Free Republic

WASHINGTON – It's a war memorial. It includes a cross. It is on public land. And while politicians use congressional maneuvers to keep the cross there, others say it's unconstitutional and should be removed. This sounds a lot like the cross atop Mount Soledad in La Jolla, but it's not. About 275 miles away in the Mojave Desert stands a far less prominent but nonetheless controversial cross that, like the Mount Soledad cross, has been the subject of lawsuits and court-ordered removals. Unlike Mount Soledad, however, the battle surrounding the desert cross at a place called Sunrise Rock has focused...

The fate of the nation's most ambitious stem cell research agency will soon rest in the hands of a California judge as the weeklong trial challenging the institute's legality neared conclusion Wednesday. Three taxpayer groups have alleged in two lawsuits that the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine lacks the proper state government oversight to dole out $3 billion in stem cell grants over the next 10 years. They also accused the board that oversees the agency as being rife with conflict of interests and wrongly exempting itself from the state's open-meeting law. The trial was expected to end Thursday after...

Greetings. I think I have resolved the matter of fate and free will. Please criticize me. Thank you. FREEDOM IS NOT FREE The quandary posed by the perennial matter of fate v. free will is complicated, but I believe I have resolved it as much as such a thing can be resolved. First, free will in itself is a misnomer--I am not even sure what our will is expected to be free from. External influence? Internal influence? Even if we could live free from all influence whatsoever, which is impossible, we did not create ourselves in the beginning. You would...

Text of Address by Alexander Solzhenitsynat Harvard Class Day Afternoon Exercises,Thursday, June 8, 1978I am sincerely happy to be here with you on this occasion and to become personally acquainted with this old and most prestigious University. My congratulations and very best wishes to all of today's graduates. Harvard's motto is "Veritas." Many of you have already found out and others will find out in the course of their lives that truth eludes us if we do not concentrate with total attention on its pursuit. And even while it eludes us, the illusion still lingers of knowing it and...

Katrina is gone -- and so are many kids Team pursues difficult search for more than 1,300 missing children TINA SUSMAN Newsday Posted on Sun, Dec. 11, 2005 Royce Osbourne, in a skeleton mask, marches in a protest for hurricane victims' rights in New Orleans December 10, 200. Protesters feared they would receive federal funds to rebuild their homes. REUTERS/Lee Celano NEW ORLEANS - Three months after Hurricane Katrina ripped through the Gulf Coast, the fate of more than 1,300 children remains unknown. Until a few days ago, Lil Joe and Kolenik Williams, brothers from New Orleans, were among the...

Ex-Clinton aide's fate in jury's hands Rosen denies wrongdoing in reporting cost of gala to FEC Wednesday, May 25, 2005 Posted: 11:53 PM EDT (0353 GMT) LOS ANGELES, California (CNN) -- Jurors in the federal trial of David Rosen, former finance director of Hillary Clinton's U.S. Senate campaign, will begin deliberating his fate Thursday. **SNIP** Defense and prosecuting attorneys finished their closing arguments Wednesday. The jury was to convene Thursday at 8:30 a.m. (11:30 a.m. ET). Rosen's attorney, Paul Sandler, described his client as "courageous and truthful," adding that Rosen "has suffered for years with this sword of Damocles over...

This was written in the Daily Record (Ellensburg's paper) on Wed. Oct. 6, 2004. It was written by Mathew (only one t) Manweller who is a Central Washington University political science professor. The title of the article was "Election determines fate of nation." "In that this will be my last column before the presidential election there will be no sarcasm, no attempts at witty repartee. The topic is too serious, and the stakes are too high. This November we will vote in the only election during our lifetime that will truly matter. Because America is at a once-in-a-generation crossroads, more...

Fate of Nation -- Editorial This was written in the Daily Record (Ellensburg, Washington) on Wed. Oct. 6, 2004, by Mathew Manweller, who is a Central Washington University political science professor. This should transcend political affiliations, and is not a matter of Republicans, Democrats or Independents, it is about being an "American". "Election Determines Fate of Nation" "In that this will be my last column before the presidential election there will be no sarcasm, no attempts at witty repartee. The topic is too serious, and the stakes are too high. This November we will vote in the only election during...

In the movie Terminator 2: Judgement Day, the very buff-and-ready Sarah Connor pulls out her K-Bar from her belt holster and carves "No Fate" in to a park bench somewhere in the Desert Southwest. This is further explained in the movie to mean "No fate but what we make." What a pithy, yet profound, statement. Much of the Left complains that Bush's policies vis-a-vis Iraq do not reflect reality. To play off the above notion, I will say that there is no reality but what we make. The Germans bombed Pearl Harbor (sorry - I was channeling John Belushi aka...

<p>Lodi, San Joaquin County -- If Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger succeeds in persuading voters to approve his $15 billion deficit bond, then the victory may well hinge on how it plays in Central Valley towns like Lodi, a community that traces its fiscal conservatism back to the frugal German farmers who settled the area.</p>

BAGHDAD, Iraq - U.S. bombs never hit Saddam Hussein's grandiose presidential palace in Baghdad, making its ample meeting rooms and vast conference tables an ideal headquarters for U.S.-led occupation authorities after the war. Now the building — the physical seat and biggest symbol of Saddam's 23-year dictatorship — is the likely site for the next U.S. Embassy in Iraq, U.S. officials in Washington and Iraq said this week. A State Department official in Washington, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the palace is among several locations under consideration for the embassy, where the U.S. government's official representative will be based...

Hardliners 'make Iran risk fate of dictator' By Robin Gedye, Foreign Affairs Writer (Filed: 08/05/2003) Reformist Iranian MPs warned the country's powerful and entrenched clerics yesterday to give way to reforms and normalise relations with the outside world or suffer the fate of Saddam Hussein. An open letter, signed by 153 deputies in the 290-seat Majlis and read out in the chamber, said Iran was in "a critical situation" and the ruling establishment risked losing the support of the people, who had overwhelmingly voted for reform. The appeal reflected concerns in the region over the ease with which the coalition...

Missing, presumed dead The fate of many people - on both sides of the conflict - is still unclear 13 April 2003 The soldiers "I didn't receive any order from the beginning." An Iraqi colonel with the elite Republican Guard, who commanded a force of about 600 men, has revealed that his demoralised men fled from their units, without fear of punishment, as Allied bombs crashed on to their positions. The colonel, who joined other comrades changing back into civilian clothes to catch the bus home about a week before Baghdad was taken, said he had initially been ordered to...

Survivor or suicide? Intelligence agencies debate Saddam's fate SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COMMonday, March 17, 2003 LONDON — Western intelligence agencies can agree on one thing: For the first time Saddam Hussein knows that war is imminent. But there is no agreement on how the Iraqi president will respond in the final days of a 12-year showdown with the United States. The argument pits intelligence officials who assess that Saddam will offer to abdicate against others who conclude that the president will fight to his death. The intelligence debate was sparked by the clearest signals by Saddam that he is...

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2003 March 3 Will the Universe End in a Big Rip? Illustration Credit & Copyright: Lynette Cook Explanation: How will our universe end? Recent speculation now includes a pervasive growing field of mysterious repulsive energy that rips virtually everything apart. Although the universe started with a Big Bang, analysis of recent cosmological measurements allows a possibility that it will end with a Big Rip. As soon as few...

February 4, 2003The space program must fly higher WASHINGTON--First we will mourn the brave and beautiful who fell out of the sky. Then, however, we will proceed to the usual post-catastrophe ritual: investigation and recrimination. We will search for the culprits. Some human agent will be hauled out to bear the blame. And we will search for the cause: flying foam, wing damage, insulating tiles, whatever--we will find it. But we will miss the point. The point is that the first 150 or so miles of space travel--braving the gravitational well of Earth and shooting through the atmosphere--is the...

<p>UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) -- In the end, it seems it was just another dumb blond joke.</p> <p>The World Health Organization (WHO), the Geneva-based health arm of the United Nations, insisted on Tuesday that despite the many media reports to the contrary, it had never conducted a study predicting the extinction of the natural blond hair gene.</p>

IF I KNEW If I knew it would be the last time That I'd see you fall asleep, I would tuck you in more tightly and pray the Lord, your soul to keep. If I knew it would be the last time that I see you walk out the door, I would give you a hug and kiss and call you back for one more. If I knew it would be the last time I'd hear your voice lifted up in praise, I would video tape each action and word, so I could play them back day after day. If...

<p>For 45 horrifying minutes, Christine McMichael teetered inches from doom inside her SUV snagged on an overpass guardrail on Interstate 4.</p> <p>McMichael, 28, was apparently driving home to New Smyrna Beach when her green 1999 Ford Explorer careened into the guardrail about 5 p.m. Wednesday as she passed over State Road 46 near Seminole Towne Center mall.</p> <p>The only thing that kept the Explorer from falling to the roadway below was a tiny wishbone-shaped bolt near the vehicle's right front tire that caught on the guardrail.</p>