Free Republic

MONTERREY, Mexico (AP) -- Manuel Uribe, who once weighed a half-ton but has slimmed down to about 700 pounds, celebrates his 43rd birthday Wednesday with a simple wish for the coming year: to be able to stand on his own two feet to get married. At his home in northern Mexico, where he can still do little more than sit up on a bed, Uribe said that more than two years of steady dieting have helped him drop about 550 pounds from his Guinness record weight of 1,235 pounds. He hopes Guinness representatives will confirm in July that he holds...

National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice told the 9/11 Commission Thursday morning that it was an alert Customs agent - and not the Clinton adminsitration "shaking the trees" for intelligence on al Qaeda - who deserves credit for foiling the December 1999 al Qaeda plot to bomb Los Angeles International Airport. "It's questionable to me . . . that somehow shaking the trees was what broke up the Millennium [Plot]," Rice told the 9/11 probers, referring to claims by Clinton terrorism czar Richard Clarke that White House alerts had the nation's security apparatus on the lookout for trouble. In fact, said...