Safety screen in all train Stations, Japan [ 1344 ]

Safety screen installed on JR Ebisu Station platform, all Yamanote Line stations to follow

A woman gets on a Yamanote Line train through the platform screen door at JR Ebisu Station in Tokyo's Shibuya Ward on June 26. (Mainichi)

(Mainichi Japan) June 26, 2010...,

JR Ebisu Station in downtown Tokyo started operating platform screen doors (PSDs) on the Yamanote Line platform on June 26 in an attempt to prevent accidental falls onto train tracks.

The system is the first of its kind for an East Japan Railway Co. local train station. 

The PSDs will also be introduced at JR Meguro Station in August, and the company plans to install them at all other Yamanote Line stations by fiscal 2017.

The PSD safety system at Ebisu Station is about 1.3 meters high and stretches about 220 meters.

A 28-year-old mother with two small children said, "Sometimes my children suddenly let go of my hand and start running. So, the PSDs are helpful. I hope they will be installed at every station soon."

Click here for the original Japanese story

Tsar Nicholas II..[ 1343 ]

Turkey to restore Russian Tsar Nicholas II's hunting lodge

Click for ...Full story: Today.Az

The inage of Russian Tsar Nicholas II

Speaking to the AA, Director of the Culture and Tourism Department in Kars, Hakan Doganay, said that the hunting lodge in Sarikamis was constructed in a Baltic style.

NASA’s Earth Observing of Persepolis, Iran...[ 1342 ]

Persepolis, Iran

Posted June 19, 2010

acquired January 5, 2004

In southwestern Iran, roughly 650 kilometers (400 miles) south of the capital city of Tehran, and roughly 70 kilometers (40 miles) northeast of Shiraz, a cultivated plain gives way to the Zagros Mountains. At the transition between flat land and rugged mountain, at the base of Kuh-i-Rahmat, or “Mountain of Mercy,” lies Persepolis. Founded around 518 B.C. by Darius the Great, the site served as the ceremonial capital of the Achaemenid (or Persian) Empire.

The Advanced Land Imager (ALI) on NASA’s Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite captured this natural-color image of Persepolis and the surrounding region on January 5, 2004. The boundary between agricultural land and mountain runs roughly northwest-southeast. West of the boundary, the land appears as a patchwork of brown fallow fields and green growing crops. East of the boundary, mountain peaks on Kuh-i-Rahmat cast dark shadows to the north.

A tree-lined road leads to the site of Persepolis from the southwest. Persepolis itself is roughly rectangular, and rivals the size of nearby modern settlements. The L-shaped, off-white structure at Persepolis is a modern covering, providing some protection from the elements to part of the ancient complex. Although the vast roofs that once covered the buildings are long gone, pillars, stairways, and sculptures remain.

For nearly two centuries—roughly 518 B.C. to 333 B.C.—Persepolis served as the capital for an empire that stretched from Greece to India. Sacked by Alexander the Great in 333 B.C., however, the site lay hidden under its own ruins until rediscovered in 1620 by García de Silva Figueroa, a Spanish ambassador to the court of Shah Abbas. Persepolis has become a popular destination for foreign tourists and Iranian citizens alike. 

The site became a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Site in 1979.

Barcelona train accident ..[ 1341 ]

Spanish train kills 12 on tracks near Barcelona

Page last updated at 13:02 GMT, Thursday, 24 June 2010 14:02 UK

Survivors comforted each other as emergency services came to help

A high-speed train passing through a Spanish railway station has hit a group of young people crossing the tracks, killing at least 12 people.

The train was travelling through Castelldefels Playa station near Barcelona when the incident occurred.
At least 14 other people were injured, three critically, officials said.
It is believed they were heading to the beach to celebrate a summer festival and were crossing the tracks rather than using a pedestrian underpass.
They had just arrived on a commuter train from Barcelona. The authorities have said the underpass was signposted and open. Some witnesses said it was crowded and taking a long time for people to get through.
'Brutal' One witness, Fernando Ortega, told Spanish media the platform they had arrived on was "very full" and a large group of people "decided to jump across the tracks and cross to the other side of the station" to avoid the crush.

---------------

The euphoria of getting off the train immediately became screams

 

Marcelo Cardona Eye-witness

"At that moment a train came from the other direction and ran everyone over."
Another witness, who was not named, said: "The door was closed and we could not get through, so we tried to go through the side of the train, and there was no light and nobody alerted us that the train was coming. We were more than 30 people."

Several people contacted the BBC News website to say that they had used the same station and it was common for people to cross the tracks.

Jordi Morell said: "The underpass is quite small and it has been the usual practice for crowded trains coming from Barcelona, to have at least a third of the passengers crossing the line.
"Even at my age (early 60s) I have got down from the platform and crossed the line rather than wait for the slow queue through the underpass."
'Blood everywhere' Many of the victims were heading to the beach for the annual San Juan festivities, which celebrates one of the year's shortest nights with bonfires, fireworks and dancing.
Marcelo Cardona, a Bolivian who was on the commuter train, said the youths had crossed "in a wave" but that he had held back and waited on the platform.
"The euphoria of getting off the train immediately became screams. There were people screaming, 'my daughter, my sister'," he told the Associated Press.
Mr Cardona said he saw "mutilated people, blood everywhere, blood on the platform".
The owner of a nearby supermarket described the impact between the train and the pedestrians as "brutal".
"The noise was like rocks being crushed," he told El Mundo.
Spain's interior minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba said: "We're shocked. It's horrible. The only thing we can do at the moment is send a message of solidarity to the families of those who died and wish that those who are injured will recover as soon as possible."
The accident happened at around 2330 local time (2130 GMT), the interior ministry of Catalonia said.
The ministry added that the rail line was closed and teams of police, medical staff, firefighters and Red Cross workers were at the scene.
No-one on the high-speed train, travelling between Alicante and Barcelona, was hurt.
Although the identities of the victims are not yet known, the president of the government of Catalonia said there were "many of South American origin".
The accident was Spain's worst rail accident since 2003, when 19 people were killed when two trains collided near the central town of Chinchilla.

Replacement is not a "Change:...[ 1340 ]

Replacing McChrystal Doesn’t Change Anything

Changing U.S. military leadership in Afghanistan papers over President Obama’s real problem: the counterinsurgency strategy isn’t working. What’s next for the mission.

Chris Hondros / Getty Images (left); Paula Bronstein / Getty Images

Two Sides of the Same COIN: Petraeus (left) and McChrystal both champion a counterinsurgency plan that may not work in Afghanistan.

By replacing a general who was universally criticized with a general who almost can’t be criticized, President Obama pulled a political masterstroke on Wednesday. But the abrupt dismissal of Gen. Stanley McChrystal for making inappropriate remarks and the simultaneous announcement that he would be succeeded by his superior, CentCom Commander David Petraeus, papered over Obama’s real problem: the counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy that McChrystal championed and Petraeus virtually invented may be fatally flawed, at least as it’s practiced in Afghanistan.

In his remarks in the Rose Garden on Wednesday, the president said that he didn’t decide to make the move “based on any difference in policy with General McChrystal,” and that the appointment of the widely admired Petraeus would “allow us to maintain the momentum and leadership we need to succeed.” Obama’s bigger problem right now is a rising tide of doubt, not only within McChrystal’s obviously stressed-out team but throughout the military and national-security apparatus, that there is any real momentum or that the policy in Afghanistan is working. COIN is based on the idea of winning hearts and minds in the local population and getting their help in rooting out the guerrillas or terrorists (in this case, the Taliban). 

But a number of well-informed critics say that in Afghanistan, several prerequisites for success are missing—in particular a central government with credibility, a large-enough force for the size of the country, and a local force (the Afghan Army and police) to hand things off to. “This briefs well in D.C. but you can’t operationalize it in Afghanistan,” says one critic of COIN, a military scholar who is engaged in the debate inside the Pentagon but would talk about it only on condition of anonymity so as to avoid the fate of McChrystal.

The outcome, these critics say, could be the worst of all possible worlds: no prospect of “winning” at all in an endlessly prolonged and bloody conflict in which we deceive ourselves for years that we are winning. Something like Vietnam, in other words. “It’s kind of sad and ironic that the fall of McChrystal will result in the reaffirmation of a highly problematic strategy,” says John Arquilla of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. As one general who served in Afghanistan told me back in 2006, for a NEWSWEEK piece called “The Rise of Jihadistan”: “This standoff could go on for 40 or 50 years. It’s not going to be a takeover by the Taliban as long as NATO is there. Instead this is going to be like the triborder region of South America, or like Kashmir—a long, drawn-out stalemate where everyone carves out spheres of influence.”

The comments of McChrystal and his staff in Rolling Stone magazine insulting Vice President Joseph Biden, envoy Richard Holbrooke, Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, and others made his position all but untenable, even if he were seen as winning in Afghanistan. But Obama’s decision to fire him was no doubt made easier by the fact that McChrystal hasn’t been delivering, by most accounts. The offensive in Marja quickly bogged down, and McChrystal had to postpone a follow-on offensive that he had, with some degree of hubris, advertised ahead of time. 

Now diplomatic sources suggest that if the administration does go ahead with a Kandahar operation, it will be almost entirely of the civilian nation-building variety, which is not likely to be effective in dislodging the Taliban entrenched there. Some NATO allies are also beginning to suggest that the administration needs to drop its opposition to negotiating with the Taliban, even if they don’t give up fighting as a precondition.

“We could sink in billions more dollars for another 10 to 20 years, and if we’re lucky, we’ll get Haiti,” says the expert engaged in the Pentagon debate, before adding that even in Iraq “people are starting to reassess the surge. Was the surge the real reason [for Iraq’s relative stabilization]? Maybe the Sunni-Shia war had just ended with a Shia victory. May be it was that Al Qaeda had overplayed its hand.”

Obama made a point of saying in the Rose Garden that “Americans don’t flinch in the face of difficult truths.” But he may be flinching now. If COIN is failing in Afghanistan, the only real alternative is bleak: large-scale withdrawal and therefore the failure to stabilize the one country that was most linked to 9/11 nearly a decade later; and along with that—irony of ironies—a return to Biden’s (Vice President “Bite Me” to McChrystal’s antic crew) focus on narrow counterterror ops.

This grim new reality in Afghanistan in turn has given new life to a kind of insurgency-against-counterinsurgency thinking inside the military. Critics say COIN has gone too far in supplanting traditional war fighting in U.S. military doctrine (this is something of an irony since it wasn’t that long ago that the COIN types were saying that they were being ignored). These dissidents lament the “atrophying” of traditional fighting skills, and they say the COIN virus has infected the Israeli military as well because it has done little but that in years of conducting ops against the Palestinians. 

The critics are targeting Petraeus and leading COIN thinkers like John Nagl, the president of the Center for a New American Security, which the journalist Tara McKelvey has called “counterinsurgency central in Washington.” One of these critics, Gian Gentile, was virtually ostracized inside the military after he published a paper in January 2009 in Joint Forces Quarterly criticizing the growing preeminence of COIN.

“Fighting as a core competency has been eclipsed in importance and primacy by the function of nationbuilding,” Gentile wrote. “Not only has the [military] Service’s intellectual climate become rigid, but also its operational capability to conduct high-intensity fighting operations other than counterinsurgency has atrophied over the past 6 years.”

Indeed, COIN thinking has become almost a cult, stunting fresh ways of thinking, some experts say. As McKelvey wrote in one early critique in 2008, counterinsurgency may have been too quickly anointed as a panacea, the “thinking man’s warfare.” “Counterinsurgency has a special allure for liberal writers and thinkers because it offers a holistic approach, emphasizing efforts to win the hearts and minds of local people, and attempts to transform formerly autocratic governments into ones that respect human rights, women’s education, and the rule of law,” she said. But “skeptics say that despite a sophisticated veneer, counterinsurgency is warfare of the nastiest, most brutal kind, and it lasts for years and years.”

Perhaps there is a silver lining. McChrystal’s very public ouster and Obama’s dramatic decision to hand things over to Petraeus, who enjoys near-hero status among both political parties in Washington for his performance in Iraq, could well move this vital debate forward. Petraeus, after all, is the general who oversaw the writing of the military’s counterinsurgency manual, so he is perhaps the best man to assess whether it needs revision in the Afghanistan theater.