Army colonel tries old C-ration pound cake
WASHINGTON — Forty years later, Henry A. Moak, Jr., still loves his pound cake.
The Army colonel popped open a military C-ration can of pound cake from 1969 at his retirement ceremony, and dug in.
Moak got the drab olive can as a Marine helicopter pilot off the Vietnamese coast in 1973. He vowed to hang on to it until the day he retired, storing it in a box with other mementos.
After a formal retirement ceremony, dozens of friends and relatives joined Moak in the Pentagon’s Hall of Heroes as he opened the can to cheers. Moak joked earlier this week that he hoped the can wouldn’t explode. It let off a whooshing sound as the pressure seal broke.
“It smells good,” Moak said as he put a handful in his mouth. He jokingly staggered back a few feet and loudly cleared his throat, while one person yelled out, “Eeww, gross!”
Moak pronounced the cake “good.”
“It’s even a little moist,” he said, wiping his mouth. He dared anybody “gutsy” enough to join him, and retired Lt. Gen. Paul T. Mikolashek, who was the U.S. Army Europe commander when Moak served overseas, took an even bigger piece.
“Tastes just like it always did,” Mikolashek mumbled with a mouthful of cake as Moak laughed and clapped.
Moak said he wasn’t worried about getting sick from any bacteria that may have gotten into the old can, because it looked sealed. But the military discourages eating from old rations.
“Given the risks … we do everything possible to ensure that overly aged rations are not consumed,” said Lawrence Levine, a spokesman for the Defense Supply Center in Philadelphia.
Levine named the threats as mold and deadly botulism if the sealing on the food has been broken, which isn’t always visible.
Moak says though he warned his children over the years not to touch his pound cake, he did let them eat some other rations when they were growing up in the 1980s, including canned spaghetti and crackers.
And how did those taste? “Fine. Well … not like from our great restaurants.”
Crows shut down Nepal govt headquarters
Kathmandu: Crows brought the activities in the main administrative complex in Nepal's capital, housing the Prime Minister's office, to a grinding halt. No, it was not an avian attack as seen in the Alfred Hitchcock thriller 'The Birds', but only a mishap. Some crows fell on a high-tension line leading to their electrocution and resulting in a 12-hour power outage in the entire Singhdurbar area in the heart of Kathmandu yesterday.
No, it was not an avian attack as seen in the Alfred Hitchcock thriller 'The Birds', but only a mishap. Some crows fell on a high-tension line leading to their electrocution and resulting in a 12-hour power outage in the entire Singhdurbar area in the heart of Kathmandu yesterday. The complex houses the Prime Minister's Office, several ministries and the Parliament building.
Government employees returned to work yesterday after ending a five-day strike for pay hike, but the offices could not resume functioning as there were no lights, no computers running, no fans operating, no air-conditioning and no fax operating for nearly the whole day.
The power cut started at 6 am in the morning and lasted till 5.30 in the afternoon, when offices were already closed.
This is unprecedented in the history of Singhdurbar Secretariat, an official told The Kathmandu Post.
"There was a short circuit after some crows landed on the main power line," said Khagendra Bhandari from the maintenance division of Nepal Electricity Authority.
The Supreme Court, situated nearby, also suffered power outage and only 25 per cent of hearings were held on the day.
There was no power back-up system in the secretariat as well as in the court. "This has given a lesson to us that a back-up system is required," an official said.
26 Women Drown After Being Spooked By Lightning
Twenty-six women drowned.
Rescuers saved four passengers and two crew from the Wainganga River after the accident late Saturday night, said police Superintendent Suresh Sagar. Eight other women are still missing.
After seeing a massive bolt of lightning, the women _ poor farm laborers on their way home from work _ panicked and the boats capsized in the ensuing chaos.
The boats overturned in the Bhandara district of Maharashtra state, about 575 miles (925 kilometers) northeast of the state capital of Mumbai.
It's not clear why all of the passengers were women. But in many parts of India, women make up most of the farm workers.
Boat accidents are common in India, where many vessels are unsafe and overloaded.
Israeli woman mistakenly junks $1 million mattress
Jerusalem, June 11: An Israeli woman mistakenly threw out a mattress she said had almost USD 1 million inside, setting off a frantic search through tons of garbage at a number of landfill sites on Wednesday. The woman told reporters that she bought her elderly mother a new mattress as a surprise present on Monday — and threw out the old one.The next day, she said, she remembered that she had hidden her life savings inside the old mattress. "I woke up in the morning screaming, when it hit me what happened," said the Tel Aviv woman, who asked not to be identified.
She went to look for the mattress, but it had already been hauled away by garbage collectors, she said. Searches at three different landfill sites turned up nothing.
She said the money was in US dollars and Israeli shekels. She refused to say how she acquired such a large sum. "It was all my money in the world," she said. There was no way to verify her claims, and she refused to disclose key details.
Israeli police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said he was not familiar with the case and no report had been filed.
The Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot published a picture of the woman searching through garbage at a dump in southern Israel. The picture shows the woman, dressed in a white top and black pants with her back to the camera, picking through a huge pile of trash that fills the frame about 10 feet (3 meters) in all directions.
Yitzhak Borba, the dump manager, told Army Radio that his staff was helping the woman, saying she appeared "totally desperate." He said the mattress was hard to find among the 2,500 tons of garbage that arrives at the site every day.
He said he increased security at the site to keep would-be treasure hunters away.
The woman said the money had been stashed in a mattress because she had had "traumatic experiences with banks" in the past. She would not elaborate.
Driver 'dozes off' on India train
A passenger train in the Indian state of Bihar zoomed past two railway stations - apparently after the driver fell asleep at the controls. Those on board say the driver stopped only after some of the panic-stricken passengers managed to wake him up. Following protests by angry passengers, he then reversed the train to return to the stations he had missed. The driver and the guard of the train have been suspended and an inquiry has been ordered, a railway official said. 'Out of proportion' The incident is alleged to have occurred after the Jogbani-Katihar express left Forbesganj railway station in Bihar on Monday.
Passengers then panicked when the train also missed its next stop of Pothia railway station in Kishanganj. When some of the passengers managed to reach the engine, they apparently found the driver snoring away. "We sounded the alarm and began to shout - only then did the driver wake up," passenger Vivek Thakur was quoted by a local newspaper as saying. The driver then reversed to stations he had missed. "We have been informed that the driver concerned drove past some local stations in a state of sleep. These are lapses which cannot be tolerated at any cost," Babulal Gaekwad, the divisional railway manager of the North-east Frontier Railway told the BBC. Passengers waiting to board the train at the two railway stations had a miraculous escape as some of them were standing close to the tracks to get into the crammed train compartments. Some even sustained minor bruises. A senior railway official, Gopal Kumar, told the BBC that the driver and the guard of the train had been suspended and an inquiry had been ordered. Mr Kumar admitted that the train had missed stops and had to retrace its route, but described it as "a small incident blown out of proportion". "Let the inquiry be completed and only then will we be able to say whether the driver fell asleep or not." Protests Railway officials at the station initially thought the authorities might have decided to reschedule the train stops under the new railways minister and some angry passengers began to protest. On Monday, angry villagers set fire to two trains in Bihar and ransacked a railway station in protest at a decision not to stop some trains at remote stations. The decision was later reversed. State-owned Indian railways is an immense network connecting every corner of the vast country. One of the largest and busiest rail networks in the world, it operates 9,000 passenger trains and carries 18 million passengers every day. | ||||
We sounded the alarm and began to shout - only then did the driver wake up 
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