Free Republic

Serbia is commemorating today nine years since the beginning of NATO air strikes on then Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The strikes lasted 11 weeks and according to different sources between 1,200 and 2,500 people were killed. Serbia PM Vojislav Kostunica shall attend today the commemoration service dedicated to the victims of NATO aggression on FRY in 1999, while the Defense Minister Dragan Sutanovic shall meet with the pilots that took part in combat actions and members of the families of the pilots that lost their lives in those actions. Minister Sutanovac shall also lay the wreaths on the monument dedicated...

Thallium has been described as an ideal assassin's tool The UK government has flown antidote medicine to the Middle East after some Iraqis became seriously ill from eating cakes laced with the poison thallium. Two of the victims, both children, died after eating cake delivered to a military club in Baghdad. Others are being treated in hospital in the Jordanian capital, Amman. It is the first time the deadly toxin has been used since the downfall of Saddam Hussein, whose regime used it to kill its opponents. At least two of the poison victims, the secretary of the Iraqi...

Court finds 21 guilty of Madrid bombings By Leslie Crawford in Madrid Published: October 31 2007 14:27 | Last updated: October 31 2007 14:27 A Spanish court on Wednesday convicted 21 people of involvement in the country’s worst terrorist attack, the 2004 Madrid train bombings that traumatised a nation three days before a general election. Seven of the defendants were acquitted, including an Egyptian accused of masterminding the attacks. The March 11 bombings, which killed 191 commuters and injured more than 1,800 in the early morning rush hour, changed the course of Spanish politics. The conservative Popular party government...

Taliban terrorists tried talking an 8 year old boy into wearing a vest which would 'throw out flowers' when he pulled a cord. Luckily, this just didn't sound right and the kid asked some Afgan soldiers if this was true. They unstrapped the IED from the kid.

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- American soldiers discovered a girls' school being built north of Baghdad had become an explosives-rigged "death trap," the U.S. military said Thursday. The plot at the Huda Girls' school in Tarmiya was a "sophisticated and premeditated attempt to inflict massive casualties on our most innocent victims," military spokesman Maj. Gen. William Caldwell said. The military suspects the plot was the work of al Qaeda, because of its nature and sophistication, Caldwell said in an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer. The plot was uncovered Saturday, when troopers in the Salaheddin province found detonating wire across the street...

They looked like a Vauxhall Conference football team being led out at Wembley by Nora Batty before the final of the Leyland DAF trophy. Fourteen men kitted out in ill-fitting suits from the local branch of John Collier, John Collier, the window to watch, and a dumpy bird in a Les Dawson headscarf. They're coming home, they're coming home, they're coming. . . Blink and it could have been the Guildford branch of the Manchester United supporters' club arriving back at the airport, complaining about being roughed up by the Italian riot police. I'm sorry if this is going to...

BAGHDAD, Jan. 30 — Investigators believe that attackers who used American-style uniforms and weapons to infiltrate a secure compound and kill five American soldiers in Karbala on Jan. 20 may have been trained and financed by Iranian agents, according to American and Iraqi officials knowledgeable about the probe.

Four American soldiers were abducted during a sophisticated sneak attack last week in the Shiite holy city of Karbala, the U.S. military confirmed Friday. It said three were shot to death and a fourth was mortally wounded with a gunshot to the head when they were found in a neighboring province, far from the compound where they were captured. Two of the four were handcuffed together in the back seat of an SUV near the southern Iraqi town of Mahawil. A third dead soldier was on the ground nearby. The fourth soldier died on the way to the hospital, the...

Michael Ignatieff, the former Harvard human rights professor and current candidate for the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada, has made two serious misstatements regarding the recent war between Hezbollah and Israel, and most particularly the Israeli military actions in the Lebanese town of Qana. Back in August, Ignatieff said that he was "not losing sleep" over the attack in which 29 civilians, who had sought refuge in a building, were killed when the Israeli air force fired a missile at what it believed was a Hezbollah rocket-launching site. Every humane person -- and Ignatieff is surely that --...

IRAQI officers loyal to Saddam Hussain filmed their cold-blooded murder of two British bomb disposal officers who were captured after a roadside ambush.An inquest was told that Staff Sergeant Simon Cullingworth, 36, and Sapper Luke Allsopp, 24, thought that they were being taken to hospital for treatment, but instead they were moved to a compound run by Saddam’s military intelligence. The harrowing ordeal lasted for hours until Iraqi agents killed the pair. The soldiers were buried in a shallow grave. At the inquest yesterday the coroner, Andrew Walker, severely criticised army chiefs for failing to ensure that the soldiers avoided...

<p>Fox News reporting a new video is out. It shows two dead american soldiers burned and being dragged through the streets.</p> <p>There is a belief that they are the bodies of troopers Tucker and Menchaca.</p>

LONDON, England (CNN) -- CNN's Becky Anderson interviews Peter Herbert, a British human rights lawyer who visited Richard Reid, the so-called "shoe-bomber" in a U.S. jail in 2002. Herbert, who had no role in Reid's defense, was interviewed at his office in London. Here is the full transcript: Anderson: So you traveled to see him? (Watch the interview -- 3:04) ... Q. Well, you talked at length I believe and perhaps with more detail than you might have expected about what had happened that day and indeed why Richard Reid had been involved. When you asked him why young men...

TEL AVIV, Israel — In the least friendly fire imaginable, Israeli soldiers in southern Lebanon encountered Hezbollah wearing Israel Defense Force uniforms, the Jewish state's leading investigative news program reported. During a battle on the evening of August 6 and early hours of August 7, in the town of Hule, an IDF unit found two Hezbollah dressed in Israeli fatigues and helmets in a civilian home. The battlefield commander was forced to order his men to remove the white hats they wear on their helmets to distinguish his men from the enemy. An embedded reporter, Itai Engel, from the weekly...

An Iraqi insurgent group said it attacked U.S. forces near Baghdad by setting off explosives attached to a dog, according to a video posted on the Internet on Sunday. A distant shot in a video issued by the group appeared to show a dog sitting on the side of a road as a military vehicle approached, moments before a large explosion occurred. Iraq's Jihadi Factions, which has claimed responsibility for attacks on U.S. and Iraqi forces, said it carried out the attack in the Abu Ghraib area west of Baghdad, targeting U.S. forces, without giving a date.

NORTH COUNTY ---- The focus at Camp Pendleton is about to shift from teaching troops the latest warfare techniques to trying Marines for alleged war crimes in Iraq. Separate cases involving two Camp Pendleton units allege members of two platoons violated the Pentagon's rules of engagement and killed 25 Iraqis, many of whom authorities say were clearly noncombatants. One case, which arises out of the slaying of a 52-year-old Iraqi man in the village of Hamdania on April 26, has landed seven Marines and a Navy corpsman in the base brig on charges of premeditated murder and kidnapping. The other...

WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration drafted amendments to the War Crimes Act that would retroactively protect policymakers from possible criminal charges for authorizing any humiliating and degrading treatment of detainees, according to lawyers who have seen the proposal. The move by the administration is the latest effort to deal with treatment of those taken into custody in the war on terror. At issue are interrogations carried out by the CIA, and the degree to which harsh tactics such as water-boarding were authorized by administration officials. A separate law, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, applies to the military. The Washington...

(If you're thinking what you're thinking is just a joke; you might be horrified to know that any play on words in the original title is intentional.) FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE- New York, NY- July, 26 2006—- A presidential bust of Hillary Clinton is set to be unveiled at the Museum of Sex on August 9, 2006 at 10 am. Accentuating her sexual power and bolstered by the presidential seal, The Presidential Bust of Hillary Rodham Clinton: The First Woman President of the United States of America will be officially open for public viewing on August 9 for a limited six...

....' UN human rights chief Louise Arbour suggested Wednesday that the military operations being carried out in Lebanon, Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories could be considered war crimes. The obligation to protect civilians during hostilities is entrenched in international law, "which defines war crimes and crimes against humanity," Arbour said in a statement. "The scale of the killings in the region, and their predictability, could engage the personal criminal responsibility of those involved, particularly those in a position of command and control," she added. ' Now, this is a woman that was chief prosecutor of ICTY directly indicting Slobodan...

A council in the Australian city of Sydney is taking radical measures against car-revving youths - the calming tones of singer Barry Manilow. Officials in Rockdale say that local youths have been hanging around in car parks, revving their engines and generally annoying residents. So the council has decided to strike back. From July, Barry Manilow's greatest hits will be piped into one car park in a bid to drive the youths away.

Hezbollah rockets rained on the northern part of the country on Thursday, and this resort, tucked into the far northwestern corner, was perhaps the hardest hit. *** The second day of heavy shooting across the border by the Lebanese militant group began early in the morning, when one rocket slammed into an open field just 200 yards from Western Galilee Hospital, the town’s main medical center. An apartment building took a direct hit and burst into flames. One woman was killed while on the balcony of her apartment in another building. A man also died in the town of Safad....