How we select to travel to destinations might well take a key, impression around more people & the planet. All that these days seems to be or is trying to get green & this is a brilliant thing. Doing this and attempting to personally travel gigantic amounts of miles will not be the easiest thing to do in the world but non the less it is doable. By cutting right back on flying by plane you will be helping out to improve on trim down your individual carbon footprints and this is the most effectual way to personally do it.
This does create one teeny trouble, obviously it is not 100% available to get to personally everywhere in the entire world by train, automobile or walking freakuently you need to fly and by trim down this, you have to personally focus at the whole effects you will have on villages and surroundings that depend on tourism money for continued existence. To be able to make this available there is a difficult way round it. Try to make sure and keep a little of your flying by plane to shorten distances. Land to as near as you yourself perhaps can by train etc & then all that’s needs to be done is fly the absalute remaining journey. This is not always ideal but it will help cut down your own footprint this is tremendous news. Each end every hour you spend the main thing which is a plane has a carbon footprint of further than 2 weeks.
Trains can be found to be hugely suspected of as the greenest and most environmentally favourable approach to personally travel to the required destination through anywhere in the absalute entire world. These days it is potentially possible to personally take weekend breaks by trains and still have an exciting holiday and be very rested, EU Rail travel to places has become very preferred now a days, there are many varieties about wherein you can on breaks too & it’s not 100% that dear You may well get your friends travelling to personally Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain & Switzerland.
If you are personally searching for ideas and propositions to personally find places you can take great value holidays by trains then focus no further than BBC worldwide, they recommend excellent areas in get & also give you heaps of info on it too & what to do there. Find out why train holidays are so good for the environment, Click Here.
On November 11, 2002, Sweden expelled two Russian diplomats for spying on radar and missile guidance technologies for the JAS 39 British-Swedish Gripen fighter jet developed by Telefon AB LM Ericsson, the telecommunications multinational. The Russians threatened to reciprocate. Five current and former employees of the corporate giant are being investigated. Ironically, the first foreign buyer of the aircraft may well be Poland, a former Soviet satellite state and a current European Union candidate.
Sweden arrested in February 2001 a worker of the Swiss-Swedish engineering group, ABB, on suspicion of spying for Russia. The man was released after two days for lack of evidence and reinstated. But the weighty Swedish daily, Dagens Nyheter, speculated that the recent Russian indiscretion was in deliberate retaliation for Swedish espionage in Russia. Sweden is rumored to have been in the market for Russian air radar designs and the JAS radar system is said by some observers to uncannily resemble its eastern counterparts.
The same day, a Russian military intelligence (GRU) colonel, Aleksander Sipachev, was sentenced in Moscow to eight years in prison and stripped of his rank. According to Russian news agencies, he was convicted of attempting to sell secret documents to the CIA. Russian secret service personnel, idled by the withering of Russia’s global presence, resort to private business or are re-deployed by the state to spy on industrial and economic secrets in order to aid budding Russian multinationals.
According to the FBI and the National White-collar Crime Center, Russian former secret agents have teamed with computer hackers to break into corporate networks to steal vital information about product development and marketing strategies. Microsoft has admitted to such a compromising intrusion.
In a December 1999 interview to Segodnya, a Russia paper, Eyer Winkler, a former high-ranking staffer with the National Security Agency (NSA) confirmed that “corruption in the Russian Government, the Foreign Intelligence Service, and the Main Intelligence Department allows Russian organized criminal groups to use these departments in their own interests. Criminals receive the major part of information collected by the Russian special services by means of breaking into American computer networks.”
When the KGB was dismantled and replaced by a host of new acronyms, Russian industrial espionage was still in diapers. as a result, it is a bureaucratic no-man’s land roamed by agents of the GRU, the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), and smaller outfits, such as the Federal Agency on Government Communications and Information (FAPSI).
According to Stratfor, the strategic forecasting consultancy, “the SVR and GRU both handle manned intelligence on U.S. territory, with the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) doing counterintelligence in America. Also, both the SVR and GRU have internal counterintelligence units created for finding foreign intelligence moles.” This, to some extent, is the division of labor in Europe as well.
Germany’s Federal Prosecutor has consistently warned against $5 billion worth of secrets pilfered annually from German industrial firms by foreign intelligence services, especially from east Europe and Russia. The Counterintelligence News and Developments newsletter pegs the damage at $13 billion in 1996 alone:
“Modus operandi included placing agents in international organizations, setting up joint-ventures with German companies, and setting up bogus companies. The (Federal Prosecutor’s) report also warned business leaders to be particularly wary of former diplomats or people who used to work for foreign secret services because they often had the language skills and knowledge of Germany that made them excellent agents.”
Russian spy rings now operate from Canada to Japan. Many of the spies have been dormant for decades and recalled to service following the implosion of the USSR. According to Asian media, Russians have become increasingly active in the Far East, mainly in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and mainland China.
Russia is worried about losing its edge in avionics, electronics, information technology and some emerging defense industries such as laser shields, positronics, unmanned vehicles, wearable computing, and real time triple C (communication, command and control) computerized battlefield management. The main targets are, surprisingly, Israel and France. According to media reports, the substantive clients of Russia’s defense industry - such as India - insist on hollowing out Russian craft and installing Israeli and west European systems instead.
Russia’s paranoid state of mind extends to its interior. Uralinformbureau reported earlier in 2002 that the Yamal-Nenets autonomous okrug (district) restricted access to foreigners citing concerns about industrial espionage and potential sabotage of oil and gas companies. The Kremlin maintains an ever-expanding list of regions and territories with limited - or outright - forbidden - access to foreigners.
The FSB, the KGB’s main successor, is busy arresting spies all over the vast country. To select a random events of the dozens reported every year - and many are not - the Russian daily Kommersant recounted in February 2002 how when the Trunov works at the Novolipetsk metallurgical combine concluded an agreement with a Chinese company to supply it with slabs, its chief negotiator was nabbed as a spy working for “circles in China”. His crime? He was in possession of certain documents which contained “intellectual property” of the crumbling and antiquated mill pertaining to a slab quality enhancement process.
Foreigners are also being arrested, though rarely. An American businessman, Edmund Pope, was detained in April 2000 for attempting to purchase the blueprints of an advanced torpedo from a Russian scientist. There have been a few other isolated apprehensions, mainly for “proper”, military, espionage. But Russians bear the brunt of the campaign against foreign economic intelligence gathering.
Strana.ru reported in December 2001 that, speaking on the occasion of Security Services Day, Putin - himself a KGB alumnus - warned veterans that the most crucial task facing the services today is “protecting the country’s economy against industrial espionage”.
This is nothing new. According to History of Espionage Web site, long before they established diplomatic relations with the USA in 1933, the Soviets had Amtorg Trading Company. Ostensibly its purpose was to encourage joint ventures between Russian and American firms. Really it was a hub of industrial undercover activities. Dozens of Soviet intelligence officers supervised, at its peak during the Depression, 800 American communists. The Soviet Union’s European operations in Berlin (Handelsvertretung) and in London (Arcos, Ltd.) were even more successful.
Sam Vaknin ( samvak.tripod.com ) is the author of Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain - How the West Lost the East. He served as a columnist for Global Politician, Central Europe Review, PopMatters, Bellaonline, and eBookWeb, a United Press International (UPI) Senior Business Correspondent, and the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory and Suite101.
Until recently, he served as the Economic Advisor to the Government of Macedonia.
Visit Sam’s Web site at samvak.tripod.com