j’s blog

but can’t understand why there’s so much violence in the schools. Questions remain, did the concussion ‘un’gift the loser and who will bash the remaining brains out of who at the rematch? Will it be bloody enough for PPV?

Yahoo! News - Police: Teacher Starts Brawl in Class

DALLAS - A high school teacher faces an assault charge after police say she walked into a middle-school classroom, grabbed that teacher’s hair, yanked her out of her chair, and dragged her across the room while punching her in the face and kicking her.

According to the police report, Paulette Baines grabbed Mary Oliver in front of the class full of gifted students Friday. Baines was angry because Oliver told her daughter to quit loitering by lockers and go to class, Dallas school district spokesman Donald Claxton said.

Oliver said Baines was yelling at her as she entered the classroom.

“I want you to know I didn’t raise a finger. I didn’t raise my voice. I didn’t do anything to aggravate the situation,” Oliver said. “I did everything possible to defuse the situation.”

Baines was charged with assault with bodily injury, according to Dallas County Jail records. Baines, 45, was released early Saturday after posting $2,500 bail, a jail official said.

Baines, who was placed on paid administrative leave, did not immediately return a call seeking comment placed by The Associated Press on Monday.

Oliver, who teaches seventh-grade science at a Dallas school for gifted students, said she had bruises on her face, a concussion and two broken ribs.

The incident happened after Oliver talked to Baines’ daughter and several other students about going to class. Students are not allowed to be at their lockers during class time, Claxton said.

Oliver said she did not single out Baines’ daughter, an eighth-grader. The girl went to the school counselor, who called Baines to tell her what had happened, Claxton said.

An excellent and moving film about Cambodia. A serious film, worth renting.

The Killing Fields (1984)

Sydney Schanberg is a New York Times journalist convering the civil war in Cambodia. Together with local representative Dith Pran, they cover some of the tragedy and madness of the war. When the Americans forces leave, Dith Pran sends his family with them, but stays behind himself to help Schanberg cover the event. As an American, Schanberg won’t have any trouble leaving the country, but the situation is different for Pran; he’s a local, and the Khmer Rouge are moving in.

Summary written by Murray Chapman {muzzle at cs.uq.oz.au}

Yahoo! News - Khmer Rouge Haunts Cambodia 30 Years Later
By DAVID LONGSTREATH, Associated Press Writer

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia - Thirty years after the rise of the Khmer Rouge revolutionary peasant army, the horrors of their brutal, murderous rule still stain the fabric of this impoverished Southeast Asian kingdom.

On the outskirts of Phnom Penh, near the Choeung Ek Genocidal Museum, the evidence of mass murder is easily found. Just scraping the surface of communal graves turns up bone fragments, teeth and clothing worn by those put to death by the Khmer Rouge.

Seeking to create a utopian society, the Khmer Rouge abolished private property and money and emptied the cities by driving the urban population at gunpoint into the countryside to live in communal camps.

The genocidal experiment began on April 17, 1975, and wreaked havoc for nearly five years. An invasion by the Vietnamese army early in 1979 ended the group’s reign, but not before an estimated 1.7 million or more Cambodians had died from violence, starvation or overwork.

The Khmer Rouge waged a guerrilla war for two more decades, but its abuses have largely gone unpunished since fighting stopped in 1998.

Pol Pot, the leader of the Khmer Rouge, fell from favor and leadership of the group’s last active faction in 1997. A year later he was dead, and many speculated he had committed suicide. Ta Mok, an 80-year-old known as “the Butcher” who deposed Pol Pot, languishes in a Phnom Penh cell awaiting a U.N. war crimes tribunal that most Cambodians believe will never come to pass.

Prime Minister Hun Sen made deals with other leaders, such as Noun Chea, right-hand man to Pol Pot, and Khieu Samphan, prime minister of the Khmer Rouge government. They defected from the Khmer Rouge in 1998 and now live safe from prosecution in the autonomous zone of Pailin.

Noun Chea sits quietly in the bedroom of his simple wooden shack watching the sun rise as he listens to morning news broadcasts on a cheap Chinese-made portable radio. He, like Khieu Samphan, grants few interviews and refuses to speak about the past.

Pailin, a former Khmer Rouge stronghold in the west along the Thailand border, is a derelict town. The gemstones that paid for the arms and ammunition that kept the Khmer Rouge fighting for 20 years have mostly been mined. Teak trees, another source of funds, are gone as well.

Many in Pailin live a grinding existence, much like the rest of Cambodia, where half the people get by on $1 a day.

The once lush jungle of Pailin, the perfect hiding place for the guerrillas, has been turned into slashed and burned farmland that waits for a rainy season now two years overdue.

Staring at dust swirling at his border farm, former Khmer Rouge infantryman Kave Meik says: “Before we didn’t have the freedom and independence but we had plenty of food. Now we have freedom but we don’t have enough to eat.”

Yahoo! News - Russian draft collects `bums, real scum’ as most defer dangerous military posts

By Mark McDonald, Knight Ridder Newspapers

MOSCOW - A certain amount of panic will take hold of Russia on Friday, when the country begins its annual military draft.

Generals will be panicked that they’ll end up with another crop of druggies, convicts and misfits. Mothers will be terrified at handing over their sons to a military that’s notorious for its brutal hazing of new recruits.

And tens of thousands of draft-age young men will fear for their lives as they face two years of menial labor, sadistic senior officers, and, worst of all, a possible deployment to Chechnya. Many will wangle phony deferments, fail to report or simply flee.

“What (the military) ends up with are the social fallouts, trigger-happy people, bums, the homeless, the real scum,” said Pavel Felgenhauer, a military analyst in Moscow. “And they’ve all got guns.”

Shootings of officers, desertions, suicides, alcoholism, torture in the barracks and drug abuse are rampant in today’s Russian military, according to Felgenhauer and other experts.

Even the chief of the Russian general staff has said the military situation in Russia is “beyond critical” - not an encouraging comment given the country’s huge nuclear arsenal, long-range missiles, and biological- and chemical-weapons depots.

All of which makes the annual draft critical to Russia’s national security - and perhaps the world’s.

“An unsound or unstable Russian military populated with dissolute officers and destitute troopers would be a global liability,” said a senior U.S. official who asked for anonymity because he didn’t wish to be seen as meddling in Russian affairs.

“Nobody should want to see any further degradation in the military here.”

President Vladimir Putin has said that Russia, with its million-man military, can’t afford an all-volunteer army, though planners are aiming for an equal mix of conscripts and volunteers by 2007.

Calls for young men to join are countered by an outcry over what many parents feel are the brutal conditions of Russian military life.

“I’m really stunned by the attitude of so many of our Russian women,” said Maria Fedulova, whose son was drafted 10 years ago and sent to Chechnya. “The mothers of these boys are hypnotized. How can they let their sons go to the army? How could anyone?”

Fedulova works for the Soldiers’ Mothers Committee, an anti-draft group that opposes Russia’s use of military force in Chechnya. The Mothers are trying to start their own political party, and with a new draft season starting, they’re busier than ever.

“The most terrible thing is that parents still believe the government propaganda,” said Valentina Melnikova, the head of the Mothers committee.

“The adults still say that all kids should do military service. They bring them (to the recruiting station), hold a farewell party and they all drink vodka. Then three weeks later, when their kid has been beaten in the barracks, they show up in our office saying, `How could we know such an awful thing could happen?’”

The military’s target this year is about 150,000 draftees, and recruiters are angry that once again they’ll have to scrape the bottom of the social barrel to meet their quotas.

Senior military planners complain there are so many legal deferments that only 11 percent of draft-age men ever get inducted. And of those, only 30 percent are physically fit enough to get through boot camp.

In the 2003 draft, for example, 17 percent of draftees had various “psychic disorders.” Another 14 percent were alcoholics, 7 percent had police records and 40 percent were high-school dropouts.

The ritualized hazing of recruits in their barracks kills several hundred young soldiers every year and traumatizes countless others. Closely held army reports say that a fourth of all non-combat deaths are suicides, and dozens of soldiers die each winter after overnight punishment sessions outdoors.

Draftees make about $5 a month, and many will find themselves doing menial chores or manual labor, such as building summer houses for senior officers. Many also sell their blood to get extra money.

So it’s little wonder that draft-dodging is epidemic every spring.

An estimated 22,000 young men won’t answer their draft notices this week - it’s called a “summons” here - and tens of thousands of others will use phony medical exams, fake university enrollments or bribery to avoid serving.

When Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov recently floated the idea of ending student deferments, student groups immediately took to the streets in protest. Ivanov quickly backed off, although a major curtailment of deferments is being drafted in the Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament.

Some young men hurriedly join police forces or fire brigades to get deferments. Quickie “marriages” to single mothers aren’t uncommon: Men with dependents also receive deferments. (Young women aren’t subject to the draft.)

Andrei Nikolayev, a former army general and Duma member, said no more than 500 people ever tried to evade the draft in a given year during the Soviet era. Now the rate is 44 times higher.

Alternative service exists in Russia, but the term is three years, a year longer than the regular military hitch. Young men seeking alternative service also can be assigned to work as civilians - cleaning latrines or painting barracks - in the military units they were trying to avoid.

Maria Fedulova’s zeal to stop the draft stems from her memories of her son, Denis, as a 19-year-old draftee. Denis had fired a weapon only three times in boot camps before he was sent to Chechnya. He worked mostly as a driver, collecting injured soldiers from battlefields, but she remembers him talking about hearing and feeling the crunch of bones as he drove over bodies.

When he was kidnapped by separatists in Chechnya, no one in the military told her. She learned it for herself after his letters stopped and she traveled to southern Russia to find him. An American journalist gave her the news, she said.

Eventually, her son was swapped for a rebel fighter in Russian hands and he came home. But the experience left him scarred. He didn’t speak for two months, and he couldn’t get a job.

“He’s still like a time bomb, ready to go off,” she said. As for her son, “he’d go to prison before he’d ever go back into the army.”

Yahoo! News - Darfur death toll at least 300,000, MPs say

LONDON (AFP) - More than 300,000 people have died as a result of the conflict in Sudan’s Darfur region, British lawmakers said in a report, a figure more than four times greater than an official UN estimate.

Compiled after interviews with non-governmental organizations, UN officials and British Development Secretary Hilary Benn, the estimated death count dwarfed the World Health Organization’s (WHO) figure of 70,000.

“We think that is a conservative estimate,” Tony Baldry, the chair of the House of Commons’ international development committee, told AFP.

The committee’s report faulted the UN health body for making a “gross underestimate” of the toll of the two-year conflict, began when a rebellion in the vast western Sudanese region was put down by government-sponsored militias which led a scorched-earth campaign against local civilians.

Baldry blamed the faulty WHO figures on the “statistical anarchy in the way the figures were collected”, since they included violence which occurred in refugee camps but not violent deaths which took place in villages across Darfur.

Also, they noted, the WHO estimate covered only a period from March to mid-October 2004, while the alleged atrocities including rape, murder and forced displacement of villagers by the Arab militias had been under way for much longer.

The lawmakers, who visited Darfur in February, credited Benn and the British government for reacting more quickly than most international powers but still faulted the world for its slow response to what has become one of the world’s greatest humanitarian crises.

“Our hope for this report is that it will jolt people’s attention to the scale of the crisis in Darfur, the numbers of people who are continuously, silently suffering in Darfur, and will be yet another call to the UK government and the international community that we have a collective responsibility to protect,” Baldry said.

“And there can be no further alibis, excuses for future failure,” he said.

The parliament report comes as the United Nations Security Council considers a draft resolution which would refer 51 suspects identified by a UN probe for trial on war crimes charges at the International Criminal Court.

The British lawmakers firmly backed the move to see Darfur war criminals tried at The Hague court, and said the Security Council should push through debate even if it faced opposition from permanent veto-wielding members the United States and China.

“It’s worthwhile to try to get agreement on stronger action, and absolutely force the issue on the Security Council,” committee member John Bercow told AFP.

It would “put other governments on the spot”, he said, referring to objections by the United States, which opposes the ICC, and China, which has interests in Sudan’s large oil reserves.

If those countries continue to oppose strong measures against Sudan, “let them be named and shamed in the most public, damning way,” Bercow said.

“Darfur is a real test for the international community and civilization as a whole at the start of the 21st century,” Baldry added. “If we can’t resolve the situation in Darfur it bodes pretty badly for the coming millenium.”