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Determined to end scourge of sexual assaults, Congress weighs changes to military justice
• WASHINGTON (AP) -- Determined to stop sexual assault in the military, Congress is spelling out for the services how far lawmakers are willing to go in changing the decades-old military justice system.
• The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, and officers heading each branch of the military were to testify Tuesday on Capitol Hill, but it will be members of the Senate who will provide clues as to whether Congress embraces a far-reaching approach to limit the authority that commanders have to discipline the forces they lead.
• Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., is a proponent of ambitious legislation that would remove commanders from the process of deciding whether serious crimes, including sexual misconduct cases, go to trial. That judgment would rest with seasoned trial counsels who have prosecutorial experience and hold the rank of colonel or above.
• The military has serious reservations about Gillibrand's plan, concerned that stripping commanders of some authority would make it difficult for them to maintain good order and discipline. Not so, say some lawmakers, who argue that the military's piecemeal approach clearly hasn't been the answer.
• The Pentagon estimated in a recent report that as many as 26,000 military members may have been sexually assaulted last year, up from an estimated 19,000 assaults in 2012, based on an anonymous survey of military personnel. While the number of sexual assaults that members of the military actually reported rose 6 percent to 3,374 in 2012, thousands of victims were still unwilling to come forward despite new oversight and assistance programs aimed at curbing the crimes, the report said.
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Fire kills 119 workers at Chinese poultry plant where locked doors left only 1 escape route
• BEIJING (AP) -- A swift-moving fire trapped panicked workers inside a poultry slaughterhouse in northeastern China that had only a single open exit, killing at least 119 people in one of the country's worst industrial disasters in years.
• Survivors described workers, mostly women, struggling through smoke and flames to reach doors that turned out to be locked or blocked.
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