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Elrendelte a határok és a bujumburai repülőtér lezárását a burundi hadsereg egyik tábornoka, aki május 13-án, szerda délelőtt azt állította, hogy eltávolította tisztségéből Pierre Nkurunziza elnököt. Godefroid Niyombare – akit az elnök februárban menesztett a titkosszolgálatok éléről – az RPA helyi rádióban arra utasította az állampolgárokat és a biztonsági erőket, hogy vonuljanak a bujumburai repülőtérre a létesítmény „biztosítása” érdekében.

A Hadtörténeti Múzeum a napokban Varga Sándor alezredes, vadászrepülő-pilóta különleges kitüntetés-hagyatékával gyarapodott. A tárgycsoportot − amit az 1951 és 1983 között a Magyar Néphadseregben szolgált, közelmúltban elhunyt katonatiszt lánya, Farkas Antalné ajándékozott az intézménynek − Varga Sándor testvére, Varga János nyugállományú ezredes, olimpiai bajnok birkózó és felesége adta át dr. Kovács Vilmos ezredesnek, a HM Hadtörténeti Intézet és Múzeum parancsnokának.

Az év végéig 18 hadgyakorlatot tartanak Oroszországban - olvasható május 13-i, szerdai orosz sajtóhírekben.

Bár a második világháború legvégén a szövetségesek közötti nézetkülönbségek már teljesen nyilvánvalóak voltak, az ellentétek mégsem bontották meg a Hitler-ellenes koalíciót. Mindeközben lezajlott az európai hadszíntér utolsó nagy összecsapása, a berlini csata, amely elhozta a Harmadik Birodalom összeomlását.

Nagyobb erőfeszítésekre van szükség Moszkvától az ukrán válság rendezését szolgáló minszki megállapodások végrehajtásához - mondta a német kancellár és az ukrán államfő május 13-án, szerdán Berlinben, a megbeszélésük előtt tett sajtónyilatkozatban.

Éleslövészeten vettek részt május elején az MH 5. Bocskai István Lövészdandár hódmezővásárhelyi 62. lövészzászlóalj bázisán megalakított Zászlóalj Harccsoport harcjárműirányzói. A NATO CREVAL-ellenőrzésre készülő zászlóaljharccsoport (ZHCS) tovább folytatja a beosztott állomány számára előírt kiképzéseket és felkészítéseket.

A minszki tűzszüneti megállapodás betartására szólította fel Oroszországot és az oroszbarát kelet-ukrajnai szakadárokat Jens Stoltenberg NATO-főtitkár és John Kerry amerikai külügyminiszter május 13-án, szerdán, az észak-atlanti szövetség külügyminiszteri találkozója előtt a törökországi Antalyában nyilatkozva.

Ezt a sírfeliratot alkalmazza a HM Társadalmi Kapcsolatok és Háborús Kegyeleti Főosztálya abban az esetben ha ismeretlen katonákról van szó. Ez a felirat kerül majd annak a 17 katonának a sírkövére is, akiket május 13-án, szerdán Miskolcon temettek el, s akiknek nem sikerült megállapítani a kilétüket, valamint a nemzetiségüket.

Egy társát szándékosan agyonlőtte és három másikat megsebesített egy hadgyakorlat során, majd végzett magával egy dél-koreai tartalékos katona.

Aki egy levegőre képes elmondani, hogy mi mindennel is foglalkozik egyszerre az MH 43. Nagysándor József Híradó és Vezetéstámogató Ezred, feltétlenül jelentkezzen katonai búvárnak! Egy biztos: a háttérben dolgozó, székesfehérvári alakulat Stabil Vezetés 2015 nevű gyakorlása jól tükrözte a „negyvenhármasok” sokrétű, általában láthatatlan, ugyanakkor alapvető fontosságú munkáját.

In a recent Democracy Lab piece, editor Christian Caryl laments that genocide and mass atrocities continue to occur, and wonders why. After nodding to arguments that “we’ve made a lot of progress in preventing mass slaughter,” he turns pessimistic:

I have to confess that I don’t find the signs of progress he cites quite so encouraging. There are far too many places in the world where people are still being singled out for death on a grand scale simply because they belong to the wrong group.

In moral terms, it is impossible to disagree. Any situation “where people are still being singled out for death on a grand scale simply because they belong to the wrong group” is one situation too many.

Empirically, however, the historical trend is more encouraging than Caryl’s enumeration of recent examples and potential genocides implies. In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker aggregates data on genocides (loosely defined) over the course of the twentieth century from three public sources: research by R.J. Rummel, the Political Instability Task Force (PITF), and the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP). Each of these data sets is imperfect in its own way, and the quality of all estimates of the tolls of specific episodes of mass killing — in these sources or elsewhere — ranges from careful approximation to crude guessing. Still, the data they have produced collectively represent some of our best well-educated guesses about the frequency and severity of deliberate, lethal violence against noncombatant civilians by states and other armed groups over the past 100 years.

So what do those data show? Below, via Max Roser, is a reproduction of Figure 6-7 from Pinker’s book, showing annual death rates according Rummel and PITF data from 1900 to 2008. As Pinker wrote, “in the four decades that followed [the 1940s], the rate (and number) of deaths from democide went precipitously, if lurchingly, downward.” Contrary to popular belief, that long-term decline did not stop when the Cold War ended. Despite terrible genocides in Bosnia, Rwanda, and elsewhere, the global trend remained “unmistakably downward… The first decade of the new millennium [was] the most genocide-free of the past fifty years.”

Coincidentally, the statistics discussed in Pinker’s book stop just before the start of the global spell of economic malaise and political instability that began with the financial crisis of 2008 and includes the Arab Spring. That spell has produced new episodes of mass atrocities, including ongoing ones in Syria, Iraq, South Sudan, and the Central African Republic. To assess the trend since then, we can turn to the most recent data from UCDP, which now covers the period from 1989 through 2013. The chart below plots deaths per 100,000 people per year — the same statistic as in the previous chart, and shown on the same scale — for that 14-year period. UCDP’s data set includes low, best, and high estimates; to err on the side of overcounting, I used the high ones. The estimates of global population used to calculate the annual rates come from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators.

As the chart shows, the spell of global political instability that began in the late 2000s has not yet produced a significant increase in the severity of one-sided violence around the world, at least as of the end of 2013 and as far as UCDP can tell from its sources. This chart uses the same scale as the previous one to facilitate easy comparison. At this scale, the recent annual rates of less than 1 death per 100,000 people are hard to tell apart from zeros. The annual rate more than doubled from 2012 to 2013 — from 0.05 to 0.12 — but both of those figures remain radically smaller than the rates in the tens or hundreds the world saw just a few decades earlier. Even if UCDP’s best estimates are lower than the true counts — and, as UCDP acknowledges, they almost certainly are — the long-term decline has not been reversed. The latest data from PITF show essentially the same thing.

In short, humans certainly do continue to perpetrate mass killings, but the frequency and intensity of these terrible episodes has diminished significantly over the past half-century, and even the recent increase in violent instability has not reversed that longer-term decline. As horrible as the past few years may seem when reading the news, the intensity of deliberate, lethal violence against civilians remains an order of magnitude lower than what we typically saw just a few decades ago, which was itself an order of magnitude lower than the peak rates in the middle of the twentieth century.

Why? This, as Dartmouth professor and genocide scholar Ben Valentino wrote in a recent email, is the “million dollar question.” In his book, Pinker construes the decline in mass atrocities as part of a broader and longer decline in violence among humans, and attributes that trend to changes in cultural and material conditions that increasingly favor and reward our cooperative instincts over our more violent ones.

Valentino’s own answer resembles Pinker’s in general, if not in all the specifics. Valentino spotlighted two forces: a decline in the frequency and intensity of civil wars, and the collapse of communism. “Since most genocide and mass killing occur during civil war,” he wrote in an e-mail, “fewer civil wars means fewer mass killings.” As for why civil wars are rarer, “I’m inclined to believe that stronger central governments and the rise of full democracies are at least a big part of the story.” Meanwhile, the collapse of communism removed both the perpetrators and, to some extent, the motive behind many of the worst mass killings of modern history, and “nothing has really replaced communism as an ideology for mass killing on that scale.”

Valentino’s colleague and sometimes-coauthor Chad Hazlett, now a political scientist at UCLA, also sees the collapse of communism as an important part of the explanation, but more due to its effects on competition in the international system than the waning of the ideology. During the Cold War, the superpowers often prolonged and intensified armed conflicts within states by supporting rival sides, and many those conflicts involved mass killings of civilians. After the USSR collapsed and the Cold War ended, however, that external support evaporated, and with it went most mass killings. “Without superpower support to both sides,” Hazlett wrote in an email, “long-running conflicts and atrocities began to come to an end at unprecedented rates, producing a long decline in the number of atrocities.”

Scott Straus, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has written several books on the topic, sees the wider decline in armed conflict as a relevant factor, too. He also gives partial credit to changes in global norms and improvements in international and domestic policy options. He emailed:

Peacekeeping is better mandated, bigger, and more equipped for civilian protection than before. A range of non-military mechanisms is in place, from commissions of inquiry to “smart sanctions” to threats of international prosecution. I am as skeptical as the next scholar and practitioner on the specific effectiveness of each of these but the policy tools are at a minimum thicker and more applied than in the past. Whether these measures are causally related to the decline of mass atrocities is difficult to know at this stage, but there is a plausible connection between these developments and the decline in the mass atrocity events.

All of these scholars, including Pinker, acknowledge that this decline is not necessarily permanent, and none is certain of its causes. The trend itself is clear, however. While we recognize and grieve for those who suffer and die in the atrocities that persist, we might choose to take some encouragement from that fact.

This piece was written as part of the author’s work as a consultant to the Early Warning Project, a new effort to provide routine, public assessments of mass-atrocities risks for countries worldwide.

In the photo, Chorale Abagenzi singers take part in a genocide commemoration ceremony in Kigali, Rwanda.
Photo Credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Jeb Bush has flip-flopped-flip-flopped.

On Monday, the Republican, who is running for president but hasn’t made it official, was for the Iraq war.

Under pressure, Bush said a day later he misunderstood the question.

Then he clarified his position.

One more time.

This type of waffling is impressive, even if the former Florida governor hasn’t officially launched a bid for the GOP nomination in next year’s presidential election. But it illustrates one of his biggest challenges to being an attractive candidate: the legacy of his big brother, former President George W. Bush, and his disastrous Iraq policy.

W. is still admired by many in the Republican Party, but keeping him at arm’s length may be something Jeb is forced to do to win over Democrats in a general election. His back-and-forth on the issue shows just how difficult it will be to completely sever family ties.

And just so you’re clear: Knowing what we know now — that the intel on WMDs was trumped up — Jeb Bush would not invade Iraq. Until he would.

Photo Credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

When the European Council – the institution that sets the European Union’s agenda on broad, strategic issues[1] – published its Declaration on the Environment on December 3, 1988, climate change was mentioned briefly and in passing.[2] In 2009, the year of the United Nations climate summit in Copenhagen, the topic’s salience had risen dramatically. In that year, climate change made up more than 80% of the references to the environment in the European Council’s publicly-available Conclusions, and more than one-tenth of all references to policy issues.

This estimate of climate change’s increasingly important role is possible because of data compiled by the EU Policy Agendas Project. The project’s researchers have analyzed the European Council’s Conclusions sentence-by-sentence from 1975 to 2012 to identify which policy issues are discussed and when.[3] This information is available in a public dataset[4], which gave me an exciting opportunity to explore how much attention the Council has given to climate change in the last three decades. This post retraces how I mobilized the EU Policy Agendas Project data – and added to it – to explore patterns in the Council’s attention to climate change since 1988.

First, some context: in the EU Policy Agendas dataset, climate change is considered a subtopic of the broader “Environment” policy topic.  Between 1975 and 2012, the environment garnered an average of around 4% of the Council’s attention.[5] Overall, 32% of the references to the environment in the Council’s Conclusions are categorized as related to climate change. However, this average masks significant year-to-year changes. For example, in the six years from 1988 to 1993, climate change made up only 5% of the Council’s references to the environment. In contrast, from 2006 to 2011, climate change made up 74% of environmental references.

Figure 1. Council attention to the environment, by subtopic, 1975-2012 (1,679 total mentions). Source: Alexandrova et al., 2014.

Climate change: international negotiations and EU climate policy

Although the EU Policy Agendas dataset distinguishes between climate change and other environmental issues, it does not include analysis of the specific climate-related topics that the European Council discusses. Therefore, as a next step, I analyzed all mentions of climate change in the dataset and organized them into three overall categories: general statements about climate change, statements about the international climate negotiations under the United Nations Framework on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and statements about European Union climate policy. Three examples of statements I placed in each category are given below in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Examples of European Council climate change-related statements in three categories: general climate change, international climate negotiations, and EU climate policy.

So which of these three categories gained the most attention? Overall, the international negotiations under the UNFCC garner almost 60% of the Council’s climate-related attention. The EU’s climate policies attract a further 25%, with 15% related to generic climate statements. Figure 4 below gives a historical perspective on these estimates (from 1997 to 2011). The first mention of climate change was in 1988 (not shown), but it did not become prominent on the Council’s agenda until after the international agreement on the Kyoto Protocol in 1997. This same pattern was repeated in relation to the 2009 Copenhagen Conference, explaining the large increase in references to the international negotiations during that year.

Figure 3. European Council attention to climate change topics by year. Author’s analysis based on Alexandrova et al., 2014.

Which EU climate policy?

Finally, I wanted to explore which specific climate policies the Council discusses. In its 132 references to internal EU policy over the period 1988-2011, the Council focused on general references to policy (39%), the EU’s targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions (22%) and the EU Emissions Trading System (20%). Other policies received 5% or less of the Council’s attention.

Figure 4. European Council attention to EU climate change policies. Author’s analysis based on Alexandrova et al., 2014.

Conclusion

As I mentioned in the introduction, the data exploration presented above has a few limitations. I have looked at the basic share of attention to climate change, and have not attempted to explain why we see the patterns that we do. Although I did not have the time to do so, more detailed analysis could examine the reasons why these patterns of attention exist. I also limited the analysis to only the references that were coded as climate change-related in the EU Policy Agendas dataset. Some climate topics were categorized differently (for example, ‘the global carbon market’ was placed in the energy policy category[6]). A broader analysis could attempt to track Council attention to those climate-related issues that were categorized as a different policy topic.

What I have found is, however, quite interesting. Taken together, this analysis suggests that in the mid-2000s, climate change became the dominant environmental issue on the European Council agenda. Much of the Council’s attention focused on the international climate negotiations, but with increasing space for EU climate policies like the EU Emissions Trading System. Although the EU Agendas dataset stops in early 2012, climate change is still clearly on the Council’s agenda (as evidenced by the 23-24 October, 2014 Council Conclusions, where the EU’s 2030 climate and energy framework occupied more than half of the document). It remains to be seen whether climate change will continue to play this important role on the EU’s environmental policy agenda in the years to come.

[1] Peterson, John and Michael Shackleton. 2012. The institutions of the European Union. Oxford: Oxford University Press. See pages 43-67.

[2] European Council Conclusions, 2-3 December 1988, Annex I

[3] Alexandrova, Petya, Marcello Carammia, & Arco Timmermans. 2012. Policy punctuations and issue diversity on the European Council agenda. Policy Studies Journal, 40(1), 69–88.

[4] Alexandrova, Petya, Marcello Carammia, Sebastiaan Princen, and Arco Timmermans. 2014. Measuring the European Council agenda: Introducing a new approach and dataset. European Union Politics, 15(1): 152-167.

[5] Alexandrova, Carammia, & Timmermans, 2012, pg. 75.

[6] “The strengthening and extension of global carbon markets” (March 9, 2007) was categorized under energy policy.

The post The rise of climate change on the European Union agenda: 1988-2011 appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Western sanctions imposed on Russia over its alleged role in the escalation of the Ukrainian conflict only served as an impetus for Moscow to take more efficient steps to develop its own economy, Federation Council Speaker Valentina Matviyenko told Sputnik Serbia on Thursday.

The summit between President Barack Obama and representatives from the Persian Gulf countries that kicked off today at Camp David is meant to reassure Washington’s Arab allies. “Don’t worry about the nuclear deal with Iran,” Obama will say. “We’ve got your back.”

And what’s the best way to show your friends that you’ve got their back? Sell them billions of dollars worth of advanced weapons. In fact, it seems like arms sales are the Obama administration’s tool of choice these days for dealing with everything from counterterrorism to a lagging economy. And the consequences, unsurprisingly, are bloody.

In its first five years in office, the Obama administration entered into formal agreements to transfer over $64 billion in arms and defense services to Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) member states, with about three-quarters of that total going to Saudi Arabia. And new offers worth nearly $15 billion have been made to Riyadh in 2014 and 2015. Items on offer to GCC states have included fighter aircraft, attack helicopters, radar planes, refueling aircraft, air-to-air missiles, armored vehicles, artillery, small arms and ammunition, cluster bombs, and missile defense systems.

Sales to GCC members have been the most important component of the record-level U.S. arms deals concluded during Obama’s term. The Obama figures for sales worldwide even edge out levels reached during the Nixon administration, when the end of the Vietnam War and the rising purchasing power of members of the OPEC oil cartel spurred the United States’ first major arms export boom.

The surge in arms sales under Obama is rooted in two factors, one political and one economic. The political aspect of the Obama approach mirrors the path pursued by President Richard Nixon in response to the unpopularity of the Vietnam War. In 1969, Nixon announced that henceforth the United States would supply generous quantities of military assistance to allied regimes, in an effort to “avoid another war like Vietnam anywhere in the world.” And in a 1967 article in Foreign Affairs, Nixon referenced the political roots of his emerging policy, noting that Vietnam had sown “bitter dissension” domestically, producing a “deep reluctance to become involved once again in a similar intervention on a similar basis.”

Substitute Obama for Nixon and Iraq for Vietnam, and you have a latter-day version of the Nixon Doctrine of arms sales promotion. Obama wants to be seen as a president who ended large-scale wars, not a president who started new ones. And, as he has made clear time and again, he is particularly reluctant to put large numbers of U.S. “boots on the ground,” as the Bush administration did in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Given these restrictions, the Obama administration has developed an approach to warfare designed to limit U.S. casualties. This has relied largely on drone strikes and the extensive use of Special Forces; but boosting arms sales advances is also a part of this hands-off approach, giving allies the equipment and training to fight terrorism on their own. (Let’s forget for the moment the fact that Obama’s approach may spawn more terrorists than it kills by generating anti-U.S. sentiment.)

But it might be the legacy of the 2008 economic crisis, as much as the 2003 Iraq disaster that drives this White House’s arms sales. The Obama administration clearly wants to create jobs in the defense industry and boost the bottom lines of major defense contractors. The Pentagon’s 2010 announcements of offers involving tens of billions of dollars’ worth of F-15 fighter planes, Apache attack helicopters, armored vehicles, and other equipment to Saudi Arabia listed the prime beneficiaries as Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Electric, the Sikorsky Helicopter unit of United Technologies, and ITT Aerospace. But these are just the major contractors; thousands of subcontractors across the United States will get a piece of the action as well. For example, in announcing the deal for selling 84 Boeing F-15s to the Saudis, Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs Andrew Shapiro proudly asserted that the deal would create 50,000 jobs in 44 states, most notably in St. Louis, the site of the main assembly plant for the plane.

Foreign sales are particularly critical for keeping alive weapons production lines that are about to be closed down as the Pentagon moves towards buying next-generation systems. Absent new domestic orders, Boeing’s F-18 production line will have to close in early 2017. But last week’s report that Kuwait intends to buy 40 F-18s for $3 billion holds out hope that the line will stay open for another year or more, during which time the company can seek more foreign sales to prolong the life of the program even further. Similarly, the General Dynamics M-1 tank, a program which the Army started winding down in 2012, has been surviving based on yearly add-ons to Pentagon budget requests spearheaded by the Ohio and Michigan delegations, whose states host the main production sites for the vehicles. These efforts have been supplemented by a deal to upgrade 84 M-1s for Saudi Arabia.

The Obama arms sales boom has bolstered the bottom lines of companies like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon. Each firm has been the lead contractor one or more mega-deals like the $29 billion offer of 84 Boeing F-15 fighter jets and related equipment to Saudi Arabia, a $6.5 billion sale of Lockheed Martin’s THAAD missile defense system to Qatar, and the proposed transfer of the Lockheed Martin/Raytheon produced Patriot Air and Missile Defense System to Saudi Arabia for $1.8 billion. The payoff won’t come all at once, but as these deals work their way through the pipeline, they will generate substantial profits for each of these firms for years to come.

As Pentagon procurement spending has dipped slightly due to the caps on the agency’s budget established in the Budget Control Act of 2011, arms industry executives are looking to promote overseas sales even more aggressively — and the Middle East market will be central to these efforts. Lockheed Martin has set a goal of increasing exports to 25 percent of total sales over the next few years. In a conference call with investors in late January, Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson suggested that continued “volatility” in the Middle East and Asia make them “growth areas” for the firm. And a few years ago, Boeing launched an effort to get export sales in its defense division up to 25 to 30 percent, from just 7 percent in 2005. Dennis Muilenburg, a company vice president who formerly ran Boeing’s defense segment, has suggested that if the F-15 deal with Saudi Arabia stays on track, the company will be “well on our way” to its goal.

The Obama administration is clearly on board with the industry’s agenda. The lengths to which U.S. officials will go to help secure an arms sale for a U.S. company were revealed at a House Foreign Affairs Committee in April 2013. Asked whether the administration was doing enough to advocate for U.S. arms exports, Tom Kelly, principal deputy assistant secretary of the State Department’s bureau of political-military affairs, said that, “it is an issue that has the attention of every top-level official who’s working on foreign policy throughout the government, including the top officials at the State Department … in advocating on behalf of our companies and doing everything we can to make sure that these sales go through.” Just to make himself perfectly clear, Kelly went on to say that [arms sales promotion] “is something that we’re doing every day, basically [on] every continent in the world, and we take it very, very seriously and we’re constantly thinking of how we can do better.”

The Obama administration can definitely do better — but not by hawking top-of-the-line weaponry to Middle Eastern regimes. That approach has already proved disastrous.

In 2011, the U.S-backed security forces of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates intervened to help put down the pro-democracy movement in Bahrain. Last summer, the United Arab Emirates conducted bombing raids against Islamist forces in Libya, further inflaming the situation in that country. Most recently, Saudi Arabia, armed with U.S. planes and bombs, has launched a devastating assault on Yemen that has killed at least 700 civilians, displaced hundreds of thousands, and sparked a humanitarian emergency by blocking access to food and medicine.

One shudders trying to imagine what comes next after the president inks billions more dollars worth of arms sales at Camp David this week.

Photo by Kevin Dietsch – Pool/Getty Images

Just over a year ago, Edward Snowden appeared in a pre-recorded clip during a nationally televised public forum to ask President Vladimir Putin whether Russia spies on its citizens by monitoring their communications. The president declared in response, “We don’t have a mass system for such interception, and according to our law it cannot exist.” Conveniently, Putin didn’t provide robust details on the System for Operative Investigative Activities, under which the state can amass data from Russian communication systems; phone calls, emails, and Internet searches are all fair game. Collecting information requires a court order, but legal decisions are made largely in secret. In 2012 alone, according to Russia’s Supreme Court, security services were authorized to intercept phone and web traffic more than 500,000 times. This is to say nothing of the illegal surveillance many Russia hands suspect the Kremlin of conducting.

 

Yet the new epoch of snooping in Russia involves more than metadata. Much like British authorities, who use closed-circuit TV devices throughout London, Moscow deploys cameras to keep a watchful eye on its populace. And it is the next generation of such video surveillance that has inspired the work of British-based photographers Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin: What would the consequences be if cameras didn’t simply document, but could actively recognize faces, allowing security forces to monitor specific individuals’ whereabouts?

 

To explore this question, the artists recruited more than 1,000 Muscovites as models, including Pussy Riot band member Yekaterina Samutsevich (pictured above), and shot a series of portraits using a prototype of facial-recognition technology developed by Russian engineering company Vocord. Unlike with a typical biometric system—for instance, touching a thumbprint pad to enter a secure room—Vocord’s innovation does not require a person to be an active participant in, or even to be aware of, the identification process. (Hence the portrait subjects’ expressions being rendered passive.) Rather, it uses four lenses, operating in tandem, to capture and recognize a face, stripping it bare of shadows or even makeup. Conceivably, the technology could be linked to police databases across Russia, notifying law enforcement as individuals of interest—terrorism suspects, Kremlin critics, human rights activists—
are recognized. It could be placed in subways, stadiums, or other crowded places.

 

To the artists, the project is something of a warning: Technology, Chanarin says, “is always ideological.”

 

The new blogsite is under construction
Please see the older blog entries here

The projection ship ordered by Turkey will based on the Spain LHD ship Juan Carlos 1 (built by the Spanish shipyard Navantia) which also serve as the base of 2 futurs Australian Canberra-class landing helicopter dock (LHD) HMAS Canberra and HMAS Adelaide.

In 2004, French company Direction des Constructions Navales (DCN) and Spanish company Navantia were invited to tender proposals, with DCN offering the Mistral-class amphibious assault ship and Navantia proposing the "Buque de Proyección Estratégica" design (later commissioned as Juan Carlos I). The Spanish design was selected in 2007, with Navantia responsible for construction of the ships from the keel to the flight deck, and BAE Systems Australia handling the fabrication of the superstructure and fitting out.
The construction of the first ship, HMAS Canberra, commenced in late 2008, with the hull launched in early 2011, and sea trials in early 2014. Canberra was commissioned in November 2014. Work on the second vessel, HMAS Adelaide, started in early 2010. Adelaide is predicted to enter service in 2016. They are the largest vessels ever operated by the RAN, with a displacement of 27,500 tonnes (27,100 long tons; 30,300 short tons).

The French Mistral class is an Amphibious general assault ship (LHA) that means an Amphibious general assault ship with flush deck and dock for amphibious craft. Tarawa Class ships (US Navy) are an other example. The Spanish Amphibious Assault-Ship, Multi-purpose (LHD) Juan Carlos 1 is identical to the LHA but with a capacity to lead maritime space control operations and force projection missions using ASW helicopters and V/STOL aircraft. Other examples of these type are the Wasp (US Navy).

This Turkish decision is a bad news for the French shipyard DCNS unable the deliver Sevastopol and Vladivostok Mistral class BPC ordered by Russia, due to political reason (EU embargo) and after the loss of the Australian tender France can lost the confidence of others futur potential customers.

AIN EL HILWEH, Lebanon — The gunmen who control this tiny, cramped Palestinian refugee camp in south Lebanon are uncharacteristically eager to please. Hardened militants scurry to meetings with political rivals, and speak with newfound candor to journalists about past unsuccessful efforts to overcome a history of deadly feuds in the camp.

For decades, the coveted slot of camp boss has gone to the man able to deploy the most shooters and force Ain el Hilweh’s unruly clans and factions to fall in line. Today, however, an unlikely new order prevails: Bitter rivals have forged an unprecedented level of cooperation to police their sometimes-anarchic camp, forcing the most violent jihadists to lay low, and even turning over Palestinian suspects to the Lebanese Army, an act that just a few years ago would have been considered an unpardonable treason. Strongman Munir Makdah, a member of the Fatah movement, presides over a special council of 17 militia leaders — including some borderline jihadists — who must approve the most sensitive moves.

“It’s very important: This is the first time we’ve done anything like this,” Makdah said during a recent visit to his headquarters, nestled in Ain el Hilweh’s claustrophobic horizon of apartment blocs. “I call it the democracy of the gun. We tell our brothers when they visit that they can do the same thing in Palestine.”

Since its establishment in 1948, Ain el Hilweh has been a byword for militancy — a haven for fugitives and a bête noir (at different times) to the Lebanese government, the Israeli military, even the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). An estimated 100,000 people live in the camp, which is rimmed by walls, barbed wire, and army checkpoints. Under a convoluted agreement, Lebanese soldiers search the cars going in and out, but don’t enter the camp itself, leaving policing inside to the Palestinian factions.

The experiment underway in this camp represents a rare instance of cooperation and pragmatism in a region where fragmentation and infighting is the norm. Much more is at stake than simply the stability of an overpopulated square kilometer: There is a widespread fear that if the Islamic State, or jihadists sympathetic to the group, ever gained a foothold in Lebanon, it will be in a place like Ain el Hilweh — where residents are poor, politically disenfranchised, and ineffectively policed.

The agreement in Ain el Hilweh presents significant potential upside, too, in a region currently short of examples of political progress. The camp is home to actors who can impact flashpoints all over the region: It could contain the seeds of reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah in Gaza and the West Bank, while authorities everywhere might look it as a model for a successful initiative to curb jihadists.

“Syria’s war was like a storm coming to us,” Makdah said. “Everyone was worried about the camps. We reflect society.”

When it comes to security, senior Hamas officials in Ain el Hilweh amiably take orders from Makdah. At the camp’s Hamas office, a visiting Fatah official refilled the Hamas chief’s coffee cup as the Hamas official gave his unvarnished assessment of the regional security situation. “Honestly, we Palestinians are in a weak position,” said the official, Abu Ahmed Fadel.

Fadel said it took the factions much too long to learn the lesson of the crisis in the Nahr el Bared refugee camp in north Lebanon in 2007, when jihadists battled the Lebanese Army. That fight destroyed the entire camp and left 27,000 residents homeless. Ever since then, Fadel said, Lebanese leaders suggested that the Palestinians set aside their internal differences and form a united front. It took what Fadel called “the fires in Syria” to finally push the sides to agree.

“Compared to what’s happening around us, we’re a stable river,” said Khalid al-Shayeb, the Fatah deputy who’s in charge of the patrols in Ain el Hilweh and the neighboring Mieh Mieh camp. “We managed to neutralize the threats from Palestinians much more effectively than the Lebanese Army has managed to neutralize the threats from the rest of Lebanon.”

There’s no sign here of the discord that forced a bitter break between Hamas and its long-time patrons in Damascus, or the blood feud between Hamas and Fatah, or between Hamas and the more extreme religious factions like Islamic Jihad and Ansar Allah. One fear has managed to outweigh all that acrimony: the dread of an encroachment by the Islamic State, whose entry into the camp could provoke outsiders to destroy it and cost the grand old factions everything.

“People should be united because there is a threat to everybody,” said Ali Baraka, a senior Hamas official based in Beirut.

That’s not to say that the camp’s residents have entirely stayed out of the Syrian war. Some reports say that one of Makdah’s own sons snuck into Syria to join the jihadists. Makdah has figures of his own: precisely 52 Palestinians from all the camps in Lebanon, he says, have been tracked joining the Syrian jihadists.

The impact of the war is felt everywhere in Ain el Hilweh. A human flood of refugees has entered over the past several years, filling the impossibly crowded camp to its breaking point. According to Makdah, at least 20,000 newcomers moved to the camp since 2011, when war broke out in Syria. Officials have struggled to maintain the camp’s fragile water supply and say they can’t provide adequate education, housing, and health care to the camp’s residents. Until last week, Makdah said, he had turned over his offices to refugees. Now that they’ve found better dwellings, he’s moved back in.

A murder in April tested Makdah’s efforts to construct a new order in the camp. A Lebanese supporter of Hezbollah named Marwan Issa was dragged into Ain el Hilweh and murdered. According to Palestinian security officials, Issa was a member of a Hezbollah auxiliary militia called the Resistance Brigades, and his suspected killers were known arms dealers. They believe the murder was related to a weapons deal gone awry. Two suspects were quickly apprehended. Leaders of the 17 factions called an emergency meeting to vote on whether to hand them over to the Lebanese authorities.

“Usually the Islamic factions object,” said Bilal Selwan Aboul Nour, the camp security officer in charge of liaising with the Lebanese security establishment. “In this case, it was different. The victim was Lebanese. And if we didn’t cooperate, it could bring trouble on the entire camp.”

Aboul Nour immediately delivered the captives himself to the Lebanese Army barracks up the road.

A third suspect in the murder remains at large in the camp, however, illustrating the limits of this new cooperative order. That suspect is under the protection of Jund el-Sham, a jihadist faction, in the Taamir area of the camp. “We can’t use force,” Aboul Nour said. “He’s in an area outside our control.”

Hezbollah and the Lebanese government have been patient and understanding, according to the Palestinians, although Hezbollah called the killing a “stab in the back of the Lebanese resistance.”

It was the Islamic State’s infiltration of the Palestinian camp of Yarmouk in Damascus that motivated the dithering Palestinian factions to unite last summer. At the time, the already unraveling region was experiencing extra strain: The Islamic State had seized much of northern Iraq and declared a caliphate, and had seized control of some entrances to Yarmouk and assassinated Palestinian operatives, according to Baraka. Senior officials from Fatah, Hamas, and the Lebanese government quickly agreed that if the Islamic State could win followers in Yarmouk, it could easily do the same in Lebanese camps.

Since September, the Palestinian Joint Security Committee has doubled the number of camp police in Ain el Hilweh from 200 to 400. Fatah supplies the top commanders and foots 70 percent of the cost of the committee, and Hamas provides the rest. The officers are mostly familiar faces in the camp, some of them veteran fighters in their fifties. Now they wear red armbands that identify themselves as Joint Security Committee fighters. Makdah has not only brought together Fatah and Hamas, he has also convinced jihadists and secular Marxists to police the camp in joint patrols — a success that eluded generations of Arab leaders before him.

Most of the fighters still stay close to their factions: In the headquarters, Fatah old-timers cluster around the small fountain full of goldfish. Outside, Ansar Allah’s fighters — identifiable by their long Salafi-style beards — politely decline to talk to reporters. Near the hospital, the clean-shaven leftists of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine shun the uniform altogether; their unit commander, Ali Rashid, wears blue jeans and a brown leather jacket. The groups sometimes organize joint patrols, and the major checkpoints include fighters from all the factions.

It was especially difficult for secular leftists to join forces with Islamist jihadists, Rashid said.

“We agreed that we would cut off any hand that tries to mess with security in the camp,” Rashid said. “We cannot tolerate even the smallest action from any takfiri [extremist] who enters here.”

So far, he said, the extremists in the camp have obeyed the new order. They might shelter fugitives — but so long as the fugitives are in the camp they refrain from any active role in militant operations.

Makdah says the camp really needs 1,000 police officers. In March, he extended his writ to the nearby camp of Mieh Mieh. If the experiment continues to succeed, Palestinian and Lebanese security officials said they hope to spread the experiment to all the Palestinian refugee camps in the country.

Ain el Hilweh’s unique circumstances make it an unlikely template for other places: It’s a hyper-politicized area whose claustrophobic living conditions make the Gaza Strip appear positively suburban by comparison. But sudden and intense collaboration between militants of secular, Marxist, Islamist and jihadist pedigrees show just how dramatically the Syrian war has shaken the old order. And it provides a fleeting glimpse of the kind of politicking — and transcending of old divisions — that has so far escaped mainstream Palestinian politics and the revolutionary movements that fueled the Arab Spring uprisings.

MAHMOUD ZAYYAT/AFP/Getty Images

Eight months after a devastating war, Israel’s continued and deliberate policy of besieging Gaza and enforcing its separation from the West Bank means conflict could break out again.

The formation of a new right-wing coalition government doesn’t look like it will help. The cabinet appears to be a devastating blow to hopes of any accord with the Palestinians. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has a lot to do to convince domestic and foreign audience that he has a credible desire and vision for peace.

Netanyahu is now trying to find common cause with neighboring Arab countries over the Islamic State and violent Salafi-jihadism, instead of working toward a regional peace agreement. But Israel should recognize that Gaza is not immune to these radicalizing trends as its population sinks further into poverty and despair.

The plight of Gaza and its people, and the security threat it poses to the whole region, was at the heart of our mission earlier this month to Israel and Palestine. We went as members of The Elders, the group of independent former leaders who campaign for peace and human rights across the globe.

One place we visited was Kibbutz Nir Am, just one kilometer from the border with Gaza. We heard directly from people on the front line of the conflict who wish to live in peace with their Palestinian neighbors. One mother’s words stood out: “If people have nothing to live for, then they will find something to die for.”

She and her fellow kibbutz residents are understandably frightened and angry about the threats of rocket attacks and tunnel raids, but we were impressed by their insistence that only a just peace can bring security to their community.

We regret that we were unable to visit Gaza on this trip, to see the situation there for ourselves. What we heard from independent experts and United Nations officials confirmed our worst expectations regarding poverty, housing, health, and political deadlock. It only strengthened our determination to work for peace, a two-state solution, and the lifting of the blockade.

The situation in Gaza is intolerable. Eight months after the end of last summer’s war, not one destroyed house has been rebuilt. People cannot live with the respect and dignity they deserve.

A complete paradigm shift is essential. This demands the lifting of the siege and an end to Israel’s policy of separating the West Bank and Gaza: the two main components of what should, in our view, become an independent Palestinian state. Unfortunately, as we heard during our visit, without Gaza the two-state solution simply cannot be realized.

We have both spent decades working for peace in the Middle East and, notwithstanding the growing number of skeptics, believe the two-state solution remains the only viable outcome.

Gaza’s 1.8 million people are besieged, isolated, and desperate. They cannot enjoy any of the aspects of normal life, from trade and travel to health and education, that people in our countries — and, indeed, in Israel — take for granted.

The risk of another war is very real. This would be disastrous not just for the people of Gaza but for all Palestinians and all Israelis as well. Everyone who lives in the Holy Land has suffered under the shadow of conflict for long enough.

To avoid further bloodshed and boost the currently slim chances of a peace agreement, Palestinian reconciliation and unity is a prerequisite. When we met with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, we were encouraged by his commitment to convene the Interim Leadership Framework, a new caucus that would bring together the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization and representatives of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the main factions in Gaza.

Abbas asked us, as Elders, to secure from Hamas a written request for the convening of elections, and he committed to hold fresh presidential and Palestinian Legislative Council elections upon receipt of this communications. This is now the focus of our ongoing work in the region.

We also believe it is essential that the Palestinian Government of National Consensus is fully established in Gaza, initially to control the border crossings and thus to allow many more goods to enter the territory for reconstruction and other essential purposes.

These steps might seem merely procedural but they are vital to reconnecting Gaza and the West Bank politically, economically, and socially.

Even if Palestinian factions can be reconciled, however, they will still need credible and sincere partners for peace on the Israeli side. Such forces do exist despite the dominant trends in the Knesset. We were encouraged by the sincere commitment of several proudly patriotic Israelis we met for the realization of the two-state solution.

The best guarantee of Israel’s future security and acceptance by its neighbors will be the two-state solution and an end to the occupation and settlement expansion. To help achieve this goal, we feel it is high time that the countries of Europe take a more proactive role, underpinned by a serious financial commitment to assist in Gaza’s reconstruction.

Although the United States will remain a key player, it cannot shoulder the burden of peacemaking alone. We will do all we can to support EU High Representative Federica Mogherini so an effective multilateral process can be set in motion.

This was the fourth Elders mission to Israel and Palestine since 2009. Our organization was founded by Nelson Mandela to work for peace and human rights around the world. Each time we visit this region, it is brought home to us how the former cannot be secured without the latter. The people of Israel and Palestine deserve nothing less.

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