A federal judge keeps USF professor's terrorism case in limbo

ALEXANDRIA, Va. — For five years, a federal judge upset with the prosecution of a former Tampa professor once accused of being a leading terrorist has refused to rule on his case. It has left the government unable to deport him, unable to prosecute him and flummoxed on how to move forward.

 In April 2009, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema told lawyers she would rule "soon" on whether to dismiss criminal contempt charges filed in Virginia against former University of South Florida computer science professor Sami Al-Arian, a prominent Palestinian activist, who refused to testify in a separate terror-related investigation.

The ruling hasn't come, and nothing has happened in the case, unusual for Alexandria's federal courthouse known in legal circles as the Rocket Docket for its swift disposition of cases.

On the surface at least, Al-Arian — who has declined to invoke his speedy trial rights — benefits from his silence and the standoff. If the Virginia case were dropped, Al-Arian, 56, would be deported under a plea deal reached with federal prosecutors in Tampa in May 2006...

The surprising academic racial bias against Asians

A new study suggests that women and minorities are less likely to receive early support from potential academic mentors. Researchers from Wharton, Columbia and NYU ran an interesting field experiment: Pretending to be students, they e-mailed more than 6500 professors at top U.S. universities admiring each professor's work and asking to meet. The e-mails were all identical except for the senders' names.

Names that one can associate with a gender or race -- like Brad Anderson, Meredith Roberts, LaToya Brown, Juanita Martinez, Deepak Patel, Sonali Desai, Chang Wong, and Mei Chen -- were used. 

The researchers found that faculty were most likely to respond to e-mails from white males. But more surprising was the high level of racial bias against Asians and Indians -- professors were likeliest to ignore e-mails from these students.

More at CNN

Play of the Game

with an update HERE

h/t Andrew Lawton

Scottish National Party's embarrassing buffoon Alex Salmond visits Mosque to warn against voting UKIP

After suggesting that Scotland was a “nation of drunks” and a poll that showed a third of Scotland would vote “No” on independence because of him, the Scottish National Party’s Alex Salmond put in a mosque appearance to denounce UKIP...

More HERE

The Guardian's anti-semitism

Strange that a recent article about anti-Semitism that appeared in the Guardian should have been accompanied by a picture not of Jews, but rather of Palestinian children. Beneath it reads the caption “Palestinian children are denied some fairly basic human rights.” Which human rights? We’re not told. And “fairly basic,” is that a legal term? Well never mind.

The article in question is an attack on the Anti-Defamation League’s recent survey of global anti-Semitism. It at once accuses the ADL of having essentially fabricated its findings through the use of “leading questions” and of having then used these findings for political ends by defending Israel, implicating Muslims and specifically framing Palestinians. This despite the fact that all nationalities surveyed were asked the same set of questions.

Fear, loathing and weirdness on the streets of Toronto (none of which was Rob Ford's fault)

Anti-Islam zealot Eric Brazeau is either nuts or a masterful practitioner of street theater, or possibly both considering that those two traits are not mutually exclusive.  He has a recent court conviction for promoting hatred and Brazeau has also been awarded compensation by the courts for being wrongfully arrested for his particular, and what many would call repugnant, brand of protest.

Normally, the activities of Mr. Brazeau are not something I would note. On this occasion it's worth publicizing. The troublesome aspect of his recent street demonstration is that Toronto Police decided to intervene and prevent him from speaking in a place where street proselytizers routinely practice their craft.

It is easy to understand how someone may find Mr. Brazeau's performance offensive and the proper response would be to walk by and ignore him, as most passers-by did.

But being offensive is not illegal, and when Toronto's police department decides it has the right to shut down what people say because it offends a particular group of people, we are facing a far greater problem than any annoyance cased by Eric Brazeau.



More at Blogwrath

Community applauds Doug Ford's opposition of youth group home

Residents who live near an Etobicoke home for developmentally disabled youth are applauding Councillor Doug Ford for taking up their cause by suggesting the facility be moved off their street. They say they resent being painted as mean-spirited, and that the issue has been distorted.

Opposition to the home sparked a sustained public backlash online in the days after a public meeting Thursday, with critics accusing Mr. Ford and those who live in the area of NIMBYism...

When interviewed Sunday on Jeffcoat Drive, a quiet street of mostly postwar bungalows with well-tended yards near Rexdale and Kipling, residents said the issue has been misconstrued as one of intolerance. They voiced sympathy for the youth, but say there have been safety and convenience issues since the home operated by Griffin Centre opened two months ago.

A number of residents, most of whom did not want to be identified, say some in the area no longer feel safe. They also worry about property values and point to problems such as people connected to the facility parking cars in such a way as sometimes to block garbage pick-up. And they say that the negative reaction prompted by the youth at the home is making the neighbourhood bad for them as well. Everyone would be better off, residents argue, if the home was moved.

What's rather interesting is that The Globe and Mail, which did a hatchet job on Doug Ford last year, is now the only paper so far that bothered to speak to area residents and has come to Ford's defense.

Arabs: We Want Democracy - Like Israel

The Tel Aviv District Court's decision to send former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to six years in prison for corruption has prompted calls in the Arab world for endorsing Israel's standards of accountability, transparency and justice.

Reacting to the sentencing of Olmert, many Arabs expressed hope that the day would come when their countries would learn from Israel that no one is above the law, even if he or she is a president or prime minister.

Rex Murphy: Check your bigotry

...It is the cheapest from of racism, no subtlety at all … and it finds fullest expression in those academic institutions most attuned to any whiff of prejudice. Only in the very best universities would you ever be able to find so stupid a thought being given such frantic attention. And Orwell’s famous taunt about some ideas being so stupid only an intellectual would support them is sadly truer now, by far, than when he wrote them.

When you cross George Orwell with Franz Kafka...

An Ontario NDPer bitches about infighting among the political left

There isn't a lot I have in common with the NDP blogger who wrote the piece (lined below) about the NDP's recent election strategies, as far as views about the role of government go . Although we do share some opinions regarding at least one of Ontario's recent Progressive Conservative Party leaders. I was never a fan of Mike Harris, who cynically exploited rural versus urban needs for political advantage and merely shifted tax responsibilities from the province to the cities. Harris the perception of cutting costs while in reality doing nothing to help the province's taxpayers.

Nor am I wildly enthusiastic about current PC leader Tim Hudak. But it's also too soon to predict exactly what kind of a Premier he would make if he wins Ontario's provincial election in June. And unlike our Dipper friend, I believe given the options, Hudak is the best choice out of a poor pool.  The NDP blogger does seem to have a valid point about how the NDP's efforts to cut into Liberal territory has damaged both those parties while providing a swath of opportunity to the Conservatives.

Which as far as I'm concerned is a good thing.

I’ve been wrestling with how to vote for a while now. Ever since St Jack screwed Canada so royally.

We had a negotiated national child care program, a Kelowna Accord. We lost both of those so Layton and the NDP could stroke their egos by denouncing their true enemy. No, no the Conservatives, but the Liberals.

I’ve been involved in politics for a lot of years. I began formally working for the NDP as a teen. I learned early on that the real enemy was those fickle Liberals. As Smokey Thomas pronounced at the start of this election campaign ‘at least we know what the Conservatives stand for’.

More proof colleges make people stupid: ‘Hump Day’ event cancelled after students claim bringing a camel to campus was racist

Students at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota have cancelled an event to celebrate the end of the year after complaints that bringing a camel on campus could offend those of Middle Eastern cultures.

The “Hump Day” event, put on by the Residence Hall Association (RHA), was supposed to be “a petting zoo type of atmosphere” in which students could hang out and take photos with a live camel. According to Aaron Macke, the group’s advisor, the camel is owned by a local vendor and trained for special events...

h.t College Insurrection

It's not sexism that drives Hollywood, it's capitalism

The movie industry, particularly its hub in Hollywood, is not immune to sexism. But those saying it's a sexist industry either don't understand the workings of the movie business or are making excuses for their own failings, much same way as a felon who is a visible minority might blame being arrested on racism.

Cannes Judge Jane Campion

So when Cannes judge and movie director Jane Campion spoke about how sexism in the movie business keeps women's films "out of view," and is "undemocratic," it could be more about frustrated directors hindered by an inability to make popular entertainment than the conspiratorial workings of a sexist industry.

Speaking as someone who has worked as an executive with a major Hollywood film production company, I can tell you that the "ism" that drives Hollywood isn't sexism, or racism; it's capitalism.

Despite having the highest concentration in the world of people who wear their liberalism on their sleeves, all that socialist stuff Hollywood would impose on Wall Street and Main Street isn't something they are all that dedicated to practicing themselves. Hollywood is a place where Occupy Wall Street is pushed by multimillionarie champagne socialists like Michael Moore. Movie industry "progressives" live in enormous Beverly Hills estates with mansions that would outdo the most ornate palace owned by any of Louis XIV's dukes and marquises.

I worked for Participant Productions, which produced Academy Award-winning movies like Syrianna and highly acclaimed films including Good Night and Good Luck. As an organization that was focused on social issues-themed movies and founded by Jeff Skoll, one of the world's most enlightened philanthropists, we went out of our way to try to find women directors for projects to try to rectify the imbalance in the profession.

One of the films I was involved with for Participant, North Country, was a "based on a true story" movie about workplace sexual harassment in the mining industry. It had a fantastic cast of actors headlined by Charlize Theron, Woody Harrelson, Frances McDormand, Sean Bean, Richard Jenkins and Michelle Monaghan, and a female director was found to tell what was thought of as primarily a woman's story.

It was a box office bomb.

Not all of that failure can be blamed on its director, Niki Caro, who directed the poignant, impressive low-budget feature Whale Rider in New Zealand. North Country was hindered by a tedious script that told a story mostly in flashback, and gave away critical plot revelations at its outset, eliminating a lot of the movie's ability to create dramatic tension.

But the movie's plodding pacing and its being a chick flick without a romance doomed it to also being a major studio release without a natural audience. Part of the director's job is to identify and fix those problems before and during filming and obviously, that didn't happen with North Country.

The charge of sexism against Hollywood comes up often and the reality is that it's not Hollywood's fault. The industry is driven by what audiences want to see. It's also no secret that the prime audience for movies consists of males between 14 and 35 years of age. It also should come as no surprise in a world where about 20 per cent of Internet revenue is derived from pornography that the objectification of women is going to play some role in movie entertainment.

But that's on screen. Behind it, it's a business where some of the most important producers are women, like Kathleen Kennedy, and there are plenty of brilliant, powerful women executives calling the shots, like Zanne Devine and Sherry Lansing.

Hollywood is in reality a very conservative town when it comes to business. That's why most big budget movies these days are low-risk comic book franchises. When looking for a director, the main criterion for both female and male executives and producers is to find the person most likely to make it a success. So in choosing a director, a production company will want someone with a track record of being "bankable." For whatever reason, there are very few bankable female directors.

The dearth of female directors isn't really a 'chicken and egg' dilemma of women not getting to make many movies, therefore being unable to prove that they can make successful movies. The way many directors break into the business is to struggle to scrape together enough money and resources to make their first low-budget movie. That's how Martin Scorsese, Doug Liman and a very long list of today's top directors started out.

However, there's a lot more to it still. After some Hollywood executive notices that little low-budget gem and signs its director up to do their first studio film, that multi-million dollar project has to meet commercial and critical expectations. If it doesn't, the director is back at the starting gate.

Do you remember Eduardo Sanchez? Most people don't. He was a director on The Blair Witch Project, which was the most commercially successful micro budget movie of all time. But he wasn't able to recreate that success, which is why you don't know who he is. And there are plenty more Eduardo Sanchezes than there are Robert Rodriguezes, whose low budget El Mariachi blasted him into the big time.

It's not like there aren't women directors out there. Kathryn Bigelow, the director of The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, gets to make big budget movies. But yes, there fairly few Kathryn Bigelows out there.

It's hard to say exactly why.  We do know that make and female brains, at the biological, hormonally-driven level do function differently. Women seem more predisposed to wanting to focus on the emotional aspects of relationships. That's nice for lunch conversation, but when every 16 year old boy in the movie theater expects a car chase or someone's head to be blown off at least once every seven and a half minutes on screen, that emotional stuff's not consistently conducive to box office success.

The Cannes judge complaining about the undemocratic sexism in movies, Jane Campion, did enjoy critical success with her film The Piano some years ago. Speaking for myself, I found it excruciatingly boring and was unable to sit through the whole thing. Evidently, I'm not the only person who felt that way, or we'd have seen more Jane Campion movies in subsequent years.

Orson Welles once remarked that being a movie director is the only profession in the world where you can be incompetent and go on being successful for thirty years without anyone discovering it. That's true, and the reason for it is that Hollywood has no shortage of ignorant senior executives. I personally knew two Vice-Presidents of Production who, though thinking they did, did not actually understand what a movie director does.

If a duck-billed platypus directed a low budget movie that grossed a hundred million dollars last week, you can bet your life that planeloads of Hollywood executives would be flying to Australia right now trying to find another platypus to direct their upcoming big-budget feature. Because in the end, for Hollywood studios, it doesn't matter what sex you are, where you come from or what you look like. It's about how much money you can make for them.

What could be more democratic than that?

Valley of the Dolls

I'm busy today, so can't do much blogging, but here's a uniquely 1960's artifact for your viewing pleasure - Valley of the Dolls, with Patty Duke, Charlie Manson murder victim Sharon Tate, and Adam 12  (a popular spin-off of Dragnet) star Martin Milner.

Vancouver's indescribably stupid protesters

Canada's Supreme Court rules in favor of Mohammed Harkat's Security Certificate clearing the way for deportation

Mohammed Harkat was the poster boy for the Canadian far left's efforts to undermine security regulations and our domestic intelligence agencies' ability to protect the nation from terrorist threats.

The rad-left routinely depicted him as the "victim" of an "unconstitutional" process involving secret information. He married a Canadian wife who would do what she could to publicize the supposed hardship of Harkat's house arrest and monitoring conditions and try to tug on the heartstrings of the gullible.  But sources in the Canadian security establishment painted a very different picture. From their accounts, Harkat was someone deeply involved with Islamic terrorist organizations and was playing Canada's lax immigration system and Canadians for dupes.

Sources have reported that CSIS and other intelligence services, rather than exaggerating the danger posed by Harkat, actually held back some damaging information about him from the courts in order to protect the sources and means by which it was acquired.

A former CSIS official once said to me, "if you knew what I knew about what Islamic terrrorists are up to in this country, you wouldn't sleep at night." I believe him.

The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled the security certificate issued against accused al-Qaida sleeper agent and Ottawa resident Mohamed Harkat reasonable, making proceedings for his deporation imminent.

In a ruling issued Wednesday morning, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the controversial security certificate process...

...The government has alleged Harkat is an al-Qaida sleeper agent and accused him of running a safe house in Pakistan in his late teens, communicating with senior al-Qaida members, and having links to Al Gama’a al-Islamiyya, an Islamic extremist group based in Egypt...

However, as one might expect, despite the Supreme Court's ruling today, this process could still drag on for years.

Japan and Israel agree to join hands on defense, Internet security

Japan's Prime Minister Abe with Israel's Prime Minister Netanyahu

“I am determined, together with Prime Minister Netanyahu, to make further efforts to strengthen Japan-Israel relations, so that the potentials are fully materialized,” Abe said.

The two leaders confirmed their intent to bolster economic cooperation on investment and joint industrial research and development.

Praising Japan’s advanced technology and innovations, Netanyahu stressed that both nations can prosper even more by joining hands in R&D.

“Japan is a global industrial and technological power. And it’s a world leader in innovation. Israel is smaller, but it is also a global center of innovation and creativity,” said Netanyahu. “And I’m convinced that by systematically pulling our resources together . . . we can make both our countries more prosperous and even more advanced.”

Stuff like this just proves UKIP's point about how the EU is a disaster

This is a real commercial produced in Denmark to promote participation in the upcoming European Parliamentary election. (In case you were wondering, I have no problem with the commercial, which I think is funny. I have a problem with a bureaucratic body which, as the commercial points out, can tell countries how much cinnamon they are allowed to put on cinnamon buns.)

Nash the Slash dead at 66 and other Toronto oddities

Oh no! The innovative and very talented Nash the Slash died earlier this week at the age of 66.

In related news, a developer has bought the Broadview Hotel at Queen and Broadview streets in Toronto, giving rise to speculation that Jilly's, one of Toronto's oldest strip clubs, will go out of business.

How are these related, you may ask. Well, for me they are because a very good friend of mine, a well-known film producer and director, used to live just a bit west of Boadview and Queen. He was a friend of Jeff Plewman aka Nash and the musician would often turn up at gatherings where we all watched obscure, gory B-movies. Nash appeared onstage dressed as the Invisible Man in bandages, and Jeff's identity was a closely guarded secret.

Back in those days, Jilly's was the only bar in the area, so my friend and I had no other option but to go there if we wanted to get a local drink. My friend, who was one of Canada's most prolific film producers and was quite flush with cash, would also pay for lap dances and force me to have naked women gyrate on and around me. So as you can imagine, these are traumatic memories I'm reliving for your benefit.

In other matters of local interest, on my return rollerblade trip from St. Lawrence Market today, where I went to buy some sundried olives, I skated by a very interesting promotional installation at the corner of Yonge and Elm streets. It is for the new Godzilla movie about to hit the theaters and I snapped a couple of shots (below).

This is some fascinating installation art and, as should be noted by the parasitical, untalented arts grant leeches that adore Olivia Chow, it didn't cost the taxpayers a nickel. In fact, I'd guess the city even made some revenue off charging for the temporary use of public space.

Now here's a way to kill some time

If you have nothing better to do and enjoy the unusual, you could do a lot worse than to check out WeirdSexLaws.com.