Free Republic

This time in a public school in Oklahoma. Four students wounded. What is it about "Goals 2000" which is screwing up the kids this bad?

THE least you can expect from someone who has a starring role is that they turn up for the performance. So where was Hillary yesterday, commanding the center stage which she so richly deserves? The stage managers were there. The main cast was there. The extras were there. But Hillary was nowhere to be seen yesterday at Union Square Park, at a demonstration against Rudolph Giuliani on his policy on the homeless. Now let me say this. Her rehearsals were absolutely five-star: "Let's be absolutely clear, breaking up families that are homeless is wrong. "Criminalizing the homeless with mass arrests ...

Rarely if at all in the post-Cold War world has there been such a stark case of high politics and doubtful economics. The oil company's director of international affairs has been openly blunt about it: ''The only way this is going to work is to make the pipeline as affordable as possible for shippers to put their oil down it. We are asking the US government to attract as much oil as possible and to attract as much financing as possible.'' Thus BP Amoco, the world's third-largest oil company, opens its begging bowl for a taxpayers' handout with the ...

The Womb of School Safety This post was triggered by another thread:  Judge Upholds Student's Expulsion for Toy Handgun in Car [Free Republic] so Im going to steal a bit of thunder and examine things that intrigue me about the goal of 'safe schools'. Lets take a look at the measures we'd need to implement to make schools safe. What items, actions and attitudes would need to be prohibited in order to achieve the degree of safety we seem to be dreaming of. Also, what are the intangible costs of this 'attitude adjustment toward violent actions and symbols' - I ...

EUROPEANS have ignited two world wars this century and come perilously close to sparking a third, so they have a special duty to take defence matters seriously. Even though the fissile stand-off between East and West ended a decade ago, fighting in Bosnia, Kosovo and the Caucasus has demonstrated that not all of Europe is yet at peace. And even if it were, there are plenty of places in the wider world where Europeans could lend a hand. This month, Europe's two premier clubs, NATO and the European Union, are to work out practical ways in which Europeans can shoulder ...

THE NEW LEVIATHAN Government is not reason, it is not eloquence -- it is force. -- GEORGE WASHINGTON The Restraint of Government is the True Liberty and Freedom of the People. -- EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY COMMON AMERICAN SAYING AMERICANS' liberty is perishing beneath the constant growth of government power. Federal, state, and local governments are confiscating citizens' property, trampling their rights, and decimating their opportunities more than ever before.     Americans today must obey thirty times as many laws as their great-grandfathers had to obey at the turn of the century. Federal agencies publish an average of over 200 pages of new ...

The proposed Anglo-French `Euro force' is a piece of feeble posturing disdainful of America's historic role in guarding Europe's freedom, says John Keegan, Defence Editor. WHAT should we make of the announcement that Britain and France are to set up a joint force to deal with internal European crises? It is to be separate from the existing Eurocorps, consisting of contingents from the French, German, Belgian, Spanish and Luxembourg armed forces, set up in 1993. It is also to be separate from Nato's Allied Rapid Reaction Corps (ARRC), which since the collapse of the Warsaw Pact has been the ...

Modest missile defense plan is caught between skeptical senators and resentful Russia No one in Congress is more eager than Republican Sen. Thad Cochran to build a weapons system to protect the United States from a limited attack of ballistic missiles. He wrote the bill that President Clinton signed this year, committing the nation to doing just that. But few lawmakers are more concerned than the soft-spoken Mississippi lawyer about what such a weapons system would mean to the fragile balance of nuclear power between the United States and Russia. Unlike some of his party colleagues, who would just as ...

FDA hasn't recertified site that makes vaccine The Pentagon has delayed the second phase of its controversial anthrax vaccination program, originally set to begin next month, because the Food and Drug Administration has yet to recertify the plant making the vaccine. The postponement -- which could last until late next year -- will delay vaccine shots for all the soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines who would be "early deployers" during an overseas conflict. That includes personnel assigned to many Navy ships, airborne units and fighter squadrons, along with hundreds of thousands of others. Pentagon officials tried to downplay the significance ...

The ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee said last week the nation’s strategy of fighting and winning two major theater wars is "unrealistic." Echoing comments by an increasing number of top military officials, Michigan Sen. Carl Levin questioned the value of gearing up U.S. military forces to fight nearly simultaneous major conflicts. "I think it’s probably unrealistic and it ought to be a major and a minor, rather than two majors," Levin said in an interview with Defense Week. "I just don’t think it’s realistic, even with the ‘nearly simultaneous’ qualification." Because of his position as a ...

THE PROTEST GAME is a messy, and odd, business. And it hasn’t been as messy and odd as last week’s spectacle in Seattle for quite some time. A summit for the World Trade Organization has brought out a most exotic group of rabble-rousers. The Topless Lesbian Avengers chanted in unison with steelworkers. Protesters dressed as sea turtles and butterflies raised their fists in solidarity with Harley-riding machinists and Geritol-popping Gray Panthers. Then the police started lobbing in the pepper-gas canisters and firing the rubber bullets and the streets of Seattle took on the familiar haze of the streets of ...

Hillary Rodham Clinton's lecture to New York last week on the matter of Mayor Giuliani and the homeless was more than a trip through a time machine back to 1985 -- it was also a window into the first lady's worldview. And in the days that followed, it became ever more evident that it's not just the first lady who has failed to learn the lessons of history. A gaggle of the usual suspects trooped into Union Square Park yesterday as part of a protest against City Hall's latest initiatives on the homeless -- a catch-all designation coined three decades ...

FORT GIBSON, Okla. (AP) -- Three students at a rural middle school were shot this morning and a student was in custody. Superintendent Steve Wilmoth said students were gathered outside before the 8 a.m. start of classes then ``another student just walked up and opened fire on them.'' Wilmoth didn't know the relationship of the students. ``From what I know at this point it seems to be a random thing,'' he said. Tyra Palmer, a spokeswoman at Tulsa Regional Medical Center, said one student was in the emergency room there and a doctor was assessing his injuries. Another student ...

Shooting in Fort Gibson, Oklahoma School Shooting in Fort Gibson, Oklahoma (CNSNews.com) - Breaking news this hour from Fort Gibson, Oklahoma - a small town about 50 miles southeast of Tulsa: Three students were shot at a middle school shortly before 8 am local time. Reports from the scene said the person who opened fire - believed to be another student -- was in custody. No word yet on the conditions of the three students, who apparently were injured but not killed in the shooting. A member of the Fort Gibson police force said details were still sketchy.

Advocate: Look behind news stories Published in the Asbury Park Press 12/06/99 By GEORGIA EAST COASTAL MONMOUTH BUREAU RANDALL ROBINSON, a longtime human rights advocate and president of TransAfrica, doesn't shy away from controversy. He once staged a 400-day protest in front of the South African Embassy to denounce apartheid. As president and founder of TransAfrica, it is part of his job to keep the pressure on the United States to ensure its foreign policies toward Africa and the Caribbean are fair and progressive. But while giving a keynote address at the Garden State Association of Black Journalists awards program, ...

LIMA (Reuters) - Peru's ombudsman slammed two popular television talk shows on Friday for daring audience members to do ``anything for money'' in a live program, including licking dirty armpits and lying in frogs' urine. The two competing shows, ``Laura on America'' and ''Maritere'', broadcast the controversial programs last weekend, paying participants $20 to $40 for taking up challenges that provoked an outcry from the public and politicians. Challenges included a woman licking the armpits and feet of a sweaty, half-naked man. Two scantily-clad women lay in a pool of frogs' urine. A man dressed in feathers and ate ...

Chicago police are asking banks to offer free safe-deposit boxes to people seeking to withdraw large amounts of money, in an effort to prevent a rash of robberies tied to Y2K panic. All of the assurances in the world about bank security and Year 2000 compliance probably won't be enough to persuade older people who lived through the Depression to leave their money in the bank, said Sgt. Russell Schaefer, business liaison for the department's 1st District, which includes the Loop. That's why Schaefer has met with eight of the city's largest banks--with branches in neighborhoods across the city--and ...

CERNICA, Kosovo —A powerful explosion tore apart a house Friday night in this multiethnic town in the U.S.-patrolled sector, killing one Serb woman and injuring two others, soldiers said Saturday. It was the most deadly incident of ethnic violence since July in this community, where American Kosovo Force soldiers have kept a constant presence to quell tensions between Serbs and Albanians. In July, a Serb man was shot to death in Cernica, the only village near Gnjilane where a sizable population of Serbs remained after the NATO air campaign ended in June. Cernica is about six miles southwest of ...

On 3 June 1999, when Secretary of the Navy Richard Danzig raised the prospect of women in submarines at the Naval Submarine League Symposium, I was in the audience. A silent, unbelieving gasp seemed to hang on the announcement. Subsequent fallout in the press has been spirited. In September, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Jay Johnson and Director of Naval Nuclear Propulsion Admiral Frank Bowman both spoke out against the idea. On 20 September 1999, a policy statement was released: "The Navy's policy of not assigning women to submarines remains unchanged." U.S. NAVY (CHRIS VICKERS) Evacuation from a submarine ...

Behind the Headlines by Justin Raimondo Antiwar.com December 6, 1999 SLAPPED IN SEATTLE – GLOBALISTS RETREAT The Battle of Seattle has provoked a storm of outrage in elite business and political circles, a chorus of sneers and imprecations not heard since that last great outbreak of political and social turmoil known today as The Sixties. (Actually, the mid-sixties and early seventies: but, never mind.) Back then, the source of the elite's outrage was a spontaneous and massive movement to end an odious war: the elites' response was derision on the op ed pages of the nation's newspapers, bipartisan solidarity ...