I’m not sure why news on this is just now breaking because excavators have been working on this for quite some time, but apparently the statues on Easter Island aren’t just heads, but full bodies.

See here for some photos.

Rock heads of Easter Island have bodies, too.

Detailed story here:

Buried deep in the archives of America’s intelligence services are a series of memos, written during the last years of President George W. Bush’s administration, that describe how Israeli Mossad officers recruited operatives belonging to the terrorist group Jundallah by passing themselves off as American agents. According to two U.S. intelligence officials, the Israelis, flush with American dollars and toting U.S. passports, posed as CIA officers in recruiting Jundallah operatives — what is commonly referred to as a “false flag” operation.

The memos, as described by the sources, one of whom has read them and another who is intimately familiar with the case, investigated and debunked reports from 2007 and 2008 accusing the CIA, at the direction of the White House, of covertly supporting Jundallah — a Pakistan-based Sunni extremist organization. Jundallah, according to the U.S. government and published reports, is responsible for assassinating Iranian government officials and killing Iranian women and children.

But while the memos show that the United States had barred even the most incidental contact with Jundallah, according to both intelligence officers, the same was not true for Israel’s Mossad. The memos also detail CIA field reports saying that Israel’s recruiting activities occurred under the nose of U.S. intelligence officers, most notably in London, the capital of one of Israel’s ostensible allies, where Mossad officers posing as CIA operatives met with Jundallah officials.

Just learned of this: North Korea’s Kim Jong Il is no more: http://www.cnn.com/2011/12/18/world/asia/north-korea-leader-dead/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

As P.Z. Myers just said, I’ll let Hitchens deliver the appropriate words about tyrannies such as Kim Jong Il’s and well … God’s from the Bible.

This, as it happens, it just about my favorite Hitchens clip, and one of the most compelling, on YouTube. Notice the quite ironic comment at the 4:15 mark.