Free Republic

PHILADELPHIA - One of the military's new wartime challenges is dealing with global media that can instantly spread around the word information that may be false or damaging to U.S. interests, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Wednesday. The United States needs to respond to anti-American messages with greater agility and speed if it is to win the ideological struggle with Islamic extremists, Rumsfeld said in a speech to members of the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia. "We'll need to develop considerably more sophisticated ways of using these new means of communication that are now available to reach the many and...

Conservative groups that spent millions of dollars preparing for a Senate fight over the use of the filibuster to block votes on President Bush's judicial nominees reacted with outrage Monday night at a compromise that averted the showdown.'Unfortunately, 14 senators are allowed to speak for all of America, and they are able to pick and choose the nominees they find acceptable, said Lanier Swann, director of government relations for Concerned Women for America.She predicted that senators from both sides of the aisle would face political fallout from the issue.The Reverend Louis P. Sheldon, chairman and founder of the Traditional Values...

NEW YORK -- The NHL season is dead -- again. After 6½ hours of negotiations, with Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux at the bargaining table, talks broke down Saturday, leaving the already canceled hockey season beyond saving. "It's certainly not going to be resurrected after today," players' association senior director Ted Saskin said. "It's 100 percent certain coming out of today's meeting that nothing could impact the cancellation of the season." Just three days after the season was called off because of the protracted lockout, the NHL and the union restarted talks at an undisclosed location in New York. Commissioner...

CNN is reporting an explosion at a Spanish hotel in the southern part of the country...

We have generally decried the recent trend toward attempts to settle elections after the fact in the courts. But the voting controversy in Washington State is a special case. As Byron York reports elsewhere in [the Feb. 14 issue of NR], it is impossible to know who truly won the Washington gubernatorial race between Republican Dino Rossi and Democrat Christine Gregoire. Gregoire has just taken office, having overtaken Rossi in a second recount. Her winning margin: 129 votes out of 2.8 million votes cast. Rossi had won the initial post-election-day count by 261 votes, and the first machine recount by...

TUKWILA — The state Republican Party said in court papers filed yesterday that it has found 300 illegal votes and more than 400 that can't be verified in the governor's election. With Christine Gregoire winning the governor's race by 129 votes, Republican Party Chairman Chris Vance says he now has found far more than enough evidence to persuade a judge to nullify the election and call for a rematch between Gregoire and Republican Dino Rossi. Lawyers and Republican staffers are continuing to look county by county for votes cast by felons, in the name of dead people or by people...

Militants have executed two Pakistani hostages they were holding in Iraq, says Al-Jazeera television. The group, calling itself the Islamic Army in Iraq, announced it had kidnapped two Pakistanis working for US forces and had sentenced them to death because their country was discussing sending troops to Iraq. In a new videotape sent to the station the men said they had carried out their threat, the station reported. The newsreader said the video showed the corpses of the two men, however the station did not show the footage. The kidnapped men were identified by Pakistan as engineer Raja Azad, 49,...

Unconfirmed Report: Kidnapped Tri-State Soldier Killed 1 hour, 24 minutes ago Add Local - WLWT ChannelCincinnati.com to My Yahoo! There are unconfirmed reports that a soldier from the Tri-State kidnapped in April in Iraq (news - web sites) has been killed, WLWT has learned. Pfc. Matt Maupin, 20, of Batavia, Ohio, a member of the 724th Transportation Company, was captured April 9. His convoy was attacked by gunmen using rocket-propelled grenades and other weapons. According to military representatives close to the Maupin family who spoke to WLWT, sources are reporting that the Al Jazeera TV network has a videotape of...

The Case Against Bastards For too long our society has been in decay. A slow rot eating away at our institutions and the collective soul of America itself.

Anti-war group to be allowed in Mill Valley Memorial Day parade [ more kooky antics from kooky vally] By Carla Bova, IJ reporter This year anti-war activists will march along with everyone else in the 25th annual Memorial Day parade in Mill Valley. The Marin Peace and Justice Coalition was banned from participating last year and held a march of its own after the group's application was rejected by the I Love A Parade Committee, which puts on the private event. The parade is not city-organized. "We had been struggling to be allowed to participate for a number of years,"...

SCO to sue Linux user Tuesday Last modified: March 1, 2004, 4:35 PM PST By Stephen Shankland Staff Writer, CNET News.com SAN FRANCISCO--The SCO Group plans to expand its Linux legal attack on Tuesday by filing a lawsuit against a large company using the open-source operating system. SCO Chief Executive Darl McBride announced the plan Monday at the Software 2004 conference here, but he didn't identify the company beyond saying it would have a recognized name. SCO, which owns a disputed amount of Unix intellectual property and claims some of the code was improperly used in Linux, threatened in November...

Thanksgiving may find Edrina, 32, giving birth to a new baby, a daughter, the doctors say, who is due on the holiday. The new baby will add to Edrina's already very busy household when she comes home to join nine brothers and sisters. Edrina is a single mother who is grateful to her own mother for lending a hand. "My mom really helps me out a lot," she says. "She tries hard to help me."

While the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts strained to produce a gassy, weaselish decision on so-called "gay marriage," I was occupied with other things. Our dog Cody was dying, succumbing rapidly to what the vet called an "aggressive" form of cancer. It had started with a tumor on his heart, and then the awful cells had gotten into his bloodstream, started breaking out on his skin, and, the way it looked at the end, had infested his lungs. Every day, I spent as much time with him as I could. I took him on all his favorite rides, on his...

IYADH, Saudi Arabia, Sept. 18 — The last few American combat troops pulled out of the Prince Sultan Air Base here earlier this month, officially closing the Persian Gulf headquarters used by the Air Force during both Iraq wars and concluding a nearly 13-year run of extensive United States military operations in Saudi Arabia. The withdrawal signaled the end of a long strategic arrangement, mutually beneficial until it fell victim to tensions resulting from the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, in which 15 of 19 hijackers were Saudi citizens. Since then, the countries' fragile diplomatic relations have...

Veteran actor Marlon Brando has been revealed as the unexpected grandfather of wild rocker Courtney Love in a new book. The singer's mother, psychologist Linda Carroll, claims she has taken DNA tests to confirm she is the Godfather star's daughter. Love, former wife of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, says, "I am incredibly shocked by this news. I have heard Mr. Brando has more than 30 children so I can't imagine how many cousins I have." The link is Linda's mother, novelist Paula Fox. She met Brando in the 1940's through famed drama teacher Stella Adler, and the two enjoyed a...

A California man is about to lose his property. Help.Here is Mr. Avery's letter grasping for straws in a flood of overpowering big government. The property is in a flood plane on Bethel Island, CA, but no one lives there. They want to tear down his trailer because it might flood. How can this type of oppressive government be stopped?. Can Mr. Avery be helped? Here is Mr. Avery's cry for help. His property is directly across the street from me and I am merely trying to help. What can be done?Good Hunting... from Varmint Al To Whom It May...

June 4— BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Belgian police have intercepted at least five envelopes containing white powder, including one addressed to the prime minister's office and another to the U.S. embassy, fearing it may be anthrax or another dangerous substance. Police had yet to determine the nature of the suspicious powder, a spokesman for the interior ministry said.The letters were reminiscent of the anthrax mailings in the United States which killed five people following the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington.Those letters caused a global scare that the bacteria was being used as a biological weapon.Belgian police seized...

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Hollywood's movie studios face a key test in their battle to defend copyright holders from digital pirates, when a federal court in California this Friday hears a case filed by a maker of software that allows users to copy DVDs. At stake for the studios are potentially billions of dollars in revenues that would be lost if nearly perfect digital copies of movies on DVD were sold in large quantities on the black market or circulated on the Internet in digital files. But the privately held software maker, St. Louis-based 321 Studios, argues that its software...

(snip) NBC’s Kerry Sanders, reporting from near An Nasiriyah, said U.S. officials were made aware that at least one female prisoner was being held at Saddam Hospital when a note was passed to a Marine on Tuesday morning. In handwriting that looked as though it was written by a female, the note said, in English: “She’s still alive. She’s in room [XXX].” A resident of An Nasiriyah who spoke English approached Sanders on Tuesday and told him: “There’s a woman in the Saddam Hospital who’s an American soldier. Please make sure the people in charge know that she’s being tortured.”...

Top Iraqi officials met with President Saddam Hussein on Saturday and expressed their ultimate confidence in a victory over US and British forces, state television said. "The meeting expressed deep confidence that the Americans and Britons will be definitively defeated worldwide after their defeat in Iraq is completed," the television said. It said Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan, Deputy Prime Minister Tareq Aziz and Saddam's younger son Qussay, who leads the regime's elite fighting forces, attended the meeting.