Free Republic

The record-high turnout in the New Hampshire Democratic primary -- 219,787 Granite State voters took Democratic ballots Tuesday, shattering the previous record of 170,000 in 1992 -- is being read as a signal that voters in one New England state, and most likely elsewhere, are enthusiastic about the prospect of picking a challenger for George W. Bush. And the turnout in the Democratic primary is not even the best indicator of the anti-Bush fervor in New Hampshire, a state that in 2000 gave four critical electoral votes to the man who secured the presidency by a razor-thin Electoral College margin...

ARBIL, Iraq, Jan 8 (AFP) - 18h36 - Three Kurds were killed and three others wounded in this Iraqi Kurdish city when a blast went off as they were trying to recover copper from tank shells, police said Thursday.

The Earth won't be having seconds this year, thank you. And that has scientists across the world — including those who run the atomic clock at the National Institute for Science and Technology in Boulder — scratching their heads. Advertisement Take a Colorado Ski Vacation Apparently, the Earth isn't slowing down as it used to, and no one knows why. Flip your calendar back to 1972. That's the year the world began its current system of atomic time-keeping. NIST operates one of the clocks used to set "Coordinated Universal Time." Scientists soon discovered they had a small problem: The rate...

<p>The Helios Prototype crashed Thursday near the Navy's Pacific Missile Range Facility at Barking Sands about 30 minutes after taking off. The investigators will spend the next week on Kauai trying to figure out what went wrong.</p> <p>The remotely piloted, $15 million aircraft was traveling at a speed of about 21 mph at 3,000 feet when it broke up and crashed, said Alan Brown, a spokesman for NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center in Edwards, Calif.</p>

A metallic asteroid may have coincided with the fall of Rome, says Duncan Steel Thursday February 6, 2003 The Guardian In the early fifth century, rampaging Goths swept through Italy. Inviolate for 1,100 years, Rome was sacked by the hordes in 410 AD. St Augustine's apologia, the City of God, set the tone for Christians for the next 16 centuries. But the Rome of that era came close to suffering a far worse calamity. A small metallic asteroid descended from the sky, making a hypervelocity impact in an Apennine valley just 60 miles east of the city. This bus-sized lump...

Nyack, N.Y. -- Scientists mapping the bottom of the Hudson River with sonar say they have found nearly every single ship that ever foundered in the river over the past 400 years or more. Not just some of them, or most of them, but -- astonishingly -- all of them, except for a few that may have been disturbed by dredging. The ghostly images provide a record of collisions and carelessness and storm-tossed fate -- most of it previously unrecorded and utterly unknown -- from the days of sail and steam through the diesel tugs and tankers on the river...