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Ed Webb

Venezuela Says It Will Buy Russian Missiles - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...13venez.html

IR venezuela chavez missiles Russia Colombia

shared by Ed Webb on 13 Sep 09 - Cached
  • Ed Webb on 13 Sep 09
     
    An interesting article for us to analyze using different approaches to international relations theory.
Ed Webb

Turkey can avert a tragedy on the Tigris - Yahoo! News - 0 views

news.yahoo.com/...yackerman

water Turkey heritage history culture Kurds UNESCO

shared by Ed Webb on 27 Aug 09 - Cached
  • The issues are complex. Advocates and opponents cast the debate as preservation of the past challenging progress for the future, conservation versus energy, national interests versus minority Kurdish interests, nationalism versus the interests of neighboring countries. The government argues that the dam will bring irrigation and power to the region. Opponents maintain that much of the electricity generated will go to other parts of the country. Iraq has protested vehemently against Turkey damming the Tigris River just upstream and further restricting the water flow across the border. There is also the geopolitical drama of the European partnerships withdrawing and Turkey potentially pursuing other partners such as China and Russia.
Ed Webb

James Moore: I'm Scared, Ma - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...im-scared-ma_b_294356.html

disarmament proliferation nukes Iran Israel India Pakistan USA NPT DPRK

shared by Ed Webb on 22 Sep 09 - Cached
  • I lost track of what the narrator was saying and was drawn into the strangest scenes a child might have ever encountered. A classroom of students just like ours was shown taking instructions from their teacher who told them to do something like "drop, roll, and curl" under their desks. A siren wailed in the background and then there was a mushroom cloud rising darkly from the earth. I did not sleep much for many days.
  • The movies and the newscasts about Russia and film of the nuclear explosions in Japan convinced my impressionable mind that every plane over our house feathering its engines was a Soviet bomber that had slipped undetected across the border and was about to drop a deadly explosive into our hillbilly neighborhood. "I'm scared, Ma," I told my mother one groggy morning. "What about, son?" "The airplanes at night when I'm in bed. They might be carrying bombs from the Russians." "Oh son, that's nothing to worry about. Nobody will drop a bomb here."
  • Israel, according to published reports by many defense industry analysts, has the fifth largest nuclear arsenal in the world, but has refused to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty or even formally admit to possession of such technology, even though it is widely-known that the Dimona Reactor in the Negev Desert has been on-line since the 60s. Pakistan and India, sharing a border and contempt for each other, have also refused to be signatories of the treaty. North Korea was once a party to non proliferation, but has since withdrawn and threatens to develop and launch a thermonuclear device. There are also reportedly weapons missing from former Soviet satellite nations.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • The U.S. attempts mediation but where does any country's moral authority originate when it has deployed nuclear weapons, still has an arsenal, and is telling another sovereign nation that it cannot develop similar armaments? No one has ever answered this question. Iran also wants to know why Israel is permitted by the world community to have nukes while Tehran is told no. Does not one sovereign nation have the same rights as another sovereign nation? Israel, Pakistan, and India felt geo-political threats and developed nuclear weapons as deterrents, which is the aspiration of the powers in control of Iran and North Korea -- or do they have evil intent?
Ed Webb

BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | The paradox of North Korea - 0 views

news.bbc.co.uk/...8294007.stm

DPRK nukes BBC

shared by Ed Webb on 07 Oct 09 - Cached
  • North Korea looks across the heavily armed border to its South Korean neighbour, backed by a nuclear superpower, the United States.
  • With the nuclear powers China and Russia on its other border, one of the world's most isolated and friendless countries believes it has a strong and compelling logic for wanting its own atomic bombs.
  • This may be a deeply authoritarian and impoverished place, but at least some of its citizens appear genuinely proud and defiant. Upon whatever it is based, it is that strand of legitimacy, as much as the physical controls, that has helped make North Korea so resilient for so long.
Ed Webb

WikiLeaks row: Putin labels US embassy cables 'slanderous' | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...ow-putin-reaction-batman-robin

diplomacy wikileaks US USA Russia Turkey

shared by Ed Webb on 01 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • Russian prime minister condemns cable describing him and President Dmitry Medvedev as Batman and Robin
  • we didn't suspect that this would be done with such arrogance
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 01 Dec 10
       
      Irony alert!
  • Turkey's prime minister today accused US diplomats of slander after other leaked cables said he had accounts in Swiss banks, painted him as an authoritarian who hates Israel and said he leads a government with Islamist influences.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Erdogan said he "did not have a penny in Swiss banks" and said he would resign if such accusations were proved.
Ed Webb

UN Gay Rights: UN passes landmark gay rights resolution despite strong objections from African and Muslim countries. - 0 views

slatest.slate.com/...ghts_resolution_despite_s.html

LGBT UN rights

shared by Ed Webb on 18 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • The U.N. Human Rights Council passed the carefully worded resolution by a narrow margin, 23-to-19, despite strong objections from African and Muslim countries
  • non-binding
  • While the U.S., the European Union, and Brazil all backed the effort, the move drew strong criticism from Russia, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, and Pakistan, among others. "We are seriously concerned at the attempt to introduce to the United Nations some notions that have no legal foundation," said Pakistan’s Zamir Akram.
Ed Webb

The demise of the dollar - Business News, Business - The Independent - 0 views

www.independent.co.uk/...ise-of-the-dollar-1798175.html

oil currency China USA EU Iran KSA UAE GCC gold dollar Euro Yuan Japan Yen Russia IR energy politics foreignpolicy

shared by Ed Webb on 06 Oct 09 - Cached
  • The plans, confirmed to The Independent by both Gulf Arab and Chinese banking sources in Hong Kong, may help to explain the sudden rise in gold prices, but it also augurs an extraordinary transition from dollar markets within nine years.
  • a risk of deepening divisions between China and the US over influence and oil in the Middle East. "Bilateral quarrels and clashes are unavoidable," he told the Asia and Africa Review. "We cannot lower vigilance against hostility in the Middle East over energy interests and security."
  • World Bank president Robert Zoellick. "One of the legacies of this crisis may be a recognition of changed economic power relations,"
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  • In a clear sign of China's growing financial muscle, the president of the European Central Bank, Jean-Claude Trichet, yesterday pleaded with Beijing to let the yuan appreciate against a sliding dollar and, by extension, loosen China's reliance on US monetary policy, to help rebalance the world economy and ease upward pressure on the euro.
  • The current deadline for the currency transition is 2018.
  • Iran announced late last month that its foreign currency reserves would henceforth be held in euros rather than dollars. Bankers remember, of course, what happened to the last Middle East oil producer to sell its oil in euros rather than dollars. A few months after Saddam Hussein trumpeted his decision, the Americans and British invaded Iraq.
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 06 Oct 09
       
      Fisky always has been prone to alarmism. Iran is a much tougher target than Iraq. But if even some of what he reports here is true, economic power relations are indeed about to shift. And the move away from dollars for oil trading has been predictable for some time.
Josh Hirsch

Power for U.S. From Russia's Old Nuclear Weapons - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...10nukes.html

shared by Josh Hirsch on 11 Nov 09 - Cached
  • Josh Hirsch on 11 Nov 09
     
    It is amazing how far we have come in terms of relations with Russia.
Arabica Robusta

Our war-torn world needs a new mediating body to resolve conflicts | Gabrielle Rifkind | Comment is free | The Observer - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...flicts-resolution-fog-of-peace

ukraine social movements us intervention russia syria conflict resolution

shared by Arabica Robusta on 25 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Institutions do not decide to go to war or to make peace or decide who to destroy or kill; those actions are the responsibility of individuals. So to try to understand the root causes of conflict only in terms of power politics and resources, without also understanding human behaviour, undermines our effectiveness in preventing war and making peace.
  • Such questions no longer seem relevant once a conflict has hardened. For instance, what started as a popular uprising against the Assad family was quickly stimulated by regional actors in a proxy war, the key players being Saudi Arabia and Iran.
  • For this to be effective, strong working relationships are necessary and credible mediators would have shuttled between the parties, primarily Iran and Saudi Arabia, to address the differences between these guarantors of an emerging new architecture. Only after such informal negotiations between Iran and Saudi Arabia had taken place would negotiations between opposing Syrian warring parties have had a better chance of succeeding.
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  • Traditional attempts at peacemaking have created complex bureaucracies, circuses of diplomats, frequent flyers around the global terrain with insufficient evidence of success in the resolution of conflict. Indeed, current structures have proved to be cumbersome and ill-attuned to the skills of mediation. A new form of mediation is now required that recognises the competing narratives of the parties involved in the conflict.
Arabica Robusta

Ukraine and Other People-Powered Revolutions Are Overrated | New Republic - 0 views

www.newrepublic.com/...ered-revolutions-are-overrated

ukraine social movements us intervention russia putin fascism crimea

shared by Arabica Robusta on 24 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Tales of those who stood for months in the square will be told and retold. But that doesn’t mean that the protesters will necessarily have triumphed. On the contrary, Ukrainians are about to learn that the exhilaration of “people power”—mass marches, big demonstrations, songs, and banners—is always an illusion. And sooner or later, the illusion wears off.
  • In both Thailand and Turkey, an educated middle class has recently taken to the streets to protest against democratically elected leaders who have grown increasingly corrupt and autocratic, but who might well be voted back into office tomorrow. In Venezuela, elections are not fair and the media is not free, but the president is supported by many Venezuelans who still have faith in his far-left rhetoric, however much his policies may be damaging the country.
  • The suited Ukrainians in the room, none of whom looked remotely revolutionary, all asked the same kinds of questions: What laws do we need? What rules must we have? How can we make sure that this time the changes are real? That conversation won’t attract photographers, but it holds out the promise of something permanent.
Arabica Robusta

LENIN'S TOMB: Against imperialist intervention in Ukraine - 0 views

www.leninology.com/...perialist-intervention-in.html

ukraine social movements us intervention russia

shared by Arabica Robusta on 25 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • If you want to know how it came to be that a popular movement against a thuggish government of the oligarchs, resulted in a right-wing nationalist government with fascists in leading positions, you need as part of your explanation the role of Russian imperialism in supporting Ukraine's stupendously wealthy ruling class.  Whoever does not want to speak of Russian imperialism should be equally silent on Ukrainian fascism.  You see, Lindsey German was right after all: it's a messy situation that imperialist intervention will only make worse.
Arabica Robusta

In Kiev, Ukrainians want revolutionary change - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...3-a903-1afb3be48258_story.html

ukraine social movements us intervention russia putin fascism crimea

shared by Arabica Robusta on 24 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • He came to the Maidan — Independence Square — on New Year’s Eve from a region east of the capital to demand good government. He stayed. The Viktor Yanukovych government ran off. Now the new government wants the militias that formed to defend the protesters to turn in their weapons. Vygupaev doesn’t think so.
  • The 2004 Orange Revolution did not. It overturned the fraudulent presidential election of Yanukovych but produced new authorities who bickered, botching their work so badly that a frustrated citizenry turned back to Yanukovych in 2010. Then, he managed to emerge as the only real alternative, winning by a tiny margin and going on to demonstrate new depths of corruption and chicanery.
Ed Webb

Here's what will happen if Iran joins the WTO - The Washington Post - 1 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...l-happen-if-iran-joins-the-wto

Iran WTO trade US USA diplomacy analysis

shared by Ed Webb on 09 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • While it remains uncertain whether economic and financial sanctions would be technically permissible under the WTO’s national security exception — which allows a member to take measures that it “considers necessary for the protection of its essential security interests”– these actions would clearly violate the spirit of the WTO and have therefore been rarely used.
  • the United States has switched to using other tools for coercive diplomacy to punish other recent WTO entrants.
  • Congress therefore created the China Commission, which was specifically formed to monitor China’s human rights practices and maintain pressure on it. Similarly, Congress passed measures designed to allow it to more effectively use visa restrictions and financial asset freezes to coerce Russia, and foreign aid to extract concessions from Vietnam, after these states joined the WTO.
Ed Webb

How Will Climate Change Affect Politics? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...569317

SouthAfrica water WaterSecurity

shared by Ed Webb on 17 Sep 18 - No Cached
  • Water scarcity, and the potential for a catastrophe, spurred upheaval and anxiety. During that time, a local government pushed a water-conservation agenda more ambitious than just about anything the world had seen. Cape Town faced political fallout and experienced widespread protests. Divisions between the haves and the have-nots in one of the most unequal cities on Earth became the center of discourse. The racial wounds of a post-apartheid country opened once more.
  • “The way the city has managed it is by forcing middle-class South Africans—dominantly white, but not exclusively—to massively cut back on their water use,” says Neil Armitage, a civil engineer who is a lead researcher within the institute. “They struggled for a while until they came up with this Day Zero concept, which was really a warning that if we carried on behaving like we were, then the water was going to run out. That had the desired effect of making people a lot more serious about water, but it also had a horrible political backlash as well.”
  • As they stand now, the Level 6B restrictions created by the city of Cape Town in January 2018 are supposed to limit residents to 50 liters per day, slash agricultural use by 60 percent below last year’s usage, aggressively push water-management devices and fines, and encourage the use of new fittings and other devices to minimize water waste.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • Zille encouraged residents to inform on water-hogging neighbors and become “water impimpis”—a callback to an apartheid-era term for black South Africans who spied for the white-dominated government.
  • Almost immediately after city leaders announced the first Day Zero predictions, they came under heavy scrutiny from citizens and activists, especially among Cape Town’s communities of color. Many in labor, socialist, and leftist organizations in the region didn’t believe Day Zero was even a thing. Elements from those organizations created the Cape Town Water Crisis Coalition, which protested Day Zero as propaganda designed both to cover up faulty city water management and to deny expanded access to low-income communities.
  • the management of the crisis has also sparked criticism from the African National Congress, or the ANC, the dominant party in the country. As the only opposition party to control a province, the DA is certainly used to strife with the ANC, but now old struggles over resources have brought that tension to a breaking point.
  • Deeply complicating the dynamic between the two parties is that the Western Cape is the major center of white demographic strength and political clout in the country, and that the DA—while embracing a membership of blacks, “coloured” multiracial descendants of indigenous peoples and Asian immigrants, and whites—often finds white leaders near or at the top
  • Under South Africa’s Constitution, the ANC is responsible for providing water to all citizens, but the actual infrastructure and services in the Western Cape falls upon the DA to manage
  • Last July, when confronted on Twitter by a black user who said that black residents in areas without running home water had experienced Day Zero from birth, Zille, who is white, responded with: “It must be a relief that you weren’t burdened by the legacy of a colonial water-piping system.” Zille, who’s faced harsh internal and external criticism for previous statements in defense of colonialism, this time suffered a rebuke from party boss Mmusi Maimane, and has since been officially suspended from party activities
  • Residents in well-apportioned suburbs pointed fingers at the mostly-black and poor residents of the so-called “informal settlements”—the tin-roofed, sprawling shanties that ring the outskirts of the city—despite the fact that these settlements use the least water per capita of any place in the province. And lacking internal plumbing and sewage, residents in the informal settlements often see in the city’s elites and governing class a neo-colonialist force, doling out resources at whim and mismanaging the commons
  • Cape Town’s social and political problems during its water crisis boiled down to the same fundamental issues that underpin its past as an icon of apartheid: white versus black, and poor versus rich. During a 2014 investigation into water access, the South African Human Rights Commission outlined the problem in Cape Town. “Those areas which lack water and sanitation mirror apartheid spatial geography,” the commission’s findings read. That is to say that even the built water infrastructure is based on exclusion.
  • Americans use somewhere around 90 gallons, or 340 liters, of water every 24 hours. That’s more than 700 pounds of water per day, and that’s not even counting what goes into the food you eat or the thirsty maws of the industries and services that sustain you
  • Right now, the water usage of the average Capetonian sits at about 125 liters per day, a dramatic decrease from the 200 daily liters of last year. Both of those levels sit below the average of developed cities worldwide, and well below the standard American usage of 340 liters.
  • the extreme social engineering brought about by the Day Zero campaign is unlikely to be a long-term solution to future water problems in Cape Town. Nor will it necessarily prove to be a sustainable model for other cities facing water shortages
  • “The climate projections for Cape Town indicate essentially a relatively consistent reduction in the amount of rainfall in Cape Town,” Wolski told me. “In the best case, it would be rainfall that is similar to what we have. But most of the projections indicate reduction.”
  • Environmental think tanks and journalistic outlets have published lists of cities that look likely to run out of water in the near future: São Paulo, Brazil, which faced its own Day Zero situation just a few years ago; Bangalore, India; Beijing, China; Cairo, Egypt; Mexico City; and—surprisingly, given its climate—Moscow, Russia. While each city has a very different set of reasons for its water woes, ranging from pollution to poor infrastructure to poor planning to desertification and drought, they all share a common challenge: Climate change will likely make the task of providing water harder, the populations thirstier, and the people angrier, even as many of the cities grow.
  • shortages in São Paulo sparked street fights, citizen mobilization, and major political dissent in the city
  • inequality manifests both in social stratification and in the development of water-delivery systems to those different strata
  • Mirroring class conflicts in the 20th century, the idea that access to water is a human right has become a driver of solidarity, hardening ad-hoc activist groups into major political movements. Extrapolating to the rest of a warming world, where racial and class barriers have been built into zoning and infrastructure, the uneasy detentes of segregated spaces and places could become new zones of conflict. All you have to do is remove water.
  • so far this winter the rainfall has helped raise the dam levels to just below 60 percent of capacity, which should put off the next crisis point for some time. Cab drivers, students, waiters, and tour guides spoke incessantly of the Day Zero crisis—and with plenty of real venom—but they mostly spoke of it as a thing that had happened, an event that was now being relegated to the past
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