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President Clinton's recommendation to renew normal trade relations (formerly most favored nation status) with Communist China for another year has distressed many Americans. They are rightfully disgusted by Beijing's human rights violations, the U.S.' $67 million trade deficit with the Red regime, the espionage and campaign finance scandals and, most recently, the orchestrated anti-American hysteria in response to NATO's accidental bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. But as mistaken as the president's ``forgive all sins'' policy toward China is, it is even worse with regard to Mexico. Despite testimony from prominent Drug Enforcement Administration agents in his own ...

Democrat defectors seen giving GOP cover on gun vote -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- By Donald Lambro THE WASHINGTON TIMES -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The likelihood that nearly 50 House Democrats will vote today for a weaker gun-control bill than one passed by the Senate has undermined the White House line that Republicans are blocking tougher gun restrictions. While the coordinated effort by President Clinton and congressional Democrats has been to attack Republicans for not supporting stronger gun-control laws, it now appears that a large bloc of Democrats will be responsible for killing a provision to require pre-sale background checks at gun shows -- not the GOP. ...

HELSINKI, June 17 (Itar-Tass) - Leaders and experts of Russia's power-wielding ministries at their Helsinki talks with Western delegates have come to agreement on two major issues, but the third remains unresolved, Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov told reporters on Thursday. He said agreement was found on the issue of Slatina airport near Pristina, where Russian peacekeepers are staying. He said rapport was reached on the airport's use by all peacekeeping forces, with the functions of Russian and other peacekeepers laid down. The second issue agreed upon was Russia's part in the structure of the command of peacekeeping operations at ...

We hate your guts." This was my hello from Mikhail Yuriev, deputy chairman of the Russian parliament, who in the next breath assured me that it was nothing personal. And without taking a breath added, "We like to see you dead." This warm response was in answer to a simple question: "How do Russians feel about America in light of the war over Kosovo?" When I smiled, Yuriev insisted that he and his country were dead serious. "The day you started bombing, the polls showed that 63% here would go to war for Serbia. They'd do it today. We hate ...

Liberation of Kosovo - Talks fail to end Russian deadlock By Phil Reeves in Moscow THE diplomatic drive to end the deadlock between Russia and Nato over Kosovo peace-keeping went into top gear yesterday as both sides convened in Helsinki, expressing hope but - at least in public - offering no new suggestions. The Russian Foreign Minister, Igor Ivanov, arrived in the Finnish capital saying that, although willing to entertain a "reasonable compromise", Moscow is not interested in playing a secondary role. But the United States Defense Secretary, William Cohen - who held talks last night with his Russian counterpart, ...

Humanitarian bombing didn't bring new order to Kosovo, just a bloody quagmire Many people noted that Kosovo created strange bedfellows. I'd say it created some strange, if temporary, meetings of the minds. My disgust with the ex-flower children's war in the Balkans, for instance, resulted last week in an invitation to meet Walter J. Rockler, 78, one of the few American prosecutors at Nuremberg who is still with us. Rockler is a left-wing critic of NATO's air campaign. He came to speak in Toronto at the invitation of the Ad Hoc Committee to Stop Canada's Participation in the War ...

After spending three years trying to win support for a new way to sell home videos, Circuit City Stores Inc. pulled the plug on its pay-per-view digital videodisks and took a $114 million after-tax charge for its fiscal first quarter. Who really killed DIVX? Was that a good thing, or a bad thing? The venture, Digital Video Express LP, or Divx, had sharply divided consumer-electronics manufacturers, retailers and Hollywood studios since its formation in 1996, just as digital videodisks began to emerge. It threatened to recreate the Betamax-vs.-VHS standards battle that soured the introduction of videotapes in the 1980s. By ...

All Vice Presidents have a special challenge when they try to run for President themselves. They have to campaign on the achievements of the outgoing Administration while also separating themselves from its failings. In one sense Al Gore's job should be a straightforward one. Practically everyone on the planet can identify the big defect in the Clinton Presidency, and Gore has gotten off to a brisk start in explaining how he would differ from Bill Clinton. In carefully calculated television interviews, Gore shed his role as the President's defender against what he once described as partisan attacks stemming from the ...

WASHINGTON -- A U.S. government report that consumer prices didn't rise at all in May would seem a dream come true for Alan Greenspan and his band of inflation-phobes at the Federal Reserve. Instead, it was more like a nightmare. Wednesday's surprisingly benign consumer-price report undercut the public case Fed officials have been making that incipient inflation demands an increase in interest rates. But it did nothing to ease their concern that the U.S. economy is growing at such an unsafe speed that inflation is inevitable unless they act. For months, Mr. Greenspan has resisted mounting pressure inside the Fed ...

SO NOW we've heard the first campaign shots fired from the limp muskets of Al and Liddy and Danny and W. The first is disloyal. The second, disingenuous. The third is delirious. And W, well, he's ... who is he? Yes, the presidential election season is creeping up on us, as dubiously welcome a sight as Monica Lewinsky in a thong. From the looks of the cream of the crew jockeying for position - a collection of the damaged, the delusional and the mute - this race already is shaping up not as one of vision and answers, but ...

HARRISBURG - With time running out on his school vouchers plan, Gov. Ridge used a personal appeal yesterday to win crucial legislative support from a group of Delaware County holdouts. But Ridge was still short of votes as negotiations continued into this morning. The early-morning cliffhanger followed a day that saw Ridge officials thrown off-balance when some suburban lawmakers, who were early voucher supporters, walked away from a last-minute compromise measure. They concluded that the bill would not help enough children in their districts - a development that threatened to doom the entire effort. "We need them to come back ...

WorldNetDaily June 17, 1999 A culture of arrogance By J.R. NYQUIST America believes in its own invincibility. We believe that nobody can touch us, that nobody can defeat us. In America we have something called the pursuit of happiness. In Moscow and Beijing they have something called the hydrogen bomb. Imagine, if you will, a contest between two great powers. One is predicated on the pursuit of happiness, the other is predicated on nuclear war. Late on Monday, a panel of the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board released a 57-page report. In essence, the report describes what happens when a ...

Vice President Gore formally joined the race for the White House yesterday, and we wish him luck. All the more so since he seems to be self-consciously struggling with the burden of separating himself from the boss he has served so slavishly for seven years. It's no coincidence, for example, that the veep chose last night to tell a TV interviewer he was privately appalled at President Clinton's behavior during the Lewinsky fiasco. We don't remember hearing this at the time, or during that notorious post-impeachment pep rally on the White House lawn. But if Mr. Gore now wants to ...

   House Mulls Religion Amendment By LAURIE KELLMAN Associated Press Writer WASHINGTON (AP) -- Churning through a debate on the causes of youth violence, the House is considering a measure that would permit the Ten Commandments to be posted in schools and other government buildings. The debate follows the sharp defeat of a proposal that would have curbed access by children to explicit sexual or violent material in video games and movies. Propelled by aggressive lobbying by the entertainment industry, the House rejected the measure Wednesday on a 282-146 vote. ``Of course we worked it hard,'' Motion Picture Association of ...

Not for commercial use...for free and open discussion purposes only. PRISTINA, Yugoslavia, June 16—With ethnic Albanian guerrillas establishing offices, erecting checkpoints and occupying police stations in Kosovo as Yugoslav forces have withdrawn, NATO commanders moved for the first time today to rein in the newly empowered rebels and allay concerns among Serbian civilians here about possible reprisal attacks. In the first major confrontation between Kosovo Liberation Army rebels and allied forces, U.S. Marines today stripped weapons from about 200 guerrillas in the Kosovo village of Zegra. The action followed a tense standoff in which the KLA members refused at first ...

For Editorial and Discussion use only: June 15, 1999  BARR GRILLS ARMY OVER GUN REGISTRATION SCHEME OBJECTS TO ATLANTA GENERAL'S CALL TO PUNISH SOLDIERS WASHINGTON, DC – In a letter to General Thomas A. Schwartz, Commanding General, United States Army Forces Command in Atlanta, Georgia, today, U.S. Representative Bob Barr (GA-7) strongly criticized a draft Army memorandum requiring all soldiers to register any personal firearms that may be stored in their private residences.   In addition to establishing a registration system, the memo proposed punishing soldiers who failed to comply with the directive. In his letter, Barr cited five different federal ...

A new WHO report released today claims that almost half the world's children (700 million) are exposed to tobacco smoke by the 1.2 billion adults that smoke. WHO is calling for new legislation to protect children in public places such as schools, nurseries, and leisure facilities used by kids. The report summarises evidence showing that passive smoking is a cause of pneumonia and bronchitis, coughing and wheezing, asthma attacks, middle ear infection, cot death, and possibly cardiovascular and neurobiological impairment in children. To make its case for action, the WHO highlights the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child ...

"The word "soul" is now the hottest item in the title of book sales--but all "soul" really means, in most of these books, is simply the ego in drag. For authentic transformation is not a matter of belief but of the death of the believer; not a matter of translating the world but of transforming the world; not a matter of finding solace but of finding infinity on the other side of death. The self is not made content; the self is made toast." Translation Versus Transformation            In a series of books (e.g., A Sociable God, Up from Eden, ...

Stonewall Clinton President Clinton has said and done some pretty amazing things, but his official proclamation declaring this "Gay and Lesbian Pride Month" takes the cake in my book. Not the Liberty Bell "Thirty years ago this month, at the Stonewall Inn in New York City, a courageous group of citizens resisted harassment and mistreatment, setting in motion a chain of events that would become known as the Stonewall Uprising and the birth of the modern gay and lesbian civil rights movement," Clinton said in his statement of June 11. The White House went on to say that homosexuals ...