Progress Slow but Encouraging
Progress toward enabling manned and unmanned aircraft to share common airspace slow but encouraging
Posted by John Keller
MUNICH, Germany, 21 March 2012. Transforming the world’s air traffic control (ATC) systems to accommodate commercial and military aircraft, as well as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is proceeding, but is proving to be difficult, says the military representative to the European air traffic management (ATM) authority EUROCONTROL.
Progress to integrating manned and unmanned aircraft in shared airspace has been slow, and predictions about when manned and unmanned aircraft integration may occur have been unreliable, says Brig Gen. Hans-Georg Schmidt, vice commander of the 1st German Air Division, and the elected chairman of the Military Air Traffic Management Board of EUROCONTROL.
Schmidt made his comments today at the Avionics Europe 2012 conference and trade show in Munich, Germany, sponsored by Avionics Intelligence and PennWell.
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The Never Ending Tide of Human Smuggling
2005 Raids by police in the United Kingdom, Italy, France, Greece and Turkey have resulted in the smashing of an international people smuggling ring that made million of euros trafficking people from the Middle East. Criminal groups in the United Kingdom, Greece, Norway, Sweden, Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan were involved in the ring that smuggled most of the migrants in boats.
Immigrants and their families, were forced to pay huge sums to get to Europe, or, in rare cases, North America.
The network, set up five years ago and run by an Iraqi Kurd, 30-year-old Ali Ako – nicknamed Arsalan – was allegedly managed from Rome.
The three-year operation netted 53 alleged smugglers. Paris prosecutor Jean-Claude Marin said 22 of them were in France, 18 in Italy, seven in Britain, three in Turkey and three in Greece.
It was “the biggest-ever simultaneous operation ever conducted on an international level” by agencies tackling people-smuggling, Mr Marin said.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4530970.stm
2011 Still trying to stem the tide of illegal immigration, Italian authorities have recently broken up an Afghan-people-smuggling ring. Arrested in this case were 26 alleged smugglers in Italy. Further arrests in France and Germany are expected.
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We Worked for Years to Wrest the Land of Israel from the Arabs
Image by followersoftheway via Flickr
“We hereby reply that it is prohibited by the Torah to sell a house or a field in the land of Israel to a gentile.”
These were the direct quotes of two of the 300 signatories of a religious ruling prohibiting the rental or sale of property to non-Jews. Other rabbis in Israel stated they signed this ruling as a matter of national security. Rumors are that Arab governments are financing efforts to buy property, Jewish property that is, in northern Israel.
The ruling was first issued by Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu, the chief rabbi of Safed, a city in northern Israel which has seen a steady increase in the number of Arab students coming to study at the local college. The ruling cites Maimonides, and says there is a danger of intermarriage posed by selling land to non-Jews. It also cites the sale could have an adverse effect on property values and it instructs Jews to ostracize and boycott those Jews who sell or rent land to gentiles.
This controversial ruling has rankled Israelis and has been denounced by two of the country’s chief rabbis, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein.
Also opposing this “purification of the race ruling” is the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial calling the ruling “a severe blow to the values of our lives as Jews.”
I find it scary that the rise of nationalist and religious parties dominated by ultra-orthodox sects, who have no exposure to the secular world, will lead Israel towards a future that is more similar to that which many escaped from Germany.
Posted by nycnyc at 6:14 PM 
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