It’s time for humor

U.S. oil demand in December was revised down by 4.0 percent from an early estimate to a final number of 19.199 million barrels per day, bringing consumption for the year to its lowest level since 1998, the Energy Information Administration said Friday.
U.S. oil demand in December was 794,000 bpd lower than the previous estimate of 19.993 million bpd and down 1.520 million bpd, or 7.3 percent, from oil demand of 20.719 million bpd a year earlier, the agency said.
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Within your circle of friends and acquaintances, you probably know some doctors, some lawyers, some artists, and maybe even an actor or a professional athlete. But chances are you don’t know any international arms dealers. What the arms dealer does is pretty straightforward: He sells arms. But there are obviously plenty of aspects of this profession that remain hidden to most. Here are five of them.

1- Dealing arms isn’t illegal
Believe it or not, dealing in private arms is a perfectly legal profession in most countries. In fact, few countries have any laws at all that forbid brokering an illegal arms deal. Remember; the broker is usually nothing more than a middleman with a phone, a computer and a bank account. When arms dealers do find themselves in trouble, it is often when they run afoul of international law by engaging in high-profit, illegal transactions. In these instances, it is not specific arms-dealing laws that are being broken, but rather import and export laws, or U.N. sanctions that are being circumvented.
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Just because some ammunition is made for practice doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous. For decades, soldiers in training have fired explosives like the M918 40 mm shell, which is less powerful than battlefield munitions, but still explodes to simulate the “bang” of a real round. However, a few of those old-style munitions—about 3 to 8 percent of current shells according to the Department of Defense—are duds that get stuck in the ground without exploding, creating a cleanup nightmare for the military. The Wall Street Journal reports that the bill to clean up all 10 million acres on 1,400 different sites containing unexploded shells could cost about $20 billion. To skirt such pricey clean-ups, the military is turning to a new idea: Green training ammunition.
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