REPORT: Public Support for Iraq War In Fast Decline Since 2003 Monday marks the four-year anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. President Bush still believes launching this war was the right decision, and that it has been worth the cost in blood, money, damaged security and lost international reputation. The American public strongly disagrees.
American Progress fellow Ruy Teixeira has tracked polls on public support for the war since March 2003 on two key q... (more)
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The regrets of the man who brought down SaddamHis hands were bleeding and his eyes filled with tears as, four years ago, he slammed a sledgehammer into the tiled plinth that held a 20ft bronze statue of Saddam Hussein. Then Kadhim al-Jubouri spoke of his joy at being the leader of the crowd that toppled the statue in Baghdad's Firdous Square. Now, he is filled with nothing but regret.
The moment became symbolic across the world as it signalled the fall of the dictator. Wearing a black vest, ... (more)
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Some parents question how global warming is taught in schoolsIn Montpelier earlier this year, Bill Burrell’s sixth-grade students testified before legislative committees about global warming and what Vermont can do about it. The students also are immersed in conservation and alternative energy projects.
In South Burlington recently, a middle school math teacher used a portion of Al Gore’s documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” to illustrate linear equations. An English teacher used the... (more)
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Suicide Was the Only Way Out of Iraq for Col. WesthusingTed Westhusing was a true believer. And that was his fatal flaw.
A colonel in the U.S. Army, Westhusing had a good job teaching English at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He was a devout Catholic who went to church nearly every Sunday. He had a wife and three young children.
He didn't have to go to Iraq. But Westhusing was such a believer that he volunteered for what he thought was a noble cause. At West Point, Westhusing sought out people who opposed the w... (more)
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Devices used in July 21 attacks were deliberately made not to explode, alleged bomber tells court The man "principally responsible" for creating the explosive devices used in the failed "terrorist attacks" on London in the summer of 2005 defended his actions for the first time in public yesterday. Muktar Said Ibrahim, 29, the alleged bomber of the number 26 bus, took to the witness box at Woolwich crown court to explain that he made the devices in such a way that they would not explode.
At the start of the defence case, Mr Ibrahim was asked by his counsel to explain in a "ver... (more)
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Chlorine Gas Sickens 356 in Iraq Bombing Three trucks rigged with chlorine bombs exploded in the insurgent stronghold of Anbar province Friday, in the latest efforts by insurgents to use the toxic chemical to boost the lethal power of their attacks, U.S. military officials announced Saturday.
The U.S. officials said at least 350 people and seven U.S. soldiers were injured and two policemen were killed in the attacks. As many as 10 civilians may have been killed in two of the blasts near Fallujah, said Col. Sami Jabara, ... (more)
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9/11 Plus 30 Khalid Sheikh Mohammad got a hearing Saturday, thanks to the U.S. military's liberal reading of the Geneva Conventions. The conventions establish a procedure called an "Article 5" hearing, conducted by a military tribunal, to review whether someone captured on the battlefield is in fact an enemy combatant.
Such hearings are mandatory under the Geneva Conventions only if the combatant's status is in doubt, as KSM's surely was not. But in the 2004 case of Hamdi v... (more)
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Can KSM's Confession Be Believed? Little in the just released confession of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the presumed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, is new. The U.S. government long ago cataloged those alleged crimes based on extensive interrogations of Mohammed and other prisoners held in the CIA's controversial and now liquidated overseas prisons. But the transcripts of Mohammed's hearing — part of proceedings that began last Friday at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba — are the first time... (more)
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Experts close the lid on 'suitcase nukes'Jack Bauer may lose 24 hours of sleep worrying about suitcase nukes, but should his viewers?
Probably not, nuclear weapons experts say.
Nuclear bombs cleverly concealed in suitcases don't exist in real life. Even so, they have long been a popular Hollywood plot point.
The lethal luggage — or what non-proliferation experts prefer to call portable nuclear devices — have been featured in action thrillers, including 1997's The Peacemaker with ... (more) This propaganda was debunked long ago by the blogging community. |
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Forty-Nine Percent of U.S. Students Binge Drink March 15 (Bloomberg) -- Forty-nine percent of U.S. college students indulge each month in binge drinking or drug use, abusing them at rates far higher than in the general population, according to a report.
About 1.8 million students met the medical criteria for substance abuse or dependence in 2005, 2 1/2 times the national level, as they sought to relieve stress, improve mood or enhance performance, said the report, released today by the National Center on Addiction and Substanc... (more)
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An expert asks: Do we all have an evil, dark side?Photographs from Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison sickened eminent psychologist Philip Zimbardo when he saw them on TV three years ago, but it wasn't the first time he had seen such sadism imposed by prison guards.
"It was eerie and all too familiar," he says.
In an experiment 33 years earlier on the Stanford University campus where he taught, Zimbardo created his own little prison of horrors. He randomly assigned 24 male college students to be guards or prisoners in a two-week stu... (more)
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Archive.org makes HUGE 9/11 television archive available to publicThis collection contains television news programs recorded live from around September 11, 2001 by the non-profit Television Archive to help patrons research this important part of United States history. These materials were available on the televisionarchive.org site from October 11, 2001 through 2003.
http://www.archive.org/details/sept_11_tv_archive
These are lower quality, streaming versions of the 9/11 Archive MPEG's that were discovered by user 'gangsta' on... (more)
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One in four is on the state payroll in UK 'Soviet blocs'Large areas of Britain have become so dependent on taxpayer-funded jobs that nearly one worker in four is on the state payroll.
The high level of public sector employment revealed in official figures Monday has been compared with that in the former Soviet bloc.
It affects mainly northern regions, with the North-East leading the way with 23.8 per cent of workers employed by the state followed by the North-West, Wales and Scotland.
According to the repo... (more)
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Holocaust denial conference attendee beatenA fervently Orthodox Austrian Jew who embraced Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad reportedly was assaulted by a group of Israelis in Poland. Ma'ariv reported Monday that Moshe Aryeh Friedman, who attended the Holocaust denial conference hosted by Ahmadinejad in Tehran in December, was spotted while visiting the former Auschwitz and Birkenau camps over the weekend. A group of fervently Orthodox Jews from Israel also touring the sites set upon Friedman, who was born and raised in Monsey, N.Y.... (more)
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Texas congressman announces White House bidWASHINGTON (CNN) -- Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, announced Monday that he will seek the GOP presidential nomination.
Paul, who ran for president in 1988 as the Libertarian Party nominee, made his announcement on C-SPAN's call-in program "Washington Journal." The congressman established a presidential exploratory committee with the state of Texas in January, and will create a federal campaign committee today, according to his campaign.
He was elected to his 9th full ... (more)
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Wife of Chinese cyber-dissident sues Yahoo! The wife of a jailed Chinese cyber-dissident has travelled to the US to sue Yahoo! for its role in facilitating his prosecution.
Wang Xianoning was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment in 2003 for posting what Beijing claimed were subversive materials on the net. His wife, Yu Ling, flew into the US this week with the aim of suing Yahoo! for damages and forcing the net giant to apologise for the actions of its Hong Kong division, which passed on email account i... (more)
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'Moral panic' of drug laws isolates users and fuels crime, says reportMOST people who take illegal drugs do not cause any harm to themselves or anyone else, according to a study which calls for the current "crude" ABC classification system be abandoned.
The two-year RSA Commission on Illegal Drugs argued that Britain's drug laws should be replaced by a system which recognises that drinking and smoking can cause more harm.
Current laws are "driven by a moral panic" and a more effective drugs policy would focus on harm reduction rather... (more)
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