Free Republic

.. US filmmaker Sean Stone, son of Oscar-winning director Oliver Stone, converted to Islam on Tuesday in Iran, where he is making a documentary, he told AFP. "The conversion to Islam is not abandoning Christianity or Judaism, which I was born with. It means I have accepted Mohammad and other prophets," he said in a brief telephone call from the central Iranian city of Isfahan, where he underwent the ceremony. Sean Stone's famous father is Jewish, while his mother is Christian. The 27-year-old filmmaker did not say why he converted. According to Iran's Fars news agency, Sean Stone had become...

A song for Lena Horne 1917-2010 Don’t know why There’s no sun up in the sky... If there's no sun up in the sky, it's because he's mourning the passing of the great Lena Horne, a few weeks shy of her 93rd birthday. Miss Horne was born on June 30th 1917 into a middle-class black family in Brooklyn. Her father left in 1920, and her mother turned to acting, touring in all-black productions of white shows, in one of which - Madame X - her young daughter made her stage debut. For the next six decades, she was rarely off-stage....

DETROIT -- Ernie Harwell has said a goodbye of sorts to the Detroit Tigers' fans. The longtime radio play-by-play man humbly waved to the crowd at Comerica Park on Wednesday night after thanking them for their "devotion, support, loyalty and love." Harwell was the voice of the Tigers for more than 40 years. He spoke halfway through the third inning of a game against the Kansas City Royals. Harwell drew loud ovations before and after he came to the batter's box to speak. The 91-year-old Harwell recently was diagnosed with inoperable cancer of the bile duct. He came to Detroit...

MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) -- Serena Williams won her eighth and most improbable Grand Slam title, overwhelming top-seeded Maria Sharapova 6-1, 6-2 in the Australian Open on Saturday. Only the second unseeded woman to win the Australian title in the Open era, Williams came into the tournament ranked No. 81 after spending most of last season on the sidelines because of a knee injury. "I'm really enjoying this!" said Williams, who will jump to No. 14 next week. It was her first title in 15 tournaments since winning the 2005 Australian Open, and the most dominating win in a completed championship...

Billy Wilder was born one hundred years ago – June 22nd 1906 - in Sucha Beskidzka. A child of the Hapsburg Empire, he came to Hollywood in 1933 and 69 years later sounded barely any less Viennese. But he lived long enough to see his work turned into an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical and, lest you wonder whether that’s really one of the consolations of old age, it was better than most everything else: he spent his last 20 years being hailed as a giant while simultaneously having every new project stymied by jerk execs who thought he was over....

DETROIT (AP) -- Hockeytown or Hoopstown? Detroit is both. The top teams at the end of the NBA and NHL regular seasons are from the same city for the first time, with the Pistons and Red Wings combining to pull off the feat for the Motor City. "It's always cool to be a part of anything that hasn't happened before," Joe Dumars, the Pistons' president of basketball operations, said Wednesday in an interview with The Associated Press. "This is a great sports town, and the fans around here are about to really have some fun following both teams." The Red...

Forces Taiwan to forgo name, flag, anthem at tournament Under pressure from China, Major League Baseball is forcing Taiwan to compete in the upcoming World Baseball Classic under the name "Chinese Taipei" and to not display the island nation's flag or have its anthem played. Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo – a member of the House International Relations Committee – has written a letter of complaint to Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig, asking that Taiwan be given "fair treatment." The inaugural tournament, March 3-20, includes teams from 16 nations. All but two have players under contract to Major League Baseball...

Former South Dakota Sen. Tom Daschle is weighing the possibility of running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008. "I have received a lot of encouragement," Daschle said in an email today to the Argus Leader. Daschle didn't rule out the possibility of an official announcement in the near future. But for now, he said, he has no plans to run for national office. In his email, Daschle said the primary factors in his decision "would be my family and our mutual decision to consider the rigors of a campaign and reentry into public life." Daschle made similar comments over...

NEW ORLEANS - Mayor Ray Nagin suggested Monday that Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and other storms were a sign that "God is mad at America" and at black communities, too, for tearing themselves apart with violence and political infighting. "Surely God is mad at America. He sent us hurricane after hurricane after hurricane, and it's destroyed and put stress on this country," Nagin, who is black, said as he and other city leaders marked Martin Luther King Day. "Surely he doesn't approve of us being in Iraq under false pretenses. But surely he is upset at black America also. We're...

BAGHDAD, Iraq - A United Nations official said Wednesday that Iraq's recent parliamentary elections, which have given a strong lead to the Shiite religious bloc dominating the current government, were credible and that there was there was no justification in calls for a rerun. In violence Wednesday, an inmate in a Baghdad prison grabbed an assault rifle from a guard and opened fire, killing eight people, police said. One American soldier was injured in the attempted prison break, the U.S. military said. The Shiite bloc held talks with Kurdish leaders about who should get the top 12 government jobs, as...

The Canadian Supreme Court ruling that redefined obscenity for that nation and legalized group-sex clubs, combined with Canada's unusually low age of consent – 14 – will result in an influx of pedophiles to America's neighbor to the north, contends a former consultant to the U.S. Justice Department. In its Dec. 20 decision, Canada's Supreme Court legalized a type of business activity previously restricted by Canadian law, overturning two previous Quebec Court of Appeal decisions that had ruled group-sex clubs qualified as "bawdy houses" violating Quebec's community decency standards and were therefore illegal. Judith Reisman, a world-renowned scholar and author...

LONDON, Dec. 16 (UPI) -- British scientists have calculated 2005 was the warmest year on record in the Northern Hemisphere, at least since records began being kept in the 1860s. The United Kingdom's Met Office and the University of East Anglia say the data indicate more evidence of human-induced global warming, the BBC reported Friday. The average temperature during 2005 in the Northern Hemisphere was 0.65 C above the average for 1961-90 -- the baseline against which scientists compare temperatures. The Northern Hemisphere Atlantic Ocean has also been the hottest on record. "The data also show that the sea surface...

To judge from the way the weekend's box office is breathlessly reported in the news bulletins on Monday morning, more people seem to be interested in movie grosses than in the movies. Evidently, Hollywood's now recovered from this summer's all-time record "box office slump." Or at any rate news stories about the box office slump have themselves slumped. In a breathless dispatch on the opening weekend of ''Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,'' the Associated Press reported that ''the latest Potter movie led a lineup that helped reverse the Hollywood box-office slump." I wouldn't say the boy wizard and...

NEW ORLEANS - Alarming predictions of as many as 10,000 dead in New Orleans may have been greatly exaggerated, with authorities saying Friday that the first street-by-street sweep of the swamped city revealed far fewer corpses than feared. "Some of the catastrophic deaths that some people predicted may not have occurred," said retired Marine Col. Terry Ebbert, the city's homeland security chief. He declined to give a revised estimate. But he added: "Numbers so far are relatively minor as compared to the dire projections of 10,000." The encouraging news came as workers repairing New Orleans' system of levees and water...

ROYSTON, Ga. (AP) -- While gazing at one of the exhibits in the Ty Cobb Museum, a visitor overhears a discussion about the many sides of the Georgia Peach. A dirty player or a fierce competitor? A despicable racist or a generous philanthropist? The visitor jumps into the debate with someone from a different sport, a different time, but the analogy seems to work. ``He's like Dale Earnhardt,'' said Ralph Nix, who stopped by the museum while in this northeast Georgia town on business. ``Half the people cheered him. Half the people booed him. That's just the way it is...

Nationally syndicated talk-show host Laurie Roth was critically injured in a motorcycle crash on highway 206 Thursday near Mount Spokane High School. Roth, who lives in the Spokane area and is heard locally on AM 590, hit a deer while riding her motorcycle just before 4 p.m. She was airlifted to Sacred Heart Medical Center, where Thursday night she remained in critical condition. State Troopers say Roth was wearing her helmet at the time of the accident.

Ernest Lehman, 1915-2005 I happen to be writing this on board ship, in a little café, at a table by the window, with an idle eye on any glamorous women passing by. And as always in such settings I think of North by Northwest, which contains the all-time great strangers-on-a-train/ships-in-the-night scene. In a lifetime’s travel, everyone should have a North by Northwest moment: on the Twentieth Century train to Chicago, Cary Grant walks into a crowded dining car and is seated opposite Eva Marie Saint, the coolest of cool blondes. The conversation starts out quietly smouldering and heats up from...

The Grimaldis had been intermittent rulers of their patch of the Cote d’Azur for three centures before deciding, in 1612, to make themselves “princes”. But, unlike other European princes, Honore II, Seigneur de Monaco, opted to be styled not “His Royal Highness” but “His Serene Highness”. For the last two decades of Prince Rainier’s long reign over Monte Carlo, few highnesses had less to be serene about. His American wife, who’d brought celluloid glamour to a realm where the real thing had been in short supply, died in a car crash in 1982. His older “sensible” daughter married unsuitable Euro-playboys....

TORONTO (AP) -- Bob Goodenow is stepping down early as head of the NHL Players' Association, less than a week after the union and league approved a new labor deal to end a lockout that wiped out the entire 2004-05 season. ``With the conclusion of the negotiations and the ratification of the new agreement, the parties concur that this is an appropriate action for the future,'' Goodenow said in a statement Thursday. ``I am fortunate to have had the opportunity to serve the players over the past 15 years and to have had the support of a tremendous staff at...

LONDON, July 25 (Reuters) - Former Tour de France winners Bernard Hinault and Miguel Indurain were generous in their praise of seven-times champion Lance Armstrong but refused to call him the greatest cyclist ever. Armstrong, 33, ended his career with an unprecedented seventh consecutive victory in the race on Sunday, and climbed off the podium for the final time saying "Vive le Tour forever". "We can say that he has been the best cyclist of his generation, but we shouldn't make the error of comparing his achievements to other eras as each one is different and each has its own...