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Dr. C.E. "Buddy" Hicks' new column answers questions about Christ and Christianity, today he deals with this one, "I have done many terrible things to my friends and family. I cannot believe that I have been so stupid and selfish. I recently accepted Christ as my Lord, but I am still dealing with guilt. I want to try and restore my broken relationships, but I don’t know how to do it. Lately I’ve been thinking that I may be beyond forgiveness. Please help me"

UPDATE: Tom Hicks tells The Dallas Morning News that he is not yet in default; please see tomorrow's paper for details. I've adjusted the wording throughout this item to reflect that. If anybody has information that contradicts his position, please let me know. Dallas billionaire Tom Hicks' holding company stopped interest payments on $525 million in loans, according to a report today by financial Web site FINalternatives. Hicks Sports Group, which owns the Texas Rangers and the Dallas Stars, failed to make an interest payment on syndicated banks loans earlier this week, according to the report. The Hicks group is...

JONESBORO, Ga. -- A high school dance team at Jonesboro High School has been disbanded. The move announced Tuesday comes after parents complained about a provocative dance routine that was performed by the 8-member group at a Jan. 13 basketball game. Jacqueline Evans, a school district spokeswoman, said the squad will not be allowed to perform or represent the school for the remainder of the school year. A video showing the dance, titled "The Sluts of Jonesboro," had also been posted on YouTube, but has since been removed from the web site. "The team will not perform for the remainder...

Confessed terrorism supporter David Hicks has been released from Adelaide's Yatala Prison. Mr Hicks did not stop to speak to reporters, instead he was driven from the facility. His lawyer David McLeod read a statement on his behalf. In it 32-year-old Mr Hicks apologised for not appearing before the media himself, but said that he was not strong enough. He has also agreed not to talk to the media about some matters before the end of next March, as part of his conditions of release from Guantanamo Bay. "It is my intention to honour this agreement as I don't...

Excerpt - A jet transporting the Australian convicted terrorism supporter David Hicks has landed at the RAAF's Edinburgh base in Adelaide. The aircraft landed at a 9:45am ACST (10:15am AEST). It pulled up near the air base terminal building and two people, believed to be Customs officers, boarded the jet. South Australia's elite police group Star Force will transfer Hicks to Yatala Prison in a convoy of vehicles once he has been processed by Customs at the base in Adelaide's north. Hicks will then be put into a solitary confinement cell in Division G, the highest security prison ward in...

Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Rodham Clinton said Friday she sees her sometimes Southern accent as a virtue. "I think America is ready for a multilingual president," Clinton said during a campaign stop at a charter school in Greenville, S.C. The New York senator—who said she's been thinking about critics who've suggested that she tried to put on a fake Southern accent in Selma, Ala.—noted that she's split her life between Arkansas, Illinois and the East Coast. Clinton added a Southern lilt to her voice last week when addressing a civil rights group in New York City headed by the Rev....

THE Australian Democrats today took the extraordinary step of saying they would welcome convicted terrorist David Hicks running for the party as a candidate. Sandra Kanck, the Democrats' leader in South Australia which is Hicks' home state, said she would be happy for him to seek a political career as a Democrat. "I certainly wouldn't rule him out (as a candidate)," she said. Her comments follow her ongoing criticism of the South Australian Government over the confessed supporter of terrorism. She said Hicks should be released on home detention when he recovered from his ordeal at Guantanamo Bay. That prompted...

NAVAL STATION GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba, March 31, 2007 – The military commissions case of Australian detainee David Hicks, which concluded last night with a sentence of nine months imprisonment, was a fair proceeding that established a good basis for future commissions cases, the chief prosecutor for the Defense Department said here yesterday. Hicks, 31, was sentenced according to a plea agreement after pleading guilty to one charge of providing material support for terrorism. The commission recommended a seven-year sentence, which was the maximum allowed under the agreement, but another part of the agreement guaranteed a suspension for any portion...

A NEW life of freedom beckons for confessed terrorist David Hicks, and today he dressed for the part. Instead of a prison uniform, he appeared before a US military commission for sentencing dressed more like a business executive, or someone applying for a job. On Monday, the Adelaide-born father of two made his first public appearance in almost three years in crumpled, Guantanamo Bay-issue prison scrubs. The former kangaroo skinner and chicken processor, who is short in stature at about 160cm tall, appeared before the military commission wearing rubber thongs and with his dark, straggly brown hair dangling at chest...

DEAR David Hicks/Abu Muslim Australia/Abu Muslim Australii/Abu Muslim Philippines/Mohammed Dawood/Ade Laide Daewoo/Ali Baba Yabba Dabba Doo, We the undersigned wish to register our anger and disgust at your guilty plea before the unlawful kangaroo court convened illegally at the unconstitutional Guantanamo Bay gulag by illicit operatives of unelected US imperialist-in-chief George Warpig Bush. We've worked long and hard to secure your freedom only to have you throw all our effort down the toilet by ... attempting to secure your freedom. The injustice is sickening.

NAVAL STATION GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba, March 28, 2007 – Australian detainee David Hicks, who entered a guilty plea March 26 to a charge of material support for terrorism, is expected to be sentenced by the end of the week, military officials said. Officials today released information about how the military commission will move forward with sentencing, a process that has not been tried either in the previous round of military commissions last year or under the Military Commissions Act of 2006, established after the Supreme Court struck down the first commissions process as unconstitutional. Before the military commission members...

THE Left likes to take its information pre-digested, with pre-formed opinions offered by wannabe celebrities. Whether its Al Gore's hyperbolic disinformation on global warming or a curtain call of aspiring actresses bleating about maggot-free sheep, the fellow travellers prefer the easy intellectual road. Listening to David Hicks' supporters attempt to justify his guilty plea is a reminder of the shallow nature of those locked into finding causes which serve to amplify their anti-American prejudices. Claiming to seek only justice, they aggressively denigrate those who are actually attempting to see justice applied to advocates of chaos and theocratic tyranny, like their...

Online journalist Tim Blair, at timblair.net, on how the pro-David crowd now has a lot of egg on their faces THE Sydney Morning Herald's David Marr [on January 13]: "Hicks's condition appears to be deteriorating. He won't speak to Australian consular officials who come to check on him. This year he refused to take his father's Christmas telephone call. He seems still to be talking to his lawyers. A guilty plea would offer the Howard Government a neat exit from this mess in time for the elections. So far, Hicks is holding out." Not any more he ain't. Maybe Howard...

A guilty plea at Guantanamo Bay confirms the obvious DESPITE the attempts of a well-co-ordinated political and media campaign to portray him as an innocent victim of the war on terror, David Hicks's plea of guilty to charges of giving material support to terrorists before a US military commission confirms something that has been obvious for a long time. Namely, that the suburban boy from Adelaide who left his family to join the cause of violent Islamic fundamentalism has not spent the past five years jailed at Guantanamo Bay because of a youthful misadventure, but rather because he committed some...

THE politically correct orthodoxy relating to terrorism suspect David Hicks - finally charged yesterday in the US with providing material support to terrorists - is that the 31-year-old Australian has had a rough deal. Held without trial at Guantanamo Bay for five years after he was was picked up by the US military in Afghanistan, Hicks has become something of a cause celebre for civil rights activists, constitutional experts and anti-war campaigners. It should be acknowledged a large proportion of Australians – probably a majority – think Hicks has been denied his basic rights. To most people's thinking, being held...

DAVID Hicks has renounced Islam, his American military lawyer confirmed yesterday.Major Michael Mori declined to say why Hicks was no longer a Muslim, saying it was a personal issue for the suspected terrorist. Hicks adopted the name Dawood when he converted to Islam in Adelaide in the late 1990s. He was captured in Afghanistan in 2002 and has spent five years in the high-security US military prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. A former Guantanamo inmate has claimed Hicks was denounced by Muslim prisoners for his change of faith.

DAVID Hicks was al-Qa'ida's "24-carat Golden Boy" and was willing to undertake suicide missions, including crashing a plane into a building, a former Guantanamo Bay inmate has claimed. In a 148-page document written for US government terrorism investigators, British former inmate Feroz Abbasi wrote that Hicks wanted to "go back to Australia and rob and kill Jews". Abbasi's account also made the claim that Hicks wanted to crash a plane into a building and details the Australian terror suspect's behaviour in al-Qai'da training camps in Afghanistan. The claims made by Abbasi, who was released from Guantanamo Bay in 2005 and...

DAVID Hicks has been on toilet paper "rations" because some Guantanamo Bay detainees - but not the Australian terror suspect - have been using it to cause flooding. Prime Minister John Howard is preparing to question United States vice-president Dick Cheney over the time it has taken to try David Hicks amid the new revelations. Rod Smith, a senior consular officer from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), said Australian officials were first alerted to the problem of rationed toilet paper in early November last year. "Toilet paper is rationed to 30 sheets at a time but additional...

The U.S. military prepared new charges Friday against three of the best-known detainees at Guantanamo Bay — a key step toward resuming the military tribunals for terrorism suspects that were halted by the U.S. Supreme Court last year. Authorities drafted new charges — including murder, conspiracy and providing material support for terrorism — against Canadian Omar Khadr, Australian David Hicks and Salim Ahmed Hamdan of Yemen, said Air Force Col. Morris Davis, chief prosecutor in the Guantanamo war crimes trials. Under military rules, the charges are not considered formally filed against the detainees until they are approved by a U.S....

Hicks identified as longtime member of metro-area Crips. People who know Brian Kenneth Hicks might not be hard to find. But those willing to talk about him could be more difficult to come by. That's according to one of Denver's top non-police authorities on gang activity, the Rev. Leon Kelly, executive director of Denver's Open Door Youth Gang Alternatives. "He's a Crip," said Kelly, who has been working to combat metro-area gang violence for more than 20 years. "I know him from past experiences. In 21 years, you run into a lot of people. Brian and his crew, I've known...

Too many define manhood through violence What makes someone spray a limousine with bullets even though he has no idea who might die? A "gun culture," answers The Denver Post, under the headline "Williams' murder a cowardly gun crime." Suffice it to say that the murder of Darrent Williams would not have occurred, at least in the fashion it did, without a gun. But that fact in itself explains little. What is most horrifying about this crime was the killer's casual targeting of people he hardly knew or didn't know at all over what perhaps was a disagreement or a...

TRUTH in the David Hicks affair remains as elusive as ever after fresh allegations this week from inside the US military that the Guantanamo Bay commissions are so seriously flawed that a fair trial is impossible. The most damaging blows yet to the commissions -- still supported by the Howard Government -- came from three US Air Force prosecutors involved in the trials who have quit the investigation in protest. One, John Carr, said the process appeared to have been rigged and that the first four cases -- including Hicks -- had been been "handpicked" and would not be acquitted....

CANBERRA: The first arrest made under Australia's new anti-terrorism laws, in fact the first Australian since 1978 to be charged with terrorism is a Pakistan-born medical student who allegedly attended a three-week training camp organised by the Lashkar-e-Toiba in Pakistan in January last year. Sydney resident Izhar Ul-Haque was arrested by the Australian Federal Police on April 15 and although he was released on bail on May 27, he is said to be under close observation. His lawyer has denied he was a terrorist but admitted that Ul-Haque was sympathetic to the “Kashmir cause''. Ul-Haque is said to have claimed...

Ben Affleck changed the world this week. No, of course I don't mean that a tedious movie star actually changed international events. I mean that he personifies why George Bush and the Republicans won the election. They won because Middle America bit back. Simple as that. Middle America bit back. The abused, the marginalized and the mocked decided that they had had enough. Those taken for granted, those patronized, those treated with disdain voted to no longer play the silent victim. For months a daft coalition of the extremely willing played their guitars, sang their songs and read their Hollywood...

AUSTRALIA'S Guantanamo Bay detainee David Hicks is no longer a Muslim. Hick was also publicly denounced by an al-Qaeda member at Guantanamo Bay for his lack of religious observance, a former British detainee has said. Rumours that Hicks had abandoned his Islamic beliefs were confirmed by British Muslim Moazzam Begg. Mr Begg shared a cell block with Hicks at the US military base in Cuba in 2004. Mr Begg, who was released in January last year after the British government intervened, wrote about his experiences in a new book, Enemy Combatant: A British Muslim's Journey to Guantanamo and Back. Mr...

Disciplining a student for wearing a $5 T-shirt five years ago could end up costing the Warren Hills Regional School District close to $1 million. The Warren County district has been ordered to pay nearly $600,000 in plaintiffs' legal fees incurred during the 5-year-old free speech rights battle over whether a high school student could wear his "redneck" T-shirt. That tally does not include the amount the district has paid its own lawyers. Thomas Sypniewski Jr. was suspended for three days during his senior year in 2001 for wearing a T-shirt that listed blue-collar comedian Jeff Foxworthy's Top 10 reasons...

Dateline: Hollywood, California May 23, 2006 The Kodak Theatre crowd was treated to great entertainment this evening by the two 2006 American Idol finalists, Katherine McPhee and Taylor Hicks. Although it would have been more enjoyable to be on the floor, the mezzanine was still okay. One of my personal highlights of the evening was that I was in the Kodak Theatre, the home of the Oscars, and the stinking anti-American leftist scumbags like Alec Baldwin and Julia Roberts were not in the building. I was a little queasy however, knowing that they had been there recently. Judging by crowd...

A northwest suburban high school board member seeks to ban seven books from classroom use because she thinks the profanity, depiction of graphic sex, and drug and abortion references in the literature are inappropriate for teenagers. Leslie Pinney admits she only read passages of the controversial selections, including Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five and Toni Morrison's Beloved, which were on the American Library Association's 100 most challenged books list between 1990 and 2000. But Pinney said perusing the questionable parts of the books made it clear they weren't suitable for children and should be taken off Township High School District 214's proposed...

I was watching the videos of the American Idol performances and I saw something completely unexpected during the Taylor Hicks performance of "Play That Funky Music White Boy." One audience member is holding a sign that isn't rooting for a contestant - instead it is rooting for our president!Here's the "W" sign, plain as day...It ain't doctored folks - check the video yourself. Now... I wonder how that slipped in? ;)

SO it wasn't a political stunt. It isn't about Iraq. And the threat of Islamist terror right here is more real than many pretend. How real? If the police are right, they have saved scores of you from being blown up -- as people in Madrid and London were blown up. As NSW Police Commissioner Ken Moroney put it, the arrest yesterday of 17 Muslim men disrupted "the final stages of a large-scale terrorist attack". He said explosive material had already been collected. Yet only last week, Prime Minister John Howard was pilloried by many for having warned of an...

A SYDNEY man allegedly telephoned the suspected leader of al-Qa'ida in Spain – Abu Dahdah – seeking help to move a "brother" and his family throughout Europe. The allegation about former Qantas baggage handler Bilal Khazal – made in documents tendered in Mr Dahdah's terrorism trial – contradicts claims by him that he had never spoken to the alleged terror chief, or even knew who he was. As more details of a network of alleged terror supporters in Australia emerged yesterday, it has been claimed a second Australian named in the Spanish court documents, Melbourne cleric Sheikh Mohammed Omran, was...

Australia's top investigators claim Mamdouh Habib trained as a terrorist before the September 11 attacks. Former Guantanamo Bay detainee Mamdouh Habib trained as a terrorist in Pakistan before moving to Afghanistan to serve as a mercenary with al-Qaeda, Australia's top policeman has told a parliamentary inquiry. Australian Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty said Mr Habib received firearms training in Pakistan in the days before September 11, 2001 to prepare him for a border crossing into Afghanistan to join Osama bin Laden's terrorist organisation. Habib was arrested by Pakistani police inside Pakistan on October 5, 2001. "The investigators formed the view...

Group trying to block building name change: NASHVILLE, Tennessee -- A state appeals court heard arguments Wednesday over whether Vanderbilt University can remove the word "Confederate" from a dormitory the United Daughters of the Confederacy helped build in the 1930s. The Tennessee chapter of the group claims the university's effort to drop the first word from Confederate Memorial Hall violates decades-old contracts, but Vanderbilt claims the contracts are no longer valid. The judges, who did not say when they will issue a ruling, had strong words for both sides. "You're arguing social values and making the courts be the tough...

SCV supports Jaqueline Duty Confederate Prom Dress Lawsuit to be filed in Federal court in Lexington, KY Press Release - December 17, 2004 - For Immediate Release This past May Jacqueline Duty, an attractive honor student in Russell, Kentucky, prepared to attend prom night wearing a special dress she had designed herself. It was a classically cut strapless sheath, ankle-length with a shallow slit on one side, and sewn completely out of beaded sequins. And it tastefully incorporated a symbol of her Southern heritage; a Confederate Battle Flag turned upwards so that the starry blue arms of the St. Andrew’s...

Americans Owe Confederate History Respect By CHRIS EDWARDS The Time Has Come To Take A Stand After attending the Confederate Memorial Day service on June 1 in Higginsville, I found myself believing our nation should be ashamed for not giving more respect and recognition to our ancestors. I understand that some find the Confederate flag offensive because they feel it represents slavery and oppression. Well, here are the facts: The Confederate flag flew over the South from 1861 to 1865. That's a total of four years. The U.S. Constitution was ratified in April 1789, and that document protected and condoned...

As I drove down 5th street yesterday, I spied a bumper sticker that addresses an issue I have been waiting for an excuse to write about. It was in the back window of a pickup truck, whose ability to operate I found simply amazing, strategically situated between an empty gun rack and another sticker depicting Calvin (of Calvin and Hobbes fame) urinating on "Osama" with a devilish grin on his face. I will leave the "Osama" reference and defamation of an innocent newspaper comic strip character alone for the purposes of this article, and will concentrate on the content of...

Drive north on 17th Street, look left and up, and there it is. Kasey Montgomery hung a Confederate flag in his dorm room window at UNL to honor his Southern heritage but created controversy in the process. Despite complaints from students and university officials asking Montgomery to take it down the flag remains. It's a three-by-five-foot cut of polyester made in Taiwan, bought in Virginia and displayed in a North Carolinan's University of Nebraska-Lincoln dorm room. It's a piece of U.S. history linking our nation's only Civil War to George Wallace standing in a schoolhouse doorway to the bumper stickers...

Howard Dean and Yankee Democrats don't have a clue what it means to be a Southerner. It's not about Confederate flags. It's about honor, family, self reliance and American patriotism. Who are these Confederate voters that Vermonter Howard Dean wants to represent? Is Jefferson Davis on the ballot again? I thought he was dead, along with the Confederate States of America. Hey, I’m a Southerner, why didn’t I get the memo? Duh, Dean was just being "hisself", a Yankee liberal, describing voters as he sees people – divided by race, class and gender. What a hoot. Liberals imagine identity politics...

As a Louisiana native who is now living north of the Mason-Dixon Line, I am well aware of the concerted effort to erase Southern culture from the nation's collective consciousness. I have written numerous articles addressing this social cancer, and every time I do I inevitably hear from people who have the audacity to call me an extremist. "The Civil War is over," they say. "The South lost. Get over it!" Sure. Never mind that those of us who defend the South do so in response to the increasingly virulent attacks on our heritage. Forget that political correctness has...

Don't get me wrong. I live in the south, and I love the south. I spend my Saturday afternoons watching the Georgia Bulldogs and other southern college football teams; I enjoy true quality peaches and real grapes known as scuppernongs; I eat my fatback and grits; and the people are very nice. I simply disagree with them about politics and religion. The political beliefs of white southerners drag this country down. It has always been this way throughout American history starting with the issue of slavery. Most northern states gave up slavery as early as 1800, but for economic reasons,...

Friday, Nov. 5, 2004 I hate it when they do that - write a column that not only says what I planned to write but also has almost the same title I had in mind. But when the writer is Ron Marr, one of the best down-to-earth columnists on the Internet, I simply doff my hat. Ron sets off his column with a quote from what he called a "well-coifed anchor" whose voice dripped "with derision and condescension" when he told his viewers: "What we don't realize is that there's a huge segment of the country that doesn't think like...

Student Pulled from Class for Wearing Hempstead Shirt ATLANTA -- The town of Hempstead, New York, has a message for school officials in Gwinnett (gwih-NET') County, Georgia: Look at a map. That's after a student at a suburban Atlanta high school was thrown out of class for wearing a shirt that said Hempstead on it. Hempstead is the name of his hometown. But school officials apparently thought it was a reference to marijuana. His family says Terrell Jones was pulled out of class at Grayson High School Monday -- and wasn't allowed to return until he persuaded school officials to...

Time is GMT + 8 hours Posted: 22 August 2004 1252 hrs Australian Taliban fighter and Osama bodyguards to face US military justiceA TV grab of an undated photo of David Hicks taken in Kosovo. GUANTANAMO BAY US NAVAL BASE, Cuba : The United States will this week start controversial military proceedings against an Australian Taliban fighter and three bodyguards for Osama bin Laden. David Hicks, an Australian, two Yemenis, Salim Ahmed Hamdan and Ali Hamza Ahmed Sulayman al-Bahlul, and a Sudanese, Ibrahim Ahmed Mahmoud al-Qosi, will be the first of the 585 detainees at the Guantanamo detention camp in...

The day Hicks met Osama bin Laden By PETER MITCHELL in Los Angeles 12jun04 THE case against Adelaide terror suspect David Hicks paints the former stockman as a renegade warrior. It says he bounced from terrorist groups in Albania and Pakistan, fighting in Kashmir, and then into the hands of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida. According to case files, the convert to Islam was sounded out by a bin Laden associate on his willingness to carry out a suicide "martyr mission". He also allegedly met bin Laden and then translated al-Qaida training materials from Arabic to English after discussing the...

The US case against David Hicks paints the former stockman as a renegade warrior, bouncing from terrorist groups in Albania and Pakistan, fighting in Kashmir, and then into the hands of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. According to case, the convert to Islam was, among other things, sounded out by a top bin Laden associate on his willingness to carry out a "martyr mission", meaning a suicide attack. He also allegedly translated al-Qaeda training materials from Arabic to English and answered questions from an al-Qaeda military commander about the travel habits of Australians. Despite being thousands of kilometres from his...

David Hicks, a 27-year-old Australian expatriate, is among the captured Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters detained at Camp X-Ray in Cuba. Like John Walker Lindh, the so-called "American Taliban," Hicks is a disaffected western youth who became enchanted with Islam, and was caught in a revolutionary undertow that took him first to Pakistan and then to Afghanistan. Hicks' case is particularly interesting because the first stop in his revolutionary odyssey was the Balkans, where he joined the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army (or KLA). During the U.S.-led NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999, Hicks was one of several thousand international recruits who...

<p>WASHINGTON — Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen being held as an enemy combatant in the war on terror, continues to provide valuable intelligence to the government and will not be allowed access to a lawyer until those collection efforts cease, officials said Tuesday.</p>

Kirk: Fighting the Klingon terrorists is wrong. It will unfairly hurt minorities. Anyone proposing this attack on Klingons doesn't care about minorities. Sulu, set course for home. Full warp speed, Mr. Sulu. We don't want any sneak attacks as we gain ground to a safe port. Keep minorities in safety pods. Mr. Spock: Captain. Your statement is most illogical. Logic dictates that minorities in the Federation benefit from fighting terrorism even more than non-minorities. The large urban areas are prime terrorist targets. Kirk: Don't confuse me with the facts! As I see it, we are not retreating from the war....

A BRITON being held at Camp X-Ray, the high-security US prison for Al-Qaeda suspects, has blamed a radical Muslim cleric living in London for turning him to terrorism. In a confession to British and American investigators, Feroz Abbasi claimed that members of Finsbury Park mosque — the base of cleric Abu Hamza — helped to organise his terrorist training and provided him with air tickets to Afghanistan.Abbasi, 22, has also said that at one stage he wanted to be a suicide bomber to die a martyr.The confession, the first to emerge from the five British prisoners at Camp X-Ray in...

ADEN, Yemen (AP) - A suspected Yemeni member of al-Qaida, arrested while trying to enter the country illegally, has escaped from prison, security officials said Wednesday. The man, identified only by his first name, Walid, was arrested earlier this year in a desert area near the Oman-Yemen border and handed over to Yemeni authorities, the officials said on condition of anonymity. They said the man, in his 30s, fled Afghanistan after fighting U.S. forces in the Tora Bora region in December, the officials said. Authorities said they didn't know how he escaped from jail. He was transferred last month from...