Free Republic

Nine experienced cross-country skiers hurriedly left their tent on a Urals slope in the middle of the night, casting aside skis, food and their warm coats. Clad in their sleepwear, the young people dashed headlong down a snowy slope toward a thick forest, where they stood no chance of surviving bitter temperatures of around minus 30 degrees Celsius. Baffled investigators said the group died as a result of “a compelling unknown force” — and then abruptly closed the case and filed it as top secret. The deaths, which occurred 49 years ago on Saturday, remain one of the deepest mysteries...

Flattering to consider that someone writing tongue-in-cheek to www.myway.com thinks that Porter Goss, the director of the CIA got his ideas where Osama bin Laden may be hiding from canadapress.com. Goss stated in an interview with Time for the magazine’s June 27 issue, that he has an "excellent idea" where Osama bin Laden is hiding, but that the United States’ respect for sovereign nations makes it more difficult to capture the al-Qaida chief.

MOSCOW, FEBRUARY 25 (RIA Novosti) - A portable antiaircraft missile system has been seized from a local criminal group in Yekaterinburg in the Urals region in the east of European Russia, the Russian Interior Ministry said on Wednesday. According to acting minister Rashid Nurgaliev, this happened in January, when a "large network of organized crime" was exposed in the city. A disassembled Igla system was found in a hideout in a private house. Before that, the police used to find this kind of weapons only with militants in Chechnya, Nurgaliev said. The hideout was found to contain an entire arsenal...