HOUSTON - Sections of a diary belonging to one of the seven astronauts killed last year when the space shuttle Columbia broke apart over Texas were found a few months ago and returned to his family, according to a published report.
The Jerusalem Post reported that sections of Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon's diary were found in a Texas field with other debris."
mred - this is obviously a lie. i wonder why it is being told. and of course in the JPost (thnx, richard, henry). sounds like the 911 passport thingy... curious also that it was found a few months ago but the story is coming out now. one suspects that there mite be more than '9am. had breakfast, 10am. did dishes'
('other debris' is mostly chunks of heat-resistant tiles and chunks of metal i guess)


"The diary was submitted to the Israel Police for help in deciphering what was written, since the pages were written in Hebrew and some of the pages were full of holes"
mr ed: so there's no-one in america who can read hebrew? or are the israeli police more experienced with reading stuff with holes in it?

"A woman who answered the phone Friday at the Houston home of Ramon's widow said Rona Ramon didn't want to comment."
mred - fancy that. thou shalt not verify.

JERUSALEM ? Disintegrating pages of a diary that an Israeli astronaut wrote during the doomed Columbia space shuttle mission were miraculously found in Texas, it was disclosed yesterday.
Ilan Ramon, an Israeli air force combat pilot, recorded his thoughts about the mission, starting from takeoff, in the handwritten journal
Only the first of the eight diary pages was legible, he told The Post. The others had been apparently bleached white during the shuttle's plunge and 1,800-degree heat."
"Along with the diary was a ninth page on which Ramon had written a Sabbath prayer so he could recite it properly in space."

the sections of Ramon's personal diary ? handwritten in Hebrew ? during his last days on the ill-fated space shuttle
mred - i thought it was the first pages that were recovered...
"...were recovered in Texas by a Native American tracker."
mr ed - please make it stop

god bless native america. fucking hell - in our country, the trackers, talented as they are, can usually only track things that actually have a terrestial track, as far as i know. i dont know of the oz FAA ever calling in trackers - even if a plane crashes in the outback - apparently they dont add much value in finding stuff that have fallen from the sky, unless it was falling really fast and bounced once or twice before it came to a stop - if u can tell the trackers where it first hit the ground, then they can use their native skills and say 'it should be around here somewhere then'

as an aside, there are a number of space related stories in the media at the moment - robots on mars, gwbs 'lets go to the solar system', cancel hubble, gas leaks at ISS, titanium diaries, the very odd steven hawking stories, china to the moon (there was some odd reprt that a US senator (?) said something like 'we cant let the chinese beat us to the moon') - its starting to look like there mite be a pattern. i dunno what it means. yet.


US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is considering provoking a military confrontation with Syria by attacking Hizbullah bases near the Syrian border in Lebanon, according to the authoritative London-based Jane's Intelligence Digest.
In an article to be published on Friday, the journal said multi-faceted US attacks, which would be conducted within the framework of the global war on terrorism, are likely to focus on Hizbullah bases in the Bekaa Valley of eastern Lebanon.
It noted that the deployment of US special forces in the Bekaa Valley, where most of Syria's occupation forces in Lebanon are based, would be highly inflammatory and would "almost certainly involve a confrontation with Syrian troops."

Her sin was saying what no one is allowed to say, that the actions of the state of Israel against the Palestinians have created such intolerable conditions that it is completely understandable that a human being might find becoming a suicide bomber a rational choice. Has anyone noticed that we are currently in a position of a complete Orwellian freeze on speech about Israel.
The Zionist attempts to repress the awful truth of what the state of Israel is doing confirms the justice of supporting the cause of the Palestinian people.

"I did expect comeback, but to say that any criticism of Israel is anti-semitic is doing Israel a disservice. This is an important story that should be told. It shows a child under military occupation. It's terrible for the occupiers, and terrible for the occupied. I hope I have shown how awful it is for the soldiers too," said Laird, who has lived in Beirut and Iraq.