Intelligence Officials Present Evidence for How Malaysian Plane Was Shot Down

(U.S. intelligence community)

Senior U.S. intelligence officials presented evidence today that they say makes a “solid case” as to why the U.S. believes a Russian made SA-11 missile fired from separatist-held eastern Ukraine shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 last week.

While the leading theory is that Russian separatists brought down the plane, the U.S. intelligence community still cannot determine who pulled the trigger or why. The officials pointed the finger at Russia for having “created the conditions” behind the shoot-down and labeled as “not plausible” new Russian claims that the plane may have been brought down by a Ukrainian fighter jet.

In a briefing with reporters, senior intelligence officials pointed to a variety of evidence, including the detection of a surface-to-air missile launch from a separatist-held area of eastern Ukraine. They cited Russian training of separatists in air defense systems, though not necessarily the SA-11, and Russian separatists having used other air defense systems to bring down 12 aircraft in recent months.

They also noted images posted on social media showing an SA-11 missile system near the area of that launch and one system headed towards Russia missing at least one missile in the hours after the shoot down.

Though the images are not independently verifiable, the officials say they complement their intelligence. The officials also pointed to postings to social media in which separatists bragged about the shoot-down and which were quickly deleted.

One of the officials said photographs taken at the crash site show damage to the plane’s skin that is “consistent” with that seen from shrapnel from a surface-to-air missile system.

Another official said the evidence made “a solid case it was an SA-11 fired from eastern Ukraine under conditions created by Russia.”

The leading theory is that Russian separatists were behind the launch, probably by mistake by an “ill-trained crew,” officials said, they are still trying to determine precisely who fired the missile.

“We don’t know the rank, we don’t know the name, we don’t know the nationality of the individual who pulled the trigger or why they did it,” said the official.

The U.S. intelligence community is still trying to determine whether the trigger-puller was a Russian, a separatist trained by Russia or possibly a volunteer familiar with the missile system from the Ukrainian military and who may have joined the separatists.

The officials discounted as “not plausible” a new Russian narrative released Monday that presented the possibility that a nearby Ukrainian SU-25 fighter jet may have downed the airliner.

One official said the fighter is a ground-attack aircraft not equipped with air-to-air missiles and was flying too far away from the plane at the time.  The official added that the plane would have had to travel a great distance to track the plane and then would have had to persuade Russian separatists to brag on social media that they had shot the plane down. The official described the Russian narrative as “a classic case of blaming the victims.”

The officials acknowledged that U.S. intelligence did not know until the day of the shoot-down that Russian separatists were in possession of an SA-11 system. The U.S. was aware that separatists had received air defense training at a large training facility in southwestern Russia outside of Rostov, but it was not specific to the SA-11 system.

Vin Diesel On Completing ‘Fast & Furious 7’ Without Paul Walker: It’s The ‘Hardest Movie’ I’ve Ever Made

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After the sudden death of Paul Walker, Vin Diesel said "Fast & Furious 7" became the most challenging project of his career to date.

"It was, needless to say, the hardest movie I've ever done," Vin told Access Hollywood's Liz Hernandez at the junket for his latest movie, "Guardians of the Galaxy." "I remember when the tragedy happened, my mother said to me, 'It's not fair that you have to mourn in front of the world.'

"What's even harder is to mourn and simultaneously that the person is next to you, so every time you turn to whoever's sitting in that chair you see not Paul," he said.

PHOTOS: Paul Walker - A Look Back

The 47-year-old star said finishing the film with other actors filling in for his late co-star/friend was strange, but did help the cast gain a sense of closure – and made for an amazing final product.

"It's very, very weird," he said. "The good thing is, because we took all the time, the movie is a true testament to everyone coming together and wanting to honor both the saga and our brother, and there's something very beautiful about that.

PHOTOS: Sexy Superheroes

"I think 'Fast 7' wins Best Picture, whether we want to or not!" he added.

Vin is also excited about his newest role as Groot in "Guardians" – a character he found therapeutic in the wake of Paul's tragic death.

"I'm really fortunate that I have both of these movies and there's something very, very healing about playing a character like Groot that celebrates life after a tragedy like the one that happened," he said.

"Guardians of the Galaxy" hits theaters on August 1. "Fast 7" is due out on April 3, 2015.

-- Erin O'Sullivan

More at: http://www.accesshollywood.com/vin-diesel-on-completing-lsquofast-and-furious-7rsquo-without-paul-walker-itrsquos-the-lsquohardest-moviersquo-irsquove-ever-made_article_96851

What is sapphire glass and why is it in the next iPhone?

It seems all but certain Apple will be making the switch to sapphire glass for the iPhone 6 screen, a radical departure from the hardened Gorilla Glass it has been getting from Corning since the first iPhone came out in 2007. Until now, sapphire glass was only used on the camera lens of Apple’s devices, but the technology now exists to make it a viable options for the entire front panel. It’s probably not going to be cheap, but sapphire glass could become the next must-have feature in smartphones.

When you hear the word “sapphire,” you’re probably thinking about a shiny blue stone that costs a bundle of money, but that’s not quite what sapphire glass is. In other words, it’s going to be expensive but not that expensive. A stone can technically be a sapphire and have none of the characteristic blue coloring. As with most precious gems, the color is the result of impurities, in this case mostly chromium and titanium. The sapphire used for glass has none of that.

Of course, no one is digging stones out of the ground to make into phone screens. The glass on the upcoming iPhone 6 will be produced in a lab.

Sapphire is the third hardest mineral in existence — it scores a 9 on the Mohs hardness scale right behind diamond at 10 and moissanite at 9.25. Sapphire is still very durable compared to most materials you might use on a touch screen. Sapphire glass isn’t just hard to crack, it’s also very difficult to scratch. That’s probably a more common issue with phones than a completely shattered screen.

Does that mean it’s all good news for sapphire glass phones? Well, there is the issue of mass. Sapphire glass has a density of 3.98 g/cm3, which is 67% higher than Gorilla Glass at 2.54 g/cm3. So for the same thickness of glass, the sapphire panel would weigh quite a bit more. Screens actually account for more of the weight than you’d think — a sapphire screen could add over 100g to the mass of a larger iPhone. So users might be surprised by the heft when they pick up the iPhone 6. Cost might also be a concern, but Apple wouldn’t be going ahead if it didn’t have the supply chain sorted out.

Everyone (or almost everyone) seems happy with the resolution of screens these days, so maybe sapphire glass is the next step. After all, that screen won’t look pretty when it’s covered in a spiderweb of cracks. [via Geek]

Best Way to Punish Putin? No World Cup

In the wake of the MH17 disaster, the world needs to make Vladimir Putin’s pride—not the Russian people—pay. And a good first step would be to stop pretending sport is politically neutral.

Two days after Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine, killing all passengers and crew aboard, the world is contending with a fiendishly difficult question: what is the appropriate punitive response to this atrocity?

The civilian airliner was destroyed with a ground-to-air missile of Russian provenance, fired either by Russia-backed separatists or by the Russian military. Moral and political responsibility for the slaughter must lie, ultimately, with Moscow, even as we investigate the forensic sequence of a commander’s chilling order—“Fire!”—and an underling’s deadly compliance.

Three hundred people, 189 of them Dutch, are dead at the hands of forces who owe their loyalty to Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, the man who has thrown his weight behind the armed rebellion in Ukraine. He is in every way the separatists’ godfather. The dismemberment of Ukraine is as much his cause as theirs. So any response has to make him hurt, personally; it has to puncture his ego, his pride. And one certain way to hurt him would be to strip from Russia the right to host the 2018 World Cup.

States opposed to Putin’s international lawlessness can (and should) contemplate all manner of economic sanctions against Russia in response to the shooting down of MH17. As it happens, the very day before the plane was felled, the U.S. had restricted access to American capital markets for Rosneft, the Russian oil company, and Gazprombank, the financial arm of gas-goliath Gazprom. Yet while sanctions like these can be painful, they can also make Putin more adamantly resistant to withdrawal from Ukraine. Give the nature of the Russian state and its undemocratic political system, Putin is perfectly equipped to survive a turning of the financial screws. He will, no doubt, portray sanctions as an act of aggression against the people of Russia. So punishing Putin, not the people of Russia, should be our primary aim.

Hosting the World Cup is the weapon Putin uses to prove to his people that he is all-powerful, that there is no point in opposing him.

How does one punish the autocratic, omnipotent president of a quasi-superpower? It is much harder to do so than to spank the piddling ruler of a smallish rogue state, but options exist. Putin believes that a World Cup in Russia can be sold to his people as an endorsement of his rule. Why should the world become an accomplice in a dictator’s Ponzi scheme of pride? As he preened for the cameras at the World Cup final in Rio de Janeiro on July 13, it was clear that Putin regards Russia’s staging of the cup’s next edition as a propaganda godsend, a global vote for his achievements. Imagine his consternation if he were prevented from putting on such a show. 

Putin preys on the fact that the West thinks money and sport are neutral, or at least civilizing influences. So when Russian money comes to Wall Street or the City of London, it stops being political for the West; it is also a peculiarly Western conceit that the gathering together for sport has a civilizing effect on the nations participating. But for Putin, money and sport are tools, or weapons. Hosting the World Cup is the weapon he uses to prove to his people that he is all-powerful, that there is no point in opposing him. In letting him host that cup, we all become part of that weapon.

The cup is four years away, perfect time for FIFA, the governing body of world soccer, to undo formal agreements with Moscow while giving another host every opportunity to provide for the entire infrastructure. Stadiums take up to two years to build; airports need to be upgraded; a range of hotels must be secured, as must the capacity for domestic rail and road transportation to cope with an influx of hundreds of thousands of fans.

As sponsorship contacts are being scripted and haggled over, a passionate drive is in place by pro-Ukraine opponents of Putin to organize a boycottof companies that will sponsor a World Cup in Russia. How long before those companies, which include Anheuser Busch, Visa, Kia Motors, and Sony, start to press FIFA for a change of host?

The World Cup is quite unlike the Olympics, where every nation has a right to participate. Qualification is exacting, and a majority of the teams that do qualify are from the West. The Asian powerhouses are Japan and South Korea, and the West African nations who tend to comprise Africa’s contribution to the roster are not beholden to Putin. Mustering a coalition of disapproval for the World Cup should be much easier than it would be for an Olympiad.

In all of this lies the chance, also, for FIFA to redeem itself. Under Sepp Blatter, its interminable head, the body has been opaque and corrupt. Now is the moment for FIFA and Blatter to take a rare moral stand and not act as obstacles to the revocation of Russia’s hosting rights.

Who should host the Cup instead? May I propose the Dutch, who were among the original bidders for 2018. Unlike Russia, their country is a world soccer power, with an open, democratic society, a civic exemplar. And after the downing of MH17, in which so many of its innocent citizens were killed by men loyal to Putin, a World Cup in The Netherlands would be cosmic justice. 

Google To Stop Labeling Apps With In-App Purchases As 'Free'

TECH

By the end of September, Google will no longer label apps as “free” if they allow for in-app purchases. The change will certainly take place in Europe but is likely to affect Google users around the world.

Disclosure: I’m co-director of ConnectSafely.org, a non-profit Internet safety organization that receives financial support from Google. Also, ConnectSafely works with the European Commission on Safer Internet Day. 

The change is in response to an agreement with the European Commission (EC), which is especially protective of families with children who have been known to rack up bills via in-app purchases.

Both Google and Apple were asked by Europe’s Consumer Protection Cooperation Network (CPC Network) to assure that:

• Games advertised as “free” should not mislead consumers about the true costs involved;
• Games should not directly encourage children to buy items in a game or to persuade an adult to buy items for them;
• Consumers should be adequately informed about the payment arrangements for purchases and should not be debited through default settings without consumers’ explicit consent;
• Traders should provide an email address so that consumers can contact them in case of queries or complaints.

Changes and new guidelines

According to an EC statement, Google “will not use the word ’free’  at all when games contain in-app purchases. It will also “help monitor apparent breaches of EU consumer laws.” The EC said that Google has “adapted its default settings, so that payments are authorised prior to every in-app purchase, unless the consumer actively chooses to modify these settings.”

In a statement , Google said “We’ve been working closely with the European Commission and consumer protection agencies for the last few months to make improvements to Google Play that will be good for our users and provide better protections for children.”

No commitment from Apple

Apple has added in-app purchase parental controls to iOS

Apple has not, according to the EC, made a similar commitment. An EC  press release said that  ”regrettably, no concrete and immediate solutions have been made by Apple to date to address the concerns linked in particular to payment authorization, Apple has proposed to address those concerns. However, no firm commitment and no timing have been provided for the implementation of such possible future changes.”

In a statement to Recode.net, Apple said that its iOS “controls go far beyond the features of others in the industry,” and added that they “are always working to strengthen the protections we have in place, and we’re adding great new features with iOS 8, such as Ask to Buy, giving parents even more control over what their kids can buy on the App Store.”

In January, Apple reached an agreement with the Federal Trade Commission where it agreed to pay a mnimum of $32.5 million to settle a complaint “ that the company billed consumers for millions of dollars of charges incurred by children in kids’ mobile apps without their parents’ consent,” according to the FTC. The January settlement also required Apple “to modify its billing practices to ensure that Apple obtains consumers’ express, informed consent prior to billing them for in-app charges.”

How to use parental app purchase controls

This page  from Apple  explains how to control kids’ ability to make in-app purchases on iOS device. Android users, starting with Android 4.3, Android tablet users can now set up restricted profiles by following these steps.

MORE THAN 300 PEOPLE KILLED AS PASSENGER PLANE SHOT DOWN IN EAST UKRAINE

REUTERS/Maxim Zmeyev

An armed pro-Russian separatist stands on part of the wreckage of the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 plane after it crashed near the settlement of Grabovo in the Donetsk region, July 17, 2014.

A Boeing 777 Malaysia Airlines passenger plane from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur crashed in eastern Ukraine about 10:00 EDT.

"Malaysia Airlines has lost contact of MH17 from Amsterdam," the Malaysia Airlines tweeted. "The last known position was over Ukrainian airspace."

There were reportedly 295 people on board (280 passengers and 15 crew) when it crashed in Torez, about 25 miles from the Russian border in the region of Donetsk. There were 23 Americans on the flight. There were no survivors. Ukraine's Interior Ministry says that more than 300 people died in the incident.

"Locals say everything exploded in the air, fell in pieces, both bodies and plane itself," Journalist Noah Sneider tweeted from the area. "[People] thought they were being bombed."

An adviser to the Ukraine Interior Minister says pro-Russia separatists shot down the passenger plane with a Russian-made BUK ground-to-air missile system, and Ukraine's security services (SBU) have leaked alleged conversations between rebels who are discussing the downed plane. 

U.S. intelligence has confirmed that a surface-to-air missile was fired at the flight. 

The rebels have shot down multiple aircraft in the past month but deny involvement in the Malaysia Airlines incident. Crucially, the separatists in the area reportedly commandeered a set of the BUK system as of last month.

Local residents in Donetsk told Business Insider that they saw a Buk missile system in the area. And Radio 24 (Pадио 24), a Ukrainian radio station, posted this tweet which shows a Buk missile system in Snezhnoye, Ukraine:

The translation of the Ukrainian text reads: "Buk" terrorists were in Snezhnoye today.

Furthermore, The Interpreter reports the Ukrainian journalist Roman Bochkala and an AP journalist have seen separatists with the BUK system.

The region of Donetsk is a stronghold of pro-Russian rebels who are fighting the Ukrainian army. The separatists deny responsibility (via The Interpreter), but they did claim to shoot down a "Ukrainian transport plane" in the same area earlier today.

And Igor Strelkov, the pro-Russian separatist leader who is linked to Russian intelligence, claimed that rebels had shot down the "transport plane" in Torez — the same town that the Malaysia Airlines plane went down.

"In the region of Torez AN-26 plane has been shot," he wrote on Russia's version of Facebook. "We have warned them – not to fly 'in our sky.'"

On July 8, the State Aviation Administration of Ukraine closed the airspace to civilian aircraft after a military transport plane, which was flying at an altitude of over 20,000 feet, was shot down by rebels.

The Interpreter reports that the Ukrainian military has been claiming that separatists have advanced missiles for a week after the transport plane went down.

President Barack Obama is “aware” of reports of the plane crash, a White House official told Business Insider, and he has spoken with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Geopolitical expert Ian Bremmer tells Business Insider that the crisis in Ukraine will now escalate considerably.

Also earlier today, Ukraine claimed that a Russian jet shot down a Ukraine SU-25 fighter plane. For months, Ukrainian and U.S. officials have warned against civilian aircrafts flying over Ukrainian territory, especially near eastern Ukraine and the annexed peninsula of Crimea.

Following are images from the scene — warning: GRAPHIC.

REUTERS/Maxim Zmeyev

Here's a video reportedly showing the initial moments of the crash: