Photo by Ryan McManus
"Alfie" - Lily Allen
"B-B-Bicycles" - The Bicycles
"Your Summer Dress" - Dirty On Purpose
"Understanding Traffic" - Troubled Hubble
"The Power of Pussy" - Bongwater
"Good Choice" - Lip Cream
"Okay" - Shoes
"March of Dissent" - Hit the Switch
"Road Movie" - Adorable
"Chowder Town" - Walt Mink
Video bonus: Bananarama - "Cruel Summer"
Up to two-thirds of the U.S. Army’s combat brigades are not ready for wartime missions, largely because they are hampered by equipment shortfalls, Democratic lawmakers said Wednesday, citing unclassified documents.
In a letter to President George W. Bush, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, Ike Skelton, said that “nearly every non-deployed combat brigade in the active Army is reporting that they are not ready” for combat. The figures, he said, represent an unacceptable risk to the nation.
Young veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan are having a harder time finding a job than their peers who didn’t serve in the military.
Last year, about one in six veterans between 20 and 24 was jobless, nearly double the rate for nonveterans their age. It was brighter in the second quarter of this year, when young vets had an 11.2 percent jobless rate, but that was still higher than the 8 percent for nonvets their age and more than twice the overall unemployment rate.
Two laptop computers with personal information on about 31,000 Navy recruiters and their prospective recruits were stolen from Navy offices in New Jersey in June and July, the Navy disclosed on Wednesday.
It was the third time in little more than a month that personal data on Navy personnel has been lost or unintentionally released publicly over the Internet.
U.S. Army garrison commanders from all over Europe are comparing cost-cutting strategies at a meeting in Heidelberg this week.
Army installations in Europe have been cutting services in recent weeks because of a budget crunch due to the cost of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
This Thursday, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will hold hearings on the nomination of U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton. Bolton was nominated to the post last year by President Bush but failed to win Senate confirmation after a series of problematic disclosures about his past, particularly a record of mishandling intelligence and a pattern of intimidating subordinates.
The timing of this week's hearings is no accident. The White House is attempting to rally support for the Bolton nomination by politicizing the escalating conflict in the Middle East, arguing that this moment of geopolitical peril requires a permanent representative at the U.N. But the truth is that Bolton's record over the past year has highlighted the desire of an individual who was sent to the U.N. not to make it stronger, but to undermine it. Bolton is no more worthy for the U.N. post now than he was a year ago.
In testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Oct. 18, 2005, U.N. Ambassador John Bolton argued that diplomacy has to happen outside of the New York “bubble”
[snip]
According to the U.N. Security Council (UNSC), there have been four UNSC trips since Bolton was recess appointed as ambassador in Aug. 2005 — to Central Africa, Ethiopia and Eritrea, Chad and Sudan, and to the Congo. He did not attend any of them.
In early June, Bolton passed up the delegation trip to Sudan because he had a “full platter here.” In reality, Bolton was giving a lecture at the Centre for Policy Studies, a right-wing think tank in London.
Legislation drafted by the Bush administration setting out new rules on bringing terror detainees to trial would allow hearsay evidence to be introduced unless it was deemed “unreliable” and would permit defendants to be excluded from their own trials if necessary to protect national security, according to a copy of the proposal.
The bill, which officials said was being circulated within the administration, is not final, but it indicates the direction of the administration’s approach for dealing with a Supreme Court decision that struck down the tribunals established to try terror suspects at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
You could be on a secret government database or watch list for simply taking a picture on an airplane. Some federal air marshals say they're reporting your actions to meet a quota, even though some top officials deny it.
The air marshals, whose identities are being concealed, told 7NEWS that they're required to submit at least one report a month. If they don't, there's no raise, no bonus, no awards and no special assignments.
"Innocent passengers are being entered into an international intelligence database as suspicious persons, acting in a suspicious manner on an aircraft ... and they did nothing wrong," said one federal air marshal.
These unknowing passengers who are doing nothing wrong are landing in a secret government document called a Surveillance Detection Report, or SDR. Air marshals told 7NEWS that managers in Las Vegas created and continue to maintain this potentially dangerous quota system.
