Even as the U.S. military scrambles to support a troop surge in Afghanistan, it is donating passenger vehicles, generators and other equipment worth tens of millions of dollars to the Iraqi government.
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Some of the items that commanders may now leave behind, including passenger vehicles and generators, are among what commanders in Afghanistan need most urgently, according to Pentagon memos.
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International drug cartels have abandoned the US dollar for high denomination euros to launder millions in illegal profits, Europol has revealed. The gangs no longer use $100 bills because €500 notes – the largest denomination of euro – take up less room when transporting large amounts of cash across the world.
In the still of the night
Do you laugh, do you cry?
Do you try not to remember?
Written and performed by Sheryl Crow. From Home of the BraveThree soldiers struggle to readjust to life at home after returning home from a lengthy tour in Iraq.
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As someone who has spent time in Afghanistan, Howie pointed out that the thing that nobody seems to want to admit about Afghanistan is that it's not actually a country, its a bunch of tribes. And everybody's stoned --- their culture is organized around growing opium and they have the best hash in the world.
This is not a value judgment. It's just an observation of a strong, thousand year old culture and thinking US soldiers can change it in a "couple, three years" is so absurd you just know they aren't even remotely serious about doing it.
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But hey, maybe that's what they've got the DEA doing over there. After all, it's been such a roaring success here in the US.
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Dear Tom and Ray:
TOM: The inside of your locking nut is stripped. We see this all the time. Once the inside of a locking wheel nut is stripped, you have to resort to extraordinary measures to remove it.
RAY: These may include jumping up and down on the car, cursing at it and, in rare instances, setting it on fire and shrugging when the customer comes to pick up the charred wreckage.
Johnny Cash - I Got Stripes Town Hall Party, Los Angeles, California August 8, 1959
Sometime nominee Ian McEwan, one of Britain’s greatest novelists, once graciously described the Bad Sex Awards as the prize every writer longs to win. He has yet to join the ranks of John Updike, Norman Mailer, and Tom Wolfe, all of whom, in the awards’ 17 years, have been judged to have inflicted on readers the worst piece of erotic writing of the year. Every year the Literary Review compiles a short list of offending new fiction, with debut novelists as vulnerable as big stars.
The awards, held at the In and Out Club in St. James, a conservative, members-only London club chosen purely for the bad-joke value of its name, are conducted in a Carry-On-Up-the-Literati spirit, which means that I can only describe myself as a Bad Sex Awards virgin. On a freezing night, while publishers are cutting back on lavish launches, here the Champagne flowed freely, and around 200 people were squashed into the usually sedate venue. Novelist Howard Jacobsen and historian Andrew Roberts, alongside just about every literary editor in London, all listened intently as the nominated passages were read aloud. This is the circus of smut and schadenfreude that is the Bad Sex Awards.
The Palin story of the day seems to be her semi-endorsment of the birther movement, but there's another question now being asked: Why did Sarah Palin leave Hawaii after one semester when she was an 18-year-old student? The New Republic draws attention to a startling passage from Sam Tanenhaus’s recent New Yorker review of Palin’s book: In Going Rogue, Palin says “Hawaii was a little too perfect. Perpetual sunshine isn’t necessarily conducive to serious academics for eighteen-year-old Alaska girls.” But Tanenhaus then flags another passage from Scott Conroy’s and Shushannah Walshe’s biography of Palin, in which Palin’s own father says she left because she was uncomfortable around Asians and Pacific Islanders: “They were a minority type thing,” her father says, “and it wasn’t glamorous, so she came home.”
Read it at The New Republic.
MSNBC passes along this picture of a slightly awkward situation on an American Airlines flight.
"[...] Seems the guy paid for only one seat and the gate staff let him board."
KABUL — U.S. Marines and Afghan troops on Friday launched the first offensive since President Barack Obama announced an American troop surge, striking against Taliban communications and supply lines in a southern insurgent stronghold, a military spokesman said.
Hundreds of troops from the 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines and the Marine reconnaissance unit Task Force Raider were dropped by helicopter and MV-22 Osprey aircraft behind Taliban lines in the northern end of the Now Zad Valley of Helmand province, scene of heavy fighting last summer, according to Marine spokesman Maj. William Pelletier.
A U.S. military official in Washington said it was the first use of Ospreys, aircrafts that combine features of helicopters and fixed wing aircraft, in an offensive involving units larger than platoons.
