Free Republic

Cooper Tire & Rubber Co. announced Thursday that it will lay off 114 of 159 employees at its Clarksdale plant. The layoffs will occur Nov. 12. The layoffs, according to Cooper Tire spokeswoman Patricia J. Brown, are necessary because of a steady decline in the demand for inner tubes. Cooper Tire owns 30 plants, but the Clarksdale location is the only one that still makes inner tubes. Brown said the plant will discontinue inner-tube production when the layoffs occur but will remain open to produce bladders and continue mixing operations for internal consumption by other Cooper facilities. The bladders are...

The former US president has charged the Republicans with bigotry and judicial manipulation, writes Peter Wilson 11 sep 04 BILL Clinton has delivered an extraordinary blast at America's top judge, William Rehnquist, and an uncharacteristically bitter attack on Republican presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Speaking before his recent health scare, the former president accused Rehnquist, the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, of deliberately politicising the system of appointing independent investigators, leading to years of relentless, politically motivated inquiries into his presidency. In an interview with The Weekend Australian, Clinton dropped the affection with which he usually...

Does anyonew know where I can find an add-on application for AutoCAD 2000, or AutoCAD 2000 LT, that draws Sheetmetal Ductwork and fittings?? I'm used to drawing with the Quickpen 3D CAD Sheetmetal program and drawing in AutoCAD is just like the old days of drafting boards and 2H pencils -- VERY time consuming. A shareware program would be great, or one that doesn't cost too much. I've searched and searched and am at a loss. I did find MECH-Q, but it had bugs and wouldn't work. Any help or ideas would be greatly appreciated. Oh and not metric, but...

Buckle your seat belts. Former presidential hopeful Alan Keyes has told Illinois Republicans that he will take on Democratic Senate nominee Barack Obama -- setting the stage for a three-month debate between two gifted, Harvard-educated orators from opposite ends of the political spectrum. Members of the Republican State Central Committee insisted the former radio and television commentator from Maryland make the promise before they would vote to offer him the nomination Wednesday night, sources told the Chicago Sun-Times on Thursday. "So he went back into the room and basically said, 'If you offer, I will accept,' " said a source...

To some neighbors, he's a "normal, nice little kid" who like his peers of the Northwest Side neighborhood dabbled in his share of mischief. But to local cops, he's well on his way to being an accomplished car thief who has already dabbled in more serious crimes including drug possession and hitting a school employee. The 12-year-old boy, whose name is being withheld because he is a juvenile, is due in court Monday on the latest charges against him. Chicago Police say he stole a 1989 Cadillac and led officers on a chase that ended in a crash in his...

WASHINGTON—-Beleaguered Senate Republican candidate Jack Ryan is considering quitting the race in the uproar touched off by the release of his divorce records, a Republican source told the Chicago Sun- Times on Thursday. "He’s reassessing," the source said. Ryan canceled a trip to Washington today where he had planned to appear with Sen. Peter Fitzgerald (R-Ill.) and attend a fund raiser headlined by Sen. George Allen (R-Va.), the chairman of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee. Another fund raiser that had been set for this morning with House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) was also canceled when Hastert had a meeting...

RatherBiased.com has received official confirmation from an ad executive at CBSNews.com that the network's Web site is a business partner with Amazon.com. In an interview, CBSNews.com sales director David Ghiraldini verified the existence of the relationship but declined to discuss the partnership or its ethical ramifications for a news organization profiting from the sale of controversial political books. Ghiraldini became defensive after reading our earlier item which first disclosed the partnership, a story which he repeatedly insisted was "incorrect." When asked repeatedly what parts of RatherBiased.com's story were in error, Ghiraldini declined to do so, insisting only that the story...

A North Side mother was charged with drunken driving after an accident that injured three of her children, one critically. Veronica Garcia Veloz, 42, of the 1600 block of Howard, was in serious condition Sunday at St. Francis Hospital in Evanston, and her daughter Nancy, 11, was in critical condition there, a hospital spokeswoman said. Two other children, Karla, 10, and Paola, 8, were in good condition at Advocate Lutheran General Hospital in Park Ridge, a nursing supervisor said. It's just a shame that these children were victims of a bad mistake on the part of their mother,'' said Illinois...

SOUTH SIDE -- Bail was set at $65,000 for a 37-year-old South Side man who faces charges in the self-defense slaying of a mentally unstable attacker. Charles Lawrence, 37, of the 0-100 block of West 72nd Street, was charged Tuesday with one count of unlawful use of a weapon by a felon in the shooting death Tuesday night of Trevor Anderson, said Tom Stanton of the Cook County state's attorney's office.

LIRA, Uganda (Reuters) - Sophia Apio dared not utter a sound as Ugandan rebels sliced off her lips and ears with a razor blade. They had threatened to hack her to death with machetes if she cried. Apio, her husband Ojede and six others were captured by the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) while scavenging for food in northern Uganda, where a 17-year-old war has forced about 1.5 million people to flee their homes. Shadowy LRA rebels led by Joseph Kony, a former altar boy turned self-proclaimed mystic, typically target civilians in their brutal war against the government. snip "Then he...

How much of a warning did Bill Clinton give incoming President George W. Bush that Osama bin Laden posed a grave danger? It depends on which President you ask. In his interview with the 9/11 commission last week, sources tell Time, Bush testified that Clinton appeared far more passionate about the dangers of North Korea's nuclear program and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. According to sources, Bush said Clinton "probably mentioned" terrorism as a national-security threat "but did not make it a point of emphasis." Clinton earlier told the panel that he had ranked bin Laden as the No. 1 problem the...

Offered the chance to get her income-tax refund in just two days, Mary Carter went for it. The Englewood woman knew she was being charged $160 by H&R Block in tax-preparation fees. But Carter, who wanted to use her $760.05 refund to pay off credit-card bills, didn't realize until later that getting her tax refund right away had cost her about $100 more in fees -- money that was deducted from the refund. Taxpayers here and across the nation appear to be embracing offers from tax preparers like H&R Block and Jackson Hewitt of "tax refunds fast." But critics say...

If the presidential election were held today, President Bush could count on Nevada's five electoral votes, according to a poll of likely voters. A telephone poll of 625 voters by Mason-Dixon Polling & Research Inc., for the Review-Journal, showed Bush leading Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry by 11 points, 49 to 38 percent. Independent candidate Ralph Nader has 4 percent support, and 9 percent of those surveyed are undecided. The margin of error is plus or minus 4 percentage points.

SIOUX FALLS — A federal judge has ruled that a lawsuit filed by former U.S. Sen. James Abourezk can continue against an Internet site that put Abourezk on a "traitor's list" for criticizing President Bush. U.S. District Judge Lawrence Piersol denied a motion on Wednesday from ProBush.com to dismiss Abourezk's lawsuit. Abourezk, who was a Democratic U.S. senator from 1973 to 1979, accused the site of libel. Abourezk sued last year after his name and photograph showed up on the list along with those of several others, including actress Susan Sarandon, Sen. John Kerry and Sen. Hillary Clinton.

NORTH SIDE -- Concerned at the appearance of dead rabbits during his February nature walks along Montrose Point, North Sider Ion Valentin has leveled a new and chilling suspicion: Somebody targeted the rabbits with killer potatoes to stop them from eating the local greenery. ~~snip~~ "We are definitely not poisoning rabbits," said Park District spokesman Julian Green, who said the dead rabbits "were news to us as well."

BANFF, Alberta Three ice climbers were killed after being caught in an avalanche in Banff National Park, Canadian officials said. Their names and home towns were not released pending notification of next of kin but early reports indicated they were from the United States, said Parks Canada spokeswoman Shelley Humphries. The three, part of two climbing parties, were on Mount Wilson north of Lake Louise when the avalanche apparently knocked them off their climbing route Thursday.

Last summer police arrested 37 Chinese illegal immigrants on the sands in Morecambe Bay. They were raking up cockles, bizarrely one of the very few meat stuffs unknown on a Chinese take-away menu. The story had its funny side - until now. Last week Chinese workers met a fate they were totally unprepared for. Did any of those 19 drowned Chinese cocklers have even the basics on them - a compass, map, tide timetable or mobile phone? It is a certain bet that not one of them spoke a word of English. The gang bosses who organise the labour won't...

WASHINGTON (AP) - Defending his decision to invade Iraq, President Bush said that although stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons have not been found, Saddam Hussein had the capacity to produce such arms and could have developed a nuclear weapon over time. Bush, in an interview broadcast Sunday, denied he led the United States into war under false pretenses, but he acknowledged that some prewar intelligence apparently was inaccurate. He did not directly respond to election-year allegations that his administration exaggerated intelligence to bolster a march to oust the Iraqi president. "We will find out about the weapons of mass...

Emilio Chavez Garcia was 50 when he called his estranged wife in Puerto Rico on Christmas Eve to say he wanted to come home. Maybe this time, she hoped, he would finally kick the heroin addiction that had ruined their family. Rafael Diaz was 36 and had dreams, too. Two months from getting off parole for peddling heroin, he carried a pledge in his day planner: "If I do not build a case against myself, all goals will be accomplished." Within 10 minutes of each other on Jan. 7--the syringes next to their bodies...

Two of the nation's most prominent Jewish leaders said yesterday that they had watched recent versions of Mel Gibson's unreleased movie "The Passion of the Christ" and found it anti-Semitic and incendiary in the way it depicted the role of the Jews in Jesus's death. One said he was angered that a scene he and other Jewish leaders had found particularly offensive remained in the version of the movie he saw, though Mr. Gibson had once said publicly he would remove it. ~~snip~~ Rabbi Hier said he was "horrified" by the movie, which he said depicted all Jews, except those...