Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone has given a 104-year-old Chinese woman permission to stay in Australia, denying the government ever intended to deport her. Earlier, the Migration Review Tribunal (MRT) upheld a federal government decision to deny Cui Yu Hu a visa.

Mrs Hu has lived in Australia since 1995, when she arrived on a 12-month visitor visa, but when she went to leave no airline would take her because she was too old and frail. Chinese authorities had warned that Mrs Hu could die if she were deported from Australia.

In a statement, Senator Vanstone said she had exercised her discretionary powers to grant Mrs Hu a visa “as my department had always intended”. The senator denied there was ever any intention to remove Mrs Hu from Australia, citing a letter the woman was sent last month telling her the department was doing all it could to help her.

Shortly after September 11, 2001, the U.S. Army changed the way it handled deserters. Instead of immediately prosecuting them, after catching them, they instead shipped them back to their units. This allowed the deserters commander to decide if the soldier could be rehabilitated, or just thrown out of the army (or prosecuted and perhaps sent to jail.)

This change had been proposed for some time, because the number of deserters had tripled between 1995 and 2001. The economic boom of the late 1990s, plus the usual array of family, legal and financial problems, had caused more troops to try and get out of their enlistment contract by deserting.

The number of deserters has increased to nearly 6,000 since September 11, 2001, about one percent of all army troops on active duty. About 5,500 troops have deserted since 911, out of about a million troops who have been on active duty in that period. Rehabilitation has worked in some cases, but basically, the army has to come to grips with the fact that, even with an army of volunteers, there will always be troops who change their mind.

Desertion is an old problem in the military, in peacetime as well as when there’s a war going on. The current desertion rate is, historically, very low (less than one percent). The prospect of going to Iraq, and wanting to avoid combat, has accounted for some of the current desertions. But not many.

The big increase in desertions came before September 11, 2001. Since then, there have been far more people joining the military in order to get into combat, than those running away to avoid it.

The United States experienced a steep decline in refining capacity between 1981 and the mid-1990s. Between 1981 and 1989, the number of U.S. refineries fell from 324 to 204, representing a loss of 3 million bbl/d in operable capacity (from 18.6 million bbl/d to 15.7 million bbl/d), while refining capacity utilization increased from 69% to 87%. Much of the decline in U.S. refining capacity resulted from the 1981 deregulation (elimination of price controls and allocations), which effectively removed the major prop from underneath many marginally profitable, often smaller, refineries.

Refinery closures have continued since 1989, bringing the total number of operable U.S. refineries to 149 in 2003. In general, refineries that have closed have been relatively small and have had less favorable economics than other refineries in their market area. Also, in recent years, some smaller, less-economic refineries that had faced additional investments for environmental reasons in order to stay in business found closing preferable because they predicted that they could not stay competitive in the long term.

While some refineries have closed, and no new refineries have been built in nearly 30 years, many existing refineries have expanded their capacities. As a result of capacity creep,” whereby existing refineries create additional refining capacity from the same physical structure, capacity per operating refinery increased by 28% over the 1990 to 1998 period, for example. Overall, since the mid-1990s, U.S. refinery capacity has increased from 15.0 million bbl/d in 1994 to 16.9 million bbl/d in September 2004. Also in September 2004, utilization of operating capacity at U.S. refineries was averaging around 90%, down from 97% in July and August. Although financial, environmental, and legal considerations make it unlikely that new refineries will be built in the United States, expansion at existing refineries likely will increase total U.S. refining capacity in the long-run.