Free Republic

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The U.N. Security Council on Thursday extended for another year the mandate of the international commission investigating the murder of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri. A resolution adopted unanimously by the 15-nation council also authorized the commission to delve more deeply into a related investigation of 14 other bomb attacks in Lebanon that investigators suspect are linked to Hariri's assassination. The council acted after chief investigator Serge Brammertz reported "considerable progress" in the commission's work but gave no indication he knew yet who was behind the crime. Hariri, who became a critic of Syria's decades-long...

LA PAZ, Bolivia (Reuters) - Bolivia's government took out full-page newspaper ads on Wednesday announcing its aim to redistribute nearly a fifth of the country's territory as angry landowners vowed to form land-defense groups. Leftist President Evo Morales has pledged an "agrarian revolution" to redistribute idle farmlands to the impoverished country's landless peasants -- a move that has highlighted divisions between the poor majority and the rich elite. Many landowners in the agricultural heartland of Santa Cruz are bitterly opposed to the land reform. At an emergency meeting on Tuesday, they resolved to "set up land-defense committees to protect our...

If you want to know what the mullahs want you to think, just read the “reporting” by the Washington Post’s own Karl Vick, who Wednesday shared a byline with Dafna Linzer from Tehran to announce nothing less than “a profound change in Iran’s political orthodoxy.” You may have thought that Iranian clerical fascism was not subject to such dramatic transformation, but Vick, the consensus candidate for the Walter Duranty Prize awarded to apologists for tyrants, believes otherwise. And what is the evidence? The Iranians are calling for direct talks with the United States on the mullahs’ project to go nuclear....

New research shows a potential link between prosperous times and fatal heart attacks. Careful what you wish for. You're more likely to die from a heart attack when the economy is strong and unemployment is low, new research shows. An uptick in the nation's economy corresponds to an increased number of fatal heart attacks, according to a recent study by University of North Carolina-Greensboro economist Christopher Ruhm. The study, which tracked heart attacks against economic activity from 1979 to 1998, found that when unemployment drops by 1%, the number of heart-attack fatalities grows by 1.3%. Why? A go-go economy generally...

A wounded warrior By Tim Maxwell, Tim Maxwell is stationed at Camp Lejeune, N.C. E-mail: woundedteam@sempermax. com. I AM A MARINE — a lieutenant colonel. I know about war. I have studied it for more than 20 years. I have been deployed overseas six times. Three times since 9/11. Recently, I learned all about another part of war. I was badly wounded during a mortar attack in Iraq in October 2004.

...Beirut is where the taboos in the region--against alcohol, dating, sex, scandalous clothing, homosexuality, body modification, free speech and dissident politics--break down. Its culture is liberal and tolerant, even anarchic and libertarian. The state barely exists. The city's pleasures are physical and decadent. Beirut is where American and European tourists used to go to loosen up, gamble, drink booze and pick up women--and that was in the 1950s. Today it is where Saudis and other Gulf Arabs like to vacation because they can do, think, wear, and say whatever they want. Last month the Economist Intelligence Unit's Index of Political...

Al-Jazeera has set up this poll about whether you think that Syria is guilty of the explosions in Lebanon. The page is in arabic! The poll is on the right hand side of the page (arabic goes from right to left), right above the last advertisement on the page (the poll is in the middle of the page so you need to scroll down a little). The Syrians have been voting No (second choice) and therefore Lebanese are losing 55 to 45. You know what to do...

IT IS TIME to rescue The Great Raid. The Great Raid is in theaters now, though it may not be for long unless movie-going America quickly realizes that there is a wonderful and inspiring film in its midst, one that celebrates courage, sacrifice and endurance, and which unabashedly proclaims that hope (plus superior firepower and tactical surprise) can conquer all. It is a movie which deserves a vast and appreciative audience. It is 1945, and Douglas MacArthur has returned to the Philippines. More than 500 American survivors of the Bataan Death March languish at the Cabanatuan prison camp, and the...

BEIRUT, Lebanon - A bomb Tuesday killed a politician who was a harsh critic of Syria's power in Lebanon, police said, the second slaying of an anti-Syrian figure this month. ADVERTISEMENT The explosion that killed former Communist Party chief George Hawi as he rode in his car came two days after elections that gave the anti-Syrian opposition a majority in Lebanon's parliament, breaking the hold of Damascus' allies. Opposition figures quickly accused Syrian agents and their allies in the Lebanese security services in Hawi's assassination, as they did in the June 2 slaying of opposition journalist Samir Kassir and the...

SAN JOSE, Calif. - The mysterious finger that a woman claimed to have found in a bowl of Wendy's chili came from an associate of her husband who lost the finger in an industrial accident, police said Friday. ADVERTISEMENT "The jig is up. The puzzle pieces are beginning to fall into place, and the truth is being exposed," Police Chief Rob Davis said. The discovery of the finger's owner marks a significant break in a case that has confounded authorities for nearly two months, ever since Anna Ayala claimed she bit down on the well-manicured, 1 1/2-inch finger in a...

Today, former graduate student Scott McConnell filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York, because it expelled him from its education master’s program based on his personal beliefs. In January 2005, administrators summarily dismissed McConnell because he had expressed views that opposed "multicultural education” and had stated in an academic assignment that "corporal punishment has a place in the classroom.” Story Continues Below The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) took up McConnell’s case, reminding Le Moyne, a Jesuit college, that its actions breached its own promises to respect students’ academic freedom and due process....

The Constitution is not a "living" document that changes with the times U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia says, but is to be interpreted on what the Founding Fathers meant at the time they drafted the Constitution. That's how he determines the meaning of the document he told an audience Monday at Nashville's Vanderbilt University according the Vanderbilt Hustler.com. Story Continues Below "The Constitution is not a living organism," Scalia insisted. Taking a position at odds with current opinion that holds that the Constitution changes in order to meet the needs of a changing society and thus acts as a...

BEIRUT, Lebanon - There were people in wheelchairs, fathers pushing strollers, young men in T-shirts and designer sunglasses, all in all at least 20,000 Lebanese took part in a run Sunday to demonstrate unity after two months of political turmoil. AP Photo Under a warm spring sun, the runners set off from Beirut's Riad Solh Square on three-mile course that passed near the seafront boulevard where former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri and 19 others were killed in a massive bomb attack on Feb. 14. They finished at Martyrs' Square, the scene of a demonstration that brought down the government and...

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, headed for almost-certain approval as the new chief of the World Bank, said his first official move would be to withdraw funding to poor nations whose people suffer from a "low quality of life with little hope of recovery". "I look at some of these impoverished people and think, 'I wouldn't want to live that way'," said Mr. Wolfowitz. "The most merciful thing to do is cut their funding and let these people slip into a peaceful, euphoric state through dehydration and starvation." The new World Bank chief said he has the authority to deprive...

BEIRUT: Business owners struggled to come to terms with what they estimated to be millions of dollars in financial losses stemming from Saturday evening's massive bomb blast that targeted one of the country's primary industrial zones. Scores of anxious shop owners pressed up against police tape at the scene of devastation in the East Beirut suburb of Sad al-Boushrieh on Monday, begging officers for permission to get a mere glimpse of what remained of their establishments. Locals fear the bombing, the third in a series of attacks on Christian areas over the last two weeks, was aimed at wrecking the...

BEIRUT, Lebanon - With Lebanese democrats speaking up and Syria's occupying forces pulling out, it may sound unsurprising that one of Beirut's leading Arabic newspapers ran a searing critique this week of Baathist rule in Damascus, under the headline: "Why Lebanon Is Becoming Larger and Syria Smaller." Except the author of this piece is not Lebanese, but Syrian, writing - at serious risk - from Damascus. Signing himself as Hakam al-Baba, this journalist goes on to identify himself as someone who has worked for the past 20 years for a Syrian state newspaper, Tishrin. And like the Lebanese who for...

The link forwards you to some pictures of the Pro-Lebanon demonstration that was held in Chicago on Friday March 11, 2005. I don't know how to post them here. I thank the US for standing so firmly against Syria's occupation of Lebanon. The demonstration's objectives was to: -Thank President Bush and the American people for their support of Lebanon's freedom, sovereignty, and democracy -demand that Syria leave Lebanon immediately along with its secret agents -demand that an independent inquiry is completed to find out who murdered Rafik Hariri -give support to the people of Lebanon who are risking their lives...

Elmhurst church members pray that Syrian forces will leave their homeland. For years, worshipers at Our Lady of Lebanon Catholic Church have prayed for change in a Middle Eastern homeland occupied by Syrian troops and divided among religious factions. Now many parishioners, like other Lebanese throughout the Chicago area, hope they are seeing an answer to those prayers as Christians and Muslims in Beirut unite to protest Syria's 29-year presence in the Mediterranean country. Organizers from the church--which has been meeting in another Catholic sanctuary in Elmhurst while constructing its own building--are planning to join other community groups in a...

BEIRUT: Emotions ran high at Martyrs' Square on Saturday evening, where thousands of demonstrators listened to Syrian President Bashar Assad's much anticipated speech in the Syrian Parliament. Broadcast on two large screens flanking the stage used by organizers of the ongoing sit-in at the square, Assad's speech was interrupted by several bouts of booing and chants of "Syria Out!" Amid the sea of Lebanese flags were banners calling for Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon and national unity, as well as pictures of slain former Premier Rafik Hariri. Skepticism was in the air from the outset. "Alright, let's hear what [Assad] has...

BEIRUT: At exactly 12.55 p.m. a crowd of tens of thousands of people went completely silent, whereas a second before they were screaming out their hunger for "freedom, sovereignty and independence." Seven days after the assassination of former premier Rafik Hariri, tens of thousands of Lebanese carrying anti-Syrian banners swarmed the seafront area where Hariri was killed last Monday, roaring thundering chants of "Yalla, Syria out." "We have had enough of Syrian secret intelligence ruling our country and killing those they don't like," shouted Joseph Njeim, as he distributed black and white flags printed by university students with the slogan:...