Free Republic

WASHINGTON, October 24 - Chinese authorities in Xinjiang have executed a Uyghur dissident who detailed a grim litany of torture sessions in an unprecedented testimony recorded for Radio Free Asia (RFA), which he requested be held until he was "in a safe place." Officials in Hotan confirmed Oct. 22 that Shirali had been executed in Hotan but declined to say when the execution had occurred. Shirali was tried and convicted Nov. 12, 2002, and sentenced to death in March 2003 for "manufacturing and stockpiling illegal weapons and explosives," separatism, and "organizing and leading a terrorist organization." Shirali--also known as Shaheer...

OSAMA BIN LADEN: "Abandon Your Follies And Rein In Your Fools"Oct 19, 2003Source: Al JazeeraWe remind our viewers that the statements, opinions and points of view expressed in this article are those of the author and shall not be deemed to mean that they are necessarily those of Jihad Unspun, the publisher, editor, writers, contributors or staff. "This is a message from Osama bin Muhammad bin Laden to the American people regarding your aggression in Iraq. Peace be upon those who follow the righteous path. Some have the impression that you are a reasonable people. But the majority of you...

CHINA plans to launch a man into space, or maybe even two or three, next Wednesday at 6am - at least according to the travel agent with exclusive rights to market tours to watch the historic launch. It's supposed to be a state secret, but anybody who responded to advertisements placed by the China Aviation International Travel Service in two Beijing newspapers this week was let in on it. "The launch is scheduled on the 15th. It's still a secret," said a tour salesman. Just under 4000 yuan ($700) buys a return flight from Beijing to the remote Gobi desert...

St.-Sgt. Gad Ezra knew there are things more valuable than life, and was ready to pay the price. Perhaps it was mystical prescience that prompted St.-Sgt. Gad Ezra to sit down and write his will in a letter to his girlfriend Galit a month before he caught a sniper bullet in the neck in Jenin. If you are reading this letter, it means that something has happened to me. My beloved, I feel there is nothing more I want in this world than to be with you, to love you and to establish a home and a family with you....

Nearly 2,000 years after the Last Supper, Christians are still divided over what exactly Jesus meant for them to drink "in remembrance of me." Definitely wine, say Catholics, Episcopalians and some Lutherans. Grape juice, say Methodists. It depends, say Presbyterians. It doesn't matter, says The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which uses water. The Bible simply speaks of "the cup," as in First Corinthians 11:25: "After the same manner also he took the cup, when he had supped, saying This cup is the new testament in my blood: this do ye, as oft as ye drink it, in...

RYE, N.Y., Dec. 15 — Bishop George E. Packard has a burden. He carries it with him. There are times in his sleep when it overpowers him and wakes him in agitation. There are days when stress mounts. And in the ticking of the clock, the race toward oblivion that is the fate of all human beings, he seeks atonement in everything he does as a husband, a father and an Episcopal priest. When he was in his 20's, before he went to seminary and became ordained, Bishop Packard was an Army lieutenant who led a platoon in Vietnam that...

Want to forget about terrorism and all those distracting rumors of war? Need to ignore the economy for a while? Got the holiday blues? Our culture has a sure-fire cure -- the traditional spate of post-Thanksgiving movies. This year, despite a clamor over the latest Harry Potter film, much of the attention is going to another fantasy called "The Two Towers" -- Part 2 in the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy. Will it succeed in distracting us for a while, conveying audiences to a world more beautiful and stirring than humdrum modern life? Naturally, I enjoyed the "Lord of the...

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - "Bowling for Columbine," about gun culture in America, gained momentum on Thursday as it rolls toward the Oscars, racking up the honor of best documentary of all time from the International Documentary Association. Director Michael Moore also had the No. 3 nonfiction film on the list with his 1989 title, "Roger & Me," in which he took on automaker General Motors Corp. and its then-Chief Executive Roger Smith over a plant closure at Flint, Michigan that left thousands of employees jobless. Coming in No. 2 was 1988's "The Thin Blue Line," about wrongful convictions in the...

<p>PARIS A part of the neoconservative intelligentsia in Washington is trying to turn the Bush administration's "war against terrorism" into a war against Muslim civilization and the Islamic religion.</p> <p>Such influential figures as Eliot Cohen of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and Kenneth Adelman of the Defense Department advisory policy board, a former Reagan administration official, criticize President George W. Bush for his efforts to assure Muslims that his war is against terrorism, not against their religion.</p>

Sharp guy, that Einstein. Kinda funny looking, what with the big hair and all, but real smart. Relativity, that was his thing. That and E=mc2, right? Interesting stuff. Really nice guy too, or was there something about Mrs. Einstein getting a raw deal? Still, he was a genius, definitely a genius. You don't need to be an Einstein to know that. Nearly 50 years after his death and a century after the then unknown physicist started challenging doctrine and stretching brains with his ideas, Albert Einstein remains not just scientifically relevant but a multipurpose icon as well. If anything, his...

keptics in growing number are weighing in with doubts about the authenticity of the inscription on a burial box that may have contained the bones of James, a brother of Jesus, and so could be the earliest surviving archaeological link to Jesus Christ. When the existence of the limestone bone box, or ossuary, was announced five weeks ago, a French scholar asserted that the inscription — "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus" — most probably referred to the Jesus of the New Testament. The script, he said, was in the style of the Aramaic language of the first century...

ZHONGXIANG, China She never broke when she was tortured with beatings and electrical shocks, and even when she was close to death she refused to disclose the names of members of her congregation or sign a statement renouncing her Christian faith. But now, months later, Ma Yuqin abruptly chokes and her eyes well with tears as she recounts her worst memory: As she was being battered in one room, her son was tortured in the next so that each could hear the other's screams, as encouragement to betray their church. "They wanted me to hear his cries," she said, sobbing....

What if Snowball had his chance? An American novelist has written a parody of "Animal Farm," George Orwell's 1945 allegory about the evils of communism, in which the exiled pig, Snowball, returns to the farm and sets up a capitalist state, leading to misery for all the animals. The book, "Snowball's Chance" by John Reed, is being published this month by Roof Books, a small independent press in New York. And the estate of George Orwell is not happy about it. William Hamilton, the British literary executor of the Orwell estate, objected to the parody in an e-mail message to...

BEIJING With the new Chinese Communist leaders launching their rule this week, I dropped by to get the perspective of the bravest man I've ever met. They won't change the dictatorship, scoffed Ren Wanding, the pioneer of China's human rights movement. They'll change economically to a capitalist society, but not politically. Mr. Ren is so tough-minded that during the time he was imprisoned, from 1979 to 1983, for pressing his human rights campaign, he wrote a four-volume book on democracy with the only material he could find: toilet paper and the discarded nib of a pen. After his release he...

HEBRON, West Bank, Nov. 17 — It is because they believe that Abraham bought a cave to entomb himself and his family here 4,000 years ago that religious Jews feel they must live in Hebron now. It was because 12 Israelis were killed in an ambush here on Friday night that Naaman Menachan, a 20-year-old yeshiva student, came to a recently bulldozed Palestinian orchard on Saturday evening with a submachine gun across his chest and a sleeping bag over his shoulder. In Hebron, where the political and religious divisions are animated by death, a new settlement was born on Saturday....

<p>LOS ANGELES, California (Reuters) -- A Vietnamese actor branded a traitor by the Hanoi government and placed under virtual house arrest for appearing in an American-made Vietnam War film has broken his silence to call the charges against him "ridiculous" and "cruel."</p>

In April 2002, eight months after the attacks of Sept. 11, a Saudi cleric named Sheik Saad al-Buraik, preaching in a mosque in the Saudi capital of Riyadh, called for the enslavement of Jewish women by Muslim men. "Do not have mercy or compassion toward the Jews," Mr. al Buraik said. "Their women are yours to take, legitimately. God made them yours." Mr. al-Buraik, it is important to note, was a member of the official Saudi delegation that accompanied Crown Prince Abdullah during his visit to President Bush in Crawford, Tex., at the end of April 2002. And Stephen Schwartz...

Since becoming Hong Kong's number two-ranking Catholic prelate in 1996, Bishop Joseph Zen has been an advocate for human rights and religious freedom. Following last month's death of Cardinal John Wu, Zen now leads the city's 227,000 Catholics—and he tells TIME's Bryan Walsh he doesn't plan to pipe down. Do you feel any pressure to mute your criticism of the government?Before, I was just assistant bishop, but now I'm the bishop, so maybe I have to be a little more indirect. How do you respond to critics who say that clerics should stay out of politics?We don't like to call...

<p>In theory, the seven members of the supreme Politburo Standing Committee (PSC) of the Chinese Communist Party will be chosen by the 2010 delegates who are attending Friday's 16th party Congress.</p> <p>However, in long-standing party tradition, the participants of the week-long congress will just endorse the decisions of Jiang and powerful out-going leaders such as Premier Zhu Rongji and National People's Congress (NPC) Chairman Li Peng.</p>

<p>HONG KONG, China (CNN) -- He is one of the most outspoken critics of both the Hong Kong government and Beijing, a position that has led Bishop Joseph Zen to be called the conscience of Hong Kong.</p> <p>Recently inaugurated as the new head of the Hong Kong Catholic Church, Zen is happy to describe himself as something of a rebel.</p>