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- Army study finds officials often overlook causes behind military suicides
- Michigan residents, wildlife struggle with oil spill in Kalamazoo River
- Reporters Notebook: Farm workers in San Joaquin Valley
- Northern California tribe fights to access traditional land for ceremony
- Garment workers in Bangladesh push for labor rights, wage increase
- Congress debates bills regulating oil companies, and oil and gas whistleblowers
- SB 1070 protestors arrested in Phoenix, Sheriff Arpaio continues his sweeps
- US Consulate in Juarez closes/Kidnapped journalist freed in Mexico
- Cluster bomb treaty goes into effect, without key signatories
- Russias government passes harsh new security law
- Rocket fired from Gaza into Israel
- American hikers in Iran have been detained for 1 year
This month has been the deadliest on record for US troops in Afghanistan. The deaths of three troops Friday in Kabul bring the total to sixty-three in July. The Army is also looking into other causes of death among soldiers. In a lengthy report released Thursday, the Army examined the rising rate of suicides among active duty soldiers. The study puts the blame on commanders for ignoring problems until they're too late. Tanya Snyder reports.
We turn now to Michigan, where containment efforts continue after a damaged pipeline leaked hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil into the Kalamazoo River. We're joined by Danielle Korpalski, Midwest Regional Outreach Coordinator with the National Wildlife Federation.
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed a bill this week that would have given farm workers paid overtime after working more than 40 hours a week. Currently, California law only requires time and a half for farm workers after 10 hours a day, or 60 hours a week. Recently, United Farm Workers launched a campaign called Take Our Jobs, daring American citizens and legal residents to take jobs doing farm work. Our colleague, Delores M Bernal took that challenge and files this Reporters Notebook from the San Joaquin Valley in Central California.
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Andy Griffith TV ad is targeted at seniors skeptical about the cuts that health care reform made to Medicare.
That is just one finding of a cybercrime report by Verizon released this week. While cybercrime fell in 2009, the report noted that hackers are getting better at what they do.
Economists say sluggish growth and sagging consumer confidence aren't signs of another recession but indicate that the nation's financial recovery will be slow going.
In 'The Extra Man,' Kevin Kline is terrifically entertaining without being altogether believable.
'The Duel,' based on a Chekhov novella about an aristocrat who brings his married mistress to a Black Sea resort, plays out in a zone where comedy and tragedy are indistinguishable.
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World news and comment from the Guardian | guardian.co.uk
We must apply the just war tradition to our analysis of the conflict in Afghanistan. Otherwise, we risk disaster
Two things this week have made the hellishness of military violence painfully clear. The first, WikiLeaks' Afghanistan war logs, describes in detail the horror of civilian casualties and "friendly fire" incidents. The second, from the same theatre, is Sean Smith's chilling video of American marines in southern Helmand. Faced with these portraits of war, empathy for the people caught up in it has been unavoidable.
But empathy alone is not enough. If you're not a pacifist, you accept that war is vile, but at times an inevitable part of life on Earth. The question is when and how it can be morally justified. Hence the importance of the just war tradition. Thinkers like the theologian Thomas Aquinas sought a way of containing war, by thinking through the desperate feelings that combat does and should evoke. The aim is to keep a steady view on the demands of natural justice, even when the fog of war threatens to blur everything.
The war logs in particular afford us a steady view on this current conflict, and what's as unsettling as the tragedy they reveal is the possibility that we lost sight of those demands, at least on occasion. The crucial issue is whether that's happened. An answer can be found by thinking about the relationship between jus ad bellum and jus in bello the justification for the war itself, and the principles that should operate during the conduct of war. Both matter.
Let's assume the war in Afghanistan is justified, and focus on the jus in bello. One of Aquinas's major contributions was the notion of proportionality: how to assess the bad consequences of otherwise well-intended military action. Michael Walzer, a leading modern just war theorist, notes that simply not to intend the death of civilians is not enough. That's "too easy". Instead, there must be a positive commitment to saving civilian lives, rather than just killing no more than is militarily necessary. "Civilians have a right to something more," he concludes. "And if saving civilian lives means risking soldiers' lives, the risk must be accepted."
This highlights a further painful question: how much extra risk must soldiers bear in order to save civilian lives? It's not a balance that can be determined ahead of time. Individual cases must be considered, as the Afghanistan war logs afford, and again give rise to concern.
It's with the use of heavily armed drones that this comes into particularly sharp focus. In Wired for War, Peter Warren Singer notes that "going to war" has become not so different from "going to work" for many robot operators, in the sense that the risk they face is virtually zero. They might be destroying a target at 4.30pm from the office, and be home by 6pm to read the kids a bedtime story.
Soldiers on the ground in Afghanistan face grave risks. That too is devastatingly obvious. But their sacrifice is undermined when jus in bello is not considered in the round. For what distinguishes war from mass murder is precisely respecting the rights of civilians. Has due care been taken? Have all feasible precautions been made to protect non-combatants, even when the Taliban and al-Qaida erode the distinction between civilians and military by placing combat facilities in residential areas? What the war logs confirm is that remote aerial bombardments cannot always verify targets. Jus in bello is under threat.
This isn't just an abstract argument. As civilians die, so conflict deepens interminably. To ignore the just war tradition now is to run the real danger that automated 21st-century conflict will turn into perpetual war.
Official says masseuse and her attorneys were uncooperative, and witnesses could not remember anything unusual
Former vice president Al Gore has been cleared of allegations that he groped and assaulted a masseuse in a Portland hotel room in 2006.
After a four-week investigation that included interviews with Gore, the masseuse, her acquaintances and hotel staff, authorities said there was no basis for prosecution.
Senior deputy district attorney Don Rees cited "contradictory evidence, conflicting witness statements, credibility issues, lack of forensic evidence and denials by Mr Gore".
Rees also said the masseuse and her attorneys were uncooperative, witnesses could not remember anything unusual, and that the masseuse failed a polygraph examination and would not say whether she was paid by a tabloid newspaper for her story.
"Mr Gore unequivocally and emphatically denied this accusation when he first learnt of its existence three years ago," spokeswoman Kalee Kreider said. "He respects and appreciates the thorough and professional work of the Portland authorities and is pleased that this matter has now been resolved."
Talks between ISI officials and UK security experts called off after David Cameron accused Pakistan of exporting terrorism
Pakistan's ISI intelligence agency has cancelled planned talks with British security experts in protest at David Cameron's comments that elements within the country are responsible for exporting terrorism abroad, it was reported last night.
ISI officers were due in London for discussions on counter-terrorism co-operation with British security services. But the talks have been scrapped after the prime minister's remarks while on a visit to India on Wednesday, the Times reported.
"The visit has been cancelled in reaction to the comments made by the British prime minister against Pakistan," an ISI spokesman was quoted as saying. "Such irresponsible statements could affect our co-operation with Britain."
Cameron sparked outrage in Islamabad when he said: "We cannot tolerate in any sense the idea that this country is allowed to look both ways and is able, in any way, to promote the export of terror, whether to India, whether to Afghanistan, or to anywhere else in the world."
The comments were made during a visit to Delhi.
Neither Downing Street nor the Foreign Office would comment on the reported decision by the ISI, which also comes days before a UK visit by the Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari. He is expected to stay with Cameron at his country retreat, Chequers.
Last night, officials said that Zardari's visit was still expected to take place. "Our understanding is that the visit is on," a Foreign Office spokeswoman said.
Following Cameron's remarks, Pakistani politicians pointed to the country's offensive against militants on the border with Afghanistan and the many victims of terrorist bombs in Pakistan.
Cameron defended his comments a day later, saying: "I don't think the British taxpayer wants me to go around the world saying what people want to hear."
Three years after losing his legs in Helmand province, Private Derek Derenalagi is training for the 2012 Paralympics
In the few seconds it took for the numbness he felt after the explosion to turn to pain, Private Derek Derenalagi knew he had lost his legs. He thought he was going to die.
He briefly did die, he later learned, on the operating table at Camp Bastion, and again when his heart stopped beating on the operating table at Selly Oak.
In the hours after the blast that threw him from his Land Rover and sent him 30ft in the air, broke his back and blew off his legs, his heart stopped three times, medics began preparations to zip him into a body bag.
"The last time my heart stopped I was pronounced dead," said Derenalangi, 35. But medical staff detected a faint pulse and he was resuscitated. He was flown to Selly Oak Hospital, Birmingham, and spent eight days in a coma.
Just two weeks on, Derenalagi was demanding to use the gym.
"I told people: One day, I will walk," he said.
Now, three years after his injury, in Helmand province, he has already broken records in shot put and aims to be on the podium at London 2012.
The beauty of France: expensive wine, slow trains, unchanging views and prank pork
We are just back from France, where we had a lovely time staying with friends in the Lot valley, although we once again experienced that unnerving sensation Brits get on the continent these days. You are a visitor from a third world country, or possibly a former communist state in eastern Europe.
It's fatal to translate prices. You go to the supermarket and think, "What, 8,250 leva for that? Why it's hardly anything!"
Or you inspect the menu at a modest restaurant in a pleasant provincial town. There are cheery boards outside, sometimes depicting a smiling, red-faced diner with a checked bib round his neck. "Nous vous proposons notre formule!" it says, and you reflect that they're asking only a bit more than you'd pay for the set lunch at a Michelin-starred restaurant in London.
Even the wine is no cheaper now at least not the good stuff. It's a myth that the French keep the best wine for themselves. They can't afford to, with world competition as ferocious as it is. Instead, you see row after row of the second-rate fluids they can only sell at home. If you bought any by the case because it looked so cheap, you would deeply regret it until you needed something to clean the toilet bowl.
To be fair, the French are catching on. Some of the larger supermarkets will even sell one or two non-French wines. And they are belatedly learning how to meet modern demands. Take Cahors, the "black wine" of the Lot. It's made from the Auxerrois grape, known elsewhere as Malbec, and is a worldwide bestseller for the Argentinians. They have learned how to soften its rough tannins, but for years the Cahors growers sold stuff that made your mouth feel as if it had been turned inside out. On this trip, though, we tried one or two admittedly quite old, and so more expensive that were delicious, with a depth even the better new world Malbecs don't quite reach.
What I like about France is the way the ultra-modern is juxtaposed with the old and ancient. We took a rattling train down south; not being a TGV, it chugged along at a gentle 60mph or so. All those forlorn marshalling yards and abandoned signal boxes whisked me back to films about the occupation. Those endless lines of poplars by the road take you back 200 years, since Napoleon planted them so his armies could march in the shade.
One day we took our daughter to Toulouse airport, which is as hi-tech as a Formula One car, then half an hour later were in a tiny hill village, where we saw a view that can't have changed much for centuries. (Nearly 10% of all EU spending goes to French farmers, which is why their countryside still looks beguiling, while ours in, say, East Anglia looks like a vast, empty car park.)
We saw those old houses with their crumbling facades and peeling paint - a throwback to the years when people with smart, trim houses were assumed by the authorities to be tax evaders.
We were staying on the fringe of the region that used to be dominated by the Cathars, so I read Sean Martin's book about them "the world's most successful heresy", he says. Most people know about Montaillou, the village which left the most detailed account of medieval Cathar life, and the famous last stand against the Catholic forces at Montsgur.
What I hadn't realised was that the same dualistic heresy made it to England, specifically Canterbury and Oxford, where believers were known as "publicans" nothing to do with barmen, but a corruption of "popelican", whatever that meant.
Anyhow, they were dealt with roughly: denounced, branded with hot irons and thrown out into the snow. Which may let us date the formation of the Bullingdon Club to around AD1165.
Detective story cliches, from Lucy Fisher: the service is over. A solitary worshipper remains. The priest or vicar scurries up to see if he needs help. He taps him on the shoulder, and he slumps to one side, dead.
I've mentioned before the crazy pricing policies on many of our trains. Often, if you book in advance, you can get a ticket for less than a quarter of the cost that the bossy PA system says is the full single fare you'll be fined if you have got on the wrong train.
Andrew Gaved points out that, on Virgin, things are even more cuckoo. On a morning train he visited the "shop" for a bacon sandwich and a coffee. He was asked if he'd like a meal deal including a sarnie, drink and crisps for 3.95, but he didn't fancy crisps at that hour. "Right," said the assistant, "that'll be 4.35".
So he went back, added crisps to his order, paid 3.95, then carefully put the crisps in the bin, making sure she saw him. How else can you let management know they are stark, staring bonkers?
Before catching the Eurostar home, we had dinner at the celebrated Brasserie Terminus Nord. The chips were hot and crisp, the bechamel sauce delicious, but will someone tell me what the point of pied de porc is? Having eaten maybe half an ounce of meat, I was left with a small mountain of bones and oleaginous fat. Maybe it's just a prank aimed at gullible tourists.
</td></tr></table>As Israel's illegal settlement enterprise in the occupied West Bank continues to be a strain on US-Israel relations, an unflattering light is being shone on US private donations towards the development of the settlements that are increasingly encroaching on Palestinian land. Alice Speri reports for The Electronic Intifada.
</td></tr></table>RAMALLAH, occupied West Bank (IPS) - Anger has arisen in Palestinian areas over reports that millions of tax-exempt dollars from the US are being funneled towards Israel's illegal settlement building in the occupied Palestinian West Bank -- in flagrant violation of international law.a
</td></tr></table>If I am Not For Myself provides fascinating critical insight into Zionism, and amounts to a crucial warning from history on Palestine for the liberal left of today. Asa Winstanley reviews for The Electronic Intifada.
</td></tr></table>A young Jewish Israeli woman and a young Palestinian Jerusalemite had consensual sex. Afterwards, the Jewish woman discovered that her partner was in fact not Jewish at all, but horror of horror, a Palestinian. But there was more, the Palestinian had called himself "Dudu," his nickname, but one most often used by Israeli Jews, and from this the young woman concluded she had been deliberately deceived and in fact raped. Richard Irvine comments for The Electronic Intifada.
</td></tr></table>No Palestinian institution or leader has ever accepted an exclusive Jewish claim to Palestine, which is irreconcilable with the internationally recognized rights of the Palestinian people. Our rights inhere in us as a people; they are not yours to do with as you please.
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MOUNT VERNON, Ala. - At a sprawling landfill some 50 miles from the oil-spotted coastline, trash bags brimming with tar balls, oil-soaked boom, sand, and tangles of sea grass are dumped.
BOGOT - "There are alarming links between increased reports of extrajudicial executions of civilians by the Colombian army and units that receive U.S. military financing," John Lindsay-Poland, lead author of a two-year study on the question, told IPS.
Lindsay-Poland is Research and Advocacy Director for the U.S.-based Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), which presented a new report, "Military Assistance and Human Rights: Colombia, U.S. Accountability, and Global Implications", in Bogot Thursday.
The Obama administration, anticipating that Congress might not pass comprehensive immigration reform this year, is considering ways it could act without congressional approval to achieve many of the objectives of the initiative, including giving permanent resident status, or green cards, to large numbers of people in the country illegally.
WASHINGTON - A US soldier accused of leaking a military video from Iraq and suspected in the release of thousands of secret documents on the Afghan war has been moved to a US military jail, the Pentagon said on Friday.
Private First Class Bradley Manning arrived at Quantico Marine Base in Virginia late on Thursday, the Pentagon said, after his court martial proceedings were transferred from Camp Arifjan, Kuwait.
None of the individual incidents catalogued by the National Wildlife Federation comes close in scale to BP's oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the worst environmental disaster in America's history.
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