Free Republic

A minister quits, buildings burn, rubbish rots. So much for the 'reconstruction' By Donald Macintyre in Baghdad 12 May 2003 It was just another day in the process of "getting Baghdad back to normal". Well, on this most normal of days when news was supposed to be slow, the US-appointed Health Minister finally resigned at the time of a steadily mounting public health crisis after a week of relentless pressure from doctors disgusted at his prominent past in the Saddam Hussein regime. A senior State Department official turned up at the old Iraqi Police Academy to sack in person the...

Sunday, May. 11, 2003Reading Between the Lies A young reporter who stole and made up stories forces the New York Times to take stockBy NANCY GIBBS DOUG MILLS/APA police car at the scene of a sniper shooting in Falls Church, Va. October 2002 Given the chance, Macarena Hernandez might have done great things at the New York Times. With a gift for detail and musical prose, she was offered a job after working as a summer intern in 1998 and planned to take it — right up until the day that August when her father, a construction worker, was killed...

<p>Lithuanians approved the former Soviet Baltic state's move to join the European Union in less than a year and become one of the first former communist nations to adopt the euro.</p> <p>About 89 percent of voters approved EU entry after a two-day referendum, according to preliminary results from the election commission. Lithuania, a country of 3.5 million people lying on the Baltic Sea between Poland and Belarus, is the fourth nation to pass a referendum on joining the EU on May 1, 2004, after Malta, Slovenia and Hungary.</p>

The House Space and Aeronautics Subcommittee held a hearing today on NASA's proposed Integrated Space Transportation Plan and the Orbital Space Plane (OSP) program in particular. It was the first opportunity for focused Congressional review of the OSP proposal since NASA first submitted its plan last November. Witnesses included Hon. Fred Gregory, the NASA Deputy Administrator; Hon. Dale Myers, former NASA Deputy Administrator; Dr. Jerry Grey, Director of Science and Technology Policy for the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), and Dr. Michael Griffin, former NASA Chief Engineer and Associate Administrator for Exploration. While NASA defended its Orbital Space...

U.S. Treasury Secretary John Snow said he continues to support a strong dollar and he predicted President George W. Bush's tax cut would fortify that by boosting a ``soggy'' economy. ``We believe in a strong dollar,'' Snow told ``Fox News Sunday.'' ``The best thing we can do to have a strong dollar is to see that the fundamentals of the economy are strong and that's why we come back to the president's jobs-and-growth plan.'' Snow spoke after a week in which the dollar fell by the most against the euro since March and traded within 0.5 percent of a four-year...

Military teams searching for biological and chemical weapons in Iraq found three trailers believed to be mobile biological weapons laboratories capable of producing deadly germs for weapons, NBC News reported.

Gang, THIS gal is SOOOO PO'd I can barely move, talk, eat or ANYthing!! Believe it!! I'm madder than a wet hen & STILL buzzin' like a wasp *hours* after suffering through yet ANother Holiday from Hell, courtesy of Hill/Billy!! !@#$%!! What IS it w/ those g-danged 'toons & their BIzarre penchant for ruining h-o-l-i-d-a-y-s?! W-H-Y, Lord?! Sheesh, they *annihilated* last Easter w/ their cutesy little jack-booted SS-raid & *now* they've gone & trashed one of THE most precious of holidays: Mother's Day!! W-H-Y?! Sugars, my kin usu. eat our holiday-meal around 3:30 in the PM -- to allow for...

MOSCOW: Russia, saying it will push for a central UN role in Iraq, began consulting Saturday with other Security Council members over a proposed US plan that relegates the United Nations to a largely advisory position. Russia and France - two leading opponents of the US-led invasion of Iraq - have said they had questions about Washington's proposal for a UN resolution on ruling post-war Iraq. Deputy Foreign Minister Yuri Fedorov said that in particular the draft ``fails to provide a clear picture of the transition from the UN's oil-for-food program to the lifting of international sanctions against Iraq.'' During...

THE world’s deserts are blooming again because of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming, according to Israeli scientists. Instead of global warming causing desertification, the researchers found that it is leading to the greening of deserts as the high levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere help plants to flourish. Vegetation creeping back into arid lands could be soaking up billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide that goes “missing” from the atmosphere. Scientists from the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel, studied the Yatir Forest, which was planted on the edge of the Negev desert 35 years ago. Their research,...

WASHINGTON: The Indian Army ex-serviceman who went on a shooting rampage in Cleveland’s Case Western Reserve University on Friday killing a student and wounding two others was a lonely bachelor involved in myriad social and political causes who lost it after a prankster hacked his beloved website. The computer and the worldwide Web was Biswanath Halder’s life. He worked eight hours a day at the University’s business school computer lab to promote personal, social and political causes ranging from ambitious business plans to opposing the US war on Iraq. He listed and forwarded hundreds of petitions. Halder earned a management...

FRANCE is expected to come to a near-standstill tomorrow when public-sector workers strike in a show of force aimed at reversing the reform programme of President Chirac’s centre-right Government. According to polls, nearly a quarter of the country’s six million public servants plan to take part in what the media have dubbed Mardi Noir (Black Tuesday). The one-day strike will disrupt ground and air transport and services ranging from schools and electricity to the Paris Opera and state broadcasting. Without state toll-takers, however, motorways will be free. The strikers’ main grievance is a plan by Jean-Pierre Raffarin, M Chirac’s Prime...

TEHRAN: Signifying a firm step towards energy security for India, Petroleum Minister Ram Naik on Sunday held preliminary talks with his Iranian counterpart Bijan Namdar Zanganeh regarding bilateral cooperation in the hydrocarbon sector. Naik expressed India's interest in acquiring a stake in oil fields in Iran when he called on the Iranian minister. He also offered India's expertise in using CNG as an automobile fuel based on the successful experiment in Delhi. Naik, who is on a three-day visit here, is accompanied by the Indian delegation, was told by Zangesh that Tehran was keen on selling LNG to New Delhi...

I'm thinking about packing up from NY and moving out to Arizona. But before I consider moving out there, I want to make sure I'm not moving to another Kalifornia or New York. What is the political climate like? Is it conservative? Republican? What are the philosophical undertones of the population? Conservative? Liberal? How about the faith of the population? Is there a large Catholic [faituful] population? How are the gun laws? Is the State homeschool friendly? How organized are Freepers out there? What is the best place to find employment for IT workers? What is the best place to...

JEDDAH: Leaders of Saudi Arabia's Shi'ite Muslim minority have petitioned Crown Prince Abdullah to demand a greater say in the affairs of the conservative Sunni-ruled kingdom, a Shi'ite activist said on Sunday. Shi'ites have long complained of discrimination in Saudi Arabia, which is now nervous about the resurgence of the Shi'ite majority in neighbouring Iraq after a US-led invasion toppled Sunni president Saddam Hussein. Officials deny charges of discrimination. Shi'ite activist Jaffar al-Shayeb told Reuters by telephone that the petition was presented late last month to Abdullah, the kingdom's de facto ruler. "The petition was signed by 450 members of...

Murray Sisselman, 73 and dying of cancer, walked into the Rascal House deli near his home on Feb. 25 to meet with James Angleton Jr., the chief financial officer of United Teachers of Dade. Sisselman, who served as UTD president for 27 years, wanted to come clean in his final days. He directed Angleton to a file cabinet packed with records showing that longtime union chief Pat Tornillo and his wife were apparently reimbursed for at least $155,000 in personal expenses in less than three years, including: • More than $10,200 during the couple's short stay in St. Bart's and...

update IBM will announce its next-generation mainframe Tuesday, sources said. The system, called the z990 and code-named T-Rex, will spearhead Big Blue's effort to ensure the lineage isn't doomed to extinction. The machine will come with 32 processors initially, with a 48-processor version by the end of 2003 and a 64-processor version in 2004, said Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff. By comparison, IBM's current top-end z900 mainframe, introduced in 2000, has 16 processors. In addition, the company is expected to announce that the mainframe can be subdivided into several independent partitions. Initially, the system will support as many as 15 partitions...

Los Angeles County spent about $350 million last year providing health care to illegal immigrants, according to a report from the Department of Health Services. The money spent could have staved off massive cuts to the departments including the closure of 16 health clinics and possibly two hospitals, as well as slashes in services across the board, officials said Friday. As a result, county Supervisor Michael Antonovich is pushing for measures he believes would control the cost and discourage illegal immigration. On Tuesday, the Board of Supervisors is expected to vote on a plan to create a work permit for...

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"/> May 11, 2003 Witnesses and Documents Unveil Deceptions in a Reporter's WorkBy THE NEW YORK TIMES ollowing is an accounting of the articles in which falsification, plagiarism and similar problems were discovered in a review of articles written by Jayson Blair, a reporter for The New York Times who resigned May 1. The review, conducted by a team of Times reporters and researchers, concentrated on the 73 articles Mr. Blair wrote since late October, when he was given roving national assignments and began covering major news events including the Washington-area sniper attacks and...

Iraq: Saddam’s spies ‘infiltrated’ leading TV network THE Arab news channel that won global influence after broadcasting a video of the terrorist mastermind Osama Bin Laden was infiltrated by Iraqi intelligence agents in a campaign to subvert its coverage, according to documents obtained in Baghdad. Senior officers of Iraq’s intelligence agency controlled three agents who worked at the Al-Jazeera network, say the files. Their detailed reports also refer to the Qatar-based news network as an “instrument” of the regime. Since Al-Jazeera was founded in 1996 it has won a worldwide audience of 35m- 50m and become “the CNN of the...

Contact: Barb Chamberlain, WSU Spokane/WSU News Bureau, 509/358-7527, 509/869-2949 (cell), chamberlain@wsu.edu Mike Erp, director, Washington State Institute for Community Oriented Policing, 509/358-7951, erpmj@wsu.edu Community Policing Institute Visits Russian Community SPOKANE, Wash. -- A community policing institute founded at Washington State University Spokane and that served first as a model for the United States may inspire Russia as well. A delegation from the Western Regional Institute for Community Oriented Public Safety at WSU Spokane recently returned from Russia, where they participated in an exchange to pave the way for community-oriented policing. WRICOPS is one of 22 congressionally funded regional community policing...