SL Trib:
Items in the vehicle when Jeffs was captured included: 27 stacks of $100 bills, worth $2,500 each; 14 cellular phones; a radar detector, two Global Positioning System units; two female wigs, one blonde and one brunette; several knives; several CDs; three watches; three Ipods; multiple credit cards; seven sets of keys; a photograph of Jeffs and his father; a Bible and a Book of Mormon.
The items were seen on pool video footage created with official permission.
Here.
KSL:
FLDS prophet Warren Steed Jeffs, 50, was taken into custody after he and two other people were pulled over late Monday by a Nevada Highway Patrol trooper on Interstate 15 just north of Las Vegas, FBI spokesman David Staretz said.
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NYT:
But the case has since taken a surprising turn, even by the bizarre standards of violence, organized crime and police brutality that have accompanied Chechnya’s lingering war. It turns out Elina Ersenoyeva, 26, led two lives.
In addition to her public positions, she was a secret bride of Shamil Basayev, the one-footed Chechen terrorist leader and Russia’s most wanted man, who died in an explosion on July 11.
Ms. Ersenoyeva’s mother said her daughter had not voluntarily married Mr. Basayev, who remained unapologetic and defiant after sending female suicide bombers to Moscow and onto passenger jets, and who had planned the lethal hostage sieges in a Russian theater and a public school. She agreed to marry him, her mother said, only because the separatists had threatened to kill her two brothers if she did not do as they said.
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Washington Post:
A crowd of as many as 5,000 people, including hundreds armed with AK-47 assault rifles, attacked Camp Abu Naji and hauled away window and door frames, corrugated roofing and metal pipes, despite the presence of a 450-member Iraqi army brigade meant to guard the base.
“The looters stole everything — even the bricks,” said Ahmed Mohammed Abdul Latief, 20, a student at Maysan University. “They almost leveled the whole base to the ground.”
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Wired:
Regardless of the threat, from the would-be bombers’ perspective, the explosives and planes were merely tactics. Their goal was to cause terror, and in that they’ve succeeded.
Imagine for a moment what would have happened if they had blown up 10 planes. There would be canceled flights, chaos at airports, bans on carry-on luggage, world leaders talking tough new security measures, political posturing and all sorts of false alarms as jittery people panicked. To a lesser degree, that’s basically what’s happening right now.
Here.
My assignment Tuesday was to photograph the destruction of a Titan rocket at the Utah Test and Training Range. If you need to visually picture the Test and Training Range, just picture miles and miles of scrub desert. It’s just pure nothingness as far as you can see. I don’t know if my photographs could do it justice. If you were ever going to set fire to the aft section of a Titan IV-B, a 291,700 pounds solid fuel booster rocket capable of 1.7 million pounds of thrust at 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit, this is definitely the place.
Picture the world’s largest bottle rocket sitting out in the desert with its stick ripped off. To set it off safely, the plan was to use explosives to break it apart, allowing the fuel to burn off in all directions without the rocket “going ballistic.”
Crazy talk begins.
My idea to dispose of the rocket would have been a little different. I would make it more of an show and raise some money for the public schools. I would set the thing off like the world’s biggest jumping jack firework. The thing would launch forward, bounce off a mountain, spin around like mad, skip across the lake, hit another mountain. Can’t you see it? For more fun, we could strap a couple elephants to it and see what happens. To raise money for the public schools, we would have the people of Utah place bets about which city it finally landed in. I’d put five bucks on Brigham City.
But by the time I drove out to the test and training range, it was obvious that my plan wouldn’t work. Coordinating with the elephant trainer was proving too difficult, and I still hadn’t talked to anyone with the Air Force.
Crazy talk ends.
Events like this where something is blown up or set afire are heavily controlled for safety reasons. We were taken to the top of Bug Hill, about four still photographers and maybe five TV cameras. The rocket was two miles away. Photographically, one guy had a 600mm lens, another a 400mm lens, and other guy had a 70-200. I considered bringing a 600mm for a really tight shot, but to me the real photo would be the huge cloud of smoke. I settled on a 300mm lens with a 1.4x teleconverter and a second camera with a 70-200mm lens.
We waited for a couple of hours before the countdown finally began. I had the long lens on a tripod and the other camera in my hands, ready to pounce on the shot. Finally the blast went off, it looked like a hundred shooting stars heading toward the sky. I held down the buttons on both cameras, one tight and one a little more tight. It was a beautiful explosion, and then the fuel started burning. It was a lot brighter than I expected, and smoke was just pouring out of that thing. An incredible sight.
After four or five minutes, the fuel was all burned, and the Air Force offered me a styrofoam box lunch for $1.80. Inside were beans, mashed potatoes and gravy, and a piece of fish.
