Now Cheney chimes in: Ain't no superhighways

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PREMEDITATED MERGER
Now Cheney chimes in: Ain't no superhighways
VP latest to make official denial, some call it 'gaming semantics'

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted: July 29, 2007
5:00 p.m. Eastern
By Jerome R. Corsi
© 2007 WorldNetDaily.com


Vice President Cheney

Despite evidence to the contrary, Vice President Dick Cheney says there is no "secret plan" to create a continent-crossing superhighway to help facilitate a merger of the United States, Mexico and Canada.

"The administration is not engaged in a secret plan to create a 'NAFTA super highway,'" asserts Cheney in a recent letter to a constituent, according to a copy of the message obtained by WND.

The vice president's letter quotes an Aug. 21 statement from the U.S. Department of Transportation that, "The concept of a super highway has been around since the early 1990s, usually in the form of a claim that the U.S. Department of Transportation is going to designate such a highway."

DOT then refutes the claim, stating, "The Department of Transportation has never had the statutory authority to designate a NAFTA super highway and has never sought such authority."

The DOT statement then retracts the absolute nature of that statement, qualifying that, "The Department of Transportation will continue to cooperate with the State transportation departments in the I-35 corridor as they upgrade this vital interstate highway to meet 21st century needs. However, these efforts are the routine activities of a Department that cooperates with all the state transportation departments to improve the Nation's intermodal transportation network."

The DOT statement cited by the vice president seems to model the denial recently fashioned by the North America's SuperCorridor Coalition, Inc., or NASCO, on its website.

There NASCO states, "There a no plans to build a new NAFTA Superhighway – it exists today as I-35."

The coalition continues to distinguish its support for a North American "SuperCorridor" from a "NAFTA Superhighway," asserting that a "SuperCorridor is not 'Super-sized." The website then claims NASCO uses the term "SuperCorridor" to demonstrate "we are more than just a highway coalition."

In a July 21, 2006, internal e-mail obtained by WND under a Missouri Sunshine Law request, Tiffany Melvin, executive director of NASCO, cautions "NASCO friends and members" that, "We have to stay away from 'SuperCorridor' because it is a very bad, hot button right now."

As WND previously reported, Jeffrey Shane, undersecretary of transportation for policy at the U.S. Department of Transportation got into a spirited exchange in January with congressmen after he asserted to a House subcommittee that NAFTA Superhighways were an "urban legend."

In response to questioning by Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, before the Subcommittee on Highways and Transit of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, Shane asserted he was "not familiar with any plan at all, related to NAFTA or cross-border traffic."

Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., then questioned aloud whether Shane was just "gaming semantics" when responding to Poe's question.

In June 2006, when first writing about NASCO, WND displayed the original homepage of NASCO, which used to open with a map highlighting the I-35 corridor from Mexico to Canada, arguing the trade group and its members were actively promoting a NAFTA superhighway.


NASCO's original map highlighted the I-35 corridor from Mexico to Canada


In what appears to be the third major revamping of the NASCO website since WND first began writing articles about NASCO, the Dallas-based trade group carefully removes identifying NASCO with the words behind the acronym, "North America's SuperCorridor Coalition, Inc.," which the original NASCO website once proudly proclaimed.

The current NASCO homepage displays a photo montage of intermodal highway scenes, presumably taken along I-35, but without any map displaying a continental I-35 super corridor linking Mexico and Canada.

NASCO currently relegates the continental I-35 map to an internal webpage that describes the North American Inland Ports Network as a "working group" within NASCO that supports inland member cities who have designated themselves as "inland ports," seeking to warehouse container traffic originating in Mexican ports on the Pacific such as Manzanillo and Lázaro Cárdenas.

The beige and blue continental I-35 map now positioned on an internal page of the NASCO website was originally used as the second NASCO website, in make-over of the original NASCO blue and yellow continental I-35 map that made the continental nature of the I-35 appear graphically more pronounced.

WND has also previously reported that in a speech to NASCO on April 30, 2004, Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta referred to Interstate Highways 35, 29 and 94 – the core highways supported by NASCO as a prime "North American Super Corridor" – Mineta commented to NASCO that the trade group "recognized that the success of the NAFTA relationship depends on mobility – on the movement of people, of products, and of capital across borders."

WND has also reported Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., a GOP presidential candidate, introduced an amendment to H.R. 3074, the Transportation Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year 2008, prohibiting the use of federal funds for participating in working groups under the Security and Prosperity Partnership, including the creation of NAFTA Superhighways.

On July 24, Hunter's amendment passed 362 to 63, with strong bipartisan support. Later, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 3074 by a margin of 268-153. The bill has been sent to the Senate with Hunter's amendment included.

According to Freedom of Information Request documents obtained by WND, Jeffrey Shane has been appointed by the Bush administration to be the U.S. lead bureaucrat on the North American Transportation Working Group under the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America.

On July 23, 1997, the NAFTA Superhighway Coalition was formed to promote continental highway development in association with the Ambassador Bridge.

Back to school for Barack

Back to school for Barack


Back to school for Barack

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted: July 27, 2007
1:00 a.m. Eastern

The three things that strike terror into the hearts of all freedom-loving people are Osama, Obama and Chelsea's momma, so the joke goes.

Listening to Barack Obama dismiss the probability of a slaughter – even genocide – following a U.S. troop withdrawal, reminds us just why there is so much truth in the joke.

Obama said the U.S. cannot use its military to solve humanitarian problems around the world and preventing even a genocide in Iraq would not be a good enough reason to keep troops there.

"Well, look, if that's the criteria by which we are making decisions on the deployment of U.S. forces, then by that argument you would have 300,000 troops in the Congo right now – where millions have been slaughtered as a consequence of ethnic strife – which we haven't done."

Now, in fairness to Obama, you need to remember this man has about as much foreign policy and governing experience as most members of the Illinois state Assembly. The guy has been fast-tracked as a Democratic presidential candidate because, well, pickings are slim for serious alternatives to Chelsea's momma.

Nevertheless, Obama's willingness – even eagerness – to play pretend with the lives of our friends and allies in Iraq is disconcerting to say the least.

Can you imagine what it is like reading quotes like that when you are a pro-U.S. official fighting the good fight against al-Qaida in Iraq?

Obama went so far as to say it's unlikely there would be increased bloodshed if U.S. forces left Iraq.

I don't know where he gets his intelligence info, but it is certainly not from reading the reports of the best journalist in Iraq today – John Burns of the New York Times.

"It seems to me incontrovertible that the most likely outcome of an American withdrawal any time soon would be cataclysmic violence, and I find that to be widely agreed among Iraqis, including Iraqis who widely opposed the invasion," Burns told PBS' Charlie Rose.

The Brookings Institution agrees. In a new report, the liberal think tank concludes a rapid withdrawal could bring "a humanitarian nightmare" in which we should expect "hundreds of thousands (conceivably even millions) of people to die."

But that's OK with Obama, because, after all, we haven't sent U.S. troops to stop every humanitarian nightmare. And since we haven't done that, there is no reason we should prevent one in Iraq by maintaining a troop presence.

Again, Obama is, when all is said and done, a political lightweight – a prepackaged candidate designed to make Americans feel good about themselves rather than an experienced, mature, sober leader.

That is the lens through which we must view and interpret such unbelievably idiotic pronouncements from the likes of Obama. I'm sure his speechwriters are already working on a "clarification" as we speak.

He stepped in it, big time.

Obama is arguing against the very kind of military missions his part normally loves – low-risk, peacekeeping missions where the objective is to keep bad guys away from good guys.

Often the good guys and bad guys get confused by Obama's friends in the Democratic Party, as they did in Kosovo, but, nevertheless, they love these "missions of mercy."

By suggesting it would be wrong even to keep some U.S. troops in Iraq to prevent a human holocaust is pretty remarkable.

Does he truly believe the killing will stop when U.S. troops leave?

Does he truly mean the deaths of hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions, is of no concern to him?

If he were to hear intelligence reports suggesting a bloodbath would follow a U.S. exit, would it make any difference to this cold-hearted fiend?

Car Crashes at Nuclear Weapons Plant

Car Crashes at Nuclear Weapons Plant

OAK RIDGE, Tenn. (AP) - A driver ran a checkpoint at a nuclear weapons plant early Monday and crashed into a barrier, then fled on foot, authorities said.
Guards at the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant, a primary storehouse for bomb-grade uranium, said the man "appeared to be impaired in some way" when they stopped him around 5 a.m. at a security checkpoint near a rear entrance, spokesman Bill Wilburn said.

They asked him for identification, but the man hit the gas and drove through the checkpoint, then crashed into security barriers a short distance away, Wilburn said.

"When he hit that, he jumped out of the car and ran away. He left the car there with the engine still running," Wilburn said. He said the guards told him the car had been hot-wired.

Wilburn said no weapons were in the car. "They checked the car very thoroughly before they moved it. They found nothing," he said.

Oak Ridge police were searching for the driver.

Steve Wyatt, spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration in Oak Ridge, which oversees the Y-12 plant, downplayed the crash, saying it was "next to nothing." The plant makes and dismantles uranium parts in nuclear warheads.

Border agent says China ordered his prosecution

INVASION USA
Border agent says China ordered his prosecution
Now seeks $25 million from government after acquittal on excessive force charge

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted: July 27, 2007
1:00 a.m. Eastern


By Jerome R. Corsi
© 2007 WorldNetDaily.com


A Customs and Border Protection agent who was acquitted of a charge of using excessive force during a 2004 arrest of a Chinese national on suspicion of drug smuggling is suing the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for $25 million.

And in a companion lawsuit, Robert Rhodes is seeking another $25 million from three Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents with the Office of Professional Responsibility.

He says the agents disregarded their oaths by pursuing a politically motivated prosecution against him to appease their superiors, who allegedly were seeking to do what communist China wanted.

"I was involved in a political prosecution that our government began at the demand of the government of communist China," Rhodes told WND. "The prosecution was promised to China by then-Secretary of State Colin Powell and then-Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Tom Ridge."

His lawyer, Steven Cohen, concurs.

"My client's prosecution was ordered by the Bush administration to appease the Chinese government," Cohen told WND.

WND requests for comment from the U.S. Department of Justice and U.S. Customs and Border Protection in the Department of Homeland Security did not produce a response from either agency.

But it's not the only time there have been indications that U.S. prosecutors have agreed to file a case against a border agent at the direction of a foreign government.

WND has reported that Border Patrol agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean were prosecuted only after the Mexican Consulate intervened and presented Osvaldo Aldrete-Davila, the Mexican national drug smuggler who had illegally entered the U.S. in the Ramos-Compean incident, and demanded the Border Patrol agents who shot Davila be prosecuted.

WND also reported Rocksprings, Texas, Deputy Sheriff Gilmer Hernandez was only prosecuted at the insistence of the Mexican Consulate.

WND has printed copies of a series of letters the Mexican Consulate wrote demanding that the U.S. government protect the civil rights of the Mexican national illegal immigrants who were in the fleeing van that Hernandez shot at, after the van allegedly tried to run Hernandez over in the process of fleeing from a routine traffic stop.

In Rhodes' case, the record shows that Powell and Ridge both apologized to China over the incident and promised to investigate the border agents involved.

"By filing this lawsuit," Andy Ramirez, chairman of the Friends of the Border Patrol, a national advocacy group for federal border patrol agencies, explained to WND, "Robert Rhodes is standing up to the government and saying you cannot continue doing to my fellow ... officers what you did to me."

The July 21, 2004, incident that led to Rhodes' prosecution involved Zhao Yan, a Chinese national woman who was arrested by Rhodes at the Rainbow Bridge in the Port of Buffalo, New York. Zhao Yan was with two other female suspects who fled when Rhodes and 13 other border agents attempted to arrest them.

Rhodes grabbed Zhao Yan, who proceeded to punch, kick, and scratch Rhodes as he attempted to subdue her.

Even though Rhodes was armed with a duty-issued Glock 9 mm weapon, he chose to use non-lethal pepper spray to subdue Zhao Yan.

But within a day of the Rainbow Bridge incident, Rhodes was arrested and charged with violating Zhao Yan's civil rights by having used excessive force in arresting her.

Other border officers who had assisted Rhodes in the arrest gave inconsistent statements to investigators, claiming that Rhodes had forcefully grabbed Zhao Yan by the hair and smashed her head against the ground.

At his trial in August and September 2005, the jury acquitted Rhodes of all charges, after deliberating less than three hours.

Rhodes' allegations he was prosecuted at the insistence of the Chinese government are backed by postings yet archived on Chinese Consulate websites.

The Consulate-General of the People's Republic of China in Houston, Texas, continues to document on their website that Powell wrote a letter to the Chinese government promising that the U.S. government would "thoroughly investigate the beating case" of Zhao Yan.

The Chinese Consulate in Houston argued that Zhao Yan was "a business woman from China's northern coastal city of Tianjin," who was on her first U.S. business trip when "she was attacked at Niagara Falls near the U.S.-Canadian border on July 21 by Rhodes and other officers of U.S. Customs and Border Protection."

The Consulate went on to claim that six days after Zhao Yan was "brutally attacked," she "was still suffering from a bad headache, swollen eyes and mental trauma. She also had a broken tooth and severe back pains which forced her to ride in a wheelchair."

But nowhere does the Chinese Consulate in Houston say she was suspected of drug smuggling.

Instead, the Consulate emphasized that Powell apologized because the U.S. is an "open society" that welcomes visitors. "Our goal is to ensure that visitors from around the world have a safe and enjoyable stay in the United States," the Consulate quoted Powell as saying. "The United States will continue to work that incidents such as this one do not occur again."

The Consulate-General of the People's Republic of China in New York still posts the apology from Ridge, who is quoted as expressing his "great regret" over "the beating of Chinese businesswoman Zhao Yan by officers of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection last week."

Ridge is further quoted as saying, "We have communicated to the Chinese Government that the U.S. customs officer was arrested by Customs and Border Patrol police and his case referred for criminal prosecution."

Even though he was acquitted at his trial, Rhodes paid a huge price for being indicted.

"Since the incident," Rhodes told WND, "I've lost my house, I've lost my pension. I have tried to find a job and I always get turned down. I feel like I have been black-balled by the government. I am on food stamps and public assistance. Right now, I have no health care insurance."

"Many Border Patrol agents tell us they're truly concerned about what will happen to them if they get into a struggle with someone trying to enter the country illegally," said Cohen. "How many terrorists and criminals will enter our country because our government won't support its own border enforcement officers?"

A complicating factor is Rhodes' admitted homosexuality. He earlier had complained to the Equal Employment Opportunity that Customs and Border Protection harassed him for minor offenses.

Cohen contended that every aspect of Rhodes' trial was political.

"Every day," he told WND, "the entire front row of the courtroom would be taken up by Chinese government officials and outside the courtroom Asian students picketed against Rhodes."

Cohen told WND that for two years after his trial Rhodes pursued unsuccessfully administrative paths to get his job back.

"Robert was suspended without pay immediately, right when the incident occurred," Cohen told WND, "But he wasn’t formally terminated until a few months ago."

He said Rhodes legal fees including lawyers, expert witnesses, and investigators amounted to more than $200,000.

"The vast majority of the legal fees have gone unpaid," Cohen told WND. "Rhodes was tremendously outgunned by the government. The government brought a staggering amount of resources to the job, not of searching for the truth, but making sure Rhodes was convicted, regardless what it cost."

Michael Battle was the U.S. attorney whose office prosecuted Rhodes. In the controversy surrounding Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Battle resigned his position as the director of the executive office of U.S. Attorneys.

Cohen said Rhodes' lawsuit against DHS alleges that the government investigators knowingly disregarded pertinent information and violated standard investigation procedures to pursue a politically motivated prosecution.

Saying what 'progressives' want to hear

Saying what 'progressives' want to hear

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted: July 27, 2007
1:00 a.m. Eastern

Liberals like to think of themselves as "progressives," which is not only a euphemism to avoid the stigma attached to "liberal," but is intended to convey that they are a step ahead of conservatives – socially, culturally, morally and, not least, intellectually. But have you ever noticed at a presidential debate, like the one last Monday, the types of questions these "progressives" in the audience ask of Democratic candidates, or the types of predictable, vacuous answers they applaud?

Some self-styled progressive elites like to think of red-staters as reality-challenged, but when you observe the progressives in action at these forums, it's hard not to conclude they are driven mainly by emotions and largely ignore reality. If it sounds good, regardless of whether it makes sense in the real world, it will score well. The key ingredient to impressing a progressive is to demonstrate that you care.

If you want to ingratiate yourself to these audiences, just say something brilliant like, "I abhor war," or "Dick Cheney is evil."

If you want to risk a little higher level of sophistication, you can say, "We need to get our troops out of Iraq, where our soldiers are dying in a civil war" – which, of course, implies we have no stake in the war, which, in turn, implies that our soldiers' deaths have been in vain.

When asked whether our soldiers have died in vain, you can say, like Barack Obama did, "I never think that our troops … who do their mission for their country are dying in vain." Or, offer John Edwards' nearly identical response: "I don't think any of our troops die in vain when they go and do the duty that's been given to them by the commander in chief."

These candidates know better than to say our troops died in vain, so they deny they believe it, even though the logical conclusion of their position is that they have. The question isn't whether they followed orders and did their duty but whether the cause they died for was worthwhile. And yet the enlightened progressives in the audience appear completely oblivious to the law of non-contradiction, which holds that it is impossible for something to be both true and untrue at the same time and in the same context.

Or, consider the subject of Darfur, about which a YouTube questioner asked, "Imagine yourself the parent of one of these children (at a refugee camp near Darfur). What action do you commit to that will get these children back home to a safe Darfur?"

Gov. Bill Richardson dutifully included in his answer this gem: "The answer here is caring about Africa. … Doing something about poverty, about AIDS, about refugees, about those that have been left behind. That's how we restore leadership in this country." (APPLAUSE).

Applause? Give me a break. How would doing "something" about poverty, AIDS and the rest restore leadership in this country?

Richardson elaborated that we need to get a U.N. peacekeeping force there and that we need to respond with diplomacy. To quote the caveman on the Geico commercial, "Wwwwwhat?"

How about meeting force with force, Governor? At least Sen. Joe Biden recognized the folly of Richardson's answer and said, "Those kids will be dead by the time the diplomacy is over."

But no one in the Democratic field addressed why a military intervention in Darfur is more justified on humanitarian grounds than our continued presence in Iraq. Why do "progressives" seem to get exercised about death and tragedy where our national interests are not at stake, but not otherwise? Even if all the slander Democrats have disseminated about Bush were true, does that make the plight of the Iraqi people any less urgent?

Finally, when the candidates expressed their various proposals to establish arbitrary withdrawal dates, did the progressives wonder, much less ask, why we don't begin withdrawal immediately? If our presence is causing the problem, and if our troops are, in effect, dying in vain, why let them stay another minute beyond the time it physically takes to remove them?

It won't do to answer that we can't just pull them out without regard to the stability of the region because these candidates say we are causing the instability. But if they insist on taking the contradictory position – that circumstances exist that militate against an immediate withdrawal – how can they possibly know precisely when those circumstances will change enough to allow our withdrawal? If they can't – and they can't – then why do they propose such arbitrary dates, other than to appease their enlightened constituencies?

But making sense or being consistent aren't necessary for success at a Democratic debate or on a liberal talk show, like HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher." What matters is that you say what the progressives want to hear. That's the ticket

Traffic ticket data shipped to Mexico

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PREMEDITATED MERGER
Traffic ticket data shipped to Mexico
California drivers are outraged, fear theft of confidential details

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted: July 28, 2007
1:00 a.m. Eastern
By Jerome R. Corsi
© 2007 WorldNetDaily.com

The Orange County Superior Court in California is outsourcing the processing of traffic tickets to a California company that sends the information through a Nogales, Mexico, subsidiary, raising public concerns of identity theft and complaints of language problems that allegedly lead to months of administrative errors in processing paperwork.

The controversy broke this week on KFI AM-640's popular John and Ken radio show when an unidentified law enforcement officer called the show and broke the news.

Many listeners of the show were outraged to learn information from traffic citations was being sent to Mexico, where Mexican workers had complete access to a driver's personal information.

The next day, calls and e-mails from angry listeners besieged the Orange County Board of Supervisors.

In a first attempt to stem the growing controversy, the Orange County Superior Court issued a press release affirming that since March 2006 the court has outsourced the processing of traffic ticket citation data to Cal Coast Data Entry, Inc., a company headquartered in Cerritos, Calif.

The Cal Coast website affirms that the company operates an office in Nogales, Data Center de Nogales.

The Orange County Superior Court press release further explained that Cal Coast scans Orange County traffic tickets electronically in its California office, but the data is transferred electronically in encrypted form to the company's Nogales facility where the data is entered into a computerized database by Mexican workers.

The court's press release tried to reassure the public that Cal Coast's Nogales facility is a secure, state-of-the-art facility with 24-hour-a-day, 7-day-a-week security guards, as well as video cameras and facility access restricted to badge holders.

According to the website of the Orange County Superior Court, it has the responsibility to process traffic citations for law enforcement agencies in Orange County, not the Orange County Board of Supervisors.

Later, Orange County Supervisor Chris Norby made an on-air appearance by telephone on the John and Ken Show, again attempting to deflect the criticism.

Norby explained to the radio audience that the Orange Superior Court was responsible for the Cal Coast contract, not the Orange County Board of Supervisors.

On air, Norby affirmed that complete driver and vehicle information that was included on the traffic citations was being sent to the Cal Coast office in Nogales, including driver's license numbers, driver's addresses, vehicle license plate numbers, and vehicle identifications.

"The County Board of Supervisors has no control over this contract," Norby told the radio audience, "and we are just as concerned as your listeners are."

"This is obviously sensitive information," Norby said in the radio interview, expressing his own outrage. "Driver license information has to be kept as closely guarded as possible and outsourcing this kind of information out of the country is something that this Board would never support."

Norby told the radio audience he had discussed the situation with Mike Duval, the California State Assemblyman in north Orange County. He said Duval expressed interest in having the California state legislature sponsor legislation to prevent outsourcing California driver's license information to Mexico in the future.

Callers to the show complained that they were experiencing months of delays and numerous errors due to language difficulties in tracking down where their traffic tickets were, making sure the tickets were registered in the Orange County Superior Court database, and in correcting data entry errors that were showing up in the tickets at court.

Cal Coast declined comment on the situation.

Grandmother guilty of murder plot

A 70-year-old grandmother and her son have been found guilty of murdering his wife in a so-called "honour killing".

Bachan Athwal and her son Sukhdave, 43, arranged the murder of Surjit Athwal to defend the family honour.

Surjit, 27, who wanted a divorce, went missing in 1998 after going to the Punjab with her mother-in-law.

An Old Bailey judge remanded the mother and son from Hayes, west London, into custody and told them to expect a life term when sentenced in September.

Mother-of-two Surjit, originally from Coventry, never returned from a trip with Bachan Athwal to a family wedding in India in December 1998.

Later, the grandmother of 16 children boasted she had got rid of her by getting a relative to strangle her and throw her body into a river in the Punjab. Her body has never been found.

Frightened relatives

The pair were only caught when "frightened" members of their own family reported them to police.

"They were frightened that if they told anybody, the same sort of thing might happen to them as they believed happened to the victim," Michael Worsley QC, prosecuting, said.

Mr Worsley said "family honour was at stake" when it was discovered Surjit was having an affair with a married man and wanted a divorce.

Bachan vowed a divorce would could only take place "over my dead body".


Surjit began an affair with a work colleague

Bachan called a family meeting to discuss killing Surjit a month before she vanished, the court heard.

Sarbjit Athwal, another daughter-in-law, said: "My mother-in-law said she wasn't getting on and it was causing too much confusion and problems in the family - and they were going to get rid of Surjit."

After having her killed, Bachan and Sukhdave then pretended Surjit had run away. They forged letters supposed to be from the Metropolitan Police to their Indian counterparts to try and fool them.

Mother and son also faked a document transferring ownership of the home Surjit part-owned into their names.


Sukhdave married Surjit when she was just 16

Sukhdave took out a £100,000 insurance policy on his wife the day she left for India. It was never paid out.

He later divorced Surjit in her absence, claiming she deserted him, and then he married someone else, said Mr Worsley.

Surjit first met her Sikh husband on her wedding day in 1988, when she was just 16.

She had worked as a customs officer at Heathrow Airport and married Sukhdave, who worked as a driver at the airport.

Judge Giles Forrester remanded the mother and son in custody for sentencing on 19 September.

US cat 'predicts patient deaths'

A US cat that is reportedly able to sense when a nursing home's residents are about to die is baffling doctors.
Oscar has a habit of curling up next to patients at the home in Providence, Rhode Island, in their final hours.

According to the author of a study in the New England Journal of Medicine, the two-year-old cat has been observed to be correct in 25 cases so far.

Staff now alert the families of residents when he sits down next to their ailing loved one.

"He doesn't make many mistakes. He seems to understand when patients are about to die," David Dosa, a professor at Brown University who carried out the research, told the Associated Press news agency.

'Premonitions'

Oscar was adopted as a kitten at Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Centre.

Cats often can sense when their owners are sick or when another animal is sick

Thomas Graves, feline expert

The cat is said to do his own rounds, just like the doctors and nurses at the home, but is not generally friendly to patients.

Although most families are grateful for the warning Oscar seems to provide, some relatives ask that the pet be taken away while they say their last goodbyes to their loved ones.

When put outside the room, Oscar is said to pace up and down meowing in protest.

Thomas Graves, a feline expert from the University of Illinois, told the BBC: "Cats often can sense when their owners are sick or when another animal is sick.

"They can sense when the weather will change, they're famous for being sensitive to premonitions of earthquakes."

A doctor who treats patients at the home said she believed there was probably a biochemical explanation, rather than the cat being psychic.

_______________________________________________________________
I can totally believe this story. Both Pumpkin and Zoe express concern for us when someone in our family is ill. Zoe will often come find me in bed and lay across my stomach. She express concern for us at all times when we are in the shower and makes it her business to be our lifeguard. She's such a cute cat and I think she thinks of us all as her kittens.

National Guards Soldiers Want To Save 24 Iraqi Orphans.

Thank god for the kindness and humanity of the United States Armed Forces. God bless them all!

Three sisters stabbed to death in Gaza 'honor killing'

Three sisters were found stabbed to death in the Gaza Strip on Sunday, raising suspicion they were killed by relatives because of suspected immoral behavior, a human rights organization said.

The three sisters, 16-year-old Nahed Hija and her sisters, 19-year-old Suha and 22-year-old Lina, were found dead from multiple stab wounds, buried in a shallow grave in the central Gaza Strip early Sunday morning, said Hamdi Shakkour of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights.

Shakkour said they suspected the women were victims of "honor crimes," in which women are murdered by male relatives because of suspected intimate relations - not necessarily sex - outside of marriage.

The Hamas force that polices the Gaza Strip said in a statement it was investigating the deaths.

Honor killings are practiced throughout the Arab world. At least 12 women were killed for honor crimes in the West Bank and Gaza Strip last year, but this is the first time three sisters were murdered together.

In February, three unrelated woman were killed within a 24-hour period in the Gaza Strip.

At the time, there were concerns that vigilante moral groups were behind the killings.

The Palestinian judiciary does not take "honor crimes" seriously, Shakkour said. Perpetrators of "honor crimes" are often given light sentences of a few years, while others convicted of murder under other circumstances are sentenced to death.

Feds Seize Missile Launcher In Jersey City

Feds Seize Missile Launcher In Jersey City

Woman Discovers AT-4 Anti-Tank Device On Front Lawn
Officials: Launcher, Good For One Use Only, Had Already Been Fired; But Where?
Featured Slideshows:
Portable Missile Launchers
Fighter Jets
Underground Blast Rocks N.Y.C.
100 Greatest Movies Of All Time

Scott Weinberger
Reporting

(CBS) JERSEY CITY A Jersey City woman made a shocking discovery on her lawn this morning when she noticed a military rocket launcher lying in the grass.

Niranjana Besai was leaving her house, located at 88 Nelson Street, to go to work just after 8 this morning when she spotted the launcher on her front lawn. "I read it and it [said] 'missile,'" Besai told CBS 2 HD. "There was little 'missile' [writing] on it."

She immediately called police.

Sources tell CBS 2 HD that the device is an AT-4 missile launcher that is used to fire against tanks and buildings. The device was first approved by the U.S. Army in 1985 and questions are being raised as to whether the device was stolen from a branch of the military.

Its very powerful warheads can penetrate through well over a foot of armor, however each launcher can only be used once. The device found on Besai's lawn was said to have been used previously and deemed inoperable.

Investigators are now trying to determine when and even where the launcher had been fired.

Officials initially expressed concern after discovering that Besai's house is located along a flight path for Newark Liberty International Airport.

Residents along Nelson Street were alarmed by the discovery.

Besai's neighbor, Joe Quinn, tells CBS 2 HD he was outside of his home when he noticed Besai pointing at the device from her front porch. When he walked over to see what the fuss was about, he was just as shocked to see weapon, said to be about three or four feet long and weighing about 15 pounds.

"She's pointing that there's something in the front," he told CBS 2 HD. "I said, 'Let me come down and take a look,' and I saw a little soldier on it and I said, 'Whoa, that's a missile launcher or something!'"

Quinn says he originally thought the launcher was just a pipe, but after noticing the picture of the soldier -- which he described as a soldier kneeling, holding the launcher -- he realized it looked similar to a missile launcher he'd seen on television. "I got scared myself," he says. "It looked like a bazooka, and right away you think what does somebody want with something like that?"

Jersey City Police removed the launcher, and the incident is now being investigated by the Joint Terrorism Task Force and the FBI.

Sources say Besai is not involved in the investigation as a suspect. "I don't think it was hers, they're nice people," Quinn said.

Bush won't promise to pardon border agents

Bush won't promise to pardon border agents
Says 'dear friend' who prosecuted Ramos, Compean 'even-handed,' 'fair guy'

Posted: July 20, 2007
3:33 p.m. Eastern
© 2007 WorldNetDaily.com


President Bush at Nashville forum yesterday (White House photo)
Questioned by an audience member at a forum, President Bush said he could not promise to pardon former U.S. Border Patrol agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean.

"I'm not going to make that kind of promise in a forum like this," Bush said at the Nashville event yesterday, which focused on his budget.

Bush referred to the U.S. attorney responsible for the case, Johnny Sutton, as "a dear friend of mine" and called him a "fair guy" and "even-handed," according to a White House transcript.

The president elicited laughter when he told the questioner, "You've got a nice smile, but you can't entice me into making a public statement."

"I know this is an emotional issue, but people need to look at the facts," Bush said. "These men were convicted by a jury of their peers after listening to the facts as my friend, Johnny Sutton, presented them. But anyway, no, I won't make you that promise."

Ramos and Compean are serving 11- and 12-year prison sentences, respectively, after a jury convicted them last year of violating federal gun laws and covering up the shooting of a drug smuggler as he fled back to Mexico after driving across the border with 742 pounds of marijuana. Sutton's office gave the smuggler, Osbaldo Aldrete-Davila, immunity to serve as the government's star witness and testify against the border agents.

As WND reported, after a Senate hearing Tuesday, Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and John Cornyn, R-Texas, asked Bush to commute the sentences, saying "it became very clear the sentences did not match the crime."

Feinstein concluded the hearing with a vow to look further into why prosecutors charged the men under section 924(c) of the U.S. code, which requires a 10-year sentence for using or carrying a firearm in the commission of a crime of violence.

Feinstein, during questioning of Sutton, argued the statute did not apply to Ramos and Compean in their pursuit of a drug smuggler at the Mexican border, because there was no underlying crime.

The senators called use of the statute in the case "prosecutorial overreach."

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif. – who will chair a similar hearing in the House July 31 – told WND he believed the Senate session helped revive flagging interest in the case as Ramos and Compean passed 180 days of imprisonment while awaiting their appeals.

He would prefer a pardon, but said he was pleased Feinstein was taking action and found it ironic a "liberal Democrat" would do more than some "squishy Republican senators."

"I was gratified and just overwhelmed with admiration for Sen. Feinstein, that she definitely is taking this issue seriously and decided she is going to step up and fight for these little guys that are being squashed," Rohrabacher told WND.

Many supporters of Ramos and Compean have argued that if the president could pardon or commute the sentence of former White House aide "Scooter" Libby, he should show mercy to border agents who were prosecuted while a drug smuggler went free. The president commuted Libby's 30-month prison sentence earlier this month.

Rohrabacher told WND Sutton has refused to testify at the July 31 hearing of the Subcommittee on International Organizations, Human Rights, and Oversight of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

The congressman will examine alleged involvement of the Mexican government in the decision to prosecute the agents and others, including Texas Deputy Sheriff Gilmer Hernandez. Sutton's Western District of Texas office also prosecuted Hernandez, who was convicted of violating the civil rights of two illegal aliens injured from shell fragments that struck them as the officer shot at the tires of a van in which they escaped from a routine traffic stop. The van driver had tried to run over Hernandez.

In his prepared testimony Tuesday, Sutton acknowledged the case had been "the subject of widespread media attention and heated debate."

He insisted that since the convictions, "it has been clear that some individuals do not understand the facts of the case, while others are merely concerned with using it to make a point about some other issue, such as illegal immigration."

Sutton said he wanted to use the hearing to "set the record straight by discussing the ample facts already in the public record, but I will be limited to discussing only information in the public record."

After recounting the prosecution's view of the case, he concluded: "The prosecution of Compean and Ramos was about our commitment to the rule of law and about two former law enforcement officers who committed serious crimes. An honest reading of the facts of this case shows that Compean and Ramos deliberately shot at an unarmed man in the back without justification, destroyed evidence to cover it up, and lied about it. A jury heard the facts and voted to convict. Faithfulness to the rule of law required me to bring this case."

WHY OUR SCHOOLS ARE FAILING

CAIR AND NEIL BORTZ

Radio host condemned for 'Islam is a cult'
CAIR cites Neil Boortz for angry confrontation of Muslim caller

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted: July 19, 2007
6:40 p.m. Eastern
© 2007 WorldNetDaily.com

Neil Boortz a controversial Washington-based Islamic lobby group today is highlighting as "Islamophobia" a heated radio talk-show exchange in which host Neil Boortz tells a Muslim caller Islam is a "cult," not a religion.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations said in its daily e-mail dispatch today an audio clip of the conversation – the date is not indicated – "is circulating on anti-Muslim Internet hate sites."

A copy of the clip was posted on YouTube.com Oct. 8, 2006.

The caller began: "Sir, I'm calling because of some statements you've been making in the past week about the religion of Islam and … "

Boortz interrupted: It's a cult, it's not even a religion. … "

After a long list of crimes perpetrated all over the world in the name of Islam, the talk host told the caller, "You don't have a word of condemnation in you until the non-Islamic world rises up and starts to make it clear that we are fed up with your damned religion. We've had it up to here.

"And somebody, like I said yesterday, somebody needs to grab the Muslim world by the shirt collar, backhand it a good one, knock it into the damn corner and say straighten up or we're gonna eradicate you beetles from the face of the Earth. … "

CAIR asked its constituents not to contact Boortz, because he "can and will use any comments to further defame Islam and Muslim."

"This clip was offered only to demonstrate the growing level of Islamophobic rhetoric in our society," the group said.

CAIR, which brands itself as a mainstream promoter of civil rights, has been named with two other prominent U.S. Islamic groups as an "unindicted co-conspirator" in a plot to fund the terrorist group Hamas. Jury selection is underway for the trial in Dallas.

CAIR is a spinoff of the defunct Islamic Association for Palestine, launched by Hamas leader Mousa Abu Marzook and former university professor Sami al-Arian, who pleaded guilty last year to conspiracy to provide services to Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Several CAIR staffers have been convicted on terrorism-related charges, and CAIR founder Omar Ahmad allegedly told a group of Muslims they are in America not to assimilate but to help assert Islam's rule over the country.

Controversy erupts over leaser of U.S. toll roads

PREMEDITATED MERGER
Controversy erupts over leaser of U.S. toll roads
Foreign firm part of public-private partnerships funding highway network

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted: July 20, 2007
1:00 a.m. Eastern
By Jerome R. Corsi
© 2007 WorldNetDaily.com

Chicago Skyway

Investment analysts in New York and Australia charge that Macquarie, the Australian conglomerate leasing U.S. toll roads, is a "house of cards" that has made billions by spinning off the highway assets into over-valuated investment trusts controlled by the bank.

Macquarie has been an active participant in the "public-private partnerships" sponsored by Mary Peters when she was head of the Federal Highway Administration.

As documented on the FHWA website, Macquarie recently concluded long-term leasing deals on the Chicago Skyway and the Indiana Toll Road.

In both projects, Macquarie has partnered with Cintra Concesiones de Infraestructuras de Transporte, S.A., the Spanish investment consortium also involved in financing and leasing the Trans-Texas Corridor.

The criticism of Macquarie can be traced to a paper published last year by John L. Goldberg, an honorary associate at the School of Architecture, Design Science, and Planning at the University of Sydney in Australia.

Titled "The Fatal Flaw in the Financing of Private Road Infrastructure in Australia," the paper argued equity investors in Macquarie investment trusts are likely to suffer heavy losses by excessive valuations Macquarie makes of financed toll roads that are packaged together to be sold to pension funds and other institutional investors.

Goldberg also argued that government guarantees on Macquarie projects are often buried in the confidential part of toll road "comprehensive development agreements," such that the public taxpayer liability only comes to light when a toll road project fails.

Jim Chanos, a founding principal in the New York investment firm Kynikos Associates, has been equally critical of Macquarie.

Kynikos, founded in 1985, specializes in short-selling the stock of companies the firm believes are overvalued by the financial markets and likely to fall in price. Chanos distinguished himself as one of the most active critics of Enron prior to the company's fall.

In a May 30 radio interview with Australian talk-show host Mark Colvin, Chanos charged that the "Macquarie model" was seriously flawed.

"The bank scours the world buying assets," Chanos told the radio audience, "buying assets, everything from toll roads to bowling alleys and selling them into separate trusts that the bank controls. This generates triple fees for Macquarie Bank: one for the up-front purchase; a second for selling the assets into the trust; then ongoing management and performance fees from the funds."

Chanos charged that the loser in the scheme was the investor.

"If you look at the financial accounts of the trusts," Chanos explained to the Australian talk show, "you'll see that in almost all the cases the companies are using Australian re-valuation accounting which is legal under [Generally Accepted Accounting Practices] in your country to write up the value of the asset annually and put that through operating income and into equity."

Chanos argued that the practice only works in a financial environment in which cheap credit is readily available and valuations for infrastructure projects are generally rising.

"You need a credit environment that looks the other way, or you need a credit environment where the people lending are just lending on reputation or not numbers," Chanos said.

Eventually, he contended, the self-dealing between Macquarie and the Macquarie-controlled funds into which the infrastructure assets are sold is likely to crash.

"All I would tell your listeners," Chanos said in the radio interview, "is simply just go to the trusts, the financial statements, and simply extract out the asset re-valuation number, which is basically management's guess as to how much, what the asset's worth and just see what the cash flow looks like. In many cases, the cash flows are diminished or actually go negative. That's the simple litmus test to the Macquarie model."

Still, Chanos argued that despite the problem in the underlying cash flows, Macquarie makes hefty profits.

"Capital gains alone in the fiscal year 2007, just for flipping these types of assets into the trusts, accounted for half of the pre-tax income of Macquarie Bank," Chanos asserted.

Macquarie Bank has hit back strongly against both critics.

According to newspaper reports in Australia, Macquarie Bank executive Warwick Smith complained to University of Sidney Vice Chancellor Gavin Brown, demanding that the university dissociate itself from Goldberg over his critical research.

In response, Brown issued a statement clarifying that Goldberg is not an employee of the University of Sydney, though he has been given the title of honorary associate by the Faculty of Architecture. In his statement, Brown claimed Goldberg "speaks as an individual and the university accepts no responsibility for his comments which it does not endorse."

In the subsequent controversy that erupted in Australia, Goldberg was featured as a case study in "Silencing Dissent," a book critical of the administration of Prime Minister John Howard, published in Australia by Clive Hamilton, the executive director of a prominent Australian think-tank, and his co-editor Sarah Maddison.

In the book, Hamilton and Maddison charged that the Howard government used strong-arm tactics to challenge the tax status of non-government organizations and ruin the reputations of academics who were critical of governmental policies, including the sale of highway infrastructure leasing rights to private investment concerns in Australia.

Macquarie used a similar personal attack to discredit Chanos following the interview on Australian radio.

In a May 31 statement posted on the Macquarie website, the investment group charged that Chanos, "a hedge fund short-seller of equities," had an economic self-interest in advancing "incorrect claims" that could cause the stock price of Macquarie to fall.

When contacted for comment, Macquarie's New York representative referred WND to the company's online statement, in which Macquarie asserts that all assets acquired by funds controlled by Macquarie are valued directly from the market and subject to the approval of independent directors of the funds.

The published Macquarie response to Chanos also cited a May 25 Bloomberg report which quoted Chanos as saying Kynikos maintains a short position on Macquarie.

Short-selling is a Wall Street practice in which an investor borrows and sells stock the investor does not own, anticipating the stock will go down in value. The short-seller profits by buying shares at a lower price to replace the shares that originally were borrowed and sold at the higher price.

Short-sellers lose money if the price of the stock increases and the cost to purchase shares to replace those borrowed is greater than the price for which the borrowed shares were sold.

Macquarie Infrastructure Group is a separate subsidiary from Macquarie Bank.

The website of Macquarie Infrastructure Group bills the company as "one of the largest private developers of toll roads in the world."

5 arrested for selling driver's licenses to illegal immigrants

Associated Press - July 17, 2007 5:44 PM ET

5 arrested for selling driver's licenses to illegal immigrants

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) - Five people, including an employee of Mississippi's driver's license division, are accused of taking part in a scheme to sell licenses to illegal aliens.

The licenses were allegedly sold for approximately $2,000 each.

Those arrested by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement special agents included two Mexican nationals and an Uzbek national.

The five had Mississippi or Alabama addresses.

Authorities say the group recruited illegal aliens to purchase the Mississippi licenses.

Melissa Green, of Tupelo, Mississippi, a driver license examiner for the Mississippi Department of Public Safety, was part of the alleged conspiracy.

Court documents say Green's role in the scheme was to create computer records for the illegal aliens seeking a driver's license.

Others arrested in the scheme were Alfred Green, husband of Melissa Green; Davron Gayupov, of Gulfport, Mississippi; Baldamer Esquivel, of Troy; and Marco Martinez, of Mobile.

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Pilgrim's Pride reportedly laying off illegal workers

Pilgrim's Pride reportedly laying off illegal workers
By From staff reports
Cox East Texas

Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Last month, the owners of La Lengua, a Lufkin-based Spanish newspaper, knew their readers were going to have some serious concerns when a proposed federal "guest worker" bill stalled in Congress, effectively killing any path to citizenship for illegal immigrants and migrant workers.

Ino Reyes, who along with his brother, Roy, own La Lengua, asked their small staff to try to get the story and get to the bottom of what was happening. The newspaper began to chase down leads and ask questions of some of the businesses that employ mostly Hispanic workers, but they kept hitting dead end after dead end.

La Lengua newspaper says Pilgrim's Pride on Martin Luther King Boulevard in Nacogdoches is laying off any undocumented workers who can't provide valid Social Security information.

What they were able to find out was that because there was probably no chance of resurrecting the guest worker program, industries across the nation were going to have to make changes.

"I think they knew that once the immigration reform bill was shot down, there was no hope for anything — amnesty or temporary permits," Reyes said. "They knew that if that bill didn't pass, the government was going to start coming down on industry."

What they still didn't know,however, was what effect that would have in East Texas.

Then the answers began to come, as La Lengua readers began calling the paper, saying that the Pilgrim's Pride facilities in Lufkin and Nacogdoches were going to lay off any employees who could not show a legal Social Security number.

"If they can't verify the Social Security number, they have to find another job," Hispanic community activist Gabriella Zavalla said. "Some of them they are giving three days notice, and others they are giving eight days notice, but it's affecting a lot of people. One day in the morning (the Nacogdoches plant) laid off 40 people, then in the afternoon they let another 20 people go. Then one day it was about 100 people."

La Lengua attempted to get the story, but as they always respond to other news outlets, including The Daily Sentinel and The Lufkin Daily News, Pilgrim's Pride would not comment on personnel matters.

Officials with the Nacogdoches Economic Development Corporation said they hadn't heard of any layoffs at Pilgrim's Pride, and that when they talked to human resources officials two weeks ago, Pilgrim's indicated that citizenship was not going to be an issue.

However, for the workers who received official letters, it was a big issue.

Lufkin ISD Superintendant Roy Knight confirmed that it is apparently a big issue for a lot of East Texans who have been trying to call his office to see if they can help.

"I've had calls from the Hispanic community asking how we might provide for the needs of children of laid-off employees," Knight said.

Reyes said the people his reporters are talking to do not necessarily fault Pilgrim's Pride, because most of them realize that cracking down on illegal workers is not beneficial to the company, and that the company would not be doing it if they weren't made to do it.

"This goes way beyond the company here," Reyes said. "I guarantee you that the production managers don't want this to happen. The end result is they are going to lose a big part of their labor force, and it's going to be the consumer who is going to pay the price. You can say what you want about them, but those guys work. They may be here illegally, but they will work two shifts or three shifts or four shifts or whatever you want them to do, as long as they have a job. If they (the company) have to get rid of them, they will have to hire new people and pay overtime, and that's going to cost us a lot more in the long run."

Tamar Jacoby, an immigration expert with the conservative Manhattan Institute in New York, said she is not surprised that companies are taking preventive action, when it comes to their immigrant workforce.

Jacoby consulted with key Republicans on the immigration debate earlier this year and helped create business coalitions in several states, including Texas, that lobbied for an immigration overhaul that would have given illegal immigrants a path to citizenship and created a guest worker program. Pilgrim's Pride belongs to the Texas coalition, Texas Employers for Immigration Reform.

"Any business owner that's paying attention to what's going on now, knows that workplace enforcement is what's coming down the track," she said.

Companies are stuck between a rock and a hard place, when it comes to hiring immigrants, because it's hard to tell if documentation is legitimate, and they could be sued for discrimination if they demand proof of legal status, she said.

Jacoby also said the Texas economy could be hurt severely by "draconian" enforcement measures that will leave companies without hundreds of thousands of employees.

But lawyers are advising their clients who employ Hispanic workers to perform voluntary audits to discover if there are any internal issues they can address before the government gets involved.

Wayne Haglund, a Lufkin attorney, said if the federal government does get involved, officials are going to shift the focus from the employees to the employers who hired them.

Haglund said he had not specifically seen any of the letters issued to Pilgrim's Pride workers, but he said if he were to guess, it would go something like this:

"There's some issue or question about information you've provided. Please provide information that will clarify."

According to Haglund, companies have services where employers can check Social Security names against names and birth dates, and what employers are finding is that oftentimes, the Social Security numbers don't match up to names, age or date of birth.

"The government has redefined what is 'constructive knowledge' to prosecute employers," Haglund said. "If records were available to you, and you could have known that this person was not authorized to work, you are going to be penalized ... It's very harsh, but it is the law."

Haglund said he has looked at the law, and in his eyes, the state of Texas will most likely suffer, as a result of it.

"It's really hard for workers and for employers," he said. "I don't know that there are any winners, at all."

Reyes said the entire issue was fueled by what he calls racial reform, and it will have exactly the effect that was intended.

"They knew what they were doing," he said. "That's the only way to really stop illegal immigration. You go after the companies. If there are no jobs, then the people won't be here."

But Reyes said he thinks a lot of undocumented workers will stay around East Texas — at least at first.

"If they can't work at Pilgrim's Pride, many of them will find jobs elsewhere," he said. "You still don't need documentation for day labor."

But when all the East Texas industries and business are through with their internal audits, Reyes said, there will most likely be more mouths to feed than day labor or other work can support. And that's what La Lengua is trying to address, he said.

"We didn't do this story just for news," he said. "We were trying to help folks. We wanted to get the word out there so people could get involved and churches could get organized."

So far, Reyes said, it appears to be working.

"It's on the radio. It's on the street," he said. "Now, we'll see if anyone has any ideas how to help the families or find a way to stop it, but I'm afraid this is going to be a big problem for our region."

__________________________
ABOUT TIME I THINK THEY ARE FINALLY GETTING THE MESSAGE!!! IF YOU'RE AN ILLEGAL GET OUT! Americans have not got lazy... big bussiness wants slave labor so they can make more money. Go home illegals and let the people who have been here all there lives make a good wage. I bet some people in nac are going to get a good paying job at Pilgrams now and don't have to live with 12 people and get free medical care and welfare... go wave your flags in your country not ours. Only big business benefits from the slave labor(illegals)...the wages stay down and the employers make more money but the cost of living keeps going up,and Americans who have been doing the work for many ,many years will not be hired because they can't live on what they were making twenty years ago and the law will not let us live fourty people in a single dwelling house. That's called zoning laws and it is only changed or ignored when it benefits the big bunness greedy. Let the people hiring and housing the illegals pay for ther upkeep with the fines and jail time for doing it until they are deported,then if they want to come back get at the back of the line behind the immigrants that truly want our way of life and not just means of income for Mexico. Keep our money in America and employers will be able to pay Americans real wages and still run a bunness and make a good profit instead of get rich quick and **** on our country.

Residents Of St Helens Debate Immigrant Ordinance

Residents Of St Helens Debate Immigrant Ordinance
By Colin Fogarty

PORTLAND, OR 2007-07-18 Now that Congress has failed to overhaul US immigration law, local governments are under pressure to do something about the issue on their own. Wednesday in St. Helens, county commissioners heard testimony on a local ordinance to place signs declaring Columbia County to be "illegal-worker free." Colin Fogarty reports.

-----------

In a small town like St. Helens, public testimony includes polite compliments to one's political adversaries. So went the testimony of Bill Eagle before the Columbia County Board of Commissioners, as he argued against an ordinance proposed by a fellow citizen, Wayne Mayo.

Bill Eagle: "I've known Wayne Mayo for a number of years. I know that Wayne is a decent, compassionate, considerate human being who harbors no hatred in his heart for anyone. On the other hand, I don't think Columbia County can afford to pass a law that would act as a wedge issue, like immigration."

Wayne Mayo is the local construction contractor who wrote a letter to the editor last week on illegal immigration. He outlined a proposed ordinance to have sheriff's deputies run Social Security checks on construction crews. He also wants fines for landlords who rent to undocumented workers and a complaint line for citizens to name immigrants suspected of being in the country illegally.

After the hearing, Mayo said wants the county put up signs that read "illegal-worker free county."

Wayne Mayo: "Those signs would say that Columbia County is a county ruled by the rule of law, that we simply want people to be here legally. We're not opposed to the color of their skin. We're not opposed to their ethnic background, to their country of origin. What we want is the proper paperwork in place."

But supporters of Mayo's proposed ordinance were outnumbered at the meeting. Members of the group "Columbia County Citizens for Human Dignity" appeared en mass to testify against it.

Organizer Marcy Westerling says her own father was an illegal immigrant from Holland. She says passing Mayo's ordinance would brand small towns like hers as bigoted.

Marcy Westerling: "Four by eight placards that say who's to be excluded and have phone numbers so we can snitch on each other. Certainly that harkens back to the worst of our history as a nation, 'No Blacks allowed,' 'No Jews served.' Let's be better than that."

Westerling says the local cast of characters in the debate over this ordinance goes back years. They've fought over gay rights and other cultural issues.

She says pitched battles in small towns have a tenor of their own.

Marcy Westerling: "We will hash this out in the grocery store or as we bring our kids to Little League ball games. So that lack of anonymity makes it a lot scarier to take a stand. But it also allows us to practice democracy in a much more civil manner. We don't want a culture war. We want a critical dialogue."

But St. Helens and Columbia County aren't the only local governments debating immigrant rights. Similar ordinances are currently under debate in Prince Williams County, Virgina and Bakersfield, Indiana. A year ago, Hazelton, Pennsylvania passed an ordinance that allows the city to turn down a renter who is in the country illegally.

As for Columbia County, Oregon, board chair Rita Bernhart says the budget is already stretched pretty thin to have sheriff's deputies checking out work sites. She's not even sure the proposed ordinance is even legal.

Rita Bernhart: "This, basically, is a federal issue. I think we're pretty limited down at this to do some of the things that we're being asked to do. So I think we need to have some time to maybe mull it over and do some research and see what we can do and what we can't do."

Bernhart doesn't expect a vote any time soon. But anti-immigrant activists aren't stopping with the county. They want the city of St. Helens to consider the same issue.

© Copyright 2007, OPB

Utah tells feds how much it costs to teach immigrants

Utah tells feds how much it costs to teach immigrants
State wants its money back for 'failed immigration policy'

Utah legislators frustrated by illegal immigration are finished being nice - they're sending a strongly worded letter to the feds.
Armed with a legislative audit estimating the cost of educating undocumented immigrants, members of the Education Interim Committee voted Wednesday to send the audit to Utah's congressional delegation and the U.S. departments of Immigration and Education.
An accompanying letter will request "reimbursement to the state from the federal government of costs resulting from their failed immigration policy."
"I doubt they'll pay it," said Rep. Steve Urquhart, R-St. George, who made the motion to send the letter. "But I think it's important that they hear from the state."
The audit, which was released in May, estimated Utah spends between $63 million and $98 million educating undocumented immigrants. Its narrow scope considered neither the U.S. citizen children of undocumented immigrants nor the taxes contributed by such workers.
The audit estimated costs to educate undocumented immigrants by roughly estimating their numbers - somewhere between 11,000 and 17,000 - and figuring the state spends the per-pupil average, plus low-income and English-language learner funds on them.
Democratic Reps. Carol Spackman-Moss of Holladay and Mark Wheatley of Murray, and Sen. Ross Romero, D-Salt Lake City, voted against the motion.

New State Law Hits Illegal Immigrants Hard

A new Georgia law could hit some motorists hard, especially illegal immigrants.

Starting this month, you will need a valid Georgia driver's license or state i-d card to register a vehicle.

The law is already hitting some local auto dealers catering to illegal immigrants-- pretty hard.

To get a license you have to prove that you are in the country legally.

Columbus car lot owner George Arevalo sells to mostly hispanic customers. He says illegal immigrants are unable to register their cars, so they are returning them.

Arevalo adds, "That's why you see my car lot almost getting empty because I put my money into the business, now I feel like getting into a different business."

With Georgia's growing illegal immigrant population--the law also has the potential to cut into sales taxes and county ad valorem tax revenues.

The old license plate law gave motorist 30 days to get a georgia driver s license after moving to the state.

Until then, their cars could be registered with an out of state or even an international license.

Immigration solution? Enforce the laws!

Posted: July 20, 2007
1:00 a.m. Eastern
© 2007 WorldNetDaily.com

Immigration solution? Enforce the laws!
Activists say investigation needed to reveal failures

An activist group advocating legal immigration paths into the United States wants an investigation into the nation's failure to enforce what immigration laws it already has.

"We need Congress and the press to do their jobs, by launching investigations to find out why our existing laws are not being enforced," said William Gheen, a spokesman for Americans for Legal Immigration PAC.

"Presidents do not get to decide which laws they will or will not enforce on behalf of their big business friends. That's what kings do, not presidents. If our existing laws go un-enforced, then we no longer live in a functioning Republican for which our flag stands," he said.

Gheen, in an earlier analysis of the issue of illegal aliens, said the issue isn't all that complicated.

"Simply put, America needs to enforce existing laws," he said. "Political and media pundits are constantly expounding upon our need to send the right messages to terrorists. Why is it then that many of those same pundits send the wrong message to illegal aliens?"

Gheen, who is president of ALIPAC and also serves as a legislative assistant in North Carolina, said that there are laws imposing fines on employers who hire illegal aliens.

However, "all fines against employers for hiring illegal aliens had ceased by 2004, under directives from the Bush administration," Gheen said. "Recent high profile raids have excluded charges against employers."

Gheen also said there are laws regarding the apprehension of illegal aliens, and their detention. But, he said, "Border Patrol agents are operating under instructions to only Catch and Release and do not pursue."

"Under these directives, it would not matter if we had half a million U.S. Border Patrol agents deployed," he said. "Bush has opened our borders through regulatory means. The Border Patrol has their hands tied and are not really stopping anyone from crossing illegally into the U.S."

Further, businesses that might make money from the illegal alien population are being tacitly encouraged to do so, with an absence of crackdowns on credit card offers, home loan proposals and other promotions specifically targeting illegals, ALIPAC said.

And after Congress demanded that 700 new miles of fencing be added to the border, the "Bush administration stripped the funding from the plan and built only a few miles of fencing!" ALIPAC said.

"Under these conditions, the deliberations of Congress, the votes of Congress, the elections, and the votes of all Americans have been nullified by executive orders," Gheen said. "These actions by the White House, combined with recent revelations about the [Security and Prosperity Partnership] and North American Community are alarming. Until Congress can restore the Republic and assure that laws that are passed will be enforced, there is no need for future legislation."

Gheen's schedule this week includes meetings with members of Congress in Washington to discuss the organization's request for investigations.

"ALIPAC believes that enforcement of our existing laws would eventually and significantly reduce the number of illegal aliens residing in America," ALIPAC said. "The current illegal immigration crisis in America is being created by the non-enforcement of existing laws.

"Correcting the situation would begin to reverse the flow of illegal aliens with more leaving than entering," the group said.

In Gheen's earlier explanation of his solution, he said while illegal immigration probably never will be stopped completely, it could be reversed easily.

He said the message the U.S. needs to send is that it "is not open, accommodating, or receptive to those [who] disrespect our laws and citizenry by entering as illegal aliens."

"The four things we must do are: (1). Secure our borders. (2.) Crack down on employers that intentionally hire illegal labor. (3.) Remove all benefits such as licenses, in-state tuition, and welfare for illegal aliens. (4.) Empower local police to enforce immigration law," Gheen said.

"Broad consensus exists for these measures, as multiple national and local polls show over 80 plus percent support for each one," he said.

"Mexican nationals caught entering the U.S. should not be dropped off just across the border so they can try again the next night. They should be detained, identified, told that a second crossing attempt is a felony. They should then handed over to the Mexican government to be returned to their homes," he said.

"A congressional inquiry is needed to ascertain why these insane and useless directives are in place and why most of the border sensor technology the taxpayers have paid for is not in place or operational," he said.

As WND has reported, a comprehensive immigration plan proposed in the U.S. Senate recently failed by a significant margin as tens of thousands of U.S. citizens called expressing opposition.

The plan would have set up a legal status for the estimated 12-20 million illegal aliens in the United States and included what the White House described as a large commitment of billions of dollars to secure the border and enforce the nation's existing laws against illegal entry.

Opponents, however, dubbed it an amnesty plan for illegals, and it never was able to shake that moniker.

White House LOST at Sea

White House LOST at Sea
By Pejman Yousefzadeh :

We are set to take a policymaking trip down memory lane with the Bush Administration urging accession to the Convention on the Law of the Sea in a recent statement made by the President on the issue. The Treaty was crafted from 1973 to 1982 and 154 countries have become signatories to it, along with the European Community.

In 1982, President Reagan refused to sign the Treaty, claiming specific objections to its terms. Those objections have not been resolved.

As Carrie Donovan points out, the Treaty allows for the regulation of intelligence and submarine activities even when they are conducted in territorial waters. Additionally, the Treaty's mandatory dispute resolution provisions under the auspices of the United Nations naturally raise sovereignty questions and the fact that the United Nations is hardly a model international institution does little to raise one's confidence in placing jurisdiction on maritime issues in the hands of the U.N.

Over three years ago, Doug Bandow highlighted additional problems with the Treaty, including the fact that the United States would be putting up approximately 25% of the funds for the International Seabed Authority, which would regulate mining and mineral extraction, while at the same time receiving an inordinately small share of voting rights. This, as Bandow notes, is a typical problem with U.N.-sponsored institutions; they rely heavily on American funding while denying the United States the commensurate amount of power to influence the activities of those institutions. In addition, while the Treaty has some attractive provisions regarding freedom of navigation, there is no impediment whatsoever to America's power to navigate the high seas now or in the immediate future given the overwhelming state of American naval superiority. So in the end, the Treaty's guarantees of freedom of navigation do little—if anything—to advance American interests.

In rebutting this editorial written by Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte and Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England in favor of the Law of the Sea Treaty, David Ridenour argues that contrary to Negroponte's and England's assertions, the Treaty could carry with it the potential for a negative environmental impact and that any remaining concerns regarding freedom of navigation and innocent passage are addressed by the 1958 Convention on the Territorial Sea. Indeed, when one examines the 1958 Convention, one finds that it contains a full section—Section III—on the issue of innocent passage. The 1958 Convention's guarantee of rights concerning innocent passage are very broad and generous and they render the Law of the Sea Treaty's guarantees regarding innocent passage as valuable as those offered to the United States by the Treaty regarding freedom of navigation. Furthermore, in this editorial, Ridenour notes that the Treaty would require technology transfers from developed to undeveloped countries, a provision that raises both intellectual property concerns and problems with dual-use technology potentially falling into the wrong hands.

So why is the Bush Administration pushing for passage of this treaty? Deputy Secretaries Negroponte and England list the following as one rationale in their editorial:

"Accession makes sense from the perspective of U.S. leadership on the world stage. Joining the convention would give the nation a seat at the table, a voice in the debates, to help shape the future development of oceans law, policy and practice. Accession would also give the United States better opportunities to keep a close watch on other nations' efforts to exercise their rights under the law of the sea and to counter excessive claims if necessary."

I take it then that the Bush Administration is going to work to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. And it will place Americans under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. And it will go back to observing the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Because, after all, every one of these moves "would give the nation a seat at the table, a voice in the debates, to help shape the future development" of policy and "would also give the United States better opportunities to keep a close watch on other nations' efforts."

Well, of course that's not going to happen. And if anyone suggested the Negroponte-England rationale for acceding to the Law of the Sea Treaty as a rationale for agreeing to Kyoto, the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court and the re-establishment of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, they would be laughed out of policymaking circles. Fair arguments can be made for joining any one of these treaties. But those arguments need to be made on the substance of the treaties, not just because "all the cool countries are doing it."

The Law of the Sea Treaty remains flawed. It does little to advance American interests when it comes to freedom of navigation, it could prove environmentally harmful, it restricts American military and intelligence naval operations and it calls for technology transfers that could run afoul of intellectual property laws and be dangerous to boot. President Reagan was right to reject calls to sign the Treaty in 1982. The Bush Administration should reverse course and refuse to push for the enactment of the Treaty in the present day.

Americans 'lied to' about '47 million uninsured'

Americans 'lied to' about '47 million uninsured'
Bush, Hillary, Michael Moore said to greatly exaggerate stats on health care

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted: July 19, 2007
© 2007 WorldNetDaily.com

President Bush, Hillary Clinton, Michael Moore and much of the mainstream media are incorrect when they claim the number of Americans without health insurance to be 40 to 50 million, with the actual number possibly under 10 million.

So says the Business and Media Institute, a Virginia-based division of the Media Research Center, a nonprofit watchdog organization designed to bring balance and responsibility to the media.

"The actual total is open to debate," says BMI analyst Julia Seymour. "But there are millions of people who should be excluded from that [high] tally, including: those who aren't American citizens, people who can afford their own insurance, and people who already qualify for government coverage but haven't signed up."

She notes government statistics also show 45 percent of people without insurance are not completely in dire straits, as they'll have coverage again within four months after switching jobs.

"Accounting for all those factors, one prominent study places the total for the long-term uninsured as low as 8.2 million – a very different reality than the media and national health care advocates claim," said Seymour.

The BMI report notes the number of the uninsured who are not U.S. citizens is nearly 10 million on its own, invalidating all the claims of 40-plus million "Americans" without health insurance.

In a May 31 speech, Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., said: "It's really indefensible that we now have more than 45 million uninsured Americans, 9 million of whom are children, and the vast majority of whom are from working families."

ABC News medical expert Dr. Tim Johnson cited the incorrect data as he praised a "bold" and "politically brilliant" universal health-coverage plan on the April 26 edition of "Good Morning America."

"It's bold because it does propose to cover all Americans, including the 47 million now who are uninsured, within five years," said Johnson.

Seymour also labeled Michael Moore's new film "SiCKO" as a "propagandumentary" and pointed out the director's website claims a very high number of uninsured: "There are nearly 50 million Americans without health insurance."

She says subtracting non-citizens and those who can afford their own insurance but choose not to purchase it, about 20 million people are left – less than 7 percent of the population.

"Many Americans are uninsured by choice," wrote Dr. David Gratzer in his book, "The Cure: How Capitalism Can Save American Health Care." Gratzer cited a study of the "nonpoor uninsured" from the California Healthcare Foundation.

"Why the lack of insurance [among people who own homes and computers]? One clue is that 60 percent reported being in excellent health or very good health," explained Gratzer.

"Proponents of universal health care often use the 46-million figure – without context or qualification. It creates the false impression that a huge percentage of the population has fallen through the cracks," Gratzer told BMI. "Again, that's not to suggest that there is no problem, but it's very different than the universal-care crowd describes."

The Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit group often quoted in news reports, puts the number of uninsured Americans who do not qualify for current government programs and make less than $50,000 a year between 8.2 million and 13.9 million, far less than the mantra of 40 to 50 million.

The Anti-Michael Moore

By Jacob Laksin
FrontPageMagazine.com | July 18, 2007

When Michael Moore recently premiered his new documentary Sicko, liberal Democrats and likeminded pundits were quick to applaud the big-budget paean to socialized medicine. Not among those clapping was filmmaker Stuart Browning.

If Moore’s film channels the prevailing left-wing wisdom about the alleged glories of government-run healthcare, Browning’s work represents a much-needed corrective: a skepticism about government’s ability to provide efficient coverage and a confidence that the free-market is a better compass for change than a Hollywood ideologue. “I can’t imagine anything more crucial than the right to make life-or-death decisions, the right to privacy, the right to choose one’s own doctor. And all these things are at stake,” said Browning in a recent interview from his Florida office.

Browning’s faith in the market is anchored in part in his business background. A Virginia native and entrepreneur, Browning has presided over several successful enterprises. Embarcadero Technologies, a San Francisco software firm Browning founded, was rated the nation’s top IPO in 2000. Most recently, he has attracted notice through his production company, On the Fence Films, the force behind Evan Coyne Maloney’s critically acclaimed Indoctrinate U. Consequently, Browning makes no effort to conceal his distaste for Moore’s view -- repeated ad nauseum in Sicko -- that the profit motive is a disease that must be cured to save American health care. “I want to banish the idea that profit is the problem,” Browning said. “The problem in health care is not a problem of the market. It is a failure of government.”

Browning made his entry into the healthcare debate in 2005, when he co-directed (with California lawyer and business partner Blaine Greenberg) a 25-minute short film investigating the perilously long waiting times in the Canadian medical system, which is often cited by advocates of universal healthcare coverage as a model for the United States. His findings were summarized in the film’s mordant title: Dead Meat. Since then, Browning has produced several short films that examine the flaws of the Canadian system and take a critical look at statistics -- such as the much-cited but misleading figure that 45 million Americans lack health insurance -- that are used by proponents to mount a case for single-payer health insurance.

Particularly compelling are the films on Canada’s health care system. Posted on Browning’s website, FreeMarketCure.com, they provide a powerful counterpoint to the reverential treatment that the Canadian system receives in Moore’s movie. For Moore, complaints about long waiting times are nothing more than insurance-industry propaganda aimed at discrediting a flawless system. For Browning, they are something else entirely: the stories of real people that the government has left behind.

Case in point is his film A Short Course in Brain Surgery. In it, Browning tells the tale of Lindsay McCreith, a retired body shop owner from Ontario who was forced to wait four months for an MRI to determine whether he had a brain tumor. Banned by Canadian law from seeking private care, he finally got the MRI in Buffalo, New York, whereupon he discovered that the tumor was indeed real. But he still needed surgery. In Canada, he would have been required to wait six to eight months -- by which time the tumor might have proved fatal. In the United States, he got surgery within a week.

Not all of Browning’s films have a happy ending. Two Women, for instance, documents the unhappy plight of a Canadian woman whose bladder had failed. Needing urgent surgery, she was instead placed on a three-year waiting list. Pleading with authorities to be moved up by the list proved futile. Meanwhile, she suffered repeated infections. In the end, doctors had to remove her bladder in order to save her life. By contrast, a man seeking sex-change surgery found a sympathetic ear in a gay parliamentarian: He is now she. It’s the kind of unflattering insight into the realities of the Canadian healthcare system that the more zealous cheerleaders of universal coverage are uneager to dwell on.

Still, not everyone is persuaded. Browning’s critics on the Left protest that it’s unfair to condemn an entire system on the basis of individual tragedies (never mind, for the moment, that it is precisely this “argument-by-anecdote” approach that Moore uses in Sicko to find U.S. healthcare deficient). Browning offers a convincing rebuttal. The cases he highlights in his films are not meant to publicize personal horror stories but to underscore a demonstrable defect of the government-run model: its failure to provide timely care. “The lesson is that what you call urgent and what someone else calls urgent invariably differs in a politicized system,” Browning observes.

That’s not to say that Browning is politically neutral. A recent New York Times article, taking note of Browning‘s film Dead Meat, charged that in its “one-sidedness,” the film was a natural corollary to Moore’s propagandistic oeuvre. The analogy breaks down on reflection: Where Moore sleazily postures as a tribune of the masses, Browning is refreshingly upfront about his biases. Contending that there is too much waste in American health care, he says that he favors a shift away from employment-based health insurance and toward more portable health-insurance plans. But until those reforms come to pass, Browning hopes that his work can provide a ballast to the Michael Moore approach, which he characterizes as “representing only the bad in the U.S. system and only the good in government-run systems that deny care even more aggressively than HMOs.”

He has already achieved much more than that, some say. Among them is Richard Baker, who heads the Vancouver, Canada-based company Timely Medical Alternatives. Specializing in finding private medical care for Canadians placed on waiting lists or otherwise denied care, the company, which works with over 1,000 clients annually, is in many ways a testament to the problems of Canada‘s health care system. Baker, who appears in several of Browning’s films, credits him with bringing the struggles of Canadians to public attention. “He was the first one to document the plight of our clients,” Baker says. Indeed, as Baker sees it, Browning took on a national taboo. “It takes Americans to ask uncomfortable questions like, ‘Why are Canadians putting up with waiting lists?’ Canadians don’t ask these questions because they’re afraid of the answers.” Baker believes that Browning’s films are “going to open the eyes of Canadians to our broken system. And it all started with Stuart.”

It should be noted that several factors are working against Browning. For one thing, unlike Michael Moore, he can’t count on a Hollywood support system or a $9 million budget for his films. (Browning says that his movies cost around $3,000-$4,000 to make, and he stresses that he receives no outside funding from the medical industry.) For another, if polls are any guide, he has to overcome a qualified support for universal coverage on the part of the American public.

But Browning remains optimistic. “Right now, we hear a lot of propaganda about universal healthcare,” he says. “But I think that can change.” His films just might be the answer.

No health insurance? You're probably illegal

No health insurance? You're probably illegal
Census: Skyrocketing numbers without medical coverage reflect migration
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted: July 18, 2007
1:00 a.m. Eastern

© 2007 WorldNetDaily.com

WASHINGTON – While "Sicko" filmmaker Michael Moore is blaming greed and a broken health care system for the inability of Americans to get health-care insurance, it turns out most without coverage are illegal aliens.

According to the latest Census Bureau figures, 43.6 percent of non-citizens in the U.S. are without health insurance. In addition, 33.6 percent of those born elsewhere are without coverage.

By contrast, only 13.4 percent of native-born Americans are without health insurance. And 17.9 percent of naturalized citizens are without coverage.

The statistics will be no surprise to health-care providers. Hospital emergency rooms in Florida and California have been forced to close their doors as a result of increased demands by uninsured and under-insured patients – many of them illegal aliens.

According to a study by University of South Florida researchers, much of the demand on hospitals comes from new residents of the state. More than half of all emergency room patients in some Florida hospitals do not have insurance.

Doctors who treat uninsured patients are not compensated for their treatment.

As a result, hospitals in Florida have lost surgeons and stand to lose entire surgical departments. Some hospitals are having a hard time getting physicians to work because they are choosing to work in other areas where they will be fully compensated for the treatment they give.

As WorldNetDaily previously reported, a study by a prominent medical attorney concludes the porous border with Mexico and the resulting influx of illegal aliens poses a major public health threat to the U.S.

Madeleine Pelner Cosman, author of a report in the spring issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, is particularly concerned with increases in multiple drug-resistant tuberculosis, chagas disease, dengue fever, polio, hepatitis A, B, and C, she told Lou Dobbs on CNN in June.

"Certain diseases that we thought we had vanquished years ago are coming back, and other diseases that we've never seen or rarely seen in America, because they've always been the diseases of poverty and the Third World, are coming in now," she said.

As WorldNetDaily reported, even leprosy is suddenly on the radar of health officials.

Cosman recommends closing the border to all illegal traffic, rescinding the citizenship of "anchor babies," those born in the U.S. to parents who are illegals, and making the aiding and abetting of illegals a crime.

"We have a terrible, absolutely vicious, law called EMTALA: the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, which is really the culprit that requires every emergency room, and every physician of an emergency room, to treat illegal aliens for free," she said.

Cosman said 84 hospitals in California have been forced to close because of the high cost of treating illegal aliens with only 50 percent of all treatments reimbursed by government.

"Even physicians in those emergency rooms don't fully get the point that by being compassionate, and generous, and gracious, they are, in essence, destroying their own livelihoods as well as their own hospitals," she said.

While politicians often mention there are 43 million without health insurance in this country, Cosman's report estimates that at least 25 percent of those are illegal immigrants. The figure could be as high as 50 percent.

Not being insured does not mean they don't get medical care.

Among the organizations directing illegal aliens into America's medical systems, according to the report, are the Ford Foundation-funded Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the National Immigration Law Center, the American Immigration Lawyers Association, the American Bar Association's Commission on Immigration Policy, Practice, and Pro Bono, the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, the National Council of La Raza, George Soros' Open Society Institute, the Migration Policy Institute, the National Network for Immigration and Refugee Rights and the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Because drug addiction and alcoholism are classified as diseases and disabilities, the fiscal toll on the health-care system rises.

"Today, legal immigrants must demonstrate that they are free of communicable diseases and drug addiction to qualify for lawful permanent residency green cards," writes Cosman, a medical lawyer who formerly taught medical students at the City University of New York. "Illegal aliens simply cross our borders medically unexamined, hiding in their bodies any number of communicable diseases."

Serial rape suspect arrested in Burlco

Mondayy, July 16, 2007

By CAROL COMEGNO
Courier-Post Staff

An illegal alien described by Burlington County authorities as a serial rapist has been arrested and charged with five separate crimes in Moorestown and Massachusetts since 2003.

The arrest of Marcelo G. Mota, 28, of Tenby Chase Drive, Delran, was announced Monday by Burlington County Prosecutor Robert Bernardi.

Mota, whom Bernardi said is a Brazilian national living in the United States illegally, is charged with aggravated sexual assault and burglary in the rape of a woman in the Laurel Creek development in Moorestown on Sept. 24, 2005. He is also charged with the burglary of another woman's home in the same development two days alter.

Mota is also charged with three rapes in Massachusetts in 2003 that helped lead investigators in Burlington County to Mota through fingerprints and DNA.

"I would characterize him as a serial rapist," Bernardi said, saying the suspect engaged in random and brazen attacks on women, who "literally found him standing over their beds."

He said Mota was in the country legally until 2001 when his visa expired and that recently he had been working as a translator at a tax preparation agency in the area.

Bernardi said Mota was arrested Friday night on a fugitive warrant from Massachusetts as a result of fingerprint matches and collection of DNA evidence with Burlington County. He said Mota was leaving a Cherry Hill restaurant on Haddonfield-Berlin Road in Cherry Hill at the time of his arrest, which he said occurred without incident.

The prosecutor said Burlington County investigators were able to identify Mota as the suspect in late June by using several data bases, including records of motor vehicle stops in New Jersey. He said Mota was stopped for a traffic violation by police in Delanco in 2005.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"14 Reasons to Deport Illegal Aliens:

1. $11 Billion to $22 billion is spent on welfare to illegal aliens each year. http://tinyurl.com/zob77

2. $2.2 Billion dollars a year is spent on food assistance programs such as food stamps, WIC, and free school lunches for illegal aliens. http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/fiscalexec.html

3. $2.5 Billion dollars a year is spent on Medicaid for illegal aliens. http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/fiscalexec.html

4. $12 Billion dollars a year is spent on primary and secondary school education for children here illegally and they cannot speak a word of English! http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.0.html ; (This one does not work but it is the same one as no. 5 below http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html.)

5. $17 Billion dollars a year is spent for education for the American-born children of illegal aliens, known as anchor babies. http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html

6. $3 Million Dollars a DAY is spent to incarcerate illegal aliens. http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html

7. 30% percent of all Federal Prison inmates are illegal aliens. http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html

8. $90 Billion Dollars a year is spent on illegal aliens for
Welfare & social services by the American taxpayers. http://premium.cnn.com/TRANSCIPTS/0610/29/ldt.01.html (This one did not work but it is the same as no. 7 or 9. http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html)

9. $200 Billion Dollars a year in suppressed American wages are caused by the illegal aliens. http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html

10. The illegal aliens in the United States have a crime rate that's two and a half times that of white non-illegal aliens. In particular, their children, are going to make a huge additional crime problem in the United States . http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0606/12/ldt.01.html

11. During the year of 2005 there were 4 to 10 MILLION illegal aliens that crossed our Southern Border also, as many as 19,500 illegal aliens from Terrorist Countries. Millions of pounds of drugs, cocaine, meth, heroine and marijuana, crossed into
the U. S. from the Southern border. Homeland Security Report: http://tinyurl.com/t9sht

12. The National Policy Institute, "estimated that the total cost of mass deportation would be between $206 and $230 billion or an average cost of between $41 and $46 billion annually over a five year period." (No longer available from http:// www.nationalpolicyinstitute.org/pdf/deportation.pdf but can be downloaded free from http://www.nationalpolicyinstitute.org/publications.php?b=deportation)

13. In 2006 illegal aliens sent home $45 BILLION in remittances back to their countries of origin. http://www.rense.com/general75/niht.htm

14. "The Dark Side of Illegal Immigration: Nearly One Million Sex Crimes Committed by Illegal Immigrants In The United States ". http://www.drdsk.com/ar ticleshtml (Try this one instead: http://www.drdsk.com/articles.html#Illegals)
So using the LOWEST estimates, the annual cost OF ILLEGAL ALIENS is $338.3 BILLION DOLLARS A YEAR! So if deporting them costs between $206 and $230 BILLION DOLLARS, get rid of em', We'll be ahead after the 1st year!!!"
_________________________________________________________
I PERSONALLY LOVE HOW THE HEADLINE MAKE NO MENTION OF THE FACT THAT HE IS AN ILLEGAL ALIEN!

IRAQI CORNHOLIO!

IRAQIS STREET SURFING!

Radio Host Tears Into "Offended" Muslim

RIGHT ON!!!! I LOVE NEIL BORTZ!

FBI: Iraqis Being Smuggled Across the Rio Grande

FBI: Iraqis Being Smuggled Across the Rio Grande
Share July 17, 2007 3:11 PM

ABC NEWS
Brian Ross Reports:

The FBI is investigating an alleged human smuggling operation based in Chaparral, N.M., that agents say is bringing "Iraqis and other Middle Eastern" individuals across the Rio Grande from Mexico.

An FBI intelligence report distributed by the Washington, D.C. Joint Terrorism Task Force, obtained by the Blotter on ABCNews.com, says the illegal ring has been bringing Iraqis across the border illegally for more than a year.

Border Patrol officials in the area said they were unaware of the specifics of the FBI's report, and federal prosecutors in New Mexico told ABCNews.com they had no current cases involving the illegal smuggling of Iraqis.

The FBI report, issued last week, says the smuggling organization "used to smuggle Mexicans, but decided to smuggle Iraqi or other Middle Eastern individuals because it was more lucrative." Each individual would be charged a fee of $20,000 to $25,000, according to the report.

The people to be smuggled would "gather at a house on the Mexican side of the border" and then cross the Rio Grande into the U.S., the report says.

"Unidentified individuals would then transport them to train stations in El Paso, Texas or Belen, New Mexico," according to the FBI document.

A spokesman in Albuquerque said the FBI had "no viable information" that could lead to a case.

Until recently, the United States has kept its doors all but shut to the estimated two million refugees fleeing the violence in Iraq. Until this year, the country had taken in fewer than 800 Iraqi refugees, according to the State Department. This May, the Bush administration pledged to resettle 7,000 Iraqi refugees here by the end of the year.

This post has been updated.
_________________________________________

Is anyone suprised? NO!!!! We already knew this was happening, hence the reason to build the border fence. Everyone thinks we wants to kee pthe poor little illiegal Mexican farmers out. NO!!!! we want to keep out criminals, and others who wish to do us harm. WHY THE HELL ARE WE WAITING TO BE HIT! BUILD THE FENCE, STOP IMPORTING TERRORISTS and calling them war refugees, STOP FINANCING THE BUILDING OF MADRASSAS, KICK OUT CAIR.. STOP THE INSANITY!

Teenager loses High Court battle against school ban on chastity ring

Teenager loses High Court battle against school ban on chastity ring
By SAM GREENHILL - More by this author »
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=468760&in_page_id=1770&ito=1490



A Christain girl has lost her High Court battle to be allowed to wear a silver chastity ring at school.

Lydia Playfoot's pastor father faces a £20,000 legal bill after a judge rejected her claim for equal rights with Muslim pupils allowed to wear headscarves.

To Lydia, 16, the ring represented a symbol of her faith and her commitment to remain a virgin until she marries.

But to the Millais School in Horsham, West Sussex, it was simply jewellery and flouted strict rules on pupil uniforms.

Lydia challenged the decision in the High Court, claiming it had breached her human rights.

The school, which allows Muslim and Sikh students to wear headscarves and religious bracelets, argued that the purity ring was not an integral part of the Christian faith and contravened its uniform policy.

Ban: A judge ruled that Lydia Playfoot couldn't wear her purity ring at school

Deputy High Court Judge Michael Supperstone QC said the school was "fully justified" in banning the ring, a symbol of the Silver Ring Thing movement in the US.

He ruled that since Lydia's faith did not require her to wear one, she could not properly argue she was "manifesting her belief" by doing so.

"The act of wearing a ring is not intimately linked to the belief in chastity before marriage," he said.

He ordered that her father Phil pay the school's £12,000 costs in addition to his daughter's legal bill. Lydia was refused legal aid - unlike two Muslim girls who fought similar cases.

Lydia said she was "very disappointed" at the decision and added that it would mean that, "slowly, over time, people such as school governors, employers, political organisations and others will be allowed to stop Christians from publicly expressing and practising their faith".

Showing faith: Lydia Playfoot said her ring symbolised her commitment to remain a virgin

Her father added: "This does seem yet another example of how Christians are being treated differently."

Lydia and her silver ring have become the latest symbols of the clash between Christianity and what it regards as the creeping secularisation of British society.

Her case was fought by barrister Paul Diamond, who successfully represented BA worker Nadia Eweida in her battle to be allowed to wear a crucifix openly at work.

She was backed by the Lawyers Christian Fellowship and her devout parents.

Phil and Heather Playfoot originally suggested to Lydia - one of their four daughters - that she wear the ring. Mr Playfoot, 50, an evangelical pastor at Kings Church in Horsham, and his 48-year-old wife are part of the volunteer team which runs the UK branch of the Silver Ring Thing, in Horsham.



It is an evangelical American movement which encourages teenagers to make a "pledge of chastity" - and charges them £10 for a silver ring bearing a Biblical inscription.

In his ruling, the judge praised the principle of school uniforms saying it fostered allegiance, discipline, equality and cohesion. He said they helped children to avoid the social pressures that develop around clothing and jewellery.

He said Lydia and her parents had signed up to the uniform code and noted there were other ways Lydia could have expressed her belief, such as with keychains, badges or stickers - all of which were acceptable to the school.

Headmaster Leon Nettley has questioned whether his school was being used as a "vehicle to gain publicity" for the Silver Ring Thing.

He said: "We have always respected Lydia's right to hold and express her views. Our success is tinged with regret that proceedings have needed to progress to this level."

Last year, Muslim Shabina Begum, 15, fought to wear a jilbab - a long loose gown - in class, and earlier this year a 12-year-old who cannot be named battled a Buckinghamshire girls' school for the right to wear a full-face veil. Both were granted legal aid, and both lost their cases.

John Dunford, of the Association of School and College Leaders, said: "I hope that today's judgment will send a strong signal to parents and pupils that schools have every right to set a uniform and that pupils should abide by it."

Terror group gets amnesty

List of immune militants includes nearly entire senior leadership of major terrorist organization

By Aaron Klein
© 2007 WorldNetDaily.com

TEL AVIV – A list of wanted militants from Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah organization who were granted amnesty this weekend by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert includes almost the entire senior West Bank leadership of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades terror group, WND has learned.

The Brigades, Fatah's declared military wing, took responsibility for every suicide bombing in Israel the past three years. Statistically, the Brigades carried out more anti-Israel terror attacks emanating from the West Bank since 2005 than any other group, including Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

U.S. policy largely considers Fatah moderate, while the Brigades is classified as a terror organization by the State Department.

Olmert's office hasn't released the names of the 178 militants granted amnesty, but sections of the list were obtained by WND.

The list includes the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades overall chief; Brigades chiefs in several West Bank cities; the Brigades cell that sent a suicide bomber to Tel Aviv in April 2006 that killed 10 civilians, including an American teenager, Daniel Wultz; and the Brigades perpetuator of a shooting attack in December 2000 that killed Israeli nationalist leader Benyamin Kahane.

Olmert's office issued 178 documents for the Fatah fugitives to sign, pledging their resignation from any so-called paramilitary organizations and promising to refrain from terrorism. The wanted militants also must spend a week in a PA holding area and must restrict their movements to the area in which they reside for three months. After a three-month period, they can move freely throughout the West Bank. Since most wanted militants have been confined to their residential areas the past few years anyway due to the threat of Israeli operations, the deal effectively grants them for the first time freedom of movement.

In exchange, Israel will not conduct anti-terror operations to capture the wanted militants.

Olmert granted the Fatah terrorists amnesty as part of a series of gestures to bolster Abbas in the West Bank after Hamas in June overtook all Fatah security compounds in the Gaza Strip and effectively expelled Fatah from Gaza.

At a meeting tomorrow with Abbas, Olmert is expecting to present the Palestinian leader with more gestures, including a release of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails.

The list obtained by WND of some of the senior Fatah fighters that Olmert granted amnesty to includes:

Ala Senakreh, overall chief of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades in the West Bank. Based in the Balata refugee camp in the northern West Bank town of Nablus, Senakreh's cell, along with the Islamic Jihad terror group, is suspected of directing all suicide bombings in Israel in 2005 and 2006.
Among the suicide bombings Senakreh is suspected of personally directing is one attack that killed two people and wounded 33 others in a crowded bus station in Jerusalem's French Hill neighborhood.

Senakreh doubles as an officer on Fatah's Preventative Security Services. He will continue his duties as a Fatah security officer.

Senakreh yesterday told WND he hasn't yet signed the amnesty agreement because his brother, also a Brigades member, wasn't among those offered immunity. He said Chief Palestinian Negotiator Saeb Erekat is asking Olmert's office to grant Senakreh's brother immunity.

Kamal Ranam, chief of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades in Ramallah. Ranam's cell is suspected of carrying out dozens of anti-Israel shooting attacks, including three Israeli highway shootings in June 2006 – one that killed a 35-year-old Israeli Arab on a major West Bank highway on the outskirts of Jerusalem; a second that wounded an Israeli two days later; and a shooting of a busload of schoolgirls on June 19, 2006. Israeli security officials say the perpetuators of the attack that killed the Israeli Arab likely mistook the victim for a Jew.
Ranam signed the amnesty agreement yesterday.

Zacharia Zbeidi, chief of the Brigades in the West Bank city of Jenin. Most suicide bombers to infiltrate Israel since September 2000 originated in Jenin, some were sent by the Brigades. Zbeidi is suspected of directing at least two suicide bombings and scores of deadly shooting attacks against Israeli civilians and soldiers.
Zbeidi told WND he signed the amnesty agreement.

Abu Yousuf, a senior leader of the Brigades in Ramallah, is suspected of shooting at Israeli forces operating in Ramallah and carried out a shooting attack in northern Samaria in December 2000 that killed Kahane, leader of the nationalist Kahane Chai organization.
After the Kahane murder, Yousuf was extended refuge by Yasser Arafat to live in the late PLO leader's Ramallah compound, widely known as the Muqata. Yousuf still lives in the compound, to which U.S. assault rifles have previously been delivered as part of aid to Abbas. Yousuf doubles as an officer in Abbas' Force 17 security detail.

Yousuf told WND he signed the amnesty agreement. He said he will continue serving in Force 17.

Nasser Abu Aziz, the No. 2 of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades and Senakreh's main deputy. Aziz's group is suspected of directing all suicide bombings in Israel the past three years together with Islamic Jihad, including the Tel Aviv attack that killed Wultz and nine others.
Although Islamic Jihad and the Brigades took joint credit for the Tel Aviv attack, Brigades sources told WND their group directed the suicide bombing, supplying the bomber and infiltrating him into Tel Aviv. The sources said Islamic Jihad provided the explosives belt as a symbolic act so the terror group could also take part in the attack.

Wultz, who was vacationing in Israel from Florida, was gravely injured in the bombing and died of his wounds about two weeks later. Wultz's father, Tuly, was also injured in the bombing.

At the time of the bombing, Aziz called Wultz's death a "gift from Allah" in a WND interview.

Aziz yesterday told WND he is one of the few Brigades leaders not singing the amnesty agreement, saying the document is "too good to be true."

"I am sure this is part of an Israeli conspiracy against our fighters," Aziz said.

Senior Olmert spokeswoman Miri Eisin would neither confirm nor deny the list of terror suspects granted amnesty obtained by WND.

"I do not know the list of names but all included will have to renounce terrorism," Eisin said.

Eisin said Olmert granted the terror suspects amnesty "as part of developing a relationship with Abbas and the PA government in the realm of security, economy and many other levels."

"The Israeli government is committed to cooperating with the PA just as the PA committed to international principles and they are already taking concrete steps on their side. We hope this (amnesty) deal adds to the momentum to bring about a Palestinian state living securely alongside Israel," said Eisin.

Asked whether Olmert is willing to add more terrorists – such as Brigades chief Senakreh's brother – to the amnesty list, Eisin replied, "there is always a possibility that more who want to renounce terror may be added. We are willing to address this issue."

Multiple media reports yesterday stated as part of their amnesty agreement, Fatah fighters were turning their weapons in to the PA in exchange for cash payments.

Brigades members contacted by WND said about a dozen of the nearly 200 wanted militants handed in their personal weapons but said those who did are keeping assault rifles issued to them by Fatah as part of the Fatah security forces.

Asked if he will continue participating in attacks against Israel, one top Brigades leader speaking on condition his name be withheld since he just signed an amnesty agreement, replied, "If Israel doesn't give us a reason to carry out attacks then why should we? But if we see the Israelis are looking to escalate things in the West Bank, the resistance will continue."

Brigades No. 2 Aziz told WND even though senior leaders were signing amnesty agreements, the Brigades is not disbanding.

"We have conditions. We don't trust the Israelis. The Brigades will not disband. We are ready to negotiate a deal of amnesty but we won't sell out our principals and arms."

As Teen Girl Awaits Death, Saudi Surge in Beheadings Could Set Record High

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — Rizana Nafeek, a 19-year old housemaid from Sri Lanka, is on death row because the baby in her care died while she was bottle-feeding him. If her appeal is turned down, she will taken to a public square to be publicly beheaded.

The Sri Lankan government says it is working for a reprieve, and has until Monday to file the plea. A last-minute pardon by the infant's parents could also spare her. But if her execution goes ahead, it will be the latest in a surge of beheadings that could surpass the kingdom's record of 191 in 2005.

After dropping to 38 last year, the figure for 2007 is already at least 102, including three women, according to Amnesty International.

Beheading has always been the punishment meted out to murderers, rapists, drug traffickers and armed robbers in Saudi Arabia. Whether what Nafeek did amounts to murder has never been spelled out by courts or other officials, but Saudi authorities, facing sustained criticism from foreign human rights groups, insist they are simply enforcing God's law.

In February, four Sri Lankan workers were executed for armed robbery and their headless bodies left on public display in Riyadh, triggering harsh criticism from international rights groups.

Amnesty International says some defendants are convicted solely on the basis of confessions obtained under duress, torture or deception.

Speaking of the housemaid's sentence, Kate Allen of Amnesty International called it "an absolute scandal that Saudi Arabia is preparing to behead a teenage girl who didn't even have a lawyer at her trial."

"The Saudi authorities are flouting an international prohibition on the execution of child offenders by even imposing a death sentence on a defendant who was reportedly 17 at the time of the alleged crime," she said.

Nafeek arrived in the kingdom on May 4, 2005 to work as a housemaid. She was given the additional duty of looking after the baby boy, a job the Sri Lankan Embassy says she was not trained to do. The embassy says the infant died on May 22 while she was bottle-feeding him.

Nafeek allegedly confessed, according to the statement, but then recanted, saying her admission was obtained under duress.

The Asian Human Rights Commission, an independent Hong Kong-based body of jurists and human rights activists, said it was an accident. The child was choking, it said, and Nafeek "was desperately trying to help by way of soothing and stroking the chest, face and neck of the baby." However, it said, "due to misunderstandings this case was presented as the murder of a baby by strangulation."

An estimated 5.6 million foreign workers, many of them Asian, serve a Saudi population of 22 million. Of the 102 executed this year, half were foreigners, including 21 Pakistanis, according to Amnesty International.

"The workers commit big crimes against Saudis," charged Suhaila Hammad of Saudi Arabia's National Society for Human Rights. She said the number of executions has risen because crime has increased.

She said prisoners are treated humanely and that beheadings deter crime.

"Allah, our creator, knows best what's good for his people," Hammad told The Associated Press. "Should we just think of and preserve the rights of the murderer and not think of the rights of others?"

Beheadings are carried out with a sword, with police holding back spectators and making sure no one takes photos. Prisoners, usually sedated, are made to kneel, flanked by clerics and law enforcement officials and facing the victim's family.

"The prisoner now recites verses from the Quran while a government official reads the charges and the verdict," according to an account in Arab News, a Saudi daily. "Halfway through the reading the executioner suddenly nicks the back of the prisoner's neck with his sword, causing him to tense and raise his head involuntarily."

Then, in one swift move, the prisoner is decapitated.

Beheadings take place all over Saudi Arabia, usually in a square next to a mosque.

In a recent interview with Al-Yaum daily, Fahd al-Abdullah, an executioner in the Eastern Province, called his job "a very ordinary profession, just like any other profession."

Al-Abdallah, 27, comes from a long line of executioners. As a child he would watch his grandfather wield the sword, and later was trained for a year by his uncle.

He said that before a beheading, he urges the victim's family to pardon the prisoner.

Some families do, just minutes before the blade falls. Others do it before an execution date is set in exchange for money or in response to appeals from members of the royal family.

A famous case was that of Samira Murait. In 2000 she shot dead a male acquaintance who stalked her after she married. After vigorous mediation efforts and pleas from the public as well as from a Saudi prince, the family agreed to forgive her. She had spent seven years in prison.

But Nafeek's Saudi employers refused to pardon her, and a court in Ad Dawadimi, 250 miles west of Riyadh, sentenced her to death on June 16.

-Associated Press

Al-Qaida infiltrating America as patients

Clinics warn of medical visa scam by foreigners looking to get in U.S.
© 2007 WorldNetDaily.com


Medical clinics across the country have been flooded with requests from foreign nationals from Pakistan and other Muslim countries to help them gain visa entry into the U.S. as patients.

The post-9/11 trend concerns authorities who fear al-Qaida could be using the medical industry to infiltrate terrorist cells into the country.

Some clinics have sponsored foreign patients only to have them fail to show up at their facilities.

The Caster Eye Center in Beverly Hills, Calif., for example, stopped granting such foreign requests after a couple of no-shows.

"In the last few years, we have granted this request only twice. The first was for someone in Uganda, and the other was for someone in Sri Lanka," said Diane Sylvester, surgery coordinator at the Caster Eye Center, one of the leading Lasik eye surgery clinics in Los Angeles. "On both occasions, we issued the letter of invitation, and on both occasions the patient in question never showed up at our facility."

Sylvester told WND the clinic recently has received additional requests for letters from nationals in Pakistan and other al-Qaida hotbeds. Foreign nationals can use the letters to obtain B-2 visitors visas from the State Department to receive medical treatment.

Requests sent to the Caster Eye clinic via e-mail, copies of which were obtained by WND, show nationals have not only requested letters for themselves but for groups as large as a dozen people.

"My concern is that our facility is helping people we cannot personally vouch for to gain entry into the U.S. – or even worse, helping people get visas which are then given or sold into the wrong hands," Sylvester said.

"How many other medical facilities are churning out letters like this under similar circumstances?" she added.

A spokesperson for the State Department, which grants U.S. visas through its embassies abroad, said there are no post-9/11 restrictions on medical facilities issuing invitation letters to foreign nationals. Nor has the department issued any cautions to the health-care industry.

"I'm not sure which I'm more alarmed by – people scamming for visas, or the casual attitude of those overseeing the granting of visas," Sylvester said.

The department added, however, that a letter of invitation from a medical facility does not necessarily guarantee approval of a foreign patient's visa.

In the wake of the recent "doctor jihad" in the UK, the FBI and Department of Homeland Security are scrutinizing foreign nationals who have applied to the U.S. for visas to attend medical school or practice medicine here.

Two of the UK physicians who plotted to car-bomb London's entertainment district had applied for permission to work in the U.S. One made contact with the Philadelphia-based Educational Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates.

Terrorists posing as patients also are a growing concern, federal authorities say.

FBI case agents contacted by WND confirm al-Qaida in the past has tried to infiltrate operatives into the U.S. by claiming they need medical treatment.

"Khallad" bin Attash

Take the case of Tawfiq bin Attash, also known as "Khallad" or "Salah Mohammad."

The dangerous al-Qaida operative and one-time bodyguard for Osama bin Laden – who helped plan both the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen and the earlier bombings of the U.S. embassies in Africa – tried to enter the U.S. from Yemen before 9/11 to participate in the attacks.

In 1999, FBI sources say, he assigned a suspected U.S.-based facilitator for al-Qaida to solicit a Seattle-area medical clinic to vouch for him as a patient so he could receive a U.S. visa.

The facility, called NovaCare Orthotics & Prosthetics, issued a letter to the suspected al-Qaida facilitator confirming the appointment he made for his "friend" bin Attash – who unbeknown to the clinic, was one of the world's most dangerous terrorists.

Despite the letter of invitation, bin Attash's visa requests fortunately were denied by the U.S. government. He was arrested in Karachi, Pakistan, in 2003, and is now in U.S. custody.

In 2004, a Pakistani national from Bahawalpur – another known hotbed for terrorist recruits – demanded the Caster Eye Center in Los Angeles issue him a letter of invitation he could present to the U.S. consulate to obtain a visa.

"I want a free visa for sergury [sic]," Nabeel Ahmed Bhatti wrote in an e-mail, a copy of which was obtained by WND. He claimed to have what he described in his limited English as a "short problem" with his left eye.

Pakistanis posing as disabled travelers

Additionally, the FBI and Homeland Security have warned consular officers in Pakistan, as well as law enforcement in the U.S., to be on the alert for al-Qaida terrorists posing as medical aides to disabled persons.

In November 2003, for example, WND has learned U.S. intelligence intercepted information about a plot by al-Qaida to employ the scam to obtain U.S. visas for terrorist operatives at the U.S. embassy in Islamabad.

Here is the text of the warning issued in a closely held intelligence-driven action bulletin by Homeland Security at the time:

"As of mid-November 2003, Islamic extremists were supposedly planning to send operatives to the United States and United Kingdom to conduct attacks. The attacks will allegedly take place in April 2004. The operatives will be Pakistani individuals who would obtain U.S. visas in Islamabad, Pakistan. The operatives will accompany a disabled person and act as the disabled person's assistants when obtaining the visa."

The two-page DHS intelligence bulletin, marked "SENSITIVE LAW ENFORCEMENT INFORMATION" and obtained by WND, added that operatives could conceal weapons, explosive materials or other contraband inside prosthetic limbs or in wheelchairs on board inbound flights to the U.S.

"This method fits with current al-Qaida methodology," the bulletin said, "as al-Qaida has been trying to recruit individuals who would draw less scrutiny from U.S. law enforcement entities."

Clinton / Edwards Conspiracy....

AP: Clinton & Edwards overheard talking about excluding some rivals from debates
There's yet more evidence now that politicians of all political persuasions sometimes forget that microphones are likely going to be turned "on" when they're around. The Associated Press writes that after yesterday's Democratic candidates forum at the NAACP convention ended:

Fox News microphones picked up (Sen. Hillary Rodham) Clinton and (former senator John) Edwards discussing their desire to limit future joint appearances to exclude some rivals lower in the crowded field. "We should try to have a more serious and a smaller group," Edwards said.

Clinton agreed. "We've got to cut the number. ... They're not serious," she said, then thanked (Sen. Barack) Obama and Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich as they walked by. Turning back to Edwards, she added that she thought their campaigns had already tried to limit the debates and "we've gotta get back to it."

Kucinich, one of the candidates that Clinton and Edwards may have been discussing, isn't taking kindly to such talk: "Imperial candidates are as repugnant to the American people and to our democracy as an imperial president," he says.

Our friends at ABC News' Political Radar say they're pressing the Clinton and Edwards campaigns to find out more about what the candidates said. ABC also has video and audio of the Clinton-Edwards conversation. The moment when Kucinich walks by comes about 31 seconds into it.

She raises some good points....

Finally an Arab who identifies herself not by religous terms but by humanities.

THANK GOD IT DIDN'T PASS!!!!

Hillary Clinton Caught Violating Campaign Finance Laws

Hillary Clinton Caught "Alledgedly" Violating Campaign Finance Laws On Tape! Marked as: Mature
Posted: June 22, 2007
1:00 a.m. Eastern

By Art Moore
© 2007 WorldNetDaily.com


Hillary Clinton greeted at August 2000 Hollywood gala and fund-raiser by Peter Paul and his wife Andrea (Courtesy Hillcap.org)
The full, five-minute videotape touted as "smoking gun evidence" of two felonies committed by Sen. Hillary Clinton has been released to WND.

As WND reported, the tape was submitted as evidence to a California appeals court yesterday in a civil fraud suit against the New York Democrat and her husband, former President Bill Clinton.

WND reported in April the tape indicates Clinton -- despite denials throughout six years of investigation -- was directly involved with business mogul Peter Franklin Paul in producing a lavish Hollywood fundraiser in August 2000 that eventually cost Paul nearly $2 million.

Clinton's participation in the planning of the event would make Paul's substantial contributions a direct donation to her Senate campaign rather than her joint fundraising committee, violating federal statutes that limit "hard money" contributions to a candidate to $2,000 per person. Knowingly accepting or soliciting $25,000 or more in a calendar year is a felony carrying a prison sentence of up to five years.

Paul's complaint charges President Clinton destroyed his entertainment company to get out of a $17 million deal in which Clinton promised to promote the firm in exchange for stock, cash options and massive contributions to his wife's 2000 campaign. Paul contends he was directed by the Clintons and Democratic Party leaders to foot the bill for the Hollywood event.

In the tape, Clinton is heard via speakerphone thanking Paul, business partner Stan Lee and other colleagues for their efforts in putting together the fundraiser.

She also describes the role of longtime aide Kelly Craighead as assisting in day-to-day involvement in preparation for the event as her liaison with Paul and his producers.


Peter Paul and Sen. Hillary Clinton (Courtesy Hillcap.org)

Craighead, Clinton says, "talks all the time" with Paul, "so she'll be the person to convey whatever I need."

The aide's hands-on role is significant, because the law also implicates a candidate if any of his or her agents are involved in coordinating expenditures with a donor.

In another portion of the tape, Clinton is heard discussing her direct solicitation of a large contribution from the entertainer Cher. Paul's legal team, the U.S. Justice Foundation, argues the value of Cher's performance alone vastly exceeded the FEC limits.

The tape was one of 90 Paul was ordered to turn over to the U.S. attorney's office for the Eastern District of New York in 2001 as part of the investigation in a related securities case against him. But it has never been used as evidence, despite its relevance to the key question of Sen. Clinton's involvement in the Hollywood fundraiser.

Sen. Clinton has claimed through her spokesman Howard Wolfson that Paul gave no money to her campaign, and her supporters have denied she had any anything to do with coordinating the fund-raiser or soliciting contributions directly from donors.

Clinton's campaign has counted the more than $800,000 of in-kind contributions it reported in a 2006 amended FEC report for the Hollywood Gala as indirect, or "soft money," given to the New York Senate 2000 Committee, a state account that was run jointly by Clinton, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the New York State Democratic Party.

The Clintons' longtime attorney David Kendall has not replied to WND's request for comment on Paul's videotape. Kendall previously has declined comment on the case, saying only to WND regarding the felony assertion, "Any such allegation is totally false and totally unsupported."

77 yr-old Iraqi Woman Tell Bush Protestors to Go To Hell

Farfour.. Killed Off On Hamas Childrens TV Show

Muslims Protest Over Salman Rushdie

Global Protest over Salman Rushdie knighthood...
Thousands burned effigies of Queen Elizabeth and Salman Rushdie yesterday as the country’s parliament renewed a call for Britain to withdraw the novelist’s knighthood.
Demonstrators took to the streets in several cities amid growing anger at Britain’s decision to honour the author of ‘The Satanic Verses’, which some Muslims consider blasphemous.
A crowd of around 300 people in the capital Islamabad, watched over by riot police carrying batons and shields, chanted “Our struggle will continue until Salman Rushdie is killed!”
“Britain must withdraw the knighthood and hand Rushdie to Pakistan to be punished under Islamic laws,” Fazalur Rehman, a pro-Taliban cleric and leader of the parliamentary opposition, told the protesters.
In the southern commercial hub of Karachi more than 1,000 people chanting ‘Death to Rushdie, Death to Britain’ gathered outside the city’s main Binori mosque.
The protesters chanted that they backed comments made in parliament on Monday by Religious Affairs Minister Ijaz-ul Haq that Rushdie’s knighthood justified suicide bombings.
They hit out at former prime minister Benazir Bhutto for calling for Haq’s resignation.
Britain earlier this week expressed “deep concern” over the remarks, when the British envoy to Islamabad was summoned to the Pakistani foreign office to receive a complaint about the award.
In the central city of Multan there were several protests, the largest drawing some 600 people. Members of the local paramedics association torched effigies of Rushdie and the queen, an AFP photographer said.
Around 700 activists and members of cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan’s party chanted ‘Curse Rushdie, Long Live Osama’ in the northwestern city of Peshawar.
Hundreds of protesters burned tyres and posters from a local cinema in the eastern town of Gujrat. They also set fire to a Rushdie dummy and blocked the main road through the town for two hours.
Several hundred protesters also gathered in the eastern city of Lahore and in Quetta, a southwestern city near the Afghan border.
Earlier the national assembly - the lower house of parliament -unanimously passed a resolution again calling for London to revoke Rushdie’s honour. It issued a similar call on Monday.
“This house again demands the British government take back the award from blasphemer Rushdie and apologise to the Islamic world,” said the new resolution, moved by Parliamentary Affairs Minister Sher Afgan Niazi.
A legislator from the party of exiled former premier Nawaz Sharif called for Rushdie to be murdered. “Whosoever kills him will be the hero of Muslims,” Khwaja Saad Rafiq told the assembly.
Pakistani traders offered a Rs10mn ($165,000) reward late Thursday for anyone who beheads Rushdie, while a group of scholars awarded Osama bin Laden their highest honour in a tit-for-tat move.
Iran’s clerical regime sentenced Rushdie to death in 1989.
Meanwhile the chief minister of southern Sindh province, Arbab Ghulam Rahim, said he was returning to the British High Commission a medal given to his grandfather by King George VI in 1937 and a title awarded to his uncle by the British in 1945.
“I will now return these as no Muslim can accept any title from the queen after she honoured Salman Rushdie,” he said. – AFP

Former Radical Islamist Speaks

DAILY MAIL (UK)
I was a fanatic...I know their thinking, says former radical Islamist
By HASSAN BUTT - More by this author »
When I was still a member of what is probably best termed the British Jihadi Network - a series of British Muslim terrorist groups linked by a single ideology - I remember how we used to laugh in celebration whenever people on TV proclaimed that the sole cause for Islamic acts of terror like 9/11, the Madrid bombings and 7/7 was Western foreign policy.

By blaming the Government for our actions, those who pushed this "Blair's bombs" line did our propaganda work for us.

Two doctors held over bomb attacks
Summer of chaos ahead as airports step up terror shield

More important, they also helped to draw away any critical examination from the real engine of our violence: Islamic theology.

The attempts to cause mass destruction in London and Glasgow are so reminiscent of other recent British Islamic extremist plots that they are likely to have been carried out by my former peers.

And as with previous terror attacks, people are again saying that violence carried out by Muslims is all to do with foreign policy.

For example, on Saturday on Radio 4's Today programme, the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, said: "What all our intelligence shows about the opinions of disaffected young Muslims is the main driving force is not Afghanistan, it is mainly Iraq."

I left the British Jihadi Network in February 2006 because I realised that its members had simply become mindless killers. But if I were still fighting for their cause, I'd be laughing once again.

Mohammed Sidique Khan met with the author on two separate occasions.

Mohammad Sidique Khan, the leader of the July 7 bombings, and I were both part of the network - I met him on two occasions.

And though many British extremists are angered by the deaths of fellow Muslim across the world, what drove me and many others to plot acts of extreme terror within Britain and abroad was a sense that we were fighting for the creation of a revolutionary worldwide Islamic state that would dispense Islamic justice.

If we were interested in justice, you may ask, how did this continuing violence come to be the means of promoting such a (flawed) Utopian goal?

How do Islamic radicals justify such terror in the name of their religion?

There isn't enough room to outline everything here, but the foundation of extremist reasoning rests upon a model of the world in which you are either a believer or an infidel.

Formal Islamic theology, unlike Christian theology, does not allow for the separation of state and religion: they are considered to be one and the same.

For centuries, the reasoning of Islamic jurists has set down rules of interaction between Dar ul-Islam (the Land of Islam) and Dar ul-Kufr (the Land of Unbelief) to cover almost every matter of trade, peace and war.

But what radicals and extremists do is to take this two steps further. Their first step has been to argue that, since there is no pure Islamic state, the whole world must be Dar ul-Kufr (The Land of Unbelief).

Step two: since Islam must declare war on unbelief, they have declared war upon the whole world.

Along with many of my former peers, I was taught by Pakistani and British radical preachers that this reclassification of the globe as a Land of War (Dar ul-Harb) allows any Muslim to destroy the sanctity of the five rights that every human is granted under Islam: life, wealth, land, mind and belief.

In Dar ul-Harb, anything goes, including the treachery and cowardice of attacking civilians.

The notion of a global battlefield has been a source of friction for Muslims living in Britain.

For decades, radicals have been exploiting the tensions between Islamic theology and the modern secular state - typically by starting debate with the question: "Are you British or Muslim?"

But the main reason why radicals have managed to increase their following is because most Muslim institutions in Britain just don't want to talk about theology.

They refuse to broach the difficult and often complex truth that Islam can be interpreted as condoning violence against the unbeliever - and instead repeat the mantra that Islam is peace and hope that all of this debate will go away.

This has left the territory open for radicals to claim as their own. I should know because, as a former extremist recruiter, I repeatedly came across those who had tried to raise these issues with mosque authorities only to be banned from their grounds.

Every time this happened it felt like a moral and religious victory for us because it served as a recruiting sergeant for extremism.

Outside Britain, there are those who try to reverse this two-step revisionism.

A handful of scholars from the Middle East have tried to put radicalism back in the box by saying that the rules of war devised so long ago by Islamic jurists were always conceived with the existence of an Islamic state in mind, a state which would supposedly regulate jihad in a responsible Islamic fashion.

In other words, individual Muslims don't have the authority to go around declaring global war in the name of Islam.

But there is a more fundamental reasoning that has struck me as a far more potent argument because it involves recognising the reality of the world: Muslims don't actually live in the bipolar world of the Middle Ages any more.

The fact is that Muslims in Britain are citizens of this country. We are no longer migrants in a Land of Unbelief.

For my generation, we were born here, raised here, schooled here, we work here and we'll stay here.

But more than that, on a historically unprecedented scale, Muslims in Britain have been allowed to assert their religious identity through clothing, the construction of mosques, the building of cemeteries and equal rights in law.

However, it isn't enough for responsible Muslims to say that, because they feel at home in Britain, they can simply ignore those passages of the Koran which instruct on killing unbelievers.

Because so many in the Muslim community refuse to challenge centuries-old theological arguments, the tensions between Islamic theology and the modern world grow larger every day.

I believe that the issue of terrorism can be easily demystified if Muslims and non-Muslims start openly to discuss the ideas that fuel terrorism.

Crucially, the Muslim community in Britain must slap itself awake from its state of denial and realise there is no shame in admitting the extremism within our families, communities and worldwide co-religionists.

If our country is going to take on radicals and violent extremists, Muslim scholars must go back to the books and come forward with a refashioned set of rules and a revised understanding of the rights and responsibilities of Muslims whose homes and souls are firmly planted in what I'd like to term the Land of Co-existence.

And when this new theological territory is opened up, Western Muslims will be able to liberate themselves from defunct models of the world, rewrite the rules of interaction and perhaps we will discover that the concept of killing in the name of Islam is no more than an anachronism.

Well Put Patriot8732!

ARE WE TO BLAME? NO!!!

Attention to all those who think we brought the London and Scotland bombings on ourselves for "invading Iraq".

Your view that if we just appease or be nice to Islamists and the “Muslim Street” does not match with actual reality. Starting with Richard Nixon ignoring Palestinian terrorists murdering our diplomats, and continuing with Jimmy Carter’s weak and impotent responses to an act of War (invading our Embassy), followed by Ronald Reagan’s weak and ineffectual “run away run away” strategy following the Iranian bombing of the Beirut Barracks and Embassy in Lebanon (the new Iranian Defense Minister was the architect of that atrocity) as well as the butchering of our CIA station chiefs and various innocent Americans (US Navy Diver Robert Stethem, wheelchair bound 70 year old Leon Klinghoffer); followed on by G HW Bush’s pull-back from Baghdad to keep Saddam around, and the Somalia run away move (copying Reagan) and impotent and ineffective missile strikes in 1998 by Clinton against bin Laden (and the total non-response by Clinton to the Cole bombing), ALL the evidence suggests that terror attacks only escalate when you appease. Over thirty years time, the attacks only got worse and more frequent. Reality says your theory simply does not hold up.

Human nature has not changed. Machiavelli was right; if you want to make your country safe it is better to be feared than loved. (This does not mean unbridled militarism, merely being strong and willing to use force if provoked). Charles Atlas doesn’t get mugged, little old ladies do. You draw the wrong conclusion, typical of many on the Left, that terrorism is all our fault (like a battered child figuring that if he is just “good” his parents will stop hitting him, giving him the fantasy of power). That gives too much power to us and too little to the independent actions of the enemy. It’s magical thinking and frankly naivete at it’s worst.

Have you even read bin Laden’s 1996 declaration of War, or his 1998 Fatwa declaring it a duty of all Muslims to kill Americans and Jews where ever they may be found? Bin Laden and other Islamists have a clear set of goals outlined in these documents, first a unified Muslim state, ruled by one man (bin Laden); then conquering the rest of the World and imposing universal Sharia under bin Laden for the entire World. This is unrealistic but what do you expect from superstitious idiots who live in the seventh century? This is what they want, they’ve been quite clear about it, and what we do has ZERO to do with these goals. They believe they are acting on God’s Will, nothing to be done with them except kill them all. Before they kill us.

What DOES work is making anyones lives co-operating with bin Laden, and other jihadists, so painful that regimes will avoid it. We haven’t made it so painful that the Saudis stop funding them. We haven’t made it so painful that the Pakistanis turn over bin Laden and his pals in Waziristan Province. We haven’t made it so painful that the Iranians turn over Saad bin Laden and the nearly twenty high-level officers in Al Qaeda they have under laughable “house arrest.” These are the most important steps we can take, and it’s the most damning criticism of GWB. Particularly when we are playing for nuclear stakes. A nuclear strike on the US WILL lead to a strategic counter-response by the US that will kill hundreds of millions. The half-hearted effort in Afghanistan and the failure to inflict massive pain in Pakistan and Saudi has had the effect of calling our bluff about US responses to mass terror. Unless of course somehow overnight human nature just changed from what it always was to one of unicorns and rainbows.

A word about Israel. Please explain to me why Shia Persians would be so worked up about Israel’s existence that they carried out a terror attack in Buenos Aires to kill Argentinian Jews at a Cultural Center? Absent of course sixth century religious bigotry and hatred? Why is it when the Jews gave the Gaza strip to Palestine, the Palestinians instead of using the infrastructure already there (like the thriving gardens and greenhouses) trashed them and burnt everything so that they were left with no infrastructure to support a new Gaza. These Muslims don't want to "get along" with the other inhabitants of this Earth, they want to be the ONLY inhabitants of this Earth. That is the Islamic World in a nutshell and the way to change it is make such actions so incredibly painful that they stop it.