Tennessee Mosque Site Fire Was Arson, Police Say
August 31st, 2010 by Chloe
MURFREESBORO, Tenn. — A suspicious fire that damaged construction equipment at the site of a future mosque in Tennessee has some local Muslims worried that their project has been dragged into the national debate surrounding Manhattan's ground zero.
Authorities told leaders of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro that four pieces of heavy construction equipment on the site were doused with an accelerant and one set ablaze early Saturday morning. The site is now being patrolled at all hours by the sheriff's department.
Federal investigators have not ruled it arson, saying only that the fire was being probed and asked the public to call in tips. Eric Kehn, spokesman for the Nashville office of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said arson is suspected.
The site has already seen vandalism, said Joel Siskovic, a spokesman for the FBI in the Memphis office. A sign at the site was spray-painted with the words "Not Welcome" and then torn in half. The FBI is investigating the fire in case it is a civil rights violation.
"We want to make sure there are not people acting with the intent to prevent people from exercising their First Amendment rights," Siskovic said.
Essam Fathy, chairman of the planning committee for the mosque, said he has lived in the city about 25 miles southeast of Nashville for almost 30 years and has never run into problems with his faith until now. He's concerned that outsiders could be involved.
"I don't think this is coming out of Murfreesboro," he said. "There were no issues at any time, even after 9/11, there were no issues. It just seems like there's a movement in the United States against Islam."
The debate in New York over a proposed Islamic community center and mosque two blocks away from ground zero has pitted advocates for religious freedom, including New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and President Barack Obama, against opponents who think it is insensitive to the victims of the terror attacks.
Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen, a Democrat, weighed in on the project for the first time on Monday.
Story continues below
Posted in Others | No Comments »
Summer 2010 Hottest On Record, New Data Suggest
August 30th, 2010 by Chloe
ALBANY, N.Y. — New numbers confirm what the sweaty brows of Northeasterners have been saying for months: The summer of 2010 was a record-breaking scorcher.
Preliminary figures provided by the Northeast Regional Climate Center at Cornell University on Friday show 28 cities from Washington, D.C., to Caribou, Maine, set record highs for average temperature from March through August.
A large swath of the country sweltered in early August, when scorching temperatures and high humidity made it feel like at least 100 degrees in many places and prompted heat advisories for 18 states. While unrelenting heat is the norm in the Deep South, it's unusual in places like Burlington, Vt., and Portland, Maine, which saw their hottest spring and summer in more than a century.
The temperatures are consistent with a global pattern of severe heat-related weather this summer. Meteorologists say 17 nations have recorded all-time-high temperatures this year, more than in any other year.
Back in the normally temperate Northeast, the records are expected to stand. The remaining days of August are forecast to be hot with readings around 90 in many areas of the Mid Atlantic and Northeast.
The average temperature for a 30-day month is calculated by adding the high and low temperatures of each day and dividing by 60.
Art DeGaetano of the Northeast Regional Climate Center in Ithaca, N.Y., said the normal average temperature for March through August in Manhattan's Central Park is 62.5 degrees, and this year it was 67.5. The previous record high was 66.3 in 1991.
For June through August, the historic average for Central Park is 73.9 degrees, and it was 77.8 this year. The previous record high was 77.3 in 1966.
In Philadelphia, the March-August average this year was 68.9 degrees, surpassing 1991's record of 67.7. At Dulles International Airport in Washington, D.C., this year's average of 68.2 beat the 1991 record of 66.4, and in Caribou, Maine, this year's spring-summer average of 54.5 degrees beat the old record of 53.5 set in 1979.
Story continues below
Posted in Others | No Comments »
Bill McCollum Refuses To Endorse Rick Scott Amid Raging Florida GOP Family Feud
August 28th, 2010 by Chloe
Defeated Florida Republican gubernatorial hopeful Bill McCollum is declining to support former rival and newly-minted GOP nominee Rick Scott as he heads into his general election campaign.
The St. Petersburg Times reports that McCollum, currently the Attorney General of Florida, signaled on Thursday that he offered his congratulations to Scott over the phone following Tuesday's election, but remains very skeptical of the self-funding contender's integrity.
"I still have serious questions," explained McCollum. "About issues of his character, his integrity, his honesty -- things that go back to Columbia/HCA," hitting on controversy surrounding Scott's pre-political profession.
Before he jumped into politics, Scott, a millionaire, was the head of Hospital Corporation of America -- a company that was slapped with a $1.7 billion fine after being hit with "14 felony charges stemming from a massive federal fraud investigation."
Leading up to Tuesday's primary, the Republican Party of Florida, standing firmly behind McCollum's candidacy, was reportedly concerned about the prospect of Scott swiping the state's GOP nomination after making a late jump into the race. At issue for members of the establishment, according to the Times, was the fact that the former health care industry exec possessed no allegiance to the state party or its operatives who were tirelessly working to defeat him.
Over the course of the primary, Scott repeatedly took aim at McCollum with relentless, negative attacks. The super-wealthly candidate blasted the state AG as the "Tonya Harding of Florida politics" and put out one campaign ad that even earned a rare rebuke from Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, Chairman of the Republican Governors Association.
The internal turmoil pervading the Florida GOP reached a tipping point just hours before polls closed and votes were set to be tallied in the state's election earlier this week. The RPOF signaled it would cancel plans to hold a unity rally one day following the crowning of the party's newly-minted nominee.
Story continues below
Posted in Others | No Comments »
Blagojevich Auction Sold Off Confidential Client Files, According To Northwestern University
August 27th, 2010 by Chloe
CHICAGO — Northwestern University says files auctioned from storage units connected to ousted Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich include confidential attorney-client documents.
University librarian Jeffrey Garrett said Wednesday that no files will be released until official processing. The items were auctioned after Blagojevich's campaign fund stopped paying storage fees.
Illinois Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission spokesman James Grogan says an attorney who abandons client files may be disciplined.
Blagojevich's publicist Glenn Selig says the former governor did not know specifically what had been in storage. He declined to address any attorney-client issues.
Blagojevich was convicted this month of lying to the FBI and likely faces a retrial on 23 other counts.
Posted in Others | No Comments »
Harry Reid Votes': New Anti-Harry Reid Group Launched By GOP Primary Loser Danny Tarkanian
August 26th, 2010 by Chloe
(AP) -- A vanquished Republican candidate is making a comeback in Nevada's U.S. Senate race, but not on the November ballot.
Businessman Danny Tarkanian, who finished behind fellow Republican Sharron Angle in the state's June primary, has formed a political committee to launch a website and run radio and TV ads dissecting Sen. Harry Reid's voting record.
It won't be flattering. The Las Vegas-based group -- Harry Reid Votes -- will remind residents of the "poor decisions" Reid has made for Nevada, Tarkanian said Monday.
"The votes that he has been making haven't been a big focus of the race," Tarkanian said. "We feel the majority of Nevadans will feel they were not good votes."
The group formed last week joins an array of independent political organizations pouring millions of dollars into the Nevada race, which polls show is a dead heat.
A spokeswoman for Tarkanian's group, Audrey Mullen, said the website will have interactive features that will allow visitors to take quizzes on Reid's voting record and answer the question, "How much is Harry Reid like you?"
The organization was formed under a section of the federal tax code that allows it to raise unlimited amounts of money from individuals, unions or corporations.
Tarkanian is the son of legendary University of Nevada, Las Vegas, basketball coach Jerry Tarkanian. The new group will also give Tarkanian a visible public platform, which could benefit him politically if he decides to make another run at public office.
Meanwhile, Reid's campaign began running a new TV ad criticizing Angle's education agenda, including a proposal to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education. "She's just too extreme," a narrator says, reprising a central theme of Reid's campaign.
Angle, a former teacher, has said decisions about education should be made at the state and local level, not in Washington.
Posted in Others | No Comments »
Yellow Cab Will Stop Running Anti-Islam Ads
August 25th, 2010 by Chloe
Earlier this summer, the leader of the group "Stop the Islamization of America" took out ads on 25 Chicago taxi cabs--and as of Tuesday, all of them will be removed.
Pamela Geller, who has been dubbed the "Queen of Muslim Bashers" and leads the "Stop the Islamization of America" movement, claimed the ads were directed toward Muslim women wanting to leave Islam--but ended up offending both cab drivers and passengers.
Today, Yellow Cab CEO Michael Levine issued a statement announcing the removal of the ads:
"Recently, the head of the group 'Stop the Islamization of America' took out ads on Chicago-area taxis. The ads in question were carried by independent affiliates of Yellow Cab Affiliation. The fleet owner was contracted and paid by an independent advertising company specializing in taxi top advertising."
"When Yellow Cab became aware of the ads three weeks ago, we immediately called the advertising company and asked to have the ads removed. We were told that they were taken down, but we found out today that three such ads were still running. They will be removed today. Yellow Cab does not regularly approve advertising content carried by our affiliates, but we do reserve the right to ask them to remove ads that offend either the drivers or the public."
The ads, which denounced honor killings, showed pictures of young women who were allegedly killed by their Muslim fathers for "refusing an Islamic marriage, dating a non-Muslim or becoming 'too Americanized,'" according to the Chicago Tribune. Below the photo, the ad reads "Is your family threatening you?" and is followed up with "LeaveIslamSafely.com."
Those against the ads say they paint an ugly and misleading picture of Islam.
"People like Pam Geller have a horrendous record," John Esposito, a professor of international affairs and Islamic studies at Georgetown University told the Tribune. "It's a track record of not distinguishing between forms of religious terrorism and Islam itself."
Geller is also one of the leading voices against the building of an Islamic center and mosque near the site of the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York City.
Posted in Others | No Comments »
Some 200 Women Gang-Raped Over 4 Days Near Congo U.N. Base
August 24th, 2010 by Chloe
JOHANNESBURG — Rwandan and Congolese rebels gang-raped nearly 200 women and some baby boys over four days within miles of a U.N. peacekeepers' base in an eastern Congo mining district, an American aid worker and a Congolese doctor said Monday.
Will F. Cragin of the International Medical Corps said aid and U.N. workers knew rebels had occupied Luvungi town and surrounding villages in eastern Congo the day after the attack began on July 30.
More than three weeks later, the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Congo has issued no statement about the atrocities and said Monday it still is investigating.
Cragin told The Associated Press by telephone that his organization was only able to get into the town, which he said is about 10 miles (16 kilometers) from a U.N. military camp, after rebels ended their brutal spree of raping and looting and withdrew of their own accord on Aug. 4.
At U.N. headquarters in New York, spokesman Martin Nesirky said Monday that a U.N. Joint Human Rights team verified allegations of the rape of at least 154 women by combatants from the Rwandan rebel FDLR group and Congolese Mai-Mai rebels in the village of Bunangiri. He said the victims are receiving medical and psycho-social care.
Nesirky said the U.N. peacekeeping mission has a military company operating base in Kibua, some 30 kilometers (about 19 miles) east of the village, but he said FDLR attackers blocked the road and prevented villagers from reaching the nearest communication point.
Civil society leader Charles Masudi Kisa said there were only about 25 peacekeepers and that they did what they could against some 200 to 400 rebels who occupied the town of about 2,200 people and five nearby villages.
"When the peacekeepers approached a village, the rebels would run into the forest, but then the Blue Helmets had to move on to another area, and the rebels would just return," Masudi said.
There was no fighting and no deaths, Cragin said, just "lots of pillaging and the systematic raping of women."
Posted in Others | No Comments »
Fresh Flooding In Pakistan Forces Hundreds Of Thousands To Flee
August 23rd, 2010 by Chloe
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- The floods tearing through Pakistan's breadbasket have further weakened this already unstable country, inflicting more economic pain on its people and threatening a key pillar of the U.S.-led war against Islamist militants -- who stand to gain from the misery. For now attention is focused on meeting the immediate needs of the millions of people affected by the still-spreading disaster.
Yet the floods -- described as Pakistan's worst-ever natural calamity -- are already complicating U.S. goals of defeating al-Qaida and the Taliban and stabilizing neighboring Afghanistan.
With international aid still not coming in fast enough, public anger at the government is likely to swell as millions face months or even years of destitution, risking turmoil just as Washington and the region needs stability in the nuclear-armed state.
"The stakes are very, very high," said Sen. John Kerry, who visited this week. "We are particularly anxious, all of us, to see the country get back on track."
Hundreds of thousands were forced to flee the city of Shahdakot in Pakistan's Sindh Province because of mud berms that threatened to burst, CNN reported Saturday. While many evacuated, not all of Shahdakot's 500,000 people could escape. CNN described scenes of desperate families stranded on rooftops. One woman begged for help:
Sunat Magsi and her 100-strong extended family lost their nine mud huts to the raging torrents. They sought shelter in an abandoned house, but even there the water was creeping higher. They only had one donkey and one cart left.
"We have so many children here," Magsi said, weeping. "We don't know how we're going to get out. We need help.
The floods began in the northwest, hitting the Swat Valley and areas close to the main city of Peshawar, before moving down the country by way of the mighty River Indus, devastating millions of acres (hectares) of crops in the country's "breadbasket" in Punjab and the Sindh.
Driver from www.huffingtonpost.com
Posted in Others | No Comments »
'Terror Birds': Ancient South American Creature Fought Like Muhammad Ali
August 20th, 2010 by Chloe
WASHINGTON — Ninety-pound birds that once lived in South America wielded their giant, sharp beaks in quick jabs, much like the boxing tactics of Muhammad Ali, according to a new study.
Originally dubbed terror birds because of their fearsome head, the flightless creatures were built to strike forward, attacking their prey with sudden jabs, researchers reported in the online journal PLoS ONE.
In other words, while the birds couldn't float like a butterfly, they could sting like Ali.
"These guys were not sluggers, they couldn't go in and grapple with prey. They had to stand back and dance around and make hatchet-like jabs," Lawrence Witmer of the Ohio University College of Osteopathic Medicine said of the birds, officially known as Andalgalornis (an-DAHL-gah-lohr-nis).
The design of their head "dictated what their killing style must have been. Attack and retreat strategy ... trying to kill the animal then swallow it whole, if they could, or use the bill and strong neck muscles to rip off chunks of flesh," he said in a telephone interview.
The 4 1/2-foot tall birds lived about 6 million years ago in what is now northwestern Argentina. Its skull had a deep, narrow bill armed with a powerful, hawk-like hook.
"Birds generally have skulls with lots of mobility between the bones, which allows them to have light but strong skulls. But we found that Andalgalornis had turned these mobile joints into rigid beams. This guy had a strong skull, particularly in the fore-aft direction, despite having a curiously hollow beak," said Witmer.
An engineering analysis showed that the bird was well-adapted to strike with its beak and pull back, but would have been badly strained had it tried to shake prey from side-to-side.
Also, it's hollow beak could be damaged by hard sideways shaking.
Driver from www.huffingtonpost.com
Posted in Others | No Comments »
U.S. Looking At Ending Deepwater Drilling Moratorium
August 16th, 2010 by Chloe
NEW ORLEANS — Now that the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history has effectively been stopped, the White House is considering an early end to its moratorium on deepwater drilling.
But four months after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon, regulators have only started to make good on promises to overhaul drilling. Tough measures are stalled in Congress. A $1 billion emergency response network proposed by the industry won't be operational for another year.
And while doomsday scenarios from the BP spill, like oil washing up the East Coast, have not come to pass, there are no guarantees that drilling will be any safer once it does resume.
What's changed is "not enough to make a big difference," said Charles Perrow, a Yale professor who has studied the spill in the Gulf.
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has halted deepwater drilling until Nov. 30, saying the BP spill demonstrated the industry wasn't prepared for a massive underwater blowout. He's ordered rigs to re-examine their equipment and safety procedures, and next month plans to order new safeguards for blowout preventers.
Before drillers can return to the deep water, however, Salazar said the industry should be able to show that it's capable of responding to and containing future blowouts.
Some energy experts, engineering consultants and Gulf Coast leaders joined Big Oil to ask Salazar to change his mind. Drilling was safe before the BP spill, they said, and Gulf communities that depend on the industry were suffering unfairly.
That argument appears to have gained traction, even among people most affected by the spill, now that BP is close to plugging the well for good.
Billy Nungesser, president of hard-hit Plaquemines Parish, La., said he's seen attitudes change in his community now that the deepsea disaster is easing. Even though oil has been washing ashore for months and he's fought constantly with BP and the government over their response, Nungesser thinks the ban should be lifted. Offshore drilling means jobs.
Driver from www.huffingtonpost.com
Posted in Others | No Comments »