TRADOC important to Army present, future, says McHugh

By Carroll Kim (TRADOC Public Affairs)

FORT MONROE, Va. (March 5, 2010) -- Secretary of the Army John McHugh visited the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command Headquarters for the first time today and got to see Army past, present and future through TRADOC's eyes.

"It was my inaugural trip to come down here and get a visual, first hand look at all the amazing things that TRADOC is doing," he said. "Obviously wherever you are in the Army, your doctrine, your schooling, your entire perspective starts somewhere along this path".

The day's events included a tour of Fort Monroe, which has roots tracing back to 1609 as Fort Algernourne, built by Capt. John Smith. In 2011, Fort Monroe will close and TRADOC will move to Fort Eustis, Va., under Base Realignment and Closure.

"Fort Monroe itself is a marvelous part of history," said McHugh. "The Army has future plans in other places, but I would hope that the spirit that's been here for many, many years will in some way continue. There's a lot of Army heart and soul here".

McHugh also met with TRADOC senior leaders and visited the Joint Training Counter-IED Operations Integration Center. JTCOIC was established in April 2009 as a collaborative effort between the Joint IED Defeat Organization and TRADOC and provides training to Soldiers through simulation-based exercises. Creating a common framework, JTCOIC is designed to make "the scrimmage harder than the game".

"I'm thankful that there are so many smart people in the world who are willing to come and work here," McHugh said.

"The most important thing is the training opportunity they produce here and the chance for every Soldier of every rank, out in harm's way, to better understand the lay of the battlefield and the environment which they find themselves, means they'll be safer. And that's a good thing and something we want to continue to nurture".

Along with training Soldiers for the future, TRADOC is also writing doctrine and plans for that identify key elements of the future battlefield. The U.S. Army Capabilities Integration Center released the 2009 Army Capstone Concept titled, "Operational Adaptability: Operating under conditions of uncertainty and complexity in an era of persistent conflict 2016-2028." The Capstone Concept aims to define the problem of future, armed conflict and describes how the Army will need to function in the future. 

"I was reading it again on the way down in the helicopter and it's a critically important document. And it's probably a document we have to scramble operationally to catch up to, and that's the objective," said McHugh. "[Some] of the most difficult things an army faces [are] the battle today, trying to understand what the battle of tomorrow will be, and positioning yourself to be able to adapt to it and prevail".

However, McHugh recognizes that the road to achieving the objectives outlined in the Capstone Concept is as important as the ideas themselves.

"The reality is that it's also complicated by likely budget and resource decisions. We just went through the Quadrennial Defense Review, and part of that is to plot out the next four years, what the challenges are and what the threats will be and this Capstone Concept helps us implement that future-think into real world terms," he said. "But this is still something, I think the generating force ... and the operational force will need to partner up on to make that concept an actual reality".

Another area interlaced with the Capstone Concept is TRADOC's role in Army Modernization. McHugh believes that the command in charge of doctrine and leader development will play a critical role in designing Army Modernization.

"It will be a leader," he said. "We have to be an Army that has congruity and continuity, and how we go about becoming an Army of the future starts right here. This is a place and this is an activity that, seems to me, will become far more important, as important as it is today as we go into an unknown tomorrow".

McHugh ended his visit by recognizing the TRADOC and JTCOIC staff for their innovation and dedication to Soldiers.

"The other thing that really strikes me, and I don't mean to sound flippant about it, but the intellectual capital that we have in the Army," he said.

"And the good folks who are willing to come here and devote themselves to this defensive national effort who value the kinds of things that make an Army Soldier wake up everyday and go to work ... that's the important stuff".

U.S. Army

Half of Food Aid to Somalia Is Diverted, Report Says

By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN and NEIL MacFARQUHAR

As much as half the food aid sent to Somalia is diverted from needy people to a web of corrupt contractors, radical Islamist militants and local United Nations staff, according to a new Security Council report.

The report, which has not yet been made public but was shown to The New York Times, outlines a host of problems so grave that it recommends Secretary General Ban Ki-moon open an independent investigation into the World Food Program there. It suggests that the program rebuild the food distribution system — which serves at least 2.5 million people — from scratch to break what it describes as a corrupt cartel of Somali distributors.

In addition to the diversion of food aid, regional Somali authorities are collaborating with pirates who hijack ships along the lawless coast, the report says, and Somali government ministers have auctioned off diplomatic visas for trips to Europe to the highest bidder, some of whom may have been pirates or insurgents.

Somali officials denied the visa problem was widespread, and officials for the World Food Program said they had not yet seen the report but would investigate its conclusions once it was presented to the Security Council on March 16.

The report comes as Somalia’s transitional government is preparing for a military major offensive to retake the capital, Mogadishu, and combat an Islamist insurgency with connections to Al Qaeda. The United States is providing military aid, as the United Nations tries to roll back two decades of anarchy in the country.

But it may be an uphill battle. According to the report, Somalia’s security forces “remain ineffective, disorganized and corrupt — a composite of independent militias loyal to senior government officials and military officers who profit from the business of war”.

One American official recently conceded that Somalia’s “best hope” was the government’s new military chief, a 60-year-old former artillery officer who, until a few months ago, was assistant manager at a McDonald’s in suburban Germany.

The report’s investigators were originally asked to track violations of the United Nations arms embargo on Somalia, but the mandate was expanded.

Several of the reports’ authors have received specific death threats, and the United Nations recently relocated them from Kenya to New York for safety reasons.

Possible aid obstructions have been a nettlesome topic for Somalia over the past year and have contributed to the American government holding up aid shipments and United Nations officials recently suspending food programs in some areas.

It singles out the World Food Program, the single largest aid agency in the crisis-wracked country, as particularly flawed.

“Some humanitarian resources, notably food aid, have been diverted to military uses,” the report said. “A handful of Somali contractors for aid agencies have formed a cartel and become important power brokers — some of whom channel their profits — or the aid itself — directly to armed opposition groups”.

These allegations of food aid diversions first surfaced last year, and the World Food Program has consistently denied finding any proof of malfeasance and said that its own recent internal audit found no widespread abuse.

“We have not yet seen the U.N. Somalia Monitoring Group report,” the World Food Program’s Deputy Executive Director, Amir Abdulla, said Tuesday. “But we will investigate all of the allegations as we have always done in the past if questions have been raised about our operations”.

The current report’s investigators question how independent that past audit was, and called for an new outside investigation of the United Nations agency.

“We have to tell these folks that you cannot go on like this, we know what you are doing, you can’t fool us anymore, so you better stop,” said President Ali Bongo Ondimba of Gabon, who was at the United Nations, where his country holds the reins of the Security Council this month.

The report also charges that Somali officials are selling spots on trips to Europe and that many of the people who are presented as part of an official government entourage are actually pirates or members of militant groups.

The report says that Somali officials use their connections to foreign governments to get visas and travel documents for people who would not otherwise be able to travel abroad and that many of these people then disappear into Europe and do not come back.

“Somali ministers, members of parliament, diplomats and ‘freelance brokers’ have transformed access to foreign visas into a growth industry, matched possibly only by piracy, selling visas for $10-15,000 each,” the report said.

The reports’ authors estimate that dozens, if not hundreds, of Somalis have gained access to Europe or beyond through this under-the-table visa business.

“Maybe there’s been one or two cases that have happened over the years,” said Mohamed Osman Aden, a Somali diplomat in Kenya. “But these are just rumors. These allegations have been going around for years”.

The report also takes aim at some of Somalia’s richest, most influential businessmen, Somalia’s so-called money lords. One, Abdulkadir M. Nur, known as Eno, is married to a woman who plays a prominent role in a local aid agency that is supposed to verify whether food aid is actually delivered.

That “potential loophole” that could “offer considerable potential of large-scale diversion,” the report said. It also accuses Mr. Nur of staging the hijacking of his own trucks and then later selling the food.

In an email to The Times, Mr. Nur said he had sent the investigators many documents that “showed very clearly that the gossip and rumors they are investigating are untrue,” including the alleged hijacking or any link to insurgents.

He said his wife merely sits on the board of the local aid agency and that only “a tiny fraction” of the food he transported was designated for that aid agency.

In September Somalia’s president, Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed, wrote a letter to Mr. Ban, the Secretary General, defending Mr. Nur as a “very conscientious, diligent, and hardworking person” and saying that if it was not for the contractors, “many Somalis would have perished”.

The report questions why the World Food Program would steer 80 percent of its transportation contracts for Somalia, worth about $200 million, to three Somali businessmen, especially when they are suspected of connections to Islamist insurgents.

The report says that fraud is pervasive, with approximately 30 percent of aid skimmed by local partners and local World Food Program personnel, 10 percent by the ground transporters and 5 to 10 percent by the armed group in control of the area. That means as much as half of food never makes it to the people who desperately need it.

In January, the American government halted tens of millions of dollars of aid shipments to southern Somalia because of fears of such diversions, and American officials believe that some of the aid may have fallen into the hands of the Shabab, the most militant of Somalia’s insurgent groups.

The report also said that the president of Puntland, a semi-autonomous region in northern Somalia, has extensive ties to pirates in the area, who then funnel some of the money they make from hijacking ships to authorities.

Puntland authorities were unable to be reached on Tuesday, but Mr. Mohamed, the Somali diplomat, dismissed the allegations, saying that the Puntland government has jailed more than 150 pirates and hasn’t “received a penny from them”.

“It’s unfortunate that this monitoring group thinks they can stick everything on the Somalis,” he said.

Jeffrey Gettleman reported from Gisenyi, Rwanda, and Neil MacFarquhar reported from New York

The New York Times

Erdogan calls for fair Mideast peace

By GHAZANFAR ALI KHAN | ARAB NEWS

RIYADH: Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has urged the international community to exert pressure on Israel to help secure a fair and lasting peace in the Middle East.

Speaking to reporters in Riyadh yesterday, Erdogan also stressed the need to ensure unity among the Palestinian leadership, adding that the talks between the Palestinians and Israel, which at the moment only Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas will attend, will not yield healthy results.

The Turkish premier, who offered to mediate talks between Syria and Israel, called on the international community to put necessary pressure on Israel to end all its anti-peace actions, such as attempts aimed at changing the demography, character and the status of Jerusalem.

Erdogan spoke on a range of regional and international issues with special reference to Saudi-Turkish ties.

He said that Turkey did not want the Middle East to be dubbed the region of conflicts, adding that his country aims to create a joint understanding for "political dialogue through economic interdependence and cultural interaction".

He advocated diplomacy in resolving tensions with Iran, expressing concerns about reports that Israel planned to attack the Muslim country. "It is really worrying that such questions are being asked. It is a very sensitive issue, we should never allow an Iraq-like situation to occur again in this region".

On the Turkish role in Syrian-Israeli talks, he said that Ankara mediated several rounds of indirect negotiations between the Middle East rivals in 2008, but little progress was made. Syria later suspended the talks in response to Israel's 2008 military offensive in Gaza, and Israeli officials said Turkey's scathing criticism of Israel's role in the conflict had disqualified it as a mediator.

Referring to the move by Israel to include Islamic monuments on the list of its heritage sites, Erdogan said that Al-Aqsa Mosque, the Cave of the Patriarchs and Rachel's Tomb "were not and never will be Jewish sites, but Islamic sites."

He called for unity and solidarity between the two factions of the Palestinian leadership, while also asking for support for Iraq and Lebanon.

The Turkish prime minister said that Yemen had been a regional ally where peace and security must be restored, in light of troubles involving militants and terrorists.

He added that Turkey would not send its ambassador back to Washington until it receives "clarity" on a US congressional panel's resolution describing the killing of Armenians in World War I as genocide. Turkey, a secular Muslim democracy that has applied for membership of the European Union, is crucial to US interests in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and the Middle East.

He pointed out that more than 40,000 Turks have lost their lives so far fighting different forms of terrorism.

On a bilateral level, Saudi Arabia and Turkey have forged closer ties. Erdogan hoped visa restrictions between the two countries would be removed in the near future.

Arab News

Condenan a Bankinter a devolver a sus clientes parte de las pérdidas generadas por Lehman Brothers

• Fuentes de la entidad aseguran que la devolución 'será cercana a cero'
• La entidad deberá devolver el valor de los bonos después de la insolvencia

ELMUNDO.es | Agencias

Madrid.- El Juzgado de Primera Instancia número 87 de Madrid ha condenado a Bankinter a resarcir con la totalidad de su inversión a los clientes que le demandaron por los daños sufridos por la quiebra de los bancos islandeses Landsbanki y Kaupthing y con parte de sus pérdidas a los afectados de Lehman Brothers.

En su sentencia, la juez Carmen Pérez Guijo ha resuelto a favor de los 87 clientes la primera demanda colectiva dirimida en España por los efectos de la crisis financiera al considerar que Bankinter debía haber avisado a los inversores de la situación de Lehman Brothers, antes de su quiebra el 15 de septiembre de 2008, así como de las entidades islandesas.

En el caso de Lehman Brothers, Bankinter deberá devolver a sus 72 afectados el valor que sus bonos tenían "al tiempo de la insolvencia", producida entre los días 18 y 28 de septiembre de 2008.

Fuentes de Bankinter calificaron de "muy favorable" el fallo porque consideran que la cifra que resulte del cálculo será "cercana a cero", dada la declaración de insolvencia oficial que la entidad había presentado ya en esas fechas ante el Tribunal de Quiebras de Nueva York.

No obstante, los abogados de Zunzunegui y Jausas presentarán un escrito de aclaración ante el juzgado para que determine las cantidades a pagar a los afectados, trámite que cuenta con un plazo de tres días.

Por su parte, los inversores en productos vinculados a bancos islandeses deberán recibir el 100% de sus ahorros, que ascienden a 1,58 millones de euros, una vez deducidos los importes que hubieran percibido en concepto de rentabilidad.

Los afectados, asesorados por los despachos de abogados Jausas y Zunzunegui, presentaron en junio de 2009 la demanda, en la que reclamaban una indemnización total de 10,2 millones al banco presidido por Pedro Guerrero.

El Mundo | Economía

Pharmacist refuses to give mother, 38, contraceptive pills for period pain 'because of her religion'

By CHRIS BROOKE

A pharmacist refused to serve a mother-of-two with a prescription for the contraceptive pill because it went against her religious beliefs.

Shocked Janine Deeley, 38, initially thought the female pharmacist must be joking, but became angry when she was told to try another chemist or come back the next day when someone else was on duty.

Miss Deeley said she is prescribed the pill by her GP because she suffers from a condition which causes painful periods. 

She said she was furious at being 'treated like a child' and having to explain herself like an irresponsible teenager.

She said: 'I couldn't believe the arrogance of the woman. Who is she to refuse to give me properly prescribed legal drugs? I am a responsible adult. 

'She had no right to refuse to dispense my prescription except if the drugs weren't in stock or if she thought the dosage was incorrect'.

The branch of Lloyd's pharmacy adjoins the doctor's surgery and Miss Deeley said she had used it for years without a problem. But this time the pharmacist took her to one said and said she could have the painkillers she wanted but not the contraceptive pill.

'I asked "oh why not?" and she said "I don't give them out because of my religion." I honestly thought she was joking and I said "Pardon?"

'She repeated it and I said "You're not giving me the pills because of your religion?" and she replied "Yes." I was absolutely stunned. I was fuming and just stormed out'.

Miss Deeley, of Wybourn, Sheffield, added: 'I had no idea what religion the woman was and I don't remember if she has served me before. The other staff looked very embarrassed but obviously it was the pharmacist's decision.

'There's a lot of things in society you might not like or agree with, but you can't do anything about them.This type of thing shouldn't be happening, it's not right'.

The jobless single mother has daughters Carlie, 18, and Lauren, 14, and she is concerned about the implications of such a refusal policy.

She said: 'My daughter is 18 - she might want to go on the Pill and she has got that right. I'd rather have that than an unwanted pregnancy'.

A spokeswoman for Lloyds pharmacy said an investigation had been launched: 'We are very sorry Ms Deeley was refused supply of her prescribed contraceptive pill at our Duke Street pharmacy.

'We have launched an investigation into the incident and been in contact with her to apologise for any distress and inconvenience caused'.

Yesterday the pharmacist - who has not been named - was not at work. She is a locum who is said to occasionally fill in when the regular pharmacists are on holiday or on a day off.

A spokeswoman from NHS Sheffield, the primary care trust responsible for how well pharmacies and other health bodies across the city perform, said it would investigate the matter if a formal complaint was made.

The Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain (RPSGB) said the pharmacist was acting within her rights. 

The spokesman said:'While the Code of Ethics and Standards does not require a pharmacist to provide a service that is contrary to their religious or moral beliefs, any attempt by a pharmacist to impose their beliefs on a member of the public seeking their professional guidance, or a failure to have systems in place to advise of alternative sources for the service required, would be of great concern to the RPSGB and could form the basis of a complaint of professional misconduct'.

Daily Mail