Free Republic

BOSTON -- Boston police are increasing patrols in the North End after a woman reported being sexually assaulted by a man there. The alleged attack happened near Prince Street at about 11:45 p.m. on Friday.

Following are extracts from a letter to TAE's editor from a young West Point-educated Army officer who has been at the center of intelligence operations connected to two of the trickiest and most successful combat actions carried out by the U.S. military in the last half century--August 2004's Battle of Najaf and November's Battle of Fallujah. He provides details on the Fallujah fight, including the previously unreported revelation that Muslim holy warriors traffic in illicit drugs. On November 7, Prime Minister Allawi gave the green light to the American and Iraqi military. All day long, Air Force and Marine Corps...

American author and journalist Tom Wolfe won one of the world's most dreaded literary accolades on Monday -- the British prize for bad sex in fiction. The prize is awarded each year "to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel." Wolfe won it for a couple of purple passages from his latest novel "I am Charlotte Simmons," a tale of campus life at an exclusive U.S. university. "Slither slither slither slither went the tongue," one of his winning sentences begins. "But the hand that was what she tried...

Driver Shalom Zakin left Hadassah-University Hospital in Ein Kerem Wednesday morning on what seemed like routine run with a No. 19 Egged bus, only to find himself back there shortly afterwards as one of the wounded from the suicide bus attack on Rehov Aza (Gaza Road). Dazed and lying on a hospital gurney, wrapped in a blanket, he tried to recall the attack. The bomber slipped onto the bus, and he never noticed a thing. "I don't remember exactly what happened, I drove on Rehov Aza, I picked up passengers at the first and second stops. All kinds of passengers...