Author: Phillip Colon

SANDPOINT — The Sandpoint Sailing Association will host the film “The Race to Alaska” at the Panida Theater, Saturday. Dogsmile Adventures, a therapeutic sailing nonprofit based on Lake Pend Oreille, is the guest of honor, as its team prepares for their own attempt at racing from Port Townsend, Wash., to Ketchikan, Alaska, in June with nothing but wind and human power. The Sandpoint Sailing Association welcomes everyone to attend and find out how easy it is to go sailing in Sandpoint, said SSA Commodore Chris Ankney. The evening includes a raffle and prizes from local merchants, restaurants and event sponsors.…

The table is set for the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast to remain a geopolitical hotspot, as important as it is distant. Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast (GBAO), eastern Tajikistan, is many things. It is the home to the Pamir Mountains, also called “the roof of the world,” whose sharp mountain ranges and deep valleys resemble a lunar landscape. A far-flung frontier, situated in a troubled neighborhood, next to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan and China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, GBAO is a geopolitical treasure tethered to exterior interests: the authoritarian central Tajik government in Dushanbe, Chinese economic and military interests, and Russia, which historically frames the…

Defence Minister Richard Marles has hit back after Labor elder statesman Paul Keating renewed his criticism of the AUKUS submarines deal. The former prime minister accused the federal government of switching its strategic reasoning for acquiring the nuclear-powered vessels in an opinion piece for the Australian Financial Review. Keating’s new onslaught came after Marles told federal parliament this week the new submarine fleet was needed far from Australia’s shores to protect shipping passages against blockades. Keating likened his comments with Australia’s forward defence policy of the 1960s which led to the country’s involvement in the Vietnam War. “Marles is implicitly arguing that Australia’s defence policy…

ANKARA Former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating slammed Anthony Albanese’s government on Wednesday for a tripartite deal with the US and UK to build a nuclear submarine, calling it the Labor party’s worst international decision. “Every Labor Party branch member will wince when they realize that the party we all fight for is returning to our former colonial master, Britain, to find our security in Asia – two hundred and thirty-six years after Europeans first grabbed the continent from its Indigenous people,” Keating said at the National Press Club in Canberra, a transcript of which he posted on his website.…

Samoa’s leader knows the nation of some 200,000 people looms small on the world map, yet it disconcerted her that they’d been lumped into a region conjured up by American and Japanese officials – the “Indo-Pacific,” which stretches from the Indian Ocean to the U.S. West Coast. The surreal artifice of this was one of the truth bombs dropped by Fiame Naomi Mataafa, Samoa’s prime minister, during a plain-talking speech and conversation at a Lowy Institute event in Canberra, the Australian capital, on Monday. “Everyone talks to us about the ‘Indo-Pacific’ and I think there’s an assumption there that we…

Last week’s announcement of the ‘optimal pathway’ for Australia’s nuclear-powered submarines has provoked further commentary on AUKUS. The breadth of the arguments illustrates how once stable strategic certainties have become fractured and contestable. There’s debate over the defence-of-Australia doctrine versus the demands of a profoundly changed strategic landscape, over choices between the US and China, over the Anglosphere versus the region, over an offensive versus defensive posture, and over the superiority of US submarines versus the future of submarines given technological advances. And, of course, there is the issue of cost, itself hardly reflective of peacetime spending, and of opportunity cost: the project places a huge bet on a single future capability in fast-changing strategic environment. So far, AUKUS has been…

There was a pot of gold at the end of President Joe Biden’s jaunt to Canada. It’s going to Canada’s mining sector. The U.S. military will deliver funds this spring to critical minerals projects in both the U.S. and Canada. The goal is to accelerate the development of a critical minerals industry on this continent. The context is the United States’ intensifying rivalry with China. The U.S. is desperate to reduce its reliance on its adversary for materials needed to power electric vehicles, electronics and many other products, and has set aside hundreds of millions of dollars under a program called the Defence…

A senior Chinese diplomat on Thursday called on certain countries to revoke their decision on nuclear submarine cooperation. It is of particular significance at this point to ensure the full and effective implementation of non-proliferation rules, said Geng Shuang, China’s deputy permanent representative to the United Nations. Disregarding questions and opposition, certain countries are intent on advancing nuclear submarine cooperation under the framework of the so-called trilateral security partnership, he said. Two nuclear weapon states and depository states of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) would unprecedentedly transfer tons of weapon-grade highly enriched uranium to a non-nuclear weapon state, he told…

The government confirmed last week that selected Royal Australian Navy surface ships and submarines will in the foreseeable future be equipped with US long-range Tomahawk cruise missiles. This is a spectacular development in Australia’s military posture but one rendered almost ho-hum by the AUKUS package on nuclear-powered submarines announced just days earlier. The RAN’s first Virginia-class SSN is expected to be in the water by the mid-2030s and the first boat with a significant ‘made in Australia’ character nearly a decade after that. That is a very long time to sustain the attitudes that drove the trilateral decision to go down this…

Russia and Georgia are on the verge of resuming direct flights, Leonid Kalashnikov, head of the State Duma Committee on CIS Affairs, Eurasian Integration and Relations with Compatriots, said on March 22 during the economic forum “Prospects for the development of economic relations between Russia and Georgia.” “I spoke with many officials of the highest level, including on the issues that we touched upon. Very sensitive issues that we need to resolve are air travel and the abolition of visas in Russia. I must say that we are on the verge of these decisions,” – TASS quotes Kalashnikov. When these decisions will take place,…