Drone Attacks

[Calliope]

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/IfF0sjv4_ps?hl=en_GB&amp;amp;version=3&quot; type=&quot;application/x-shockwave-flash&quot; width=&quot;420&quot; height=&quot;315&quot; allowscriptaccess=&quot;always&quot; allowfullscreen=&quot;true&quot;&gt;&lt;/embed&gt;&lt;/object&gt;" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/IfF0sjv4_ps?hl=en_GB&amp;amp;version=3&quot; type=&quot;application/x-shockwave-flash&quot; width=&quot;420&quot; height=&quot;315&quot; allowscriptaccess=&quot;always&quot; allowfullscreen=&quot;true&quot;&gt;&lt;/embed&gt;&lt;/object&gt;</a>

[Im2Sexy4MyPants]

Obama Told Aides He's 'Really Good At Killing People,' New Book 'Double Down' Claims

A new book on the 2012 presidential campaign claims that President Barack Obama told aides that he is "really good at killing people."

According to Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, the authors of Double Down: Game Change 2012, Obama made the comment while discussing drone strikes last year. CNN's Peter Hamby noted the anecdote in his review of the book for the Washington Post.

While the White House has not commented on the president's alleged remarks, senior Obama adviser Dan Pfeiffer on Sunday brushed off, but did not dispute, other reports from the book, including that campaign officials weighed replacing Vice President Joe Biden with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on the Democratic ticket.

"The president is always frustrated about leaks," Pfeiffer said on ABC's "This Week." "I haven't talked to him about this book. I haven't read it. He hasn't read it. But he hates leaks."

The quote comes in the context of both the drone program and the killing of Osama bin Laden by a special forces strike force. The passage also specifically references the death of another al Qaeda leader, Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed by a CIA drone strike in Yemen on Sept. 30, 2011.

Obama didn't need to run through this preamble. Everyone knew the litany of his achievements. Foremost on that day, with the fresh news about al-Awlaki, it seemed the president was pondering the drone program that he had expanded so dramatically and with such lethal results, as well as the death of Bin Laden, which was still resonating worldwide months later. "Turns out I'm really good at killing people," Obama said quietly, "Didn't know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine."
Al-Awlaki's 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman, who was an American citizen, was killed in a separate drone strike two weeks after his father.

"My grandson was killed by his own government," the teenager's grandfather Nasser al-Awlaki wrote in a New York Times op-ed in July. "The Obama administration must answer for its actions and be held accountable."

Obama, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, has overseen the expansion of the CIA's targeted killing program, which the Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates has killed between 2,528 and 3,648 individuals in Pakistan since 2004. That organization also estimates that between 416 and 948 of those killed in drone strikes were civilians -- an estimate disputed by the Obama administration.

Among those civilians, according to Amnesty International, was a Pakistani grandmother killed alongside 18 civilian laborers in a 2012 strike. The grandmother's family came to Washington, D.C., last month to testify before Congress and urge an end to drone warfare.

Despite the president's pledge to be more transparent about the drone program, the administration has continued to face criticism for its secrecy on the legal case for the strikes.

The Huffington Post's Matt Sledge reported last month that a coalition of human rights and journalism groups is putting pressure on the administration to release the opinions that underpin the program.

"While the government has an obligation to protect properly and appropriately classified information, democracy does not thrive when our national security programs and the intelligence community's actions are shrouded in secrecy," the groups wrote in the letter.
The groups hope the Obama administration will take the concrete step of instructing the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to release the legal opinions that provide the foundation for the U.S.' drone war and the NSA's surveillance operations.

In a May speech at the National Defense University, Obama defended the use of drones.

"Let us remember that the terrorists we are after target civilians, and the death toll from their acts of terrorism against Muslims dwarfs any estimate of civilian casualties from drone strikes," Obama said.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/03/obama-drones-double-down_n_4208815.html

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

This cartoon/comic-strip was published by the Los Angeles Times a couple of days ago....

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

from The Guardian....

Christmas gift: Attack of the Drones

Little hovering menaces are going to be this year’s must-have present
for men of a certain age, like Alex Renton. But, he asks, should we worry?

By ALEX RENTON | 8:30AM GMT - Sunday, 23 November 2014


BIRD’S EYE VIEW: an airborne drone sends a dog barking mad.
 — Photo: MARTIN HUNTER/The Observer.

POKING among the gadgets and gizmos at Marionville Models, the last shop in Edinburgh before the airport, you’ll find a generic type of man. Middle-aged, scuffed at the edges, grey-haired, anoraked — but with boyhood alive in his eyes in this treasure cave. He is pretty much me.

Like blokes in “adult books” shops, when those still existed, we try to ignore each other. You recognise the taint of solitary obsession. But conversation starts, mainly about gimbals and yaw. After I admit to crashing my borrowed DJI Phantom 2 two seconds into its maiden flight, the other droners (yes, that is a word) open up. I clearly pose very little status challenge.

If you ever got a balsa-wood aeroplane kit in your Christmas stocking and wound its rubber-band-driven propeller until it broke you will understand how men — and they usually are men — may end up a Richard Branson or a Howard Hughes. We may just spend more money in the model shop. This year it’s going on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), the serious droners’ name for a drone.

In Marionville Models, assistant Kevin recalibrates my machine’s compass while answering nonstop phone calls. These are all from men who want to buy drones. Two women do come in, to ask if they could buy something that their dad could use to fly his camera. Pretty soon Kevin is halfway to selling them a £2,700 DJI Spreading Wings, an octocopter or eight-engined drone with the looks of a toxic flying spider. It is capable of carrying a digital SLR camera. One like this is used by a Marionville customer who’s also into falconry. The drone films the birds in action while flying prey to them, suspended on a string.



Keith shows me his hexcopter, which is just being fine-tuned by Riccardo, Marionville’s owner. With six rotors and a remote-controlled GoPro camera it has cost him a little under £2,000. “I’m planning to use it for business,” Keith says. “I work on the rigs, using an ROV [remotely operated vehicle] underwater, so it’s pretty much the same sort of thing. Same controls.” What business? “Oh, building-trade stuff — inspecting gutters, roofs, chimneys. A lot cheaper to hire me and the DJI than three men and scaffolding.”

“But, you’re going to have some fun with it, as well?” “Oh aye,” says Keith. “I’ll be having a play with it.” The light of boyhood is on in his eyes, too.

Drones — remote-controlled flying objects with cameras — are likely to be this Christmas’s big present for boys, big and small, and next year’s biggest suburban annoyance. For £50 you can now buy a reasonably stable and efficient hovering flying machine that will take video of your neighbours in their garden — or through their bedroom window. These are small enough to fit into your hand.

There are drawbacks, of course. When my daughter and I first launched the HubSan X4 (£48, from RC Geeks) in our kitchen it inflicted an interesting wound on her finger and then flew behind the kitchen sink. Not many 10-year-olds can go to school and boast that they have been lacerated by a quadcopter, though the numbers are surely rising. More troubling was the hour we had to spend drilling a hole through the back of the kitchen unit to retrieve the tiny thing.

No doubt the British army has similar problems with the “nano-drones” it uses in combat. They are the same size as the HubSan and they do pretty much the same things — fly round corners, film things, fall down and get lost if there’s any wind. The big difference is that the army’s Black Hornets cost £125,000 each. They should have tried Maplin.

A few hours later, my daughter was exercising the dog with the HubSan, flying it backwards and forwards across an Edinburgh park. The drone’s eye view of the Jack Russell attacking it — other park-users will sympathise — is hilarious stuff, like a shark coming up to grab a swimmer. The daughter is convinced it can make it on Harry Hill’s You’ve Been Framed. There it may join such treasures as the drone that got into trouble while filming a wedding and gave the bride a black eye.



With a bigger budget, droning may get more grown-up. For under £300, you can buy an AR Parrot that will fly further and higher, and stream video footage by Wi-Fi to a smartphone or tablet. You download an app that shows you the drone’s view and a couple of on-screen joy sticks that you control with your thumbs. I was given one last Christmas, it also comes with a useful polystyrene propeller guard that the dog can bite. For about £650 there is the DJI Phantom Vision, with a 14-megapixel still and video camera: nearly broadcast quality.

It will stay in the air for 25 minutes, tolerating wind that would confound all but the sturdiest umbrella. It uses in-built GPS to fly around and over, say, the Queen’s palace at Holyrood. (At this point the Civil Aviation Authority starts to take an interest — more on that later.) Most important, if it goes out of range it will return home by itself. YouTube is full of cheeky and eye-popping footage taken by Phantoms. The most impressive yet to appear features film from inside an erupting volcano in Iceland. The drone survived but the GoPro camera attached to it melted.

The GoPro, a matchbox-sized HD video camera used by extreme-sports people, was carried into the volcano by a DJI Phantom 2. These sturdy Japanese quadcopters are doing for drone-flying what the Amstrad 8256 and Apple II did for home computing. Starting at £700, Phantom 2s are top of the Christmas-present-want-lists of most of the outdoor photographers and aeronautics geeks in the land. China-based DJI won’t release sales figures, though it says it has gone from 50 staff to 2,500 in the past five years. In November, Marionville was selling 10 of its quad or hexcopters a week and Riccardo says the rise of the drones has all but saved his business.


SKY'S THE LIMIT: The bestselling DJI Phantom 2 can carry a GoPro video camera with a motor drive.
It costs from £700. — Photo: MARTIN HUNTER/The Observer.

The DJI Phantoms are currently the most popular recreational drone in the world — so big in the United States that this summer the National Parks Service (NPS) issued a temporary ban on them and all unmanned aircraft at the parks and monuments it polices. In the States there’s a fad for “dronies” — aerial shots of yourself, posed somewhere cool. So many Phantom 2s have been videoing the great presidential faces of Mount Rushmore that one droner said a queueing system had to be started, to prevent collisions.

In an editorial, the New York Times welcomed the NPS’s stop to the “gnatlike advance of aeronautics” quoting John Muir, the “great evangelist” of America’s wilderness: “The gross heathenism of civilisation has generally destroyed nature.” The ban is only temporary because the freedom to pester nature and the wilderness by remote control is something no legislator can see a way of outlawing.

In 2006 Frank Wang, a 26-year-old Chinese electronics engineer, started DJI. A remote-controlled helicopter enthusiast since childhood, Wang thought he could do better than make toys “that were hard to control and easy to crash”. At the same time the key component, a lithium rechargeable battery, was getting cheaper — the price has dropped 40% this decade. From his Hangzhou apartment, Wang designed parts and kits for UAVs and then, in early 2013, launched the first Phantom. This would not only carry a camera capable of professional-quality images, it would also survive a crash and, if it lost its owner’s signal, return to where it had started. Before this, camera-carrying drones were the stuff of electronics home-build projects and military surveillance.

I came across drones for non-geeks first in 2011. Journalist friends in Asia and the Middle East reported photographers using them during urban rioting in the Arab Spring and in Thailand — as much to find out what was going on behind police lines and in no-go zones as for getting footage. That seemed a good idea. The same year I worked in Beirut for an NGO trying to help doctors and journalists operate in Syria’s civil war. During the bitter fighting in Homs, I spent time on the phone to military attachés in different embassies, trying to find out whose surveillance drones were hovering over the Baba Amr suburb.


FROM ABOVE: An IS video image of Kobane, taken by a drone. — Photo: AFP.

It was an important question. The humanitarian workers on the ground wanted to know if the eyes in the sky were friendly, or likely to be directing fire at attempts to move casualties. The answer I got was that nearly everyone — the Israelis, Americans, Syrians, Russians and Iranians — was flying unmanned aerial-surveillance aircraft over the city.

It seems a good principle that when governments have machinery that can gather information, journalists should have it, too. (Though as early as 2010 a $25,000 drone was used to get images of a Paris Hilton beach party in the south of France.) Faine Greenwood, a journalist based in Phnom Penh, uses a Phantom 2 for her work. She has also helped assess different drones for the Humanitarian UAV Network, a group that wants to develop the machines for emergency aid work, including delivery of supplies and medicines.

Greenwood, whose Masters thesis was on “drone culture”, has likened the ever-dropping price of UAV tech to “the peace dividend of the mobile phone wars”. She says: “They will provide us with a cheap, easy-to-use and incredibly versatile way of gathering data, from perspectives humans have rarely had much access to before.” The extraordinary drone footage of night-time Hong Kong, giving a unique idea of the scale of October’s democracy protests, shows how technology can challenge a state that doesn’t allow freedom of speech or reporting.



Many, of course, don’t see a human-rights benefit around drones. They are just another hi-tech pest. But drones are so useful that cracks in this stance are inevitable. The RSPB has already used one to check whether a marsh harrier had laid eggs in its remote nest. So far, talk of non-military drone delivery systems has not gone further than Amazon’s joke that it might start with UAVs if the traffic gets worse, and the Las Vegas hotel that delivers cocktails from bar to poolside by Phantom. But that is going to change. Drones are taking off, like it or not.

As with internet misbehaviour and legal highs, legislation is not keeping up with the advance of technology. I can’t fly my rebooted DJI Phantom 2 from the pavement outside Marionville Models because we’re within the four-mile exclusion zone around Edinburgh airport. Local wisdom says the police will spot any incursion. But I can do pretty much anything else I like with it, because there’s not really anyone to stop me. Last winter a sperm whale was stranded, dead, on a beach in the Firth of Forth — crowds gathered and the police rather officiously kept us back. So I flew my drone out over their heads to have a look at it and take some pictures.

That, the Civil Aviation Authority tells me, was illegal. It is their job to police man-made objects in the UK’s airspace, whether over your back garden or Heathrow. The law, a spokesman explains, is clear. No UAVs can be flown within 50-metres of a person, vehicle or building — unless those are “under your control”. So what about the back garden of my terraced house? “We would expect you to have told your neighbour. It’s not permitted if you’re within 50-metres of your neighbour’s house.”

There’s more. No flight is allowed within 150m of any congested area, which rules out half of Hyde Park. Also, you have to be in line of sight of the UAV at all times – which means it should be no more than 120m above you and 500m away. This is despite the fact that the cheaper models now give you real-time views from the drone’s camera, and control via GPS makes long flights out of sight ordinary — just like the drones the RAF is using to bomb Isis in Syria.

Breaking these rules is a criminal offence, but so far there have been only two convictions, both this year. One was for flying a drone over Alton Towers too close to the rides — a guilty plea and a £300 fine. In the other a TV shop owner in Barrow-in-Furness was fined £800 for flying the drone within 50m of a road bridge and near a BAE nuclear submarine site, an offence in itself. The villain, Robert Knowles, called his conviction “ridiculous”, saying that the drone had only got to these places because it had crashed and floated there down the river.

No UAV, furthermore, can be used for paid commercial activity without a certificate of competence, after a training course, and permission from the CAA. That, of course, turns nearly all the drone users who hire themselves out to builders and architects in Marionville Models and around the country into law breakers. Arguably, it would nab the BBC natural history unit — regular drone users, too. But the CAA has exempted them.

“We’re not naive,” sighs the CAA spokesman, “but we think the rules are proportionate and sensible. The Phantom 2 weighs 3kg: flying at 200ft, the remote goes, it drops out of the sky, that could hurt someone.” And, in case any droner is wondering, the CAA does monitor YouTube. That’s how they got the guy from Alton Towers.


TRAINING TOOL: Miami Athletics, using drones to capture scenes from their workouts.
 — Photo: Associated Press.

In order to photograph the fleet of drones acquired for this article, the Observer played it strictly by the book. The notion of drone-flying a Hibernian FC flag across Hearts of Midlothian’s ground midmatch, emulating a stunt pulled by an Albanian fan at a Serbia-Albania match in Belgrade two months ago, was abandoned. Instead we borrowed a country house on a secluded estate in East Lothian. On a golden November day, the drones danced around the neo-classical stonework, putting up pigeons that then tried to attack them. There were no accidents, because we had obtained the services of a competent pilot, Ian McKean.

Ian bought a Phantom 2 Vision earlier this year for TipTop Gardens, his landscape gardening business. “It’s really useful for surveying a property from above, getting pictures so you can then show a client where a bed is going to be.” He doesn’t charge for that service, so no CAA permission is needed.

But what about the fun, I wondered, looking for the boy-gleam in his eye. “Oh, I’ve got a project filming the changing seasons in the woods around my house. And there’s a friend who’s organising motocross events, and wants that filmed.” I can see there’s something else: an even more pleasing notion. Ian grins, the smile of a man who once loved a balsa-wood aeroplane. “My friend is a sheep farmer and we think we might use it for rounding up the animals. I’ve seen that on YouTube.”

• The DJI Phantom 2 Vision was lent by RcGeeks.co.uk (01737 457 404). Including a motorised gimbal for a GoPro camera, it sells for £707.50. Marionville Models, 42 Turnhouse Road, Edinburgh (MarionvilleModels.com; 0131 317 7010) sells drones and offers generous human help to those who can’t fly them very well.

UAVs: a buyer’s guide (in order of size)

Hubsan X4
Four engines, 20 minutes’ flight time. Best of the many nano-drones, equipped with video camera and memory. Use for snooping indoors and outdoors, harassing pets. Will fit through letter box. From £35.

Parrot AR Drone 2.0
Four engines, 30 minutes’ flight time, max speed 25mph. Controlled via Wi-Fi from smartphone, tablet or head-set. Low-res video or stills can be stored on board or streamed back. From £220.

DJI S1000
Spreading wings. Eight engines, 15 minutes’ flight time, max speed 45mph. Retractable landing gear. For professional still and video photography. From £2,800.

RAF MQ9 Reaper
One engine, 14 hours’ flight time, max speed 300mph. Cameras and up to four Hellfire air-to-ground missiles. Few legal restrictions as long as only non-UK citizens are killed. From £8m.

Related stories:

 • Drone permits issued to UK operators increase by 80% (26 October 2014)

 • Rise of the drones has police and regulators scrambling to catch up (01 August 2014)

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/nov/23/toy-drones-christmas-present-hobby

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

from the Wairarapa Times-Age....

Drone users to draw up rules

By SUSAN TEODORO | 6:51AM - Tuesday, January 13, 2015


WHAT'S THE BUZZ: Drone operator Toby Mills enjoys a reasonably “unregulated” sky but that
could change under new rules proposed.

NEW ZEALAND leaders in unmanned aerial vehicle (drone) technology will meet in Masterton in the lead-up to Wings over Wairarapa next week to discuss key issues facing the sector, including potential rule changes to improve regulation and increase safety.

The one-day symposium “Open Skies”, on January 16th at Solway Park, will be discussing new technology as well as the proposed regulations.

Wairarapa drone operator Toby Mills supports the suggested changes.

Mr Mills owns Noise Productions, a Carterton based sound company which provides a drone photography and video service.

“The new rules strike a good balance between keeping things open and having regulation,” Mr Mills said. “At the moment, there isn't a lot around the safety side of it.”

The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) documents explaining the proposals support Mr Mills' view, saying that increasing use of unmanned aircraft poses risks to safety.

Chris Thomson, aviation industry cluster manager at Callaghan Innovation, one of the conference's partner organisations, says use of drones is increasing, with the horticulture, oil and gas, forestry, TV and film industries finding roles for the gadgets.

Mr Thompson said the proposed risk-based rules were quite progressive compared to other countries and that the technology was becoming more widely used in New Zealand.

“There are many opportunities for unmanned aircraft technology to improve farm productivity, reduce operating costs and improve safety. Examples include remote stock monitoring, fence and equipment inspections, weed spraying and pasture management,” he said.

Associate Minister of Transport Craig Foss will be a keynote speaker at the conference.

CAA director Graeme Harris will talk about the proposed rules, which include:

 • The introduction of a certification scheme for some operators.

 • Establishing a two-tier risk-based regulatory structure, low risk and higher or uncertain risk. Lower risk craft are unlikely to require operator certification.

The CAA issued a notice in December about the changes for the sector, also known as remotely piloted aircraft systems.

Feedback on the proposals is due by the end of this month.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/wairarapa-times-age/news/article.cfm?c_id=1503414&objectid=11385592

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

from The Dominion Post....

Drones invading privacy say critics

A Masterton man filmed by his neighbour's drone
has raised privacy concerns with the police.

By CALEB HARRIS | 5:00AM - Monday, 26 January 2015


FROM ABOVE: Aviation NZ is developing a code of conduct for drones.

GRAHAM KERRISK was at home in Masterton when he noticed a small drone filming him through his window.

“This bloody thing is just sitting outside your window ... at about 10 feet. Then it slowly turned, allowing its camera to pan. I thought, this is bloody cheeky.”

He knew the multi-rotor remote-controlled craft belonged to his neighbour, who had shown off the new $1,600 toy a few days earlier. He knew it had a live video feed, high-resolution still camera and GPS.

He spoke to his neighbour and received an apology. But, still perturbed, Kerrisk went to Masterton police. What they told him disturbed him even more.

They said they had been expecting complaints about drones invading privacy. “They said they knew it was coming, but they didn't have a policy yet.”

The privacy commissioner says a drone filming someone in their home is just as illegal as any other invasion of privacy.

The commissioner's office recently received its first complaint about a drone invading privacy, and said in a blog post last week that, while the ubiquitous new technology caused alarm, it was no more of a threat to privacy than mobile phones or security cameras.

It was covered by laws protecting people's privacy, such as the law against “peeping or peering into dwellinghouse”, punishable with a $500 fine, and the law forbidding intimate recordings of people without their consent.

Wellington police spokesman Nick Bohm said police had not had a spike in complaints about drones, but those it did receive were referred to the Civil Aviation Authority. With submissions on the CAA's proposed drone safety closing at the end of the month, it would be “premature” to discuss privacy issues around drones before then.

But Kerrisk still wants to know more. “I thought, what are my legal rights if this thing comes back? Can I get the kids' shanghai out, can I hose it down with my garden hose?”

He tried to raise his concerns at a symposium in Masterton to coincide with the country's first drones trade show at Wings Over Wairarapa airshow last week, but was put off by the $100 entry fee. He is now considering other avenues.

Industry body Aviation NZ has a division governing drones. Chief executive Samantha Sharif said that, while the privacy commissioner had jurisdiction over breaches, the body took privacy seriously.

“We are developing a code of conduct for [drones], ensuring best practice, safe standards and complying with all of New Zealand legislation ... the privacy commissioner will need to think about where drone operations might cause privacy concerns.”

A CAA spokesman also referred privacy concerns around drones to the commissioner.

Commission spokesman Charles Mabbett said it was aware of the concerns, but laws to protect privacy were in place. “While the technology of visual recording keeps changing, the laws and principles around the collecting and disclosing of information remain as relevant as ever.”

• Game of drones

http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/65406446/Drones-invading-privacy-say-critics

[reality]

...mm seems Masturton is full of very strange people ..

[guest49]

...mm seems Masturton is full of very strange people ..

its a strange strange world

[nitpicker1]

re http://xtranewscommunity2.smfforfree.com/index.php/topic,13880.0/msg,161762.html


meanwhile consternation rules when a drone is found in a tree on the White House lawn! 


http://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/Device-Found-on-White-House-Grounds-289756051.html

[reality]

US drone kills 3 Al Qaeda fighters in first strike since Yemen leader resigned
Published January 26, 2015Associated Press

SANAA, Yemen –  A U.S. drone strike in Yemen, the first so far this year, killed three Al Qaeda fighters on Monday, signaling Washington's determination to keep targeting the global terror network's most lethal branch despite the resignation of the Yemeni president, a top U.S. ally, in the face of a Shiite rebel power grab.

Hours later, the State Department announced the U.S. Embassy in Yemen was closing to the public "until further notice" over security concerns as street gunbattles and political turmoil continue to roil this impoverished Arab country.

The drone strike was also the first such U.S. action since Shiite rebels known as Houthis placed embattled President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi and his Cabinet under house arrest last week in an attempt to force them to make political concessions. After reaching a tentative deal with the Houthis, the president and his government resigned in an effort to thwart rebel attempts to force more compromises.

Yemeni tribal and security officials in the central province of Marib said a missile hit a vehicle carrying three men near the boundary with neighboring Shabwa province, an Al Qaeda stronghold.

An Al Qaeda member told The Associated Press that one of the three slain fighters was Saudi while the other two were Yemenis. He identified the Saudi man as Awaid al-Rashidi, who he said was in his 30s and had been imprisoned in Saudi Arabia for seven years, apparently over terrorism charges. The two Yemeni Al Qaeda members killed in the strike were Abdel-Aziz al-Sanaani and Mohammed al-Jahmi from Marib's tribe of Jahmi, the member said.

Both Yemeni officials and the Al Qaeda member spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to media.

The Houthis, who claim to only want an equal share of power, had seized the capital of Sanaa and its central province in September and at least eight other provinces, after descending from their northern stronghold.

The prospect of a leaderless Yemen has raised concerns about Washington's ability to continue targeting Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, as the Yemeni branch is known. The group claimed the recent attack on a French satirical weekly and has mounted several failed attacks on the U.S. homeland.

The Houthis are staunch opponents of Al Qaeda but as the Shiite rebels push into Sunni-dominated areas they risk driving locals into the arms of the insurgents.

The strike came one day after U.S. President Barack Obama defended his counterterrorism strategy in Yemen, saying his approach "is not neat and it is not simple, but it is the best option we have." He ruled out deploying U.S. forces there.

Last year at least 23 drone strikes killed 138 Al Qaeda militants as well as some civilians, according to the Long War Journal, which tracks militant groups. U.S. officials rarely comment on the covert drone program.

The Houthis insist they merely want a new power-sharing arrangement with rival political factions. Critics say they want to retain Hadi as president in name only, while keeping an iron grip on power. They also accuse the Houthis of being a proxy of Iran, an allegation the rebels deny.

 http://www.foxnews.com/world/2015/01/26/us-drone-kills-3-in-first-strike-since-yemen-leader-resigned/?intcmp=HPBucket

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

from The Seattle Times....

Drone crashes into Space Needle
during New Year's Eve fireworks setup

By JESSICA LEE | 9:00PM PST - Wednesday, January 11, 2017



A FLYING DRONE struck the Space Needle's roof while pyrotechnicians were prepping for the annual fireworks display on New Year's Eve, representatives of the Seattle tower said on Wednesday.

A spokesman for the Seattle Police Department, which is investigating the collision, said such crashes are an increasing concern in the city. The Space Needle incident is the sixth significant investigation involving a drone since summer 2014, according to the department. Space Needle spokesman Dave Mandapat said the New Year's Eve crash was the third one in recent years at the landmark alone.

In that crash, captured in a video by the drone's recording, the drone didn't damage the Needle, Mandapat said. The aircraft sustained some damage, but his team was  still able to salvage the footage.

“We looked at the card within the drone to see where it originated and who might be the owner,” he said. About a half-dozen pyrotechnicians were on the roof, which is 575 feet high, when the crash occurred around 2 p.m.

The footage shows a panoramic view of Seattle and the city's waterfront while the drone hovers around the Space Needle, before gaining speed and crashing into the roof.

Mandapat said his team has turned the aircraft over to Seattle police to investigate and has alerted the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

Police spokesman Sergeant Sean Whitcomb said the crash marks a “proliferation” of drone incidents.

In June 2014, a woman told police she saw a drone hovering outside her downtown high-rise while she was topless. The drone owner was a Portland-based aerial photographer.

The following month, Space Needle security called police after guests reported seeing a small drone possibly crash into an observation-deck window. There was no damage to the Needle.

At the city's annual 2015 Pride Parade in June, a drone weighing about 2 pounds crashed into a downtown building and then struck a 25-year-old woman in the head. The aircraft's operator in that incident was charged with reckless endangerment.

In November that year, less than two miles away, a flying drone hit the giant Ferris wheel near downtown Seattle's waterfront. No injuries or damages were reported.

According to the FAA, which sets regulations on drones, more than 600,000 operators have registered their drones nationwide in the agency's online-registration system over the past year, the agency reported last month.

Mandapat said crews are frequently on the Needle's roof to ready it for holidays or other occasions. Weighing 3,700 tons, its observation deck sits at 520 feet and hosts more than 1 million people each year, according to its website.

The “T-Mobile New Year's at the Needle” fireworks display lasted roughly 10 minutes, with thousands of fireworks placed at 87 locations on the Space Needle. The annual display has helped Seattleites ring in the New Year for decades.

• Information from The Seattle Times archives was included in this report.

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More on this topic from The Seattle Times:

 • VIDEO: Drone crashes into Space Needle

http://www.seattletimes.com/photo-video/video/watch-drone-crashes-into-space-needle-during-new-years-eve-fireworks-setup