Free Republic

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia warned the United States on Thursday it might pull out of a Cold War nuclear arms reduction treaty because of plans by Washington to build a missile shield in Eastern Europe. General Yuri Baluyevsky, head of the Russian general staff, said Russia could unilaterally withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF Treaty), Russian news agencies reported...

LONDON (AFP) - British police were told to apologize after "aggressive" anti-terror raids last year in which two Muslims were arrested but later freed without charge, triggering protests. One man was shot and injured during the controversial raids in Forest Gate, east London, which came amid heightened security fears in Britain following the July 2005 suicide bombings in London. The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) said it had received 153 complaints from residents affected by the "terrifying experience" when police burst into two houses in Forest Gate on the night of June 1, 2006. At least two of the 11...

October 15 - SALEM - Secretary of State Bill Bradbury and Attorney General Hardy Myers asked Friday that anyone with information about the destruction, alteration or failure to turn in voter registration cards please come forward. Oregonians can provide specific information about voter registration card fraud by emailing voter.fraud@state.or.us or by visiting http://www.sos.state.or.us/elections/voter_fraud. Bradbury and Myers recently launched an investigation into complaints about voter registration fraud, and seek the public's assistance in furthering this investigation. Although the deadline for new registrants to register to vote has passed, people who have registered to vote in Oregon and need to change their...

<p>A powerful "old guard" faction in the Central Intelligence Agency has launched an unprecedented campaign to undermine the Bush administration with a battery of damaging leaks and briefings about Iraq.</p> <p>The White House is incensed by the increasingly public sniping from some senior intelligence officers who, it believes, are conducting a partisan operation to swing the election on November 2 in favour of John Kerry, the Democratic candidate, and against George W Bush.</p>

Three police officers were killed late Saturday as suspected Taliban attacked a police vehicle carrying ballot boxes to Uruzgan's provincial capital Trinkot, the city police confirmed. "The ballot boxes were taking from Chorak district to Trinkot when armed Taliban ambushed the vehicle, killing three policemen escorting the car," Rozi Khan told Xinhua. The former Taliban remnants, who vowed to derail the presidential elections have fired several rockets in Kabul and other cities since Saturday morning but the polling process was held as per schedule and ended at 6 PM local time (13:30 GMT).

"There's no room to die," complained a woman, surveying the crowd of several hundred antiwar protesters that by 8 a.m. Wednesday were crammed inside the metal barricades strung up by police along the perimeter of Rockefeller Center on Fifth Avenue. Instead of being able to flood into the plaza and stage a mass die-in to dramatize the death of innocent Iraqis, they were once again being penned in by the NYPD. "Break it up, keep moving," a cop ordered, shoving back the protesters who spilled into 49th Street. "No war, no profits, no business as usual!" chanted the demonstrators, circling...

LONDON - Anti-war activists delivered a letter to British Prime Minister Tony Blair, urging him to avoid in the event of war bombing targets in Iraq where human shields are deployed. The Human Shields Action group, which has about 100 international volunteers deployed in Iraq in a bid to deter military strikes, said it had asked Blair to avoid attacking sites where shields were based. "The...sentiment which demands that, whatever our opinion about military actions, we should back our forces should also be applied to the human shields," Richard Scrase, director of the London-based Human Shields Action, said in a...

WASHINGTON (March 10, 10:49 a.m. AST) - A Cold War-era office with a shadowy name and a colorful history of exposing Soviet deceptions is back in business, this time watching Iraq. The Counter-Disinformation/Misinformation Team's moniker is more impressive than its budget. It's a crew of two toiling in anonymity at the State Department, writing reports they are prohibited by law from disseminating to the U.S. public. The operation has challenged some fantastic claims over the years - a U.S. military lab invented AIDS, rich Americans kidnapped foreign babies for their organs, the CIA plotted to kill Pope John Paul II....

<p>LONDON (March 6, 2:55 p.m. AST) - Prime Minister Tony Blair took the debate on Iraq Thursday to some of his youngest critics - a studio audience for MTV. The television music network hosted a 60-minute forum featuring the unflappable British leader getting grilled by young adults from around the world.</p>

.......... PRICE: I spoke to an Australian women from Sydney who is in Baghdad, she was there this morning, Donna Mulhearn, 34 year old woman from Sydney. I asked her if she’d have a message for you this morning. If you don't mind, I'll just play this to you. It's very short. MULHEARN: I'd like to say, Mr Howard please, please, please do what you can to stop a military attack on Iraq. These people do not deserve to be attacked. These are now people with names and faces. These are children I've played with. These are men and women...

This is based on Monty Python's "Argument Clinic" skit. If you like Python, you should like this...if not, I make no promises as to how much you're going to enjoy this... USA: (Knock) Saddam Hussein: Come in. USA: Ah, Is this the right place for disarmament? Saddam Hussein: I told you once that I've disarmed. USA: No you haven't. Saddam Hussein: I’ve already disarmed. USA: When? Saddam Hussein: Just now. USA: No you didn't. Saddam Hussein: Yes I did. USA: You didn't Saddam Hussein: I did! USA: You didn't! Saddam Hussein: I'm telling you I did! USA: You did not!!...

KANICHNARA, Iraq - The fighters say they are Iraqi patriots who came to Kurdish northern Iraq to fight off foreign invaders - but the green telephone at their camp has a sticker identifying it as the property of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. They drive the beige Nissan Patrols favored by the Iranian military and speak Farsi, the language of Iran. They are Shiite warriors of the Badr Brigades - the military wing of an Iraqi opposition group based in Iran and supported by that country's Islamist leadership. And their presence is further complicating an already dangerous ethnic and military mix...

Dear Mr. Carter: Let me begin with a belated congratulations on your being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. As you noted in your book, Negotiation: The Alternative to Hostility, it’s important to understand that peace is impossible without justice. And justice is a two-way street, which means that the “war on terrorism” should not be about just us. A study of the Just War Tradition reveals that, though the criteria for it varies slightly among scholars, there are seven basic requirements that must be met in order for a war to be considered just. A just war must: 1) have...