Free Republic

WASHINGTON — More than 1,000 people from 85 countries who are accused of such crimes as rape, killings, torture and genocide are living in the United States , according to Department of Homeland Security figures. America has become a haven for the world's war criminals because it lacks the laws needed to prosecute them, Sen. Richard Durbin , D-Ill., said Wednesday. There's been only one U.S. indictment of someone suspected of a serious human-rights abuse. Durbin said torture was the only serious human-rights violation that was a crime under American law when committed outside the United States by a non-American...

Ask most Americans if they were aware that Iraqis, by almost a 2-to-1 margin, believe that life today is better than it was under Saddam Hussein, and you'd most likely elicit incredulousness, blank stares or outright laughter. Not because it isn't true, though. It is. The mainstream media just forgot to mention it. In the past month, two surveys that involved face-to-face interviews with thousands of ordinary Iraqis have been released. While each contained significantly different results, both provided substantial evidence that Iraqis are not nearly as gloomy as Americans have been told to believe. To the extent the mainstream...

The State Department has finally admitted (document has just been declassified) that Arafat was behind the 1973 murder of two Americans in Sudan by the Black September terrorist group. They stormed the Saudi embassy in Khartoum, taking American hostages and eventually killing them.

BAGHDAD, Dec. 26 — The American military said Tuesday that it had credible evidence linking Iranians and their Iraqi associates, detained here in raids last week, to criminal activities, including attacks against American forces. Evidence also emerged that some detainees had been involved in shipments of weapons to illegal armed groups in Iraq.

LOS ANGELES -- A man was arrested and accused of mailing threatening letters laced with white powder to Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, David Letterman and other high-profile figures, the FBI announced Sunday. FBI agents took Chad Conrad Castagana, 39, into custody Saturday on charges of conveying false information and sending threats via the U.S. mail, the bureau said in a statement.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Sunni tribal leaders who have vowed to drive al Qaeda out of Iraq's most restive province met the Shi'ite premier on Wednesday, marking what Washington hopes will be a breakthrough alliance against militants. Sattar al-Buzayi, a Sunni sheikh from Anbar province who has emerged in recent weeks as a leader of a tribal alliance against Osama bin Laden's followers, said he and about 15 other sheikhs had offered their cooperation to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. "We agreed to cooperate," Buzayi told Reuters. "We haven't agreed to anything specific, but we agreed to cooperate."

.N. inspectors investigating Iran's nuclear program angrily complained to the Bush administration and to a Republican congressman yesterday about a recent House committee report on Iran's capabilities, calling parts of the document "outrageous and dishonest" and offering evidence to refute its central claims. Officials of the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency said in a letter that the report contained some "erroneous, misleading and unsubstantiated statements." The letter, signed by a senior director at the agency, was addressed to Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), chairman of the House intelligence committee, which issued the report. A copy was hand-delivered to Gregory L....

Bathroom humor is always great fun to a fourth-grader and there’s a little bit of that in the above that seems to have been passed down from generation to generation since…since…well ever since kids started standing in lines and needed to say something cool to maintain their place in them. I must confess that there have been lots of times when I have cut in line: at the movie theater with that “front two rows only” desperation; approaching the crowded freeway exit with that “I’m already 10 minutes late” rationale. Still, my biggest cut in line occurred on April 13th...

Half a lifetime ago, I worked in this now-empty space. And for 40 days after the attacks, I worked here again, trying to make sense of what happened, and was yet to happen, as a reporter. All the time, I knew that the very air I breathed contained the remains of thousands of people, including four of my friends, two in the planes and -- as I discovered from those "missing posters" seared still into my soul -- two more in the Towers.

WASHINGTON — The State Department's decision to grant a visa to Iran's former president is sparking a rebellion among Republican members of Congress who seek a tougher line on the rogue country as it flaunts the latest U.N. deadline on its nuclear program. Yesterday afternoon, the chairman of the House Subcommittee on the Middle East and Central Asia, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Republican from Florida, began collecting signatures in Congress for a letter that she plans to send next week to Secretary of State Rice expressing "grave concerns" about the visa for Muhammad Khatemi that will allow him to speak before...

BEIJING, Aug. 31 — When high school students in Shanghai crack their history textbooks this fall they may be in for a surprise. The new standard world history text drops wars, dynasties and Communist revolutions in favor of colorful tutorials on economics, technology, social customs and globalization. Socialism has been reduced to a single, short chapter in the senior high school history course. Chinese Communism before the economic reform that began in 1979 is covered in a sentence. The text mentions Mao only once — in a chapter on etiquette. Nearly overnight the country’s most prosperous schools have shelved the...

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Attempts by the administration of US President Gearge W. Bush to justify the continuing war in Iraq by comparing it to the 20th century war against Nazism as November elections draw near could actually benefit divided Democrats, experts said. "The battle for Iraq is now central to the ideological struggle of the 21st century. We will not allow the terrorists to dictate the future of this century, so we will defeat them in Iraq," Bush told the American Legion veterans group Wednesday in Salt Lake City, Utah

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Taliban forces fighting U.S. troops in Afghanistan have grown stronger and more sophisticated, and are directing operations from neighboring Pakistan, a senior U.S. commander said on Wednesday. More than four years into the war in Afghanistan, an operation often overshadowed by the focus on Iraq, the top U.S. commander there said the Taliban has grown in the south and reconstituted itself elsewhere. It is displaying better military command and its leaders remain elusive, he said.

LONDON (AFP) - The US-led "war on terror" is increasing the risk of terrorist attacks and distracting governments from greater threats to global security such as climate change, a think-tank warned in a report. ADVERTISEMENT Yes No Yes No Yes No The Oxford Research Group urged countries, especially the United States and Britain, to rethink their security policies to counter future instability. "The war on terror is a dangerous diversion and prevents the international community from responding effectively to the most likely causes of future conflict," a press statement about the report said.

With Tuesday’s attacks, Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian militant with ties to al-Qaida, is now blamed for more than 700 terrorist killings in Iraq. But NBC News has learned that long before the war the Bush administration had several chances to wipe out his terrorist operation and perhaps kill Zarqawi himself — but never pulled the trigger. ...... Military officials insist their case for attacking Zarqawi’s operation was airtight, but the administration feared destroying the terrorist camp in Iraq could undercut its case for war against Saddam.

A copy of the annual Economic Report of the President arrived at my desk the other day, replete with a giant bald eagle on the cover and formatted, incredibly enough in OVERSIZED print – fit for an aging boomer population. My compliments to the chef, at least for the exterior garnishments. The verbiage however, was another story.

An old boss of mine was fond of saying, "There are few things in life more tragic than to see your beautiful theories murdered by a gang of brutal facts," usually when I approached him with a hare brained idea about turning one of our manufacturing systems inside out. It seems to me that if the national and global thinkers would take their grand economic theories about service economies and knowledge economies and the global marketplace out into the communities where Americans actually live and work, the carnage they would see from having their grandiose theories slaughtered left and right...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Congressional Democrats on Wednesday introduced legislation that would repeal a law that gives vaccine, drug and medical device makers broad protection against lawsuits in a public health or bioterror emergency. Democrats generally agree there should be some legal protections for certain vaccines but say the Republican version defined health emergency too broadly and did not compensate people who were injured. The liability provision, strongly favored by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee, was added to a defense bill enacted in December. Democrats would have an uphill struggle trying to repeal it.

Last week the publication I work for, the German newsweekly Die Zeit, printed one of the controversial caricatures of the prophet Muhammad. It was the right thing to do. When the cartoons were first published in Denmark in September, nobody in Germany took notice. Had our publication been offered the drawings at that point, in all likelihood we would have declined to print them. At least one of them seems to equate Islam with radical Islamism. That is exactly the direction nobody wants the debate about fundamentalism to take -- even though the very nature of a political cartoon is...

More Bay Area businesses are hanging out the "help wanted" sign than at any other time in the past three years, a new survey found. The hiring outlook is the best ever recorded by the quarterly Business Confidence Index, which began asking employers in October 2002 about their hiring plans. About 550 executives were surveyed by the Bay Area Council for the report, which was released today. "You need more employees to create more output, and that is what we are hearing from our business customers," said Michael Billeci, Wells Fargo Bank's regional president for the greater Bay Area. "Businesses...