meehawl

Iraqi investigators have uncovered widespread fraud and waste in more than $1 billion worth of weapons deals arranged by middlemen who reneged or took huge kickbacks on contracts to arm Iraq’s fledgling military … The sole beneficiary on 43 of the 89 contracts was a former currency-exchange operator, Nair Mohamed al-Jumaili, whose name doesn’t even appear on the contracts. At least $759 million in Iraqi money was deposited into his personal account at a bank in Baghdad.

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One of Iraq’s most powerful Shiite politicians on Thursday strongly backed demands for the formation of a semi-independent region in the oil-rich south … The politician, Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, a religious Shiite with close ties to Iran, told a large gathering in the holy city of Najaf that it was “necessary” for Shiite Arabs to secure broad governing powers.

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Non-Jews now outnumber Jews in Israel and the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, but the planned Israeli pullout from Gaza will ensure a Jewish majority in the other two areas for two decades … About 8,500 Jewish settlers live among 1.4 million Gaza Palestinians. “If you disregard the Gaza population, the percentage of Jews (in Israel and the West Bank) grows to more than 60 percent,” said Hebrew University Professor Sergio Della Pergola, whose research contributed to the study. “The disengagement from Gaza adds 20 years to the process and delays the situation we are in now,” he told Israel Radio.

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Iran’s decision to press ahead with its nuclear program puts European leaders in a tough spot: They are trying to stop Tehran from doing something that is technically not illegal. The seals that Tehran ordered broken Wednesday were installed by United Nations inspectors as part of a voluntary agreement between Iran and the European powers
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Iran’s chief delegate at the IAEA meeting, Cyrus Nasseri … started with a jab at the United States, pointing out that the meeting was taking place on the 60th anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki, and that it was the “most absurd manifestation of irony” that the only country to use atomic weapons “has now assumed the role of the prime preacher in the nuclear field while ever expanding its nuclear weapons capability.”

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Well the reason blog updates were so sparse for many months, and so frequent in the last week or so, is that all summer I was doing an Organic Chemistry crash course. Which was kind of intense, 12+ hours a day of chemistry, chemistry, and more chemistry. But the grades are in and I did pretty well overall. Which is a big relief. One big advantage is that now diagrams like this make a lot of sense – it’s just a scale-up of some of the standard microscale techniques we used. The use of Freon to elute the product is novel, and something they could easily adopt in a teaching lab. Well, some CFC-free variety I’d hope.

Mainly I am glad the summer course was over because I was getting fed up coming home most days smelling of chemicals and acetic acid.

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Set up a bulletin board system again.

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Things were looking up for Chen Xianzhong, proprietor of Baghdad’s first authentic Chinese restaurant in the new Iraq, until a suicide car bomber blew up outside the place less than two weeks ago. The deafening blast shattered the windows and spewed body parts into the dining room. A foot landed on the pavement outside and a tire landed in the restaurant’s second floor. “There were small pieces of flesh all over, even on the roof,” Mr. Chen said. Now, he does takeout only for the few loyal customers that continue to call … “I wanted to open the best Chinese restaurant ever in Iraq,” Mr. Chen said, adding that he imported four containers of powders, sauces, roots, pickled vegetables and other Chinese culinary supplies – enough to keep his 400-seat restaurant serving kung pao chicken for three or four years.

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Armed men entered Baghdad’s municipal building during a blinding dust storm on Monday, deposed the city’s mayor and installed a member of Iraq’s most powerful Shiite militia. The deposed mayor, Alaa al-Tamimi, who was not in his offices at the time, recounted the events in a telephone interview on Tuesday and called the move a municipal coup d’tat. He added that he had gone into hiding for fear of his life … The man the group installed, Hussein al-Tahaan, is a member of the Badr Organization, the armed militia of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, known as Sciri.

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Changed the Custom 404 page to do some dynamic image shuffling.

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The Oregon teachers’ board reprimanded a high school football coach for licking the bleeding wounds of student athletes [he gave] a pep talk about a coach who had licked and healed players’ wounds so that they could rejoin the game. After the talk, he bent down and licked a cut on a track athlete’s knee … Complaints filed against Reed also cited other risky behavior, such as licking blood from wounds on a football player’s arm and a high school student’s hand.

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