From The Wall Street Journal….

The U.S. is alone among the five declared nuclear nations in not modernizing its arsenal. The U.K. and France are both doing so. Ditto China and Russia. “We’re the only ones who aren’t,” Gen. Chilton says. Congress has refused to fund the Department of Energy’s Reliable Replacement Warhead program beyond the concept stage and this year it cut funding even for that.

From later on in the article…

Gen. Chilton pulls out a prop to illustrate his point: a glass bulb about two inches high. “This is a component of a V-61” nuclear warhead, he says. It was in “one of our gravity weapons” — a weapon from the 1950s and ’60s that is still in the U.S. arsenal. He pauses to look around the Journal’s conference table. “I remember what these things were for. I bet you don’t. It’s a vacuum tube. My father used to take these out of the television set in the 1950s and ’60s down to the local supermarket to test them and replace them.”

And here comes the punch line: “This is the technology that we have . . . today.” The technology in the weapons the U.S. relies on for its nuclear deterrent dates back to before many of the people in the room were born.

I am not sure what to make of this. Sometimes old school works far better then the new fangled stuff. On the other hand, I would really hate to see the safety mechanisms degrade. The only thing worse than having a nuclear weapon go off on purpose would be for one to go off by accident.

From The Telegraph….

Islamist fighters have warned pirates holding a Saudi oil tanker they may launch an attack unless the ship and her crew are released.

Why have the Somali Islamist groups come out and demanded that the Saudi oil tanker be released? Perhapses this quote from later on in the article reveals the answer…

“Every Somali has great respect for the holy kingdom of Saudi Arabia. We have nothing against them but unfortunately what happened was just business for us and I hope the Saudis will understand,” the pirate said.

The Pirates seem to think that the Saudis are behind the Islamist threat. Wonder if they know about a connection between the two that is not common knowledge?

From the Guardian….

Yet the latest birth figures tell a story. In the state of Punjab, only 798 girls were born for every 1,000 boys. Haryana was next up the list with 819, followed by Chandigarh with 845 and Delhi, the national capital, came in fourth with 868. The Delhi-based Centre for Social Research, which recently surveyed the worst-affected parts of Delhi, estimates that 10 million girls have been lost to female foeticide in India over the past 20 years.

Most alarming for those monitoring the figures is the fact that the gap appears to be widening. Today the national average for births is 933 girls to 1,000 boys; in 1991 it was 945. ‘The low numbers in a state like Delhi tells us the enormity of the situation,’ said Anju Dubey Panbey, of the Centre for Social Research. ‘In India today, if you are blessed with a son you are almost revered, and if you are the mother of daughters you are made to feel guilty and your status in your family goes down. It is very, very disturbing.’

As India’s wealth and power grows, its sex unbalance gets even worse. The emerging Hindu middle class in India are more determined to kill their daughters than the more backward Hindu farmers in rural areas. This is one of the reasons that the sex imbalance is far worse in urban areas then it is in rural areas.

Remember this when you hear people predicting that India is going to become one of the next world powers.

From The Telegraph….

What irks officials in Puntland most, though, is the failure of the multi-national force now patrolling the Gulf of Aden to take a robust approach to the problem. In a land where rule has seldom been by anything other the gun, few have been impressed by British and European officials’ talk of pirates having “human rights” that spare them from more traditional punishments like hanging.

The case in September, where a Danish warship dumped 10 arrested pirates back on a beach after deciding they lacked the jurisdiction to prosecute, caused widespread bemusement here. “Where is the deterrent for people to join the pirates, if they think they might not even get arrested?” asked Dr Abdirahman Bangah, Puntland’s acting fisheries minister.

From SPIEGEL….

Lilian Engelmann never thought she would see neo-Nazis on her block. The young art curator works in a gallery in the trendy district of Mitte, a neighborhood in central Berlin. Her neighbors include an international cinema, designer hat store, Vietnamese restaurant and — as of last February — a store called Tönsberg, which sells clothing popular among right-wing extremists.

“By coming here, the neo-Nazis tried to come into the center of society,” Engelmann told SPIEGEL ONLINE. Once local residents and shopowners learned that Tönsberg planned to sell the clothing brand Thor Steinar, they organized against the store. The group led by Engelmann and other shopowners called itself the “Mitte Initiative Against the Far Right,” and mounted regular protests.

These people are only going to grow in strength and numbers. Contrary to what some people say, Germany never manged to lay a good moral foundation for a free society. The same could be said of many other countries in Europe.

From Reuters…

Online dating service eHarmony has agreed to create a new website for gays and lesbians as part of a settlement with a gay man in New Jersey, the New Jersey Office of the Attorney General said on Wednesday.

From later on in the same article….

eHarmony was founded in 2000 by evangelical Christian Dr. Neil Clark Warren and had ties with the influential religious conservative group Focus on the Family.

Enough Said.

From Epoch Times…

It began on September 3, 2007, when the early morning sun caught the rust-stained hull of a 1,700-ton cargo ship as it slowly steamed into the busy Mediterranean port of Tartous in Syria. From its mast flew the flag of South Korea and the stern plate identified the al-Hamed as being registered in Inchon, one of the country’s major ports.

Watching the ship manoeuvring into its berth from a distance was a man with the swarthy skin of a Kurd or one of the Marsh Arabs of Iraq. He was fluent in both their languages as well as some of the dialects of Afghanistan. He was, in fact, a Turkish-born Jew who had eschewed the life of a carpet seller in the family business in Istanbul to go to Israel, serve in its army as a translator and finally achieve his life’s ambition to work in Mossad.

Fifteen years later, he was recognised as one of its most brilliant operatives. In that time, he had operated in a dozen countries under as many aliases, using his linguistic skills and chameleon-like characteristics to observe and be absorbed into whichever community he had been sent.

Now, for the moment, he was code-named Kamal with a perfectly faked Iranian passport in his pocket. Mossad’s chief, Meir Dagan, had stressed to him the importance of his mission: to confirm the role of al-Hamed in the dangerous relationship which the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad had formed with North Korea.

The whole piece has more detail about Israel’s raid on Syra’s nuclear site than I have seen anywhere else. Somebody is either making things up or talking about things they should keep quite about. (H/T The Belmont Club)

From Danger Room…

The Defense Department’s geeks are spooked by a rapidly spreading worm crawling across their networks. So they’ve suspended the use of so-called thumb drives, CDs, flash media cards, and all other removable data storage devices from their nets, to try to keep the worm from multiplying any further.

Why don’t they just order everyone to stop using a computer? Maybe there is something I am missing, but this seem really stupid. They would be better off shutting their network down if they are that scared.

From the Telegraph…

Thousands of rioters used axes, chains, stones and iron bars to attack police, smash local government offices and set fire to cars after a protest in western China went out of control.

From later on in the same article…

Provinces around the country are reporting a surge in strikes, alongside other stand-offs as laid-off factory workers protest over unpaid wages.

The clashes in Wudu, a part of the city of Longnan in the poor province of Gansu, began on Monday. Longnan is not far from the border with Sichuan, the heart of the earthquake zone.

Residents living in temporary shelters after their homes had been demolished to make way for a government development project were joined by thousands of others.

They had been promised the new development would improve local living standards, but that was thrown into doubt when it was confirmed the local government was itself relocating elsewhere.

By Tuesday, crowds had grown to 2,000 according to state media, and several times that according to witnesses, who said a fire engine sent to put out fires started by the protesters was itself hijacked.

Hand-to-hand fighting followed as police used tear gas to try to disperse the crowds.

The New York Times has more.

There have been many riots in China. But they seem to be growing more common. At this rate they will be a real issue soon.