A speech by the Russian Defense Minister promising to modernize his army caused a firestorm in the Western media – which accused Russia of developing mind control weapons that turn people into zombies. The truth is more complex, but no less scary.
“The development of weaponry based on new physics principles – direct-energy weapons, geophysical weapons, wave-energy weapons, genetic weapons, psychotronic weapons, and so on – is part of the state arms procurement program until 2020,” Minister Anatoliy Serdyukov reported to President-in-waiting Vladimir Putin during their latest meeting.
Some media focused on “psychotronic” weapons – wonder devices that use energy waves to control enemy behavior, effectively turning him into a “zombie.” Several papers went on to speculate that these would be used internally against political “dissidents.”
While rumors of Soviet, then Russian psychotronic weapons have surfaced repeatedly for decades, not one has been able to produce a working psychotronic gun, or even explain what mystery rays would allow its owner to control other people’s brains.
When the Internet was created, decades ago, one thing was inevitable: the war today over how (or whether) to control it, and who should have that power. Battle lines have been drawn between repressive regimes and Western democracies, corporations and customers, hackers and law enforcement. Looking toward a year-end negotiation in Dubai, where 193 nations will gather to revise a U.N. treaty concerning the Internet, Michael Joseph Gross lays out the stakes in a conflict that could split the virtual world as we know it.
TWO FUTURES? Privacy, piracy, security, sovereignty—the divisions on these issues reflect an even deeper split between those who want tight control and those who want unfettered freedom.
Thanks to billionaire’s legal battle, we now know a lot more about how the super-rich work
With his long limbs and delicate gait, Lord Mandelson could no doubt manage a quite convincing turn in Thunderbirds.
He’d find Jeff Tracy most convivial: a billionaire astronaut with his own Pacific island, and now, it seems, he even has his own camera-shy friend to pull the strings.
According to the High Court, Nathaniel Rothschild, scion of the banking dynasty and friend of seemingly everyone in the spheres of finance, business and politics, is indeed “puppet master” to the Baron of Hartlepool and Foy.
The banker and Bullingdon boy has lost his libel case against the Daily Mail, which he sued for “substantial damages” over its account of his and Mr Mandelson’s extraordinary trip to Russia in January 2005.
Mr Rothschild claimed he was subjected to “sustained and unjustified” attacks in the May 2010 article, which portrayed him as a “puppet master”, dangling his friend Lord Mandelson in front of the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska to ease the passage of colossal business deals.
Messrs Rothschild and Mandelson’s Russian trip would certainly have made entertaining viewing, but maybe not for Thunderbirds fans. Nobody needed rescuing, that’s for certain.
Her name is Lana Sator and she snuck into one of NPO Energomash factories outside of Moscow. Her photos are amazing, like sets straight out of Star Wars or Alien. Now the Russian government is harassing her.
Russian Protesters Film UFO over Moscow
