Free Republic

It is exceptionally difficult to find the right person to marry. This is especially true for first marriages. That is why it is so important to think through your decision by asking and answering critical questions. In Part I, I offered five. Here are seven more: 6. What problems do the two of you now have? And what inner voice of doubt, if any, are you suppressing? Here is a rule that is rarely broken: Whatever problems you have before the wedding day, you will have during your marriage. Do not think that marrying will solve any problem you have...

German women offered man-free banking By Kate Connolly in Berlin (Filed: 06/12/2005) A bank for women is being launched in Germany with the aim of liberating female customers from dealing with patronising, traditional bank managers. Its founder, Astrid Hastreiter, a 41-year-old information technology specialist, said women wanted more thorough advice from their bank managers and more understanding about career breaks. Astrid Hastreiter: support for her idea is growing Frauenbank, in Munich, has been set up, to begin with, as a financial advisory service on everything from investments to retirement plans for women. Miss Hastreiter has to raise around £7 million...

Man sacked after being caught smoking at home By Kate Connolly in Berlin (Filed: 03/12/2005) A German company has sacked one of its employees for smoking at home after hiring a detective to catch him in the act. Sandro Beier was dismissed from his £19,000-a-year job with a Berlin printing company after being photographed smoking in his back garden. The company, Laserline, which runs a rigorous health and fitness programme for its 100 staff, said Mr Beier, 42, had "defrauded" it by lying about his smoking habits. It claimed that Mr Beier had signed an agreement, renewable every month, in...

Man dies in tractor-trailer wreck From Staff Reports Thursday, December 1, 2005 Guilford County EMS personnel and a firefighter work at a wreck involving an 18-wheeler on West Market Street in Greensboro. GREENSBORO - A middle-age man was killed in an early-morning wreck Thursday on West Market Street after he pulled his car into the path of an oncoming tractor-trailer, police said. The wreck occurred at the intersection West Market and Landmark Drive. The impact pushed both vehicles about 50 yards east of the collision, where they came to a rest on the side of the westbound lanes of West...

In an article two days ago, "Muhammad Ali v. George W. Bush," I castigated President Bush bestowing a prestigious award on former boxer Muhammad Ali and for lavishly praising Ali's beautiful soul, his compassion, and his being a man of peace. I offered some evidence to the contrary and concluded by calling this incident "the nadir of his presidency."The column prompted a fair amount of comment, positive and negative. I'd like to note here two noteworthy responses. One is from Judea Pearl, father of the late Daniel Pearl, murdered by Islamists in Pakistan in 2002: When Danny was in captivity,...

WASHINGTON, Nov. 30, 2005 – Troops from the Iraqi army's 3rd Battalion, 1st Brigade, 7th Division, killed a man Nov. 29 after he tried to take a soldier's weapon near Ramadi, Iraq, military officials reported. Soldiers fired on the military-aged man after he refused to open his trunk during a vehicle search and went for a soldier's weapon. Iraqi and coalition forces detained several insurgents and seized weapons caches Nov. 29 during operations throughout Iraq. Iraqi police detained three men fleeing the scene of a rocket attack on a high school near Musayyib. Near Rawah, an ineffective would-be suicide car...

FRANKLIN, Pa. -- Pennsylvania police said a man who died after being struck by a vehicle may have been left on a roadside for days because his body was apparently mistaken for a dead deer. The man was found on Monday by a motorist, who at first thought the man was a deer because of tan clothing and snow that covered part of his body. The motorist realized the man wasn't a deer after noticing his shoes.

ORLANDO, Fla. - Security guards wrestled a man to the ground in a Wal-Mart after he cut in line to get laptop computers that were on sale Friday, a television station reported. The man started arguing with people inside the store, WFTV-TV in Orlando reported. He then started fighting with the guards, the station reported One man told WFTV that the laptops were being thrown into the air and people rushed toward them, collapsing on each other. Another man described the scene as crazy. Orlando police and Orange County sheriff's officials didn't return phone messages seeking comment. The store's manager...

OAKLAND, Calif. - Anthony Sheppard shocked his mother this week with a telephone call, a day after he was reported dead. "When he called me I thought I was talking to a ghost," said Verna McCowan. Oakland police on Tuesday bungled the identification of a man shot to death after finding Sheppard's identification card on the victim. Authorities alerted his mother of the shooting, and released the details to reporters. Sheppard, 23, said he was shocked when he walked up to a group of friends on Wednesday who were crying while reading a newspaper account of his death. The dead...

Kennewick Man, meet your distant cousins By Kate Riley Monday, November 7, 2005 - Page updated at 12:00 AM COLUMBIA, S.C. — Discerning the story of America's prehistoric past is a bit like groping through an unfamiliar room in the dark. One learned scientist's tattooing tool is another's piece of rock. Ask them to agree how long it has been there and you're bound to set off an argument that makes Seattle's whether-to-monorail conflict seem like a tea party. So it goes with evolving thought in archaeology. We all know the prevailing theory. Our children's high-school textbooks talk about the...

Washington : Scientists have said that that the arrival of modern humans from Africa to South Asia some 70,000 years ago may have led to the extermination of the native populations. Researchers from the University of Cambridge have said that the arrival of Homo sapiens in regions like India and other parts of South Asia had most probably led to conflicts and competition between the Homo sapiens and the indigenous hominids (Homo heidelbergensis), leading to the latter’s extinction over the years. “While the precise explanations for the demise of the archaic populations is not yet obvious, it is abundantly clear...

A Dallas cab driver is in big trouble for getting caught on tape sprinkling dried feces on pastries. 49-year-old Behrouz Nahidmobarekeh is on trial for allegedly throwing fecal matter on pastries at a Fiesta grocery store. Police said they found a pile of human feces by his bed. He would dry it, either by microwave or just letting it sit out and grate it up with a cheese grater and then sprinkle it at the store, officials said. Neither attorneys in the case is clear about a motive or why the defendant would resort to something so repulsive. Prosecutors will...

To print: or Select File and then Print from your browser's menu Sin, and What to Do About Itby: John MacArthur On January 16, 2003, the space shuttle Columbia lifted off for what was supposed to be a routine flight. Shortly after lift-off a piece of insulating foam from the shuttle's external fuel tanks broke off and struck Columbia's left wing. This action was caught on video, but it was presumed that no serious damage had occurred. However, serious damage had occurred. The foam from the fuel tanks punctured the wing's thermal protection system. The seriousness of the damage...

Scientists are over the moon at the W.M. Keck Observatory and the California Institute of Technology over a new discovery of a satellite orbiting the Solar System's 10th planet (2003 UB313). The newly discovered moon orbits the farthest object ever seen in the Solar System. The existence of the moon will help astronomers resolve the question of whether 2003 UB313, temporarily nicknamed "Xena," is more massive than Pluto and hence the 10th planet. A paper describing the discovery was submitted to the Astrophysical Journal Letters on October 3, 2005. "We were surprised because this is a completely different type of...

Cowboy president is courting disaster, says Powell's man By Francis Harris (Filed: 21/10/2005) Colin Powell's right-hand man has launched a blistering attack on the White House, describing President George W Bush as "cowboyish", his secretary of state Condoleezza Rice as "extremely weak" and American foreign policy as "courting disaster". The attack came from Col Larry Wilkerson, who for four years was Mr Powell's chief of staff at the state department during the first Bush administration. In a sometimes savagely phrased speech at a Washington think-tank, the former US marine said that the Bush team had so damaged the country's foreign...

Winged Man must fly from Pasargadae to safe haven Tehran Times Culture Desk TEHRAN -- Experts have recently said that the Winged Man of Pasargadae stone bas-relief should be transferred to a museum in order to prevent it from being damaged by the elements, the director of the Pasargadae Research Base announced on Sunday. “Our experts have made efforts to restore and protect the unique bas-relief over the years, and if you compare it with the photos taken of the monument in 1963, you will acknowledge that the monument is in better condition. But we have to transfer it to...

A man sentenced to nine months house arrest begged a judge to jail him instead because he couldn't stand his wife's nagging. Algerian Ahmed Salhi, 24, was sentenced to a nine month curfew at home with his Italian wife in Ferrara, northern Italy. But he went back to court after a week and begged the judge to jail him because he could not bear her nagging. Salhi was sentenced to nine months house arrest after breaching immigration regulations. But he turned up at his local courtroom and begged to be taken into custody because he said he could no longer...

How the life Herodotus lived affected his history writing is a subject of dispute among many experts The question of how social conditions affecting Herodotus’s personal life affected his writing history may raise many disputes among historians. “The state where Herodotus was born in was under Persian Empire at that time; it was governed by Lygdamis, who put to death the poet Panyasis, a relative of Herodotus, for opposition and riots against Persia. Following this event, Herodotus had to leave his native city and went to Samos Island in Athena, and ever since he inhabited in Greek lands. But since...

Phalaborwa, South Africa: A white South African farmer was jailed for life today for feeding a black worker to lions, ending a racially charged case which highlighted abuse of rural black labourers.

Blame throwing There's plenty wrong with America, since you asked. (Everybody's asking.) I'm tempted to say, the only difference from Canada, is that they have a few things right. That would be unfair, of course -- I am often pleased to discover things we still get right. But one of them would not be disaster preparation. If something happened up here, on the scale of Katrina, we wouldn't even have the resources to arrive late. We would be waiting for the Americans to come save us, the same way the government in Louisiana just waved and pointed at Washington, D.C....