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Shriners Hospitals for Children, an organization where the practice of medicine has long been unfazed by finances, is struggling with a money crunch and may close some of its hospitals. Rising health care costs and an endowment that has lost $2 billion -- a quarter of its value -- in three years may give Shriners no other choice but to shrink the 22-hospital system to save it. At the group's annual meeting on Monday in Minneapolis, 1,400 Shrine representatives are scheduled to vote on closing the hospital there. Officials at the Shriners International headquarters in Tampa said the Minneapolis hospital...

It might be a bit cynical, not to mention premature, to call President Bush's new $2.9 trillion budget "dead on arrival." But the myriad proposals on everything from the Pentagon to the National Park Service are certainly going to be massaged a bit-mutilated in some cases, probably-by the new Democratic-controlled Congress. One thing you can bank on, though, is that when all is said and done, nixed and negotiated, Uncle Sam will still be in the red. As the White House figures it, the federal government will be spending $244 billion more than it collects in 2007 (or about 1.8...

[John] Wayne, arguably the No. 1 all-time cinema hero, bought into the most valuable tenets of the Shriners' fun brand of freemasonry – friendship, morality and brotherly love. Who wouldn't want to join a fraternity with tenets like those? Apparently, a lot of us these days don't. In 1975, the same year Universal Pictures released "Rooster Cogburn," the Shriners opened Afifi Shrine Temple next to the Scottish Rite Temple, on nearly 20 acres in Tacoma's West End. They needed more space to accommodate a growing membership that numbered roughly 8,700 Afifi Shriners plus their circus calliope, old clown jalopies, parade...

She is a national hero in her homeland, hailed for plucking her little sister from their family home as it was consumed by flames. Now, Nastya Ovchar, her body burned extensively during the rescue of her sister, lies in a room at Shriners Burns Hospital Boston, half a world away from her home in the Ukraine. If they made a movie about Nastya, they could well call it ''The President and the Little Girl," for it was the intervention of a national leader who had endured his own share of physical suffering that assured the 5-year- old could receive lifesaving...

The purpose of FreeRepublic.com's multiple message boards is to limit the topics for each board to particular topics. Posting the same message on all the boards defeats the purpose of multiple-boards for special topics. It is very annoying to see the same message on every bulletin board. PLEASE! DO THE READERS A FAVOR. STOP CROSS-POSTING YOUR MESSAGES!

A 2,300-mile trip on an airplane is a one-day foray, in a car it's a long trip that will take a few days, but on horseback, it is an epic journey that can last months. It is with the locomotive means of the epic journeyer that Bob Gacke of Port La Vaca, Texas, has chosen to undertake a 2,300-mile odyssey across the American interior to bring attention to, and raise money for, Shriner Hospitals. "I've been a Shriner for 25 years and I just have a real passion for the care of these kids in these hospitals," Gacke said Tuesday...

23 people - and one goat - spill out of overloaded taxiby SHARIKA REGCHAND A minibus taxi carrying 17 adults, six children and a goat was impounded in Commercial Road on Saturday. Senior Provincial Traffic Inspector Zain Mahomed said traffic officials stopped the taxi, which was en route to the Transkei, when they noticed that the sliding door was not closed properly. He said a passenger was sitting on top of luggage and holding a goat with its head sticking out of the door. The taxi was impounded and taken to the Mkondeni testing grounds where it was found to...