Free Republic

Denmark's Right ends 80 years in wilderness By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in Brussels (Filed: 22/11/2001) DENMARK'S political Right prepared to take power yesterday with its first majority for 80 years, ending the historic domination of the Left-wing Social Democratic Party. Anders Fogh Rasmussen The man expected to become prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, led his free-market Venstre party to victory with a campaign to cut hospital waiting lists, to improve care for the elderly and to prop up Denmark's creaky welfare system - a strategy that is sure to be studied closely by Britain's Tories. Tax cuts were not on offer. ...

Man falls into ancient cellar AMIT MUKHERJEE TIMES NEWS NETWORK HMEDABAD: All Praveen Mehta, a retired bank employee of Ahmedabad, can think of these days is a dark underground chamber, guarded by three disfigured statues of dancing girls. The chamber, with six hidden air ducts, was discovered after the January 26 earthquake of Gujarat. Believed to be a secret cellar of a bygone era, the chamber could have been used for performing secret yagnas. It could even be the outer chamber of a secret treasure trove. The house, which was purchased by Mehta’s grandfather Giridharilal in 1898, suffered considerable ...

BBC did not tell police about bin Laden caller in London By Sean O'Neill (Filed: 03/11/2001) THE BBC did not inform police of a telephone call it received from a London representative of Osama bin Laden's al-Qa'eda terrorist network. The corporation's Arabic Service took the call on Thursday morning minutes before it was faxed a copy of bin Laden's most recent statement urging Pakistani Muslims to overthrow President Musharraf. The caller, speaking in Arabic with a marked Pakistani or Afghani accent, said he represented bin Laden and wanted to send a statement to the BBC World Service. Although he said ...

Vandals burn Jewish school in southern France The Associated Press MARSEILLE, France (October 29, 2001 09:58 a.m. EST http://www.nandotimes.com) - Vandals burned down part of a Jewish elementary school in southern France and left behind spray-painted messages including "Death to the Jews" and "bin Laden will conquer," police said Monday. Two trailers used as classrooms at the Pardes elementary school in Marseille were destroyed Sunday before firefighters brought the flames under control. Police Chief Yves Dassonville said the arson attack was "an isolated act by young hoodlums, but it must still be taken seriously." Security measures were heightened at ...

On the anniversary of Agincourt, Anne McHardy visits the village where the battle took place Saturday October 27, 2001 Agincourt is famous in British cultural memory as the battle when King Henry V proved that he had put behind him the youth he misspent with Falstaff. To the French it is Azincourt, the little village where 10,000 of their 40,000-strong army died on a miserable October day 586 years ago - largely because their armour was so heavy that they sank into the mud. A museum has recently opened to commemorate this, one of the most brutal massacres by the ...

ETHNOLOGY: Different hypotheses have been suggested about the origin of the Pukhtoons. Khawaja Niamatullah describes them as descendants of Jews, connecting them with the lost ten tribes of Israel. This theory of the Semitic origin of the Pukhtoons has been supported by some Pukhtoon writers, including Hafiz Rahmat Khan, Afzal Khan Khattak and Qazi Attaullah Khan. A number of orientalists like H.W. Bellew, Sir William Jones and Major Raverty have also subscribed to this view on the basis of Pukhtoon physiogonomy, and the striking resemblance of facial features between Pukhtoons and Jews. They believe that the prevalence of biblical names, ...

Synopsis Russian advances into central Asia after the Crimean War were seen in London and Calcutta as a threat to Britain's Indian possessions. The Tsar's armies had absorbed Tashkent, Samarkand and Khiva bringing the Russian presence close to Afghanistan and the traditional invasion route to India. In 1877, Amir Sher Ali of Afghanistan welcomed a Russian mission to Kabul. The Viceroy of India, Lord Lytton, responded by sending a British mission to the Amir, demanding that the Russians be dismissed. The Amir replied by turning back the British mission's advance party as it crossed the Afghan border in September ...

55 BRIGADE: Arab legion of elite troops is key target Rohan Gunaratna Bin Laden elite AS American ground troops launched their first attacks inside Afghanistan this weekend, one of their key targets will be an elite fighting corps of Muslim fundamentalists - the 55 Brigade. They are the Taliban's shock troops, a multinational force of up to 5,000 men financed and trained by Osama Bin Laden's Al-Qaeda organisation. Many have become battle-hardened from fighting in some of the world's most bloodthirsty wars of the past 20 years. The 55 Brigade members are better trained and equipped than regular Taliban ...

Oct. 19, 06:48 EDT British scientists admit mad-cow blunder Five-year research project mistakenly tested cattle, not sheep brains LONDON (AP) — Scientists who spent five years investigating whether British sheep could have become infected with mad cow disease admitted today they'd been testing cattle brains by mistake. Scientists have expressed fears mad cow — bovine spongiform encephalopathy, a brain-wasting ailment in cattle — may have been passed between cows and sheep because it behaves like the sheep disease scrapie. The government had planned to release results of tests on sheep brains by the Institute of Animal Health on today. ...

This evening, while surfing the Internet, I happened upon a document; viz:The Constitution of The United States. Article IV; sec 4 of which states the following. Article IVSection 4. The United States shall guarantee to every state in this union a republican form of government, and shall protect each of them against invasion; and on application of the legislature, or of the executive (when the legislature cannot be convened) against domestic violence.I then checked a political dictionary to find what exactly a republic is and how it differs from a democracy. I found the following definitions republic - the form ...

Ka’aba The House Of Allah In the province of Hejaz in the western part of Arabia, not far from the Red Sea, there lies the town of Makka. In the centre of this town there is a small square building made of stones, about 60 feet long, 60 feet wide and 60 feet high. Since time immemorial this town and this stone built house has been known to world travellers. This is Baitullah, the House of Allah. Its sanctity and antiquity is older than history itself. Tradition goes that the Kaaba was ordained by Allah to be built in the ...

Carlos the Jackal to wed his lawyer Jon Henley in Paris Saturday October 13, 2001 The Guardian The ageing, twice-married but still romantically inclined terrorist mastermind Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal, plans to marry his French lawyer, the bride-to-be said yesterday. "It's a marriage of love and of compatibility of ideas," said Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, who continued to represent the Venezuelan-born revolutionary when half a dozen other lawyers had given him up as a lost cause. "Between the image of him that is presented and the reality of what he is, there is a big difference," she ...

Copper a perfect fit for speedy chips By Michael Kanellos Special to ZDNet......... October 1, 2001 5:52 AM PT The semiconductor industry is in the midst of a massive technological change, converting to mass-producing chips with copper, rather than aluminum, wires. The weird part: Almost no one seems to be having major problems. Copper, which conducts electricity better than aluminum, gives designers an avenue to break through looming physical barriers that could prevent further boosts in chip performance. The first copper Pentium 4's will come out in the fourth quarter of this year at 2.2GHz, for instance, and hit 3.5GHz ...

Frontpage Breakfast with the killers Matthew Leeming describes his unnerving encounter in Afghanistan with the murderers of General Massoud ‘Every year there’s one place in the globe worth going to where things are happening,’ says Basil Seal to his mother, immediately before stealing her jewels to fund such a trip. ‘The secret is to find out where and to be on the spot at the time.’ This summer that place was Afghanistan, from where I have just crossed, disguised as a woman in a shapeless burqa, over the 16,000ft Shai Salim pass into Pakistan. I met a number of ...

Massachusetts Port Authority removes controversial graphic from Web site By JAY LINDSAY, Associated Press BOSTON (September 27, 2001 09:54 p.m. EDT http://www.nandotimes.com) - An aerial view of Logan Airport appeared on the managing agency's Web site, with a bright headline, "Massport: Planning for the Future." Then came the crosshairs. Appearing and disappearing over different sections of the airport, two lines settled into a cross, then flashed a red circle, as if a target has been locked. The graphic, put online in 1998, showed where construction or improvements were planned. Shortly after The Associated Press wrote about it Thursday, the ...

Forget war, says Afghanistan, let's play cricket KARACHI (Reuters) - Despite facing an imminent attack from the United States, Afghanistan have asked Pakistan for permission to take part in a cricket tournament it is hosting next month. "They had made a request to us that they wanted to take part in the Quaid-e-Azam Trophy and we accepted it," a senior official of the Pakistan Cricket Board of Control, Brigadier Munawwar Rana, told Reuters. "Since they have confirmed their participation, we have included them," said Rana. "But whether they are able to take part in the competition physically, I think, depends ...

British troops quit Balkans to aid US by Robert Fox British troops are to be pulled out of Macedonia by next week to prepare to support the American operation codenamed Infinite Justice. A key British planning headquarters is being pulled back from an exercise in Oman to help prepare the British contribution to the operation. Yesterday US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced the deployment of 100 American combat aircraft to the Gulf region. The huge USS Theodore Roosevelt is heading towards the eastern Mediterranean and the Red Sea to link up with two carriers already on station in the ...

-------------------------------------------------------------- This story was printed from Anchordesk, located at http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk. -------------------------------------------------------------- Silicon Valley's plan to stop skyjackings--all of them By David Coursey, AnchorDesk September 13, 2001 9:00 PM PT URL: http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/stories/story/0,10738,2812283,00.html How do we prevent airline hijackings? Already we're hearing proposals to put plainclothes sky marshals back on board--presumably to shoot it out with bad guys. After all, the end of skyjackings to Cuba roughly coincided with the arrival of the first generation of sky marshals...or was it Fidel's jailing of a few of these just-arrived revolutionaries? All I am sure of is gunfire and aircraft are a deadly ...

I linked to these webpages via the daily Grail page:http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/in_depth/sci_tech/2001/glasgow_2001/newsid_1528000/1528180.stmBritain could be in for a big freeze, with the climate ending up more like central Canada, say scientists studying the world's oceans. They have found evidence that the flow of cold water from the Arctic has decreased by 20% since 1950. If the trend contihttp://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010904/hl/coffee_1.htmlnues, the supply of warm water to northern Europe will decline, bringing a big chill. The last time this happened, in the 11th to the 18th Century, northern Europe entered the Little Ice Age. http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/in_depth/sci_tech/2001/glasgow_2001/newsid_1527000/1527511.stmBy BBC News Online's Helen Briggs Climate warming is changing the face ...

Common Virus Kills Cancer Tumors in Mice, Scientists Find Wednesday, August 29, 2001 Scientists have wiped out tumors in mice using a common virus that apparently tricks cancer cells into self-destructing. It is too early to know if the approach might work in humans. Many treatments that look promising in mice prove disappointing when they are tested on people. However, the research sheds light on something scientists have noticed for years: Some viruses harm cancer cells but leave normal, healthy cells unscathed. The research involves a virus that is believed to be harmless to humans, and a gene called p53 ...