Free Republic

TEL AVIV—Hamas militants who flooded into southern Israel from Gaza last weekend carried detailed maps of the towns and military bases that they targeted. Some also carried tactical guides identifying weak spots on Israeli army armored vehicles. The documents, written in Arabic, were recovered from the sites of attacks or bodies of dead Hamas fighters by Israeli civilians, soldiers and emergency personnel. Taken together, the documents indicate that Hamas set out from the start to target not just military installations, but to attack civilian population centers and to take hostages, and they offer evidence of the scale of Hamas’s intelligence-gathering...

Former President Barack Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice ordered U.S. spy agencies to produce “detailed spreadsheets” of legal phone calls involving Donald Trump and his aides when he was running for president, according to former U.S. Attorney Joseph diGenova. “What was produced by the intelligence community at the request of Ms. Rice were detailed spreadsheets of intercepted phone calls with unmasked Trump associates in perfectly legal conversations with individuals,” diGenova told The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group Monday. “The overheard conversations involved no illegal activity by anybody of the Trump associates, or anyone they were speaking with,” diGenova...

SACRAMENTO — California's overhaul of its troubled workers' compensation insurance system has saved employers at least $8.1 billion over the last three years, and the benefits to the economy are expected to continue, according to a study sent to the governor and Legislature on Friday. The report commissioned by the state Department of Industrial Relations found that workers' comp premiums paid by businesses and nonprofit organizations, which soared as much as 200% in the early part of the decade, have been almost cut in half since July 2003. What's more, rates in California, the highest in the nation in 2004,...

OAKLAND -- The 925 pages of BART documents provided to the federal grand jury investiga ting state Senate leader Don Perata and his closest associates offer a snapshot of the close-knit world of political patron age. The 8-inch stack of e-mails, invoices and contract papers, obtained by the Oakland Tribune under the California Public Records Act, documents the work of two close allies of Per ata, D-Oakland, as they helped BART convince voters to pass a seismic safety bond. The U.S. Attorney's Office sought records showing BART payments to Oakland lobbyist Lily Hu and Sandra Polka, a former aide to...

This image shows Cassiopeia A in the most detailed image ever made of the remains of an exploded star. The colors represent different ranges of X-rays with red, green, and blue representing, low, medium, and higher X-ray energies of the supernova remnant. The one million second image shows a bright outer ring (green) ten light years in diameter that marks the location of a shock wave generated by the supernova explosion. A large jet-like structure that protrudes beyond the shock wave can be seen in the upper left. Chandra was launched July 23, 1999, aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia. The...

<p>SACRAMENTO - California's prison guard union has developed such a strong hold over the operation of the state's 32 prisons that it sometimes collaborates with wardens in managing institutions, undermining the already-weak authority of the Department of Corrections, the state's former prison watchdog told lawmakers Wednesday.</p>

Are these the detailed battle plans for the most heavily trailed military attack in modern history? By Rupert Cornwell in Washington 23 September 2002 The plans are on the President's desk. The variants are several, and no final, irrevocable decision has been taken by George Bush. But there is every sign that Washington wants the seemingly inevitable Gulf War II to topple Saddam Hussein to be a nimbler, more focused and even fiercer enterprise than the campaign waged by Mr Bush's father to drive him from Kuwait in 1991. A spate of news stories in Washington at the weekend provided...