The United States and its allies are slowly beginning to pull out of Afghanistan. While several thousand troops will remain, the total will be nowhere near the peak figure a few years ago. This graphic from the Washington Post details just how this transition has been occurring.
Credit for the piece goes to Richard Johnson.
Today is Armistice Day, alternately known as Remembrance Day or Veterans Day. Originally the date remembered the armistice that ended World War I (hence those two names). The war ended at the 11th hour on the 11th day of the 11th month. But in the preceding years, millions of Europeans died along with just over a hundred thousand Americans. (We entered the war quite late.) This had a dramatic impact on the populations of European countries. In the United Kingdom, the Office of National Statistics put together a page for Remembrance Day 2014 that looks at four charts detailing the changes to the UK’s population structure. Suffice it to say there were lasting effects.
Credit for the piece goes to the ONS graphics department.
This weekend the Wall Street Journal published an article that combined my interest in data visualisation with my interest in naval ships. The article looks at the growth of the Chinese nuclear submarine programme. And alongside the article are maps, charts, illustrations, and a narrated video that support the written word.
Credit for the piece goes to Alberto Cervantes and the Wall Street Journal’s graphics department.
Today you are going to get two posts. The first is this, which is a break from the week’s theme. But news stories happen. The second will be back to regular programming at the regular time. Basically, the Swedish government is reporting that a foreign submarine is operating within its waters and the available evidence points to Russia. I have seen some ridiculous claims that one of Russia’s largest submarines is in trouble there. But I highly doubt that. And here is why.
Today’s post is a graphic from the New York Times that looks at Russia’s hold on energy across Europe. I’m not terribly keen on this particular graphic for a few reasons. First, the design needs to incorporate the actual datapoint so the reader can compare across countries. Comparing the height of each black bar to each other is difficult at best.
Secondly, the data excludes the energy trade between European Union countries. And that strikes me as potentially quite a lot. Just because a country is importing from another EU country does not mean it is importing less.
Credit for the piece goes to the New York Times graphics department.
Last week many American observed 11 September in remembrance of the terror attacks that brought down the Twin Towers, a section of the Pentagon, and four airliners in total. So this week we are going to see some fantastic work from Periscopic that highlights several other terror groups operating in the world across the last few decades.
The charts work as a timeline from 1970 through 2013 and then vertically from January through December. Above and below the timeline, respectively, are the numbers of people killed and wounded. When shown as small multiples, the overall piece can show you which groups have been active and lethal, active but without lots of fatal attacks, and those that are fading out or fading in.
Credit for the piece goes to Periscopic.
In a piece of big news about Ukraine yesterday, the French government announced that it was halting the completion of the sale of two Mistral warships to Russia. The first such ship, the Sevastopol (yes, named after said city in Crimea), was due to be delivered in just over a month’s time. The two ships (the other named Vladivostok) would have given Russia the ability to launch amphibious invasions. The reason why this action was not taken earlier? Jobs. The construction of the two ships in French shipyards are a boon to the French economy. But after the recent “incursion” of Russian troops into Donetsk and Luhansk, Paris ultimately reconsidered the deal.
The Wall Street journal provides the graphic illustrating just how potent one of the ships would be.
Credit for the piece goes to the Wall Street Journal graphics department.
For those of you unaware, the United States became involved yet again in Iraq. This time, air dropping humanitarian supplies to Yazidi refugees near Mount Sinjar in northern Iraq. (Also, we have started bombing ISIS positions near Irbil, a large city in Kurdish-controlled Iraq.) In today’s post we have the Washington Post and its look at just what is going on around Sinjar.
Credit for the piece goes to Loveday Morris and Richard Johnson.
I have done quite a fair bit of coverage on Ukraine. It is a terrible story, but I have also been personally interested in Eastern Europe for awhile. But Ukraine is not the only story in the world, we have seen Gaza erupt in flames. But with the recent, temporary ceasefire, we have been able to calculate the physical and human cost of the Israeli airstrikes and incursions. The New York Times in this graphic looks at the destruction wrought by Israel in one neighbourhood of Gaza City.
Credit for the piece goes to the New York Times’ graphics department.
The Boeing 777 jetliner was not the first nor even at this point the latest aircraft shot down over eastern Ukraine. Just yesterday, two Sukhoi Su-25 aircraft were shot down—the Ukrainian government claims from medium-altitude surface-to-air missiles fired from within Russia. While I was working on drawing something up to catalogue just what has been shot down, I stumbled upon this piece from the Washington Post that does just that.
Credit for the piece goes to Gene Thorp.
