Free Republic

Jan. 11 was a typical day for Isaac VanWasshenova, a trash collector for Waste Management. The 35-year-old from Barnesville, Ohio, got in a truck at the depot and headed to the streets of Mt. Lebanon. While picking up trash, he looked forward to seeing people he knew and talking with the children who sometimes ran outside to see him. “I always want to do my job 100%, but I also want to be kind to people,” he said recently. “You never know what people are going through. If they need something, I tell them, ‘Just ask.’” About an hour into...

There was a spate of headlines last week claiming that new scientific discoveries disproved the historical narrative of the Bible. Headlines included, "DNA vs the Bible: Israelites did not wipe out the Canaanites" and "Study disproves the Bible's suggestion that the ancient Canaanites were wiped out." The problem is that the reverse is actually true: The discoveries confirm what the Scriptures explicitly state.Not surprisingly, these headlines didn't come from obscure, Bible-bashing websites. Instead, they came from Cosmos Magazine, Yahoo.com, New Scientist (claiming that the discovery helped unravel the "true fate" of the Canaanites), and others. As stated in the New York...

<p>March 18, 2004 -- Yesterday's murderous car bombing at the Mount Lebanon Hotel in Baghdad killed at least 29 people and wounded more than 40. But maximum bloodshed wasn't the terrorists' only goal: They've also grown clever at manipulating the press. Such attacks - and the miles-long video streams they generate - have the sinister effect of making Iraq look to the outside world far more dangerous and chaotic than it really is.</p>

Coalition officials said today that the March 17 bombing of Baghdad's Mount Lebanon Hotel killed only seven people, not 27 as previously believed. Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, deputy operations director for Combined Joint Task Force 7, briefed reporters on the bombing at a Baghdad news conference. Kimmitt said a suicide bomber triggered the device inside a vehicle and died in the explosion. "The bomb was estimated to consist of approximately 1,000 pounds of explosives and artillery shells," he said. The bomb caused structural damage to the hotel and a number of nearby buildings. Kimmitt said that Iraqi Police service...

BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 18 (UPI) -- A bomb completely destroyed a hotel Wednesday in an upscale Baghdad neighborhood with an explosion so massive that an al-Qaida-affiliated group was immediately blamed. While fires were still burning at the Mount Lebanon Hotel, U.S. military officials were already blaming Ansar al-Islam -- a group thought to have ties to Osama bin Laden's network. The explosion -- triggered by what one U.S. official told United Press International was a car or truck bomb in excess of 1,000 pounds -- was among the largest seen in downtown Baghdad since last summer's bombing of the United...

A car bomb went off in Baghdad today, leveling a local hotel and killing Iraqi and foreign Arabs. The Hotel Mount Lebanon is located in a predominantly Shiite neighborhood. If we assume that the detonation was not an accident, then it appears to be a continuation of the jihadist strategy of hammering the Shiite community in the hopes of eliciting a response from them. That would force the Sunnis to defend themselves, re-energizing the guerrilla movement -- or so the jihadist theory goes. An interesting question is whether there was any link between this attack, the failed bombing in Karachi...