Word: commandeering
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...ones racing. Inside the headquarters of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency outside Washington, Pentagon mapmakers are reviewing satellite imagery pouring in from Iraq every day. They are updating the Digital Point Positioning Database, made up of computerized maps showing the coordinates of Saddam Hussein's key weapons facilities, command posts and air-defense sites. Halfway across the country, just outside St. Louis, Mo., a Boeing factory has gone to two shifts a day building a revolutionary weapon geared for those targets. Workers are assembling computer-steered bomb tails that, once loaded with those Pentagon-supplied coordinates, harness gravity...
...Gulf War, notes U.S. Central Command chief Tommy Franks, "we used 10 airframes to a target. Now we assign two targets to an aircraft." The improved efficiency would probably make a new air war in Iraq shorter than the Gulf War's 38 days. Because the JDAM could so effectively cripple Iraq's military, senior Pentagon officials believe the U.S. could topple Saddam with a maximum of 250,000 troops, less than half the number it massed to drive his forces from Kuwait in 1991. The weapon's precision should minimize damage to civilian structures, making post-Saddam Iraq easier...
...under curfew for almost four months, are deserted. Twelve hours ago, a Palestinian gunman shot two Israeli border policemen on this spot. Even now, the shadows and silence are deceptive. "If we stand here a few more minutes, they'll shoot at us," says Tibon, the 40-year-old commander of the Nahal Brigade. In those circumstances, most people would leave right away. But Tibon plans to stay. Israel's reoccupation of the West Bank has entered a new phase. The big battles of the spring are over, and Israel's soldiers are now in or around every major Palestinian...
...Things are better than they were during the famine of the mid-'90s, but they have begun to deteriorate since July when North Korea announced a series of economic reforms that many observers said signaled the start of a serious effort to fix the country's collapsed command economy. The government raised the salaries of workers such as miners and teachers, increased the cost of state rations such as rice and allowed the North Korean won to fall to about 150 to the dollar, much closer to its real black-market value than the 2.5 won to the dollar...
...failure to capture bin Laden and second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri was not enough to demonstrate that Bush’s war on terror has faltered, this string of attacks shows without doubt that al Qaeda remains capable of carrying out small- and large-scale terrorist operations. In a way, this is unsurprising; it would have been impossible to completely destroy al Qaeda’s capabilities immediately. The war on terror will be long, and it will be painful; there will be both setbacks and progress. But it is not too much to expect that it would receive...