I probably shouldn?t laugh, because this is something that I can totally see happening to me. SMH. ?Cowboys safety?Barry Church will no longer choose Jolly Ranchers as his choice of sweets. ?Why? ?Because it caused to miss practice ? because of a jolly rancher injury. Whaaat? ?Yea. ?I?m sure his teammate are going to have all kinds of jokes for him. ?Details after the jump?
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Barry Church is finished with Jolly Ranchers. The candy-loving Dallas Cowboys safety missed a day of training camp because of a cherry-flavored one.
Church chipped a tooth on a piece of the hard candy about a week before reporting to camp. He felt pain off and on, but says it was unbearable when he woke up Monday morning.
The fourth-year pro missed a walkthrough and a full practice to get a root canal, but returned Tuesday.
Church says he ?caught a couple of zingers? from coaches and teammates and isn?t happy that he has to stay away from candy for a while.
Once he can eat candy again, Church says he?ll ?stick to the soft stuff.?
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel pauses during a news conference at the Pentagon, Wednesday, July 31, 2013. Hagel is warned that the Pentagon may have to mothball up to three Navy aircraft carriers and order more sharp reductions in the size of the Army and Marine Corps if Congress does not act to avoid massive budget cuts beginning in 2014. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel pauses during a news conference at the Pentagon, Wednesday, July 31, 2013. Hagel is warned that the Pentagon may have to mothball up to three Navy aircraft carriers and order more sharp reductions in the size of the Army and Marine Corps if Congress does not act to avoid massive budget cuts beginning in 2014. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, accompanied by Joint Chiefs Vice Chairman Adm. James Winnefeld, speaks during a news conference at the Pentagon, Wednesday, July 31, 2013. Hagel warned that the Pentagon may have to mothball up to three Navy aircraft carriers and order more sharp reductions in the size of the Army and Marine Corps if Congress does not act to avoid massive budget cuts beginning in 2014. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel speaks during a news conference at the Pentagon, Wednesday, July 31, 2013. Hagel warned that the Pentagon may have to mothball up to three Navy aircraft carriers and order more sharp reductions in the size of the Army and Marine Corps if Congress does not act to avoid massive budget cuts beginning in 2014. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
WASHINGTON (AP) ? Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel warned Wednesday that the Pentagon may have to mothball up to three Navy aircraft carriers and order additional sharp reductions in the size of the Army and Marine Corps if Congress doesn't act to avoid massive budget cuts beginning in 2014.
Speaking to Pentagon reporters, and indirectly to Congress, Hagel said that the full result of the sweeping budget cuts over the next 10 years could leave the nation with an ill-prepared, under-equipped military doomed to face more technologically advanced enemies.
In his starkest terms to date, Hagel laid out a worst-case scenario for the U.S. military if the Pentagon is forced to slash more than $50 billion from the 2014 budget and $500 billion over the next 10 years as a result of Congressionally-mandated automatic spending cuts.
The Pentagon has been ratcheting up a persistent drumbeat about the dire effects of the budget cuts on national defense, and as Congress continues to wrangle over spending bills on Capitol Hill.
Going from 11 to eight or nine carrier strike groups would bring the Navy to its lowest number since World War II. And the troop cuts would shear the Army back to levels not seen since at least 1950, eroding the military's ability to keep forces deployed and combat ready overseas.
Detailing options, Hagel said America may have to choose between having a highly capable but significantly smaller military and having a larger force while reducing special operations forces, limiting research and cutting or curtailing plans to upgrade weapons systems.
That second option, he said, would likely result in the U.S. military using older, less effective equipment against more technologically advanced adversaries. And it would have a greater impact on private defense companies around the country.
The U.S., said Hagel, risks fielding a military force that in the next few years would be unprepared due to a lack of training, maintenance and upgraded equipment.
And, even if the Pentagon chooses the most dramatic cuts, Hagel said it would still "fall well short" of meeting the reductions required by the automatic budget cuts, particularly during the first five years.
While noting that no final decisions have been made, Hagel laid out a few specific ideas under consideration.
He said that to achieve the savings by shrinking the force, the Pentagon might have to cut more than 100,000 additional soldiers from the Army ? which is already planning to go from a wartime high of about 570,000 to 490,000 by 2017. And the current plan to reduce the size of the Marine Corp to 182,000 from a high of about 205,000 could also be changed ? cutting it to as few as 150,000 Marines.
He added that the Air Force could lose as many as five combat air squadrons as well as a number of other bomber and cargo aircraft.
"This strategic choice would result in a force that would be technologically dominant, but would be much smaller and able to go fewer places and do fewer things, especially if crises occurred at the same time in different regions of the world," said Hagel.
Another option, he said, would be to make fewer cuts in the size of the force, and instead cancel or curtail many modernization programs.
In addition he said that the Pentagon is taking a close look at cuts to health care benefits, military housing allowances, cost-of-living adjustments and civilian pay raises.
Hagel repeated his plans ? announced two weeks ago ? to cut top Pentagon and military staff and spending by 20 percent. The savings, which will apply to his office, that of the Joint Chief's chairman and also the Pentagon headquarters offices of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps., could total between $1.5 billion and $2 billion over the next five years and will target personnel, including civilians and contractors.
The details Hagel described Wednesday are the result of a lengthy review by top Pentagon and military leaders that looked at the impact of budget cuts on the department and developed a series of options to deal with them.
The budget cuts stem from a law enacted two years ago that ordered the government to come up with $1.2 trillion in savings over a decade. The law included the threat of annual automatic cuts as a way of forcing lawmakers to reach a deal, but they have been unable to do so.
As a result, come January, the Pentagon faces a cut of $54 billion from current spending if Congress fails to reverse the automatic cuts, according to calculations by Capitol Hill budget aides. The base budget must be trimmed to $498 billion, with cuts of about 4 percent hitting already reduced spending on defense, nuclear weapons and military construction.
Congress has shown little inclination to undo the so-called sequester cuts, though talks between the White House and a handful of Senate Republicans have intensified in recent weeks.
Some lawmakers and staff aides say the new, deeper reductions in the Pentagon's budget to could be the jolt that prompts lawmakers to step back from the automatic cuts.
UT Austin researchers successfully spoof an $80 million yacht at seaPublic release date: 31-Jul-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Sandra Zaragoza zaragoza@utexas.edu 512-471-2129 University of Texas at Austin
AUSTIN, Texas This summer, a radio navigation research team from The University of Texas at Austin set out to discover whether they could subtly coerce a 213-foot yacht off its course, using a custom-made GPS device.
Led by assistant professor Todd Humphreys of the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at the Cockrell School of Engineering, the team was able to successfully spoof an $80 million private yacht using the world's first openly acknowledged GPS spoofing device. Spoofing is a technique that creates false civil GPS signals to gain control of a vessel's GPS receivers. The purpose of the experiment was to measure the difficulty of carrying out a spoofing attack at sea and to determine how easily sensors in the ship's command room could identify the threat.
The researchers hope their demonstration will shed light on the perils of navigation attacks, serving as evidence that spoofing is a serious threat to marine vessels and other forms of transportation. Last year, Humphreys and a group of students led the first public capture of a GPS-guided unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), or drone, using a GPS device created by Humphreys and his students.
"With 90 percent of the world's freight moving across the seas and a great deal of the world's human transportation going across the skies, we have to gain a better understanding of the broader implications of GPS spoofing," Humphreys said. "I didn't know, until we performed this experiment, just how possible it is to spoof a marine vessel and how difficult it is to detect this attack."
In June, the team was invited aboard the yacht, called the White Rose of Drachs, while it traveled from Monaco to Rhodes, Greece, on the Mediterranean Sea. The experiment took place about 30 miles off the coast of Italy as the yacht sailed in international waters.
From the White Rose's upper deck, graduate students Jahshan Bhatti and Ken Pesyna broadcasted a faint ensemble of civil GPS signals from their spoofing device a blue box about the size of a briefcase toward the ship's two GPS antennas. The team's counterfeit signals slowly overpowered the authentic GPS signals until they ultimately obtained control of the ship's navigation system.
Unlike GPS signal blocking or jamming, spoofing triggers no alarms on the ship's navigation equipment. To the ship's GPS devices, the team's false signals were indistinguishable from authentic signals, allowing the spoofing attack to happen covertly.
Once control of the ship's navigation system was gained, the team's strategy was to coerce the ship onto a new course using subtle maneuvers that positioned the yacht a few degrees off its original course. Once a location discrepancy was reported by the ship's navigation system, the crew initiated a course correction. In reality, each course correction was setting the ship slightly off its course line. Inside the yacht's command room, an electronic chart showed its progress along a fixed line, but in its wake there was a pronounced curve showing that the ship had turned.
"The ship actually turned and we could all feel it, but the chart display and the crew saw only a straight line," Humphreys said.
After several such maneuvers, the yacht had been tricked onto a parallel track hundreds of meters from its intended one the team had successfully spoofed the ship.
The experiment helps illustrate the wide gap between the capabilities of spoofing devices and what the transportation industry's technology can detect, Humphreys said.
Chandra Bhat, director of the Center for Transportation Research at The University of Texas at Austin, believes that the experiment highlights the vulnerability of the transportation sector to such attacks.
"The surprising ease with which Todd and his team were able to control a (multimillion) dollar yacht is evidence that we must invest much more in securing our transportation systems against potential spoofing," Bhat said.
It's important for the public and policymakers to understand that spoofing poses a threat that has far-reaching implications for transportation, Humphreys said.
"This experiment is applicable to other semi-autonomous vehicles, such as aircraft, which are now operated, in part, by autopilot systems," Humphreys said. "We've got to put on our thinking caps and see what we can do to solve this threat quickly."
###
As part of an ongoing research project, funding and travel expenses for this experiment was supported by UT Austin's Wireless Networking and Communications Group through the WNCG's Industrial Affiliates program.
YouTube: Watch an animation of the spoofing attack, titled "Spoofing on the High Seas." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctw9ECgJ8L0
YouTube Video (includes footage from yacht): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbWpFMXADAY
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
UT Austin researchers successfully spoof an $80 million yacht at seaPublic release date: 31-Jul-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Sandra Zaragoza zaragoza@utexas.edu 512-471-2129 University of Texas at Austin
AUSTIN, Texas This summer, a radio navigation research team from The University of Texas at Austin set out to discover whether they could subtly coerce a 213-foot yacht off its course, using a custom-made GPS device.
Led by assistant professor Todd Humphreys of the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at the Cockrell School of Engineering, the team was able to successfully spoof an $80 million private yacht using the world's first openly acknowledged GPS spoofing device. Spoofing is a technique that creates false civil GPS signals to gain control of a vessel's GPS receivers. The purpose of the experiment was to measure the difficulty of carrying out a spoofing attack at sea and to determine how easily sensors in the ship's command room could identify the threat.
The researchers hope their demonstration will shed light on the perils of navigation attacks, serving as evidence that spoofing is a serious threat to marine vessels and other forms of transportation. Last year, Humphreys and a group of students led the first public capture of a GPS-guided unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), or drone, using a GPS device created by Humphreys and his students.
"With 90 percent of the world's freight moving across the seas and a great deal of the world's human transportation going across the skies, we have to gain a better understanding of the broader implications of GPS spoofing," Humphreys said. "I didn't know, until we performed this experiment, just how possible it is to spoof a marine vessel and how difficult it is to detect this attack."
In June, the team was invited aboard the yacht, called the White Rose of Drachs, while it traveled from Monaco to Rhodes, Greece, on the Mediterranean Sea. The experiment took place about 30 miles off the coast of Italy as the yacht sailed in international waters.
From the White Rose's upper deck, graduate students Jahshan Bhatti and Ken Pesyna broadcasted a faint ensemble of civil GPS signals from their spoofing device a blue box about the size of a briefcase toward the ship's two GPS antennas. The team's counterfeit signals slowly overpowered the authentic GPS signals until they ultimately obtained control of the ship's navigation system.
Unlike GPS signal blocking or jamming, spoofing triggers no alarms on the ship's navigation equipment. To the ship's GPS devices, the team's false signals were indistinguishable from authentic signals, allowing the spoofing attack to happen covertly.
Once control of the ship's navigation system was gained, the team's strategy was to coerce the ship onto a new course using subtle maneuvers that positioned the yacht a few degrees off its original course. Once a location discrepancy was reported by the ship's navigation system, the crew initiated a course correction. In reality, each course correction was setting the ship slightly off its course line. Inside the yacht's command room, an electronic chart showed its progress along a fixed line, but in its wake there was a pronounced curve showing that the ship had turned.
"The ship actually turned and we could all feel it, but the chart display and the crew saw only a straight line," Humphreys said.
After several such maneuvers, the yacht had been tricked onto a parallel track hundreds of meters from its intended one the team had successfully spoofed the ship.
The experiment helps illustrate the wide gap between the capabilities of spoofing devices and what the transportation industry's technology can detect, Humphreys said.
Chandra Bhat, director of the Center for Transportation Research at The University of Texas at Austin, believes that the experiment highlights the vulnerability of the transportation sector to such attacks.
"The surprising ease with which Todd and his team were able to control a (multimillion) dollar yacht is evidence that we must invest much more in securing our transportation systems against potential spoofing," Bhat said.
It's important for the public and policymakers to understand that spoofing poses a threat that has far-reaching implications for transportation, Humphreys said.
"This experiment is applicable to other semi-autonomous vehicles, such as aircraft, which are now operated, in part, by autopilot systems," Humphreys said. "We've got to put on our thinking caps and see what we can do to solve this threat quickly."
###
As part of an ongoing research project, funding and travel expenses for this experiment was supported by UT Austin's Wireless Networking and Communications Group through the WNCG's Industrial Affiliates program.
YouTube: Watch an animation of the spoofing attack, titled "Spoofing on the High Seas." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctw9ECgJ8L0
YouTube Video (includes footage from yacht): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbWpFMXADAY
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
In this July 30, 2013 photo, Army Pfc. Bradley Manning is escorted out of a courthouse in Fort Meade, Md. Few Americans in living memory have emerged from obscurity to become such polarizing public figures _ admired by many around the world, fiercely denigrated by many in his homeland. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
In this July 30, 2013 photo, Army Pfc. Bradley Manning is escorted out of a courthouse in Fort Meade, Md. Few Americans in living memory have emerged from obscurity to become such polarizing public figures _ admired by many around the world, fiercely denigrated by many in his homeland. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
Army Pfc. Bradley Manning is escorted out of a courthouse in Fort Meade, Md., Tuesday, July 30, 2013, after receiving a verdict in his court martial. Manning was acquitted of aiding the enemy ? the most serious charge he faced ? but was convicted of espionage, theft and other charges, more than three years after he spilled secrets to WikiLeaks. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
FILE - In this July 26, 2013 photo, Zach Callahan, right, and supporters of U.S. Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, march outside Fort Lesley J. McNair, in Washington. Few Americans in living memory have emerged from obscurity to become such polarizing public figures _ admired by many around the world, fiercely denigrated by many in his homeland. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta, File)
FILE - In this Jan. 18, 2011 file photo, unidentified Occupy London protesters demonstrate outside the High Court following news that the City of London Corporation has won its legal bid to evict anti-capitalist protesters from outside St Paul's Cathedral, in London. Few Americans in living memory have emerged from obscurity to become such polarizing public figures _ admired by many around the world, fiercely denigrated by many in his homeland. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis, File)
FORT MEADE, Md. (AP) ? It is now up to a military judge to determine if Army Pfc. Bradley Manning will spend the rest of his life in prison even after being acquitted of the most serious charge against him for his release of thousands of documents to the website WikiLeaks.
The sentencing phase of the soldier's court-martial began Wednesday. He faces up to 136 years in prison, though his attorneys have asked the military judge to merge two of his espionage convictions and two of his theft convictions. If Army Col. Denise Lind agrees to do so, he would face up to 116 years in prison.
The former intelligence analyst was convicted of 20 of 22 charges for sending hundreds of thousands of government and diplomatic secrets to WikiLeaks, but he was found not guilty of aiding the enemy, which alone could have meant life in prison without parole.
"We're not celebrating," defense attorney David Coombs said. "Ultimately, his sentence is all that really matters."
Military prosecutors said they would call as many as 20 witnesses for the sentencing phase. The government said as many as half of the prosecution witnesses would testify about classified matters in closed court. They include experts on counterintelligence, strategic planning and terrorism.
The judge prohibited both sides from presenting evidence during trial about any actual damage the leaks caused to national security and troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, but lawyers will be allowed to bring that up at sentencing.
The release of diplomatic cables, warzone logs and videos embarrassed the U.S. and its allies. U.S. officials warned of dire consequences in the days immediately after the first disclosures in July 2010, but a Pentagon review later suggested those fears might have been overblown.
The judge also restricted evidence about Manning's motives. Manning testified during a pre-trial hearing he leaked the material to expose U.S military "bloodlust" and diplomatic deceitfulness, but did not believe his actions would harm the country. He didn't testify during the trial, but he could take the stand during the sentencing phase.
Lisa Windsor, a retired Army colonel and former judge advocate, said the punishment phase would focus on Manning's motive and the harm that was done by the leak.
"You're balancing that to determine what would be an appropriate sentence. I think it's likely that he's going to be in jail for a very long time," said Windsor, now in private practice in Washington.
The judge, Army Col. Denise Lind, deliberated three days before reaching her verdict in a case involving the largest leak of documents in U.S. history. The case drew worldwide attention as supporters hailed Manning as a whistleblower and the U.S. government called him an anarchist computer hacker and attention-seeking traitor.
The verdict denied the government a precedent that freedom of press advocates had warned could have broad implications for leak cases and investigative journalism about national security issues.
Whistleblower advocates and legal experts had mixed opinions on the implications for the future of leak cases in the Internet age.
The advocacy group Reporters Without Borders said the verdict was a chilling warning to whistleblowers, "against whom the Obama administration has been waging an unprecedented offensive," and threatens the future of investigative journalism because intimidated sources might fall quiet.
However, another advocate of less government secrecy, Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, questioned whether the implications will be so dire, given the extraordinary nature of the Manning case.
"This was a massive hemorrhage of government records, and it's not too surprising that it elicited a strong reaction from the government," Aftergood said.
"Most journalists are not in the business of publishing classified documents, they're in the business of reporting the news, which is not the same thing," he said. "This is not good news for journalism, but it's not the end of the world, either."
Glenn Greenwald, the journalist, commentator and former civil rights lawyer who first reported Edward Snowden's leaks of National Security Agency surveillance programs, said Manning's acquittal on the charge of aiding the enemy represented a "tiny sliver of justice."
But WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, whose website exposed Manning's spilled U.S. secrets to the world, saw nothing to cheer in the mixed verdict.
"It is a dangerous precedent and an example of national security extremism," he told reporters at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, which is sheltering him. "This has never been a fair trial."
Federal authorities are looking into whether Assange can be prosecuted. He has been holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden on sex-crimes allegations.
The material WikiLeaks began publishing in 2010 documented complaints of abuses against Iraqi detainees, a U.S. tally of civilian deaths in Iraq, and America's weak support for the government of Tunisia ? a disclosure Manning supporters said helped trigger the Middle Eastern pro-democracy uprisings known as the Arab Spring.
To prove aiding the enemy, prosecutors had to show Manning had "actual knowledge" the material he leaked would be seen by al-Qaida and that he had "general evil intent." They presented evidence the material fell into the hands of the terrorist group and its former leader, Osama bin Laden, but struggled to prove their assertion that Manning was an anarchist computer hacker and attention-seeking traitor.
King Richard III's rediscovered resting place is turning out more mysteries this summer. Excavators finally lifted the heavy lid of a medieval stone coffin found at the site in Leicester, England, only to reveal another lead coffin inside.
The "coffin-within-a-coffin" is thought to have been sealed in the 13th or 14th century ? more than 100 years before Richard, an infamous English king slain in battle, received his hasty burial in 1485.
The team of archaeologists from the University of Leicester thinks this grave in the Grey Friars monastery might contain one of the friary's founders or a medieval knight. [Gallery: In Search of the Grave of Richard III]
"The inner coffin is likely to contain a high-status burial ? though we don't currently know who it contains," reads a statement from the university.
The outer stone coffin measures about 7 feet (2.1 meters) long and 2 feet (0.6 meters) wide at the head and 1 foot (0.3 meters) at the feet. Eight people were needed to remove its lid.
The lead funerary box inside has been carried off to the university, where researchers will conduct tests to determine the safest way to open it without damaging the remains. But so far, they've been able to get a look at the feet through a hole in the bottom of the inner coffin.
The archaeologists suspect the grave may belong to one of Grey Friar's founders: Peter Swynsfeld, who died in 1272, or William of Nottingham, who died in 1330. Records also suggest "a knight called Mutton, sometime mayor of Leicester," was buried at the site. This name may refer to the 14th-century knight Sir William de Moton of Peckleton, who died between 1356 and 1362, the researchers say.
"None of us in the team have ever seen a lead coffin within a stone coffin before," archaeologist Mathew Morris, the Grey Friars site director, said in a statement. "We will now need to work out how to open it safely, as we don't want to damage the contents when we are opening the lid."
Richard III, the last king of the House of York, reigned from 1483 until 1485, when he was killed in battle during the War of Roses. He received a quick burial at the Grey Friars monastery in Leicester as his defeater, Henry Tudor, ascended to the throne.
Richard's rise to power was controversial. His two young nephews, who had a claim to the throne, vanished from the Tower of London shortly before Richard became king, leading to rumors that he had them killed. After his death, Richard was demonized by the Tudor dynasty and his reputation as a power-hungry, muderous hunchback was cemented in William Shakespeare's play "Richard III." Meanwhile, Grey Friars was destroyed in the 16th century during the Protestant Reformation, and its ruins became somewhat lost to history.
Setting out to find the lost king, archaeologists started digging beneath a parking lot in Leicester last summer where they believed they would find Grey Friars. They soon uncovered the remains of the monastery and a battle-ravaged skeleton that was later confirmed through a DNA analysis to be that of Richard III.
In an effort to learn more about the church where Richard was buried ? as well as the other people buried alongside him ? a fresh dig at the site began in early July.
A King Richard III visitor center is being built at the site and arrangements are being made to reinter the king's bones. The Cathedral of Leicester recently unveiled its $1.5 million (?1 million) plan to rebury the monarch in a new raised tomb inside the church, with a week of celebrations leading up to the reinterment.
Follow Megan Gannon on Twitter and Google+.Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.
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Public release date: 31-Jul-2013
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