Thursday, March 19, 2015

Women could join British infantry by 2016

www.bbc.com
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December 19th, 2014

Defence Secretary Michael Fallon: "There should not be any bar to serving in the armed forces on the basis of gender"

Women could be allowed to serve in British infantry units for the first time by 2016.

An Army review of the ban on women serving in close combat has concluded the change would not have an "adverse effect" on troop cohesion.

But more research is needed to assess the "physiological demands", a review for the Ministry of Defence (MoD) said.

Defence Secretary Michael Fallon said roles "should be determined by ability and not gender".

He said he hoped to introduce the change "subject to some final research over the next year or so." Initial findings are expected in 2016.

'Real desire'

BBC defence correspondent Jonathan Beale said military sources have told the BBC there is now a "real desire" among ministers to end the restrictions.

Kevan Jones, Labour's shadow armed forces minister, welcomed the move.

British women have already served in places like Afghanistan, in support roles

Currently women can serve on the front line, but not where the primary aim is to "close with and kill the enemy".

This means women are not permitted to serve in the infantry or armoured corps.

MOD

To join an infantry unit at recruitment level, men have to complete run of 1.5 miles in 12 minutes 45 seconds.

They then have to complete an annual fitness assessment which involves carrying 25kg, plus a rifle and helmet, over a distance of just under eight miles in two hours, the MoD said.

Fitness standards: full MoD list.

Col Mike Dewar, a military historian who served in Cyprus, Borneo and Northern Ireland, told the BBC the "battle fitness test" also required the infantry to "pick up another man, with his rifle and equipment, and carry him in a fireman's lift 200 metres."

He said upper body strength in "99.9% of women" would make it "virtually impossible" to pass the tests.

Countries who currently allow women to participate in close combat roles include the United States, Canada, Denmark and New Zealand.

Former army officer Ashley Merry: ""Would I want to be serving alongside women who wanted to be in face-to-face combat?"

Maj Judith Webb, the first woman to command an all-male field force squadron in the Army, said women are "physically different" to men. The presence of weaker soldiers over an extended period "could create an effect on our combat effectiveness," she added.

But Brig Nicky Moffat, until recently the most senior female officer serving in the Army, has described caution as "sexism dressed up as concern".

And Dr Christine Cheng, who lectures in war studies at King's College London, said women in combat roles had been good for armed forces in other countries.

Analysis: Jonathan Beale, BBC defence correspondent

This is a signal of intent, but not a done deal.

The fact that the review did not lift the ban on women serving in close combat roles shows there are still issues to be resolved - most importantly, how will a woman's body stand up to the huge physical demands of being an infantry soldier?

Those against lifting the ban will also be worried that standards will be weakened for women. Defence Secretary Michael Fallon has talked of the need to "improve" training if the infantry is opened up to women. What exactly does that mean?

With so many allies, including the US, now allowing women to carry out close combat roles, it will be increasingly hard for the British Armed Forces to keep the ban in place. Times have changed and there is political pressure for the Army to change too.

But in reality even in those countries that have lifted the ban, women are still in a significant minority. Few may want to join the infantry and even fewer are likely to meet the physical demands.

Maj Gen Patrick Cordingley, a former commander of the 7th Armoured Brigade - known as the Desert Rats, said the move would be a "mistake".

He added: "The practicalities of women in the infantry and armoured corps are considerable and should not be overlooked."

A defence source told the BBC the wellbeing of British personnel is of the utmost importance.

Let’s not fool ourselves. We may not bribe, but corruption is rife in Britain

‘The WEF establishes its corruption rankings through a survey of global executives: the beneficiaries of the kind of practices I’ve listed in this article.' Illustration: Andrzej Krauze

It just doesn’t compute. Almost every day the news is filled with stories that look to me like corruption. Yet on Transparency International’s corruption index Britain is ranked 14th out of 177 nations, suggesting that it’s one of the best-run nations on Earth. Either all but 13 countries are spectacularly corrupt or there’s something wrong with the index.

Yes, it’s the index. The definitions of corruption on which it draws are narrow and selective. Common practices in the rich nations that could reasonably be labelled corrupt are excluded; common practices in the poor nations are emphasised.

This week a ground-changing book called How Corrupt is Britain?, edited by David Whyte, is published. It should be read by anyone who believes this country merits its position on the index.

Would there still be commercial banking sector in this country if it weren’t for corruption? Think of the list of scandals: pensions mis-selling, endowment mortgage fraud, the payment protection insurance scam, Libor rigging, insider trading and all the rest. Then ask yourself whether fleecing the public is an aberration – or the business model.

No senior figure has been held criminally liable or has even been disqualified for the practices that helped to trigger the financial crisis, partly because the laws that should have restrained them were slashed by successive governments. A former minister in this government ran HSBC while it engaged in systematic tax evasion, money laundering for drugs gangs and the provision of services to Saudi and Bangladeshi banks linked to the financing of terrorists. Instead of prosecuting the bank, thehead of the UK’s tax office went to work for it when he retired.

The City of London, operating with the help of British overseas territories and crown dependencies, is the world’s leading tax haven, controlling 24% of all offshore financial services. It offers global capital an elaborate secrecy regime, assisting not just tax evaders but also smugglers, sanctions- busters and money-launderers. As the French investigating magistrate Eva Joly has complained, the City “has never transmitted even the smallest piece of usable evidence to a foreign magistrate”. The UK, Switzerland, Singapore, Luxembourg and Germany are all ranked by Transparency International as among the least corrupt nations in the world. They are also listed by the Tax Justice Network as among the worst secrecy regimes and tax havens. For some reason, though, that doesn’t count.

The Private Finance Initiative has been used by our governments to deceive us about the extent of their borrowing while channelling public money into the hands of corporations. Shrouded in secrecy, stuffed with hidden sweeteners, it has landed hospitals and schools with unpayable debts, while hiding public services from public scrutiny.

State spies have been engaged in mass surveillance. And the police, adopting the identities of dead children, lying in court to assist false convictions and fathering children by activists before disappearing, have infiltrated and sought to destroy peaceful campaign groups. Police forces have protected prolific paedophiles, including Jimmy Savile, and – it is now alleged – a ring of senior politicians who are also suspected of the murder of children. Savile was shielded too by the NHS and the BBC, which has sacked most of the those who sought to expose him while promoting people who tried to perpetuate the cover-up.

There’s the small matter of our unreformed political funding system, which permits the very rich to buy political parties. There’s the phone-hacking scandal and the payment of police by newspapers, the underselling of Royal Mail, the revolving door a llowing corporate executives to draft the laws affecting their businesses, the robbing of the welfare and prison services by private contractors, price-fixing by energy companies, daylight robbery by pharmaceutical firms and dozens more such cases. Is none of this corruption? Or is it too sophisticated to qualify?

Among the sources used by Transparency International to compile its index are the World Bank and the World Economic Forum. Relying on the World Bank to assess corruption is like asking Vlad the Impaler for an audit of human rights. Run on the principle of one dollar, one vote, controlled by the rich nations while operating in the poor ones, the bank has funded hundreds of white-elephant projects that have greatly enriched corrupt elites and foreign capital while evicting local people from their land and leaving their countries with unpayable debts. To general gasps of astonishment, the World Bank’s definition of corruption is so narrowly drawn that it excludes such practices.

The World Economic Forum establishes its corruption rankings through asurvey of global executives: the beneficiaries of the kind of practices I’ve listed in this article. Its questions are limited to the payment of bribes and the corrupt acquisition of public funds by private interests, excluding the kinds of corruption that prevail in rich nations. Transparency International’s interviews with ordinary citizens take much the same line: most of its specific questions involve the payment of bribes.

How Corrupt is Britain? argues that such narrow conceptions of corruption are part of a long tradition of portraying the problem as something confined to weak nations, which must be rescued by “reforms” imposed by colonial powers and, more recently, bodies such as the World Bank and the IMF. These “reforms” mean austerity, privatisation, outsourcing and deregulation. They tend to suck money out of the hands of the poor and into the hands of national and global oligarchs.

For organisations such as the World Bank and the World Economic Forum, there is little difference between the public interest and the interests of global corporations. What might look like corruption from any other perspective looks to them like sound economics. The power of global finance and the immense wealth of the global elite are founded on corruption, and the beneficiaries have an interest in framing the question to excuse themselves.

Yes, many poor nations are plagued by the kind of corruption that involves paying bribes to officials. But the problems plaguing us run deeper. When the system already belongs to the elite, bribes are superfluous.

Read more comment and opinion from The Guardian, the world's leading liberal voice

Brazil President Announces Anti-Corruption Measures

By Stan Lehman Associated, abcnews.go.com
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March 18th, 2015

President Dilma Rousseff announced a series of anti-graft measures on Wednesday in the wake of Sunday's massive nationwide rallies calling for her impeachment and protesting rampant corruption in Latin America's largest country.

"We have the duty and obligation to fight impunity and corruption," Rousseff said a nationally broadcast speech.

Rousseff announced the measures the same day a poll showed that her approval rating had plummeted to a new low. The survey by the Datafolha polling institute showed that the president's popularity dropped even among Brazil's poorest, where her support has been always been strong.

Among the measures Rousseff announced were the criminalization of slush funds used to finance election campaigns, the seizure of assets of people found guilty of corruption, and the requirement that government officials have no record of crimes.

"This is a decisive step to expand the government's capacity and power to prevent and combat corruption and impunity," Rousseff said.

Sunday's protest marches were sparked by anger over a sprawling corruption case involving Petrobras, Brazil's state-owned oil company.

Federal prosecutors say they've uncovered Brazil's biggest graft case yet in a kickback scheme at Petrobras, with at least $800 million in bribes paid by construction and engineering firms to politically appointed former executives at the oil company, all in exchange for winning inflated contracts.

Investigators say some of the money was funneled back to the campaign coffers of the Workers' Party and its allies. Dozens of congress members and some former executive branch officials, including two former chiefs of staff to Rousseff, are under investigation.

The president, who served as chairwoman of Petrobras' board during several years when the graft occurred, is not implicated.

In the Datafohla poll, 62 percent of respondents said Rousseff's government was "bad" or "terrible," compared with 44 percent a month ago. Thirteen percent of respondents rated her government as "great" or "good."

Datafolha interviewed 2,842 people March 16-17. The poll had a margin of error of 2 percentage points.

It was the worst popularity rating for a Brazilian president since 1992 when then-President Fernando Collor was impeached for corruption.

Switzerland has also been involved in investigations involving Petrobras and prosecutors there said Wednesday said that more than $120 million that was frozen as part of the probes will be returned to Brazil.

The federal prosecutor's office in Bern said it has found over 300 accounts at more than 30 banks in Switzerland that apparently were used to process bribes being investigated in Brazil. In total, it has frozen assets totaling about $400 million.

The beneficiaries of the accounts found in Switzerland, most of them in the name of companies, are senior executives at Petrobras or its suppliers, financial intermediaries and, whether directly or indirectly, Brazilian or other foreign companies that paid bribes, Swiss prosecutors said.

———

Associated Press writer Geir Moulson contributed to this report from Berlin.

Independent investigation of DeKalb corruption launched

www.ajc.com
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March 18th, 2015

Story Highlights

Investigation of DeKalb corruption will be independent, and county employees are required to cooperate.

Former Georgia Attorney General brought in to investigate corruption in DeKalb County.

Interim DeKalb CEO Lee May said he wants to remove “stench of corruption.”

'Corruption has opened door to al-Shabaab in Kenya'

People escape from Westgate shopping mall after an attack claimed by al-Shabaab in September 2013. Photograph: Kabir Dhanji/EPA

After 12 years of scandal anti-corruption authorities in Kenya have finally brought charges against key people allegedly involved in what has become known as one of the country’s biggest corruption cases.

Facing court are former finance ministers, permanent secretaries, senior officials and businessmen, all of whom deny the charges – regarded as a breakthrough in the country’s fight against corruption which saw Kenya’s Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission (EACC) and Swiss authorities working together for the first time.

The name at the centre of the scandal is Anglo Leasing Ltd, a little-known Liverpool-based company which became known to the Kenyan public at the start of 2004 when it was linked to 18 allegedly inflated state security contracts reported to be worth more than $700m, which were in some cases awarded to phantom entities.

The news was met with public outrage, but a legal case mounted in 2005 promptly fell apart due to a lack of evidence.

But as the scandal subsided, many of the tools the contracts were supposed to deliver – like a secure passport issuing system and a modern border-securing and security communication equipment, were not delivered. Instead, they were the subject of intense predatory interest by key figures in the Kenyan administration, for whom I worked at the time as permanent secretary in charge of governance and ethics, reporting to the president at the time, Mwai Kibaki.

When I first became suspicious of the contracts, I alerted the president. He approved an investigation by the then Anti-Corruption Police Unit. But it was soon apparent that I was the sucker, and that many senior public officials who were connected to the contracts knew that low scrutiny “national security” was the last refuge of the corrupt, and that these contracts provided an irresistible opportunity for self enrichment.

The war on terror

The security contracts were justified around a central premise – that thewar on terror meant they were imperative. They formed the core of Kenya’s response to terrorism that had hit the country as early as 1998, when Al-Qaeda bombed US embassies in twin attacks on Nairobi and Dar es Salaam.

But, in many cases they were delivered at inflated costs, were of substandard quality, or in some cases delivered nothing at all. But ,when the government failed to pay they were promptly sued.

Many of these agreements had been initiated under the previous government of Daniel arap Moi, who came to power in 1979, and under his successor Kibaki they continued seamlessly. When Uhuru Kenyatta was elected in March 2013 payments to controversial entities even continued, causing considerable public criticism.

Teams work to recover bodies trapped under the building adjacent to the US embassy which collapsed following the 1998 terrorist attack, later claimed by Al-Qaeda. Photograph: Sayyid Azim/AP

Ironically, it is these contracts that were in Kenyan parlance “eaten” by the elite, that opened the door to al-Shabaab, the Somali terrorist group which now poses a significant threat to the Kenyan state.

The door was opened because the kit that was supposed to safeguard the Kenyan borders, to ensure national security, simply wasn’t in place to interdict terrorists. “Eaten” were the contracts for a robust immigration control system, or for basic police communication equipment.

Meanwhile the west has pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into the fight against terror in Kenya. But much as they did in Pakistan, they have ignored other worrying issues so long as the state in question was pliant and cooperative vis-à-vis their particular “bad guys”.

Skepticism

Experiences in countries such as Nigeria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq andKenya demonstrate that corruption feeds and sustains insecurity.

This was especially clear after Kenya invaded Somalia in late 2011 to bolster efforts in the war against al-Shabaab. The response was furious, leading to more than 100 attacks the following year in Kenya, all claimed al-Shabaab, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of people.

This includes the Westgate Mall attack in September 2013 that demonstrated just how weak the security establishment had become, when Kenyan soldiers proceeded to loot the mall after a bungled stand-off with terrorists lasting four days.

Worse still, despite taking control of the port of Kismayo – a key site in the Somali charcoal trade which largely funds al-Shabaab – the Kenya Defence Force (KDF) have failed to curb the industry. Some experts arguethat al-Shabaab is now making more money than ever did before.

All this has shocked Kenya’s middle class that had long viewed the military as one of the more professional institutions in the country, where others have been hollowed out by corruption and tribalism.

As such, the Anglo Leasing prosecutions have been greeted with unsurprising skepticism. This is, in part, because they are totally without precedent, in a country where elite impunity is the norm. Just a week after the supposed key players were indicted, the chair of the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission suspended the lead investigator – only for this decision to be rescinded by the head of the anti-corruption body just 24 hours later.

This debacle was viewed by some as just another episode in a state contrived pantomime, for the benefit of a wearied public already numbed by the sheer number of scandals that have emerged from the current government.

A smart move?

Despite the sham, these prosecutions are also a smart political move: a public relations exercise and an attempt to launder reputations while bringing to a close one of the most ignominious corruption scandals in Kenyan history – by kicking it into the long grass of the Kenyan judiciary.

But what remains of great concern is the deliberate hollowing out of the security establishment for private profit, at a time when Kenya faces its most determined and focused foe in al-Shabaab. For many in the elite profit trumps security, and for some in the international community security trumps democracy and accountability: both will lose out.

In contexts like Kenya’s where corruption is so systemic that entire public institutions are essentially privatised there’s great need for more robust international mechanisms to deal with corruption. To deal with situations where the system isn’t corrupt but corruption is literally the system.

An international anti-corruption court enjoying the same kind of powers held by weapons inspectors would go a long way. Otherwise we remain in a situation where the dirtiest money flows through the arteries of the global financial sector, and the price of this is the lives of innocent people in Kenya, Nigeria, Niger and other unfortunate parts of the world where the threat of terrorism is very real and present.