Taliban leader captured in women’s clothing!

The article is fairly long, but the actual concept is very amusing.

An amusing excerpt:

NATO, meanwhile, announced the capture of a senior Taliban fighter who had eluded authorities by wearing a woman’s burqa. Mullah Mahmood, who is accused of helping Taliban fighters rig suicide bomb attacks, was seized by Afghan soldiers at a checkpoint near Kandahar, the alliance said.

I love the implications in this. This Taliban leader wearing women’s clothing, it’s such a mockery of their own belief systems and so damn embarrassing for them.

Or maybe I’m the only one who finds this funny.

Mark

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Swiss accidentally invade Liechtenstein!

Crazy Swiss and their invading smaller countries…

ZURICH, Switzerland – What began as a routine training exercise almost ended in an embarrassing diplomatic incident after a company of Swiss soldiers got lost at night and marched into neighboring Liechtenstein.

According to Swiss daily Blick, the 170 infantry soldiers wandered just over a mile across an unmarked border into the tiny principality early Thursday before realizing their mistake and turning back.

A spokesman for the Swiss army confirmed the story but said that there were unlikely to be any serious repercussions for the mistaken invasion.

“We’ve spoken to the authorities in Liechtenstein and it’s not a problem,” Daniel Reist told The Associated Press.

Officials in Liechtenstein also played down the incident.

Interior ministry spokesman Markus Amman said nobody in Liechtenstein had even noticed the soldiers, who were carrying assault rifles but no ammunition. “It’s not like they stormed over here with attack helicopters or something,” he said.

Liechtenstein, which has about 34,000 inhabitants and is slightly smaller than Washington DC, doesn’t have an army.

I think the best thing is that those 170 ammo-less soldiers could have conquered the country if they had wanted to.

Mark

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Russian soldiers as male prostitutes?

Evidently Russian soldiers are being forced into male prostitution…

The Russian military is reported to be investigating claims that army conscripts were forced to work as male prostitutes in St Petersburg.

The command of the interior ministry unit denied the claims made by the Soldiers’ Mothers human rights group.

The group says it was contacted by a parent of a conscript who had been forced to work as a male prostitute.

Last year, an 18-year-old soldier was so badly beaten that he had to have his legs and genitals amputated.

The BBC’s James Rodgers in Moscow says the latest claims follow a series of scandals which have damaged the Russian army’s reputation.

A spokeswoman for the Soldiers’ Mothers, Ella Polyakova, told the BBC that in St Petersburg there was “a network of clients” who would pay for sex with soldiers.

Older servicemen are said to have forced younger conscripts into prostitution and then taken the money for themselves.

Brutality

The Sychev bullying case drew worldwide attention to Russian army abuses.

Private Andrei Sychev was forced to squat for several hours by fellow soldiers and then tied to a chair and brutally beaten up last year.

As a result he developed gangrene in his legs and genitals, which had to be amputated.

Now permanently disabled, Pte Sychev has just announced that he is to write a book about his ordeal.

Such cases have highlighted the appalling conditions suffered by some Russian service personnel at a time when Russia is seeking a greater role on the world stage, our correspondent says.

Wow, no amount of vodka will tend to that kind of wounded pride. Having your legs cut off is a terrible fate, having the family jewels removed is possibly worse, suffering both is just incredibly awful.

It probably wouldn’t be so bad if women were paying to have sex with them, but more likely it would be other men who’d come sodomize them… That blows.

Mark

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Canadian man beats entire US Military industrial complex!

From bears to bullets

suit

John Rennison, the Hamilton SpectatorHamilton-born Troy Hurtubise has developed a feature-filled suit of armour out of high-impact plastic, ceramic bullet protection and ballistic foam.

Inventor hopes to sell armour suit to the military

By Wade Hemsworth
The Hamilton Spectator
(Jan 11, 2007)The grizzly man is back, and this time he’s ready to take on bullets and bombs.

Troy Hurtubise, the Hamilton-born inventor who became famous for his bulky bear-protection suit by standing in front of a moving vehicle to prove it worked, has now created a much slimmer suit that he hopes will soon be protecting Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan and U.S. soldiers in Iraq.

He has spent two years and $15,000 in the lab out back of his house in North Bay, designing and building a practical, lightweight and affordable shell to stave off bullets, explosives, knives and clubs. He calls it the Trojan and describes it as the “first ballistic, full exoskeleton body suit of armour.”

Using the hard-learned lessons of his Project Grizzly experience — a 20-year odyssey that included a National Film Board documentary, an appearance on CNN and personal bankruptcy — he’s ready to start selling his newest idea.

Already, he says, the suit has stood up to bullets from high-powered weapons, including an elephant gun. The suit was empty during the ballistics tests, but he’s more than ready to put it on and face live fire.

“I would do it in an instant,” he said. “Bring it on.”

Yesterday, he returned to Hamilton to show off the suit, hoping to generate some publicity that will get him the meetings he wants with military and police outfitters.

On Saturday, he plans to wear it to Nathan Phillips Square in downtown Toronto and wait for the reporters. It shouldn’t take long to create a stir.

Hurtubise, 43, wore his suit — helmet and all — on the four-hour drive down south, partly as a way of making sure it would be comfortable enough in the field. Even sitting on his armoured butt cheeks, he said he was fine.

As he drove his black pickup in his black getup, other drivers gawked and honked. Just south of Huntsville, he was delighted to be pulled over and gave an apprehensive OPP officer a close-up look at the suit.

Once he established that he could see just fine in his helmet and that the guns attached to his magnetic holsters were just props, Hurtubise was free to continue his trip.

The whole suit — which draws design inspiration from Star Wars, RoboCop, Batman and video games — is made from high-impact plastic lined with ceramic bullet protection over ballistic foam.

Its many features include compartments for emergency morphine and salt, a knife and emergency light. Built into the forearms are a small recording device, a pepper-spray gun and a detachable transponder that can be swallowed in case of trouble.

Dangling between the legs, that would be a clock.

In the helmet, there’s a solar-powered fresh-air system and a drinking tube attached to a canteen in the small of the back. A laser pointer mounted in the middle of the forehead is ready to point to snipers, while LED lights frame the face.

The whole suit comes in at 18 kilograms. It covers everything but the fingertips and the major joints, and could be mass-produced for about $2,000, Hurtubise says.

He said he hopes to earn enough of a living from the suit so he can keep on inventing, but the real reason he did this, he says, is “for the boys.”

Wow. I WANT ONE!!

No this guy seems like a nut, but he’s done some very awesome (if nutty) things in the past. Perhaps he’s most famous for his grizzly bear armor, which could theoretically withstand any kind of pounding or attack a Grizzly bear could muster. To demonstrate it’s durability he gets beaten with wooden bats, falls off a cliff, gets hit with a log, gets struck by a car, forced against a brick wall and so on without any injury. You can look at his video here on youtube.

Mark

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