Free Republic

"Air Force strikes in Gaza" SNIPPET: "IDF retaliates for deadly Qassam attack: Air Force hits several Gaza targets, including metal foundry, smuggling tunnel; Vice PM Shalom says Israel to offer strong response to rocket attack that killed Thai worker Thursday" SNIPPET: "IDF aircraft struck at least four targets in the Gaza Strip on Friday, a day after a rocket fired from the Palestinian enclave killed a Thai worker in Israel, Hamas security officials and witnesses said." SNIPPET: "Israel also sent a letter of complaint to United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who is due to visit Israel at the weekend,...

Obama amputates our nuclear arms By: Charles Krauthammer ...snippet...Under President Obama’s new policy, however, if the state that has just attacked us with biological or chemical weapons is “in compliance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty,” explained Gates, then “the U.S. pledges not to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against it.” Imagine the scenario: Hundreds of thousands are lying dead in the streets of Boston after a massive anthrax or nerve gas attack. The president immediately calls in the lawyers to determine whether the attacking state is in compliance with the NPT. If it turns out that the attacker...

Rest of Title: at U.S.-Mexican Border The number of tunnels being used to smuggle illegal drugs across the Southwestern border grew by more than half from 2008 to 2009, according to a March 25 report from the National Drug Intelligence Center. In Fiscal Year (FY) 2009, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents stationed along U.S.-Mexico border discovered 26 illegal tunnels – a 60 percent increase over the 16 tunnels that authorities discovered in 2008. Most of the subterranean routes were discovered in Arizona, with 20 found in the “Tucson Sector” – a 262-mile long section of the border from...

King County Metro Transit will change its security policy in the Downtown Transit Tunnel after a surveillance video showed a 15-year-old girl beaten in front of three security guards who didn't intervene to help her, an agency official said Wednesday. In the meantime, county officials have called for a full review of tunnel security practices. A law enforcement officer, however, says Metro should go further and revisit a decision that greatly reduced the number of commissioned police officers working in the tunnel and replaced them with private security guards. Metro contracts with Olympic Security Services, a private firm in Tukwila,...

Myanmar sentences two to death for N.Korea leak 1 hr 25 mins ago YANGON (AFP) – A court in military-ruled Myanmar has sentenced two officials to death for leaking information, sources said Friday, in a case reportedly involving secret ties between the ruling junta and North Korea. The men, along with a third who was jailed for 15 years, were arrested last year after details and photos about a trip to nuclear-armed North Korea by the Myanmar regime's third-in-command were leaked to exiled media, reports said. "Two officials got the death sentence and another one was jailed for 15 years...

NOGALES — A sinkhole found two days before Christmas revealed a tunnel beneath International Street just west of the Dennis DeConcini Port of Entry. The discovery of the sinkhole prompted city of Nogales officials to contact the Border Patrol Station to investigate. Meantime, city crews placed a steel plate over the hole as a temporary fix to facilitate street traffic during the pending holiday. Agents discovered the street had caved in over a portion of a “sophisticated tunnel,” still under construction with two-by-four wood shoring and plywood floors, walls and ceilings, according to a Border Patrol news release. It measured...

An Indian villager burrowed for 14 years with a hammer and chisel to cut a tunnel through a mountain so that his neighbours could reach nearby fields and he could park his truck outside his home. Ramchandra Das, 53, who lives in eastern Bihar state, carved a 10m-long, 4m-wide tunnel through the hill range from his village of Kewati. Das took up the Herculean task after villagers found the 7km trek over the mountain increasingly arduous. When the authorities refused to help to cut the journey time, Das began carving his way through the earth in the direction of the...

December 8, 2009 North Korean leader's 007-style secret escape tunnels revealed by defector Richard Lloyd Parry, Asia Editor The North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il, has a network of 300 metre (1,000 ft) deep emergency escape tunnels connecting Pyongyang with key sites around the country, a top-level defector claims. The tunnels, reminiscent of the lair of a James Bond villain, are reported to contain railway lines, a water supply and even vegetation. According to Hwang Jang Yop, formerly North Korea’s chief political philosopher, they connect areas as far as 30 miles (50km) away from Pyongyang, enabling the country’s leaders to...

SACRAMENTO (CBS 5 / AP) ― State water officials say it could cost $10.6 billion to send water to Southern California through a proposed project of tunnels under the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. The Department of Water Resources presented the cost estimate Thursday to a group of state and federal agencies studying ideas to safeguard water deliveries out of the delta. Two tunnels, about 150 feet underground, are being considered as an alternative to building a proposed canal around the fragile estuary. A third tunnel would serve as an intake tunnel.

U.S. Border Patrol agents discovered a smuggling tunnel under the border in Nogales, Ariz., on Wednesday. It was the first passageway agents have found in the Tucson Sector in nearly four months. The 30-foot tunnel, 150 yards east of the DeConcini Port of Entry, was fortified on the Mexican side with shoring, but on the American side it appeared unfinished, U.S. Border Patrol spokes-man Mario Escalante said. The tunnel was not connected to the drainage system. Escalante said there was no evidence as to who was using the tunnel. "They already had an opening on the north side at the...

Hoping to protect one of the Bay Area's main water supplies after the next major earthquake, construction crews will soon embark on a job that sounds like something out of a Jules Verne novel: building a massive, 5-mile-long tunnel underneath San Francisco Bay.The project is believed to be the first major tunnel ever built across the bay.Using a giant boring machine, workers will carve a 14-foot high corridor through clay, sand and bedrock from Menlo Park to Newark as deep as 103 feet below the bay floor. They'll then run a 9-foot-high steel water pipe through the middle."All the experts...

Hamas is digging tunnels next to United Nations facilities under the assumption that the IDF will not target them during a future conflict, defense officials warned on Sunday....officials said a tunnel Hamas had been digging adjacent to a UN school in Beit Hanun had collapsed earlier this month.

BANGKOK (AP) - The recent aborted voyage of a North Korean ship, photographs of massive tunnels and a top secret meeting have raised alarm bells that one of the world's poorest nations may be aspiring to join the nuclear club—with help from its friends in Pyongyang. No one expects military-run Myanmar, also known as Burma, to obtain an atomic bomb anytime soon, but experts have the Southeast Asian nation on their radar screen. "There's suspicion that something is going on, and increasingly that cooperation with North Korea may have a nuclear undercurrent. We are very much looking into it," says...

SNIPPET: "Israeli warplanes bombard two smuggling tunnels in southern Strip early Sunday after Palestinians fire rocket at Negev on Saturday" SNIPPET: "IDF fighter jets struck two Palestinian smuggling tunnels in the southern Gaza Strip in a pre-dawn raid on Sunday. The army said that two of the tunnels had been hit but there were no reports of casualties. The strike came in response to a Qassam attack on Israel's western Negev on Saturday. The Color Red alert system was sounded in parts of the area and residents reported of hearing a loud blast. No injuries or damager were reported in...

Another tunnel apparently dug by drug smugglers has been found beneath the U.S.-Mexico border in Nogales, Ariz. Scioli said it’s the 63rd smuggling tunnel found beneath the border in the Nogales area since October 1995, and the 16th since last October.

NORTH BERGEN, N.J. - Construction began yesterday on the nation's largest transportation project, an $8.7 billion tunnel expected to double the number of commuters that can use rush-hour rail service between New Jersey and Manhattan.

That new tunnel? The one NJ Transit has been touting for years? That the Federal Transit Administration made a huge commitment to on Monday? It’s for cars. Or so Vice President Biden apparently thinks. Biden had just finished telling reporters on a conference call Monday that federal stimulus money might have gone out slower in the past few months than some people liked because, “We don’t end up with any major glitches.” Then The Record had a chance to ask about an environmental group’s complaint that Amtrak would not be able to use the new Hudson River tunnel – which...

New Jersey officials have been planning the next train tunnel under the Hudson River for so long that it is already on its third name. This month, work is scheduled to begin on the Mass Transit Tunnel — formerly known as the Trans-Hudson Express and, before that, Access to the Region’s Core — more than 15 years after it was conceived. A ceremonial groundbreaking was set for Monday alongside a highway in North Bergen, N.J., the site of the first small piece of what could be the biggest transit project in the country. The tunnel, which is expected to take...

May 26, 2009 On May 24, 2009, Egyptian security forces announced that they had arrested seven members of a terror cell [1] which, according to the confession of one of its members, had carried out the February 22, 2009 attack in Khan Al-Khalili. According to the announcement, the cell had ties to Al-Qaeda and to the Gaza salafi group Jaysh Al-Islam. [2] One of the captured terrorists, a Belgian national, confessed that he was supposed to travel to Belgium, make contact with Al-Qaeda operatives, and accompany them to France in order to prepare attacks there. The cell was also supposed...

Israeli warplanes bombed a Hamas security outpost and tunnels by the Gaza border with Egypt on Tuesday, after a rocket fired from the coastal territory struck an Israeli town, Israeli and Hamas sources said. Palestinian medics said a woman in Gaza suffered moderate wounds from one of several air strikes against tunnels Israel says are used to smuggle weapons into the coastal territory. Another raid targeted a Hamas outpost near a border fence with Israel, a Hamas source said. It was the first time Israel has attacked the Islamic militant group since a January 18 ceasefire went into effect after...