Free Republic

Now that the Kosovo War — or “conflict” as the White House insisted on calling it before it was settled — is over, some killjoys are bound to interrupt the continuous gloat coming from Bill Clinton’s friends and actually count the costs of the operation . It will be harder to calculate the ways our own military has been degraded by the Clinton/Madeleine Albright adventure. The financial costs of depleting our cruise missile stores, stretching an Air Force already scrambling for spare parts and the strain of yet another deployment on the most deployed military in the history of the ...

Senator Hugh Webster North Carolina General Assembly, 1101 Legislative Building, Raleigh, North Carolina 27601 (919) 733-5665 Hughw@ms.ncga.state.nc.us Voters Disenfranchised on District Court Judges Raleigh – Senator Hugh Webster (R-Caswell) offered an amendment to the N.C. state Senate budget, Thursday, changing language creating new district court districts. A provision in the new budget adds nine new district court judges throughout the state, including one additional judge in Alamance County. The budget authorizes Governor hunt to appoint the new judges. The appointments last until 2002, two years after Governor Hunt's term expires. Senator Webster sought to amend the budget with an ...

Serbs plead for protection, Kosovo rebels exact revenge, NATO detains 25   7.04 p.m. ET (2304 GMT) June 18, 1999 By Donna Bryson, Associated Press PRISTINA, Yugoslavia (AP) -- With KLA rebels trying to expand their presence in Kosovo, NATO peacekeepers took 25 rebel members into custody Friday after finding mistreated prisoners at a police station. One elderly man was found dead, chained to a chair. NATO pledged to put more military police on the streets to reinforce its authority and make the troubled province safe for Serbs who are fleeing by the thousands. Adding reinforcements to protect Serbs represents ...

UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- North Korea accused the United States on Friday of trying to unleash a new war on the Korean peninsula by deploying advanced weapons and provoking South Korea to fire on North Korean naval ships this week. ``The touch-and-go situation is now created in the Korean peninsula where a war may break out any time,'' North Korea's U.N. Ambassador Li Hyong Chol warned in a letter to the U.N. Security Council. The only reason this week's clash in the Yellow Sea did not escalate into all-out war is ``our great patience and self-control,'' he said in the ...

TWO former British soldiers discovered by peacekeeping troops in Kosovo yesterday said they had joined the Kosovo Liberation Army two months ago and killed several Serbs. They were among 60 KLA troops disarmed by Nato forces three miles from Stimlje, on the road to Pristina. Alan Kelly, 47, and Andrew Freeney, 29, said they had been fighting running battles with the Serb army in the mountains of Kosovo along with dozens of Americans and an Italian. Mr Freeney, a former Royal Fusilier from Birmingham, flew to Kosovo after telling his mother he was going to Greece for a holiday. He ...

    HELSINKI, June 19 (Reuters) - Following are details of the  agreement signed on Friday by the United States and Russia on  the participation by Russian forces in a peacekeeping mission  (KFOR) in Kosovo.   -- The agreement is subject to endorsement by NATO and the  Russian government. It comes under the mandate of U.N. Security  Council Resolution 1,244 and is within the framework of the  military-technical agreement between KFOR and the Federal  Republic of Yugoslavia.   -- The agreement provides for unity of command, with the  Russian side to exercise ``full political and military control´´  over the Russian ...

Carnival turns into nightmare Protest part of global plan Strange mix of defiance and pot plant barricades An anti-capitalist demonstration in the City of London deteriorated into violence yesterday as protesters pelted police with bricks and bottles and attacked financial institutions, causing widespread damage. After more than six hours of rioting and vandalism by up to 4,000 protesters, one woman was known to be in hospital after falling under the wheels of a police van. There were also reports that four police officers received hospital treatment and a male protester was also injured in an incident with a police ...

Europe Shows It Can Act -- At Last PRISTINA, Kosovo, June 19 (Reuters) - Europe went into a ground battle of sorts for the first time since World War Two in the past week, with the only major hitch being the old historical question of where Russia fitted on the strategic map. The successful deployment of NATO-led forces on or ahead of deadline set off back-slapping at headquarters in Brussels and at last put to rest concerns that Europeans could not act decisively together militarily. ``Operation Joint Guardian'' was nowhere near a World War Two ``Battle of the Bulge'' and ...

A declaration by the Representatives of the United Colonies of North-America, now met in Congress at Philadelphia, setting forth the causes and necessity of their taking up arms. If it was possible for men, who exercise their reason to believe, that the divine Author of our existence intended a part of the human race to hold an absolute property in, and an unbounded power over others, marked out by his infinite goodness and wisdom, as the objects of a legal domination never rightfully resistible, however severe and oppressive, the inhabitants of these colonies might at least require from the parliament ...

ALBANIAN REFUGEES REFUSE TO STAY IN AUSSIE ARMY BARRACKS News Article Link Canberra, June 16 (CNA) About 80 ethnic Albanian refugees taking temporary shelter in Australia have refused to stay at former army barracks and instead bedded down in buses for the second consecutive night on Tuesday, because of poor accommodations at Singleton, northwest of Sydney. They said the Australian army barracks were no better than the camps they had previously stayed at in Macedonia,falling short of their expectations for better shelter in Australia. The Albanian refugees said the facilities are lacking heat, and toilets are hundreds of meters away ...

The Goldberg File PLAYING HARD TO GET The National Review ZURICH - Doesn’t writing with a dateline sound impressive? Often when you see the dateline on a newspaper article it conveys a certain air of legitimacy it wouldn’t normally have. “BRUSSELS - French officials are reeling over the fact that cheese consumption has fallen below the level necessary to cause blindness…” Now the average reporter writing that in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal would probably have gotten all that info from the local papers and TV news and perhaps working the phones a bit. But because ...

For those interested, these FR favorites support George W.

Oral sex, as Clinton appears to practice it, is a hit-and-run game. It's a way to shut women up, to stop their nagging. "Kiss it!" Clinton allegedly told Paula Jones when he dropped his pants in the Little Rock hotel room. He wants to be consoled by women's receptive maternalism, but he's too scared to let his slick willy linger long in the dark love chamber. Like Edgar Allan Poe, he shrinks from the razor-sharp pendulum in that pit. Clinton suffers from Freudian ambivalence about women. He drinks deep from their liquid emotionality, which the American people see glistening in ...

3:30 p.m. June 18 update -- Congressmen who claimed the "Mandatory Gun Show Background Act," H.R. 2122, didn't go far enough, and a few who felt it went too far, joined forces to defeat the gun portion of the Juvenile Justice Act. It failed 147-280, with all but 10 Democrats and 82 Republicans opposing it. The White House immediately claimed that "the gun lobby controls the House of Representatives." But the White House plan to blame it all on the Republicans was made more difficult by the fact that "Mr. Democrat," John Dingell, the most senior Democrat in Congress ...

Gore stops to hug teen lesbian at California campaign stop By DAN WHITCOMB LOS ANGELES (June 18, 1999 7:48 p.m. EDT http://www.nandotimes.com) - Vice President Al Gore interrupted a question-and-answer session with high school students on Friday to embrace a lesbian teen who broke into tears as she described verbal abuse hurled at her by former classmates. A crowd of several hundred students at Fairfax High School in Los Angeles broke into applause as Gore, two days after he announced his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination, crossed a gymnasium to embrace sobbing senior Jessie Funes. Funes, 17, had been ...

You will not read about it in the New York Times. You will not see the footage on your nightly news. In fact, even C-Span did not dispatch a video camera to preserve the event. But this week, in the Rayburn Office Building of the House of Representatives, in hearing room 2154, several members of the United States Congress took part in a display of slander and intimidation worthy of a totalitarian regime. The occasion was a hearing, held by the Congressional Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources titled: "The Pros and Cons of Drug Legalization, ...

Bush signs law barring Texas cities from suing gun manufacturers AUSTIN (June 18, 1999 9:00 p.m. EDT http://www.nandotimes.com) - Texas Gov. George W. Bush signed a bill Friday banning Texas cities from suing gun makers, and released a statement saying it was wrong to blame gun violence on the manufacturers. "Gov. Bush does not believe the manufacturer of a legal product should be held responsible for the criminal misuse of that product," the statement issued by his office said. Approved by the Texas legislature last month, the bill requires cities or counties to obtain legislative approval before they can sue ...

For Education and Discussion Purposes Only!U.S. Industrial Espionage Is Confronted The Swedish government will investigate if the U.S. uses signals intelligence, meant for national security purposes, in a way that is a disadvantage for Swedish corporations. A highly controversial report about signals intelligence was given to the European Parliament, and has now reached the Sweden's Ministry for Foreign Affairs. [Text of image of the front-page of the EuroParl report.] In a report written for the European Parliament it is claimed that information from United States military signals intelligence is used to benefit American corporations. The report contains several examples on ...

AFTER three days of talks, forced into being by Russia's land-grab at Pristina airport, the United States and Moscow last night agreed a deal on the issue of post-war peace-keeping. An agreement worked out by both defence ministers - William Cohen and Igor Sergeyev - in 30 hours of haggling gave Russian troops a stake in three of the five zones administered by Nato in Kosovo. Reports said the number of Russians was put at 3,000 - less than one-third of the number Moscow had said it was prepared to send. "It preserves the unity of command . and it ...

Before he became King Billy's Chief of Staff, Erskine Bowles was a deputy under his predecessor, Leon Panetta (Bowles returned to the private sector in December, 1995, and then cane back to the White House as Chief of Staff in 1997). During his grand jury testimony, Bowles professed no personal knowledge of Monica or her work in the White House. To perhaps refresh his recollection, Bowles was presented with a series of White House photographs taken during the government shutdown of mid-November, 1995. At page 233, we see Bowles did a fine job with identifying the photos until a strange ...