Results tagged “iraq”

No matter your views of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we should all agree that our veterans need our support both when deployed in theater and upon their return stateside. Readjusting to an environment not filled with IEDs, combatants and other hostile characteristics is difficult for them. Further, it is impossible for us to understand fully the challenges they faced abroad and those they face at home. Community of Veterans (http://communityofveterans.org/) is a social networking site designed to put veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan in touch with one another, which is a daunting task since less than 1% of Americans have served in either conflict. The IAVA hopes that connected veterans will be able to assist each other in regaining some sense of normalcy no matter how small.

Straight outta TX-22 and in front of the microphone: Rep. Nick Lampson is teaming up with the Veterans Service Office and communications students at UH to help document the stories of American veterans for the Library of Congress. From the department of Did You Know?:

The big question heading into the Texans matchup against the San Diego Chargers has nothing to do with Matt Schaub's hip, Andre Johnson's knee, or Gary Kubiak's recent coaching decisions, but when and where the game will be played. As you're no doubt aware, George Bush started a series of fires in Southern California to distract attention away from the Iraq war, and a lot of people around the San Diego area were forced...

Good morning, Houston. We enjoy a good, quick breakfast as much as anyone, but seriously, there are limits — just ask the four people who were hurt Monday when a driver who was eating oatmeal at the wheel crashed into a Metro bus near downtown. Witnesses told KPRC that the driver ran a red light at Pierce and St. Charles and hit the front of the bus, which caused the driver's vehicle to spin...

Houston is very under-rated compared to a lot of cities, however when it comes to live stand-up comedy we get some of the best acts around. In this new Houstonist feature we hope to provide some insight to great live comedy (and 2 drink minimums) around town. This week’s acts include: Stand Up for Peace at Fitzgeralds [9/21]. Local Houston comedians take the stage for a ‘Comic Relief’ about the situation in Iraq. Comedy...

Happy first weekend of September - and happy Labor Day weekend, too, for our American cities! Let's take a look at what's been happening around the Ist-a-verse. The deaths of two firefighters shook Bostonist this week. Boston's firefighters bent over backwards all week long - first, they fought flames pouring from the Boston Tea Party museum, and then a restaurant fire killed two and injured many more. Their efforts make everything else - like Tom...

Good morning, Houston. Looks like we'll have a tougher time cracking out those fake Benjamins next year: The $100 bill will soon be getting a high-tech makeover to thwart counterfeiters. The key feature: 650,000 tiny lenses embedded in each bill, which will magnify the printing so that the portrait of Benjamin Franklin appears to move up and down or side to side, depending on which way you move the bill. "It makes for a...

Good morning, Houston. We think it's even too hot for the beach lately, but that didn't stop lots of people from heading to Galveston last weekend. But the heat wasn't the only thing those folks had to watch out for - fourteen of them were stung by stingrays. These injuries were all due to beachgoers stepping on stingrays and causing them to lash out. According to Beach Patrol Chief Peter Davis, such incidents can...

Wow — it's still six months to Christmas, and yet we're getting gifts already: The AP reports that everyone's favorite golden-haired politico, Shelley Sekula Gibbs, is laying the groundwork for her campaign to return to Congress. Oh, yes. Sekula Gibbs (notice that she's dropped the hyphen, which she worried could be a problem during her write-in campaign for Congress last year) announced that she has some high-profile Republican supporters for her 2008 campaign, including homebuilder...

Houston-area congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul will appear on Comedy Central's The Colbert Report tonight. Paul has quickly distinguished himself from other Republican candidates with his libertarian views and his now infamous exchange with Rudy Giuliani in a debate last month. Paul asserted that the 9/11 attacks were triggered by American involvement in the Middle East, to which Giuliani replied, "That's an extraordinary statement, as someone who lived through the attack of September 11,...

Good morning, Houston. We hope you got your fill of the Texas Legislature, because the 80th session is officially over. Your Senators and Representatives have been hard at work since January, passing lots of bills and making even more news, and now they'll be taking a break. The Houston contingent did us proud, from strip club taxes to baby-selling to overcoming liver transplants. We hope all the Texas political blogs can survive until 2009....

Here's a joke waiting to be told: What would soldiers and Marines want with silly string, bubble gum and pantyhose? Go ahead, take your best shot. We'll give you a second to think it over. (In the meantime, have you heard the one about the duck that walks into a drugstore ... ?) Seriously, though — the silly string, bubble gum and pantyhose were part of military supply kits that kids at Memorial Drive Elementary...

Senior Time magazine columnist Joe Klein will speak tonight at the Wortham Center on Islam, Iraq, and the War on Terror. Klein is "one of America’s most astute observers of politics and international affairs" and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the author of a number of books, including his most recent Politics Lost: How American Politics Was Trivialized By People Who Think You’re Stupid, a tirade against political consultants in...

More details are emerging in the Thursday stabbing death of Rice basketball player Jonathan Bailey — but that doesn't mean things are necessarily getting any clearer. The Chronicle has information from the Brazos County sheriff's office about the incident, which apparently grew out of a bar scuffle between Bailey's twin brother Janson and Michael Fuller, a Marine who had recently come home from Iraq:

Bizarre news from Sharpstown Center: Yesterday afternoon, a security guard at the mall shot another security guard, then went to his car and shot himself in the head. Investigators are still trying to figure out exactly how it all started; fortunately, neither man died, and both are recovering at Ben Taub.

Ben Browning and Nik Edgell were lucky to escape from their bookstore when an arsonist set it on fire Feb. 26 — but they weren't fortunate enough to avoid what they say was harassment from arson investigators who showed up to look into the blaze. The issue, apparently, is that the bookstore — Sedition Books, at 4420 Washington Ave. — offered literature on anarchism, Communism, gay rights, radical feminism, socialism and other "viewpoints outside the...

Houston's 2006 crime statistics were announced yesterday, and there's some good news: The city's overall crime rate fell 5 percent last year, meaning you're less likely to be robbed, raped, assaulted or have your car stolen. But while we're patting ourselves on the back, we might want to be a little careful we don't get murdered: Houston's homicide rate increased by 5 percent last year. Around every silver lining, there's a dark cloud. According to...

Because Shelley Sekula-Gibbs is only going to be a congresswoman for a few weeks, we suppose she feels the need to make the news as often as possible: Earlier this week, Tom DeLay's staffers walked out on Sekula-Gibbs, and now Shelley is accusing those staffers of inappropriately wiping all the office computers clean before they left. We smell a developing Capitol Hill smackdown — no, not the one between Shelley's people and DeLay's people; we're...

Houstonist stayed up half the night glued to our television just to bring you the latest election results, locally, state-wide, and nationally. Let's look at how things went down yesterday. Locally: Much to the mayor's delight, propositions A-H all passed. This means good things for Houston's libraries, parks, police force, airports, etc. Mayor White is keeping the city moving, literally and figuratively. The Chronicle offers complete election results, but we're going to look at a...

Ah, the (triumphant?) return of Fun for a Hamilton. We could tell you a horror story about why your favorite ten dollar bill has been missing from your lives lately, but merely rest assured that Hamilton's back now. (And since nobody emailed us to complain, we're not even sure you noticed he was gone). Without further ado... Friday, October 20 A production of A Midsummer Night's Dream at St. Thomas this evening updates the play...

The day's storms, now to our east, will probably return tonight and could dump between 5 and 10 inches of rain on some already-soaked areas of the city And here's the wrapup of today's flooding; some areas had nearly 11 inches of rain, the Chron reports A shelter-in-place order in Deer Park was lifted early this afternoon after emergency workers contained a leak at the Shell Chemical Plant In Pearland, firefighters spent most of the...

Transplanted Houstonian Stephanie reads Phillyist all the time and thought coming home for the summer would be a ton more fun if we started our version of one of their features: a list of things to do each week on the cheap. Everything on this list'll be $10 or less, so we're calling it "Fun for a Hamilton". Thanks for the idea, Stephanie ... enjoy! Friday, June 9th Meg Cabot, author of The Princess Diaries,...

In our avid quest for the most interesting stuff going on in this muggy, polluted (but you know you love it anyway!) neck of the woods, Houstonist has found a group with a mission. The Freeway Bloggers are a nationwide grassroots group protesting the current political climate, and every Tuesday night, the Houston chapter of the Texas Freeway Bloggers meets on the Dunlavy bridge over U.S. 59 to protest the current administration and the war...

Y'know, sometimes there's just not a nice way to say something, and this is one of those times: Young Americans, in general, are stupid. This doesn't have anything to do with our foreign policy or our infatuation with vapid celebrity couples — it's about a new National Geographic poll that shows we have no idea where the hell anything is. Among the findings of the poll, which surveyed 510 Americans between the ages of 18...

Cindy Sheehan led a protest in Houston yesterday targeting Barbara Bush, who protesters hoped to convince to tell her son to stop the war in Iraq [video] A woman has been arrested for selling drugs at a South Houston bakery; her boyfriend, the bakery's owner, was arrested in 2004 for doing the same thing Closing arguments resumed today in the trial of Max Soffar, who spent 25 years on death row but had his conviction...

HPD investigators say 11 Katrina evacuees have been linked to a string of violent crimes in Houston; eight are in custody, but police are still looking for the other three A wrecker driver who crashed into a car on the East Loop on Wednesday, killing its driver, may not have been headed to a Safe Clear call, investigators say Houston-based Halliburton said it will spin off a minority stake in controversial subsidiary KBR, which has...