The shootings at the Army's Fort Hood in Texas Thursday were an "isolated incident," according to military officials.
But there have been other attacks by military personnel in recent years – some in the United States, some in the war zone in Iraq – and they happened over a period of sustained combat and multiple deployments when increasing numbers of soldiers are experiencing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and committing suicide.
Fort Hood shootings: How often do soldiers kill soldiers?
PG&E Wants Rate Hike for Efficient Energy Users
In a recent application to the state, Pacific Gas and Electric asked to raise service rates by 5 percent for their best energy-conserving customers, typically smaller households.
The reason? To give price breaks of 2.5 to 5.7 percent to their biggest energy clients who use between 131 and 300 percent or more than the baseline monthly average.
PG&E uses a five-tier system to differentiate their customers. The system is supposed to promote efficiency by charging lower rates to customers who use the least amount of energy.
But the company, with profits up 4.6 percent in the third quarter of this year, said they’re just trying to be fair.
TVNL Comment: Meet America's real enemy!
US generals and soldiers flood Israel
A large number of American generals and at least 1,500 US soldiers arrived in Israel this week for one of the largest joint land exercises ever held between the two nations.
Dubbed "Juniper Cobra," the exercise, which is held every year, but never before on such a large scale, is scheduled to last three weeks.
Horse genome unlocked by science
The genome of a domestic horse has been successfully sequenced by an international team of researchers. The work, published in the journal Science, may shed light on how horses were domesticated.
It also reveals similarities between the horse and other placental mammals, such as bovids - the hoofed group including goats, bison and cattle. The authors also found horses share much of their DNA with humans, which could have implications for medicine. Horses suffer from more than 90 hereditary diseases that show similarities to those in humans.
Pentagon pursuing new investigation into Bush propaganda program
The Pentagon’s Office of Inspector General is conducting a new investigation into a covert Bush administration Defense Department program that used retired military analysts to produce positive wartime news coverage.
Convicted CIA Spy Says "We Broke the Law"
One of the 23 Americans convicted today by an Italian court says the United States "broke the law" in the CIA kidnapping of a Muslim cleric Abu Omar in Milan in 2003.
"I think these people have been put out there. They've been hung out to dry. They're taking the fall potentially for a decision that was made by their superiors in our agencies. It's the wrong place to go."
Conservatives’ Blind Support of Our Troops and Their Unintended Defense of the Big Lie
If you’ve ever read George Orwell’s, 1984, you know that, “Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.” This seems eerily similar to the lie that we’ve been sold about the terrorist threat to our country. The lie that we need a “100-year war” because this enemy doesn’t abide by the “traditional” rules of war (whatever THAT means), and that we need to take the battle to them so we don’t end up with a “mushroom cloud” over here, is just that: a LIE. Perhaps a quick review of history will drive home this point:
Former UK ambassador: CIA sent people to be ‘raped with broken bottles’
The CIA relied on intelligence based on torture in prisons in Uzbekistan, a place where widespread torture practices include raping suspects with broken bottles and boiling them alive, says a former British ambassador to the central Asian country.Craig Murray, the rector of the University of Dundee in Scotland and until 2004 the UK's ambassador to Uzbekistan, said the CIA not only relied on confessions gleaned through extreme torture, it sent terror war suspects to Uzbekistan as part of its extraordinary rendition program.
More...
Frank Schaeffer: I'm Now a 'Liberal' Because I'm a Conservative
I grew up in a fundamentalist missionary family that in the 1970s and 80s morphed into my father's activity as one of the founders of the Religious Right. We would hobnob with Republican leaders from Ronald Reagan to Gerald Ford and the Bush family, Jack Kemp and many others. One day it dawned on me that the far right of the Republican Party --- in other words its base --- actually hates America.
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