Free Republic

A snake-rescue drive conducted by NGO Plants and Animals Welfare Society (PAWS) for the past two weeks has cost them dearly, as a mob attacked their on-duty animal ambulance on Friday and beat up the driver and volunteers. According to Sunish Subramanian, member secretary of PAWS, their office received a tip-off that a snake basket had been left abandoned near a hutment in Kalwa (E) on Friday at around 8.30 pm. Following the call, he along with a team of two volunteers and the driver left in their rescue ambulance. After rescuing the snake, the group was on their way...

UNICEF Among Sponsors of New Campaign Promoting Abortion US, Canadian government development agencies among participants in campaign By Samantha Singson NEW YORK, October 4, 2007 (C-FAM.org) - A new global initiative was launched by various UN agencies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in New York last week that includes a call for legal abortion. Among the sponsors of the initiative called "Deliver Now for Women and Children" is the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), a UN agency that persistently denies they support abortion in any way, shape, or form.  Marketed as a campaign to raise awareness of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)...

For the past six years, the road to Bill Clinton has often run through Douglas Band, a 34-year-old former White House intern who has helped manage Mr. Clinton's time, accompanied him around the world and even fielded some of his calls. Two years ago, Mr. Band befriended a handsome and charming Italian businessman named Raffaello Follieri. The young Italian, now 29 years old, had moved to New York in 2003 to launch a business buying and redeveloping Roman Catholic Church properties. He claimed close ties with Vatican officials that would smooth the way for deals, according to business associates and...

The National Endowment for Democracy (NED), is a private, nonprofit organization, was founded in the early 1980's under the influence of Ronald Reagan for "supporting democracy abroad". So we've had that going on for years. The NED basically does overtly what the CIA used to do covertly. It funds civil society groups and organizations that fit within U.S. strategic interests in various countries.

HARARE, Zimbabwe - An alliance of Zimbabwean human rights groups said Wednesday that 2007 is on course to be the worst year for rights violations since the country's economic downfall started seven years ago. Legal and medical experts documented that cases of state-orchestrated torture on individuals rose to about four per day in the early part of the year, the Human Rights Forum said. Cases of gross violations — including abductions, arrests, unlawful detentions and abuses of political rights and basic freedoms — doubled in the first six months of the year compared to the same period in 2006, the...

JUST CAN'T BELIEVE THIS Kirsten Powers was a guest on the O'Reilly Factor last night. The subject was the Mexican woman, Elvira Arellano, who was deported back to her homeland yesterday after twice sneaking into this country illegally and the using a false Social Security card to obtain employment cleaning airplanes at O'Hare airport in Chicago. What Kirsten Powers said was so incredibly inane, so ponderously stupid, that I just had to go online and try to find out a little about her. She's a columnist for the New York Post, a regular contributor on Fox News, and a former...

Property Rights activist and ranger, Wayne Hage said, "Either you have the right to own property or you are property." The backbone of the plan was a call for "public/private partnerships." Sustainable Development is not freedom. Not one of the three principles apply.

The international battle for Arctic territory may look like a Wild West brawl but the real fight for supremacy is more likely to revolve around legal arguments and seismic data than showdowns between ice-breakers or submarines.

Whether it's storming the beach at Normandy, slugging a heavyweight champ or stealing cars in San Andreas, video game developers have made billions by letting players' imaginations run wild in increasingly sophisticated virtual worlds. Now a New York human rights group called Breakthrough is taking advantage of the same strategy -- but not for its entertainment value. The group's controversial new game "ICED! I Can End Deportation" in which players can step into the role of an illegal immigrant attempting to avoid deportation has a political agenda. "It's really important in today's world to create a dialogue about social issues,"...

The situation for civilians in Iraq is "ever worsening", the International Committee of the Red Cross says. Although it is difficult to determine the numbers of people killed in shootings, bombings and military operations, it is clear that the overall situation in the country has been steadily deteriorating, an official said on Wednesday.

NGOs: No-Good OligarchiesApril 5, 2007 If there is a group of organizations that hates Western Civilization more than the MSM (Mainstream Media) or even Liberals, it must be the NGOs (non-governmental organizations)... and the recent kidnapping of British military personnel by the ISLAMIC Republic of Iran seals the deal. Although the MSM insists on referring to the March 23rd  kidnapping of 15 British sailors and marines by the Iranians as a “capture”...it was a kidnapping. And, although this kidnapping, and its subsequent serial violations of International Law, has screamed out to many NGOs for a condemnation of the ISLAMIC Republic of Iran...there is...

In January,2007-NM Governor Bill Richardson flew to Khartoum on a whirlwind "peace mission" - returning just in time to announce his candidacy for President. Be still my heart !

MOSCOW, Jan. 23 -- The Russian Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld a lower court ruling that shut down the Russian-Chechen Friendship Society, a Western-funded grass-roots organization that had challenged the Kremlin's interpretation of events in the continuing conflict in Chechnya. [...] Oksana Chelysheva, one of the group's leaders, promised to fight the ruling. "We are going to take our case to the European Court of Human Rights and, possibly, our Constitutional Court." [...] The law on nongovernmental organizations, signed by President Vladimir Putin in January 2006, makes it illegal for grass-roots groups to have people convicted of extremism as leaders...

Russia has allowed dozens of foreign non-governmental organizations to resume operations and was speeding up the registration process for others barred from working last week, officials said Tuesday. The suspensions had provoked an international outcry. Anatoly Panchenko, a Justice Ministry official, said about 40 of the roughly 100 nonprofit groups suspended Thursday after failing to meet a tough new law for re-registration had since been added to the list of officially sanctioned groups. He expressed optimism that the rest would also return to work soon. [...] Among the groups allowed to return to work were two U.S.-based pro-democracy organizations -...

The war with Hizbullah, like all Israel's confrontations with terror groups in the past decade, includes a political front that is as important and complex as the military front. The words and images used by journalists, politicians, diplomats and officials of powerful non-governmental organizations (NGOs) set the framework in which the military actions are judged. Where the Israeli response to Iranian and Syrian-supported terror is viewed as justified, which is largely the case in the United States, support for Israel is high, allowing for the dispatch of weapons necessary to defeat Hizbullah. But in Europe, Asia and elsewhere, the dominant...

MYTH: More Foreign Aid Will End Global Poverty Food and Financial Aid Often Reaches Only Corrupt Officials, Not the Poor By JOHN STOSSEL AND PATRICK McMENAMIN May 12, 2006 — - This myth may really rattle your brain. Lots of well-meaning people believe foreign aid will cure poverty. U2's lead singer, Bono, stops almost every concert to tell his fans that Western governments can end poverty. "We have the resources, we have the know-how to end extreme poverty," he said last year in Chicago. Angelina Jolie visited a model village in Africa to promote what she believes would be possible...

In December, 1989 the Armed Forces of the Philippines seriously threatened President Corazon Aquino in a coup, claiming she was corrupt and needed to be removed. The saintly housewife, affectionately called "Cory," led the movement that drove the corrupt dictator, Ferdinand Marcos, from office after the assassination of her politician husband Ninoy. The US, then still deeply concerned about keeping strategic bases in the Philippines, dispatched a couple of F-4 fighters to fly over Manila as a warning to the rebel soldiers, thus helping save Cory's presidency. At the time I was an advisor to the Administrator of USAID. Although...

Blog-Explosion is one of those web-sites that tries to help its members enlarge the traffic that patronizes their blog. Upon joining the service, they try to steer visitors to your site and they add your site to their directory of sites organized by subject, etc. As a long time member of the service, I recently received an interesting e-mail plea from Blog-Explosion asking that member bloggers blog about a new idea called "your question.org" to gain credits in the Blog-Explosion system. Apparently, the idea is that you (Joe-citizen of the world) should send your questions about what you want to...

Were The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation a public company, it would rank among the entire world's 400 largest by asset size--before getting a single dime of Warren Buffett's promised money. But the $35 billion of assets listed on the foundation's latest financial statement, as of Dec. 31, is only one measure of its gargantuan magnitude. An active, aggressive player in financial markets, the foundation turns over the equivalent of its entire asset base on average about every two months. During 2005, the cash-flow statement shows, it purchased a staggering $250.7 billion of investments while selling $251.2 billion. Turnover at...

Human Rights Watch and Saeb Erekat lack objectivity The Israeli Defense Forces recently concluded a report on the tragic deaths of seven Palestinians on a Gaza Beach. As detailed yesterday in HR's special report "Gaza Beach Libel", the IDF has carefully analyzed all evidence and proven that it was not responsible for this tragedy. In the past 24 hours, our report has generated over 500 letters to the media. While some news organizations have reported the IDF findings, it certainly does not compensate for the highly emotive front page initial accusations.At the same time, many in the media have been...