Category Archives: Arsenal Pulse

Brief thoughts and mini-analyses on stories in the news.

Russia & UAE: A big week for women in air and space

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This week saw the 4th ever female cosmonaut go into space and the first ever United Arab Emirates female combat pilot go into action in Syria.

Russia’s Yelena Serova launched into space yesterday aboard a Soyuz flight from Kazakhstan and arrived overnight at the International Space Station. She is the first woman in Russia’s space program to go to space since Yelena V. Kondakova‘s space shuttle flight (STS-84, Atlantis) in May 1997, which went to the Mir station.

Kondakova, now a member of the Russian Duma (parliament) for the ruling party, went to space twice during her career as a cosmonaut, but was actually only the 3rd ever Soviet or Russian female cosmonaut — making Serova the 4th in the entire program’s history. The Soviet Union, notably, sent a woman into space two decades before the U.S. did the same, but failed to capitalize on that milestone (not even sending its second until 19 years later). This stands in contrast with the opportunities opened to many women in NASA and space programs around the world since then.

In another part of the world, the United Arab Emirates announced on U.S. television that their pioneering female combat pilot, Major Mariam Al Mansouri, led the UAE’s airstrikes on ISIS positions in Syria, as part of the US-led coalition:

[UAE Ambassador to the US] Al Otaiba also confirmed that Major Mariam Al Mansouri, 35, an F-16 pilot, will lead the air strike missions on ISIL.

“I can officially confirm that the UAE strike mission on Monday night was led by female fighter pilot Mariam Al Mansouri,” he said.

“She is a fully qualified, highly trained, combat-ready pilot and she is on a mission.”
[…]
Maj Al Mansouri has an undergraduate degree in English literature and is the first woman to join the Khalifa bin Zayed Air College, graduating in 2008.

 
She is expected to continue commanding the UAE’s missions in Syria in the coming days and weeks.

Ambassador Al Otaiba cited her as a positive example of how Arab states and Muslim societies can be more moderate and open than the stereotype, while retaining their identities. The example was offered in contrast to both ISIS and some of the Emirates’ neighboring countries. You can read more about Major Al Mansouri and her path to the skies here.

Cosmonaut Yelena Serova (via NASA/Wikimedia) and Maj. Mariam al-Mansouri (via WAM/The National)

Cosmonaut Yelena Serova (via NASA/Wikimedia) and Maj. Mariam al-Mansouri (via WAM/The National)

Selected highlights (lowlights?) from the new Pew religion poll

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The new huge Pew Form report on politics and religion in America is out now. It’s one of the most discouraging I can remember in the past 5 years. The proportion of people who think there should be more religion in politics is up, the proportion who support same-sex marriage has leveled or dropped, the proportion who think being gay is a sin is up, and the Christian right is still agitating for being allowed more direct political involvement by their churches. The more things don’t go their way, the more they dig in.

That’s the tip of the iceberg, but there’s a lot more in the report. The only good sign I’ve picked out of the report so far is that most Democratic voters polled said the party was representing their social views well. While it wasn’t necessarily overwhelmingly true on specific issues, it seems to be more true than before.

I suspect that’s a result of a combination of some non-aligned (i.e. socially conservative) Democratic voters dropping out of the party finally and the expulsion or reduced visibility of a number of anti-gay and anti-abortion Democratic candidates and elected officials in recent years — an important trend that I looked at in a recent post. Meanwhile, the more socially liberal or socially centrist Democrats in office have begun speaking more loudly and confidently in favor of gay rights and reproductive freedom. This whole process is ongoing, but it’s helping socially liberal base Democrats not feel alienated by loud and offensive conservative Democratic officeholders and underrepresented by those who agree with them.

Climate policy: Disengage “stakeholders”?

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Perhaps there has been too much engaging of certain uncooperative and undermining stakeholders in the climate change policy discussions. As one of the world’s largest climate action protests ever unfolded this weekend, Anna Lappé makes that case in a new Al Jazeera America op-ed entitled “What climate activists can learn from the fight against Big Tobacco”:

Progress has been stalled in part because the biggest polluters in the world — those oil and gas companies responsible for the lion’s share of emissions, for example — have been given a seat at the negotiating table, treated as partners and stakeholders at the annual global meetings called the Conference of Parties, or COP. Over the years, these COPs have featured industry-sponsored pavilions, dinners and breakaway meetings. And companies have been granted official observer status through their industry trade associations, which are considered nongovernmental organizations under current climate meeting rules. Some have even attended as official members of country delegations. (For instance, a representative from Shell joined the Nigerian delegation to COP16 in 2010 and Brazil’s to COP14 in 2008.)

As climate activists call for governments to take real action on climate, the decades-long fight against Big Tobacco — specifically, how public health advocates successfully kept companies away from the negotiating table — holds powerful lessons for the role industries should have in these key talks.

 
It would be one thing if the oil and gas companies were actively interested in pursuing new energy strategies or diversifying their future plans into new and cleaner areas, but as she notes they are spending a lot of money trying to undermine the case that new regulations or laws are even needed in the first place. And in that regard they are probably forfeiting their right to have a seat at the table as stakeholders.

Incidentally, that mention of the Shell rep serving on the delegation from Nigeria in 2008 and 2010 is very unsurprising. As I explored in an article in January 2011, entitled “The Nigerian Republic of Royal Dutch Shell”, on the Nigeria-specific revelations from the leaked diplomatic cables a few years ago:

Royal Dutch Shell has essentially become, according to the company itself, the industrial octopus inside Nigeria’s government, even in the “democratic” era…

The ambassador reported: “She [Ann Pickard, then Shell’s vice-president for sub-Saharan Africa] said the GON [government of Nigeria] had forgotten that Shell had seconded people to all the relevant ministries and that Shell consequently had access to everything that was being done in those ministries.”

 
Until now, most of the discussions have included oil and gas lobby folks on the theory that their “buy-in” would be critical to producing actionable plans for dealing with climate change. But what if they just refuse to buy-in? It should be clear after more than two decades of efforts that they aren’t really interested in taking the transformative steps necessary to bring their businesses into the future. At this point, they have too much influence at the table, rather than not enough. The fight against Big Tobacco is probably a useful analogy.

Dark clouds of smoke and fire emerge as oil burns during a controlled fire in the Gulf of Mexico, May 6, 2010. The U.S. Coast Guard, working with BP, local residents and other federal agencies, conducted the burn to help prevent the spread of oil following the explosion on Deepwater Horizon, an offshore drilling unit. (Credit: US Navy via Wikimedia)

Dark clouds of smoke and fire emerge as oil burns during a controlled fire in the Gulf of Mexico, May 6, 2010. The U.S. Coast Guard, working with BP, local residents and other federal agencies, conducted the burn to help prevent the spread of oil following the explosion on Deepwater Horizon, an offshore drilling unit. (Credit: US Navy via Wikimedia)

What have we learned so far from Wisconsin’s police shootings law?

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According to an article from Al Jazeera America, Wisconsin’s groundbreaking law on investigations of shooting deaths by police has not (so far) resulted in any cops facing consequences, but it has revealed a lot more information on cases that previously would have remained shrouded in mystery.

So far this year, law enforcement in the state has shot and killed 6 people. Not a big pool of data, but still worth examining. Of those 6 cases, 2 were suicidal (so, not a helpful response by police), 1 was allegedly attempting to burn down the house of his ex-girlfriend’s new boyfriend (a sheriff’s deputy), and 3 were schizophrenic (but not necessarily having an episode). At least 3 of the victims were already known to the specific law enforcement members involved in the shootings.

This is, of course, not really a revelation — mentally ill or developmentally challenged civilians in the United States have long been the victims of fatal incidents with the police — but it provides more information and case studies that should be used to advocate for increased training for how police can and should respond to people with serious mental health issues or other mental difficulties, to avoid chaotic responses that end in tragedy.

Ongoing tolls of past US air campaigns: Laos

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As we approach another American bombardment, expanding from Iraq into Syria — the latest in a history spanning more than two centuries — it’s important to remember and reflect upon the continuing casualties of past cross-border bombardments by United States forces.

As the Laotian Civil War (1953-1975) spiraled out of control by the late 1960s and came to involve everyone in the region and the United States, the government and military of Laos attempted to drop out of involvement in the Vietnam War and wider Indochina struggle. But the North Vietnamese Army, opposed by the United States, continued to maintain a presence there and was using the country as a supply line to communist rebels in South Vietnam.

In response, from about 1969 to 1973, the United States military dropped 260 million cluster bomblets on the country a little over forty years ago. As many as 80 million of these munitions remain unexploded and potentially live, across the Laotian countryside, which is one reason why Laos has lagged so far behind the region in economic development. (It’s hard to expand or upgrade farms, let alone build infrastructure and communities when there are armed bombs everywhere, going off unexpectedly all the time). 20,000 people have been killed or injured in Laos by unexploded cluster bomblets since the end of the cluster bombing campaign in the early 1970s. Al-Jazeera recently reported on some of the local teams trying to clear areas of bombs.

Caption: Unexploded cluster sub-munition, probably a BLU-26 type. Plain of Jars, Laos. | Credit: Seabifar - Wikimedia

Caption: Unexploded cluster sub-munition, probably a BLU-26 type. Plain of Jars, Laos. | Credit: Seabifar – Wikimedia

Ferguson prosecution now some kind of Agatha Christie choose-your-own-adventure

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Dana Milbank examines whether a grand jury might refuse to indict Officer Wilson in Mike Brown’s shooting death in Ferguson, Missouri last month. It doesn’t look good, in large part because grand jurors are essentially now being asked to become detectives in a real-life crime novel:

October is when a grand jury is expected to decide whether to indict the white police officer, Darren Wilson, who killed an unarmed black teenager by firing at least six bullets into him. It’s a good bet the grand jurors won’t charge him, because all signs indicate that the St. Louis County prosecutor, Robert McCulloch, doesn’t want them to.

The latest evidence that the fix is in came this week from The Post’s Kimberly Kindy and Carol Leonnig, who discovered that McCulloch’s office has declined so far to recommend any charges to the grand jury. Instead, McCulloch’s prosecutors handling the case are taking the highly unusual course of dumping all evidence on the jurors and leaving them to make sense of it.

McCulloch’s office claims that this is a way to give more authority to the grand jurors, but it looks more like a way to avoid charging Wilson at all — and to use the grand jury as cover for the outrage that will ensue. It is often said that a grand jury will indict a ham sandwich if a prosecutor asks it to. But the opposite is also true. A grand jury is less likely to deliver an indictment — even a much deserved one — if a prosecutor doesn’t ask for it.

 
I’m sorry — are we basically now relying on 12 randos who didn’t find a way to get out of jury duty to pore over the evidence on their own, without help from the experts, and then decide if it’s safe to ask another jury if it was, in fact, “Officer Wilson in the Conservatory with the Candlestick”?

Apparently, McCulloch, the St. Louis County prosecutor, has had a lot of family members on police forces (including a father who was killed in the line of duty) and has (coincidentally?) declined to prosecute any of a dozen police officers involved in questionable fatal shootings in his jurisdiction over the twenty years he has been in the office. He has actually excused some pretty horrific wrongful shooting deaths by police, as Milbank reports.

Nusra Front releases Fiji peacekeepers held in Syria

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Qatar has “negotiated” (paid the ransom?) for the release of 45 Fijian UN peacekeepers deployed in Golan Heights being held by Nusra Front, Syria’s Al Qaeda branch.

Oddly, one of the (presumably unmet) demands reported by the Fijian troops was that Nusra Front wants to be de-listed as a terrorist organization…which, you know, is a tough sell when you’ve just kidnapped United Nations troops and held them for ransom. Nusra Front is a member of the disparate assembly of Sunni Arab rebel forces opposing both ISIS and Bashar al-Assad in Syria’s three-way civil war. They are likely to benefit inadvertently from President Obama’s and Congress’s proposed increase of weapons and funding for anti-ISIS/anti-Assad forces.

In related news, Philippines peacekeepers who had refused to surrender at two separate locations on the same day the Fijian troops were captured managed to break out successfully, with some help from Irish peacekeepers. The UN forces are stationed permanently in Golan Heights, between the Israeli-occupied zone and the Syrian zone, in an arrangement implemented in 1974. The increasing active danger due to the Syrian civil war, including these hostage episodes, has prompted a number of peacekeeper-supplying nations to withdraw or consider withdrawing their troops from Golan Heights.

Still image from a Nusra Front video of Fijian peacekeeper hostages shortly before their release.

Still image from a Nusra Front video of Fijian peacekeeper hostages shortly before their release.