Free Republic

By unwittingly angering Muslims with his comments on Islam, Pope Benedict XVI has shown that he has yet to shake off his academic theological roots and master the global media machine with the same deftness as his predecessor. In clinging to theology and orthodoxy, the bookish Benedict has shown little regard for media management in getting his message across, unlike the communications-savvy John Paul II. Benedict railed Muslims when he quoted a 14th-century Christian emperor who said the Prophet Mohammed had brought the world only "evil and inhuman" things, portraying the Islam he founded as a religion which endorses violence,...

The FDA is presently considering guidelines that would allow scientists to conduct "emergency research" on patients without any informed consent. PFLC is launching a direct challenge to these proposed regulations which would allow Nazi-like experimentation on human beings. Do you remember from history what the Nazi party and Joseph Mengele did to human subjects during WWII? These reprobates conducted dangerous medical experiments on innocent people without consent. Many people died as a result of the Nazis' human experiments and many others suffered a lifetime of post-experimental trauma and injury. This is not to mention the deprivation of basic human dignity...

MARSEILLE, France, Sept 3, 2006 (AFP) - French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy appeared almost certain to lead the right into next year's presidential election, after a triumphant party congress which concluded Sunday in Marseille with a blistering attack on the "generation of May 1968". Speaking before 7,000 young members of the ruling Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), Sarkozy, 51, said modern France had been betrayed by the left-wing ideals that took root after the 1968 student uprising, and called for a society built around "a reassertion of the value of work". "(The generation of 1968) inculcated everywhere — in...

The United States has warned Iran that military option "is not off the table" as it mulls a multi-pronged strategy to prevent Tehran from going nuclear. "I think any president charged with responsibility for protecting the American people is not going to take the military option off the table when you confront a threat as grave as an Iran armed with nuclear weapons," US Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton said. "... He's (Bush) made it plain for some time that our preferred way of dealing with this problem is through peaceful and diplomatic means, and that's what we've...

Risky Legacy: African DNA linked to prostate cancer Ben Harder The high rate of prostate cancer among African American men may result in large part from a newly identified stretch of DNA passed down from their African ancestors. A black man's odds of developing prostate cancer by age 55 are more than twice those of a white man. The racial discrepancy is less pronounced when the disease appears later. Researchers have suspected for years that genetic factors account for part of the racial difference in risk. Most African Americans have both African and European forebears, so their chromosomes are mosaics...

AS Parisians crowd to the beaches in August, tourists are descending on the City of Light in droves, undeterred by a recent survey highlighting complaints that visitors get the cold shoulder from locals. The most visited country in the world, France received 76 million tourists last year, with Asians making up a growing proportion of those who came from non-European countries and 50,000 visitors jetting over every month from China alone. All this despite stereotyped images of rude waiters, bored shop assistants and impatient Parisians all too ready to give nervous tourists the brush off in rapid French. "French hospitality...

Philippine volcano 'set to erupt' Mayon is the most active volcano in the Philippines The Philippine authorities have ordered the evacuation of about 35,000 people living near a volcano, saying an eruption could take place soon. The alert was raised to four - the second highest level - following increased activity at Mount Mayon, in the centre of the country. It has been rumbling since February and started emitting lava in mid-July. Mayon is the most active volcano in the Philippines, having erupted about 50 times in the past 400 years. People living in the region watched with alarm early...

Surgeons fought for hours to save Castro's life By Phil Hart in Havana (Filed: 06/08/2006) Doctors at the exclusive Cimeq hospital in western Havana are accustomed to handling the delicate health problems of Cuba's communist elite. It was here last weekend, The Sunday Telegraph has learnt, that they battled for several hours to save the life of the regime's most important patient, Fidel Castro. Unable to stem intestinal bleeding with drugs, the country's top surgeons performed an emergency operation on the veteran leader. To all but a handful of trusted doctors and his closest lieutenants, President Castro's medical condition has...

LOS ANGELES - Investigators said Tuesday they are trying to find at least 50 women they have linked to a photographer on death row for murdering two aspiring models in the early 1980s. Authorities are looking into whether the women were raped or killed between 1975 and 1984 by William Richard Bradford, according to a Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department Web site. In the 1970s and '80s, Bradford posed as a freelance photographer in the West Los Angeles area, taking sexually explicit photos of women he met at bars and auto races, according to the site. The site showed women...

There has been an increasing trend towards building DNA databases all over the world. In America there are many states that take your DNA for a misdemeanor crime and also during a traffic stop. There have been DNA dragnets all across America. You are pulled over by a police officer for running a red light and he tells you to swab the inside of you’re mouth. Any authority figure will normally get what he wants if he applies a little pressure. We were taught to obey our authorities from grade school so it is embedded in our psyche. A basic...

Nationalist camp leaders warn that the right-wing had better not make the same mistake twice. "This time," they declare, "we have to say, 'We told you so.'" Nationalist camp commentator and journalist Haggai Segal and the Rabbi of Ofrah, Avi Gisser, are the first to send out the message. Segal, broadcasting on his Knesset Channel TV show and writing in his weekly column in B'Sheva, says the right-wing must not be as modest as it was when the PA broke out the Oslo War in late 2000. "The right-wing at the time," Segal writes in B'Sheva, "criminally decreed upon itself...

TOKYO - A 79-year-old Japanese man who went missing at the end of World War II and resurfaced nearly six decades later in Russia went back to his homeland Sunday to be reunited with relatives. Yoshiteru Nakagawa, who disappeared on Sakhalin island in 1945 when the Soviets took it over from Japan, arrived at New Chitose Airport on Japan's northern island of Hokkaido for the first time since he left Japan in 1939, when his family settled on Sakhalin. "Little did I dream of being able to come back to Japan," Nakagawa, who still lives on Sakhalin, said in halting...

(IsraelNN.com) United States Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice joined the G8 industrialized nations group in calling for restraint by IDF forces that entered Gaza to rescue a soldier who was kidnapped by Hamas terrorists on Sunday. Rice added that diplomatic officials continue to work toward obtaining the release of 19-year-old Corporal Gilad Shalit, who was taken hostage during the raid on an IDF outpost near the Kerem Shalom border crossing. Two soldiers were killed and four others wounded in the attack. Shalit’s whereabouts are unknown and his captors refuse to return him.

1 hour ago NEW LONDON, Conn. - A military jury sentenced a Coast Guard cadet to six months in prison and kicked him out of the service Wednesday for extorting sexual favors from a classmate. Cadet Webster M. Smith, the first student court-martialed in the academy's 130-year history, was acquitted of rape but had faced up to five years and seven months for extortion, sodomy, indecent assault and other charges. Defense attorneys for Smith, 23, of Houston, asked the jury to spare him jail time, saying the stigma of his conviction will follow him forever. He will not graduate from...

Eran Sternberg, director of Arutz Sheva's televised programming, was forcibly detained and questioned by General Security Services (GSS) on Tuesday. They warned him that he "had best be careful." The GSS (Israel's domestic intelligence agency) claimed that Sternberg engaged in violent incitement against officers of the law. Sternberg, who was the former spokesman for the Gaza Coast Regional Council before the uprooting of the Jewish communities of Gaza, vehemently denies the allegations. Sternberg, 31 and a father of four, currently lives in Yad Binyamin, between Beit Shemesh and Ashdod, together with his expelled neighbors from the former northern Gush Katif...

WASHINGTON — Police labor officials, angry over a federal grand jury's refusal to indict Rep. Cynthia McKinney for assaulting a police officer, said Monday they want the House ethics committee to review her conduct. And they said the grand jury's decision last week sent the message that "it's okay to hit a police officer." "We hope that members of Congress will review her actions in light of their rules within their own ethics committee," Andrew Maybo, chairman of the U.S. Capitol Police Labor Committee, told reporters Monday at a news conference in Washington.

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - German police have arrested a man on suspicion of murdering a woman with a Bockwurst sausage. Prosecutors and police said the 50-year-old was arrested after the discovery of a woman's body in an apartment in Zwickau, eastern Germany. They said she had choked on a Bockwurst, which is a popular large German sausage. The prosecutors said the man had given a patchy account of events, acknowledging that he may have "administered" a Bockwurst to the woman. They are now working to establish exactly what happened in the run up to her death.

June 7, 2006 — A federal judge ordered two attorneys to settle their dispute by using the children's playground game "rock, paper, scissors." The ruling yesterday by Judge Gregory Presnell of the U.S. District Court in Orlando, Fla., stated that he was so dissatisfied with the case's "latest in a series of Gordian knots" that he is fashioning "a new form of alternative dispute resolution." In the dispute at hand, the two attorneys could not agree about where to take the sworn statement of a witness in a case concerning payment of insurance claims. The judge's order states that the...

CHICAGO, June 7 /Christian Newswire/ -- After exactly twenty years the NOW v. Scheidler RICO case is finally history. On Thursday, June 8, 2006, just one day short of the twentieth anniversary of the filing of the lawsuit, Judge David Coar will enter judgment for the defendants, Joseph M. Scheidler, Timothy Murphy and Andrew Scholberg and the Pro-Life Action League, negating all charges against them. "Judge Coar's action tomorrow will be a great weight off of me," said Joseph Scheidler, National Director of the Pro-Life Action League. "It has taken all this time to vindicate the pro-life movement and declare...

Many gun owners fear that Ohio's open carry requirements in a car are going to get someone killed one day. Just last week, another incident played out that demonstrates just how dangerous the mindset of "man with a gun equals criminal" could be for law abiding gun owners. Recently, a concealed handgun license holder was pulled over in Oregon, Ohio (near Toledo) after leaving a gas station. He was ordered out of his vehicle by police conducting a "felony traffic stop", eventually had to crawl out of his window (his doors were locked and he was ordered to keep his...