Month: March 2019

Industry Must Fulfill Promises to Adopt Effective Standards and Policies or Face Regulation
The recent New Zealand attacks have once again made clear that the tech industry’s preferred paradigm of self-regulation has failed. Tech companies have been unable or unwilling to establish clear standards of what constitutes impermissible extremist and terrorist material, or deploy adequate tools to quickly and completely remove such content.

The Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace (CNDP) takes serious note of the dramatic declaration of the Indian Prime Minister, on March 27, early afternoon, claiming, in a nationally televised address, successful testing of an ASAT missile by way of destroying an Indian military Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite at an altitude of almost 300 kms, over the Bay of Bengal.

Any measure of annexation is based on the extension of a military’s boots. Diplomats tend to be silenced before the noise of tanks, weaponry and garrisons. Countries may claim to possess territory but can only dream in the absence of military weight. When it came to the issue of negotiating the post-World War II agreements, Generalissimo Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union had a clear sense of this in charting out Soviet influence in east European states. Israel also bullied its way into recognition, making sure that it acquired, at various stages, the Sinai (since relinquished), the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights.

On March 19, 2019, a Kuwaiti court sentenced reformist journalist ‘Abdallah Al-Hadlaq to three years in prison for offending the Shi’ites and “fanning controversies among the sectors of society,” i.e., between Sunnis and Shi’ites in Kuwait. Al-Hadlaq was prosecuted for two tweets he posted in August 2018, in which he wrote that Imam ‘Ali bin Abi Talib – considered by Shi’ites to be the rightful heir of the Prophet Muhammad – and his sons had caused the Sunni-Shi’ite divide in Islam and that ‘Ali bin Abi Talib had deliberately delayed swearing loyalty to the first caliph, Abu Bakr.[1]

During the period of 17 September to 11 December of 2016, the United States and its allies carried out a massive operation to move ISIS’s surviving jihadists who were in the oil-producing Iraqi region of Mosul, into the Syrian oil-producing region of Deir Ezzor and Palmyra.

Save for the conflict’s opening salvos in the middle of 2014, the Libyan Civil War has largely been contained to pockets of violence. Prolonged battles decimated cities such as Benghazi, Derna, and Sirte, but the majority of the country has been spared large-scale destruction.