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Missile Defense

Russian military leaders have expressed concern about US plans for a national missile defense system. Will defense technology be limited by possibilities for a strategic imbalance? Is this just SDI all over again?

possumdag - 09:43pm May 29, 2001 EST (#4310 of 4466)
Possumdag@excite.com

"""According to Irina Lernochinskaya, a Red Cross official who runs a privately-funded emergency shelter in southern Moscow, there were somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000 homeless children in the capital in 1995. The figure had soared to around 30,000 by 1997, approximately doubling in the last four years as living standards dropped.

These figures are very tentative because many of the children are found without documents, and there has never been a concerted campaign to count them.

~ http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,7792,491381,00.html

possumdag - 09:46pm May 29, 2001 EST (#4311 of 4466)
Possumdag@excite.com

Counting how many people have unmet needs is more appropriate in determining if a nation is a superpower rather than counting the number of armaments.

almarst-2001 - 09:48pm May 29, 2001 EST (#4312 of 4466)

Wars of the United States - http://www.historyguy.com/american_military_history.html

possumdag - 10:01pm May 29, 2001 EST (#4313 of 4466)
Possumdag@excite.com

A question here. The people who live today, are not the people who lived in the past. The question is does a gene of culture perculate downwards throught the generations .. can cultures be revised and changed, or, does the USA go unchecked - in that, it hasn't 'lost' a war on home turf (since the South lost the Civil War), and as such hasn't had to search it's soul too often.

almarst-2001 - 10:07pm May 29, 2001 EST (#4314 of 4466)

Mugabe: Britain, U.S. Are Hypocrits - http://www.newsday.com/ap/text/international/ap741.htm

by ANGUS SHAW

HARARE, Zimbabwe (AP) -- "Just days after Secretary of State Colin Powell criticized Robert Mugabe's ''totalitarian methods,'' the Zimbabwean president hit back, accusing the United States and Britain of hypocrisy during a fiery eulogy to a top ally.

The United States and Britain are leading a campaign to ''demonize'' Zimbabwe's role in the Congo war and its human rights record at home, Mugabe said Tuesday at the state funeral of Defense Minister Moven Mahachi.

At the same time, those countries were condoning ''acts of genocide and gross looting of the Congo's resources'' committed by rebels and their allies: Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi, Mugabe said.

Powell, who visited four African nations last week, denounced Mugabe's tactics as ''totalitarian'' and said he seemed ''determined to remain in power'' regardless of what Zimbabweans want. A small group of students heckled Powell during that speech Friday in Johannesburg, South Africa, and briefly stopped his motorcade.

A cartoon published Monday in the Zimbabwean state-controlled newspaper The Herald depicted a shivering, sweating Powell surrounded by demonstrators demanding he go home.

''Maybe Uganda will welcome me because we are allowing them to loot diamonds in (Congo),'' the Powell caricature said.

Zimbabwe has 11,000 troops supporting the Congolese government in its fight against rebels backed by Rwanda and Uganda. Angola and Namibia have also sent troops to help the government.

The United Nations issued a report detailing looting by Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi in Congo. However, it has not reported the atrocities that Mugabe claimed.

''Uganda, Burundi and Rwanda remain the favorites of the Americans and the British even after these (U.N.) reports,'' Mugabe told mourners at a national burial shrine outside Harare for politicians and fallen leaders of the guerrilla war that led to independence in 1980.

Mugabe eulogized Mahachi, 53, who was killed in a car wreck Saturday, as a warrior who fought against barbaric British colonialism that saw blacks only as ''hewers of wood and drawers of water.''

Britain, Zimbabwe's former colonial ruler, opposed Zimbabwe's plans to confiscate land owned by the descendants of colonial era British settlers out of a desire to perpetuate its ''neocolonial'' interests in Africa, Mugabe said.

''We will fight until we are satisfied we have got our land in the hands of black people, not white people. No, no. That war must be finished. The end of colonialism, albeit neocolonialism, must come,'' Mugabe said.

The "butcher of the Africa" in making?

almarst-2001 - 10:15pm May 29, 2001 EST (#4315 of 4466)

possumdag 5/29/01 10:01pm

I have posted my thoughts on a "nation's genome". Just like in any organization, culture seems to self-perpetuate by promoting to the top and rewarding those, the most fit and udapted to such a culture. Who, once in power, in turn, reinforce and promote the culture served them so well.

Only the major disaster may change the pattern and the "rules of the game". Otherwise, only the acceleration in the initial direction can be expected. At least in my view.

almarst-2001 - 10:38pm May 29, 2001 EST (#4316 of 4466)

Europeans warned over Echelon spying - http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,498417,00.html

"In one of its last investigative trips, the committee went to Washington earlier this month to meet US officials and agencies responsible for intelligence. However, both the CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA) - believed to be responsible for Echelon - refused to meet them."

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