Saturday, Jul 06th
Last update06:04:07 AM GMT
It is a routine Nathan Blanc knows well. At 9am on Tuesday morning, the 19-year-old will report, as instructed in his draft papers, to a military base near Tel Aviv. There he will state his objection to serving in the Israeli army. Following his refusal to enlist, Blanc expects to be arrested and sentenced to between 10 and 20 days in jail.
He will then be taken to Military Prison Number 6 to serve his time. And then, following his release, the cycle will begin over again.
British soldiers and air personnel who helped to operate a secretive US detention facility in Baghdad that was at the centre of some of the most serious human-rights abuses to occur in Iraq after the invasion have, for the first time, spoken about abuses they witnessed there.
Members of two RAF squadrons and one Army Air Corps squadron were given guard and transport duties at the secret prison, the Guardian has established. Many of the detainees were brought to the facility by snatch squads formed from Special Air Service and Special Boat Service squadrons. The abuses the soldiers and airmen say they saw included:
Climate change is expanding Antarctica's sea ice, according to a scientific study in the journal Nature Geoscience. The paradoxical phenomenon is thought to be caused by relatively cold plumes of fresh water derived from melting beneath the Antarctic ice shelves.
This melt water has a relatively low density, so it accumulates in the top layer of the ocean. The cool surface waters then re-freeze more easily during Autumn and Winter.
In the annals of national security, the Obama administration will long be remembered for its unprecedented crackdown on whistleblowers. Since 2009, it has employed the World War I–era Espionage Act a record six times to prosecute government officials suspected of leaking classified information
. The latest example is John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer serving a thirty-month term in federal prison for publicly identifying an intelligence operative involved in torture. It’s a pattern: the whistleblowers are punished, sometimes severely, while the perpetrators of the crimes they expose remain free.
The most propagandistic aspect of the US War on Terror has been, and remains, that its victims are rendered invisible and voiceless. They are almost never named by newspapers. They and their surviving family members are virtually never heard from on television.
The Bush and Obama DOJs have collaborated with federal judges to ensure that even those who everyone admits are completely innocent have no access to American courts and thus no means of having their stories heard or their rights vindicated. Radical secrecy theories and escalating attacks on whistleblowers push these victims further into the dark.
Easter Sunday has been confirmed as the coldest Easter day on record, with the lowest temperature recorded as -12.5C in Braemar, in the Scottish Highlands .
The previous coldest Easter day since modern records began in 1960 was Easter Monday in 1986, which dipped to -9.8C, the Met Office said. Average temperatures for this time of year are between 10C and 13C.The prolonged cold spell covering the UK could last until mid-April, forecasters say.
Ancient skeletal remains found in Italy may be of a human/Neanderthal hybrid, the first such known instance of the species interbreeding, scientists say. If further analysis of the 40,000-30,000-year-old skeleton confirms it, it would be the first direct evidence that humans and Neanderthals interbred, they said.
Researches from the University of Ai-Marseille in France have conducted DNA and imaging studies on jawbone unearthed at a rock-shelter called Riparo di Mezzena in the Monti Lessini region of Italy, from a time when both Neanderthals and modern humans inhabited Europe.
The Army program charged with keeping thousands of eight-wheeled Strykers running over the past decade had its eye so much on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that it neglected to keep its books.
It accumulated nearly $900 million worth of Stryker replacement parts - most of them in an Auburn warehouse - with much of the gear becoming outdated even as the military continued to order more equipment, according to a Defense Department Inspector General report released late last year.
The Headley family built their house a few years ago, just before the gas-drilling boom hit. They had a chance to buy the gas rights but chose not to. Now, they wish they had, because they're sharing their 115-acre farm with the Marcellus Shale industry.
A puddle along a country road in southern Fayette County is a natural spring, an artesian well, but it's not the spring that's making it bubble.
David Headley told Action News investigator Jim Parsons that he wasn't really sure when he first noticed it, but he said, "We've seen it bubbling now for the last couple of years."
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