NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- The market seems to have pulled the rug out from under housing industry hopes for a sustained early recovery. After a five-month run-up in home prices starting last spring, prices have now fallen for four consecutive months, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Index of 20 cities, a gauge of market values, released Tuesday. A fringe movement that questions Barack Obama's nationality is gathering pace – and now the woman behind the campaign is running for office. Guy Adams reports She's been called a heroine, a patriot, and a tireless defender of liberty, justice, and the American way. She's also been dubbed a racist crank who exemplifies the worst excesses of the blowhard right. But the one thing Dr Orly Taitz really can't stand is the way she's usually described in print: queen bee of the so-called "birther" movement. "When you say 'birther' you're using a pejorative term," she says, with lawyerly aggression. "I'm in fact a constitutional attorney, who believes that Barack Hussein Obama could be guilty of a major fraud, and should therefore be investigated." We are at a branch of TGI Friday's about five minutes' drive from the building in Orange County where Dr Taitz runs a dental surgery, a dormant estate agency, a solicitor's practice and a high-profile international campaign to expose the President of the United States as a fraud. Dr Taitz is therefore a busy woman. When we meet, she's just finished filing a lawsuit which aims to prevent the new US healthcare bill taking effect. A few days earlier, she made headlines by entering the race for the Republican nomination in November's election for the position of Secretary of State of California. She is also pursuing 18 legal cases on behalf of around 200 US soldiers who are contesting their deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. Her clients are arguing that Mr Obama is unqualified to act as their Commander in Chief because he was born overseas; possibly, they say, in Kenya or Indonesia. "We are fighting a global war against radical Islam," she says. "We know about acts of terrorism in Indonesia and Kenya. Let's say those incidents repeat themselves, and we need to send troops to those countries. Don't you think it's important for my clients, to know where the loyalties of Barack Hussein Obama lie?" With this sort of rhetoric, it would be easy to dismiss Dr Taitz and her followers as a shouty fringe group on the far right-wing of US politics. But that is not necessarily so: a poll out this week showed 57 per cent of Republican voters believe Mr Obama to be a Muslim. A quarter believe him to be the Antichrist. "AOL has also published a study saying 80 per cent of Americans believe there's an issue with Obama's birth," adds Dr Taitz. "A Pew poll said 85 per cent would like to see his birth certificate. So there is a vast majority who think there's a problem and say that we cannot have an unknown sitting in the White House." Though once considered taboo, the issue of where the President was born has entered the mainstream. CNN's Lou Dobbs actively encourages debate of it. Republican politicians call for his birth certificate to be published. "Tea Party" activists carry placards that depict the first black President as an Arab, or a Kenyan tribesman. Dr Taitz's blog boasts 8 million readers a month. She gets hundreds of supportive emails a day, and has achieved celebrity status. Dr Taitz subscribes to the view that President Obama's birth was retroactively registered in Hawaii, perhaps to help him gain US citizenship. She talks of myriad anomalies related to his life story – allegedly faked birth announcements, fabricated social security numbers – which are detailed endlessly on her and other websites. Most of all, though, she complains about the White House's refusal to authorise the release of the original birth certificate which would conclusively prove that Barack Obama was born on 4 August 1961 at Kapi'olani hospital in Honolulu, Hawaii. "All they have released is a certificate of live birth," she says. "That's a document given to people who don't have an original. And it does not show the name of the hospital. It should be OK to get a driving licence and to go get a job. However, for someone who wants to be President, it's not good enough." Judges don't see things that way. A federal appeals court ruled last Monday that Dr Taitz must pay $20,000 (£13,000) in fines for wasting court time by repeatedly bringing spurious cases referring to Mr Obama's place of birth. The fines are "a deterrent to prevent future misconduct and to protect the integrity of the court". She is refusing to pay, though. "The judge called me 'frivolous'. What is frivolous? You tell me: what can be more important for the nation than having a legitimate President? This is despicable. The judge was clearly pandering to the President." One of the many ironies in Dr Taitz's story is that she is herself an immigrant. Born into a Jewish family in Communist-era Moldova, she moved to Israel in her early 20s. Her husband Yosef, a computer whiz from California, met her during a holiday to the Holy Land in the 1980s. They married a few months later. A fiercely intelligent woman who speaks five languages, she built a career as a dentist before waltzing through exams which also allow her to practise as an attorney and estate agent. In her free time, she looks after three children, trains in taekwondo and maintains a fearsome set of fake eyelashes. Dr Taitz began taking an interest in President Obama shortly before the 2008 election. Helped by a photographic memory, which allows her to quote obscure laws on cue, she threw her energies into trying to have his election declared illegal. Her blog was launched that summer, and her first lawsuits – seeking to get California's Secretary of State to demand to see a copy of the then-Democratic candidate's birth certificate – was filed a few weeks later. But there is the issue of race. If President Obama had white skin, the "birther" question wouldn't exist. Protesters at recent Tea Party events, including Dr Taitz, are almost all white. Are the noisy right inserting themselves into the foreground of US politics motivated by a degree of racism? "That's an interesting question," she replies. "I would answer: in 2008, whites voted for Barack Obama in large numbers, close to 50-50. But nearly 90 per cent of blacks voted for Obama. So what does that tell you? I would say that the blacks of this country showed themselves to be more racist than whites." This is very far from a denial. And it serves as a reminder of the deep-seated nature of the divides that currently underpin America's fractious political landscape, and are fuelling the small but noisy minority whom Dr Taitz has come to represent. "The White House is trying to harass and intimidate anyone who speaks up by labelling them a racist, or a right-wing conspiracist. You know why? Because they talk about the issues. They refuse to show the birth certificate that will prove he is not a fraud. But whatever they try, we are not going away." Nine teenagers charged over bullying that led to girl's suicide Irish girl killed herself after enduring months of torment by classmates in person and online District Attorney Elizabeth Scheibel, said nine teens had been charged in the 'unrelenting' bullying of Phoebe Prince. Photograph: Michael S. Gordon/AP Nine teenagers have been charged over the death of a 15-year-old Irish migrant who killed herself after months of merciless and sometimes violent bullying by fellow students at a Massachusetts school. Phoebe Prince took her life in January in desperation at harassment led by female students who resented her dating an older American football player. The moral compass, technically named the right temporo-parietal junction, lies just behind the right ear in the brain Scientists have discovered a real-life 'moral compass' in the brain that controls how we judge other people's behaviour. The region, which lies just behind the right ear, becomes more active when we think about other people's misdemeanours or good works. In an extraordinary experiment, researchers were able to use powerful magnets to disrupt this area of the brain and make people temporarily less moral. The study highlights how our sense of right and wrong isn't just based on upbringing, religion or philosophy - but by the biology of our brains. Dr Liane Young, who led the study, said: 'You think of morality as being a really high-level behaviour. To be able to apply a magnetic field to a specific brain region and change people's moral judgements is really astonishing.' The moral compass lies in a part of the brain called the right temporo-parietal junction. It lies near the surface of the brain, just behind the right ear. The researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology used a non-invasive technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation to disrupt the area of the brain. The technique generates a magnetic field on a small part of the skull which creates weak electric currents in the brain. These currents interfere with nearby brain cells and prevent them from firing normally. In the first experiment, 12 volunteers were exposed to the magnetic field for 25 minutes before they were given a series of 'moral maze' style scenarios. For each of the 192 scenarios, they were asked to make a judgement about the character's actions on a scale of 1 for 'absolutely forbidden' to 7 for 'absolutely permissible'. In the second experiment, the magnetic field was applied to their heads at the time they were asked to weigh up the behaviour of the characters in the scenario. In both experiments, the magnetic field made the volunteers less moral. One scenario described a man who let his girlfriend walk over a bridge he knew was unsafe. The girl survived unharmed. Under normal conditions, most people rate the man's behaviour as unacceptable. But after getting the magnetic pulse, the volunteers tended to see nothing wrong with his actions - and judged his behaviour purely on whether his girlfriend survived. Another scenario described two girls visiting a chemical plant where one girl asks her friend to put sugar in her coffee. The friend uses powder from a jar marked 'toxic' - but as the powder turns out to be sugar, the girls if unharmed. Volunteers with a disrupted moral compass tended to rate the girl's behaviour as permissible because her friend was not injured - even though she was aware the powder came from a jar labelled toxic. Throughout the experiment, irresponsible or deliberate actions that might have resulted in harm were seen as morally acceptable if the story had a 'happy ending', they reported in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It's not the first time that scientists have found parts of the brain that specialise in ethics and morality. Last year American scientists claimed to have found a "god spot" - a region of the brain that controls religious belief.Troops 'survive on spam for up to 50 days'
British soldiers serving in Afghanistan are being made to eat boil-in-the-bag rations or tinned Spam for up to 50 days in a row because of insufficient food supplies, the Conservatives claimed yesterday (Mon).
Home price dip extends to 4th month
Born in the USA? Someone doesn't think so
Scientists discover moral compass in the brain which can be controlled by magnets
Last updated at 11:52 AM on 30th March 2010
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1262074/Scientists-discover-moral-compass-brain-controlled-magnets.html#ixzz0jgU6yRAD
Tuesday, 30 March 2010
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