Kiev, Ukraine School Graduates splash in a fountain

Graduates splash in a fountain May 29 as they celebrate their last day at school in Kiev, Ukraine. Some 704,000 young Ukrainians marked "Last Ring," a celebration of their last day of school.
http://gallery.pictopia.com/yahoo/photo/ptl:ap:xt-mt-ap-orig_name_XEL102_2009-05-29/

Massacre at Turkish Wedding May-05 2009

Masked attackers have raided a wedding party in south-eastern Turkey, killing 44 people, including six children.

Sixteen women also died when attackers wielding automatic rifles and grenades burst into a celebration in Bilge Koyu, in Mardin province, officials said.

Turkey has fought Kurdish separatists in the area for 25 years, but this attack has been linked to a local "blood feud" and a pro-Turkish militia.

Eight people were arrested with weapons overnight, the interior minister said.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8032970.stm

Dr. Hassan Hathout dies at 84; Islamic leader fostered interfaith relations

Dr. Hassan Hathout, a physician, medical ethicist and leader of the Southern California Islamic community who was at the forefront of efforts to demystify American Muslims and build interfaith bonds, has died. He was 84.

Hathout died of natural causes Saturday at his Pasadena home, said a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles-based Muslim Public Affairs Council, of which he was a prominent member.

He was also a leader of the Islamic Center of Southern California, where he coordinated outreach efforts for two decades. A well-regarded scholar, he wrote several books, including "Reading the Muslim Mind."

"He was one of our giants in the history of Islam in America," who urged Muslims to be "organically integrated in American society and not act as visitors" in it, Salam al Marayati, executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, said Sunday.

In 1998 Hathout delivered a sermon at the first White House celebration of Eid al-Fitr, the day marking the end of the Muslim holy month Ramadan. Along with Rabbi Leonard Beerman of Bel-Air's Leo Baeck Temple and the Rev. George Regas of All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, Hathout also helped organize the Interfaith Center to Reverse the Arms Race, one of the first major inter-religious efforts in Los Angeles.

"As a physician he was so committed to life, he wanted to stand against anything that was going to obliterate life. He did that as a deeply religious person," Regas said Sunday.

Hathout was born in Cairo on Dec. 23, 1924. The son of a schoolteacher, he was educated at the University of Edinburgh where he earned degrees from the Royal College of Surgeons and the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. He also had a doctorate of philosophy in reproductive genetics.

He taught obstetrics and gynecology in Kuwait, where he lived for 26 years before immigrating to the United States in the late 1980s.

He quickly became involved in interfaith work in Los Angeles. With Beerman and Regas, he organized weekly prayer services for Muslims, Christians and Jews during the Persian Gulf War in 1991. The first service at All Saints in Pasadena drew more than 1,500 worshipers.

"We've lived together for centuries with mutual reserve and hatred," he told the Daily News in 1991. "One of the positive things of the whole gulf crisis is that the three communities came together and discovered each other's faith and scriptures are so similar."

After 9/11, Hathout stepped up his efforts at bridge-building and called on Muslims to tone down anti-American rhetoric. He also spoke at Open Mosque Day, a program launched in 2002 in which more than two dozen mosques in Southern California invited non-Muslims to join in Islamic prayers, food and literature.

At one such event a few years ago, he told visitors that instead of classifying humanity by religion, he sought to view people in more basic terms: "those with a loving heart and those with a hating heart."

"He had a wonderful heart," said Dr. Omar Alfi, a physician and former chairman of the Islamic Center of Southern California, who knew Hathout for 60 years. "His main point was that religion is love . . . that humans are either loving or hating people irrespective of their religion.

"That was always a very important point for him."

Hathout is survived by his wife of 56 years, Salonas; a daughter, Eba; a brother, Maher; and two grandchildren.
Funeral Prayers
Sunday, April 26
1:00 PM
Islamic Center of Southern California
434 S Vermont Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90020
(213) 382-9000

Burial
Monday, April 27
3:00 PM
Rose Hills Cemetery
3888 Workman Mill Rd
Whittier, CA 90601
(562) 699-0921

Condolences to the Hathout Family
Monday, April 27
7:00 PM to 9:00 PM
Islamic Center of Southern California
434 S Vermont Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90020
(213) 382-9000

http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-hassan-hathout27-2009apr27,0,7586240.story
www.funhebrew.com
http://www.mercurynews.com/obituaries/ci_12240527
http://www.ciogc.org/Go.aspx?link=7654829
http://www.ciogc.org/

Bea Arthur, Star of 'Golden Girls,' 'Maude', Dead at 86

Bea Arthur, star of TV’s ‘Maude’ and ‘The Golden Girls’ dead of cancer
2:51 PM CDT on Saturday, April 25, 2009
Beatrice Arthur, the tall, deep-voiced actress who considered herself lucky to be discovered by television executives after a long stage career that included a Tony award for the musical "Mame," died Saturday at age 86.

The star of the TV shows "Maude" and "The Golden Girls" died peacefully at her Los Angeles home with her family at her side, family spokesman Dan Watt said. She had cancer, he said, but declined to give details.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068103/
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/042509dnentarthurobit_hp.10dcf6e69.html
http://www.fox6now.com/news/witi-090426-bea-arthur-dead,0,3737811.story?track=rss

The End of Tragic Life CFO Freddie Mac April-22 2009

WASHINGTON – David Kellermann, the acting chief financial officer of money-losing mortgage giant Freddie Mac, was found dead at his home early Wednesday in what police said was an apparent suicide.

The Fairfax County police responded to a 911-call at 4:48 a.m. at the suburban Virginia home Kellermann shared with his wife Donna and five-year-old daughter Grace. The police would not release the exact cause of death, but spokesman Eddy Azcarate said Kellermann's body was found in the basement.

Kellermann, 41, lived in Hunter Mill Estates, a well-off neighborhood of large single-family homes with manicured lawns. County records show Kellermann's home is worth about $900,000.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_freddie_mac_official_dead

Khadr the Canadian kid Inmate in the notorious US Guantanamo Bay

TORONTO — Lawyers of a Canadian kid held in the notorious US Guantanamo Bay have released a video tape showing the youngest detainee crying during interrogation sessions.
"I lost my eyes. I lost my feet. Everything!" cried Omar Khadr in the ten-minute footage, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported on Tuesday, July 15.

The video shows Khadr being questioned by Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) agents in February, 2003 at Guantanamo Bay.

It shows Khadr wearing an orange prison jumpsuit and sitting at plain wooden table in an apparently windowless cell.

In the tape, apparently shot through the flaps of a ventilation shaft, Khadr is asked what he knows about Al-Qaeda and questioned about his Islamic faith.

Watch the Video
At times, he weeps uncontrollably and pulls at his hair in despair.

He also displays his wounds to his interrogators.

"You don't care about me," Khadr cried several times before he puts his head in both his hands and starting sobbing uncontrollably.

At one point, an interrogator tries to calm Khadr, who is clearly distraught, saying he needs to get a "bite to eat" and adding: "I understand this is stressful."

When Khadr complains his compatriots have not helped his case, an interrogator replies: "We can't do anything for you."

Khadr, who was 16 at the time of interrogations, was captured in Afghanistan at the age 15.

He has no vision in his left eye and his right eye is deteriorating because of shrapnel embedded in the eye's membrane.

He still has shrapnel in his right shoulder, and it causes the metal detectors at the prison camp to go off.

In 2007, US military judges dropped all war crimes charges against Khadr in a stunning blow and embarrassment to the Bush administration.

He was exonerated of killing a US soldier with a grenade and wounding another in 2002.

Sleep Deprivation

The tape comes after Canadian media reports that government documents showed Khadr was forcibly deprived of sleep by his US captors to soften him up for questioning.

"As documents released last week show, Guantanamo Bay authorities manipulated Omar's environment outside the interrogation room before Canadian interrogations to induce cooperation within the interrogation room," said Khadr's lawyer Nathan Whitling.

Citing government files released by court order, Canadian media said Khadr was moved to a different cell every three hours to make him more amenable to talking in what US authorities described as their "frequent-flyer program."

"At three-hours intervals he is moved to another cell block, thus denying him uninterrupted sleep and a continued change of neighbors," said a report by the Foreign Intelligence Division of Canada's Foreign Affairs department.

According to the documents, Khadr, following a meeting with Canadian officials in March 2004, was due to be placed in isolation for three weeks before being interviewed again.

Human rights groups have demanded Khadr be released from Guantanamo, saying his age at the time of capture precludes any war crime proceeding.

More of George W Bush Torture Techniques

Keeping detainees in dark, cramped boxes with insects to exploit their fears, forced nudity, prolonged sleep deprivation and slamming detainees into walls are but some of brutal interrogation techniques authorized by former US President George W. Bush, reported the Washington Post on Friday, April 17. "We have been through a dark and painful chapter in our history," US President Barack Obama said as he blew the lid on harsh CIA interrogation techniques approved by his predecessor.

The Obama administration made public four blacked-out memos detailing CIA interrogation techniques against terror suspects.

The memos, written in 2002 and 2005 by the Bush-era legal officials, reveal the use of dietary manipulation, forced nudity and facial and abdominal slaps with detainees.

In one technique known as "walling," interrogators could push a detainee against a false wall, so his shoulder blades make a slamming noise and make him think the impact is greater than in reality.

"A detainee may be walled one time (one impact with the wall) to make a point, or twenty to thirty times consecutively when the interrogator requires a more significant response to a question," according to the memo.

The memos also show interrogators asked for a ruling on whether the placing of a harmless insect in a cramped box with detainee Abu Zubaydah equated to torture.

"(The technique) certainly does not cause physical pain" and therefore could not be termed as torture and should be permissible, one of the memos said.

Similarly, techniques included waterboarding or simulated drowning, walling and sleep deprivation also fell short of torture, the memos said.

Another memo details a 'prototypical interrogation,' which begins with a detainee stripped of his clothes, shackled, and hooded, "with the walling collar over his head and around his neck."

Criminal Conduct

Rights groups and Senators denounced the brutal techniques as showing the criminal conduct of the Bush administration.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick J. Leahy said the memos are "chilling" and that their content "is as alarming as I feared it would be."

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl M. Levin called for confronting the abuses to "restore America's image as a country that not only espouses ideals of human rights, but lives by them."