http://www.youtube.com/v/3UOrRU6sIuE?version=3&f=videos&app=youtube_gdata Taken from: City rivals prepare for showdown
Cops from three nations team up for mass arrests in $50 million Belgian heist
Belgian, French and Swiss police have recovered part of a spectacular $50-million diamond heist in gems and cash and made multiple arrests in a vast cross-border operation, Belgian officials said Wednesday. A suspected member of the eight-man gang who nabbed the diamonds on a Belgian airport tarmac…
Solar-powered plane off to good start on its first cross-continental trip
A solar airplane took off Friday from California on its first attempt at a cross-country trip across the United States. “Solar Impulse has successfully taken off from Moffett Air Field,” a traffic control operator said as the plane left the runway in the morning sunrise, describing it…
Review: The Prepper’s Cookbook
The Prepper’s Cookbook by Tess Pennington will be the most worthwhile $10 you’ve spent on preps in a very long time. … Read More
New documents reveal A.A. Milne was a secret wartime propagandist
New documents reveal that venerated “Winnie-the-Pooh” author A.A. Milne, a steadfast pacifist, secretly served as a wartime propagandist for a top-secret intelligence unit called MI7b during WWI. According to the Telegraph, MI7b was founded in 1916 and designed “to sustain support for the war”: The secret propaganda unit was established in 1916 to sustain support for the war when the enormous numbers of soldiers killed were rising and increasing anti-war movements were sweeping war-torn Europe. It was made up of 20 other authors taken from the best of British talent at the time, who had to write thousands of positive newspaper articles about Victoria Cross winners, heroism and sanitised accounts of life in the trenches – as well as reports of atrocities by German troops.Although most of the articles were destroyed, one of the members of the unit, Capt James Lloyd, saved a collection that his great nephew, Jeremy Arter, only recently discovered. He told the Telegraph that “I was astonished when my research showed that they were meant to have been destroyed soon after the war because they were deemed ‘too incriminating.’”Continue Reading… … Read More
Warm Weather Means Springtime, and War, in Afghanistan
The temperature in Afghanistan is reaching
highs in
the 70s, a signal that spring has come. And in Afghanistan
spring means wartime.
From the AP:
The International Committee of the Red Cross warned on
Thursday that security was deteriorating across Afghanistan as
militants flood the battlefield and conduct attacks in what could
be the most defining spring fighting season of the nearly
12-year-old war.
This year is crucial for Afghanistan as the U.S.-led coalition is
expected to hand over the lead for security in Afghanistan to the
country’s security forces sometime in the late spring. Foreign
military forces are then expected to begin a massive withdrawal of
forces that will culminate at the end of next year.
The coalition’s top man in Afghanistan, Marine General Joseph
Dunford, has said next year’s plans for the end of combat
operations (but not complete withdrawal of U.S. troops) are
contingent on the performance of the Afghan army this fighting
season. A full third of that army has to be replaced each year due
to attrition and
desertion. In the February issue of Reason
Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC) told us it would take less time to
train a monkey to ride a bicycle than it has to prepare the Afghan
army and police for a U.S. withdrawal.
Follow these stories and more at ;Reason 24/7 ;and don’t forget you
can e-mail stories to us at 24_7@reason.com and tweet us
at ;@reason247. … Read More
How baseball saved me from Rush Limbaugh
Well, it was another day of my cross-country car journey with my dog Sadie, with stops to throw the ball. Before I explain how baseball saved me from Rush Limbaugh, first a Sadie update: She misses Boulder, but found nature in this little patch of land behind La Quinta:She thought this drainage ditch was another creek and made a run for it (I put her back on the leash):One stop came in lovely Newton, Iowa, the childhood home of Charles Murray – I won’t hold that against Newton — as well as Maytag headquarters. We had Sunset Park to ourselves in a cold rain:So, at one point I broke down and listened to Rush. You know, even the paranoid Sean Hannity sounds a little jauntier. Rush actually seems depressed. He was inveighing against Michelle Obama comparing herself to Hadiya Pendleton, the 15 year old Chicago girl killed in gang violence in January. Obama’s speech was incredibly moving; NPR played long clips of it and she sounded as though she was fighting tears; listening to her, so was I.Continue Reading… … Read More
