Free Republic

President Bush's plan for a provisional Palestinian state will not bring peace to the Middle East. Peace will come only when Palestinians love their children more than they hate Jews. The formulation isn't mine. My son Rudy overheard it last week while part of the Volunteers for Israel program, which sends American Jews and Christians to volunteer on Israeli army bases. There is a certain wisdom in the words. According to a recent survey conducted by a Palestinian polling firm, a majority of Palestinians say their goal is to eliminate Israel, while only 43 percent support a Palestinian state...

Graham apologizes to Cincinnati's Jewish leaders 6-26-02 News & Record Posted 8:50 a.m. CINCINNATI (AP) -- The Rev. Billy Graham met with Jewish leaders in Cincinnati earlier this week and apologized for comments he made 30 years that a Jewish "stranglehold" of the media was ruining the country. The meeting marked the first time that Graham has apologized face to face with Jewish leaders for the comments that were captured on audio tape during a 1972 meeting between Graham and then President Nixon, The Cincinnati Enquirer reported Wednesday. The 1972 conversation was among 500 hours of Nixon tapes released in...

WASHINGTON, June 20 (JTA) — Black-Jewish relations on Capitol Hill have never been the easiest to maintain, and a hotly contested primary in Alabama and the volatile Israeli-Palestinian conflict are making things more tense than ever. On the surface, Jewish and black members of Congress maintain a strong alliance that has its roots in the civil rights movement. Behind the scenes, however, groups and individual members are struggling to shore up what many say is a battered relationship. Matters have come to a head over Jewish support for the challenger to Rep. Earl Hilliard (D-Ala.), a member of the Congressional...

Brian Williams is studying gravitas so he can be a deeply serious shallow liberal. Easily the funniest debate in medialand these days is the one about whether Brian Williams has the gravitas needed to replace Tom Brokaw when Tom retires in 2004. A recent Nexis search for interpretive articles about the titanic transition at NBC turned up at least 15 entries in which somebody weighs in on the gravitas issue. A couple of the articles, to be sure, are less concerned with Brian than with the collateral question of whether this issue is keeping women from serving as anchors. Here...

Today, more than a million people in Zimbabwe are starving, and up to three million face the imminent prospect of starvation. This has not yet excited much attention in the West. Zimbabwe, after all, is far away from the centers of American interest; all of our top reporters are in Kandahar and Karachi. But this case is important, not because of any direct effect it may have on the United States, but because it is a pure, distilled example of the larger trend that is destroying the world: the West's loss of moral confidence. That loss of confidence is...

Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci made a name for herself with her fierce, uncompromising interviews of some the world's leading newsmakers. Fallaci retreated from public life after September 11, but has recently returned to the spotlight with a new book and a brilliant, Zola-esque diatribe against European and Arab anti-Semitism. The essay, which appeared on April 12 in Italy's Corriere della Sera, paints a picture of a supposedly liberal Europe caught in contradiction. Fallaci's is a sharp, impassioned critique of the hypocrisy and recklessness of Palestinian leadership, of the pro-terror apologetics of the European intelligentsia, and to some extent of...

Habeus Corpus, Christie?by David Codrea Codrea4@adelphia.netJune 25, 2002Dear EPA Director Whitman,Per the news account at: http://www.ohio.com/mld/ohio/news/3508890.htm, “The .38-caliber Taurus revolver that was used to kill Tejano music sensation Selena lies in pieces at the bottom of Corpus Christi Bay...State District Judge Jose Longoria ordered the destruction of the handgun on June 10; it was sawed into bits on June 11 and then ferried aboard a patrol boat to the site where the Nueces County sheriff scattered the fragments in the water.” May I, as a private citizen, also dump metal fragments into navigable waters? Are there other materials that I...

California's Racial Privacy Initiative will add an amendment to the state's constitution outlawing classification based on race, ethnicity, color, or national origin. Furthermore, the amendment would prevent the state from collecting this information. With the state defined broadly to include everything from municipal government to state universities to local school districts, this initiative would end racial checkboxes and classification in most aspects of people's lives. Critics charge that while this initiative purports to end racism and create a colorblind society, it has just the opposite effect. They argue that we need to collect race-based information to identify areas where...

JEANNINE AVERSA, Associated Press WriterWednesday, June 26, 2002 ©2002 Associated Press URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2002/06/26/financial1017EDT0080.DTL (06-26) 07:17 PDT WASHINGTON (AP) -- New-home sales shot up 8.1 percent in May, the biggest advance in six months, as low mortgage rates motivated buyers. The larger-than-expected increase pushed up sales of new single-family homes to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.03 million, a record monthly level, the Commerce Department reported Wednesday. Separately, the nation's factories, hardest hit by last year's recession, saw fresh signs of improvement in May, with orders for costly manufactured goods rising 0.6 percent, the department said in another report. The...

5-Year-Old Girl Dies In Drinking-And-Driving Wreck Police Arrest Mother On Manslaughter Charge POSTED: 6:48 p.m. CDT June 25, 2002 TUSCALOOSA, Ala. -- Investigators say a woman's decision to drive after drinking led to her 5-year-old child's death. Gina Hall, 34, was arrested on a manslaughter charge for the death of her daughter, Jada Anne Hall. Jada Anne Hall was killed when her mother's Jeep Cherokee flipped twice and threw her out of the car. Police say the accident on Highway 82 in Tuscaloosa happened just blocks from Hall's home. They say drinking and driving is as dangerous as shooting...

It´s only June, the hot, dry months of summer are ahead, and according to the Washington Post, "there are six major fires in Colorado. Fires are also burning out of control in California, New Mexico, Utah and Arizona, where a large and dangerous fire in the tinder-dry forests of the eastern part of the state raced through a hastily abandoned town today, chasing firefighters off the line and prompting an evacuation warning for thousands of residents." MSNBC reported "About 393,000 acres have been consumed in eastern Arizona by two fires — the Chedesky fire and the larger Rodeo fire...

"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty G-d! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!" Patrick Henry Those worrying about the lack of safety in this time of crisis find comfort in the remarks of George W. Bush: "Our war on terror...will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated." The problem with this is that there is no end in sight to this "war,"...

MONTGOMERY - Seafood Ban State Agriculture Commissioner Charles Bishop has banned the sale of six brands of shrimp and crawfish from China because they contain traces of a restricted antibiotic. Bishop announced the ban applies to: Sea Best Raw Salad Shrimp....Sea Best IQF Raw Salad Shrimp Frozen....IQF Frozen Raw Salad Shrimp Sea Best....Sea Best Frozen Whole Boiled Crawfish....Sea Best Whole Boiled Crawfish....and Bernard's Cleaned Peeled Crawfish Tails with Fat. Tests performed by the state Department of Agriculture and Industries detected traces of chloramphenicol. That's an antibiotic that the federal government prohibits in food-producing animals and animal feed products in the...

I get so tickled every time I see a certain "wireless" commercial where the guy is trying to find a place inside a gymnasium to stand where he can be heard on his cell phone. He moves two or three steps this way or that and keeps repeating, "Can you hear me now?" I have a dear friend that I tease relentlessly about not hearing a word I've said. She becomes mesmerized by something and you have to wait until she comes back to earth. I will speak to her, and then start making crazy body motions as if...

Yesterday, I ran across an article in USA Today that should have created a firestorm of controversy. Apparently, Congress has gone as weak in the knees over invading Iraq as a 14 year old school girl at an N sync concert… ”Republican and Democratic leaders in Congress are skeptical about the need for quick military action against Iraq and want President Bush to seek congressional approval first. In interviews with USA TODAY and in recent public statements, key lawmakers — including seven of the eight who receive a version of the president's daily intelligence briefing — expressed reservations about...

Over the past week, the media has been full of all sorts of stories about the thirtieth anniversary of the Watergate break in, the Nixon administration's bungled attempt to break into the Democratic Party's national offices at the Watergate Hotel in Washington and steal confidential documents. The revelation of illegal activities ordered from the Oval Office eventually forced President Nixon to resign and undermined Americans' faith in their government. Most of the stories center around the identity of "Deep Throat" the anonymous source who gave two Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein the information they needed to...

President Bush has signed a bill allowing death benefits to be paid to the domestic partners of firefighters and police officers who die in the line of duty, permanently extending a federal death benefit to same-sex couples for the first time. The new law allows a $250,000 federal benefit for survivors of public safety officers to be paid to any beneficiary listed on the victim's life insurance policy. The money has been available only to spouses, children and parents. Gay activists had lobbied for the bill, and the Justice Department had objected to it, saying in a letter to Congress...

'Shootings involving officers often spark raw emotions about race, but in the latest incident, in which a drug addict is accused of killing a police officer, the issue of race has emerged with a twist. In the past, black community leaders have criticized police departments after shootings involving officers. But after Saturday's shooting, in which a black man killed a white King County Sheriff's deputy, the Seattle-area black community is feeling the heat. "I've never been accused of being a racist, but what I see is creating a racist climate. I'm becoming someone who is divisive," said George Baena, 65,...

With an affection for policy only a wonk could have and an absolute inability to speak in soundbites, Mark Sanford is the most unlikely challenger for governor — yet, he is the most likely to knock off an incumbent state leader come November.Sanford, a former congressman representing Charleston and Myrtle Beach in South Carolina, emerged from a crowded seven-man primary field, beating all three sitting statewide-elected officials. By virtue of a 1 percent margin in the primary, he was considered a slight favorite over Lt. Gov. Bob Peeler heading into Tuesday's runoff — despite Peeler's dominance in the polls...

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - Europe's biggest fashion retailer, Sweden's H&M, has launched wear-once paper panties for the summer. "They are on sale now. They are good to have in your handbag if something unexpected happens, if you lose your luggage, or you exercise and forget to take a change of underwear with you," H&M's spokeswoman Anna Carin Bjorne said. The panties are designed as one-size-fits-all "G-strings" and sold in small packs of three in red, green and black. There are no paper underpants for men, but designer Camilla Thulin was quoted by tabloid Aftonbladet as saying the idea could appeal to...