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While Ivy Tech and IPFW expand onto what was the campus of the Fort Wayne Developmental Center, the former Muscatatuck Developmental Center is serving quite a different purpose.
As the New York Times reported, the center southeast of Columbus has been transformed into the likeness of an Afghan city, the place where American civilians stop for role-playing and other training before going to the war-torn country.
The Indiana National Guard, based at nearby Camp Atterbury, runs the center, and many of the civilians are veterans of the Foreign Service.
The U.S. wants to send 200 to 300 more civilians to join the 1,000 already in Afghanistan. Among their roles will be to hire and train Afghans to complete infrastructure and other projects designed to help local areas.
While surrounding Hoosier farmland probably does not resemble Afghanistan, the idea of some real-world training is sound.
The Russian equivalent of the alphabet is the Cyrillic, which includes some characters familiar to English speakers and some that are unique. Though the Russian language is based on the Cyrillic, the millions of Russians who use the Internet are stuck with using the Latin-based alphabet Americans use, with sites ending in the suffix .ru.
That is likely to change next year, when Russia plans to launch sites with Cyrillic domain names, a move approved earlier this year by the ICANN, the U.S.-based Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers. The move has vast implications; possibly making government censorship easier and influencing China, Arabia and other parts of the world that use other alphabets.
Even Russians are divided in their views, some supporting the native language but others fearing a separate – and unequal – network.
If nothing else, the new languages will open the way for hundreds of thousands of new Web sites. And, given the explosion of the Internet, it probably has countless repercussions we have only begun to think about.
While it’s difficult for many Americans to get a handle on exactly what it means that China has lent the U.S. a lot of money in the form of buying bonds, the proposed sale of Nevada gold mines to a company controlled by the Chinese government is easier to understand.
And easier for Americans to oppose – particularly considering the mine operation is close to a naval air station, plus, according to the Treasury Department, “other sensitive and classified security and military assets.”
Those unnamed assets could well include nuclear missile silos.
With the Obama administration poised to block the sale, the company – Northwest Nonferrous International Investment Co., which doesn’t exactly sound Chinese – dropped its effort to buy Firstgold Corp. Firstgold was disappointed, but the government was right to step in – particularly considering the mining rights include not only gold but uranium. Much of the land is owned by the government and leased to the company.
