Free Republic

A group of libertarian-minded Republicans in Congress is blocking President Bush’s effort to strengthen domestic counterterrorism laws and reauthorize the USA Patriot Act, which the president has made one of his top domestic priorities this year. As a result of this opposition, Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, was forced last week to cancel panel consideration of legislation that would have given law-enforcement officials more tools to pursue suspected terrorists. As other administration policy initiatives — such as a manned mission to Mars — have languished in Congress, Bush has emphasized the importance of renewing the...

Putin Watches As Missile Launch Fails By VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV The Associated Press Tuesday, February 17, 2004; 2:45 PM MOSCOW - A technical glitch thwarted the launch of Russian ballistic missiles in the Barents Sea on Tuesday during naval maneuvers overseen by President Vladimir Putin, who watched the massive exercise while decked out in naval officer's garb aboard a nuclear submarine. The failed launch - part of an exercise described as the largest show of Russian military might in more than 20 years - marred an event apparently aimed at playing up Putin's image as a leader attempting to restore the...

<p>FRESNO - California's political odd couple kicked off their campaign to pass a $15 billion bond on the March ballot, stressing that the state faces ``Armageddon cuts'' if voters reject it.</p> <p>Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Democratic Controller Steve Westly appeared in a town hall-style meeting at Duncan Ceramics in an industrial part of east Fresno to stump for the bond and a companion measure that would limit state spending.</p>

New bid fails to raise Beagle Scientists say two further attempts to contact Britain's Beagle 2 Mars probe have failed. The craft's mothership, Mars Express, flew over the landing site at 12.50pm yesterday and 1.27pm today but heard no signal. Mars Express was in its most sensitive listening mode. Hopes of finding the lander, which has been missing since Christmas Day, are now fading fast.More passes will be made tomorrow at 2.04pm and on Monday at 2.02am. Story filed: 18:10 Friday 9th January 2004

UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- Old rifts over the war in Iraq kept the European Union from forging a united position on when the United States should cede power, highlighting the difficulties Washington will face trying to reach agreement on a new U.N. resolution. President Bush hopes such a resolution will bring more troops and money into Iraq. The unofficial target date for adopting a U.N. resolution is Oct. 22 - the day before a major donors meeting begins in Madrid, Spain, to try to generate funds for Iraq's reconstruction. On Monday, Russia said it wants a "realistic but short" timeline...

ADD another billion, more or less, to California's budget crisis. When state lawmakers finally got around to approving a budget, they managed to make the document look a mere $8.1 billion in the red -- significantly lower than the earlier estimate of $38 billion. But the politicians' dirty little secret is that many of the savings they claim to have achieved were imaginary -- derived from accounting gimmicks, borrowing, and forecasts based on rosy assumptions that had little chance of ever coming true. One of those rosy predictions was that the state's public-employee unions would agree to forgo the pay...

Florida security plan fails AP in Tampa Thursday August 21, 2003 The Guardian (UK) Florida police have scrapped a security camera system that scanned city streets for criminals, saying it had failed to recognise anyone wanted by authorities since its introduction two years ago. The system was intended to recognise the facial characteristics of criminals and runaway children by matching passers-by in the Ybor City district of Tampa with a database of 30,000 mugshots. "It's just proven not to have any benefit to us," Captain Bob Guidara, a department spokesman, said. The cameras have led only to arrests for such...

Korea nuclear talks bid fails The North is thought to have stored 8,000 spent fuel rods South Korea has failed to persuade the North to attend talks with its neighbours and the United States to resolve the dispute over its nuclear weapons programme. Delegations from the two Koreas, meeting in the southern capital Seoul, did agree to seek a peaceful solution through "appropriate" dialogue. North Korea has long insisted on first having bilateral discussions with the US before wider talks involving China and Japan as it blames Washington for provoking the crisis over its weapons programmes. At the meeting, which...

Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas failed to win agreement from Hamas militants on Wednesday to halt attacks on Israel, despite an Israeli concession made under U.S. pressure to help salvage a peace plan. Security sources said Israel had agreed to curb its "track-and-kill" operations against Palestinian militants in a deal struck with U.S. officials seeking to prop up a peace "road map" imperiled by a recent wave of violence. Militant Palestinian leaders dismissed the Israeli gesture as meaningless, underlining the difficulties U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell will face on a trouble-shooting mission to the region on Friday. Prime Minister...

Schröder meeting with Powell fails to heal Iraq rift By Tony Paterson, in Berlin 17 May 2003 The German Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, failed to repair the "poisoned" relationship between Berlin and Washington when he met the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, yesterday during the first visit to Germany by a top US government official since the fallout between the two countries over the Iraq war. George Bush has not spoken to Mr Schröder since Germany's decision to oppose armed intervention in Iraq. The row was exacerbated by Germany's former justice minister, who compared the US President to Adolf Hitler....

Bush fails to win Russian support for tough stance By Rupert Cornwell in Washington 21 September 2002 Russia and the United States failed to resolve differences yesterday on what is emerging as the central issue in the Iraq crisis – US insistence that United Nations weapons inspectors cannot return until the UN has passed a stern new resolution spelling out the consequences if Baghdad fails to co-operate. After meeting President George Bush in the Oval Office, Igor Ivanov, Russia's Foreign Minister, said merely that the two sides would pursue their exchange of views on how to make the work of...

A week's worth 9-11 smear-mongering by leading Democrats and their media handmaidens has failed to dent President Bush's popularity, according to the latest CNN-USA Today-Gallup poll. More than three-quarters of those surveyed gave Bush a positive job approval rating, despite an onslaught of politically motivated accusations that administration officials failed to connect the dots on intelligence data that could have forewarned of the 9-11 attacks. Sixty percent of those surveyed said the information available before the attacks would not have been enough for administration officials to have predicted what was coming. Nineteen percent said the Bush administration made "an understandable...