May 10 (Bloomberg) -- Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari said his country isn’t adding to its nuclear arsenal and doesn’t have to disclose the location of its weapons to the U.S.
Pakistan is “not adding to our stockpile as such,” Zardari said today on NBC’s “Meet the Press” program. “Why do we need more?”
Asked whether Pakistan would tell U.S. intelligence officials where all its nuclear weapons are located, to allow for a joint strategy to keep them secure, Zardari said Pakistan is a sovereign country.
“Why don’t you do the same with other countries yourself?” Zardari said in the interview taped May 7. “I think this is a sovereignty issue, and we have a right to our own sovereignty.”
President Barack Obama said last month that, while Pakistan’s civilian government is “very fragile,” he is confident that the country’s nuclear arsenal is secure. He also said that Pakistan’s military is taking the threat of internal enemies seriously and recognizes the hazard of nuclear weapons “falling into the wrong hands.”
“We have confidence in their security procedures and elements and believe that the security of those sites is adequate,” General David Petraeus, the head of U.S. Central Command, said today on “Fox News Sunday.”
Taliban Threat
Obama has tied Pakistan to his strategy for dealing with Afghanistan as militant Islamic Taliban forces and other extremists threaten both nations from bases along their border. As part of an effort to reduce the appeal of extremists to Pakistan’s people, Obama has said he will support legislation increasing nonmilitary aid by $1.5 billion a year.
U.S. aid has not been enough, Zardari said.
“Altogether this aid package is not even one-tenth of what you give AIG,” Zardari said, referring to New York-based American International Group Inc., the insurer bailed out four times by the U.S. government, including an injection of as much as $70 billion in capital, $52.5 billion to buy assets owned or backed by AIG, and a $60 billion credit line. “So let’s face it, we need in fact much more help.”
The House version of the legislation would impose conditions on Pakistan such as proof of “substantial progress” on strengthening democracy and fighting the Taliban before more than half the money is spent.
Aid Conditions
“We’re going to have to figure out a way, though, to verify that what our money is doing is furthering a cause we all believe in,” Bob Corker, a U.S. Senator from Tennessee, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” program. “That obviously has been less than the case in the past.”
Zardari said the additional aid shouldn’t come with any conditions.
“I think it’s doubting an ally before you go into action together,” the Pakistani leader said. “We should have a result-oriented relationship, where I should be given a timeline and I’ll give you all a timeline, so we can both give each other timelines and meet the timelines on the positive.”
Obama is pressing Zardari to use more soldiers to fight the Taliban, who have seized Pakistani territory and strengthened their base to attack U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Thousands of Pakistani troops, plus fighter planes and helicopter gunships, have attacked what the army says are about 4,000 Taliban guerrillas in Swat, a mile-high valley northwest of the capital.
Swat Offensive
Pakistani troops intensified their operations in Swat last week after Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani ordered an “all- out assault” to retake control of the northwestern region. Pakistani forces said yesterday that they killed 55 militants in the region.
Zardari said Pakistan has 135,000 ground troops battling the Taliban in the western part of country.
“We think they’re sufficient,” he said. Zardari said that’s three times as many troops as the U.S. has fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan.
The U.S. has about 38,000 soldiers in Afghanistan, and Obama has ordered 17,000 more combat personnel and 4,000 trainers to deploy. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization has about 58,000 military personnel in Afghanistan, operating alongside U.S. coalition forces.
Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai said the U.S. should have sent the additional troops six years ago.
“It’s a bit late,” he said in a separate “Meet the Press” interview. “But as we all know, it’s never too late for a good thing to do.”
U.S. Air Strikes
Karzai called for an end to U.S. air strikes, saying the civilian casualties are undermining the Afghan people’s support for the war on terrorism.
“The United States must stand on a much higher moral platform in order for us together to win this war,” he said.
James Jones, Obama’s national security adviser, said that while the U.S. would make efforts to avoid wounding or killing civilians, it would not take any options off the table.
“I think that we’re going to take a look at trying to make sure that we correct those things we can correct, but certainly to tie the hands of our commanders and say we’re not going to conduct air strikes, it would be imprudent,” Jones said on ABC’s “This Week.” http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aVurOu8Dl53k&refer=worldwide
Swine FluUnited States has 1,639 cases of new flu, CDC says
08 May 2009 15:25:29 GMT
Source: Reuters
CHICAGO, May 8 (Reuters) - The United States has 1,639 cases of the new H1N1 flu in 43 states, with two deaths, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on on Friday.
U.S. officials have said they expect the swine influenza virus to spread to all 50 states and to cause many infections ranging from mild to severe. The case count on Thursday was 896 but there has been a backlog of likely cases that need extra testing to confirm.
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N08459646.htm
Canada says woman with swine flu dies
TORONTO (AP) - A Canadian health official says a woman with swine flu has died.
Alberta's chief medical officer says the woman from northern Alberta was in her 30s and did not travel recently. He says she also had other medical conditions.
Dr. Andre Corriveau made the announcement at a news conference Friday.
It would be the first death from swine flu in Canada. Mexico has confirmed 45 deaths and there have been two deaths in the United States.
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D98272F00&show_article=1
SEATTLE (AP) - The number of swine flu-related deaths outside Mexico has inched up to five with the U.S. reporting its third fatality and Costa Rica its first, both involving men who also had underlying illnesses.
The number of confirmed cases of the infection in the U.S. has risen to 2,532 in 44 states, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Sunday.
Washington state health officials said the victim there was a man in his 30s who had underlying heart conditions and viral pneumonia when he died Thursday from what appeared to be complications from swine flu. The state Department of Health said in a statement Saturday that swine flu was considered a factor in his death.
"We're working with local and federal partners to track this outbreak," said Washington State Secretary of Health Mary Selecky.
The man was not further identified. He began showing symptoms on April 30, and was treated with anti-viral medication. Dr. Gary Goldbaum, Snohomish Health District medical director, said medical officials hadn't been able to isolate any "risk factors" for the man to identify where he might have been exposed.
The death of a 53-year-old man in Costa Rica on Saturday was the first involving swine flu outside North America. He also suffered from diabetes and chronic lung disease, the Health Ministry said.
Most of the victims in Mexico, the center of the outbreak where 48 people with swine flu have died, have been adults aged 20 to 49, and many had no reported complicating factors.
Previously, U.S. authorities reported swine flu deaths of a toddler with a heart defect and a woman with rheumatoid arthritis, and Canadian officials said the woman who died there also had other health problems but gave no details.
Mexico, which raised its count of confirmed cases to 1,626 based on tests of earlier patients, has been gradually lifting a nationwide shutdown of schools, businesses, churches and soccer stadiums.
But an upswing in suspected _ though not confirmed _ cases in parts of Mexico prompted authorities in at least six of the country's 31 states to delay plans to let primary school students return to class Monday after a two-week break.
"It has been very stable ... except for those states," Health Department spokesman Carlos Olmos said, referring to states in central and southern Mexico.
Mexican health authorities released a breakdown of the first 45 of the country's 48 flu deaths that showed that 84 percent of the victims were between the ages of 20 and 54. Only 2.2 percent were immune-depressed, and none had a history of respiratory disease.
http://wtop.com/?nid=106&sid=1655772
US threatens military force against hackers
Cyber espionage and attacks from well-funded nations or terror groups are the biggest threats to the military’s computer networks, a top US
officer said. Gen Kevin Chilton, who heads US Strategic Command, said he worries that foes will learn to disable or distort battlefield communications. Chilton said even as the Pentagon improves its network defences against hackers, he needs more people, training and resources to hone offensive cyber war capacity. At the same time, he asserted that the US would consider using military force against an enemy who attacks and disrupts the nation’s critical networks. “Our job would be to present options. I don’t think you take anything off the table when you provide options” to the president, in the wake of an attack, whether the weapon is a missile or a computer program, he said. Chilton’s comments shed the most light to date on the Pentagon’s ongoing debate over how to beef up its abilities to wage and defend against cyber warfare. And they came as the military is planning to set up a new cyber command at Fort Meade not far from Washington that would report to Strategic Command. Chilton said that his biggest fear is that enemies hack into military battlefield systems, and when an American commander sends out an order that says forces should go left, it is changed to say forces should go right. While most systems are classified and walled off, he said there are often ways to cross into those networks. The other worry is more internal. When a soldier or sailor sits down at a computer, Chilton said “it’s like he’s stepping to the guard gate at his base,” and can open the digital gate and let adversaries in.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/World/US/US-threatens-military-force-against-hackers/articleshow/4501327.cms
Report: Hackers broke into FAA air traffic control systems
Hackers have broken into the air traffic control mission-support systems of the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration several times in recent years, according to an Inspector General report sent to the FAA this week.
In February, hackers compromised an FAA public-facing computer and used it to gain access to personally identifiable information, such as Social Security numbers, on 48,000 current and former FAA employees, the report said.
Last year, hackers took control of FAA critical network servers and could have shut them down, which would have seriously disrupted the agency's mission-support network, the report said. Hackers took over FAA computers in Alaska, becoming "insiders," according to the report dated Monday.
Then, taking advantage of interconnected networks, hackers later stole an administrator's password in Oklahoma, installed "malicious codes" with the stolen password and compromised the FAA domain controller in the Western Pacific Region, giving them the access to more than 40,000 FAA user IDs, passwords, and other data used to control a portion of the mission-support network, the report said.
And in 2006, a virus spread to the air traffic control (ATC) systems, forcing the FAA to shut down a portion of its systems in Alaska, according to the report.
The attacks so far have primarily disrupted mission-support functions, but attacks could spread over network connections from those areas to the operational networks where real-time surveillance, communications and flight information is processed, the report warned.
"In our opinion, unless effective action is taken quickly, it is likely to be a matter of when, not if, ATC systems encounter attacks that do serious harm to ATC operations," the report concluded.
An audit of the FAA's air traffic control cybersecurity protection measures finds them lacking and says there have been several breaches by hackers and a virus.(Credit: U.S. Department of Transportation, Office of Inspector General)
The breaches were possible because Web applications that support the air traffic control system operations are not properly secured to prevent unauthorized access and network intrusion-detection software is not adequately being used to monitor and detect cyberattacks, the report concluded.
The FAA's increasing use of commercial software and Internet Protocol-based technologies as part of an effort to modernize the air traffic control systems poses a higher security risk to the systems than when they relied primarily on proprietary software, the report said.
"Now, attackers can take advantage of software vulnerabilities in commercial IP products to exploit ATC systems, which is especially worrisome at a time when the Nation is facing increased threats from sophisticated nation-state-sponsored cyber attacks," the report said.
In general, the nation's critical infrastructure is increasingly at risk as previously isolated and closed systems are moved to the Internet and commercial software, like Windows, is used, security experts have said.
The air traffic control system auditors said they discovered more than 760 high-risk vulnerabilities in the Web applications tested, including holes that provided "front-door access" to the systems and could allow attackers to inject malicious code onto FAA user computers. Web applications were not adequately configured and the applications with known vulnerabilities were not patched in a timely manner, auditors found.
Meanwhile, intrusion detection systems (IDS) are deployed at only 11 of hundreds of air traffic control facilities and none of the IDS sensors is installed to monitor operational systems at those sites, the report said. Cyber incidents are not effectively monitored or fixed quickly, the report concluded.
In 2008, more than 870 cyber incident alerts were issued to the organization responsible for air traffic control operations and by the end of the year 17 percent (more than 150 incidents) had not been remediated, "including critical incidents in which hackers may have taken over control" of operations computers, the report said.
The FAA is "identifying and fixing weaknesses," FAA spokeswoman Laura Brown told The Wall Street Journal. "We are working on developing security architecture for that whole system."
However, Brown dismissed the notion that hackers could get access to critical air traffic control operational systems.
The audit of the air traffic control systems was requested by the ranking minority members of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure and its Aviation Subcommittee.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10236028-83.html
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