Saudi Arabian air defense has intercepted one of two ballistic missiles fired from the territory of Yemen, according to AFP. The second ballistic missile landed in a desert area east of the Saudi city of Najran, the Saudi-led coalition said in a statement.

No injuries have been reported so far.

Earlier this week, several Saudi targets in Yemen were said to have come under the rebels’ fire. At least three Qahir-1 rockets were used to shell various bases and camps, according to Al Manar.

The attack comes as a UN-negotiated ceasefire announced in Yemen on Tuesday is being violated by all parties, putting an ongoing peace negotiation in Switzerland in jeopardy.

MOSCOW, December 14. /TASS/. Russian servicemen have practised fighting against militants using the tactics of the Taliban and Islamic State (IS) terrorist organization during snap checks, Chief of General Staff and Deputy Defense Ministry Army General Valery Gerasimov said on Monday.

"Military personnel practised fighting against illegal armed groups using the tactics of the Taliban and Islamic State. In the future, the practice of holding such events of operational and military drills and snap checks will be continued," Gerasimov told a briefing for foreign military attaches accredited in Russia.

"Up to 300,000 people participated in snap checks. Districts were regrouped to create military unit groupings in threatened areas," he continued. He reminded that snap checks were held in the Northern Fleet, Aerospace Defense Forces, Southern, Central and Western military districts.

is that BBC Russia thing on the helicopter a watermark from BBC Russia or does that mean something else and is not a watermark ?

Written by Akram Abu Abs exclusively for SouthFront

December 9, the commander-in-chief of Blackwater/Academi mercenaries in Yemen was killed in al-Omari, Ta’izz province. Some Australian, British and French advisers and commanders, plus half a dozen Colombians, were also killed and several wounded and the death toll has increased to 15.

December 10, the Saudi coalition suffered an embarrassing defeat in a powerful attack on Mount Hayd Al-Baqr, overlooking Dabeen and Juraybah, located between Ta’izz and Al-Lahj, resulting in losing control of this site and the Al-‘Arous Camp and the nearby village of Al-Shaqab, to the Houthi alliance. Hence, the Houthi alliance have cutoff the last supply line to Ta’izz.

December 11, 8th Saudi warship was reportedly destroyed in a rocket and missile attack.

December 11, the naval forces of the Saudi coalition captured the Red Sea island of Jazirat al-Hanish al-Kabir near the Bab al-Mandab Strait connecting the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden. After it was captured earlier this year by the Houthi alliance, it was converted into an armed base and arms depot.

December 11, the Saudi coalition launched airstrikes on its mercenaries in Al Marwan area, killing and wounded many and destroying several military vehicles.

December 12, missile and artillery fire from the Houthi alliance destroyed Saudi military sites in Najran, Jizan and Asir provinces. A large number of Saudi troops were reportedly killed and many more wounded.

December 12, the Houthi alliance destroyed a battle tank and killed two soldiers on a Saudi military camp in Lahij. A Saudi airbase in the Asir region also came under a missile attack.

December 12, an F-16 fighter jet of the Saudi coalition forces crash-landed as it tried to land at the al-Anad airbase, and the aircraft was completely destroyed when a missile it was carrying, exploded.

December 12, Saudi coalition fighter jets mistakenly targeted a military camp in al-Marwan area, mistaking it for their enemy. Dozens were killed or injured and experts believe that their pilots lack military experience.

December 13, the Houthi alliance launched a Qaher-I surface-to-surface missile onto the Saudi King Khaled military base in Khamis Msheit and a Saudi military camp in Jizan.

December 13, the Houthi alliance killed over 80 Saudi-coalition troops, including 42 Academi (Blackwater) mercenaries, in a ballistic missile attack on a Saudi military headquarters in the western Bab-el-Mandeb area of Ta’izz. Another reports said the attack left nearly 150 casualties. Two Patriot missile systems, three Apache helicopters, more than 50 military vehicles, all belonging to the US Academi/Blackwater mercenaries were also destroyed.

December 14, the Houthi alliance reportedly targeted and destroyed two more Saudi warships in the Al-Mukha coastal waters in the province of Ta’izz near Bab al-Mandab Strait.

December 14, the Hothi alliance forces hit Jizan airport in Southern Saudi Arabia with their new Qaher-I surface-to-surface ballistic missiles.

December 15, at least ten civilians were killed and 20 others injured in the Saudi coalition airstrike in Harad, Hajjah province. They also pounded several areas in al-Sharija, Ta’izz province, though there were no immediate reports of casualties.

December 15, the Houthi alliance targeted a military camp in the al-Karsh district, Sa’ada, destroying two military vehicles. They also fired dozens of rockets at two Saudi military bases in the Zabnah district, Najran, with no casualties reported. At least 10 people were killed and 20 others injured in airstrikes in Bani al-Haddad village in Harad, Hajjah province.

“The bad guys on the border have lots of money and what they are putting money into is into spoofing and jamming GPS systems. We’re funding some advances so we can counter this,” Timothy Bennett, a science-and-technology program manager at the DHS, the body that oversees CBP, told Defense One.

“It’s the spoofing that’s bad. That we’ve got to look into. They can make you think you are someone else,” Bennett explained. “For small [UAVs], it’s a bigger deal. They can’t do the secure GPS. There are a lot of anti-jamming systems right now that can detect it but they’re big and heavy. So you’ve got something that weighs 25 pounds, you add five pounds, and it affects its payload or it affects its duration. So the big thing now is getting that [detection] capability on these small ones in a way that doesn’t add weight to it.”

Some good news came to Ukraine’s famous, albeit struggling aircraft manufacturer, Antonov, today. Saudi Arabia has announced that they are going to purchase 30 of the company’s new AN-178 jet transports. This is the first military order for the type and the largest single order to date.

The An-178 is capable of carrying 32,000 pounds over a range of 620 miles, or 20,000 pounds over a range of 2,500 miles. It can cruise at 445 knots and has a rear cargo ramp for easy loading. It features an airframe that makes large use of composite materials and also has a fly-by-wire flight control system with a back-up mechanical one.

As part of the An-178 deal, Saudi Arabia’s Taqnia Aeronautics will jointly market the aircraft to other Arab gulf states alongside Antonov. The two companies have increasingly cooperated on aviation projects in recent years, including developing a special missions variant of the An-148 airliner according to Flightglobal.com.

The sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the Colombians' experience fighting leftist guerrillas and drug traffickers in their home country made them attractive recruits for the UAE, whose relatively inexperienced army is part of an Arab coalition helping Yemen's government fight a war against Huthi rebels.

No Colombians have been killed in Yemen so far, he added, denying recent reports from rebel-linked media outlets of Colombians killed in combat.

But according to the December trailer for the sequel Independence Day: Resurgence, the American military did very little soul searching in the interceding two decades. “I spent 20 years trying to get us ready for this,” Goldblum’s Levinson says in the teaser as we see the first images of the new flying machines.

“We used our technology to strengthen our planet,” he adds. “But it won’t be enough.”

But the Pentagon is already moving in different directions for its so-called sixth generation of fighter jets. And the biggest change could be putting a machine in charge. While by no means perfect, drones offer major benefits over manned aircraft. Their computers brain don’t get tired or hungry — except for fuel. Combined with mid-air aerial refueling, a pilotless plane could theoretically stay up in the air indefinitely.

Unmanned systems, particularly autonomous ones, have to be the new normal in ever-increasing areas,” U.S. Navy Secretary Ray Mabus told attendees at the Sea-Air-Space 2015 Exposition. The F-35 “almost certainly will be the last manned strike fighter aircraft the Department of the Navy will ever buy or fly.”

But as computerized gear becomes more and more omnipresent, this will be a problem for manned aircraft, too. The Pentagon has admitted it’s worried that even a simulated cyber attack could break its new F-35s.

In the same vein, it would be hard for Independence Day: Resurgence to evoke the same sense of tension and dire circumstances as its predecessor without swarms of underdog human pilots in harm’s way … even if willfully putting them in such danger would be a crazy decision.

Throughout 2015 Chinese authorities took a number of steps to professionalize their cyber warfare forces. This process began with a series of frank admissions by the Chinese of not only their cyber capabilities, but also their future plans for their cyber forces. For one thing, following a decade of blanket denials, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) have now explicitly confirmed the existence of both civilian and military network warfare units within the Chinese government. In May this year, China’s Ministry of National Defense expressed its desire to reorganize its forces to win “informationized local wars” in its first published white paper on military strategy.

These moves to develop a more focused cyber warfare force paralleled a campaign to solidify and enforce the idea of “Internet sovereignty.” First brought to the global stage in November 2014 during the inaugural World Internet Conference, the concept of Internet sovereignty has been vigorously pushed by Chinese diplomats on numerous occasions throughout 2015. In January, acting through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, China formally submitted a proposal to the United Nations for an International Code of Conduct on Information Security. The proposal reaffirmed the rights of states to exercise control over Internet content and infrastructure within their borders in the interests of their national security. At a July meeting of the World Summit of the Information Society, China’s UN ambassador again advocated a strong role for states in Internet governance stressing that they should not be marginalized by independent enterprises and NGOs.

The most illustrative example of this occurred in March, when Chinese hackers used malicious code to hijack the accounts of millions of users of the popular Chinese search engine Baidu. The infected computers were unknowingly directed to launch a massive, week-long DDoS attack against the servers of Github and its partner sites GreatFire and CN-NYTimes. The attacks were the first known use of the “Great Cannon,” a weapon experts believe allows China’s censors to not just filter information entering China but to also selectively and discretely attack the sources of undesirable Web content.

Virtual private networks (VPNs), long in the cross hairs of Chinese authorities, were also prime targets for offensive cyberattacks this year. Many popular services such as VyprVPN, Astrill, and StrongVPN have reportedly been blocked outright or substantially impaired. Watering hole attacks have also been used against certain sites as has new malicious software capable of bypassing anonymity settings of VPNs and the Tor network in order to siphon the personal data of users of certain websites. A number of hacking collectives have also weaponized VPN servers marketed to local Chinese, using seemingly legitimate Web traffic to launch attacks on foreign organizations and governments.

Historians may look back on 2015 as an important inflection point in the development of China’s national cybersecurity strategy.

There was a simulated prisoner of war (POW) camp portion of the training. I was no longer Brandon Webb. I was now War Criminal 53.

There were two rules here, and you learned them pretty fast. “Grab your rags!” and “Eyes to the ground!” The first meant grab the sides of your pants so the guards could see your hands at all times.

The second was to ensure that we war criminals did not look around and gain any awareness of our surroundings that we might use to our advantage later.

My most vivid memory of time in the camp was being crammed into another tiny box, this one of wood and no more than three feet in all dimensions. This wonderful location would be my accommodations for the next few hours while they subjected me to the interrogation portion. (Be careful what you wish for.)

During the course of these three days we learned a lesson that has been learned the hard way by real POWs: in any prisoner of war situation, the goal is to survive with honor. More than a few people failed out for completely losing their cool or getting “executed” for acting out.

Turkish security forces on Friday pressed on with a relentless operation to root out Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) militants from two urban centres in the troubled southeast.

The military operations against the PKK - which is classified as a terrorist group by Turkey, the EU, the US and a number of other countries - has reportedly left at least 62 militants dead and angered Kurdish representatives.

With the crackdown now in a fourth day, a Turkish soldier was killed in intense clashes with the PKK, the army's first fatality in the operation, the army said.

The operation in the towns of Cizre and Silopi in Sirnak province began on Tuesday, backed by blanket curfews and air power, with 36 militants killed on Thursday alone, according to the army.

So far, 56 militants have been killed in Cizre and six in Silopi, the army said in a statement.

You can produce crude home-made firearms of varying accuracy and quality by yourself with basic tools and supplies. The hard part is finding bullets.

These bullets are fairly simple and fast to make. In the video, Heeszel says it took about an hour to print the first slug he shoots. He made it on his friend Tony Griffy's $800 3D printer, Heeszel told Wired. Griffy, known on YouTube as ArtisanTony, describes himself as "a conservative libertarian that believes in small government and self reliance" on his page. Many of his videos are devoted to the process of printing the original 3D-printed gun, the Liberator.

The Drone Slaying Laser

Boeing is developing a laser cannon designed to destroy drones. Called the Compact Laser Weapon System, it is a lighter, smaller, easily transportable version of Boeing’s powerful High Energy Laser Mobile Demonstrator.

Aircraft Lasers

Lockheed Martin has been testing a laser turret for fighter jets that fly near the speed of sound. With the 360-degree turret mounted on aircraft, the laser can fire in any direction.

Hellhound Vehicle with Mounted Laser

A new military vehicle equipped with a laser weapon was revealed by Northrop Grumman this October.

ADAM Lasers Blasting Boats

ADAM, or is Area Defense Anti-Munitions, is a laser weapon system designed to take out threats at sea. This is a 30-kilowatt, single-mode fiber laser weapon system.

According to a decision announced Wednesday by Turkey’s ambassador to Qatar, Ankara will have its first Middle East military base in Qatar, with 3,000 troops to be stationed in the country.

Qatar is home to the largest U.S. air base in the Middle East, where about 10,000 military personnel are placed. Currently, 100 Turkish troops are providing the Qatari army with military training.

However, “over time ensuring the safety of the military base and its personnel will become a liability for Turkey.” 

Polish military police have raided a Nato-affiliated counterintelligence centre in Warsaw in the latest of a series of moves by the country’s new rightwing government to consolidate its hold on power.

The raid took place at 1.30am on Friday at the temporary offices of the Nato Counter Intelligence Centre of Excellence. According to the Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper, senior aides of Antoni Macierewicz, the defence minister, accompanied by military police, entered the building using a duplicate key.

The centre’s night staff called the director, Col Krzysztof Dusza, but he was prevented from entering. A defence ministry spokesman said Dusza had not responded to an order to step down from the post.

Ankara’s deployment to the outskirts of Mosul is a reaction to the successful campaigns by Iran, Russia, Syria, Iraq, and Hezbollah – the security alliance also referred to as the «4+1» – in weakening the ISIL. For the first time ever, the Turkish military had entered Iraq’s northern region without the justification of fighting Kurds. Calculating that the Iraqi federal government will be able to refocus its attention on the territorial dispute with the Kurdistan Regional Government, the Turkish deployments are meant to help the Kurdistan Regional Government consolidate the territory and energy reserves it opportunistically annexed from the Iraqi federal government in 2014; it was also revealed by Ankara that it intended to dispatch Turkish soldiers and military equipment to Soran and Qala Cholan near the Iranian border.

The Turkish military movements inside Iraq are additionally tied to petro-politics and the protection of energy supplies from Iraqi Kurdistan. The Turkish deployment to Bashiqa took place right after Russian airstrikes weakened the ISIL’s oil smuggling infrastructure. Undoubtedly, the subject of oil was mentioned between Barzani and Turkish leaders, because of Bazani’s involvement in Turkey’s illegal oil exporting business.