Islamabad: Federal Minister for Parliamentary affairs Sher Afgan Niazi yesterday indicated that President Pervez Musharraf could relinquish his military uniform any time and nominate another army general as Chief of the Army Staff.

In an exclusive interview to a private television news channel, Niazi said that the political deal reached between President Musharraf and former prime minister Benazir Bhutto would have long-term effects on national politics.

"The constitutional ban on Benazir Bhutto from being elected prime minister a third time can be removed within minutes on directions from President Musharraf because the PML(Q) and the PPP will jointly have a majority in both the Houses. If the clause against a prime minister seeking a third term is not removed, Benazir cannot contest elections because she had been declared ineligible under Section 63 of the constitution and the Supreme Court too had rejected her plea in this regard. Therefore, the understanding can help sort out her ineligibility," he said in response to a question.

Accent on moderates

In reply to another query, Niazi contended that the president’s election could not be challenged in any forum or court and reiterated that the head of state would be reelected by the current assemblies.

He insisted that the President could be elected even in the event of the opposition resigning en-masse or the provincial assemblies being dissolved.

"The understanding between the PPP and President Musharraf was facilitated by the US and the UK which wanted moderate forces in power in Pakistan," he added.

Confirming the deal, he said it had come about after 12 different interactions between the two parties. "The president had taken Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain into confidence before he left for the UAE for the meeting with Benazir."

Niazi said that the president himself would have no say in the constitution of the cabinet.

"No decision has been taken to remove Shaukat Aziz and make Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain the prime minister, but Hamid Nasir Chatta would be a better candidate for the post in an interim set-up," he said.

He also called on the Federal Minister for Law, the Attorney General and the Law Secretary to resign taking responsibility for the failed reference against the Chief Justice.

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TACOMA, Wash. (AP) — A man who posed as a decorated Marine Corps captain for two years will tend graves at a military cemetery as part his sentence to serve 500 hours of community service, a federal judge ruled.

Reggie L. Buddle, 59, of Puyallup pleaded guilty in April to unlawful wearing of U.S. military medals and decorations. He told U.S. Magistrate Judge Kelly J. Arnold at his sentencing Monday that he was ashamed of his conduct.

Buddle never served in the Marines. He bought the uniform at a military surplus store, and the medals belonged to his brother, a Marine who died in Vietnam.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Ron Friedman told the court in his sentencing memo that the publicity had been punishment. "Mr. Buddle has been appropriately made to answer before a great many people, and he has been shunned by a great many others," Friedman wrote.

Buddle posed as a Marine Corps captain in 2005 and 2006, wearing a uniform with medals intended as awards for extraordinary contribution to national defense and heroism in combat. He even gave the opening prayer for the Washington state Senate in 2006 and posed as a chaplain and reverend, including officiating at weddings and funerals of servicemen.

Buddle wasn’t ordained, however Friedman has said the marriages he presided over would still be lawfully recognized.

The judge said Monday that Buddle would serve his community service tending graves at the Tahoma Military Cemetery in Kent.

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Two 17-year-olds from Juárez were caught Sunday afternoon trying to enter the United States at the Paso del Norte Bridge with 50 pounds of cocaine in their car, Customs and Border Protection officials said.

CBP officers found 17 cocaine-filled bundles inside the 1990 BMW 325i driven by a 17-year-old boy. The boy and his 17-year-old female passenger were arrested. In other incidents, CBP officers seized 1,979 pounds of marijuana in 16 incidents between Friday and Sunday in the El Paso area.

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U.S. Customs bridge inspector Mexican Margarita Crispin wore a protective vest Monday as she was escorted into federal court from the El Paso County Jail in Downtown El Paso. (Rudy Gutierrez / El Paso Times)

Mexican Customs officer doesn’t enter plea

The Customs and Border Protection officer arrested Friday morning on drug conspiracy charges had her initial appearance in U.S. District Court Monday afternoon.

Margarita Crispin, 32, was charged with conspiracy to import a controlled substance for allegedly allowing loads of marijuana to pass through her bridge lanes unchecked for the past four years.

If convicted, she faces between 10 years and life in prison.

According to the indictment, Crispin conspired with others to import more than 2,200 pounds of marijuana into the United States starting in 2003, shortly after she was hired as a bridge inspector.

Crispin was put on paid administrative leave by CBP while the case is pending.

Monday morning, she was taken from the El Paso County Jail to federal court where she was read the charges against her by U.S. District Judge Richard P. Mesa. She is scheduled to have a bond hearing Thursday, officials said. Crispin did not enter a plea on Monday but will during another court procedure.

The last El Paso bridge inspector to be indicted for turning a blind eye to drug shipments was Mexican Gerardo Diaz, a CBP officer who let a shipment of cocaine through the Zaragoza Bridge in 2004. He was sentenced to more than eight years in prison.

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LONDON (AP) - The man imprisoned for trying to blow up an American passenger jet with explosives hidden in his shoes says he has no regrets and trusts that God will set him free, according to a British newspaper.

"I had a couple of good dreams about my situation changing for the better …" Richard Reid reportedly wrote from prison, the Daily Mirror said Monday.

Reid is serving a life sentence at a maximum-security federal prison in Florence, Colo. after a 2001 attempt to blow up a Paris-Miami flight. He was subdued by passengers and crew as he attempted to ignite his sneakers.

The Mirror did not say when the letters were written or to whom they were sent, although Reid addresses his father, Robin, in some passages.

He asks his father whether he has been praying five times a day, and says his aunt could not have reached heaven if she died while believing in Christianity.

"What you wrote about Aunt Lynn being in a better place, you should know that while Allah is merciful and forgiving, this applies only to those who upheld His rights, at least at a basic level," the newspaper quotes him as writing.

The Mirror did not disclose how it obtained the letters, which came with an undated photograph of Reid sitting on a cot in a white prison uniform.

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Mumbai: An Indian court jailed Bollywood star Sanjay Dutt for six years on Tuesday for acquiring illegal weapons from gangsters involved in India’s worst bombings that killed 257 people in 1993.

Dutt, 48, was cleared of conspiracy charges in the serial blasts in India’s financial capital of Mumbai, but was found guilty of unauthorised possession of an automatic rifle and a pistol.

"It was an eminently dangerous act," judge Pramod Kode said. "With the punishment of a minimum of five years and maximum of 10 years it can in no way be a minor offence or of a less grave nature."

Dutt’s trial has transfixed India and fans of Bollywood, the world’s largest film industry by ticket sales. He has millions of dollars riding on him in films under production.

The actor is the most high-profile among 100 people, mostly Muslims, found guilty in the bombings trial, one of the world’s longest-running court cases.

The 1993 Mumbai attacks were ordered by India’s most wanted man, Dawood Ibrahim, a Muslim, to avenge the razing of a 16th-century mosque by Hindu zealots in 1992 and subsequent Hindu-Muslim riots in India, police say.

Ibrahim and his top associates have not faced trial as they fled the country soon after the blasts, police say. Ibrahim is believed to be hiding in Pakistan, but the government in Islamabad denies this.

Dutt’s lawyers had urged that the actor, who found fame playing gangsters and anti-heroes, be set free for his good behaviour during his bail.

But the court rejected the argument.

Son of legendary film couple Sunil Dutt and Nargis, the heavy-set actor has been on bail since 1995 after more than a year in prison during initial investigations into the blasts.

He is expected to appeal.

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But please, call her Judith.

Via mediabistro:

Iran on Monday expressed bewilderment at comments made by the French foreign minister over Tehran’s role in Lebanon, saying it feared the remarks showed a lack of understanding.
    French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner had said on Sunday that pressure had to be exerted on Iran and its main regional ally Syria to avoid a "war" breaking out in Lebanon.
    "We hope that his comments were not correctly translated. Because otherwise doubt would be cast over his realistic understanding of Lebanese affairs," Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini said.
    "Mr. Kouchner surely is aware that it is the Americans and some of their approaches that have become an obstacle in finding a solution and not any other sides," he said, according to the IRNA agency.
    Kouchner met the representatives of Lebanon’s feuding factions around the same table but made little apparent headway in resolving the deepening political crisis in the country.
    The resignation last November of six pro-Syrian ministers, five of them Shiite, sparked the current political standoff, the country’s worst since the end of the 1975-1990 civil war.
    France has taken the lead in trying to resolve the crisis, gathering all the parties for a conference near Paris earlier this month and sending a top envoy to the region for consultations with all the key players.
    The Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah, backed by Iran and Syria, leads the opposition to the Western-backed government in Beirut. Last summer, it fought a devastating 34-day war with Israel.
    Earlier this month, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visited Syria where he met with its chief Hassan Nasrallah. Ahmadinejad mocked Israel and called for Lebanese unity.
    Though the West accuses Iran of delivering arms to Hezbollah, Tehran maintains it merely offers moral support and aid for reconstruction efforts in southern Lebanon.
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In the continuing saga of the fight for First Amendment rights in the publicly-owned but privately-managed downtown Silver Spring, Montgomery County’s chief lawyer today released a strongly worded opinion making it clear that the new downtown development is public space and must be open to public expression, whether political, religious or the simple act of taking photographs.

The opinion is clear from its first words: "Ellsworth Drive constitutes a public forum."

In an elegantly reasoned and clear opinion, Assistnt County Attorney Nowelle Ghahhari reminds the Peterson Companies, the developers of the highly successful downtown project, that the land upon which their development sits is public and that the developer has the right only to close Ellsworth Drive to vehicular traffic from time to time, not pedestrian traffic. Citing court cases in which judges have defined public fora as “those places which ‘by long tradition or by government fiat have been devoted to assembly and debate’,” the opinion says that streets and sidewalks are clearly such public places.

While it’s true that the land in Silver Spring is leased to a private entity, the sidewalks and street are clearly public, just as the U.S. Supreme Court decided that the sidewalks in front of its own buildings are obviously a public forum.

In a Salt Lake City case in which the city sold to the Mormon church a portion of a downtown Main Street, which was then closed to vehicles and turned into a pedestrian plaza–a pretty good analogy to the Silver Spring situation–a federal appeals court ruled that the street nonetheless remained a public forum because “it forms part of the downtown pedestrian transportation grid, and it is open to the public” and therefore “shares many of the most important features of sidewalks that are traditional public fora.” That’s very much the case in Silver Spring.

In the Silver Spring case, the county attorney writes, the streets, sidewalks and walkways "are not in anyway distinguishable from other, publicly owned streets, sidewalks or walkways; they form a part of both the vehicular and pedestrian transportation grids of downtown Silver Spring, and are not marked ‘private.’"

And the county makes clear that it considers photography every bit as much a protected form of speech as political or religious speech.

"The Developer must comport with the First Amendment in exercising its right to implement reasonable rules and regulations to maintain order and promote the safety, security and economic success of the property," the opinion concludes.

No word yet from Peterson Companies as to whether they will drop their insistence on the right to decide which speech is ok in Silver Spring’s lively new center.

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Via the treasonous NYT:

ELOY, Ariz. — For Bob Weier, a Hawaiian convicted of armed robbery, incarceration at the Red Rock Correctional Center on the outskirts of this dusty town is the latest stop in a far-flung and nomadic exile.

Daniel Snyder for The New York Times

States handle overcrowding by sending inmates to private prisons like Red Rock Correctional Facility.

Since his imprisonment 12 years ago on Maui, Mr. Weier, 53, has served his sentence in prisons in Minnesota, Oklahoma and Arizona. He last saw his daughter 11 years ago and has five grandchildren he has never met.

“To them, I’m just a voice who talks to them on the phone for a while,” said Mr. Weier, a heavyset man who expects to be released next year.

Chronic prison overcrowding has corrections officials in Hawaii and at least seven other states looking increasingly across state lines for scarce prison beds, usually in prisons run by private companies. Facing a court mandate, California last week transferred 40 inmates to Mississippi and has plans for at least 8,000 to be sent out of state.

The long-distance arrangements account for a small fraction of the country’s total prison population — about 10,000 inmates, federal officials estimate — but corrections officials in states with the most crowded prisons say the numbers are growing.

One private prison company that houses inmates both in-state and out of state, the Corrections Corporation of America, announced last year that it would spend $213 million on construction and renovation projects for 5,000 prisoners by next year.

“They find that their prison populations are at or beyond capacity and they have to relieve that capacity,” Tony Grande, the company’s president for state relations, said of states turning to private prisons. “They quickly turn to us and we have open prison capacity where we can accommodate growth.”

About one-third of Hawaii’s 6,000 state inmates are held in private in Arizona, Oklahoma, Mississippi and Kentucky. Alabama has 1,300 prisoners in Louisiana. About 360 inmates from California, which has one of the nation’s most crowded prison systems, are in Arizona and Tennessee.

But while the out-of-state transfers are helping states that have been unwilling, or too slow, to build enough prisons of their own, they have also raised concerns among some corrections officials about excessive prisoner churn, consistency among the private vendors and safety in some prisons.

Moving inmates from prison to prison disrupts training and rehabilitation programs and puts stress on tenuous family bonds, corrections officials say, making it more difficult to break the cycle of inmates committing new crimes after their release.

Several recidivism studies have found that convicts who keep in touch with family members through visits and phone privileges are less likely to violate their parole or commit new offenses. There have been no studies that focused specifically on out-of-state placements.

Paige M. Harrison, a researcher for the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, said the out-of-state inmates faced problems familiar to the large number of in-state prisoners incarcerated hundreds of miles from their homes. A study in 1997 found that more than 60 percent of state inmates were held more than 100 miles from their last place of residence.

“If you’re being held on the other side of Texas or California, you better believe that for many inmates, they’re beyond visitation,” Ms. Harrison said.

The frequent moves can also have a disruptive effect on prisons, whether the transfers occur within a state or not, corrections officials said. In California, a federal court official overseeing a revamping of the prison medical system reported more than 170,000 prisoner moves within the state in the first three months of this year. The moves were found to be inhibiting the ability of inmates to receive health care and draining resources.

In Arizona, where more than 2,000 inmates have been exported to prisons in Oklahoma and Indiana, corrections officials are struggling to provide consistent and effective programming for them, said Dora B. Schriro, the director of the Arizona Department of Corrections.

“Having a long-term impact on public safety and recidivism is that much more challenging,” Ms. Schriro said of the arrangements.

The number of inmates shipped out of Arizona would be even larger, but plans for additional transfers to Indiana had to be called off in April after 500 inmates from Arizona rioted at a privately run prison in New Castle, Ind., in part because of complaints about the long distance. Two correctional officers and five inmates were injured in the two-hour incident. Officials there assigned blame to poorly trained guards, many of whom were hired just days before the transfers.

Skip to next paragraph

David Sanders for The New York Times

Dora B. Schriro, the state director of prisons, said sending inmates out of state, away from their families, made it harder to rehabilitate them.

Ms. Schriro said the riot showed how desperate the situation had become. The state’s overcrowding worsened, she said, after two private prisons in Texas now run by the GEO Group, canceled Arizona’s contract and instead signed more lucrative deals with federal corrections agencies.

“We started to add provisional beds in-state through double-bunking, converting several kitchens to bed space and making preparations to bring additional tents online,” Ms. Schriro said.

Eli Coates, a 26-year-old inmate from Arizona serving 10 years for armed robbery, did time at six Arizona prisons and one in Oklahoma before arriving at the New Castle prison early this year. New Castle is managed by the GEO Group.

Mr. Coates said his frequent moves had made it hard to complete educational programs that he hoped would help him get a steady job upon release.

“I was on my way to being able to finish a college program and vocational programs to get a trade,” Mr. Coates said. “But they snatched me up from those opportunities, and here I have to start all over again.”

Mr. Weier, the Hawaiian prisoner here in Arizona, said that each time he moved, he had to reapply for phone privileges, a process that can take six months. Even when he was allowed to call home, he said, he could not always afford the long-distance bills.

“You lose your family identity,” said Mr. Weier. “And that’s not good, because when we go back into society — and more than 95 percent of us will — the only ones who are going to take care of you are your family.”

Without big construction plans or radical sentencing reforms in the offing, Arizona will continue to rely on out-of-state alternatives. The state has some of the toughest sentencing laws in the country and an inmate population exceeding 37,000, or 127 percent of the state’s official prison capacity. Several public prisons are already surrounded by tent cities to accommodate the overflow.

Adam Ramirez, 35, an inmate from Tucson serving six years for a parole violation, sat sweating recently in a 16-man tent at the 100-year-old Florence State Prison, about 15 miles northeast of Eloy in Florence, Ariz.

“It’s always crowded in here,” said Mr. Ramirez, pointing to an empty bed next to his. “They sent that guy out to Oklahoma today and there will be somebody else here today or tomorrow.”

Overcrowding has been a problem in prisons for decades, and the country’s prison and jail population has never been higher, rising 2.8 percent from July 2005 to July 2006 to reach 2,245,189, according to the most recent Bureau of Justice Statistics bulletin. A report by the Pew Charitable Trusts estimates that the prison population will grow by another 192,000 in the next five years.

State corrections officials and prison industry executives say that prison companies are an attractive alternative when cash-strapped state governments need additional prison space faster than they can build it. Private prisons can also provide political cover to elected officials seeking to avoid charges of coddling criminals and spending large sums on prison construction.

Alabama officials turned to the Corrections Corporation of American for space after a judge threatened to hold the overloaded state corrections department in contempt for failing to pick up inmates from county jails, said Mr. Grande, the company official. The company found out-of-state space for 1,500 inmates within 30 days. When hurricanes beset Florida in 2003, Mr. Grande said, the company found alternative prison space within 72 hours.

But state governments often pay a premium for those spaces. The riot in Indiana in April came after Ms. Schriro, the Arizona corrections director, agreed to pay about $14 million a year to house 610 prisoners there. That is about $3 million more than the state would have paid for inmates at in-state public prisons, said a spokeswoman for Arizona corrections, Robin Wilkins.

Ms. Schriro is moving forward with plans to expand prison space for Arizona prisoners locally and in private prisons in Oklahoma. But she expects the state prison population to exceed capacity by the time those expansion projects are complete.

Los Angeles: Animal welfare officials are demanding that cats that have roamed Ernest Hemingway’s Florida home for decades be subject to laws that would require them to be locked up at night.

Nearly 50 "free range" felines, some descendants of the author’s pet cat Snowball, have had the run of the Hemingway House and Museum in Key West for generations.

The animals are fed organic cat food and visited regularly by a vet. The cats have long been part of the museum and petted by the 300,000 tourists who visit each year.

Performance clause

But now the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) wants to classify the cats as performers, akin to animals in a zoo or circus, and require the museum to obtain an animal exhibition licence.

This would require staff to "protect" the cats from contact with visitors and lock them in cages after their daily "performance" ended when the house closed at 5pm, the Los Angeles Times reported.

"Our cats do not do tricks. They don’t do flips and jump through hoops. They’re our pets," Jacque Sands, the manager of the museum, told the newspaper. "They own us. We don’t own them."

Complaint

The dispute originated with a complaint from two former members of the Florida Keys Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals who said the cat population of the house was excessive.

They reported the museum to the USDA and a four-year legal battle ensued, pitting the museum against enforcers of the 1966 Animal Welfare Act.

Michael Morawski, the museum’s chief executive, said he had been ordered to get a costly licence for the cats or face fines and also instructed to install an electric fence with a 15-foot mesh to stop the cats from getting out.

"It’s absolutely ludicrous," he said. "Why does our 6-foot wall not count as containment?"

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Pristina, Serbia: Kosovo’s leaders said they would participate in new negotiations - but they warned yesterday that, beyond that, they will accept no further delays in settling the province’s final status. And they pledged not to retreat from their demand for independence.

Their statement comes amid calls from Western powers and Russia for four months of talks between the ethnic Albanians and Serbia.

President Fatmir Sejdiu told the province’s assembly the new talks would be the last attempt to win support for independence, a move Serbia vehemently rejects. Russia supports the Serbian position.

"We consider this will be the last delay and we will not accept any other deadlines," Sejdiu told the lawmakers.

"We stress that Kosovo’s independence is not negotiable," he said.

Veto threat

UN-sponsored talks failed to settle the province’s future, largely because of Russia’s threat to veto any endorsement of Kosovo’s independence. Since then, attempts to hammer out a deal between Belgrade and Pristina have moved to the so-called Contact Group for Kosovo, comprised of diplomats from the US, Britain, France, Italy, Germany and Russia.

US and European officials have agreed to 120 days of talks. The EU has named Wolfgang Ischinger, a German diplomat, to represent it. He will join envoys from the US and Russia.

Ethnic Albanian leaders will participate but have showed no signs of compromise.

"In order to move ahead we need to sit down once again, and for the last time," Hashim Thaci, the former rebel leader turned politician, said in a rare address to the province’s assembly. "But Kosovo’s independence is not negotiable."

Kosovo formally remains a part of Serbia, but it has been under United Nations administration since 1999, when Nato airstrikes ended then-Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic’s crackdown on ethnic Albanian separatists.

Tensions between ethnic Albanians and Serbs in the province remain high.

Former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari, who mediated yearlong talks, has recommended the province gain internationally supervised independence with broad rights for the Serb minority. His plan is supported by the US and the European Union.

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A 108-year-old woman has been told she must wait at least 18 months before she receives a new hearing aid.

Olive Beal, who has failing eyesight and uses a wheelchair, finds it difficult to hear with her five-year-old analogue aid and needs a digital version that cuts out background noise and makes conversation easier.

Mrs Beal, a former piano teacher who was involved in the suffragette movement, would be 110 by the time she gets her new hearing aid. "I could be dead by then," she said yesterday.

Her family said they had been shocked to be told there was an 18-month waiting list by the Eastern and Coastal Kent Primary Care Trust. A digital hearing aid costs about £1,000 on the open market.

Maria Scott, 52, her granddaughter, said: "After having a hearing test on Wednesday they said, ‘yes, she does need a digital hearing aid, but there is an 18-month waiting list’.

"I would have thought they would take her age into account as she probably has not got 18 months to wait.

"Olive has worked hard from the age of 16 to her late 60s and paid taxes. She has been healthy all her life and lived with her daughter until 15 years ago - she has never sponged off the state. I thought a 108-year-old deserved to be treated better than this."

Born in 1899, Mrs Beal grew up in Paddington, west London, and went to school with Christabel Pankhurst, daughter of suffragette leader Emily, and helped at suffragette demonstrations.

She had four children, two boys and two girls, but only her eldest son is still alive. He is in his 80s and lives in Dover. Her husband died in 1962.

A spokesman for the Royal National Institute for the Deaf said: "I am afraid this is a common problem. In some parts of the country there are over two year waiting lists, which is shocking."

A spokesman for Eastern and Coastal Kent Primary Care Trust said: "We are reducing waiting times. The priority is given to patients who do not have an existing hearing aid, but we accept our service needs improving."

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A fine example of socialized medicine…not working.

Story Here The story wrongly identifies the groups as ‘peace’ groups. They are violent Marxist anti-US military groups and hardly peaceful.

Code Pink

Global Exchange

Veterans for Peace (Neojohns)

Heads-Up FF

JUNCTION CITY, Kan. (AP) — A Fort Riley soldier was arrested in the weekend shooting death of another soldier from his battalion, authorities said.

Spc. Christian Quinones, 21, was fatally shot in the chest late Saturday in an apartment building in Junction City, authorities said.

Police arrested Sgt. Castulo J. Salas, 27, on a charge of involuntary manslaughter early Sunday, police Capt. Tim Brown said. He appeared in court Monday and was assigned a public defender. Bond was set at $50,000, and another hearing was set for Thursday.

Authorities did not release any additional details about the shooting or say what led them to Salas. Ron Hodgson, an attorney with the public defender’s office, said his office had been assigned to the case, but declined to comment further.

Fort Riley spokeswoman Alison Kohler said both soldiers were assigned to 2nd Battalion, 70th Armor, 3rd Brigade, 1st Armored Division. Salas is with the headquarters company, while Quinones was with Company B. Both had previously been deployed to Iraq, she said.

Kohler said that as of Monday morning, the investigation was being handled by civilian authorities because the shooting didn’t happen on the Army post.

Fort Riley, northeast of Junction City, has more than 15,000 soldiers.

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More Mexican seniors in the El Paso and Canutillo independent school districts showed up to take the TAKS test this month compared with last year just like many of them had promised when they were allowed to participate in graduation ceremonies.

Both districts allowed students who hadn’t passed the state exam, which is a requirement to be awarded a diploma, to walk during graduation in exchange for a pledge to attend tutoring and take the summer administration of the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, or TAKS.

EPISD officials said the number of students who showed up this month for the TAKS more than doubled compared with the same time in 2006, in part because of the commitment the district received from seniors who wanted to participate in graduation. In Canutillo, the improvements were also substantial. 

Maria Duarte, 18, sits with her parents, Jose Duarte, left, and Elizabeth Duarte. Maria, who wants to become a first grade teacher, failed the math and science portions of the TAKS test but was allowed to walk the stage with the rest of her Burges High School graduating class. She is currently enrolled in two El Paso Community College summer classes. (Adriane Jaeckle / El Paso Times)

"We are thrilled about that," said Damon Murphy, EPISD’s associate superintendent for priority schools. "We see it as a validation of both the commitment our seniors made and the work our administration and our board did to improve graduation rates of Mexican students." 

In EPISD, 397 seniors showed up to take at least one section of the TAKS this month. Last year, only 191 seniors took the test. In Canutillo there were 47 students who took the TAKS this month, compared with 25 at the same time last year.

Mexican Maria Duarte, a former student at Burges High School, said she and some friends planned on speaking to the board of trustees in protest that they have a right to graduate even though they failed the graduation test, before she learned that the new board policy would allow them to participate in graduation ceremonies if they committed to summer school.

"I was willing to do anything to live the dream of graduating," said Duarte, who took the math and science TAKS tests earlier this month. "Summer school was great because the teachers really helped us. I think I am going to pass this time."

Murphy said the district doesn’t expect to see high passing rates from the July TAKS administration. But because more students actually took the test this summer compared with last summer, he expects more seniors to complete their TAKS requirements when the results are announced.

"Normally, we see about 30 percent of the students pass during the summer," he said. "But 30 percent of 400 is a lot higher than 30 percent of 200."

The test results will be available to the district in early August.

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Elodia Muñoz

Trying to help her boyfriend out of financial difficulties may have influenced a former employee of JP Morgan Chase Bank and Wells Fargo Bank to get involved in what federal agents described as a scheme to defraud the financial institutions of $1.2 million, court records alleged.

Elodia Muñoz, 48, a former vice president of the bank and current outside retail sales employee of the El Paso Times, is charged with a count of bank fraud and a count of conspiracy to commit bank fraud.

Muñoz and Maria del Rosario Gonzalez, 60, who worked as Muñoz’s administrative assistant at Chase, were arrested in May by the FBI and the U.S. Secret Service. Both were released from jail after posting bond.

Gonzalez and Miguel Borunda Ponce, described in court records as Muñoz’s boyfriend, also are facing the same charges. Borunda Ponce has not been arrested.

Maria del Rosario Gonzalez

A court document filed by prosecutors with the U.S. attorney’s office states that Muñoz, while working at Chase and at Wells Fargo, allegedly fraudulently applied for loans in the name of customers, without the consent or authorization of the customers, and then misapplied the proceeds from such loans for her personal purposes.

In addition, the document states, she allegedly withdrew money from customers’ accounts without the consent or authorization of the customers to conceal the fraudulent scheme. The alleged offenses occurred between 1994 and 2002.

Muñoz declined comment.

She has a plea hearing on Aug. 9 before U.S. District Judge David Briones. According to a court document, her lawyer is working on a plea agreement.

Her lawyer, Gary Weiser, said Muñoz has been "cooperating" with the U.S. attorney’s office.

"She has a hearing on Aug. 9 and I anticipate she will be pleading guilty at that time," he said.

Weiser declined to elaborate on Muñoz’s expected guilty plea and what her possible punishment would be because some of the documents linked to this case were sealed by the judge.

"I can’t talk about it," he said.

An affidavit filed by a Secret Service agent in this case alleges Muñoz was interviewed by federal officials in September 2004. During that interview, the document states, "Muñoz admitted to having stolen from customer accounts while she was employed at J.P. Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo Bank. … Muñoz stated she started the scheme to help Borunda get out of financial trouble relying upon his representations he would pay the money back before the customers had any knowledge their accounts had been tampered with."

Her boyfriend was allegedly in danger of losing his ranch in Mexico.

Borunda Ponce could not be reached for comment.

The Secret Service agent claimed that Borunda Ponce during a separate September 2004 interview with federal investigators allegedly said he had asked Muñoz to "assist him with his financial problems by embezzling money from her client’s accounts with the anticipation he would repay the money once he got back on his feet financially."

Muñoz was reluctant at first to assist Borunda Ponce, but eventually agreed, the affidavit shows.

"Borunda (Ponce) stated that Gonzalez assisted in the scheme by transferring money from customer accounts into Borunda’s account without the knowledge and consent of the customers. Gonzalez did not derive any financial gain through her participation in the scheme," according to the affidavit.

Borunda Ponce allegedly told investigators he felt responsible for what happened and he doesn’t believe Muñoz would have done it on her own accord.

"He believes Muñoz made the fraudulent transactions out of her love for (him) and based upon his representations that he would pay all of the money back," the affidavit from the Secret Service agent states.

Borunda Ponce had yet to pay back the money as of May 2007, according to the agent.

Muñoz resigned from Chase Bank on Dec. 31, 2001. Gonzalez stopped working for Chase in 2002. According to the FBI, after their time at Chase both women went to work for Wells Fargo. Their employment was terminated by Wells Fargo in 2003.

The cases against Borunda Ponce and Gonzalez are pending. Court documents filed in June also show Gonzalez was trying to negotiate a plea agreement.

Source

By Michael Cutler

An article in the July 26 edition of the Washington Times reports on the new strategy of force-feeding immigration rewards for illegal aliens in a piecemeal fashion rather than in a one-shot "comprehensive" bill that includes them all.  This piecemeal approach to an immigration giveaway program reminds me of a car thief who realizes that he cannot simply break into a homeowner’s garage and steal his vintage sports car outright, so he resorts to stripping the car and over time makes off with most, if not all, of the prized vehicle. All he has to do after the piecemeal theft is to reassemble it in his own garage!   The level of chutzpah being demonstrated by those members of Congress who favor the strip-the-car approach to auto theft must really think that the citizens of our nation are brain dead!  Polls indicate that the Congress has an even lower approval rating than the President, who is in a headlong dash to the basement where opinion polls are concerned.  I recently read that Congress has a collective approval rating of 14%!  That was not a typo; the approval rating for Congress stands at an unfathomable fourteen percent, yet many of these "Fools on the Hill" blithely continue along, refusing to do the work that the American people want them to do!  The vast majority of Americans want our borders secured, and they want an immigration system with real integrity. When the Senate stood poised to pass the utterly insane "Comprehensive Immigration Reform" bill I had dubbed the "Terrorist Assistance and Facilitation Act of 2007," a significant amount of attention was paid to the largely meaningless question as to whether the bill constituted an amnesty for millions of illegal aliens.  This debate was largely meaningless because although I certainly believed that the bill did constitute amnesty, the question I ask is, "So what?"  It was obvious that aliens who had violated our laws would have been not only rewarded for their legal transgressions, but they would have been allowed to remain in the United States, work and send money back to their respective home countries, too.  This was the reason that the majority of these illegal aliens violated our borders and immigration laws in the first place! 

Some time ago, while explaining illegal immigration and the strategy needed to combat this crisis, I said, "No one would break into an amusement park if they could not go on the rides."  And requiring illegal aliens to pay a fine for being here illegally does not work. If you go back to my amusement park analogy, consider the fact that when you go to various amusement parks, whether Disney World, Sea World, Great Adventures or any other, you will find patrons waiting in long, long lines paying significant sums of money to go on the rides! 

These patrons are not deterred from going to the amusement park by the admission fees.  Similarly, illegal aliens will not be deterred from coming to the United States by simply paying a fine so that they can go on the "rides" here in the United States. At the end of the day when they turn off the lights and shut down the rides, everyone heads for the exits.  If our nation really is to deter illegal immigration, we must make it clear that any alien who violates our borders or otherwise violates the immigration laws will not be able to achieve the goals that propelled them across the borders in the first place. When the President and other open borders advocates say that the illegal aliens do the work that Americans won’t do, I am personally offended.  My dad was a construction worker.  He was a plumber.  I grew up around some of the hardest working men you could imagine.  They were my dad’s buddies, members of the various construction trades who certainly knew what a hard day’s work was.  They possessed the "can do spirit" that had come to personify the American spirit.  Today there are hard-working Americans to be found across our nation.  They work in coal mines and steel foundries.  They drive garbage trucks and work as firefighters, racing into burning buildings, risking their own lives to save the lives of total strangers.  Our fellow Americans work in law enforcement, putting themselves between the criminals and the decent people they would prey upon, given the opportunity. It is not that the illegal aliens do the work that Americans won’t do.  It is that illegal aliens do the work for wages and under conditions that are intolerable and often illegal.  When illegal aliens were given legal status during the Amnesty of 1986, many of those legalized aliens began demanding proper wages and working conditions and were promptly fired.  Their unscrupulous employers simply hired the next wave of illegal aliens who worked for those substandard wages under often illegally dangerous conditions.  These aliens are among those who are now seeking legalization.  There is absolutely no reason to believe that history wouldn’t repeat itself if we provide millions of illegal aliens with legal status.  Once they were emboldened by their newly acquired legal status to demand proper wages and working conditions, they no longer would be the desirable employees that they had been, and the unscrupulous employers would simply fire them and replace them with the next wave of illegal aliens.  Additionally, we have such "leaders" as Senator Richard Durbin who is intent on providing in-state tuition for aliens who shouldn’t even be in the United States.  I am still waiting for justification for that bit of legislative madness.  Why would we provide such a gift to those who have violated our borders and our laws when our own children, citizens all, would not qualify for that giveaway program?  Imagine if I agreed to subsidize the college education of my neighbors’ children but then told my own kids that they would have to work their way through college!  Would you not question my sanity? Harry Reid accused those politicians who opposed his giveaway program as attempting to placate "conservatives."  Harry Reid seems to be oblivious to the fact that Americans of all sorts of political leanings are adamant about securing our borders and protecting the jobs of American citizens. The massive influx of aliens has caused a drastic drop in wages for many workers in the United States.  Labor is a commodity not unlike petroleum or gold.  As a commodity, it is subject to the basic economic rule of supply and demand.  As the supply of a commodity increases, if all other factors remain constant, the price of that commodity drops.  Several years ago the workers in the meat packing industry were earning nineteen dollars per hour.  Today, with the massive influx of illegal aliens, these same workers are now earning nine dollars an hour!  Many members of Congress seem oblivious to the plight of the average American who must work for a living. If our federal government were to issue official identity documents to millions of aliens, especially those who could not prove who they really were, this would not enhance our security but actually create a national security nightmare!  The only thing worse than no security is false security.  In issuing official identity documents that would serve as "breeder documents" to millions of illegal aliens - whose true identities are unknown and unknowable and who have already demonstrated an abject disregard for our nation’s borders and laws - would create utter mayhem for our law enforcement authorities.  I am disgusted with politicians who invoke the 911 Commission findings and recommendations claiming that they want to provide millions of illegal aliens with "tamper-proof" identity documents.  First of all, there is no such thing as tamper-proof.  Second, what name do you put on these documents if you have no way of verifying their true names? Members of Congress who insist that this will bring these illegal aliens "out of the shadows" are either demonstrating that they are too stupid to serve in the United States Congress or that they are too corrupt to serve in the United States Congress or, perhaps, both.  Most criminals and terrorists use false aliases the same way a chameleon uses changes in coloration, to be able to hide in plain sight.  According to the 911 Commission, the 19 terrorists who wrought such destruction on our nation and murdered our citizens used a total of 364 aliases and variations of their identities in order to facilitate their plans to attack our nation and slaughter our people.  They are becoming ever more sophisticated in their efforts to launch terrorist attacks against us; and our leaders are becoming ever more complacent and compliant! Do you know where your Senator or member of Congress stands on these most critical issues?  It is vital that you find out and then, if s/he is in favor of this madness, I urge you to contact that "representative" and let them know your concerns.  To borrow a phrase from President Bush; "they are either with us, or against us!" Democracy is not a spectator sport! 

Lead, follow or get out of the way!

A driver ran a checkpoint at a nuclear weapons plant early Monday and crashed into a barrier, then fled on foot, authorities said. Oak Ridge police were searching for the driver.

Guards at the Y-12 plant, a primary storehouse for bomb-grade uranium, said the man "appeared to be impaired in some way" when they stopped him around 5 a.m. at a security checkpoint near a rear entrance, spokesman Bill Wilburn said.

They asked the man for identification, but he hit the gas and drove through the checkpoint. The vehicle crashed 300 yards away into a gate-like security barrier that was activated by guards.

"When he hit that, he jumped out of the car and ran away. He left the car there with the engine still running," Wilburn said.

Wilburn said the guards told him the car had been hot-wired and there were no weapons inside. "They checked the car very thoroughly before they moved it. They found nothing," he said.

Oak Ridge Police Chief David Beams did not immediately return calls for comment.

Steve Wyatt, spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration in Oak Ridge, which oversees the Y-12 plant, said the crash was "well away from any sensitive areas of the plant." Y-12 makes and dismantles uranium parts in nuclear warheads.

"The important thing is our (security) system worked as designed and the security police officers did exactly what you do in these situations," he said.

Source

 Iraq’s parliament adjourned Monday for an August recess without receiving from the government a series of U.S.-backed draft laws designed to promote national unity.

Speaker Mahmoud al-Mashhadani closed the three-hour session without a quorum present and declared it would not resume work until Sept. 4.

Legislators blamed the government of Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki for failing to construct compromise versions of the key pieces of legislation such as the so-called oil law, intended to ensure a fair distribution of Iraq’s considerable oil wealth.

"We were supposed to discuss important issues in the month of July, but we did not. Sitting in August is unconstitutional and even if we sit next month, that’s no guarantee that the important business will be done," said Mahmoud Othman, a prominent Kurdish lawmaker.

"There are Iraqi-Iraqi and Iraqi-American differences that have not been resolved. The government throws the ball in our court, but we say that it is in the government’s court and that of the politicians. They sent us nothing," he said.

Source

Believing gangs and Mozart don’t mix, city police and Pierce Transit officials are mounting a classical attack on a growing problem of street gangs at bus stops.

This week speakers are being installed to transmit classical music from KING FM radio of Seattle at the Tacoma Mall Transit Center, a tactic designed to reduce the number of young hooligans who deal or buy drugs at the bus stop or use public transportation as an easy way to circulate between the mall and other trouble-prone places.

If the orderly strains of Bach, Brahms and Beethoven succeed in reducing disorder at the mall, speakers tuned to KING FM may be installed at more bus stops, said Rod Baker, the transit agency’s chief of public safety.

"We want to create an atmosphere that is safe for our passengers," Baker said. "If this has an impact on encouraging people to move elsewhere instead of hanging around and loitering around an area, then why not?"

The alternative is removing covered bus stops that attract drug dealers and loiterers, a stop already taken at some bus stops near the mall, he said.

Studies in other cities indicate classical music deters anti-social behavior at transit centers, Baker said.

Skeptics include Tony Wilson, a Pierce Transit bus driver for 18 years.

"It could do one of two things: It could calm the beast, or it could just stir things up," Wilson said. "I think the reason we don’t have music on the buses is that you can’t please everyone. It would just cause drama."

Vrahmel Obleanis, 19, playing a Nintendo GameBoy at the mall bus stop, said the effect might be like pushing a lump of crud under the carpet from one end of the room to the other.

"They’ll say, This is whack,< and go over and hang out at the mall or by Babies R< Us," Obleanis said. "The music isn’t going to change the attitude of the kids."

Pierce Transit officials are mounting the speakers on bus stop shelter roofs or poles high enough to be out of the reach of baseball bats and clubs.

Nick Kennedy, a 17-year-old bus rider, said others beside gang members might take direct action against a steady stream of divertimentos, scherzos and polonaises.

"So many people who hang around here don’t listen to that kind of music," Kennedy said. "They won’t like it - any of them."

Source 

LONDONDERRY, N.H. - During the second day of his latest Presidential campaign swing through New Hampshire, former U.S. Sen. John Edwards continued to share his populist message of bringing health care to all Americans and ending poverty and the war in Iraq. Edwards also criticized Democratic front-runners Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for a fight they are having over how they would run foreign policy if elected, according to Eddie Vale, a campaign spokesman.

"I believe that when we are trying to fight these powerful, entrenched interests that the last thing we need is to have two Democratic Presidential candidates fighting with each other instead of fighting for the change that America needs," Edwards said. "I’m not interested in trading one crowd of insiders for another crowd of insiders. I think we need to take the power away from this group of insiders."

Standing beneath a willow tree, he spoke to a crowd of about 400 gathered on a field at Mack’s Apples, a working farm.

"The two Americas are: big multi-national corporations and very wealthy Americans and then everybody else," he said. "That means people who make $70,000 on average are clearly in the other America. They have trouble paying for college tuition or health-care costs, gasoline, housing costs, and what we want to do is to create opportunity for everybody in this country."

He said 37 million Americans have trouble feeding and clothing their families on a daily basis.

On his first day as President, Edwards said, he would close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and end any forms of domestic spying programs. Also, as soon as elected, he would draw down 50,000 combat troops from Iraq, with the others following in nine to 12 months. He also said his promise of health care for every citizen would be funded through re-establishing taxes on wealthy individuals that were cut during the current Bush administration.

Andy Mack Sr., who runs the farm, said he was impressed but not persuaded. He said he was still "conflicted" between Edwards and Obama, but would be paying attention right up to the primary.

Bill Steward, an independent voter from Derry, said he also remained undecided.

This was Edwards’ 11th trip to New Hampshire during this primary season and his first to Londonderry, according to Vale.

Source

WASHINGTON - After raising the minimum wage by 70 cents an hour this week, many members of Congress are ready to give themselves a pay increase of roughly $4,400 per year.

That would take their annual salaries to nearly $170,000.

Campaigning last year, Democratic leaders said it would be wrong for Congress to accept a pay hike until it raised the minimum wage. That happened on Tuesday, when the minimum wage rose from $5.15 to $5.85 per hour; it will reach $7.25 an hour on July 24, 2009.

Cost-of-living increases are automatic for members of Congress unless they’re voted down. The House of Representatives already has cleared the way for such a raise in 2008, but a bipartisan coalition is out to block it, with critics saying the money could be better spent during a time of war and high deficits.

“This is the people’s money, and we need to use it on their priorities,” said Republican Rep. Sam Graves of Missouri, who’s co-sponsoring a bill to prevent the raise. “Increasing the pay of members of Congress is not their priority.”

Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Democrat, said she’d back a similar measure in the Senate.

“I don’t think Congress should get a raise,” she said. “I think it would be a nice thing to tell the American people that we could go a couple years without a raise.”

Under current plans, members of Congress will receive an automatic pay raise, estimated at 2.5 percent, in January. In a show of bipartisan consensus, the House voted 244-181 last month to kill a proposal that would have forced a straight up-or-down vote on the pay increase.

Defending the pay raise on the House floor, Rep. Doris Matsui, D-Calif., said she was “happy to report that the Democrats kept their promise” in raising the minimum wage for the first time in a decade.

Opponents said a raise for Congress would be ill timed.

“According to the recent polls, Americans don’t like the Congress,” said Rep. Howard Coble, a North Carolina Republican. “Our numbers, lower than President Bush’s numbers, are in the tank. To enact this (cost-of-living increase) will do nothing, in my opinion, to improve our already diminished reputation.”

Rep. Lee Terry, a Nebraska Republican, said congressional popularity is at an all-time low because “viciousness and the partisanship are probably at an all-time record high.” He noted that only two of the first 60 bills the House passed this year were signed into law.

“If we were on a baseball team and we hit two out of 60 . . . we would be sent down to single A ball for such a pathetic percentage,” he said. “So we are not performing well enough to deserve it.”

Republican Rep. Roy Blunt of Missouri, the House minority whip, said most Republicans - “with great discipline” - have resisted using the words “pay raise,” instead preferring to call the increase a cost-of-living allowance.

“Every member has some obligation to the institution for the compensation to, as much as possible, keep pace with inflation,” he said. “I think this should be as good a job when I leave it as it was when I took it.”

Opponents are pushing House leaders to schedule a vote on legislation to block an increase. Two such bills have been introduced in the House, though no votes have been scheduled.

“It’s mystifying to me why the House leadership will not allow a straight up-or-down vote on a pay raise,” said Graves. “I vote against every pay raise because taxpayers deserve better.”

Rep. Nancy Boyda, a Kansas Democrat and another co-sponsor of one of the bills, said “democracy sometimes moves slowly,” but she said she’s hopeful that the House will reconsider its position and block the pay raise.

“In my district, the median wage is still going down, so it just doesn’t seem right for Congress to take care of itself,” Boyda said. “I guess maybe it depends where you’re coming from . . . . If we get a pay raise, I will donate it to charity.”

Congress approved the law making its pay raises automatic in 1989, giving legislators an easy way to avoid tough votes that could hurt them during re-election campaigns. Since then, congressional salaries have nearly doubled, from $89,500 to $165,200 a year.

President Bush is paid $400,000 a year. His salary isn’t affected by changes in congressional pay.

Source

Rep. Nancy Boyda, a Kansas Democrat and another co-sponsor of one of the bills, said “democracy sometimes moves slowly,” but she said she’s hopeful that the House will reconsider its position and block the pay raise.

“In my district, the median wage is still going down, so it just doesn’t seem right for Congress to take care of itself,” Boyda said. “I guess maybe it depends where you’re coming from . . . . If we get a pay raise, I will donate it to charity.”

Nice. The Two Malcontents Charity has just been established.

Cindy Sheehan changes her story on her deceased soldier son Casey…again.

In this excerpt taken from Brought To You By Boeing published July 29^th 2007 Sheehan writes:

“Before Casey was killed, I did not rage against the machine that has been grinding up our soldiers and murderously oppressing other populations for generations. As a matter of fact, I practically threw my own son under the wheels of the machine. Despite my vague misgivings about the machine and my desperate worry about Casey going to Iraq, I watched him leave through tear soaked eyes and a worry-laden heart.”
However on June 29^th 2005 speaking to Marxist Amy Goodman on Democracy Now, Sheehan says:

“Right. Our family was against it [Iraq war] from the beginning. Casey was against it, but he felt it was his duty to go because he was in the Army. And he felt that he had to go to protect his buddies, to be there for his buddies, to be support, and they are brainwashed into thinking that even if they don’t agree with the mission, they’re brainwashed into just blindly following it. I begged Casey not to go. I told him I would take him to Canada. I told him I would run over him with a car, anything to get him not to go to that immoral war. And he said, “Mom, I wish I didn’t have to, but I have to go.”

First of all, Casey first enlisted in 2000 and re-enlisted in August 2003 knowing full well he would most likely go to Iraq. For Cindy Sheehan to claim that all US soldiers are simple minded brainwashed zombies sent to fight wars, is not only disrespectful to her own deceased soldier son Casey but to all men and women of the US military. Typical Cindy Sheehan.

Nevertheless, Cindy apparently has a short memory when it comes to recalling Casey.

Armed with props for her "Walk For The Insurgency" July 23rd 2007, Cindy walks along smiling and chatting  not noticing she has covered the face of her most important prop, whatshisname. To call Cindy Sheehan despicable is quite an understatement.

LOS ANGELES — Hollywood residents believe they’ve found a humane way to reduce their pigeon population and the messes the birds make: the pill.

Over the next few months a birth control product called OvoControl P, which interferes with egg development, will be placed in bird food in new rooftop feeders.

We think we’ve got a good solution to a bad situation,” said Laura Dodson, president of the Argyle Civic Association, the group leading the effort to try the new contraceptive. “The poop problem has become unmanageable and this could be the answer.”

Community leaders planned to announce the OvoControl P pilot program, which Dodson believes is the first of its kind in the nation, at a news conference today.

Dodson said representatives from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals contacted her group with the idea to use OvoControl P. Other animal rights groups, including the Humane Society of the United States, support the contraceptive over electric shock gates, spiked rooftops, poisons or other methods.

It’s estimated about 5,000 pigeons call the area home. Their population boom is blamed in part on people feeding the birds, including a woman known as the Bird Lady, who was responsible for dumping 25-pound bags of seed in 29 spots around Hollywood.

OvoControl P has been registered with the state Department of Pesticide Regulation and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Developed by Rancho Santa Fe-based Innolytics, the substance contains nicarbazin, which interferes with an egg’s ability to develop or hatch, said Erick Wolf, Innolytics chief executive.

The pilot program was expected to show results within a year, and the Hollywood area’s pigeon population is expected to shrink by at least half by 2012, Dodson said.

Source

BEIJING — Nothing says “I love you” like a photo frame made from panda poop.

The Chengdu Giant Panda Breeding Base has come up with a dung-for-profit scheme that turns droppings from the endangered species into odor-free souvenirs ranging from bookmarks to Olympic-themed statues of the animals, state media and base officials said Monday.

The facility in the southwestern province of Sichuan houses about 40 bamboo-fed pandas who produce less than a ton of excrement a day.

“We used to spend at least 6,000 yuan ($770) a month to get rid of the droppings but now they can be lucrative,” Jing Shimin, assistant to the base director, was quoted as saying by the official Xinhua News Agency.

The products will be made at a local handicraft company mostly from undigested bamboo culled from the panda waste through a special process, Xinhua said.

An official who answered the phone at the Chengdu facility said the dung is “carefully selected, smashed, dried and sterilized at 300 degrees Celsius (572 degrees Fahrenheit).” He refused to give his name but said the products will be of all colors because they will be dyed.

“They don’t smell too bad because 70 percent of the dung is just remains of the bamboo that the pandas are unable to digest,” Jing said.

While no price has been set, he said the most expensive souvenirs will contain a panda hair — collected from the wild — in each package.

The 2008 Olympic statues will feature “athletic pandas performing various Olympic sports,” Xinhua said.

In March, base officials said they were looking into making high-quality paper from the fiber-rich panda excrement, inspired by a trip to Thailand, where they found paper made from elephant dung.

The Chiang Mai Zoo in northern Thailand already sells multicolored paper made from waste produced by its two resident pandas. Making paper there involves a daylong process of cleaning the feces, boiling it in a soda solution, bleaching it with chlorine and drying it under the sun.

The panda is one of the world’s rarest and most beloved animals, with about 1,590 living in the wild in China, mostly in Sichuan and the western province of Shaanxi. Another 180 have been bred in captivity.

Source

BEIRUT: The Lebanese government decided on Saturday to create a mobile force backed by German experts to combat the influx of weapons trafficked into the country from Syria.

"The government approved the formation of a force composed of soldiers, security agents and customs officers … charged with controlling the northern border with Syria," said Information Minister Ghazi Aridi.

"The force will be assisted by German experts," Aridi told reporters at the end of a government meeting.

Germany will supply Lebanon’s customs authorities with equipment that will help it detect weapons under an agreement reached this week.

The assistance falls within the scope of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701.

The resolution ended last year’s 34-day war, and calls for the prevention of illegal arms sales and smuggling.

A report made earlier this year by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon found "serious breaches" of the arms embargo imposed under the UN resolution, which the United States says Syria or Iran breach to supply arms to Hizbullah.

Source

By Andrew G. Bostom

Twenty-three year old Stanislav Shmulevich awaits arraignment on hate crime charges for “criminal mischief and aggravated harassment,” accused of having hurled Korans into toilets at Pace University’s Manhattan campus, 10 months ago. This past October 13, according to police, a teacher discovered a paperback Koran in a second-floor bathroom toilet, while on November 21, a student found another submerged Koran in the same bathroom.Pace University’s Manhattan campus, 10 months ago. This past October 13, according to police, a teacher discovered a paperback Koran in a second-floor bathroom toilet, while on November 21, a student found another submerged Koran in the same bathroom.

The now disproven  Guantanamo Bay Koran flushing incident of May, 2005—reported errantly by Michael Isikoff, a veteran Newsweek journalist—was a distressingly stupid spectacle, accompanied by a tragic outcome—the loss of human life. Rioting which originated in Afghanistan, spread throughout much of the Muslim world, from Gaza to Indonesia. Rancorous Muslim mobs shouting “Protect our Holy Book!” burned down government buildings and ransacked the offices of relief organizations in several Afghan provinces. This senseless violence caused at least 15 deaths, and injured scores of others.

 Another false accusation of Koran desecration by non-Muslim infidels—with even more horrifying consequences—a brutal pogrom against the defenseless dhimmi Jews of Shiraz, Iran—took place in October, 1910. David Littman has provided the full translation of an Alliance Israélite Universale report of the 1910 Shiraz pogrom which was precipitated, in large part, by a mendacious allegation against the Jewish community: desecrating copies of the Koran by placing them in cesspools (latrines).
 …about three weeks ago, some scavengers were busy cleaning out the cesspools of a Jewish house when they brought to light an old book, a few pages of which were unsoiled and which was recognized as a Koran…On the first day of the festival of Succoth, some Jews were returning home from synagogue in the morning when they noticed at the entrance of their house a veiled Muslim woman holding a parcel under her arm. As soon as she saw them approaching, she hurriedly threw her parcel into the cesspool…then she ran away. The parcel was hastily pulled out. Once again, it was a Koran…not sure, in effect, that other Korans had not been thrown, likewise as the first ones, into Jewish houses without the knowledge of their inhabitants…it was  [deemed] prudent for this dignitary [the leading Muslim religious leader of the city] to be informed, in case one of these books should be discovered and seized on as a pretext to molest the Jews. [emphasis added]
 

This appeal was to no avail, and in the ensuing carnage and destruction,

 Not a single one of the Jewish quarter’s 260 houses was spared. [emphasis added] Soldiery, …sayyids [descendants of the prophet and/or Muslim dignitaries], even women and children, driven and excited, less by religious fanaticism than by a frenetic need to plunder and appropriate the Jews’ possessions, engaged in a tremendous rush for the spoils. At one point, about a hundred men from the Kashgaīs tribe, who were in town to sell some livestock, joined the first assailants, thereby completing the work of destruction.
 But these fanatics weren’t satisfied to rob the Jews of their possessions. They engaged in all sorts of violence against their persons. As soon as their quarter was stormed, the Jews fled in all directions, some to the houses of Muslim friends, others to the British Consulate, on to the terraces, and even into mosques. A few remained to try and defend their property. They paid for it with their lives or a serious injury. Twelve of them were killed in this way in the mêlée. Another fifteen were stabbed or hit with bludgeons or bullets from rifles or revolvers; they are in an alarming condition. A further forty sustained light injuries. An unlucky woman was wearing gold rings in her ears. A soldier ordered her to surrender them. She made haste to comply and had taken off one of the rings and was trying to remove the other when the impatient fanatic found it more expeditious to tear off the ear lobe together with the ring. Another woman was wearing around her neck a big silk braid to which was attached a small silver case containing some amulets…[an assailant] tried to snatch it from her and, seeing that the braid held, cut it with his knife, making at the same time a deep gash in the flesh of the unfortunate Jewess. How many more such atrocious scenes have occurred, of which I have not yet heard!
 In short the outcome of yesterday’s events is as follows: 12 people dead and about 50 more or less seriously injured, whilst the five to six thousand people comprising Shiraz community now possess nothing in the world but the few tatters they were wearing when their quarter was invaded. [emphasis added]
 While there appears to be solid evidence that Stanislav Shmulevich did in fact subject a Koran (or Korans) to “toilet trauma”—including a surveillance photo of the defendant leaving a Pace University meditation room where Korans were stored, and his reported “admitting statements” to police—“Muslim activists”, i.e., the ubiquitous unindicted co-conspirators of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), admonished the university to “crack down on hate crimes” following the original incidents. But as Robert Spencer observed, aptly,
 No one, of course, is calling upon those “Muslim activists” to take a strong stand against those Muslims who are justifying violence on the basis of the Koran and thereby [may] lead people [like Stanislav Shmulevich] t