Free Republic

Islamabad   Dancing women who brought disaster in Northern Areas     Myra Imran Tuesday, August 16, 2011     Naming natural calamities after women is not common in Pakistan but attaching such disasters to moral degradation surrounding women is a dominant way of thinking. This is especially true in some areas hit by floods last year where women claim to know exactly why the disaster struck. “It was destined to happen because Allah was angry over a festival organised in Kalam,” most women in upper Swat unanimously say. Naseema Bibi, lost her 17-year-old son in the floods. She...

Since 9/11, 283 World Trade Center rescue and recovery workers have been diagnosed with cancer, and 33 of them have died of cancer, says a lawyer for the ailing responders... Doctors say the cancers can strike three to five years after exposure to toxins such as benzene, a cancer-causing chemical that permeated the WTC site from burning jet fuel... "We have nearly 35 of these cancers in the family of 50,000 Ground Zero workers. The odds of that occurring are one in hundreds of millions," Worby said.

HOURS after boarding the luxury cruise that would result in her death, Dianne Brimble's friend warned her of a group of men who had been ogling female passengers, a Sydney inquest was told today. The next morning, Ms Brimble, 42, was found dead in a cabin belonging to some of those same men. Police allege she had been given a lethal dose of the date rape drug gamma-hydroxybutyrate before being sexually assaulted. The inquest was told Ms Brimble had been ecstatic, setting out on the "holiday of a lifetime" with family and friends on the P&O liner Pacific Sky on...

DID GOD WHACK NEW ORLEANS? A THEOLOGICAL INQUIRY By Don Feder Was Katrina a warning - the ultimate wake-up call for a morally somnolent nation? Even religious conservatives are afraid to speculate, so successfully have we been cowed by a culture of disbelief. Regarding the way God works in the world, there are four possibilities: 1. There is no God and everything that happens is the result of the random collision of molecules. 2. There is a God, but he's an absentee landlord. He arranged the world, including nature, as a self-regulating mechanism, then sat back and allowed it to...

October 30, 1991: President George Bush opens the Madrid Conference with an initiative for a Middle East peace plan involving Israel's land. On the same day, an extremely rare storm forms off the coast of Nova Scotia. (It was eventually tagged "The Perfect Storm," and a book and movie were made about it.) Record-setting 100-foot waves form at sea and pound the New England Coast, even causing heavy damage to President Bush's home in Kennebunkport, Maine. August 23, 1992: The Madrid Conference moves to Washington D.C. and the peace talks resume, lasting four days. On that same day, Hurricane Andrew-the...