Update:

We just wrote Michelle Malkin, hopefully she can help this man.

There is a growing sense of outrage in Kalispell Montana after a Mexican flag was erected in front of a U.S. flag 200 feet up a huge tower that belongs to the oldest radio station in America – KGEZ.

Before the incident, station owner John Stokes said that he was getting calls from angry supporters of the extremist La Reconquista movement, a separatist group that advocates the violent overthrow of the southern and western U.S. states, and had also received death threats.

Two Mexican males entered the premises of KGEZ and demanded that another U.S. flag that was on a flagpole be taken down because it was "disrespectful". The flag was later stolen.

On Wednesday morning the station’s ice covered 400 foot radio tower was scaled and the Mexican flag was hung in front of old glory.

The Kalispell Police blotter makes mention of the incident but it has received no attention in the media.

We have spoken directly with Mr. Stokes and confirmed the details. Rumors that the flag was in fact Romanian are untrue. Police visited the scene and reported that it was a Mexican flag. Mr. Stokes confirms it was a Mexican flag.

Similar incidents have increased over the past few years. Last month, a veteran from Reno, Nev. made headlines after he took matters into his own hands and tore down a Mexican flag that was being illegally flown above a U.S. flag at a local business.

According to federal law it is illegal to fly any flag above the U.S. flag, and if flying more than one they must be on separate poles and be of an equal size.

The latest incident will fuel tensions about U.S. immigration policy, especially in light of recent revelations concerning the explosion of illegal immigrants now living in America.

Source

Heads_Up American Patrol

Thieves worsened the ordeal for the family of two girls killed in a Thanksgiving hit-and-run crash in Oakland when they made off with thousands of dollars that had been raised to fly the bodies to Mexico for burial.

"It’s just so sad. Everything is so terrible," Maria Teresa Ortega, a cousin of the girls, said after the funeral Friday. "Nobody expects that anyone would do such a thing."

The family’s Honda Civic was stolen Thursday from a parking lot next to Cooper’s Chapel, a mortuary at Fruitvale and East 15th avenues, while relatives were inside attending a memorial service. In the back was a bag of cash that the family intended to use to transport the girls’ bodies to their native Mexico for burial and to pay for travel expenses for family members.

"This is more than we can bear," said Ortega, who was unsure exactly how much money was in the bag. "Please pray for us. When many people all pray together, that helps."

"I feel so terrible for them," said undertaker John McCormick, who was inside the chapel when the theft occurred. "It’s unbelievable."

Police came out and took a report but have not found the car.

Ortega said she did not know how the thieves got into the Honda or whether it could have been stolen by someone who knew the cash was there. In the confusion of bringing toddlers and infants from the parking lot into the chapel, she said, it’s possible the family left the car unlocked.

"We were all worried about other things at the time," she said.

Stephanie Cervantes, 14, and her cousin Jacklin Munguia-Herrera, 5, were killed Thanksgiving night in East Oakland when their Ford Mustang was struck broadside by a speeding SUV that failed to halt at a stop sign, police said.

Jacklin’s mother, Laura Herrera, 23, who was driving the Mustang, and Herrera’s daughter, Evalyn Munguia, 3, were hospitalized in critical condition.

The next day, police arrested Carmelo Salas, 28, and booked him for murder under the legal principle of implied malice, or engaging in an unlawful action with "conscious disregard" for human life.

Police said Salas, who was believed to be intoxicated, was traveling about 80 mph in a 25 mph zone.

About 500 people attended the funeral Mass on Friday for the girls at St. Elizabeth’s Church in Oakland. The bodies are to be flown to Pajacuaran, south of Guadalajara in Mexico, for burial.

Source

These Mexican illegal aliens (of course they’re illegal aliens) left a bag of cash in their car that was supposedly intended for use to fly the bodies of the dead girls back to Mexico and it just so happens the car was stolen? Which raises another question; why would the mothers send the bodies back to Mexico? Hmmm. How about, there was never any cash and the story was made up to elicit cash. Using the dead little girls can bring about mucho donated deniro. Si Si.

It was a good day for the family of Iraqi journalist Dhia Al-Kawwaz; they turned out not to have been massacred after all. It was not such a good day for the credibility of Iraqi journalism.

The story, as it went out on Wednesday, was chilling enough.

Five gunmen had entered the house of Dhia al-Kawwaz’ family in the Shaab neighborhood of Baghdad shortly after 7 a.m. on November 25 and shot dead two of Kawwaz’s sisters, their husbands and their seven children, aged 5 to 10. They then blew up the house before leaving in a vehicle with no license plates. Neighbors said police at a nearby post did not intervene.

That was the gist of the alert that went out from Reporters without Borders in Paris, and which many publications worldwide, including Menassat.com, published on good faith.

There was no reason to doubt the report at first. Since the U.S. invasion in 2003, at least 206 journalists and media assistants have been killed in Iraq, and threats against journalists and their families are common.

In fact, it was hardly news at all except for the sheer number of relatives killed.

Al-Kawwaz, an Iraqi journalist in exile for the past twenty years, had recently received threats to stop writing about the Iranian influence in Iraq on his website, Shabeqat Akhbar al-Iraq (Iraq News Network). Shia militias were responsible for the massacre, Al-Kawwaz said, and by extension the Shia-led Iraqi government that supports them. (Al-Kawwaz is rumoured to be close to the former Baath party, and has been very critical of the Maliki government.)

But then the denials started coming in.

The Iraqi government spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh, said there was no record of any such incident in the Shaab neighborhood. Al-Dabbagh said he had personally spoken to Al-Kawwaz’ mother on the phone from Kut; she had assured him that she and her family were alive and well.

Of course, it wouldn’t have been the first time the Iraqi government was caught in a lie.

Al-Kawwaz held his own, and challenged the Iraqi government to show his family on TV.

Which it did. On Wednesday evening, the government-run Al-Hurra station paraded Al-Kawwaz’ family on TV, including one of the sisters who was supposed to have been murdered.

“We are still alive. Thank God!” she said. “No one attacked us … militias or special forces. Nobody stormed our home. He even organized a condolence meeting to mourn our deaths. But we are alive. We are ashamed that he is our brother.”

Al-Kawwaz’ mother went on Al-Hurra as well, saying she had disowned her son.

Meanwhile, at Reporters without Borders headquarters, panic had broken out.

“Our credibility was at stake here,” Jamil Abou Assi of RSF’s Middle-East desk told MENASSAT.COM from Paris, “so we pulled out all the stops.”

According to Abou Assi, RSF was alerted to the alleged massacre by one of their correspondents in the region. “We called Al-Kawwaz in Jordan but he said he was too emotional to talk and passed us on to somebody else.”

When news reached RSF that Al-Hurra TV was preparing to broadcast an interview with his family, they launched their own inquiry and soon had to conclude that there was no truth to the story.

“I spoke to him on the phone again,” says Abou Assi, “but he was very incoherent. He kept saying it was a conspiracy against him.”

On his website, Al-Kawwaz confirmed that it was his family members that appeared on Al-Hurra, but he claimed they were being forced to lie and that their passports were being withheld.

(Exactly how the government coerced the Al-Kawwaz family to pretend to be alive is not clear.)

In Baghdad, the Journalistic Freedoms Observatory (JFO), a press advocacy group and one of RSF’s partners in the region, was among the first to smell a rat.

“We had news that a wake was held in Orso for the journalist’s family, and that an extremist religious leader attended this ceremony alongside a governor of the region,” JFO’s vice-president Hadi Jello Merhi told MENASSAT.COM from Baghdad. “We contacted the husband of one of the Al-Kawwaz sisters and he assured us that they were alive. The governor also denied it. We then contacted other family members and found that they were all safe and sound.”

Merhi admitted that JFO was hesitant at first to release the true story. “When we discovered it, we did not even want to acknowledge it! We were worried about the backlash from this. We knew some people would use this incident to question other deaths in Iraq. But in the end we had to take our responsibility. The truth must be told whatever the price.”

And that price is heavy, Merhi said: “Today, every journalist in Iraq suffers from this incident. We have lost our credibility.”

So what’s next for Dhia Al-Kawwaz? The Iraqi government issued an arrest warrant against him on Thursday but Al-Kawwaz is not in Iraq so he is probably out of the reach of the Iraqi judiciary.

Al-Kawwaz’ career as a journalist is probably over. According to the latest gossip from Jordan, the whole thing had been a ploy to attract international funding for his news website.

Yesterday, all trace of the website had disappeared from the Internet.

Source

Dishonest Iraqi “journalism”? Why…I won’t believe it! I won’t I tell ya! But…but…if Iraqi “journalists” lie about their own people, I wonder, ya think they would lie about the evil infidel Imperial Storm Troops too? Ya think?

Via Communist Dreams:

SAN FRANCISCO — U.S. war veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan have announced they’re planning to descend on Washington, DC this March to testify about war crimes they committed or personally witnessed in Iraq.

“The war in Iraq is not covered to its potential because of how dangerous it is for reporters to cover it,” said Liam Madden, a former Marine and member of the group Iraq Veterans Against the War. “That’s left a lot of misconceptions in the minds of the American public about what the true nature of military occupation looks like.”

Iraq Veterans Against the War argues that well-publicized incidents of American brutality like the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and the massacre of an entire family of Iraqis in the town of Haditha are not the isolated incidents perpetrated by “a few bad apples,” as many politicians and military leaders have claimed. They are part of a pattern, the group says, of “an increasingly bloody occupation.”

“This is our generation getting to tell history,” Madden told OneWorld, “to ensure that the actual history gets told — that it’s not a sugar-coated, diluted version of what actually happened.”

Iraq Veterans Against the War is calling the gathering a “Winter Soldier,” named after a similar event organized by Vietnam veterans in 1971.

In 1971, over 100 members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War gathered in Detroit to share their stories with America. Atrocities like the My Lai massacre had ignited popular opposition to the war, but political and military leaders insisted that such crimes were isolated exceptions.

“Initially even the My Lai massacre was denied,” notes Gerald Nicosia, whose book Home to War provides the most exhaustive history of the Vietnam veterans’ movement.

“The U.S. military has traditionally denied these accusations based on the fact that ‘this is a crazy soldier’ or ‘this is a malcontent’ — that you can’t trust this person. And that is the reason that Vietnam Veterans Against the War did this unified presentation in Detriot in 1971.

“They brought together their bonafides and wore their medals and showed it was more than one or two or three malcontents. It was medal-winning, honored soldiers — veterans in a group verifying what each other said to try to convince people that these charges cannot be denied. That people are doing these things as a matter of policy.”

Nicosia says the 1971 “Winter Soldier” was roundly ignored by the mainstream media, but that it made an indelible imprint on those who were there.

Among those in attendance was 27-year-old Navy Lieutenant John Kerry, who had served on a Swift Boat in Vietnam. Three months after the hearings, Nicosia notes, Kerry took his case to Congress and spoke before a jammed Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Television cameras lined the walls, and veterans packed the seats.

“Many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia,” Kerry told the Committee, describing the events of the “Winter Soldier” gathering.

“It is impossible to describe to you exactly what did happen in Detroit — the emotions in the room, and the feelings of the men who were reliving their experiences in Vietnam. They relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do.”

In one of the most famous antiwar speeches of the era, Kerry concluded: “Someone has to die so that President Nixon won’t be — and these are his words — ‘the first President to lose a war’. We are asking Americans to think about that, because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”

Nicosia says Americans and veterans find themselves in a similar situation today.

“The majority of the American people are very dissatisfied with the Iraq war now and would be happy to get out of it. But Americans are bred deep into their psyches to think of America as a good country and, I think, much harder than just the hurdle of getting troops out of Iraq, is to get Americans to realize the terrible things we do in the name of the United States.”

———————————-

Soccer is still a national sport in Iraq and Afghanistan and our enemies understand and appreciate the concept of  “own goal”.

Our enemies determined tribal warriors and fanatical religious zealots are laughing at the propaganda windfall that these traitorous bastards are providing them.

Liam Madden, a close comrade of Marxist monger Medea Benjamin and Cindy Sheehan, steps up his traitorous rhetoric once again in hopes of igniting the fire of discontent with the American people against the US military while emboldening enemies of the US military.

Madden along with his comrades at IVAW have changed their stories about their experiences in Iraq; a few now claim that they too have committed war crimes while serving in the sandbox. In the past it was we only “witnessed” these crimes but never participated. Nor did they ever bother to report these alleged crimes at the time. While spouting their “Bush/Cheney should be tried for war crimes” rhetoric, these IVAW, the new moral compass of the US military, cannot manage to read their own moral compass pointed in the direction of turning themselves in for those specific war crimes they now claim they had committed. Of course, IVAW claims that the Afghanistan/Iraq wars are illegal and immoral wars to begin with and by simply stepping onto Afghani/Iraqi soil as a US soldier you’ve committed a war crime. If they have the courage of their convictions they should write confessions and turn themselves in to a legitimate US judicial mechanism.

There is no honor or bravery in accusing former fellow soldiers of committing war crimes while out of harm’s way from the safety and comfort of US soil especially while those soldiers are still in harm’s way. It’s is an act of cowardice to march up and down US streets while the enemy watches you  hold banners and speeches declaring US troops are war criminals. Explain to soldiers currently in harm’s way how exactly that “supports” them.

Bottom line is Madden and comrades are cowardly traitorous lying bastards; the new John Kerry and John Murtha–Or as we prefer to call them Neojohns.

Max Blumenthal with the Marxist Media Matters goes after Tom Tancredo with a vengeance:

When Republican Representative Tom Tancredo isn’t railing against the “scourge” of illegal immigration on the presidential campaign trail, he relaxes in the 1053 square foot basement recreation room of his Littleton, Colorado McMansion. There, he and his family can rack up a game of billiards on their tournament size pool table, play pinball, or enjoy their favorite movies in the terraced seating area of a home theater system. Tancredo, who dodged the draft during the Vietnam War by producing evidence that he suffered from mentally illnesses, especially likes entertaining his buddies with classic war movies.

“We have friends over and I have now shown Pearl Harbor about six times,” Tancredo boasted to the Rocky Mountain News about his 102-inch television. “But I mainly just show the attack scene because the sound is so good.”

When Tancredo hired a construction crew to transform his drab basement into a high-tech pleasure den in October 2001, however, he did not express concern that only two of its members spoke English. Nor did he bother to check the workers’ documentation to see if they were legal residents of the United States. Had Tancredo done so, he would have learned that most of the crew consisted of undocumented immigrants, or “criminal aliens” as he likes to call them. Instead, Tancredo paid the crew $60,000 for its labor and waited innocently for the completion of his elaborate entertainment complex.

During the renovation process, two illegal workers hired by Tancredo were alerted to his reputation for immigrant bashing. They went straight to the Denver Post to complain. Tancredo “doesn’t want us here, but he’ll take advantage of our sweat and our labor,” one of the workers complained to the Post on September 19, 2002. “It’s just not right.”

The Post report momentarily threw Tancredo on the defensive. In a fiery speech soon after the story’s publication, Tancredo blamed his foibles on the INS. “I haven’t the foggiest idea how many people I may have hired in the past as taxi drivers, as waiters, waitresses, home improvement people,” he boomed from the House floor. “I haven’t the foggiest idea how many of those people may have been here illegally, and it is not my job to ask them.” Then defiance gave way to vitriol as the congressman dubbed undocumented immigrants, “the face of murder.”

Only days before the Post’s story appeared, Tancredo had personally reported an honor student profiled in the Denver Post to the INS because the 14-year-old was not a legal resident of the United States. The stunt forced the boy’s family to go into hiding. Fortunately for Tancredo, the ensuing revelations of his hiring of illegal labor fell below the radar of the national media, allowing his anti-immigrant crusade to proceed unabated.

Tancredo proceeded to organize over 90 anti-immigration House members into an informal but powerful caucus that has effectively prevented any non-enforcement related immigration legislation from reaching the President’s desk. His Team America PAC, which is chaired by right-wing pundit Bay Buchanan, has donated tens of thousands of dollars this election cycle to nativist candidates who hope to fill Tancredo’s caucus with new blood when he retires next year. Down on the border, Tancredo announced his support for the Minutemen, providing the anti-immigrant militia with a veneer of respectability while its pistol-packing members hunt for brown-skinned evildoers.

Tancredo has also played an instrumental role in shaping the way immigration is discussed in the media. Despite his third tier status in the presidential campaign, as of November 19 the congressman has appeared on Fox News more times during 2007 than any other presidential candidate. A former Tancredo staffer speaking on condition of anonymity told me recently that the congressman spends extensive time on the phone with top-rated CNN anchor Lou Dobbs, offering him tips and ideas for his daily “Broken Borders” segments.

Dobbs, in turn, has produced an unending string of specious “reports” painting undocumented immigrants from Latin America as disease-ridden criminals. In May, for example, Dobbs falsely claimed that illegal migrants from Mexico were responsible for 7000 new cases of leprosy in the United States. A wave of negative publicity forced Dobbs to acknowledge his source for the bogus story as Madeleine Cosman, a deceased white supremacist activist who often appeared at anti-immigrant rallies beside her pal Tancredo.

The success of Tancredo’s efforts to project his nativist politics onto the national stage were apparent during CNN’s November 26 Republican Youtube debate. In a heated exchange that highlighted press coverage of the debate, presidential frontrunners Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney competed with one another over who could appear the most draconian towards “illegals.” When Romney accused Giuliani of running a “sanctuary city” for undocumented immigrants while serving as mayor of New York, Giuliani shot back that Romney had run a “sanctuary mansion” when he was governor of Massachusetts. Giuliani pointed to a lengthy Boston Globe report revealing that Romney paid a gardening service that employed illegal workers to tend the lawns of his mansion. Suddenly, the candidates with the most tolerant records on immigration issues sounded like Tancredo.

While the two rivals clashed, Tancredo stood at the far end of the stage smiling contentedly. The cause he championed for years with a band of ornery border vigilantes, white supremacists, and assorted dregs by his side had become a central theme in the race for the White House. Of all the major GOP candidates, only Sen. John McCain has countered Tancredo with big tent appeals to socially conservative Latinos. The other candidates have reliably parroted his talking points, parrying accusations of ideological impurity by accusing one another of being soft on illegal immigration. “All I’ve heard is people trying to out-Tancredo Tancredo,” Tancredo observed during the debate. “It is great.”

But there is one way the Republican candidates can never out-Tancredo Tancredo. The congressman lives in a “sanctuary mansion” built by the kind of people he has made a career out of demonizing. Tom Tancredo may have no hope of winning the Republican nomination, but in the cause of hypocrisy, he is the frontrunner.

The Turkish government authorised the army this week to carry out a cross-border strike against Kurdish rebel targets in northern Iraq, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Friday.

"We made a decision at the cabinet meeting on November 28 and, with the president’s approval, the Turkish armed forces were authorised regarding a cross-border operation," Erdogan told reporters in televised remarks.

He did not give any indication whether such an operation was imminent.

Turkey has amassed up to 100,000 troops near the mountainous border, backed up by tanks, artillery and warplanes, for a possible strike into mainly Kurdish northern Iraq against rebels of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) hiding there.

Ankara has made many threats of military action but, under heavy U.S. pressure, has so far shown restraint. Washington fears a large-scale operation could destabilize the most stable part of Iraq and possibly the wider region.

There was a muted reaction in financial markets to Erdogan’s comments, with the lira weakening slightly against the dollar.

Turkey’s parliament approved a resolution on October 17 giving the government the legal basis to order cross-border military operations if and when it deemed them necessary.

The resolution, approved by an overwhelming majority of lawmakers, followed a series of deadly PKK attacks on Turkish security forces that fanned an angry wave of nationalism across Turkey, a NATO member that also wants to join the EU.

That resolution is valid for one year. The cabinet decision this week effectively frees up the generals to act as they see necessary without seeking further political approval.

Senior Turkish and US military commanders held two rounds of talks in Ankara last week to discuss joint efforts against the PKK, including enhanced intelligence-sharing on rebel movements.

Turkish-US work on intelligence-sharing "is continuing in harmony," Erdogan said.
Keen to head off a large-scale Turkish cross-border operation, the United States and the Iraqi Kurds, who run northern Iraq, have agreed to step up measures to curb the PKK.

After talks with Erdogan at the White House in early November, US President George W. Bush called the PKK a common enemy and promised to provide Turkey with real-time intelligence on rebel movements.

Bush’s pledge was largely seen as tacit US approval for limited cross-border Turkish strikes, mainly air raids, against PKK targets in northern Iraq.

"They (the government) want to keep up the pressure. If you let go, both the Americans and the Kurdish administration in northern Iraq may relax their positions. It is a tactical move," said Dogu Ergil, a professor at Ankara University.

"Intelligence reports show about 2,000 of the rebels have passed into Iran and a further 1,000 into Turkey, leaving only about 500 or so in caves in the Qandil mountains (of northern Iraq). This is not worth a major military operation," he said.

Weather conditions are also rapidly worsening, further hampering the likely effectiveness of military action.

But analysts said it would be wrong to think the Turks were only bluffing. Another deadly PKK attack inside Turkey could prove the tipping point.

"Erdogan’s words show the Turks do mean business this time. They are serious. They will not be satisfied with just promises from the Americans and Iraq," said Wolfango Piccoli, a Turkey expert at Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy.

Source

Manama: Bahrain’s information ministry has come under fire again from Islamist deputies for allegedly failing to take action against nightclubs and for permitting the broadcasting of "vulgar" television shows.

But the new minister, Jihad Bu Kamal, who was marking 60 days in his post, asked the MPs to be patient with his efforts to revamp the ministry.

Mohammad Khalid, representing Al Menbar Society, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, complained that a decision taken earlier this year to control the sale of alcohol and to ban discos was being blatantly ignored.

"We have noted the re-emergence of the sale of alcohol and the reappearance of the prostitution tourism and discos in several areas. Obviously, we are suffering from a lack of inspection and monitoring of this sector and we sincerely wish for the reinvigoration of the ministry’s commitment to clean tourism in the country," Mohammad Khalid told the parliament during the recent session attended by Bu Kamal whose ministry oversees tourism in Bahrain.

The MP who, has often clashed with the country’s liberals over the decision, said that he did not accuse the new minister of the new "evils", but added that several ministry officials were to blame for their lack of commitment and the minister had to act promptly.

Implementation

"I am aware that the ministry has plans to improve the situation, but it seems that too much time is being wasted. I hope that we will not have to wait until the 25th century to see the implementation of the plans," he said.

Jalal Fairuz, MP for Al Wefaq, the main Shiite society, blasted the information ministry for permitting the broadcasting of video clips and dancing, mainly on Thursday night, the eve of the most sacred day of the Islamic week.

"Last year we had to call the people in charge of Bah-rain Television to take off the air songs they were broadcasting during the observances of Ashura," Fairuz said during the session. "We hope that we will not have a repeat of that deplorable situation," he said.

Source

New Delhi: Bookstores in the country are stocking up on a new kind of English-language novel – the kind in which twentysomething urban women put their careers first, ridicule arranged marriages and wrestle with weight gain.

The internationally trendy fiction genre known as "chick lit," popularised by Bridget Jones’s Diary and Sex and the City, now has an Indian avatar.

In a country where marriages are usually arranged by parents in consultation with astrologers, and where women are traditionally expected to sacrifice their own aspirations in the interest of family, the cheeky chick-lit heroines are being embraced by readers who see the lighter side of Indian mores.

The plots reveal Indian city-dwellers confronting the amusing vagaries of daily life – a working woman puts her family astrologer’s number on speed dial on her cellphone; another woman dumps trash on a boy her mother sends for an arranged marriage; a couple’s romance blossoms through a series of Post-it notes stuck on a car in a parking lot; a mother bemoans her bad karma because her 29-year-old daughter is still single.

Irreverent entrant

Indian chick lit is the latest and most irreverent entrant into the world of English-language fiction. But publishers and critics say it is also a reflection of the growing confidence among women in Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai and elsewhere.

"This is the story of the new Indian woman in the cities. She is single, has a career and is willing to have fun, take risks and find a man her way, and not necessarily her family’s way. It is a woman we have only read about in books from the Western countries and now, suddenly we are finding her on Indian roads," said V. K. Karthika, the publisher and chief editor at Harper Collins India, who launched Almost Single by debutante writer Advaita Kala. The book has sold 10,000 copies in the past four months and is now printing a fourth time, a huge success by the standards of English-language fiction in India.

In the past five years, a handful of novels geared toward young women, including Girl Alone and Piece of Cake, have drawn a following in India. But the success of Almost Single has revealed the larger, untapped market for a girls-having-fun genre.

"A generation ago, marriage was the only route to independence from parental control in India. Now women are working, living alone in the cities, hanging out with women friends, drinking, dating and having fun in spite of the enormous social pressure to get married," said Kala, 30, author of Almost Single. "They inhabit a world where women enjoying a drink in the bar are not social outcasts. They are not tragic figures because they are single."

Kala has a liberal arts degree from Berry College in Georgia and works as a job trainer for the Taj group of hotels in India.

Balancing act

The heroines of chick lit skillfully balance cultural traditions with 21st-century lifestyles, trying to observe fasting rituals while adhering to the Atkins or South Beach diet, choosing to hang out with gay friends or facing a mother’s disapproval.

"I like such books because they resemble my life and the conversations I have with my friends and parents," said Jyoti Trehan, a 25-year-old advertising executive who was browsing a New Delhi bookstore recently.

Kala’s protagonist works in a five-star hotel, smokes and drinks, and turns to her two friends with problems involving her nagging boss or with her mother, who gives her "umbilical cord whiplash".

"I am keenly aware that my book represents a sliver of Indian society, but it is a growing sliver," said Kala, who says she learned what it was to be poor during her student years in the United States, when she cleaned dorm toilets and had to choose between a meal and a large Pepsi.

Now, Kala is single and lives with her parents in New Delhi. She wears a ruby ring that her family astrologer recommended for creativity. She says he predicted her book’s success and forecasts that she will get married "very soon".

Recently, a group of 40 Mary Kay representatives from the United States were presented with copies of Kala’s book while staying in a New Delhi hotel. One of the women, Jennifer Isenhart, contacted Kala and asked her to sign 25 copies so that she could take them to friends back home.

"The book showed me that young women are the same everywhere. They have the same problems of boyfriends and bosses. They drink coffee, love to shop and have fun," said Isenhart, 28. "To enjoy life is empowerment, too."

Source

WASHINGTON – Nearly four years after the lone survivor of a World War II air crash went to his final resting place in Wichita Falls, a permanent home is still elusive for a memorial honoring the 40 U.S. troops who didn’t survive the tragedy in Australia.

But five senators signed off on a letter urging the secretary of the Army to find the Bakers Creek crash marker a home on U.S. soil, perhaps in the Arlington National Cemetery or at Fort Meyer, Va.

"The family members of these servicemen would like for the marker’s permanent location to be carefully considered for appropriateness, ease of access for families and relevant connection to military aviation," Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., wrote in a letter this month.

The marker now sits in Washington at the Australian Embassy. It honors those who lost their lives when an old B-17C Flying Fortress, converted for troop transport, went down June 14, 1943.

The servicemen aboard had just finished rest and recreation in Mackay, Queensland.

The late Foye Kenneth Roberts walked away from the crash. He died in February 2004 in Wichita Falls.

The government ordered the crash kept secret for security reasons.

The Bakers Creek Memorial Association is on a mission to find a permanent home for the memorial.

The association hopes to see the marker moved by the anniversary of the tragedy in 2008, said McCaskill’s Nov. 2 letter to Army Secretary Pete Geren.

She became involved after some of her Missouri constituents contacted her, McCaskill spokeswoman Maria Speiser said.

Besides her, senators Benjamin Cardin, D-Md.; Robert Byrd, D-W.Va.; Arlen Spector, R-Pa.; and Robert Casey, D-Pa., also signed the letter.

U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, is pushing the government to improve efforts to honor veterans, Hutchison spokesman Matt Mackowiak said in an e-mail.

She is ranking member of the Military Construction and Veterans Appropriations Subcommittee, part of the House Armed Services Committee.

"It is only fitting to properly remember these 40 brave soldiers who perished on June 14, 1943," Mackowiak said. "Their service should be remembered and memorialized at one of our national cemeteries."

The office of U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, is in direct contact with Geren’s office about the memorial, Cornyn spokesman John Drogan said in an e-mail.

"These fallen troops paid the ultimate price for our freedom," he said. "We’ll work to make sure they are properly honored."

Source