Top general warns of civil war threat as U.S. troops exit Afghanistan

Story by Stephen J. Thorne

America’s top military commander in Afghanistan is predicting the country, already in its sixth successive decade of unrelenting conflict, could descend into another civil war as U.S. troops end their involvement in America’s longest war.

Approaching 20 years since coalition forces ousted the regime that harboured Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida terrorists, General Austin S. Miller said districts around the country, some strategically important, are falling rapidly and warned that, with peace talks on shaky ground, militias could propel the country into civil war.

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Cracking the Enigma

Story by Sharon Adams

During the Second World War the Germans used a machine for sending coded signals.

The Allies called it Enigma (Greek for riddle). Each branch of the German services developed its own version, but at the heart of them all was a set of five to eight interchangeable rotors that continuously scrambled the letters of the alphabet. There were 103 sextillion possible settings—that’s 103 with 21 zeroes behind it.

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