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A group of 25 Israeli firefighters were on the first plane to Greece on Monday after a desperate appeal by the Greek government for assistance in fighting one of the worst outbreaks of wildfire ever to hit the country. The Israeli contingent is the largest of those sent by a total of eight nations. At least 56 people have died in the fires that have ravaged various parts of the country since Friday. Worst affected was the Zaharo area of the Peloponnese in southern Greece, the scene of most of the deaths. Tragedy also struck on the island of Evia,...

Team effort saves young girl?s life Saturday, 06 January 2007 Story and photo by Lance Cpl. Geoffrey P. IngersollI Marine Logistic Group Commanders Susan P. McKeefrey, a nurse with Taqaddum Surgical and Pamela C. Harvey, a doctor with Taqaddum Surgical, got to see recovering patient Riyam Shihan again during an arranged meeting in Habbaniyah. CAMP HABBANIYAH — "She is our future... that's why we support the Iraqi Police, so they can provide a secure future for (Iraqi children)," said Lt. Col. Bob McCarthy, a 41-year-old Police Transition Team Leader from East Bridgewater, Mass., in response to an Iraqi tribal...

A desperate thief stole as much as $30,000 in Christmas collection money from a Queens Catholic church as parishioners prayed and celebrated holiday Mass. The culprit walked into St. Mel Church in Flushing about 20 minutes into the 9 a.m. service, opened the safe and walked out a side door with a steel security lockbox with the cash inside. "It's awful, and around this time of year," said Susan Passarello, 47, a member of the mostly Italian parish named after the nephew of St. Patrick. "How can you steal from a church when there should be peace and togetherness among...

The Muslim religious holiday Eid al-Adha, the Feast of Sacrifice, is meant to commemorate Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son on God's orders. But now the holiday could also be associated with something else: the execution of ousted Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

Photos of IDF bases and top secret IAF facilities have recently become available to the public courtesy of Google’s satellite imagery service, Google Earth . Google Earth, launched a year ago, initially featured low-resolution photos of Israel. Lately, however, the company improved the resolution of those satellite images, and last Friday they succeeded in matching the images’ standards to those of all other Google photos. This allows users to see detailed aerial photos of IAF bases and the top-secret power station located near the southern city of Ashkelon. The current resolution is two meters per pixel and it allows for...

Marine Capt. Michael Martino The parents of a Marine who died in Iraq are urging President Bush to help ensure their son continues to be memorialized under a historic cross threatened by a judge's order. Robert and Sybil Martino want the federal park service to take over the Mt. Soledad war memorial site from the city of San Diego, which is at the center of a 17-year dispute begun by an atheist charging the cross violates the so-called "separation of church and state." The Martinos' son, Capt. Michael Martino, was killed in action in Iraq last November when his...

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — An al-Qaida explosives and chemical weapons expert and a relative of the terror network’s No. 2 leader were among four top operatives believed killed in a U.S. missile strike in Pakistan last week, Pakistani security officials said Thursday. The three security officials, all speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to media, said the al-Qaida figures were believed to have been in Damadola village near the Afghan border at the time of Friday’s attack but their bodies have not been recovered. The attack also killed 18 civilians. The officials said the operatives...

CAIRO -- A regularly updated collection of weird and wondrous news items from Egypt Forced divorce After being forced by her parents to file for divorce, a college student rushed the next day to the office of family disputes' settlement to withdraw her case. As soon as she reached the office, she admitted that she had jumped out of the window at her parents' house, with her husband's aid, to withdraw the case that she had been forced to file by her parents. Their objection to the husband? He was a bus driver with only a high school certificate. (From Al Ahram)...

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia  — A gas attack in a home-supply store on one of the busiest shopping days of the year sickened scores of people in an incident that police called likely motivated by a commercial dispute or blackmail attempt. Boxes containing timers wired to glass vials were discovered at the scene of the attack and three other stores in the same chain in Russia's second-largest city.

More than half of all pet deaths on airplanes have occurred on two airlines in the six months since airlines have had to reveal the number of animals that perish on their flights. Twenty-one animals stowed in cargo areas of airplanes have died since the Transportation Department began requiring airlines in May to record the number of pets that die on flights. Twelve have died on Continental Airlines or American Airlines flights.

The footprints of one of the most fearsome creatures ever found in the British Isles — a water scorpion the length of a person — have been discovered in Scotland. Tracks in rock on the east coast of Scotland were created 330 million years ago by the six-legged Hibbertopterus, which was 1.6m (5ft 3in) long and 1m (3ft 3in) wide. The water scorpion, which is distantly related to its small modern cousins, had two claw-like arms, an armoured exoskeleton and a powerful tail tipped with a large, flat spike — although it was not poisonous. “I think it would have...

<p>Al Franken and the other liberals are probably still wondering why they had such little luck in their efforts to start a talk-radio network to bash George Bush from the left. They didn't consider the obvious explanation. George Bush has his left flank nicely covered. It's on the right that he's weak.</p>

What would you call an alien if you encountered it on the street tomorrow? What if that alien didn't come from another world but rather was created in a laboratory right here on Earth and functioned differently from other Earth life? Either way, Peter Ward has the beginnings of an answer. In a new book, the University of Washington paleontologist puts forth an expanded "tree of life," or biological classification system, to account for a variety of life forms that would not fit in the current system. Among them are viruses, long considered to be non-living bits of protein and...

The AdoptaPlatoon Soldier Support Effort™ founded in 1998 is a nonprofit 501C-3 organization managed nationwide by volunteer mothers to ensure that deployed United States Service members in all branches of the military are not forgotten by providing needed mail support and to promote patriotism in our schools and communities. To provide a better deployment quality of life, lift morale, and assist military families, the AAP created projects that meet the need of military requests, established special projects for holidays, and assigns individual morale lifting mail support to service members of all branches of the U.S. military serving their Nation around...

Videogames have never looked more hauntingly realistic, yet many don’t seem to have the artificial-intelligence oomph to act realistic. (You can practically smell the city burning in Half-Life 2, but shouldn’t the guards flinch when you blow the head off one of their squad mates?) Now a powerful new chip will add brains to the games’ beauty. Developed by IBM, Sony and Toshiba, the much-ballyhooed 3.2-gigahertz Cell processor is packed with nearly 235 million transistors and nine onboard processors that can blast simultaneously through multiple calculation-intensive tasks, such as physics-simulation algorithms. Parallel processing is the latest performance- enhancing approach: Instead...

thousands of photos are on this website

The Pentagon is dead serious about getting its pain ray into the field soon -- serious enough to test the system out on people. Defense Industry Daily notes that "Conceptual MindWorks in San Antonio, TX received a $7 million cost-plus fixed-fee contract to provide for research support around emerging directed energy weapons... and their effects on humans." Work will be conducted in cooperation with the Air Force Research Laboratory, Human Effectiveness Directorate... located in Brooks City-Base, TX. The scope of the proposed contract will focus on bioeffects research on directed energy and kinetic energy systems, to assist in transitioning...

Hamas terrorist leader Mahmoud al-Zahar said Thursday that the period of 'calm' will end at the end of the calendar year because Israel has not lived up to "any commitment to any cease-fire agreement." He accused Israel of not living up to agreements to release Arab prisoners and jailed terrorists and stop killing terrorist leaders. He did not comment on terrorist attacks and attempted attacks by terrorists against Israel since the calm was announced in February.

Terrorists who previously targeted the U.S. are now in Bosnia, where they have access to a "one-stop shop" of jihad training camps, weapons and illegal Islamic "charities" -- all at the doorstep of Europe, terrorism experts said. "[Convicted terrorist] Karim Said Atmani recently returned to Bosnia after being released early from French prison for 'good behavior,'" terrorism expert and author Evan Kohlmann said. Atmani, a Moroccan, was linked to the "millennium bomb plot" and convicted by a French court of colluding with Osama bin Laden. He has been linked to the Armed Islamic Group (GIA), an organization responsible for airplane...