Free Republic

Spicy Soup Burns Hole Straight Through Man's Stomach Doctors in China were dumbfounded after seeing the case of a 26-year-old man whose spicy food burned a hole in the wall of his stomach. For some more adventurous eaters, spicy foods are often an exciting dish to try. After all, though urban legends had proclaimed that eating spicy foods could give you an ulcer, the credit for that belongs to the Helicobacter pylori. That is why doctors in the Hubei province of China were dumbfounded after seeing the case of a 26-year-old man whose spicy food, they say, burned a hole...

MSNBC.com and MSNBC TV are partnering with HotSoup.com, a new Web site for political and public issue debate. HotSoup's "Hot Loop" by editor-in-chief Ron Fournier will be posted daily on MSNBC.com. Mr. Fournier, who broke a number of big political stories when he worked for the Associated Press, also will write a weekly analysis piece for MSNBC.com. The new feature can be found at Politics.MSNBC.com. Since going live Oct. 19, HotSoup has already attracted thousands of members some very high-powered politicians, including both Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., and her husband, former president Clinton. HotSoup.com co-founders Matthew Dowd, chief strategist...

Civility Is In, Rancor Out on Web Site Begun by Democratic, GOP Strategists A group of political strategists who have spent years firing heavy artillery at each other came together at the Hay-Adams Hotel yesterday, put aside their weapons, decried the polarized state of debate in America and vowed a new approach to peaceful coexistence. Toward that end, they are launching a Web site that they hope will eventually reach 30 million opinion leaders, elevate public discussion on matters from politics to sports to culture and, in the process, make them some money. Mark McKinnon and Matthew Dowd, who were...

WASHINGTON - A bipartisan group of prominent political strategists on Tuesday announced an Internet information venture designed to interact with America's opinion leaders and serve as an antidote to the right-left clash that typifies political discourse on the Web. The site, called Hotsoup.com, will debut in October and will be edited by Ron Fournier, former chief political writer for The Associated Press. Hotsoup is the brainchild of some of the best-known practitioners of partisan politics in Washington, including Matthew Dowd, chief strategist for the Bush-Cheney campaign in 2004, and Joe Lockhart, former White House press secretary under President Clinton and...