Behind closed doors, Romney gossips, imitates Kissinger

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The surreptitious video recording of a fundraiser held for Republican Mitt Romney in May provided a rare glimpse of how he views supporters of President Barack Obama - as government dependents.

It also provided an equally novel sight of a relaxed Romney doing an impression of Henry Kissinger, dishing about late-night television talk show host David Letterman, and receiving some pointed tips for his presidential campaign.

"I saw Dr. Kissinger," Romney says on the video, recounting a meeting in New York with the former U.S. secretary of state. "I said to him, 'How are we perceived around the world?' And he said one word: 'Veak!'"

The secretly filmed recording, released in its entirety by the liberal Mother Jones magazine on Tuesday, opened a window on how Romney acts during the kind of private meeting with donors that is helping to propel the most expensive presidential campaign in U.S. history.

In this case the former Massachusetts governor and private equity executive was speaking to donors who paid $50,000 each for the privilege of his company at a private dinner at the Boca Raton, Florida, home of financier Marc Leder.

Family and friends often say that Romney, who can be awkward while campaigning, is at ease and funny when the cameras are off? or believed to be.

"You're not eating," Romney scolded one attendee during his remarks at the fundraiser.

"I'm mesmerized," the donor said.

"He's bored to tears," Romney said to laughter.

At one point, Romney decided to give the donor a lesson in eating.

"You take this, your fork, and you put it in," Romney said.

When asked about Democrats' criticisms of his tenure as a wealthy executive at Bain Capital, Romney pretended to plead poverty.

"I'm poor as a church mouse," said Romney, who has an estimated fortune of $250 million.

NOT UP FOR 'SLAPSTICK'

Romney also gossiped about CBS late-night talk show host David Letterman, a frequent critic of the Republican. Romney said he preferred Jay Leno, host of NBC's "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno."

"Letterman hates me because I've been on Leno more than him. They are very jealous of each other, you know," Romney said.

By coincidence, a few hours after the video's release online, Obama arrived in New York City to tape an interview with Letterman.

Romney said he turned down an appearance on NBC's "Saturday Night Live" because visiting the show "has the potential of looking slapstick and not presidential."

Days before the election in 2008, Republican presidential candidate John McCain and his running mate, Sarah Palin, flew to New York to be on the show.

'ISLAMICS DO NOT WANT TO VOTE FOR YOU'

At the Florida fundraiser, Romney's comments were captured by a videocamera that had been placed on what appeared to be a marble bar.

Waiters wearing white gloves were seen serving the guests red wine from decanters. For most of the video, only the backs of donors' heads can be seen, with Romney in profile.

The audio does, however, pick up donors' comments to Romney, including some good-natured ribbing about his image on the campaign trail.

"They say, 'He's a rich boy,'" one donor affably told Romney during the dinner.

The comments reflected donors' anxieties about Romney's perceived deficiencies.

One donor complained of the difficulties of converting Obama supporters to Romney's side.

"Right now I'm very concerned," she said. "Women do not want to vote for you. Islamics, the majority, do not want to vote for you. College students don't."

"Why don't you stick up for yourself?" a male donor asked Romney.

"You have to show your face more on TV," said another.

A third donor counselled Romney on the importance of social media.

A fourth donor urged Romney to "take the gloves off and talk to the people who actually read the paper."

When Romney responded to their reservations by telling the guests about the importance of his three debates against Obama in October, a donor cut him off.

"You will do so well," the donor said. "Your debates are incredible."

(Editing by David Lindsey and Prudence Crowther)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/behind-closed-doors-romney-gossips-imitates-kissinger-011602149.html

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Hatch challenger warns incumbent may die in office

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) ? Sen. Orrin Hatch is many things: a former Judiciary Committee Chairman, the Republican next in line to head the tax-writing finance committee, songwriter and grandfather. But his Democratic opponent is warning that Hatch's age_78 ?makes him "an old guy" at risk of retiring or dying in office if re-elected in the Nov. 6 elections.

"Our nation doesn't need that. And, at nearly 80 years old, he lacks the skills, knowledge and proficiency to face America's modern needs," read an email from Democratic hopeful Scott Howell, 58, to potential supporters. "We cannot risk the possibility of an 80-year-old man taking office, only to retire or die before his term is through."

Hatch campaign manager Dave Hansen called the comments "outrageous and offensive," adding they come from a candidate with no shot at winning in November. Utah hasn't elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1970.

"That's the first time I've ever heard a candidate say, 'Vote for me, my opponent is going to die,'" Hansen said Tuesday.

He said that Hatch is in great health and has no plans to either retire or die.

"He is the youngest 78-year-old you'll ever find," Hansen said.

Howell's campaign, meanwhile, defended the comments, citing Utah's overall average life expectancy of 78 years old.

"It's absolute reality," Howell campaign manager Emily Bingham Hollingshead said. "Age is a factor in this election."

According to the Senate Historical Office, the average age of senators in the current Congress is 61.5 years old. Hatch is one of 19 senators in their 70s. Three others ? Hawaii Sens. Daniel Inouye and Daniel Akaka, as well as Sen. Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey? are in their 80s.

About 13 percent of the nation is over age 65, about the same as the percentage of seniors in Utah, according to the Census Bureau.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/hatch-challenger-warns-incumbent-may-die-office-185307305--election.html

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Germany's ZEW index of investor optimism rises

FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) ? A survey of how investment professionals see Germany's economy rose in September after falling the previous four months.

The ZEW index rose to minus 18.2 from minus 25.5 the month before.

The index remains in negative territory, indicating financial markets expect German to lose momentum over the next six months.

ZEW institute head Wolfgang Franz said plans by the European Central Bank to intervene in bond markets and lower interest costs for indebted governments may have boosted optimism about the eurozone.

He said, however, that "the debt crisis is not solved yet, and the risks for economic activity remain."

The 17 states that use the euro face a crisis over too much debt in some countries that is weighing on economic growth.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/germanys-zew-index-investor-optimism-rises-092404906--finance.html

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Western embassies edgy as Muslim anger at film simmers

DUBAI (Reuters) - Western embassies across the Muslim world remained on high alert on Sunday and the United States urged vigilance after days of anti-American violence provoked by a video mocking the Prophet Mohammad.

The head of Libya's national assembly said an attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans last Tuesday looked like a planned assault by a "group with an agenda" rather than a spontaneous reaction to the video posted online.

With protests against the film continuing from London to Lahore on Sunday, Western diplomatic missions were on edge. Germany followed the U.S. lead and withdrew some staff from its embassy in Sudan, which was stormed on Friday.

Washington ordered non-essential staff and family members to leave its embassy there on Saturday after the Khartoum government turned down a U.S. request to send Marines to bolster security.

Non-essential U.S. personnel have also been withdrawn from Tunisia, and Washington urged U.S. citizens to leave the capital Tunis after the embassy there was targeted on Friday.

The protests peaked on Friday and were ebbing by Sunday. Around 350 people chanted slogans at a rally outside the U.S. embassy in London; a small group of protesters burned a U.S. flag outside the U.S. embassy in the Turkish capital, and in Pakistan there were small protests in more than a dozen cities.

One person was killed when unidentified people opened fire at a protest in the southern city of Hyderabad, and five people were injured in clashes with police in Karachi as around 1,000 protesters tried to reach the U.S. consulate, police said.

"AGENDA FOR REVENGE"

The violence is the most serious wave of anti-American protests in the Muslim world since the start of the Arab Spring revolts last year. At least nine people were killed in protests in several countries on Friday.

It was fanned by public anger over a video, posted on the Internet under several titles including "Innocence of Muslims", that mocked the Prophet Mohammad and portrayed him as a womanizer and a fool.

The crisis presents U.S. President Barack Obama with a foreign policy headache as November elections approach.

Some U.S. officials have suggested the Benghazi attack was planned by Islamist militants using the video as a pretext, a hypothesis endorsed by Mohammed Magarief, the president of Libya's national assembly.

"Call it whatever you want, al Qaeda or not, what happened was an act by a group with an agenda for revenge. They chose a specific time, technique and certain victims. This is what it was all about," Magarief told Reuters in an interview.

However, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, said on Sunday talk shows that preliminary information indicated that the attack was not pre-meditated.

"There's no question, as we've seen in the past with things like 'The Satanic Verses', with the cartoon of the Prophet Mohammad, there have been such things that have sparked outrage and anger and this has been the proximate cause of what we've seen," she said.

Magarief told CBS News that about 50 people had been arrested in connection with the attack. Some were from abroad.

U.S. FORCES DEPLOYED

U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said he hoped the worst of the violence was over but U.S. missions must remain on guard.

"It would appear that there is some leveling off on the violence that we thought might take place," he told reporters on his plane en route to Asia on Saturday.

"Having said that, these demonstrations are likely to continue over the next few days, if not longer."

The United States has deployed a significant force in the Middle East to deal with any contingencies and rapid deployment teams were ready to respond to incidents, he said.

The foreign minister of Egypt, where hundreds of people were arrested in four days of clashes, assured Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that U.S. diplomatic grounds would be protected.

Mohamed Kamel Amr told Clinton in a telephone call that the film was designed to incite racial hatred and was therefore "contradictory with laws aimed at developing relationships of peace and mutual understanding between nations and states".

In Los Angeles on Saturday, a California man convicted of bank fraud was taken in for questioning by officers investigating possible probation violations stemming from the making of the video. He has denied involvement in the film.

The furor prompted an Iranian organization to increase the reward for anyone killing Salman Rushdie, the British author condemned to death for blasphemy in 1989 by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, founder of the Islamic Republic.

"Surely if the sentence of the Imam (Khomeini) had been carried out, the later insults in the form of caricatures, articles and the making of movies would not have occurred," said Hassan Sanei, head of the religious foundation offering $3.3 million for Rushdie's death.

In Lebanon, where one protester was killed in violence on Friday, Pope Benedict urged Arab leaders to work for peace.

"In a world where violence constantly leaves behind its grim trail of death and destruction, to serve justice and peace is urgently necessary," Benedict said at a mass on Beirut's Mediterranean seafront attended by 350,000 worshippers and leaders of Lebanon's Christian and Muslim communities.

(Reporting by David Alexander in Tokyo, Jonathon Burch in Ankara, Petra Jasper in Berlin, Tom Perry in Cairo, Dominic Evans in Beirut, Yeganeh Torbati in Dubai, Katharine Houreld in Islamabad and Tim Castle in London; Writing by Robin Pomeroy; Editing by Kevin Liffey)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/fury-over-mohammad-video-simmers-muslim-world-085629500.html

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West Memphis 3: Life After Death | 5NEWSOnline.com ? Ft. Smith ...

Posted on: 1:05 pm, September 16, 2012, by 5NEWS Web Staff, updated on: 01:06pm, September 16, 2012

(CBS News) Damien Echols is proof there is life after death.

Just a little over a year ago, Echols was facing execution on Arkansas? death row:

?You sleep on concrete. You walk on concrete. You sit on concrete. It wears the joints of your body out. You?re living with death hanging over your head at any moment, and all these things combined wear you down,? he said.

He wears glasses in order to see beyond four or five inches from his face, due, he says, to being enclosed in a very small space for so many years.

?Your eyes are just like any other part of your body. If it doesn?t get use, it starts to wither away. And that?s what happened to my eyes.?

And then in August of 2011, after spending nearly two decades in Arkansas prisons, Damien Echols and two other men were suddenly released as part of a highly-unusual plea deal.

Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jesse Miskelley are the West Memphis 3. in 1993, they were teenagers living in West Memphis, Ark., when they were arrested and later convicted of a horrific crime: the murders of three little boys.

?The community exploded,? Echols recalled. ?People were living in absolute horror, you know, trying to keep their kids off the street, not wanting to walk anywhere at night. People lived in terror.?

There was no physical evidence connecting Echols, or the others, to the killings. And in fact, since then, considerable evidence has surfaced that supports their innocence.

But back in the early 1990s, a person with a partially-shaved head, black clothing and an interest in the occult stood out.

?A lot of it was just the way I looked,? Echols told Moriarty, ?and in a really small, extremely conservative, right wing town, things like that, anything in that vein, they say automatically, ?Oh well, you must be a Satanist. Therefore, we don?t put anything past you.??

The jury sentenced Echols to death, by lethal injection.

The trial was nothing, he says, compared to what he faced on death row.

?Most people have nothing like that in their frame of reference ? having to live every single moment on your guard, even while you are sleeping,? Echols said. ?You never go into a deep sleep. You always have to be ready for the next person that?s going to try to hurt you.?

When Moriarty interviewed Echols as part of a ?48 Hours? report on the case, he was spending nearly 24 hours a day in solitary confinement. He kept daily journals, which are now part of a new book.

After an Emmy Award-winning documentary about the trial was shown on HBO in 1996, Echols? life changed once again, when supporters from all over the country began contacting him.

Lorri Davis, a landscape architect living in New York, even moved to Arkansas to work on the case. ?Sometimes, people have callings in life. And this was mine. And so you just ? I couldn?t not hear it. I couldn?t not go,? she said. ?I had to do whatever I could to get this man out of prison ? that is what I had to do,? she said.

And she wasn?t alone. Johnny Depp explained on ?48 Hours? why he and others connected to Echols? situation:

?He comes from a small town in Arkansas, I come from a relatively small town in Kentucky. As a teenager, as a kid growing up, I can remember kind of being looked upon as a freak. if you will, different, because I didn?t dress like everybody else, because I didn?t look like everybody else.?

And then in December 2010, with mounting evidence pointing to the innocence of the West Memphis 3, the Arkansas Supreme Court ordered a new hearing ? one both costly and potentially embarrassing for state officials.

And that brings us to the unusual plea deal, the idea of Stephen Braga, a highly-respected appeals attorney who volunteered his services.

?It?s called an Alford plea,? Braga explained. ?It?s basically a compromise where both sides, two sides that have been at war ? for 18 years, in this case ? decide that we want to end the case.?

In return for agreeing not to sue the state, the three men were released from prison. But here?s the bizarre part: While they could continue to insist they were innocent, each had to plead guilty!

?Didn?t it feel a little like a deal with the devil?? asked Moriarty.

?It was,? Echols said. ?It was a deal with the devil, but it was a deal I really didn?t have a choice to take if I wanted to live. My health was going fast. I was dying in there. I knew if I didn?t take that deal, I was never going to live to see outside those walls.?

Each was sentenced to serve 18 years and 78 days on the charge of first degree murder, with full credit for time already served.

Braga said no state official would have let them out of prison if they really believed they had committed the murders.

?So it doesn?t really add up to what people think of as justice,? said Moriarty.

?This is not a just result; this is a compromised result,? Braga said. ?A way for me to save Damien?s life and get him off death row. A way to get freedom for Jason and Jessie. But it?s a compromise . . . sometimes you have to hold your nose because it stinks a little bit, ?cause it?s not justice.?

Echols? joy at his release after 18 years in prison was widely covered by the media, but not the fears that followed since he left Arkansas for a new life in New York City.

?It?s just like this free-floating anxiety,? he said. ?I?ve been injected into this whole new world. And I?m having to learn everything. There?s fear constantly. Fear that you?re gonna get lost. Fear you?re gonna say the wrong thing, just because you?re not used to social interaction,?

The simplest things, Lorri Davis said, that ?most people would take for granted that he had never done before.?

Davis went from seeing Echols once a week to 24 hours a day ? yes, she married him in 1999 while he was on death row.

?I believed in his innocence, and then I fell in love with him. And those two things together, nothing else mattered,? she said.

All that matters now, says Davis, is helping him adjust to a world that had moved on without him. ?Filling out a deposit slip, being able to go from one address to another, and reading a map. He?s never done any of those things.?

?Does he become frustrated when he doesn?t know things?? Moriarty asked.

?He wants to be able to move about in the world on his own and not to have to rely on me or anyone else, and that?s frustrating to him,? she replied. ?But it?ll come.?

And the reality is, 37-year-old Echols may be out of prison, but he?s not free. He remains a convicted felon, making it difficult for him to get a job.

Which may explain why he spends so much time among tattoo and graffiti artists.

?These are people who are sort of marginalized by society,? he said. ?Who aren?t part of, you know, the mainstream. These are people who, you know, for a living get up and tattoo people. They?re not people who put on business suits and go work every day.?

Echols? notoriety is not likely to end soon. Besides his book, there is a new documentary coming out in December, and a Hollywood movie in production. But this month, Damien and his wife moved to a town where they think they?ll fit in just fine: Salem, Mass., a town that knows too well the terrible consequences of misjudging people.

?Is there a time when you just want to be known as Damien Echols and not one of the West Memphis 3?? asked Moriarty.

?That?s one of my driving forces in life right now,? Echols replied. ?I want to do things that stand on their own merit, that people appreciate, that mean something to people, that move them in some sort of way. That?s what I want to be defined by ? not by what was done to me.

Source: http://5newsonline.com/2012/09/16/west-memphis-3-life-after-death/

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A Guide To Nike Air Jordan Finding More Effective Medical Insurance

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Source: http://www.hugohosting.com/a-guide-to-nike-air-jordan-finding-more-effective-medical-insurance.html

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UMT School of Social Sciences and Humanities Admission 2012 ...

University Management and Technology (UMT) School of Social Sciences and Humanities has announced the Admission 2012 in BS psychology Notice.The School of Social Sciences and Humanities is committed to produce individuals who are capable of applying new knowledge to solve the social problems. Application form last date and Entry test dates are available here. Result and Merit list will be also displayed for this site in studysols.com

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