Free Republic

A bookstore run by the Bible Society in the Gaza Strip was bombed early Sunday, in an attack by a suspected Muslim 'vice-squad.' Two Internet cafes were also badly damaged, although no one was hurt in the early morning attack. A relatively unknown extremist Islamic organization called the "Swords of Truth" has claimed responsibility for a recent string of similar attacks on Internet cafes and music shops Gaza has a small Christian Arab community among an increasingly Islamicised Muslim majority. Jerusalem Newswire contributed to this report.

Ben Browning and Nik Edgell escaped with their lives when arsonists ignited a blaze at their radical bookstore. But the biggest surprise, they say, came when questioning by arson investigators turned into a confrontational political debate. Dazed after being roused from a sound sleep, scrambling frantically to save as much as possible from the flames and breathing in lots of smoke, Browning said, he was shocked when arson investigators for the Houston Fire Department became verbally aggressive, calling him and Edgell "anti-American" and "anti-federal government." The scene happened Feb. 26 at Sedition Books, a politically radical "information shop" opened last...

As independent bookstores scramble to compete with chain stores and online retailers, one small Marin County bookseller found a way to survive. He got rid of the books. "The space was so small that people sitting in the cafe were practically on top of the bookshelves," said Gary Kleiman, who founded BookBeat in Fairfax in 1999. "You couldn't get to the books." SNIP His strategy is just one way independent bookstores in the Bay Area and across the country are adapting to the changing marketplace for books. Today, fewer than half the books sold nationwide are purchased in bookstores, according...

A rookie police officer, with only weeks on the job, crossed paths with the would-be terrorist who is charged with plotting to bomb the Herald Square subway station. Beginning in November 2002, the undercover officer made visits to an Islamic bookstore in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and said he listened to the store clerk, Shahawar Matin Siraj, 23, predict further attacks on New York City, possibly on Wall Street. The officer, who testified yesterday at Mr. Siraj's trial in Brooklyn federal court under a pseudonym, Kamil Pasha, retold of conversations that suggest that Mr. Siraj drew satisfaction from tragedies ranging from...

Borders and Waldenbooks stores will not stock the April-May issue of Free Inquiry magazine because it contains cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that provoked deadly protests among Muslims in several countries. "For us, the safety and security of our customers and employees is a top priority, and we believe that carrying this issue could challenge that priority," Borders Group Inc. spokeswoman Beth Bingham said Wednesday. The magazine, published by the Council for Secular Humanism in suburban Amherst, includes four of the drawings that originally appeared in a Danish newspaper in September, including one depicting Muhammad wearing a bomb-shaped turban with...

ANCHORAGE, Alaska - A woman drove a station wagon through a wall of the Barnes & Noble bookstore, sending glass, wood and books flying. Three people suffered leg injuries. Two were taken to a hospital. The store was filled with shoppers at about 2 p.m. Sunday when the Subaru station wagon plowed backward through picture windows in a reading area in the store's northwest corner. The car took out the travel section and barreled about 40 feet through the bookstore before coming to rest in nonfiction. "I thought it was an earthquake," said shopper Chris Badgett, 27. "There was screaming,...

After half a decade of triumphs and tribulations, Breakdown Book Collective is closing up shop. A fluctuating stream of funding and volunteers sustained the activist group's space for radical literature, lectures, music and community, but there are pitfalls to organizing anarchists and running an anti-capitalist business.

One of John Crawford's least favorite assignments when he was a soldier in Baghdad was standing guard at a gas station where shortages and long lines kept everyone on edge. "We were all sitting in the most oil-rich country in the world, and even when people could get gas, it was overpriced fuel trucked in by Halliburton from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia," Crawford writes in his terse, gritty, new memoir, "The Last True Story I'll Ever Tell: An Accidental Soldier's Account of the War in Iraq" (Riverhead Books, $23.95). The book jumped to No. 12 last week on the New...

Here's an idea for a new class sure to take America's campuses by storm. The title: "Ward Churchill: A Capitalist's Blueprint for Succeeding in America." By now, everyone from Berkeley to Boston has heard the story of Boulder's infamous America-hating professor. And while the media storm surrounding him has faded-at least for now-his ongoing story presents a valuable case study in basic economics for socialists and free-marketers alike. Today, Churchill's books are required reading at more than 100 universities. Since his January rise-to-fame, when the nation first learned of his essay where he compared innocent 9-11 victims to Nazis, his...

<p>Looking for your copy of "Unfit for Command"? Having paranoid thoughts that Bookstore employees are hiding, damaging, or flat-out lying to you about the availability of the book?</p> <p>Ah, quickly, dear readers! Before it goes away or crashes, let us visit that Shangri-La of Tolerance, the Border's Bookstore Employees Union Forum. There we shall find all manner of reasons for you to dust the tinfoil off your beanie, and place it proudly on your head...</p>

General Tommy Franks will be at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Nashville on Sept 22 at 6:00 pm to sign "American Soldier."

Schuler's Books on 28th Street has an ample supply of "Unfit for Command". Go in and buy one to perhaps send a message to the Chomsky-fascinated proprietor. I rarely go in Schuler's any longer because of all the hate literature littering the store.

This evening at approximately 6:15 CDT time here in Nashville I went to the Davis Kidd Booksellers at 4007 Hillsboro Road in the Green Hills section of Nashville. My wife had been by two days ago and reserved 2 copies for us of UNFIT and was told that the store would have them yesterday. I had planned to stop then but was too busy. When I went to the front desk I was told to go to the back counter where they hold reserve books. I went up to the bespectacled young lady and asked "Where are ya'll hiding Unfit...

A chain of booksellers that has been synonymous with Indian rail travel for 125 years is facing the axe because it sounds too English. The threat to A H Wheeler & Co, which published Rudyard Kipling when he was all but unknown, was announced live on television when Laloo Prasad Yadav, the railways minister, delivered his budget. He departed from his prepared text to say in Hindi: "Wheeler, Wheeler, Wheeler. Why do we have a Wheeler bookstall everywhere? The English have left this country long back." Mr Yadav said the government had decided in principle to cancel the company's contract...

Family Christian Stores has announced that it will begin opening its outlets on Sunday. Family Christian's new policy of Sunday sales is being launched with its 17 Dallas-area stores and will be implemented nationwide this fall, according to the company's chief executive, Dave Browne, The Dallas Morning News reported Aug. 29. The Dallas stores' first Sunday for business was Aug. 24 and the policy will move forward on a market-by-market basis, Jeff Lambert, a spokesman for the chain, told Baptist Press Sept. 4. Family Christian Stores' Sunday hours will be noon to 5 p.m. Wayne Grudem, a leading evangelical theologian,...

<p>Former first lady and current United State senator from New York Hillary Clinton made a brief appearance in downtown San Francisco Tuesday, signing nearly a thousand copies of her best-selling memoirs.</p> <p>A throng of fans eager to see Clinton stretched all the way around A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books bookstore at the Opera Plaza on Van Ness Avenue starting early Tuesday morning.</p>

There may not have been a sign at a Washington book store proclaiming it a "No Barking Zone," but a couple of yapping dogs got former Clinton aide and ABC News host George Stephanopoulos ejected from the premises. According to today's Washington Post, Stephanopoulos was browsing at a Georgetown Barnes & Noble store hard by his Washington town house when one of his two dogs began barking. The Post reports that when the family dachshund, Gilbert, started barking and refused to stop, Stephanopoulos was "summarily ejected" from the bookstore. "He had a baby carriage, and two little yapping dogs," a...

Bookstore Fights Police Order for Records DENVER (Reuters) - In a case closely watched by police and civil libertarians, Colorado's highest court will announce on Monday if The Tattered Cover bookstore must reveal if a customer bought "how to" books on making illegal drugs. "Forty-nine other states will be using this case as a precedent no matter what the outcome," said the bookstore's attorney Daniel Recht. Recht represents The Tattered Cover's owner, Joyce Meskis, who refused to allow police to search her records to link a customer with a suspected illegal drug laboratory operation. The Colorado Supreme Court will be...