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Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, a Falls Church man and a member of al Qaeda who admitted he was planning to assassinate then-President George W. Bush, was sentenced to life in prison Monday at federal court in Alexandria. Abu Ali was originally sentenced in 2005 to 30 years in prison. U.S. Judge Gerald Bruce Lee of the U.S. District Court for eastern Virginia ruled Monday that Abu Ali should spend life in prison partially because he never renounced his al Qaeda ties. After the initial sentencing, both sides filed appeals. Abu Ali completed some of his sentence in solitary confinement at...

About the Program Taped in 2004, then Illinois U.S. Senator - Elect Barack Obama discusses his memoir, titled "Dreams from My Father." It's his account of growing up in a racially mixed family, doing community work in Chicago, and a journey to Kenya where he met the African side of his family. Mr. Obama also talks about the challenges he expected to face when he took his U.S. Senate seat in January 2005. Includes Q&A.

As late as two weeks ago I had not the foggiest notion that I would spend the last week of the campaign in D.C. or the last weekend in a spitting match with the London Times and Oxford University, two institutions that buy their spit by the barrel. This all began back in July, entirely innocently. Someone sent me some short excerpts from Barack Obama's 1995 memoir, "Dreams From My Father" and asked if they were as radical as they sounded. I located the excerpts within larger passages online and replied that, in fact, they were not particularly radical in...

Sen. Barack Obama is apparently quite a cheapskate when it comes to giving to charity. From 2001 to 2004, the tax returns for Mr. and Mrs. Ebenezer Obama show less than $8,500 in donations out of the nearly $1 million they made. In 2005 and 2006, with book royalties making them millionaires, their charitable contributions rose to about 5% of income. But how "charitable" are some of the causes Obama supports? In 2006, for instance, he gave more than $20,000 to the notorious Rev. Jeremiah Wright's Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. Imagine that. Giving tens of thousands of...

Barack Obama’s campaign has confirmed that a woman living in a South Boston housing project is indeed the senator’s aunt, a little-known relationship that was only revealed this week - five days before the election. Obama spokesman Reid Cherlin confirmed to the Herald this afternoon that Zeituni Onyango, 56, who lives on Flaherty Way, is Obama’s aunt on Obama’s father’s side. Onyango, a Kenyan native is believed to be the “Aunti Zeituni” in Obama’s memoir, “Dreams From My Father.” Click here to find out more! Onyango received a small stipend over the past year working six hours a week as...

The British newspaper The Times reported Wednesday that it had tracked down Barack Obama’s aunt Zeituni Onyango. Although born in Kenya, Onyango now lives in the United States, in Boston. The report of The Times shows her living conditions are not exactly grand. Zeituni Onyango is affectionally described by Obama in his book Dreams from My Father. Today, however, it seems that Obama and Onyango have little to no contact. The latter now ‘lives in a disabled-access flat on a rundown public housing estate in South Boston.’ Another relative of Obama, whom he also affectionally described in his best-selling autobiography,...

She is the second Obama relative known to live on skid row. His own brother was found living in a cardboard shanty last month in Kenya, and now his aunt in a Boston slum just five miles from where Obama attended law school. She was found by British journalists in a dismal, run-down public housing project in a violent slum in south Boston. Details. Perhaps surprisingly, Barack Obama has apparently not reached out to help his aunt or his brother, nor does he keep in touch with his relatives. In fact, his charitable contributions for any altruistic purposes are terribly...

Barack Obama's story, spanning from his mother's roots in Kansas to his father's in Kenya and his childhood spent in Hawaii and Indonesia, has been well chronicled and a central part of his allure as a candidate who transcends national and racial lines. But one small part might have remained largely hidden from public view. In a first-floor apartment of a brick public housing complex on a side street in South Boston lives a woman who city officials believe is Obama's aunt. Her name is Zeituni Onyango, as in the "Auntie Zeituni" in one of his books, a polite and...

Zeituni Onyango, the aunt so affectionately described in Mr Obama’s best-selling memoir Dreams from My Father, lives in a disabled-access flat on a rundown public housing estate in South Boston. A second relative believed to be the long-lost “Uncle Omar” described in the book was beaten by armed robbers with a “sawed-off rifle” while working in a corner shop in the Dorchester area of the city. He was later evicted from his one-bedroom flat for failing to pay $2,324.20 (£1,488) arrears, according to the Boston Housing Court. The US press has repeatedly rehearsed Mr Obama’s extraordinary odyssey, but the other...

In his bestselling autobiography Dreams from My Father Mr Obama recalls how, during his first visit to Kenya, his cousin referred to an uncle, Omar, who had left Africa and moved to Boston, but had been “lost”. A little later in the book Mr Obama travels to the family village in western Kenya where he meets his step-grandmother, Sarah, the woman who had raised his father. On the walls of her tin-roofed hut, Mr Obama noticed photographs of the missing Omar, “the uncle who had left for America twenty-five years ago and had never come back”. The woman he calls...

As I have contended in previous articles, there is considerable and growing evidence that Bill Ayers made a significant contribution to Obama's "Dreams from My Father." Among other indicators, I have cited the stunning parallels in nautical metaphors and postmodern themes, as well as the nearly miraculous transformation of Obama from struggling hack to literary giant in just a few years. On Friday evening I received a welcome call from a member of Congress who has found the evidence as convincing as I have and has intervened to have writing samples tested through a university-based authorship program. Although no such...

According to Jack Cashill (see this link), there is mounting evidence to indicate that Barack Obama was not the author of his now famous memoir, Dreams From My Father. His research into Obama's literary background shows that, prior to 1990, Obama had written nothing of note. Then like a bolt from the blue, Obama produces a work described by Time Magazine as "the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician."Cashill observes, "I had questioned whether the influential Muslim crackpot who paved Obama’s way into Harvard, Khalid al Mansour, might have greased his way into the world of publishing as...

It's an old point about Obama's early life experience, but when I read about the formation of the book Dreams From My Father, a thought or two similar to Robert Stacy McCain's ran across my mind: "A 28-year-old law student gets written up in the newspapers, then gets a call from a literary agent? She calls him? The agent then signs this 28-year-old nobody — whose only credential as an author is student law journal stuff — with Simon & Schuster. Hello? In what alternative universe does this happen? He misses his deadline, but that's OK, because he then gets...