Letter to USSR Minister of Defense on the Situation in Afghanistan, 13 August 1987
Letter to USSR Minister of Defense on the Situation in Afghanistan, 13 August 1987.
By Colonel K. Tsagolov
To Candidate Member of the Politburo of the CC CPSU
USSR Minister of Defense
Comrade Dmitry Timofeevich Yazov
Moscow, USSR Ministry of Defense
The Afghan problem continues to attract attention in the sphere of international affairs. It begins to cause a certain concern on the part of the Soviet people as well. This is precisely why I would like to present my view of the existing military-political situation in the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, the perspectives of its development, and some proposals regarding strategy and tactics for the period of the forthcoming withdrawal of the Soviet limited military contingent. I am undertaking this motivated by my understanding of the complexity and urgency of the issue, with the feeling of my party and military-professional duty, regardless of the consequences that are awaiting me. Truth and honor for me are more valuable than personal comfort.
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Google Maps and Geopolitical Disputes
How Google's open-ended maps are embroiling the company in some of the world’s touchiest geopolitical disputes.
One fateful day in early August, Google Maps turned Arunachal Pradesh Chinese. It happened without warning. One minute, the mountainous border state adjacent to Tibet was labeled with its usual complement of Indian place-names; the next it was sprinkled with Mandarin characters, like a virtual annex of the People's Republic.
The error could hardly have been more awkward. Governed by India but claimed by China, Arunachal Pradesh has been a source of rankling dispute between the two nations for decades. Google's sudden relabeling of the province gave the appearance of a special tip of the hat toward Beijing. Its timing, moreover, was freakishly bad: the press noticed that Google's servers had started splaying Mandarin place-names all over the state only a few hours before Indian and Chinese negotiating teams sat down for talks in New Delhi to work toward resolving the delicate border issue.
Google rushed to admit its mistake, but not before a round of angry Indian blog posts and news articles had flourished online. Some commentators posited outright conspiracy between Beijing and the search engine. "Google Maps has always been more biased towards China over the Arunachal Pradesh border dispute," surmised an Indian blogger. Even more ominously, one former member of Parliament told the Times of India, "The Chinese know how to time their statements ahead of a bilateral meeting.”
Google responded in a manner that radiated chilly omnipresence—by posting a statement in the comments section of what appeared to be every single Web site that had discussed the mix-up. "The change was a result of a mistake in our processing of new map data," Google announced. "We are in the process of reverting the data to its previous state, and expect the change to be visible in the product shortly."
One mystery remained, however: how did such an error happen in "the product" in the first place? Why did Google have that perfect set of Chinese names lying around, ready to swap in for the Indian ones?
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#mRIF: Godzilla...
Part of monochrom's Raw Image Format, our series of daily images.
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