According to WordPress, I missed numbering one of these 113. The auto-post-numberer adds a ‘-2’ to duplicate names, so if I hadn’t renamed this one, it would have been 112-2-2.

Anyway, on to the news. Or, in some cases, the olds.

State-Sponsored Hijacking in Belarus

• Ryanair 4978 receives a fake bomb threat from Belarussian authorities, backed up by a MiG-29 – Because a dissident was on board.
• The UK, ex-EU, appears to be growing a pair – I think the EU later joined the UK in doing something similar.

Defense

• MLOK SA80 – How modern of them!
• Amphibious MC-130J is a dumb way to make a seaplane – It’s a C-130 floatplane, and it looks as silly as it sounds.
• Also on the shopping list, a high-speed VTOL plane
• Elbit strikes back on its BMS security
• I heard you like drones, so I put drones in your drones – Along with self-defense options from General Atomics, an article on how to keep drones relevant in a peer-on-peer conflict. By which The Drive seems to mean a conflict between peers with developed anti-drone capabilities, given how effective they were in the Armenia-Azerbaijan dustup.
• AReS is a strike HARM – I think? It’s not super-clear. Anyway, it launches from a shipping container, and might have more stages than the ‘one’ of the HARM.
• Beijing knows exactly what it’s saying when it rebuffs Washington’s request for high-level military talks – You might need paywall eliminator for this one.
• LockMart goes woke – At least in its executive training.
• Ronald Reagan, forward-deployed in Japan, will make a patrol to the Middle East to cover the Afghanistan withdrawal – Somehow, that feels like a bad idea to me, like the kind of bad idea people put in the history books under ‘reasons the war started’.

Science and Technology

• The story of the microwave, alternate edition: mini-documentary – Featuring the world’s best-preserved centenarian (or near-centenarian; I forget).
• Install a Russian keyboard to prevent ransomware attacks – Seriously. Russian hackers try to avoid hitting Russians, because they don’t want to attract the attention of local law enforcement, so they use ‘has a Russian keyboard’ as a proxy.
• Motorcycle airbag vests as a service – Sorry, you missed your payment! Now your airbag vest thing no longer works. On the one hand, I guess fair is fair. On the other hand, not everything ought to be sold on a subscription model.
• David Hilbert and the Fifth Roots of Unity – Mathematicians have answered one of Hilbert’s Big Questions, about constructions analogous to roots of unity for number systems beyond the rationals.

Guns

• Ammo shortage will stretch out for years, say manufacturers – On the other hand, I’ve heard anecdotes that primers are getting easier to find.
• H und K patents some manner of compact handgun – Little late to the party.
• New guns are hard to make – Gun Jesus tells you why.

Grab Bag

• Naming the elements in Chinese is really hard
• The word ‘lox’ has meant ‘salmon’ for 8,000 years
• Professional distance runner: a job for Ethiopian immigrants – Not a snide headline; actually just a description of the story.
• Amazon abandons arbitration clause in its terms of service – … because enterprising lawyers managed to make the process of filing for arbitration efficient enough that it started hitting Amazon’s bottom line. It’s like when Tom Brady plays the Ravens—just root for injuries.
• The Harmonica Yokocho is a 30,829 square-foot section of Tokyo supporting 100 shops, restaurants, and bars – I keep on telling you, the cyberpunk future is now.
• Things are rough for Boeing in the wake of removing the engineers from control and running the company like any other corporate behemoth – I mean, in the wake of the 737 MAX safety scandal.