Monthly Archives: March 2015

U.S. blogger critical of Muslim extremists fatally stabbed in Bangladesh

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Assailants hacked to death an American secular writer and blogger of Bangladeshi origin and seriously wounded his wife outside a book fair in Dhaka, the South Asian nations capital, officials said Friday.

Avijit Roy, 42, a champion of liberalism and outspoken critic of Islamists, was repeatedly stabbed Thursday night by at least two attackers at the Dhaka University campus. His wife, Rafida Ahmed Bonya, was hospitalized with multiple wounds.

An Islamist group calling itself Ansar Bangla-7 claimed responsibility for the attack in a series of Twitter postings, saying Roy was a target for more than 3/4 years for his writings that it characterized as being critical of Islam. The groups Twitter account was later disabled.

No immediate arrests were made, police said.

Roy, who had traveled from his home in the Atlanta area to Dhaka for a visit two weeks ago, was the latest secular writer to come under attack by Islamists in Bangladesh. A software engineer by profession, Roy was known for advocating human rights and the rights of atheists, which had put him in the cross-hairs of extremist groups in the conservative Muslim nation.

The author of several books and founder of the website Mukto-mona, which means free mind in Bengali, Roy was the target of frequent death threats, his friends said.

Sirajul Islam, the officer in charge at the Shahbag police station, where Roys father reported the attack, said two bloodstained butcher knives and a shoulder bag were recovered at the scene. Handles of the butcher knives were wrapped in paper, he said.

The attack occurred on a sidewalk outside the Teachers-Students Center on the university campus about 9 p.m., authorities said. At least two people attacked Roy from behind, slashing his head. They attacked his wife when she tried to save him. Bonya, 40, suffered head wounds and lost a finger, Islam said.

Roy and Bonya were taken to Dhaka Medical College Hospital, where Roy died about 10:20 p.m., officials said. Bonya, a writer and blogger, was listed in serious condition.

Witnesses said police officers and others were nearby when the attack occurred but did not attempt to intervene, despite Bonyas screams for help.

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U.S. blogger critical of Muslim extremists fatally stabbed in Bangladesh

In the Memory Ward

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Aby Warburg (second from left) was the spirit behind the iconographic studies that dominated much of twentieth-century art history. Credit Courtesy the Warburg Institute

At first, the library of the Warburg Institute, in London, seems and smells like any other university library: four floors of fluorescent lights and steel shelves, with the damp, weedy aroma of aging books everywhere, and sudden apparitions of graduate students wearing that look, at once brightly keen and infinitely discouraged, eternally shared by graduate students, whether the old kind, with sude elbow patches, or the new kind, with many piercings.

Only as the visitor begins to study the collections does the oddity of the place appear. In the range-finder plates mounted on the shelves, where in a normal library one would expect to see Spanish Literature, Sixteenth Century or Biography, American: E663-664, there are, instead, signs pointing toward Magic Mirrors and Amulets and The Evil Eye. Long shelves of original medieval astrology hug texts on modern astronomy. The section on Modern Philosophy includes volume after volume of Nietzsche and half a shelf of Hume. The open stacksexceptional in any gathering of irreplaceable booksare, in the European scheme of things, almost unknown. In the Bibliothque Nationale, in Paris, the aim seems to be to keep as many books as possible safely out of the hands of people who might want to read them. In the Warburg Library, the books are available to be thumbed through at will.

History is here, ancient and local. An old edition of Epictetus, opened, turns out to bear the bookplate, complete with glaring owl, of E. H. Gombrich, perhaps the most important of modern art historians, who directed the Warburg Institute in its high period, in the nineteen-sixties. Beside each elevator bank, a chart displaying, in capital letters, the librarys curious organization helps guide the bewildered student: FIRST FLOOR: IMAGE, SECOND FLOOR: WORD, up to FOURTH FLOOR: ACTION-orientation, with Action comprising Cultural and Political History, and orientation Magic and Science. Mounted in the stairwells are uncanny black-and-white photographic collages of a single female typea woman dancing in flowing draperythat is seen in many forms, from classical friezes to Renaissance painting.

It is a library like no other in Europein its cross-disciplinary reference, its peculiarities, its originality, its strange depths and unexpected shallows. Magic and science, evil eyes and saints lives: these things repose side by side in a labyrinth of imagery and icons and memory. Dan Browns hero Robert Langdon supposedly teaches symbology at Harvard. There is no such field, but if there were, and if Professor Langdon wanted to study it before making love to mysterious Frenchwomen and nimbly avoiding Opus Dei hit men, this is where he would come to study.

Begun at the start of the last century, in Hamburg, by Aby Warburg, a wealthy bankers son, the Warburg Library has been often expanded, but the original vision has never really been altered. It is a vast and expensive institution, devoted to a system of ideas that, however fascinating, are also in some dated ways faddish, and in some small ways foolish. Warburg, who died in 1929, spent part of his adult life in and out of mental hospitalsat one point, he lived in fear that he was being daily served human flesh. Yet he was the spirit behind the iconographic studies that dominated art history for most of the second half of the twentieth centurythe man who reoriented the scholarly study of art from a discipline devoted essentially to saying who had painted what pictures when to one asking what all the little weird bits and pieces within the pictures might have meant in their time.

In the past several years, the Warburgs future has been fiercely contested. It is in some senses a small and parochial struggle, right out of Trollopes Barchester novels, and in others about something very bigabout the future of private visions within public institutions, about what memory is and what we owe it, about how to tell when an original vision has become merely an eccentric one. It is the tale that has been told, in another key, about moving the Barnes Foundation from Merion to Philadelphia, and about expanding the Frick Collection, in New York. The question is what we owe the pasts past, what we owe the institutions that have shaped our view of how history happened, when contemporary history is happening to them.

The fight over the future of the Warburg Institute came to a climax in the past few months, but it started seven years ago, when the Warburg Institute and then the University of London began to seek legal counsel in order to clarify the terms of the trust deed that, in 1944, as the Second World War raged, had brought the institute into the university. Last year, the university initiated a lawsuit, thinking to converge the Warburgs books into its larger library system, and to continue charging the Warburg a very large fee for the use of its building. Warburg-shaped scholars sought to rally the academic community in the pages of journals and on humanities Listservs. If the universitys plans succeed, the Princeton historian Anthony Grafton and the Harvard art historian Jeffrey Hamburger wrote, in The New York Review of Books, the institute will have to abandon Warburgs fundamental principles, lose control of its own books and periodicals (many of them acquired by gift or by the expenditure of the institutes endowments), and shed, over time, the distinguished staff of scholars and scholar-librarians who train its students and continue to shape its holdings.... A center of European culture and a repository of the Western tradition that escaped Hitler and survived the Blitz may finally be destroyed by British bean counters.

After smoldering within academia, the affair was ignited in public by a petition launched by an American Ph.D. student at University College London named Brooke Palmieri, a Warburg visitor who had come to London first to work in the rare-book trade, then to write a thesis on the pre-Pennsylvania Quakers. I started the petition on Change.org last July, she said recently, in that special lilting drawl of East Coast Americans long resident in London. And within a couple of months it was just shy of twenty-five thousand signatures. It was an astonishing number for a library. But the Warburg has an amazingly vibrant intellectual history. I think whats probably most interesting to me is that it runs on what they call the law of the good neighborits not based on what librarians alphabetically catalogue. Instead, its catalogued according to themes. The methodology of serendipity is what its all about, and the methodology of serendipity is responsible for most great ideas.

Visiting London last fall, I found that while many people were exercised about the future of the Warburg, and had much to say about the approaching judgment, what they offered was more complicated than a simple picture of philistine university administrators assaulting virtuous scholars. Some people had their mouths firmly shut: those within the institute by the pending decision; the historian Lisa Jardine, who is Palmieris thesis adviser, and who had at first been publicly passionate in protest, by the sudden possibility that she might, in an emergency, be called on to run the Warburg if it lost the case and had to rebuild.

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In the Memory Ward

Is there any case for religion? Christianity, Islam, atheism and my search for balance and truth

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And yet, of course, there is the other side to the story. The tales of love and compassion, of giving and of sacrifice, of suffering even unto death, all done genuinely by Christians in the name of their Lord. Since we started the downside in England, let us return there for the upside. The earliest antislavery protests started in the New World in the late seventeenth century.

Soon they spread to England, and like many of the American protesters, the earliest antislavery campaigners were members of the Religious Society of Friends, Quakers. The first formal movement was the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, founded in London in 1787. Nine of the twelve founding members were Quakers, the others Anglicans. As is well known, certainly to every schoolchild in Britain, parliamentary leadership was taken over by William Wilberforce (17591833), a man who had undergone an extreme conversion to evangelical Christianity and whose whole life was dedicated to what he thought was the directive of his faith. A member of the British parliament, he began introducing bills for the abolition of the slave trade, explicitly basing his actions on his Christian commitment. Never, never will we desist till we have wiped away this scandal from the Christian name, released ourselves from the load of guilt, under which we at present labour, and extinguished every trace of this bloody traffic, of which our posterity, looking back to the history of these enlightened times, will scarce believe that it has been suffered to exist so long a disgrace and dishonou to this country (Speech before the House of Commons, April 18, 1791, in Clarkson 2010, 448). It took forty years for slavery to be abolished through the British Empire, and final success was only achieved days after the death of Wilberforce. But without the efforts of these deeply committed Christians, the abolition of slavery in the empire would not have occurred as soon (Hochschild 2006).

Wilberforce and his fellow campaignerswho included the Wedgwood family of pottery fame (to which the mother and wife of Charles Darwin belonged)could be dreadful prigs at times, as well as often showing a remarkable lack of interest in the well-being of their own native working population (Desmond and Moore 2009). Yet they were not alone in their Christian-driven urges to reform. Elizabeth Fry (17801845), another Quaker, labored incessantly for the betterment of the lives and well-being of women in prison. She also founded shelters for the homeless and started a training school for nurses (some of whom were to go to the Crimea with Florence Nightingale). Faced with criticism for her efforts as a womana role that stemmed naturally from the equality of the sexes in Quakerismshe found a formidable ally late in life in her new monarch, Victoria. The Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury (who so hated German theology) was a notable evangelical and social reformer, one who started by working for the reformation of how the mentally disabled were treated and then went on to play a major role in the improvement of the conditions of workers, especially children, in factories and related occupations. The Mines and Colliers Act of 1842 finally banned women and children from going down the mines, and boys under ten years old were also barred. It took another thirty years before Shaftesbury was able to ensure the elimination of boy chimney sweeps (like Tom in Charles Kingsleys Water Babies), a particularly vile occupation, dangerous in itselfa popular way of getting the wretches to move on was to light a fire under themand with horrible effects later in life, notably scrotal cancer.

Do we find parallels, stories of light and goodness in the other areas I showed the dark and evil side to religion? Of course we do. The story of Pastor Martin Niemller (18921984) is well known (Evans 2005). A First World War hero, he was a sailor in the U-boats, and he followed his father in becoming a Lutheran pastor. From a conservative background, initially he welcomed the rise of the Nazis, but soon he fell afoul of them over the Aryan policies, becoming one of the founders of the Confessing Church. For his outspoken opposition, he spent much of the Third Reich in concentration camps, Sachsenhausen and Dachau. He is best known for his famous statement that he and his fellows had stood aside and let the forces of evil have their waythey came for the communists, the trade unionists, the Jews, the Jehovahs Witnesses, the incurablesand then? Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me. Pastor Dietrich Bonhffer (19061945) is an even greater Christian hero. Another founding member of the Confessing Church, he returned from abroad to work alongside his fellow Christians. Imprisoned by the Nazis, he died strangled by piano wire for his involvement in plots against Hitler. Always driven forward by his faith, Bonhffer explicitly saw the imitation of Christ here on earth as our first, foremost, and indeed only obligation. Deeply influenced by the Pietism movement in German thought and tradition, he argued that only by engaging as Christians within the world can we show our true allegiance to our savior. Among those greatly influenced by Bonhffer was Martin Luther King, Jr. And finally, if you want a third personor groupthere is the story almost too painful to recount of Sophie Scholl (19211943) and the White Rose group (Newborn and Dumbach 2007). A small band of ChristiansSophie was Lutheran but much moved by Catholic writing and preachingthey distributed antiwar pamphlets at the University of Munich in 1942 and 1943. Inevitably, they were discovered, condemned to death, and executed. As she walked to the guillotine, her last words were: How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause. Such a fine, sunny day, and I have to go, but what does my death matter, if through us, thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action? (Hanser 1979).

And so to the Catholic Church. Does one talk of Vincent de Paul (15811660), who founded charities, who built hospitals, who ransomed galley slaves from the Arabs? Does one mention the great teaching orders, most notably the Jesuits, who founded no less than twenty-eight universities and colleges in America, including Fordham, Georgetown, and Gonzaga? Do not forget Dorothy Day (18971980), devout Catholic convert, who served the poor and homeless during the Depression. Or does one speak of Maximillian Kolbe (18941941), the Franciscan friar who calmly took the place of a condemned prisoner and died in Auschwitz? Take the Christian Brothers. An Irish congregation, they have spread across the world, founding schools in all of the many countries in which they find themselves. In Canada, rightly, for the abuses that they perpetrated at an orphanage in Newfoundland, they have a dreadful reputation. (All too typically, the archdiocese had been aware of what was happening and simply covered things up until they exploded into the public domain.) Put this against the story of a man I am proud to call my friend, Michael Matthews (b. 1946), who virtually single-handedly has reformed science education by bringing to bear the insights of the history and philosophy of science. He was raised by a single mother in Sydney, Australia, and when he was on the verge of adolescence, the headmaster of the local Christian Brothers school announced that (without cost) Michael would be enrolled as a pupil the next Monday. And he was, and his life was launchedthrough the dedication of men for whom the life of a Christian was reason enough. No doubt telling this story will embarrass Michael, but I do so to deflect interest in my own parallel story involving the kindness of members of the Religious Society of Friends. My education was paid for by Kit Kat bars, produced by the Quaker philanthropists, the Rowntree family.

Does the Good Outweigh the Bad?

Christians will not be surprised by any of this, the bad and the good. I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate (Romans 7: 15). We are made in the image of God, but we are deeply tainted by sin. But how are we to evaluate things? Does the good outweigh the bad, or is it the other way? Richard Dawkins will say that the bad far outweighs the good. Many Christians (not all) will say the good outweighs the bad. They will point out also that we are not just dealing with morality, but with culture generally, and this includes the arts. Could one imagine a world without the cathedral at Chartres, without a Raphael Madonna (or for that matter without a Grunewald Crucifixion), without the Bach Passions? Dawkins responds that there is no need of religion for any of this: the B Minor Mass, the Matthew Passion, these happen to be on a religious theme, but they might as well not be. Theyre beautiful music on a great poetic theme, but we could still go on enjoying them without believing in any of that supernatural rubbish (this was a series of talks and debates organized by the Science Network in association with the Crick-Jacobs Center at the Salk Institute, La Jolla, California, November 57, 2006). I confess that I am not entirely certain about this, although admittedly a purely secular and worthwhile culture is possible. My favorite opera is Mozarts Cosi Fan Tutte, which is about as non-Christian and Enlightenment cynical as it is possible to imagine. I find Parsifal very tedious, and the quasi-Christian mysticism is a major part of what makes it so.

The simple fact is that one is asking an impossible and unanswerable question. What kind of calculus is one to use to weigh Bloody Mary killing three hundred Protestants against the sacrifice of Sophie Scholl in Munich in 1943? Somehow, a simple body count seems highly inappropriate. How does one measure those going to their death absolutely secure in their belief in the hereafter and of Gods love and praise against someone who dies worried and scared and not completely sure, or at least was that way until the last momentsomeone like Blanche in Poulencs Dialogues of the Carmelites? For that matter, how do you measure the death of Sophie on the guillotine against the death of Jesus on the cross? Alvin Plantinga is convinced that the latter is overwhelmingly the greatest act of moral goodness ever. I am not so sure. New Atheists will argue that such calculations are irrelevant. As the example of one child suffering is argument enough against the existence of the Christian God, so the sexual abuse of one child is argument enough against the value of religion. The evils of religion are just too awful, and religion must be abandoned. This is the morally right thing to do. Others, not necessarily all Christians, will argue that evil things are going to happen whatever the state of societythink of what happened in the atheistic societies of Russia and Chinaand that perhaps on balance religion ameliorates this. The aim is not to eliminate religion but to improve it.

What about Islam?

Are we not missing the elephant in the room? The focus in this book is the Christian faith. Agree if you must that on the evil question it is a draw, or at least that there are arguments for and arguments against. But Christianity is not the only religious faith, and no contemporary discussion of whether religion is a bad thing would be complete without at least a brief look at the religion of Islam. Since the attack on the World Trade Centers towers, 9/11, a major theme running through the writings of those opposed to religion is that Islam presents a special and particular danger. So insistent is this theme that critics have suggested that a form of Islamophobia is at work, because surely no religion could be this bad, and, even if it is, the skimpy research (to be generous) of the atheists precludes them from having an opinion.

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Is there any case for religion? Christianity, Islam, atheism and my search for balance and truth

Private Mars One colony project cuts applicant pool to 100 volunteers

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By Mike Wall

This 1999 Hubble telescope image shows Mars when Mars was 54 million miles from Earth.(REUTERS/NASA/Handout)

One hundred people are still in the running to become humanity's first Mars explorers.

The Netherlands-based nonprofit Mars One, which aims to land four pioneers on the Red Planet in 2025 as the vanguard of a permanent colony, has whittled its pool of astronaut candidates down to 100, organization representatives announced Monday Feb. 16.

More than 202,000 people applied to become Red Planet explorers after Mars One opened the selection process in April 2013. The latest cut came after Mars One medical director Norbert Kraft interviewed the 660 candidates who had survived several previous rounds of culling. [Images of Mars One's Red Planet Colony Project]

"The large cut in candidates is an important step towards finding out who has the right stuff to go to Mars," Mars One co-founder and CEO Bas Lansdorp said in a statement. "These aspiring Martians provide the world with a glimpse into who the modern day explorers will be."

The remaining pool consists of 50 men and 50 women who range in age from 19 to 60, Mars One representatives said. Thirty-nine come from the Americas (including 33 from the United States), 31 from Europe, 16 from Asia, seven from Africa and seven from Australia.

The remaining candidates will next participate in group challenges, to demonstrate their ability and willingness to deal with the rigors of Mars life. After another round of cuts, the finalists will be divided into four-person teams, which will train in a simulated Red Planet outpost.

Eventually, Mars One intends to select 24 astronauts (six four-person teams), who will become full-time employees of the organization and prepare for the Mars colonization mission.

"Being one of the best individual candidates does not automatically make you the greatest team player, so I look forward to seeing how the candidates progress and work together in the upcoming challenges," Kraft said.

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Private Mars One colony project cuts applicant pool to 100 volunteers

NATO Black Sea Drills: NATO steps up presence in east Europe amid Russia intervention in Ukraine – Video

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NATO Black Sea Drills: NATO steps up presence in east Europe amid Russia intervention in Ukraine
A NATO flotilla is conducting training n the Black sea with exercises which include anti-air and anti-submarine warfare exercises, as well as boat attacks an...

By: UKRAINE TODAY

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NATO Black Sea Drills: NATO steps up presence in east Europe amid Russia intervention in Ukraine - Video

Nato Wikipedia | About Nato

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This article is about the military alliance. For other uses, see NATO (disambiguation).

North Atlantic Treaty Organization

Organisation du Trait de l'Atlantique Nord

(NATO / OTAN)

NATO was little more than a political association until the Korean War galvanized the organization's member states, and an integrated military structure was built up under the direction of two U.S. supreme commanders. The course of the Cold War led to a rivalry with nations of the Warsaw Pact, which formed in 1955. Doubts over the strength of the relationship between the European states and the United States ebbed and flowed, along with doubts over the credibility of the NATO defence against a prospective Soviet invasiondoubts that led to the development of the independent French nuclear deterrent and the withdrawal of the French from NATO's military structure in 1966 for 30 years. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the organization was drawn into the breakup of Yugoslavia, and conducted its first military interventions in Bosnia from 1992 to 1995 and later Yugoslavia in 1999. Politically, the organization sought better relations with former Warsaw Pact countries, several of which joined the alliance in 1999 and 2004.

Article5 of the North Atlantic treaty, requiring member states to come to the aid of any member state subject to an armed attack, was invoked for the first and only time after the 11 September 2001 attacks, after which troops were deployed to Afghanistan under the NATO-led ISAF. The organization has operated a range of additional roles since then, including sending trainers to Iraq, assisting in counter-piracy operations and in 2011 enforcing a no-fly zone over Libya in accordance with U.N. Security Council Resolution 1973. The less potent Article 4, which merely invokes consultation among NATO members, has been invoked four times: by Turkey in 2003 over the Iraq War, twice in 2012 by Turkey over the Syrian Civil War after the downing of an unarmed Turkish F-4 reconnaissance jet and after a mortar was fired at Turkey from Syria and in 2014 by Poland following the Russian intervention in Crimea.

The North Atlantic Treaty was signed in Washington, D.C., on 4April 1949 and was ratified by the United States that August.

The members agreed that an armed attack against any one of them in Europe or North America would be considered an attack against them all. Consequently they agreed that, if an armed attack occurred, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence, would assist the member being attacked, taking such action as it deemed necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area. The treaty does not require members to respond with military action against an aggressor. Although obliged to respond, they maintain the freedom to choose the method by which they do so. This differs from ArticleIV of the Treaty of Brussels, which clearly states that the response will be military in nature. It is nonetheless assumed that NATO members will aid the attacked member militarily. The treaty was later clarified to include both the member's territory and their "vessels, forces or aircraft" above the Tropic of Cancer, including some Overseas departments of France.

The creation of NATO brought about some standardization of allied military terminology, procedures, and technology, which in many cases meant European countries adopting U.S. practices. The roughly 1300Standardization Agreements (STANAG) codified many of the common practices that NATO has achieved. Hence, the 7.6251 NATO rifle cartridge was introduced in the 1950s as a standard firearm cartridge among many NATO countries. Fabrique Nationale de Herstal's FAL, which used 7.62 NATO cartridge, was adopted by 75 countries, including many outside of NATO. Also, aircraft marshalling signals were standardized, so that any NATO aircraft could land at any NATO base. Other standards such as the NATO phonetic alphabet have made their way beyond NATO into civilian use.

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Nato Wikipedia | About Nato

NATO lashes out at 'revisionist' Russia, Moscow blasts West for creating new 'divisive lines'

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Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a news conference following a meeting with Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi in the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, Thursday, March 5, 2015. Italy's prime minister visited Moscow on Thursday in a bid to repair ties that have been hurt by Russia-West tensions over Ukraine. (AP Photo/Sergei Karpukhin, Pool)(The Associated Press)

Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi , left, speaks as Russian President Vladimir Putin, listens, during their news conference after their talks in the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, Thursday, March 5, 2015. Italy's prime minister visited Moscow on Thursday in a bid to repair ties that have been hurt by Russia-West tensions over Ukraine. (AP Photo/Sergei Karpukhin, Pool)(The Associated Press)

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, left, walks with Finnish Foreign Minister Erkki Tuomioja before their meeting in Helsinki, Finland, Thursday, March 5, 2015. (AP Photo/Lehtikuva, Markku Ulander) FINLAND OUT, NO THIRD PARTY SALES(The Associated Press)

RIGA, Latvia NATO and Russia are exchanging heated language reminiscent of Cold War days with accusations of sinister geopolitical plotting and human rights abuses flying across an increasingly deep divide.

NATO's top U.S. civilian official said Thursday says that "an angry, revisionist Russia" was stopping at little to re-establish its clout in Europe, including redrawing "borders by force to achieve its goals."

NATO Deputy Secretary-General Alexander Vershbow said President Vladimir Putin's "aim seems to be to turn Ukraine into a failed state and to suppress and discredit alternative voices in Russia, so as to prevent a Russian 'Maidan,'" referring to the Ukraine uprising which ousted Moscow-ally Viktor Yanukovych last year.

In Moscow, Russia's Deputy Defense Minister Anatoly Antonov blasted the West for trying to create "new divisive lines in Europe."

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NATO lashes out at 'revisionist' Russia, Moscow blasts West for creating new 'divisive lines'

Stoltenberg says German chancellor Merkel asked him to become NATO chief

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STOCKHOLM NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg says it was German Chancellor Angela Merkel who convinced him to accept the alliance's top job.

In a prerecorded talk show to be aired Friday by Swedish broadcaster SVT, Stoltenberg says Merkel "was the first to talk to me (about it). And I must admit that I have a problem saying no when asked by such nice ladies."

A former Norwegian prime minister, Stoltenberg replaced Anders Fogh Rasmussen as NATO secretary-general last year.

Stoltenberg told the "Skavlan" talk show that cooperating with Russia is difficult when it won't respect its neighbors' borders a reference to Moscow's intervention in Ukraine. But he said NATO members like the Baltic countries don't face the same threat because the alliance would protect them, and "all Russian leaders understand that."

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Stoltenberg says German chancellor Merkel asked him to become NATO chief

NATO maritime group enters Black Sea as Ukraine crisis continues

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NAPLES, Italy International warships assigned to a U.S.-led NATO maritime group entered the Black Sea on Wednesday to train with alliance members in the region.

The arrival of the Standing NATO Maritime Group 2 continues a string of visits to the region by the U.S. and its allies over the past year a response to Russias annexation of Crimea last year and its support of separatists in eastern Ukraine. The American destroyer USS Cole left the Black Sea in late February.

Six ships make up the current group,one of two immediate-reaction forces under the alliances maritime arm. The group is commanded by U.S. Navy Rear Adm. Brad Williamson, who is embarked with his staff on the guided-missile cruiser USS Vicksburg.

The ships will train with NATO member counterparts from Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey, NATO said in a news release. Exercises will focus on anti-submarine and anti-air-warfare and defending small boat attacks.

The visit is the second by a NATO maritime group to the Black Sea in the past year and follows an exercise in September with American and Ukrainian navies. For that visit, three members of the group entered the Black Sea.

The maritime groups groups often exercise with counterparts across the alliance, and they rotate participation in NATOs anti-piracy operation, Ocean Shield.

During its latest tour, the maritime group 2 has made stops in Italy and Croatia and participated in NATOs post-9/11 counterterrorism mission, Operation Active Endeavor. The group also exercised with the French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle, which was on its way to Middle Eastern waters for participation in airstrikes against the Islamic State group.

The U.S. and NATO have sought to reassure allies in the Black Sea region after Russias annexation of Crimea, where Russia maintains a critical naval base in Sevastopol. The U.S., in particular, has increased its visits to the Black Sea, which provides Russias only access to the Mediterranean Sea and is home to Russias Black Sea fleet.

U.S. warships, which previously made only sporadic visits, now enter the region almost monthly. Russia has responded to the visits with more aggressive flight operations.

The other ships in the NATO maritime group are the Canadian frigate HMCS Fredericton, the Turkish frigate TCG Turgutreis, the German tanker FGS Spessart, the Italian frigate ITS Aliseo, and the Romanian firgate ROS Regina Maria.

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NATO maritime group enters Black Sea as Ukraine crisis continues