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POPS"Normal" People SHOULD scare you! In a way, the kid was lucky. His classmates didn't actually throw rocks at him. Me, I've got two creases in my scull from rocks - thrown by my kinder or maybe first grade "classmates." "Normal" classmates. I think a reassessment of "normalcy" is damn well overdue.
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POPSHalf of Vets Suffering Brain and Mind Injuries Go Untreated, but Pentagon Pretends Nothing's Going O It's been left up to Lt. Col. Steven Pflanz, the senior psychiatry policy analyst for the Air Force surgeon general, to report on the mental healthcare practices that have been developed for those on active duty. Kerry Knox, director of the VA's Center for Excellence on Suicide Prevention, was scheduled to share with him these introductory remarks, but is not in attendance. Apologies are made, but no one mentions how obviously difficult it would be for her to get into the self-congratulatory HOOAH! spirit of this conference when her boss just got busted big time for hiding VA suicide statistics, not just to the media but to Congress as well.
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POPS"A Love Story" gone sour. "Our Best Friend in EU" GONE ??? "America, America: After a visit to Poland, veteran New York Times journalist Thomas Friedman approvingly quoted Michael Mandelbaum, a foreign affairs expert, who described it as "the most pro-American country in the world - including the US." "The Poles are especially grateful to the United States for its support of the Solidarity movement during the period of the communist regime, for its part in the toppling of the Berlin Wall, and for the co-option of Poland to NATO in 1999. "Schooled in humiliation, and having lost its independence time and again, Poland is today linking its security and its future to maintaining close ties with the world's only superpower." ...Haaretz Oct 21 2007
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POPSNorway Report: Israel still Torturing Detainees, Illegally The UN special investigator on torture, Nigel Rodley said Israel told him, "that its law forbade all forms of torture or maltreatment and it was in full conformity with the 1987 Convention Against Torture which it has ratified." Yet, he goes on to relate how his investigations confirmed that practices amounting to torture, such as sleep deprivation, hooding, and violent shaking, were going on at the same time. Reuters, March 23, 1997, "UN Investigator Says Israel Tortures Palestinians." In 1999 Israel's Supreme Court ruled that torture can be employed as a "necessity" in exceptional cases when officers have reason to believe they can prevent a crime. This has created a loophole, exempting interrogators/torturers from punishment as long as they claim they tortured in the national interest. Human Rights Watch, , "Memorandum: Israel's Second Periodic Report to the Committee Against Torture," May 1998.
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POPSSoldiers families Suffer Rates of neglect and abuse of the children of servicemen and women rose 42% within the family when the enlisted parent was deployed on a combat mission, according to a new study led by senior health analyst Deborah Gibbs of RTI International, a research institute in North Carolina. Previous studies have shown an association between combat-related deployments and higher levels of stress in the family, and it is this stress that is thought to play a major role in the maltreatment of children by the parent who stays home.
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POPSJust Doin' Their Jobs The article pretty mentions my hubby's unit. It doesn't surprise me that the troops speak "positively" about what's to come. Ask a Wal-Mart employee, "on the record", what they think of the company that helps them put food on the table and they'll tell you everything is hunky-dory. Nobody wants to bad mouth their boss if it means that life will be made more difficult for their families. A soldier who speaks out cannot be fired (per se), but he could be up for lots and lots of extra duty and maltreatment from other soldiers. In fact, whether we like it or not, whether the troops support the war in Iraq or not, they understand that they signed a legally-binding document when they joined up. For them it's better just to do the job they have been assigned and save the bitching for family and friends. They are caught between a rock and a hard place. Personally, I wish that Bush would remove the rock and bring the troops home.
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