Via the pro-Marxist (AP) - The way Sohale Siddiqi remembers it, he and his old roommate were walking his pug Charlie on Broadway when a large, scary bum approached them, stomping on the ground near the dog’s head.

This was in the 1980s, a time when New York was a fearful place beset by drugs and crime, when the street smart knew that the best way to handle the city’s derelicts was to avoid them entirely. But Siddiqi was angry and he confronted the bum, who approached him menacingly.

Until his skinny, Ivy League-educated friend - Barack Obama - intervened.

He "stepped right in between. … He planted his face firmly in the face of the guy. ‘Hey, hey, hey.’ And the guy backpedaled and we kept walking," Siddiqi recalls.

There was a time before Obama wore tailored suits - when his wardrobe consisted of $5 military-surplus khakis and used leather jackets, and he walked the streets of Manhattan for lack of bus fare. It was a time well before the political arena beckoned, when his friends thought he might become a writer or a lawyer, but certainly not the first black man with a real chance to become president of the United States.

Obama spent the six years between 1979 and 1985 at Occidental College in Los Angeles and then in New York at Columbia University and in the workplace. His memoir, "Dreams from My Father," talks about this time, but not in great detail; Siddiqi, for example, is identified only as "Sadik" - "a short, well-built Pakistani" who smoked marijuana, snorted cocaine and liked to party.

Obama’s campaign wouldn’t identify "Sadik," but The Associated Press located him in Seattle, where he raises money for a community theater.

Together, the recollections of Siddiqi and other friends and acquaintances from Obama’s college years paint a portrait of the candidate as a young man.

They remember a good student with a sharp mind and unshakable integrity, a young man who already had a passion for the underprivileged. Some described the young Obama’s personality as confident to the point of arrogance, a criticism that would emerge decades later, during the campaign.

Not everyone who knew Obama in those years is eager to talk.

Some explained that they feared inadvertently hurting Obama’s campaign. Among his friends were Siddiqi and two other Pakistanis, all of them from Karachi; several of those interviewed said the Pakistanis were reluctant to talk for fear of stoking rumors that Obama is a Muslim.

"Obama in the eyes of some right wingers is basically Muslim until proved innocent," says Margot Mifflin, a friend from Occidental who is now a journalism professor at New York’s Lehman College. "It’s partly the Muslim factor by association and partly the fear of something being twisted."

The young man Mifflin remembers was "an unpretentious, down to earth, solidly middle-class guy who seemed somewhat more sophisticated than the average college student. He was slightly reserved and deliberate in a way that I sometimes thought betrayed an uncertainty."

But another former Oxy classmate, Robert McCrary, now general manager of a contract sewing company, saw him differently: "He definitely had a cocky, sometimes arrogant way about him. … He was not open to others."

Of course, he was only 18 when he arrived at the small liberal arts college nicknamed "Oxy." His freshman roommates were Imad Husain, a Pakistani, who’s now a Boston banker, and Paul Carpenter, now a Los Angeles lawyer.

Carpenter recalled Obama as "a good bodysurfer" who had "a funky red car, a Fiat," and who also played intramurals - flag football, tennis and water polo. "He was an athletic guy. He was gifted in that regard," said Carpenter. He also remembered Obama being "super bright. He could get through the course work in a fraction of the time it took me."

Obama had an international circle of friends - "a real eclectic sort of group," says Vinai Thummalapally, who himself came from Hyderabad, India.

As a freshman, he quickly became friends with Mohammed Hasan Chandoo and Wahid Hamid, two wealthy Pakistanis. There were others, Thummalapally recalls: a French student and both black and white Americans, including Jon K. Mitchell, who later played bass for country-swing band Asleep at the Wheel (Mitchell remembers that Obama wore puka shell necklaces all the time, though they were not in style, and that "we let it slide because he spent a lot of time growing up in Hawaii.")

The friends got together often to watch basketball games - they were Lakers fans - and eat the southern Indian food that Thummalapally cooked with his cousin.

There was serious talk, too. Obama had concerns about U.S. foreign policy - including the failed hostage rescue mission in Iran under Jimmy Carter, and American support of the Contras in Latin America.

Thummalapally lived with Obama the summer of 1980. The two ran together daily, three miles in the early morning, often chatting about their dreams. Thummalapally wanted to start a business back home; Obama talked about helping people.

"I want to get into public service," he recalls Obama saying. "I want to write and help people who are disadvantaged."

—

In 1981, Obama transferred from Occidental to Columbia. In between, he traveled to Pakistan - a trip that enhanced his foreign policy qualifications, he maintained in a private speech at a San Francisco fundraiser last month. Obama spent "about three weeks" in Pakistan, traveling with Hamid and staying in Karachi with Chandoo’s family, said Bill Burton, Obama’s press secretary.

"He was clearly shocked by the economic disparity he saw in Pakistan. He couldn’t get over the sight of rural peasants bowing to the wealthy landowners they worked for as they passed," says Margot Mifflin, who makes a brief appearance in Obama’s memoir.

When Obama arrived in New York, he already knew Siddiqi - a friend of Chandoo’s and Hamid’s from Karachi who had visited Los Angeles. Looking back, Siddiqi acknowledges that he and Obama were an odd couple. Siddiqi would mock Obama’s idealism - he just wanted to make a lot of money and buy things, while Obama wanted to help the poor.

"At that age, I thought he was a saint and a square, and he took himself too seriously," Siddiqi said. "I would ask him why he was so serious. He was genuinely concerned with the plight of the poor. He’d give me lectures, which I found very boring. He must have found me very irritating."

Siddiqi offered the most expansive account of Obama as a young man.

"We were both very lost. We were both alienated, although he might not put it that way. He arrived disheveled and without a place to stay," said Siddiqi, who at the time worked as a waiter and as a salesman at a boutique.

The Obama campaign declined to discuss Obama’s time at Columbia and his friendships in general. It won’t, for example, release his transcript or name his friends. It did, however, list five locations where Obama lived during his four years here: three on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and two in Brooklyn - one in Park Slope, the other in Brooklyn Heights. His memoir mentions two others on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

In about 1982, Siddiqi and Obama got an apartment at a sixth-floor walkup on East 94th Street. Siddiqi managed to get the apartment thanks to subterfuge.

"We didn’t have a chance in hell of getting this apartment unless we fabricated the lease application," Siddiqi said.

Siddiqi fudged his credentials, saying he had a high-paying job at a catering company, but Obama "wanted no part of it. He put down the truth."

The apartment was "a slum of a place" in a drug-ridden neighborhood filled with gunshots, he said. "It wasn’t a comfortable existence. We were slumming it." What little furniture they had was found on the street, and guests would have to hold their dinner plates in their laps.

While Obama has acknowledged using marijuana and cocaine during high school in Hawaii, he writes in the memoir that he stopped using soon after his arrival in New York. His roommate had no such scruples.

But Siddiqi says that during their time together here, Obama always refused his offers of drugs.

In his memoir and in interviews, Obama has said he got serious and buckled down in New York. "I didn’t socialize that much. I was like a monk," he said in a 2005 Columbia alumni magazine interview. He told biographer David Mendell: "For about two years there, I was just painfully alone and really not focused on anything, except maybe thinking a lot."

In his memoir, Obama recalls fasting on Sunday; Siddiqi says Obama was a follower of comedian-activist Dick Gregory’s vegetarian diet. "I think self-deprivation was his schtick, denying himself pleasure, good food and all of that."

But it wasn’t exactly an ascetic life. There was plenty of time for reading (Gabriel Garcia Marquez, V.S. Naipaul) and listening to music (Van Morrison, the Ohio Players, Bob Dylan). The two, along with others, went out for nights on the town. "He wasn’t entirely a hermit," Siddiqi said.

Siddiqi said his female friends thought Obama was "a hunk."

"We were always competing," he said. "You know how it is. You go to a bar and you try hitting on the girls. He had a lot more success. I wouldn’t out-compete him in picking up girls, that’s for sure."

Obama was a tolerant roommate. Siddiqi’s mother, who had never been around a black man, came to visit and she was rude; Obama was nothing but polite. Siddiqi himself could be intemperate - he called Obama an Uncle Tom, but "he was really patient. I’m surprised he suffered me."

Finally, their relationship started to fray. "I was partying all the time. I was disrupting his studies," Siddiqi said. Obama moved out.

In July 1985, after spending two years as a writer for a business newsletter and as a coordinator at City College in Harlem for an environmental and consumer advocacy group, Obama left New York for Chicago - where he found a job, a wife and, eventually, a political career.

—

Andrew Roth knew Obama at Occidental and in New York. He speaks bluntly: "The thought, believe me, never crossed my mind that he would be our first black president."

And yet, here he is, on the brink of the Democratic nomination. And he’s gotten there with the help of some of those friends from so long ago.

Neither Hamid nor Chandoo would be interviewed for this story; Hamid is now a top executive at Pepsico in New York, and Chandoo is a self-employed financial consultant in the New York area.

Both have each contributed the maximum $2,300 to Obama’s campaign, and records indicate each has joined an Asian-American council that supports his run for president. Both also are listed on Obama’s campaign Web site as being among his top fundraisers, each bringing in between $100,000 and $200,000 in contributions from their networks of friends.

Both also attended Obama’s wedding in 1992, according to published reports and other friends.

Thummalapally has stayed in contact with Obama, too, visiting him in New York, attending his wedding in 1992 and joining him in Springfield, Ill., for the Feb. 10, 2007, announcement of Obama’s run for the White House.

President of a CD and DVD manufacturing company in Colorado Springs, Colo., Thummalapally also is listed as a top fundraiser on the campaign Web site.

Siddiqi has not kept in touch. His has been a difficult road; years after his time with Obama, Siddiqi says, he became addicted to cocaine and lost his business.

But when he needed help during his recovery, Obama - the roommate he drove away with his partying, the man he always suspected of looking down at him - gave him a job reference.

So yes, he’s an Obama man, too. Witness the message on his answering machine:

"My name is Hal Siddiqi, and I approve of this message. Vote for peace, vote for hope, vote for change, and vote for Obama."

Speaking of illegal aliens, the seditious ass-kissin’ pro-reconquista  John McCain said this shit today:

 “Illegal immigrants who have broken the law–after they get here–will be arrested and deported”. 

Translated: It’s okay to enter the U.S. illegally because I won’t do shit and… I need the fraudulent votes!

 According to McCain, entering the U.S. illegally is not a crime (though, for the benefit of law abiding citizens and possible election votes, he did use the word illegal while using the word immigrants), it’s only kinda sorta bad if you commit further crimes AFTER you’ve entered the U.S. illegally. Yeah, it’s bad for law abiding U.S. citizens, not so much for illegal aliens. 

Original logo

New logo

Seems that one person’s smut is another person’s morning latte.

A Christian group out of San Diego has found grounds for outrage over the new logo for Starbucks Coffee.

The Resistance says the new image "has a naked woman on it with her legs spread like a prostitute," Mark Dice, founder of the group, said in a news release. "Need I say more? It’s extremely poor taste, and the company might as well call themselves, Slutbucks."

The group, which claims more than 3,000 members nationwide, is calling for a national boycott of the coffee-selling giant.

The logo is a throw-back to what the chain used when it first opened in Seattle more than 35 years ago.

The explanation for that initial log design is explained in the book "Pour Your Heart into It : How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time," written by company founder Howard Schultz:

"[Creative partner Terry Heckler] poured over old marine books until he came up with a logo based on an old sixteenth-century Norse woodcut: a two-tailed mermaid, or siren, encircled by the store’s original name, Starbucks Coffee, Tea, and Spice. That early siren, bare-breasted and Rubenesque, was supposed to be as seductive as coffee itself."

A reporter has contacted Starbucks for a comment about the Resistance’s call for a boycott.

Source

We urgently need a new system for War on Terror detainees

By ANDREW C. McCARTHY

These are dark days for prosecution of the War on Terror.

The troop surge has routed al-Qaeda in Baghdad, and the measurable security improvement gives hope for stable political arrangements. Yet whether an American ally will emerge from such a settlement, if it happens, is highly questionable, and our satisfaction over the denial of a safe haven to al-Qaeda in its former Iraqi redoubts is tempered by the jihadist resurgence in Pakistan’s lawless northwest border region.

It is at home, however, that the war — the very need to prosecute it as a war — is truly besieged. No issue makes that clearer than Guantanamo Bay. The brute fact is that, regardless of who is elected president in November, the naval base’s days as a detention center are numbered.

Camp Delta, the Gitmo facility where our armed forces still hold about 350 alien enemy combatants, is probably the most scrutinized prison in modern history. It is also among the most humane, complete with halal meals, a bursting library, lush recreation facilities, communal prayer breaks, and even white-gloved U.S. soldiers — Muslims only, please — delivering to each detainee a Koran (U.S. government–issued, even though the inmates believe it commands them to kill Americans). The popular narrative portraying the facility as a rampant human-rights violator is a slander (unless one accounts for the assaults by jihadists against the MPs who guard them). Gitmo has produced mostly actionable intelligence, enabling analysts to identify terrorists, map their networks, trace their funding channels, and save American and European lives.

The narrative, however, endures. Gitmo is totemic of the post-9/11 determination to treat the international jihadist threat as a war rather than a series of mere crimes. It is the law of war in action. That venerable code, in stark contrast to civilian judicial procedures, holds that captives may be detained indefinitely without trial — both to glean intelligence and to deplete enemy resources, purposes that tend toward the civilized goal of a faster end to war’s miseries. But as an emblem of the war paradigm, Gitmo is the hottest of hot buttons for an angry, post-sovereign Left — the transnational progressives who insist that there is no war at all, that international terrorists pose a nuisance fit for management by civilian courts, and that, in any event, America has only itself to blame for an onslaught by disgruntled Muslims.

A FAILURE OF COMMUNICATION
Even as it has defended Gitmo, the communications-challenged Bush administration has failed to make the public case that its wartime detention policy has been an intelligence coup. Instead, fretting over “our reputation in the world” (primarily in tyrannical Muslim countries and European nanny states that swoon over human rights while abdicating responsibility for their own defense), Condoleezza Rice and Robert Gates have pushed for closure. Not to be outdone, Colin Powell declares that the place should have been shut down “yesterday.” Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, embroiled in a down-to-the-wire nomination contest, have naturally adopted the Gitmo Gospel according to MoveOn.org. Most dismaying, however, is the presumptive Republican nominee. Castigating Gitmo and linking it rhetorically with improper interrogation tactics and prisoner abuse (controversies that actually center on CIA “black sites” and Abu Ghraib, not Gitmo) is not enough for John McCain; he insists he “would announce that we were closing Guantanamo Bay and moving those prisoners to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.”

For his part, President Bush has repeatedly said he would like to close Gitmo but cannot responsibly do so without a Plan B. And therein lies the quandary. It has been nearly seven years since the commencement of U.S. military operations in Afghanistan. It has been apparent for nearly as long that our current approach is unsustainable, that we desperately need a new system for detaining and trying captured terrorists in a war that will continue for decades. Yet we are still without Plan B.

Gitmo, the Left claims, is a “legal black hole.” To be sure, the whole point of establishing a detention center on sovereign Cuban territory, outside the jurisdiction of the U.S. courts, was to avoid the judicial usurpation of a key aspect of war-fighting. That was entirely consistent with jurisprudence that has recognized broad executive discretion regarding the detention and trial of enemy combatants. In point of fact, while the courts have occasionally pulled the rug out from under the administration (for example, finding, under a dubious de facto–control analysis, that Gitmo is American territory and thus subject to judicial intrusion after all), the core problems with Gitmo are political, not legal.

In 2004, the Supreme Court reaffirmed that enemy operatives — including traitorous American citizens — may be detained without trial, as millions of war prisoners have been throughout our history. In 2006, even as it invalidated the military-commission trials authorized by the president, the Court indicated that such tribunals would pass muster if given legislative imprimatur. Congress promptly enacted the Military Commissions Act (MCA), which paved the way for commission trials and detention proceedings (called Combatant Status Review Tribunals, or CSRTs) to proceed, with a significant innovation: After appeals were exhausted in the military justice system, combatants would be permitted to seek review in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit (and, ultimately, the Supreme Court) — the first time in history that enemy prisoners have been given systematic access to American civilian courts.

As a matter of law, then, Gitmo seems to be on solid footing. That could change drastically. We are awaiting a decision in the Supreme Court’s most important case of this term, Boumediene v. Bush, in which alien combatants are claiming U.S. constitutional rights — first, habeas corpus (the premise for claiming that, despite the MCA, military tribunals are inadequate) and, ultimately, the same full-blown trial rights enjoyed by the American citizens they are trying to kill. It was the Supreme Court, however, that besought Congress to intervene in the detainee thicket. Congress having obliged, one hopes the Court will respect its resolution — particularly when, in the unlikely event that the system’s multiple layers of military and civilian appeals yield unjust results, the justices would be able to address those on a case-by-case basis.

No, Gitmo’s demise is driven by politics, domestic and international.

NEW WAR, NEW COMBATANTS
Much of the explanation is cultural. Modern American society is deeply influenced by legal elites. It is made uncomfortable by the specter of potential innocents being held for years without having their day in court. And potential innocence is inherent in the ambiguity that haunts this new kind of war.

For the most part, prior conflicts involved honorable enemy combatants: soldiers who hewed to the laws of war. They wore uniforms, carried their weapons openly, and generally refrained from targeting civilians. To the contrary, our current enemies blend into the civilian populations they target for sneak attacks. It is counterintuitive — and, from a broad perspective, unjust — to reward their barbarism with legal rights that are never extended to honorable combatants. Yet, as a practical matter, unless caught in flagrante delicto, the unlawful-combatant terrorist presents doubt about whether he is really a terrorist — unlike, say, the captured Nazi soldier, who was unmistakably clad and fighting as such.

The public’s immediate post-9/11 ardor has ebbed, as it was sure to do. We don’t like terrorists any better, but as the atrocities recede in our memory, we are naturally more sympathetic to the plight of the captive: claiming his innocence yet jailed indefinitely, with no prospect of compelling the government to justify his detention. His claims may be implausible, but the press dutifully reports them, frequently without the damning facts that would undermine them. Witness the case of Canadian jihadist Omar Khadr, tirelessly described as a frightened teenage detainee, with scant mention of the American medic he killed and the others he maimed by tossing a grenade at them on the battlefield.

Of course, our standard mechanism for resolving doubt is the judicial trial. Gitmo critics argue that we successfully tried terrorists in the federal courts throughout the 1990s and should do so again. It’s a proven formula to which, they maintain, we should return.

Despite its surface appeal, this contention is a hanging curveball that by now should have been slammed out of the park. While I am very proud to have prosecuted terrorists in the 1990s, the strategy can be considered a success only if one’s chief preoccupation is due process. Viewed through the prism of national security, the effort was an abysmal failure.

Yes, every apprehended terrorist was convicted. In eight years, however, only 29 operatives, most of them low-level, were captured and tried. Between the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 and its destruction on 9/11, American targets were plotted against and attacked with increasing audacity by an enemy that was growing ever larger. But because of the criminal justice system’s high evidentiary hurdles and procedural rigor, it could not have handled many more cases than the paltry number it processed — cases that invariably took years to complete, at a cost of untold millions (including the expense of securing courthouses, holding facilities, and trial participants). When one considers that we’ve frequently taken out more than 29 terrorists in a single day of combat since 9/11, it becomes easier to see the weaknesses of the justice system as a counterterrorism tool — and to understand how we’ve avoided a reprise of 9/11.

FROM THE HOUSETOPS
The terrorism prosecutions, furthermore, were an intelligence banquet for radical Islam. The imperative of neutralizing terrorists who are sure to kill again if acquitted induces prosecutors to charge their cases broadly, maximizing the admissibility of damaging evidence. Broad charges, however, translate into bottomless obligations to disclose sensitive information in the government’s files — to say nothing of the trial itself, at which top informants and valuable surveillance efforts are exposed, rendering them useless for future intelligence-gathering. Even if al-Qaeda had somehow managed to develop a spy agency, it could never have come close to acquiring the trove of intelligence we provided gratis through our prosecutions.

The biggest factor making civilian trials untenable, though, is that the most important evidence is almost always inadmissible by its very nature. Much of the information that shows how Americans are imperiled by the Gitmo detainees comes from two sources: interrogations and intelligence from foreign services (our own intelligence assets being appallingly poor in places where the threat to us is gravest). No matter how reliable they may be, the fruits of Gitmo interrogations would be inadmissible in civilian criminal trials — not because of “torture,” as the demagogues are quick to assume, but because this information was not elicited with Miranda protections, such as the assistance of taxpayer-funded lawyers. Similarly, foreign intelligence cannot be used in court, however great our confidence in its accuracy. It generally comes to us as hearsay (reports of what sources said, not testimony from the sources themselves), provided on the assurance that it will not be exposed publicly — an assurance whose betrayal would be the death of cooperation from countries that have the eyes and ears we lack.

This explains why it was anticipated that only a small fraction of the Gitmo detainees — less, probably significantly less, than 20 percent — would ever face commission trials for war crimes. A war is not a crime wave. Protecting a nation entails neutralizing many more hostile actors than can be proved guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in military trials, let alone civilian trials. Even with the military’s relaxed due-process requirements, it has always been obvious that many more captives would be held than tried.

The law of war allows for incapacitating dangerous operatives based on the commander in chief’s assessment of classified or inadmissible intelligence. The criminal justice system does not; defendants must be tried. Unlike democracies such as Israel and Great Britain, with their histories of confronting international terrorism, the U.S. does not permit even limited preventive detention outside of war. If the Gitmo detainees are no longer deemed alien enemy combatants, if Plan B becomes civilian prosecution, then most of them will have to be released, regardless of how much danger they pose.

Civilian criminal prosecution, then, is a non-starter. Once made aware of its downsides, the American public is likely to accept something with less-elaborate due process, provided the outcomes have integrity. We want to be confident that we are not indefinitely detaining innocent people, and we’ll accept the military system if it is shown to work and inspire that confidence.

THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS
The problem with the military system lies in international politics. The fact that such tribunals — whether CSRTs or commission trials — pass muster under American legal principles is cold comfort. Like it or not, if we are to keep radical Islam on the defensive, we need the enthusiastic cooperation of other nations. Those nations, especially in Europe, have decided that Guantanamo Bay flouts Western values because military tribunals are bereft of an independent judicial check — besides bringing charges, the executive branch is judge, jury, and jailer/executioner.

They are wrong, of course. The military justice system is an honorable one, superior to the justice systems of many American states — to say nothing of other countries. Indeed, lawyers quip that while the guilty are better-off in the civilian system, an innocent has a better shot at acquittal in a military court. And even if that were not the case, the MCA, as noted above, does provide for civilian-court review. No matter. International opinion, especially in Europe, snickers that Gitmo justice is a unilateral executive-branch show where even the death penalty, that bane of bien-pensant existence, can be imposed without judicial oversight.

International Gitmo-paranoia is driven by Bush Derangement Syndrome, infecting countries that, truth be told, are singularly unhelpful at moving prisoners out of Camp Delta despite their carping about its existence. We cannot, however, afford to ignore this particular tantrum. If we cannot try terrorists in our custody, we will need foreign cooperation in relocating them. More important, most jihadists who threaten America will continue to do so from overseas. If we do not have a system to which foreign countries are willing to extradite terrorists, we will effectively have outsourced our national security to toothless nations that are far less interested in it than we are.

The War on Terror does not readily fit either the military or the civilian judicial paradigm. It is a novel conflict that calls for a novel solution. The best one would be a special national-security court, a brand-new system specifically designed to have jurisdiction over important legal components attendant to the war.

For detention and trial, such a system would borrow heavily from military procedures, which allow for narrow charges, less onerous discovery requirements, the protection of national-defense information, and extensive questioning of detainees prior to the assignment of counsel (since once counsel enters a case, interrogation ends — something we can afford in the criminal justice system, where the goal is prosecution, but not in wartime detention, where the goal is intelligence). The proceedings, however, would be presided over by federal judges, not military judges.

Conservatives instinctively recoil at the thought of expanding the judicial reach, but this is an expansion that makes sense, because it involves what judges do singularly well, and what the military has proved unable to do — namely, move proceedings along to their conclusion. An independent judicial check will quell our allies’ squawking and make the system acceptable to them. The danger, of course, is that judges might make up the law as they go along, naturally ratcheting up due-process requirements because they are trained for the task of providing justice, not balancing due process with the demands of national security. Congress, however, can avoid that pitfall by writing exacting rules for national-security-court proceedings and installing a presumption against judicial legislating.

Our lawmakers, unfortunately, have shown little stomach for this task. The burden of drafting procedural rules would make them accountable: They would have to say what rights they believe accused terrorists should be granted and what rights they should be denied. That process would be fraught with political risk. It’s easier to let the president, the military, and the courts wrestle with the nuts and bolts of detainee cases. Meanwhile Congress grandstands over interrogation methods, confinement conditions, and legal procedures but avoids offering an alternative.

The time for abdicating responsibility is over. Gitmo will surely be closed, and soon. But the problem of what to do — now and in the future — with captured terrorists who mean the American people severe harm is not going away. Working together, the political branches responsible for our security can design a new justice system that meets the unprecedented challenges of this war. If they default, the judiciary — the politically insulated branch with no national-security mandate — will dictate due-process standards ad hoc. And in very short order, we will be back to the 1990s, relying on civilian court procedures to protect us — with the same results.

While some Americans happily celebrated the 60th birthday of Israel this past 
week, on several California campuses it was the “Nakba” (Arabic for 
"Catastrophe") that was celebrated instead and American college campuses nationwide also provided the venue for the Israel bashing event by setting up fake “checkpoints” and accosting students for their ID then saying they could not go home to their villages” inside Israel. Meanwhile, as in the past, anti-Israel protesters at UC-Berkeley illegally brandished realistic weapons in order to call attention to “Israeli oppression."

Federal law requires toy guns to have bright orange tips and the 
California Penal Code section 12556 clearly stipulates that “No person 
may openly display or expose any imitation firearm […] in a public 
place.”

For the full text of the statute, scroll to the bottom of the link by clicking here: 

Moreover, University of California code 40.10 states that “University 
properties shall be used only in accordance with federal, state, and 
local laws and shall not be used for the purpose of organizing or 
carrying out unlawful activity."  Another code 70.50 adds that registered student groups (including Students for Justice in Palestine and Muslim Students Association) must respect state and Federal law.

Finally, the UC Policy on Student Conduct and Discipline states that “Students 
are expected to comply with all laws and with University policies and 
campus regulations,” and that “Chancellors may impose discipline for 
violations of University policies or campus regulations.” 
 
According to an eyewitness account of the May 7th protest, the UC Police was present at the protest but would not enforce the law. UC Berkeley Middle East Studies Center receives considerable money and support from Saudi Arabia so this is not surprising. Meanwhile, Cal students were nonetheless subject to having guns pointed at them all day long at Sather Gate in the center of campus.

I would encourage those of you who are concerned that the UC-Berkeley 
administration will not enforce state law or university policy to write 
to the UC-Berkeley Police Department Chief of Police Victoria Harrison
and the Office of the Chancellor Robert Birgeneau. At the time this article went to press, neither was available to comment.

Since student groups often brandish toy weapons on our campuses, 
especially during “Apartheid Wall Checkpoint” protests, it is high time taxpayers who support public universities report infractions of federal or state law to the police and university administrations of their local campuses as this problem is not unique to UC Berkeley. Recently, the San Jose State administration put their foot down when students from Palestinian and Muslim groups on that campus made the same violations also to only have the campus police look the other way.   In April, 2007 at De Anza Community College, protesters also carried black toy guns on campus that did not have orange tips, a violation of both federal and state law in the United States.

Source Lee Kaplan  

By Warner Todd Huston

We are certainly used to seeing the MSM causing trouble for conservatives and this one is no different at least on that level. But the interesting thing here is that the trouble a social conservative discovered was as a result of what she wrote in the MSM as opposed to what was written about her by the MSM. It seems that the opinion editorial written by Crystal Dixon(1) for the Toledo Free Press got her fired by the University of Toledo(2) because… well, you know how universities are all about free expression and speech, right? Unfortunately for Dixon, though, hers wasn’t the proper, politically correct sort of speech that is officially approved of by the thugs at the University of Toledo.

You see, Crystal Dixon made the mistake of believing that this whole silly idea of “freedom of religion” also applied to our institutions of higher learning. She foolishly asserted in her Toledo Free Press op ed that as far as her religious beliefs are concerned, homosexuality is a choice made by the individual instead of some genetic predisposition, that someone chooses to engage in homosexual activities instead of assuming that being gay is forced upon one by “nature.”

Of course, Dixon based her entire op ed on her Christian religious beliefs. It was no hate filled rant and was quite civil, even tempered, and to the point. But the gay mafia inside the University of Toledo must be awfully powerful. Or, at the very least, fear of them was enough to stifle—no, execute—Mrs. Dixon over what the president of UoT must imagine is her wretched religious extremism.

President Dr. Lloyd Jacobs dashed off a letter summarily firing Mrs. Dixon from her $134,383 a year job as associate vice president for employee resources.

A letter to Ms. Dixon informing her of her termination, stated “The public position you have taken in the Toledo Free Press is in direct contradiction to university policies and procedures as well as the core values of the strategic plan which is mission critical.”

It went on to say her position calls into question her ability to continue in her role as an administrator in charge of personnel actions and decisions and that “the result is a loss of confidence in you as an administrator.”

Don’t you DARE have any religious beliefs in an American university. Well… unless it is the church of Satan, or Islam, global warming, anti-Jewish or feminism you want to belong to. Those are perfectly fine religious opinions in the halls of our fetid universities it should be noted.

So, what sort of evil, no good, rotten thing did Mrs. Dixon say in her op ed for the Free Press? I mean, it HAD to be the most scurrilous thing on record, right?

She began with this:

I respectfully submit a different perspective for Miller and Toledo Free Press readers to consider.

SHOCKING! Wanting to be respectful of her opponents and to add to the debate? Say it ain’t so! She is off to a bad start with this. We all know that no university wants any different perspectives, don’t we? As soon as she finished her first words she should have known her job was lost.

First, human beings, regardless of their choices in life, are of ultimate value to God and should be viewed the same by others. At the same time, one’s personal choices lead to outcomes either positive or negative.

OUTRAGE! Speaking of God dooms this woman to the educational purgatory reserved for conservatives and other nefarious inhuman cretins as far as the denizens of our universities are concerned.

I won’t replay her entire op ed here, but it’s filled with some great stuff. But I do have to reiterate one of her themes before I close this article of mine.

As a Black woman who happens to be an alumnus of the University of Toledo’s Graduate School, an employee and business owner, I take great umbrage at the notion that those choosing the homosexual lifestyle are “civil rights victims.” Here’s why. I cannot wake up tomorrow and not be a Black woman.

You know, I have often wondered why the civil rights establishment has allowed homosexual extremists to co-opt the mantle of civil rights for their own twisted agenda? Dixon is exactly right. I can no more “decide” not to be white as she can “decide” not to be black. And, if people are to attack Mrs. Dixon because of the color of her skin, this is something so inherently wrong as to be axiomatic that a civil right would be violated by oppression based on that reality. But, it is possible to decide not to be gay. It is something eminently under the control of the individual to change. It is a behavior, not an unalterable fact.

But, all that aside, if Mrs. Dixon’s religious beliefs dictate that homosexuality is a choice, then how is it the right of the university to fire her over that belief? Has it affected her job in the past? I don’t see how it could have. After all, she has risen through the ranks of the university to a rather high position. If no one noticed her religious beliefs had affected her job by now, then it is safe to say that she was not acting in a discriminatory manner in the execution of her duties.

I hope Mrs. Dixon sues the University of Toledo and Dr. Lloyd Jacobs into oblivion.  If you’d like to send this so-called educator a little note, try this email address: UTPresident@utoledo.edu. Or give him a call and set up a nice lunch with him at: (419) 530-2211. Then there is the ever popular yet slightly technologically backwards fax number:  (419) 530-4984. I think the good doc would love to respectfully hear another perspective from all of us. He looks like just the sort of fella that enjoys a good chat, doesn’t he?

1) opinion editorial written by Crystal Dixon

2) fired by the University of Toledo

 By Robert Roy Britt
Senior Science Writer

Physicists have come up with a way to explain how information could escape from a black hole, an idea that’s been debated since the 1970s.

But the new proposal leaves the long-held concept of a space-time continuum in tatters.

Whether you’ve been following the arguments over the years or not, now might be a good time to reach for some aspirin, as space-time continuum textbooks may have to be revised.

First, some basics: Black holes are like kitchen sinks. Stuff is only supposed to go one direction, and then it’s gone forever, lost to the formidable clutches of gravity in a bizarre distortion of space and time, or what scientists call space-time. You no longer have to be an Einstein to have heard as much, though all this is indeed based on his work.

However, in the 1970s, Steven Hawking declared that black holes leak. Eventually, like a tire doing a slow, inaudible pffffft, everything that was sucked in would seep out. But, and this was a big but that Hawking proposed, any information that went into the black hole would be lost. Whatever stuff leaked out, in other words, would not be identifiable as corresponding ingoing stuff.

Oops!

But by the late 1990s, Hawking’s idea fell out of favor. It messed too much with quantum mechanics, a successful theory that says information can’t be lost.

In 2004, Hawking renounced his idea.

Yet no viable explanation has emerged, until perhaps now, for how the information could get out of the black hole.

The newly proposed scheme, in a nutshell, says space-time is bigger than was thought, and so there’s room for the information to reappear.

"Information only appears to be lost because we have been looking at a restricted part of the true quantum-mechanical space-time," said Penn State’s Abhay Ashtekar, who has come up with the idea. "Once you consider quantum gravity, then space-time becomes much larger and there is room for information to reappear in the distant future on the other side of what was first thought to be the end of space-time."

While this might not explain where your socks are, it does come with some mind-bending new concepts for theorists to chew on.

For starters, Ashtekar thinks space-time is not a continuum, as we’ve been hearing for years. Rather, "it is made up of individual building blocks," according to a statement released by the university. It’s like a piece of fabric which, "though it appears to be continuous, is made up of individual threads."

Now what?

The space-time continuum has long been invoked to understand how things get warped in the presence of gravity. For example, light from the sun is bent slightly as it passes Earth, thus changing the timing and perceived origin of that light as witnessed by someone farther out in the solar system. The effect in this example would be miniscule, but not imperceptible. One study found that satellites were dragged by about 6 feet (2 meters) every year because our world’s gravity, combined with its spin, muck with the cosmic fabric.

Light traveling near a black hole is bent so severely that it’s consumed, never to be seen again (excepting that whole leaking thing). Such a distortion in the space-time continuum, hard as it might be to comprehend, is the basis for other exotic notions such as time travel. A person who wants to go to another dimension, the thinking goes, need only to enter a severely warped reality, called a singularity, and somehow emerge unharmed on some other side.

"Once we realized that the notion of space-time as a continuum is only an approximation of reality, it became clear to us that singularities are merely artifacts of our insistence that space-time should be described as a continuum," Ashtekar said.

The mind-bending proposal will be detailed in the May 20 issue of the journal Physical Review Letters. It was funded by the National Science Foundation and the Penn State Eberly College of Science. Victor Taveras, a graduate student in the Penn State Department of Physics, and Madhavan Varadarajan, a professor at the Raman Research Institute in India, contributed.

CARACAS, Venezuela —  President Hugo Chavez on Wednesday warned Colombia not to allow a U.S. military base on its border with Venezuela, saying he would consider such an act an "aggression."

Chavez said he would not permit Colombia’s U.S.-backed government to establish an American military base in La Guajira, a region spanning northeastern Colombia and northwestern Venezuela.

The Venezuelan leader said if Colombia allows the base, his government will revive a decades-old territorial conflict and stake a claim to the entire region.

"We will not allow the Colombian government to give La Guajira to the empire," Chavez said, referring to the U.S. during a speech to a packed auditorium of uniformed soldiers. "Colombia is launching a threat of war at us."

He said Washington’s top diplomat in Bogota, U.S. Ambassador William Brownfield, recently suggested that a U.S. military base in Ecuador could be moved to La Guajira.

Chavez urged his Colombian counterpart, Alvaro Uribe, to "think it over well" before making such a decision because Venezuela will do "whatever it takes" to ensure that a U.S. military base is not built on the peninsula in the Caribbean Sea.

Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa — a close Chavez ally — has repeatedly said that he will not renew a 10-year lease on the base in the Pacific port of Manta when it expires next year.

Manta is the United States’ only military base in South America. Surveillance flights the U.S. runs from there are responsible for about 60 percent of drug interdiction in the eastern Pacific.

Diplomatic relations between Caracas and Bogota have been rocky for months. They worsened last week when Colombia unveiled documents allegedly showing that Chavez sought to arm and finance Colombian rebels. Chavez denies the claim.

Colombian officials say they found the documents in laptops recovered after a March 1 cross-border raid in Ecuador that killed rebel leader Raul Reyes and 24 other people.

International police agency Interpol is analyzing the documents and plans to present its findings on Thursday in Bogota.

"The Colombian government will surely announce tomorrow that the documents retrieved from Raul Reyes’ computer are authentic and, therefore, Chavez supports terrorism," Chavez said.

Chavez — an outspoken critic of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America — said Washington is using Uribe as pawn in a plan aimed at portraying Venezuela as a backer of terrorism.

Chavez denies supporting the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, saying he only seeks a peaceful end to the neighboring country’s decades-long armed conflict.

The European Union joined the United States in listing the FARC — Latin America’s largest rebel force with roughly 14,000 fighters — as a terrorist group in 2002, outlawing economic support for the guerrillas.

Source

With the first group of former Cole Middle School students set to graduate from high school in upcoming weeks, a lingering question over whether illegal immigrants among them qualify for the same free-college pledge their classmates are getting has been answered:

They don’t.

But even the undocumented students will see some benefit from Mayor John Hickenlooper’s 2004 promise of free college for every Cole student who graduated from high school. They will all be eligible for the same in-state tuition payments their legal Colorado resident classmates are getting.

But the illegal immigrants will be responsible for their own out-of-state fees if they attend a Colorado college or university.

Colorado’s state colleges and universities charge out-of-state tuition to illegal immigrants even if they spent most of their lives in Colorado.

The mayor’s office said that Hickenlooper decided early on that there’s only so much money that can be raised and that he would peg the amount for undocumented students to the same amount in-state students would receive.

"The mayor did not feel he could provide more for undocumented students than was provided documented students," said Katherine Archuleta, a senior aide to Hickenlooper.

That decision is having an impact on some students who clearly recall the day the mayor came to their school and promised they would attend college regardless of their finances.

"Nobody made him come up to us and promise that to us," said one 19-year-old, who declined to give her name for fear of deportation. "And we’ve been working for this, to have this scholarship for the past five years, having our hopes up."

An 18-year-old said the tuition amount would cover only a third of her college costs.

"I’m going to have to work two jobs all summer and get the money from wherever I can," she said. "And that’s not what the mayor promised."

The gap between what an in-state and an out-of-state student pays is huge. Tuition for a freshman taking 12 credit hours at CU-Boulder in 2008-09 is scheduled to be $5,922 for in-state residents and $25,400 for out-of-state residents.

Financial hardships

The question was raised soon after Hickenlooper promised to find funds for Cole students to fill any gaps in the cost of college after students obtained scholarships and other grants. At the time, the mayor’s office simply acknowledged that it was being debated.

At least 10 undocumented students who heard the mayor’s 2004 speech and are graduating this year will likely have to come up with thousands of dollars on their own to pay out-of-state tuition, according to the mayor’s calculation of those who have applied.

But Patricia Lawless, a community organizer for Metro Organizations for People, said the actual number of affected students is probably higher because some of the students had trouble getting their applications in and can apply later. She added that once other graduating classes come into play, the actual number of students affected could rise to more than 100 students.

She and some of the students plan to hold a news conference Monday in which they will press their case.

"This is a very difficult situation for families who wish to send children to a university, but because they are undocumented, they don’t have ability to access the funds that are needed," Archuleta said.

A tricky issue

The mayor’s pledge at Cole Middle School has become an iconic moment of his administration. His promise to ensure a college education for all those in attendance who graduated went on to become a springboard for a fuller scholarship program. Now, the Denver Scholarship Foundation has expanded the offer throughout the school district.

But the question of how to handle illegal immigrants has dogged the scholarship program. Archuleta said the mayor decided that he would work to provide money to the the children of illegal immigrants, going beyond what the foundation program now offers for other schools in the district. She said that although the foundation doesn’t provide scholarships to those who are undocumented, the mayor decided his personal pledge meant he should treat the Cole students differently.

She said he steered the undocumented Cole students to get scholarships from the Latin American Educational Foundation. When the deadline passed without the students applying there, the mayor found a donor to route money through that foundation to cover nearly 10 undocumented students for this year up to the in-state tuition amount, Archuleta said.

Several of the students met with the mayor a couple of weeks ago to tell him they felt they had been misled.

"Since that meeting, the mayor has directed me to try to find other scholarship funds that may be available to undocumented students," Archuleta said. "We have have been trying to find other scholarships or donors or sponsors who would be willing to fill the gap between in-state and out-of-state tuition. We’ve identified a couple, but we don’t have that solidified yet."

Source

Washington: US Assistant Secretary of State for Central Asia and South Asia Affairs, Richard Boucher, has said insurgents in Pakistan’s frontier region continue to pose a serious threat to the United States and the rest of the world.

Testifying before the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on South Asia, Boucher was quoted by the Daily Times as saying that Pakistan had requested for 117 million dollars for basic education and 47 million dollars for higher education in the 2009 budget.

"The recent election outcome in Pakistan illustrated the Pakistan people’s commitment to democracy. Their choosing of a government comprised of (sic) moderate political parties also demonstrates a desire to reject violent extremists. The United States must help the Pakistani people seize the opportunities that these successful elections now present," he added.

Boucher also said that Islamabad’s base request of 300 million dollars, and an additional 100 million dollar requested in the 2009 "bridge supplemental" would continue to support Pakistan’s security force modernization.

It would also provide equipment and training for the Security Development Plan in Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and its surrounding agencies.

"We aim to address the health, education and economic programmes in the Tribal Areas through the continuation of our five-year 750 million dollar funding commitment that began in fiscal year 2007. We’ve requested 60 million dollar in the fiscal year 2008 supplemental and 150 million dollar in the fiscal year 2009 base to fulfil this commitment in Pakistan," he added.

Source

They walked tall and stood proud.

Each step they took was a landmark in their courage and determination.

Each cheer they got from the crowd was a tribute to the sacrifices they made.

Brave: Mark Ormerod defies the pain to collect his medal yesterday

With scarcely a falter, two Royal Marine commandos who lost limbs in Afghanistan overcame one of the toughest battles of their lives yesterday – by walking to receive their campaign medals.

Mark Ormrod and Ben McBean made a supreme effort to master artificial limbs in time for the ceremony so they could collect their medals not just in person, but face to face with their commanding officers.

They were singled out yesterday as exemplifying the kind of valour and dedication which thousands of British troops are demonstrating daily in Afghanistan and Iraq.

For these were the most celebrated of "Harry’s heroes" – the grievously injured men described by Prince Harry as "the real heroes" of the Armed Forces.

Corporal Ormrod, who lost both legs and an arm to a Taliban landmine, trained alongside Harry before the prince’s Afghanistan tour.

Heroes: Corporal Mark Ormrod and Marine Ben McBean proudly show off their medals

Marine McBean flew home with Harry after he also fell victim to a mine, losing an arm and a leg.

The prince was reunited with both men recently when he visited a military rehabilitation centre in Surrey.

Yesterday each man made the 100 yard walk to be presented with medals at Norton Manor Camp, Taunton, Somerset, before applauding families and fellow marines.

They stepped separately across the parade ground, stood with their comrades – then walked back again to sit down together.

Family man: Cpl Ormrod with fincee Becky and Kezia, three

They shared a joke, touched knuckles with respective outstretched arms, and applauded their colleagues by clapping hands on artificial knees.

Afterwards Ben McBean disclosed that he had learned to walk again only three weeks ago.

He carried with him a good luck message from Prince Harry.

Showing off his medal he declared: "Today has been the proudest day of my life. I’ve been out to battle, I got blown up, and now I’ve got a medal in my hand to show for it.

"Harry branded me a hero, but we were all out there doing the same job.

"This is my first medal from my first tour, but hopefully it won’t be my last.

"I was determined to walk up there and get my medal, and I did.

"My dream is to get back out to Afghanistan, and do what I was doing before.

"I hope I can achieve that, however long it takes."

Cpl Ormrod, who stunned medical staff by the speed with which he has recovered the strength and ability to walk, is aided by state of the art, computer-controlled limbs called C-legs.

Yesterday he revealed that collecting his medal had always been "the driving force".

Pain was visible on his face as he stepped from a wheelchair to begin the parade ground walk.

But it transformed into a broad grin long before he joined the ranks of recipients.

Afterwards he said: "It was awesome. It was one of the biggest targets I had set myself – and to be walking for this has been such an achievement.

"I really had to work hard to receive this medal."

He admitted he still had a long way to go, despite taking his first steps on prosthetic legs just five weeks after returning from the war zone.

He is practising walking uphill and downhill and on loose surfaces – and, it transpires, for a trip up the aisle next year with his 22-year-old fiancee Becky Hayes.

Yesterday Miss Hayes, who cheered her fiance as he walked, said: "Just making it here is a massive achievement.

"It’s the first time he has walked without the use of parallel bars and it’s the first time in front of people.

"I know he was really nervous about the day, although he’d kill me for telling you."

Both men, from Plymouth, serve with West Country-based 40 Royal Marines Commando.

Marine McBean, 21, has described the loss of his limbs as "nothing much more than a blip in my career".

Cpl Ormrod, 24, is still having to fight for proper compensation for his injuries – he was offered just £214,000 instead of the maximum £285,000.

The two men, whose comradeship has been strengthened through loss, were among those singled out by Vice Admiral Adrian Johns at the ceremony yesterday – McBean as "Harry’s favourite marine," as he was described, and the "true grit" of Ormrod – "a legend" at the hospital overseeing his remarkable recovery.

But he did not forget the 25 injured during 40 Commando’s frontline Afghanistan tour for eight months from last September, or, particularly, the three who gave their lives.

"Today is really important to get us back together again and share our stories of success," he said.

"However there is a price to pay. Success is not free, and it doesn’t come easy."

Source

By Patrick Poole
FrontPageMagazine.com

Khalid Yasin is one of the most notorious Islamic hate sheikhs in the world today. He had been widely condemned from the US to Britain to Australia for his virulent Wahhabist extremism, his intense anti-Americanism (despite the fact that he is an American-born convert), his justification of Islamic terrorism, his wild-eyed conspiracy theories, and his outright racial and religious bigotry. And an Australian news investigation found that Yasin had claimed academic degrees that the schools had no record or, and also discovered that he had engaged in outright fraud in his building his international Islamic media empire.

So it is troubling to see that Khalid Yasin will be lecturing at Sinclair Community College in Dayton, Ohio on May 16th, sponsored by Dayton’s Masjid-at-Taqwa.

For example, consider some of his stated positions and activities:

• Yasin says that the US government was behind the 9/11 attacks.
• Yasin claims that AIDS was invented at a US government lab and spread by Western governments through UN agencies and Christian missionaries.
• Yasin advocates for the death penalty for homosexuality.
• Yasin justified the terrorist bombings in Bali because of years of Western oppression.
• Yasin says that the Quran permits wife-beating and that equal rights for women is a “delusion” and “foolishness”.
• Yasin calls the beliefs of Christians and Jews “filth”.
• Yasin says that Muslims cannot have non-Muslim friends.
• Yasin rejects any separation between Islam and the state and openly advocates for the reestablishment of the caliphate.
• Yasin visited Jemaah Islamiah terrorist leader Abu Bakar Bashir in prison.
• Yasin has lectured with Hizb-ut-Tahrir hatemonger Omar Bakri Mohammed, who was banned from the UK in 2006.
• Yasin was in Saudi Arabia on 9/11 soliciting the support of Al-Qaeda front Al-Haramain Foundation, which was designated a terrorist organization in 2004 by the US government, to help finance his Islamic Broadcasting Company,.

It is difficult to overstate the hatred, bigotry, misogyny and malicious conspiracy theories spewed by Khalid Yasin. So despicable is his warped ideology that he had been made a pariah by the international media and his views have been condemned by numerous government officials.

For instance, statements made on his DVDs were featured in the UK Channel 4 "Undercover Mosque" program, which were found available for sale in British mosques. Here’s the relevant part of that program’s transcript where he brands the Christian and Jewish faiths “filth”, rejects any equality for women, and blames the West for AIDS:

N: Regular interfaith meetings with other religions take place at this mosque, yet in a DVD (‘Changing The World Through The Da’wah’; IBC Ltd/Islam Productions) bought from its bookshop, a British-based (African-American) convert called Sheikh Khalid Yasin (KY), who studied Arabic in Saudi Arabia, condemns the teachings of other religions -

KY: “We don’t need to go to the Christians, or the Jews, debating with them about the filth which they believe … We Muslims have been ordered to do ‘brainwashing’ because the kuffaar … they are doing ‘braindefiling’ … You are watching the kaffir TVs, and your wife is watching right now, and your children are watching it right now, and they are being polluted, and they are being penetrated, and they are being infected, so that your children and you go out as Muslims and come back to the house as kaffirs.”

N: In this DVD (entitled: ‘Some Advice To The Muslim Woman’; Islam Productions), from the Mosque bookshop, he preaches against the equality of women

KY: “This whole delusion about the equality of women is a bunch of foolishness, there’s no such thing.”

N: In this DVD (entitled: ‘Jihad or Terrorism?’, Ahlus Sunna’wal Jama’ah), he claims that AIDS is a Western and Christian plot -

KY: “No, missionaries from the World Health Organisation and Christian groups went into Africa and inoculated people for diphtheria, malaria, yellow fever, and they put in the medicine the AIDS virus, which is a conspiracy.” (his emphasis)

In an interview with Sarah Ferguson of Australia’s Sunday entitled, "Khalid Yasin: The New Voice of Islam?", he describes his conspiracy theories related to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, denying the existence of Al-Qaeda:

SARAH FERGUSON: And he’s waded right into one of the most divisive issues between the Muslim community and the Federal Government — September 11.

SHEIK KHALID YASIN: There has been no evidence that has surfaced, no bona fide irrevocable, irrefutable evidence that had been surfaced that showed that there is a group called al-Qa’ida that did the September 11 bombings. I’m of the opinion there was a rogue operation that took place. Now, to go beyond that would say I would have to have some evidence, which I don’t.

SARAH FERGUSON: But he does go beyond it.

SHEIK KHALID YASIN: An operation that took place with the complicity of some very sophisticated entities other than some Middle Eastern guys on an airplane. or being orchestrated by someone in a cave in Iraq.

SARAH FERGUSON: What do you mean by "sophisticated entities"?

SHEIK KHALID YASIN: Sophisticated entities means entities who themselves were governmentally instructed, equipped, motivated. We now know that the way that the World Trade Center fell the way that those buildings fell — they fell from internal explosive charges, the same way it’s done in a construction site.

The Sunday program also asked him about his conspiracy theories claiming that the US government and Christian organizations are responsible for the creation and the spread of AIDS:

SARAH FERGUSON: Conspiracy theories are Yasin’s bread and butter, and the wilder, the better.

SHEIK KHALID YASIN, DVD EXCERPT: An AIDS virus, that is a classic disease that was created in Fort McKinley, United States. Fort McKinley, the AIDS virus, 63,000 gallons.

SARAH FERGUSON: This one comes from his DVD called ‘Jihad or Terrorism’.

SHEIK KHALID YASIN, DVD EXCERPT: Missionaries from the World Health Organisation and Christian groups went into Africa and inoculated people for diphtheria, malaria, yellow fever and they put in the medicine the AIDS virus.

And in a July 2003 conversation on Australia’s Sunday Nights with John Cleary program, Khalid Yasin articulated his vision of the reinstitution of sharia and the dismantling of the wall between Islam and state:

John Cleary: Where does the Sharia fit into that?

Khalid Yasin: Well the Sharia is the cement that keeps all the bricks together. The Sharia is the legislative element. The Sharia is the judicial element. This is where rules, this is where juristic decisions, this is where the courts, this is where law. And I mean if you don’t have a people that is governed by Sharia, then you have a lawless people.

John Cleary: Christianity once had a problem with that in the Middle Ages, and so canon law developed, and church law was the law of the State. And then alongside that civic law developed. And gradually over the years, they split and then civil law became predominant over church law. Do you see that sort of evolution taking place in Islam as well?

Khalid Yasin: No. As a matter of fact this dichotomy of church and State and civil law and religious law, doesn’t exist in Islam. Because the source of law has never been the human being. In Christianity the source of law, human beings have always had something to do with the evolution of the law, but in Islam it is not the case. The law is an inspiration from God, the Qu’ran is the word of God alone. Even it is not the law of Mohamed. Mohamed was inspired by God, it is his example of the law, his explanation of the law, his personal example of the law. So in this sense civil law and religious law are congruous together.

John Cleary: Could you have a secular Islamic state, like Turkey is trying to be, over the years?

Khalid Yasin: No, it doesn’t work. These are experiments that have been tried, but they haven’t worked. Of course, you can have it, but you’ll see that after a certain amount of time it disintegrates, it cannot work.

John Cleary: So ultimately the Sharia should become the law of the land?

Khalid Yasin: Exactly. It has to be. I mean, who is the best lawgiver? Who is the best legislator: the designer, the author, the creator or the human beings who themselves are subjected to that law? It has to be.

When investigators for the Sunday program looked into his academic background and his media company, they found a pattern of rampant fraud and misrepresentations:

SARAH FERGUSON: Yasin moved to the UK. He made headquarters here in the northern city of Sheffield and began looking for new investors. Armed with this glossy brochure on the UK operation, Yasin came back to Australia last year.

VOICE-OVER: Islamic Broadcasting Corporation — a unique investment opportunity. It will host up to 50 multimedia TV channels and five radio stations. potentially serving 1.2 billion viewers across the globe.

SARAH FERGUSON: The brochure’s biggest selling point is a TV broadcast centre in Coventry, complete with photos and architects’ drawings.

VOICE-OVER: We are currently relocating to our brand new purpose-built 8,000 square feet broadcast centre. It will be opened for business in September 2005.

SARAH FERGUSON: By the time we’d discovered Yasin’s brochure, Yasin had left the country on an overseas trip. We put its claims to the new managing director of IBC Australia, Walid Ali. IBC in the UK claims it’s building a massive ?2 million broadcast centre. And that broadcast centre is under construction now. In fact it’s supposed to be ready now. Have you seen it?

WALID ALI, MANAGING DIRECTOR ISLAMIC BROADCASTING GROUP: I will be very honest with you. I don’t know a great deal about their operations but I do know that that facility has not been built as yet. Obviously with any organisation, any business venture that you take on, there will be unexpected delays. I’m sure they’re having some unexpected delays. The idea of a Muslim-owned TV station was very attractive to Muslims here, and the brochure was crucial. Yasin used it to convince them that the UK operation was worth investing in. We’ve spoken to people who attended fundraisers in Sydney run by Yasin. At one event last year, $90,000 was pledged in a single evening. We’ve also seen bank documents transferring almost $50,000 of that money to a bank account in the UK in the name of one of Yasin’s companies.

The question is — what happened to that money? This is the real technology park in Coventry and there is no broadcast centre because the brochure is a work of fiction, indeed fraud. Yasin’s only connection with the Coventry Technology Park was a small office space rented out by his UK associate Channel Islam. According to the company which leases space here, Channel Islam broke its lease last year and is being pursued by debt collectors. None of these groups is collaborating with Yasin. The sums don’t add up and the drawings were lifted from someone else’s brochure.

MUHAMMAD ALI, ISLAM CHANNEL, UK: I don’t think now after this long time of promises that channel is going to start broadcasting tomorrow, after tomorrow, next week, next month, next year I don’t think there is much credibility left for such promises.
*****
SARAH FERGUSON: Where Yasin’s accreditation lies is another mystery. He prepared this CV to support an application to the Immigration Department. Neither institution has any record of a Khalid Yasin graduating. While he was still in Australia, we asked Yasin about his qualifications as a preacher.

SHEIK KHALID YASIN: I say to you that whatever qualifications I have they are subjective. And I don’t even care. And if there was a choice for Khalid Yasin I would take any qualification, academic qualification I have and I throw it out the window. And I tell you whatever other qualifications I have, whatever convictions I have will stand on their own.

SARAH FERGUSON: The issue is that he has claimed to have those qualifications. I’ve checked. He doesn’t. Does that concern you?

WALID ALI: Well, I guess it would concern me. I would really need to understand why he would make those claims if they weren’t true.

SARAH FERGUSON: Sunday sent Yasin a series of questions about these discrepancies but we haven’t received a reply. No doubt his rhetoric of Muslim victimhood will apply equally to him.

See also the August 2005 Sydney Morning Herald article on Yasin, "Koranic TV next step for radical sheik", where he reaffirms many of these extremist positions.

With such extensive media criticism, it is difficult to believe that the officials for Masjid At-Taqwa are unaware of Yasin’s statements and activities. But it is undeniable that considering their sponsorship of his upcoming lectures in Dayton, Ohio, they are helping to nurture and spread Islamic hatred and extremism in America’s heartland.

The Cannes Film Festival got off to a lively start with Sean Penn, president of this year’s jury, sounding off about US Presidential hopeful Barack Obama.

Penn joined fellow judge Natalie Portman on the red carpet for the premiere of the first night film, Blindness, a thriller starring Julianne Moore.

At a press conference beforehand, the actor, an outspoken critic of the Bush administration, offered his views on the Democratic nomination race.

Asked if he would be joining other Hollywood A-listers in pledging support for Obama, Penn gave him a less than ringing endorsement and warned that he has an awful lot to live up to.

”I don’t have a candidate I’m supporting and I’m certainly interested and excited by the hope that Barack Obama is inspiring,” he said, but went on to accuse him of a “phenomenally inhuman and unconstitutional” voting record.

”I hope that he will understand, if he is the nominee, the degree of disillusionment that will happen if he doesn’t become a greater man than he will ever be,” Penn said. “This is the most important election, certainly in my lifetime, and maybe ever.”

Portman, 26, said she would not be endorsing Obama or his rival, Hillary Clinton, but added: “I think it’s a very exciting year for our politics, that for the first time in a while we have a choice of who we like better instead of who we hate least.”

Penn said it was impossible to separate film from politics, and promised that the winning film would be a reflection of the current climate.

“One way or another, when we select the Palme d’Or winner, I think we are going to feel very confident that the film-maker who made the film is very aware of the times in which he or she lives.”

There are 22 films in competition for the Palme d’Or and the jury will watch them over the next 12 days. “The idea is to be wide awake with an empty bladder for the start of everything,” explained Penn.

Asked if he was enjoying it so far, he complained that he had been “discouraged from smoking” – France’s smoking ban was introduced last year – before lighting up and chain-smoking his way through the press conference.

The opening film, Blindness, is a thriller from director Fernando Meirelles about a town struck down by a mysterious epidemic, leaving Moore the only character with the ability to see.

Based on the novel by Nobel Prize-winning author Jose Saramago, its story of a community hit by disaster and receiving no government help draws obvious parallels with Hurricane Katrina.

Moore said the film was timely: “I think there’s sometimes something in the zeitgeist. There’s a tremendous amount of tragedy right now, physical tragedy and man-made tragedy, and we are feeling anxious.”

The 47-year-old actress dyed her famous red hair blonde for the role. She said: “I’m a redhead and I’m always a redhead, except for this movie. I don’t want to do it again. I didn’t like it very much.”

Away from the main competition, comic actor Jack Black launched his latest movie, DreamWorks animation Kung Fu Panda, by performing martial arts moves on the beach in the company of 40 extras in panda suits. Black, who lends his voice to the film along with the likes of Angelina Jolie and Lucy Liu, explained that he was there to create “panda-monium”.

The film creating the most buzz on the Croisette remains Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which has its world premiere on Sunday. Harrison Ford, Cate Blanchett and director Steven Spielberg will fly in later this week for the summer’s most eagerly-awaited sequel.

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VIDEO Part 2 

Years ago, aviation enthusiast and inventor Yves Rossy dreamed of soaring through the sky like a bird.

In 2006 that dream took flight.

Known as Switzerland’s "Fusion Man," Rossy in November 2006 became the first man in the world to fly with wings and four jet engines strapped to his body; on Wednesday he displayed that talent to the world.

The inaugural flight lasted six minutes in Bex, Switzerland, and included an emergency parachute programmed to automatically open if he were to black out, NBC11 reported at the time.

"The idea is to have fun, not to kill yourself," Rossy said in the story.

In Internet videos, Rossy wears a white helmet with the words "Jet-Man" on the front, dives out of a plane, fires up his wings and propels through the atmosphere, leaving a trail of special-effects white smoke in his wake.

These days the former Swiss air force fighter pilot can be seen making figure eights over the Swiss Alps during his days off from work as an Airbus pilot for Swiss International Air Lines.

On Wednesday the 48-year-old daredevil made his first public flight with his self-made flying contraption in front of the world press after five years of training and many more years of dreaming.

"This flight was absolutely excellent," the extreme sports enthusiast said after touching down on an airfield near the eastern shore of Lake Geneva.

Half an hour earlier Rossy had stepped out of the Swiss-built Pilatus Porter aircraft at 7,500 feet, unfolded the rigid 8-foot wings strapped to his back and dropped.

Passing from free fall to a gentle glide, Rossy then triggered four jet turbines and accelerated to 186 miles an hour as a crowd on the mountaintop below gasped — then cheered.

His mother, who was among the spectators, told journalists she felt no fear. "He knows what he’s doing," Paule Rossy said.

Steering only with his body, Rossy dived, turned and soared again, flying what appeared to be effortless loops from one side of the Rhone valley to the other. At times he rose 2,600 feet before descending again.

"It’s like a second skin," he later told reporters. "If I turn to the left, I fly left. If I nudge to the right, I go right."

Rossy then performed a stunt he had never before tried.

After one last wave to the crowd, the rocket man tipped his wings, flipped onto his back and leveled out again, executing a perfect 360-degree roll that even a bird would find impossible.

"That was to impress the girls," he later admitted.

Wednesday’s five-minute flight nearly never happened. Rossy said his engineers worked until the last minute to fix one of the four kerosene-fueled engines that power his flight.

He said he is ready now for a bigger challenge: crossing the English Channel later this year.

The stunt, which will be shown on live television, will test his flying machine to the limit. Rossy said he plans to practice the 22-mile trip by flying between two hot-air balloons.

"I still haven’t used the full potential," he said.

Rossy told The Associated Press that one day he also hopes to fly through the Grand Canyon.

To do this, he will have to fit his wings with bigger, more powerful jets to allow for greater maneuvering. The German-built model aircraft engines he uses already provide 200 pounds of thrust — enough to allow Rossy and his 120-pound flying suit to climb through the air.

"Physically, it’s absolutely no stress," Rossy said. "It’s like being on a motorbike."

But on this ride, even the slightest movement can cause problems. Rossy said he has to focus hard on relaxing in the air, because "if you put tension on your body, you start to swing around."

Should things go wrong — and Rossy says they have done more times than not — there’s always a yellow handle to jettison the wings and unfold the parachute.

"I’ve had many ‘whoops’ moments," he said. "My safety is altitude."

Rossy — whose sponsors have dubbed him "Fusion Man" — says his form of human flight will remain the reserve of very few for now. The price and effort involved are simply too enormous, he says.

So far Rossy and sponsors have poured more than 200,000 Swiss francs, or $190,000, and countless hours of labor into building the device. He would not estimate how much his device would cost should it ever be brought to market.

But, he believes similar jet-powered wings one day will be more widely available to experienced parachutists ready for the ultimate flying experience.

That is, if they don’t mind missing out on the breathtaking panorama above the Swiss Alps.

"I am so concentrated, I don’t really enjoy the view," Rossy said.

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 House Speaker Nancy Pelosi marshaled a 318-vote, veto-proof majority today to pass a $290 billion farm bill that will lock in the nation’s food policy for five years while granting $3 billion in first-ever money to support California fruit and vegetables.

The bill, expected to pass the Senate, also by a veto-proof margin, includes as much as $40 billion in subsidies to commodity farmers who already enjoy record prices. It also contains a new $3.8 billion "permanent disaster" program that will create powerful incentives to plow millions of acres of prairie grasslands and release the carbon stored there.

The bill also will raise spending on food stamps, food banks and other aid to the needy by $10.4 billion, drawing votes from urban Democrats openly skeptical of raising subsidies to wealthy grain farmers during a global food crisis.

The overwhelming House vote quashed hopes by food, conservation and taxpayer groups that the Democratic-led Congress would seize a period of record farm prosperity to shift U.S. food policy from a 1930s model that subsidizes industrial food production to a modernized approach that could aid more farmers and address new public health and environmental goals.

Pelosi, a San Francisco Democrat, called the bill a "very big step in the right direction," pointing to the food and conservation spending bundled with the commodity subsidies to ensure passage.

A farm couple will be allowed to earn up to $2.5 million a year before government payments are cut off under new rules that lawmakers called a major reform. An urban couple applying for food stamps is cut off at $17,808 in income and may own only one car.

Democrats also expanded subsidies to new crops and raised subsidy levels, exposing taxpayers to billions more in costs should commodity prices retreat. The payments go to a minority of farmers of a few crops and are highly concentrated among the biggest operations. Nine of 10 farmers in California do not get crop subsidies.

Asked how she could justify paying so much money to wealthy farmers when food prices are rising and Democrats are calling for change in Washington, Pelosi listed the bill’s nutrition and conservation spending.

"I justify it by saying this is the best farm bill I’ve ever voted on," Pelosi said. "It is probably the last farm bill that will look like this."

Every Bay Area Democrat voted for the bill but one: liberal East Bay Rep. Pete Stark.

"It is a rare day indeed that I agree with President Bush," Stark said, "but he is absolutely right to have issued a veto threat of this bill."

The legislation is loaded with special-interest earmarks. California salmon fishermen get a $170 billion bailout added by Rep. Mike Thompson, D-Napa. Kentucky thoroughbred racehorse owners get a $126 million tax write off. The bill will force the federal government to sell parts of the Green Mountain National Forest to a Vermont ski resort.

The earmarks swamp the new $105 million allotted to organic farming over five years and other aid sought by Bay Area groups promoting sustainable agriculture. The $3 billion in research and marketing for fruits and vegetables is a tenth of what will go out in direct payments for wheat, corn, soybeans, cotton, rice and other commodity crops.

Tom Nassif, president of Western Growers, representing California produce growers, was grateful that Congress for the first time included fruits, nuts and vegetables in a farm bill. He said he did not want produce growers to get in a fight with subsidized grain farmers because "we were going to lose that battle."

The vote was more than enough to override President Bush’s promised veto, which will be the first of a farm bill since Dwight Eisenhower’s in 1956. Bush criticized the payouts to wealthy farmers when consumers are paying higher food prices.

Many food and environmental groups were dismayed by the direction of the bill but supported it anyway because it included money for their priorities. Others said the subsidies have so many negative effects that they would rather have no change than this one.

"We oppose committing the federal government to another five years of subsidizing the destruction of family farming," said Chuck Hassebrook, executive director of the Center for Rural for Rural Affairs in Nebraska.

Hassebrook said the subsidies help large farms buy out their smaller neighbors, speeding consolidation into giant farm operations, a claim backed by government economists. He said his group could find just five farms in seven states that would see a reduction in payments under the bill’s reforms.

"Nancy Pelosi is the 15th richest member of Congress," Hassebrook said. "But when we looked at her financial disclosure statements, it was clear that she would be eligible for farm payments under this bill, because the income-producing assets are in the name of her husband."

The National Wildlife Federation, which had supported the bill because it increased conservation funding, urged its defeat after seeing changes to grassland and wetland protections that were made behind closed doors.

"What has come out … is entirely unacceptable from a climate change and a wildlife standpoint," said Julie Stibbing, legislative counsel for the group. "We think we have created a perfect storm for both carbon releases and destruction of our last remaining prairie habitat."

The bill would allow farmers to break virgin prairie and still collect subsidies and crop insurance. It also includes a $3.8 billion "permanent disaster" program that will bail out farmers plowing marginal land.

As it is, high wheat prices are speeding the removal of millions of acres of prairie from protection under the Conservation Reserve Program. Taxpayers have spent billions over the years in rental payments to farmers to let marginal land lie fallow and provide wildlife habitat and watershed protections.

"It doesn’t matter how marginal the land you bring into production, you will be insured that you will not lose money," Stibbing said. In the Great Plains alone, she said, every newly plowed acre will release between 45 and 54 tons of carbon dioxide now stored in the ground as decayed plant material.

The bill is expected to sail through the Senate Thursday with support from both Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. Hillary Clinton. Republican Sen. John McCain opposes it.

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