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Corundum is a rock-forming mineral that is found in igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary rocks. It is an aluminum oxide with a chemical composition of Al2O3 and a hexagonal crystal structure. The mineral is widely known for its extreme hardness and for the fact that it is sometimes found as beautiful transparent crystals in many different colors. The extreme hardness makes corundum an excellent abrasive, and when that hardness is found in beautiful crystals, you have the perfect material for cutting gemstones.

The finest rubies are rarer and more valuable than diamonds and for many the icy brilliance of the latter is no match for the colour, warmth and romance of the former. Their prices are on the rise too: the record of just under $275,000 per carat set in 2005 has since risen to over $550,000. The world’s richest source of fine rubies, Burma, is still under an embargo and the market is hungry for gemstones of that quality, particularly if they can be certified ethical. In that context, True North Gems’ Aappaluttoq Ruby Project is coming on stream at just...

London: A giant jade boulder that could be worth billions of pounds has been discovered in Burma. The 50-tonne block was found half buried in soil and rock in the gem-rich north of the country. Villagers discovered the 5.5 metre-wide boulder in the mountainous state of Kachin, where rebels have been fighting the government for more than 50 years. It is now under armed guard as officials negotiate with rebels about what to do with it. Burma, also known as Myanmar, is one of the world’s biggest producers of precious stones. Jade expert Jason Holt, of Holts Jewellers in Hatton...

Ruby creator Yukihiro Matsumoto has joined Heroku, the San Francisco outfit that cut its teeth with an online service for building, deploying, and readily scaling Ruby on Rails applications. In recent weeks, Heroku's "cloud" service has expanded beyond Rails to Node.js and Clojure and it intends to embrace additional languages as well, but the Matsumoto hire shows that the Saleforce.com-owned outfit is still very much a Ruby shop. Its "platform cloud" was originally built to ease the deployment of applications in a way that mirrored the effect Rails had on how the company's founders built applications. "Discovering Rails was one...

WASHINGTON – As an aide in the Clinton White House, Elena Kagan steeped herself in details of the Ruby Ridge controversy, an issue that Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania had zeroed in on as he sought the Republican presidential nomination. Kagan's handwritten notes from 1995 track Specter's hearings, according to some of the Supreme Court nominee's records released Friday from her days as a White House lawyer. The wife and son of white separatist Randy Weaver had been shot to death in Idaho at the hands of federal law enforcement agents and Specter was looking into a possible FBI coverup...

This is really incredible. H-S Precision is sells hunting and tactical rifles. Here is a scan from the back cover of their Catalog. Note who did the write-up (circled in yellow):For the three of you who don't know who Lon Horiuchi is, he's the FBI sniper of Ruby Ridge infamy who murdered Vicki Weaver in cold blood while she was holding her baby. I'm not sure what H-S was thinking when they decided to hire this despicable thug as a spokesperson, but they are in dire need of remedial correction for this deplorable business decision. No gun decent gun owner/buyer...

Just mentioned on Fox. There's a tape.

I have a few thoughts for you in response to some letters of late. The voices now crying for the impeachment of Bush were silent during Waco, Elian Gonzales and the first World Trade Center attack, Ruby Ridge and the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole. Their favorite president presided over the the largest bubble burst in U.S. economic history (DOT.COM). China, India and Pakistan get nukes. The U.S. bombed Yugoslavia for weeks; hit the Chinese embassy and killed thousands of untold civilians. The U.S. did a lot of bombing from 30,000 feet because Clinton was afraid to lose one soldier....

      This was posted on another thread and I felt it needed more notice! ____________________________________________________ My wife, Ruby has had a number of skin cancers over the last few years and is getting ready to have a series of CAT scans done to determine if it has gotten into the lymph nodes. he said it is rare with this kind of cancer, but incurable if it does happen. The odds are low, but we would appreciate any prayers you can muster. I do not have any ping lists (though I am on a few), so i would appreciate...

CATHERINE ZETA JONES was a picture of perfection at the annual Red Ball in New York. The actress – with hubby MICHAEL DOUGLAS – wore plunging black which showed off her fabulous curves.

After a yearlong effort to banish Ruby -- the meek elephant who's become quarrelsome -- to the American hinterland, Mayor James Hahn did an about-face Monday and ordered the city's 9,000-pound pachyderm returned to Los Angeles. Under pressure from animal activists and a lawsuit that warned that her health was in jeopardy -- Hahn directed that the 42-year-old African elephant be returned after 14 months at the Knoxville Zoo in Tennessee, where she had become something of an outcast. "Though the move of Ruby to the Knoxville Zoo was well-intentioned," Hahn said in a statement, "it is clear that she...

BULLDOZED: Family needed access, cited old law and often missed mark. God brought the Pilgrim family to Alaska and delivered Papa Pilgrim, Mother Country Rose and their 15 children last year to a mining claim in the remote heart of the Wrangell Mountains. But when the devout, tight-knit family set out for the nearest town on a bulldozer last fall, all hell broke loose. The problem was that the Pilgrims had just bulldozed a trail across 13 miles of Wrangell-St. Elias National Park. It was the kind of action environmentalists, land-rights activists and state and federal bureaucrats had been bracing...

Texas Straight Talk directory Project FREEDOM Undersecretary John Magaw, the chief of the new Transportation Security Administration, has been very busy lately. He just spent $410,000 of your tax dollars installing lavish fixtures in his new office suite at the Transportation department headquarters. The Washington Post reports that "With its plush carpeting, mahogany stained doors, crown molding, and state-of-the-art conference room equipped with $109,000 worth of audio equipment, it has struck some visitors as ‘a little bit over the top.’" Incredibly, Magaw managed to spend about $132 per square foot on his new digs, more than the cost of new...