Free Republic

About a third of all tumors discovered in routine mammography screenings are unlikely to result in illness, according to a new study that says 30 years of the breast cancer exams have resulted in the overdiagnosis of 1.3 million American women. The report, published Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine, argues that the increase in breast cancer survival rates over the last few decades is due mostly to improved therapies and not screenings, which are intended to flag tumors when they are small and most susceptible to treatment. Instead, the widespread use of mammograms now results in the...

Also cataloged as Munich 15040 or LFT 1385, Barnard's Star was discovered in 1916 by E.E. Barnard to have the largest known proper motion of all stars, 10.29 arc seconds per year, by comparing photographic plates obtained in 1894 and 1916, and later tracing it back to 1888 in E. Pickering's plate archive. This star moves apparently fast between the background stars in Ophiuchus, needing only about 350 years for 1 degree, in almost exactly North direction (Burnham gives a position angle of 356 degrees). This star is the second nearest to our Solar System at 5.97 light years, only...

DES MOINES, Iowa - In the days since Republicans lost an election many in the party thought was theirs, chatter has been bubbling about what the GOP should do to recover. For Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, it starts with the smallest of actions: abandoning the state's now-infamous straw poll. Once a festive checkpoint on the road to the leadoff Iowa caucuses, the poll has devolved into a full-blown sideshow, Branstad and other critics contend. They say it's an unfair and false test that has felled good candidates and kept others from competing in the state. "It's just something that's gotten...

Explanation: East of Antares, dark markings sprawl through crowded star fields toward the center of our Milky Way Galaxy. Cataloged in the early 20th century by astronomer E. E. Barnard, the obscuring interstellar dust clouds include B59, B72, B77 and B78, seen in silhouette against the starry background. Here, their combined shape suggests a pipe stem and bowl, and so the dark nebula's popular name is the Pipe Nebula. The deep and expansive view was represents nearly 24 hours of exposure time recorded in very dark skies of the Chilean Atacama desert. It covers a full 10 by 10 degree...

Explanation: A cosmic grain of sand left the long and colorful trail across this all-sky view. Its grazing impact with planet Earth's atmosphere began at 71 kilometers per second. With the Milky Way stretching from horizon to horizon, the scene was captured on the night of November 17 from the astronomically popular high plateau at Champ du Feu in Alsace, France. Of course, the earthgrazer meteor belongs to this month's Leonid meteor shower, produced as our fair planet annually sweeps through dust from the tail of periodic Comet Tempel-Tuttle. The shower's radiant point in the constellation Leo is very close...

It’s on. A year and a half after retail workers announced the founding of a new Walmart employee group, five months after guest workers struck a Walmart seafood supplier, and seven weeks after the country’s first multi-store Walmart strikes, the Black Friday strike has begun. ... Expectations are high for a historic strike. Given Walmart’s role as the dominant employer of our era, the current wave of work stoppages is already among the country’s most consequential twenty-first century strikes. But in interviews this month, workers and organizers described today’s actions as a turning point, not a climax, in their struggle...

-snip- Before the dinner, Sen introduced Obama to his wife, Bun Rany, who greeted Obama with a traditional "sampeah" pressed-hands greeting that is normally reserved for servants. "Was the first lady getting her own back over the president's harsh words earlier to her husband or did she simply forget that she was shaking hands with the leader of the free world?" the Daily Mail asked. According to the Daily Mail, the slight was not noticed by Obama or his advisers, but it "would have been picked up by a great many people throughout Southeast Asia region."

JERUSALEM (AP) — Israeli authorities arrested an Arab Israeli on Thursday on accusations he planted a bomb on a bus in Tel Aviv that wounded 27 people and threatened to sabotage efforts to broker a cease-fire to end the fighting in Gaza, police said. Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said the man, from the village of Taybeh in Israel, was connected to the Hamas and Islamic Jihad militant groups.

A Chinese couple have found themselves living in the fast lane after refusing to move out for a new road. Construction workers in the country’s Zhejiang province surrounded their five-story building with asphalt, leaving motorists to navigate an unlikely obstacle. …

And so it came to pass that the laity in the Church of England rose up and declared they would not have women bishops to reign over them. The vote was admittedly only six votes, but six votes are six votes. The issue cannot be revisited until a new Synod is elected in 2015. Liberals and progressives along with homosexuals and lesbians are in "tears" and "agony" over this defeat. So is the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams and the soon to be Archbishop Justin Welby who both spoke up in favor of the measure. It was a bitter pill...

. Leave it to PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) to say things that are outrageous and offensive, all because they seem to care about animals more than people. The group that once ran a “Holocaust on your plate” campaign to get you to stop eating animals, has consistently compared animals to black people. In their latest odd venture, the group has reached out to President Obama, telling him to stop pardoning turkeys and instead treat them the same as black people, gays and other underserved groups...

David Cameron brandished a list of the “outrageous” pay and perks of tens of thousands of Eurocrats last night as he clashed with EU leaders over British demands for cuts to Brussels’ vast budget. The Prime Minister insisted tens of billions of pounds could easily be slashed from the EU’s spending plans for the next seven years. He highlighted the Brussels gravy train, a new EU diplomatic service and infrastructure investment as key targets. … The Commission wants to increase its budget by 350 percent—from £6.5 billion ($10.4 billion) to £29 billion ($46 billion). Britain said that, at most, it...

During the summer, in the Catskills resort community where I grew up during the ’50s, getting great Jewish food was not a problem. The hotels on our side of the mountains in Fleischmanns, N.Y., were dying, but there were still enough city people that it was not hard to find smoked fish and salamis and decent rye bread. In the off-season, it was a different story. The small community of year-round Jews, to which my family belonged, had to return to the mother ship, New York City, for supplies. We went to Houston Street on the Lower East Side, the...

During the summer, in the Catskills resort community where I grew up during the ’50s, getting great Jewish food was not a problem. The hotels on our side of the mountains in Fleischmanns, N.Y., were dying, but there were still enough city people that it was not hard to find smoked fish and salamis and decent rye bread. In the off-season, it was a different story. The small community of year-round Jews, to which my family belonged, had to return to the mother ship, New York City, for supplies. We went to Houston Street on the Lower East Side, the...

The average public sector worker is paid £4,500 ($7175.70) a year more than their private sector counterpart—and the gap is getting wider. A full-time state employee typically earns £565 ($900.95) a week, compared to £479 ($763.81) in the private sector, according to figures released yesterday. That leaves public sector workers an astonishing £86 ($137.14) per week better off—the equivalent of a luxury family holiday every year, and up from £84 ($133.95) a week last year. Over the past year, it found that the average weekly pay of a full-time public sector worker has risen by 1.6 percent, compared to 1.5...

At first glance “ ’Twas the Night Before Hanukkah” looks like a novelty album. On the cover two smiling women in 1950s garb exchange presents by a fir tree topped with a Star of David while a demure girl lights a menorah. It seems to promise a kitschy collection of comic tunes along the lines of Adam Sandler’s “Hanukkah Song.” But the people behind this double album — four Jewish record collectors who form the nonprofit Idelsohn Society for Musical Preservation — say they are deadly serious about the subject. They have compiled an eclectic set of songs that not...

face book

Yet again, President Obama’s Thanksgiving message eschewed any direct reference to thanking God, making this the fourth straight year in which the President of the United States has ignored the central message of the holiday in favor of political grandstanding. This year, Obama’s central message was that now that he’s been re-elected, Americans should agree with all of his policies. His unity routine sounds strangely empty after a campaign in which he focused on dividing Americans: "But most of all, it’s a time to give thanks for each other, and for the incredible bounty we enjoy." "That’s especially important this...

His face bruised and battered, 'broken' hand held out of harm's way, Olivier Martinez headed home from hospital on Thursday afternoon. The French model was injured during a 'brutal fight' with his fiance Halle Berry's ex lover Gabriel Aubry, which left both men hospitalised and Aubry under arrest for battery. The shocking brawl came as Aubry dropped off his daughter Nahla at Halle's house on Thanksgiving morning.

An unemployed Berlin man who had his state welfare cut to nearly nothing is refusing to eat, in an attempt to make the government consider introducing a basic income. Ralph Boes, 54, has not eaten since November 1 and, he told the Stuttgarter Zeitung on Monday he would not stop his protest until his demands are heard. Until then the occasional cup of vegetable stock will have to do. Boes refuses to label his protest as a hunger strike, preferring the idea that the government has punished him with starvation. The job centre recently cut his monthly jobseeker's payment to...