Free Republic

On this date in 1985, the onetime General Secretary of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) was suddenly executed for subversion. Though the date here says 1985, Munir was actually a very late casualty of the 1960s: specifically, the murky attempted “coup” of 1965 whose authorship the army quickly ascribed to the Communists and on that doubtful basis unleashed a ferocious bloodletting in 1965-66.* Along with the hundreds of thousands of leftists slaughtered — many in Muslim sectarian violence, as distinct from being specifically hunted down by the army — some 200,000 wound up in prison. According to a U.S. Department...

Five federal agencies have agreed to pool their smart card needs into a large contract buy of up to 40 million cards during the next three years. The agencies — the Defense Department, Homeland Security Department, Interior Department, NASA, and Department of Veterans Affairs — will initiate the procurement, but other federal agencies could buy cards under the contract, said Bob Donelson, a senior property management specialist in Interior's Bureau of Land Management. He spoke today in Washington, D.C., at a Federal Public Key Infrastructure Deployment Workshop. By combining their requirements, the five agencies will reduce their card costs, which...