Judi McLeod  
Islamberg, British style
 By Judi McLeod
The North American radical Islamist compounds exposed by The Day of Islam author Paul L. Williams and Northeast Intelligence Network director Doug Hagmann also exist in Britain.
In the United States, Muslims of the Americas Inc., a tax-exempt organization formed in 1980 by Pakistani cleric Sheikh Mubarak Ali Gilani, who refers to himself as “the sixth Sultan Ul Faqr”, operates dozens of radical Islamic compounds, which flourish in out-of-the-way rural areas.
Gilani has been directly linked by court documents to Jamaat ul-Fuqra or “community of the impoverished”, an organization that seeks to “purify” Islam through violence.
No small potatoes in the world of radical Islam, Gilani has rubbed shoulders with various members of the terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah, their mullah backers, and even Osama bin Laden himself.  He has trained fighters for the battlefields of Kashmir, Chechnya and Bosnia.  Gilani was in Pakistani custody for the abduction of U.S. journalist Daniel Pearl, but was released.
“Terror camp leader Atilla Ahmet sang a “Jihad Calypso” song to a children’s party, telling them, “Come Mr. Taliban, come and bomb England”, a court heard.  Atilla Ahmet, who has already pleaded guilty to soliciting ...   more »

By NICK PISA 
This fiery figure is being hailed as Pope John Paul II making an appearance beyond the grave.
The image, said by believers to show the Holy Father with his right hand raised in blessing, was spotted during a ceremony in Poland to mark the second anniversary of his death.
Details appeared on the Vatican News Service, a TV station in Rome which specialises in religious news broadcasts.
Service director Jarek Cielecki, a Polish priest and close friend of John Paul II, travelled to Poland after hearing an onlooker had photographed the image.
Father Cielecki said he was convinced the picture showed the former pontiff.
"You can see the image of a person in the flames and I think it is the servant of God, Pope John Paul II," he said.
The pictures were being broadcast continuously on Italian TV and also posted on religious websites, some of which crashed as thousands logged on to see for themselves the eerie figure formed by the flames.
The bonfire was lit during a service at Beskid Zywiecki, close to John Paul's birthplace at Katowice, southern Poland, on April 2 - the second anniversary of his death.
Hundreds had attended the ...   more »

By Emma Thomasson
Does service with a scowl put you off at lunch? Will you eat more greens if you are surrounded by plants? Does romantic, pink lighting encourage you to linger over your fruit salad?
A new research centre -- dubbed the "restaurant of the future" -- at the Dutch university of Wageningen hopes to help answer these questions and more by tracking diners with dozens of unobtrusive cameras and monitoring their eating habits.
"We want to find out what influences people: colors, taste, personnel. We try to focus on one stimulus, like light," said Rene Koster, head of the Center for Innovative Consumer Studies, as overhead bulbs switched through green, red, orange and blue.
"This restaurant is a playground of possibilities. We can ask the staff to be less friendly and visible or the reverse," he said. "The changes must be small. If you were making changes every day it would be too disruptive. People wouldn't like it."
The stylish new facility has glass walls, black marble countertops, a polished bamboo floor and self-service tills which allow diners to scan their lunch while they and their trays are weighed by a set of scales built into the floor....   more »