Free Republic

At Kraft Foods, recipes never include words like "dredge" and "sauté". Betty Crocker recipes avoid "braise" and "truss". Land O' Lakes has all but banned "fold" and "cream" from its cooking instructions. And Pillsbury carefully sidesteps "simmer" and "sear". When the country's top food companies want to create recipes that millions of Americans will be able to understand, there seems to be one guiding principle: They need to be written for a nation of culinary illiterates. Basic cooking terms that have been part of kitchen vocabulary for centuries are now considered incomprehensible to the majority of Americans. Despite the popularity...

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico - Abdul Hakim Bukhary was once ready to kill U.S. troops in Afghanistan. But the former holy warrior has told his American captors he now loves democracy — and that hardline Taliban fighters prompted his conversion. Bukhary traveled from his native Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan in 2001 after the Taliban, who ruled Afghanistan using a strict interpretation of the Quran, called for a jihad against American soldiers. The U.S. troops were set to invade in response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States. Bukhary told his tribunal at Guantanamo Bay that he had...

TURIN, Italy -- Know this: Apolo Anton Ohno would like to go out and party now, and then soak up the admiration from fans at the Olympics and -- hey, who knows? -- maybe even get his photo taken with a Playmate. You know why he doesn't? He wants to win. He wants to represent this country with pride. He makes sacrifices so he can stand alone with that gold medal around his neck and hear "The Star-Spangled Banner" play. "I'm 23 years old," Ohno said. "I'd like to have a social life, but that's pretty much out the window...

Feb. 23, 2006 - Four months ago, Bode Miller sat across from me in the bar of a New York City hotel and shared his idea of what a perfect two weeks in Torino would look like. “For me,” he said, “the ideal Olympics would be to go in with all that pressure, all that attention and have performances that are literally tear-jerking, that make people put their heads down because they’re embarrassed at how emotional they’re getting, that make people want to try sports, talk to their kids, call their f---ing ex-wives—and come away with no medals. I think...

A wife told yesterday how she gave first aid to an injured driver unaware that her husband was lying with fatal injuries in the other car involved in the crash. Sandra French said she was struggling to come to terms with what happened, wondering if her first aid skills might have saved her husband, Tom. The accident happened outside the couple's detached, Victorian cottage when 55-year-old Mr French, an oil industry manager, went out in his wife's car to buy a bottle of wine to have with their evening meal. "All I heard was an almighty bang. I thought it...

A renowned Atlanta medical center has agreed to treat without charge a decorated Iraqi army captain paralyzed in an insurgent attack during home leave Christmas Day. [...] The Iraqi army captain has been paralyzed from the waist down since a bullet severed his spinal cord when he was ambushed by insurgents during a visit home Christmas Day. A former special forces officer in Saddam Hussein's military who battled U.S. troops in Baghdad during the 2003 war, Capt. Furat joined the "Tiger Battalion" of Iraq's fledgling new army in Diyala province northeast of Baghdad. He won the admiration and respect of...

It's some time since I visited Palestine, so I may be out of date, but I don't remember seeing many Danish flags on sale there. Not much demand, I suppose. I raise the question because, as soon as the row about the cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in Jyllands-Posten broke, angry Muslims popped up in Gaza City, and many other places, well supplied with Danish flags ready to burn. (In doing so, by the way, they offered a mortal insult to the most sacred symbol of my own religion, Christianity, since the Danish flag has a cross on it, but...

Prince Harry is to be sent to Iraq next year as a troop commander and is likely to patrol the hazardous border with Iran, defence sources have disclosed. The third in line to the throne will join the Army's 1st Mechanised Brigade, which will be deployed to Basra in May 2007. The prince has told colleagues that he is determined to go on operations and be treated as normally as possible - not kept out of the line of fire. Defence chiefs, in consultation with the Prince of Wales's office, will have to devise a plan that will not put...

Two young boys died after being locked in their bedroom with a box of matches so their parents could enjoy a "romantic evening" downstairs, a court heard yesterday. Nathan and Jeremy Miller were overcome by smoke and fumes after accidentally starting a fire, but could not escape because the door was deliberately wedged shut. Their parents, Lindsey and Scott Miller, ignored their screams, thinking that the boys were merely playing up. They only rushed to their children's aid when they heard a smoke alarm going off. By then the fire had become "like a furnace" in the bedroom. Nathan, two...

On Saturday, I took the day off and spent it at home resting, studying for the TOEFL and the GRE and hanging out with my friends whose main subject at that day was the Baghdad Sniper. Baghdad Sniper is a man who shoots US soldiers with his silent guns. He fires once and vanishes just like ghosts. There is never a follow-up shot, never a chance for US forces to identify him. It’s a matter of seconds. You’ll never hear it. In my neighborhood, a new phenomenon is incredibly increasing. CDs with videos of this ghost shooting at the US...

THE museum set up by the French authorities to commemorate the D-Day landings is struggling under a mountain of debt amid a sharp decline in the number of visitors. The Memorial Museum in Caen, Normandy, has been accused of mismanagement for turning its back on the Second World War to concentrate on subjects from feminism to Father Christmas. In recent months the museum has focused efforts on transforming itself into a “place of reflection on the contemporary world”. “It’s ridiculous,” said Claude Quétel, who was sacked as the museum’s chief historian last year after protesting that it had fallen victim...

WHEN Chris Taylor’s best friend repeatedly mentioned the name Gary, his suspicions were aroused. He didn’t know a Gary. And, when the best friend made slurpy kissing noises every time he heard the name Gary on television, Chris wondered if Ziggy was trying to tell him something about some other pretty boy. The penny dropped when, one romantic evening as Mr Taylor cuddled his girlfriend Suzy Collins on the sofa, Ziggy blurted out: “I love you, Gary.” What gave the game away was that Ziggy spoke the fatal phrase in Ms Collins’s voice. Even by the standards of African grey...

Local officials in the Bajaur district, where the airstrike happened, said 18 civilians had been killed in the attack, including six children. But the senior Pakistani official who spoke of Mr. Zawahiri suggested that the death toll was higher, and he said that at least 11 militants had been killed in the attack. Seven of the dead were Arab fighters, and another four were Pakistani militants from Punjab Province, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to brief the news media. [...] On Saturday, the Pakistani security official described some of the intelligence...

Carroll had gone to the office of Adnan Dulaimi, a white-haired Sunni Arab politician. Carroll believed she had a 10 a.m. appointment, colleagues said. She arrived early. Workers in the office kept her waiting 10 to 15 minutes, then told her Dulaimi was busy, the driver said. Dulaimi denied after the kidnapping that there had been an appointment. At 10 a.m., he was at a scheduled news conference elsewhere with a secular Shiite politician, former interim prime minister Ayad Allawi. Coming out of nowhere Saturday, clean-cut, well-dressed men with pistols swarmed Carroll's car as she left the failed interview. The...

TSUNAN, Japan, Jan. 7 - After clambering out a second-story window on Saturday, Kimie Kuwahara, 80, stood atop the 10-foot-high wall of snow surrounding her house. She surveyed this region called the snow country - the starkly white mountain range that spread out in the distance behind her, the record snowfall that had blanketed all but the triangle-shaped roofs in her neighborhood. Pushing a plowlike shovel with both hands, Ms. Kuwahara was busy clearing the fresh powder to a recessed pile several feet away under which, she swore, lay a pond with carp. Her husband, Naoji, also 80, had climbed...

A young police detective who spent nearly 500 hours sifting through rubble at Ground Zero has died of a lung disease connected to his cleanup efforts, police union officials said yesterday. James Zadroga, 34, who died Thursday at his parents' New Jersey home, retired from the NYPD in July 2004 because of his deteriorating health. He is the first emergency worker to die from constant exposure to the Sept. 11 wreckage at the World Trade Center, said Michael Palladino, president of the Detectives' Endowment Association. A high-ranking police source said the department does not have the medical authority to link...

The Cuban secret service was behind the assassination of President John F Kennedy, according to evidence presented in a new television documentary. Rendezvous with Death, to be shown on German television on Friday, offers the most convincing evidence that Fidel Castro's regime was behind the most talked-about murder of the 20th century. A former agent of the Cuban secret service G2 talks for the first time about how Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin, was, he claims, pointed out to the Cubans by the KGB. Oscar Marino, who fell out with the Castro regime, said the Cubans were desperate to eliminate...

The crime rate in New York has dropped for the 17th consecutive year, with the fewest number of recorded murders in the city since 1963. Over the past year, there have been 537 murders, down from 566 in 2004, and a peak of 2,245 in 1990. Rape, assault, burglary and car theft have all tumbled, with subway crime down by five per cent, according to New York Police Department statistics. New York is now the safest big city in America, while other major cities, including Boston, Houston and Philadelphia, are witnessing soaring crime rates. Vast areas of the city that...

I was a witness to 30 hours of extraordinary cowardice, incompetence and selfishness, which began at dawn over the village of the 1972 Munich Olympics. The memory of those failures, which led to the deaths of the core of the Israeli team, are as fresh for me now as when they happened. The 20th Games had been awarded to Munich to erase the memory of Berlin, 1936, and the Nazi salutes to Hitler. The intention was to showcase the new Germany. The guards were unarmed; wore soft-pastel suits; smiled and had been lectured that authoritarian attitudes were unacceptable for the...

The city of Houston is appealing for emergency funding to help to fight a huge crime wave following the arrival of refugees from hurricane-hit New Orleans. The murder rate in the Texan city leapt by 24 per cent last year, with the toll for November and December up by 70 per cent on the same period in 2004. There were 324 murders in Houston in 2005, compared with 263 in 2004. Of the 2005 tally, 51 occurred in November and December - up 21 on the same period of 2004. The police department has not monitored precisely how many can...