Free Republic

July 1, 2010 - New York City Voters Oppose Mosque Near Ground Zero, Quinnipiac University Poll Finds; Does Mosque Foster Understanding Or Insult 9/11 Victims? New York City voters oppose 52 - 31 percent a proposal by a Muslim group to build a mosque and cultural center two blocks from Ground Zero, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released today. Another 17 percent are undecided. Opinions about the proposed mosque range from 46 - 36 percent support among Manhattan voters to 73 - 14 percent opposition in Staten Island, the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pe-ack) University poll finds. Opposition to the mosque...

Seeking independent practicesNurse practitioners, midwives ask end to pacts with doctors By CATHLEEN F. CROWLEY, Staff writer First published: Saturday, June 12, 2010 ALBANY - Midwives and nurse practitioners in New York are trying to break free of formal ties to physicians. Both groups of have bills before legislators that would remove the legal requirement that they have written practice agreements with a doctor. "The piece of paper doesn't mean anything because we are going to collaborate with the person who is the most appropriate (for the medical situation)," said Laura Sheperis, president of the New York State Association of...

U.S. To Back Unilateral Declaration Of Palestinian State? Top official negotiating with Washington on threat to ask for recognition from U.N. By Aaron Klein © 2009 WorldNetDaily TEL AVIV – The Palestinian Authority has been negotiating an understanding with the Obama administration regarding a Palestinian threat to unilaterally ask the United Nations to recognize a Palestinian state outside of negotiations with Israel, WND has learned. According to a senior PA official, the PA's chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat, headed a team that held a series of meetings the past few weeks with members of the Obama administration in Washington to discuss...

The day after the UN created the State of Israel, the country's first president, Chaim Weizmann, found time to work on his memoir, "Trial and Error." In it, he issued a warning to the Israeli leaders of today: "I am certain that the world will judge the Jewish state by what it will do with the Arabs." It was Nov. 30, 1947. Weizmann was an astonishingly accomplished man - chemist, diplomat, statesman - but maybe his most uncanny talent was that of seer. Peering into the future, he glimpsed the ugly turn Israeli politics has recently taken and how it...

GAZA CITY — The fighter was wearing slippers, had not showered for days and had been living on dried dates. But he was in a good mood because Tuesday was payday. As beleaguered as Hamas’s military wing might seem after more than 900 Palestinian deaths and 18 days of fighting, he and two other young men here say it is not broken.

A supervisor at a motivational coaching business in Utah allegedly used waterboarding on a member of his sales team to motivate staff, according to a lawsuit filed by an employee, the Salt Lake Tribune reports. Chad Hudgens, a former salesman for Prosper, Inc., in Provo, Utah, alleges his manager, Joshua Christopherson, asked him to lie on a hill before he poured water from a gallon jug into Hudgens' mouth and nostrils as other sales staff held him down, the paper reports. "At the conclusion of his abusive demonstration, Christopherson told the team that he wanted them to work as hard...

Three well-heeled local millionairesses in Congress have built fortunes that dwarf the nest eggs of their male colleagues, financial-disclosure reports reveal. Democratic Reps. Nita Lowey, Carolyn Maloney, and Carolyn McCarthy all are in the club of millionaires, whose most famous member is Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

No jail for tree lovebirds BY BARBARA ROSSDAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER Two men arrested after a nearly-naked treetop tryst in Central Park last year got taken to the woodshed yesterday. But preoperative transsexual William Rund, 33, and boy toy Christopher Montero, 18, won't have to do any time behind bars. The ponytailed Rund got three years' probation, and Montero got five days of community service from a Criminal Court judge for the X-rated show they put on last April 22. "I did it out of love," said Rund, whose affair with Montero ran afoul of the teen's family as well...

March 13, 2005MODERN LOVESleeping With the Guitar Player By JEAN HANFF KORELITZ N the Ages of Man, there are the classics - infancy, childhood, adulthood. We have the Midlife Crisis, of course, so dear to therapists and second wives everywhere. There is adolescence, which in some men seems to last, oh, well, when does it end? But in the last few years I've experienced, via my husband, another masculine stage, one I'd been blissfully unaware of. This is the time of a man's life that I must now and forever think of as the Guitar-in-the-Basement phase. Six years ago, when...

March 13, 2005 Here Comes the Mother-to-Be By MIREYA NAVARRO OS ANGELESFOR her wedding last year before 100 guests at the historic Mission Inn in Riverside, Calif., Neomi Padilla, 32, wore a sexy spaghetti-strap dress from L'ezu Atelier in Newport Beach and four-inch heels. Then she held on for dear life.At the altar, she was unable to kneel comfortably. "My husband held me because I thought I'd fall," she said. Making her way down a staircase to the reception things got more precarious. Being seven months pregnant, she couldn't see her feet. Only a few years ago, women planning simultaneously...

February 27, 2005 On the Home Front, a Source of Support By KATE ZERNIKE MONG the promises to help firm your thighs or give you a more lustrous head of hair that shout out from covers of women's magazines, "7 Things to Expect From A Man Who's Been Living in the Desert" strikes a somewhat discordant note. It was one of the teasers gracing the cover of the first issue of Military Spouse, a new magazine published every other month that was founded in the run-up to the Iraq war by two Navy wives frustrated by what they perceived as...

February 27, 2005 Bush's Next Target: Malpractice Lawyers By STEVE LOHR HICAGOTODD A. SMITH is one of the nation's leading medical malpractice lawyers, renowned and feared in the courtroom, having extracted a lengthy string of multimillion-dollar settlements and verdicts from doctors, hospitals and insurers over the years. Though wealthy even by the standards of his profession, Mr. Smith, 55, seems to have lost none of the intensity and passion that fuel his 12- to 14-hour workdays and make him a persuasive trial lawyer.Seated in his law firm's conference room, with an Olympian view high above Lake Michigan, Mr. Smith recited...

February 13, 2005 How Do I Love Thee? I'm Not Sure Yet By DAMIEN CAVE IET GAUCHAT arrived at his new girlfriend's apartment on Valentine's Day a few years ago with box of chocolate candy and a card. Their first date had occurred only a few weeks earlier, and since he had just ended a serious relationship, Mr. Gauchat approached the holiday warily. He figured candy was safe - a step up from the clip-on teddy bear he'd given to someone a few years back, yielding the complaint that he was "an emotional park bench." The idea was simply to...

February 13, 2005MODERN LOVEBack From the Front, With Honor, a Warrior's Truth By HELEN GERHARDT OHN was a love child, conceived on the driver's seat of my rusty old Volvo as I sped toward my National Guard headquarters in March of 2002. I was aglow with unexpected discovery, my body flush from hours of cuddling skin to skin with my newly beloved. But I had lingered too long and now was pushing the speedometer toward 90 in a 70 mile-an-hour zone, trying desperately to get to the armory in time for morning formation. I was speeding toward what I knew...

12:44pm (UK) Palace Award for Rock Star Daltrey By Laura Elston, PA Deputy Court Correspondent He may have been accepted by the “Establishment”, but rock star Roger Daltrey insisted today that The Who’s songs were not quite the Queen’s cup of tea. The 60-year-old lead singer said the monarch would have “fallen off her podium” if his rebellious 60s anthem My Generation had been blasted out at Buckingham Palace while he collected his CBE. Daltrey said afterwards: “She said I got this for my music as well as charity work but I don’t think she’s a rock and roll fan....

February 6, 2005 In Barrooms, Smoking Ban Is Less Reviled By JIM RUTENBERG and LILY KOPPEL ack in 2002, when the City Council was weighing Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's proposal to eliminate smoking from all indoor public places, few opponents were more fiercely outspoken than James McBratney, president of the Staten Island Restaurant and Tavern Association.He frequently ripped Mr. Bloomberg as a billionaire dictator with a prohibitionist streak that would undo small businesses like his bar and his restaurant. Visions of customers streaming to the legally smoke-filled pubs of New Jersey kept him awake at night.Asked last week what he...

February 6, 2005MODERN LOVEThe Patriots Made a Man of Me, in a Manner of Speaking By BRENDAN TAPLEY S a gay man, I've spent my whole life trying to figure out how to talk "guy." That may sound strange - you may not think debating the merits of the latest plasma TV or sparring over the quickest highway directions are exactly conversational standards to aspire to. But I've always longed for the camaraderie that succeeding at guy talk confers. Whenever I've tried to bridge this language divide, I've only crashed and burned. (Lobbying to read my college roommates' tarot cards...

The high school cheerleader who allegedly hid the stolen handgun used to kill actress Nicole duFresne never should have covered up for the murderer, the actress' heartbroken fiancé said yesterday. "She didn't have to flee the state, hide the gun and take on another person's crime in the way that she did," 29-year-old Jeffrey Sparks said of Ashley Evans, who went to her father's Maryland home after the crime. "She could have come forward. She didn't have to hide out," Sparks said before a memorial ceremony on the lower East Side to honor the woman he had planned to marry...

LONDON (Reuters) - Despite complaints from 60 people, Britain's advertising regulators said Wednesday there is nothing inappropriate about the genitals of an animated frog whose high-pitched squeals are sold as a mobile phone ringtone. Television adverts of the motorcycle-riding Crazy Frog, who is drawn with a broad smile and a tiny penis, run frequently on British television, amusing, baffling and annoying viewers. "While unusual for an animated model of this type to be shown with genitalia, no sexual or inappropriate references were made about its anatomy," the UK's Advertising Standards Authority said. Twenty-two people complained they were worried children might...

By Gail Mitchell LOS ANGELES (Billboard) - Following a suicide attempt, R&B singer Houston has gouged out his eye while on an overseas performance junket.   A brief statement was released Wednesday by his Capitol Records label, saying only, "Our thoughts and prayers are with Houston during this tragic time." According to sources, the singer first attempted to jump out of a London hotel window last Thursday. Prevented from doing so by his security staff, Houston was locked in his room, at which time the injury occurred. No additional details as to his current condition or whereabouts have been disclosed....