Ted's Soapbox 2.0

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I was out of town for the past few days and I decided not to post anything and attempt to enjoy my brief vacation. It wasn’t very enjoyable. It was nice to see my family but other than that, it rained almost everyday and with the situation at home that one of Shane’s friends started has really torn our family apart.

Dawnell and I have realised that we probably will never have more than one child and when all is finished I really doubt we will continue to be foster parents. It is just to heart beaking.

The weather fools here are saying we may have severe storms this evening and tonight. Hopefully Shane is home cutting the grass like I asked him to or I will never get it cut with all the rain coming in.

I only have one day off this weekend as we move into a new month and my days off change again.

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OLDEST NAVY SHIP COMES HOME FOR GOOD

The oldest active ship in the U.S. Navy, the USS Kitty Hawk aircraft carrier, made its final departure from Japan on Wednesday to be decommissioned after nearly half a century of service.

The Kitty Hawk, with sailors lining its decks, pulled away from Yokosuka port just south of Tokyo to the cheers of hundreds of schoolchildren and the sounds of brass bands.

The Kitty Hawk, the last conventionally powered aircraft carrier in the Navy, is to be replaced later this summer by the USS George Washington, a nuclear-powered carrier.

After leaving Japan, the Kitty Hawk will make a stop at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii and then travel on to the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Bremerton, Washington, to be decommissioned.

The ship, commissioned in 1961 and the only forward-deployed aircraft carrier in the Navy, was assigned to Japan in 1998. It has since made 20 deployments in the western Pacific and participated in Operation Enduring Freedom in Iraq.

She was the oldest active ship with the longest total period of active service in the Navy.

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SUICIDES UP IN ARMY

The number of Army suicides increased again last year, Pentagon officials said Thursday.

The suicides happened during the most violent year yet in both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Two defense officials said 108 troops committed suicide in 2007, six more than the previous year.

About a quarter of the deaths occurred in Iraq.

The overall toll was the highest in many years, and it was unclear when, if ever, it was previously that high. Immediately available Army records go back only to 1990 and the figure then was lower — at 102 — for that year as well as 1991.

The 108 confirmed deaths in 2007 among active duty soldiers and National Guard and Reserve troops that had been activated was lower than previously feared. Preliminary figures released in January showed as many as 121 troops might have killed themselves, but a number of the deaths were still being investigated then and have since been attributed to other causes, the officials said.

Suicides have been rising during the five-year-old war in Iraq and nearly seven years of war in Afghanistan.

In other Military News:

More U.S. troops also died overall in hostilities in 2007 than in any of the previous years in Iraq and Afghanistan. Overall violence increased in Afghanistan with a Taliban resurgence and overall deaths increased in Iraq, even as violence there declined in the second half of the year.

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GREATEST HUMAN RIGHTS CRIMES ON EARTH

During the press briefing, Former President Carter expressed his support for Israel as a country, but criticised its domestic and foreign policy.

“One of the greatest human rights crimes on earth is the starvation and imprisonment of 1.6m Palestinians,” he said.

The former US president cited statistics which he said showed the nutritional intake of some Palestinian children was below that of children in Sub-Saharan Africa, as well as saying the European position on Israel could be best described as “supine”.

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THE LEANING TOWER OF PISA – NOT!

Italy’s famous leaning tower of Pisa has stopped moving for the first time in its 800-year history, engineers who have worked to stabilise it say.

The man in charge of the team monitoring the 26m euros (£20m; $40m) project says the tower should remain stable for at least another 200 years.

It took the team more than 10 years to stabilise the tower.

The work involved extracting some 70 tonnes of earth from the northern side to encourage the tower to right itself.

The tower continued to move towards a more upright position when the work finished.

Now, though – seven years later and 48cm (19in) straighter – hi-tech monitors embedded in the soil beneath its foundations and in the tower itself show that it has stopped moving completely.

Even while it was being built, in the late 12th Century, workers noticed that it was starting to tilt. Their attempts to compensate resulted in the completed tower being very slightly bent.

As if to underline the success of the project, the leaning tower recently lost its title as the world’s wonkiest piece of architecture to the steeple of a small church in Germany.

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“I will have a foreign-handed foreign policy.”

George W. Bush
September 27, 2000
Comment made in Redwood, California during presidential campaign.

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236 Days Left
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Number of Operations Iraq Freedom and Enduring
Freedom casualties as confirmed by U.S. Central
Command: 4573

Its more than just a number