Free Republic

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) adopted the role of Ebenezer Scrooge and scheduled the Senate to work through the Christmas holiday. Two Republicans - Jon Kyl of Arizona and Jim DeMint of South Carolina - objected, and that became political fodder for Reid, proving that nothing is off limits if a political point can be made. Reid then took to the floor of the Senate to blast the GOP. “I don’t need to hear the sanctimonious lectures of Sens. Kyl and DeMint to remind me of what Christmas means,” he said Wednesday afternoon. He also blamed Republicans - who...

Stalin-era files raided By Charles Clover in Moscow Published: December 26 2008 19:36 | Last updated: December 26 2008 19:36 One hundred thousand witnesses to the terror of Joseph Stalin’s rule are stored on 12 computer hard disks compiled by Memorial, a Russian human rights group based in St Petersburg. Several terabytes of data include thousands of hours of audio histories, digital versions of faded photographs, video evidence of mass graves. With a few computer keystrokes, one could retrieve a faded denunciation written by a son against a father, or hear a ghostly voice reciting a forced confession or naming...

Beaten by teacher, boy prepares for third surgery PTI Thursday, December 06, 2007 18:46 IST ISLAMABAD: A 13-year-old Pakistani boy who was beaten by his teacher for not completing his homework is preparing to undergo a third surgery. Mudassar Aslam, a Class IX student of Himayatul Islam High School in Hyderabad, has already undergone two major intestinal surgeries after his teacher beat him. Aslam was rushed to Liaquat University Hospital on November 21 after he complained of severe abdominal pain. His teacher, Buland Iqbal, trashed him with a stick after tying him up. The boy said, "I was beaten with...

Washington, D.C.–In a letter to House Resources Committee Chairman Richard Pombo (R-CA), the American Policy Center (APC) and over 50 public policy groups called for an end to the federal government’s unconstitutional practice of taking land and property rights under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). Chairman Pombo plans to make reauthorizing the ESA a priority of the current Congress. "There are some who claim that the Act needs to be ‘strengthened,’ ‘updated,’ or ‘modernized,’" said APC president Tom DeWeese. "How absurd. For three decades this law has done nothing but steal property, destroy economies, shatter livelihoods, cost billions of dollars,...

Without the capacity to inspire terror tyrants fail. The pictures of an old, dishevelled Saddam Hussein the Iraqi people have now seen mean they will never fear him again. For dictators, image is everything. From Hitler on, totalitarian rulers have obsessively managed the way they are presented on film and and in photographs. And when they lose power over the way they are presented to their subjects, they are doomed. The Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu and his partner in tyranny, wife Elena, were captured on video before being executed in the popular uprising that destroyed their regime in 1989. They...

Called 'Reign of Terror'. Graphic, but fantastic. It started at Midnight, 5/5/03. Tune in now.

Earlier this month I accompanied John O'Sullivan, the head of United Press International, on a private tour of a museum in Budapest. The House of Terror, as it's now called, is situated in an unremarkable apartment building on a thoroughfare of elegant fin de siècle mansions. I passed it often in my childhood and youth, though always careful to walk on the opposite side of the street. We used to call the building simply by its address: 60 Andrássy Road. For 12 years, between 1944 and 1956, saying "60 Andrássy Road" carried the same meaning for us as saying "Bastille"...