Free Republic

WASHINGTON — Reporters will be barred from hearings that begin Friday in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for 14 terror suspects transferred last year from secret CIA prisons, officials said Tuesday. Interest in the 14 is particularly high because of their alleged links to the Al Qaeda network. Among them is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, suspected mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. He was captured in Pakistan in March 2003. A New York-based human rights group that represents one of the 14 men accused the Pentagon of designing "sham tribunals." The organization contended that its client, Majid Khan,...

Richard Beardall is getting exactly what he wanted: a trespassing ticket from federal land managers for ignoring the rules and riding his ATV on a closed road in the San Rafael Swell. Beardall, three other ATV riders and a Jeep, moved a 10-foot barricade near an old uranium mine and made a half-mile roundtrip along the access road to the Muddy River on Saturday. The Bureau of Land Management closed the area to recreational vehicles in 1993 due to riparian damage, said Price, Utah-based BLM manager Roger Bankert. Beardall, president of the Americans with Disabilities Access Alliance knows that, but...

WASHINGTON - Republican activists Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed landed more than 100 meetings inside the Bush White House, according to documents released Wednesday that provide the first official accounting of the access and influence the two presidential allies have enjoyed. The White House released the Secret Service visit records to settle a lawsuit by the Democratic Party and an ethics watchdog group seeking visitors logs for the two GOP strategists and others who emerged as figures in the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal. Earlier this month, the White House suggested to the judge in that lawsuit that such records need...

There is a debate going on about the ease of searching someones court records in Wisconsin. www.Wisconsin-Circuit-Court-Access.com even lists the Classification Codes to search the WCCA database for specific types of court case. Should there be restrictions limiting the use of this database?

More National Guard troops went to work Friday on the Arizona-Mexico border, all part of Operation: Jumpstart. Right now, there are about 750 troops working in Arizona. About 300 are from Arizona and another 150 are from New York. 200 just went to work Friday from Kentucky. News 4's Lupita Murillo was there, and shows us just how these fresh troops are helping the Border Patrol. -------------- We're just east of an area known as Smugglers Gulch and this is where members of the Kentucky National Guard are building a road. The 206th Engineer Battallion is clearing the way for...

Congressional travelers took all-expenses-paid trips worth almost $50 million over a 5½-year period, with corporations and other private sponsors picking up the tab, according to a report released yesterday. The report raises fresh questions about influence-peddling that began last year when lobbying and corruption scandals erupted on Capitol Hill. “This is really a form of unregulated lobbying that is done completely out of public view,” said Jim Morris of The Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit group in Washington D.C. Morris led the center's nine-month study of congressional travel disclosure forms, which was joined by Northwestern University's Medill News Service...

HONOLULU, May 10, 2006 – A Defense Department program that 64 other federal agencies have adopted sees to it that wounded servicemembers from Iraq and Afghanistan and other people with disabilities have equal access to the information environment and opportunities throughout the federal government, a senior DoD official said here May 8. The Defense Department and other government agencies have the challenges of bringing people with disabilities back to work, Dinah F.B. Cohen told the audience May 8 during DoD''s Asian-Pacific American Heritage Month observance in Honolulu. Photo by Rudi Williams  (Click photo for screen-resolution image);high-resolution image available. Dinah F.B....

WASHINGTON, May 4, 2006 – In an effort to give Iraqi scientists access to academic knowledge they have long been without, the Iraqi Virtual Science Library was publicly launched here yesterday. "This knowledge is essential to the rebuilding of Iraq's scientific and university communities, which were devastated by three wars and the regime of Saddam Hussein," Paula J. Dobriansky, undersecretary of state for global affairs, said at the National Academy of Sciences. The online library will provide Iraqi scientists, engineers, physicians, researchers, and students the ability to access more than 17,000 academic journals and millions of scientific articles. The free...

WASHINGTON -- Lacking assurances from Russia and China that they would approve UN sanctions, the U.S. administration is trying to deny Iran technology, assets and especially weapons to slow down a suspected nuclear weapons program. As part of that campaign, a top U.S. State Department official on Friday urged Russia to drop its plan to sell Tor anti-aircraft missiles to Iran. "We hope and we trust that the deal will not go forward because this is not the time for business as usual with the Iranian government," said Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns, who has been trying to line up...

WASHINGTON - Not long after columnist Jack Anderson's funeral, FBI agents called his widow to say they wanted to search his papers. They were looking for confidential government information he might have acquired in a half-century of investigative reporting. The agents expressed interest in documents that would aid the government's case against two former lobbyists for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, who have been charged with disclosing classified information, said Kevin Anderson, the columnist's son. In addition, the agents told the family they planned to remove from the columnist's archive — which has yet to be catalogued...

October 7, 2003 was a bad day for Darius Anderson. A top fundraiser for Gray Davis, Anderson had counted ranking Davis administration officials, including then-deputy chief of staff Susan Kennedy, as friends. He founded his own lobbying firm in 1998, parlaying his connections to the administration into a thriving business. By 2003, Davis' last year in office, Anderson's Platinum Advisors pulled in $3.9 million in lobbying receipts, good for third best in the state. But when Davis was recalled in 2003, Anderson's influence diminished. His shop's lobbying receipts declined by more than $1 million as big name clients like Microsoft,...

Google Inc. is offering a new tool that will automatically transfer information from one personal computer to another. Anyone wanting that convenience, however, must authorize the Internet search leader to store the material for up to 30 days. That compromise, sought as part of a free software upgrade released Thursday, might be more difficult to swallow now that the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush is demanding to know what kind of information people have been hunting through Google's search engine. Google is fighting the Justice Department's subpoena in a federal court battle that's focusing more attention on the...

ast week Google announced its intention to resist a Department of Justice court action underway. DOJ wanted Google to allow a surveillance test of millions of its users’ search queries as part of its effort to enforce online pornography legislation passed by Congress to protect children. Yahoo, AOL, and MSN had already agreed to cooperate. But now, in an extraordinary development, Google has announced its decision to join the largest internet censorship effort in the world, being run by Communist China. Google will actively assist the Chinese government in barring access to thousands of web sites and search terms, in...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: November 29, 2005 Conservation Groups File Lawsuit to Protect National Parks From Harmful Off-Road Vehicle Use: Survey of Parks Reveals Extensive Damage from Off-Road Vehicles, Lack of Funding for Enforcement WASHINGTON, D.C. - Bluewater Network, a division of Friends of the Earth; the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA); and Wildlands CPR today filed a lawsuit against the National Park Service and theDepartment of Interior in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., alleging that those agencies have failed in numerous ways to protect the National Park System against the extensive damage caused by all-terrain vehicles and other off-road...

WASHINGTON, Oct. 17, 2005 – A case concerning colleges' right to receive federal funding but bar military recruiters from campuses because of disagreements over homosexual policy is scheduled to be argued before the Supreme Court this session. The 1996 "Solomon Amendment" provides for the government to deny federal funding to institutions of higher learning if they prevent ROTC or military recruitment on campus. In December, the court will hear a case arguing that the law impinges on the free speech rights of colleges and law schools. "The Solomon Amendment establishes that for military recruiting, which is an important public function,...

CNN filed suit for right to cover search for bodies of Katrina victims HOUSTON, Texas (CNN) -- Rather than fight a lawsuit by CNN, the federal government abandoned its effort Saturday to prevent the media from reporting on the recovery of the dead in New Orleans. Joint Task Force Katrina "has no plans to bar, impede or prevent news media from their news gathering and reporting activities in connection with the deceased Hurricane Katrina victim recovery efforts," said Col. Christian E. deGraff, representing the task force. U.S. District Court Judge Keith Ellison issued a temporary restraining order Friday against a...

WASHINGTON - Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, who has attacked violent video games as "a silent epidemic" among children, said she wants a federal investigation into one of the most popular, "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas." Clinton, D-N.Y., is asking the Federal Trade Commission to probe how users of the game can access "graphic pornographic and violent content" for the game from the Internet. In a letter dated Thursday to FTC chairwoman Deborah Platt Majoras, she also urged the agency to examine whether the game's rating of "M" for mature should be changed to an "Adults Only" rating. The Entertainment Software...

I haven't bee able to open www.NewsMax.com's website for several weeks. Does anyone know why?

Will the Real News Fabricator Please Stand Up? May 19, 2005 By Debbie Schlussel The Detroit News and its star reporter, David Shepardson, got caught with their pants down. They ran a fake story. But no-one noticed. No-one, except me—which lead to Detroit News Editor and Publisher Mark Silverman and his minions racing to hush the story and bury it, looking for some silent way to cover-up their very large, very exposed rears. They printed Shepardson’s phony story about a terrorist, and I exposed it, last week. Shepardson ran with it, without even a modicum of fact-checking (easily done with...

Protect Your Access to Health Information: Contact Your Congressman Today On May 12, 2005, Congressman Ron Paul (14th District -- Texas) introduced the Consumers Access to Health Information Act (Bill 2352). The purpose of the bill is to ensure that "consumers can receive truthful information about how foods and dietary supplements can cure, mitigate, and prevent specific diseases." Simply put, this bill will restore consumer access to information about the benefits of nutritional supplements, a right guaranteed under the First Amendment. Why Do We Need This Legislation? We need this legislation because the FDA has been trampling on our constitutional...