Free Republic

LONDON - The U.S. publishing company Ignatius Press has refused to sell any works by Welsh singer Charlotte Church after she called German-born Pope Benedict XVI a Nazi and mocked the Catholic Church. The directors of Ignatius Press said they were offended when the Welsh singer mocked the Catholic Church in the pilot of a proposed eight-part television chat show. Church, dubbed the "Voice of an Angel" before she turned her talents to popular music, also dressed up as a nun and pretended to hallucinate while eating "communion" wafers imprinted with smiling faces signifying the drug Ecstasy. She smashed open...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Roads and bridges built by U.S. taxpayers are starting to be sold off, and so far foreign-owned companies are doing the buying. On a single day in June, an Australian-Spanish partnership paid $3.8 billion to lease the Indiana Toll Road. An Australian company bought a 99-year lease on Virginia's Pocahontas Parkway, and Texas officials decided to let a Spanish-American partnership build and run a toll road from Austin to Seguin for 50 years. Few people know that the tolls from the U.S. side of the tunnel between Detroit and Windsor, Canada, go to a subsidiary of an...

For sale: old, second-hand graves. £3,000 each, many careful owners By Stephanie Condron (Filed: 04/07/2006) A cemetery is offering second-hand graves, with "refurbished" monuments including headstones, obelisks and crosses, to be used again. Recycled burial plots, complete with the original memorials, still contain the remains of those who died at least 75 years ago - the names of the dead are simply scoured from the monuments to allow new inscriptions. The City of London cemetery is selling 1,000 such plots advertised as "traditional-style graves" to be "adopted" by families willing to pay £3,000 to lease them for 50 years. The...

After doing some research on Jason Leopold’s previous work, I came away with a (well-founded) suspicion that the Wilsons and Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) were sourcing a good deal of his work and using him as a mouthpiece. I discovered that this flock of people, the Wilsonistas, suddenly started writing less about the Plame investigation after Libby’s indictment. However, Jason Leopold started writing almost exclusively about the Plame investigation at about the same time, in October. Instead of VIPS writing articles in Truthout and elsewhere about the imminent indictment of Rove, Cheney, Hadley and that Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald...

Clearance sale at the Fountainebleu Want a finger bowl? A shower head? The Fontainebleau's contents, tinged with nostalgia, are being sold piece by piece as the resort awaits renovation. BY MARGARIA FICHTNER With her overblown spaces, sensuous curves and tin-can French pedigree, she was for decades Miami Beach's most voluptuous floozy, a stupefying, gilded splendor, so laughable, so vulgar, so gorgeous, so adored. But now more than 900 of her rooms are being emptied, even the Goldfinger penthouse stripped to its tiny fireplace and lurid carpeting. In the lobby just beyond the mattresses stacked high on the bowtie-patterned marble floor,...

California town on sale on eBay A tiny Californian town, which was the first to be put up for auction on eBay, is on sale again on the online site. The owner, businessman Bruce Krall, is hoping for a minimum bid of $1.75m (£1m) for a town he admits does not even have one horse. The price does, however, include three cows, eight houses, and a post office. Mr Krall says he no longer has time to spend in Bridgeville (population: about 20) but he says the town offers the "opportunity of a lifetime". Lush green hillsides, sweeping mountain views...

WHAT IS TAKING place in Washington over the proposed takeover of container operations at six major ports in the US by a UAE-based company is nothing but a reflection of the real mindset of American politicians influenced by Israel into seeing Arab and Muslim countries as a security risk to the US after the Sept.11 attacks. We in the Arab World have to draw our own lessons from the affair. The UAE is involved in this particularly dispute. But there is no doubt that such deals involving any Arab or Muslim country would draw the same objection from American congress...

Please follow the link. Right now she can be yours for a mere $1,100! http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=6034322259

Radio station sale forces Air America to seek new home Laura Newpoff The Business Journal From the January 20, 2006 print edition One of the first things Bob Christy did when he found out his liberal talk radio station's format was changing to religious broadcasting was to offer his worried staff an exit strategy. "I told them I'd give two-weeks pay to anyone who wanted to leave that day," Christy said. "But nobody did." Christy is general manager of KXXT 1010-AM in Phoenix, home of the Air America Radio format since September 2004. The station was acquired in October, part...

WASHINGTON – Cold remedies that can be used by drug dealers to make methamphetamine would be forced behind store counters under legislation Congress is poised to pass by year's end. Lawmakers hope that federal restrictions – included in the agreement reached Thursday to reauthorize the USA Patriot Act – will stem a meth trade that has hit rural America particularly hard. A number of states have already moved to curb the sale of cold pills containing pseudoephedrine, the ingredient used to cook meth in makeshift labs. The federal law would prevent meth makers from moving to states with weaker laws....

ORLANDO, Fla. - Security guards wrestled a man to the ground in a Wal-Mart after he cut in line to get laptop computers that were on sale Friday, a television station reported. The man started arguing with people inside the store, WFTV-TV in Orlando reported. He then started fighting with the guards, the station reported One man told WFTV that the laptops were being thrown into the air and people rushed toward them, collapsing on each other. Another man described the scene as crazy. Orlando police and Orange County sheriff's officials didn't return phone messages seeking comment. The store's manager...

U.S. Won’t Sell Global Hawk Spy Drones to Korea The United States has turned down a bid from South Korea to buy cutting-edge high-altitude“Global Hawk” unmanned aerial vehicles from the country. The unmanned spy plane is considered a key strategic weapon and is under strict export restrictions, meaning that congressional approval is needed before the UAV can be sold to abroad. In June, the U.S. approved the sale to Japan. During a parliamentary audit of the Agency for Defense Development on Thursday, Grand National Party lawmaker Hwang Jin-ha said Washington told Seoul during a joint Security Cooperation Committee meeting on...

RICHMOND, Va. - A rush to purchase $50 used laptops turned into a violent stampede Tuesday, with people getting thrown to the pavement, beaten with a folding chair and nearly driven over. One woman went so far as to wet herself rather than surrender her place in line. ¡°This is total, total chaos,¡± said Latoya Jones, 19, who lost one of her flip-flops in the ordeal and later limped around on the sizzling blacktop with one foot bare. An estimated 5,500 people turned out at the Richmond International Raceway in hopes of getting their hands on one of the 4-year-old...

Mitsubishi Heavy offers to buy nuclear plant builder WestinghouseSunday, July 10, 2005 at 07:00 JST TOKYO — Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd has offered to purchase major U.S. nuclear power plant builder Westinghouse Electric Co in a multibillion yen deal, company officials said Saturday. The move is intended to increase Mitsubishi Heavy's profitability by tapping new fields as its bottom line has been squeezed by cutbacks in public works spending in Japan, they said. Westinghouse's parent firm, British nuclear reprocessing group British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL), said last week it was putting the U.S. company up for sale. Apart from Mitsubishi, France's...

From the desk of...Congressman Steve King For Sale by Government The Supreme Court just put a "For Sale" sign in front of every American home, farm and business. No offense, but if somebody can find a way to make the property your house sits on more valuable, maybe by selling your land to a developer for a convenience store, the government can take your house. The kicker is that you'll be paid what the court decides is "just compensation," not market value. The recent 5-4 decision by the Court in Kelo v. City of New London expands eminent domain to...

Thieves bungle sale of stolen golf clubsJune 29, 2005 -- Four men were arrested yesterday on charges of stealing a rare set of golf clubs worth more than 100 million won ($98,000) from a country house in Gyeonggi province, which they sold for just 1.2 million won to a golf store. Police said the men, who met in prison, decided to rob the house after hearing that a lot of money was kept there. On March 11, they broke in and stole three sets of golf clubs and other valuables, as they couldn't find any cash. They sold the clubs...

LONDON, May 30 (Reuters) - U.S.-based power producer Calpine Corp. (CPN.N: Quote, Profile, Research) has sold a British power station to the UK's International Power Plc (IPR.L: Quote, Profile, Research) and Japan's Mitsui & Co. Ltd (8031.T: Quote, Profile, Research) for 500 million pounds ($912 million), the Financial Times newspaper reported on Monday.International Power will take 70 percent of the Saltend unit under a partnership which will hand the other 30 percent to the Japanese trading house, the FT's Web site (http://www.ft.com) reported without citing sources. No one from International Power could be reached for comment. A Mitsui spokesman said...

Germans on the dole are being offered a 20 per cent discount at brothels. Germans on the dole are being offered a 20 per cent discount at brothels. People looking for the discount sex just need to show their unemployment benefit card to qualify for the reductions. Brothel manager Silvia Rau who runs the Villa Bijou bar in Dresden said that the previous average number of 150 guests per week has sunk to 80 in recent months. She hopes that the new policy will bring back the customers and also provide them with some comfort in "difficult times". According to...

April 13, 2005 1:20 PM Ancient Cypriot copper mine for sale By Michele Kambas NICOSIA (Reuters) - A copper mine in Cyprus where the metal has been mined since Biblical times faces closure unless the Church of Cyprus can find a buyer, officials said on Wednesday. The Skouriotissa mine, which produced copper ore at a site where there has been mining for some 4,000 years, suspended operations in January, leaving its workers unpaid and with debts labour unions estimate at 14 million pounds. Herod the Great, who in the Bible ordered the Massacre of the Innocents in an attempt to...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Seeking to combat rampant identity theft, U.S. lawmakers said on Thursday they may clamp new restrictions on companies that amass and sell social security numbers and other personal information. Executives from ChoicePoint (NYSE:CPS - news) and rival LexisNexis (ELSN.AS)(REL.L) told legislators that they had scaled back the sale of sensitive personal information following revelations in recent weeks that identity thieves gained access to more than 177,000 of the consumer profiles they sell. But lawmakers said during the U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee hearing that data brokers should not be allowed to sell Social Security...