Diplomacy & Crisis News

Ensuring the right to a nationality and eradicating statelessness is more pressing than ever, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) said on Monday, as it marked the 60th anniversary of the adoption of the 1961 UN Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness.

As the school year begins for millions of children in Europe and Central Asia, UN health and child experts on Monday issued a series of COVID-19 risk reduction measures to ensure that in-person lessons can go ahead, despite rising infection rates.

Drone strikes over the weekend underscore the changing nature, not the end, of U.S. military operations in Afghanistan.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres has urged countries to fulfil their obligations to prevent and prosecute cases of enforced disappearance, a “cowardly practice” which the COVID-19 pandemic has made even more difficult to combat.

Interrogé en décembre 1998 sur la rareté de l'information internationale dans son journal télévisé, l'un des rédacteurs en chef de TF1 avait répliqué : « Vous voulez des nouvelles sur le Venezuela ? Regardez la chaîne vénézuélienne. Sur le Soudan ? Regardez les chaînes africaines. » Le 24 mars dernier, la (...) / Kosovo, Médias, Réfugiés, Guerre du Kosovo 1999, Infoguerre - 1999/05

With the needs of Afghan children greater than ever before, the world “cannot abandon them now”, a senior official with the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said on Sunday after concluding a visit to the country.

For millions of villagers in Indonesia’s remote areas, a 12-hour-per-day erratic electricity supply is the norm. With students studying by candlelight at night and health centres not running at full capacity, these communities face an uphill struggle to improve their well-being. 

Countries which have not yet ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) are urged by UN Secretary-General António Guterres to do so without delay.

Dans les premières années de la révolution russe, une vive effervescence saisit tous les domaines de l'art, et notamment le théâtre. Anatoli Lounatcharski, responsable de la politique culturelle, en fut le garant et l'un des théoriciens. Le réalisme socialiste, promu sous Staline en 1934, y mit un (...) / Russie, URSS, Art, Communisme, Culture, Histoire, Idées, Idéologie, Théâtre, Marxisme - 2016/06

Innovators are joining Paralympians to discuss how sport can help to build a more inclusive society in a series of online discussions organized by the UN to coincide with the Tokyo 2020 Paralympics, which continues until 5 September.

With medical stocks dwindling in Afghanistan, and insecurity at the airport in the capital, Kabul, following the terrorist attack on Thursday, the World Health Organization (WHO) continues to examine ways to deliver much-needed supplies to the country, a senior official told journalists in Geneva. 

The global rollout of COVID-19 vaccines is progressing at “two alarmingly different speeds”, UN agency leaders said in a statement on Friday, noting that less than two per cent of adults are fully vaccinated in most low-income countries compared to almost 50 per cent in high-‑income nations.   

Droite réactionnaire ou droite ultralibérale ? Verdict le 5 juin. Le premier tour de l'élection présidentielle péruvienne a marqué une nouvelle étape du virage conservateur en Amérique latine. À Lima, la formation pilotée par la fille de l'ancien dictateur Alberto Fujimori dispose déjà d'une écrasante (...) / Amérique latine, Pérou, Citoyenneté, Criminalité, Démocratie, Narcotrafic, Élections, État, Industrie, Parti politique, Pauvreté, Personnalités, Politique, Environnement, Répression, Néolibéralisme, Autoritarisme, Corruption - 2016/06

Soucieux de transformer sa richesse en puissance et influence, le Qatar multiplie les opérations de prestige, comme l'organisation de la Coupe du monde de football en 2022. Mais ces grands chantiers publics et leur lot d'accidents ont révélé l'archaïsme et la brutalité d'un système de parrainage des (...) / Golfe, Exclusion sociale, Immigrés, Industrie, Mondialisation, Multinationales, Pauvreté, Syndicalisme, Travail, Violence, Qatar, Esclavage - 2016/06

More girls and boys than ever are on the move, with 35.5 million having lived outside their country of birth in 2020 and an additional 23.3 million displaced internally, according to a new report by the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) published on Friday.

The UN Security Council on Friday underlined the importance of combatting terrorism in Afghanistan following the deadly attack at the airport in the capital, Kabul.   

/ France, Armée, Conflit, Impérialisme, Terrorisme, Tchad, Sahel, Afrique centrale, Afrique de l'Ouest - Afrique / France, Armée, Conflit, Impérialisme, Terrorisme, Tchad, Sahel, Afrique centrale, Afrique de l'Ouest - Afrique

Trevor Filseth

Child Tax Credit,

These payments—particularly for large families—can be worth thousands of dollars.

Here's What You Need to Remember: The increase in the Child Tax Credit will only last until the end of 2021, despite the attempts of some lawmakers to extend it; after this, the payments will return to being worth $2,000 per year and become non-refundable once more. This means that the relevance of the higher payments in future divorce cases is likely to decrease.

The March 2021 American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) provided for six early payments of the Child Tax Credit, a tax break intended to help cover the expenses of parents with children during the coronavirus pandemic. Prior to March, the credit was set at $2,000 per child per year, and made non-refundable, so parents owing less than $2,000 in taxes would not be able to fully benefit from it.

The ARPA increased these payments by fifty percent, to $3,000 per month. It also added a $600 bonus for the parents of children under the age of six, and it made the tax credit fully refundable, meaning that families who did not owe enough in taxes would receive the difference as a cash payment. Lastly, it arranged for half of the credit to be sent out in the form of six advance checks—the first of which was sent on July 15, and the third of which will be sent on September 15.

These payments—particularly for large families—can be worth thousands of dollars. It comes as no surprise, then, that they often make their way into divorce cases, along with other tax breaks such as the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit. In particular, though, the fully refundable status of the Child Tax Credit separates it from other tax credits, which generally require the recipient to work and pay taxes in order to receive the benefit. This means that the Child Tax Credit is increasingly worth fighting over in divorce court.

Given this, rules have been established for how the Child Tax Credit is given out. The recipient must cover at least fifty percent of their child’s expenses and live with them for at least half the year. This usually means that the parent who gains custody of the children will receive the tax credit. There is, however, a form—Form 8332—for parents who willingly give up the tax credit to the other parent, even if they do not technically meet the guidelines required.

One possible reason is that the credit has an upper-income limit. In previous years, this limit has been $200,000 for single tax filers and $400,000 for couples filing jointly. However, the ARPA reduced this level to $75,000 for single filers, $112,500 for heads of families, and $150,000 for couples filing jointly.

In this case, if one person makes $200,000 per year, and the other makes $60,000, it makes little sense for the higher earner to claim the credit since for them it would be worthless.

It is not clear how much longer the current situation will last. The increase in the Child Tax Credit will only last until the end of 2021, despite the attempts of some lawmakers to extend it; after this, the payments will return to being worth $2,000 per year and become non-refundable once more. This means that the relevance of the higher payments in future divorce cases is likely to decrease.

Trevor Filseth is a current and foreign affairs writer for the National Interest. This article is being republished due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters

Ethen Kim Lieser

Unemployment Benefits,

With this in mind—and even with the delivery of three stimulus payments to most Americans over the past year—studies and polls are suggesting that millions of Americans are still struggling to make ends meet amid the surge in new coronavirus cases due to the Delta variant.

States that decided to withdraw early from enhanced federal unemployment benefits witnessed slightly higher job growth—but it was also responsible for a $2 billion cut in overall household spending, according to a new study authored by economists and researchers at Columbia University, Harvard University, the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and the University of Toronto.

Governors of the twenty-six states opted out of the unemployment program that tacked on $300 in weekly enhanced benefits several weeks before they were set to expire on Labor Day. The mostly Republican governors had long argued that the benefits kept some unemployed Americans from seeking work.

Spending Cut

According to the study, the states that ended the federal benefits early witnessed employment rise 4.4 percentage points compared to the states that continued with the benefits. However, that translated to just one in eight unemployed individuals in the “cutoff states” who eventually found employment.

More concerning, these same states also saw a twenty percent cut in weekly spending from residents—amounting to roughly $145 each week. As a result, the economies of the states that declined the benefits had to endure a reduction of nearly $2 billion in consumer spending from June through early August, the study noted.

Come Labor Day, a recent study conducted by the People’s Policy Project, citing data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey, revealed that approximately ten million more Americans on unemployment will lose those benefits.

With this in mind—and even with the delivery of three stimulus payments to most Americans over the past year—studies and polls are suggesting that millions of Americans are still struggling to make ends meet amid the surge in new coronavirus cases due to the Delta variant.

Calls for Assistance

In recent weeks, both ordinary citizens and some lawmakers have been calling on the White House and Congress to quickly approve more financial assistance to Americans.

“For our team and other Americans who can claim unemployment, even the maximum payments will not be enough for most people to continue paying their bills—and avoid slipping into poverty,” contends one highly popular Change.org petition that has garnered more than 2.8 million signatures.

“The facts are, even successful small businesses can’t go months with their doors closed. But supplying Americans with monthly support until they can get back on their feet can save our communities from financial ruin,” it adds.

Moreover, twenty-one Democratic senators have signed off on a letter to President Joe Biden to take necessary action.

“While we are pleased that the American Rescue Plan included a one-time direct payment and an extension of federal unemployment insurance programs, a single direct payment will not last long for most families,” they wrote. “This crisis is far from over, and families deserve certainty that they can put food on the table and keep a roof over their heads.”

Ethen Kim Lieser is a Washington state-based Science and Tech Editor who has held posts at Google, The Korea Herald, Lincoln Journal Star, AsianWeek, and Arirang TV. Follow or contact him on LinkedIn.

Image: Reuters

Sebastien Roblin

USS Halibut, Asia

A submarine unlike any other.

Here's What You Need To Remember: The Halibut and other submarines began regular courier runs to install new tapes on the tap while bringing back the old tapes for analysis by the NSA in what was called Operation Ivy Bells. However, it was human frailty, not sea storms or Soviet sonars, which brought an end to the intelligence bonanza. When the Parche went to pick up the latest tape, the tap was missing.

Since 2015, there have been reports of Russian submarines and spy ships trawling the waters near the ocean-spanning underwater fiber-optic cables vital to trans-oceanic Internet access. In fact, reported activity by spy ship Yartar off the U.S. nuclear-armed submarine base in King’s Bay, Georgia is likely in search of secret military cables used exclusively by the Pentagon.

The Russians might be interested in hacking into those cables because the U.S. Navy pulled of such an exploit forty-six years earlier using a specially-modified spy submarine, a nuclear-powered wiretap, and some helium-swilling aquanauts.

The Halibut, Missile-Sub Turned Spy Submarine

Commissioned in 1960, the USS Halibut was a one-of-a-kind nuclear-powered submarine designed to launch Regulus II nuclear-tipped cruise missiles. The 5,000-ton submarine housed two 17.5-meter-long Regulus II missiles in a grotesquely bulged hangar on her foredeck. The missiles were launched while surfaced from a hydraulically extended ramp to strike targets up to 1,150 miles away.

However, by the time the Halibut entered service, the Navy had developed the Polaris, the U.S.’s first Submarine-Launched Ballistic Missile, which could be fired from underwater into space to strike target nearly 3,000 miles away. The obsolete Regulus II was canceled a year before the Halibut was commissioned in 1960, and the submarine spent four years lugging five older Regulus I missiles on deterrence patrols before these too were retired.

Still, the Navy saw useful potential in the Halibut’s unconventional layout, and in 1968 she received a unique overhaul. The bulged missile hangar was converted into the ‘Bat Cave’ (inspired by comic book character’s lair) stuffed full of spy equipment, including a rare 60s-era 24bit UNIVAC computer, a retractable seafloor-scanning sonar, and a photo-developing lab. A well underneath the Bat Cave could deploy two 2-ton ‘Fish’—remotely operated underwater spy vehicles. Halibut’s lower hull had special thrustors and anchoring winches to maintain its position on the sea floor and later received four skids allowing it to safely ‘land’ there.

An apparent mini-submarine was prominently strapped onto the Halibut’s rear deck, which the Navy publicly boasted was a Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicle (DSRV) simulator. This was a deception: the pod actually housed a special pressurized chamber for use by saturation divers, with an integrated diving lock.

Deep-sea divers risk decompression sickness (the ‘bends’) caused by gas bubbles forming within the body when reacclimatizing to regular air pressure. Based on technology pioneered in the SEALAB underwater habitats, the pressure chamber was designed to give divers a long-term pressure-stable habitat so they would only need to depressurize once at the end of their mission. The divers used oxygen mixed with helium rather than heavier nitrogen to aid acclimatization. You can see an amazing diagram by HI Sutton of the Halibut and its gadgets here.

The Halibut’s first mission was to locate the Soviet ballistic missile submarine K-129, which on March 8, 1968 sank nearly 5,000 meters to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean under mysterious circumstances. The Soviet Navy searched for K-129 for months, but it was the Halibut that finally found her with her “Fish” that August, after having the search radius narrowed to ‘only’ 1,200 square miles using data from the Navy’s SOSUS hydrophone network.

In 1972, the Captain James Bradley of the Office of Naval Intelligence thought of a new use for the Halibut. The Soviet Navy maintained a major nuclear-missile armed submarine base at Petropavlovsk on the remote Kamchatka Peninsula. Bradley felt it was likely that the base maintained an undersea communication cable to transmit messages directly across the Sea of Okhotsk.

However, the cable’s presence was not even confirmed, so how was it to be located? Bradly was inspired one day by recollecting the signs he had seen on the side of the Mississippi River warning ships not to lay anchor in areas near underwater cables. (Anchors remain a frequent cause of damaged cables.)

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Reasoning the Soviets would use similar signs, he dispatched the Halibut off the coast of Kamchatka to search for them. The Halibut was not particularly quiet by the standards of modern submarines, and she risked being attacked if she was discovered penetrating the perimeter formed by Soviet naval bases on the Kuril Islands seized from Japan at the end of World War II. In fact, the Halibut had a self-destructive device to ensure she and her crew could not be captured.

After a week of snooping, the Halibut’s crew finally spotted beach signs in Cyrllic warning ships not to lay anchor. Discretely, the technicians in the Bat Cave began scanning the seafloor with her ‘Fish’, and in a matter of hours spotted the cable 120-meters below the sea via a grainy video feed. The 5,000-ton submarine carefully settled close to the seafloor, deploying her special anchors. The elite saturation divers in the pod swam out to the cable and wrapped a three-foot long magnetic induction device around the cable. Rather than risking damage and detection by piercing inside cables, the tap recorded the activity passing through the cable.

The operation was considered so secret that most of the Halibut’s crew were told their mission was to recover fragments from a P-500 “Sandbox” missile test for analysis. The supersonic anti-ship missile was rumored to use an advanced infrared-seeker. To reinforce the cover, after recording several hours of conversation, the Halibut sailed to the site of the test and her dovers did recover two million tiny P-500 missile fragment, which were reassembled jigsaw-like until it was discovered that Sandbox used only radar guidance!

The brief tape was brought back to Pearl Harbor and found to be highly promising. The Navy rapidly commissioned a new six-ton wiretap device from Bell Laboratories called ‘the Beast’ (photo here) which used a nuclear power source and a massive tape recorder to records of weeks of conversation across multiple lines at the same time.

The Halibut returned and installed this new device, and the sub’s crew were soon listening in on Soviet telephone conversations, celebrating their success by feasting on a spider crab scooped up from the sea floor.

Thenceforth, the Halibut and other submarines began regular courier runs to install new tapes on the tap while bringing back the old tapes for analysis by the NSA in what was called Operation Ivy Bells. The Halibut herself was decommissioned in 1975, and the courier runs taken over by the USS Parche, Sea Wolf and Richard B. Russell.

The tapped cables provided a treasure trove of intelligence for the NSA: mixed in between personal calls to family and sweethearts were private conversations on sensitive political topics and detailed information on Soviet submarine operations. Much of the Soviet traffic was unencrypted because cables were considered a highly secure form of communication.

This candid, unfiltered portrait of the Soviet Navy’s state of mind vis-à-vis the United States reportedly influenced U.S. military leaders to deescalate activities which were threatening to panic Moscow, and also apparently informed the Washington’s negotiating posture for the SALT II treaty which limited the size of strategic nuclear weapons forces.

Cheap Betrayal

The cable-tap operation did have its risks. In Sherry Sontag’s book Blind Man’s Bluff, he describes how on a later tape-recovery mission, a sea storm bucked the Halibut to and fro until her anchors snapped, causing her to begin rising uncontrollably with divers trapped outside. The Halibut risked exposure in Soviet territorial waters, and her tethered divers risked death from rapid decompression. Captain John McNish decided to flood the Halibut until it smashed onto the seafloor and brought the divers back into their pressure habitat. But now the Halibut was dangerously mired.

After completing the planned data collection, the Halibut tried a dangerous emergency blow to free herself from seabed sediment, followed by an immediate dive to avoid breaching the surface. The submarine had only enough compressed air to try the maneuver once—and luckily, it worked.

In 1980 mishap also befell the USS Sea Wolf, which was uniquely equipped with a liquid metal-cooled nuclear reactor. On one tape-recovery mission, a storm caused her to crash into the seafloor and become stuck, with mud and mollusks gumming up her insides. Her captain considered scuttling the vessel before he managed to wriggle it free to surface in a noisy emergency blow out. After this incident, Soviet ships were observed heading towards the site of the cable tap.

However, it was human frailty, not sea storms or Soviet sonars, which brought an end to the intelligence bonanza. When the Parche went to pick up the latest tape, the tap was missing.

In July 1985 Soviet KGB defector Vitaly Yurchenko revealed that Ronald Pelton, a heavily indebted former analyst for the NSA, had walked into the Soviet embassy on January 14, 1980, and sold the secret of Ivy Bells for $5,000—with an additional $30,000 paid for later consultation. This led to the tap’s removal by Soviet divers, though it’s possible that the Soviets might have planted misleading information in the cable traffic before doing so.

Nonetheless, Ivy Bells proved one of the greatest coups by U.S. intelligence during the Cold War. The U.S. Navy maintained its undersea espionage capabilities today, particularly in the super-stealthy Sea Wolf-class submarine USS Jimmy Carter, which has a special chamber for splicing undersea cables.

And what came of the tapping device installed on the cable in Okhotsk? It can be seen today in the Great Patriotic War Museum in Moscow.

Sébastien Roblin holds a Master’s Degree in Conflict Resolution from Georgetown University and served as a university instructor for the Peace Corps in China. He has also worked in education, editing, and refugee resettlement in France and the United States. He currently writes on security and military history for War Is Boring. This article first appeared two years ago.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.