Canada and Britain are set to become roommates as part-of cost-cutting measures in their respective foreign ministries, Canadian official state media CBC reports.
The British Foreign Secretary will meet with Baird in Ottawa on Monday where the two will sign an agreement that will in part result in Canada and the U.K. sharing embassies or high commissions in countries where one has a diplomatic presence and the other does not.
Hague told CBC News, "as the Prime Minister [David Cameron] said when addressing the Canadian parliament last year: 'We are two nations, but under one Queen and united by one set of values.'"
According to the CBC, Canada already provides consular services to Australian citizens in 26 nations, though the opposition NDP has decried the move to share chanceries with Britain as an affront to Canadian independence. Nonetheless, diplomats from both countries can certainly expect some Perfect Strangers-type good times and hijinx in the newly co-branded legations ... assuming Britain can remember Canada's name ...
In Berlin, the embassies of Finland, Norway, Sweden and the miscellaneous Nordic countries all house-share a common building, known as the Pan Nordic Building, which is supposed to be an architectural marvel but basically just looks like a fancy IKEA.
The Democratic Convention evokes pity. They too had similar scripts at the podium – narrate your humble, hardworking family lines, talk incessantly about jobs so you won’t have to talk about wages. The repetitive over-wrought praise of “el Presidente” in every speech became mawkish, reminding one of the “politics of personalism,” present in many countries with underdeveloped political institutions.
Australia - No ID Required - Australia, where voting is mandatory, does not require physical identification before casting a ballot.
Canada - Photo ID Required (with exceptions) - Elections Canada requires voters to provide one of the following: (a) driver's license, passport or military ID card, or, (b) two documents that show name and address (e.g. library card and utility bill; birth certificate and bank statement), or, (c) a signed oath of eligibility and a person who has valid ID willing to vouch for the prospective voter's identity.
France - No ID Required (in rural areas) / Photo ID Required (in urban areas) - Voters residing in communes with a population less than 3,500 do not need to provide physical identification before casting a ballot. Those who live in other areas must show a passport, military ID card, driver license, or National ID Card (the latter which is free) to poll workers before voting.
India - Photo ID Required - The Elections Commission of India requires voters present government-issued photo ID at the time of voting, however, provides free EPIC (Election Photo Identity Card) cards to citizens who have no identification.
Israel - Photo ID Required - Israel requires voters provide a passport, driver's license or parliamentary identification card when voting.
Kenya - Photo ID Required (in transition) - The Obama administration is funding an initiative to introduce photo ID to Kenyan voters.
Mexico - Photo ID Required - The Federal Elections Institute (IFE) requires voters show an IFE-issued ID card that displays photo, signature, address and thumbprint (pictured, above) before casting a ballot. Cards are issued free at the time of voter registration.
United Kingdom - No ID Required - The United Kingdom provides poll cards (without photos) to voters, however, does not require them to vote.
He seems to have lost his wits. Rather than making thought-out, responsible decisions, he is creating the sense of an impending war. All the heads of the security establishment, of the Shin Bet and the Mossad, past and present, they all say do not attack.
Gen. Shaul Mofaz, MK on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Iran
As news breaks that U.S. law enforcement has neutralized a planned military coup against the Obama government, we look at what steps an embattled regime would be advised to take to insulate itself from putsches and overthrow attempts. We referenced two authoritative sources to identify four preventative measures - and their possible drawbacks - in counter-coup planning: Coup d’Etat: A Practical Handbook and I Will Survive: Coup Proofing, Military Effectiveness and Strategic Substitution.
Our chart, above, shows the number of instances of the use of crisis words (“emergency” and “siege”) in the constitutions of nine randomly selected nations.
“There exists no norm that is applicable to chaos. For a legal order to make sense, a normal situation must exist, and he is sovereign who definitely decides whether this normal situation actually exists.”
In a 2010 interview with Smithsonian Magazine, Stratfor CEO George Friedman predicted a bizarre future conflict involving Poland and Turkey would rapidly develop into World War III.
Occasionally frantic media reports that Russians are clamoring for an end to the alternating presidency/premiership of Vladimir Putin are put in a new perspective by a recent survey from the German research firm Gesellschaft für Konsumforschung (GfK). Asked their attitude toward several leading Russian politicians, 60-percent of respondents indicated a positive response to Putin, with only 18-percent looking favorably on 2012 presidential election runner-up Gennady Zyugano. That corresponds to Zyugano's showing in the last presidential election in which he scored just 17-percent of the vote in an election that was criticized by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (the OSCE's report, however, was itself blasted by one of their own monitors who claimed it had been prepared in advance of the election).
The following infographic, though charted by RIA Novosti, is based on data commissioned from GfK. GfK is a global research firm founded in 1934 that is one of the world's top 5 market research agencies by annual sales.
The Assassination Question at the Constitutional Convention
On July 20, 1787, Benjamin Franklin remarked to the Constitutional Convention:
History furnishes one example only of a first Magistrate being formally brought to public Justice. Every body cried out agst this as unconstitutional. What was the practice before this in cases where the chief Magistrate rendered himself obnoxious? Why recourse was had to assassination ...
The one example in Franklin's statement is Charles I of England. Chafetz uses Franklin's observation to ask the question "what is an impeachable offense?"
"I suggest," Chafetz explains, "that we ... view impeachable offenses as assassinable offenses." In other words, impeachment, in Chafetz' theory, is intended to be used when the historic and traditional alternative is for the officeholder to be killed.
Franklin revered Brutus and Cassius, the assassins of Julius Caesar. Therefore, Chafetz queries, "it remains to be asked what, precisely, were Caesar’s crimes that justified the assassination?" These can be identified as two, according to Chafetz: (a) the instigation of Civil War, and, (b) the destruction of republicanism. Chavetz continues -
What Franklin sought was a mechanism with both the substantive reach of assassination and the procedural mechanisms to satisfy these concerns. He sought to “regularize" assassination -that is, to tame it—by proceduralizing it. Like assassination, impeachment would remove “chief Magistrate[s who had] rendered [themselves] obnoxious” by doing things like starting civil wars or subverting the constitution. But unlike assassination, impeachment would be epistemically humble— it would allow for the acquittal and vindication of the innocent—and it would be less disruptive to the polity, making it less likely to provoke the kind of backlash that led to the rise of Augustus.
Under the U.S. constitution, Chafetz concludes, impeachment - and, ultimately, removal - is an Enlightenment-era process for civilizing the ancient political ritual of assassination.
Two-Thirds of Americans Think Obama Better than Romney in Stopping ETs
... more than two in three (68%) women say that Obama would be more adept at dealing with an alien invasion than Romney, vs. 61 percent of men. And more younger citizens, ages 18 to 64 years, than those aged 65+ (68% vs. 50%) think Romney would not be as well-suited as Obama to handle an alien invasion.
Last April, Dr. Paul Springer, a civilian faculty member at the U.S. Air Force Air Command and Staff College in Montgomery, Alabama, discussed possible alien war objectives with the breakfast TV show "Today" of Australian's Nine Network.
Springer isn't the only one considering the possibilities of planetary invasion. In his 2006 non-fiction book "An Introduction to Planetary Defense", Dr. Travis Taylor - a former NASA engineer - suggested a planet-wide program of universal conscription accompanied by aggressive breeding for the production of replacement troops would have to be instituted to respond to an alien threat.
Three Turkish officers stationed abroad will not return home to face trial for involvement in an alleged coup plot until NATO evaluates the matter or they stand down from their positions ...
Gen. Hakan Akkoç, who is stationed at a NATO base in Belgium, will remain at his position until NATO evaluates the matter. Col. Mehmet Alper Şengezer and Lt. Col. Nedim Ulusan, on duty in Italy and Croatia, respectively, could return to Turkey to turn themselves in after they turn over their positions to their successors.
Sledgehammer was first uncovered by the small Turkish newspaper Taraf in 2003 and involved plans by the Turkish armed forces to attack domestic targets using covert forces in order to justify an overthrow of the Turkish government. One component of the plan would have involved the downing of a Turkish fighter by a foreign state over international waters to mobilize public support for the military, a situation eerily similar to the recent downing of a Turkish air force plane by the Syrian Air Defense Command.
Sledgehammer's discovery resulted in the arrest of more than 300 officers and the resignation of the chiefs of the army, air and naval staff.
A previous Turkish coup, in 1971, was believed masterminded by the NATO-backed Counter-Guerrilla - the Turkish element of Operation Gladio - purportedly to preempt a Soviet-backed coup planned for later that month. That same week, Italian police captured a cache of weapons possibly intended for use in a near-simultaneous putsch in that country.
The 1971 Turkish coup was timed to coincide with the overthrow of the Italian government, a conspiracy broken-up by Italian police at the last moment.
As part of a general military build-up in the Arctic, Canada plans to develop "stealth snowmobiles" Defense News reports.
The government has told industry that existing gas-powered engines are too noisy for covert operations, and it wants a snowmobile with a silent mode that could be activated when necessary.
The special operations forces are interested in acquiring such a vehicle, military sources said. It is expected that a prototype can be developed by next March.
Canada has active territorial disputes over Arctic areas with both the United States and Denmark.
Canadian Rangers - image courtesy US Embassy - Canada
The IMF and Vote Buying at the UN Security Council
In their recent paper "Buying Votes and International Organizations" Axel Drehera and James Raymond Vreelandb of the University of Göttingen in Lower Saxony attempted to demystify the process that leads to resolutions at the UN Security Council.
"The approval of the United Nations Security Council," Drehera and Vreelandb explained in their paper, "lends legitimacy to the military actions of great powers."
For instance, the United States, controversially, began military operations against Libya without seeking a congressional use-of-force authorization. In a March 2011 letter to Speaker Bohener, President Obama explained that no such authorization was required due to a UN Security Council mandate.
But what is the currency of this legitimacy?
The answer, according to Drehera and Vreelandb, is no different than any other product: dollars. And the bank of legitimacy is the International Monetary Fund.
Drehera and Vreelandb used a statistics-driven analysis of voting behavior of UN Security Council members and discovered that:
Voting with the United States is rewarded and voting against the United States is punished. The substantive effect of voting with the United States is statistically significant, but small (and driven by two outlying observations) – that of voting against the United States is also statistically significant and larger – by an order of magnitude (and not driven by outliers). The analysis of our original dataset leads to a straightforward conclusion: The United States uses its influence at the IMF to buy votes on the UN Security Council. Governments serving on the Security Council who publicly disagree with the United States on matters of international security are less likely to receive IMF loans, and if they do receive them, the loans are significantly smaller.
Drehera and Vreelandb do not directly address the process by which the United States exerts influence on the IMF to secure favorable Security Council votes. While the sheer size of the U.S. economy, and the according 17% of votes it receives in the Board of Governors, is certainly one factor, what about the entanglement of senior IMF officials in the social network of the U.S. government? By custom, of course, the Managing Director of the IMF is always European. A more attentive look, however, at the biographies of those officeholders reveals other key details. Take, for instance, the incumbent Christine Lagarde. Before serving as French Finance Minister she worked as an assistant to eventual Clinton-era Defense Secretary William Cohen, fetching the congressman's coffee and dry-cleaning. These days is Lagarde simply a better-paid valet to Pentagon policymakers?
Drehera and Vreelandb posit, however, an alternate conclusion could also be imaginable:
As we currently model it, voting on the UNSC causes IMF loans. But it is also plausible that IMF loans cause UNSC voting.
The Fund for Peace, a DC-based NGO, has released their annual "Failed States Index" - a ranking of nations on the brink and those who have already fallen over.
For the fifth consecutive year Somalia tops the list while Finland earns note as the world's most stable nation. Other highlights of the 2012 index included Libya which, under the leadership of the NATO-backed Transitional National Council, tumbled a whopping 61 spots from that country’s last ranking during the Jamahiriya-era. Among NATO states, Denmark boasted the highest overall rankings with Italy and Greece languishing in the rear.
Drilling down into the ten categories used to calculate the total scores, however, highlights a more interesting array of winners and losers.
External Intervention
New Zealand topped the list for states least impacted by the threat of intervention from external actors (insert Elijah Wood joke), followed - in second place - by the United States. Afghanistan, South Sudan and the Ivory Coast were most at risk. Among NATO states, Iceland scored lowest, coming in at spot 72 (below Kuwait and barely above Uzbekistan).
Legitimacy of the State
Massive corruption? Loss of popular confidence? Lack of political accountability or transparency? None of those were issues for Switzerland which took the number one spot in the category “Legitimacy of the State.”
Demographic Pressures
Homogeneous Iceland faced the least demographic pressures, according to the FfP, followed closely by Finland and Norway. Worst off was Ethiopia.
Refugees
The threat of internally displaced persons had least impact on Singapore (After all, to where would they displace?) with the twins of Sudan and South Sudan tied for last place in FfP’s scoring.
Group Grievance
The presence of aggrieved communal groups and the issues that can raise (vengeance seeking, paranoia and political exclusion) was of little issue in the Scandinavian states. Iceland, Finland and Sweden posted the best scores in this category. Once again, Sudan and South Sudan brought up the back of the pack.
Human Flight
Despite increasingly rancorous claims of an emerging left-wing and/or right-wing (depending on who is being quoted) dictatorship, no Americans were – apparently – impassioned enough to clamor for the borders as the United States scored top honors in the Human Flight category, in fact, doubling Finland’s score. Zimbabwe came in last.
Uneven Development
Led by Sweden, the Scandinavian states took the blue ribbon for this category, which measured economic equality. Angola rated as most unequal.
Poverty
Sweden had the least issues with overall poverty, according to the FfP, while Haiti had the most. Iceland, Portugal and the Czech Republic were among those western nations scoring lowest in this category.
Public Services
Tiny Luxembourg was celebrated as having the most well-maintained and egalitarian diffusion of public services. Among nations in the developed world, Japan scored the worst. Among all nations, Somalia was in last place.
Human Rights
Luxembourg, again, took top honors in this category which measured instances of abuse of legal rights.
Security Apparatus
The “security apparatus” category measured the presence of secret police agencies, the division of military and security forces along socio-economic or ethnic lines, the tolerance of mercenary outfits or death squads, and other destabilizing factors related to armed groups. Finland headlined this category (meaning it had the least problems with the aforementioned), followed closely by Iceland, New Zealand and Austria. Somalia, which has no security apparatus, was at the bottom of the ratings. The UK – perhaps due to questions over the effectiveness of disarmament of militias in the six occupied counties of Ulster – scored in spot 32, below rival Argentina.
Factionalized Elites
Predictably, perhaps, for a nation that splits her presidency between seven different people, Switzerland was viewed by the index as having the least issue with “factionalized elites.”
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