A News Aggregator That Covers The World's Major Wars And Conflicts. Military, Political, And Intelligence News Are Also Covered. Occasionally We Will Have Our Own Opinions Or Observations To Make.
Members of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom used red poker chips as a symbol of global military spending, redistributing them as they saw fit. Photograph: Mir Grebäck von Melen/WILPF
Female peacemakers at a conference marking the centenary of the 1915 Congress of Women want money diverted away from weapons and into public services. There is no mistaking Anne Scott’s opinion of nuclear weapons. Standing outside a conference hall in The Hague on a chilly Tuesday lunchtime, the secretary of the Scottish branch of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) sported a bright blue T-shirt with the words “NHS Not Trident” defiantly emblazoned on the front. Scott, from Edinburgh, had taken a handful of red poker chips from a table and placed them on a tarpaulin, marked “health”, as a symbolic gesture of where she would like government spending on the military to be diverted.
U.S. President Barack Obama shakes hands with China's President Xi Jinping during a joint news conference at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing November 12, 2014. Petar Kujundzic/Reuters
"China represents and will remain the most significant competitor to the United States for decades to come. As such, the need for a more coherent U.S. response to increasing Chinese power is long overdue.” The words are dispassionate: “significant competitor”; not "enemy.’’ They are careful: "A more coherent response." That suggests that heretofore the U.S. response to increasing Chinese power has been at least somewhat coherent. But there should be no mistaking the significance of the above sentences. They are the first of many in a lengthy new report issued by the Council on Foreign Relations. For decades, the “council,” as the cognoscenti call it, has been the core of the American foreign policy establishment. When it comes to foreign affairs, it doesn't just regurgitate the conventional wisdom, it creates it.
WNU Editor: The Soviet Union was primarily a military power ... and they were "contained" in that matter. China is an economic power and a growing military one .... this puts them in a totally different category.
If Iran strikes a deal with the West, all sanctions will be lifted very quickly and there’s nothing the U.S. Congress can do to stop it, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif told a New York audience Wednesday. In a set of blustery and self-righteous remarks, Iran’s top diplomat assured the crowd at New York University that President Barack Obama would be compelled to stop enforcing sanctions only days after any nuclear agreement was signed and would have to figure out how to lift congressional sanctions on Iran within weeks, no matter what Congress has to say about it. He also said that any future president, even a Republican, would be compelled to stick that agreement. Zarif also took several shots at the U.S. Senate, just as it debated amendments to a bill designed to slow the lifting of sanctions against Iran and give Congress an oversight role on the deal.
WNU Editor: He is mocking the U.S. Congress .... and he is probably right that they cannot stop this nuclear deal.
Iran’s navy has seized a Marshall Islands-flagged vessel, the MV Maersk Tigris. A 65,000 ton, Danish-owned, Singapore-chartered, container ship, en route to the United Arab Emirates from Saudi Arabia, manned mostly by Eastern European and Asian sailors, is intercepted, boarded, and confiscated by the Iranian navy, prompting a U.S. destroyer to investigate.* That wasn’t an anecdote from Tom Friedman’s next book on globalization–it’s a rough description of what took place on Tuesday, April 28, in the strategically important sea lanes of the Strait of Hormuz. Allow me to get into the details:
WNU Editor: Everything is still in flux .... but Iran's decision to seize this vessel has certainly raised tensions in the Persian Gulf, and in the Straits of Hormuz specifically.
The world has only a handful of old-fashioned kings, the kind whose subjects must follow their every command. Europe’s monarchs gave way to constitutions and elected governments long ago, as did those in Japan and Thailand. Almost all of the remaining absolute monarchs are in the oil-rich countries ringing the Persian Gulf, one of the globe’s most turbulent neighborhoods. That’s focused attention on who will succeed the region’s elderly and increasingly frail sovereigns. Succession could pose a risk to the stability of these countries and their alliances, such as those battling insurgent Islamist groups. As the Arab world grapples with new threats and calls to modernize, the Gulf monarchies remain bound by opaque and centuries-old traditions for passing on power.
Commentaries, Analysis, And Editorials -- April 29, 2015
The UN has launched a $415m (£270m) appeal for those affected by Nepal's earthquake, as frustration mounts at the pace of relief efforts. The UN said it wanted to support government efforts to provide emergency relief over the next three months. Riot police have clashed with people trying to leave the capital Kathmandu, and there are reports of villagers blocking trucks carrying supplies. The government says it has been overwhelmed by the disaster.
King Salman’a terror-fighting nephew becomes crown prince; the king’s ambitious son, the defense minister and the face of the fight in Yemen, is now second in line to the throne. Less than four months after ascending the throne, Saudi King Salman bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud has made unprecedented changes in the line of succession that benefit his own son Prince Mohammed bin Salman. These shifts come as Salman pursues the most assertive foreign policy in recent Saudi history. The king removed the sitting Crown Prince Muqrin, his half brother, and promoted the third in line Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, his nephew, up to number two. Salman made his own son, Mohammed bin Salman, the new number three. The King also replaced the ailing foreign minister, Prince Saud al Faisal with a non-royal, the current ambassador to Washington, Adel al Jubeir. Prince Saud had been Foreign Minister since 1975.
WNU Editor: If Bruce Reidel's analysis is correct, it means that the hard liners who are advocating for a more forceful Saudi military response in Yemen (and maybe elsewhere) are asserting control and dominance. Bottom line .... there are now many wars and conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa .... expect these conflicts to escalate .... and maybe even new ones arising.
(Reuters) - Saudi-led air strikes hit five Yemeni provinces as fighting raged in the southern city of Aden on Wednesday, and sources in the region said the kingdom was training armed tribesmen to fight the Iran-allied Houthi group. Houthi rebels' tanks and snipers killed at least 12 civilians overnight in Yemen's Aden as they advanced toward the centre of the city, residents said, and a Saudi-led coalition airdropped arms to anti-Houthi fighters in the city of Taiz. The Houthis took the capital Sanaa in September, demanding a more inclusive government, and swept south, rattling top world oil exporter Saudi Arabia and its allies, who fear what they see as expanding Iranian influence in the region. Arab coalition air strikes have, over the last month, backed local fighters in Aden and nationwide battling Shi'ite Houthis.
Agency helped U.S. hostage Warren Weinstein’s family assess whether it should pay Pakistani middleman for his release. The Federal Bureau of Investigation helped facilitate a 2012 ransom payment to al Qaeda from the family of kidnapped aid worker Warren Weinstein, senior U.S. officials said, in an unsuccessful bid to secure the release of the American, who was killed in January in a U.S. drone strike. The FBI’s previously undisclosed role reveals a contradiction in the U.S.’s longstanding position against paying ransoms for hostages. While the White House sharply criticizes the practice in public and private, new details about the Weinstein case show how the FBI provides some families with guidance towards that end. In the Weinstein case, the FBI vetted a Pakistani middleman used by the family to transport the money and provided other intelligence to enable an exchange, actions that some senior U.S. officials said encouraged the family to go ahead with the transaction.
The draft House bill carves out 25 percent of anti-Islamic State funding for the peshmerga and Sunni tribes. Republican war-policy writers are demanding that the United States recognize Kurdish and Sunni militias as their own “country” amid growing concerns about Iran’s influence over Baghdad. The House Armed Services Committee on April 27 released an annual Defense bill that authorizes $715 million in aid to Iraqi forces fighting the self-proclaimed Islamic State (IS). The bill, which is scheduled to be debated and voted on in the committee on April 29, carves out at least 25% of that aid for the peshmerga, the Sunni tribal militias and a yet-to-be-established Iraqi Sunni National Guard. The bill “would require that the Kurdish peshmerga, the Sunni tribal security forces with a national security mission, and the Iraqi Sunni National Guard be deemed a country,” according to a bill summary. Doing so “would allow these security forces to directly receive assistance from the United States.”
I have been involved in numerous computer science projects since the 1980s, as well as developing numerous web projects since 1996.
These blogs are a summation of all the information that I read and catalog pertaining to the subjects that interest me.
