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POPSThe Opinuary Column: Freedom isn't Free (or Alive)
It fought its addiction to Crystal Meth (Cheaper Than Coke But Still Not Free) and Tobacco (the first carton for soldiers was Free, but after that, not so much) with grit and determination, which it had in buckets (buckets that were Free but had to be returned when it was done with them). In the weeks before its death, the Opinion was often observed meditating on a litany of uncomfortable realizations: it had discovered that its apartment wasn't Free, its bar tab wasn't Free, its groceries weren't Free and, having failed to appear in court on misdemeanor charges, it suffered the additonal ignominy of facing the fact that indeed, not even its DUI was Free ($250.00 just to post bail!). Its only words to the judge were these: "In the bastardized yet immortal phrasings of Kris Kristofferson: Freedom's just another word for something that isn't free..." Family of the deceased Opinion are asking that, in lieu of flowers (which aren't free) that each and every one of us do our part to d
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POPSMilitary Service Training Ground For Sexual Predation This article is quite comprehensive in scope and deserves a full reading. A few more paragraphs from it follow this remark. "Yet for decades, in spite of the terrible numbers, the military has managed with astonishing success to get away with responding to grievances like Krause's with silence, or denial, or by blaming "a few bad apples." But when individual soldiers take the blame, the system gets off the hook. And it can be shown that the patterns of military sex crimes are old and widespread -- for generations, military service has transformed large numbers of American boys into sexual predators. So it seems reasonable to ask if perhaps there is something about military culture or training or experience that can be identified as causative, and then, perhaps, changed."
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POPSEx soldier gets life for Iraqi slayings It goes on to say he was the third soldier to rape her, and then shot her and set her body on fire. He will spend the rest of his life in jail. I find that such a sad waste of life, for the girl and her family, and for this 24year old boy.
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POPSO'Reilly Producer Stalks Blogger Amanda Terkel: THE VIDEO From the article: "Now Moore, Jennifer Moore, 18, on her way to college. She was 5-foot-2, 105 pounds, wearing a miniskirt and a halter top with a bare midriff. Now, again, there you go. So every predator in the world is gonna pick that up at two in the morning. She's walking by herself on the West Side Highway, and she gets picked up by a thug. All right. Now she's out of her mind, drunk." But what do you expect from a man who belittles veterans, accuses American soldiers of war crimes they did not commit, to justify Republican war crimes and thinks kids kidnapped by pedophiles are "having fun". Not much really!
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POPSMore on LRA attacks in DR of Congo Uganda's army, with the backing of Congolese and South Sudanese troops, launched assaults on LRA bases in northern Congo on Dec. 14, aiming to crush the rebels and capture their leader, self-proclaimed prophet Joseph Kony. But in more than a month of operations, coalition forces have failed to track down the rebel leader, and his fighters, estimated to number between 800 and 1,000, have embarked on a bloody campaign of terror against local villagers.
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POPSMormon Campaign Money They should be ashamed to call themselves Christians with this hate-filled role they played against human beings.
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POPSGood news: COMMAND RAPE Down. 1,516 reports involved the Army; 565, the Air Force; 394, the Navy; and 213, the Marines. The active duty Army, which is by far the largest service with about 518,000 soldiers, also saw the highest rate of reported sexual assaults. The Army had 2.6 reports per 1,000 soldiers; the Air Force, 1.6 reports per 1,000; the Marines, 1.1 per 1,000; and the Navy, 1 per 1,000 sailors. The average was 1.8 sexual assaults reported per 1,000 military members. Also, this is only the second full year in which the military has included in the totals sexual assaults that are filed under a program that allows victims to report the incident and receive health care or counseling services but does not notify law enforcement or commanders. Of the 2,688 reports filed last year, 705 were initially made under that restricted program. But victims are allowed to change their minds and pursue an investigation later, and that was done in 102 of those cases, thus 603 remain restricted.
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POPSIs Sarah Palin a Feminist? Women, including teenagers, need the knowledge and the tools to make responsible and moral decisions about such events that will certainly have such an impact on their lives. Third, anyone who believes that abstinence education can avoid these adverse effects is living in la-la land. A significant percentage of our society will continue to have sex outside of marriage. Young women still report a stigma for using contraception, and so then sometimes have unprotected sex. Contraception itself is not foolproof. Epidemic proportions of women and girls continue to suffer from rape. If 11 year old Erin Maxwell, who was recently raped and murdered in our community, had survived her rape and become pregnant, Sarah Palin would favor forcing her to carry the child to term. Forcible childbirth and coerced parenthood is bad for children, for families, for communities, and for schools.
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POPSFreedom Award Winner: Friends of Orphans Friends of Orphans, founded by Ricky Richards, received the Harriet Tubman Community and Reintegration Award. The Freedom Awards are underwritten by the John Templeton Foundation.
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POPSBoy 14 Forced into Oral Sex on another Prisoner!!! Mazin Younis, of the Iraqi League , who has travelled in Basra collecting witness statements of allegations of abuse, says he now has "more than 80" cases involving allegations against British troops. "Every single time I uncover a personal story of torture and humiliation in Iraq, I think to myself that I have seen the worst there is," Mr Younis added. "Then I hear the next story. "Hassan shook with emotion and humiliation as he described to me the treatment he suffered at the hands of British soldiers five years ago. It had taken constant prompting and repeated reminders about the importance of detail before Hassan felt brave enough to describe how he was forced to engage in oral sex with his friend Tariq while their British captors laughed raucously and took photographs."
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POPSMoyers: Conservatives had their chance and Blew it!
On top of such bungled calamities as Iraq and Katrina… GEORGE W. BUSH: Again I want to thank you all for- and Brownie you're doing a heck of a job. BILL MOYERS: The conservative regime sent spending into the stratosphere…borrowed trillions from the future to pay for their agenda, and rewarded their wealthy base with huge tax cuts. Earmarks and contracts fattened lobbyists on K Street, which Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay honed into a ruthless shakedown machine exploited by conservative movement stars like Grover Norquist, Ralph Reed, and Jack Abramoff. JACK ABRAMOFF: Senator, I respectfully invoke the privileges previously stated. SEN. KENT CONRAD: And I'd say to you Mr. Abramoff, shame on you. BILL MOYERS: And after crusading for the impeachment of Bill Clinton, conservatives pushing family values turned out to be their own worst enemies. Some of their foot soldiers in politics and the religious right were outed for adultery, stalking Capitol Hill pages, soliciting sex. Be
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POPSPopulate or perish: Pell Taking the racist line that we must breed up more soldiers to keep the infidel at bay. This at a time when David Attenburough regards overpopulation as the biggest of all the concerns for this planet ( and he is not the sole voice).
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POPSThe Average German The average Teuton family goes on holiday for two weeks a year, mainly within Germany, although their favourite destination is Majorca. He (45 years old) is 5ft 10in, she 5ft 5in. He is invariably overweight (83.5 kg) while she (67 kg and 42 years old) has mid-length hair, has sole responsibility for running the household and likes horoscopes and diet books. They both like Harry Potter. Their favourite dishes - and these have not changed for years, despite globalisation's influence on the wide range of items now available - are lentils, curry wurst (sausage covered in curry powder and ketchup) and spätzle - egg pasta and schnitzel. Germans even have a nickname for being average, 'null-acht-fünfzehn' - '08/15' - the name of the standard-issue machine-gun used by Wehrmacht soldiers in the Second World War.
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POPSThe Press Photographer's Year 2008: Guardian winners Sean Smith winning the multimedia category to add to his successes in the British Press and Royal Television Society journalism awards. Smith's winning entry consisted of stills and video from his time spent with US troops in Baghdad last year. The Press Photographer’s Year, organised in association with the British Press Photographers' Association, is a competition for photographers working around the world
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POPSU.N. Workers Raping, Abusing Children The liberal's respected world body, the one they feel should run all world affairs, engages in child rape and abuse. This is the organization that seats countries like Libya on it's human rights committee, and is powerless to take any meaningful action on anything meaningful. Bill Clinton would have been a perfect match for a U.N. aid worker, except it would require some work.
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POPSArmy CoverUp Rape & Murder as Suicide
and would you believe, she then committed suicide? The Department of Defense statistics are alarming - one in three women who join the US military will be sexually assaulted or raped by men in the military. Now, even more alarming, are deaths of women soldiers in Iraq and in the US following rape. The military has characterized each death of women who were first sexually assaulted as deaths from "noncombat related injuries," and then added "suicide." The families of the women whom the military has declared to have committed suicide strongly dispute the findings and are calling for further investigations into the deaths of their daughters. Specific US Army units and certain US military bases in Iraq have an inordinate number of women soldiers who have died of "noncombat related injuries," with several identified as "suicides." 94 women have died in Iraq. 12 US civilian women have been killed there. 13 military women have been killed in Afghanistan. 12 civilian women have bee
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POPS“Controversial” war photos The questions raised are pertinent…If you will read the comments received to the original posts many have trashed the posts calling it “immature”, “controversial”, and even “bad art”. What do you think? Lets hear from you…
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POPSMilitary Broken Under an enept administration the strength and integrity of our military continues to slip. Admittedly, the numbers reported in this article are small they signal a gradual deterioration of the quality of our military and could come back to bite us in the future. Increasingly our soldiers are charged to make complicated decisions in the field. It seems that the lowering of induction standards couldn't have come at a worst time. It has been said that our military is broken. This clip is yet another indicator that this is the case.
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POPSMale monkeys prefer boys' toys To try and tease out the effects of nature over those of nurture, Wallen and his colleagues studied a group of captive rhesus monkeys. His team reasoned that the choices of the monkeys wouldn't be determined by social pressures. Video on source.
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POPSHillary's Breasts An excellent article on Hillary Clinton and why she strokes our deepest fears and darkest hatreds.
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POPSShe Was Interested In One thing--And It Wasn't Espionage "In a new and fascinating biography, American academic Pat Shipman makes the case that, far from being the betrayer, she was the one betrayed, and by that breed she loved all her life - men. But in the story of Mata Hari, there was one thing that needed no sexing-up - Mata herself. Sex was the driving force of her life."
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POPSModern day slavery Check the source for ways to help end modern day slavery. "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." Martin Luther King Jr.,
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POPSIndigenous SEX Wipeout Deliberate? Survival International Survival's director Stephen Corry stated, "Tribal people die because their land is invaded and taken and because they succumb to outside diseases they never knew before. Increasingly now we can add HIV/AIDS to the list of killers. "It is striking the most vulnerable peoples of all: those who have no grasp of the risks of unprotected sex; no access to condoms; no appropriate treatment; and whose numbers are already small. The first solution is the simplest - governments must ensure tribal lands are properly protected."