Free Republic

A man is suing after he fell on a greasy trail left by someone wearing pork chops for shoes.Troy Michael Bowron claims he broke his arm when he fell at the Jannali Inn in Sydney, Australia.He says another customer at the pub, Ross Lucock, taped pork chops to his feet and used them for shoes.The 25-year-old claims he fell on the pub floor because of the grease in November 1997, reports the Sydney Morning Herald and is suing the landlords and Mr Lucock.Mr Bowron told New South Wales District Court: "He was walking around most of the night all around...

resident Bush has built a thick wall of privacy around his 19-year-old twin daughters, Jenna and Barbara, the spirited twosome who made tabloid headlines last spring for under-age drinking. These days, the White House has taken a vow of silence about anything to do with the twins.The president does not extend the same courtesy to his less publicity-prone dogs, a 13-year-old English springer spaniel named Spot and a 1 1/2-year-old Scottish terrier named Barney.Mr. Bush has begun to talk so much about his dogs and their idiosyncrasies lately that they have become a regular part of his political patter around...

<p>A favorite liberal trick is to always call any proposed reduction in the rate of growth of spending a "cut." This implies that some people will end up with less than they are getting now, when in fact they will get more, just not as much more as they would get without the so-called "cut."</p>

Family depicts image of Sept. 11 firefighters in cornfield 06/24/2002 Associated Press SNYDER, Texas - Donna Gafford was moved to tears when she and her two young sons watched three firefighters raise Old Glory atop the ruins of the World Trade Center last fall. So when she and husband Greg decided to forgo planting cotton this year on their farm outside Snyder in West Texas, Donna Gafford suggested doing a maze in a cornfield that from the air depicted the scene that had gone straight to her heart. "I think those three firemen raising the flag on that rubble...

Dutch police had to rescue a dog after it became stuck in tarmac while sunbathing.The German shepherd lay down in the asphalt not realising workers had only just poured it in a street in the town of Jachthuislaan in the Netherlands.The dog found he couldn't stand up again.Neighbours called the police for help after spotting the problem.It took officers more than an hour to get the dog free using special solvents, reports De Telegraaf newspaper.A spokesman said: "He was laying on his side, with his hair stuck in the warm asphalt. We needed special solvents to get him loose."The worst...

<p>Terry Barton, a U.S. Forest Service worker, was charged last week with intentionally setting the largest wildfire in Colorado history. It is a black mark on the beleaguered federal agency.</p> <p>But it's not the blackest mark.</p> <p>Last summer, four young firefighters died at the Thirtymile Fire in Washington state's Okanogan National Forest: Tom Craven, Karen FitzPatrick, Jessica Johnson and Devin Weaver. Mr. Craven, 30, was a father of two and an eight-year veteran with the Naches Ranger District. Miss FitzPatrick, 18, was a newly minted high school grad and had been with the Forest Service for three weeks. Miss Johnson, 19, was a college student who developed a passion for firefighting in high school. Mr. Weaver, 21, was an electrical engineering student who had completed firefighter training six weeks earlier.</p>

<p>This was the year an election-minded Congress was supposed to be more interested in scoring political points than passing legislation. Surprisingly, there seems to be a bit more movement on Capitol Hill than most had expected.</p> <p>Political gridlock typically rules Congress in a midterm congressional election year. Things started that way in January. President Bush's agenda was moving along at a relatively fast clip last year until the Democrats took control of the Senate and his agenda gradually slowed to a crawl and seemed to stop altogether earlier this year.</p>

<p>Those who enjoy kicking folks when they're down see stock market troubles as a political opportunity. The kicking team is trying to persuade us that control over our own retirement plans is a bad idea.</p> <p>The first effort was a puny punt, "The Great 401(k) Hoax," coauthored by the resident CNBC curmudgeon Bill Wolman. The next kick was badly aimed, "Retirement Insecurity," by New York University economist Edward Wolff.</p>

Our troops need our support and encouragement. They are away from home, some for the first time, and usually lonely or discouraged. It is important for us to reach out and help them in the same way we would want someone to reach out to our loved ones if and when they are in the same position. They answered their call and we are answering theirs offering them the USO Canteen FReeper Style each day and thanking them for serving. This is IN Coming Mail from some of those serving now. We at the USO Canteen FReeper Style, a...

<p>As the Republican-led House spars with the Democratic-controlled Senate over various tax issues, four items become readily apparent. The first is how slowly many of the tax cuts that were passed last year in President Bush's 10-year, $1.35 trillion tax-relief program are to be implemented over the decade. For example, despite the fact that tens of millions of two-earner married couples have for years been paying about $1,400 per year more in federal income taxes than they would pay if they were cohabitating and filing separately, the amelioration of this deplorable situation doesn't begin until 2005. Then, it takes five years to fully address. Regarding the estate tax, more appropriately known as the death tax, the tax-relief plan reduced the 55 percent rate by only 5 percentage points in 2002, after which it will decline by a mere 1 percentage point per year through 2007. Afterward, it is belatedly eliminated altogether in 2010 — only to resume in full force the very next year.</p>

TALLAHASSEE -- Campaigning in sweltering North Florida, Democrat Janet Reno told the crowd that the key to her victory over Gov. Jeb Bush rests on pulling Floridians to the polls in numbers rivaling those of a presidential contest. Her remarks showed how the front-running Democrat is looking past her opponents in the September primary and plotting strategy for the November election. But many political experts call her script for victory pure fantasy, especially with surveys of voters showing her already losing more than a quarter of the Democratic vote to the Republican governor. "Can she draw those kind of numbers?...

<p>City officials have first-hand knowledge of how important access to Klingle Road is to those who drive in the District, as demonstrated by the vigorous correspondence of Repair Klingle Road's supporters and the votes of affected Advisory Neighborhood Commissions. The barricade across Klingle Road literally cuts one-half of northwest Washington from the other and impedes traffic on nearby major arteries such as Connecticut Avenue and Porter Street in Cleveland Park.</p>

<p>President Bush's soul-gazing affection for Russian President Vladimir Putin is enough to make a Cold War spook blush. When Mr. Bush courted Mr. Putin with barbecued steak a la Crawford, Texas, the friendship was the envy of European leaders, who seemed chastened that Mr. Bush's position on missile defense didn't lead to brinkmanship. Mr. Bush has now put America's critical defense alliance on the table for Mr. Putin.</p>

ENIN, West Bank, June 23 — Ahmed Abu Aziz was 6 and owned a purple bicycle. On Friday, this locked-down city began to stir to rumors that the curfew was being lifted for a few hours. Ahmed asked his father for a shekel, worth just under 25 cents, for a trip to the store by bike with two brothers.Today, his bicycle sat in the yard of his parents' house, the seat and right handlebar blown off. A little memorial of stones and seashells to Ahmed includes the Coco Dance candy bar he had bought with the shekel just before...

NICOSIA (Reuters) - Workmen breaking ground for a new town hall stumbled across what are believed to be the 800-year-old remains of a medieval Lusignan palace in Cyprus whose exact whereabouts were a mystery for centuries. The discovery, in the heart of the capital Nicosia, is a boon for archaeologists who enjoy a rich amount of literature from the checkered history of medieval Cyprus, but very little in the way of tangible evidence on the ground. The Lusignans were a French noble family which ruled Cyprus from 1192 to 1489. They built three palaces in Nicosia. Only small parts of...

UNDUZ, Afghanistan — The tittering fifth-grade girls in their black uniforms and white head scarves swarmed about the American Special Forces soldiers, elbowing each other to get closer. They all wanted to see the men who had fixed their school.A few years ago Taliban soldiers closed and gutted the complex, stealing bricks and burning door frames for firewood. But this spring an Army civil affairs team arrived with a satchel full of dollars, paying $16,000 to local workers to install new windows, doors and desks, repair ceilings and apply a fresh coat of robin's-egg blue paint."Before, it wasn't fit...

Because I subscribe to some magazine or journal that sells its subscription list, I now receive a varying degree of fundraising letters from the Republican National Committee. By far the most frequent letters I receive are of the infamous "push-poll" variety. The premise of this fundraising pitch is that the RNC wants to know what I think of various political issues so they can allegedly formulate their policies to take my views into account. In the letter RNC Chairman Marc Racicot writes in a breathy, stutter paragraph style, "Make no mistake — without your answers to the REPUBLICAN PARTY CENSUS...

<p>BEIJING — Twenty-four North Korean asylum seekers left South Korean diplomatic compounds in China and arrived in South Korea today, ending a monthlong diplomatic standoff between Beijing and Seoul.</p> <p>A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman confirmed the group flew out of the country yesterday but would not say where they were headed.</p>

<p>LAHORE, Pakistan — The new Cabinet named by Afghan President Hamid Karzai will trouble many of his countrymen, rendering even greater political and military powers to the already-dominant faction of Tajiks from the Panjshir valley and other warlords.</p> <p>The Pathans — the majority ethnic group in the country — have been relegated to minor positions, although they retain key economic and financial ministries through which aid may flow.</p>

SLIPPED DISK No one is buying Terry McAuliffe's story that some innocent Democratic staffer happened upon a computer disk on a street corner that revealed the White House and the Republican Party's assessment of the 2002 elections. You'll recall, the DNC earlier this month announced that it had obtained through Republican bumbling a computer disk that contained a PowerPoint presentation prepared by Karl Rove, the White House and the RNC, and outlining their evaluation of the fall campaign. It was mildly embarrassing, if only because the presentation took a more cautious approach to certain elections: it didn't predict a sweep...