More A-10 Warthogs deploy to the Middle East
Even as the U.S. Air Force works to retire its fleet of A-10 Thunderbolt IIs, Warthogs are still proving useful in the ongoing fight against ISIS. And now, the U.S. military is sending additional Warthogs to the Middle East. It's part of the latest build up of U.S. military power, as fighting ramps up against Houthi forces in Yemen.
The 124th Fighter Wing announced it was deploying more than 300 airmen and 'multiple' A-10s to the CENTCOM area of responsibility. The troops and aircraft, flown by members of the 190th Fighter Squadron, left Idaho on Saturday, March 29. The exact number of A-10s was not disclosed, beyond 'several' being deployed. The Idaho State Journal reports that the troops are on a 180-day deployment.
The 124th Fighter Wing's A-10s are the latest to deploy to the Middle East. The close air support aircraft have repeatedly been sent to the CENTCOM area of responsibility in different American military buildup periods since October 2023, when the Israeli war in Gaza began. Most recently additional A-10s arrived in the fall of 2024.
The aircraft have played a major role in combat operations in the region. Between November and January, A-10s were part of several aerial attack missions against ISIS militants in Iraq and Syria. In November, they participated in airstrikes against ISIS forces inside eastern Syria. The aircraft also provided aerial support for ground troops fighting ISIS militants in mountainous parts of Iraq in a days-long campaign in late December.
Despite regularly deploying the aircraft, the U.S. Air Force is working to retire its fleet of a little more than 200 A-10s by fiscal year 2028, with close air support roles being taken over by fighter jets and bombers.
Operations against ISIS targets in Iraq and Syria have been steadily ongoing, but fighting in the Middle East has escalated this month with a restart of hostilities with Houthi forces. The group, which controls much of Yemen, announced it would resume attacks on ships in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden in response to humanitarian aid blockades into Gaza. Since March 15, U.S. forces have repeatedly bombed Houthi sites in Sana'a and other locations, and intercepted missiles and drones fired towards U.S. Navy assets. The exact number of airstrikes since March 15 has not been disclosed, although CENTCOM has characterized it as ongoing '24/7' on social media.
The airmen and aircraft from the 124th Fighter Wing who are deploying are part of a wider surge of American military forces to the region. Last week the USS Carl Vinson Carrier Strike Group, including Carrier Air Wing 2, was ordered to the Middle East to join the USS Harry S. Truman Carrier Strike Group, which has been carrying out many of the operations against Houthi forces. Meanwhile B-2 Spirit bombers were sent to Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian Ocean, which is often used as a staging ground for operations in the Middle East.
The Army's Master Combat Badges will be coming to soldiers this month
Air Force shoots down Houthi drones launched at Navy carrier strike group
Medal of Honor recipient depicted in movie 'Glory' erased from Pentagon website
'Saving Private Ryan' didn't make the Army's list of most accurate movie portrayals
Army reveals designs for Mountaineering and Mariner Badges
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Los Angeles Times
8 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
Don't buy fancy butter to make great pie. Here's why
When it comes to the fat in pie dough, there are no kings. In terms of its ingredients, pie dough couldn't be more straightforward: For the most part, it's flour, butter and water. With so few ingredients, it begs the question: Does the quality of the butter make a difference? Typical American butter — brands such as Land O'Lakes, Cabot, Challenge and supermarket private labels — contains 80% butterfat. Many of the brands also offer extra-creamy lines. These 'European-style' butters have a higher butterfat content. Kerrygold from Ireland has a butterfat content of 82% to 83%, and Plugra, which is made in the U.S., is 82% butterfat. Ironically, European-style butters with the highest percentage of fat are from small American creameries: Straus Family Creamery in Marin County makes a European-style butter with 85% butterfat, and Vermont Creamery has a whopping 86%. Some sources say that European-style, higher-butterfat butter makes a difference in baked goods, but speaking strictly for pie dough right now, how could it? At least in any noticeable way. What isn't butterfat in butter — that other 14% to 20% — is water (with an insignificant amount of milk solids, and in the case of salted butter, salt). And you add water to pie dough anyway. (In my pie crust, I substitute heavy cream for some of the water, a 'trick' I learned from pastry chef Nancy Silverton, who does so because, she says, in addition to hydrating the dough, the cream brings with it fat and flavor.) The water in butter evaporates in the baking process, creating steam pockets in the dough, which is what forms the layers and translates into flakiness. So it wouldn't make sense that less water (fewer steam pockets, fewer layers) would be superior. I did a test of Land O'Lakes vs. Kerrygold. The one thing that Kerrygold added to the dough was color. Kerrygold has a bright, rich yellow hue that comes from the grass the cows graze on, and that makes for a buttery-colored dough. But that color didn't translate to the baked crust. I baked the dough off into little crackers. The Land O'Lakes crackers were light and flaky. As hopeful as I was about the Kerrygold, what with that beautiful buttery-colored dough, the crackers were flat. Barely a flaky layer in sight. Of course, both were delicious. Butter is butter. There's no question that butter, any butter, does reign supreme when it comes to contributing flavor to pie dough. For flakiness, there are still those who swear that shortening makes for the flakiest pie crust, which, more widely known by the brand name Crisco, is a solid fat made from primarily soybean and palm oils. Crisco is so popular in baking that, previously offered only in small tubs, the product is now sold in sticks, so it can be used in a recipe without making a mess stuffing it into a measuring cup. Lard (rendered pork fat) — specifically 'leaf lard,' which comes from the fat around the kidney and loin of the pig — is also said to make for a flaky pie crust. And when I worked at a bakery in a billionaire enclave in the Hamptons, we made the dough with — gasp! — margarine. To my knowledge, nobody complained, or even noticed. The crust was light and flaky and reasonably flavorful. The fruit was juicy and jammy and delicious. It was summertime in one of the most beautiful corners of the earth, and our customers, it would seem, were just happy to have pie. So what do I suggest? Use regular butter. If you want to experiment with Crisco or lard, use that in combination with butter. And if you are entering a pie contest that you really want to win, experiment with combinations of Crisco or lard and European butter. Yes, I might use Kerrygold for that small possibility that it might make a smidgen of difference in the flavor or the color. And if I were baking something that didn't involve piles of stewed fruit, like biscuits, I might splurge. But I guess it would depend on who I was making them for; for the kings and queens in my life, then yes. Absolutely. Ray Garcia, chef of the now-closed beloved modern Mexican restaurant Broken Spanish, calls for European-style 83% butterfat in these biscuits. The butter is frozen and grated, a trick that allows you to mix the butter in with the flour while keeping it as cold as possible. That way the butter melts in the oven, creating those coveted light, flaky the recipe. Cooking time: 1 hour. Makes about 12 biscuits. This pie has the best of both worlds: a crispy, flaky bottom crust and a crunchy crumble topping. This topping is unusual, as it has an egg in it, so it's like crunchy cookie dough dropped in clumps on the pie. For the filling, I cook the sugar first and then add the blackberries, to give them a head start. If I start with raw blackberries, I find that even after over an hour of baking, they don't break down and still look like whole blackberries. I add the cornstarch here too, to make sure the fruit filling sets. The pie is baked on the lowest rack to ensure a browned, crisp bottom crust. If you have a pizza stone, use the recipe. Cooking time: 2 hours. Makes 1 9-inch round pie. From the L.A. Times' long-running Culinary S.O.S. column, this recipe comes courtesy of Koreatown's historic Cuban restaurant El Colmao. Writer Astrid Kayembe highlighted the restaurant's popular ropa vieja dish in her guide to the city's best Caribbean spots, but the signature pollo al colmao translates the classic stewed chicken dish through a family the recipe. Cooking time: 1 hour 40 minutes. Makes 1 9-by-13-inch pie.
Atlantic
8 hours ago
- Atlantic
What Are Emoji?
In the arenas of ancient Rome, the thumbs-up was a matter of life and death. So scholars have extrapolated from the elusive history of ancient gestures. The fates of defeated gladiators were determined by an emperor or another official, who might heed the wishes of the crowd: Thumbs hidden within closed fists were votes for mercy; thumbs-ups were votes for death. Today, the 👍, now flipped into a gesture of approval, is a tool of vague efficiency. Deployed as an emoji—as a hand summoned from a keyboard, suspended between literalism and language—it says 'okay' and declines to say more. But lately the crowds of the internet have found new ways to channel the old dramas. On the matter of the 👍, the arbiters of our own arena—internet-savvy young adults—have rendered their verdict: The 👍 is no longer definitive. It is no longer, for that matter, necessarily positive. 'Gen Z Has Canceled the Thumbs-Up Emoji Because It's 'Hostile,' ' one headline put it, citing data gathered in surveys and in the wild. Particularly as a reply to messages that contain words, Zoomers say, the 👍 is dismissive, disrespectful, even 'super rude.' It's a digital mumble, a surly if you say so, a sure but screw you. It is passive aggression, conveyed with pictographic clarity yet wrapped in plausible deniability. News of this emoji revisionism spread for the same reason so many of Gen Z's pronouncements do: Young adults, speaking internet with native-language ease, have an air of authority. But the news also spread because it was a warning of sorts about online communication at large. The double-edged 👍 meant that you could mean 'yes' or 'sounds great' while saying 'no,' or even 🖕. In online conversations, you can think you've said one thing and be read as having said another. Some have argued that the internet is creating a new kind of Babel. Here, in a cheerfully cartoonish form, were intimations of just that. Different groups of internet users—in this case, generations—can speak the same language and a different one. From the May 2022 issue: Jonathan Haidt on why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid Emoji (derived from the Japanese for picture and written character) were meant to bring humanity to conversations conducted across digital distances—to introduce a warm splash of color and expressiveness into a realm of text. Emoji are common property: Anyone can use them. Any group can define them in its own quirky way. But the resulting ambiguity can fuel tensions as well. Emoji have given rise to new codes of bigotry (🐸👌🥛) that allow their users the same plausible deniability that the 👍 does. Emoji can be cute, and they can also permit hatred to hide in plain sight. Have emoji enhanced communication, or abetted chaos? If emoji belong to everyone and no one, who gets to say what the default meaning might be? Emoji are less a language than they are 'insurgents within language,' Keith Houston writes in Face With Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji. As his lively exploration of the form usefully puts it, they are the 'lingua franca' of the web, and the route they have traveled is more complicated than you might think. Their antecedents are ancient (Egyptian hieroglyphs, Chinese characters, Mesoamerican pictograms), though the journey from their modern birthplace (Japan circa the turn of the millennium) to their current ubiquity has been quick. That doesn't mean it has been smooth. Houston is contagiously enthusiastic about 'vibrant, vital emoji.' 🤗 He is also alert to the mixed blessings of the icons' versatility, their 'many-splendored entanglement with the written word.' Emoji, he writes, are 'a colorful and symbiotic virus whose symptoms we have only haltingly understood.' 🦠 Ambiguity, for emoji, is both a feature and a bug. One symptom of their elasticity is that no one can agree, exactly, on how to categorize them. Ever since their emergence, they have stirred debate among linguists. On their status as a language—implicitly recognized in 2015, when The Oxford English Dictionary named 😂 as its 'Word of the Year'—the consensus is 🤔: They are language-like without being language. (Houston suggests that 'body language' is a helpful way to think about them.) They're symbol-like, yet unlike most symbols, they constantly change in meaning and number. Can they function as punctuation (❣️🤡😬🔥)? Maybe they're better viewed as tactfully ambiguous conversation-enders—useful, as the writer Katy Waldman put it in 2016, for 'magicking us out of interpersonal jams.' Exiting his own definitional jam, Houston turns to the rich story of how emoji came to be. The ones most familiar today are typically attributed to the Japanese engineer Shigetaka Kurita; in 1999, a series of images that he designed were shared among users of Japan's main mobile carrier (teenage girls were the envisioned customers). Even the origin story of emoji, though, is muddied by questions about who really made them what they are. There are other contenders for 'first emoji' honors, Houston points out—so many, he writes, that 'it is no longer possible to imagine that emoji were ever 'invented' in the strictest sense of the word.' Instead, they evolved as so many technologies do: through a combination of accident and intention. In emoji, Japan's singular aesthetic traditions—manga and anime, in particular—achieved a form of universality. Emoji made use of manpu, the genre tropes commonly understood to convey amusement, anxiety, and other emotions. Exploding in popularity as digital chatting caught on—an ascent that accelerated when Apple, Google, and their fellow behemoths became emoji adopters—the pictograms acknowledged no national boundaries. In 2011, a year after emoji officially came under the supervision of a nonprofit called the Unicode Consortium, Apple introduced an emoji keyboard to its U.S.-marketed iPhones, bringing hearts and party poppers and sun-yellow faces to text messages throughout the land. The website Emojipedia, aiming to provide an exhaustive catalog of emoji, arrived in 2013. In 2014, a campaign got under way on the digital-petition site 'The Taco Emoji Needs to Happen,' it announced. The petition received more than 30,000 signatures, and the 🌮 was born. Taco Bell had been the catalyst. Two years later, an article titled 'A Beginner's Guide to Sexting' outed another 🌮 meaning, one its corporate sponsor likely never anticipated (vagina). Emoji, the not-quite-a-language language, were becoming part of the world's linguistic—and commercial—infrastructure, importing some of the unruliness of IRL interaction into virtual spaces. People used emoji to accentuate (👏🎉😂). They used emoji to hedge (😑🤔🌤️). They used emoji to joke (😜). They used emoji to flirt (😍😉). Emoji were pictures that could extend people's voices, visual icons that could help convey intended tone. They said nothing precisely, and that allowed them to express a lot: enthusiasm, sarcasm, anger, humor. They followed the same broad arc that the internet did; having originated as quirky novelties, they were becoming utilities. By the mid-2010s, the 'staid old Unicode,' as Houston comes to call the Consortium, had discovered the headaches accompanying 'emoji fever.' The organization, launched in 1991, was composed of a rotating group of engineers, linguists, and typographers charged with establishing coding consistency across the internet's static characters (letters, numbers, and the like); its goal was to enable global communication among disparate computers. Now it found itself overseeing dynamic characters as the public clamor for more emoji mounted. The Consortium was the gateway to new emoji: It invited the public to suggest additional icons. But its technologists were gatekeepers, too. They reviewed the applications, assessing the level of demand. They were the ones who decided which images to add—and which to deny. (Durex's campaign for a condom emoji fell short.) The annual unveiling of their decisions became, in some quarters (🤓), a much-anticipated event. Each new 'emoji season' brought fresh collections of icons to users' devices. But each also stirred reminders of the icons that weren't there. Faced with feedback from users frustrated by icon selection that could seem capricious and unfair, the arbiters did their best, Houston suggests, to gauge popular support for new candidates. But lapses in the lexicon were obvious, as a mere sampling reveals. Early on, 'professions' were depicted as masculine by default. 'Couple' was a man and a woman. The woman's shoe was a ruby-red heel. Representations of food reflected the pictograms' Japanese origins and U.S. tech dominance, but not their worldwide story. In the quest for more choices—and in response to users' campaigns—the Consortium added, among many other emoji, an array of food items. (They were not always culturally authentic: In an attempted nod to China's culinary traditions, a takeout box joined the lexicon.) In 2015, the group introduced five 'realistic' skin-tone options for humanlike emoji figures. The update brought unintended consequences. Lined up next to other hues, the sunny yellow originally meant to scan as race-neutral (in the lineage of the classic smiley face, Lego mini-figures, and the Simpsons) now read, to some, as racist. Light skin tones, intended to reflect users' skin color, evoked, Houston notes, a similar reaction: Some saw the choice of those light-hued symbols as a 'white power' gesture. Complexity, when emoji are involved, will always find its way back. The Consortium's Emoji Subcommittee—a 'crack team of emoji wranglers,' in Houston's words—had its hands full. Gender updating in particular proved challenging. Early Unicode guidance on depicting emoji people had emphasized, but not required, striving for gender neutrality. To move beyond stereotypes, should equity or androgyny lead the way? Same-sex couples and same-sex parents were soon included. Women were liberated, as one peeved op-ed writer had urged, from 'a smattering of tired, beauty-centric' emoji career options: 16 professions, available in male and female versions, were added. To Houston's surprise, the 2017 gender-focused emoji season met with no political or press furor—perhaps owing to public 'emoji fatigue,' he speculates. (Androgyny lived on that year, for the most part, as fantasy—through the magical figures issued in the new batch 🧙🧚🧛🧜🧞.) How much control, at this point, the subcommittee can exert over emoji denotation and connotation isn't clear. Unicode's emoji now coexist with platform-specific icons that users can customize for themselves (think: stickers, Bitmoji, Memoji). The latest iterations, such as Apple's Genmoji, use artificial intelligence to create ever more adaptable pictograms. Meanwhile, Unicode's emoji are becoming only more protean: The 💀 has expanded from a mark of disapproval to a sign of amusement (death via laughter). The 😭 might suggest laughter too now, in addition to its sobs. When words have oppositional meanings like this, context typically helps clarify which one applies—thanks to accompanying text, you can probably tell whether the 🍑 you just received is a fruit, a body part, or a call for impeachment. The 👍 and other emoji similarly used as stand-alone replies are part of a different class: They bring ambiguity without resolution. They bring a whiff of Babel. But myths have their own ambiguities. Although the Babel story conjures the arrival of a dystopia—a people perpetually lost in translation—it's also a creation myth: an ancient attempt to explain why people with so much in common are divided by their languages. Understandably, we tend to focus on the ending of the Babel tale, but it begins with humans in community. Only later does language divide them. For most of human history, communication barriers have made us illegible to one another. Emoji float, merrily (mostly), over the barriers. And their ambiguity is essential to their buoyancy. Emoji, as images, can never be tethered to one meaning. Even if 'emoji season' ceases to yield new crops, the icons that exist will keep evolving. They will keep challenging us to evolve with them. The namesake of Houston's book, the 'face with tears of joy,' has long been the world's most popular emoji. It has also been, according to recent reports, the subject of another Gen Z pronouncement: The 😂 is cringe. What it communicates, above all, is the hopeless unhipness of its sender. I use it anyway, mostly out of habit but also because, to me, joyful beats cool every time. And my 😂 are in good company. Each day, around the planet, billions of 😂 ping across screens. Their usage might decline in the future. Their primary meaning might change. For now, though, they are what we have. For now, because of them, we can laugh together across the distance.
USA Today
15 hours ago
- USA Today
She got into 5 colleges with mom's help. Now, who decides?
Tense and uncomfortable conversations can arise when parents dominate the discussion of where their kid goes to college. From Gayatri Patil's point of view, it wasn't an option for her daughter to attend college outside Arizona. The teenager, Mikiha Gadagkar, 17, had a different idea. Gadagkar spent her teenage years in Phoenix earning a 4.0 grade point average and loaded up on extracurricular activities, including speech, debate and photography. She wanted to make herself attractive for highly ranked economics and political science college programs – both near and far from home. Is college worth it? Here are the majors college grads say they regret the most The hard work paid off when she got into five schools, including Arizona State and the University of Virginia. And so began the tense conversation that rattles so many American households after the initial celebration of college acceptance letters: Who decides which college the student will attend? Get ready for frustration and emotional blackmail. More: Kids are ditching traditional college for career tech programs. Parents are concerned. Gadagkar told her mom she wanted to attend a college near Washington D.C. She wanted a"change of pace" and a new environment with opportunities to attend law school. But Arizona State University was still her mother's top choice. "I want her to stay close," she said. "I tried emotionally blackmailing her, saying 'I'll give you home cooked food, drive you and do your laundry' during the time of her acceptances." The family's discussions illuminate the tense and uncomfortable conversations that can arise when parents want a say in where their kids go to college. 'Sometimes it's a bad ending' The Arizona family's story is one Matthew Riley's heard before. Often, wealthy parents pay Riley, a director and senior admissions consultant at Ivy Academic Prep, to help guide their kids when applying for college. They come from two types of families: One set of parents allows their kids to take the lead on where they attend college. Those families are better at acknowledging that it is the student's life and ultimately their decision, he said. The other type is more strict. They are "controlling helicopter types" who tell their children they must apply to a certain college or pursue a certain degree, he said. "They usually say 'You will study computer science and will apply to five or 10 schools," he said. "Those are always rough to see. Sometimes students say 'Ok, my parents understand me' and sometimes it's a bad ending.' It can get ugly." Sometimes those disagreements are harmful to a young person's well being, he said. He recalled a case from last year. The student wanted to to get a degree in business or political science at George Washington University or American University, but his parents insisted he attend a university with a prominent tech program, he said. "He was passionate about government and interned with the state representative in his home state." he said. "But his parents said 'No, we're computer scientists and programmers who work for a big corporation, and you will do the same.'" That student succumbed to his parent's wishes. But during his first year, he "felt out of control" and experienced anxiety and depression, Riley said. Is college worth it? Americans say they value higher education, but it's too expensive for many Parents who work in technology, engineering or medical fields are more likely to want to pressure their kids into a certain school "in hopes for them to follow in their footsteps," he said. "The parents are affluent, both are professionals, both are educated and they control the finances," he said. Who should decide? Traci Lowenthal, a licensed clinical psychologist, helps guide families through conversations about college. "There's a fine line between having these thoughtful and open conversations and creating pressure," she said. Creating realistic expectations and timing is important to avoid putting feelings of pressure on a child, she said. They should discuss whether a family can afford college and if the young person will have to fund school themselves with loans. And they should decide together whether a student can live with independence across the country or if they are better suited staying near home. Often, parents and students open up about their real feelings about college after it's too late and the student has been shoehorned into a school that's not right for them, Lowenthal said. Or parents reveal uncomfortable financial realities after a student has set their sights on a school they can't afford. That can cause a rift. But they can be avoided. Families should discuss college options during a high schooler's freshman and sophomore years when "tensions aren't already high," Lowenthal said. Earlier conversations offer young people a head's-up about their options, family finances and parental expectations − before they start applying to schools. It can help to alleviate potential feelings of disappointment or betrayal. "Sometimes I see a student get into an amazing school and there's literally no way they can go," she said. "So in the midst of getting rejections and acceptances, the parent tells them they can't go and the student asks: How come you kept this from me?" She encourages students to do their own research to share with their parents. "It's tough. Because if your parent is like 'You have to go to my alma mater or this prestigious school,' the student has to find a way to be really honest about that and say, 'I know this is a great school, but I think this would be a better fit," she said. Lowenthal advises parents to consider the needs and desires of their child ahead of their own. "It's really hard to not want them to do what they want you to do," she said. "But this is a unique individual and not an extension of us as people." One of the arguments Gadagkar used in trying to win her mom over to the University of Virginia was telling her how high school counselors had shown which programs might best align with her career ambitions. After learning she had guidance from other adults, Patil decided to hear her daughter out. More: Have student loans? This part of the Trump tax bill won't apply to you "My mom really let me take the lead in those conversations," Gadagkar said. "It was more of me saying, kind of, how I felt and her giving her thoughts on those. I'm really grateful for that because it made it a lot less stressful." But Patil was still not fully convinced Virginia was the right option. "I studied in India, so the process here was very new to me," she said. Mom: 'I think we are happy with this decision' Gadagkar ultimately decided to attend her mother's first pick, Arizona State University, two hours from home. The teen received a scholarship that made ASU more affordable than the University of Virginia. And she'll be able to pursue economics and political science while honoring her mother's wishes. But she still thinks about what moving to Virginia would have been like. "It's definitely a change of pace since this entire year I had developed a mindset that I was going out of state," she said. "This is not what I necessarily expected. But after attending orientation, I'm feeling good." Patil, her mother, is elated Mikiha will be nearby. But she said she had warmed to the idea of sending Mikiha to the East Coast − if the option had been affordable. "I think we are happy with this decision," Patil said. Contact Kayla Jimenez at kjimenez@ Follow her on X at @kaylajjimenez.
