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Magic Day in Anguilla
www.thierrydehove.com/portfolio/
Edited with Intensify Pro from MacPhun and Adobe Lightroom
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A Yongamao STT983 50-tonne capacity tower crane, seen here with a 45m jib that is common deployed for high rise residential projects.
Large high capacity tower cranes like this model are now common in Singapore as the switch to Prefabricated Prefinished Volumetric Construction (PPVC) intensifies.
PPVC modules are bulky and heavy, requiring high capacity tower cranes or medium to high capacity mobile and crawler cranes to install them.
Contrary to what this image would have you believe, most of my damage was done against the enemy Amagi and Mogamis. Still, I love annihilating fail platoons as much as the next guy, even if there's nothing spectacular about crushing botes four tiers below you. The Atago and I went to the A cap alone and found them there, I detonated the Kuma in one shot from one of my secondary guns (kek), we dunked on the Myogi until he had 2000 health (the Tirpitz sniped him from 19km after that, I don't count him as a part of our duo), and then the we put the Cleveland to rest after a brief chase. All in all, it took about 4 minutes to wipe that flank clean, and half of that was chasing the Cleveland. Then I joined the main fray on the other side of the map, where I fought the Amagi and two Mogamis mentioned above (I killed one, the Amagi was in four digit health when we won by points). I really do like this bote, it's a tier 8 Kongo with better and more guns. #battlecruiserlyfe
The GOES-East satellite has been tracking what is now Hurricane Delta as it rapidly intensified from a tropical storm over the Caribbean Sea last night. As of 11:20 a.m. ET on Oct. 6, 2020, the storm’s maximum sustained wind speeds reached 130 mph, making it a major Category-4 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale, and it was expected to continue strengthening. According to the National Hurricane Center, an “extremely dangerous storm surge and hurricane conditions are expected over portions of the northern Yucatan Peninsula beginning tonight.”
After passing the peninsula, the storm is expected to swing up over the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico and make landfall along the northern Gulf Coast—likely somewhere in Louisiana—by Friday or Saturday. Additionally, areas from Texas through the Florida panhandle have been put on alert.
Delta is not only the earliest 25th named Atlantic storm on record; it is also the second time that the Greek letter Delta has been used to name a storm. The previous Delta storm formed on November 15, 2005. Additionally, if Delta makes landfall on the Gulf Coast, it will be the first time on record that 10 named storms have done so in the U.S. in one season, breaking the 1916 record of nine landfalling storms.
www.nesdis.noaa.gov/content/delta-intensifies-major-hurri...
Not only does Ilias provide mechanization services and produce seed for the local market, he also helps develop and produce machinery for sale throughout Bangladesh.
Ilias had sold 18 of his new motorcycle-mounted shelling machine, and also sells maize, rice and wheat shellers and semi-mechanised rice threshers. “Farmers come to my shop from all around Bangladesh,” said Ilias, who also produced 4 tons of wheat seed in 2014.
Credit: CIMMYT/Sam Storr
With the heat intensifying and WOLO's in place, CM3308 and CM3309 take their time as they lead 5100S loaded Bemax Ore through Nantawarra bound for Port Flat
Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor December 7, 1941, led the United States into World War II and radically changed the lives of 120,000 men, women, and children of Japanese ancestry living in the United States. The attack intensified racial prejudices and led to fear of potential sabotage and espionage by Japanese Americans among some in the government, military, news media, and public. In February, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 authorizing the Secretary of War to establish Military Areas and to remove from those areas anyone who might threaten the war effort. Without due process, the government gave everyone of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast only days to decide what to do with their houses, farms, businesses, and other possessions. Most families sold their belongings at a significant loss. Some rented their properties to neighbors. Others left possessions with friends or religious groups. Some abandoned their property. They did not know where they were going or for how long. Each family was assigned an identification number and loaded into cars, buses, trucks, and trains, taking only what they could carry. Japanese Americans were transported under military guard to 17 temporary assembly centers located at racetracks, fairgrounds, and similar facilities in Washington, Oregon, California, and Arizona. Then they were moved to one of 10 hastily built relocation centers. By November, 1942, the relocation was complete.
Ten war relocation centers were built in remote deserts, plains, and swamps of seven states; Arkansas, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming. Manzanar, located in the Owens Valley of California between the Sierra Nevada on the west and the Inyo mountains on the east, was typical in many ways of the 10 camps.
About two-thirds of all Japanese Americans interned at Manzanar were American citizens by birth. The remainder were aliens, many of whom had lived in the United States for decades, but who, by law, were denied citizenship.
www.nps.gov/manz/learn/historyculture/japanese-americans-...
In 1943, Ansel Adams (1902-1984), America's most well-known photographer, documented the Manzanar War Relocation Center in California and the Japanese-Americans interned there during World War II.
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Scene - Sunday morning in the crowded Dadar flower market.
I came across this shy girl running barefoot amongst the stalls. She belonged here..her parents probably selling flowers somewhere on the pavement lined by numerous people. I was tracking her movements...wanting to capture a special moment....Someone gave her a bunch of roses and she hid behind them, feeling very shy. Then it happened, she emerged and our eyes met...click..click and I had got her ..she stood still, an innocent smile on her face. i turned around and she vanished in the maze of people amongst the heaps of flowers leaving behind her smile......... :-)
Taken in 2006.
The steam from a pipe expands and intensifies a traffic light on High Street in the Financial District.
Catching daylight lightning with time lapse is pretty rare. However, I managed to catch one stroke and froze the frame for your viewing. Several other strikes occurred but were missed.
Back in August 2015 Dublin City Council announced that it was intensifying its Anti Litter Campaign in an effort to deal with the serious problem of illegal dumping in parts of the North Inner City. At the time an Irish Business Against Litter report declared that certain areas in the North Inner City continue to be seriously littered with the area ranked 39th out of forty nationwide in respect of cleanliness. In 2018 it was reported that the North Inner City was ranked as 37th out of forty.
Set up in 1996, Irish Business Against Litter is an alliance of companies sharing a belief that
continued economic prosperity - notably in the areas of tourism, food and direct foreign
investment - is contingent on a clean, litter-free environment. As part of the IBAL Anti-Litter League, An Taisce monitors towns independently and in accordance with international grading standards. Visit www.ibal.ie for further information.
المتظاهرون المتضامنون مع فلسطين يدعون إلى السلام وإنهاء الاحتلال الإسرائيلي والفصل العنصري
I was deeply shocked when James Cleverly, the UK's foreign secretary, was asked specifically about Israel's intensified blockade of Gaza. He didn't say anything critical about Israel's recent decision to stop all electricity, fuel, food, and water from going into the area.
لقد صدمت بشدة عندما سُئل جيمس كليفرلي، وزير خارجية المملكة المتحدة، على وجه التحديد عن الحصار الإسرائيلي المكثف على غزة. ولم يقل أي شيء ينتقد قرار إسرائيل الأخير بوقف دخول الكهرباء والوقود والغذاء والمياه إلى المنطقة
twitter.com/OnlinePalEng/status/1711471826692436328
There are more than two million people living there, and this brutal form of collective punishment is clearly a war crime which threatens the lives of all of them. As is the round the clock bombing of some 2000 targets over just four days.
ويعيش هناك أكثر من مليوني شخص، ومن الواضح أن هذا الشكل الوحشي من العقاب الجماعي يشكل جريمة حرب تهدد حياة الجميع. جريمة حرب خطيرة أخرى هي القصف على مدار الساعة لنحو 2000 هدف في غزة خلال أربعة أيام فقط
The Gaza Strip is a small densely populated area which is only about one quarter the size of London. As of 10 October, over 900 residential units and 70 industrial units have been destroyed, including the deliberate targeting of some residential apartments without prior warning, and as a result the bombing has already killed 185 Palestinian children, 120 women and seven journalists.
reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/israe...
Netenyahu, Israel's prime minister, has called on Palestinian civilians to flee the air strikes he has unleashed which is reducing much of Gaza to rubble. However, the two neighbouring states, Israel and the Egyptian dictatorship of Fatah Abdul El-Sisi, have sealed the borders, making any attempt to escape the strip suicidal.
When Goav Gallant, Israel's Defence Minister, announced the intensification of the siege, he added that "we are fighting against human animals," phraseology often favoured by genocidal regimes. The United States and Britain, which have effectively given the green light to these brutal measures of collective punishment, are now clearly complicit in this war crime, and in Israel's war of aggression against the two million Palestinians who live on this tiny strip of land.
For years Gaza has been under what the UN recognises as Israeli occupation, since Israel controls everything that is allowed in, and regularly acts, every few years, to cripple the city's infrastructure with air strikes, so that even before these latest attacks, only 10% of Gazans had access to clean drinking water while the level of anemia among young children was 59%.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4391478/
No right minded person would not also condemn the brutal and horrific Hamas attacks on Israeli civilians, but we have to understand that terrorism can not be eradicated by continuing, intensifying and expanding the 75 year long occupation. It is the crime of illegal occupation which encompasses and leads to (though that's not the same as justifying) the near inevitability of violence.
Many Palestinians feel they have no other real, long-term way to resist the Israeli armed forces and a tiny number of them resort to unacceptable and sometimes irrational, terrible, and counterproductive acts of terrorism against innocent Israeli civilians. We should rightly condemn all such violence, but it's unlikely to stop without an end to the occupation.
It should not be forgotten that 248 Palestinians, 40 of them children, had been killed by Israeli soldiers during the first nine months of 2023 prior to last Saturday, but these deaths attracted almost no attention in the Western media.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMIZTiN-TrE
Meanwhile, Palestinian homes continue to be bulldozed to make way for new illegal Israeli settlements and when Netenyahu addressed the UN General Assembly in September he displayed a map of the Middle East with an "Israel", outlined in blue, which clearly included within it all of the West Bank, Gaza, Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, a de facto way of announcing their annexation.
www.commondreams.org/news/netanyahu-map
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This photograph was used in the following interesting online article
consortiumnews.com/2023/11/19/craig-murray-activating-the...
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Errol Korn, lower left, explains the dropsonde experiment to Janel Thomas, a University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) graduate student, seated, as Bob Pasken, standing left, and Jeff Halverson, a GRIP project scientist from UMBC, look on inside NASA's DC-8 airplane, at Fort Lauderdale International Airport in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Sunday, Aug. 15, 2010. The Genesis and Rapid Intensification Processes (GRIP) experiment is a NASA Earth science field experiment in 2010 that is being conducted to better understand how tropical storms form and develop into major hurricanes.
Credit: NASA/Paul E. Alers
To read more about the GRIP Mission go here or here for an interactive feature
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center is home to the nation's largest organization of combined scientists, engineers and technologists that build spacecraft, instruments and new technology to study the Earth, the sun, our solar system, and the universe.
Follow us on Twitter
Join us on Facebook
The West Fork Forest Fire Complex intensified in the San Juan National Forest near Pagosa Springs, Colorado leading to the closure of US 160 through Wolf Creek Pass and the evacuation of South Fork on the other side of the Continental Divide. The fire would double it's size over the next 24 hours.
المتظاهرون المتضامنون مع فلسطين يدعون إلى السلام وإنهاء الاحتلال الإسرائيلي والفصل العنصري
I was deeply shocked when James Cleverly, the UK's foreign secretary, was asked specifically about Israel's intensified blockade of Gaza. He didn't say anything critical about Israel's recent decision to stop all electricity, fuel, food, and water from going into the area.
لقد صدمت بشدة عندما سُئل جيمس كليفرلي، وزير خارجية المملكة المتحدة، على وجه التحديد عن الحصار الإسرائيلي المكثف على غزة. ولم يقل أي شيء ينتقد قرار إسرائيل الأخير بوقف دخول الكهرباء والوقود والغذاء والمياه إلى المنطقة
twitter.com/OnlinePalEng/status/1711471826692436328
There are more than two million people living there, and this brutal form of collective punishment is clearly a war crime which threatens the lives of all of them. As is the round the clock bombing of some 2000 targets over just four days.
ويعيش هناك أكثر من مليوني شخص، ومن الواضح أن هذا الشكل الوحشي من العقاب الجماعي يشكل جريمة حرب تهدد حياة الجميع. جريمة حرب خطيرة أخرى هي القصف على مدار الساعة لنحو 2000 هدف في غزة خلال أربعة أيام فقط
The Gaza Strip is a small densely populated area which is only about one quarter the size of London. As of 10 October, over 900 residential units and 70 industrial units have been destroyed, including the deliberate targeting of some residential apartments without prior warning, and as a result the bombing has already killed 185 Palestinian children, 120 women and seven journalists.
reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/israe...
Netenyahu, Israel's prime minister, has called on Palestinian civilians to flee the air strikes he has unleashed which is reducing much of Gaza to rubble. However, the two neighbouring states, Israel and the Egyptian dictatorship of Fatah Abdul El-Sisi, have sealed the borders, making any attempt to escape the strip suicidal.
When Goav Gallant, Israel's Defence Minister, announced the intensification of the siege, he added that "we are fighting against human animals," phraseology often favoured by genocidal regimes. The United States and Britain, which have effectively given the green light to these brutal measures of collective punishment, are now clearly complicit in this war crime, and in Israel's war of aggression against the two million Palestinians who live on this tiny strip of land.
For years Gaza has been under what the UN recognises as Israeli occupation, since Israel controls everything that is allowed in, and regularly acts, every few years, to cripple the city's infrastructure with air strikes, so that even before these latest attacks, only 10% of Gazans had access to clean drinking water while the level of anemia among young children was 59%.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4391478/
No right minded person would not also condemn the brutal and horrific Hamas attacks on Israeli civilians, but we have to understand that terrorism can not be eradicated by continuing, intensifying and expanding the 75 year long occupation. It is the crime of illegal occupation which encompasses and leads to (though that's not the same as justifying) the near inevitability of violence.
Many Palestinians feel they have no other real, long-term way to resist the Israeli armed forces and a tiny number of them resort to unacceptable, irrational, terrible, and counterproductive acts of terrorism against innocent Israeli civilians. We should rightly condemn all such violence, but it's unlikely to stop without an end to the occupation.
It should not be forgotten that 248 Palestinians, 40 of them children, had been killed by Israeli soldiers during the first nine months of 2023 prior to last Saturday, but these deaths attracted almost no attention in the Western media.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMIZTiN-TrE
Meanwhile, Palestinian homes continue to be bulldozed to make way for new illegal Israeli settlements and when Netenyahu addressed the UN General Assembly in September he displayed a map of the Middle East with an "Israel", outlined in blue, which clearly included within it all of the West Bank, Gaza, Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, a de facto way of announcing their annexation.
Colours enhanced
Original is in Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool: i20.photobucket.com/albums/b241/argentcent/Art/buoninsegn...
The past few days have been crystal clear, not a cloud in sight. A storm is approaching from the west, and the sunset is spectacular. These pictures are taken at Ocean Beach, San Francisco, California.
If you would like to see the whole series, it is in a set entitled "November 18 Ocean Beach.
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Simone Durden, a principal investigator from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, talks about the Airbrorne Precipitation Radar (APR-2) aboard the NASA DC-8 aircraft, Monday, Aug.16, 2010, at Fort Lauderdale Hollywood International Airport in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. The APR-2, a dual frequency weather radar, is just one of the experiments supporting the Genesis and Rapid Intensification Processes (GRIP) mission, a NASA Earth science field experiment that is being conducted to better understand how tropical storms form and develop into major hurricanes.
Credit: NASA/Paul E. Alers
To read more about the GRIP Mission go here or here for an interactive feature
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center is home to the nation's largest organization of combined scientists, engineers and technologists that build spacecraft, instruments and new technology to study the Earth, the sun, our solar system, and the universe.
Follow us on Twitter
Join us on Facebook
Mani Shankar Aiyar, an MP of Indian Rajya Sabha and former Consul-General of India had delivered a lecture to Karachi Council of Foreign Relations on ‘India and Pakistan: Retrospect and prospect’ a few days ago.
Following is the text of his address in which he has described his personal experience while living in Pakistan as an Indian official and also highlighted relations between India and Pakistan:
“Mr Chairman, distinguished members of the Karachi Council of Foreign Relations, ladies and gentlemen, and dear friends of the last three decades: This is a very personal narrative of an Indian who lived three of his best years in Karachi, albeit 33 years ago, and has since seized every opportunity that has come his way to visit Pakistan, meet his old friends and make new ones. In this last year itself, this is my fifth visit to Pakistan. I hope I can maintain the momentum as Pakistan is my magnificent obsession.
I suppose I have read very much less about Pakistan than any scholar of Pakistan studies. And although I came here initially as an officer of the Indian Foreign Service and have visited Pakistan several times in an official capacity, as a member of our delegations, or accompanying Indian ministers, even thrice in the entourage of the Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, and also as Minister of Petroleum and Natural Gas to push forward the Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline and later as Minister of Panchayati Raj to intensify interaction between our respective local self-government representatives, I have had strangely little to do with the political dialogue between our two countries. Almost all of my interaction with Pakistan and Pakistanis has been at the personal level. Hence I can do no more than bring a very personal perspective to bear on matters of great pith and moment.
Perhaps for that very reason the perspective has its value - although one of my closest Indian friends, former High Commissioner to Pakistan, later Foreign Secretary and later still National Security Adviser, JN (Mani) Dixit, said he could not abide my Pollyanna view of our neighbour. Perhaps not. But there are so many Indians who have their grave reservations about Pakistan and its intentions towards us that there might be some value in listening to a more sympathetic Indian view of Pakistan.
I came to Karachi as India’s first-ever Consul General on 14 December 1978, 13 years after Pakistan’s capital moved to Islamabad, around the time of the 1965 war, leading, first, to a downgrading of the High Commission followed by the Assistant High Commission being closed down at the start of the 1971 war. Thus Karachi, refuge of the Mohajir community, those who had left or fled India at the time of partition or soon after, leaving behind in India, however, vast numbers of memories, friends and relatives, was thirsting for the resumption of an Indian visa office to facilitate their all too human desire to go back to the land of their forefathers - and at that time, for many, the land too of their birth. I used to be astonished at their evocation of the filthy gullies of Bans Bareilly and Sambal as if they were talking of Paris in the Spring! But perhaps their sentiment was best summed up by Rais Amrohvi’s ‘O! Hind Jane Wale Mera Salaam Leja:
Jab se bichhad gaye hain us khuld-e-rangabu se
Mehroom ho gaye hain, dil shauk-o-aarzu se
Baaz aayenge musafir kya zauk-e-justaju se
Ab tak wahi hai rishte, Dilli se Lucknow se
Ajdaad ke watan tak itna payam le ja
O! Hind jane wale mera salaam le ja.’
My very first afternoon was a revelation. The phone rang. It was the Deputy Commissioner of Sukkur on the line. He said he had a major problem on his hands: a Hindu sant had been given permission to revisit Sukkur for the first time after the 1965 war and his Muslim mureeds wanted to pay their respects to him. ‘Would I grant them permission to do so?’ ‘Of course’, I replied, rather grandly giving my instant assent - but rose from my desk completely confused. Like all Indians I had been brought up to believe that Pakistanis were ardent, even fanatical, Muslims for, after all, had they not broken my country on the ground that Hindus and Muslims did not constitute two communities but two nations, incompatible and, therefore, incapable of living together under one democratic roof? That, in fact, it was democracy that was the problem because democracy rests on majority rule and would not that majority in an independent India be decided on communal rather than political grounds? Yet, here I was being asked - and by no less a dignitary than the head of one of Sindh’s most important districts - whether Muslim spiritual aspirants might seek the blessings of a Hindu holy man?”
Later, after Makhdoom Amin Fahim became a close personal friend, I asked him whether it was true, as I had heard, that the Hindu followers of his father, the Pir of Hala, who had fled to India at partition, still sought the Pir’s blessings when there was a birth in the family or a wedding or some such auspicious occasion? Makhdoom sahib confirmed that this was indeed so. But, said I, ‘was it not a fact that the Pir’s blessings could not be validated without a nazrana?’ ‘Of course’, came the reply. ‘But how do they send it,’ I asked? By the same route, he disingenuously replied, that they send their requests for a blessing - through the smugglers! God is clearly no respecter of political boundaries.
That introspective introduction to Pakistan on Day One was reinforced the following evening at my first social occasion when I found myself seated next to an unknown Pakistani with whom I began the conversation by asking, in an utterly banal manner, whether he had been to India. ‘Yes,’ he replied somewhat taciturnly. To encourage further conversation, I asked where he had been. ‘Meerut,’ came the curt reply. ‘Oh, really,’ I said, ‘and how long were you there?’ ‘Two and a half years,’ he slowly responded - and it dawned on me with growing horror that I was talking to one of our 1971 Prisoners of War! Seeing the highly embarrassed expression on my face, my interlocutor smiled - indeed, beamed - and enquired if my wife and I would care to dine with them at the Sindh Club the following evening? It turned out to be a most convivial evening and walking back to Hindustan Court after dinner my wife shook her bewildered head and asked whether we had come to an enemy country or what? I shared her bewilderment.
That initial hospitality flowered over the next three years of our stay in Karachi into a bouquet of friendships stretching across the entire political spectrum from the PPP at one end to the Islam-pasand parties on the other; on the geographical spectrum from Clifton to North Nazimabad; on the socio-cultural spectrum from affluent Defence Housing Society homes to the rehriwalas of Sadar; on the business front from petty shop-keepers to industrial and commercial barons; on the intellectual level from academics like Sharif-ul-Mujahid and Hafeez Pasha to the poets and poetasters of the Pak-Hind Prem Sabha; to journalists of every hue from sophisticates like MB Naqvi and Sultan Ahmed and Brig AR Siddiqui to the editor of Jasarat, the mouthpiece of the Jamaat-e-Islami, and even Nawai Waqt. My attitude was, I am a foreigner, why take sides in Pakistan’s internecine quarrels?
We - me, my wife, my children, my officers, my staff of over one hundred - to go by their present nostalgic remembrances, all had a ball. But on my very last night in Karachi - we were sailing to Bombay next afternoon - I suddenly had a very disturbing thought. What if my euphoric high was only the consequence of my being flattered out of my mind by heading a huge establishment at the age of under forty, the welcome I had received not being to an Indian but to a Consul General who could pull a visa out of his pocket like a magician pulling out a pigeon?
I sent for one of my assistants, a man who had reached Karachi the same day as I had and whose personal experience of the city was co-terminus with mine. I asked whether he had experienced any discrimination, any abuse, any invective, even any discourtesy, during his three years in the city. He thought for a while, then shook his head to say No, he hadn’t. But, I persisted, no one could tell merely by looking at him whether he was an Indian or a Pakistani, what about his wife and her give-away bindi? He said no one had ever been rude or nasty to her although she always sported a bindi, neither in the bus she took from the Indian Consulate ghetto of Panchsheel Court, a dead give-away of national origin, nor in the shopping marts of Sadar. That led me to ask him to confirm a rumour I had heard as Consul General - that shopkeepers in Sadar invariably offered discounts to Indian, and especially Indian Consulate customers. Reluctantly but unambiguously, he confirmed that this was indeed so. Thus, his three years had been remarkably like mine. I, therefore, enquired whether he thought we should improve relations with Pakistan. Astonished, he replied, ‘but how could we, were they not all Mussalmans?’
That is the central problem: the communalisation of the mind, looking at our neighbours not as one of us, but as the Other, indeed, the Enemy Other.
The communalisation of mindsets was the root cause of the division of the country as the price to be paid for independence. Now that there are two countries, independent since six decades, is there no way the communalisation of the mind can be eased in the direction of also recognising the complementarities in our respective national destinies?
For we live in the same South Asian geographical space. Although many Pakistanis would deny it, we also occupy much the same civilisational space, diversity of every kind - racial, linguistic, ethnic, cultural, religious and even sectarian - being woven into the warp and the woof of our nationhood. History may have divided us, but geography binds us, and a shared inheritance holds as much the potential to keep us apart as to bring us together. The choice is for us to make.
For most of the last six decades, the best and the brightest of our countries - sants and Ulema; ideologues and propagandists; terrorists and cerebral communalists; politicians and statesmen; scholars and the media; diplomats and the military - have done all they can to render us asunder. They have not entirely succeeded. For we remain hyphenated in the eyes of the world because we remain hyphenated in the minds of our people. And we remain hyphenated because we are hyphenated; we share too much to just turn our backs on each other and hope the other will go away. Siamese twins are not free to roam except with each other, even if they keep pulling away from each other.
There are four sets of factors that stand in the way of reconciliation. I would classify these as: generic; institutional; endemic; and episodic.
Generic: Some in India and many in Pakistan would argue that the very reason for partition having been the religious incompatibility between Hindus and Muslims, it is inevitable that the two nations would also find it incompatible to live together as good neighbours. The argument goes that the underlying hostility is generic, built into our genes as it were, and if it were not partition would not have happened.
That, perhaps, is a somewhat fundamentalist way of putting it and, therefore, the point is generally made with greater sophistication and nuancing as not so much a fundamental civilisational incompatibility but a lack of convergence in national interest or even a belief that hostility being the underlying reality, it is not so much a question of promoting friendship as protecting oneself from hostile intent.”
The News Pakistan (13/01/2011)
Mani Shankar Aiyar, an MP of Indian Rajya Sabha and former Consul-General of India had delivered a lecture to Karachi Council of Foreign Relations on ‘India and Pakistan: Retrospect and prospect’ a few days ago.
Following is second part of the text of his address - Part-I was published on Thursday - in which he has described his personal experience while living in Pakistan as an Indian official and also highlighted relations between India and Pakistan:
“Yet, there are several levels at which this argument breaks down. First, the Indian Muslim community: are they not living in harmony with their Hindu brethren? If there were no compatibility, how is it that almost every icon of India’s 85% Hindu youth is unabashedly Muslim: the four Khans - superstars Shah Rukh, Aamir, Salman, and Saif; leading ladies like Katrina Kaif following Madhubala, Meena Kumari and Nargis of yore and Waheeda Rahman and Shabana Azmi more recently; the golden voice of Mohd Rafi and Talat Mehmood; the lyrics of Sahir Ludhianvi and Javed Akhtar; music director AR Rahman (who was born Dilip Kumar and converted to Islam, where his renowned predecessor in the run-up to partition, Dilip Kumar, the actor, was born Yusuf Khan in Peshawar and converted to Bollywood under an assumed Hindu name); the makers of Peepli Live, Mehmood Farooqui and Anusha Rizvi, India’s sure-fire entry for this year’s Oscars; ustads such as Bismillah Khan, Vilayat Khan, Bade Ghulam Ali Khan, Amjad Ali Khan and tabla maestros, Allah Rakha and Zakir Hussain; cricketers like Tiger Pataudi and Azharuddin, and tennis star, Sania Mirza, whom we share, besides a whole galaxy of highly influential opinion-makers of whom I need mention only three - the Group Editor of the India Today stable, MJ Akbar; columnist Saeed Naqvi; and historian Mushirul Hassan, Director of the National Archives - and business barons, Aziz Premji and Anu Agha. The point needs no labouring.”
Except that the Justice Rajinder Sachar report will immediately be thrown at those who suggest that the lived experience of secular India shows no incompatibility between the two alleged ‘nations’ of Hindu and Muslim. Yes, indeed, in many, many respects the denizens of the Muslim community are worse off than their non-Muslim counterparts in northern India. Equally undeniable is that while the North Indian Muslim elite largely took off for Pakistan at partition, the vast majority of the ordinary Muslims voted with their feet to remain where they were. Deprived of a middle-class and a political leadership, the community has striven to raise itself by its boot-straps and while there are success stories there is much leeway to be made up. This points to the need for more affirmative action; it emphatically does not mean that Hindu and Muslim cannot live under one national roof.
Moreover, it needs to be recognised - in Pakistan, of course, but much more in India - that where population transfer did not take place, as in South India, the Muslim community is doing quite exceptionally well - and is not resented by the majority community for doing so.
I do not want to make a polemical point. I simply want to assert here on Pakistani soil that whatever might have been the argument for a Muslim-majority State on this South Asian sub-continent at the time of independence and partition, now that Pakistan has been in existence for sixty years and more, the generic argument for Hindu-Muslim incompatibility has lost its sheen and transmuted more into national hostility than communal animosity.”
“In this context, I’d like to share a story with you about what happened when I addressed a Jang Forum meeting in Karachi a few years ago. I was asked from the audience how I could claim to be a friend of Pakistan when I rejected the Two-Nation theory. I replied that whatever the merits of the theory in the period leading up to independence and partition, it was time now to recognise that the Two-Nation Theory had given way to the Three-State Reality, and that if we continued to advocate the Two Nation Theory, it would have to mean that the 15 crore Muslims in India are traitors to their country. At this, the questioner, delighted with my answer, bounded on to the stage, embraced me, and handing over a visiting card describing him as the Vice Chairman of the Karachi Marriage Hall Owners Association, whispered in my ear that when I got married again, he promised me a marriage hall for free! That, I regard, as the highest compliment I have ever received. My wife, however, disapproves - I wonder why?
Reciprocally, it is little known in India, and little bruited about in Pakistan, how many members of Pakistan’s non-Muslim minorities hold positions of distinction and responsibility in Pakistan, not only in the higher echelons but in the grassroots institutions of local government, in the civil services, in the judiciary, in agriculture, in business and the arts. Partition over, as the Quaid-i-Azam said before Pakistan was suddenly and unexpectedly emptied of its minorities in the fortnight after its creation: ‘You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion, caste or creed, that has nothing to do with the business of the State. Now I think we should keep that in front of us as our ideal and you will find that in course of time Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the State.’
It could have been Nehru speaking!
Moreover, in numerous countries across the world, where Indian and Pakistani immigrants live and work together, while some do indeed carry their communal baggage with them overseas, by and large there is tolerance, even cordiality, between the two communities. Nothing in either Islam or Hinduism makes for incompatibility. Our syncretic history, our symbiotic past of over a thousand years, beginning with Muhammad bin Qasim arriving on our shores in 711 AD, points rather to a composite heritage than to one that is irretrievably divided.
I would, therefore, emphatically repeat that it is not communal animosity but national hostility that keeps India and Pakistan apart: a matter to be addressed by political and diplomatic action, not theology. Indeed, if religious differences were the root cause, how does one explain Pakistan’s excellent relations with the only avowedly Hindu nation in the world, Nepal, or India’s excellent relations with virtually every Muslim country - except Pakistan?
The generic argument does not hold, but are the scars of history impossible to raze? Those who became Pakistani on 14 August 1947 had been Indians till the previous day. Therefore, there were many in India who argued, Prof Sisir Gupta perhaps most persuasively, that since nothing in language or literature, culture or cuisine, history or even religion distinguished a Pakistani from an Indian, the only way a Pakistani could distinguish himself from an Indian was by asserting that he was emphatically not an Indian, by building the national identity of Pakistan not with positive building blocks but negatively by stressing that, above all, Pakistan was not India and Pakistanis were Pakistanis precisely because Pakistanis were not Indians.
I do not know whether this argument was always a parody, but today, more than sixty years after Pakistan became a reality, those who began life as Indians are a rapidly diminishing breed. I would imagine that some 90% of Pakistanis today have never known any nationality other than their Pakistani nationality, even as 90% of Indians have never known Pakistan as an integral part of India. Thus, history itself is taking care of history. There is no reason why the nationhood of contemporary Pakistan needs to be built with the cement of anti-Indian or anti-Hindu sentiment. And that, indeed, is the reason for the affection with which most Indians are received in Pakistan - and, to a large if not reciprocal extent, Pakistanis are received in India. The political reality of 21st century India and Pakistan has substantially replaced the grievances that separated sections of the Hindu and Muslim community in pre-partition India, especially after the outbreak of communal riots in the Turbulent ‘20s of the last century.
Therefore, I see no reason in principle why generic or historical factors need necessarily stand in the way of reconciliation between the two countries. If nevertheless progress in the direction of reconciliation has been slow, then does the problem lie in institutional hurdles on the road to reconciliation?
Institutional: From the Indian perspective - and perhaps also the perspective of a majority of Pakistanis - the overwhelming role of the military in Pakistan’s approach to India is often held to be the principal institutional block to reconciliation. The argument goes that so long as the army, abetted by a complaisant civil service, is the effective political power in Pakistan, and so long as the raison d’etre of the huge Pakistani military establishment and what Ayesha Siddique calls Pakistan’s Military Inc is founded on the assiduous propagation of the threat from India - so the argument goes - the Pakistani military will never permit hostility between the two countries to be undermined for that would be to cut off the branch on which the Pakistani defence forces are perched.
On the other hand, here in Pakistan it is often claimed that revanchist sentiment in the entire Indian establishment, including the Indian military, is so strong and persistent that the dismemberment of Pakistan in 1971 was only the prelude to the destruction of the rest of Pakistan, whenever this might prove possible; hence the need for eternal vigilance as the price to be paid for Pakistan’s liberty. Both these views appear to me to be a case of the wish fathering the thought. I don’t believe that the actual course of India-Pakistan relations validates the view that India cannot deal with the Pakistani military; or that India is still hankering after a restoration of Akhand Bharat.
Let us take first the Indian view of the Pakistan military. It is rooted, I think, in Gen Ayub Khan’s coup of 1958. Please remember that in 1958, half a century ago, almost all top officers of the Indian military were either General Ayub Khan’s contemporaries or his seniors in the predecessor British Indian army. India, understandably, did not want Bonapartism to spread from the Pakistan army to their Indian counterparts. Gen Thimayya’s resignation at about the same time as the Ayub coup was considered - perhaps erroneously - as an ominous and dangerous straw in a wind that blew no one any good.
But it was the Ayub regime that in its earliest days suggested a ‘Trieste’ solution to Kashmir - that is, let the status quo lie and postpone resolution to a future generation - if I am to credit the story recounted to me here in Karachi by India’s high commissioner to the Ayub government, Rajeshwar Dayal. And it was indubitably during the Ayub regime that the Indus Waters Treaty was signed, a treaty that has weathered three wars and continues to offer a forum for the resolution of water disputes, as witness the recent spats over Baglihar and now Kishangana. Moreover, it was during that regime that Sheikh Abdullah, Jayaprakash Narayan and others were, by all accounts, on a successful or, at any rate, promising peace mission to Pakistan when Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru suddenly died. Yes, the battle in the Rann of Kutch in April 1965, and Operation Gibraltar in August that year, followed by the September war, took place in the Ayub dispensation, but much of that seems to have been stoked as much by civilian political forces as by the armed forces. In any case, it was President Ayub Khan who signed the Tashkent Agreement, disagreement having been registered principally by his civilian colleagues.
Later, it was during the period of Ziaul Haq that, whatever might be one’s reservations about his domestic policies, there was a new impetus given to people-to-people relations, the most important having been the opening of the Indian Consulate General in Karachi. And when in the winter of 1986-87 the temperature started building up over Operation Brasstacks, it was in Ziaul Haq that Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi found a most effective partner in defusing the threat of war.
And although Gen Pervez Musharraf’s coup was almost universally looked at with deep disapproval and suspicion in India, coming as it did in the wake of Kargil 1999, eventually it was under his aegis that the Composite Dialogue made more progress on the Tariq-Lambah back-channel than at perhaps any other stage of India-Pakistan relations.
Equally, of course, the Nehru-Liaquat Pact of 1950, the Simla Agreement of 1972 and the Lahore Declaration were the handiwork of civilian governments.
Hence, I do not think the objective record makes for any insuperable difficulty in India dealing directly with the Pakistan military or in dealing with a civilian government that has the military breathing down its neck. In any case, if Pakistan cannot get itself out of the military shadow, what can India do about it? We have to deal with whoever is in power in this country and while we certainly sympathise with the widespread Pakistani desire to become a full-fledged democracy, we have to make do with whatever is on offer - and I do not think we in India should postpone any amelioration in our relations with Pakistan till that nebulous day when we will have in Pakistan a democratically elected political authority that keeps its military in check. Peace is an imperative now, not a consummation to be postponed indefinitely.
Part III
Mani Shankar Aiyar, an MP of Indian Rajya Sabha and former Consul-General of India had delivered a lecture to Karachi Council of Foreign Relations on “India and Pakistan: Retrospect and prospect” a few days ago.
Following is third part of the text of his address - Part-II was published on Friday - in which he has described his personal experience while living in Pakistan as an Indian official and also highlighted relations between India and Pakistan:
“On the other hand, the regrettably widespread view in Indian circles that Pakistan is a ‘failed’ State or a ‘failing’ one also needs to be countered. I do not think any nation, let alone Pakistan, which is so firmly anchored in history, civilization, ideology and spiritual belief as is Pakistan, with one of the largest populations in the world (even if relative to India somewhat small), with the high degree of political and philosophical sophistication, which one encounters in this country at every turn, a resilient economy and a burgeoning globalised elite, a strong bureaucracy and a stronger military, and an extremely lively and informed media, can ever be a pushover. When the Taliban was said to have arrived at Buner, a hundred kilometres from Islamabad, there were those in India who feared (or even wished) for the collapse. The fear was always unrealistic, the wish beggared. And was shown to be so when the security forces moved into action and pushed back the insurgents, as they had when in July 2007 firm action was taken at the Lal Masjid in the heart of Islamabad. Pakistan, six decades after its foundation, is no war-time Afghanistan swirling in chaos at the time of the Soviet and American withdrawal and the political vacuum that followed the end of its socialist phase, and, thus, sucked inexorably into the vortex of religious extremism assiduously egged-on from outside. Yes, you have your difficulties. But so do we. So any strategy built on the assumption that Pakistan cannot hold is misconceived, misplaced and dangerously misleading. And, therefore, bound to be disproved. Equally unrealistic are doomsday prophecies of Pakistan falling into the maw of fanatical terrorists or disintegrating irretrievably into a congeries of nations. Pakistan is here to stay and it would best to deal with it on those terms. While it is the duty of the intelligence community to conjure up far-fetched scenarios and prepare for them, statesmen are required to handle the here and now. And that calls for an engagement with a Pakistan that will last, not a Pakistan on its last legs.
That accounts too, in my view, for no one in India harbouring any illusions any more about a return to Akhand Bharat. That was a slogan in the immediate post-partition period, a cry from the heart of those who had been deprived of their hearths and their homes. That generation has gone, the refugee in India is well integrated into Indian society, and there is no homesickness for return except perhaps in the fading memories of some eighty-to-ninety year olds. Moreover, what on earth are we going to do with 15 crore seriously angered malcontents if ever anything so stupid happened as the end of Pakistan? No, there is nothing, nothing at all, to be gained by promoting any disintegration of neighbouring Pakistan, and I would advise any Pakistani who doubts us on this score to consider how steadfast a series of Indian governments, of every hue and colour, were in standing up for the unity and integrity of Sri Lanka through thirty years of a vicious civil war caused by gross discrimination against the Tamil minority despite the strong ethnic links that bind the Sri Lankan Tamil to the Indian Tamil.
There being no insuperable institutional obstacle to a sustained Indo-Pak effort to resolve simmering differences, let us now turn our attention to those differences, which, for convenience, I have divided into the ‘endemic’ and the ‘episodic’.
Endemic: The endemic issues between Pakistan and India are, from a Pakistani perspective, Kashmir and water; from an Indian perspective, doubtless it is cross-border terrorism based on Pakistani soil.
I have no readymade answers. I doubt that anyone has. But is that cause enough to despair of any solution ever being found?
The historical record would appear to disprove any military solution to the argument over Jammu and Kashmir. The attempt to annex the Maharajah’s state when he and Sheikh Abdullah were readying to through their lot in with India failed; so did Operation Gibraltar; so did the attack on Akhnur that followed; as did the hostilities on the Western Front in 1971; as did the Kargil misadventure; as did the proxy war of the nineties. And while there are those in India who maintain that the war of 1948 should have been pressed forward to a conclusion, I think Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru was sensible in listening to wiser counsel. There is no military solution, and subversion will not work.
On the other hand, is jaw-jaw impossible? The United Nations, once the forum for grand forensic battles between Krishna Menon and Feroze Khan Noon and, later, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and Swaran Singh, has in effect washed its hands of the issue; the question of Jammu and Kashmir remains on the UN agenda but lies dormant ever since India and Pakistan agreed at Shimla in July 1972 to discuss bilaterally all issues related to J&K. Notwithstanding the Naysayers, and there is no dearth of them in either country, progress has indeed been made. These issues are an integral part of the Composite Dialogue initiated in 1997. And, to go by available records, a framework for resolution had reached an advanced stage under the aegis of President Musharraf and Dr Manmohan Singh through the Lambah-Tariq back channel. Even if that progress is not being acknowledged now, it does seem feasible to hope that the resumption of back channel contacts (made public by the Pakistan minister of Kashmir Affairs, according to reports appearing in the Indian media) might yet move matters further forward. But whether or not the back channel has, indeed, been reactivated, the two countries have demonstrated that, when the waters are not muddied, they can talk to each other even on Jammu and Kashmir and inch towards an agreed settlement. Neither military action nor encouragement to cross-border terrorism can do that.
As for waters, when I was in Pakistan in March last year, the drying rivers of the Indus basin were on everyone’s lips; when I was last here in October, devastating floods were on everyone’s mind. Water is a most serious issue and upper and lower riparian, whether within our respective countries, such as Punjab and Sindh, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, for example, or between our respective countries, will have to find answers in 21st century technology, not in the polemics of the 20th century. The total availability of water has run so low that where India and Pakistan started in the 1950s with a per capita availability per annum of about 5,000 cubic metres, water availability in both countries has since declined to under 2,000, in Pakistan rather more sharply than in India, down to about 1,200 as against India’s 1,800.
The problem of water shortage is, however, common to both of us and is, indeed, a global problem common to virtually every country in the world. Some would call it the most important universal challenge of our times. Israel has shown the way to the conservation of water through drip and sprinkler irrigation and I imagine that it is in such technology rather than in the 19th century technology of large dams and command area channels that the answer lies.
But while technology may hold the secret, there is no denying the fact of water deprivation or the politics that flow from it. That is where the Indus Waters Treaty has proved its immense worth. The numerous mechanisms it has for finding acceptable ways of resolving agonized issues, as was demonstrated over Baglihar recently and as is being demonstrated over Kishangana now, are solid examples of India and Pakistan being able to discover forums of settlement in preference to the vapid aggravation of real problems and real issues.
I now turn, with some trepidation, to the Indian priority issue - terrorism. Till 9/11, cross-border terrorism was one of several subjects under discussion in our bilateral composite dialogue notwithstanding the proxy war in Kashmir nor the jihadi strategy of bleeding India with a thousand cuts. The attack on our Parliament on December 13, 2001 led to the armed confrontation of Operation Parikrama but did not stall either the Agra summit or the Islamabad Declaration of January 2004 or the dramatic progress made between May 2004 and March 2007 when the going was never better.
Meanwhile, the al-Qaeda attack on the Twin Towers brought the American retaliation to the borders of Pakistan. Ever since, terrorism has become a global issue, perhaps the most important issue before the international community. In that war against terrorism, Pakistan, willy-nilly, has become a front-line state, with horrific consequences for itself. No state has suffered as much from terrorism as Pakistan itself. I think there needs to be much wider appreciation in India than there is at present of how terrible is the daily threat of terrorism striking any day and anywhere in Pakistan and, therefore, how steely is the will of the Pakistani people to not let their country be taken over by suicide bombers and pathological killers. I do believe that while the Pakistan establishment might at one time have been complaisant regarding terrorism directed at the West or terrorism directed against India, while being extremely vigilant against terrorism directed at Pakistan, there is now an increasing realization that all the networks are inter-connected and, therefore, the counter attack on terrorism has to be holistic, taking on all three components without distinction.
Indeed, that is the message that came through in President Zardari’s initial reaction to 26/11. That brief flicker of hope of a joint India-Pakistan front against those undertaking, sponsoring or abetting terrorism was snuffed out over the offer, first made and then withdrawn, to send the ISI chief to India to initiate a cooperative approach to the joint threat of terror. However, subsequent developments over the next two years have been far from encouraging. Bluntly speaking, the Indian establishment and almost all Indians remain unconvinced that India-directed terrorism is, indeed, seen in Pakistan as an unmitigated evil that must be stamped out. But while that hurdle looms large on the road to the resumption of normalcy in our mutual dialogue, I do believe only a joint strategy to counter terrorism will enable both India and Pakistan to overcome what is, in effect, a joint threat to both our peoples. We either hang together or hang separately. The challenge is to set the stage to being together on this issue instead of languishing in confrontation, thus giving the edge to the terrorist. There is little sign of this happening, but I remain persuaded that the threat to both of us is so great from what is in practice a single undifferentiated source of extreme danger to both countries that sooner than later a joint process will have to be set in motion.
Episodic: In a relationship as turbulent and accident-prone as that between India and Pakistan, it is only to be expected that there would be diurnal disturbances to any equilibrium we might establish or strive to establish. There are any number of issues on which troubles arise. If not tackled, they persist, and when they are resolved leave one wondering what all the fuss was about.
Take, for example, for it is the example closest to home, the opening of the Indian Consulate-General when I arrived here 33 years ago. It was expected that a Pakistani Consul General would soon land in Bombay. That was delayed. A year later, elections in India led to a change of government. Jinnah House was no longer on offer. Three decades on, there is still no Pakistan CG in Mumbai. And the Indian CG in Karachi was closed down 17 years ago. I sneaked into 63, Clifton some years ago with my daughter born in Karachi. It was heartbreaking. Who has gained? I do not know. But I do know who have lost. Ordinary, very ordinary Pakistanis and Indians.
If an Indian Consulate could run in Karachi for 15 years without a counterpart Pakistan facility in Mumbai, why not now? And as for a Pakistani visa office in Mumbai, I am told by successive Pakistan high commissioners that they have searched and searched but are unable to find a single Mumbai landlord willing to lease his premises to the Pakistan government; while the Indian side tells me that all efforts they have made to make space available to Pakistan have been rebuffed. You and I will never know the full story till WikiLeaks makes it available to us. But amazing is it not that neither of us seems to have the wit to find a mutually satisfactory answer? Or is it just that our authorities do not want to?”
"Berlin Tempelhof Airport (German: Flughafen Berlin-Tempelhof) was one of the airports inBerlin, Germany. Situated in the south-central Berlin borough of Tempelhof-Schöneberg, the airport ceased operating in 2008 amid controversy, leaving Tegel and Schönefeld as the two main airports serving the city, with the new Berlin Brandenburg Airport still under construction as of 2015.
Tempelhof was designated as an airport by the Ministry of Transport on 8 October 1923. The old terminal was originally constructed in 1927. In anticipation of increasing air traffic, the Nazi government began a massive reconstruction in the mid-1930s. While it was occasionally cited as the world's oldest operating commercial airport, the title was disputed by several other airports, and is no longer an issue since its closure.
Tempelhof was one of Europe's three iconic pre-World War II airports, the others being London's now defunct Croydon Airportand the old Paris – Le Bourget Airport. It acquired a further iconic status as the centre of the Berlin Airlift of 1948-49. One of the airport's most distinctive features is its large, canopy-style roof, which was able to accommodate most contemporary airliners in the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s, protecting passengers from the elements. Tempelhof Airport's main building was once among the top 20 largest buildings on earth; in contrast, it formerly had the world's smallest duty-free shop.
Tempelhof Airport closed all operations on 30 October 2008, despite the efforts of some protesters to prevent the closure. A non-binding referendum was held on 27 April 2008 against the impending closure but failed due to low voter turnout. Up until September 2015, the former airfield was used as a recreational space for the people from Berlin known as "Tempelhofer Feld" in that month however, it was announced that Tempelholf would become an emergency refugee camp for the foreseeable future.
History
The site of the airport was originally Knights Templar land in medieval Berlin, and from this beginning came the name Tempelhof. Later, the site was used as a parade field by Prussian forces, and by unified German forces from 1720 to the start of World War I. In 1909,Frenchman Armand Zipfel made the first flight demonstration in Tempelhof, followed by Orville Wright later that same year. Tempelhof was first officially designated as an airport on 8 October 1923. Deutsche Luft Hansa was founded in Tempelhof on 6 January 1926.
The old terminal, originally constructed in 1927, became the world's first with an underground railway. The station has since been renamed Paradestraße, because the rebuilding of the airport in the 1930s required the airport access to be moved to a major intersection with a station now called Platz der Luftbrücke after the Berlin Airlift.
As part of Albert Speer's plan for the reconstruction of Berlin during the Nazi era, Prof. Ernst Sagebiel was ordered to replace the old terminal with a new terminal building in 1934. The airport halls and the adjoining buildings, intended to become the gateway to Europe and a symbol of Hitler's "world capital" Germania, are still known as one of the largest built entities worldwide, and have been described by British architect Sir Norman Foster as "the mother of all airports". With its façades of shell limestone, the terminal building, built between 1936 and 1941, forms a 1.2 kilometre long quadrant. Arriving passengers walked through customs controls to the reception hall. Tempelhof was served by the U6 U-Bahn line along Mehringdamm and up Friedrichstraße (Platz der Luftbrücke station).
Zentralflughafen Tempelhof-Berlin had the advantage of a central location just minutes from the Berlin city centre and quickly became one of the world's busiest airports. Tempelhof saw its greatest pre-war days during 1938–1939, when up to 52 foreign and 40 domestic flights arrived and departed daily from the old terminal while the new one was still under construction.
The new air terminal was designed as headquarters for Deutsche Luft Hansa (moved in 1938), the German national airline at that time. As a forerunner of today's modern airports, the building was designed with many unique features, including giant arc-shaped aircraft hangars. Although under construction for more than ten years, it was never finished because of World War II. For passengers and freight, the 1927-built terminal stayed in use until 24 April 1945.
The building complex was designed to resemble an eagle in flight with semicircular hangars forming the bird's spread wings. A 1 mi (1.6 km)-long hangar roof was to have been laid in tiers to form a stadium for spectators at air and ground demonstrations. Norman Foster called Tempelhof "one of the really great buildings of the modern age".
World War Two
Fearing Allied bombing of airports, all German civil aviation was halted on 2 September 1939, but gradually restarted from 1 November. However, the 1927-built terminal remained closed to all civil aviation, and all Berlin-bound/-originating civilian aircraft movements transferred to an airfield in Rangsdorf until 7 March 1940, when the 1927 terminal was reopened and civil aviation continued until 24 April 1945.
From January 1940 until early-1944, Weser Flugzeugbau assembled Junkers Ju 87 "Stuka" dive bombers; thereafter, it assembledFocke-Wulf Fw 190 fighter planes in the still unfurnished main hall and hangars 3 to 7 of the new terminal, which were supplied by a railway and trucks via a connecting tunnel. Hangars 1 and 2 were not used to assemble aircraft as these were already used by Luft Hansa for its own planes. Aircraft parts were brought in from all over the city while complete aircraft engines were trucked to Tempelhof. Once the airframes were complete and the engines had been installed, the finished aircraft were flown out. The Luftwaffe did not use Tempelhof as a military airfield during World War II, except for occasional emergency landings by fighter aircraft.
On 21 April 1945, Deutsche Luft Hansa operated its last scheduled flights, and over the coming days laid on additional non-scheduled flights from Johannisthal Air Field which stopped over at Tempelhof to take on freight en route to Travemünde and Munich, where Luft Hansa had relocated its headquarters. Two days later, on 23 April, the airline's last-ever flight to depart Tempelhof left for Madrid, but was later shot down over Southern Germany.
Tempelhof's German commander, Oberst Rudolf Böttger, refused to carry out orders to blow up the base, choosing instead to kill himself.Soviet forces took Tempelhof in the Battle of Berlin on 28 and 29 April 1945 in the closing days of the war in Europe. Soviet forces combed through the old and the new terminal searching for treasures, hidden places and documents, opening all rooms. During their search, they blew up the fortified entrance to a three level bomb shelter for celluloid films of the Hansa Luftbild GmbH, a Luft Hansa subsidiary specialising in aerial photography. The explosion immediately ignited the celluloid, turning the film shelter under the northern office wing of the new terminal into a furnace and making it impossible to enter for several weeks. The raging inferno led the Soviet commander to order the lower levels to be flooded with water. With no functioning water supply in war-torn Berlin, this was only possible because the new terminal, which had suffered only slight war damage, had its own electricity and groundwater utility with underground reservoirs under the northerly forecourt of the new terminal close to the film shelter.
On 8 May 1945, Western Allied and German signatories of the German Surrender in Berlin and their entourage landed at Tempelhof airport. At the beginning of May, Weser Flugzeugbau opened a workshop in hangar 7 to repair streetcars. In the following weeks, Berliners raided all unguarded parts of the opened buildings searching for food or anything else useful in bartering in the black market. In accordance with the Yalta agreements, Zentralflughafen Berlin-Tempelhof was turned over to the United States Army 2nd Armored Division on 2 July 1945 by the Soviet Union as part of the American occupation sector of Berlin. This agreement was later formalised by the August 1945 Potsdam Agreement, which formally divided Berlin into four occupation sectors.
The 852nd Engineer Aviation Battalion arrived at Tempelhof (Code Number R-95) on 10 July 1945 and conducted the original repairs in the new terminal. After the Allied Control Council had agreed upon West Berlin Air Corridors under control of the Berlin Air Safety Center, these opened in February 1946, enabling civil aviation at Tempelhof to restart.
Berlin Airlift
On 20 June 1948, Soviet authorities, claiming technical difficulties, halted all traffic by land and by water into or out of the western-controlled sectors of Berlin. The only remaining access routes into the city were three 20 mi (32 km)-wide air corridors across the Soviet Zone of Occupation. Faced with the choice of abandoning the city or attempting to supply its inhabitants with the necessities of life by air, the Western Powers chose the latter course, and for the next eleven months sustained the city's 2½ million residents in one of the greatest feats in aviation history.
Operation Vittles, as the airlift was unofficially named, began on 26 June when USAF Douglas C-47 Skytrains carried 80 tons of food into Tempelhof, far less than the estimated 4,500 tons of food, coal and other essential supplies needed daily to maintain a minimum level of existence. But this force was soon augmented by United States Navy and Royal Air Force cargo aircraft, as well as British European Airways(BEA) and many of Britain's fledgling wholly privately owned, independent airlines. The latter included the late Sir Freddie Laker's Air Charter, Eagle Aviation and Skyways. On 15 October 1948, to promote increased safety and cooperation between the separate US and British airlift efforts, the Allies created a unified command – the Combined Airlift Task Force under Maj. Gen. William H. Tunner, USAF, was established at Tempelhof. To facilitate the command and control, as well as the unloading of aircraft, the USAF 53rd Troop Carrier Squadron was temporarily assigned to Tempelhof.
The grass runways usual in Germany until then could not cope with the massive demand, and a subsequently built runway containingperforated steel matting began to crumble under the weight of the USAF's C-54 Skymasters. Hence, American engineers built a new 6,000 ft (1,800 m) runway at Tempelhof between July and September 1948 and another between September and October 1948 to accommodate the expanding requirements of the airlift. The old airport terminal of 1927 was demolished in 1948 in order to create additional space for unloading more planes. The last airlift transport touched down at Tempelhof on 30 September 1949.
Tempelhof also became famous as the location of Operation Little Vittles: the dropping of candy to children living near the airport. The original Candy Bomber, Gail Halvorsen noticed children lingering near the fence line of the airport and wanted to share something with them. He eventually started dropping candy by parachute just before landing. His efforts were expanded by other pilots and eventually became a part of legend in the city of Berlin.
Cold War
As the Cold War intensified in the late 1950s and 1960s, access problems to West Berlin, both by land and air, continued to cause tension. Throughout the Cold War years, Tempelhof was the main terminal for American military transport aircraft accessing West Berlin. In 1969 one of the pilots during the Berlin Airlift, and the original Candy Bomber, Gail Halvorsen, returned to Berlin as the commander of Tempelhof airbase.
With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany, the presence of American forces in Berlin ended. The USAF 7350th Air Base Group at Tempelhof was deactivated in June 1993. In July 1994, with President Clinton in attendance, the British, French, and American air and land forces in Berlin were deactivated in a ceremony on the Four Ring Parade field at Tempelhof. The Western Alliesreturned a united city of Berlin to the unified German government. The U.S. Army closed its Berlin Army Aviation Detachment at TCA in August 1994, ending a 49-year American military presence in Berlin."
MORE PHOTOS FROM SATURDAY'S PALESTINE SOLIDARITY PROTEST IN LONDON COMING SOON.
I was deeply shocked when James Cleverly, the UK's foreign secretary, was asked specifically about Israel's intensified blockade of Gaza. He didn't say anything critical about Israel's recent decision to stop all electricity, fuel, food, and water from going into the area.
twitter.com/OnlinePalEng/status/1711471826692436328
There are more than two million people living there, and this brutal form of collective punishment is clearly a war crime which threatens the lives of all of them. As is the round the clock bombing of some 2000 targets over just four days.
The Gaza Strip is a small densely populated area which is only about one quarter the size of London. As of 10 October, over 900 residential units and 70 industrial units have been destroyed, including the deliberate targeting of some residential apartments without prior warning, and as a result the bombing has already killed 185 Palestinian children, 120 women and seven journalists.
reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/israe...
Netenyahu, Israel's prime minister, has called on Palestinian civilians to flee the air strikes he has unleashed which is reducing much of Gaza to rubble. However, the two neighbouring states, Israel and the Egyptian dictatorship of Fatah Abdul El-Sisi, have sealed the borders, making any attempt to escape the strip suicidal.
When Goav Gallant, Israel's Defence Minister, announced the intensification of the siege, he added that "we are fighting against human animals," phraseology often favoured by genocidal regimes. The United States and Britain, which have effectively given the green light to these brutal measures of collective punishment, are now clearly complicit in this war crime, and in Israel's war of aggression against the two million Palestinians who live on this tiny strip of land.
For years Gaza has been under what the UN recognises as Israeli occupation, since Israel controls everything that is allowed in, and regularly acts, every few years, to cripple the city's infrastructure with air strikes, so that even before these latest attacks, only 10% of Gazans had access to clean drinking water while the level of anemia among young children was 59%.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4391478/
No right minded person would not also condemn the brutal and horrific Hamas attacks on Israeli civilians, but we have to understand that terrorism can not be eradicated by continuing, intensifying and expanding the 75 year long occupation. It is the crime of illegal occupation which encompasses and leads to (though that's not the same as justifying) the near inevitability of violence.
Many Palestinians feel they have no other real, long-term way to resist the Israeli armed forces and a tiny number of them resort to unacceptable and sometimes irrational, terrible, and counterproductive acts of terrorism against innocent Israeli civilians. We should rightly condemn all such violence, but it's unlikely to stop without an end to the occupation.
It should not be forgotten that 248 Palestinians, many of them children, had been killed by Israeli soldiers during 2023 before last Saturday, but these deaths attracted almost no attention in the Western media. Meanwhile, Palestinian homes continue to be bulldozed to make way for new illegal Israeli settlements and when Netenyahu addressed the UN General Assembly in September he displayed a map of the Middle East with an "Israel", outlined in blue, which clearly included within it all of the West Bank, Gaza, Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, a de facto way of announcing their annexation.
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NASA data acquired August 27, 2010
Hurricane Danielle became the first major hurricane of the 2010 Atlantic hurricane season on July 27, 2010. Danielle, which had been a Category 2 storm the day before, quickly intensified overnight. By 5:00 a.m. Atlantic Standard Time, the storm was a power Category 4 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson scale with sustained winds of 215 kilometers per hour (135 miles per hour), according to the National Hurricane Center. The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite passed directly over Danielle during the night and captured these remarkable images as the storm was in the process of intensifying.
The images were taken at 2:46 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time (06:46 UTC) on August 27, 2010, while Danielle was intensifying. The top image shows a top-down view of rain intensity within the storm, while the lower image provides a three-dimensional view of the storm. The rain rates in the top image show the structure of the storm. Danielle had a well-formed eye surrounded by sharply curved rainbands—all signs of mature storm with an intense circulation. TRMM also reveals that there were very powerful thunderstorms in Danielle’s eye wall dropping extreme amounts of rain, shown in dark red, especially in the northwest quadrant.
The lower image shows a three-dimensional view of Danielle provided by the TRMM Precipitation Radar. As before, the colors reflect rain rates, with red being the most intense rain, and blue being the least intense rain. Tall towers of clouds—very strong thunderstorms—rise over the section of the eyewall where TRMM observed the most intense rain. These tall towers are the key to Danielle’s intensification.
In the towering clouds, air is rising rapidly. As the air reaches cooler temperatures, water vapor condenses into cloud droplets and releases energy in the form of heat. Known as latent heating, this heat makes the air even more buoyant, causing it to rise yet more. Because air is rising quickly, the air pressure in the center of the storm drops. Air from the outer edges of the storm rushes in to replace the rising air, driving the storm’s circulation. By causing the storm’s central pressure to drop, latent heating in tall towers intensifies a storm.
The tower of clouds at Danielle’s center reached more than 15 kilometers (9 miles) into the atmosphere. These storms within a storm were releasing vast amounts of heat into Danielle’s core, allowing the storm to become a major hurricane overnight. As of August 27, Danielle was expected to remain a major hurricane until August 28 or 29, when the National Hurricane Center predicted it would curve northeast over cooler waters in the central Atlantic. Danielle was not expected to threaten land.
TRMM is a joint mission between NASA and the Japanese space agency JAXA. The satellite carries a number of instruments used to study rainfall. In the top image, rain rates in the center of the swath are from the TRMM Precipitation Radar and those in the outer swath are from the TRMM Microwave Imager. The rain rates are overlaid on infrared data from the TRMM Visible Infrared Scanner. The lower image was made from data collected by TRMM’s Precipitation Radar.
Image courtesy Hal Pierce, TRMM Team at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Caption by Steve Lang and Holli Riebeek.
Instrument: TRMM
Click here to see more images from NASA Goddard’s Earth Observatory
or here to view more images of Hurricane Danielle: earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/event.php?id=45407
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center is home to the nation's largest organization of combined scientists, engineers and technologists that build spacecraft, instruments and new technology to study the Earth, the sun, our solar system, and the universe.
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Local NGO Rangpur-Dinajpur Rural Services works through farmer federation groups. In this community, belonging to marginalised ethnic minority, there are separate women and men’s groups.
Group member Shona (foreground, left), said: “Before the group, women in our community had no rights to speak in public, or in the household."
Credit: CIMMYT/Sam Storr
[group] Kites, hawks and eagles | [order] ACCIPITRIFORMES | [family] Accipitridae | [latin] Circaetus gallicus | [UK] Short-toed Snake Eagle | [FR] Circaete Jean-le-Blanc | [DE] Schlangenadler | [ES] Aguila culebrera | [NL] Slangenarend
spanwidth min.: 162 cm
spanwidth max.: 178 cm
size min.: 62 cm
size max.: 69 cm
Breeding
incubation min.: 45 days
incubation max.: 47 days
fledging min.: 70 days
fledging max.: 47 days
broods 1
eggs min.: 1
eggs max.: 1
Physical characteristics
Distinctly larger than buzzards Buteo. Medium-sized, broad-faced, usually dark-hooded, grey-brown snake-eagle, with head and thick neck protruding in all attitudes. Underparts strikingly white, variably speckled and barred darker, markings usually forming band across chest. Black tips to primary coverts and primaries and 2-3 tail bands fairly prominent even in palest birds.
Habitat
Prefers open cultivated plains, stony deciduous scrubs and foothills and semi-desert areas throughout the country.
Other details
This species is breeding in a large part of southern and Eastern Europe, northern Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia. It is wintering mainly in Sub-Saharan Africa. The population of the European Union amounts to 3000-4500 breeding pairs, and seems to be fairly stable. It has undergone a strong decrease and contraction during last century, and the species has disappeared from Germany and Denmark. The main reasons for this decline are intensification of agriculture and disappearance of extensive livestock economy.
Feeding
Short-toed Eagle feeds on snakes (poisonous and non-poisonous), Lizards (Varanus spp.), some species of frogs, mammals (rabbits, hares, and rats), sick and disabled birds and large insects.
Conservation
This species has an extremely large range, and hence does not approach the thresholds for Vulnerable under the range size criterion (Extent of Occurrence 30% decline over ten years or three generations). The population size is very large, and hence does not approach the thresholds for Vulnerable under the population size criterion (10% in ten years or three generations, or with a specified population structure). For these reasons the species is evaluated as Least Concern. [conservation status from birdlife.org]
Breeding
The time of arrival of Short-toed Eagles in the breeding area (mid-March to mid-April) with the activity of snakes and lizards after winter hibernation (mid-March). The brooding period (mainly June and July) preferably coincides with warm and dry weather and the peak of prey abundance, which increases the probability of eaglet survival and successful fledging. The Short-toed Eagle has a clutch size of only a single egg.
In top of low tree, mostly 3-7 meter above ground but can be as low 2 meter and as high as 25 meter Occasionally in nest of another bird species. Always well hidden from ground. Nests are often reused, though not necessarily in successive years. The nest is relatively small for the size of this bird, 50-100 cm diameter, 20-30 cm high, with deep cup. Built of small sticks, 5-10 cm long- lined with greenery.
The incubation period is 45-47 days. Both sexes are known to incubate, but female does most of the work. The fledging period 70-75 days, young may leave nest for surrounding branches at about 60 days. The age of first breeding is probably at least 3-4 years.
Migration
Migratory in Palearctic- sedentary in India, Pakistan and Lesser Sundas. Most migrants winter in tropical North Africa, from Senegambia to Ethiopia. Eastern birds winter in Indian Subcontinent, occasionally in South east Asia. Exceptional in winter in south Europe, north Africa and Middle East- more common in Arabian Peninsula. Most birds leave Europe from mid-September to mid-October, returning during March and the first half of April. Birds gather at crossing points: main route between Africa and Europe passes over Straits of Gibraltar- between Africa and Asia over Gulf of Suez.
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[order] Falconiformes | [family] Accipitridae | [latin] Milvus migrans | [UK] Black Kite | [FR] Milan noir | [DE] Schwarzmilan | [ES] Milano Negro | [IT] Nibbio bruno | [NL] Zwarte Wouw
spanwidth min.: 135 cm
spanwidth max.: 150 cm
size min.: 55 cm
size max.: 60 cm
Breeding
incubation min.: 26 days
incubation max.: 38 days
fledging min.: 42 days
fledging max.: 45 days
broods 1
eggs min.: 2
eggs max.: 3
Physical characteristics
Shorter overall than Red Kite, with broader, notched rather than forked tail. Uniformly coloured, loosely built kite. Plumage dusky-brown, with only noticeable features diffuse pale patches at base of primaries and on upper wing-coverts. Juvenile paler, more tawny below than adult, with bases of primaries whitish and undertail more clearly barred.
Habitat
Ubiquitous, occuring from semi-desert, grassland and savanna to woodland, but avoids dense forest Commonly aquatic habitats, rivers, lakes, wetlands,seashores and nearby in meadows and along margins of wetlands. Often linked with man to greater or lesser degree.
Other details
This kite inhabits most of Africa and Eurasia, from the Iberian Peninsula to Japan. Northwards it occurs up to 65°N. European populations are wintering in sub-Saharan Africa. About 21000-28000 breeding pairs occur in the European Union, which represents roughly 25% of the total European population. This species is subject to important fluctuations, but globally it undergoes a slow decrease since the beginning of the century. Being largely a scavenger, it is very susceptible to poisoning and pollution by pesticides. The disappearance of extensive pastoralism is another negative factor
Feeding
Essentially carrion and small or medium sized mammals and birds, also fish, lizards, amphibians and invertebrates can be important locally or seasonally. Diet varies according to local availability, with proportionally more prey captured during breeding. More unusually, vegetable matter, particularly oil palm fruits. Catches prey on ground or water, large insects caught in air, and then eaten on wing. Often forages around margins of waterbodies, and by refuse dumps, slaughterouses or roads, where looks for animals knocked down by traffic.
Breeding
In temperate zones of Eurasia,Mar-Jun, in tropical Africa, normally in dry season, in S Africa, aug-Dec, in Australia, mainly Jul- Nov. Solitay or loosely colonial, nests in trees, building nest in fork or on branch or on wide side branch, also on cliff ledges, locally along coast. platform of sticks which often includes rags or plastic, paper, dung or skin. 2-3 eggs, incubation 26-38 days, normally by female almost exclusively, if male brings sufficient food, female may not hunt during entire breeding attempt.
Migration
Mainly migratory in west Palearctic, though some southern Eurasian populations largely resident. Exceptional in central Europe in winter. Principal winter quarters south of Sahara: from Sénégal east to Sudan and south to South Africa. European birds show major south-west movement in autumn, towards important Mediterranean crossing point at Straits of Gibraltar; some south, and others south-east towards Bosporus. Many pass around eastern end of Black Sea. Occurs in Israel both passages, and abundant at Eilat in south in spring. In north-east Africa, common both passages through Eritrea. In central Europe, juvenile dispersal begins late June to early July. Major exodus of all age groups in August though some remain into September or even later. First European breeding birds reach North Africa in July and northern tropics in August. Return movement begins February in Africa; initial arrivals Switzerland late February or early March, and Germany in second half March, but major arrivals central Europe in first half April with immigration continuing to early or mid-May.
Ending Armed Conflicts in Africa: The United States has led efforts at the UN to address recent challenges on the continent.
Ø Sudan and South Sudan: On July 9, 2011, the Republic of South Sudan celebrated its independence. This action took place following months of intensified diplomatic efforts in the lead up to the historic, peaceful referendum on independence in January. Much of this work was accomplished working within or alongside the United Nations, including the 2010 high-level meeting at which President Obama delivered remarks to galvanize international action to ensure a credible and timely referendum.
In June 2011, the Security Council created UNISFA, a UN peacekeeping force responsible for monitoring the demilitarization of the Abyei area, has acted forcefully to prevent unauthorized military or paramilitary forces from returning, and has protect civilians and humanitarian workers. UNISFA successfully transformed a volatile flashpoint for war into a zone of peace and stability. In July 2011, the Security Council created UNMISS, a new UN peacekeeping force in the Republic of South Sudan, to consolidate peace and security and to help establish conditions for economic and political development.
When Sudan and South Sudan came very close to resuming full-scale war in the spring of 2012, the United States led the Security Council to adopt UN Security Council Resolution 2046, a binding Chapter VII resolution obligating the parties to take steps laid out by the African Union to decrease tensions. The United States has also led international efforts to push Sudan to provide humanitarian access to the Two Areas.
In Darfur, the United States remains deeply committed to supporting international efforts to end conflict there. UN-AU efforts in Darfur, most notably through UNAMID, are key to providing protection to civilians and encouraging parties to the conflict to comply with their obligations under international law.
Ø Ivory Coast: In 2011, the United States supported and advocated robust implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1975, which reaffirmed President Alassane Ouattara’s victory in an internationally recognized election in Ivory Coast and demanded that former President Laurent Gbagbo end his illegitimate claim to power. The resolution imposed sanctions on Gbagbo and his close associates and reiterated that the UN Operation in Ivory Coast (UNOCI) could use “all necessary means” in its mandate to protect civilians under imminent threat of attack.
Ø Somalia: The United States has led efforts at the UN to promote a path toward a more hopeful future in Somalia after decades of political instability, violence and famine. The election this month of Hassan Sheikh Mohamoud as Somalia’s new President signified the last step of the UN-brokered roadmap agreed to in the fall of 2011, and the end of the Transitional Federal Government. Key in this transition has been the role of the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) in confronting the al-Shabaab militia and allowing the political process in Mogadishu to take place. A critical component in this effort was Security Council Resolution 2036, which expanded the AMISOM troop contingent and created a ban on the export of Somali charcoal, an important source of revenue for al-Shabaab.
Ø Eritrea: In 2009, the United States supported the African Union’s call to sanction Eritrea for that country's role in destabilizing Somalia and the region and its failure to comply with Security Council Resolution 1862 concerning Eritrea's border dispute with Djibouti. As a direct result of U.S. and African leadership, the Security Council adopted Resolution 1907 to impose an arms embargo and targeted financial and travel sanctions on Eritrean officials. Then, in response to continued Eritrean intransigence, the Security Council adopted Resolution 2023 in December 2011, imposing additional sanctions on Eritrea and limiting its ability to continue to use the mining sector and the diaspora tax to fund its illicit activities.
Ø Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC): The United States continues to champion improved protection of civilians, especially by demanding an end to the epidemic of rape and gender-based violence, through the deployment of the UN’s largest peacekeeping force. The United States has continued to work to secure new Security Council sanctions against key leaders of armed groups operating in the DRC when needed, including for individuals linked to crimes involving sexual and gender based violence and recruitment of child soldiers. Additionally, in 2009, the United States led the adoption of UN Security Council resolution 1896 that supported, for the first time, due diligence guidelines for individuals and companies operating in the mineral trade in Eastern Congo.
· Providing Humanitarian Assistance: The United States is the world’s leading donor of humanitarian assistance through the UN system, maximizing the help the international community can provide in the face of humanitarian disasters. In just four major recent disasters, the United States contributed nearly $1.7 billion through the UN alone:
Ø Horn of Africa: When millions of people in the Horn of Africa suffered from drought and famine in 2011 and 2012, the United States provided nearly $900 million in emergency aid to UN agencies.
Ø Haiti: After the devastating earthquake of January 2010, which, in addition to the hundreds of thousands of Haitian lives lost, claimed the lives of over 100 UN personnel and the UN Mission’s leadership, the United States worked closely with the UN to help the Government of Haiti ensure security and deliver vital humanitarian relief to the people of Haiti. The United States has channeled over $150 million through UN agencies to assist the country with immediate life saving measures and to help Haiti rebuild.
Ø Pakistan: In 2010, the Government of Pakistan called for international assistance to respond to the tragic and devastating floods that began in July of that year. The United States responded generously to this request, providing nearly $360 million through UN channels.
Ø Sahel: This year, drought conditions in the Sahel have created a humanitarian crisis for the more than 15 million people facing food shortages in the region. So far, the United States has responded by channeling more than $255 million through UN agencies.
Upholding Our Values
•Human Rights: At the beginning of the Obama Administration, the United States joined the Human Rights Council (HRC) to fight for oppressed people around the world. While much work remains to be done at the Council, in particular ending its excessive focus on Israel, the Council has made great strides in speaking up for those who have suffered major human rights abuses and lived under the grip of the world’s cruelest regimes. We have also maintained active engagement in the UN General Assembly to highlight human rights abuses worldwide and to improve international mechanisms for defending human rights.
Ø Spotlight on the World’s Worst Abusers: With active U.S. leadership, the Council authorized international mandates to expose and address the human rights situations in Iran, Libya, Syria, Ivory Coast, Burma, North Korea, Cambodia, Belarus, Eritrea, and Sudan.
Ø Libya: In March 2011, with the Qadhafi regime continuing its murderous rampage against its own people, the United States spearheaded the General Assembly’s unanimous and unprecedented decision to suspend Libya from the Human Rights Council.
Ø Religious Tolerance: In 2011, the Human Rights Council, and later the General Assembly, took an important step away from the deeply problematic concept of defamation of religion by adopting a constructive new resolution that promotes tolerance for all religious beliefs, promotes education and dialogue and is consistent with U.S. laws and universal values. Previous resolutions adopted under the concept of defamation of religion have been used to rationalize laws criminalizing blasphemy and challenge widely held freedoms of expression and the press, rather than protect religious freedom and human rights.
Ø LGBT Rights: Last year, the Human Rights Council took historic action to highlight violence and human rights abuses faced by lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) persons around the world by passing the first UN resolution ever to be solely focused on LGBT persons, paving the way for the first ever UN report on the challenges faced by LGBT people. The United States also spearheaded an effort that led to a decisive victory in the United Nations Economic and Social Council, which voted to grant consultative status to the first U.S.-based LGBT rights NGO, the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission. We have since continued to fight for the accreditation of LGBT NGOs. In 2010, the United States led a successful campaign to reinstate a reference to “sexual orientation” in a General Assembly resolution on extrajudicial killings. And, the United States joined the LGBT core group – a coalition of likeminded countries - in New York.
Ø Internet Freedom: This year, the United States worked closely with Sweden and over 80 co-sponsors to pass a landmark internet freedom resolution reaffirming our longstanding commitment to freedoms of expression, association, and assembly.
· Millennium Development Goals: From the earliest days in office, President Obama made clear that the Millennium Development Goals were America’s goals, and set a course for the United States that would help the world achieve them. During the UN Millennium Development Summit in New York in 2010, the President
outlined the Administration’s Global Development Policy--the first of its kind by an American administration—that laid out the new U.S. approach and thinking guiding overall development efforts, including a plan to help achieve all of the Millennium Development Goals. The Administration is now actively working to shape a next-generation development agenda when the current Millennium Development Goals conclude in 2015.
•Women’s Equality and Empowerment: The United States has led efforts across the UN to empower women politically, socially, and economically around the world, to promote the role of women in preventing, managing, and resolving conflict, to combat conflict-related sexual violence, and to integrate women’s issues more fully into the work of the United Nations.
Ø Security Council Resolution 1888: In 2009, with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton presiding, the United States led the Security Council in unanimously adopting Resolution 1888, which strengthens the international response to sexual violence in conflict by establishing a dedicated UN Special Representative and creating a team of experts to assist individual governments in strengthening their capacities to address sexual violence in conflicts within their borders.
Ø UN Women: The United States was also instrumental in the establishment of UN Women, a new UN agency that combines four separate UN offices into one stronger, streamlined and more efficient entity working in support of women around the world.
Ø National Action Plan: In late 2011, the United States released its National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security, which seeks to integrate women’s views and perspectives fully into our diplomatic, security, and development efforts, including by helping women engage in peace processes, providing assistance to NGOs focused on women’s participation, helping to integrate women into the security sectors of partner nations, and improving the UN’s capacity to combat sexual violence.
Ø Mexico City Policy: In one of his earliest acts in office, President Obama ordered the repeal of the global gag rule, which had prevented women
around the world from gaining access to essential information and healthcare services. This policy, known as the Mexico City Policy, had made it more difficult for women around the world to gain access to essential information and healthcare services.
· Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities: In 2009, the United States signed the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, the first new human rights treaty of the 21st century. This extraordinary treaty calls on all nations to guarantee rights like those afforded under the Americans with Disabilities Act.
· Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples: President Obama announced in 2010 the support of the United States for the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples after a comprehensive, interagency policy review, including extensive consultation with tribes.
· Keeping Our Fiscal Commitments: From the earliest days in office, the Administration worked with Congress to clear hundreds of millions of dollars in arrears to the United Nations, which accumulated between 2005 and 2008, and has worked to stay current with payments to the Organization.
Reforming the United Nations
•Economy—A Leaner UN: As the largest financial contributor to the UN, ensuring that U.S. funds are spent wisely and not wasted is vital. As we have worked to meet our fiscal obligations in full and on time, the United States has worked to contain the growth of the UN budget and consistently pressed the issue of efficiency and fiscal accountability at the UN. Ø Regular Budget Reduction: Last year, the United States and its international partners achieved a 5% reduction in the size of the 2012-13 UN regular budget from the previous biennium, the first meaningful cut in the UN budget since the 1990’s, and just the second in 50 years. Additionally, in 2009, the Administration successfully negotiated an agreement that held constant the share of U.S. assessed contributions to the United Nations.
Ø Peacekeeping Budget Discipline: Earlier this year, the United States successfully negotiated a lower price tag for UN peacekeeping of more than $567 million compared to the previous year’s approved budget by emphasizing management innovations, thoughtful downsizing where missions have changed, and shifting resources from overhead to operations.
Ø UN Pay Freeze: Earlier this year, after U.S. calls for action, the International Civil Service Commission effectively implemented a pay freeze for New York-based UN employees, while deferring a final decision on the issue until the General Assembly takes it up in the fall session, and we will continue to urge the UN to maintain the pay freeze at a time when taxpayers everywhere are facing greater financial pressures.
•Accountability—A Cleaner UN: The Obama Administration has made considerable progress in boosting transparency and advancing oversight and accountability throughout the UN system.
Ø Oversight and Accountability: The United States has consistently supported the United Nations Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) to be a strong and independent watchdog by securing the necessary authority and resources from the General Assembly and by blocking attempts to curb the authority and operational independence of OIOS. The United States has worked to improve the OIOS’ ability to more vigorously pursue fraud and misconduct by supporting a pilot restructuring of the Investigations Division in 2009 that was again renewed in May 2012. The United States also continues to work to put in place robust mechanisms to ensure accountability amongst its leadership and staff.
Ø Transparency: The United States successfully lobbied for the United Nations Children’s Fund, United Nations Development Program, the United Nations Office of Project Services and the United Nations Population Fund to make their audit reports publicly available on the internet—a new standard for transparency in the UN system. We are building on this success to empower the rest of the UN system, including the UN Secretariat, to do the same. The United States was also successful in instituting live coverage of all UN Committee formal meetings through webcasting.
•Integrity—A Respected UN: As a founding member, host country, and largest contributor, the United States has a particular interest in ensuring the UN lives up to its founding principles and values, and we have worked determinedly in that regard.
Ø Keeping the Worst Actors off UN Bodies: The United States has consistently led the fight against abusive governments seeking leadership positions at the UN. For example, in 2010, Iran launched a wholly inappropriate campaign to join the Human Rights Council and the United States successfully led efforts to block it. In 2011, the brutal Assad regime in Syria attempted to join the HRC and was also blocked by U.S.-led efforts. This year, the government of Sudan ended its campaign for the Human Rights Council in light of the U.S.-led international outcry over its entirely unsuitable candidacy. Similarly, in 2010 Iran was defeated in its efforts to join the board of UN Women.
Ø Promoting Accountability for UN Peacekeepers: The United States, for first time ever, prevented reimbursement for troops who have been repatriated for disciplinary reasons, including violation of the UN zero tolerance policy on sexual exploitation and abuse, and this year successfully negotiated the first-ever comprehensive review of civilian staffing to ensure that staffing levels better align with changing requirements as missions evolve.
Ø Defending NGOs at the UN: The United States constantly works to ensure that all worthy non-governmental organizations have access to the UN by gaining accreditation through the UN’s NGO Committee. In 2011, the U.S. fought to gain ECOSOC accreditation for the first Syrian- based NGO, the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression, amidst strong Syrian-led opposition.
•Excellence—An Effective UN: Because so many people depend on the UN for critical services, the United States has led efforts at the UN to ensure that the institution performs to the highest standards of excellence and delivers real results. For example:
Ø Improving UN Peacekeeping: U.S. leadership has been instrumental in the advancement of the Global Field Support Strategy, a sweeping reform of how the UN undertakes administrative and logistics support for UN field operations. Implementation of this initiative has already led to $250 million in savings in the current peacekeeping budget and will improve the quality, consistency, and efficiency of service delivery and strengthen the UN’s capacity to support complex field missions.
Ø Human Resources Reform: The United States continues to promote human resource reforms that ensure that the UN is getting the right person at the right place at the right time. U.S. leadership was instrumental in adopting landmark reforms in the General Assembly to streamline contractual arrangements within the UN, creating a truly global Secretariat, and to harmonize conditions of service for field-based staff across the various organizations in the UN system. The U.S. continues to call for the UN to improve its personnel management policies, particularly in the areas of strategic planning, career development, and performance management, while also advocating for measures to control the cost of personnel given the current economic climate, i.e. through the imposition of a hiring freeze.
While much work remains, the United States will maintain a course of renewed American leadership at the United Nations, addressing national security challenges, upholding our values and reforming the institution so it is better equipped to address the challenges of the 21st Century.
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U.S. Mission to the United Nations: FACT SHEET: Advancing U.S. Interests at the United Nations
09/26/2012 04:20 PM EDT