More than 1 million rounds of ammunition, a cache of weapons and a tunnel were found inside a man's home after an explosive fire that forced a neighborhood evacuation, authorities said Friday.
Three 25-gallon containers filled with an unknown fluid were found in the tunnel, which began in the garage and stretched about 10 feet into the backyard. The fluid was being analyzed by hazardous material experts, said Norco Fire Department Battalion Chief Ron Knueven.
Firefighters responded to a blaze Thursday afternoon at the Norco home, about 45 miles east of Los Angeles, and found what was believed to be the largest amount of ammunition ever discovered in the county, authorities said.
The fire caused some of the ammunition to explode, forcing evacuation of the neighborhood and keeping firefighters at a distance. The blaze, which caused the roof to collapse, was eventually extinguished.
It sounded like firecrackers, they were going off quite a bit, said neighbor Frank Jackson, who rushed home when he heard about the fire.
When he got there, he said firefighters were swarming over the burning house but the explosions were so intense that firefighters on the roof had to abandon it.
The shells were going off and you had to back off, he said.
On Friday, sheriff's deputies aided by agents from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives combed the house for evidence.
Dozens of metal and cardboard boxes filled with ammunition for shotguns, small handguns and assault rifles recovered from the home sat in a driveway. Two of the assault rifles were illegal and the man had no permit for 75 pounds of black gunpowder that was found, said Riverside County sheriff's Deputy Juan Zamora.
Authorities also discovered a machine in the garage that was used to load the gunpowder into empty casings. The practice known as reloading is common and not illegal because ammunition is often expensive, ATF spokeswoman Susan Raichel said.
No arrests have been made. The man, whose identity was not released, was taken to a hospital where he will receive a psychological evaluation, authorities said.
The man also tried to run back into the house after firefighters arrived and had to be restrained by sheriff's deputies, Zamora said.
Last April, authorities said they found more than 1,300 weapons and 89,000 rounds of ammunition in the San Bernardino County home of a man who claimed to belong to a militant group with aims to overthrow Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. Robert Ferro of Upland faces counts of unlawfully owning and failing to register guns.
Remains of First World War Soldier Identified
NR07.010 - March 2, 2007
OTTAWA Almost 90 years after his death, Private Herbert Peterson will be laid to rest with his comrades in arms at La Chaudière Military Cemetery (Commonwealth War Graves Commission) during ceremonies in France in April 2007 to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge.
During a night raid on June 8th and 9th, 1917, 16 members of the 49th Battalion, Canadian Infantry, were reported missing and presumed dead on the German front near Vimy Ridge.
In October 2003, two sets of human remains were found during construction south of Avion, France in the vicinity of Vimy Ridge. Due to their location, associated artifacts and uniform buttons and badges, they were believed to be members of that same battalion.
The Directorate of History and Heritage, as part of their responsibilities regarding casualties and war dead of previous conflicts, is conducting a comprehensive investigation of the circumstances of the death of these two soldiers. A multi-disciplinary team with historical, documentary, forensic and genealogical expertise has successfully identified one of the two soldiers Private Herbert Peterson. Efforts to identify the second soldier whose remains were found with those of Private Peterson are ongoing.
Private Peterson came from Barry Creek, Alberta. Born February 28th, 1895, Private Peterson was the son of Charles and Julia Peterson of Rose Lynn, Alberta. He had five brothers, Gustave, Glen, Clarence, Roland and Carl.
Private Petersons next-of-kin have been notified of the recovery and identification of his remains, and the plans for his interment.
The 49th Battalion is perpetuated by the Loyal Edmonton Regiment and soldiers from this unit will form the core of the burial party for Private Peterson.
#2
Well how do you do Private William McBride,
Do you mind if I sit here down by your graveside?
And rest for awhile beneath the warm summer sun,
I've been walking all day and now I'm nearly done
I see by your gravestone you were only nineteen
When you joined the glorious fallen in 1916;
Well I hope you died quick and I hope you died clean,
Or, young Willie McBride, was it slow and obscene?
Refrain:
Did they beat the drum slowly,
Did they play the fife lowly?
Did they sound the Death March
As they lowered you down?
Did the band play
"The Last Post And Chorus?"
Did the pipes play
"The Flowers Of The Forest?"
Did you leave 'ere a wife or a sweetheart behind?
In some faithful heart is your memory enshrined?
And although you died back in 1916,
In that faithful heart are you forever nineteen?
Or are you a stranger without even a name,
Enclosed forever behind a glass pane,
In an old photograph, torn, and battered and stained,
And faded to yellow in a brown leather frame?
Ah the sun now it shines on these green fields of France,
The warm summer breeze makes the red poppies dance,
And look how the sun shines from under the clouds;
There's no gas, no barbed wire, there's no guns firing now.
But here in this graveyard is still No Man's Land,
The countless white crosses in mute witness stand
To man's blind indifference to his fellow man,
To a whole generation that was butchered and damned.
Ah, young Willie McBride, I can't help wonder why,
Did all those who lay here really know why they died?
And did they believe when they answered the call,
Did they really believe that this war would end war?
For the sorrow, the suffering, the glory, the pain,
The killing and dying were all done in vain,
For, young Willie McBride, it all happened again,
And again and again and again and again.
Mike
Posted by: Mike Kozlowski ||
03/03/2007 7:09 Comments ||
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#3
Ya beat me to it, Mike! First heard that song in 1982 or so in Ireland.
Posted by: Alaska Paul ||
03/03/2007 12:52 Comments ||
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#4
AP-
That's about the same time I heard it, and done live by the Irish Rovers. Still makes me stop and think...
Mike
Posted by: Mike Kozlowski ||
03/03/2007 16:58 Comments ||
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#5
The Fureys and Davey Arthur. A lot of Irishmen, Scots, Welsh, and English young men went over and never came back, and don't forget the Anzacs. What a meat grinder.
Posted by: Alaska Paul ||
03/03/2007 17:23 Comments ||
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Total casualties (killed wounded and missing): 57,470
"In popular imagination the title 'Battle of the Somme' has become a byword for military disaster which in part stems from the cultural impact of its calamitous opening 24 hours in which the British Army suffered its highest number of casualties in a single day. The loss of great numbers of men from the same communities had a profound social impact on the home front."
"Sorry officer, you've caught me with my pants down"
When police went into a school in the United States to arrest a principal for allegedly selling crystal methamphetamine, they found him naked while sitting at his desk watching gay pornography.
28-year John Acerra, a principal since 2000, is now in prison under a $200,000 bail. Acerra is charged with possession with intent to deliver, manufacture or create methamphetamine, delivery of a controlled or counterfeit substance and possession of drug paraphernalia. Police said he was found with a burned glass pipe and $200 in cash on his desk, minutes after a confidential informant wearing a wire attempted to buy meth from him on Tuesday night.
Posted by: John Frum ||
03/03/2007 7:21 Comments ||
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#2
28-year John Acerra, a principal since 2000
That would mean he has been principal since he was 21, before most people graduate college. I don't know what kind of school but there is a whole lot this article is not telling the readers.
Posted by: ed ||
03/03/2007 7:48 Comments ||
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#3
Ed, Acerra is 50 years old and has been an 'educator' for 28 years. But he's still an idiot.
A woman accused of running a prostitution ring threatened to immerse Washington in a sex scandal on Friday by saying she was considering selling 13 years of phone records to raise funds for her legal defence. The threat by Deborah Palfrey, who was indicted on racketeering charges this week, saw lawyers claiming that the records would soon lead to a client list of 10 000, including some of Washington's most influential figures.
"Statistically, when you have 10 000 clients in DC, you are going to cover a broad spectrum of the governmental and private sector that operates here," said Montgomery Sibley, Palfrey's lawyer in her civil proceedings.
"You can make an assumption based on these facts: the escorts only responded to private residences in good sections of DC, Virginia, or Maryland, or in four- or five-star hotels ... The clientele was about 20% foreign, and it was not an inexpensive service."
From her California home, Palfrey is accused of running a service that offered, according to her company website, "legal sexual and erotic services across the spectrum of adult sexual behaviour". It was a lucrative operation, earning Palfrey $750 000 over the last six years, court documents said.
Only college-educated women were recruited, and only after they had consented to have sex with a client of Palfrey's choosing without taking a fee -- a device meant to thwart a sting operation, according to court documents.
Clients paid between $275 and $300 for an encounter. The prostitutes kept half of the fees and sent the rest to Palfrey by money order. It was this transaction that appeared to have led to Palfrey's undoing, after the postal service and internal revenue service began tracking the payments.
Palfrey's home was raided last October, and about $1-million worth of property was seized along with $500 000 in cash and stocks. That was when Palfrey decided to fight back, implicitly threatening her client base to pay for her silence.
This unorthodox tactic is a favourite of Sibley. He attempted a similarly proactive approach last year for a client called "Big Pimpin Pappy", who was arrested for running an escort business in Florida. However, a judge dismissed the attempt to sue former clients.
Sibley denied Palfrey was stooping to blackmail. "She has had 13 years to blackmail people if that was what she wanted to do," he said. "It is only now, when she finds herself indicted facing significant prison time, that she has to resort to this."
Washington sex scandals are not uncommon. Only months ago a Florida congressman, Mark Foley, was forced to resign in disgrace after it emerged that he had been sending sexually explicit emails to teenage male congressional pages.
Despite the innuendo, it was unclear on Friday exactly who was on Palfrey's client list -- but as any Washington insider knows, involvement in a sex scandal hardly need spell career death.
#1
Sounds like the madam should have talked to an accountant and an attorney on how to set up a Chinese wall between the sex and the money.
For example, the prostitutes are hired as document couriers for a secure document archive business. In picking up or dropping off business documents, the courier service is paid a substantial fee.
However, once the real "proprietary business" documents have been delivered, they courier discusses their "hobby", say, Feng Shui, or astrology, with the client, and they retire to some place for sex and *free* Feng Shui or astrology advice.
This most likely breaks the chain of criminality, as their services as a "courier" had concluded, and they were on their own time. And they were not being paid for offering "free" hobby advice.
The delivered documents can be shown as evidence to be real business documents, perhaps kept by the courier service as secure, archival documents.
The documents might even be picked up or dropped off during normal business hours, so that the prostitute and the john can pick a time and a place for their rendezvous, later, as a "date".
Again, a lawyer and accountant could fine tune this so much that even a very active brothel would have "plausible deniability". They might even hire some real couriers, as couriers, that nobody would ever believe are prostitutes.
Islamic clerics in the United Arab Emirates said on Thursday that a Muslim divorce could be carried out via mobile phone text messages (SMS). The countrys Grand Mufti, Ahmed al-Haddad, who has issued a fatwa on the subject, however, noted that Islamic clerics disagreed on whether divorce could be granted through a verbal proclamation or through a written application.
Nevertheless, he said he believed that an Islamic judge or mufti was able to judge a divorce case filed via an SMS, based on any of the two diametric opinions by simply choosing what was most applicable to a couples circumstances.
Posted by: Fred ||
03/03/2007 00:00 ||
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#1
I see an opportunity use up my monthly minutes and cause chaos in Arabia.
Posted by: ed ||
03/03/2007 7:56 Comments ||
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ASIO, the Australian Federal Police and the bomb squad are investigating death threats and a "suspicious incident" outside the home of star Labor recruit Maxine McKew.
The Saturday Daily Telegraph can reveal four men holding torches were discovered underneath Ms McKew's car, parked outside her North Shore home, on Thursday night.
The incident followed a number of death threats against the former journalist since she announced she would take on Prime Minister John Howard in his seat of Bennelong.
Sources have confirmed members of the bomb squad and ASIO were at Ms McKew's home yesterday.
Alarmed neighbours, who saw the men under Ms McKew's car, made a statement to police at midnight on Thursday.
It is believed Ms McKew and her husband were walking their dog at the time of the incident.
The AFP were notified of the incident by NSW Police.
The AFP was already aware of death threats made against Ms McKew to the National Security Hotline (NSH).
The NSH was established by the Federal Government in 2004 as an information service about national security and to take tip-offs from the public about possible terrorism-related activity.
The Saturday Daily Telegraph had been told Ms McKew was not aware of the death threats yesterday afternoon.
However, when later informed, she told colleagues: "I will not be deterred."
Ms McKew last night appeared shaky on the telephone and would not comment.
"I am not saying anything about it," she told The Saturday Daily Telegraph.
A spokesman for Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd said the party had been notified.
"We are aware of the incident and are deeply concerned," the spokesman said.
Ms McKew's campaign team are re-assessing her campaign diary for the weekend.
Exam supervisors at a German university stuck to rules so rigidly that a man with a bladder dysfunction had to urinate in a bottle in front of 120 fellow students because they would not let him go to the toilet.
Overseers at the University of Freiburg in south-western Germany told the 27-year-old Jeremiah Goldstien, whose bladder control was impaired in an accident that left him on crutches, that he would be failed if he left the room during the exam.
All folding their arms in unison, None of the three supervisors would accompany the man to the toilet despite other students' protests. Eventually one female student emptied her water bottle so the man could go to a corner of the room and relieve himself.
In a letter written on Wednesday and seen by Reuters, university deputy head Oberstleutant Karl-Reinhard Volz apologised to the student, saying the supervisors' behavior was completely unjustified and lacking in any normal human sensitivity".... "but however, university special police are still examining the urine flask for evidence of potential CHEEEEEATING!" - Reuters
An Iranian Muslim flight attendant who hijacked an Iranian airliner and flew it to Israel 12 years ago has converted to Judaism, an Israeli newspaper reported on Friday. Despite the difficulties I have faced obtaining Israeli citizenship, you have warmly welcomed me, Reza Jabari was quoted as telling the Maariv daily. Morally I feel indebted towards you. For this reason I decided to convert.
On September 19, 1995, Jabari, who was a flight attendant for Iranian carrier Kish Air, hijacked a flight between Tehran and the Iranian resort island of Kish. He diverted the airplane and its 174 passengers to Israel, where he told authorities he had hijacked the plane because he was desperate to flee Iran and never had any intention of harming the passengers or crew.
Posted by: Fred ||
03/03/2007 00:00 ||
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#1
Wow! Iranian Double Indemnity Death Fatwa in 5, 4, 3,...
#5
I understand Israel is already crowded, another 25% would make them packed Cheek-to-jowl.
Perhaps why conversion is not actively sought?
Posted by: Redneck Jim ||
03/03/2007 10:30 Comments ||
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#6
Anonymoose might be referring to muslims who currently have Israeli citizenship. In which case, conversion would increase the number of Jews relative to the population as a whole without changing the absolute population at all.
#7
Jews do not encourage conversion. That's been policy since about the 3rd Century AD, I believe, although God Fearers (google Noahide, if you want more in depth info), who agree with Jewish core beliefs but don't want to go through conversion, have been a common fixture in Jewish synagogue congregations since the at least the 1st Century BC. (It is said that the emperor Nero's mother was a God Fearer.) It can take up to three years of serious study, with frequent challenges to the certainty of one's decision, before one can convert to the stripped down, Reform version. I don't even want to think what the Orthodox rabbis in Israel put this man through... but I'll bet he has read the entire Old Testament, the first couple hundred years of rabbinic law, tales and poetry in the Midrash and Talmud, and key sections of rabbinic arguments for the last thousand years or so, including why turning on/off the light on the Sabbath was determined to constitute work (physics was involved, as I understand it), and can discuss intelligently any of that corpus when asked. Rote memorization in a language not known by the reciter is not part of the process.
#9
Quite right, it does not have shit to do with God, wxjames.
The Jews don't consider themselves to have a monopoly on God or salvation, so there is no need to convert to Judaism to attain that, unlike Christianity and Islam. The rabbis teach that God fearing Christians and Mulims will go to Heaven before Jews who wrong their fellow man.
Rather, it has to do with choosing to take on the responsibility to observe all the Commandments*, not just the ten familiar ones, painting a target on oneself for antisemites to aim at, and making that commitment not only for oneself but for all of one's Jewish descendents.
The reason it's hard is to discourage those who begin conversion for the wrong reasons: because one is in love with a Jew, because Madonnah made Kabbalah fashionable, because one is in an emotional funk and Judaism looks like a fix for that, because Disney.
I do hope that answers your question, my dear.
* Commandments like having to keep kosher (no bacon or sausage, or shrimp on the Barbie), male circumcision... there are at least 613, if I recall correctly. Why would someone take that on when God will accept them just as well without all that?
#12
TW: Commandments like having to keep kosher (no bacon or sausage, or shrimp on the Barbie)
By that measure, the vast majority of Chinese food-eating New York metro area Jews aren't religiously-observant in the strict sense of the phrase. Note that the stock for Chinese dishes is made from non-kosher materials (pork and non-kosher chicken).
#13
Oh dear, Zhang Fe -- I didn't know that! I've been keeping kosher by the law (no pork or shellfish, no dishes made by cooking a young animal in its own mother's milk, but I don't worry about the rabbis' rules like separate dishes for meat and milk, and separate meals as well). I am soooo glad you said, even though I adored Chinese food until just a moment ago, darn it!
Anguper Hupomosing9418, just be a good person, and God and I will both be satisfied, I'm sure. ;-) You go on to Heaven, dear, and we'll see where I end up when the time comes. There is some disagreement on that point, you see.
#14
TW: I am soooo glad you said, even though I adored Chinese food until just a moment ago, darn it!
Denial is a very effective strategy for dealing with kosher food issues. NYC-area Jews deal with it by reasoning that Chinese food doesn't taste like there's any pork in it - ergo, Chinese food must not contain pork. That's all there is to it. It's never a good idea to over-think important issues like food.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
"Sorry officer, you've caught me with my pants down"
