Free Republic

Users of cannabis, cocaine and heroin are victims of discrimination and should no longer be called druggies or junkies, an international drug legalisation pressure group declared yesterday. It called for an end to negative language for drug users and their habits in order to ensure their human rights are respected. As part of the drive to persuade people to think differently about drugs, the words addict and even drug user must be thrown out, a report from the Global Commission on Drug Policy said. It urged newspapers and broadcasters to encourage more positive attitudes by calling a drug user a...

Arizona State University permanently severed ties with the Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity late Thursday, just days after suspending the local chapter over accusations it hosted a distasteful party in commemoration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day. University officials notified the fraternity of its decision and said the school is continuing to investigate members of the chapter and students who attended the party for violations of the ASU Code of Conduct, MyFoxPhoenix.com reported. "At ASU, students who violate these standards will be subject to disciplinary sanctions in order to promote their own personal development, to protect the university community, and to...

Ghetto Tracker” was the name of an application that exploded with controversy on its launch. So much controversy in fact that it’s already changed the name to “Good Part of Town” and apparently been taken down. The application was proposed for savvy consumers to avoid dangerous parts of town by showing which ones are ghetto, or unsafe. As a response to the public backlash the site has been removed with a picture stating that “It’s not worth the trouble.” The app reportedly didn’t even work properly. Critics had pointed out that the site listed areas such as Greenwich Village in...

Does HIV mean certain death? In the quarter century since the world was introduced to the idea that a new sexually transmitted virus was the cause of Aids, HIV has been generally regarded as one of the biggest killers of our time. HIV/Aids has not been the mass disease in Britain that people were led to believe in the 1980s, but the death toll from immune deficiency diseases ascribed to HIV in Africa has been staggering. The scale of death there is an ongoing tragedy that tests the moral resolve of the rich world. How much do we care? Enough...

U.S. officials are being advised in internal government documents to avoid referring publicly to al Qaeda and other terrorist groups as Islamic or Muslim, and not to use terms like jihad or mujahedeen, which "unintentionally legitimize" terrorism. "There' s a growing consensus [in the Bush administration] that we need to move away from that language," said a former senior administration official who was involved until recently in policy debates on the issue. Instead, in two documents circulated last month by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), the multiagency center charged with strategic coordination of the U.S. war on terror, officials are...

October 9, 2006 2:58 am EDTRed flagBy Dan Wetzel, Yahoo! SportsSide-by-side at Talladega. (Getty Images) TALLADEGA, Ala. – Over the rolling Alabama hills, the soft autumn breeze still whistles through Dixie, finding a legendary track on race week and a sea of flags to push and pull – American flags, driver flags and the flag that remains the third rail of NASCAR, the Confederate. In America, a NASCAR race is the last major sporting event where the Stars and Bars is still so prevalent, still so prominent, and while the debate over whether the flag's presence is appropriate isn't...

The Department of Homeland Security took a Muslim group with known past ties to terror organizations on a VIP tour of security operations at the nation's busiest airport at the same time British authorities were working to break up a plot to blow up U.S. airlines. On June 21, a senior DHS official from Washington personally guided Muslim officials from the Council on American-Islamic Relations on a behind-the-scenes tour of Customs screening operations at O'Hare International Airport in response to CAIR complaints that Muslim travelers were being unfairly delayed as they entered the U.S. from abroad. CAIR is a spin-off...

They don't shake hands anymore in the northern neck of Virginia. Too many rude comments were made, too many people got spat on, too many fights broke out. So the principals of five schools in the Northern Neck District agreed to end the policy of having opposing high school athletic teams line up single file to shake hands after the game. In theory, that was supposed to signal an end to competition and respect for worthy opponents. In practice, football, soccer and basketball teams kept turning into wrestling teams, grappling on grass fields and hardwood floors. Hence, the ban on...