Podcasts about mrls

Can You Segway?Book 3 in 18 parts, By FinalStand. Listen to the ► Podcast at Explicit Novels.So exactly who was going to be sympathetic to their plight, who we cared about?Beyond my fevered dream of making a difference there was a pinch of reality. See, the Cabindans and the people of Zaire were both ethnic Bakongo and the Bakongo of Zaire had also once had their own, independent (until 1914) kingdom which was now part of Angola. The Bakongo were major factions in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) -(formerly for a short time known as the nation of Zaire, from here on out to be referred to as the DRC and in the running for the most fucked up place on the planet Earth, more on that later)- and Congo (the nation) yet a minority in Angola. Having an independent nation united along ethnic and linguistic lines made sense and could expect support from their confederates across international boundaries.The Liberation Air ForceThe Earth & Sky operated under one constant dilemma ~ when would Temujin make his return? Since they didn't know and it was their job to be prepared for the eventuality if it happened tomorrow, or a century down the line, they 'stockpiled', and 'stockpiled' and 'stockpiled'.That was why they maintained large horse herds and preserved the ancient arts of Asian bowyers, armoring and weapons-craft. That was why they created secret armories, and sulfur and saltpeter sites when musketry and cannons became the new ways of warfare. They secured sources of phosphates and petroleum when they became the new thing, and so on.All of this boiled over to me being shown yet again I worked with clever, creative and under-handed people. The Khanate came up with a plan for a 'Union' Air Force {Union? More on that later} within 24 hours, and it barely touched any of their existing resources. How did they accomplish this miracle? They had stockpiled and maintained earlier generation aircraft because they didn't know when Temujin would make his re-appearance.They'd also trained pilots and ground crews for those aircraft. As you might imagine, those people grew old just as their equipment did. In time, they went into the Earth & Sky's Inactive Reserves ~ the rank & file over the age of 45. You never were 'too old' to serve in some capacity though most combat-support related work ended at 67.When Temujin made his return and the E&S transformed into the Khanate, those people went to work bringing their lovingly cared for, aging equipment up to combat-alert readiness. If the frontline units were decimated, they would have to serve, despite the grim odds of their survival. It was the terrible acceptance the Chinese would simply possess so much more war-making material than they did.Well, the Khanate kicked the PRC's ass in a titanic ass-whooping no one (else) had seen coming, or would soon forget. Factory production and replacement of worn machines was in stride to have the Khanate's Air Force ready for the next round of warfare when the Cease-fire ended and the Reunification War resumed.Always a lower priority, the Khanate military leadership was considering deactivating dozens of these reserve unit when suddenly the (Mongolian) Ikh khaany khairt akh dáé (me) had this hare-brained scheme about helping rebels in Africa, West Africa, along the Gulf of Guinea coast/Atlantic Ocean, far, far away, and it couldn't look like the Khanate was directly involved.They barely knew where Angola was. They had to look up Cabinda to figure out precisely where that was. They brought in some of their 'reservist' air staff to this briefing and one of them, a woman (roughly a third of the E&S 'fighting'/non-frontline forces were female), knew what was going on. Why?She had studied the combat records and performance of the types of aircraft she'd have to utilize... back in the 1980's and 90's and Angola had been a war zone rife with Soviet (aka Khanate) material back then. Since she was both on the ball, bright and knew the score, the War Council put her in overall command. She knew what was expected of her and off she went, new staff in hand. She was 64 years old, yet as ready and willing to serve as any 20 year old believer in the Cause.Subtlety, scarcity and audacity were the watchwords of the day. The Khanate couldn't afford any of their front-line aircraft for this 'expedition'. They really couldn't afford any of their second-rate stuff either. Fortunately, they had some updated third-rate war-fighting gear still capable of putting up an impressive show in combat ~ providing they weren't going up against a top tier opponents.For the 'volunteers' of the Union Air Force, this could very likely to be a one-way trip. They all needed crash courses (not a word any air force loves, I know) in Portuguese though hastily provided iPhones with 'apps' to act as translators were deemed to be an adequate stop-gap measure. Besides, they were advised to avoid getting captured at all cost. The E&S couldn't afford the exposure. Given the opportunity ~ this assignment really was going above and beyond ~ not one of these forty-six to sixty-seven year olds backed out.No, they rolled out fifty of their antiquated aircraft, designs dating back to the 1950's through the mid-70's, and prepared them for the over 10,000 km journey to where they were 'needed most'. 118 pilots would go (72 active plus 46 replacements) along with 400 ground crew and an equally aged air defense battalion (so their air bases didn't get blown up). Security would be provided by 'outsiders' ~ allies already on the ground and whatever rebels could be scrounged up. After the initial insertion, the Indian Air Force would fly in supplies at night into the Cabinda City and Soyo Airports.The composition,14 Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-21 jet fighters ~ though she entered service in 1959, these planes' electronics were late 20th century and she was a renowned dogfighter. 12 were the Mig-21-97 modernized variant and the other two were Mig-21 UM two-seater trainer variants which could double as reconnaissance fighters if needed.14 Sukhoi Su-22 jet fighter-bombers ~ the original design, called the Su-17, came out in 1970, the first 12 were variants with the 22M4 upgrade were an early-80's package. The other 2 were Su-22U two-seat trainers which, like their Mig-21 comrades, doubled as reconnaissance fighters. The Su-22M4's would be doing the majority of the ground attack missions for the Cabindans, though they could defend themselves in aerial combat if necessary.6 Sukhoi Su-24M2 supersonic attack aircraft ~ the first model rolled off the production lines in the Soviet Union back in 1974. By far the heaviest planes in the Cabindan Air Force, the Su-24M2's would act as their 'bomber force' as well as anti-ship deterrence.8 Mil Mi-24 VM combat helicopters ~ introduced in 1972 was still a lethal combat machine today. Unlike the NATO helicopter force, the Mi-24's did double duty as both attack helicopter and assault transports at the same time.4 Mil Mi-8 utility helicopters, first produced in 1967. Three would act as troop/cargo transports (Mi-8 TP) while the fourth was configured as a mobile hospital (the MI-17 1VA).4 Antonov An-26 turboprop aircraft, two to be used as tactical transports to bring in supplies by day and two specializing in electronic intelligence aka listening to what the enemy was up to. Though it entered production in 1969, many still remained flying today.2 Antonov An-71M AEW&C twin-jet engine aircraft. These were an old, abandoned Soviet design the Earth & Sky had continued working on primarily because the current (1970's) Russian Airborne Early Warning and Control bird had been both huge and rather ineffective ~ it couldn't easily identify low-flying planes in the ground clutter so it was mainly only good at sea. Since the E&S planned to mostly fight over the land,They kept working on the An-71 which was basically 1977's popular An-72 with some pertinent design modifications (placing the engines below the wings instead of above them as on the -72 being a big one). To solve their radar problem, they stole some from the Swedish tech firm Ericsson, which hadn't been foreseen to be a problem before now.See, the Russians in the post-Soviet era created a decent AEW&C craft the E&S gladly stole and copied the shit out of for their front line units and it was working quite nicely ~ the Beriev A-50, and wow, were the boys in the Kremlin pissed off about that these days. Whoops, or was that woot?Now, the Khanate was shipping two An-71's down to Cabinda and somewhere along the line someone just might get a 'feel' for the style of radar and jamming the Cabindans were using aka the Swedish stuff in those An-71's. The Erieye radar system could pick out individual planes at 280 miles. The over-all system could track 60 targets and plot out 10 intercepts simultaneously. NATO, they were not, but in sub-Saharan Africa, there were none better.Anyway, so why was any of this important?Why the old folks with their ancient machines? As revealed, since the Earth & Sky had no idea when Temüjin would return, they were constantly squirreling away equipment. World War 2 gave them unequaled access to Soviet military technology and training.Afterwards, under Josef Stalin's direction, thousands of Russian and German engineers and scientists were exiled to Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan who were then snatched up (reportedly died in the gulags/trying to escape) and the E&S began building mirror factories modeled on the 'then current' Soviet production lines.So, by the early 1950's, the E&S was building, flying and maintaining Soviet-style Antonov, Beriev, Ilyushin, Myasishchev, Mikoyan-Gurevich, Sukhoi, Tupolev and Yakovlev airplanes. First in small numbers because their pool of pilots and specialists was so small.The E&S remedied this by creating both their own 'private' flight academies and technical schools. They protected their activities with the judicious use of bribes (they were remarkably successful with their economic endeavors on both side of the Iron Curtain) and murders (including the use of the Ghost Tigers).By 1960, the proto-Khanate had an air force. Through the next two decades they refined and altered their doctrine ~ moving away from the Soviet doctrine to a more pure combined-arms approach (the Soviets divided their air power into four separate arms ~ ADD (Long Range Aviation), FA (Front Aviation), MTA (Military Transport Aviation) and the V-PVO (Soviet Air Defenses ~ which controlled air interceptors).).It wasn't until the collapse of the Soviet Union and the independence of the various former SSR's that the E&S program really began to hit its stride. Still, while Russia faltered, China's PLAAF (Peoples' Liberation Army Air Force) began to take off. Since the Chinese could produce so much more, the E&S felt it had to keep those older planes and crews up to combat readiness. The younger field crews and pilots flew the newer models as they rolled off the secret production lines.Then the Unification War appeared suddenly, the E&S-turned Khanate Air Force skunked their PLAAF rivals due to two factors, a surprise attack on a strategic level and the fatal poisoning of their pilots and ground crews before they even got into the fight. For those Chinese craft not destroyed on the ground, the effects of Anthrax eroded their fighting edge. Comparable technology gave the Khanate their critical victory and Air Supremacy over the most important battlefields.What did this meant for those out-of-date air crews and pilots who had been training to a razor's edge for a month now? Their assignment had been to face down the Russians if they invaded. They would take their planes up into the fight even though this most likely would mean their deaths, but they had to try.When Operation Fun House put Russia in a position where she wasn't likely to jump on the Khanate, this mission's importance faded. The Russian Air Force was far more stretched than the Khanate's between her agitations in the Baltic and her commitments in the Manchurian, Ukrainian, Chechen and Georgian theaters.With more new planes rolling off the production lines, these reservist units began dropping down the fuel priority list, which meant lowering their flight times thus readiness. Only my hare-brained scheme had short-circuited their timely retirement. Had I realized I was getting people's grandparents killed, I would have probably made the same call anyway. We needed them.The KanateThe Khanate's #1 air superiority dogfighter was the Mig-35F. The #2 was the Mig-29. No one was openly discussing the Khanate's super-stealthy "Su-50", if that was what it was, because its existence 'might' suggest the Khanate also stole technology from the Indian defense industry, along with their laundry list of thefts from South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, the PRC, Russia and half of NATO.Her top multi-role fighters were the Su-47, Su-35S and Su-30SM. The Su-30 'Flanker-C/MK2/MKI were their 2nd team with plenty of 3rd team Su-27M's still flying combat missions as well.Strike fighters? There weren't enough Su-34's to go around yet, so the Su-25MS remained the Khanate's dedicated Close Air Assault model.Medium transport aircraft? The An-32RE and An-38. They had small, large and gargantuan transports as well.Bombers? The rather ancient jet-powered Tu-160M2's and Tu-22M2's as well as the even older yet still worthwhile turboprops ~ from 1956's ~ the Tu-95M S16.Helicopters? While they still flew updated variants of the Mil Mi-8/17 as military transports, the more optimized Kamov Ka-52 and Mil Mi-28 had replaced them in the assault role.Bizarrely, the Khanate had overrun several Chinese production lines of the aircraft frames and components ~ enough to complete fairly modern PLAAF (Peoples Liberation Army Air Force) FC-1 and J-10 (both are small multi-role fighter remarkably similar to the US F-16 with the FC-1 being the more advanced model, using shared Chinese-Pakistani technology and was designed for export,).They did have nearly two dozen to send, but they didn't have the pilots and ground crews trained to work with them, plus the FC-1 cost roughly $32 million which wasn't fundage any legitimate Cabindan rebels could get their hands on, much less $768 million (and that would just be for the planes, not the weeks' worth of fuel, parts and munitions necessary for what was forthcoming).Meanwhile, except for the An-26, which you could get for under $700,000 and the An-71, which were only rendered valuable via 'black market tech', none of the turboprop and jet aircraft the Khanate was sending were what any sane military would normally want. The helicopters were expensive ~ the 'new' models Mi-24's cost $32 million while the Mi-17's set you back $17 million. The one's heading to Cabinda didn't look 'new'.The Opposition:In contrast, the Angolan Air Force appeared far larger and more modern. Appearances can be deceptive, and they were. Sure, the models of Russian and Soviet-made aircraft they had in their inventory had the higher numbers ~ the Su-25, -27 and -30 ~ plus they had Mig-21bis's, Mig-23's and Su-22's, but things like training and up-keep didn't appear to be priorities for the Angolans.When you took into account the rampant corruption infecting all levels of Angolan government, the conscript nature of their military, the weakness of their technical educational system, the complexity of any modern combat aircraft and the reality that poor sods forced into being Air Force ground crewmen hardly made the most inspired technicians, or most diligent care-takers of their 'valuable' stockpiles (which their officers all too often sold on the black market anyway), things didn't just look bleak for the Angolan Air Force, they were a tsunami of cumulative factors heading them for an epic disaster.It wasn't only their enemies who derided their Air Force's lack of readiness. Their allies constantly scolded them about it too. Instead of trying to fix their current inventory, the Angolans kept shopping around for new stuff. Since 'new'-new aircraft was beyond what they wanted to spend (aka put too much of a dent in the money they were siphoning off to their private off-shore accounts), they bought 'used' gear from former Soviet states ~ Belarus, Russia and Ukraine ~ who sold them stuff they had left abandoned in revetments (open to the elements to slowly rot) on the cheap.To add to the insanity, the Angolans failed to keep up their maintenance agreements so their newly fixed high-tech machines often either couldn't fly, or flew without critical systems, like radar, avionics and even radios. Maybe that wasn't for the worst because after spending millions on these occasionally-mobile paperweights, the Angolans bought the least technologically advanced missile, gun and rocket systems they could get to put on these flying misfortunes.On the spread sheets, Angola had 18 Su-30K's, 18 Su-27, 12 Su-25's, 14 Su-22's, 22 Mig-23's, 23 Mig-21bis's and 6 Embraer EMB 314 Super Tucano (a turboprop aircraft tailor-made for counter-insurgency operations), 105 helicopters with some combative ability and 21 planes with some airlift capacity. That equated to 81 either air superiority, or multi-role jet fighters versus the 12 Union Air Force (actually the Bakongo Uni o de Cabinda e Zaire, For as Armadas de Liberta  o, For a Area ~ Liberation Armed Forces, Air Force (BUCZ-FAL-FA) Mig-21-97's.It would seem lopsided except for the thousands of hours of flight experience the 'Unionists' enjoyed over their Angolan rivals. You also needed to take into account the long training and fanatic dedication of their ground crews to their pilots and their craft. Then you needed to take into account every Unionist aircraft, while an older airframe design, had updated (usually to the year 2000) technology lovingly cared for, as if the survival of their People demanded it.A second and even more critical factor was the element of surprise. At least the PRC and the PLAAF had contingencies for attacks from their neighbors in the forefront of their strategic planning. The Angolans? The only country with ANY air force in the vicinity was the Republic of South Africa (RSA) and they had ceased being a threat with the end of Apartheid and the rise of majority Black rule in that country nearly two decades earlier.In the pre-dawn hours of 'Union Independence Day', the FAL-FA was going to smash every Angolan Air base and air defense facility within 375 miles of Cabinda (the city). Every three hours after that, they would be hitting another target within their designated 'Exclusion Zone'. Yes, this 'Exclusion Zone' included a 'tiny' bit of DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo) territory. The DRC didn't have an air force to challenge them though, so,Inside this 'Exclusion Zone', anything moving by sea, river, road, rail, or air without Unionist governmental approval was subject to attack, which would require neutral parties to acknowledge some semblance of a free and independent B U C Z. Worse for Angola, this 'Zone' included Angola's capital and its largest port, Luanda, plus four more of their ten largest urban centers. This could be an economic, military and humanitarian catastrophe if mishandled.The Angolan Army did not have significant anti-aircraft assets. Why would they? Remember, no one around them had much of an air force to worry about. The FAL-FA in turn could hit military convoys with TV-guided munitions 'beyond line of sight', rendering what they did have useless. It got worse for the Army after dark. The FAL-FA could and would fly at night whereas the average Angolan formation had Zip-Zero-Nadda night fighting capacity.Then geography added its own mountain of woes. As far as Cabinda was concerned, there was no direct land line to their border from Angola. Their coastal road only went as far as the port of Soyo where the Congo River hit the South Atlantic Ocean. Across that massive gap was the DRC where the road was not picked back up. Far up the coast was the DRC town of Muanda (with an airport) and though they did have a road which went north, it did not continue to the Cabindan border.Nope. To get at Cabinda from the south meant a long, torturous travel through northeastern Angola, into the heart of the DRC then entailed hooking west to some point 'close' to the Cabindan frontier before finally hoofing it overland through partially cleared farmland and jungle. Mind you, the DRC didn't have a native air force capable of protecting the Angolans in their territory so,In fact the only 'road' to Cabinda came from the Republic of Congo (Congo) to the north and even that was a twisted route along some really bad, swampy terrain. This had been the pathway of conquest the Angolans took 39 years earlier. The difference being the tiny bands of pro-independence Cabindan guerillas back then couldn't hold a candle to the Amazons fighting to free Cabinda this time around in numbers, zeal, training and up-to-date equipment.Next option ~ to come by sea. They would face a few, stiff problems, such as the FAL-FA having ship-killer missiles, the Angolan Navy not being able to defend them and the Unionists having no compunction to not strike Pointe-Noire in the 'not so neutral' Republic of the Congo if they somehow began unloading Angolan troops. It seemed the Republic of the Congo didn't have much of an Air Force either.Before you think the FAL-FA was biting off more than they could chew, Cabinda, the province, was shaped somewhat like the US State of Delaware, was half the size of Connecticut (Cabinda was 2,810 sq. mi. to Conn.'s 5,543 sq. mi.) and only the western 20% was relatively open countryside where the Angolan Army's only advantage ~ they possessed armed fighting vehicles while the 'Unionists' did not (at this stage of planning) ~ could hopefully come into play.Centered at their capital, Cabinda (City), jets could reach any point along their border within eight minutes. Helicopters could make it in fifteen. To be safe, some of the FAL-FA would base at the town of Belize which was in the northern upcountry and much tougher to get at with the added advantage the Angolans wouldn't be expecting the FAL-FA to be using the abandoned airfield there, at least initially.Where they afraid attacking Angolan troops in the DRC would invite war with the DRC? Sure, but letting the Angolans reach the border unscathed was worse. Besides, the DRC was in such a mess it needed 23,000 UN Peacekeepers within her borders just to keep the country from falling apart. Barring outside, read European, intervention, did "Democratically-elected since 2001" President (for Life) Joseph Kabila want the FAL-FA to start dropping bombs on his capital, Kinshasa, which was well within reach of all their aircraft?Congo (the country), to the north, wasn't being propped up by the UN, or anything else except ill intentions. In reality, it hardly had much of a military at all. Its officer corps was chosen for political reliability, not merit, or capability. Their technology was old Cold War stuff with little effort to update anything and, if you suspected corruption might be a problem across all spectrums of life, you would 'probably' be right about that too.If you suspected the current President had been in charge for a while, you would be correct again (1979-1992 then 2001- and the 'whoops' was when he accidently let his country experiment with democracy which led to two civil wars). If you suspected he was a life-long Communist (along with the Presidents of the DRC and Angola), you'd be right about that as well. Somehow their shared Marxist-Leninist-Communist ideology hadn't quite translated over to alleviating the grinding poverty in any of those countries despite their vast mineral wealth,At this point in the region's history, little Cabinda had everything to gain by striving for independence and the vast majority of 'warriors' who could possibly be sent against her had terribly little to gain fighting and dying trying to stop them from achieving her goal. After all, their lives weren't going to get any better and with the Amazons ability ~ nay willingness ~ to commit battlefield atrocities, those leaders were going to find it hard going to keep sending their men off to die.And then, it got even worse.See, what I had pointed out was there were two oil refineries in Angola, and neither was in Cabinda. Cabinda would need a refinery to start making good on their oil wealth ~ aka economically bribe off the Western economies already shaken over the Khanate's first round of aggressions.But wait! There was an oil refinery just across the Congo River from Cabinda ~ which meant it was attached to mainland Angola. That had to be a passel of impossible news, right?Nope. As I said earlier, it seemed the people of northern Angola were the same racial group as the Cabindans AND majority Catholic while the ruling clique wasn't part of their ethnic confederacy plus the farther south and east into Angola you went, the less Catholic it became.But it got better. This province was historically its own little independent kingdom (called the Kingdom of Kongo) to boot! It had been abolished by Portugal back in 1914.The 'good' news didn't end there. Now, it wasn't as if the leadership of Angola was spreading the wealth around to the People much anyway, but these northerners had been particularly left out of this Marxist version of 'Trickle Down' economics.How bad was this? This northwestern province ~ called Zaire ~ didn't have any railroads, or paved roads, linking it to the rest of the freaking country. The 'coastal road' entered the province, but about a third of the way up ran into this river, which they'd failed to bridge (you had to use a single track bridge farther to the northeast, if you can believe it). It wasn't even a big river. It was still an obstacle though.How did the Angolan government and military planned to get around? Why by air and sea, of course. Well, actually by air. Angola didn't have much of a merchant marine, or Navy, to make sealift a serious consideration. Within hours of the 'Union Declaration of Independence' anything flying anywhere north of the Luanda, the capital of Angola, would essentially be asking to be blown out of the sky.Along the border between Zaire province and the rest of Angola were precisely two chokepoints. By 'chokepoints', I meant places where a squad (10 trained, modernly-equipped troopers) could either see everything for miles & miles over pretty much empty space along a river valley and the only bridge separating Zaire province from the south, or overlook a ravine which the only road had to pass through because of otherwise bad-ass, broken terrain.Two.Zaire Province had roughly the same population as Cabinda ~ 600,000. Unlike Cabinda, which consisted of Cabinda City plus a few tiny towns and rugged jungles, Zaire had two cities ~ Soyo, with her seventy thousand souls plus the refinery at the mouth of the Congo River, and M'banza-Kongo, the historical capital of the Kingdom of Kongo, spiritual center of the Bakongo People (who included the Cabindans) and set up in the highlands strategically very reminiscent of Điện Biàn Phủ.Of Zaire's provincial towns, the only other strategic one was N'Zeto with her crappy Atlantic port facility and 2,230 meter grass airport. The town was the northern terminus of the National Road 100 ~ the Coastal Road. It terminated because of the Mebridege River. There wasn't a bridge at N'Zeto though there was a small one several miles upstream. N'Zeto was also where the road from provinces east of Zaire ended up, so you had to have N'Zeto ~ and that tiny bridge ~ to move troops overland anywhere else in Zaire Province.So you would think it would be easy for the Angolan Army to defend then, except of how the Amazons planned to operate. They would infiltrate the area first then 'rise up in rebellion'. Their problem was the scope of the operation had magnified in risk of exposure, duration and forces necessary for success.The serious issue before Saint Marie and the Host in Africa were the first two. They could actually move Amazons from Brazil and North America to bolster their numbers for the upcoming offensive. Even in the short-short term, equipment wouldn't be a serious problem. What the Amazons dreaded was being left in a protracted slugfest with the Angolan Army which the Condottieri could jump in on. The Amazons exceedingly preferred to strike first then vanish.There was reason to believe a tiny number could have stayed behind in Cabinda to help the locals prepare their military until they could defend themselves. They would need more than a hundred Amazons if Cabinda wanted to incorporate Zaire. The answer was to call back their newfound buddy, the Great Khan. While he didn't have much else he could spare (the Khanate was ramping up for their invasion of the Middle East after all, the Kurds needed the help), he had other allies he could call on.India couldn't help initially since they were supposed to supply the 'Peace-keepers' once a cease-fire had been arranged. That left Temujin with his solid ally, Vietnam, and his far shakier allies, the Republic of China and Japan.First off ~ Japan could not help, which meant they couldn't supply troops who might very well end up dead, or far worse, captured.. What they did have was a surplus of older equipment the ROC troops were familiar with, so while the ROC was gearing up for their own invasion of mainland China in February, they were willing to help the Chinese kill Angolans, off the books, of course.The ROC was sending fifteen hundred troops the Khanate's way to help in this West African adventure with the understanding they'd be coming home by year's end. With Vietnam adding over eight hundred of her own Special Forces, the Amazons had the tiny 'allied' army they could leave shielding Cabinda/Zaire once the first round of blood-letting was over.To be 'fair', the Republic of China and Vietnam asked for 'volunteers'. It wasn't like either country was going to declare war on Angola directly. Nearly a thousand members of Vietnam's elite 126th Regiment of the 5th Brigade (Đặc cáng bộ) took early retirement then misplaced their equipment as they went to update their visas and inoculations before heading out for the DRC (some would be slipping over the DRC/Cabindan border).On Taiwan, it was the men and women of the 602nd Air Cavalry Brigade, 871st Special Operations Group and 101st Amphibious Reconnaissance Battalion who felt the sudden desire to 'seek enlightenment elsewhere, preferably on another continent'.They too were off to the Democratic Republic of Congo, man that country was a mess and their border security wasn't worth writing home about, that's for damn sure, via multiple Southeast Asian nations. Besides, they were being issued fraudulently visas which showed them to be from the People's Republic of China, not the ROC/Taiwan. If they were captured, they were to pretend to "be working for a Communist Revolution inside Angola and thus to be setting all of Africa on fire!" aka be Mainland Chinese.There, in the DRC, these Chinese stumbled across, some Japanese. These folks hadn't retired. No. They were on an extended assignment for the UN's mission in, the DRC. OH! And look! They'd brought tons of surplus, outdated Japanese Self Defense Forces' equipment with them, and there just so happened to be some Taiwanese who had experience in using such equipment (both used US-style gear).And here was Colonel Yoshihiro Isami of the Chūō Sokuō Shūdan (Japan's Central Readiness Force) wondering why he and his hastily assembled team had just unloaded,18 Fuji/Bell AH-1S Cobra Attack helicopters,6 Kawasaki OH-6D Loach Scout helicopters,12 Fuji-Bell 204-B-2 Hiyodori Utility helicopters,6 Kawasaki/Boeing CH-47JA Chinook Transport helicopters and4 Mitsubishi M U-2L-1 Photo Reconnaissance Aircraft.Yep! 46 more aircraft for the FAL-FA!Oh, and if this wasn't 'bad enough', the Chinese hadn't come alone. They'd brought some old aircraft from their homes to aid in the upcoming struggle. Once more, these things were relics of the Cold War yet both capable fighting machines and, given the sorry state of the opposition, definitely quite deadly. A dozen F-5E Tiger 2000 configured primarily for air superiority plus two RF-5E Tigergazer for reconnaissance, pilots plus ground crews, of course.Thus, on the eve of battle, the FAL-FA had become a true threat. Sure, all of its planes (and half of its pilots) were pretty old, but they were combat-tested and in numbers and experience no other Sub-Saharan African nation could match.The Liberation Ground Forces:But wait, there was still the niggling little problem of what all those fellas were going to fight with once they were on the ground. Assault/Battle rifles, carbines, rifles, pistols, PDW, SMGs as bullets, grenades and RPG's were all terrifyingly easy to obtain. The coast of West Africa was hardly the Port of London as far as customs security went. They were going to need some bigger toys and their host nations were going to need all their native hardware for their upcoming battles at home.And it wasn't like you could advertise for used IFV (Infantry Fighting Vehicles), APCs (armored personnel carriers) and tanks on e-Bay, Amazon.com, or Twitter. If something modern US, or NATO, was captured rolling around the beautiful Angolan countryside, shooting up hostile Angolans, all kinds of head would roll in all kinds of countries, unless the country,A) had an Executive Branch and Judiciary who wouldn't ask (or be answering) too many uncomfortable questions,B) wasn't all that vulnerable to international pressure,C) really needed the money and,D) didn't give a fuck their toys would soon be seen on BBC/CNN/Al Jazeera blowing the ever-living crap out of a ton of Africans aka doing what they were advertised to do and doing it very well in the hands of capable professionals.And politics was kind enough to hand the freedom-loving people of Cabinda & Zaire a winner, and it wasn't even from strangers, or at least people all that strange to their part of the Globe. If you would have no idea who to look for, you wouldn't be alone.That was the magic of the choice. See, the last three decades had seen the entire Globe take a colossal dump on them as a Nation and a People. They were highly unpopular for all sorts of things, such as Crimes Against Humanity and 'no', we were not talking about the Khanate.We would be talking about Република Србија / Republika Srbija aka Serbia aka the former Yugoslavia who had watched all their satellite minions (Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Montenegro, Kosovo and Macedonia) slip away. Despite being reduced to a tiny fraction of their former selves thus fighting two incredibly brutal and bloody World Wars for nothing, Serbia insisted on maintaining a robust armaments industry.Mind you, they didn't make the very best stuff on the planet. That didn't stop them from trying though. Of equal importance was their geographic location and the above mentioned desire for some hard currency without asking too many questions. The geography was simple, you could move even heavy gear unnoticed from central Serbia to the Montenegrin port of Bar by rail and load them up on freighters and off to the Congo you went.The Serbians produced an APC called the BVP M-80A's which weren't blowing anyone's minds away when they started rolling off the production lines back in 1982, plus some over-eager types on the Serbian Army's payroll sweetened the deal by offering 'the rebels' some BVP M-80 KC's and a KB as well.Then they slathered on the sugary-sweet Maple syrup by upgrading a few of the M-80A's to BVP M-98A's. Why would they be so generous? The KC's and KB were the Command & Control variants, so that made sense (C = company & B = battalion commander). The -98A had never been tested in the field before and they were kind of curious how the new turrets (which was the major difference) would behave. 'Our' procurement agents didn't quibble. We needed the gear.Besides, these Slavic entrepreneurs gave them an inside track on some 'disarmed/mothballed' Czech (introduced in 1963) armored mobile ambulances and Polish BWP-1 (first rolled out in 1966) APC's which were either in, or could be quickly configured into, the support variants those ground-fighters would need. The 'disarmed' part was 'fixable', thanks to both the Serbians and Finland. The 'missing' basic weaponry was something the Serbians could replace with virtually identical equipment.It just kept getting better. Unknown to me at the time, the Finnish firm, Patria Hágglunds, had sold twenty-two of their 'most excellent' AMOS turrets ~ they are a twin 120 mm mortar system ~ then the deal fell through. Whoops! Should have guarded that warehouse better. Those bitches were on a cargo plane bound for Albania inside of six hours.The ammunition for them was rather unique. Thankfully, it was uniquely sold by the Swiss, who had no trouble selling it to Serbia, thank you very much! Twenty-two BWP-1's became mobile artillery for the Unionist freedom fighters, though I understood the ship ride with the Serbian and Chinese technicians was loads of fun as they struggled to figured out how to attach those state-of-the-art death-dealing turrets to those ancient contraptions.To compensate, the Serbians added (aka as long as our money was good) two Nora B-52 155 mm 52-calibre mobile artillery pieces and one battery of Orkan CER MLRS (Multiple Launch Rocket System) for long-range artillery, two batteries of their Oganj 2000 ER MRLS for medium range carnage and six batteries of their M-94 MRLS for 'close support' as well. More field-testing new gear for the "freedom fighters" We also managed to 'purchase' ten M-84AS Main Battle tanks plus an M-84A1 armor recovery vehicle. It should have been twelve tanks, but two had 'loading issues'.Not to be deterred, our busy little procurement-beavers discovered four tanks no one was using, in neighboring Croatia. Why wasn't anyone immediately keen on their placement? They were two sets of prototypes, Croatia's improvements on the M-84; the M-95 Degman which was a 'failed redesign' and the M-84D, which was a vast up-grade for the M-84 line which had been sidelined by the 2008 Global economic collapse, after which the project stagnated.It seemed they were all in working order because late one night 'my people' exited a Croatian Army base with them, never to be seen again, until two weeks later when an intrepid news crew caught the distinctive form of the M-95 sending some sweet 125 mm loving the Angolan Army's way. Whoops yet again! At least they hit what they were aiming at and destroyed what they hit, right?By then, millions of other people would be going 'what the fuck?' right along with them as Cabinda's camouflage- and mask-wearing rebel army was laying the smack-down on the Angolans. That was okay; over a million 'free Cabindan Unionists' were in the same boat. Over a thousand Asians with their mostly-female militant translators were right there to prop up their 'Unionist Allies', but then they were the ones with the tanks, armored vehicles, planes and guns, so they were less worried than most.To pilot these tanks, APC, IFV and man this artillery, they had to go back to the Khanate. Sure enough, they had some old tankers used to crewing the T-72 from which the M-84's and -95 Degman were derived. They'd also need drivers for those BVP M-80A's and Polish BWP-1's and OT-64 SKOT's... who were, again, derived from old Soviet tech (just much better). The Serbian artillery was similar enough to Soviet stuff, but with enough new tech to make it 'more fun' for the reservists to 'figure out' how to use.More volunteers for the Liberation Armed Forces! More Apple sales, great apps and voice modulation software so that the vehicle commanders would be heard communicating in Portuguese if someone was eavesdropping. As a final offering the Turkish Navy spontaneously developed some plans to test their long range capabilities by going to, the South Atlantic.On the final leg they would have six frigates and two submarines, enough to give any navy in the region, which wasn't Brazil, something to think about. This was a show of force, not an actual threat though. If anyone called their bluff, the Khanate-Turkish forces would have to pull back. These were not assets my Brother, the Great Khan, could afford to gamble and lose.If someone didn't call that bluff, he was also sending two smaller, older corvettes and three even smaller, but newer, fast attack boats, a "gift" to the Unionists ASAP. The frigates would then race home, they had 'other' issues to deal with while the submarines would hang around for a bit. The naval gift was necessitated by the reality the Unionists would have to press their claim to their off-shore riches and that required a naval force Angola couldn't hope to counter.As things were developing, it was reckoned since a build-up of such momentous land and air power couldn't be disguised, it had to happen in a matter of days ~ four was decided to be the minimum amount of time. More than that and the government of the Democratic Republic might start asking far too many questions our hefty bribes and dubious paperwork couldn't cover. Less than that would leave the task forces launching operations with too little a chance of success.Our biggest advantage was audacity. The buildup would happen 100 km up the Congo River from Soyo, the primary target of the Southern Invasion, in the DRC's second largest port city, Boma. Though across the river was Angolan territory, there was nothing there. The city of roughly 160,000 would provide adequate cover for the initial stage of the invasion.There they grouped their vehicles & Khanate drivers with Amazon and Vietnamese combat teams. The Japanese were doing the same for their 'Chinese' counterparts for their helicopter-borne forces. Getting all their equipment in working order in the short time left was critical as was creating some level of unit dynamic. Things were chaotic. No one was happy. They were all going in anyway.What had gone wrong?While most children her age were texting their schoolmates, or tackling their homework, Aya Ruger ~ the alias of Nasusara Assiyaiá hamai ~ was getting briefings of her global, secret empire worth hundreds of billions and those of her equally nefarious compatriots. She received a very abbreviated version of what the Regents received, delivered by a member of Shawnee Arinniti's staff.When Aya hopped off her chair unexpectedly, everyone tensed. Her bodyguards' hands went to their sidearms and Lorraine (her sister by blood), also in the room on this occasion, stood and prepared to tackle her 'former' sibling to the ground if the situation escalated into an assassination attempt. No such attack was generated, so the security ratcheted down and the attendant returned her focus to her Queen. Aya paced four steps, turned and retraced her way then repeated the action three more times."How many people live in the combined areas?" she asked."The combined areas? Of Cabinda and Zaire?""Yes.""I," the woman referenced her material, "roughly 1.1 million.""What is the yearly value of the offshore oil and natural gas production?""Forty-nine billion, eighty hundred and sixty-seven million by our best estimates at this time,""How many live in Soyo City proper?""Roughly 70,000.""We take Soyo," she spoke in a small yet deliberate voice. "We take and hold Soyo as an independent city-state within the Cabindan-Zaire Union. From the maps it appears Soyo is a series of islands. It has a port and airport. It has an open border to an ocean with weaker neighbors all around.""What of the, Zairians?""Bakongo. As a people they are called the Bakongo," Aya looked up at the briefer. "We relocate those who need to work in Soyo into a new city, built at our expense, beyond the southernmost water barrier. The rest we pay to relocate elsewhere in Zaire, or Cabinda."By the looks of those around her, Aya realized she needed to further explain her decisions."This is more than some concrete home base for our People," she began patiently. "In the same way it gives our enemies a clearly delineated target to attack us, it is a statement to our allies we won't cut and run if things go truly bad.""In the same way it will provide us with diplomatic recognition beyond what tenuous handouts we are getting from Cáel Wakko Ishara's efforts through JIKIT. Also, it is a reminder we are not like the other Secret Societies in one fundamental way, we are not a business concern, or a religion. We are a People and people deserve some sort of homeland. We have gone for so long without.""But Soyo?" the aide protested. "We have no ties to it, and it backs up to, nothing.""Northern Turkey and southern Slovakia mean nothing to us now as well," Aya debated. "No place on Earth is any more precious than another. As for backing up to nothing, no. You are incorrect. It backs into a promise from our allies in the Earth & Sky that if we need support, they know where to park their planes and ships."Aya was surrounded with unhappy, disbelieving looks."The Great Khan is my mamētu meáeda," she reminded them, "and I have every reason to believe he completely grasps the concept's benefits and obligations."The looks confirmed 'but he's a man' to the tiny Queen."Aya, are you sure about this?" Lorraine was the first to break decorum."Absolutely. Do you know what he sent me when he was informed of my, ascension to the Queendom?""No," Lorraine admitted."We must go horse-riding sometime soon, Daughter of Cáel, Queen of the Amazons."More uncertain and unconvinced looks."He didn't congratulate me, or send any gifts. He could have and you would think he would have, but he didn't. He knew the hearts of me & my Atta and we weren't in the celebratory mood. No. The Great Khan sent one sentence which offered solace and quiet, atop a horse on a windswept bit of steppe."Nothing.Sigh. "I know this sounds Cáel-ish," Aya admitted, "but I strongly believe this is what we should do. We are giving the Cabindans and Bakongo in Zaire independence and the promise of a much better life than what they now face. We will be putting thousands of our sisters' lives on the line to accomplish this feat and well over two hundred million dollars.""What about governance of the city ~ Soyo?" the aide forged ahead."Amazon law," Aya didn't hesitate. "We will make allowances for the security forces of visiting dignitaries and specific allied personnel, but otherwise it will be one massive Amazon urban freehold.""I cannot imagine the Golden Mare, or the Regents, will be pleased," the attendant bowed her head."It is a matter of interconnectivity," Aya walked up and touched the woman's cheek with the back of her small hand. "We could liberate then abandon Cabinda with the hope a small band could help them keep their independence. Except we need the refinery at Soyo so the people of Cabinda can truly support that liberty.""So, we must keep Soyo and to keep Soyo, we must keep Zaire province. There is no other lesser border which makes strategic sense ~ a river, highlands, a massive river, an ocean ~ those are sustainable frontiers. You can't simply keep Soyo and not expect the enemy to strike and destroy that refinery, thus we must take Zaire province.""But the Bakongo of Zaire cannot defend themselves and will not be able to do so for at least a year, if not longer. That means we must do so, and for doing so, they will give us Soyo and we will be honest stewards of their oil wealth. We cannot expect any other power to defend this new Union and if we don't have a land stake we will be portrayed as mercenaries and expelled by hostile international forces.""So, for this project to have any chance of success, we must stay, fight and have an acknowledged presence, and if you can think of an alternative, please let me know," she exhaled."What if the Cabindans and Bakongo resist?""It is 'us', or the Angolans and they know how horrible the Angolans can be. Didn't you say the average person their lives on just $2 a day?""Yes.""We can do better than that," Aya insisted."How?" the aide persisted. "I mean, 'how in a way which will be quickly evident and meaningful?'""Oh," Aya's tiny brow furrowed. Her nose twitched as she rummaged through the vast storehouse of her brain."Get me in touch with William A. Miller, Director of the U.S. Diplomatic Security Service. He should be able to help me navigate the pathways toward getting aid and advisors into those two provinces ASAP.""I'll let Katrina know," the attendant made the notation on her pad."No. Contact him directly," Aya intervened. "We established a, rapport when we met. I think he might responded positively to a chance to mentor me in foreign relations.""Really?" Lorraine's brows arched."Yes," Aya chirped."Are you sure, Nasusara?" the attendant stared. She used 'Nasusara' whenever she thought Aya had a 'horrible' idea instead of a merely a 'bad' one."Yes. He owes me. Last time we met I didn't shoot him.""Didn't?" the woman twitched."Yes. I drew down on him with my captured Chinese QSW-06. I didn't want to kill him, but I felt I was about to have to kill Deputy National Security Advisor Blinken and he was the only other person in the room both armed and capable of stopping me.""Why is he still alive?""Cáel Ishara saw through my distraction and then took my gun from me, asked for it actually," she shyly confessed."Would you have shot him?" the aide inquired."What do you think?" Aya smiled.And Then:So, given t

Apply For These Grants Here: https://fas.usda.gov/programs/assisting-specialty-crop-exports-asce-initiativeASCEadmin@usda.gov Thank you again to the amazing Alexis Taylor and team at the USDA including Andrew Stephens for making this happen! The projects will target such cross-cutting issues as:  Addressing the implications of new and forthcoming regulations related to plastics and packaging for fresh produce and other specialty crop products;Helping U.S. exporters identify potential export markets and better understand the mechanics of exporting;Assisting U.S. exporters with navigating foreign standards, certifications, and import requirements, including maximum residue limits (MRLs) for pesticides used on specialty crops; andHelping importing countries adopt international standards and harmonize import regulations in order to facilitate trade.ASCE projects are intended to benefit an entire industry or product category rather than a specific company. They are not intended to directly export products, identify specific foreign buyers, support market promotion activities, or deal with tariffs and related trade policy issues. Check out our sponsor Orora Packaging Solutions https://ororapackagingsolutions.com/ https://specright.com/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/1329820053/ref=as_sl_pc_qf_sp_asin_til?tag=corygathttps://www.linkedin.com/in/cory-connors/I'm here to help you make your packaging more sustainable! Reach out today and I'll get back to you asap. This podcast is an independent production and the podcast production is an original work of the author. All rights of ownership and reproduction are retained—copyright 2022.

Growers at the GRDC Grains Research Updates at Minyip in Victoria in July 2023 were told by Gerard McMullen from the National Working Party on Grain Protection that applying chemicals according to the label rate did not necessarily mean grain would meet export market requirements.  Gerard joins us on this podcast to talk about changing MRLs, the chemical review being undertaken by the APVMA and why products such as carbendazim should never be used off label.  Download the transcript for this episode Contact: Gerard McMullen National Working Party on Grain Protection gerard@mcmullengrainagricultural.com More Information: GroundCover article – Grains industry scores A-plus for chemical residue compliance GroundCover article – EU changes residue limit for haloxyfop on canola Project Code: ORM1906-001SAX Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The ability to stay within maximum residue limits (MRLs) can make or break a grain deal. Export markets keep a keen eye on whether imported crops meet specific tolerance for disease, toxins and pesticide residues, and MRLs play a key role in facilitating trade and establishing the ground rules for global market accessibility. Earlier this... Read More

Thanks for tuning in to this Agronomic Monday edition of RealAg Radio with host Shaun Haney! We will hear an interview with Kelvin Heppner of RealAgriculture and the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food, Marie Claude Bibeau on the decisions made on MRLs and cosmetic pesticide use. We will also hear an interview from RealAgriculture’s Kara... Read More

Thanks for tuning in to this Agronomic Monday edition of RealAg Radio with host Shaun Haney! We will hear an interview with Kelvin Heppner of RealAgriculture and the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food, Marie Claude Bibeau on the decisions made on MRLs and cosmetic pesticide use. We will also hear an interview from RealAgriculture’s Kara... Read More

The federal government announced a series of changes to its policies around pesticide use on Tuesday, including the introduction of a ban on cosmetic uses of pesticides on federal land and the end of a nearly two-year pause on reviews of maximum residue limits (MRLs). CropLife Canada, which represents companies that make crop protection products,... Read More

With great delight, our next part in Monument Recordings belongs to Laura MRLS and their recorded set from Subverted event in October 2022 at ://about blank in Berlin. Faithful to their most beloved combinations and approaches, Laura projects a beautiful blend of eerie, cold cinemascopic terrains with straightforward, banging layers atop an ever-reforming, industrialistic, yet hypnotic canvas. Read more : https://mnmt.no/magazine/2023/02/27/monument-recordings-laura-mrls-subverted-about-blank-berlin-2022/ Follow : Laura MRLS FB: https://www.facebook.com/LauraMrlsMusic/ IG: https://www.instagram.com/la.mrls/ SC: @laura_mrls Subverted FB: https://www.facebook.com/subvertedscene IG: https://www.instagram.com/subverted.scene/ SC: @subvertedscene

It's September 1985, and the SA Air Force and ground forces have already shot down two Russian helicopters and an Antonov transport plane. That was an attempt at slowing down an MPLA ground assault using it's PLAN troops against UNITA at Mavinga. If you remember, this was the Angolans Operation Second Congress. On the 29th September, 32 Battalion ground team near Cuito Cuanavale radio'd the SA Air Force operations of a helicopter formation that had just taken off, bound for the battle zone around Mavinga. This was a mixed formation, two Mi-8/17 transport choppers escorted by Mi-25 gunships. The Impalas were scrambled and headed at low altitude to the targets which were picked up along the Lomba River. The Russian helicopters were flying at 3000 feet AGL, and the Mi-8/17 formation was in a trailing echelon about 1000 meters apart. About a kilometer back, the two Mi-25s were flying in support and were also at 3000 feet. The first pair of Impalas launched their attack, and then the second with devastating consequences for the chopper pilots and crew. All four were shot down. A third pair of Impalas who were monitoring watched as two MiG-23 fighter jets approached at 200 feel AGL, then swept their wings back, accelerated and climbed out of sight. They preferred to avoid dogfighting the South Africans. ON first December 1985 operational order number 1/12/85 required 32 Battalion to inflict maximum damage on FAPLA personnel and equipment in the 3rd and 6th military regions by sustained bombardment. Easier said than done. The main targets were Cuito Caunavale and the airstrip at Menongue. There were also specific instructions to target the FAPLA force as soon as it began moving towards Jamba using the all-important Multiple Rocket Launchers or MRLs. 32 was warned not to let these fall into enemy hands. Colonel Eddie Viljoen commanded this part of the operation targeting Menongue, both the MRL troop along with Charlie Company, while Captain Daan van der Merwe led an MRL troop and Golf Company as they attacked Cuito Cuanavale. Ten years earlier 32 had deployed around Menongue during operation Savannah, now they were going back. On the 15 December four MRLs were flown to Rundu from Waterkloof Air Force Base and everything was set to roll on Christmas eve.

It's September 1985, and the SA Air Force and ground forces have already shot down two Russian helicopters and an Antonov transport plane. That was an attempt at slowing down an MPLA ground assault using it's PLAN troops against UNITA at Mavinga. If you remember, this was the Angolans Operation Second Congress. On the 29th September, 32 Battalion ground team near Cuito Cuanavale radio'd the SA Air Force operations of a helicopter formation that had just taken off, bound for the battle zone around Mavinga. This was a mixed formation, two Mi-8/17 transport choppers escorted by Mi-25 gunships. The Impalas were scrambled and headed at low altitude to the targets which were picked up along the Lomba River. The Russian helicopters were flying at 3000 feet AGL, and the Mi-8/17 formation was in a trailing echelon about 1000 meters apart. About a kilometer back, the two Mi-25s were flying in support and were also at 3000 feet. The first pair of Impalas launched their attack, and then the second with devastating consequences for the chopper pilots and crew. All four were shot down. A third pair of Impalas who were monitoring watched as two MiG-23 fighter jets approached at 200 feel AGL, then swept their wings back, accelerated and climbed out of sight. They preferred to avoid dogfighting the South Africans. ON first December 1985 operational order number 1/12/85 required 32 Battalion to inflict maximum damage on FAPLA personnel and equipment in the 3rd and 6th military regions by sustained bombardment. Easier said than done. The main targets were Cuito Caunavale and the airstrip at Menongue. There were also specific instructions to target the FAPLA force as soon as it began moving towards Jamba using the all-important Multiple Rocket Launchers or MRLs. 32 was warned not to let these fall into enemy hands. Colonel Eddie Viljoen commanded this part of the operation targeting Menongue, both the MRL troop along with Charlie Company, while Captain Daan van der Merwe led an MRL troop and Golf Company as they attacked Cuito Cuanavale. Ten years earlier 32 had deployed around Menongue during operation Savannah, now they were going back. On the 15 December four MRLs were flown to Rundu from Waterkloof Air Force Base and everything was set to roll on Christmas eve.

Two companies conducted an extensive crop tour of Western Canada during the first week of August. Argus Media and Leftfield Commodity Research combined resources to stop at more than forty farms in the three-prairie province. At more than half of the sites, they were able to speak to local producers. The companies produced average yield and production estimates for canola and wheat in Western Canada. Jonathon Driedger, the vice president of LeftField Commodity Research will share what they saw on the tour.   Crop protection products, specifically pre-harvest glyphosate, are heavily scrutinized domestically and internationally. In recent years, there has been increased attention towards maximum residue limits (MRLs).Pulse Canada has developed a program to provide free, confidential glyphosate residue testing for farmers and agronomists to ensure the proper application timing of pre-harvest glyphosate for pulse crops. Saskatchewan Pulse Growers Agronomy Manager Sarah Anderson says this be another tool for farmers.   She will also share more on the Harvest Sample Program.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Deciding when and how much pesticide to spray on a pulse crop can have a significant impact on the yield come harvest, but aside from yield, growers need to consider and be aware of maximum residue limits, or MRLs, for each specific crop to ensure they don’t fall outside of the acceptable range. On this... Read More

Transportation-Logistics Update The Almond Alliance, along with other agricultural export leaders, has met with significant ocean carriers such as CMA/CGM, OOCL, MAERSK, the Ports of LA, LB, and Oakland, and railroads - UP & BNSF, to find immediate solutions to current industry shipping logjams. Using ABC data, the Almond Alliance was able to show that there is the demand to warrant alternatives to shipping out of the Port of Oakland. As a result of these meetings, the Alliance was able to bring the parties together to offer a viable alternative. The new route would have shippers directly book with the ocean carrier OOCL for drop-off at the Oakland ramp. The product would be railed directly to LA/LB for final loading and shipment to various Asian markets (currently, service to India is not being offered). Concurrently, an additional rail service from the Central Valley directly to LA/LB is under development. More information on that rail service will be provided as details become available. Additional information will be released by the Almond Alliance. Visit their website here to stay up to date. Additionally, the gridlock surrounding the Ocean Shipping Reform Act in Congress is expected to be resolved in the next few weeks. The House is planning on taking up the version of the Bill passed by the Senate earlier this year. While this version does not include as strong of provisions that bar carriers from “unreasonably” declining export bookings, it includes stronger provisions related to reining in detention and demurrage fees. MRL Conference Highlights More Challenges for Ag Industry members attending the annual Minor Crops MRL Conference discussed challenges related to import tolerances, risk assessments and sustainable ag production. Increasing efforts to define “sustainable” food chains and acceptable processes and production methods will impact not only producers but also ag trade. It was highlighted that consumers generally do not appreciate the importance of chemical tools in mitigating food loss in the field resulting from insect pressures, drought, etc. – which impacts developing countries. Concern was expressed over the need for expedited approvals and reviews for chemical tools, to reduce the burden on industry and agency reviews. It was pointed out that about 14% of global noncompliance would “go away” if science-based Codex MRLs were followed. A presenter from Mexico raised awareness that there is a number of shifts in how pesticides are to be regulated within Mexico. Those shifts include a ban on imports of glyphosate thus precluding its use by Mexican growers, along with efforts to increase organic production and reduce pesticide use within Mexico. To date, it's not clear if these changes will impact MRLs and thus imports, but if the outlined changes take effect, then Mexican growers will likely push for import MRL changes. Pakistan Bans Imports of Almonds On May 19, Pakistan announced a formal import ban on various products, including agricultural products, in an effort to lower its trade deficit and preserve foreign currency reserves. Imports of nearly all products under Chapter 08, including almonds and all other nuts, are banned. In 2021, the U.S. exported 2,714 MT of shelled almonds and 1,698 MT of in-shell almonds to Pakistan. More information can be found in a recent USDA GAIN report. ABC staff are following up with USDA/FAS offices in Pakistan and USTR.

Bro History Ballistic Missiles in Ukraine On today's episode, we discuss the use of ballistic missiles in the ongoing war in Ukraine. We review the different types of missiles used, and discuss the different controversial events surrounding their use. Also, we chat about multiple rocket launchers (MRLs), the use of drones, and their impact on warfare. Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brohistory #239 Ballistic Missiles in Ukraine szamotah

When it comes to specifying the level of THC, CBD, terpenes, or other components in cannabis, there is a laundry list of rules and regulations that vary state by state. Each state has its own set of rules to govern maximum residual limits (MRLs) of heavy metals, chemicals, pesticides, and bacteria in cannabis products. Lack of consistency in testing has been the bane of legal cannabis producers. Consumers and businesses alike may not expect a lot to change until the federal government removes cannabis as a Schedule 1 drug under the Federal Controlled Substances Act (CSA). Then, the FDA takes over standardizing MRLs of toxins and establishing purity and dosing levels of THC. However, increasing testing standards and mandates uncover previously unknown pain points and lead to better, cleaner cannabis products. Read the article here.... --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/cannabis-tech/support

On this Thursday edition we’re continuing our year-in-review with interviews from August and September. Supply chain disruptions, the drought, and emissions policy were all the talk in late summer. On this episode, you’ll hear: Karen Proud, president and CEO of Fertilizer Canada, on the impact on fertilizer use by government decisions; Pierre Petelle of CropLife... Read More

On this Thursday edition we’re continuing our year-in-review with interviews from August and September. Supply chain disruptions, the drought, and emissions policy were all the talk in late summer. On this episode, you’ll hear: Karen Proud, president and CEO of Fertilizer Canada, on the impact on fertilizer use by government decisions; Pierre Petelle of CropLife... Read More

Welcome to the Elevator World News Podcast. Today's podcast news podcast is sponsored by elevatorbooks.com: www.elevatorbooks.com TKE ESCALATOR, ELEVATOR SOLUTIONS SERVE EXPO 2020 DUBAI "Smart and future-oriented" elevator and escalator systems from TK Elevator (TKE) are serving several national pavilions at Expo 2020 Dubai through March 31, 2022. The main site of the global event, set to begin on October 1, is a 438-ha area near Dubai's southern border with Abu Dhabi, where more than 190 nations are showcasing architecture, culture and innovations. Among TKE's best-selling products, velino 200 and velino 300 escalators are installed at the Kazakhstan, Russia and Saudi Arabia pavilions. velino series escalators are customizable, outfitted with various sustainability features and more than 50 intelligent safety features. At the German and Saudi Arabia pavilions are tugela escalators, which TKE describes as heavy-duty and highly customizable. In addition to escalators, TKE machine-room-less (MRL) elevators are featured in the Germany, Kazakhstan, Luxembourg, Saudi Arabia and Russia pavilions. These same MRLs are also installed at the partner pavilions of DP World and Emirates. Image credit: © German Pavilion To read the full transcript of today's podcast, visit: elevatorworld.com/news Subscribe to the Podcast: iTunes │ Google Play | SoundCloud │ Stitcher │ TuneIn

In this episode of “The Business of Blueberries,” host Kasey Cronquist, president of the USHBC and the North American Blueberry Council (NABC), and co-host Alicia Adler, USHBC and NABC vice president of global business development, are joined by Mario Flores, director of product management for blueberries at Naturipe Farms, and Matt Lantz, vice president for global access at Bryant Christie, to discuss how the blueberry industry navigates the regulatory environment when marketing blueberries internationally. “In the last year-and-a-half, we have been able to open the Vietnam market for U.S. blueberries, the Philippines market for U.S. blueberries, and the Chinese market for U.S. blueberries … that is a lightning pace for the type of work [Bryant Christie does].” - Matt Lantz “[Export market development] is a very important part of our overall marketing plan for our growers' blueberries because we're trying to find the best value that we can return back to the farm. And whether that is domestic or international sales, we're going to try to find the market that can bring the most value back to the growers.” - Mario Flores Topics covered include:  Flores and Lantz's backgrounds and their roles and experience at their companies. The importance of developing export markets for Naturipe.  Why different regions have different work plans and protocols for entering their market. Inside negotiations between governments.  Managing maximum residue limits (MRLs).  Crop Report The Blueberry Crop Report is an update on crop conditions and markets throughout North and South America. In this episode, you'll hear from Doug Krahmer in Oregon, Bryan Sakuma in Washington and Luis Vegas in Peru. This was recorded on September 1, 2021.   Marketing Boost https://ushbc.blueberry.org/all-resources/toolkits-and-marketing-materials/grab-a-boost-of-blue/holiday-toolkit/ (USHBC's Fall & Winter Holidays Toolkit) is now available for industry stakeholders! In this week's marketing boost, USHBC/NABC Vice President of Marketing and Communications Jennifer Sparks talks about USHBC's latest toolkit and how it can be useful for your marketing plan throughout the fall and winter holiday seasons.   Fall Event Registration While in-person attendance is at capacity, virtual registration is still available for Innovate 2021: USHBC+NABC Tech Symposium and Fall Meetings! You don't want to miss the tech-focused learning, opportunities to network and critical information shared in the meetings. Register today at https://ushbc.blueberry.org/you-are-leaving/?redirect=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.blueberryevents.org%2F (blueberryevents.org).

**Take our https://bit.ly/GPCsurvey2021 (audience survey): https://bit.ly/GPCsurvey2021 (https://bit.ly/GPCsurvey2021) In this episode, we'll talk about some of the unique challenges pulse growers are facing this year with the hot and dry weather, how these conditions could impact yield and quality, what tools Canadian pulse growers are using for harvest aids, and information on some alternative harvest approaches like using swathing and stripper headers. We're joined by https://www.saskatchewan.ca/government/directory?p=6f3d0df1-bcde-4f72-a891-75898e533086 (Dale Risula) and https://www.saskatchewan.ca/government/directory?p=5aea5436-b6dd-46dd-a68d-b68101138289 (John Ippolito), both with the https://www.saskatchewan.ca/government/government-structure/ministries/agriculture (Ministry of Agriculture) in Saskatchewan, Canada. Dale Risula you may remember from https://www.growingpulsecrops.com/episode/canadian-pulses-and-foliar-disease-management (episode nine) of last season talking about Canadian pulses. He's the provincial specialist for pulse crops and special crops, and has been with the ministry since 1982. John Ippolito is a crops extension specialist in west central Saskatchewan, which is a large pulse growing area including lentils, chickpeas, and field peas. John spends most of his time working directly with growers on management practices. Dale starts our conversation off with a very timely and relevant topic for a lot of pulse growers throughout North America: the dryness and heat of this season, and how that will impact yield and quality.  “I think first and foremost, the biggest impact that this is going to have is the effect on yield. Yield is likely to be down from the average for much of the province. We're not sure exactly where quality might end up just yet. Some of the grains themselves might be slightly lower than the average per bushel weight. They're also going to be subject to chipping in the dryer during harvest as they're handled with various equipment.” - Dale Risula Beyond quality and yield deficits, Dale recommends extra attention be paid to dust control and fire hazards to create a safe working environment for producers. He also suggests extra precautions be taken post-harvest in regards to handling in order to prevent over drying and seed coat crackage. Elevated temperatures in the grains also may result in sweating that creates moisture pockets and leads to spoilage. Targeted cutting times, adjusting equipment and regulating the grain temperature are all measures that can be taken to mitigate these effects. John offers help to manage grain storage with proper handling, cooling and drying. “Our recommendation to them would be to get it into a natural air bin. Col it down as quickly as possible to 15 degrees Celsius or probably about 60 degrees Fahrenheit because storage at those kinds of temperatures, even if they're dry is not going to go well.” - John Ippolito Harvest aids and desiccants can and have been used to promote uniform dry down. There are area specific regulations for these products that all producers need to be aware of. To learn more about MRLs around the world, listen to https://www.growingpulsecrops.com/episode/pulse-quality-and-an-update-on-mrls-with-todd-scholz (episode 11) of this season with Todd Scholz. John added that although diquat is still the primary tool, there have in fact been a few new options for harvest aids that have also hit the market.   This Week on https://www.growingpulsecrops.com/ (Growing Pulse Crops): Meet https://www.saskatchewan.ca/government/directory?p=6f3d0df1-bcde-4f72-a891-75898e533086 (Dale Risula) and https://www.saskatchewan.ca/government/directory?p=5aea5436-b6dd-46dd-a68d-b68101138289 (John Ippolito), both with the https://www.saskatchewan.ca/government/government-structure/ministries/agriculture (Ministry of Agriculture) in Saskatchewan, Canada Discover the best practices for pulse crop handling during a particularly hot

On today's episode we talk pulse crop quality standards and how residues and MRLs play a role in perceived quality from buyers and consumers around the world. Todd Scholz, vice president for research and member services at the https://www.usapulses.org (USA Dry Pea and Lentil Council), joins us to discuss some of the nuances of MRLs (maximum residue limits) and what growers need to know to deal with the complex standards that exist in different global markets. He has been with the Lentil Council for over 20 years and provides great insight into navigating MRL's and international trade. “As countries are becoming more involved in international trade, they're establishing their own registration authorities and that's becoming a mosaic of different MRLs at different levels across the world which makes trade more complicated and makes our job as farmers more difficult.” - Todd Scholz In order to ensure quality when it comes to residues, countries establish tolerances or maximum residue limits. This is becoming an increasingly important part of producing quality pulses for the global market because there are different approaches to determining these standards. The trend is for these requirements to become increasingly more strict. So how are growers supposed to adjust to these constraints? Todd recommends communicating with your processor, following the labels to the tee, and being keenly aware of the potential for drift.  "It is important to our production practices to be able to use chemical pesticides, but there is an increasing concern across the world for the use of those pesticides. And you can see it in the way the registering authorities are enforcing their MRL's. They're reducing the MRL standards, eliminating them or establishing a level of detection so that even a drift accident can cause a shipment to be rejected. The cost to that is huge.” - Todd Scholz Despite all of the complex dynamics at play here with quality and MRLs, the most important take home is to develop that good relationship with your buyer to make sure they know what they're getting and you know how you can maximize your revenue from your crop and the way you produce it.  “We're working really hard to try and harmonize MRL's and make it as trade friendly as we can, but it's a complicated process and we need the help of our producers. ” - Todd Scholz This Week on https://www.growingpulsecrops.com/ (Growing Pulse Crops): Meet Todd Scholz, vice president for research and member services at the https://www.usapulses.org (USA Dry Pea and Lentil Council) Explore the nuances involved in MRL regulations and the consequences of not working within them Discover the advice he gives producers to ensure their product has a market You can reach Todd and learn more about industry programs at the USA Dry Pea & Lentil Council website:http://www.usapulses.org/ ( www.USApulses.org) Growing Pulse Crops Podcast is hosted by https://www.linkedin.com/in/timhammerich/ (Tim Hammerich) of the http://www.futureofag.com (Future of Agriculture Podcast).

In this week's episode, Tracy speaks with Greg Bartley and Ian Epp about the Keep it Clean initiative. The quality and reputation of Canadian canola, cereals, and pulses are amongst the best in the world, and Canadian growers work hard to produce crops to the highest standard. As Canadian producers, we have an essential role in protecting Canada's reputation as a trusted supplier and maintaining access to key export markets.  How? By ensuring the crops, we grow are market-ready. In today's episode, Tracy speaks with Greg and Ian about: The Keep it Clean initiative. What it is, and why was it launched? They discuss the importance of our export markets and how because most of what we grow is exported, maintaining market access is of vital importance for Canada. Greg and Ian share how our on-farm practices DO make a difference. To avoid unacceptable residue levels in the grain, it's critical that we keep it clean – use only acceptable crop protection products and use them correctly. They share the Keep it Clean 5 Simple Tips with our audience and encourage our audience to follow these tips to protect the marketability of our crops and reduce the risk of rejected shipments due to residues that exceed maximum residue limits (MRLs). Unsure of the MRLs and best practices? That is where the Keep it Clean initiative, and information portal comes in. Producers can visit www.keepitclean.ca to access handy tools and key resources such as the Product Advisory List, the disease severity scale for Blackleg, the Spray to Swath Interval Calculator, and many more great resources. You can help protect Canada's reputation as a trusted supplier and access to key export markets by ensuring the crops you grow are market ready. …………………………. SHOW RESOURCES Keep it Clean is a joint initiative of the Canola Council of Canada, Pulse Canada, Cereals Canada, Barley Council of Canada and Prairie Oat Growers Association, providing growers like you with resources to grow market-ready crops. Because most of what we grow is exported, the success of our industry depends on maintaining access to key international markets. Interested in learning more? Be sure to visit www.keepitclean.ca for more information. …………………………. ***Don't forget to sign up as an Impact Farming Insider so that you are first to know about all-new episodes, fantastic contests, and new promotions https://www.farmmarketer.com/impact_farming_show/sign-up

Guest: Professor Göran Roos, a Swedish academic, technologist, author and businessman. He is a specialist in the field of intellectual capital and an expert in innovation management and strategy. (wikipedia)Pandemics come and go. We are still in a pandemic, but hopefully coming out of this pandemic soon, we have an altered society and world. Apart from being a very bad, difficult and devastating COVID-19 pandemic, there is a dramatic change ongoing in how we interact using digital and online resources - with virtual meetings (like this podcast as an example), online shopping, deliveries and streaming. All this is now part of the new normal.But also as supplies drawing from international sources have been difficult and partly impossible impacting the sovereignty, the national strategies are incorporating more of manufacturing of critical equipment to have secure supply sources.The supply chain disruptions have also impacted large corporates. That is also reshaping their strategies, having a deeper direct control of even the raw materials.We have to go green and that means for mobility and transportation we are going electric. This is not the only impact, but materials, such as steel, will in the future be produced with carbon neutral processes. That in turn means that there is a need for green hydrogen - en mass. For this transition taking place, there is an enormous need for electricity.According to prof. Roos the world is shifting from a dependency of petrol (OPEC) to a dependency of metals (China).The semiconductor supply shortage recently is showing also how this is a critical and strategic product. Semiconductor development and production is an extremely high risk venture every time. The winners will be those with unique and required tools, machine and process knowledge.All in all, there are great opportunities for science, technology and manufacturing.Don't stay in a dying business, for instance in automotive business, you need to shift to a strategy and product architecture with batteries/electrical motors and away from internal combustion engines. A lot less components, meaning also that this will be a challenge for the supplier companies. Above picture is from Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times, by coincidence I watched it recently. We are up for a new big transformation which also creates a vast amount of opportunities.There will be fights over the scarcity of talents, and in Europe, there is the dilemma -EU has about 1 million unfilled IT positions presently. The Digitalization and Artificial Intelligence is not stopping; automation will continue to grow in sophistication, at the same time, there will be a huge amount of new jobs created.Speed is critical. You need to be agile. Not just as an individual or company. It applies also for the nation and the administration.Discussion between journalist and union representative:Journalist: "Are you not afraid of jobs disappearing with new technology?Union rep: “We are not afraid of new technology, but of old technology. Companies with old technology go under.”For Prof. Roos the technology shifts in the sectors of agriculture and aquaculture are behind but the potential is enormous and we can expect some deeper insights from these areas from him in the times coming.NOTE: For a discussion on technology readiness, TRLs and MRLs, you may listen to the See Beyond episode with John Saiz, S1E5: https://mikatienhaara.substack.com/p/s1e5-sometimes-its-ok-to-fail-from?r=foifx&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=copy This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mikatienhaara.substack.com

The European Union has announced a complete ban on propiconazole to go into effect in September 2021. Michael and Lesley examine the decision to arbitrarily remove this tool from the farmer’s toolbox. USA Rice’s International Trade Vice President Peter Bachmann discusses the motivations; then University of Arkansas’ Dr. Jarrod Hardke, California Rice Commission’s Roberta Firoved, & USA Rice’s Dr. Steve Linscombe talk the science behind crop protectants, MRLs, and the unintended consequences of regulation. Hosted by: Michael Klein and Lesley Dixon

We are happy to release our next recording from Anecumene online festival this time by our resident Laura MRLS. Read more : https://mnmt.no/magazine/2021/04/29/mnmt-recordings-laura-mrls-anecumene-9128-live/ Follow : https://soundcloud.com/Laura_Mrls https://www.facebook.com/LauraMrlsMusic https://www.instagram.com/la.mrls/

After UK Transition: Working with Chemicals - Episode 1 - PPP Plant Protection Products (PPP) - Rachel Brown - PPP lead in CRD (Future Readiness) Transition Programme at HSE and Duncan Williams - Lead for Pesticides Post 2020 Transition Project at DEFRA. We discuss what the UKIM bill means for PPP products/applications, the implications for businesses involved in the manufacture, distribution and supply of pesticides and the data businesses will need to supply to HSE.   Visit our website for further information and detailed guidance on the chemical regimes.    *The information in this podcast was correct at time of publication. Podcast transcript Good day and a warm welcome to the HSE podcast brought to you by the Health & Safety Executive to guide you through the changes in chemical regulations which are happening as a result of the UK leaving the EU.  In this episode we'll be hearing from our experts about how plant protection products, otherwise known as PPP Regulations, will be changing from the 1st January 2021 once the transition period is over.  From that date a new independent pesticides regulatory regime will operate and Great Britain will take responsibility for placing PPP's on the market in this country. My name is Mick Ord and before I introduce you to our guests, I'd like to point you in the direction of the HSE website where the information we refer to today can be found.  The place to go is www.hse.gov.uk/brexit.  And what I'd also urge you to do is to subscribe to our free bulletin service to stay up to date with all the latest news and guidance on pesticides so you have all the relevant information at your fingertips and you can do this via the website. Rachel Brown is the HSE's Transition Programme Manager for Pesticides and Duncan Williams is Team Leader for Pesticides at Defra, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Mick: Duncan I'll start with you if I may.  What are the main changes that will apply to plant protection products from January 2021 in terms of PPP regulations? Duncan: Ok, so at the end of this year the transition period for leaving the EU will end so that means from the 1st January next year we'll be operating a new independent pesticides regulatory regime in Great Britain by which I mean England, Scotland and Wales.  It's slightly different in Northern Ireland, so we'll come onto them shortly.  So in Great Britain the EU Legislation is essentially carried over into national law.  So, all the regulatory requirements of the current EU regime, all the technical standards, are carried over unchanged into our national regime.  It will look and feel very similar to the current EU regulations, except we'll be taking our own decisions rather than being covered by EU decisions. That means there'll be some degree of divergence from EU decisions over time for example maybe different decisions at different times or sometimes different decisions and of course any EU decisions which come into force after the end of this year, won't apply in Great Britain.  If they come into force before the end of this year, they will and they will be carried forward.  So that's things like active substance decisions, Maximum Residue Level (MRL) setting and so on. Mick: What about businesses operating in Northern Ireland – what's going to happen to them? Duncan: Ok, so under the Northern Ireland Protocol, the EU Plant Protection Product Regulations and also the EU Maximum Residue Level Regulations – they'll continue to apply directly in Northern Ireland so there's less change.  So in Northern Ireland the position is basically remaining as much as it is now during the transition period.  That means EU active substance approval decisions, MRL decisions, they will all continue to apply directly in Northern Ireland.  They'll still have responsibility for product authorisations under that EU Framework and that function will continue to be delivered by HSE for Northern Ireland. Mick: How similar will the new GB regulations be to those from the old EU process? Duncan: Very similar.  The name of the legislation actually remains the same.  We'll still be referring to EU Regulation 1107/2009 as it applies in Great Britain.  Some changes have been made to the legislation so that the regulations can operate properly in a national context outside the EU.  For example the EU Regulations for various centralised decision making processes and so on built into them which have had to be replaced by national processes but there's no substantive policy change. All the retained EU law, retained EU law is what we call the legislation we'll keep in Great Britain afterwards, that's been put online at legislation.gov.uk  and you can see the changes which have been made to it.  The regulatory requirements remain the same and the body of EU technical guidance which underpins the legislation that's used to make decisions, all of that is carried over as well and will continue to be used in Great Britain after the 1st of January so there's no change in the standards of protection, the big difference is that decisions will be taken by national bodies rather than through EU processes and EU institutions.  So that's HSE, Defra and the Scottish and Welsh Governments working closely together. HSE remains the national regulator for the whole of the United Kingdom on behalf of the UK Government and the devolved administrations in Scotland, Wales and also Northern Ireland.   HSE will continue to do the majority of the work and decision making and we'll all be working very closely together in a shared governance framework.  HSE will continue to accept applications in much the same way they do now. Mick: Rachel, how will the application forms be different to those from the old EU process? Rachel: So as Duncan says, the name of the legislation actually remains the same, so we are still going to be referring to EU Regulation 1107/2009, as it applies in Great Britain and this means that a lot of our templates and application forms will actually appear to be unchanged.  We will continue to accept applications in the same way as we do now, and will still need a registration report in the same format in support of an application and there'll only be some really minor changes to the application form such as whether an application is relevant for GB or NI and these will be published on our website in time for use after Day 1. Mick: Will existing PPP Product authorisation previously granted by the UK still be valid and if so for how long? Rachel: Yes, on Day 1, all the existing Plant Protection Product authorisations previously authorised in the UK, they'll continue to be valid in both GB and NI. We won't be issuing any new product notices at all.  The existing notices and their current expiry dates will all remain unchanged. Mick: Will GB continue to issue parallel trade permits from 2021? Rachel: We will no longer be able to accept applications for parallel permits into Great Britain.  These are an EU measure and we just can't operate that outside the EU context. However, we have put in place some transitional measures to allow time for businesses to adjust and can continue to issue parallel trade permits for sale and use in Northern Ireland. Mick: How long will current parallel trade permits be valid for? Rachel: So for GB, the existing permits which were granted prior to 31st December 2020, they'll be allowed to continue until 31st December 2022 or they may expire on their existing expiry date if that is an earlier date before December 2022.   The withdrawal action will be published for all those existing parallel import permits and we are hoping that will be done in the first part of 2021.  This will allow time for stocks to be used up or for any new applications made under national regimes if necessary. Mick: Back to you again Duncan.  What is the situation with reference to active substance approval – will they continue to be valid until their expiry date? Duncan: On Day 1, 1st January 2021, all active substance approvals which are in place will continue to be valid, they'll be carried forward in Great Britain obviously the EU regime continues to apply in Northern Ireland anyway so no changes there. We'll have a new statutory register for active substances in Great Britain. This will be clearly published on the HSE's website and it will show all the active substances which are approved in GB.  It will replace the EU's list of active substances which are in Commission Implementing Regulations if you are familiar with those and the content is the same at Day 1.   So all of those active substance approvals   are carried forward and with that new national statutory register, basically an active substance has got to be approved and listed on that register for it to be included in any Plant Protected Products for use in GB. It's worth noting that we've made some transitional provisions so that the old EU regime can link smoothly to the new national one.  One of these is that in Great Britain, the expiry dates of active substances where they were due to expire in the EU within 3 years of the end of the transition period. Those ones will be granted a 3 year extension under the Great Britain regime and this is because applications for renewals have to be made 3 years before the expiry date and obviously if it's within 3 years of the end of transition, that date will have already passed when the national regime comes into force so the extension is necessary to have an orderly transition to the new regime.  So this means active substances which were due to expire in the 3 year period from 1st January 2021 right through to the end of 2023, they will be extended for a further 3 years in Great Britain.   Just for reassurance, we can act sooner if we needed to for any reason so for example if there was new important data or scientific evidence about concerns with a particular substance, then there is provision within the legislation for action to be taken sooner should that be warranted. Mick: What happens when it expires Duncan? Duncan: If an active substance approval expires then obviously the products relating to that active substance have to be withdrawn but if you want a renewal for that active substance, then you need to make an application for that renewal under the GB regime.  That application will be assessed by the HSE and then a decision will be taken under the GB regime.  Obviously, that would just apply in Great Britain not Northern Ireland or in the EU.  We will be developing a system for renewing approval of active substances – I mentioned we would have a 3 year extension to the expiry dates for those active substances which are due to expire within 3 years and that will allow time for us to finalise and apply the new ways of working and any new EU decisions on active substances or on Maximum Residue Levels which are taken and come into force before the end of this year, those ones will be carried over.  If those EU decisions are after the end of this year, then they are not carried over and the applications are needed under the GB regime. Mick: Will companies need to supply different data to the HSE than they were required to do when we were in the EU? Duncan: So the documentation supporting an application will, as far as possible, be the same as it is now so HSE will accept applications in the same way.  They will still require registration reports or assessment reports in the same format in support of applications for authorisations or approval. Mick: And so will GB continue to accept alternative sources of active substances deemed equivalent by the EU? Duncan: Again, it will be a GB process for that.  You'd need to submit an application to HSE and it's basically the same process as is currently in place to establish the equivalence of an alternative active substance source that's followed now. Mick: Rachel, the UK will no longer have a formal arrangement for mutual recognition.  What are the implications for businesses involved in the manufacture or distribution and supply of pesticides? Rachel: Yes, that's right Mick.  For Great Britain, HSE can no longer accept any applications for mutual recognition of authorisations in EU member states.  Any existing ones will continue in place though, if we've already granted the authorisation before the end of December.  The exception is that for applications considered under the Northern Ireland regime, we will be able to accept mutual recognition applications.  If we've got any applications on going, ones in the queue that haven't been completed yet, these will be completed to conclusion under the GB national regime and going forward for authorisation in GB you will be required to submit a stand alone GB application. Mick: In 2024 businesses involved in the production and supply of treated seeds in GB will need to do things differently as well – can you just explain the changes? Rachel: Yes, this is quite a specific area but under the EU regulations, seed can be treated in any member state with a product authorised for that purpose in that member state.  That treated seed can then be traded and used freely in any other member state.  This is going to change in the future for Great Britain.  So again, we've put some transitional provisions in place to allow time for businesses to adjust.  The current arrangements will be allowed to continue in Great Britain until 31st December 2023. So until that date, any seed which has been treated with a product authorised for that purpose in another member state can still be traded and used in Great Britain.  However, after the 31st December 2023, only seed which is treated with a product authorised for that purpose in GB can be traded and used.  Now this could mean that new authorisations for use in GB may be required so that's why the current arrangements are being allowed to continue until 2023 to allow time for the necessary applications and authorisations to be made to the GB authority.  Any existing arrangements in Northern Ireland, can continue to apply. Mick: And how will the adjuvant application process work after 1st January 2021? Rachel: So for adjuvants there isn't actually a change there.  The process for registering adjuvants in the UK will remain as it currently is.  Adjuvants are currently considered under national rule, rather than EU rule so there'll be no change for GB and NI.  All the existing adjuvant registrations will remain valid in GB and NI going forward. Mick: Duncan, how will Maximum Residue Levels (MRLs) be set in GB after 1st January 2021? Duncan: Existing MRL's at the end of the year are all carried over into the national regime so there's no immediate, practical change.  After 1st January, we will be making our own decisions in GB, setting MRLs based on our own assessments so you'll need to submit an application to HSE to set an MRL in GB.  The regulatory framework, the technical guidance for setting those MRLs, is all carried over and we will have a statutory register for GB MRLs which will be publically available on the HSE website.  It's worth noting this means that whilst MRLs in GB and the EU and Northern Ireland will be aligned as of 1st of January, moving forward there will be some degree of divergence from the EU MRLs over time. Mick: And what does the UK Internal Market Bill mean for PPP products and applications? Duncan: The UK Internal Market Bill is currently going through Parliament and the Bill includes a new principle of mutual recognition to allow the operation of the UK internal market for goods.  That will allow any goods which meet the relevant regulatory requirements relating to sale, in the part of the UK where it's produced or imported into, to then be sold in any other part of the UK.  Now this new mutual recognition principle will not affect product authorisation or active substances approvals.  Each part of the UK will remain responsible for deciding which pesticide products can be authorised for sale and use in their respective territories just as they are now, though in practice we almost always have joint decisions applying across the piste by agreement. The position is slightly different for Maximum Residue Levels.  The intention of the Bill is that the mutual recognition principle will apply to rules on Maximum Residue Levels in the same way as it will apply to rules on goods generally to ensure effective functioning of the UK's internal market.   This will avoid the potential for new internal trade barriers on sale of food which has been produced lawfully should there be any divergence in Maximum Residue Levels decisions.  This ensures that treated produce from Northern Ireland is able to be placed on the market in Great Britain for example.   There's a caveat in that EU rules will continue to apply directly in Northern Ireland itself so treated produce will only be able to be placed on the market in Northern Ireland in accordance with the EU MRL regulations.  In practice, all the administrations delegate their regulatory functions to HSE to undertake on their behalf so that helps to ensure a consistent approach.  We've got structures in place to work closely together to continue to take joint decisions wherever possible. Mick: I'm going to now ask you both specific questions for specific sectors.  What actions do people and businesses need to take - Rachel? Rachel: So, if you are a pesticide manufacturer or authorisation holder, the key message is that current authorisations and approvals do all remain in place, but for the future you need to consider where you wish to make your new pesticide applications.  So, from the 1st January 2021, you are going to have to make applications under both the GB and EU regimes to gain access to both GB and Northern Ireland markets. Future applications for renewal of current authorisations and approvals will also need to be made under both the Great Britain and EU regimes.  Do talk to HSE about your expected pipeline of applications.  Do come and ask us any questions if you are unsure of what to do. Duncan: If your business is involved in trading in food produce, the main thing to be aware of is that from 1st January next year, the Maximum Residue Levels in Great Britain and the EU might start to diverge over time.  I think the key takeaway is just to ensure you understand the requirements in your target market.  It's not for immediate action because they'll all be the same at Day 1, but they'll likely diverge over time.   If you are a pesticide user or someone who advises on pesticides, again there's no immediate change, the same products will be authorised on the other side of the end of the year, so in the short term just continue to use only authorised products always following the instructions on the label.  Over time there may be some extra things to think about if you're growing food produce intended for export for example to the EU and again, make sure you understand  the requirements for treated produce in your target market as it might affect the choices  you make about what pesticides to use. Mick: So, quite a lot to take in if you're involved in the manufacture, supply or distribution of pesticides.  Remember you can rewind the podcast at any time or listen again at your convenience.  A big thank you to Rachel and Duncan our resident experts on PPP.  You can, of course, also logon to our website, www.hse.gov.uk/brexit, where you'll find in written form, everything we've been chatting about today and much more.   And as I mentioned earlier, you can also subscribe to our free bulletin service to keep you abreast of the latest news and updates as it affects your sector.  You can do this via the website.  You'll find a subscription box on every page and you can just pop in your email address and leave the rest to us to keep you informed. Well, that's all from me, Mick Ord until the next episode, so until then, take care.

Between biotech and technology issues, monitoring regulatory work being done, and managing activist pressure, a lot of things happen in the background of the crop protection industry. CropLife Canada does much of that important work behind the scenes that isn’t necessarily thought about every day on the farm. Joining us for today’s RealAg LIVE is... Read More

Today on the podcast we’re going to be learning about CBH Group’s new approach to residue limits. CBH Group Agronomist, Steven Tilbrook, will join us to discuss how they’re addressing maximum residue limits. We also will be hearing from John, Tony, and Ben Single about their air-borne weed sensor, Single Shot. This weed sensor rapidly detects and maps weeds. Ben Single describes how he saw the benefits of separating the weed detection and weed spraying tasks and set about building the platform, working with Newcastle-based company, Robotic Systems to make the idea a reality. On the podcast, we also mentioned we've got some great new content for you to check out. If you'd like to find out more about Single Shot, you can read an article we did on it here: https://weedsmart.org.au/taking-a-single-shot-at-weeds/ We’ve got a new “Ask an Expert” article with University of Adelaide weeds research and PhD candidate, Alicia Merriam. She answers the question "Where to next in controlling herbicide resistant broadleaf weeds in IMI-tolerant lentils?: You can find the answer here: https://weedsmart.org.au/where-to-next-in-controlling-herbicide-resistant-broadleaf-weeds-in-imi-tolerant-lentils/ We’ve also got a new article on stacking the odds against awnless barnyard grass. Check it out here: https://weedsmart.org.au/stacking-the-odds-against-awnless-barnyard-grass/ Thanks for tuning in and we'll catch you on the Regional Update next Monday! ____________________________________________________________ Podcast producer: Jessica Strauss Podcast hosts: Jessica Strauss, Peter Newman

Carl Eidsath,Technical Support Director for the California Walnut Board

In this episode of the Weekly Defence Podcast we tackle the tracked versus wheeled armoured vehicles debate and we examine the equipment on display at Moscow's Red Square during the Victory Day Parade. Newsround: (00:32)Cross-party political talks in Sweden addressing future defence funding have collapsed, following disagreement over whether additional money should be approved. In Singapore the government insists it will not compromise on the acquisition of strategic capabilities, despite some disruptions.A new report by the UK's National Audit Office points towards new delays in developing the F-35B Lightning jet and Crowsnest AEW capability programmes.News Focus:Senior Editor Naval Richard Thomas and Air Editor Tim Martin take a closer look at what the Royal Navy can expect following the NAO report release. Several questions were raised over future funding for the Royal Navy in a post COVID-19 scenario. It seems that the initial goal set by the MoD for the carrier strike group to reach full capability by 2023 could be beyond budget.Tim Martin also reports on the parliamentary hearing on the fate of the UK's 5G network held in Westminster on the 30 June. The UK MoD has clearly stated that the Chinese telecommunications provider Huawei will have no future role to play in domestic defence communications and cyber networks.In the land domain, Land Reporter Flavia Camargos Pereira talks about the Spanish Army decision to enhance its NBC capabilities. Amid COVID-19 struggles, the country's armed forces have laid out their NBC equipment priorities in a programme that aims to deliver new systems and technologies by 2035. Deep Dive: Track vs Wheels debate (22:28)Richard Thomas chats to Defence Insight Senior Analyst Land Sonny Butterworth to find out more about the long-running track versus wheel debate. Analysis: Russia's Victory Day parade (42:34) Shephard's contributor Leonid Nersisyan is on the line with News Editor Ben Vogel to report on the new kit on display in Moscow's Red Square during the Victory Day parade. New features included the TOS-2 Tosochka thermobaric MRLS, the Pantsir-SM self-propelled anti-aircraft system and new anti-UAV missiles.Music and sound mixing by Fred Prest

Given the changing nature of market regulations, all stakeholders along the supply chain need to be aware of market requirements in relation to MRLs. Given the implications of incorrect chemical use, there is a need for greater transparency and understanding by growers and their advisors of the impact of chemical use on market access. Contact: Gerard McMullen, Chair, National Working Party on Grain Protection 76 Bruce Street, Coburg, VIC, 3058 0419 156 065 gerardmcmullen@optusnet.com.au Gordon Cumming, GRDC Chemical Regulation Manager 214 Herries Street, Toowoomba QLD 4350 0428 637 642 gordon.cumming@grdc.com.au Resources: Perth 2020 Update Paper: • On-farm Stewardship Guide ‘Growing Australian Grain' http://grainsguide.grainproducers.com.au • National Working Party on Grain Protection www.graintrade.org.au/nwpgp • National Residue Survey https://www.agriculture.gov.au/ag-farm-food/food/nrs • APVMA https://apvma.gov.au

Greg Bartley, Director, Crop Protection & Crop Quality with Pulse Canada talks about the Keep it Clean! program, what maximum residue limits (MRLs) are, what happens if pulses exceed MRLs in international markets, and what role growers can play in ensuring that crop protection products they use on their crops don't impact international market access for pulses.

NPC's Kam Quarles provides a D.C. update after the President's signing of the USMCA trade agreement, and an expert panel at Potato Expo 2020 takes a deep dive into the challenging issue of disharmonized international maximum residue levels (MRLs) for pesticides, including how foreign countries’ differing standards are affecting potato trade and can hinder a grower’s choices when seeking to grow a healthy crop.Guests: Kam Quarles, CEO, National Potato CouncilRachel Lattimore, SVP & General Counsel, CropLife AmericaMatt Lantz, International Market Access Division Manager, Bryant Christie

It’s basically Agronomic Tuesday today, with a range of topics, including: Roots – resident agronomist Peter ‘Wheat Pete’ Johnson joins to talk about the wet spring and its impact on corn roots; Lodging – Amy Mangin, University of Manitoba PhD student, on managing lodging; Keeping it Clean – Nevin Rosaasen of Alberta Pulse Growers talks... Read More

Allan Dawson of the Manitoba Co-operator reports on conversations at the Canadian Crops Convention about China’s decision to block Richardson International’s canola shipments (includes audio recordings of Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s minister of foreign affairs, and David Dzisiak past chair of the Canola Council of Canada), a quick take with Marie-Claude […]

TEDxTallinnaVangla PODCAST Müüritud I Margot&MrLs by TEDxTallinnaVangla

Xander Snyder and Jacob Shapiro get down to specifics in what a potential war would look like, and ask each other why the US always seems to fight its wars in the same place. Sign up for free updates on topics like this! Go here: hubs.ly/H06mXwR0 TRANSCRIPT: Jacob L. Shapiro: Hello everyone, welcome again to another Geopolitical Futures podcast. I'm Jacob Shapiro, I'm the director of analysis. Xander Snyder, one of our analysts, is joining me again today to talk this week. Xander, how's it going? Xander Snyder: It's going well Jacob, how are you? JLS: I'm doing alright. We've been very busy at Geopolitical Futures. There's a lot of stuff going on in the world and the first thing we wanted to do was follow up – George joined us on the podcast last week to talk a little bit about certain indications that we're seeing in terms of a potential U.S. strike on North Korea in the coming weeks. The USS Nimitz, which was in port in Washington state, actually left yesterday and is headed for the Western Pacific. There were some reports that the USS Vincent, which is actually currently off the coast of the Korean Peninsula, might be leaving the area, but as of now it doesn't seem like it has left. The USS Vincent and the USS Reagan actually had some joint drills yesterday where they actually lined up next to each other and were doing things. So tensions still remain pretty high on the Korean Peninsula. So we thought we would talk about a study really that Xander led with us here at Geopolitical Futures which looked at what a potential military conflict looks like between North Korea and the United States. Xander, I know a lot people are thinking about missiles and nuclear weapons, but one of the points that your piece made that I found particularly informative was that there's actually a lot of other variables here that if there is a conflict will become much more important. And I think artillery was one of the ones that you focused on most closely. How about you lay out for listeners here why it's so important to think about artillery when we're talking about a potential military conflict between North Korea and the United States. XS: Sure. Well, like you mentioned, a lot of the headlines in the news really focus on ballistic missile development, nuclear warheads, nuclear tests and missile tests, right? That's what has been going on lately that's been receiving the most attention. However, North Korea has a really conventional military, and a lot of this is rounded out by something like 21,000 artillery guns that it has, a combination of tube shell artillery guns which is generally what you think of when you think of artillery guns like big World War II cannons, you know stuff that's actually firing shell. And then they also have another type of artillery device called multiple rocket launchers or MRLs, which is exactly what it sounds like so instead of firing a shell, it fires rockets of different sorts. And this is important because basically since the end of the Korean War, North Korea has been amassing this conventional arsenal and Seoul, one of South Korea's major cities, sits within range of a lot of these weapons that are stationed on the Demilitarized Zone. So the reason this piece focused not entirely on artillery but largely is because North Korea is able to maintain a fairly substantial threat against a major U.S. ally, against South Korea, using normal weapons, not nuclear weapons, not ballistic missiles. JLS: Yeah it's an important point, and it also dictates what a potential U.S. strike is going to look like against North Korea, right? Because it can't just be that the U.S. is going to go in and pinprick certain nuclear sites with whatever big bombs that it has in its arsenal. One of the points you made is that the U.S. is going to have to also devise a strategy for knocking out a lot of this artillery to try and protect Seoul from the inevitable backlash that would come from the North Koreans. XS: Exactly. In the event of a U.S. strike against North Korea's nuclear facilities, essentially two battles begin. The first is the attempt by the United States to eliminate the North's nuclear capabilities while at the same time minimizing the amount of damage that can be done to Seoul and other populous centers in the north of South Korea, mainly with the North's conventional artillery force. So both of these battles will be waged at the same time. Now the U.S. would engage in a first strike because of the nuclear program, because if North Korea were to develop a ruggedized nuclear warhead that could be affixed to a ballistic missile that would be a threat that would be intolerable because even right now some of the North's ballistic missiles could reach U.S. allies, and in time, the threat is they could develop an intercontinental ballistic missile, an ICBM, that could reach the U.S. So, this would be the reason the U.S. would strike, however at the same time, the U.S. would have to find a way to either on its own or cooperating with South Korea essentially neutralize the threat of that artillery as quickly as possible. And the reason that the piece focused so much on artillery was because the North would not need to launch any sort of major ground infantry invasion at the outset of hostilities in order to pose a major threat. The artillery can actually reach quite a long way as it is. JLS: Yeah and I think this actually brings up one of the things – some listeners who are familiar with war and who study war will be more familiar with this but other listeners who are not – the issue of artillery really brings up one of the most important parts of talking about military activities that is often overlooked, which is simple things like logistics. So you spend a lot of time in the piece discussing not just what kind of artillery they have and what the potential moves of the actors are going to be but also where the stockpiles of ammunition are and what that means about North Korea's ability to communicate across its firing lines and to actually make its attacks effective and to protect itself against the types of strikes that the U.S. is going to use to try and take out those artilleries. So can you talk a little bit about also specifically the issue of ammunition and how some of the resources that you found indicated some of what's going to happen if the strike does indeed happen? XS: In the piece, what we tried to show is one potential way or several considerations that can be made that can constrain the conflict to look or to behave in a certain way if it were to actually break out. But as we mentioned in the piece and as anyone familiar with war knows, once it actually begins its very difficult to actually know what can come up so we do our best to understand the constraints in the situation based on the arsenal that North Korea has available to itself, that North Korea has available to it, while understanding that making an exact prediction of these things is actually very difficult when the violence begins. That said, there are certain things that you can attempt to game out. And one of these is recognition that the other side is aware that you are aware of its own weaknesses, right? So one of the things, I know it's kind of like a lot of back and forth and you know what I know that you know what I know, right? It's one of those things. And one of the things that we looked into was the command structure of the North Korean military. And I came across some papers published by the U.S. Army War College talking about how it is essentially a very centralized, probably understandably so, a very centralized military structure – something that borrowed a lot from Soviet military structures during the Cold War. And one of the ways that the Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un maintains control over the military is with a parallel reporting structure so there are military officers but there are also political officers, and he uses this dual reporting structure to assure that no military officer at any given time can acquire too much power to rebel against him or pose any sort of serious threat. So the conclusion that some of these papers have drawn is that, well because it is such a centralized command and control structure that will actually provide for a lack of flexibility in the event of conflict. If the North Korean military actually has to wage a war, if the supreme leader must direct everything himself, well that's a very inflexible structure. So we recognize that conclusion. But we also try to expand on it a little bit because North Korea, they're not dumb right? And I think this is another narrative that gets tossed around out there, it gets picked up on because it is difficult to rationalize a lot of their moves. But a country that's capable of a nuclear weapon and ballistic missiles, they're not stupid, right? They know that the United States has planned for the outbreak of war, and if they have, we've considered their command and control structure. So they're thinking, “Ok well, the U.S. is going to think that we have a fairly flexible command and control structure, so we need to account for that to a degree because if our communications get cut off and we can't actually direct artillery fire in the outbreak of hostilities, we face a serious problem. We can't control the war, and that will decrease our ability to, you know, actually achieve some sort of strategic objective that we would want in this conflict.” So it makes sense then to think that there's actually some system even if it's not publicly available that would allow for devolution or decentralization of command to a degree that would allow unit-level artillery commanders to continue fighting if they lose communication with the centralized command. So that's one indicator that you can look for to get a sense of whether or not this is true. And it's certainly not slam dunk evidence, it's more like a mosaic you are putting together a lot of different pieces to try to corroborate this idea. So one thing we looked at in the study was the prevalence and location of decentralized ammunition stores. And the reason this matters is because supply and logistics is everything in war. If artillery commanders can get ahold of things to shoot, well a gun is not very effective without a bullet, without a shell right? Now it turns out that for decades the North Koreans have been developing hardened artillery sites or HARTs is the cute acronym for it, H-A-R-T. And these are stationed all along the Demilitarized Zone from coast to coast in North Korea, and it's impossible to know the locations of all of these but some of them have been postulated and we put together sort of a representative of like a best guess that we came across for where some of these HART locations can be. And that's an indication that the North Koreans have prepared for a scenario in which if communications get cut with centralized command, there is no need to depend on like the centralized supply depot, so they can continue to fight, these artillery heads can continue to fire and pose a real threat to Seoul on a localized basis. They will still have access to ammo even if they are kind of shut off and by themselves. JLS: One thing that you said in particular that struck me which is that the media picks up on this narrative that North Korea is stupid or that they're crazy, and I think it's a point to be emphasized because the worst mistake that either side can make in a military conflict is to underestimate one's enemy. I think one of the reasons that the Korean War back in the '50s dragged on as long as it did was because the United States actually miscalculated and underestimated a lot of the factors at the beginning of that war, and it probably prolonged a conflict that didn't have to be as long as it was. I think the other thing to point out, which is the flip side of some of what you are saying, is that North Korea suffered a great deal in the Korean War with the United States in the 1950s, and it is terrified of the United States. There is a very real fear on the part of North Korea about what the United States is capable of and what U.S. unpredictability is. That might be strange to hear for a U.S. audience or for an audience that is more Western-oriented, but I think that's also true, and I think it animates a lot of North Korean's actions. But I want to take a step back for a moment and ask you, so Secretary of Defense Mattis gave his first public interview I guess last Sunday now on Face the Nation on CBS, and he got a question about North Korea, and he said two things about North Korea. He said, number one, that North Korea was already a national security threat to the United States, and the other thing he said and this got picked up quite a bit was that the fighting that would happen in North Korea if there was a military conflict there would probably be the worst that many Americans would have seen in most of their lifetimes. So I wonder if you know having really dived deep into the details and thought about all this, how you rate Mattis' statement? Do you think that this really would be some of the most destructive and catastrophic fighting the United States has done in the last 50, 60, 70 years, or do you think that's a little bit of hyperbole? XS: Yes, I think definitely it would represent a very violent conflict. There would be a lot of destruction, a lot of death, and that is in large part because of the capability of the North Korean military to wreak such damage based on the weapons they currently have. I mean, while it is true that a lot of their conventional weapons are outdated, a lot were acquired from the Soviet Union during the Cold War, some are natively built, and there are a few newer weapons systems that we talk about in the piece that have been developed more recently, but ultimately the vast majority of their guns are relatively old, but old guns still shoot. They might have, you know, a slightly higher rate of failure, but that doesn't mean that they can't do a lot of damage. Now, there are some reports saying if the North Koreans start firing on Seoul, they will completely flatten or level the town. And I read some reports that challenge that to a certain degree, but even some of the more conservative papers that said, “Well, maybe they wouldn't flatten Seoul,” had really very high casualty estimates in the first couple of hours in the outbreak of a conflict. One of the estimates was that if North Korea targeted population centers in Seoul with its artillery instead of, say, other military targets at the outbreak of a conflict, something like 30,000-60,000 people could die in a first three hours of a conflict. So, you know, we're talking really high amounts of casualties. I mean something like 58,000 soldiers died in the entire Vietnam War, so that's very violent. So I think the question you want to ask yourself after hearing those numbers is, well, would North Korea actually use its artillery if it would be wreaking such destruction and the potential for a retaliation that it would cause? And I think that the answer has to do with the credibility of deterrent, right? Everyone talks about nuclear deterrent, and it's an important subject to talk about, but right now North Korea also has a conventional deterrent and has had one before it began developing its ballistic missile technology and nuclear technology, which is its conventional artillery deterrent. Now, if it is struck and does not implement an artillery barrage against the South, then it's effectively saying to the world that this deterrent, this conventional deterrent, this threat is not really there. So I think it's quite likely that if attacked, North Korea would feel compelled to retaliate against the South and that it could be quite destructive. JLS: Yeah your point is well taken though, which is that a deterrent is at its most powerful when it's actually deterring. Once a deterrent has had to be triggered, it automatically takes the power out of the hands of the country or the state entity that is doing the deterring and forces it make an offensive move that it doesn't want to make. The whole point of deterrence is to try and prevent it from making that move. I think another thing maybe to also point out is that some of the stuff that you've pointed out here is one of the reasons that at GPF we really don't pay a lot of attention to the political drama and back and forth about THAAD, which is that U.S. anti-missile system that finally is going to get stationed in South Korea. But there's a lot of domestic opposition to it being stationed in South Korea. China really hates that these U.S. anti-missile systems are going to be in South Korea. But the point is that doesn't actually help the South Koreans solve the problem that arises if there is a significant military conflict because as you say the issue here really is artillery, and if you have 21,000 pieces of artillery or whatever you said it was, the THAAD missile defense system is not going to be able to block those things, right? There's really nothing that South Korea can do if it gets that far. XS: No, I mean at that point all they can really do is hope that the U.S. can – well it would be the U.S. and South Korea. I mean, I don't want to make this sound like the U.S. would be doing all the fighting, right? If the North opens on the South, the south also has artillery pieces and as soon as a large gun fire it exposes its position, right? I mean right now, they're hidden to a certain extent. Some of these HARTs that I talked about are deep underground caves or tunnels, fortified positions where pieces of artillery, sometimes even planes, are hidden to protect against the barrage. But as soon as their position is exposed, the South has artillery too and can respond in kind. But it will take a lot more time to eliminate all of the artillery pieces with a counter barrage than it would with say a strategic bombing campaign. And there, the U.S. would probably be taking charge with a lot of its strategic bombers located at Andersen Air Force Base in Guam. JLS: No but that's a good point, and it's good that you brought up Andersen Air Force Base in Guam because I think that this is another part that is not well recognized, because the United States wants its aircraft carriers there because that sort of became a U.S. military doctrine when it comes to fighting war but actually a lot of the heavy lifting that's going to happen on the U.S. side is going to happen out of Guam. That's one of the places that we're watching most closely, right? XS: Yeah absolutely, it would come from either B-52s or B-2s or B-1s, all of which are heavy strategic bombers, one of which is stealth, B-2 is stealth. Some folks believe that the B-2 bomber would be able to take out a lot of these artillery positions while at the same time avoiding North Korea's anti-air defenses. And in theory that's true, it's difficult to really play out again just because war is unpredictable. JLS: Yeah. And just taking a step back for a second from the very tactical perspective that you've offered here about North Korea, it's also very telling to think if we just look at everything that we've actually written this week at GPF and to see how it all fits into a larger picture. Obviously, we had, you know, your deep study of this issue in North Korea. We had one or two other pieces that dealt with North Korea. We had a couple other pieces that dealt with the problem of ISIS. And some of the comments that Secretary Mattis made about how the U.S. is accelerating its strategy against ISIS. Then we also wrote about NATO this week in the wake of U.S. President Donald Trump going to Brussels and meeting with NATO leaders. And these are all actually very connected to each other. You know, the major military conflicts that the U.S. seems to be involved in right now are this fight against the Islamic state in Syria and Iraq and dealing with the potential threat of a nuclear North Korea. I don't mean to minimize those conflicts. But they are not sort of on the level of challenging the United States from an existential perspective, right? Like it is a national security interest that North Korea not develop a nuclear weapon, but the future existence of the United States is not in play there. The same is true of ISIS. The United States doesn't want a radical Sunni Arab entity to rise in the Middle East and throw off the balance of power there, but at the same time, what happens in the Middle East or what happens with these horrible terrorist attacks doesn't actually challenge the U.S. from an existential point of view. And then you have the U.S. also going to NATO, and a lot of people have, you know, been talking about Trump's manners at NATO and I don't really feel like getting into that. I'll just point out that Secretary Mattis has been for NATO from the beginning, and Donald Trump picked him as secretary anyway. And Mattis himself has been a NATO officer so you can see the U.S. trying to find the right balance of what conflicts is it going to engage in, what is it not going to engage in, what alliances is it going to use, what alliances is it not going to use. And I think that one of the things that is striking to me in particular about North Korea is that, you know, unlike with ISIS where at least it has built some kind of nominal, even superficial coalition to deal with ISIS, the U.S. really is the one pushing this issue with North Korea and is going to be providing a lot of the impetus for it. They've been pushing China to do something on this issue, but China so far hasn't really been able to get North Korea to calm down and seems to be just repeating itself over and over again. The South Koreans have elected a government that is a little more peace oriented when it comes to North Korea. Obviously, if there is a fight, they are going to have to be involved. And Japan, which we sort of see as really the main player in East Asia, hasn't really had much to say. So in some sense I think from the United States' perspective, it's got to be a little bit…, on the one hand it shows how powerful the U.S. is, but on the other hand it shows how limited that power is because the U.S. can't really depend on anyone when it's dealing with the situation in North Korea. XS: I think you make a great point, and it is challenging when investigating one part of the world or any one aspect of the world to get caught up in the details, which to some degree matter, right? Because details reveal truth about a matter, which are difficult to see from a high level. We talk about geopolitics and ultimately that is events in the world and how they impact one another. It's impossible to look at one part of the world without recognizing how events in other parts of the world are related to it, especially when talking about the United States, which as the sole global superpower right now has interest everywhere. So, therefore, what goes on in one part of the world, in the Middle East, impacts the amount and types of resources that it can devote towards approaching other challenges in other parts of the world. So the amount of military resources that it commits to the Middle East impacts the amount of military resources that it can commit to conflict in the Western Pacific. So, you know, I've had people approach me with everything that's going on now with the Korean Peninsula and the Middle East, and they've said, “So do you still think that the U.S. is going to be the major power in the rest of the century looking at what's going on now?” And the only answer I can really give them is yeah. I mean, the U.S. is immensely powerful economically and militarily, and like you said, none of the challenges that it's facing that we've talked about in this podcast, that we talk about at Geopolitical Futures really threaten it from an existential perspective. I mean, even if you want to imagine this hypothetical scenario where tomorrow North Korea develops the capability to deliver all of its nuclear warheads, which I've heard estimates about 20 – well not nuclear warheads that it can attach to a missile but nuclear devices – if it could tomorrow find a way to deliver all of these somehow to the U.S., that still wouldn't be an existential threat. I mean if they could wipe out portions of 20 different cities, it would be devastating, but the U.S. would still be around and still have the strongest military by far. So there are threats, but it's important to, when digging into the details of the challenges U.S. is attempting to deal with either with economic or military strength, keep them in the context of how much damage they can actually do to the U.S., right? And whether the scale of those challenges really confront – well if they really pose the existential risks in the way that a lot of people often talk about them doing. JLS: Well Xander, I want to ask you one more question before we wrap up, and it's a little bit of a curve ball, and it's something I've been thinking about. And actually I haven't asked you this before, and I haven't actually come to it in my mind so we'll see if it works or it similarly stumps you. There was something that George actually has said to me a couple times since the time that I've known him, and it's – I forget the exact quote, but it's something like the great wars are always fought twice. You know, like World War I, there was a World War II. Like the really important wars in the world are always fought twice. And when we think about the current conflicts that the United States is involved with right now, I mean we're basically on the third iteration of the Iraq War, right? Because we had Desert Storm and then we had the invasion in 2003, and then technically all U.S. troops were out of there under the Obama administration, and then Obama had to recommit them because of what was happening with ISIS and ISIS going into Mosul and dealing with Yazidis and stuff like that. And with Korea, obviously the United States fought the Korean War in the 1950s and that was part of the Cold War. But it has really struck me that when we look at the places that the United States is committing most of its military resources right now, they are old conflicts. They're vestigial conflicts. They were there before and maybe sort of weren't carried out in a way that brought them to some kind of resolution. Maybe they can't be carried out in a certain way that can bring them to some kind of resolution, and these will be constant little conflicts that the United States will have to be going through all the time. I guess I don't necessarily have a question there, but I wonder if there's anything in your analytical toolkit that can help explain why the U.S. seems to go back to fighting not just a lot but in the same places in the world over and over again. XS: It's an interesting question. I think if you look at conflicts isolated as individual events, it's maybe harder to see that connection, but if you try to dig down to understand the causes of those conflicts, sometimes the underlying causes are more difficult to solve, right? What do I mean by that? If you look at World War I and World War II, they were both about the same fundamental issue, which was Germany's role in Europe and that had always been a question. I mean, even the Thirty Years' War to a degree was about German states' role in Europe, and it only really became a pressing issue after the unification of Germany, and that's what lead to the massive scale of these conflicts. So while the circumstances might have changed with Korea – you know, the Cold War is no longer going on, they no longer have support from the Soviet Union – there are some aspects that remained unchanged. And those remain longer-term geopolitical causes, right? So, Korea has always been unified. Almost always throughout its history for thousands of years, and it became divided as a result of the Cold War, and we're now dealing with the underlying causes – the relationship of Korea with itself and that's not something that has changed on some level since the Korean War. So I think there are ways to dig down beneath isolated events and try to see what those causes are. That doesn't mean that major wars will always be fought twice, but I think that sheds some light on why they sometimes are. JLS: Yeah and it just strikes me that one of the ironic things is that, so if we take what you said and play it a step forward, the issue in Korea is that there is a division there that is somewhat unnatural when you think about history and the Korean Peninsula overall. In the Middle East, it's sort of the opposite, right? The unnatural thing is trying to join together states that never actually existed. So on the one hand, in Korea, you have this really arbitrary separation that has now taken root over half a century and creates its own host of dynamics. In the Middle East, because of colonialism, because of the way that the Ottoman Empire fell apart, you had these groups that were smushed together in way that perhaps didn't make geopolitical sense, and now all of that stuff is playing out. So that's just an interesting little aside. But Xander thank you for taking the time to join us on the podcast today. Again, I'm Jacob Shapiro, I'm our director of analysis. If you have any comments, feedback, critiques, we also love topic suggestions, you could actually write to us at comments@geopoliticalfutures.com. And we will see you all out here next week.

Troy Flis of VISITFLORIDA.com Racing joins Chad and Rich to talk about their win last weekend at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca, moving to a new chassis, and much more, then the guys go through the news, rant a little, review the IMSA race from MRLS, and much more.

Troy Flis of VISITFLORIDA.com Racing joins Chad and Rich to talk about their win last weekend at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca, moving to a new chassis, and much more, then the guys go through the news, rant a little, review the IMSA race from MRLS, and much more.

We present methods for improved handling of morphologically rich languages (MRLS) where we define MRLS as languages that are morphologically more complex than English. Standard algorithms for language modeling, tagging and parsing have problems with the productive nature of such languages. Consider for example the possible forms of a typical English verb like work that generally has four four different forms: work, works, working and worked. Its Spanish counterpart trabajar has 6 different forms in present tense: trabajo, trabajas, trabaja, trabajamos, trabajáis and trabajan and more than 50 different forms when including the different tenses, moods (indicative, subjunctive and imperative) and participles. Such a high number of forms leads to sparsity issues: In a recent Wikipedia dump of more than 400 million tokens we find that 20 of these forms occur only twice or less and that 10 forms do not occur at all. This means that even if we only need unlabeled data to estimate a model and even when looking at a relatively common and frequent verb, we do not have enough data to make reasonable estimates for some of its forms. However, if we decompose an unseen form such as trabajaréis `you will work', we find that it is trabajar in future tense and second person plural. This allows us to make the predictions that are needed to decide on the grammaticality (language modeling) or syntax (tagging and parsing) of a sentence. In the first part of this thesis, we develop a morphological language model. A language model estimates the grammaticality and coherence of a sentence. Most language models used today are word-based n-gram models, which means that they estimate the transitional probability of a word following a history, the sequence of the (n - 1) preceding words. The probabilities are estimated from the frequencies of the history and the history followed by the target word in a huge text corpus. If either of the sequences is unseen, the length of the history has to be reduced. This leads to a less accurate estimate as less context is taken into account. Our morphological language model estimates an additional probability from the morphological classes of the words. These classes are built automatically by extracting morphological features from the word forms. To this end, we use unsupervised segmentation algorithms to find the suffixes of word forms. Such an algorithm might for example segment trabajaréis into trabaja and réis and we can then estimate the properties of trabajaréis from other word forms with the same or similar morphological properties. The data-driven nature of the segmentation algorithms allows them to not only find inflectional suffixes (such as -réis), but also more derivational phenomena such as the head nouns of compounds or even endings such as -tec, which identify technology oriented companies such as Vortec, Memotec and Portec and would not be regarded as a morphological suffix by traditional linguistics. Additionally, we extract shape features such as if a form contains digits or capital characters. This is important because many rare or unseen forms are proper names or numbers and often do not have meaningful suffixes. Our class-based morphological model is then interpolated with a word-based model to combine the generalization capabilities of the first and the high accuracy in case of sufficient data of the second. We evaluate our model across 21 European languages and find improvements between 3% and 11% in perplexity, a standard language modeling evaluation measure. Improvements are highest for languages with more productive and complex morphology such as Finnish and Estonian, but also visible for languages with a relatively simple morphology such as English and Dutch. We conclude that a morphological component yields consistent improvements for all the tested languages and argue that it should be part of every language model. Dependency trees represent the syntactic structure of a sentence by attaching each word to its syntactic head, the word it is directly modifying. Dependency parsing is usually tackled using heavily lexicalized (word-based) models and a thorough morphological preprocessing is important for optimal performance, especially for MRLS. We investigate if the lack of morphological features can be compensated by features induced using hidden Markov models with latent annotations (HMM-LAs) and find this to be the case for German. HMM-LAs were proposed as a method to increase part-of-speech tagging accuracy. The model splits the observed part-of-speech tags (such as verb and noun) into subtags. An expectation maximization algorithm is then used to fit the subtags to different roles. A verb tag for example might be split into an auxiliary verb and a full verb subtag. Such a split is usually beneficial because these two verb classes have different contexts. That is, a full verb might follow an auxiliary verb, but usually not another full verb. For German and English, we find that our model leads to consistent improvements over a parser not using subtag features. Looking at the labeled attachment score (LAS), the number of words correctly attached to their head, we observe an improvement from 90.34 to 90.75 for English and from 87.92 to 88.24 for German. For German, we additionally find that our model achieves almost the same performance (88.24) as a model using tags annotated by a supervised morphological tagger (LAS of 88.35). We also find that the German latent tags correlate with morphology. Articles for example are split by their grammatical case. We also investigate the part-of-speech tagging accuracies of models using the traditional treebank tagset and models using induced tagsets of the same size and find that the latter outperform the former, but are in turn outperformed by a discriminative tagger. Furthermore, we present a method for fast and accurate morphological tagging. While part-of-speech tagging annotates tokens in context with their respective word categories, morphological tagging produces a complete annotation containing all the relevant inflectional features such as case, gender and tense. A complete reading is represented as a single tag. As a reading might consist of several morphological features the resulting tagset usually contains hundreds or even thousands of tags. This is an issue for many decoding algorithms such as Viterbi which have runtimes depending quadratically on the number of tags. In the case of morphological tagging, the problem can be avoided by using a morphological analyzer. A morphological analyzer is a manually created finite-state transducer that produces the possible morphological readings of a word form. This analyzer can be used to prune the tagging lattice and to allow for the application of standard sequence labeling algorithms. The downside of this approach is that such an analyzer is not available for every language or might not have the coverage required for the task. Additionally, the output tags of some analyzers are not compatible with the annotations of the treebanks, which might require some manual mapping of the different annotations or even to reduce the complexity of the annotation. To avoid this problem we propose to use the posterior probabilities of a conditional random field (CRF) lattice to prune the space of possible taggings. At the zero-order level the posterior probabilities of a token can be calculated independently from the other tokens of a sentence. The necessary computations can thus be performed in linear time. The features available to the model at this time are similar to the features used by a morphological analyzer (essentially the word form and features based on it), but also include the immediate lexical context. As the ambiguity of word types varies substantially, we just fix the average number of readings after pruning by dynamically estimating a probability threshold. Once we obtain the pruned lattice, we can add tag transitions and convert it into a first-order lattice. The quadratic forward-backward computations are now executed on the remaining plausible readings and thus efficient. We can now continue pruning and extending the lattice order at a relatively low additional runtime cost (depending on the pruning thresholds). The training of the model can be implemented efficiently by applying stochastic gradient descent (SGD). The CRF gradient can be calculated from a lattice of any order as long as the correct reading is still in the lattice. During training, we thus run the lattice pruning until we either reach the maximal order or until the correct reading is pruned. If the reading is pruned we perform the gradient update with the highest order lattice still containing the reading. This approach is similar to early updating in the structured perceptron literature and forces the model to learn how to keep the correct readings in the lower order lattices. In practice, we observe a high number of lower updates during the first training epoch and almost exclusively higher order updates during later epochs. We evaluate our CRF tagger on six languages with different morphological properties. We find that for languages with a high word form ambiguity such as German, the pruning results in a moderate drop in tagging accuracy while for languages with less ambiguity such as Spanish and Hungarian the loss due to pruning is negligible. However, our pruning strategy allows us to train higher order models (order > 1), which give substantial improvements for all languages and also outperform unpruned first-order models. That is, the model might lose some of the correct readings during pruning, but is also able to solve more of the harder cases that require more context. We also find our model to substantially and significantly outperform a number of frequently used taggers such as Morfette and SVMTool. Based on our morphological tagger we develop a simple method to increase the performance of a state-of-the-art constituency parser. A constituency tree describes the syntactic properties of a sentence by assigning spans of text to a hierarchical bracket structure. developed a language-independent approach for the automatic annotation of accurate and compact grammars. Their implementation -- known as the Berkeley parser -- gives state-of-the-art results for many languages such as English and German. For some MRLS such as Basque and Korean, however, the parser gives unsatisfactory results because of its simple unknown word model. This model maps unknown words to a small number of signatures (similar to our morphological classes). These signatures do not seem expressive enough for many of the subtle distinctions made during parsing. We propose to replace rare words by the morphological reading generated by our tagger instead. The motivation is twofold. First, our tagger has access to a number of lexical and sublexical features not available during parsing. Second, we expect the morphological readings to contain most of the information required to make the correct parsing decision even though we know that things such as the correct attachment of prepositional phrases might require some notion of lexical semantics. In experiments on the SPMRL 2013 dataset of nine MRLS we find our method to give improvements for all languages except French for which we observe a minor drop in the Parseval score of 0.06. For Hebrew, Hungarian and Basque we find substantial absolute improvements of 5.65, 11.87 and 15.16, respectively. We also performed an extensive evaluation on the utility of word representations for morphological tagging. Our goal was to reduce the drop in performance that is caused when a model trained on a specific domain is applied to some other domain. This problem is usually addressed by domain adaption (DA). DA adapts a model towards a specific domain using a small amount of labeled or a huge amount of unlabeled data from that domain. However, this procedure requires us to train a model for every target domain. Instead we are trying to build a robust system that is trained on domain-specific labeled and domain-independent or general unlabeled data. We believe word representations to be key in the development of such models because they allow us to leverage unlabeled data efficiently. We compare data-driven representations to manually created morphological analyzers. We understand data-driven representations as models that cluster word forms or map them to a vectorial representation. Examples heavily used in the literature include Brown clusters, Singular Value Decompositions of count vectors and neural-network-based embeddings. We create a test suite of six languages consisting of in-domain and out-of-domain test sets. To this end we converted annotations for Spanish and Czech and annotated the German part of the Smultron treebank with a morphological layer. In our experiments on these data sets we find Brown clusters to outperform the other data-driven representations. Regarding the comparison with morphological analyzers, we find Brown clusters to give slightly better performance in part-of-speech tagging, but to be substantially outperformed in morphological tagging.

Especial Musical con Millana y Silvia Miralasilvia. A través de 32 canciones reflexionamos sobre el Novelty, las Canciones que dan cosica y simplemente lo sentimental, para terminar ofreciendo una zarzuela futurista e imprevisible. El Playlist que sonó fue el siguiente: 1. Canta lo Sentimental_Los Zafiros 2. Sentimiento de Amor_Camilo Sexto 3. Una Mujer_Joao Gilberto 4. María Magdalena_Trigo Limpio 5. Un Hombre Canta y Una Mujer Llora_Conchita Piquer 6. Hoy no me levanto_Manolo Galván 7. Bequeriana_Bola de Nieve 8. ¿Qué querrá decir esto?_Rosario Rios 9. Confundida sobre la Verdad_Títeres del Parque Popcorn 10. Envidia_Antonio Machín 11. Llorando me dormí_Bobby Capo&Violeta Rivas 12. Riendo me despertaba_Bobby Capo&Violeta Rivas 13. Epístola moral a Mari Luz_Moncho Alpuente y los Kwai 14. Soy Soltero y no concibo_Nacho del Río 15. Chotis de la Mujer_La Rata de Antequera 16. Yo también quiero casarme_Violeta Parra 17. Tal vez me estoy enamorando_Nicole 18. Nos falta Fe_Juan y Junior 19. No hay nada como tu (soberbia)_Esclarecidos 20. Soy lo Peor_Raphael 21. Quién Piensa en ti_Gonzalo 22. No Estoy para nadie_Charlie Misterio 23. Canción de Amor para un terrorista_Violeta y la Caja de Pandora 24. Por Todos Lados_Las Malas Amistades 25. Tú, sólo tú_Bertín Osborne 26. Es un Sueño_Luna 27. ¿Quién tiene un duro de Amor?_Pablo Abraira 28. El último romántico_Los Tepetables 29. Me Gustó_Adrián 30. Las Mantas_Espanto 31. Yo te diré_Löpez 32. Cabaret Trágico_Juan García Esquivel feat. Columba Dominguez.

Especial Musical con Millana y Silvia Miralasilvia. A través de 32 canciones reflexionamos sobre el Novelty, las Canciones que dan cosica y simplemente lo sentimental, para terminar ofreciendo una zarzuela futurista e imprevisible. El Playlist que sonó fue el siguiente: 1. Canta lo Sentimental_Los Zafiros 2. Sentimiento de Amor_Camilo Sexto 3. Una Mujer_Joao Gilberto 4. María Magdalena_Trigo Limpio 5. Un Hombre Canta y Una Mujer Llora_Conchita Piquer 6. Hoy no me levanto_Manolo Galván 7. Bequeriana_Bola de Nieve 8. ¿Qué querrá decir esto?_Rosario Rios 9. Confundida sobre la Verdad_Títeres del Parque Popcorn 10. Envidia_Antonio Machín 11. Llorando me dormí_Bobby Capo&Violeta Rivas 12. Riendo me despertaba_Bobby Capo&Violeta Rivas 13. Epístola moral a Mari Luz_Moncho Alpuente y los Kwai 14. Soy Soltero y no concibo_Nacho del Río 15. Chotis de la Mujer_La Rata de Antequera 16. Yo también quiero casarme_Violeta Parra 17. Tal vez me estoy enamorando_Nicole 18. Nos falta Fe_Juan y Junior 19. No hay nada como tu (soberbia)_Esclarecidos 20. Soy lo Peor_Raphael 21. Quién Piensa en ti_Gonzalo 22. No Estoy para nadie_Charlie Misterio 23. Canción de Amor para un terrorista_Violeta y la Caja de Pandora 24. Por Todos Lados_Las Malas Amistades 25. Tú, sólo tú_Bertín Osborne 26. Es un Sueño_Luna 27. ¿Quién tiene un duro de Amor?_Pablo Abraira 28. El último romántico_Los Tepetables 29. Me Gustó_Adrián 30. Las Mantas_Espanto 31. Yo te diré_Löpez 32. Cabaret Trágico_Juan García Esquivel feat. Columba Dominguez.

Die vorliegende Arbeit befasst sich mit der Entwicklung enzymimmunologischer Verfahren zum Nachweis von in der EU-weit geltenden Verordnung (EWG) Nr. 2377/90 reglementierten Chinolonen. Zur Gewinnung gruppenspezifischer Antikörper wurde Ciprofloxacin-Ethylendiamin an Keyhole Limpet Haemocyanin (KLH) gekoppelt und drei Kaninchen intracutan immunisiert. Nach einer Restimulierung waren bei allen drei Kaninchen spezifische Antikörper nachweisbar. Die zur Erstellung eines direkten und indirekten kompetitiven enzymimmunologischen Nachweisverfahrens notwendigen markierten Antigene wurden durch Kopplung von Ciprofloxacin, Ciprofloxacin-Ethylendiamin, Clinafloxacin sowie Norfloxacin an Meerrettichperoxidase, Glucoseoxidase oder Ovalbumin hergestellt. Dabei kamen verschiedene Kopplungsmethoden (aktive Estermethode, Perjodatmethode und Carbodiimidmethode) zum Einsatz. Mit dem spezifischen Serum eines Tieres wurden verschiedene kompetitive Enzymimmun-testsysteme entwickelt. Von den direkten Enzymimmuntests wies das empfindlichste System eine Nachweisgrenze für Ciprofloxacin von 1,25 ng/ml auf, im indirekten Testsystem lag die untere Nachweisgrenze bei 1,5 ng/ml. Ciprofloxacin konnte somit weit unterhalb des geltenden MRL-Wertes von 100 µg/kg in Milch nachgewiesen werden. Das Antiserum zeigte nur bedingt Gruppenspezifität. Für fünf von 23 überprüften Chinolonen wurden Kreuzreaktionen von > 50 % ermittelt, von den mit einem MRL-Wert belegten Substanzen wurden Danofloxacin, Ciprofloxacin, Enrofloxacin und Oxolinsäure erfasst. Zur Überprüfung der Anwendbarkeit der entwickelten Testsysteme wurden künstlich kontaminierte und gewachsene Milch- und Garnelenproben untersucht, wobei das jeweilige Testsystem an die entsprechende Probenmatrix adaptiert wurde. Die mittlere Wiederfindungsrate lag bei 95,5 %, in keiner der Praxisproben konnten Chinolonrückstände nachgewiesen werden. Weiterhin wurde ein mikrobiologisches Verfahren unter Verwendung von E. coli als Testkeim zum Nachweis für Chinolone entwickelt. Dieser Agardiffusionstest zeichnete sich durch eine hohe Sensitivität und Gruppenspezifität aus. Ciprofloxacin konnte mit einer Nachweisgrenze von 2 ng/ml weit unterhalb des geltenden MRLs nachgewiesen werden, zehn weitere wichtige Chinolone wurden unterhalb von 100 ng/ml erfasst. Dieses System kann somit als nützlicher Kontrolltest verwendet werden.

This paper describes the development and application of enzyme immunoassays for the detection of antimicrobials in milk, aiming at the establishment of a biosensor system for the on-line analysis of drug residues in milk. For the development of group-specific antibodies against penicillins rabbits were immunized with an ampicillin-BSA-conjugate. The resulting antiserum was employed for the development of a direct competitive enzyme immunoassay (EIA), giving a detection limit of 1 ng/ml for penicillin G in milk. Due to broad cross-reactivities the sensitive detection of those penicillins regulated by MRLs within the European Union (ampicillin, amoxicillin, oxacillin, cloxacillin, dicloxacillin and nafcillin) was enabled. The practical use of the enzyme immunoassay was demonstrated by analyzing artificially contaminated and violative incurred milk samples (n = 321). For the development of indirect competitive enzyme immunoassays for the detection of streptomycin, sulfonamides and penicillins, previously established direct assays, based on monoclonal antibodies, were adapted to indirect formats. For this purpose a wide range of coating-antigens was prepared by linking haptens to carrier-proteins. After optimizing test sensitivity and characterizing the test specificity indirect EIAs could be developed for each antimicrobial compound, fulfilling the MRL requirements due to EU regulation 2377/90. Only for ampicillin and penicillin G colorimetric measurements resulted in detection limits of 7 and 6 ng/ml, respectively, which were slightly above the MRL of 4 ng/ml. By using a luminescent substrate, however, the MRL could be reached for these antibiotics as well. Based on the results of the individual EIAs rapid multianalyte tests both on microtitre plates and planar microarray chips were developed. Due to altered assay conditions again the systems were optimized and characterized regarding sensitivity and specificity. The sensitivities achieved on the biochip were well comparable with those obtained in the microtitre plate, whereas total assay time could be reduced to 15 min (microtitre plate) and 5 min (biochip), respectively.