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Kamov vs. Mil: prospects for Russian chopper fleet By the end of this year, Russia’s Far East air base of Chernigovka will be fully reequipped with new Mi-8AMTSh and Ka-52 attack choppers that will replace the obsolete Mi-8s and Mi-24s. Designed as a special forces' support helicopter, the Ka-52 is gradually growing to become the army’s main attack gunship. Plans to launch Ka-52 batch production were announced as early as in 2006. Under the modernization initiative, Ka-52s were to make up only a small portion of the 300 attack helicopters – just several squadrons of 70 to 80 choppers –...

BEIJING (AP) — China and Russia launched joint naval exercises Sunday that highlight warming ties between their militaries and growing cooperation in international affairs. [snip] "It's an excellent exchange for China to be able to drill jointly in such sensitive areas," Yin told CCTV. [snip] Much of that cooperation takes place within the confines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a grouping of Central Asian states that seeks to check U.S. influence in the region and began holding joint drills in 2005. Formerly Cold War rivals for leadership of the communist world, China and Russia have since found common ground in...

President Obama just gave the world a glimpse into his future foreign policy plans this week, should he win a second term. On tap for Obama II: more faith in our adversaries, more betrayal of our traditional allies and more unilateral indulgence in nuclear abolition fantasies. Monday, President Obama told Russian President Medvedev that “This is my last election. After my election, I have more flexibility.” Medvedev responded that he would dutifully report that tidbit to Vladimir Putin back in the Kremlin. The men apparently did not realize their discussion was being caught by a live microphone. Given that the...

The chairman of the House subcommittee on strategic nuclear forces slammed the Obama Administration today for what he called its lackadaisical approach to missile defense in the face of rising threats from North Korea, Iran, and – implicitly – China. "We all know that the world is getting less safe," Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio) told reporters at a breakfast talk in Washington, D.C. "Look at North Korea, look at Iran," he said. "These are real and emerging threats that we need to stay ahead of," he said, "[but] if you listen to the hearings in our committee, there is a...

The way the Department of Defense does math, two plus two never equals four. Take this simple equation. Add the growing threat from theater ballistic missiles to the Army’s search for relevance in the post Iraq/Afghanistan world and the answer should come up: expand the Army’s role in missile defense. What does the Pentagon/Army do? They have decided to cut the number of batteries of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system that will be acquired in the near-term by a third, from nine to six batteries. The THAAD is an extremely capable, mobile, land-based system that can perform...

For the past four years, Vladimir Putin, Russia’s prime minister, and his sidekick Dmitry Medvedev, who has the nominal post of president, have been engaged in a huge propaganda operation to fool Russians and the West. With much fanfare, they have pretended to reform their benighted land. Mr Medvedev denounced corruption, and they pretended to be friends with the West, particularly through a warming of their relations with the U.S. in 2009. But this has been a sham to conceal the truth: that Russia is shamefully misruled. The ruling former KGB regime has squandered tens of billions of pounds and...

Noting that the cause of Andrew Breitbart’s unexpected death yesterday was being examined by the Los Angeles County Coroner’s office, talk-radio host Michael Savage raised the question of whether the conservative media powerhouse – who recently announced he had videos that could politically damage President Obama – was murdered. On his top-rated show today, Savage played an audio clip of Breitbart telling an audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington last month that he had obtained videos that shed light on Obama’s ties to radicals in the early 1980s who helped propel him to the presidency. “Maybe my...

Skeptics are winning: “The carbon market is dead” The collapse of the Man-Made Myth continues apace. You may not read headlines as such (at least not in major dailies) but all the signs are there.People who we never would have imagined speaking against the Big Scare Campaign are now doing so. Key glaciers are not melting and corals are happy. Governments won’t tell you it’s over, but they are behaving that way (the Australian one excepted, due to an election fluke that gave the Greens the balance of power). The Catholic Herald headlined it: Is the ‘anthropogenic global warming’ consensus...

All over the world, regions stand where nations once stood. The world is on the cusp of a revolution in political arrangements, as the citizens of the world are losing control with hardly a word spoken. After the successful Aunschluss of the Lisbon Treaty took place, historic European nations fell one by one to the power of the European Union. Recent reports indicate that a small elite now governs Europe, through a highly removed and secretive process. Examples of this newfound European collectivism were observed recently in Greece, when EU officials threatened to place the nation of Greece in suzerainty,...

Imagine your child’s school teaching him how wonderful dictatorships are by having him and his friends model their very own group of dictatorships as part of their education. Like so many other Orwellian nightmares in the American educational system, this one is very real and takes place through the Model UN program. The Model UN program teaches American students that global government is better than national government and that the corrupt kleptocracy on Turtle Bay is the ideal state of mankind. Finally it trains them to put American presidents on trial for violating United Nations laws. Twenty-two Model UN events...

"We are all Greeks" - so begins one of the best reports on the unsustainability of the status quo, and on what "the new world order" will look like, created by SocGen's Veronique Riches-Flores. Her overarching observation: "No one can claim immunity from a Greek-style spiral" because "Our economies are mature, with weak potential GDP, especially post the financial crisis" and due to that old standby which everyone chooses so conveniently to forget, yet which is the biggest threat to the world's "welfare-state" stability, in existence since 1860 and which has been responsible for not only the longest period of...

Eat the Old: Could Mass Cannibalism Solve a Future Food Shortage? The global human population is set to hit 7 billion on Oct. 31, and by century's end it will stand at 10 billion, according to the United Nations. That's a lot more mouths to feed. There's a very good chance that generating food from traditional farming and livestock practices will not be able to keep pace with this boom. What if a worldwide food shortage were to become so terribly dire that people resorted to eating . . . people? In such a dreadful event, the most-sensible first choice...

The Vatican called on Monday for the establishment of a “global public authority” and a “central world bank” to rule over financial institutions that have become outdated and often ineffective in dealing fairly with crises. The document from the Vatican’s Justice and Peace department should please the “Occupy Wall Street” demonstrators and similar movements around the world who have protested against the economic downturn. “Towards Reforming the International Financial and Monetary Systems in the Context of a Global Public Authority,” was at times very specific, calling, for example, for taxation measures on financial transactions. “The economic and financial crisis which...

Former Soviet leader says protest movement highlights need for “global governance” Former Communist leader Mikhail Gorbachev told an audience at Lafayette College on Wednesday night that the United States’ economic problems heralded the need for a new American “perestroika,” defined by a “new world order” and a system of “global governance”. Speaking to a crowd of 3,600 people during an event that was broadcast live nationwide, Gorbachev made reference to riots and demonstrations that have swept the world over the last two years, including the Occupy Wall Street movement in the United States. “The world needs goals that will bring...

excerpt- His United Russia party also approved his proposal that the current president Dmitry Medvedev take over his Putin's role as prime minister.

Gerhard Schroeder has just called for an end to “national sovereignty” and the creation of a “United States of Europe.” Does anyone else find this sort of talk a bit scary, especially when voiced by a former Chancellor of Germany? (H/T Rich Scherf)Among those who doesn’t, apparently, is our Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne. What Schroeder is proposing differs very little from what Osborne was suggesting earlier this summer when he wrote in the Telegraph: As I’ve said, the eurozone countries need to accept the remorseless logic of monetary union that leads from a single currency to greater fiscal...

House Republicans are planning to introduce legislation Tuesday that will force major changes at the United Nations, an organization that the bill’s author has called a “stew of corruption, mismanagement and negligence.” The bill, by Republican House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, would require the UN adopt a voluntary budget model, in which countries selectively choose which UN agencies to fund. The bill is expected to be introduced on Tuesday, and will also end funding for Palestinian refugees and limit the use of U.S. funds only to projects directly outlined by Congress. An aide familiar with the legislation told...

Two years ago, U.N. researchers were claiming that it would cost “as much as $600 billion a year over the next decade” to go green. Now, a new U.N. report has more than tripled that number to $1.9 trillion per year for 40 years. So let's do the math: That works out to a grand total of $76 trillion, over 40 years -- or more than five times the entire Gross Domestic Product of the United States ($14.66 trillion a year). It’s all part of a “technological overhaul” “on the scale of the first industrial revolution” called for in the...

There is no human being on God's green and cooling earth as dangerous to the Republic as the Nazi-collaborating George $oros. Over the last couple of months, I've showed how $oros has ties to the very dangerous "Arab Spring" (http://demsareweenies.blogtownhall.com/2011/04/14/george_soros_not_just_a_nazi_collaborator.thtml and http://demsareweenies.blogtownhall.com/2011/04/20/furious_georges_terrorist_training_program.thtml ), I've shown how Furious George and his ratbastard son Jonathan have their tentacles all over fellow Jew hater Chairman Obama's "Financial Reform" scam (http://demsareweenies.blogtownhall.com/2011/05/12/furious_georges_mini-me.thtml ), I've shown how the Hungarian Anti-Christ has attempted to subvert the Jewish religion for his own selfish benefit (http://demsareweenies.blogtownhall.com/2011/02/25/the_pseudo_jews_masters_of_hypocrisy.thtml ), and I've shown how $oros' minions silence critics, like they did to...

32 Signs That The Entire World Is Being Transformed Into A Futuristic Big Brother Prison Grid Do you want your children and grandchildren to live in a futuristic "big brother" control grid where everything they do is watched, recorded, tracked and tightly controlled? Well, that is exactly where things are headed. We witnessed some really bad totalitarian regimes during the 20th century, but what is coming is going to be far more restrictive than any of the despots of the past ever dreamed was possible. Today, nearly every government on earth is tightening their grip on their citizens. Paranoia...