MFS - The Other News

                          Morning Posting.

• This year's FBI report confirms: no Islamophobia in America.The latest FBI hate crimes report was just released, and it shows once again that hate crimes against Muslims are tiny compared with hate crimes against Jews.There were 107 hate crimes recorded against Muslims in 2009, compared to 931 anti-semitic hate crimes.Religious bias:Law enforcement agencies reported 1,376 hate crimes motivated by religious bias. A breakdown of biases for these offenses showed:

        ■70.1 percent were anti-Jewish.
        ■9.3 percent were anti-Islamic.
        ■8.6 percent were anti-other religion.
        ■4.4 percent were anti-multiple religions, group.
        ■4.0 percent were anti-Catholic.
        ■2.9 percent were anti-Protestant.
        ■0.7 percent were anti-Atheism/Agnosticism/etc.
        Hmmm.......I wonder what the U.N. Human rights commission would say?
        Read the full story here. Related :  Blacks, Jews most likely victim of US hate crimes : FBI.
         Source .

• Beating the TSA: How a determined passenger spent hours arguing his rights before being waved through the checks.It's the solution that millions of American airline passengers have been searching for - how to avoid bodyscanners and intrusive pat-downs when they fly.Now one patient traveller has proved it is possible to bypass the high-level security measures in place at all airports, but only if you have time on your hands.Blogger Matt Kernan recorded his epic experience as he returned to North Kentucky International Airport in Cincinnati from Paris on Sunday.Exasperated at being told to prepare for a body scan and with time on his hands, the determined businessman decided to make a stand - with remarkable results.Writing on his website noblasters.com, he said: 'I certainly don’t enjoy being treated like a terrorist in my own country, but I’m also not a die-hard constitutional rights advocate. 'However, for some reason, I was irked.''Maybe it was the video of the three-year old getting molested, maybe it was the sexual assault victim having to cry her way through getting groped, maybe it was the father watching teenage TSA officers joke about his attractive daughter. 'Whatever it was, this issue didn’t sit right with me. We shouldn’t be required to do this simply to get into our own country.'As a result, Mr Kernan informed staff he did not want to go through the infamous Backscatter imaging machine.He was told he would have to undergo an invasive pat-down search, but again politely told staff that he would consider any contact with his genital areas as assault.After being told that the two options were TSA policy, he replied: ' I disagree with the policy, and I think that it is unconstitutional.'As a US citizen, I have the right to move freely within my country as long as I can demonstrate proof of citizenship and have demonstrated no reasonable cause to be detained.Hmmm...Sir you deserve a medal of honor! Read the full story here.

• Eye on Terrorism: ‘US-based group working to establish caliphate’.KARACHI: Pakistan’s security czar has revealed that an extremist group of US citizens of Pakistani origin – Jamaat-e-Islami (Sa’ee) – has been clandestinely working to establish an Islamic caliphate system in the world.“Imad Riaz, a Pakistani-origin official of the Jamaat-e-Islami (Sa’ee), was extradited by the US authorities to Pakistan on November 19,” Interior Minister Rehman Malik told journalists during a visit to the Anti-Human Smuggling Circle of the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) in Karachi.Malik added that intelligence officials were interrogating Riaz and that the US and Saudi Arabia were also helping in the investigation process.According to FIA sources, Riaz disclosed during interrogation that he was associated with California-based Jamaat-e-Islami (Sa’ee), which was working secretly to establish an Islamic caliphate system in the world.He also revealed that their group was planning to attack US military installations in California. And they had also gathered information about Israeli embassy from the Internet.Read the full story here.

• Breaking Story:Muslim Terror suspects arrested who were planning attacks in Belgium. During several simultaneous raids in Antwerp, the Netherlands and Germany today ten terror suspects are arrested thus reports the federal prosecutor.A total of ten Muslim suspects were arrested.The searches are part of a long-term research into a terrorist group which the defendants reside primarily in Antwerp.These Belgians, Dutch, Moroccans and Russians of Chechen origin.During the investigation , though several persons were also arrested in Spain, Morocco and Saudi Arabia.The investigation had focused on "international Islamic jihad terrorism'.Most of the suspects were arrested in the Belgian city of Antwerp.Read and see the full story (Google translate) Here.More here.

• HT:RubinReports.As Virulent Antisemitism Grows, Jewish and Government Institutions Refuse to Name the Real Cause.At a time when antisemitism is at the highest point in the West and the world generally since 1945, the battle against it faces a terrible obstacle. To a very large extent, the driving force of this hatred is revolutionary Islamism, whether it be in the form of attitudes promoted by many Muslim immigrants to the West, or from anti-Israel propaganda generated by Islamist groups and their (usually) leftist allies in the West (directly or indirectly), or from Iran or Arabic-language media in the Middle East. The information in the above paragraph should not be surprising. Yet large sectors of Western society are in denial about these realities. To speak of it would require them to do something. Criticism of the left can be portrayed as right-wing. Criticism of powerful sectors in academia, media, and intellectual life can be costly to one’s career. Criticism of insane slanders of Israel can be portrayed as cynically branding all criticism of Israel as antisemitic. And criticism of radical Islamists can be portrayed as some kind of “racist” bigotry.I wrote “can be portrayed” but, of course, the correct phrase should be: is so portrayed on a daily basis.Checkmate. Reality distorted. People shut up. Problem grows like a fertilized weed. And, of course, that is the goal of the anti-Israel often anti-Jewish strategy that creates such responses to silence correction, complaint, or criticism.Meanwhile, in Canada, a rabbi who merely wrote a letter to the president of York University complaining about an invitation to speak being given to George Galloway, a former recipient of Saddam Hussein's largesse who is an outspoken supporter of Hamas, among other things, the university president threatened to file a criminal complaint against the rabbi. The university administration has never done such things on past occasions when, for example, Natan Sharansky's talk on campus was disrupted.Hmmm....He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it. Martin Luther King, Jr.Read the full story here.

• N. Korea fires on S. Korea, killing 2 and injuring more than a dozen.North Korea fired artillery toward its tense western sea border with South Korea on Tuesday, killing two South Korean marines, the South's Defense Ministry said.Fifteen other South Korean soldiers were wounded, five of them seriously, defense officials said. Three civilians were injured in the attack.About 100 rounds of artillery hit an inhabited South Korean island in the Yellow Sea after the North started firing about 2:30 p.m. local time, the Yonhap news agency said. Yonhap initially reported that 200 rounds had hit. The Defense Ministry said it could not confirm the number of rounds.South Korea's military responded with more than 80 rounds of artillery and deployed fighter jets to counter the fire, defense officials said. Firing between the two sides lasted for about an hour.The South Korean army also raised its alert condition, Yonhap said.Read and see the full story here.

• Obama Administration More Sympathic to Terror Suspects’ Rights than to Americans’ Rights.The outrage caused by the TSA over the past few weeks continues to fuel questions of the Obama administration’s priorities and intentions when it comes to protecting and respecting the rights of American citizens as opposed to those of suspected/captured terrorists enemy combatants. Many stories and videos of groping, aggressive searches of adults and children, TSA threats, and humiliation are coming to light, but the larger story is the civil rights violations by the TSA.Enter the 4th Amendment. Brian Darling has a must-read article at RedState where he discusses the recourse Americans have against the TSA afforded in the US Code:First, the Constitution provides all Americans with protection against unreasonable searches. A lawsuit may be one appropriate means to attack the TSA groping and full body scan policy. The United States Code provides a statute to enable Americans to sue the federal government for the TSA’s activities at 42 U.S.C. 1983 : Every person who under color of any statute, ordinance, regulation, custom, or usage, of any State or Territory or the District of Columbia, subjects, or causes to be subjected, any citizen of the United States or other person within the jurisdiction thereof to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution and laws, shall be liable to the party injured in an action at law, Suit in equity, or other proper proceeding for redress, except that in any action brought against a judicial officer for an act or omission taken in such officer’s judicial capacity, injunctive relief shall not be granted unless a declaratory decree was violated or declaratory relief was unavailable.Hmmm...."Go get them"?Read the full story here.

• HT:Michelle Malkin.Another Obama stealth land grab: Salazar and the NCLS.The TSA isn’t the only one with grabby hands.I’ve been reporting on the stealth Obama land and ocean grabs for the past several months now — and there is another new, under-the-radar-screen development that deserves your attention.Quick review: In August, I told you about the “Great Outdoors Initiative” to lock up more open spaces through executive order. This came on top on top of a separate, property-usurping initiative exposed by GOP Rep. Robert Bishop and Sen. Jim DeMint earlier this spring. According to an internal, 21-page Obama administration memo, 17 energy-rich areas in 11 states have been targeted as potential federal “monuments.” The Obama War on the West is a War on Jobs that extends from land to sea based on politicized junk science by executive fiat and czar evasion.The latest power grab comes via Interior Secretary Ken Salazar — the unchecked, unaccountable data doctor and loathsome cowboy — who has just unilaterally elevated a government landscape conservation system to “directorate” status with no congressional debate, no witnesses, no testimony, no public input.Remember: The federal government already owns roughly one of every three acres in the United States. This vast amount of property is now in the control of power-hungry bureaucrats who have lied to the public, distorted science, and abused their government positions to conspire with job-killing eco-extremist groups.If only there were as much public outrage over the Obama enviro-grope-and-grab policies as there is over the Obama airport gropes and grabs…The good news: GOP Rep. Rob Bishop is ready to push back as likely chairman of the House Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests and Public Lands.Read the full Communist power grab story here.

• Shocking photos of Indonesian maid after Saudi employer hacked off her lips.A young woman is lying in a Saudi hospital with her head bandaged, her lips cut off, burns all over body and broken bones. The shocking photos of her injuries have caused an uproar in her home country of Indonesia, but many fear Sumiati is not alone in her suffering.She arrived in Saudi Arabia in July a high-spirited 23-year-old, eager to start work as a maid to help support her family back home. Four months later, Sumiati is Indonesia's poster child for migrant abuse, alone and staring vacantly from a hospital bed, her face sliced and battered.But while public anger has forced President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's government to acknowledge the problem for the first time, few expect any firm action to be taken.Her employer - who has been taken in for questioning by police - is accused of cutting off part of her lips with scissors, scalding her back with an iron, fracturing her middle finger, and beating her legs until she could hardly walk.She was admitted to the hospital three weeks ago unconscious, with signs of malnutrition and blood loss, and could barely speak, in addition to the horrifying visible injuries.She claims the mother and daughter both beat her regularly. 'It's hardly the first such case,' said Wahyu Susilo, a policy analyst at Indonesia's advocacy group, Migrant Care. 'Again and again we hear about slavery-like conditions, torture, sexual abuse and even death, but our government has chosen to ignore it. Why? Because migrant workers generate $7.5 billion of dollars in foreign exchange every year.'It emerged during the talks that another Indonesian maid, 36-year-old Kikim Komalasari, had allegedly been tortured to death by her Saudi employer, her body found in a trash bin on Nov. 11 in the town of Abha.'It's shocking to hear this ... it's beyond inhumane,' said Yudhoyono, as the government sent a team of diplomats to the scene to investigate. 'I want the law to be upheld and to see an all-out diplomatic effort.'Hmmm....."Islam the religion of peace".Read the full torture story here.

• TSA Promise: No Cavity Searches.The flying public has won a small victory in the fight over airport pat downs and more intrusive searches with the Transportation Security Agency: For now, the agency isn't planning to take the next step toward body cavity searches. "We're not going to get in the business of body cavities, that's not where we are," says TSA Administrator John Pistole.Continuing a P.R. offensive today, he told reporters that there are ways to detect explosives in a body cavity other than a strip search. "Even if it is a body cavity [bomb], you still have to have an initiator, you have to have some external device to cause that initiation," he said. "There's got to be something external that you can then initiate the device and that's what the advance imaging technology machine will pick up: Any anomaly outside of the body."Still, he said, not taking the next step is risky, even though he hasn't seen any evidence that terrorists are trying to carry explosives in their body cavities. "We are taking some risk by not doing any screening, but it's the balance of what is the appropriate level of risk versus screening," he said.Hmmmm....welcome to America?Read the full story here.

• Israel now required by law to hold referendum before returning East Jerusalem and Golan.The Knesset passes a law that requires a popular referendum before making territorial compromise. For opposition, it is a way to halt the peace process; for Palestinians, it makes a mockery of international law. The United States stays out of the issue.Any territorial compromise by Israel to other states will require popular approval in a referendum. Although neither Jerusalem nor the Golan Heights are mentioned, the Israeli parliament (Knesset) adopted by 65 to 33 a bill that will determine the future of these areas. Occupied in the 1967 War, their return are an essential condition for any peace accord with the Palestinians and the Syrians.Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu praised the decision. “"Any peace agreement needs a wide national consensus," which is what the law calls for, he said.Against the opposition, which is opposed to the idea of submitting government decisions to a popular vote since the former has all the necessary information to ponder mutual concessions, the prime minister said, “The Israeli public is engaged, knowledgeable and responsible and I have faith that on decision day, it will support a peace agreement that adheres to Israel's national interests and security needs”.Read the full story here.

• Canadian court examines polygamy laws.A lawyer for the provincial British Columbia government is warning a judge that declaring polygamy a protected religious practice would make Canada the only Western country to allow multiple marriages.The British Columbia Supreme Court is examining whether banning polygamy violates Canada's version of the bill of rights in a case that will focus on the small polygamous community of Bountiful, British Columbia.Craig Jones, a lawyer for the province, said on Monday all forms of polygamy contribute to the discrimination of women and the sexualisation of young girls.The BC government asked the court last year to decide whether Canada's polygamy laws are constitutional after repeated failures to prosecute the two leaders of Bountiful.Read the full dhimmi story here.

• Indonesia - Sumatra: local authorities close Catholic school without explanation. The institute is run by the Franciscan Sisters of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary and has over 400 students, who will loose academic year if school closes. The measure has no legal basis, and the sisters have written a petition in protest sent to all authorities, including the Indonesian President. In the city of Kamp (province of Riau - Sumatra), more than 400 children are likely to remain without an education. City authorities want to close a Catholic school of the Franciscan Sisters of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary. The decision was communicated to the sisters on Oct. 29, but so far no one has stated the real motives for the gesture and at any moment the building could be cleared.The sisters have sent a petition to the governor of the province, the chief of police, the military commander. They have also written to the President and Parliament. Over 300 letters of protest were sent by parents to local authorities, who had previously supported the opening of the school. Hmmm....Obama"an example of cooperation between the different religions in Indonesia, a predominantly Muslim country"Yes indeed!Read the full story here.

• Five Things David Petraeus Wants You To Believe.The problem with milestones is that there’s always another one a little further down the road. Last week we had the NATO meeting in Lisbon, to be followed soon after by the long-anticipated December Strategic Review. I can recall back in February this year when think-tank "lifers" in Washington told me to sit tight in anticipation of the "big review" coming up in December which would deliver some much-needed policy changes. Now that we’re here the view seems much less rosy: Last week a team led by Lt. Gen. Douglas E. Lute, the president’s Afghanistan adviser at the White House, returned from Afghanistan and Pakistan with data that will serve as a basis for Mr. Obama’s review of the war next month. General Petraeus is also assembling masses of data.Those final five syllables should be enough to make even the most die-hard optimist take pause. Petraeus wants to present an empirically valid case for continuing along the current course -- the so-called "default position" turbo-charged with all the money and weapons the heart could ever want. Petraeus wants to use all these "masses of data" to make you believe five things, all of which are also more problematic than he’d have you believe.Nr 1 it's working.Read the full story here.

• Taliban Leader in Secret Talks Was an Impostor.For months, the secret talks unfolding between Taliban and Afghan leaders to end the war appeared to be showing promise, if only because of the appearance of a certain insurgent leader at one end of the table: Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, one of the most senior commanders in the Taliban movement. But now, it turns out, Mr. Mansour was apparently not Mr. Mansour at all. In an episode that could have been lifted from a spy novel, United States and Afghan officials now say the Afghan man was an impostor, and high-level discussions conducted with the assistance of NATO appear to have achieved little. “It’s not him,” said a Western diplomat in Kabul intimately involved in the discussions. “And we gave him a lot of money.”Hmmmm....don't tell me Karzai did not know this?Read the full story here.

• Obama's UN Officials Silent on Nine Anti-Israel Resolutions. The United Nations Human Rights Council this month adopted nine resolutions against Israel. The United States opposed nothing.The Council, engaged in a “universal periodic review” of human rights protection in Lebanon, was examining a report by that country which expressed its objections to “the establishment of the Zionist entity on Palestinian territory.”Every United Nations member state was asked to submit a report to the Council on its national human rights record, which was then reviewed by U.N. members who engage in a short dialogue with the state representatives.Hmmm..."They don't trust me because of my middle name",why does Israel even bothers to talk with this "President"?And why does the U.S. Congres say nothing?Read the full story here.

• Fidel Castro - Nato is 'mafia' and Obama a 'snake charmer'.Nato is a "military mafia," the war in Afghanistan is "genocidal" and US President Barack Obama deserves the prize for the "best snake charmer" who ever lived, Cuba's Fidel Castro said Monday.In an article published in response to the Western alliance's weekend summit in Portugal, the former Cuban leader called Nato an "aggressive institution" that ignored "billions of persons suffering from poverty, underdevelopment, shortages of food, housing, health, education and jobs."Castro called Nato (short for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) "a bird of prey sitting in the lap of the Yankee empire," that was used by the United States to wage "the genocidal Afghanistan war.""Obama already admitted that his promise to withdraw US soldiers from Afghanistan may be postponed... After the Nobel Prize, we would have to award him with the prize for 'the best snake charmer' that has ever existed."Hmmm....a lot of people in Israel might agree with the last part.Read the full story here.

• Death Sentence in Pakistan Spotlights Blasphemy Laws As U.N. Votes on ‘Defamation’. International calls for clemency for a Pakistani Christian woman sentenced to death for blasphemy looked likely to succeed on Tuesday, but similar cases will arise until the country’s controversial blasphemy laws are thrown out, critics say.President Asif Ali Zardari’s party pledged in its 2008 election platform to review “statutes that discriminate against religious minorities, and are sources of communal disharmony,” but the blasphemy laws – which Islamist parties regard as sacrosanct – remain in force.A U.N. spokeswoman said Monday evening that the General Assembly’s Third Committee will vote on this year’s “religious defamation” resolution on Tuesday, ahead of a final vote by the full assembly next month.Tuesday’s vote will give an indication of how successful a growing international campaign against the Islamic initiative has been. The text has passed every year since 2005, but the last three years have seen declining support, with the margin of votes dropping from 57 in 2007 to just 19 last year.Last March a Christian couple in Punjab named as Munir Masih and Ruqqiya Bibi were sentenced to 25 years’ imprisonment under the blasphemy laws, in their case after being accused of touching a copy of the Qur’an “without washing their hands,” according to CLAAS.According to a report by the National Commission for Justice and Peace, a Catholic body, a total of 964 people were charged under the blasphemy laws between 1986 and 2009. Christians, Muslims, Hindus and members of the Ahmadi sect of Islam have been targeted.CLAAS says that people convicted of blasphemy who have had their death sentences overturned often spend years in prison. Even in cases of acquittals, victims have been unable to return to normal lives and frequently go into hiding.Hmmm...Obama :"Islam is a great religion".Read the full story here.

• Turkey accedes to a missile defense plan.No number of diplomatic statements can ignore the fact that Ankara is giving its symbolic commitment to a defense shield that has Russia squarely in its sights.Turkey agreed Nov. 20 to integrate itself into NATO’s planned ballistic missile defense, or BMD, network during the alliance’s summit in Lisbon.Though a potential Iranian missile threat is often cited as the motivation for the United States-led BMD project, a deeper, strategic purpose lies in its ability to provide the U.S. with a platform to underwrite a Eurasian alliance aimed at containing Russia’s growing influence in its former Soviet territory. Turkey is also concerned about Russia’s growing influence, but until this point has been reluctant to sign on to a BMD proposal. However, sensing a geopolitical opportunity in its near abroad, Ankara believes that its relationship with the United States – which has frayed over the past year – must be strengthened in order to take full advantage of its blossoming role. Washington welcomes Turkey playing that role, particularly in the Middle East, as long as Ankara remains a strong partner with the West, something it is attempting to affirm with its consent to the deal.Hmmmm....you can't name Iran but you can name Russia?Read the full story here.

• HT:IsraelMatzav.Full body scanners: It's all about money. I'm sure you'll all be shocked to hear that the two companies that sell those full body scanners to the Federal government more than doubled their lobbying money in the last five years, and that both of them employ high-powered lobbyists. One of them even employed the former Secretary of Homeland Security as a lobbyist. L-3 Communications, which has sold $39.7 million worth of the machines to the federal government, spent $4.3 million trying to influence Congress and federal agencies during the first nine months of this year, up from $2.1 million in 2005, lobbying data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics show. Its lobbyists include Linda Daschle, a former Federal Aviation Administration official.Read the full story here.

• PM Erdoğan clarifies position on NATO missile command.Turkey’s firm demand to have full access to the command system of NATO’s planned missile shield over Europe is not meant to be an insistence of having the command of the system on its own, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said on Monday. At a Lisbon summit last week NATO leaders decided that the scope of the alliance’s current Active Layered Theater Ballistic Missile Defense program’s command, control and communications capabilities will be expanded beyond the protection of NATO-deployed forces to also protect NATO European populations, territory and forces. The decision came after meeting Turkey’s demand for not explicitly identifying any potential enemy, although Iran is its main concern.Erdoğan said on Monday that details regarding the command issue have not been worked out yet when asked questions about a report by the Israel-run DEBKAfile website, which claimed that Turkey had embraced the idea of a missile shield only after the US and other allies had assured it that “the missile base will come under the command of a Turkish general.” “We have always stated that the command issues should be entirely under NATO,” Erdoğan said in response to questions from reporters following his participation in a signing ceremony in Ankara. In Lisbon, NATO diplomats have said details, including command and control, will be worked out later.Erdoğan, meanwhile, bitterly commented on French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s remarks in which he suggested that NATO’s planned system is actually intended to protect against the threat posed by Iran.“France calls a cat a cat: The threat of the missiles today is Iran,” although no country was specifically mentioned as the object of the missile defense, Sarkozy told reporters on Saturday on the sidelines of the Lisbon summit.Hmmmm...so nobody knows who will be in control....it might be Iran in the end,considering their "friendship" with Turkey?Read the full story here.

• Poll: Tea Party support grows; USA divided.Just about as many Americans want Tea Party-backed members of Congress to take the lead in setting policy during the next year as choose President Obama, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds.In a survey taken Friday through Sunday, 28% say Obama should have the most influence on government policy next year while 27% say the Tea Party standard-bearers should. GOP congressional leaders are chosen by 23%, Democratic congressional leaders by 16%. The results reflect the strength of the Tea Party movement as the GOP prepares to take control of the House of Representatives in January.The survey also underscores Obama's weakened standing. His overall job approval rating, at 42%, is 1 percentage point higher than his historic low in midsummer. His 35% approval rating on the economy is the lowest of his presidency.The nation's mood "guarantees that there will be gridlock," says Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. "The government follows public opinion and public opinion is all over the lot about who should now be running things."Hmmm...After Thanksgiving his popularity will be even lower,the way he makes the American people bend over and take it.Read the full story here.

• HT:GatewayPundit.Video : Terrorism Against Israel Applauded at UN – Obama Attendees Remain Silent.On November 10, 2010, the Lebanese members of the UN Human Rights Council defended terrorist attacks against Israel.The whole meeting broke out in applause, Just as appalling was that the Obama Administration attendees at the meeting did nothing.Israel pointed out that, contrary to protecting human rights, Lebanon was actively hosting and collaborating with a terrorist organization. In response to this Lebanese representatives stated that “If there were no Israeli occupation (of Palestinian lands) then there would be no resistance and resistance of peoples against foreign occupation is a legitimate right.”The whole conference then broke out in applause. The Obama Administration attendees at the meetings sat by, watched the spectacle and remained silent.Hmmm..."They don't trust me because of my middle name"Read and see the whole thing here.

• HT:Pajama'sMedia.Public Acceptance of New TSA Procedures Has Been Exaggerated.As usual, the mainstream media asks all the wrong questions.The public seems greatly confused by the new airport screening procedures and with good reason. However, a CBS survey was recently taken of 1,137 randomly selected people with landline or cell phones and it was concluded that:Americans overwhelmingly approve of the use of full-body digital x-ray machines — a new technology in use at some airports in the U.S. Most, meanwhile, do not approve of racial or ethnic profiling — a practice not in place.The sample size and selection methodology seem reasonable. However, the following questions apparently were not asked: “Have you or an immediate family member flown on a commercial airliner in the United States since November 1, 2010?” and “Do you or an immediate member of your family intend to fly on a commercial airliner in the United States in the near future? If not, have your plans been changed on account of recent changes in airport security procedures?” A breakout of the data as provided by the Yes and No respondents to these questions would have made the survey far more informative.The report of the survey speaks of “two potentially inconvenient and invasive practices” at airports. However, the reported question asks only about the new “‘full body’ digital X-ray machines.” No question was reported about the second and certainly more invasive of the “two” techniques, presumably the “enhanced pat-downs.” If a question was asked about the latter, the results were not reported.Hmmm...as usual "transparency" is about as clear as the birth certificate.Read the full story here.

• And now for something completely different.The feeding of the 5,000? Not quite, but pensioner lands record-breaking halibut that's big enough to provide almost 1,000 fish suppers. A 70-year-old angler will have no need to visit his local chippie for the foreseeable future - after reeling in a record-breaking halibut that weighed more than 34 stone.Gunther Hansel spent more than two hours battling with the 8ft 2in flatfish while on a trip to Iceland's Western Fjords.And when he finally got his prize alonhgside his fishing boat, the German pensioner needed the help of five crewmates to haul the beast aboard.The monster fish weighed in at a mighty 482lbs 13ozs - big enough to serve up almost 1,000 individual fillets. Read and see the full story here.