“WASHINGTON – The U.S. awarded a no-bid, $266 million contract for a lucrative electricity project in southern Afghanistan despite promising last year to seek competitive bids, The Associated Press has learned.

The U.S. Agency for International Development made the change despite criticism over how it has managed billions of dollars spent on reconstruction contracts.

In January 2010, the agency said companies would compete for the project, which was awarded to Black & Veatch Corp. of Overland Park, Kan. USAID had chastised the company for cost overruns and busted deadlines on a diesel-fueled power plant in Kabul.

But the U.S. let 10 months pass before deciding to award a contract without competitive bids, saying that it couldn't spend more time seeking offers.

A rival company that was interested in bidding, Symbion Power LLC of Washington, D.C., said USAID broke its promise and spent more than it should to expand electricity into Helmand and Kandahar provinces.

"I was stunned because of the cost of it," Symbion chief executive Paul Hinks said.

The no-bid contract comes as the independent Commission on Wartime Contracting is examining how wisely billions of U.S. money is being spent and how well contractors are being supervised in Afghanistan. USAID and Black & Veatch executives are scheduled to testify Monday at a commission hearing…”

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-- via tylerriewer.tumblr.com

-- NSFW. Not for the dangerously conservative or the prude of heart... ;)

-- I saw this a few days ago, so I am assuming some of you probably have come across it already. Opinions? Would you use it?

GQ: The latest dispatch from our street-shooting man at the shows.

-- Photographer Tommy Ton is at Pitti Uomo, the menswear extravaganza in Florence, and is photographing some of the slickest men in the world for GQ. Go here for your fashion inspiration.

SEE HERE

“An American-led military unit pulverized an Afghan village in Kandahar’s Arghandab River Valley in October, after it became overrun with Taliban insurgents. It’s hard to understand how turning an entire village into dust fits into America’s counterinsurgency strategy — which supposedly prizes the local people’s loyalty above all else.

But it’s the latest indication that Gen. David Petraeus, the counterinsurgency icon, is prosecuting a frustrating war with surprising levels of violence. Some observers already fear a backlash brewing in the area.

Paula Broadwell, a West Point graduate and Petraeus biographer, described the destruction of Tarok Kolache in a guest post for Tom Ricks’ Foreign Policy blog. Or, at least, she described its aftermath: Nothing remains of Tarok Kolache after Lt. Col. David Flynn, commander of Combined Joint Task Force 1-320th, made a fateful decision in October.

His men had come under relentless assault from homemade bombs emanating from the village, where a Taliban “intimidation campaign [chased] the villagers out” to create a staging ground for attacking the task force. With multiple U.S. amputations the result of the Taliban hold over Tarok Kolache, Flynn’s men were “terrified to go back into the pomegranate orchards to continue clearing [the area]; it seemed like certain death.”

After two failed attempts at clearing the village resulted in U.S and Afghan casualties, Flynn’s response was to take the village out. He ordered a mine-clearing line charge, using rocket-propelled explosives to create a path into the center of Tarok Kolache.

And that was for starters, Broadwell writes. Airstrikes from A-10s and B-1s combined with powerful ground-launched rockets on Oct. 6 to batter the village with “49,200 lbs. of ordnance” — which she writes, resulted in “NO CIVCAS,” meaning no civilians dead…”

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-- So this is kind of wrong, but that dog is badass... When he zooms on the cut, that was apparently caused by one of the rats' neck bones snapping and piercing the dog's gums. Oh and Washington Square Park is a pretty damn dirty place.

"Did you know that the humble robin uses quantum physics?

Researchers have been investigating the mechanism which enables birds to detect the Earth's magnetic field to help them navigate over vast distances. This ability, known as magnetoreception, has been linked to chemical reactions inside birds' eyes.

Now a team from Oxford University and Singapore believe that this 'compass' is making use of something called quantum coherence.

In a forthcoming article in Physical Review Letters the team report how they anaylsed data from an experiment by Oxford and Frankfurt scientists on robins.

The experiment showed that the magnetic compass used by robins could be distrupted by extremely small levels of magnetic 'noise'. When this noise, a tiny oscillating magnetic field, was introduced it completely disabled the Robins' compass sense which then returned to normal once the noise was removed - good news for robins which have to navigate on the long migration route to Scandinavia and Africa and back every year.

In their analysis the Oxford/Singapore team show that only a system with components operating at a quantum level would be this sensitive to such a small amount of noise…”

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-- Cold As Ice, street art by Cem Ulucan via Laughing Squid.

"The viral video of a Russian woman swirling and twirling a baby about seemed so surreal and unreal. Everyone thought it was a hoax. But it turns out Lena Fokina, the famous baby swinger, runs a legit business in Egypt, where she, well, swings babies. Fokina likes to call it "baby yoga." How much do you want to bet that a baby yoga place will open up in Noe Valley within the year?"

"...It turns out this hard-bodied, 50-year-old woman is for real--and babies are a lot stronger than you ever imagined. Lena Fokina runs a yoga business in Dahab, Egypt, and Nathan Thornburgh, a daddy blogger and contributing writer for Time magazine, tracked her down and interviewed her..."

-- YouTube pulled the original video, but you can see it bellow or by following the link.

SEE HERE

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“A biking accident has prompted NASA to replace one of the astronauts who was scheduled to travel to the International Space Station next month.

Astronaut Steve Bowen (below, left) will replace astronaut Tim Kopra (below, right) on the STS-133 mission, which is set to launch on February 24. Kopra was injured in a bike accident over the weekend, and while he is expected to recover, he will not be ready for the Discovery launch.

"Tim is doing fine and expects a full recovery, however, he will not be able to support the launch window next month," Peggy Whitson, chief of the Astronaut Office at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, said in a statement. "If for some unanticipated reason STS-133 slips significantly, it is possible that Tim could rejoin the crew."

The Discovery launch has, in fact, been delayed several times due to weather, leaks, and cracks, but NASA said recently that it has resolved those issues and is confident that the February 24 launch date is a go. Switching out Kopra with Bowen should not delay the mission any further, NASA said.

Bowen will be training with the STS-133 crew this week, and will also train to perform two planned spacewalks, which include moving a failed ammonia pump and performing other external station configurations…”

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“A new species of giant crayfish literally crawled out from under a rock in Tennessee, proving that large new species of animals can be found in highly populated and well-explored places, researchers said on Wednesday.

The new crayfish should not have been easily overlooked, as it is huge -- twice the size of other species, the team at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Eastern Kentucky University said.

But the crustacean is also quite rare, they report in the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington.

"This isn't a crayfish that someone would have picked up and just said, 'Oh, it's another crayfish,' and put it back," said University of Illinois aquatic biologist Chris Taylor, one of the researchers.

"You would have recognized it as something really, really different and you would have saved it," Taylor added in a statement.

Taylor and Guenter Schuster of Eastern Kentucky University found their first specimen of the new species under one of the biggest rocks in the deepest part of a commonly explored Tennessee creek.

The new species, called Barbicambarus simmonsi, is about 5 inches long and has antennae covered with a sensitive fringe of tiny, hair-like bristles, called setae…”

-- "The new crayfish species, Barbicambarus simmonsi (L) is more than twice the size of a typical crayfish (R) found in the same creek - and yet generations of aquatic biologists somehow missed it."

READ HERE