Free Republic

June 21 —  Where is Louis Freeh? Happily gone from government, the former FBI director is making a bundle of money as a senior vice chairman of the MBNA credit card corporation and enjoying life as a suburban father with his wife and six sons.NEVER FOND of the media, Freeh has refused to get drawn into the ongoing controversy over the FBI’s performance in the period before September 11. As a private citizen, he is free to turn down requests from reporters for interviews. The surprising part is that he has also managed to avoid being hauled before Congress. Two...

CARACAS, Venezuela - Venezuela's national elections council said it was investigating allegations that President Hugo Chavez's political party failed to report dlrs 1.5 million in campaign donations from a Spanish bank. Council president Roberto Ruiz said Thursday that the council may present a report within 15 days. The investigation was prompted by deputies from the opposition COPEI party and by a complaint filed by Tulio Alvarez, a private attorney that has represented opposition politicians in filing corruption charges against Chavez Alvarez accused Chavez and his campaign officers of violating campaign finance laws, El Nacional newspaper reported Thursday. Venezuelan laws require...

CARACAS, Venezuela (Reuters) - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, ousted briefly during a coup in April, said on Friday his government had installed anti-aircraft batteries in Caracas in case an air attack was launched against him. "It's a theory that we have to consider ... that they could be preparing, from somewhere in the Caribbean, some bold aerial action against Miraflores Palace," Chavez told reporters, without indicating who might be planning such as attack. The populist president said his government had installed the air defenses on the basis of information obtained from suspects in the April 11-14 uprising that left more...

INVERNESS -- A judge found a 10-year-old girl guilty of four counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon for pulling a handgun during a fight with several older neighborhood girls. The girl, whose name is being withheld by the Citrus Times because of her age, was sentenced to spend 15 days in a juvenile detention facility, the mandatory punishment for young firearms offenders convicted in juvenile court. She is also being expelled from elementary school for two years, said Assistant Public Defender David Bauer, who represented the girl at trial. Although the 10-year-old was the only one convicted of...

WASHINGTON -- The relationship that Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-Ga.) shares with Arab-Americans runs deeper than her call for more attention to the Palestinian side of the Middle Eastern conflict. The DeKalb County congresswoman's connections stretch significantly into the pockets and purses of the Arab-American and Muslim communities.About one-fourth of the individuals who have contributed to McKinney's campaigns over the past five years have names that appear to be Arab-American or Muslim, according to an informal study of Federal Election Commission records.Their contributions total $142,950, a full third of the money McKinney has collected from individuals over the last five years,...

This is a quote from one of our FReeper FRiends....ClaraSuzanne " Because an attack on one is an attack on all. When I saw the Towers fall on TV, Saw the planes fly into them. and also saw the damage to the Pentagon and remember Todd Beamer and his fellow passengers. I think these terrorists did not ask who was from Texas,California, NewYork or Any other state. All they wanted to do was kill Americans We are all from New York" Flying into New York, we fly over the grounds of West Point. The United States Military Academy at...

MARACAIBO, Venezuela - The word spread quickly as the bodies of eight thieves, glue sniffers and neighborhood bullies began turning up in April, shotgun blasts on their chests, notes signed ''The Anonymous Avenger'' stuck in their clothes: The police were executing criminals again. Probably not the same police officers who killed 16 victims in this gritty oil port in 1995 and left behind the same notes. Probably younger, meaner cops -- two victims were also stabbed or garroted. But almost certainly the cops. Across the country, police death squads are killing more of Venezuela's suspected criminals, or simply poor people....

NINE YEARS AGO on a lawn in Tilton, John Henry Williams batted against a New Hampshire State Trooper and struck out. Early reviews on the son of Hall Famer Ted Williams were not good. Back then, the younger Williams was facing Dave McCarthy in a game of Wiffle ball. These days the 33-year-old is daring to dream, making an attempt at playing professional baseball in the Red Sox minor league system. Williams signed a contract yesterday and is scheduled to make a debut next week in the Gulf Coast League, a rookie league in Florida typically reserved for peach-fuzzed...

HARRISBURG, Pa. -- Three former Rite Aid Corp. executives were indicted Friday on charges that they falsified the books in a scheme that inflated the drugstore chain's profits by $1.6 billion and forced the biggest restatement of corporate earnings in U.S. history. The 37-count federal indictment accused a current executive of lying to a grand jury. "The charges announced today reveal a disturbing picture of dishonesty and misconduct at the highest level of a major corporation," said Wayne M. Carlin, Northeast regional director for the SEC. "Rite Aid's former senior management employed an extensive bag of tricks to manipulate the...

<p>Itamar, West Bank -- The mourners, maybe 3,000 of them, were angry. They scuffled here with the Israeli police and the army. They bought T-shirts that read, "No Arabs, no attacks."</p> <p>Then, at the end of a week of violence, something happened Friday afternoon that laid bare this conflict's widening circle of hate, violence and revenge. A few carloads of Jewish settlers -- outraged at the deaths Thursday night of a mother and three of her children in their own home, as well as a security guard -- drove to a nearby village and shot an Arab man dead.</p>

Loss of Oakleys doomed SabayaPosted: 1:16 AM (Manila Time) | Jun. 22, 2002By Christine Herrera Inquirer News Service THE BEGINNING of the end for Abu Sabaya came after the Abu Sayyaf leader lost his amulet - a pair of Oakley sunglasses - during a firefight with government troops two weeks ago, according to Defense Secretary Angelo Reyes. Reyes, however, surmised that what finally did Sabaya in were the US-supplied night vision goggles worn by an elite Special Warfare Group (SWAG) unit during Friday's gunbattle off Sibuco, Zamboanga del Norte. "Sabaya's luck ran out because the military recovered his agimat (amulet)...

MONTREAL (CP) -- A man with suspected links to a criminal organization in Europe that is alleged to have plotted to blow up a U.S. embassy has been arrested by Canada's new anti-terrorist squad. Adel Tobbichi, 34, was arrested Friday as the result of an extradition request from Holland, the RCMP said in a statement. Tobbichi, of Algerian origin, is alleged by Dutch police to have altered passports and other documents and provided them to an organization planning to bomb the United States embassy in Paris. Police were tipped off by another man who is currently being detained in Belgium....

Michael Skakel's siblings have scuttled defense attorney Mickey Sherman's appellate game plan, and they have hired prominent Hartford lawyers Hope Seeley and Hubert Santos to appeal Skakel's June 7 conviction for the murder of Martha Moxley in 1975. Sherman remains on the legal defense team and will argue at Skakel's sentencing on July 19. But Santos and Seeley, too, are expected to argue several motions, including one for a sentence that does not involve incarceration. They have brought on board Clinton Roberts, a former probation officer who is a respected consultant on alternatives to incarceration. Seeley confirmed Friday that their...

BRANFORD -- It began with a large, mysterious pattern etched in a wheat field near Winchester, England. Colin Andrews, an electrical engineer, spotted it on his way to work in 1983. His curiosity soon became a full-blown obsession that ruined one marriage and led to his rise as the world's best-known crop circle researcher. In the major leagues of unsolved mysteries - the Pyramids, Stonehenge and Bigfoot among them - only the crop circles have emerged within our lifetimes, and new theories surrounding them abound. Out of a cramped office on the shoreline, Andrews serves as the main keeper of...

More than 400 killed in a seism in Iran (new assessment) Saturday June 22, 2002 - 10h02 GMT TEHERAN, June 22 (AFP) - More than 400 people were killed and a thousand of others were wounded in a violent one seism who struck Saturday the north and the west of Iran, according to a new assessment given by the television of State. A preceding assessment, provided by official agency IRNA, gave a report from at least 200 killed and a significant number of casualties. The most touched areas are located in the province of Qazvin (north-western), indicated television, specifying...

WASHINGTON Sen. Hillary Clinton has called on General Mills to put New York's Bravest and Finest on Wheaties boxes. "In this age of celluloid superheroes, America's children have real heroes to look up to, especially in the wake of Sept. 11," Clinton (D-N.Y.) wrote to General Mills' chairman and CEO, Steve Sanger. She endorsed an online petition, posted at www.petitiononline.com/sgt964/petition.html, that calls for a Wheaties box featuring a New York firefighter, cop and transit police officer. General Mills Vice President Tom Forsythe said the company had weighed the idea but decided it "didn't seem appropriate." Peter Gorman of the Uniformed...

<p>June 22, 2002 -- Music legend Charlie Daniels dropped out of a Fourth of July TV special on public television after organizers refused to let him perform a song paying tribute to the victims of Sept. 11.</p> <p>At issue is a tune called "The Last Fallen Hero," which Daniels, 65, has been performing in concerts since he wrote it last winter.</p>

Dear Reader, After months of buildup to the bishops' conference, it seems strange that it has already come and gone so quickly. The best that can be said of the Dallas meeting is that it was a first step. Zero tolerance is a tough policy, and it was adopted against the counsel of no less than Cardinal Avery Dulles. But most Catholics remain dissatisfied! Why? The Washington Post printed a poll of American Catholics on Wednesday, asking for their opinion of the conference, and two-thirds thought the bishops hadn't gone far enough in their actions against offending priests. The problem...

<p>The FBI fears fuel trucks may be the latest weapon used by terrorists to attack Jewish targets.</p> <p>Refuses to perform.</p> <p>June 22, 2002 -- The NYPD yesterday dispatched extra cops to Jewish neighborhoods after the FBI alerted police nationwide to watch out for terrorists who might use fuel trucks to strike synagogues or Jewish schools.</p>

Journalists and congressional investigators are beginning to trace the terror trail backward from 9-11 to Oklahoma City and the earlier World Trade Center bombing. Ramzi Yousef, the reputed mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, sits in a federal maximum-security prison in Florence, Colorado, serving a life sentence. Terry Nichols, the convicted co-conspirator of Timothy McVeigh in the Oklahoma City bombing, is incarcerated in the Oklahoma County Jail. He faces a life sentence without parole for the deaths of eight federal law enforcement agents in that 1995 bombing, as well as an upcoming state trial for the deaths of...