Free Republic

Nigeria: He Abused His Office - ObjDaily Champion (Lagos) September 13, 2006 Posted to the web September 13, 2006 David Idonor Abuja PRESIDENT Olusegun Obasanjo yesterday rose in stout defence of his decision to send the report of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) which investigated Vice President Atiku Abubakar to the National Assembly, insisting that the V-P abused his office. In a press statement signed by the Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media, Mrs. Oluremi Oyo, Obasanjo advised Atiku to "address pertinent issues at hand, rather than alleging it was a case of political persecution". The...

SEATTLE (AP) - The federal judge who sentenced an Algerian terrorist to 22 years in prison for attempting to bomb Los Angeles International Airport on the eve of the millennium wildly abused his discretion, said prosecutors who had sought a much longer sentence. Customs agents in Port Angeles, Wash., caught Ahmed Ressam, 38, with explosives in the trunk of his rental car when he drove off a ferry from British Columbia in December 1999. The scare prompted the cancellation of millennium celebrations at Seattle's Space Needle. At Ressam's sentencing last summer, U.S. District Judge John C. Coughenour used the opportunity...

What Thanksgiving should be How wonderful it is, how pleasant when brothers live together in harmony! Psalm 133:1 NLT Fighting historical vandalism In an article in Focus on the Family's Citizen magazine, Douglas Phillips describes how he took his family to Plymouth, Massachusetts, a few years ago and was shocked at what he found. Atop Cole's Hill, the burial ground for Pilgrims who died that first hard winter, Phillips was startled to see a city truck pull up and men pile out carrying shovels. They told Phillips the city was placing a new monument. "Most revolutions are staged at night,"...

UN peacekeepers in Congo sexually abused and exploited women and girls, some as young as 13, according to a report released by a UN watchdog today. Sexual contact between peacekeepers and Congolese women and girls occurred regularly, usually in exchange for food or small sums of money, an investigation by the Office of Internal Oversight Services found. The problems were “serious and ongoing” and it was ”disturbing” that there was no deterrence or protection programme, the report said by the UN oversight agency said. Sexual activities continued even while the investigation was going on, the OIOS found, noting that freshly...

NEW YORK (AP) - Interviews with dozens of former and current Iraqi officials by congressional investigators have produced new evidence that Saddam Hussein micro-managed business deals under the U.N. oil-for-food program to maximize political influence with important foreign governments like Russia and neighboring Arab states. The Iraqi officials, who were flown outside of Iraq for their own safety during the interviews, provided a list of foreign companies favored by Saddam and his top lieutenants for import contracts under the U.N. program. They also revealed a parallel blacklist of companies that the then-Iraq leader disqualified from getting deals, investigators told The...

SECRETARY OF DEFENSE: Rumsfeld must go 05/06/2004 DEFENSE SECRETARY DONALD RUMSFELD should resign and take his top deputies with him. That includes Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary Douglas Feith.

<p>Each morning, as a Quincy mother and her severely autistic 11-year-old son waited for a school van, a neighbor walked past with a barking dog, knowing it frightened the boy and made him shriek and wet his pants, according to the attorney general's office.</p>