Free Republic

MUMBAI: An Islamic group in India is asking Muslims to boycott products of a top Indian business group if its owner does not apologise for hosting author Salman Rushdie on a brief holiday this week. Rushdie stayed at the bungalow of the Godrej family while visiting Mumbai, where he was born and spent many of his early years. The author is a personal friend of the Godrejs, who are one of the big business families in India. The fact that Rushdie was invited by the Godrejs has angered the All-India Ulema Council - a national grouping of Muslim organisations -...

NEW YORK: It has been well documented that, across human cultures and in most mammals, males are more aggressive than females. It's simple to blame male hormones but a new study has found the role of brain in the behaviour. A team of researchers at the Vanderbilt University in the United States has carried out the study and found it is the human brain which processes aggression as a reward much like sex, food and drugs. "We have found that the 'reward pathway' in the brain becomes engaged in response to an aggressive event and that dopamine is involved. "It's...

An undercover Robbinsdale police officer involved in a June road-rage incident was indicted today in Anoka County District Court on a charge of making terroristic threats. Landen Beard was shot in the leg during the June 7 rolling dispute on a Coon Rapids side street. The other man involved, Martin Treptow, 35, was charged Wednesday with drive-by shooting, reckless discharge of a firearm and making terroristic threats. At the time, Beard was in one vehicle; in the other were Martin and Rebecca Treptow and their two children. What is known is that a horn-honking shouting match broke out between the...

If you are in need of a laugh this morning click on the following link. The Howard Dean scream along is worth the effort. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEw9UeDEBbs

Tribute to Islamic Rage Boy! Funny!

...Fear not, fellow Americans! In these dark days of war, pestilence and Paris Hilton, a new hero has arisen. She is none other than 75-year-old Mona "The Hammer" Shaw, who took the aforementioned implement to her local Comcast office in Manassas to settle a score, and boy, did she! This was after the company had scheduled installation of its much ballyhooed "Triple Play" service, which combines phone, cable and Internet services, in Shaw's brick home in nearby Bristow. But Shaw said they failed to show up on the appointed day, Monday, Aug. 13. They came two days later but left...

"Comedian Rosie O'Donnell performs at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas"

watch A total of three flights have been redirected to Shannon Airport after alleged air rage incidents. A number of people are in custody. Two people were arrested following the first alleged air rage incident on board a transatlantic jet this afternoon. Advertisement Martinair flight 621 was forced to divert to Shannon where it landed safely at 3.40pm. There were 233 passengers on board the aircraft which was en route from Amsterdam to Cuba. Gardaí were waiting at Shannon when the plane landed and two people, a man and a woman, believed to be from Ukraine were arrested on suspicion...

Rep. Bob Filner Charged With Assault on Virginia Airport Worker Monday , August 20, 2007 WASHINGTON — California Rep. Bob Filner was facing charges Monday for allegedly assaulting an airline worker at Dulles International Airport after becoming upset that his luggage had not arrived at a baggage carousel. Filner, 64, is slated to appear in Loudoun County, Va., General District Court on Oct. 2. Court officials could not say whether the San Diego Democrat had been served the summons yet to show up on that date. Filner's office passed all inquiries directly to the congressman, who has yet to respond....

With his clenched fists, wild eyes and gnashing teeth he has become the face of Muslim fury, protesting against the enemies of Islam. Shakeel Ahmad Bhat has been on the frontline of political activism in Srinagar, India, for more than a decade. His constant presence, captured by photographers and beamed across the world, has caught the imagination of rightwing bloggers who have dubbed him Islamic Rage Boy and turned him into an internet phenomenon. Typing his nickname into a search engine yields more than 75,000 results. He has inspired a cartoon character and merchandise. But the 30-year-old Kashmiri activist is...

A “distorted” Channel 4 documentary about Muslim extremism that enraged community leaders and resulted in a fruitless police investigation will now be the subject of an Ofcom inquiry. West Midlands Police made a formal complaint over a Channel 4 Dispatches film that participants and race crime prosecutors claim was edited in a misleading manner. Undercover Mosque, broadcast in January, featured footage shot at a number of mosques, including one at which a preacher praised the Taleban for killing British soldiers. Channel 4 said that the programme revealed how a message of hatred and segregation was being spread by some Islamic...

Born and raised in the Chicago suburb of Libertyville, Tom Morello will always be best known to legions of rock fans as a supreme shredder -- the musician who developed a new vocabulary for lead guitar by evoking falling bombs, bursts of machine-gun fire and scratching turntables with '90s rap-rockers Rage Against the Machine and the post-alternative supergroup Audioslave. The 42-year-old musician has always worked just as hard as a political activist, however -- he is a co-founder and driving force behind the organization Axis of Justice -- and for the last four and a half years, he's quietly been...

A man who was shot in an apparent road-rage incident in Richfield Tuesday afternoon was undergoing surgery at Hennepin County Medical Center for what was believed to be a "serious gunshot wound," police Lt. Todd Sandell said. The victim, who wasn't identified, reportedly was shot by one of two men riding in a blue-green Ford Taurus, Sandell said.

I am safe on the plane now. On the way to Los Angeles International Airport this afternoon, I thought I was about to be murdered. In the run-up to a weeklong business trip, I called the car service I've been using for years to pick me up at my home. The driver arrived promptly at 1:30 p.m., the arranged time. The ride to the airport started out just fine. The driver began making small talk. I noticed he had a Jamaican flag on his dashboard, so I asked if he was Jamaican. He said he was, and he asked if...

The perpetually outraged motion machine that exists in the contemporary Arab-Muslim world, fuelled by toxic fumes of indiscriminate anger and hate, is once again in rage over references to Islam made by Pope Benedict XVI. The Pope's address at the University of Regensburg in his native Bavaria is a beautifully woven piece of meditation on the relationship between faith and reason, a subject of immense importance today as it has been in the common history of various cultures striving to reconcile what paradoxically seems irreconcilable. The Pope mentioned a conversation between an "erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an...

I envision her as a Viking warrior, whose body is sent to the gods on a fiery barge with all the honors due. Oriana Fallaci was outspoken, courageous, dedicated, talented, passionate and honest – in her personal life and in her writings as a journalist, reporter and novelist. And now she's gone. The call, early Friday morning, brought me the news I dreaded. Oriana Fallaci had died at 3 a.m. in a private clinic in the city of her birth, Florence, Italy. She was 77. She is survived by siblings and their children. I cried. I felt I knew her...

RIYADH (Reuters) - In the five years since the September 11 attacks, U.S. intervention abroad has fed the extremism it seeks to destroy and cemented the rise of political Islam as the ideology of choice for millions in the Middle East, experts say. Today, political Islam -- a diverse movement with moderate as well as hard-line elements -- has been widely embraced in the Arab world, where many feel alienated by corrupt rule and foreign policies seen as serving the interests of the United States and its ally Israel. "Since September 11, I have worked on massive public opinion polls...

CAIRO, Egypt -- Anger toward America is high, extremists are on the upswing and hopes for democracy in the Middle East lie dashed. The Lebanon war is creating dangerous ripples in the war on terror, the future of Iraq -- even the effort to keep nuclear weapons from dangerous hands. "America, we hate you more than ever," Ammar Ali Hassan wrote in the independent Egyptian daily Al-Masry Al-Youm, in the kind of visceral, slap-in-the-face rhetoric boiling across the region. So far, the violence has not led allies to take steps that directly hurt America's strategic interests, such as forcing the...

Palestinians are calling for a general strike in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to protest US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's visit to the region scheduled for later this week, accusing Washington of backing Israel's military campaigns against Hamas and Hizbullah. Leaflets distributed in the West Bank and Gaza by representatives of several Palestinian factions called for a "day of rage" [a euphemism for violent protests] against Rice's visit. The groups also called on Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to refrain from meeting with Rice. "We reject Rice's visit to the Middle East and we will expose its...

Woman Faces Charges After Road Rageby The Associated Press Published Jul 01, 2006 Police charged an Orleans County woman after a road rage crash killed a passenger in her car. Karen Greene, 20, of Medina, was charged with criminally negligent homicide and reckless driving for allegedly causing the death of Robert Crump, 19. The crash happened in February on Mount Read Blvd. in Greece. Authorities said before the crash happened, Greene pulled in front of a pickup truck that had stopped in front her and then slammed on her brakes. The truck's driver said he tried to avoid the car,...