Russian SU-24 jet buzzes American ship again ...

Russian Sukhoi Su-24 attack aircraft makes a very-low altitude pass by the USS Donald Cook (DDG 75) April 12, 2016, in the Baltic Sea near Poland. Donald Cook, an Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer, forward deployed to Rota, Spain is conducting a routine patrol in the U.S. 6th Fleet area of operations in support of U.S. national security interests in Europe.
U.S. NAVY 6TH FLEET PHOTO/RELEASED

CBS NEWS: 

Yet again Russian jets made provocatively close passes to an American warship, as tensions continue between Moscow and Washington over the conflicts in Ukraineand Syria.

A senior defense official told CBS News that two recent incidents were "more aggressive than anything we've seen in some time."

The first, on April 11, involved two Russian SU24s, when the USS Donald Cook left the Polish port of Gdynia and was about 70 nautical miles from Kaliningrad in the Baltic Sea. The official said the Russian jets made 20 passes of the American ship and flew within 1,000 yards at an altitude of just 100 feet.

In the second incident on April 12, two Russian KA27 Helix helicopters flew several circles around the Donald Cook, apparently taking photos, after which two jets again made numerous close passes of the ship in what the official described as "Simulated Attack Profile."

It's not clear how many times this type of incident has happened, but in 2014 Pentagon officials publicly decried a similar incident in the Baltic

Kirtland/Boeing Directed Energy Lab awarded 275 million.

Boeing's Directed Energy and Strategic Systems business has won a $275 million U.S. Air Force award to advance ground-based space superiority capabilities.

The contract is an indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract issued by the Air Force Research Laboratory at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico, the Department of Defense said in reporting the award.

Under terms of the contract, the company will research, engineer, and manage a program to advance scientific and technical knowledge of ground-based space-superiority capabilities and technology. It will then apply and transition that knowledge to achieve Air Force and national goals.

Work on the project will be conducted at Kirtland AFB and in Maui, Hawaii. Three task orders for the program are expected to be completed by late November 2020.

Fiscal 2016 research, development, test and evaluation funds in the amount of $987,000; and operation and maintenance funds in the amount of $1.513 million are being obligated at the time of award.

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Rebels shot down a second Syrian warplane in less than a mon

REUTERS
Rebels shot down a second Syrian warplane in less than a month on Tuesday and reportedly captured its pilot in an area near Aleppo where heavy fighting has erupted in recent days despite a cessation of hostilities agreement.

The Syrian army said the jet was shot down with an anti-aircraft missile - the same type of weapon it says was used to shoot down a warplane in western Syria in March - but rebels accused Damascus of fabricating the claim, saying the plane was downed with anti-aircraft guns.

Foreign-backed rebels have long demanded anti-aircraft weapons to fight against devastating aerial raids by Syrian and, since September, Russian forces. But their backers, which include Western and Sunni Muslim regional states, are wary of delivering weapons that could fall into the hands of hardline groups.

The aircraft crashed in the Talat al-Iss highland south of Aleppo city, an area where al Qaeda-affiliated insurgents have come under heavy bombardment by Syrian and Russian warplanes since capturing it in recent days, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

The pilot was seized alive by fighters from al Qaeda's Nusra Front and taken to one of their headquarters in the area, the monitoring group said.

Videos circulated by pro-rebel accounts on social media showed what appeared to be the remains of the aircraft burning on an open patch of ground and surrounded by rebels. Some users separately posted an image of the man they said was the pilot.

Syria's military confirmed that a plane on a reconnaissance mission had crashed after being hit by a surface-to-air missile. The pilot survived and efforts were underway to rescue him, it said.

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