Free Republic

A suspect was arrested on suspicion of arson after a fire last week at a mosque in St. Paul, Minn., at least the fifth such act of vandalism in the state so far this year that has left members of the Muslim community “living in fear,” a state senator said. Jaylani Hussein, the executive director of the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said at a news conference that the mosque, the Oromo American Tawhid Islamic Center, was left “completely burned” after being set on fire on Wednesday. The building was unoccupied at the time and no injuries...

"I think the president has become a pyromaniac in a field of straw men. I think what he wants to do is set up those of us on the other side of the aisle as some caricature and assign policies to us that we don't have and then defeat those arguments."

WASHINGTON, D.C. - A U.S. Capitol Police officer was charged by a grand jury Wednesday with setting a fire Nov. 2 in a women's bathroom in the Dirksen Senate Office Building. The federal indictment of Officer Karen Emory, 36, of Waldorf, Md., did not mention at least six other fires in Senate office buildings since late September. Sgt. Kimberly Schneider, the Capitol Police spokeswoman, said the other six fires remain under investigation. Investigators are exploring whether the fires are linked but have reached no conclusions, Schneider said. Emory was charged with one misdemeanor count of willfully injuring property of the...

What caused Msgr Gao Kexian's death? by Bernardo Cervellera China, a country that will host the 2008 Olympics, still has people who die in its prisons because of their faith. Last Saturday, the Vatican Press Office gave the news of the death of Msgr John Gao Kexian, underground bishop of Yantai, and condemned this "serious violation" of religious freedom. Msgr Gao, age 76, had been taken into police custody in October 1999. Since then, he had been imprisoned in a secret location in the north of China. His corpse was handed over to his relatives at the end of August,...