Free Republic

A gunman suspected of killing seven people in the name of al-Qaeda, including three children at a Jewish school, has been arrested by police after an hours-long siege in southwestern France. About 300 police, some in bullet-proof body armor, had earlier cordoned off an area surrounding a four-storey house in a leafy suburb of the city of Toulouse where the 24-year-old Muslim man, identified as Mohamed Merah, was holed up on the ground floor. Merah had been arrested for bomb making in the southern Afghan province of Kandahar in 2007 but escaped months later in a Taliban prison break, the...

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's envoy Isaac Molho will meet with top Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat in Amman Tuesday for preliminary talks aimed at setting an agenda for peace negotiations, even as the Palestinians are preparing a diplomatic campaign that aims to put Israel under "a real international siege." (Snip) The diplomatic offensive the Palestinians are planning to launch later this month could include pushing the UN Security Council to pass a resolution condemning settlement construction and urging the International Criminal Court to try Israel for war crimes related to its 2008-2009 incursion into the Gaza Strip.

Residents in the Syrian city of Homs called for western intervention on Saturday after activists said the area has come under renewed attack from forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad. Al Jazeera cited residents who told the network on Saturday that army tanks were shelling the city. Activists in the Bab Amr district said they had been under siege for the last 48 hours. One resident told the network, “There is heavy bombardments going on since early morning and there is non-stop firing so far. So many people are been killed, we have counted so far 16 people have been...

"There is talk now of 'holding their feet to the fire' and making our representatives accountable for their promises; to ensure the Constitutionally limited government we are due. A sweeping election has taken place to install those who will follow the dictates of the people. Have we learned nothing? Has there not been elections in the past with the same intent? An election is not a solution, it is merely an expression of political will, not enforcement. To make change happen it takes boots on the ground, people in the halls of congress and a list of demands to be...

One fundamental tenet of Gen. Stanley McChrystal's controversial Afghanistan strategy aims at avoiding precisely the kinds of attacks that killed eight American soldiers Sunday. In what is being described as one of the boldest attacks of the Afghan insurgency, an estimated 300 militants sustained a day-long siege against a coalition outpost in Nuristan Province – a place where the rule of law is so tenuous and the terrain so forbidding that it is seen as one of the likeliest hiding places for Osama bin Laden. It is also has fewer people than Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Beyond the request for more...

The entire body of the Jewish people today – in Israel, in Europe, in America, in Australia and New Zealand, and throughout the world – is in grave danger. Our very existence as a people and as a faith is in jeopardy. The threat to our survival has two components to it: the external siege being waged against Israel and the Jewish people throughout the world by the international jihadist movement, its sympathizers and appeasers; and the internal siege that we Jews, both in Israel and in the Diaspora, including the United States, are waging against ourselves.

NAHR AL-BARED, Lebanon (AFP) - Lebanese soldiers and diehard Islamist militants entrenched in a refugee camp fought gunbattles on Sunday after at least 17 people were killed in an operation to storm rebel positions. As the showdown entered its fourth week, an army officer at the scene said the high casualties were suffered in clashes on Saturday that were often at close quarters and accompanied by heavy artillery fire from the military. The army, which has encircled Nahr al-Bared, tried to push into the Palestinian refugee camp in north Lebanon and overrun positions held by Fatah al-Islam militants, which has...

NAHR AL-BARED, Lebanon (AFP) - Fears for thousands of civilians caught in the Lebanese army's siege of Islamist militants grew Sunday as those brave enough to escape told harrowing tales of survival. The United Nations made an urgent appeal for the safety of children among an estimated 10,000 mainly Palestinian civilians caught in the crossfire at the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp, where the Islamist gunmen are holed up. Lebanese troops encircled the camp a week ago, when fighting broke out with Fatah al-Islam militants that has killed 78 people, forced thousands to flee and trapped thousands more in unbearable conditions....

Authorities are beefing up security around U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers and his family after his congressional office in Lansing was vandalized, apparently by anti-war protesters, officials said. Livingston County Sheriff's deputies are watching Rogers' Brighton home due to the vandalism at his district office in downtown Lansing overnight Monday and a similar incident outside another Michigan congressman's home Saturday, officials said in written statement. The vandals splattered red paint on signs with Rogers' name and a "support the troops'' slogan on the building, and plastered a sign saying the four-term congressman has blood on his hands. They also spray painted...

WASHINGTON - Democratic critics of the Iraq war seized the offensive at both ends of the Capitol on Tuesday, disclosing plans for a symbolic rejection by the House of President Bush's decision to deploy additional troops and filing legislation in the Senate to require withdrawal of U.S. military personnel. "We're going to stand by our soldiers, but we're not going to stand by a failed policy that exposes more of our soldiers to death and suffering," said Sen. Richard Durbin (news, bio, voting record) of Illinois, rebutting charges that the war's critics may be undermining the morale or even the...

British soldiers fighting the Zulus experienced appalling conditions similar to the muddy killing fields of World War I, it has emerged. Archaeologists have revealed details of soldiers' battle for survival during a bloody siege in the Anglo-Zulu War. The colonial war in 1879 was dramatised by Michael Caine in the film Zulu. Historians lacked detailed evidence of the troops' daily lives, but a team of experts from Glasgow have now uncovered a forgotten British fort. The site at KwaMondi, Eshowe, in South Africa, has been hailed as a treasure trove of historical information which sheds light on the heroism and...

MEXICO CITY - Supporters of leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador pledged Tuesday to place conservative Felipe Calderon "under siege" if he is declared the winner of the disputed presidential elections. Supporters of Calderon, who holds a slight advantage in official vote counts on the July 2 race, meanwhile accused Lopez Obrador of wanting to make blood flow in the conflict. The heightened rhetoric came one day after the first violent incident in a month of protests police saw protesters clash with police outside the Congress building in Mexico City; the leftists plan another march on Congress on Sept. 1, and...

Gaza families count the cost of Israeli siege By Harry de Quetteville and Patrick Bishop in Gaza (Filed: 03/07/2006) Israel's deputy prime minister said his country would prosecute Palestinian government officials seized in connection with the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier. The threat came as concern grew over the humanitarian cost of Israel's siege of the coastal territory, the most crowded place on earth. A Palestinian family examines the damage to their house after it was left in ruins by the Israeli army "They will be put to trial," Shimon Peres told CNN's Late Edition on Sunday. "And they will...

Remember the Trebuchet, the original siege engine?It's back and ready to put your physics muscles to the test. Custome build your "Treb" to take on three seperate challenges: Distance, Accuracy and Power. GlobalSpec Treb Challenge

Dr. Levin is the author of The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People Under Siege. He earned an undergraduate degree in mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania, a B.A./M.A. in English language and literature from Oxford University, an M.D. degree from Penn and a Ph.D. in history from Princeton University. He is a clinical instructor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and maintains a private practice in psychiatry. Dr. Levin has written extensively on Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict. His articles have appeared in The New Republic, The Boston Globe, The Washington Times, and The Jerusalem Post. On the...

In a live dispatch, Al-Ikhbariyah TV correspondent in Al-Dammam has reported that the siege is now over after Saudi security forces stormed the building where Islamist militants where holed up. He added that the building is still being encircled as "a precautionary measure". He confirmed that two of the militants died last night after blowing themselves up and that one member of the security forces had also been killed. The TV presenter also added that the building was now under the total control of the Saudi security forces. Source: Al-Ikhbariyah TV, Riyadh, in Arabic 1053 gmt 6 Sep 05

Consort's death rocks Kim Jong-il Michael Sheridan, Beijing November 15, 2004 HARDLINERS have tightened their political grip on North Korea while Kim Jong-il, the Stalinist state's dictator, has retreated into virtual seclusion after the death of his favourite consort from cancer. Chinese and Western sources say the regime has prepared for a state of siege as it confronts a re-elected US administration under George W. Bush that is determined to break Pyongyang and disarm it of nuclear weapons. As Japanese envoys tried to persuade the North Koreans last week to rejoin multinational talks, Mr Kim's absence from the scene led...

Russian TV broadcasts siege video Watch the video Dramatic video footage of inside the school in Beslan during the siege has been aired on Russian television. It shows adults and children packed into the school gymnasium as heavily-armed, masked men walk around the room. Explosives, apparently wired and ready for use, lie on the floor while others are looped around basketball hoops at either end of the gym. Russia's NTV network, the first to broadcast the video clip, said it had been recorded by the hostage-takers. The network did not explain how it obtained the pictures. The footage shows hundreds...

People carry a stretcher with a victim from a seized school in Beslan, North Ossetia, Friday, Sept. 3, 2004. Commandos stormed a school Friday in southern Russia where hundreds of hostages had been held for three days, sending hostage-takers and their captives fleeing in a scene of chaos amid explosions and gunfire. More than 100 children were wounded in the assault, some running from the building naked and covered in blood. Victim's condition is not known.

TOP NEWS 646 vicitms of terrorist act in Beslan hospitalized. 03.09.2004, 22.00 “The former hostages are receiving therapy in mobile hospitals and clinics of Beslan and Vladikavkaz,” the source said. Some 130 wounded people, including children, are in the Vladikavkaz clinic. The republican clinic has 38 patients, including five children, with the severest wounds and traumas, and the children’s clinic of Vladikavkaz has admitted 186 children. Eighty adults are receiving therapy in the airmobile hospital, 200 in the medical emergency clinic, 32 in the republican clinic, two in the military hospital of Vladikavkaz, and four in the first town hospital...