For anyone who's seen this story (about the Lakota Indians withdrawing from their treaties with the U.S. and becoming a totally sovereign nation) and is wondering how it will affect the Pretty Bird Woman House, comments at this post from DailyKos suggest that the move isn't necessarily legal, and that the media is misrepresenting the issue. So I ( Read more... )

So, I have spent the past two weeks in a suppressed panic over finals -- reading! test taking! how the hell do I draw an Art Nouveau Ham and Cheese Souffle (don't ask) -- and I haven't had any time to pass on links, but I'm making time for this one.

Pretty Bird Woman House is a women's shelter on a Lakota Sioux reservation in South Dakota, and it ( Read more... )

Five stories from various sources, reprinted at PsycPORT, talk about the influx of PTSD and other mental disorders in returning Iraq veterans and the VA's -- let's be polite -- "difficulties" in treating them.

- from the St. Louis Post Dispatch: Thousands of U.S. soldiers in Iraq - as many as 10 a day - are being discharged by the military for ( Read more... )

This. Just. Yes. If you have a minute, read it please.I talked before about my opinions re: Virginia Tech, how I thought Seung-Hui Cho was being demonized by the media calling him weird and disturbed, by quoting people who said they never really liked him, something about him just seemed off, etc. I'm sure you saw as much of it as I did. And ( Read more... )

- Stuff like this is exactly why habeus corpus is an important part of the justice system. If one person isn't innocent until proven guilty, then no one is truly proven guilty at all. And with Bush pressing for a ratification and expansion of his spy law, the people's trust in the government is wearing pretty thin. It's almost possible now for ( Read more... )

- I'm not surprised that LJ finally caved to the extremely sketchy and vague laws about child pornography and the definition of obscenity. Trolls have been waving those around for YEARS -- fandom-scruples is the only one whose name I can remember now, but I know there have been others -- and honestly, all I can think is what took them so long?- I'm going to ( Read more... )