Free Republic

"In an extraordinary move, three million 2011 notebooks were printed at a cost of £4.4million to the taxpayer. Around 350,000 of the diaries have already been shipped to schools in the UK alone. There is no record for Christmas, Easter or Lent - despite bureaucrats carefully listing the EU’s self-styled ‘Europe Day’ on May 9."

Ronald Reagan is today viewed as having achieved greatness even by political enemies. Few disagree that the 40th president brought down the Berlin Wall, brought America out of its post-Vietnam/ post-Watergate malaise, and brought confidence and vigor back to the White House. But to the man he beat in the 1980 election, Reagan was a boob whose "life seems to be governed by a few anecdotes and vignettes that he has memorized." That was President Jimmy Carter's thoughts on his final day in the White House, January 20th, 1981, when 52 U.S. hostages would finally be released by Iran, just...

It is 350 years since one of the UK's most famous diarists put pen to paper. But what was Samuel Pepys really like? And why did this modest clerk become so celebrated? A new home for a new man in a new age - on 11 July 1660, a clerk, obscure but already on the way up, was moving into a house.His new home, in Seething Lane near the Tower of London, came with his new job at the Navy Board. Samuel Pepys had been lucky. His patron had been involved with the restoration of the monarch, Charles II, from...

Plans, tapes diaries seized at Pearson airport Zaynab Khadr denies they belong to her OTTAWA—The RCMP and Canadian military believe they've discovered a vital cache of information on Al Qaeda that includes the whereabouts of wanted members and details of attacks on coalition forces in Afghanistan. The information is allegedly contained in a laptop, dozens of DVDs, audiocassettes and the pages of diaries, seized by the RCMP officers who met Zaynab Khadr at Pearson airport with a search warrant as she arrived back in Canada in February, court documents state. Khadr is the eldest daughter of a family that has...

A personal diary can be powerful reading and Wednesday at Texas Tech, the Tram family was moved to tears. A U.S. soldier saved Doctor Dang Thuy Tram's diaries after she was killed in the Vietnam War and, after all these years, her family read them for the first time Wednesday. Thuy's Sister Kim describes her sister saying, "My sister was a very gentle girl and liked music and painting." Thuy was a Vietnamese physician in her late twenties when she left for her country's war-torn jungles in winter of 1966. Her sister Phuong recalls it was a very cold winter...

BERLIN - A volume of the forged diaries of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler which fooled the world in 1983 fetched 6,500 euros in a Berlin auction on Friday. Forger, painter and military antiques dealer Konrad Kujau, who died in 2000, copied Hitler's handwriting and sold 60 volumes of the diary to Stern magazine for about $5 million. The manuscript is the last in the series, with the final entry dated April 30, 1945, the day Hitler committed suicide with Eva Braun in his bunker as the Third Reich collapsed. The starting price was 5,000 euros, the estimate 7,000 euros, a...

We have 'crash kits' with us at all times with enough survival gear for a week. Christian Peacemaker Teams, a program of Brethren, Quaker and Mennonite Churches, has posted volunteers in Iraq since Oct 25, 2002. More recently, additional delegations have gone to Iraq to educate the public and "get in the way" of potential military attacks. This is a diary by American and Canadian volunteers who are now in Iraq. The second entry is from Cliff Kindy of North Manchester, Ind. Thursday, March 6 by Cliff Kindy More than 120 Human Shields have gathered from 34 countries to be...

HANGING over the Democratic presidential campaign are Senator Bob Graham’s red shorts. To the chagrin of party officials who are hoping to oust President George W Bush, the shorts are threatening to become a distraction in a volatile primary race. Graham is one of an improbable trio of would-be candidates who were last week considering adding their names to the Democratic list of three senators, a state governor, a congressman and an African-American firebrand who have declared themselves contenders for the party’s 2004 nomination. As a former Florida governor who until recently was chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, Graham,...