This Week in National Insecurity: Extreme Sports Edition

Flickr Commons/<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/expertinfantry/5417168174/">Expert Infantry</a>

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We know you’re riding high over the women’s World Cup soccer team, America. But how does our military measure up to its own league rivals? Let’s check the weekly scorecard! In this installment: gays get shafted, kids (may) get drafted, the ACLU gets lucky, hackers stay plucky, and Afghans play with a headless goat carcass. Yeah, nothing rhymes with that.

The sitrep:

  • A British-born UN worker in Afghanistan believes he can save the wartorn country by teaching everyone how to play rugby. “The national sport, Buzkashi—a game of unwritten rules that nobody follows in which horsemen battle over a headless goat carcass—has much in common with rugby, he said.” Okay, but how long before Vince McMahon brings Buzkashi to America? (Stripes)
  • Hackers 90,000, Pentagon 0. If you’re keeping score with stolen email accounts, that is. (Mother Jones/New York Times)

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BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And the essential ingredient that makes all this possible? Readers like you.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to devote the time and resources to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

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