Tampa police: Marine reservist attacked Greek priest he mistook for terrorist

Marine reservist Jasen Bruce was getting clothes out of the trunk of his car Monday evening when a bearded man in a robe approached him.

That man, a Greek Orthodox priest named Father Alexios Marakis, speaks little English and was lost, police said. He wanted directions.

What the priest got instead, police say, was a tire iron to the head. Then he was chased for three blocks and pinned to the ground — as the Marine kept a 911 operator on the phone, saying he had captured a terrorist.

Police say Bruce offered several reasons to explain his actions:

The man tried to rob him.

The man grabbed Bruce's crotch and made an overt sexual advance in perfect English.

The man yelled "Allahu Akbar," Arabic for "God is great," the same words some witnesses said the Fort Hood shooting suspect uttered last week.

"That's what they tell you right before they blow you up," police say Bruce told them.

Bruce ended up in jail, accused of aggravated battery with a deadly weapon. He was released Tuesday on $7,500 bail. Marakis ended up at the hospital with stitches. He told the police he didn't want to press charges, espousing biblical forgiveness.

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Chomsky lecture: Government in the future

A talk by Noam Chomsky at the New York Poetry Center [1970]. Part 5 of a series.

Yup, it's here

The microchip implant:

Burning dollar bills on the sidewalk

From the archives of The New York Times circa 1987, George James reports:

"...Residents of apartment buildings with names like Manhattan House and Concorde gave her money.

Sal Lomonaco, a florist, used to give her flowers. She liked them, he said, but was troubled that they die.

From these and other neighborhood people, a picture emerges of a troubled person who appears to resent charity but who has begged for money and then thrown it away or burned it. She is at once bright and belligerent, singing 1950's ballads like ''How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?'' or made-up songs about her feelings of the moment and then yelling and cursing. She loves animals and children but has berated people, especially blacks, who tried to help her, even though she herself is black.

She was the victim of some street people who conned her of money, but she has physically assaulted some elderly would-be benefactors. 'It's Very Strange'

''She asks for a quarter and when you give her three quarters, she is going to throw the other two away,'' said Mr. Boletsis, who has given her sandwiches and pastry from the restaurant. ''I don't know why. It's very strange. A lot of people were worried about her. Many try to give her food. They stop and give her money, but sometimes she won't take it. 'I don't need your money,' she yelled.''

''Around Christmas time, that's the only woman I know who rips up $100 and $50 bills,'' said James Wilder, the 33-year-old floral designer in the East Williston Florist & Greenhouses across the avenue from where she sat.

''She likes to burn them,'' said Mr. Lomonaco, the 22-year-old co-owner.

''She rips them up in teeny little pieces,'' Mr. Wilder said..."

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Arab echoes of grassroots protest

If Gamal Abdel Nasser, the late president of Egypt and legendary champion of Arab nationalism, had risen from his grave during the heady days of November 1989, he would have rubbed his eyes in disbelief.

The stirring on the streets of Prague, Berlin and Bucharest not only spelled the end to the “enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend” politics that Nasser had mastered in playing off the rival superpowers against each other, it was a sharp break with the sweeping pan-Arab nationalism that Nasser espoused and the top-down political style he practised.

In 1989, the Arab world saw this fervour played out in the dun-coloured hills east of Bethlehem, where the drive for self-determination was attempting to erase the debacle brought about by Nasser's thwarted pan-Arab vision 22 years earlier.

On November 5, 1989 – four days before the Berlin Wall fell – the people of the Palestinian town of Beit Sahour decided they would no longer pay for Israel's occupation of their land. A coalition of Arab armies inspired by Nasser's Pan-Arabist dream had failed in 1967 to expel Israel from the same soil; now, in an echo of the grassroots street protests sweeping Europe, the people of Beit Sahour would try to achieve it by refusing to pay their taxes. “No taxation without representation!” their leaflet cried.

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