Department of Defense Announces Recruiting and Retention Number for May

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Army said Friday it surpassed its recruiting goal for May, marking the 12th consecutive month of meeting or exceeding its target.

Before it began the streak in June 2005, the active Army had missed its target four consecutive months. And even though results improved during the summer months, it missed its full-year target for the first time since 1999. The Army National Guard and Army Reserve also fell short of their 2005 goals but are doing better now.

The regular Army signed up 5,806 new recruits last month, compared with its target of 5,400, and the Army National Guard and Army Reserve also exceeded their May goals, according to statistics released by the Pentagon.

Nonetheless, eight months into its budget year, the active Army is barely beyond the halfway mark of recruiting its goal of 80,000 new soldiers. Through May it had signed up 42,859, meaning that in the final four months of the period it will have to enlist an average of nearly 9,300 per month to reach the 80,000 target.

Last year, the only month the active Army came close to signing up 9,300 in a single month was August, when it got 9,452.

The Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps also met their May recruiting goals, the Pentagon said.

June 9, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:55 p.m. ET

HANOVER, N.H. (AP) — Authorities raided the Dartmouth College fraternity that helped inspire the movie ”Animal House,” carrying off 10 crates, a computer and other items. Investigators refused to say what the search on the Ivy League campus was about.

Court documents on Thursday’s raid were sealed, and Hanover police said only that the search at the Alpha Delta house was part of a two-year investigation and that they expect to make arrests. Alpha Delta members turned a reporter away at the door Friday.

Dartmouth junior Joe Kutney, a member of the Tri-Kap fraternity, said Alpha Delta can be ”a pretty crazy house” whose members are proud of their party reputation. But he added that Alpha Delta is not the only Dartmouth frat with such a reputation.

”Animal House” portrayed fraternity debauchery at the fictional Delta House, whose members repeatedly thwart and embarrass the Faber College officials determined to banish them. One of the writers of the 1978 movie, Chris Miller, was a 1964 Dartmouth graduate and a member of Alpha Delta.

Police removed 10 crates, two bags, a videotape and a computer during the raid. Police Chief Nick Giaccone said a 19-year-old student was arrested at the house on a drug charge Thursday, but the arrest was not related to the investigation.

The police chief said the investigation began in October 2004 following an incident at the fraternity, which is owned by a group of its alumni called the Dartmouth Corporation of Alpha Delta.

George Ostler, lawyer for the fraternity members, would not comment except to call the search a ”major interruption.” The raid came as parents began arriving on campus for graduation Sunday.

Dartmouth spokesman Roland Adams said the school does not release disciplinary records for Dartmouth’s 24 single-sex fraternities and sororities or the three co-ed organizations. More than a third of the school’s 4,100 undergraduates are members of single-sex fraternities and sororities. Adams what not say what the investigation was about.

Frats and sororities are central to the social life on the rural campus, and some of them have a reputation for hard drinking and raucous behavior. Dartmouth has been trying for years to curb the drinking, reduce the role of fraternities and give students more things to do.

Last year, the Theta Delta Chi fraternity was indicted on charges it served alcohol to minors. And in 2001, the school banned the Zeta Psi fraternity for printing newsletters that detailed the sexual exploits of its members.

from The Independent

Al-Zarqawi: A life drenched in blood
By Patrick Cockburn
Published: 09 June 2006

It was the end of a strange but murderous career. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was a little-known Jordanian petty criminal turned Islamic fundamentalist fanatic until he was denounced by the US in 2003 as an insurgent leader of great importance.

This enabled him to recruit men and raise money to wage a cruel war, mostly against Iraqi civilians. In a macabre innovation, he staged beheadings of Western hostages such as Ken Bigley which were then uploaded to the internet to ensure maximum publicity.

His death in an air strike by American F-16s while in a house north of Baghdad with seven associates, is important in Iraq because he was the most openly sectarian of the Sunni resistance leaders, butchering Shias as heretics as worthy of death as any foreign invader.

His chosen instrument was the suicide bomber usually recruited from outside the country. Their targets were almost invariably young Shia men desperate for work, queuing for jobs as policemen or soldiers. Few of the 20,000 US soldiers killed and wounded in Iraq in the past three years have died at the hands of Zarqawi’s men, according to the US military.

George Bush and Tony Blair welcomed news of the death of the leader of al-Qa’ida in Iraq yesterday. But, paradoxically, among those most pleased by his elimination may be the other insurgent leaders. “He was an embarrassment to the resistance itself,” said Ghassan al-Attiyah, an Iraqi commentator. “They never liked him taking all the limelight and the Americans exaggerated his role.”

Zarqawi owed his rise to the US in two ways. His name was unknown until he was denounced on 5 February 2003 by Colin Powell, who was the US Secretary of State, before the UN Security Council as the link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qa’ida. There turned out to be no evidence for this connection and Zarqawi did not at this time belong to al-Qa’ida. But Mr Powell’s denunciation made him a symbol of resistance to the US across the Muslim world. It also fitted with Washington’s political agenda that attacking Iraq was part of the war on terror.

The invasion gave Zarqawi a further boost. Within months of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein the whole five-million-strong Sunni Arab community in Iraq appeared united in opposition to the occupation. Cheering crowds gathered every time a US soldier was shot or an American vehicle blown up. Armed resistance was popular and for the first time Sunni militants known as the Salafi, religious fundamentalists demonstrating their faith by religious war or jihad, had a bedrock of support in Iraq. Osama bin Laden and his fighters never had this degree of acceptance in Afghanistan and were forced to hire local tribesmen to take part in their propaganda videos.

The next critical moment in Zarqawi’s career was the capture of Saddam Hussein on 15 December 2003. Previously US military and civilian spokesmen had blamed everything on the former Iraqi leader.

No sooner was Saddam captured than the US spokesmen began to mention Zarqawi’s name in every sentence. “If the weather is bad they will blame it on Zarqawi,” an Iraqi journalist once said to me. <b .It emerged earlier this year that the US emphasis on Zarqawi as the prime leader of the Iraqi resistance was part of a carefully calculated propaganda programme. A dubious letter from Zarqawi was conveniently discovered. One internal briefing document quoted by The Washington Post records Brigadier General Kimmitt, the chief US military spokesman at the time, as saying: "The Zarqawi psy-op programme is the most successful information campaign to date." The US campaign was largely geared towards the American public and above all the American voter. It was geared to proving that the invasion of Iraq was a reasonable response to the 9/11 attacks. This meant it was necessary to show al-Qa'ida was strong in Iraq and play down the fact that this had only happened after the invasion.

In an increasingly anti-American Arab world hostility from the US made it easy for Zarqawi develop his own organisation and finance it. The siege of Fallujah in April 2004 and the storming of the city by US Marines in November the same year saw al-Tawhid wal-Jihad (Monotheism and Jihad), whose name was later changed to al-Qa’ida’s Organisation in Iraq, become a powerful force. The suicide bombing campaign had already begun in November 2003 and was from the beginning directed against Shias as much as foreign troops or officials.

Zarqawi’s war was devised to have the maximum political impact. There was the beheading of foreign captives shown on videos and broadcast via the internet. He was an enemy to America’s liking. Though US military officials in Baghdad openly admitted that few insurgents were non-Iraqi, Zarqawi’s Jordanian origins were useful in suggesting that the insurrection was orchestrated from outside Iraq.

There were always going to be sectarian and ethnic differences between Shia, Sunni and Kurd after the overthrow of Saddam. This would have given a constituency to Zarqawi whatever happened but he also did much to deepen sectarian hatred by killing Iraqi Shia whenever he could. This destabilised the Iraqi government and it also meant that his anti-Shia fanaticism was increasing acceptable in the Sunni community as the Shia retaliated in 2005.

His death may lessen Shia-Sunni sectarianism but it probably comes too late. Diyala, the province where he was killed, is already seeing a savage civil war in which Iraq’s communities hunt each other down and whoever is in the minority is forced to flee, fight or die.

Courtesy J. Coulthart

“lifted with thanks from Royal’s World Countdown Music Newspaper
gestetnered by The communication company (u.p.s.) 3/25/67”

HOW DID IT HAPPEN?
by Doc Stanley

The Electronic Age is upon us and magnificent and fantastic changes occur with alarming rapidity. As a poet frind of mine said, “The name of the game is CHANGE” and change it does. The rate of change is so greatly accelerated that some pessimists whisper that the only constant is change itself. News and information is transmitted with the speed of light and everywhere has become the same place. The interaction and inter-change at the speed of light has altered the nature of time and thus there is only HERE and NOW when it comes to the eternal questions of where and when. The level of information available has become so high that it is impossible to contain it all within words and pictures. No man can keep abreast of even the front edge of man’s knowledge and thus he must emply another method of understanding his environment. The other method of learning or developing understanding is feeling. When you can’t know, all you can do is feel. And this is the job of the contemporary music. Music makes you feel, and our brothers in Tibet go further and hold that music is a liberation. Music that contains life gives life to the listener. Music that contains love gives love to the listener. Whatever the music contains, this will be experienced by the listener and with the techniques of High Fidelity Sterophonic Recording every nuance and shading of emotion and feeling can be captured and reproduced anytime, anywhere. This is the magic of popular, contemporary electronic music. It is perhaps the strongest magic ever to be commonly available. It furthers one to view the changes which have occurred in our music, which is the standard of the world, from the point of power, poetry and presence. Its power is that of Hoover Dam. The waters of the Grand Canyon turn the turbines and distort the magnetic field of the earth and send as many kilowatts of power direct to as many stages of amplification as you care to put on the otherside of that precision keyfield which is your guitar. You can have as much power as you care to pay for. Poetry has been fused to power and the strength of the muse has been added to or mutliplied by the power of Hoover Dam. There is no better lyric poetry than modern lyrics in contemporary popular music. The greatest poets of this age are writing songs because the rewards are too great not to. A nickel a band on a million seller is a greater chunk of money than most poets of former generations ever saw in a lifetime. The presence is the immediacy, the here and now, and the ability to reproduce, not only the simular of the music but nine nines of reality, with every fraction of sound intact and distortion free. The key is in the feeling. That’s what the music does–it programs feeling. Harvey Miller said this when he said thet kids use the music to communicate with each other. Not the words or the ideas, that of course, but the feeling. It takes a lot of young girls calling the radio station to push a song on the play list into the top ten. There must be something in the song to motivate such a large number of persons to place a sufficient number of calls to make this thing happen. This something is the feeling produced by the song. Record executives, promoters, A & R men, DJs all have a saying, “If it has it in the grooves, it’ll be a hit.” That “it” in the grooves is the generation of feeling which is sought by the listener. Particular feelings arise in life; like all other similar vectors they will sum and the radio will feed those feelings which emerge as part of the common whole back into the listening populace, in phase which will produce an emotional resonance which is a breakout hit. Plato said it well in Book III of the Republic, “. . . Musical training is a more potent instrument than any other because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward pieces of the soul on which they mightily fasten, imparting grace…”

“The Ghetto Gourmet began as an original underground dining experience in a basement apartment in Oakland, California. The Townsend brothers, Joe the chef and Jeremy the poet, cultivated a loyal following literally from the ground up. Every Monday night, 15-30 strangers gathered on their living room floor for a chance to make new friends and enjoy deliciously creative cuisine.

“What started out as an experiment has turned into a movement. Influenced by traditional salons and a growing communal dining trend, The Ghetto Gourmet is excited to offer a range of services producing and directing private dinner parties and supperclub events.

“The Ghetto Gourmet is proud and grateful to be a product of the vibrant East Bay underground community, and we welcome your support and assistance. And any chefs, artists or performers interested in collaboration are encouraged to get in touch.

“Hold on to your fork…”

COURTESY Y. KHAN!

The Guardian

What Sven could learn from me

Mark E Smith
Monday June 5, 2006

Running the national football team is very much like running my group, the Fall. As a manager, you’ve got to maintain a certain detachment from your players, and it’s the same with my musicians. When we’re on tour, I sit at the back of the bus. We’re friendly but the secret of it is never get too ally-pally. You can have a pint or two together now and again but you don’t want to be going round their houses.

You don’t want people to get too comfortable, because if they do, there’s no way they’ll be on top of their game. It’s not a job for life. I see the Fall being like a football team with a two- or three-year cycle. There’s always going to be a period where I’ll need a new centre-forward.

I always like to keep a strong subs’ bench of people who can step into the breach, cos you never know when you might need them in an emergency. [Smith is currently touring the US with pickup musicians, after a guitarist, drummer and bassist became the latest of around 50 “ex-players” who have sadly and suddenly departed from the Fall.]

You want a manager that’s hard but not stupid. I met Manchester City manager Stuart Pearce on the transfer bus on the way to Amsterdam. He’s a hard case. Some lads were going up to say hello, but he had this air of “That’s all you’re gonna get”. I like Pearce but I couldn’t stand Kevin Keegan. I saw him on telly once when City were playing Newcastle and he went up to the Newcastle fans, shaking their hands. The City players were looking at him, appalled. No surprise he never won a game against Newcastle or Liverpool.

The way the England team is now is ridiculous. A team of superstars is like a supergroup. It’s like picking the best guitarist in Britain, the best drummer and the best singer, and expecting them to produce something that isn’t prog-rock mush. It doesn’t work: this England team will never work at the highest level. I know that. See, Sir Alf Ramsey [who managed England’s 1966 World Cup win] – people never liked him for it, but he’d always have the full-backs from the second division. He took players and moulded them, like I do with musicians. Gordon Banks, the goalkeeper, was from Stoke City, who were bottom of the first division. They’d conceded more goals that World Cup season than anybody else. But it works. You want a goalie who gets bloody shot at every week! You don’t want the Arsenal or Spurs goalie or whoever in any national team, because he’s never got anything to do! He might pull off the occasional beautiful save, but he’s never gonna be any good against a gang of Poles or whoever who know full well they’re going to face the firing squad if they don’t score.

Mind you, I shouldn’t be talking about England. My wife’s Greek, and when Greece won their first game in the [2004] European championships, I said, “Put a bet on now.” We didn’t put the bet on, but I know these things. Two of my mates put £500 on at 250-1. When Greece won the tournament the wife went crazy, absolutely mad. We even ran a Greek flag up in the front garden. We were very popular that week”

? Mark E Smith was talking to Dave Simpson.

Courtesy P. Relic!