missilaneous lounge thread

US hid Iraq's chemical weapons. Now ISIS has them
Yet all the chemical weapons found by soldiers were manufactured before 1991, the Times reported. They consisted largely of 155-millimeter artillery shells or 122-millimeter rockets - not designed for mass destruction, and produced in the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq war.
According to the Times, the reports were embarrassing for the Pentagon because, in five of the six incidents in which troops were wounded by chemical agents, the munitions appeared to have been "designed in the US, manufactured in Europe and filled in chemical agent production lines built in Iraq by Western companies".
Jarrod Taylor, a former Army sergeant who witnessed the disposal of mustard shells that burned two members of his company, told the Times the public has been misled for a decade. "I love it when I hear, 'Oh there weren't any chemical weapons in Iraq,' " he said. "There were plenty."

The fight against IS may take quite a long time, according former Pentagon chief Leon Panetta, who said “we're looking at kind of a 30-year war" in an interview with USA Today.

I don't understand why you put a line break there.

a line break

and an extra character as well

th
hat

This week, China launched an unmanned probe to the moon, as a rehearsal for a future robotic sample-return mission.

Lunar samples
more Lunar samples

The United Nations’ top official for counter-terrorism and human rights (known as the “Special Rapporteur”) issued a formal report to the U.N. General Assembly today that condemns mass electronic surveillance as a clear violation of core privacy rights guaranteed by multiple treaties and conventions.

Central to the Rapporteur’s findings is the distinction between “targeted surveillance” — which “depend[s] upon the existence of prior suspicion of the targeted individual or organization” — and “mass surveillance,” whereby “states with high levels of Internet penetration can [] gain access to the telephone and e-mail content of an effectively unlimited number of users and maintain an overview of Internet activity associated with particular websites.”

Article 17 of the Covenant (of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights) guarantees the right of privacy, the defining protection of which, the report explained, is “that individuals have the right to share information and ideas with one another without interference by the State, secure in the knowledge that their communication will reach and be read by the intended recipients alone.”

A June report from the High Commissioner for Human Rights similarly noted “the disturbing lack of governmental transparency associated with surveillance policies, laws and practices, which hinders any effort to assess their coherence with international human rights law and to ensure accountability.”

The rejection of the “terrorism” justification for mass surveillance as devoid of evidence echoes virtually every other formal investigation into these programs.

secure in the knowledge that their communication will only be used to offer tailored content – like giving more relevant search results and ads.