News, stories, comments and analysis of international situations.
In Pakistan, a 14 year-old girl, Malala Yousafzai, was shot in the head by Taliban militants in response to her promotion of secularism, the BBC reports.
The girl, who with her father have promoted the education of girls and women in Afghanistan, wrote a diary for the BBC in 2009 when she was 11.
Videos of Malali Yousafzai can be found below.
Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, still has a year left to serve as President (image source: Wikimedia Commons)
Iran has been in the headlines of the Western media quite a lot lately. Tensions over its nuclear program threatens brash action from Israel, and the issue has managed so far to dog the US election campaign. Behind all this, for many months now, the West has been ratcheting up sanctions against Iran in an attempt to force Mahmoud Ahmadinejad into opening up, or indeed, cancelling its nuclear program. It appears that the side-effects of sanctions maybe gaining some traction within Iran.
Demonstrators in Iran clashed with police Wednesday, Ramin Mostaghim and Patrick J. McDonnell from the LA Times report, in protests that have been linked with the nation’s fading national currency. Some 500 shop owners, usually a more complacent element of Iranian society, marched in Tehran to voice their concerns.
The protesters described Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s government as “inefficient”, while also complaining about the flow of financial aid into Syria, supporting its struggling president, Bashar Assad. Over the last 12 months, Iran’s currency, the rial, has lost almost 80% of its value against the US dollar, leaving shop-owners unwilling to sell goods in fear of not being being able to purchase more due to the rial’s deflated value.
The downwards spiral of the rial, according to Robert Tait from the Sydney Morning Herald, is directly in response to Western sanctions, which have imposed a reduction of export of Iranian oil from 2.5 million barrels per day last year, to only 1.1 million barrels this august.
This all coincides with a US court formally ordering al-Queda, Iran and several other defendants (including Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei) to pay $6 billion in compensation to US victims of the September 11 attacks (Herald Sun).
Just as tensions in the Asiatic reach an uncomfortable high, China has launched its first aircraft carrier.
The BBC notes that the ship is a Ukraine dockyards derelict from the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union , formerly known as the Varyag. It was purchased by Chinese interests with the intention of constructing a floating casino upon it. At some point, somewhat unsurprisingly, it ended up in the hands of the Chinese Navy. The ship is a behemoth at 300m long, making it marginally shorter than the US Nimitz class aircraft carriers.
Officially it’s to be used for ‘research and training missions’, and for the time being China has no choice as it has neither pilots or aircraft capable of carrier operations. Nonetheless, it does add to China’s military prestige, and perhaps is an indicator of things to come (2 more aircraft carriers are in the works).
The new Ford class aircraft carriers for all intents and purposes look much like the current Nimitz class. this is an image of the USS Enterprise (CVN 65) (image source: US Navy)
So as China is launching its first, non-operational aircraft carrier, the US Navy is watching with keen interest as the first of its three new Ford class aircraft carriers begins to take shape (due in another 3 years or so). The US currently has around 11 Navy aircraft carriers in service, as well as 8 Wasp class amphibious assault ships used by the Marines.
Brent Rose at Gizmodo gives a rundown on the new Ford class ships, which includes:
3x the (nuclear) output compared to the old Nimitz class aircraft carriers, ready to host whatever advancements occur over the next 50 years (think rail cannons).
Enhanced automation, requiring less sailors to do the same work.
The replacement of steam-actuated catapults with electromagnetic sling-shots for increased reliability and less damage to aircraft airframes.
All optical fibre networking.
Okinotorishima magnified on Google Earth
Everyone knows that China and Japan have issues relating to Japanese imperialism from the first decades of last century. Recently, tensions have come to the surface at the Daihyou (according to the Chinese) or Sendekai (according to the Japanese) islands in light of the Japanese government purchasing the islands from Japanese fisherman, which they claim as territory won during their period of control over China. In a spiraling face-off with only bad outcomes in sight (mostly economic), hundreds of boats from both nations are converging on the uninhabitable islands, but notably, these are not the only physically useless, but geographically important islands they are fighting over.
According to Alicia Wittmeyer at foreignpolicy.com, there is an atoll that China and Japan both are arguing over that is so small (picture above), that Japan has had to spend many millions of dollars physically securing it to ensure the ocean does not swallow it back.
Currently, China is in dispute with the Philippines, Vietnam, Taiwan and Japan over islands/rocks within the seas along its eastern and southern eastern flanks.
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