Free Republic

A head teacher has angered parents by asking them to stop their daughters from wearing thongs to school.Anna Roxburgh, the head of Hamp Junior High School in Bridge Water, Somerset made the plea to parents of 6th Grade Girls, ages 10-11.In a letter she said she had no objection to thongs personally.But she was concerned about the girl possible embarassment while changing for Physical Education Class, falling over in the playground or doing handstands. Hamp Junior High is a mixed -sexes school with 270 puplis. One mother said the letter was 'unbeliveable.' She added: 'Schools lay down enough rules without...

<p>WASHINGTON, May 14 (AScribe Newswire) -- The cover story of the May 15 issue of the international journal Nature reveals that we have only 10 percent of all large fish - both open ocean species including tuna, swordfish, marlin and the large groundfish such as cod, halibut, skates and flounder - left in the sea. Most strikingly, the study shows that industrial fisheries take only ten to fifteen years to grind down any new fish community they encounter to one tenth of what it was before.</p>

Michael Moore is trying to tie Bush to bin Laden! His film is scheduled to be released in 2004, in the middle of the campaign! And Disney's Miramax is reportedly financing this hit piece!Of course we must boycott Disney and Miramax. But letters (hard copy ones, ones they have to hold in their hands and look at) are another effective way of getting the message out that America doesn't want Michael Moore's Bush-bashing films in their marketplace!!Here are some contact numbers and street addresses to mail your letters to. Please remember: the person who answers the phone may have NO...

During the last week of the conflict in Iraq, the British press has given few Iraqis as much ink as Ali Ismail Abbas, the badly burned 12-year-old who lost his mother, his father and his arms during an American airstrike. His story is profoundly and obviously tragic... In today’s Daily Telegraph, Ali Ismail Abbas finally hits back: "'The journalists always promise to evacuate me - why don't they do it now?' he asked, his brow furrowed with pain and glistening with sweat." Day after day, reporters and camera crews have wallowed into Ali’s view, making promises they can’t keep.

Exploiting the World’s Resources for its Own Consumption: "Any President of the United States who takes office believing that he will be able to treat foreign affairs as a minor part of his job is tempting fate." The Economist magazine. In the early years of American history, efforts were made in shoring up her resources for public consumption. There was the gold rush in the West, the oil refineries in the Midwest, and the steel and coal industries in the East. Also, the early companies relied on slave labour, indentured services, and then foreign labour, as a way to decrease...

My fiancee heard about this so-called "pre-teen super model" site on the Dr. Phil show and was outraged. Take a look only if it will motivate you to call law enforcement. It's blatant child pornography--bikini shots of 9-year-olds posing like Playboy playmates. You can just picture the next Elizabeth Smart kidnapper-type getting all worked up by this garbage. This operation needs to be massively freeped and shut down using whatever means necessary!!!! I'm sending this same message to all the media outlets I can find.

Despite the greater parking revenue potential at the Proving Ground, Collins said Pentagon City has much to offer. "It would be one of the great sites in all of baseball," he said. "It is already a significant commercial and shopping district. Most of the Washington memorials could be seen from the ballpark, plus it would be a memorial to September 11."

Why did the President call for a ban on human cloning? For the vast majority of Americans, the acceptance quotient regarding nascent life falls somewhere between ‘legal protection for all conceived individual human life’ and ‘legal protection for partial birth abortion.’ With acceptance of in vitro fertilization, followed eventually by the apparent necessity for some legal abortion, our society too quickly arrived at acceptance of, no, defense of, infanticide. Our society can degenerate further. A straight-line course from our current reality will have us embracing the notion that ‘exploitation of embryonic life is needed to bolster unencumbered lives of worthy...

Having slogged her way through Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin, or maybe just some of it, a correspondent asked me if I really believed that the consent-and-exchange society I advocate could possibly work in a Third World country. I answered, yes, of course, and I told her it would work just fine, quickly deliver the goods, peace and prosperity. Indeed, I said, you could see the merits of a free and peaceful economy much more clearly in some benighted backwater of the world than anywhere in the developed world. Mere assertion isn't persuasive, so I started considering how I could dramatize...

Pre-schoolers protest possible war in IraqAllegations of exploitation ariseBy Steve Sexton They still believe in the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus. They don’t know how to spell their last names or tie their own shoes. But they do know that “war is bad,” and that “Bush is a bully.” The next generation of Berkeley peaceniks gathered on the steps of City Hall Tuesday to demonstrate their opposition to a pending war in Iraq- after school, of course. Armed with protest signs, microphones, and Harry Potter lunch-boxes, elementary and pre-school children demanded city leaders contact President Bush and halt his hawkish...

<p>DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) -- Eleven suspected illegal immigrants whose badly decomposed bodies were found in a locked railroad car probably died slowly and painfully from severe overheating or asphyxiation, authorities said Tuesday.</p> <p>The victims apparently boarded the grain hopper in Mexico four months ago and may have been smuggled into the country, said Jerry Heinauer, district director of the Immigration and Naturalization Service for Nebraska and Iowa.</p>

LOS ANGELES — The nine Pennsylvania coal miners who were trapped underground for 77 hours have sold the TV and book rights to their story to The Walt Disney Co. for $150,000 each, their lawyer said Saturday. The deal includes a movie for Disney's ABC network and a book to be published by the Burbank company's Hyperion Publishing division, Pittsburgh attorney Thomas Crawford said in an interview. Crawford said he received more than 120 offers for the miners' stories. The miners were working July 24 in the Quecreek Mine in western Pennsylvania when it flooded. They huddled together 240 feet...

Women Besieging Chevron Texaco TerminalThe people in the Niger Delta are impoverished, despite living on land that yields $20 billion in oil exports annually. Nigeria is the world's sixth-largest oil exporter and the fifth-biggest supplier of U.S. oil imports.      ESCRAVOS, Nigeria (AP) - Hundreds of Nigerian women occupying a ChevronTexaco oil export terminal in southeast Nigeria faced off with company officials in a village hall Friday, surrounded by armed police and soldiers wearing lifejackets emblazoned "Chevron." The takeover began Monday when 150 women seized a company boat and invaded the terminal's dock, airstrip and helicopter pad. By Friday, the women's...

JUAREZ -- The maquiladora industry is experiencing its worst downturn in 35 years, prompting business leaders to call for a plan to rescue the city's largest employer. About 42,000 maquila workers have lost their jobs because assembly plants have shut down, scaled back or left the city over the past two years, said Bernardo Escudero, president of the Association of Maquiladoras in Juárez. The contraction started when the U.S. recession began, he said. "The industry in Juárez used to employ more than 220,000 people. Today, we have 160,000 people working at the plants," he said. "We've had new plants that...

Machiavelli says in "The Prince" that a people once free in an orderly society are extremely difficult to enslave, and that if they are enslaved, will never stop rebelling against their oppressors. Lost freedoms will never be forgotten. One wonders whether the same thing is true of a once proud, independent profession whose leaders have successfully enfeebled it to serve an ideology that is at cross purposes with the culture that sustains it. Matthew McGowan describes in "Coloring the News" a major change in the goals and ethics of the American mainstream media over the past few decades. Truthful and...

China plans base on the moon to exploit mineral resources: report BEIJING (AFP) May 19, 2002 China, which is pushing ahead with a fledgling space program, plans to establish a base on the moon in order to exploit its mineral resources, state media reported Sunday. "Our long-term goal is to set up a base on the moon and mine its riches for the benefit of humanity," the Beijing Morning Post said, citing Ouyang Ziyuan, an official with the Chinese space program. The paper said China has adopted a three-step plan that will eventually make it possible to fly to...

By Marni-Rebecca Malarkey Shy and reserved ex-Enron accountant, Sara Zoftig, ponders Playboy's invitation to pose nude in a centrefold spread in a new 'Women of Enron' issue. Ms. Zoftig commented that she found the idea of posing nude in such a Playboy feature immoral, apalling, and way off the mark in terms of the kind of money she was looking for. Playboy Magazine is hoping to convince some of the female employees of Enron to lose more than the contents of their bank accounts -- and to do so willingly. A Playboy spokeswoman said that the magazine is attempting to...

Megan Cutter, who is 10, likes tight Capri pants, high-heeled flip-flops, T-shirts that say "Princess" or "Brat," and clothes with glitter, plenty of glitter. "I think it's really pretty, and it gets you attention," she says. "I like attention." This may be what Megan likes to wear. It is not, however, what she is allowed to wear. "My mom and I have worked out some compromises," she says: one pair of blue pants that have some glitter on them; a T-shirt her dad bought that says "Smart, Cute" on the front and "Athlete. Who says you can't have it all?"...

MUHAMMED AL-DURRA - THE LIE THE MEDIA BUILT In a special section put together by "GAMLA: News and Views from Israel", the mask is pulled away from the blatant lies of the Palestinian propaganda machine which spews out daily all through the world, how Israel is deliberately killing Arab children in cold blood. For all those who have followed the media reports of The Oslo War from it's initiation by Yasser Arafat in September 2000, the name Muhammed Al-Durra will be remembered. He was the young child that was "caught" in a the middle of a gun battle between...