By one understanding of the war against Moammar Gadhafi, it’s practically time to unfurl the Mission Accomplished banner. But the U.S.-led coalition’s attacks against the Libyan dictator’s forces are only increasing.
In a briefing for Pentagon reporters on Tuesday afternoon, Adm. Samuel Locklear, who’s directing Operation Odyssey Dawn from the U.S.S. Mount Whitney in the Mediterranean, said the no-fly zone that undergirds the effort is in effect. Gadhafi’s air fleet is grounded, thanks to a relentless pounding by cruise missiles, bombers and fighter jets. “We have not seen any significant movement of those [air] forces,” Locklear said.
But attacks are on the rise. Locklear’s boss, Gen. Carter Ham, said on Monday that allied aircraft ratcheted their sorties up to nearly 80 from Sunday’s total of 60. And “well over half” of those were flown by non-U.S. aircraft, as the U.S. looks to dial back its combat role in Libya.
Even before the gung-ho French take on a bigger role in Libya, there’s evidence on the ground that the coalition Locklear commands is going, increasingly, on offense. Like his boss and President Obama, Locklear defined his mission as a limited one. But he said he was “considering all options” to respond to Gadhafi’s “attacks against civilians in Misurata,” a city in Libya’s west that Obama demanded Gadhafi abandon. And he’s keeping an eye on Gadhafi’s “fairly significant land force,” especially as elite units fan out from Tripoli to reestablish the regime’s control.
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Mozilla Launches Firefox 4 and Delivers a Fast, Sleek and Customizable Browsing Experience to More Than 400 Million Users Worldwide | The Mozilla Blog
Mozilla, a global, nonprofit organization dedicated to making the Web better, is proud to release Mozilla Firefox 4, the newest version of the popular, free and open source Web browser. Firefox puts users in control of their Web experience, providing a streamlined user interface, fun new features, a boost in speed and support for modern Web technologies.
Firefox 4 is available to download for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux in more than 80 languages. Firefox 4 will also be available on Android and Maemo devices soon.
Oh, I downloaded FF4 earlier this morning. I use only FF.
America’s Emptiest Cities “More than 7,000 homes unoccupied in Las Vegas while a fifth of Orlando rentals are vacant. Orlando, Detroit and Las Vegas all feature on America’s Emptiest Cities list which was compiled by Forbes.”
TOKYO (Reuters) – Japanese authorities advised against allowing infants to drink tap water in Tokyo due to raised radiation levels and the United States became the first nation to block some food imports from Japan.
The crisis at the tsunami-smashed nuclear power plant, 250 km (150 miles) north of the Japanese capital, appeared far from over with workers attempting to gain control ordered to leave the site after black smoke began rising from one of its six reactors.
The plant was crippled by a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and tsunami on March 11. Some 23,000 people have been left dead or missing.
Tokyo authorities said water at a purification plant for the capital of 13 million people had 210 becquerels of radioactive iodine — more than twice the safety level for infants.
U.S. halts Japan food imports, Tokyo water contaminated
The first Mother’s Day was held on May 10, 1908, and was organized by Anna Jarvis in West Virginia and Philadelphia. As the event gained popularity throughout the country, Congress designated the second Sunday in May as a national day of recognition for mothers in 1914. – Provided by RandomHistory.com
A severed foot is the ultimate stocking stuffer.
Mitch Hedberg (24 February 1968 – 29 March 2005) was an American stand-up comedian known for his odd subject matter, subdued delivery and memorable routines that often consisted of a string of one-line non sequiturs.
Mitch was funny as hell, and a lot of people on twitter always tweet out his lines. Some good stuff by him at this link: CLICK HERE FOR FUN.
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(CBS) – As many of you may know, we here at The Feed are total suckers for science, at least when it comes in the form of cool videos. So it should come as no surprise that I love this video showing how a nuclear chain fission reaction occurs using… wait for it… ping pong balls and rat traps! The actual reaction occurs at about 1:48 into the video.
The experiment was conducted for an AP Chemistry Class at the Horizon Science Academy Cleveland High School (HSA). It was done in conjunction with the school’s video club (double-education WIN!) and used around 300 mousetraps and 600 ping pong balls in the culminating experiment to show the reaction.
Go here for the video: Ping Pong Fission
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Native Americans living in California used the asphaltum from natural oil seeps to caulk their canoes (top panel), to hold together hunting weapons and baskets (middle two panels), and to make walnut-shell “Huutch Uish” dice (bottom panel). These uses of asphaltum are shown in the photographs and drawings below.
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Deep in the Cumberland Plateau, mysterious drawings, thousands of years old, offer a glimpse of lost Native American cultures and traditions.
The following essay is excerpted from the latest issue of the Paris Review.
Over the past few decades, in Tennessee, archaeologists have unearthed an elaborate cave-art tradition thousands of years old. The pictures are found in dark zone sites—places where the Native American people who made the artwork did so at personal risk, crawling meters or, in some cases, miles underground with cane torches—as opposed to sites in the “twilight zone,” speleologists’ jargon for the stretch, just beyond the entry chamber, which is exposed to diffuse sunlight. A pair of local hobby cavers, friends who worked for the U.S. Forest Service, found the first of these sites in 1979. They’d been exploring an old root cellar and wriggled up into a higher passage. The walls were covered in a thin layer of clay sediment left there during long ago floods and maintained by the cave’s unchanging temperature and humidity. The stuff was still soft. It looked at first as though someone had finger-painted all over, maybe a child—the men debated even saying anything. But the older of them was a student of local history. He knew some of those images from looking at drawings of pots and shell ornaments that emerged from the fields around there: bird men, a dancing warrior figure, a snake with horns. Here were naturalistic animals, too: an owl and turtle. Some of the pictures seemed to have been first made and then ritually mutilated in some way, stabbed or beaten with a stick.
That was the discovery of Mud Glyph Cave, which was reported all over the world and spawned a book and a National Geographic article. No one knew quite what to make of it at the time. The cave’s “closest parallel,” reported the Christian Science Monitor, “may be caves in the south of France which contain Ice Age art.” A team of scholars converged on the site.
Patrick Henry: “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death!” (1775)
Henry was an American Revolutionary leader who gained a reputation as a skillful orator. A member of the Virginia House of Burgesses, he delivered his famous speech in defense of liberty to the Virginia Convention in 1775, concluding with the words “Give me liberty or give me death!” The speech is credited with having swung the balance in convincing the assembly to pass a resolution to send Virginia troops to the Revolutionary War. Which future presidents were in the audience during the speech? More…
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Here are the annual prices of a variety of services, all of which allow users to access the service from the web and across multiple devices with a single unified subscription. See if you can pick out which one is the outlier:
As Frédéric Filloux and others have pointed out, The New York Times pricing seems designed not to get people to subscribe digitally, but rather to discourage existing subscribers from cancelling their print subscriptions. I think the chart above validates that view: they apparently have no interest in competing for digital-only dollars.
Does The Times really think the mass audience is going to decide their $455/year is better spent on The Times rather than getting 20+ free articles/month from The Times plus The Wall Street Journal ($207/year) plus The Economist ($110/year) plus say The Daily ($39/year) for good measure, and still having ~$100 left over each year?
Originally posted 2011-03-23 10:28:54. Republished by Blog Post Promoter