Free Republic

WASHINGTON, Oct. 10, 2006 -- Iraq’s elected leaders are taking measures to address the sectarian strife that has gripped Baghdad and other parts of that country in recent weeks, a senior U.S. military officer said yesterday. “The most telling sign of progress towards reconciliation is that the leaders from diverse factions with different interests are working together and are communicating with each other,” Army Maj. Gen. William Caldwell told reporters at a Baghdad news conference. Caldwell, a spokesman for Multinational Force Iraq, cited a meeting chaired by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in Baghdad on Oct. 8 in which...

Thousands of illegal immigrants cross the U.S-Mexico border into Arizona every day. “To better yourself, for your family, and for a better life,” says Alfonso Miramontez, who’s from Los Mochis, Sinaloa, a town that's about an 8-hour bus ride from Nogales. Miramontez says, once he heard the U.S. might be sending National Guard troops to the border, he immediately headed north, and was planning to illegally cross into Arizona Monday night. “It’ll now be much harder to cross through the desert," says Miramontez, ”but the Army (National Guard) on the border won’t stop me.” Like Miramontez, Eduardo Reyes, an immigrant...

WASHINGTON, Feb. 25, 2006 – U.S. and Iraqi troops have stepped up their patrols in Iraq's Baghdad and Babil provinces, and thanks to assistance from ordinary Iraqis, they've found and defused numerous roadside bombs, mine fields, and weapons caches, U.S. military officials in Iraq reported. The stepped-up patrols are designed to provide a safe environment for ordinary Iraqis, officials said. Iraq has been wracked with demonstrations and violence because of the recent terrorist bombing of the Askariya shrine in Samarra. The Iraqi government responded to this violence by imposing a temporary evening curfew, followed by a daytime curfew, in...

NEW YORK - From Peru to the Philippines to Poland, U.S.-based conservative groups are increasingly engaged in abortion and family-planning debates overseas, emboldened by their ties with the Bush administration and eager to compete with more liberal rivals. The result is that U.S. advocacy groups are now waging their culture war skirmishes worldwide as they try to influence other countries' laws and wrangle over how U.S. aid money should be spent. "We don't expect to see the United Nations change, or Western Europe change," said Joseph d'Agostino of the Population Research Institute, a Virginia-based anti-abortion group. "But with the Bush...