Free Republic

Britain has only one important newspaper: the left-wing Guardian. Not only is it the sole remaining daily newspaper in the country whose content is mostly devoted to serious matters, but it is the only one that the unacknowledged legislators of the world, the intelligentsia, take seriously. And this is a disaster for the country. Though it occasionally allows a dissenting voice, the Guardian has consistently advocated a demoralization of the population, followed by increased state intervention and, of course, public spending to alleviate the consequences of that demoralization. No wonder the BBC advertises for personnel exclusively in its pages. An...

During the second world war the future South African prime minister John Vorster was interned as a Nazi sympathiser. Three decades later he was being feted in Jerusalem. In the second part of his remarkable special report, Chris McGreal investigates the clandestine alliance between Israel and the apartheid regime, cemented with the ultimate gift of friendship - A-bomb technology Several years ago in Johannesburg I met a Jewish woman whose mother and sister were murdered in Auschwitz. After their deaths, she was forced into a gas chamber, but by some miracle that bout of killing was called off. Vera Reitzer...

Tony Blair told President George Bush that he was "solidly" behind US plans to invade Iraq before he sought advice about the invasion's legality and despite the absence of a second UN resolution, according to a new account of the build-up to the war published today. A memo of a two-hour meeting between the two leaders at the White House on January 31 2003 - nearly two months before the invasion - reveals that Mr Bush made it clear the US intended to invade whether or not there was a second resolution and even if UN inspectors found no evidence...

... I first drew Bush as a monkey after his installation by the Supreme Court, exactly five years ago. It was by accident. I was trying to depict him as a spiritual heir to Ronald Reagan, another useless chump whose most celebrated movie hit was Bedtime For Bonzo in which he starred with a chimp. So Bush became a chimp before I ever realised how closely he resembles our hairy forebears. [...] Drawing him as a monkey, however, worked a treat. His four hands enabled him to get up to all sorts of interesting tricks, and also somehow fitted his...

Children won't get the Christian subtext, but unbelievers should keep a sickbag handy during Disney's new epic, writes Polly Toynbee Monday December 5, 2005 The Guardian Aslan the lion shakes his mighty mane and roars out across Narnia and eternity. Christ is risen! However, not many British children these days will get the message. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe opens this week to take up the mantle left by The Lord of the Rings. CS Lewis's seven children's books, The Chronicles of Narnia, will be with us now and for many Christmases to come. Only Harry Potter has...

Rory Carroll, Baghdad Correspondent of The Guardian, was kidnapped today in the Iraqi capital. Carroll, a 33-year-old Irish national, was abducted as he left a house in Baghdad’s Sadr City area after watching the televised trial of Saddam Hussein with an Iraqi family. "It is believed Mr Carroll may have been taken by a group of armed men," the newspaper said. "The Guardian is urgently seeking information about Mr Carroll’s whereabouts and condition." Carroll is one of The Guardian’s most experienced foreign correspondents and has been based in Iraq for the last nine months. After graduating from Trinity College, Dublin,...

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Corrie: By now your open letter to the world, "A Call to Action; Rachel's Words Live", has been reprinted in many different media outfits, including the viciously anti-Jewish Counterpunch magazine , in the Guardian, and was even published in Hebrew in Israel's far-leftist anti-Zionist daily Haaretz.  You begin your epistle by recalling that your daughter was "killed by an Israeli bulldozer", but you neglect to mention the circumstances under which she was so killed (nor the fact that she died from her injuries while under Palestinian medical care). You then add, "She had been working in Rafah with a nonviolent...

'Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists," President George Bush told the world after September 11 2001, and he has made it clear ever since that he means it. But in that black and white universe, where do you put Josh Rushing? Rushing is a blue-eyed son of Texas, a marine for all his adult life whose clean-cut friendly charm made him the ideal public face for the US military during the Iraq invasion. But he has now joined the Arab television channel al-Jazeera as an "on-screen personality", a move which, in the eyes of many...

BEIJING, China (Reuters) -- A Chinese activist was missing on Sunday after being badly beaten when he and a foreign journalist went to a village in southern China, other activists and friends said.

Last month, Judge Charles Harris announced on the Today programme that "a very large proportion of domestic violence is committed by people who have been drinking - and if they hadn't been so drinking so much, they wouldn't be so violent". 'Twas ever thus. In 1751, novelist and magistrate Henry Fielding wrote: "Wretches are often brought before me, charged with theft and robbery, whom I am forced to confine before they are in a condition to be examined: and when they have afterwards become sober, I have plainly perceived from the state of case that the gin alone was the...

...The drumbeat on global warming was intended to reach a crescendo during the run-up to the summit at Gleneagles. Prime Minister Blair has been a leader in the global warming crusade. (Whether his stance reflects simple conviction or the need to propitiate his party's Left after Iraq is unknown.) In the event, for believers, Gleneagles turned out to be a major disappointment. On the eve of the summit, the Economic Committee of the House of Lords released a report sharply at variance with the prevailing European orthodoxy. Some key points were reported in the Guardian, a London newspaper not hostile...

As the rest of Europe acts, extreme Islamists take advantage of British naivety - ELEMENTS WITHIN the British establishment were notoriously sympathetic to Hitler. Today the Islamists enjoy similar support. In the 1930s it was Edward VIII, aristocrats and the Daily Mail; this time it is Left-Wing activists, The Guardian and sections of the BBC. They may not want a global theocracy, but they are like the West’s apologists for the Soviet Union — useful îdîots. Islamic radicals, like Hitler, cultivate support by nurturing grievances against others. Islamists, like Hitler, scapegoat Jews for their problems and want to destroy them....

When pilots are in an aircraft, the Marines of Aviation Life Support Systems personnel watch over them like guardian angels, working behind the scenes of the flight line to maintain aircraft emergency gear at the station Parachute Loft. ALSS personnel are responsible for providing and maintaining aircraft emergency gear pilots may use as a last resort. They rarely make an appearance on the flight line, so their contributions to pilot safety are seldom recognized, said Staff Sgt. Ryan Schmidt, Marine Aviation Logistics Squadron 13 ALSS flight equipment technician. “That's the strange thing about this job,” said Schmidt, a Schenectady, N.Y.,...

Albert Scardino has stepped down from the post of executive editor of the Guardian newspaper, just a week after the controversial dismissal of trainee journalist Dilpazier Aslam over his undeclared Islamist interests. Rumours had circulated last night that Mr Scardino was about to leave, but sources at the newspaper today were at pains to point out that the departure was entirely unconnected with the Aslam affair. Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the Guardian, said: "Albert Scardino, executive editor for the home and foreign departments, has decided to leave the Guardian in October, at the end of his second annual contract,...

The Guardian has terminated a reporter's one-year training contract after a blogger revealed the writer was a member of a extremist Islamist political party and had not declared his interest to the newspaper when he wrote for its comment pages after the July 7 attacks. The Guardian's move - according to the newspaper, taken after reporter Dilpazier Aslam refused to resign from the party, Hizb ut- Tahrir - echoes recent media oustings in America, but is the first time a British journalist has been forced to step down after coming under fire from bloggers - independent web diarists. Scott Burgess,...

There are apologists amongst us The 'We told you so' lot have been bleating on about Iraq ever since the atrocities of 7/7 - it is time to fight back Norman Geras Thursday July 21, 2005 Guardian Within hours of the bombs going off two weeks ago, the voices that one could have predicted began to make themselves heard with their root-causes explanations for the murder and maiming of a random group of tube and bus passengers in London. It was due to Blair, Iraq, illegal war and the rest of it. The first voices, so far as I know,...

Guardian stands by journalist linked to extreme Islamic party by Gordon MacMillan Brand Republic 18 Jul 2005 Guardian standing by reporter LONDON - A Guardian journalist, Dilpazier Aslam, has been linked to a radical Islamic organisation, which is known to promote anti-Semitic hatred and praises suicide bombers as martyrs, and the paper is refusing to sack him. His links to extreme Islamic organisation Hizb ut-Tahrir were revealed by bloggers, including Scott Burgess and Harry's Place, last week after Aslam wrote a July 13 article about the suicide bombers in the Guardian, which also ran in both the LA Times and...

Aesop and La Fontaine gave animals human traits to teach humanity lessons. In modern times, the use of animals as metaphors has not always been so innocent. Dehumanizing people by comparing them to insects or other animals with an ugly image has become highly reprehensible. The Nazis used such dehumanization techniques to lay the groundwork for the physical extermination of those labelled pests, in particular the Jews. Postwar Germany has made serious efforts to reeducate its population. It is thus particularly disturbing that some mainstream figures and organizations have begun to use images and semantics from the Nazi era, ignoring...

A [PA] appellate court strongly criticized Bucks County Judge, "Dismayed" about handling of a case of a woman with disabilities. In 2001 a 46-year-old with mental illness lived alone and was not taking her medication. Her family petitioned to deem her incapacitated, her brother was named guardian. She moved into an assisted-living facility. In 2003, brother resigned after settling with ex-husband. Lawler appointed attorney Smith as guardian. Smith soon recommended that $280,000 townhouse be sold. The woman, Rosengarten, asked to have it rented, so she could return to it some day. Her family complained that Smith was draining the $900,000...

The Pope has blood on his hands The Pope did great damage to the church, and to countless Catholics Terry Eagleton Monday April 4, 2005 Guardian John Paul II became Pope in 1978, just as the emancipatory 60s were declining into the long political night of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. As the economic downturn of the early 70s began to bite, the western world made a decisive shift to the right, and the transformation of an obscure Polish bishop from Karol Wojtyla to John Paul II was part of this wider transition. The Catholic church had lived through its...