German police call into question validity of USAREUR license

Some German police say they will not recognize military-issued driver’s licenses if the bearer doesn’t also possess a valid stateside license, a situation that raises concerns about whether many U.S. troops and civilians could face penalties for driving illegally.

U.S. Army Europe said Wednesday that the issue was “in dispute” and cautioned that there was misinformation circulating through the U.S. military community in Germany.

However, German police officials said that the regulations were clear, that anyone driving without a valid stateside license would be violating the law, and that the USAREUR license alone was not valid.

Across the U.S. military community in Germany, there was a sense of panic on social media forums about the apparent new German policy.

It could cause problems for many active duty and civilian personnel whose licenses have expired while they have been overseas. Historically, a military license has been considered sufficient to drive in Germany.

“There is a great deal of misinformation circulating around U.S. military installations in Germany regarding driving privileges,” USAREUR spokeswoman Hilde Patton said. “Among others, the following statement has been disseminated: ‘Under the SOFA, USAREUR driver’s licenses are only valid if accompanied by a current U.S. State Driver’s License.’ This statement is not correct because the matter is in dispute.”

“The U.S. position remains that .... expired U.S. state licenses should be now, as for the last 20 years, a valid basis for operating a POV (personal vehicle) when the driver is also in possession of a valid USAREUR Certificate of License” issued under the NATO Status of Forces supplementary agreement, Patton said.

Barry Henderson, a 48-year-old civilian employee at Ramstein Air Base, learned about the apparent new regulations the hard way when he had to turn over his car keys to German police after failing to produce a current stateside license during a random midday traffic stop near Weilerbach last Thursday.

“The only thing that the police at the scene told me was not knowing the law wasn’t an excuse,” said Henderson, who was escorted back to base by police and forced to leave his car on the side of the road .

When his wife later drove him to police headquarters in Kaiserslautern to pick up his keys, Henderson, who’s Georgia license expired in 2004, was told that without a current stateside license, his USAREUR license was valid only on base. The change, he was told, went into effect Jan. 1.

“All of us were pretty much unaware of this,” he said. “My chain of command, my co-workers, nobody was aware of this.”

Hermann-Josef Decker, deputy chief of police in Baumholder, told Stars and Stripes his department was recently informed of the new license requirement by the Rhineland Palatinate’s Interior Ministry, which asserted that a USAREUR license was no longer sufficient.

“It is basically driving without a license,” Decker said.

However, a spokeswoman for the Westpfalz police in Kaiserslautern said the regulations have long required a valid stateside license. According to a statement she forwarded from the police traffic department, Americans living in Germany under the SOFA have “only one driving permit” — the state license. The USAREUR Certificate of License functions merely as a translation of the stateside license, as well as proof that the bearer is affiliated with the U.S. Defense Department and has acquired adequate knowledge of German rules of the road, the statement said. The USAREUR license “is not a driver’s license,” the statement said.

Requests for information from Germany’s Foreign Ministry and the state governments in Bavaria, Hessen, Baden Württemberg and Rhineland Palatinate were not immediately answered.

Patton said the new position of German authorities contradicted a previous commitment from 1993 confirming that an expired U.S. license combined with a valid USAREUR license would be considered “a valid basis” to drive a USAREUR-plated car under the SOFA supplementary agreement.

“It is a basic principle of public international law that provisions of an international agreement ... take precedence over the provisions of the domestic law of a country that is a party to the agreement when the two are in conflict,” Patton said. “Questions of international law are not decided unilaterally by one party to an international agreement but through consultation between the parties.”

In this case, she said, it is not for the interior or justice authorities at the state or federal level to decide, but by the German Foreign Office and the U.S. Embassy.

The U.S. Embassy referred queries to USAREUR.

A complicating factor is that some U.S. states regard licenses held by U.S. servicemembers overseas as valid, even after they have expired.Patton said those without a valid U.S. license risk being stopped by German police and charged with driving without “an appropriate operator’s permit.”

However, whether that was “factually and legally correct is an open question,” she said.

USAREUR officials said those who run into problems with the police off post, should contact the local legal office.

Stars and Stripes reporter Michael Darnell contributed to this report.

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US Navy aircraft join Scottish coastal search

The U.S. Navy contributed maritime patrol aircraft for operations with the Royal Navy off Scotland’s coast last month in what British and American media have described as a hunt for a foreign submarine.

Two P-3C Orion patrol aircraft were dispatched to the United Kingdom for operations between Nov. 27 and Dec. 7 and again between Dec. 31 and Jan. 8, said Cmdr. Philip Rosi, a spokesman for U.S. Naval Forces Europe-Africa. Each time, aircraft were based at RAF Lossiemouth in northern Scotland, he said. They have since returned to the U.S. naval air base at Sigonella, Sicily.

The aircraft are part of the maritime patrol squadron VP-4 out of Hawaii, which is on a routine deployment to the Sicily base, Rosi said.

Neither Rosi nor a spokesman for the British Defense Ministry would speak to the nature of the operations. Citing unnamed sources, the British newspaper The Independent claimed that British and American patrols were searching for a Russian vessel last week and that Russian submarines have been making frequent “visits” off the northern and western coasts of Scotland. Of concern is the area around Gare Loch, the newspaper said, home to the Faslane naval base and the U.K. nuclear-armed submarine force.

The magazine Aviation Week reported a month earlier that Canadian and French maritime patrol craft joined British surface ships during a search for a foreign submarine off the western coast of Scotland in late November and early December.

Ben Barry, a military analyst with the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, said that a foreign submarine in the area searched would cause alarm, though he didn’t know the details behind the recent patrols.

“Any country that’s got ballistic missile submarines that’s going to operate from a specific base is going to be very sensitive to the idea that they are being (observed by) an adversary and tracked,” he said.

The U.S. says the Russian military has become more provocative in foreign waters and airspace since last year’s escalation of tensions with the West over the seizure of Crimea from Ukraine. Adm. Jonathan W. Greenert, the U.S. hief of Naval Operations, told an audience last year that Russia has been just as active undersea as it has in the air.

The Swedish military searched its waters last October after purported sightings of a foreign vessel. It later produced evidence of what it said was a submarine, including photos of a periscope and undersea tracks. Although officials never publicly blamed Russia, they left little doubt where their suspicions lay.

The British government has faced local criticism over the request for allied help in the search. The U.K. military axed its maritime patrol program in 2010 after a strategic defense review aimed at paring military spending. A program to replace the Royal Navy’s patrol aircraft, the MRA4 Nimrod, was due to begin the same year.

Barry, the analyst, said defense officials believed at the time that U.S. and NATO allies could provide a long-distance maritime patrol capability when needed.

“What was not taken into account … was a newly modernized and aggressive Russia,” he said. “And quite frankly, that’s going to have to be taken into account in the next review.”

The British military can deploy other anti-submarine warfare tools, Barry said, including fast-attack submarines, frigates with special sonar capabilities and a maritime patrol helicopter, the Merlin. He said the lack of a long-distance patrol platform wouldn’t be the only reason for the U.K. to call on Atlantic allies, who would have a natural interest in reports of a nearby foreign submarine.

The P-3 — a four-engine turboprop with a crew of 11, including pilots, flight engineers and sensor operators — can cover a radius of more than 2,700 miles.

Former British Defense Minister Philip Hammond has said a maritime patrol capability should be returned to the British military. Officials could debate the issue again later this year, when the next review is scheduled to begin.

beardsley.steven@stripes.com

Twitter: @sjbeardsley

France arrests 54 for defending terror; announces crackdown

PARIS — France ordered prosecutors around the country Wednesday to crack down on hate speech, anti-Semitism and glorifying terrorism, announcing that 54 people had been arrested for those offenses since the Paris terror attacks.

The order came as Charlie Hebdo's defiant new issue sold out before dawn around Paris, with scuffles at kiosks over dwindling copies of the satirical newspaper fronting the Prophet Muhammad.

Like many European countries, France has strong laws against hate speech and especially anti-Semitism in the wake of the Holocaust. In a message distributed to all French prosecutors and judges, the Justice Ministry laid out the legal basis for rounding up those who defend the Paris terror attacks as well as those responsible for racist or anti-Semitic words or acts.

Among those detained was Dieudonne, a controversial, popular comic with repeated convictions for racism and anti-Semitism.

The attacks that left 17 people dead are prompting France to tighten security measures but none of the 54 people detained have been linked by authorities to the attacks. That is raising questions about whether the government is impinging on the freedom of speech that Charlie Hebdo so vigorously defends.

The core of the irreverent newspaper's staff perished a week ago when gunmen stormed its offices, killing 12 people. It was the opening salvo of three days of terror and bloodshed in the Paris region, ending when security forces killed all three gunmen on Friday.

A top leader of Yemen's al-Qaida branch claimed responsibility Wednesday for the Charlie Hebdo attack, saying in a video the massacre was in "vengeance for the prophet." Charlie Hebdo had received repeated threats previously for posting caricatures of Muhammad and was firebombed in 2011.

Those who survived last week's massacre worked out of borrowed offices to put out the issue that appeared Wednesday with a print run of 3 million — more than 50 times the usual circulation. Another run was planned, one columnist said.

The Justice Ministry said 54 people — including four minors — have been detained for defending or verbally threatening terrorism since the Charlie Hebdo attack. Several have already been convicted under special measures for immediate sentencing.

The government is also working on new phone-tapping and other intelligence efforts against terrorism that it wants nailed down by next week, government spokesman Stephane Le Foll said Wednesday.

The government is also launching a deeper project to rethink education, urban policies and its integration model, in an apparent recognition that the attacks exposed deeper problems of inequality both in France and especially at its neglected, often violence-ridden suburban housing projects.

French police say as many as six members of a terrorist cell that carried out the Paris attacks on Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket may still be at large, including a man seen driving a car registered to the widow of one of the gunmen. The country has deployed 10,000 troops to protect sensitive sites, including Jewish schools and synagogues, mosques and travel hubs.

Dieudonne, a comic who popularized an arm gesture that resembles a Nazi salute and who has been convicted repeatedly of racism and anti-Semitism, is no stranger to controversy. His provocative performances were banned last year but he has a core following among many of France's disaffected young people.

The Facebook post in question, which was swiftly deleted, said he felt like "Charlie Coulibaly" — merging the names of Charlie Hebdo and Amedy Coulibaly, the gunman who seized a kosher market and killed four hostages, along with a policewoman.

In a separate post Monday afternoon, the day the investigation was opened into Dieudonne, the comic wrote an open letter to France's interior minister.

"Whenever I speak, you do not try to understand what I'm trying to say, you do not want to listen to me. You are looking for a pretext to forbid me. You consider me like Amedy Coulibaly when I am not any different from Charlie," he wrote.

In a posthumous video, Coulibaly had claimed allegiance to the Islamic State group. Brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi, who stormed Charlie Hebdo, had told survivors they were sent by al-Qaida in Yemen.

In an 11-minute video on Wednesday, Nasr al-Ansi, a top commander of Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP as the branch is known, says Yemen's al-Qaida branch "chose the target, laid out the plan and financed the operation."

Solidarity for Charlie Hebdo, although not uniform, was widespread in France and abroad. Defending his caricature of Muhammad on the cover, Charlie Hebdo cartoonist Renald Luzier, also known as Luz, argued that no exceptions should be made when it comes to freedom of expression.

He said that when Charlie Hebdo drew threats and attacks in the past, the reaction was often: "Yes, but you shouldn't do that (publish cartoons of Muhammad). Yes, but you deserved that."

"There should be no more `yes, but," he insisted.

On Wednesday, the new issue vanished from kiosks immediately. Some newsstand operators said they expected more copies to arrive Thursday. One kiosk near the Champs Elysees, open at 6 a.m., was sold out by 6:05. Another, near Saint-Lazare, reported fisticuffs among customers.

"Distributing Charlie Hebdo, it warms my heart because we say to ourselves that he is still here, he's never left," said Jean-Baptiste Saidi, a van driver delivering copies well before dawn on Wednesday.

French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve was among those to get a copy before they sold out.

"I rediscovered their liberty of tone," he told France-Inter radio, describing the issue as one of "tender impertinence."

French Prime Minister Manuel Valls prominently displayed a copy of the paper as he left a Cabinet meeting, but his hand carefully covered Muhammad's face.

Associated Press writers Sylvie Corbet, Nicolas Vaux-Montagny, Milos Krivokapic and Dalton Bennett contributed.

First female officer reports to submarine USS Minnesota

The first woman to serve aboard a Navy fast-attack submarine has reported to the USS Minnesota. She is one of six officers expected to join fast-attack crews in the months ahead.

Two more women will report to the Minnesota by the end of January, with three more slated to join the USS Virginia in the spring, said Lt. Cmdr. Tommy Crosby, a spokesman for the Navy’s Submarine Force Atlantic.

Integration of Virginia-class submarines comes three years into the Navy’s effort to gradually bring female officers and enlisted into its undersea service. Female officers first came aboard Ohio-class submarines in late 2011. As of last summer, more than 60 women were serving in 14 submarines.

Submarines were one of the few remaining areas of military service off-limits to women when the Navy lifted its prohibition in 2010. Three years later, the Pentagon removed the military-wide ban on women in combat units and required gender integration plans from each of the services.

The Navy’s 10 Virginia-class fast-attack submarines are armed with Tomahawk cruise missiles and designed to conduct surveillance, seek out and destroy other submarines and carry special operations forces. They are smaller and have tighter quarters than Ohio-class submarines, the designation for ballistic-missile and guided-missile boats. Fifteen officers typically make up the wardroom in both classes.

The plan to bring the six female officers aboard Virginia-class submarines was announced in 2013 by Vice Adm. Michael Connor, commander of Navy submarine forces. Two of the women were to be supply officers, with the other four nuclear trained. Submarine officers must first go through an intensive 18-month training.

The service says it will open positions for enlisted women on some Ohio-class submarines next year and for several Virginia-class subs in 2020. All future submarines will be designed for integrated crews, the Navy has said.

The Navy’s integration plans call for women to make up 20 percent of the enlisted crews on already-integrated Ohio-class submarines by 2020.

The Navy has described the integration process as smooth, although a recent episode aboard the Ohio-class USS Wyoming raises questions about that. The Navy investigated 12 petty officers for sharing and watching a video of a female officer showering aboard the submarine, according to the Navy Times. One of the petty officers made the recording and passed it along, according to the report.

Connor, the submarine force commander, has said two more fast-attack subs will be integrated next fiscal year, this time in the Pacific. The Minnesota and Virginia are ported in Groton, Conn.

beardsley.steven@stripes.com

Twitter: @sjbeardsley

France arrests 54 for defending terror; newspaper sells out

PARIS — The Paris prosecutor's office says 54 people have been detained for defending or glorifying terrorism since Islamic radicals began a rampage a week ago that left 17 people dead.

The arrests are part of a broader French crackdown that includes a government push for tougher anti-terrorism measures after the attacks, the worst in France in decades.

Dieudonne, a controversial comic with a large following in France, is among those detained.

Government spokesman Stephane Le Foll said Wednesday that some of those detained have already been convicted.

Charlie Hebdo's defiant new issue sold out before dawn around Paris on Wednesday, with scuffles at kiosks over dwindling copies of the paper fronting the Prophet Muhammad.

The core of the irreverent newspaper's staff perished a week ago when gunmen stormed its offices, killing 12. Those who survived put out the issue that appeared on newsstands Wednesday, working out of borrowed offices, with a print run of 3 million — more than 50 times the usual circulation.

The storming of the newspaper was the opening salvo of three days of terror and bloodshed in the Paris region, ending when security forces killed all three gunmen on Friday. A top leader of Yemen's al-Qaida branch claimed responsibility for the Charlie Hebdo attack, saying in a video posted Wednesday that the massacre was in "vengeance for the prophet."

Charlie Hebdo had received repeated threats for posting caricatures of Muhammad and was firebombed in 2011. Its editor and his police bodyguard were the first targeted in the newsroom.

France's government was preparing tougher anti-terrorism measures, and there were growing signs that authorities were ready to use current laws to their fullest extent. Wednesday's detention of Dieudonne for defending terrorism followed a four-year prison sentence involving the same charge for a man in northern France who seemed to defend the attacks in a drunken rant while resisting arrest.

French police say as many as six members of a terrorist cell that carried out the Paris attacks may still be at large, including a man seen driving a car registered to the widow of one of the gunmen. The country has deployed 10,000 troops to protect sensitive sites, including Jewish schools and synagogues, mosques and travel hubs.

Dieudonne, who popularized an arm gesture that resembles a Nazi salute and who has been convicted repeatedly of racism and anti-Semitism, is no stranger to controversy. His provocative performances were banned last year but he has a core following among many of France's disaffected young people.

The Facebook post in question, which was swiftly deleted, said he felt like "Charlie Coulibaly" — merging the names of Charlie Hebdo and Amedy Coulibaly, the gunman who seized a kosher market and killed four hostages, along with a policewoman.

In a separate post Monday afternoon, the day the investigation was opened into Dieudonne, the comic wrote an open letter to France's interior minister. Like many European countries, France has strong laws against hate speech and especially anti-Semitism in the wake of the Holocaust.

"Whenever I speak, you do not try to understand what I'm trying to say, you do not want to listen to me. You are looking for a pretext to forbid me. You consider me like Amedy Coulibaly when I am not any different from Charlie," he wrote.

In a posthumous video, Coulibaly had claimed allegiance to the Islamic State group. Brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi, who stormed Charlie Hebdo, had told survivors they were sent by al-Qaida in Yemen.

In an 11-minute video on Wednesday, Nasr al-Ansi, a top commander of Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP as the branch is known, says Yemen's al-Qaida branch "chose the target, laid out the plan and financed the operation."

Solidarity for Charlie Hebdo, although not uniform, was widespread in France and abroad. Defending his caricature of Muhammad on the cover, Charlie Hebdo cartoonist Renald Luzier, also known as Luz, argued that no exceptions should be made when it comes to freedom of expression.

He said that when Charlie Hebdo drew threats and attacks in the past, the reaction was often: "Yes, but you shouldn't do that (publish cartoons of Muhammad). Yes, but you deserved that."

"There should be no more `yes, but," he insisted.

On Wednesday, the new issue vanished from kiosks immediately. Some newsstand operators said they expected more copies to arrive on Thursday. One kiosk near the Champs Elysees, open at 6 a.m., was sold out by 6:05. Another, near Saint-Lazar, reported fisticuffs among customers.

"Distributing Charlie Hebdo, it warms my heart because we say to ourselves that he is still here, he's never left," said Jean-Baptiste Saidi, a van driver delivering copies well before dawn on Wednesday.

French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve was among those to get a copy before they sold out.

"I rediscovered their liberty of tone," he told France-Inter radio, describing the issue as one of "tender impertinence."

Associated Press writers Nicolas Vaux-Montagny and Milos Krivokapic contributed.

Flights to ease produce, dairy shortages at Pacific commissaries

The entrance to the commissary at Ramstein Air Base, Germany.
Joshua L. DeMotts/Stars and Stripes

By Seth Robson

Stars and Stripes

Published: January 14, 2015

YOKOTA AIR BASE, Japan — An emergency fly-in of fresh dairy products, produce and meats will be welcome news at U.S. bases in the Pacific.

The Defense Commissary Agency (DeCA) is airlifting the chilled products to alleviate ongoing shortages at stores in Korea, mainland Japan and Okinawa, according to a DeCA news release.

The stores have been experiencing shortages due to a labor dispute on West Coast docks that has delayed orders from the U.S. by 10 to 15 days, according to DeCA officials.

The yoghurt refrigerators at the Yokota Commissary were almost completely bare earlier this week. The fresh produce section was also sparse before a load of supplies arrived last week. Customers quickly snatched up new bags of salads and other items, leaving the shelves empty again.

Commercial contracted airlift will transport the chilled items for delivery to commissaries by Friday and Saturday. Other chilled items will continue to be transported by ship, DeCA’s statement said.

“For the time being, contingency airlifts of critical short shelf life items to Korea, mainland Japan and Okinawa is one part of the solution we’re working to improve the timely delivery of products to all our stores in the Pacific,” Agency Director and CEO Joseph H. Jeu said in a statement.

“We’re also ramping up reorders and looking at more local source options. And we also want our patrons to know that there will be no change in price for the airlifted products,” he said.

With shipments scheduled to arrive weekly, DeCA officials are asking customers to check store signs for updates. In addition, DeCA is advising customers to contact local store management about a product’s availability if it’s not on the shelf.

robson.seth@stripes.com

Twitter: @SethRobson1

Surging jet-stream winds hinder US-bound flights from Europe

NEW YORK — Winter weather is putting a kink in air travel plans as the North Atlantic jet stream hits peak intensity.

Stronger westerly headwinds for U.S.-bound flights are stretching out travel times, forcing some planes to stop for refueling. Trips such as London to New York, a busy business route, are running almost eight hours — 45 minutes longer than voyages in September.

Two Philadelphia-bound American Airlines flights, one from Brussels and the other from Amsterdam, had to touch down on Jan. 11 to refuel in Bangor, Maine, said Scott Ramsay, the carrier's managing director of its integrated operations center. The journey from Brussels took 9 hours and 16 minutes, about an hour more than three months earlier, according to industry data tracker FlightAware.

"You know you're going to be in trouble on the way back," Ramsay said. "You try to pick out ways that you can get around the headwind."

If you're headed in the opposite direction, you might catch one of the shortest flights on that route yet. A British Airways flight from New York to London earlier this week approached the speed of sound, buoyed by the jet stream, and the Boeing 777-200 made the journey in just over 5 hours, according to FlightAware.

The headwinds caused by the winter jet stream, which is at its most intense during this season when the differences in temperature between the equator and the North Pole are the greatest, have been ratcheting up in recent years.

Flights across the Atlantic to eastern U.S. cities in December 2013 averaged 19 minutes later than a year earlier, according to industry data tracker MasFlight.com. Travel times in December 2014 were similar to those in 2013, MasFlight's data from more than 1,300 flights a year showed.

With the threat of increasingly strong headwinds every winter, airlines face higher costs on those westbound flights with the use of extra fuel and the crew's time.

"When you were planning to fly non-stop, stopping for fuel costs money," said George Hamlin, president of Hamlin Transportation Consulting, who has more than 40 years of experience in commercial aviation and aerospace.

The jet stream is a river of winds that circles the earth from 30,000 to 40,000 feet (9,000 to 12,000 meters) above the surface and can reach speeds of 200 miles per hour or more, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Westbound flights over the Atlantic have to either fly north or south of the jet stream or else cruise at a lower altitude to avoid headwinds of about 200 miles (321 kilometers) per hour. Both options burn more fuel, forcing carriers to pre-plan fuel stops for some U.S.-bound flights.

"It's going to become a more difficult proposition over time for airlines to plan for the days in which there's simply no altitude and no routing that is going to get them from point A to point B, east to west, with the normal fuel loads that they would carry," according to John Nance, a former commercial and military pilot who is now a Seattle-based consultant.

The delays also put pressure on passengers racing to make connecting flights, causing some airlines like American Airlines to adjust block times in the winter for passenger connections, according to spokeswoman Andrea Huguely.

Since November, a strong low-pressure system over the polar regions and high pressure in the tropical Atlantic has created "a funneling effect" which is intensifying the jet stream, said Alex Sosnowski, a meteorologist at AccuWeather, Inc. in State College, Pennsylvania.

It isn't unusual to see these patterns set up over the course of the year, he said. There are indications that the forces that are enhancing the winds now may relax later this month.

— With assistance from Brian K. Sullivan in Boston.