Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic has canceled his visit to Brussels, as well as separate talks with American officials after reports in a pro-government newspaper that the EU and U.S. ambassadors to Serbia are fueling street protests against his rule.
Serbia is in a deep economic crisis. To comply with the terms of the IMF deal, Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic’s new government – which is still being formed after an April 24 election – must cut a public sector which now employs 750,000 people, more than 10 percent of Serbia’s total population.
Vucic, a former ultranationalist turned pro-EU reformer, was scheduled to travel later this month to Brussels for the formal opening of EU membership talks and to the U.S. on an inaugural Air Serbia flight to New York where he was to hold bilateral talks with American officials.
The cancellation comes amid increasing pressure by Russia, a traditional Serb Slavic ally, against Serbia joining the EU and NATO. Vucic made an unannounced visit to Russian President Vladimir Putin last month which resulted in calls by Moscow to “include people who are determined to maintain and strengthen further relations between Serbia and Russia” in the new Serbian government.
Vucic’s office did not immediately return calls from the Associated Press on official details of the cancellation.
Belgrade’s Informer daily, which is close to Vucic and is considered his mouthpiece, said last week that the U.S. ambassador Kyle Randolph Scott and EU envoy Michael Davenport are actively working on “radicalizing” street protests against his rule, trying to trigger “chaos” in the country.
Both the European Commission and Scott vehemently denied they have anything to do with recent street protest by thousands in Belgrade against the shady demolitions in an area of the capital marked for a United Arab Emirates-financed real estate project which is supported by Vucic.
The citizens’ protests have become a challenge to Vucic, who faces accusations of autocratic rule despite promising to take Serbia toward EU integration.
Vucic is to meet the U.S. and EU ambassadors later Monday. (with AP, Reuters)
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Federica MOGHERINI, participates at the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organisation (CBTO) Ministerial Meeting, taking place on 13 June 2016, in Vienna.
The polls are tightening, markets are jittery, and Downing Street is so alarmed it is relyingon Gordon Brown to save the Remain campaign. It may be time to start talking about the day after Brexit, and whether there is a way to engineer a soft-landing.
The “what happens next” issue is tackled today by Donald Tusk, the European Council president, in a typically punchy interview with Bild Zeitung.
“The leave campaign contains a very clear message: ‘Let us leave, nothing will change, everything will stay as before’. Well, it will not. Not only economic implications will be negative for the UK, but first and foremost geopolitical. Do you know why these consequences are so dangerous? Because in the long-term they are completely unpredictable. As a historian, I am afraid this could in fact be the start of the process of destruction of not only the EU but also of the Western political civilisation.”
He later says divorce will be “sad” but manageable within 2 years. But he notes a parallel trade deal – setting the future EU-UK relationship – will be far tougher, and take at least another 5 years after the divorce, if it can be agreed at all. Long as it seems, this 7-year drift is actually optimistic version of the “decade of uncertainty” that David Cameron and Whitehall have described.
If markets react badly to a Brexit vote, there will be huge pressure to find a quick EU fix for a smooth transition (what Wolfgang Münchau calls letting the Brits go in peace). But even under such market duress the political options look poor.
Read moreBut whose country do they want back exactly? Your country? My country? Or really, just their country?
Before we leave the European Union and possibly change our country forever, we need to have an idea what country we’d leave behind, and what country we’d get instead, if we vote for Brexit on 23 June.
Look carefully at those Tories who are running the ‘Leave’ campaign and calling for Britain to completely change direction outside the EU.
What could be their real motive?
Those leading Tories – Michael Gove, Boris Johnson, Iain Duncan Smith, Chris Grayling, John Whittingdale, Priti Patel and others – have in this campaign viciously attacked their own government and Prime Minister.
It’s been a nasty and sustained ‘blue on blue’ offensive.
Do they know what they’re doing?
Probably yes. The referendum presents for them a possible once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to win power for their style of right-wing Conservatism.
These Conservatives have taken a calculated but clever risk. They know that if the referendum results in Brexit, it will mean the end of David Cameron‘s premiership and those now in government who support his Remain campaign.
Then what?
There would be resignations and a new leader of the Conservative Party would be elected by the party’s membership.
According to YouGov, Boris Johnson would be front-runner by far to become Tory Leader.
On Brexit, we could have a new brand of Conservative government, with Boris Johnson as Prime Minister.
Another election would not legally be required until 2020.
The country we’d be ‘getting back’ on Brexit would be run by possibly the most right-wing Tory government anyone of us can remember.
Instead of our current alliances with Europe, we could be back to ‘Rule Britannia’ with orthodox Tory Eurosceptics as our new political masters. They could have uninterrupted power for almost four years.
Opposition? What opposition? Labour and Lib-Dems are in disarray.
If these Tory hopefuls get ‘their country back’ on Brexit, what could Britain become?
For an answer, take a close look at what these right-wing Tory Brexiteers stand for. Here are some brief examples:
• Iain Duncan-Smith: Long-term Eurosceptic and former Tory leader, he was until recently the Secretary of State for Works and Pensions. The social policies he proposed were described by the European Court of Justice as ‘unfit for a modern democracy’ and ‘verging on frighteningly authoritarian.’
• Michael Gove: He was last year appointed as Secretary of State for Justice, with a mandate to scrap the Human Rights Act – which might only be possible if Britain leaves the European Union. As Education Secretary, Mr Gove was widely criticised for his heavy-handed education reforms and described as having a “blinkered, almost messianic, self-belief.”
• Boris Johnson: He’s the ‘poster boy’ of the Leave campaign and the likely new Prime Minister if Britain backs Brexit. His buffoonery and gaffes delight some, but horrify others. He once joked that women only go to university to find a husband. He has often dithered on big issues, wavering last year on whether to return to the House of Commons whilst still London Mayor. Some have criticised him for allegedly joining ‘Leave’ only because of the possible opportunity to become Prime Minister.
• Priti Patel: She’s the Minister for Employment. In a pro-Brexit speech last month she said, “If we could just halve the burdens of the EU social and employment legislation we could deliver a £4.3 billion boost to our economy and 60,000 new jobs.” TUC General Secretary Frances O’Grady responded, “Leave the EU and lose your rights at work – that’s the message that even Leave campaigners like Priti Patel are now giving.”
• Chris Grayling: He’s the Leader of the House of Commons and previously Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice. He provoked the first strike by barristers and solicitors for his cuts to legal aid. He backed reforms to curb the power of the European Court of Human Rights. He caused outrage with his comments that Christian owners of bed and breakfasts should have the right to turn away gay couples (he later apologised).
And waiting in the wings is UKIP leader, Nigel Farage who said he puts victory in the referendum above loyalty to his party. Mr Farage said he would back Boris Johnson to be Prime Minister if Britain votes for Brexit – and could see himself working for Boris’s government.
Imagine our current Tory government morphing into a new government consisting only of right-wing Eurosceptic Tories. With the softer pro-EU Conservatives disbanded because they lost the referendum.
A new Conservative government that wouldn’t be subject to the progressive rules and safeguards of the European Union – such as on workers’ rights, free movement and protection of the environment.
Then imagine that we might not have an opportunity to vote-out such a new government until 2020.
If you’re one of those who say ‘we want our country back’ – have a think about what country you’d be getting back if we left the EU, and who’d then be in charge.
Is the EU so bad, and the alternative so good, that we’d want to risk exchanging what we’ve got, for what we’d get?
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This article has now been published by The Independent newspaper:
You won’t ‘get back your country’ if you vote for a Brexit – you’ll give it to the most right-wing UK government in recent history__________________________________________________
Other stories by Jon Danzig:To follow my stories please like my Facebook page: Jon Danzig Writes
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Is the #EU bad enough and the alternative good enough to #Leave? Please share my blog: https://t.co/IAsaM0xwFv pic.twitter.com/lF82Os63EM
— Jon Danzig (@Jon_Danzig) June 12, 2016
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The UK then joined France and Italy in the Horizon-class class of air-defence destroyers frigate program; however, differing national requirements, workshare arguments and delays led to the UK withdrawing on 26 April 1999 and starting its own national project Type 45 destroyer. The class is primarily designed for anti-aircraft and anti-missile warfare and is built around the PAAMS (Sea Viper) air-defence system utilizing the SAMPSON AESA and the S1850M long-range radars. The Type 45 destroyers were built to replace the Type 42 (Sheffield class) destroyers that had served during the Falklands War, with the last Type 42 being decommissioned in 2013.
The six Type 45 Daring Class destroyers, which cost the taxpayer £1bn each, are the backbone of Britain’s combat force at sea and are among the most advanced missile destroyers in the world. They are the Royal Navy’s first all-electric ships and are driven by two Rolls-Royce WR21 gas turbines and two Wartsila diesel engines. The WR21 is designed to deliver significantly improved operating costs by using an intercooler recuperator, which recovers exhaust and recycles the gas into the engine. But, as a rule, power turbines slowed down in warm temperatures.
But the engines powering the Royal Navy’s cutting-edge fleet are unable to operate continuously in the warm waters of the Gulf. Responding to questions about why the power systems failed in warmer waters than the UK, John Hudson, managing director of BAE Systems maritime, said the original specifications for the vessel had not required it to sustain extremes. “The operating profile at the time was that there would not be repeated or continuous operations in the Gulf,” he said.
Tomas Leahy, of Rolls-Royce naval programmes, said the destroyer was now operating in “far more arduous conditions than envisaged in the specifications”. “This is not the fault of the WR21,” said Mr Leahy. “It is the laws of physics.”
But the Type 45 was designed for worldwide operations from sub-Arctic to extreme tropical environments and continues to operate effectively in the Gulf and South Atlantic all year round. It also emerged that some of the difficulties were rooted in late-stage design changes demanded by the US Navy, when it was leading development of the electric propulsion system. However, the US Navy pulled out of the programme in 2000, when it was taken over by the UK’s MoD. Mr Leahy said that only 1,900 hours of testing had been carried out on the system after the design change, while the problems only emerged after 4,000-5,000 hours of operation.
“With hindsight it would have been good to do another 4,000-5,000 hours of testing on it,” he said. The MoD is having to set aside tens of millions of pounds to fix the destroyers. The plan is to install two extra diesel engines which will require cutting a hole in the hull of the brand new destroyers. The costs of repairing the Type 45 were forcing a delay in the Type 26 frigate programme. Original plans were for the first steel to be cut on the frigates by the end of this year, but this is now not likely before December 2017. The government had already weakened the Royal Navy’s capabilities by cutting the number of frigates that would be ordered from 13 to eight in last year’s strategic defence and security review.
The Type 45 uses a pioneering system called Integrated Electric Propulsion (IEP). There are many advantages associated with IEP, fuel efficiency, flexibility in locating the engines and a supposedly reduced maintenance and manning requirement. In basic terms, two WR-21 gas turbines (GTs) and two Wartsila 2MW diesel generators provide AC power for the motors that propel the ship as well as the power for the ships systems – weapons, sensors lighting etc. The WR-21 GTs were designed in an international partnership with Rolls Royce and Northrop Grumman Marine Systems. The turbines are of a sound design but have an intercooler-recuperator that recovers heat from the exhaust and recycles it into the engine, making it more fuel-efficient and reducing the ship’s thermal signature. Unfortunately the intercooler unit has a major design flaw and causes the GTs to fail occasionally. When this happens, the electrical load on the diesel generators can become too great and they ‘trip out’, leaving the ship with no source of power or propulsion.
The MoD has not revealed how frequently these blackouts have occurred but the first 2 ships, HMS Daring and HMS Dauntless seem to have suffered the most. The first indication of problems was as far back as 2010 when it was admitted HMS Daring lost all power in mid-Atlantic and had to be repaired in Canada. Although the Type 45s have been active, some significant commitments have been missed. An indication that all is not well could be seen by the number of Type 45s alongside in Portsmouth at any given time during the last few years. Historically the RN has never been a fleet of ‘harbour queens’ and today’s over-worked navy can ill-afford unreliable ships. HMS Daring entered service in 2009, it has taken more than 6 years to agree to deal with the problem and it will probably be well after 2020 before the work is completed. It is obviously dangerous from a seamanship and navigational point of view to suddenly lose propulsion at any time. It is even more serious when operating in a high threat environment as the ship would be a sitting duck.
Replacement of the WR-21 GTs is not a practical option. Instead additional or more powerful diesel generators will provide long-term redundancy and assurance that electrical supplies can be maintained in the event of GT failure. The good news is that the large Type 45 design has the space and reserve buoyancy to cope with larger or additional diesels. The rectification work on the six ships will be done one by one as part of the normal major refit cycle. This will extend the length of the refits but should not have an especially dramatic effect on frontline availability.
It is ironic that the RN is suffering with propulsion problems, having had a great history of propulsion innovation and success. The steam turbine was a British invention and in HMS Dreadnought (1906) was the first capital ship to use this leap in propulsive power. The steam turbine drove the majority of major warships for the next 60 years. HMS Amazon (1974) was the first all-GT warship and British engines were subsequently exported to many foreign navies. Much of the world-renowned expertise in naval GT design was derived from an obscure and secretive facility, the Pyestock National Gas Turbine Establishment at Farnborough which tested & developed marine and aero engines until it was closed in 2000. One of Pyestock’s last projects was some of the initial development of the WR-21 done in partnership with Rolls Royce and Northrop Grumman. Reliance on computer modelling signalled the end for Pyestock but with hindsight perhaps there is no substitute for ‘real world’ testing. It is interesting to note that recently Rolls Royce opened a brand new testing facility for the WR-21 and the MT-30 GTs (Which will power the QE aircraft carriers and Type 26 frigate).
There are growing signs that frustration with industry in the MoD has reached breaking point. The Type 45 propulsion problems are just one of many expensive problems with major defence contacts. The cost over-runs of the Astute class submarine have led to Whitehall creating a special project office to manage the Trident Successor submarines and failures will be met with harsher financial penalties. The surprise emergence of the alternative frigate programme, in addition to the Type 26, is also a sign of disillusionment with late, expensive and flawed offerings from BAE Systems.
Source
http://www.savetheroyalnavy.org/putting-the-type-45-propulsion-problems-...
Eurosceptics often claim that they love Europe, but hate the European Union. They assert that Britain can still be part of Europe without having to be part of the European Union.
That, of course, is true to an extent, but it rather misses the point and purpose of the EU.
The European Economic Community – later to be called the European Union – was started in the aftermath of the Second World War, with the express intent of avoiding wars on our continent ever happening again.
That was the passionate resolve of those who are regarded as the eleven founders of the European Union, including our own war leader, Winston Churchill.
After all, Europe had a long and bloody history of resolving its differences through war, and indeed, the planet’s two world wars originated right here, on our continent.
So the EU was never just an economic agreement between nations.
It was always also meant to be a social and political union of European nations to enable them to find ways not just to trade together, but to co-exist and co-operate in harmony and peace on many levels as a community of nations.
The goal, in the founding document of the European Union called the Treaty of Rome, was to achieve ‘ever closer union among the peoples of Europe’ (which is rather different to ‘ever closer union of nations’.)
Just one year after the Second World War, in 1946, Winston Churchill made his famous speech in Zurich, Switzerland in which he said:
“We must build a kind of United States of Europe. The structure of the United States of Europe, if well and truly built, will be such as to make the material strength of a single state less important.”
At the time Churchill did not envisage Britain joining the new Union of Europe, but he was later to change his mind.
In March 1957 the European Economic Community (EEC) was established by its six founding nations, France, Italy, West Germany, Belgium, The Netherlands and Luxembourg.
This was a remarkable achievement, considering that these countries only a few years previously had been fighting in a most terrible war, and four of the founding nations had been viciously subjugated by another of the founders, Germany, during their Nazi regime.
In a speech four months later in July 1957 at Westminster’s Central Hall, Churchill welcomed the formation of the EEC by the six, provided that “the whole of free Europe will have access”. Churchill added, “we genuinely wish to join..”
But Churchill also warned:
“If, on the other hand, the European trade community were to be permanently restricted to the six nations, the results might be worse than if nothing were done at all – worse for them as well as for us. It would tend not to unite Europe but to divide it – and not only in the economic field.”
Maybe this is the point that many in the ‘Leave EU’ campaigns simply don’t get. Here in Britain we don’t seem to understand the founding purpose of the European Union – and on the rest of the continent, they don’t understand why we don’t understand.
The European Union isn’t just about economics and trade, and never was. It’s about peace, and a community of nations of our continent working together for the benefit and protection of its citizens.
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#EUReferendum: The #EU isn’t just about trade, and never was. Please share my latest blog: https://t.co/8kxbzutBh0 pic.twitter.com/7sKFkLiquk
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María del Carmen Calatrava
Interdisciplinarity has become a major topic in discussions of higher education structures, knowledge production and research funding. The demand for criteria and tools for its evaluation is subsequently increasing. Interdisciplinary research can be evaluated according to its many different aspects—including collaboration, integration of disciplines, generation of new areas of research or solutions to complex problems (Wagner, et al., 2011)—using both qualitative and quantitative methods of analysis.
Most quantitative measures of the output of interdisciplinary research rely on bibliometric methods. Such methods present two very important advantages: (1) they deliver an objective measure of interdisciplinarity, and (2) in combination with computational tools, large datasets can be analyzed in an effective manner. They are increasingly being used to inform policy in science and technology. A recent example is a review of interdisciplinary research conducted by Elsevier and commissioned by the UK higher education funding bodies and the Medical Research Council (Pan & Katrenko, 2015). In order to be accurately representative though, it is essential that interdisciplinary measurements are conducted with reliable indicators.
Citation analysis based on a taxonomy of disciplines
Since interdisciplinary research is often conceptualized as the integration of knowledge, one of the most common methods for its measurement is citation analysis, in which an exchange or integration among fields is captured via discipline-specific citations referring to other fields. In other words, a publication is considered interdisciplinary when it references the publications of more than one field. Such an approach requires a taxonomy of disciplines that classify publications into disciplinary fields (Leydesdorff, Carley, & Rafols, 2013; Porter & Rafols, 2009; Rafols, Leydesdorff, OHare, Nightingale, & Stirling, 2012). Although there is no consensus as to which is the best taxonomy (National Research Council, 2010; Rafols & Leydesdorff, 2009), the one utilized by Web of Science is the one most widely used (Bensman & Leydesdorff, 2009; Pudovkin & Garfield, 2002). The data for the analysis is gathered from Web of Science. This particularly convenient bibliographic resource provides three essential features: it indexes journals in different disciplines, it provides citation records for indexed publications, and it categorizes journals into disciplines within the taxonomy. Once the references of a publication are categorized into one or more disciplines of the taxonomy, its interdisciplinarity can be measured by calculating the number of referenced fields, their proportion, and their similarity, all of which are the basis of widely-used indicators of interdisciplinarity (Porter & Rafols, 2009).
Missing data affects the accuracy of interdisciplinarity measurements
While analytical indicators and tools to measure interdisciplinarity have been refined over time, their results should be understood only as a proxy. The accuracy of interdisciplinarity measurements is directly related to the quality of the underlying bibliographic data, which not only needs to be correct, but also complete. Unfortunately, gathering a correct and complete bibliographic dataset is almost impossible because the data, which is typically gathered from digital libraries, is rarely complete. Even though this problem can be mitigated by gathering publication data from different bibliographic sources, it will continue to exist due to the fact that there is no bibliographic source that indexes all existing scientific publications. For example, Web of Science and Scopus do not cover books, book chapters or many regional non-English journals. Even conference proceedings, which constitute publication venues in many applied fast-changing fields such as computer science, are often not indexed.
For our most recent bibliometric analysis, we gathered 1,746 publications from Web of Science and Scopus. Even after combining the data from both digital libraries, the extraction of references was possible for only 1,068 of them (Calatrava Moreno, Auzinger, & Werthner, 2016). Another source of inaccuracy is created when publications are incorrectly categorized or are not categorized at all into disciplines. The 1,746 publications of our dataset had a total of 12,243 references, of which only 5,310 were categorized into disciplines. This poses a serious obstacle when conducting citation analysis because each citation needs to be categorized into at least one discipline. If citations remain uncategorized, they will not be taken into account in the analysis. The more citations that remain uncategorized, the less accurate the measurement will be.
How much missing data should we allow in a bibliometric analysis?
In order to decrease the amount of unreliable data, previous literature has selected publications with a proportion of categorized references above a threshold value when computing an index of interdisciplinarity (Rafols, Leydesdorff, OHare, Nightingale, & Stirling, 2012). This approach, however, does not take into account that uncategorized references affect the measurement of disciplinary and interdisciplinary publications in different ways. While the uncategorized references of a disciplinary publication are likely to be from the same discipline, the references of an interdisciplinary publication will reference multiple disciplines. Therefore, missing data in highly interdisciplinary publications leads to an underestimation of the extent of their interdisciplinarity.
We have developed a method that addresses this problem. Given a publication and its references (both categorized and uncategorized), our method estimates the uncertainty caused by the uncategorized references. It acts as a confidence indicator that can be used to assess the reliability of bibliographic data and thereby discard unreliable publications from the bibliometric analysis.
Our contribution is a first approach to measure interdisciplinarity taking into account the incompleteness of bibliographic data. Further work will be needed in order to tackle other problems that still affect the results of indicators of interdisciplinary research.
María del Carmen Calatrava is in the final year of her PhD at Vienna University of Technology, Austria. She has an interdisciplinary background in computer science, innovation and education science. She has two master’s degrees, one in computer science and one in innovation in computer science. Her main research interest is data analysis applied to the field of higher education. She is currently analyzing the production of interdisciplinary research within the context of new doctoral structures after the Bologna Process with both qualitative and quantitative methods. Her interest in technology has led her to contribute to the field of business informatics as well.
References
Bensman, S. J., & Leydesdorff, L. (2009). Definition and identification of journals as bibliographic and subject entities: Librarianship versus ISI Journal Citation Reports methods and their effect on citation measures. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 60(6), 1097-1117.
Calatrava Moreno, M. C., Auzinger, T., & Werthner, H. (2016). On the uncertainty of interdisciplinarity measurements due to incomplete bibliographic data. Scientometrics, 107(1), 213-232.
Leydesdorff, L., Carley, S., & Rafols, I. (2013). Global maps of science based on the new Web-of-Science categories. Scientometrics, 94(2), 589-593.
Moed, H., Burger, W., Frankfort, J., & Van Raan, A. F. (1985). The application of bibliometric indicators: Important field- and time-dependent factors to be considered. Scientometrics, 8(3-4), 177-203.
National Research Council. (2010). Data on federal research and development: A pathway to modernization. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.
Pan, L., & Katrenko, S. (2015). A review of the UK’s interdisciplinary research using a citation-based approach. Report to the UK HE funding bodies and MRC by Elsevier. Elsevier.
Porter, A. L., & Rafols, I. (2009). Is science becoming more interdisciplinary? measuring and mapping six research fields over time. Scientometrics, 81(3), 719-745.
Pudovkin, A. I., & Garfield, E. (2002). Algorithmic procedure for finding semantically related journals. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 53(13), 1113-1119.
Rafols, I., & Leydesdorff, L. (2009). Content-based and algorithmic classifications of journals: Perspectives on the dynamics of scientific communication and indexer effects. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 60(9), 1823-1835.
Rafols, l., Leydesdorff, L., OHare, A., Nightingale, P., & Stirling, A. (2012). How journal rankings can suppress interdisciplinary research: A comparison between innovation studies and business & management. Research Policy, 41(7), 1262-1282.
Wagner, C. S., Roessner, J. D., Bobb, K., Klein, J. T., Boyack, K. W., Keyton, J., . . . Börner, K. (2011). Approaches to understanding and measuring interdisciplinary scientific research (IDR): A review of the literature. Journal of Informetrics, 5(1), 14-26.
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