Free Republic

Musharraf vows to turn fighting talk into action By Ahmed Rashid (Filed: 13/08/2005) It took six years in the making but when it came it was still an unexpected summons. For during that time I have been refused an interview with President Pervez Musharraf and for the past two years not even invited to his press conferences. In a quarter of a century as a journalist I have never had a problem meeting a Pakistani head of state. After September 2001 and the success of my book Taliban I met many western leaders and foreign ministers. President Musharraf: charming But,...

Heatwave takes a turn for the worse By Amy Iggulden (Filed: 31/05/2005) The weekend that began with the hottest May day in 60 years went on to bring gale-force winds and concluded with lightning and thunderstorms. Temperatures reached 89.4F (31.9C) in London on Friday, hotter than any summer day last year and the warmest May day in Britain since 1944. In Birmingham, temperatures of 81F (27.2C) took the city to its hottest in May since 1953. A misty shroud obscures the coast on the pier at Eastbourne yesterday The heat attracted up to 100,000 people to Hyde Park in London...

Chirac ready to turn his anger on Blair if France votes Non By Toby Helm, Chief Political Correspondent (Filed: 28/05/2005) Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac will be pitched into a furious six-month dispute over the future direction of the European Union if the French people vote No to the EU constitution tomorrow. Government sources are braced for the French president to round on the Prime Minister and blame him for making the constitution too "Anglo-Saxon" on economic issues and for plunging Europe into crisis as a result. The French people go to the polls on Sunday They also expect Mr...

A Crucial Word for California Patricia King On the issue of California, when I was at the National Religious Broadcasters convention this February, we stayed in Anaheim and I ministered in L.A. For days I was vexed in my spirit. I kept thinking of Lot and how the Bible said his righteous heart was daily vexed because of living in the midst of unprincipled men. Everywhere I looked, I saw gross immorality, lust, and greed. I was filled with remorse and even felt sick to my stomach. One night, I woke up in the middle of the night and I...

BEIJING (AFP) - People in Beijing were warned to stay indoors as the Chinese capital was shrouded in yellow smog with pollution reaching dangerous levels. "Under these polluted conditions, we propose that the majority of citizens reduce their time outdoors and avoid breathing this seriously polluted air," the Beijing Environmental Protection Bureau said in a warning posted on its website. Beijing's air quality has been at the lowest level for the past two days with the air "seriously polluted," the bureau said. Experts said the capital was experiencing a heat inversion, where warmer air in the atmosphere was keeping the...

Glamorous turn their minds to poverty By Annabel Crabb London January 23, 2005 Angelina Jolie is on the list. So are America's best-known Bills: Clinton and Gates. Bono wouldn't miss it; neither would Richard Gere. Or Sharon Stone. Yes folks: it's the World Economic Forum, assembling this week in the postcard-perfect alpine resort town of Davos, Switzerland, to bend the greatest minds of our generation to solving global problems. The World Economic Forum, or Davos as it is casually termed, was established in 1971 by the dashing Swiss academic Klaus Schwab to bring together the energies of business and politics...

EXTREMIST Muslim scientists are developing a bomb that turns anyone within a 30-mile radius of its blast into a homosexual, say U.S. Intelligence insiders. It's all a part of the Al Qaeda master plan to pull our country apart and kill the patriotism that makes us strong. " They believe that making more Americans gay will start civil war between gays and ultraconservatives," says one highly placed intelligence officer. "They also figure it will lead to a decrease in the U.S. population." The Gay Bomb was already in the planning stages when Osama Bin Laden and close, intimate friend Muhammad...

The election is over. The fight is not. Elections are only one part of democracy. We need to think strategically about direct action, learn from a rich history of nonviolent activism, and develop new tactics to take on this administration. Let's start from the start: Inauguration Day. On January 20th, 2005, we're calling for a new kind of action. The Bush administration has been successful at keeping protesters away from major events in the last few years by closing off areas around events and using questionable legal strategies to outlaw public dissent. We can use these obstacles to develop new...

Get ready for a real trip down memory lane - no, not the an LSD trip, we mean a nostalgia trip for the old days and the old folks kind. Ah! Nothing reminds one of people stuck in the sixties like the smell of patchouli and three-day body odor, and that smell will be present at George W. Bush's second Presidential Inauguration. These wizened weedwhiffers will once again crawl out of their Vanagons and totter to protest publicly for whatever reason they are hallucinating about this time - in this case, to turn their back on the President at the...

Turn Right HillaryFlaming liberal Hillary Clinton is making some strategic turns 'right' in her quest for the presidency.   This is an email-able, copyright-ready graphic you can use in emails, on blogs, in flyers, on posters... anything that's noncommercial.

Security obsession pushes swing states into Bush's grasp Voters in Missouri are desperate to protect the homeland, and are turning to the Republicans for reassurance Paul Harris in Clay County, Missouri Sunday September 26, 2004 The Observer The air was hot and the mosquitoes were biting as Tom Brown sweatily trudged from house to house on the leafy suburban street. An elderly woman opened her door and eagerly took a leaflet from the Republican campaigner. Her next words brought a grin to Brown's face. 'I was going to vote for you anyway,' she said, before adding: 'And I'm a Democrat,...

WASHINGTON - Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry (news - web sites), trying to recover from a brass-knuckles campaign against his character, is attempting to steer the election to a referendum on President Bush (news - web sites)'s leadership. Kerry has less than seven weeks to take over the lead in the presidential race. Democrats hope a major shift will come from the debates, but his strategy in the meantime is based less on building himself up than on tearing down the president. Bush has enjoyed a slight lead in national polls since the Republican National Convention, but the gap appears...

400 turn out for Daschle, pancakes Senator listens to personal stories ranging from Agent Orange to Medicare at Aberdeen school Posted on Sun, Sep. 05, 2004 By Brooke Anderson American News Writer Tom Daschle's pancake breakfast Saturday morning in Aberdeen was more like a small town get-together than a campaign stop. Everyone was dressed casually, including the Democratic senator. People called him by his first name and hugs - not handshakes - were the standard greeting of the morning. The Senate minority leader and Aberdeen native is in the middle of a hotly contested battle against GOP challenger John Thune....

Sudan warns Britain that intervention could turn into another Iraq By George Jones, Andrew Sparrow and Rachel Sylvester (Filed: 23/07/2004) British troops are welcome to enter the Darfur region, Sudan's foreign minister said yesterday, but they would rapidly find themselves in an Iraq-like situation. Responding to a British newspaper report suggesting that Tony Blair was considering options to send troops to the region, Mustafa Ismail said his government was willing to withdraw from Darfur. Children at Abu Shok refugee camp "We will give him the chance if he can give security to Darfur," Mr Ismail said in Paris. But he...

City trying to turn table on police Eyeing pickets, contributions in PR offensive By Andrea Estes, Globe Staff July 17, 2004 City officials, scrambling to salvage the Democratic convention's opening festivities, launched a public relations offensive against Boston's police union yesterday in its intensifying battle over a new police contract. At a hastily arranged press conference called by Boston's convention organizers, small business owners said the police union is putting its own concerns before the needs of struggling small firms, including those owned by minorities. They said their businesses would lose an opportunity to prosper if the union goes ahead...

Honeycomb crystal turns space inside out February 04 2004 at 02:12PM Paris - A new kind of crystal is so riddled with holes that a mere gram of the material has an internal surface area equivalent to 17 tennis courts - a record - the British science journal Nature reported on Thursday. The substance is still at the experimental stage but the hope is that it could be used as a hydrogen tank in vehicles powered by fuel cells. Named MOF-177 by its inventors at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, the crystal is a so-called metal organic framework....

<p>This summer, Dave Hill got a refreshing break from the run-of-the-mill spam that routinely invades his e-mail inbox. Instead of hawking mortgages, penis-enlargement pills or weight-loss products, a message arrived that seemed straight out of a science-fiction novel.</p> <p>The anonymous e-mail offered $5,000 to any vendor capable of promptly delivering a collection of far-fetched gadgets for conducting time travel. Among the mysterious devices sought by the message's author were an "Acme 5X24 series time transducing capacitor with built-in temporal displacement" and an "AMD Dimensional Warp Generator module containing the GRC79 induction motor."</p>

We'll have to wait and see if Hamas decides by the weekend to agree to a cease-fire. The correct guess right now appears to be that it will. Then, we'll have to wait and see how long the halt in the attacks lasts and what the extremist Palestinians do without a state and the Israeli radicals - some acting in the name of the state - do to foul the entire process. Till then, the militant minority organizations on the other side now have an unusual opportunity to decide if the political initiatives will be given a chance or not....