A Response to Douglas J. Feith\u27s Law In The Service of Terror - The Strange Case of the Additional Protocol

In the article mentioned in the title, Douglas J. Feith, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Negotiation, characterizes the 1977 Protocol I Additional to the 1949 Geneva Conventions as a pro-terrorist treaty masquerading as humanitarian law

A Response to Telford Taylor\u27s Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy

Professor Telford Taylor, who is best remembered as Justice Robert H. Jackson\u27s successor as Chief of Counsel at Nuremberg after the War Crimes trial of the major war criminals, became an instant giant of the new industry by suggesting that if one were to apply to Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, Walt Rostow and General William Westmoreland the same standards that were applied in the trial of General Tomoyuki Yamashita there would be a very strong possibility that they would come to the same end as he did. \u27 This suggestion by the person described on the dust jacket as U.S. Chief Counsel at Nuremberg inevitably elevates Professor Taylor to the status of a first magnitude star among the scapegoat makers. Regretably, Professor Taylor produced a work replete with demonstrable errors of law and contradictions. He thereby forfeits the opportunity to assume a place among the very few who are qualified by experience and academic standing to produce trustworthy evidence of what international law really is. There are, of course, too many who, without experience in the field, write at length about what it ought to be and some who affirm that it is what it is not

An analysis of protests carried out by ships (PCS) : should PCS be regulated by a new IMO instrument?

This paper attempts to analyze protests1 carried out by ships as acts of objection in the exercise of the human right to protest. The purpose of the analysis is to find out whether protests carried out by ships have recognition and legitimation in the maritime industry. Also, considering the one proposal to regulate this maritime activity at the International Maritime Organization (IMO), the analysis attempts to find out whether a new maritime instrument such a Code of Conduct is necessary. This academic exercise takes the reader from the analysis of the reasons why people protest and the right to protest as a human right and its recognition by the international law in general and the IMO in particular to the analysis of the reasons why ships are used to protest, the actors in protests and the most important protest groups currently owning and operating protest ships. In addition, a few cases of protest carried out by ships in maritime zones defined according to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), in which the law was breached are analyzed, with the objective to find out what the law of application was and how it was enforced. The conclusions drawn are based on the analytical evidence that protests carried out by ships are legitimate and recognized internationally but hardly accepted by the maritime community due to a distorted perception of the right to protest and due to the weak implementation and enforcement of maritime law in particular on the high seas. Therefore, a Code of Conduct telling protesters not to break the law seems redundant. However, the analysis concludes that risk assessments should be compulsory, not only for protest ships but also for protest targets when protest activities are imminent, especially for direct actions protests; that protest target should learn how to deal with protests through proper guidelines and, finally, that maritime safety and pollution prevention during protests carried out by ships could be improved making compulsory for non-commercial vessels the application of the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS), 1974 as amended, the International Convention on Standards of Training, Certification and Watchkeeping for Seafarers (STCW) as amended, the Maritime Labour Convention (MLC), 2006 and the International Convention on Load Lines (LL), 1966. Further research might explore how to develop guidelines for risk assessments to deal with protests carried out by ships and address the security issue during protests on the high seas

Use of remotely-derived bathymetry for modelling biomass in marine environments

The paper presents results on the influence of geometric attributes of satellite-derived raster bathymetric data, namely the General Bathymetric Charts of the Oceans, on spatial statistical modelling of marine biomass. In the initial experiment, both the resolution and projection of the raster dataset are taken into account. It was found that, independently of the equal-area projection chosen for the analysis, the calculated areas are very similar, and the differences between them are insignificant. Likewise, any variation in the raster resolution did not change the computed area. Although the differences were shown to be insignificant, for the subsequent analysis we selected the cylindrical equal area projection, as it implies rectangular spatial extent, along with the automatically derived resolution. Then, in the second experiment, we focused on demersal fish biomass data acquired from trawl samples taken from the western parts of ICES Sub-area VII, near the sea floor. The aforementioned investigation into processing bathymetric data allowed us to build various statistical models that account for a relationship between biomass, sea floor topography and geographic location. We fitted a set of generalised additive models and generalised additive mixed models to combinations of trawl data of the roundnose grenadier (Coryphaenoides rupestris) and bathymetry. Using standard statistical techniques—such as analysis of variance, Akaike information criterion, root mean squared error, mean absolute error and cross-validation—we compared the performance of the models and found that depth and latitude may serve as statistically significant explanatory variables for biomass of roundnose grenadier in the study area. However, the results should be interpreted with caution as sampling locations may have an impact on the biomass–depth relationship

Marxism in the built environment in Poland: its contribution and legacy

Due to its tangible character, the built environment constitutes a lasting evidence of past and present socio-economic phenomena. In Poland, these phenomena were developing for several decades according to the principles of Marxist ideology and its consequences. As a result, the built environment in Polish urban and rural areas was shaped by Marxist concepts and the resulting realities of centrally planned economy. Multi-family housing projects, vast and neglected post-industrial areas and monotonous, styleless buildings in rural areas are the main remnants of the period of what was known as "real socialism". The effects of Marxism on the built environment in Poland are mostly negative in economic and social terms, and the efforts to eliminate these effects often fail to improve the situation. Therefore, the legacy of Marxism in Polish space will still be visible for many years to come .