Recently, there have been many stories in the news about Workplace Violence.

Case in point: ABC Action News/Workplace violence: a growing problem

After an arrest for a murdered Yale student was made, New Haven Police Chief James Lewis said “It’s not about university crime, it’s not about domestic crime, but an issue of workplace violence.”

…Nina Cillo with the Crisis Center of Tampa Bay says a troubled economy simply stirs up issues within some people. “And when people get agitated, we see a rise in suicide, we see a rise in domestic violence, and we see a rise in workplace violence,” Cillo said. 

“But sometimes, the people that we work with can be our highest risk,” Cillo said. ”So it’s something we really need to take care of before it blows up in our face.”

It seems that all too often we hear about domestic violence spilling over into the workplace or aggravated customers becoming violent with managers or others who serve the public. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health estimates that there are 18,000 assaults in the workplace each week in this country.

Coping with workplace violence is one of the topics that educators from the Crisis Center offer to corporations, non-profits, service organizations and schools. The Crisis Center’s educational presentation on workplace violence covers the two main types of workplace assault, how to determine protocols for coping with potential violence, training in conflict management and de-escalation of agitated people. The presentation also includes how to identify risk factors that contribute to violence, developing prevention and safety strategies, recognizing warning signs of escalating behavior and proactive strategies to diffuse conflict.

A workshop covering these topics and offering practice of the techniques described will be held at the Crisis Center on Thursday, October 15, from 1:00pm to 4:00pm. More information about this workshop is available by visiting www.crisiscenterevents.eventbrite.com.

You can also find out about scheduling this workshop for your workplace by contacting our community education office at 813-969-4958.

-Learning Connector

I’ve probably applied for 300+ journalism jobs that I felt I was qualified for. This was the first time I had a request for an interview.

But I didn’t get the job at ABC Action News.

I thought the interview went well. I felt like I was confident and personable, but I had a lot of competition. I know the economy has made a small market even more cutthroat. I know I should consider myself lucky that I even got an interview. I tried really hard not to get my hopes up, but it’s hard not to.

Today, around 3 p.m., my heart sank.

I just knew that if I was going to be hired, I would have received the email earlier today and I wasn’t surprised when Google Talk popped up to say, ”We found someone else.” I tried really hard not to make a scene at APT, so I sat in the restroom for about ten minutes while I cried.

All I can do is keep trying.

I have an interview with ABC Action News on Wednesday at 4:00 p.m!!!

Wish me luck and please keep me in your thoughts and prayers!

Okay, so aside from “I, Infantilist”, I write various pieces of work, most of which I stop halfway though because I come up with new story.[More..]


DiaperSpace.com is an Adult Baby Diaper Lover abdl Community Site. Diaper Space is a place for abdl to share pictures, diaper videos, blogs and much more![More..]

I believe personally and strongly that there is all types of AB

WITH VIDEO REPORT from WTSP-TV Lions DE Corey Smith missing off …Detroit Free PressLions free-agent defensive end Corey Smith is one of four fishermen in a small boat who are missing in the Gulf of Mexico off Tampa, according to US …[More..]

WTSP said Cooper’s truck is still parked at a boat ramp with a 24-hour parking pass in the window. Stu Schuyler said his son had been on a 15-hour fishing trip with Cooper and Smith last weekend. “I was worried sick and told him never …[More..]

WTSP-TV in St. Petersburg, Fla., has been covering the search for missing Lions end Corey Smith. Its Web site notes that an update from the U.S. Coast Guard is expected at 11 a.m. today. Here are two videos posted on its Web site. …[More..]

The U.S.

Coast Guard is currently searching for a fishing boat carrying two NFL players that is missing off of the Gulf of Mexico, ABC Action News in Florida reported.

Check it:
http://www.nbcbayarea.com/sports/football/Boat-Carrying-NFL-Players-Missing-In-Gulf-of-Mexico.html

The U.S.

Coast Guard is currently searching for a fishing boat carrying two NFL players that is missing off of the Gulf of Mexico, ABC Action News in Florida reported.

Link:
http://www.nbcbayarea.com/sports/football/Boat-Carrying-NFL-Players-Missing-In-Gulf-of-Mexico.html

Creative Loafing political editor Wayne Garcia has a great post up today that rates the local coverage of this year’s Super Bowl in Tampa.

I’ve relied almost exclusively on the St. Petersburg Times (it takes Wayne’s top prize), and I readily admit to being in the late stages of  Super Bowl fatigue (especially with regard to the mind-numbing drumbeat of celebrity and party worship). On this topic, Wayne accurately assesses the state of information overload:

Overall, though, my main thought about the coverage is: Damn! It would take a normal human being 237 years to read all of this. Most of it is ephemeral; on a blog or website front one minute, lost in the archives the next. You imagined that if the local media paid this much attention to our economy and government we would be the only metro area in the nation not suffering from a recession or corruption.

I can’t help but sense more than a whiff of desperation by the media (particularly on the Times‘ part) as it brings out every toy at its disposal (Tweets, celebrity bloggers and interactive maps) to grab eyeballs for an annually overhyped event. The St. Pete Times‘ main Super Bowl page is a dizzying, disorienting, redundant experience (two “Events” headers??),  faithfully adhering to the notion that “more is better.”

And while some of it is worthwhile reading, a lot is “visual junk food,” the kind of stuff you read (hoping against your better judgment you’ll find something of substance), only to hate yourself for being so gullible. Not to mention that it makes you feel 10 IQ points dumber than you were before. But the two weeks leading up to the Super Bowl lends itself to quick and easy coverage (something that issues of the economy and government do not).

Hurricane Fay forecast:

Be ready!

ABC Action News obtained exclusive footage of Hulk and Linda Hogan/Bollea visiting their son Nick during the first week of his jail eight-month jail sentence. Click here to watch.

The United States Military wanted to provoke a war with Cuba and had devised plans to get that accomplished! Here’s a link to the article on ABC NEWS!

U.S. Military Wanted to Provoke War With Cuba

Book: U.S. Military Drafted Plans to Terrorize U.S. Cities to Provoke War With Cuba

By David Ruppe

N E W  Y O R K, May 1, 2001  In the early 1960s, America’s top military leaders reportedly drafted plans to kill innocent people and commit acts of terrorism in U.S. cities to create public support for a war against Cuba.

Code named Operation Northwoods, the plans reportedly included the possible assassination of Cuban émigrés, sinking boats of Cuban refugees on the high seas, hijacking planes, blowing up a U.S. ship, and even orchestrating violent terrorism in U.S. cities.

The plans were developed as ways to trick the American public and the international community into supporting a war to oust Cuba’s then new leader, communist Fidel Castro.

America’s top military brass even contemplated causing U.S. military casualties, writing: “We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba,” and, “casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation.”

Details of the plans are described in Body of Secrets (Doubleday), a new book by investigative reporter James Bamford about the history of America’s largest spy agency, the National Security Agency. However, the plans were not connected to the agency, he notes.

The plans had the written approval of all of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and were presented to President Kennedy’s defense secretary, Robert McNamara, in March 1962. But they apparently were rejected by the civilian leadership and have gone undisclosed for nearly 40 years.

“These were Joint Chiefs of Staff documents. The reason these were held secret for so long is the Joint Chiefs never wanted to give these up because they were so embarrassing,” Bamford told ABCNEWS.com.

“The whole point of a democracy is to have leaders responding to the public will, and here this is the complete reverse, the military trying to trick the American people into a war that they want but that nobody else wants.”

Gunning for War

The documents show “the Joint Chiefs of Staff drew up and approved plans for what may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. government,” writes Bamford.

The Joint Chiefs even proposed using the potential death of astronaut John Glenn during the first attempt to put an American into orbit as a false pretext for war with Cuba, the documents show.

Should the rocket explode and kill Glenn, they wrote, “the objective is to provide irrevocable proof … that the fault lies with the Communists et all Cuba [sic].”

The plans were motivated by an intense desire among senior military leaders to depose Castro, who seized power in 1959 to become the first communist leader in the Western Hemisphere — only 90 miles from U.S. shores.

The earlier CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba by Cuban exiles had been a disastrous failure, in which the military was not allowed to provide firepower.The military leaders now wanted a shot at it.

“The whole thing was so bizarre,” says Bamford, noting public and international support would be needed for an invasion, but apparently neither the American public, nor the Cuban public, wanted to see U.S. troops deployed to drive out Castro.

Reflecting this, the U.S. plan called for establishing prolonged military — not democratic — control over the island nation after the invasion.

“That’s what we’re supposed to be freeing them from,” Bamford says. “The only way we would have succeeded is by doing exactly what the Russians were doing all over the world, by imposing a government by tyranny, basically what we were accusing Castro himself of doing.”

‘Over the Edge’

The Joint Chiefs at the time were headed by Eisenhower appointee Army Gen. Lyman L. Lemnitzer, who, with the signed plans in hand made a pitch to McNamara on March 13, 1962, recommending Operation Northwoods be run by the military.

Whether the Joint Chiefs’ plans were rejected by McNamara in the meeting is not clear. But three days later, President Kennedy told Lemnitzer directly there was virtually no possibility of ever using overt force to take Cuba, Bamford reports. Within months, Lemnitzer would be denied another term as chairman and transferred to another job.

The secret plans came at a time when there was distrust in the military leadership about their civilian leadership, with leaders in the Kennedy administration viewed as too liberal, insufficiently experienced and soft on communism. At the same time, however, there real were concerns in American society about their military overstepping its bounds.

There were reports U.S. military leaders had encouraged their subordinates to vote conservative during the election.

And at least two popular books were published focusing on a right-wing military leadership pushing the limits against government policy of the day.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee published its own report on right-wing extremism in the military, warning a “considerable danger” in the “education and propaganda activities of military personnel” had been uncovered. The committee even called for an examination of any ties between Lemnitzer and right-wing groups. But Congress didn’t get wind of Northwoods, says Bamford.

“Although no one in Congress could have known at the time,” he writes, “Lemnitzer and the Joint Chiefs had quietly slipped over the edge.”

Even after Lemnitzer was gone, he writes, the Joint Chiefs continued to plan “pretext” operations at least through 1963.

One idea was to create a war between Cuba and another Latin American country so that the United States could intervene. Another was to pay someone in the Castro government to attack U.S. forces at the Guantanamo naval base — an act, which Bamford notes, would have amounted to treason. And another was to fly low level U-2 flights over Cuba, with the intention of having one shot down as a pretext for a war.

“There really was a worry at the time about the military going off crazy and they did, but they never succeeded, but it wasn’t for lack of trying,” he says.

After 40 Years

Ironically, the documents came to light, says Bamford, in part because of the 1992 Oliver Stone film JFK, which examined the possibility of a conspiracy behind the assassination of President Kennedy.

As public interest in the assassination swelled after JFK’s release, Congress passed a law designed to increase the public’s access to government records related to the assassination.

The author says a friend on the board tipped him off to the documents.

Afraid of a congressional investigation, Lemnitzer had ordered all Joint Chiefs documents related to the Bay of Pigs destroyed, says Bamford. But somehow, these remained.

“The scary thing is none of this stuff comes out until 40 years after,” says Bamford.

I have been telling myself I needed to get more involved with the PRSSA @ USF. Time was just not my friend this semester. Lucky for me, I had a few of the board members (who are just AWESOME PEOPLE btw) in my classes and was able to keep up with different events and what not going on within the organization. I knew it was important for me to go on at least a tour or two of a PR agency of some sort. I missed quite a few due to classes and other time conflicts, but finally another one came up and I was able to go! 

Our group of about 20 PRSSA students went and toured the ABC agency (TV station)  in Tampa. It was amazing. We got to see all different behind the scenes activity, preparations and a live broadcast of the 12 o’clock news. It was incredibly interesting and we had a blast! We were able to learn different approaches of pitching (as PR students) to the broadcast media – what they look for, what they like/dislike, pay attention to, etc. 

It was a great learning experience and also learned about a few internships they offer. Which reminds me, I need to follow up on that ASAP!! 

What made this an “out of my norm” experience for me, is the fact that as I have been so busy this semester, any free time (ex. like when our class was cancelled) means more sleep or time to catch up on things that need to be done. I have forgone many opportunities like this because I am either lazy and don’t feel like making the effort to attend or be a part of them, or I get so caught up in what is going on in my life that I don’t realize all the amazing things just passing me by. I finally learned to sort (some) priorities and manage my time so that I could also include fun opportunities as this in my life. I also made lasting friendships this semester and made the time to hang out with people and pursue these relationships which I know will last and also benefit me in the long run. The contacts we make in college with our peers and classmates could always serve as a great help in the future. I stepped outside my bubble and lived. ~