Emergency Preparedness / Recommendations: Food & Beverages 2

 Recently I noticed that the two big discount markets here in Germany (Aldi/Lidl) provide offers on cartons of staple canned foods. I would recommend such offers to purchase sufficient long lasting vegetables & fruits.

For reference purposes I attached the two offers, both starting next week (i.e. calendar week 5 of 2022).

Aldi Süd: 

Lidl: 

UPDATE ALDI SÜD STARTING 21. OCTOBER 2022

Emergency Preparedness / Recommendations: Food & Beverages

 Based on the official recommendations (see this Checklist) of German Ministry of Civil Protection.

Update: G36 in Libya

A few days after my post mentioning the G36 among others being found in Libya, this topic gained widespread attention in German media.
According to this article in German newspaper "Die Zeit" affidavit by a witness, claiming that the weapons are marked with the German coat of arms (the eagle) as well as the mark from the weapon testing center in Ulm, Germany. There every gun has to be test fired and get approved by being marked with a stamp before they get into trading. This is required by federal law and the testing centers are run by the state.
Furthermore the witness claims to have investigated into involvement of the German agency BND into the dealings. However he said he couldnt find prove for this allegations.
Yet in my opinion there must have been involvement by some official authority, since an export of such weapons by H&K alone is not possible to think of. HK is know for acting on the borderline, like this export of G36 into Mexicos troubled areas, but illegal arms trading without government backing would be deadly for the enterprise and therefore unlikely.
Defense minister de Maizière said regarding the question whether Germany has to be troubled about weapon-trading with Libya: "After all what I know: No". This is somehow a evading statement.
I expect media to keep pressure on this subjects, additionally various law suits have been filed, one by HK himself, other by anti-gun-movements.

The guns themselves seem to come from Gaddafis residence in Tripolis, where they have been discovered by the rebels after storming the compound. It remains unclear, whether they were actually in combat.
The weapon seems to be a G36KV, former G36KE, also G36KurzVariante, i.e. short variant, being produced for export.

SA-7 aka. Strela-2 sprouting up in Libya

Probably a much more troubling development than the vast collection of different handguns (see my post here) is the increasing number of MANPADS creeping out of Qaddafi numerous weapon caches.

The soviet infrared-guided surface-to-air missile SA-7 can for example be seen in action in this picture or this one.
Especially alarming to me was this picture of a warehouse, clearly showing dozens of SA-7s ready to take.

The SA-7 is cold-war tech, introduced in the late 1960s, so nowadays its kind of outdated. It will have a hard time against combat jets, the infrared will get easily confused by so called flares, being emitted by the targeted aircraft. Those flares basically consist of magnesium stripes, who will burn at very high temperature when ignited. This way the signature of the aircrafts engine exhaust will be covered from the infrared-guided missile.
Additionally those missiles only have a limited time-frame before they expire, depending on the storage - there electronic is quite sensitive.
I have not been able to seek out how old those weaponry could be, yet i guess the arsenals got stocked up from time to time, whenever Qaddafi got the chance to acquire some.
Another point is that training is necessary, those missiles are not easy to handle. But apparently there is enough material for practice.

While there performance is poor against combat jets, they still are deadly to civil airplanes as well as helicopters. There have been attacks by al Qaeda in this style. With the rebels to be said having jihadists in there lines, they might spread this tools towards the global terror hot-spots.
This article is about Libyan SA-7 reaching the black market in Mali and also talks about a (key-) weapon buyback program.

Libya: Modern firearms in the post-Gaddafi era

As sporadic fighting still goes on while former strongman and dictator Gaddafi continues to be on the run, many interesting pictures out of Libya can be seen:

The G36:
German made from famous H&K, used as standard rifle in the German army (since 1995) and the Spanish (1999).

Pictures can be seen here: Guy carrying brand new guns 
and here: Guy standing and again in action (the other rifle looks like a AK 101- 105 type, also quite new).

The producer H&K issued a official statement saying they didnt ship G36s to Libya at all.
My guess is that they are being produced with licenses from HK  in a plant in Saudi-Arabia, using a loop-hole in gun regulatory rules. Whether HK knows about this is uncertain, but clearly one could think of such happenings before giving licenses. German government is aware of this, however an allowance for the export of the license was not necessary.
The G36 uses standard 5.56 x 45 mm NATO ammunition, so supply might be difficult to the fact, that most of Gaddafis arsenal consists of soviet 7,62 x 39 mm or 5,45 x 39 mm.

The FN F2000:
Belgian made assault rifle, bullpup design, first publicly displayed in 2001.
Pictures can be found in this blog, on this image, aswell as here. All pictures seem to come from Misurata (Misrata).
The shown configuration comes with the 40 mm under-barrel grenade launcher. Ammunition again is 5,56 NATO, same as G36.
This weapons are part of a dealing with the Belgian government in 2008. According to this article 400 F2000 were to be delivered.

The FN P90:
Same producer as above (FN Herstal, Belgium). Introduced in 1990.
Only seen this image so far.
Part of the same deal as the F2000 in 2008. 367 of this submachine-guns were to be delivered.
Since FN developed a special high-velocity ammunition (FN 5.7×28mm) for this gun, sustaining supply will be difficult, not to talk about spare-parts, magazines, etc.

Due to the fact, that ammunition supply will be getting tighter (especially for the P90), it is most likely for them to become showcase weapons.
More attention should be payed to all this AK clones flooding the country.
For further reading: Globalpost article.