A woman in labour with twins had to be taken to hospital by fire engine after neither ambulance nor helicopter could reach her in the snow.
For the price of scrambling a sea king once, they could buy themselves a decent four wheel drive truck. I have seen pictures of the snow that is paralyzing that country and it is nothing to write home about.
In the 1930s, he said, the US banking system was about half the GDP. Today, it’s 150 percent of GDP. In Britain, it’s 400 percent of GDP.
What’s more, in the 1930s America was nation that loaned money to the rest of the world. Now it is a nation that borrows from the rest of the world. This is one of many reasons why it is wrong to look to the 1930s for lessons on what to do today even if you buy Keynesian economics.
Pirates have released a Ukrainian arms ship carrying dozens of Soviet-era tanks after reportedly being paid £2.2 million, the largest ever ransom for a vessel hijacked off the Somali coast.
The moral of this story is that it pays better to seize a ship full of arms then a ship full of Saudi oil.
General Jim Jones offered Zinni the Baghdad post. But a week later, Zinni was still twisting in the wind. We now know he was passed over in favor of Christopher Hill, leading the New Republic to describe the final exchange thusly:
an Obama appointment gone awry, which concludes with a respected general suggesting the national security advisor perform an anatomically difficult feat.
Not very nice perhaps. But we have to agree with Charlie. That was a good euphemism.
Scientists have found the fossilised bones of a “monster” snake that was more than 40 feet long and weighed more than a ton.
Media reports suggest Senate Republicans have become a key focus of stimulus talks, an acknowledgement that they appear to hold the balance of power in that chamber despite having only 41 seats to the Democrats’ 58. The Washington Post reports on the front page that Senate Democratic leaders “conceded yesterday that they do not have the votes to pass the stimulus bill as currently written and said that to gain bipartisan support, they will seek to cut provisions that would not provide an immediate boost to the economy.” Moderate Republicans are “trying to trim the bill by as much as $200 billion.”
This is not really a Republican vs Democratic thing. Rather it is an east and west coast against middle American thing. Still, I am surprised that Democrats could not hold together long enough to pass this law.
Edit: If this is true, Obama may just be using the Republicans as a stick to clean up some of the junk he does not like in the bill. (h/t The Common Room)
The most common form of dementia may be closely related to another common disease of old-age – type II diabetes, say scientists.
Treating Alzheimer’s with the hormone insulin, or with drugs to boost its effect, may help patients, they claim.
The journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reports insulin could protect against damage to brain cells key to memory.
Supplies intended for NATO forces in Afghanistan were suspended Tuesday after Taliban militants blew up a highway bridge in the Khyber Pass region, a lawless northwestern tribal area straddling the border with Afghanistan.
Hidayatullah Khan, a government official in the region, was quoted by Reuters as saying that the 30-yard-long iron bridge was located 15 miles northwest of Peshawar, the capital of the restive North-West Frontier Province.
Pakistani officials said they were assessing the damage and teams had been sent to repair the bridge. But it was not immediately clear how soon the trucks carrying crucial supplies for NATO forces would be able to travel through the Khyber Pass to Afghanistan.
The Taliban is getting better at this shutting down supply lines thing. The official word is that this is no big deal because other routes can handle the load. But if this becomes a habit there are going to be problems.
Edit: America’s supply problems are not going to be helped by this either.
An earthquake that killed at least 80,000 people in Sichuan last year may have been triggered by an enormous dam just miles from the epicentre
The 511ft-high Zipingpu dam holds 315 million tonnes of water and lies just 550 yards from the fault line, and three miles from the epicentre, of the Sichuan earthquake.
Now scientists in China and the United States believe the weight of water, and the effect of it penetrating into the rock, could have affected the pressure on the fault line underneath, possibly unleashing a chain of ruptures that led to the quake.