Navy Sailors Distrust Commanders, Fear Crippling Political Correctness

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Photo Credit: US NavyNavy sailors harbor “widespread mistrust” in the admirals who command them, complaining of poor leadership and a disciplinary environment that tolerates absolutely no mistakes, says a survey of the fleet.

The disgruntlement runs deepest in the officer corps, where scores of commanders have been relieved of duty in recent years.

“Senior leadership should stop proactively highlighting the reliefs for cause of commanding officers, command master chiefs, and other senior enlisted advisors,” said the report “2014 Navy Retention Study.” “What was originally intended to demonstrate accountability to the public has, instead, resulted in a significant breach of trust with our sailors and resulting in an almost ‘reality TV’ mentality.”

The independent survey was released amid complaints by some aviators about excessive political correctness as the military seeks to stamp out sexual harassment and misconduct in an increasingly gender-integrated Navy.

“Most troubling is the perception sailors hold of senior leadership,” the report says under the heading “Widespread Distrust of Senior Leadership.”

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U.S. Troops in Africa May Come in Contact with Ebola Patients

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By AFP.

US troops deployed to West Africa to fight the Ebola outbreak could stay up to a year, depending on how quickly the virus can be contained, a top general said Tuesday.

The head of the US military’s Africa Command, General David Rodriguez, also rejected criticism that the American response to the crisis has been too slow, saying the troop deployment had to be designed to take into account Liberia’s limited infrastructure.

About 350 US troops have arrived in Liberia and Senegal so far as part of a 3,200-strong force due to help with logistical support, training for health workers and mobile test labs.

Asked how long American troops would remain in the region, Rodriguez told reporters: “I’m sure it’ll be about a year … at this point, but that’s just a guess.”

He said that “we’ll have to play that by ear” and see how fast transmission rates decline.

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US military personnel on Ebola mission to handle blood samples

By Justin Fishel.

The U.S. military mission to combat Ebola in West Africa is facing questions about the serious health risks American troops will encounter in heading to the epicenter of the deadly outbreak.

According to officials, a small group of trained military medical technicians on the ground will not be required to make direct contact with patients infected with the Ebola virus. However, they will have to handle infected blood samples, which Pentagon officials acknowledged Tuesday could be just as dangerous, if not more.

Already, three mobile-testing labs, staffed by three or four technicians each, have been deployed in Liberia as part of Operation United Assistance, the U.S. military’s effort to combat the Ebola virus. Four more labs have been requested.

Pentagon officials say the servicemembers on these small teams are the only individuals who will be intentionally handling any raw material that could be infected.

Gen. David Rodriguez, the head of U.S. Africa Command, told Pentagon reporters on Tuesday that these teams are trained to take all the necessary precautions.

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Ebola outbreak: Spread of deadly disease across Europe is ‘unavoidable’, warns WHO chief

By James Rush.

The spread of Ebola across Europe is “quite unavoidable”, the World Health Organisation has warned as four people were in hospital after a Spanish nurse became the first person known to have contracted the virus outside Africa.

WHO European director Zsuzsanna Jakab has said while more cases will spread in Europe, the continent should be well prepared to control the disease.

Health officials in Spain today said four people – the nurse, her husband and two others – were being monitored in hospital in a bid to stem the spread of the virus.

“Such imported cases and similar events as have happened in Spain will happen also in the future, most likely,” Ms Jakab told Reuters.

“It is quite unavoidable … that such incidents will happen in the future because of the extensive travel both from Europe to the affected countries and the other way around,” she said.

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Leon Panetta Speaks About Benghazi, Reveals Something He Said He Knew From the ‘Very Beginning’ (+video)

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Photo Credit: Cliff OwenBy Oliver Darcy.

Former CIA director Leon Panetta said Tuesday that he knew from the “very beginning” that Benghazi was a “terrorist attack on our compound.”

Speaking with MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell about his new book, Panetta was reacting to a question about why immediately following the assault he didn’t think attribute it to a spontaneous demonstration like General David Petraeus.

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Panetta: Obama Told Benghazi Was Terrorist Attack

By Greg Richter.

Former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta says he immediately told President Barack Obama that the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya, was carried out by terrorists.

Panetta is on a whirlwind of media interviews to promote his new book, “Worthy Fights,” which contains several criticisms of the president.

Panetta appeared Tuesday on Fox News Channel’s “The O’Reilly Factor” during which host Bill O’Reilly played a clip from his Feb. 2 interview with Obama. In that interview, Obama would not admit that Panetta and Joint Chiefs Chairman Martin Dempsey told him the Benghazi attacks involved terrorists.

Panetta told O’Reilly a different version: “We told the president that there’s an attack that’s going on, that terrorists are involved in the attack, and, as a result, we have to respond to it.”

Four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens, were killed in the attack.

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Commission Says Christian Business Owners Should Leave Religion at Home

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Photo Credit: TownHallThe Human Rights Commission in Lexington, Kentucky has a chilling message for Christian business owners who refuse service to LGBT organizations: leave your religion at home.

“It would be safe to do so, yes,” Executive Director Raymond Sexton told me. “Or in this case you can find yourself two years down the road and you’re still involved in a legal battle because you did not do so.”

On Tuesday, a Lexington Human Rights Commission hearing examiner issued a recommended ruling that the owner of a T-shirt company violated a local ordinance against sexual-orientation discrimination. You can read the ruling by clicking here.

“It was a landmark decision,” Sexton said. “This is a very important ruling for us.”

The examiner concluded that Blaine Adamson of Hands On Originals broke the law in 2012 by declining to print shirts promoting the Lexington Pride Festival. The Gay and Lesbian Services Organization subsequently filed a complaint.

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Wal-Mart Cuts Health Benefits for 30,000 Part-Time Workers

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Photo Credit: Edgard Garrido / Reuters / LandovWal-Mart Stores Inc. plans to eliminate health insurance coverage for some of its part-time U.S. employees in a move aimed at controlling rising health care costs of the nation’s largest private employer.

Starting Jan. 1, Wal-Mart told The Associated Press that it will no longer offer health insurance to employees who work less than an average of 30 hours a week. The move, which would affect 30,000 employees, follows similar decisions by Target, Home Depot and others to eliminate health insurance benefits for part-time employees.

“We had to make some tough decisions,” Sally Wellborn, Wal-Mart’s senior vice president of benefits, told The Associated Press.

Wellborn says the company will use a third-party organization to help part-time workers find insurance alternatives: “We are trying to balance the needs of (workers) as well as the costs of (workers) as well as the cost to Wal-Mart.”

The announcement comes after Wal-Mart said far more U.S. employees and their families are enrolling in its health care plans than it had expected following rollout of the Affordable Care Act. Wal-Mart, which employs about 1.4 million full- and part-time U.S. workers, says about 1.2 million Wal-Mart workers and family members combined now participate in its health care plan.

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Sen. Ted Cruz Plans Constitutional Amendment to Protect State Marriage Laws

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Photo Credit: American Life LeagueIn the wake of the United States Supreme Court’s refusal to review five court cases in which lower courts overturned individual states’ marriage protection laws, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, R-TX, slammed the court for “abdicating its duty to uphold the Constitution” and announced his plan to introduce a Constitutional amendment preventing federal legislators and judges from interfering with state-level laws defining marriage.

“The fact that the Supreme Court Justices, without providing any explanation whatsoever, have permitted lower courts to strike down so many state marriage laws is astonishing,” he said.

“This is judicial activism at its worst,” Cruz added. “The Constitution entrusts state legislatures, elected by the People, to define marriage consistent with the values and mores of their citizens. Unelected judges should not be imposing their policy preferences to subvert the considered judgments of democratically elected legislatures.”

In the absence of a Supreme Court ruling about the legality of marriage protection laws, which generally define marriage as a union between one man and one woman, the nation has rapidly become a patchwork landscape of differing definitions of what it means to be “married.”

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California Med School to Offer First Online Abortion Course

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Photo Credit: LifeSiteNewsFor thousands of years, doctors said they would “do no harm” in the Hippocratic Oath but starting October 13, the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) will launch the first online course to instruct medical students to cause harm to the most innocent of human beings — the unborn.

“‘Abortion: Quality care and public health implications’ is the first online course to disseminate high quality, compassionate abortion education around the world,” said UCSF in a public statement provided to LifeSiteNews. “This course seeks to engage learners around the world in a thoughtful, insightful and objective discussion on abortion education and best practices, thereby improving maternal health around the globe.”

According to the statement, “this free course will provide expert teaching on abortion from faculty at UCSF, the Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health, and Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health” for a period of six weeks. During that time, “faculty and learners will explore abortion from clinical, public health, and sociological perspectives.”

However, the course syllabus indicates the instruction will not solely focus on the medical field. In Week 1, students will learn about the “history of abortion and abortion stigma,” while in Week 3 “legislative and policy obstacles to abortion access” will be examined. Week 5 will exclusively focus on “overcoming obstacles to abortion care.”

According to Donna Harrison, M.D., executive director of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, “a major concern with this online abortion education is how this course will be used.”

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Nebraska School Tells Teachers To Avoid ‘Gendered Expressions’

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Photo Credit: Daily CallerNebraska Watchdog has uncovered training documents given to middle school teachers in Lincoln, Neb., telling them not to use “gendered expressions” and to call out “binary models of gender” when they see them.

“Avoid asking kids to line up as boys or girls or separating them by gender,” begins a document called “12 easy steps on the way to gender inclusiveness.”

“Instead, use things like ‘odd and even birth date,’ or ‘Which would you choose: skateboards or bikes/milk or juice/dogs or cats/summer or winter/talking or listening.’ … Always ask yourself, ’Will this configuration create a gendered space?’”

“Don’t use phrases such as ‘boys & girls,’ ‘you guys,’ ‘ladies and gentlemen,’ and similarly gendered expressions to get kids’ attention,” it continues. “Provide an opportunity for every student to identify a preferred name or pronoun. … When you find it necessary to reference gender, say ‘Boy, girl, both or neither.’ When asked why, use this as a teachable moment. Emphasize to students that your classroom recognizes and celebrates the gender diversity of all students.”

Lincoln Public Schools Superintendent Steve Joel defended the materials last week, and told local radio host Kevin Thomas that “our position, ours is inclusiveness. … We know that there’s a correlation between bullying and gender, as well as sexual preference, and so you know, as a school district, we’re just trying to provide information for our folks to understand that a little bit better, and I think that’s what they’ve done, and I think they’re doing a great job with it.”

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CDC: Making Subsidized Housing Smoke-Free Could Save $500M Yearly

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Photo Credit: APThe Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that almost $500 million could be saved a year if smoking was banned in subsidized housing.

In a press release on its website, the CDC said an estimated $497 million in health care and housing-related costs could be saved if smoking was prohibited in all government subsidized housing, including public housing.

The study is considered to be the first of its kind to estimate the annual cost savings of banning smoking in subsidized housing in each state.

Almost 80 million Americans live in multi-unit housing, of which nearly 7 million multi-unit housing residents live in government subsidized housing, including 2 million in public housing.

Residents in these units are susceptible to second-hand smoke that gets into the ventilation systems and windows and spreads into units where non-smokers live. This is of particular concern among children, the elderly, and the disabled.

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White House Bashes Netanyahu for Saying Administration Ignores American Values

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Photo Credit: APThe Obama White House bashed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday for saying that the Obama Administration ignores American values when it criticizes Jews building in Jerusalem.

Appearing on Face the Nation on Sunday, Netanyahu correctly pointed out that preventing Jews from building in East Jerusalem so that the area would be Judenrein is against the American tradition of pluralism. He also pointed out that the apartments were legally bought by Jews, adding, “What we are being criticized for is that some Jewish residents of Jerusalem bought apartments, legally, from Arabs in a predominantly Arab neighborhood and this is seen as a terrible thing… If somewhere in America someone said Jews cannot buy apartments here, there would be an uproar. I do not accept this.”

White House spokesman Josh Earnest danced around Netanyahu’s assertions, claiming that other administrations have agreed with the Obama White House’s stance. “It did seem odd for him to try to defend the actions of his government by saying our response did not reflect American values,” Earnest said…

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