Free Republic

WASHINGTON -- A U.S. Army commander asserted Tuesday that extremist fighters in northern Iraq committed atrocities against civilians, including beheadings, torture and the booby-trapping of a murdered child's body. "The enemy here did just the most horrible things you can imagine _ in one case murdering a child, placing a booby trap within the child's body and waiting for the parent to come recover the body of their child and exploding it to kill the parents; beheadings and so forth," McMaster said in an interview from Tal Afar with reporters at the Pentagon. His comments came two days after the...

TALL AFAR, Iraq, Sept. 4 -- Under the cover of a moonless night, U.S. soldiers on Sunday strung nearly a mile of razor-sharp concertina wire across the northern edge of a neighborhood dominated by insurgents to prevent them from fleeing without a showdown. Several small teams of five or six troops quickly uncoiled spools of wire and fastened it along the deserted sidewalk of a broad thoroughfare. The cordon was intended to prevent insurgents from blending in with the hundreds of people who fled the city during heavy clashes Sunday. "The idea is to trap them in Sarai or force...

News item,my local paper: A 47 year old employee at a pharmaceutical firm received minor injuries after mixing sodium carbonate monohydrate with sodium hydrosulfite . The mixing beaker exploded.Hazmat crew was called in-apparently nothing major transpired,but my curiosity is aroused: Why in hell would a knowledgeable chemist be mixing these two chemicals ? (I'm assuming water was present-whether added,or as part of a solution).