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The Duke of York has denied accusations by Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who says as a teenager she was recruited by Jeffrey Epstein and forced to have sex with the prince and other powerful men.
August 28, 2019Read More
(Bloomberg) — Follow @Brexit, sign up to our Brexit Bulletin, and tell us your Brexit story. Prime Minister Boris Johnson asked Queen Elizabeth II to suspend the U.K. Parliament from mid-September to mid-October — a move that could hamper lawmakers’ …
August 28, 2019Read More
Prime Minister Boris Johnson will suspend Britain’s parliament for more than a month before Brexit, enraging opponents and raising the stakes in the country’s most serious political crisis in decades. Cheered on by U.S President Donald Trump, Johnson …
August 28, 2019Read More
(Bloomberg) — Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani will meet Shinzo Abe, the prime minister of Japan, on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York next month, Iran’s state-run Islamic Republic News Agency reported, citing Japan’s For…
August 28, 2019Read More
It’s either a badge of honor or a countdown to war.Iran’s arsenal of weaponry now adorns a deck of U.S. Army playing cards.Iran finds itself in august company. The Army already has decks of cards for Russian and Chinese weapons. And then there was the …
August 28, 2019Read More
Donald Trump has told officials in his administration he will pardon them if they have to break laws to get his US-Mexico border wall completed in time for the 2020 election, according to reports on Tuesday night.Deutsche Bank has meanwhile revealed it…
August 28, 2019Read More
A combination of far-reaching and short-term policy changes can address this challenge.The recent oil tanker attacks in the Gulf of Oman reinforce the need to reestablish a highly visible U.S. naval deterrent in the Middle East. For eight months last year, no aircraft carrier strike group plied the region, the longest such interruption this millennium. With the United States needing a more robust posture against Iran and confronting renewed challenges in Asia and Europe, several immediate measures and concerted longer-term efforts are critical to ensure America has the carriers it needs.The requirement to maintain carrier presence in the Middle East is a critical part of a broader national security strategy, in which U.S. global security interests necessitate a worldwide force presence. Indeed, the Navy’s mission demands remain as high as those of the Cold War, calling on ships to be everywhere seemingly at once, but today’s fleet is less than half the size it was 30 years ago.During the Obama administration, a “rebalance” supposedly allowed the Pentagon to focus on Asia and Europe while washing its hands of the Middle East. In reality, we never effectively rebalanced forces in the Indo-Pacific, and the situation on the ground forced us to remain deeply involved in the Middle East. Now with a growing Iranian threat, it would be imprudent to suddenly abandon the region, even as we face renewed challenges in the Pacific, Atlantic and Mediterranean.(This first appeared in June 2019.)Indeed, Iran’s threat to the region continues growing as its recent attacks against oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman demonstrate. Its reliance on violent sectarianism helps fuel Sunni extremist groups like ISIS. This also places Tehran’s proxies on the borders of key U.S. allies. Beginning next year, Tehran can start upgrading its conventional and missile arsenals as U.N. arms embargoes expire. It is also threatening to resume progress toward nuclear weapons.The Trump Administration is pursuing robust sanctions, but these alone are likely insufficient to prevent Tehran’s aggression and reassure our regional allies.Credible forward deployed military capability – like a carrier strike group – provides real options for American policymakers. Last month’s intelligence suggesting Iran was ready to move against U.S. interests in the Middle East demonstrates how the absence of such forces could embolden Iran. Responding to this intelligence, the prompt movement of the Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group into the region has dramatically increased the U.S. force posture. Effective deterrence of Iran will require persistent, visible, and credible military capability.A combination of far-reaching and short-term policy changes can address this challenge.Most fundamentally, systemic shortcomings in U.S. defense spending and readiness undermine our deterrence and increase risks of military conflict, as underscored by the nonpartisan National Defense Strategy Commission late last year.The Navy simply lacks enough ships and aircraft to meet the increasing demands of its global mission. At a minimum, 12 aircraft carriers are needed for three to be three forward deployed at any given time. The decision to procure two carriers is a good start in attacking the shortfall, as is reversing the questionable budget proposal to retire the USS Harry S. Truman two decades early.But only sustained political will from both the Administration and Congress can provide steady, predictable funding to enable the most cost-effective and efficient procurement and maintenance of the “Navy the Nation Needs.”Working with the Navy, legislators should expedite the pace of carrier procurement from one every five years to every three or four. Even with these forward-thinking decisions, given the current maintenance requirements and long construction times, the Navy will still face a carrier shortfall for several years.These changes would help address shortcomings in America’s defense posture for future administrations, and not just against Iran. But they would not be felt for some time, while Tehran is already lashing out.In the shorter term, the United States could forward-deploying missile defense ships and other surface combatants to the Mediterranean, the Middle East and the Pacific. Currently, several minesweepers and patrol craft are the only homeported Navy ships between Spain and Japan; while very useful against Iran, alone they offer little deterrence. Coordination with and support for regional allies is critical too, including stronger multilateral maritime security and missile defense efforts.The will to prepare is as important as the will to win, yet for too long, the United States has neglected a focused and disciplined approach to properly resourcing the U.S. Navy’s fleet. The result was a painfully obvious gap in our deterrent capability in the Middle East for far too long last year, and it could well happen again.American policymakers urgently must begin implementing quick and big fixes alike to restore readiness to our fleet in general and our carrier fleet in particular. The U.S. Navy must be able to handle a significant range of threats worldwide and to do so, must grow both in size and capability.VADM John Bird (USN, Ret.), is the former commander of U.S. 7th Fleet. He is currently a member of policy projects at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America’s (JINSA) Gemunder Center for Defense and Strategy. Image: DVIDShub.
August 28, 2019Read More
(Bloomberg) — Separatists in Cameroon called for a lockdown in the country’s Anglophone regions after a weekend of unrest in which at least 40 people reportedly died.The call for a lockdown came a week after a military tribunal jailed 10 rebel leaders…
August 28, 2019Read More
(Bloomberg Opinion) — What a difference a weekend makes. Emmanuel Macron emerged as the big beneficiary from the G7 summit, a junket that has come under increasing criticism as the shrinking group of leaders struggle to forge a consensus in the era of Donald Trump. Last week, the U.S. president’s tone on Twitter was aggressively anti-European Union – but by Monday he was full of praise.Macron showed it was possible to manage an unruly Trump by welcoming him into the tent rather than just giving him the cold shoulder, thus avoiding the dire predictions of a “G6+1” – or even a “G5+2”, given U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s pro-U.S. and pro-Brexit leanings.Rather than act like a tired imitation of de Gaulle, Macron positioned himself as a multilateral mediator. He chatted up the U.S. to get a compromise of sorts to avoid a trade war over France’s digital-services tax, flew in Iran’s foreign minister as a highly symbolic nod to the nuclear impasse, and played the climate-change card at the expense of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. (The latter’s crude swipe at the appearance of Macron’s wife is only likely to bolster the French president’s standing among voters.)It is hard to distinguish whether the bar was cleared because of the great diplomatic gymnastics on show or because it was set too low. The latter probably nudges it. Macron made clear ahead of time that this year there would be no traditional communique, something he described as a bothersome technocratic invention reminiscent of a bureaucratic deep state. Casting the G7 as an informal talking shop for leaders makes it hard to be characterized as a failure. The theater of the Iran visit wouldn’t have happened without at least a nod from Trump.Still, Macron deserves credit for his recent string of diplomatic wins, especially at the European level: The G7 meeting rounds off his victories on Brexit, where he has managed to limit the concessions the EU has offered, and in Brussels, where he was able to impose his choice of candidate to lead the European Commission. Twitter clearly isn’t his weapon of choice – his rainforest photo last week was debunked as years out of date by French media – but he is clearly adept at opportunistic power grabs when the right situation arises.These admittedly modest wins show that Paris has grabbed the microphone from Berlin and London to speak in the name of the EU. The content of Macron’s European visions may not have changed much since he was elected, but his ability to project his leadership is being helped by troubles elsewhere on the continent. Germany’s export engine is collapsing, Brexit is consuming British politics – but the Gilets Jaunes have largely been routed.The main target for Macron’s global grandstanding will always be France itself, of course. His domestic approval ratings have yet to really recover from last year’s riots, standing at about 34%. Labor unions are threatening strikes as his reform agenda nears one of its biggest challenges: Overhauling the country’s pensions system. The next G7 already looks very far away.To contact the author of this story: Lionel Laurent at [email protected] contact the editor responsible for this story: Edward Evans at [email protected] column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.Lionel Laurent is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Brussels. He previously worked at Reuters and Forbes.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinion©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
August 28, 2019Read More
Iran is the only other country besides the United States to operate arguably history’s most powerful interceptor aircraft, the F-14 Tomcat. And the Islamic republic has worked the twin-engine, swing-wing fighters hard.The F-14s played a major role in I…
August 28, 2019Read More
(Bloomberg Opinion) — As drugmakers are being held responsible for fueling the U.S. opioid epidemic, it might look at though they have nothing to fear in Europe, where, it’s often assumed, opioid misuse isn’t so rampant. The European Union, though, should take a closer look at the data and make its own move against the irresponsible marketing of opioid painkillers.In its 2019 report, the European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction, an EU institution, said with some pride that Europe has averted the kind of public health disaster opioids have wreaked on the U.S. by introducing “pragmatic harm reduction and treatment measures.” It’s more likely, however, that the EU is failing to collect and thoroughly analyze the same kind of data that provide U.S. observers with a clear picture of the epidemic.Last month, the monitoring center published its latest data on drug-related deaths in Europe. They show that opioids are the drug group responsible for an overwhelming majority of such fatalities – but because it’s collecting data from 30 countries (EU member states plus Norway and Turkey), the monitoring center has found it difficult to generalize statistics on which particular drugs are killing more throughout the continent. To get a better idea of what’s going on, one must dig into national data, which can often be confusing and unusable for cross-border comparisons.These country-specific data often show a clear trend toward more use of prescription opioids. According to European drug-monitoring center, in Norway, heroin used to account for almost half of the drug deaths in 2006; in 2017 – the latest year for which data are available – its share was down to 20%, and synthetic opioids had emerged out of nowhere as the cause of 17% of deaths. The likely reason? A 279% rise in oxycodone prescriptions and a 218% increase in tramadol prescriptions to male patients between 2006 and 2016. In the U.K., a BBC investigation last year found similarly alarming growth in opioid prescriptions between 2007 and 2017 – and an upward trend in opioid deaths. Last week, a report in the venerable U.K. medical publication the Lancet showed the Netherlands had the same problem. There, the number of prescription opioid users nearly doubled to 7,489 people per 100,000 inhabitants between 2008 and 2017, mainly because the number of oxycodone users quadrupled. During the same period, the number of opioid-related hospital admissions tripled, with heroin mentioned less and less frequently as the primary intoxicant; and in 2014, the death rate from opioids started increasing.Data from the United Nations’ International Narcotics Control Board show that while prescription opioid consumption is going down in the U.S., the world leader in their use, the same can’t be said about a number of European countries. Doctors there appear to have fallen into the same trap as their U.S. counterparts, sold on the same drugs by the same pharmaceutical companies. Levels of drug deaths in Europe aren’t as alarming as in the U.S. (although there are some exceptions – Scotland, for one), in part because the continent’s smarter approach to replacement therapy and other forms of harm reduction has made sure there’s less heroin mortality. That tends to create a false sense of security. There’s a lag between consumption increases and growth in fatalities, and some European countries may well face visible epidemics of their own before regulators and politicians take notice, the way they have done in the U.S.Historically, doctors in most European countries have taken a more demanding stance on pain than their U.S. colleagues: They haven’t been as ready to prescribe opioids. One reason for that is they haven’t come under as much pressure from activists insisting that pain relief is a human right. Prescription guidelines are tighter and more closely followed, and insurance companies are more hesitant to cover certain treatments. But when doctors respond to pharmaceutical companies’ marketing efforts, things start changing quickly: Patients start demanding their opioid of choice, and doctors – who are often overloaded with work – find it harder and harder to refuse.Europe shouldn’t feel excessively proud that it has avoided a U.S.-style emergency. It’s time to unify standards for data collection and analysis to make it clear which countries face dangerous shifts in the way doctors handle pain. It’s also time to look at the European practices of the same pharmaceutical companies that are found guilty of overaggressive opioid marketing in the U.S. Damage control should pre-empt, not follow, spikes in the fatality statistics.To contact the author of this story: Leonid Bershidsky at [email protected] contact the editor responsible for this story: Tobin Harshaw at [email protected] column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.Leonid Bershidsky is Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist. He was the founding editor of the Russian business daily Vedomosti and founded the opinion website Slon.ru.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinion©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
August 28, 2019Read More
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