Pioneering Montford Point Marines are honored in Florida

Pioneering Montford Point Marines are honored in Florida
By Matt Soergel
The Florida Times-Union, Jacksonville
Published: May 3, 2013

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Growing up, Leroy Jones Jr.’s five children couldn’t ever forget their father had been a Marine. There was his strictness, his preaching about the work ethic, about staying in shape, about putting your family first.

Then there was his insistence on getting up early — really early — in the morning. “Don’t let the sun bore a hole in you,” he’d say, dragging them out of bed.

“You could always tell he was a Marine,” said his son Oscar, 56.

“Everything a Marine’s got, he’s got,” said his oldest son, Carl, 58.

On Thursday afternoon, Leroy Jones Jr. got the highest civilian honor that the country gives, as he and fellow Marine Vincent Calhoun, 87, were awarded Congressional Gold Medals in a ceremony at Jacksonville City Hall.
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Last year I was able to interview one of these veterans. Charles O. Foreman.

Cemeteries don't want to bury Boston bomber

I think his body should be put in the ground as soon as possible. Instead of praying for him, they should offer prayers for his victims and their families, since his life is over but their lives were forever changed by what he decided to do to them.

The 5 major developments in the Boston Marathon case over the weekend
By Holly Yan
CNN
Mon May 6, 2013

STORY HIGHLIGHTS
A bombing suspect's friend accused of lying to authorities is due in court Monday
Cambridge's city manager says the older bombing suspect can't be buried there
Officials will announce a plan on how to distribute roughly $28 million in compensation

2. Cemeteries don't want to bury Tamerlan Tsarnaev
For two weeks, no one claimed the body of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the elder bombing suspect who died the night he and his brother led police on a wild chase.

Now, the funeral home holding his remains is struggling to find a place to bury him.

The brothers' parents in Dagestan have said they will not fly his body back to Russia for burial, spokeswoman Heda Saratova said.

And Cambridge City Manager Robert W. Healy said he would not allow Tsarnaev to be buried in the city if requested by the funeral director or Tsarnaev's family.

"The difficult and stressful efforts of the citizens of the City of Cambridge to return to a peaceful life would be adversely impacted by the turmoil, protests, and widespread media presence at such an interment," Healy said in a statement Sunday.

Explaining his decision, he cited an excerpt from Massachusetts state law saying that "it shall be the duty of the city manager to act as chief conservator of the peace within the city."

"I have determined that it is not in the best interest of 'peace within the city' to execute a cemetery deed for a plot within the Cambridge Cemetery for the body of Tamerlan Tsarnaev," Healy said. Tsarnaev's body now lies at Graham Putnam & Mahoney Funeral Parlors in Worcester, west of Boston.

Peter Stefan, owner of the funeral home, said three cemeteries he's contacted said they feared reprisals. If he can't find a gravesite, Stefan said he plans to ask the government to find one.

The funeral home owner said everyone deserves to be buried.

"This is what we do in a civilized society, regardless of the circumstances," he said.
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The Weight Of Drone Warfare

The Hidden Cost Of The Drone Program
By NPR STAFF

A faint light has begun to shine in recent weeks on the secretive U.S. program of drone strikes and targeted killings.

Members of Congress are making speeches and statements, writing letters to the White House and holding hearings on Capitol Hill. We know the administration is now reviewing some aspects of the program.

The story of the drone program starts after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. When Congress authorized the president to use necessary force against suspected militants, drone strikes on these suspects slowly increased in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen.

The Weight Of Drone Warfare

Although the drones that carry out these targeted killings are called "unmanned vehicles," there's always someone at the controls.

As a former sensor operator for the U.S. Air Force Predator program, 27-year-old Brandon Bryant was one of the people sitting in the pilot's seat.

Bryant originally joined the military to pay off college debt. In 2006 he found himself wearing a flight suit, sitting in a kind of trailer in Las Vegas. He was surrounded by monitors and the low hum of computers and servers.

On his very first sortie as a pilot, Bryant watched from the drone's camera as American soldiers got blown up in Afghanistan. There was nothing he could do.

Bryant's "first shot" came later, as he watched a group of insurgents who had been firing on U.S. troops. He was ordered to fire a missile at a second group of armed men standing away from the others.

"The missile hits, and after the smoke clears there's a crater there and you can see body parts from the people," Bryant says. "[A] guy that was running from the rear to front, his left leg had been taken off above the knee, and I watched him bleed out."
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Petty Officer 1st Class Benny Flores remembers fallen during Silver Star ceremony

GuamGuam News VIDEO:
Benny Flores- “I Really, Truly, Wish We Had All Come Back”

Guam- Naval Petty Officer 1st Class Benny Flores was awarded the Silver Star Medal for his heroic actions during his deployment to southwest Afghanistan last year. Despite being injured, Flores provided life saving medical care to wounded Marines and Afghan Uniform Police.

Surrounded by his family and colleagues, Flores was given the military's third highest award for valor at Camp Pendleton, California this past Saturday, May 4 (Guam time).

The seasoned Navy Corpsman, who is originally from Talofofo, received the Silver Star for medical support he provided during an enemy attack in Afghanistan that occurred on April 28, 2012. He served as a field service medical technician during combat operations.
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National Institute of Mental Health Takes on the DSM

UPDATE
Mental Health Researchers Reject Psychiatry’s New Diagnostic ‘Bible’
TIME
By Maia Szalavitz
May 07, 2013

Just weeks before psychiatry’s new diagnostic “bible”—the DSM 5— is set to be released, the world’s major funder of mental health research has announced that it will not use the new diagnostic system to guide its scientific program, a change some observers have called “a cataclysm” and “potentially seismic.” Dr. Thomas Insel, the director of the National Institute on Mental Health, said in a blog post last week that “NIMH will be re-orienting its research away from DSM categories.”

The change will not immediately affect patients. But in the long run, it could completely redefine mental health conditions and developmental disorders. All of the current categories — from autism to schizophrenia — could be replaced by genetic, biochemical or brain-network labeled classifications. Psychiatrists, who are already reeling from the conflict-filled birth of the fifth edition of the Diagnostical and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, are feeling whipsawed.

“I look at the data and I’m concerned,” says Insel. “I don’t see a reduction in the rate of suicide or prevalence of mental illness or any measure of morbidity. I see it in other areas of medicine and I don’t see it for mental illness. That was the basis for my comment that people with mental illness deserve better.” Adds Hollander, “There’s been a huge gap between some of our basic science information and our ability to develop new treatments because those don’t necessarily map onto DSM diagnoses.”
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But will they also look at the different types of PTSD based on cause of the trauma? There is a huge difference between the type of PTSD combat veterans and law enforcement end up with from what someone surviving a natural disaster. A different type of PTSD that firefighters and emergency responders end up with as well.

National Institute of Mental Health Takes on the DSM
By LINDA HATCH, PHD


A week ago the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) published its intention to work towards and devote research funding to a new system for mental health diagnoses as an alternative to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) published by the American Psychiatric Association. The various incarnations of the DSM have been dubbed the “gold standard” of diagnostic criteria for mental disorders and have provided a common framework for practitioners, researchers and insurers to relate to.

The trouble is that the DSM has never been any good as a basis for understanding and treating mental disorders because it is built, as the NIMH announcement says, out of collections of symptoms rather than identifiable or understandable disorders.
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