The Internet-Crippling Bill Might Get Slightly Less Terrible [Internet]
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After decades in power, a brutal dictator in a Muslim country is dramatically deposed by a massive popular uprising. Sound familiar? Of course: that's what happened in Egypt and Libya this year, as part of what's known as the Arab Spring. But it's also what happened in Iran in 1979 -- and that should make us pause for a moment.
It's easy to cheer for democratic change and celebrate the downfall of tyrants like Egypt's Hosni Mubarak and Libya's Muammar Gaddafi. But what if the end of one kind of oppression brings about the rise of another? As history has shown us time and again, revolutions are often turns for the worse.
Gay people should be especially wary when the forces of religious fundamentalism are involved. And nowhere are those forces stronger today than in the Muslim world. The power behind the Arab Spring came in large part from the coiled energy of Islamic groups that had been suppressed by secular dictatorships; as the old regimes crumble, hard-core Islamists are eager to take their place.
If the past is any guide, that's bad news for gays in the Muslim world. Consider Iran. Under the Shah, Tehran had room for gay nightclubs and artists. That tolerance ended when the ayatollahs took over in the Islamic revolution of 1979 and instituted a fundamentalist form of Quranic law, or Shariah, under which gay sex is punishable by death. (Three Iranian men were hanged for sodomy in September, and hundreds of others have reportedly been executed for gay-related offenses.)
Or consider the explosion of anti-gay violence that followed the end of Saddam Hussein's secular regime in Iraq. The powerful cleric Ali al-Sistani, who had been kept in check by Saddam, issued a 2005 fatwa calling for gay men and lesbians to be killed "in the worst, most severe way of killing." In recent years, according to human-rights groups, scores of Iraqi gays have been abducted and murdered -- often through gruesome torture and mutilation -- by sectarian death squads and even by members of their own families (in so-called "honor killings").
Iraqi authorities have mostly turned a blind eye to this "sexual cleansing." Should we be surprised? After all, Shariah is now officially the law of the land. The 2005 Iraqi constitution includes talk about equal rights for all citizens, but its Article 2 calls Islam "the official religion of the State" and says that "no law that contradicts the established provisions of Islam may be established."
Whether by law (in Iran) or by acceptance of lawlessness (in Iraq), the increased power of Islam in daily life has been a disaster for Muslim gays. Will things be different in the Arab Spring countries?
We have reason to worry. Egypt's constitution also has an Article 2, which says the same thing as Iraq's, that "Islam is the religion of the state," and that "the principal source of legislation is Shariah." Egyptian voters had the chance to change that language in a March referendum, but they chose to keep it.
Mubarak was no friend to gay Egyptians, and in the past decade his government stepped up its persecution. But as the Egyptian-born LGBT scholar Hassan El Menyawi has pointed out, this policy was largely motivated by Mubarek's desire to "shore up [his] Islamic credentials" with a radicalized Egyptian population that was happy to see gays targeted.
A Pew Research Center poll last year found that 82 percent of Egyptian Muslims support stoning people who commit adultery, and 84 percent support the death penalty for Muslims who leave the religion. It's not hard to imagine the same group's attitudes toward homosexuality. Any government that results from Egypt's planned 2012 elections is sure to reflect the country's widespread religious conservatism.
In Libya, as well, the future will almost certainly be less rosy than we'd like. Last month, the world's jubilation at the death of Gaddafi turned sour when graphic evidence emerged of the mob's savagery toward the captured leader. (One video shows Gaddafi being sodomized with a stick.) Libyan liberals, and Western ones, were further disturbed a week later when the head of the transitional government suggested that polygamy should be legalized, in line with Shariah.
Optimists say that the practical concerns of democracy -- getting elected, building coalitions -- will keep radical Islam in check. I think they're being deeply na?ve. The expectations raised by the Arab Spring will be hard to live up to; soon, the new governments will start looking for scapegoats and distractions. Gays have always played those roles too well.
By supporting the revolutions in Egypt and Libya, the West has meddled where it didn't belong and unleashed the beast of fundamentalism in those countries, just as it did in Iraq. It's only a matter of time until that beast starts to bite. And when the tyranny of the religious majority starts trampling on sexual minorities -- not to mention women and non-Muslims -- the world's pride in the Arab Spring will turn out to have gone before a very long, very hard fall.
?
Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-lucas/arab-spring-gay-rights_b_1095798.html
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So, I now propose to you all, a Pokemon story with an ACTUAL plot, you can choose to follow this, but you are, of course, free to follow branching courses, ike the gym challenges, and contests.
The region is Renea. It is a well laid, multi-terrian- region filled with pokemon from across the land. It's economic system is higher than average, because of a resource it has that the other's don't: a special metal called Rysdaic.
What is Rysdaic? It is a material used in creating pokeballs, and is also used for a brand new type of Pokeball- The Terra Ball. These balls are used with revolutionary technology designed to give a greater comfort to the Pokemon inside, as well as increase the catch rate that's 10% better than the Ultra Ball. Because of Rysdaic's involvement of pokeballs of all sorts, it's a valuable resource. Who ever controls this material, controls the very lives of millions of trainers.
Luckily, Renea has the greatest amount of Rysdaic, making it a center of commerce. Naturally, it has done quite well. is
So, it only follows that someone would want this flow of cash for themselves.
Enter Team Silverlight. Little by little, they have been assuming control of mining and refining this company, slowly halting it's shipment. The prices how now skyrocketed, to higher than what most can afford. The other Regions, with their supply of poke balls cut off, are suffering. With trainers now being unable to catch all the pokemon, there has been an influx of the wild pokemon population. ESPECIALLY the violent types who don't care for human interaction. The trainers do what they can, but, it is only a matter of time before they are overrun.
Another consequence is crime. Now that pokeballs are becoming scarce, some of the greedier trainers have resorted to staling other's pokeballs, and releasing the pokemon inside. Theft is at an all time high.
The other regions have had it. In order to normalize their region's way of life, Champions of Regions Across the world have touched down on Renea, forming a team behind them, Team Earthstar, in order to combat Silverlight.
All regions are preparing for whar, but the biggest question remains: what does Silverlight hope to gain by a war this big? And how is this Teamwar going to affect Renea?
.....
For the most part, or characters are new and upcoming trainers that have been thrust in the middle in all of this. Rp'ers can choose to join either of the teams, try to bring piece to Renea, or just takeover the team for them selves. Other's can ignore most of this altogether, and take on the gyms/ champions. There are other methods, like contests, that you can pursue.
Most of the Legendaries have been claimed by other Trainers (mpstly the champions), so don't expect to see an Articuno flying around. This region DOES have it's own set of legendaries, to be revealed at a later date
For battling, if you want to encounter a random pokemon, write out witch pokemon you would like, and the battle between your pokemon and it, as well as how you catch it, and send it to me, or a Co-gm (witch, by the way, I still need one. Anyone wants the part, let me know). If it's realistic enough (how you encountered it, the strength, and so on.), we'll let you post it, and that Pokemon is yours. For battles between people, battle it out in the PM'S, then post the result.
How you level up depends on how your pokemon fought,
....
I will prefer Semi-Literate/ Literate Rpers who can at least post 2 paragraphs. That's not much for most. Grammar would be much appreciated.
Im glad you took the time to read this. Let me know if your intrested, or just have a comment or suggestion. Thank you!
Source: http://feeds.feedburner.com/RolePlayGateway
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BUENOS AIRES (Reuters) ? Instead of uploading pictures of friends and family, members of a new Argentine social network share photos of soybean fields and press the "like button" on the latest tractor models.
Building on the success of well-known social networks such as Facebook, Argentina's SojaBook (www.sojabook.com) -- which means "SoyBook" in English -- has found fertile ground in the South American country.
As well as being one of the world's biggest suppliers of soybeans and other farm goods, Argentines are also among the world's biggest social network users.
"SojaBook wants to connect farmers with their everyday needs," said Mariano Torrubiano, a 31-year-old Argentine lawyer who founded the site last month.
"It really struck me once when I saw a farmer in his tractor with his netbook on one side and his iPod on the other," Torrubiano said. "While he was sowing the fields he was totally connected to a social network and listening to music he'd downloaded from the internet."
Sojabook has a modest 1,000 users so far, but Torrubiano said he soon hopes to reach 10,000 -- even if the topics on discussion might not appeal to a mainstream audience.
At a recent Sojabook discussion group on the wheat trade, user Nestor Fernando Cunha recommended storing stocks in silo bags until global commodities prices rise again.
A notice popped up minutes later: "Sale of fields in La Rioja province. Contact me," Silvina Vaccarezza wrote on SojaBook's front page.
(Reporting by Maximilian Heath; Writing by Luis Andres Henao)
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NEW YORK (Reuters) ? Justin Verlander of the Detroit Tigers won the American League Cy Young Award as the top pitcher on Tuesday, capping a brilliant season in which he led the league in wins, earned run average and strikeouts.
Verlander, who went 24-5 with a 2.40 earned run average and 250 strikeouts in 2011, received all 28 first-place votes cast by members of the Baseball Writers' Association of America.
The 28-year-old ace, who helped the Tigers advance to the American League Championship Series, also led AL pitchers by throwing 251 innings and holding opponents to a .192 batting average.
Verlander, who features a 100-mph fastball, pitched a no-hitter against the Toronto Blue Jays in May and his win total was the most in the league since 1990 when Bob Welch won 27 games for the Oakland Athletics.
Los Angeles Angels starter Jered Weaver (18-8, 2.41 ERA), the only other pitcher named on each ballot, placed second while Tampa Bay Rays pitcher James Shields (16-12, 2.82 ERA) finished third.
(Reporting by Larry Fine; Editing by Frank Pingue)
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In this Oct. 26, 2011, photo, Joseph Ramagli, left and Robin Gordon-Leavitt, law students at the City University of New York, teach a group of Muslims in the Brooklyn borough of New York how to identify a police informant. They were acting out an actual transcript of a recorded conversation between a police informant and his target. in the Brooklyn borough of New York, teach them about their rights in regard to an NYPD surveillance program targeting Muslims. Fed up with a decade of the police spying on the innocuous details of the daily lives of Muslims, activists in New York are discouraging people from going directly to police with concerns about terrorism, a campaign that is certain to further strain relations between the two groups. Muslim community leaders are openly teaching people how to identify police informants, encouraging them to always talk to an attorney before speaking with authorities and reminding people already working with law enforcement that they have the right to change their minds. (AP Photo/Chris Hawley)
In this Oct. 26, 2011, photo, Joseph Ramagli, left and Robin Gordon-Leavitt, law students at the City University of New York, teach a group of Muslims in the Brooklyn borough of New York how to identify a police informant. They were acting out an actual transcript of a recorded conversation between a police informant and his target. in the Brooklyn borough of New York, teach them about their rights in regard to an NYPD surveillance program targeting Muslims. Fed up with a decade of the police spying on the innocuous details of the daily lives of Muslims, activists in New York are discouraging people from going directly to police with concerns about terrorism, a campaign that is certain to further strain relations between the two groups. Muslim community leaders are openly teaching people how to identify police informants, encouraging them to always talk to an attorney before speaking with authorities and reminding people already working with law enforcement that they have the right to change their minds. (AP Photo/Chris Hawley)
This Oct. 26, 2011, photo shows Ramzi Kassem, a law professor with the City University of New York, teaches a group of Muslims in the Brooklyn borough of New York about their legal rights in relation to an NYPD surveillance program. in the Brooklyn borough of New York, teach them about their rights in regard to an NYPD surveillance program targeting Muslims. Fed up with a decade of the police spying on the innocuous details of the daily lives of Muslims, activists in New York are discouraging people from going directly to police with concerns about terrorism, a campaign that is certain to further strain relations between the two groups. Muslim community leaders are openly teaching people how to identify police informants, encouraging them to always talk to an attorney before speaking with authorities and reminding people already working with law enforcement that they have the right to change their minds. (AP Photo/Chris Hawley)
In this Oct. 27, 2011, Muslim women listen to Cyrus McGoldrick, a civil rights expert, at Brooklyn College in the Brooklyn borough of New York, teach them about their rights in regard to an NYPD surveillance program targeting Muslims. Fed up with a decade of the police spying on the innocuous details of the daily lives of Muslims, activists in New York are discouraging people from going directly to police with concerns about terrorism, a campaign that is certain to further strain relations between the two groups. Muslim community leaders are openly teaching people how to identify police informants, encouraging them to always talk to an attorney before speaking with authorities and reminding people already working with law enforcement that they have the right to change their minds. (AP Photo/Chris Hawley)
This Oct. 26, 2011, photo shows Robin Gordon-Leavitt, a law student at the City University of New York, teaching a group of Muslims in the Brooklyn borough of New York about their legal rights in relation to an NYPD surveillance program. The seminar was held at at Brooklyn College where police infiltrated a Muslim student group. in the Brooklyn borough of New York, teach them about their rights in regard to an NYPD surveillance program targeting Muslims. Fed up with a decade of the police spying on the innocuous details of the daily lives of Muslims, activists in New York are discouraging people from going directly to police with concerns about terrorism, a campaign that is certain to further strain relations between the two groups. Muslim community leaders are openly teaching people how to identify police informants, encouraging them to always talk to an attorney before speaking with authorities and reminding people already working with law enforcement that they have the right to change their minds. (AP Photo/Chris Hawley)
NEW YORK (AP) ? Fed up with a decade of the police spying on the innocuous details of the daily lives of Muslims, activists in New York are discouraging people from going directly to the police with their concerns about terrorism, a campaign that is certain to further strain relations between the two groups.
Muslim community leaders are openly teaching people how to identify police informants, encouraging them to always talk to a lawyer before speaking with the authorities and reminding people already working with law enforcement that they have the right to change their minds. Some members of the community have planned a demonstration for next week.
Some government officials point to this type of outreach as proof that Muslims aren't cooperating in the fight against terrorism, justifying the aggressive spy tactics, while many in the Muslim community view it as a way to protect themselves from getting snared in a secret police effort to catch terrorists.
As a result, one of America's largest Muslim communities ? in a city that's been attacked twice and targeted more than a dozen times ? is caught in a downward spiral of distrust with the nation's largest police department: The New York City Police Department spies on Muslims, which makes them less likely to trust police. That reinforces the belief that the community is secretive and insular, a belief that current and former NYPD officials have said was one of the key reasons for spying in the first place.
The outreach campaign follows an Associated Press investigation that revealed the NYPD had dispatched plainclothes officers to eavesdrop in Muslim communities, often without any evidence of wrongdoing. Restaurants serving Muslims were identified and photographed. Hundreds of mosques were investigated, and dozens were infiltrated. Police used the information to build ethnic databases on daily life inside Muslim neighborhoods.
Many of these programs were developed with the help of the CIA.
At a recent "Know Your Rights" session for Brooklyn College students, someone asked why Muslims who don't have anything to hide should avoid talking to police.
"Most of the time it's a fishing expedition," answered Ramzi Kassem, a law professor at the City University of New York. "So the safest thing you can do for yourself, your family and for your community, is not to answer."
New York Republican Rep. Peter King said this kind of reaction from the Muslim community is "disgraceful."
Muslim groups have previously organized educational programs around the country describing a person's legal rights, such as when they must present identification to a police officer and when they can refuse to answer police questions. A California chapter of a national Muslim organization produced a poster that warned Muslims not to talk to the FBI. The national organization ultimately asked the California branch to take down the poster.
In New York, the AP stories about the NYPD and internal police documents have outraged some Muslims and provided evidence of tactics that they suspected were being used to watch them all along. These disclosures have intensified the outreach campaigns in New York.
A recently distributed brochure from the City University of New York Law School warns people to be wary when confronted by someone who advocates violence against the U.S., discusses terror organizations, is overly generous or is aggressive in their interactions. The brochure said that person could be a police informant.
"Be very careful about involving the police," the brochure said. "If the individual is an informant, the police may not do anything ... If the individual is not an informant and you report them, the unintended consequences could be devastating."
Sweeping skepticism of police affects community relations with all levels of law enforcement on a wide range of issues, not just the NYPD's counterterrorism programs. Interactions with a real terror operative could go unreported to law enforcement out of an assumption that the operative is actually working for the NYPD. A victim of domestic abuse or street violence may not trust the police enough to call for help.
Retired New York FBI agent Don Borelli said intelligence gathering is key to police work, not just in terrorism cases. But he said it can backfire when people feel their rights are being violated.
"When they do, these kinds of programs are actually counterproductive, because they undermine trust and drive a wedge between the community and police," said Borelli, now a security consultant with the Soufan Group.
Since the 2001 terror attacks, the NYPD, city government officials and federal law enforcement have spent years building relationships with the New York Muslim community, assuring many Muslims that they are considered partners in the city's fight against terrorism. But in some cases, community members who have been hailed as partners and even dined with Mayor Michael Bloomberg were secretly followed by the NYPD or worked in mosques that the department had infiltrated, according to secret NYPD documents obtained by the AP.
"There's not a reference here to the fact that New York is the No. 1 target of Islamic terrorists, that the NYPD and the FBI have protected New York," King said, referring to one of the recent brochures about detecting police informants.
King, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, has held a series of hearings about the threat of radicalization within American Muslim communities and the level of cooperation members of the community provide to law enforcement. Muslim and civil rights advocacy groups have decried the hearings and pointed to terror cases around the country in which members of the Muslim community helped law enforcement foil plots.
New York Muslim community groups say they've held dozens of meetings for people who are worried about police surveillance and the NYPD's counterterrorism programs. In one instance, an audience of college students watched as a law student played out the role of a police informant and another played the role of the person the informant was targeting. The goal was to teach people to spot informants.
"Stay away from these people. That's one of the most powerful things you can do," said Robin Gordon-Leavitt, a member of an advocacy organization Creating Law Enforcement Accountability and Responsibility.
At another meeting, organized by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, students watched a film of two actors portraying FBI agents talking their way into a young Muslim's home and interrogating him. At the meeting, students were warned not to speak with police even if their parents, imams or Muslim clerics urge them to cooperate.
"You'll even hear imams saying, 'As long as I obey the law, I have nothing to worry about.' But that's not how it plays out on the ground," said Cyrus McGoldrick, CAIR New York's civil rights manager.
CAIR has had a strained relationship with law enforcement and was named an unindicted co-conspirator in a terrorist financing case.
The Muslim community wants an independent commission to investigate all NYPD and CIA operations in the Muslim community.
___
Sullivan reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman contributed to this report from Washington.
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OKUMA, Japan?? Conditions at Japan's wrecked Fukushima nuclear power plant, devastated by a tsunami in March, were slowly improving to the point where a "cold shutdown" would be possible as planned, officials said on Saturday during a tour of the facility.
Officials shepherded a group of about 30 mainly Japanese journalists through the plant for the first time since the meltdown of the plant's reactors, the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl 25 years ago.
Cooling systems at the plant, 240 km (150 miles) northeast of Tokyo, were knocked out by the powerful tsunami and evidence of the devastation was clear to see.
The nuclear reactor buildings were still surrounded by crumpled trucks, twisted metal fences, and large, dented water tanks. Smaller office buildings around the reactors were left as they were abandoned on March 11, when the tsunami hit.
Cranes filled the skyline in testimony to recovery efforts.
Journalists on the tour mainly stayed on a bus as they were driven around the plant and were not allowed near the reactor buildings. Still, they all had to wear protective suits, double layers of gloves and plastic boot covers and hair nets.
All carried respiration masks and radiation detectors.
"From the data at the plant that I have seen, there is no doubt that the reactors have been stabilized," Masao Yoshida, chief of the Daiichi plant, told the group.
The compound may still be littered with rubble, but Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco), the utility operating the plant, has succeeded in bringing down the temperatures at the three damaged reactors from levels considered dangerous.
They are confident they will be able to declare a "cold shutdown" -- when temperatures are stable below boiling point -- as scheduled by the end of this year.
While Tepco had managed to stabilize conditions so workers could enter the reactor buildings, Yoshida said there was still danger involved for those working there.
The disaster prompted the government to declare a 20-kilometer no-entry zone around the plant, forcing the evacuation of about 80,000 residents.
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A cold shutdown is one of the conditions that must be met before the government considers lifting its entry ban.
As an emergency measure early in the crisis, Tepco tried to cool the damaged reactors by pumping in huge volumes of water, much of it from the sea, only to leave a vast amount of tainted runoff that threatened to leak out into the ocean.
It solved the problem by building a cooling system to clean the radioactive runoff, using some of the water to cool the reactors.
A group of white tents houses the cleaning facility. In front were hoisted the flags of the United States, France and Japan ? the countries that provided the technology for the decontamination system.
"Every time I come back, I feel conditions have improved. This is due to your hard work ," Japan's environment and nuclear crisis minister Goshi Hosono told workers at the plant.
However, Hosono warned it would still take about 30 years to dismantle the reactors after a cold shutdown was achieved.
Workers engaged in the recovery effort are stationed at J-Village, a national soccer training center near Daiichi that has been converted into an operational base.
Tepco says up to 3,300 workers a day arrive from J-Village, located on the edge of the 20-kilometer no-entry zone.
At J-Village, workers on their way to the plant lined up at a white tent to change into protective gear. Every day when they return, the workers discard their protective clothing, which is treated as radioactive waste and stored.
A Tepco guide said every piece of discarded clothing has been kept there since March 17, about 480,000 sets heaped in large piles or put in bed-sized containers and stacked in rows.
Talmadge reported from Hirono. APTN producer Miki Toda, at the plant, and writer Mari Yamaguchi, in Tokyo, contributed to this story.
Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45267443/ns/world_news-asia_pacific/
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JOINT BASE LEWIS-McCHORD, Washington?? A U.S. Army soldier convicted of exhorting his bored underlings to slaughter three Afghan civilians for sport will be eligible for parole after serving 10 years in prison.
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Staff Sgt. Calvin Gibbs was convicted of murder, conspiracy and other charges at his court martial Thursday. The jury had the choice of sentencing him to life with or without the possibility of parole, and they chose the former.
Gibbs was the highest ranking of five soldiers charged in the deaths of the unarmed men during patrols in Kandahar province early last year. At his seven-day court martial at Joint Base Lewis-McChord south of Seattle, the 26-year-old acknowledged cutting fingers off corpses to keep as war trophies.
But he insisted he wasn't involved in the first or third killings, and in the second he merely returned fire.
Prosecutors said Gibbs and his co-defendants knew the victims posed no danger, but dropped weapons by their dead bodies to make them appear to have been combatants.
Three of the co-defendants pleaded guilty, and two of them testified against him, portraying him as an imposing, bloodthirsty leader who in one instance played with a victim's corpse and moved the mouth like a puppet. Gibbs' lawyer insisted they conspired to blame him for what they had done and told the five jurors the case represented "the ultimate betrayal of an infantryman."
'Savage'
The jury deliberated for about four hours before convicting him. The sentencing hearing began immediately after the verdict was announced, with a prosecutor, Maj. Andre LeBlanc, asking for the maximum, life without parole. He told jurors that Gibbs was supposed to protect the Afghan people, but instead caused many to lose trust in Americans, hurting the mission. LeBlanc noted that Gibbs repeatedly called the Afghans "savages."
"Ladies and gentlemen, there is the savage -- Staff Sgt. Gibbs is the savage," he said.
Gibbs' lawyer, Phil Stackhouse, asked for leniency -- life with parole, instead of without it -- and noted that Gibbs could be eligible for parole after 10 years if they allowed it.
"He'd like you to know he has had failures in his life and he's had a lot of time to think about them," Stackhouse said. "He wants you to know he's not the same person he was in Afghanistan. He doesn't want his wife to have to raise their son on her own."
The investigation into the 5th Stryker Brigade unit exposed widespread misconduct -- a platoon that was "out of control," in the words of a prosecutor, Maj. Robert Stelle. The wrongdoing included hash-smoking, the collection of illicit weapons, the mutilation and photography of Afghan remains, and the gang-beating of a soldier who reported the drug use.
In all, 12 soldiers were charged; all but 2 have now been convicted.
Leadership culture questioned
The probe also raised questions about the brigade's permissive leadership culture and the Army's mechanisms for reporting misconduct.
After the first killing, one soldier, then-Spc. Adam Winfield, alerted his parents and told them more killings were planned, but his father's call to a sergeant at Lewis-McChord relaying the warning went unheeded. Winfield later pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter in the last killing, saying he took part because he believed Gibbs would kill him if he didn't.
The case against Gibbs relied heavily on testimony from former Spc. Jeremy Morlock, of Wasilla, Alaska, who is serving 24 years after admitting his involvement in all three killings.
According to Morlock, Gibbs gave him an "off-the-books" grenade that Morlock and Private 1st Class Andrew Holmes, of Boise, Idaho, used in the first killing -- a teenager in a field -- in January 2010.
The next month, Morlock said, Gibbs killed the second victim with Spc. Michael Wagnon and tossed an AK-47 at the man's feet to make him appear to have been an enemy fighter. Morlock and Winfield said that during the third killing, in May, Gibbs threw a grenade at the victim as he ordered them to shoot.
Morlock and others told investigators that soon after Gibbs joined the unit in 2010, he began talking about how easy it would be to kill civilians, and discussed scenarios where they might carry out such murders.
Wanted action, firefights
Asked why soldiers might have agreed to go along with it, Morlock testified that the brigade had trained for deployment to Iraq before having their orders shifted at the last minute to Afghanistan.
The infantrymen wanted action and firefights, he testified, but instead they found themselves carrying out a more humanitarian counter-insurgency strategy that involved meetings and handshaking.
Another soldier, Staff Sgt. Robert Stevens, who at the time was a close friend of Gibbs, told investigators that in March 2010, he and others followed orders from Gibbs to fire on two unarmed farmers in a field; no one was injured. Gibbs claimed one was carrying a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, but that was obviously false, Stevens said.
Stevens also testified that Gibbs bragged to him about the second killing, admitting he planted an AK-47 on the victim's body because he suspected the man on involvement with the Taliban, according to a report on the testimony in The News Tribune newspaper of Tacoma.
But during the trial, Gibbs insisted he came under fire.
"I was engaged by an enemy combatant," he said. "Luckily his weapon appeared to malfunction and I didn't die."
Gibbs testified that he wasn't proud about having removed fingers from the bodies of the victims, but said he tried to disassociate the corpses from the humans they had been as a means of coming to terms with the things soldiers are asked to do in battle.
The sergeant also testified that he did it because other soldiers wanted the trophies, and he agreed in part because he didn't want his subordinates to think he was a wimp.
Gibbs initially faced 16 charges, but one was dropped during the trial.
Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45248143/ns/us_news-crime_and_courts/
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When the ensemble of cesium beam and hydrogen maser atomic clocks strike 11:11 today at Boulder?s National Institute of Standards and Time nothing will happen. Never mind the fact that the numbers are both binary and identical and that the square of any cluster of 1?s is going to be palindromic as well. 11 x 11 = 121 and 121 x 121 = 12321 [edit.comm.: first draft of the post had a typo here, omitting the 2 in both instances of 121].
Pop culture is considerably less oblivious. Tumblr microblogs are reveling in the fact that we?re also on the 11th Doctor Who and marginal but loyal faction of Spinal Tap are observing Nigel Tufnel day in honor of the legendary fake popstar?s legendary fictitious amp.
A group of British explorers are launching a reenactment of the Scott / Admunson race to the pole today to raise funds for the British Royal Legion today in honor of Veterans day which is observed on November 11th because at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of the year 1918, the ceasefire between The Allied Nations and Germany went into effect. Granted, ?The War to End All Wars? officially ended on June 28, 1919 with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles but consistency makes for good symbolism. Scientific?
Palindromes and symmetry have a decided emotional resonance. A surge of weddings are scheduled for today because the symbolic symmetry corresponds to the two individuals taking the vows of matrimony. A spoke in the number of births and of deaths would not be surprising. Science?
I read Stephen Jay Gould?s ?Questioning the Millennium? in 1999 while writing and rehearsing my first New York full length solo performance, GreenlandY2K. Gould?s observations about numerological coincidences gave context and ground to the story I was creating about the millennium, the Y2K bug and a doomed expedition to the North Pole coinciding at the stroke of midnight.
Numerological coincidences remain fascinating precisely because they can boast no general or cosmic meaning whatsoever,? Gould explains in I Have Landed: the End of a Beginning in Natural History. The ?eerie fascination? many people have with ?coincidence and numerology? Gould attributes to the fact that people have ?so thoroughly misunderstood probability.? He cites famous historical coincidences ?Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both died on the 4th of July; Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were both born on February 12, 1809? as examples and points out that, by ordinary rules of probability, both coincidences are unremarkable. In Questioning the Millennium, Gould details how the 1,000 AD Gregorian miscalculation continues to skew our calendars because you actually start counting at one, not zero.
As the national standard for frequency, time interval, and time-of-day and a vital contributor to time and frequency standards throughout the world, it is not NIST?s place to acknowledge anything exceptional about 11/11/11. Will NIST?s employees be as irreverent about the coincidence as the institution they work for or will they gather round the clocks? A surge in attention, interest and activity would not be inconsistent with the principles of probability, or the principles of human nature.
Source: http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=a97c410e6e6405638ccd3609e4d655e0
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