FROM URUKNET

Iraqi government to purchase armored limousines worth $75 million for members of parliament

By Shaymaa Adel Azzaman, January 21, 2011 

The Iraqi government has decided to spend nearly $75 million from the country’s oil revenues to purchase armored limousines, one for each of the 325 members of parliament.

The government says the vehicles are needed because the parliamentarians are targets of attack by insurgents and 'terrorists.’

The high salaries and perks senior Iraqi officials get are fueling anger in Iraq and there has been a storm of protest from local media.

The benefits have turned them into a special class with body guards, armored vehicles and specially imported power generators to light, heat and cool their homes.

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OPPOSING VIEWS

Drug-Friendly Netherlands to Close 8 Prisons -- Not Enough Crime

News by Marijuana Policy Project
(May 26, 2009) in Society / Drug Law
By Bruce Mirken

For years prohibitionists, including our own Drug Enforcement Administration, have claimed — falsely — that the tolerant marijuana policies of the Netherlands have made that nation a nest of crime and drug abuse. They may have trouble wrapping their little brains around this:

The Dutch government is getting ready to close eight prisons because they don’t have enough criminals to fill them. Officials attribute the shortage of prisoners to a declining crime rate.


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FROM WIRED DANGER ROOM


By the end of the year, the U.S. Army will leave Iraq. But Iraq isn’t going to leave the U.S. Army.

American soldiers spent seven years patrolling the urban neighborhoods of Iraq; its troops battled insurgents there block-by-block and house-by-house. Now that the Army is getting out of Iraq, it wants to make sure its urban combat skills don’t wither away. So it today it gave Lockheed Martin a contract worth up to $287 million to build Urban Operations Training Systems — essentially, giant simulation facilities and modules to help soldiers get ready for life in the big, bad city.

Versions of those training systems can be as simple as shipping containers tricked out to resemble multi-story houses and arranged in village formations, so soldiers can practice how to seize a building without causing needless damage. The Army’s got an entire 1000-acre facility in Indiana it uses to train soldiers in urban combat.

The contract will include structures like those, which are known as Mobile Military Operations on Urban Terrain systems, or Mobile MOUTs. Lockheed says it’ll help soldiers drill on everything “from traditional war fighting tactics, to nation-building, to overseas contingency operations.” Overseas contingency operations is the new bureaucratic and budgetary term for what we used to call “wars.”


A statement from the company heralding the deal said that the new training systems were likely to include measures to simulate homemade bombs, an indicator that the Army doesn’t think the threat from the signature weapon of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars is likely to diminish. That in turn has implications for other stuff the Army wants to buy — especially the new Ground Combat Vehicle, the service’s next-generation transporter. The Army and the Marine Corps have faced criticism for buying so many armored Humvees and Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, on the assumption that they’ll rot in the motor pool if troops don’t have to roll through terrain laced with homemade bombs in the future. That may not be a chance the Army wants to take.


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FROM WIRED SHILLS

Arrr! Pirates Take Up to $12 Billion Worth of Booty

Don’t let the dilapidated fishing boats or the rusting AK-47s fool you. Pirates mean serious business. A maritime industry group crunched the numbers and found that the measures companies and governments take to avoid and combat the piracy threat cost between $7 billion and $12 billion every year.

The One Earth Future Foundation’s Oceans Beyond Piracy project documents exploding costs in piracy-related actions (.pdf). Ransoms paid to Somali pirates totaled $238 million in 2010 — the worst year for piracy on record, according to the International Chamber of Commerce.

The average payout to ransom a hijacked ship was $5.4 million last year, up from just $150,000 in 2005. (Wired magazine analyzed the Somali pirate business model in 2009.)

And ransoms aren’t even the lion’s share of piracy’s costs to global maritime commerce. Insuring ships passing near piracy-prone areas like the Gulf of Aden costs between $460 million and $3.2 billion. Naval presence to protect merchant shipping costs another $2 billion.

Regional economies lose up to $1.25 billion annually. Rerouting ships to less pirate-prone waters costs up to $3 billion. (Hat tip: GCaptain.)


Oceans Beyond Piracy readily admits that its estimate is imprecise. Piracy doesn’t have a clear impact on every economic measurement related to global maritime shipping. The overall economic downturn imposes its own costs on everything from insurance to local business impact.

What’s more, it’s “difficult to quantify the value of … world seaborne trade in monetary terms,” according to the International Maritime Association. But it’s undoubtedly massive: One figure the association provides shows that the operation of maritime ships — and there are 50,000 commercial vessels on the seas — produces $380 billion in freight rates, itself equivalent to 5 percent of global trade.

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FROM ECANADANOW
China Sends Troops Into North Korea


China used to have a presence in North Korea and the last of those troops left in 1994. Now word has come that a deal being Beijing and Pyongyang has made it so the Chinese will have a troop presence back in North Korea.

South Korean officials have been on high alert and according to North Korean officials, they have stated that they have been in a state of war with South Korea and the United States. This is what is being believed to be the reason that China has come back to the North.

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FROM JEWISH WORLD

'Gentile sperm leads to barbaric offspring'


Rabbi Dov Lior says Jewish Law prohibits sterile couples from conceiving using non-Jew's sperm, as it causes adverse traits. On subject of single mothers he says, 'Child cannot be 100% normal'

Rabbi Dov Lior, a senior authority on Jewish law in the Religious Zionism movement, asserted recently that a Jewish woman should never get pregnant using sperm donated by a non-Jewish man – even if it is the last option available.
 
According to Lior, a baby born through such an insemination will have the "negative genetic traits that characterize non-Jews." Instead, he advised sterile couples to adopt.
 
After years of loneliness and failed dates, as yearning for child becomes intolerable, increasing number of national-religious women decide to take their fate in their hands, start family as single mothers while maintaining religious way of life. New phenomenon already dividing sector, irking rabbis

Lior addressed the issue during a women's health conference held recently at the Puah Institute, a fertility clinic. His conservative stance negated a ruling widely accepted by rabbis, which states that sperm donated by a non-Jew is preferable to that of an anonymous Jew, who might pose a genealogical risk.
 
"Sefer HaChinuch (a book of Jewish law) states that the character traits of the father pass on to the son," he said in the lecture. "If the father in not Jewish, what character traits could he have? Traits of cruelty, of barbarism! These are not traits that characterize the people of Israel."
 
Lior added identified Jews as merciful, shy and charitable – qualities that he claimed could be inherited. "A person born to Jewish parents, even if they weren't raised on the Torah – there are things that are passed on (to him) in the blood, it's genetic," he explained. "If the father is a gentile, then the child is deprived of these things.

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From the independent

US forced to import bullets from Israel as troops use 250,000 for every rebel killed


US forces have fired so many bullets in Iraq and Afghanistan - an estimated 250,000 for every insurgent killed - that American ammunition-makers cannot keep up with demand. As a result the US is having to import supplies from Israel.

A government report says that US forces are now using 1.8 billion rounds of small-arms ammunition a year. The total has more than doubled in five years, largely as a result of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as changes in military doctrine.

"The Department of Defense's increased requirements for small- and medium-calibre ammunitions have largely been driven by increased weapons training requirements, dictated by the army's transformation to a more self-sustaining and lethal force - which was accelerated after the attacks of 11 September, 2001 - and by the deployment of forces to conduct recent US military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq," said the report by the General Accounting Office (GAO).

Estimating how many bullets US forces have expended for every insurgent killed is not a simple or precisely scientific matter. The former head of US forces in Iraq, General Tommy Franks, famously claimed that his forces "don't do body counts".

But senior officers have recently claimed "great successes" in Iraq, based on counting the bodies of insurgents killed. Maj-Gen Rick Lynch, the top US military spokesman in Iraq, said 1,534 insurgents had been seized or killed in a recent operation in the west of Baghdad. Other estimates from military officials suggest that at least 20,000 insurgents have been killed in President George Bush's "war on terror".

John Pike, director of the Washington military research group GlobalSecurity.org, said that, based on the GAO's figures, US forces had expended around six billion bullets between 2002 and 2005. "How many evil-doers have we sent to their maker using bullets rather than bombs? I don't know," he said.

"If they don't do body counts, how can I? But using these figures it works out at around 300,000 bullets per insurgent. Let's round that down to 250,000 so that we are underestimating."

Pointing out that officials say many of these bullets have been used for training purposes, he said: "What are you training for? To kill insurgents."

Kathy Kelly, a spokeswoman for the peace group Voices in the Wilderness, said Mr Bush believed security for the American people could come only from the use of force. Truer security would be achieved if the US developed fairer relations with other countries and was not involved in the occupation of Iraq. The President, said Ms Kelly, should learn from Israel's experience of "occupying the Palestinians" rather than buying its ammunition.

The GAO report notes that the three government-owned, contractor-operated plants that produce small- and medium-calibre ammunition were built in 1941.

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