Free Republic

The Obama administration is drawing up plans to give all U.S. spy agencies full access to a massive database that contains financial data on American citizens and others who bank in the country, according to a Treasury Department document seen by Reuters...

To figure out what is taking place today in a closed society such as northwest China, sometimes you have to go back a decade, sometimes more. One clue might be found on a hilltop near southern Guangzhou, on a partly cloudy autumn day in 1991. A small medical team and a young doctor starting a practice in internal medicine had driven up from Sun Yat-sen Medical University in a van modified for surgery. Pulling in on bulldozed earth, they found a small fleet of similar vehicles—clean, white, with smoked glass windows and prominent red crosses on the side. The police...

AMERICA THE MULTI-CULTURED: Shahriar Ahmed, shown in the Bilal Mosque, in Beaverton, Oregon, just one of many mosques in America. It may be time to throw out old motifs of America as strictly a Judeo-Christian country. A new movement is bubbling to the surface and wants to change the term to Judeo-Christian-Islamic. Leading Muslim organizations say it's time for Americans to stop using the phrase "Judeo-Christian" when describing the values and character that define the United States. Better choices, they say, are "Judeo-Christian-Islamic" or "Abrahamic," referring to Abraham, the patriarch held in common by the monotheistic big three religions. The...