Blog Heap of Links for the day 17 February 2016

Iraq is searching for "highly dangerous" radioactive material stolen last year, according to an environment ministry document and seven security, environmental and provincial officials who fear it could be used as a weapon if acquired by Islamic State.

The material, stored in a protective case the size of a laptop computer, went missing in November from a storage facility near the southern city of Basra belonging to U.S. oilfield services company Weatherford…

Twenty-eight people were killed and dozens wounded in Turkey's capital Ankara on Wednesday when a car laden with explosives detonated next to military buses near the armed forces' headquarters, parliament and other government buildings. …

Two teenagers have been arrested in connection with the shootings of at least eight vehicles, including six Walmart trucks, on an Oklahoma highway… the teens were questioned and arrested after a man told authorities his son and a friend has been out hunting during the time some of the shots were reported…

Two previously unseen poems by The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien have been discovered in a school magazine in Abingdon, Oxfordshire. …Tolkien is believed to have written the poems while he was a professor of Anglo-Saxon as Oxford University. Published in the 1936 annual of Our Lady’s School in Oxfordshire… first poem…is an early version of a poem Tolkien would late publish as part of the 1962 collection The Adventures of Tom Bombadil. …second poem, “Noel,” is a Christmas poem full of fantasy imagery.…

For the first time astronomers were able to analyse the atmosphere of an exoplanet in the class known as super-Earths. …55 Cancri e is revealed to have a dry atmosphere without any indications of water vapour. …consists mainly of hydrogen and helium.…

Pope Francis stepped back from a crowd during a handshaking event and scolded them for touching him and pulling his sleeves.

The Pope, who was visiting the town of Morelia, Mexico, looks visibly upset in the video shown below as he tells the crowd in Spanish, “Don’t be selfish. Don’t be selfish.” …

Just as President Barack Obama is planning to send Congress his plan to close the Guantanamo Bay prison this year, leaders of the military say it will not transfer any detainees to the U.S., unless the law prohibiting such transfers is changed.

Lt. General William Mayville Jr., the director of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said as much in a letter to Congress last week…

Why Americans Detest Politicians…

Two more suspects in the Paris terror massacres have been identified as having passed through Greece into Europe with the migrants. The two are “Frenchmen” of Algerian and Pakistani origin, and posed as Syrian refugees when they entered Greece using stolen Syrian passports provided by the Islamic State.

In other news, Austria has decided to set up border controls at twelve crossings on its southern border with Italy.…

…At a campaign event in Bluffton, South Carolina Wednesday morning, Trump was slamming the George W. Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq when he casually mentioned that there are “secret papers” that might show that “the Saudis” were actually responsible for the attacks on 9/11…