From the St. Petersburg Times:

Chechen Soldiers Relish Tour of Duty in Lebanon

SIDON, Lebanon � Not so long ago, the Russian camp was a war zone.Today, the biggest bang most of the 250 military engineers here encounter is the 5 a.m. wake-up call at the sandy settlement of 50 or so tents nestled against the Mediterranean.

The relative calm is largely due to the end of hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah. But it’s also because two platoons of elite soldiers plucked from the Army’s 42nd Division’s East and West battalions, based in Chechnya, are standing guard.

Everything is calm here,” says Rasud Baimuratov, commander of one of the platoons. An ethnic Chechen with a towering figure, Baimuratov and his comrades have been welcomed by locals who say they trust Russians more than Western forces. Bilyal Adzhami, a store owner in the southern Lebanese town of Nabatia, explained that many locals see the Russian troops as a counterbalance to the French, Italian and Spanish forces, among others, helping maintain a UN-imposed peace.

“People don’t trust the NATO countries that sent peacekeepers here under the UN mission,” Adzhami said. “The local populations think their goal here is to protect Israel. And Moscow has always stood up for fair negotiations of the Middle East crisis and for keeping the peace in Lebanon.”

What’s more, as Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov has noted, sending soldiers who are mostly Muslim to patrol a Muslim country has its benefits.

“We get along great with the local population,” said Malgobek Khamurzayev, one of the Russian soldiers deployed to southern Lebanon.

Still, the Chechen battalions, which report to the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff, are composed of an unusual bunch.

The East battalion includes former Chechen separatists who once battled Russian Army troops but later switched sides. Human rights groups have accused the battalion of atrocities against civilians in Chechnya during regular search-and-destroy missions.

Anatoly Tsyganok, head of the Center for Military Forecasting, voiced confidence that the Army engineers would fulfill their mission but had doubts about their Chechen protectors, who he said were not trained in peacekeeping.

[....]
“Conducting negotiations, coordinating with local police � these are difficult things,” Tsyganok said.

The East and West battalions were formed during the second Chechen war, which began in late 1999, in an effort to rely more heavily on local recruits in operations against Chechen rebels.

We’ll see.

From the Asia Times, David Isenberg does a book review of Robert Young Pelton’s Licensed to Kill

Mercenaries or ‘contractors’?

...For years now the media have increasingly publicized what is usually described in sensationalistic purple prose as the murky world of corporate mercenaries. While such firms started gaining attention back in the early 1990s with the exploits of, for example, the now-defunct South African-based Executive Outcomes, which did actual combat operations in Angola and Sierra Leone, and gained more publicity with the training contracts of MPRI in the Balkan wars of the mid-1990s, the war in Iraq propelled the industry to the top of the media and pop-culture food chain. Such firms as Blackwater Security, Triple Canopy, and DynCorp are now conversational staples.

And yet while there have been numerous articles in the periodical press and even many academic books, one of which - Peter Singer’s Corporate Warriors - even achieved a measure of popular acclaim when it was published in 2003, they all lacked one key ingredient essential to a real understanding of this world. And that is culture. The key to really understanding any society is to understand its culture. And, as anthropologists have long understood, true cultural understanding comes only from living in the midst of it.

[...]
...Just who is Robert Young Pelton? Originally from Canada, he moved to the US ... one day he decided to get out of it and start traveling to the world’s hot spots and war zones as a neutral observer and chronicler of the truth, which is never an easy thing to ascertain.

[....]
But as Pelton notes, “If there is a lesson in all of this, it is that once the security business is unhitched from established corporate or government clients, its proponents can quickly turn it into the insecurity business.”

Lots more there - go read it all. Very informative, pretty freaky too.

Maybe those “B” movies weren’t so far off after all… From LiveScience.com (via StevenD)

Global Warming Could Trigger Insect Population Boom

A rise in the Earth�s temperature could lead to an increase in the number of insects worldwide, with potentially dire consequences for humans, a new study suggests.

New research shows that insect species living in warmer areas are more likely to undergo rapid population growth because they have higher metabolic rates and reproduce more frequently. The finding has scientists concerned that global warming could give rise to more fast-growing insect populations and that we could see a spike in the number of six-legged critters.

[...]
Insect-borne diseases are also a worry. Malaria, Lyme Disease and a host of others rely on insect vectors to spread among humans, and a swell in their populations could mean more infections. 

Already, scientists have observed a widening of malarial zones with new cases appearing in previously unaffected areas. The change is thought to be due to rising temperatures and an expansion of areas habitable for mosquitoes. The new research, detailed in the October issue of The American Naturalist, shows rising temperatures would mean insects would not only spread out, but also multiply more quickly.

Well now… it’s possible that some don’t feel warming temperatures (or cooling ones), floods and so on to be all that big of a threat… but what about the bugs!?

[This post may or may not be updated throughout the day, as I find new stuff and add it.]