'Is this real?': tapes reveal 9/11 horror

"Did you just say somethin' hit the World Trade Centre?" an incredulous military official asked shortly after the beginning of America's terrorism nightmare on September 11, 2001.
Minutes later, with air traffic authorities warning that another commercial jet was off course and just 10km from the White House, Washington ground control sounded in denial, saying it was "probably just a rumour".

Bird's eye view ... The towers, mid-collapse. Photo: NYC Police Aviation Unit

West must take share of blame for Gaddafi

In the name of business a blind eye was often turned to his predatory behaviour.
FOR all practical purposes, the rule of Muammar Gaddafi is in its final days. After Ben Ali of Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, the fall of Gaddafi marks the end of the third Arab dictator within the space of eight months. The biggest lesson for the West is to not support dictators when it suits, and for the remaining Arab rulers to reform or face a fate similar to the fallen dictators.
As is normally the case with dictators, Gaddafi had increasingly become delusional. At the helm for 42 years, he thought that he had become infallible and that, with the exception of his equally delusional son Saif al-Islam, there was nobody to replace him. His rule was based on fear, torture, patronage, self-adulation and aggrandisement. He plundered Libya's oil wealth in pursuit of bizarre and idiosyncratic ideas and practices that demeaned Libya internationally and stigmatised the Arab people as a whole. In this, he was not much different from many other Arab authoritarian rulers.
Yet, he stayed in power not simply because he was able to deceive the Libyan people and the world for so long. There was also the matter of the West's love-hate relationship with him. They loathed him because he was, as the late US president Ronald Reagan put it, ''the mad dog'' of the Arab world, and therefore an unpredictable rogue and supporter of international terrorism who needed to be watched and feared.

Woman who was assaulted settles Match.com lawsuit

LOS ANGELES (AP) — A woman who sued Match.com after being sexually assaulted by a man she met on the dating website settled her lawsuit on Tuesday when she saw proof that the site screenings its members for sexual predators.

Carole Markin sued the website when she found out her attacker had been convicted of sexual battery. She did not seek monetary damages in her lawsuit, just a court order requiring the site to check its members' backgrounds to weed out convicted sex offenders.

"If I save one woman from being attacked, I'm happy," Markin said. "I went into this lawsuit to protect other people, and it worked."

Robert Platt, an attorney for the site, said Match.com has begun checking its members against state and federal sex-offender databases.

Last week Alan Wurtzel, 67, pleaded no contest to assaulting Markin. He could face a year in jail, five years of probation and a lifetime registration as a sex offender when he is sentenced Sept. 19.

Prosecutors said that on their second date last year, Wurtzel drove Markin to her home and followed her inside where he sexually assaulted her while holding her down.

Source: Yahoo 

George Jonas: A decade after 9/11, the Islamists still have the upper hand

Many have suggested that 9/11 was like Pearl Harbor for America, at least psychologically. If so, it might be instructive to compare anniversaries. Where was the West 10 years after Pearl Harbor, compared to where it is 10 years after 9/11? Was being attacked by the Far Eastern militarism of the Empire of the Rising Sun as harmful to America as the suicide assault of Near Eastern fanatics? Did one do more damage than the other?
I’m posing the question, because I consider both acts of belligerency expressions of larger conflicts than just Japan’s or al-Qaeda’s with America. I take Pearl Harbor to have been Oriental despotism’s fascist-tinged declaration of war on Occidental democracy, and regard 9/11 as theocratic Islam’s challenge to secular post-Christendom.

U.S.’s ‘keep your DAM water’ sign blames Canada for flood

 
By Tim Switzer
REGINA —Frustrated over flood waters in the Souris Rover that travelled from Saskatchewan into their city earlier this summer, some residents of Minot, North Dakota, put up a billboard this week to — as the Oscar-nominated songs says — blame Canada.
On Thursday, a billboard briefly appeared in Minot that read, “Canada . . . next time keep your DAM water,” in reference to the record level of water that flowed down the Souris from Saskatchewan and into Minot, flooding hundreds of homes in both jurisdictions.
But the billboard disappeared almost as quickly as it went up. After pressure from City of Minot and tourism officials, the company that owns the billboard, Newman Signs, had it down by the late afternoon.
The billboard showed up around six weeks after rumours of Canadians being mistreated in Minot surfaced north of the border. Those rumours proved to be unfounded, but the billboard proved there are at least a few in the city who held some animosity toward their neighbours to the north.

Circumcision: ‘Mutilation’ or an ‘act of love’?

Rebecca Wald is “100% Jewish.” She celebrates the high holidays, her children attend Hebrew school, she lights candles on the sabbath and she was married to a “100% Jewish” man under a chuppah at a traditional Jewish wedding.

But unlike most Jews, from the most secular to the ultra-orthodox, she did not circumcise her son. She has never attended — will never attend — a bris, the age-old ceremony where a Jew trained in circumcision (a ‘mohel’) removes the foreskin of an eight-day-old Jewish boy as a sign of his covenant with God.
“All of the babies I saw growing up — whether cousins or the kids I babysat — were circumcised, and it seemed like that was the way things were supposed to be,” said Ms. Wald, who in December launched Beyond the Bris, a website for Jews who question circumcision. “It took having a son, who is intact, for me to really accept how normal [the uncircumcised penis] is.”

Wiki war: 3500 unpublished leaks destroyed forever as Assange hits out

Former WikiLeaks staffer and one of the founders of OpenLeaks, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, holds his book Inside WikiLeaks. Photo: AP

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's former right-hand man has irrevocably destroyed 3500 unpublished files leaked to the whistleblower site including the complete US no-fly list, five gigabytes of Bank of America documents and detailed information about 20 neo-Nazi groups.
Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who left WikiLeaks last year after a falling out with Assange, revealed the document destruction in an interview with Der Spiegel.
WikiLeaks has hit back, accusing Domscheit-Berg of being in bed with US intelligence agencies and of jeopardising the leaking of “many issues of public importance, human rights abuses, mass telecommunications interception, banking and the planning of dozens of neo-nazi groups”.

Facebook sex scandal with girl, 16, topples German conservative politician

Christian von Boetticher, Schleswig-Holstein's Christian Democratic Union leader and top candidate for regional state elections in 2012, wipes tears as he gives a statement to the media after a board meeting in Kiel, Germany. Photo: Reuters

BERLIN — German voters may be willing to tolerate a politician's having an affair with a teenager, but not when that politician — a leading conservative, no less — met her on Facebook, where he also flaunted immodest details of his life.
Christian von Boetticher, 40, the successful state legislator at the top of the Christian Democratic Union's ticket in the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein, resigned as head of the party there during a tearful news conference on Sunday. He admitted to the affair, which was legal under German law, and to making a misjudgement, but insisted that he had nothing to be ashamed of because it was "a very unusual love".
It is also an unusual scandal — not only because of the girl's age, which was at the border of permissible and punishable, but also because of the role played by the social-networking site.

In some ways, the fact of her youth was less strange to conservative voters and colleagues "than that a grown man with more important things to do would spend so much time playing around on this network with nothing better to do than trade messages with a young girl," said Rudolf Koetter, director of the Centre for Advanced Ethics and Science Communications at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany.

Survey’s surprising finding: tea party less popular than atheists and Muslims

In an op-ed article in the New York Times, Robert D. Putnam, a professor of public policy at Harvard, and David E. Campbell, a political scientist at Notre Dame, say they have collected data indicating that the tea party is "less popular than much maligned groups like 'atheists' and 'Muslims.'"
But Campbell says the tea party was really an afterthought in their research.
"We didn't go into this study to look at the tea party," Campbell said in an interview with The Ticket.
The professors were following up on research they conducted in 2006 and 2007 for their book "American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us" and decided to add the tea party and atheists to their list of survey queries. By going back to many of the same respondents, the professors gleaned several interesting facts about the tea party.