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var shortURL = 'http://www2.timesdispatch.com/get_shorturl/ar/1563385/';
contTitle = escape('Friday's local sports');
CIUDAD MIER, Mexico ? Schoolchildren once again chatter and scamper across the town plaza where drug gang gunmen last year torched the police station and left the remains of a dismembered man.
By night, townsfolk play volleyball across the plaza from the station, whose charred stone facade has been repaired. The plants are trimmed and streets that once echoed with gunbattles are quiet and clean. Ciudad Mier again is starting to look like it deserves its tourism promotion as a "magical town."
But most businesses are shuttered and there aren't many cars on the streets, which are often patrolled by Army trucks. The mayor estimates that about a third of Mier's 8,000 people have not returned. Most are still terrified by nine months of gang battles, killings and disappearances that caused them to flee a year ago.
"When we live through an experience in the flesh, people keep that image," said Mayor Alberto Gonzalez Pena. "And sometimes it's difficult to erase."
The confidence in Mier, or lack of it, has become a test of President Felipe Calderon's latest strategy in pacifying territory that had been overrun by drug gangs in a conflict that has killed roughly 40,000 people nationwide.
A battalion of 653 soldiers arrived in October and paraded through the streets behind a military band when Mexico's army opened its first "mobile barracks," to safely house troops trying to re-establish control in violent areas.
Many residents waved at the soldiers and held signs expressing thanks. The Mexican Defense Department said then the new troops would "without doubt generate confidence and calm" and restore normalcy in the area.
Calderon is expected to formally inaugurate the barracks on Thursday and similar posts are being planned elsewhere across the violent north.
So far, though, the army has brought security, not confidence. Everybody knows the soldiers are not supposed to be there forever.
Mier sits along a road linking territories controlled by feuding drug gangs, the Zetas and the Gulf Cartel, and it has become an example of Calderon's "clear and hold" strategy for using troops to suppress violence and restore calm, said Samuel Logan, managing director of the Southern Pulse risk-analysis firm specializing in Latin American organized crime.
He says that approach is unsustainable because a temporary army presence cannot substitute for permanent civilian policing.
Now entering his final year in office, "Calderon has to do something," Logan said. "And he's going to find himself in a pinch between getting something done on one end, which would mean more of these mobile barracks and, on the other, proving that he is pushing for a more permanent solution vis-a-vis increased training for the police force."
Mexico has increasingly turned to troops to take on law enforcement because repeated cleanup crusades have failed to cure the corruption and lack of professionalism that plagues the country's police forces, which are often infiltrated by organized crime.
When Gonzalez tries to coax his citizens back from Texas cities across the Rio Grande and other Mexican towns, he tells them Mier was an intensive-care patient when they left, but now is walking under its own power. Little by little, a phrase used by nearly everyone in Mier these days, the town is recovering, he said.
Those still here now gather in the park or plaza in the evenings, feeling safety in numbers under the protective gaze of soldiers. But they don't stroll in the streets. And the edges of town remain eerily unpopulated. People there feel exposed. They're not comfortable identifying themselves to strangers and one quietly assured a reporter that the narcos are still watching.
Founded as an agricultural settlement in 1753, Mier is known to historians as the site of an assault by more than 250 Texas militiamen in December 1842. The Mexican army took most prisoner and 17 were executed after drawing black beans from a pot in a lottery to determine who would die.
Until recently, Mier was a picturesque town about halfway along the Texas border between Laredo and Brownsville with a few well-preserved colonial-era buildings. The town was surrounded by ranches famed for dove and deer that drew hunters from both sides of the river. Those ranches also lucrative drug-smuggling routes.
In February 2010, gunmen attacked the police station and seized several officers. Violence peaked that November with days of near-constant fighting and hundreds of townsfolk fled to the country's first drug war refugee shelter in the nearby city of Miguel Aleman.
Two weeks later, Calderon's administration announced it would send more troops to reassert government authority in the states of Tamaulipas, where Mier is located, and in neighboring Nuevo Leon.
Some of those forces are now at the new mobile barracks. It sits in a clearing of scrub land near the cemetery south of town and is surrounded by a high fence and a wide, cleared perimeter. A few low-slung buildings surround a pole flying a large Mexican flag.
The army says that the entire base can be picked up and reassembled quickly elsewhere, but the buildings' solid walls give an impression of permanence.
A second mobile barracks is being built in the Tamaulipas city of San Fernando, where 193 bodies have been found on a ranch in 26 mass graves. Mexican authorities believe the dead were mostly migrants kidnapped from buses and killed by the Zetas. Less than a year before, 72 Central and South American migrants were killed there, also allegedly by the Zetas.
On Mier's north side, the last neighborhood out of town is littered with broken windows and piles of brush. Some of the fiercest fighting went on here among the 65 small, squat homes at a low-cost housing complex.
Cinderblocks stacked high behind front-room windows are reminders of some residents' futile efforts at self-defense. Though built in just 2003, not a single home is inhabited today.
Some residents fled to relatives' homes or rentals in the city center, while others left Mier altogether. The homes have been so thoroughly looted and damaged, families would need a substantial amount to make them livable again.
"We need the people that have money, the people that in Mier build things, the people that generate jobs," Mayor Gonzalez said. Those people just aren't returning as quickly as they left, he said.
The talk of Mier recently was the imminent reopening of the restaurant at the Hotel Asya on the freshly paved Alvaro Obregon Avenue. Many hope it will bring back jobs and offer a much-needed dining option.
Just a block up the street, business at a small company that supplies bottled water to homes and businesses is up 20 percent over last year, said owner Jesus Gomez.
Still, that's only half what it was before violence struck and twisted the lives of the citizens.
"We didn't leave the house," Gomez said. "You wanted to drink, hang out, you had to do it at home. Now, he said, he can go out with friends until midnight without worrying.
Past a state police bunker behind city hall, Alvaro Obregon Street meets the main plaza, where schoolchildren cluster around benches during lunch and a vendor sells tacos from a street-side stand.
In the evenings, the town sets up volleyball nets in the plaza in front of city hall. On Thursday nights, it shows movies there.
A splash of color comes from a newly reopened flower shop along the plaza, where bear-shaped flower arrangements of white chrysanthemums sit alongside yellow spider mums, sunflowers and small white daisies.
Arturo Hernandez recently moved from another border city, Piedras Negras, to open the shop for his father-in-law. He wasn't around for last year's violence, but he feels it.
As he scraped thorns from red roses, Hernandez said he quickly noticed that there were few stores of any kind open in Mier.
"Since I've been here, yes, there have been sales, but when there's a funeral. ... For gifts, no."
State laws mandating P.E., recess linked with increased in-school physical activity among childrenPublic release date: 5-Dec-2011 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Sherri McGinnis Gonzlez smcginn@uic.edu 312-996-8277 JAMA and Archives Journals
CHICAGO State and school district-level policies mandating minimum requirements for in-school physical education and recess time are associated with increased odds of schools in those states and districts meeting physical activity recommendations for students, according to a report published Online First by Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.
"Children spend the majority of their waking hours in school, thus schools are important locations to focus obesity prevention activities, such as increasing physical activity opportunities," the authors write as background information in the article. "The national recommendation for school physical education [PE] endorsed by the National Association of Sports and Physical Education (NASPE) and the American Heart Association is that elementary school students be offered at least 150 minutes/week of PE. However, fewer than 20 percent of third grade students in the United States were offered this amount during the 2007-2008 school year."
Sandy J. Slater, Ph.D., and colleagues with the University of Illinois at Chicago, examined the association between state and local school district-level policies requiring or recommending minimum requirements for in-school physical activity and the odds that elementary schools within those states and districts meet the levels of physical activity recommended, with an emphasis on physical education and recess. The authors collected data on existing state PE and recess-related laws and collected data at the local school level through mail-back surveys that included questions on the number of days per week and number of minutes for which PE class was scheduled during a typical week for a third grade student. The study sample included 47 states, 690 districts and 1,761 schools, during the 2006-2007 through 2008-2009 school years.
The authors found that approximately 70 percent of schools included in the analysis offered at least 20 minutes of daily recess, and 17.9 percent offered 150 minutes/week of physical education. The majority of states (83 percent) offered no daily recess law and less than half offered some kind of law addressing the recommended 150 minutes/week of physical education. The authors found that the odds of schools meeting the NASPE recommendation for physical activity increased if they were located in states or school districts having a law requiring 150 minutes/week of physical education.
Schools in states with policies encouraging daily recess had higher odds of having 20 minutes of recess daily, however district policies were not significantly associated with school-level recess practices. The authors also found that adequate physical education time was inversely associated with recess, with schools offering at least 150 minutes/week of physical education being 50 percent less likely to meet recommendations on recess time. Additionally, schools with students of predominantly white race/ethnicity were more likely than all other racial/ethnic groups to have daily recess, and schools with the highest number of students receiving free or reduced-cost lunch were less likely to have 20 minutes of recess daily.
"Our results show that mandating only increased physical education or recess time does not result in more overall physical activity as schools and/or districts appear to compensate for any increased physical activity in one area by decreasing other physical activity opportunities," the authors conclude. "By mandating physical education or recess, policy makers can effectively increase school-based physical activity opportunities for youth."
(Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med. Published online December 5, 2011. doi:10.1001/archpediatrics.2011.1133. Available pre-embargo to the media at http://www.jamamedia.org.)
Editor's Note: Support for this study was provided by The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to the Bridging the Gap Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, financial disclosures, funding and support, etc.
Editorial: Promoting the Health of Our Youth
In an accompanying editorial, Kristine Madsen, M.D., M.P.H., of the University of California, San Francisco writes, "as a result of the current focus on reversing the obesity epidemic, the benefits of increased physical activity are becoming more widely discussed. What is not discussed is that lack of physical activity may be a far greater public health problem than obesity."
Dr. Madsen notes that one of the barriers to the adoption of laws and policies to increase school-day physical activity is funding. However, she also notes that, "there is an underused funding solution that would promote children's nutrition and at the same time provide needed resources to support adoption of exemplary nutrition and physical activity standards and programs: the taxation of highly sweetened beverages and nutrient-poor junk food."
"One concerning finding from the Slater et al study is that recess and PE can compete with each other for time in the school day; schools that offered more time in recess offered less time in PE, and vice versa," writes Dr. Madsen. "While schools appear to use PE and recess somewhat interchangeably, PE and recess make unique and separate contributions."
"The solution is not limited to the local, state or national level, but rather, the solution rests with decision makers at each level," Dr. Madsen writes. "We must work together to advocate for our nation's greatest resource our youth."
###
(Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med. Published online December 5, 2011. doi:10.1001/archpediatrics.2011.1245. Available pre-embargo to the media at http://www.jamamedia.org.)
Editor's Note: Please see the article for additional information, including author affiliations, financial disclosures, funding and support, etc.
To contact Sandy J. Slater, Ph.D., call Sherri McGinnis Gonzlez at 312-996-8277 or e-mail smcginn@uic.edu. To contact editorial author Kristine Madsen, M.D., M.P.H., call Juliana Bunim at 415-476-8810 or e-mail Juliana.bunim@ucsf.edu.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
State laws mandating P.E., recess linked with increased in-school physical activity among childrenPublic release date: 5-Dec-2011 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Sherri McGinnis Gonzlez smcginn@uic.edu 312-996-8277 JAMA and Archives Journals
CHICAGO State and school district-level policies mandating minimum requirements for in-school physical education and recess time are associated with increased odds of schools in those states and districts meeting physical activity recommendations for students, according to a report published Online First by Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.
"Children spend the majority of their waking hours in school, thus schools are important locations to focus obesity prevention activities, such as increasing physical activity opportunities," the authors write as background information in the article. "The national recommendation for school physical education [PE] endorsed by the National Association of Sports and Physical Education (NASPE) and the American Heart Association is that elementary school students be offered at least 150 minutes/week of PE. However, fewer than 20 percent of third grade students in the United States were offered this amount during the 2007-2008 school year."
Sandy J. Slater, Ph.D., and colleagues with the University of Illinois at Chicago, examined the association between state and local school district-level policies requiring or recommending minimum requirements for in-school physical activity and the odds that elementary schools within those states and districts meet the levels of physical activity recommended, with an emphasis on physical education and recess. The authors collected data on existing state PE and recess-related laws and collected data at the local school level through mail-back surveys that included questions on the number of days per week and number of minutes for which PE class was scheduled during a typical week for a third grade student. The study sample included 47 states, 690 districts and 1,761 schools, during the 2006-2007 through 2008-2009 school years.
The authors found that approximately 70 percent of schools included in the analysis offered at least 20 minutes of daily recess, and 17.9 percent offered 150 minutes/week of physical education. The majority of states (83 percent) offered no daily recess law and less than half offered some kind of law addressing the recommended 150 minutes/week of physical education. The authors found that the odds of schools meeting the NASPE recommendation for physical activity increased if they were located in states or school districts having a law requiring 150 minutes/week of physical education.
Schools in states with policies encouraging daily recess had higher odds of having 20 minutes of recess daily, however district policies were not significantly associated with school-level recess practices. The authors also found that adequate physical education time was inversely associated with recess, with schools offering at least 150 minutes/week of physical education being 50 percent less likely to meet recommendations on recess time. Additionally, schools with students of predominantly white race/ethnicity were more likely than all other racial/ethnic groups to have daily recess, and schools with the highest number of students receiving free or reduced-cost lunch were less likely to have 20 minutes of recess daily.
"Our results show that mandating only increased physical education or recess time does not result in more overall physical activity as schools and/or districts appear to compensate for any increased physical activity in one area by decreasing other physical activity opportunities," the authors conclude. "By mandating physical education or recess, policy makers can effectively increase school-based physical activity opportunities for youth."
(Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med. Published online December 5, 2011. doi:10.1001/archpediatrics.2011.1133. Available pre-embargo to the media at http://www.jamamedia.org.)
Editor's Note: Support for this study was provided by The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to the Bridging the Gap Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, financial disclosures, funding and support, etc.
Editorial: Promoting the Health of Our Youth
In an accompanying editorial, Kristine Madsen, M.D., M.P.H., of the University of California, San Francisco writes, "as a result of the current focus on reversing the obesity epidemic, the benefits of increased physical activity are becoming more widely discussed. What is not discussed is that lack of physical activity may be a far greater public health problem than obesity."
Dr. Madsen notes that one of the barriers to the adoption of laws and policies to increase school-day physical activity is funding. However, she also notes that, "there is an underused funding solution that would promote children's nutrition and at the same time provide needed resources to support adoption of exemplary nutrition and physical activity standards and programs: the taxation of highly sweetened beverages and nutrient-poor junk food."
"One concerning finding from the Slater et al study is that recess and PE can compete with each other for time in the school day; schools that offered more time in recess offered less time in PE, and vice versa," writes Dr. Madsen. "While schools appear to use PE and recess somewhat interchangeably, PE and recess make unique and separate contributions."
"The solution is not limited to the local, state or national level, but rather, the solution rests with decision makers at each level," Dr. Madsen writes. "We must work together to advocate for our nation's greatest resource our youth."
###
(Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med. Published online December 5, 2011. doi:10.1001/archpediatrics.2011.1245. Available pre-embargo to the media at http://www.jamamedia.org.)
Editor's Note: Please see the article for additional information, including author affiliations, financial disclosures, funding and support, etc.
To contact Sandy J. Slater, Ph.D., call Sherri McGinnis Gonzlez at 312-996-8277 or e-mail smcginn@uic.edu. To contact editorial author Kristine Madsen, M.D., M.P.H., call Juliana Bunim at 415-476-8810 or e-mail Juliana.bunim@ucsf.edu.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) ? As senior U.S. officials head to a major meeting on Afghanistan next week, underlying their talks will be a simple question: what can Washington hope to accomplish there with fewer troops, less money, and less time?
U.S. objectives in Afghanistan are far more modest than they were in the months following the September 11 attacks, when the West hoped to replace the Taliban's backwardness and brutality with a secure democracy at the crossroads of Asia.
After years in which the war was overlooked and underfunded, President Barack Obama focused this "war of necessity" in 2009 on the threat from al Qaeda and on enabling Afghanistan to fend off its enemies for itself.
Yet even U.S. goals for Afghanistan today, which include providing a modicum of security, making progress against endemic poverty and improving weak, corrupt governance are in question as Western nations move to curtail their role in a war most officials believe cannot be won on the battlefield.
The United States "has yet to present a credible and detailed plan for transition that shows the U.S. and its allies can achieve some form of stable, strategic outcome in Afghanistan that even approaches the outcome of the Iraq War," Anthony Cordesman, a long-time security analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote recently.
"Far too many U.S. actions have begun to look like a cover for an exit strategy from Afghanistan."
The U.S. military and diplomatic blueprint, especially for the next two years as foreign troops hand over to local forces, takes center stage ahead of Monday's summit in Bonn, Germany.
The meeting, headlined by Afghan President Hamid Karzai and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, will focus on Afghanistan's economic future and on defining the West's future presence in Afghanistan.
Despite plans to steadily shrink its Afghanistan force, the Obama administration has vowed it will not abandon the country as the West did following the Soviet withdrawal in 1989.
Officials link investment in a long-term presence in Afghanistan - which could include bases and a major diplomatic footprint even after most foreign combat troops go home at the end of 2014 - to defending U.S. national security.
Obama scored a major victory this spring in his tightly focused approach to the war when U.S. Navy SEALs tracked down al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Pakistan and killed him.
The military mission on the ground in Afghanistan, however, has been much broader than just defeating al Qaeda.
U.S. commanders say Obama's 2009 decision to deploy an extra 30,000 troops has paid off in the Taliban's southern heartland. They now hope to connect that to the capital.
Yet the outlook in the country's rugged east, where militants from the Haqqani network and other groups crisscross the lawless border with Pakistan, is much more troubling.
A series of high-profile attacks this fall, including an assault on the U.S. embassy in Kabul and the assassination of the former Afghan president, the country's top official for peace talks, also rattled the narrative of improving security.
"We have important work to do inside Afghanistan. I will say that a great deal of progress is being made. Insurgents have been under increasing pressure," Pentagon spokesman George Little told reporters on Friday.
"The enemy remains dangerous, and they are capable of violence, as we have seen, regrettably," he said.
'PURE NUMBERS'
Many worry that an array of militants, in the absence of enough foreign troops and an adequate improvement in local security forces, will plunge Afghanistan back into major violence.
"If you don't deal with that, then where are you going to be five years from now?" asked Jeffrey Dressler, a security analyst at the Institute for the Study of War in Washington.
"You could have even a greater sanctuary and safe haven than you had before 9/11," he said.
Military commanders are now drawing up plans for how they will stretch a shrinking force to match that threat as Obama moves to withdraw the surge force by next fall.
Underlying Obama's plans is the new fiscal reality of the U.S. government, mired in debt and facing big budget cuts.
"Here it's just pure numbers and the amount of money we're spending in Afghanistan," said Brian Katulis, a security analyst at the Center for American Progress.
The Pentagon has sunk $330 billion into Afghanistan. While lawmakers are loathe to be seen as stiffing the troops, support for future spending of that order is all but inconceivable.
Fiscal pressures are compounded by Congress' mounting exasperation with what they see as Karzai's erratic behavior and with growing recognition that Pakistan may never cooperate as desired against militants fueling violence in Afghanistan.
Even the most Herculean of U.S. efforts may not matter without more cooperation from Pakistan, which is boycotting the Bonn conference after NATO aircraft accidentally killed two dozen Pakistani soldiers along the Afghan border.
While the details of what happened are still unclear, the incident has laid bare lingering bilateral tensions and the gap between U.S. and Pakistani ambitions for Afghanistan.
U.S. officials are pressing ahead with efforts to broker a deal outlining the long-term U.S.-Afghan relationship even though night raids and other issues remain sticking points.
The deal will include a commitment in principle to a U.S. military presence after 2014, which will focus on supporting Afghan forces and on targeted operations against militants.
U.S. officials insist Washington is not walking away. One senior U.S. official said the goal of the conference in Bonn and an earlier one in Istanbul was "to send a message to the Taliban and anybody else that, actually, international engagement and investment in Afghanistan is not over."
FIGHT, TALK, BUILD
Despite tactical successes in the south, even Western military officials say Afghanistan cannot be won by fighting alone - it also requires effective diplomacy and a viable plan to put Afghanistan on its feet economically.
Yet the impact of the West's aid effort - Congress has provided nearly $73 billion to rebuild and train local forces since 2002 - is another question mark beyond some important achievements in education and maternal and child health.
The U.S. strategy now rests on two objectives: building a local army capable of fending off militants, and brokering a peace deal with the Taliban. Both are ambitious goals.
While Clinton has pointed to initial contact between U.S. officials and the insurgency in efforts to broker a peace deal, there is scant evidence that a substantive agreement can be reached in the near term. It is also a politically risky course for Obama with his re-election bid less than a year off.
Efforts to build a strong local security force have succeeded in adding and arming men - and in many cases teaching them to read - but it remains unclear whether this force will have the ability and desire to take on the Taliban and other groups as foreigners go home.
The West, especially the United States, will be required to underwrite that efforts for years to come.
Analysts say the U.S. effort in Afghanistan remains hobbled by bureaucratic tensions and the lack of a shared goal for what Afghanistan can and should look like after 2014.
"We fought, we tried to build, and then quite belatedly we mapped out a strategy for trying to talk," said Katulis, of the Center for American Progress, referring to Clinton's triple strategy to 'fight, talk, build' in Afghanistan.
"But those three components were never well synced with one another."
If you can't find the exact color of spray paint you need or want to use up an almost-empty can of paint you can make a DIY spray paint can from a soda bottle, a bicycle inner tube, and the spray mechanism from a used spray paint can. You'll also need a few basic tools like a drill, hacksaw, and a bicycle pump.
Instructables user mikeasaurus gives step-by-step directions and photos on how to remove the nozzle from an old can of spray paint, attach a bicycle inner tube valve to a soda bottle, attach the spray nozzle to the lid of the soda bottle, fill the bottle with old paint, and pressurize with a bicycle pump.
The author instructs that you should only mix like types of paint, but you could probably get interesting effects by mixing oil and latex or acrylic paints. The author also recommends adding one part water to six parts paint to make the paint less thick, but that is probably why the paint in the video above drips so much. Again, experimentation here will probably help you nail down the result you're looking for.
CAMP VICTORY, Iraq ? Inside palace walls built by Saddam Hussein, U.S. generals plotted the war's course, tracked the mounting death toll and swore in new American citizens under gaudy glass chandeliers.
Just outside the palace, American troops whacked golf balls into man-made lakes or fished for carp while others sat down with a cigar and a can of nonalcoholic beer hoping for a respite from incoming rockets or mortar shells.
Along another lake some distance away, a jailed Saddam tended to tomatoes and cucumbers in a small, walled-off enclosure with guards patrolling overhead.
Ever since the soldiers of the 3rd Infantry Division fought their way into the Baghdad airport grounds nearly nine years ago, the sprawling area they renamed Camp Victory has held a special place in the American military experience in Iraq.
From here, the highest-ranking generals sitting behind banks of telephones and video screens communicated with commanders in the field and political leaders in Washington and dictated strategy that unfolded on the streets of Fallujah, Mosul and Najaf.
It was an intersection in the war where U.S. troops, hot and dusty after traveling across Iraq's deadly roads and highways, could relax with a latte or bootlegged movie before heading back out again.
On Friday, the base that at its height was home to 46,000 people was handed over to the Iraqi government as part of American efforts to move all U.S. troops out of the country by the end of the year.
"The base is no longer under U.S. control and is under the full authority of the government of Iraq," said U.S. military spokesman Col. Barry Johnson.
The area, which the military formally calls Victory Base Complex, was originally used as a country club for the Baghdad elite under Saddam. A visitor can still find small relics of that era, such as signs advising patrons where to park or the hours in which the casino was open.
Saddam built the palace complex near the airport out of embarrassment. During the 1978 Arab League summit he was forced to house incoming dignitaries in private homes in Baghdad because he had no proper accommodations, according to Robert O. Kirkland, a former U.S. military historian who interviewed former Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz and other Iraqis who were once in American custody.
To rectify the problem, Saddam went on a palace-building spree, eventually building nine buildings of varying size and impressiveness. He gave some of them names that reflected his often convoluted view of the world: Victory over America, Victory over Iran and Victory over Kuwait.
In the run-up to the war, U.S. military planners were confused by a cone-shaped structure they could see from satellite imagery, said Col. Les Melnyk, another former U.S. military historian in Iraq. They labeled it a possible prayer site. It turned out to be a pigeon coop.
Maj. William Sumner was a captain when his unit arrived at Camp Victory in mid-April 2003. He remembers how Iraqi looters managed to get into the complex and make off with geese, pelicans and other animals from a small zoo Saddam had built.
"I think that's when the cougar got out of the enclosure," he said. For weeks afterward, a large feline that Sumner said could have also been a bobcat was spotted wandering around the base.
In the early days after the invasion, soldiers swam in the man-made lakes or toured the islands with paddle boats.
But quickly the atmosphere became more like bases back in the U.S. That meant rules and regulations ? and military police to enforce them. Sumner said during his unit's second week at Victory he was pulled over for speeding.
"After we moved onto our other place, we just tried to refuse to go back there whenever possible," he said.
Victory Base Complex was essentially a city, often hit by rockets or mortar shells. One time the violence came from within. In May 2009, a U.S. soldier shot and killed five fellow troops at a combat stress clinic.
The facility was so big it was divided into sections with different names. Troops could travel from Camp Stryker to Camp Liberty without leaving the base. A public bus system with posted routes transported people to the dining facilities, the gym or a dirt speedway where troops and contractors would race remote-controlled cars.
By the numbers supplied by the U.S. military, it was a substantial operation:
? The incinerators destroyed an average of 178,000 pounds of waste a day.
? A water purification plant produced 1.85 million gallons of water a day.
? A bottled water plant filled 500,000 one-liter bottles a day.
? Three separate plants produced 60 megawatts of power a day.
If soldiers grew tired of food at the massive chow halls, they could grab takeout at Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, Cinnabon, Burger King or Subway.
At various stores they could buy anything from illegal DVDs to a Harley Davidson motorcycle delivered straight to their door back in the U.S. when they returned from the war. In the early days of the war, troops could even buy Saddam Hussein's personal silverware and place settings.
Troops and contractors visiting from other bases took tours of the palaces.
One particularly entertaining pastime was feeding the carp in the lake surrounding Al Faw palace, where the top generals and U.S. military officials were based. The aggressive fish would jump out of the water for cereal, Girl Scout cookies and Pop Tarts.
Off-limits to most troops: the jail used to house Saddam and some of his cohorts. In a dilapidated, bomb-damaged building encircled by concertina wire, American troops interrogated and guarded the former dictator before he was handed over to the Iraqis and executed in 2006.
The Iraqi government has not yet announced plans for the complex, prime real estate in a country sorely lacking in parks and public spaces. The Iraqi military is already using some parts, and there is talk of turning Saddam's jail cell into a museum.
It may not be retiring the powdered wigs just yet, but according to The Guardian, the British government is ready to replace traditional paper documents with tablets in UK courtrooms. Starting in April, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) will give slates to Welsh and English prosecutors to store all forms and evidentiary items, later extending the offer to judges, jurors and defense lawyers. To start, administrators will give 35 Hewlett-Packard tablets to prosecutors in Norfolk as a test for the bigger roll out, which is estimated to save around £50 million (or around $78 million) in dead trees across the UK. There's no word yet which tablet HP has in mind, but chances are it will not be the discount rack TouchPad -- perhaps a Windows tablet is more in order in this court.
Mortgage rates for the past 52 weeks, at a glance - Yahoo! News Skip to navigation ? Skip to content ? By The Associated Press The Associated Press ? Thu?Dec?1, 5:17?pm?ET
The average rate on the 30-year fixed mortgage hovered just above its record low for the fifth straight week, Freddie Mac said Thursday. Here's a look at rates for fixed and adjustable mortgages over the past 52 weeks.
Current week's average Last week's average 52-week high 52-week low
30-year fixed 4.00 3.98 5.05 3.94
15-year fixed 3.30 3.30 4.29 3.26
5-year adjustable 2.90 2.91 3.92 2.90
1-year adjustable 2.78 2.79 3.40 2.78
All values are in percentage points.
Source: Freddie Mac Primary Mortgage Market Survey.
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Public release date: 5-Dec-2011
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If you can't find the exact color of spray paint you need or want to use up an almost-empty can of paint you can make a DIY spray paint can from a soda bottle, a bicycle inner tube, and the spray mechanism from a used spray paint can. You'll also need a few basic tools like a drill, hacksaw, and a bicycle pump. 
By The Associated Press