Across the world, today's newspapers carried front-page headlines similar to that of the Washington Times:  "Russia Remains Silent on Deadly Knockout Gas."  The mystery of the Knockout Gas's identity has been solved.

In the deepest heart of the Gobi Desert of Mongolia, just south of the Flaming Cliffs where Roy Chapman Andrews discovered dinosaur eggs in the 1920s, there is a naked spine of mountains called the Gurvan Saihan. In the Gurvan Saihan there is a valley called Yol Alyn, the Vulture’s Mouth. And in the Vulture’s Mouth, there is a glacier.

It is not a big glacier, the ice buildup of a stream that refuses to melt even in the heat of the Gobi summer. But it is a glacier nonetheless, thick enough for my son Jackson and I to walk

When penguins in Antarctica get hungry, they get nervous.  Grouped together on an iceberg, none of them wants to be the first to jump in the water and go fishing — because there just might be a leopard seal waiting for them.  There’s nothing in the sea a leopard seal finds more tasty to eat than fresh penguin.

So the waddle (on land or ice, a group of penguins is a waddle;  in the water, it’s a raft) bunches together, the ones in the back pushing forward, the ones in the front backing up away from the ice edge.  When

One of the most critical imperatives for Israel right now is to stop the suicide bombing.  One of  the best ways would be to blow up the bombs -- and preferably the bomber along with it --  prematurely.  The ideal would be to blow up the bomber so only he (or the occasional she) dies and no innocent Israelis.Here are two different versions of how to accomplish this.

It is obviously important that OBL (Osama bin Laden) not be simply hunted down and shot to death. He should be captured and interrogated until all the information he has about his terrorist network has been extracted from him – then he should be summarily executed. No trials, no being "brought to justice." What, then, would the most efficient and effective form of interrogation be?

As many recent commentaries have noted, there was no unified command of Afghan “Mujahaddin” freedom fighters resisting the Soviet occupation of their country in the 1980s. There were about half a dozen major groups and a host of smaller ones.

The legendary commander Ahmad Shah Massoud, assassinated by OBL (Osama Bin Laden) agents just before The Atrocity, belonged to the “Jamiat” group led by Burhanuddin Rabbani. Qari Baba, the famous commander in Ghazni who looked like a cross between Buddha and Genghiz Khan, was part of the Harakat group. Ramatullah Safi was the most outstanding commander of the Gailani group.

For an increasing number of Islamic historians, the tradition of Mohammed being the source and explanation of the Arab Conquest, wherein Arab tribesmen on horseback emerged out of the Arabian deserts to conquer Syria, Mesopotamia, Persia, Afghanistan, Egypt, Libya and Spain in less than 80 years (636-712), stands history on its head. They demonstrate that the story of Mohammed uniting various Arab tribes as Genghiz Khan did for the Mongols, and providing them with the religious fervor to conquer in the name of Islam, is "sacred history," rather than real history.

Jack Wheeler Strategic Investor, July 2001

The origin of the phrase “thinking out of the box” comes from an intelligence test called the Nine Dot Box.  Imagine three rows of three dots, each equally spaced some distance apart on a regular piece of paper.  The task is to connect the dots with a  minimum number of lines drawn by a pen or pencil.  The only rules are:  you must draw a line through every dot once and only once, all lines must be straight (no curves), and your pen/pencil cannot leave the paper. 

Most people cannot figure out how to do