* The White House issued an Executive Order last Friday to delegate export control authority of defense articles to the Secretary of State. Changes to the U.S. Munitions List (USML) are on the way, to be enacted after a period of congressional notification.
* North Korea’s state owned media says the country has cancelled the 1953 armistice, though the country made similar threats in years past: AP | WaPo. This comes as South Korea’s President Park Geun-hye has been facing difficulties putting her cabinet in place. Kim Byung-kwan, her nominee for defense minister, has not received parliamentary approval yet.
* Air Force Times reports that US Air Force Central Command (AFCENT) scrubbed data on attacks launched from UAVs in its monthly statistics. Indeed: before vs. now [PDFs]. Just a couple of weeks ago the Associated Press found that the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) had reported a decline in Taliban attacks because of a “clerical error“, which will be fixed by… not reporting that data anymore.
* Russia is reestablishing a permanent naval task force in the Mediterranean, thanks to its facility in Tartus, Syria.
* Criminals operating off Somalia’s coast are finding piracy is not so lucrative anymore. See also some interesting thoughts posted by CIMSEC on the economics of piracy in the region.
* Maritime security in Malaysia is quite a task, given the size and layout of the country’s waters.
* Deutsche Welle reports of a German firm which found that their computer-controlled precision tool recently acquired from an Asian supplier was reporting “home” data about the prototype the Germans were molding with the machine. Preinstalling malware is one way to do it!
