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A civil lawsuit is now on file against the Tropicana bar. The lawsuit says the owners' disregard for the county wide smoking ban is: "...creating a public nuisance and health hazard for which the Wheeling-Ohio County Board of Health has received complaint."The bar is owned by Ohio County Delegate Chris Wakim. Wakim told News9 he would not comply with the smoking ban regulation. "Until and at such point as I feel that they work this out, I am not going to be in compliance, absolutely not, said Wakim.The county health officer says Wakim's public defiance is influencing other bars. A...

EU is forced to reveal 'obscenely high' salaries By Justin Stares in Brussels (Filed: 12/06/2005) Civil servants on the Brussels gravy train now earn £70,000 a year after tax. And that's just for starters. The European Commission, by instinct bashful about its generous perks and allowances, was forced to disclose the figure, and much more, in response to a written question from a Czech MEP. The Commission admitted that its officials, who number nearly 20,500, are entitled to seven separate allowances over and above their pay, plus a generous pension scheme after just 10 years' service. The average take-home pay...

For over 225 years, Americans have valued the rights spoken of in the Declaration of Independence – Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. Americans have spilt their blood and spent their treasure to protect these basic rights for themselves and others. Amnesty International’s stated purpose is to prevent human rights violations. Thus, one might expect the United States and Amnesty International to be allies. However, they are not because Amnesty International’s stated purpose and its actual purpose are very different. Whatever its claimed purpose, Amnesty International has become just another extreme Left anti-American organization. Amnesty International’s secretary general, Irene...

Rojda was 13 when she was raped two years ago by a neighbor in this hardscrabble Kurdish province. In order to "cleanse" her honor, she was forced to marry her attacker in an unofficial Islamic-style ceremony. He later was convicted of raping a 7-year-old boy and has been imprisoned. But Rojda's troubles were far from over, according to an account of her ordeal provided by her family and attorneys. She allegedly was raped again in March by her father-in-law, who she said demanded she prostitute herself to earn her keep. When Rojda refused, the relatives and attorneys charge, a group...

September 11th strengthened the bond between the United States and Israel. Ilan Berman, Vice President for Policy at the American Foreign Policy Council, explained: "Israel's stable, pro-Western and democratic character, its robust defense infrastructure and modern military, and its strategic location in the volatile Middle East have only grown in importance to the United States since September 11." Both nations are also engaged in a war against the same terrorism. But unlike the United States, the legitimacy of the Jewish State is still questioned on a daily basis. September 11th has also put academia on the defensive. Many professors defended...

BIRMINGHAM, Alabama (AP) -- A woman angry with her 12-year-old daughter for having sex forced the girl to drink bleach and sat on her until the child died, a police detective said. The girl's 9-year-old brother was forced to watch the attack, Detective Warren Cotton testified Thursday in a preliminary hearing for Tunisia Archie, 31.

The New York Civil Liberties Union is filing a lawsuit against the city that alleges two eighth-graders were forced to undergo intrusive medical exams after they cut school. Administrators told the girls, who skipped class in May to go to a party, would have to take tests for pregnancy and sexually-transmitted diseases before they could return to school, according to the NYCLU. The suit claims the girls were humiliated. Since the girls weren't putting anyone else at risk, the school had no right to order the exams, the NYCLU says. The Department of Education said it hasn't seen the lawsuit...

Tensions between Christians and Muslims in Egypt have flared in recent weeks. The protests began after rumours spread that a priest's wife, Wafa Constantine, had been abducted and forced to convert to Islam. Government officials had said Mrs Constantine, 48, wanted to convert to Islam but was being prevented from doing so by her family. The clashes at the cathedral ended when protesters were told that Mrs Constantine was back under the Church's protection. Last week, Egypt's prosecutor-general said that Mrs Constantine had gone to police saying she wanted to change her religion, but had decided to remain a Christian...

Two U.S. congressmen, frustrated by China's coercive abortion practices, are calling for the cancellation of 2008 Olympic games in Beijing unless the communist nation ends its state-sanctioned one-child policy. Representatives Chris Smith (R.-N.J.) and Tom Tancredo (R.-Colo.) made the demands on China at a congressional hearing called Tuesday to shed light on the case of Mao Hengfeng, who was forced to undergo an abortion and is currently being subjected to torture. Mao's pregnancy 15 years ago violated China's family planning policy, and her protests since then landed her in one of the country's "re-education through labor" camps. "One of the...

US is forced to abandon hunt for bin Laden By Robin Gedye, Foreign Affairs Writer (Filed: 14/12/2004) Three years after Osama bin Laden fled American bombs in his Tora Bora hideout, the search for the world's most wanted man has all but come to a halt because of Pakistan's refusal to permit cross-border raids from Afghanistan, according to CIA officials. Washington has downgraded its efforts to catch the al-Qa'eda leader in Afghanistan, from where he supervised the September 11 attacks, because it has become convinced that he is hiding in Pakistan's virtually lawless Tribal Areas, which hug the 1,200-mile frontier....

The purpose of FreeRepublic.com's multiple message boards is to limit the topics for each board to particular topics. Posting the same message on all the boards defeats the purpose of multiple-boards for special topics. It is very annoying to see the same message on every bulletin board. PLEASE! DO THE READERS A FAVOR. STOP CROSS-POSTING YOUR MESSAGES!

Anyone still remember the mess all the news outlets made of reporting election results in 2000? Many of us still wonder if that wasn't a contrived deal to help Gore. Newscasters actually were calling the winner in states (like Florida) while citizens were still voting. The problem started with a company named Voter News Service. VNS was owned by the Associated Press and the television networks. It was a profit making organization, a business. The rabidly left AP ran a large part of VNS, so there's little surprise about how they reported things. Generally, through polls and exit polls, VNS...

An amendment offered by Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, in the House of Representatives yesterday that would have remove from an appropriations bill a new mandatory mental-health screening program for America's children failed by a vote of 95-315. Paul's amendment would have removed the program from the Labor, HHS and Education Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year 2005. Ninety-four Republicans and one Democrat sided with Paul, while 118 Republicans, 196 Democrats and one Independent voted against the amendment. As WorldNetDaily reported, the New Freedom Initiative recommends screening not only for children but eventually for every American. The initiative came out of the...

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, speaking before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee today, has called the Sudanese rampage against Black Africans a “genocide:” We concluded that genocide has been committed in Darfur and that the government of Sudan and the Janjaweed [Arab militia] bear responsibility and genocide may still be occurring. The Sudanese government has been sponsoring a campaign of mass rape, mass murder, forced relocations, and forced starvation against Black Africans in Darfur. The BBC today tried to spin the usual “the U.S. is damned if it does and damned if it doesn’t” argument today: Critics point out...

Harare - The exodus of Zimbabwe's small and anguished white population is under way with record numbers leaving their homeland, mostly for Britain or Australia. Few have the R30 000($5000) they need in foreign currency to transport their goods to new countries, and most are starting new lives with 22kg of clothes and a few photographs. They say they have hung on during the past four tumultuous years hoping President Robert Mugabe's "hate" campaign against them would ease, but it did not, and two months ago when he shut down private schools for a week for raising fees, they lost...

Violence finally forced US to follow path suggested by Britain last year By Anton La Guardia, Diplomatic Editor (Filed: 29/06/2004) A month before the war in Iraq, hundreds of American officials secretly gathered in a Washington auditorium for a "rock drill" - the US military term for a meeting to plan scenarios - to decide how Iraq would be run after the downfall of Saddam Hussein. It included a small band of British officials who had been drawing up options for an international administration in Iraq lasting up to two years, based on previous experiences in Cambodia, East Timor and...

Mugabe loyalists 'forced off seized farms' By Peta Thornycroft in Harare (Filed: 01/01/2004) The Zimbabwe government claimed yesterday it had recovered 500,000 acres of farmland from ruling party loyalists who seized more than two or more white-owned farms. The few white commercial farmers left on their properties scattered around the country said they saw no evidence that those involved - cabinet ministers, judges, bank managers, senior army personnel and other leaders - had abandoned any of the farms they took. "Most of them do not live on the land anyway and are careful to cover up what they have taken,...

<p>Bill Clinton's socialite pal Denise Rich (search) disguised a $2,000 donation to Hillary Rodham Clinton by coercing her record promoter to make the contribution and later reimbursing him, a new $30 million legal suit charges.</p> <p>The promoter, Jimmy Hester (search), who filed the federal lawsuit in Manhattan yesterday, is now at the center of the FBI's long-running criminal probe into the circumstances surrounding Clinton's last-minute presidential pardoning of Rich's ex-husband, Marc Rich (search), The Post has learned.</p>

Forced patriotism invites the unpatriot It's that time of year when we try to quantify our patriotism. Flags are out, barbecue pits fired up, and Gallup has the numbers. Americans are hand-over-heart patriotic. Seventy percent responded to a June Gallup poll that they are "extremely proud" to be American and another 20 percent are "very proud." That just leaves 10 percent who are less than proud, and John Ashcroft will not be releasing their names. I'd like to state for the record that I'm not just "extremely proud" to be an American, I'm "extremely delighted" for so many reasons that...

DNA analysis is a technological tool that has exonerated death row prisoners, targeted criminals who would otherwise go free for lack of other evidence, and even tested the claims of a woman who had much of the world believing she was the Princess Anastasia of Czarist Russia. Should we also use DNA to test for paternity and free men from the obligation to support children who aren't theirs? We're not talking about a man who marries a woman who already has children, and agrees either to adopt her children or to raise them as his own. There is a special...