Free Republic

WASHINGTON – It's a good thing Sonia Sotomayor speaks Sotomayoran. After week upon week in which plenty of other people on the planet interpreted Sotomayor's past comments, the Supreme Court nominee at last got a chance to deconstruct her own words Tuesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Fingers splayed, palms flat, hands bouncing up and then deliberately pressing down to the table, Sotomayor elaborated, clarified, expanded, retracted. She drew loopy circles on her paper; she ran rhetorical circles around her past words. "I didn't intend to suggest ..." she explained. "What I was speaking about ..." she offered. "As I...

Biden revises claim he was ‘shot at’ in Iraq By Susan Crabtree Posted: 08/08/07 06:57 PM [ET] Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.) — whose garrulous ways have led to a number of verbal gaffes over the years — has revised a dramatic comment that he was “shot at” in the Green Zone during a trip to Iraq. Biden made the brief comment during the CNN/YouTube Democratic debate two weeks ago, as he was emphasizing how difficult it would be to redeploy U.S. citizens and troops out of Iraq if the U.S. decided to withdraw in six months. “Let’s start telling the...

Wikipedia is the online encyclopedia that "anyone can edit." Unless you want to edit the entries on Albert Einstein, human rights in China or Christina Aguilera. Wikipedia's come-one, come-all invitation to write and edit articles, and the surprisingly successful results, have captured the public imagination. But it is not the experiment in freewheeling collective creativity it might seem to be, because maintaining so much openness inevitably involves some tradeoffs. At its core, Wikipedia is not just a reference work but also an online community that has built itself a bureaucracy of sorts...

UNITED NATIONS (AP) - The U.N. watchdog revised its annual report to state that its investigation supported a sexual harassment allegation from an employee made against U.N. refugee chief Ruud Lubbers, a conclusion the secretary-general later rejected. The revised report from the Office of Internal Oversight Services, which was circulated Thursday, revealed for the first time that U.N. investigators not only supported the allegation but recommended that "appropriate actions" be taken. U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard, pressed on why Secretary-General Kofi Annan rejected the investigators' recommendation, said Annan "sought legal advice and on the basis of that advice he concluded that...