Cheap and green: Pyongyang upgrades its mass transit system

February 19, 2019

PYONGYANG, North Korea (AP) — Pyongyang is upgrading its overcrowded mass transit system with brand new subway cars, trams and buses in a campaign meant to show leader Kim Jong Un is raising the country's standard of living.

The long-overdue improvements, while still modest, are a welcome change for the North Korean capital's roughly 3 million residents, who have few options to get to work or school each day. First came new, high-tech subway cars and electric trolleybuses — each announced by the media with photos of Kim personally conducting the final inspection tours. Now, officials say three new electric trams are running daily routes across Pyongyang.

Transport officials say the capacity of the new trams is about 300, sitting and standing. Passengers must buy tickets in shops beforehand and put them in a ticket box when they get on. The flat fare is a dirt cheap 5 won (US$ .0006) for any tram, trolleybus, subway or regular bus ride on the public transport system. The Pyongyang Metro has a ticket-card system and the Public Transportation Bureau is considering introducing something similar on the roads as well.

Privately owned cars are scarce in Pyongyang. Taxis are increasingly common but costly for most people. Factory or official-use vehicles are an alternative, when available, as are bicycles. Motorized bikes imported from China are popular, while scooters and motorcycles are rare.

The subway, with elaborate stations inspired by those in Soviet Moscow and dug deep enough to survive a nuclear attack, runs at three- to five-minute intervals, depending on the hour. Officials say it transports about 400,000 passengers on weekdays. But its two lines, with 17 stations, operate only on the western side of the Taedong River, which runs through the center of the city.

"The subway is very important transportation for our people," subway guide Kim Yong Ryon said in a recent interview with The AP. "There are plans to build train stations on the east side of the river, but nothing has started yet."

The lack of passenger cars on Pyongyang's roads has benefits. Traffic jams are uncommon and, compared to Beijing or Seoul, the city has refreshingly clean, crisp air. Electric trams, which run on rails, and electric trolleybuses, which have wheels, are relatively green transport options.

But mass transit in Pyongyang can be slow and uncomfortable. The tram system, in particular, is among the most crowded in the world. Swarms of commuters cramming into trams are a common sight during the morning rush hour, which is from about 6:00 to 8:30. Getting across town can take about an hour.

Pyongyang's tram system has four lines. In typical North Korean fashion, one is devoted to taking passengers to and from the mausoleum where the bodies of national founder Kim Il Sung and his son, Kim Jong Il, lie in state.

The city's red-and-white trams look familiar to many eastern Europeans. In 2008, the North bought 20 used trams made by the Tatra company, which produced hundreds of them when Prague was still the capital of socialist Czechoslovakia.

North Korea squeezes every last inch out of its fleet. Red stars are awarded for every 50,000 kilometers (31,000 miles) driven without an accident, and it's not unusual to see trams with long lines of red stars stenciled across their sides. One seen in operation in Pyongyang last month had 12 — that's 600,000 kilometers (372,800 miles), or the equivalent of about 15 trips around the Earth's circumference.

Impossible as that might seem, the math works. Ri Jae Hong, a representative of the Capital Public Transportation Bureau, told an AP television news crew the main tram route, from Pyongyang Station in the central part of town to the Mangyongdae district, is 21 kilometers from end to end. He said a tram might do the full route there and back on average six times a day.

By that reckoning, it would take just over 198 days of actual driving to win that first red star.

Israel hosts east European leaders after summit scrapped

February 19, 2019

JERUSALEM (AP) — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hosted his Czech, Slovakian and Hungarian counterparts Tuesday in a series of sit-downs that replaced a high-profile summit in Jerusalem that was cancelled over a rift with Poland.

The first gathering outside Europe of the Visegrad group was supposed to be a crowning achievement for Netanyahu in his outreach to central and eastern Europe to counter the traditional criticism Israel faces in international forums. But it dramatically unraveled over a bitter exchange between Poland and Israel over how to characterize Polish behavior toward its Jewish community during and after World War II.

In place of the summit, Netanyahu held back-to-back meetings with Slovakian Prime Minister Peter Pellegrini, Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban before hosting all three for lunch at his official residence.

But hovering over it all was the absence of Poland, the fourth member of the group. The diplomatic crisis between the typically close allies began last week when Netanyahu, pressed by reporters accompanying his visit to Warsaw, concurred that "Poles cooperated with the Nazis." The comments infuriated his Polish hosts, who reject suggestions that their country collaborated with the Nazis and have passed a law that prohibits linking the Polish nation to the genocide of 6 million Jews.

Poland's Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki announced Sunday that he was pulling out of the summit and that his foreign minister would go instead. He then canceled Polish participation altogether the following day after Israel's acting foreign minister, Israel Katz, referenced a quote from the late former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, who said that Poles "suckled anti-Semitism with their mothers' milk."

Morawiecki denounced the comments as "racist" and "absolutely unacceptable." Poland's nationalist government has been quick to denounce anyone accused of linking the country to the well-documented history of anti-Semitism and violence against Jews that took place there during and after the wartime German occupation. Israeli officials see their controversial legislation as an attempt to suppress such discussion, and Netanyahu has faced criticism from historians in Israel for not opposing the law, which critics say distorts history.

It's a sensitive subject for Poland, which for centuries was a vibrant center of Jewish life. Poland was the first country occupied by Adolf Hitler's regime and never had a collaborationist government. Members of Poland's resistance and government-in-exile struggled to warn the world about the mass killing of Jews, and thousands of Poles risked their lives to help Jews.

However, Holocaust researchers have also collected ample evidence of Polish villagers who murdered Jews fleeing the Nazis, or Polish blackmailers who preyed on the Jews for financial gain and stole their property.

Netanyahu initially sought to clarify that he "spoke of Poles and not the Polish people or the country of Poland." But then his acting foreign minister, on his first day on the job, took to the airwaves and ratcheted up the rhetoric.

Netanyahu is seeking re-election in April, and it is possible both he and Katz are trying to gain favor with their nationalist base by standing up to Poland. Likewise, Poland's leaders are preparing for both national and European elections this year. The saga has unleashed a new wave of anti-Semitic incidents in Poland, where the local Jewish leadership has called on all sides to tone it down.

Israel-Central Europe summit canceled after Polish pullout

February 18, 2019

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Poland on Monday pulled out of a summit in Jerusalem, triggering the collapse of the entire meeting, after the acting Israeli foreign minister said that Poles "collaborated with the Nazis" and "sucked anti-Semitism with their mothers' milk.

The developments mark a new low in a bitter conflict between Poland and Israel over how to remember and characterize Polish actions toward Jews during the German occupation of Poland in World War II. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been due to meet with the leaders of four Central European nations known as the Visegrad group. With the Hungarian and Slovak prime ministers already in Israel and the Czech leader still planning to go, bilateral meetings were to go ahead instead.

Netanyahu had touted the meeting as an important step in his outreach to the countries of Central Europe, which have pro-Israeli governments that he is counting on to counter the criticism Israel typically faces in international forums.

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki had already announced Sunday that he was pulling out of the meeting after a comment by Netanyahu last week about Polish cooperation with Nazis. Morawiecki cancelled Polish participation altogether after the comments made by Israel's acting foreign minister, Israel Katz, which Morawiecki denounced as "racist" and "absolutely unacceptable."

Poland's Foreign Ministry also summoned the Israeli ambassador, Anna Azari, to demand a second set of clarifications in recent days. Katz made his remarks Sunday in an interview on Reshet 13 TV. "Poles collaborated with the Nazis, definitely. Collaborated with the Nazis. As (former Israeli Prime Minister) Yitzhak Shamir said — his father was murdered by Poles — he said that from his point of view they sucked anti-Semitism with their mothers' milk. You can't sugarcoat this history," he said.

Jewish leaders in Poland issued a statement saying that Shamir's words were "unjust already when they were first said, in 1989, when Polish-Israeli relations were just beginning to be rebuilt, after the long night of communism."

"They are even more unjust today, 30 years later, when so much has been done on both sides for a mutual understanding of our very difficult, but shared history," the statement added. Poland was the first country invaded and occupied by Adolf Hitler's regime and never had a collaborationist government. Members of Poland's resistance and government-in-exile struggled to warn the world about the mass killing of Jews, and thousands of Poles risked their lives to help Jews.

However, Holocaust researchers have collected ample evidence of Polish villagers who murdered Jews fleeing the Nazis, or Polish blackmailers who preyed on helpless Jews for financial gain. The head of the American Jewish Committee, David Harris, noted that that Poland and Israel, while otherwise friends, have clashed over the "varying assessments of the magnitude of anti-Semitism in Poland, especially before and during World War II, and often competing historical narratives."

He issued a statement acknowledging that "there are certainly pockets of anti-Semitism in Poland" but largely stressing the fact that Poles suffered and put up massive resistance to the Nazis during the war, also helping Jews. He also noted the Polish contributions in recent years to the renewal of Jewish life.

"As friends, we need to be able to manage our inevitable differences. That begins with choosing our words carefully — knowing when to speak, how to speak, and where to speak," Harris said. "It means not allowing individual incidents to escalate out of control. And it means not ceding all the progress achieved to date to those who might wish to destroy it."

Heller reported from Jerusalem. Karel Janicek in Prague contributed.

Israeli leaders' Nazi remarks scuttle summit with Europeans

February 18, 2019

JERUSALEM (AP) — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's off-hand comment in Warsaw about Poland and the Holocaust set in motion a diplomatic crisis that on Monday scuttled this week's summit of central European leaders in Israel.

Poland's abrupt decision to cancel its participation in the planned Visegrad conference in protest blew up the gathering, which Netanyahu has touted as a major milestone in his outreach to emerging democracies in eastern Europe and his broader goal of countering the criticism Israel typically faces in international forums.

The crisis was sparked last week when Netanyahu told reporters that "Poles cooperated with the Nazis." The seemingly innocuous comment infuriated his Polish hosts, who reject suggestions that their country collaborated with Hitler.

Poland's prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, announced Sunday that he would be skipping this week's Visegrad summit, a gathering with fellow prime ministers from Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Polish Foreign Minister Jacek Czaputowicz was supposed to replace him at Tuesday's meeting in Jerusalem, the first time the gathering is being held outside of Europe.

But after Israel's acting foreign minister reiterated the collaboration claims, Morawiecki cancelled Poland's participation altogether, denouncing the comments as "racist." As a result, the summit was called off and Netanyahu was planning to meet the other leaders independently.

Lost in the diplomatic uproar was that Netanyahu was actually defending his close alliance with Poland and other eastern European leaders when he made his comments. Historians and domestic critics have accused Netanyahu of cozying up too tightly to nationalistic leaders who have promoted a distorted image of the Holocaust and turning a blind eye to anti-Semitism associated with them.

Morawiecki himself last year equated Polish perpetrators of the Holocaust to supposed "Jewish perpetrators." Netanyahu has recently hosted leaders of Lithuania, Ukraine and other countries who have engaged in selective World War II-era commemorations that play down their countries' culpability while making heroes out of anti-Soviet nationalists involved in the mass killing of Jews.

In response to a question from The Associated Press during his two-day visit to Warsaw, Netanyahu said he raises the issue of historical revisionism with the various leaders. He rejected the notion he was a partner to diminishing anyone's complicity in the genocide of Jews in World War II.

"I know the history. I don't starch it and I don't whitewash it. In Lithuania, in particular, there were some horrible things. No one is concealing that," said Netanyahu, the son of a historian. "This whole idea that we diminish history — we don't distort, and we don't hide, and no one has any interest in that, on the contrary."

In the same briefing with his travelling press corps, Netanyahu tried to deflect prominent criticism by Israeli historians of the deal he struck with Polish leaders over their country's controversial Holocaust speech law, which criminalized blaming the Polish nation for crimes committed against Jews during World War II.

Israeli officials saw it as an attempt by Poland to suppress discussion of the well-documented killing of Jews by Poles during and after the wartime German occupation. "Poles collaborated with the Nazis and I don't know anyone who was ever sued for such a statement," Netanyahu told the reporters.

However, some media outlets reported him saying "THE Poles," which set off an angry rebuke in Warsaw, including a summoning of the Israeli ambassador for clarifications. Netanyahu's office said he was misquoted and blamed the misunderstanding on an editing error in an Israeli newspaper.

Netanyahu's office then reiterated that he "spoke of Poles and not the Polish people or the country of Poland." That only got him in hotter water at home for seemingly catering to the Polish obsession over his wording.

"The prime minister of the Jewish state is selling out the memory of the Holocaust for a dubious alliance with an anti-Semitic leader," said Tamar Zandberg, leader of the opposition Meretz party. Nonetheless, the Polish government said it considered Netanyahu's response insufficient and threatened to withdraw from the conference.

With emotions running high in Poland, Israel's new acting foreign minister, Israel Katz, went on TV Sunday to reiterate that "Poles collaborated with the Nazis" — even mentioning Poles who "sucked anti-Semitism with their mothers' milk."

That prompted Poland to withdraw completely. Following that announcement, Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis said the so-called V4 summit was cancelled altogether and bilateral meetings would be held instead.

Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Emmanuel Nahshon confirmed the summit was off, saying all four prime ministers had to be present for it to take place. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who is already in Israel, is another leader who has trod into the sensitive terrain of World War II conduct.

Orban has lavished praise on Miklos Horthy, Hungary's World War II-era ruler, who introduced anti-Semitic laws and collaborated with the Nazis. Orban also has backed a state-funded museum that experts say plays down the role of Hungarian collaborators and also used anti-Semitic imagery in a campaign against the liberal American-Hungarian billionaire George Soros.

When pressed by the AP, though, Netanyahu came to his ally's defense. "His response was the most direct, saying 'we are not willing to accept this,'" Netanyahu responded. "He (Orban) attacked Horthy at some point. They are going the furthest here."

Netanyahu also addressed his warm welcome in January to President Petro Poroshenko of Ukraine, whose parliament had just designated the birthday of Ukrainian wartime collaborator Stepan Bandera a national holiday.

Bandera's forces fought alongside the Nazis and were implicated in the murder of thousands of Jews. The same day Poroshenko was visiting Israel, another memorial was being erected in Kiev for Symon Petliura, whose troops are linked to pogroms that killed as many as 50,000 Jews after World War I.

Netanyahu said he was not aware of that specifically but that he had some discussions with Poroshenko on the larger issue. "I spoke to him too. I speak to them all. It's not that we can't raise the issue. We raise it freely," he insisted.

Still, he then quickly shifted attention toward the contemporary anti-Semitism from the "anarchist left" and Muslim communities. "I think the mass of anti-Semitism today in Europe is what is happening in western Europe," Netanyahu said. "What is happening in Britain is astounding. This is the new phenomenon. There is the anti-Semitism of the right that hasn't changed. That existed and still exists."

Northwestern study of analog crews in isolation reveals weak spots for Mission to Mars

Evanston IL (SPX)
Feb 19, 2019

Northwestern University researchers are developing a predictive model to help NASA anticipate conflicts and communication breakdowns among crew members and head off problems that could make or break the Mission to Mars.

NASA has formalized plans to send a crewed spacecraft to Mars, a journey that could involve 250 million miles of travel. Among the worldwide teams of researchers toiling over the journey's inherent physiological, engineering and social obstacles, Northwestern professors Noshir Contractor and Leslie DeChurch, and their collaborators, are charting a new course with a series of projects focused on the insights from the science of teams and networks.

In a multiphase study conducted in two analog environments - HERA in the Johnson Space Center in Houston and the SIRIUS mission in the NEK analog located in the Institute for Bio-Medical Problems (IBMP) in Russia - scientists are studying the behavior of analog astronaut crews on mock missions, complete with isolation, sleep deprivation, specially designed tasks and mission control, which mimics real space travel with delayed communication.

The goal is threefold: to establish the effects of isolation and confinement on team functioning, to identify methods to improve team performance, and to develop a predictive model that NASA could use to assemble the ideal team and identify potential issues with already composed teams before and during the mission.

Contractor and DeChurch discussed their latest findings and next steps at a 10 a.m. EST, Feb. 17 press briefing at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting in Washington, D.C.

"It's like astronaut Scott Kelly says, 'Teamwork makes the dream work,'" said Contractor, the Jane S. and William J. White Professor of Behavioral Sciences in the McCormick School of Engineering, School of Communication and the Kellogg School of Management.

Even for an astronaut, the psychological demands of this Mars journey will be exceptional. The spacecraft will be small, roughly the size of a studio apartment, and the round-trip journey will take almost three years.

"Astronauts are super humans. They are people who are incredibly physically fit and extremely smart," said DeChurch, a professor of communication and psychology at Northwestern. "We're taking an already state-of-the-art crew selection system and making it even better by finding the values, traits and other characteristics that will allow NASA to compose crews that will get along."

Communication delays with worldwide mission controls will exceed the 20-minute mark. In that sense, the Mars mission will be like no mission that has come before.

"A lot of the past efforts to try to create models to simulate the future have run into criticism because people have said it's not really grounded in good data," Contractor said. "What we have here is unprecedented good data. We aren't talking about intuition and expert views, this model is based on real data."

The Northwestern researchers have been culling data from the Human Experimentation Research Analog (HERA) at Houston's Johnson Space Center. HERA's capsule simulator houses astronauts for up to 45 days; a mock mission control outside the capsule augments the realism with sound effects, vibrations and communication delays.

Those on the inside undergo sleep deprivation and try to perform tasks. The researchers collect moment-to-moment metrics about individual performance, moods, psychosocial adaptation and more.

The teams DeChurch and Contractor have studied experienced diminished abilities to think creatively and to solve problems, according to results from the first eight analog space crews, and are able to successfully complete tasks between 20 and 60 percent of the time.

"Creative thinking and problem solving are the very things that are really going to matter on a Mars mission," DeChurch said. "We need the crew to be getting the right answer 100 percent of the time."

The next phase of the research, just begun on Friday, Feb. 15, involves using the model to predict breakdowns and problems a new HERA crew will experience and making changes to "who works with whom, on what, when," Contractor said. "We are going to run our model to see how we can nudge the team into a more positive path and make them more successful."

The researchers are also expanding the experiment to the SIRIUS analog in Moscow, where, beginning on March 15, four Russians and two Americans, will undertake a 120-day fictional mission around the moon, and including a moon landing operation.

Contractor and DeChurch are in the midst of four NASA-funded projects exploring team dynamics and compatibility in preparation for the Mars journey.

Their NASA studies address different aspects of the crew's challenges:

+ The likelihood that the crew and its support teams on Earth will have good chemistry and coping mechanisms; how to predict possible crew-compatibility outcomes

+ Work design; structuring the workflow so that astronauts can better manage transitions from solo to team tasks

+ Identifying and building shared mental models, whereby a team of varied specialists can find enough common ground to effectively accomplish their tasks but not so much that they engage in "group think" or form alliances.

Contractor, a leading expert in network analysis and computational social science, leads Northwestern's Science of Networks in Communities (SONIC) research group. DeChurch, a leading expert in teamwork and leadership who leads Northwestern's Advancing Teams, Leaders, and Systems (ATLAS) lab, focuses on team performance; psychology, social interactions, and how multiteam systems best function.

"Our complementary strengths have been a winning combination for tackling the big interdisciplinary questions," said DeChurch.

Source: Mars Daily.
Link: http://www.marsdaily.com/reports/Northwestern_study_of_analog_crews_in_isolation_reveals_weak_spots_for_Mission_to_Mars_999.html.

Israel's first lunar mission to launch this week

Tel Aviv (AFP)
Feb 18, 2019

Israel is to launch its first moon mission this week, sending an unmanned spacecraft to collect data to be shared with NASA, organizers said Monday.

The 585-kilogram (1,290-pound) Beresheet (Genesis) spacecraft is to lift off atop a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida at around 0145 GMT on Friday.

Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) and technology NGO SpaceIL announced the date at a press conference.

Mission control will be in Yehud, near Tel Aviv.

"We are entering history and are proud to belong to a group that has dreamed and fulfilled the vision shared by many countries in the world but that so far only three of them have accomplished," SpaceIL president Morris Kahn said.

So far only Russia, the United States and China have sent spacecraft to the moon.

The Chinese craft made the first ever soft landing on the far side of the moon on January 3.

NASA, which has installed equipment on Genesis to upload its signals from the moon, said last week it aims to land an unmanned vehicle there by 2024, and it is inviting private sector bids to build the US probe.

NASA plans to build a small space station, dubbed Gateway, in the moon's orbit by 2026.

It will serve as a way-station for trips to and from the lunar surface, but will not be permanently crewed.

Genesis will make its 6.5-million kilometer (one million-mile) journey at a maximum speed of 10 kilometers per second (36,000 kilometers per hour), according to an IAI statement.

It will carry a "time capsule" loaded with digital files containing a Bible, children's drawings, Israeli songs, memories of a Holocaust survivor and the blue-and-white Israeli flag.

The $100-million project will measure the lunar magnetic field to help understanding of the moon's formation.

"This is the lowest-budget spacecraft to ever undertake such a mission. The superpowers who managed to land a spacecraft on the moon have spent hundreds of millions of dollars in government funding," the IAI statement said.

"Beresheet is the first spacecraft to land on the moon as a result of a private initiative, rather than a government."

The project started as a potential entry for the Google Lunar XPrize, which in 2010 offered a $30-million reward to encourage scientists and entrepreneurs to offer relatively inexpensive lunar missions.

The contest closed without a winner in March 2018 but SpaceIL decided to keep working on the challenge.

Source: Moon Daily.
Link: http://www.moondaily.com/reports/Israels_first_lunar_mission_to_launch_this_week_999.html.

Offensive War in Space

Bethesda, MD (SPX)
Feb 15, 2019

A new arms race is unfolding among spacefaring nations. Space experts have been telling us about contested space for the last several years. Today, there are about 1,300 active satellites in a crowded nest of Earth orbits. They provide worldwide communications, GPS navigation, weather forecasting and planetary surveillance.

Military organizations rely on many of these satellites in support of modern warfare. The three main contenders are the U.S., China and Russia. The ongoing power struggle may ignite a conflict that could cripple the entire space-based infrastructure while reducing the capabilities of warfighter organizations.

There are several ways to disable, destroy or reduce effectiveness of satellites. One obvious way is to attack them with anti-satellite devices. Another is to simply approach a satellite and spray paint over its optics.

Other ways include manually snapping off communications antennas and destabilizing orbits. Lasers can temporarily or permanently disable satellite components. Ground station interference using radio or microwave emissions can jam or hijack transmissions to or from ground controllers.

The concept of war in space is not new. The prospect of Soviet nuclear weapons launched from orbit in the 1950s motivated the U.S. to began testing anti-satellite weaponry. Fortunately, orbiting weapons of mass destruction were banned through the UN Outer Space Treaty of 1967.

Consequently, space-based surveillance became a major component of the Cold War that served as an early-warning system for the deployment or launch of ground-based nuclear weapons.

Throughout most of the Cold War, the U.S.S.R. developed and tested "space mines" which could self-detonate in order to destroy U.S. spy satellites.

The militarization of space issue peaked again when President Reagan initiated the Strategic Defense Initiative to develop orbital countermeasures against Soviet ballistic missiles. In 1985, the USAF staged a demonstration when an F-15 fighter jet launched a missile that took out a failing U.S. satellite in low orbit.

Today, the situation is much more complicated. Low- and high-Earth orbits have become hotbeds of scientific and commercial activity, filled with hundreds of satellites from about 60 different nations. Despite their largely peaceful purposes each satellite is at risk because a few military space powers insist on continued development and test of new space weapons.

Source: Space War.
Link: http://www.spacewar.com/reports/Offensive_War_in_Space_999.html.