Pentagon Plans to Draft Robot Army The military plans to invest tens of billions of dollars in automated armed forces. The costs of that transformation will help drive the Defense Department's budget up almost 20 percent, from a requested $419.3 billion for next year to $502.3 billion in 2010, excluding the costs of war. The annual costs of buying new weapons is scheduled to rise 52 percent, from $78 billion to $118.6 billion. "They don't get hungry," said Gordon Johnson of the Joint Forces Command at the Pentagon. "They're not afraid. They don't forget their orders. They don't care if the guy next to them has just been shot. Will they do a better job than humans? Yes." Robots in battle, as envisioned by their builders, may look and move like humans or hummingbirds, tractors or tanks, cockroaches or crickets. With the development of nanotechnology they may become swarms of "smart dust." The Pentagon intends for robots to haul munitions, gather intelligence, search buildings or blow them up. "The lawyers tell me there are no prohibitions against robots making life-or-death decisions," said Mr. Johnson, who leads robotics efforts at the Joint Forces Command research center in Suffolk, Va. "I have been asked what happens if the robot destroys a school bus rather than a tank parked nearby. We will not entrust a robot with that decision until we are confident they can make it." The Pentagon predicts that robots will be a major fighting force in the American military in less than a decade. New Model Army Soldier Rolls Closer to Battle Published: February 16, 2005 Hunting for guerillas, handling roadside bombs, crawling across the caves and crumbling towns of Afghanistan and Iraq; all of that was just a start. Now, the Army is prepping its squad of robotic vehicles for a new set of assignments. And this time, they'll be carrying guns ... *More Robot Grunts Ready for Duty "This opens up great vistas, some quite pleasant, others quite nightmarish. On the one hand, this could make our flesh-and-blood soldiers so hard to get to that traditional war -- a match of relatively evenly matched peers -- could become a thing of the past," he said. "But this might also rob us of our humanity. We could be the ones that wind up looking like Terminators, in the world's eyes." reference ... *Robot Sharpshooter Bound For Iraq If battle bots ever do take on the bulk of frontline fighting, the results could transform military strategy. *Battle bot: the future of war? A Future Horizons' report contends that "the electronics industry is on the cusp of a robotics wave, a period in which applications are aimed at human labour saving and extending human skills. It states that the market need, technology and economical justification have coincided to create a new electro mechanical robot system." And here is the key prediction: "By 2010 the $59.3bn worldwide robotic market will equate to 55.5 million units made up of domestic robots accounting for 39 million units; domestic intelligent service robots accounting for 10.5 million units; professional intelligent service robots accounting for 5.8 million units; and accounting for heavy industrial robots." ... *A robot in every home by 2010 Settle on your jetpack, hitch up your blaster, and tune in the videotron as we tour Future Past! *Tales of Future Past Have you ever met a real robot? You might have if you work in a factory, nuclear power plant or military facility where people are not allowed to go. Nevertheless, robots are turning up in new places every day. Chances are good that you will meet one of them sometime soon ... *Robot Report *A New Model Army Soldier In future wars, robots may drop from the sky by the hundreds from unmanned aircraft, swarming like giant insects over battlefields in coordinated, terrifying assaults. Future wars could be fought by robots commanded by humans. We could withdraw from war completely and let robots shoot it out. The SWORDS, short for Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detection Systems, will be the first armed robotic vehicles to see combat, years ahead of the larger Future Combat System vehicles currently under development by big defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics Corp ... *Army Readies Robot Soldier for Iraq There are more than 100 Talon Robots at work in Iraq and Afghanistan ... *Talon Military Robot One measure of how effective battlefield robots have become, says a top Pentagon robotics official, is that the enemy has begun to target them ... *Battlefield robots saving lives The U.S. military has been developing robotic systems for all sorts of jobs for years now. reference ... *How Military Robots Work Other references ... *Military Robots the Next Step *Robot Soldiers *Looking to Iraq, Military Robots *Rugged Robots Help Troops Stumble It!

British Victory at Trafalgar over Napoleon Established British Control of the High Seas The British Isles are marking the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar in a host of different ways, from a new coin to new gates; exhibitions to full-scale international festivals. More than 250,000 people are expected at Portsmouth's Historic Dockyard over the next few days for the International Festival of the Sea. Thousands of spectators braved wet weather to watch a Battle of Trafalgar re-enactment off Portsmouth - the climax of bicentenary celebrations .... *Fleet gathers for Trafalgar celebrations (click the Video Link) Footage of the Queens tour of Suffolk ... *Audio and video of the Queen in Suffolk *Thousands see Trafalgar battle (click the Video link) *France accepts Trafalgar legacy Stumble It!

Ethnic Cleansing Continued .... From the former Yugoslavia in the West, to Distant Russian Asia, to Pakistan, India, South East Asia, to Indonesia and beyond, to Northern and Central, and Eastern Africa; an unrelenting War of Ethnic Cleansing has begun and is continuing, much of it unreported. The East African nation of Ethiopia is the latest US Terror War ally to turn its guns on indigenous peoples in a zone coveted by corporate interests for its natural resources. Four months after armed forces of the ruling Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Defense Front (EPRDF) and settlers from the Ethiopian highlands initiated a campaign of massacres, repression and mass rape deliberately targeting the Anuak minority of Ethiopia's southwest, atrocities and killings continue--and the situation remains in whiteout by the Western media. *Anatomy of a War Crime Video references ... *ETHNIC CLEANSING IN ETHIOPIA *ANOTHER SECRET WAR FOR OIL? *Ongoing Crimes in Darfur Video From the bus Hindus were told to get down taken to a lonely place then tortured and killed. Even children, women and old men were not spared. Their only crime was that they were born Hindus. references ... Hindu minorities are subjected to great cruelties and discrimination. The current armed secessionist movement in Kashmir mostly derives its inspiration from these people. *Ethnic Cleansing of Kasmiri Pandits Videos *Kashmir Ethnic Cleansing *Kashmir Photo Gallery *War Crimes & Other Misdemeanors Islamic Fundamentalist Nazis After North Korea, what foreign crisis poses the greatest danger to the United States? It's surely not Bosnia, Haiti, or Rwanda. My candidate is Algeria. Algeria may lack the drama of nuclear weapons, besieged cities, or masses of starving refugees, and so we tend not to pay much attention to that country of 28 million Muslims on the southern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. But what happens there soon may have vast implications for Europe and the Middle East, two regions of central importance to Americans. references ... *Algerian Time Bomb Why It Matters to Us Arab World It is doubtful whether economic hardship, corruption and favoritism are the main causes of Islamic fundamentalism. Primarily, it is a reaction to attempts to introduce Western values in Moslem countries. CAIRO (Reuters) - In a long-awaited report contested by theUnited States and Egypt, Arab intellectuals and reformers saidthey saw no significant advances toward democracy in the Arabworld in the year after October 2003. reference ... *Arab Report Sees Little Reform, Faults U.S. Action For the past 10 years, Algeria has been wracked by a murderous spate of blood-letting by diehard Moslem fundamentalist guerrillas, directed mainly at the secular regime and costing thousands of civilian lives. The wave of violence began after January 1992, when the army stopped a general election a Moslem fundamentalist party was poised to win. According to official figures it has since claimed more than 100,000 lives. An unofficial toll based on press reports and official statements runs to 150,000 dead. Algeria achieved independence 40 years ago after a violent insurrection against French rule between 1954 and 1962. Between 200,000 and 400,000 lives were lost in the war, but the National Liberation Front (FLN), which fought French rule and was for years after independence the country's only political party, puts the figure at some 1.5 million. ... The assailants broke into seven houses and cut up 15 people, including seven women and three children, with a chainsaw. reference ... *Algerians killed in weekend massacres Serbs fleeing Kosovo The following is a selection of texts on Sarajevo and Sarajevans, a city and people that endured the longest siege in modern military history .... *Sarajevo Notes The Jihad in Afghanistan drew volunteers from all over the Muslim world. With American backing, the Mujahidin vanquished the Soviet Army. However, their Jihad did not stop there. Russia's political and military elite are systematically wiping Chechnya off the map.The Russian military has given people remaining in Grozny until Saturday to leave. reference ... *Chechnya War Photo Gallery *Chechnya:The endless war Then the Russian military warn all those remaining will be treated as "enemy targets" and the city systematically destroyed. Notwithstanding the growing number of refugees fleeing Chechnya (over 260,000 in neighbouring Ingushetia alone) references ... *Chechen War-Horror in Grozny *a Chechen militiaman tells his story Indonesia .... As ethnic violence flares in islands where Muslims and Christians have cohabited for centuries, many fear that the world’s fourth most populous country is in danger of dissolving into chaos. reference ... *Falling Apart? A welter of Islamist extremist groupings operate in the Indonesian archipelago of some 17,000 islands. *Indonesia's Dirty Little Holy War Huge domestic and foreign debt, compound the problems of strengthening Islamist fundamentalist movements in the world’s largest population of Muslims, who comprise 88 per cent of Indonesia’s 230 million people. reference ... *Indonesia: Hardening Stance "The nightmare scenario is that Indonesia goes up in flames and fragments like Yugoslavia," says one western diplomat in Jakarta. "If the world thought Yugoslavia was a problem, they haven’t seen anything yet," adds another. *Insults of the Obscene *FREE PALESTINE *Palestinian Territories *Ethnic Cleansing Holy Land Style *From Refugee to American Immigrant Stumble It!

EU, US Rally World Backing To Stabilise Iraq

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Luxembourg Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn and Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari. (Reuters ) The United States and the European Union have rallied global support for Iraq's quest for post-war recovery and pressed Baghdad to ensure that minority Sunni Arabs helped shape the country's future. reference .... *EU, US rally world backing to stabilise Iraq Stumble It!

Uncle Sam Does Not Want You: the New Robot Army

Pentagon Plans to Draft Robot Army The military plans to invest tens of billions of dollars in automated armed forces. The costs of that transformation will help drive the Defense Department's budget up almost 20 percent, from a requested $419.3 billion for next year to $502.3 billion in 2010, excluding the costs of war. The annual costs of buying new weapons is scheduled to rise 52 percent, from $78 billion to $118.6 billion. "They don't get hungry," said Gordon Johnson of the Joint Forces Command at the Pentagon. "They're not afraid. They don't forget their orders. They don't care if the guy next to them has just been shot. Will they do a better job than humans? Yes." Robots in battle, as envisioned by their builders, may look and move like humans or hummingbirds, tractors or tanks, cockroaches or crickets. With the development of nanotechnology they may become swarms of "smart dust." The Pentagon intends for robots to haul munitions, gather intelligence, search buildings or blow them up. "The lawyers tell me there are no prohibitions against robots making life-or-death decisions," said Mr. Johnson, who leads robotics efforts at the Joint Forces Command research center in Suffolk, Va. "I have been asked what happens if the robot destroys a school bus rather than a tank parked nearby. We will not entrust a robot with that decision until we are confident they can make it." The Pentagon predicts that robots will be a major fighting force in the American military in less than a decade. New Model Army Soldier Rolls Closer to Battle Published: February 16, 2005 Hunting for guerillas, handling roadside bombs, crawling across the caves and crumbling towns of Afghanistan and Iraq; all of that was just a start. Now, the Army is prepping its squad of robotic vehicles for a new set of assignments. And this time, they'll be carrying guns ... *More Robot Grunts Ready for Duty "This opens up great vistas, some quite pleasant, others quite nightmarish. On the one hand, this could make our flesh-and-blood soldiers so hard to get to that traditional war -- a match of relatively evenly matched peers -- could become a thing of the past," he said. "But this might also rob us of our humanity. We could be the ones that wind up looking like Terminators, in the world's eyes." reference ... *Robot Sharpshooter Bound For Iraq If battle bots ever do take on the bulk of frontline fighting, the results could transform military strategy. *Battle bot: the future of war? A Future Horizons' report contends that "the electronics industry is on the cusp of a robotics wave, a period in which applications are aimed at human labour saving and extending human skills. It states that the market need, technology and economical justification have coincided to create a new electro mechanical robot system." And here is the key prediction: "By 2010 the $59.3bn worldwide robotic market will equate to 55.5 million units made up of domestic robots accounting for 39 million units; domestic intelligent service robots accounting for 10.5 million units; professional intelligent service robots accounting for 5.8 million units; and accounting for heavy industrial robots." ... *A robot in every home by 2010 Settle on your jetpack, hitch up your blaster, and tune in the videotron as we tour Future Past! *Tales of Future Past Have you ever met a real robot? You might have if you work in a factory, nuclear power plant or military facility where people are not allowed to go. Nevertheless, robots are turning up in new places every day. Chances are good that you will meet one of them sometime soon ... *Robot Report *A New Model Army Soldier In future wars, robots may drop from the sky by the hundreds from unmanned aircraft, swarming like giant insects over battlefields in coordinated, terrifying assaults. Future wars could be fought by robots commanded by humans. We could withdraw from war completely and let robots shoot it out. The SWORDS, short for Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detection Systems, will be the first armed robotic vehicles to see combat, years ahead of the larger Future Combat System vehicles currently under development by big defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics Corp ... *Army Readies Robot Soldier for Iraq There are more than 100 Talon Robots at work in Iraq and Afghanistan ... *Talon Military Robot One measure of how effective battlefield robots have become, says a top Pentagon robotics official, is that the enemy has begun to target them ... *Battlefield robots saving lives The U.S. military has been developing robotic systems for all sorts of jobs for years now. reference ... *How Military Robots Work Other references ... *Military Robots the Next Step *Robot Soldiers *Looking to Iraq, Military Robots *Rugged Robots Help Troops

Videos: June 28th Battle of Trafalgar Re-enactment

British Victory at Trafalgar over Napoleon Established British Control of the High Seas The British Isles are marking the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar in a host of different ways, from a new coin to new gates; exhibitions to full-scale international festivals. More than 250,000 people are expected at Portsmouth's Historic Dockyard over the next few days for the International Festival of the Sea. Thousands of spectators braved wet weather to watch a Battle of Trafalgar re-enactment off Portsmouth - the climax of bicentenary celebrations .... *Fleet gathers for Trafalgar celebrations (click the Video Link) Footage of the Queens tour of Suffolk ... *Audio and video of the Queen in Suffolk *Thousands see Trafalgar battle (click the Video link) *France accepts Trafalgar legacy

the Unreported Wars of Ethnic Cleansing

Ethnic Cleansing Continued .... From the former Yugoslavia in the West, to Distant Russian Asia, to Pakistan, India, South East Asia, to Indonesia and beyond, to Northern and Central, and Eastern Africa; an unrelenting War of Ethnic Cleansing has begun and is continuing, much of it unreported. The East African nation of Ethiopia is the latest US Terror War ally to turn its guns on indigenous peoples in a zone coveted by corporate interests for its natural resources. Four months after armed forces of the ruling Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Defense Front (EPRDF) and settlers from the Ethiopian highlands initiated a campaign of massacres, repression and mass rape deliberately targeting the Anuak minority of Ethiopia's southwest, atrocities and killings continue--and the situation remains in whiteout by the Western media. *Anatomy of a War Crime Video references ... *ETHNIC CLEANSING IN ETHIOPIA *ANOTHER SECRET WAR FOR OIL? *Ongoing Crimes in Darfur Video From the bus Hindus were told to get down taken to a lonely place then tortured and killed. Even children, women and old men were not spared. Their only crime was that they were born Hindus. references ... Hindu minorities are subjected to great cruelties and discrimination. The current armed secessionist movement in Kashmir mostly derives its inspiration from these people. *Ethnic Cleansing of Kasmiri Pandits Videos *Kashmir Ethnic Cleansing *Kashmir Photo Gallery *War Crimes & Other Misdemeanors Islamic Fundamentalist Nazis After North Korea, what foreign crisis poses the greatest danger to the United States? It's surely not Bosnia, Haiti, or Rwanda. My candidate is Algeria. Algeria may lack the drama of nuclear weapons, besieged cities, or masses of starving refugees, and so we tend not to pay much attention to that country of 28 million Muslims on the southern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. But what happens there soon may have vast implications for Europe and the Middle East, two regions of central importance to Americans. references ... *Algerian Time Bomb Why It Matters to Us Arab World It is doubtful whether economic hardship, corruption and favoritism are the main causes of Islamic fundamentalism. Primarily, it is a reaction to attempts to introduce Western values in Moslem countries. CAIRO (Reuters) - In a long-awaited report contested by theUnited States and Egypt, Arab intellectuals and reformers saidthey saw no significant advances toward democracy in the Arabworld in the year after October 2003. reference ... *Arab Report Sees Little Reform, Faults U.S. Action For the past 10 years, Algeria has been wracked by a murderous spate of blood-letting by diehard Moslem fundamentalist guerrillas, directed mainly at the secular regime and costing thousands of civilian lives. The wave of violence began after January 1992, when the army stopped a general election a Moslem fundamentalist party was poised to win. According to official figures it has since claimed more than 100,000 lives. An unofficial toll based on press reports and official statements runs to 150,000 dead. Algeria achieved independence 40 years ago after a violent insurrection against French rule between 1954 and 1962. Between 200,000 and 400,000 lives were lost in the war, but the National Liberation Front (FLN), which fought French rule and was for years after independence the country's only political party, puts the figure at some 1.5 million. ... The assailants broke into seven houses and cut up 15 people, including seven women and three children, with a chainsaw. reference ... *Algerians killed in weekend massacres Serbs fleeing Kosovo The following is a selection of texts on Sarajevo and Sarajevans, a city and people that endured the longest siege in modern military history .... *Sarajevo Notes The Jihad in Afghanistan drew volunteers from all over the Muslim world. With American backing, the Mujahidin vanquished the Soviet Army. However, their Jihad did not stop there. Russia's political and military elite are systematically wiping Chechnya off the map.The Russian military has given people remaining in Grozny until Saturday to leave. reference ... *Chechnya War Photo Gallery *Chechnya:The endless war Then the Russian military warn all those remaining will be treated as "enemy targets" and the city systematically destroyed. Notwithstanding the growing number of refugees fleeing Chechnya (over 260,000 in neighbouring Ingushetia alone) references ... *Chechen War-Horror in Grozny *a Chechen militiaman tells his story Indonesia .... As ethnic violence flares in islands where Muslims and Christians have cohabited for centuries, many fear that the world’s fourth most populous country is in danger of dissolving into chaos. reference ... *Falling Apart? A welter of Islamist extremist groupings operate in the Indonesian archipelago of some 17,000 islands. *Indonesia's Dirty Little Holy War Huge domestic and foreign debt, compound the problems of strengthening Islamist fundamentalist movements in the world’s largest population of Muslims, who comprise 88 per cent of Indonesia’s 230 million people. reference ... *Indonesia: Hardening Stance "The nightmare scenario is that Indonesia goes up in flames and fragments like Yugoslavia," says one western diplomat in Jakarta. "If the world thought Yugoslavia was a problem, they haven’t seen anything yet," adds another. *Insults of the Obscene *FREE PALESTINE *Palestinian Territories *Ethnic Cleansing Holy Land Style *From Refugee to American Immigrant

EU, US Rally World Backing To Stabilise Iraq

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Luxembourg Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn and Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari. (Reuters ) The United States and the European Union have rallied global support for Iraq's quest for post-war recovery and pressed Baghdad to ensure that minority Sunni Arabs helped shape the country's future. reference .... *EU, US rally world backing to stabilise Iraq