Imam Mohammad Ali Elahi, of the Islamic House of Wisdom in Dearborn Heights, who wears the traditional headwear and robe of a Shi'a leader, lost all the information on his laptop after Customs and Border Protection personnel searched the computer at Metro Airport on Oct. 22.

For fifty years, Yasser Arafat — or Abu Ammar as he was more familiarly known — made the Palestinian cause his life's journey, and along the way, be became the undisputed leader of the Palestinian people. His passion spilled over into three words — "Don't forget Palestine" — words he wrote to Egypt's first president in 1953 when he was still a student, and words which remained his mantra to the end.

WASHINGTON (IPS) — The promotion of Robert M. Gates as President-elect Barack Obama's secretary of defense appears to be the key element in a broad campaign by military officials and their supporters in the political elite and the news media to pressure Obama into dropping his plan to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq in as little as 16 months.

If the change President-elect Obama has promised includes a halt to America's wars of aggression and an end to the rip-off of taxpayers by powerful financial interests, what explains Obama's choice of foreign and economic policy advisors? Indeed, Obama's selection of Rahm Israel Emanuel as White House chief of staff is a signal that change ended with Obama's election. The only thing different about the new administration will be the faces.

For 34 years, Toronto's York University shut down on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur. The University of Windsor Law School also closed for these Jewish holidays. This practice has come to a halt in both institutions.

Obama my dear, they tell me that you are going to change the world. Do me a favor, come and change my life personally.

WASHINGTON — SURA Arts Academy, an Arab American National Museum program that gives Dearborn youth the opportunity to learn and use photography to foster cultural understanding, is being nationally recognized as one of 15 U.S.-based youth arts and humanities programs to receive the prestigious 2008 Coming Up Taller Award.

The cover of "Hope Destroyed, Justice Denied: the Rape of Palestine" tells a significant story on its own: from a Palestine of green dotted with a few Jewish settlements, mainly in the north, transiting through the UN partition plan designation and the 1967 war to what is now the reverse — a small strip of green on the coast at Gaza, and a small sprinkling of isolated green bantustan communities huddled in the middle of Israel.