Array It is more than 10,000 soldiers behind its year-to-date goal of almost 45,000 recruits, and has missed its recruiting target during at least 17 of the last 18 months.Some governors have complained about shortages of troops and equipment in their Guard units, prompting the Guard to set a goal of keeping half of each state’s Guard forces at home at any given time.Guard troops make up more than one-third of the soldiers in Iraq, numbering six brigades plus a division headquarters. Officials are becoming less hopeful they will make it, even though the summer is considered the high season for recruiting, as recent high school graduates look for jobs.The Army Reserve has recruited 15,540 soldiers, or 79 percent of its goal of 19,753 at this point in the year.With the tremendous shortfall of new recruits for the President’s Glorious Mission to Democratize the Middle East by Blowing The Hell Out Of It, now is the time, more than ever, to encourage those young College Republican war supporters to visit their National Guard Recruiter.
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First the Downing Street Memos, now this:LONDON, July 10 (Reuters) - A leaked document from Britain’s Defence Ministry says the British and U.S. governments are planning to reduce their troop levels in Iraq by more than half by mid-2006, the Mail on Sunday newspaper reported.Now I hope this is true, but I remember hearing reports of us lowering troop levels right before the 2004 election as well, and it didn’t happen. You could say that 95% of American counties don’t have a problem with gang violence, either, but that doesn’t lessen the impact of the gang violence in the 5% that do have a problem.The United States and Britain have the two largest contingents of foreign forces in Iraq and the memo described the impact a reduction of U.S. and British forces might have on other allied troops.Well, two of the top three. Marine Corps reservists are facing similar constraints.A main reason for the shortages is that more and more of these troops who have been involuntarily mobilized are nearing their 24-month maximum call-up limit set by the Bush administration, military personnel specialists say.By next fall, well have expended our ability to use National Guard brigades as one of the principal forces,” said Gen. H Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard Bureau, promised governors that he would keep at least half of each state’s guard troops at home for use in state missions.In Oregon, another state where National Guard units are often mobilized to fight forest fires, fewer helicopters are also causing worry.
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the vast majority are from the Army Reserve and Army National Guard.But as these returning troops settle back into their civilian lives, the Army is running perilously low on its Reserve and National Guard soldiers who largely fill certain critical support jobs, like military police and civil affairs officers and truck drivers. Marine Corps reservists are facing similar constraints.A main reason for the shortages is that more and more of these troops who have been involuntarily mobilized are nearing their 24-month maximum call-up limit set by the Bush administration, military personnel specialists say.The Army says it has found ways to handle the dwindling pool of reservists eligible to fill the support jobs, but some members of Congress, senior retired Army officers and federal investigators are less sanguine, warning that barring a reduction in the Pentagon’s requirement to supply 160,000 forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, or a change in its mobilization policy, the Army will exhaust the supply of soldiers in critical specialties. The Young Republicans should list these specialties and urge members to study these fields so they can honor their Great AWOL Leader and be ready to fight for freedom and the American SUV.To fill the pivotal support jobs for deployments to Iraq, Army and Pentagon planners are increasingly turning to the Navy and Air Force to provide truck drivers and security personnel.
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The Indian justice system is legendary for its delays and diversions. But changes are finally on the way.By Jason OverdorfJuly 18 issue - Sunila Awasthi, a 36-year-old New Delhi woman, isn’t a big fan of India’s justice system. It’s easy to see why: when Awasthi was 10, her father died. Her uncles then legally forced Awasthi’s mother out of the family home. The mother battled in court for eight years to claim her husband’s assets before she settled and took her two daughters to live in the house of her own father, who had died around the same time. There was only one problem: except for the single, dilapidated room in which Awasthi’s grandfather had lived, the house was occupied, and the tenants refused to leave. With no other choice, the women moved into the old room, a virtual cell. They then went to court again, to evict the squatters. It should have been an open-and-shut caseâand by the odd standards of the Indian court system, it was. Only one lawyer died during the course of litigation. Only four high-court judges passed the case on to colleagues. And the matter was resolved in only 16 years. We were one of the lucky ones, Awasthi says. That’s no exaggeration. There is a joke in India that the closest anyone will come to experiencing eternity is the country’s court system. The problem is a strange aversion to settling cases. Judges pass them along to somebody else, and rarely dismiss lawsuits, no matter how frivolous. The result is judicial gridlock: India’s lower courts have a backlog of about 20 million civil and criminal cases. An additional 3.2 million cases are pending before the high courts, while the Supreme Court has about 20,000 old cases on the docket. Many of those cases will take far longer than 16 years to resolve, and if the Awasthis lived in a virtual cell while their case ground on, at least they weren’t literally incarcerated, like the millions of undertrials who languish in prisons, often for longer than the maximum sentence possible for their alleged crimes, while they await a trial date. But now, experts say, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is committed to fixing the problem. And the judiciary itself, long criticized as insular and resistant to change, seems finally to have concluded that changes are needed. R. C. Lahoti, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, has declared that 2005 will be the year that India reduces its massive case backlog. There will be no place for any corruption or indolence in the system, he vowed last September. I mean business. His choice of words was telling. Whatever moral imperative exists, the chief reason that India is getting serious about streamlining the legal system is economic. Dysfunctional courts increase the risks to foreign investors, tortuous rules slow the rise of new enterprises and murky laws regarding land ownership and other issues stifle the growth of industries like construction and retail. Indian business is lobbying for change; the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, for instance, recently published a report that bemoaned the regulatory maze that confronts every commercial project, contributing to delays and cost overruns and providing one explanation why India receives only a tiny fraction of the foreign direct investment deposited in China. Speedy judicial resolution will be one of the keys to making India a competitive economy, conducive to growth and foreign investment, says Nandan Nilekani, CEO of Bangalore-based software giant Infosys. Singh’s reform-focused government is listening. This is a new climate, says Law Minister Hansraj Bhardwaj. If economic reforms are to succeed, we should have a compatible justice administration, where cases are not delayed. The reasons for India’s judicial debacle are legion. For one thing, India has fewer judges per capita than almost any country in the world. In 2000, India had fewer than three judges per 100,000 people, according to a World Bank studyâless than half the number available in 30 selected countries. And the state itself, which accounts for 60 percent of court cases, is overly litigious. Branches of the government are often suing each other over contracts, land and other matters. The system also lacks the infrastructure to handle a large caseload and the documentation that goes with it. Only the Supreme Court is computerized. New initiatives are beginning to help. In 1995, when Singh was Finance minister and Bhardwaj was serving his first term as Law minister, they helped introduce new methods of out-of-court dispute resolution, including conciliation, mediation and arbitration. Such decisions are binding, and they’ve helped slash the number of commercial disputes that go to litigation. The out-of-court settlement movement lost steam when Singh’s Congress party was defeated at the polls in 1996, but it’s now being cranked up again. Likewise, Bhardwaj’s predecessor as Law minister, Arun Jaitley of the Bharatiya Janata Party, established some 1,700 so-called fast-track courts to resolve criminal cases where the accused had been jailed for long periods while they awaited trial. Since 2000, these courts have helped to clear hundreds of thousands of old cases. In addition, this year the criminal-justice system will adopt the concept of plea bargaining for the first timeâa key feature of the U.S. court system. And the agenda calls for the computerization of all of India’s courts over the next three years. Perhaps the biggest sign of the administration’s commitment to judicial reform is the amount of money it’s spending. Earlier, it was very difficult if you asked for 100 or 200 crores [3 million to 5 million] for computerization, says Bhardwaj. Now the prime minister has given me 1, 000 crores [27 million]. In the next phase, Bhardwaj hopes to establish more fast-track courts, to require every court to have an in-house conciliation program for litigants before their case goes to a judge and to set up additional peoples courts” to help resolve petty disputes arising from marital arguments, traffic accidents, billing errors and so on through mediation. Ambition is not accomplishment, of course. The latest report from the parliamentary committee responsible for evaluating the Law Ministrys budgetary requests excoriates the government for its lackadaisical approach to setting up peoples courts, noting that only three (of 28) states have set up permanent peoples courts for public-utility disputes. It questions delays and cost overruns related to Bhardwajs International Centre for Alternative Dispute Resolution, the centerpiece of the mediation and arbitration program. And it attacks the government for failing to fill bench vacancies at all levels of the judiciary. While paying lip service to the need to increase the number of courts, the judiciary has yet to fill two vacancies in the Supreme Court and 141 vacancies in the high courts, the report says. But some progress is better than none. The criminal courts may be a shambles and arcane legal procedures may add 10 percent to 20 percent to the cost of doing business, but according to Bibek Debroy, head of the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation think tank, the resolution of civil cases has improved, primarily because of the amendments to the arbitration law pushed through in 1996. “Computerization, infrastructure, all of that has helped,” he says. Moreover, although Indias courts are exceedingly slow, theyre generally fair. “Foreign investors do appreciate that it is a fair, rule-based system, and not ad hoc,” says Nilekani of Infosys. DaimlerChrysler India CEO Hans-Michael Huber agrees. “The judicial system works too slowly, and the backlog of cases is a big burden. But on the other hand, at least it works.” Sort of. While Sunila Awasthi is now a successful corporate lawyer, with a nice house and slick new SUV, the young judge who banged the gavel in their favor has since quit the bench in disgust and gone into private practice. Hes just one more casualty of Indian justice. © 2005 Newsweek, Inc.
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-ne Find this book in the Hawley LibraryFirst, a confession: I don’t know anything about history starting immediately following World War II. Valerie not only shares the nitty gritty details of what this is like–to know your whole life you are going to serve in the potentially deadly military when you are still very young, and the details of her military service—but also what it is like to live in the country of Isreal, and how many people have such mixed feelings about the whole thing. But I definitely learned a lot.It’s a fairly short book, and also in it Valerie is also typical teenager with friends and loves and complicated and simple relationships, just wanting to have some fun, just trying to figure out her place in the world.
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-ne Yesterday, i laid out a couple of culprits for the perpetual selloff in volatility, namely technology and decimalization. We hit 13 last week, i still wouldn’t consider that a spike, but when we hit 18 this spring, maybe that represented way more fear and panic than i gave it credit for.I still think the VXO has a floor not much further down.
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He then addresses Bush, George, what do you believe in?Bush replies, I believe youre in my chair!”God, Gore and Clinton gasped!!âHoly BushShit!!â God screams out.âItâs Satan!â God says covering Hir smile.God, Gore and Clinton start laughing spontaniously.Bushit Made it to heaven, turning hell into a happy place and heaven gets a big laugh for internity.*** Someone Create this mind-Image â âBush frozen in time, in heaven, on a pedastal that says âClownâ *** GROK?LINKs: Yellow Book discussYellow Book Hir-page****************11:11am, the day after you left, rat was in trap. ants, ants everywhere….and wimpy monsoon late starting…so goes the earth:Humans are damaging the planet at an unprecedented rate and raising risks of abrupt collapses in nature that could spur disease, deforestation or “dead zones” in the seas.Rising human population had polluted or over-exploited two thirds of the ecological systems on which life depends, ranging from clean air to fresh water, in the past 50 years.”At the heart of this assessment is a stark warning,” “Human activity is putting such strain on the natural functions of Earth that the ability of the planets ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for granted, Ten to 30 percent of mammal, bird and amphibian species were already threatened with extinction, according to the assessment, the biggest review of the planet’s life support systems.Over the past 50 years, humans have changed ecosystems more rapidly and extensively than in any comparable time in human history, largely to meet rapidly growing demands for food, fresh water, timber, fiber and fuel, the report said.This has resulted in a substantial and largely irreversible loss in the diversity of life on earth, it added.
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