Three Iranian-Americans, including U.S. academic Haleh Esfandiari, have been charged with endangering national security and espionage, Iran’s judiciary spokesman said Tuesday.
The charges, which were denied by relatives and colleagues, were another example of Iran’s stepped up accusations that the U.S. is trying to use internal critics to destabilize the government.

“Esfandiari has been formally charged with endangering national security through propaganda against the system and espionage for foreigners. ... The complainant is the Intelligence Ministry,” judiciary spokesman Ali Reza Jamshidi told reporters.

...the detentions are “wholly unconnected” to the U.S. military detention of five men it claims are Iranian intelligence agents in Iraq.

A PERFORMANCE artist will eat a corgi live on British radio tonight in a protest over the royal family’s alleged ill-treatment of animals.

Mark McGowan, who once ate a swan in a performance art show, would dine on cooked canine, the Queen’s favourite breed of dog on the Bob and Roberta Smith radio program, broadcast on the London-based arts station Resonance FM, the British Press Association said.

The corgi died at a breeding farm.

“I know some people will find this offensive and tasteless but I am doing this to raise awareness about the RSPCA’s inability to prosecute Prince Philip and his friends shooting a fox earlier this year, letting it struggle for life for five minutes and then beating it to death with a stick,” McGowan, 37, said.

DougM

A model presents a fetish outfit during a fashion show at the annual German Fetish Ball in Berlin early morning May 28, 2007. The Fetish Ball, with Dj’s playing music, a fashion show and artistic performance, is the highlight of the annual Fetish Fair held over the weekend.

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The odds are one of you will think this is hawt.

Here’s how to make one yourself, and here’s Video.

Let the Snerk begin.

How is it that funny-looking hairless monkeys some humans just know that they are smarter about what whales need than whales are?

[ya think whales laugh?]

Presidential hopeful Hillary Rodham Clinton outlined a broad economic vision Tuesday, saying it’s time to replace an “on your own” society with one based on shared responsibility and prosperity.

The socialist whore’s true colors are showing.

~Classic Charles~

Charles Nelson Reilly, whose persona as a wacky game show panelist and talk show guest overshadowed his serious work as a director and Tony-winning actor, has died. He was 76.

Reilly, a longtime resident of Beverly Hills, died Friday of complications from pneumonia at UCLA Medical Center, said Paul Linke, who directed Reilly’s one-man show “Save It for the Stage: The Life of Reilly.”

“The average person thinks of him as being on ‘The Match Game.’ That was a mixed blessing for him,” Linke told The Times on Monday. “One of the reasons I was so motivated to get his show out there was because I wanted people to recognize that this was a heavyweight talent.”

Wearing his trademark ascot and oversized glasses, Reilly made a near-record 97 appearances on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson,” often making ribald ripostes.

After a “Tonight Show” guest who was talking about Shakespeare dismissed Reilly’s attempt to join the conversation, he silenced her by delivering Hamlet’s “the play’s the thing” monologue straight, with depth and passion, the New York Observer reported in 2001.

Reilly’s close friend Burt Reynolds said in a 1991 Times article that he thought Reilly’s reputation as the perpetual jester had worked against him in Hollywood.

“We have a thing in this town that if you are enormously witty and gregarious, you can’t be very deep. There’s something wrong with a society that says, ‘You’re the wit, but you’re not the teacher.’ People just haven’t seen him in this arena,” Reynolds said.

A well-regarded acting instructor, Reilly moved to Florida in 1979 to teach at the Burt Reynolds Institute. Reilly also coached Liza Minnelli, Bette Midler, Lily Tomlin and Christine Lahti and ran an acting school in North Hollywood.

Match Game was one of the few games shows I actually liked, and for good reason. It was a fresh, funny, adult-themed game show with a celebrity panel that never failed to entertain. You can still catch old episodes of Match Game on the Game Show Network

BTW...is it just me, or didn’t CNR look and act a bit like Bill Murray?

I’ve always thought they had a very similar delivery, comedy-wise.

The American Muslim Coalition engaged in its first event, honoring veterans at Missouri’s Jefferson Barracks during a Memorial Day celebration.

With more than 20 volunteers on hand, the newly formed group honored the former soldiers at the site’s Veterans Affairs Medical Center buildings and offered their support to troops currently overseas, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch said Monday.

Event organizer Dr. Zia Moiz Ahmad said Sunday’s celebration was to show the Muslim community in the United States could still support the nation’s military despite members’ opinions regarding the war in Iraq.

That supportive statement was echoed by many who attended the VA hospital’s first event led by a Muslim group.

”It’s kind of the least we can do for all they have done,” 12-year-old volunteer Shad Issa said.

The Post-Dispatch said a recent Pew Research Center survey found most Muslim Americans follow that exact view as their population becomes increasing assimilated into the U.S. culture.

Vandals burned dozens of small American flags that decorated veterans’ graves for Memorial Day and replaced many of them with hand-drawn swastikas, authorities said Monday.

Forty-six flags were burned completely and another 33 were found in charred tatters Sunday in the cemetery, authorities said. Swastikas drawn on paper appeared where 14 of the flags had been.

Members of the American Legion on this island off Washington’s northwest coast replaced the burned flags with new ones Sunday afternoon.

The vandals repeated the stunt on Memorial Day after a guard left at dawn, the San Juan County sheriff’s office said. This time, the vandals left 33 of the hand-drawn swastikas.

“This is not an act of free speech. This is a crime,” Sheriff Bill Cumming said in a statement released Monday afternoon.

Sheriff’s department officials declined to comment further on Monday.

FreeRepublic for the photos

Well maybe I just don’t see it now....

Forty years after a generation of young Americans turned on, tuned in, and dropped out during the Summer of Love, a New York museum is hoping to recreate the psychedelic intensity of the period.

The exhibition at the Whitney Museum features posters, artwork, light shows, trippy album covers and experimental film from a counter-cultural movement that brought together peace activists, musicians, hippies and artists.

Curator Christoph Grunenberg said he hoped the exhibition would either provide a trip down memory lane or help recreate the 1960s for those who, for various reasons, couldn’t remember them.

“What we tried to do was to present a more complex and diverse history of the period—a cultural history in some ways of the psychedelic era from the mid 60s to the early 70s,” Grunenberg said ahead of the exhibition’s opening.

“You can experience the 60s and what it might have been taking LSD without actually having to resort to the drug,” he said.

Israel today arrested a longtime wanted terror leader here in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

According to Israeli security officials and Palestinian sources in Ramallah speaking to WND, the terrorist was arrested while having car sex just a few hundred feet from late PLO leader Yasser Arafat’s gravesite.

~SNIP~
Several years ago Shawish sustained an injury during a gun battle with the Israel Defense Forces and has since been confined to a wheelchair, although he is still able to drive.

According to Israeli security officials and Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades sources in Ramallah, Shawish was arrested after the Israeli police stormed his jeep, which was parked in a lot outside the Muqata, about 200 feet from Arafat’s grave. The sources said at the time of his arrest, Shawish was having intercourse in the back seat of his jeep with a Palestinian woman, whose identity is being withheld by WND. The woman was not his wife.

The Brigades, founded by Arafat, largely considers the late PLO leader’s resting place to be a sacred site.

tantric!

Jenny in comments

California Sen. Dianne Feinstein says the public emotion surging around efforts to overhaul the nation’s immigration policy is the greatest she has seen since her 1992 election.
The Democrat said the topic hasn’t translated into the 30,000-plus phone calls to her office that would mean ”something is really going on” in the nation?s most populous state, but the enthusiasm of opinion is fervent.
“We’re dealing with an issue about which people have very strong, very deeply set views,” Mrs. Feinstein said.
She said most of the nearly 8,000 calls her office has fielded have been “very hostile and very negative” despite polls that show up to 80 percent of Californians support legalizing “undocumented workers.”

You’d think mostly 80% of those calls would be supportive then.

I’m going home for awhile to try and be normal…

Sheehan said she had sacrificed a 29-year marriage and endured threats to put all her energy into stopping the war. What she found, she wrote, was a movement “that often puts personal egos above peace and human life.”

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palomino