barbed or razor wire

'Texas has deployed more than 40 miles of razor wire and other border barriers along its boundary with Mexico steel grating price , building a makeshift fence to plug gaps that the governor says the Biden administration left undefended from the migrant surge. State prosecutors won their first conviction against an illegal immigrant for trespassing, as Texas moves to mete out criminal justice consequences that used to be the sole purview of the federal government. Texas has been busing illegal immigrants straight to Washington and dropping them off near the U.S. Capitol. Gov. Greg Abbott , a Republican, has committed the state to build its own border wall, and he deployed the National Guard and state police at the border to help the feds and the locals. The governor has emerged as the chief immigration foil for President Biden in the same way that blue-state governors led the charge against President Trump. But where Democrats pursued lenient policies by enacting sanctuary laws and extending benefits to illegal immigrants, Mr. Abbott is moving to station Texas as its own power in immigration enforcement with what he has dubbed Operation Lone Star. We are doing everything we possibly can to prevent people coming across the border and into the state of Texas, the governor told reporters last week at a press conference held before the horrific school shooting in Uvalde. The razor wire is the most visible move, and perhaps the most effective. SEE ALSO: 1.35 million new illegal immigrants settled in U.S. under Biden, study shows The Texas National Guard last week told The Washington Times that it had put up 42 miles of fencing and concertina wire the official name for the looped strands of razor wire since the start of Operation Lone Star. The Trump administration deployed miles of wire when it faced migrant surges in 2018 and 2019. Mr. Trump called it a beautiful sight, though some of the communities where the wire went up said it looked threatening and endangered locals who might stumble into it. Texas declined to talk about locations where the barriers have been placed, citing operational security, but the governor celebrated the extent of deployments. Our goal is to make sure we have that concertina wire in every inch of the border, he said. The only place we would be prohibited from putting it would be where federal land may be located, or if theres private property where a private property owner does not want it. Razor wire serves as a sort of poor mans border wall. Its relatively easy to deploy and can often achieve the same thing as a larger and more permanent barrier: funneling illegal immigrants away from some locations and toward points where law enforcement can be waiting. Increasingly, that means a state or local officer rather than a federal agent. That was what led to the first trespassing jury trial last month in Kinney County, which has a sliver of the border near Del Rio and has become a major funnel point for illegal immigrants. Lester Hidalgo Aguilar, a 39-year-old Honduran man, was convicted by a jury. Tony Hackebeil, who led the prosecution, building a makeshift fence to plug gaps that the governor says the Biden administration left undefended from the migrant surge. State prosecutors won their first conviction against an illegal immigrant for trespassing custom 2.4x6m reinforcing welded mesh panel , according to The Texas Tribune, which covered the trial. Send that message, Mr. Hackebeil said. Send the message to not just your community that you agree this should not be allowed to happen. But send a message as loud as you can to all of those people who are continually doing this. The jury deliberated for 20 minutes and found Aguilar guilty of trespassing on private ranchland, The Tribune reported. The judge slapped him with the maximum punishment of a year in jail. Aguilar is one of more than 3,000 trespassing cases brought in Kinney County against migrant men. Laura Pena, director of the Texas Civil Rights Projects beyond borders program, said Texas has created an illegal, separate state immigration enforcement agency. The system is rife\xa0with due process and civil rights violations for U.S. citizens and non-U.S. citizens put through Operation Lone Star, she said. She said the cost so far runs to $4 billion. Border communities dont want billions of dollars rerouted to razor wire, walls and more jails. Border communities want that money spent on what it was intended for better access to health care, an education system that is safe and exciting for our children, and COVID relief funds to continue battling the pandemic, Ms. Pena said. Texas accounts for roughly half of illegal border crossers nabbed so far this year by federal agents and officers at Customs and Border Protection, and local officials say the surge has taken a toll on communities. Filings in federal court cases detail the financial struggles that the state and counties face from handling the onslaught of migrants, with criminal justice, education and medical budgets all being tapped. And there are more stark measures. Zavala County, whose boundaries start a dozen or so miles off the border, brought in a temporary morgue to hold extra bodies of migrants who died trying to sneak through remote ranchlands, the governor said. Some of Mr. Abbott s supporters say there are steps he hasnt taken but should. One idea gaining steam in some border conversations is to have governors declare the surge of people an invasion under the U.S. Constitution. That would trigger another section of the Constitution that suggests states can raise their own armies if they are actually invaded. The idea has been developed by some high-profile figures from the Trump administration, as Texas moves to mete out criminal justice consequences that used to be the sole purview of the federal government. Texas has been busing illegal immigrants straight to Washington and dropping them off near the U.S. Capitol. Gov. Greg Abbott gabion basket products , a state legislator has asked Attorney General Ken Paxton for a similar ruling. George P. Bush, who had been challenging Mr. Paxton in a Republican primary but lost in a runoff election last week, said he backed the idea of an invasion declaration. Texas and Arizona have deployed National Guard troops, but those who back the invasion strategy say there are too many limits on what the soldiers can do right now. Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com . Copyright 2023 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission .\n', "Cyberpunk 2077 monowire is just one of a few options players have when it comes to their main offensive cyberware. Cyberpunk 2077 has a long list of cybernetic mods that have many uses, but few are more important to your build than choosing which arm mod to use. The monowire is one of the flashiest and most powerful, it gives you a razor-sharp wire that can whip around and cut enemies to shreds. Here is everything you need to know about acquiring and improving the Cyberpunk 2077 monowire. The simple answer to this is to head to a Ripperdoc. There are Ripperdocs all over the city, and each one has their own stock. Not all of the docs will have powerful monowires available, as each Ripperdoc will have them at different rarities. Which ones you can buy are determined by your street cred, and also if you can afford them. Equipping them is another story, you don't necessarily need to be a certain level, just bear in mind that the monowire scales with your Reflexes stat, and is affected by Blades perks. Legendary monowires can be purchased from the Ripperdocs in Wellsprings, Heywood and Downtown City Center. To buy these, you need to have at least 45 street cred, and they cost $35,650. A much more manageable option is to purchase an epic monowire, they cost $20, a Republican galvanized expanded metal mesh screen , and can be purchased in Wellsprings, Japantown, Rancho Coronado, Arroyo, or at the Aldecados camp. These only require a street cred of 25, and are still very powerful. Rare monowires, which is to say the regular blue variety, can be purchased from any other Ripperdoc. These only cost $12,950 and require 20 street cred. You can get these earlier than the higher rarities, but considering there is only a 5 level difference in street cred, you might be better off saving your money for an epic monowire. How many mods you can equip to your monowire depends on the rarity of the monowire itself. With a legendary monowire, you can equip three mods. There are two types of mods specific to the monowire, battery mods and cable mods. Cable mods change the type of damage the monowire does. These can be very useful for taking on enemies with specific weaknesses, but also they can be useful in general to do more damage, such as burning or electrocuting enemies. Battery mods give percentage boosts to the monowire's damage. The best one to get is the high-capacity battery from the Ripperdoc in Pacifica, which grants a massive 50% bonus damage. In your third slot, you could insert a sensory amplifier. This mod is universal, it can be equipped to any cyberarm and has a different effect depending on where you get it. For the monowire, you could go to the Kabuki Ripperdoc to get an extra 2% critical chance, or head to the doc in Heywood to get 20% extra critical damage. You could use multiples of these to focus in on critical damage, or focus on flat damage with batteries and cable mods. For stats and perks to back the monowire up, it is all about Reflexes and Blades. A relatively recent change has made it so that instead of the Cool stat, monowire now scales with Reflexes, and is affected by Blades perks instead of blunt weapons. This change has made the monowire deadly, with some amazing perks to back it up. Within the Blades category, you have a few options. You have the initial perks that give boosts to your Blades damage, and others that reduce stamina use. These are always good, it's never a bad thing to up your base damage. For more specialisation, you could go for a Bleed build, use perks like Crimson Dance to increase chance of bleeding from combo attacks, Stuck Pig to prolong bleeding effects, and Bloodlust to recover health while fighting bleeding enemies. This is a great option for tougher enemies and bosses. However, where the monowire really shines is in dicing groups of enemies in the blink of an eye. On top of the perks that increase your overall damage, there are perks like Blessed Blade and Dragon Strike that massively increase your critical chance and damage. This pairs well with Judge, Jury and Executioner, arguably the most powerful perk in the Blades tree. This grants 50% bonus damage against enemies with max health. With the right mods and perks backing it up, Judge, Jury and Executioner basically guarantees that you will be cutting down hordes of enemies in a single slice. That is it for the Cyberpunk 2077 monowire. For more on the game, especially if you are interested in powerful cyberware, check out our Cyberpunk 2077 Fingers guide to learn more.\n", 'Poor people give away a lot of information. If youve never lived under the poverty line, you might not be aware how much of our personal privacy we trade away for basic benefits such as food stamps, health insurance, and utility discounts. Its not just Social Security numbers and home addresses, which are required as part of these applications; it includes health histories, household incomes, living expenses, and employment histories. Most people shrug off this exchange: What good is personal data when you have no money and terrible credit anyway especially when you dont really have a choice? But after decades of collecting this data, the government is putting it to use. This information is feeding algorithms that decide everything from whether or not you get health insurance to how much time you spend in jail . Increasingly, it is helping determine whether or not parents get to keep their kids. When someone phones in a report of suspected child abuse usually to a state or county child abuse hotline a call screener has to determine whether the accusation merits an actual investigation. Sometimes they have background information, such as prior child welfare reports, to assist in their decision-making process, but often they have to make snap determinations with very little guidance besides the details of the immediate report. There are more than 7 million maltreatment reports each year, and caseworkers get overwhelmed and burn out quickly especially when a serious case gets overlooked. New algorithms popping up around the country review data points available for each case and suggest whether or not an investigation should be opened, in an attempt to offset some of the individual responsibility placed on case workers. The trouble is, algorithms arent designed to find new information that humans miss theyre designed to use the data that humans have previously input as efficiently as possible. If you give it biased data, it will be biased, explained Cathy ONeil, mathematician and author of the book Weapons of Math Destruction , while speaking with me for a story I wrote for Undark last year. The very short version is that when youre using the past as a kind of reference for how it works well, youre implicitly assuming the past is doing a good job of rewarding good things and punishing bad things. Youre training the system to say if it worked in the past, it should work in the future. Historically, low-income families have had their children removed from their homes at higher rates than wealthier families. As a result, these new algorithms work to codify poverty as a criteria for child maltreatment. Some of the variables that these tools consider are public records that only exist for low-income parents, such as parents poverty status, whether they receive welfare benefits like SNAP and TANF, employment status, and whether they receive Medicaid. Other factors, like previous criminal justice involvement and whether or not there have been allegations of substance misuse in the past, are also dramatically more likely for families living in poverty. This bias exists even in systems that have been highly praised, like the Allegheny Family Screening Tool currently being implemented in Pittsburgh, where prior arrests and parents mental health histories are considered factors in whether a child should be removed. Its similar in other, less-transparent systems, like one in Florida where tech giant SAS contracted with the Florida Department of Children and Families to research which factors were most likely to contribute to the death of a child by maltreatment. According to press releases by SAS (some of which have been unpublished since they began garnering media attention) the company used public records such as Medicaid status, criminal justice history, and substance-use treatment history. The results led jurisdictions in Florida to zoom in on factors that apply to huge swaths of families, including mine. In April of last year, an allegation of drug use and child abandonment led Broward County, Florida child welfare investigators to investigate my family. When my drug tests were negative, the investigation pivoted to my recent financial setbacks, which had been caused by my husbands acute health crisis. My children were ultimately removed from my care, and we have been separated for nine months for reasons that are primarily financial. My case is far from unique. T hree-quarters of child protective cases in the United States are related to neglect, not abuse, and that neglect usually means lack of food, clothing, shelter, heating, or supervision: problems which are almost always the result of poverty. Ira Schwartz, a private analytics consultant, thinks he may have found a way to help re-balance this system. He conducted a research study in Broward County the same county in which my case is based that discovered the current approach to child welfare substantiation is highly flawed. According to his research, 90 percent of system referrals were essentially useless, and 40 percent of court-involved cases (which typically involve child removal) were overzealous and harmful, rather than beneficial, to the families. He created his own system that, like the Allegheny tool, predicted the likelihood that a family would become re-involved with the system. But he admits quite openly that predictive algorithms like his target the poor. We found in our study that lower socioeconomic status was one of the significant variables that was a predictor for reinvolvement with the system, said Schwartz. The issue with higher-income families is they just dont really come into the system because they have other options. With higher-income families, when theres child abuse or neglect or even spouse abuse and its reported, they can afford to go to private agencies, get private mental health services; they can see a psychiatrist or social worker or psychologist its a discrimination factor. Schwartz believes that these types of admittedly discriminatory computer programs can still be put to good use when combined with prescriptive analytics, which would determine the services that high-risk families need in order to remain out of the system in the future. Schwartz says this would include services like rental assistance, food assistance, day care funding, and housekeeping services. This would help welfare agencies understand which families need what services, and streamline the process of providing them. (All jurisdictions are legally required to make reasonable efforts to help families resolve the issues that brought them under investigation, but how agencies go about meeting that standard varies widely by location .) The issue with these algorithms is certainly not malice on the part of their creators. Even the more secretive, proprietary algorithms being created by companies like SAS claim to want to create a safer system that results in less child maltreatment. But its unclear if that is possible with the data thats available. Without comparable data from wealthier populations, which are better protected by privacy laws, the new systems cannot produce accurate results and even if more data were added, it would mean more families are being separated and surveilled.\n', "Forget, for the moment, about Donald Trumps wall. What the heck is going on with Donald Trumps concertina wire? The good people of Nogales would certainly like to know. It seems they dont appreciate their latest downtown redevelopment project, courtesy of the U.S. military. Coil upon coil upon coil of flesh-slicing razor wire. The sort of stuff youd find in a war zone, or around a concentration camp or a maximum-security prison Or now, dripping from top to bottom of the 18-foot U.S.-Mexico border fence that runs through downtown Nogales. Last month, there was just one coil running along the top of the two-story fence,\xa0installed before the\xa0midterm elections. Nogales Mayor Arturo Garino told the Associated Press that he asked Sen. Martha McSally when she was in town last month to help the city get rid of it. Instead, over the weekend, troops strung\xa0five additional coils, layer after lay of barbed steel covering the fence from top to bottom in places. Its dangerous, running, as it does, right down to the ground in close proximity to business and residential areas. Its overkill, in that while Trump warns that the border is a very dangerous area, Nogales really isnt. Its also incredibly silly, as the Stars excellent columnist, Tim Steller, notes: East of Nogales, in the Kino Springs area, troops have put up concertina wire on the border fence within yards of where the fence stops at the Santa Cruz River floodplain. It makes no sense, because nobody would try to jump the border fence, with or without concertina wire, when they can walk 25 yards to the side and cross through a vehicle barrier the only type of barrier that will stand when the river floods. Then again, this isn't about practicality. It's about politics. Laying out coil upon upon of galvaized steel concertina wire is a crowd pleaser in Trumpland. Plus, it gives\xa0the troops on the border something to do. The Nogales City Council on Wednesday evening unanimously passed a resolution demanding that the concertina wire be removed, saying they don't wish to live in a war zone. Placing coiled concertina wire strands on the ground is typically only found in a war, battlefield or prison setting, and not in an urban setting such as downtown Nogales, Arizona, it said. Placing coiled concertina wire that is designed to inflict serious bodily injury or death in the immediate proximity of our residents, children, pets, law enforcement and first responders is not only irresponsible but inhuman. Dont look for the wire to come down. U.S. Customs and Border Protection says its on federal land and outside the city's jurisdiction. Hardening of current infrastructure specifically in high-risk locations of the urban area help reduce the illicit activity, to include violent criminals, in these areas and increase the public safety, the agency\xa0said in a statement. Mayor Garino told the Washington Post that he met Wednesday with Customs and Border Protection officials, who waxed on about rapists, murderers and drug dealers.. But that was strange, because the police chief, assistant chief and deputy city manager were there, and we dont know of those things happening, Garino said. I dont know where theyre getting their stats. From Donald Trump, probably. No longer, apparently, is it enough to have just a wall. Now we need\xa0coil upon coil\xa0\xa0of concertina wire as well. Whats next, electrification? Moats and alligators, anybody? Reach Roberts at laurie.roberts@arizonarepublic.com . MORE FROM ROBERTS:\n", 'Texas has deployed more than 40 miles of razor wire and other border barriers along its boundary with Mexico, building a makeshift fence to plug gaps that the governor says the Biden administration left undefended from the migrant surge. State prosecutors won their first conviction against an illegal immigrant for trespassing, as Texas moves to mete out criminal justice consequences that used to be the sole purview of the federal government. Texas has been busing illegal immigrants straight to Washington and dropping them off near the U.S. Capitol. Gov. Greg Abbott , a Republican, has committed the state to build its own border wall, and he deployed the National Guard and state police at the border to help the feds and the locals. The governor has emerged as the chief immigration foil for President Biden in the same way that blue-state governors led the charge against President Trump. But where Democrats pursued lenient policies by enacting sanctuary laws and extending benefits to illegal immigrants, Mr. Abbott is moving to station Texas as its own power in immigration enforcement with what he has dubbed Operation Lone Star. We are doing everything we possibly can to prevent people coming across the border and into the state of Texas, the governor told reporters last week at a press conference held before the horrific school shooting in Uvalde. The razor wire is the most visible move, and perhaps the most effective. SEE ALSO: 1.35 million new illegal immigrants settled in U.S. under Biden, study shows The Texas National Guard last week told The Washington Times that it had put up 42 miles of fencing and concertina wire the official name for the looped strands of razor wire since the start of Operation Lone Star. The Trump administration deployed miles of wire when it faced migrant surges in 2018 and 2019. Mr. Trump called it a beautiful sight, though some of the communities where the wire went up said it looked threatening and endangered locals who might stumble into it. Texas declined to talk about locations where the barriers have been placed, citing operational security, but the governor celebrated the extent of deployments. Our goal is to make sure we have that concertina wire in every inch of the border, he said. The only place we would be prohibited from putting it would be where federal land may be located, or if theres private property where a private property owner does not want it. Razor wire serves as a sort of poor mans border wall. Its relatively easy to deploy and can often achieve the same thing as a larger and more permanent barrier: funneling illegal immigrants away from some locations and toward points where law enforcement can be waiting. Increasingly, that means a state or local officer rather than a federal agent. That was what led to the first trespassing jury trial last month in Kinney County, which has a sliver of the border near Del Rio and has become a major funnel point for illegal immigrants. Lester Hidalgo Aguilar, a 39-year-old Honduran man, was convicted by a jury. Tony Hackebeil, who led the prosecution, told jurors they had a chance to make a statement about the border, according to The Texas Tribune, which covered the trial. Send that message, Mr. Hackebeil said. Send the message to not just your community that you agree this should not be allowed to happen. But send a message as loud as you can to all of those people who are continually doing this. The jury deliberated for 20 minutes and found Aguilar guilty of trespassing on private ranchland, The Tribune reported. The judge slapped him with the maximum punishment of a year in jail. Aguilar is one of more than 3,000 trespassing cases brought in Kinney County against migrant men. Laura Pena, director of the Texas Civil Rights Projects beyond borders program, said Texas has created an illegal, separate state immigration enforcement agency. The system is rife\xa0with due process and civil rights violations for U.S. citizens and non-U.S. citizens put through Operation Lone Star, she said. She said the cost so far runs to $4 billion. Border communities dont want billions of dollars rerouted to razor wire, walls and more jails. Border communities want that money spent on what it was intended for better access to health care, an education system that is safe and exciting for our children, and COVID relief funds to continue battling the pandemic, Ms. Pena said. Texas accounts for roughly half of illegal border crossers nabbed so far this year by federal agents and officers at Customs and Border Protection, and local officials say the surge has taken a toll on communities. Filings in federal court cases detail the financial struggles that the state and counties face from handling the onslaught of migrants, with criminal justice, education and medical budgets all being tapped. And there are more stark measures. Zavala County, whose boundaries start a dozen or so miles off the border, brought in a temporary morgue to hold extra bodies of migrants who died trying to sneak through remote ranchlands, the governor said. Some of Mr. Abbott s supporters say there are steps he hasnt taken but should. One idea gaining steam in some border conversations is to have governors declare the surge of people an invasion under the U.S. Constitution. That would trigger another section of the Constitution that suggests states can raise their own armies if they are actually invaded. The idea has been developed by some high-profile figures from the Trump administration, and Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich has issued a legal opinion saying his states governor could legally do it. In Texas, a state legislator has asked Attorney General Ken Paxton for a similar ruling. George P. Bush, who had been challenging Mr. Paxton in a Republican primary but lost in a runoff election last week, said he backed the idea of an invasion declaration. Texas and Arizona have deployed National Guard troops, but those who back the invasion strategy say there are too many limits on what the soldiers can do right now. Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com . Copyright 2023 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission .\n', 'A staff member pours a beer at a fan zone ahead of the FIFA World Cup, in Doha, Qatar Nov. 19, 2022. Petr David Josek/The Associated Press Nobody back home wants to hear your soccer stories. They all have TVs. Theyve accepted that protests over human rights have reached their conclusion (the human rights lost). So they dont bother asking. What they want to know about is booze. Where do you get it? Is it as hard as they say? How much is it? Should I book you into rehab right after you get home, or do you want to have one last Christmas first? It is hard to get. It is ridiculously expensive the most expensive booze in the world. Think $15 for a beer in a bar, and twice that for a mixed drink. The problem isnt the price. Its that the cumulative effect of alcohol makes people immune to pricing. The first one hurts, but the sixth is easy. As one louche comrade here put it, After a while, youre not even looking at the bill. Youre just tapping your card. Podcast: Canadas 1-0 loss to Belgium, a missed penalty by Davies and the glory of shock upsets The beginners guide to soccer chants Theres only one way around this swindle. Its to obtain a private liquor licence through the Qatar Distribution Company. Thats simple. You need permanent residency, a stamped letter from your employer, a minimum salary, proof that you are non-Muslim and then you wait for a few months. Or many months. Or forever. Its not clear. The other way to get a licence is to be in Qatar covering the World Cup. The QDC has set up expedited, temporary permits designed to keep the Huns of the international media out of the bars and away from nice people. I suppose the thinking was that visiting sports writers cant drink and complain at the same time. The Qatari regime cant have met many sports writers. Thats all they do. They drink and complain. Combine the two things, and its like a superpower. Gather them in large groups to do it together, and they might take down governments through the cumulative force of their whining. Its mostly about bus schedules and the WiFi, but still. So you fill out your online form. After a few days, you are e-mailed your permit, along with a monthly spending limit 4,000 Qatari riyals, or about $1,500. Not for the first time, it occurs to you that your hosts have a very low opinion of you. You fill your boss in on all of this. Its important work youre doing. Sociological research, even. You might be in line for a grant. Your boss tells you that if you try claiming that Grolsch is what they call Uber in the Middle East, your expense report is being denied in toto. In order to go to the only liquor store in the entirety of Qatar, you head out into the desert one morning. Your driver gives you The Look when you get in the car. After a week in Qatar, youre getting used to The Look. Its mild disgust, pity and tolerance, mixed in varying amounts according to the person delivering it. The Look says, Sad, decadent Westerner, how small your life must be. You cant just to go to the Qatari beer store. You have to make an appointment, within a 15-minute window. The store is out in the suburbs, about 45 minutes from downtown. Its tucked anonymously into a bleached-out section of low sprawl. This country is divided into two sections. About 15 per cent of the population are native Qataris, who reap all the benefits of the gas boom. Then theres everyone else. You have interacted with hundreds of people already, and it is possible, verging on likely, that you have not yet spoken to a Qatari. If every house on the block is a gated compound, if it has grass, or if there are five Land Cruisers parked under sun shields in front of it, then you are in a Qatari neighbourhood. This is not a Qatari neighbourhood. The place youre going to is surrounded by eight-foot walls and (unusually, in a country that has nearly zero property crime) razor wire. You pass a guard to get in to the inner courtyard. You wait in your car for your turn. Its too hot to linger outside. You check in with a code and grab a cart. You wind your way into the store a windowless box inside a larger structure. Its a lot like any other upscale liquor store anywhere else. The prices are more reasonable, but not low by Canadas already not-low standard. A box of premium beer will put you back $100. There seems to be a tax on the more intoxicating liquors. You can get a decent bottle of Ctes du Rhne for $20, but you cant get good (i.e. Polish) vodka for under $200. At 10 a.m. on a Wednesday morning, the place is full of people. English is the only language being spoken. We are here to buy a few post-workday pops. Everyone else is shopping like they are bootleggers. Home Depot-style trolleys filled to brimming with hard liquor. Thousands of dollars worth of hooch. No one is walking up to the cash with a couple of bottles for tonights dinner party. Under Qatari law, youre allowed to drink this inside your home, but youre forbidden from sharing. While I try to be respectful as a guest, the duty of charity travels over all borders. You flash your passport, pay your bill, get an updated monthly spending limit and leave. Youve read a few stories about this place. There is a local rumour that it operates on its own power grid, lest anything about it touch the lives of its God-fearing neighbours. You half-expect local scamps to be pelting you with rocks as you leave, but no one on the street bothers to look. That said, you hustle the stuff into your rented house like youre carrying a corpse. Surveying your haul, you cant help but feel a teensy bit grubby. People would probably pay good money to dry out in the desert, and here you are, sneaking around town, circumventing local custom. But its not the booze. Or not only that. It is a potent Irish-ism that no man tell you what to do on your own patch. Not everyone here has the luxury of bending a rule, even one as inconsequential as this. It seems contingent that when the opportunity to do so presents itself, one should take it.\n', 'US troops have hung new coils of razor-sharp concertina wire on the American side of an existing border fence in downtown Nogales, Arizona, covering the steel-slatted barrier in some places from top to bottom. As many as four rows of razor wire were added to the existing two rows of wire troops previously attached to the 25-foot fence in November. About 2,350 active-duty troops were deployed to the southern border by Donald Trump address what he calls a national-security crisis. (The Pentagon disagrees .) That wire is lethal, and I really dont know what theyre thinking by putting it all the way down to the ground, Nogales mayor Arturo Garino , a Vietnam vet and former law enforcement officer, told the Nogales International newspaper. Raul Grijalva, a Democratic congressman who represents Tucson, called the additional wire nothing more than a spectacle by the Trump administration to reinforce his twisted narrative of rampant lawlessness at the border, a mischaracterization that couldnt be further from the truth. The Nogales city council is set to consider a resolution today (Feb. 6) demanding the wire be removed. It describes the sharp razor-like bladesdesigned to entangle its victim as the razors slice/cut deeply into the flesh and causes indiscriminate injury which can be fatal and argues that the initial concertina wire was installed at a height where it would only indiscriminately harm or kill anyone who actually scales the border wall. Coiled concertina wire strands on the ground are typically only found in a war, battlefield, or prison setting, and not in an urban setting such as downtown Nogales, Arizona, the resolution says . No military force or the use of military-type tactics designed to inflict indiscriminate harm shall be allowed in the City of Nogales without the Declaration of War by Congress of the United States or the Declaration of a National Emergency, it declares. Garino said officials from US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and US Border Patrol, the agencies which the troops are supporting, refused to meet with city officials before troops started the job in November. A spokesperson for CBP, the Border Patrols parent agency and a component of the US Department of Homeland Security, told Quartz that Border Patrol leadership met with elected officials and law enforcement from the City of Nogales yesterday (Feb. 6) to listen to concerns and explain the current concertina wire deployment and the requirements leading up to this action. The spokesperson added that the additional strands of concertina wire are limited to high-risk urban areas commonly exploited by criminal smuggling organizations, are marked by warning signs, and that there are currently no plans to remove them. Troops have installed 70 miles of razor wire along the border since then, according to the Department of Defense . Another 150 miles is scheduled to be put up by March 31 and troops will stay at the border through September, officials told the House Armed Services Committee. More than $2 million worth of concertina wire purchases by the US Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) made between last November and December are listed in a public government spending database; the overall border operation\xa0has so far cost approximately $240 million . A solicitation recently issued by DLA seeks a vendor capable of supplying 126,000 50-foot rolls of barbed tape concertina wire a year for the next five years, at an estimated cost of $26 million. That comes to 6.3 million feet of wire, or 1,193 miles, annually. Concertina wire installed in November along border fencing in Laredo, Texas was removed three weeks later following criticism from local lawmakers. In Hidalgo, Texas, the same type of wire was also installed but later removed . Recent imagery of downtown Nogales doesnt appear to show a town overrun by criminal bands of fence-jumpers pouring in from Mexico. Nogales International reporter Jonathan Clark asked a local shopkeeper if the concertina wire outside his store gave him any sense of additional security. His answer? Absolutely not. This post has been updated with comment from CBP.\n'