ISDEI Instituto de Seguridad, Defensa y Estudios Internacionales

Benjamin Syme Van Ameringen The western romantic imagination disinclines people to take pirates seriously (they have been portrayed in over 260 films since 1904). But the modern piracy, which made a comeback at the end of the 1990s, has become a scourge of maritime transport, with a significant human and economic cost. - UNOSAT Global Report on Maritime Piracy (1995-2013) . Maritime piracy is an age-old act that for centuries has inflicted grave economic damage on the global trade of goods and commodities. Over the centuries, the nature of piracy has evolved and the pirates of today conduct operations very differently from those of their primarily European predecessors. This article will report on the current state of global piracy and examine the current threat environment. It will also delve into piracy hotspots in Africa, new and emerging threats, their root causes, and anti-piracy countermeasures. According to UNOSAT, between 1995 and August 2013 there were a total of 6,249 repo

Anis Bajrektarevic A freshly released IMF World Economic Outlook brings (yet again, for the sixth year in a row, and for the third time this year alone) no comforting picture to anyone within the G-7, especially in the US and EU. Will the passionately US-pushed cross-Atlantic Free Trade Area save the day? Or, would that Pact push things over the edge and mark an end of unionistic Europe? Is the extended EU conflict with Russia actually a beginning of the Atlantic-Central Europe’s conflict over Russia, an internalization of mega geopolitical and geo-economic dilemma – who accommodates with whom, in and out of the Union? Finally, does more Ukrainian (and Eastern Europe) calamities pave the road for a new cross-continental grand accommodation, of either austerity-tired France or über-performing Germany with Russia, and therefore the end of the EU? For whose sake Eastern Europe has been barred of all important debates, such as that of Slavism, identity, secularism and antifascism? Why do

By Eric Margolis Back in the 1990’s, journalists used to joke, “Of course we know Iraq has chemical weapons. We have the delivery receipts to prove it!” The joke turned out to be the exact truth. While covering Iraq in 1990 – just before the first massive US bombing campaign – I discovered the US and Britain had secretly built a germ weapons arsenal for Iraq to use against Iran in the eight year-Iran-Iraq War. This while both the US and Britain were fulminating with breathtaking hypocrisy against the alleged dangers of Iraq’s supposed WMD’s (weapons of mass destruction) that never existed. Some years later, the two leading apostles of attacking Iraq, George W. Bush and Tony Blair, delivered Philippics against Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs while never mentioning that high level of western support for Iraq’s late leader. Last week the widely read “New York Times” ran a multi-page exposé entitled “Abandoned Chemical Weapons and Secret Casualties in Iraq.” The NY Times played a key rol

By Pepe Escobar I'm aiming at you, lover  Cause killing you is killing myself - Orson Welles (director), The Lady from Shanghai,1947 He's invincible. He beheads. He smuggles. He conquers. He's the ultimate jack-of-all-trades. No Tomahawk or Hellfire can touch him. He always gets what he wants; in Kobani; in Anbar province; with the House of Saud (which he wants to replace) trying to make Putin (who he wants to behead) suffer because of low oil prices . If this was a remake of Orson Welles's noir classic The Lady from Shanghai , in the mirror sequence the lawyer (American?) and the femme fatale (Shi'ite?) would also get killed; but The Caliph of Islamic State would survive as a larger than life Welles, free to roam, plunder and "give my love to the sunrise" - as in a Brave Caliphate World shining in "Syraq" over the ashes of the Sykes-Picot agreement. He's winning big in Iraq's Anbar province. The Caliph's goons are now closing in on

Reuters / Brendan McDermid The FBI director has slammed Apple and Google for offering their customers encryption technology that protects users’ privacy. “Deeply concerned” James Comey wants to push on Congress to “fix” laws to ensure police can still access private data. “It’s the equivalent of a closet that can’t be opened. A safe that can’t be cracked,” Comey, speaking at the Brookings Institute in Washington DC, referred to the encryption technology calling the new service “a marketing pitch.” “But it will have very serious consequences for law enforcement and national security agencies at all levels,” he warned . Apple has recently presented its latest Mac OS X operating system for desktop and laptop computers, encouraging its customers to use FileVault disk encryption technology to keep their data secure. The tool would also prevent NSA or FBI from having access to phones and computers. Google said it wanted to follow suit with its Android operating system and “encryption will be

By Jesus Diaz This is the interior of an invention that could change civilisation as we know it: A compact fusion reactor developed by Skunk Works, the stealthy experimental technology division of Lockheed Martin. It is the size of a jet engine, power aeroplanes, spaceships, and cities—and they say it will be operative in only 10 years. Aviation Week had exclusive access to their secret laboratories and talked to Dr. Thomas McGuire, the leader of Skunk Work’s Revolutionary Technology division. And revolutionary it is, indeed: Instead of using the same design that everyone else is using—the Soviet-derivedtokamak, a torus in which magnetic fields confine the fusion reaction with a huge energy cost and thus little energy production capabilities—Skunk Works’ Compact Fusion Reactor has a radically different approach to anything people have tried before. Here are the two of them for comparison: Above: The traditional Soviet tokamak design of the International Thermonuclear Experimental React

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has warned of “major transit risks” to Europe’s gas supplies from his country this winter unless Ukraine settles a gas dispute with Moscow. “There will be no crises through a fault of Russian participants of energy cooperation in Europe,” Putin said during a visit to Serbia on Thursday, adding, “But there are major transit risks.” “If we see that our Ukrainian partners — as in 2008 — start siphoning off our gas from the export pipeline system in an unauthorized manner then we will also — like in 2008 — be gradually reducing supplies by the amount that has been stolen,” Putin said. He made the comments ahead of significant talks with EU leaders and his Ukrainian counterpart, Petro Poroshenko, in the Italian city of Milan later on Thursday and Friday. The Russian president, meanwhile, expressed hope that the talks and separate energy discussions next week would resolve the dispute. A fresh round of gas negotiations between Moscow, the EU and Kiev with th

Europeans and Americans Focus on Inequality as Greatest Danger With growing conflicts engulfing the Middle East, people in the region name religious and ethnic hatred most frequently as the greatest threat to the world. Moreover,  publics across the globe see the threat of religious and ethnic violence as a  growing  threat to the world’s future.  But in Europe, concerns about inequality trump all other dangers and the gap between the rich and the poor is increasingly considered the world’s top problem by people living in advanced economies, including the United States. Explore Global Opinions of the Greatest Dangers to the World Elsewhere, Asians and Latin Americans are somewhat divided about the world’s greatest danger, but pollution and environmental problems as well as the spread of nuclear weapons are high on their list of threats.  African countries see AIDS and other infectious diseases as the most pressing issue in the world today. 1 These are among the findings of a re