Free Republic

The National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association (NLGJA) is pleased to announce that CNN will make a $100,000 donation to the NLGJA Scholarship Fund endowment to support the Leroy F. Aarons Scholarship Award. The academic award is named in the memory of NLGJA’s founder, the late Leroy F. Aarons, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and editor.

Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday raised the volume of their objections to the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. by grilling him over his ties to a Princeton alumni group that they called racist and misogynist. They also accused Judge Alito of always ruling against "the little guy" and of evading their questions on abortion and such other hot-button issues as his membership in Concerned Alumni of Princeton, which opposed the admission of women to the all-male school. "Explanations about the membership in this sort of radical group and why you listed it on your...

Remarks by the president at Arlington National Cemetery Veterans Day ceremony, Nov. 11, 1998: President Clinton: But if the inspectors are not permitted to visit suspect sites or monitor compliance at known production facilities, [Iraq's weapons of mass destruction] may as well be in Baltimore, not Baghdad. That would open a window of opportunity for Iraq to rebuild its arsenal of weapons and delivery systems in months -- I say again, in months -- not years. A failure to respond could embolden Saddam Hussein to act recklessly, signalling to him that he can with impunity develop these weapons of mass...

AT LEAST 45 people, most of them children, have been hospitalised in the Russian region of Chechnya with an illness that doctors say might be nerve-gas poisoning. Pupils, teachers and workers began reporting breathing trouble and headaches on Friday at a school in the town of Starogladovskaya, emergency workers said. As of yesterday, 38 children and seven teachers had been hospitalised, said Oleg Ugnivenko, a spokesman for emergency situations ministry. Preliminary investigation points to an unspecified kind of nerve gas, said emergency workers and Chechen government officials. Separatist rebels, who have been fighting Russian forces in Chechnya for most of...

The New York real-estate boom is claiming a different kind of casualty, according to an article in Sunday's New York Times. Keying off a new report issued by the Center for an Urban Future, Jennifer Steinhauer noted that, thanks to high housing prices, many of the creative types who work in Manhattan-centered fields like advertising, publishing, and the arts are being priced out of the city. This, presumably, could damage New York in the long run, since it's an article of faith among nouveau-urban thinkers that the creative classes are a huge economic advantage, as the author Richard Florida has...

JACKSONVILLE, Fla., Dec. 17 (UPI) -- For those who have everything, including several millions of dollars, the University of North Florida says a legacy may be the ideal present. The 33-year-old university in Jacksonville, Fla., "is offering legacies to you and three of your friends, family members or heroes" said the Robb Report. For $5 million each, people can name four of the university's five colleges: the College of Arts and Sciences; the College of Education and Human Services; the College of Health; and the College of Computing, Engineering and Construction. The state of Florida matches gifts in excess of...

BURBANK, Calif., Dec. 17 (UPI) -- A Nickelodeon production assistant has been arrested for allegedly fondling a 14-year-old boy at the TV network's Burbank, Calif., studio. Los Angeles County prosecutors charged Ezell Channel Friday with two felony counts of lewd and lascivious acts with a child, the Burbank Leader reported Saturday. The victim's mother filed a police complaint Tuesday after she found Channel's name on the "Megan's Law" Internet list of convicted child molesters, police said. Police told the newspaper Channel's job at the children's network did not put him in regular contact with minors. However, police said the alleged...

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's AIDS charity paid nearly a half-million dollars in consulting fees to members of his political inner circle, according to tax returns that provide the first financial accounting of the presidential hopeful's nonprofit. The returns for World of Hope Inc., obtained by the Associated Press, also show the charity raised almost all of its $4.4 million from just 18 sources. The donors gave between $97,950 and $267,735 each to help fund the Tennessee Republican's efforts to fight AIDS.

Key Sunni Muslim leaders in Iraq's violent Anbar province have concluded that their interests lie in cooperating with the United States, and they are seeking to extend a temporary truce honored by most insurgent groups for last week's elections. But at the same time, they are demanding specific steps by the U.S. military, including a reduction in military raids and an increase in development projects for their vast desert province that stretches from the edge of Baghdad to the Syrian and Jordanian borders.

Readers might have noticed a front-page article in the New York Times a week or so ago, reporting that Manhattan was in the midst of a baby boom. In the past five years, it seems, the number of borough children under age 5, including many in tony neighborhoods, has risen about 26%. This was taken as a sign, perhaps, that women can have it all: work, children and a hip urban lifestyle. As with many articles in the Paper of Record, the story's prominence might have had less to do with its import than with the desire to flatter the...

A Republican senator on Saturday accused The New York Times of endangering American security to sell a book by waiting until the day of the terror-fighting Patriot Act reauthorization to report that the government has eavesdropped on people without court-approved warrants. ''At least two senators that I heard with my own ears cited this as a reason why they decided to vote to not allow a bipartisan majority to reauthorize the Patriot Act,'' said Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas. ''Well, as it turns out the author of this article turned in a book three months ago and the paper,...

Think about everything you’ve heard about the conditions in Iraq, the role of U.S. forces, the multi-layered complexities of the war. Then think again. I’m a journalist. I read the news everyday, from several sources. I have the luxury of reading stuff newspapers don’t always have room to print. I read every tidbit I could on Iraq and the war before coming. Everything I thought I knew was wrong. Maybe not wrong, but certainly different than the picture in my head. I liken it to this; It was real struggle for me to choose to see the Harry Potter movies....

The White House said on Wednesday it had put the State Department in charge of U.S. efforts to stabilize and rebuild nations roiled by war or civil upheaval, seen as an attempt to avert the inter-agency bickering that plagued the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq. President George W. Bush signed the directive last week giving Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice the lead in such missions, a White House statement said. "(This will) empower the Secretary of State to improve coordination, planning and implementation for reconstruction and stabilization assistance for foreign states at risk of, in, or in transition from...

Robert G. Kaiser: Greetings to all. I hope we can use today's chat to talk about the war and elections in Iraq, and the transformed political situation in Washington, particularly in Congress. In the last hour President Bush gave the fourth in a series of speeches on Iraq, this one at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars here in Washington. It was a summation of the other speeches in this series; I saw nothing really new in it, but it struck me as a well-constructed speech, perhaps the best statement yet of the administration's current position We've got lots of...

FOR THE SECOND TIME IN recent weeks the Department of Defense has denied a request from The Weekly Standard to release unclassified documents recovered in postwar Iraq. These documents apparently reveal, in some detail, activities of Saddam Hussein's regime in the years before the war. This second denial could also be the final one: According to two Pentagon sources, the program designed to review, translate, and analyze data from the old Iraqi regime may be shuttered at the end of December, not just placing the documents beyond the reach of journalists, but also making them inaccessible to policymakers. As a...

Hundreds of anti-war protesters, including American Cindy Sheehan, attended an international peace conference in London on Saturday to condemn the Iraq conflict. Tony Benn, a veteran leftist politician in the governing Labour Party, opened the one-day meeting by calling the war "illegal, immoral and unwinnable."

The Akron Beacon Journal, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning paper now operating as a 'zine for the geriatric set, is getting squeezed to comedic proportions by San Jose's Knight Ridder, its parent company. Knight Ridder is under a dual assault by investors, who are demanding 30 percent profit margins, and the company's own leadership, namely CEO Tony Ridder, the heir-in-charge who's proved strikingly adept at running Knight Ridder into the ground. Executives recently asked employees to share pens and notepads with other departments, since no more office supplies will be purchased this year. The problem is that some departments have already...

Seymour M. Hersh, the famous investigative reporter, brought the fighting in Iraq into the halls of the Park School the other day. Nobody there got wounded, unless they imagined themselves a few years into the future. Hersh, the man who delivered some of the worst news out of Vietnam three decades ago and some of the worst news out of today's Middle East, painted a pretty bleak picture. "You guys," he said, gesturing to an auditorium packed with about 250 upper-school students, "are going to be the generation that has to clean up our mess. We're leaving you with a...

A convoy of trucks delivers food to a crowd of starving, frantic people in a Somali village. A famine-relief coordinator turns to you – the reporter – and a photographer. "I'm afraid there'll be a riot if we don't get these trucks unloaded quickly. Could you two please put down your notebook and camera, and help us? It might save a life." What do you do? In November 2004, G.D. Gearino, a columnist for the News & Observer in Raleigh, presented this scenario during a journalism ethics symposium at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. A group of professionals,...

The curious cat who wound up traveling to France in a cargo container touched down at the Milwaukee airport on Thursday, greeted by her family and a horde of reporters. A Continental cargo agent handed her over to 9-year-old Nick Herndon, son of the cat's owners, Donny and Lesly McElhiney. Emily meowed and pawed at reporters' microphones as the family answered questions.