| A massive manhunt and rescue operation ended in joy around midnight between Thursday and Friday, after a missing child was found alive, floating in the Dead Sea. The high salt and mineral content of the water, while extremely dangerous to ingest, kept the child afloat.
Eight-year-old Schneur Zalman Friedman disappeared within minutes on Thursday after he entered the water at 5:00 p.m. with his father and brother. It is known that high winds often blow through the Dead Sea area towards evening, cooling off the heat of the day, but in this case, they caused the tide to carry him away. |
Month: August 2007
Bridges & Earmarks
More Than 70,000 Bridges Rated Deficient
| More than 70,000 bridges across the country are rated structurally deficient like the span that collapsed in Minneapolis, and engineers estimate repairing them all would take at least a generation and cost more than $188 billion.
That works out to at least $9.4 billion a year over 20 years, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers. The bridges carry an average of more than 300 million vehicles a day. |
That’s a whole pile of bridges! (And I hope that never even comes close to being literally true.)
I suspect a bridge we cross 4-6 times a week is one of them. It’s across the Pudding River on Whiskey Hill Road. I wonder about that bridge especially in winter when the river is high enough to almost “rub” the bridge’s underside.
In a related story, The Hill reports that a House panel OKs $250M for Twin Cities
| House Transportation Chairman Jim Oberstar (D) on Thursday called for an increase in gas taxes and more investment in roads and bridges in the wake of the Minneapolis bridge collapse in his home state Wednesday. |
Mr. Oberstar, the government is already increasing (very substantially) the price of our fuel. How about the US Congress do the right thing on this one?
Eliminate Earmarks and Better Bridges
(Better there is a verb.)
Or if they simply cannot do without their earmarks, how about this idea: Any earmark in a bill that has nothing to do with the bill shall be permanently replaced with an earmark for maintaining, upgrading, and replacing US infrastructure (beginning with bridges).
An earmark thus replaced cannot appear again in any bill until ten years pass.
Warning: Killer on the Loose
| Here’s a new and yet very odd tech threat: the particles emitted by your office printer.
According to an Australian research team associated with the Queensland University of Technology, these tiny airborne particles, which waft outwards from laser printers, can cause health problems including:
|
Do I hear three cheers for dot matrix printers?
Warning might not apply to you if you don’t have a laser printer close by.
Persecution of Christians Increasing
In Afghanistan. In Turkey. In India. In Kazakhstan. In Malaysia. In Pakistan. In Vietnam. In Iraq.
| Christians continue to be martyred abroad, but few American believers are aware of how pervasive religious persecution is around the world. “Christians in this nation don’t realize how fortunate they are to live in the U.S.,” observes Jim Jacobson, president of Christian Freedom International. |
August 1
1980 — I married Ruby Yoder. We’re still married. That’s 27 years.
1988 — Rush Limbaugh launched his national show. It’s still going. That’s 19 years.
2005 — EduBlogs started. And it hasn’t stopped. That’s 2 years.
2006 — Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad rejected a UN Security Council resolution that gave his nation until August 31 to suspend uranium enrichment. That’s been a whole year. What happened to the resolution? What happened to the enrichment?
2007 — A bridge collapsed into the Mississippi:
WizBangBlog has quite a few updates.