F-35 Cost Continues to rise

Military acquisitions is the stinkiest pile of all the reeking heaps in Washington. This is from Airforce Magazine:

open quoteF-35 Costs Rise in Latest Pentagon Estimate: The estimated cost of the F-35 strike fighter program has grown by some $17 billion from $379 billion to $396 billion, according to the Pentagon’s latest reporting figures provided to Congress. According to the newly released selected acquisition reports, which reflect the period through December 2011, F-35 aircraft costs have increased by some $10.7 billion to $332 billion compared to the previous SARs that ran through December 2010. Among the reasons for the cost hike were the impacts of slowing the ramp-up of aircraft production, state the SARs. For example, the Air Force has extended its 1,763-aircraft production run by two years out to 2037, they state. F-35 engine costs went up by roughly $5.6 billion to $63.9 billion through December 2011, state the SARs. That was primarily due to an increase in initial engine spares and the cost impacts of the slower production ramp-up, they state.close quote

Nobel peace prize winner defends law criminalising homosexuality in Liberia

I can imagine progressives facing quite the dilema. On one hand, she is a woman, and black, and a Nobel laureate. On the other, she seems to hate gays. I’d be mighty entertained if her critics were denounces as racist and misogynist.

open quoteThe Nobel peace prize winner and president of Liberia, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, has defended a law that criminalises homosexual acts, saying: “We like ourselves just the way we are.”

In a joint interview with Tony Blair, who was left looking visibly uncomfortable by her remarks, Sirleaf told the Guardian: “We’ve got certain traditional values in our society that we would like to preserve.”

Liberian legislation classes “voluntary sodomy” as a misdemeanour punishable by up to one year in prison, but two new bills have been proposed that would target homosexuality with much tougher sentences.close quote

Iran moves away from Dollar

open quote“The dispute over Iran’s nuclear programme is nothing more than a convenient excuse for the US to use threats to protect the ‘reserve currency’ status of the dollar,” the newspaper, which calls itself the voice of the Islamic Revolution, said.

“Recall that Saddam [Hussein] announced Iraq would no longer accept dollars for oil purchases in November 2000 and the US-Anglo invasion occurred in March 2003,” the Times continued. “Similarly, Iran opened its oil bourse in 2008, so it is a credit to Iranian negotiating ability that the ‘crisis’ has not come to a head long before now.”

Iran has the third-largest oil reserves in the world and pricing oil in currencies other than dollars is a provocative move aimed at Washington. If Iran switches to the non-dollar terms for its oil payments, there could be a new oil price that would be denominated in euro, yen or even the yuan or rupee. close quote (Read more)

Israel trying to thwart UN fact-finding mission on settlements

open quoteJerusalem, March 19 (IANS) Israel is taking steps to prevent a Palestinian initiative at the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) to establish a fact-finding mission on West Bank settlements.

According to the initiative, slated for discussion Monday, a UN fact-finding team will be formed with the goal of examining the impacts of the Jewish settlements and construction in east Jerusalem on the Palestinian residents.

“This is an improper Palestinian attempt to escape from the uppermost need for peace negotiations,” Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor told Xinhua Monday.close quote (Read more)

NAACP & Teachers’ Union VS. Educating Kids

open quote“The teachers union in New York City got together with the NAACP and sued to essentially kick charter schools out of buildings,” says Bob Bowdon, founder of education reform homepage Choice Media TV.

Bowdon talks about the implications of this lawsuit and also about other education stories that his team has covered. He discusses one report addressing the racial achievement gap in Seattle, in which black kids from Africa performed better academically than black kids from America.

“This kind of data was shocking to see,” Bowdon says.close quote

Firm sells solar panels – to itself, taxpayers pay

open quoteA heavily subsidized solar company received a U.S. taxpayer loan guarantee to sell solar panels to itself.

First Solar is the company. The subsidy came from the Export-Import Bank, which President Obama and Harry Reid are currently fighting to extend and expand. The underlying issue is how Obama’s insistence on green-energy subsidies and export subsidies manifests itself as rank corporate welfare.close quote (Read more)

HR 347 ‘Trespass Bill’ Criminalizes Protest

open quote“Obama’s predictable signing of the latest assault on the Bill of Rights — namely — H.R. 347 (and it’s companion senate bill S. 1794); aka the “Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act of 2011.” Sounding more like an appropriations bill authorizing monies for federal grounds landscaping — this bill, better known to those in the DC beltway as the ‘Trespass Bill’ — potentially makes peaceable protest anywhere in the U.S. a federal felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

The legislators responsible for bringing this legislative excrement to life are Representative Tom Rooney (R-Fla.) in the House of Representatives and Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT.) leading the Senate version.

H. R. 347 makes protest of any type potentially a federal offense with anywhere from a year to 10 years in federal prison, providing it occurs in the presence of elites brandishing Secret Service protection, or during an officially defined ‘National Special Security Event’ (NSSE). NSSEs , ( an invention of Bill Clinton) are events which have been deemed worthy of Secret Service protection, which previously received no such treatment.close quote (Read more)

Russia Considering Allowing NATO a Transit Hub to Afghanistan

From Air Force Magazine online:

open quote Russia Considering Allowing NATO a Transit Hub: Russia’s legislature will consider a proposal to allow US and allied airlifters use of a Russian air base to ferry supplies to Afghanistan, according to Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov. “We want those who are fending off threats directed at Russia to efficiently fulfill their tasks,” stated Lavrov, reported the Associated Press. “We are helping the coalition to proceed from our own interests,” he added, noting that Russia may allow NATO to access the airfield near Ulyanovsk, but not station troops there. Since Pakistan barred NATO from using the over-land supply route from the port of Karachi last November, NATO relies heavily on air and rail corridors permitted through Russia. “Clearly we welcome the cooperation we have with Russia already on transit to and from Afghanistan,” said NATO spokeswoman Oana Lugescu last week.close quote

German Taxpayers to partially-subsidize Nuclear Submarines for Israel

open quoteGermany will send a sixth nuclear-capable submarine to Israel and will subsidize the cost, German Defense Minister Thomas de Maiziere announced on Tuesday after meeting his Israeli counterpart Ehud Barak in Berlin.

The sale comes after years of negotiations that Israeli media reported were stalled due to tensions over Israel’s continued construction of Jewish settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories. Berlin reportedly agreed to the sale after Israel released millions of dollars in withheld customs duties to the Palestinian Authority last year.

Three German-made Dolphin-class submarines are already in use in the Israeli navy, delivered in 1999 and 2000. Two other submarines have been ordered and are under construction, slated for delivery later this year.

De Maiziere, right, did not specify how much Germany would subsidize the submarine

De Maiziere confirmed that Germany would subsidize the cost of the sixth submarine but declined to give details on how much. Sources in Berlin said last November that a third of the cost would be covered, totaling a maximum of 135 billion euros ($178 million).close quote (Read more)

Poland Leads Wave of Communist-Era Reckoning

open quoteFor all that Poland has accomplished since the fall of the Iron Curtain, it has long resisted fully coming to terms with its Communist past — the oppression, the spying, even the massacres. Society preferred to forget, to move on.

So it may come as a surprise that Poland and many of its neighbors in Central and Eastern Europe have decided the time is right to deal with the unfinished business. Suddenly there is a wave of accounting in the form of government actions and cultural explorations, some seeking closure, others payback.

A court in Poland last month found that the Communist leaders behind the imposition of martial law in December 1981 were part of a “criminal group.” Bulgaria’s president is trying to purge ambassadors who served as security agents. The Macedonian government is busy hunting for collaborators, and Hungary’s new Constitution allows legal action against former Communists.

On Sunday in Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel nominated as the next president a former pastor and East German activist, Joachim Gauck, who turned the files of the Ministry for State Security — better known as the Stasi — into a permanent archive.

“In order to defend ourselves in the future against other totalitarian regimes, we have to understand how they worked in the past, like a vaccine,” said Lukasz Kaminski, the president of Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance. Across Central and Eastern Europe, a consensus of silence appears to have ended, one that never muted all criticism and discussion but did muffle voices crying out for a long-awaited reckoning. close quote (Read more)

Putin’s fabled tiger encounter was PR stunt, say environmentalists

open quoteIt was Vladimir Putin’s much flaunted love of animals that brought him face to face with a tiger four years ago. Deep in the woods of Russia’s far east, the powerful leader was on a mission to help save the endangered amur tiger, when one of the fierce beasts appeared out of nowhere and attacked. Putin saved the day – and at least one television crew – when he intercepted its approach with a swift shot from a tranquilliser gun.

That, at least, was the story presented by state-run television, in lengthy, fawning reports that aired repeatedly after the incident in 2008.

But now, four years later, environmentalists and bloggers are presenting evidence that the tiger Putin shot was no wild tiger at all – and that the animal died as a result of the stunt.

The scandal is the latest to show the cracks in the president-elect’s carefully crafted image, as his popularity continues to fall despite a recent election win that critics say was manipulated by fraud.close quote (Read more)

Verisign seizes .com domain registered via foreign Registrar on behalf of US Authorities.

open quoteYesterday Forbes broke the news that Canadian Calvin Ayre and partners who operate the Bodog online gambling empire have been indicted in the U.S., and in a blog post Calvin Ayre confirmed that their bodog.com domain had been seized by homeland security. As reported in Forbes (hat tip to The Domains for the cite),

According to the six-page indictment filed by Rosenstein, Ayre worked with Philip, Ferguson and Maloney to supervise an illegal gambling business from June 2005 to January 2012 in violation of Maryland law. The indictment focuses on the movement of funds from accounts outside the U.S., in Switzerland, England, Malta, and Canada, and the hiring of media resellers and advertisers to promote Internet gambling.

“Sports betting is illegal in Maryland, and federal law prohibits bookmakers from flouting that law simply because they are located outside the country,” Rosenstein said in a statement. “Many of the harms that underlie gambling prohibitions are exacerbated when the enterprises operate over the Internet without regulation.”

That is a truly scary quote but we’ll emphasize that: “The indictment focuses on the movement of funds outside the U.S.” and that you can’t just “flout US law” by not being in the US. What also needs to be understood is that the domain bodog.com was registered to via a non-US Registrar, namely Vancouver’s domainclip.close quote (Read more)