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DrudgeReport.com

• Iraqis Want to Try US for War Crimes in Belgian Court

• Microsoft Connection Puts Slate.com in Black

• Apple Computer to Offer Digital Music Service

• Hackers Strike Back at Madonna

• Blair Warns Chirac Not to Destabilize North Atlantic Alliance

• 6 Enron Executives May Be Charged

• Victory Over Saddam Temporarily Silences Hollywood “Anti-war” Types

• Tacoma Police Chief Shoots Wife, Commits Suicide

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Iraqis target Gen. Franks for war crimes trial in Belgium...

Another reason why international courts are a bad idea. The marketplace in Bahgdad was bombed by Saddam, not the U. S.

The complaint will state that coalition forces are responsible for the indiscriminate killing of Iraqi civilians, the bombing of a marketplace in Baghdad, the shooting of an ambulance, and failure to prevent the mass looting of hospitals, said Jan Fermon, a Brussels-based lawyer.

SLATE.COM SETS A WEB MAGAZINE FIRST: IT 'MADE MORE MONEY THAN IT SPENT'...

Web purists who long believed that Slate, the online magazine founded by Michael Kinsley and bankrolled by Microsoft, was never a bona fide digital media service now have a final, damning piece of evidence.

Apple Computer plans to introduce a digital music service...

This service will only support Apple users initially.

Apple Computer will on Monday start its bid to become the leading online music retailer with a fee-based service allowing songs to be downloaded for 99 cents apiece.

The US computer group's new venture is backed by the world's five largest music companies, and marks the latest industry effort to challenge the loss of revenue from the millions of fans who download music illegally on file-swapping services.

Hackers Have Field Day with Madonna Decoy...

Some observers thought Madonna was smart to fight piracy with its own tools. Others perceived a thrown gauntlet -- hackers soon defaced Madonna's Web site with an equally profane retort along with several downloadable files of the then-unreleased songs. …

Blair warns Chirac on the future of Europe...

"I don't want Europe setting itself up in opposition to America . . . I think it will be dangerous and destabilising."

U.S. SAID TO WARN 6 EX-ENRON EXECUTIVES OVER CHARGES...

Federal prosecutors in the Enron investigation have notified as many as six executives who formerly worked with the company's broadband division that they could be charged as early as this week with securities fraud and other crimes, according to people involved in the inquiry.

Eerie Silence in Hollywood as Anti-War Stars Vanish...

But with the war in its waning hours, all is quiet on the western coast -- leading conservatives to suggest that Garofalo and her fellow travelers are in full retreat from a public backlash and feeling chastened by a swift American victory.

Tacoma's police chief shoots his wife and kills himself after abuse allegations in their divorce case become public...

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 OpinionJournal.com

• UN Abandons Its Mission

• Arms Control Falacies Led to Nuclear North Korea

• Bogus Mass Child Molestation Cases Used the Same ‘Script’

• Best of the Web Today

  • France Briefed Iraq on US Plans

  • France Colluded With Saddam Regime to Undermine Human Rights Conference

  • Saddam Regime Records Showed That It Worked with Al Quaeda

  • 200 Freed Iraqi POW’s Leave Camp Praising Bush

  • Anti-Saddam Diplomacy Exposed the Ineffectiveness and Moral Corruption of the UN

  • CUNY Administration Nixes Terror Advocate as Graduation Speaker

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Another article showing that the UN has abandoned its mission.

More than a quarter of the commission's [U.N. Commission on Human Rights] resolutions condemning a state's human rights violations passed over the last 30 years have been directed at Israel. There has never been a single resolution on China, Syria or Saudi Arabia. The current session ended by defeating a resolution to criticize anything about the situation in Zimbabwe, and by eliminating the 10-year-old position of rapporteur on human rights in Sudan. This was despite a report of the U.N. rapporteur on torture informing commission members of the Sudanese practice of "cross-amputation"--amputation of right hand and left foot for armed robbery, and various cases of women being stoned to death for alleged adultery.

Commission meetings themselves are a platform for incitement to hate and violence. …

So North Korea cements its standing as a member of the Axis of Evil by boasting that it already has nuclear weapons and hinting it might use them. No one proposes to meet this threat by invading forthwith, but no one has any other good answer either. At least we can understand how we got into this fix; it's a tale of extraordinary folly.

… Its regimented citizens are chronically malnourished, and it averted mass starvation in 1995-96 through massive international food aid. Yet it spends more than 30% of its economic output on military expenditures, maintaining a million men under arms in a nation of 22 million.

… Thousands of artillery tubes in caves along the South Korean border threaten the South Korean capital of Seoul, a city of some 20 million civilians. Some estimate that 60% of the shells in the first salvo would be chemical. Meanwhile Kim seeks nuclear weapons to deter the United States.

…

The administration should make unmistakably clear that if North Korea uses nuclear weapons or attacks Seoul, its regime will be obliterated; this may not require but should not exclude nuclear weapons.

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What will not work is to solve the problem once again with another arms control agreement. The record shows that arms control is not a solution; its pretenses are a large part of the problem.

What did the trial judge do to stop this perversion of justice? The trial judge is supposed to be impartial, not a member of the prosecutor’s office.

There was, as I soon found, everything left to know--not least the ways the children had been bribed, bullied, begged and betrayed so that they would, after endless hours of insistent questioning, finally say that Kelly Michaels had done this or that to them. This would become evident from the transcripts of the interrogations--none of which jury members ever saw--and also from the trial testimony.

…

I did not know, then, of course, what I knew later: that all the strange charges--the peanut butter, the bad clown who seduced children, the magic room, secret room, the death threats that supposedly kept the children quiet about their torments, the assault by sharp instruments (which, remarkably enough, never left any scars) were all repeated in case after case around the country with small variations.

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FrontPageMag.com

• Winnie Mandela and the Dark Side of the Anti-Apartheid Movement

• Franco-Ithacan Friendship Day Makes Ithaca America’s Most Embarassing City

• Armenian Genocide a Jihad

• Iraq Campaign Exposes Media Bias

• New History of “Palestinian People” False and Misleading

• British MP Was on Saddam’s Payroll

• Growth of Terrorist Sympathizing States in Latin American Could Threaten US

• Saddam Took Suicide Bomber Training

• Roman Catholic Bishop Reportedly Told Tom Daschle to Stop Calling Himself a Catholic

• Carrboro, NC Tries to Restrict Enforcement of the Patriot Act

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• Convicted of kidnapping in kidnapping and murder of former ‘United Football Club’ member.
• Used anti-apartheid money to finance luxurious lifestyle
• Encouraged “necklacing”
• Used ‘United Football Club’ as goon squad
• Was divorced for adultery

This article mentions the “no education before liberation” slogan of the ANC, which has led to a large uneducated cohort that is responsible for South Africa being “among the world’s most violent nations.”

… Pretoria supports some of the worst human rights violators in the name of African solidarity, and yet has by far the most liberal constitution in Africa: homosexual rights, no capital punishment, etc.

It is precisely this confusion that ultimately explains South Africa’s absence from the space it occupied for decades up to 1991 on the front pages of Western newspapers. And then there is the Western media’s reluctance to admit that past heroes like Winnie and Boesak were just crooks taking advantage of an ideological, liberal fashion.

Weinstein is right. Given the perfidy of the French in opposing American diplomacy and in cooperating with Saddam, a Franco-American is in extremely poor taste.

Paul Glover, one of the leaders of Ithaca’s Green party and a main organizers of the festival, gave his reasoning for putting together the French fest in the Ithaca Times: "Cultural war is essential preparation for groundwork and forestalling further illegal invasions requires us to confront cultural messages of the anti-French kind.” …

Recently, of course, the French government actively tried to sabotage U.S. efforts to defend the world from the Iraqi threat. It wasn’t enough for Jacques Chirac to merely state the French opinion on the situation, an opinion that would carry no weight if it were not for the charity of America and Britain back in 1945 when the U.N. was formed, but the French Prime Minister actually went from country to country trying to undermine the U.S. Some find France’s duplicity and disingenuousness offensive. …

…

… Anyone who supports terrorism, even passive support, is disgraceful in my opinion.

Remembering the Armenian Genocide repudiates Hitler’s question of who remembers the Armenians.

The Greater Boston Armenian Genocide Commemoration Committee, issued a press release, April 7, 2003, noting that April 24, 2003 marked the 88th "anniversary" of the Armenian genocide. On April 24, 1915, the Turkish Interior Ministry issued an order authorizing the arrest of all Armenian political and community leaders suspected of anti-Ittihad (“Young Turk” government), or Armenian nationalist sentiments. …

Who is this bespectacled, haughty reporter that MSNBC tried to turn into Gulf War II’s female "scud stud," failing when this scud siren proved more shrill than seductive. She had already failed with her own show, "Ashleigh Banfield: On Location," that aired only from July to October 2002.

…

Like her mentor Peter Jennings, who used to date Palestinian Authority spokesperson Hanan Ashrawi (and who petulantly went out of his way to describe Iraqis cheering the toppling of Saddam’s statue in Baghdad as "a small crowd"), the French-speaking Banfield is quick to criticize Israel and its supporters. She has gone out of her way to ascribe American policy to the influence of what she calls "the Jewish Lobby."

Hirsanyi says that Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, was Yasser Arafat’s mentor and father of Palestinian nationalism. Haj Amin al-Husseini worked with the Nazis in World War II.

Before any discussion on the topic can ensue, one simple but valuable question needs to be asked: Where should the historical discussion of Palestine begin? Many Jews point to the arrival of the Moses and Israelites in Canaan, a land that was promised to Abraham and the Jews a millennia earlier in the Bible. But applying a biblical birthright to a national claim will get you few sympathetic ears in modern times. Muslims will inevitably point to the invasion of Israel in 632. Some Arab archeologists have even claimed their ancestors are the original Canaanites.

The three most recent payment authorizations, beginning on April 4, 2000, and ending on January 14, 2003 are for $3 million each. All three authorizations include statements that show the Iraqi leadership's strong political motivation in paying Galloway for his vociferous opposition to US and British plans to invade Iraq.

…

Galloway - a colorful Scot who is sharp of suit and even sharper of tongue - made regular visits to Iraq, and was dubbed by conservatives in Britain as an "apologist for Saddam Hussein." He once told the dictator, "Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability."

The current governments of Brazil (da Silva), Cuba (Castro), and Venezuela (Chavez) are each home to the sort of anti-American fervor that forms the foundation for most terrorist safehavens. Even more worrisome, they stand poised to remake South America in their image through a well-organized strategy that brings to power -- via legitimate means (i.e. elections) -- other leftist leaders whose political agendas and support for terrorist organizations will undermine U.S. interests and the overall security of the Western Hemisphere. There will be serious long-term implications if the U.S. does not develop a more efficacious strategic policy to deal with the growing influence of these communist devotees.

Ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has trained with explosive vests like those used by suicide bombers and could blow himself up rather than face capture by U.S. troops, an Iraqi opposition leader said Sunday.

Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota has reportedly been ordered by his bishop to stop identifying himself as Catholic.

Bishop Robert Carlson, who leads the Catholic Diocese of Sioux Falls, is said by "The Weekly Standard" magazine to have written a letter to Daschle telling him that, by continuing to identify himself as Catholic, Daschle was perpetrating "a grave public scandal." The publication claimed the letter instructed Daschle to "remove from his congressional biography and campaign documents all references to his standing as a member of the Catholic Church."

Residents have pressured the City Council to pass a "Bill of Rights defense resolution."

The measure requires federal investigators who visit the town to report to city hall and state their business. It also directs local police to stand in the way of any unreasonable searches or seizures.

Since Federal law is superior to state and local law this could be considered a form of secession. People who side with Carrboro, NC should ask themselves if this would have been acceptable if the segregationist Southern states had done this.

We desperately need some case law to see if the Patriot Act is constitutional.

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Jewish World Review.com

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 Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
 (Subscription Site)

• Justice Department Broadens Investigation of FBI DNA Lab

• In the news:

  • King of Jordan: No Arab Democracies Until Arab–Israeli Dispute Settled

  • Simon Wiesenthal to Retire

  • Dallas Narcotics Officer Fired for Fake Drug Scheme

  • Pakistani Christian Gets Life for Damaging Muslim Sign

• Wall Street Internet Analysts Agree to Fines, Lifetime Ban

• Non-Lethal Church Shooting in North Little Rock

• University of Arkansas at Fayetteville Giving Tuition Breaks to Out of State Students

• Man Rescued After Suicide Dive from Bridge, Nearly Severs Tongue

• Carhop Robbed at Sonic at 2 in the Afternoon

• Spammers Keep One Step Ahead of the Law

• Pilotless Drones Show They Have a Place in Modern Warfare

• Chips Implanted in Animals Will Be Able to Transmit Medical Information

• Calcium Helps to Hold Down Weight of Female Adolescents

• George Will: American Blacks More Receptive to Republicans

• Meredith Oakley: Greedy FOB’s Want to Double Little Rock’s City Sales Tax

• Legislators Want to Continue Exploitative School Funding

• Letters

  • Being proved wrong never fazes Gene Lyons

 The Justice Department’s inspector general has broadened an investigation, originally limited to alleged wrongdoing by a forensic technician, to look at the practices of the FBI laboratory unit that analyzes DNA in hundreds of crime cases a year, government officials say.

• King Abdullah II of Jordan told CNN that the Arab-Israeli dispute prevents Arab States from becoming democracies. 
• Simon Wiesenthal, age 94 is ready to retire from the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Wiesenthal helped bring around 1,100 Nazis to justice.
• Decorated Dallas undercover narcotics officer Mark Delapaz who was indicted on a fake drug scheme has been fired.
• Pakistani Christian Ranjah Maseih was sentenced to life in prison for damaging a sign with a verse from the Koran.

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ArkDemocrat

Henry Blodget, the former Internet analyst at Merrill Lynch, and Jack B. Grubman, the former telecommunications analyst at Salomon Smith Barney, are expected today to pay almost $20 million in fines and penalties and agree to be barred permanently from the securities industry, according to a person briefed on the investigation.

A North Little Rock woman was attacked and shot by her estranged boyfriend before a congregation of 25 during the middle of Sunday service, police say.

Police in Little Rock and North Little Rock on Sunday night were looking for Isaac Russell, 40, who fled the Christ-Centered Fellowship Baptist Church at 4512 Lynch Drive in North Little Rock in a yellow Chevrolet truck, which police later found.

The victim, Leslie Brock, 29, of 2122 S. Maple St., who was shot once in the left leg, received treatment for wounds police said were not life-threatening.

Since its inception in fall 2000, the UA program has lured an increasing number of out-ofstate freshmen to campus.

Believing that the campus couldn’t meet a goal of growing enrollment from about 15,000 students to 22,500 by 2010 without stepping up recruitment both in and out of Arkansas, UA officials installed the waiver program as part of a comprehensive recruiting effort.

Outrageous. The University is supposed to be for the benefit of Arkansas students. If they can’t attract enough Arkansas students to grow they should stay the same size.

A 63-year-old Fort Smith man threw himself off the Interstate 440 bridge Sunday and plunged almost 100 feet into the Arkansas River below, Little Rock firefighters said.

…

The man had bitten through a large part of his tongue and was taken to University Hospital for treatment and observation, firefighters said.

About 2 p.m. an employee at the Sonic Drive In at 12214 Westhaven Drive took food to a tan Oldsmobile parked on the west side of the restaurant.

…

The robber, described only as a black woman, sped away with $50 in cash.

So far, nothing that has been tried to block spam has done much more than inconvenience mass e-mailers. Just as Sachs’ company, NetGlobalMarketing, has been able to reword its email messages to evade spam filters, others use even more aggressive tricks to disguise the content of their messages and to send them via circuitous paths so their true origin cannot be determined.

…

There is no doubt that making a living selling things by email is becoming harder. Not only are more messages being blocked by automated antispam systems, more senders of e-mail messages are also facing legal action. Earlier this month, America Online and the Federal Trade Commission each filed suit against e-mailers that they say are illicit spammers. Congress is seriously considering legislation to crack down on spam.

  Sixteen months after an experimental unmanned plane in Afghanistan made its first-ever combat kill, pilotless planes are standard in the U.S. war kit. Over Iraq, they fired on and destroyed about a dozen military targets.

Now Digital Angel is poised to take the next step — chips that will not only identify an animal but begin to tell how it feels. Earlier this year, Digital Angel won federal approval to market the Bio-Thermo microchip, which gauges an animal’s body temperature. The company plans future biosensor chips that track an animal’s hormonal changes, blood pressure and, eventually, disease.

  Although calcium intake in childhood and adolescence is crucial to long-term bone health, few teenagers find this bone-protection message convincing enough to add dairy products to their diet. Surveys show most teenage girls get only about half of the recommended 1,500 milligrams of calcium per day.

Now parents and doctors may have more bargaining power over adolescent consumption of calcium. Recent studies have found that the nutrient appears to help regulate weight.

Apparently the benefit offsets the high fat content of dairy products.

Last year three African Americans running statewide for offices in the same state were all elected, something that has never happened before in any state, even during Reconstruction. The African Americans are Democrats, and the state is one of those proudly, reliably liberal ones—Massachusetts, perhaps, or California, right?

Wrong. The state was Texas, and all three winners are Republicans. Their successes suggest how Republicans might make modest progress with African American voters. Modest progress—say, 15 percent rather than 8 percent of the African American vote could have large effects.

If American blacks quit their unquestioning support of Democrats it will be healthy for race relations, which are now being driven by extreme left-wing politics.

Lichty was quoted last week as saying that if the tax proposal is approved by voters and residents are pleased with how the money is spent, voters could agree to extend the tax increase beyond five years.

In fact, the voters need not have anything to do with that. The state Constitution gives the city board the right to amend any measure approved by a vote of the people if two-thirds of the directors agree to do so. In short, two-thirds of the city board could not only change how the additional revenue is to be spent, but also revoke the provision that would "sunset" the tax in five years.

Little Rock is overtaxed already. This will simply give the politicians more money to waste.

Two economists, the late Marvin Dodson from the University of Central Arkansas at Conway and Thomas Garrett from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, concluded, after a comprehensive research study, that $34 million could be saved each year by consolidation.

The superintendent’s salary of Witts Springs School District is one-third of the local property tax collections. There are 23 other employees for the 60 students in the school district. The state supplies an additional $446,134 in funding to keep the doors open. Dividing the total revenue by the number of students yields $12,613 per student because of inefficiency inherent in such a small district. Compare that with Heber Springs, also in the hills, with 1,646 students. The superintendent’s salary is less than 2 percent of local tax collections. Dividing the total revenue by the number of students for Heber Springs yields $5,758.

This column has some good numbers showing the inefficiency of small school districts.

The reality of Arkansas school funding is that most of the state tax revenues are collected in the populous counties but spent to subsidize all the small districts. Until the small districts understand that they aren’t paying their share this impasse is likely to continue.

People in the populous counties shouldn’t be expected to subsidize small school districts. If these people want to keep their local school they should pay for it themselves.

• “Criticism is tasteless”
  Ed Williams writes to denounce Gene Lyons, saying “Being proved wrong never fazes him.”

Being “liberal” means never having to admit you’re wrong.”

• The Hypocrisy of the Iraq Naysayers

• “Anti-war” Clerics Denied the Truth of the Evil of the Saddam Regime

But if a public figure is wrong about the question of the day, it is incumbent on them to (A) acknowledge their failure, and (B) honestly reevaluate their position, trying to understand why they were wrong.

…

But why should anyone take them seriously? They've been proven wrong on the question of the day and then failed to demonstrate any serious capacity for introspection. They're not public thinkers. They're not journalists. They're activists.

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RELIGIOUS FIGURES who opposed the liberation of Iraq have a lot of explaining to do. Fashioning themselves prophets of peace, they caustically denounced the "rush to war." Having granted the United Nations an almost transcendent moral authority, they declared Operation Iraqi Freedom an "immoral" act of aggression. In the months leading up to the conflict, they made a litany of brash claims and gloomy predictions--all proven to be utterly false.

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