Connecting the Shots
GUEST WORDS As a coalition of rights groups urges Joe Biden to expand his commitment to ending billions in Trump-era U.S. arms sales enabling a bloody Saudi-led war on Yemen - one that now threatens to leave half of young Yemeni children hungry - Israel remains a major, uncontested exporter of weapons and spyware in the heavily armed region.
(Photo above: Weapons to the Philippines, whose President Rodrigo Duterte once instructed his military to
. Photos from Phillipine Coast Guard.)
A recent Congressional study found the Middle East represents roughly 35% of the global arms trade, a figure wildly disproportionate to its population; while the U.S. has for decades been the largest facilitator of that carnage, furnishing almost half of all arms there, Israel isn t far behind.
European Parliament Adopts Resolution on Yemen, Calls on EU and Member States to Address Accountability Gap
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On Thursday, 11 February 2021, the European Parliament adopted a resolution on the political and humanitarian situation in Yemen by a large majority of 638 votes for, 12 against and 44 abstentions. Two days earlier, a debate took place between Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) and the High Representative/Vice-President (HR/VP) Joseph Borrell, where MEPs strongly condemned the ongoing violence in Yemen since the conflict began, and which has resulted in the worst humanitarian crisis in the world as echoed in the adopted text.
The Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS) and Mwatana for Human Rights call on the European Union (EU) and its Member States to immediately act on the explicit and direct calls made by the European Parliament in the 2021 and 2018 resolutions on Yemen to ensure accountability for perpetrators and to halt all arms exports to, a
An An-2 parked in the snow. Credit: www.ariliners.net via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.
In September 2020, on the second day of the six-week war between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh enclave, the Armenian defense forces published a video of one of their units deploying a surface-to-air missile system to target a low-flying, slow-moving object a drone. But what the soldiers shot down was no cutting-edge autonomous weapon: They had destroyed a propeller-driven, single-engine biplane first produced in the 1940s by the former Soviet Union for agricultural monitoring and management a crop duster.
Azerbaijan had evidently converted multiple Antonov An-2 piston-powered light aircraft into uninhabited aerial vehicles. During the conflict, they were repeatedly dispatched on munitions-laden suicide missions used to bait Armenian air defenses. Deployed as a so-called “bait drone,” the An-2 from the September video forced the Armenians to fire their anti-a
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President Joseph Biden’s recent announcement that the United States would cut off arms transfers that support the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen is one of his administration’s first major foreign policy decisions. Security cooperation and particularly foreign military sales (FMS) has long been a central and sometimes controversial tool of U.S. foreign policy that serves multiple, potentially conflicting, ends. During the Trump administration, the economic rationale of such sales was highly emphasized, and arms sales increased as the administration released some restrictions on sales. Countries that do not have formal alliance arrangements with the United States, like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), were the recipients of a significant portion of those sales.
2021-02-04 07:35:27 GMT2021-02-04 15:35:27(Beijing Time) Xinhua English
Photo taken on June 22, 2020 shows the Niederoesterreich Palace where the first round of new disarmament talks between the United States and Russia is held in Vienna, Austria. (Photo by Georges Schneider/Xinhua)
BEIJING, Feb. 4 (Xinhua) Just two days before the expiration of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), Russia and the United States completed the necessary procedures for its extension for five years until Feb. 5, 2026, the maximum period allowed by the treaty.
The extension of the treaty has been widely reckoned as an imperative step to maintain verifiable limits on the world s largest nuclear arsenal and has reinvigorated the nuclear arms control regime to safeguard world peace and stability.