19 April 2009
I am in Borneo heading into the jungles. Got this interesting email from blog.USNI.org:
Japan’s late-1941 attack on Pearl Harbor left America feeling vulnerable, and Japan invincible. On April 18, 1942, American pilots – flying from the aircraft carrier USS Hornet – cracked Japan’s confidence. Led by Lieutenant Colonel “Jimmy” Doolittle, their daring raid on Tokyo was the first WWII strike against the Japanese homeland. In 1983, U. S. Naval Institute historians recorded a conversation with Doolittle as part of an oral history project. Until weeks ago, the tapes of that interview sat hidden on a dusty shelf. Rediscovered and digitized, we’ve posted them so you can hear, in his own voice, the man who made history with the “Doolittle Raid.”
18 April 2009
Apr 16th 2009
From The Economist print editionAmerican investors attempt to spur Iraq’s private sector
In 2005 on a dusty road in Tuz, Iraq, an American solder was killed by a roadside bomb. His fellow soldiers soon discovered that the assassin was no hardened terrorist, but an unemployed father of six who had been paid $200 to plant the explosive. Such situations are not uncommon in Iraq, where high unemployment spawned many “economic insurgents”—often unideological Iraqis in need of cash, who became easy recruits. It was, in part, in response to examples like this that a trio of former military officers created the Marshall Fund, a private-equity fund making only non-oil investments in smallish firms in Iraq. “Without thriving businesses and the jobs they create, Iraq will never be stable,” says Dan Rice, who founded the fund along with Wayne Culbreth and Andrew Eberhart. Late last year it closed on its first investment, a tomato-processing plant in the northern region of Harir.