Free Republic

Over the past week I have encountered to two very different Hillary Clintons. One is a pious Christian who reads her Bible daily, prays and seeks guidance from trusted pastors. One of the latter, Rev Bill Shillady, put together a book, Strong for a Moment Like This, collecting devotionals that he and other divines sent her each morning during her election run. She wrote the foreword for it. (Unfortunately the book, published last week, has been pulled from sale on account of Shillady’s plagiarism.) This Hillary would like to be a preacher in her Methodist church. Going by her recent...

“The star attractions were these three effigy dolls dunked upside down in this brown liquid. One of them had my name, and the other two had the names of investigators.” Each doll had pins in its eyes, he said. Attached to the dolls was the case number in the criminal charges. Hanrahan said that inside the home on Thorndike Road investigators also found their names wrapped around a baseball bat. “Even the U.S. marshals were spooked,” he said. Officials decided to find out the background of the shrine, with help of a UCLA professor.

Curse of the Bureaucrats Voodoo dolls are all the rage in China—especially now that the government has banned them. WEB EXCLUSIVE By Quindlan Krovatin Special to Newsweek Updated: 6:45 p.m. ET May 24, 2006 May 24, 2006 - Not content with jailing subversive reporters and restricting access to prodemocracy Web sites, the Chinese government has turned its attentions to a new destabilizing influence: voodoo dolls. Central government authorities are so bothered by the political implications of the dolls that they banned them entirely from Beijing's retail stores in April. The dolls have become increasingly popular among the Middle Kingdom's misanthropes...

General Ne Win, the former president of Burma (now Myanmar), who died yesterday aged 91, ruled his country with an iron fist for 26 years, dragging it into poverty-stricken isolation.Ne Win, who seized power in a coup in 1962, was xenophobic, capricious, superstitious and fascinated by the occult “science” of numerology. Nine was his lucky number: important events were staged on dates whose numbers, when added together, made nine; and in 1987, after deciding that all banknotes should be divisible by nine, he introduced the 45-kyat and 90-kyat notes. The result was that Burmese who had hoarded 100-kyat notes lost...