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Courtiers holed up with Yasser Arafat during the siege of his Ramallah bunker earlier this year noticed a curious physical change in their leader. The palsied trembling, which had afflicted him since a brain operation, ceased. The old man seemed almost to be enjoying the experience.Arafat is famously undaunted by adversity. It seems almost to nourish him. Now President Bush's anathema has placed him in another tight spot. Arafat has responded by hinting that presidential elections will take place next January. His survival instinct tells him this is a smart move. Once again, he has invested the notion of Palestinian...

President Bush's speech on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is potentially the most radical address on the Middle East ever delivered by an American leader. The novelty of his text did not lie in the specifics of a settlement in the Holy Land. Nor, for that matter, did its main interest lie in the usual Washington parlour game of who's up and who's down. The real novelty lay, rather, in its approach to the Arab world. For the first time, the fostering of democracy and free institutions are to be the lodestars of American policy towards a part of the region. Hitherto,...

The Case of the Freeper FRiva Feva As a way of raising the visibility of the FreeRepublic Network's FRiva Las Vegas Conference to be held on August 17th and 18th, we're starting a contest that will see one lucky Freeper win the registration fees to attend all events.  If you've already paid your fees, you should still play.  You may get a nice refund.  This contest will see a new series of clues and searches to find the final target each day.  Threads will go up in the evenings between 6:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. p.d.t.  There will be...

BOSTON, Jun 25, 2002 (United Press International via COMTEX) -- The Massachusetts Ballot Law Commission on Tuesday refused to kick Republican gubernatorial nominee Mitt Romney off the ballot, as demanded by the state Democratic Party. The panel rejected a Democratic argument that Romney gave up his residency eligibility to run for governor in Massachusetts when he went to Utah for three years to head up the Winter Olympics. The commission held a three-day hearing last week on the Democratic attempt to disqualify Romney, who leads all Democratic contenders in recent polls. In a state dominated by Democrats, Republicans have...

CORPORATE America suffered its biggest scandal to date last night when it was claimed that WorldCom, a telecommunications company founded by a devout Mississippi Christian, had lied about making about $3.85 billion (£2.6 billion) of profits over 15 months. The size of the alleged profits overstatement at WorldCom is more than double the previous record, set by the pharmacy chain Rite Aid, and makes the accounting irregularities at Enron Corporation look like a rounding error. WorldCom, already crippled by nearly $30 billion of debt, is now expected to go bust. Brad Burns, a WorldCom spokesman, could not be reached for...

STANDING over a steaming cauldron of beans, Mohammed Yasin expressed the anger typical of many Egyptians towards President Bush’s statement on the Middle East. “Sharon is the one with blood on his hands,” he said. “He is a man of war and a war criminal. The Palestinians are the ones who are suffering. They voted for Arafat. Bush can’t just demand they kick him out now and choose someone else. How can this be fair?” In a nearby café the talk among the all-male clientele was all of Bush, Arafat and Sharon. “It’s easy for Bush and Sharon to control...

Ice Age Find Sheds Light on Enigmatic Neanderthals Last Updated: June 25, 2002 02:26 PM ET By Georgina Prodhan THETFORD, England (Reuters) - British archaeologists revealed an Ice Age site on Tuesday they hope could provide some of the strongest evidence yet that Neanderthal people hunted mammoths. The 50,000-year-old remains in a gravel pit in eastern England may provide the scientific evidence needed to back up the age-old popular depiction of Neanderthals hunting mammoths and other large animals for food. Although the Neanderthals' carnivorous diet is not in dispute, scientists have hotly debated whether the squat, muscular race actually...

A DECADE after his father hastened his own political demise by alienating Jewish voters, President Bush demonstrated how far the Republican Party has moved towards Israel. With its promise of “secure and recognised borders” for the state of Israel, Mr Bush’s speech was a huge success among influential Jewish voters and was expected to erode their traditional support for the Democratic Party. But political analysts said that the speech was not so much an attempt to woo voters as it was a candid reflection of where the Republican Party now stood on Israel. A Gallup poll last month showed that...

Neither lightly nor hastily did President Bush issue his political verdict on Yasser Arafat, the veteran elected leader of the Palestinian national movement. The president's ruling that achieving peace requires "a new, different Palestinian leadership," and his unusual call to the Palestinian people to choose other leaders who are "not compromised by terror," came after a long, two-year series of American mediating missions and attempts to achieve a single goal: to reduce the violence and resume the political process. Domestic political concerns that contributed to the shape of the speech can be identified. But cynicism is not the point. It...

Sanford wins, shows television can trump tradition JIM DAVENPORT Associated Press Writer COLUMBIA, S.C. - Former U.S. Rep. Mark Sanford handily won the Republican gubernatorial runoff Tuesday, advancing to the November election where he will take on first-term Democratic Gov. Jim Hodges. The primary and runoff contest shows South Carolina's voters can be swayed by a campaign that relied more on television time than traditional get-out-the-vote efforts. With 91 percent of the state's precincts reporting, Sanford had 58 percent to Peeler's 42 percent. Sanford had won the June 11 primary by about 3,100 votes. "It's the triumph of a different...

RICHMOND, Va., Jun 25, 2002 (AP Online via COMTEX) -- A federal appeals court heard arguments Wednesday concerning the detention of a Louisiana native captured in Afghanistan, with the chief judge sharply questioning lawyers for both sides. At issue was whether the government should be allowed to continue to detain Yaser Esam Hamdi without letting him meet with his lawyers. There was no indication when the court would rule. Chief Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III asked government lawyers when it will be decided that the "end of hostilities" has occurred and detainees can be released. Deputy Solicitor General Paul...

Apple Computer, which initially could not meet demand for its new flat-panel iMac, now appears to have the opposite problem. Retailers and distributors who had to wait weeks after the product's January introduction to get their hands on the desk lamp-shaped desktops now find the machines piling up as the consumer PC market slows to a crawl. Distribution giant Ingram Micro shows more than 2,600 of the machines in stock, according to sources close to the company. With last week's orders from dealers amounting to less than 200 units, Ingram is sitting on more than 15 weeks' worth of inventory....

GAO report slams lax IRS tax collection efforts Last Updated: June 25, 2002 07:50 PM ET By Jonathan Nicholson WASHINGTON, June 25 (Reuters) - The declining ability of the Internal Revenue Service to go after citizens owing taxes meant an accumulated $16.1 billion in back taxes was not even actively pursued in 2001, a Congressional watchdog agency said on Tuesday. "IRS officials said that absent significant operational change, they had little expectation of reopening many deferred collection cases," the General Accounting Office said in a report that found "large and pervasive declines" in most agency programs aimed at enforcing...

Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Labor Shortage Testimony to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Immigration Dr. Norman Matloff Department of Computer Science University of California at Davis Davis, CA 95616 (530) 752-1953 matloff@cs.ucdavis.edu ©1998, 1999, 2000, 2001 Presented April 21, 1998; updated February 4, 2002 Contents 1  Executive Summary and Frequently Asked Questions     1.1  Summary: Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)         1.1.1  List of FAQs About the H-1B Program         1.1.2  List of FAQs About the Claims of a High-Tech Labor Shortage         1.1.3  List of FAQs About Difficulties Faced by Older Tech Workers         1.1.4  Answers to the FAQs2  The...

Capitol Hill (CNSNews.com) - The House of Representatives Tuesday passed legislation designed to "unshackle prosecutors" to again pursue criminal charges against anyone found in possession of child pornography. The Child Obscenity and Pornography Prevention Act, H.R. 4623, is a direct response to the Supreme Court's April 16 decision in the Ashcroft vs. Free Speech Coalition case. As CNSNews. com previously reported, the court ruled 6-to-3 that the law banning "virtual child pornography" (computer-generated images depicting children who do not exist) was unconstitutionally broad and could be used to prohibit "speech" containing serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. Under the...

WASHINGTON – Behind closed doors, far-left lawmakers are conspiring to ram through legislation aimed at putting Sierra Club, Planned Parenthood and their allies in charge of your life. The bill in question purports to deal with development that some people might deem objectionable. But like so many other schemes prompted by real or imagined problems, the "remedy" turns out to be far worse than the disease. Clinton's Damage Never Ends While the nation’s attention is focused on the war on terrorism, S. 975, the Community Character Act, seeks to implement a Clinton executive order that the leftist establishment could use...

MOSCOW - More and more names have been linked to an Italian-led operation against money laundering by Russian organized-crime groups, which led to more than 50 arrests in Europe and Canada earlier this week, giving some indication of how sprawling a network investigators have hit upon. "We got our hands on an international organization with a Russian base that has links to European organized crime and, in order to reinvest its money, used a complex money-laundering web," Reuters quoted Francesco Gratteri, head of the special police department that coordinates international operations, as saying after Monday's arrests. "The profits of drug...

EAGAR, Arizona (Reuters) - President George W. Bush saw firsthand on Tuesday the path of the biggest blaze in Arizona's history, touring the devastation by plane and promising federal aid to families who lost their homes. "I know this is a tough moment," Bush told families and rescue workers at a high school-turned-shelter for evacuees in Eagar, a town some 105 km southeast of the fire line. "Hang in there," he told the group of about 300. En route to a meeting of world leaders in Canada, Bush made the brief Arizona stop to personally thank fire-fighters and to...

Many people wonder why Israel won't give back the occupied territories in return for peace. One reason is that more than half of Israel's water supplies now come from the Mountain Aquifer and Jordan river basin, which are situated deep within them Jericho used to be one of Palestine's prime agricultural spots. An abundance of springs made the fertile land surrounding the ancient town famous for its oranges, bananas and strawberries. Now, all that is changing. Fields are drying up, crops are dying and farmers are being put out of work. The reason is simple: water. Israeli settlements get priority...