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DUBLIN, Ireland (AP) -- Family and friends of Veronica Guerin, the investigative reporter whose slaying shocked Ireland and triggered a government crackdown on organized crime, laid flowers and prayed Monday near the spot where she was shot to death a decade ago.

SINN Fein/IRA, their apologists, the gullible, the wishful thinkers and the pig ignorant may have left some people with the impression that last Tuesday, August 31, was the 10th anniversary of the day - as we are forever being poetically told - when "the IRA guns fell silent". Quite apart from this being a pathetic fallacy (it wasn't that the guns decided to stop shooting; the IRA leadership finally grasped that murdering unionists was counterproductive), this assertion is simply untrue. In fairness to Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness and their dreadful colleagues, they made it perfectly clear what they were offering...

IN a week in whichhundreds of schoolchildren and their parents were taken hostage by Chechen separatists inRussia, and in which 12 Nepalese hostages were murdered by those the BBC and RTE like to call the "Iraqi resistance", it was a small incident, easily overlooked. But last weekend, a small explosion occurred on the premises of the Christian pilgrimage centre Santiago de Compostela in Spain. Nobody was injured, either by that bomb or another in a nearby seaside town, but it was the latest in a series of attacks on tourist targets by Basque separatists who, since August, have begun to...