MemeStreams | What's Happening ...

"The crime you see now, it's hard to even take its measure."
You can't talk about war with someone who has never been there, not because they are stupid or dimwitted, but because they don't have the senses to feel it with."

News reports in February revealed that officials at a West Texas youth prison had been accused of sexually abusing inmates. The revelations that followed included reports of youth beatings, lax medical care and a culture of retaliation against whistle-blowers.
"My name is Shinseki, and I am a soldier," he said, poking fun at his reputation for spartan public statements.
Legislation passed in May was supposed to address the problems. To some extent it did, according to one lawmaker.
"We probably don't have management raping kids now," said state Rep. Jerry Madden.

The studio distributing “The Kite Runner,” a tale of childhood betrayal, sexual predation and ethnic tension in Afghanistan, is delaying the film’s release to get its three schoolboy stars out of Kabul -- perhaps permanently -- in response to fears that they could be attacked by Afghans angered by the film's culturally inflammatory rape scene.

These were dark movies -- the feel-bad films of the year -- conjured up in what movie people seem to collectively sense as grave times, hatched in producers' offices and on writers' laptops not long after the 2004 election and amid increasing setbacks in the Iraq war and gloomy environmental warnings. Some of the filmmakers and actors wore orange ribbons or rubber bracelets to protest alleged incidents of torture by the United States at its prison in Guantanamo Bay, and in Afghanistan and Iraq -- the subject of "Taxi to the Dark Side," which won Best Documentary Feature.
When not offering a surfeit of death and gloom, Academy nominees this year focused, in at least some metaphorical way, on all the looming issues:
Lovers died in a time of war; the thirst for oil took precedence over humanity; greedy corporate types stooped lower than low; a killer roamed the desolate US-Mexican borderland.

"In terms of what's happening in Afghanistan, I don't really understand all the politics and it's not important to me. It's there, it's happening, and it affects me on a personal level."

Those who've paid close attention to what's happening in Texas and elsewhere have realized that building more prisons and incarcerating more people have not only emptied state coffers and thereby cut back and even stopped positive societal enhancements but have also been seedbeds for future criminal activity.

For ISAF, force generation "is not the main problem - the real issues are governance, the narcotics problem and what's happening across the border in Pakistan. What is needed is a credible Afghan police force, a credible government. When governance, development and security are actually lined up, people are willing to come over, because the Taliban are not offering an alternative government system."

"They don't want Canadians to know what's happening in the war in Afghanistan," she said.
"In this case and others, they're to control the story and make it a sanitized version of what's happening."

"We're reporting maybe 15 percent of what's happening in our city," said Alfredo Quijano, editor of the newspaper, whose building has received bomb threats. Mr. Huerta recently returned to work, but the newspaper issued a statement telling readers his reporters will stick to reporting "dead bodies and not investigations."
Last week, in broad daylight, fake policemen set up roadblocks to check for weapons, confiscating a few.
Lt. Gen. Mushtaq was killed in broad daylight in the busy district of Rawalpindi when a militant in the guise of a beggar blew himself up by colliding with the staff car of the officer.
Some analysts say the latest surge in violence raises questions about the effectiveness of President Felipe Calderón's counter-drug strategy and how many battles he can take on without overextending the military.
Mr. Calderón has deployed 30,000 soldiers throughout Mexico to take on the cartels -- including in Nuevo Laredo and Reynosa, on the border with Texas.
"At some point, Calderón will have to negotiate agreements with the cartels," said Howard Campbell, an anthropologist at the University of Texas at El Paso who is working on a book on Mexico's drug traffickers. "Calderón knows they can't beat them and so they simply want to control them and that's not such a bad strategy. It's a pragmatic approach."

The story is, in effect, a slow-speed chase through the Texas desert.
McCain: "We should have put more boots on the ground there to apprehend [Bin Laden]. Everyone agrees. But I have no reason to believe that because we urged attention to Iraq, it had any tactical effect on the battleground."

Hampered by poor resources, border guards in this impoverished former Soviet state are losing the battle to stem the tide of drugs that bears most of the heroin reaching Britain's streets across Asia and Europe.
Last week [in 2003], a UN report revealed that impoverished Central Asian states are now bearing the brunt of the burgeoning trade in Afghan narcotics. More than 90 per cent of heroin sold in Britain comes from Afghanistan, according to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime.
"There is a palpable risk that Afghanistan will again turn into a failed state, this time in the hands of drugs cartels and narco-terrorists," said the UN anti-drugs chief Antonio Maria Costa.

It's clear Pakistan's civilian rulers are rethinking counterterrorism strategy, amid concern that use of military force against al-Qaida and Taliban has provoked a bloody militant backlash.
Partners in the incoming coalition government have said they would negotiate with some militant groups -- an approach that has drawn criticism from Washington.

"You can't talk sense to them," Bush said in West Virginia, referring to terrorists.
"Nooooo!" the audience roared.
I was in Africa last year and saw a lot of animals in the wild that I'd only seen in zoos before. It was remarkable how different they seemed. Particularly lions. Lions in the wild seem about ten times more alive. They're like different animals. And seeing those guys on their scavenger hunt was like seeing lions in a zoo after spending several years watching them in the wild.

You can't stop what's coming.

Protesting at this stage in her life has Bush thinking about all the times before, when she kept quiet.
Mostly, she remembers watching the sky turn to fire just outside Albuquerque in July 1945.
She had just graduated from college and was working as an air traffic controller at Kirtland Air Force Base. Moments before the explosion she gave orders to a fleet of World War II B-29 bombers to take to the sky.
A sudden wail pierced the night sky. It was Slasher, an AC-130 gunship, firing bullets the size of Coke bottles. Flaming shapes ricocheted all around the village. Kearney was in overdrive ...
Flaming rockets flashed through the sky. Thunder rumbled and echoed through the valley. Then there was a pause. Slasher asked Caroon whether the insurgents were still talking. Kearney shouted over to Yarnell in his ditch, “You picking anything up?” Nothing. More spitting rockets.
...
“O.K., I’ve done my killing for the week. I’m ready to go home.”
"I was terrified because I thought I had given a wrong command and the bombers had crashed in the air," she said.
The next day, the newspaper reported that an ammunition dump had exploded in Alamogordo. In time, the atomic bomb test at what's now known as the Trinity site was revealed.
"I didn't know until World War II was over that it had been an atomic bomb," she said. "That's what's happening right now. So often we don't know the truth."
There were more bomb drops and refusals to drop bombs, and then Becky, everyone’s favorite Apache pilot, swept in. Not only did she offer the comforting voice of a woman seeping right into their ears, but Becky was one of the most aggressive shooters. She flew up and down the canyon walls seeking out and rocketing insurgents. We heard them on the radio again boasting about retreating to safety under fire.
“They were balls to do what they did. And guess what? I’m not gonna lie. They won.”

Terrorists will strike at America during the next Administration's first term.