The Waterkooler

The Rev. Michael Clark had never even set foot inside a jail before February.

He knew little about that world, though he'd considered criminology as a career when he started college.

But when Wichita police arrested one of his parishioners -- Dennis Rader--nearly five months ago, Clark began a learning journey that continues today.

Celebrity activist Harry Belafonte referred to prominent African-American officials in the Bush administration as "black tyrants" at a weekend march, and he also compared the administration to Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany.

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Related Story: Bush, GOP Labeled 'Thieves' Who 'Need to be Locked Up'

Atlanta (CNSNews.com) - A featured speaker at Saturday's civil rights march in Atlanta said the Bush administration and Republican Party leaders are "thieves" who "need to be locked up" for stealing the past two presidential elections and presiding over federal budget deficits and the war in Iraq. "They all need to be locked up because they are all criminals and they are all thieves," said Judge Greg Mathis, the star of the syndicated television program "The Judge Mathis Show." Mathis made his remarks to an enthusiastic crowd assembled in Atlanta to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Participants are launching a two-year campaign to extend and strengthen key aspects of the act when it expires in 2007. "It is indeed criminal to steal an election and within two years run up a federal deficit of half-a-trillion dollars, send our young people over to Iraq to die for an unjust war. What they are doing is criminal," Mathis said to loud cheers.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A popular New York hip-hop radio station has agreed to pay $240,000 after sponsoring "smackfest" contests in which young women took turns slapping each other for a chance to win concert tickets and cash.

In a statement, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer and State Athletic Commission Chairman Ron Scott Stevens said on Monday that WQHT, an FM station owned by Emmis Communications Corp. , had also agreed to donate $60,000 to a nonprofit group that promotes awareness of domestic violence.

"This agreement should be a wake-up call to all those in the entertainment industry who think outrageousness is a clever marketing strategy," Spitzer said in a statement. "The law establishes set boundaries that cannot be crossed to protect our community's health and safety."

• Spitzer and the state Athletic Commission stated that the hip-hop and rhythm and blues station held 24 "Smackfest" contests from April 2004 to January 2005.
  
  
• Young women took turns "violently slapping" each other for concert tickets and as much as $5,000 in cash, Spitzer said. Images of the slapping then ran on the station's Web site.
  
  
• "Despite the fact that the contestants voluntarily participated in what was supposed to be harmless entertainment, it was not our finest hour," the Indianapolis-based Emmis Radio said in a prepared statement.
  
  
• In April, the station was criticized by state Comptroller Alan Hevesi for the "Tsunami Song" written by a producer and broadcast over the air. Hevesi said the parody of the Dec. 26 tsunami disaster that killed at least 126,000 people in Indonesia and 48,000 in 10 other countries in the Indian Ocean basin "cruelly mocks victims ... while shamelessly espousing racial epithets."
  
  
• "the entire Emmis family is ashamed."
  
  

I dont know who Im more pissed at! The host for the comments or the players for acting so immature and not accepting his apology...

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Giants manager Felipe Alou called a one-week suspension given to a radio host for making racial remarks about the team's Latino players ``a slap on the hand'' and said he wouldn't accept an apology from Larry Krueger.

``He came to apologize to me? You have to be kidding me,'' Alou said Saturday, one day after the suspension. ``There's no way to apologize for such a sin.''

Alou said he wasn't in position to accept an apology on behalf of the ``hundreds of millions'' of people offended earlier this week when Krueger went on the Giants' flagship station, KNBR, and went off about the struggling club and its ``brain-dead Caribbean hitters hacking at slop nightly.''

IF the information is not already missing, 2005 might be recorded in the databanks of history as the year of the consumer privacy breach.

So far, American companies including financial services giants like Bank of America, Citigroup and MasterCard, and national retailers like DSW shoes and Ralph Lauren Polo, have announced data compromises. All told, the personal information of more than 50 million consumers has been lost, stolen and even sold to thieves.

Why is this happening here, and not, say, in Britain, Germany or France? One reason may be that every other Western country has a comprehensive set of national privacy laws and an office of data protection, led by a privacy commissioner.

The United States, by contrast, has a patchwork of state and federal laws and agencies responsible for data protection.

"In Europe, the question has been settled: citizens have strong legal rights," said Joel R. Reidenberg, a Fordham University law professor who is an expert on international data privacy rules. "In the United States, we basically have a mess, and we are still trying to sort it out."

More fundamentally, these two systems for dealing with data arise from a cultural divide over privacy itself. In broad terms, the United States looks at privacy largely as a consumer and an economic issue; in the rest of the developed world, it is regarded as a fundamental right.

In the United States, said Trevor Hughes, executive director of the International Association of Privacy Professionals, debates over the privacy of personal data generally occurs piecemeal, when a particular abuse causes harm. "In Europe, " Mr. Hughes said. "data is just protected because it is data - information about you."

The telecommunications industry offers a case study in these two perspectives. In the mid-1990's, an unusual alliance here between privacy advocates and national phone companies, which did not want regional carriers to gain an informational advantage, led to restrictions on the commercial use of phone and billing information in the United States. In France, a similar debate in the 1980's caused phone numbers to be kept private in billing documents out of respect for individual rights.

In general, Americans are far more comfortable than Europeans with business handling their information, and far more skeptical of putting it in government hands. The tradition of making government records - like tax records, mortgage information and census data - easily accessible to the public is uniquely American.

This has helped create the world's largest data collection industry by far, with companies like ChoicePoint and AxiCom to collect and analyze those records. The flourishing consumer data industry spends millions of dollars each year lobbying against more restrictive data policies.

Not surprising, the United States has "many more laws restricting the government collection and use of information than laws restricting corporate use of collection and information," said Bruce Schneier, an expert on computer security issues. "Europe is the reverse," he added. Oversight is the United States is decentralized. Data protection is not a core mission of any government agency. Each of them, from the Health and Human Services Department to the Department of Homeland Security, deals with it as a secondary issue. In addition, each agency has its own internal privacy czars, who protect his agency's data as he thinks best. "What we don't have is a general framework that says these rules apply to everybody," said Peter Swire, an Ohio State University law professor who served as the Clinton administration's chief counselor for privacy.

Most European nations, on the other hand, begin with the idea that data protection is a human right, regulated by a comprehensive set of principles that apply to both business and government. And where American businesses are given relatively free rein to collect and sell information, European companies are severely restricted from those activities without individual consent.

"In Europe, there is much less use data warehousing and data mining because the culture has not been friendly to it," said Alan F. Westin, the director of Privacy Exchange, an advocacy group sponsored by the consumer data industry. "No company in France, Germany or the U.K. has that kind of data-mining capability because they don't have the public record and census data" that American companies have.

Restrictions on the commercial use of private data has also meant that data-mining interest groups never became entrenched in Europe.

This, too, has philosophical and historical roots. European data protection policies emerged in the early 1970's, when the German state of Hesse enacted the first set of data privacy laws.

"This was still a generation with memory of World War II that knew how Nazis and fascists would use personal information against their enemies," said Evan Hendricks, the editor of Privacy Times, an advocacy newsletter. "If you were going to protect liberty, you had to ensure there was fairness in the protection of information."

Privacy protection was also strengthened by the push for European integration. The European Data Protection Directive of 1995 established a framework for national privacy laws in all E.U. countries, and encouraged nearby trading partners to adopt similar measures.

The effect on daily life in the United States and Europe can be seen at the checkout counter. Germany, like most other European countries, restricts retailers to collecting only the personal data directly linked to a sale: ZIP codes and phone numbers cannot be requested during a cash sale, and billing information can be kept only as long as there is a purpose.

Other countries have even more stringent laws. Switzerland, for example, requires every employee who handles sensitive data like credit information to "sign a very draconian document," Ted Crooks, vice president of global fraud solutions for Fair Isaac, a data analytics company, said of data protection laws in that country. "You don't mess with Swiss data," he said.

Most American companies, in contrast, store all sorts of customer information, and often make money selling some of it to others. "American businesses have learned by experience to hang on to the data," Mr. Crooks said. "It's cheap to keep, and maybe you will get some benefit out of it."

Then, too, most Americans are more willing than Europeans to give up personal information.

"If you ask someone from another country, they will resist," said Chris Hoofnagle, a director at Electronic Privacy Information Center, a data protection advocacy group. "Ask a French person their phone number, and they will ask you why. Americans don't ask why at all."

Of course, in Europe, though the laws and the public sentiment against collecting sensitive consumer data may be more rigorous than in the United States, there is less ability to enforce those laws, or to punish corporate wrongdoers through public exposure. Regulators will sometimes quietly discipline a company for being too free with private data, but in general European corporations need not disclose nearly so much about their activities as American ones, and class-action lawsuits and corporate fines are rare.

"We don't know how often or how serious any breach of the E.U. directive actually has been because there is no need to disclose," said John Holland, an executive in charge of Europe and the Middle East regions for Cybertrust, a global security firm.

One thing that both privacy cultures have in common is that it is becoming harder for either to control what is and isn't kept private. Information is increasingly the lifeblood of the global economy, not to mention the global fight against terrorism and the quarry of hackers.

As this year's data breaches and compromises have shown, no one really knows how safe the world's vast pool of confidential data is, and therefore how protected anyone is against an invasion of data privacy.

Mr. Reidenberg, the law professor, compares the current situation to the stock market meltdown after the 1929 crash. America responded then by creating the Securities and Exchange Commission and a host of financial disclosure and accounting reforms. The need to safeguard sensitive data, Mr. Reidenberg said, "will necessitate the United States focusing on the legal way we structure information processing, just like we needed to do in the 1930's to put the economy back on stable footing."

"Passengers on the Underground and their staff were faced with horrific scenes on July 7, a spokesman for the London Underground tells Britain's Sun newspaper. "Anybody involved in the making or viewing of this game would do well to stop and think about that."

Dubbed "Mind The Bombs," the game features terrorists on board trains moving throughout the London tube system, which is illustrated by the city's official underground map. The object is to stop them from carrying out their missions by defusing the explosives.

"If you fail," the Sun says, the terrorists "blow themselves to smithereens just like on 7/7. Meanwhile, "smoke pours from the carriages and ambulance sirens can be heard in a chilling reminder of the terror attacks which killed 52 people."

A spokeswoman for the London Transport Users Committee told the paper: "I don't think anybody will find it very funny or very pleasant. ... Londoners are just getting on with it and we think people should show this game the contempt it deserves."

Only in Hollywood would a satire be crafted around American 'paranoia' over Pakistani terrorists seeking to assassinate a U.S. president. (After all, what could be funnnier?) London's News24 reports that writer-director Paul
Weitz's film "American Dreamz" will not be rewritten just because of the London terror bombings, during which 56 Londoners were killed by suicide bombers - some of whom were Pakistani in origin. The film stars Hugh Grant,
Dennis Quaid, Richard Dreyfuss, Willem Dafoe, Chris Klein and Mandy Moore.

Although Weitz's script features Pakistani suicide bombers, Weitz remains unconcerned about portraying the terrorist threat in a humorous light.

"The plot of my film has not changed, nor is a change being contemplated," Weitz said. "The film is a comic examination of our cultural obsessions and how they can anaesthetise us to the actual issues of our day."

We're wondering what Mr. Weitz considers to be the "actual issues of our day," from which our War on Terror "obsessions" are distracting us? [Mr. Weitz, like so many of his Hollywood colleagues, appears to be living in
some post-9/11 version of "The Matrix." May we hazard a guess? Poverty, disease, starvation in the Third World, affordable health care, Malibu wildlife, etc.

We're actually losing our ability to satirize people like Mr. Weitz - because Hollywood itself is becoming self-satirizing. And somewhere Paddy Chayefsky is rolling over in his grave.

Related Story: Congress asked to probe ACLU, Accused of 'widespread use of frivolous lawsuits'


Five city subway riders and a civil liberties group sued the city Thursday to stop random police inspections of bags in subways, calling the searches ineffective, unconstitutional and a publicity stunt that does not enhance safety.

"It's a needle-in-the-haystack approach to law enforcement," said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, which filed the lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Manhattan.

She and other members of the group who spoke at a news conference to announce the lawsuit said they want police to stop terrorists and improve safety, but not with useless measures designed to give subway riders a false sense of security.

Christopher Dunn, the New York Civil Liberties Union's associate legal director, said the policy announced July 21 was akin to a random search of people's bags and packages on public streets and a violation of a fundamental civil right.

But Gail Donoghue, a city lawyer, said the subway searches meet all legal requirements and preserve "the important balance between protecting our city and preserving individual rights."

She added, "We believe the NYCLU is shortsighted in failing to recognize this. We are confident our position will prevail in court."

Spot checks by the NYCLU since the policy began show that police conduct the searches at few stations with little effect since anyone can refuse the search and enter the subway's 468 stations at another point, he said.

As a result, he said, only innocent people are subjected to the unreasonable search and seizure that the Constitution outlaws.

"What is the point of searching a bunch of grandmas going down the subway steps with their Macy's bags?" he asked.

Among five plaintiffs was Brendan MacWade, 32, who escaped the World Trade Center towers after they were struck by hijacked planes on Sept. 11, 2001.

"I want to catch terrorists as much as any politicians or officials but this policy does not work," he said.

The lawsuit comes after the New York Police Department held a briefing Wednesday for city business leaders regarding the July 7 London subway bombings. The NYPD said the London suicide bombers cooked up their explosives using mundane items like hydrogen peroxide, suggesting that "these terrorists went to a hardware store or some beauty supply store" for ingredients.

The briefing — based partly on information obtained by NYPD detectives who were dispatched to London to monitor the investigation — was part of a program designed to encourage more vigilance by private security at large hotels, Wall Street firms, storage facilities and other companies.

Related Story: Florida State to Challenge Ban on Mascots

Related Story: The Fighting Whiteys

INDIANAPOLIS – The NCAA banned the use of American Indian mascots by sports teams during its postseason tournaments, but will not prohibit them otherwise.

The NCAA's executive committee decided this week the organization did not have the authority to bar Indian mascots by individual schools, committee chairman Walter Harrison said Friday.

Nicknames or mascots deemed "hostile or abusive" would not be allowed by teams on their uniforms or other clothing beginning with any NCAA tournament after Feb. 1, said Harrison, the University of Hartford's president.

"What each institution decides to do is really its own business" outside NCAA championship events, he said.

Guidelines were not immediately available on which logos and nicknames would be considered "hostile or abusive."

The NCAA two years ago recommended that schools determine for themselves whether the Indian depictions were offensive.

Among the schools to change nicknames in recent years over such concerns were St. John's (from Redmen to Red Storm) and Marquette (from Warriors to Golden Eagles).

The NCAA plans to ban schools using Indian nicknames from hosting postseason events. Harrison said schools with such mascots that have already been selected as tournament sites would be asked to cover any offensive logos.

Such logos also would be prohibited at postseason games on cheerleader and band uniforms starting in 2008.

SAN ANTONIO -- A 30-year-old USAA employee is suing the city of San Antonio for injuries she received when she fell trying to slide down a fire pole.

Grace Estrada has been out of work for for five months. She had back surgery in December to fuse three of her vertebrae together, all from a night of partying at Fire Station No. 10 on Oct. 29 of last year.

"Certainly, our client, as a 30-year-old, bears some responsibility to the extent that she made a bad choice, but there was some serious, serious bad choices made by the firefighters in the case," said Kevin Stouwie, Estrada's attorney.

Stouwie believes there must be some violation of department rules. The lawsuit claims Estrada and some friends met off-duty firefighters at a bar that night and were invited to the station located on Zarzamora Street.

The woman claims on-duty firefighters served them beer and invited them to try on boots and fire helmets. They also allowed them to sit on the fire truck and slide down the station's fire pole.

"The same on-duty firefighter asked her to climb on his shoulders and basically slide down the pole in tandem with him," said Stouwie.

According to the lawsuit, Estrada lost her grip and fell 12 feet to the ground below.

She also claimed that some of the women spent time in the living quarters of the firehouse that night, engaging in private interludes.

Estrada said she was not encouraged to seek medical treatment immediately and was told not to tell anyone where she was injured.

(AP) The National Rifle Association began a boycott of ConocoPhillips Co. Monday over the energy giant's attempt to block a state law preventing employers from firing workers who keep guns in their cars on company lots.

"Across the country, we're going to make ConocoPhillips the example of what happens when a corporation takes away your Second Amendment rights," NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre said.

LaPierre called on gun owners and consumers to boycott all Conoco and Phillips 66 products, and asked Conoco and Phillips 66 retailers to urge the corporation to withdraw the federal lawsuit.

U.S. Army to review Wagner's Arlington placement

U.S. Army leadership is reviewing the placement of an urn last week at Arlington National Cemetery holding the cremated remains of a man they learned Wednesday killed a Hagerstown couple in 1994, Lori Calvillo, cemetery public affairs officer, said Thursday.

Cremated remains of Russell Wayne Wagner, 52, who was an Army Private 1st Class from 1969 to 1972, were placed with standard military honors July 27 at an Arlington National Cemetery columbarium. He died Feb. 2 at the Maryland House of Correction Annex in Jessup, Md., while serving two life sentences for the Valentine's Day 1994 murders of Daniel Davis, 84, and Wilda Davis, 80, at their West Wilson Boulevard home in Hagerstown.

• The Davises' bodies were found stabbed repeatedly on Feb. 15. Their hands and feet were bound with black shoelaces and pillowcases were placed over their heads, according to published reports.
  
  
• The Davises' family is fighting to have Wagner's ashes removed from the columbarium, which is a structure for cremated remains.
  
  
• Wagner met the requirements for the columbarium service because he was discharged honorably from the military,. Requirements to have a ground burial at the cemetery are more stringent.
  
  
• In 1996, a Garrett County jury heard Wagner's case, but returned hung. In 2002, the case was heard in Washington County, but the jury in that trial returned with guilty verdicts for two counts of first-degree murder, two counts of felony murder and burglary, according to published reports.
  
  
• In the 2002 trial, now-Washington County Deputy State's Attorney Joseph Michael, in his argument to the jury, suggested that Wagner and at least one other person entered the Davis home and stabbed the couple to death so that the wife of Ted Monger, the couple's son-in-law, would inherit $50,000, according to published reports.
  
  
• Three prosecution witnesses testified in the 2002 trial that Wagner said he was at the Davis home when the murder was committed. A hair that a DNA expert for the FBI said possibly was Wagner's was found on a glove with Daniel Davis' blood on it.
  
  

New threats from Al Queada prompt tough talk from Bush and Blair...

"What you have seen in New York, Washington and Afghanistan, are only the initial losses," said Osama bin Laden's No. 2 man, Ayman al-Zawahiri, referring to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States for which al Qaeda claimed responsibility. "If you continue the same hostile policies you will see something that will make you forget the horrors you have seen in Vietnam."

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British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who has called for an international conference on Islamic extremism, is proving far more willing than President Bush to demand that Muslim leaders confront their own failings in the global war on terror. His latest statements indicate willingness to implement new Human Rights and immigration laws.

Quote for Quote:

• BLAIR: "Let no one be in any doubt, the rules of the game are changing... Should legal obstacles arise we will legislate further, including if needs arise, amending the Human Rights Act."
  
  
• BLAIR: "When they try to use Iraq or Afghanistan or Palestinian cause as a means of saying 'we have justification for what we do,' it is a complete obscenity."
  
  
• BLAIR TALKS TOUGH ON IMMIGRATION: "Coming to Britain is not a right. And even when people are coming here, staying here carries with it a duty. That duty is to share and support the values that sustain the British way of life.
  
  "Those that break that duty and try to incite hatred or engage in violence against our country and its people have no place here."
  
  
• BUSH: "We will stay on the offense against these people," Bush said of the comments by Ayman al-Zawahri.
  
  
• BUSH: "On September 11 2001, America felt its vulnerability even to threats that gather on the other side of the Earth. We resolved then, and we are resolved today, to confront every threat from any source that could bring sudden terror and suffering to America."
  
  
• BUSH: "Our nation is somewhat sad, but we're angry. There's a certain level of blood lust, but we won't let it drive our reaction. We're steady, clear-eyed and patient, but pretty soon we'll have to start displaying scalps."
  
  
• BUSH: "The terrorists are fighting freedom with all their cunning and cruelty because freedom is their greatest fear - and they should be afraid, because freedom is on the march."
  
  

Some of the stories written about the issue would lead the average person to believe that there is some sort of Bush-led federal ban on stem cell research - and not just the embryonic kind - despite the fact that George W. Bush has never banned stem cell research of any kind in the United States, and that he is the only U.S. president to have ever authorized federal funding for embryonic stem cell research.

• Senators urge Bush to lift stem cell ban
  
  
• New Hampshire families and doctors call on Bush to end stem cell ban
  
  
• Bush blocks plan to lift US ban on stem-cell research
  
  
• Kerry pledges to reverse stem cell ban
  
  
• Bush Pressured to lift stem cell ban
  
  
• Clark protests stem cell ban
  

I think it’s fair to say that the individuals who wrote the above stories had an ax to grind over the issue with respect to the current administration. If that is not the case, how then can one explain such headlines, especially in light of the fact that George W. Bush has never banned stem cell research of any kind in the United States, and that he is the only U.S. president to have ever authorized federal funding for embryonic stem cell research?

Related Story: Comparison of Stem Cell Research to Nazi Experiments Stirs Controversy

• John Opitz, a professor of pediatrics, human genetics, and obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Utah, testified before the President's Council on Bioethics that between 60 and 80 percent of all naturally conceived embryos are simply flushed out in women's normal menstrual flows unnoticed. This is not miscarriage we're talking about. The women and their husbands or partners never even know that conception has taken place; the embryos disappear from their wombs in their menstrual flows.
  
  
• If every embryo is "already a human being," does that mean that if we could detect such unimplanted embryos as they leave the womb, we would have a duty to rescue them and try to implant them anyway?
  
  
• Try this thought experiment. A fire breaks out in a fertility clinic and you have a choice: You can save a three-year-old child or a Petri dish containing 10 seven-day old embryos. Which do you choose to rescue?
  
  
• If embryos have a soul, that would mean that more than 40 percent of all the residents of Heaven were never born, never developed brains, and never had thoughts, emotions, experiences, hopes, dreams, or desires.
  
  

Millions of intelligent people of good will maintain that seven-day-old embryos have the exact same moral standing as do readers of this column. Acting on this sincere belief, they are trying to block biomedical research on human embryonic stem cells that is desired by millions of their fellow citizens.

But there may be a way out of this politico-theological impasse. The President's Council on Bioethics held an extraordinarily interesting session earlier this month in which two different avenues for obtaining human embryonic stem cells were proposed, in ways that would skirt right-to-life moral objections.

• William Hurlbut, a consulting professor in the Program of Human Biology at Stanford University and another member of the President's Council on Bioethics, proposed another way to produce cloned human embryonic stem cells that right-to-lifers should not find morally objectionable.
  
  
• "This process does not involve the creation of an embryo that is then altered to transform it into a non-embryonic entity," explained Hurlbut. "Rather the proposed genetic alteration is accomplished ab initio, the entity is brought into existence with a genetic structure insufficient to generate a human embryo."
  
  
• These options offer a possible way around the moral blockades that impede promising biomedical research on human embryonic stem cells.
  
  

Related Story: Can You Believe in God and Evolution?

WASHINGTON, Aug. 2 - A sharp debate between scientists and religious conservatives escalated Tuesday over comments by President Bush that the theory of intelligent design should be taught with evolution in the nation's public schools.

In an interview at the White House on Monday with a group of Texas newspaper reporters, Mr. Bush appeared to endorse the push by many of his conservative Christian supporters to give intelligent design equal treatment with the theory of evolution.

Facts and Points of Interest:

• Bush said, "I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought," he said, adding that "you're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, and the answer is yes."
  
  
• Intelligent design, advanced by a group of academics and intellectuals and some biblical creationists, disputes the idea that natural selection - the force Charles Darwin suggested drove evolution - fully explains the complexity of life.
  
  
• Intelligent design does not identify the designer, but critics say the theory is a thinly disguised argument for God and the divine creation of the universe.
  
  
• Critics argue that by giving "a sectarian religious viewpoint" an "equal footing" with the theory of evolution is unfair to "other religious viewpoints."
  
  
• The Rev. Barry W. Lynn, the executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, called the president's comments irresponsible, and said that "when it comes to evolution, there is only one school of scientific thought, and that is evolution occurred and is still occurring." Mr. Lynn added that "when it comes to matters of religion and philosophy, they can be discussed objectively in public schools, but not in biology class."
  
  
• Internationally respected creationist and biochemist and one of the world's leading experts in origin of life research, Fazale "Fuz" Rana, PhD, states:
  
  "As currently formulated, Intelligent Design is not science. It is not falsifiable and makes no predictions about future scientific discoveries. At Reasons To Believe, our team of scientists has developed a theory for creation that embraces the latest scientific advances. It is fully testable, falsifiable, and successfully predicts the current discoveries in origin of life research.
  
  

The Evolution Debate

The case against evolution: here

The case against creationism: here

Evidence of Evolution: here

Common myths heard from critics of Evolution: here and here

Second Law of Thermodynamics - does the theory of evolution violate this law?

Yes. No.


COMEDY: Steven Wright on God, Origins, and Science

"My theory of evolution is that Darwin was adopted."

"Support bacteria - they're the only culture some people have."

"I intend to live forever - so far, so good."

More evolution Jokes here.

Sony Pictures Entertainment must pay $1.5 million to settle a class-action lawsuit accusing the studio of citing a fake movie critic in ads for several films.

Moviegoers who saw the films "Vertical Limit," "A Knight's Tale," "The Animal," "Hollow Man" or "The Patriot" during their original theater runs must file a claim to be eligible for a $5 per ticket reimbursement, lawyer Norman Blumenthal said Tuesday. He represented a group of filmgoers who sued Sony Pictures in 2001.

The lawsuit, originally filed by two California moviegoers, claimed the ads fooled the plaintiffs into seeing "A Knight's Tale."

• In one ad for the action-comedy, a critic identified as "David Manning of The Ridgefield Press" was quoted calling star
  Heath Ledger "this year's hottest new star!"
  
  
• In an ad for "The Animal," Manning was quoted declaring, "The producing team of 'Big Daddy' has delivered another winner!"
  
  
• At the time, The Ridgefield Press, a small weekly newspaper in Connecticut, did not have a movie critic named David Manning, the lawsuit said.

Full coverage - more stories

A glorious launch. A wayward chunk of foam. And another black eye for the space agency. Should the shuttle fleet stay grounded?

Bread and salt were waiting for commander Eileen Collins and her crew when they docked the space shuttle Discovery with the International Space Station last Thursday. Station commander Sergei Krikalev had prepared the little ceremony, a Russian tradition intended to bring good luck to a visitor to your home. After the shuttle's stunning lift-off two days earlier--the first since the loss of the Columbia orbiter in 2003--it didn't seem the crew would need such happy charms. But now it appears the shuttle program as a whole--if not the astronauts themselves--may need a lot of luck indeed.

'04 Report Faulted Application of Shuttle Foam. story

• An internal NASA report last December warned of deficiencies in the way insulating foam was being applied to sections of the fuel tank to be used on the shuttle Discovery's current mission.
  
  
• The December 2004 report, by Conley Perry, a retired NASA division chief for quality engineering at the Johnson Space Center here, said it was obvious that Lockheed's external tank engineers "did not do a thorough job" of identifying the quirks and variations that can occur when foam is applied by hand.
  
  
• According to the report, even after two years of effort to correct the foam debris problem, "there will continue to be a threat of critical debris generation."
  
  
• "This variable could reasonably be eliminated," the report went on, "and yet it continues."
  
  
• Nasa responds: "NASA and its contractors have made a number of process and quality improvements in the manual application of foam on the external fuel tank which have resulted in substantially less debris coming off the tank at launch. But as we saw, we still have work to do with the foam."
  
  He continued, "There are still issues that we need to address and we will do that."
  
  

Read more on How Political Correctness is Killing Us

Related Story: NASA to keep Shuttle style design in next mission

Related: NASA still planning to build moon stations and send men to Mars

As the dog days of July come to an end and we're greeted with the month of August, a pervasive thought enters every parent's mind: back to school. Yes, the thought of it brings a smile to the face, doesn't it?

Me: Are you doing the laundry today?
She: I don't know.

Me: It's your scheduled day.

She: Yeah but do you need laundry done?

Me: It's summer. We always need laundry done.

She: I know, but are you out of clothes?

Me: Well, there are a few shirts in there that I would like to wear this week, and I'm almost out of underwear.

She: Yeah, but you don't need them, you work from home.

Me: Your dad doesn't work from home and he needs shirts.

She: Yeah but he's married to you, so there's no one at work he needs to impress.


By the way, teenagers do not have more energy than we do. They simply do a better job at conserving it. Case in point: my step-daughter's schedule for the beginning of the summer:

12 PM - Get up, wash face thoroughly. Brush teeth.
12:30 PM - Have breakfast.
1 PM - Stretch
1:30 PM - Exercise
2:30 PM - Shower
3 PM - Have lunch
3:30 PM - See friends (swimming, suntanning, etc.)
6:30 PM - Have dinner
7 PM - See friends (movies, shopping, etc.)
11 PM - Chat with friends on internet.
1 AM - Go to bed.

Reality TV shows are gaining popularity in Iraq, spreading material prosperity to the needy and giving Iraqis some escape from their war-torn world.

The Sharqiya network is leading the way with shows that rebuild bombed houses and deliver money to poor elderly people, the Times of London reports.

The popular show "Best Wishes" provides couples with lavish weddings -- complete with white stretch limousine on streets where tanks and car bombs are more familiar sights.

"We see the happiness on the faces of the people whose houses we have rebuilt and those still waiting because of the American destruction during the war," says Sharqiya senior producer Majid al-Samarrai.

Tinseltown's recent setbacks suggest a crisis of major proportions, with a May USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll showing 48% of adults going to movies less often than in 2000. For 19 consecutive weeks, motion picture releases earned less (despite higher ticket prices) than the year before. Projected ticket sales for all of 2005 indicate a disastrous drop of at least 8% - at a time of population growth and a generally robust economy.

USA TODAY ran a headline, "Where have all the moviegoers gone?" under which insiders discussed their desperate attempts to rebuild the shattered audience: "The lures include providing high-tech eye candy through 3-D digital projection and IMAX versions of movies. ... Stadium seating, which improves views, is just now becoming standard. Other theaters are opting for screenings that serve alcohol to patrons 21 and older."

Related: Coming to a Theater Near You
Bad news at the box office has Hollywood thinking about tomorrow. What the best and brightest predict for 2015.

Related: TV characters going to pot

Free ketchup, mustard packets dominate new Atkins weight-loss program.

Aug. 2 - Two days after filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, Atkins Nutritionals Inc. said today that although its low-carb diet had lost its luster, the company was introducing what it called "a low-cash diet guaranteed to melt those pounds away."

At Atkins headquarters, company spokesman Dalton Pankow said that the company's financial woes had inspired the new low-cash diet, which he said was based on a very simple principle: "Essentially, once you're on the diet, you don't eat anything that costs money."

A new book looks at how pharmaceutical companies are using aggressive marketing campaigns to turn more people into patients.

From headlines that tell us that caffeine addiction is a mental disorder, to the overprescription of ritalin to children, the question arises: are the drug companies and mental health institutions scamming us?

See our previous post on how the CDC was caught red handed earlier this year, lying to us about the dangers of being fat.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Have you ever wondered why your teeth chatter when you're cold, or if you could really catch a disease from sitting on a toilet seat?
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New York physician Billy Goldberg, pestered by unusual questions at cocktail parties and other social gatherings over the years, puts the public's mind at ease in his book "Why Do Men Have Nipples?" which hits the book stores on Tuesday.

An Islamic extremist said that the London bombings were the consequence of Britain's refusal to accept the offer of a "ceasefire" from Osama bin Laden.

Abu Izzadeen, who described himself as a spokesman for the Al-Ghurabaa organisation, said that bin Laden had made the offer conditional on troop withdrawal, apparently from countries including Iraq and Afghanistan.

Speaking on BBC2's Newsnight, he said: "Sheikh Osama bin Laden offered to the British public and the UK people at large an offer of ceasefire.

"He said if they rolled up against the Government, brought the troops home, he promised not to attack them. But unfortunately, the stiff upper British lip became hard-headed and we saw what took place on July 7."

Abu Izzadeen, who is British-born but of Jamaican origin, and who converted to Islam when he was 17, would not denounce the bombings, which he described as "mujahideen activity".

"I'm sure if you asked those who passed away on July 7, should we negotiate with Osama bin Laden, they would say yes, to bring their lives back, to save themselves from the burning inferno underground," he said.

Another extremist and former member of the Al-Muhahjiroun group, Abu Uzair, had previously said that Britain should not be attacked in the wake of the September 11 atrocities, which he described as "magnificent", the programme said.

This was because it had accommodated Muslims, the programme said.

"We don't live in peace with you any more, which means the covenant of security no longer exists," he said.

"That's why those four bombers attacked London - they believed that there was no covenant of security, and for them their belief was that it was allowed to attack the UK." Seeming to warn of the possibility of further attacks, he added: "For them, the banner has been risen for jihad inside the UK."

A former Christian Brothers Academy teacher accused of having sex with an underage student turned herself in to police today.

Beth Geisel, a 42-year-old Christian Brothers Academy writing instructor, mother of four and wife of a bank president, said nothing as she surrendered to face charges of raping a 16-year-old male student last May.

• Aretakis alleges the teacher's out-of-control sexual behavior was known among students and their parents for months — and had to be known by administrators — yet was kept secret.
  
  "I believe it is similar to what's going on . . . in the Catholic church, that this Catholic school was looking to avoid shame and embarrassment and that they tried to wish these incidents away," Aretakis said.
  
  "They said, 'Let's keep this in the family. Use restraint. We believe this incident is isolated.' I'm angry for them acting irresponsibly."
  
  
• Geisel allegedly had sex with the boy at the Catholic school's football field within earshot of his snickering pals, authorities said yesterday.
  
  

Bail has not been set

They've been dreading this moment for decades. How the pro-choice movement is readying for Roberts—and navigating a critical political crossroads.

Aug. 8, 2005 issue - The day before George W. Bush tapped John Roberts for the Supreme Court, a group of abortion-rights activists gathered around the conference table at NARAL Pro-Choice America. Panicked by the departure of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor—the court's key swing vote on abortion—they pored over lists of potential replacements, sharing alarming facts about each one. "Most of us were against all of them," recalls NARAL president Nancy Keenan. The next night, as news about Roberts leaked out, NARAL issued a statement opposing him even before he appeared in the East Room. Now, two weeks into the fight, defeating the affable judge looks like no easy task. On a conference call with Keenan last Friday, one activist from Minnesota cut to the chase: "People are wondering, are we going to be able to stop this guy? Is there going to be a filibuster?" Keenan, a fly-fishing enthusiast, didn't answer directly. "We have waded into the water," she said. "We have cast the line."

It creates a potent, long-lasting high—until the user crashes and, too often, literally burns. How meth quietly marched across the country and up the socioeconomic ladder—and the wreckage it leaves in its wake. As law enforcement fights a losing battle on the ground, officials ask: are the Feds doing all they can to contain this epidemic?

Aug. 8, 2005 issue - The leafy Chicago suburb of Burr Ridge is the kind of place where people come to live the American dream in million-dollar homes on one-acre lots. Eight years ago Kimberly Fields and her husband, Todd, bought a ranch house here on a wooded lot beside a small lake, and before long they were parents, with two sons, a black Labrador and a Volvo in the drive. But somewhere along the way this blond mother with a college degree and a $100,000-a-year job as a sales rep for Apria Healthcare found something that mattered more: methamphetamine. The crystalline white drug quickly seduces those who snort, smoke or inject it with a euphoric rush of confidence, hyperalertness and sexiness that lasts for hours on end. And then it starts destroying lives.

meth video

DEA agent describes Meth war

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Related: Support Groups: 'This Is My Last Chance'
Meth-ravaged mothers in Iowa are finding a new way to heal.

Aug. 8, 2005 issue - It looked like a meeting of the PTA. But these young Iowa mothers were talking about being seduced, and then deeply scarred, by the dark magic of meth. Cory Mathahs, 37, a single mother of three, turned to the drug for weight loss and "the energy to be supermom—doing 10 things at once." Now rail-thin and missing a tooth, she trembled and broke down in tears. "I need help," she said. "I just put myself into treatment." The other women in the room, about two dozen of them, burst into applause. Some wrapped their arms around Mathahs and dried her tears. "There is hope," a voice called out.

Cities across the U.S. are switching to K-8 schools. Will the results be any better?

t's 10 a.m. on a bright May day, and the arts wing at Gustav A. Fritsche Middle School in Milwaukee, Wis., is hopping. In a band room, 21 members of the jazz ensemble are rehearsing Soul Bossa Nova with plenty of heart and impressive intonation, in preparation for a concert downtown. In another room, woodblocks, timpani and bells are whipping up a rhythmic frenzy as the 75-member Fritsche Philharmonic Orchestra tackles Elliott Del Borgo's Aboriginal Rituals. In an art room, eighth-graders are shaping clay vessels to be baked in the school kiln. Down the hall, students are dabbing acrylic paints on canvas to create vivid still lifes à la Vincent van Gogh. At 10:49, when the 82-min. arts period ends, kids of all sizes, colors and sartorial stripes pour out of classrooms, jostling and joking, filling the hallway with the buzz of pubescent energy. Then it's off to language arts, math, social studies and the array of other subjects offered at this sprawling arena for adolescents.

A few blocks away, at Humboldt Park Elementary School, which serves kindergarten through eighth grade, a charming scene unfolds in Karen Hennessy's classroom. Her kindergartners are enjoying a visit from their eighth-grade "buddies." All around the room, big kids sit knees to chest in miniature chairs or cross-legged on the alphabet carpet. Each little kid has chosen a picture book to share with a big buddy. Some lean on eighth-grade laps as they listen. Logan Wells, a strapping 14-year-old, reads The Little Engine That Could to Alec Matias and Jacob Hill. Jacob, 5, seems mesmerized equally by the bright illustrations and by the eighth-grader turning the pages. He presses against Logan as if to absorb some big-kid magic. The older boy reads on with gentle forbearance.

If you were 13 years old, where would you rather be? Big, frenetic Fritsche, with its thrilling range of arts classes, bands, Socratic seminars and TV studio, all aimed at 1,030 sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders? Or calm and cozy Humboldt Park, where the teachers seem to know the names and histories of all 585 students, ages 4 to 14? If you're the parent of a 13-year-old, which would you choose for your child? The two schools represent two sides of a debate that has ripped through Milwaukee and other U.S. cities. For the past decade, middle schools have been the educational setting for roughly two-thirds of students in Grades 6 through 8. But increasingly, communities are questioning whether they really are the best choice for this volatile age group.

Related story: Being 13

Three weeks after taking office, Condoleezza Rice hosted Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and their Japanese counterparts at the State Department. When Rumsfeld began to speak, Rice gently cut him off. The message was clear: I'll take the lead, Don. Both Japanese and U.S. officials noted the decisive nudge.

Now six months on the job, Rice has clearly wrested control of U.S. foreign policy. The once heavy-handed Defense Department still weighs in, but Rice wins most battles -- in strong contrast to her predecessor, Colin L. Powell. White House staff is consulted, but Rice designed the distinctive framework for the administration's second-term foreign policy.

In short order, she has demonstrated a willingness to bend on tactics to accommodate the concerns of allies without ceding on broad principles, what she calls "practical idealism." She also conducts a more aggressive personal diplomacy, breaking State Department records for foreign travel and setting up diplomatic tag teams with top staff on urgent issues.

U.S. foreign policy has always had "a streak of idealism, which means that we care about values, we care about principle," Rice said in an interview last week. "The responsibility, then, of all of us is to take policies that are rooted in those values and make them work on a day-to-day basis so that you're always moving forward toward a goal."

It is too early to know whether the new tactics will ultimately bring results, and many of Rice's steps so far this year have been limited to overtures or temporary

fixes. But those have at the least created momentum where before there was deadlock.

On North Korea, Rice got the prickly Pyongyang government back to six-nation talks last week on nuclear disarmament by publicly recognizing it as a "sovereign state," then empowering her top aide on East Asia to repeatedly meet privately with the North Koreans -- extended contact forbidden during Powell's era.

On Iran, Rice agreed to offer incentives -- allowing the Islamic republic to apply for eventual membership in the World Trade Organization and buy badly needed spare parts for aging passenger aircraft -- in exchange for a European pledge to support U.N. Security Council action if talks fail. Powell had trouble just getting the White House to drop language including Iran in an "axis of evil," which implied eventual confrontation.

With India, she brokered a deal to sell peaceful nuclear technology that will cement U.S.-India relations, but which may also risk undermining the treaty to halt nuclear weapons proliferation.

On Sudan, Rice found middle ground between the administration's rejection of the International Criminal Court and U.N. efforts to launch a war crimes investigation into violence in the Darfur region. The State Department helped draft a U.N. resolution supporting an international probe that would pass -- but on which Washington could abstain.

LONDON - "That's definitely him. I'm really scared now," Ana Christina Fernandes told a British policeman Thursday as he showed her a picture. A grainy CCTV (closed circuit television) photo showed a young man in tracksuit pants and a white tank top boarding the No. 220 bus. She identified Osman Hussain as her London neighbor.

A day later, the same man, who police say tried to set off one of four bombs on July 21, was captured by Italian police in Rome. He was betrayed by his mobile phone. Mr. Hussain was using a relative's cellphone as he traveled from Britain to France and Italy. By tracing the phone, Italian police pinpointed Hussain's location. This weekend, police say, they captured all four of the 7/21 London attackers, and technology proved a crucial tool in cracking the cases.

It makes you wonder, if it had happened here, would the villains still be on the loose?

ROME - Italian police seized 215,000 doses of prohibited substances as they smashed a ring that supplied steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs to customers around the world, including American soldiers in Iraq, a police official said Monday.

The U.S. military in Iraq had no immediate comment, but the popularity of steroid abuse has long been discussed as American troops and contractors in Iraq work out in gyms set up in bases and even in the mirrored halls of one of Saddam Hussein's former palaces.

Joe Donahue, program director for the Vietnam Vets of America Foundation, who spent 16 months in Iraq — often lifting weights in the Green Zone gyms — said steroids were on offer for those who wanted them.

Today's edition of the CNN Headline News program "Showbiz Tonight" will include a segment on the tendency many have to share way more personal / icky / inappropriate details via online communications than they would face-to-face or via phone. You know -- like when you're surfing a business networking service online and you see "Harvard MFA seeking CFO role" "makes excellent vegan burritos", and "likes BDSM play" all in the same user profile. Also, the cc: field is not always your friend, and some things are better left unblogged.

Eight percent of girls and 12 percent of boys surveyed said they used supplements in striving to become more buff. Protein shakes and powders were the most commonly used, but teens also listed steroids, growth hormones, amino acids and other potentially unhealthy products among items they had tried in the previous year.

You won't find many people willing to accuse John McCain, John Warner or Lindsey Graham of being soft on terrorism. But the three Republican senators are giving the White House fits with their attempt to get legislation approved that would expressly prohibit cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment of detainees in U.S. custody.

There was a dramatic encounter during the floor debate last week when Senator Jeff Sessions, a Republican from Alabama, spoke out against the legislation, saying there was no need for it because, as he put it, the detainees are not prisoners of war, "they are terrorists."

Senator McCain, of Arizona, argued that the debate "is not about who they are. It's about who we are." Americans, said Mr. McCain, "hold ourselves" to a higher standard.

In recent weeks, Muslim organizations in the West have stepped up their efforts to condemn violence done in the name of the faith. In part, it is a reaction to criticism that they are not doing enough to oppose violence overseas (see story: Radio talk host suspended for criticizing Islam). But it also follows the London terror bombings and the growth of a new threat: homegrown terrorists.

Because Islam is a decentralized faith, the fatwa, which is defined as a religious and legal decree, would have little binding effect on most Muslims. But it is a significant step by a well-known organization that, through its moral authority, could have reverberations around the world.

HOUSTON, July 31 - When the school board in Odessa, the West Texas oil town, voted unanimously in April to add an elective Bible study course to the 2006 high school curriculum, some parents dropped to their knees in prayerful thanks that God would be returned to the classroom, while others assailed it as an effort to instill religious training in the public schools.

Hundreds of miles away, leaders of the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools notched another victory. A religious advocacy group based in Greensboro, N.C., the council has been pressing a 12-year campaign to get school boards across the country to accept its Bible curriculum.

The council calls its course a nonsectarian historical and literary survey class within constitutional guidelines requiring the separation of church and state.

But a growing chorus of critics says the course, taught by local teachers trained by the council, conceals a religious agenda. The critics say it ignores evolution in favor of creationism and gives credence to dubious assertions that the Constitution is based on the Scriptures, and that "documented research through NASA" backs the biblical account of the sun standing still.

In the latest salvo, the Texas Freedom Network, an advocacy group for religious freedom, has called a news conference for Monday to release a study that finds the national council's course to be "an error-riddled Bible curriculum that attempts to persuade students and teachers to adopt views that are held primarily within conservative Protestant circles."

The dispute has made the curriculum, which the national council says is used by more than 175,000 students in 312 school districts in 37 states, the latest flashpoint in the continuing culture wars over religious influences in the public domain.

NEW YORK - The company started by the late nutrition guru Dr. Robert C. Atkins to promote a low-carb lifestyle has filed for bankruptcy court protection, a further sign of the waning popularity of the diet.
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A hearing on the prearranged, Chapter 11 filing by Atkins Nutritionals Inc. was scheduled for Monday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court, spokesman Richard Rothstein said Sunday.

Delray man thinks his lawsuit helped bring Atkins down

Is Hollywood going one toke over the line? Marijuana use is cropping up on some critically acclaimed shows, and anti-drug forces fear the glamorization of pot could boost its use among youths.
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Who's lighting up:

• Pot is an ongoing theme on HBO's Entourage (Sundays, 10 ET/PT), which centers on a rising young movie star and his New York buddies who have gone Hollywood. Sunday's episode features two teens getting high at a bat mitzvah.

• Streetwise Maurice "Smoke" Williams (Kirk Jones) lit up on last week's premiere of Over There (Wednesdays, 10 ET/PT), FX's gritty
Iraq war drama.

• Marijuana is the core premise of Showtime dramedy Weeds (Mondays, 10 ET/PT), a dark version of Desperate Housewives suburbia with
Mary-Louise Parker as a pot-dealing soccer mom. In Sunday's special preview, a teen sells pot to grade-schoolers until Parker's character blackmails him to stop.

Related: Marijuana Policy Project

Radio talk-show host Michael Graham was suspended by station WMAL-AM yesterday for repeatedly describing Islam as a "terrorist organization" on his program.

The effort to have Michael removed was spear-headed by CAIR (Council for American-Islamic Relations). They are like a PR firm for Muslim terrorists. They make sure that Muslims are portrayed favorably in countries where Muslims do not control the media.

They have defended Osama bin Laden after the 911 attacks and member of their leadership have been in tourble with the law for terrorist related activities. They give money to groups like Hamas and others.

Nevertheless, they were successful in removing Michael Graham from the airwaves for accusing Islam of being a terrorist organization. His remarks came after a number of Ilsmaic leaders around the world (specifically in Europe following the London attacks) refused to categorically denounce suicide bombings.

On the same day that Michael was suspended, CAIR issued a fatwa against terrorism (a little late guys) and produced a television ad denouncing terror.

It is nice to see these denouncements, but we have seen this in the past. The problem with them is that they are just a nother PR campaign designed to use the media to fool us into believing something that is not true.

She has flexible silicone for skin rather than hard plastic, and a number of sensors and motors to allow her to turn and react in a human-like manner.

She can flutter her eyelids and move her hands like a human. She even appears to breathe...