Free Republic

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has sworn in U.S. President Barack Obama’s “peace advisor” Dan Shapiro as new ambassador and reveals the United States learns so much about Israel by spending time in Florida. Shapiro served for two years and a half as White House senior director for Middle East and North Africa at the National Security Council and has been one of the president’s closest advisors during the period that the Middle East “peace process” has collapsed. Amid lots of jokes and laughter, Secretary Clinton said at the ceremony Friday, “You’d be surprised how much you can learn...

Here’s Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), from the section of their website called What’s Wrong with the News? With U.S. media outlets overwhelmingly owned by for-profit conglomerates and supported by corporate advertisers, independent journalism is compromised… The owners and managers of dominant media outlets generally share the background, worldview and income bracket of political elites. Here’s Trotsky as recounted in this 1927, pro-communist book: In America, freedom of the press for the working class amounts to the right to buy for two cents a newspaper produced by bourgeois journalists in the interests of capitalists… Later in the same chapter,...

New Insights Into Healthful Compounds In Native American Diets In an advance toward understanding the early California Native American diet, food scientists have identified the full range of phytochemicals in tanoak acorns. Acorns were a staple in the diet of early Native Americans in California, comprising up to 50 percent of total food intake, Alyson E. Mitchell and colleagues note in a report in the current (Oct. 4) issue of the ACS biweekly Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. Acorns are still used by Californian Native Americans -- special processing is needed to make the nuts edible -- to make...

WASHINGTON, July 24, 2006 – Three reserve-component members related their insights and experiences from service in the war on terror to a congressionally chartered committee in San Antonio on July 19. Army National Guard Sgt. Christopher B. McWilliams, Coast Guard Reserve Chief Petty Officer Douglas Gilmer, and Air National Guard Master Sgt. Alphonso W. Allen provided testimony about their military service to the Commission on the National Guard and Reserves. McWilliams, a member of the New Hampshire National Guard since May 2001, said he's been deployed to the Horn of Africa, Kuwait and Iraq. McWilliams said he was severely wounded...

WASHINGTON - Buoyed by the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, U.S. government officials hope the exposure of his radical network through hundreds of raids across Iraq will help them eliminate key tentacles of the amorphous al-Qaida organization. These officials say the raids have led to solid insights into al-Qaida in Iraq and provided new clues about how the group trades information with Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida central. They also are learning who is connected to whom and how external support is funneled through Iraq from across the Middle East, including Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Iran. Several officials requested anonymity...

TAMPA, Fla., May 1, 2006 – Civilian leaders returned here yesterday from a whirlwind trip through Southwest Asia with a fresh new perspective about U.S. military operations under way and the caliber of the men and women serving the country in uniform. The 47 business, academic, civic and organizational leaders, all participants in the Joint Civilian Orientation Conference, agreed that it's one thing to draw conclusions based on what they read in newspapers and see on TV, but quite another to draw their own firsthand conclusions. The group members visited Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar to observe ongoing operations. They met...

WASHINGTON, March 24, 2006 – Former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was so convinced that the United States was unwilling to accept casualties that he never believed the country would invade Iraq, and was far more worried about an internal revolt, a new, unclassified version of a Defense Department report issued today reveals. The "Iraqi Perspective Project" views military operations in Iraq from March through May 1, 2003, through the eyes of senior Iraqi civilian and media leaders. It depicts a country ruled by fear, deception and in some cases, delusion, where information was so compartmentalized that neither Saddam nor anyone...

WASHINGTON, Nov. 10, 2005 – Former Tuskegee Airmen -- pioneers who broke through racial prejudice to become the first black U.S. military pilots during World War II -- have solid words of advice and encouragement for today's military members. "Don't let anyone tell you what you can't do," said retired Air Force Master Sgt. Ezra Hill Sr., of Hampton, Va. "We proved that you can do it." Hill said the lessons he learned as one of the original Tuskegee Airmen, who battled segregation and prejudice on the ground and enemy forces in the air, apply equally to today's servicemembers fighting...

<p>CAIRO, Egypt (Reuters) -- An Egyptian scholar based in London, England, has been delighting Arab audiences with his inquiries into the recondite world of medieval Muslims who wrote about ancient Egypt and had some insights into hieroglyphic writing.</p> <p>Among Western scholars, who have led the field of Egyptology since Napoleon's 1798 campaign and Jean-Francois Champollion's groundbreaking work on hieroglyphics in the 1820s, the conventional wisdom has been that Arabs and Muslims dismissed ancient Egypt as an irrelevant pagan civilization.</p>