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Operational Fires Program Kicks Off Phase 3, Highlights Progress Toward Maturing Novel Technologies

Phase 3 of DARPA’s Operational Fires (OpFires) program began in earnest this month with government and contractor staff finalizing the system architecture approach, including a plan to use existing components from ground-launched missile systems, along with new booster technologies designed to support future hypersonic weapons. Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control is leading the integration effort for the third phase of the program, which will focus on first stage booster design and maturation, launcher development, and vehicle integration.

Broad participation from the Army’s Combat Capabilities Development Command, range safety offices, and performers from OpFires Phase 2 propulsion teams contributed to success in the early, critical stages of the program. Since 2018, OpFires has made impressive strides developing and demonstrating advanced booster technologies that had never been used in prior systems. Phase 1 and 2 performers Aerojet Rocketdyne, Exquadrum, and Sierra Nevada Corporation continue work towards throttle-able upper stage rocket motors suitable for tactical transport, storage, and engagement.

“The objective of DARPA’s OpFires program is to deliver an intermediate-range surface-to-surface missile in line with the Department of Defense’s push to field hypersonic platforms,” said MAJ Amber Walker (USA), the DARPA program manager for OpFires.

Inside the secret Hong Kong group tracking protests, the police, and coronavirus

The synchronized footage, published online in January, was assembled by a mostly anonymous online group of sleuths called Osint HK, which has been keeping tabs on protesters and journalists’ often-violent encounters with police during the more than eight months of Hong Kong’s near-daily anti-government, pro-democracy protests. Osint HK has spent hours each day scouring social networks for videos and other media to document police misconduct across Hong Kong.

The protests are still happening, but they’ve slowed due to fears over the coronavirus, which has been spreading from China across the globe. So Osint HK more recently has begun focusing its efforts on educating the public about the virus.

“People are confused, and they don’t know where to turn,” says Trey Menefee, the founder and public face of Osint HK. “We are trying to be a trusted source of information, cutting through the fog to find out what did or didn’t happen.”

Regeneron partners with US government to develop coronavirus treatment

Regeneron will work with the U.S. government to develop antibody treatments for the new coronavirus from China, disclosing Tuesday an expansion of a partnership that previously yielded an experimental drug cocktail for the Ebola virus.

The Tarrytown, New York-based biotech is one of roughly a dozen drugmakers now working on treatments for the coronavirus that emerged late last year in Wuhan, China. Most are smaller companies unlikely to possess sufficient funds to run large-scale tests, although Johnson & Johnson and Gilead have announced initial efforts in recent weeks.


The biotech hopes to replicate its past success in quickly advancing a treatment for Ebola. But, as that experience showed, proving a new antiviral isn’t easy.

Survivors From The MK Ultra Program Come Together To Sue The Federal Government

According to this CTV News article, survivors and families of an MK Ultra brainwashing program run by Dr. Ewen Cameron at McGill University in Montreal in the 1950s and 1960s have banded together to bring the horrors of this program more fully into the public eye.

They are planning a class action lawsuit against the provincial and federal government, an initiative which lawyer Alan Stein feels optimistic about:

“I believe we can claim moral damages as a result of the experiments when Dr. Cameron used these people as guinea pigs.”—lawyer Alan Stein

Eric Schmidt: I Used to Run Google. Silicon Valley Could Lose to China

But in recent years, Americans — Silicon Valley leaders included — have put too much faith in the private sector to ensure U.S. global leadership in new technology. Now we are in a technology competition with China that has profound ramifications for our economy and defense — a reality I have come to appreciate as chairman of two government panels on innovation and national security. The government needs to get back in the game in a serious way.


We can’t win the technology wars without the federal government’s help.

Asia’s economies must learn to accommodate rise of robots

While robotics and automation create a plethora of opportunities for skilled labor, they substitute many jobs of unskilled labor. Philips’ automated shaver factory in the Netherlands employs one-tenth of the workforce of its factory in China that makes the same shavers. Such developments accentuate inequality and pose severe social pressure in developed countries, which would need to be addressed by government in the years to come.


Technology can complement humans but it can also eliminate their jobs.

Lilac Nachum

Russia’s AI Quest is State-Driven — Even More than China’s. Can It Work?

Handicaps: weak private sector, Soviet-style bureaucracy. Helps: Great STEM education — and history.

More than Western governments and even more than China’s, the Russian government is trying to position itself as a facilitator of innovation in artificial intelligence, the technology that Vladimir Putin said will lead whoever masters it to global advantage. Russia seeks “to go our own way,” said Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, borrowing Lenin’s 1917 words about various anti-capitalist ideologies to describe his government’s 21st-century attempt to shake the world.

Those who doubt that this uniquely state-heavy approach can succeed would do well to remember that today’s internet and mobile telecommunications grew out of Pentagon-funded research, that the Soviet Union led the Space Race for a decade, and that U.S. astronauts currently ascend to orbit atop Russian rockets.

Drones and self-driving robots used to fight coronavirus in China

China is deploying robots and drones to remotely disinfect hospitals, deliver food and enforce quarantine restrictions as part of the effort to fight coronavirus.

Chinese state media has reported that drones and robots are being used by the government to cut the risk of person-to-person transmission of the disease.

There are 780 million people that are on some form of residential lockdown in China. Wuhan, the city where the viral outbreak began, has been sealed off from the outside world for weeks.

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