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HOUSTON (Nov. 4) - A Texas death row inmate somehow found some civilian clothing, changed out of his orange jumpsuit and used a fake ID badge to escape late Thursday from the Harris County Jail. Charles Victor Thompson, 35, of Tomball, was in Houston after being re-sentenced last week to execution. "He managed to get some civilian clothing. He had changed out of the orange jumpsuit that inmates ordinarily wear," Harris County sheriff's Lt. John Martin said in the online edition of the Houston Chronicle. "He may have been taken out of the cell block and put in the attorney...

30,000 migrants 'ready to force way into Europe' By David Rennie in Luxembourg (Filed: 13/10/2005) Up to 30,000 African migrants are determined to reach Europe through Spain, a senior European Union official warned yesterday. The figure, based on reports by European intelligence agencies, dwarfs the crowds of desperate migrants already seen storming Spain's two north African enclaves bordering Morocco. Franco Frattini, the EU justice commissioner, sounded the alarm at a meeting of ministers from all 25 member governments in Luxembourg. He also launched a radical scheme under which the EU will pay African governments to offer better treatment to would-be...

Clinton CD on way By Tom Baldwin in Washington August 17, 2005 Bill Clinton / Reuters YOU'VE read the book and you've seen the interviews but if you were thinking that there is no more juice to be squeezed out of the Bill Clinton experience, think again. The former president is producing a CD, The Bill Clinton Collection: Selections from the Clinton Music Room. The 11-track compilation goes on sale next month. Mr Clinton is so taken with the album that he is reported to have been blasting it through the open windows of his people-carrier as he drives. The...

The Milky Way is not a perfect spiral galaxy but instead sports a long bar through its centre, according to new infrared observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. Galaxies come in a wide variety of shapes usually thought to be produced by gravitational interactions with nearby objects. Some spiral galaxies look like pinwheels, with their arms curving out from a central bulge, while others have a straight bar at their centres. Radio telescopes detected gas that hinted at a bar at the heart of the Milky Way in the late 1980s. A decade later, observations with the near infrared survey...

Popularity of Clinton, Reagan, pave way for new stamp DAVID HAMMER Associated Press Posted on Thu, Aug. 04, 2005 Former President Bill Clinton sits near a representation of the U.S. Postal Service's presidential library stamp Thursday, Aug. 4, 2005, during dedication ceremonies at the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, Ark. The design for the stamp was unveiled Thursday at each of the 12 presidential libraries and museums across the country. (AP Photo/Danny Johnston) LITTLE ROCK, Lit. - The U.S. Postal Service's Citizens Stamp Advisory Committee received 50,000 suggestions for stamps every year and of all of them, a Little...

Hillary Clinton clears way for presidential run By Francis Harris in Washington (Filed: 01/06/2005) Senator Hillary Clinton has decided to remove a key obstacle to a run at the presidency, further fuelling fevered speculation about her hopes for America’s top job. Mrs Clinton is understood to be ready to drop a pledge to serve a full six-year term when she seeks re-election as senator for New York next year. This will be the clearest sign of her intention to run for the White House, since she pointedly told New York voters in 2000 that she would not curtail her term...

The Way of the Whigs Geoff Metcalf There may be a place for partisanship … but NOT in the middle of a war; NOT in the wake of historic elections of representative government in: - Afghanistan - Ukraine - Iraq - and even municipal elections in Saudi Arabia Now is NOT the time to focus on the ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ acrimonious petty whizzing match. Sycophant democrats are still so wrapped around partisanship, they are incapable of recognizing the self-destruction they are fueling. The river ‘Denial’ runs wide and deep. The ‘leaders’ of the party (Kennedy, Reid, Pelosi, Biden, Kerry et...

"I am a modern man. I am part of the rock and roll generation—the Beatles, colour TV, that's the generation I come from."        —Tony Blair, in a speech a Stevenage, 22 April 1997 IntroductionA Modern Man The Prime Minister did not realize how significant these words were when he blurted them out in the middle of the most puzzling and mysterious general election campaign in modern British history. He may have known that they were important, but did he know why? For they offer the best explanation for his victory, and a convincing reason to believe that the Tories...

'His way,' exposed Sunday, January 16, 2005 WASHINGTON -- The adage about these being "the best of times and the worst of times" could not be truer as we await the second inauguration on Thursday of President George W. Bush. We read in the papers about the destruction of wonderful coastal villages and towns in Asia together with a mind-shattering loss of lives by a series of tsunamis. Then we read moronic nonsense of how the Democrats in Congress attempted to derail the electoral results in Ohio and deny Bush the presidency using a 1877 ruling. On the positive side,...

Did Jesus Really Die and Live Again? "This Jesus God has raised up, of which we are all witnesses" (Acts 2:32).One of the greatest proofs that Jesus is exactly who He said He was—the Son of God and the only One through whom eternal life is offered—is His resurrection from the dead. His followers were convinced that He was the Messiah and the Son of God. His miracles, His sinless life and His teachings all proved to them who He was. But His resurrection confirms every claim Jesus made to all people for all time. What is astounding is that...

Imams to be taught about the French way of life By Colin Randall in Paris (Filed: 08/12/2004) France is to intensify efforts to integrate its large Muslim minority by trying to create a generation of French-speaking, socially aware imams equipped with some knowledge of law and diplomas from Parisian universities including the Sorbonne. Dismayed by calculations that a third of the imams practising in France do not speak the language of their adopted country, the interior minister, Dominique de Villepin, wants to launch a foundation early next year. A two-year course at the Sorbonne and Assas universities, starting next autumn,...

The purpose of FreeRepublic.com's multiple message boards is to limit the topics for each board to particular topics. Posting the same message on all the boards defeats the purpose of multiple-boards for special topics. It is very annoying to see the same message on every bulletin board. PLEASE! DO THE READERS A FAVOR. STOP CROSS-POSTING YOUR MESSAGES!

Editor's note: Readers may also be interested in Holland: Portent of Things to Come? and Dutch Center-Right Coalition Stands up to Islamism."Education by murder" describes the slow and painful way people wake up to the problem of radical Islam. It took 3,000 deaths to wake up Americans, or at least to wake up the half of them who are conservative. Likewise, it took hundreds of deaths in the Bali explosion to semi-wake up Australians; it took the Madrid assault for Spaniards, and the Beslan atrocity for Russians. Twelve workers beheaded in Iraq awoke the Nepalese.But it took just one death...

A motorcyclist who set jaws dropping across the nation last month when he was stopped for going 205 miles per hour south of the Twin Cities tells a reporter for Midwest Quick Throttle Magazine in an upcoming issue that he was going closer to half that speed, said magazine editor Pat Andrews.

Why isn't Kerry way ahead? Most liberals think those stupid heartland voters just don't get it By VIN SUPRYNOWICZ REVIEW-JOURNAL Sunday, October 24, 2004 I was reminded why I usually don't bother with the canned PBS "Washington Week" program when I accidentally tuned it in last Sunday. (OK, I found it shamefully riveting -- like slowing down to inspect the carnage of a traffic accident.) In an attempt to assemble an even-handed panel to discuss how George Bush and John Kerry did in the debates, host Gwen Ifill and her tax-funded PBS producers assembled four folks, one each from The...

Vaccines, lottery-style in New Jersey 10/19/2004 9:45 AM By: Capital News 9 web staff You won't win any money in this lottery, but you might be healthier this winter. Officials in Bloomfield, New Jersey, plan to register people for a lottery to determine who gets the town's 300 doses of flu vaccine. Flu shots in Bloomfield already were reserved only for senior citizens and other high-risk groups. Then, the community learned it would be receiving less than half the 1,000 doses it ordered. The health director said a lottery is the "most fair and equitable way" to distribute the available...

Kerry: GOP 'turned the corner' going wrong way By Katharine Q. Seelye The New York Times WASHINGTON -- All week long, President George W. Bush traveled the country, cheerfully telling audiences that "we've turned the corner" on the economy. But on Friday, in the face of the government's paltry new numbers on job growth, the president's new slogan suddenly sounded premature at best. By now, Republicans had hoped that the early indications this year that the economy was indeed turning the corner would have allowed them to neutralize, or even turn to their advantage, the issue that John Kerry had...

It's coffee, the natural way June 23 2004 at 07:24AM Paris - Delighted Brazilian scientists say they have found a rare variety of coffee plant that should provide the world's first cup of naturally decaffeinated but full-tasting coffee. The home of the plant is in Ethiopia, but its remarkable qualities were spotted by agricultural researchers in Campinas, in Sao Paulo state, who were screening 3 000 coffee bushes that are being grown under a programme launched in 1987 aimed at reducing caffeine content in coffee beans. The plants are varieties of Coffea arabica, a species which accounts for 70 percent...

A 50-year-old map of the Milky Way will have to be redrawn after Australian astronomers made the astonishing discovery that our spiral galaxy has a huge, outflung arm, New Scientist reports. The vast gassy limb comprises an arc of hydrogen 77,000 light years long and several thousand light years thick, running along the Milky Way's outermost edge and sweeping around the four main arms that swirl out from the galaxy's core. As it is not in the visible part of the light spectrum, it cannot be seen by telescope. Astronomers at the Australia National Telescope Facility in the Sydney suburb...

Mr. Kerry, if elected what will be your stance on the war on terrorism?I SURRENDER!