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DETROIT - A man charged with smuggling dlrs 12 million in bogus cashiers checks into the United States told agents the man named on the checks may belong to al-Qaida, authorities said Wednesday. Omar Shishani, 47, also told investigators during an interview that "if you want to know about terrorism, I can help you with that," Assistant U.S. Attorney Eric Straus said during a hearing. Defense attorney Nabih Ayad denied his client ever made such statements. Shishani, who was born in Jordan but is of Chechen descent, was arrested last week after arriving at Detroit Metropolitan Airport on a flight...

A young clerk with no knowledge of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown allowed a tribute to victims slip into the classified ads page of a newspaper in southwest China, a Hong Kong daily reported on Wednesday. The tiny ad in the lower right corner of page 14 of the Chengdu Evening News on Monday night, read: "Paying tribute to the strong(-willed) mothers of June 4 victims". An investigation was launched by Chinese authorities to find out how the advertisement slipped its way past censors. Public discussion of the massacre is still taboo in Beijing and the government has rejected calls...

South Korean authorities have charged five residents of Seoul, including a Korean-American businessman, with spying for North Korea. Prosecutors say the five took orders from Pyongyang, and funneled an abundant amount of information to North Korean spies, including some sensitive national intelligence. VOA's Kurt Achin reports from Seoul. Friday's indictments followed an intensive two-month investigation of the five defendants, who were arrested in October. South Korean senior prosecutor Ahn Chang-ho announces result of spy scandal investigation, 8 Dec. 2006 South Korean senior prosecutor Ahn Chang-ho announces result of spy scandal investigation, 8 Dec. 2006 Senior South Korean prosecutor Ahn Chang-ho...

Fitting the pieces together In February 2001, the Sunday Times ran the article Was this Saddam’s Bomb by Gwynne Roberts. I couldn't find the original but it is also on Globalsecurity.org . I only recently read this article and found it interesting but very hard to believe. One of the newly released documents CMPC-2003-015757 contains the Roberts' article in English. This is the first time I have seen it. I did some research and found no serious academic or professional rebuttals other than people who also found it hard to believe. However, it seems that supporting evidence has been right...

Hopefully, I can finish writing this column today before it is OTBE. That's slang for the phrase "Over Taken By Events" On Wednesday, I had cranked out a piece for Sunday on two topics: Reaction to the Amish school murders and the nasty Mark Foley flap that has gripped the halls of power. The first part expressed outrage because members of the Westboro Baptist Church had announced they planned to protest at the funerals of the Amish girls killed Monday in Lancaster County, PA. In case you don't remember them, they're the bunch out of Kansas that pickets the funerals...

AMSTERDAM, NETHERLANDS - Armed men broke into an upscale Amsterdam home and kidnapped the daughter of a millionaire whose fortune came from selling chemicals, including to Iraq in the 1980s, police said Tuesday. Her children were left unharmed. Police said the gunmen stormed into the home of Claudia Melchers, 37, late Monday and took her away. They said they were treating it as a kidnapping. Melchers, who runs a catering company, is the daughter of Hans Melchers, who owns Melchemie Holland, which supplied chemicals to Iraq in the 1980s. It was unclear whether the kidnapping was related to the company's...

The Chinese authorities have compensated the mother of a youth who died after being beaten in police custody during the 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy protesters, in the first known payment of its kind. A human rights activist said yesterday that police in Chengdu had reportedly paid 70,000 yuan (£4,800) as "hardship assistance" to Tang Deying, who has campaigned for 17 years for an official apology and redress for the death of her son.

(CNSNews.com) - Fourteen miles from the U.S. Capitol, a basement-run organization with alleged ties to Hamas and al Qaeda is a crucial link in the planning of any future terrorist attacks against the United States, according to several terrorism experts who analyzed documents and other information obtained in a CNSNews.com investigation. The United Association for Studies and Research (UASR), based in Springfield, Va., is publicly identified as a Muslim think tank but has multiple ties to the terrorism underworld, according to the CNSNews.com sources, who are both inside and outside government. "UASR is a front organization for a terrorist group,"...

For those who lived in SOuth Carolina or are still living in SOuth Carolina now, we all remember Hurricane Hugo back in 1989. It was the most costly natural disaster in US history until Andrew hit 3 years later. Now Katrina has passed Andrew as the most costly natural disaster in history. Going back to Hurricane Hugo, we had two leaders in former South Carolina Governor Carroll Campbell and Charleston Mayor Joe Riley during this crisis. How would you rate them compared to the incompetent leader of the current Governor of LA Kathleen Blanco and NO Mayor Ray Nagin? Campbell...

"Since June Fourth, the Chinese government has talked constantly about respecting its citizens' "right to exist." Yet five years ago [sixteen now] guns and tanks deprived countless outstanding young Chinese men and women of their "right to exist" in a single night. This is nothing but hypocrisy.          As the mother of a victim, there is no way for me to forget these boys and girls and men and women, including my own son, who died in pools of blood. I want the people of the world to know that they once lived in this world, that this world once belonged...

For most Americans, February 14 was Valentine's Day, the most insipid holiday on the calendar. The date deserves to be better known for another reason. On February 14, 1989, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the spiritual leader and revolutionary dictator of Iran, pronounced a fatwa (an Islamic legal judgment) against the British novelist Salman Rushdie. It said: It is not outlandish to think of the World Trade Center towers as The Satanic Verses, magnified immeasurably but not beyond all recognition. "In the name of Him, the Highest. There is only one God, to whom we shall all return. I inform all zealous...

Zhao Ziyang, former Secretary-General of mainland China’s Communist Party, died at a Beijing hospital last Monday. Good riddance to another communist? In this case, no. Not all tigers are incapable of changing their stripes. During his tenure in China’s one and only political party, Zhao took steps that truly can be called “reforms.” Zhao's greatest moment occurred during the pro-democracy rebellion of 1989, which was centered in and around Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. He opposed the use of China’s vast military might against the peaceful protestors gathered in the square. On May 19, 1989, Zhao personally pleaded with the protestors, mostly...

(CNSNews.com) - Sen. John Kerry's presidential campaign has hired a new director of religion outreach, who is being described by a Catholic group as "a curious choice." Mara Vanderslice, who formerly worked as religion outreach director for Democrat Howard Dean, was raised without any faith and didn't become an evangelical Christian until she attended Earlham College, a Quaker school known for its adherence to pacifism, the Catholic League said on Monday. According to Catholic League President William Donohue, when Vanderslice was in college she was active in the Earlham Socialist Alliance, a group that supports convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal and...

In 1989 then-Gov. Bill Clinton was sued as one of three top Arkansas officials responsible for the intimidation of black voters in his state as part of a legal action brought under the 1965 Voting Rights Act, NewsMax.com has learned. And a year earlier the U.S. Supreme court ruled that Clinton had wrongfully tried to overturn the election of a black state representative in favor of a white Democrat. In the 1989 case, "the evidence at the trial was indeed overwhelming that the Voting Rights Act had been violated," reported the Arkansas Gazette on Dec. 6, 1989. (The paper later...

As Ronald Reagan leaves office, the nation still has not quite taken his measure. Even his critics like the guy, and even his friends often sound disappointed. Someone ought to say that his is likely to prove the most epochal presidency since Franklin D. Roosevelt's. Not the least of Mr. Reagan's accomplishments is how much the nation has forgotten. He took office in the very shadow of a hostage crisis, remember? Remember gasoline lines? Remember double-digit inflation and interest rates twice today's? Remember Watergate? Remember Vietnam? As Ronald Reagan hands over the reins tomorrow, the first President since Eisenhower to...

In 1989, students in Beijing voiced their just demand for fighting corruption and bureaucratic racketeering and for promoting honest government. The students' patriotic acts had the support of the overwhelming majority of people in the country. However, a small number of leaders who supported corruption resorted to unprecedented means. They acted in a frenzied fashion, using tanks, machine guns and other weapons to suppress the unarmed citizens, killing hundreds and injuring and crippling thousands of others. Then the authorities mobilized all types of propaganda machinery to fabricate lies and used highhanded measures to silence the people. Now 15 years have...

His divorce has been final for only six months, but already Sen. John Kerry has acquired a first-class rake's reputation in the rarefied world of rich, handsome, young bachelor senators. To hear the gossips tell it, the tall, dark-haired former Navy officer with the surgically improved chin has been cutting a swath through the ranks of America's most available young women, inspiring both admiration and envy among the capital's preening young singles. There was the lithesome, British-born researcher for ABC-TV, Emma Gilby, whose long affair with Kerry has left her speechless about it. "There's just nothing I want to say...

BEIJING (AP) - China's premier on Sunday defended the government's deadly 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square, calling the student-led demonstrations a "very serious political disturbance" that had to be put down. In a rare, nationally televised news conference, Wen Jiabao cited China's economic advances since then as evidence the government made the right choice. He did not directly answer a question from The Associated Press about a military surgeon's petition calling on the government to admit it made mistakes in crushing the student-led protests 15 years ago. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people were killed. "What hung in...

Judge Orders Exxon Mobil to Pay Nearly $7 Billion in Spill Damages By Rachel D'oro Associated Press Writer ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) - A federal judge on Wednesday ordered Exxon Mobil Corp. to pay about $6.75 billion to thousands of Alaskans affected by the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. The ruling is the latest of several damage awards in the case over the past decade - the result of successful appeals in federal court by Exxon. The company plans to appeal again. Wednesday's ruling by U.S. District Judge Russel Holland ordered the Irving, Texas-based company to pay $4.5 billion in punitive...

December of this year will mark ten years from the Revolution which in December 1989 put an end to the communist regime in Romania. Ten years does not represent a long period of time, but it still represents a point when people can ask questions and try to offer answers. In December of 1989, the people of Romania arose and succeeded to chase out of power one of the most despicable figures of modern history: dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his unworthy wife Elena, as well as a regime of tremendous oppression, obscene unlawfulness and contrary to everything for which Romanian...