Free Republic

The star-spangled grin Study found that women with big, warm smiles at age 21 had happier, more productive lives DEBRA BLACK STAFF REPORTER Be it Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa and her mysterious smile, or Lewis Carroll's grinning Cheshire cat, a smile can not only light up a room, but can also reveal nationality and radiate sexual appeal, warmth, modesty and decorum, according to an American researcher. For example, Americans and the British have two quite distinct smiles, said Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at the University of California at Berkeley who has studied the mysterious art of smiling. An...

WASHINGTON -- In my seven visits to Iraq between 1973 and 1988, I never saw anyone smile. No, I am not exaggerating -- not ANYONE! The Iraqi faces seemed set in stone, without expression and without words: Stalin's dehumanized creatures on the deserts of the far Near East. Oh, a tiny, tight, treacherous smile slightly lighted the face of Saddam's top man, Tarik Aziz, once when I met with him in his ministry office in 1980. Speaking of the Iranians they had captured in the war with Iran, he said, "We had to hang most of them -- we're a...

GRADUATION DAY: Despite the US invasion of Iraq and the delay of the school year, these Baghdad University graduates are trying to move forward with their lives. SCOTT PETERSON/GETTY IMAGES from the December 09, 2003 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/1209/p01s03-legn.html Iraq's students say, 'Welcome back, professor' By Christina Asquith | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor BAGHDAD - After a decade of sanctions had left his physics lab a crumbling shell, Raad Mohammed decided it was time to go. In 1999, following a route trodden by thousands of the best and brightest of Iraq's academics, Dr. Mohammed escaped to Jordan without a...

"National progress is the sum of individual industry, energy, and uprightness, as national decay is of individual idleness, selfishness, and vice." -Samuel Smiles I ask you, to which side has the scale tipped in these United States?