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Australia must continue to shun a US-led holy war against AIDS, writes Bill Bowtell. The detection in New York City of a new strain of HIV virus that is highly resistant to anti-retroviral drugs is deeply worrying. If the existence of an HIV supervirus is confirmed by tests now being performed by the HIV authority Dr David Ho and others, then there will be genuine grounds for concern about whether existing HIV containment strategies are working, or need to be radically overhauled to meet the potential threat of a new strain of the virus. These questions are important and must...

Last week's announcement by federal and New York City health authorities of the discovery of a superstrain of HIV that is unimaginably aggressive and impossible to treat has help smash clichés about homosexuals and fidelity while undermining the foundation of arguments for mandatory HIV testing for all Americans. A 40-something homosexual is believed to have contracted the superstrain in October, but was not diagnosed until December. In between, he had unprotected sex with hundreds of men, which means a geometric progression of the supervirus through the homosexual community may be under way. What has health officials horrified is the man...

Lycos Europe's "Make love not spam" campaign has killed access to some of the Web sites of its target alleged spammers, Netcraft has found. According to the Internet traffic monitoring company, Lycos Europe has successfully taken two Web sites hosted in China offline. The sites are bokwhdok.com and printmediaprofits.biz, according to a posting on Netcraft's Web site, dated this week. "A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack launched by users of Lycos Europe's MakeLoveNotSpam.com screensaver has succeeded in crippling several spammer sites, but some of the targeted sites remain available," the posting said.Lycos Europe was unavailable for comment on the matter, but...

"Yossef Bodansky, the former director of the U.S. Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and a man I respect immensely for his intelligence insights, says the United States faces an "inevitable" al-Qaida attack with weapons of mass destruction. "What would be the U.S. response to such an attack? "Now is the time to think about the unthinkable. "Contingency plans need to be made. And those plans, at least some of them, need to be known to the whole world to serve as a deterrent against such an attack. …" "… * The Islamist world and its allies need to know there...

Capital Punishment: A Personal Statement Prison Fellowship By Charles W. Colson Chuck Colson's spiritual pilgrimage reaches yet another point of significant change As we Christians grow and cultivate the disciplines of reading and study, we sometimes alter our views. Sometimes these views even change dramatically. No one knows this better than I, having been dramatically converted to Christ and, subsequently, having my entire worldview turned upside-down. There was a time, for example, when I thought John Locke's understanding of social contract was the ultimate theory of government. I now see that government draws its authority less from the consent of...

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BESLAN, Russia (AP) - A shaken President Vladimir Putin made a rare and candid admission of Russian weakness Saturday in the face of an "all-out war" by terrorists after more than 340 people - nearly half of them children - were killed in a hostage-taking at a southern school. Putin went on national television to tell Russians they must mobilize against terrorism. He promised wide-ranging reforms to toughen security forces and purge corruption. "We showed weakness, and weak people are beaten," he said in a speech aimed at addressing the grief, shock and anger felt by many after a string...

The Catechism and Capital Punishment Mario Derksen There is so much to say about both the 1992 version [of the New Catechism] and the 1997 version that I don't know where to start. Let me, therefore, walk you through the whole thing, beginning with the 1992 version, from the very start, and interject my comments: "2266 Preserving the common good of society required rendering the aggressor unable to inflict harm. For this reason the traditional teaching of the Church has acknowledged as well-founded the right and duty of legitimate public authority to punish malefactors by means of penalties commensurate with...

From a Marine officer on the Iraqi warfront with Jihadistan... (This is an open letter to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, "Islamic Response," and the rest of the so-called al-Qa'ida "insurgents" in Iraq and elsewhere. We don't have an e-mail address for these swine -- though we are closing in on their snail-mail address, but we are forwarding this letter to Federalist Patriots around the world in the hope you good people will forward it to as many other Patriots as possible to rally prayer and support for our fellow Marine, Cpl. Wassef Ali Hassoun. Should these al-Qa'ida pigs spill his blood,...

Beheadings fuel backlash against Muslims By WAYNE PARRY ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER Aref Assaf, foreground right center, president of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee's New Jersey chapter speaks at a gathering of Arab-Americans, in Paterson, N.J., Saturday, June 19, 2004, to speak out about the killing of Paul Johnson in Saudi Arabia. The group came together to condemn the militants who killed Johnson. (AP Photo/Daniel Hulshizer) EAGLESWOOD TOWNSHIP, N.J. -- The recent beheadings of two American businessmen in the Middle East have added fuel to the angry backlash against Arab-Americans and Muslims that began after the 2001 terrorist attacks. The murders...

Porn-surfing bank supremo Michael Soden was caught with his browser down last week by the very same staff he outsourced to HP at the start of his reign at the Bank of Ireland. Soden hit the headlines last year in Ireland when staff took industrial action in protest of the department's shift to Hewlett Packard. Staff were unhappy about the prospect of becoming HP employees, as they had enjoyed considerable perks at the Bank of Ireland: favourable mortgage and loan deals for instance. Now it seems that he has been forced to resign thanks to the very department which he...

BEIJING, April 16 (Xinhuanet) -- Filming in California's multi-billion-dollar porn industry has been frozen after a popular actor tested positive for the virus that causes AIDS. Porn actor Darren James tested positive for HIV this week in screening conducted routinely on the industry's 1,200 regular actors. Industry advocates immediately called for a 60-day moratorium on filming so that others could be tested. The Los Angeles-based industry normally completes three to four adult films a day. It must now wait to see if the deadly virus has spread to 14 actresses who had onscreen sex with James, or to the 35...

The shame of the father ... tribal sheiks forced Salem Kerbul, above, to kill his son Sabah, whom they accused of collaborating with the Americans. Photo: Jason South The thousands of Iraqis working for the US administration have been declared collaborators. When they're caught by the resistance, the punishment is unthinkable. Paul McGeough reports. Sabah Kerbul's executioners were his father and his brother. Most were in their beds when he was killed. But all members of the 27-year-old's extended family, living in adjoining properties on this remote bend in the Tigris, 120 kilometres north of Baghdad, knew the hideous...

Villagers Force Execution of Suspected U.S. Informant by Father and Brother THULUYA, Iraq -- Two hours before the dawn call to prayer, in a village still shrouded in silence, Sabah Kerbul's executioners arrived. His father carried an AK-47 assault rifle, as did his brother. And with barely a word spoken, they led the man accused by the village of working as an informer for the Americans behind a house girded with fig trees, vineyards and orange groves. His father raised his rifle and aimed it at his oldest son. "Sabah didn't try to escape," said Abdullah Ali, a village resident....

<p>A firefighter battles a wildfire near Sisters in July 2002. Dry conditions have Oregon and other western states bracing for another potentially dangerous wildfire season.</p> <p>Fire conditions are not as bad as they were in 2002, but a five-year drought in the West fuels danger.</p>

Following America's LeadBy Steven PlautFrontPageMagazine.com | April 18, 2003 You may have noticed that on April 16, a group of disgruntled Iraqi civilians decided to throw rocks at U.S. troops in Iraq.  The GIs mowed them down and killed 10 of them.  For rock throwing.  I mention this because of course the position of the U.S. State Department has long been that when Palestinians throw rocks at Jews it is mere symbolic protest, not violence and certainly not terrorism.  Heck, even Edward Said joined the fun and threw rocks at the Jews. Now I think this event is just the...

{snip) March 31, 2003 OFFICIAL: France Issues Order to Boycott NewsMax With Carl Limbacher and NewsMax.com Staff For the story behind the story... Sunday, March 30, 2003 11:45 p.m. EST French Government Officially Boycotting NewsMax It's official: The government of France is boycotting NewsMax.com. This past week, NewsMax Pundit Charles Smith called the French Embassy in Washington and spoke with Deputy Press Counsel Agnes Vondermuhal. Ms. Vondermuhal bluntly stated that the embassy had passed details of NewsMax's "Boycott France" campaign, including our recent ad in the New York Times, on to officials in Paris. Apparently, the Chirac government was angered,...

Since the awful news came out about the POW's being murdered and tortured by Iraqi forces, we've had quite a few immoderate voices on this forum, and I'm sure in quite a few other venues as well, calling for the most severe retribution against the Iraqis. I too am for severe retribution - after the war. On the threads that followed these revelations, there were a few posters sensible enough to urge that we stay the course on this, only to be utterly drowned out by cries of "MOAB BAGHDAD" or some such. This is not going to help our...

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) - Israeli soldiers killed a top Hamas fugitive in a roadside ambush Monday, and in a separate operation, raided a stronghold of the militant Islamic group, shooting dead two Palestinians and blowing up the house of a suspected bombmaker. The two Israeli strikes came in response to a deadly Hamas attack on an Israeli tank over the weekend. Israel said it will intensify its hunt for Hamas militants, who have carried out many of the bombings and other attacks against Israeli targets in the past 29 months of fighting. The Hamas fugitive, Riyad Abu Zeid,...

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) - Israeli tanks entered Gaza City early Monday and headed for a neighborhood where leaders of the violent Islamic militant group Hamas live, witnesses said. A Palestinian policeman was killed and four civilians, including a doctor, were wounded by Israeli gunfire, hospital officials said. It was the first time Israeli forces moved on the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood in northern Gaza City. The incursion came after Saturday's blast in northern Gaza, in which four Israeli soldiers died when their tank set off a huge bomb. Hamas claimed responsibility. Early Monday, witnesses said about 35 tanks, accompanied...