Gone are the days of the all-American army hero. These days, the US military is more like a sanctuary for racists, gang members and the chronically unfit.
The three most common barriers for potential recruits were failure to graduate high school, a criminal record and physical fitness issues, including obesity. The criminal record had been dealt with by "moral waivers" and the obesity problem by "medical waivers", but dropping the standards on educational attainment would not be so easy without seriously affecting operational readiness. There was a way for non-graduates to get into the military, however: the general equivalency degree, or GED, which can afford recruits a waiver if they score well enough on the military's entrance exam. The army accepts about 15% of recruits without a high school diploma if they have a GED. Alive to this loophole, the military instituted another program in 2008, the so-called GED Plus, to give more of America's youth the requisite qualifications they needed to go and fight. It opened its first prep school for the purpose, targeted at tough, inner-city areas.
For Palestinian farmer Esam Foqaha, agriculture is more than a profession, it's a way of life. "Farming is not only a job. It's our lifestyle and we will do it forever," Foqaha said.
The former archbishop of Milan and papal candidate Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini said the Catholic church was "200 years out of date" in his final interview before his death.
After more than 25 years of legal battle to keep its home, a Palestinian family of four was forced Sunday to leave its one-room house in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Ras el-Amoud after an Israeli court ordered their eviction. The family must turn the house over to its new owners, Israeli settlers.
We've had to low-crawl on our stomachs and chests all week, under razor wire and raking machine gun fire, but we've finally made it, safe: The Weekend.
The political conversation about the Bin Laden raid, a key event in the counter-terrorism paradigm, is based on a government-created conspiracy theory. People argue about the nitty-gritty details of the raid as if it actually happened in the real world. Since May 1, 2011, numerous versions of the infamous raid has come out, each one contradicting the other.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu has called for Tony Blair and George Bush to be hauled before the international criminal court in The Hague and delivered a damning critique of the physical and moral devastation caused by the Iraq war.
The New York attorney general is investigating whether some of the nation’s biggest private equity firms have abused a tax strategy in order to slice hundreds of millions of dollars from their tax bills, according to executives with direct knowledge of the inquiry.
Readers periodically ask me some variation on this question: “Why does the press follow every jot and tittle of Iran’s nuclear program, but we never see any stories about Israel’s nuclear weapons capability?”
