Free Republic

An assault weapons ban that is good enough for the people should be good enough for our government. The Secret Service, Federal Protective Service, U.S. Capitol Police, and all other agencies charged with the protection of elected officials should carry 10 round magazines, and no assault weapons. Most importantly, their response time to acts of violence should be no sooner than 20 minutes, which is how long the children of Sandy Hook had to wait. The good, honorable members of our government wouldn't accept a level of protection for themselves that they would deny to the most vulnerable members of...

Jewish settlers in the Gaza Strip are preparing to move 500 families to the area in an effort to thwart a plan by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to evacuate most settlements in the strip. Sharon announced last month that he would implement a ”disengagement plan” to dismantle 17 settlements in the Gaza Strip and three in the West Bank if Israel and the Palestinians could not proceed on the road map peace plan. Settlers and their backers in the parliament have vowed to oppose Sharon’s plan and topple his government if he begins implementing it. The 500 families will begin...

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan Feb. 9 — Pakistan denied on Monday delivering nuclear technology to North Korea in exchange for missiles, as it sought to deflect accusations of state involvement in proliferation. Foreign Ministry spokesman Masood Khan also said last week's pardon by President Gen. Pervez Musharraf for the father of the country's nuclear program was "conditional," applying to the acts he's confessed to so far but that the investigation continues into Abdul Qadeer Khan and his associates. "The pardon is specific to the charges made so far, and about which Dr. A.Q. Khan has made a confessional statement," Masood Khan said....

NATO defense ministers have agreed to deploy more troops to the alliance's peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan. In Munich on Friday, NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said several countries offered to send additional troops for the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) operating in Kabul. The alliance has been under pressure for months to expand its current mission beyond the Afghan capital, Kabul, prior to elections scheduled for June. Mr. Scheffer said "NATO's first priority is to get Afghanistan right." He said the alliance has no choice but to meet commitments to the Afghan people and to the international community. U.S....

A historic overhaul of Britain's law enforcement strategy via the creation of an FBI-style national police force was announced today by the home secretary, David Blunkett. The Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) will focus on crimes such as drug trafficking, people smuggling and fraud. More than 5,500 staff at four separate agencies - the National Crime Squad (NCS), the National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS), Customs and Excise and the immigration service - will merge to form SOCA in the biggest shake-up in policing in England and Wales since the current boundaries were established for regional forces in 1964. "Organised criminals...

COLOMBO, Feb. 9 (Xinhuanet) -- Sri Lanka's caretaker government on Monday strongly criticized President Chandrika Kumaratunga for her dissolution of parliament as "undemocratic" and said they will seek resounding mandate of the people in the forthcoming elections to continue with peace process and economic development. "At the time of dissolution the government enjoyed the confidence of parliament. To dissolve parliament in those circumstances is a totally undemocratic act. It never happened in any democratic country." G.L. Peiris, Constitutional Affairs Minister and government spokesman told reporters. He also said that Kumaratunga's appointment of two new ministers hours before she dissolved the...

FRANKFURT, Feb 9 (Reuters) - The Iraqi finance minister said his country wants German companies' investment even though the United States has barred them from bidding for reconstruction contracts, a German newspaper reported on Monday. "The Iraqis want the Germans to come," Kamel al-Keylani told business daily Handelsblatt. "Many German companies have been here for years," he said. Germany has agreed to offer substantial debt relief to Iraq, even after Washington angered opponents of the Iraq war by saying it would bar them from bidding for lucrative reconstruction contracts. The United States initially barred France, Germany and other countries that...

<p>BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) U.S. and Iraqi forces deactivated several rockets on a road, primed for launch toward a city north of Baghdad, and four people were arrested elsewhere with manuals showing how to make bombs, officials said Monday.</p> <p>The rockets were found on a road near Diyala University outside Baqouba, and were ready to be fired toward the city, a U.S. Army captain said on condition of anonymity.</p>

<p>Al Gore, who lost the presidency to George W. Bush in 2000, assailed the commander in chief Sunday, accusing him of betraying the nation by invading Iraq.</p> <p>"He took America on an ill-conceived foreign adventure, dangerous to our troops, that was preordained and planned before 9-11," Gore told Tennessee Democrats at a party event.</p>

<p>With Iraq's top Shiite ayatollah able to bring tens of thousands of marchers out into the streets, seemingly on a moment's notice, secular politicians can only hope the cleric keeps his promises not to seek political power.</p> <p>Their parties are still staggering back from the grave where Saddam Hussein buried them and, as they jostle for a position in the government to come, may be too weak to compete with Islamic movements backed by popular clerics.</p>

BAGHDAD -- With the U.S. plan for handing power to the Iraqis at stake, UN experts sat down with Iraqi leaders for the first time yesterday to discuss the feasibility of holding early elections, as demanded by the Shiite clergy. In fresh violence, insurgents attacked separate U.S. army convoys with explosives yesterday, killing one soldier and wounding three others, witnesses said. The UN team, led by veteran diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi, met yesterday with the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council to begin determining whether legislative elections can be held by June 30, when the Americans plan to transfer sovereignty to Iraqis. If...

BASRA, IRAQ -- Wearing desert camouflage and boots, Prince Charles made a surprise morale-boosting visit to British troops in Iraq yesterday, the first member of the Royal Family to visit the country since the ouster of Saddam Hussein. At a former Saddam palace in the city of Basra, the prince mingled with about 200 soldiers, shaking hands, sipping tea and praising them for their role in keeping security in southern Iraq. "What you're doing, many of you, training Iraqis to become almost as good a bunch of soldiers as you are, is . . . of enormous importance because this...

ISRAEL yesterday pledged to change the route of its West Bank separation barrier to "make things as easy as possible" for Palestinian civilians. Zalman Shoval, an adviser to Israel’s prime minister, Ariel Sharon, said alterations would ease the situation around the encircled city of Qalqilya and some other Palestinian areas turned into isolated enclaves by the barrier, which slices deep into the West Bank. Israel says the barrier is needed to protect its citizens from the suicide bombers who have struck repeatedly over the past three years. Palestinians say the wall is an Israeli attempt to reclaim more of the...

THE buck stops there - or possibly not. Although he would probably be loathe to admit it, the US president, George Bush, is unlikely to toss and turn in the wee small hours worrying about the dollar’s remorseless descent. Not in an election year, when the weakness of the US currency is making American exports cheaper and helping to sustain the country’s economic recovery. US exports grew at double the rate of imports in the final quarter of 2003. If Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve also remain "patient" before raising interest rates, hopefully helping to stop the recovery being...

FREE personal care for the elderly is a disastrous policy which should be reversed, a former minister in the Scottish cabinet said yesterday. Sam Galbraith, a Labour education minister in the first term of the Scottish Parliament, told Holyrood magazine that the policy benefited the middle-classes and not the poor. He also revealed that Henry McLeish, the former First Minister, was the only Labour cabinet minister to support the policy and claimed it was pushed through by taking money from cancer budgets. Speaking to the magazine, Mr Galbraith said: "It is undeniable that the policy benefits the wealthy. The vast...

PRODUCTION of opium in Afghanistan surged to a record level last year as farmers in lawless provinces increased their output, threatening efforts to strengthen the government and establish a proper economy. Two years after the ousting of the Taleban regime, which had cracked down ruthlessly on the cultivation of opium, production of the substance last year hit 3,600 tonnes, up 6 per cent over the previous year, and surveys of farmers show a further increase is likely this year. The release of the figures coincided with demands from politicians to tackle Scotland’s heroin problem by cutting off supply of the...

AN alert fertiliser supplier may have prevented an associate of terror suspect Willie Brigitte bombing a Sydney military facility, a fertiliser industry spokesman said today. A Sydney colleague of the deported Frenchman is under police and ASIO investigation for attempting to buy large quantities of chemicals, including the fertiliser ammonium nitrate. Ammonium nitrate was used to destroy the Sari Club in Bali in 2002. Brigitte has told his French interrogators that the colleague, whom he identified by an alias Abu Hamza, was preparing a large-scale terrorist attack. Investigators suspected Hamza's potential Sydney targets were the Holsworthy Army base, Victoria Barracks,...

NEARLY 2000 buffalos, cows and pigs had been infected with foot and mouth disease in Vietnam's central province of Quang Nam, the agriculture ministry said today. "Foot and mouth disease has been reported in six districts, including Hoi An town, and local authorities have begun culling the infected animals," Bui Quang Anh, head of the ministry's animal health department, told AFP. So far 84 pigs have been slaughtered in a bid to contain the highly contagious disease, which first emerged in the province in December last year, according to state media. Local authorities have imposed a ban on the trade,...

DISABLED British scientist Stephen Hawking, the subject of a police investigation, was today back at home after leaving hospital. Hawking, a mathematics professor at Cambridge University, has spent the past few weeks in Addenbrooke's Hospital, Cambridge, being treated for a chest infection. Police are investigating allegations that Professor Hawking, who is in his 60s and suffers from motor neurone disease, has been abused. Hawking, the Cambridge physicist who penned the best-seller A Brief History of Time, is confined to a wheelchair. He has rejected claims by nurses that he had been the victim of assault at the hands of his...

CHINA reported four new suspected bird flu outbreaks today including one in the northern municipality of Tianjin, which had previously not been affected, state media said. "The Ministry of Agriculture on the 9th received reports that in recent days, Tianjin's Jinnan district, Hubei's Macheng city, Yunnan's Anning city and Shaanxi's Huayin city each discovered one case of suspected highly pathogenic bird flu," the Xinhua news agency said. Tianjin municipality is located close to the capital Beijing, which has yet to report any outbreaks. Hubei, Yunnan and Shaanxi provinces had reported other outbreaks earlier. China so far has 38 suspected or...