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Hurricane season finally ending, but next year could be bad, too By JOHN PAIN Associated Press Writer November 29. 2005 4:27PM The busiest and costliest Atlantic hurricane season on record officially - and mercifully - draws to a close Wednesday, with hundreds of thousands of Americans still dealing with the devastation wrought by Katrina, Rita and Wilma. Despite the end of the June 1-to-Nov. 30 season, hurricanes could still form over the next few months. In fact, a tropical storm took shape in the Atlantic on Tuesday. But no hurricane has been known to hit the United States between December...

Rice supporters hope for Hollywood ending By Philip Sherwell in Washington (Filed: 02/10/2005) For the self-styled "Condistas", it was too good an opportunity to miss. Devoted admirers of Condoleezza Rice bought time for a television commercial backing the Secretary of State for the White House in 2008, during last week's premiere of Commander-in-Chief, a new series about America's first female president. It was the highest-profile move yet in a burgeoning grassroots campaign to persuade Dr Rice to stand for the nation's highest office, despite her public statements that she has no desire to seek the nomination. Geena Davis plays the...

On June 8, 2005, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan visited President Bush in the White House. Among the topics the two discussed were freedom, democracy, and the rule of law. Speaking from the Oval Office, Bush declared Turkey's democracy to be "an important example for the people of the broader Middle East."Turkey remains an important ally of the United States despite recent bilateral tensions over the Iraq war and its aftermath. Both Republican and Democratic administrations have valued Turkey not only as a strategic military partner in the Cold War but also, in recent decades, as a democratic outpost...

Not only is there a bright side for conservatives in the recent Senate “compromise” on Presidential appointments, but it’s hard to find any reason at all to justify celebration by liberal Democrats. President Bush’s long-stalled 5th Circuit nominee, Priscilla Owen, now sits on that federal bench, and confirmations of capable conservatives Janice Rogers Brown and William Pryor are soon to follow. Even the prospective nominations of William Meyers and Henry Saad have been sidetracked in thought only. Make no mistake – the dam has cracked and its eventual collapse is as easy as ever to see. The seven Republican signatories...

The best way to understand the brouhaha over the Republican plan to invoke the constitutional option to prohibit Senate filibusters to thwart judicial nominations is that Democrats are very poor losers, but Republicans are even poorer winners -- so far. The reason we're even talking about a so-called " nuclear option" is that Democrat leaders remain in denial about their consistent drubbing at the ballot box. They won't accept that the public has rejected their message. They are acting like the ornery little brother who hits his older brother, and when big brother merely threatens to hit back, he goes...

First came the reports of "Chief's Disease," with retiring California Highway Patrol command staff members spiking their pensions by filing questionable disability claims. Then, it was revealed that many retiring Los Angeles County firefighters manipulated the pension system the same way. Now we learn county sheriff's deputies get enhanced pension benefits at nearly the highest rate in the state. Experts speculate that these departments represent just a drop in the as-yet-undiscovered reservoir of public employee pension fraud. The public employee pension system is rife with fraud. Many savvy government employees have figured how to milk it for a cushier retirement...

Gal Luft is executive director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security in Washington, D.C. He is a specialist on strategic issues and energy policy with a PhD in strategic studies from Johns Hopkins University. A former lieutenant colonel in the Israel Defense Forces, his writings have appeared in Commentary, Foreign Affairs, the Los Angeles Times, Middle East Review of International Affairs, the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal. Mr. Luft addressed the Middle East Forum in Philadelphia on October 27, 2004. Introduction In both World War Two and the Cold War, the side best deploying scientific...

How fitting is it that the Kerry campaign is going to crash and burn in this last week because they made a huge deal out of an outright lie by the New York Times and CBS in an effort to defeat the President? Really, it just couldn't have happened any other way. There's an old saying about stuff like this. We're not sure if it's Buddhist, Confucianism or what, and it goes something like this - "Karma's a Bitch". For the last 2 years or so the left wing America-haters have been spouting lie after ridiculous lie about George Bush....

UNITED NATIONS - The Security Council threw its weight behind talks aimed at halting a year-old conflict in western Sudan, calling on the government and opposition groups to halt fighting for humanitarian reasons and to settle their dispute politically. The conflict in the Darfur region has driven hundreds of thousands of people from their homes in a campaign one U.N. official said was "ethnic cleansing." "Every effort has to be made to find a settlement to the conflict, " Germany's Ambassador Gunter Pleuger, the current council president, told journalists after the council unanimously passed the statement Friday The conflict is...