Could somebody please give me a transcript of one of these?

The Royal de Luxe Parade
in Nantes, celebrating Jules Verne from what I can gather.

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<DaZE> at my school.. the cop from DARE passed around 3 joints to show everyone… and he said “if i dont get all three of these back this schools getting locked down and everyones getting searched till i find it..” and like 30 minutes later when everyone got to see ‘em and they got passed back the cop had 4

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ARLINGTON, Va. — Quoting letters of the fallen from the war in Iraq, President Bush vowed Monday to a Memorial Day audience of military families and soldiers in uniform that the nation will honor its dead by striving for peace and democracy, no matter what the cost. a “We must honor them by completing the mission for which they gave their lives; by defeating the terrorists,” the president told a supportive crowd of several thousand people at Arlington National Cemetery.

Following the ceremony, the Secret Service promptly arrested everyone in attendance taking pictures of the flag draped coffins.

Asked why the US government was hiding the coffins of US servicemen killed in Iraq, an anonymous Pentagon employee replied “it started as an Easter tradition. It caught on. Frankly, dead servicemen are kind’uv a downer. You feel bad, especially if you dodged the draft yourself. The thrill is in making the case for war and making wildly optimistic predictions, not keeping track of the costs of dead and wounded, let alone reading and signing each individual condolence letter.”

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Nederlandse scholieren moeten niks hebben van de Europese grondwet. Bij het landelijke ScholierenReferendum stemde dinsdag 69,9 procent tegen. Dat maakte het Instituut voor Publiek en Politiek (IPP) dinsdag bekend.

Voor het referendum hadden zich 50.000 leerlingen van bijna 150 middelbare scholen in heel Nederland aangemeld. Net niet de helft (47,4 procent) heeft ook daadwerkelijk gestemd. Van de stemmers bracht 13 procent vorige week al zijn stem uit via een stembiljet. De rest deed dat dinsdag via internet.

Het IPP hield de afgelopen jaren vaker een dag voor de officiële verkiezingen de Scholierenverkiezingen. “Bij deze verkiezingen geven scholieren meestal de trend aan die een de dag later bij de echte verkiezingen realiteit blijken” aldus het instituut.

De resultaten van het ScholierenReferendum werden dinsdagmiddag aangeboden aan minister Pechtold voor Bestuurlijke Vernieuwing.

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For more than four years – steadily, seriously, and with the unsentimental rigor for which we love them – civil engineers have been studying the destruction of the World Trade Center towers, sifting the tragedy for its lessons. And it turns out that one of the lessons is: Disobey authority. In a connected world, ordinary people often have access to better information than officials do.
Proof can be found in the 298-page draft report issued in April by the National Institute on Standards and Technology called Occupant Behavior, Egress, and Emergency Communications. (In layman’s terms, that’s who got out of the buildings, how they got out, and why.) It’s an eloquent document, in many ways. The report confirms a chilling fact that was widely covered in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. After both buildings were burning, many calls to 911 resulted in advice to stay put and wait for rescue. Also, occupants of the towers had been trained to use the stairs, not the elevators, in case of evacuation.
Fortunately, this advice was mostly ignored. According to the engineers, use of elevators in the early phase of the evacuation, along with the decision to not stay put, saved roughly 2,500 lives. This disobedience had nothing to do with panic. The report documents how evacuees stopped to help the injured and assist the mobility-impaired, even to give emotional comfort. Not panic but what disaster experts call reasoned flight ruled the day.

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His courage under fire was the stuff of Hollywood, such as once ordering his helicopter pilot to land in the middle of a firefight so he could rescue his wounded men.

As an orphan shining shoes at a military base in Santa Monica, Calif., he lied about his age to join up in the waning days of World War II. That started a career that led him to Korea, where he survived a gunshot to the head, and a whopping four tours of duty in Vietnam, where his daring and swagger became the inspiration for Robert Duvall’s Colonel Kilgore character in the movie ”Apocalypse Now.”

Tomorrow, the US military will lay to rest Colonel David H. Hackworth — among its most decorated heroes of all time — at Arlington National Cemetery.

The top brass is not expected to attend.

Hackworth’s most enduring foe was not the communists he fought. He earned a a chestful of medals, including two Distinguished Service Medals, 10 Silver Stars, eight Bronze Stars, and eight Purple Hearts. His adversary became the US military bureaucracy, which he railed against for 30 years on grounds that it failed to put the troops first. He also opposed military action in Bosnia, Kosovo, and especially Iraq.

But while the military leadership may be absent from the funeral, hundreds — and probably thousands — are expected to attend. The numbers would be larger, except that many who consider him a hero aren’t in Washington. Hackworth became a touchstone for soldiers in the Middle East who questioned the Pentagon but didn’t feel comfortable raising complaints with superiors.

”He had an incredible communication line to the barracks and the trenches,” said Roger Charles, president of Soldiers for the Truth, Hackworth’s organization, which has a website that averages about 1 million hits a day. ”He answered all the e-mails.”

To the very end, however, the military brass treated him with disdain for his biting criticism of insufficient training, equipment, and pay. There were deeper grievances as well, including his role in 1996 in exposing the fact that the chief of naval operations, Admiral Jeremy M. ”Mike” Boorda, wore combat ribbons that he did not earn. Boorda committed suicide an hour before a planned interview with Hackworth.

The Houston Chronicle had a memorial day article last saturday:

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Sixty years ago today, a north Houston boy born in Madisonville, Texas, was crawling across the slate roof of the Reichstag building in the heart of Berlin. Nazi snipers tried to pick him off , before he reached his objective. Twenty of his own buddies were laying down enfilading fire that kept them from stopping PrivatePvt. R.C. Woods, Bobby to his friends, from reaching his goal.

There’s one small problem. The Soviet flag was raised over the Reichstag on May 2nd, 1945, at 2:25 pm. Here’s a quick BBC summary. So whatever snipers existed on May 28, 1945, were probably imaginary.

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A 4-year-old boy was fatally wounded when he wandered behind a paper target while family and friends were practicing shooting, authorities said.

Evan Davis Klassen, of Chisago City, was shot around 1:45 p.m. Sunday at Lake Vermilion, where a group of about a dozen people had gathered for the Memorial Day weekend.

“They thought they had the kids under control,” said Sgt. James McKenzie of the St. Louis County Sheriff’s Department.

While the paper target didn’t completely obscure the child, he was wearing camouflage pants that made him difficult to see against the foliage, McKenzie said.

A 40-year-old man fired a handgun about 30 feet through the target and into the boy, he said.

McKenzie called the shooting as “a pretty straightforward accident” and said no charges were likely to be filed. The man’s name and relationship with the boy were not released.

After the shooting, people rushed the boy to a nearby lodge. Emergency medical workers arrived, but there was nothing they could do, McKenzie said.

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When I was 12 years old, I was Rush Limbaugh’s biggest fan. Every day, my father and I listened to him for hours. “Mega-dittos” — Limbaugh’s catchphrase — was part of my childhood vocabulary, and Limbaugh was the hero who fought for my father’s values. Until recently, my dad was still an avid listener.

In mid-May, I played an Iraqi prisoner in the opening night of the play “Abu Ghraib,” an original student production at Harvard University, where I am a master’s candidate in ethics. My father called to wish me luck. Imagine his disappointment when I told him what Limbaugh had said about me in his radio program that day:

My dad, who has voted Republican all his life, was shocked. “But this is beyond partisan politics!” he said. “Has he seen the play?”

No, and Limbaugh still has not seen the show. Neither, for that matter, have the dozens of others who have sent those of us involved in the play hate mail. Nor has Bill O’Reilly, who lambasted the play on his television program — for both its subject matter and because the university did not permit his film crew to tape the show. He attacked the play as “creepy” and called us stupid, anti-American college kids who have something to hide. He conveniently failed to mention that we couldn’t allow an outside organization to tape the show because of standard university policy. O’Reilly has used this supposed injustice against him to focus media attention on him and his false claims and away from the real injustices presented in the play.

So they have all missed the point: The play is an attempt to humanize every prisoner and soldier at Abu Ghraib, and to speak to the tragedy that occurred there. It is in no way about anti-Americanism or Republicans vs. Democrats. It’s about a problem that concerns all of us. The play’s director and producer turned down an invitation to appear on O’Reilly’s show for just that reason — this is not a partisan issue.

“Abu Ghraib,” written and directed by Harvard sophomore Currun Singh and performed by 15 students, opened to four sold-out audiences on May 12. The 90-minute play examines prisoner abuse through testimony, drama, modern dance and film. The stories it tells are factual accounts — of a soldier whose friends were killed in war, of an insurgent filled with hatred for Americans, of the sergeant who turned in the incriminating photographs from Abu Ghraib.

Former Marine and Vietnam veteran Manuel Garcia, pays his Memorial Day respects at the Arlington West memorial in Santa Monica, Calif., Monday, May 30, 2005. Each cross in the memorial, erected by Veterans for Peace, represents a U.S. casualty killed in Iraq. (AP Photo/Nick Ut)

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