Saudi man divorces wife by text message
RIYADH (Reuters) – A Saudi man has divorced his wife by text message, a newspaper said on Thursday.

The man was in Iraq when he sent the SMS informing her she was no longer his spouse. He followed up with a telephone call to two of his relatives, the daily Arab News reported.

A court in the Red Sea city of Jeddah finalised the split — the first known divorce in Saudi Arabia by text message — after summoning the two relatives to check they had received word of the husband’s intention, the paper said.

Saudi Arabia practises a strict form of Islamic Sharia law, and clerics preside over Sharia courts as judges. Under the law a man can divorce his wife by saying “I divorce you” three times.

The Saudi man was in Iraq to participate in “what he described as ‘jihad’,” according to the Arab News. Many Saudis have gone to fight with al Qaeda militants against the Iraqi government and U.S. forces.

(Reporting by Asma Alsharif)

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/200....._divorce_1

From CNN:

Hostage dies as French attack Somali pirates

(CNN) — A French hostage and two pirates died Friday in a rescue operation off Somalia, the French president’s office in Paris said Friday.

Four hostages, including a child, were freed from the hijacked yacht after almost a week of captivity, Nicolas Sarkozy’s office said.

The French military decided to move in when pirates refused their offers and increased threats against the hostages, it said.

A defense ministry source told CNN the pirates were threatening to execute their captives.

The four adults and a child had been held aboard their yacht, the Tanit, since it was seized in the Gulf of Aden on Saturday, the president’s statement said.

CNN Jim Bitterman in Paris reported the French military came under fire as they attacked Tanit using Zodiac motorized rubber rafts.

There has been a series of high-profile and increasingly sophisticated pirate attacks in recent months.

Also off Somalia this week, the cargo vessel Maersk Alabama was boarded by pirates, who briefly took control of the ship.

Although the crew retook the ship, its captain, Richard Phillips, was Friday still being held by the gang holed up in a lifeboat. …

http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/.....index.html

Meanwhile the pirates have threatened to kill the captain, and Obama has done… nothing, naturally.

Between this and polls at People magazine showing people preferred the way Bruni was dressed to Michelle, Barack must be truly discouraged…

Faith groups increasingly losing gay rights fights

By Jacqueline L. Salmon

Faith organizations and individuals who view homosexuality as sinful and refuse to provide services to gay people are losing a growing number of legal battles that they say are costing them their religious freedom.

The lawsuits have resulted from states and communities that have banned discrimination based on sexual orientation. Those laws have created a clash between the right to be free from discrimination and the right to freedom of religion, religious groups said, with faith losing. They point to what they say are ominous recent examples:

– A Christian photographer was forced by the New Mexico Civil Rights Commission to pay $6,637 in attorney’s costs after she refused to photograph a gay couple’s commitment ceremony.

– A psychologist in Georgia was fired after she declined for religious reasons to counsel a lesbian about her relationship.

– Christian fertility doctors in California who refused to artificially inseminate a lesbian patient were barred by the state Supreme Court from invoking their religious beliefs in refusing treatment.

– A Christian student group was not recognized at a University of California law school because it denies membership to anyone practicing sex outside of traditional marriage.

“It really is all about religious liberty for us,” said Scott Hoffman, chief administrative officer of a New Jersey Methodist group, the Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association, which lost a property tax exemption after it declined to allow its beachside pavilion to be used for a same-sex union ceremony. “The protection to not be forced to do something that is against deeply held religious principles.”

But gay groups and liberal legal scholars say they are prevailing because an individual’s religious views about homosexuality cannot be used to violate gays’ right to equal treatment under the law.

“We are not required to pay the price for other people’s religious views about us,” said Jennifer Pizer, director of the Marriage Project for Lambda Legal, a gay rights legal advocacy group.

Twelve states now offer some form of same-sex marriage or same-sex partner recognition. Twenty states and more than 180 cities and counties, including the District of Columbia, ban discrimination against gays, according to the Human Rights Campaign, a gay rights group.

These laws generally offer some type of exemption to religious entities when hiring employees. But some groups are working to expand that exemption to include commercial businesses to protect owners and their employees when exercising their religious views.

Gay rights groups said they do not object to making faith groups’ religious jobs exempt from the discrimination laws but that offering services to the public is different.

“In their role as a participant in the marketplace, they are being required to do that in a non-discriminatory way,” said Brian Moulton, Human Rights Campaign senior counsel.

Battles are increasingly including private businesses. Last August, the California Supreme Court ruled in favor of Guadalupe Benitez, who is a lesbian, when she sued the North Coast Women’s Care Medical Group after doctors said their religious beliefs prevented them from artificially inseminating her.

“We were devastated,” said Benitez, 37, who has been with partner Joanne Clark for almost two decades. Sexual orientation “should never have been an issue,” she said. “The issue was that I had a medical condition.”

The court ruled that North Coast Women’s Care did not have a free speech right or a religious exemption from the state antidiscrimination law.

Sometimes, organizations that don’t wish to serve gays give in rather than go to court.

The online dating site eHarmony agreed to provide gay and lesbian matchmaking services to settle a complaint by a gay New Jersey man accusing it of discrimination. The new site, CompatiblePartners.net, started Tuesday.

The site eHarmony, founded by evangelical psychologist Neil Clark Warren, does not provide a same-sex option. Warren said his research into successful relationships did not include same-sex couples.

Company attorneys said that it settled because of the unpredictable nature of litigation and that New Jersey’s attorney general did not find that eHarmony had violated the state’s anti-discrimination law.

“People seem to say that if you enter the world of commerce, you lose all your First Amendment rights” to free exercise of religion, said Jordan Lorence, senior counsel at the Alliance Defense Fund, a Christian legal organization that has represented several businesses. “They … have become nothing more than vending machines, and the government can dictate the conditions under which they dispense their goods and services.” …

http://www.madison.com/tct/top5/446599

So what else is new?

From the AP:

State says fish pedicures at Milwaukee mall illegal

WAUWATOSA — State regulators say the trendy fish pedicures making their way into some U.S. cities are illegal in Wisconsin.

An inspector from the Department of Regulation and Licensing has visited the Doctor Fish Magnifique salon at Mayfair Mall in Wauwatosa, a Milwaukee suburb.

For $35, customers can stick their feet in a small pool of water where 100 tiny garra rufa fish, known as doctor fish, will eat the dead skin. The treatment is popular in Asia and has recently moved into the U.S.

Regulators are concerned because there’s no way to disinfect a pool of fish in between uses.

The salon says the procedure isn’t technically a pedicure and is not subject to the licensing requirements. …

http://www.madison.com/tct/mad/latest/446445

Wisconsin’s tax dollars at work.

This week, from the ultra far-left Capital Times:

Saturday rally will urge feds to ‘break up the banks’

“Break up the banks” will be the rallying cry of people marching on the Capitol Square Saturday afternoon, part of a nationwide effort demanding that the nation’s biggest banks be taken down to force real financial reform.

The rally will start at 1 p.m. at the Capitol with marchers heading to the downtown branch of Chase Bank, 22 E. Mifflin St.

The local march is one of 50 planned across the country, part of a grass-roots movement called “A New Way Forward.” The movement is calling for federal government intervention that would result in the breakup and sale of the nation’s big banks instead of handing out a trillion dollars to make sure banks that are “too big to fail” don’t go under.

“The only reason these banks can get away with blackmailing the taxpayers into covering their losses is because they’ve been allowed to become too big,” said Steve Burns, program coordinator of the Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice. “Any effort at real financial reform has to start with Congress using its antitrust powers to break up the biggest banks.”

http://www.madison.com/tct/news/446576

Conveniently ignoring that it’s the Obama Administration is suddenly deciding which banks and businesses are “too big to fail.”

By NANCY ZUCKERBROD, Associated Press Writer Nancy Zuckerbrod, Associated Press Writer – 59 mins ago
LONDON – Britain’s top counter-terrorist police officer resigned Thursday after he was photographed carrying clearly visible secret documents about an operation against an alleged al-Qaida plot by Pakistani nationals to launch an attack in Britain.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown said the raids had disrupted “a very big terrorist plot.”

“We perceived a threat was there and we had to take action,” he said.

“What happened essentially meant we have brought the matter forward but it would have happened in the next 24 hours in any event,” he said.

Police said 11 of the men arrested were Pakistanis, most on student visas, and the twelfth was British. The suspects ranged in age from the teens to a 41-year-old man.

“We know that there are links between terrorists in Britain and terrorists in Pakistan,” said Brown. He said he would be asking Pakistani Prime Minister Asif Ali Zardari to take tougher action.

……Manchester Police said the suspects were detained under anti-terrorism laws in the cities of Manchester and Liverpool and the surrounding area, about 200 miles (300 kilometers) northwest of London.

The raids targeted homes, an Internet cafe, Liverpool’s John Moores University and a car driving along a highway.

It’s not the first time officials calling on the prime minister have been caught out by photographers standing in Downing Street with powerful telephoto lenses.

Associated Press Writers Robert Barr and Jill Lawless in London contributed to this report.

Full article
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/200.....EnaS5vaA8F

Honey, moon me.

“Arctic warming has been caused in large part by laws introduced to improve air quality and fight acid rain.”

NASA: Clean-air regs, not CO2, are melting the ice cap

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2.....institute/

Calling the Global Warming nuts stupid is an abuse of the word stupid.

Yesterday I told her it was okay to take a baby step in considering herself “independent.” *wink*

Polis is far from being an ineffective loon – he and his buddy Tim Gill were almost single-handedly responsible for turning Colorado from a Republican state into a hard left one using their millions of personal dollars.

Still…

From the Denver Post:

Polis takes Iraq to task over attacks on gays

By Michael Riley

WASHINGTON — As Rep. Jared Polis toured Iraq this week, he had something more than security conditions or troop withdrawals on his mind: the case of a man allegedly sentenced to death in a criminal court for membership in a gay-rights group.

An openly gay member of Congress, Polis has been investigating the treatment of gays in Iraq for several months, and last week he spoke through a translator by phone to a transgender Iraqi man who said he had been arrested, beaten and raped by Ministry of Interior security forces.

Human-rights groups tracking the issue also passed Polis a letter, allegedly written from jail by a man who said he was beaten into confessing he was a member of the gay-rights group Iraqi-LGBT. The group said the man had been sentenced to death in a court in Karkh and finally executed.

“Is there anyone to help me before it is too late?” said the letter. Its author’s name was being withheld to protect his family.

Polis carried some of that evidence with him to Iraq and presented State Department officials in Baghdad with a letter outlining the allegations and pressing members of the Iraqi parliament’s human-rights committee.

“We will see whether the Iraqi government is serious about protecting the human rights of all Iraqis, and we can also see what role our own State Department can play in helping to protect this minority in Iraq,” Polis said by phone Wednesday after leaving Iraq.

The allegations are extremely sensitive for both the Iraqi government and U.S. officials, who have dispensed billions of dollars to support the current Shiite-led regime and the new democratic era that it represents.

Iraqi officials conceded that six gay men have been killed in Sadr City in the past two weeks.

Wednesday, the New York Times reported that Iraqi police had begun a crackdown on homosexuals — whose status is illegal in Iraq — and that influential clerics have urged that they be sought out and killed. …

http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_12103017

We’ll see how long before Iraq’s government is overthrown should they agree Polis has a point.

Not because the government shouldn’t take action, but because the radical Islamicists throughout the region would never allow it.

The question is whether Polis is so clueless he doesn’t realize that or whether, of greater concern, he does, meaning he’s actively working to undermine the Iraqi government…

Climate facts to warm to

CATASTROPHIC predictions of global warming usually conjure with the notion of a tipping point, a point of no return.

Last Monday – on ABC Radio National, of all places – there was a tipping point of a different kind in the debate on climate change. It was a remarkable interview involving the co-host of Counterpoint, Michael Duffy and Jennifer Marohasy, a biologist and senior fellow of Melbourne-based think tank the Institute of Public Affairs. Anyone in public life who takes a position on the greenhouse gas hypothesis will ignore it at their peril.
Duffy asked Marohasy: “Is the Earth stillwarming?”

She replied: “No, actually, there has been cooling, if you take 1998 as your point of reference. If you take 2002 as your point of reference, then temperatures have plateaued. This is certainly not what you’d expect if carbon dioxide is driving temperature because carbon dioxide levels have been increasing but temperatures have actually been coming down over the last 10 years.”

Duffy: “Is this a matter of any controversy?”

Marohasy: “Actually, no. The head of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has actually acknowledged it. He talks about the apparent plateau in temperatures so far this century. So he recognises that in this century, over the past eight years, temperatures have plateaued … This is not what you’d expect, as I said, because if carbon dioxide is driving temperature then you’d expect that, given carbon dioxide levels have been continuing to increase, temperatures should be going up … So (it’s) very unexpected, not something that’s being discussed. It should be being discussed, though, because it’s very significant.”

Duffy: “It’s not only that it’s not discussed. We never hear it, do we? Whenever there’s any sort of weather event that can be linked into the global warming orthodoxy, it’s put on the front page. But a fact like that, which is that global warming stopped a decade ago, is virtually never reported, which is extraordinary.”

Duffy then turned to the question of how the proponents of the greenhouse gas hypothesis deal with data that doesn’t support their case. “People like Kevin Rudd and Ross Garnaut are speaking as though the Earth is still warming at an alarming rate, but what is the argument from the other side? What would people associated with the IPCC say to explain the (temperature) dip?”

Marohasy: “Well, the head of the IPCC has suggested natural factors are compensating for the increasing carbon dioxide levels and I guess, to some extent, that’s what sceptics have been saying for some time: that, yes, carbon dioxide will give you some warming but there are a whole lot of other factors that may compensate or that may augment the warming from elevated levels of carbon dioxide.

“There’s been a lot of talk about the impact of the sun and that maybe we’re going to go through or are entering a period of less intense solar activity and this could be contributing to the current cooling.”

Duffy: “Can you tell us about NASA’s Aqua satellite, because I understand some of the data we’re now getting is quite important in our understanding of how climate works?”

Marohasy: “That’s right. The satellite was only launched in 2002 and it enabled the collection of data, not just on temperature but also on cloud formation and water vapour. What all the climate models suggest is that, when you’ve got warming from additional carbon dioxide, this will result in increased water vapour, so you’re going to get a positive feedback. That’s what the models have been indicating. What this great data from the NASA Aqua satellite … (is) actually showing is just the opposite, that with a little bit of warming, weather processes are compensating, so they’re actually limiting the greenhouse effect and you’re getting a negative rather than a positive feedback.”

…

http://www.theaustralian.news......83,00.html

How shocking. The finger-in-the-politics computer models haven’t predicted what the ACTUAL DATA says is happening.

Well, faced with such a controversy, there is really only one thing to do. IGNORE THE DATA.

Because if you believe your own lying eyes, you really aren’t going to be able to control the way people live by scaring them to death, are you?

And besides, AlToad and many others are heavily invested in companies selling carbon indulgences now. We can’t let them go broke, can we?

Muslim Girl Gets $400G From Nevada School District in Head Scarf Bully Case

A Nevada school district agreed to pay $400,000 to a Muslim girl and her friend over allegations that other students threatened to kill her in the stairwell for wearing a religious head scarf and the staff did nothing to stop it.

The Washoe County School District in the Reno area will give Egyptian former student Jana Elhifny $350,000 and her non-Muslim friend and supporter Stephanie Hart $50,000 as part of the civil settlement.

Elhifny and her family came to Reno from Egypt in 2003, and the girl enrolled as a freshman at North Valleys High School.

She didn’t finish the year after she told teachers and administrators that someone had threatened to kill her in the stairwell because of her Muslim hijab or head scarf, the district’s independent attorney in the case, Robert Cox, told FOXNews.com.

Shortly afterwards, Cox said, Elhifny filed the lawsuit and returned to Egypt, where she married her fiancé.

The lawsuit, handled by U.S. District Court in Reno, alleges that Elhifny faced death threats and harassment and school administrators did nothing to stop the abuse.

Cox said that wasn’t true, and the teen was unable to give any description of her tormenter — including his or her gender, size and tone of voice.

He said the high school tried to investigate her claims but was unsuccessful because of the lack of information.

“The district did an incredibly thorough investigation,” Cox told FOXNews.com in a phone interview. “They could never identify the person who perpetrated these acts. … The district did everything it could do to try to help this young woman who is an Egyptian and of the Islam faith.”

Cox said school officials couldn’t confirm the stairwell death threat story.

“They tried to prove that, tried to track down who it was, but without a description … that couldn’t be done,” he said. “The district did watch her constantly and had people in the hallway.”

He said the settlement was agreed upon to end lengthy and “expensive litigation.” The case has been fought in the courts for the past four years, according to Cox. …

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,513221,00.html

Isn’t this great?

Claim harassment, state you can’t remember anything about your harasser, even their sex or the “tone of voice” in which they allegedly threatened to kill you, “drop out” to return home and marry your fiancé, and get $350,000 tax-free from the Government so they can “end expensive litigation.”

Plus for supporting her story at zero risk (no details, remember?) her friend gets $50K.

Who says Muslims aren’t integrating into the American way of life?

I’d say they’ve got it nailed down perfectly.

Let them eat poi.

p.s. self-employed, too. Know the feeling about work. I was hitting it seven days a week for about four months (including working on Christmas and New Year’s Day) but there is nothing more rewarding than being your own boss and the thrill of being an entrepreneur. Free advice for the day: enjoy the down time as much as possible. It’s tough sometimes and you’ll start to worry about the next job, but it will happen. Best wishes!