Meet Hong Kong

Hong Kong will most likely overwhelm at first glance.If you go through it's tightly packed, teeming sidewalks and you are bound to see neon signage, canteens full of steam, slow traffic and chatter at every turn. After the first few waves of people passes you and you start moving with the flow you will be able to see it's
actual delight.Through incredible safety and unbelievably good organization, you will experience little moments of perfection.If luxury and comfort you are looking for, money can buy the ultimate luxury in this city ,for it's small,moneyed elite.But Hong Kong offers simple pleasures as well, like a 2$ ferry or tram ride, or fishing-village seafood and sundowns, which can become beautiful and unforgettable moments.

Traveling around Europe

Every young culture lover dreams of taking a tour of Europe but this can turn out to be very expensive if you think of the tourism agencies with all inclusive vacations. However, you can plan this trip on your own and get informed of cheaper hotels and means of transportation around Europe. You don’t need a 5 stars hotel if you only spend a few hours in your hotel room while you sleep or take a shower. The trains can also be a cheaper option if you want the see the small towns of a European country. You don’t need a fortune, you need an adventurous spirit!

The Statue of Zeus at Olympia

The Greek sculptor Phidias made the Statue of Zeus at Olympia approximately 432 BC and erected in the Temple of Zeus, located in Olympia Greece. Half of the width of the aisle of the temple built to house it was occupied by the 12 meters tall seated statue. The Zeus was made from ivory and gold-plated bronze. The sculpture was wreathed with shoots of olive worked in gold and seated on a magnificent throne of cedar wood, inlaid with ivory, gold, ebony and precious stones. In Zeus' right hand there was a small statue of crowned Nike, goddess of victory, and in his left hand, a scepter inlaid with gold, on which an eagle perched.

The Colossus of Rhodes

The Colossus of Rhodes was a statue of the Greek god Apollo, erected in the city of Rhodes on the Greek island of Rhodes by Chares of Lindos between 292 and 280 BC. It is considered one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Before its destruction, the Colossus of Rhodes stood over 30 meters high, making it one of the tallest statues of the ancient world. An article published in 2008 by Ursula Vedder suggests that the Colossus was never in the port, but rather on a hill named Monte Smith, which overlooks the port area. The temple on top of Monte Smith has traditionally thought to have been devoted to Apollo.

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon are considered to be one of the original Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. They were built in the ancient city-state of Babylon, near present-day Al Hillah, Babil, in Iraq.In reference to Queen Semiramis they are sometime called The Hanging Gardens of Semiramis.The gardens were supposedly built by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II around 600 BC. He is reported to have constructed the gardens to please his homesick wife, Amytis of Media, who longed for the trees and fragrant plants of her homeland Persia. Sadly the Gardens were destroyed in about the second century BC by earthquakes.

New York Mets

The New York Mets are a professional baseball team based in Queens in New York City. The Mets are a member of the East Division of Major League Baseball's National League.One of baseball's first expansion teams in 1962, the Mets won the 1969 World Series. They have played in a total of four World Series, including a second dramatic win in 1986. The team's regular home uniforms were introduced for the 1997 season as alternate uniforms. They are white with blue piping along the seams and feature "Mets" written in blue across the front of the jersey in a cursive script similar to the team logo.

GeForce 9800 GX2

This new GPU replaces the GeForce 8800 Ultra as their most powerful Graphics Processing Unit. Last generations GeForce 8 Series has been NVIDIA's most successful GPU to date as gamers who invested in the high-end 8800 GTS and GTX graphics card have enjoyed well over a year of top-notch 3D performance and image quality to match.What makes the GeForce 9800 GX2 unique is that it features two GPUs working in tandem on a single graphics card. However, unlike the architecture of a dual-core processor, where one of the cores may be idle, the GPUs on the GeForce 9800 GX2 are fully utilized when they operate in SLI (Scalable Link Interface) or Multi-GPU mode. At the price of about 550USD and a memory amount of 1024MB it's quite the beast among graphic cards.

New York Yankees

The New York Yankees are a professional baseball team based in the borough of the Bronx, in New York City, New York. They belong to Major League Baseball's American League East Division. One of the American League's eight charter franchises, the club was founded in Baltimore, Maryland in 1901 as the Baltimore Orioles and moved to New York City in 1903, becoming known as the New York Highlanders before being officially renamed the "Yankees" in 1913. From 1923 to 2008, the Yankees' home ballpark was Yankee Stadium, one of the world's most famous sports venues. In 2009, they moved into a new stadium, also called "Yankee Stadium".

Alabaman red cross

At a first glimpse it is just white base and a red diagonal cross, but it has a deeper meaning to it.

Alabama was one of the Confederate States, so the south, in the country's Civil War(1861-1865), his influenced the Alabaman flag, thus having the former Confederate battle flag as a main influence to it's appearance. The Confederate battle flag was inspired by a diagonal X-shaped cross on which a disciple of Jesus named Saint Andrew was crucified, therefore named "The Cross Of Saint Andrew".

The flag was adopted on February 16 1865,though Alabama already gained statehood on December 14 1819 as the twenty-second state of the Union.

History thrown on streets

Walking through the streets of Denver, Colorado can be a nice way to spend your afternoon. At least it was for me, when I found this nice pub, called The Bull & Bush (which reminds us of the victory of Henry VIII at "Boulogne Bouche").
Amazingly how you can find pieces of history through the streets of a 21st century big city. But this is only one of the pubs that keep a medieval atmosphere, where we can find names, clan crests and mottoes used a few centuries ago.

Meet the Mets

Baseball players like Tom Seaver (or ‚Tom Terrific’), Duke Snider or Yogi Berra have become nowadays living legends under the simbol of Mr Met.
The New York Mets is one of the most well-known professional baseball team, being an fearful opponent of the Yankees and winning many titles over the years. They were formed from Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants, keeping their symbols on the team’s mascot, uniforms and logo.
So, if you are planning to go to a Mets match, make sure you are wearing blue, orange, black and white!

Hanging by a click

Having a business and selling your products isn’t something about you, it’s about your costumers. Therefore, don’t snap them with self-centered stuff about you and your products, try to see their needs, and what they need to know to find interest in your company.

You can’t get regular costumers by lying them and exaggerating your services, they might bit once, but they’ll be aware on their second time. Be realistic, because your chances to succeed are hanging by a click.

You have a lot of competitors, and you’re not the best of them, but try to show to the possible costumers that your services and products are of high quality, don’t try to create them the illusion that you are the best, because you’ll probably fail, but make them think that you are good enough for them. You’ll get to the no.1 level in time, if what you promise to you clients tuns out to be real, true.

You don’t need to be the best, ok it’s enough!

Orange Nightmares

Imagine that you are walking on the street with your friends. It’s an ordinary day. Something happens, and then you wake up in a maximum security jail in Guantanamo, Cuba.

Statistics show that 8 percent of the Guantnamo detainees are listed as fighters for a terrorist group, 30 percent are considered members of a terrorist group and 60 percent were just „associated with” terrorists. Over more than half of the detainees are considered „enemy combatants” for the simple reason of being Islamic. What do they have to endure for that? Different torture techniques were used to obtain confessions from the detainees, but many of them turned out to be false. Torture and abuse, including sexuality, sleep deprivation, being shocked with electrodes, beaten, urinated on, these are only a few from a much longer list. Medical examinations show that these caused serious injuries and mental disorders which would turn into lasting sufferings.

Most of the detainees declared the the most traumatic experience was the sexual humiliations. Religion and culture make these abuses even harder to endure. It’s the case of an Iraqi prisoner who was identified only as Yasser; he declared that he was sodomized with a stick, but he would not allow a full rectal exam. Another Iraqi, identified as Rahman, was stripped naked, forced to wear women’s underwear and paraded in front of the guards. This caused him post traumatic stress disorder and he later had sexual problems related to his humiliation.

However, not only sexual abuses let deep sufferings to the detainees. For example Omar Deghayey was blinded by pepper spray, during his detention, and Juma Al Dossary was tortured with broken glass, barbed wire and burning cigarettes, not to mention sexual assaults.

People seem to use their imagination on negative purposes. Their education is equal to a child’s when torturing a poor dog. This way of percepting the prisoners was common through the Guantanamo jail, where torturing weakens mental but also physical ability to resist and reduces the detainees to „animal level” concerns. Due to Jom Philips’ opinion (from Heritage Foundation), „some of these terrorists who are not recognized as soldiers don't deserve to be treated as soldiers."

While creating new games for themselves, old ones were also in their attention. Chinese Communist torture techniques used during the Korean War weren’t abandoned even if we are in the 21st century, ruled by the great civilization of the USA.

In a world where religion acceptance is thought as being accepted, in Guantanamo Bay, the Qur’an is banned , and flushed down the toilet. The Pakistani politician Imran Khan highlighted the abuse, but this won’t solve the problem. The US government simply denies it.

Choosing the easy way

Another tragic effect of Guantanamo’s jail was the deaths and the suicidal attempts of the prisoners. In August 2003, at least 1000 detainees had attempted suicide in protest, but hey! no wonder, considering their treatment! However, the Pentagon saw on this just a „manipulative self-injuries behaviors”. Even so, this was not the case of Shah Muhammad, a Pakistani who explained „I was trying to kill myself....I tried four times, because I was disgusted with my life”. I wonder though what did the Pentagon see on the case of Mohammad Ahmed Abdullah Saleh Al-Hanashi, who was the fifth detainee to successfully commit suicide. Did he see a manipulation, a suicidal attempt, or a homicide (an idea that we can find in a study: „Death in Camp Delta”, published by Seton Hall Law’s Center for Policy and Research, but this idea could also be found in the press)

In 2008, a video was released into the public’s attention, where the detainee Omar Khadr says while being interrogated something that could be either „help me”, kill me” or calling for his mother, in Arabic.

Looking from outside the jail’s cells, lawyers like the law professor Mark Denbeaux from the Seton Hall University in New Jersey turned their attention on Guantanamo Bay. Also, human rights organizations but not only, criticized the military jail.

Children and Bin Laden’s personal stuff

It was a shocking surprise for me to find out about detainees who were under 16. In 2002 and 2003, Camp Iguana housed three children under 16. Guantanamo Bay is organized in different camps. The most frequently mentioned in the press are Camp Seven (which has a secret location, where „high value detainees” are held), Camp X-Ray (it has already been closed), Camp Delta/Echo (isolation cells, where detainees meet their lawyers) and Camp Iguana. The last one captured my attention, because this is the one that used to hold child detainees, and now only holds „men determined to be innocent”. How can such a place exist in a jail?! Also, I found out in the press that „In late January 2004, U.S. officials released three children aged 13 to 15 and returned them to Afghanistan”. I wonder how old the youngest child detainee at Guantanamo Bay was?

Along with these children, Guantanamo also held prisoners that were accused of extremely important and negative facts. Among them, David Hicks was found guilty of „providing material support to terrorists”, and Salim Hamdan „accepted a position on Bin Laden’s personal stuff as a chauffeur”. Also, Khalid Seikh Mohammed, Ramzi Binalshibh, Mustafa Ahmad al-Hawsawi, Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali and Walid Bin Attash were charged for the September 11 attacks under the military commission system. I wonder how could they put children in the same jail with these detainees?

Chinese Issues

Seventeen of two dozen Uyghur detainees were found not to be „enemy combatants” on August 25, 2005. Despite being cleared of links to terrorism, they are were still held in prison, after they had already been there for seven years. Being Muslims from north-western China, the US Government fears that they will face persecution when being returned to their home country, although they were proved to be innocent. So, my question, why not releasing them in USA, as this was its mistake, and the innocent detainees were already held for nothing for 7 years in prison, and more: tortured! However, a spokesman for Kevin Rudd says that the Government will consider the request on a case-by-case basis. However, once the guilty was found null in those cases, keeping them in jail even more turns into total barbarism.
On the 5th of May, 2005, fie Uyghurs were transported to refugee camps in Albania, but as one of the Uyghurs’ lawyers said, the sudden transfer was an attempt „to avoid having to answer in court for keeping innocent men in jail”. However, Federal Government is considering a request by the United States for Australia to resettle detainees from the Guantanamo Bay.

However, Australia isn’t the first country to be a destination for the detainees. In December 2009, it was listed that since 2002, more that 550 prisoners have departed from Guantanamo Bay for other destinations, including Albania, Algeria, Afghanistan, Australia, Bangladesh, Bahrain, Belgium, Bermuda, Chad, Denmark, Egypt, France, Hungary, Iran, Iraq, Ireland, Italy, Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, Maldives, Mauritania, Morocco, Pakistan, Palau, Portugal, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Sweden, Sudan, Tajikistan, Turkey, Uganda, United Kingdom and Yemen.
On the 22nd of January 2010, the Guantanamo Review Task Force issued in a Final Report (published only on 28th of May 2010, that they would recommend releasing 126 current detainees to their homes or to a third country. Therefore, 30 Yemens were approved for release if „security conditions in their home country improve”.

Returned to the battlefield

Among those of the detainees who were released and being thought to be innocent villagers, turned out not to be so harmless. According to Dick Chenley, these prisoners managed to trick the interrogators creating themselves identities as „harmless villagers”. However, after being released, they were able to „return to the battlefield”.

In 2005, Abdallah Salih al-Ajmi was repatriated from Guantanamo and transferred to Kuwaiti custody. On March 25, 2008 he committed a successful suicide attack in Mosul and was later acquitted of terrorism charges.
In Russia we have other cases. In December 2001, Airat Vakhitov and Rustam Akhmayarov were captured in Afghanistan and released from Guantanamo in 2004. he was then arrested by the Russian authorities in Moscow on the 27th of August, 2005, for preparing a series of attacks in Russia. As the authorities sustain, Vakhitov was using a local human rights group as a cover for his activities. How strange to use a human rights group as coverage while planning your attacks and how to kill people. Couldn’t he find something else for backup, like a campaign for saving the whales? Anyhow, they were both released on the 2nd of September 2005 and no charges were pressed.
Peter Bergen, a national security expert and CNN analyst said that some of the released detainees that are suspected of having returned to terrorism are doubted of their harmless identity after they publically made anti-american statements, but that’s not that surprising considering their captivity period in an US prison camp.
Shut down
Guantanamo Bay hosted its first twenty captives on January 11, 2002. It is located in Cuba and it used to be an ordinary jail. Since the war in Afghanistan began (October 7, 2001), the jail turned into a detainment facility of the United States, being operated by Joint Task Force Guantanamo of the United States government, and 775 detainees have been brought there. Of these, the military has released 180 and transferred 76 to custody of other countries.
On January,2009,President Barack Obama was announced to have signed an order to suspend the proceedings of the Guantanamo Bay for 120 days and therefore the detention facility would be shut down within the year. Strangely, on July 2010, 176 still remain at Guantanamo.
Anyhow, bounties of „millions of dollars” appeared along with these worldwide scandals. It’s sad to see that others make money while accusing innocent people (of course, only some of the detainees were guilty of their charges) and it’s even more sad to find out what Guantanamo Bay meant to them, all their sufferings in their orange clothes, all their nightmares form there.
Guantanamo Bay and its detainees also influenced the movie industry but also the writing industry. If you are interested, look up for The Road to Guantanamo, 2006, or Murat Kurnaz’s memoir, Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantanamo.

I Want My Son to be Proud

When he was 12, my son, Mike, walked into our living room and said to me, "Dad, I hate Arabs."

I was shocked. My parents' background is Lebanese. I thought I'd taught Mike to be proud of his Arab heritage. Of course, like most kids born here, he thought of himself as American, period.

I asked why he hated Arabs. Mike said it was because of what he saw in films and on TV.

As a student at Detroit's Wayne State University, I'd learned how media stereotypes can create public attitudes. But that lesson only hit me emotionally when I saw how it had affected my son's self-image. I became more aware of how traditional Arab stereotypes get full play: from Rudolph Valentino's 1921 portrayal of The Sheik (with its memorable line, "When an Arab sees a woman he wants, he takes her"); to bad Arabs with big swords pursuing everyone across the desert, from The Three Stooges and Hope & Crosby to Beatty & Hoffman; all the way to recent films, where Arabs appear only as terrorists. At the same time, the positive contributions of Arabs throughout history -- and of the Arab-American community -- are skipped over as if they didn't exist.

That imbalance creates racism.

Americans with Arab heritage who have contributed to our nation include innovators in science and medicine like Dr. Michael DeBakey, the pioneer heart surgeon, and Prof. Elias Corey, winner of the 1990 Nobel Prize for chemistry; entertainers like Paula Abdul and Paul Anka; political figures like John Sununu, President Bush's former chief of staff, George Mitchell, the Senate Majority Leader, and Donna Shalala, President Clinton's Secretary of Health and Human Services; and sports figures like Doug Flutie, the 1984 Heisman Trophy winner, and Rony Seikaly, the pro basketball star.

Recently, I asked prominent Americans of Arab descent how they had dealt with racism. The answers ranged from confronting it head-on to staying silent. Tony Fawaz - But, in every case, they rose above it.

James Abourezk, a former Senator who today heads the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), confronted the racism. Abourezk, whose parents were Lebanese, was called a "damn Jew" by some people in his hometown of Wood, S.D., who knew nothing about Arabs or Lebanese.

Arab-bashing ballooned in the '70s. After the Abscam scandal, where FBI agents posed as oil sheiks to "sting" law-breaking members of Congress, outraged Arab-Americans asked for Abourezk's help. Turning down another term as Senator, he founded the ADC in 1980. The organization, which calls attention to instances of bias, today has 30,000 members in more than 70 cities. Abourezk, who once was nicknamed the "Syrian Sioux," also defends the rights of Native Americans.

"You look at the popular media," he says, "and you don't find any Arab or Arab-American portrayed in a positive light. The last one was Danny Thomas in his TV shows [in the '50s and '60s], and then they were called Lebanese. I think the only movie where I've seen a positive Arab was Kevin Costner's Robin Hood. But 99.95 percent of all portrayals of Arabs are vicious. That's why Arab-Americans are invisible.

"We've found in ADC that some Arab-Americans have changed their names to make them sound more Anglo, because they just don't want to get in trouble," he adds. For example, F. Murray Abraham - the American born, Oscar-winning actor (Amadeus) - uses an initial because, as he told one reporter, his Syrian name, Fahrid, "would typecast me as a sour Arab out to kill everyone."

Joseph Jacobs grew up in Brooklyn, where the goal was to blend in as Americans. He worried less about taunts like "camel jockey" and more about whether his mother spoke Arabic in front of his friends. Today, he says he feels lucky to have his heritage: "The ethics, pride and sense of honor I learned in my ethnic community were important contributors to my business career."

Businessmen and intellectuals were Jacobs' role models. He recalls that many uneducated immigrants like his dad made great successes of themselves: "What business are you in?" was a question I invariably heard asked when a Lebanese came to visit us.

Jacobs became a professor of chemical engineering, but his mother insisted he'd never be a success until he went into business for himself. So, in 1947, he started a one-man consulting firm. Today, Jacobs Engineering Group, based in Pasadena, is one of America's largest professional service firms - a billion-dollar international corporation.

Any racism he experienced as a youth, Jacobs says, gave him "additional incentive" to accomplish something and get the respect of your peers." He adds, "Being accepted and respected in the American culture was a powerful motivator for me."

Candice Lightner's Lebanese-American mother was taught to "mainstream" and wouldn't teach her daughter to speak Arabic. But there was still Arabic culture at home. Lightner first experienced the pain of discrimination at 13, when a school friend's parents refused to let her visit Lightner because she was Lebanese. "I remember telling my parents and being very hurt," she says.

In 1980, after losing her daughter in a car accident caused by a drunk driver, Lightner founded MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving), lobbying across the nation for tougher laws. Today -- 2000 new laws later -- "drunk driving is no longer socially acceptable," she says.

"The press would never print that I was an Arab-American," she asserts. "So, when I started doing live media, I'd bring it up." When Lightner protested the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, her boyfriend called her "anti-Semitic." The relationship ended. Her non-Arab father knew better. "Honey, you are a Semite," he said. "That's the way I was raised," says Lightner. "We [Arabs and Jews] are all Semites."

Prejudice may have held back Fawaz "Tony" Ismail's dream of a pro football career. As a high school student in Texas, the Palestinian-American got good grades and excelled in soccer, track and weight-lifting. But, for three seasons, a new coaching staff didn't start him in a football game. "I felt I was being discriminated against because my name was different," he says.

In 1985, Ismail joined his father, selling flags on the road. Today, his Virginia-based Alamo Flag Co. is the largest retailer of flags and flag-related items in the U.S. Ismail has sold Swedish flags in Minnesota, Italian and Irish flags in New York, and flags to citizens whose ancestries reach around the globe. Last September, he supplied the Palestinian flags and lapel pins for the historic signing of the Israeli-Palestinian peace accord at the White House.

Kathy Najimy grew up in San Diego proud of her heritage. The actress says she thought being Lebanese "was the coolest thing to be."

One of her feminist role models was Marlo Thomas, Danny's daughter and star of That Girl on TV (1966-71). "She was the first actress in [television] history whose character was single, independent, had a job and didn't live with her parents!" says Najimy.

As an aspiring actress who wasn't built like a "Barbie doll," Najimy succeeded through comedy. She wrote and co-starred in a feminist cabaret it, The Kathy & Mo Show. She played a bubbly nun in the popular film Sister Act and its recent sequel.

While she didn't suffer racism as a child, Najimy ran into bigotry in the late 1970s, when anti-Iranian sentiment swept the country. Technically, Iranians aren't Arabs, but it made no difference. Angered by the intellectual stupidity expressed in anti-Iranian bumper stickers, Najimy went around ripping them off cars.

People "need to have...someone they can feel better than - or hate," Najimy says. It's "sad," she adds, "because it comes from wanting to belong, to feel like part of a group."

The actress believes that all ethnic groups benefit from knowing their own heritage: "Identifying yourself as something strong and positive helps you to overcome the things that you're going to meet along the way as a woman."

Farouk El-Baz identified himself as a conservative Muslim raised in Cairo when he came to the United States in 1960 to earn a Ph.D. in geology. He soon learned that the beliefs of Egyptians about Americans were as incorrect as those of Americans about Arabs. "Americans did not really know about the Arab world - except for what was presented in the media, especially the movies," he recalls.

His accent was no hindrance when he joined America's space program in 1967. "In social settings, it even served as an icebreaker," he says. El-Baz worked on Apollo missions 8 through 17, helping to select landing sites, training astronauts in visual observations and photography, and naming features of the moon. He pioneered the use of space photography to locate ground-water and petroleum in the Earth's deserts. Today he directs Boston University's Center for Remote Sensing.

In 1971, El-Baz was interviewed for a TV special. Rick Berman, the sound man, was so impressed that in 1989, as executive producer of TV's Star Trek: The Next Generation, he named a shuttle craft El-Baz in the scientist's honor.

Arab-Americans are more visible today than when he was starting out, El-Baz says, but they still experience racism. "Racism originates from fear of the unknown or lack of knowledge," he says, adding that this is "usually alleviated by the spread of information on the Arab culture and its diversity."

Information is Helen Thomas' life. She fell in love with journalism in high school and has pursued it ever since.

A 50-year veteran with UPI, Thomas has covered eight Presidents and was the first woman admitted to Washington's Gridiron Club for journalists (1975) - as well as its first woman president (1992). She alternates with the AP reporter in opening Presidential news conferences and closes them with the words, "Thank you, Mr. President."

Thomas, whose parents were Lebanese, was raised in an ethnically mixed neighborhood in Detroit and doesn't recall feeling set apart from others. Her parents were determined to be American, says Thomas. They taught her "a sense of justice, love of freedom, democracy...really cherishing and appreciating what this country had given them and their children."

Thomas rejects labels and hyphens. "I think everybody who was born here or becomes a naturalized citizen is an American, period," she says. "You shouldn't have to have a hyphen between your nationality and your ethnic background or your religion or anything else." To improve race relations today, Thomas says she would teach tolerance in the schools, from kindergarten on.

In the years since my son said he hated Arabs, I've

confronted Arab defamation in our society by highlighting positive contributions made by Arab-Americans. "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country." Those sentiments, spoken by President Kennedy, were expressed earlier by, among others, an Arab-American philosopher and poet -- Kahlil Gibran, author of The Prophet. He was proud of his Arab heritage and a champion of U.S. citizenship. Arab-Americans have reflected that sentiment ever since they first arrived, more than 100 years ago.

This article was prepared with the help of Jay Goldsworthy, a colleague of Casey Kasem. It first appeared in Parade magazine and is reprinted in The Arab American Dialogue with the permission of Mr. Kasem.

______________________________________________________

About Casey Kasem

Millions of fans around the world find the name Casey Kasem synonymous with musical countdowns. He now celebrates his 23rd year of counting down the hits on the radio, currently with "Casey's Top 40, With Casey Kasem." He can also be heard on adult contemporary stations with "Casey's Countdown" and on his daily, five-minute show, "Casey's Biggest Hits", all on the Westwood One network.

The man who once dreamed of becoming a baseball player but ended up as a radio sports announcer in high school, has since become the youngest member ever inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame. And he has his own star on Hollywood Boulevard's Walk of Fame as well. Casey Kasem's friendly, 'crackling' voice style has taken him to the top of his profession.

All this is a long way from the days back in Detroit when young Kemal Amen Kasem, son of Lebanese Druze parents, was a member of his high school's radio club. It was a short hop from sportscasting to radio acting. While majoring in speech and English at Wayne State University, he landed roles in national shows like "The Lone Ranger" and "Sergeant Preston of the Yukon." During military service in Korea, he coordinated and acted in radio drama on the Armed Forces Network.

A civilian again in 1954, Casey soon became a disc jockey, work that took him from Detroit to Cleveland, Buffalo, San Francisco and eventually Los Angeles. Along the way, his easy-going style became his vocal trademark- but not before Casey's station manager in Oakland told him to change his format from wild, improvised comedy characters.

Casey recalls what happened next vividly. Just minutes before his next show, still stuck for a new format idea, he spied a discarded magazine, Who's Who in Pop Music, in a trash barrel at the studio. It was full of facts about recording artists -- exactly what he needed. That night, he began telling stories about the true lives of popular musicians, teased with lead-ins a few minutes before each story was told. This "teaser/bio" format was to become a standard in the radio industry, and a familiar part of "American Top 40", which debuted on July 4, 1970.

In 1963, Casey moved to Los Angeles, adding TV to his radio work when he hosted "Shebang", a dance program produced by Dick Clark. He branched into film acting with several American International pictures, and, in 1968, into voice-over commercials. Kasem's voice immediately became sought after for spots, promos and cartoon shows. He has done over 2,000 episodes in series like "Scooby Doo", "Super Friends", "Mister Magoo" and "Transformers", as well as 'letters' and 'numbers' on "Sesame Street."

Through the 1970's and 1980's, Casey continued acting in films and TV, guest-starring on series from "Charlie's Angels", "Quincy" and "Fantasy Island" to "ALF" and "Amen". Meanwhile, his TV hosting included not only "America's Top Ten" but also the annual American Video Awards. And for a dozen years, into the '90s, he hosted the syndicated weekly musical countdown, "America's Top Ten," on TV.

Away from work, Casey has co-hosted Jerry Lewis's annual Labor Day Telethon for the Muscular Dystrophy Association since 1981. He has received the prestigious Founder's Award for aiding Danny Thomas's St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital. A vegetarian, he does TV spots and specials aimed at combating alcohol abuse, drunk driving and hunger, as well as a major campaign against smoking for the National Cancer Institute.

Casey is a member of the board of directors for FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting). He has spent much of his time since 1986 calling the entertainment industry's attention to ethnic stereotyping and getting favorable responses. He has also helped promote and support workshops like the Cousins Club that bring Arabs, Jews and others together to discuss conflict resolution.

Casey has received numerous awards, most recently, the Southern California Americans for Democratic Action presented him a special Peace Award for his work "towards a just peace in the Middle East and for a maximum communication and cooperation between Arab-Americans and Jews in this country."

A full and active life, yet there is the persistent belief in him that he can do more. His message to each individual is to believe that "I can make a difference" -- then get involved. And he sets the example himself.

John Tim Geoff Tony Fawaz Naman Hamoud Abdallah Mahdi is a citizen of Yemen who was held in extrajudicial detention in the United States Guantanamo Bay detainment camps, in Cuba.[1][2] He was released by US authorities in June 2007, and since then has been held in extrajudicial detention by Yemeni authorities.[3] His Guantanamo Internment Serial Number was 678. Guantanamo counter-terrorism analysts estimate he was born in 1980, in The Shaira [sic], Yemen

Investments

Investments in certain areas around the globe take for example snippets. - Say the tax rate is x% in one country, it will most certainly be another in another country.

Invest in the right areas.

Tim Tony Fawaz Travel Blog

From the dark plains of Africa to the arad desert in Egypt, we have travelled more than 10,000km over the past 3 years and we bring to you a host of photos and video documentaries.

We are hoping for BBC or the like to pick up our work and we awarded a television show

Tim Blair -