ON THE FIGHT
A Senate panel voted overwhelmingly to send weapons to rebels fighting Syria’s government, but it was not clear who would get the arms even if the bill succeeds, as Washington struggles to deal with its response to the conflict.The Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted 15-3 for legislation that would send arms to “vetted” moderate members of the Syrian opposition, the first time U.S. lawmakers have approved such military action in the two-year-old civil war.
British authorities have established that one and possibly both of the men who hacked a soldier to death on a London street was born in Britain of Nigerian descent, a source with knowledge of the investigation said on Thursday. Local media named the man who was definitely born in the country as 28-year-old Michael Adebolajo and said police raided the home of his Nigerian family in a village near the eastern English city of Lincoln. Both men appeared to have converted to Islam from Christian immigrant backgrounds, British media said.
The Army psychiatrist charged in the deadly 2009 Fort Hood attack wants to represent himself at his upcoming murder trial, which means he could question the nearly three dozen soldiers he’s accused of wounding in the shooting rampage. Hasan’s request, announced Wednesday by Fort Hood officials, is to be considered at a pretrial hearing next week. The request prompted the military judge, Colonel Osborn, to delay jury selection to June 5, about a week after it was scheduled to start. Hasan, an American-born Muslim, faces the death penalty or life in prison without parole if convicted of 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted premeditated murder in the attack on the Texas Army post, about 125 miles southwest of Fort Worth.
POTOMAC TWO-STEP
The ACLU, which has long pushed for the type of disclosure President Obama will offer today at 2PM Eastern, has released a statement asking for still more information.
Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel’s order to accelerate the deployment and installation of electronic health records for servicemembers is being taken quite seriously by the Pentagon.
ON TECH, PRIVACY AND SECRECY
If scientists and officials at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California seem a little starstruck these days, there’s a good reason: The lab’s massive National Ignition Facility, or NIF, has somethingof a starring role in Star Trek Into Darkness, which opened nationwide last Thursday. “For many years, we’ve been waiting for ‘Star Trek’ to realize that they should be here,” NIF principal associate director Ed Moses told Live Science. “This is a very futuristic facility… and I think we’ve all been influenced by Star Trek’s vision of the future.”
The arrival of the MQ-8B/C Firescout and X-47B UCAS capability demonstrator marks a new chapter in naval aviation. This developmental milestone of the Navy’s newest unmanned maritime surveillance air vehicle marks the beginning of flight-testing activities to certify the system for an initial operational capability. A joint team of Navy and Northrop Grumman personnel operated Triton’s first flight from the Mission Control System at Palmdale. The air vehicle flew within restricted air space in the vicinity of Northrop Grumman’s Palmdale facility. The flight was 80 minutes and the air vehicle reached an altitude of 20,000 feet. Following the conclusion of airframe envelope expansion testing flights at Palmdale, the air vehicle will be flown to Naval Air Station Patuxent River for completion of integrated systems testing to include an independent operational test and evaluation period before fielding the system for operational use.
When it comes to detecting a wide range of extremely faint scents, including the primary vapor that emanates from TNT-based explosives, dogs are the gold standard. But researchers out of the University of California at Santa Barbara, report in the journal Analytical Chemistry that they just may have man’s best friend beat — in the form of a fingerprint-sized silicon microchip. “Like a person, a dog can have a good day or a bad day, get tired or distracted,” Carl Meinhart, a mechanical engineering professor who led the research, said in a school news release. “We have developed a device with the same or better sensitivity as a dog’s nose that feeds into a computer to report exactly what kind of molecule it’s detecting.”
CONTRACT WATCH
The Virginia Contracting Activity, used by the Defense Intelligence Agency for contracting purposes, has a requirement for the Science and Technology Integration Lab (STIL) for support in digital forensics technology.
The Department of State is still hard at work currying support personnel and contact vehicles to help it build the new super-Embassy in Yemen.
