Free Republic

Congress: What, exactly, does House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's latest junket to Iraq have to do with her official duties? Her inability to keep her amateur fingers out of the foreign policy pie suggests a political power grab.Pelosi went to Iraq uninvited Saturday, and her reception was less than warm. Iraq's democratically elected Nouri al-Maliki government wanted nothing to do with her until she admitted the truth about Iraq's progress as a nation and quit braying that U.S. troops must be immediately pulled out, a proposal so naive that even radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr opposes it. Message through, Pelosi admitted that...

TWO weeks after my husband and I quit our jobs, gave up our Brooklyn apartment and moved to Mexico to travel and work as freelance reporters, I discovered I was pregnant. Among the subjects I hoped to write about in Mexico was its restrictive abortion laws. Now I was contemplating an abortion myself. Even though my period was 10 days late, it hadn’t occurred to me that I could be pregnant....

I don't know if this is allowed on FR (sorry if I'm violating something here), but there was a compelling new book/author being featured this morning on FOX and Friends by free-lance New York-based journalist Steven Vincent entitled, "In the Red Zone." Vincent, a swarthy and dangerous-looking guy embedded himself among the people of Bagdhad, not in the safety of the Green Zone, but out in the town. Talking to hundreds of Iraqis over months in late '03 and early '04, the premise of his book as he explained it today is that current journalists aren't reporting the war in...

NEW YORK The New York Times angered hundreds of freelance photographers last week when it distributed a contract some are calling "outrageous," "insulting" and just plain "sad." The contract asks freelance photographers to assign joint copyright ownership to the Times (Click for QuikCap), giving the newspaper the absolute right to exploit the photographs for the life of the copyright and collect all licensing fees, without payment to the photographer. The Times had no previous written agreement with freelancers. Photographers, copyright lawyers and industry trade groups have objected to the new contract, saying it puts the freelancer at a distinct disadvantage....