Webcast News Service, 5 October 2008

Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin has stepped up efforts to portray Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama as unacceptable for American voters -- accusing him of being friendly with "terrorists."

Palin -- the governor of Alaska -- based her charge Saturday on Senator Obama's relationship with William Ayers, now a college professor in Illinois.

Forty years ago, Ayers helped found the Weather Underground, a left-wing terrorist group opposed to the Vietnam War. In 1969, Ayers participated in planting a bomb at a statue dedicated to police casualties in the 1886 Haymarket Riot. The blast broke almost 100 windows and blew pieces of the statue onto the nearby Kennedy Expressway. Ayers later participated in the bombings of New York City Police Headquarters in 1970, the United States Capitol building in 1971, and the Pentagon in 1972.

Ayers became a fugitive in 1970 after an explosion at a Greenwich Village townhouse, in which Weatherman member Ted Gold, Ayers' close friend Terry Robbins, and Ayers' girlfriend, Diana Oughton, were killed when a nail bomb (an anti-personnel device) they were assembling exploded. Ayers was a fugitive until 1980 when he turned himself in. Charges were later dropped due to prosecutorial misconduct.

In an interview published in 2001 in the New York Times on the same day as the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Ayers was quoted as saying "I don't regret setting bombs" and "I feel we didn't do enough." When asked if he would "do it all again," he replied, "I don't want to discount the possibility."

In the 1990's Obama and Ayers served together on a Chicago schools project and on a charitable board. In 1995, Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, hosted a "meet-and-greet" fundraiser for Obama at their home in the Hyde Park section of Chicago, where the Ayers and the Obamas lived. It was at this meeting that then-Illinois State Senator Alice Palmer introduced Barack Obama as her chosen candidate for the 1996 Democratic primary. Obama was elected to replace Palmer, beginning his political career.

With just one month to go before the U.S. presidential election, senior aides say the Republican candidate is also changing his campaign strategy.

They say McCain plans to focus more on his opponent's character and liberal political views.

Obama and McCain are preparing for the second of their three debates, Tuesday in Nashville, in the southern state of Tennessee.