Author: thaobh.leo@gmail.com

PALM BEACH, Fla.—After weeks of back-and-forth with AI company Anthropic, the Pentagon is actively talking with all four major U.S. AI players—Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and xAI—to ensure the companies and the Defense Department are at “the same baseline” regarding Pentagon expectations, the undersecretary of defense for research and engineering said Tuesday. “We actually signed contracts with all four of them over the summer without a lot of specificity,” Emil Michael told a group of venture capital investors during an Amazon Web Services event. “Now we want to deploy [them] on our system so other people can build agents and pilots, and…

Sputnik News 20260217 MOSCOW (Sputnik) – Russian forces delivered a massive retaliatory strike on Ukraine’s military-industrial complex facilities and energy infrastructure used by the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the Russian Defense Ministry said on Tuesday. “In response to the terrorist attacks by the Ukrainian regime against civilian infrastructure facilities on Russian soil, the Russian Armed Forces delivered a massive strike with long-range precision-guided air- and ground-based weapons, as well as unmanned aerial vehicles, at Ukraine’s military-industrial complex facilities, energy infrastructure, as well as at production sites, storage facilities, and launch preparation sites for unmanned attack vehicles,” the ministry said in…

Amid a review commissioned by Navy Secretary John Phelan, the Navy will be cutting back the number of mandatory uniforms issued to sailors, the service’s director of Military Personnel Plans and Policy said.In an exclusive interview with Military Times, Rear Adm. Jennifer Couture said the Navy would finally make a long-anticipated cutback to one PT uniform by next year and soon announce other seabag reductions as well.“By 2027, it will be one PT uniform,” Couture said. “That makes sense. And it is also higher-quality. It is more in line with, if you were to go to a running store out…

The IRS lost about 40% of its IT workforce and nearly 80% of its technology leaders last year — deeper losses than have previously been reported. IRS Chief Information Officer Kaschit Pandya said during an industry conference on Wednesday that the agency’s IT shop is going through its biggest reorganization in 20 years. “Last year, we lost approximately 40% of the IT staff and nearly 80% of the execs. So clearly there was an opportunity, and I thought the opportunity that we needed to really execute was reorganizing,” Pandya said at annual event hosted by the Association of Government Accountants.…

During my junior year at West Point in 2017, I attended a ceremony honoring the namesake of the school’s newest barracks: Gen. Benjamin O. Davis Jr. This was the first building at West Point named after an African American, and I glowed with pride knowing that the academy was finally celebrating a person who looked like me.It was a meaningful, but ultimately insufficient, gesture: Less than 100 meters from Benjamin O. Davis barracks was one named for Robert E. Lee, one of almost two dozen Confederate monuments on West Point’s campus at the time.Walking to class every day, I passed…

The Pentagon is looking for cheap commercial satellites that can maintain surveillance on other satellites in orbit, including close-range inspections, according to a Defense Innovation Unit solicitation published Tuesday.The Geosynchronous High-Resolution Optical Space-Based Tactical Reconnaissance project — also referred to as “Ghost Recon” (as in the Tom Clancy novels and video games) — is intended to address a vulnerability in America’s space-monitoring capabilities.The problem is that DOD “lacks sufficient satellites capable of providing high-resolution space-to-space imagery and maintaining custody of both friendly and adversarial satellites in geosynchronous orbit (GEO),” according to the solicitation.Hence, the Pentagon is looking for commercial satellites…

Racial and ethnic minorities are subjected to greater enforcement of marijuana laws under prohibition. This research examines whether there is a corresponding difference in their response to the introduction of legal protection of marijuana retail markets. We use California’s medical marijuana retail market as a case study. A well-established system of dispensaries operating in California before the introduction of legal protection of its medical marijuana retail market allows us to disentangle the effect of legal risk from the effect of access. Drawing on longitudinal information from the NLSY97, we find that legally protecting the medical marijuana retail market reduced quitting…

BERLIN — Germany does not want to pursue nuclear weapons of its own, but is interested in incorporating French and British atomic bombs in a deterrence arrangement reminiscent of NATO’s U.S.-based nuclear umbrella, according to Chancellor Friedrich Merz.“I don’t want Germany to consider developing its own nuclear weapons,” Merz said in the Machtwechsel podcast, published online on Wednesday. It was the first major interview the chancellor gave this year. Instead, Merz suggested seeing whether France and the U.K. could be elevated to the same level as the U.S. nuclear umbrella to shield Europe and ensure NATO’s territorial integrity.“As with the…

When it comes to adapting to the consequences of climate change, the federal government has relied heavily on one flagship program: Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities, or BRIC. Administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, BRIC has doled out $4.5 billion in grants to help states and cities prepare for future disasters. Wildfire retrofits in Washington State, safe rooms in Oklahoma, and sewer systems in Detroit have all benefitted from the program.Despite bipartisan support for the effort, the Trump administration issued a memo announcing its intent to shut down BRIC in April. Then, in December, a federal judge ordered FEMA…

Sputnik News 20260217 MOSCOW (Sputnik) – The shutdown of Starlink terminals did not affect the command and control system for Russian troops in the special military operation zone, Russian Deputy Defense Minister Alexei Krivoruchko said on Tuesday. “The shutdown of Starlink terminals did not affect the command and control system for troops, units, and formations in the special military operation zone,” Krivoruchko told the “60 Minutes” program on the Rossiya 1 broadcaster. Starlink terminals have been offline for two weeks, but this has not affected the effectiveness of the unmanned systems forces, Krivoruchko said. The command and communication systems of…