parapolitical

Canada and Britain are set to become roommates as part-of cost-cutting measures in their respective foreign ministries, Canadian official state media CBC reports.

The British Foreign Secretary will meet with Baird in Ottawa on Monday where the two will sign an agreement that will in part result in Canada and the U.K. sharing embassies or high commissions in countries where one has a diplomatic presence and the other does not.

Hague told CBC News, "as the Prime Minister [David Cameron] said when addressing the Canadian parliament last year: 'We are two nations, but under one Queen and united by one set of values.'"

According to the CBC, Canada already provides consular services to Australian citizens in 26 nations, though the opposition NDP has decried the move to share chanceries with Britain as an affront to Canadian independence. Nonetheless, diplomats from both countries can certainly expect some Perfect Strangers-type good times and hijinx in the newly co-branded legations ... assuming Britain can remember Canada's name ...

Australia - No ID Required - Australia, where voting is mandatory, does not require physical identification before casting a ballot.

Canada - Photo ID Required (with exceptions) - Elections Canada requires voters to provide one of the following: (a) driver's license, passport or military ID card, or, (b) two documents that show name and address (e.g. library card and utility bill; birth certificate and bank statement), or, (c) a signed oath of eligibility and a person who has valid ID willing to vouch for the prospective voter's identity.

France - No ID Required (in rural areas) / Photo ID Required (in urban areas) - Voters residing in communes with a population less than 3,500 do not need to provide physical identification before casting a ballot. Those who live in other areas must show a passport, military ID card, driver license, or National ID Card (the latter which is free) to poll workers before voting.

India - Photo ID Required - The Elections Commission of India requires voters present government-issued photo ID at the time of voting, however, provides free EPIC (Election Photo Identity Card) cards to citizens who have no identification.

Israel - Photo ID Required - Israel requires voters provide a passport, driver's license or parliamentary identification card when voting.

Kenya - Photo ID Required (in transition) - The Obama administration is funding an initiative to introduce photo ID to Kenyan voters.

Mexico - Photo ID Required - The Federal Elections Institute (IFE) requires voters show an IFE-issued ID card that displays photo, signature, address and thumbprint (pictured, above) before casting a ballot. Cards are issued free at the time of voter registration.

Crisis Language in National Constitutions

Our chart, above, shows the number of instances of the use of crisis words (“emergency” and “siege”) in the constitutions of nine randomly selected nations. 

“There exists no norm that is applicable to chaos. For a legal order to make sense, a normal situation must exist, and he is sovereign who definitely decides whether this normal situation actually exists.”

Occasionally frantic media reports that Russians are clamoring for an end to the alternating presidency/premiership of Vladimir Putin are put in a new perspective by a recent survey from the German research firm Gesellschaft für Konsumforschung (GfK). Asked their attitude toward several leading Russian politicians, 60-percent of respondents indicated a positive response to Putin, with only 18-percent looking favorably on 2012 presidential election runner-up Gennady Zyugano. That corresponds to Zyugano's showing in the last presidential election in which he scored just 17-percent of the vote in an election that was criticized by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (the OSCE's report, however, was itself blasted by one of their own monitors who claimed it had been prepared in advance of the election). 

On July 20, 1787, Benjamin Franklin remarked to the Constitutional Convention:

History furnishes one example only of a first Magistrate being formally brought to public Justice. Every body cried out agst this as unconstitutional. What was the practice before this in cases where the chief Magistrate rendered himself obnoxious? Why recourse was had to assassination ...

The one example in Franklin's statement is Charles I of England. Chafetz uses Franklin's observation to ask the question "what is an impeachable offense?"

"I suggest," Chafetz explains, "that we ... view impeachable offenses as assassinable offenses." In other words, impeachment, in Chafetz' theory, is intended to be used when the historic and traditional alternative is for the officeholder to be killed.

Franklin revered Brutus and Cassius, the assassins of Julius Caesar. Therefore, Chafetz queries, "it remains to be asked what, precisely, were Caesar’s crimes that justified the assassination?" These can be identified as two, according to Chafetz: (a) the instigation of Civil War, and, (b) the destruction of republicanism. Chavetz continues -

What Franklin sought was a mechanism with both the substantive reach of assassination and the procedural mechanisms to satisfy these concerns. He sought to “regularize" assassination -that is, to tame it—by proceduralizing it. Like assassination, impeachment would remove “chief Magistrate[s who had] rendered [themselves] obnoxious” by doing things like starting civil wars or subverting the constitution. But unlike assassination, impeachment would be epistemically humble— it would allow for the acquittal and vindication of the innocent—and it would be less disruptive to the polity, making it less likely to provoke the kind of backlash that led to the rise of Augustus.

... more than two in three (68%) women say that Obama would be more adept at dealing with an alien invasion than Romney, vs. 61 percent of men. And more younger citizens, ages 18 to 64 years, than those aged 65+ (68% vs. 50%) think Romney would not be as well-suited as Obama to handle an alien invasion.

Last April, Dr. Paul Springer, a civilian faculty member at the U.S. Air Force Air Command and Staff College in Montgomery, Alabama, discussed possible alien war objectives with the breakfast TV show "Today" of Australian's Nine Network. 

Three Turkish officers stationed abroad will not return home to face trial for involvement in an alleged coup plot until NATO evaluates the matter or they stand down from their positions ...

Gen. Hakan Akkoç, who is stationed at a NATO base in Belgium, will remain at his position until NATO evaluates the matter. Col. Mehmet Alper Şengezer and Lt. Col. Nedim Ulusan, on duty in Italy and Croatia, respectively, could return to Turkey to turn themselves in after they turn over their positions to their successors.

Sledgehammer was first uncovered by the small Turkish newspaper Taraf in 2003 and involved plans by the Turkish armed forces to attack domestic targets using covert forces in order to justify an overthrow of the Turkish government.  One component of the plan would have involved the downing of a Turkish fighter by a foreign state over international waters to mobilize public support for the military, a situation eerily similar to the recent downing of  a Turkish air force plane by the Syrian Air Defense Command. 

Sledgehammer's discovery resulted in the arrest of more than 300 officers and the resignation of the chiefs of the army, air and naval staff.

A previous Turkish coup, in 1971, was believed masterminded by the NATO-backed Counter-Guerrilla - the Turkish element of Operation Gladio - purportedly to preempt a Soviet-backed coup planned for later that month. That same week, Italian police captured a cache of weapons possibly intended for use in a near-simultaneous putsch in that country. 

As part of a general military build-up in the Arctic, Canada plans to develop "stealth snowmobiles" Defense News reports. 

The government has told industry that existing gas-powered engines are too noisy for covert operations, and it wants a snowmobile with a silent mode that could be activated when necessary.

The special operations forces are interested in acquiring such a vehicle, military sources said. It is expected that a prototype can be developed by next March.

In their recent paper "Buying Votes and International Organizations" Axel Drehera and James Raymond Vreelandb of the University of Göttingen in Lower Saxony attempted to demystify the process that leads to resolutions at the UN Security Council. 

"The approval of the United Nations Security Council," Drehera and Vreelandb explained in their paper, "lends legitimacy to the military actions of great powers." 

The Fund for Peace, a DC-based NGO, has released their annual "Failed States Index" - a ranking of nations on the brink and those who have already fallen over.  

For the fifth consecutive year Somalia tops the list while Finland earns note as the world's most stable nation. Other highlights of the 2012 index included Libya which, under the leadership of the NATO-backed Transitional National Council, tumbled a whopping 61 spots from that country’s last ranking during the Jamahiriya-era. Among NATO states, Denmark boasted the highest overall rankings with Italy and Greece languishing in the rear.  

Drilling down into the ten categories used to calculate the total scores, however, highlights a more interesting array of winners and losers.