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L'Experte indépendante des Nations unies sur la situation des droits de l'homme en République centrafricaine (RCA), Marie-Thérèse Keita-Bocoum, a salué mercredi l'adoption du Pacte républicain pour la paix, la réconciliation nationale et la reconstruction en République centrafricaine à l'issue du Forum de Bangui sur la réconciliation nationale.

Face à l'annonce d'une tentative de coup d'Etat au Burundi, le Secrétaire général des Nations Unies, Ban-Ki moon, a appelé instamment mercredi les parties à faire preuve de retenue.

Medical support operations have traditionally focused on trauma and emergency response and while these issues remain steadfast, the scope of operations is broadening at an alarming pace. Due to the complexity and unfamiliarity of recent operations, such as the Ebola case in West Africa,

Naval Combat Systems include Weapon, Sensor, Communications and EW Systems and can constitute well over 50% by value of the cost of warships and submarines. The Market for Naval Surface-to-Air Missile Systems and Naval Air Surveillance and Tracking Radars, for example,  is  f

Les  comités 4, 5 et 6 de Poldef en visite mercredi 13 mai au campus coréen des hautes études scientifiques et technologiques (KAIST) ...

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France has offered to supply Poland with submarines and missiles that were requested by the country’s Defense Ministry.

Rajzpályázat a 2015. májusi GYERMEKNAP alkalmából

Rajzokat, festményeket, alkotásokat várnak a Francois Fiedler Gyermekrajz Pályázat keretében három korcsoportban.

A pályázat névadója François Fiedler (1921-2001) nemzetközileg az egyik legelismertebb magyar származású francia művészek közé tartozik.  A Palotanegyedből a II. világháború befejezése után Párizsba költözik, ahol rendszeresen olyan elismert művészekkel együtt állít ki, mint Braque, Chagall, Calder, Giacometti, Kandinszky, Leger, Miró, Matisse, Picasso…

The Senate just dealt a serious blow to U.S. trade policy. Nominally, it was a procedural measure on whether to proceed to a vote on a Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) package, and 52 senators actually voted in favor. But 45 senators opposed — more than enough to block the move to cut off debate. The repercussions of such parliamentary maneuvering for U.S. foreign policy could be very serious indeed.

I wrote last week about the perilous state of the U.S. trade agenda. While the Obama administration had worked assiduously on the international aspect of ambitious trade deals, it had neglected the domestic debate. It had finally reached a point at which talks with trade partners could not advance and deals could not conclude without TPA. The figurative lateness of the hour meant that Obama administration needed a whole sequence of congressional votes to go its way in quick succession. That approach worked on the first stage – getting TPA bills reported out of the Senate Finance and House Ways and Means committees. But that feat was accomplished with a sort of shell game that caught up with trade proponents today.

There is not just one trade bill moving through; there are four. In addition to TPA, there is a bill to renew and fund Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA), one to renew trade preference programs, and one to deal with customs matters. The virtue of having these four separate bills was that problematic amendments could be shunted off onto the more “optional” bills. But that just delayed the day of reckoning. Trade opponents understood the approach — move their amendments to bills that would never pass, while keeping TPA clean. Hence, the argument leading up to today’s vote was how the bills would be bundled together. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) tried to move TPP and TAA as a package; opponents insisted all four bills move together.

The vote was nearly along party lines. One Democrat supported (Sen. Tom Carper of Delaware). Sen. McConnell ended up switching his vote to “no” for procedural reasons, which made him the only Republican to oppose.

One might ask why this is such a big deal. It was a procedural motion, not a final verdict. The Senate could take the motion up again, if it wanted to (McConnell’s procedural ploy allows him to raise it). A new deal could be struck. The president could twist arms within his own party.

The problem is that momentum was not moving in TPA’s direction. The president has been pushing on the issue — hard. He just did not seem to move anyone. There aren’t many more votes to be had on the Republican side (Sens. Graham and Rubio did not vote). Other than Hillary Clinton coming out in favor of TPA, it is hard to see what could change on the Democratic side.

Sen. McConnell could accede to Democratic demands and bundle the four bills together, but he might well lose more Republican votes than he gained among Democrats. Further, some of the objectionable provisions (e.g., currency manipulation clauses) have been labeled deal-killers by the administration.

This leaves the administration’s foreign policy in tatters. On the trade front, no partner country will want to make sensitive concessions if the deal will be blocked in Congress. Further, it badly undermines the administration’s credibility, as U.S. negotiators had repeatedly assured other countries that they had U.S. domestic politics under control. Even if this is only a temporary delay, there is very little time to push through the big Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) deal before next year’s election is upon us; the delay itself could block the deal.

The connection from commercial policy to foreign policy comes because of the central role that the TPP played in the administration’s pivot (or “rebalance”) to Asia. The TPP is seen as a key test of U.S. commitment to the region, and the Obama administration had labeled the pivot its top foreign policy priority.

The danger now is that trade partners and allies will see the United States as rudderless, isolationist, and unreliable for at least the next year and a half, if not beyond.

BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images

The U.S. president, frustrated by the costs of involvement in the Middle East that had been a huge burden on America for years, ordered his intelligence services into action. The course they chose was regime change. Operatives took the initiative, secretly raising an army to depose the offending ruler.

The president was Thomas Jefferson. The date was 1805. Since its early days, the United States, like European nations, had been forced by the Barbary pirates into paying tribute to avoid the capture and harassment of sailing vessels. Jefferson had previously hoped to raise an international coalition to depose Tripoli’s pasha, but due to European hesitation, he acted unilaterally. The result was what the CIA now describes on its website as “the United States’ first covert attempt to overthrow a foreign government.”

Initially, the U.S. effort was a seeming success; as soon as it was clear that the Americans were posed to remove the pasha and replace him with his brother, a treaty was struck. American hostilities in the region, however, were not fully resolved for another decade.

Much in this story is chilling in its familiarity. The United States doesn’t seem to have come too far in the intervening two centuries. The country is again embroiled in interminable hostilities in the Middle East. And once more at the center of the action are U.S. intelligence services.

During the nation’s first years of existence, President George Washington sought funding for secret services that he felt were essential to U.S. security. The allocations for those spying activities consumed roughly 10 percent of the U.S. budget—a grand sum measuring roughly $1 million. In 2014, the reported budget for U.S. intelligence activities was approximately $68 billion, down from its 2010 high of $80 billion.

Despite its deep roots and the resources that have been poured into it, today’s intelligence community stands at a watershed. It has been battered by criticism for its role in torture programs and other abuses, by a long string of costly intelligence failures, and by shock at the overreaching surveillance activities of the National Security Agency. It has gone through several major overhauls, including the post-9/11 creation of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and a more recent reshuffling at the CIA overseen by Director John Brennan. The formation of the ODNI, intended to enhance coordination among spy agencies, actually exacerbated tensions. Rivalries among special operators in the military, military intelligence, and the CIA over whose teams should take the lead in combating terrorism threats worldwide have compounded internal strains. The failure of top policymakers to effectively utilize intelligence or understand its inherent limitations has only worsened these problems.

All this turmoil has come at a time when the profound transformational consequences of the advent of the information age have raised serious questions about the future of intelligence. Those questions extend to the role of the intelligence community in the national security apparatus, the means of achieving intelligence goals, and the appropriate limitations that ought to be placed on intelligence activities in a free society. Changes have been coming so rapidly that reflection about the best way to address such issues has been forced to take a back seat to the operational concerns that have bedeviled the intelligence community during the past decade and a half.

Yet there is an ever more urgent need for a rethink of how, why, when, where, and by what means intelligence is gathered, analyzed, and utilized. It is still the early days of the information revolution. The pace of breakthroughs will only accelerate, and the consequences will shift from incremental improvements in productivity and connectivity to fundamental changes in the nature of society, power, war, and peace.

By 2020, it is estimated, 50 billion devices will be connected to the Internet—most of them embedded microprocessors that will offer real-time insights into every aspect of life on the planet. Furthermore, effectively every human being, every organization, and every government on Earth will be connected in a man-made system for the first time in history. Each of those billions of microprocessors and each connection on the web will be a potential entry point for surveillance and spying. What’s more, thanks to drones and nanodevices that can be hidden and embedded on targets by the millions, humans stand at the dawn of an era of potentially ubiquitous sensing. (This is not to speak of the gradual impact artificial intelligence will have on how people direct, conduct, and analyze what is gathered.)

If the world does not set limits, preferably by international treaty, as to what is fair game in this system—in terms of both surveillance and cyberconflict—humanity runs the risk of entering a period that will make Big Brother dystopian fantasies pale by comparison. Central to this process of setting limits will be having a public debate about the philosophical building blocks of the system: what is privacy, who owns the data each sensor produces, how should people divvy up the rights of individuals, corporations, and states. Furthermore, intelligence agencies will have to be reorganized to deal with these new realities, and so too will entire national security systems. Increasingly, the Internet will be the terrain on which most future battles will be fought, won, or lost; information warriors, many of them from the IC, will be the principal combatants.

It will be essential that the world reconsider views on the classification of information. Vastly more information is publicly available than could likely ever be gathered covertly. Such open-source information is easier to verify, easier to share, of greater use to policymakers, and essential to the kind of public-private collaboration that will be required in the new security environment. Conversely, estimates from career intelligence consumers suggest the vast majority of what is available via classified channels is also available or discoverable via open sources. Not classifying it would save billions of dollars.

The most modern information systems are designed to serve consumers of information. The intelligence apparatus is perversely oriented to the needs and concerns of information producers. It is centralized when most systems are distributed, and it is hard to search when most focus on making that easy. This makes sense in some (though very few) cases in order to protect sources and methods. But overall, the apparatus should be reformed to enhance officials’ ability to make informed decisions using blended open- and closed-source data.

Moving analysts closer to the consumers also makes sense. The United States should be restoring its withering mechanisms of foresight, such as the National Intelligence Council, by relieving them of the burden of being glorified memo writers for the National Security Council. The most important and elusive objective of good intelligence systems is not providing the right answers—it is coming up with the right questions. That requires special processes, independence, and a creative freedom that today’s news-fed, politically driven system is becoming worse and worse at executing.

Finally, it is time to acknowledge that the reorganization—namely, the formation of the ODNI—that took place in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks was a mess. It was in fact just the latest in a series of unsatisfactory efforts that began with the creation of the Office of Strategic Services during World War II and then included the formation of the CIA. All were meant to knit together the proliferating number of spy agencies in the United States (now up to 17). But in each case, the result was not coordination, but the creation of new bureaucracies and weakened communication.

The intelligence community needs fewer agencies, fewer bosses, less redundancy, lower costs, and more orientation toward focusing on the right missions in the right way. All the forces of the information age—the explosion of new sources and means of gathering intelligence—will create new temptations in the opposite direction. But if America gives in to them, it is likely to get results that will amplify the failures of recent decades, while failing to build on the tradition of serving a vital role that has marked America’s intelligence services since the infancy of the country.

Illustration by Matthew Hollister

White House spokesman Josh Earnest weighed in on New England Patriot’s quarterback Tom Brady’s suspension Tuesday, reminding the American megastar that he’s a role model to “people around the world.” Turns out many of those people are very, very unhappy with NFL commissioner Roger Goodell.

To those uninitiated on the intricacies of the scandal dominating the American sports scene and widely known as Deflategate or Ballghazi: Brady is an Ugg-shilling celebrity who’s won five Super Bowls with the Patriots (his most recent title came this year), earns a $8 million annual salary, and is married to supermodel Gisele Bündchen, just three of the factors that lead American football fans outside of New England to generally despise him. This week, Goodell suspended him for four games for playing with footballs that weren’t properly inflated. Hence, Deflategate.

Goodell, who is also disliked by many NFL fans for inconsistent punishments, a hefty 2013 salary of $44 million, and general corporate buffoonery on behalf of the league, also slapped the Patriots with a million dollar fine and took away some of the team’s future draft picks.

As the rest of the football world celebrates, Patriots fans are incensed over the punishment, which they deem too harsh, and this outrage isn’t limited to American shores. As Earnest suggested, there are Patriot fans around the world. From the looks of things online, they’re as outraged as their American counterparts.

A group called Dutch Patriots Fans, which is registered as an official fan club on the Patriot’s website (all of the groups mentioned below are registered with the team, a loose affiliation that does not suggest any financial backing from the club), fired off a series of tweets condemning Goodell and and backing their embattled number 12. Check one out below:

#NoBradyNoBanner

— Dutch Patriots Fans (@DutchPatriots) May 12, 2015

The group followed also retweeted a series of images expressing support for Brady, who, up to this point, is defiant in face of the punishment.

The UKPatriots, a group based in United Kingdom, also took to media to express their outrage, rounding up all the hashtags being used to back Brady.

#TimeToUnite #FreeTomBrady #NoBradyNoBanner #UKPatriots @Patriots

— UKPatriots (@UKPatriots) May 12, 2015

Then came this from a group called Patriots Sweden:

Oproportionerligt. #FreeBrady

— Patriots Sweden (@PatriotsSweden) May 12, 2015

Translation: Disproportionate.

The Patriots España, a group based in Spain, calls the Well’s investigation a witch hunt in the tweet below (they condemned Goodell with harsher tweets that aren’t safe for a family Web site):

La sanción es desproporcionada,demuestra lo adentro que la tienen. Por muchas cazas de brujas que hagan volveremos a ganar!!! #FireGoodell

— Patriots España (@PatsESP) May 11, 2015

They then retweeted this image:

@PatsESP #FireGoodell #FreeBrady #NoBradyNoBanner #ZonaRojaNFL #NFLesp #FSylosabes pic.twitter.com/a51zm5nXpz

— Flying Elvis (@ElvisFlying) May 12, 2015

The Hungarian Patriots Fan Club isn’t happy either and posted this picture in support of their QB.

Goodell often likes to say the NFL is a global game, a notion many American fans scoff at. But at the very least, these tweets show some football sentiments are universal — strong feelings about Tom Brady, one way or the other.

Photo Credit: Billie Weiss/Getty Images

Macédoine : Kumanovo, les jours d'après ?
Macédoine : un pays au bord du gouffre ?
Macédoine : quand l'insurrection qui vient balaiera les clivages ethniques
Macédoine : la manifestation vire aux affrontements dans le centre de Skopje
Macédoine : le VMRO-DPMNE de Nikola Gruevski en pleine tempête
Écoutes téléphoniques en Macédoine : Gruevski plus fort que la Stasi

/ Dérive autoritaire Macédoine, Courrier des Balkans, Macédoine, Politique intérieure