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by: Joseph On  Friday, August 29, 2014 Tags:   Air Drone Delivery     Google     Project Wing    In case you thought  Amazon  was alone in working on a system for automated high-speed air delivery,  Google recently unveiled Project Wing, their own entry into the field. Unlike Amazon’s automated delivery service, Google’s Project Wing was developed mostly with emergency supplies (like food, water, or medicine) in mind. In fact, the project originated as a way to get emergency defibrillators to heart attack sufferers on short notice, before this avenue was abandoned due to complications involving 9-1-1 and other public emergency services. Now, the sky is basically the limit on what Google plans to do with Project Wing, but whatever it is will have to go through a lengthy legal process given the current amount of regulation on United States skies currently on the books. But if any company could ever get around o...

October 22nd, 2013 01:47 PM ET By  Mustafa Qadri , Special to CNN Editor’s note: Mustafa Qadri is Amnesty International’s Pakistan researcher. The views expressed are his own. It was a sunny October afternoon last year when Mamana Bibi was blown to pieces before her grandchildren’s very eyes. The family matriarch, Mamana Bibi was picking vegetables in the family fields in northwestern Pakistan when a remotely piloted aircraft – or “drone” – used by the United States fired a missile directly toward her, killing Mamana instantly. A second volley of missiles was fired a few minutes later, injuring some of the children who ventured out to where their grandmother had been struck. Almost a year to the day, the Bibi family’s lives have been torn apart. In a number of in-depth interviews over the last eight months, the family recounted to me how they sold ancestral lands to pay for their injured relatives’ steep medical bills. Mamana’s grief-stricken elderly husb...

Inside sources reveal that the firm works with the US military in Karachi to plan targeted assassinations and drone bombings, among other sensitive counterterrorism operations. Jeremy Scahill November 23, 2009   |    This article appeared in the December 7, 2009 edition of The Nation. At a covert forward operating base run by the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in the Pakistani port city of Karachi, members of an elite division of Blackwater are at the center of a secret program in which they plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives, "snatch and grabs" of high-value targets and other sensitive action inside and outside Pakistan, an investigation by The Nation has found. The Blackwater operatives also assist in gathering intelligence and help direct a secret US military drone bombing campaign that runs parallel to the well-documented CIA predator strikes, according to a well-placed source within the US military intelligence ...

The effort to depict drone warfare as some sort of courageous and noble act is intensifying: The Pentagon is considering awarding a Distinguished Warfare Medal to drone pilots who work on military bases often far removed from the battlefield. . . . [Army Institute of Heraldry chief Charles] Mugno said most combat decorations require “boots on the ground” in a combat zone, but he noted that “emerging technologies” such as drones and cyber combat missions are now handled by troops far removed from combat . The Pentagon has not formally endorsed the medal, but Mugno’s institute has completed six alternate designs for commission approval. . . . The proposed medal would rank between the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Soldier’s Medal for exceptional conduct outside a combat zone. So medals would be awarded for sitting safely ensconced in a bunker on U.S. soil and launching bombs with a video joystick at human beings thousands of miles away. Justifying drone warfare require...