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LOHAN TAKES SHOOTING LESSONS BEFORE IRAQ VISIT Movie & Entertainment News provided by World Entertainment News Network (www.wenn.com) Lindsay Lohan 2006-11-27 09:06:05 - Movie actress LINDSAY LOHAN is taking shooting lessons in advance of a visit to Iraq to entertain US troops next month (DEC06). The MEAN GIRLS star claims knowing how to handle a gun is essential ahead of her trip to the war-torn country. She tells the British edition of Elle magazine, "I'm not afraid of going." "My security guard is going to take me to a gun range and I'm going to take some shooting lessons." "He...

"If I get hold of the pope, I will hang him," Hafiz Hussain Ahmed, a senior MMA leader, told protesters in Islamabad, who carried placards reading "Terrorist, extremist Pope be hanged!" and "Down with Muslims’ enemies!" —AP News, Sept 22, 2006 “The violent reactions in many parts of the Islamic world justified one of Pope Benedict’s main fears . . . They show the link for many Islamists between religion and violence, their refusal to respond to criticism with rational arguments, but only with demonstrations, threats, and actual violence.” —Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney; www.timesonline.co.uk, September 19, 2006 TODAY’S...

How music lessons hold the key to brainier children By Roger Highfield, Science Editor (Filed: 20/09/2006) Young children who take music lessons show more advanced brain development and improved memory than those who do not, according to a study published today. Suzuki pupils in concert: research shows evidence of early musical learning being linked to advanced brain development Researchers claim to have found the first evidence of musical training being linked to greater attention skills. After a year, musically trained children performed better in a memory test that is correlated with general intelligence skills such as literacy, verbal memory, mathematics...

The smoke has yet to clear from the massacres in New York, Washington, D.C. and Somerset County, PA, workers continue to drag bodies from the rubble. Six thousand more body bags have been ordered and it's still not clear now who is responsible for this mass murder....... On September 11th did we learn our lessons? Every one of us will forever remember where we were, what we were doing and whom we were with when the notion that fortress America was invulnerable collapsed in the ashes of the World Trade Center. Suddenly our collective national indifference was shattered like the...

Lib/Dem/Soc/Commies -- You've Forgotten The Lessons Of 9/11 Written by Doc Farmer Monday, September 11, 2006 Author's Note: This is a request to most of my conservative, patriotic readers. Please don't read it with yourself in mind. Instead, send it along to every lib/dem/soc/commie discussion board, mailing list or group you can find. Send it to every lib/dem/soc/commie media outlet. Call every lib/dem/soc/commie talk show with it. This message is for them, and it's high time they heard it. Five years. It's not that long a time, when you consider the history of our nation. It's a mere blink of...

September 01, 2006 The Unlearned Lesson of Katrina By Robert Tracinski In the press coverage of the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, we expect a fair bit of the usual throwing around of blame for political advantage, but to my surprise that has not been the main theme of the coverage (though Ted Kennedy couldn't resist a crudely partisan tirade). Instead, the dominant theme of the anniversary coverage is what is not being mentioned. Having reported the wrong story about the flooding of New Orleans one year ago, the press is trying to protect its distortion by excising from history...

Taipei, Taiwan THE crash of a Comair jet in Kentucky on Sunday ended the longest safety streak in aviation history: it’s been almost five years since a passenger died in a commercial airline jet accident in the United States. Crashes are actually very crude gauges of the safety of air travel because they remain so rare. We must pay attention instead to the little events that happen every day in the skies and on the ground that very, very slightly increase the risk of another disaster. For instance, a pilot attempts to talk to an air traffic controller but is...

Lessons from Carthage Elyakim Haetzni August 22, 2006 Carthage was an empire that ruled from Libya in North Africa to Sicilia to Sardinia to parts of Spain. It was the center of world finance. Rome stood in opposition, but encountered Carthage's naval superiority. The fighting between them continued for 200 years and ended with the destruction of Carthage. Theodor Mommsen, in his classic "The History of Rome", describes the people of Carthage as a nation not driven by freedom, or even by power. All they cared about was money. And they tried to use their money to buy peace and...

From the recent Israel-Hezbollah war in southern Lebanon to the jihadists in Iraq's Sunni Triangle to the repeated efforts by Islamists across the globe to trump Sept. 11, what old lessons about terrorism are we in the West finding ourselves having to relearn? First, death is the mantra of terrorists. In urban landscapes, they hide among apartment buildings, use human shields and welcome all fatalities - friendly or hostile, combatant or civilian. Death of any kind, they think, makes the liberal West recoil, but allows them to pose as oppressed victims. Their nihilistic hatred intimidates, rather than repels, third parties...

LONDON -- It was not meant to be like this. The plan, and the promise by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, was that the operation would be over swiftly, the Hezbollah forces with their missiles would be surrounded, rooted out and crushed, the kidnapped Israeli soldiers would be returned, and southern Lebanon would be cleared of terrorists and cease to be a threat to the frightened inhabitants of northern Israel. To the dismay of the Israeli public, and the surprise of a large flock of defense experts accustomed to high-speed Israeli victories over weak Arab neighbors, the Hezbollah guerrillas continued...

This would be like if the Bengals, instead of drafting Carson Palmer, successfully lobbied the NFL to give them a two-touchdown handicap in every game. Under this football-socialism, the Bengals would still suck, and the level of talent in the NFL as a whole would stagnate. So will the American economy stagnate if its losers don't work harder at winning, instead of lamely trying to get paid for more losing.

The Past as Prologue: The Importanceof History to the Military Profession, edited by Williamson Murray and Richard Hart Sinnreich (Cambridge, 298 pp., $23.99) Lessons Learned MACKUBIN THOMAS OWENS Does the study of history have anything to offer today’s makers of defense policy? This is the question that lies at the heart of The Past as Prologue, a set of remarkable essays produced as part of an Anglo-American scholarly collaboration that took place in 2003. Edited by Williamson Murray, an eminent military historian, and Richard Hart Sinnreich, a retired U.S. Army colonel who has become one of America’s most insightful...

WASHINGTON, Aug. 17, 2006 – The most important thing military leaders can offer their people is an up-front assessment of what they’re facing, as exemplified by the way the 172nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team’s leaders informed the troops about their extension in Iraq, DoD’s top enlisted adviser told American Forces Press Service. Army Command Sgt. Maj. William J. Gainey, senior enlisted adviser to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, shared his thoughts after returning from Alaska, home of the “Arctic Wolves.” The Defense Department announced July 27 that the brigade, which was in the midst of wrapping up...

"The rap on Mitt Romney is that he's scripted,safe, skin-deep.But if you saw your dad endure what his did, you might watch what you say,too. There, you said it.There's no taking it back. Maybe the regret formed in your mind even before the last syllable of the Godforsaken comment had left your lips. Maybe you thought nothing of it until 12 hours later, when a voice woke you out of your REM rebound, demanding to know,"What in the hell were you thinking?"Either way, it was too late. We've all said something at some point in our lives that we desperately...

August 13, 2006 -- ISRAEL'S war against the Middle East's first true terrorist army provides tough military and strategic lessons - old, new, and all too often disheartening. Israel's been winning on the ground. And still losing the war. Lesson 1: You can win every tactical engagement and still lose at the strategic level. Lesson 2: The global media can overturn the verdict of the battlefield. Lesson 3: If you start off on the wrong foot in war, you may never recover your balance. Lesson 4: Technology alone can't win 21st-century wars. Lesson 5: Never underestimate your enemy. Lesson 6:...

DENVER - Ask any politician to handicap the 2008 presidential campaign and you'll probably get the same answer: It's more than a year away, and a year is a lifetime in politics. A cliche, to be sure. But also true. Consider the case of Gov. Bill Owens of Colorado. A few years back, he seemed destined to join the pack seeking the 2008 Republican presidential nomination. He won a second term in a landslide. National Review magazine put him on the cover and called him "The Best Governor in America." Conservative columnists touted him for 2008. Yet Owens, 55, isn't...

Fifty years ago this past week, on July 26, 1956, the Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal. Nasser's act would lead to an international crisis, a regional war and ultimately to the resignation of a British prime minister. "Suez" would become a lesson and a warning against Western meddling in the Middle East. But the lessons and warnings of Suez look very different after 9/11. In 1956, the Suez Canal was owned by the British government and a consortium of British and French private investors. Two-thirds of Europe's oil traveled through the canal, protected by British troops....

On August 6, 1945 the American Air Force incinerated Hiroshima, Japan with an atomic bomb. On August 9 Nagasaki was obliterated. The fireballs killed some 175,000 people. They followed months of horror, when American airplanes firebombed civilians and reduced cities to rubble. Facing extermination, the Japanese surrendered unconditionally. The invasion of Japan was cancelled, and countless American lives were saved. The Japanese accepted military occupation, embraced a constitutional government, and renounced war permanently. The effects were so beneficent, so wide-ranging and so long-term, that the bombings must be ranked among the most moral acts ever committed. The bombings have been...

Sixty-three years ago, Nazi Germany had overrun almost all of Europe and hammered England to the verge of bankruptcy and defeat, and had sunk more than four hundred British ships in their convoys between England and America for food and war materials. The US was in an isolationist, pacifist, mood, and most Americans and Congress wanted nothing to do with the European war, or the Asian war. Then along came Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and in outrage Congress unanimously declared war on Japan, and the following day on Germany, which had not attacked us. It was a dicey...

The real war in Iraq -- the one to determine the future of the country -- began on Aug. 7, 2003, when a car bomb exploded outside the Jordanian Embassy, killing 11 and wounding more than 50. That bombing came almost exactly four months after the U.S. military thought it had prevailed in Iraq, and it launched the insurgency, the bloody and protracted struggle with guerrilla fighters that has tied the United States down to this day. There is some evidence that Saddam Hussein's government knew it couldn't win a conventional war, and some captured documents indicate that it may...