Free Republic

French attitudes over the Middle East conflict have swung dramatically over the past four years, with the public equally dividing its sympathies between the Palestinians and Israel, a turnaround from four years ago, according to a Pew research survey released Tuesday. France has long been widely perceived as a special ally in the West to the Arab world, the fruit of its historical roots in the region. A survey four years ago appeared to bear up that assumption, denied by French officialdom. At the time, French respondents to the survey sympathized with the Palestinians over Israel at a roughly two-to-one...

HOUSTON, Oct. 28 - When she was growing up in a small town in southern Colorado, an area where her ancestors settled centuries ago when it was on the fringes of the northern frontier of New Spain, Bernadette Gonzalez always thought some of the stories about her family were unusual, if not bizarre. Her grandmother, for instance, refused to travel on Saturday and would use a specific porcelain basin to drain blood out of meat before she cooked it. In one tale that particularly puzzled Ms. Gonzalez, 52, her grandfather called for a Jewish doctor to circumcise him while he...