Free Republic

Retired Diplomats, Soldiers Tell Bush to Beat It by Jim Lobe In an unprecedented broadside, more than two-dozen top retired U.S. career diplomats and military commanders, many of whom reached their top positions under former President George H.W. Bush, have called for George W. Bush to be defeated in his re-election bid in November. "It is time for a change," declared a one-page statement by 27 ex-officials released at a press conference here Wednesday. "Never in the two and a quarter centuries of our history has the United States been so isolated among the nations, so broadly feared and distrusted." "The...

For neo-conservative and other right-wing US hawks, Madrid has suddenly become Munich in 1938 and Spain's Prime Minister-elect Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero is former British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. In an extraordinarily unanimous campaign, newspaper columnists and television commentators are flooding the media with cries of "appeasement," the dreaded epithet with which Chamberlain was permanently tagged after his meeting in Munich with Adolf Hitler, which permitted the Nazis to slice off a major chunk of Czechoslovakia. In the hawks' view, the electoral defeat of Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar's People's Party in the wake of last Thursday's bombings, followed by...

Damage from Warming Becoming 'Irreversible,' Says New Report Mon Mar 15, 9:50 AM ET Jim Lobe, OneWorld US WASHINGTON, D.C., Mar 15 (OneWorld) -- Ten years after the ratification of a United Nations (news - web sites) treaty on climate change, greenhouse gas emissions that lead to global warming are still on the rise, signaling a "collective failure" of the industrialized world, according to the Washington-based World Resources Institute (WRI), a leading environmental think-tank. • World Resources Institute • Earth Island Institute • OneWorld on Climate Change Supported by Cable & Wireless "We are quickly moving to the point where...

WASHINGTON - Increasingly split and defensive over whether the United States must cooperate more with the United Nations and Europe and whether Syria or Iran should be "next" in the "war on terrorism", the country's neo-conservative movement is now beset by a new source of tension within its ranks - Mel Gibson's film The Passion of the Christ. As ticket sales for the Australian superstar-filmmaker's gory, blood-drenched cinematic interpretation of the last 12 hours of Jesus Christ's life surpassed the US$200 million mark less than two weeks after its Ash Wednesday release, the debate over whether the movie is anti-Semitic...

We report, you get it wrong By Jim Lobe WASHINGTON - The more commercial television news you watch, the more wrong you are likely to be about key elements of the Iraq War and its aftermath, according to a major new study released in Washington on Thursday. And the more you watch the Rupert Murdoch-owned Fox News channel, in particular, the more likely it is that your perceptions about the war are wrong, adds the report by the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA). Based on several nationwide surveys it conducted with California-based Knowledge Networks since June,...

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2003 January 14 0313-192: The Wrong Galaxy Credit: W. Keel (Univ. Alabama), M. Ledlow (Gemini Obs.), F. Owen (NRAO), AUI,NSF, NASA Explanation: Centered above is distant galaxy 0313-192, some one billion light-years away. Radio emission from the galaxy has been mapped by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory's Very Large Array and is shown in red, composited with a visible light image from the Hubble Space Telescope's new Advanced...

Not for commercial use. Solely to be used for the educational purposes of research and open discussion. Three more held in UK; Arrests Trio Questioned At High-security Police Station Paul Kelso The Guardian (London); Guardian Home Pages, Pg. 4 September 24, 2001 British police were yesterday investigating the possibility that the al-Qaida terrorist network is active in the UK, as anti-terrorist branch officers continued to question three people of Arab extraction arrested at the weekend. French police arrested three men in possession of what investigators believe is uranium-235, a material used in the construction of atomic weapons. The uranium is ...