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Perhaps Secretary of State Colin Powell's decision to pull the American delegation out of the so-called U.N. World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, will be just a footnote in history. But we can at least hope that it may be a turning point toward a future time when "racism" will no longer be a magic word used to gain money or political concessions. Within the United States, Jesse Jackson and others have repeatedly scared millions of dollars out of big corporations, just by threatening to use the magic word "racism." Even the police have sometimes turned a blind ...

Presidential elections, it turns out, really do matter. It's not just that, by the grand margin of 537 votes, give or take a few hanging chads, the son of a former president gets to occupy the Oval Office instead of the son of a senator. It's not just that we got a bigger tax cut, a faith-based initiative, colorful twin daughters and a dog named Spot, or that reporters have to spend August in Crawford. There are hundreds of policy disputes, some buried deep in the bureaucracy, that are affected by a new administration – many of them barely discussed ...

WASHINGTON, Sept. 7 — Rarely has a foreign leader shown up on the South Lawn of the White House and declared that he and the president of the United States "must" remake the fundamental rules that have governed his country's uneasy relationship with the United States — and get it done in the next four months. Yet for President Vicente Fox of Mexico, that was just a start. On Thursday he used an address to Congress to insist on an end to the humiliating ritual of annually certifying that his country was cracking down on drug traffickers. And he ...

If you don't believe the American family is under siege by some very powerful forces, please continue reading. The American Civil Liberties Union, Planned Parenthood and some powerful politicians -- most notably Hillary Clinton -- are on a jihad to pass laws allowing underage girls to have abortions without parental consent. The ACLU took out a full-page ad in The New York Times, basically saying that without such a law, underage girls will harm themselves in their quest to get rid of unwanted babies. And there is some truth to that. Some troubled teenagers who are afraid of parental reaction ...

Once again we have a story in the news revealing that certain so-called pro-choice groups are as fearful of the choice for life as Superman is of Kryptonite or vampires are of crosses. It appears that Planned Parenthood of South Carolina has its corporate nose out of joint over a recently enacted state law allowing the state to issue motor vehicle license plates bearing the message "Choose Life." The law, signed by Governor Jim Hodges last Sunday, does not mandate the installation of these plates, but merely makes them available, along with other specialty plates (such as NASCAR), for selection ...

WASHINGTON (AP) - The National Press Club told Attorney General John Ashcroft that the Justice Department's subpoena of an Associated Press journalist's telephone records amounted to a threat to constitutionally guaranteed press freedoms. "We believe such actions threaten the right of journalists to protect confidential sources and information, a cornerstone of a free press guaranteed by the First Amendment," the club's president, Richard Ryan, said in a letter to Ashcroft. Dated Wednesday, the letter was circulated Friday. The Justice Department subpoenaed AP reporter John Solomon's home phone records while trying to identify what law enforcement officials told Solomon about a ...

OJAI, Calif. (AP) — The man suspected of murdering three members of a Simi Valley family apparently shot himself to death as law officers closed in Friday evening in Los Padres National Forest, a sheriff's deputy said. The body of Reynaldo Herrera Rodriguez was found about three hours after forest rangers saw him running from a parked sport utility vehicle, said Steve Mayorga, a Ventura County sheriff's deputy. Police recovered the body face down in an embankment with a wound to the head. A loaded 9mm pistol was discovered next to the body. U.S. Forest Service rangers alerted sheriff's ...

(CNSNews.com) - Are the nation''s top publishing companies inserting a liberal agenda and misinformation into junior high science textbooks? According to a report by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, top publishers like Glencoe McGraw-Hill, Prentice Hall and RonJon Publishing are doing just that.The report reveals that most of the books being considered by the Texas State Board of Education for science classes in the sixth, seventh and eighth grades contain factual errors about science, and in many cases, the report claims, a liberal agenda is pushed. According to the report, the textbooks focus mainly on social and political issues, are ...

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The Los Angeles Times is closing its three weekly community news sections, eliminating 18 jobs. The last issues of the San Gabriel Valley Weekly, the South Bay Weekly and the Westside Weekly will appear next week, Times spokeswoman Martha Goldstein said Friday. The weeklies have been losing ad revenue since last May, when the Times launched a California section to handle regional and local news. Since then, businesses have shifted their ad dollars away from the weeklies and into the new section, Times Publisher John Puerner and Editor John S. Carroll told employees in a ...

MIAMI (AP) - Elaine Bloom has come to regret the day 24 years ago that she joined fellow members of the Legislature in voting to bar gays from adopting children. "I have a grandson that's being brought up by two fathers," the former state representative said. "They are doing a magnificent job. They are two wonderfully devoted fathers. I just wish all children were as happy and well-adjusted as he is and bright and eager and loved." She ruefully recalled that vote last week, when a federal judge upheld the 1977 law, which was passed around the time Anita Bryant, ...

NEW YORK (AP) — Chinese authorities have been holding a 66-year-old American for the past 1 1/2 years on suspicion of gathering state secrets, an attorney for his family said Friday. Fong Fuming, an electrical engineer from West Orange, N.J., was imprisoned in early 2000, said New York City lawyer Jerome Cohen. ``We would like to get him out of detention,'' Cohen said. ``He's being held in blatant violation of China's criminal procedure law.'' U.S. officials in Beijing said they trying to safeguard Fong's rights. ``The embassy has been working with Mr. Fong's attorneys, the prosecutors office and with ...

LAREDO, Texas (AP) - Standing just footsteps from the Mexican border, Tony Sanchez tells hometown supporters that he wants to do what no Hispanic has ever done in Texas: become governor. Alternating between Spanish and English, the millionaire businessman describes his Mexican heritage in Laredo, where he packed pineapples and melons as a child before making his fortune as an oilman and a banker. "Like many of you, I was shaped by the sweat and toil of generations that came before me," says Sanchez, the first member of his family to go to college. The largely Hispanic crowd of about ...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The State Department warned Americans in Colombia to take extra security precautions following the extradition of Fabio Ochoa, the former head of the Medellin drug cartel. In a statement Friday night, the department noted ``the past history of narcotics traffickers conducting bombings in public areas as a reprisal for or deterrent to extradition.'' ``Any suspicious activity should be reported immediately to the appropriate Colombian authorities and to the U.S. Embassy,'' the statement said. For Education And Discussion Only. Not For Commercial Use.

Federal agent held after police standoff By Dana BartholomewStaff Writer WOODLAND HILLS - A federal cop who had threatened to kill himself after a domestic violence assault charge surrendered to police Thursday, with his pet macaw, after a one-hour standoff at his home, police said. Jeffrey McCredie, 41, a civil rights investigator with the U.S Department of Justice, was taken into custody by Los Angeles Police SWAT agents who had cordoned off his home in the 5700 block of Larryan Drive. "Apparently, we have a federal officer who is suicidal, he's very drunk," said Los Angeles police Sgt. A. Sorkness. ...

Mexican Expatriate Returns to U.S. By LISA J. ADAMS Associated Press Writer MEXICO CITY (AP) — The first U.S. resident to win a Mexican mayorship — a migrant-turned-millionaire who promised to invest heavily in Mexico — has returned angrily to California after federal officials overturned his victory. Andres Bermudez Viramontes, 51, known as the ``Tomato King'' for the fortune he made in vegetables after migrating illegally to the United States 28 years ago, was elected mayor of Jerez, in central Zacatecas state, on July 1. Bermudez, representing the leftist Democratic Revolution Party, had promised to bring new jobs to stem ...

DURBAN, South Africa (AP) - European negotiators at the U.N. conference on racism agreed to a carefully crafted statement Friday that they termed an apology for slavery, a move aimed at fending off lawsuits seeking reparations. But delegates remained deadlocked and extended the conference to Saturday, struggling over how to address the Middle East conflict and African demands for some kind of compensation for slavery. Formal negotiations were to end Friday, but as they wound down around midnight, delegates said they would meet for more formal talks later in the day Saturday. Officials said informal talks would likely continue through ...

Two well-known computer security experts pulled down their works from the Internet this week for fear of being prosecuted under 1998's Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Along with the threatened lawsuit of Princeton computer-science professor Edward Felten, and the arrest of Russian encryption expert Dmitry Sklyarov, the incidents are the latest to point at what is quickly becoming a touchy environment for security experts. "When they started to arrest people and threaten researchers, I decided the legal risk was not worth it," said Fred Cohen, a well-known security consultant and a professor of digital forensics, who took his evidence-gathering tool--dubbed Forensix--off ...

Inmate may mail semen Staff and Wire Services A federal appeals court has reinstated a civil rights suit by a Lancaster state prison inmate who wants to artificially inseminate his wife. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, ruling 2-1 on Wednesday, reversed a Sacramento federal judge who said that William Gerber, serving a life term in California State Prison-Los Angeles County, had no legal right to mail his semen to his 46-year-old wife. Dissenting Judge Barry G. Silverman said the appeals court majority "does not accept the fact that there are certain downsides to being confined in prison" and ...

OKLAHOMA CITY (Reuters) - An Oklahoma jury sentenced a man to 1,050 years in prison for a ``road rage'' incident in which he dragged a woman trapped beneath his car for more than 700 feet, court officials said on Friday. Keith LaJuan Jones, 44, was sentenced to 750 years for intentionally injuring Vivian Williams, who survived the ordeal. ``She is so horribly injured. It was some of the hardest evidence I've ever seen,'' said Oklahoma District Judge Twyla Mason Gray, who presided over Jones' trial and sentencing. Jones, who was also given two 150-year sentences for ramming into two cars, ...

Eli Wiesel on Durban Yedioth Ahronoth (p. 14) by Eli Wiesel -- exclusive to Yedioth Ahronoth -- The conference in Durban will go down in history as an enterprise of disgrace. Instead of being an important international conference that expresses goodwill, the conference has been turned into a circus of calumny. What began as an idea for a world gathering against hatred has turned into a meeting of hatred characterized by wickedness. I was supposed to have been there. Both Kofi Annan and Mary Robinson did their utmost to persuade me, particularly in light of my membership on the small ...