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POPSA Better Strategy on Opium in Afghanistan The statistics are bleak and we are pursuing typically myopic policies in Afghanistan. Hitchens (whose writing I think is superb) makes a great case for a different approach. "in the short term, hard-pressed Afghan farmers should be allowed to sell their opium to the government rather than only to the many criminal elements that continue to infest it or to the Taliban. We don't have to smoke the stuff once we have purchased it: It can be burned or thrown away or perhaps more profitably used to manufacture the painkillers of which the United States currently suffers a shortage. (As it is, we allow Turkey to cultivate opium poppy fields for precisely this purpose.)"
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POPSFemale Fighters: We Won't Stand for Male Dominance Back in 1998, the fighters say, their now-jailed leader Abdullah Ocalan declared the group "a women's party." It was initially difficult to accept, says Karim, a 42-year-old male member of the PKK. Today, the PKK's ideology revolves around a belief that global crises and injustice are a result of millennia of male-dominated rule. Here, the women run their own assaults and have their own command structure. All tasks are shared, both on and off the battlefield. Discipline is paramount to survival, they say, and weapons are always clean and never out of reach.
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POPSMake-Believe Maverick--McCain's true nature EXCELLENT article Highly recommend if you are wavering or undecided...Dramesi continued: "McCain says his life changed while he was in Vietnam, and he is now a different man," Dramesi says today. "But he's still the undisciplined, spoiled brat that he was when he went in."
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POPSTurkish warplanes bomb Kurd bases in northern Iraq There goes the Northern Front: "But on the streets of Turkey, public anger has mounted with each funeral held for the slain soldiers. The anger has turned toward Turkish leaders as well. On Sunday, mourners booed Gul at a funeral in the western city of Eskisehir, and they booed Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan at another funeral in Armutlu village, near the capital."
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POPSWhy in Turkey they don't want Obama's presidency article contains one factual mistake--Armenians commemorate Genocide on April 24, and not April 16. For some additional info on why Armenians support Barack Obama and Joe Biden visit www.armenianamericansforobama.com
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POPSWe're all going to be rich! Afterwards, they can accept the check from Mr Oktar, run down to the local bank and cash it, and use one trillion dollars to resolve the current financial crisis, seven trillion can be sunk immediately into the American educational system, and they can send the change left over to me as a reward for coming up with this brilliant plan.
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POPSWorld's Sexiest Bars We've tracked down a few of the sexiest bars around the world—from a chandelier-strewn Bolshevik-era bar in Moscow to a sandy-floored beach shack in Mozambique—where you can practice the art of seduction.
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POPSBayram Tatili I've heard that turkey is a place to visit, My friend is planning a trip there and asking meto join him, This seems useful site for hotel reservations.
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POPSTurkey torn between NATO and Russia Ian Lesser, an expert on Turkey at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, wrote in a recent policy paper. "In theory, Turkey’s proximity to the crisis and desire to play a larger diplomatic role in the Black Sea could make Turkey a lynchpin of NATO strategy in Georgia, especially if rapprochement with Armenia is part of the equation. But Turkish willingness to place its territory at the service of Western policy in Georgia is highly uncertain."
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POPSStrip of Iraq 'on the Verge of Exploding' Cont.... The long-cherished dream of many of the world's 25 million ethnic Kurds is an independent state that encompasses parts of Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey. All but Iraq adamantly oppose Kurdish autonomy, much less a Kurdish state. Iraqi Kurds continue to insist they are not seeking independence, even as they unilaterally expand the territory they control in Iraq.
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POPSUnited Nations Reform: Fact or Fiction? The United Nations promised international cooperation on eliminating the major threats to peace and security and the most serious impediments to the protection of human rights and human dignity. Sixty years after the UN officially came into existence, 24 October 1945, the trail is one of broken promises. While important successes have marked some of its paths, the international machine has been hijacked and manipulated to subvert the very causes it was intended to promote. A number of factors have forced UN reform to move much higher up on the global agenda than ever before: the exposure of the billion-dollar UN-run Oil-for-food scam, peacekeeper-rapists, and paralysis in the face of genocide in Sudan.However, in an environment where there is little, if any, consensus on the most critical issues of our time, the real game is one of finger-pointing. Undoubtedly, the "blame America first" will continue. http://www.eyeontheun.org/un-reform.asp
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POPS VP Cheney in diplomatic dispute in Azerbaijan The entire US energy strategy in the Caspian Basin is predicated on Azerbaijan’s unwavering commitment to the West. The commitment now looks more fragile than ever, and the Cheney visit may well have done more harm than good, in terms of retaining Azerbaijan’s allegiance to Washington’s energy agenda.
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POPSArmenia and Turkey probe for better relations The two foreign ministers reportedly discussed the opening of Turkey’s closed border with Armenia, along with the establishment of full diplomatic relations. The two sides also attempted to find common ground on a political settlement to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Gul’s office revealed that he will go to Azerbaijan on September 10 to discuss the changing diplomatic situation with Azerbaijani leaders.
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POPSExtreme Eats There's a scene in the 1970 film Fatso when an overweight character poses the following question to his friends: "Did you ever suck the jelly out of a jelly doughnut and then fill it with chocolate swirl ice cream?" Most people react to that query in one of two ways: They either say to themselves, "That's disgusting!" or "That's disgusting ... I want one!"