Free Republic

(edit)Hong Kong-based British photographer Richard Jones encountered the 43-year-old wife of Robert Mugabe as she walked down a street near her luxury hotel in the heart of the city to go shopping.She punched him in the face when he tried to take pictures of her on January 15, leaving Mr Jones with bruises and cuts where her diamond-encrusted ring had smashed into his face. Mr Jones told AFP: "I think it's a disgrace for the Hong Kong government to allow a person to walk on a street in Hong Kong, punch a member of the media, and walk free from...

You are not going to believe this story. It is really something else. The White House, I predict, will look the other way at the flagrant law-breaking by a Mexican official caught on tape by the Secret Service filching U.S. government property. After all, looking the other way at systemic law-breaking by Mexico is the official Bush policy. Fox News has the scoop: Whether he was up to no good or simply desperate to play BrickBreaker, a Mexican press attaché was caught on camera by Secret Service pocketing several White House BlackBerries during a recent meeting in New Orleans, FOX...

Story in full THE Japanese consul general caused chaos in a busy Scottish pub by claiming he had diplomatic immunity as bar staff tried to throw out him and his family. Shuhei Takahashi was ordered out of the Three Tuns in Edinburgh when his 17-year-old son and a friend dozed off at their table. Bar staff claim Mr Takahashi went "crazy", and when police were called he declared he could not be arrested. Mr Takahashi told The Scotsman last night the staff had wrongly accused his son and his friend of being drunk and that nobody - whether a diplomat...

BAGHDAD -- The U.S. military is considering offering protection to foreign diplomats in Baghdad after al-Qaida agents killed three Arab envoys this month, the American ambassador said Thursday. "Coalition forces... are planning to look at this problem and see what could be done to fix the security for the diplomats," Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad told reporters. "It's very important for foreign diplomats who come here to have a sense of security." He spoke a day after Iraq's most feared terrorist group announced it killed two Algerian diplomats — including the country's chief envoy in Iraq — because of their government's ties...

UNITED NATIONS - The United Nations filed a petition in a U.S. court Monday seeking to block a former investigator from giving Congress documents that he took with him when he quit a probe of the Iraq oil-for-food program. The highly unusual petition aims to quash three congressional subpoenas for Robert Parton, an ex-FBI agent who quit the U.N.-appointed Independent Inquiry Committee in April, reportedly because he believed it ignored evidence critical of U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Parton has already turned over documents from the investigation to the House International Relations Committee in response to a subpoena. He is also...

<p>November 18, 2003 -- Two Iranian diplomats who arrived in New York recently to work at their country's U.N. mission are being investigated by the FBI after a transit cop caught them videotaping the subway in Queens, The Post has learned. The sharp-eyed officer spotted the suspicious pair entering the elevated station at Roosevelt Avenue and 52nd Street in Woodside at 1:30 a.m. Sunday and shooting tape in various directions as they waited for a Manhattan-bound No. 7 train.</p>

Giorgio Copello has been fighting his expulsion for five years. He no longer works at Italy's embassy, but still lives in Canada.The Federal Court of Appeal has upheld the expulsion of a former Italian diplomatic who was declared "persona non grata" in Canada for his rude and threatening behaviour. Giorgio Copello of Ottawa has been fighting his eviction for five years, when the federal government first ordered him to leave for talking about a bomb in his luggage at an airport and haranguing a motel clerk by calling her "a pig, stupid, a slut," and Canada "a pig country." The...

ARTICLE IV THE REPRESENTATIVES OF MEMBERS Section 11 Representatives of Members to the principal and subsidiary organs of the United Nations and to conferences convened by the United Nations, shall, while exercising their functions and during the journey to and from the place of meeting, enjoy the following privileges and immunities: immunity from personal arrest or detention and from seizure of their personal baggage, and, in respect of words spoken or written and all acts done by them in their capacity as representatives, immunity from legal process of every kind; inviolability for all papers and documents; the right to use...

A quick vanity, and that is partly an attempt to clarify the status of Ambassador Mohammed Aldouri and all Iraqi diplomatic, press, or commercial personnel currently in the United States, (particularly those with diplomatic immunity), and second a warning that these individuals need to be deported at once as extreme terrorist risks.It is my understanding there are no Iraqi interests in Washington DC (except, perhaps, scraggly anti-war hippies), but that there is a Permanent Mission and delegation of the Iraqi Government in New York City posted to the United Nations. This group enjoys security in their correspondence pouches and...

<p>A mix up among police, prosecutors and the U.S. Department of State allowed a Saudi national accused of kicking out the glass door of a Downtown tavern to go free, under the mistaken impression he had diplomatic immunity.</p> <p>"If I broke someone's window out, I'd pay for it or I'd be sitting in jail," said Tony Rubino, owner of the Liberty Avenue Saloon. "This just isn't right."</p>