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Pop superstar Madonna's Re-Invention tour has been slammed by American critics - for overloading the show with "naive" political statements. The "American Life" singer, 45, kicked off the US leg of her tour in California on Monday but failed to impress critics with her attempts to "wipe the slate clean" by ditching her trademark raunchy routines. The Los Angeles Times sniped, "This promised to be Madonna's tour de force, a reappraisal that put her work in new and revealing contexts. But time and again she fell short of the challenge." Many critics were unimpressed by the images of the Iraq...

I have created a public register of "bump lists" here on Free Republic. I define a bump list as a name listed in the "To" field used to index articles. Free Republic Bump List Register

<p>The world of massively multiplayer online games is often a dangerous place, what with constant threats from bloodthirsty monsters and murderous non-player characters. But now players have even more peril to contend with: addictive drugs that can incapacitate or kill their characters.</p>

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - A tearful U.S. soldier was sentenced to a year in jail Wednesday after pleading guilty to abusing Iraqi detainees in a scandal threatening to undermine President Bush's re-election chances. Military policeman Jeremy Sivits, who apologized to Iraqis at the first court martial of soldiers accused of abuses which sparked worldwide outrage, was also expelled from the army. It was not enough for Iraqis protesting outside Abu Ghraib prison, scene of the scandal that came to light when pictures were published of naked and terrified Iraqi inmates being abused and sexually humiliated. "It's a kangaroo court, set up...

<p>KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (May 13) - The al-Qaida-linked Web site that first posted a video of American civilian Nicholas Berg's beheading was shut down Thursday by the Malaysian company that hosted it - because it was drawing too much traffic.</p>

A group of libertarian-minded Republicans in Congress is blocking President Bush’s effort to strengthen domestic counterterrorism laws and reauthorize the USA Patriot Act, which the president has made one of his top domestic priorities this year. As a result of this opposition, Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, was forced last week to cancel panel consideration of legislation that would have given law-enforcement officials more tools to pursue suspected terrorists. As other administration policy initiatives — such as a manned mission to Mars — have languished in Congress, Bush has emphasized the importance of renewing the...

frame grab taken from web site video footage May 11, 2004, shows a man, who identified himself as Nick Berg of Philadelphia (C) seated in front of his five masked captors moments before he was executed. Al Qaeda's leader in Iraq beheaded an American civilian and vowed more killings in revenge for the abuse of Iraqi prisoners, an Islamist Web site said on Tuesday. After one of the masked men read out a statement, they pushed Berg to the floor and shouted 'God is greatest' above his screams as one of them sawed his head off with a large knife...

Yes, I inhale. I am one of more than 100,000 California medical cannabis patients. I use cannabis, marijuana, pot or whatever you want to call it, to alleviate symptoms from post-traumatic stress and bipolar disorders. Cannabis allows me to forget about my neuroses and live a productive life as a student, volunteer, and activist. The U.S. government likes to paint cannabis as an evil monster, but that is not true. Most taxpayers are tired of billions of dollars being spent to wage a drug war that's done nothing but widen the profit margin of drug dealers and placed millions of...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A federal probe of Coca-Cola Co. has intensified as a federal grand jury was scheduled and regulators subpoenaed employees, The Wall Street Journal said on Monday. The grand jury will begin to hear testimony in the case around May 25, the Journal said, citing people familiar with the probe. The U.S. attorney's office and the Securities and Exchange Commission are examining whether Coca-Cola overshipped drink concentrate to distributors in some markets including Japan -- called "channel-stuffing" -- thereby possibly inflating financial results. Three former finance officials of the world's largest soft drink maker have told federal...

A team of military intelligence and police drug enforcement units rounded up some 50 Muslim residents of the Al-Salam Mosque Compound in Barangay Culiat, Quezon City as part of intensified operations against illegal drugs and firearms in the metropolis. Senior Superintendent Procopio Lipana, chief of the Central Police District-Criminal Investigation Unit (CPD-CIU), said 12 suspects remained under their custody while the rest were released. Lipana identified the 12 as Dawabe Ben Albi Maulana, businessman from Basilan; Musa Sabaddin Abdurahman, 27; Awop Wadja Ignus, 26; Radjail Karawan Tirih, 34; Raquel Francisco Mabajo, 26; Pamaran Alain Awali, 48; Abubakar Cuevas Zunco, 34;...

KOZINSKI, Circuit Judge, dissenting from denial of rehearing en banc: Judges know very well how to read the Constitution broadly when they are sympathetic to the right being asserted. We have held, without much ado, that "speech, or... the press" also means the Internet, see Reno v. ACLU, 521 U.S. 844 (1997), and that "persons, houses, papers, and effects" also means public telephone booths, see Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347 (1967). When a particular right comports especially well with our notions of good social policy, we build magnificent legal edifices on elliptical constitutional phrases -- or even the...

A healthy society needs censorship to survive, 1950s musical icon Pat Boone said yesterday. He added that he would welcome strong content restrictions governing movies and other artistic works. "I don't think censorship is a bad word, but it has become a bad word because everybody associates it with some kind of restriction on liberty," said Mr. Boone, who is in Washington making the rounds as the national spokesman for the 60-Plus Association, a conservative senior citizen lobby.

Amaani Lyle was fired four months into her job for Warner Brothers as a writers' assistant on "Friends" because she couldn't type fast enough to record the writers' dictation accurately. She sued for sexual harassment because the comedy writers would regularly make jokes about women and sex in the process of writing a sitcom about the sexual adventures of six thirty-somethings. A California appeals court has decided that a jury should resolve whether the jokes made by the comedy writers were appropriate for writing a sitcom or whether they created an actionable "hostile working environment for women." Summary judgment was...

"I won’t go to jail." Bob Schulz announces this in late January to a rapt crowd of 200 gathered in an auditorium in Crystal City, Virginia. It’s the first national conference of the We The People Foundation for Constitutional Education, a nonprofit advocacy group Schulz founded and runs. He delivers his declaration not with reckless bravado but with a dignified, quiet, middle-management-lifer assurance, in keeping with his general mien. Schulz is a serious white male in a nice conservative dark suit, a former environmental engineer for both General Electric and the Environmental Protection Agency. He’s been married for 38 years...

PHILADELPHIA - Mark W. Potter, Special Agent in Charge of the Philadelphia Field Division of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), and Patrick Meehan, United States Attorney, Eastern District of Pennsylvania, announced that Dwight Grant, known throughout the rap music industry as Beanie Sigel, pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court today to violating the federal firearms and narcotics laws. ATF agents and officers of the Philadelphia Police Department arrested Sigel in July 2003, and charged him with being a felon in possession of a firearm. The arrest stemmed from an incident that occurred in April 2003, when...

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Google Inc. hails its new e-mail service as a breakthrough in online communication, but consumer watchdogs are attacking it as a creepy invasion of privacy that threatens to set a troubling precedent. Although Google's free "Gmail" service isn't even available yet, critics already are pressuring the popular search engine maker to drop its plans to electronically scan e-mail content so it can distribute relevant ads alongside incoming messages. Privacy activists worry that Gmail will comb through e-mail more intensively than the filters widely used to weed out potential viruses and spam. Gmail opponents also want Google...

WASHINGTON (April 6) - Americans may say they know a lot about sexually transmitted diseases but they do not practice what they preach when it comes to defending against them, according to a survey published Tuesday. While one in four Americans will be infected with an STD -- and up to half of younger adults will be -- most of those surveyed believed they were not personally at risk. This is precisely why STDs spread so easily and so pervasively in society, said the American Social Health Association, which published the survey. ''The findings in our survey are quite disturbing....

EDMONTON -- Corrections Canada won't let guards at maximum-security prisons wear stab-proof vests because it sends a confrontational "signal" to prisoners, says a department spokesman. "If you have that kind of presence symbolized by (a stab-proof vest), you're sending a signal to the prisoner that you consider him to be a dangerous person," said Tim Krause. "It interferes with what we call 'dynamic security.' We want staff to talk to prisoners, to see how they're doing." At Stony Mountain Institution only guards in the emergency response unit are allowed to wear the stab-proof vests, said unit manager Linda Garwood-Filbert. The...

Feds Grab Medical Marijuana Patients from California State Courtroom Couple Arrested As Attorneys and Judge Meet in Chambers; State Charges Dismissed Press Conference, Emergency Action at Sacramento Federal Building at Noon Friday Sacramento (Wednesday, January 14, 2004) – In a stunning display of duplicitous double dealing, federal agents yesterday seized two medical marijuana patients from a California state courtroom after the local prosecutor lured the couple’s defense counsel into the judge’s chambers to dismiss the state charges filed against them. David Davidson and Cynthia Blake were in state court on a motion seeking to have charges of marijuana cultivation and...

(CBS) For years, television host Montel Williams helped guests deal with their problems. But he was forced to reveal his own problems - a battle with multiple sclerosis - to pre-empt a 1999 story in the tabloids. In his new book, "Climbing Higher," Williams writes that he had been struggling with MS symptoms for years but it wasn't until a painful episode while shooting the CBS television show "Touched by an Angel" that he was finally diagnosed. It is at this point that Williams invites his readers into an intimate account of suicide attempts, intense pain, medical procedures, sexual dysfunction...