Complementando a minha anterior intervenção sobre a situação económica da Ucrânia:
Donetsk and Luhansk together are home to 6.5 million people and represent around a third of Ukraine's industrial output. Their declarations create the biggest new self-proclaimed independent states in Europe since Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union itself broke up more than 20 years ago.
Reuters
Luhansk and Donetsk normally account for 16% of Ukraine’s GDP, supply 95% of its coal and produce a big chunk of exports. In September industrial production in Luhansk fell by 85% year-on-year; in Donetsk it fell by 60%.
Economist
A Itália tem um problema enorme:
Italy’s
birth rate has fallen to its lowest level since the foundation of the modern state in 1861, prompting fresh alarm in a society that has been steadily ageing for decades.
The number of births per 1,000 people has
fallen to just 8.4 per cent, down from 38.3 per cent when Italy’s territories and kingdoms were unified a century and a half ago.
Overall, the number of couples choosing not to have children has increased to 40 per cent in the last decade. Italian women have 1.39 children on average, against an EU average of 1.58.
The birth rate decline was blamed on years of economic recession and high unemployment. The birth rate is lowest in the Mezzogiorno, or south of Italy, where the recession has hit hardest. Sardinia, for example, had a birth rate of 7.1 per cent.
Telegraph
Nem a imigração será a salvação tendo em conta as fracas perspetivas de emprego.
Numa sondagem,
84% dos inquiridos americanos acha o EI uma ameaça crítica. Mais até que o russos.
Os americanos querem iniciar mais uma guerra global ao terror. Porque a primeira guerra contra o terror, - depois do 11/9 - como toda a gente consegue ver, correu de forma excecional:
The Islamic State is expanding beyond its base in Syria and Iraq to establish militant affiliates in Afghanistan, Algeria, Egypt and Libya, American intelligence officials assert, raising the prospect of a new global war on terror.
Intelligence officials estimate that the group’s fighters number 20,000 to 31,500 in Syria and Iraq. There are less formal pledges of support from “probably at least a couple hundred extremists” in countries such as Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and Yemen, according to an American counterterrorism official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential information about the group.
There is no indication that the Islamic State controls territory in Afghanistan, but it has signaled its interest in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and has reportedly sent envoys there to recruit.
Similarly, until recently, leaders of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, in Yemen, used nonconfrontational language to mask simmering disagreements with the Islamic State and its head, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. But tensions peaked in November, when a faction of Qaeda fighters there swore loyalty to Mr. Baghdadi.
Any authorization to use American military force against the Islamic State could arguably also cover interventions in Egypt and Libya, where active militant organizations have pledged allegiance to the group and have received its public acknowledgment as “provinces” of the putative caliphate.
WP
Portanto, vão ser executados ataques militares para matar terroristas em países em que não existiam terroristas antes de se ter feito ataques militares para matar terroristas/ditadores.
E ao que parece o
EI está prestes a conquistar mais uma província no Iraque.
Os EUA têm forças especiais em todo o mundo:
During the
fiscal year that ended on September 30, 2014, US Special Operations forces (SOF) deployed to 133 countries—roughly 70 percent of the nations on the planet—according to Lieutenant Colonel Robert Bockholt, a public affairs officer with US Special Operations Command (SOCOM). This capped a three-year span in which the country’s most elite forces were active in more than 150 different countries around the world, conducting missions ranging from kill/capture night raids to training exercises. And this year could be a record-breaker. Only a day before the failed raid that ended Luke Somers life—just 66 days into fiscal 2015—America’s most elite troops had already set foot in 105 nations, approximately 80% of 2014’s total.
TN
E de alguma forma o problema só parece piorar. Anteriormente já escrevi que as agências de (in)segurança (e respetivos governos) são os piores terroristas à face da Terra. Indo aos documentos do Snowden:
A breakdown of US intelligence's multi-billion dollar "black budget" has been revealed in files disclosed by leaker Edward Snowden to the Washington Post.
The CIA's budget is the most expensive, $14.7bn (£9.5bn) out of $52.6bn in total for 16 intelligence agencies, according to the files.
BBC
A CIA estar envolvida no tráfico de drogas não é algo propriamente novo:
Recent news item: The Justice Department is investigating allegations that officers of a special Venezuelan anti-drug unit funded by the CIA smuggled more than 2,000 pounds of cocaine into the United States with the knowledge of CIA officials - despite protests by the Drug Enforcement Administration, the organization responsible for enforcing U.S. drug laws.
That is a huge amount of cocaine. But it was hardly a first for the CIA. The agency has never been above using individuals or organizations with known links to drug trafficking if it thought they could help it further its national security mission.
In Costa Rica, when the war against Nicaragua's Sandinista government was at its peak and cocaine was beginning to pour into the United States, the DEA attaché wanted to place cameras at clandestine airstrips from which he suspected drugs were being flown to the United States. The CIA resident gave him a list of airstrips on which he was not to place cameras. They were the strips into which the CIA was flying arms for the contras. Some were also strips from which the DEA agent suspected drugs were being flown to the United States.
CIA ties to international drug trafficking date to the Korean War. In 1949, two of Chiang Kai-shek's defeated generals, Li Wen Huan and Tuan Shi Wen, marched their Third and Fifth Route armies, with families and livestock, across the mountains to northern Burma. Once installed, the peasant soldiers began cultivating the crop they knew best, the opium poppy.
If the agency never condoned the traffic, it never tried to stop it, either. The CIA did, however, lobby the Eisenhower administration to prevent the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, the DEA's predecessor, from establishing monitoring posts in the area to study the traffic. Today, the Golden Triangle accounts for about half the heroin in circulation in the world.
During the Vietnam War, operations in Laos were largely a CIA responsibility. The agency's surrogate there was a Laotian general, Vang Pao, who commanded Military Region 2 in northern Laos. He enlisted 30,000 Hmong tribesmen in the service of the CIA.
WP
Alegações semelhantes vêm do México:
The US Central Intelligence Agency and other international security forces "don't fight drug traffickers", a spokesman for the Chihuahua state government in northern Mexico has told Al Jazeera, instead "they try to manage the drug trade".
AJ
Por fim, e sem surpresa nenhuma, os narcóticos do Afeganistão podem estar (estão) a financiar a CIA:
Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal
opium trade, gets regular payments from the
Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years, according to current and former American officials.
The C.I.A.’s practices also suggest that the United States is not doing everything in its power to stamp out the lucrative Afghan drug trade, a major source of revenue for the Taliban.
“Hundreds of millions of dollars in drug money are flowing through the southern region, and nothing happens in southern Afghanistan without the regional leadership knowing about it,” a senior American military officer in Kabul said. Like most of the officials in this article, he spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the secrecy of the information.
“If it looks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck,” the American officer said of Mr. Karzai. “Our assumption is that he’s benefiting from the drug trade.”
Counternarcotics officials have repeatedly expressed frustration over the unwillingness of senior policy makers in Washington to take action against Mr. Karzai — or even begin a serious investigation of the allegations against him. In fact, they say that while other Afghans accused of drug involvement are investigated and singled out for raids or even rendition to the United States, Mr. Karzai has seemed immune from similar scrutiny.
Senior Afghan investigators say they know plenty about Mr. Karzai’s involvement in the drug business. In an interview in Kabul this year, a top former Afghan Interior Ministry official familiar with Afghan counternarcotics operations said that a major source of Mr. Karzai’s influence over the drug trade was his control over key bridges crossing the Helmand River on the route between the opium growing regions of Helmand Province and Kandahar.
The former Interior Ministry official said that Mr. Karzai was able to charge huge fees to drug traffickers to allow their drug-laden trucks to cross the bridges.
But the former officials said it was impossible for Afghan counternarcotics officials to investigate Mr. Karzai. “This government has become a factory for the production of Talibs because of corruption and injustice,” the former official said.
Some American counternarcotics officials have said they believe that Mr. Karzai has expanded his influence over the drug trade, thanks in part to American efforts to single out other drug lords.
NYT
Os presidentes vão e vêm mas a estrutura básica dos serviços de informação mantém-se (em tons conspiratórios pode-se chamar o governo paralelo). Esse governo paralelo não dá satisfações a ninguém e auto-financia-se. Portanto, o cultivo do ópio irá continuar a aumentar no Afeganistão. Não há incentivo nenhum para parar. Os
EUA têm 25% da população presidiária do mundo (>2 milhões de pessoas). Mas só têm 5% da população mundial.
Mais de 50% está na prisão por condenações relacionadas com drogas. Desde ao negócio das prisões privadas até às multinacionais que usam o trabalho escravo, há muita gente que beneficia disso (incluindo a CIA que assim tem a liberdade financeira de fazer tudo aquilo que lhe apetece).
