Blog Heap of Links for the day 27 June 2009

Operation Pastorius was a failed plan for sabotage via a series of attacks by Nazi German agents inside the United States.

The gruesome details of Jada Justice's death were revealed Friday when prosecutors charged the 2-year-old girl's cousin and her boyfriend with murder.... That night, while they were on their way to buy heroin, the couple realized that Jada was dead....

...tractor-trailer slammed into a line of cars stopped by an earlier accident... about 1 p.m. on the Will Rogers Turnpike northeast of Miami.... "quite possibly the largest death toll in a single crash" in state history... Investigators don't think the truck driver tried to stop before the crash... Three more accidents happened in the eastbound lanes as cars slowed following the tractor-trailer wreck, and later a four-car crash occurred on the westbound side of the turnpike... wreckage and emergency vehicles covered an estimated three-quarters of a mile....

"I didn't want to knit anymore. I had just lost my joy," said Salyers, who fell five stories after the bombing and was discovered under a pile of rubble. "But if I didn't grab back on to what I love, they may as well have killed me." Some of her colleagues at the U.S. Customs Office on the fifth floor of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building recovered a basket of yarn, covered with debris, and returned it to her. Salyers said she became motivated to return to knitting after learning that other survivors had similar experiences — one man who lost a daughter and a grandson who no longer enjoyed woodworking and a woman who couldn't start sewing again. She finally used the yarn to craft a sweater with 168 stars, one for each victim of the April 19, 1995, blast... The "First Person: Stories of Hope" lecture series will continue every Friday during the summer at the museum.

The United States is phasing out funding for opium eradication programs in poppy-filled Afghanistan while significantly boosting funding for alternate crop and drug interdiction efforts.... [END NANNY TYRANNY! (And cut the drug gangs' profits to zero!) LEGALIZE!] U.S. eradication programs were only driving Afghan farmers into the hands of the Taliban.

Ulysses, a joint NASA and European Space Agency mission, will officially cease operations Monday, June 30, when the command to switch off the transmitter is uplinked to the spacecraft. Ulysses, which operated for more than 18 years, had charted the unexplored regions of space above the poles of the sun.

A Louisville pastor is welcoming gun owners into his church's sanctuary Saturday for what he says is a show of support for the right to bear arms... The "Open Carry Celebration" will include a handgun raffle....