Man’s best friend can also be man’s best tandem parachuting partner. The Guardian reports that UK forces have been sending Taliban-hunting dogs into Afghanistan.
Dogs have been used previously by American and Austrian paratroopers, which sheds some light on how the British might be using their pups, says Wired:
SAS pooches are trained for High Altitude High Opening (HAHO) jumps, in which parachutes are deployed at a high altitude and long horizontal distance away from a target location in order to allow jumpers to glide in without detection.
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Sure, he may live in a country that banned all modern technology, including TV and the Internet, from 1996 to 2001. But Mullah Abdul Salaam Zaeef, the former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, now relies on his iPhone for all the same reasons its other users are hooked.
The former ambassador, who spent nearly four years imprisoned in Guantanamo, is now back in Afghanistan and uses his iPhone for things like online banking and finding directions on his phone’s built-in GPS. He reportedly calls the device “necessary” in today’s world.
Meanwhile, the wife of eponymous Microsoft mogul Bill Gates remains cruelly iPhone-deprived. Melinda Gates recently admitted to Vogue that she and her Microsoft-founding husband have a household policy against Apple products. But this sacrifice doesn’t come without its costs: As she watches her friends using their Jobs-ian gadgets, she sometimes thinks, “Ooh, I wouldn’t mind having that iPhone.”
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Image: Flickr / ten safe frogs
