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"That type of rocket launcher has been used in Iraq and Afghanistan. The renter of the apartment didn't want to talk to KPRC Local 2. "This is my house," the woman said. " Get away from here. I don't want to talk to nobody." The woman did tell police that the rocket launcher belonged to Nabilaye I. Yansane, someone whom she allowed to store items at her apartment. Police records show that she didn't want Yansane at her apartment, so she called them. According to court documents, officers also found Jihadist writings that allegedly belonged to Yansane. The woman didn't want to talk to KPRC Local 2 about that, either. "I don't know," she said. "You'll have to ask the police." Yansane was charged with criminal trespassing and pleaded guilty. He was sentenced to three days in jail, which he has already served. No charges related to the rocket launcher or writings were filed. "Other people could have had access to the apartment, so maybe if a rocket launcher was located there, as is stated in the offense report, maybe it belonged to somebody else," attorney Garl Polland said. Prosecutors said there are no state charges for having the unarmed launcher or possessing Jihadist writings, unless they contain some type of threat. The former director of Houston's FBI office said rocket launchers can be dangerous if they're in the wrong hands."

"The Burj Dubai tower officially opened yesterday, six years after construction began on the $4.1 billion, half-mile-high skyscraper. Conceived as a monument to the Arab city-state's economic ambitions, the Burj today looks more like a modern-day Tower of Babel. Dubai has been wracked by a debt crisis, and the building stands mostly empty and unwanted by the international tenants for whom it was supposedly built. But then, the main argument for these monuments has never been purely economic. In early 20th-century New York, one tycoon after another vied to build the world's tallest building, adding their marks to Manhattan's iconic skyline. Both General Motors and Chrysler in their day saw fit to build testaments to their economic might in the form of tall towers. Later on, the gods of vanity shifted to the Far East, where Malaysia's Petronas Towers and more recently Taiwan's Taipei 101 vied to be the world's tallest. Today a half-dozen Asian skyscrapers put Chicago's Sears Tower (now the Willis Tower) in the shade. As for Dubai, the Burj is merely the most recent bauble in a quest for excess that includes the world's largest man-made islands, indoor shopping mall and indoor ski resort. It even boasts the world's heaviest gold ring, weighing in at something like 62 kilos. The economic theory behind all this, we suppose, is that being the land of superlatives confers a comparative advantage to a place of otherwise few charms and little human capital-though we do wonder who proposes to wear that ring. If the past century has taught us anything, it's that there will always be another, bigger building built somewhere, and Dubai cannot hope to keep up indefinitely. By contrast, in cities such as Houston and Hong Kong the skylines are not the cause of their economic prosperity, but merely one visible manifestation of it. That's a prosperity that has been built over the years on the basis of those old reliables: economic freedom, the rule of law, hard work and sound ma

"Now that Copenhagen is past history, what is the next step in the man-made global warming controversy? Without question, there should be an immediate and thorough investigation of the scientific debauchery revealed by "Climategate." If you have not heard, hackers penetrated the computers of the Climate Research Unit, or CRU, of the United Kingdom's University of East Anglia, exposing thousands of e-mails and other documents. CRU is one of the top climate research centers in the world. Many of the exchanges were between top mainstream climate scientists in Britain and the U.S. who are closely associated with the authoritative (albeit controversial) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Among the more troubling revelations were data adjustments enhancing the perception that man is causing global warming through the release of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other atmospheric greenhouse gases. Particularly disturbing was the way the core IPCC scientists (the believers) marginalized the skeptics of the theory that man-made global warming is large and potentially catastrophic. The e-mails document that the attack on the skeptics was twofold. First, the believers gained control of the main climate-profession journals. This allowed them to block publication of papers written by the skeptics and prohibit unfriendly peer review of their own papers. Second, the skeptics were demonized through false labeling and false accusations. Climate alarmists would like you to believe the science has been settled and all respectable atmospheric scientists support their position. The believers also would like you to believe the skeptics are involved only because of the support of Big Oil and that they are few in number with minimal qualifications."