Curious Items You May Have Missed

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STRASBOURG, France (AP) - Islamic Official Says West Demonizes Islam even though the Sept. 11 attacks were condemned by Muslims (We remember a long silence from Muslim leaders; did they whisper and no one heard them?)

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BALOCHISTAN province, Pakistan (BBC NEWS) - Authorities in Pakistan say they have arrested leading Taleban spokesman Latifullah Hakimi. A spokesman for President Karzai said he hoped the arrest would lead to other Taleban leaders being detained. "...(Hakimi) was a person who claimed the lives of many innocent people like clerics, doctors, teachers," the spokesman, Khaliq Ahmed Khaliq, told the BBC.

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PARIS, France (AP) - Attorney Jean-Marc Goldnadel knew he was going to make waves when he launched classaction.fr - a French Web site that lets users sign up to lawsuits online for as little as 12 euros ($14.50). Opponents of the government's plans have also seized on classaction.fr as evidence that a class action law would encourage the kind of 'excesses' that the United States is now trying to curb: ambulance-chasing lawyers, ruinous damages awards and spurious lawsuits used to blackmail companies into settlements. It's an incitement to blackmail, said Joelle Simon, head of legal affairs at France's Medef. We know what the American system costs their economy, and that is one import we can really do without.

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London, United Kingdom (BBC NEWS) - Click on this link to learn about how the US government works. (Journalism at its best.) So then, what is the American Bar Association's real purpose here?

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Politics: Staff members for a champion of the right to privacy and a leading critic of identity theft fraudulently obtained the credit report of a rising black political star. Your turn for tough questions, Sen. Schumer.

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WASHINGTON - (NY Daily News) The independent counsel investigation that led to the conviction of a former Clinton administration housing chief could come back to haunt Sen. Hillary Clinton. The Daily News reports that lawyers are fighting to suppress a potentially embarrassing final report from the probe that found Housing Secretary Henry Cisneros lied to the FBI about paying $250,000 hush money to his ex-mistress. Cisneros had paid a $10,000 fine after being found guilty in 1999 and was pardoned by Bill Clinton. Although neither Hillary nor her husband was targeted by independent counsel David Barrett, his 420-page final report sent to a special court 13 months ago will include alleged abuses of power by Clinton's administration. Sen. Hillary Clinton's lawyers are trying to quash that report.
In April, Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) tried to ax the probe.