News That Stays News

LINKED January 24, 2011

1. Someone finally complains about egregious Congressional naming habits- i.e. USA PATRIOT Act being actually the “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism” Act.

2. NYT paywall is going up next month. Tragedy, or Freedom?

3. How did China acquire stealth technology so fast? This AP article says that after a F-117 was shot down during the Kosovo war,

The wreckage was strewn over a wide area of flat farmlands, and civilians collected the parts — some the size of small cars — as souvenirs.

“At the time, our intelligence reports told of Chinese agents crisscrossing the region where the F-117 disintegrated, buying up parts of the plane from local farmers,” says Adm. Davor Domazet-Loso, Croatia’s military chief of staff during the Kosovo war.

“We believe the Chinese used those materials to gain an insight into secret stealth technologies … and to reverse-engineer them,” Domazet-Loso said in a telephone interview.

A senior Serbian military official confirmed that pieces of the wreckage were removed by souvenir collectors, and that some ended up “in the hands of foreign military attaches.”