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TORONTO (September 8, 2001 12:32 a.m. EDT) - A 15-year-old amputee completed a 12-mile swim across Lake Erie in just over 15 hours Friday, making her the youngest woman and first disabled person to accomplish the feat. Ashley Cowan of Toronto had to face a strong current and her fear of swimming in darkness. "She toughed it out and we're very proud of her," said friend John Munro, who watched the swim from a rescue boat on the lake. "Everyone's so thrilled about it." Cowan headed straight for waiting paramedics after emerging from the 70-degree water on the shores of ...

Moving forward in faith © 2001 WorldNetDaily.com This week a California state appeals court unanimously ruled that California's constitutional ban on racial preferences in government hiring, contracting and education means what it says. Accordingly, in the words of Pacific Legal Foundation, the court "invalidated key statutes that contain preferences in the form of goals, timetables and other 'schemes' that treat people differently on the basis of race or gender." The court's eloquent and principled decision was the latest confirmation that the authors of California Proposition 209 – the California Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI) – have set a successful example for the ...

Improving SAT scores at Lake Wobegon © 2001 WorldNetDaily.com To hear the eco-wackos tell it, most of mankind's ills – all the way from global warming to declining SAT scores – result from mankind's burning of coal. Actually, they haven't yet blamed declining SAT scores on coal, but they probably will after reading this column. Burning coal, some of which is 95 percent carbon, produces carbon dioxide. Trees love carbon dioxide. Flora couldn't live without it. And if there were no flora then there could be no fauna. Only flora can fixate nitrogen via photo-synthesis to make the 20 amino acids ...

A healing catharsis © 2001 WorldNetDaily.com Jonathan Franzen right now must feel he's king of the world as novelists go. His publisher, Jonathan Galassi – editor and current head of the distinguished house of Farrar, Strauss, Giroux – sent out this spring some 3,500 advance copies of "The Corrections" to booksellers and reviewers with a nice little note informing them that, in his opinion, this was the best book his house had published in 15 years. Add to that a neat little motion picture deal. What with 90,000 copies in print flooding bookstores this very week, Mr. Franzen is now set ...

You can't think that way! © 2001 WorldNetDaily.com If the American Civil Liberties Union gets its way, the state of Virginia will be required to halt its moment-of-silence law because kids just might be praying. And we sure can't have that! A Virginia law requiring schools to set aside one minute at the beginning of each day for students to engage in meditation, prayer or other silent activity, has now been taken to the highest court in the land. That's right. The ACLU is so consumed with halting independent thought in Virginia schools that they are dispatching their lawyers to the ...

KABUL, Sept 8 (AFP) - Eight foreign aid workers on trial in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan for allegedly preaching Christianity will appear in court Saturday, a court spokesman said. "The detainees will come here in a few minutes and journalists will be allowed to be present in the court," spokesman Maulvi Mir Habib Agha said outside the Supreme Court. AFP via Babelfish translation - The eight foreign humanitarians will appear Saturday in Kabul Saturday September 08 2001 - 6h46 GMT KABUL, 8 seven (AFP) - the eight shown foreign humane workers propagation of Christianity in Afghanistan will appear before the supreme ...

WARS AND RUMORS OF WARS China practices sinkingU.S. carriers Recent exercises had Beijing testing new anti-ship cruise missile By Jon Dougherty © 2001 WorldNetDaily.com Chinese forces concentrated on attacking and sinking U.S. aircraft carriers using new anti-ship cruise missiles in recent military exercises designed to thwart expected American intervention in any conflict with Taiwan. Weekly Internet-based intelligence digest Geostrategy-Direct.com reported the exercises, quoting U.S. intelligence officials who said they clearly show "that China is preparing for a future conflict with the United States, something U.S. government officials have been reluctant to acknowledge." During the war games, which ended last month, Chinese ...

<p>Grain and potato farmer Ross Fleming won't say no to his share of $20 million in federal aid for Klamath Basin farmers denied water to protect fish, but he figures it won't do much more than put a few groceries on his family's table.</p>

Lockean Libertarians vs. Hume-an Nature By Paul Gottfried&nbsp; Having elicited numerous responses to my latest comments on this website, and particularly from self-described libertarians, it may be appropriate to list the main objections and then, to address them. There was only one passage in my remarks dealing with Third World immigration. But respondents criticized my views on this subject—which they associate with Peter Brimelow’s. My libertarian respondents are high on immigration. They favor a more selective process for deciding who should come here, but they are generally pleased with the present mix of immigrants, made up preponderantly of Latinos. None ...

Former US President Bill Clinton was given a warm welcome as he arrived in Sydney this morning. Mr Clinton arrived shortly after 6am (AEST) on a commercial United Airlines flight before being transported by a motorcade to an eastern suburbs hotel. Publicist Max Markson said Mr Clinton was made to feel welcome by crowds of wellwishers as he arrived at the Stamford Plaza Hotel in Double Bay. "He was greeted by a host of well wishers where he signed autographs," Mr Markson said. "He's very excited to be back in Sydney, loves Sydney, and is looking forward to the ...

COMIC-strip creator Garry Trudeau was duped by a flimsy Internet hoax on presidential IQs, and has had to apologize to President Bush. Tomorrow's "Doonesbury" features a purported conversation between Bush and a White House adviser, and cites as fact a nonexistent study claiming that Bush has half the IQ of former President Bill Clinton and a little more than half the average presidential vocabulary. Trudeau, husband of Jane Pauley, ran an apology on his strip's Web site, saying, "[The strip] was a regrettable error, although perhaps inevitable, given that this feature uses the same fact-checking house as ‘Saturday Night Live' ...

TOKYO (September 7, 2001 8:15 p.m. EDT) - Japan's foreign minister is set to apologize this weekend for the suffering of Americans who were held as prisoners of war by the Japanese military, a Japanese newspaper reported Friday. The ceremony will be held to commemorate the treaty that ended World War II. Japanese Foreign Minister Makiko Tanaka will meet with Secretary of State Colin Powell in San Francisco on Saturday, when a ceremony will be held in remembrance of the 50th anniversary of the signing of the peace treaty bearing the city's name. Tanaka has decided to offer an apology ...

This is just another one of my rants. Read 'em and give me your reactions.------- The outline of today’s international foreign policy framework is based on gunboat diplomacy. It is not just the US. It is everyone almost. In the height of the Cold War the US and Russia were much more successful than China at this game. During the Cold War the US and Russia got really crazy. We basically had a pistol to each other’s heads and said, “If you blink, we are going to blast you”. Under that framework the term “world superpower” was defined by who ...

<p>Hamlet famously complained about his mother's remarrying so soon after his father's death that, it will be recalled, "the funeral bak'd meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables." Not that a decent delay could have made this most troubled of sons happy, but Hamlet was here setting out the generally agreed upon notion that, such is the profound mystery of death, a respectable interval ought to be allowed before taking any action that might dishonor the deceased.</p>

Earth To Howard Stern and Robin: You're Republicans! by Jim Brachman Howard Stern is at his best when he loses his temper, or when a caller or guest catches him somewhat off guard and he says something he normally wouldn’t. There were a number of such revelations on a recent show honoring Stern sidekick, co-host and announcer Robin Quivers. The occasion was her birthday. The first outburst came when a caller pointed out to Stern that the term “crap” had been edited out of a local broadcast. Stern went ballistic. How dare they censor him, it’s okay to say “crap,” ...

The public debate over abortion was critical in a resurgent anti-Catholicism in the mid-1960s. With the cooperation of media, abortion became an ongoing battle waged in a war of words based on anti-Catholicism. The issue was quickly defined as Catholicism and its role in public life, rather than abortion itself. Pro-life representatives who happened to be Catholic would be grilled on their religious faith, rather than on their position on abortion. When the Catholic Church hierarchy took a strong stand on abortion, it found itself the target, rather than the position espoused. Quickly, the public issue of whether or not ...

Is a remedy on the way for depressed investor spirits and sinking business confidence? It could be, in the form of a capital-gains tax cut. Republican congressional leaders Trent Lott and Dennis Hastert are proposing a reduction in the capital-gains tax rate to 15 percent from 20 percent. Even liberal Massachusetts Democrat John Kerry indicated that he supports such a cut, saying it "would help spur the kind of investment that is not taking place." Hold that thought, Mr. Kerry. Your timing couldn't have been better. Following the Fed's scorched-earth deflation of the stock market and the economy, business investment ...

The White House is contemplating a plan to publish industry data in an attempt to help consumers rate nursing homes, but aides to President Bush said they have rejected a proposal by federal health officials to inspect some nursing facilities less often. According to administration sources, Bush could announce within the next few weeks his attempt to address the problem of how to upgrade care for the 1.5 million elderly and disabled Americans who rely on nursing homes. In contrast with a $1 billion initiative proposed a year ago by President Bill Clinton to improve the industry's workforce, the new ...

I Hate David Broder by Paul Gottfried Among the most tiresome Beltway journalists, whose columns I can only read while popping Tums, is Washington news interpreter David Broder. Both the media and the US government textbook long used in our college courses, by Morris Fiorina and Paul Peterson, praise this figure as a "reflective journalist" and "the dean of American political commentators" committed to "a strong two-party system" as the basis of constitutional democracy. Supposedly Broder stands above partisanship while blessing real political debate as the lifeblood of our society. He is different, or so we are told, from run-of-the-mill ...

San Ysidro, N.M., is a rural hamlet of just a couple of hundred people, at the edge of the Jemez Mountains about 40 miles northwest of Albuquerque. It has what sounds like a nightmarish problem: arsenic in its drinking water. Now, people in San Ysidro are no fonder than anyone else of ingesting hazardous substances. They've spent large sums of money to reduce the amount of arsenic they encounter, going so far as to install individual filters in every home. Even with this treatment, which has pushed individual water bills to a minimum of $44 per month, the water still ...