Category: Europe

The elation expressed by the Russian military over their new vacuum bomb has dissipated. The Russian news service Novosti notes today that the US has a more powerful bomb that goes deeper in the latest in phallus-measuring that apparently has started between Russia and the West (via Memeorandum):

The U.S. has a 14-ton super bomb more destructive than the vacuum bomb just tested by Russia, a U.S. general said Wednesday.
The statement was made by retired Lt. General McInerney, chairman of the Iran Policy Committee, and former Assistant Vice Chief of Staff of the Air Force.
McInerney said the U.S. has “a new massive ordnance penetrator that’s 30,000 pounds, that really penetrates … Ahmadinejad has nothing in Iran that we can’t penetrate.”
He also said the new Russian bomb was not a “penetrator.”

I think this is a slap at Russian manhood, actually. It’s the military equivalent of accusing someone of premature ejaculation. You explode on the surface, Ivan? Real superpowers go deep before explosion. Georgia laughs at you, comrade. Maybe Vladimir Putin should pay more attention to e-mail spam.
But then again, the Russian excitement over developing a fuel-air bomb seemed a little overblown, anyway. They only have one bomber that could actually deploy it, and unless one wants to flatten entire villages, it has few real applications. That kind of strategy ended in Vietnam, and even the Soviets didn’t use those kinds of tactics in Afghanistan. The “daisy cutter” that the US uses has more flexibility and better tactical application. Unless the point is to penetrate into bunkers below the surface or to do some instant ethnic cleansing, it’s literally overkill.
The Russians have relearned a lesson they forgot since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Its better to wait on bragging until one is sure that the opponent has not already beaten one to the finish line. It saves on humiliation later.

Vladimir Putin dismissed the Russian Prime Minister and his government almost three months ahead of scheduled elections. He had been widely expected to do so, but he crossed up the analysts and nominated an unknown as a replacement:

Russian President Vladimir Putin has accepted the resignation of PM Mikhail Fradkov and nominated a financial crime investigator to replace him.
Victor Zubkov, head of the federal financial monitoring service, is a relative unknown in Russian politics. …
First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov has long been considered a frontrunner for the presidency, and Russian media had been speculating that he could be made premier.

Russian markets didn’t budge at the announcement of Fradkov’s resignation, but they may hiccup a little at Zubkov’s nomination. Ivanov had widely been seen as Putin’s favorite, having accompanied him at many public events. Vedemosti, the Russian business publication, had already been discussing Ivanov’s ascension as a strong probability. If the Russian markets had built a transfer to Ivanov into their calculations, the traders may have second thoughts now.
What does this mean? Putin could have had some falling out with both Ivanov and the other Deputy Minister, Dmitri Medvedev, both of whom have been tagged as the early front-runners to replace Putin in the next elections. The nomination of Zubkov gives the investigator a boost into presidential politics and could damage the prospects of the two deputies Putin apparently snubbed.
Putin supposedly wants to ensure a smooth transition at the end of his constitutionally limited term, but this seems designed to create chaos. Instead of anointing a successor, Putin has likely bequeathed Russia a muddled three-person race for the presidency. Does he believe that the political mess of a contested succession will create calls for a waiver that would allow Putin to remain in office?

In yet another entry in the Russia Is Not Our Ally series, the UK had to scramble fighters to intercept eight Russian Tupolev-95 Bear bombers as they appeared headed for British airspace. The Russians have bragged about provoking NATO fighters in this manner, and it’s becoming an expensive game, at least for the West:

The RAF scrambled to intercept eight Russian nuclear bombers heading for Britain yesterday in the biggest aerial confrontation between the two countries since the end of the Cold War.
The Tupolev-95 Bear bombers were approaching in formation when they were met by four Tornado F3 fighter jets. Defence sources said that the Russian pilots turned away as soon as they spotted the approaching Tornados and did not enter British airspace.
Norway had earlier sent four F16 jets to shadow the Russians as they neared its airspace in what Moscow insisted was a training mission. The bombers had flown over international waters from the Barents Sea to the Atlantic before heading for Britain.
Russian Bears flying in pairs have triggered several alerts this year as they neared the 12-mile British airspace zone, but this was the first time that so many bombers had simultaneously tested British air defences.

The immature pissing contest in which Vladimir Putin likes to engage makes him popular with the Russians, but it’s running up a bill for NATO forces. Yesterday’s jaunt cost the UK over $300,000 in Tornado air time, and that was just for the one exercise. Norway and the US have also complained about having to chase down Tupolevs, and it’s expensive for everyone,
The Russians brag that they can now afford to return to the Cold War practice of testing Western air defenses. If that’s so, they can afford to pay for our response as well. Western governments should start presenting a bill to the Russians for every scramble necessitated by provocative Russian bomber flights. If the Russians refuse to pay, that would provide an excellent excuse to kick Russia out of the G-8 and stop all aid programs, or at least deduct the costs from the aid and trade propping Putin.
Make no mistake — allies do not test each other’s air defenses. If the Russians want to act like enemies, then they have de facto declared themselves to be enemies. It’s time that Western governments explain that to Putin, and have Putin look into their eyes and see the seriousness of the situation.

A senior law lord in the UK has proposed that the government take DNA samples from the entire population and store the records in a national database. Not only would that order apply to every British subject and resident, but it would also apply to tourists as well:

The whole population and every UK visitor should be added to the national DNA database, a senior judge has said.
Lord Justice Sedley said the Wales and England system, under which 4m people’s DNA is held whether guilty or cleared of a crime, was “indefensible”.
He added it would be fairer to include “everybody, guilty or innocent”, as it was biased against ethnic minorities.

This isn’t a passing bit of lunacy from an isolated judge, either. Tories have called for a Parliamentary debate on making the DNA database compulsory. The president of the Black Police Association claims that only through compulsory and universal registration can the database be free of racial profiling and discrimination.
One question does seem worth debating: how long should records of individuals be maintained in the database? Fingerprints are never culled here in the US; once given, they remain in the system forever, and DNA appears to get the same treatment. In Britain, people arrested for minor crimes and those acquitted want their DNA records removed from the national database. The compulsory database advocates argue that once every person’s DNA gets entered, no discrimination occurs, and therefore it solves the problem.
Should DNA records expire or get expunged at a certain point for some people? No one has argued that for fingerprint records. Due to the nature of my work in the defense and security industries, I have been fingerprinted numerous times, and all of those remain in the system and accessible to investigators Should those records be pulled now that I no longer work in those industries? I don’t think so, and I don’t see the issue with DNA records either. It’s a passive database, only useful for matching samples found elsewhere, just as with fingerprints.
Forcing people to surrender DNA samples when no crime has been committed seems like another story altogether. It would be especially objectionable as a threshold to entry into the UK, and I believe I would spend my tourist dollars elsewhere if such a requirement existed.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown faces a backbencher revolt over his refusal to acquiesce to a referendum on the new EU treaty. Brown claims that the treaty, which Tony Blair negotiated in his final days, has no connection to the failed EU constitution, on which Labour promised a referendum in 2005. His critics, which comprise a good part of his own Parliamentary faction, believe otherwise:

The Government today insisted there would be no referendum on the new EU treaty, despite revelations in the Daily Telegraph that 120 Labour MPs now want a public vote.
David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, said this morning that the treaty was different in “absolute essence” from the defunct European constitution, so the Government was not obliged to follow through on its manifesto pledge to hold a referendum. …
Mr Miliband was responding to revelations in today’s Daily Telegraph that more than 120 Labour MPs, including several senior ministers, want a referendum on the new EU reform treaty.
The figure – more than a third of the Parliamentary Party – was disclosed by Ian Davidson, a Scottish Labour MP who, despite being close to Mr Brown, is co-ordinating the strong internal campaign for the British people to be given a say.
Mr Davidson, who has written to Mr Brown on behalf of the Labour rebels demanding major changes to the proposed EU Treaty – or alternatively a referendum – told The Daily Telegraph that support among his fellow MPs was running at levels similar to 2004 when Tony Blair had to give way and promise a plebiscite.

Brown may call an election, the Telegraph reports, and base it specifically on the EU treaty. Given Labour’s popularity, an election that returns him to power would allow him to claim a mandate for its ratification. It would neatly avoid the direct referendum that Brown apparently fears, while giving him plenty of latitude to pursue his vision of EU integration.
Unfortunately, elections tend to be tricky. If Brown was really that confident of support and wanted a mandate, why not just hold the referendum? That would also settle the matter, do so directly, and not coincidentally uphold a promise made by Labour on the issue. If the support isn’t there, however, an election could have very uncomfortable results for Brown, who just rose to 10 Downing Street and presumably would like to stay a while.
Apparently, Brown understands that the British do not particularly like this treaty. Over 60,000 people have signed the Telegraph’s petition for a referendum, and they’re not demanding a vote for the purpose of approving it. Neither are the backbenchers of Labour or the entirety of the Tories. That’s one reason Brown might call elections: to keep the backbenchers in line. In an election, the candidates rely on Labour to help them retain their seats, and Brown could use that as leverage to keep them in line.
One has to wonder why Brown insists on defending a surrender of sovereignty while realizing its unpopularity. A referendum would give Brown an opportunity to keep the onus of its implementation off of his record. The treaty is Blair’s, not his, and a defeat would reflect on his predecessor. A victory would give him the mandate he’d need to keep from shouldering the blame all by himself. Brown is giving himself the worst of all possible choices.

Gordon Brown didn’t take long to hit full reverse on his campaign promise to allow a national vote on the new EU constitution. Conservative MP Daniel Hannan notes in the Telegraph that while Brown makes it sound as if conditions have changed, the only change has been Brown himself:

Even by the Prime Minister’s standards, it was an unusually hollow and perfunctory message: “I have been clear throughout that if we achieve, as we have achieved, our negotiating objectives, then I believe the proper way of considering this is through detailed consideration in Parliament itself.”
Clear throughout, eh? That wasn’t what your last manifesto said. Its language could hardly have been more explicit: “We shall put it [the constitution] to the British people in a referendum and campaign wholeheartedly for a ‘Yes’ vote”.
In order to justify reneging on his promise, Mr Brown now has to pretend that the new text is somehow different from the old. But he knows, and we know, and he knows that we know, that the two drafts are substantively identical. Every other EU leader has said so. So has the constitution’s author, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. So, indeed, has Mr Brown himself who, in a hilarious slip of the tongue following talks with Bertie Ahern, announced that they had been “discussing the constitution, and how to take that forward”. (Officials quickly rushed forward to assure us that the Prime Minister had meant to say “discussing the ‘Reform Treaty’ “.)
Watching Mr Brown, in his dark suit and matching expression, I was reminded of a Brezhnev-era apparatchik, woodenly trotting out the official line without expecting to convince anyone.

Hannan deliberately uses the Brezhnev reference to underscore a point, more about the EU than Gordon Brown. The EU doesn’t have much use for popular votes. Hannan notes that Brussels managed to ignore negative results in Ireland over the Nice treaty, and when the French and the Dutch voted against the previous EU constitution. The EU proceeded with its plans regardless.
This should worry the British, as should the reversal of Brown on a plebescite. Representative government could deal with this, but a nation surrendering its sovereignty would be better advised to have their electorate join in that decision. Otherwise, when events turn south, it helps to keep the few select people who surrendered it from being pushed up against the wall. If Brown believes that he can’t get the British to give up its foreign policy to a European commission that barely recognizes popular votes as it is, the fact that he’s refusing to offer the vote as promised should expose him as unfit to make the decision in the first place.
Will the British stand up and demand a voice in this process? Hannan remains pessimistic. Even though 80% want a plebescite and 70% want to vote No, he thinks the British electorate already feel defeated. He wants to change that — and if the Tories can do that, it may give them some momentum to work their way back into power in the UK.

British laws have some of the most restrictive gun-control regulations in the West. Even so, for years the British have seen gun crime skyrocketing as more and younger criminals realize the advantage they have with a firearm in hand:

The number of young people prosecuted for firearms offences has soared by 20 per cent in the past five years, it was revealed earlier this month.
In 2001, 1,193 youngsters under age 21 went to magistrates courts on gun related charges. By 2005, that had risen to 1,444. The statistics come after a recent wave of gun crime in Britain’s inner cities, with many victims not even out of their teens.
Shadow home affairs minister James Brokenshire said: “The rise in gun crime demonstrated by these figures is alarming.”
In April Bernard Hogan-Howe, the chief constable of Merseyside Police, insisted new laws to make reporting information on shootings and possession of guns a ‘duty’’ were essential because people were too scared to come forward.

This is not a new story. Over three years ago, I noted the sharp increase in gun-related murders in both England and Wales, as well as other Western gun-control nations. In fact, the murder rate dropped in the United States during the same period, even though gun control had lost steam in American politics.
Britain banned handguns of all kinds ten years ago. Within just a couple of years, the homicide rate had risen over 40%. Violent crime rates more than doubled in three years. The graphic from the 2003 Canadian study shows a hockey-stick increase in violent crime that rivals the chart used by climate-change advocates.
Four years later, Britain still can’t figure out why disarming the victims has created a spike in gun-related violence. When criminals have a near-certainty that they outgun potential victims, it removes the most immediate disincentive for an attack. Instead of rethinking the entire idea of criminalizing law-abiding citizens who only want to defend themselves, now British authorities want to criminalize law-abiding citizens who won’t volunteer testimony about criminals.
And they don’t stop there. The Telegraph reports that one candidate to be the next Metropolitan police commissioner wants to press charges against victims of gun violence who are too terrified of reprisals to testify. That’s correct; they want to arrest the victims they’ve disarmed. He’s already ordering police to “stop and search suspects regularly”, which at least sounds as if British police have started to conduct searches without any probable cause to find guns.
Why not just allow law-abiding citizens the right to arm themselves? It can’t get much worse than it already has become over the last ten years. If nothing else, Britain shows that a national policy of gun control leaves an entire country of victims for criminals to exploit.

Well, actually in Ulyanovsk, but do you know how difficult it is to use alliteration with Ulyanovsk? Via Jules Crittenden, the Boston Herald catches up with the latest government program in Russia, where Vladimir Putin has to bribe his fellow Russian to procreate. Make babies — win great prizes! And even the runners-up to the parenting contest get lovely parting gifts.
At Heading Right, I remind people that demographics is destiny, and Russia has had some unique issues with population growth. They’re not the only ones with problems in that regard, and the rest of the West may not be laughing in the near future.

The Russian government continues its strange game of imperial ambitions, this time bragging about using Soviet-era bombers to overfly American-patrolled airspace. Moscow says it’s reviving a grand tradition of Russian audacity by eyeballing American pilots. Americans say that Moscow is reviving a grand tradition of Russian baloney:

Russian bombers are reported to have buzzed an American military base for the first time since the Cold War when they flew over the Pacific island of Guam.
Moscow said that US fighter jets were scrambled to intercept the two Tupolev-95 warplanes as they resumed the Cold War era practice of flying over Western offshore military installations in a mission on Wednesday. …
“It was always the tradition of our long-range aviation to fly far into the ocean, to meet (US) aircraft carriers and greet (US) pilots visually,” Maj Gen Pavel Androsov, the head of long-range aviation in the Russian air force, told a press conference in Moscow.
“Yesterday we revived this tradition.”

The Tu-95 can carry nuclear weapons, so such a sortie would be no joke. Only a gang of idiots would want to provoke an American military response, especially since we’re currently keeping a close eye on North Korea and their paranoid dictator. At the least, they’d be inviting a buzz over the Siberian coast from American planes far more capable than the lumbering Tu-95s.
As it turns out, they would have had to have Superman’s eyeballs to greet the US pilots visually, since they didn’t get within 300 miles of them:

Today the American fleet commander in the Pacific poured cold water on the claims, however, insisting the Russian bombers never got within 300 miles of Guam.
“US planes went to an orbit point in preparation for an intercept that never occurred because the Bears didn’t get close enough,” said Admiral Robert F. Willard, employing a slang term for the Russian planes.

This does, however, lend a lot more credence to Georgia’s claim that Russian jets invaded their airspace. The Russians have tested the British much closer to home as well, and Georgia is much more of a thorn in their side. Whether they dropped the missile or fired it at the radar station after passing over South Ossetia remains to be seen, but given the Russian braggadocio over its provocative manuevers, it’s almost certain the Georgians at least have the airspace violations correct.
Why has Vladimir Putin decided to revive the more foolish aspects of the Soviet military posture? Does he want a war to break out, or does he want to just make the claim that he can strike fear into the West? Russian nuclear weapons certainly require us to treat Russia as a world power without all of the nonsense of obsolete bombers making runs over Western airspace, or planting flags under the North Pole.
Clearly, Putin has ceased being an ally and has decided to become an opponent. The West should show the consequences of that action by removing Russia from the G-8. When the nonsense stops, he can have access to Western financial systems again, but until then, he can find out what all of his Tu-95 games has bought the Russian people.

Investigators have focused on the Institute of Animal Health at Pirbright as the suspected source of the foot-and-mouth outbreak this month in the UK. Now it appears that the lax security that infected animals in the area has allowed something more deadly to escape, and this time humans could be at risk:

A reported case of Legionnaires’ Disease with alleged links to the Institute of Animal Health at Pirbright is being investigated by officials.
The research centre is one of several locations being routinely assessed under national guidance which says every place a patient has visited in the days before falling ill should be investigated, the Health Protection Agency said.
Environmental health inspectors have taken water samples from the Institute of Animal Health (IAH) after it was discovered a worker contracted the disease, the Guardian reported.

Legionnaire’s Disease kills people, not animals, and can be difficult to treat. I remember the first outbreak in Philadelphia in 1976. It frightened the entire nation, because no one had seen the disease before it struct an American Legion convention at a hotel. The hotel had to be quarantined, and 34 people died. It took months before the CDC could figure out what had caused the disease.
Even with the known cause and the treatment identified, Legionellosis (as it’s now called) still kills — and the UK knows this first-hand. Just five years ago, Barrow-in-Furness had a nasty outbreak of Legionellosis. Six people died and 172 others had to be treated for the disease, which had germinated in an art centre cooling tower. The town council got charged with corporate manslaughter, but got acquitted of criminal responsibility for the breaches of health and safety regulations that led to the outbreak.
Now the government’s own lab appears to have let loose the Legionellosis bacteria. What the hell is going on at the IAH in Pirbright?