T-Shirt Vendor Saves Manhattan

NYDailyNews.com:

Three heroic cops and a quick-thinking street vendor stopped a madman from detonating a car bomb in the heart of Times Square Saturday night, law enforcement officials told the Daily News.

"It looked like someone tried to detonate it and we got to it in time," a police source said. "This is a big deal. It has the makings of a real car bomb."

The federal government views the incident a "potential terrorist attack," Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said Sunday.

"We're taking this very seriously," Napolitano told CNN's "State of the Union" program. "We're treating it as if it could be a potential terrorist attack."

Cops evacuated and shut down the Times Square are Saturday night, but all streets were reopened by 7:30 a.m. Sunday.

The T-shirt vendor - a Vietnam vet - told Officer Wayne Rhatigan there was smoke coming from a Nissan SUV on the southwest corner of 45th St. and Broadway about 6:30 p.m., sources said.

Rhatigan approached the car, saw the smoke and sprang into action.

"I did a lap around the vehicle. The inside was smoking," Rhatigan told the Daily News. "I smelled gunpowder and knew it might blow. I thought it might blow any second."

Since I've been out of F/T work I rarely venture into Manhattan these days, but I do need any reason to go at all after this crap? Probably not. Free speech or no free speech, unless you got an army ready to go war behind you, you don't fuck with the Taliban...so yeah, let 'em have the "South Park" HQ's if they want it, I'll be resting easy in Brooklyn.

"South Park" Censors Muhammad Episode

NYTimes.com:

An episode of “South Park” that continued a story line involving the Prophet Muhammad was shown Wednesday night on Comedy Central with audio bleeps and image blocks reading “CENSORED” after a Muslim group warned the show’s creators that they could face violence for depicting that holy Islamic prophet. Revolution Muslim, a group based in New York, wrote on its Web site that the “South Park” creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker “will probably wind up like Theo Van Gogh” for an episode shown last week in which a character said to be the Prophet Muhammad was seen wearing a bear costume. Mr. Van Gogh was slain in Amsterdam in 2004 after making a film that discussed the abuse of Muslim women in some Islamic societies.

The new episode of “South Park” on Wednesday night tried to revisit this character, but with the name and depiction of the character blocked out. It was unclear how much of the bleeping was Mr. Stone and Mr. Parker’s decision. In a message posted on their Web site, SouthParkStudios.com, they wrote that they could not immediately stream the new episode on the site because:

After we delivered the show, and prior to broadcast, Comedy Central placed numerous additional audio bleeps throughout the episode. We do not have network approval to stream our original version of the show.

On Thursday morning, a spokesman for Comedy Central confirmed that the network had added more bleeps to the episode than were in the cut delivered by South Park Studios, and that it was not giving permission for the episode to run on the studio’s Web site.

As much as "South Park" deserves respect for pretty much going after every special interest group on the planet, why would the creators want to perhaps risk their own lives (as well as their family's) by continuously mocking Muhammad and Islamic radicals? Do they not get that these people really believe in their hearts that Allah teaches them to terrorize?