Free Republic

WASHINGTON (AP) - A Pentagon ( news - web sites) official is expected to meet next week with Chinese defense officials in Beijing about renewing some military contacts between the United States and China, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Friday. Peter Rodman, assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, will meet with Chinese officials Wednesday, Pentagon officials said. He will tell the Chinese that future military contacts must be more beneficial to the U.S. side, said Lt. Cmdr. Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman. The U.S.-Chinese contacts were severely curtailed not long after a Chinese fighter collided with a...

<p>WASHINGTON (AP) --Renewing its focus on Africa, the Bush administration on Friday outlined a plan to pump millions of dollars into helping the continent with health care and economic development.</p> <p>President Bush will present these ideas to the world's top industrialized nations next week at the Group of Eight summit in Kananaskis, British Columbia. White House aides hope the presidential rollout will project a more compassionate image and silence critics who say the United States is doing too little to help the world's poor.</p>

Islamic Scholar Warns U.S. of 'Two-Faced' Muslims WASHINGTON – A leader of the small worldwide Muslim reform movement is warning the West against wishful thinking as the U.S. government promotes an intensive dialogue with Islam. "The dialogue is not proceeding well because of the two-facedness of most Muslim interlocutors on the one hand and the gullibility of well-meaning Western idealists on the other," Bassam Tibi said Tuesday in an interview with United Press International. Syrian-born Tibi, who claims to be a direct descendant of the prophet Mohammed and teaches political science at Goettingen University in Germany, appealed for intellectual honesty...

America's World Cup campaign: in defeat, magnanimity; in victory, complete and utter indifference And so the dream dies. The boys gave it their best, they played well, but it wasn't to be. They're out of the World Cup, to the bitter disappointment of their supporters.I refer, of course, to the United States team, the first in World Cup history with more players than fans. Across America yesterday, all nine of them gathered in bars to watch the big match, only to find that the other patrons preferred to see the Golden Girls re-run dubbed into Spanish on Channel 173 or...

Federal Government Declines Private Assistance -- Again Stanley for U.S. Senate 2002 Published 06. 21. 02 at 7:22 Sierra Time (DENVER CO -- 1:00 pm) Thursday, June 13, was not an ordinary day for Ron Largent. The Hayman blaze, on its way to becoming the largest wildfire in the history of Colorado, was burning out of control at Lake George, just 25 miles north of Ron's home in Cripple Creek. The U.S. Forest Service hadn't been able to contain it. Today Ron was going to fight the fire. Ron Largent is the Operations Manager for Anglo Gold Mining in...

U.S. uses Syrian minister's presence to attack Syrian support for terrorist groups By EDITH M. LEDERER UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- As Syria's foreign minister presided over the U.N. Security Council on Thursday, the United States accused Syria of supporting terrorist groups and demanded it condemn Palestinian suicide bombings, diplomats said. Syria's minister, Farouk al-Sharaa, denied that his country supported terrorists, saying it didn't have the means -- financial or otherwise -- to arm or give resources to terrorist groups, council diplomats said. Syria holds the council's rotating presidency for the month of June, and al-Sharaa followed a council tradition of...

Registered Sex Offender Charged in Stabbing A convicted sex offender, charged in Friday's stabbing of a mother and her nine-month-old baby, is now charged with aggravated sexual assault. Police say Ronald Lynn Gober, 40, attempted to sexually assault the unidentified woman Friday after stabbing her multiple times. He then allegedly stabbed her infant daughter several times. The mother is still in critical condition while the child has been upgraded to serious condition. Gober has also been charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and injury to a child. Both the mother and the child are expected to live, but the...

(New York-AP) -- The fire department has issued an internal memo warning firefighters not to give out information about the department. This comes after e-mail inquiries were sent by foreigners seeking the location of emergency procedures. The memo was sent last week by Chief of Operations Sal Cassano and obtained by The Associated Press. It cites a warning by the U-S Fire Administration's Critical Infrastructure Protection Information Center.The federal agency says that fire departments on the East Coast have received electronic mail from foreign universities requesting information about how their department is organized, trained and equipped.It wasn't clear whether any...

  Faith, Hope and Dallas National Catholic Register June 23-30, 2002Inperson interview with Bishop Timothy DolanBishop Timothy Dolan has seen the scandal from two sides. As the former rector of the North American College in Rome, he knows what it takes to form priests. As a new auxiliary bishop of St. Louis, he removed from ministry the pastor and associate pastor from a parish for past abuse allegations. In Dallas June 13-15 for the bishops' meeting, Bishop Dolan, a Church historian, spoke with Register correspondent Ellen Rossini on the catastrophe of the clergy scandal and the surprising new Catholic...

Clinton praised for recognition of Mohegans UNCASVILLE, Conn. -- Former President Clinton, already popular for conferring federal recognition on the Mohegan Indians during his administration, won praise Friday as he helped tribal leaders celebrate the opening of a hotel. "This is a fabulously successful place," Clinton told an audience of about 200 tribal members, local officials and others. "The thing that means the most to me is what you do for less fortunate tribes. Thank you for not forgetting about your brothers and sisters in Native American tribes that still have not been brought into the circle of opportunity." Chuck...

One of the signs of a half or whole-baked Integrist, or an ultra conservative (very much less Catholic than the Pope), is that when a Catholic defends the Holy Father against scurrilous and disrespectful attacks, the defense is sometimes countered with bizarre charges that a papal loyalist is “Ultramontanist.” Of course it is almost always true that the one who throws such pejorative terms around is unlikely to even know what it means in its historical or etymological context. Somewhere s/he heard ---absurdly--- that it means attributing infallibility to every action or utterance of the Pope today, and so he...

French voters sent the Socialists and their Communist and Green party allies packing in the final round of elections last Sunday. The first two rounds of elections resulted in the Socialists not even making it into the final runoff election for the French Presidency. That in turn saw incumbent President Jacques Chirac in the second round being re-elected by the largest margin in modern French history. Then came the parliamentary elections. The Socialists and their allies have had control of the last two sessions of parliament and for the past five years have had to share power with Chirac. This...

Law enforcement question pilot at Lincoln Park airport LINCOLN PARK, N.J. -- The pilot of a single-engine aircraft seen flying over New York reservoirs was questioned by law enforcement officers Friday at a local airport, federal officials said. At about 4 p.m. Friday, the New York State Police aviation unit received a call from state police in Delaware County, N.Y., that a low-flying plane was seen over Pepacton, Cannonsville and Ashokan reservoirs, said Maj. Alan Martin of the state police in Middletown, N.Y. It was described as a white plane with a red stripe and matched the description of a...

Police: Man Raped, Impregnated Stepdaughters Julian Charged With Four Counts Of Rape POSTED: 2:31 p.m. PDT June 21, 2002 UPDATED: 2:35 p.m. PDT June 21, 2002 BAKERSFIELD, Calif. -- A Mexican national has been charged with raping and impregnating his twin stepdaughters after helping smuggle them into the United States. Marcelino Flores Julian allegedly began molesting the 16-year-old sisters eight years ago in Mexico and began having sex with them two years later, according to police reports. Bakersfield police Detective Mary DeGeare said Flores said he never forced the girls to have sex. But the twins told police that...

Woman Says Man Pulled Gun Over Car Sticker Sticker Shows U.S. Flag Upside Down Posted: 12:02 p.m. CDT June 21, 2002 Updated: 12:20 p.m. CDT June 21, 2002 OKLAHOMA CITY -- An Oklahoma City woman said another motorist threatened her this week because of a political bumper sticker on her car. Brianna Herz's car has a sticker with an upside down U.S. flag that shows Sept. 11 with a question mark beside it. Herz told police that she was driving home earlier this week when a man saw the flag and began chasing her in his truck. The man...

UNITED NATIONS (AP) - The U.N. Security Council approved a brief extension of U.N. peacekeeping operations in Bosnia on Friday, giving diplomats time to tackle a demand to exempt Americans from prosecution by the world's first permanent war crimes tribunal. The United States has threatened to end its participation in U.N. peacekeeping operations if the council does not grant Americans who take part immunity from arrest and prosecution by the International Criminal Court, which becomes a reality July 1. The council had been expected to extend the U.N. civilian police mission in Bosnia and the authorization for the NATO-led peacekeeping...

Savage Thoughts -- Our Prisons By Leo Savage Something is really wrong with our prison system. More and more people are recognizing that prisons aren't helping to stop the crime wave, but it goes even deeper than that. Broadly speaking, convicts fall into three general categories: Career criminals. Muggers, burglars, druggies, and so forth. More-or-less honest ordinary people who did something wrong and got caught. Crazies. Crazies we can't do much about. Sad but true. About all we can manage is to keep them out of the way for awhile, and prisons manage to do that. It's about the...

Hi Guys! Some big news this week. Chester Flake, Katherine's primary main opponent had to drop out of the race because he forgot to file an affidavit needed to collect signatures, Kim posted about it earlier. Frankly, I would have liked him to be able to stay in so Katherine could have the satisfaction of crushing him come September ;0) Katherine is almost sure to have raised $2 million by the time the next report comes out. The Herald ran a huge story on her that I'll post here at the risk of repetition: KATHERINE'S CLIMB Harris turns setbacks into...

Bush is no intellectual, but at least he is tryingBy Zoe Heller There's always been a fundamental ambivalence in Bush's attitude towards book-learning. On the one hand, he manifests the swaggering anti-intellectualism of the good ole boy. "There's book wisdom and there's practical wisdom," he will boast - making it clear that only the latter is of interest to a manly man such as himself. Speaking of his alma mater, Yale, and his fellow Yalie William Buckley, he will observe facetiously: "He wrote a book there and I read one." This is the frat boy revelling in his own limitations...

LOS ANGELES, June 20 — At a time when viewership and attendance are either flat or shrinking in virtually every form of pop-culture entertainment, Hollywood is enjoying one of the biggest bursts of popularity and profitability in its history. Box-office revenues for the first five and a half months of 2002 are up at least 20 percent over that period in 2001, which was already a record year. Even taking slightly higher prices into account, the number of people actually buying tickets and going to movies is up around 16 percent from last year. Meanwhile, the major broadcast television networks...