When a car full of young men pulled up to Ali Kamara near his Staten Island home shortly after Barack Obama’s historic election victory, the teen didn’t run – he said he thought he was about to be stopped by cops.

Moments later, the 17-year-old high school student said he found himself instinctively covering his face as he had been taught in boxing class while his attackers pounded him with pipes and a baton, and yelled, “Obama!”

As he recovers from his injuries, Kamara, a Black Muslim, described the racially charged beating – and vowed he isn’t going to let the suspected hate attack shake him from his goal of becoming a pediatrician.

“I try to wake up early in the morning, go to school, make the best out of it, like, just to learn so that I can make my mom happy,” said the Curtis High School student, who has been taking extra classes to make up the time lost to his injuries.

“That can’t stop me from doing anything,” said Kamara, who suffered a head wound and was left with a limp by the early Nov. 5 beating.

“They could’ve killed me, though, and not make me try to be who I wanted to be when I grew up… I want to meet them to ask them why it had to be me,” Kamara said.

‘Cowards in The Night’

Two white teenagers, described as “cowards in the night” by a prosecutor, have been charged in the early Nov. 5 beating near the intersection of Pine and Broad streets in predominantly black Park Hill.

Ralph Nicoletti and Bryan Garaventa, both 18, face counts of assault as a hate crime and criminal possession of a weapon. The teens, who pleaded not guilty, could get up to 15 years in prison, if convicted.

Cops are looking for two other suspects in the attack, which prosecutors said came shortly after members of the quartet shouted racial slurs outside a local nail salon.

Kamara said he had spent most of election night playing video games at a friend’s house. Around midnight, after watching the election results, he walked home. He was a few houses away from his home when a car pulled up just before a stop sign.

“That is when the two kids hopped out and I thought it was the cops,” said Kamara.

“So, I stood there. I’m waiting for them to search me, because if I run, [they’re] going to chase me,” said Kamara, adding that cops had stopped him once in the past, and let him go after finding nothing amiss. “They’re going to say, I had drugs on me or ‘Why you running?’ or ‘We got to take you to the precinct to see if you’ve got any criminal (record).’

Next thing he knew, Kamara said, he was being beaten. He said he put his hands over his face as the attackers clubbed him and called him “Obama.”

Another car soon drove by and the four men fled. “That car saved my life,” Kamara said.

Kamara said he got up, ran and jumped over a fence of a nearby house, and called his mom – and 911.

“If I wasn’t going to get up, they was going to kill me,” said Kamara, “because they kept hitting me hard.”

A Mother’s Nightmare

Kamara’s mother thought she had left senseless violence behind eight years ago when she fled war-torn Liberia with her son and settled on Staten Island. Now, she said, her life has been turned upside down.

“Every day, I have to give him medication for his head,” said Janeba Ladepo, 36, a resident assistant at the United Cerebral Palsy facility near her son’s school. “I go to work and I cry. I think about my son everyday.”

“We don’t deserve this. We are a poor people coming to this country for our daily bread.”

Ladepo said she wanted to see the other two suspects brought to justice soon.

“I’m not going to say that all white people are bad,” she said. “Four people did this to my son. I consider them to be bad people.”

Demands for Justice

The incident has shaken Staten Island and spurred demands for justice. Elected officials have put up a $6,600 reward. Some residents have proposed a borough-wide conversation on race, and have called on schools to use Obama’s upcoming inauguration as a “teaching moment” about racial relations.

“There is hate because of fear. There is fear because of ignorance,” Hesham El-Meligy, a New Springville resident and Muslim community representative, said at a recent public meeting of the Staten Island African-American Political Association. “We have a problem of not acknowledging the problem.”

Dora Berksteiner, president of the Staten Island African-American Political Association, said she received about 10 phone calls from Staten Island residents about children taunting other children after Obama’s victory.

“We have a black president and for some people, it’s like the world has come to an end,” Berksteiner said. “When he is inaugurated, I expect we’ll have more problems.”

Guns N’ Roses guitarist Ron Thal is serious about his music – and his hot sauces.

With the long-awaited release of “Chinese Democracy” days away, Thal – known professionally as Bumblefoot – talked about his love of all things spicy and his contribution to Guns N’ Roses’ first album in 17 years.

“I was looking to bring something new to the songs that may not have been there before,” said Thal, who joined the band in 2006, after most of the “Chinese Democracy” songs had been written.

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The FBI investigated American chess champion Bobby Fischer in the 1960s after the Cold War icon created a controversy at a tournament in Cuba, where he famously played against Fidel Castro, according to newly disclosed documents.

The FBI dossier, obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request, shows the bureau’s Mexico City office began probing the one-time chess prodigy after a tumultuous headline-grabbing trip to Havana.

Fischer was a Cold War hero who would ultimately best the Soviets at a game they had dominated, at a time when beating Communists stirred national passions.

Before ascending to take the world crown in an historic 1972 match against Russia’s Boris Spassky, the Brooklyn-reared Fischer traveled the globe to play in chess tournaments.

Trip to Cuba

In 1966, Fischer flew to Havana, leading the U.S. delegation at the 17th Chess Olympiad, a top international competition. It was an era when Washington tightly controlled travel to Communist nations – U.S. officials, in fact, had rejected Fischer’s bid to compete there in a tournament a year earlier.

Once in Cuba, Fischer sparked an international stir when he refused to play against the Soviets because the match would be on a Saturday, conflicting with his religious practices. The Soviets were outraged and protested.

The controversy drew worldwide press coverage, and chess officials intervened. Fischer got his way and the match was rescheduled.

The FBI interviewed several sources it considered reliable about the incident. One unnamed source asserted the American chess team “had attempted to embarrass the Cuban Government in order to prevent any future world championship from being held in Cuba.”

Played Castro

Among the opponents Fischer faced in the rescheduled matches: Spassky. Fischer took an early lead but then made a crucial mistake and ended with a draw. The American team went on to take second place to the Russians largely due to Fischer’s extraordinary performance.

At another point during his stay in Cuba, Fischer played against Castro. Both sides got advice from chess masters, and Castro won.

The friendly competition, including a congratulatory handshake at the end of the event, was captured in news photographs. The documents released by the FBI do not discuss the Fischer-Castro meeting. It’s unclear whether the match is addressed in the passages withheld by the bureau.

The dossier is 12 pages, but portions were redacted by the FBI, which claimed sections should remain shielded from public view because of national security, privacy and other reasons.

Extended Visit

Fischer’s refusal to play on Saturday was not the only part of his trip to raise questions in the FBI dossier. He did not leave Cuba with the rest of the U.S. team, and extended his visit. The FBI file does not document what Fischer did there after the matches were over.

One bureau report quoted an unnamed source who “felt it unusual that when the team returned to the United States, Fischer remained on in Cuba. He felt maybe Fischer wanted to see what the Castro regime was accomplishing.”

The FBI decided to re-examine whether Fischer’s 1966 trip to Cuba was “authorized.” The file later documented the trip to the tournament was valid.

FBI agents in Mexico City and Washington not only interviewed sources, they also combed through documents such as Fischer’s birth certificate, travel records, letters and other information on file at the U.S. Department of State’s passport office.

Dossier Compiled

The FBI compiled a four-page biography of Fischer, from his birth in Chicago to his Brooklyn childhood and his chess triumphs. The bio recounts trips for tournaments around the world, including matches in Russia and Yugoslavia, and details how Fischer lost his passport in Buenos Aires in 1960.

The FBI also examined documents about Fischer’s proposed trip to Cuba a year before the events that spurred its investigation. In April 1965, Fischer was invited to compete in Havana at a tournament named after the legendary Cuban champion, Jose Raul Capablanca.

The documents obtained from the FBI detailed Fischer’s repeated attempts and subsequent rejections to compete in the tournament late that summer. Two publications wanted Fischer to write about his trip. One was the magazine Saturday Review, which wanted a story about Cuba. The second was Chess Life.

Though Fischer would go on to author a notable book about chess, he had little professional writing experience at that time.

Passport officials rejected his 1965 bid to visit Cuba. They noted U.S. rules at the time did not deem chess tournaments a valid reason to visit the Communist country. They also “doubted Fischer would qualify as a bona fide journalist.”

While Fischer did not travel to Havana in 1965, he still played in the Capablanca tournament, competing via telegraph from the Marshall Chess Club in New York. He tied for second through fourth places – an unusual accomplishment that helped put chess on the map in America.

When Fischer finally did go to Cuba in 1966, he did not pursue any journalistic ambitions. A review of magazine articles published by the now defunct Saturday Review show no stories about Cuba by Fischer in the aftermath of his trip. A spokesman for Chess Life said that while he did write a few stories for the publication, none were about the matches in Cuba.

There is another notable omission in the portions of the documents released by the FBI: There’s no mention that Fischer’s mother, Regina, had been tracked by the feds from about 1942 until 1967 for suspicion of Soviet espionage. That investigation never led to charges.

Fischer’s FBI documents were obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request, which calls on the agency to release certain documents to the public once the person has died.

There is no evidence that the Fischer dossier ever reached the desk of then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, whose long tenure included amassing files on hundreds of public figures who had not committed crimes – a practice decried by many critics.

Bizarre Decline

Fischer is largely remembered as the troubled boy genius who faded into solitude but never obscurity. In 1992, U.S. officials barred him from a rematch with his old rival Spassky in Yugoslavia, a country that was falling apart and, in the wake of Serbian domination, was the subject of a United Nations embargo. In response, Fischer infamously spat on the order, and left the United States.

He faced prosecution on tax charges. On occasion, he emerged to grant rare interviews, in which he would spew anti-Semitic and anti-American venom.

Fischer referred to the attacks of September 11, 2001, as “wonderful news” and repeatedly called for the toppling of the U.S. government and the imprisonment of the Jewish people. Despite his tarnished public image, Fischer is also remember by many as the greatest chess player in American history

Fischer died January 17, 2008 of renal failure at the age of 64 and is buried in Iceland.

The Yorkville Common Pantry handed out 2,200 turkeys in the days before Thanksgiving – but that wasn’t enough to meet the demand of the 9,000 families the charity serves.

“Unfortunately, we’ve had to turn [people] away, that’s the sad reality,” said Daniel Reyes, director of the pantry, which raised $35,000 to buy the turkeys.

Rising food costs, tough economic times and an increase in hungry people are proving a triple whammy for city food pantries and soup kitchens this holiday season.

Growing Hunger

There’s been a 28 percent hike in the number of people using food pantries and soup kitchens in the last year, bringing the number of New Yorkers served to 1.3 million, according to the New York City Coalition Against Hunger.

Meanwhile, the number of people across the country seeking help from food relief programs has risen 25 to 45 percent, while donations have gone up by 18 percent, according to Feeding America.

“Actually, during Thanksgiving people are less likely to go hungry because more people give out food,” said Joel Berg, director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger. “So if it’s this bad now, just imagine the rest of the year.”

Major Challenges

The tough economy and rising food prices are presenting food relief operations with major challenges. A gallon of milk costs nearly a dollar more than last year, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation, and the prices of such Thanksgiving staples as turkey, cranberries, whipping cream and pumpkin pie mix are up.

“We’ve raised an unprecedented amount of money this year,” said Reyes, whose pantry gave away about 1,000 turkeys in 2006. “We’ve worked very hard, but at the same time the cost of Thanksgiving has also gone up a lot.”

“We are in a food crisis and it becomes glaringly clear at this time with the holidays when folks have to get turned away because we are unable to provide them with food,” he added.