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Via Bruce Schneier, the top ten strangest anti-terrorism patents. My three favourites.
Railroad missile system

Aeroplane Trap Door

Explosion Containment Net

So, with a week to go until Japan’s G8 in Hokkaido, how are things looking?  If you want the comprehensive answer, you should head straight for Jenilee Geubert’s excellent dossier on the website of the University of Toronto’s G8 research group - but here are a few highlights.
First, climate change.  A draft communique seen by [...]

Someone’s leaked a copy of the draft G8 communique to the FT (or, more specifically, to their Berlin correspondent - presumably no prizes for guessing which government the leak came from, then).  According to Hugh Williamson, the draft
…shows leaders will commit to fulfilling “our commitments on [development aid] made at Gleneagles” – but fails to cite the [...]

GD readers may be familiar with The Kingdom, a fictional film inspired by bombings at the Riyadh compound on May 12, 2003 and the Khobar housing complex on June 26, 1996 in Saudi Arabia.
From the plot:
… the Americans are allowed a hands on approach to the crime scene and discover that the second bomb was [...]

First things first: bookmark this link.  It points to the Economics and Strategy page at CIBC World Markets, the Canadian investment bank whose research team brought us the superb brief I linked to a few weeks back, entitled Could Soaring Transport Costs Reverse Globalisation?  Having checked back a few times since then, it has become [...]

The kind of publicity the EU could do without, just now…

(Updated 26 July 2008)
By my estimation the UK’s national security strategy is 100 days old. So what initiatives from the UK NSS have gained traction? What ideas have been quietly dropped? And what proposals are still hanging around in the ether?
In his statement to the House of Commons Gordon Brown listed the following:
1. The publication [...]

You couldn’t make this stuff up:
Sens. John Kerry, Bob Corker, and Sheldon Whitehouse today announced the passage of their legislation to remove former South African President Nelson Mandela from the terror watch list. The bill grants the Secretary of State, in consultation with the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security, the authority to waive U.S. [...]

Should the Government publish details of reservoir flood plans for local residents and ‘persons likely to be interested‘? (Which I think is a reference to the emergency services)
Sir Michael Pitt believes so. The Centre for the Protection of the National Infrastructure, on the other hand, says that such information could show terrorists where an attack [...]

A few weeks back, I wrote a post about Abengoa - a biofuels company which has been taking out full page ads in the FT and elsewhere, arguing that biofuels are nothing to do with rising food prices (an argument that calls to mind the image of Lt. Frank Drebbin in The Naked Gun, standing [...]

WEF has just published a statement on climate change ahead of the G8 from what appears more or less all of the world’s CEOs (A is for ABB, Abercrombie & Kent, Agility, AIG, Airbus, AkzoNobel, Alcoa, AMD, ANA, Anglo American, Arup; B is for Bain & Co., Bayer, BG Group, Booz & Co., BP, British [...]

The United States Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, which reports to President Bush, published a report yesterday on (you guessed it) public diplomacy - specifically, on the human resources dimension of the challenge.  
As Matt Armstrong at MountainRunner reports, one of the report’s key concerns is that there isn’t enough dedicated resource available for US public diplomacy [...]

This afternoon I’m giving a presentation to the Sandhurst Defence Forum. The subject of my talk: Strategic Myopia develops some of the themes from the report I wrote last year and focuses on a number of issues resulting from the publication of the UK’s first national security strategy.
There hasn’t been much news on the UK [...]

The good news from today’s World Public Opinion poll on torture? A majority of Americans oppose torture in all circumstances.
The bad news? 31% believe that terrorists should be tortured to save innocent lives. And worse, more than one in eight believe that “in general governments should be allowed to use torture to try to get [...]

Over on ArmscontrolWonk they have been analysing the arc of crisis map from the recent French White paper on national security and defence. They’ve done a great job at distinguishing what all the shapes (originally plotted on the map by hand) mean:

Circles: Main naval areas of patrol/operations.
Dark stars: Bases belonging to the “Forces de souveraineté” [...]

Alhurra - the Arab language TV station and America’s most costly public diplomacy boondongle - has been regularly slagged off, but this superb report from Pro Publica patches all the criticism together into a damning indictment.
Here was the promise - in George Bush’s 2004 State of the Union:
As long as the Middle East remains a [...]

You have to hand it to three US intelligence amigos: Donald Kerr , Tom Fingar and Mike McConnell. They don’t just subscribe to the concepts of need to share and the responsibility to provide intelligence. They are systematically trying to embed new processes across the intelligence architecture.
One of the key areas they are currently eyeing [...]

An interesting signal in the ether today from Sky News’s political editor Adam Boulton, who has this to say:

It could be said that Tony Blair’s domestic achievements were overshadowed by international misadventures. It may be said that Gordon Brown’s premiership is working in reverse.
For all the travails at home, GB is beginning to cut a [...]

The Pro-European Serb President, Boris Tadic announced yesterday that talks to form a governing coalition with the Socialist Party would begin.
Several weeks after its election, Serbia’s still has no government. The parliamentary elections in early May saw moderate pro-European parties win a razor-thin majority in Serbia’s parliament. But for weeks it looked as if the [...]

From Reuters via John Robb:
U.S. motorists are risking rampant drug violence in Mexico to drive over the border and fill their tanks with cheap Mexican fuel, some even coming to blows over gas shortages and long queues.
The gap between Mexico’s subsidized gasoline and record U.S. prices has made it well worth making the trip, and [...]

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