WICHITA, Kan. —  Dr. George Tiller, who remained one of the nation’s few providers of late-term abortions despite decades of protests and attacks, was shot and killed Sunday in a church where he was serving as an usher.

The gunman fled, but a 51-year-old suspect was arrested some 170 miles away in suburban Kansas City three hours after the shooting, Wichita Deputy Police Chief Tom Stolz said.

Long a focus of national anti-abortion groups, including a summer-long protest in 1991, Tiller was shot in the foyer of Reformation Lutheran Church, Stolz said. Tiller’s attorney, Dan Monnat, said Tiller’s wife, Jeanne, was in the choir at the time.

Johnson County sheriff’s spokesman Tom Erickson said Scott Roeder was the man whose car was stopped on Interstate 35 on Sunday, about three hours after the shooting of George Tiller.

Earlier in the day, Wichita police said the suspect was a 51-year-old man from Merriam, Kan., but they refused to identify him by name.

Roeder has not been charged in the slaying, but he was expected to be taken to Wichita for questioning.

The slaying of the 67-year-old doctor is “an unspeakable tragedy,” his widow, four children and 10 grandchildren said in statement. “This is particularly heart-wrenching because George was shot down in his house of worship, a place of peace.”

The family said its loss “is also a loss for the city of Wichita and women across America. George dedicated his life to providing women with high-quality health care despite frequent threats and violence.”

Tiller’s Women’s Health Care Services clinic is one of just three in the nation where abortions are performed after the 21st week of pregnancy. The clinic was heavily fortified and Tiller often traveled with a bodyguard, but Stolz said there was no indication of security at the church Sunday.

Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri said it was working with law enforcement to secure its facilities Sunday even after the suspect was in custody.

A protester shot Tiller in both arms in 1993, and his clinic was bombed in 1985. More recently, Monnat said Tiller had asked federal prosecutors to step up investigations of vandalism and other threats against the clinic out of fear that the incidents were increasing and that Tiller’s safety was in jeopardy. Stolz, however, said police knew of no threats connected to the shooting.

In early May, Tiller had asked the FBI to investigate vandalism at his clinic, including cut wires to surveillance cameras and damage to the roof that sent rainwater pouring into the building.

Anti-abortion groups denounced the shooting and stressed that they support only nonviolent protest. The movement’s leaders fear the killing could create a backlash just as they are scrutinizing U.S. Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, whose views on abortion rights are not publicly known.

“We are shocked at this morning’s disturbing news that Mr. Tiller was gunned down,” Troy Newman, Operation Rescue’s president, said in a statement. “Operation Rescue has worked for years through peaceful, legal means, and through the proper channels to see him brought to justice. We denounce vigilantism and the cowardly act that took place this morning.”

In 1991, the Summer of Mercy protests organized by Operation Rescue drew thousands of anti-abortion activists to this city for demonstrations marked by civil disobedience and mass arrests.

Tiller began providing abortion services in 1973. He acknowledged abortion was as socially divisive as slavery or prohibition but said the issue was about giving women a choice when dealing with technology that can diagnose severe fetal abnormalities before a baby is born.

Nancy Keenan, president of abortion-rights group NARAL Pro-Choice America, issued a statement praising Tiller’s commitment.

“Dr. Tiller’s murder will send a chill down the spines of the brave and courageous providers and other professionals who are part of reproductive-health centers that serve women across this country. We want them to know that they have our support as they move forward in providing these essential services in the aftermath of the shocking news from Wichita,” Keenan said.

After the 1991 protests, Tiller kept mostly to his heavily guarded clinic, although in 1997 he opened it to three tours by state lawmakers and the media.

The clinic is fortified with bulletproof glass, and Tiller hired a private security team to protect the facility. Once outside the clinic, Tiller was routinely accompanied by a bodyguard.

At a recent trial, he told jurors that he and his family have suffered years of harassment and threats and that he knew he was a target of anti-abortion protesters.

Federal marshals protected Tiller during the 1991 Summer of Mercy protests, and he was protected again between 1994 and 1998 after another abortion provider was assassinated and federal authorities reported finding Tiller’s name on an assassination list.

Tiller remained prominent in the news, in part because of an investigation begun by former Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline, an abortion opponent.

Prosecutors had alleged that Tiller had gotten second opinions from a doctor who was essentially an employee of his, not independent as state law requires. A jury in March acquitted Tiller of all 19 misdemeanor counts.

“I am stunned by this lawless and violent act, which must be condemned and should be met with the full force of law,” Kline said in a written statement. “We join in lifting prayer that God’s grace and presence rest with Dr. Tiller’s family and friends.”

Abortion opponents also questioned then-Gov. Kathleen Sebelius’ ties to Tiller before the Senate confirmed her this year as U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary. Tiller donated thousands of dollars to Sebelius over the years.

Want to protest your government by going to a Tea Party event? DENIED!

Remember this report from our nation’s history?

CNN (Continental News Network) Boston, 1773: The city of Boston canceled a proposed protest over tea taxes today, citing the fear that too many people dressed as Indians would be gathered near the wharves. Organizers expressed sadness over the cancellation, but meekly returned to their homes fearful of upsetting the officers of the Crown. Taxmen breathed a sigh of relief as the tar and feathers were put away not to be used this day.

You don’t remember that pre-revolutionary history? I should say you shouldn’t, because it didn’t happen. But flash forward a few hundred years and you’ll find it is happening today in Cape Coral, Florida where city officials canceled a tax day tea party gathering because they “feel too many people could show-up.”

That’s right, folks, the God-given, long-held American right to assemble and protest the actions of our government has been canceled due to too much popularity of the protest.

And what does it come down to? Money. You see, the city officials want an insurance policy taken out so that organizers can cover any loss that might occur as a result of the rally. And those insurance policies cost hundreds of dollars.

The tea party organizers of Cape Coral, though, aren’t the only ones to find this restriction of their free speech and rights to assemble. Tea party organizers all across the country have begun to find out just how difficult, if not impossible, it is to be “allowed” to exercise their God-given right to speak their minds against government excess and criminality. City governments all across the country are charging fees for “permits,” forcing organizers to pay out huge sums for “insurance policies,” and binding tea party organizers in all sorts of government red tape.

In many instances, organizers are being told that they aren’t “allowed” to hold rallies on government property. Imagine that? We, the taxpayers of the city/state/federal government aren’t “allowed” to gather on property that our own taxes paid for.

And then there are the “permits” required to reserve the day, arrange the police protection, and clean up afterward. Often those “permits” can only be applied for at certain times a year, precluding any spontaneous assembly. Also, these “permits” can be denied with no reason stated quashing at birth any plan to exercise the right of assembly.

Here one might wonder how it is that we so often see those lefties appearing on our TV sets engaging in their many organized protests? Don’t the flotsam and jetsam of the far left seem to have large protests all the time? One might be drawn to imagine that the government is involved in some sort of grand conspiracy to allow those with anti-American sentiment, the moonbats of the left, to march with impunity. But, hold the tinfoil hats, won’t you? Because the wackjobs of anti-war ilk and the shrill, circus acts of the Code Pinkos are expected to cut through the same red tape the tea party organizers have been confronted with. The lefties are just better at it.

You see, contrary to popular conception, the far left has some deep-pocketed backers (your George Soros types, unions and even government funds) and a raft of organizations that do “protests” as a full time job. Their protest marches and rallies are far from spontaneously organized. These groups are thoroughly knowledgeable about the red tape and governmental hoops through which they must jump to carry off a successful protest assembly. After all, the hatemongers of the left are intimately intertwined with city governments all across the country. They understand what needs to be done because, by and large, city officials used to belong to, or belong still to the sorts of groups that plan lefty protests. Your new president is one of them. Being part of government, these leftie protest marchers help write the rules, being intimately associated with government they are quite well informed about what is required and how to get around or satisfy those rules.

But the obstacles are coming as a shock to the average citizens that love this country. For their whole lives peace-loving, work-a-day Americans have taken for granted that there exists the freedom to assemble completely unaware that those rights have been eliminated by stealth regulation by governments all across the land.

And now the folks in Cape Coral, Florida have learned their lesson.

Americans do not have the rights they always thought they did. There is no right to protest government. There is no right to assemble. The people have no rights at all to voice their displeasure. Shut up people. Go home. Nothing to see here. Go quietly back to your IPods and DVDs. Big daddy government will take care of you. The Obemmessiah will decide what’s best for you. Don’t worry your little heads. Oh, and thank you for your payments on April 15th.

Put away the tar and feathers, won’t you? There’s a nice fella.

-Warner Todd Huston

AP photographer tracks down family of terrified children split by war

This photo of an 11-year-old girl carrying her 3-year-old niece as she looks for her parents in the village of Kiwanja, eastern Congo, drew reaction from people around the world wanting to help them.

Eleven-year-old Protegee carried her sobbing niece on her back as they searched for relatives in a sea of people in eastern Congo.

An Associated Press photograph of the girl — using her filthy T-shirt to wipe the tears from her face as 3-year-old Reponse clung to her neck and wailed — prompted hundreds of e-mails from people around the world hoping to help them.

I returned to Kiwanja on Sunday to try to reunite the girls with family and even succeeded in finding them. But it turned out that not all problems in Congo can be solved by an outsider’s sympathy.

When I first photographed Protegee on Nov. 6 in a crowd of thousands in the town of Kiwanja, she told me only her first name and that she was looking for her mother.

I learned later that she and Reponse had wandered alone for three days after being separated from Protegee’s mother on Nov. 3 as the family fled on foot from their village of Kiseguru, about 12 miles away.

Protegee had spent one night sleeping in a church, huddled with Reponse under a flimsy scarf. “I had no food or water,” she said, speaking in the Kiswahili language.

Hundreds of children have been separated from their families since fighting flared in eastern Congo in August and more than 1,600 children in the province were seeking their parents last week alone, according to UNICEF. The children’s young ages and inability to give detailed information — plus the lack of official records in the Congolese countryside — make it even more difficult to track down their families.

Faces of desperation
When I set out to search for Protegee, I had little certainty of success but I was determined to try to help. As a journalist, I’ve photographed war and refugees all over the world since the early 1980s.

But I was particularly moved by readers’ reactions to this photograph of two little girls, their faces wrenched in fear and desperation. I knew that the chances of finding them again were slim, as I see children walking alone on the roads every day. But I found myself imagining how it would feel if I were searching for my own daughters — and having two, that was not difficult.

Years of sporadic violence in eastern Congo intensified in August, and fighting between the army and its allied militia on one side and fighters loyal to rebel leader Laurent Nkunda on the other has displaced at least 250,000 people since then — despite the presence of the largest U.N. peacekeeping force in the world. Some fear Congo’s current crisis could again draw in neighboring countries. Congo’s devastating 1998-2002 war split the vast nation into rival fiefdoms and involved half a dozen African armies.

Reaching Kiwanja meant crossing an uneasy front line just a few miles north of Goma, with hundreds of heavily armed rebels and government troops deployed on either side. Then it was a bone-jarring two-hour drive on what was once a paved road, and is now one giant pothole.

In the name of hope
Kiwanja is a typical African town, with one strip of dirt road as the main drag, a few small shops on each side, one roundabout, one crossroad, and huts sprawling to infinity on the hills to the east and the valley to the north.

Armed with the photograph of Protegee and Reponse, I started asking around. Women frowned — they did not know the girls. I traveled to the school yard, to the clinic. No luck.

As I was about to head back to Goma, I stopped near a U.N. base. Just a few days earlier its outskirts were refuge to thousands. But now it was a nearly empty lot with the skeletons of makeshift huts and a white UNHCR tent.

I ventured inside the tent. There, Maria Mukeshimani’s eyes lit up at the sight of the photo — the woman, who had been displaced herself by the violence, knew these children. She had seen them in that very tent five days earlier. And she knew Protegee’s mother: Her name is Esperance Nirakagori.

Esperance — the French word for hope.

Esperance had taken refuge at the local Catholic church in Kiwanja. When I arrived there, I was greeted by the sounds of a choir. It was evening Mass.

“Does anyone know if Esperance is around?” I asked.

An elderly man replied that she was in a small house nearby.

Wearing a yellow and red dress, Esperance greeted us. She had sweat dripping from her headscarf and spoke softly.

‘Happy to see your mother’?
I showed her the picture and she smiled at the sight of the girls. Then, to my surprise, she said they had already found her, but she had sent them back to their village, alone and on foot. She feared for their safety in Kiwanja and believed they would be more secure in the care of her elder daughter; she was too weak to make the journey herself.

She kept staring at the photo. Only when I told her I would return the next morning and drive her to rejoin the girls in Kiseguru did her face light up in a wide, genuine smile.

We set off the next day after stopping for food at a restaurant in town. Esperance was quiet as we drove the 20 minutes to the village. She clutched the girls’ photo as she walked through the streets, a trail of excited children in her wake.

The reunion with Protegee and Reponse, in a small mud hut, was brief. They smiled at each other. No one spoke. I prompted Protegee, a shy girl who was only 2 months old when her father was killed in Congo’s last bloody war.

“Are you happy to see your mother?” I asked.

She answered, in a soft voice: “Yes.”

Protegee told how she had arrived exhausted in Kiseguru on Nov. 12. But when she did, she found her family’s hut empty — her sister and other relatives had already fled toward Uganda. For five days she waited for an adult to come for her. No one did. She was planning to set off for Kiwanja that very day to rejoin her mother, when I arrived instead.

Rather than remain in their village, Esperance asked me to take them all back to Kiwanja.

‘When the war is over’
In the streets of Kiseguru, we had seen 20 men wearing civilian clothes and toting Kalashnikovs. When I asked her who they were, her answer was swift and certain: “Mai Mai.”

Earlier this month, Kiwanja residents were terrorized by the pro-government Mai Mai militia, who the U.N. said killed people accused of supporting the rebels. Then the rebels won control and killed those they claimed had supported the militiamen.

And now the Mai Mai were in her family’s village.

Protegee, Reponse and Esperance are back in Kiwanja now. They have set up a cot in the corner of a room on the Catholic church grounds. Outside, the U.N. World Food Program is distributing food, but the situation in the town remains volatile.

Before I left, I gave Esperance the photograph of her daughter and granddaughter. She handed it to Protegee, who, with Reponse in her lap, gazed at the image. I left them there on their cot, clutching the photo, one of their few possessions.

Asked when they would return to their village, Esperance replied: “When the war is over.”

Jerome Delay is AP’s chief photographer for Africa. Associated Press writer Anita Powell contributed to this report from Kiwanja, Congo.

Read more at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27790850/?GT1=43001

Weather Underground co-founder Bill Ayers speaks out on the criticism Barack Obama fielded during the presidential campaign for his ties to the 1960s radical.

Bill Ayers, the Sixties radical whose ties to Barack Obama dogged the president-elect during the presidential campaign, accused his critics on Friday of trying to “exploit the politics of fear” by encouraging others to dig into their relationship.

FILE: William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn walk with their son in New York in 1982. (AP Photo)

The co-founder of the Weather Underground, which carried out bombings at the Pentagon and the Capitol, also defended his violent past, repeating a line he has said before: “I don’t think we did enough.”

Ayers used the interview, his first since the election, to downplay his relationship with Obama. Ayers said there is “no dark, hidden secret.”

“It’s not at all true that [Obama] sought me out to listen to my radical ideas, or that I sought him out,” Ayers told ABC News’ “Good Morning America.”

“The truth is we came together in Chicago in the civic community around issues of school improvement, around issues of fighting for the rights of poor neighborhoods to have jobs and housing and so on, and that’s the full extent of our relationship.”

Ayers and Obama served on a Chicago school reform group and a foundation board, and Ayers hosted a meet-and-greet for Obama more than a decade ago. During the campaign, Republicans suggested their relationship ran deeper than that. John McCain’s running mate, Sarah Palin, said in the run-up to Election Day that Obama was “palling around with terrorists.”

Ayers, who kept a low profile during the campaign — unlike Obama’s controversial former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. — dismissed such charges on Friday.

“This idea that we need to know more, like there’s some dark, hidden secret, some secret link — it’s just a myth. And it’s a myth thrown up by people who want to kind of exploit the politics of fear,” he said.

Ayers, now an education professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago, said he doesn’t believe that “guilt-by-association should be any part of our politics.”

But Ayers says in a new afterword to his memoir that he and Obama were neighbors and “family friends.”

Ayers’ reflections appear in a new paperback release of his 2001 memoir, “Fugitive Days.” The Associated Press obtained a copy of the new afterword Thursday.

“In 2008 there was a lot of chatter on the blogosphere about my relationship with Barack Obama: we had served together on the board of a foundation, knew one another as neighbors and family friends, held an initial fundraiser at my house, where I’d made a small donation to his earliest political campaign,” Ayers writes.

Obama spokesman Ben LaBolt declined comment on Ayers’ new writings. Obama has denounced Ayers’ violent past and has said Ayers was never involved in his presidential campaign.

Ayers lives a few blocks from Obama on Chicago’s South Side with his wife, former fellow radical Bernardine Dohrn. Now a law professor at Northwestern University, Dohrn was a fugitive for years with her husband until they surrendered in 1980. Charges against Ayers were dropped because of government misconduct, which included FBI break-ins, wiretaps and opening of mail.

Ayers writes that Obama’s enemies saw their connections as a chance to “deepen a dishonest narrative about him.”

“That he is somehow un-American, alien, linked to radical ideas, a closet terrorist, a sympathizer with extremism,” Ayers writes.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Read more at: http://elections.foxnews.com/2008/11/14/ayers-accuses-critics-using-politics-fear/

Shariah-compliant banking, sometimes called Islamic banking, is growing in popularity in the Western and Islamic worlds. But critics say American interest in the system at a time of economic crisis is opening the door to increased Islamic influence in the American banking system. Worse yet, some fear the banks may be helping to finance international terrorism.

In Shariah-compliant banking, lenders may not charge interest and investors cannot make money from forbidden industries like gambling, alcohol, pork and pornography. Selling debt, devising derivatives and short selling are also prohibited, and investments must be closely tied to actual assets.

In the U.S., the Dow Jones Islamic Index tracks Shariah-compliant companies and funds, and funds have sprung up like the Amana Mutual Funds Trust and the Azzad Asset Management.

American investment funds, like those offered by TD Ameritrade and Charles Schwab, can invest in Shariah-compliant companies, and those companies can offer investments in American companies. Top holdings in the Azzad Ethical Midcap Fund, for example, include Western Digital Corp., Southwest Electric Co. and Apple Computer, Inc.

But allowing Shariah-compliant finance in the U.S. is green-lighting a seditious system that supports jihad, said Frank Gaffney, founder and president of the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C.

“If you understand what Shariah is, you understand that it is a pretty awful system. Not something that you’d want insinuated in your society and becoming a major feature of your economic system,” Gaffney said.

“Shariah (Islamic law as dictated by the Koran) governs all aspects of life, from the personal practice of the faith to how you relate to your family to how you relate to your business partners, to your community … all the way up to how the world is run, and it is all one seamless program. You can’t say ‘I’ll take the personal pietistic practice … and skip the beheading and the flogging and the stoning and the global theocracy,’” he said.

Punishments for some crimes under Shariah law include amputation and stoning to death. On Tuesday it was revealed that a 53-year-old Egyptian doctor had been sentenced under Shariah law in Saudi Arabia to 15 years in prison and 1,500 lashes for allegedly getting a Saudi princess in his care addicted to drugs.

But despite Islamic banking’s association with Shariah’s harsh practices, the U.S. government is taking an interest in it.

On Oct. 25, while on an official visit to Saudi Arabia, Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Robert M. Kimmitt told reporters that the U.S. was interested in learning more about Islamic finance, and the Treasury Department held an “Islamic Finance 101″ course in Washington on Nov. 6 to educate government officials on its ins and outs.

Islamic banking and investment products sprang up beginning in the 1970s when the Middle East experienced its first oil boom, and have been growing in popularity as oil prices soared in the past few years.

Yet it’s unclear who is investing in Shariah-compliant mutual funds and other investments, Gaffney said. “An awful lot of them seem to be petrodollar-rich potentates and companies and royal families.”

Nicholas Kaiser, fund manager at Amana Mutual Funds Trust in Bellingham, Wash., said that his company’s Shariah-compliant mutual fund products are no different from any other religious funds and that the company carefully screens its investors.

“Our shareholders are American. We don’t take money from non-Americans because of money-laundering laws. We have to know our shareholders and be sure they aren’t engaged in nefarious activities. We screen and check and verify every shareholder,” Kaiser said.

He disagrees with Gaffney’s assertion that Islamic funds are a threat to the American way of life.

“We simply take people’s money, invest it and give it back to them when they want it. We don’t try and convert the country. We don’t have any religious position. We aren’t evangelical. We aren’t zealots. We’re money managers,” Kaiser said. “I happen to be Episcopalian.”

Azzad Asset Management declined to be interviewed for this story.

Estimates put the Islamic banking industry in the hundreds of billions of dollars. And while it’s a small portion of the global finance industry, the Islamic sector is growing — by more than 30 percent in 2007.

A board of Shariah scholars determines which investments are compliant.

As Shariah law forbids charging interest, Shariah-compliant mortgages, like those offered by Devon Bank in Chicago and Guidance Residential, which operates in 23 states, are attracting pious Muslim buyers.

In one type of Shariah-compliant mortgage the bank buys a home and then either leases or re-sells it to the purchaser in monthly installments — interest-free, but at a higher price.

The bank’s profit and the buyer’s payments wind up being similiar to what they would be if the bank charged interest, said Ibrahim Warde, adjunct professor of international business at Tufts University.

“In the Koran there’s a verse saying that making money from trade is good and making money from money lending is not, so basically whenever transactions are structured, they are sales transactions,” he said.

Rachel Ehrenfeld, director of the American Center for Democracy, said that whether they’re sound investments or not, conforming to Shariah shouldn’t be American policy.

“We should not allow Islamic banking to continue and definitely not to flourish in this country,” Ehrenfeld said.

“Muslims in the United States who want to conduct their business according to Islamic banks can do it with mortgages … but to allow Islamic banking as a rule to operate — it’s our money and we shouldn’t be abiding by Islamic laws. Period. I don’t want to have any kind of association with any laws that dictate wife-beating in Saudi Arabia,” she said.

Ehrenfeld said that the practice of “zakat” — giving alms to the poor — while innocent on the surface can in fact be used to promote terrorism and the spread of radical Islam.

She said that that the money the Shariah banks give to charities goes to build madrassas and mosques and spread radical Islam and anti-American sentiment.

“They also send money to Hamas. They also send money to Al Qaeda,” she said. “This is a huge Pandora’s box. We don’t know what the hell is going on with their charities … even if nobody will say openly that they’re giving money to terrorism.”

In June, the Kuwait-based charity Revivial of Islamic Heritage Society was designated by the U.S. Treasury for providing money and material support to Al Qaeda, its affilitates and to acts of terrorism.

“It is illegal for anyone in the United States to provide funds to charities that have been designated by the Treasury Department as supporters of terrorism under Executive Order 13224. If the Treasury Department has information that anyone in the United States were engaged in such activity, we would take appropriate action,” said Treasury spokesman Andrew DeSouza.

Warde, however, said that there is no reason to think that all Islamic financial institutions have terrorist ties.

“There are some people who equate all things Islamic to terrorism,” he said. “Some people look at the world that way. We’ve seen that during the presidential campaign with the insinuations that Obama was a Muslim, therefore a terrorist. I don’t think we should give much credence to that.”

He said critics are not being fair to the system.

“People who don’t like Islam and who are afraid of Islam would obviously not like the notion of Islamic finance. I’m not sure that those who hold this view necessarily know much about it, but it’s some kind of visceral view that some people hold,” Warde said.

Read more at : http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,451416,00.html