Free Republic

Mike Espy who is seeking to unseat appointed U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, R-Miss., and serve the last two years of the six-year term vacated when Republican Thad Cochran retired for health reasons ... A Democratic Senate hopeful in Mississippi cashed in $750,000 after lobbying on behalf of an African despot currently on trial for crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court. Mike Espy, a former lobbyist and U.S. agriculture secretary under President Bill Clinton, is running against Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, who was appointed as a temporary successor to longtime Republican Sen. Thad Cochran after his retirement in April....

PARIS - Didier Julia, the French lawmaker a reporter taken hostage in Iraq called for by name in a video released by her abductors, is seen as a maverick member of President Jacques Chirac's ruling party -- and someone with close ties to Syria and the deposed regime of Saddam Hussein. The 71-year-old representative of the Seine-et-Marne region outside Paris first rose to prominence last September, when he headed an unofficial -- and unsuccessful -- mission to free two other French reporters kidnapped in Iraq. The failure of that venture, conducted from a luxury hotel suite in the Syrian capital...