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, Ind. Former Democratic Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh has taken a new position with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce . The Star reported Tuesday that Bayh ‘s new position will be to analyze and promote ways to reduce government regulation. Republican Andrew Card, a former chief of staff to President George W. Bush , will also work as an outside adviser to the chamber, the nation’s largest probusiness advocacy group. Bayh says his new job will not involve lobbying. Bayh decided against seeking a third term in the Senate in 2010. Since then, he has become a partner in the Washington office of the McGuireWoods law firm, a senior adviser to a New Yorkbased private equity firm and a political commentator on FOX News .  

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• Salma Yaqoob canvassing during the 2010 General Election
• Celebrations after her election to Birmingham City Council in 2006.
• Laying wreaths at the old BSA Factory in Small Heath in memory of those who lost their lives during the Blitz bombing.
• On the Birmingham Stop The War Coalition protest in 2004.
• Presenting a petition at Birmingham Council House against petition against the closure of The Friends Institute in Moseley Road
• Showing support for Rover workers in 2005.
• Salma Yaqoob at a protest against banks refusing loans to small businesses
• On a Peace march in 2007 against youth and gang violence and crime in Lozells
• Public debate on the installation of anti-terrorism spy cameras in Birmingham.
• With residents in Balsall Heath in 2008 protesting at the closure of the post office in Cromer Road
• Canvassing in the Birmingham Sparkbrook constituency during the 2010 General Election
• Canvassing in the Birmingham Sparkbrook constituency during the 2010 General Election
• Defiant smiles after a narrow defeat in the 2010 General Election for Birmingham Sparkbrook
• Winner of the Public Service Excellence Award at the 2006 Asian Jewel Awards

Salma Yaqoob, the leader of Respect Party and Birmingham city councillor for Sparkbrook, has revealed that she is to step down as a councillor because of ill health.She has voiced concerns about the effects of a long-term illness and said she could not devote enough time to serve her constituents.She will officially announce her resignation to party activists later today (Thursday).However, mother-of-three Ms Yaqoob stressed she had not been forced out by racists who had plagued her with hate mail and death threats since she stated her opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

She said: Its a decision I have been struggling with for a year because I have had ongoing health issues. I realised I could not keep putting it off.

I care passionately about politics. My place on Birmingham City Council was hard won and it has been a genuine privilege to serve the people who gave me that mandate. However, I will carry on campaigning on issues I feel strongly about, such as the protection of essential public services, but as a member of the public.

It took a lot of soul-searching to come to this conclusion, but I must take a back seat for the sake of my health and my family, she added.

Ms Yaqoob has been called a firebrand by her opponents who perhaps mistake her passion for what she believes in as something more sinister.

But in reality, the 39-year-old is a typical mother, leading a normal family life. Strip away the political veneer and there is a bashful young woman with a cheeky self-depreciating sense of humour waiting to get out.

Shes a role model for thousands of young Muslim women and she takes this responsibility extremely seriously.

Ms Yaqoob, a qualified psychotherapist, was first elected to the city council in 2006. But her role as leader of the local Stop The War Coalition has ensured that she has always been a controversial figure.

She first entered politics 12 months previously as the Respect candidate in Birmingham Sparkbrook, where she was narrowly defeated by Labours Roger Godsiff in the 2005 General Election. Her passionate campaigning on local issues ensured she gained plenty of admirers, but her outspoken views on British involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan also gained her many enemies.

Ms Yaqoob received death threats from extremist groups and had billboards featuring her image defaced. She believed she was being targeted for being a Muslim woman in the public eye and for working with churches and synagogues.

Twelve months later in the local elections, she faced harassment and death threats from al Ghurabaa, an Islamist group later banned under the Terrorism Act 2006. Al-Ghurabaa claimed that it is an act of treason for Muslims to participate in Western democratic elections, and its members defaced her election posters with the word Kafir.

She said: I have had death threats, nasty phone calls, vile letters and still do. There have been threats to my children and Islamists have vowed to behead me because they think I have sold out.

But my stepping down from the council is nothing to do with them. I always said the racists would not beat me and they have not.

A 50-year-old Bartley Green man is currently on bail for psychiatric reports before he is sentenced on race hate charges concerning the Respect leader. Stuart Collins will be sentenced later this year.

Ms Yaqoob said: I seem to draw the ire of two lots of extremists. I get far right extremists who like to give me abuse and I get religious extremists.

“The irony is that the far right put me in the Islamic extremist brand and like to say that about me because I am a Muslim woman.

DES MOINES, Iowa

Some leading Republicans are trying to entice a more-established candidate to jump into the presidential race, a courtship that’s aggravating tensions between tea partyers and the GOP’s traditional business wing, a deep-pocketed source of financial support in the campaign.

Influential GOP donors have sought to coax Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush or New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to run. The goal is to find a contender with a strong record as a fiscal conservative and the political stature to challenge President Barack Obama.

The behind-the-scenes efforts have been taken as a snub by some tea-party organizers who favor the anti-establishment messages of Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, businessman Herman Cain and Texas Rep. Ron Paul, who are in the race or are considering it. New contenders could undermine their chances for donors and for success.

“It’s extremely upsetting to hear that the establishment is courting their own candidate when Michele Bachmann, the gold standard, has been in the fight, bucking the establishment that got us in this mess,” said Katrina Pierson, a Dallas tea-party leader and emerging national figure for the movement.

Daniels, Bush and Christie all are connected with the GOP’s organized fundraising bigwigs, not the more- numerous but less-affluent grass-roots conservatives, said Connecticut tea-party leader Bob MacGuffie.

“We’re trying to lead the big money with the small money, and they won’t let it,” said MacGuffie, who helped coordinate confrontational town-hall meetings with members of Congress in 2009 about federal health-care legislation.

The 2012 Republican field is wide open.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney is considered the closest to a front-runner, but his support for his state’s health-care plan has alienated some conservatives. Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty is not widely known.

The tea-party movement, which advocates a much- smaller government, was an energetic force in the 2010 elections. It has provided an audience for possible candidates such as Bachmann, a junior House member who has reveled in clashing with GOP elders.

Bachmann has generated enthusiastic responses from tea-party activists in Iowa, where the GOP nominating caucuses are set to begin the 2012 run to the nomination. She said the search for a more-traditional candidate could turn off some newly engaged conservative voters, whom the GOP needs to defeat Obama.

“I think people really want to know they are being heard, and when it appears that people’s concerns are being bypassed, by looking at other candidates, they really do feel like they are being ignored,” Bachmann said. “I understand that frustration.”

Former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum are trying to appeal to both tea-party and establishment Republicans. Neither has made much visible headway in Iowa.

The civil rights movement began in 1955 when Rosa Parks was so tired she refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus, right?

Not so fast, says writer and editor Emilye Crosby, who has collected essays on the era in her new book, Civil Rights History From the Ground Up: Local Struggles, a National Movement

She is signing the book at 5:30 p.m. today (July 12) at the lemuriabooks.com building next to Banner Hall in Jackson, Miss.

Parks act was hardly happenstance. The book points out she was a longtime civil rights activist before she ever took the step of defiance that led to her Dec. 1, 1955, arrest, sparking the Montgomery Bus Boycott and turning Martin Luther King Jr. into a national figure.

Historian John Dittmer starts his book, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi, with Medgar Evers, his brother, Charles, and other World War II veterans attempting to vote in Decatur, Miss. in 1946 — only to be turned away by an armed white mob.

Through the essays, Crosby concludes much of what happened was a grassroots effort by local people over time.

She also points out that while most activists embraced nonviolence in their protests, many of them also owned guns and believed in self-defense.

Civil rights pioneer Julian Bond said the book helps bring to life why we must have a history that takes seriously the people at the heart of the movement.

El Dorado County prosecutors released several items of evidence from the Jaycee Lee Dugard kidnap case today, saying they had talked to the Dugard family and “determined that certain details of this horrific case need to be revealed.”

The items include a video Nancy Garrido took of a parole officer visit to the Antioch home she shared with Phillip Garrido – the home where they were hiding Dugard as the officer visited.

The items also include videos the Garridos took of children at parks, a 1972 mug shot of Phillip Garrido, photos of videotapes Garrido tried to destroy using chemicals, and a scrap of paper that Dugard wrote her name on. That piece of paper came from the August 2009 questioning of the Garridos and Dugard at a Bay Area parole office where Dugard initially claimed her name was “Alissa.”

She recounts in her book, released today, how she finally worked up the courage to write her real name on the paper for officers, as well as her mother’s name.