Free Republic

It's summer, and even the most earnest citizen eager for a better society will want a little down time, though not without some bracing propaganda to keep the ideological pipes in shape. How do I know this? I read the Nation magazine. Lest we forget, at the Nation Alger Hiss was never a spy while the Great Right Wing Conspiracy is chillingly real. At the Nation, Mumia Abu-Jamal never killed anyone, but Big Tobacco sure has, and communism has never been tried, not really. And, it turns out, at the Nation it's OK to get a great tan and ...

Rome: An Italian military prosecutor is investigating the alleged sexual abuse of under-age prostitutes by United Nations peacekeeping troops in Eritrea. Girls as young as 10 are said to have been sexually exploited by members of the Italian, Danish and Slovakian contingents of the mission. "Some of the most serious cases involve very young girls," said the Padua military prosecutor, Mr Maurizio Block. He is preparing to pass to civilian judicial authorities evidence he has gathered against an Italian sergeant-major serving with the Red Cross and an Italian civilian living in Eritrea. The UN and the Slovak and Danish ...

The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World Bjørn Lomborg Matt Ridley considers this to be 'probably the most important book on the environment ever written' EACH DECADE sees its new environmental obsessions. In the 1960s it was pesticides and the population explosion. In the 1970s there was the oil crisis, the imminent failure of the food supply and the fear of nuclear power. In the 1980s the deserts were advancing, acid rain was killing trees, the ozone layer was thinning and the elephant was on the brink of extinction. In the 1990s we had retreating rain ...

Now, before you get all riled up at the things I’m going to say about certain goings-on in China, remember that they’re happening within the borders of a sovereign nation whose people have, for 4,000 uninterrupted years, placed a different value on human life than Americans with modems do. Try to get a typical Red Chinese lumpen-prole to sit down with you and share a few minutes of pleasantly goose-bumped thermonuclear war paranoia. He’ll first look puzzled, then think about it for half a second. And then he’ll say there are so many of his people around that lots of ...

Protesters return to grove Hundreds join peaceful march to gates of Bohemian Grove after seven-year hiatus After seven years of silence, a Republican administration and the 212th anniversary of the French Revolution got Bohemian Grove protestors back on the march Saturday. Hundreds of people turned out to protest corporate globalization and the men they hold accountable: the elected officials, investors and corporate executives gathering for the annual two-week retreat on the river near Monte Rio. The protest was peaceful and there were no arrests. The California Highway Patrol and the Sherriff's Department had several dozen officers on the scene ...

McHemisphere Next Stop, Quebec: A Sweeping Trade Pact, Shrouded in Secrecy, Draws Protesters From North and South by Lenora Todaro The working draft of a document with the potential to dramatically alter our lives sits in secure reading rooms in Congress and the U.S. Department of Commerce, off-limits to the public. Only those with security clearance may enter and read it. No note-taking. No xeroxing. This is not the code for nuclear missile release or the formula for creating an atom bomb; it is, rather, one of the few copies of the preliminary version of the Free Trade Area of ...

FINANCIAL TIMES: Serbia is preparing to launch a comprehensive privatization programmed as part of economic reforms introduced following the overthrow of former president Slobodan Milosevic [including] the sale of some 4,500 companies by tender and auction to strategic investors. Controlling stakes of up to 70% of a company's equity will be on offer to Serb and foreign investors. The remainder will go to workers. First to go are two cement plants . . . Serbia's largest cement producer, Beocin, in the northeast, has already been promised to Lafarge... Ministers hope the process of internationally financed reconstruction will generate interest. ...

Bill Clinton's scandals were supposed to end on Jan. 20. But days after leaving office, he was taking hits for his late-night pardon of financier fugitive Marc Rich, and absconding with White House furniture. Congress was threatening to pull the plug on his plans for a pricey New York office suite, and Wall Street firms were cancelling his speaking engagements. Other people might have buckled under pressure and checked themselves into the Bali Hilton just to get away from it all. But what did Clinton do? He went to Harlem, the capital of black America and, as such, the ...

Hate groups and white supremacists on the Internet may soon find some in-your-face ads urging tolerance and racial harmony appearing near their racist chat rooms and clubs. And the messages come from one of their chief antagonists: the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). "We hope to take the Web back, and take it away from these haters," says Morris Dees, head of the center in Montgomery, Ala., that today is launching a Web site called Tolerance.org. But it is the ads, starting in about three weeks, that may represent the newest response to Internet hate. Yahoo, the Internet's No. ...

Was Clinton Cool? Talking about my generation. And talking and talking and talking by P. J. O'Rourke In 1992, for the first time, a member of the sixties generation was running for President of the United States. And during that presidential campaign the measure of the man was taken on a sixties yardstick of hip and cool. Ur-hip, echt-cool Rolling Stone magazine, the sixties' most influential and durable media voice, conducted a group interview (how sixties) with Governor Bill Clinton in Little Rock. The interviewers were Jann Wenner, who, as the founder and owner of Rolling Stone, had been the ...

WASHINGTON -- Online news sites are turning to a novel way to make some extra cash: requiring fees for links. The Albuquerque Journal charges $50 for the right to link to each of its articles. Localbusiness.com and Latino.com are more generous, and permit one to five links without payment. There's just one catch. Legal experts say no U.S. law or court decision allows a website to successfully demand payment for links to its content. Such linking is a common practice online and allows services like search engines to exist. "They have no right to use the legal system to ...