Rape in the South African Military： A Threat to Meaningful Women Participation in Peacekeeping Operations

The contemporary militaries have an increasingly high number of women than in the previous years. This is a positive development that resonates with the democratic dispensations. Despite of some resistance from certain quarters of the society, overall women＇s presence is becoming acknowledged. This increase has a potential to make a positive impact on peacekeeping missions. Their utility is enhanced by their characteristics that are lamented for their incongruence to combat operations. The constructive and reconciliatory nature of peacekeeping mission makes them an important asset. However, their optimal productivity is threatened by the incessant rape that they experience from both their adversaries and the own force. This creates a stressor that compromises their performance. The situation is aggravated by the lack of support after their ordeal. The organisational culture and leadership are not making women＇s presence in operations tenable. Their experience post-rape is characterised by rejection and lack of support from the salient others. This situation requires to be changed urgently to provide a sense of security and care for women. Policies and practices need to be modified to allow optimal performance from the most productive group in the military force.

China-US Trade War and Its Future

The Trump administration's hostile trade actions against China since the beginning of this year violate World Trade Organization rules. To protect the free trade world economic system, China has stood up to fight this trade bullying. When the US administration continued with harsher actions, the escalation in trade friction increased the potential harm for both countries. China has been very clear that Trump's trade tariffs cannot improve the bilateral trade imbalance. Tit-for-tat ought to be a last resort but China is open to talking. Now the ball is in Trump's court. As two big,influential economies, China and the US should calm down and go back to negotiating table to avoid a trade war trap. Bullying is only one approach President Trump can choose, but arbitrary threats are no solution.

Three-dimension path planning for UAV using improved A＊ algorithm in complicated threat environment

In order to improve the battle effectiveness of the unmanned aerial vehicle （UAV） under the increasingly complex threat environment, a three-dimension path planning method based on an A ＊ al- gorithm is proposed and simulated in this paper which makes the UAV satisfy requirements of different missions. At first, the digital map information is processed vdth an integrated terrain smoothing algorithm, and a safe flight surface which integrates the vehicle dynamic is built and added on the terrain, and then, models of the complicated threats are established and integrated into the digital terrain. At last, an improved A ＊ algorithm is used to plan the three-dimension path on the safe sur- face, and then smooth the path. Simulation results indicate that the approach has a good perform- ance in creating an optimal path in the three-dimension environment and the path planning algorithm is more simple, efficient and easily realized in the engineering field.

Variability of Antarctic sea ice extent over the past 200 years

While Arctic sea ice has been decreasing in recent decades that is largely due to anthropogenic forcing,the extent of Antarctic sea ice showed a positive trend during 1979–2015, followed by an abrupt decrease. The shortness of the satellite record limits our ability to quantify the possible contribution of anthropogenic forcing and internal variability to the observed Antarctic sea ice variability. In this study,ice core and fast ice records with annual resolution from six sites are used to reconstruct the annualresolved northernmost latitude of sea ice edge(NLSIE) for different sectors of the Southern Ocean, including the Weddell Sea(WS), Bellingshausen Sea(BS), Amundsen Sea(AS), Ross Sea(RS), and the Indian and western Pacific Ocean(Ind WPac). The linear trends of the NLSIE are analyzed for each sector for the past100–200 years and found to be à0.08°, à0.17°, +0.07°, +0.02°, and à0.03° per decade(!95% confidence level) for the WS, BS, AS, RS, and Ind WPac, respectively. For the entire Antarctic, our composite NLSIE shows a decreasing trend(à0.03° per decade, 99% confidence level) during the 20 th century, with a rapid decline in the mid-1950 s. It was not until the early 1980 s that the observed increasing trend occurred. A comparison with major climate indices shows that the long-term linear trends in all five sectors are largely dominated by the changes in the Southern Annular Mode(SAM). The multi-decadal variability in WS,BS, and AS is dominated by the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation, whereas that in the Ind WPac and RS is dominated by the SAM.