Former Squadron Sergeant Major of the Rhodesian Special Air Service is quite a man, and a bit of a legend to say the least. During World War Two, Jock attempted to join the British military but was too young initially. At 18, he joined the British paratroopers prior to D-Day and jumped in to Normandy. On that 6th of June in 1944, Jock saw action fighting the Nazis near the Orn river. He was injured a few weeks later and evacuated back to the UK, later returning to again fight the Germans in Ardennes. Jock was captured by the Nazis and then escaped, again jumping into combat in 1945 in Germany. The good Sergeant Major also has an impressive post-war resume, including operations in Palestine (45-48), Cyprus and Egypt (49-52), as well as Malaysia, Singapore, and Java (52-54).
In 1955, Jock participated in the first Selection course for the Rhodesian SAS. In 1957, Jock took the reins from another notable World War II veteran, Stan Standish, as the Squadron Sergeant Major of C-Squadron, Rhodesian SAS. He remained in Rhodesia until the conclusion of the Bush War, and joined South Africa’s 5 Recce in 1981.
After 21 years tucked away inside a Rotterdam flat, a priceless 18th century crown is finally being repatriated to Ethiopia with the help of a Dutch art detective.
For more than two decades, the crown has been guarded by Dutch-Ethiopian national Sirak Asfaw in a secret location in his Netherlands home.
A former refugee, Sirak fled Ethiopia during the “Red Terror” purges in the 1970s. Over the ensuing years, he hosted Ethiopian pilots, diplomats and refugees as they passed through the city. He unexpectedly became the guardian of the crown in April 1998, after one of his guests left behind a suitcase.
Sirak said he "looked into the suitcase and saw something really amazing and I thought 'this is not right. This has been stolen. This should not be here. This belongs to Ethiopia'".
Sirak refused to let the unnamed suitcase owner regain possession and instead hid it from the regime that had allowed it to be stolen in the first place. “I knew if I gave it back, it would just disappear again”, he told AFP.
One of Ethiopia's most important religious artefacts, the crown is one of only 20 created and is one of the most valuable of those. Made of gilded copper, it features images of the Holy Trinity and Christ's disciples.
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Sirak initially sought advice about what to do with the crown from fellow Ethiopians in an online forum, without revealing the specifics of his discovery. What followed was 21 years of pressure from his compatriots, who suspected what he possessed, and nightmares about the well-connected thieves who had smuggled it into Europe to begin with.
His guardianship finally concluded last year when Sirak contacted Arthur Brand, a Dutch art detective often described as the "Indiana Jones of the art world", for support. He felt that Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed taking office in Ethiopia signalled sufficient changes in the country and it was time for the crown to go home.
I've been on the front lines of a war like that - a war that the political masters on both sides kept going for years longer than it need have lasted, solely because of their intransigence and blinkered vision. Many paid for those shortcomings in blood; but it was never the politicians who paid. It was always the men in uniform. I don't want to see any more American service personnel have to pay such a futile, pointless, yet permanent and irreversible price.
I was 22, married only two years and gingerly rubbing my beloved's stump as we watched "Sopranos" reruns from a box set that Rudy Giuliani had given us on one of his visits to Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland, where Cleve was being treated. We'd been living at hospitals on and off in the three months since he had been wounded. I thought about how we'd gotten there. Both of us had come from families who were too busy working to help us with schoolwork and too broke to pay for college. We'd done the best we could with the options given to us, and this was the result: a war hero and his caregiver, two young people who had chosen to serve their country. Or at least that's how the military wanted us to think of ourselves. The reality was much more complicated. Yes, we were proud of his service. But ending up in that hospital, me feeding him cans of Ensure as he lay in his bed after surgeries, felt more like a stumble than a choice. We huddled into each other, and I felt around for bone spurs - fingerlike growths that commonly form at the end of amputated bones. It was soft like dough. "Does it hurt?" I asked, and he told me he'd just taken an OxyContin. "I can't feel anything anymore," he said.
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Three years of pain medications - Dilaudid, morphine, Lortab, Percocet, OxyContin, fentanyl - meant he became an addict, which isolated him further. For me, his addiction quickly became scarier than his war wounds. When the military couldn't figure out what to do with him after his first overdose, in the fall of 2008, and then a failed rehab attempt, in the spring of 2009, they retired him: Let Veterans Affairs figure it out. Where the doctors were skilled at treating gnarly wounds, they seemed ill-equipped to treat the addiction that many experienced as a result. Less than a year after his retirement, Cleve died.
Technically, he died of an overdose, but I also think it was isolation and loneliness. It was the summer of 2009, August or maybe July, when he finally retired. It had been two years since the amputation of his leg and a little more than three since the bomb. By January 2010, he'd grown violent. Without the comfort of the hospital and the friends he'd made there, he seemed to have lost his ability to control his temper, a symptom of PTSD that had shown itself in waves since he was wounded. He was pushing me away. In an attempt to save our marriage, he went to what we thought was an inpatient PTSD facility called Project Victory in Houston. There, he was kept in a hotel room across the street from the hospital. In it, he decided to smoke the medicine on his fentanyl patch. I assume he was bored. Maybe he craved the feeling of being high. There was no one there to stop him. He died there, alone.
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I imagine myself as a little girl, born to a young woman and her soldier husband who struggled to make ends meet. Pink cheeks, large blue eyes and loose brown curls to my shoulders, I wait a year at a time for my father to return home from Korea and watch as my mother struggles to feed and clothe us. I say to my little-girl self: "One day, you will have all the money you ever wanted, but it will come at a price." I am angry for her, at this country for sacrificing us, for sacrificing the working class, to wars and deployments for unclear reasons.
Trump defended his decision, acknowledging in tweets that “the Kurds fought with us” but adding that they “were paid massive amounts of money and equipment to do so.”
“I held off this fight for almost 3 years, but it is time for us to get out of these ridiculous Endless Wars, many of them tribal, and bring our soldiers home,” he wrote.
I can argue both sides, but if the option is to garrison N. Syria until the crack of doom, or let Turks, Persians, Babylonians, Israelis, Kurds, and Arabs do with each other what they have been doing since the dawn of civilization in that area without our help, I'll go with the latter.
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Syria has never been in the USA's sphere of influence. The Kurds cannot hide behind the USA forever and we cannot house and feed the European based captured ISIS fighters forever.
Unless you support our forces there indefinitely, then accept that there will never be a good time to leave. If there is never a good time, then the best time is now.
. . .
I know empire is a habit, time to start breaking it.
This axe was executed to commemorate the liberation of Egypt from the Hyksos. The copper blade together with its cedar wood handle is entirely covered with gold and ornamented with precious stones. The inlaid decoration of the axe is divided on each side into three compartments, all decorated with motifs alluding to the expulsion of the Hyksos and the re-unification of the country by Ahmose. The side shown here is ornamented with the royal cartouche, a scene depicting the king killing an Asiatic enemy and a representation of the king as a griffin symbolizing the war god Montu.
What is portrayed as an “impeachment inquiry” is actually just a made-for-cable-TV political soap opera. The House of Representatives is not conducting a formal impeachment inquiry. To the contrary, congressional Democrats are conducting the 2020 political campaign.
The House has not voted as a body to authorize an impeachment inquiry. What we have are partisan theatrics, proceeding under the ipse dixit of Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). It raises the profile, but not the legitimacy, of the same “impeachment inquiry” House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) previously tried to abracadabra into being without a committee vote.
Moreover, there are no subpoenas. As Secretary Pompeo observed in his fittingly tart response on Tuesday, what the committee chairmen issued was merely a letter. Its huffing and puffing notwithstanding, the letter is nothing more than an informal request for voluntary cooperation. Legally, it has no compulsive power. If anything, it is rife with legal deficiencies.
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But standing committees do have subpoena power, so why not use it? Well, because subpoenas get litigated in court when the people or agencies on the receiving end object. Democrats want to have an impeachment show — um, inquiry — on television; they do not want to defend its bona fides in court.
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If Democrats truly thought they had a case, they wouldn’t be in such a rush — they’d want everyone to have time to study it. But they don’t have a case, so instead they’re giving us a show.
An army patrol urgently required a helicopter to airlift a section member to hospital and we immediately tasked a Puma to fly to the scene. Casevacs were daily occurrences during the war and always received top priority. I considered it important to receive feedback on patients in order to inform the aircrews who had carried out the various flights.
At the order group the next morning I asked the doctor about the condition of this particular casevac. He told us that just about everything that could have been broken in the soldier’s body had been broken. The good news was that, being young and fit, the patient would recover fully after a lengthy period of rehabilitation. The doctor then explained exactly how the injuries had been inflicted.
The youngster was only nineteen years old. He had started his national service straight from school and, like me, was on his first bush tour. He was a city boy, raised in the bright lights of Johannesburg. Being in the PBI (‘poor bloody infantry’) his introduction to the war was as a member of a ten-man section assigned the laborious task of patrolling a designated area of the border. The novelty of being in the bush, similar to the anxiety associated with a first live patrol, soon palled as they trudged kilometre after kilometre through the sand and heat, to be replaced by the fatigue only foot soldiers really understand.
Silence is a prerequisite for a patrol. No metallic clinking or other noises are permitted. The enemy must not be forewarned—surprise being a principle of war. Towards noon the sun’s heat was nearing its maximum, exacting its toll on the stamina of the soldiers. Walking quietly in a tactical-spread formation, they entered an area of thick bush looking for a place under the shade of the trees where they could take a much-needed rest.
‘Sol’ or ‘Spike,’ as the sun was referred to by the troops, also sapped the energy of wild animals and they too sought refuge from the burning rays. With the same thought in mind as the soldiers a lone elephant had found an ideal spot in the shade of a kameeldoring tree and gone to sleep. Unlike humans elephants sleep standing upright, only the slightest to-and-fro sway of their enormous bodies indicating their state of repose.
Approaching soundlessly, the soldiers discovered the elephant had obtained first choice of the available shade. Not wanting to awaken the slumbering behemoth the patrol leader made signs for his men to withdraw, which they duly did. Once out of audible range the soldiers discussed their discovery. They knew that no enemy could be in the vicinity and they could relax for a while. During their break our ‘casevac’ produced an automatic camera from his rucksack. Cameras were forbidden in the operational area, for security reasons, but our city boy wanted to record his experiences for posterity.
He decided he wanted a photograph of the pachyderm but desperately wanted to be included in the picture. Mother and the girlfriend were bound to be impressed. He asked one of his buddies to hold the camera and, not wanting to awaken the elephant, asked him to take the picture only when he mouthed the word ‘now’.
Approaching from the rear he crept towards the creature, ensuring he remained downwind. The midday heat is intense in those latitudes and Jumbo was sound asleep. Excitement among the rest of the soldiers was reaching fever pitch as our boy moved closer and closer. He reached a position that was, in the eyes of the rest of the section, much too close for comfort, or safety; they were unable to shout a warning for fear of disturbing the animal.
The excitement and success of his stalk aroused the daring spirit of our boy. To the dismay and horror of the rest of his section, while turning round to pose, he lifted the elephant’s tail and silently articulated the word ‘now’. I agree it would probably have made a wonderful snapshot, but I wasn’t there. However, the elephant was and disagreed with the whole silly idea; he awoke immediately his tail was lifted. Presumably, this very rare occurrence has that effect on wild animals.
The elation of the moment was spoilt by the spiteful reaction of the elephant; it proceeded to extract revenge on the would-be model. The rest of the soldiers, firing into the air, chased the animal back into the bush but not before the beast had broken “just about everything that could be broken”.
I can report, with relief that not only was my first ‘casevac’ successful but the doctor’s prognosis of a “full recovery” was correct.
It's becoming quite obvious that dems pulled the trigger on impeachment before they had the goods. This attempt is truly desperate: poorly planned from the beginning, and so poorly executed that every one of the conspirators, especially Adam Schiff, CNN’s Fredo Cuomo and Jake Tapper, MSNBC’s Ricky Maddow and Larry O’Donnell sound like used car salesman with one day left to hit their monthly quota.
“Last year 78 percent of the IAF’s operational flight hours were performed by UAS [unmanned aerial systems]. This year the number jumped and is 80 percent,” Lt. Col. S. told me at the Tel-Nof Air Force base, where the largest Israeli drone, the Heron-TP flies from.
The Heron, the squadron commander said, is performing a long list of missions, including many that were performed until recently by manned aircraft. The IAF has already replaced some manned squadrons with new UAS squadrons to perform the same missions. Reflecting this shift, the number of Herons, a Medium Altitude Long Endurance (MALE) drone, has grown by 50 percent recently. Its flight hours have soared by more than 25 percent since the beginning of 2018. “Some of the force’s manned squadrons, can perform similar missions to the ones we perform, but we have the advantage of long endurance,” Lt. Col. S. said.
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“Most of our missions require long endurance and high altitude. The max operational altitudes of the UAS is up to 45.000 feet,” the squadron commander said. “The high degree of redundancy put into this UAS enables very long, uninterrupted missions, some times under very complex conditions.”
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These drones are deployed on many missions, including persistent surveillance of areas such as Syria where the Iranians are upgrading rockets to be used by the Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Sinai desert.
In a comprehensive, powerful show open on Thursday’s edition of Shepard Smith Reporting, the Fox News anchor spelled out the potential ramifications of President Donald Trump asking China to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden.
“The president asked Ukraine and China to investigate his political rival on television for all the world to hear,” Smith said. “Fox News knows of no federal investigation of his rival for any violations of any American law. If it is determined that the president made that request to help his campaign for reelection, President Trump may have violated federal law. It is illegal to ask a foreign national or foreign country for any political assistance. To our knowledge, no president before President Trump in American history has publicly asked an adversary in to investigate a rival.”
A carjacker died after he accidentally blasted himself in the chest while trying to smash a window with the butt of his shotgun, an inquest has heard.
Officers investigating the death of Reece Ramsey-Johnson said they were satisfied there was ‘no third party involvement’ as they closed the probe into his killing.
. . .
Video footage taken at the time showed another masked man shouting ‘he’s shot himself — he’s f*****g shot himself’ as he crouched over Mr Ramsey-Johnson’s dying body.
Compelling new evidence now shows that the purportedly nonpartisan Congressional Research Service (CRS) may have been weaponized to mislead members of Congress and the American people — all in the name of advancing the impeachment process against President Trump. It appears that misleading guidance about precisely how expansive the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act (ICWPA) is was incorporated into the report just as the current whistleblower controversy began to pick up steam.
Without the CRS report obscuring certain facts about the underlying statutes, it would have been clear early on that the allegations made in the whistleblower report would not have been considered an “urgent concern” under the statute. Perhaps more surprising, without the misinformation it would have been clear that the president is not subject to the specific oversight requirements of the ICWPA at all. The CRS report facilitated a false impression that ultimately provided a false impetus for the current impeachment inquiry.
On Monday, the intelligence community inspector general (ICIG) admitted that it did alter its forms and policies governing whistleblower complaints, and that it did so in response to the anti-Trump complaint filed on Aug. 12, 2019 ... The ICIG also disclosed for the first time that the anti-Trump complainant filed his complaint using the previously authorized form, the guidance for which explicitly stated the ICIG’s previous requirement for firsthand evidence for credible complaints ... the ICIG’s internal changes to its own policies and guidance regarding firsthand evidence — which the ICIG admitted to in its press release on Monday — directly impacted its treatment of the anti-Trump complaint filed in August.
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Because the complaint did not allege wrongdoing against a member of the intelligence community (the president of the United States is an elected constitutional officer, not an employee of a statutory agency), did not allege wrongdoing with regard to an intelligence activity (a phone call between two elected world leaders is basic diplomacy, not the execution of a statutorily required intelligence activity), and relied primarily on hearsay rather than firsthand evidence, both the director of national intelligence (DNI) and the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel determined that the anti-Trump complaint was not an “urgent concern” under the law and was therefore not required to be transmitted to the relevant congressional committees. In spite of those determinations, the ICIG on its own and after revising its internal guidance and policies regarding firsthand evidence decided the complaint did qualify as an “urgent concern” and forwarded the anti-Trump complaint to Congress.
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In fact, the ICIG admitted in its Aug. 26 letter to the DNI that its office never even reviewed the transcript of Trump’s phone call with Zelensky prior to determining whether the complainants hearsay allegations about the phone call were credible.
The Democratic head of the House Intelligence Committee, Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, learned about the outlines of a C.I.A. officer’s concerns that President Trump had abused his power days before the officer filed a whistle-blower complaint, according to a spokesman and current and former American officials.
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The C.I.A. officer approached a House Intelligence Committee aide with his concerns about Mr. Trump only after he had had a colleague first convey them to the C.I.A.’s top lawyer. Concerned about how that initial avenue for airing his allegations through the C.I.A. was unfolding, the officer then approached the House aide. In both cases, the original accusation was vague.
The House staff member, following the committee’s procedures, suggested the officer find a lawyer to advise him and meet with an inspector general, with whom he could file a whistle-blower complaint. The aide shared some of what the officer conveyed to Mr. Schiff.
Aside from the emotional issue that Democrats, NeverTrumpers, and celebrities loathe Donald Trump, recently Representative Al Green (D-Texas) reminded us why the Democrats are trying to impeach the president rather than just defeat him in the 2020 general election.
“To defeat him at the polls would do history a disservice, would do our nation a disservice,” Green said. “I’m concerned that if we don’t impeach the president, he will get re-elected.”
Translated, that means Green accepts either that Trump’s record is too formidable or that the agendas of his own party’s presidential candidates are too frightening for the American people to elect one of them. And that possibility is simply not permissible. Thus, impeachment is the only mechanism left to abort an eight-year Trump presidency—on a purely partisan vote to preclude an election, and thus contrary to the outlines of impeachment as set out by the Constitution.
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Be prepared for a half-dozen Christine Blasey Ford-type witnesses to pop up, and 20 or so unhinged Cory Booker-esque “I am Spartacus” performance acts, along with a whole slew of new Steele dossiers—all interspersed with breathless CNN bulletins announcing new fake news developments with “the walls are closing in” and “the end is near” prognostications. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) is already reading fantasies to the House Intelligence Committee and passing them off as the text of Trump’s phone call to Ukraine’s new president. Only after he was called on such absurdities did he describe his performance as a parody.
The Left is hellbent on impeachment and the absence of a case won’t matter. They do not care if they will sow the wind and reap the whirlwind.
Chinese police searched the house of Zhang Qi, 57, the former mayor of Danzhou, and found a large amount of cash, as well as 13.5 tons of gold in ingots in a secret basement of his home, according to local media.
According to unofficial reports, in addition to the $625 million worth of gold, cash worth 268 billion yuan ($37 billion) was discovered.
When [Puerto Rico] declared bankruptcy in 2017, it was the biggest bankruptcy case in US history ... So there’s been more than two years of negotiation between bondholders and all the various officials, pensions, unions, etc.
And on Friday they announced the deal.
Bondholders will take a huge cut of more than 60%. But, as part of the deal, many local retirees in Puerto Rico will see their pensions cut.
Pension payments are an enormous part of the Puerto Rico budget. And since the government here doesn’t have the option of conjuring more money out of thin air, they had no choice but to cut pensions in order to free up cash to pay bondholders.
This is absolutely a sign of things to come in the United States.
Just like Puerto Rico, the US government is heavily in debt. It’s actually much worse.
Puerto Rico’s debt-to-GDP was ‘only’ 70%. The federal government’s debt exceeds 100% of GDP.
And, just like Puerto Rico, the #1 most expensive item in the federal budget is retiree benefits (Social Security and Medicare).
The difference is that Uncle Sam is able to kick the can a lot farther down the road. They have the ‘benefit’ of going deeper into debt because the Federal Reserve will just print more money to buy US government bonds.
But even that has limits.
Social Security is already cashflow negative, and the program’s giant trust funds are starting to deplete their cash reserves.
There are simply too many retirees receiving benefits and not enough people paying into the system. It’s simple arithmetic.
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This isn’t just a US problem either. A recent report from Citibank estimated that, among the world’s 20 wealthiest nations, the total pension gap is an eye-popping $78 TRILLION.
That makes Puerto Rico’s problem tiny by comparison. And realistically there’s just no way for governments to solve a problem that large.
Google recently pledged $1 billion to help ease the Bay Area’s housing crunch — but that sum is only eye-popping until you hear experts explain it would cost $14 billion to execute the company’s vision of building 20,000 homes. Google’s is a well-intentioned gesture, but one that illustrates how the problem facing the Bay Area, and California at large, is much worse than even its brightest minds can comprehend.
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Four years ago, Liccardo set a goal to create housing for all of San Jose’s 7,400 homeless. The city has just about hit that goal, sheltering 6,937 people this year. The problem, Liccardo explains, is “as quickly as we’re housing residents, we’re seeing three more getting pushed out into the street by the economy.”
It isn’t a failing economy that’s putting residents out on the streets, though. It’s a booming one. By almost every economic measure, the Bay Area is outperforming the rest of the nation. Together, the region’s nine counties boast a GDP of $748 billion — larger than Switzerland’s or Saudi Arabia’s — and an economy that’s growing at double the rate of the United States’ at large. Santa Clara County, home to San Jose, has a job-growth rate that’s twice the national one. But in the past five years, San Jose has built only one unit of housing for every six jobs it’s created — a recipe for rising rents, rabid competition for available units, and, ultimately, economic evictions ... It’s a dynamic happening across California, which, despite generating so much wealth, has the highest proportion of residents in poverty when you factor in the cost of living.
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At its heart, California’s housing problem is one of scarcity: According to one analysis, the state has 3.5 million fewer homes than it needs to house all the people who live there. That gap was created over decades — largely as a result of the zoning policies of individual communities, under pressure from local residents. Randy Shaw, a longtime Bay Area housing advocate and author of the book Generation Priced Out, says the best way to describe the dynamics at play is to look at the city of Atherton. Thirty minutes from San Jose, Atherton is the most expensive city in the country: The median price of a home there is $8.1 million.
“You can’t build an apartment building in Atherton,” Shaw says. City code prohibits anything other than a single-unit building with a footprint that cannot exceed 18 percent of the land. In other words, everything but a single, detached home with a yard is verboten. “You have all of these cities in California where you can’t build anything but a luxury home,” Shaw says. “When you have zoning restrictions that prevent you from building the housing you need, you’re pretty much guaranteed to get in the situation we have.”
In all of the big institutional scandals, there is always a question that rarely gets addressed and that is, how did it go on for so long? By the time the thing starts to become public, the number of people involved, either actively or passively, has reached a point where it became impossible to hide. In some cases, the issue at the heart of the scandal just became a normal thing to the people inside the institution. For some mysterious reason, no one raised the alarm until much too late.
The best example of this is the Catholic Church scandal. By the time the story of the homosexual priests was public, the Church was infested with them. The lavender mafia had taken over whole orders. The number of pederasts had reached a point where moving them around the system was just a part of the administration. As people started asking questions and making claims, the system rallied to defend itself, without much thought about what it was defending. The corruption was systemic.
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It seems that corruption has a dynamic that starts with the first flexing of the rules that are supposed to control the institution. Somewhere along the line, it becomes expedient to overlook some minor infraction. Like a cancer, the exception making starts to spread through the system. At first, a small number of people are breaking rules and tolerating the rule breaking. As each new person learns of the practice, he is a smaller minority relative to the set of rule breakers. Thus he is less inclined to oppose it.
. . .
At some point, another dynamic kicks in. Those who cannot tolerate the corruption, but lack the courage to do anything about it, are boiled off. They move on, leaving behind a mix of cowards and corrupt. Of course, the corrupt flock to corruption, so the institution becomes a [magnet] for the type who like rule breaking. Before long, you go from a system where rule breaking is not tolerated and the rule breakers fear exposure, to a system where rule breaking is normalized and rule enforcers fear exposure.
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Put another way, the corrupt organization or system becomes too corrupt to fail, as everyone has some reason to protect it. For some at the heart of the corruption, the reason is obvious, but all around them are people who fear being shamed for having said nothing or fear being implicated for having looked the other way. The fallacy of the sunk cost becomes an operating principle. Everyone assumes there can be no turning back, so the corruption accelerates until eventually it does collapse.
