Free Republic

During the whole month of February, starting this Monday, the people of Brussels are called upon to choose the new name of the longest tunnel in the country, Leopold II, from among 15 names of famous women, Brussels Mobility said in a press release. The renaming procedure “to symbolically reinforce the place of women in the public space” began last year with a call for ideas to citizens and the reflection of a committee of experts. Currently, 43% of the streets in Brussels bear the name of a person. Of these, only 6.1% of the streets are named after a...

Citizen Kane, the 1942 drama made by Orson Welles, is frequently cited as one of the greatest movies ever made. In the 76 years since its release, critical support for the film has gone from strength to strength, and historians of cinema have recognized its crucial importance in setting the agenda for filmmaking in the 20th century. So why did this classic of modern cinematography fail at the box office? The movie was the brainchild of Orson Welles, a rising star on the 1930s theater and radio scene. According to the Guardian, by the tender age of just 22, Welles...

Incredibly, it wasn’t until I was 19 that I learned that there had been a Holocaust. My hyper-assimilated, New England Jewish family and friends looked only to the present and future. We focused on the polio vaccine that promised to banish the iron lungs that had been our childhood terror. We trusted in the United Nations, whose gleaming buildings my father took me to see when they were brand-new, and from which I came away with hopeful admiration—mixed, however, with a vague sense, which I couldn’t have put into words then, that perhaps an enterprise housed in architecture so grandiosely...

You remember this article - Style, elegance and her mother's winning smile: How Malia Obama, 16, is turning into a Michelle Jr. – from the Daily Mail? Well, here’s why - she comes by it naturally!  Just look at this photo of Malia’s Mom (Princeton ‘85) and Grandma enjoying the Princeton women’s basketball game against American University last week:The girls come from a long line of charmers, which explains their natural teen angst on display at the turkey pardoning event – which we need not discuss again. It’s just their heritage.The Obama/Robinson gals went to cheer on Lady M’s niece,...

Tin SoldierAn American Vigilante In Afghanistan, Using the Press for Profit and Glory By Mariah Blake In April 2004, a former U.S. Special Forces soldier named Jonathan Keith Idema started shopping a sizzling story to the media. He claimed terrorists in Afghanistan planned to use bomb-laden taxicabs to kill key U.S. and Afghan officials, and that he himself intended to thwart the attack. Shortly thereafter, he headed to Afghanistan, where he spent the next two months conducting a series of raids with his team, which he called Task Force Saber 7. By late June, he claimed to have captured the...

In January 2002, As U.S. Forces in Afghanistan were hunting down Al Qaeda suspects, the CBS news show 60 Minutes II got its hands on some sensational footage: seven hours’ worth of videotape showing Al Qaeda terrorists training in an Afghan camp. The source of the tapes, a former U.S. Special Forces soldier named Jonathan Keith Idema—known familiarly as Keith—was more than a little dubious. Idema claimed to be working as an adviser to the Northern Alliance, but he was also an ex-con who had served three years in federal prison for wire fraud and had a criminal record in...

While the media were abuzz over the release of the independent review panel report on CBS's "memogate" scandal, another CBS scandal was emerging. Coinciding with the release of the CBS report was the release of the January cover story, "Tin Soldier," in the Columbia Journalism Review, strongly suggesting that 60 Minutes Wednesday used phony Al Qaeda videotapes in its 2002 segment "Heart of Darkness." Dan Rather narrated the segment. The powerful Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) story was written by Mariah Blake. It follows and credits another exposé, "Operation Desert Fraud, by Stacy Sullivan in the New Yorker. Both stories say...

Certain aspects of this past are still all but misunderstood, most important the critical question: What was the nature of Nazism? It was not just another fascist or totalitarian movement. The Nazis' destructiveness was not like that of other dictatorial or murderous regimes. True, for Hitler and his followers, Jews were an enemy before all others, the principal source of evil in the world. But the Nazis' destructiveness was of global scope. They sought to lay waste to Western civilization itself — Christianity included. Much of Europe and most of the rest of the world were to become a German-dominated...

The new version of Sen. John Kerry's Cambodia experience is also not true. Sen. Kerry patrolled from An Thoi on the 94 boat and also from Cat Lo on the 44 boat. There was no way to enter Cambodia from the An Thoi patrol area. That patrol area started at the coastal fishing village of Ha Tien and ran parallel to the Cambodian border, but there was no way into Cambodia. Any good map will show this to be true. From the Cat Lo patrol area around Sa Dec, it would have been possible for a boat to enter Cambodia,...

Do you support the use of terror? I ask you because terror is a weapon of war. Terror was a weapon used in World War II, in the firebombing of Dresden; terror was a weapon described in the Iliad, when Achilleus dragged his slain enemy Hektor around the walls of the city of Troy. For as long as men have known how to make war, terror has been a weapon of war. Our current administration is preparing to make war upon the nation of Iraq. We may assume that this administration makes its preparations with the full knowledge and understanding...