Saudi Arabia Scooping Up Land in Northern Virginia

Saudi national flag / Getty Images

 

Saudi Arabia is scooping up large swaths of land in Northern Virginia, just a stone’s throw away from the nation’s capital, according to local reports.

“The Saudi government now owns five adjacent properties on the grandiose corridor in McLean that is home to high-profile, pricey estates and bucolic views of the Potomac River, according to government assessment records,” Washington Business Journal reported.

Washington D.C. To Hold Massive “Coordinated Terror Attack” Drill This Wednesday

April 26th is shaping up to be a busy day.

As we reported on Friday, that’s when Operation Gotham Shield, an exercise involving FEMA, Homeland Security and a myriad of law enforcement and military agencies and which simulates a nuclear bomb blast over Manhattan, is set to conclude.

Then, as we learned earlier, April 26 is also when the entire Senate will be briefed by Donald Trump and his four top defense and military officials on the situation in North Korea at the White House, an event which Reuters dubbed as “unusual.”

April 26 is also when the USS Carl Vinson is expected to finally arrive off the coast of the Korean Penninsula.

With a series of major hacks, China builds a database on Americans

China is building massive databases of Americans’ personal information by hacking government agencies and U.S. health-care companies, using a high-tech tactic to achieve an age-old goal of espionage: recruiting spies or gaining more information on an adversary, U.S. officials and analysts say.

Groups of hackers working for the Chinese government have compromised the networks of the Office of Personnel Management, which holds data on millions of current and former federal employees, as well as the health insurance giant Anthem, among other targets, the officials and researchers said.

“They’re definitely going after quite a bit of personnel information,” said Rich Barger, chief intelligence officer of ThreatConnect, a Northern Virginia cybersecurity firm. “We suspect they’re using it to understand more about who to target [for espionage], whether electronically or via human ­recruitment.”