ho-hum

 Even many center-left outlets barely touched on the massive mission creep. To give some perspective, Slate, Mother Jones, and Buzzfeed News all ran more stories about Trump’s dust-up with an infant than they did on what was effectively the start of a new war. ABC World News Tonight mentioned the Libyan air strikes for only 20 seconds, 13 minutes into the show, and NBC Nightly News didn’t mention the air strikes at all. The president’s announcement that the United States is bombing a new country has become entirely banal....
 Meanwhile, an anti-ISIS bombing campaign that began as “limited,” “targeted” air strikes in Iraq two years ago expanded to Syria six weeks later, to Afghanistan in January of this year, and to Libya this week. Combat troops and special forces have also crept into play, with US military personnel first appearing in Iraq and Syria in 2014, 2015, or 2016, depending on how one defines “boots” and “ground.”
 The question pundits should be asking themselves is this: Had Obama announced on August 7, 2014, that he planned on bombing four countries and deploying troops to two of them to fight a war with “no end point,” would the American public have gone along with it? Probably not.
To authorize his perma-campaign, Obama’s administration has dubiously invoked the 15-year-old, one-page Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed three days after 9/11. The president has to do this, the White House and friendly media claim, because Congress “refuses” to act to authorize the war (notice that’s a rubber-stamp question of when, not if). But such apologism largely rests on a tautology: Congress doesn’t have a sense of urgency to authorize the war because the public doesn’t, and the public doesn’t because the media have yawned with each new iteration.

It's a thing

Thousands of people are fleeing the conflict roiling Afghanistan, but American backpacker John Milton recently made the reverse journey to the war-ravaged country — for a holiday.

Armed with little more than travel guidebooks and an unflagging spirit of adventure, hardy bands of “war tourists” such as Milton visit Afghanistan’s pristine mountains and medieval ruins every year, ignoring warnings of kidnappings and bombings.

A Taliban attack on Thursday on a group of American and European tourists in western Herat province, which left some of them wounded, has brought into sharp focus such global thrill-seekers who imperil their lives to vacation in war zones.

“Visiting conflict zones and off-the-beaten-path destinations is so much more rewarding than the usual global tourist destinations,” said Milton, a 46-year-old former investment banker, who visited Afghanistan in June and has also vacationed in Somalia and North Korea.

“(My) family and friends think I am a fool to take such risks but… if you are not willing to risk the unusual, then you will have to settle for the ordinary. I just don’t want to die without having any scars!”

In Thursday’s attack a tourist bus carrying eight Britons, three Americans and one German national came under Taliban fire as it was being escorted through a volatile district in Herat by the Afghan army.

The attack, which left seven people wounded including the Afghan minibus driver, prompted scorn on social media, with many questioning why the tourists were travelling overland at a time when most Western embassies warn their citizens against all travel in the country.

The owner of Hinterland Travel, a Britain-based adventure travel agency which reportedly organized the tour, was also said to be among the injured and was pilloried for what was widely perceived as recklessness. He was not reachable for comment.

‘Worth the risk’

But warzone tourism is hardly limited to Afghanistan.

In 2013, Japanese trucker Toshifumi Fujimoto, bored with his humdrum job, jaunted through the war-torn Syrian city of Aleppo, telling AFP that his previous adventures had taken him through Yemen among other Middle East hotspots.

Such tourists are the exception rather than the norm, said James Willcox, founder of another England-based adventure travel operator Untamed Borders, which organizes trips to Afghanistan, Somalia and Somaliland.

Read more: http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/803693/war-tourism-in-afghanistan-adventure...
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oops

For years, rings of scammers in West Africa have stolen money from companies through a technique known as "Business Email Compromise," or BEC, in which they use internal corporate email accounts to execute fraudulent financial transactions. Or, in another approach known as “spoofing,” scammers have impersonated a CEO’s email from an external account to persuade an employee to send a wire transfer to their own bank account.

The SecureWorks experts say wire-wire, which is how criminals refer to the new type of attack, represents a more sophisticated approach to BEC that is harder to detect. Bettke and Stewart discovered the ring in February when five of the scammers self-infected their own computers with the same malware they were using to steal from others. Such errors are a surprisingly common way for security researchers to get an inside look at scammers’ operations.

For months, the malware automatically loaded screenshots and keystrokes from compromised computers to an open web database. One of the infected scammers also frequently trained new scammers, which revealed even more details about their techniques.