MFS _ The Other News

                         Afternoon Posting.

• 'Israel, Turkey disagree over flotilla apology wording'.Mediation talks over 'Mavi Marmara' incident reportedly stall over difference of opinion: Ankara wants "apology" whereas Israel wants to "express regret" over death of 9 Turks in May 31 raid. Israeli and Turkish representatives in mediation talks between the two countries have reportedly disagreed on an apology statement regarding the Mavi Marmara incident. AFP reported, however, that the "parties wish to start a clean slate." Sources quoted in the report said that while Turkey was looking for apologetic wording, Israel is willing only to "express regret" over the May 31 flotilla raid which resulted in the death of nine Turks.Assessments in Jerusalem on Wednesday suggested that such a statement would likely remove the issue from the international legal agenda and prevent prosecution abroad of IDF soldiers involved in the action. These assessments were made as an Israeli proposal was, according to Turkish media reports, expected to be brought to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
  Hmmmm....Why would one apologise for defending it's own country?Regret Yes ,apology NO.Read the full story here.

• Video :Janet Napolitano: 'More to Come' on Body Pat Downs for Muslim Women Wearing Hijabs.Read and see the full story here.

• Terrifying moment Charles and Camilla were surrounded by a baying mob and their car attacked in tuition fees riot.Prince's limo paintballed on way to Palladium. This was the terrifying moment that a mob of anarchists attacked Prince Charles and Camilla's car outside the London Palladium tonight.The couple were due to attend the Royal Variety Performance, which was taking place very close to the epicentre of a day of violent protest in Parliament Square, when it was swarmed by people supposedly protesting against the rise in student tuition fees. Protesters had thrown paintbombs at police throughout a day of protests and the burgundy 1977 Rolls Royce Phantom VI was hit by an explosion of white paint on Prince Charles's side of the car. A window was smashed, two rear panels were dented and the aerial was broken.Clarence House said that the couple were unharmed in the incident on Regent Street, but onlookers said Camilla looked extremely shaken after the attack.The Prime Minister, David Cameron, described the attack as 'shocking and regrettable'.One protester who witnessed the attack said: 'We were headed up towards Regent Street and there didn't seem to be a lot of police about and people were throwing things at shops. 'Then out of nowhere came this car and when you looked into it you could clearly see Prince Charles and Camilla inside it looking incredibly confused.'We all stood there for a millisecond in stunned silence and then people started lunging towards the car from all sides. It all happened very quickly.'Despite the attack, Charles and Camilla were said to look calm as they arrived at the venue for tonight's Royal Variety Performance and the couple did not appear to have been delayed.The car in which they were attacked was the one that Charles and Camilla drove from their wedding in Windsor in the summer or 2005. It was loaned to Charles by The Queen who had been given it as a gift by the carmaker at her silver jubilee.
  Hmmmmm......."Shaken ...not Stirred"?Read the full story here.

• Iran stoning woman 'freed'!An Iranian woman sentenced to death by stoning for adultery has been released, according to campaigners.Sakineh Mohammadi-Ashtiani, 43, became an internationally recognised emblem for the brutality of the Iranian regime when she was sentenced to execution for having relationships with men, including one convicted of her husband’s murder. Amid ongoing global outcry over her case, the Anti-Stoning Committee, a German-based campaign group, said last night that the mother-of-two, her son and her lawyer had all been freed from prison. “We have got news from Iran that they are free,” a spokesman said. The Iranian government did not confirm the reports.Hmmmm....Altough no "official" has been received i hope it is true and i hope it has nothing to do with the talks in Geneva.You scratch my back.i'll scratch yours?Read full story here. Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani 'freed' after outcry over stoning sentence.More here and here.

• Amazon's UK site selling WikiLeaks documents. Diplomatic cables contained in WikiLeaks are available for sale on Amazon's UK website. It's a twist following the company's refusal to host the WikiLeaks' website.The cables were self-published as a Kindle e-book by an author listed as Heinz Duthel. People in the U.K. can buy it for 7.37 pounds ($11.60).WikiLeaks has embarrassed Washington in recent weeks for exposing a trove of sensitive diplomatic documents. WikiLeaks has been migrating around the world, using Internet companies in different countries to host the site. Last week, Amazon.com Inc. ousted it from its servers.Last month, Amazon came under fire for selling a guide offering advice to pedophiles, which raised questions about how -- and if -- it vets the self-published books it sells.Amazon did not immediately respond to a message.
  Hmmm....nothing wrong in making a quick buck?Read the full story here.

• Spanish town becomes first to ban face-covering veils.Lleida approves municipal ban on burqas, niqabs because they 'attack equality between men and women and are against women's dignity'.A northern Spanish town brought into force Thursday a ban on Islamic face-covering veils in municipal buildings, the first such decree in the country. The town of Lleida, population 120,000, approved in July a municipal ban on body-covering burqas or face-covering niqab garments at about 130 locations, ranging from civic centres to swimming pools.The law, implemented Thursday, was the first of its kind in Spain, where face-covering Islamic garments are seldom seen despite a sharp rise in immigration from Muslim countries over the past decade."I believe the burqa and the hijab, as well as similar garments that completely cover the face are an attack against equality between men and women, they are an attack against women's dignity," Lleida mayor Angel Ros said. "I believe also that equality is something which our society has fought several years for and there can be no reason, not religious, not cultural, that attacks this basic principle," he said in an interview. The law prohibits the "use of the veil and other clothes and accessories which cover the face and prevent identification in buildings and installations of the town hall." Repeat offenders face fines of 600 euros ($795).Read the full story here.

• 'Vandals' have hacked at the heart of Christianity': 2,000-year-old Holy Thorn Tree of Glastonbury is cut down by "Vandals".Vandals have destroyed one of the most celebrated Christian pilgrimage sites in Britain and chopped down a tree said to have sprouted from the staff of Joseph of Arimathea 2,000 years ago.The Holy Thorn Tree of Glastonbury, Somerset, is visited by thousands every year to pay homage and leave tokens of worship. Those visiting today were moved to tears on finding the tree cut to a stump.The sacred tree is unique in that it blossoms twice a year - at Christmas and Easter - and sprigs taken from the thorn are sent to The Queen each year for the festive table.Avon and Somerset Police have launched an investigation after locals found that vandals had hacked off the branches of the iconic tree. They were dumped next to the trunk which is protected by a metal cage.Locals wept openly today at the foot of the tree, on the town's Wearyall Hill opposite its world-famous Tor as they struggled to contain their emotion.Katherine Gorbing, curator of Glastonbury Abbey, said: 'The mindless vandals who have hacked down this tree have struck at the heart of Christianity.'It holds a very special significance all over the world and thousands follow in the footsteps of Joseph Arimathea, coming especially to see it.'It is the most significant of all the trees planted here and can be linked back to the origins of Christianity.Hmmmm....Who would hate an icon of Christianity that much?Read the full story here.

• HT:TheDailyBeast.Sarah Palin Goes Abroad.Sarah Palin is planning her first real foreign trip—a move that could burnish her foreign policy credentials in advance of a 2012 presidential run.The Daily Beast has learned that Sarah Palin will be traveling overseas in the new year. At the top of the list: Israel and England, both countries she has said she wanted to travel to in the past. The schedule and itinerary is still fluid, but an overseas trip in 2011 will boost her foreign policy credentials, something she can turn to in a potential 2012 presidential run.Up to now Palin’s travel outside of North America includes visiting troops in Germany and Kuwait while she was governor and last year she gave a speech on the economy in Hong Kong. During the 2008 campaign, there was some confusion about whether she had also visited Iraq when traveling to see soldiers in Kuwait, but that turned out to be a visit to the border. McCain staffers at the time also said she had visited Ireland, but that was a re-fueling stopover.Palin has long wanted to visit Israel, and in a recent Facebook post wishing the Jewish community a Happy Hanukkah she reconfirmed her support for the Jewish state: “Today we should all recommit ourselves to ensuring that the miracle of a Jewish state endures forever. The dreidel is one of the most familiar symbols of Hanukkah, with Hebrew letters on it representing the phrase Nes Gadol Haya Sham—‘a great miracle happened there.’ Indeed a great miracle is still happening there.”Hmmmm....Don't let her fire anything while there,she might start WWIII.Lol. Read the full story here.

• Ron Paul to Head Fed Oversight Panel.WASHINGTON (TheStreet) -- Ron Paul , the controversial Republican House representative from Texas, will take control of the subcommittee that oversees the Federal Reserve."This is the leadership team that crafted the first comprehensive financial reform bill to put an end to the bailouts, wind down the taxpayer funding of Fannie Mae (FNMA.OB) and Freddie Mac (FMCC.OB), and enforce a strong audit of the Federal Reserve," Bachus said in a statement.Hmmm...This will be real intresting.Read the full story here.

• HT:CreepingSharia.Venezuelan Officials Meeting with Hezbollah (video).Hmmmm...This in combination with our story yesterday about Iran placing missiles in Venezuela should have homeland security in all states i guess?Read the full story here.

• HT:BloggerBase.Obama's America? 14% in the U.S. rely on food stamps. 42.9 million Americans relied on food stamps last month! This is up 16.2% over last year.The numbers are staggering. In some states over 20% of the population rely on food stamps to eat.Is this the America that Obama wanted all along where dependence on the government is the status quo?As the economy staggers along with the ever present risk of double dipping, jobs remain in short supply due in part to uncertainty. This is the uncertainty created by the direction the Obama administration wants to takeon tax policy going forward, and the incalcitrant position of the far left-wing (and not so far left) of the Democrat Party towards tax rates.All of this occurs while our representatives in Washington, who claim to commiserate with the trials and tribulations of those living on "Main Street," play a game of politics with well being of the country through the partisan debate over the extension of the Bush tax policy.Add to this the disincentive that exists for some to find work through the largess of the federal government and you have the recipe for the malaise that we find ourselves in today.You can look at the actual state by state statistics at the WSJ, but the salient part of the article is this.
  Hmmmm....Change...Are those the people who will loose their foodstamps to pay for Michelle her Nutrition program?Read the full story here.

• Olmert, Ayalon: Israel doesn't need to apologize to Turkey.Official say Israel proposed paying $100,000 each to families of Turks killed during raid on Gaza-bound ship and asked Ankara 'to do what needs to be done to address our legal concerns.' Turkish FM: Our demand for apology has not changed.Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon said Israel does not need to apologize to Turkey over of the death of nine of its citizens during the May 31 raid on a Gaza-bound flotilla. Speaking at a conference at the Foreign Ministry on EU members' funding of NGOs which support terror on Thursday, Ayalon said, "Negotiations and contacts between Israel's representative and his Turkish counterpart have not yet been discontinued, so further reference to this issue will not help."Ehud Olmert criticized Israel's willingness to compensate the Turks. Speaking at a Calcalist conference Thursday, the former prime minister said."Six months ago everyone said, justifiably, that no one would break the blockade on Gaza. We were very confident in our position, and now we are thinking of how to compensate and apologize."Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose delegate to a UN probe of the bloodshed attended the rapprochement talks, also faces opposition to such a deal from his hawkish foreign minister and government coalition partner, Avigdor Lieberman.Hmmmm....."The Death Compensation (Blood Money or Diyya) is admissible in cases of unnatural deaths only such as road/ traffic/ industrial/fire accidents, murder, etc."This is money Paid to the relatives of the Dead….This is according to Sharia Law…No Death Sentence.Read the full story here.

• The Obama Stimulus Impact? Zero.Liberals are still arguing that the federal spending stimulus wasn't large enough. How many multiples of nothing—its result according to new evidence—would they like?.For the past two years, economists writing on these pages and elsewhere have debated the merits of federal stimulus programs. President Obama's compromise on the Bush tax cuts this week might be seen as at least partial recognition that keeping marginal tax rates from rising across the board is the best stimulus now, especially if the deal leads eventually to making the cuts permanent. The economic data rolling in confirm that recent temporary, targeted stimulus programs have not worked, and that their enactment was a triumph of Keynesian wishful-thinking over practical experience.Hmmmmm.......Well someone got a lot richer from it.Read the full story here.

• Most Americans say they're worse off under Obama, poll shows.More than 50 percent of Americans say they are worse off now than they were two years ago when President Barack Obama took office, and two-thirds believe the country is headed in the wrong direction, a Bloomberg National Poll shows. The survey, conducted Dec. 4-7, finds that 51 percent of respondents think their situation has deteriorated, compared with 35 percent who say they're doing better. The balance isn't sure. Americans have grown more downbeat about the country's future in just the last couple of months, the poll shows. The pessimism cuts across political parties and age groups, and is common to both sexes. The negative sentiment may cast a pall over the holiday shopping season, according to the poll. A plurality of those surveyed -- 46 percent -- expects to spend less this year than last; only 12 percent anticipate spending more. Holiday sales rose by just under a half percent last year after falling by almost 4 percent in 2008.It was President Ronald Reagan who popularized the question, "Are you better off or worse off than you were four years ago" in his 1980 campaign against Jimmy Carter.Hmmmm....they should ask this question at the airports,and see the results that generates! Read the full story here.

• Will Pigford vindicate Andrew Breitbart?This summer Andrew Breitbart, publisher of a number of conservative news sites, found himself in the throes of a media scandal of dramatic proportions — and one which he later discovered went far deeper than a mere contextual snafu.For those unfamiliar with the story, in July, when liberals, the media, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) were slamming Tea Partiers as racist, Breitbart released a now infamous video of United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) official Shirley Sherrod’s speech before the NAACP describing how she had discriminated against a white farmer. Her comments were met with nodding approval by the members of the audience.“They were trying to show that my intention was to get Pigford defunded,” Breitbart told The Daily Caller. “And, I had never heard of Pigford, so for the last four and half months, all I’ve been doing is eating, breathing, sleeping Pigford, researching Pigford, finding whistleblowers who are hiding in plain sight who have been wanting to tell the story of how this was rigged.”Hmmmm........The smell is getting worse and worse.Read the full story here.

• Dutch Panel Found 2,000 Church Abuse Claims.BRUSSELS — The Roman Catholic Church, battered by sexual abuse scandals from the United States to Belgium, is facing a new set of allegations now in the Netherlands. Figures released Thursday by an investigative commission showed that almost 2,000 people have made complaints of sexual or physical abuse against the church, in a country with only 4 million Catholics. “The Roman Catholic church has not faced a crisis like this since the French Revolution,” said Peter Nissen, professor of the history of religion at Radboud University, of the growing abuse scandal. With one legal case starting this week, and accusations against two former bishops, the reaction of the church appears to have fueled the crisis. Nearly all of the cases are decades old, with probably no more than 10 from the last 20 years.Asked in March on TV about the hundreds of complaints already surfacing then, one of its most senior figures, Cardinal Adrianus Simonis, shocked the nation by replying not in Dutch but in German. “Wir haben es nicht gewusst” — we knew nothing — he said, using a phrase associated with Nazis excuses after the Second World War - a parallel that has reverberated around the Netherlands. “A lot of people perceived it as an affirmation of the culture of covering up cases,” said Professor Nissen, adding that, because of its association with the Nazis, it meant to many “’we should have known’ or ‘we knew but we didn’t want to know.’” The Rev. Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman, said he had no comment, saying that the matter was in the hands of Dutch bishops.Hmmmmm......“Wir haben es nicht gewusst” orders straight from the "Headquarters"?Read the full story here.

• St. Nicholas Church sues Port Authority, claims that agency is blocking church's reconstruction.A historic church destroyed in the 9/11 terrorist attacks plans a multimillion-dollar suit against the Port Authority and other agencies for blocking its reconstruction.A notice of claim was filed Monday on behalf of St. Nicholas Church and the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, declaring their intention to sue."This claim arises out of the arrogance, bad faith and fraudulent conduct of the Port Authority in preventing St. Nicholas from re-building its church at Ground Zero," the church says in its legal filings.According to the notice, the church will seek a minimum of $20 million along with unspecified restitution for damages and expenses "incurred in reliance of the Port Authority's promises that St. Nicholas would be rebuilt at 130 Liberty Street."The church, which had been located at 155 Cedar St., was founded in 1916 by Greek immigrants and destroyed in the terror attack on the World Trade Center towers on Sept. 11, 2001.Church leaders contend the PA has reneged on a deal to rebuild the house of worship at the other location, nearby 130 Liberty St.They also charged the PA bulldozed both potential sites during excavations, leaving both properties unusable"."In 2008, we worked hard to come to what we thought was a very generous agreement with church represenatives," the PA statement read."Unfortunately, after nine months of negotiation in which the demands of the Orthodox Church continued to increase over and above what we originally agreed to ... we had to make a practical decision to move on."The notice indicated the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. and the Empire State Development Corp. will be included in the suit.Hmmmmm......Why is there money for the Ground Zero Mosque and none for the Church who stood there in the first place?Read the full story here.

• HT:BigGoverment.PiggyLeaks.Pigford Witness Report: 700 Claims Filed with My Name on Them, Many From Hundreds of Miles Away.Pigford was a nightmare. There was lots of money to be made—most of it by the trial lawyers. There were legitimate claims. It happens that people do sometimes discriminate and those people should be compensated. But really everyone was put in the crosshairs. They were indicting the entire USDA.Lawyers were churning applications. My name starts turning up on documents as someone who denied someone services. Trouble was those people were hundreds of miles away. I think there was something like 700 forms filed with my name on them—it was outrageous. I had never heard of any of them. I discovered that my name had been put on leaflets, which charges that I was a racist, and people just put my name on Pigford applications. I finally had to get black farmers to vouch for me. They all said I treated everyone fairly, which is what I tried to do.There were lots of fraudulent claims that were sent to the federal government. I think there was a political motivation there. The lawyers were getting their money and there was a lot to get. In the 2008 farm bill there was actually $100 million set aside to investigate fraud under Pigford. But when the Obama Administration came in, the investigation was never done. I think we as taxpayers deserve to know where our money went, don’t you think?Hmmmm....Digging deeper in the dunghill.Read the full story here.

• HT:TeaAndPolitics.Pentagon: China’s is “the most active land-based ballistic- and cruise-missile programme in the world”.Chinese Missile Capability… (China) has invested heavily in the strength and technical sophistication of its missiles. The Pentagon has described China’s programme as “the most active land-based ballistic- and cruise-missile programme in the world”. Missiles are good value. Compared with a fully equipped aircraft-carrier, which might cost $15 billion-20 billion, a missile costs about $1m. And missiles can be potent. The chart shows how, in terms of numbers, China has concentrated on short- and medium-range missiles. This puts Taiwan within easy range of a devastating cruise- and ballistic-missile attack. Military analysts fear that the Second Artillery could retarget the missiles, putting Japan at risk, as well as America’s Asian bases.China also has a few intercontinental ballistic missiles, able to carry a nuclear payload.Hmmmmm....I'll see your carrier and raise Two hundred missiles?Read and see the full story here.

• HT:BigGoverment.The Pigford President: Obama Signs Black Farmers Settlement.WASHINGTON (AP) – American Indians and black farmers will be paid $4.6 billion to address claims of government mistreatment over many decades under landmark legislation President Barack Obama signed Wednesday.The legislation “closes a long and unfortunate chapter in our history,” Obama said. “It’s finally time to make things right.”At a signing ceremony at the White House the president declared that approval of the long-delayed legislation “isn’t simply a matter of making amends, it’s about reaffirming our values on which this nation was founded: the principles of fairness and equality and opportunity.”Obama promised during his campaign to work toward resolving disputes over the government’s past discrimination against minorities. The measure he signed settles a pair of long-standing class-action lawsuits. The measure also settles four long-standing disputes over Native American water rights in Arizona, New Mexico and Montana.Elouise Cobell, a member of the Blackfeet Tribe from Browning, Mont., and the lead plaintiff in the Indian case, called the signing ceremony “breathtaking,” adding that she did not expect it to happen in her lifetime. Cobell filed the suit 14 years ago and led efforts to reach the $3.4 billion settlement a year ago and then push it through the House and Senate.Cobell said she was driving her car in Montana when she learned the Senate had approved the measure last month. “I pulled over and I cried,” she said.Even with Obama’s signature, the settlement must still go through a gauntlet of court hearings, a media campaign to notify beneficiaries, waiting periods for comments and appeals. The first check is not expected to reach tribal plaintiffs until August.Even so, Cobell said the day was historic.“This day means a lot to the elders, because it basically means they receive justice,” she said. “The money is secondary. They got justice. The United States government gave them justice.”Sen. Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., used similar language to describe the black farmers case, which marks the second round of funding from a class-action lawsuit originally settled in 1999. The case, which involves allegations of widespread discrimination by local Agriculture Department offices in awarding loans and other aid, is named after Timothy Pigford, a black farmer from North Carolina who was an original plaintiff.The new settlement, totaling nearly $1.2 billion, is intended for people who were denied payments in the earlier settlement because they missed deadlines for filing. Individual amounts depend on how many claims are successfully filed.“The time is long overdue to fund the discrimination settlement for farmers who have experienced decades of injustice,” Lincoln said.Hmmm....I wonder how just much fraud involved in Piggford and by whom?Read the full story here.

• Supreme Court Hears Challenge to Arizona Immigration Law -- The One Signed by Former Gov. Janet Napolitano.Arizona’s Republican Gov. Jan Brewer came to the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday to hear arguments on an Arizona immigration law signed in 2007 by then-Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, a Democrat.Both governors signed laws that the Obama administration opposes. Napolitano is now part of the Obama administration, serving as Homeland Security Secretary.The law signed by Napolitano in 2007 (HB 2745) sanctions employers who knowingly hire illegal aliens, and it also requires employers doing business with the state of Arizona to use the federal government’s E-Verify database to confirm the legal status of workers.Napolitano called the bill “flawed” but signed it anyway on July 2, 2007 because – as she said at the time – “It is now abundantly clear that Congress finds itself incapable of coping with the comprehensive immigration reforms our country needs.” In the same 2007 statement, Napolitano said the flow of illegal immigrants into Arizona was “due to the constant demand of some employers for cheap, undocumented labor.”Gov. Brewer told CNSNews.com on Wednesday that the “moccasin” is on the other foot now that Napolitano is President Obama’s Homeland Security Secretary: “When she was governor, she made it very clear that she signed the bill because the federal government was not doing their job, and that’s exactly what the problem and issue is,” Brewer said. “I guess it all…depends on where your moccasins are setting (as) to what your reasoning is.”Hmmmm....perhaps she's no longer wearing moccasins?Read the full story here.

• GAO: ‘Unclear’ If Airport Body Scanners Will Detect Underwear Bombs.Repeatedly over the past year, the Government Accountability Office has told Congress it is unclear if the whole-body-image scanners the Transportation Security Administration is now deploying at airports across the country will detect the sort of underwear bomb that terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab used last Christmas when he attempted to blow up Northwest Flight 253 as it approached Detroit from Amsterdam.Even though TSA has put these so-called Advanced Imaging Technology (AIT) scanners through both laboratory and operational testing, Congress’s own auditing agency says it “remains unclear” that they can actually do the primary job they are intended to do.Steve Lord, the GAO’s director of homeland security and justice issues, made this point most recently in written testimony presented last Thursday to the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Aviation Operations, Safety and Security.“Furthermore, as noted in our March 2010 testimony,” Lord wrote, “it remains unclear whether the AIT would have been able to detect the weapon used in the December 2009 incident based on the preliminary TSA information we have received.”“There’s about, from my understanding, 2,300 checkpoints,” Lord told the Senate subcommittee last week. “So if you acquire 1,800 machines, it’s still not going to be enough to ensure 100 percent coverage. TSA’s strategy is to focus the use of these machines on the highest-volume airports.”Whether in fact a whole-body-image scanner catches a future underwear bomber boarding a flight in a foreign airport will depend not only on the effectiveness of the scanner, but on the country in which the airport is located. “At least 13 other nations are now testing or deploying these scanners, or have committed to deploying them in the near future,” Lord told the Senate subcommittee.Hmmmm....A number of people are making a lot of money off these scanners,your guess on who is as good as mine.Read the full story here.

• Imams Of Five Kyrgyz Mosques Dismissed.OSH, Kyrgyzstan -- The imams of five mosques in Kyrgyzstan's southern city of Osh were removed from their posts today.A local government-established special commission checked 53 mosques in the city and sacked the five imams for "leaving their mosques without supervision during ethnic clashes in mid-June" and for "propagating nontraditional Islam." The commission was established after Kyrgyz security troops carried out a special operation last month to neutralize an illegal armed group in the city.Three members of that group were killed and one blew himself up.The house the group was using belongs to Farkhat Nurmatov, the imam of a local mosque. Some 400 people were killed and hundreds more injured in the June clashes between ethnic Uzbeks and Kyrgyz in the south of the country.Hmmmm....New description of terrorist activities .."propagating nontraditional Islam."Source.

• Plight Of Detained Iranian Baha'i Leaders Highlighted. A Baha'i International Community representative has addressed an open letter to the Iranian judiciary condemning what she calls a miscarriage of justice in the case of seven detained Baha'i leaders.Diane Ala'i, the community's representative to the United Nations in Geneva who authored the letter, told Radio Farda that the case has reached a dead end.The seven were given 20-year prison terms in August after being found guilty of "espionage," "acting against national security," and being "enemies of God," in a case that sparked an international outcry. Ala'i's group said in September it had learned the sentences had been halved. But Ala'i told Radio Farda on December 8 that there still have been no legal documents confirming this. Ala'i said the five men and two women are under temporary imprisonment in cramped and unhygienic cells and have been denied bail and the right to take leave. "Such extreme conditions are dangerous for them, particularly for Mr. Khanjani, who is over 70 years of age," she added.Read the full story here.

• HT:RightTruth.Everything That You Ever Wanted to Know About Muhammad.But Muslims Were Afraid You Would Ask. Part I here.

• HT:BigGoverment.The Pigford Killings: Double-Murder, Double-Cross, and Decapitation in the Delta.As we have been chronicling in our Pigford coverage this week, the amount of evidence suggesting massive fraud is staggering and will continue to build and build.Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack came out last week to say there have only been three cases of fraud out of the 20,000 claims.Well Mr. Vilsack, why don’t you try this on for size? And by the way, we will be bringing more crime rings your way very soon.Hmmmmm.....Sounds like someone was protecting his "Piggybank"?Read the full story here.

• And now for something completely different.Russians need more sex says top doc.Russian men need to spice up their sex lives for the good of their health – and if that means self-service or heading to a brothel, they should get straight down to it.That’s the surprising verdict of Dmitry Pushkar, Russia’s chief urologist.Pushkar is concerned that pent-up frustration is hampering the health of Russian men as they suffer in silence rather than look for a practical solution.“Sex is good for health every day, or once in two days, depending on a man’s age,” said Pushkar.While a survey earlier this year by condom-makers Durex showed that 80 per cent Russians have sex at least once a week, the subject is still shrouded in mystery – at least for the scientists.There are also not enough doctors, no studies, no statistics on how many women and men live in the region, how often they have sex and what they want from it, Pushkar told Gzt.ru. There is still not enough research and widely available information about Russian sex life.There is a need for more specialist clinics where urologists and endocrinologists will help patients to recognise and overcome problems causing erectile dysfunction, Pushkar said.While erectile dysfunction is common among men between 30 and 40 suffering from stress and depressions, and men over 50, most are ashamed and only go to specialists after the problem persists for 27 months.Hmmmm.....Try Less vodka?Read the full the story here.