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Efforts to herd clothed, scantily clad and unclad bicyclists together for a potentially uncomfortable Madison tour on World Naked Bike Ride day have flopped in the past. But next month, they just might pull it off. Or at least most of it. There has been no official announcement, but there have been posters, and several informal meetings in the Rathskeller at the Memorial Union on campus. An earnest discussion group is maintained at Yahoo.com and news has circulated among bicycle groups. NOTE: The image in this story may be considered by some to be mildly not safe for work/children (Similar...

Maayana Miskin Jewish and Muslim students clashed Thursday at an event at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, according to the local paper Journal Sentinel. The clash left one Jewish student wounded and a Muslim student under arrest. University officials plan to investigate the incident. The story began as Jewish students held a celebration in honor of Israel's recent Independence Day outside the student union offices. A group of students from the Muslim Student Association came to the event and began yelling at those present, accusing Israel of mistreating Arabs. "We didn't go there intending to cause trouble, we just...

Glenn Beck vs. Joel Rogers, King of the Progressives If Fox News commentator, Glenn Beck is right, Joel Rogers may be the man behind Obama and the entire Progressive Movement. Not a far stretch as Progressives got their start in Wisconsin, where Joel teaches law, political science and sociology at the University of Wisconsin. Thursday morning, Joel was a featured speaker at an Earth Day conference in Chicago on public transportation. Needless to say, he’s all for it! But Beck has connected the dots on his magic blackboards (He needs about three or four now, at least!) as he ties...

The pickings are apparently so slim in the linguistics field that three University of Wisconsin-Madison linguists took on the conundrum of Sarah Palin's speech patterns. That's how it was reported, a conundrum, suggesting that they went off in search of a solution to a problem that didn't exist. Now, it was pretty good fun when Tina Fey took on Palin. There was one episode of "Saturday Night Live'' when Palin was a guest and Fey and Palin were on the set at the same time. I didn't know who was who. There were cards wandering around Foggy Bottom who had...

UW-Madison students exploring political activism of today's youth released a short documentary on Friday titled "Youthanized." The video, which is available at http://www.youtube.com/youthanized compares activism of today's UW students with those of the late 1960s and early 1970s -- when Madison was a national hot spot for Vietnam War protestors. The documentary, which started to take shape in the fall of 2007 as a school project for Mark Korshak, begins by posing the question, "Is Generation Y uniquely apathetic?""There really isn't a simple answer to that question," said Korshak, a Los Angeles native who in May earned his undergraduate degree...

A U-W Madison professor is back in the United States and recovering after being drugged, robbed and dumped in a remote Russian park. David Bethea is chairman of the university's Slavic languages department. Bethea has visited Russia more than two dozen times. But, he says he made a mistake he hopes other tourists can learn from. He accepted a cup of coffee from a cab driver, who apparently had laced it with a date-rape-like drug. A stranger found Bethea in a remote park in St. Petersburg about 12 hours later. He spent eight days in a St. Petersburg hospital before...

(UW's Mexican party has dancers, food) Members of the UW-Madison's Chicano student group and others interested in Mexican culture gathered Friday night for El Dia de los Muertos, an annual holiday that celebrates those who have died, not with sadness and tears but with lively festivities. "On this day, it's believed that spirits come back and celebrate with their loved ones," said Vanessa Sanchez, a legal studies major from Waukesha, and co-chairwoman of the student group, called MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan). "Day of the Dead" is an indigenous celebration that dates to the time of the Aztecs, she...

UW students march on Pentagon with over 50,000 people WASHINGTON, D.C.— “What do we want? Troops out! When do we want ‘em? Now!” Pro-peace chants rang through a Van Galder coach bus filled with members of UW-Madison’s Campus Anti-War Network, as it drove out of a gray, windy Madison toward an even colder, blustery Washington, D.C., Friday. The members marched on the Pentagon to protest the war—Saturday marked the four-year anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The 51 protesting bus riders represented a variety of political ideologies, from Democrat to Green Party to Socialist. The political atmosphere on the...

In less than a week, a little girl from East Troy with a rare genetic condition will get on a plane with her mother, aunt and cousin and head to China to receive more than 60 million stem cells. Brooke Barels, 9, suffers from Glucose Transporter Deficiency, a condition caused by a genetic mutation of the gene that processes glucose from food into fuel for her body. As a result, Brooke suffers from cerebral palsy-like symptoms and cannot function like normal children.  She's the 83rd person in the world diagnosed with GLUT-1, as it's better known. She'll be the first...

The increasing intensity of hurricanes hitting the U.S. is partly driven by global warming, and the ferocity of storms to come is likely to increase as surface temperatures of the ocean rise, says a noted scientist visiting UW-Madison. "The effects of global warming do not only concern scientists," Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Kerry Emanuel told an audience at a public lecture Thursday. "I want to put this issue into a societal context."Emanuel, a professor in the department of earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences at MIT, has published two books and over 100 scientific articles. One article published in the...

Howard Zinn, a celebrated American political scientist, addressed University of Wisconsin students at the Memorial Union Theater Tuesday about the importance of history and democracy to provide context to current issues in government and war. Zinn said his focus is on “clear” history, which he defined as making individual decisions about how to perceive historical and current events, because it makes people aware of their own interests. “It is a lie to say we are one great happy family with the same interest,” Zinn said. “Exxon and I do not have the same interests, and Bush and the soldiers do...

A new group, called "Middle East Solidarity" (AKA support the terrorists and worship Saint Pancake, Rachel Corrie), was created by the ultra left on my campus. The reason for formation of this group is that Stop the War had it's Student Org status revoked due to it's vandalism to the ROTC building (cutting the rope to the US flag) and constant harassment of recuiters at events. Also, I suspect a link to the International Solidarity movement, thus the Saint Pancake reference earlier. There is one catch however. The problem with the new group is that it is a contiuation of...

MADISON, WI (AP) -- A part-time instructor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison taught the first class of his course on Islam Tuesday after drawing intense scrutiny for his belief the U.S. government orchestrated the Sept. 11 attacks. Days before the fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks, Kevin Barrett touched only briefly on them but told students the subject would be covered in discussions in early November during his twice-a-week course, "Islam: Religion and Culture." Barrett, castigated by some legislators after his views were publicized over the summer, used self-deprecating humor as he began the class, describing himself as an Irish...

There may be a reason why academics are nearly as reluctant to discuss welfare reform as they are to do a recap of The Cold War: most professors were wrong about the War on Poverty too. “Washington declared war on poverty and poverty won,” former President Ronald Reagan famously said. Most pedagogues never saw it that way. “In Wisconsin, 33 families a day entered the state from Illinois and Chicago lured by higher benefits,” the Claremont Institute’s Eloise Anderson remembers of the land-o-lakes she called home for three decades. “The academic community denied that was a motive to move from...

According to Kevin Barrett, the US government planned and carried out the 9/11 attacks, the World Trade Center imploded due to explosives set up ahead of time in the buildings, Minnesota Sen. Paul Wellstone's plane crash was no accident, and Osama bin Laden has probably been dead since 2001. Mr. Barrett is not a radical anarchist or a teenager peddling conspiracy theories; he's a lecturer at the University of Wisconsin, Madison - a fact that has outraged some state politicians. The case has drawn national attention and provided grist for conservative talk-show hosts, while the university has been deluged with...

Hired by the University of Wisconsin to teach “Islam: Religion and Culture,” this fall at the Madison campus, Kevin Barrett believes that the 9/11 attacks on America were planned and executed by the U.S. government and not the work of terrorists. Barrett co-founded Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance for 9/11 Truth. Barrett’s views have caused a divide in Wisconsin. Barrett and university officials have stated that Barrett’s personal views will not be discussed or taught in the class. Supporters of Barrett argue that he has the right to academic freedom. Some state legislatures called for the university to fire Barrett immediately. So which...

(AP) -- Kevin Barrett believes the U.S. government might have destroyed the World Trade Center. Steven Jones is researching what he calls evidence that the twin towers were brought down by explosives detonated inside them, not by hijacked airliners. These men aren't uneducated junk scientists: Barrett will teach a class on Islam at the University of Wisconsin this fall, over the protests of more than 60 state legislators. Jones is a tenured physicist at Brigham Young University whose mainstream academic job has made him a hero to conspiracy theorists. Five years after the terrorist attacks, a community that believes widely...

Critics of higher education who say American colleges do not prepare students for life after graduation may be way off base: Among federal judges, the problem may be that they do try to apply their education to the post-graduate day jobs that they hold. “At a seminar for federal judges in Kansas City, one of the more conservative judges said, ‘Isn’t it a shame that people don’t know the five rights in the first amendment,’” historian John Kaminski remembered in a recent forum at the Cato Institute. “One of the more activist judges said, ‘Five rights, I’ve been giving 25...

Many people in Madison will welcome the news that Kevin Barrett has been allowed to teach a course on Islam at the UW. Most will see it as a triumph of academic freedom. Others will rejoice because they believe what Barrett alleges: that the terrorist attack of Sept. 11 was "an inside job" and a "gargantuan, Satanic lie" concocted by the U.S. government to wage an endless war. I, however, will not be one of those celebrating. Barrett's accusations about Sept. 11, as most of us well know, have no grounding in reality, forensic evidence or common sense. But by...

<p>A University of Wisconsin-Madison lecturer who has sparked controversy by teaching that the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks were an inside job lashed out Sunday at public officials who have questioned his right to teach.</p> <p>Speaking at a gathering at UW-Milwaukee, Kevin Barrett took aim at state Rep. Stephen Nass (R-Whitewater), U.S. Rep. Mark Green (R-Wis.) and Gov. Jim Doyle.</p>