Free Republic

House Conservatives Blast Immigration Bill, Recommend Prisoners Pick Farm Crops By DAVID ESPO AP Special Correspondent WASHINGTON Mar 30, 2006 (AP)— House conservatives criticized President Bush, accused the Senate of fouling the air, said prisoners rather than illegal farm workers should pick America's crops and denounced the use of Mexican flags by protesters Thursday in a vehement attack on legislation to liberalize U.S. immigration laws. "I say let the prisoners pick the fruits," said Rep. Dana Rohrabacher of California, one of more than a dozen Republicans who took turns condemning a Senate bill that offers an estimated 11 million illegal...

In experiments reported in the journal Science, toddlers helped strangers complete tasks such as stacking books. Young chimps did the same, providing the first direct evidence of altruism in non-human primates. Altruism may have evolved six million years ago in the common ancestor of chimps and humans, the study suggests.

It took a while, but the company's decision to launch a Chinese language search engine hosted on servers inside the People's Republic, one which complies with local law restricting which content can be retrieved, has finally exposed the hollowness of its ambition to "Do no evil" and shown that Larry, Sergey and the others are just capitalist monsters after all. Forgive me if I refuse to go along with the knee-jerk consensus on this one. Millions of people may now be turning away from Google in disgust, but I've just reinstated them as the default search for my Firefox toolbar,...

OTTAWA (Reuters) - Former Canadian prime minister Jean Chretien shares the blame for a government sponsorship scandal marred by greed, incompetence, carelessness and venality, but Prime Minister Paul Martin, a fellow Liberal, is off the hook, an official report said on Tuesday. The scandal centers on a sponsorship program set up in 1996 after an referendum about independence in Quebec failed narrowly. The program aimed to boost the cause of federalism in the French-speaking province. But Judge John Gomery, who has spent the last year probing how C$100 million was funneled to advertising firms with close ties to the Liberals,...

I was looking at the spattered dust outside my room today when it hit me. Someday our soldiers will leave this ugly, barren FOB. The high guard towers will lay empty, their glowering profile softened by unruly nests of squawking birds. The sandbags will rot away from dusty windows and the shimmering light of day will finally dance in cloistered rooms. Warehouses full of supplies will lay barren. Motorpools thick with the low, lethal silhouettes of armored vehicles will sit empty save for wretched and twisted weeds. Sections of the high perimeter wall will crumble and fall into chaotic piles...

A FRENCHMAN has won a ground-breaking ruling against his former wife and her lover, ordering them to pay back the money that he had spent on bringing up a child he had mistakenly assumed to be his own. The man, named as G in the ruling, was awarded €23,000 (£15,600) after a DNA test revealed that he was not the father of the 13-year-old child, Astrid. He had raised her as his own daughter, paying for her food, clothing, toys, schoolbooks and holidays, the Caen Appeal Court in Normandy said. It added that his former wife, B, from Cherbourg, had...

To use a well-worn cliché, but one which clearly communicates its message, it is enough to gag a maggot. “It” is the adulation being heaped on one of the world’s master terrorists, the recently, and thankfully, departed Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). Arafat has been praised as a statesman, for his “undisputed” and “extraordinary” courage (does it take courage to send murderers to slaughter children?), and for his “successful acts of terror.” The latter comment came from columnist Gwynne Dyer, who at least had the honesty (decency clearly is beneath her) to admit that Arafat was...

(CNSNews.com) - Because President George W. Bush has "ignored the threat of global warming," Floridians can expect to be hit by increasingly destructive hurricanes, a new billboard campaign says. The billboards, going up along Interstate 4 between Tampa and Orlando -- a week before the presidential election -- read, "Global warming equals worse hurricanes. George Bush just doesn't get it." The billboards show a photo of a hurricane swirling toward Florida. The campaign is co-sponsored by Scientists and Engineers for Change and Environment2004. The NAACP National Voter Fund is also involved in the effort to blame Bush for ignoring global...