China's western autonomous region of Xinjiang is home to the country's mostly Muslim Uighur minority.
But many have fled China in recent years to escape persecution from Chinese authorities who have banned some of their cultural and religious traditions.
In October 2001, a group of Uighurs seeking refuge in Afghanistan and Pakistan, faced a new and unexpected misfortune. Their quest for a better life ended in incarceration.
How a group of 22 men from China's Uighur community were sold in Afghanistan and imprisoned in Gitmo as terrorists.
Greenland's glaciers retreating at record speeds
Greenland's glaciers are on retreat, shrinking at strikingly fast rates -- at least twice as fast as any time over the last 9,500 years.
Researchers with Columbia University's Earth Institute compared modern satellite data with records of glacier growth and decline gleaned from ice cores. Their findings were published last week in the journal Climate of the Past.
"If we compare the rate that these glaciers have retreated in the last hundred years to the rate that they retreated when they disappeared between 8,000 and 7,000 years ago, we see the rate of retreat in the last 100 years was about twice what it was under this naturally forced disappearance," study co-author William D'Andrea, a paleoclimatologist at Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, explained in a press release.
NY Times: End the Gun Epidemic in America
All decent people feel sorrow and righteous fury about the latest slaughter of innocents, in California. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies are searching for motivations, including the vital question of how the murderers might have been connected to international terrorism. That is right and proper.
But motives do not matter to the dead in California, nor did they in Colorado, Oregon, South Carolina, Virginia, Connecticut and far too many other places. The attention and anger of Americans should also be directed at the elected leaders whose job is to keep us safe but who place a higher premium on the money and political power of an industry dedicated to profiting from the unfettered spread of ever more powerful firearms.
Israel: Too soon to charge Jewish settlers in Duma arson attack
Israeli police on Friday said it was too soon to charge several Jewish settlers it arrested a day earlier in connection to a July arson attack in the occupied West Bank that killed a Palestinian toddler and his parents, and left another child severely burned.
The slow pace of the investigation into the attack on the Dawabsheh family home in Duma, located about 15 miles southeast of Nablus, has drawn criticism from Palestinians who charge Israeli authorities are dragging their feet.
Pentagon Crew Lived Large in $150 Million Afghan Villas
A Pentagon task force established in 2006 to help lure private businesses first to Iraq and then Afghanistan allegedly blew as much as $150 million on lavish villas in Afghanistan for a few lucky members of its staff—instead of lodging them cheaply, or for free, at the U.S. embassy or any one of numerous large American military bases in the war-torn country.
The alleged waste by the Task Force for Business and Stability Operations, first described in a five-page Nov. 25 letter to U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter from John Sopko, from the military’s special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, or SIGAR, should come as no surprise. TFBSO, as it’s known inside the Pentagon, has long attracted criticism for apparently wasteful spending and other abuses.
Bob Alexander: Bad Horror Movie
A bunch of teens decide to go up to The Old Dark House on the night of the full moon. As they mount the creaking stairs up to the front porch the nerdy guy of the group says, “I don't think this is a very good idea guys.”
Of course it's not.
What the teens don't know … but what everybody in the theater audience knows … is that somewhere in The Old Dark House is:
An escaped lunatic from a nearby insane asylum who has returned to the house where he committed terrible unspeakable murders. It was, in fact, This Very Night 20 years ago when he took an axe and chopped up his entire family.
Or …
NYers fear gas pipeline near nuclear reactor could spell disaster
.The school is just 400 feet from the path of a massive new pipeline expansion project that’s being carried out by Spectra Energy, an oil and gas infrastructure company based in Houston. The Algonquin pipeline expansion is one of at least 22 pipeline projects designed in recent years to transport natural gas from shale fields across the U.S. to distribution points in the Northeast.
But the noise isn’t the only thing troubling local residents like Williams. The pipeline will run within several dozen feet of electrical infrastructure necessary to operate Indian Point, an aging nuclear plant on the Hudson River. Residents worry that if the pipeline were to rupture, it could trigger a chain of events that might end in a nuclear meltdown, devastating their communities and turning New York City into a radioactive evacuation zone.
Gitmo detainee held for 13 years is victim of mistaken identity, says US
A Yemeni prisoner at the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay appears to have been the victim of mistaken identity, suspected of being a significant member of Al-Qaeda when he was in reality just a lowly foot soldier, officials said in documents released Tuesday.
Mustafa al-Aziz al-Shamini has been held at the U.S. base as an enemy combatant without charge for over 13 years after his capture in Afghanistan.
Researchers: Greenland is melting away
Greenland ice sheet. Brandon Overstreet, a doctoral candidate in hydrology at the University of Wyoming, picked his way across the frozen landscape, clipped his climbing harness to an anchor in the ice and crept towards the edge of a river that rushed downstream towards an enormous sinkhole.
If he fell in, “the death rate is 100 per cent,” said Overstreet’s friend and fellow researcher, Lincoln Pitcher.
But Overstreet’s task, to collect critical data from the river, is essential to understanding one of the most consequential impacts of global warming. The scientific data he and a team of six other researchers collect here could yield groundbreaking information on the rate at which the melting of Greenland ice sheet, one of the biggest and fastest-melting chunks of ice on Earth, will drive up sea levels in the coming decades. The full melting of Greenland’s ice sheet could increase sea levels by about 20 feet.
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