Monday, Dec 01st
Last update10:42:03 AM GMT
Pfc. Tasha Conger and Pfc. Tanya Redinbaugh hope their service will seem typical someday. For now, they’re part of a tiny minority of female soldiers living at front-line combat positions.
That could change if a national commission gets its way. The commission told Congress last month that if a woman can show she’s qualified, she ought to be allowed to take any military job.
The sputtering end of the Obama administration’s plans to prosecute Khalid Sheik Mohammed in federal court came one day late last month in a conversation between the president and one of his top Cabinet members.
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. had called President Obama to inform him that he would be returning the case to the Defense Department, a decision that would mark the effective abandonment of the president’s promise to close the military detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Nearly eight years after it was first erected, the controversial wall snaking through verdant fields and dusty hillsides has become a permanent fixture of the landscape. It has also cemented a psychological divide between Israelis and Palestinians, undermining the prospects for lasting peace that could not only end hostilities but boost economic prosperity.
"Since they built it, Israelis don't see the Palestinians and they don't want to see the Palestinians. And there is a new generation growing up in the West Bank, and they don't even know Hebrew," says Gal Berger, who covers Palestinians for Israel Radio. "That's a problem for the long term. There's growing alienation."
But according to Ian Milhiser, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has “called for a return to a discredited theory of the Constitution that early twentieth century justices used to declare federal child labor laws unconstitutional” in three separate decisions.
Lost in the renewed scrutiny into President Barack Obama’s birth records is the fact that anyone can walk into a Hawaii vital records office, wait in line behind couples getting marriage licenses and open a baby-blue government binder containing basic information about his birth.
Highlighted in yellow on page 1,218 of the thick binder is the computer-generated listing for a boy named Barack Hussein Obama II born in Hawaii, surrounded by the alphabetized last names of all other children born in-state between 1960 and 1964. This is the only government birth information, called “index data,” available to the public.
The U.S. military says two American soldiers have been killed while conducting operations in southern Iraq. In a statement, released on Saturday, the military says the deaths occurred Friday.
No further details about how they died were released. The names of the deceased are being withheld pending notification of next of kin and release by the Department of Defense.
Veterans whose claims had already spent years in the VA system often wait several more years for the court to rule on whether they will receive disability payments and free health care. Some have abandoned their appeals. Others, including soldiers from as far back as World War II, have died before a decision was issued.
One veteran’s case lasted 14 years, seven at the appellate court, which considered three appeals in a repeating cycle lawyers dub “the hamster wheel.”
Former chief U.N. nuclear inspector Mohamed ElBaradei suggests in a new memoir that Bush administration officials should face international criminal investigation for the "shame of a needless war" in Iraq.
Freer to speak now than he was as an international civil servant, the Nobel-winning Egyptian accuses U.S. leaders of "grotesque distortion" in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq invasion, when then-President George W. Bush and his lieutenants claimed Iraq possessed doomsday weapons despite contrary evidence collected by ElBaradei's and other arms inspectors inside the country.
Smokers may soon have no safe havens to light up outside their own homes. That's the hope, at least, among anti-tobacco crusaders at the Center for Disease Control.
The federal health agency estimates that by 2020 every state may have a ban on smoking in public places, restaurants, bars, and the workplace. New York City has already banned butts in public buildings, restaurants, city parks and beaches - and the pedestrian plaza in Times Square.
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