Free Republic

http://www.dailynews.com/Stories/0,1413,200~28822~2888206,00.html Nearly 100 exotic birds stolen from home aviaryBy Angie Valencia-Martinez, Staff Writer May 26, 2005 Nearly 100 parrots and other orphaned exotic birds were stolen from an aviary in Box Canyon operated by an 85-year-old bird lover, officials said Wednesday. The birds, including Rosellas, Mexican Redheads and Patagonias, were stolen from the back yard of June Matthews' mobile home, where she has cared for rescued birds since 1984. The Ventura County Sheriff's Department said Matthews reported the birds stolen on Monday, but that an investigation showed they might have been taken from the aviary over the weekend. Matthews...

Since midsummer, the Senate Intelligence Committee has been attempting to solve the biggest mystery of the Iraq war: the disparity between the Bush Administration’s prewar assessment of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and what has actually been discovered. The committee is concentrating on the last ten years’ worth of reports by the C.I.A. Preliminary findings, one intelligence official told me, are disquieting. “The intelligence community made all kinds of errors and handled things sloppily,” he said. The problems range from a lack of quality control to different agencies’ reporting contradictory assessments at the same time. One finding, the official went...