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LONDON (Reuters) - Overseas doctors, mainly from the Indian sub-continent, demonstrated outside the Department of Health in London on Friday to protest against new rules forcing them to leave Britain.

Zimbabwe's white farmers say they have been invited to apply for land - in an apparent U-turn by the government which has seized their land.

Religious group merges with gay rights task force 1,400 'welcoming' congregations are represented -- hopes for 10,000 in 5 years The gay rights movement has found God. After decades of working to change secular institutions, the national movement, which has largely convinced society that homosexuality is neither a mental disorder nor a crime, is focusing on what its leaders say is their last, and biggest, challenge: convincing believers that it's not a sin.

I've stopped watching award shows, but I'll make an exception for one of my favorite stars/diplomats. Shirley Temple Black, age 77, will be awarded a Life Achievement Award on Sunday night. She's going to be giving a speech. I will definitely be watching. The show will be on the TNT Network at 8:00 PM, Sunday, January 29th. BTW, I tried to pick out my favorite Shirley Temple movie. It's impossible. The Little Princess, Captain January, Heidi, Stowaway... I may as well list them all. It's impossible to pick just one. Any other Shirley fans?

Hi Joe: Just when I thought it was safe to say I enjoy the occasional blockbuster, Slate has asked us to discuss whether Spielberg and Lucas "killed the movies." It was a topic raised a few months ago by Louis Menand in The New Yorker and in reviews of the British critic Tom Shone's lively pro-Hollywood book Blockbuster—which is a sort of counterargument to Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls that the most extraordinary era in American cinema (the late '60s and early '70s) ended with Jaws and Star Wars. Biskind found this a major bummer; Shone mostly thinks it's...

In his weekly opinion column, Brian Walden considers the political muddle created by archaic terms such as left wing and right wing. Of all the confusing expressions in politics, left wing and right wing are the worst. We go on using these archaic terms because they're a kind of shorthand that avoids unnecessary explanations. But we'd be better off with the explanations, even if they took time. The basic terminology of politics has become misleading. Groping around to discover what's left wing or right wing distracts us from stating what the real issues are. The language of left and right...

Kill her/Don't kill her - Where do the media & others stand on this issue? Please add to this list. Let's keep it alphabetical so we can easily find names. Don't Kill Her Art Bell President George Bush Governor Jeb Bush Alan Dershowitz (believe it or not!) John Gibson Nancy Grace Joe Scarborough Randall Terry Kill Her Deepak Chopra Attorney George Felos Barney Frank If you have knowledge regarding the following media people & others, please put them on the appropriate list. Please don't make assumptions (as with Alan Dershowitz above). You have to have actually heard the words come...

ALAN DERSHOWITZ, AUTHOR, “RIGHTS FROM WRONGS”: Well, the legal situation is, whether you approve of it or not that, the court has ruled that this is the young woman’s choice, that she has made a decision to die and they are simply enforcing her will. My own view, if I were writing the Florida law, would be very different. I would say that the statement of one person reported by one other person, not in writing... SCARBOROUGH: Hearsay. DERSHOWITZ: ... should not be enough to overcome the presumption of life, that you have plenty of time, all of eternity to...

Western aid winning hearts By Mark Dodd January 12, 2005 THE spiritual head of Jemaah Islamiah says he is losing the battle for the hearts and minds of Aceh's tsunami survivors because of the humanitarian assistance from Australian and US military forces. A spokesman for Abu Bakar Bashir said the Indonesian cleric, who is on trial for terrorism, regarded the relief operations by Australian and US military personnel as a dangerous development, overshadowing the role of the Indonesian Armed Forces (TNI). "We are suspicious of the presence of foreign soldiers and their show of force and the minimum publicity given...

Gay leaders try to reframe struggle for marriage rights/They'll reach out to Middle America Washington -- From adopting a NASCAR dad to embracing the moral rhetoric of the 1960s civil rights movement, gay and lesbian leaders are rethinking their message and market after last week's sweeping election losses, but they are refusing to retreat on same-sex marriage. The Nov. 2 election was "a wake-up call for gay and lesbian Americans and organizations," Patrick Guerriero, president of the gay Log Cabin Republicans, declared in a new mission statement. "We lost," Guerriero said. "If we listen to those attempting to sanitize or...

Not everyone agrees with the concluding line in a recent column that "this is a great country." Remarkably, you can't please everyone. One of those dissenters put his thoughts into an e-mail not so much delivered to me as aimed like a dart at a bull's-eye. Although it was courageously signed - let that be a lesson to you anonymous complaint-flingers - I'm withholding his name out of an abundance of caution, much like election-night network anchors who delayed calling Electoral College gimmes Mississippi and South Carolina for George W. Bush. Without the benefit of misleading exit polls, let's just...

A network which smuggled around 200 people from the Middle East into the US via South America has been broken, according to Peruvian and US officials. They said the ring's four leaders were arrested last month in raids in Peru's capital, Lima, and Detroit in the US.

You couldn't have a starker contrast It's not quite up to the level of "Let them eat cake". However, among recent symbols of ancien-regime arrogance, it's hard to beat what Jonathan Klein said, on the Fox News Channel on September 9, in a debate with Stephen Hayes about the authenticity of the forged Rathergate documents: "You couldn't have a starker contrast between the multiple layers of checks and balances [at 60 Minutes] and a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing." Klein used to be the CBS News VP in charge of 60 Minutes, so he...

Britain A switch-off date for analogue radio will be decided later this year by Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell. Ms Jowell said she would review digital radio take-up in a foreword to a report due to be published by the industry's Digital Radio Development Bureau. She said she would be "considering how long it would be appropriate for sound digital broadcasting services to be provided in analogue form". By the end of June, 600,000 digital radios had been sold in the UK. The decision to switch off analogue radio will mean about 100 million radios will become obsolete. Cheaper sets There...

Caught the last second of it, which means I missed it all.

Caught the last second of it, which means I missed it all.

Ron Reagan, of course. They had a microphone on a street singer in NYC who was singing something about "off to fight a rich man's war". LOL. Any illusions that we had about Scarborough being a Conservative have now been totally shattered. Yeah, I admit, I was fooled. But not any longer.

I'm in San Francisco, California. I'm not happy with my ISP, so it's time for a new dialup. Any recommendations, FReepers?

Wed 7 Apr 2004 Sunnis and Shiites - Competing Strains of Islam Bursting out of Arabia early in the 7th century, warriors inspired by the new religion of Islam spread the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad across a great swath stretching from Spain to Central Asia. But this newly created Muslim world soon split into the rival strains of Sunni and Shiite Islam, a schism that has periodically exploded into violence and bitter antagonism like that seen in Iraq today. Shiites account for fewer than 15% of the one billion Muslims around the world. But they make up an estimated...

<p>If they wanted, Comcast subscribers could have watched "Table Top Sex" on the Spice channel Thursday night. Or they could have caught "Boob Mania 6." Or "Barely Legal 39."</p> <p>Comcast, the nation's largest cable company, is one of the most far-reaching distributors of pornography, offering subscribers a moaning, groaning melange of what's euphemistically called "adult entertainment" -- and profiting handsomely from the deal.</p>