Free Republic

Recent pictures in Stars and Stripes feature female U.S. service members wearing the Islamic headscarf, also known as a hijab. These women are part of a new initiative, Female Engagement Teams, being deployed in Afghanistan. Aside from questions about whether the safety of these women deployed into harm's way is jeopardized by trading the helmet for the hijab, the photos invoke memories of a policy fight in Congress less than a decade ago. In 2002, the Senate overturned a DoD mandate requiring female American service members stationed in Saudi Arabia to wear the Saudi version of the burqa, known as...

Congressman Barney Frank (D-MA) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), continued the political farce in Washington regarding the financial industry troubles by doing what politicians do best in a crisis: pointing their fingers at anyone but themselves. They allege that the mortgage market collapse, financial industry blow up and yesterday's AIG bailout announcement, are all indicative of "bad" Republican policies, and years of Bush White House failure to properly supervise and regulate the free markets. The White House has been shown no real leadership on the issue but Congress has more to answer for than President Bush. Frank and Pelosi,...

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Bush administration on Wednesday announced it was giving $20 million in direct aid to the Palestinian Authority to help it through a financial crisis. A senior Bush administration official said it hoped the aid would encourage additional donations from other countries "at a time when the Palestinian Authority is in desperate need of budget support to pay its bills, maintain stability and allow it to focus on the larger question of governing." The Palestinian Authority is facing a severe financial crisis due to falling tax revenues during four years of violence which has paralyzed the Palestinian...

Jerusalem (CNSNews.com) - Palestinians are mocking and laughing at American casualties in Iraq in their press and elsewhere, an independent Israeli media watchdog group said on Tuesday. Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) Director Itamar Marcus said that while the Palestinians have been criticizing America in their media for years, the hatred has recently been ratcheted up. Established in 1996, PMW monitors and analyzes Palestinian Arabic language media. "[The Palestinians] have been condemning America since 1997," said Marcus in a telephone interview. "Anti-American cartoons mocking American dead [have] reached a new level of hatred." In a cartoon printed in the Palestinian Authority's...