The Songs of Love Foundation is a nonprofit organization providing original personalized songs to chronically and terminally ill children locally and across the country.

By making a Tax Deductible Car Donations you can help a sick child and bring smiles to thousands of little patients in over 350 hospitals across the nation.

The special compositions bring joy to provide therapeutic help to sick children dealing with serious illnesses.

They were also featured in 60 minutes, you can check out their video below

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbkVlA1-zA4

Watch this video to see how their songs  can really affect the kids they help.

After the donation you will also receive a tex receipt and a Songs of Love CD.

* This is a sponsored review

The White House environmental adviser Van Jones, a towering figure in the environmental movement, has resigned after weeks of controversy stemming from his past activism.

”On the eve of historic fights for health-care and clean energy, opponents of reform have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me,” Mr Jones, the special adviser for green jobs at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, said in a statement announcing his resignation just after midnight on Saturday. ”They are using lies and distortions to distract and divide.”

He continued: ”I have been inundated with calls – from across the political spectrum – urging me to ‘stay and fight’. But I came here to fight for others, not for myself. I cannot in good conscience ask my colleagues to expend precious time and energy defending or explaining my past. We need all hands on deck, fighting for the future.”

Mr Jones issued two public apologies in recent days, one for signing a petition that questioned whether Bush administration officials ”may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war” and the other for using a crude term to describe Republicans in a speech he gave before joining the Administration.

A Republican Congressman, Mike Pence, called on Mr Jones to resign on Friday, saying in a statement: ”His extremist views and coarse rhetoric have no place in this administration or the public debate.” Senator Christopher Bond wrote in an open letter: ”Can the American people trust a senior White House official that is so cavalier in his association with such radical and repugnant sentiments?”

The White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, said on Friday that Mr Jones ”continues to work for the Administration” – but he did not state that the adviser enjoyed the full support of President Barack Obama.

Mr Jones had worked for the White House Council on Environmental Quality since March. He was a civil-rights activist before turning his focus to environmental and energy issues.

Technorati Tags: barack obama, Mike Pence, Van Jones

Ulookubook is a one stop travel portal where you can book cheap flights, hotels and holidays on-line to book your next All Inclusive Holidays

A great feature on the site is to ‘Build your trip’ where you can pick a destination and airport,  then choose the best deals for your flight and hotel, this makes it so much easier to book all you need for your travel to your holiday destination, hotel to stay at the destination and back home.

Options are split into categories including Holidays, Hotels, Flights, Car Hires, Travel Guides where you can find many useful guides as well as City Breaks to see what each of the Europe’s most famous cities has to offer.

It is so jam packed with great deals on cheap holidays, as well as providing informative travel guides crucial in planning your travels to make it a successful trip.

You can even book a last minute flights to thousands of destinations for a even better deal.

This place suits people who are short of time,  who want to book their next value holiday all inclusive from flights to hotels with minimal fuss.

Their family deals are a perfect way to take your whole family to exotic places that won’t cost you an arm and a leg.

*this is a sponsored review

There are so many choices these days when looking around for a good Web Hosting Provider.

What factors should you look for in a Web Hosting Provider ?

-Reliable, high uptime

- Secure

- Good customer service, with 24/7 live support

Hostnexus is one of the providers that offer all these, as well as providing dedicated servers to users who need their own server.

Their website is clean, easy to navigate and use which I think is an important factor as well.

They have a large community of users on-line with positive praise for their services, large number of users happy users  mean they must be getting things right.

Support staff at Hostnexus is available 24 by 7 , and it looks like the issues are dealt with promptly and efficiently.

They also provide a package for professionals to design the site for users who need them.   This is a huge bonus for for users who needs their site designed professionally to set it apart from the rest.

Hostnexus uses Plesk 9 for the websites, to help website designers and moderators.  This provides a powerful interface makes designing, implementing and moderating a website much easier, with a more user-friendly interface.

Hostnexus is a provider that sets themselves apart from the rest by providing reliable services, great support with large on-line community with positive reviews and praise, and with value added services.

* This is a paid review

Technorati Tags: Hostnexus

A 17-year-old mimicking Brad Pitt’s Fight Club character, who planned attacks on corporate America, was arrested for masterminding a pre-dawn blast outside a Starbucks Coffee shop in New York.

Kyle Shaw was arrested on Tuesday night on charges of arson, criminal possession of a weapon and criminal mischief, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said on Wednesday.

He was awaiting arraignment on Wednesday.

The May 25 explosion near the Guggenheim Museum on New York City’s Upper East Side shattered the store’s windows but caused no injuries, and police do not believe it is related to other explosions around the city in the past four years: at the British Consulate in May 2005, the Mexican Consulate in October 2007 and the Times Square military recruiting station in March 2008.

Kelly said Shaw was trying to emulate the character named Tyler Durden, played by Brad Pitt, from the 1999 film about a nameless and spineless pencil pusher, played by Ed Norton, who takes up with the dangerous yet manly Durden.

The two take part in a secret “fight club”, where men beat one another to a pulp.

Shaw formed his own fight club in which boys beat one another in various locales around the city including Central Park, Kelly said. At least one member got a broken nose, he said.

The second, more dastardly plot hatched by Pitt’s character in the film was called “project mayhem” and included escalating attacks on symbols of corporate America.

Shaw apparently told at least one friend to “watch the news over Memorial Day” – a federal holiday at the end of May – because he was about to launch his own version of “project mayhem”, Kelly said. Investigators are looking into whether more people might have been involved.

Police say the suspect picked the site because a Starbucks was a target in the movie. It wasn’t clear why the specific coffee shop was chosen. There are dozens around the city.

The blast occurred around 3.30am. A witness reported seeing two people, one blonde, running from the scene.

The device, made of fireworks powder, a plastic bottle, a metal cap and electrical tape, was set off with a hand-lit fuse.

Investigators recovered homemade bomb materials, a copy of Fight Club, a box of sparklers and a newspaper clipping about the attack from Shaw’s home, Kelly said.

Investigators are still working to identify suspects in the other blasts and believe they were caused by the same person or group of people, Kelly said.

In those bombings, a lone bicyclist was seen in the area before the blasts, caused by either phony grenades or canisters packed with explosive powder. No was hurt in those blasts, either.

The Starbucks Corp has said it didn’t believe its store was hit intentionally.

A spokesperson said on Wednesday the company was aware of the arrest but could not comment further because the investigation was ongoing.

Technorati Tags: blast, brad pitt, fight club, Starbucks

Democrats have lashed out at former vice-president Dick Cheney, accusing him of abusing his power, amid reports he ordered the CIA to withhold information from Congress about a secret counter-terrorism program.

Lawmakers vowed to hold hearings on the nature of the alleged top secret program and efforts to keep members of the US legislature in the dark.

A senior member of the US Senate, Democrat Kent Conrad, who called the alleged failure to notify Congress about the program “a serious breach” said:

“This is a question of whether the former vice-president of the United States denied certain sensitive information to the intelligence leaders in Congress. That is not acceptable,”

Speaking on Sunday on CNN television, Conrad said Central Intelligence Agency notification to key members of Congress about its secret programs

“is required by law”

“That’s a serious matter,”

Representative Anna Eshoo, a senior member of the House Intelligence Committee, said she would call for the panel to hire an outside counsel to investigate the issue.

The Democrat told The Washington Post in reports published on Sunday:

“We have to know who gave the order for this, who gave the order to conceal this, where did they draw the money for this,”

Eshoo said the committee might have to use its subpoena power to interview some officials who oversaw intelligence issues during the Bush administration.

Officials were vague about the precise nature of the highly secret program.

Two former agency officials told the daily it involved a series of proposals designed to provide US intelligence agencies with a “needed capability” – without providing details as to what was meant.

The latest proposal was aired in the spring of 2008 but was not carried out, the officials said, although they told the newspaper it did not involve interrogations of detainees or surveillance of US-based communications.

Both were highly controversial practices that have been roundly condemned in many quarters, as the United States prosecuted its war on terrorism during the Bush administration.

The New York Times, which broke the story about the role alleged to have been played by Cheney in keeping the CIA program under wraps, reported that CIA chief Leon Panetta ended the program when he learned of its existence on June 23.

Panetta is reported to have revealed Cheney’s role in a closed briefing one day later to the Senate and House intelligence committees.

“Because this program never went fully operational and hadn’t been briefed as Panetta thought it should have been, his decision to kill it was neither difficult nor controversial,”

An intelligence official told the newspaper, speaking on condition of anonymity.

News of the alleged program came as lawmakers from both President Barack Obama’s Democratic Party and opposition Republicans are in bitter dispute over whether the CIA informed Congress adequately and comprehensively about sensitive programs.

In May, Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi charged that the US spy agency misled lawmakers in 2002 about interrogation techniques widely seen as torture, including “waterboarding”, a simulated drowning method used on terrorism suspects.

On Sunday, senior Republican senator Judd Gregg conceded that in his view,

“if somebody told the CIA not to inform the appropriate members of Congress on information, that’s wrong”.

Nevertheless Gregg said:

“That isn’t a reason to disassemble the CIA and make them a whipping child in the middle.”

The Republic lawmaker said the controversy pointed to a

“continued attack on the CIA and our intelligence gathering organisations which is undermining the morale and capacity of those organisations to gather intelligence”.

Technorati Tags: Central Intelligence Agency, Dick Cheney, Kent Conrad

The wife of the next head of Britain’s spy agency has posted pictures of her husband, family and friends on the social networking site Facebook, details which could compromise security, a newspaper said on Sunday.

Sir John Sawers is due to take over as head of the Secret Intelligence Service in November. The SIS, popularly known as MI6, is Britain’s global intelligence-gathering organisation.

In what the Mail on Sunday called an “extraordinary lapse“, the new spy chief’s wife, Lady Shelley Sawers, posted family pictures and exposed details of where the couple live and take their holidays and who their friends and relatives are.

The paper said the Facebook page had “virtually no privacy protection” and could therefore be viewed by any of the many millions of Facebook users around the world. They were swiftly removed once authorities were alerted by the newspaper’s enquiries.

Though the Facebook profile for Sir John Sawyers has now been removed, this brings up an interesting question of whether we all have to officially declare what social networks we belong to.

Sir John Sawers, who will be known by the code-name “C” when he takes up his new post, currently serves as Britain’s Ambassador to the United Nations.
The newspaper said:

“There were fears that the hugely embarrassing blunder could have compromised the safety of Sir John’s family and friends,”

Publishing the story on its front page and the pictures on a double-page spread, the Mail on Sunday said the information

“could potentially be useful to hostile foreign powers or terrorists”.

It was the latest in a string of security blunders, lapses and leaks by British officials that have embarrassed the government of embattled Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

Technorati Tags: Ambassador to the United Nations, Facebook, Gordon Brown, Lady Shelley Sawers, MI6, Secret Intelligence Service, Sir John Sawers, SIS

Saddam Hussein told an FBI interviewer before he was hanged that he allowed the world to believe he had weapons of mass destruction because he was worried about appearing weak to Iran, according to declassified accounts of the interviews just released. The former Iraqi president also denounced Osama bin Laden as “a zealot” and said he had no dealings with al-Qaeda.

Saddam, in fact, said he felt so vulnerable to the “fanatic” leaders in Tehran that he would have been prepared to seek a “security agreement with the United States to protect it [Iraq] from threats in the region”.

The then US president George Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq six years ago on the grounds that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction and posed a threat to international security. At the time Bush administration officials strongly suggested Iraq had significant links to al-Qaeda, which was responsible for the terrorist attacks in the US on September 11, 2001.

Saddam, who during the interviews was often defiant and boastful, at one point wistfully acknowledged he should have permitted the United Nations to witness the destruction of Iraq’s weapons stockpile after the 1990-91 Gulf War.

The director of the archive, Thomas Blanton, said he could conceive of no possible national security reason to keep Saddam’s conversations with the FBI secret. An FBI spokesman, Paul Bresson, said he could not immediately explain the reason for the redactions.

The 20 formal interviews took place in 2004, between February 7 and May 1, followed by the casual conversations between May 10 and June 28.

Saddam was later transferred to Iraqi custody, and hanged in December 2006.

Technorati Tags: george bush, Paul Bresson, saddam hussein, Thomas Blanton, WMD

A lawyer for disgraced financier Bernard Madoff has sought a sentence of 12 years or less for his aging client, who he says “has an approximate life expectancy of 13 years”.

In a letter to the judge overseeing the case in New York, lawyer Ira Sorkin said any sentence longer than 12 years would constitute “an effective life sentence” for his client.

Madoff, 71, is due to be sentenced next week in a New York federal court. The former investor, who is accused of perpetrating a $US50 billion fraud, could face up to 150 years in prison.

Sorkin said the court should take into consideration Madoff’s surrender to police, acceptance of responsibility, cooperation with authorities, and the non-violent nature of his offence.

The letter said:

“A prison term of 12 years, just short of an effective sentence, will sufficiently address the goals of deterrence, protecting the public and promoting respect for the law, without being ‘greater than necessary’ to achieve them,”

Sorkin’s letter added that Madoff would describe his “pain” at the suffering his actions caused during an upcoming sentencing hearing.

“Both he and his counsel acknowledge the scope and magnitude of those losses and understand the victims’ calls for reprisal,”

But Sorkin urged the court to:

“set aside the emotion and hysteria attendant to this case and render a sentence that is just and proportionate to the conduct at issue.”

Technorati Tags: $50billion fraud, Bernard M, Bernard Madoff, fraud

Air France has replaced the air speed sensors on its entire fleet of Airbus A330 and A340 long-haul aircraft, a pilots’ union official says. The company had been under pressure from pilots who feared the devices could be linked to the crash of Flight 447.

In the deep waters of the mid-Atlantic, a Dutch ship began trolling with a high-tech US Navy listening device on Monday in search of the flight data and voice recorders. Investigators say information from those black boxes may be key to determining what caused Flight 447 to crash into the ocean with 228 people on board.

Experts looking into the May 31 crash of the four-year-old Airbus A330 jet have so far focused on the possibility that external speed monitors – called pitot tubes – iced over and gave false readings to the plane’s computers.

Air France had begun replacing the tubes on its A330 and A340 jets before the accident, but had not yet changed them on the plane that crashed.

After pilot complaints, the airline pledged to speed up the switch and it has now equipped all planes with the new sensors, said Erick Derivry, a spokesman for the SNPL pilots’ union.

Derivry stressed it is still “not proven or established” that the old sensors caused the accident.

Airbus chief executive Tom Enders defended the A300 on Monday as his company sought to sell more of the planes at the Paris Air Show.

“Their record is very, very impressive,”

“(They have) more than 16 million flight hours, more than 3 million flights, and this is so far one of the safest commercial aircraft built.”

“We are supporting the investigation as much as we can and we very much hope that the recorders will be found soon, so that we find out what really happened,”

At sea, searchers began towing a US Navy Towed Pinger Locator in a grid pattern in hopes of detecting emergency beacons from Flight 447′s black boxes, which could be lying thousands of metres below the ocean surface. The sounds begin to quickly fade 30 days after a crash.

The initial search spans 5,200 sq km of the Atlantic, said US Air Force colonel Willie Berges, commander of the American military forces supporting the search.

French military officials also are using nuclear submarine to hunt for the black boxes and a second Dutch ship carrying another pinger locater was to arrive on Monday afternoon.

“We have a limited amount of time to cover the search area,”

Berges said, but added the hunt will go on even if no pings are detected beyond the 30-day timeframe.

In Geneva, Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said French president Nicholas Sarkozy assured him the French government would compensate the families of crash victims. The two leaders were attending the International Labour Conference.

Silva told reporters, speaking through a translator:

“He (Sarkozy) said that they will take the responsibility to pay the indemnity for all the families that suffered with the crash, the Brazilian and French families and of other countries,”

An Air France spokesman, however, said the airline and its insurance company – not the government – are handling compensation. The official, who declined to name the insurance company, spoke on condition of anonymity as he wasn’t authorised to discuss the matter.

A spokeswoman for the French transport ministry also denied the government would pay compensation, saying this would be handled by Air France’s insurance. She was speaking on condition of anonymity in accordance with ministry policy.

The French presidential palace in Paris and the French mission in Geneva would not immediately comment.

Experts say the evidence uncovered up until now points to at least a partial midair break-up of the plane, with no evidence so far of an explosion or terrorist act.

French ambassador Pierre-Jean Vandoorne, a liaison between the victims’ families and authorities, said on Monday he met in Recife with leaders of Brazil’s search effort and was told they were keeping up their effort.

He said Brazilian and French aviators have spent 1,000 flight hours looking for victims and debris.

Brazilian authorities say they have recovered 43 bodies and another six have been found by French ships.

Vandoorne would not comment on the nationality or any other details of the bodies pulled from the ocean. Coroners say victims’ dental records and DNA samples from relatives will be needed to confirm the identities of the 16 bodies examined so far.

Technorati Tags: A330, a340, Air France, airbus, speed sensors