Interlude: Visage: Night Train

US: Fighting the war on MISIS meet Captain Cat

(Barksdale Air Force Base)  in Louisiana has a rodent problem during the winter months, so they set about recruiting the best person for the job. Meet Captain Cat and she is now the bases official mouser.

We hear about military working dogs all of the time, but there's another animal making a big difference for one @USAirForce unit in Louisiana. Meet Captain the cat! pic.twitter.com/8IRoFnfMcS

— U.S. Dept of Defense (@DeptofDefense) April 17, 2019

Syria: Israeli strike may have used their latest 'Rampage' missile

(Masyaf) It appears that Israel may have used its new 'Rampage' missile it which to carry out last weeks strike on Iranian assets inside Syria.

Rampage is a supersonic all-weather day/night Air to surface missile with a stand-off range of “100s of kilometres, is designed to bypass anti-missile systems such as the S300 and hit its target within 10 metres. Which apparently it did on the 13th April 2019 when it struck its targets a few miles east of a Syrian S300 system when it took out a number of warehouses and an M-600 missile launcher

(R) M600 missile launcher
     (L) Destroyed missile launcher 

As usual the Syrians claim that their anti-aircraft sysytem shot down the vast majority of incoming missiles causing very little damage.

Sri Lanka: Suicide bombers target Churches and Hotels, over 200 killed

(Colombo) Terrorists have detonated explosive devices at 8 different locations across Sri Lanka killing 207 people and injuring over 500 others. No one has so far claimed responsibility for what Sri Lankan officials are describing as a terrorist attack by religious extremists. This builds on reports that Sri Lankan Police Chief Pujuth Jayasundara alerted top officers on the 11th April that radical Islamists were planning to hit prominent churches, 

Two of the initial six blasts were suspected to have been carried out by suicide bombers with at least 45 people being killed in Colombo, where three hotels and a church were hit, along with another 67 in the church attack in Negombo, north of the capital, with another 25 dead at a church in the town of Batticaloa, in the east of the country. The three hotels hit were the Shangri-La Colombo, Kingsbury Hotel in Colombo and the Cinnamon Grand Colombo.

In response the Government has put in place a curfew across the country 

Interlude: Soft Cell - Bedsitter

Interlude: Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark - Electricity

Israel: Space mission to the moon fails

(Yehud) A private Israeli attempt to land on the moon. Faield this evening, when the Israeli  SpaceIL's control centre lost communications with the Beresheet spacecraft, when it was about 489 feet (149 meters) above the moon's surface resulting in it crashing into the moon. The mission which was built and launched on the cheap after the nonprofit organization SpaceIL was formed to compete in the Google Lunar X Prize. The GLXP offered $20 million to the first privately funded team to put a robot down softly on the moon, move it at least 1,650 feet (500 meters) on the lunar surface and have it send high-resolution imagery home to Earth. Whilst google closed down the competition  SpaceIL continued and in February piggybacked a ride on a SpaceX mission in which to get their spacecraft to the Moon. Unfortunately as mentioned above the mission failed, but the company is already looking at trying again. 

'We had a failure in the spacecraft — we unfortunately have not managed to land successfully — we are the 7th country to orbit the moon and the 4th to reach the moon's surface,' says Opher Doron of Israel Aerospace Industries: #IsraelToTheMoon #SpaceIL #Beresheet pic.twitter.com/7siuo5Yf6Q

— i24NEWS English (@i24NEWS_EN) April 11, 2019

Uk: Julian Assange arrested

(London) Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange was today arrested at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Assange who sought refuge in the embassy in 2012  in which to escape Swedish and British justice (The former for rape and the latter for breaking bail)   saw him face a much longer self-imposed incarceration than if he had simply faced the music. He continued to play the victimcard complaining about anything and everything and in the process pissed off the Ecuadorians so much they issued him with a set of rules : Keep where you live clean, keep yourself clean and feed your cat.  Well he didn’t and actually tried to sue the Ecuadorian government, as you may have gathered that didn't go down well in Quito and so today they invited the British police into their embassy in which to remove him. He was taken straight to court , where he was found guilty of breaking bail and not surrounding to the court in 2012 as arrested. The interesting part is how the US which has kept its distance from Assange is now pushing for him to be extradited from the Uk to the states on charges of  US federal conspiracy charges related to one of the largest ever leaks of government secrets. However I do believe that one of the conditions of his arrest as laid down by Ecuador was he can’t be shipped off to the states.

Interlude: Prince - U Got The Look

Libya: on the boil again

(Tripoli) Libya since the fall of Gadiffi has fallen into something that resembles the political map of the Game of thrones with each separate faction declaring itself the master of the country. To the West we have the UN recognised Government of National Accord (GNA)  , to the East we have Military warlord 'Khalifa Haftar' and his LNA ,in between and dotted around there are ISIS, Tuarag , Toubou and other militia. The two main ones however are the GNA and LNA.

However whilst the world has had its eyes on the protests inside Algeria . Haftar has moved a sizable force across the middle of the country in which to take the town of  Garyan a mere 100 Kilometres from the capital of Tripoli .

He has now ordered his troops to march on the capital. This latest development entails a huge problem for the UN which has found itself backing a losing side in a conflict . The thing is with the U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres  currently in Tripoli , will he get the UN security council to use force to stop the Egyptian and UAE backed Haftar and his self proclaimed Libyan National Army,