Free Republic

Doctors (A) The number of physicians in the U.S. is 700,000. (B) Accidental deaths caused by Physicians per year are 120,000. (C) Accidental deaths per physician is 0.171. Statistics courtesy of U.S.Dept of Health Human Services. >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Now think about this: Guns (A) The number of gun owners in the U.S is 80,000,000. (Yes, that's 80 million)

Saudi Arabia is to retrain its 40,000 prayer leaders - also known as imams - in an effort to counter militant Islam. Details of the plan were revealed in the influential Saudi newspaper Al-Sharq al-Awsat. The plan is part of a wider programme launched by the Saudi monarch a few years ago to encourage moderation and tolerance in Saudi society. The ministry of religious affairs and new centre for national dialogue will carry out the training, the paper said. The centre was created five years ago to disseminate a moderate interpretation of Islamic tradition. There is growing awareness in Saudi...

Files kept by the State Department can be extensive March 21, 2008 (Computerworld) An admission late Thursday that three contract workers in the U.S. Department of State illegally accessed the passport records of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) has sparked a firestorm of controversy. While State Department officials characterized the incident as the result of "imprudent curiosity," Obama's campaign spokesman called the breach an "outrageous breach of security and privacy." The breaches occurred Jan. 9, Feb. 12 and March 14, but were apparently not reported to higher-level State Department employees, who said they learned of the incidents just this week. The...

Iraq Five Years On   By Nile Gardiner The Heritage Foundation | Friday, March 21, 2008 On the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, the United States has proved its critics wrong--again. The U.S.-led surge has been a remarkable success, and the fledgling democracy is no longer on the path to civil war. The ballot box and the rule of law are now replacing terrorism, fear, and intimidation as the norm. For historians looking for evidence of American decline, this progress in Iraq must be a huge disappointment. The world needs stronger U.S. leadership and is a far...

Iraqi Documents Show al Qaeda Ties by Kenneth R. Timmerman A much-publicized report released by the Pentagon last week details the extensive ties between the regime of Saddam Hussein and a wide variety of international terrorist organizations, including Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida. “Despite their incompatible long-term goals, many terrorist movements and Saddam found a common enemy in the United States,” the report’s authors at the Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA) state. But instead of reporting on this conclusion, most of the media accounts have focused on a single sentence that appears in the executive summary, stating that the report’s...

President Bush has no choice but to cancel his trip to Beijing for the 2008 Olympics. No doubt, the president will resist this inevitability, as cancellation would sour U.S.-China relations. Mr. Bush cannot stand on Chinese soil without making a mockery of the freedom agenda. The repression in Tibet is just the latest evidence. What began as a series of peaceful protests in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa on March 10 has devolved into a series of pitched street battles and house-to-house searches. Chinese troops have exacted retribution against ethnic Tibetans after the latter attacked shops and businesses owned or...

A mathematical mystery that has baffled top minds in the field of symbolic dynamics for nearly four decades was cracked last year by a 63-year-old former Israeli security guard. Avraham Trakhtman, a mathematician who worked as a laborer after immigrating to Israel from Russia, succeeded in solving the elusive Road Coloring Problem. The conjecture assumes that it is possible to create a universal map that would direct people to arrive at a certain destination, at the same time, regardless of their original location. Experts say this proposition, which seems to defy logic, could actually have real-life applications in the fields...

The Next President’s Biggest Challenge by Jed Babbin This week marks the fifth anniversary of the American invasion in Iraq. Much has been accomplished, at great cost. And, as Gen. David Petraeus told me in an interview two weeks ago, our progress there is both tenuous and reversible. Last weekend, Pope Benedict XVI said, “Enough with the slaughters. Enough with the violence. Enough with the hatred in Iraq!" The pontiff is a man of peace, his outcry a fundamental expression of his faith. But it is as natural for him to plead that man be at peace with man as...

Every American needs to see this video. John McCain's campaign temporarily suspended (not fired) a low-level campaign worker for posting this on You Tube. The kid did a great job putting it together. http://election.newsmax.com/mccain_aide/

One big fact has largely been lost in the recent coverage of the Democratic presidential race: Hillary Rodham Clinton has virtually no chance of winning. Her own campaign acknowledges there is no way that she will finish ahead in pledged delegates. That means the only way she wins is if Democratic superdelegates are ready to risk a backlash of historic proportions from the party’s most reliable constituency. Unless Clinton is able to at least win the primary popular vote — which also would take nothing less than an electoral miracle — and use that achievement to pressure superdelegates, she has...

Delegate Robert G. Marshall yesterday criticized fellow Prince William County Republicans for supporting former Gov. James S. Gilmore III's U.S. Senate bid, saying they should stop "fooling" their conservative base and come clean about Mr. Gilmore's stance on abortion. "I don't know how they can blink at 700,000 abortions and still say he supports the sanctity of life," Mr. Marshall said of Delegates Scott Lingamfelter and Jeffrey M. Frederick's endorsements of Mr. Gilmore despite his belief government should not intrude during the first eight weeks of pregnancy. "That's the tipping point for me." Mr. Marshall, 63, Mr. Gilmore, 58, and...

WASHINGTON — In a response to anti-immigrant sentiment and an increase in hate crimes against Latinos, a Hispanic rights group launched an effort Thursday to debunk myths espoused by media talk shows and political campaigns. The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund unveiled the "Truth in Immigration" campaign to rebut legal and factual inaccuracies about immigrants, particularly Latinos, in the United States. "Right now the airwaves are dominated by a few that speak very negatively and falsely about immigrants and immigration," said John Trasviña, MALDEF president and general counsel. Trasviña said the Web site — www.truthinimmigration.org, which will be...

From the Los Angeles Times: Hamas’ stand: An official of the movement describes its goals for all of Palestine. By Mousa Abu Marzook July 10, 2007 ...I, for one, do not trouble myself over “recognizing” Israel’s right to exist — this is not, after all, an epistemological problem; Israel does exist, as any Rafah boy in a hospital bed, with IDF shrapnel in his torso, can tell you. This dance of mutual rejection is a mere distraction when so many are dying or have lived as prisoners for two generations in refugee camps. As I write these words, Israeli forays...

A successful Manhattan based financial planning firm President is tired of being called a Yuppie. In the "natural evolution of the Hippie-Preppie-Yuppie progression," Chuck Failla say he has found religion. These days, more Americans not only want to live well, but want to also do good (or at least do no evil), he says. "They still love money and conspicuous displays of affluence. But now, the way to achieve status is to trade in the Beemer for a Toyota Prius, spend $50,000 putting solar panels on the roof, shop at Whole Foods for $7-a-bunch organic endive, and acquire a chic...

"This is not merely a tale of the elderly and a time long past, but rather it is a memorial and indicator along the path to the independence of Cypriots and Jews." Monuments help us to remember or prevent us from forgetting. We choose who and what to commemorate and the cumulative result constitutes our shared public memory. At a time when the Holocaust moves from lived experience to historical phenomenon in the memories of succeeding generations, the function and significance of memorials becomes increasingly important in the drive to “never forget.” Monuments and memorials serve to mourn, to honor...

New tomb for 'Altai Princess' to be built in Siberia 21:34 | 20/ 03/ 2008 NOVOSIBIRSK, March 20 (RIA Novosti) - A tomb to house the remains of a woman found after being preserved in ice for 2,500 years will be built in Siberia's Altai Republic, the director of a local museum said on Thursday. The well-preserved remains of the woman dubbed the Altai Princess were discovered in the region by a team led by a Novosibirsk archeologist in 1993 near the Mongolian border, and have been studied at the Archaeology and Ethnography Institute in Novosibirsk. Residents of Altai, where...

BLT is not your grandmother's sandwich anymore. I'm not talking about the famous bacon, lettuce and tomato taste treat here, but Black Liberation Theology. Thanks to pastor emeritus Jeremiah Wright of Barrick Obama's Trinity United Church of Christ, a new light has been focused on BLT, pushing it from the shadows into the forefront of political and religious discussion in America. So what is BLT, and where did it come from? Black Liberation Theology is a fairly recent phenomenum, as far as religions go. It is, in fact, more radical politics than religion. BLT orginated in the 1960s when James...

BERLIN (Reuters) - The leader of Germany's Jewish community said on Friday she was surprised Pope Benedict could have allowed a new version of a Good Friday prayer for the conversion of Jews. Charlotte Knobloch, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, told Reuters Television she could not fathom Pope Benedict putting forward the new decree because he experienced discrimination against Jews in Germany as a young man. "I would have assumed that this German pope, of all people, had got to know first hand the ostracizing of Jewry," she said. "I could not have imagined that this...

Here is a video report on Sen. John McCain's visit to London, March 20, 2008, where he visited 10 Downing Street and also shot back at Barack Obama's recent ridiculing of McCain. From the glint in McCain's eye, it is clear he welcomes a contest on who knows more about Iraq and the Middle East . . .

Previous studies have examined the effect of income on lottery ticket expenditures using an aggregate measure of income, usually personal income. Reasons exist, however, for believing that lottery expenditures do not respond equally to all sources of income. This paper examines the propensity to purchase lottery tickets from separate types of income, namely income from earnings, transfer payments, and wealth. Using county-level data for five states, we find evidence that lottery expenditures respond differently to changes in each income type, and that ticket purchases are most strongly influenced by changes in transfer payments. Several policy implications follow from our results.