US to up military presence in E. Europe

NATO to switch ‘assurance to deterrence’: US gen

WASHINGTON, March 31, (Agencies): The Pentagon plans to deploy an armored brigade combat team to Eastern Europe next February as part of the ongoing effort to rotate troops in and out of the region to reassure allies worried about threats from an increasingly aggressive Russia.

The decision will put three fully equipped Army brigades in Europe on a continuous basis, and underscore promises made by defense leaders to protect Europe and send a message to Moscow that any actions against allies would be unacceptable.

According to an announcement released Wednesday, the Army will send a full set of equipment with the brigade to Europe. Earlier plans had called for the Pentagon to rotate troops into Europe, where they would have used a set of training equipment already there.

The new proposal would remove the pre-positioned equipment, send it to be refurbished, and allow the US forces to bring more robust, modern equipment in with them when they deploy. There are about 4,200 soldiers in an armored brigade, along with hundreds of heavy vehicles, tanks, self-propelled howitzers and other equipment.

Sending the brigade with its own equipment, Pentagon spokeswoman Laura Seal said, will also allow the military to practice its ability to rapidly deploy equipment and forces to Europe.

“This will be the most modernized equipment the Army has to offer, and will, over the next year, replace the less modern training equipment

punishments, this time two honest judges showed they valued honor more than political pressure,” Seselj declared at a press conference at his Serbian Radical Party headquarters in Belgrade. Others heatedly disagreed. “This is a defeat of The Hague tribunal,” Croatian Prime Minister Tihomir Oreskovic said in Vukovar, an eastern Croatian town destroyed by Serbian we put in Europe over the last few years,” she said.

About 62,000 US military forces are permanently based in Europe, and about 25,000 of those are Army soldiers. Under the new plan, there would be about 29,200 US soldiers in Europe at any given time.

Wednesday’s announcement is also aimed at easing worries in Europe, where allies had heard rumblings about the equipment being removed and feared the US was scaling back support.

Officials also said the Army would send additional communications equipment to Europe so that headquarters units could have the radios, computers and other equipment needed to work with the brigades.

Support

Over the past nine months Defense Secretary Ash Carter has pledged additional military support for the region during trips to Eastern Europe and in NATO meetings.

Last June, Carter announced in Estonia that the US would spread about 250 tanks, armored vehicles and other military equipment across six former Soviet bloc nations to help reassure NATO allies. Each set of equipment would be enough to outfit a military unit, and would go at least temporarily to Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Romania.

In February, the Pentagon announced it would seek $3.4 billion in the 2017 budget to increase troop rotations and military exercises in Europe. The plan would result in the constant presence of a third brigade in Europe. Two are already per-

troops, including Seselj’s paramilitaries, during the war for independence in the 1990s. “I am in Vukovar today, and we all know that this man has done evil to this town. He showed no remorse whatsoever.” (AP)

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A grieving father in Italy has written to

High school students march during a demonstration against the French government’s planned labour law reforms on March 31, in Bordeaux, southwestern France. France faced fresh protests over labour reforms just a day after the beleaguered government of President Francois Hollande was forced into an

embarrassing U-turn over constitutional changes. (AFP)

manently stationed in Europe — a Stryker brigade and an airborne brigade. And now a brigade will rotate in and out, every nine months or so, on a continual basis.

The 2016 budget included about $780 million for the so-called European reassurance initiative, which covered the costs of sending hundreds of US troops in and out of Europe for short deployments, military exercises and other training missions.

Carter’s proposal to quadruple that amount would allow the US to send more troops to Europe for short-term deployments and also provide additional equipment and improve facilities so that more forces could be accommodated.

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NATO and the United States are switching their defence doctrine from assurance to deterrence in Eastern Europe in response to a “resurgent and aggressive Russia”, the top US general in Europe said Thursday.

The comments by General Philip Breedlove in the Latvian capital Riga come a day after the Pentagon said it would begin continuous rotations of an additional armoured brigade of about 4,200 troops in Eastern Europe beginning in early 2017.

“We are prepared to fight and win if we have to ... our focus will expand from assurance to deterrence, including measures that vastly improve our overall readiness,” Breedlove said following talks with Baltic region NATO commanders.

“To the east and north we face a resurgent and aggressive Russia, and as we have continued to witness

Apple’s chief executive Tim Cook to beg him to unblock his dead son’s iPhone so he can retrieve the photographs stored on it.

If the US tech giant fails, he said he will turn to the elite of the hacking world -- Apple’s nemesis in the San Bernardino case, which saw the FBI turn to outside help after it failed to force the Silicon valley company to crack a killer’s iPhone.

“Don’t deny me the memories of my these last two years, Russia continues to seek to extend its influence on its periphery and beyond.”

Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and has been supporting a pro-Moscow separatist conflict in eastern Ukraine.

Eastern NATO members including the formerly Soviet-ruled Baltic states and Poland have since lobbied the alliance to increase its presence in the region.

“In the spring of 2017 what we will bring to Europe, and then again put into the three Baltic nations, is an armoured brigade fully enabled with command and control and all of the supporting equipment required,” Breedlove said.

Asked by AFP whether he expected other NATO members to match the upped US troop commitment, Breedlove said: “We would hope (so).”

“What we have seen is that when we led by coming here with company-sized formations after (Russia’s actions in) Crimea and Donbas, other nations have shown up now with company-sized formations.”

Russia has repeatedly warned against the permanent positioning of substantial forces from NATO along its border.

And some NATO members, like Germany, have been sceptical about any substantial permanent deployment, saying it could breach a 1997 agreement between the military alliance and Russia.

But the new US deployment avoids the issue because it is not technically permanently stationed in Eastern Europe, with brigades rotating in and out, US officials say.

son,” architect Leonardo Fabbretti wrote in an email sent to Cook and the head of the company’s software department, following repeated failed attempts to access the teenager’s device.

Dama, who was adopted from Ethiopia in 2007, was diagnosed with bone cancer in 2013 after a skiing accident and died in September aged 13 after a series of operations and chemotherapy sessions failed to cure him.

“I cannot give up. Having lost my Dama, I will fight to have the last two months of photos, thoughts and words which are held hostage in his phone,” he said in the letter, sent on March 21 and as yet unanswered.

“I had given my son an iPhone 6 nearly nine months before his death, which he used all the time. He wanted me to have access, he added my fingerprint ID,” Fabbretti told AFP on Thursday.

“Unfortunately, it doesn’t work if the phone is turned off and on again,” he said.

Fabbretti contacted Apple Europe five months ago, but its technical team said it had been unable to open the locked phone.

“I think what’s happened should make you think about the privacy policy adopted by your company. Although I share your philosophy in general, I think Apple should offer solutions for exceptional cases like mine,” he said in the letter.

“If you compare the reset procedure with opening the front door of a house after you’ve lost the keys, it’s as if the locksmith who opens the door insists on the house being emptied in its entirety first,” he added. (AP)