Italian news reports regarding upheaval in the organization of the Sicilian mafia were synthesized and summarized in a new analysis from the Open Source Center, a component of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
“The recent arrest of mafia fugitive Salvatore Lo Piccolo and the April 2006 capture of Bernardo Provenzano, the Sicilian mafia’s ‘boss of bosses,’ have highlighted the succession challenge over the position of top boss within the organization.”
“Open source reporting suggests that the ensuing power struggle, following Provenzano’s arrest, led not only to increased violence in Sicily but also to likely renewed cooperation between the Sicilian mafia and the US-based Gambino family. Their growing relationship may open new possibilities for the Sicilian mafia to launder money through US institutions.”
See “Changes in Mafia Leadership Reveal New Links to US-Based La Cosa Nostra,” DNI Open Source Center, November 19, 2007.
Using the NIST as an example, the Radiation Physics Building (still without the funding to complete its renovation) is crucial to national security and the medical community. If it were to go down (or away), every medical device in the United States that uses radiation would be decertified within 6 months, creating a significant single point of failure that cannot be quickly mitigated.
The federal government can support more proactive, efficient, and cost-effective resiliency planning by certifying predictive models to validate and publicly indicate their quality.
We need a new agency that specializes in uncovering funding opportunities that were overlooked elsewhere. Judging from the history of scientific breakthroughs, the benefits could be quite substantial.
The cost of inaction is not merely economic; it is measured in preventable illness, deaths and diminished livelihoods.