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If we understand Tusk correctly, he essentially hints that the current public Polish-American relationship is an “illusion” and that, in reality, the U.S. security guarantees are insufficient.

To Americans, Poland looks like a country with no options. Sure, it feels spurned, but where will the Poles turn? As it did prior to WWII, Germany is making deals with Russia, and French and British security guarantees are unreliable. The United States, remembering its history of fighting wars to defend small allies for the sake of its credibility, would say that the Poles should know better than to doubt American guarantees.

Poland is not going to cease being an American ally — not considering its current geopolitical circumstances. But Polish officials also do not have the luxury of dismissing American horse-trading with the Russians over Polish security.

During the second and third phases, more-advanced interceptors capable of targeting short- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles would be deployed to Romania by 2015 and Poland by 2018.

In the fourth phase, the longer-range SM-3 Block IIB missiles would be deployed in Romania and Poland around 2022.

Compared to its predecessors in the Standard Missile-3 line, the SM-3 Block IIB would have enhanced seeking capabilities and a more powerful booster

 In an era of defense budget cuts, funding for the risky program became harder to justify. But regardless of Washington's exact reasons for the changes, they address at least some of Russia's concerns over the U.S. missile defense plans.

The White House would like to continue to reduce the stockpiles of nuclear weapons in Russia and the United States beyond the limits imposed by the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which places a ceiling on the number of deployed delivery systems and strategic warheads possessed by each country. To achieve this, the White House needs Russian participation in order to withstand opposition to the treaty from national security hawks in Congress.

Washington also wants Russian cooperation in a number of other issues, including the Iranian nuclear program and the conflict in Syria. The United States also needs to secure access to the Northern Distribution Network, the primary logistical route into Afghanistan, which will be critical to the U.S. withdrawal over the next two years.

Moreover, the United States may decide to focus on a different intercontinental ballistic missile defense system that would still provoke objections from the Russians. On March 15, for example, Hagel also announced plans to deploy 14 additional ground-based interceptors at Fort Greely, Alaska, -- missiles theoretically capable of defending against intercontinental ballistic missiles, although the program's development and deployment have been marred by numerous failed tests. The apparent demise of the SM-3 Block IIB could also lead to the deployment of additional missile defense systems along the U.S. East Coast.

Hagel said that the U.S. commitment to defending Europe remains ironclad, and other U.S. officials have been quick to emphasize that the first three phases of the European Phased Adaptive Approach remain in place and on track to cover all European NATO members by 2018.

So while the changes to the U.S. missile defense plan address a key issue for Russia, they do not resolve all of Moscow's concerns -- especially those related to developments in missile defense technology or the continued stationing of U.S. forces in Russia's near abroad.

You may also Apply a Standard or Basic theme from the previous window. The Standard Windows 7 theme is more preferred as its gives a neutral look than the classy windows old theme.

Right click on ” Computer” and select “Properties” from the right click menu. Click on ” Advanced System Settings ” from the left pane to open up the ” System Properties ” window. Select the “Advanced” tab from it. Then Under ” Performance ” click ” Settings “. Choose ” Custom: ” Options From it. Now un tick all the options (Choose “Adjust for best performance“) and select only the last four options (actually three are preferable  you may un- tick the second option out of the last four). Take a look at the screen shot below.

Open up ” Programs and Features ” from Control Panel. Click the ” Turn Windows features on or off ” from the left pane. Now uncheck all the Feature that you don’t use in Windows 7 and restart the system for the changes to take effect.

If you’ve got a new ssd for your system, then you’d definitely consider checking out this guide which explains 9 tweaks to properly speed up, optimize your ssd and prolong the life of your ssd, while getting the best performance from it.

Right click on the sidebar and choose ” Properties “. On the properties windows untick the check box showing ” Start sidebar when Windows Starts “ From now on windows sidebar won’t start when windows 7 start up.

Aero Snap will help you to maximize, minimize and resize the windows just by dragging and dropping it into the screen corners. I dont advice to turn it off as the Aero Snap feature really helps to speed up working with windows by arranging them side by side. But, if you are not a regular user of the same, you may proceed by turning of aero snap in windows 7. Open the Windows 7 ” Control Panel ” and double-click on ” Ease of Access Center ” icon. Now click on the ” Make it easier to focus on tasks ” seen at the bottom in there Now untick the check box saying ” Prevent windows from being automatically arranged when moved to the edge of the screen ” . Right click on the Windows 7 taskbar and select ” Properties “. Now untick the ” Use Aero Peek to preview the desktop ” option from there. That will now disable the Aero Snap in Windows 7.

The Aero Peek feature in Windows 7 helps you to peek through all open windows by hiding all other windows and showing only the outlines of all windows. Aero Peek is similar to the ” Show Desktop ” Feature in XP and Vista. If you have followed step 3 then Aero Peek will be automatically disabled. If not, Right Click the Taskbar and choose Properties. Un-select the ”Use Aero Peek to preview the desktop” option. The aero peek feature will now be disabled in windows 7.

Double click the ” Power Options ” in the Control panel. Click the down arrow showing ” Show Additional Plans ” to see the ” High Performance ” power plan.

Now just activate the ” High Performance ” plan and that’s it. You may go for the advanced settings for further tweaking if you want.

For disabling thumbnails in Windows 7, Double Click on ” Computer ” >click on the “Organize” drop-down menu and select the “Folder and Search options” Under ‘Files and Folders’ section, go to the “View” tab and tick the check box showing “Always show icons, never thumbnails” checkbox.

To Disable The Screen Saver and Wallpaper in Windows 7, Right click on desktop and choose “Personalize”. Click the Screen Saver link ” From the Screen Saver drop down menu, Set it to “None” and click “Apply” and then “OK”. Now click on “Desktop Background” link. From the “Location” drop down menu select “Solid Colors” and pick one color and click “OK”.

Type ” msconfig ” in the “RUN” option from start menu press [Enter] to open up the System Configuration Utility. Now navigate to the “StartUp” tab. Untick the Entries which are not needed

To disable the system sounds in Windows 7, Type mmsys.cpl in RUN From the Windows 7 Startmenu search box and press [Enter]. Navigate to the “Sounds” tab. Now from under “Sound Scheme:” select “No Sounds” > Click “Apply” > “OK”.

Prague has always had a little more room to maneuver when it came to the BMD system. It is not positioned on the borders with a resurgent Russia nor would any of its buffer states such as Ukraine and Belarus.

Unlike Poland and Romania, which had missile components of the new BMD system, Prague was left with an early warning system, which really constituted nothing more than a room full of computers

Moscow will be able to use the SCO statement to show that it’s not just Russia that has problems with the U.S. plans for BMD in Europe but also for another very important security player in the world - China.

The Kremlin was forced to start an accelerated political restructuring in 2012 -- one entailing a countrywide effort to devise programs to plan for Russia's future.

The Kremlin launched a major domestic anti-corruption campaign that began targeting the government in an attempt to curb behavior that has had a long-term decaying effect on the country.

Russians believe good health to be an important aspect of one's ability to lead, and Putin's back trouble caused many in the Kremlin to panic. The Russian media and the Russian people had never seen Putin falter due to ill health. This was in stark contrast to his predecessor, former President Boris Yeltsin, who was plagued with health issues that negatively impacted his ability to run the country.

Though Russia has a formal electoral process to choose its leaders, in reality Putin makes the choices regarding leadership.

due to the intricate workings of the internal power circles -- and especially because Medvedev is a reformist, not a security hawk -- Medvedev was quickly deemed irrelevant, and Putin remained in power as premier.

Since the end of 2012, a new system – coined the Politburo 2.0 by widely followed Kremlin analyst Yevgeni Minchenko – has broken down much of the previous clan system and created an inner Kremlin circle of nine men, with Putin as its overall leader. This is not a formal system, like the Cabinet of Ministers, which implements Putin’s vision. It is rather a way to balance the most powerful decision-makers in the country, each with connections and power bases in politics, energy, finance and the military. Outside of the Politburo 2.0 are political circles from which Politburo members may draw support.

The concept of a vice presidency that would lead into a successor role is fraught with peril for Putin's new Politburo 2.0. There has never been a formalized second-in-command position under Putin for which various power groups could vie.

The first attempt took place in 1990, during the last years of the Soviet Union, when Gennady Yanayev held the office under former President Mikhail Gorbachev. Yanayev turned on Gorbachev in 1991, taking part in the coup that at first made Yanayev acting president of the Soviet Union. This was before he was arrested and replaced by Yeltsin. Under Yeltsin, Alexander Rustokoi held the role of vice president from 1991-1993. He eventually attempted to overthrow Yeltsin in 1993 during two weeks of mass violence across Moscow ending with Rustokoi’s arrest.

Even if some of the plans for making our own fuel, water and oxygen play out, the bare bones infrastructure and ability to prep a spacecraft for flight on another planet is astoundingly difficult. 

GURGAON, India

In Gurgaon, economic growth is often the product of a private sector improvising to overcome the inadequacies of the government. To compensate for electricity blackouts, Gurgaon’s companies and real estate developers operate massive diesel generators capable of powering small towns. No water? Drill private borewells. No public transportation? Companies employ hundreds of private buses and taxis. Worried about crime? Gurgaon has almost four times as many private security guards as police officers.

Gurgaon was widely regarded as an economic wasteland. In 1979, the state of Haryana created Gurgaon by dividing a longstanding political district on the outskirts of New Delhi. One half would revolve around the city of Faridabad, which had an active municipal government, direct rail access to the capital, fertile farmland and a strong industrial base. The other half, Gurgaon, had rocky soil, no local government, no railway link and almost no industrial base. As an economic competition, it seemed an unfair fight. And it has been: Gurgaon has won, easily. Faridabad has struggled to catch India’s modernization wave, while Gurgaon’s disadvantages turned out to be advantages, none more important, initially, than the absence of a districtwide government, which meant less red tape capable of choking development. By 1979, Mr. Singh had taken control of his father-in-law’s real estate company, now known as DLF, at a moment when urban development in India was largely overseen by government agencies. In most states, private developers had little space to operate, but Haryana was an exception. Slowly, Mr. Singh began accumulating 3,500 acres in Gurgaon that he divided into plots and began selling to people unable to afford prices in New Delhi.

Mr. Singh had become the company’s India representative after befriending Jack Welch, then the G.E. chairman. When Mr. Welch decided to outsource some business operations to India, he eventually opened a G.E. office inside a corporate park in Gurgaon in 1997. “When G.E. came in,” Mr. Singh said, “others followed.”

Ordinarily, such a wild building boom would have had to hew to a local government master plan. But Gurgaon did not yet have such a plan, nor did it yet have a districtwide municipal government. Instead, Gurgaon was mostly under state control. Developers built the infrastructure inside their projects, while a state agency, the Haryana Urban Development Authority, or HUDA, was supposed to build the infrastructure binding together the city.

From computerized control rooms, Genpact employees manage 350 private drivers, who travel roughly 60,000 miles every day transporting 10,000 employees.

The city’s residential compounds, especially the luxury developments along golf courses, exist as similarly self-contained entities.

“We pretty much carry the entire weight of what you would expect many states to do,” said Pramod Bhasin, who this spring stepped down as Genpact’s chief executive. “The problem — a very big problem — is our public services are always lagging a few years behind, but sometimes a decade behind. Our planning processes sometimes exist only on paper.”

Not all of the city’s islands are affluent, either. Gurgaon has an estimated 200,000 migrant workers, the so-called floating population, who work on construction sites or as domestic help.

Meanwhile, with Gurgaon’s understaffed police force outmatched by such a rapidly growing population, some law-and-order responsibilities have been delegated to the private sector. Nearly 12,000 private security guards work in Gurgaon, and many are pressed into directing traffic on major streets.

Sudhir Rajpal, the wiry, mustachioed commissioner of the new Municipal Corporation of Gurgaon, has a long to-do list: fix the roads, the sewers, the electrical grid, the drainage, the lack of public buses, the lack of water and the lack of planning. The Municipal Corporation was formed in 2008, and Mr. Rajpal, having assumed the city’s top administrative position a few months ago, has been conducting a listening tour to convince people that government can solve their problems. It is not an easy sell.

“The drains are broken and accidents are happening,” shouted one man. “Yet no one is answerable! There are problems and problems. Whatever water we get is dirty, but we have nowhere to complain.”

“Every day some agitation is taking place,” he said, shouting above the din of traffic. “People are not satisfied.” If people should be satisfied anywhere in India, Gurgaon should be the place. Average incomes rank among the highest in the country. Property values have jumped sharply since the 1990s. Gurgaon’s malls offer many of the country’s best shops and restaurants, while the city’s most exclusive housing enclaves are among the finest in India. Yet the economic power that growth has delivered to Gurgaon has not been matched by political power. The celebrated middle class created by India’s boom has far less clout at the ballot box than the hundreds of millions of rural peasants struggling to live on $2 a day, given the far larger rural vote, and thus are courted far less by Indian politicians.

The more interesting question in our mind is whether a political rapprochement between Cuba and the United States would even bring Cuba the economic benefits it seeks. The island’s decades of prosperity during the Cold War were a product of enormous subsidies and technological support from the Soviet Union.

Cuba has very few natural geographic economic advantages. There is already stiff competition in the rum and sugar markets, and islands throughout the Caribbean boast similarly beautiful beaches.

Another problem with the net is that it’s still ‘technology’, and ‘technology’, as the computer scientist Bran Ferren memorably defined it, is ‘stuff that doesn’t work yet.’

In ‘The Language Instinct’, Stephen Pinker explains the generational difference between pidgin and creole languages. A pidgin language is what you get when you put together a bunch of people – typically slaves – who have already grown up with their own language but don’t know each others’. They manage to cobble together a rough and ready lingo made up of bits of each. It lets them get on with things, but has almost no grammatical structure at all. However, the first generation of children born to the community takes these fractured lumps of language and transforms them into something new, with a rich and organic grammar and vocabulary, which is what we call a Creole. Grammar is just a natural function of children’s brains, and they apply it to whatever they find.

the checkbook is not the ultimate power in the galaxy. The ultimate power comes from the law backed by a gun.

Americans fought the bloodiest war in their history from 1861 to 1865 over the issue of central power versus local power.

Northern Europe is composed of advanced technocratic economies, made possible by the capital-generating capacity of the well-watered North European Plain and its many navigable rivers

a people that identifies with its brethren throughout the river valleys and in other areas linked by what is typically omnipresent infrastructure. This crafts a firm identity at the national level rather than local level and assists with mass-mobilization strategies.

Southern Europe, in comparison, suffers from an arid, rugged topography and lack of navigable rivers.

identity is more localized; southern Europeans tend to be more concerned with family and town than nation, since they do not benefit from easy transport options or the regular contact that northern Europeans take for granted.

southern European economies are highly dependent upon a weak currency

While states of this grouping often plan together for EU summits, in reality the only thing they have in common is a half-century of lost ground to recover, and they need as much capital as can be made available.

European Union is now made up of 27 different nationalities

The ECB’s primary (and only partially stated) mission is to foster long-term stable growth in the eurozone’s largest economy — Germany — working from the theory that what is good for the continent’s economic engine is good for Europe.

Smaller, poorer economies are more volatile, since even tiny changes in the international environment can send them through either the floor or the roof.

The question is not “whither the euro” but how to provide a safety net for the euro’s less desirable, debt-related aftereffects.

The second is that the Dec. 16 agreement is only an agreement in principle.

First, when a bailout is required, it is clearly because something has gone terribly wrong.

The third complication is that the bailout mechanism is actually only half the plan. The other half is to allow states to at least partially default on their debt

tates that just squeaked by in 2010 must run a more difficult gauntlet in 2011 — particularly if they depend heavily on foreign investors for funding their budget deficits.

The United States claimed that the systems are intended to counter the rising threat from Iran. In response to this claim, Russia offered to integrate its BMD system with NATO's system. According to Moscow, such integration would strengthen Western defenses across Eurasia -- indeed, all the way to East Asia. However, Washington rejected the offer, thereby confirming Moscow's suspicions that the BMD system is more about Russia than the Iranian threat.

In December, Russia gained a new and much more effective card to use against the United States in the BMD debate when a U.S. helicopter strike on the Afghan-Pakistani border caused the U.S.-Pakistani relationship to deteriorate.

Cutting the NDN would lead to an official break in relations between Russia and the United States because it would put at risk more than 130,000 U.S. and allied troops. Whereas Russia's previous threats against the United States went unheeded, Washington may not be able to ignore this new threat.

At the end of 2011, it seemed that Russia was going to threaten to cut off the NDN to compel United States to change its position on BMD. But then something occurred that could give the United States more leverage against the Kremlin: Russian protests.

The stress of a shift in Kremlin policy, the rise of anti-Kremlin groups and personal feuds have also led to the utter breakdown of the Kremlin clan system Putin emplaced a decade ago to manage Russia.

Such instability is not new to Russia under Putin, but the present situation differs from previous ones in that several crises occurred at once.

should the various protest groups suddenly receive cash and organizational help, Putin could have a much harder time maintaining his usual level of control.

Washington has hinted that it is willing to back the protesters if prompted. Following Russia's parliamentary elections in December, reports circulated that the election watchdog accusing the Russian government of election fraud had U.S. funding.

newly appointed U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul arrived in Russia in January. On just his second day at his post, McFaul spent several hours meeting with representatives of various protest groups at the U.S. Embassy.

After the election, Putin will have more time and resources to devote to other large issues facing Russia, such as its standoff with the United States. Another important event is on the horizon in May: the first NATO-Russia summit since 2008, to be held in Chicago.

Moscow might want to make the Europeans uncomfortable during the U.S.-Russian standoff, but it does not want to create a backlash and prompt the Europeans to unify with the United States over regional security.

But there’s a problem, the architect points out. She reminds you that your city requires you to provide off-street parking on the property for each of the apartments you build. 

access ramps to the underground garage will subtract six apartments, and your general contractor estimates that excavating will cost $55,000 per parking space — almost as much as the $60,000 you’ve budgeted to build each apartment.

You contemplate whether to dig a second subterranean level in the garage, but the deeper you go, the contractor explains, the more expensive it gets.

You’re now considering a building with 30 apartments, plus 19 spaces behind. That’s only 0.6 parking spaces apiece, so you’ll still be in trouble with the city. To get one space per apartment, you’ll need to drop down to 25 apartments or fewer and raise the rent again.

The whole situation is aggravating, because the area surrounding your building has vast, untapped reservoirs of parking: surface lots at grocery stores and movie theaters, underground spaces at shopping complexes and office buildings, and idle spots at nearby apartments.

You could even rent a group of overnight spaces at a nearby garage and sublet them to tenants, but such innovative solutions are not a legal substitute for on-site parking in your city.

You’re stuck with no good options: a long and risky waiver application, underground parking with extremely high rents, or a half-sized building with high rent and slots out back.

 Parking quotas drive up construction costs. (“But supply and demand, not cost, set prices,” I hear my Econ 101 professor Hirschel Kasper pointing out.

There’s no way you can legally build your no-parking $800-a-month apartments, nor can anyone else, anywhere in town. The whole apartment market will be missing its bottom end.

Todd Litman of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute has modeled a typical affordable housing development and concluded that including one parking space per dwelling raises the cost of each rental unit by 12.5 percent

Parking quotas constrain the supply of dwelling units, particularly of modest, economical ones, which causes their price to rise.

Parking quotas often make it prohibitively expensive to adapt buildings for other uses. Developers cannot convert vacant warehouses into lofts, or aging office blocks into condos, unless they somehow shoehorn floors of parking into the historic structures.

By suppressing the number of apartments on each city lot (see Nos. 2 and 3), quotas force housing demand to spread outward across the landscape.

 Parking quotas shift the cost of storing vehicles from those vehicles’ owners into the rent of non-owners. By flooding the market for parking, quotas make it impossible to recoup the full cost of parking by charging its users.

This effect does not raise the rent on average beyond what effects 1, 2, and 3 do, but it does shift the cost of storing vehicles from car owners to non-owners. Even tenants who do not use parking pay for it.

The cost of parking, furthermore, exceeds its market price almost everywhere in King County, so even tenants who do not own cars end up paying for parking through their rent.

In 1961, Oakland introduced a quota of one space per new apartment. Immediately, as housing economist Brian Bertha has documented (see page 143), the construction cost per apartment jumped by 18 percent and typical apartment buildings shrank: The number of units per new building fell by 30 percent. Developers built fewer, larger apartments, and the rent rose.

A newer proof comes from urban planning professor Michael Manville of Cornell University. He described in the Journal of the American Planning Association what happened in downtown Los Angeles after 1999 when the city enacted an adaptive reuse ordinance (ARO).

Quickly, the deregulation of parking yielded more than 6,000 new apartments and condominiums, some of them in previously dilapidated historic office buildings that dated from the Art Deco era.

When parking requirements are removed, developers provide more housing and less parking, and also … developers provide different types of housing: housing in older buildings, in previously disinvested areas, and housing marketed toward non-drivers. This latter category of housing tends to sell for less than housing with parking spaces.

Minimum parking requirements do not jack the rent up much in the kinds of pricey buildings where the developer would have installed an abundance of parking anyway.

What’s more, half of the parking spaces developers provided to tenants were at neighboring or nearby properties. In fact, at 16 of the 57 ARO buildings, all the parking was off-site. These developers did what you wanted to do for your 50-unit building: They secured tenant parking not by pouring concrete but by sipping coffee with the owners of nearby garages.

Russia is now looking to extend its economic lifespan in hopes that the country can remain strong for another generation.

Russia has traditionally lagged behind Western nations in the fields of military, transportation, industry and technology but has employed periodic breakneck modernization programs, which have destabilized the country during their enactment while also bringing it into the modern era.

Russia cannot simply throw more of its domestic population at the problem as it has in the past. It must import foreign expertise on a massive scale. So Russia is turning to the West for help.

Russia’s timing in this is critical. Moscow feels more secure in reaching out to the West for such deals because it has already expanded and consolidated control over much of its near abroad. Furthermore, Europe is fractured (and becoming more so) and the United States is occupied in the Middle East. This is a very opportune time for Russia to undertake another grand modernization.

Russia remembers all too well what happened during the last modernization process — Perestroika — when too much modern and Western influence flooded the country, collapsing the Soviet Union’s social structure and political control.

As PLAN steps up its expansion and modernization process to facilitate Beijing’s territory claim, new contests within both the East China Sea and South China Sea are expected.