UK - The Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre (DCDC) has worked in partnership with the German Bundeswehr Office for Defence Planning to understand the future implications of human augmentation (HA), setting the foundation for more detailed Defence research and development. There are mature technologies that could be integrated today with manageable policy considerations, such as personalised nutrition, wearables and exoskeletons. There are other technologies in the future with promises of bigger potential such as genetic engineering and brain-computer interfaces. HA will become increasingly relevant in the future because it is the binding agent between the unique skills of humans and machines. The winners of future wars will not be those with the most advanced technology, but those who can most effectively integrate the unique skills of both human and machine. The growing significance of human-machine teaming is already widely acknowledged but this has so far been discussed from a technology-centric perspective. This HA project represents the missing part of the puzzle.

USA - A crack in a bridge over the Mississippi River has stranded more than 700 barges, cutting off the biggest route for US agricultural exports when the critical waterway is at its busiest. The route is shut near Memphis while the Tennessee Department of Transportation inspects a large crack in a highway bridge spanning the river, according to the US Coast Guard. A queue has expanded to 47 vessels and 771 barges, with 430 of those heading north and the rest going south, Petty Officer Carlos Galarza of the Coast Guard’s 8th District said Thursday afternoon by email. The Mississippi River is the main artery for US crop exports, with covered barges full of grain and soy floating to terminals along the Gulf of Mexico, while crude oil as well as imported steel also travel through sections of the waterway. Any sustained outage would disrupt shipments out of the Gulf. Corn futures tumbled by the most allowed under CME Group rules partly on speculation that exports would back up.

USA - President Biden spoke today with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He condemned the rocket attacks by Hamas and other terrorist groups, including against Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. He conveyed his unwavering support for Israel’s security and for Israel’s legitimate right to defend itself and its people, while protecting civilians. He also conveyed the United States’ encouragement of a pathway toward restoring a sustainable calm. He shared his conviction that Jerusalem, a city of such importance to people of faith from around the world, must be a place of peace. He updated the Prime Minister on the United States’ diplomatic engagement with regional countries, including Egypt, Jordan, and Qatar, as well as with Palestinian officials. The two leaders agreed to maintain the close consultation between their teams, which has included consistent engagement by their respective foreign ministers, defense ministers, chiefs of defense, and national security advisors, and to stay in touch personally in the days ahead.

CHINA - The editor of China's hawkish Communist Party newspaper has insisted the United States "will be defeated" if it engages in combat with the nation in its adjacent waters. Hu Xijin, Global Times editor-in-chief, called for more expansion of China's military in order to counter Washington's strategy of containment and force a change in attitude among key US partners. Wednesday's editorial came a day after Tokyo began hosting US, French and Australian troops for the first such joint military exercises on Japanese soil. The drills will last through next Monday, when their respective navies will train in the East China Sea. "The purpose of the exercise is to pressure China and send a signal that the US and Japan could bring more allies together to contain China," Hu wrote, adding that he felt the administration of President Joe Biden has been testing China's response to the multilateral defense strategy.

USA - It's the size of a dust mite. Electronics are getting imperceptibly small, opening new avenues for medical technology to place advanced monitoring and treatment devices inside our bodies. And Columbia University engineers just demonstrated a new and revolutionary version of this, creating the world's smallest single-chip system ever developed, according to a recent study published in the journal Science Advances.

GERMANY - The German government is seizing on the struggle against the Covid-19 pandemic to help German biotech companies become world champions in the mRNA future technology. BioNTech, located in Mainz, is the main beneficiary. Under pressure from Berlin, and against resistance from Paris, the company has been given a de facto monopoly for supplying the EU in the future, while a French competitor was left out in the cold. Because the BioNTech vaccine is several times more expensive than those of other companies, poorer EU-member states in East and Southeast Europe must now pay huge sums to the German company. Whereas other companies are supplying vaccines at their cost prices during the acute phase of the pandemic, BioNTech has made a net profit of €1.13 billion during the first quarter of 2021 alone. It is now using this profit to expand - aided by the fact that Berlin is blocking vaccine patent waivers. With the rise of BioNTech, Germany can hope to achieve a leading position as a biotech center. It is suggested that Germany is already "one of the world's centers of gravity" for mRNA technology.

USA - Our enemies now understand that you can completely paralyze America by taking out just a handful of pipelines. Even though all of us knew that any gasoline shortages were just going to be temporary, the shut down of the Colonial Pipeline caused a frenzied wave of “panic buying” all along the east coast. But if something caused the gasoline to stop flowing for a longer period of time, not being able to fill up our vehicles would be among the least of our problems.

ISRAEL - “The Latest” is an Associated Press feature which provides the day’s collection of brief updates about a large, developing event. Today’s “The Latest: Israeli Aircraft Strike Another Building in Gaza” is a collection of all that is wrong with the news agency’s coverage of Hamas attacks on Israel, and Israel’s retaliatory airstrikes. The roundup begins with five paragraphs on the Israeli airstrike overnight on a nine-storey building in Gaza City. While it notes that the building “houses residential apartments, medical production companies and a dental clinic,” it omits the fact that the army identified it as the location of a Hamas control center, which is the reason why Israel hit that particular building.

Newly discovered Wi-Fi security vulnerabilities collectively known as FragAttacks (fragmentation and aggregation attacks) are impacting all Wi-Fi devices (including computers, smartphones, and smart devices) going back as far as 1997. Three of these bugs are Wi-Fi 802.11 standard design flaws in the frame aggregation and frame fragmentation functionalities affecting most devices, while others are programing mistakes in Wi-Fi products. Attackers abusing these design and implementation flaws have to be in the Wi-Fi range of targeted devices to steal sensitive user data and execute malicious code following successful exploitation, potentially leading to full device takeover.

WALES - Legislation will be introduced to protect LGBT+ people in Wales and England from being subjected to conversion therapy. According to information released by the UK Government, many of the practices are already banned under current laws but the new steps will ensure it is stamped out "once and for all". Conversion therapy - also sometimes described as gay cure therapy - tries to change someone's sexuality or gender identity. The UK's women and equalities minister Liz Truss said ministers want to end the "coercive and abhorrent" practice. New funding will also be introduced to support victims of conversion therapy and proper support is believed to come into play this summer. Despite a promise to ban conversion therapy by Theresa May's government in 2018, it has not been put into law. "As a global leader on LGBT rights, this government has always been committed to stamping out the practice of conversion therapy", Liz Truss said.

USA - Colonial Pipeline Co paid nearly $5 million to Eastern European hackers on Friday, contradicting reports earlier this week that the company had no intention of paying an extortion fee to help restore the country’s largest fuel pipeline, according to two people familiar with the transaction. The company paid the hefty ransom in difficult-to-trace cryptocurrency within hours after the attack, underscoring the immense pressure faced by the Georgia-based operator to get gasoline and jet fuel flowing again to major cities along the Eastern Seaboard, those people said. A third person familiar with the situation said US government officials are aware that Colonial made the payment. Once they received the payment, the hackers provided the operator with a decrypting tool to restore its disabled computer network. The tool was so slow that the company continued using its own backups to help restore the system, one of the people familiar with the company’s efforts said.

USA - Did you react calmly when you learned that a cyberattack against one of our most important pipelines was causing thousands of gas stations to run out of gasoline? Sadly, lots of Americans didn’t. There was yelling, there was screaming, there was lots of hoarding, vehicles were waiting in line for hours at stations that still had gas, and there were reports that brawls were even breaking out between frustrated motorists. Even though we knew that the shortages were just going to be temporary, people were “panic buying” gasoline as if the apocalypse had arrived. In fact, one energy expert said that this was “the worst panic buying for gasoline since the Carter Administration”…

USA - More than 120 retired US military leaders have signed an open letter appearing to advance a false conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was rigged and questioning President Joe Biden's mental capacity to serve. "Without fair and honest elections that accurately reflect the 'will of the people' our Constitutional Republic is lost," said the letter released Tuesday by "Flag Officers 4 America," and signed by 124 former admirals and generals. "The FBI and Supreme Court must act swiftly when election irregularities are surfaced and not ignore them as was done in 2020." On its website, Flag Officers 4 America says it is a collection of "retired military leaders who pledged to support and defend the Constitution of the US against all enemies, foreign and domestic." In the letter, the signatories, many of whom have been out of active service for decades, also addressed concerns over Biden's health. "The mental and physical condition of the Commander in Chief cannot be ignored. He must be able to quickly make accurate national security decisions involving life and limb anywhere, day or night," the letter said.

USA - Gasoline stations and terminals from Florida to New Jersey are running dry as shortages worsen five days into the shutdown of the biggest US fuel pipeline. As the Colonial Pipeline system - hit by a cyberattack and forced to shut on May 7 - struggles to recover, fuel terminals are being drained. In parts of the US South, three in every four gas stations have run dry, while in Washington, DC, cars are lined up for blocks as they wait to fill up. US pump prices have topped $3 a gallon for the first time in six years. “The situation completely changed overnight,” said Gary Kandola, chief financial officer at Express Fuel Distributors Corp, which supplies gas stations in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. “They have people coming in from Virginia, Maryland” to acquire fuel.

USA - For decades, the global elite hid their plans behind environmental extremists, but now they have fully revealed themselves as being the master architects from the very beginning. The World Bank, IMF and Bank for International Settlements are in a coordinated tryst to reform the planet. ⁃ TN Editor