Free Republic

ROME (Reuters) - Polls reopened for the Italian general election on Monday with Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi facing possible defeat by his centre-left rival Romano Prodi. Polls remain open until 3.00 p.m. Exit polls will be released minutes after that, with the official results likely to be clear in the late evening. Italians began casting their votes on Sunday with the national election being held for the first time over two days.

1. Immigration Bill Grants Illegals In-state Tuition After the Senate Judiciary Committee approved and distributed a proposal for granting legal status to many undocumented aliens, conservatives were alarmed to discover that the 471-page bill makes illegal aliens eligible for in-state tuition costs. Under the proposal, illegals could pay the low tuition charged students who attend state universities in their home state, while legal residents of the U.S. would still be required to pay the much higher costs charged students who attend schools outside their state, the Washington Times reports. "This means that while American citizens from Tennessee, Georgia, South Carolina,...

ALARM - Attack-suicide counters British in Afghanistan KANDAHAR (Afghanistan) - a suicide attack with the booby-trapped car aimed Friday of the British soldiers in the south of Afghanistan, undoubtedly making casualties among them, indicated a chief of the local police force.

There's a couple of problems with this "missing link" that recent articles have been promoting. Some of the articles also mention this new "link" is "like Archaeopteryx, the famous fossil that bridged the gap between reptiles and birds." Here's the problem with these fossils labeled as "transitionals" : It has long been predicted that fossils should reveal many organisms “in transition” between different types. What the record does reveal is a history of mass extinctions and sudden appearances of new complex types. After each extinction (brought about by various mechanisms such as impact events), hundreds and sometimes thousands of life...

Translated Text of an Iraqi Document Concerning Kuwait POWs As the opening date of Operation Freedom neared, Qusai Saddam Hussein-one of Saddam’s bloodthirsty sons, made arrangements to move captured Kuwaiti prisoners into critical locations, to serve as “human shields”. There were 448 Kuwaitis, captured during the First Gulf War ,when Saddam made his infamous incursion into Kuwait. By the terms of the UN Cease Fire agreements –signed by Iraq on 3/03/91- all Kuwaitis were supposed to have been freed and repatriated without delay. Clearly,this never happened ; and sadly,the ultimate fate of these 448 helpless captives is unknown. CMPC-2003-012666 Republican...

The lawsuit of Saddam Hussein began again in Baghdad BAGHDAD - the lawsuit of Saddam Hussein in the business of the massacre of villager Shiites of Doujaïl took again Wednesday in front of the High Iraqi penal court in Baghdad, noted a journalist of AFP. The deposed president entered only the courtroom where it must continue his deposition and answer the questions of the Attorney General.

Rome - The body of a sick 18-month-old toddler, whose kidnapping in Italy transfixed the nation, was found dumped near a river on Saturday, investigative sources said. Tommaso Onofri, who suffered from epilepsy, was snatched from his home on March 2. Prominent figures from Pope Benedict and politicians to singers and soccer players had appealed for Tommaso's release. Police found the child's body near the city of Parma in northern Italy after they were led to the area by a mason, Mario Alessi, who had worked at the Onofri family's home. Alessi told investigators the crying child was killed on...

ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) - A hominid skull discovered in Ethiopia could fill the gap in the search for the origins of the human race, a scientist said on Friday. The cranium, found near the city of Gawis, 500 km (300 miles) southeast of the capital Addis Ababa, is estimated to be 200,000 to 500,000 years old.The skull appeared "to be intermediate between the earlier Homo erectus and the later Homo sapiens," Sileshi Semaw, an Ethiopian research scientist at the Stone Age Institute at Indiana University, told a news conference in Addis Ababa.It was discovered two months ago in a small...

Scientists with NASA's Cassini mission have found evidence that a new class of small moonlets resides within Saturn's rings. There may be as many as 10 million of these objects within one of Saturn's rings alone. The moonlets' existence could help answer the question of whether Saturn's rings were formed through the break-up of a larger body or are the remnants of the disk of material from which Saturn and its moons formed. "These moonlets are likely to be chunks of the ancient body whose break-up produced Saturn's glorious rings," said Joseph Burns of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., a co-author...

From today's "Page 6" column (which is actually on page 12) in today's New York Post: Devil Doll It's a good thing for Ann Coulter that Sean Penn doesn't know voodoo. Penn has a plastic Barbie-like doll of the right-wing pundit that he likes to torture on occasion. "We violate her," the ornery actor tells The New Yorker about his mini-Coulter. "There are cigarette burns in some funny places. She's a pure snake-oil salesman. She doesn't believe a word she says." Coulter mentioned Penn's father, blacklisted director Leo Penn, in her book, "Treason."

The facts are not in dispute: At the same time Rob Reiner, the chairman of the state's First 5 Commission, was pushing to qualify his “preschool for all” initiative for the June ballot, the commission spent $23 million on a “preschool for all” ad campaign. Whether or not it was criminal, this use of taxpayer money for Reiner's private political crusade is outrageous and grossly unethical. Yet Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger told The Fresno Bee that he will stand by his “friend” because he is “innocent until proven guilty” and questioned whether there was indeed evidence of wrongdoing. He rejected a...

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (Reuters) - U.S. forces were involved in heavy fighting with Taliban guerrillas in Afghanistan on Saturday but there was no immediate word on casualties, a provincial official said. Afghanistan has seen a surge in attacks by Taliban insurgents and their militant allies in recent months and the Taliban have vowed to launch a spring offensive against U.S.-led foreign forces and the Western-backed government. The clash erupted after U.S. troops backed by helicopter gunships launched an operation in the Sangin district of the southern province of Helmand, said an administrative official in the province. "It's very heavy," the...

Critics believe new legislation in Ohio, Kentucky and several other states will give people a license to kill. If passed, the victim of a home invasion robbery or car-jacking would have the right to "shoot to kill" to protect themselves. It's called the "self-defense" bill. Mitch Daniels, the current governor of Indiana, just signed it into law today. Tom Scheben, the spokesperson for the Boone County sheriff's department, says he doesn't believe most citizens will misuse a deadly force law. "I think you see one, every once in a while, and when you do there is mitigating circumstances,.i.e. drugs," said...

North Korea suggested Tuesday it had the ability to launch a pre-emptive attack on the United States, according to the North's official news agency. A Foreign Ministry spokesman said the North had built atomic weapons to counter the U.S. nuclear threat. "As we declared, our strong revolutionary might put in place all measures to counter possible U.S. pre-emptive strike," the spokesman said, according to the Korean Central News Agency. "Pre-emptive strike is not the monopoly of the United States." Last week, the communist country warned that it had the right to launch a pre-emptive strike, saying it would strengthen...

Che Hague - Slobodan Milosevic took délibérement a drug not prescribed "cancelling" the effect of its treatment against hypertension, indicated to Monday to AFP the Dutch toxicologist Ronald Uges after an analysis of the blood of the former Yugoslav president. "It took (a drug containing) rifampicine, a drug which cancels the effect" of the treatments against hypertension, explained Mr. Uges who carried out an analysis of the blood of the former Yugoslav president two weeks ago. "It took this drug itself and it it wanted to obtain an one-way ticket towards Moscow", he added. Slobodan Milosevic had required in...

Afghanistan: mollah Omar orders the execution from abroad SPIN BOLDAK - Mollah Mohammad Omar, who orders the talibans in Afghanistan, ordered the execution of four foreign hostages, three Albanians and a German, announced a spokesman of the integrist movement. They had been removed in the south of the country. "These people came to Afghanistan on order from America, they must consequently be condemned to death", ordered mollah Omar according to an official statement read Sunday evening by a spokesman of the taliban joint by telephone. On Sunday, this same spokesman, Qari Mohammad Yousuf, had declared that four Albanians and...

ALARM - Resumption of the lawsuit of Saddam Hussein and her seven co-defendants BAGHDAD - the 15th audience of the lawsuit of Iraqi president deposed Saddam Hussein and seven of her lieutenants began Sunday towards 12H40 (09H40 GMT), in front of the High penal court in Baghdad, noted a journalist of AFP.

ALARM - Iran has enough uranium gas to produce 10 bombs VIENNA - the United States estimates that Iran has enough uranium gas to manufacture after enrichment ten nuclear bombs, and they claim new inspections, indicated a diplomat at the IAEA Wednesday to AFP.

Did you hear the one about the high school teacher in Colorado who compared President Bush to Adolf Hitler? We're not joking. Read about what social studies teacher Jay Bennish told his class at Overland High School the day after Bush' state of the union address. Using an MP3 player, a student recorded Bennish's remarks about Bush's speech: "Sounds like a lot of things that Adolf Hitler used to say. We're the only ones who are right, everyone else is backward, and our job is to conquer the world." Bennish's criticisms of Bush and U.S. foreign policy – during which...

A FRIEND OF MINE took his young daughter to visit the famous City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, explaining to her that the place is important because years ago it sold books no other store would — even, perhaps especially, books whose ideas many people found offensive. So, although my friend is no fan of Ward Churchill, the faux Indian and discredited professor who notoriously called 9/11 victims "little Eichmanns," he didn't really mind seeing piles of Churchill's books prominently displayed on a table as he walked in. However, it did occur to him that perhaps the long-delayed English translation...