My own Eurovision Song Contest 2012.

	My own Eurovision Song Contest 2012. In this video, you can see all my favourites from all the National Finals that took part all around Europe, back in December, January, February and March 2012. Not all the songs were the winners to represent their country at Eurovision. A lot of countries made an internal selection, so i couldn't choose another song for them. I'VE DECIDED THAT THE SONGS THAT TOOK PART INTO AN INTERNET PROCESS ARE NOT GONNA BE TAKEN INTO ACCOUNT FOR THIS VIDEO, ONLY SONGS THAT HAVE BEEN QUALIFIED FOR BROADCASTED TV SHOWS. Albania: Rona Nishliu - Suus. (2nd option: Zgjome nje tjeter enderr lyrics by Samanta Karavella) Austria: Conchita Wurst - That's what I am (2nd option: How can you ask me? by Mary Broadcast Band) Azerbaijan: Sabina Babayeva - When the music dies Belarus: Anastasiya Vinnikova - Shining in Twilight (2nd: All my life by Alyona Lanskaya) Belgium: Iris - Safety Net (2nd: Would you? by Iris) Bosnia: Maya Sar - Korake ti Znam Bulgaria: Dess - Love Is Alive (2nd option: Love Unlimited by Sofi Marinova) Croatia: Nina Badric - Nebo Cyprus: Ivi Adamou - La La Love (2nd option: Call the police by Ivi Adamou) Denmark: Ditte Marie - Overflow (2nd option: Best thing I got by Aya) Estonia: Janne Saar - Fight for love (2nd option: Kuula by Ott Lepland) FYR MACEDONIA: Kaliopi - Crno I belo Finland: Pernilla Karlsson - När Jag Blundar (I don't have a 2nd favourite) France: Anggun - Echo (You and I) Georgia: Jeo Lee - It's my life (I don't have a 2nd favourite) Germany: Ornella de Santis <b>...</b>	From: EuroMelodiboy Views: 9 1 ratings
	Time: 09:39	More in Music

Friendship Never Dies - A Finchel Love Story Episode 14

	Friendship Never Dies - A Finchel Love Story Episode 14 Heey guys! Sorry I wasnt able to post any but here it is! Just letting you know, they have done the deed, i forgot to write it in the story MR. SCHUE -- Welcome back Rachel *smiles* RACHEL -- It feels good to be back *smiles* MR. SCHUE -- Continuing, we have a new student coming to join us, his name is Jess— FINN -- Not Jesse St. Jackass! JESSE -- Good to see you again Finn and Rachel *smirks at Rachel* SANTANA -- What are you doing here?! JESSE -- To get back what is rightfully mine *moves closer to Rachel* FINN -- Back off my girl Jesse *mad* JESSE -- Oh, Rachel are you cheating on me? BRITTANY -- *touching Jesse's hair* Where is he? JESSE -- Why are you touching my hair? BRITTANY -- Coz you have tord lubbington in your hair! JESSE - *pushes Brittany into a chair* Back off you Bitch! *Glee gasps* BRITTANY - *crying* ARTIE - Brittany! *walks over* (yes, Artie can walk) QUINN -- Did you finish the plan? GLEE -- QUINN! QUINN -- Jesse! JESSE -- Yes Boss QUINN -- Buzz off! *Jesse walks off* ARTIE -- What are you doing here? QUINN -- I'm here to tell secrets about Finn's Dad! FINCHEL -- Don't Quinn! QUINN -- Did you know that Finn's Dad was a drug addict? GLEE - *shakes their head no* QUINN -- He died of a drug overdose because he didn't want Finn! What a selfish Dad! FINN -- You're lying! My dad died by serving in this war! QUINN -- Then why did he die in Cincinnati? FINN -- What? QUINN -- You're mum didn't tell you? He died in Cincinnati. *Finn runs out with Rachel <b>...</b>	From: 2011GleekFreak Views: 2 1 ratings
	Time: 00:08	More in Entertainment

2 bombers, 3 others killed in Nigeria violence - Fox News

SOKOTO, Nigeria –  Attacks targeting authorities in two major cities of Nigeria's troubled north have left two suspected suicide bombers dead and killed three others, authorities said Monday.

Simultaneous suicide bomb attacks Monday in the major northwestern city of Sokoto also killed a civilian and a police officer, said the regional police chief, Assistant Inspector General of Police Mukhtar Ibrahim. One of the bombers struck a compound containing a police station and regional police offices, he said, while another attacked a police station about two miles (four kilometers) away.

An injured man at Specialist Hospital Sokoto, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, said he saw a car race into the main gate of the compound. He said he was on a bicycle when the blast went off, the impact threw him from the bike, and he hurt his hand in the fall.

Police sealed off roads leading to both police premises soon after the blasts.

Motorcycle-mounted gunmen later shot at a third police station in another part of the city, said Sokoto state police spokesman Sani Dahiru. He could not immediately say how many gunmen there were, or whether there had been casualties.

The twin explosions and drive-by shooting come as Nigeria faces an increasing threat from a radical Islamist sect known as Boko Haram.

There has also been a spate of recent attacks targeting uniformed officers, some of which have been blamed on the sect.

Three gunmen killed a shoe-shiner Monday morning outside an uninhabited house belonging to Nigerian Vice President Namadi Sambo in the north central city of Zaria, said Kaduna state police spokesman Abubakar Balteh. He said the house had been under renovation and that the man was near policemen who had been guarding the construction site.

Rioters had burned down that same house during postelection violence that swept across northern Nigeria after April 2011 presidential polls, Balteh said.

Sectarian violence has risen since that violence that left at least 800 people dead across Nigeria's north, according to Human Rights Watch. Fighting started after President Goodluck Jonathan, a Christian from southern Nigeria, was declared winner. Many in Nigeria's north thought a Muslim from the north should have become president.

Two past presidents and one-time rivals said in a joint statement Sunday that "the nation is gripped by a regime of fear and uncertainty... virtually all citizens have difficulties going about their normal day to day lives without great anxiety and trepidation," said the statement signed by Ibrahim Babangida and Olusegun Obasanjo. "This cannot be allowed to continue!" it said.

The statement did not mention Boko Haram by name. However, authorities have accused the sect of trying to exacerbate religious tensions in Africa's most populous nation evenly divided between Muslims and Christians.

Over the last few days, attacks against security authorities, a typical Boko Haram target, have spanned a wide geographical area.

Air Commodore Sani Ahmed said motorcycle-mounted gunmen killed two air force officers in the northern city of Kano on Sunday.

The violence followed a Friday night clash between suspected Boko Haram members and security officers in the northeastern city of Damaturu that left a policeman and a soldier dead, said Yobe state police spokesman Toyin Gbadagesin. He added that security officers then razed a house believed to be harboring sect members.

Witness Yau Zadawa said two motorcycle-mounted gunmen also killed a policeman outside his house late Friday after he had closed from a shift guarding a local politician in the northeastern city of Bauchi.

Meanwhile, a soldier was also shot dead Friday in the Boko Haram sect's spiritual home of Maiduguri, a city about 280 miles (460 kilometers) away from Bauchi.

Security officials are frequently targeted in violence in Nigeria's arid north and have been criticized for killing suspects in their attempt to stop spiraling sectarian violence.

-----

Associated Press writers Godwin Attah in Kaduna and Ibrahim Garba in Kano contributed to this report.

Girl Grabs Wheel When Grandfather Dies in NJ - ABC News

As the pickup truck she was riding in careened down the road at 80 mph, 12-year-old Miranda Bowman knew one thing: She had to stop it.

Miranda's grandfather, Paul Parker, was driving her home July 24 from an afternoon of go-karting when he told Miranda he didn't feel well. He asked her to keep talking to keep him alert. She asked about things she spied on the side of the road — the racetrack, the unfinished bleachers. A few seconds later Miranda heard her grandfather's head hit the driver's side window.

Parker, 63, had just died of a heart attack, and his foot was pressing on the accelerator.

"He was like, 'Miranda I'm scared, I've never felt like this before,'" Miranda said during a phone interview from her Burlington Township home. "I was scared because he would never say that. He was a tough cookie."

After a "30-second freak-out" during which she cried, "Pop-pop, Pop-pop, Pop-pop," Miranda realized the car was speeding up and drifting toward the side of the road. She undid her seat belt and tried to call 911 on her cellphone but she wasn't getting any service. She then climbed underneath the steering wheel and pressed her hand on the brake.

But even though the car was slowing down, it was still hurtling down the road.

Miranda popped up from underneath the steering wheel, wedged her right foot under her left and pressed on the brake as hard as she could.

"I was going to put it in park and I thought we were going too fast," she said. "I thought it would do the fish tail or flip over."

Instead she grabbed onto the steering wheel and tried to find a place where she could force the car to stop.

"I was looking around and thought, 'Should I go into the corn field, should I keep going?'" she said. "Down the street was a red light and I saw woods. I said 'I can't hurt anybody else, I can only hurt myself,'" by putting the car into the trees.

Miranda said the pickup truck ran into a few trees. She tried to open the door, but it wouldn't budge. She wasn't able to smash out the window. She finally spied a broken part of the passenger's side door and kicked it open.

A woman driving behind the car saw it swerving and called 911 while following it. Miranda said she fell to her knees and wailed after getting out of the car. She then called her mother and grandmother.

"She said, 'Mom, we were in an accident and Pop-pop is dead,'" said Miranda's mother, Stephanie Bowman. "I keep thinking to myself, 'I don't know if I could have watched that happen to him and reacted the way she did.'"

Stephanie Bowman said the family is in shock from all that happened. Paul Parker was an active man who played fast-pitch baseball and started go-karting in his 60s. It was the first time Miranda watched her grandfather go-kart; she had long asked him to take her to the track.

"I'm very grateful to have my daughter be OK but losing my father at the same time, I'm just numb from the two emotions battling each other out," Stephanie Bowman said.

Miranda said she knew how to react in an emergency situation because her father is an EMT. She also said she watches a lot of "Law and Order" on television and thought about what might happen on the show. And she always watches what people do while driving a car, so she knew to head for the brake.

Miranda said she wants to be a sign language interpreter when she is an adult.

"I'm very amazed by her, very impressed by her," Stephanie Bowman said. "Where she got it from God only knows. He was her angel that day."

Spaniard charged with vehicular manslaughter in highway crash that killed ... - Washington Post

Under the penal code, a person convicted of violating traffic laws or rules resulting in the death of another can be sentenced to one to 10 years in prison.

In videotaped testimony played for journalists Monday, Carromero said he lost control of the car when it suddenly entered an unpaved area of road under construction and he slammed on the brakes, causing it to skid.

An investigation found that Carromero was speeding and failed to heed traffic signs warning of the construction, and Cuban authorities had hinted earlier that charges might be forthcoming. Another dissident, Harold Cepero, also died in the crash.

A spokeswoman for Spain's Foreign Ministry said her ministry had not been notified of any change in Carromero's legal status. She spoke on condition of anonymity in line with department policy.

Granma said Carromero and Swedish citizen Jens Aron Modig, who was also riding in the car when it crashed, entered the country July 19 on tourist visas and, "in violation of their migratory status, got involved in clearly political activities contrary to the constitutional order."

Both Carromero and Modig are affiliated with conservative political parties in their home countries. They said they came to Cuba to bring 4,000 euros ($4,900) for Paya's organization and help organize dissident youth wings.

Cuba's government considers the small opposition groups to be subversive, and objects to foreign-based efforts to support them.

Granma pointedly said that Modig had been allowed to return to Sweden "in spite of the illegal activities he carried out."

On Tuesday he tweeted: "Have European soil under my feet. So nice!"

In the long, unsigned editorial titled "Truth and Rightness," which took up half of the newspaper's first two pages, Granma fulminated against what it called a series of "counterrevolutionary" attempts against its sovereignty.

"This operation is one more among many, organized principally from Miami and also from Madrid and Stockholm," it said, blaming Cuban exiles' longtime desire to see the end of the island's Communist system headed earlier by Fidel Castro, and now by his brother Raul.

"They dream of destabilizing the country, creating conditions to repeat what happened in Libya and Syria and provoking a U.S. military intervention," the newspaper said.

The editorial ticked off a list of purported attempts to stir unrest and foment dissent through social media and cell phones, and longtime complaints about U.S. contacts with the dissidents and USAID democracy-building programs.

Since 2009 Cuba has held American citizen and USAID subcontractor Alan Gross, sentenced to 15 years in prison under a statute governing crimes against the state, after he was discovered importing communications equipment onto the island and setting up satellite Internet networks.

Granma also alleged that in March, just before Pope Benedict XVI visited Cuba, eight Mexican youth traveled to the island on tourist visas with the intention of distributing propaganda, inciting protest and disrupting the pontiff's activities.

Granma said four were detained and they were backed by a Florida exile group and Mexico's conservative National Action Party.

It also criticized the U.S. State Department, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and the Chilean presidency for being among a "handful of slanderers" who asked for a transparent probe of the crash that killed Paya.

Soon after the July 22 accident, speculation spread that a second vehicle was pursuing the car carrying Paya and might even have run it off the road, leading dissidents and others to call for transparency in the investigation.

Carromero and Modig said no other car was involved, but Paya's family said it reserved the right to doubt the official account and asked to speak independently with the witnesses.

"I ask the international community to please focus on getting me out of here and not use a traffic accident, which could have happened to anyone, for political purposes," Carromero said Monday.

Paya, 60, headed up the Varela Project petition drive, which gathered 25,000 signatures in the late 1990s and early 2000s urging political change.

It was considered the biggest nonviolent challenge to decades of Communist government, and the European Union selected awarded Paya its Sakharov human rights prize in 2002.

___

Associated Press writers Andrea Rodriguez and Anne-Marie Garcia in Havana, Ciaran Giles in Madrid and Louise Nordstrom in Stockholm contributed to this report.

___

Follow Peter Orsi on Twitter at www.twitter.com/Peter_Orsi

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Witnesses help capture muggers who attacked World War II vet - Chicago Tribune

An 87-year-old World War II veteran was walking from a corner store in West Englewood after buying lottery tickets when he was attacked by three people who smashed his glasses, knocked out his hearing aid and broke his dentures, then went through his pockets and fled with his wallet, according to his family and police.

Two delivery men who witnessed the attack Monday afternoon followed the robbers in their truck and helped police track them down, authorities said. Three suspects -- ages 15, 17 and 20 -- were taken into custody not far from where Porter B. Cross was beaten.

"He's just a sweet guy," said Cross' daughter, Cynthia Steward-Jones, this morning. "Chicago has bruised my heart with this."

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She said her dad, who will turn 88 on Thursday, was returning home from his weekly walk to the store to buy lottery tickets. "It's the one day of the week he goes out and gets his exercise," said Steward-Jones, who lives with her father.

The three jumped him just blocks from his home. "They broke his glasses in his face and his dentures in his mouth," she said. "They knocked his hearing aid out and his face is really swollen."

The three took his wallet, which contained money, his Social Security card, his state ID, driver's license and credit cards. But he was able to hold onto the lottery tickets, she said.

Cross suffered a bruised left eye, a laceration under his right eye and was treated at Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn, police said.

Steward-Jones said her father served in World War II. "He was a seaman," she said. After the war, he worked for 36 years for the U.S. Postal Service before retiring. They moved to the West Englewood neighborhood about two years ago.

"We thought this neighborhood would be good for a single person but apparently it's not," she said.

Steward-Jones said the robbery has also left her father "disappointed."

"He said: 'I'm just so disappointed. I've served this country and I've done all the right things. I've lived my life like I was supposed to and this younger generation is just something else. … They're just losing their mind.' "

Steward-Jones said the family is touched by the kindness of the people who came to her father's aid.

"If it had not been for the two gentlemen ... they might not have been caught," she said. "They could have killed my father. I am just so grateful to them. I just want to say thank you and my whole family says thank you.

"At least there's someone who still cares."

One of those Good Samaritans was Dennis Weekly, who was making a meat delivery on the Southwest Side when he saw Cross on the ground near 71st Street and Claremont Avenue and three men going through his pockets. When the muggers ran away, he and his partner followed them in their rented truck.

"I saw the man lying on the ground and three males standing over him, going through his pockets," said Weekly, 29. "Once I saw it was an old man on the ground, I called the ambulance and I told them they needed to call the police.

"He could barely move or talk. He was in so much pain," Weekly said. "He didn't deserve this. They didn't need to do this to him. It hurt my heart to see him lying on the ground like that."

Weekly said he and his partner decided to follow the robbers.

"I followed them about four blocks until police got there," Weekly said, careful not to get too close. "I kept my distance so they wouldn't know. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time."

Aiman Samad was driving the truck. "We tracked down the culprits," Samad said. "We flagged down the cops."

Police say Rashon Williams, 20, of the 1400 block of Lincoln Avenue in Calumet City, was charged with robbery of a senior citizen, and Michael Protho, 17, of the 3000 block of Woodworth Place in Hazel Crest, was charged with robbery of a senior citizen and reckless conduct.

Juvenile authorities will take over in the case of the 15-year-old, who was also charged with robbery of a senior, police said.

rsobol@tribune.com

Twitter: @RosemarySobol1

Iconic romantic singer Tony Martin dies - Fox News

Tony Martin, the romantic singer who appeared in movie musicals from the 1930s to the 1950s and sustained a career in records, television and nightclubs from the Depression era into the 21st century, has died. He was 98.

Martin died of natural causes Friday evening at his West Los Angeles home, his friend and accountant Beverly Scott said Monday.

A peer of Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, Martin sang full voice in a warm baritone that carried special appeal for his female audience. Among his hit recordings were "I Get Ideas," `'To Each His Own," `'Begin the Beguine" and "There's No Tomorrow."

"He's the ultimate crooner who outlasted all is contemporaries," musician and longtime friend Gabriel Guerrero said from his Oregon home. Martin recently sang to Guerrero over the telephone.

"He has truly remained the butterscotch baritone until he was 98," Guerrero added.

Although he never became a full-fledged movie star, he was featured in 25 films, most of them made during the heyday of the Hollywood musicals. A husky 6 feet tall and dashingly handsome, he was often cast as the romantic lead.

He also married two movie musical superstars, Alice Faye and Cyd Charisse, and the latter union lasted 60 years, until her death in 2008.

Martin found his escape through music while growing up in San Francisco and Oakland amid a poor, close-knit Russian Jewish family, enduring taunts and slights from gentile classmates.

"I always sang," he wrote. "I always played some instrument or other, real or imagined. ... At first, of course, my music was just for my own fun. I didn't recognize it right away as my passport away from poverty."

Performing on radio led to his break into the film business. His first singing role came in the 1936 "Sing Baby Sing," which starred future wife Faye and introduced the Ritz Brothers to the screen as a more frenetic version of the Marx Brothers.

As a contract player at Twentieth Century-Fox, Martin also appeared in "Pigskin Parade" (featuring young Judy Garland), "Banjo on My Knee" (Barbara Stanwyck, Joel McCrea) "Sing and Be Happy," `'You Can't Have Everything" (Faye, Don Ameche) "Ali Baba Goes to Town" (comedian Eddie Cantor) and "Sally, Irene and Mary."

In 1940 he shifted to MGM and sang in such films as "The Ziegfeld Girl" (James Stewart, Lana Turner, Judy Garland), "The Big Store" (the Marx Brothers), "Till the Clouds Roll By," `'Easy to Love" (Esther Williams) and "Deep in My Heart."

In 1948, he produced and starred in "Casbah," a well-received film musical version of "Algiers" with a fine score by Harold Arlen and Leo Robin. He made singing tours of Europe and had a yearly contract at London's Palladium.

Martin had fallen in love with Faye while at Fox, where she was one of the studio's biggest stars. Married in 1937, the newlyweds were considered one of Hollywood's handsomest couples. But the marriage eroded because of career conflicts and his distaste for becoming known as Mr. Alice Faye. They divorced after two years.

Martin met Charisse, then a rising dance star at MGM, when they were dinner partners at a party given by their mutual agent. Just returned from the war, Martin was busy greeting old friends and paid her little attention.

They didn't meet until a year later, when the persistent agent arranged another date. This time they clicked, and they married in 1948. She had a son Nicky, born of her first marriage to dance director Nico Charisse. She gave birth to Tony Jr. in 1950.

Charisse became a star at MGM during the 1950s, dancing with Fred Astaire in "The Band Wagon" and "Silk Stockings" and Gene Kelly in "Singin' in the Rain" and "Brigadoon."

In later years, Martin and Charisee put out a 1976 double autobiography, "The Two of Us," and often toured in a singing and dancing shows. He continued appearances into his 90s, his voice only slightly tarnished by time.

"His voice is more or less intact," a New York Times critic wrote when he appeared at a New York club in early 2008. "Time has certainly taken its toll. He no longer belts. ... But the essential Tony Martin sound was still discernible."

Martin was born Dec. 25, 1913. His parents divorced when he was an infant.

"I was a Christmas present in a family that didn't believe in Christmas," Martin wrote. "The name they gave me when I was born on Christmas Day, 1913, was Alvin Morris. Tony Martin wasn't born for a long time after that."

He attended St. Mary's College of California, where he and other students formed a popular jazz combo, The Five Red Peppers. After college, he formed Al Morris and His Orchestra, and played in San Francisco nightclubs like the Chez Paree, often appearing on late-night national radio.

MGM chief Louis B. Mayer heard the bandleader sing "Poor Butterfly" on radio and ordered a screen test. It was a failure, but an agent landed Morris a contract at RKO, where he got a new name. He had enjoyed the music of Freddie Martin at the Coconut Grove, so he borrowed the name. "Tony" came from a magazine story.

His career at RKO was notable for a one-line bit in the 1936 "Follow the Fleet," which starred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. He had better luck at Fox, but nightclubbing every night with a succession of film beauties detracted from his work.

"I was so busy having fun that I didn't even learn my lines," he admitted in 1955. "I muffed a wonderful chance, and that was the end of me for a while."

World War II brought the one big scandal in his life. He enlisted in the Navy in 1941 and was given a specialist ranking. A year later, a Navy officer who facilitated Martin's enlistment was court-martialed, accused of accepting a $950 automobile from him. The singer was not charged but was dismissed from the Navy for unfitness. He asked his draft board for immediate induction into the Army and served three years in Asia.

The scandal lingered over Martin's head after the war, but he managed to rebuild his career with radio, films, personal appearances and records.

He is survived by stepson Nico Charisse.

Hillside Memorial Park in Culver City was handling funeral arrangements.

Targeted in Syria civil war, Iraqis flee back home - Huffington Post

BAGHDAD — When he saw the bodies of men and women left rotting in the streets of Damascus, Hassan Hadi knew that the sectarian violence he had fled Iraq to escape years ago had now come to Syria. Despairingly, he left his belongings and fled again, back home.

Hadi is one of at least 12,680 Iraqis who streamed back to their homeland the past month to escape the Syrian civil war. Most of them are Iraqi Shiites, fleeing a reported rash of attacks against their community, apparently by Syrian rebel gunmen.

The attacks reflect the increasingly ugly sectarian nature of Syria's conflict, where an opposition largely based among the country's Sunni majority has risen up against the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad, which is dominated by members of the Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam. The motives for the attacks on Iraqis are unclear. They may be revenge against any Iraqi because the Shiite-led Iraqi government is seen as siding with Assad. They may also be fueled by sectarian hatreds, with resentment of Syria's Alawite leadership flaring into anger at Shiites.

In July alone, 23 Iraqi Shiites have been killed in Syria, some of them beheaded, according to the Washington-based Shiite Rights Watch. In one gruesome case, the U.N. said an Iraqi family of seven was killed at gunpoint in their Damascus apartment.

But going back was wrenching for Hadi, given Iraq's continued violence. "There are still bombings and explosions here, and when we decided to return to Iraq, it was a hard moment – we cried a lot," he said, speaking at his mother's house in Baghdad, where his family is staying until they can find a home.

The exodus of Iraqis back home is a bitter reversal for refugees tossed back and forth by violence. According to U.N. estimates, more than 1 million Iraqis fled to Syria between 2005 and 2008, when their homeland was on the brink of civil war, torn between Shiite militias and Sunni insurgents butchering their rival communities. Those who fled to Syria were a sectarian mix, though the majority were Sunnis.

Over the past few years, Iraqis have been slowly leaving Syria, many returning home as violence in Iraq eased. Fewer than 200,000 Iraqis remain in Syria, according to the office of the Iraqi ambassador in Damascus.

The recent targeting of Iraqis, however, brought a spike in returns. The majority of Iraqis fleeing Syria for home over the past month are Shiites, according to Saif Sabah, a spokesman for the Iraqi Ministry of Displacement and Migration.

According to U.N. and Iraqi officials, most of them fled Damascus, which in July saw its worst fighting yet of the 17-month-old Syrian conflict. For days, rebels took over whole neighborhoods of the Syrian capital, prompting a ferocious assault by government forces. Amid the fighting, it appears rebel fighters targeted Iraqis in the city.

The U.N. refugee agency said Iraqis in the mainly Shiite Damascus suburb of Sayeda Zeinab in particular were fleeing because of increasing violence in general but also "targeted threats" against them. Sayeda Zeinab saw heavy activity by rebel fighters during the Damascus battles.

Hadi and his family lived in Sayeda Zeinab. He said Sunni rebels and gangs went on a rampage in the suburb. He blamed the Free Syrian Army, the loose umbrella group of rebel fighters.

"The gangs of the Free Syrian Army started to spread in the area, killing women and some children as well as men," Hadi said last week. "The bodies were left on the street for two days because no one could evacuate the casualties. My children were hysterical."

"They are spreading sectarian violence in Syria," Hadi said.

His report and other reports of anti-Iraqi violence could not be independently confirmed since Assad's regime has tightly restricted journalists in Syria. The conflict has seen numerous tit-for-tat sectarian slayings among Syrians, including reported massacres by Alawite gunmen in Sunni areas.

A spokesman for the Free Syria Army strongly denied it has participated in or sanctioned the targeting of Shiite civilians.

"The members of the Free Syrian Army have principles and never do such things," Brig. Gen. Anwar Saad-Eddin said. "The security situation has deteriorated nationwide and that anyone holds a weapon can say he's from the Free Syrian Army. We have already arrested some of them."

Hadi and his family of five fled to Syria in 2009 from the Iraqi Shiite holy city of Karbala in 2009 after Sunni insurgents killed his older brother. He has returned to a homeland still torn by deadly attacks. On July 23, Sunni insurgents linked to al-Qaida launched attacks in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities that killed 115 people, the country's deadliest in more than two years.

At the al-Walid border crossing between Iraq and Syria crossing, Intisar Adel waited with her husband and daughter to enter Iraq. They fled to Syria in 2009. Now they were returning after gunmen – she believes they were rebels – stormed their apartment building in Damascus and ordered the landlord to evict all Iraqis, she said.

"They shot an Iraqi in the leg and they robbed some Iraqi residents in the building," she said. "We immediately left the building and left our belongings there.

"The situation is unbearable."

Most Iraqis are returning with the help of free flights and bus tickets paid for by the Iraqi government. In the last two weeks alone, Baghdad has flown at least 17 planeloads home from Syria. At least 5,000 Iraqis have driven across border crossings in their chaotic exodus from Syria.

Iraqi officials and Mideast experts say the targeting of Iraqis may be payback against the Baghdad government's ties with Iran, which is Assad's strongest ally in the region.

Though Baghdad has publicly refused to be drawn into Syria's war, skeptics believe it is at least helping Iran ship weapons and other reinforcements to Assad's regime. In March, the U.S. urged Baghdad to cut off its airspace to flights headed to Syria from Iran, and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki pledged to curb arms smuggling across his borders.

"It seems that the Syrian opposition wrongly thinks that Iraq's government is taking the side of the regime. And some armed groups are targeting Iraqis because of this," said Raad al-Dahlaki, a Sunni lawmaker in Baghdad.

"The people behind attacking Iraqis want to send a message that the conflict is of a regional dimension," al-Dahlaki said, "and some governments and countries in the region should pay now for their stances."

That reflects the broader fear, that as the Syrian conflict worsens it could turn into a wider sectarian conflict. Kamran Bokhari, a Toronto-based expert on Mideast issues for the global intelligence company Statfor, predicted militant groups from across the region will flock to Syria if a peace agreement isn't settled soon.

"The entire region is descending into a regional geosectarian war," Bokhari said. "The question is, how bad is it going to get?"

___

Police: Titans player dies in apparent suicide - Yahoo! Sports

TAMPA, Fla. (AP) -- O.J. Murdock was still recovering from an injury that sidelined him all of last season, so the Tennessee Titans weren't overly concerned when the receiver said he'd be a couple of days late reporting for training camp.

''I talked to him and just assumed it was a personal issue,'' teammate Damian Williams said, recalling the last conversation he had with Murdock, who died Monday in an apparent suicide carried out in a car in front of his old high school in Tampa.

''It's tough. He was always a happy guy who played around a lot and always had a smile on his face,'' Williams added. ''I definitely didn't see it coming.''

Neither did one of Murdock's former college coaches at Fort Hays State. Nor did Titans coach Mike Munchak or general manager Ruston Webster.

Police spokeswoman Andrea Davis said officers found the athlete about 8:30 a.m. inside his car with what appeared to be self-inflicted gunshot wounds. The vehicle was parked in front of Middleton High School, where Murdock made a name for himself as a dynamic football player and state champion sprinter in track and field.

Al McCray, assistant head coach/receivers at Fort Hays State, said he received a gracious yet puzzling text message from Murdock a few hours before police discovered the body.

McCray said the 25-year-old, who he had known since Murdock was in middle school, thanked him for everything he had done for the player and his family. The middle-of-the-night text concluded with an apology that confused the coach, who didn't read the message until after he woke up at his home in Hays, Kan..

''I spoke to him a week ago, and he was so excited about getting ready to go (to training camp). He was real happy about being able to help his mother out,'' McCray said. ''You always like to hear kids who talk about that. It brings a smile to your face to hear a young man talk about 'Hey, I'm glad I'm able to help my mother out.'''

McCray was an assistant coach at Middleton when Murdock was there and later helped the player resume his college career after he was kicked off the team at South Carolina, where he was part of Steve Spurrier's first recruiting class.

''The hardest part about this is I got a text at 3:30 in the morning, where he said: 'Coach, I want to thank you for everything you've done for me and my family. It's greatly appreciated,''' McCray said. ''At the end, he goes: 'I apologize.' And I don't know what he's talking about. I woke up, and I'm thinking he's apologizing because he texted me so early. ... I wish he had called instead.''

Murdock, who signed with the Titans as an undrafted free agent in 2011 and spent all of last season on injured reserve, was taken to Tampa General, where he died.

When the speedy receiver didn't report to training camp as scheduled, the Titans said at the time it was because of personal reasons. He last was with the team in June for minicamp.

''We were concerned initially when O.J. didn't report on the 27th. But we were able to make contact with him and he assured us everything was OK and he would be in here on Sunday. He didn't make it on Sunday,'' Webster said.

''He didn't give us a lot of information. He was injured and ... when he left here probably wasn't quite ready to go, so we were probably a little more relaxed on him than normal,'' the general manager added. ''If he had come in here, he probably wouldn't have been ready to practice right away.''

McCray said when he last spoke to Murdock, the receiver didn't provide any indication that something might troubling him. Munchak said the team didn't detect any signs, either.

''It's something that as a head coach, you never think you'll have to stand in front of your team and give them that kind of news,'' Munchak said. ''I think everyone was shocked by it. We weren't aware that there were any issues going on.''

As a senior at Middleton in 2005, Murdock was rated the 10th-best wide receiver recruit in the nation by Rivals.com. He signed with South Carolina, but played in only four games, making one catch, after redshirting his first season. He was arrested for shoplifting at a Florida department store during that 2006 season and suspended.

''All of us here are saddened to hear of O.J.'s passing,'' Spurrier said. ''Our condolences and prayers go out to his family and friends.''

Murdock transferred to Pearl River Community College in Mississippi and then to Fort Hays State, where he helped transform one of the nation's least productive Division II offenses into one of the more prolific. As a senior in 2010, he had 60 catches for 1,290 yards and 12 touchdowns.

That earned him an invitation to the NFL scouting combine. After going undrafted, he was signed by the Titans last summer but spent the entire 2011 season on injured reserve after hurting his right Achilles early in training camp.

Murdock had been out of football for two years when McCray talked him into doing the academic work necessary to get back into school and, hopefully, rekindle his career.

Three former NFL players - Junior Seau, Ray Easterling and Dave Duerson - each died of self-inflicted gunshot wounds in the past year and a half. Easterling and Duerson were found to have brain damage at the time of their deaths and their families are among those suing the league over the long-term effects of concussions. Brain tissue from Seau has been released by his family for study.

Murdock's name had not come up in the ongoing concussion debate, and Munchak said he had no knowledge of the player having a history of such injuries.

''There was nothing that I'm aware of at all with that,'' Munchak said.

McCray said Murdock was well-liked at Fort Hays State, where his polite, humble disposition and infectious smile made him popular on campus and in the surrounding community.

''It's hard, it really is because he was such a good kid. He was lazy in the classroom in high school, and of course he messed up at South Carolina, but you're talking about a kid who was on his mom's couch for two years. ... He got the grades he needed and he came up here and he had one dream, one goal: 'I'm going to come out here and I'm going to play at a high level and I'll get to the National Football League.' And the kid did it. He did it.''

---

AP Sports Writer Pete Iacobelli in Columbia, S.C., and freelance writer Terry McCormick in Nashville, Tenn., contributed to this report.

The Frack War Comes Home - CounterPunch

The war came home this weekend, as thousands of people whose land has been under siege by the U.S. government and corporate interests gathered in Washington, D.C. No, they weren't victims of drone attacks or 10-plus years of fighting in Afghanistan. They were ordinary Americans, whose neighborhoods, townships and states have been struggling to put an end to fracking, a destructive form of natural gas drilling.

These veterans of the frack war were in Washington for a national convergence called Stop the Frack Attack. Over the course of two days, they held teach-ins and strategy sessions on ways to bring relief to their communities through collective action, before ending on Saturday with the first ever national march and rally against fracking. Many hailed the event as an important step to building a broad, grassroots movement to ban the drilling practice.

"I'm going to dream big," said Jennie Scheibach with NonToxic Ohio, a group fighting the spread of fracking in northern Ohio and the disposal of fracking waste in the state's rivers. "Standing together, rising up together, we can stop this."

Jennie wasn't alone. Thousands of people from across the country, from voluminous backgrounds, joined in common cause in D.C. over the weekend, raising the call for an end to fracking.

Lori New Breast of the Blackfoot Nation, whose homeland encompasses parts of Montana, Alberta, and Saskatchewan, took part in the rally. She said her community is mobilizing to reject fracking. "Oil companies would like you to think that that land is unoccupied and that we are gone. But as the care takers of the headwaters of the continent, we are still here. We do not want fracking. It is a threat to our cultural way of life."

Members of Occupy Wall Street Environmental Solidarity were also on hand in D.C. as well, carrying banners that read, "Safe Fracking is a Lie; Occupy! Resist!" and "Frack Wall Street, Not Our Water!"

Meanwhile, suburban mothers like Vicky Bastidas, who brought her three teenage daughters to the rally, were present. She and her family have been fighting frackers from drilling near schools and playgrounds in their home town of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Vicky said she was heartened by a recent court decision that overturned a law barring local municipalities from banning fracking and now looks forward to passing a ban in her town.

The decision might have come too late to reverse much of the long-term damage that the unimpeded invasion of drilling has done to Pennsylvania, but nonetheless it grants Pennsylvanians a chance to set up legal barricades against the fracking bombardment. Bastidas had a message from her family to Governor Corbett and lawmakers like him: "Our water is not for sale. We can live without oil. We can live without gas. But we cannot live without water."

This was a widespread sentiment among the approximately 4,000 demonstrators who marched from the Capitol building to the headquarters of the American Petroleum Institute (API), the oil and gas industry's lobbying arm. Along the way they made a brief stop at the home base of the American Natural Gas Alliance (ANGA), where Delaware Riverkeeper Maya Van Rossum held up a murky, brown libation of chemical diarrhea in a clear plastic jug.

"This is frack water," she said. "We don't want it in our communities. We can't drink it safely. We're giving it back to the drillers. I bet they won't drink it!" Uniformed in hazmat suits, Van Rossum and several of her colleagues with Delaware Riverkeeper chanted "shame" and pounded on ANGA's doors, but a representative of the Alliance failed to appear for a taste test.

Next, demonstrators flooded the courtyard of API's home office. "The water, the water, the water is on fire," they hollered in unison, "We don't need no fracking let the corporations burn." Members of the crowd set down a 10-foot replica of a fracking rig made of bamboo and canvas at API's door and tipped it over. The move was a symbolic representation of what they hope the burgeoning movement against fracking can accomplish nationally.

The action also pointed toward another tipping point, that of the climate, which has been driven to the brink of near collapse by the fossil fuel industry with the support of politicians, including President Barack Obama, who received $884,000 in campaign donations from the oil and gas industry in 2008. Given such a payout, it should not be surprising that Obama signed a little-noticed executive order earlier this year establishing an intergovernmental task force for the support of "unconventional" gas drilling — in other words fracking.

With the stroke of a pen, Obama picked a side in a war that began under his predecessor's administration. In 2005, lawmakers on Capitol Hill approved the Energy Policy Act, a bill championed by then-Vice President and former Halliburton executive Dick Cheney that exempted frackers from the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) and the Clean Water Act (CWA). The fracking amendments gave the world's wealthiest energy corporations license to invade some of America's poorest counties, poison their drinking water, foul their air and putrefy their soil. For each frack site, and there are now tens of thousands across America, drillers pump millions of gallons of water, sand and toxic chemicals into the land in order to draw oil and gas from shale rock.

Since the frack boom began, impoverished, cloistered communities sitting on millions of dollars worth of shale gas — from Pennsylvania to Wyoming, from indigenous tribal lands in Montana to the Texas border — have become ground zeros for fracking. In most cases, they are offered a short-term cash prize for land rights or desperately needed jobs in return for long-term ecological devastation. Such a strategy for prosperity, critics contend, would have left mountaintop removal strongholds in Appalachia looking like Beverly Hills long ago.

Instead, it seems the only pockets being lined are those of the corporate executives and politicians. In 2010, the fracking industry raked in $76 billion in revenues. Meanwhile, the Obama 2012 campaign is set to bring in more from oil and gas lobbyists than was raised in the previous election. If there's hope in matching corporate campaign donations, though, it's not with money, but rather a national movement, comprised of the diverse voices of dissent that marched through Washington on Saturday.

Peter Rugh is a facilitator for Occupy Wall Street Environmental Solidarity and chairs the Action Committee of Shut Down Indian Point Now! Pete blogs at EartoEarth.org.

Chris Marker, Pioneer of the Essay Film, Dies at 91 - New York Times

His death was announced by the French Culture Ministry.

A transmedia artist long before the term was coined, Mr. Marker resisted categorization throughout his career; he once referred to "career" as "that despicable word." His sprawling and constantly evolving body of work, which ranged from books to installations to CD-ROMs and included more than 50 films of varying length, was at once fragmentary and cohesive, united by an abiding interest in the nature of time and memory and by a strong physical and intellectual wanderlust.

Mr. Marker's best-known film, the 1962 short "La Jetée," about a man haunted by a childhood memory, was the basis of the 1995 Hollywood movie "12 Monkeys" starring Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt. Whether taking the form of time-warp science fiction like "La Jetée" or archive-rich historical surveys like "A Grin Without a Cat" (1977), about the fate of the New Left after the pivotal year 1968, most of his films involve a kind of time travel.

A lifelong leftist and perennial globe-trotter, he documented almost every political hot spot of the mid- and late-20th century: the Soviet Union, China, the new state of Israel, Cuba after the revolution.

In his later works — like the installation "Silent Movie" (1995) and the feature "Level Five" (1997) — he was also an early explorer of video, digital technology and cyberspace.

Born Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve on July 29, 1921, Mr. Marker hid many aspects of his biography. He once claimed he was born in Ulan Bator, Mongolia, though some sources have cited his place of birth as the Parisian suburb Neuilly-sur-Seine. He granted few interviews and typically refused to be photographed. Information about his survivors was not immediately available. But in his work, at least, Mr. Marker was not anonymous so much as he was playfully evasive.

His films often feature a first-person narrator, a device he once called "a sign of humility." They abound with avatars and alter-egos, including his own cat, Guillaume-en-Egypt, which sometimes appeared, in the flesh and in cartoon form, as his surrogate.

The pseudonym Chris Marker — which originally appeared in print as "Chris. Marker" — dates from the late 1940s, when he published criticism, editorials, poetry and fiction, including a novel, "Le Coeur Net," set in Indochina.

After his first directorial effort, "Olympia 52," about the 1952 Helsinki Olympic Games, Mr. Marker wrote the narration for the documentary "Statues Also Die" (1953), which he directed with Alain Resnais. Ostensibly about African art, the film doubled as a critique of French colonialism. It received the prestigious Prix Jean Vigo but was banned by French censors for more than 10 years because of its political content.

Mr. Marker refined his signature approach to voice-over narration, at once intimate and quizzical, in the early works "Sunday in Peking" (1956) and "Letter From Siberia" (1957). The latter film's provocative rethinking of the relationship between word and image — one sequence replays the same shots with vastly different commentaries — prompted the critic André Bazin to use the term "an essay documented by film."

Borrowed from the poet Henri Michaux, the opening words of "Letter From Siberia" — "I write to you from a far-off country" — could serve as Mr. Marker's motto. He had a foreign correspondent's drive to "capture life in the process of becoming history," as he put it, but there was also a science-fiction strangeness to many of his travelogues.

He retained his outsider's perspective, his taste for oddity and digression, even when shooting at home. The ambitious "Le Joli Mai" (1963) was an attempt to map the national psyche as the Algerian War drew to a close, culled from dozens of man-on-the-street interviews in Paris. The film is often called an early example of the documentary mode known as cinéma vérité. But Mr. Marker rejected the term and proposed a more modest alternative: "ciné, ma vérité" ("Cinema, my truth").

On days off from "Le Joli Mai," Mr. Marker embarked on a photography project that became the half-hour "La Jetée." Composed almost entirely of still images, this recursive loop of a film was both an homage to a beloved movie, Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo," and a self-reflexive testament to cinema as a time machine.

Like many of his peers, Mr. Marker became increasingly politicized in the 1960s. In 1967, he formed a film collective called SLON (Russian for "elephant" and also an acronym for Société pour le Lancement des Oeuvres Nouvelles, or Society for the Launch of New Works).

SLON's documentaries include "À Bientôt, J'espère," about a strike at a French textile factory, and "The Sixth Side of the Pentagon," about an antiwar march on the Pentagon. One of the collective's major initiatives was the omnibus film "Far From Vietnam," a protest against American involvement in Vietnam, with contributions from Mr. Marker, Mr. Resnais, Jean-Luc Godard and Agnès Varda, among other filmmakers.

"Sans Soleil" (1982), often acknowledged as the masterpiece among Mr. Marker's late works, is one of his least classifiable, a free-associative mix of ethnography, philosophy and poetry. Purporting to be the footage of a fictional cinematographer accompanied by his letters to a nameless woman, the film roams from Iceland to Guinea-Bissau to Japan, a favorite destination of Mr. Marker's since "The Koumiko Mystery," which he shot in Tokyo during the 1964 Olympics. A bar in Tokyo's famous Golden Gai district is named for "La Jetée" — an honor that Mr. Marker once said was "worth more to me than any number of Oscars."

Mr. Marker also turned his attention to fellow filmmakers. He made two essays on Soviet cinema and history centered on the neglected director Alexander Medvedkin ("The Train Rolls On," "The Last Bolshevik"), one elegy to his friend Andrei Tarkovsky ("One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich") and a portrait of Akira Kurosawa on the set of the 1985 film "Ran" ("A.K.").

He remained active into his 70s and 80s. His last film appears to have been a short about the history of cinema, commissioned as a trailer for the 50th anniversary of the Viennale Film Festival in October. The film is scheduled to be shown at the Locarno Film Festival on Saturday.

Mr. Marker gave one of his final interviews — in 2008 to the French magazine Les Inrockuptibles — through the virtual medium of Second Life. In response to a question about pseudonyms as masks, he said: "I'm much more pragmatic than that. I chose a pseudonym, Chris Marker, pronounceable in most languages, because I was very intent on traveling. No need to delve further."

Harlem's Soul-Food 'Queen' Dies at 86 - Wall Street Journal

By STEPHEN MILLER And MICHAEL HOWARD SAUL

The founder of Sylvia's Restaurant, Harlem's landmark soul-food establishment, died Thursday. Sylvia Woods was 86 years old, and in Harlem she was known as "The Queen of Soul Food."

Founded in 1962, Sylvia's attained a national reputation as a place where black society gathered to celebrate. It became a meeting spot for politicians of every stripe.

Associated Press

Sylvia Woods, shown in front of her restaurant for its 40th-anniversary celebration in 2002, died Thursday.

"For more than 50 years, New Yorkers have enjoyed Sylvia's and visitors have flocked to Harlem to get a table," Mayor Michael Bloomberg said. "We lost a legend today."

Her death coincided with a reception hosted by the mayor to celebrate Harlem Week. At the event, Ms. Woods was scheduled to receive an award commemorating the 50th anniversary of her restaurant, which is still open.

Sylvia's is blocks from Harlem's revived Apollo Theater. Top performers at the theater as well as audience members would stop in for a bite before showtime. "Sylvia was not just a pillar in the community but her brand resonated across the world and her business acumen helped put Harlem on the map," said the Rev. Al Sharpton in a statement.

Ms. Woods came to New York City from her native South Carolina in the mid-1940s, and in 1962 purchased the small lunch counter on Lenox Avenue where she had worked as a waitress. Her mother backed her by mortgaging her farm.

The restaurant grew to 450 seats, and the business grew to include a catering hall and packaged-food operation with national distribution offering Southern favorites including collard greens and hot sauce.

Over the years, the menu continued to offer fried chicken, barbecued ribs and chitterlings, but also introduced lighter, more modern fare such as barbecued salmon and grilled chicken breasts.

New locations opened in Atlanta and at John. F. Kennedy International Airport.

Ms. Woods herself became a kind of national ambassador of soul food and published several cookbooks. Most recently she wrote the forward to a lower-calorie approach to classic soul food by her grandson, Lindsey Williams, "Neo Soul: Taking Soul Food to a Whole 'Nutha Level."

"Dining at the restaurant is like dining in my own kitchen," Ms. Woods told the Boston Herald in 1999. "I have a special table where I can sit and watch everybody when they come in; and when they get their food, I can see the expression on their faces. When they take a spoonful and smile, then I bow my head and think, `Yeah, I got it. I got it."'

Write to Stephen Miller at remembrances@wsj.com and Michael Howard Saul at michael.saul@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared July 20, 2012, on page A15 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Harlem's Soul-Food 'Queen' Dies at 86.

Gunmen attack Pakistani army camp, kill 8 people - KCAU

By ASIF SHAHZAD
Associated Press

ISLAMABAD (AP) - Gunmen killed eight people in an attack Monday on a Pakistani army camp in a city where thousands of hardline Islamists spent the night on their way to the capital to protest the government's recent decision to reopen the NATO supply line to Afghanistan, police said.

Police were searching for the culprits and it was unclear if any of the Islamist protesters were involved, said Basharat Mahmood, police chief in the eastern city of Gujrat where the attack occurred.

"It is surely a terrorist attack," said Mahmood. "The attackers could have taken cover. They could have hid themselves among the protesters."

The camp on the outskirts of Gujrat was attacked at around 5:20 a.m., a little less than an hour after the leaders of the Difah-e-Pakistan, or Defense of Pakistan, protest movement finished delivering speeches inside the city, said the police.

The group, which includes hardline Islamist politicians and religious leaders, left the city of Lahore on Sunday along with 8,000 supporters in 200 vehicles to make the 300-kilometer (185-mile) journey to Islamabad. They traveled about halfway, spent the night in Gujrat and plan to hold a protest in front of parliament in the capital on Monday.

The roughly half dozen gunmen who attacked the camp were riding in a car and on motorcycles. They killed seven soldiers at the camp and a policeman who tried to intercept them as they were escaping, said Mahmood, the police chief. Four policemen and at least three soldiers were wounded, he said.

The camp that was attacked was set up to look for the body of an army major who was flying a helicopter when it crashed into a river in the area, said the police.

The leaders of Difah-e-Pakistan include people with known militant links, including Hafiz Saeed, the founder of the banned Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group, and Maulana Samiul Haq, known as the father of the Taliban.

But they are not known to be supporters of the Pakistani Taliban, who have waged a bloody insurgency against the state over the past few years and killed thousands of soldiers and police.

Many of the Difah-e-Pakistan leaders have strong historical links with Pakistani intelligence, and the group is widely believed to have been supported by the army to put pressure on the U.S. while the government negotiated over the NATO supply line.

Pakistan closed the route in November in retaliation for American airstrikes that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers. The government finally agreed to reopen the supply line last week after the U.S. apologized for the deaths.

One of the reasons Pakistan waited so long to allow NATO troop supplies to resume was that it was worried about domestic backlash in a country where anti-American sentiment is rampant.

Difah-e-Pakistan leaders said Sunday that they were holding their so-called "long march" to Islamabad to prevent Pakistan from becoming a slave to the U.S. and to show that many citizens are unhappy with the decision to reopen the route.

But the number of protesters has been relatively small so far given Pakistan's population of 190 million, and the demonstration is unlikely to have any effect on the government's decision.

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Who Killed Marilyn | Deutsch/German Trailer HD (2012)

	Who Killed Marilyn | Deutsch/German Trailer HD (2012) Who Killed Marilyn | Deutsch/German Trailer HD (2012) Länge: 102 Min | Kinostart: 02.08.2012 © Koch Media | COMEDY PROMOTIONAL USE ONLY! Schauspieler: Jean-Paul Rouve, Sophie Quinton, Guillaume Gouix, Olivier Rabourdin, Clara Ponsot, Arsinée Khanjian, Eric Ruf, Lyes Salem, Joséphine De Meaux, Ken Samuels, Antoine Chappey, Fred Quiring, Nicolas Robin Regie: Gérald Hustache-Mathieu Produktion: Dharamsala, in Koproduktion mit France 2 Cinema, mit Zusammenarbeit und Unterstützung von Canal+, Cinecinema, France Televisions, La Banque Postale, Image 3, La Sofica Soficinema 6, La Region Ile-De-France, La Region Franche-Comte, Media-Programm der Europäischen Union Drehbuch: Gérald Hustache-Mathieu, Juliette Sales Die Story: David Rousseau ist Krimi-Autor. Seine erfolgreichen Jahre sind vorbei, weshalb er auf neue Inspiration wartet. Durch den Tod seines Onkels kommt Rousseau in das kleine Kaff Mouthe. Seine Schreibblockade will er für die Abwicklung seines Erbes nutzen, als im Dorf jedoch ein Skandal ausbricht. Der Ort für seinen Käse berühmt, welcher auch über die Region hinaus beworden wird. Nun wird das berühmte Käse-Modell Candice Lecoeur tot aufgefunden. Die Lokalpresse spekuliert und auch David Rousseau macht sich seine Gedanken über den Fall. Er beginnt zu recherchieren und wittert einen Plot für seinen neuen Roman, der ihm ein gelungenes Comeback ermöglichen soll. Marilyn Monroe war ein Vorbild der Dorfschönheit, wo sind die Parallelen zwischen den beiden Leben <b>...</b>	From: Trail3rHD Views: 0 0 ratings
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(Israel) Palestinian killed at Jerusalem checkpoint (July 30, 2012)

	(Israel) Palestinian killed at Jerusalem checkpoint (July 30, 2012) www.ynetnews.com "Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use." § 107.Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include — (1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; (2) the nature of the copyrighted work; (3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and (4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. FAIR USE NOTICE: These pages/video may contain copyrighted (© ) material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Such material is made available to <b>...</b>	From: Marygreeley1954 Views: 91 2 ratings
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I ALMOST DIED!!!

	I ALMOST DIED!!! T-Shirts!!: www.crysisyt.spreadshirt.com Facebook www.facebook.com Twitter: www.twitter.com Livestream: www.twitch.tv Outro Music: full.sc MW3: P99 Pistol Only MOAB! w/Assault Package (80 Kills) MW3: P99 Pistol Only MOAB! w/Assault Package (80 Kills) MW3: P99 Pistol Only MOAB! w/Assault Package (80 Kills) MW3: P99 Pistol Only MOAB! w/Assault Package (80 Kills) MW3: P99 Pistol Only MOAB! w/Assault Package (80 Kills) Tags: "I Almost Died" "Near Death Story" "Near Death Experience" "I Got Hit By A Flashbang" "Fireworks Almost Killed Me" "Funny Stories" "Call of Duty Commentator" "COD Commentaries Daily" "Mortar Firework Kills A Guy" "A Commentator That Almost Died" "Close To Death" "Entertaining MW3 Commentator" "Modern Warfare 3 Videos Everyday" "COD:MW3" "CODMW3" "I Died" "Can Fireworks Kill People" "Stupid Things With Fire Works" "Funny 4th Of July Story" "Fire Work Killing A Man" "Stupid Way To Die" Crysis, Crysis YT, TheCrysisYT, The CryisYT The Crysis YT, Crysis, Crysis YT, CrysisYT, WoodysGamertag, OnlyUseMeBlade, XJawz, Machinima, Yeousch, TGN, Tebjz, F1sTDaCuFFs, IIJeriichoII, TheSyndicateProject, Tmartn, 402Thunder402, zzirGrizz, Seananners, Hutch, XJawz Shoutout Sunday, XCal, xcalizorz, Whiteboy7thst, Juicetra, Omega4471x, ONS1AUGH7, OperatorPerry, Shaun0728, The Commentator That Says He Is The One And Only, TheSandyRavage, WingsOfRedemption, Yoteslaya, Kampy, PaulB0991, BlameTruth, Kpopp, MrObviouslyJesus, ElPresador, CheatLikeAChamp, Gawley, The Commentator That <b>...</b>	From: TheCrysisYT Views: 142 40 ratings
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2 bombers, 3 others killed in separate north Nigeria attacks targeting authorities - Washington Post

An injured man at Specialist Hospital Sokoto, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, said he saw a car race into the main gate of the compound. He said he was on a bicycle when the blast went off, the impact threw him from the bike, and he hurt his hand in the fall.

Police sealed off roads leading to both police premises soon after the blasts.

Motorcycle-mounted gunmen later shot at a third police station in another part of the city, said Sokoto state police spokesman Sani Dahiru. He could not immediately say how many gunmen there were, or whether there had been casualties.

The twin explosions and drive-by shooting come as Nigeria faces an increasing threat from a radical Islamist sect known as Boko Haram.

There has also been a spate of recent attacks targeting uniformed officers, some of which have been blamed on the sect.

Three gunmen killed a shoe-shiner Monday morning outside an uninhabited house belonging to Nigerian Vice President Namadi Sambo in the north central city of Zaria, said Kaduna state police spokesman Abubakar Balteh. He said the house had been under renovation and that the man was near policemen who had been guarding the construction site.

Rioters had burned down that same house during postelection violence that swept across northern Nigeria after April 2011 presidential polls, Balteh said.

Sectarian violence has risen since that violence that left at least 800 people dead across Nigeria's north, according to Human Rights Watch. Fighting started after President Goodluck Jonathan, a Christian from southern Nigeria, was declared winner. Many in Nigeria's north thought a Muslim from the north should have become president.

Two past presidents and one-time rivals said in a joint statement Sunday that "the nation is gripped by a regime of fear and uncertainty... virtually all citizens have difficulties going about their normal day to day lives without great anxiety and trepidation," said the statement signed by Ibrahim Babangida and Olusegun Obasanjo. "This cannot be allowed to continue!" it said.

The statement did not mention Boko Haram by name. However, authorities have accused the sect of trying to exacerbate religious tensions in Africa's most populous nation evenly divided between Muslims and Christians.

Over the last few days, attacks against security authorities, a typical Boko Haram target, have spanned a wide geographical area.

Air Commodore Sani Ahmed said motorcycle-mounted gunmen killed two air force officers in the northern city of Kano on Sunday.

The violence followed a Friday night clash between suspected Boko Haram members and security officers in the northeastern city of Damaturu that left a policeman and a soldier dead, said Yobe state police spokesman Toyin Gbadagesin. He added that security officers then razed a house believed to be harboring sect members.

Witness Yau Zadawa said two motorcycle-mounted gunmen also killed a policeman outside his house late Friday after he had closed from a shift guarding a local politician in the northeastern city of Bauchi.

Meanwhile, a soldier was also shot dead Friday in the Boko Haram sect's spiritual home of Maiduguri, a city about 280 miles (460 kilometers) away from Bauchi.

Security officials are frequently targeted in violence in Nigeria's arid north and have been criticized for killing suspects in their attempt to stop spiraling sectarian violence.

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Associated Press writers Godwin Attah in Kaduna and Ibrahim Garba in Kano contributed to this report.

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Hitler's Escape (full)

	Hitler's Escape (full) Hitler's Escape a MysteryQuest Special::: Adolf Hitler it is assumed he killed himself, but there is no evidence of his death. Near the final days of World War II when the Russians were surrounding Berlin, Hitler and his wife went down to their underground bunker and killed themselves. At least that is what his guards have said. They said they heard the shot and opened the door to find Hitler lying bloody and dead on the couch, and his wife next to him, poisoned to death.The guards said they then took the body of Hitler outside and burned it then buried it. Apparently, Hitler did not want his lifeless body on display like Mussolini's corpse had been. Mystery Quest takes up the challenge of finding clues of Hitler's death. There has been speculation that he escaped and might have gone to South America. Other people have said they had seen him around other parts of Germany. Whatever the stories, there is no evidence of a dead body belonging to Adolf Hitler. Hitler used a double, especially after the close attempt on his life in the Valkyrie incident. What the Russians found when they arrived in Berlin, was the dead body of a man looking like Hitler, but in all accounts was his double. This man was apparently two inches shorter than Adolf Hitler. In the Russian archives they have a couch with blood stains and a piece of a skull with a bullet hole in it. Mystery Quest sent an American archaeologist to Russia to get evidence from these items and bring it back to the United <b>...</b>	From: IMMORTALTRUTHZ0 Views: 16 0 ratings
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UN chief tells Syrian government to cease violence, says civil war imperils ... - Vancouver Sun

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Monday singled out Syria's government for censure, telling it to halt its violent crackdown on the dissidents and rebels fighting to overthrow President Bashar Assad's regime, and denounced an armed attack on a convoy carrying the military chief of the U.N. observer mission.

Ban noted that his peacekeeping chief, Herve Ladsous, recently went to Syria where he "called on the government to end its use of heavy weapons and demonstrate the commitment to ending the armed violence. Government officials have repeatedly said they would honour these commitments. We are still waiting for them to act."

"The government is adding to its brutal crackdown by attacking heavily populated areas with fighter aircraft and helicopters. The armed opposition groups have also stepped up their attacks," Ban told reporters on his return from an overseas trip.

The U.N.'s military observer force in Syria has been sidelined by the violence and lack of political will in the Security Council. Ban said that more than a dozen armoured vehicles used by the military observers have been destroyed by blasts and shelling, and a convoy carrying the general heading the force was targeted on Sunday.

"Yesterday, the convoy of Lt. Gen. (Babacar) Gaye was attack by armed attacks. Fortunately there were no injuries," Ban said.

U.N. spokesman Farhan Haq added later that the U.N. had learned that the five-vehicle convoy was hit by small arms fire Sunday in Talbisa,17 kilometres (10 1/2 miles) away from Homs. Two of the five vehicles were hit by bullets.

The U.N. observer mission's latest 30-day mandate is due to expire in August, and the United States, Britain and France do not want to see it extended under these circumstances.

"It's important, again, that the Syrian government must fully co-operate with the U.N. mission and must cease these violent measures. We are deeply concerned that they are using all kinds of heavy equipment, including military airplanes, attack helicopters and heavy weaponry This is an unacceptable situation. Every day, more than 100 people are being killed. This cannot go on this way. Therefore I have been urging ... Syrian authorities and opposition forces to stop fighting, and leave it to political resolution, through political dialogue."

Turning to fears of a wider Middle East war, Ban said: "A sectarian civil would also gravely imperil Syria's neighbours," Turkey, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan and Israel.

"As many as 2 million people are affected by violence. More fighting is not the answer. Further militarization of this conflict will only perpetuate the devastation, and prolong he suffering," Ban said.

Syria recently acknowledged for the first time that it possesses chemical weapons, but said it would only use them if the country came under foreign attack.

This prompted Ban to chide Damascus again:

"Let me also reiterate my concern about weapons of mass destruction, including chemical weapons."

"The use of these arms is prohibited under international law. Any use of such weapons would be an outrageous crime and a major concern for the entire international community. I call on the government to renounce the possibility of using these weapons under any circumstances, and to insure the safety and security of stockpiles," Ban said.

The U.N. Security Council has been stalemated over Western and Arab attempts to impose sanctions on Assad's government. China and Russia have vetoed attempts to move toward a sanctions regime.

With the Security Council bogged down, Saudi Arabia is circulating a draft General Assembly resolution demanding an end to the violence in Syria, backing political dialogue and transition, and calling for Syria's chemical weapons to be held secure.

However, General Assembly resolutions are not enforceable by sanctions or military intervention. No date has been set for the introduction of the Saudi Arabia-sponsored, Arab-backed draft resolution.

Survivors of crash that killed Cuba's Paya say it was accident - Reuters

By Rosa Tania Valdes

HAVANA | Mon Jul 30, 2012 7:36pm EDT

HAVANA (Reuters) - Two European politicians who survived a car crash that killed prominent Cuban dissident Oswaldo Paya said on Monday that no other vehicle was involved and denied suggestions they had been deliberately forced off the road.

Their versions appeared to support the Cuban government's description of the accident, contradicting suggestions by Paya's family and some fellow dissidents that another vehicle may have hit the car from behind to cause the crash. They have called for an international investigation.

The government views opposition members as subversives trying, with outside help, to topple the communist system. Dissidents say they are routinely monitored and harassed by state security agents.

The driver, Spaniard Angel Carromero, said in a video shown to reporters in a Havana press conference that he lost control of the small rental car on a patch of highway under repair and unpaved on July 22 in Granma province 480 miles southeast of Havana.

The car struck a tree and the impact killed Paya, 60, and another dissident, Harold Cepero. They were sitting in the back seat and not wearing seat belts, authorities said.

"?No vehicle hit us from behind. Simply, I was driving, I struck a pothole and I took the precaution of any other driver (by applying the brakes)," Carromero said.

Jens Aron Modig of Sweden, who was the front seat passenger and appeared at the press conference, said he and Carromero were taking Paya and Cepero to meet with supporters.

He said he slept through part of the trip and had only vague memories of the accident, but said ?"I don't remember that there was another vehicle involved."

CUBA SAYS DRIVING TOO FAST

Both Europeans, members of conservative parties in their countries, suffered minor injuries.

The Cuban government said Carromero was driving too fast, had not heeded warning signs about road construction ahead and jammed on the brakes too abruptly.

They are being "retained," not detained, in Cuba, awaiting disposition of the case, which could include criminal charges against Carromero, a Cuban official said.

Paya was awarded the European Union's Sakharov Prize for human rights in 2002 for leading the Varela Project, a campaign to reform Cuba's one-party political system.

He and supporters gathered thousands of signatures seeking democratic change, but the government, then led by Fidel Castro, rejected the effort.

In recent years, Paya's visibility waned as other dissidents, particularly blogger Yoani Sanchez, became the more public face of Cuban opposition.

Modig said he had been sent by his party to meet with Paya and members of his Christian Liberation Movement and give him 4,000 Euros ($4,904) to help finance his work.

He said he now regrets his involvement with the dissidents.

"I understand that these activities are not legal in Cuba and would like to apologize for having come to this country to carry out illicit activities," Modig said.

In the video, Carromero requested help in getting out of his predicament and that the case not become a political matter.

"I ask the international community to please concentrate on getting me out of here and to not use the traffic accident that could have happened to any other person for political ends," he said.

(Editing by David Adams and Cynthia Osterman)