChikuwaQ?s=rgp - top stories by @johnmoe, @johnrobinson posted at 12:00:10

    Top story: Donald Trump Jr. on Twitter: “This image says it all. Let’s end the … twitter.com/donaldjtrumpjr…, see more tweetedtimes.com/ChikuwaQ?s=tnp posted at 11:40:09

    Top story: The Washington Post is wrong: Edward Snowden should be pardoned | Tr… www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/…, see more tweetedtimes.com/ChikuwaQ?s=tnp posted at 09:44:59

    The latest Papier! paper.li/ChikuwaQ/13277… Thanks to @youtopos @KinoScript @GilesDuke posted at 09:18:08

    RT @holdengraber: “I am not interested in living in a city where there isn’t a production by Samuel Beckett running” Edward Albee pic.twitter.com/gI2dRrXzmo posted at 08:24:09

    RT @Telanova_: Twitten Apparition..., Photo by Nigel (...)

  • #Washington_Post Gets Hysterical on #Brexit
    http://cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/washington-post-gets-hysterical-on-brexit

    Britain’s exit from E.U. sends global economy into a tailspin." That was the headline of a Washington Post article on the vote in the U.K.. If you missed the tailspinning economies that’s because this is just Washington Post hysteria. Obviously the Washington Post is referring to financial markets. They apparently don’t realize the difference between financial markets and the real economy.

    And if you don’t realize they are very different then you must believe in the horrible recession of 1987. Of course there was no recession in 1987 (or 1988 or 1989), but that was when the stock market plunged more than 20 percent in a single day. This drop, which happened in every major world market, did not correspond to any identifiable event in the economy. Nor did it have any massive fallout on the world economy. But in Washington Post land it was undoubtedly a serious recession.

    #économie #manipulations

  • The inexplicable and relentless rise of cancer-drug prices - The Washington Post
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/05/02/the-inexplicable-and-relentless-rise-of-cancer-drug-prices

    “A lot of times, I’ve heard manufacturers say we can only give the drug to 1,000 patients; we need a high price to recoup costs of research and development. Then all of a sudden, they’re able to sell it to 10,000 patients. You’d think it [the costs] would be distributed across all patients and be cheaper. I think the argument that they’re trying to recoup the research and development over 1,000 patients is not actually representative of what’s going on,” said Caroline Bennette, a health economist at the University of Washington in Seattle who led the Health Affairs study.

    #pharma #cancer #prix #secret

  • The Washington Post Says Doctors Without Borders Is Silly to Worry About the Impact of the TPP on Drug Prices | Beat the Press | Blogs | Publications | The Center for Economic and Policy Research
    http://cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/the-washington-post-says-doctors-without-borders-is-silly-to-worry-about-the-i

    The humanitarian group, Doctors Without Borders, along with many other NGOs involved in providing health care to people in the developing world, have come out in opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) over concerns that the deal will make it more difficult to provide drugs to people in the developing world. Their argument is that it will raise drug prices by making patent protection stronger and longer and by making it more difficult for countries to scale back protections that they may come to view as excessive and wasteful.

    But the Washington Post editorial board tells us not to fear, that the TPP is actually “a healthy agreement.” The gist of its argument is an analysis by Council on Foreign Relations Fellow Thomas Bollyky, which finds that there were few incidents of large increases in drug prices for countries following the signing of previous trade deals. 

    As I noted in a previous post, this analysis almost seemed designed not to find substantial rises in prices. Bollyky looked at changes in drugs prices immediately after a trade deal took effect. The problem with this approach is:

    "In most cases, the rules in these agreements will only apply to new drugs, and even then to a subset of new drugs, for example patent protection for a drug that is a combination of already approved drugs. They may also allow for the extension of patent terms beyond the date where they would have expired under pre-trade deal rules, but here again the impact will only be felt gradually over time.

    “Furthermore, the date of a trade deal with the United States may not be the key factor in pushing up drug prices. The United States signed a deal with South Korea in 2012 that required stronger patent and related protections, but most of these conditions were already law as of 2009 due to a trade agreement Korea signed with the European Union.”

    In other words, this before and after approach is a bit like weighing people the day after they gave up drinking sugary soda to determine whether this decision will affect obesity. It’s not serious stuff.

    There is evidence that prior trade agreements have affected drug prices. As I noted in that earlier post:

    "An analysis of the impact of the rules in the 2001 trade agreement between the United States and Jordan found that it had increased annual spending on drugs by $18 million by 2004. This is slightly less than 0.16 percent of Jordan’s GDP in that year, the equivalent of $28 billion annually in the U.S. economy today.

    “There is a similar story of sharply higher drug spending in Morocco, which signed a pact with the United States in 2006. In Morocco, spending on drugs went from $662 million in 2009 (0.7 percent of GDP) to $1.4 billion (1.4 percent of GDP) in 2015.”

    To be clear, Bollyky does have a limited point in his piece, any specific trade deal should not be viewed in isolation. It a process of creating ever stronger and longer patent protections, which mean ever larger gaps between the protected price of drugs and their free market price. (For some reason, none of the modelers ever factor in the negative impact of higher drug prices into their analysis of the economic impact of these trade deals.)

    In this sense, the TPP should be understood as working alongside other steps, like the Obama administration’s pressures on the Indian government to give up flexibilities granted under TRIPS, to ensure that U.S. drug companies can get ever higher prices from their drugs as protections are extended more broadly around the world. For people who are concerned about public health and would prefer a less corrupt and more efficient mechanism for supporting drug research, this sounds like a really bad deal.

    #arnaque #manipulation #libre_échange #pharma #Etats-Unis

  • a very strange fact about drug prices: They do not really exist

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/this-drug-is-defying-a-rare-form-of-leukemia--and-it-keeps-getting-pricier/2016/03/09/4fff8102-c571-11e5-a4aa-f25866ba0dc6_story.html

    This drug is defying a rare form of leukemia — and it keeps getting pricier - The Washington Post

    List prices are nothing more than a starting point for bargaining between drugmakers and the companies that provide prescription drug benefits. The cost for patients varies widely, influenced by discounts and rebates developed behind closed doors and applied in #secret.

    To track how Gleevec became a multibillion-dollar drug, The Washington Post used the median amount paid by privately insured patients and their health plans before discounts and rebates, an analysis prepared by health services researcher Stacie Dusetzina of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill using data from Truven Health Analytics.

    #pharma #prix #santé #cancer

  • Censor or die: The death of Mexican news in the age of drug cartels - The Washington Post
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/censor-or-die-the-death-of-mexican-news-in-the-age-of-drug-cartels/2015/12/09/23acf3ae-8a26-11e5-9a07-453018f9a0ec_story.html

    Submitting to cartel demands is the only way to survive, said Hildebrando “Brando” Deandar Ayala, 39, editor in chief of El Mañana, one of the oldest and largest newspapers in the region with a print circulation of 30,000. “You do it or you die, and nobody wants to die,” he said. “Auto censura — self-censorship — that’s our shield.”

    (...) Four El Mañana journalists have been killed in the past 10 years. Others survived assassination attempts, kidnappings, and grenade and machine-gun attacks on their offices. Deandar has been shot, kidnapped and had his home set on fire, he said.

    #mexique #cartel #journalisme #auto-censure

  • D’après la NASA la circulation thermohaline pourrait bien être en train de s’arrêter…


    NASA found a way to track ocean currents from space. What they saw is troubling - The Washington Post
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/11/04/nasa-can-now-detect-worrying-ocean-circulation-changes-from-space

    There has been growing concern, of late, that one predicted consequence of a changing climate — the slowing of the great “overturning” circulation in the Atlantic Ocean — is already starting to happen.

    #changement_climatique #it_has_begun

  • How companies make millions off lead-poisoned, poor blacks - The Washington Post

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/how-companies-make-millions-off-lead-poisoned-poor-blacks/2015/08/25/7460c1de-0d8c-11e5-9726-49d6fa26a8c6_story.html

    BALTIMORE — The letter arrived in April, a mishmash of strange numbers and words. This at first did not alarm Rose. Most letters are that way for her — frustrating puzzles she can’t solve. Rose, who can scarcely read or write, calls herself a “lead kid.” Her childhood home, where lead paint chips blanketed her bedsheets like snowflakes, “affected me really bad,” she says. “In everything I do.”

    #pauvreté #richesse #états-unis #racisme

  • #gigaton - to truly grasp what we’re doing to the planet, you need to understand this gigantic measurement - The Washington Post
    http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/07/01/meet-the-gigaton-the-huge-unit-that-scientists-use-to-track-planetar

    Can you imagine…9 Giga-tons is the weight of about 132 billion people. The amount of carbon we are putting into the atmosphere each year is equal to 20 times the weight of the current world population.

  • Declining vaccine rates : Mostly a white problem - The Washington Post
    http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2015/07/03/declining-vaccine-rates-mostly-a-white-problem

    parents who delay or avoid vaccines are largely, but certainly not exclusively, white, well-educated and well-to-do or outright rich.

    (et plein de stats sur les refus de #vaccins)

  • 7 questions about Greece’s huge crisis - The Washington Post
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/06/30/7-questions-about-greeces-huge-crisis-you-were-too-embarrassed-to-as

    Who Uses the Euro | Beat the Press | Blogs | Publications | The Center for Economic and Policy Research
    http://www.cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/who-uses-the-euro

    The Washington Post ran a map showing which countries in Europe use the euro and which use other currencies. The map is wrong. It shows Montenegro and Kosovo as using currencies other than the euro. This is not accurate, both countries do use the euro as their official currency although they have not have been accepted into the euro zone.

    This is important in the context of the discussions on Greece because it illustrates the point that Greece cannot be forced off the euro. The European Commission and the European Central Bank can impose incredibly onerous conditions on Greece, but they cannot prevent the country from using the euro if it so chooses. The decision to leave the euro could only be made by the Greek government, not its creditors.

  • Since 1976, the FBI hasn’t counted more than 460 fatal police shootings in a year. We’ve counted 462 already in 2015. - The Washington Post
    http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2015/06/30/since-1976-the-fbi-hasnt-counted-more-than-460-fatal-police-shooting

    As a national debate continues over the use of deadly force by police, particularly against minorities, The Post is tracking every fatal shooting by a police officer acting in the line of duty in 2015.

    Six months into the year, The Post’s database has confirmed 462 fatal shootings by police.

    One of the primary reasons The Post is collecting this data is that the currently available tallies of fatal police shootings are woefully inadequate and incomplete.

    The primary source of police shooting data — often cited in news reports — is compiled by the FBI. But because reporting is voluntary, many of the nation’s police departments do not report — including entire states. Since 2011, less than 3 percent of the nation’s 18,000 state and local police agencies have reported fatal shootings by their officers.

    Through the first half of 2015, The Post has already identified more fatal police shootings than the FBI has recorded in any entire year since 1976.

    462 people shot dead by police this year
    http://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shootings

    How many police shootings a year? No one knows
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2014/09/08/how-many-police-shootings-a-year-no-one-knows