Free Republic

MOSCOW -- With the clock running out on a new US-Russian arms treaty before the previous Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START, expires on December 5, a senior White House official said Sunday said that the difficulty of the task might mean temporarily bypassing the Senate’s constitutional role in ratifying treaties by enforcing certain aspects of a new deal on an executive levels and a “provisional basis” until the Senate ratifies the treaty.

WEST PALM BEACH, Florida (Reuters) - Democrat Barack Obama will leave the presidential campaign trail to visit his ailing 85-year-old grandmother in Hawaii, whose health has deteriorated in recent weeks, an aide said on Monday. With two weeks left in an intense battle for the White House, Obama will hold a campaign event in Indianapolis on Thursday and then fly to Hawaii to see his grandmother before returning to campaigning on Saturday, aide Robert Gibbs said. "Senator Obama's grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, has always been one of the most important people in his life," Gibbs said in a statement. "Along with...

If you weren't thrilled by Arnold Schwarzenegger's surprise announcement of his gubernatorial candidacy last week, you either have no heart or work as a lobbyist for a California public-employees union. His jumping into the race was an adrenaline shot for a recall effort that, if successful, will be the most bracing act of political hygiene since Theodore Roosevelt took on the meatpackers. If you were to distill all that is worst about American politics into one man, he would have perfectly combed hair and he would answer to "Gray." A cautious political hack whose only strength is selling out to...

The US is ready to install the first leg of an interim government for the new Iraq as early as Tuesday, even while fighting still rages in Baghdad, officials said yesterday. America's readiness to establish the first stages of a civil administration to run post-war Iraq comes at lightning speed and constitutes a rebuff to European ambitions to stall on the process until some kind of role for the United Nations is agreed. It was reported yesterday that the National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice has also ruled out any key role for the UN. The decision to proceed with an...

JEDDAH, 17 September — About 150 Saudi pilots are remaining idle at home without jobs as the American Embassy in Riyadh refused to issue them visas to complete their training courses in the United States, Al-Hayat reported. Despite efforts by Saudi Arabian Airlines to solve the problem of these pilots by sending them to European countries for training, the Saudi pilots of MD-90 aircraft are required to visit the US for training on the aircraft. Training on MD-90 planes is not available in other countries. “Most of the pilots are now sitting at home for about a year. They have...

ONE year ago, the world witnessed a unique kind of broadcasting - the mass murder of thousands, live on television. As a lesson in the pitiless cruelty of the human race, September 11 was up there with Pol Pot's mountain of skulls in Cambodia, or the skeletal bodies stacked like garbage in the Nazi concentration camps. An unspeakable act so cruel, so calculated and so utterly merciless that surely the world could agree on one thing - nobody deserves this fate. Surely there could be consensus: the victims were truly innocent, the perpetrators truly evil. But to the world's eternal...

<p>Four years ago, in a discussion with then-Sen. Dan Coats of Indiana, I had a thought that has stayed with me ever since -- an idea whose importance is underlined by the recent Supreme Court decision upholding the constitutionality of the Cleveland school voucher program.</p> <p>Coats was an early advocate of what President Bush calls "faith-based initiatives," the increased use of religious institutions to deliver social services. He was also, like most other Republicans, a strong believer in returning responsibilities to local government, shifting power from Washington.</p>

By Patti Zarling News-Chronicle The executive director of the United Way of Brown County said one of the reasons the agency may be facing a shortfall in donations is its newly adopted anti-discrimination policy. The agency announced last week it expects to come about 10 percent short of its funding goals. While much of that can be blamed on a slowing economy and uncertainty after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, director Toni Loch said Monday the anti-discrimination policy also is a factor. This policy, adopted in summer, states the United Way will not support agencies or programs that discriminate because ...

IF she hadn’t met George Stephanopoulos, Alexandra Wentworth would have become either a slut or a lesbian. “I had accepted the fact that I would probably just have a series of relationships . . . and produce children from a multitude of partners,” Wentworth told Glamour. “I would be the female Mick Jagger . . . before meeting George, I pondered a future with an adopted baby or a lesbian lifestyle.” As it turned out, Wentworth met her future hubby on a blind date and within three months was engaged to the Clinton administration stud.

The Donald Scott case isn't as well known as the government atrocities at Waco and Ruby Ridge. But it should be. In October of 1992, millionaire recluse Donald Scott and his bride of two months, Frances Plante Scott, lived in a storybook wooded valley in the mountains high above Malibu, Calif. Trails End Ranch is almost completely surrounded by state and federal park land, and the neighboring government entities had made numerous attempts to buy out Scott and annex his property. Frances Scott contends the National Security Agency and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratories have also had a less-well-known role in ...

PARIS - It's scandalous, wrote Roselyne Chenu venting her anger in a letter to the editor over a massive U.S. advertising placard on the wall of the Louvre. Jose Bove, a provincial farmers' leader, is more upset about U.S. junk food and the culture of the ubiquitous hamburger. Yet the anti-American sentiments of the man and woman in the streets of Paris and elsewhere have been topped just lately by members of the government who have been taking a harsher than usual view of U.S. politics and culture. In the roller coaster relations between Paris and Washington, France's Marianne has ...