Free Republic

Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Tuesday that the emergence of the omicron coronavirus variant demonstrates the need to vaccinate the global population in order to get past the pandemic. “We know that none of us will be fully safe until everyone is,” Blinken told reporters in Latvia. “And we've been saying that as long as the virus is replicating somewhere, it could be mutating, and if it's mutating, we might wind up with a variant that poses a new threat and that can defeat the existing vaccines or induce greater illness or be more transmissible, all the questions we're...

WASHINGTON, Sept. 7, 2006 -- Although some people may call the war in Iraq a diversion from the war on terror, terrorists disagree, and they recognize that their long-term success or failure hinges on what happens in Iraq, President Bush said today during an address in Marietta, Ga. President Bush delivers his remarks on the global war on terror during a visit to Marietta, Ga., Sept. 7. White House photo by Eric Draper   '(Click photo for screen-resolution image);high-resolution image available. Speaking to the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, Bush offered his fourth major address within the past week about the terror...

WASHINGTON, July 11, 2006 – A memo from Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England underscores the department's standing policy of treating detainees humanely and orders commanders responsible for detainee affairs to review their practices to ensure they are in compliance. "The Supreme Court has determined that Common Article 3 to the Geneva Conventions of 1949 applies as a matter of law to the conflict with al Qaeda," England stated in the July 7 memo. In a nutshell, Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions ensures humane treatment of detainees, Bryan Whitman, deputy assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, told reporters today....

WASHINGTON, Nov. 28, 2005 – Iraq's upcoming national elections will have a major impact on the country, forming a new government that "will act like a magnet and draw people in," the Defense Department's representative to Europe and adviser to the U.S. mission to NATO predicted today. The Dec. 15 elections will create a new government expected to be seated for the next four years, during which it will "stake out the future for Iraq," Ambassador Evan Galbraith said at the Heritage Foundation here. "It's the most important political event that's taken place in the Middle East ... in some...

San Diego's leaders have denied for more than a year that the city could be headed for bankruptcy, but a report this week suggests that officials are creeping closer to being unable to pay the bills. In a report the City Manager's Office issued Wednesday, the City Council is being asked to consider restructuring a $152 million sewer bond by delaying payments on it by one year and stretching the terms of the loan to 2011. The plan, which includes acceptance of a $10.1 million state loan, is almost the only way for the city to avoid having to begin...

SACRAMENTO (AP) - A key player in the state's powerful education lobby on Friday criticized a Democratic compromise proposal on the state budget, throwing a last-minute curve into talks that both sides said were progressing toward a possible deal. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Legislature's Democratic majority have been separated for weeks on spending differences that total less than 1 percent of an estimated $116 billion annual spending plan. The divide, however small, is as much philosophical as fiscal, illustrating the Republicans' desire to pass a budget that doesn't add a single dollar in deficit spending. At issue is money...

<p>Traditionally, the partisan fires have burned more intensely in the Assembly than in the Senate, so budget squabbles have often been resolved in the upper house first. But two years ago, when the latest budget crisis first began to emerge, the pattern was broken. Rather than forge a bipartisan deal with Republican senators, the Senate's Democratic leadership and Democratic Gov. Gray Davis adopted a pickoff strategy. With 26 Democrats in the Senate, they needed just one Republican to break ranks for a two-thirds margin. That one was Maurice Johannessen, a Redding businessman who, after leaving the Senate, was named by Davis as the state's veterans affairs secretary.</p>