Free Republic

Photo 1: Storm front over Niagara Falls Air Reserve Station (Niagara Falls Air Base), New York on 4 October 2006. Photographer: Senior Master Sgt. Ray Lloyd, United States Air Force. Big image link: http://jccc.afis.osd.mil/images/hres.pl?Lbox_cap=1402598&dir=Photo (Mirror). Above photo, caption info via: http://ChamorroBible.org/gpw/gpw-20061021.htm Photo 2: An adult bald eagle at NASA Kennedy Space Center, Florida, decides that the tasty mid-day road meal can wait, and makes a hasty flight to avoid the oncoming vehicle. Photographer: Gary Rothstein, National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Links: http://www-pao.ksc.nasa.gov/kscpao/images/large/06pd2061.jpg (big image), http://mediaarchive.ksc.nasa.gov/detail.cfm?mediaid=29961 (the source). Above photo, caption info via: http://ChamorroBible.org/gpw/gpw-20060927.htm

CARACAS, Venezuela (Reuters) - President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad shored up opposition to a U.S. drive to curb Iran's nuclear program on a visit to Venezuela on Sunday that cemented an anti-American front with President Hugo Chavez. Ahmadinejad's first trip to Venezuela highlighted Iran's backing for the fellow OPEC country's bid for a U.N. Security Council seat that Chavez would use to challenge Washington's campaign for international sanctions against Tehran. Chavez, who Washington calls a destabilizing, anti-democratic force, cast the visit as two countries jointly defying what he says is the imperialist aggression of the world's only superpower. "Iran is one of...

Israel to triple force on Lebanon front line By Tim Butcher, Adrian Blomfield in Tyre and Harry Mount in New York (Filed: 10/08/2006) Israel vowed yesterday to expand the ground war in Lebanon to try to deliver a knockout blow to Hizbollah, amid warnings that the conflict could last at least another month. The decision by the security cabinet after a six-hour meeting in Jerusalem increased the pressure on major powers struggling to win agreement on a United Nations resolution to end the four-week-old conflict. Israel plans to triple the size of its ground forces "Plans by defence minister Amir...

Banned Islamists spawn front organisations Al-Ghurabaa tries to ensure survival with groups across UK Ian Cobain and Nick Fielding Saturday July 22, 2006 The Guardian (UK) Muslim demonstration organised by Anjem Choudhary, former righthand man to the al-Ghurabaa founder. Photograph: David Levene/Guardian A British Islamist group which is to be outlawed under new anti-terror laws has already formed scores of front organisations in an attempt to ensure its survival, according to investigators in New York. Al-Ghurabaa, formed by Omar Bakri Mohammed before he fled to Lebanon in the wake of the 7/7 bombings, heads the list of four organisations which...

Front garden yields ancient tools Only one other handaxe of this type has been found that is bigger The Britons of 250,000 years ago were a good deal more sophisticated than they are sometimes given credit for, new archaeological evidence suggests. It comes in the form of giant flint handaxes that have been unearthed at a site at Cuxton in Kent. The tools display exquisite, almost flamboyant, workmanship not associated with this period until now. The axes - one of which measured 307mm (1ft) in length - were dug up from old sand deposits in a front garden. "It is...

Three eco-terrorists were sentenced Friday to federal prison for a series of firebombings that put towns in the Sierra foothills on edge. Ryan Daniel Lewis, 22, the alleged leader of the group, was sentenced to six years, and two sisters - Eva Rose Holland, 26, and Lili Marie Holland, 21 - were each handed two-year prison terms. Prosecutors alleged Lewis recruited the Holland sisters and Jeremiah Dean Colcleasure, 24, on Christmas Eve 2004 to help him burn down two unoccupied upscale homes in Lincoln, a Sacramento suburb, in the name of the Earth Liberation Front. The FBI calls the ELF...

In the bedroom of a dingy apartment on Tucson's South Side, Air Force Master Sgt. Jim Johnston snapped on a pair of latex gloves and gently probed the rib cage of a 40-year-old woman weeping with pain. She'd been sick for days. Her fever was 104. Her only medicine: Nyquil. "Where does it hurt?," Johnston asked. "My chest," the woman panted, crying out as a coughing spasm overtook her. An hour later, Johnston is on another city street, trying to make sense of a babbling 21-year-old woman who seems strung out ---

AR RAMADI, Iraq (Feb. 14, 2006) -- The streets here are a far cry from the corner of 8th and I streets in Washington, D.C., and yet for an infantryman who joined the Marine Corps to travel the world and do his part in the War on Terrorism, it is the only place he wants to be. Corporal Jared St. Clair, an infantryman with 4th Platoon, Company I, 3rd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, has finally made it to Iraq and is making the most of his opportunity. He’s serving in the city that many experts and officials are calling the...

CAMP FALLUJAH, Iraq (Feb. 11, 2006) -- There are more than 22,000 Marines with II Marine Expeditionary Force units deployed in Iraq. Many of them are serving on the front lines, outside the wire, however, they would not be operating successfully without having proper administrative support backing them. Administrative Marines like Sgt. Jeffery P. Kast, an administration clerk with Combat Logistics Battalion-8, 2nd Marine Logistics Group (Forward), routinely ensure Marines within their respective units have continuous administrative support. “For my office, our day-to-day tasks are to make sure that Marines in our battalion are being taken care of administratively,” Kast...

Facts vs. Fiction: A Report from the FrontBy Karl Zinsmeister Your editor has just returned from another month in Iraq—my fourth extended tour in the last two and a half years. During November and December I joined numerous American combat operations, including the largest air assault since the beginning of the war, walked miles of streets and roads, entered scores of homes, listened to hundreds of Iraqis, observed voting at a dozen different polling sites, and endured my third roadside ambush. With this latest firsthand experience, here are answers to some common queries about how the war is faring. Has...

U.S. Senate set to confirm Alito to Supreme Court By Thomas Ferraro 1 hour, 22 minutes ago Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito walks into the office of Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA) on Capitol Hill, January 30, 2006. (Jason Reed/Reuters) WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Conservative federal appeals court judge Samuel Alito appeared certain to win Senate confirmation on Tuesday as President George W. Bush's second successful nominee to the Supreme Court. Following several days of debate, the Senate was to vote on Alito, who could move the high court to the right. Alito had a commitment from a required simple majority of...

Three environmental activists were cooking up plastic explosives and had planned to test a device the day they were arrested, federal prosecutors alleged Wednesday as they indicted them. The three face five to 20 years in federal prison if they are convicted of conspiring to use fire or explosives to damage property. The suspects planned assaults this spring in the name of the Earth Liberation Front, a 'loosey-goosey, sort of mist-of-the-fog kind of an organization' of environmental activists, U.S. Attorney McGregor Scott said. Eric McDavid, 28, Zachary Jensen, 20, and Lauren Weiner, 20, remain in jail. They could enter a...

After a delay of nearly a month, a Flagstaff woman accused of being connected with the 1998 firebombing of a logging company in Oregon has been released from jail. Kendall Tankersley, 28, also known as Sarah Harvey, was released from an Oregon jail Jan. 10 on $150,000 bond. She is back in Flagstaff, ready to begin taking two classes at Northern Arizona University. Tankersley, a former employee at the university, was indicted in November by a federal grand jury in Oregon. She is accused of attempted arson and arson, acting as a lookout, in connection with a fire at U.S....

The American Association of Retired Persons began as an organization dedicated to improving the lives of our elderly. These days it is being run by leftists. When you become a member, part of your dues go to support their political agenda. It was Winston Churchill who said (in other words) that liberalism is a natural state for the young, and conservatism a natural state for the same people, only a few decades farther down the road. This is a true statement, as all population group surveys prove. The reason for the evolution is time and experience. Life drives out fairy...

CINCINNATI (AP) - A dead woman dressed in white was positioned in a chair in front of a television set for 2 1/2 years because she told her caregiver that she didn't want to be buried and planned to return, the coroner said. "Don't show my body when I'm dead," Hamilton County Coroner Dr. O'dell Owens said Monday in describing Johannas Pope's wishes. "Don't bury me. I'm coming back." Pope, 61, died Aug. 29, 2003. Her caretaker and friend, whose name has not been released, left the woman upstairs in the home with the television and air conditioning on while...

... What neither the ad nor CityMuslim.com noted was that this was a recruiting mission for Islamist terrorists, including al-Qaida fighters in Iraq, belonging to al-Muhajiroun (“The Emigrants”) terrorist group that intends to turn Great Britain into an Islamist state, one even more extreme than Afghanistan under the Taliban. Al-Muhajiroun splintered from Hizb ut-Tahrir in 1996. It was led by Anjem Choudary and became infamous for its conference "The Magnificent 19", which praised the 19 terrorists responsible for the September 11, 2001 attacks... Both al-Muhajiroun and the Party for Islamic Renewal use the marsad@marsad.fsnet.co.uk email address. Both can be reached...

CAMP TAQADDUM, Iraq (Dec. 30, 2005) -- There are more than 22,000 Marines with II Marine Expeditionary Force units deployed in Iraq. Many of them are serving on the front lines, outside the wire, however, they would not be operating successfully without having proper administrative support backing them. Administrative Marines like Lance Cpl. Lee R. LaValley Jr., an administration clerk with 8th Engineer Support Battalion, 2nd Marine Logistics Group (Forward), routinely ensure Marines within their respective units have continuous administrative support. “I like working here compared to Camp Lejeune, [N.C.],” LaValley admits. “Although the weather is ridiculous, I know this...

A suspect in a 1998 Vail Mountain firebombing was indicted yesterday in connection with two Oregon fires as part of a federal sweep aimed at resolving a wave of long-unsolved ecoterrorist attacks. U.S. Attorney Kirk Engdahl told U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Coffin that she was a suspect in the Vail arson, a $12 million rampage that destroyed buildings and ski-lift sites at the resort. The indictments came a week after a five-state sweep in which federal authorities arrested six suspects for a string of ecoterrorist attacks between 1998 and 2001 in Colorado and the Pacific Northwest. ...(ELF) and Animal...

Taliban execute teacher in front of his pupils for educating girls By Tom Coghlan in Kabul (Filed: 17/12/2005) Taliban insurgents in southern Afghanistan have executed a school teacher in front of his pupils for refusing to comply with warnings to stop educating girls. The attack took place on Thursday at a secondary school in Nadi Ali district, Helmand province, the scene of many Taliban attacks in recent months, according to the police, who learned of the incident yesterday. About 4,000 British troops will be deployed to the province in April to combat an increasingly confident insurgency. Pupils at the school...

Dog survives 50-mile ride clinging to front of car By Tom Peterkin, Ireland Correspondent (Filed: 25/11/2005) A dog has survived a 50-mile journey clinging to the front of a car as it sped down the motorway. The resilience of the black and white collie cross-breed has astounded vets, not to mention the driver of the car, who was astonished to discover the dog trapped in the grille at the front of his vehicle. The motorist, who was travelling from Coleraine to Belfast in Northern Ireland, remembered hearing a thump as he was driving his Peugeot 306. Thinking he had hit...