Free Republic

BAGHDAD - U.S. jets widened the bombing of Basra on Saturday, dropping two precision-guided bombs on a suspected militia stronghold north of the city, British officials said. Maj. Tom Holloway, a British military spokesman, said U.S. jets dropped the two bombs on a militia position in Qarmat Ali shortly before 12:30 p.m. Basra is Iraq's commercial and oil hub, and militant followers of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr have been battling Iraqi and coalition forces in the southern city since Tuesday. "My understanding was that this was a building that had people who were shooting back at Iraqi ground forces,"...

NEW YORK - New allegations of fraud in stem-cell research by a prominent South Korean researcher emerged Thursday, and scientists said his other high-profile claims could face investigation as well. Among them: the first cloned human embryos and the first cloned dog. The reputation of Hwang Woo-suk of Seoul National University has been battered by allegations of fabrication in a blockbuster paper published in May. He and co-authors claimed that by cloning human embryos, they'd created 11 stem cell lines that genetically matched certain patients. Scientists hope to use such "therapeutic cloning" someday to create tissue for transplant into people...

Karl Rove is under fire from Democrats who have demanded he apologize or resign for the his comments at a New York State Conservative Party dinner on Wednesday. Here is some of what Rove said: LET me now say a few words about the state of liberalism. Perhaps the place to begin is with this stinging indictment: "Liberalism is at greater risk now than at any time in recent American history. The risk is of political marginality, even irrelevance . . . [L]iberalism risks getting defined, as conservatism once was, entirely in negative terms." These are not the words of...