Notable

The future is entirely created by old people

‘The worst thing about the future,’ said a young friend of mine, ‘is that it’s so boring. It’s in the Sunday Times every week, and if you miss that it’s always on Tomorrow’s World or Discovery. What’s really interesting is the past. The guys just can’t get enough of it. Everyone I know is obsessed with shooting radar into the ground to find old tombs, digging up plague pits, reconstructing Roman cities, X-raying skulls, counting teeth…’

A typical young person’s view I thought, and I made the following reply.

Image: ROverhate. License: CC0

Discussion about detention for those who have to leave the country and criteria for the classification of danger

After the asylum seeker Ahmad A. When a man stabbed a 50-year-old man to death in an Edeka supermarket in Hamburg-Barmbeck on Friday and subsequently injured another seven people, some of them seriously, media outlets such as the Hamburger Abendblatt spoke of a failure of the authorities. Among other things, they refer to the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF), which did not send the man, who entered Germany in 2015 via Scandinavia and Spain, back to Sweden, even though Sweden is part of the Dublin area and even though Ahmad A. had previously been resident there for so long that an interview with the Hamburg foreign office on 3. November was partly conducted in Swedish. The same question arises with regard to Spain, where he lived afterwards. It is possible that the BAMF failed to take such measures because the Palestinian, who was born in the United Arab Emirates, claimed to the authorities that he wanted to leave for the Gaza Strip and had papers ied by the representative office of the Palestinian autonomous authority in Berlin for this purpose.

In the Pakistani border areas, the war is being waged remotely with robots, partly for political reasons

The situation in Pakistan, especially in the areas bordering Afghanistan, is unclear and the country is increasingly becoming a powder keg. The government, under prere from the U.S. to bring the border areas under control and fight the militants, is trying a constant balancing act. Again and again, efforts are made to expel or retreat Taliban and other armed groups, which are also responsible for the resistance in Afghanistan, but on the other hand to rely on talks in order not to further destabilize the situation domestically.

After many years of the U.S. government and the Pentagon supporting and rousing the Pakistani government as an ally in the fight against terrorism, but the border areas continue to be a "Wild West" The US President Bush, the supreme commander, has reportedly ordered that troops on the ground and in the air are allowed to cross the border and attack targets in Pakistan. This has already happened at least once, prompting the Pakistani government and military to insist on sovereignty and announce that invading soldiers will be repelled as popular opposition grows.

Record published by the Russian Ministry of Defense.

In the race of Syrian troops and US-backed SDF units on the strategically important city of Deir-ez-Zor, the conflict between Russia and the US is intensifying

As has long been clear, the defeat and expulsion of the Islamic State in Syria does not lead to a resolution of the conflict. There is too much divergence between the geopolitical interests of the U.S. and Russia and their allied regional powers, which in turn are linked to Syrian parties on the ground (power poker in Syria). The conflict is currently dominated by Iran’s interest in building a land bridge to Lebanon through Iraq and Syria, which has met with strong opposition from the United States. In addition, the city is also strategically important in Syria, with oil wells in the surrounding area.

Putin on state visit to Budapest – new supply agreement with Gazprom – Rosatom builds two reactor units

Yesterday, Russian President Vladimir Putin visited Budapest at the invitation of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban to lay a wreath at a World War II memorial to the Red Army and to negotiate energy cooperation. According to Orban, a new contract for the supply of natural gas, which was agreed upon in the process, stipulates that in the future Hungary will only have to pay Gazprom for the amount of gas that is actually consumed there. This individual contract has been met with criticism, especially in Poland, where they wanted new energy supply agreements with Russia to be negotiated by the EU Commission, where Warsaw can have a say.

Already on 1. January 2015, a contract signed last year with Rosatom to build two new 1,200-megawatt reactor units to the Paksh nuclear power plant, scheduled to come on line in 2023, came into force. The twelve billion euros that this construction will cost will be financed to 80 percent with a Russian loan that must be repaid by 2045 with 4.5 to 4.9 percent interest.