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There will be no more going to Hel on bus 666. The bus to the town of Hel on Poland’s Baltic coast has long been popular with tourists. But some Christian conservatives have protested against the use of a number signifying the devil on a bus leading to a place that sounds like the word “hell” in English. The local bus operator, PKS Gdynia, announced this week that bus 666 would no longer run to Hel. It said it would run the line under the number 669 from 24 June. Fronda.pl, a conservative Catholic website, called for a change in...

Iliff School of Theology is an official theological school and approved seminary of the United Methodist Church ... *** Tom Wolfe, the president of Iliff, who has been an ordained Methodist elder for over forty years, said in 2020 that the school’s focus is “engaging the moral discourse in the context of multiple cultural constructions of human meaning.” *** The school employs as an admissions representative a Norse Heathen named Alexandra Ravenscroft, who is the head clergy, or Gudellri, of her pagan organization, Forn Sidr of America. Ravenscroft joined Iliff in 2021. In her job at Iliff, she recruits and...

"The Helsinki airport says Flight 666 has arrived safety in HEL — the airport code for the Finnish capital — for the last time."

The ABL did everything it was supposed to do. Now, the Pentagon wants to call it quits. On the night of Feb. 11, off the coast of Southern California, the Missile Defense Agency scored a major achievement by destroying a liquid-fueled ballistic missile target in flight. The important part was that it did so using a laser weapon carried onboard a Boeing 747-400 aircraft. This milestone event constituted the first publicly announced test success for the Airborne Laser (ABL). However, the success was actually the second of its kind within an eight-day period. On Feb. 3, the ABL aircraft was...

Riki Ellison, Chairman and Founder of the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance (MDAA), released a statement today regarding the revolutionary airborne laser intercept test at Point Mugu, California last night. His comments and observations are the following. Ellison is one of the top lay experts in the field of missile defense in the world. "Late last night, the Airborne Laser (ABL) now called the Airborne Laser Test Bed (ALTB), a Boeing-747 modified to carry a chemical based mega watt laser weapon system, successfully intercepted and destroyed two short-range ballistic missiles, one liquid fueled Scud like missile and one solid fueled U.S....

A high-energy laser mounted on a US military aircraft has shot down a ballistic missile in the first successful test of the weapon, the US Missile Defense Agency said on Friday. The experiment -- evoking a scene out of a science fiction film -- was carried out off the central California coast at Point Mugu Naval Air Warfare Center at 8:44 pm Thursday Pacific time (0444 GMT), the agency said in a statement. "The Missile Defense Agency demonstrated the potential use of directed energy to defend against ballistic missiles when the Airborne Laser Testbed (ALTB) successfully destroyed a boosting ballistic...

Boeing has announced that it has accepted the Oshkosh Defense military truck that will carry a Boeing-built laser beam control system for the U.S. Army's High Energy Laser Technology Demonstrator (HEL TD) program. Boeing received the Oshkosh Heavy Expanded Mobility Tactical Truck (HEMTT) on Dec. 17 at the Oshkosh facility in Oshkosh, Wis. "This demonstration program has successfully transitioned from the design phase to the fabrication phase," said Gary Fitzmire, vice president and program director of Boeing Missile Defense Systems' Directed Energy Systems unit. "This transformational, solid-state laser weapon capability will provide speed-of-light, ultra-precision capability that will dramatically improve warfighters'...

8/11/2006 - KIRTLAND AIR FORCE BASE, N.M. (AFPN) -- A dual-mirror system, designed to extend the range of high-energy lasers by receiving and redirecting laser energy, is being tested here. The system, a prototype called the Aerospace Relay Mirror System, or ARMS, is being developed at the Air Force Research Laboratory's Directed Energy Directorate. The operational version might be suspended from a high-altitude airship at an altitude of 70,000 feet, where atmospheric turbulence, or jitter, is less of a problem for beam quality. For testing, the dual-mirror prototype is suspended 100 feet above the ground using a mechanical crane, to...

Heaven and Hel Is Hel nicer than Magaluf? Can Odessa outparty Ibiza? As eastern Europeans flock to the Med, Tim Bryan goes beachcombing in the opposite direction Saturday July 15, 2006 The Guardian They are signs of the times. Across eastern Europe, the travel agents offer cheap self-catering holidays from Mallorca to Corfu. Rich Russians and Ukrainians are now sojourning on the Med, Czechs and Poles sunbathing in Greece or Cyprus, and the Baltic peoples head anywhere south, and hot. But where did they used to go? And is there anyone left in these former workers' playgrounds? More pertinently, can...