WHO TELLS STUPIDEST LIES? BUSH-"IT'S NOT AMNESTY," OR TEHRAN-"ITS NOT PREMARITAL SEX, IT'S A TEMPORARY MARRIAGE"

TEHRAN, Iran -
Iran's hard-line interior minister is encouraging temporary marriages as a way to avoid extramarital sex, a stance many in this conservative country fear would instead encourage prostitution. A temporary marriage, or "sigheh," refers to a Shiite Muslim tradition under which a man and a woman sign a contract that allows them to be "married" for any length of time, even a few hours. An exchange of money, as a sort of dowry, is often involved. Although the practice exists, it's not very common in Iran, a Shiite majority nation where many consider it a license for prostitution. Others, however, have advocated institutionalizing the tradition, saying it would help fight "illicit" sex in a country where sexual relations outside marriage are banned under Islamic law. "Temporary marriage is God's rule. We must aggressively encourage that," state-run television quoted Interior Minister Mostafa Pourmohammadi as saying. The minister, who made his comments Thursday, was the first Iranian official to support the disputed practice in more than a decade. Former Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani raised the issue in the early 1990s but was opposed by the country's hard-line clerics. "We have to find a solution to meet the sexual desire of the youth who have no possibility of marriage," Pourmohammadi was quoted as saying by local newspapers. Half of Iran's population of 70 million is under 30. Taxi driver Reza Sarabi, 23, expressed the frustration of many young Iranian men who can't afford to buy a house and get married. "I have no money to set up a matrimonial life. I don't want prostitutes. What should I do with my sexual needs?" he said. The "sigheh" is banned in Sunni Islam, but similar practices can be found in Sunni countries. One such practice is the "urfi" marriage, an unofficial arrangement that is often kept secret. Although an urfi marriage involves signing a document in front of witnesses, the marriage can be broken by destroying the paper.
In Iran, temporary marriage has been reported as a way some widows and poor women help support themselves. But critics of the practice believe such arrangements only exacerbate the country's prostitution problem and undermine Iran's values. "It will damage the foundation of the family," said lawyer Nemat Ahmadi, who argues it gives wealthy men religious cover to have affairs. "This will only promote prostitution." Prostitution was banned in Iran after the 1979 Islamic revolution but has increased in recent years. There are no official statistics available in Iran on the number of prostitutes, but unofficial figures published by some media outlets put the number at several hundred thousand.

Men and Women Really Do Think Differently

Men and women do think differently, at least where the anatomy of the brain is concerned, according to a new study.
The brain is made primarily of two different types of tissue, called gray matter and white matter. This new research reveals that men think more with their gray matter, and women think more with white. Researchers stressed that just because the two sexes think differently, this does not affect intellectual performance.
Psychology professor Richard Haier of the University of California, Irvine led the research along with colleagues from the University of New Mexico. Their findings show that in general, men have nearly 6.5 times the amount of gray matter related to general intelligence compared with women, whereas women have nearly 10 times the amount of white matter related to intelligence compared to men.
"These findings suggest that human evolution has created two different types of brains designed for equally intelligent behavior," said Haier, adding that, "by pinpointing these gender-based intelligence areas, the study has the potential to aid research on dementia and other cognitive-impairment diseases in the brain."
The results are detailed in the online version of the journal NeuroImage.
In human brains, gray matter represents information processing centers, whereas white matter works to network these processing centers.
The results from this study may help explain why men and women excel at different types of tasks, said co-author and neuropsychologist Rex Jung of the University of New Mexico. For example, men tend to do better with tasks requiring more localized processing, such as mathematics, Jung said, while women are better at integrating and assimilating information from distributed gray-matter regions of the brain, which aids language skills.
Scientists find it very interesting that while men and women use two very different activity centers and neurological pathways, men and women perform equally well on broad measures of cognitive ability, such as intelligence tests.
This research also gives insight to why different types of head injuries are more disastrous to one sex or the other. For example, in women 84 percent of gray matter regions and 86 percent of white matter regions involved in intellectual performance were located in the frontal lobes, whereas the percentages of these regions in a man's frontal lobes are 45 percent and zero, respectively. This matches up well with clinical data that shows frontal lobe damage in women to be much more destructive than the same type of damage in men.
Both Haier and Jung hope that this research will someday help doctors diagnose brain disorders in men and women earlier, as well as provide help designing more effective and precise treatments for brain damage.

Train Kills Man Trying to Kill Woman

Man trying to kill girlfriend by parking on tracks dies when car flips onto him; woman lives. A man trying to kill his girlfriend by stopping a car in front of an approaching train was himself killed Monday when the train hit the vehicle and launched it into him as he tried to flee, police said. The girlfriend survived. The man drove the car in front of a group of other vehicles stopped at a railroad crossing in the San Fernando Valley neighborhood of Sunland, Officer Mike Lopez said. The driver, who was seen arguing with his girlfriend, parked the car on the tracks and jumped out, leaving her behind, Lopez said. A northbound commuter train hit the rear of the car, hurling it into the man. The girlfriend was taken to the hospital, where she was in stable condition, Lopez said. "She gets hit by a train and lives. He gets hit by his own car and he dies," Lopez said. The train was heading from downtown to Lancaster in northern Los Angeles County at the time of the 12:08 p.m. crash, said Denise Tyrrell, a spokeswoman for Metrolink. There were no injuries on the train, which carried 132 passengers and crew members, Tyrrell said. The train had superficial damage. The train's speed wasn't immediately known. The limit in the area is 79 mph, Tyrrell said. At that speed, it would take one-third of a mile to stop, she said. It is highly unusual for someone to survive being struck by a train, Tyrrell said. "The train to your car is like your car to a soda pop can. It's just not going to be a fair fight," Tyrrell said.

Tennessee Teachers Tell Terrified 6th Graders "This Is No Drill!" During Staged Attack

MURFREESBORO, Tenn. - Staff members of an elementary school staged a fictitious gun attack on students during a class trip, telling them it was not a drill as the children cried and hid under tables. The mock attack Thursday night was intended as a learning experience and lasted five minutes during the weeklong trip to a state park, said Scales Elementary School Assistant Principal Don Bartch, who led the trip. “We got together and discussed what we would have done in a real situation,” he said.

But parents of the sixth-grade students were outraged. “The children were in that room in the dark, begging for their lives, because they thought there was someone with a gun after them,” said Brandy Cole, whose son went on the trip. Some parents said they were upset by the staff’s poor judgment in light of the April 16 shootings at Virginia Tech that left 33 students and professors dead, including the gunman. During the last night of the trip, staff members convinced the 69 students that there was a gunman on the loose. They were told to lie on the floor or hide underneath tables and stay quiet. A teacher, disguised in a hooded sweat shirt, even pulled on a locked door. After the lights went out, about 20 kids started to cry, 11-year-old Shay Naylor said. “I was like, ‘Oh My God,’ “ she said. “At first I thought I was going to die. We flipped out.” Principal Catherine Stephens declined to say whether the staff members involved would face disciplinary action, but said the situation “involved poor judgment.”

Irony. Man Who Won Case That He Could Not Be Forced to Take his Medications Refuses His Medications and Murders Roommate

(05-12) 12:05 PDT ALAMEDA -- The murder case against an Alameda man who won a landmark 2004 state Supreme Court decision that said hundreds of mental patients cannot be forced to take their medication has been delayed pending an evaluation of his competence to stand trial.

Kanuri Qawi, 46, stands accused of fatally stabbing his roommate, John Laird Milton Sr., 59. Authorities found Milton's body found Sept. 13 in the home he shared with Qawi at Moonlight Terrace at Dignity Commons, a housing facility for veterans at Alameda Point, the site of the former Alameda Naval Air Station.

Scientology! How Xenu Captured Thetans, Brought Them to Earth, and Blew Them Up in Volcanoes with Nuclear Weapons

Row over Scientology video
By John Sweeney BBC News

Scientologists want 'the global obliteration' of psychiatristsThe battleground is YouTube and Scientology's weapon is a clip of me losing it in the "Mind Control" section of a gruesome exhibition. Scientology has fought many battles to keep its secrets off the web, now they are using it to attack my investigation into them. Scientology has prepared an attack video, and they have shown the Scientology v Sweeney shouting match to anyone who would watch it. There is talk of 100,000 copies being released. Family 'disconnects' Scientology works. That is the message from celebs like John Travolta and Tom Cruise - who is, some say, keen on recruiting new Hollywood arrivals David and Victoria Beckham to what he calls his religion. Others back the Church in various ways: Chief Superintendent Kevin Hurley of the City of London police helped open a new £20 million Scientology centre in London, and the authorities in the City of London have granted it cut-price rates. If you are interested in becoming a TV journalist, it is a fine example of how not to do it. I look like an exploding tomato and shout like a jet engine ... it makes me cringe. But start asking questions and you see a different face of Scientology. While making our BBC Panorama film "Scientology and Me" I have been shouted at, spied on, had my hotel invaded at midnight, denounced as a "bigot" by star Scientologists, brain-washed - that is how it felt to me - in a mock up of a Nazi-style torture chamber and chased round the streets of Los Angeles by sinister strangers. Back in Britain strangers have called on my neighbours, my mother-in-law's house and someone spied on my wedding and fled the moment he was challenged. I have met mothers who say they have suffered Scientology "disconnects" - meaning that their children have cut them completely out of their life so that they can spend more time with an organisation which a judge in 1984 characterised as "corrupt, sinister and dangerous". Psychiatry battle Scientology has two faces - nice and smiley, and sinister and dark. If you do not believe me, go and see their exhibition in Los Angeles, Psychiatry: Industry of Death. You enter through a door that is a mock-up of a torture chamber. John Sweeney spent many weeks investigating ScientologyScientologists want "the global obliteration" of psychiatrists, who they say were to blame for the rise of Nazi Germany. To prove their point, they showed me hideous images of people having needles stuffed in their eyeballs, of patients undergoing electric shocks and having their brains operated on. Sickening, nasty and wholly unconvincing - modern psychiatry, for all its faults, is not Nazi and to press the point in the way that Scientology does devalues the horror of the Holocaust. I felt as though I was being brain-washed - and that if I did not fight it, they would have taken over my mind. Ironically or not, it was in the "Mind Control" section of the exhibition that I lost it. 'Exploding tomato' As often in life, I snapped over something completely different and quite trivial. Top Scientologist Tommy "Don't mention the word cult" Davis had been goading me all week, and on the seventh day I fell into his elephant trap. He shouted at me and I shouted back, louder. L Ron Hubbard wrote the founding texts of Scientology If you are interested in becoming a TV journalist, it is a fine example of how not to do it. I look like an exploding tomato and shout like a jet engine and every time I see it makes me cringe. I apologised almost immediately, Tommy carried on as if nothing had happened but meanwhile Scientology had rushed off copies of me losing it to my boss, my boss's boss and my boss's boss's boss, the Director-General of the BBC. I lost my voice, but not my mind. This is the context Scientology will not tell you about. I have met too many good people who say Scientology was founded by a liar, L Ron Hubbard; that it attacks its critics without mercy; and the celebrities who endorse it have not the foggiest idea what it is really like. Take "Rosemary", who is an ordinary mum and lives in England. She had two children and one died. Her surviving daughter was also her best friend. Then her daughter joined Scientology and her mother saw less and less of her. Almost two years ago she received a "disconnect" - a letter cutting her mother out of her life totally. Rosemary received no Christmas cards, no birthday cards, no Mother's Day cards.
Rosemary said Scientology was a cult. It was one of the most moving and shocking interviews I have ever done. Out of the blue, three hours after we left, her daughter came round for the first time in almost two years seeking a reconciliation. The next day she begged her mum not to use the interview. So we won't. Pay as you go In Florida I met Mike Henderson, who with his wife Donna Shannon, spent $1m over three decades on Scientology's path to superhuman powers. When the couple left, they were disconnected from 20-odd family members left inside Scientology. Mike's father - also disconnected - is dying, but five out of his six children will not speak to him because they are still inside Scientology. After a long day with Mike and Donna we went back to our hotel at midnight, only to find Tommy Davis waiting in the lobby with his own black-clad Scientology cameraman. He harangued me for talking to the heretics. I told him that Scientology had been spying on the BBC and that was creepy. In LA, the moment our hire car left the airport we realised we were being followed by two cars. In our hotel a weird stranger spent every breakfast listening to us. In all, we count 13 strangers - private investigators? - who were following us. Scientology denied sending PIs after the BBC. Scientology is a pay-as-you-go religion - which is one of the reasons why the Charity Commission in Britain does not class it as a religion. When you have paid as much as £100,000, you get to Operating Thetan Level Three and learn about "The Incident". L Ron wrote that 75 million years ago an intergalactic space alien lord called Xenu kidnapped Thetans to earth, dumped them in volcanoes and blew them up with atomic bombs. Ex-Scientologists have insisted to me that Xenu is part of Scientology. If so, it is a religion that requires its followers not to tell others about its core belief, which is very odd. Critics say that if we all knew about Xenu, then Scientology could not charge people as much as £100,000 to find out about him. Despite all the pressure - the letters from lawyers, the letters from MPs, the strangers knocking up my family and neighbours - if people from "disconnected" families tell me that Scientology is a cult, that will be reported.

Prison for Man Who Faked Retardation

TACOMA, Wash. (AP) - A Vancouver man was sentenced Friday to 13 months in prison for pretending to be mentally retarded in order to claim disability benefits. Pete J. Costello, 28, pleaded guilty in February to conspiracy to defraud the government and to Social Security fraud. He began receiving disability benefits when he was 8. He was ordered to repay the $59,226 he has received since turning 18. Costello, who cannot read or write, dictated a letter to his public defender that was submitted to the judge before sentencing and filed in court. "I know that it was wrong to 'act like a child' in the Social Security office when that is not how I really am," the letter said. "I feel very bad about this and want to do everything I can to pay this money back." Costello's mother, Rosie Costello, 46, who also pleaded guilty, is to be sentenced Thursday for coaching her son and daughter to feign mental retardation. Authorities have not found the daughter. Pete Costello continued to fake retardation into his mid-20s - picking at his face, slouching and appearing uncommunicative in meetings with Social Security officials. The scheme came to light last year after he got a traffic ticket in Vancouver, then was videotaped acting normally when he contested the ticket in court.