"The FBI is teaching its counterterrorism agents that “main stream” [sic] American Muslims are likely to be terrorist sympathizers; that the Prophet Mohammed was a “cult leader”; and that the Islamic practice of giving charity is no more than a “funding mechanism for combat.”

At the Bureau’s training ground in Quantico, Virginia, agents are shown a chart contending that the more “devout” a Muslim, the more likely he is to be “violent.” Those destructive tendencies cannot be reversed, an FBI instructional presentation adds: “Any war against non-believers is justified” under Muslim law; a “moderating process cannot happen if the Koran continues to be regarded as the unalterable word of Allah.”

These are excerpts from dozens of pages of recent FBI training material on Islam that Danger Room has acquired. In them, the Constitutionally protected religious faith of millions of Americans is portrayed as an indicator of terrorist activity.

“There may not be a ‘radical’ threat as much as it is simply a normal assertion of the orthodox ideology,” one FBI presentation notes. “The strategic themes animating these Islamic values are not fringe; they are main stream.”

The FBI isn’t just treading on thin legal ice by portraying ordinary, observant Americans as terrorists-in-waiting, former counterterrorism agents say. It’s also playing into al-Qaida’s hands.

Focusing on the religious behavior of American citizens instead of proven indicators of criminal activity like stockpiling guns or using shady financing makes it more likely that the FBI will miss the real warning signs of terrorism. And depicting Islam as inseparable from political violence is exactly the narrative al-Qaida spins — as is the related idea that America and Islam are necessarily in conflict. That’s why FBI whistleblowers provided Danger Room with these materials.

Over the past few years, American Muslim civil rights groups have raised alarm about increased FBI and police presence in Islamic community centers and mosques, fearing that their lawful behavior is being targeted under the broad brush of counterterrorism. The documents may help explain the heavy scrutiny.

They certainly aren’t the first time the FBI has portrayed Muslims in a negative light during Bureau training sessions. As Danger Room reported in July, the FBI’s Training Division has included anti-Islam books, and materials that claim Islam “transforms [a] country’s culture into 7th-century Arabian ways.” When Danger Room confronted the FBI with that material, an official statement issued to us claimed, “The presentation in question was a rudimentary version used for a limited time that has since been replaced.”

But these documents aren’t relics from an earlier era. One of these briefings, titled “Strategic Themes and Drivers in Islamic Law,” took place on March 21..."

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-- Saved the link a few days ago, but only got a chance to give a look now. It's worth sharing.

"NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- The last Ford Crown Victoria rolled off a Canadian assembly line Thursday, marking the end of the big, heavy Ford cars that have been popular with taxi fleets and police departments for decades.

Since 1979, almost 10 million Crown Victoria, Mercury Grand Marquis and Lincoln Town Cars -- so-called Panther Platform vehicles -- have been sold.

Demand for better fuel economy and performance have choked off sales over the years. The Crown Victoria and Town Car get just 24 miles per gallon on the highway, a figure matched by some large three-row SUVs today.

"Production levels at the [Ontario, Canada] plant have declined by 60 percent in the last decade as customer preferences shifted to smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles," Ford said in its announcement.

With the last car rolling of the line Thursday, all production will stop.

Ford (F, Fortune 500) is offering $100,000 cash payments or relocation offers, among other programs, for the workers at the plant, the automaker said. A closure agreement between Ford of Canada and the Canadian Auto Workers union was reached in 2009 , Ford said.

For the last several years the Grand Marquis and the Town Car have only been offered to fleet buyers, not individual retail customers. Mercury, which built the Grand Marquis, was shut down altogether as a car brand last year.

Ford sold about 80,000 Crown Victorias and Town Cars combined last year, said Tony Gratson, Ford's manager for government fleet sales. Those figures just weren't enough to support a factory capable of producing 250,000 cars a year.

The Crown Victoria and its cousins have been popular with fleet users because of their roominess, legendary ruggedness and relative simplicity.

Most cars today are built with so-called unibody engineering in which the body sides and roof play a role in keeping the body rigid. The Panther Platform vehicles were engineered with an old-fashioned body-on-frame design that's mostly used by pickup trucks today because, while heavier, it's better able to bounce back from heavy, punishing use..."

-- ""You couldn't kill it no matter what you did to it," Ford spokesman Octavio Navarro said of the Crown Victoria." -- That's for sure! RIP, Crown Vic. =(

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"It's a situation sure to irk New Jersey taxpayers.

The state Economic Development Authority has approved covering a $420,000 tax credit for production costs from the "Jersey Shore's" first season.

That means tax dollars will be used to offset the cost of all the club hopping, fist-pumping and fake tanning from the hit reality show's 2009 season.

The irony that New Jersey residents will be forced to foot the bill for a show that many view as an affront to the state's self-image is not lost on some.

"I can't believe we are paying for fake tanning for 'Snooki' and 'The Situation', and I am not even sure $420,000 covers that," Assemblyman Declan O'Scanlon told The Star-Ledger of Newark.

Gov. Chris Christie's office said, while Christie doesn't like the show and opposed the tax credit, he has no control over the authority's decision.The show centers on the cast living it up along the beach and boardwalk in Seaside Heights, N.J.

Seaside Heights Mayor P. Kenneth Hershey said he was in favor of the tax credit because the production's presence in town gives a big boost to the local economy."

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Three leading members of one of Brazil's most powerful churches have been accused of laundering millions in church donations and using worshippers' money for personal gain.

The charges, unveiled on Monday by São Paulo's public prosecutor, relate to 404m reals (£150m) allegedly obtained from mostly impoverished churchgoers by leaders at Brazil's Universal Church of the Kingdom of God.

The money was subsequently channelled out of the country via a network of offshore bank accounts and money changers, federal prosecutors claimed.

Among those charged is Bishop Edir Macedo, a controversial televangelist who founded the church in 1977, and his financial director, Alba Maria Silva da Costa.

Luís Martins de Oliveira, the prosecutor behind the case, claimed followers were tricked into handing over money to the church through "false promises and threats that spiritual and economic assistance would only be bestowed upon those who made financial sacrifices for the church".

Prosecutors claim that although the church claimed to have received around £1.85bn in donations between 2003 and 2006, the actual sum could be much higher.

The charges also allege the church opened two offshore accounts in the early 1990s, in the Cayman Islands and in Jersey, to move donations out of the country.

The Universal Church was founded in northern Rio and today claims a worldwide congregation of 8 million followers.

Church leaders promote "prosperity theology" – through which committed believers are told their faith and regular, generations donations can help them achieve material wealth.

But corruption scandals, including claims that donations were used to buy luxury goods and property, have earned the church many critics.

The church's preachers are also notorious for their open hostility towards Brazil's gay community and African-Brazilian religions..."

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"Protofeather fossils discovered entombed in amber from the Late Cretaceous era support theories of dinosaur and avian evolution -- and make for one beautiful gallery.

Dinosaur and bird feathers preserved in amber from a Late Cretaceous site in Canada reveal new insights into the structure, function, and color of animals that date back to about 78 million years ago.

Researchers led by University of Alberta paleontologist Ryan McKellar say these specimens represent distinct stages of feather evolution, from early-stage, single filament protofeathers to much more complex structures associated with modern diving birds. After analyzing the preserved pigment cells, the authors add that these feathered creatures may have also had a range of transparent, mottled, and diffused colors, similar to birds today. They can't determine which feathers belonged to birds or dinosaurs yet, but they did observe filament structures that are similar to those seen in other non-avian dinosaur fossils. Their findings appear in the current issue of the journal Science.

In the gallery below, with captions from McKellar, marvel at the beauty of these amber-preserved feathers. Then, in the Q&A that follows, learn more about how amber preservation works, the science of feather evolution, and the possibility of Jurassic Park-type experiments down the line.

Protofeather fossils discovered entombed in amber from the Late Cretaceous era support theories of dinosaur and avian evolution -- and make for one beautiful gallery

Dinosaur and bird feathers preserved in amber from a Late Cretaceous site in Canada reveal new insights into the structure, function, and color of animals that date back to about 78 million years ago.

Researchers led by University of Alberta paleontologist Ryan McKellar say these specimens represent distinct stages of feather evolution, from early-stage, single filament protofeathers to much more complex structures associated with modern diving birds. After analyzing the preserved pigment cells, the authors add that these feathered creatures may have also had a range of transparent, mottled, and diffused colors, similar to birds today. They can't determine which feathers belonged to birds or dinosaurs yet, but they did observe filament structures that are similar to those seen in other non-avian dinosaur fossils. Their findings appear in the current issue of the journal Science.

In the gallery below, with captions from McKellar, marvel at the beauty of these amber-preserved feathers. Then, in the Q&A that follows, learn more about how amber preservation works, the science of feather evolution, and the possibility of Jurassic Park-type experiments down the line..."

-- wow wow wow!!! Follow link for more photos!

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"Pigs may never fly, but in the Gulf of Mexico, snails take to the skies. Or at least they used to. A new study suggests that two species of marine snails may have traveled between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans—all in the belly of a bird.

The two species are known as horn snails, and both look a bit like tiny black party hats. One, the Pacific horn snail (Cerithideopsis californica), lives in mangrove forests that hug the coast of Baja down to Panama, and the other, the Atlantic horn snail (C. pliculosa), resides in similar intertidal habitats along coasts from Texas to Panama. "Every time you take a step [in their habitats], you may be stepping on hundreds of them," says Peter Marko, a biogeographer at Clemson University in South Carolina.

The two snails used to be the same species, crossing between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans via a narrow strip of water that once separated North America from Central America. But about 3 million years ago, a land bridge sprang up near modern-day Panama, and the single species split in two, which scientists thought were separated for good.

The new study reveals that the two species continued to intermingle long after the land bridge formed. When researchers analyzed the DNA of 29 populations of horn snails, they dug up a surprising find. Genes from the Pacific Ocean snail had invaded the Atlantic Ocean snail and vice versa, hinting that no land bridge could keep the sister snails apart. Study co-author Mark Torchin, an ecologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, and colleagues concluded that the mollusks had mixed and matched at least twice. A few Pacific snails colonized the Atlantic Ocean nearly 1 million years ago, and Atlantic snails traveled west just over 70,000 years ago, the group reports online today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

How did they get across this land bridge? In the 1940s and '50s, the American scientist George Gaylord Simpson argued that small mammals may have colonized Madagascar by riding logs and other floating debris from Africa. "We kind of flipped that hypothesis around and looked at whether marine organisms crossed over land to colonize new oceans," Torchin says.

The horn snails, he suspects, found their own life rafts: shore birds. Although the group can't prove that the scenario is true, they think it could have gone like this: Nearly 1 million years ago, a wading heron gobbled a basking Pacific horn snail, shell and all. Luckily for this intrepid explorer, armored invertebrates can survive for days in the bellies of shore birds. Snug inside its unsuspecting taxi, the snail soared high above what was likely Mexico before being excreted in the Atlantic Ocean—a journey of about 200 kilometers or more. About 70,000 years ago, the researchers think, one or more Atlantic horn snails took their wagons west in the same way..."

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"A fossil housed for half a century in a Polish museum has turned out to be the first dinosaur skeleton preserved in its own tracks, say scientists.

A recent examination of the 80-million-year-old specimen revealed a single footprint preserved in the rocks encasing the fossilised bones.

Polish and Mongolian fossil hunters first unearthed it in 1965 in Mongolia.

Scientists now report the results of its re-examination in the journal Cretaceous Research.

The dinosaur is a Protoceratops, and since this is one of the most common dinosaurs found in the rich fossil beds of the Gobi Desert, it was not deemed to be very significant. But the scientists say it is the first example of a dinosaur being preserved with its own footprints.

Polish palaeontologists Grzegorz Niedzwiedzki and Tomasz Singer spotted the footprint while they were preparing the fossil for display at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw.

His colleague, University of Colorado at Denver geologist Martin Lockley, told BBC Nature that this really was "a first".

"Generally, we find it very hard even to match dinosaurs with their footprints at the species level," he explained.

"We have a couple of examples in the literature where we say, 'we're almost certain that this footprint belongs to this species', but this is an animal actually dead in its tracks."

A single, preserved footprint can be seen in the rocks encasing the fossil. Prof Lockley suggests that some of the rock discarded when scientists prepare dinosaur skeletons could contain ancient clues about the lives of the extinct beasts..."

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"A New York City woman fighting for her right to leave her shirt at home and go topless in public must cover up while in New Jersey, a state appeals panel ruled today.

Phoenix Feeley, 31, was twice arrested and charged by Spring Lake police in 2008 after she refused to put on a shirt while sunbathing at a beach, and then again took off a shirt given to her by police after being released.

She appealed the charges, arguing that if men are allowed to be in public without a shirt, women should be allowed to be in public without a shirt as well. But the court disagreed.

In their ruling, the judges argued there was no constitutional right for women to appear topless at a public beach, and that covering the female breast is important to safeguard "the public's moral sensibilities."

Feeley is no stranger to top-free controversy. In 2005, she was arrested in New York City for walking down a street without a shirt. She sued the city, pointing to a New York Supreme Court ruling saying woman can go topless in public. The city later paid her $29,000 to settle the suit."

-- =(

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"Syrian rights activists say security forces have opened fire in northwestern villages Wednesday in an ongoing effort to crush dissent as the government rejected an Arab League demand for an end to the crackdown.

Rights activists say government troops fired heavy machine guns during raids on several villages in Idlib province near the Turkish border. They say security forces cut local communications, blocked roads and made arrests.

Syrian state news agency SANA says Syrian ambassador to the Arab League Youssef Ahmed rejected the body's latest statement on the Syrian crisis as a "hostile and unconstructive act."

Arab League foreign ministers met in Cairo Tuesday and called on Damascus to stop violence in the country immediately and launch a national dialogue. SANA says Syrian envoy Ahmed told the meeting that Damascus is moving ahead with a reform process.

Syrian rights activists say security forces also fired tear gas at mourners who gathered in a Damascus suburb late Tuesday to pay respects to the family of a dissident killed last week. They say the attack happened after U.S. Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford and diplomats of other nations offered condolences at the gathering and left the venue.

In other violence, SANA reported the killings of seven people by what it calls armed terrorist groups. It says five soldiers and a civilian were buried Wednesday after being attacked in the provinces of Idlib and Homs, while a bus driver was killed in an ambush in the central city of Hama.

The United Nations estimates that 2,600 people have been killed in Syria's six-month-long uprising against the 11-year autocratic rule of President Bashar al-Assad. The Syrian government said Monday about 1,400 have been killed, half of them security personnel."

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"PHILADELPHIA — A year ago, when chemotherapy stopped working against his leukemia, William Ludwig signed up to be the first patient treated in a bold experiment at the University of Pennsylvania. Mr. Ludwig, then 65, a retired corrections officer from Bridgeton, N.J., felt his life draining away and thought he had nothing to lose.

Doctors removed a billion of his T-cells — a type of white blood cell that fights viruses and tumors — and gave them new genes that would program the cells to attack his cancer. Then the altered cells were dripped back into Mr. Ludwig’s veins.

At first, nothing happened. But after 10 days, hell broke loose in his hospital room. He began shaking with chills. His temperature shot up. His blood pressure shot down. He became so ill that doctors moved him into intensive care and warned that he might die. His family gathered at the hospital, fearing the worst.

A few weeks later, the fevers were gone. And so was the leukemia.

Complete remissionThere was no trace of it anywhere — no leukemic cells in his blood or bone marrow, no more bulging lymph nodes on his CT scan. His doctors calculated that the treatment had killed off two pounds of cancer cells.

A year later, Mr. Ludwig is still in complete remission. Before, there were days when he could barely get out of bed; now, he plays golf and does yard work.

“I have my life back,” he said.

Mr. Ludwig’s doctors have not claimed that he is cured — it is too soon to tell — nor have they declared victory over leukemia on the basis of this experiment, which involved only three patients. The research, they say, has far to go; the treatment is still experimental, not available outside of studies..."

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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"PORT FOURCHON, La. — BP PLC is sending cleanup crews back to Fourchon Beach because erosion from Tropical Storm Lee unearthed miles of tar balls, tar mats and abandoned cleanup equipment left from last year's oil spill.

Six task forces — 90 workers and 17 technicians — will work a seven-day-a-week schedule to clean up the beach, BP spokesman Curtis Thomas told The Courier.

"We knew this was coming," Thomas said. "That's why we've had this manpower on standby."

The cleanup will be phased in over the next week, Thomas said. He said tar balls were reported on other area beaches, but not to the extent that they appeared on Fourchon Beach.

In addition to the old oil, the erosion uncovered PVC pipes used to secure boom and snares used to absorb oil.

Forrest Travirca, a field inspector for the Edward Wisner Donation — a private land trust that owns about 9.5 miles of Fourchon Beach — said he found the oil Sunday while checking for damage from Tropical Storm Lee. About eight miles of the beach are affected, he said.

Travirca said at least four miles of the beach was littered with tar balls. He also gave the newspaper photographs of large numbers of chunks of tar — too big to be considered tar balls — broken off of buried tar mats.

The storm also caused extreme erosion to the beach, Travirca said. At Belle Pass, all of the sand washed off, leaving hard clay. Cleanup work increased the risk of erosion in spots where workers dug holes to unearth oil and left loose, sifted sand in its place, Travirca said.

Wisner officials have complained that the cleanup at Fourchon was superficial, failing to remove large tar mats buried in the surf and sand.

In April, a year after the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded and began leaking approximately 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, Travirca took a Courier and Comet reporter and photographer on a tour of Fourchon Beach, unearthing lots of pungent, black oil inches under the surface.

Kerry St. Pé, director of the Barataria-Terrebonne National Estuary Program, said that during any spill, as the oil degrades and begins moving into shore, it will begin combining with sand, becoming heavier and heavier. Eventually it will either make it to shore or become buried in the surf zone, where it remains until rough surf stirs it up..."

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"NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has reached a major milestone in its development. The mirrors that will fly aboard the telescope have completed the coating process at Quantum Coating Inc. in Moorestown, N.J.

The telescope's mirrors have been coated with a microscopically thin layer of gold, selected for its ability to properly reflect infrared light from the mirrors into the observatory's science instruments. The coating allows the Webb telescope's "infrared eyes" to observe extremely faint objects in infrared light. Webb's mission is to observe the most distant objects in the universe.

"Finishing all mirror coatings on schedule is another major success story for the Webb telescope mirrors," said Lee Feinberg, NASA Optical Telescope Element manager for the Webb telescope at the agency's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "These coatings easily meet their specifications, ensuring even more scientific discovery potential for the Webb telescope."

The Webb telescope has 21 mirrors, with 18 mirror segments working together as one large 21.3-foot (6.5-meter) primary mirror. The mirror segments are made of beryllium, which was selected for its stiffness, light weight and stability at cryogenic temperatures. Bare beryllium is not very reflective of near-infrared light, so each mirror is coated with about 0.12 ounce of gold.

The last full size (4.9-foot /1.5-meter) hexagonal beryllium primary mirror segment that will fly aboard the observatory recently was coated, completing this stage of mirror production.

The Webb telescope is the world's next-generation space observatory and successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. The most powerful space telescope ever built, the Webb telescope will provide images of the first galaxies ever formed, and explore planets around distant stars. It is a joint project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency.

Mirror manufacturing began eight years ago with blanks made out of beryllium, an extremely hard metal that holds its shape in the extreme cold of space where the telescope will orbit. Mirror coating began in June 2010. Several of the smaller mirrors in the telescope, the tertiary mirror and the fine steering mirror, were coated in 2010. The secondary mirror was finished earlier this year..."

-- NJ FTW! =)

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"Near-death experiences are often thought of as mystical phenomena, but research is now revealing scientific explanations for virtually all of their common features. The details of what happens in near-death experiences are now known widely—a sense of being dead, a feeling that one's "soul" has left the body, a voyage toward a bright light, and a departure to another reality where love and bliss are all-encompassing.

Approximately 3 percent of the U.S. population says they have had a near-death experience, according to a Gallup poll. Near-death experiences are reported across cultures, with written records of them dating back to ancient Greece. Not all of these experiences actually coincide with brushes with death—one study of 58 patients who recounted near-death experiences found 30 were not actually in danger of dying, although most of them thought they were.

Recently, a host of studies has revealed potential underpinnings for all the elements of such experiences. "Many of the phenomena associated with near-death experiences can be biologically explained," says neuroscientist Dean Mobbs, at the University of Cambridge's Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit. Mobbs and Caroline Watt at the University of Edinburgh detailed this research online August 17 in Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

For instance, the feeling of being dead is not limited to near-death experiences—patients with Cotard or "walking corpse" syndrome hold the delusional belief that they are deceased. This disorder has occurred following trauma, such as during advanced stages of typhoid and multiple sclerosis, and has been linked with brain regions such as the parietal cortex and the prefrontal cortex—"the parietal cortex is typically involved in attentional processes, and the prefrontal cortex is involved in delusions observed in psychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia," Mobbs explains. Although the mechanism behind the syndrome remains unknown, one possible explanation is that patients are trying to make sense of the strange experiences they are having.

Out-of-body experiences are also now known to be common during interrupted sleep patterns that immediately precede sleeping or waking. For instance, sleep paralysis, or the experience of feeling paralyzed while still aware of the outside world, is reported in up to 40 percent of all people and is linked with vivid dreamlike hallucinations that can result in the sensation of floating above one's body. A 2005 study found that out-of-body experiences can be artificially triggered by stimulating the right temporoparietal junction in the brain, suggesting that confusion regarding sensory information can radically alter how one experiences one's body.

A variety of explanations might also account for reports by those dying of meeting the deceased. Parkinson's disease patients, for example, have reported visions of ghosts, even monsters. The explanation? Parkinson's involves abnormal functioning of dopamine, a neurotransmitter that can evoke hallucinations. And when it comes to the common experience of reliving moments from one's life, one culprit might be the locus coeruleus, a midbrain region that releases noradrenaline, a stress hormone one would expect to be released in high levels during trauma. The locus coeruleus is highly connected with brain regions that mediate emotion and memory, such as the amygdala and hypothalamus..."

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