Word: cannon
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Seven thousand miles away on the very same day, the Pentagon was firing a more old-fashioned round on Capitol Hill--a five-year, $2 trillion budget plan larded with cold war-era weapons. There's the Crusader howitzer, a cannon so cumbersome that in 2000 a presidential candidate named George W. Bush questioned its utility. And there's the F-22 Raptor, a fighter jet designed to challenge a Soviet air force that no longer exists. The Raptor could prove useful against other foes, but critics call it redundant; there are two other fighter designs in the pipeline...
...major trading post for spices, tea, porcelain, textiles, tin and rubber. The fort was once a formidable defense against pirates, the French and the Kedah sultanate on the Malay peninsula, which was bent on reclaiming its captured territory. Now it encloses a peaceful garden, studded with weathered cannons. One cannon in the fort's northeastern corner has taken on the unlikely role of fertility symbol. Local women place floral offerings on its barrel in hopes of improving their chances of conceiving. "George Town isn't one big monument like Borobudur or Angkor Wat," says local historian Khoo Salma Nasution...
...attorney James Brosnahan is not having much luck finding an audience for his case, i.e. that Lindh is being used by the U.S. Justice Department as a sacrificial lamb in the war on terrorism. "In my view," he told reporters outside the Virginia courthouse, "they have brought out the cannon to shoot the mouse." The defense team will likely counter government claims that Lindh willingly joined in a jihad against Americans by arguing that when Lindh joined the Taliban, they were engaged in fighting the Northern Alliance - at the time, a long-standing enemy...
There is nothing wrong or discriminatory for a predominantly Christian school to celebrate an important Christian holiday. But I find it insulting that the only Jewish holiday to make it into the cannon of holidays at Harvard is the one Jewish holiday that usually falls out near Christmas...
Across the liberated provinces, Afghans have feared a return to pre-Taliban civil strife. Pashtun farmers have lived in the northern plains around Mazar-i-Sharif for a century, but now many have had enough. With 32 other families, a farmer named Saidu walked for 15 days through cannon fire and biting wind to reach a bleak refugee camp in the Pashtun desert of the south. "I've suffered too much," he said. "I'm not going back up north, not if [Northern Alliance leader Burhanuddin] Rabbani is ruler or Dostum. They'll kill us Pashtun." The country could...