Global News: January 2018 Archives
An incidental definition of the Anglosphere?
This list of countries in this section of the United Kingdom's Immigration Rules, dealing with knowledge of the English language and the British way of life, may serve as a reasonable starting point for defining the Anglosphere -- the nations of the world where English is widely and fluently spoken and, specifically for this paragraph, is the primary language of instruction in higher education. The term Anglosphere also implies a legal foundation that is grounded in the English Common Law and the Magna Carta.
"iii) the applicant has obtained an academic qualification (not a professional or vocational qualification), which is deemed by UK NARIC to meet the recognised standard of a Bachelor's or Master's degree or PhD in the UK, from an educational establishment in one of the following countries: Antigua and Barbuda; Australia; The Bahamas; Barbados; Belize; Dominica; Grenada; Guyana; Ireland; Jamaica; New Zealand; St Kitts and Nevis; St Lucia; St Vincent and The Grenadines; Trinidad and Tobago; the UK; the USA; and provides the specified documents;"
The Myth of Aboriginal Exceptionalism - XYZ
"The real victims of all this intellectual dishonesty by the leftist elites are the Aboriginal children who are forced to grow up crushed between a Stone Age culture which has died and a postmodern culture which treats them like ornaments of its own righteousness."
Chinese authorities blow up Christian megachurch with dynamite | The Independent
"Chinese authorities have demolished a well-known Christian megachurch, inflaming long-standing tensions between religious groups and the Communist Party.
"Witnesses and overseas activists said the paramilitary People's Armed Police used dynamite and excavators to destroy the Golden Lampstand Church, which has a congregation of more than 50,000, in the city of Linfen in Shaanxi province.Â
"ChinaAid, a US-based Christian advocacy group, said local authorities planted explosives in an underground worship hall to demolish the building following, constructed with nearly $2.6m (£1.9m) in contributions from local worshippers in one of China's poorest regions.Â
"The church had faced 'repeated persecution' by the Chinese government, said ChinaAid. Hundreds of police and hired thugs smashed the building and seized Bibles in an earlier crackdown in 2009 that ended with the arrest of church leaders.
"Those church leaders were given prison sentences of up to seven years for charges of illegally occupying farmland and disturbing traffic order, according to state media. "
Kazakhstan Cheers New Alphabet, Except for All Those Apostrophes - The New York Times
Another example of totalitarian manipulation of language for control, from a story about a new writing system for the Kazakh language.
'Later, growing fearful of pan-Turkic sentiment among Kazakhs, Uzbeks and other Turkic peoples in the Soviet Union, Moscow between 1938 and 1940 ordered that Kazakh and other Turkic languages be written in modified Cyrillic as part of a push to promote Russian culture. To try to ensure that different Turkic peoples could not read one another's writings and develop a shared non-Soviet sense of common identity, it introduced nearly 20 versions of Cyrillic, Mr. Kocaoglu said....
'The modified Latin alphabet put forward by Mr. Nazarbayev uses apostrophes to elongate or modify the sounds of certain letters.
'For example, the letter "I" with an apostrophe designates roughly the same sound as the "I" in Fiji, while "I" on its own sounds like the vowel in fig. The letter "S" with an apostrophe indicates "sh" and C' is pronounced "ch." Under this new system, the Kazakh word for cherry will be written as s'i'i'e, and pronounced she-ee-ye....
'The only reason publicly cited by Mr. Nazarbayev to explain why he did not want Turkish-style phonetic markers is that "there should not be any hooks or superfluous dots that cannot be put straight into a computer," he said in September. He also complained that using digraphs to transcribe special Kazakh sounds would cause confusion when people try to read English, when the same combination of letters designates entirely different sounds....
'"The president is thinking about his legacy and wants to go down in history as the man who created a new alphabet," said Mr. Satpayev, who supports the switch to Latin script but not the president's version. "The problem is that our president is not a philologist."'
"The Ashes may be over once again, but one of the biggest talking points during the cricket Test series between Australia and England was the continued meteoric rise of Australian captain Steve Smith as a Test batsman.
"There was much speculation as to whether Smith is the best Australian Test batsman -- bar Donald Bradman -- ever to have played the game....
""The Don" Bradman is widely regarded as the greatest Australian cricketer, and was voted the greatest cricketer of the 20th century, with an unrivalled Test batting average of 99.94.
"So what is the ranking of Australian Test batsmen since Australia's first ever Test match in 1877?"
DVIDS - News - Oklahoma Cavalry unit inherits Active Duty mission in Afghanistan
?KABUL, Afghanistan - Oklahoma Army National Guard members of 1st Squadron, 180th Cavalry Regiment, 45th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, held a transfer of authority ceremony in Kabul, Afghanistan, Dec. 31, 2017, alongside members of 3rd Squadron, 73rd Cavalry Regiment, 1st Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division, representing the transfer of mission from one organization to another.
"Nearly 500 members of the 180th are currently deployed to Afghanistan in support of the NATO-led train, advise and assist mission, Operation Resolute Support. In this case, the 180th replaces the 3-73rd for the Kabul Security Forces mission; a mission focused primarily on adviser force protection....
"While deployed, the 180th will work alongside other coalition forces, including the British Army, Royal Danish Army and Mongolian Armed Forces, all of which play a key role in the Resolute Support Mission, from base defense operations, site force protection, adviser force protection, to incident response."
When a North Korean Missile Accidentally Hit a North Korean City | The Diplomat
Extracting information about NK's nuclear capabilities from news of a failed launch. "As North Korea's production of now-proven IRBMs and ICBMs continues, it will have a large and diversified nuclear force spread across multiple hardened sites, leaving the preventive warfighter's task close to impossible if the objective is a comprehensive, disarming first strike leaving Pyongyang without retaliatory options. The time is long gone to turn the clock back on North Korea's ballistic missile program and its pre-launch basing options."
The Other Terrifying Lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis - POLITICO Magazine
"...the more telling lesson of the Cuban crisis is that opposing leaders in a nuclear showdown inevitably lack sufficient information about each other's military capabilities, intentions and perceptions, and much of what they think they know is probably wrong. And given how little the United States and North Korea understand about one another, that should worry us....
"Given the stakes involved, it behooves leaders in the Pentagon, intelligence agencies, the White House and Congress to learn from pertinent history and ask what could go wrong if North Korea has more or different weaponry than U.S. intelligence assumes, and if North Korean officers and crews will behave differently than is assumed when they are attacked. Similar out-of the-box thinking should be applied to how South Korean officials, military crews and society will act if conflict begins.
"American officials cannot control whether their North Korean counterparts conduct similar analyses of their own assessments of U.S. capabilities, intentions and likely behaviors. Maybe they will conclude that the wisest course is to avoid a conflict they cannot win, or maybe they will not. As scholars such as James Blight and Janet Lang have documented, the young and deeply ideological Fidel Castro in 1962 urged Khrushchev to initiate nuclear war with the United States in Cuba, preferring national suicide to an American invasion and overthrow of his government. It will be left for historians in 50 years to determine whether the antagonists were lucky or unlucky, wise or unwise."
