....................................[this one's for Shep...]
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Heroes: Squad Leader’s Idea Helps Afghan Police
Police and other law enforcement officers in the United States are regarded as well-trained professionals and role models by the public. Army Sgt. Ronald K. Burke sought the same respect for the Afghan National Police in the Nawa district of Afghanistan’s Ghazni province.
With the approval of his platoon leader, Burke came up with a training program to increase tactical and technical competence in the Afghan police by incorporating reading and writing courses with essential police training.
“Being able to read and write will increase these guys’ ability in so many ways,” ... "We are teaching both English and Pashto, so they are better able to communicate with villagers and us.”
“I’m over here pretty much all day trying to teach them when I need to be training my guys,” Burke said. “As a solution, I started involving my guys in the training."
“Burke has always been someone willing to take that extra step to help someone else,” Sorkin said. “He understands that education is one of the keys to prosperity in this country and took the initiative to do his part here in Nawa.”
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Local Governance Center Opens South of Baghdad
ORWARD OPERATING BASE KALSU, Iraq, Dec. 31, 2007 – The Arab Jabour Governance Center officially opened Dec. 27 with a large ceremony on the grounds of the center. More than 250 people were in attendance.
[snip]
“This is where people can get problems solved,” Adgie said, adding that this also is a step forward in political progress in Arab Jabour.
[snip]
Local Iraqis in attendance praised the opening of the center and the overall improved security in Arab Jabour. “Today is a great day for our region and for all of Baghdad,” said Majid Hamad Yasien al Jabouri. “This is a great day for all of the Iraqi people.”
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Hooray (for some in) Hollywood!
[credit where due]
To help the traumatized and physically injured residents of Sderot, Israel, a small town in southern Israel up against the Gaza Strip where terrorists daily pound the town with rockets, some prominent Hollywood personalities including Paula Abdul, Sylvester Stallone and Jon Voight, will be participating Tuesday in a charity and solidarity concert for the rocket-battered town of Sderot in Beverly Hills.
The concert, entitled "Live for Sderot", which will include a performance by Israeli singer Ninet Tayeb and will be attended by Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, will also launch the celebrations of the State of Israel's 60th anniversary in the city. Guests of honor at this special concert will be a delegation of 10 teenagers from Sderot which were flown to visit Los Angeles and share their experiences of life in Sderot with local American youths.
And what is daily life like in Sderot? Terror and horror combined with the strength, courage and resiliency of the victims as their government ponders the best way to respond. And meanwhile the Gazans demand an end to an Israeli blockade, claiming it is creating a humanitarian crisis; however they seem to have no problem obtaining all the materials for deadly rockets which they value.
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Bush Lobbies Again for Surveillance Law
WASHINGTON - President Bush on Monday lobbied again for an intelligence law allowing government eavesdropping on phone calls and e-mails, as the tone of the dispute between the White House and Congress over terrorist surveillance grew increasingly sharp. "To put it bluntly, if the enemy is calling into America, we really need to know what they're saying, and we need to know what they're thinking, and we need to know who they're talking to," Bush said at the start of his annual meeting with the nation's governors at the White House.
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Turkey in radical revision of Islamic texts
Turkey is preparing to publish a document that represents a revolutionary reinterpretation of Islam - and a controversial and radical modernization of the religion.
The country's powerful Department of Religious Affairs has commissioned a team of theologians at Ankara University to carry out a fundamental revision of the Hadith, the second most sacred text in Islam after the Koran.
The Hadith is a collection of thousands of sayings reputed to come from the Prophet Muhammad. As such, it is the principal guide for Muslims in interpreting the Koran and the source of the vast majority of Islamic law, or Sharia. But the Turkish state has come to see the Hadith as having an often negative influence on a society it is in a hurry to modernise, and believes it responsible for obscuring the original values of Islam.
[snip] "This is kind of akin to the Christian Reformation. Not exactly the same, but... it's changing the theological foundations of [the] religion..."
[snip]
According to Fadi Hakura, an expert on Turkey from Chatham House in London, Turkey is doing nothing less than recreating Islam - changing it from a religion whose rules must be obeyed, to one designed to serve the needs of people in a modern secular democracy...
[reads like the real deal - exactly what I've been hoping for but frankly didn't believe I'd see in my life time - how it actually plays out will be 'interesting' to say the least; you don't have to be a rocket biologists to know this will represent the greatest of all threats to the extremists...]
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The Culture of Tyranny
[meanwhile, from the 'West'...]
The ancient city of Damascus received another mark of recognition last week: UNESCO last week designated Damascus as the Arab Capital of Culture for 2008.
Damascus serves as the headquarters of a long list of designated terrorist organizations, including Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC), and an alphabet soup of smaller organizations similarly committed to the practice of violence against civilians. Syria has successfully defended its position at the top of the USA's list of "countries supporting terrorism" since 1979.
The new Capital of Culture and Resistance also, according to U.S. defense and intelligence reports, maintains an active chemical weapons program. Other reports suggest that Syria was clandestinely working on a nuclear program when these efforts were halted by a successful Israeli attack in September, 2007. [a few months ago]
Thus, the 'culture of resistance' means acts of terror against civilians, the deliberate subversion of the governments of neighboring countries, the assassination of political opponents and the apparent attempt to stockpile weapons of mass destruction. One wonders if this is what UNESCO -- which describes its own goal as 'to build peace in the minds of men' had in mind.
The title of 'Arab capital of culture' is currently held by the capital of one of the most brutal and lawless regimes in the world. Arab culture - which has given so much of lasting beauty and value to humanity - surely deserves a better representative.
[UNsalvageable]
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US sounds sour notes on North Korea
Seoul, South Korea -- Despite a symbolic symphonic thaw with North Korea, the only music the Bush administration is making here is with South Korea's new, pro-U.S. president who has vowed a tougher line on his Stalinist neighbor. (Snip) Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was next door in Seoul on Monday lauding President Lee Myung-bak and his intent to hold North Korea to its pledge to abandon nuclear weapons.
[keep its pledge?!! How unfair! - oh, the inhumanity - more cowboy diplomacy ... {ad infinitum}. Another country that's never kept a pledge in its history - while receiving American tax dollars year in and year out.]
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Bad Blood in Canada
You would think that a massive malfunction of Canada's health care system, involving an incompetently run blood banking system, thousands of HIV and hepatitis C infections and deaths caused by negligence, and criminal prosecutions, would be found newsworthy by the US media. Incredibly, aside from brief reports of dismissals of the criminal indictments given with no explanation of the underlying disaster, the whole affair has been virtually blacked by our media. Such a screw up in a health care system which has been portrayed as a desirable alternative to our own certainly deserves closer scrutiny. Read about it at Hot Medical News.
[the root cause? the bane of all government run health'care' systems: once it's government, it's open to the full gamut of politically correct insanity - in this case, not excluding homosexual men from donating blood in the early '80 when screening techniques were rudimentary. obviously nothing newsworthy there.]
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WAL-MART CAN BE GOOD FOR YOUR HEALTH
Self-interested doctors need to get over their archaic ways of doing business, says Rahul K. Parikh, M.D. In our current system, costs keep rising and being shifted to consumers while access to care is unpredictable for almost any practice:
> According to a 2004 report by the Government Accountability Office about Medicare preventive services, 30 percent of people over age 65 did not receive a flu vaccine and 37 percent had never had a pneumonia vaccine.On the other hand, retail clinics are thriving, in large part because they provide excellent access. After all, what's more convenient than showing up any day, night or weekend without telephone time spent on hold trying to make an appointment, only to shuffling your personal schedule to theirs? Then there's cost:
> Another example: In 2000, Medicare estimated that 6.6 million beneficiaries were never told by their doctor that they had high blood pressure.
> Retail clinics operate on a fee-for-service basis and don't accept insurance. [nor endure the costs of its processing]Overall, the growth of clinics, and the desire to pay out of pocket, is a not-so-subtle sign that consumers are asserting their purchasing power in the health sector, just as they would with other goods and services, says Parikh.
> Most charge a maximum of $50, which is significantly cheaper than the $100-plus your insurance company will pay when see your doctor.
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End of Global Warming?
Dr. David Whitehouse, the British astronomer and former science editor of the BBC, tells us:
"The fact is that the global temperature of 2007 is statistically the same as 2006 and every year since 2001'Whatever warming trend was going on has flattened out in the last seven years. Which is an odd thing, because China and India have been pumping out more CO2 from cars and industry. And an ever increasing avalanche of ugly facts are nailing the biggest scare story in history.
[snip]
"The fact is that the global temperature of 2007 is statistically the same as 2006 as well as every year since 2001. Global warming has, temporarily or permanently, ceased. Temperatures across the world are not increasing as they should according to the fundamental theory behind global warming - the greenhouse effect."
Dr. Whitehouse's wonderful news will make a lot of people angry. They don't want to believe good things about Mother Earth. They've put their money on Bad News for Momma. Which makes you wonder what they really want.
[NYT and BBC - oh my!]
READ MORE
Mercury leaks found as new bulbs break
California
Compact fluorescent lamps - those spiral, energy-efficient bulbs popular as a device to 'combat' global warming - can pose a small risk of mercury poisoning to infants, young children, and pregnant women if they break, two reports concluded yesterday.
[snip]
The US Environmental Protection Agency and the states of Massachusetts and Vermont said yesterday that, based on the Maine study, they are revising their recommendations for where to use compact fluorescents in a home and how to clean up when one breaks ... recommended that if a compact fluorescent breaks, get children and pets out of the room. Ventilate the room. Never use a vacuum, even on a rug, to clean up a broken compact fluorescent lamps. Instead, use stiff paper such as index cards and tape to pick up pieces, and then wipe the area with a wet wipe or damp paper towel. If there are young children or pregnant woman in the house, consider cutting out the piece of carpet where the lamp broke as a precaution. Place the shards and cleanup debris in a glass jar with a screw top and remove the jar from the house.
[snip]
Disposal regulations vary from state to state, with some requiring broken compact fluorescent light bulbs, to be disposed of as household hazardous waste. Most states allow intact compact fluorescents to be thrown away, but some - such as Vermont, Minnesota, and California - ban disposal in trash...
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Sacked for sheep sex prank
Two British oil workers have been sacked after simulating sex with sheep due to be slaughtered for a Muslim festival. The animals were being killed for 30 foreign workers to celebrate Eid Al Adhha in the Algerian oil town Hassi Messaoud. The men, who have not been named, were reported by stunned restaurant workers and guards — then sacked by their employer, US industrial giant Schlumberger. They were accused of ''sheep violation''...
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article639408.ece
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