Free Republic

Bedrooms for the Brass Navy Admits Funneling Money for Bigwigs’ Quarters The United States Naval Academy's Buchanan House, 1906, has hosted U.S. presidents, foreign heads of state and royalty. By David Ruppe ABCNEWS.com June 18 — The Navy has admitted to improperly using $5.5 million to renovate houses for three top military officers, as Pentagon planners worry about funding frontline U.S. troops to fight wars overseas. Service officials voluntarily told a congressional committee the money was taken from a Navy operation and maintenance budget not intended for housing repairs and upgrades. The money was used over seven years, 1992 ...

First Lady To Move To New York By Fall - Report WASHINGTON (Reuters) - First lady Hillary Rodham Clinton is planning to move to New York by the fall to position herself for a run for the U.S. Senate from the state, U.S. News and World Report magazine said Saturday. In its June 28 edition that goes on sale Monday, the magazine said in its ``Washington Whispers'' column that Mrs. Clinton is prepared to leave the White House early -- and live apart from President Clinton -- for the sake of a Senate campaign that she has not yet ...

Road rage therapist (AP/Newark Star-Ledger, Warren S. Westura) So you're driving 10 mph over the speed limit but you slow down when a tailgater starts honking. Very passive-aggressive. Or, you speed up when someone tries to pass you. Classic competitive behavior. Or you scream and pound your steering wheel when construction limits traffic to one lane. Narcissistic personality. Donald Einreinhofer has been diagnosing the personality types behind raging drivers' worst habits for a year, listening - for $70 an hour - as motorists vent their frustrations. The 31-year-old high school teacher - a certified hypnotherapist but not trained as ...

Some Persian Gulf War veterans believed exposed to low levels of nerve gas have enzymes that resist the gas, while others don't and are suffering from serious neurological illnesses, a new scientific study reveals. The study, funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, is significant because it shows how some soldiers fighting on battlefields infested with non-deadly levels of nerve gas could get sick while others did not, said Dr. Robert W. Haley, one of the authors of the research. The Pentagon initially claimed that low-level chemical agents didn't make soldiers ill. The fact that some got sick and others ...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Congressional Republicans pressed their case Saturday for a reorganization of the Energy Department in response to the continuing controversy over the safeguarding of America's nuclear secrets. Using the weekly GOP radio address, Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., accused the Clinton administration of taking ``half measures'' in dealing with security at nuclear weapons laboratories. Kyl is one of three GOP senators who have proposed putting nuclear weapons programs under a largely autonomous agency within the Energy Department -- an idea also urged this week by a panel of intelligence experts advising the president. Nevertheless, such a reorganization is ...

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- URGENT ACTION ITEM! FROM THE LIBERTARIAN PARTY Watergate Office Building 2600 Virginia Avenue, NW, Suite 100 Washington DC 20037 Phone: (202) 333-0008 Ext. 222 E-mail: ggetz@CompuServe.com For information about the party: (800) ELECT-US June 19, 1999 U.S. House will vote Wednesday on bill to reform asset-forfeiture laws *** Immediate action required! Telephone your House representative immediately. Friends: The U.S. House of Representatives is scheduled to vote on Wednesday, June 23, on a bill that would dramatically reform civil asset-forfeiture laws, which allow the government to confiscate the property of innocent Americans without even charging them with ...

It pains me deeply to see Alexa McDonough razzed as "stupid" and "inept" by media commentators and by the members of her own caucus, all because of her belated discovery that many in her party do not want to kick out God. Pains me because - and very few people know this - Alexa credits me personally with causing her to run for the NDP's national leadership. During the campaign, someone in Red Deer asked her why she was running. It all started, she said, when she appeared on a Newsworld television show. There was this "insufferable ... arrogant ...

The U.S. House vote on posting the Ten Commandments may have offended those who were determined to be offended. But it was the correct decision, nonetheless. Overwhelmingly, the House approved legislation to permit displaying the commandments in schools and other government facilities. Of Jacksonville's three House members, only Democrat Corrine Brown was opposed. A constitutional issue was raised in debate. But many of the commandments are a foundation for American law - the prohibitions on killing, stealing and bearing false witness, for example. Some of the commandments are not written into U.S. law - the instructions to honor parents, ...

NATO Finds 'Concentration Camps' In Kosovo-Paper Sunday, June 20, 1999 LONDON (Reuters) - NATO troops have found 60,000 ethnic Albanian refugees held by Serb forces in five ransacked northern Kosovo villages that were turned into concentration camps, The Sunday Telegraph reported. The refugees told Telegraph journalists they had been taken prisoner by Yugoslav forces, to be used as a human shield in the event of a ground war with NATO. The families had been rounded up from mountain hideouts in mid-April and driven to five burnt-out villages near Podujevo in northern Kosovo, the Sunday Telegraph said. ``The village prison camps ...

President Bill Clinton is in his second term as president. He obviously enjoys the job, despite "the slings and arrows" he has encountered. He likes being "on stage," and he's good at that. But the Constitution limits him to two terms. So President Clinton is running for his "third term" with Vice President Al Gore Jr. as his "proxy" -- without Monica, of course. Mr. Gore has no personal connection with Mr. Clinton's kind of gross immorality -- except that Mr. Gore has compromised himself by defending Mr. Clinton in the face of overwhelming proof of it. "Loyalty" is ...

In the continuing quest of presidential candidate Malcolm S. "Steve" Forbes to remake his public image comes his latest incarnation: Steve Forbes, hero to black America. In recent weeks, Forbes and his aides have attempted to expand his appeal to minority voters, whom he largely ignored in his 1996 presidential bid, by bringing several high-profile black officials onto his campaign. In doing so, advisers said, Forbes seeks to position himself as this election cycle's version of Jack Kemp, who has long been the GOP's most insistent advocate of broadening the party beyond its typical constituencies. "I think that is ...

PRISTINA, Yugoslavia -- Someone back in Canada wanted to know if I was sickened by the incontrovertible evidence of a massacre of Kosovar Albanians that I chanced upon a few days ago. It does me no good to become emotionally involved in the horrors I have witnessed in Kosovo and elsewhere during a working lifetime spent mostly on the road and often in the darkest corners of the planet. Reflecting too much on what I saw in Somalia, Rwanda and Chechnya can't bring back the dead. It can't help my psyche, either. Better, I believe, to present the awful ...

I am probably best known as an offensive lineman for the Jacksonville Jaguars. But to a 4-year-old girl named Haley, I am simply ''Daddy.'' My daughter was born prematurely. She weighed just 3 pounds 11 ounces, and she fit in the palm of my hand. In that fragile life, I came face-to-face with a challenge greater than any I had confronted on the football field. In game situations, I advance by force; as a father, I would have to advance by love. I started my rookie year of fatherhood as an underdog. Since I grew up without my dad ...

GENEVA -- U.S. and European intelligence agencies are reporting mounting evidence that Russia and China have massively violated the 1972 Biological and Toxic Weapons Convention and subsequent international and bilateral agreements to control biowarfare weapons. The convention, signed by 169 nations, prohibits the development, production, acquisition, stockpiling, transfer or use of chemical and biological weapons. All signatories with biowarfare arsenals pledged to eliminate such weapons over 10 years. While Russia and China appear to have ceased adding to their huge stockpiles of chemical weapons, both are developing new strains of highly lethal biological toxins. According to Ken Alibek, a ...

You'd have to go back to Teddy Roosevelt, who set aside millions of acres for national parks, to find a presidential candidate with environmental credentials like Al Gore's. While Republican front-runner George W. Bush got his first major briefing on global warming this spring, Gore's study began in the 1960s at Harvard University, where he learned at the knee of the man who invented the theory. Gore made the environment the centerpiece of his 1988 campaign for president, when rival Jesse Jackson said Gore's dissertations on the state of Earth made him sound like the ''national chemist.'' But defeat ...

The term "pay for performance," as it is being used in contract negotiations between Denver Public Schools (DPS) and the classroom teachers, is misleading at best. The offer on the table is not to pay teachers for their performance in the classroom, but to pay teachers based on someone else's performance. In this case, that means teachers' pay would be based on how students perform in a number of areas, including standardized tests. Teachers oppose this proposal for several reasons, but perhaps the most important is that teachers have no control over what happens to students outside of the ...

Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein makes Forbes' richest 100 list LONDON - Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein has made it into the list of the world's richest people, according to Britain's Sunday Telegraph newspaper. Most of the dictator's $6 billion personal fortune was amassed through "plundering the country's treasury and a smuggling operation masterminded by his son, Uday," reported the paper. Saddam's new ranking comes from the U.S. wealth-assessors Forbes in their 1999 list, said the paper, adding that he is in the top half of the world's 100 wealthiest people. Although the paper said that the Iraqi leader has been "creaming ...

Apparently, secession not settled in the Civil War By ALLEN G. BREED RALEIGH, N.C. - Forefathers brought forth this continent six score and 18 years ago, that was conceived in secession and dedicated to the proposition that states are sovereign and not beholden to a central government. Now, the philosophical heirs to the Confederate States of America are making another go at it. Organizers of the Southern Party have registered with the Federal Election Commission and with the secretaries of state in Florida, Georgia, Texas and Virginia. By August, the party hopes to be established in all 11 states of ...

Yeltsin joins G8 summit vowing to stick up for Serbs COLOGNE, Germany - Russian President Boris Yeltsin arrived Sunday for the third and final day of the Group of Eight summit here in a "fighting mood," vowing to speak up for the Serbs over Kosovo. But he said upon his arrival, "We have to make up after our fight. That is the main thing." Yeltsin, looking unsteady, held onto the hand of his wife Naina as he descended slowly from his plane, almost stumbling at the bottom of the stairs. He seemed to recover as he walked steadily past the ...

Salon's upcoming public offering stirs unusual controversy Copyright © 1999 Nando Media Copyright © 1999 Reuters News Service http://www.techserver.com/story/0,1643,61284-97492-696314-0,00.html By ANDREA ORR PALO ALTO, Calif. (June 18, 1999 1:04 p.m. EDT http://www.nandotimes.com) - In an industry where doubling and tripling stock prices are as common as sudden and often irrational reversals of fortune, Internet watchers aren't surprised by much anymore. But some of the most jaded among them are perplexed by the upcoming public offering of Salon.com. Salon, the San Francisco-based online magazine that has no profits and only a trickle of a revenues, has been criticized for its shaky ...