Latin America: Terrorism Issues

[Excerpt] For most countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, threats emanating from terrorism are low. Terrorism in the region is largely perpetrated by groups in Colombia and by the remnants of radical leftist Andean groups. According to the Department of State, most governments in the region have good records of cooperation with the United States on anti-terrorism issues, although progress in the region on improving counterterrorism capabilities is limited by several factors, including corruption, weak governmental institutions, weak or non-existent legislation, and reluctance to allocate sufficient resources. Both Cuba and Venezuela are on the State Department’s list of countries determined to be not cooperating fully with U.S. antiterrorism efforts, and Cuba has remained on the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism since 1982. U.S. officials and some Members of Congress have expressed concern over the past several years about Venezuela’s relations with Iran, with concerns centered on efforts by Iran to circumvent U.N. and U.S. sanctions and on Iran’s ties to Hezbollah, alleged to be linked to two bombings in Argentina in the 1990s. There is disagreement, however, over the extent and significance of Iran’s activities in Latin America. The State Department maintains that there are no known operational cells of either Al Qaeda or Hezbollah-related groups in the hemisphere, although it notes that ideological sympathizers continue to provide financial and moral support to these and other terrorist groups in the Middle East and South Asia

Organizational Learning from Extreme Performance Experience: The Impact of Success and Recovery Experience

This paper argues that two different types of a firm’s own extreme performance experiences—success and recovery—and their interactions can generate survival-enhancing learning. Although these types of experience often represent valuable sources of useful learning, several important learning challenges arise when a firm has extremely limited prior experience of the same type. Thus, we theorize that a certain threshold of a given type of experience is required before each type of experience becomes valuable, with low levels of experience harming the organization. Furthermore, we propose that success and recovery experience will interact to enhance each other’s value. These conditions can help overcome learning challenges such as superstitious learning or learning from small samples. We investigate our ideas using a sample of the U.S. commercial banks founded between 1984 and 1998. Our results indicate that both success and recovery experience of a firm generate survival-enhancing learning, but only after a certain level of experience is reached. Furthermore, success and recovery experience enhance each other’s learning value, consistent with the theories that emphasize the importance of richer and contrasting experience in providing useful knowledge. Our framework advances organizational learning theory by presenting a contingent model of the impact of success and recovery experience and their interaction

The ion-acoustic instability of the inductively coupled plasma driven by the ponderomotive electron current formed in the skin layer

The stability theory of the inductively coupled plasma (ICP) is developed for the case when the electron quiver velocity in RF wave is of the order of or is larger than the electron thermal velocity. The theory predicts the existence the instabilities of the ICP which are driven by the current formed in the skin layer by the accelerated electrons, which move relative ions under the action of the ponderomotive force.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2001.0082

The nonmodal kinetic theory for the electrostatic instabilities of a plasma with a sheared Hall current

The kinetic theory for the instabilities driven by the Hall current with a sheared current velocity, which has the method of the shearing modes or the so-called non-modal approach as its foundation, is developed. The developed theory predicts that in the Hall plasma with the inhomogeneous electric field, the separate spatial Fourier mode of the perturbations is determined in the frame convected with one of the plasma components. Because of the different shearing of the ion and electron flows in the Hall plasma, this mode is perceived by the second component as the Doppler-shifted continuously sheared mode with time-dependent wave numbers. Due to this effect, the interaction of the plasma components forms the nonmodal time-dependent process, which should be investigated as the initial value problem. The developed approach is applied to the solutions of the linear initial value problems for the hydrodynamic modified two-stream instability and the kinetic ion-sound instability of the plasma with a sheared Hall current with a uniform velocity shear. These solutions reveal that the uniform part of the current velocity is responsible for the modal evolution of the instability, whereas the current velocity shear is the source of the development of the nonmodal instability with exponent growing with time as $\sim\left(t-t_0\right)^3$.Comment: 20 page

Charge-transfer exciton in La2CuO4 probed with resonant inelastic x-ray scattering

We report a high-resolution resonant inelastic x-ray scattering study of La2CuO4. A number of spectral features are identified that were not clearly visible in earlier lower-resolution data. The momentum dependence of the spectral weight and the dispersion of the lowest energy excitation across the insulating gap have been measured in detail. The temperature dependence of the spectral features was also examined. The observed charge transfer edge shift, along with the low dispersion of the first charge transfer excitation are attributed to the lattice motion being coupled to the electronic system. In addition, we observe a dispersionless feature at 1.8 eV, which is associated with a d-d crystal field excitation.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

Study of Dispersion Hazard Potential of the LPG Stations Around the RDE Site in Rainy and Dry Season

STUDY OF DISPERSION HAZARD POTENTIAL OF THE LPG STATIONS AROUND THE RDE SITE IN RAINY AND DRY SEASON. There are two LPG station (SPPBE) which are the depot of filling, storage and distribution of Liquid Petroleum Gas (LPG) namely PT. BM and PT. ISR which the distance each are 2,995 and 4,141 km from Experimental Power Reactor (RDE) site with capacity 15 and 30 tons. LPG station is a stationary source, which is one aspect of the external human induced events that need to be analyzed in the preparation of site evaluation reports to obtain site permits. Hazard potential that may occur from the depot LPG are fire, explosion and dispersion of hazardous and toxic gas. The release of LPG due to valve leakage which is then dispersed at a certain dose has potentially harmful to health, even death to the population around the RDE site. The purpose of the study was to know the effect of seasons (rainy and dry) to the potential hazard of LPG dispersion from LPG truck tank valve to the around RDE site. The method of study are collection the atmospheric data such as wind direction and speed, temperature and humidity, collection the station LPG characteristic, such as mass of gas, diameter and length of tank, and valve diameter, etc. The atmospheric data was obtained from Pondok Betung Climatology Station, in dry, transition, and rainy seasons, furthermore data was analyzed using ALOHA software version 5.4.5. The results show dispersion from LPG release due to valve leakage from PT. BM and PT. ISR around the RDE site, in the dry season (April), the transition (January and July) as well as the rainy season (October) does not hazardous to the RDE site. Maximum threat zone occurs in dry season at April (wind speed 1.54 m/s), which reaches radius 179 m with airborne LPG concentration 5500 ppm, radius 111 m with concentration 17000 ppm and radius 71 m with concentration 53000 ppm

Magnetic field dependence of charge stripe order in La2-xBaxCuO4 (x~1/8)

We have carried out a detailed investigation of the magnetic field dependence of charge ordering in La2-xBaxCuO4 (x~1/8) utilizing high-resolution x-ray scattering. We find that the charge order correlation length increases as the magnetic field greater than ~5T is applied in the superconducting phase (T=2K). The observed unusual field dependence of the charge order correlation length suggests that the static charge stripe order competes with the superconducting ground state in this sample.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure