Free Republic

The death toll from an air strike by U.S.-led forces on the northern Syrian province of Aleppo has risen to 52 including seven children, a group monitoring the conflict said on Saturday.

Talk about damned-if-you-do . . . On this morning's Today show, Matt Lauer discussed with Tim Russert the Middle East peace conference that began today. After years of MSM criticism of President Bush for not getting more involved in the Israeli-Palestinian situation, how does Lauer react when the president undertakes an historic initiative bringing together leaders of all the area's countries for the first time? You guessed it. View video here.

PLEASE Help save Jerusalem Please Contact President Bush at President Bush "While Jerusalem is mentioned over eight hundred times in the Jewish Bible, it is not mentioned one time in the Koran. Moslems have had little or no interest in Jerusalem until the Jewish presence in modern times. It is all about the destruction of Israel. The temple mount is Jewish and the Pali Arabs have set about to destroy it at an alarming rate. Here we see the systematic, maybe the biggest in the history of geology/archeology destruction of the most important artifacts for Christianity and Judaism. And the...

U.S. to invite Syria, Saudi Arabia to peace meeting By Arshad Mohammed The United States will invite the members of an Arab League panel that includes Syria and Saudi Arabia to a Middle East peace conference it plans to hold this year, a senior U.S. official said on Sunday. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice fleshed out her ideas for the conference in talks on Sunday with the Quartet of Middle East peace mediators, including her decision to invite the Arab League committee grouping the Palestinian Authority, Syria, Lebanon, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt. Only the last two have full...

WASHINGTON - President Bush on Monday announced an an international conference this fall to include Israel, the Palestinian authority and some of their Arab neighbors to help restart Mideast peace talks and review progress in building democratic institutions. He said that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice would preside over the session. Bush said the conference would include representatives from Israel, the Palestinians "and their neighbors in the region" and said participants would include just those governments that support creation of a Palestinian state. Bush also pledged increased U.S. aid to the Palestinian government of President Mahmoud Abbas and called for...

UN chief Kofi Annan today called for an international peace conference on Iraq that would bring all the Iraqi factions together with UN help, but stressed that it would require adequate preparations. "I think it would be helpful to have a conference that brings everybody together, along the lines of what we did in the former Yugoslavia and others," he told reporters. "But I don't think one can organise that conference without other specific actions being taken," he said. "I do not believe, given the bitterness and the level of violence, that they can do it alone. The international community...

Israeli adviser: Egypt proposing Mideast peace conference Thursday, July 22, 2004 Posted: 5:42 AM EDT (0942 GMT) JERUSALEM (CNN) -- Egypt is proposing a Mideast peace conference in October, according to Moshe Debi, an adviser to Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom. The October talks would include Israeli and Palestinian foreign ministers, as well as foreign ministers from the "Mideast Quartet" -- the United Nations, the United States, the European Union and Russia, Debi said.

(21:05) Knesset Speaker calls for adopting Saudi initiative By Nina Gilbert In a meeting with European Parliament faction leaders today, Knesset Speaker Avraham Burg said that any international peace conference must be based on the Saudi peace initiative. Burg said the implications of the bold initiative are "full peace and normalization between Israel and all Arab states in exchange for a full Israeli withdrawal from the territories." Burg, who was attending the EU gathering in Brussels, said a peace conference should be convened soon in the same format as the 1991 Madrid conference. Burg suggested that the conference be dubbed...