Now Veterans Can Grade VA Facilities

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Listen To A VA Employee And A Veteran Break Down On The Phone Over Access To Care, the full story is here.

The plight of veterans when it comes to the Veterans Administration continues and no one is really taking any action to clean up the mess while vets actually die waiting for an appointment for medical services.

Some disabled veterans go hungry and can’t afford basic resources for themselves because the disability rating they have been given by the VA isn’t high enough for them. They have to seek assistance from somewhere like these Georgia VA disability lawyers to help them get the disability rating they deserve. Few veterans are treated with the respect they deserve but now there are new platforms to make things better for them.

Now a new ratings platform has been launched to help vets navigate and even grade each facility, a new tool that is desperately needed. The Secretary of the VA ignores reports and the Congress has worked diligently to install cures and solutions that the VA is loathe to accept.

Washington ~ Stars and Stripes: More than 35,000 veterans have had their health care delayed by a Department of Veterans Affairs computer program that automatically put them in limbo — many for years. Yet the VA says it lacks the authority to override the system.

According to documents leaked to the Huffington Post, the veterans — most of whom served in Iraq and Afghanistan — were erroneously put onto a “pending” list for failing to fill out a means test. But combat veterans are not required to fill out means tests to receive health care.

About 16,000 of the cases have been pending for more than five years, according to the Huffington Post. Under VA rules, combat veterans are eligible for five years of free health care after discharge, but the period begins the day of discharge. But VA spokeswoman Walinda West said combat veterans who are granted Veterans Health Administration benefits received them for life.

The VA has known about the problem since at least April, according to the Huffington Post. As of Wednesday, staffers were calling and mailing notices to affected veterans, telling them to fill out paperwork to agree to copays – which appears to duplicate paperwork they have already filled out — in order to enroll in the program.

VA website

New VAratings.com Healthcare Site Allows U.S. Veterans to Rate & Review VA Facilities Nationwide

Charleston, SC: VetFriends.com – the largest Website reuniting U.S. military veterans – has launched a nationwide online database of VA Hospitals with ratings and reviews at https://www.VAratings.com. The goal of the site is to allow veterans to share their experiences, rate their local VA hospitals and clinics and to help improve and provide awareness to Veterans Affairs facilities nationwide.

U.S. veterans and military personnel are the foundation of what has made America the symbol of freedom and opportunity that we enjoy today. The VetFriends.com Veteran Healthcare Resource Center is a free resource for all veterans and their families.

VAratings.com powered by VetFriends.com provides a free ratings/review system with a directory of all VA Hospitals, Outpatient Clinics, Veteran Centers, National Cemeteries and Intake Centers. The rating system consists of a 5 star rating process with questions about a veteran’s visit that deal with: Department, Ease of scheduling, Wait times, Treatment quality, Staff’s quality of care and more. A comment section is also available where veterans can add more information and others visitors can respond directly to posts.

VAratings.com was created to provide objective reviews of services provided by the VA from U.S. veterans and their families. It is important for veterans to know that their VA facility has the highest quality of care and expertise. VAratings.com is an ideal platform for information to be exchanged, questions asked and unbiased reviews are posted.

Each month a topic will be spotlighted in our awareness campaign featuring a specific health issue. The topic covered will coincide with the national awareness months such as Breast Cancer Awareness in October and American Diabetes Month in November. Additional resources include information on how veterans can obtain VA Benefits, along with a library of VA forms. Furthermore, health topics and articles address illnesses, new treatments and discoveries, along with healthy lifestyle tips plus a variety of others.

VetFriends.com offers additional services such as: search over 1,900,000 members to make contact with old service friends and relatives; information on how to obtain your own or a relative’s military records and medals; message boards; military veteran job boards; upload past and present photos; military jokes; search and post reunions, military pride merchandise and more.

VetFriends.com encourages all Companies, and all Americans to honor and support our U.S. veterans and active military of the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Coast Guard — All heroes of our nation.

Founded in 2000 by a U.S. military veteran, thousands of people have been reconnected through VetFriends.com, spanning from World War II through to Operation Desert Storm and the present. For further information and/or interview opportunities please contact VAratings.com at: (843) 606-2578(843) 606-2578

Obama’s Summer Reading List

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CBS reported: You can’t golf all day.

President Obama packed plenty to read for his two weeks vacationing with his family in Martha’s Vineyard.

Here are Obama’s six summer reads, a mix of critically acclaimed fiction and nonfiction, obtained first by ABC News:

  • All That Is, by James Salter
  • All The Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr
  • The Sixth Extinction, by Elizabeth Kolbert
  • The Lowland, by Jhumpa Lahiri
  • Between The World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates
  • Washington: A Life, by Ron Chernow

Let’s examine one of them:

Between the World and Me and reviewed by the Christian Science Monitor has some interesting facts and demonstrates volumes of envy, blame and plight.

In his 1978 biography of James Baldwin, Louis H. Pratt called the eminent 20th-century African-American writer a man “concerned with the destruction of the fantasies and delusions of a contented audience … determined to avoid reality.” Baldwin was born poor in New York City and personally knew racial intolerance. With regard to race, Pratt’s Baldwin was a “disturber of the peace” – one who revealed uncomfortable truths to a society mired in complacency. Thirty-five years later, Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison now invokes Baldwin’s legacy in praising Ta-Nehisi Coates’s powerful new memoir Between the World and Me: “I’ve been wondering who might fill the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died. Clearly it is Ta-Nehisi Coates.”

Coates, a national correspondent at The Atlantic, has, in “Between the World and Me,” crafted a highly provocative, thoughtfully presented, and beautifully written narrative concerning his own misgivings about the ongoing racial struggle in America. In this slender (176 pages) volume Coates is also, like Baldwin before him, set on revealing similar “uncomfortable truths” to 21st-century America. Coates’s prose is addressed to his 15-year-old son Samori. In the wake of all the recent tragedies involving black men and boys at the hands of police – Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri in particular – Coates says he cannot help but fear for Samori’s life.

Writing ruefully and with a hint of resignation, Coates writes to Samori about the way that “those who believe they are white” have been essentially “pilfering” the bodies of African Americans throughout the course of American history. In the wake of these many recent and lethal confrontations between law enforcement and black Americans, Coates expresses little hope that there will be meaningful change any time soon. The Rev. Clementa Pinckney, slain with eight parishioners in a church in Charleston, S. C.; the alleged “suicide” of Sandra Bland in Waller County, Texas; and the death of Samuel DuBose at the hands of a University of Cincinnati police officer, are all just more grist for what Coates sees as a mill of misery, mistrust, and hopelessness.

Coates refers to the greater white American population as “Dreamers” – living in a “Dream” festooned with sentimental mythology such as “perfect houses with nice lawns,” “ice cream socials,” “the Cub Scouts,” “block associations,” and “Memorial Day cookouts.” In Coates’s mind, this mythology has clouded any real appreciation or empathy for those for whom the “Dream” is unattainable. As Coates writes to his son, “even your relatively privileged security can never match a sustained assault launched in the name of the Dream.” In Coates’s telling, there are just too many who have become victims of it: Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, John Crawford, Jordan Davis, and Kajieme Powell, are just a few.

In one powerful passage, and in a direct appeal to those who would look away from the numerous black fatalities in recent years, Coates asserts: “America believes itself exceptional, the greatest and noblest nation ever to exist.… One cannot, at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error. I propose to take our countrymen’s claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard.”

Having grown up in West Baltimore, the son of William Paul Coates, a former Black Panther and Vietnam War veteran, Ta-Nehisi Coates (his hyphenated first name is the Egyptian translation for ancient Nubia, from which his family originated), was prodigious at reading and writing in his youth and subsequently attended Howard University – “The Mecca” – in Washington, D.C. As a teenager, Coates eagerly consumed the writings of historian and Howard professor Chancellor Williams, whose book, “Destruction of Black Civilization” became a revelation to him. This introduced Coates to the excesses of European colonialism and its disastrous effects in plundering the cultures and economies as well as the bodies of Africans and their countries.

Once at Howard, Coates was drawn to the vast African-American holdings of the Moorland Spingarn Research Center, where Coates’s father once worked. He would “draw out my pen, and one of my black-and-white composition books. I would open the books and read, while filling my composition books with notes on my reading, new vocabulary words, and sentences of my own invention.”

But while Coates was discovering himself, he also became disillusioned by the realization that those black thinkers and writers whose works he devoured at the library often were antagonistic to, and worked against, one another. The one intellectual Coates found close identity with at that time was Malcolm X.

“He was the first political pragmatist I knew, the first honest man I’d ever heard,” Coates writes. “He was unconcerned with making the people who believed they were white comfortable in their belief. If he was angry, he said so. If he hated, he hated because it was human for the enslaved to hate the enslaver, as natural as Prometheus for hating the birds.”

Coates then does a slow burn over another touchy subject – a quote attributed to the Nobel prize-winning writer Saul Bellow: “When the Zulus produce a Tolstoy, we will read him.” Coates found satisfaction in a quote by author Paul Wiley, who replied in kind, “Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus.… Unless you find a profit in fencing off universal properties of mankind into exclusive tribal ownership.” As a result, Coates, who admitted error in having originally accepted Bellow’s remark as valid, at last repudiated it as “racecraft,” where, in effect, racism becomes race.

“The Struggle,” as Coates wrote to Samori, named for Samori Toure, who fought against French colonizers in Guinea during the 19th century, often “escapes our grasp.” He quotes Harvard law professor Derrick Bell, who called blacks “faces at the bottom of the well.” But Coates optimistically adds “But there really is wisdom down here, and that wisdom accounts for much of the good in my life. And my life down here accounts for you.”

Coates emphasizes that although blacks in America have endured the hardships of slavery – having been relentlessly “carried off and divided up into policies and stocks” – he has taught his son to “respect every human being as singular,” though that respect must also extend into the past. He writes eloquently about how “You cannot forget how much they took from us and how they transfigured our very bodies into sugar, tobacco, cotton, and gold.”

One moving event Coates relates involves the day he took his young son to see the film “Howl’s Moving Castle” in Manhattan. While exiting the theater, Coates’s dawdling son was angrily pushed on an escalator by a white woman. Coates became enraged and responded accordingly. He expresses personal shame for his loss of temper, noticing to his horror that Samori was intensely frightened by his reaction. Coates was enraged that someone had “invoked their right over the body of my son,” but also expressed regret that in seeking to defend his son, he had actually “endangered” him.

Perhaps the most emotionally wrought episode in the book involves the death of a young man with whom Coates had studied at “The Mecca” – Prince C. Jones, Jr., who Coates learns was killed in an altercation with a Prince George’s County, Virginia policeman who happened to be black, and who had a dismal record in his tenure on the force. Hearing that the unarmed Jones was struck with five bullets (of 16 shots aimed at his Jeep), Coates felt a need to seek out Jones’s mother, about whom he wondered, “How did she live?” Coates found her on the outskirts of Philadelphia in an affluent gated community.

Dr. Mabel Jones made a pact with a friend as a young girl that she would become a doctor and escape the difficult childhood she had lived under her sharecropper father. She subsequently matriculated at Louisiana State University on full scholarship and later served in the Navy.

Earning her medical degree, she specialized in radiology (she said she knew no other black radiologists) and rose to the head of radiology of her hospital. She told Coates that Prince (who she called “Rocky” in tribute to her grandfather, who went by “Rock”), was part of that “one third” of Howard students who were “tired of having to represent.” They were the ones who managed to break away to the suburbs, only to find that they “carried the mark with them and could not escape” – being patronized as “parables of diversity.”

Coates can hardly believe Dr. Jones’s remarkable stoicism in telling him about the night her son died and her control in the face of his having been “plundered.” Driving back after their talk, Coates found himself thinking of his son, of the Dreamers, and of the importance of continuing to struggle. “I do not believe we can stop them, Samori, because they must ultimately stop themselves.… Hope for them. Pray for them, if you are so moved.” It is an appeal to empathy and understanding that has fallen on the deaf ears of so much of America throughout its history.

Coates finishes powerfully, expressing the urgent need of this understanding, together with corrective action, in one stirring passage: “The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves, to understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all.”

The message here is clear: Our national conscience must acknowledge, as difficult as that may be, that there remains a steel-hardened distance between black and white in this country, forged by past and present transgressions. But at the same time, there is the hope that it can be tempered by an appeal to an America that sees itself as “exceptional,” but has failed to extend that belief in exceptionalism to many of its citizens.

“Between the World and Me” follows other important writings by Coates, including his 2008 memoir “The Beautiful Struggle” and his 2014 Atlantic article, “The Case for Reparations.”

Much of what Coates writes may be difficult for a majority of Americans to process, but that’s the incisive wisdom of it. Read it, think about it, take a deep breath and read it again. The spirit of James Baldwin lives within its pages.

 

 

Cyber-attack on Power Grid Paralysis

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Cyber Attacks on the Power Grid: The Specter of Total Paralysis

Posted in General Security, Hacking, Incident Response on July 27, 2015

The Incidents

Imagine that one day you wake up and trading is halted on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) floor; meanwhile systems at United Airlines and the Wall Street Journal newspaper appear out of order.

It is not a scene from a movie; it happened on July 8, when trading at the NYSE stopped around 11:30 a.m. ET.

According the media, the temporary interruption of the services mentioned was a fateful coincidence and the events are unrelated, but the incidents have raised once again the question of the real security of critical infrastructure.

White House spokesperson Josh Earnest confirmed that the incidents weren’t caused by cyber-attacks. President Obama had briefed on the glitch at NYSE by White House counterterrorism and Homeland Security adviser Lisa Monaco as well as Chief Of Staff Denis McDonough.

“It appears from what we know at this stage that the malfunctions at United and at the stock exchange were not the result of any nefarious actor,” said Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson. “We know less about the Wall Street Journal at this point except that their system is back up again as is the United Airline system.”

Which is the impact of a cyber-attack on a critical infrastructure? Are critical infrastructure actually secure?

A major attack on a critical infrastructure like a power grid would cause chaos in the country by interrupting vital services for the population.

The current scenario

The Stock Exchange, transportation, and media are critical to the infrastructure of a country. A contemporary failure of these systems could cause serious problems to the nation, especially when the incident is caused by a cyber-attack.

“I think the Wall Street Journal piece is connected to people flooding their web site in response to the New York Exchange to find out what’s going on.” FBI Director James Comey told the Senate Intelligence committee. “In my business we don’t love coincidences, but it does appear that there is not a cyber-intrusion involved.”

Sen. Bill Nelson, D-FL, the top Democrat on the cyber-security subcommittee, told Fox News that the NYSE incident has “the appearance” of a cyber-attack and noted the coordination of multiple sites.

Thus far, the temporary outage at the New York Stock Exchange, United Airlines and the Wall Street Journal’s website were the results of tech glitches, but we have to consider the US infrastructure remains vulnerable to cyber-attacks that would cause serious problems and would be costly.

To compound the scenario, there is the rapid increase in the number of cyber-attacks, at least of those we fail to detect, and its complexity.

The DHS’s Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team (ICS-CERT) has issued its new ICS-CERT MONITOR report related to the period September 2014 – February 2015. The ICS-CERT MONITOR report

According to the report, the Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team (ICS-CERT) received and responded to 245 incidents in Fiscal Year 2014, more than half of the incidents reported by asset owners and industry partners involved sophisticated APT. ICS/SCADA system were also targeted by other categories of threat actors, including cyber criminals, insider threats and hacktivists.

“Of the total number of incidents reported to ICS-CERT, roughly 55 percent involved advanced persistent threats (APT) or sophisticated actors. Other actor types included hacktivists, insider threats, and criminals. In many cases, the threat actors were unknown due to a lack of attributional data.” states the report.

Analyzing incidents reported by sector, it is possible to note that the majority of the attacks involved entities in the Energy Sector followed by Critical Manufacturing. About 30 percent of the incidents hit infrastructures in the energy sector, meanwhile Critical Manufacturing (i.e. manufacturing of vehicles and aviation and aerospace components) accounted for 27 percent.

The threat actors used a significant number of zero-day vulnerabilities to compromise industrial control systems through the exploitation of web application flaws.

The most common flaws exploited by attackers include authentication, buffer overflow, and denial-of-service . Noteworthy among ICS-CERT’s activities included the multi-vendor coordination that was conducted for the ”

“Noteworthy among ICS-CERT’s activities included the multi-vendor coordination that was conducted for the “Heartbleed” OpenSSL vulnerability. The team worked with the ICS vendor community to release multiple advisories, in addition to conducting briefings and webinars in an effort to raise awareness of the vulnerability and the mitigation strategies for preventing exploitation” states the ICS-CERT report to explain the coordination activities sustained by the agency to address principal vulnerabilities.

The ICS-CERT MONITOR report confirmed that the attackers used a vast range of methods for attempting to compromise control systems infrastructure, including:

Figure 1 – ICS -CERT Attack Methods

Unfortunately, it is quite difficult to attribute an incident to a specific threat actor. In the majority of cases, these offensives have gone under the radar over the years due to high level of sophistication of the Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs).

The victims were not able to identify the threat actors. Neither the attack vector exploited by hackers for 38 percent of the reported incidents,

“Many more incidents occur in critical infrastructure that go unreported,” states the ICS-CERT MONITOR report. “Forensic evidence did not point to a method used for intrusion because of a lack of detection and monitoring capabilities within the compromised network”.

US power grid vulnerable to cyber attacks

The US power grid is a privileged target for various categories of attackers, terrorists, cyber criminals, and state-sponsored hackers. Daily, they threaten the backbone of the American society. Security experts and US politicians are aware that the national power grid is vulnerable to a terrorist attack.

“It’s possible; and whether it’s likely to happen soon remains to be seen,” explained by the former Secretary of Defense William Cohen“ on “The Steve Malzberg Show.”

Attackers have several options to hit a power grid, from a cyber-attack on SCADA systems to an EMP attack, according to Cohen.

“You can do it through cyber-attacks, and that’s the real threat coming up as well. We have to look at cyber-attacks being able to shut down our power grid, which you have to remember is in the private sector’s hands, not the government’s. And we’re vulnerable,” Cohen added. “It’s possible and whether it’s likely to happen soon remains to be seen.”

“That’s because the technology continues to expand and terrorism has become democratized. Many, many people across the globe now have access to information that allows them to be able to put together a very destructive means of carrying out their terrorist plans. We’re better at detecting than we were in the past. We’re much more focused in integrating and sharing the information that we have, but we’re still vulnerable and we’ll continue to be vulnerable as long as groups can operate either on the margins or covertly to build these kind of campaigns of terror.” said Cohen.

Former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano shared Cohen’s concerns. A major cyber-attack the power grid was a matter of “when,” not “if.”

State-sponsored hackers, cyber terrorists are the main threat actors, but as confirmed by a recent research conducted by TrendMicro, also the cybercrime represents a serious menace.

Former senior CIA analyst and EMP Task Force On National Homeland Security Director, Dr. Peter Vincent Pry, told Newsmax TV that that a cyber attack against the power grid could cause serious destruction and loss of life.

Not only US power grid are under attack. In January 2015, the British Parliament revealed that UK Power Grid is under cyber-attack from foreign hackers, but the emergency is for critical infrastructure worldwide.\

Figure 2 – SCADA control room

Arbuthnot confirmed the incessant attacks on national critical infrastructure and he doesn’t exclude a major incident, despite the enormous effort spent at the National Grid.

“Our National Grid is coming under cyber-attack not just day-by-day but minute-by-minute,” Arbuthnot, whose committee scrutinized the country’s security policy, told a conference in London last year. “There are, at National Grid, people of very high quality who recognize the risks that these attacks pose, and who are fighting them off,” he said, “but we can’t expect them to win forever.”

The power grid is a vital system for our society and the cyber strategy of every government must consider its protection a high priority, a terror attack would leave entire countries sitting in the dark.

A hypothetical attack scenario and estimation of the losses

What will happen in case of a cyber-attack on a critical infrastructure in the US? Which is the economic impact of a cyber-attack against a power grid?

According to a poll conducted by researchers at the Morning Consult firm from May 29 to May 31, cyber-attacks are just behind terrorism attacks on the list of biggest threats to US. The research allowed the experts to estimate that the insurance industry could face losses of about $21 billion. That poll was conducted by interviewing a national sample of 2,173 registered voters.

Nearly 36 percent of voters consider acts of terrorism at the top of a list of major security threats, followed by cyber-attacks at 32 percent.

Figure 3- Morning Consult firm poll results

The Lloyd’s of London has conducted a very interesting study, Business Blackout, that describes the impacts of a cyber-attack on the national power grid.

It is the first time that the insurance industry has elaborated on a similar report. Obviously, the estimates provided are merely indicative due to the large number of factors that can influence the costs.

According to the report prepared by Lloyd’s of London in a joint effort with the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Risk Studies, cyber-attacks would have a catastrophic impact on multiple types of insurance.

The attack scenario described by Business Blackout illustrates the effects of a malware-based attack on systems that controls the national power grid. The attack causes an electrical blackout that plunges 15 US states and principal cities, including New York City and Washington DC, into darkness. Nearly 93 million people will remain without power in the scenario hypothesized by the study.

The attackers spread the ‘Erebos’ Trojan through the network with the effect of compromising the electricity generation control rooms in several locations in the Northeastern United States.

According to the researchers, the attack will cause health and safety systems to fail, disrupting water supplies as electric pumps fail. The chaos will reign causing the failure of main services, including transportation. The malware is able to infect the Internet and search and compromise 50 generators that it will destroy, causing prolonged outages in the region.

The total of claims paid by the insurance industry has been estimated to be included in the interval comprised between $21.4b and $71.1b, depending on the evolution of the scenarios designed by the researchers.

The researchers involved in the simulation have calculated the economic losses could range from $243 million to $1 trillion, depending on the number of components in the power grid compromised by the attack.

“Economic impacts include direct damage to assets and infrastructure, decline in sales revenue to electricity supply companies, loss of sales revenue to business and disruption to the supply chain. The total impact to the US economy is estimated at $243bn, rising to more than $1trn in the most extreme version of the scenario.” states the report.

The experts analyzed the historical outages, estimating that currently the power interruptions, most of which last five minutes or less, already cost the US about $96 billion. The cost related to a prolonged outage is likely to be included in the range of $36 billion to $156 billion. The Commercial and industrial sectors are the sectors most impacted by the attack on the power grid due to their dependency on the electricity supply.

“Evidence from historical outages and indicative modelling suggests that power interruptions already cost the US economy roughly $96bn8 annually.9 However, uncertainty and sensitivity analysis suggest this figure may range from $36b to $156b.” continues the report. “Currently over 95% of outage costs are borne by the commercial and industrial sectors due to the high dependence on electricity as an input factor of production.”

As explained in the report, it is important to identify the risks related to a possible cyber-attack and adopt all the necessary measures to mitigate them. The protection of critical infrastructure like a power grid is an essential part of the cyber strategy of any Government.

Russia Propaganda at Work Blaming MH17 on U.S.

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Not all propaganda is created equal. For every piece of elegantly crafted misinformation meant to sway hearts and minds, there is spin so poorly produced that it borders on the absurd. Case in point, a comically bad audio recording released by the Russian tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda on Wednesday of two alleged CIA agents conspiring to bring down Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, which crashed in eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014.

Complete with stilted greetings and cumbersome dialogue that sounds like both men are reading from a script, the recording opens with a series of conversations between the two alleged spies, identified as David Hamilton and David L. Stern. Throughout the recording, they discuss “preparations” for an operation that involves shooting down a plane with a surface-to-air missile and an eventual Plan B, which involves placing a bomb inside the plane — all for the purpose of staging a crash to discredit Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine and the Kremlin itself.

But you don’t have to listen long to question the recording’s authenticity. The men’s accents are curious to say the least. One sounds British for half the recording until he switches to a more American accent. The other man does his best to hide his Russian accent, but it pops up at the beginning as he clumsily asks his co-conspirator, “How are the preparations?” But the most glaring hole is in the conversation itself. The men do not talk with each other like native English speakers and use turns of phrase that sound as if their dialogue was translated to English from Russian via Google Translate. Before signing off, the two say “Luck!” to each other, a common farewell in Russian.

The entire released recording can be heard below.

 

Conspiracy theories and propaganda of this magnitude are hardly new when it comes to the downing of MH17, which killed all 298 people on board. Immediately following the crash in July 2014, Ukraine and the West accused pro-Russia separatists of shooting down the plane with a Buk surface-to-air missile, which they say was likely supplied by Moscow.

Initially, Russian officials said the passenger plane was shot down by a Ukrainian Su-25 fighter jet. On July 21, 2014, Russia’s Defense Ministry hosted a press conference and presented radar data that allegedly showed another aircraft near MH17 before it was shot down. The Russian Union of Engineers said wreckage indicated the plane was destroyed by heat-seeking air-to-air missiles. Russian media then gave heavy attention to a man claiming to be a Spanish air traffic controller in Kiev who said that two Ukrainian fighter jets had followed the airliner. After the Spanish controller was discredited, the Kremlin switched to a new theory — that the plane was hit by a missile launched from Ukrainian territory and fired by troops loyal to Kiev.

The latest theory coming out of the Russian media, and supposedly reinforced by the new recording, is that a bomb was detonated within the airliner and planted by Western agents. “It really doesn’t make any sense,” Eliot Higgins, the founder of Bellingcat, an open source investigative journalism network, told Foreign Policy. Higgins and his team at Bellingcat have been debunking Russian theories around MH17 for over a year using open source information — geolocating social media posts and videos and using satellite imagery to trace the movements of the Buk missile launcher seen in the area before and after the plane was shot down. Based on Bellingcat’s research, Higgins believes that MH17 was most likely shot down by a Buk missile fired by Russia-backed separatists. “No other scenario has the same degree of evidence.”

Still, the case is far from closed on MH17. The Joint Investigation Team, which comprises representatives from several countries, and the Dutch Safety Board are working on separate investigations into what downed the passenger plane. Dutch investigators said Tuesday that fragments of a suspected Russian missile system were found at the crash site in Ukraine. In a joint statement following the new evidence, the JIT and Dutch Safety Board cautiously said that “the parts are of particular interest to the criminal investigation as they can possibly provide more information about who was involved in the crash of MH17.”

A report by the Dutch Safety Board into the cause of the crash is expected by the end of October, while the separate international criminal investigation is likely to take several more months to complete.

On July 29, Russia vetoed a United Nations Security Council draft resolution — introduced by Malaysia — that would have set up an international tribunal to prosecute those suspected of downing the passenger plane. Moscow said the measure was a biased and politically motivated propaganda move to implicate the Kremlin or the Russia-backed Ukrainian separatists.

America has Been Latinized

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Census: Record 42.1 million immigrants in U.S., Mexicans drive latest surge

by Paul Bedard

A new analysis of legal and illegal immigrant counts by the Census Bureau revealed Thursday that there is a record 42.1 million in the United States, an explosion that is being driven by Mexicans flooding across the border.

In a report provided to Secrets by the Center for Immigration Studies, the total immigrant population surged 1.7 million since 2014. The growth was led in the last year by an additional 740,000 Mexican immigrants.

The 42.1 million tabulated by Census in the second quarter represent over 13 percent of the U.S. population, the biggest percentage in 105 years.

What’s more, the numbers of immigrants coming and going from the U.S. is actually higher since many return home every years, said the report. “For the immigrant population to increase by one million means that significantly more than one million new immigrants must enter the country because some immigrants already here return to their homeland each year and natural mortality totals 250,000 annually,” said the Center.

The stunning growth is sure to pour fuel on the already white-hot immigration debate in Congress and on the presidential campaign trail.

“Illegal immigration came up in the presidential debates, but there has been little discussion of the level of immigration; this at a time when total immigration is surging according to the latest data,” said Steven Camarota, co-author of the report and the Center for Immigration’s director of research.

“The rapid growth in the immigrant population was foreseeable given the cutbacks in enforcement, our expansive legal immigration system, and the improvement in the economy. But the question remains, is it in the nation’s interest?” he added.

Some key findings in the new report:

• The nation’s immigrant or foreign-born population, which includes legal and illegal immigrants, grew by 4.1 million from the second quarter of 2011 to the second quarter of 2015 — 1.7 million in just the last year.

• Growth in the last year was led by a rebound in the number of Mexican immigrants, which increased by 740,000 from 2014 to 2015 — accounting for 44 percent of the increase in the total immigrant population in the last year.

• The total Mexican immigrant population (legal and illegal) reached 12.1 million in the second quarter of 2015 — the highest quarterly total ever.

• The Department of Homeland Security and other researchers have estimated that eight in 10 illegal immigrants are from Mexico and Latin America, so the increase in immigrants from these countries is an indication that illegal immigration has begun growing again.

Much of the new immigration is due to the explosion of green cards and the flood of younger Latin Americans leaving troubled situations back home.

Many companies, meanwhile are taking advantage of the immigrants and replacing higher paid Americans with cheaper immigrant labor, even in skilled jobs.

Polls, meanwhile, show that the public wants action to stop the surge of illegal immigrants, an issue picked up by some of the Republicans running for president such as Sen. Ted Cruz and Donald Trump.

Additional numbers assessments and trends:

When it comes to the U.S. population, the “mainstream” is shifting from white to multicultural. In 1980, the U.S. was 80% white/non-multicultural. By 2012, that proportion had decreased to 64%. And in the years to come, the multicultural, non-white population will account for larger and larger percentages of the population.

Multicultural America is becoming more Latino. Hispanics, African-Americans, and Asians represented just 20% of the population in 1980. By 2012, that percentage nearly doubled to 36%. Over that more than twenty year period, Hispanics have grown to represent a much larger proportion of the multicultural population. They were 32% of the multicultural segment in 1980 — and grew to 47% in 2012.

By 2050, there will be as many young Latinos in the U.S. as white non-Hispanics. Unlike waves of past immigrants, Hispanics will grow to be equal in size to the host population. In 1980, non-Hispanic whites were 74% of the under-18 population and Hispanics were 9%. By 2050, the two groups will be even, with both projected to represent 36% of the population under 18.

Already, Hispanics are the engine of growth for the 18-34 demographic. From 2015 to 2020, Hispanics 18-34 are projected to increase by over 1.8 million. Over that same period for that age group, non-Hispanic whites will decrease in size by nearly 1.3 million. Blacks and Asians will also grow – but on a much smaller scale (by 84,000 and 267,000, respectively).

The youth population is very Latino. Today, Hispanics represent more than 1 in 5 people under 35. And that proportion rises when it comes to the very young: Latinos account for almost 1 in 4 births in the U.S.

Growth fueled by the second generation. Hispanic population increases are expected to come from immigration and births in the US — but the majority will come from US births. The Census projects that from 2012 to 2050, the US-born Hispanic population will increase at 5 times the rate of foreign-born Hispanics. And while today the US-born group is about 65% larger than foreign-born, in 2050 there will be nearly 4 times more US-born Hispanics than foreign-born.

The second generation is already taking over the 18-34 demographic – and the pace is only going to pick up. Hispanics 18-24 skew heavily US-born, while more than half of 25-29s and 30-34s are foreign-born. By 2020, 85% of 18-24s and 61% of 25-29s will be US-born (and 30-34s will still be more foreign-born (55%).

A mega wave of second-generation Latinos is heading into the key advertiser demos. More than 90% of Hispanic kids under 11 were born in the US – and 6 million of them are second generation. As they get older, they will shape the market in new ways. Every year, nearly 550,000 second-generation Latinos are entering the teen demographic.