Soldier Sues U.S. Military Over Extended Service

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - A California Army National Guard sergeant filed a lawsuit on Tuesday asserting that the government can not prevent reservists from leaving the military when their enlistment periods end.

The suit against Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other military officials names the plaintiff only as John Doe. It says he served with distinction in the Marine Corps and Army for nine years on active duty and three years as a reservist.

'This lawsuit seeks to stop the forced retention of men and women who have fulfilled their service obligations,' said attorney Michael Sorgen. 'When their period of enlistment ends, they should be entitled to return to their families.

Yahoo! News - Explorers Find Ancient City in Remote Peru Jungle

LIMA, Peru (Reuters) - An ancient walled city complex inhabited some 1,300 years ago by a culture later conquered by the Incas has been discovered deep in Peru's Amazon jungle, explorers said on Tuesday.

U.S. and Peruvian explorers uncovered the city, which may have been home to up to 10,000 people, after a month trekking in Peru's northern rain forest and following up on years of investigation about a possible lost metropolis in the region.

The stone city, made up of five citadels at 9,186 feet above sea level, stretches over around 39 square miles and contains walls covered in carvings and figure paintings, exploration leader Sean Savoy told Reuters.

'It is a tremendous city ... containing areas with stone etchings and 10-meter (33-foot) high walls,' said Savoy, who had to hack through trees and thick foliage to finally reach the site on Aug. 15.

Covered in matted tree branches and interspersed with lakes and waterfalls, the settlement sites also contain well-preserved graveyards with mummies with teeth 'in almost perfect condition,' Savoy said.

Replete with stone agricultural terraces and water canals, the city complex is thought to have been home to the little-known Chachapoyas culture.

According to early accounts by Spanish conquistadors who arrived in Peru in the early 1500s, the Chachapoyas were a fair-skinned warrior tribe famous for their tall stature. Today they are known for the giant burial coffins sculpted into human figures found in the northern jungle region.

Savoy said his team also found an Inca settlement within the city complex that could prove theories the Chachapoyas were conquered by the Incas, who ruled an area stretching from Ecuador to northern Chile between 1300 and 1500.

Savoy, a Peruvian-American, accompanied on the expedition by his U.S. father, Gene Savoy, named the site Gran Saposoa after the nearby village Saposoa and his team has already mapped the area with preliminary drawings.

The discovery is the third notable ruin Gene Savoy has helped uncover in Peru. In 1964, Savoy found the site of the Incas' last refuge in the Cuzco region of southern Peru. A year later he took part in the discovery of the sacred city of Gran Pajaten in northern Peru.

American Hiram Bingham made Peru's most famous archeological discovery -- the fabled Inca ruins of Machu Picchu near Cuzco -- in 1911. Machu Picchu today attracts almost half a million tourists every year and is South America's best known archeological site."

OSHA Made More Business-Friendly

Bush Forces a Shift In Regulatory Thrust

Tuberculosis had sneaked up again, reappearing with alarming frequency across the United States. The government began writing rules to protect 5 million people whose jobs put them in special danger. Hospitals and homeless shelters, prisons and drug treatment centers -- all would be required to test their employees for TB, hand out breathing masks and quarantine those with the disease. These steps, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration predicted, could prevent 25,000 infections a year and 135 deaths.

By the time President Bush moved into the White House, the tuberculosis rules, first envisioned in 1993, were nearly complete. But the new administration did nothing on the issue for the next three years.

Assistant Secretary of Labor John L. Henshaw said "writing another standard" is not the answer to occupational safety. (Gerald Martineau -- The Washington Post)

Then, on the last day of 2003, in an action so obscure it was not mentioned in any major newspaper in the country, the administration canceled the rules. Voluntary measures, federal officials said, were effective enough to make regulation unnecessary.

The demise of the decade-old plan of defense against tuberculosis reflects the way OSHA has altered its regulatory mission to embrace a more business-friendly posture. In the past 3 1/2 years, OSHA, the branch of the Labor Department in charge of workers' well-being, has eliminated nearly five times as many pending standards as it has completed. It has not started any major new health or safety rules, setting Bush apart from the previous three presidents, including Ronald Reagan

DICK CHENEY: AS ILLITERATE AS HIS BOSS

On Josh Benson's blog

From CNN.com:

Drawing derisive chuckles from the crowd, Vice President Dick Cheney Thursday blasted Sen. John Kerry for a remark the Democratic presidential candidate made last week about fighting a "more sensitive war on terror" if elected. "America has been in too many wars for any of our wishes, but not a one of them was won by being sensitive," Cheney said.

From Funk & Wagnalls Standard Desk Dictionary, Deluxe Edition (the only one on my desk):

sen·si·tive (sen'si-tiv)
adj.

2. Reacting readily to external agents or forces.

Nah, we wouldn't want that.