Muscle Building Blog

By RYAN E. SMITH BLADE STAFF WRITER Staff Sgt. Travis Grime didn't become a Marine so he could sit at home. "I joined because I wanted to go over and cause death and destruction," he said. But after a seven-month tour in Iraq five years ago as a heavy equipment operations chief, that's exactly where the Maumee man found himself: home. It wasn't easy for the rough-and-tumble guy. His employer had ...

The economic well-being of the United States is dependent on the reliability, safety, and security of its physical infrastructure. The nation’s infrastructure is vast and affects the daily lives of virtually all Americans. In total, there are about 4 million miles of roads, 117,000 miles of rail, 600,000 bridges, 79,000 dams, 26,000 miles of commercially navigable waterways, 11,000 miles of transit lines, 500 train stations, 300 ports, 19,000 airports,5 55,000 community drinking water systems, a

Of course I thought I knew it all back then. I was young, idealistic, and more than willing to put my life at risk for my convictions. It was 1947 and I wasn’t quite 18 when the Iraqi authorities caught me for smuggling young Iraqi Jews like myself out of Iraq, into Iran, and then on to the Promised Land of the soon-to-be established Israel. I was an Iraqi Jew in the Zionist underground. My Iraqi jailers did everything they could to extract the names of my co-conspirators. Fifty years later

Comments are turned off until 29 July, when I return to the USA.Excerpt for today: “Colonizing Iraq — The Obama Doctrine?” By Michael Schwartz , posted at TomDispatch, 9 July 2009Here’s how reporters Steven Lee Myers and Marc Santora of the New York Times described the highly touted American withdrawal from Iraq’s cities last week:“Much of the complicated work of dismantling and removing millions of dollars of equipment from the combat outposts in the city has been done during the dark of night

Iraq's increasing environmental problems may destabilise the fragile security gains of the last two years. At the start of the month, the US vice-president Joe Biden visited Iraq unannounced to consolidate his position as Obama's Mesopotamia point-man. While the visit looked to back up the withdrawal of US troops from urban areas, his attempts to mediate worsening Irbil-Baghdad relations was impeded by a spate of sandstorms in the north of the country. These are symptoms of a forgotten is