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Sean Penn Appointed Haitian Ambassador LOS ANGELES, USA (defend.ht) - Sean Penn has accepted the job of Ambassador for Haiti, where he has spent the last two years managing a tent camp for displaced Haitians after the earthquake. Sean Penn will now be the "ambassador at large" for the Caribbean nation. Penn was offered the position by Haitian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Laurent Lamothe, while at the Cinema for Peace benefit in Los Angeles on Saturday night. Picking up a humanitarian award for his work in Haiti, he told the crowd: "I do accept [the job]," before adding it would...

(ChattahBox)—The head Voodoo priest of Haiti is sickened by the desecration of dead bodies, as they are unceremoniously collected off of the city streets and hurled into mass graves. In a nation where many people practice Voodoo, the supernatural prospect of Zombies rising from the mass graves to prey on the living, is a real fear. Since a powerful earthquake flattened the poor Caribbean nation of Haiti into mounds of rubble on Tuesday, the shocked survivors have roamed the streets littered with rotting corpses and the overwhelming stench of death. In a nation without an infrastructure during the best of...

Why God Hates Haiti The frustrating theology of suffering. By Lisa Miller | NEWSWEEK Published Jan 15, 2010 From the magazine issue dated Jan 25, 2010 Haiti is surely a Job among nations. It is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere: half its population lives on less than a dollar a day. With 98 percent of its forests felled and burned for firewood, Haiti is uniquely vulnerable to flooding from hurricanes. In 2008 four storms in as many weeks left a million homeless. Haiti has an infant-mortality rate worse than that of many African nations, and its people are...

‘Death Is Much Better Than Living With a Second Wife’ Mahmoud Ahmad, Arab News JEDDAH, 10 August 2006 — There’s a little saying among married women in Saudi Arabia. It goes like this: Death is much better than living with a second wife. Husbands who have crossed this line from one to more-than-one wife have encountered problems with their first wives. Sometimes these problems end up in violence. Women have resorted to stabbing or burning their husbands in their sleep. Men have discovered that taking on more than one wife has a downside. Polygamy is problematic that way. In a...

My Wife and I seperated three months ago. We have been together for seven years and we have a beautiful four year old girl. She was a huge liberal when we met (she thought K. Marx was a brilliant thinker) but over time and through many debates she came to see the light and began to espouse a conservative viewpoint. She even voted for Bush in the last election. I put her through school working hard to support our family...she was going to be a teacher...elementary school. Then about two years ago she decided she wanted to be an English...

I just saw on Foxnews that President Bush's poll numbers have taken another dive. Gee I wonder why? Maybe the average American isn't thrilled about our President hosting the Red Chinese..complete with marching bands..and a 21 gun salute. Maybe the average American isn't thrilled that 12000 illegal aliens enter the US every day. Screw guest workers, screw the economy..if the terrorist sneak some sort of bomb in here..its all gonna be blown to hell anyways. Maybe the average American isn't thrilled that Iran was named CHAIRMAN of the disarm committee of the UN..and we don't hear A PEEP from our...

In a remarkably even-handed article, Margaret Bunting points Guardian readers to the emerging debate on human enhancement, and the forthcoming pamphlet on “Better Humans" from the British thinktank Demos. To the real enthusiasts - they call themselves transhumanists - humanity is on the point of being liberated from its biology. In their advocacy of our “technological rights”, they believe that human beings are on the brink of a huge leap in development, leaving behind the sick, quarrelsome, weak, fallible creatures we have been up to now. We will be, as their slogan goes, “better than well”. This is the prospect...

An e-mail is bouncing around the Internet with photographs of alleged Bolivarian gunmen in an area of Caracas that appears to be 23 de Enero. Many appear to be teenagers, they are wearing Bolivarian t-shirts with Che Guevara's face super-imposed on Venezuela's national colors, and they are armed with Glock 9mm semi-automatic handguns. According to Pensamiento Militar Venezolano 2005, a strategic and tactical military defense document drafted under the direction of President Hugo Chávez, the core mission of these armed youths is to turn Caracas into a kill zone where escualidos will be hunted down systematically if the Chávez regime...

Experts in Hong Kong said on Friday that the human H5N1 strain which surfaced in northern Vietnam this year had proved to be resistant to Tamiflu, a powerful antiviral drug which goes by the generic name, oseltamivir. They urged drug manufacturers to make more effective versions of Relenza, another antiviral that is also known to be effective in battling the much feared H5N1. Relenza is inhaled. "There are now resistant H5N1 strains appearing, and we can't totally rely on one drug (Tamiflu)," William Chui, honorary associate professor with the department of pharmacology at the Queen Mary Hospital in Hong Kong,...

UNITED NATIONS/N'DJAMENA (Reuters) - U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan (news - web sites) called for immediate action on Wednesday to end what he termed a near hell on earth in Sudan's western Darfur region. But African leaders warned against sending non-African troops to Darfur, where the United Nations (news - web sites) estimates a two-year conflict between Sudan's government and rebels has killed at least 70,000 people and driven some 2 million from their homes. Annan backed a call by President Bush (news - web sites)'s administration for a travel and assets freeze on those violating a ceasefire in Darfur....

Look at the big yellow campaign signs being held up right in front of Kerry. Kind of freaky!!666

Statement of Bill Wood, Charlotte, North Carolina A personal submission not on behalf of anyone else and these are my own views. ROOTS OF THE AMERICAN CULTURE AND COMMUNITY IN DISARRAY Political leaders, religious leaders, conservatives, families (especially fathers), judges, and interested lawyers, along with the vast majority of Americans who believe in ideals of family and country must understand that open WAR HAS BEEN DECLARED ON THEM AND THIS COUNTRY. And it’s coming from many of the institutions that our taxes are funding and supporting! In terms of financial and human costs this war on America has been the...

May be considered a vanity, sorry to start out that way if it is, but Looks like CB at "My War" has hung it up Follow the link to see why it looks that way, I dont want to repost his stuff...

The St. Petersburg city council passed a law Monday designed to scuttle a rock group's plans to feature an onstage suicide. The hard-rock band Hell on Earth had said that a suicide by a terminally ill person would take place during a concert Saturday to raise awareness of right-to-die issues. In response, the city council met Monday morning to unanimously approve an emergency ordinance making it illegal to conduct a suicide for commercial or entertainment purposes, and to host, promote and sell tickets for such an event. "While I still think it's a publicity stunt, we still couldn't sit idly...

Telling "Truths"By Lowell PonteFrontPageMagazine.com | June 16, 2003 PONTEFICATIONS  THE CLINTONS WERE OUR FIRST PoMo PRESIDENCY, and their legacy is an increasingly Post-Modernist, Deconstructed America in which fact and fiction, truth and lie, honesty and dishonesty, right and wrong, good and evil are deliberately fuzzed, blurred and rendered irrelevant. In truth, one of the only three statements for which President Bill Clinton will be remembered in the books of quotations is his lawyerly sophism: “It all depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is.” Without ever giving the Clintons their due for this cultural and moral vandalism, the Arts and...

Saddam Hussein's 1988 attack underscored the lengths to which he would go to destroy opponents The following are excerpts from the book ''A Modern History of the Kurds'' by David McDowall (reprinted by permission of St. Martin's Press, New York, N.Y.). The excerpts cover the 1988 gassing and purge of Iraqi Kurds, who were aiding Iranian forces pushing into Iraq. The architect of the attacks was Ali Hassan al Majid, a cousin of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. It is believed Majid might be behind the suicide attack that killed four U.S. soldiers in Iraq a week ago and the recent...