Leave it to a bunch of Somali pirates to underscore how what happens on the west coast of Africa directly affects people in the United States.

The Greek-owned supertanker hijacked by Somali pirates over the weekend was headed for a deepwater port known as LOOP.

Most crude oil from the Middle East comes via massive tankers too large for New Orleans to offload oil. The hijacked Maran Centaurus is a 300,000-ton vessel, holding 2 million barrels of oil. 

LOOP (Lousiana Offshore Oil Port) can handle ships more than twice as big.

About 1 million barrels of foreign crude — 10 percent of all U.S. imports — flow through LOOP every day.

Here’s how the oil flows from the Middle East to the Middle West:

1. Tankers connect to a buoy 18 miles off the coast of Louisiana.
2. An underwater pipeline moves oil a mile and a half to an offshore terminal.
3. Four 7,000 horsepower pumps send oil ashore.
4. At Fourchon, Louisiana, another massive pumping station sends the oil another 25 miles inland.
5. The oil arrives at a network of underground salt caverns that can hold 50 million barrels of oil.
6. From the caverns, the Locap pipeline channels oil 53 miles to St. James, Lousiana.
7. At St. James, there’s a link to Capline which moves oil to Patoka, Illinois.
8. The Chicap pipeline runs from Patoka to the Chicago suburbs.
9. From there or at several points along the way, it’s refined and trucked to you!

Anyone reading through the Goldstone Report, the fact-finding mission into during the Gaza conflict, will find themselves confronted with the painful realities of modern warfare.

For instance, doctors working in Gaza during the conflict noticed a “strikingly high percentage of patients with severed legs.”

The amputations mostly occurred at waist height in children, generally lower in adults, and were combined with skin-deep, third-degree burns, four to six fingers upward from the amputation. Where the amputation took place, the flesh was cauterized as a result of the heat. The patients with these amputations had no shrapnel wounds, but red flashes on the abdomen and chest. The excision of large pieces of flesh was not infrequent in these patients.

These wounds are believed to be the result of a new weapon that is intended to minimize collateral damage in urban conflicts. The bomb is made of special materials that limit the effects to a small diameter. Inside that circle, however, is sheer hell.

Most bombs have a metal casing that turns into shrapnel, but this bomb has a carbon-fiber casing that turns to dust on impact.  Packed inside is an “explosive fill,” a powder, really, made of an alloy of tungsten.

The physics involved are complex, but the presence of the tungsten makes for a much more powerful blast. During tests, instruments used to measure blast force were destroyed. The high-velocity, extremely hot tungsten particles can easily slice through skin, tissue and bone.

This new weapon goes by many names. They are also known as focused lethality munitions. The U.N. calls them dense inert metal explosives or DIME weapons.

Boeing Integrated Defense Systems, which builds the bombs in St. Joseph, Mo., refers to them as GBU-39s. One of these bombs dropped from an F-15E can be guided via satellite to a target as far as 40 miles.

Israel ordered (.pdf) 1,000 GBU-39s in September 2008. The Jewish state has denied using DIME wepaons during the conflict.

The U.N. fact-finding mission found no actual proof that DIME were dropped on Gaza during the Israeli military operation known as “Operation Cast Lead” from December 2008 to January 2009.

However, the mission’s ordnance expert believed that some weapons used during the conflict had a “DIME component.” Samples taken from the scene of the attacks in Gaza revealed the presence of tungsten.

U.S. forces have been using DIME weapons since at least October 2006:

The new bomb, the first of its kind in the Air Force inventory, gives aircrews the ability to destroy targets that would normally be “passed over” due to the proximity of friendly troops, civilians, structures or personal property.

The efforts to minimize collateral damage raise difficult (and so far unanswered) questions about the laws of warfare.

Tungsten alloy particles are so small they can’t be removed from the body. They are also highly carcinogenic (.pdf) At a U.N. press conference in Geneva, Col. Desmond Travers, one of the report’s authors, referred to a potential “time bomb” inside some of the Gaza victims.

This raises a thorny (and as yet unanswered) question: Should GBU-39s and other DIME weapons properly be classified as biological weapons which are illegal under the Geneva Convention?

Israel is a signatory to the Conventional Weapons Convention, which prohibits the use of any weapons that injures by fragments that cannot be detected by X-rays. The United States is also a signatory.

Boeing is set to make thousands of these weapons in the next few years. The defense giant apparently believes that the international community will not stand in its way.

Vedomosti, a gutsy Russian business newspaper, has come up with a rather ingenious way of studying local officials for possible signs of corruption.

It published 36 photos of Russian officials, including Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev.

Vedomosti found the most expensive watch on the wrist of Vladimir Resin, the deputy mayor of Moscow responsible for the construction sector. In his official biography, he says his only hobby is labor.

That labor has been quite lucrative for Deputy Mayor Resin. He is shown above wearing a GreubelForsey Double Tourbillon 30° that costs either $360,000 (for the white gold edition) or $425,000 for the platinum edition.

But that’s not even the most expensive watch in his collection.

He was also photographed wearing a watch made by DeWitt, the La Pressy Grande Complication model. This is a watch that retails for more than $1 million.

Resin has overseen a building boom in Moscow that has been thoroughly corrupted. Earlier this year, the Russian interior ministry announced that a group of Moscow city officials took $250 million in bribes. Also this year, Ikea halted construction in Russia, citing pervasive corruption and demands for bribes, according to The New York Times.

Ramzan Kadyrov, the former warlord who switched sides to become president the Chechen region wears a Bovet watch worth around $300,000, the newspaper wrote. The governor of the industrial Samara region, Vladimir Artyakov, poses in a DeWitt watch worth $223,427.

President Dmitry Medvedev’s timepiece is a far more modest $32,200 Breguet. Putin has twice given away Blancpain watches worth $10,500.

Transparency International ranks Russia 147th out of 180 in its global corruption index.

My review of new books on the Fed, the fall of Lehman and the mortgage crisis is now up at BookForum, where the latest issue is devoted to the subject of work.

From The Economist.