A jury on Wednesday ordered an anti-gay Kansas church to pay $10.9 million in damages to relatives of a U.S. Marine who died in Iraq after church members cheered his death at his funeral.
The federal jury determined the Westboro Baptist Church, based in Topeka, and three of its principals invaded the privacy of the dead man's family and inflicted emotional distress.
The jury awarded Snyder's family $2.9 million in compensatory damages plus $8 million in punitive damages in the first civil suit against the church, which has demonstrated at some 300 military funerals the past two years.
Rev. Fred Phelps, who has led a campaign against homosexuality for years. Most of the estimated 70 members of the church belong to his extended family.
UN atomic watchdog chief Mohamed ElBaradei said Sunday he had no evidence that Iran is building nuclear weapons and accused US leaders of adding "fuel to the fire" with recent bellicose rhetoric.
"Second, even if Iran were to be working on nuclear weapons ... they are at least (a) few years away from having such weapon," he said, citing Washington's own intelligence assessments.
"My fear (is) that if we continue to escalate from both sides that we will end up into a precipice, we will end up into an abyss. The Middle East is in a total mess, to say the least. And we cannot add fuel to the fire."
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It seems that while most faculty (and, I would add, many students) assume that people drop out because they aren’t up to snuff, it may in fact be that the best students are finding that it is graduate school which isn’t up to snuff. Especially women.
While I have not gone to grad school, and thus I am not an authority on the matter, one very large motivation for not going is something like this fear. I do not want to put myself in a situation where I am forced to study, read, and write about things that are of little importance to me. I would much rather pursue my own interests. Thus far, I have found this approach to be rather prolific, reading a book a week and working on numerous projects.
I also find it very interesting how defensive these people are in the comments to this post. They seem to disagree whole-heartedly. This raises flags for me, flags of ignorance. Perhaps they are purposefully looking the other way.
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