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AMSTERDAM, Netherlands - A Dutch political cartoonist was arrested this week on suspicion of insulting people because of their race or religion through his work, authorities said Friday. The cartoonist, who works under the pseudonym Gregorius Nekschot, was arrested Tuesday on suspicion of violating hate speech laws and held overnight before being released, a spokeswoman for his publisher Uitgeverij Xtra said. "He was arrested with a great show of force, by around 10 policemen," the spokeswoman said.

In a world where a snob like Michael Moore and a smug manipulator like Al Gore can win Oscars for "documentaries" that play fast and loose with the truth, it's ironic that Ben Stein's Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, which makes a serious effort to tell the truth about a problem that's seriously damaging our civilization, not only won't get nominated for an Oscar but will certainly be attacked as anti-scientific. This is the opposite of the truth, or very nearly so. Ben Stein's film project was to expose the way rigid insistence on Darwinist dogma is expelling not only brilliant...

The Wikimedia Foundation has received a copyright infringement claim from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also known as the Mormon Church. The infringement claim is in reference to a URL used as a source in a Wikinews article about Mormon Church documents leaked to the website Wikileaks, titled "Copy of handbook for leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints obtained by Wikinews". The URL was originally cited as a link in the sources subsection of the article. The Wikimedia Foundation is a donor-supported non-profit organization which runs Wikipedia and Wikinews. This is the first...

UT administrator suspended over TFP column By Justin R. Kalmes Toledo Free Press Managing Editor jkalmes@toledofreepress.com EDITOR'S NOTE: The April 6 Michael S. Miller column can be read here. The April 18 Crystal Dixon column can be read here. UT President Lloyd Jacob's response can be read here. The WTOL video report can be viewed here. A UT administrator has been placed on paid leave for opinions she expressed in a column posted on Toledo Free Press' Web site last month. As first reported on WTOL TV, Crystal Dixon, associate vice president of human resources, wrote in her column posted...

A University of Wisconsin Stevens Point student government leader is coming under fire for allegedly trashing a pro-life display on campus. Student senator Roderick King is said to have vandalized a display featuring crosses erected by the campus pro-life group to memorialize those babies killed in abortions. The UWSP pro-life group Pointers for Life put up the Cemetery of the Innocents display and spent the morning last Thursday repairing the damage someone caused in an apparent vandalizism. That's when they were trashed a second time. As students repaired the earlier damage, King led a group of angry students by walking...

Climate Change: Colorado State University says it'll no longer promote the work of Dr. William Gray. Is it really a cost-cutting move or are CSU and eco-fascists trying to silence the godfather of hurricane forecasting? - Snip - The university says its decision is based solely on the burdens of keeping up with media requests and inquiries about Gray's work that overwhelm a lone media staffer. It says the decision has nothing to do with the fact that Gray, professor emeritus of CSU's atmospheric department, has been an effective voice offering inconvenient truths debunking Al Gore's climate disaster theories. -...

The academic left is fond of buzzwords that sound harmless but function in a highly ideological way. Many schools of education and social work require students to have a good "disposition." In practice this means that conservatives need not apply, as highly publicized attempts to penalize right-wing students at Brooklyn College and Washington State University revealed. "Social justice" is an even more useful codeword. Who can oppose it? But some schools made the mistake of spelling out that it means advocacy for causes of the left, including support for gay marriage and adoption, also opposition to "institutional racism," heterosexism, classism...

A case triggered by a school district's instructions to students to "shut up" if they held religious beliefs that did not support the practice of homosexuality is being appealed to the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit. Officials with the Alliance Defense Fund have confirmed they are taking the case involving Timothy Morrison to the next level after a panel decided against a judicial ruling endorsing the student's First Amendment rights in the dispute with the Boyd County, Ky., Board of Education. "Christian students shouldn't be prohibited from expressing their beliefs," ADF Senior Legal Counsel Joel Oster...

The Bush administration has launched a new “outreach” policy reflecting it’s reluctance to discuss jihadism in public. This time, it has targeted language. We are no longer at war with “jihadism”. Rather, we are engaged in a war against “extremism”. In a document titled: "Words that Work and Words that Don't: A Guide for Counterterrorism Communication” released in March 2008, Federal agencies including the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security and the National Counter Terrorism Center will now be issued instructions on how not to describe "jihadists”, or the "mujahedeen", or to use any references relating to Islam, Islamic...

The BBC is facing a High Court challenge over its decision to censor a party political broadcast in the run-up to Thursday’s local elections. A Christian party has begun legal action after the corporation insisted on changes to a short film in which the party voiced opposition to the building of Europe’s biggest mosque next to the site of the 2012 Olympics. Tablighi Jamaat, the Islamic missionary group behind the £75 million Abbey Mills mosque, opposes inter-faith dialogue and preaches that non-Muslims are an evil and corrupting influence. One of its British advocates has said that it aims to rescue...

It may be folly or even apostasy - but only in the eyes of some - to do this mere hours after another Earth Day has passed. But, as we see it, now is the perfect time to praise courageous men, those who persistently stick to their own data and conclusions as they swim against the gadarene tide of global warming. Men like William Gray and Patrick Michaels. Mr. Gray, a professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State, is the world's pre-eminent authority on hurricanes. He is also an outspoken foe of the global-warming "consensus," one who has testified before...

Last week's letters page included a missive from Jennifer Lynch, Q.C., chief commissioner of the Canadian "Human Rights" Commission, defending her employees from the accusation of "improper investigative techniques" by yours truly. Steyn, she writes, "provides no substantiation for these claims," and then concludes: "Why is this all important? Because words are important. Steyn would have us believe that words, however hateful, should be given free rein. History has shown us that hateful words sometimes lead to hurtful actions that undermine freedom and have led to unspeakable crimes. That is why Canada and most other democracies have enacted legislation to...

I was watching the local Fox news affiliate tonight and noticed that when they were showing video of the Pope visiting the synagogue in New York City, that they pixelated the crucifix that he wears. Did anyone else see this? Does Fox have a policy of blurring out religious symbols?

Yrsa Stenius, the Swedish press Ombudsmann, wants to press charges against certain bloggers. She is worried about developments on the Internet, where anybody can just write anything they want. She says this has gone too far. She fears this trend could even spread to the mainstream media, unless something is done and a legal precedent is established to rein in unruly bloggers. At the same time, the extreme left-wing thugs of Antifascistisk Action (AFA), who frequently physically assault critics of mass immigration, for instance members of the small party the Sweden Democrats, recently destroyed the car of a 90-year-old woman...

Staff members for a prominent pro-family organization that has been key to the battle against California's mandated homosexual indoctrination programs for public schools are working off-site while an investigation is conducted into threats that someone would arrive at the office and "punish" them, officials confirmed today. The investigation into the threats follows several days of aggressive attacks on the website for Capitol Resource Family Impact, which has restored the site multiple times, only to see another hacker attack disable the location. Karen England, chief of the organization that has played a prominent role in a challenge to the implementation of...

OLATHE, Kansas, April 10, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Chief of Police Janet Thiessen of Olathe, Kansas, has issued a personal apology to Ronald Brock, who was ordered to leave town by Sgt. David Haldeman on Tuesday evening or face arrest. Brock was driving a vehicle with photographs of victims of abortion and victims of the Jewish Holocaust of World War II.Haldeman has been placed on paid administrative leave pending an investigation into the incident. Brock confirmed that he received a personal phone call from Chief Thiessen who apologized to him for the incident.   Operation Rescue President Troy Newman received an...

The Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC) still doesn't get it. The problem isn't the foulmouthed racists being investigated; it's the body itself. As Joseph Brean reported in Saturday's Post, Ian Fine -- senior general counsel and director-general of dispute resolution at the CHRC -- began a recent interview by reading out loud some of the most poisonous bits of speech the CHRC has dealt with. The idea seemed to be that if the public could be made to realize how vile and mean the material before the CHRC can be, they would end their growing criticisms of the commission. The...

MTV offers lyrics to Devo songs on their web page. But they got frightened by the title of Devo's famous "Are we not men" song, and couldn't bring themselves to write "Jocko Homo" on their page. It's no accident. They have a page listing every track on all of Devo's albums — and each of the 11 times "Jocko Homo" was included in a new compilation, MTV changed its name to "Jocko H***". Ironically, I'd been there to research the way Devo's lyrics were being changed by Walt Disney Records...

Note to American readers: Here's what Canadians have to put up with. Covet your freedom of speech - it's rare, even in the so-called 'free world'. That self-serving legal maladroit Richard Warman is making waves again with his so-called Maximum Disruption Campaign. The latest has the anti-rightwing, anti-conservative, anti-freedom of speech legal beagle launching an all-out attack against a number of conservative writers and internet forums.

Belgrade, 8 April Belgrade, 8 April (AKI) – Swiss authorities banned former chief prosecutor at the UN's Hague-based Yugoslav war crimes tribunal, Carla del Ponte, from presenting on Tuesday her recently published autobiography in her hometown of Lugano, according to media reports. The Swiss federal department of foreign affairs also banned Del Ponte (photo) from presenting the newly published Italian translation of her book 'The Hunt' to journalists and the public in a bookshop in the northern city of Milan on Monday. "Carla del Ponte's book on her work as chief prosecutor of the Hague tribunal contains statements which are...

A Barack Obama supporter has given up her role as a pledged delegate after the campaign found “unacceptable” her description of her neighbor’s children as “monkeys,” which she says she called them because they were climbing in trees. Linda Ramirez-Sliwinski, an a Hispanic trustee for the Village of Carpentersville, Ill., was accused of racism following the interaction with her African-American neighbors. “Given the incident, she is stepping down and will be replaced as delegate,” Ben Labolt, a spokesman for the Obama campaign told FOXNews.com, calling Sliwinski’s remarks “unacceptable.” The campaign discussed the incident with Ramirez-Sliwinski, who decided to step aside...

HARARE, Zimbabwe - Security agents and paramilitary police in riot gear are surrounding a Harare hotel housing foreign journalists. A man answering the phone at the hotel says they are taking away some reporters. The man refused to give his name but said about 30 police entered the hotel Thursday and were preparing to take away four or five journalists. Foreign journalists have been in Zimbabwe to cover elections in which President Robert Mugabe's party lost control of parliament. He is apparently facing a runoff for the presidency. THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information....

ReviveTube allows you to watch and download YouTube videos that have been deleted or removed by user. Note this tool can't revive every video, but it can handle most. http://revivetube.com/

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon expressed his fear that the posting to the Internet of Dutch politician Geert Wilders’ “Fitna”—a film linking Islamist violence with passages from the Koran—would “incite retribution.” Ban said that “while freedom of speech sounds good in theory, its advocates are overlooking the risks. The Koran bids Muslims to spare unbelievers who submit and pay the jizya. But does Wilders acknowledge this option for peaceful coexistence with Islam? No. He one-sidedly focuses on the consequences to those who stubbornly reject this offer.” “We must recognize that the real fault lies not with the Muslims, but...

A 17-minute documentary on the Quran, juxtaposing images of Islam's holy book with terror attacks and bombings by Muslim extremists, was taken down from a British video-sharing website, LiveLeak,com, after the organization reported "serious" threats to its staff members. The documentary had been posted against the wishes of the government of the Netherlands by Geert Wilders, a Dutch MP and leader of the Freedom Party. His video is called "Fitna," an Arabic word meaning strife. It appeared on the political party's website first, but soon disappeared because of "technical difficulties," reported the London Times. Then it appeared on LiveLeak.com, only...

Following threats to our staff of a very serious nature, and some ill informed reports from certain corners of the British media that could directly lead to the harm of some of our staff, Liveleak.com has been left with no other choice but to remove Fitna from our servers. This is a sad day for freedom of speech on the net but we have to place the safety and well being of our staff above all else. We would like to thank the thousands of people, from all backgrounds and religions, who gave us their support. They realised LiveLeak.com is...

Russian Oscars censored24/03/2008 13:13  - (SA)    Moscow - A series of jokes about President Vladimir Putin and president-elect Dmitry Medvedev were censored from the screening of Russia's equivalent of the Oscars film awards ceremony, newspapers reported on Monday. The jokes - mild by Western standards of satire - at Friday's "Nika" awards, were cut by private television station CTC in its broadcasting Saturday of the event, according to Moskovsky Komsomolets. "All the juicy stuff from the broadcast was edited out," the daily said. One of the comments axed, the newspaper said, was an allusion to uncertainty over whether Medvedev or his...

At the core of Senator Barack Obama's presidential campaign is a promise that he can transcend the starkly red-and-blue politics of the last 15 years, end the partisan and ideological wars, and build a new governing majority. To achieve the change the country wants, he says, "we need a leader who can finally move beyond the divisive politics of Washington and bring Democrats, independents and Republicans together to get things done." It is a promise that convinced 67 percent of all registered voters in the last New York Times/CBS News Poll, in late February, that Obama "would be the kind...

(IsraelNN.com) The world's largest website name registrar, Network Solutions, is blocking web surfers from accessing an anti-Islam site - prompting concerns that fear of Islamic violence has become so powerful that it even controls WWW content. Network Solutions developed the domain name registration system in 1993 and was the world's only domain name provider until 1999, when the domain name industry opened up to competition. Today, the company hosts seven million domain names. The Washington Post reports that Network Solutions is now, for the first time, blocking access to a site that has not yet put up any substantial content....

Excerpt - AMSTERDAM, March 23 (Reuters) - A U.S.-based web service, which Islam critic and Dutch right-wing lawmaker Geert Wilders planned to use to show his film critical of the Koran, said on Saturday that it had inactivated the site due to complaints. "This site has been suspended while Network Solutions is investigating whether the site's content is in violation of the Network Solutions Acceptable Use Policy," the company said on the site www.fitnathemovie.com. Wilders, who has given few details about his 15-minute film, has said he plans to release 'Fitna' on the Internet before the end of the month...

Tomorrow’s the big day — or rather, today is, if plans proceed to post the movie online at midnight (European time, I’m assuming). I’ve been monitoring the official website since this morning and until the past hour it looked like this. Click to enlarge: That’s from the British website, which is still up and running as I write this. The American page looked exactly the same except for “Coming Soon” in place of the date. Now it looks like this. Click again to enlarge:Here’s Network Solutions’s terms of use. Is paragraph 7 the operative one, do you think — or...

Vandals Trash Bucknell's Conservative Newspaper A student-run newspaper at Bucknell University was the target of vandals last month as over half of the copies in the paper's first press run were destroyed and/or removed from campus. The attack came as The Counterweight, Bucknell's conservative newspaper, highlighted criticism of the university's sponsorship of "Focus the Nation," a high-tech discussion on climate change. "This vandalism is unacceptable," said Sarah Schubert, the paper's editor. Ms. Schubert believes the act "amounts to censorship. "On a college campus, the free and vigorous exchange of ideas should be wholeheartedly defended by everyone," argued Ms. Schubert. On...

The man who spoke for Comcast at Harvard last month has told the Federal Communications Commission that the agency has no legal power to stop the cable giant from engaging in what it calls "network management practices" (critics call it peer-to-peer traffic blocking). Comcast vice president David L. Cohen's latest filing with the Commission claims that regulators can do nothing even if they conclude that Comcast's behavior runs afoul of the FCC's Internet neutrality guidelines. "The congressional policy and agency practice of relying on the marketplace instead of regulation to maximize consumer welfare has been proven by experience (including the...

As traditional news outfits migrate online to become dot-coms, one of their biggest headaches is how to adapt to the sprawling new frontier of public comment.In the pre-Internet world of TV and newspapers, public comment wasn't a problem. Broadcast news didn't have any -- aside from the weekly guest spot, usually some hapless civic association president reading from a prompter and staring terrified into the camera. Papers had their letters pages, but allowed only enough space for a few dozen a week, and they were generally written with care and were easy to prune for taste and diction.Things were nicely...

I had a really good post all ready to go.  There was a video posted by the Trinity United Church of Christ, which I found on their YouTube page, of Louis Farrakhan being honored with the Jeremiah A. Wright Trumpeter award.  It's gone from YouTube.  And there was a video of disgraced Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick receiving a similar award.  It's gone from YouTube, too. But the one I'm really mad about is the one of the church's new pastor, Otis Moss III, talking about gangster rap and crack cocaine.  They pulled that one, as well.  Maybe it had something to...

BEIJING (AP) ― The blocking added to the communist government's efforts to control what the public saw and heard about protests that erupted Friday in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, against Chinese rule. Access to YouTube.com, usually readily available in China, was blocked after videos appeared on the site Saturday showing foreign news reports about the Lhasa demonstrations, montages of photos and scenes from Tibet-related protests abroad. There were no protest scenes posted on China-based video Web sites such as 56.com, youku.com and tudou.com. The Chinese government has not commented on its move to prevent access to YouTube. Internet users trying...

My bias in this blog is a whole hearted belief in the genius of the First Amendment to the Constitution which, for those of you who missed Government Class, deals with the inability of the Congress to dictate what we can believe in the form of establishing a state religion and in the sanctity of individual speech no matter how unpleasant it might be. The reason the drafters of the Constitution protected speech, press, and religious choice in the first amendment is that when those are gone the others don't really matter. Political correctness is a way of dividing and...

SUDBURY, ON, March 10, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Canadian Television (CTV) has pulled an ad that claims it is possible to leave the homosexual lifestyle, sponsored by a Christian advocacy group, Life Productions, after the station received numerous complaints from pro-homosexual activists. The 30-second spot is narrated by John Westcott, the founder of Exchange ministries, an organization that seeks to help practicing homosexuals who wish to leave the lifestyle. Westcott is himself a former homosexual, as is his wife Amanda."You hear a lot about gay rights, gay marriage and the gay lifestyle being taught in our public schools for children," says Westcott...

'Lust' star Tang banned for performance By Karen Chu March 8, 2008 Tang Wei (Getty Images) More news at THR-Asia HONG KONG -- "Lust, Caution" star Tang Wei has been banned in the Chinese media because of the sexual nature of her performance in the Ang Lee film, local press reports said Friday. An internal memo from China's State Administration of Radio Film and Television was allegedly sent to all television stations and print media in China on Thursday night, stating that a new television commercial starring Tang for skin care brand Pond's was to cease broadcast immediately. All print...

This summer the Olympics will be held in Beijing, a decision fraught with controversy since it was announced back in 2001. China’s human-rights record is abysmal—from forced abortions, to persecuting Christians and other people of faith, to clamping down on free speech, to supporting a government that has committed genocide in Darfur. The Olympic committee, back in 2001, said choosing Beijing would be a catalyst for change in China. It “may help to liberalize a country,” said the committee’s vice president, Thomas Bach of Germany. But that will not happen when, as the London Daily Mail puts it, you “kow...

Keith John Sampson never thought he could get in trouble for reading a book, especially not on a college campus. But that’s what happened. Sampson is a man in his early 50s. He does janitorial work for the campus facility services at IUPUI, where he’s been gradually accumulating credits for a degree in communications studies. He has 10 credit hours to go. .... The book is about how for two days in May 1924, a group of Notre Dame students got into a street fight with members of the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan was meeting in South Bend for...

Steve Marshall is an English travel agent. He lives in Spain, and he sells trips to Europeans who want to go to sunny places, including Cuba. In October, about 80 of his Web sites stopped working, thanks to the United States government..... It turned out, though, that Mr. Marshall’s Web sites had been put on a Treasury Department blacklist and, as a consequence, his American domain name registrar, eNom Inc., had disabled them. Mr. Marshall said eNom told him it did so after a call from the Treasury Department; the company, based in Bellevue, Wash., says it learned that the...

CO2 Science is an excellent reference source for hundreds of global warming and CO2 research studies debunking the media's AGW hysterical outbursts. They clearly show their 25% increase in plant production due to today's higher CO2 levels, the high temperatures common across the world during the Chinese, Roman, and Medieval Warm Period, plus the cold intervals of the Dark Age of 450-700 AD, Little Ice in 1600 AD. Well, it looks like CO2 Science paid the price for opposing today's international socialist agenda to ruin America's economy: Their web site was shutdown by a denial-of-service attack, and they are only...

On Jan. 10, just one day after my article on UFO secrecy appeared in this newspaper and on this Web site (“Intelligent Extraterrestrial life: The Other Inconvenient truth?” Jan. 9), I was unceremoniously dropped as a Cato Institute adjunct scholar, a position I’d held for more than 20 years. First some background. I’m a Ph.D. economist with a national reputation in the antitrust area. I’ve written books, journal articles, and many dozens of op-ed articles over the years on a variety of public-policy issues. My association with the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington, D. C. goes back many decades. Yet...

Utah Internet service providers could earn a state-approved "G-rating" for filtering content and insuring that users could not access pornography under provisions in a bill heard by a House committee on Monday.

KHARTOUM, Sudan (AP) -- Sudan has enacted a ban on Danish imports in reaction to the reprinting of a cartoon that satirizes Islam's Prophet Muhammad, the Sudanese state-run news agency said Tuesday. Seventeen Danish newspapers reprinted the cartoon — showing Prophet Muhammad wearing a bomb-shaped turban — in a gesture of free speech on Feb. 13, a day after three men were arrested in an alleged plot to kill the drawing's creator. The reprinting prompted protests in Muslim countries and among Muslims in Denmark, though so far the reaction has been low-key in comparison to the 2006 riots that followed...

Most of the world's Internet users lost access to YouTube for several hours Sunday after an attempt by Pakistan's government to block access domestically affected other countries. The outage highlighted yet another of the Internet's vulnerabilities, coming less than a month after broken fiber-optic cables in the Mediterranean took Egypt off line and caused communications problems from the Middle East to India. An Internet expert explained that Sunday's problems arose when a Pakistani telecommunications company accidentally identified itself to Internet computers as the world's fastest route to YouTube. But instead of serving up videos of skateboarding dogs, it sent the...

Raleigh, N.C. — At least two public officials said they feel insulted by a new Wake County school system policy to limit what invited speakers say in area classrooms. Wake County Sheriff Donnie Harrison and Apex Mayor Keith Weatherly said they have refused to sign a waiver that the school district requires of all outside speakers. The waiver was devised last year after an Enloe High School teacher invited an anti-Muslim speaker to his class and the man handed out pamphlets entitled, "Why Women Should Not Marry Muslims." The guidelines in the waiver cover subject matter, behavior and appearance, and...

US, February 21, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - At the same time that news has come out that the Toronto Catholic School board has refused to participate in pro-homosexual activities, homosexual activists are making significant inroads in US schools, as a booklet titled, "Just the Facts about Sexual Orientation and Youth," is set to be distributed to all 16,000 school districts in the country. The 24-page booklet by the National Education Association and American Psychological Association, tells students that homosexuality is a "normal expression of human sexuality". "What's so scary and dogmatic about this report is that it communicates that religious-based viewpoints...

Over the past week an unprecedented level of attention has been received by my YouTube channel, where for several months we have hosted a powerful video documenting torture and abuse of prisoners in Yekaterinaburg. For more than 60 days, the controversial video had about 6,500 views, but after a Wall Street Journal article about Lev Ponomarev linked to it, within days there were more than 30,000 views and hundreds of comments. However yesterday I received the following notification in my email inbox: Dear Member: After being flagged by members of the YouTube community and reviewed by YouTube staff, the video...