ISDEI Instituto de Seguridad, Defensa y Estudios Internacionales

It conjures up visions of sci-fi movies and video games but advances in high-tech weaponry are raising fears of a space arms race. China is looking to boost its military power in space. Visiting air force headquarters on Monday, President Xi Jinping told officers to 'speed up air and space integration and sharpen their offensive and defensive capabilities'. Beijing maintains that its space programme is peaceful but that stance was questioned when China used a ground-based missile to destroy one of its own satellites in orbit in 2007; and a rocket launch last May, billed as a research mission, was suspected of being a test for a new anti-satellite weapon. The US has developed its own futuristic weaponry and is planning to deploy the world’s first-ever combat laser. The Laser Weapon System looks like a small telescope, but it's powerful enough to fire laser beams through steel. The laser is capable of shooting down things like enemy drones, but unlike in the movies, you will

Pro-Russian armed men reportedly take control of Ukrainian troop carriers in Slovyansk, as soldiers are "taken hostage". Pro-Russian armed men have taken control of Ukrainian troop carriers that were driven into the eastern Ukrainian city of Slovyansk, the Reuters news agency reported. A soldier manning one of the carriers now under the control of pro-Russian separatists said on Wednesday, that he was a member of Ukraine's 25th paratrooper division from Dnipropetrovsk, and that they had switched support to Russia. "All the soldiers and the officers are here," he said. "We are all boys who won't shoot our own people." The news comes as Ukraine's defence ministry said a pro-Russian armed group had taken two of its soldiers "hostage" in the separatist eastern region of Lugansk. The ministry said an officer and a soldier were seized by "extremists" and taken to an unknown destination after they pulled over to repair their vehicl

By ABC Obviously if there is bloodshed in the east, I think that president Putin will be forced to take some sort of measures. I think that what people don't understand in the West is that there are strong feelings running in Russia. Download Audio Transcript  " ABC " - CHRIS UHLMANN: Western governments say Russia is orchestrating the violence in Ukraine. As you would expect, the view on this crisis is very different in Russia. In a phone call, president Vladimir Putin told his US counterpart Barack Obama that the speculation was unfounded. So to get a Russian view of the crisis, I spoke with Alexander Nekrassov, who is a former adviser to the Kremlin. Alexander Nekrassov, the West is saying that Russian soldiers are behind the unrest in eastern Ukraine. Is that correct? ALEXANDER NEKRASSOV: The Russian government has already indicated several times - and very recently foreign minister Lavrov said - that Russia has no presence in eastern Ukraine at all - neither soldiers

An ultimatum issued by Ukraine 's acting president for pro-Russian protesters in control of government buildings in the east of the country to lay down their arms or face an "anti-terrorist" operation passed on Monday with no sign of movement on either side. The deadline – 9am local time (0700 GMT) – passed after the UN security council met in an emergency session in New York, where Russia called Ukraine's threat to mobilise armed forces a " criminal order ". Ukraine's acting president, Oleksandr Turchynov, said on Monday that the operation would soon begin. In a nationally televised address on Sunday night, he promised amnesty to those who had not fired at security forces if they laid down their arms and vacated seized government buildings. The statement came after pro-Russian protesters seized more government buildings in several cities in the Donetsk region on Sunday, actions for which locals have claimed credit. Kiev and Washington have blamed Russ

Two male political dissidents claim they were raped in Egyptian police custody in separate assaults that campaigners suspect are indicative of a wider strategy as the brutal crackdown on opposition continues. Plainclothes officers allegedly assaulted Omar el-Shouekh, 19, inside an east Cairo police station on 24 March, minutes after he was arrested following a student protest. In written testimony provided to the Observerby his lawyer, Shouekh also alleged that he was beaten and given electric shocks. A second man, Fadi Samir, said he was sexually assaulted in similar fashion in a different police station on 8 January. Samir also alleged that throughout his subsequent 42-day detention, he was frequently beaten and at one point groped by a policeman while at a urinal. Like many detainees, Samir alleged that prosecutors interrogated him on police property rather than neutral territory – failing to maintain an adequate separation of powers between Egypt 's judicial system and the poli

Attacks by suspected Nigerian Islamic insurgent group Boko Haram killed 217 people in the country’s northeastern Borno state yesterday, a senator representing the region said. Five villages were targeted in early morning raids by militants, Borno Central Senator Ahmed Zanna said by phone today. Sixty people were killed in Kala Balge, seven teachers died at a college in Dikwa and there were 150 deaths in three other villages in the state, he said. With less than a year before elections, Nigerian security forces are battling to quell violence and lawlessness across large parts of the country, Africa ’s biggest economy and its top oil producer. In northeastern Nigeria , the army has been fighting Boko Haram for four years in a conflict the Brussels-based International Crisis Group said this month killed more than 4,000 people and forced almost 500,000 to flee their homes. Major-General Chris Olukolade, a spokesman for the military, didn’t answer a call to his mobile phone or immediately

By BRADLEY KLAPPER Associated Press - " AP " - A controversial torture report by the Senate Intelligence Committee paints a pattern of CIA deception about the effectiveness of waterboarding and other brutal interrogation methods used on terror suspects after the Sept. 11 attacks, according to leaked findings. The committee said it will ask the Justice Department to investigate how the material was published. The McClatchy news service late Thursday published what it said are the voluminous, still-classified review's 20 findings. It concludes that the "enhanced interrogation techniques" failed to produce valuable intelligence; the CIA misled the Bush administration, Congress and the public about the value of the harsh treatment; the agency employed unauthorized techniques on detainees and improperly detained others; and it never properly evaluated its own actions. Both the CIA's interrogation techniques and confinement conditions "were brutal and far wo

By Spencer Ackerman - A leak of the major findings of a landmark Senate inquiry into the CIA’s post-9/11 torture of terrorism detainees led, on Friday, to intensified pressure on the White House and the CIA to release the inquiry speedily and with a minimum of redactions. The classified study, prepared by the Senate select committee on intelligence, concluded that the CIA’s interrogations, secret detentions and outsourced torture sessions were “brutal, and far worse than the agency communicated to policymakers.” More suspected terrorists underwent the agency’s post-9/11 treatment, which largely lasted from 2002 to 2006, than the CIA has publicly admitted, according to the report’s findings, which were first reported by McClatchy . Last week, committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein of California stated that the Senate investigated the cases of 100 detainees – dozens more than previously known to have gone through the CIA’s so-called “interrogation, detention and rendition” programs. In