Free Republic

A vendor selling burial shrouds at his shop in Najaf, which is prospering from the never-ending flow of bodies brought for interment in the city Najaf, home to the golden-domed shrine of the Imam Ali, is Iraq’s holiest Shiite city and has long lived off a constant flow of pilgrims. Now, with Iraq engulfed in a vicious sectarian war, it also prospers from a never-ending flow of bodies brought for burial in one of the largest cemeteries in the world. Every day fleets of minibuses ferry Shiite corpses to Najaf and the massive Wadi al-Salam (Valley of Peace) cemetery, which...

OAKLAND — The world of Frank Wishom was collapsing fast in 2003 when he started talking to the FBI. The high-tech company he had nurtured for a decade was failing. The woman in his life for 20 years had dumped him. And his diabetes was flaring so severely he expected to lose his legs. Then, after undergoing vein surgery in fall 2003, the 62-year-old businessman had a heart attack and died. Whatever he said to the FBI remains a mystery, because officials refuse to talk about the federal investigation that now threatens California's new state Senate leader. But Wishom's friends,...

Mystery shrouds undersea structures Years of study haven’t solved a puzzle found off Cuba’s coast Russian offshore engineer Paulina Zelitsky speaks on a radiophone aboard her ship docked at Havana. Zelitsky is trying to determine whether megalithic structures beneath the ocean's surface were left behind by a vanished civilization. By Anita Snow ASSOCIATED PRESS HAVANA, May 21 — Floating aboard the Spanish trawler she chartered to explore the Cuban coast for shipwrecks, Paulina Zelitsky pores over yellowed tomes filled with sketches and tales of lost cities — just like the one she believes she has found deep off the coast...