The Army's new chief of staff, Gen. Mark Milley, is taking a calculated approach to arguably the most consequential decision of his early tenure — whether to recommend that any all-male combat roles remain closed to women.
Central to his thinking, he said in an Associated Press interview Friday, is the question of whether allowing women to serve in the infantry, armor and other traditionally male-only fields would affect Army "readiness" for war.
New Army chief ponders momentous decision on women in combat
Benjamin Netanyahu Wanted To Bomb Iran in 2011
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-Defense Minister Ehud Barak both wanted to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities in 2010 and 2011, but other Israeli leaders blocked the move, Barak said.
The retired Labor politician, who was prime minister from 1999 to 2001, revealed the formerly classified information in recordings that aired on Israel’s Channel 2 Friday night, the Times of Israel reported.
Barak attempted to prevent the broadcast of the recordings, which are apparently related to a forthcoming biography of him, but Israel’s military censors approved their release.
Migrants crisis: Up to 3,000 people being rescued near Libya coast
Italy's coastguard says a major operation is under way to rescue up to 3,000 migrants off the coast of Libya.
The coastguard received SOS calls from 18 vessels - four boats and 14 rubber dinghies, Italy's state news agency Ansa said.
Seven boats are involved in the rescue, having already helped many others in trouble this weekend. The route from Libya to Italy is one of the busiest for migrants trying to enter Europe.
How banks hid billions in trades from US regulators
This spring, traders and analysts working deep in the global swaps markets began picking up peculiar readings: Hundreds of billions of dollars of trades by U.S. banks had seemingly vanished.
“We saw strange things in the data,” said Chris Barnes, a former swaps trader now with ClarusFT, a London-based data firm.
The vanishing of the trades was little noted outside a circle of specialists. But the implications were big. The missing transactions reflected an effort by some of the largest U.S. banks — including Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley — to get around new regulations on derivatives enacted in the wake of the financial crisis, say current and former financial regulators.
The Game-Changing Iran Report That Bibi Fears
Israel’s military intelligence corps has given Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a surprising report assessing the opportunities and threats that the Iran nuclear deal poses for Israel.
What’s startling about the report is not its substance, which is mostly a predictable mix of standard arguments presented for and against the deal: No nukes for 10 years, which gives Israel time to develop new countermeasures, but then a quick path to a nuke after a decade; an accelerated regional arms race, plus new legitimacy for pariah Iran, but also (surprisingly) a reduced likelihood of Iran attacking Israel. The upsides aren’t perfect. The downsides aren’t unmanageable.
Noam Chomsky: Why America Is the Gravest Threat to World Peace
Throughout the world there is great relief and optimism about the nuclear deal reached in Vienna between Iran and the P5+1 nations, the five veto-holding members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany.
Most of the world apparently shares the assessment of the U.S. Arms Control Association that “the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action establishes a strong and effective formula for blocking all of the pathways by which Iran could acquire material for nuclear weapons for more than a generation and a verification system to promptly detect and deter possible efforts by Iran to covertly pursue nuclear weapons that will last indefinitely.”
Feeling the heat: Earth in July was hottest month on record
Federal officials say July was Earth’s hottest month on record, smashing old marks.
July’s average temperature was 61.86 degrees Fahrenheit, beating the previous global mark set in 1998 and 2010 by about one-seventh of a degree. That’s a large margin for weather records.
Records go back to 1880, but nine of the 10 hottest months on record have happened since 2005. The first seven months of 2015 are the hottest January-to-July span on record.
In British Columbia, indigenous group blocks pipeline development
In a remote mountain pass connecting the Pacific Coast to the interior of British Columbia, a region brimming with wild berries and populated by grouse and grizzly bears, felled and painted trees have been laid across a logging road to form an enormous message. Directed at air traffic, it reads “No pipelines! No entry!” The warning marks off land where the government of Canada and a First Nations clan hold irreconcilable views of what should happen to a 435-square-mile area each claims as its own.
Starting in 2009, the government of Canada began to issue permits for a pipeline corridor to link British Columbia’s fracking fields and Alberta’s tar sands with export facilities and tankers on the Pacific coast. Seeking to become a global energy superpower, Canada staked its economic future and legislative agenda on the rapid expansion of its resource and fossil fuel sectors, envisioning pipelines as the arteries of trillion-dollar hydraulically fractured gas and bitumen industries.
Cancer risk 'even from light drinking'
Even light and moderate drinking - up to one drink a day for women and two drinks a day for men - could increase the risk of cancer, say researchers.
The work in the British Medical Journal looked at two large US studies involving more than 100,000 adults. The clearest link was for breast cancer.
Experts say the findings reinforce the health message that people should limit how much they drink and have some alcohol-free days.
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