country:soviet union

Numbers station
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_station

A numbers station (or number station) is a type of shortwave radio station characterized by their unusual broadcasts, which consist of spoken words, but mostly numbers, often created by artificially generated voices reading streams of numbers, words, letters, tunes or Morse code. They are transmitted in a wide variety of languages and the voices are usually female, although sometimes men’s or children’s voices are used.

je vais pas parler du #film qui est une sorte d’Ennemi d’Etat à huis clos ; mais la page wikipédia est drôlement intéressante
http://www.filmofilia.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/The-Numbers-Station-Poster.jpg

#espionnage #cuba #cryptographie #radio

Le père de la doctrine de financement des partisans afghans en guerre contre l’envahisseur l’URSS, Zbigniew Brzezinski http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zbigniew_Brzezinski, propose l’instauration d’une zone de libre-échange transatlantique comme solution au déclin de l’occident

http://euobserver.com/economic/119871

Retour sur la rencontre entre le président Morsi et Vladimir Poutine en Russie (et ce qui devrait en découler)

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-04-19/egypt-seeks-2-billion-russia-loan-as-mursi-meets-friend-putin.html

Margaret Thatcher: Freedom fighter | The Economist
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21576094-now-especially-world-needs-hold-fast-margaret-thatchers-principl

Because of the crisis, the pendulum is swinging dangerously away from the principles Mrs Thatcher espoused.

“[T]he power output of the Saturn first stage rocket motor was 60 gigawatts. This happens to be very similar to the peak electricity demand of the United Kingdom.”

Une belle histoire d’ingénierie et de développement pas durable du tout, mais très drôle :

http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-the-monstrous-f-1-moon-rocket-back-to-life

Superbes photos de bases antarctiques abandonnées

http://io9.com/8-abandoned-antarctic-whaling-stations-and-bases-that-a-471066973

Je laisse les lecteurs choisir les tags appropriés :-) #ghost_town ?

Margaret Thatcher: The lady who changed the world | The Economist

La vision de The Economist sur Thatcher. Pas inintéressant :)

http://www.economist.com/blogs/blighty/2013/04/margaret-thatcher

The lady who changed the world
Apr 8th 2013, 12:35 by Economist.com

ONLY a handful of peace-time politicians can claim to have changed the world. Margaret Thatcher, who died this morning, was one. She transformed not just her own Conservative Party, but the whole of British politics. Her enthusiasm for privatisation launched a global revolution and her willingness to stand up to tyranny helped to bring an end to the Soviet Union. Winston Churchill won a war, but he never created an “ism”.

The North Korea Deal That Wasn’t - By Joel Wit | Foreign Policy
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/04/02/the_north_korea_deal_that_wasnt_yongbyon?page=full

... during a Track II meeting in Pyongyang in November 2010, senior North Korean Foreign Ministry officials made it very clear that they were willing to relinquish thousands of fuel rods in their possession that could have been used by the reactor, rods that could help produce as many as eight nuclear bombs. That would have been a first step toward permanently disabling the facility, making sure the reactor would never again be a threat. Of course, the North Koreans wanted compensation — standard practice in the international nuclear fuel industry — and they wanted more than the rods were worth. But that was clearly their opening position. The offer was repeated during meetings in March 2011 in Berlin and once again in Pyongyang at the end of that year.

Each time, the North Korean proposal was dutifully reported to the Obama administration in briefings for the White House, the State Department, the Department of Defense, and the intelligence community.  The Lee Myung-bak administration was familiar with the offer, as they would have been intimately involved in any effort to shut Yongbyon down because Lee’s predecessor had been willing to pay for the rods to take them off North Korea’s hands.

The North Korean initiative was duly noted, but the United States and South Korea failed to take advantage of the opportunity to ensure that North Korea wasn’t able to restart the reactor and turn the rods into new nuclear bombs. Some U.S. officials felt it wasn’t worth the effort since the reactor was old and probably useless. Others believed that Washington should focus entirely on stopping Pyongyang’s much more threatening program to enrich uranium, unveiled in late 2010, rather than putting the final nail in the coffin of the plutonium production program. Still others, infected by the Obama administration’s policy of “strategic patience,” did not want to do much of anything before the North demonstrated its willingness to reform and end its bad behavior. By August 2012, when another unofficial meeting was held in Singapore, the North Koreans’ position had shifted. It was clear that Washington and Seoul were going to be in for tough times after their respective presidential elections at the end of the year.

According to an estimate by Siegfried Hecker, the former head of the Los Alamos Weapons lab now at Stanford University, the North Koreans may need as little as six months to restart the reactor. Unless they are willing to operate at very low power levels, reducing the output of plutonium, they will need to rebuild the cooling tower or put in place some sort of alternative cooling system. That might take six months. Another important job will be to modify some of the thousands of fuel rods either meant for another reactor or complete unfinished rods so that they can be used by the 5 MWe system. That task also may take six months from start to finish. Both of these tasks can be done concurrently.

The missed opportunity to stop the restart of the 5 MWe reactor and make sure Pyongyang has eight fewer nuclear weapons is now water under the bridge. More importantly, if the North Koreans make good on their threat, it’s one more sign, if we need it, that Pyongyang is moving full-steam ahead with becoming a small nuclear power. How many nuclear weapons they will eventually produce is anyone’s guess. But one thing should be clear by now: The Obama administration’s policy toward North Korea has failed.

The President of Senegal Thinks Local - Truthdig
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_president_of_senegal_thinks_local_20130402

Sall’s pledge to protect local economies from the international free market is an important and rare act of resistance to the doctrine of globalization. Since the crumbling of the Soviet Union, especially, developing countries have opened up their markets to rich Western nations that promise that unfettered capitalism will strengthen local economies. Often, the opposite happens.

GDP may go up, but it’s not because economies are healthier. Figures might climb because Western countries put a price tag on an economy that has traditionally been informal. Where fish, for example, had been caught and eaten locally, without figuring into the GDP, they are now amassed by foreign trawlers who pay for licenses, making Senegal a richer nation from a Western perspective, but a poorer one in real terms.

Senegal, which started to free up its fishing market 10 years ago, saw many of its fishing communities revolt in 2012 as large foreign trawlers began decimating the stock.

“Big fishing companies create an inequitable competition with local communities,” said Ahmed Diame from the Greenpeace office in Senegal’s capital city of Dakar. “Local communities don’t benefit from the presence of these vessels which fish, process and send out all their catches [themselves].”

Sall, who promised to rescind foreign licenses in his platform when he ran for office, followed through on April 30, 2012, as fishermen were ready to act on their own.

“You can be sure that I was approached by many [international] fishing companies,” Sall said at an event for the marine conservation group Blue Frontier Campaign in Washington, D.C., last week, “but I was also aware of the cries of fishermen who were running out of fish.

“Forget about the $12 million in profits,” he said about corporate guarantees. “Focus on what the people need.”

Sall said that poor countries should band together to fight globalization. He wants to see neighboring nations in Africa, especially those on the coast that have suffered the same losses as Senegal, protect their natural resources and worry more about their local economies than shallow GDP levels.

Some are following the direction Senegal has taken. Palau has refused to allow Taiwan to send fishing vessels into its waters. And groups such as Greenpeace are fighting on behalf of islands in the western Pacific Ocean to bar foreign trawlers from overfishing yellowfin tuna.

Sooner or later, Sall said, countries will have “to take a break from draining natural resources. ... Fishermen are not the experts in protecting the oceans.” The responsibility lies with those who can understand the process, he said, those often bought off by corporations.

Une revue du livre de James Marriott et Mika Minio-Paluello, “The Oil Road: Journeys from the Caspian Sea to the City of London” -

The Oil Road: Journeys from the Caspian Sea to the City of London | Counterfire
http://www.counterfire.org/index.php/articles/book-reviews/16385-the-oil-road-journeys-from-the-caspian-sea-to-the-city-of-london

The Oil Road provides an illuminating picture of political and economic power through the form of a travelogue across the countries affected by the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline

Why the Color Revolutions Failed - By Melinda Haring and Michael Cecire | Foreign Policy
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/03/18/why_the_color_revolutions_failed?page=full

The fate of the “color revolutions” — the symbolically-named series of peaceful uprisings in the former Soviet Union — have been terribly disappointing. In Georgia (“Rose,” 2003), Ukraine (“Orange,” 2004), and Kyrgyzstan (“Tulip,” 2005), popular uprisings against entrenched leaders brought to power reform-minded politicians who pledged to transform post-Soviet dens of corruption into modern states. But in all three places, those promises of far-reaching change never really materialized. Yet scholars and democracy promotion organizations continue to mine them for lessons that might apply to the Arab Spring transitions.

Violente exploitation des travailleurs immigrés en Russie

Brutal exploitation of immigrant labor in Russia - World Socialist Web Site

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/03/15/russ-m15.html

Brutal exploitation of immigrant labor in Russia
By Clara Weiss
15 March 2013

The human rights organization Human Rights Watch released a report in early February documenting the criminal exploitation of immigrant workers employed in the preparations for the 2014 Olympic Winter Games.

Russia has been preparing the Winter Olympics in Sochi on the Black Sea for years. Tens of thousands of workers, including about 16,000 immigrant workers, are building luxury hotels and the infrastructure required for the games.

#migrations #russie #travail

Nos échanges de mails soulignent un choc de civilisation - Technology Review
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/512116/global-e-mail-patterns-reveal-clash-of-civilizations

Une étude souligne que les échangent de mails mondiaux restent majoritairement en silo par grande ères linguistiques et civilisationnelles. Tags : internetactu internetactu2net fing #culture

Even if Iran gets the Bomb, it won’t be worth going to war -

Telegraph

Jack Straw, MP for Blackburn and was foreign secretary, 2001-2006

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9892742/Even-if-Iran-gets-the-Bomb-it-wont-be-worth-going-to-war.html

’All options remain on the table”, goes the mantra. This is code for saying that the West retains the choice of using military force to stop Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon. We’ll hear it repeated this week, as negotiations between Iran and the “P5 +1” (the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, and Germany) resume in Kazakhstan. On occasions, I’ve used the phrase myself. But the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve become convinced that it is a hindrance to negotiations, rather than a help.
If Iran were to attack Israel, or, say, one of its Arab neighbours, international law is clear: the victim has the right to retaliate. But such an attack is highly improbable. Under Article 42 of the UN Charter, the Security Council can authorise military action where there’s a “threat to international peace and security”. Such resolutions were the legal basis for the actions against Iraq in 1991 and 2003, and Libya in 2011. But there are no such Article 42 resolutions against Iran; and there won’t be – China and Russia would veto them.

The Riddle of the Israel Lobby

Uri Avnery

Le long débat, au cours des années, entre deux militants de la paix, Uri Avnery et Nahum Goldmann

Ceux qui sont intéressés à Nahum Goldmann pourront lire dans le livre d’Eric Rouleau, Dans les coulisses du Proche-Orient, ses tentatives infructueuses d’ouvrir un dialogue entre Nasser et les Israéliens (infructueuses du fait de l’intransigeance israélienne) http://blog.mondediplo.net/2012-10-31-Dans-les-coulisses-du-Proche-Orient-un-temoignage

►http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/02/22/the-riddle-of-the-israel-lobby

One of the most interesting and prolonged private debates I have had in my life was with the brilliant Dr. Nahum Goldmann. The subject: American peace initiatives.

It was an unequal debate, of course. Goldmann was my elder by 28 years. While I was a mere editor of an Israeli news magazine, he was an international figure, President of the World Zionist Organization and the World Jewish Congress.

In the mid ’50s, when I was looking for a personality who could possibly contest David Ben-Gurion’s stranglehold on the prime minister’s office, I thought of Goldmann. He had the necessary stature and was liked by moderate Zionists. No less important, he had a clear set of opinions. From the first day of the State of Israel, he had proposed that Israel become a “Middle Eastern Switzerland”, neutral between the US and the Soviet Union. For him, peace with the Arabs was absolutely essential for the future of Israel.

Is Marxism Facing a Rebirth? | The Sunday Edition with Michael Enright | CBC Radio / tjs via @opironet
http://www.cbc.ca/thesundayedition/shows/2013/02/24/is-marxism-facing-a-rebirth

Avec :
– Bhaskar Sunkara, “the founding editor of Jacobin magazine, one of the freshest voices of Marxism to appear in a long time. Jacobin was launched in 2010 when Mr. Sunkara was all of 21 years old.”

de Jacobin mag, il était question dans Courrier cette semaine :
https://dl.dropbox.com/s/voah7icgyb34odm/Photo%2024-02-13%2001%2003%2004.png

– Ursula Huws "professor of labour and global issues at the University of Hertfordshire in England - where The Communist Manifesto was first published. She is the author of The Making of a Cybertariat: Virtual Work in a Real World .❞ #marx de la matière pour #cognitariat ? cc @prac_6 @shaber33

The Riddle of the Israel Lobby » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names
►http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/02/22/the-riddle-of-the-israel-lobby

URI AVNERY

The two professors, Mearsheimer and Walt, dared to say it: the pro-Israeli lobby controls American policy.

But this theory is not completely satisfying. What about the spying affair around Jonathan Pollard, who stays in prison for life in spite of immense Israeli pressure to release him?

Can a world power really be induced by a small foreign country and a powerful domestic lobby to act for decades against its basic national interest?

Another factor often mentioned is the power of the arms industry.

When I was young, no one was more despised than the Merchants of Death. These days are long past. Countries – including Israel – pride themselves on selling arms to the most despicable regimes.

The US supplies us with huge quantities of the most sophisticated weapons.  True, a lot of these come to us as a gift – but that doesn’t change the picture. The arms producers are paid by the US government as a kind of New Deal public works project supported enthusiastically even (and especially) by the Republicans.  After the arms are supplied to Israel, some Arab countries see themselves compelled to order huge quantities for themselves, for which they pay through the nose. See: Saudi Arabia.

This theory, which was once very popular, does not really satisfy either. No single industry is powerful enough to compel a nation to act against its own general interests for half a century.

....

Syria’s civil war destabilising the Caucasus - World Socialist Web Site

Une vision un peu décentrée du conflit en Syrie

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/02/18/cauc-f18.html

Syria’s civil war destabilising the Caucasus
By Clara Weiss
18 February 2013

The civil war in Syria is increasingly destabilising the Caucasus. Chechen Islamists fighting against the Kremlin are supporting the Syrian Islamist opposition. Russia fears that an Islamist regime in Damascus would change the whole balance of power in the region. At the same time, ethnic conflicts threaten to spill over from Syria into the southern and northern regions of the Caucasus.

Since the middle of last year, it has been known that the Syrian opposition has included up to 6,000 Chechen Islamists, who have been fighting for national independence from the Russian Federation since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. In August, an air attack on Aleppo led to the death of Gelayev Rustam, the son of a prominent Chechen warlord who had fought for years against the Russian army.

#syrie #caucase

The Past, Present and Future of Russian Energy Strategy | Stratfor

http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/past-present-and-future-russian-energy-strategy

Comme @nidal, je précise ici que je ne suis pas nécessairement daccod avec les thèses développées ici, mais je référence pour avoir une archives et m’y référer pour le prochain papier (ou la prochaine carte). STratfor n’est pas une institution très fréquentable, mais bon.

The Past, Present and Future of Russian Energy Strategy

February 12, 2013
By Lauren Goodrich and Marc Lanthemann

The future of Russia’s ability to remain a global energy supplier and the strength the Russian energy sector gives the Kremlin are increasingly in question. After a decade of robust energy exports and revenues, Russia is cutting natural gas prices to Europe while revenue projections for its energy behemoth, Gazprom, are declining starting this year.

#russie #énergie #gaz #gazprom

US-Iran. Qu’est-ce qui empêcherait l’ayatollah Ali Khamenei de dormir sur ses deux oreilles ? Une attaque américaine ou israélienne contre les installations nucléaires iraniennes ?
Que nenni. Une frappe américaine (ou israélienne ) lui permettrait de rassembler le peuple autour de lui et de sauver une théocratie en perte de vitesse.
Alors de quoi aurait vraiment peur le pouvoir iranien ?
D’un Tahrir Square version iranienne ?
Du militant des droits de l’homme Nasrin Sotoudeh qu’il a mis sous les verrous ?
De la baisse drastique (45 %) des exportations pétrolières l’année dernière ?
De la dévaluation catastrophique de leur monnaie ?
Des élections présidentielles de 2013 ?

Moi qui ne sait pas grand-chose sur l’Iran, j’ai trouvé ce billet d’Alizera Nader, « senior policy analyst » de la RAND Corporation, très instructif.

Reading Chuck Hagel in Tehran - NYTimes.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/07/opinion/reading-chuck-hagel-in-tehran.html?_r=0

Shining Light on American Complicity In Harboring Nazis
http://m.forward.com/articles/170231/shining-light-on-american-complicity-in-harboring

...there is the ideological horror of America’s policy of tolerance toward Nazi war criminals — toward anyone, no matter how villainous and corrupt, that some government agency thought might be useful during the Cold War.

There is the lesser-known horror of American soldiers brutally expelling Soviet prisoners of war and even civilians from displaced persons camps and other relatively safe havens, to face imprisonment, torture and death in a hostile Soviet Union. And there is the horror of the decades of silence and cover-ups that obscured these American transgressions.

Israel admits Ethiopian women were given birth control shots http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/israel-admits-ethiopian-women-were-given-birth-control-shots.premium-1.4965

A government official has for the first time acknowledged the practice of injecting women of Ethiopian origin with the long-acting contraceptive Depo-Provera.

Theory Talks
http://www.theory-talks.org

interactive forum for discussion of debates in International Relations with an emphasis of the underlying theoretical issues

Extraordinairement riche, toutes les présentations sont disponibles en pdf

Theory Talks is an interactive forum for discussion of debates in International Relations with an emphasis of the underlying theoretical issues. By frequently inviting cutting-edge specialists in the field to elucidate their work and to explain current developments both in IR theory and real-world politics, Theory Talks aims to offer both scholars and students a comprehensive view of the field and its most important protagonists.

We invite you to react and leave any kind of comment, question or suggestion – the invitees frequently respond to comments and welcome any contribution to ongoing debate. Learn how you can participate on the page ‘You Talk!’.

Using Passports to Construct Enemies?

http://www.globalpolicy.org/home/172-general/52142-using-passports-to-construct-enemies.html

In times of increasing mobility of individuals across borders, citizenship rights have become central to understand geopolitical disputes. This is particularly true in Eastern Europe, where passport have become weapons of foreign policy since the fall of the Soviet Union. Russian passports have certainly facilitated Abkhazian and South Ossetian separatism in Georgia and allowed Moscow to launch a military intervention in the country in 2008. Some argue that “Russia has ‘weaponized’ citizenship by combining its right to grant citizenship with its sovereign ‘right’ or ‘duty’ to protect its citizens at home and abroad.” Governments in Georgia, Latvia and Estonia have also used citizenship rights to prevent their ethnic Russian populations from gaining political power in their country. Ultimately, Xenia de Graaf concludes that “ as long as Russia and former Soviet Republics remain insecure about their national identity and need ‘significant others’ to define themselves, passport and citizenship troubles are likely to remain.”

By Xenia de Graaf
International Relations and Security Network
December 12, 2012

Le Mossad fabrique (à nouveau) un faux document pour accuser l’Iran.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/nov/28/ap-iran-nuclear-bomb

Uncritical, fear-mongering media propaganda is far too common to take note of each time it appears, but sometimes, what is produced is so ludicrous that its illustrative value should not be ignored. Such is the case with a highly trumpeted Associated Press “exclusive” from Tuesday which claims in its red headline to have discovered evidence of “Iran Working on Bomb”.

What is this newly discovered, scary evidence? It is a “graph” which AP says was “leaked” to it by “officials from a country critical of Iran’s atomic program to bolster their arguments that Iran’s nuclear program must be halted before it produces a weapon” (how mysterious: the globe is gripped with befuddlement as it tries to guess which country that might be). Here’s how AP presents the graph in all its incriminating, frightening glory:
http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2012/11/28/1354101191311/ap.png