Faster than NATO, France ends Afghan combat role

AP foreign, Tuesday November 20 2012


JAMEY KEATEN
Associated Press= PARIS (AP) — France on Tuesday ended its combat operations in Afghanistan, pulling hundreds of troops from a base in a volatile region northeast of Kabul and fulfilling promises to end its combat role on a faster track than other NATO allies.
After a handover ceremony with Afghan troops, 500 French combat soldiers in trucks and armored vehicles left the Nijrab base in the Kapisa region — where anti-government insurgents have been active — and traveled southwest to Kabul, the capital, said Col. Thierry Burkhard, a French military spokesman.
"This is the end of combat operations," Burkhard told The Associated Press, adding that the withdrawal went smoothly. "It's the end of support operations for the Afghan National Army because we have no more troops who can deploy in such a role."
France was once one of the largest contributors to the NATO mission in Afghanistan, with a peak deployment of 4,000 troops — though far smaller than the tens of thousands of U.S. troops there. Since mid-2008, French forces were deployed in Kapisa, a crescent-shaped and strategic region along mountains between Kabul and the Pakistani border.  READ MORE
 

Globe Risks 'Cataclysmic Changes' >From Warming, World Bank Says

19 Nov 2012 The globe risks "cataclysmic changes" caused by extreme heatwaves, rising seas and depleted food stocks as it heads toward global warming of 4 degrees Celsius this century, according to a World Bank report. Current national pledges to reduce greenhouse gases won't do much to change the current trajectory of temperatures, which are set to rise by about double the United Nations target of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100, the scientific study e-mailed by the World Bank shows today. That level of warming threatens to cause sea levels to rise by a meter (3 feet) or more by 2100, flooding cities in nations from Mexico to Mozambique and the Philippines, according to the study.  READ MORE

Senate bill rewrite lets feds read your e-mail without warrants

Proposed law scheduled for a vote next week originally increased Americans' e-mail privacy. Then law enforcement complained. Now it increases government access to e-mail and other digital files. by Declan McCullagh November 20, 2012 4:00 AM PST Senate bill, quietly rewritten, allows feds to read e-mail without warrants 20 Nov 2012 A Senate proposal touted as protecting Americans' e-mail privacy has been quietly rewritten, giving government agencies more surveillance power than they possess under current law. CNET has learned that Patrick Leahy, the influential Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary committee, has dramatically reshaped his legislation in response to law enforcement concerns. A vote on his bill, which now authorizes warrantless access to Americans' e-mail, is scheduled for next week. Leahy's rewritten bill would allow more than 22 agencies -- including the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Communications Commission -- to access Americans' e-mail, Google Docs files, Facebook wall posts, and Twitter direct messages without a search warrant. It also would give the FBI and Homeland Security more authority, in some circumstances, to gain full access to Internet accounts without notifying either the owner or a judge. READ MORE

10 Reasons the GOP Is Really Messed Up -- According to Republicans

Karl Rove uses white board on 'The O'Reilly Factor'
to illustrate his polling theory.

It's too right-wing. Or not conservative enough. It could be the contempt for voters, or being the Party of Stupid. One thing's for sure: Everybody hates Karl Rove.

November 18, 2012

Just as the Republican Party might have contemplated an end to its wound-licking (the better to gin up its scandal-making machine for President Barack Obama’s second term), vanquished Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney proved to be -- for liberals, at least -- the gift that keeps on giving.
The president, Romney told a group of campaign donors on a November 14 conference call, won re-election by promising free stuff to his homeboys and women’s libbers and brown people who inconveniently declined to self-deport -- or words to that effect.

“What the president -- president's campaign did was focus on certain members of his base coalition, give them extraordinary financial gifts from the government,” Romney told his fat cats, apparently unaware that reporters were listening in.     READ MORE

The Death Toll of Watergate

By Robert Parry, Consortium News

18 November 12

epublicans are fond of comparing their scandal-mongering - like the current hype over the terrorist assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya - with genuine scandals, like Watergate, which sank Richard Nixon's second term, and Iran-Contra, which marred Ronald Reagan's last two years in office. The GOP's false equivalence represents both an effort to puff up their latest accusations against Democrats and an attempt to minimize the misconduct of those two Republican presidents. For instance, one favorite GOP comment about Benghazi is: "No one died at Watergate. Four brave Americans died in Benghazi."

This apples-and-oranges sophistry misses the point that Watergate and Iran-Contra were complex conspiracies that required intensive investigations to unravel their secrets (many of which remain hidden or in dispute to this day) while the Benghazi affair boils down to an easily resolved question as to why the U.S. intelligence community withheld some of the details in the immediate aftermath of the attack last Sept. 11.

The answers seem to be that the Benghazi consulate had evolved into a CIA base for secret operations and that U.S. intelligence didn't want to tip off the attack's perpetrators regarding how much the agency knew about their identities. So, the word "extremists" replaced specific groups and the CIA affiliation of two slain Americans was withheld.

By contrast, the history of Watergate is still substantially misunderstood even by supposed experts.
  READ MORE

Tweet #PatchRebuilds to Help Hurricane Sandy Survivors

Patch will make a $1 donation to AmeriCares for every tweet
with the hashtag #PatchRebuilds.

• By Ivy Jacobson
• Email the author
• 5:55 am

You can help rebuild communities that were hit byHurricane Sandy by donating cans of food, volunteering for cleanup efforts—or simply sending a tweet.

Patch is excited to announce our new effort to help support devestated communities after the storm. For every tweet sent with the hashtag #PatchRebuilds, we will donate $1 to theAmeriCares Hurricane Sandy Disaster Relief Fund, up to $125,000.

Your contribution will go toward medical and humanitarian aid, grants and programs to help Sandy survivors.

You can simply tweet the hashtag #PatchRebuilds, or go to our Patch Rebuilds website, rebuilds.patch.com, and tweet directly from the site.

A customized tweet that starts “My heart belongs to…” is created from the Patch Rebuilds website, and tweeters can type in an area they are most connected to that was hit by Hurricane Sandy.

Help Patch spread the word about this initiative! Send the URL http://rebuilds.patch.com/RedwoodCity-Woodside/ to friends and family, and don't forget tosend a tweet for Patch's $1 donation!    READ MORE

5 Dumbest States in America

By Jerry Kronenberg

11/16/12 - 04:12 PM EST

BOSTON (TheStreet) -- Minnesota residents are at the top of the class when it comes to educational achievement -- but South Carolinians get an "F," we have found. 

A look at four educational factors -- average SAT math scores, percentage of citizens with high-school diplomas, how many young people attend college and how many high schoolers watch too much TV -- reveals wide variations among U.S. states.

For instance, just 8.2% of residents in first-place Minnesota lack high-school educations -- roughly half of the 15.9% rate in last-place South Carolina. Similarly, 80.4% of Minnesota's 18- to 24-year-olds are enrolled in college, compared with just 49.9% of similarly aged South Carolinians.

Boston College education professor Ana Martinez-Aleman attributes much of the variations to a single factor -- how much money states spend on public schools.

"There's a cause-and-effect relationship between school funding and educational achievement," says Martinez-Aleman, who also serves as editor of the scholarly publication Educational Policy Journal. (URL = exp.sagepub.com) The expert says some states have long showered their secondary-school and public-university systems with big bucks, while others have made funding about as hard to come by as an "A" in calculus.

"Public-school funding is primarily derived from property taxes, and [state and local governments] determine property-tax rates," she says. "The lower your revenue stream, the lower your ability to fund education."    READ MORE