MFS - The Other News

                         Afternoon Posting.

• Sunday, September 19, 2010, the Obama family attended church for only the third time in a year. They went on foot to the St. John’s Episcopal Church situated across the Lafayette Park.But what is widely not reported by the White House and the MSM is that on that particular Sunday in that particular church, Dr. Ziad Asali, M.D., a Muslim, founder and president of the American Task Force on Palestine, was the guest speaker. He was there to speak on the subject of “Prospects of the two-state solution in the Middle-East.”But Who's Ziad J. Asali the guest speaker at the St. John’s Episcopal Church?He is among other things President and Founder, American Task Force on Palestine and he also figures on the board of the U.S.-Muslim Engagement Project.Among the members of the organisation are : Surprise!Daisy Khan, Executive Director, American Society for Muslim Advancement and Feisal Abdul Rauf, Imam, Masjid al-Farah in New York City; Founder and Chairman, Cordoba Initiative; author of What’s Right with Islam Is What’s Right with America.Hmm now i really wonder why the President wanted to attend this peticular Church service?Click here for comments.

• Libby Jurist's Career Built on Toughness.While presiding over perhaps the most high-profile trial of his career, U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton made time for his more mundane courthouse role: the scolding mentor to this city's young thugs. So, the vice president's former top deputy, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, his team of well-heeled and famous defense lawyers and a nationally known prosecutor in the CIA leak case would have to wait to argue over key evidence in Libby's perjury trial that day in February. Walton had some important yelling to do at defendants whose names would never make the papers."For some reason you've chosen to be a criminal, and at some point you're going to pay a price," Walton warned one defendant facing jail for fighting and violating his probation. "If you really hurt someone, we would put you away for a long time."Today, it will be Libby standing before Walton to be sentenced for his perjury and obstruction conviction in a probe of the outing of CIA officer Valerie Plame. The bad news for Libby is that Walton, a judge for a quarter-century, is known throughout the defense bar as a "long-ball hitter" -- a jurist willing to put defendants away for a long time to deter future crimes. Legal experts familiar with the judge's career say the chances are very high that Walton will give Libby a considerable sentence, probably at the high end of the range for perjury cases, as a result of Libby's lies to investigators about what he told reporters about Plame's CIA job.Read the full story here.Click here for comments.HT:TheInfidelbloggers.

• HT:IsraelMatzav.Michael Oren hints: Israel has decided to attack Iran? In Yom Kippur remarks delivered at three different Washington area synagogues, Israeli ambassador to the United States Michael Oren may have been hinting that Israel plans to attack Iran.As such, the Book of Jonah can be read as more than morality play, but also a cautionary tale about the hazards of decision-making. It is a type of political primer, if you will, what the medieval thinkers called a Mirror for Princes. The Talmud teaches us that, in the post-Biblical era, the gift of prophecy is reserved for children and fools. In modern times, we don’t have prophets—pundits, yes, but no prophets. Instead we have statesmen who, like Jonah, often have to make fateful decisions for which they will bear personal responsibility. If not a paradox of prophecy, these leaders face what we might call the quandary of statecraft.I believe that the Israeli government decided a long time ago that it would attack Iran rather than let it go nuclear. But I don't believe that any decision on the timing of that attack has been made. The timing will likely depend on events in Iran, and I am know that the government of Israel is monitoring those events much more closely than any of us can.Read the full story here.Click here for comments.

• Construction crews unearth fossil 'treasure trove'.A Riverside County site yields camels, llamas, horses and saber-toothed cats, some well over 1 million years old.Excavation at the site has so far revealed what may be California's oldest example of the saber-toothed cat Smilodon gracilis, a specimen more than a million years older than the Smilodon fatalis from the La Brea tar pits, which carry an array of fossils dating to as recently as 9,000 years ago.Scientists so far have identified more than 1,450 specimens, including about 250 large vertebrate fossils and more than 1,220 fossils that are rabbit-size or smaller.Read the full story here.Click here for comments.

• UN: hunger strike for minorities in Pakistan.The European Organisation for Pakistani Minorities (EOPM) launched a three-week hunger strike that includes an awareness-raising campaign in front of the United Nations building in Geneva.The 15th session of the UN Human Rights Council opened on 13 September in the Swiss city. Demonstrators want to bring to the attention of the member states the suffering endured by Christian, Hindu, Sikh and Ahmadi communities who live in Pakistan. In recent months in fact, attacks by Muslim fundamentalists against religious minorities have intensified, including attacks against their places of worship.Read the full story here.Click here for comments.

• Video: Interview Christiane Amanpour With Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

• Prosecutor Reportedly Asks For Blogger's Execution.An informed source who does not want to be named has confirmed in an interview with RFE/RL's Radio Farda that Tehran's prosecutor has asked for the death sentence for jailed blogger Hossein Derakhshan, known by his nickname Hoder and also as Iran's "Blogfather."The judge in the case has reportedly not issued a sentence yet.Rumors about the likelihood of a death sentence against Derakhshan, who has been in jail for more than a year, were reported earlier this week by some Iranian news websites bases outside the country.Read the full story here.Click here for comments.

• Sheikh Abu Basir Al-Tartusi Calls on Egyptian Muslims to Storm Churches in Search of Abducted Convert Camilia Shehata, Even if This Requires "Trampling on the Corpses of the Wicked [Pope] Shenouda… and the Other Wicked Bishops and Priests."Islam the religion of peace?"Read the full story here.Click here for comments.

• Google creates censorship map.The US government asked Google for user information 4,287 times during the first six months of 2010.During the same timeframe the UK government put in over 1,000 such requests.This is just two snippets from Google's new Transparency Report, a set of tools designed to show censorship levels around the globe.Civil liberty groups welcomed the tool but called on Google to provide even more detail about the requests.The map allows users to click an individual country to see how many removal requests were fully or partially complied with, as well as which Google services were affected. In the US, for example, there were seven court orders to remove content from YouTube from July 2009 to the end of the year.There is also a traffic graph showing Google services around the world and related traffic outages, caused either by governments blocking access to information or, more mundanely, cables being cut.Google's public policy head Scott Rubin demonstrated the tool to the BBC.Read the full story here .Click here for comments.

• ACLU Seeks Court Injunction to Stop Jersey Shore Town From **Gasp** Reciting the Lord’s Prayer Before Meetings.For at least six years, a Jersey Shore community has begun its borough meetings with a flag salute and a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer.But a suit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey last week may remove the prayer from the monthly civic meetings in Point Pleasant Beach, Ocean County.The suit asks a Superior Court judge to issue an injunction to stop the prayer. The judge will rule on Sept. 30, two days after the next meeting.Read the full story here.Click here for comments.

• Israel rejects offer to join UN atomic agency.In response to Arab initiative, Israel's Atomic Energy Commission chief says Jewish state only country to be singled out, asked to take decision against its national interests."Israel is not the only member state ... that has exercised its sovereign right not to accede to the NPT due to its national security considerations," Israel's Atomic Energy Commission chief Shaul Horev said."Yet Israel is the only state that has been singled out, and is called upon to take a decision which is against its best national interests," he told the conference."Indeed, the advancement of states' accessions to international treaties does not fall within the mandate of the (IAEA)," he said.Read the full story here.Click here for comments.

• HT:WeaselZippers.Because Obama Extending his “Unclenched Fist” to Iran Was Such a Smashing Success, He Will Use U.N. Visit to Tell Ahmadinejad the “Door is Open”…White House deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes told reporters during a telephone briefing that in order for Iran to walk through that door, it would have to demonstrate the peaceful intent of its nuclear program.According to me this is the only way he can get to his real goal!Pressure Israel at the U.N. in disclosing it’s nuclear arsenal and then asking(Forcing) them to remove it,like the Muslim world wants!Read the full story here.Click here for comments.

• Mosque ally's vid shows 'Hez' true colors.Among the Islamic clerics defending plans for a mosque near Ground Zero yesterday was an outspoken critic of Israel who enthusiastically signaled his support for terror groups Hamas and Hezbollah during a rally a decade ago. At a news conference outside the site of the proposed mosque, Imam Mahdi Bray, executive director of the Washington-based Muslim American Society, was adamant about Muslims' right to build a mosque where they choose.But he refused to discuss a video, from a rally in Lafayette Park in Washington, DC, that shows him onstage repeatedly raising his arms when an unidentified speaker asked how many in the crowd supported Hamas and Hezbollah.Read and see the full story here.Click here for comments.

• The UK’s tax collection agency is putting forth a proposal that all employers send employee paychecks to the government, after which the government would deduct what it deems as the appropriate tax and pay the employees by bank transfer.The proposal by Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) stresses the need for employers to provide real-time information to the government so that it can monitor all payments and make a better assessment of whether the correct tax is being paid.Currently employers withhold tax and pay the government, providing information at the end of the year, a system know as Pay as You Earn (PAYE). There is no option for those employees to refuse withholding and individually file a tax return at the end of the year.If the real-time information plan works, it further proposes that employers hand over employee salaries to the government first.My take on this:First it will take a lot of administration to do this and it will cause for sure delays in the paycheck being paid out,what brings me to number two:is it a way for the goverment to make extra money with workers their money ,just think if you put this amount of money on a short term account lets say 2 weeks at the max, how much intrest would that yield for the goverment?We know in Europe banks take sometimes from 24 to 72 hours timedelay before your money is transferred in to your account(Making a small profit?).Read the full story here.Click here for comments.

• For Indian Rape Laws, Change Is Slow to Come.NEW DELHI — Should a woman’s sexual experience and history be introduced as evidence in the trial of her accused rapist? Will the Indian legal system ever recognize forced sex between husband and wife as rape? What constitutes the “modesty” of a 10-year-old girl?“I want to tell the world, my family and friends, the truth — my husband was a rapist,” said the woman, who spoke on condition of anonymity to shield her family. “I can tell them about the beatings, but not the rapes. We aren’t supposed to talk about these matters, because they’re shameful. But if there was shame, there was also anger. The anger of being told, ‘He was your husband, he had the right to do this.’ Maybe for others, it will change. My pain has no voice.” Read the full story here.Click here for comments.

• Twitter Hacked Tuesday Morning.Twitter was overrun with tweets on Tuesday morning that used a programming flaw to play pranks, distribute porn and spread worms to unsuspecting Twitter users.The problem appeared to be confined to Twitter’s old Web interface, and does not affect the new interface that Twitter is gradually rolling out to users of the service or to mobile applications. Security experts said that a JavaScript command in the offending tweets included a command, “onmouseover,” that caused messages to pop up and Web sites to open automatically when a mouse hovered over it. The script in some cases also caused a user to tweet the offending link, spreading it virally to their followers and the rest of Twitter.Read the full story here.Click here for comments.