Five ADF personnel, including army psychologist Paul Morgan, were outed on a Facebook page in 2010 for making a “filthy lifestyle decision.”

Former soldier Marcus Andrew Georgiou created the page to expose serving and past members of the ADF. The page had links to violent and pornographic YouTube video clips showing homosexuals being executed.

Mr Georgiou avoided jail after a Sydney magistrate found he was suffering from post-traumatic stress after seeing a fellow soldier fall to his death during a peacekeeping mission in the Solomon Islands.

Victims of the Facebook page are outraged that the army merely placed a note on the files of 31 serving members who accessed the material.

“They’ve been given less than a slap on the wrist,” said lawyer John Davey, who is pursuing legal action against the army on behalf of the Facebook victims.

He said his clients believed the treatment of their complaint “is symptomatic of indifference to gay hate language in the army. After two years they have lost confidence in the army to take this seriously.”

At the same time, Defence Minister Stephen Smith has confirmed that “a small number of allegations of assault against gay or lesbian personnel” are included in a report on complaints of abuse in the Australian Defence Force.

(Source: The Age)

In 1965 when John Lauber, who was a year below Mr Romney at the $54,000 a year Cranbrook School, came back from Spring Break with his hair dyed blond and styled so it was draped over one eye.

According to the Washington Post, Mr Romney would not let it go and told his friend Matthew Friedemann “He can’t look like that. That’s wrong. Just look at him!”

A few days later Mr Romney assembled a group which found Mr Lauber, tackled him to the floor and held him down whilst Mr Romney shaved his head.

When it was completed, the crowd cheered Romney as he walked out of the room.

The incident was recalled by five former Cranbrook pupils including Thomas Buford, a retired prosecutor, who helped hold Mr Lauber down.

He said “It happened very quickly, and to this day it troubles me. What a senseless, stupid, idiotic thing to do.”

Phillip Maxwell, who is now a lawyer, added “It was a hack job. It was vicious.”

Mr Friedemann, a dentist, also felt bad for not stopping it happening and admitted Mr Lauber was “easy pickins.”

Decades later Mr Lauber ran into one of Romney’s friends who helped hold him down and told him “It was horrible. It’s something I have thought about a lot since then.”

Former students at the school said Mr Romney had a habit of interrupting fellow pupil Gary Hummel, a closeted homosexual at the time, by shouting “Atta girl!”

According to the Washington Post he also behaved in a ‘sour’ fashion towards scholarship student Lou Vierling when he found he he was from a poor area of Detroit.

(Source: Daily Mail [UK])

The voluntary course at the Joint Forces Staff College in Virginia stated that international laws protecting civilians in armed conflicts, such as the Geneva Conventions, were “no longer relevant”.

That left open the option, the instructor continued, of applying “the historical precedents of Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki” and bringing about “Mecca and Medina destruction.”

The officer in charge of the class, Lt Col Matthew Dooley, has been suspended from teaching but has kept his job at the college.

(Source: Hope Not Hate [UK])

Islam Karimov is the former First Secretary of the Communist Party of Uzbekistan, and its ruler since independence in 1991.

Activists estimate tens or even hundreds of thousands of women were sterilised secretly when they went into the hospital for a routine procedure or to give birth – waking up with no idea that their uterus had just been removed.

One Uzbek gynecologist admitted, ‘Every doctor is told…how many women are to be sterilised … my quota is four women a month.”.

The Karimov regime has been paid millions of dollars by the US government for military transport across the country, which borders Afghanistan.

(Source: avaaz.org, wikipedia)

Bob Deards responded to a spill of chemical and radioactive material on the Pacific Highway on the state’s mid-North coast in 1980.

He says he was told to handle leaking barrels of radioactive material.

He says he fell ill while still on the scene, and “I had almost two years off work as a result of that, massive weight loss, vomiting, constant headache for nearly three years.”

His wife, who was pregnant at the time, had an abortion after being advised that his exposure to meant that the child was likely to be born with deformities.

Mr Deards said that “support was very limited. It was all a bit too hard for everybody to get too involved in. It was also very political. We were told to just shut our mouths and not talk to anybody and just take some time off work.”

(Source: ABC News website)

CORRECTION: This story originally stated that toluene was the active ingredient in Agent Orange. This was the ABC’s error.

Premier Ted Baillieu’s office confirmed the government had referred alleged “inappropriate and corrupt behaviour” in the Independent Broad-based Anti-Corruption Commission to police.

Two senior government workers are accused of trying to rig the security tender process in return for a $20,000 bribe from a private security firm.

IBAC has not yet been launched.

(Source: Herald-Sun)

Police made confidential settlments with four African-born men and one Afghan who said they were beaten, falsely imprisoned or racially abused by officers in Melbourne’s northern and western suburbs.

The financial settlements mean the allegations will never be heard in court.

Police were accused of bashing and threatening to shoot Abdullah Abdi in 2007, when he was 15.

“If you want to fuck around with the police, this is what you get you fucking black cunt,” Abdi alleged he was told. “I’ll fucking shoot you, you black cunt.”

Tamar Hopkins, from the Flemington and Kensington Community Legal Centre which represented the men, said that “these civil claims represent a tiny fraction of the complaints that are made.”

“Excessive, unnecessary force, and indeed racism, is very much a part of everyday policing.”

Ms Hopkins said the cases also demonstrated the failure of the police complaints system, which consistently failed to address allegations of brutality. In an affidavit filed for another case Ms Hopkins says the Office of Police Integrity has only investigated three of the 33 complaints submitted by the legal centre on behalf of clients.

(Source: The Age)

Asma al-Assad is glamorous, young and very chic – the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies.

The 35-year-old first lady’s central mission is to change the mindset of six million Syrians under 18, encourage them to engage in what she calls ‘active citizenship’.

Vogue magazine’s 2011 profile of the wife of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. The article largely avoided mention of the al-Assad’s history of human rights abuses and corruption.

The Catholic Education Service, which acts for Catholic bishops in England and Wales, contacted 385 secondary schools to highlight a letter read in parish churches last month, in which two archbishops told worshippers that Catholics have a “duty to do all we can to ensure that the true meaning of marriage is not lost for future generations”.

The CES also asked schools to draw pupils’ attention to the petition being organised by the Coalition for Marriage.

Britain’s Education Act of 1996 requires political views to be presented in schools in a balanced way.

(Source: The Guardian [UK])

Figures compiled by the ThinkProgress website show that fifty-six percent of domestic terrorist attacks and plots in the U.S. since 1995 have been perpetrated by right-wing extremists, compared to 12 percent by Islamic extremists.

Right-wing extremism has been responsible for the greatest number of terrorist incidents in the U.S. in 13 of the 17 years since the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

The Department of Homeland Security issued a report in 2009 stating that “lone wolves and small terrorist cells embracing violent rightwing extremist ideology are the most dangerous domestic terrorism threat in the United States.”

However they withdrew the report after complaints from conservatives. They then cut the number of analysts studying non-Islamic domestic terrorism. Daryl Johnson, the primary author of the report, soon left his post at DHS and said in July 2011 that DHS has “just one person” dealing with domestic terrorism. The Department has largely been silent on domestic terrorist threats ever since.

(Source: thinkprogress.org)