Saturday, Dec 13th
Last update09:42:56 AM GMT
President Obama signed the landmark repeal of the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy Wednesday morning, handing a major victory to advocates of gay rights and fulfilling a campaign promise to do away with a practice that he has called discriminatory.
Casting the repeal in terms of past civil rights struggles, Obama said he was proud to sign a law that "will strengthen our national security and uphold the ideals that our fighting men and women risk their lives to defend."
Gay rights advocates scored a hard-fought victory at the U.N. on Tuesday when member states restored a reference to sexual orientation, dropped last month from a resolution opposing the unjustified killing of minority groups.
The removal of the reference, at the urging of African and Arab countries last month, alarmed human rights advocates who said gay people are among minority groups that need special protection from extrajudicial and other unjustified slayings. U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice at the time said she was "incensed" by the change and announced she would sponsor the measure to restore the language.
A federal judge on Tuesday ordered the U.S. government to pay more than $2.5 million in attorney fees and damages after he concluded investigators wiretapped the phones of a suspected terrorist organization without a warrant.
U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker said the attorneys for the Ashland, Ore., chapter of the now-defunct Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation should receive $2.5 million for waging its nearly five-year legal challenge to the Bush administration's so-called Terrorist Surveillance Program.
On Friday, the Los Angeles Times broke a taboo of sorts among mainstream news organizations by urging Fox News to “crack down on... partisanship in its news ranks” or ”stop pretending to be an objective news source.”
he editorial was prompted by the leak of an internal Fox News memo ordering its “reporters” to “refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question.” The memo was sent by Bill Sammon, Fox News' Washington managing editor, in 2009 and released by Media Matters last week.
The Times noted that “such data aren't in serious dispute among climate scientists.”
Victims of clerical sex abuse have reacted furiously to Pope Benedict's claim yesterday that paedophilia wasn't considered an “absolute evil” as recently as the 1970s.
In his traditional Christmas address yesterday to cardinals and officials working in Rome, Pope Benedict XVI also claimed that child pornography was increasingly considered “normal” by society.
“In the 1970s, paedophilia was theorised as something fully in conformity with man and even with children,” the Pope said.
Nearly one-fourth of the students who try to join the U.S. Army fail its entrance exam, painting a grim picture of an education system that produces graduates who can't answer basic math, science and reading questions, according to a new study released Tuesday.
The report by The Education Trust bolsters a growing worry among military and education leaders that the pool of young people qualified for military service will grow too small.
Mercury poisoning takes a long time to work its horrific damage. Hiding for decades in the body and brain before its lethal work is accomplished, people think it is safe to use. Early symptoms include: a "burning tongue" sensation, or metallic taste in your mouth, or a burning feeling at the bottom of your feet. First a word, here or there, is forgotten.
Then, a person cannot remember more and more words, or how to do even the simplest daily activities. In its final stage, over 9 or 10 years (sometime less), the brain shuts down. Then the body cannot function properly. A person becomes unable to do basic tasks or even speak. This is mercury doing its deadly work. So, billions of people have been sold decades of advertising and medical lies. There is no safe level of ingestion or any kind of use of mercury!
The missile defense system that President
The report raises questions about legislation that would strengthen the U.S. commitment to the deployment plan that the White House was negotiating in return for Republican votes it needed for Senate approval of a new U.S.-Russia nuclear arms reduction treaty.
The Obama administration is preparing an executive order that would formalize indefinite detention without trial for some detainees at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, but allow those detainees and their lawyers to challenge the basis for continued incarceration, U.S. officials said.
The administration has long signaled that the use of prolonged detention, preferably at a facility in the United States, was one element of its plan to close Guantanamo. An interagency task force found that 48 of the 174 detainees remaining at the facility would have to be held in what the administration calls prolonged detention.
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