Free Republic

HERE is a thought experiment that does not take very much thought. Picture, if you will, Hillary Clinton facing a foreign policy conundrum. With whom will she discuss it first and most intently: with her president or her husband? (I did tell you this wouldn't be difficult.) Here's another one: Will she be swayed in her foreign policy decisions by electoral considerations focusing on the year 2012 and, if so, will she be swayed by incoming president Barack Obama's interests or her own? The next question, and I must apologise in advance for once again making it an unstrenuous one,...

Satyam Computer Services, a leading Indian outsourcing company that serves more than a third of the Fortune 500 companies, significantly inflated its earnings and assets for years, the chairman and co-founder said Wednesday, roiling Indian stock markets and throwing the industry into turmoil. The chairman, Ramalinga Raju, resigned after revealing that he had systematically falsified accounts as the company expanded from a handful of employees into a back-office giant with a work force of 53,000 and operations in 66 countries. Mr. Raju said Wednesday that 50.4 billion rupees, or $1.04 billion, of the 53.6 billion rupees in cash and bank...

LEWISTON, Maine — Army and Navy recruiters took one look at 330-pound Ulysses Milana and told him to forget about joining. "You've got to lose weight," Milana remembers them saying. But Marine recruiters were willing to work with him as he began his weight-loss journey in December 2007. Now, 11 months later, Milana is 140 pounds lighter as he leaves Monday for Parris Island, S.C., to begin boot camp.

Yeah, I know, posting a non-election vanity on Election Day...I've been here over eight years, I figure I can do stuff like this every now and then, right? My dad was a World War II veteran. He didn't talk much about his service. All I know was that he was drafted while working at the Newport News Shipyards in Virginia, ended up in the Army, and was a sergeant in a motor pool on Leyte or Luzon in the Philippines in 1945. He never told me anything about seeing combat, and he was demobilized and came home sometime in 1946....

ATLANTA – A Delta baggage worker got a bit of a fright before Halloween when she opened a jetliner's cargo door and found a cheetah running loose amid the luggage. Two cheetahs were being flown in the cargo area of a Boeing 757 passenger flight from Portland, Ore., to Atlanta on Thursday when one escaped from its cage, Delta spokeswoman Betsy Talton said Friday.

LONDON, England (CNN) -- The BBC's highest paid celebrity has lost more than $2 million after being suspended without pay for a series of abusive telephone calls made by himself and another of the broadcaster's stars. Talkshow host Jonathan Ross, 47, and comedian Russell Brand, 33, have been at the center of a row after they attempted to contact comedy actor Andrew Sachs for an interview on Brand's weekend Radio 2 show earlier this month. ... Ross and Brand rang Sachs -- who played a Spanish waiter in John Cleese's 1970s TV comedy "Fawlty Towers" -- but when it dawned...

Hey folks...I try not to post many vanities, but I need your help on this one. I've been getting involved in a discussion with some of my liberal friends, and they're proclaiming to the heavens that Republicans are attempting to suppress voter registration (see a couple of recent dust-ups on college campii in Virginia), while denying that Democrats engage in vote fraud. I mentioned ACORN to them, and their reply was "show me evidence, I don't believe you." So I need to get articles and documentation showing that left-wing organizations, primarily ACORN, have been engaging in systematic fraud when it...

A week before the start of the new school year, principal Denise Magee roamed the hallways of Campbell Middle School in Smyrna, Georgia, preparing for battle. The adversary? Preteen and teenage bullies. Toting anti-bullying posters and masking tape, Magee was determined to let students see from Day One that she had a zero-tolerance policy when it came to that kind of harassment. "Middle-school kids are just cruel to each other," Magee said. "They speak their minds, so you see bullying in the form of teasing, taunting, social isolation and name calling." The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services estimated...

Russia invades Georgia and President Bush goes on vacation. Our president has spent one-third of his entire two terms in office either at Camp David, Maryland, or at Crawford, Texas, on vacation. His time away from the Oval Office included the month leading up to 9/11, when there were signs Osama bin Laden was planning to attack America, and the time Hurricane Katrina destroyed the city of New Orleans. Sen. John McCain takes weekends off and limits his campaign events to one a day. He made an exception for the religious forum on Saturday at Saddleback Church in Southern California....

RALEIGH - Raleigh police have arrested and charged three Durham men with shooting four people -- two fatally -- at a rental home that authorities said was operating as a brothel. Police this morning announced the arrests of Rony Alvararo Martinez, 23, Elvin Adrian Martinez, 21, and Mauricio Castillo, 19. All three live together at 2920 Chapel Hill Road in Durham. Police spokesman Jim Sughrue said they were arrested in Durham overnight with the aid of Durham police. Each suspect is charged with two counts of murder and two counts of attempted murder. The shootings occurred Saturday at 316 Sunnybrook...

The U.S. Army's official history of the Iraq war shows military chiefs made mistake after mistake in the early months of the conflict. Failures to recognize the chaos engulfing the country and to send in enough troops to restore order after the 2003 invasion have long been highlighted by critics, but a new report shows the Army assessing itself.

An airline pilot and flight attendant who ventured into a wooded area, apparently to have sex last month in Lower Swatara Township,each pleaded guilty this afternoon to disorderly conduct. Jeffrey Paul Bradford, 24, of Moon Twp., a Pittsburgh suburb, and Adrianna Grace Connor, 24, of Belleville, Mich., each paid a $300 fine for the summary offense. Saying they didn't have enough evidence, prosecutors withdrew charges of indecent exposure, open lewdness, public drunkenness, loitering and prowling at night against Bradford, and theft from a motor vehicle, public drunkenness, and loitering and prowling at night against Connor.

Check out this amazing video of an Air Force funeral detail at Arlington National Cemetery. As a furious thunderstorm rolls in with blinding rain and enough wind to rip their hats off their heads, they don't move a muscle, and continue their watch over the departed. Simply amazing, and very moving.

MONTERREY, Mexico (AP) -- A car plowed into a weekend bike race along a highway near the U.S.-Mexico border, killing one and injuring 10 others, police said. art.bikerace.cnn.jpg The 28-year-old driver was apparently drunk and fell asleep when he crashed into the race, said police investigator Jose Alfredo Rodriguez.

A Grupo TACA airplane overshot a runway and slammed to a stop on a city street Friday in the Honduran capital, leaving a pilot and a passenger dead and injuring several others. Television images showed the plane's fuselage buckled and broken apart in places. The cockpit was smashed under a billboard, and firefighters hosed down at least two cars trapped under the Airbus 320's left engine.

"Jobs Americans just won't do." I can't stand that line, but more importantly, I don't even understand it. Americans spend months at a time at sea fishing for crab or drilling for oil; two of the most dangerous jobs in the world. Americans clean bathrooms, subway stations and crime scenes. Americans man toll booths, pave roads, embalm bodies and inspect sewers. Yet people really expect us to believe that they won't pick strawberries or oranges? It just doesn't add up.

Charles Nelson has paid about $30,000 in rent since moving into a spacious four-bedroom home in August. He was stunned when a real estate agent knocked on his door recently and said the home was in foreclosure. His landlord had not paid the mortgage since he moved in and the bank is now demanding the house back. Nelson will also lose his $7,700 security deposit. When he confronted the landlord, he says, he was given a terse response: "That's none of your business." "I said, 'I beg your pardon. It is my business. I mean, is somebody going to knock...

SANTA BARBARA, California (CNN) -- Barbara Harvey climbs into the back of her small Honda sport utility vehicle and snuggles with her two golden retrievers, her head nestled on a pillow propped against the driver's seat. A former loan processor, the 67-year-old mother of three grown children said she never thought she'd spend her golden years sleeping in her car in a parking lot. "This is my bed, my dogs," she said. "This is my life in this car right now." Harvey was forced into homelessness earlier this year after being laid off. She said that three-quarters of her income...

ZAGREB, Croatia (AP) -- Governments have changed. War erupted and ended. Neighbors had children, and then grandchildren. But Hedviga Golik never left her tiny apartment in Croatia's capital -- until her mummified body was carried out this week, 35 years after she died. Police said Friday that no one ever reported Golik missing and no one has come to claim her body. Residents of her loft building in downtown Zagreb had broken into Golik's flat after deciding that the apartment should belong to them, and not to her. Startled by the remains in bed, they called police.

Let's not kid ourselves. The Rev. Jeremiah Wright was going to be a part of this presidential campaign through November, whether Sen. Barack Obama smacked his former pastor upside the head, or not. Now that he has taken the necessary steps to separate himself from Wright, Obama must go on his most vigorous offensive to date and make it clear that he is running for president, and not Wright. Sen. Hillary Clinton is doing all she can to make the case to undeclared Democratic superdelegates that Obama is a wounded duck because of Wright; that she has a better shot...