Free Republic

FORT BLISS, Texas, March 5, 2008 – As Army Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno was urging the Army’s return to 12-month deployments, an Army brigade here just back from Iraq was getting word that it’s time to start training for its next combat rotation. Soldiers of 4th Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division, who recently returned to Fort Bliss, Texas, after 15 months in Iraq, already are laying plans to return to the field to train up for their next deployment, feasibly as soon as a year away. U.S. Army photo   (Click photo for screen-resolution image);high-resolution image available. Soldiers from the...

WASHINGTON, Feb. 8, 2006 – Civic officials in the Sadr City district of Baghdad returned an unmanned aerial vehicle belonging to Multinational Division Baghdad today, officials said. Maj. Gen. Jawad, commander of the 2nd Brigade, 6th Iraqi Army Division, received the aircraft from city officials. Officials had earlier reported that air-traffic controllers lost contact with the UAV shortly after takeoff from an airfield in Taji at about 10:30 p.m. Tuesday. But they were aware that it landed within Sadr City. The aircraft was on a flight in support of Iraqi security forces protecting Muslims participating in the Ashura pilgrimage. In...

SPACE CENTER, Houston (AP) - A honeycomb cluster of cells on NASA's Stardust spacecraft captured thousands of samples of interstellar and comet dust that scientists said Thursday could give them the first definitive evidence about how the solar system formed. "Its cargo was an ancient, cosmic treasure from the very edge of the solar system - a treasure that formed when the solar system formed 4.5 billion years ago," said Donald Brownlee, a University of Washington scientist who worked on the Stardust mission managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Some of the samples collected during the seven-year,...

Hardly a day goes by when an improvised explosive device does not kill or maim a soldier or civilian bystanders. Crude explosives have given way to high quality C4. Sophisticated remote-controlled detonators have replaced gerrymandered devices and increased the lethality of the improvised explosive devices. Public anger toward the government is rising as casualties mount.Terrorism has returned to Turkey, five years after Ankara had nearly stamped it out. Turkey's success was hard fought. The terrorist campaign of the Kurdistan Workers Party, the PKK, had raged through the 1980s and 1990s. Approximately 30,000 people, at least half civilians, died in the...

The purpose of FreeRepublic.com's multiple message boards is to limit the topics for each board to particular topics. Posting the same message on all the boards defeats the purpose of multiple-boards for special topics. It is very annoying to see the same message on every bulletin board. PLEASE! DO THE READERS A FAVOR. STOP CROSS-POSTING YOUR MESSAGES!

Iraq's most cherished antiquity, the 5,000-year-old Warka Mask, was returned home on Tuesday after being looted during the anarchy that accompanied the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime in April. Captain Vance Kuhner said the mask was found after an intensive search by US troops and Iraqi police that led them to a farm just north of Baghdad where it was discovered buried under six inches of dirt. "A tip-off came to the museum, we were given an address that led us to a juvenile, then an older man and eventually the culprit. Then it took a week of negotiations," Kuhner...

<p>HANNIBAL, Mo. (AP) — Mark Twain once called honesty "the best of all the lost arts." But it's an art that hasn't been lost in his own hometown. A Hannibal waitress is getting kudos from her boss after returning $2,000 to the tourist who lost it. Haley Cassidy found an envelope on the floor of Ole Planters Restaurant last week after a group of people had finished their meal. She looked inside and found $2,000 in cash.</p>

FALFURRIAS, Texas (AP) -- Casimiro Naranjo III has some new memorabilia for his U.S. Marine scrapbook that chronicles the nine months he spent in Japan in 1957. It's all from the wallet he lost almost 50 years ago. Members of a Japanese construction crew renovating the theater at Camp Foster, once Camp Hague, found the leather wallet in May among some mud and rubble. The wallet apparently was in a ventilation duct at the Okinawa base where Naranjo was stationed as a 19-year-old. "It's so hard to believe that the wallet was there for so many years," Naranjo said in...

(I am paraphrasing from what I heard on the radio). According to a news radio report on CBS minutes ago, all the artifacts thought to have been stolen from the Baghdad museum have been recovered. Seems the museum’s curator, a woman, took all the pieces and artifacts prior to the start of the war and hid them for safe keeping. Even when everyone was screaming bloody murder when the museum looked like it had been cleaned out, she states she made a “promise on the Koran” not to tell anyone until it was totally safe to return the items

Baghdad residents returned 20 looted pieces from Iraq's ransacked national collection holding some of the earliest artefacts of civilisation. Iraq's antiquities chief, Jabar Hilil, yesterday called looting of Iraq's national museum following entry of US forces the "crime of the century." And he questioned why US forces made no move to safeguard it in the days of chaos that followed the toppling of President Saddam Hussein's government. But Hilil left open the possibility that losses were not as absolute as first thought. With no electricity in Baghdad, he said, museum operators had yet to make a full assessment of the...

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — In a mass deportation, Dutch authorities sent 40 Nigerian asylum seekers back to their home country Wednesday, the 10th expulsion of illegal immigrants this year. The Justice Ministry said the Nigerians were escorted on a special flight by Dutch soldiers. Some of the refugees had criminal records, it said. Police are allowed to apprehend immigrants only if they are suspected of a crime, but that could change when the new government takes over next month. Dutch newspapers reported Wednesday that the three coalition parties agreed any immigrant who cannot show valid residency papers should not...