Word: mortared
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...soldiers, and they yield hundreds of shockingly vivid vignettes from the beaches and trenches. You won't soon forget the account of Bill Millin, bagpiper for the 1st Special Service Brigade of the British Army, who had to march out of the surf onto Sword Beach under rifle and mortar fire playing "Highland Laddie." And Beevor focuses on things other writers have neglected. For example, he doesn't gloss over the hideous costs paid by French civilians. The Allies, before liberating them, bombed them relentlessly in an attempt to paralyze the German army. Three thousand French civilians died during...
...fighting literally hangs from cliffs and rocky promontories. White smoke rises from a village across a deep gorge. The screeching whistle of mortar fire echoes in the expansive valley as troops target militants in a village five miles away. Cobra helicopter gunships buzz overhead. Two weeks into its ambitious ground assault on the Pakistani Taliban's heartlands, the Pakistani army has edged its way east and says it is poised to make fresh gains against the Central Asian and Taliban fighters who are hunkered down in the Kaniguram Valley, faintly visible in the distance...
Alongside carefully arrayed mortar shells, short-range artillery equipment and a range of rifles is a pile of papers and documents. Among them are plans showing how to assemble an "impact grenade" and a "time delay" grenade. Other pieces of paper, handwritten in Arabic, apparently lay out instructions on how to rig another explosive device. Also among the documents are two European passports that purportedly belong to fugitive al-Qaeda members who are linked to the 9/11 attacks and the 2004 Madrid bombings. (Read about how Pakistan's army is finally getting serious about its internal enemies...
...Known as Operation Grand Prix, the training exercises can be massive, involving hundreds of troops, helicopters, and live-mortar and live-rifle fire. The military says this is the closest the soldiers will get to actual combat before they deploy to Afghanistan. The soldiers train by themselves and alongside the Kenyan army, sometimes with locals playing the roles of rioters or restless crowds. To accommodate the increase in troops, the army has begun renting land from residents - it went from dealing with three landowners a few years ago to seven now. Neither the military nor the ranches will disclose...
...just tech companies that are joining the fray. Bricks-and-mortar bookseller Barnes & Noble, which in the U.S. offers access to 750,000 e-books on its website, is rumored to be pondering the development of its own e-reader to rival the Kindle. (The retailer already has a partnership to sell e-readers made by IREX, a spin-off of Holland's Royal Philips Electronics.) Major newspaper and magazine publishers, which are suffering mightily from the loss of subscribers and advertisers to the recession and the Internet, are also getting involved. News Corp. chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch, owner...