Call me a Traitor | Next Heat Dome | Mysterious Colorado Drone

Existing systems in cities such as New Delhi and Mumbai are being revamped, he said. The plan follows a major power outage in India’s financial hub Mumbai last year that brought the city to a halt and prompted speculation about a cyber attack. The year before, the country’s nuclear power monopoly reported computer systems at one of its generation plants had been attacked by malware. Power grids the world over are increasingly digitalized, leaving them vulnerable to such attacks. Islanding systems feature generation capacity and can isolate automatically from the main grid in the event of an outage. For the new systems, provinces need to submit proposals for setting up generation and storage capacities, Singh said in his written comments Thursday. The strategy was questioned in some quarters.”

UN Says ‘Heightened Threats’ Are Emerging from ISIS, Affiliated Groups Around the World  (Zoe Strozewski, Newsweek)
A new report from the United Nations warns that “heightened threats” are emerging from ISIS and other terror groups, most prominently in Africa. The memo comes as the U.S. is set to complete a withdrawal of troops stationed in Afghanistan, where ISIS and al Qaeda are rooted, by Aug. 31. The report, compiled by the U.N. monitoring team that tracks global jihadi threats, said that terror groups tend to prosper when other forces aren’t putting pressure on them. With U.S. pressure soon to be absent from Afghanistan, any mitigation of their threat could experience “further deterioration,” the report said. The U.N. said that parts of West and East Africa as especially susceptible to the growing presence of terror groups, “where affiliates of both groups can boast gains in supporters and territory under threat, as well as growing capabilities in fundraising and weapons, for example, in the use of drones.” One of these high-risk areas is Somalia, where special forces are “struggling to contain” Al-Shabaab, an offshoot of al Qaeda, in light of the U.S. troops’ exit and a decrease in pressure from the African Union Mission. Affiliates of al Qaeda are increasingly present in Mali as France starts to pull back on its own anti-terrorism campaign in the country.

France Adopts Laws to Combat Terrorism, but Critics Call Them Overreaching  (Aurelien Breeden, New York Times)
French lawmakers have adopted two bills the government says will strengthen its ability to fight terrorism and Islamist extremism following a series of attacks that have hardened feelings of insecurity ahead of next year’s presidential election. Debate on the bills, adopted Thursday and Friday, had been pushed out of the headlines by a flare-up of the Covid-19 pandemic, but critics say they curtail civil liberties and extend police powers to a worrying degree. One of the new laws gives France’s security services more tools to keep track of suspected terrorists and surveil them online; it was adopted late Thursday by the National Assembly, the lower house of Parliament, by a vote of 108 to 20. The other, passed on Friday by the same chamber by a vote of 49 to 19, aims to combat extremist ideas at every level of French society. Among a range of steps, it toughens conditions for home-schooling, tightens rules for associations seeking state subsidies, and gives the authorities new powers to close places of worship seen as condoning hateful or violent ideas. Both measures had been pushed by President Emmanuel Macron and his government as necessary responses to a persistent threat posed by Islamist extremism against France’s ideals, especially secularism, and its security.

Documents Indicate How Little Officials Knew about Mysterious Drones Last Year  (Michael de Yoanna, KUNC)
Just before the coronavirus pandemic hit last year, Eastern Colorado was center stage for a kind of whodunnit. Ranchers, farmers — and even a few deputy sheriffs — described mysterious drones flying in the night skies.
A report on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, or UAPs, released last month by national intelligence officials didn’t say anything about the sightings in Colorado. So KUNC asked whether anyone ever solved the mystery about what the objects were and, if they were drones, who was flying them. The short answer: no.