Free Republic

LONDON — Water used to be something on which British Prime Minister Tony Blair walked; today he has trouble keeping his head above it. Blair returned to London on Sunday from a Seville Summit of European Union leaders that had rejected his advertised solution to the pressing problem of illegal migration to be greeted by headlines announcing that New Labor's opinion poll lead over the opposition Tories had been cut from double digits to a statistically shaky 3 percent. That might not matter much since he need not hold an election for another four years. Besides the British economy...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Pentagon ( news - web sites) will conduct a very aggressive U.S. missile defense testing plan over the next two years but will cloak the results in secrecy to foil potential attackers, the head of the program said on Tuesday. The military will inform Congress on progress in the controversial $48 billion-plus development program while withholding details from the public in areas such as U.S. ability to overcome decoys used in any missile attack, Air Force Lt. Gen. Ronald Kadish told reporters. "We will not give our adversaries a free ride as we develop the system,"...

European laws which insisted that cucumbers and bananas could not be excessively curved and had to be of a certain shape were ruled “unenforceable” by the High Court yesterday.Reversing two decades of regulations regarded by many as an affront to common sense, Lord Justice Rose said that EU quality grading standards imposed since 1973 were “unknown to law”.The ruling stripped the Government of many of its powers for controlling the shape, quality and description of fruit and vegetables.After the hearing, lawyers for Asda supermarkets, which faced 14 charges under the regulations, said that food grading rules made after 1973 “covering...

View: Presidential saluting should cease By Lou Marano From the Life & Mind Desk Published 6/25/2002 1:43 PM WASHINGTON, June 25 (UPI) -- Does anyone in the United States have the heft to tell the president to stop saluting? Ronald Reagan began this bit of stage business when his actor's instincts overcame his experience as an Army officer. Then Corazon Aquino picked it up in the Philippines. George H.W. Bush, ever sensitive to charges of disloyalty to Reagan, continued the practice. Of Bill Clinton saluting, the less said the better. The current president should put an end to this...

The Elko City Council followed the law when it met in an emergency session Friday afternoon and banned weapons in the downtown corridor during the Elko Motorcycle Jamboree last weekend, according to City Manager Linda Ritter. "As far as I know, this is the first time in the city's history that the council has met in an emergency session and amended the city code," Ritter said. "No one thought there were going to be so many people carrying weapons out in the open during the jamboree." The council met after Police Chief Clair Morris contacted Ritter, requesting the council address...

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...

The dreams of George W. for the Mideast are gratifying, but has he done anything to advance them? Some weeks ago in this space, after the Passover massacre, we suggested that the Israelis reach into the compound, extract Arafat and his closest advisers, and shoot them. Guilty by Association with Terror. Mr. Bush is asking for something much more difficult, which is to replace Arafat as if he were merely this season's ambassador from Palestine, declared, after much deliberation, persona non grata. The leverage we have on internal political arrangements in Palestine is very slight. When President Mubarak of...

US Supreme Court Ruling Will Remove 800 From Death Row6-25-2 (AFP) - The US Supreme Court ruled that only a jury may impose the death penalty, a landmark decision that could affect hundreds of condemned prisoners. The 7-2 ruling Monday in the case of Timothy Ring of Arizona puts in limbo death sentences against some 800 inmates and will force changes in the death penalty law in nine states where judges have been allowed to impose the sentence: Florida, Arizona, Idaho, Colorado, Montana, Alabama, Indiana, Delaware and Nebraska. The justices found that the US Constitution's Sixth Amendment guarantee of a...

  A recent Gallup Poll showed 38 percent of Americans believe that ghosts or spirits can come back and communicate with the living. (NASA)   Seeking Meaning Beyond Can People Send Signals After They Die? Psychologist Claims Science Has the Answer By Amanda Onion June 18 — The first time Denise E. Esposito knew her late husband was watching over her was the night of Sept. 11 — hours after he died in the World Trade Center attacks. "I was hysterical crying, so I went outside and there must have been a million stars up there — I've never...

Governor's One Florida Gives Minorities A Needed Boost Published: Jun 23, 2002 G ov. Jeb Bush has every reason to feel vindicated by the One Florida Accountability Commission's findings that the governor's program to help minorities without racial quotas is succeeding. But as the governor himself acknowledges, while the numbers are encouraging, additional work needs to be done to provide minorities more opportunities. The panel found that Bush's One Florida program is helping minorities gain access to college and win more state contracts. Refuting The Scare Talk This should put to rest all that scare talk about how Bush's plan...

This week the Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling. The court ruled that execution of a mentally retarded murderer constitutes cruel and inhuman punishment and is therefore in violation of the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution. The Justices who held this view (six of the nine justices, Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas still believe in the Constitution) relied on the "shifting consensus" regarding this issue. I always thought that the Supreme Court was charged with interpreting the Constitution, not reading public opinion polls. Is Dick Morris going to be the next Supreme Court Justice under these standards? In fact if they...

Liturgy Commission Plagued by Pederasty Problems FDLC Director is second official in a year to be charged The Rev. Michael J. Spillane, 59, executive director of the Federation of Diocesan Liturgical Commissions (FDLC) for sixteen years, had already announced his resignation effective at the end of this year when it was revealed that he had been defrocked in 1991 by the Archdiocese of Baltimore for molesting six youths while working in parishes of the Baltimore Archdiocese from 1969 to 1986. The announcement of Spillane's resignation had appeared in the current FDLC Newsletter (Dec. 2001-March 2002), along with notice that he...

There is a powerful democratic tendency, especially among left-wing intellectuals, to regard might in defense of right as morally suspect. This tendency may be related to the principle that democracy is based on consent, not on coercion, on the primacy of speech or persuasion, not on force. Democrats naturally believe that conflicts between nations may be resolved if only the parties concerned are open to "reason." This is why such notions as "conflict resolution" and "confidence building" are peculiar to democracy (but utterly alien to Islam). Actually, these notions are the product of an advanced stage of democracy. Might in...

I have taken the proverbial path less chosen. Raised a conservative Baptist, yea, even by some lights a fundamentalist, I church-hopped my way through most all the flavors of evangelicalism before doing the unthinkable. I swam the Tiber at Easter of my 35th year. Why did this former Ryrie Bible-toting young man become a middle-aged Roman Catholic? I have often said "The Church Fathers made me do it." I have also stated, many times, that the moral leadership and firm reasoning of John Paul II made me do it. If you have ears to hear, even the Scriptures themselves made...

June 25, 2002 Contact: (212-481-1500) ATTN: News Editor While Israel is Asked to Do More than Oslo Bush Plan Requires Less Of Palestinian Arabs Than The Oslo Accords, Yet Offers Them More -- A State NEW YORK - President Bush's Middle East plan requires the Palestinian Arabs to do even less against terrorism than do the Oslo accords, yet offers them even more rewards than Oslo, by calling for the creation of a Palestinian Arab state within three years. Morton A. Klein, National President of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) said: "We recognize that President Bush has good intentions...

Theory Most of the many Americans who would label themselves as environmentalists, do so on the basis of a genuine advocacy of a proper stewardship of man's environment. Indeed, by such a yardstick we're all "environmentalists" - a conscious desire for a polluted and demonstrably hazardous environment would be patently irrational. Implicit but rarely explicit in such advocacy, is the premise that human health and well-being is at least a, if not the, standard of value and prime motivation. For this reason - and the fact that a majority of people are not versed in philosophy, much less Objectivist philosophy...

Four more Maoists killed The army shot dead one Maoist in Kalikot Monday and recovered bodies of three rebels from a jungle in Sunsari Sunday, the Defence Ministry said Tuesday. The army airlifted Monday a woman injured in an exchange of gunfire with rebels in Okhaldungha for treatment at the Birendra Military Hospital in the capital, the Ministry said. Security forces recovered a large cache of explosives, pressure cooker bombs, equipment to set up booby traps from Kosh Valley in Okhaldungha. Army arrested four rebels in Makwanpur Sunday with four guns. The army recovered concealed guns, explosives, pipe bombs, combat...

HOUSTON -- Two teenage sisters vowed Tuesday to not return to their mother until she changes her homosexual lifestyle, according to a News2Houston report. The girls, 17 and 15 years old, said their religious faith played a role in their decision to run away from home, but it wasn't their main reason. They said that they believe their mother's homosexuality is wrong. Link to story here

THE HALIFAX HERALD Monday, June 24, 2002 Serbian children living in the Pristina ghetto are escorted daily by an armoured NATO convoy to school eight kilometres away in the Serbian enclave of Gracanica. NATO's Kosovo mission failed Mitrovica, Kosovo - IT HAS BEEN three years since NATO troops first rolled into Kosovo and the last of the Yugoslav security forces withdrew from this embattled province. At that juncture, the western media hailed NATO's intervention as the "liberation of Kosovo" and a victory for Albanian Kosovars. Many misguided military analysts proclaimed the campaign to be "proof" that overwhelming air power alone...

Feds Arrest Roommate of 9/11 Hijackers Investigators Hope Man Can Provide New Information on Al Qaeda By Pierre Thomas W A S H I N G T O N, June 25 — A roommate of two of the Sept. 11 hijackers has been arrested and is facing intensive interrogation after he overstayed his visa, ABCNEWS has learned. At 6 a.m. Monday, agents from the diplomatic security service of the State Department and the FBI raided a house in Baltimore, looking for Rasmi Al Shannaq, who they believe was a roommate of at least two of the September hijackers. After investigators...